The demonstrations at Howard and the AUC have drawn worldwide attention to these institutions projecting themselves as independent facilities in service to Black communities. The student resistance reveals the true aims of these institutions; which is to enrich private corporations and train another generation of Black and brown sellouts only interested in enriching themselves, while turning their backs on the needs of the people who fought and died to put them in school. . . .
Joe Biden
#BuildBackBetter – A Neoliberal Public Relations Stunt
These social reforms are meant to address some of the more glaring social contradictions produced by four decades of neoliberal policies, but with the objective to strengthen capitalism and preempt radicalism. . . .
Haiti and The US “Responsibility to Protect”
While the images of what appears to be thousands of Haitians stuck in the border city may be shocking, this can not be observed separately from Western imperialism and it’s allied nations that are responsible for the trajectory of this crisis. . . .
Why the Pandemic Is Getting Worse in the United States
Skepticism abounds for good reasons. What passes for political leadership lurch between pretending that Covid-19 isn’t an issue until hospitals are full of patients or demanding that everyone be vaccinated without changing any of their living conditions. In any case the virus is now endemic, meaning that it isn’t going away. A nation that puts everyone on a knife edge of precarity cannot begin to address what this reality means for millions of people. Systemic change was needed before the pandemic and it is sorely needed now. . . .
On Joining the Military and Marching to the Left
You cannot easily decouple individuals, especially colonized individuals, from the forces that pushed them into economically incentivized conscription. A dialectical idealist in Marxist clothing will—in a bid to censure anti-imperialist veterans—sound like a libertarian in their condemnations. They will say things like, “there is always a choice” and “there are plenty of jobs in the marketplace.” When it comes to economically incentivized conscription, some so-called Marxists possess more faith in the free market’s ability to provide other forms of employment than Milton Friedman in his heyday. While dialectical materialists, a.k.a. Marxists, never excuse participating in an imperialist institution, they certainly understand the forces that drive people into its employ. . . .
On Afghanistan: Joe Biden is the Imperialist in Chief
First of all I hate that nationalistic jingoism “homeland,” but that’s what y’all’s president said yesterday in his speech about the inevitable unfolding chaos in Afghanistan, and the man was belligerent in saying the quiet part about US imperialism in Afghanistan out loud. He might as well have stood at the podium and said, “We went into Afghanistan for payback against the terrorists we helped create when we used the Afghan people to fight the Soviet Union in the 80s, and that’s all we cared about. We did that and to hell with them people and their country!” . . .
Black August, Letter Writing and the ‘Harm Reduction’ Administration
There are four major components in the yearly commemorations of Black August: study, fast, train, and fight. People are encouraged to study the works and words of former and current political and politicized prisoners. People are encouraged to fast from sunrise to sunset. People are encouraged to train and become more physically active. People are encouraged to fight against the system. However, one of the lesser centered but equally important aspects of Black August is letter writing. Nearly a half-century ago, Gresham Sykes wrote in The Society of Captives: A Study of a Maximum Security Prison that, “life in the . . .
Biden is Anti-Haiti, and His Haitian-American Press Person Doesn’t Give a Damn
On Wednesday May 26, 2021 Haitian American Karine Jean Pierre, principal deputy press secretary for the Biden White House, took the podium to address questions from the press. Because the corporate Democratic Party establishment realizes that showcasing racial diversity is necessary in the face of its almost 30 year history of supporting bone crushing policies like NAFTA, GATT, financial deregulation, and the 1994 Crime Bill, Democrats use demonstrations of neo-liberal diversity as their only talisman to keep the fealty of their more ethnically diverse constituency. . . .