This July 4th marks 234 years of US independence. And although America’s ongoing “melting pot experiment” is theoretically unbiased to Blacks, Latinos and Muslims, the Southern Poverty Law Center reports that hate groups, like the well-armed Hutaree militia, have increased 200 percent since President Obama’s 2008 election.
Texas, the former rebel republic and current headquarters of the Guardians of the Free Republic is now waging new ethnic and ideological battlefronts, by arming schoolchildren with conservative-bent textbooks that re-sculpt some of America’s most traditional outlooks. In Arizona, new immigration legislation now gives a tacit eyewink for police to roundup and shakedown Latinos. And if you didn’t know, the catchy slogan “If you see something, say something” is a discreet way of saying “keep a close eye on all Muslim people.”
The resulting rifts over the civil liberties of US citizens and Obama’s recent speech on Immigration Reform, offer a perfect platform to dissect the definition and discrepancies of “We the People” as spoken of constitutionally and historically.
It was German cartographer Martin Waldseemueller who named the Western Hemisphere “America” in tribute to Italian navigator Amerigo Vespucci in 1507. As early as 1782 when colonists were still blasting their British kinfolk with musket balls, J. Hector St. John Crevecoeur posed the question “What is an American?” in his famed book Letters from an American Farmer. So who then exactly are “We the People” in modern terms and times?
Certainly, when these three simple but significant words were first penned in the US Constitution in 1787, the founders didn’t envisage America becoming a vast multi-ethnic society in a world of international laws, where state-sanctioned slavery could have them prosecuted today for the likes of war crimes and crimes against humanity.
Certainly, when the ironfisted but seldom-mentioned, President James K. Polk, swiped an unprecedented 1.2 million square miles of territory from Mexico as spoils of war in 1846, it was never intended for millions of Mexicans to sneak across “America’s” border with impunity today. But as the saying goes, “Mexicans aren’t crossing the border, the border has crossed them.”
And certainly, as for Japanese-American citizens, “We the People” became constitutionally meaningless when Franklin D. Roosevelt decreed Executive Order 9066, which unleashed the US military to mass-incarcerate 120,000 men, women, and children of Japanese ancestry during World War II.
While the malice of the founders and ethnic crackdowns of Polk and Roosevelt do not detract from their “American greatness,” there’s comparative objection from Blacks and liberal Democrats because the new textbooks in Texas place positive spotlights on people like Jefferson Davis and Sam Houston. Based on the outcry, you’d think that Davis and Houston were more crippling to the cause of African Americans, than say, George Washington or Thomas Jefferson.
If you’ve notice however, there’s an overall process at work to politically repackage the image and ideals of America’s founding history. As such, despite centuries of known ethnic mistreatment and “Whites-Only” privileges, America conversely portrays itself as being uniquely constituted with rights and freedoms that were always meant for “everyone” to partake . . . As though “We the People” signified Blacks, Native Americans, Latinos, Asians and even Muslims all along.
Sure, this promotes feel-good nationalism, especially during these days of protracted warfare in Muslim countries. But the unedited political truth as cited in Foreign Affairs magazine is that: “For substantial stretches of US history, it was believed that only the people of English origin, or those who were Protestant, or white, or hailed from northern Europe were real Americans.”
Although the founders bequeathed a largely-Anglo nation, what they didn’t politically calculate were a few societal probabilities . . . That demographic shifts could eventuate a “New We the People,” causing Anglo people to teeter on the brink of becoming a minority on American soil, where “one man, one vote” would become an establishment threat. Moreover, that the “New We the People” could send a Black man to the White House in the 21st century.
On the downside, along with secretive hate groups, the “New We the People” has attracted mainstream opposition from Tea Partiers who openly aim to “take their country back,” which among other things is a coded expression of “ethnic displeasure.” The fact that a group like the Tea Party has almost instantly become a fully-financed movement of scale, is a foretelling omen that the “New We the People” can expect continued ethnic resistance well into the future.
So the celebratory fireworks and barbeques on the 4th of July may mask the nation’s racial complexities for 24 hours. Yet the much-hailed ideals that the Declaration of Independence proclaims are still nevertheless A Dream Deferred, given that lingering ethnic prejudges and political contradictions remain endemic 234 years later . . . and still counting.
~~~~~~~~~~~~
Ezrah Aharone is the author of two political books: Sovereign Evolution: Manifest Destiny from Civil Rights to Sovereign Rights (2009) and Pawned Sovereignty: Sharpened Black Perspectives on Americanization, Africa, War and Reparations (2003). He is a founding member of the Center for Sovereignty Advancement. He can be reached at Ezrah@theCSA.org.
Friday, July 2, 2010
Monday, May 17, 2010
- SOVEREIGN EVOLUTION -
MANIFEST DESTINY FROM CIVIL RIGHTS TO SOVEREIGN RIGHTS
(Ezrah Aharone • AuthorHouse • Nonfiction • 301 Pages • ISBN: 978 1438938585)
Rated “24th Best Black Book of 2009” - Inside Black Hollywood Magazine
From emancipation to segregation to integration – from Tubman to King to Obama – the freedom of African Americans emerged from a continuum of political evolutions, each of which is built upon prior legacies and achievements. In advancing the forward flow of this political progression, SOVEREIGN EVOLUTION re-declares freedom and equality in 21st-century terms, using sovereign principles and standards.
“Today’s political world is light years away from both the 1860s when segregation was progress and the 1960s when riding the front of a bus was progress,” writes Ezrah Aharone. “Where you sit on a bus today is becoming relatively cosmetic, considering the wars and webbings of geopolitics that control the chromium, oil, and rubber for its tires. Our conceptions and moral obligations of freedom must therefore continually evolve in direct pace with the demands and circumstances of the political times.”
With “sovereignty” being the highest expression of political authority and accountability of a people, Ezrah applies sovereign ideals in ways that no other work has convincingly or relevantly related to the African American experience. SOVEREIGN EVOLUTION however does not promote a movement for political independence, but rather provides a mirror to show a clearer sociopolitical reflection of our historical development and future potential as a people.
As Ezrah writes, “SOVEREIGN EVOLUTION is both the title of the book and a transformative sociopolitical concept, that offers a new realm of ideals and solutions to centuries-old difficulties.” Each chapter accordingly sets a platform to infuse sovereign awareness and discourse into mainstream domains that span from elders and Hip Hop culture; to Black universities; to church congregations; to Black organizations and government officials.
Ezrah delivers a straightforward political language with evolutionary messages for lasting advancement. His preciseness and originality of political thought, coupled with his international experience in Africa, provides a unique scope of reference that gives SOVEREIGN EVOLUTION uncommon distinction.
Ezrah Aharone is also the author of PAWNED SOVEREIGNTY (A classic alongside Welsing’s Isis Papers and Woodson’s Mis-Education of the Negro – Rolling Out Magazine). Born in Newark and raised in Passaic NJ, he holds a BS from Hampton University (1980). He has lived and now works in West Africa as a political and economic consultant, where his relationships extend from presidents to everyday people in remote villages. He is also a founding member of the Center for Sovereignty Advancement, which is a political think tank institution.
CONTACT: www.EzrahSpeaks.com • Info@theCSA.org • (732) 566-9327
Thursday, April 22, 2010
Lessons from Confederate History Month
By Ezrah Aharone 4/10
Next year in April commemorates the 150th anniversary of America’s Civil War. So under the pretext to “encourage tourism” in Virginia, which has over 100 Confederate monuments, GOP Governor Bob McDonnell dusted-off an old proclamation that declares April as “Confederate History Month.” Not only did he revive it, he removed a clause stating “that slavery was one of the causes” of the war.
President Obama called this “an unacceptable omission,” while members of Virginia’s Legislative Black Caucus said the document was “offensive, one-sided, and a revision of history.” GOP Governor Haley Barbour of Mississippi, who declared April as “Confederate Heritage Month” in a similar proclamation which also excluded slavery, said all the fuss “doesn’t amount to diddly.” But McDonnell apologized and amended Virginia’s proclamation to include and condemn slavery.
The real problem here however, supercedes the omissions and one-sidedness of any single proclamation, including Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation. American history is largely promoted with slanted, bravado narratives of nationalism, whereby the means are always vindicated by glorifications of the end. And when it comes to the historiography of slavery, a taboo-blame of racism is transferred upon African Americans who veer from sugarcoated viewpoints.
As such, Americans are made to think that the Civil War was fought to end the Confederate immoralities of slavery. But based on unquestioned racism that lasted well into the 1960s, it’s illogical that millions of Whites would actually fight and slaughter 624,000 of themselves over the rights of Blacks way back in the 1860s. If the Emancipation Proclamation was really predicated upon America’s “goodness of democracy,” why would Democrats and Republicans turnaround and willfully legislate a full century of segregation after so much self-bloodshed?
On the surface, this outlook certainly qualifies for a transferred taboo-blame of racism. But to lend historical validation, consider a quote from President Obama himself. As then-senator, he commented to Time Magazine (June 25, 2005) that: “I cannot swallow whole the view of Lincoln as the Great Emancipator. I am fully aware of his limited views on race. Anyone who actually reads the Emancipation Proclamation knows it was more a Military Document than a clarion call for justice.”
Speaking of “omissions and one-sidedness” in proclamations . . . Instead of mandating a unilateral “Military Document” (signed only by him and his Secretary of State), Lincoln and representatives of our forbearers should have jointly agreed and formally signed a binding “Bilateral Accord” that satisfied the ideals and demands of the 4 million “Emancipated” people in question. That would have been the honorable, non-racist, democratic thing for any offending government to do after nearly 250 years of enslavement.
What’s lasting and telling about this affront and disingenuous nature of the Emancipation Proclamation, is the unspoken but undeniable lack of affinity and familiarity that African Americans hold towards it today. Although it presumably represents our long-awaited “triumph over slavery,” it’s hard to find a Black person who can recite a complete phrase from it. Simply ask around and you’ll find proof yourself.
The unedited truth is that Lincoln ended slavery in the Confederacy for the same reason it was instituted – to make capitalism more functional. By the 1860s the Industrial Revolution was in gear. Northern industrial businesses would outperform Southern agrarian businesses, making it necessary to restructure labor, commerce, and capital investments. Paying low wages to Black industrial laborers therefore made better economic sense and great social policy for a more civilized face of government.
But since Southern states stood to lose billions in property (enslaved) assets and wealth, the Confederates sought secession and war became an unavoidable consequence of this industrial shift. While a Confederate victory would have definitely prolonged slavery, this should not be politically misconstrued into the notion that Lincoln’s fight against secession was thereby a fight for the justice of abolition.
To believe that the principal of the Civil War was to “free” Africans from the Confederates is as inaccurate as thinking the current war in Afghanistan is being fought to free Afghans from the Taliban. Although Afghans may eventually be liberated from Taliban influences as a by-product of the war, the underlying purpose and politics of the conflict are immensely more far-reaching. And likewise were the driving circumstances between the Civil War and the by-product of Emancipation.
But since the facts of American history are slanted with narratives to glorify American democracy, the Civil War is framed to unduly credit and equate the Union with noble motives. So it’s acceptable to place taboo-blames of racism on supporters of Confederate History Month, since Confederates resided on the opposite side of the war. Yet, the prevailing mischaracterizations surrounding Lincoln and the Emancipation Proclamation, now cause African Americans to reside on the opposite side of the truth.
Ezrah Aharone is the author of two political books: Sovereign Evolution: Manifest Destiny from Civil Rights to Sovereign Rights (2009) and Pawned Sovereignty: Sharpened Black Perspectives on Americanization, Africa, War and Reparations (2003). He is a founding member of the Center for Sovereignty Advancement. He can be reached at Ezrah@theCSA.org.
Next year in April commemorates the 150th anniversary of America’s Civil War. So under the pretext to “encourage tourism” in Virginia, which has over 100 Confederate monuments, GOP Governor Bob McDonnell dusted-off an old proclamation that declares April as “Confederate History Month.” Not only did he revive it, he removed a clause stating “that slavery was one of the causes” of the war.
President Obama called this “an unacceptable omission,” while members of Virginia’s Legislative Black Caucus said the document was “offensive, one-sided, and a revision of history.” GOP Governor Haley Barbour of Mississippi, who declared April as “Confederate Heritage Month” in a similar proclamation which also excluded slavery, said all the fuss “doesn’t amount to diddly.” But McDonnell apologized and amended Virginia’s proclamation to include and condemn slavery.
The real problem here however, supercedes the omissions and one-sidedness of any single proclamation, including Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation. American history is largely promoted with slanted, bravado narratives of nationalism, whereby the means are always vindicated by glorifications of the end. And when it comes to the historiography of slavery, a taboo-blame of racism is transferred upon African Americans who veer from sugarcoated viewpoints.
As such, Americans are made to think that the Civil War was fought to end the Confederate immoralities of slavery. But based on unquestioned racism that lasted well into the 1960s, it’s illogical that millions of Whites would actually fight and slaughter 624,000 of themselves over the rights of Blacks way back in the 1860s. If the Emancipation Proclamation was really predicated upon America’s “goodness of democracy,” why would Democrats and Republicans turnaround and willfully legislate a full century of segregation after so much self-bloodshed?
On the surface, this outlook certainly qualifies for a transferred taboo-blame of racism. But to lend historical validation, consider a quote from President Obama himself. As then-senator, he commented to Time Magazine (June 25, 2005) that: “I cannot swallow whole the view of Lincoln as the Great Emancipator. I am fully aware of his limited views on race. Anyone who actually reads the Emancipation Proclamation knows it was more a Military Document than a clarion call for justice.”
Speaking of “omissions and one-sidedness” in proclamations . . . Instead of mandating a unilateral “Military Document” (signed only by him and his Secretary of State), Lincoln and representatives of our forbearers should have jointly agreed and formally signed a binding “Bilateral Accord” that satisfied the ideals and demands of the 4 million “Emancipated” people in question. That would have been the honorable, non-racist, democratic thing for any offending government to do after nearly 250 years of enslavement.
What’s lasting and telling about this affront and disingenuous nature of the Emancipation Proclamation, is the unspoken but undeniable lack of affinity and familiarity that African Americans hold towards it today. Although it presumably represents our long-awaited “triumph over slavery,” it’s hard to find a Black person who can recite a complete phrase from it. Simply ask around and you’ll find proof yourself.
The unedited truth is that Lincoln ended slavery in the Confederacy for the same reason it was instituted – to make capitalism more functional. By the 1860s the Industrial Revolution was in gear. Northern industrial businesses would outperform Southern agrarian businesses, making it necessary to restructure labor, commerce, and capital investments. Paying low wages to Black industrial laborers therefore made better economic sense and great social policy for a more civilized face of government.
But since Southern states stood to lose billions in property (enslaved) assets and wealth, the Confederates sought secession and war became an unavoidable consequence of this industrial shift. While a Confederate victory would have definitely prolonged slavery, this should not be politically misconstrued into the notion that Lincoln’s fight against secession was thereby a fight for the justice of abolition.
To believe that the principal of the Civil War was to “free” Africans from the Confederates is as inaccurate as thinking the current war in Afghanistan is being fought to free Afghans from the Taliban. Although Afghans may eventually be liberated from Taliban influences as a by-product of the war, the underlying purpose and politics of the conflict are immensely more far-reaching. And likewise were the driving circumstances between the Civil War and the by-product of Emancipation.
But since the facts of American history are slanted with narratives to glorify American democracy, the Civil War is framed to unduly credit and equate the Union with noble motives. So it’s acceptable to place taboo-blames of racism on supporters of Confederate History Month, since Confederates resided on the opposite side of the war. Yet, the prevailing mischaracterizations surrounding Lincoln and the Emancipation Proclamation, now cause African Americans to reside on the opposite side of the truth.
Ezrah Aharone is the author of two political books: Sovereign Evolution: Manifest Destiny from Civil Rights to Sovereign Rights (2009) and Pawned Sovereignty: Sharpened Black Perspectives on Americanization, Africa, War and Reparations (2003). He is a founding member of the Center for Sovereignty Advancement. He can be reached at Ezrah@theCSA.org.
Saturday, February 27, 2010
The Makings of Modern Mis-Education
By Ezrah Aharone 2/10
Dr. Carter G. Woodson, the father of Black History Month and second Black PhD to graduate from Harvard, wrote the acclaimed The Mis-Education of the Negro way back in 1933. In the 1940s, psychologist Kenneth Clark’s “Doll Test,” demonstrated that Black children were being psychologically conditioned to yearn and favor the looks of White people at the expense of self-dislike. His critical findings were cited during Brown vs. Board of Education when the Supreme Court desegregated schools in 1954.
Here we are, decades removed and Dr. Woodson’s book is still widely sold and studied, while Black children are still predisposed to view White dolls as “prettier and nicer” with hair that’s “better” than Black dolls. Educationally, we face ever-dismal challenges where Black children enter kindergarten a full year behind Whites; by high school the gap extends to 4 to 5 years; and 58 percent of Black males don’t even graduate high school.
Princeton researchers recently published a 7-year study, concluding that a 20-year “Manhattan Project-effort” is necessary to close today’s education and economic gaps of racial inequality. Just so you’ll know, the original Manhattan Project was a massive pursuit, costing the equivalent of $22 billion and comprising thousands of scientists who developed the A-Bomb in 1945 to nuke Japan into a crisp. So, to infer this same category of endeavor, speaks to the comparative enormity of the challenge.
There’s good reason for skepticism since Black kids who dropout commonly say “classes aren’t interesting.” And as far back as my childhood in the 1960s, “Acting White” has been a tagline used by Black kids to ridicule those who academically excel. Naturally, adults respond by saying, “there’s nothing White about being smart.” Although this is absolutely true, it absolutely misses the point and fails to address the sociopolitical and mis-educational factors that confound young minds to misconstrue smartness with Whiteness.
Children worldwide learn that the earth is round and 1 + 1 = 2. These are universal facts that are neither Black nor White. However, the functions and end-uses that nations apply such facts to educate kids are neither neutral nor universal. Hence, “Acting White” is a troubled way that youngsters express something that we have lacked the power to change – Which is that the functions and end-uses of America’s “System of Education and Intellect” are based on skewed purposes, processes, and interpretations that place European images, ideals, and institutions as the central and supreme frame of reference and relevance. This lack of intellectual and institutional equality, encapsulates the essence of the mis-education identified by Dr. Woodson.
Our mistake is that we consider it sufficient to simply insert Black people into existing White institutions, and then paste tidbits of sanitized versions of “Black History” into America’s larger body of education. By contributing without properly correcting the end-uses and known partialities within America’s “System of Education and Intellect,” we have allowed “the problem to masquerade as a solution.”
Ask yourself – To what end-use is our current system of thought being applied, and who are the ultimate beneficiaries and end-users? With our 4 centuries of collective intellect and institutions, we can’t stop our youngsters from shooting and killing each other. We can’t even stop them from cursing in front of elders. We have communities nationwide being held hostage to Black-on-Black crime. Mis-education is making us intellectually and functionally unfit to “rescue ourselves from ourselves.”
Black leaders and educators have convened for decades to debate and decipher “what’s wrong.” But here’s a hard truth – The very psychological inducements that trap Black children to idolize and overvalue White dolls, mutates into sociopolitical mindsets that induce Black adults to idolize and overvalue European ideals and institutions just the same . . . its one yoke with two levels of shackles.
Centuries of mis-education won’t simply evaporate, yet the purging process would undress America’s character and historiography in ways that America would find uncomfortable and unwilling to concede. So unless we mount ample intellectual and institutional capacities, The Mis-Education of the Negro will not only be the title of Dr. Woodson’s book, it will be an accurate description of a permanent reality.
Ezrah Aharone is the author of two political books: Sovereign Evolution: Manifest Destiny from Civil Rights to Sovereign Rights (2009) and Pawned Sovereignty: Sharpened Black Perspectives on Americanization, Africa, War and Reparations (2003). He is also a founding member of the Center for Sovereignty Advancement. He can be reached at Ezrah@theCSA.org.
Dr. Carter G. Woodson, the father of Black History Month and second Black PhD to graduate from Harvard, wrote the acclaimed The Mis-Education of the Negro way back in 1933. In the 1940s, psychologist Kenneth Clark’s “Doll Test,” demonstrated that Black children were being psychologically conditioned to yearn and favor the looks of White people at the expense of self-dislike. His critical findings were cited during Brown vs. Board of Education when the Supreme Court desegregated schools in 1954.
Here we are, decades removed and Dr. Woodson’s book is still widely sold and studied, while Black children are still predisposed to view White dolls as “prettier and nicer” with hair that’s “better” than Black dolls. Educationally, we face ever-dismal challenges where Black children enter kindergarten a full year behind Whites; by high school the gap extends to 4 to 5 years; and 58 percent of Black males don’t even graduate high school.
Princeton researchers recently published a 7-year study, concluding that a 20-year “Manhattan Project-effort” is necessary to close today’s education and economic gaps of racial inequality. Just so you’ll know, the original Manhattan Project was a massive pursuit, costing the equivalent of $22 billion and comprising thousands of scientists who developed the A-Bomb in 1945 to nuke Japan into a crisp. So, to infer this same category of endeavor, speaks to the comparative enormity of the challenge.
There’s good reason for skepticism since Black kids who dropout commonly say “classes aren’t interesting.” And as far back as my childhood in the 1960s, “Acting White” has been a tagline used by Black kids to ridicule those who academically excel. Naturally, adults respond by saying, “there’s nothing White about being smart.” Although this is absolutely true, it absolutely misses the point and fails to address the sociopolitical and mis-educational factors that confound young minds to misconstrue smartness with Whiteness.
Children worldwide learn that the earth is round and 1 + 1 = 2. These are universal facts that are neither Black nor White. However, the functions and end-uses that nations apply such facts to educate kids are neither neutral nor universal. Hence, “Acting White” is a troubled way that youngsters express something that we have lacked the power to change – Which is that the functions and end-uses of America’s “System of Education and Intellect” are based on skewed purposes, processes, and interpretations that place European images, ideals, and institutions as the central and supreme frame of reference and relevance. This lack of intellectual and institutional equality, encapsulates the essence of the mis-education identified by Dr. Woodson.
Our mistake is that we consider it sufficient to simply insert Black people into existing White institutions, and then paste tidbits of sanitized versions of “Black History” into America’s larger body of education. By contributing without properly correcting the end-uses and known partialities within America’s “System of Education and Intellect,” we have allowed “the problem to masquerade as a solution.”
Ask yourself – To what end-use is our current system of thought being applied, and who are the ultimate beneficiaries and end-users? With our 4 centuries of collective intellect and institutions, we can’t stop our youngsters from shooting and killing each other. We can’t even stop them from cursing in front of elders. We have communities nationwide being held hostage to Black-on-Black crime. Mis-education is making us intellectually and functionally unfit to “rescue ourselves from ourselves.”
Black leaders and educators have convened for decades to debate and decipher “what’s wrong.” But here’s a hard truth – The very psychological inducements that trap Black children to idolize and overvalue White dolls, mutates into sociopolitical mindsets that induce Black adults to idolize and overvalue European ideals and institutions just the same . . . its one yoke with two levels of shackles.
Centuries of mis-education won’t simply evaporate, yet the purging process would undress America’s character and historiography in ways that America would find uncomfortable and unwilling to concede. So unless we mount ample intellectual and institutional capacities, The Mis-Education of the Negro will not only be the title of Dr. Woodson’s book, it will be an accurate description of a permanent reality.
Ezrah Aharone is the author of two political books: Sovereign Evolution: Manifest Destiny from Civil Rights to Sovereign Rights (2009) and Pawned Sovereignty: Sharpened Black Perspectives on Americanization, Africa, War and Reparations (2003). He is also a founding member of the Center for Sovereignty Advancement. He can be reached at Ezrah@theCSA.org.
Saturday, February 20, 2010
Political Burglary in the Union
By Ezrah Aharone 2/10
During President Obama’s first State of the Union address, there were over 100 applause lines, no shouts of “you lie,” and no reality show contestants (that we know of) breached security on a schmooze mission.
Aside from these successes, the Union is being politically burglarized and is in immediate need of rescue – Rescue from the collapsing weight of national debt and unregulated greed throughout America’s “Free Market Capitalism,” and rescue from the fast-sinking quicksand of military mishaps. This plundering for profits and power, long superseded Bush’s arrival and will long subsist beyond Obama’s departure.
World capitalism (costs of labor, value of currencies, controls over resources) did not evolve haphazardly in isolated fragments that are unrelated to coercion, occupation, and military might. With few exceptions, nations with the strongest currencies also have the strongest militaries and records of hegemony. Capitalism euphemistically has “free markets,” but as Ron Jacobs wrote in CounterPunch, capitalism is neither moral nor immoral – it is “amoral.” And “in order to survive, it must expand . . . The fact that the US spends more money on weaponry and war is directly related to this phenomenon.”
America was not only born with foreign debts from war-costs of its revolution, but it has bled annual debts in all but two years since its founding. Of the $3.8 trillion in Obama’s proposed 2011 federal budget, $738 billion is for defense and over $1 trillion will be borrowed from foreign creditors. Now with double-digit unemployment and a $12 trillion national debt, at least 45 cents of every US dollar is owed to governments like Kuwait and China.
Sovereign Wealth Funds (financial institutions of foreign governments that invest in other nations) are pouring into America faster than immigrants. At one point from November 2007 to January 2008, the governments of Kuwait, China, Singapore, United Arab Emirates, and South Korea invested over $40 billion in US banks. Since 2001, the dollar has tail-spun in value to the point where it is no longer the world’s strongest currency. And if you notice, some US businesses will now accept payments in Euros.
In a Charles Darwin-like fashion of “natural selection/survival of the fittest,” the financial services industry has subsequently resorted to cannibalizing the financial meat off the bones of the disadvantaged public, via subprime mortgages, usury interest rates, excessive penalties, Ponzi schemes and predatory lending practices. Consumers who’ve lost homes, investments, and retirement funds have had little government recourse, unless you count state-operated Power Ball lotteries.
Had this burglary been orchestrated by individuals instead of institutions, it would be criminal. But under the guise of “too big to fail,” rather than prosecuting, the government is subsidizing some of these same institutions with billions in tax-funded bailouts. And in a classic case of “wolves watching the henhouse,” some of the same Wall Street execs are being rotated into musical-chair appointments as “experts” to run the Federal Reserve, Treasury Department and other fiscal agencies.
But how could the so-called best and brightest people of government and Washington think tanks, who supposedly safeguard society, sit back and watch clusters of companies become “too big to fail” in the first place? Whether it’s incompetence or complicity, here’s what they should know before more ransom is given to bailout corporations that later split multimillions of loot “bonuses” among execs – If any business, in any industry, is deemed “too big to fail,” then that alone should stipulate it as a “modern-day monopoly” which, under expanded Antitrust Laws should subject it to be broken-up long before its failure can burglarize society.
As for healthcare, once you mix corporate greed with the political influence and endless lobbying dollars of the insurance industry, it’s easy to understand why “affordable” insurance is so controversial among congressmen who already have comprehensive (tax-funded) coverage. Remember, capitalism is amoral. So, because of “profit motives” your health is secondary to money. Therefore, whenever a healthcare bill does pass, the pendulum will surely swing to favor money-hungry companies that delay and deny needed approvals to the sick. Not to mention “drive through” surgeries.
The coziness, favoritism, and profiteering between government and corporations are known practices of “dollars and dealings” within a thriving plutocratic culture, where society’s elite moneychangers engage in “Pay-to-Play Democracy” to influence policymaking, party platforms, and election outcomes. Bluebloods who “donate” $25,000 per-plate to attend political fundraisers, don’t waste their “bargaining chips” by trying to moralize capitalism. Besides, it would be rudely inappropriate to advocate for the burglarized public while plutocrats dine on braised stuffed pheasant.
Ezrah Aharone is the author of two political books: Sovereign Evolution: Manifest Destiny from Civil Rights to Sovereign Rights (2009) and Pawned Sovereignty: Sharpened Black Perspectives on Americanization, Africa, War and Reparations (2003). He is also a founding member of the Center for Sovereignty Advancement. He can be reached at Ezrah@theCSA.org.
During President Obama’s first State of the Union address, there were over 100 applause lines, no shouts of “you lie,” and no reality show contestants (that we know of) breached security on a schmooze mission.
Aside from these successes, the Union is being politically burglarized and is in immediate need of rescue – Rescue from the collapsing weight of national debt and unregulated greed throughout America’s “Free Market Capitalism,” and rescue from the fast-sinking quicksand of military mishaps. This plundering for profits and power, long superseded Bush’s arrival and will long subsist beyond Obama’s departure.
World capitalism (costs of labor, value of currencies, controls over resources) did not evolve haphazardly in isolated fragments that are unrelated to coercion, occupation, and military might. With few exceptions, nations with the strongest currencies also have the strongest militaries and records of hegemony. Capitalism euphemistically has “free markets,” but as Ron Jacobs wrote in CounterPunch, capitalism is neither moral nor immoral – it is “amoral.” And “in order to survive, it must expand . . . The fact that the US spends more money on weaponry and war is directly related to this phenomenon.”
America was not only born with foreign debts from war-costs of its revolution, but it has bled annual debts in all but two years since its founding. Of the $3.8 trillion in Obama’s proposed 2011 federal budget, $738 billion is for defense and over $1 trillion will be borrowed from foreign creditors. Now with double-digit unemployment and a $12 trillion national debt, at least 45 cents of every US dollar is owed to governments like Kuwait and China.
Sovereign Wealth Funds (financial institutions of foreign governments that invest in other nations) are pouring into America faster than immigrants. At one point from November 2007 to January 2008, the governments of Kuwait, China, Singapore, United Arab Emirates, and South Korea invested over $40 billion in US banks. Since 2001, the dollar has tail-spun in value to the point where it is no longer the world’s strongest currency. And if you notice, some US businesses will now accept payments in Euros.
In a Charles Darwin-like fashion of “natural selection/survival of the fittest,” the financial services industry has subsequently resorted to cannibalizing the financial meat off the bones of the disadvantaged public, via subprime mortgages, usury interest rates, excessive penalties, Ponzi schemes and predatory lending practices. Consumers who’ve lost homes, investments, and retirement funds have had little government recourse, unless you count state-operated Power Ball lotteries.
Had this burglary been orchestrated by individuals instead of institutions, it would be criminal. But under the guise of “too big to fail,” rather than prosecuting, the government is subsidizing some of these same institutions with billions in tax-funded bailouts. And in a classic case of “wolves watching the henhouse,” some of the same Wall Street execs are being rotated into musical-chair appointments as “experts” to run the Federal Reserve, Treasury Department and other fiscal agencies.
But how could the so-called best and brightest people of government and Washington think tanks, who supposedly safeguard society, sit back and watch clusters of companies become “too big to fail” in the first place? Whether it’s incompetence or complicity, here’s what they should know before more ransom is given to bailout corporations that later split multimillions of loot “bonuses” among execs – If any business, in any industry, is deemed “too big to fail,” then that alone should stipulate it as a “modern-day monopoly” which, under expanded Antitrust Laws should subject it to be broken-up long before its failure can burglarize society.
As for healthcare, once you mix corporate greed with the political influence and endless lobbying dollars of the insurance industry, it’s easy to understand why “affordable” insurance is so controversial among congressmen who already have comprehensive (tax-funded) coverage. Remember, capitalism is amoral. So, because of “profit motives” your health is secondary to money. Therefore, whenever a healthcare bill does pass, the pendulum will surely swing to favor money-hungry companies that delay and deny needed approvals to the sick. Not to mention “drive through” surgeries.
The coziness, favoritism, and profiteering between government and corporations are known practices of “dollars and dealings” within a thriving plutocratic culture, where society’s elite moneychangers engage in “Pay-to-Play Democracy” to influence policymaking, party platforms, and election outcomes. Bluebloods who “donate” $25,000 per-plate to attend political fundraisers, don’t waste their “bargaining chips” by trying to moralize capitalism. Besides, it would be rudely inappropriate to advocate for the burglarized public while plutocrats dine on braised stuffed pheasant.
Ezrah Aharone is the author of two political books: Sovereign Evolution: Manifest Destiny from Civil Rights to Sovereign Rights (2009) and Pawned Sovereignty: Sharpened Black Perspectives on Americanization, Africa, War and Reparations (2003). He is also a founding member of the Center for Sovereignty Advancement. He can be reached at Ezrah@theCSA.org.
Friday, December 25, 2009
Happy Holidays: Enjoy the Religious War
By Ezrah Aharone 12/09
While President Obama revs-up the war machinery during this holiday season as he simultaneously holds the Nobel Peace Prize, it brings ponder to the possibility of lasting peace, considering that this conflict also embodies a borderless ideological “collision of religions.”
Although 9/11 makes the US feel justified in droning Afghanistan into submission, a few factors are worth noting since the groups known as Al Qaeda, Taliban, and Islamists are not all regional members of some Lodge-like fraternity who attend annual conventions to blow-up airplanes. Just as Saddam Hussein and Osama Bin Laden weren’t “colleagues,” they don’t all know each other or have close bonds. I’d bet that 9/11 was just as surprising to Americans as it was to many of the very combatants that the US now targets in the mountains of Afghanistan.
If you read A History of God by Karen Armstrong, you’ll find that the autonomous tribes and clans throughout this region have been warring and exacting “rough-and-ready” justice on themselves and invaders for centuries. Afghanistan is not only called the “Graveyard of Empires” because of its war victories, it’s a land where loyalty can be “rented” to the highest bidder. In fact, Afghans have a term called “Turning Turbans” to signify the switching of sides and loyalties.
But in this case, the one uncompromising factor is their Islamic belief and obligation to rid-out Westerners whom they regard as foreign occupiers and infidels. Before resigning his State Department post, former Marine Captain, Matthew Hoh, aptly assessed that Afghans are fighting in some areas only because the US military “is there.” If American soldiers weren’t “there,” many Afghan fighters would have a pre-9/11 outlook when America was not a “declared enemy.”
Meantime, despite the public’s mounting war outcries and economic anxieties, Obama has done something that can potentially reserve him a seat among the pantheon of the greatest commander-in-chiefs – He has become a “wartime president.” Many of the most renowned American presidents have the “glorified” distinction of being war leaders.
America’s warped fascination with war is openly boasted in its national anthem, which puts a twist of splendor on the butchery during the War of 1812 – “the perilous fight,” “ramparts gallantly streaming,” “rocket’s red glare,” “bombs bursting in air.” If you want instant success, just make a blood-spattering war movie that depicts American bravery and greatness. Don’t make the mistake though of featuring Black heroes like Spike Lee’s Miracle at St. Anna because that lacks comparative box-office appeal.
This cancerous love affair with blood, circulates the veins of society and manifests in everything from the highest crime rate and gun homicides in the world; to belligerent television, movies, and video games for “entertainment” pleasures; to routine abortions and capital punishment; to random mass murders of schoolchildren; to over 90,000 annual rapes of women.
A nation’s true character is defined – not by fluffy words in its constitution – but by the moral and cumulative sum of its historical conduct. Yet America, with its enduring history of questionable wars and centuries of racialized misconduct, has a false self-perception of being a nation of peace. Dr. King called the US government “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world” . . . and said God hasn’t “appointed America as his messianic force, a kind of policeman of the whole world.”
America has a national holiday recognizing Dr. King and his nonviolent philosophy, but nonviolence is certainly not America’s philosophy. Nonviolence is something that Black America is conditioned to practice towards Euro-Americans, but nonviolence is considered a cardinal weakness by this establishment. Heck, America isn’t even fond of compromise, and it definitely doesn’t “love its enemies.” It practices an unrepentant “eye-for-eye” variety of Christianity that “lives by the sword.”
The religious notion that God endorses the US military is reinforced in the “Oath of Enlistment” that all soldiers must “swear,” which evokes “Faith” and eerily concludes with the words, “So Help Me God.” As Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia affirmed, “A religious-neutral government does not fit with an America that reflects belief in God in everything from its money to its military.”
If the reverse occurred whereby the Christian streets of America were stormed by Muslim soldiers with Blackwater-like mercenaries, ordinary Americans would fight no less fiercely than Afghans. Call them terrorists or whatever else, but based on their longstanding heritage and religious convictions they have no intentions to allow America, via the corrupted Hamid Kharzi government, to institute a Plymouth Rock-like presence in Afghanistan.
Consequently, the decade of 2010 launches with an outright, but undeclared, “Religious War” with Crusaders on one side, Jihadists on the other, with no negotiating table between these two Abrahamic faiths that originally share spiritual commonalities without today’s political complexities. So, as with Iraq, it’s near-certain that Afghanistan won’t become a vacation destination for Americans in your lifetime.
Ezrah Aharone is the author of two political books: Sovereign Evolution and Pawned Sovereignty. He is also a founding member of the Center for Sovereignty Advancement. He can be reached at Ezrah@theCSA.org.
While President Obama revs-up the war machinery during this holiday season as he simultaneously holds the Nobel Peace Prize, it brings ponder to the possibility of lasting peace, considering that this conflict also embodies a borderless ideological “collision of religions.”
Although 9/11 makes the US feel justified in droning Afghanistan into submission, a few factors are worth noting since the groups known as Al Qaeda, Taliban, and Islamists are not all regional members of some Lodge-like fraternity who attend annual conventions to blow-up airplanes. Just as Saddam Hussein and Osama Bin Laden weren’t “colleagues,” they don’t all know each other or have close bonds. I’d bet that 9/11 was just as surprising to Americans as it was to many of the very combatants that the US now targets in the mountains of Afghanistan.
If you read A History of God by Karen Armstrong, you’ll find that the autonomous tribes and clans throughout this region have been warring and exacting “rough-and-ready” justice on themselves and invaders for centuries. Afghanistan is not only called the “Graveyard of Empires” because of its war victories, it’s a land where loyalty can be “rented” to the highest bidder. In fact, Afghans have a term called “Turning Turbans” to signify the switching of sides and loyalties.
But in this case, the one uncompromising factor is their Islamic belief and obligation to rid-out Westerners whom they regard as foreign occupiers and infidels. Before resigning his State Department post, former Marine Captain, Matthew Hoh, aptly assessed that Afghans are fighting in some areas only because the US military “is there.” If American soldiers weren’t “there,” many Afghan fighters would have a pre-9/11 outlook when America was not a “declared enemy.”
Meantime, despite the public’s mounting war outcries and economic anxieties, Obama has done something that can potentially reserve him a seat among the pantheon of the greatest commander-in-chiefs – He has become a “wartime president.” Many of the most renowned American presidents have the “glorified” distinction of being war leaders.
America’s warped fascination with war is openly boasted in its national anthem, which puts a twist of splendor on the butchery during the War of 1812 – “the perilous fight,” “ramparts gallantly streaming,” “rocket’s red glare,” “bombs bursting in air.” If you want instant success, just make a blood-spattering war movie that depicts American bravery and greatness. Don’t make the mistake though of featuring Black heroes like Spike Lee’s Miracle at St. Anna because that lacks comparative box-office appeal.
This cancerous love affair with blood, circulates the veins of society and manifests in everything from the highest crime rate and gun homicides in the world; to belligerent television, movies, and video games for “entertainment” pleasures; to routine abortions and capital punishment; to random mass murders of schoolchildren; to over 90,000 annual rapes of women.
A nation’s true character is defined – not by fluffy words in its constitution – but by the moral and cumulative sum of its historical conduct. Yet America, with its enduring history of questionable wars and centuries of racialized misconduct, has a false self-perception of being a nation of peace. Dr. King called the US government “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world” . . . and said God hasn’t “appointed America as his messianic force, a kind of policeman of the whole world.”
America has a national holiday recognizing Dr. King and his nonviolent philosophy, but nonviolence is certainly not America’s philosophy. Nonviolence is something that Black America is conditioned to practice towards Euro-Americans, but nonviolence is considered a cardinal weakness by this establishment. Heck, America isn’t even fond of compromise, and it definitely doesn’t “love its enemies.” It practices an unrepentant “eye-for-eye” variety of Christianity that “lives by the sword.”
The religious notion that God endorses the US military is reinforced in the “Oath of Enlistment” that all soldiers must “swear,” which evokes “Faith” and eerily concludes with the words, “So Help Me God.” As Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia affirmed, “A religious-neutral government does not fit with an America that reflects belief in God in everything from its money to its military.”
If the reverse occurred whereby the Christian streets of America were stormed by Muslim soldiers with Blackwater-like mercenaries, ordinary Americans would fight no less fiercely than Afghans. Call them terrorists or whatever else, but based on their longstanding heritage and religious convictions they have no intentions to allow America, via the corrupted Hamid Kharzi government, to institute a Plymouth Rock-like presence in Afghanistan.
Consequently, the decade of 2010 launches with an outright, but undeclared, “Religious War” with Crusaders on one side, Jihadists on the other, with no negotiating table between these two Abrahamic faiths that originally share spiritual commonalities without today’s political complexities. So, as with Iraq, it’s near-certain that Afghanistan won’t become a vacation destination for Americans in your lifetime.
Ezrah Aharone is the author of two political books: Sovereign Evolution and Pawned Sovereignty. He is also a founding member of the Center for Sovereignty Advancement. He can be reached at Ezrah@theCSA.org.
Saturday, November 21, 2009
Placebos of Black Political Leadership
By Ezrah Aharone 11/09
The election of President Barack Obama is shifting America’s axis of race in ways that have yet to be politically quantified. But from a standpoint of Black political leadership, it signals a definite “changing of the guards.” The once-popular preacher/protester ilk of leadership from the 1960s finds itself gasping for 21st century oxygen, as young Black leaders are card-carrying democrats who can now “eyeball” whomever they please.
Perception suggests that African Americans are finally becoming politically powerful as a people. But every industrialized nation with an ethnically diverse population has a general “pecking order” of power, starting with the dominant group most able to leverage capital might into political influence that shapes foreign, domestic, and military policies. All other simulations of power (freedoms of speech, press, assembly etc.) are like political window-dressings of democracy that may boost patriotism, but lack utility for minority people to command such influence.
Similarly, people who’ve taken “Placebo” sugar pills, sometimes experience boosts in health, being that they psychologically expect and believe the tablets contain “medicinal properties” to cure them. In much the same way, America’s placebos (civil rights, integration, citizenship) have given us expectations and beliefs of power, when in reality, they lack the “political properties” of control (sovereignty, independence, statehood) wielded by Euro-Americans . . . Which is exactly why our centuries-old ailments remain largely uncured.
Although upcoming generations of Black leaders are digesting Americanization more easily, I’m reminded of Winston Churchill who once remarked that Euro-Americans will always “do the right thing, after they’ve exhausted all alternatives.” And so, racial progress and the rise of Black political leaders cannot be disconnected from America’s habitual militarism and its 21st century requirements for economic survivability . . . Honestly, how much longer could we be coaxed into voting for White multimillionaires and fighting ambiguous wars abroad if we still faced stark Jim Crowness here?
But whether you believe it or not, there remains unvoiced resentment towards civil rights leaders for pricking lasting nerves. Euro-Americans have a known nationalist tendency of not liking to be cited or corrected of their political flaws and flagrances. So naturally this establishment welcomes fresh, race-neutral Black leaders who skillfully steer around the systemic/endemic nature and ramifications of America’s racial inequities, which Obama faultlessly personifies.
Part of his ascension involved soothing the historical burdens of White guilt, while keeping civil rights leaders at arms-length to prevent staining his political immaculacy of White acceptance. As such, he cryptically foretold during his campaign that “he’s rooted in the Black community, but not limited by it.”
My question is – What crime did we commit as a people where someone would have to present such a political defense for himself? If everyone is “equal” why then, conversely, is he “not limited by the White community” since he’s also half-White? Most troubling however is the unseen, unchallenged “source” that compelled him to make this disclaimer since it holds proven capabilities to diminish us, as Black people, beneath the respect and political worth that all people deserve.
Despite such subliminal credence to Whiteness, the repercussions of centuries of Euro-American greed and immoralities are heading homeward to roost. Not only is America experiencing an internal crisis of leadership and financial upheaval, its international integrity and superpower image are jeopardized, as the world community frowns upon its brash war escapades. In response, it has become strategically expedient for Euro-American males to deflect the government’s aggression away from themselves.
Similar to the Lone Ranger designating Tonto “the leader” (after being surrounded by angry Indians) the establishment hopes Obama and other Black leaders like Attorney General Eric Holder and UN Ambassador Susan Rice, can convey a “placebo appearance” that the US government is no longer a big, bad, all-White wolf with the blood of Black and Brown people dripping from its fangs. Together, they put a converted face of “change” on what otherwise is a contiguous history of “Euro-American hegemony as usual.”
Yes, America is multicultural. Yes, Africans in America are making progress. But in our honest pursuit of political power – via the leadership tutelage of Euro-Americans – it is our spiritual responsibility to question if we, in the process, are becoming proxy participants in a 21st century continuation of the same “interloping for resources” that initially barbarized us and Native Americans, under the pretext of “freedom and democracy.”
Ezrah Aharone is the author of two political books: Sovereign Evolution and Pawned Sovereignty. He is also a founding member of the Center for Sovereignty Advancement. He can be reached at Ezrah@theCSA.org.
The election of President Barack Obama is shifting America’s axis of race in ways that have yet to be politically quantified. But from a standpoint of Black political leadership, it signals a definite “changing of the guards.” The once-popular preacher/protester ilk of leadership from the 1960s finds itself gasping for 21st century oxygen, as young Black leaders are card-carrying democrats who can now “eyeball” whomever they please.
Perception suggests that African Americans are finally becoming politically powerful as a people. But every industrialized nation with an ethnically diverse population has a general “pecking order” of power, starting with the dominant group most able to leverage capital might into political influence that shapes foreign, domestic, and military policies. All other simulations of power (freedoms of speech, press, assembly etc.) are like political window-dressings of democracy that may boost patriotism, but lack utility for minority people to command such influence.
Similarly, people who’ve taken “Placebo” sugar pills, sometimes experience boosts in health, being that they psychologically expect and believe the tablets contain “medicinal properties” to cure them. In much the same way, America’s placebos (civil rights, integration, citizenship) have given us expectations and beliefs of power, when in reality, they lack the “political properties” of control (sovereignty, independence, statehood) wielded by Euro-Americans . . . Which is exactly why our centuries-old ailments remain largely uncured.
Although upcoming generations of Black leaders are digesting Americanization more easily, I’m reminded of Winston Churchill who once remarked that Euro-Americans will always “do the right thing, after they’ve exhausted all alternatives.” And so, racial progress and the rise of Black political leaders cannot be disconnected from America’s habitual militarism and its 21st century requirements for economic survivability . . . Honestly, how much longer could we be coaxed into voting for White multimillionaires and fighting ambiguous wars abroad if we still faced stark Jim Crowness here?
But whether you believe it or not, there remains unvoiced resentment towards civil rights leaders for pricking lasting nerves. Euro-Americans have a known nationalist tendency of not liking to be cited or corrected of their political flaws and flagrances. So naturally this establishment welcomes fresh, race-neutral Black leaders who skillfully steer around the systemic/endemic nature and ramifications of America’s racial inequities, which Obama faultlessly personifies.
Part of his ascension involved soothing the historical burdens of White guilt, while keeping civil rights leaders at arms-length to prevent staining his political immaculacy of White acceptance. As such, he cryptically foretold during his campaign that “he’s rooted in the Black community, but not limited by it.”
My question is – What crime did we commit as a people where someone would have to present such a political defense for himself? If everyone is “equal” why then, conversely, is he “not limited by the White community” since he’s also half-White? Most troubling however is the unseen, unchallenged “source” that compelled him to make this disclaimer since it holds proven capabilities to diminish us, as Black people, beneath the respect and political worth that all people deserve.
Despite such subliminal credence to Whiteness, the repercussions of centuries of Euro-American greed and immoralities are heading homeward to roost. Not only is America experiencing an internal crisis of leadership and financial upheaval, its international integrity and superpower image are jeopardized, as the world community frowns upon its brash war escapades. In response, it has become strategically expedient for Euro-American males to deflect the government’s aggression away from themselves.
Similar to the Lone Ranger designating Tonto “the leader” (after being surrounded by angry Indians) the establishment hopes Obama and other Black leaders like Attorney General Eric Holder and UN Ambassador Susan Rice, can convey a “placebo appearance” that the US government is no longer a big, bad, all-White wolf with the blood of Black and Brown people dripping from its fangs. Together, they put a converted face of “change” on what otherwise is a contiguous history of “Euro-American hegemony as usual.”
Yes, America is multicultural. Yes, Africans in America are making progress. But in our honest pursuit of political power – via the leadership tutelage of Euro-Americans – it is our spiritual responsibility to question if we, in the process, are becoming proxy participants in a 21st century continuation of the same “interloping for resources” that initially barbarized us and Native Americans, under the pretext of “freedom and democracy.”
Ezrah Aharone is the author of two political books: Sovereign Evolution and Pawned Sovereignty. He is also a founding member of the Center for Sovereignty Advancement. He can be reached at Ezrah@theCSA.org.
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