Blogosphere
Blogosphere
Freedom Rider: Solidarity with Moms 4 Housing
Margaret Kimberley: The displacement of black people from their communities isn’t new. Urban renewal, popular and accurately known as Negro removal, was a weapon in use for many years. ... Oakland where Moms 4 Housing took matters into their own hands ... They are mothers with young children and despite being employed could not find adequate places to live. ... These women took bold action when they moved into an empty house targeted by a real estate speculator and called it their own ... Critics say that the women are stealing. If so they are behaving no differently than the banksters whose malfeasance created the real estate bubble in the first place. ... They are no different than the politicians who do their bidding and allow the austerity regime to accelerate...
[ Visit Website ]
Jan 15, 2020, 3:31pm
Blogosphere
Freedom Rider: Iran and the Need for Black Activism
Margaret Kimberley: For most of American history black people could be counted on to oppose United States war making abroad. If no one else spoke up in defense of countries declared enemies, we would. Posturing about strategic interests, the Cold War or the War on Terror brought sneers and disbelief even as the rest of the country swallowed lies and supported aggression. ... But that was before a black secretary of state, Colin Powell, told very big lies and made the case for the invasion of Iraq. ... The enemies of peace are many and powerful. The corporate media work hand in hand with the duopoly to convince Americans that war is peace and freedom is slavery. ... The people must be independent of all these forces. The common sense forged by the common experience of oppression must be resurrected...
[ Visit Website ]
Jan 8, 2020, 4:07pm
Blogosphere
Climate Crisis Rages in Australia, with 14 of 15 hottest Places in World and Sydney Fire-Besieged
Juan Cole: Australia has been turned by the climate crisis into a huge oven. On Wednesday, 14 of the hottest places in the world were in Australia. ... Firefighters are combating 100 wildfires in New South Wales (NSW), with some of them encroaching on Sydney, Australia’s largest city. NSW declared a 7-day state of emergency. ... The continent-wide average temperature on Wednesday, of 107.4° F. (41.9° C.), the hottest in recorded history, broke the record set just on Tuesday. That was the average, which means there were places substantially hotter than that. ... Australia is a major exporter of coal and other hydrocarbons, and with 0.7 percent of the world population is responsible for 5% of carbon dioxide emissions if exported fuels are counted. That is staggering...
[ Visit Website ]
Dec 20, 2019, 2:06pm
Blogosphere
Freedom Rider: Propaganda and the Defeat of Jeremy Corbyn
Margaret Kimberley: If Corbyn can be defeated with a libel it can work just as well on Sanders. ... The 2016 Brexit referendum played a significant role in these events. ... Corbyn and his party were relentlessly targeted by the corporate media who worked in collusion with the Tories, the surveillance state, and rightwing forces in the country. He was accused of being a Russian agent and an anti-Semite. ... “Repetition of a lie can change minds, much like subliminal messaging on a constant loop.” ... Corbyn was facing an establishment that had too much to lose if he won. They could not risk him freeing Julian Assange or returning gold illegally stolen from Venezuela or refusing to snatch Iranian oil tankers if the U.S. demanded it. They couldn’t risk anyone possibly disrupting the work of MI6...
[ Visit Website ]
Dec 18, 2019, 2:38pm
Blogosphere
Freedom Rider: Abolish the Police
Margaret Kimberley: Trump’s attorney general threatened to withdraw police “protection” from Black communities – but, of course, no such thing exists. ... There is little benefit to the public in the way law enforcement officers work in this country. They rarely protect the public from violence. Most of their activity consists of finding any and every reason to put black people behind bars. The police are the 21st century slave patrol ... “We would be fortunate indeed if we were to lose police “protection.” ... The idea of abolishing the police should not be considered strange or outlandish. Doing so is a necessity and police departments prove it themselves every day. ... The police are and will remain a menace unless and until we have true community control over their operations...
[ Visit Website ]
Dec 13, 2019, 3:26pm
Blogosphere
Freedom Rider: Liberals Love the Military
Margaret Kimberley: The trauma of Donald Trump’s presidency has created continued insanity for American liberals. They were never very trustworthy, due to their abiding belief in United States exceptionalism and an imagined right for it to intervene in the rest of the world as it pleased. ... If liberals were to be taken seriously they would question military values, question the nearly 20-year long presence of the U.S. in Iraq and Afghanistan ... These wars are the longest in history and are war crimes by definition. ... The idea of American exceptionalism must be discarded completely. ... Of course that would mean questioning nearly every premise of political decision making in this country...
[ Visit Website ]
Dec 5, 2019, 3:39pm
Blogosphere
Freedom Rider: Say No to Bloomberg
Margaret Kimberley: Bloomberg says he wants to stop Donald Trump but he’s really running to stop Bernie Sanders. ... There are many reasons to oppose a Bloomberg presidential campaign. Billionaire rule has damaged New York, the nation and the entire world. The word “oligarch” is an insult when applied to other nations like Russia, but an American oligarch has announced his intention to buy the presidency for himself or someone else and opposition has been quite muted. ... Michael Bloomberg was the worst mayor for black New Yorkers. While Rudy Guiliani and his overt appeals to racism drew ire, Bloomberg’s approach of buying off opposition allowed him to get away with doing far worse....
[ Visit Website ]
Nov 27, 2019, 4:25pm
Blogosphere
Freedom Rider: The Ukrainegate Farce
Margaret Kimberley: Donald Trump is not a very smart man. ... The Bidens’ actions were definitely corrupt but Trump should have left that alone. Other presidents have done far worse in their interventions against foreign governments but they knew not to leave personal fingerprints on dubious activity. Presidents always give themselves deniability but Trump couldn’t help but involve himself directly and create a new scandal. ... Trump’s stupidity and general awfulness aren’t enough to get a Democrat elected in 2020. Only policy positions that result in positive change for people’s lives will bring about that result but that is exactly what Democrats refuse to do...
[ Visit Website ]
Nov 20, 2019, 2:28pm
Blogosphere
Iran: Economic Blockade and Crowd Protests were also How the US made the 1953 Coup
Juan Cole: The crowd protests that grew to affect 100 cities over the weekend in Iran were sparked by the government increasing the price of gasoline by as much as 3 times overnight. ... But the underlying discontents with the government have been caused by a sinking economy, expected to shrink by 9% this year. ... In turn, Iran’s economic woes derive from Donald Trump’s economic blockade of the country, whereby he has virtually halted Iranian oil sales ... The campaign aims at regime change, and the social unrest it has succeeded in provoking is testimony to the deadly efficiency of the blockade. ... The situation eerily resembles that in summer, 1953...
[ Visit Website ]
Nov 18, 2019, 2:36pm
Blogosphere
Freedom Rider: Hybrid Warfare in Bolivia and Beyond
Margaret Kimberley: The violent coup in Bolivia, like all of Washington’s regime-change and dirty tricks operations, has been aided and abetted by corporate media’s masters of euphemism. ... It is problematic to invade, occupy, overthrow and impose deadly sanctions on helpless civilians when average people can easily access information for themselves. Getting and keeping public support for evil doing is a risky proposition. ... That is why governments tell lies. ... They can’t assume a thumbs up from the public when they kill and destroy. They need propaganda and at this stage of history when the United States and its allies can’t expect to get what they want, the lies must be many and they must be promoted constantly. ...
[ Visit Website ]
Nov 13, 2019, 1:36pm
Blogosphere
Freedom Rider: America Needs Protest
Margaret Kimberley: In recent months mass protests involving millions of people have emerged in countries such as Haiti, Ecuador, and Chile. In each instance the spark was unique to that nation. ... Political corruption, theft from the people, the desire for real democracy, and interference from the United States and its allies all play a role in these events. ... However, the country with an entrenched oligarchic class, a lying and useless media, and the world’s largest incarceration state is by and large silent. The United States is still the worst purveyor of violence in the world with high rates of inequality and a racist system that has gone on unabated. Yet Americans do not take to the streets....
[ Visit Website ]
Nov 6, 2019, 2:29pm
Blogosphere
Freedom Rider: The Baghdadi Scam
Margaret Kimberley: The tale of an assassination should not be accepted without question. The U.S. claimed that Baghdadi’s body was identified with the help of a DNA sample ... The story of Kurds, Turks and ISIL in Syria is complicated but the root cause of all the twists and turns is an old and very simple story. The United States under president Barack Obama used ISIL and al-Qaeda terrorists in an attempt to overthrow the Syrian government. The project was a completely bipartisan affair, with the supposed political rivals in the republican and democratic parties on board with using Baghdadi and his forces for their own purposes...
[ Visit Website ]
Oct 30, 2019, 2:44pm
Blogosphere
Freedom Rider: The Return of Hillary Clinton
Margaret Kimberley: It’s not clear if smear-mongering Clinton is running for president, or just fleeing reality. ... It isn’t clear if Hillary Clinton has just lost it and can’t control herself, really thinks she can make a third presidential run, or is trying to keep the unraveling narrative of her defeat together. Like all establishment Democrats she has Bernie Sanders in her crosshairs and will do anything to keep him from getting the nomination. ... Whatever her ultimate goal, her reappearance spells disaster for the Democratic Party. It is proof that their plot to upend Sanders will only end in defeat and another Trump term in office....
[ Visit Website ]
Oct 23, 2019, 3:12pm
Blogosphere
Freedom Rider: Trump, Obama and Syria
Margaret Kimberley: Whether by mistake or design, Donald Trump is presiding over the – agonizing slow – demise of Barack Obama’s illegal and immoral scheme to overthrow the government of Syria using jihadist terror armies. ... Pointing out that the Trump team is particularly inept is only part of the story. The Democrats’ crocodile tears shed over the Kurds are part of their effort to undermine Trump while continuing to engage in the same criminality which both parties practice. Not one Democratic Party critic has questioned the premise of U.S. imperialism which brought the Kurds and the Syrians to this point...
[ Visit Website ]
Oct 16, 2019, 4:11pm
Blogosphere
Freedom Rider: Botham Jean, Joshua Brown and Antonio Williams Freedom Rider: Botham Jean, Joshua Brown and Antonio Williams
Margaret Kimberley: The death of a police murder witness in Dallas is reminiscent of another police atrocity and coverup in New York City. ... There is always hope that justice will be done but also recognition that it is rarely the case. Yet in Dallas the killer cop was actually convicted by a multi-racial jury. But what should have been a cause for some relief turned into farce ... Just three days after the conviction Brown was also killed. ...While the facts surrounding Botham Jean’s and Brown's murders were somewhat anomalous, a man in New York City suffered the same fate but in a more typical fashion for police murder victims. ... Williams’ last words were, “I didn’t do nothing. Why are you bothering me? Why are you after me?” The police tackled and shot him but two of the bullets struck one of officers and he died along with Williams...
[ Visit Website ]
Oct 9, 2019, 4:21pm
|
FountainofLight.net