Kenya’s problem beyond ethnicity and elections.

(IPS) There is more to Kenya’s post-election violence than a bungled vote count and so-called tribal rivalries. As protests degenerate into organised ethnic violence in Rift Valley towns and countryside, the root-cause of the unrest lies elsewhere.

"We must tackle the fundamental issues underlying the disturbances -- like equitable distribution of resources -- or else we will be back here again after three or four years," former U.N. chief Kofi Annan told journalists in Nairobi’s Serena Hotel Sunday, after talking to survivors of the violence which has claimed over 1,000 lives and displaced some 250,000 people since the December election.

Though Annan’s mediation to initiate a structured dialogue between President Mwai Kibaki and opposition leader Raila Odinga is making progress -- Kibaki and Odinga shook one another’s hands last week and vowed to continue a dialogue to resolve the crisis -- the wave of violence has taken on its own dynamics.

Even if Kibaki, a Kikuyu, and Odinga, a Luo, were to make peace and reach a power-sharing deal down the line, the chronic economic and political root- causes of the tribal violence would not go away.

"Its characterisation as a tribal enmity is simplistic -- access to land, housing, and water are the real issues that appear in the guise of ethnicity and are triggered by political disputes," said a Danish aid worker who was part of an emergency assessment team in the Rift Valley. "There is an unmistakable class dimension to the turmoil in Kenyan society," the aid worker said, wishing to remain anonymous.

"Only one category of people had come out to protest against the electoral irregularities: the poorest of the poor, the jobless, and the landless. People from only one class are seen to be committing violence and registering resentment against poll cheating," says Millicent Ogutu, who works at a Nairobi-based media company.

In Nairobi, the only sites of trouble throughout the post-election spree of violence have been the slums of Kibera, Mathare, and other shantytowns. This pattern is visible also in other troubled regions, such as Kisumu in Odinga’s home province of Nyanza, and in the Rift Valley towns of Eldoret, Molo, Nakuru, and Naivasha.

Following conciliatory speeches made in the presence of Annan by Kibaki and Odinga outside Harambee House, the president’s office, Ogutu and others IPS talked to expressed scepticism that any long-term solution to Kenya’s gaping economic disparity, tribe-based cronyism, and corruption would be reached.

"Have you seen any middle-class person of any tribe shouting slogans against either Odinga or Kibaki?" asked Raphael Karanja, a radio journalist. "It is only the people who had a misplaced faith in the power of the ballot, and who genuinely believed that their vote can lead to a change of guard and better economic policies that might alleviate their basic problems of land, housing, and drinking water that have risen up in protest."

Most of the protestors -- in Nairobi’s slums and other places -- belong to the Luo and Klenjin tribes while the majority of victims of the recent violence have been the Kikuyus. But beneath these simplistic tribal battle-lines lie the historic patterns of uneven resource distribution in Kenya.

The biggest issue is that of land. "The state had showed a blatant bias in favour of one tribe at the expense of the rest at the time of independence when the land left behind by the British was to be distributed among the local people," says an economics professor at the University of Nairobi, who wishes to remain anonymous, as he is a government employee. Kikuyus bought much of the land in Kenya -- even in non-Kikuyu regions -- as they dominated the first administration of Jumo Kenyatta and were given preferential treatment in the award of loans for buying land.

"That resulted in Kikuyu families holding land in the midst of other tribes, especially in the fertile Rift Valley, the main region of turmoil in every wave of electoral violence that Kenya has seen since a multiparty system was introduced in 1992," the professor explained.

The Dec. 2007 elections were not the first perceived to be rigged. They were not the first to lead to post-electoral violence. Similar spurts of tribal violence -- mainly anti-Kikuyu -- also took place in the run-up to the 1992 elections and, on a much larger scale, during and after the 1997 elections.

Another big issue is that of housing and water in the localities where the poorest people live. The issue is directly related to corruption. "The gap between the few rich and the majority poor has widened so greatly over the last decade that even if a common Kenyan is able to raise resources and wants to build a proper house, he finds bureaucratic hurdles at every step which cannot be overcome without extra money for corrupt officials," says Ogutu.

There are no middle class neighbourhoods in Nairobi. There are either slums, or posh, rich localities.

"Under [President Daniel arap] Moi’s and Kibaki’s governments, the rich have gotten super rich and adopted a culture of conspicuous consumption with big cars and bigger houses. On the other hand, the poor have been further impoverished and conspicuously so. The middle class has shrunk, with the very few moving up but most of them barely surviving the slide down into the economic and social abyss," says the professor. The violence that has taken on tribal characteristics is in fact rooted in the widening class divisions between the rich and poor of the country.

The poor thought that democracy and elections would help them influence government policy. Odinga raised expectations by campaigning as the people’s candidate and a champion of the poor. He received votes across tribal divides.

"After the peaceful transition of power in 2002, most Kenyans actually had faith that they can bring about another change through their vote. Hence, the large turnout and the peaceful December elections," says Ogutu. "That faith is irreparably dented. Raila shaking hands with Kibaki is cosmetic and, at best, a momentary and tenuous truce. It won’t change a thing for them. They’ll be back on the street sooner or later." (source)

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Nahum Grymes (J. Holiday)

Okay so I've been hearing all over that J. Holiday is Eritrean. And from what I can gather online it appears to be the truth. And not a surprise, especially when you look at his features.

I do hope that he takes the opportunity to speak about his nationality and use the media platform to express some Pan-African pride.

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Gnarles Barkley: "Run"

Run (listen/download)

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Mumia: It ain't the voting that counts it's the counting

It ain't the voting that counts it's the counting (listen/download)

Mumia Abu-Jamal is an award-winning journalist, former President of the Philadelphia Association of Black Journalists, and author of "Live From Death Row", "Death Blossoms", "All Things Censored", “Faith of Our Fathers” and the recently released “We Want Freedom”. A resident of Pennsylvania’s death row since 1982, new evidence, including the recantation of a key eyewitness, new ballistic and forensic evidence, judicial racial prejudice, and a confession from Arnold Beverly (one of the two confessed killers) points to his innocence. Mumia continues to fight for a new trial with the support of tens of thousands around the world.

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Mumia: The madness called home, Kenya.

The madness called home, Kenya (listen/download)

Mumia Abu-Jamal is an award-winning journalist, former President of the Philadelphia Association of Black Journalists, and author of "Live From Death Row", "Death Blossoms", "All Things Censored", “Faith of Our Fathers” and the recently released “We Want Freedom”. A resident of Pennsylvania’s death row since 1982, new evidence, including the recantation of a key eyewitness, new ballistic and forensic evidence, judicial racial prejudice, and a confession from Arnold Beverly (one of the two confessed killers) points to his innocence. Mumia continues to fight for a new trial with the support of tens of thousands around the world.

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Obama is not King.

We welcome Mel Reeves as a contributor to The Liberator. Mel is a freelance writer, activist and organizer living in Miami, Florida and will be contributing regularly to The Liberator. He is also the former editor of the Minnesota Spokesman-Recorder newspaper in Minneapolis and the Miami Times.

Obama is not King: The presidential candidacy of Barack Obama has spawned lots of banter about Martin Luther King Jr, whose birthday the country recently observed. Obama has been mentioned in the same breath as King, as the fulfillment and embodiment of the civil rights leaders’ dream. Obama’s supposed symbolism is misleading and represent gross misrepresentations of the truth.

So let me take a moment to set the record straight.

Now when we consider the idea of Obama as the fulfillment of Kings’ dream we should refer to the great one himself. In his now popular, “I have a dream,” speech delivered from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial at the 1963 March on Washington, King elucidated his vision of things to come.

“I have a dream,” proclaimed King; “that this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed, ‘We hold these truths to be self evident that all men are created equal,’”… that, “sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood,”… that, “even the state of Mississippi, will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice”… and that, “my four children will live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.”

The fulfillment of Kings vision has yet to come to pass. Even Obama admitted as much last Sunday in a speech at King’s former church, Ebenezer Baptist in Atlanta. Obama, explained that, “for most of this country’s history, we in the African-American community have been at the receiving end of man’s inhumanity to man. And all of us understand intimately the insidious role that race still sometimes plays – on the job, in the schools, in our health care system, and in our criminal justice system.”

However, the talk about the Senator’s possible election as president of the US as culmination of the civil rights movement reveals a popular misconception about King and a misreading of his most popular speech. It exposes how few people actually read the entire text. (If they had it wouldn’t be so popular) Because within it lies a radical critique of US society and a clarion call to continue the struggle. It is not the innocuous pablum, which the revisionists have assigned to it.

In actuality, King’s vision was about collective progress, not individual progress. Obama rightly pointed out during the South Carolina debate that MLK would probably not have endorsed either candidate including Obama. Obama is right King would not endorse anyone who was tied to the power structure, which he saw as the source of our problems as people (black, white, Latin, Asian, Native, women, etc.).

Obama --no matter how folks want to see him-- is still indeed tied to this social/economic/ political system and does not represent a break from the power structure. This is true despite his misleading and disingenuous mantra of “change” and “hope.” Recognizing this, the human rights leader would have viewed the idea of Obama winning the presidency not as a sign of the advancement of the race, but as nothing more than tokenism.

King enlightened us on the problem of tokenism in his essay “The Sword that Heals.”

“Still another technique had begun to replace the old methods for thwarting the Negroes’ dreams and aspirations. This is the method known as tokenism…Tokenism is a promise to pay. Democracy in its finest sense is payment. The Negro wanted to feel pride in his race. With tokenism the solution was simple. If all twenty million Negroes would keep looking at Ralph Bunche [insert Obama] the one man in so exalted a post would generate such a volume of pride that it could be cut into portions and served to everyone. A judge here and a judge there, an executive behind a polished desk, a high government administrator all these were tokens used to obscure the persisting reality, and discrimination.

Those who argue in favor of tokenism point out that we must begin somewhere; that it is unwise to spurn any breakthrough, no matter how limited. There is a critical distinction, however, between a modest start and tokenism. Its [tokenism] purpose is not to begin a process, but instead to end the process of protest and pressure. It is a hypocritical gesture not a constructive first step.”

Enough said!

Ironically, Obama’s race is merely a smoke screen making it harder for folks to see who and what he really represents. But in the process of fooling folks he is also standing the history and intent of the Civil Rights movement on its head. He is accomplishing this through revision and inference.

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Obama versus King.

We welcome Chigozie Onyema, a member of the Kwame Ture Society (KTS), a student organization founded at Howard University to further the development, dissemination of knowledge, and the advancement of the Africana studies discipline. Members of KTS will be regularly contributing to The Liberator.

Obama versus King: Is Obama the successor to Dr. King? Many have touted Obama as the next great exemplar of black activism and progressive thinking. His victory in the Iowa Caucus has asserted him as a force to be reckoned with, but we must ask—is he really cut from the same cloth as King?

No. Obama’s proposed policies contradict those of King. Although they both harbor desires to connect with people along the racial and economic divide, King never compromised his core values or the interests of his people. In 1967 at the Riverside Church in New York, King delivered his “Beyond Vietnam” speech, stating “it seemed as if there was a real promise of hope for the poor -- both black and white -- through the poverty program... Then came the buildup in Vietnam and I watched the program broken and eviscerated as if it were some idle political plaything of a society gone mad on war, and I knew that America would never invest the necessary funds or energies in rehabilitation of its poor so long as adventures like Vietnam continued to draw men and skills and money like some demonic destructive suction tube.” King was vilified by the establishment for this speech, which included President Lyndon Baines Johnson. Johnson accused King of throwing it in with the communists. Time magazine said the speech was “demagogic slander that sounded like a script from Radio Hanoi (Vietnam radio station)."

Today the Iraq War, in many ways has replaced the Vietnam War on our political agenda. This war, far from defending you and me, is an attempt to control precious resources throughout the Middle East and dictate policies to other nations through its stranglehold on resources. This war is, in all likelihood, a prelude to wars that could take place in Africa and Latin America as the US competes with other imperialist powers like China and the European Union. Where is Obama in this dangerous battle over power and lucre? Is he, like King, a man of conscience opposing the immorality of such wars? No, when asked if he would withdraw troops by 2013, the end of his first term, Obama made no such commitment. In fact, in 2007 he agreed to support surgical missile strikes in Iran, and the invasion of Pakistan, which would expand this immoral war.

The apparent breakthrough of having a black man as president could lull us into complacency on this war issue. In that same Riverside Church speech King called the US “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world,” having a black man continue that legacy certainly places him in direct opposition to King and firmly in the same category as Hillary Clinton, John Edwards and the other main stream candidates who do not oppose this war and future wars of aggression. The idea of Obama’s candidacy as the fulfillment of King’s “Dream” is not only inaccurate, but is an insult to King’s true legacy.

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Another Earcie: Lesser Known Photographs.

Received this email today from Liberator illustrator Melodee Strong:

Greetings friends! I was just made aware [that] a fellow artist in [the] North Side Minneapolis community has suffered a stroke this past December and unfortunately has to close his studio at Homewood Studios and move into a rehab home. Earcie Allen is a photographer. He was in the middle of a project documenting the Women of the North Side and was going to have a show at the Homewood Studios Gallery next month. That has changed. Some of Earcie's closest friends have found a collection of his less known photographs and decided to show this work in place of the North Side Project.

I have only been able to speak to Earcie a few times when I was at the studios in the past but during those moments he made an impression on me. He is such a beautiful and talented person. I hope that some of you will be able to come out to his show and support his recovery. I am sure that most of you working as artists or doing the things you love could understand how hard it would be for your soul to not be able to do those things any longer. As some of you know, last year my mother also suffered a stroke. Although her recovery has been remarkable, most cases can be very devastating. It has been hard to watch my mom get back to her old self as I am sure it will be just as hard for Earcie's family and friends.

For more information about Earcie and his show, please go to www.homewoodstudios.com
Click in the calendar link and his studio link.

The show is titled- Another Earcie: Lesser Known Photographs by Earcie Allan. The show runs from 2/1-2/27, the opening reception is 2/15 from 6-9 pm. Hope to see you there!

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Afro:Baile.

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Mumia: The idea of a black president.

The idea of a black president (listen/download)

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Mumia: Pakistan after Bhutto.

Pakistan after Bhutto (listen/download)

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Genocide in Kenya?

Human Rights Watch says opposition ODM Party members have been witnessed inciting the violence in Rift Valley and Kenyan blog "Chronicles of the Kenyan Genocide" suggests that the election conflict is being used as a mask to enable violent groups to remove Kenyans from their homes, land and property.

(CBC) Former United Nations secretary general Kofi Annan on Saturday said he has seen evidence of "gross and systematic" human rights abuses in Kenya's Rift Valley.

Close to 700 people have been killed and 255,000 forced from their homes in the province following last month's disputed election, which returned President Mwai Kibaki to power.

After visiting the region, Annan, who is trying to broker a political solution to the crisis, told reporters that while the conflict may have been triggered by disputed elections, it has evolved into "something else.

"Let us not kid ourselves and think that this is an electoral problem. It is much broader and much deeper," Annan said after visiting the towns of Eldoret and Molo in western Kenya.

He also flew over Nakuru, the regional capital of the Rift Valley. Until recently, the city of 300,000 has been largely spared the ethnic clashes that followed the Dec. 27 vote.

Hundreds of homes were reported to have burned in Nakuru on Friday, but armed gangs at multiple checkpoints are preventing journalists from seeing the damage on the ground.

Members of President Mwai Kibaki's Kikuyu tribe have been targeted by groups accusing the president of stealing the elections.

Annan said he was shocked by the scenes he witnessed and that those responsible must be held responsible for their deeds.

"We saw gross and systematic human rights abuses of fellow citizens," Annan said in Nairobi after his visit. "Impunity cannot be allowed to stand."

On Saturday, police brought 16 charred corpses to the mortuary in Nakuru. Officials expected the death toll would rise amid reports of sporadic gunfire.

Nine bodies were also taken to the morgue Friday afternoon, police said. (source)

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Zimbabwe teachers strike for fair pay.

(SW Radio Africa) After embarking on a "go-slow" action since rejecting the offer of a 1,000% pay increase by government, teachers in Zimbabwe have finally decided to conduct a full-on strike. The Progressive Teachers Union of Zimbabwe (PTUZ) said its members will not be reporting for work until their demands are met. PTUZ president, Raymond Majongwe, blasted government officials for spending a fortune on all the wrong issues while the teachers simply want to be able to report to work and live a decent life.

Majongwe said they are demanding a minimum salary of Z$1.7 billion per month. This includes a monthly transport allowance of Z$352 million and a housing allowance of Z$240 million per month. They are also demanding regular salary reviews in order to keep up with inflation, which is unofficially estimated to be 150,000%.

Majongwe criticised government and ruling party officials for spending billions on less important agendas. He pointed to a report on the state television ZTV this weekend that showed ZANU-PF officials in Matabeleland South, ululating as they unveiled 18 brand new 4x4 vehicles to be used in the party's election campaign. "There is corruption in the corridors of power," said the outspoken activist. He added: "Their children have the luxury of going to schools outside the country."

And salaries are not the only issue. We spoke to a teacher who described the dire conditions under which the schools are operating. Charles Mabwadarika, a Harare based teacher, said there are no books for the students to read or to write in. The furniture in the classrooms is old and in a state of disrepair. Students are being crammed into small spaces where they learn standing up or sitting on the floor. There is also not enough chalk for teachers to use.

Union officials say teachers cannot live on their current salary. Government is not communicating with the teachers, so it appears students at state run schools will not be learning for some time to come.

Meanwhile, workers at the National Railways of Zimbabwe (NRZ) are reported to have been on a go-slow for the past fortnight. Their dispute with government is also over salaries. (source)

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Ngugi wa Thiong'o on ethnic cleansing in Kenya.

(BBC) Ngugi laments Kenya violence: Writers must sometimes feel like the Greek prophetess Cassandra, gifted to see the future but fated not to be believed.

What is unfolding in Kenya could as well have been lifted from my novel Wizard of the Crow where the ruling party and the opposition parities engaged in Western-sponsored democracy become mirror images of one another in their absurdity and indifference to the poor.

The picture of men and women burnt down in a church where they had gone for refuge still haunts my mind. A child running away from the fire was caught and hurled back into the flames.

One of the few survivors was quoted as saying: "But they knew me; we were neighbours. I thought Peter was a friend - a good neighbour. How could Peter do this to me?"

I had heard the same puzzled cry from Bosnia. I had heard the same cry from Iraq. I had heard the same, same words from Rwanda: "We were neighbours; we'd married into each other. How could this happen?"

And now I hear the same cry from Eldoret North in my beloved Kenya. For me this burning of men, women and children in a church is a defining single instant of the current political impasse in Kenya.

And this must be separated from accusations and counter-accusations of rigged elections by the contending parties.

Rigged elections is one thing - it can be righted by any mutually agreed political measures - but ethnic cleansing is another matter altogether.

What is disturbing is that this instant seems to have been part of a co-ordinated programme with similar acts occurring in several other places at about the same time against ordinary members of the same community.

Ordinary people do not wake up one morning and suddenly decide to kill their neighbours.

Ethnic cleansing is often instigated by the political elite of one community against another community. It is premeditated - often an order from political warlords.

Or it may be the outcome of an elitist ideology of demonising and isolating another community.

Either way the aim is to drive members of the targeted community from the region.

Premeditated

Frantz Fanon, the intellectual visionary of the Third World, had long ago warned us of the dangers of the ideology of regionalism preached by an elite whose money can buy them safe residence in any part of a country.

A single instance of premeditated ethnic cleansing can lead to an unstoppable cycle of vendettas - a poor-on-poor violence - while those who tele-guided them to war through the ideology of hate and demonisation are clinking glasses in middle-class peace at cocktail parties with the elite or the supposed enemy community.

This crime should be investigated by the United Nations.

If it is found that a political organisation has run a campaign on a programme that consciously seeks to isolate another community as a community, then they ought to be held fully accountable for the consequences of their ideology and actions.

It is often easier to blame a government when it is involved in massacres. This is as it should be.

A government must always be held to higher standards, for its very legitimacy lies in its capacity to ensure peace and security for all communities.

But what about if such a massacre is inspired by a programme of an opposition movement?

This ought to receive equally severe condemnation from all and sundry, for being in opposition does not give an organisation the right to run on an ideology of isolation and hate targeted at another community.

An opposition movement is potentially a government of tomorrow. A programme that such a political organisation draws while in opposition would obviously be the programme they'll try to implement when in power.

That's why such acts must be condemned even when they are clothed in progressive, democratic-sounding words and phrases.

I therefore call upon the United Nations to act and investigate the massacres in Kenya as crimes against humanity and let the chips fall where they may.

For the sake of justice, healing and peace now and in the future I urge all progressive forces not to be so engrossed with the political wrongs of election tampering that they forget the crimes of hate and ethnic cleansing - crimes that have led to untimely deaths and the displacement of thousands.

The world does not need another Bosnia; Africa certainly does not need another Rwanda. (source)

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Time for federalism in Kenya.

(East African Standard) Devolution can cure skewed distribution of nation’s wealth: On July 20, 1963, Ronald Ngala warned Kenyans that anyone trying to stop the Majimbo (regional) Government was digging their own grave.

Does it seem to have come to pass, 43 years later? Does Kenya seem to urgently need a federal system of Government?

Our meddling with a centrist unitary system of government seems to have failed. Do we need to rethink our nationhood?

Nothing lends credence to this view as clearly as the latest distribution of roads’ construction funds by the Ministry of Roads and Public Works. It is scandalous that close to four and a half decades after Uhuru, the distribution of development should still be so lopsided. One would have understood and excused this in the days of Jomo Kenyatta when even the smallest path in the then larger Kiambu District was tarmacked, at the expense of more justified roads elsewhere.

For, we were a nation in infancy in the Jomo Kenyatta days, fresh from the traumatic experience of the Emergency. We were trying to know and accept each other. Those were the years I went to Primary School in Nairobi. I learnt all about the amoeba, the spirogyra and the paramecium in Gikuyu. We understood it as a matter of course that all the good things should go to Central Province. We were made to believe that the Mau Mau had brought independence. They said the Mau Mau had come from Central Province. Moreover, the President was also from Central Province. Other people would have to wait for their turn to produce their President before the good things of life could go to their regions.

When President Moi came to power in 1978, he promised Kenyans that he was going to follow the footsteps of Jomo Kenyatta. And he did. Overnight, the whole place was awash with hitherto little heard of people from Rift Valley Province. They occupied a disproportionate number of positions in the Public Service. They directed most projects of significance to their province. Some have since been condemned as white elephant projects.

Come December 2002 and Kenyans deluded themselves with the belief that they had crossed the valley of ethnicity. Even Luo Nyanza, which has traditionally been allergic to leadership from Central Province gave President Mwai Kibaki an astounding 98.9 per cent of the Presidential votes. But the Kibaki Government has instead reintroduced ethnicity of distressing proportions.

Why would Nyandarua District get Shillings 956 million for road construction, while the bulk of Luo Nyanza districts get less than ten million shillings each?

Why should Nyeri get Sh785 million, while Moyale, Kisii Central, Nakuru, Trans Nzoia and Bomet get much less.

Something is wrong with the use of our taxes. In the lead to independence in 1961, the small tribes formed themselves into the Kenya African Democratic Union (Kadu) whose leaders were the late Ronald Ngala, Jean Marie Seroney, Masinde Muliro, John Keen and Daniel arap Moi. The prompting was their fear of political and economic dominance by the numerous Luo and Kikuyu, who were the stalwarts of Kanu. They were concerned that Kanu would form a Government that would concentrate the national wealth in the hands of these two communities. They therefore advocated for a majimbo government, which would devolve both political power and economic wealth.

It was with a majimbo constitution that Kenya went to independence. Our leaders knew even that early in our national life that we could never trust any one tribe with the welfare of other tribes. Now we are old enough to remember what Kenyatta and Moi did, and still older enough to see what Kibaki is doing. To counter this, the so-called big tribes are today busy lining up their own tribesmen to take over the Presidency from Kibaki at next year’s General Election. They want to redirect national wealth to their communities. But what will happen to the small tribes? What special kind of genetic engineering, or genetically modified foods do they need to eat so that their women can produce enough children who will grow up fast enough to give them the numbers to produce His Excellency the President of the Republic Kenya?

The portrait of an inequitable Kenya replicates itself over and over, from the Kenyatta days to the present.

Each time the President makes senior appointments to Public office, more than half of the people are from his community. These are then flavoured with a smattering of politically correct individuals from other places, beginning with communities that claim con-sanguinity with, and propinquity to, the ruling community. It is the same in the Judiciary and in foreign missions, as it is in the appointment of Permanent Secretaries and heads of parastatals. People who are well past retirement age remain in office running down our institutions. They are in office to serve themselves and their communities.

The founders of the Kenyan nation were right. They came back from Lancaster with the correct Constitution.

Jomo Kenyatta and Tom Mboya messed up with it. Ngala, Muliro and Moi allowed them. Kenyatta wanted to use a unitary constitution to oppress the rest of Kenya. Mboya thought, for his part, that he would soon succeed Kenyatta and use the new Constitution the same way Kenyatta was doing.

We should stop pretending that we can ever be one people, sharing equally in the national resource. Two years ago, they took to Othaya Sh595 million for water development and to the larger Meru Sh429 million.

The rest of Kenya’s 72 districts got Sh5 million each. This was in a year when tax collection was as follows: Central Province Sh1.8 billion, Nyanza Sh6.9 billion, Western Sh5.5 billion, Rift Valley Sh5.56 billion, North-Eastern Sh43 million, Coast Sh2.7 billion and Eastern Sh920 million. Who is cheating whom? No, I want to enjoy the benefits of my tax in Emanyulia as they enjoy in Othaya. I want devolution of wealth. (source)

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Mumia: Praying with the devil.

Praying with the devil (listen/download)

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Mumia: The economics of gangsters.

The economics of gangsters (listen/download)

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Maya Angelou (Clinton) + Toni Morrison (Obama).

When I saw the Maya Angelou endorsement of Hillary Clinton I scratched my head. Her video doesn't really say much about why I should vote for Clinton besides the fact that Angelou admires her as a woman. So it was kind of interesting when I saw that Toni Morrison, one of Angelou's strongest counterparts in the pantheon of black female writers, who also infamously called Bill Clinton the "first black president", endorsed Barack Obama.

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Waving Goodbye to Hegemony.

A very well written and visionary piece -- regardless of my opinion of the vision. This illustrates the importance of being visionary and far seeing. What's funny to me is that this type of vision is not new. Leaders of ancient West African "empires" such as Mali, Ghana, and Songhai built "empires" peacefully through diplomatic relations and trade. Religion (largely Islam) was used as a diplomatic tool. Converts were encouraged to practice Islam as they saw fit -- even to continue practicing their indigenous religions -- adopting it more as a gesture and tool towards unity and solidarity than as a forced conquest or crusade. Nations were encouraged and ushered into empire through mutual economic and security benefits. Therefore, one glaring omission from the vision put forth in this article is the basic idea of Sankofa -- looking back in order to move forward wisely. Why make it so hard -- acting like a wheel needs to be reinvented -- when we could simply look back and realize that a historical model is there already waiting to be modified and reapplied.

(NY Times) Waving Goodbye to Hegemony: Turn on the TV today, and you could be forgiven for thinking it’s 1999. Democrats and Republicans are bickering about where and how to intervene, whether to do it alone or with allies and what kind of world America should lead. Democrats believe they can hit a reset button, and Republicans believe muscular moralism is the way to go. It’s as if the first decade of the 21st century didn’t happen — and almost as if history itself doesn’t happen. But the distribution of power in the world has fundamentally altered over the two presidential terms of George W. Bush, both because of his policies and, more significant, despite them. Maybe the best way to understand how quickly history happens is to look just a bit ahead.

It is 2016, and the Hillary Clinton or John McCain or Barack Obama administration is nearing the end of its second term. America has pulled out of Iraq but has about 20,000 troops in the independent state of Kurdistan, as well as warships anchored at Bahrain and an Air Force presence in Qatar. Afghanistan is stable; Iran is nuclear. China has absorbed Taiwan and is steadily increasing its naval presence around the Pacific Rim and, from the Pakistani port of Gwadar, on the Arabian Sea. The European Union has expanded to well over 30 members and has secure oil and gas flows from North Africa, Russia and the Caspian Sea, as well as substantial nuclear energy. America’s standing in the world remains in steady decline.

Why? Weren’t we supposed to reconnect with the United Nations and reaffirm to the world that America can, and should, lead it to collective security and prosperity? Indeed, improvements to America’s image may or may not occur, but either way, they mean little. Condoleezza Rice has said America has no “permanent enemies,” but it has no permanent friends either. Many saw the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq as the symbols of a global American imperialism; in fact, they were signs of imperial overstretch. Every expenditure has weakened America’s armed forces, and each assertion of power has awakened resistance in the form of terrorist networks, insurgent groups and “asymmetric” weapons like suicide bombers. America’s unipolar moment has inspired diplomatic and financial countermovements to block American bullying and construct an alternate world order. That new global order has arrived, and there is precious little Clinton or McCain or Obama could do to resist its growth.

The Geopolitical Marketplace

At best, America’s unipolar moment lasted through the 1990s, but that was also a decade adrift. The post-cold-war “peace dividend” was never converted into a global liberal order under American leadership. So now, rather than bestriding the globe, we are competing — and losing — in a geopolitical marketplace alongside the world’s other superpowers: the European Union and China. This is geopolitics in the 21st century: the new Big Three. Not Russia, an increasingly depopulated expanse run by Gazprom.gov; not an incoherent Islam embroiled in internal wars; and not India, lagging decades behind China in both development and strategic appetite. The Big Three make the rules — their own rules — without any one of them dominating. And the others are left to choose their suitors in this post-American world.

The more we appreciate the differences among the American, European and Chinese worldviews, the more we will see the planetary stakes of the new global game. Previous eras of balance of power have been among European powers sharing a common culture. The cold war, too, was not truly an “East-West” struggle; it remained essentially a contest over Europe. What we have today, for the first time in history, is a global, multicivilizational, multipolar battle.

In Europe’s capital, Brussels, technocrats, strategists and legislators increasingly see their role as being the global balancer between America and China. Jorgo Chatzimarkakis, a German member of the European Parliament, calls it “European patriotism.” The Europeans play both sides, and if they do it well, they profit handsomely. It’s a trend that will outlast both President Nicolas Sarkozy of France, the self-described “friend of America,” and Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany, regardless of her visiting the Crawford ranch. It may comfort American conservatives to point out that Europe still lacks a common army; the only problem is that it doesn’t really need one. Europeans use intelligence and the police to apprehend radical Islamists, social policy to try to integrate restive Muslim populations and economic strength to incorporate the former Soviet Union and gradually subdue Russia. Each year European investment in Turkey grows as well, binding it closer to the E.U. even if it never becomes a member. And each year a new pipeline route opens transporting oil and gas from Libya, Algeria or Azerbaijan to Europe. What other superpower grows by an average of one country per year, with others waiting in line and begging to join?

Robert Kagan famously said that America hails from Mars and Europe from Venus, but in reality, Europe is more like Mercury — carrying a big wallet. The E.U.’s market is the world’s largest, European technologies more and more set the global standard and European countries give the most development assistance. And if America and China fight, the world’s money will be safely invested in European banks. Many Americans scoffed at the introduction of the euro, claiming it was an overreach that would bring the collapse of the European project. Yet today, Persian Gulf oil exporters are diversifying their currency holdings into euros, and President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran has proposed that OPEC no longer price its oil in “worthless” dollars. President Hugo Chávez of Venezuela went on to suggest euros. It doesn’t help that Congress revealed its true protectionist colors by essentially blocking the Dubai ports deal in 2006. With London taking over (again) as the world’s financial capital for stock listing, it’s no surprise that China’s new state investment fund intends to locate its main Western offices there instead of New York. Meanwhile, America’s share of global exchange reserves has dropped to 65 percent. Gisele Bündchen demands to be paid in euros, while Jay-Z drowns in 500 euro notes in a recent video. American soft power seems on the wane even at home.

And Europe’s influence grows at America’s expense. While America fumbles at nation-building, Europe spends its money and political capital on locking peripheral countries into its orbit. Many poor regions of the world have realized that they want the European dream, not the American dream. Africa wants a real African Union like the E.U.; we offer no equivalent. Activists in the Middle East want parliamentary democracy like Europe’s, not American-style presidential strongman rule. Many of the foreign students we shunned after 9/11 are now in London and Berlin: twice as many Chinese study in Europe as in the U.S. We didn’t educate them, so we have no claims on their brains or loyalties as we have in decades past. More broadly, America controls legacy institutions few seem to want — like the International Monetary Fund — while Europe excels at building new and sophisticated ones modeled on itself. The U.S. has a hard time getting its way even when it dominates summit meetings — consider the ill-fated Free Trade Area of the Americas — let alone when it’s not even invited, as with the new East Asian Community, the region’s answer to America’s Apec.

The East Asian Community is but one example of how China is also too busy restoring its place as the world’s “Middle Kingdom” to be distracted by the Middle Eastern disturbances that so preoccupy the United States. In America’s own hemisphere, from Canada to Cuba to Chávez’s Venezuela, China is cutting massive resource and investment deals. Across the globe, it is deploying tens of thousands of its own engineers, aid workers, dam-builders and covert military personnel. In Africa, China is not only securing energy supplies; it is also making major strategic investments in the financial sector. The whole world is abetting China’s spectacular rise as evidenced by the ballooning share of trade in its gross domestic product — and China is exporting weapons at a rate reminiscent of the Soviet Union during the cold war, pinning America down while filling whatever power vacuums it can find. Every country in the world currently considered a rogue state by the U.S. now enjoys a diplomatic, economic or strategic lifeline from China, Iran being the most prominent example.

Without firing a shot, China is doing on its southern and western peripheries what Europe is achieving to its east and south. Aided by a 35 million-strong ethnic Chinese diaspora well placed around East Asia’s rising economies, a Greater Chinese Co-Prosperity Sphere has emerged. Like Europeans, Asians are insulating themselves from America’s economic uncertainties. Under Japanese sponsorship, they plan to launch their own regional monetary fund, while China has slashed tariffs and increased loans to its Southeast Asian neighbors. Trade within the India-Japan-Australia triangle — of which China sits at the center — has surpassed trade across the Pacific.

At the same time, a set of Asian security and diplomatic institutions is being built from the inside out, resulting in America’s grip on the Pacific Rim being loosened one finger at a time. From Thailand to Indonesia to Korea, no country — friend of America’s or not — wants political tension to upset economic growth. To the Western eye, it is a bizarre phenomenon: small Asian nation-states should be balancing against the rising China, but increasingly they rally toward it out of Asian cultural pride and an understanding of the historical-cultural reality of Chinese dominance. And in the former Soviet Central Asian countries — the so-called Stans — China is the new heavyweight player, its manifest destiny pushing its Han pioneers westward while pulling defunct microstates like Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan, as well as oil-rich Kazakhstan, into its orbit. The Shanghai Cooperation Organization gathers these Central Asian strongmen together with China and Russia and may eventually become the “NATO of the East.”

The Big Three are the ultimate “Frenemies.” Twenty-first-century geopolitics will resemble nothing more than Orwell’s 1984, but instead of three world powers (Oceania, Eurasia and Eastasia), we have three hemispheric pan-regions, longitudinal zones dominated by America, Europe and China. As the early 20th-century European scholars of geopolitics realized, because a vertically organized region contains all climatic zones year-round, each pan-region can be self-sufficient and build a power base from which to intrude in others’ terrain. But in a globalized and shrinking world, no geography is sacrosanct. So in various ways, both overtly and under the radar, China and Europe will meddle in America’s backyard, America and China will compete for African resources in Europe’s southern periphery and America and Europe will seek to profit from the rapid economic growth of countries within China’s growing sphere of influence. Globalization is the weapon of choice. The main battlefield is what I call “the second world.”

The Swing States

There are plenty of statistics that will still tell the story of America’s global dominance: our military spending, our share of the global economy and the like. But there are statistics, and there are trends. To really understand how quickly American power is in decline around the world, I’ve spent the past two years traveling in some 40 countries in the five most strategic regions of the planet — the countries of the second world. They are not in the first-world core of the global economy, nor in its third-world periphery. Lying alongside and between the Big Three, second-world countries are the swing states that will determine which of the superpowers has the upper hand for the next generation of geopolitics. From Venezuela to Vietnam and Morocco to Malaysia, the new reality of global affairs is that there is not one way to win allies and influence countries but three: America’s coalition (as in “coalition of the willing”), Europe’s consensus and China’s consultative styles. The geopolitical marketplace will decide which will lead the 21st century.

The key second-world countries in Eastern Europe, Central Asia, South America, the Middle East and Southeast Asia are more than just “emerging markets.” If you include China, they hold a majority of the world’s foreign-exchange reserves and savings, and their spending power is making them the global economy’s most important new consumer markets and thus engines of global growth — not replacing the United States but not dependent on it either. I.P.O.’s from the so-called BRIC countries (Brazil, Russia, India, China) alone accounted for 39 percent of the volume raised globally in 2007, just one indicator of second-world countries’ rising importance in corporate finance — even after you subtract China. When Tata of India is vying to buy Jaguar, you know the landscape of power has changed. Second-world countries are also fast becoming hubs for oil and timber, manufacturing and services, airlines and infrastructure — all this in a geopolitical marketplace that puts their loyalty up for grabs to any of the Big Three, and increasingly to all of them at the same time. Second-world states won’t be subdued: in the age of network power, they won’t settle for being mere export markets. Rather, they are the places where the Big Three must invest heavily and to which they must relocate productive assets to maintain influence.

While traveling through the second world, I learned to see countries not as unified wholes but rather as having multiple, often disconnected, parts, some of which were on a path to rise into the first world while other, often larger, parts might remain in the third. I wondered whether globalization would accelerate these nations’ becoming ever more fragmented, or if governments would step up to establish central control. Each second-world country appeared to have a fissured personality under pressures from both internal forces and neighbors. I realized that to make sense of the second world, it was necessary to assess each country from the inside out.

Second-world countries are distinguished from the third world by their potential: the likelihood that they will capitalize on a valuable commodity, a charismatic leader or a generous patron. Each and every second-world country matters in its own right, for its economic, strategic or diplomatic weight, and its decision to tilt toward the United States, the E.U. or China has a strong influence on what others in its region decide to do. Will an American nuclear deal with India push Pakistan even deeper into military dependence on China? Will the next set of Arab monarchs lean East or West? The second world will shape the world’s balance of power as much as the superpowers themselves will.

In exploring just a small sample of the second world, we should start perhaps with the hardest case: Russia. Apparently stabilized and resurgent under the Kremlin-Gazprom oligarchy, why is Russia not a superpower but rather the ultimate second-world swing state? For all its muscle flexing, Russia is also disappearing. Its population decline is a staggering half million citizens per year or more, meaning it will be not much larger than Turkey by 2025 or so — spread across a land so vast that it no longer even makes sense as a country. Travel across Russia today, and you’ll find, as during Soviet times, city after city of crumbling, heatless apartment blocks and neglected elderly citizens whose value to the state diminishes with distance from Moscow. The forced Siberian migrations of the Soviet era are being voluntarily reversed as children move west to more tolerable and modern climes. Filling the vacuum they have left behind are hundreds of thousands of Chinese, literally gobbling up, plundering, outright buying and more or less annexing Russia’s Far East for its timber and other natural resources. Already during the cold war it was joked that there were “no disturbances on the Sino-Finnish border,” a prophecy that seems ever closer to fulfillment.

Russia lost its western satellites almost two decades ago, and Europe, while appearing to be bullied by Russia’s oil-dependent diplomacy, is staging a long-term buyout of Russia, whose economy remains roughly the size of France’s. The more Europe gets its gas from North Africa and oil from Azerbaijan, the less it will rely on Russia, all the while holding the lever of being by far Russia’s largest investor. The European Bank for Reconstruction and Development provides the kinds of loans that help build an alternative, less corrupt private sector from below, while London and Berlin welcome Russia’s billionaires, allowing the likes of Boris Berezovsky to openly campaign against Putin. The E.U. and U.S. also finance and train a pugnacious second-world block of Baltic and Balkan nations, whose activists agitate from Belarus to Uzbekistan. Privately, some E.U. officials say that annexing Russia is perfectly doable; it’s just a matter of time. In the coming decades, far from restoring its Soviet-era might, Russia will have to decide whether it wishes to exist peacefully as an asset to Europe or the alternative — becoming a petro-vassal of China.

Turkey, too, is a totemic second-world prize advancing through crucial moments of geopolitical truth. During the cold war, NATO was the principal vehicle for relations with Turkey, the West’s listening post on the southwestern Soviet border. But with Turkey’s bending over backward to avoid outright E.U. rejection, its refusal in 2003 to let the U.S. use Turkish territory as a staging point for invading Iraq marked a turning point — away from the U.S. “America always says it lobbies the E.U. on our behalf,” a Turkish strategic analyst in Ankara told me, “but all that does is make the E.U. more stringent. We don’t need that kind of help anymore.”

To be sure, Turkish pride contains elements of an aggressive neo-Ottomanism that is in tension with some E.U. standards, but this could ultimately serve as Europe’s weapon to project stability into Syria, Iraq and Iran — all of which Europe effectively borders through Turkey itself. Roads are the pathways to power, as I learned driving across Turkey in a beat-up Volkswagen a couple of summers ago. Turkey’s master engineers have been boring tunnels, erecting bridges and flattening roads across the country’s massive eastern realm, allowing it to assert itself over the Arab and Persian worlds both militarily and economically as Turkish merchants look as much East as West. Already joint Euro-Turkish projects have led to the opening of the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline, with a matching rail line and highway planned to buttress European influence all the way to Turkey’s fraternal friend Azerbaijan on the oil-rich Caspian Sea.

It takes only one glance at Istanbul’s shimmering skyline to realize that even if Turkey never becomes an actual E.U. member, it is becoming ever more Europeanized. Turkey receives more than $20 billion in foreign investment and more than 20 million tourists every year, the vast majority of both from E.U. countries. Ninety percent of the Turkish diaspora lives in Western Europe and sends home another $1 billion per year in remittances and investments. This remitted capital is spreading growth and development eastward in the form of new construction ventures, kilim factories and schools. With the accession of Romania and Bulgaria to the E.U. a year ago, Turkey now physically borders the E.U. (beyond its narrow frontier with Greece), symbolizing how Turkey is becoming a part of the European superpower.

Western diplomats have a long historical familiarity, however dramatic and tumultuous, with Russia and Turkey. But what about the Stans: landlocked but resource-rich countries run by autocrats? Ever since these nations were flung into independence by the Soviet collapse, China has steadily replaced Russia as their new patron. Trade, oil pipelines and military exercises with China under the auspices of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization make it the new organizing pole for the region, with the U.S. scrambling to maintain modest military bases in the region. (Currently it is forced to rely far too much on Afghanistan after being booted, at China’s and Russia’s behest, from the Karshi Khanabad base in Uzbekistan in 2005.) The challenge of getting ahead in the strategically located and energy-rich Stans is the challenge of a bidding contest in which values seem not to matter. While China buys more Kazakh oil and America bids for defense contracts, Europe offers sustained investment and holds off from giving President Nursultan Nazarbayev the high-status recognition he craves. Kazakhstan considers itself a “strategic partner” of just about everyone, but tell that to the Big Three, who bribe government officials to cancel the others’ contracts and spy on one another through contract workers — all in the name of preventing the others from gaining mastery over the fabled heartland of Eurasian power.

Just one example of the lengths to which foreigners will go to stay on good terms with Nazarbayev is the current negotiation between a consortium of Western energy giants, including ENI and Exxon, and Kazakhstan’s state-run oil company over the development of the Caspian’s massive Kashagan oil field. At present, the consortium is coughing up at least $4 billion as well as a large hand-over of shares to compensate for delayed exploration and production — and Kazakhstan isn’t satisfied yet. The lesson from Kazakhstan, and its equally strategic but far less predictable neighbor Uzbekistan, is how fickle the second world can be, its alignments changing on a whim and causing headaches and ripple effects in all directions. To be distracted elsewhere or to lack sufficient personnel on the ground can make the difference between winning and losing a major round of the new great game.

The Big Three dynamic is not just some distant contest by which America ensures its ability to dictate affairs on the other side of the globe. Globalization has brought the geopolitical marketplace straight to America’s backyard, rapidly eroding the two-centuries-old Monroe Doctrine in the process. In truth, America called the shots in Latin America only when its southern neighbors lacked any vision of their own. Now they have at least two non-American challengers: China and Chávez. It was Simón Bolívar who fought ferociously for South America’s independence from Spanish rule, and today it is the newly renamed Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela that has inspired an entire continent to bootstrap its way into the global balance of power on its own terms. Hugo Chávez, the country’s clownish colonel, may last for decades to come or may die by the gun, but either way, he has called America’s bluff and won, changing the rules of North-South relations in the Western hemisphere. He has emboldened and bankrolled leftist leaders across the continent, helped Argentina and others pay back and boot out the I.M.F. and sponsored a continentwide bartering scheme of oil, cattle, wheat and civil servants, reminding even those who despise him that they can stand up to the great Northern power. Chávez stands not only on the ladder of high oil prices. He relies on tacit support from Europe and hardheaded intrusion from China, the former still the country’s largest investor and the latter feverishly repairing Venezuela’s dilapidated oil rigs while building its own refineries.

But Chávez’s challenge to the United States is, in inspiration, ideological, whereas the second-world shift is really structural. Even with Chávez still in power, it is Brazil that is reappearing as South America’s natural leader. Alongside India and South Africa, Brazil has led the charge in global trade negotiations, sticking it to the U.S. on its steel tariffs and to Europe on its agricultural subsidies. Geographically, Brazil is nearly as close to Europe as to America and is as keen to build cars and airplanes for Europe as it is to export soy to the U.S. Furthermore, Brazil, although a loyal American ally in the cold war, wasted little time before declaring a “strategic alliance” with China. Their economies are remarkably complementary, with Brazil shipping iron ore, timber, zinc, beef, milk and soybeans to China and China investing in Brazil’s hydroelectric dams, steel mills and shoe factories. Both China and Brazil’s ambitions may soon alter the very geography of their relations, with Brazil leading an effort to construct a Trans-Oceanic Highway from the Amazon through Peru to the Pacific Coast, facilitating access for Chinese shipping tankers. Latin America has mostly been a geopolitical afterthought over the centuries, but in the 21st century, all resources will be competed for, and none are too far away.

The Middle East — spanning from Morocco to Iran — lies between the hubs of influence of the Big Three and has the largest number of second-world swing states. No doubt the thaw with Libya, brokered by America and Britain after Muammar el-Qaddafi declared he would abandon his country’s nuclear pursuits in 2003, was partly motivated by growing demand for energy from a close Mediterranean neighbor. But Qaddafi is not selling out. He and his advisers have astutely parceled out production sharing agreements to a balanced assortment of American, European, Chinese and other Asian oil giants. Mindful of the history of Western oil companies’ exploitation of Arabia, he — like Chávez in Venezuela and Nazarbayev in Kazakhstan — has also cleverly ratcheted up the pressure on foreigners to share more revenue with the regime by tweaking contracts, rounding numbers liberally and threatening expropriation. What I find in virtually every Arab country is not such nationalism, however, but rather a new Arabism aimed at spreading oil wealth within the Arab world rather than depositing it in the United States as in past oil booms. And as Egypt, Syria and other Arab states receive greater investment from the Persian Gulf and start spending more on their own, they, too, become increasingly important second-world players who can thwart the U.S.

Saudi Arabia, for quite some years to come still the planet’s leading oil producer, is a second-world prize on par with Russia and equally up for grabs. For the past several decades, America’s share of the foreign direct investment into the kingdom decisively shaped the country’s foreign policy, but today the monarchy is far wiser, luring Europe and Asia to bring their investment shares toward a third each. Saudi Arabia has engaged Europe in an evolving Persian Gulf free-trade area, while it has invested close to $1 billion in Chinese oil refineries. Make no mistake: America was never all powerful only because of its military dominance; strategic leverage must have an economic basis. A major common denominator among key second-world countries is the need for each of the Big Three to put its money where its mouth is.

For all its historical antagonism with Saudi Arabia, Iran is playing the same swing-state game. Its diplomacy has not only managed to create discord among the U.S. and E.U. on sanctions; it has also courted China, nurturing a relationship that goes back to the Silk Road. Today Iran represents the final square in China’s hopscotch maneuvering to reach the Persian Gulf overland without relying on the narrow Straits of Malacca. Already China has signed a multibillion-dollar contract for natural gas from Iran’s immense North Pars field, another one for construction of oil terminals on the Caspian Sea and yet another to extend the Tehran metro — and it has boosted shipment of ballistic-missile technology and air-defense radars to Iran. Several years of negotiation culminated in December with Sinopec sealing a deal to develop the Yadavaran oil field, with more investments from China (and others) sure to follow. The longer International Atomic Energy Agency negotiations drag on, the more likely it becomes that Iran will indeed be able to stay afloat without Western investment because of backing from China and from its second-world friends — without giving any ground to the West.

Interestingly, it is precisely Muslim oil-producing states — Libya, Saudi Arabia, Iran, (mostly Muslim) Kazakhstan, Malaysia — that seem the best at spreading their alignments across some combination of the Big Three simultaneously: getting what they want while fending off encroachment from others. America may seek Muslim allies for its image and the “war on terror,” but these same countries seem also to be part of what Samuel Huntington called the “Confucian-Islamic connection.” What is more, China is pulling off the most difficult of superpower feats: simultaneously maintaining positive ties with the world’s crucial pairs of regional rivals: Venezuela and Brazil, Saudi Arabia and Iran, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, India and Pakistan. At this stage, Western diplomats have only mustered the wherewithal to quietly denounce Chinese aid policies and value-neutral alliances, but they are far from being able to do much of anything about them.

This applies most profoundly in China’s own backyard, Southeast Asia. Some of the most dynamic countries in the region Malaysia, Thailand and Vietnam are playing the superpower suitor game with admirable savvy. Chinese migrants have long pulled the strings in the region’s economies even while governments sealed defense agreements with the U.S. Today, Malaysia and Thailand still perform joint military exercises with America but also buy weapons from, and have defense treaties with, China, including the Treaty of Amity and Cooperation by which Asian nations have pledged nonaggression against one another. (Indonesia, a crucial American ally during the cold war, has also been forming defense ties with China.) As one senior Malaysian diplomat put it to me, without a hint of jest, “Creating a community is easy among the yellow and the brown but not the white.” Tellingly, it is Vietnam, because of its violent histories with the U.S. and China, which is most eager to accept American defense contracts (and a new Intel microchip plant) to maintain its strategic balance. Vietnam, like most of the second world, doesn’t want to fall into any one superpower’s sphere of influence.

The Anti-Imperial Belt

The new multicolor map of influence — a Venn diagram of overlapping American, Chinese and European influence — is a very fuzzy read. No more “They’re with us” or “He’s our S.O.B.” Mubarak, Musharraf, Malaysia’s Mahathir and a host of other second-world leaders have set a new standard for manipulative prowess: all tell the U.S. they are its friend while busily courting all sides.

What is more, many second-world countries are confident enough to form anti-imperial belts of their own, building trade, technology and diplomatic axes across the (second) world from Brazil to Libya to Iran to Russia. Indeed, Russia has stealthily moved into position to construct Iran’s Bushehr nuclear reactor, putting it firmly in the Chinese camp on the Iran issue, while also offering nuclear reactors to Libya and arms to Venezuela and Indonesia. Second-world countries also increasingly use sovereign-wealth funds (often financed by oil) worth trillions of dollars to throw their weight around, even bullying first-world corporations and markets. The United Arab Emirates (particularly as represented by their capital, Abu Dhabi), Saudi Arabia and Russia are rapidly climbing the ranks of foreign-exchange holders and are hardly holding back in trying to buy up large shares of Western banks (which have suddenly become bargains) and oil companies. Singapore’s sovereign-wealth fund has taken a similar path. Meanwhile, Saudi Arabia plans an international investment fund that will dwarf Abu Dhabi’s. From Switzerland to Citigroup, a reaction is forming to limit the shares such nontransparent sovereign-wealth funds can control, showing just how quickly the second world is rising in the global power game.

To understand the second world, you have to start to think like a second-world country. What I have seen in these and dozens of other countries is that globalization is not synonymous with Americanization; in fact, nothing has brought about the erosion of American primacy faster than globalization. While European nations redistribute wealth to secure or maintain first-world living standards, on the battlefield of globalization second-world countries’ state-backed firms either outhustle or snap up American companies, leaving their workers to fend for themselves. The second world’s first priority is not to become America but to succeed by any means necessary.

The Non-American World

Karl Marx and Max Weber both chastised Far Eastern cultures for being despotic, agrarian and feudal, lacking the ingredients for organizational success. Oswald Spengler saw it differently, arguing that mankind both lives and thinks in unique cultural systems, with Western ideals neither transferable nor relevant. Today the Asian landscape still features ancient civilizations but also by far the most people and, by certain measures, the most money of any region in the world. With or without America, Asia is shaping the world’s destiny — and exposing the flaws of the grand narrative of Western civilization in the process.

The rise of China in the East and of the European Union within the West has fundamentally altered a globe that recently appeared to have only an American gravity — pro or anti. As Europe’s and China’s spirits rise with every move into new domains of influence, America’s spirit is weakened. The E.U. may uphold the principles of the United Nations that America once dominated, but how much longer will it do so as its own social standards rise far above this lowest common denominator? And why should China or other Asian countries become “responsible stakeholders,” in former Deputy Secretary of State Robert Zoellick’s words, in an American-led international order when they had no seat at the table when the rules were drafted? Even as America stumbles back toward multilateralism, others are walking away from the American game and playing by their own rules.

The self-deluding universalism of the American imperium — that the world inherently needs a single leader and that American liberal ideology must be accepted as the basis of global order — has paradoxically resulted in America quickly becoming an ever-lonelier superpower. Just as there is a geopolitical marketplace, there is a marketplace of models of success for the second world to emulate, not least the Chinese model of economic growth without political liberalization (itself an affront to Western modernization theory). As the historian Arnold Toynbee observed half a century ago, Western imperialism united the globe, but it did not assure that the West would dominate forever — materially or morally. Despite the “mirage of immortality” that afflicts global empires, the only reliable rule of history is its cycles of imperial rise and decline, and as Toynbee also pithily noted, the only direction to go from the apogee of power is down.

The web of globalization now has three spiders. What makes America unique in this seemingly value-free contest is not its liberal democratic ideals — which Europe may now represent better than America does — but rather its geography. America is isolated, while Europe and China occupy two ends of the great Eurasian landmass that is the perennial center of gravity of geopolitics. When America dominated NATO and led a rigid Pacific alliance system with Japan, South Korea, Australia and Thailand, it successfully managed the Herculean task of running the world from one side of it. Now its very presence in Eurasia is tenuous; it has been shunned by the E.U. and Turkey, is unwelcome in much of the Middle East and has lost much of East Asia’s confidence. “Accidental empire” or not, America must quickly accept and adjust to this reality. Maintaining America’s empire can only get costlier in both blood and treasure. It isn’t worth it, and history promises the effort will fail. It already has.

Would the world not be more stable if America could be reaccepted as its organizing principle and leader? It’s very much too late to be asking, because the answer is unfolding before our eyes. Neither China nor the E.U. will replace the U.S. as the world’s sole leader; rather all three will constantly struggle to gain influence on their own and balance one another. Europe will promote its supranational integration model as a path to resolving Mideast disputes and organizing Africa, while China will push a Beijing consensus based on respect for sovereignty and mutual economic benefit. America must make itself irresistible to stay in the game.

I believe that a complex, multicultural landscape filled with transnational challenges from terrorism to global warming is completely unmanageable by a single authority, whether the United States or the United Nations. Globalization resists centralization of almost any kind. Instead, what we see gradually happening in climate-change negotiations (as in Bali in December) — and need to see more of in the areas of preventing nuclear proliferation and rebuilding failed states — is a far greater sense of a division of labor among the Big Three, a concrete burden-sharing among them by which they are judged not by their rhetoric but the responsibilities they fulfill. The arbitrarily composed Security Council is not the place to hash out such a division of labor. Neither are any of the other multilateral bodies bogged down with weighted voting and cacophonously irrelevant voices. The big issues are for the Big Three to sort out among themselves.

Less Can Be More

So let’s play strategy czar. You are a 21st-century Kissinger. Your task is to guide the next American president (and the one after that) from the demise of American hegemony into a world of much more diffuse governance. What do you advise, concretely, to mitigate the effects of the past decade’s policies — those that inspired defiance rather than cooperation — and to set in motion a virtuous circle of policies that lead to global equilibrium rather than a balance of power against the U.S.?

First, channel your inner J.F.K. You are president, not emperor. You are commander in chief and also diplomat in chief. Your grand strategy is a global strategy, yet you must never use the phrase “American national interest.” (It is assumed.) Instead talk about “global interests” and how closely aligned American policies are with those interests. No more “us” versus “them,” only “we.” That means no more talk of advancing “American values” either. What is worth having is universal first and American second. This applies to “democracy” as well, where timing its implementation is as important as the principle itself. Right now, from the Middle East to Southeast Asia, the hero of the second world — including its democracies — is Lee Kuan Yew of Singapore.

We have learned the hard way that what others want for themselves trumps what we want for them — always. Neither America nor the world needs more competing ideologies, and moralizing exhortations are only useful if they point toward goals that are actually attainable. This new attitude must be more than an act: to obey this modest, hands-off principle is what would actually make America the exceptional empire it purports to be. It would also be something every other empire in history has failed to do.

Second, Pentagonize the State Department. Adm. William J. Fallon, head of Central Command (Centcom), not Robert Gates, is the man really in charge of the U.S. military’s primary operations. Diplomacy, too, requires the equivalent of geographic commands — with top-notch assistant secretaries of state to manage relations in each key region without worrying about getting on the daily agenda of the secretary of state for menial approvals. Then we’ll be ready to coordinate within distant areas. In some regions, our ambassadors to neighboring countries meet only once or twice a year; they need to be having weekly secure video-conferences. Regional institutions are thriving in the second world — think Mercosur (the South American common market), the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (Asean), the Gulf Cooperation Council in the Persian Gulf. We need high-level ambassadors at those organizations too. Taken together, this allows us to move beyond, for example, the current Millennium Challenge Account — which amounts to one-track aid packages to individual countries already going in the right direction — toward encouraging the kind of regional cooperation that can work in curbing both terrorism and poverty. Only if you think regionally can a success story have a demonstration effect. This approach will be crucial to the future of the Pentagon’s new African command. (Until last year, African relations were managed largely by European command, or Eucom, in Germany.) Suspicions of America are running high in Africa, and a country-by-country strategy would make those suspicions worse. Finally, to achieve strategic civilian-military harmonization, we have to first get the maps straight. The State Department puts the Stans in the South and Central Asia bureau, while the Pentagon puts them within the Middle-East-focused Centcom. The Chinese divide up the world the Pentagon’s way; so, too, should our own State Department.

Third, deploy the marchmen. Europe is boosting its common diplomatic corps, while China is deploying retired civil servants, prison laborers and Chinese teachers — all are what the historian Arnold Toynbee called marchmen, the foot-soldiers of empire spreading values and winning loyalty. There are currently more musicians in U.S. military marching bands than there are Foreign Service officers, a fact not helped by Congress’s decision to effectively freeze growth in diplomatic postings. In this context, Condoleezza Rice’s “transformational diplomacy” is a myth: we don’t have enough diplomats for core assignments, let alone solo hardship missions. We need a Peace Corps 10 times its present size, plus student exchanges, English-teaching programs and hands-on job training overseas — with corporate sponsorship.

That’s right. In true American fashion, we must build a diplomatic-industrial complex. Europe and China all but personify business-government collusion, so let State raise money from Wall Street as it puts together regional aid and investment packages. American foreign policy must be substantially more than what the U.S. government directs. After all, the E.U. is already the world’s largest aid donor, and China is rising in the aid arena as well. Plus, each has a larger population than the U.S., meaning deeper benches of recruits, and are not political targets in the present political atmosphere the way Americans abroad are. The secret weapon must be the American citizenry itself. American foundations and charities, not least the Gates and Ford Foundations, dwarf European counterparts in their humanitarian giving; if such private groups independently send more and more American volunteers armed with cash, good will and local knowledge to perform “diplomacy of the deed,” then the public diplomacy will take care of itself.

Fourth, make the global economy work for us. By resurrecting European economies, the Marshall Plan was a down payment on even greater returns in terms of purchasing American goods. For now, however, as the dollar falls, our manufacturing base declines and Americans lose control of assets to wealthier foreign funds, our scientific education, broadband access, health-care, safety and a host of other standards are all slipping down the global rankings. Given our deficits and political gridlock, the only solution is to channel global, particularly Asian, liquidity into our own public infrastructure, creating jobs and technology platforms that can keep American innovation ahead of the pack. Globalization apologizes to no one; we must stay on top of it or become its victim.

Fifth, convene a G-3 of the Big Three. But don’t set the agenda; suggest it. These are the key issues among which to make compromises and trade-offs: climate change, energy security, weapons proliferation and rogue states. Offer more Western clean technology to China in exchange for fewer weapons and lifelines for the Sudanese tyrants and the Burmese junta. And make a joint effort with the Europeans to offer massive, irresistible packages to the people of Iran, Uzbekistan and Venezuela — incentives for eventual regime change rather than fruitless sanctions. A Western change of tone could make China sweat. Superpowers have to learn to behave, too.

Taken together, all these moves could renew American competitiveness in the geopolitical marketplace — and maybe even prove our exceptionalism. We need pragmatic incremental steps like the above to deliver tangible gains to people beyond our shores, repair our reputation, maintain harmony among the Big Three, keep the second world stable and neutral and protect our common planet. Let’s hope whoever is sworn in as the next American president understands this.

Parag Khanna is a senior research fellow in the American Strategy Program of the New America Foundation. This essay is adapted from his book, “The Second World: Empires and Influence in the New Global Order,” to be published by Random House in March. (source)

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Mario. "Do Right"

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Wes Fif = (Jeezy + Ross).

These bass frequencies are addicting. It's nothing too new: Wes Fif is just a hybrid of Young Jeezy and Rick Ross. I guess I like this dude for the same reason people drink Red Bull with their favorite liquor.

Wastin Your Time (listen/download)
I Love It Baby (listen/download)
Out Yo Mind (listen/download)

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Black Power: Revisiting the Model and Meaning.

The National Association of Kawaida Organizations (NAKO) presents a symposium on The Black Power Movement, "Remembering Audacious Black Power: Revisiting the Model and Meaning."

Saturday, February 2, 2008 / 5pm - 8pm / Admission is $15
Restoration Plaza (in the Skylight Gallery) [1368 Fulton Street / Brooklyn NY 11216]

Dr. Maulana Karenga wrote for the Los Angeles Sentinel newspaper (7/19/07), "…In the summer of '66, Rep. Adam Clayton Powell Jr. (NY), then chair of the House Committee on Education and Labor, called together a group of leaders from across the country to discuss the meaning of Black Power as a Movement, to mark off areas of essential attention for practical initiatives and to plan a series of conferences to harness the best ideas and energy of the Movement and push it forward in collective and concrete ways."

Three members of that steering committee will discuss their mandate and more. They are Chuck Stone, Cheikh-Omar Abu Ahmed, and Dr. Maulana Karenga.

Chuck Stone: Former Tuskeegee Airman in WW II; from (64-67) Special Assistant to Rep. Adam Clayton Powell; editor of the Chicago Defender and Founding President of the National Association of Black Journalists; author of university textbook, Black Political Power in America; and, professor at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Cheikh-Omar Abu Ahmed: participated in the freedom rides to break the color barriers under James Farmer; founder of the Congress of Racial Equality; organizer under Byard Rustin for the March on Washington; and, co-founder with Adam Clayton Powell Jr. of the Black Power Conference of 1966.

Dr. Maulana Karenga: Professor of Black Studies, California State University-Long Beach; Chair of The Organization Us and the National Association of Kawaida Organizations (NAKO); Creator of Kwanzaa, Kawaida, and the Nguzo Saba: author of Kwanzaa: A Celebration of Family, Community and Culture; author of the university textbook Introduction to Black Studies; and, vice-chair of the steering committee for the Black Power Conferences.

For further inquires, call 718-523-3312 or 718-398-1729 (nakoinfogroup@yahoo.com). Also on Saturday, March 1, 2008 there will be a public meeting regarding the Black Farmers
at Restoration Plaza [1368 Fulton Street / Brooklyn, NY 11216]

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Kenya: What can we do?

My friend asks about the situation in Nakuru, Kenya: "What can we do? What can I do? If you know, please help me NOT standby and watch this Rwanda-like Atrocity continue without attempting to take action. I may be in Japan, but I am not too far to do what I would want someone to do for me if the table was turned."

My 3 simple rules:

1) Write about and discuss the situation in consistent, organized, collective spaces. Meaning: not via spontaneous email threads, facebook groups, not in a casual disorganized, temporary manner. ORGANIZE your discussion! Be STRATEGIC! For example, do it right here on The Liberator blog or in The Liberator Magazine -- all are welcome -- OR your local study group or community/family meetings. I beg of us all, make our spaces of discussion consistent. That is how they become powerful and useful. Anything else is at a high risk for becoming intellectual masturbation. In these spaces, more specific ideas will surface that are more creative, relevant and powerful than any one person could possibly list or suggest for you. It is the consistent, collective space that must be the foundation so that ideas may be manifested as sustainable and effective -- powerful.

If you do not belong to a consistent, collective space I suggest you get to work on that before you do anything else, lest you get overwhelmed and narcissistic with your own thoughts for no reason. We've been down this road already with Hurricane Katrina, right? Sitting there crying on our couches -- it is a practically useless action in the end, and it is shameful, frustrating and perhaps psychotic of us if we continue to repeat it.

But before you say you don't belong to a collective space, take a good look at your life. Are you on a sports team? Do you take dance classes? Do you make music with a band or group? Courage is taking existing non-politically aware spaces and making them aware. There are no prerequisites -- you don't have to be surrounded by "righteous" or "pure" group members. These are things I'd prefer to strive for together rather than alone. If I can become "righteous" on my own but cannot assist anyone, my righteousness is merely an exercise of my ego and, in my opinion, is relatively worthless. So do not feel pressured into thinking you have to already be or think or act a certain way in order to be apart of helping. Yet be open to growth and changing if you discover that this is what is required for you to truly be of help.

And political awareness doesn't have to distract from your collective spaces' primary function. However, it should enable your collective space to "be in the loop" and to participate and "do something" when needed. After all, your band might not have planned the Montgomery Bus Boycott if this were 1955, but would your collective have been aware of the planning and participated and contributed to the organized effort when called upon?

It's time to realize that power means exactly being able to "do something" when we need to do it. And time to realize that we cannot have (the) power (to do something) without organization. The organization does not have to be massive, just consistent! "Where two or more gather" -- as long as that space is consistent.

If we understand this, and continue to do nothing to achieve these necessary steps to organization, I believe our tears become spit in the eyes of those who suffer.

2) Interview folks who know more than you about the situation in order to learn what is really going on and what help from you, if any, is desired -- again, I predict that organized action, even gestures, are what is needed and desired, rather than the tears or gestures of individuals. And then write about those interviews, transcribe them, share them and use them for your own education.

3) Ignore western media as much as possible.

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Mumia: False history and its consequences.

Teaching False History And Its Consequences (listen/download)

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NewHero. Angry. Jaded. DirtyHero. Corrupt.

While watching the newest episode of The Wire last night, I developed what I call another TV Theory -- you know those thoughts you have while watching TV or a movie or something that you think are just so profound? Well, I'm admitting it may not be revolutionary or a major contribution to anyone's canon, but I thought it was an interesting enough idea to share.

Basically, I noticed that there were five categories into which all of the different adult character groups fit into. Everyone -- school teachers, policemen, politicians and journalists (perhaps with the exception of the drug dealers, you tell me):

You got your new hero school teachers, policemen, politicians and journalists -- the cats who are new to their respective institution, are naive yet still eager to create change.

You got your angry school teachers, policemen, politicians and journalists -- the cats who were once new heroes but hit a brick wall and are now just full of contempt for their institutions and their jobs and pretty much disappointed, disillusioned and stressed out.

You got your jaded school teachers, policemen, politicians and journalists -- the cats who are way past being angry and have adopted a sort of quiet anger. They don't really care about the success of the institution enough to be stressed about it and don't care about the failure of the institution enough to continue to try and improve it in any fundamental way, they just go through the motions and do just enough work to continue to please their authority figure.

You got your dirty hero school teachers, policemen, politicians and journalists -- the cats who are optimistic yet not so naive as to believe that they can create change without getting their hands dirty and also were strong willed (or stubborn) enough to leap over the purgatory of being jaded.

And you got your corrupt school teachers, policemen, politicians and journalists -- the cats who have advanced past their anger and past being jaded and past trying to be a dirty hero to realize that if they just stopped spinning their wheels trying to change a system that just won't change, they could satisfy some of their personal life desires and goals by stealing from or cheating their institution.

I thought it was pretty interesting and relevant to what I've experience since being in the "real world".

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FESPACO Africana Film Festival documentary.

"FESPACO" is a documentary film about the intricate relationship between Black Americans and Africans, captured on film at one of the world's largest film festivals – FESPACO, which takes place bi-annually in Burkina Faso, West Africa. Narrated by Danny Glover and written, directed, and produced by Kevin Arkadie (Writer, Producer, Creator of "New York Undercover;" writer of "The Temptations") , it's more "Reels" than "Roots", told from a point of view inside the world's black independent film movement. While it's a film about film, specifically Black film, the dramatic thrust of the documentary involves six filmmakers from the African diaspora who cross the Atlantic to enter their films into competition in West Africa. The results are surprising, enlightening, and often inspiring. Producing are Ivory Coast Productions and PRAI (Promoting Reel African Images).

The movie will have its official U.S. premiere at the Los Angeles Pan African Film And Arts Festival at the Magic Johnson Crenshaw 15 Theaters in Baldwin Hills. Currently, there are two screenings:

Sunday, February 10 at 1:25pm and
Monday, February 18 at 11:00am

The Pan African Film And Arts Festival takes place from February 7 to 18. Their website is paff.org

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The Brotherhood.

I love the intention and purpose of Harlem's Brotherhood Sister Sol organization and this short film, "The Brotherhood" -- created by a Brotherhood Sister Sol alumni who now goes to NYU Tisch Film school and is also working on a second film for the "Sister Sol" aspect of the organization for the women -- does an excellent job of capturing that intention, that purpose as well as the history of the program.

One challenge that I think must be put to us all -- and that the Bell Hooks/Paul Gillroy interview that Nikki posted the other day challenges us to do as well -- is for us to not give up on a critique of the capitalist ethic even as we build successful institutions within the capitalist paradigm. The book "The Revolution Will Not Be Funded: Beyond The Non-Profit Industrial Complex" covers this in depth.

But basically I'm saying that while we take advantage of the non-profit (or NGO) loophole, we must also continue to envision and be courageous enough to attempt to advance past this paradigm, because it is inherently one in which our institutions are not funded (therefore owned and totally controlled) by the people who they serve. The Liberator is guilty of participating in the capitalist paradigm as well, so a challenge such as this one does not dismiss the work of our institutions. But what we must do is continue to remember, envision and act to supersede that paradigm in order to fashion a more perfect independence for our communities.

Check out this great video, and visit the Change Makers website. Also leave some feedback for the filmmakers. Your comments will help the organization in a competition for funding because one of the deciding factors on who gets the money is how many people have posted comments about the film/organization.

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Mumia: Omaha Night.

Omaha Night (listen/download)

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Email Better: The Trusted Trio.

As you can see I've modified my trusted trio to actually be a "quality quad". Another thing I like about Gmail is that it automatically allows you to archive mail with a specific archive button so you don't need the archive label/folder described below. So instead of archive, I use an "et cetera" label. That's where I automatically redirect mail from people who email me way too much (to the people who email me too much: now you know why I never read your emails on time!) -- I check that once or twice a week. Then, since I have multiple email accounts that all redirect to the same inbox I needed the personal folder to redirect all mail from family and close friends who usually just send me "how are you doing" emails and forwards. Besides that, I use the "followup" and "hold" labels as described below. Enjoy!

(Lifehacker) Managing the steady stream of email that gathers in your inbox every day can feel like an impossible task. Not long ago, I kept a lengthening list of folders in my email software to track messages by topic, sender, project, urgency and any other context that seemed relevant that hour. I'd spend lots of time carefully dragging and dropping every message from my inbox into the folder it seemed to belong in that day. After awhile I had so many folders the system was completely useless. Some of the folders - even after the work of creating and populating them - I barely ever opened again.

Since then I've slimmed down my email buckets to just three: what I call the Trusted Trio. Using just a few, simple action-based folders, it takes very little thought to keep on top of my email and a consistently empty inbox [...]

The Trusted Trio

* Follow Up: These messages represent tasks you must complete; whether that's a response that will take more than two minutes (anything less than that, just respond on the spot!) or some sort of an action. All these messages represent an item on your to do list.

Examples of messages that might go here include: a request to update the web site, or a message from a long-lost high school friend who you haven't spoken to in years that you want to spend some time writing with updates on your life. To make sure you actually follow up on the messages in this folder, you must review it regularly. Alternately, when you add a message to this folder, make sure you also add it to your to-do list. Here's more on how to separate your email from your to-do's.

* Archive: The Archive folder is your long-term email reference library. Place all the messages that contain information you may want to retrieve at some point in the long term future in Archive. Any completed threads, completed requests, memo's you've read, questions you had answered, and completed project email goes into Archive. Basically, whenever an email is "closed" but you may find it useful at some point in the future place it in Archive.

Dumping everything directly into Archive may seem scary to dedicated filers . It was to me at first. However, the archive is your "pile" versus "file;" Just remember it's completely searchable, and any message you place there will be retrievable using a well-crafted query.

* Hold: The Hold folder is a temporary holding pen for important messages you'll need quick access to within the next few days. If you're waiting on someone else to get back to you with crucial information, or you're maintaining a thread about a time-sensitive topic, keep it in the Hold folder. For you GTDers, items in the Hold folder might correspond with items in the next few weeks in your tickler file.

Examples of messages that would go in Hold are: a FedEx confirmation number for a delivery that's on its way, or a message from a co-worker that says, "I'll get back to you Tuesday re: The Big Project."

This folder should be reviewed on a regular basis and cleared out as the message contents are no longer needed (ie, that FedEx got delivered or your co-worker gets back to you.)

Empty your inbox
Now that the Trusted Trio is in place, it's time to empty your inbox. Whether you're starting with an overstuffed inbox with months worth of messages or the 2 dozen that arrived since your last processing session, the method is the same. Starting with the oldest message, open it up and:

* If it requires a response or action which will take less than one minute to complete, do it on the spot, then move the message to Archive.

* If it requires an action on your part that will take more than one minute to complete, move it to the Follow Up folder.

* If it's a piece of information or a promise you're waiting on from someone else, move it to Hold.

* If it's an informational message you may want to refer to later, move it to Archive.

* If it's of no use, delete it.

Wash, rinse and repeat for every message in your inbox until it is completely empty.

Keep it empty
Once you've got your inbox down to zero messages, keeping it that way is a matter of repeating the process above a few times a day. Schedule times for processing email into your schedule - like once first thing in the morning, once after lunch and once in the late afternoon. Train yourself to follow the golden rule:

Never leave a read email message in your inbox.
Commit to making a decision about the fate of every message you read in the inbox on the spot. Whether you respond immediately or file it in Followup, Archive or Hold, never leave a message in your inbox to make room for future, incoming mail - because there will always be more.

The catch
Now, just because you have all your messages filed neatly away in Followup, Archive and Hold doesn't mean you're free and clear. The hard part of this system is consistently revisiting Followup and Hold and complete the "open loops" stowed away there. To keep yourself from getting lulled into a total sense of completeness, mark all the messages in Hold and Followup as unread so you can keep an eye on the number of outstanding items.

Caveat
Of course this exact system won't work for everyone in every situation. For instance, I use a few other Lifehacker-specific labels in my LH Gmail, for instance, in addition to these three. But anytime I add a new bucket I think long and hard about it - and new additions are often temporary or saved search folders that eventually get deleted, whereas the Trusted Trio is a permanent fixture. (source)

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The next Facebook privacy scandal.

(Webware) The next Facebook privacy scandal: Facebook is no stranger to the complaints of privacy activists. First, it was the site's News Feed feature back in 2006. Most recently, the company's Beacon service drew widespread criticism. This blog post will outline yet another major privacy issue, in which Facebook recklessly exposes user data.

Facebook launched its widely popular application developer program back in May 2007. As of press time, there were more than 14,000 applications. Some, including most of the popular apps, are made by companies, while a few of the popular apps, and a significant number of the long tail of the less popular applications are made by individual developers.

But a new study suggests there may be a bigger problem with the applications. Many are given access to far more personal data than they need to in order to run, including data on users who never even signed up for the application. Not only does Facebook enable this, but it does little to warn users that it is even happening, and of the risk that a rogue application developer can pose.

Privacy problems for the user

In order to install an application, a Facebook user must first agree to "allow this application to...know who I am and access my information." Users not willing to permit the application access to all kinds of data from their profile cannot install it onto their Facebook page.

What kind of information does Facebook give the application developer access to? Practically everything. According to the Application Terms of Service,

"Facebook may...provide developers access to...your name, your profile picture, your gender, your birthday, your hometown location...your current location...your political view, your activities, your interests...your relationship status, your dating interests, your relationship interests, your summer plans, your Facebook user network affiliations, your education history, your work history,...copies of photos in your Facebook Site photo albums...a list of user IDs mapped to your Facebook friends."

The applications don't actually run on Facebook's servers, but on servers owned and operated by the application developers. Whenever a Facebook user's profile is displayed, the application servers contact Facebook, request the user's private data, process it, and send back whatever content will be displayed to the user. As part of its terms of service, Facebook makes the developers promise to throw away any data they received from Facebook after the application content has been sent back for display to the user.

Researchers blast Facebook

Some applications may make use of all this data, but as researchers from the University of Virginia have detailed in a recent report, Facebook provides applications with access to far more private user information than they need to function. Adrienne Felt, a student and lead researcher on the project, told me that of the top 150 applications they examined in October 2007, "8.7 percent didn't need any information; 82 percent used public data (name, network, list of friends); and only 9.3 percent needed private information (e.g., birthday). Since all of the applications are given full access to private data, this means that 90.7 percent of applications are being given more privileges than they need."
(Credit: Adrienne Felt, with permission.)

Felt condemned this practice, and said that it violated the the idea of least authority, an important security design principle that states that an actor should only be given the privileges needed to perform a job. In other words, she said, an application that doesn't need private information shouldn't be given any.

"Regardless of the click-through disclaimer that Facebook makes users accept, I don't think people understand what's happening to their data behind the scenes. If applications don't appear to use private data--but then they all have this same standard click-through screen--how can users differentiate between applications that really need access to data and all the rest?"

More than your own data--selling out your friends

Facebook's Web site and lengthy application terms of service curiously fail to mention something rather important. In addition to providing the application developer access to most of your private profile data, you also agree to allow the developer to see private data on all of your friends too.

Many Facebook users set their profiles to private, which stops anyone but their friends from seeing their profile details. This is a great privacy feature that can protect users from cyberstalkers and is completely gutted by the application system. To restate things--if you set your profile to private, and one of your friends adds an application, most of your profile information that is visible to your friend is also available to the application developer--even if you yourself have not installed the application.

The good news is that Facebook lets you configure the amount of your own private data that your friend's applications can see. The bad news is that it's hidden away, requiring several clicks through menus to find a page listing specific privacy settings (Privacy -> Applications -> Other Applications). Furthermore, the default values are extremely lax, such that a user who has yet to discover the preference page is essentially sharing her entire profile by default.

This friend data-sharing "feature," and the ability to protect against it, isn't mentioned anywhere else on Facebook's site, nor are users informed about it when they install an application.

On Tuesday, I had the opportunity to briefly chat with Chris Kelly, Facebook's chief privacy officer. During our conversation, he dismissed claims that Facebook does nothing to inform users that applications have access to data on user's friends, stating that "we have made things very clear to users, and they understand it very well." However, by press time, he had yet to send me a link to anywhere on the site where this information was "clearly" explained.

I also spoke with George Washington University Law professor and privacy expert Daniel Solove to get his thoughts on the issue. Regarding Facebook's claims that it makes its privacy policy clear to users, he said that "they seem to be going on the assumption that if someone uses Facebook, they really have no privacy concerns." Furthermore, "a kind of vague notice in a privacy policy that no one reads suddenly permits Facebook to do whatever they want with minimal to no privacy protections."

As for actually getting user permission before using their data in new and creepy ways, Solove said that the company "seem to have a very cavalier attitude to their users consent."

Rogue developers

Ok. So in order to give your friends virtual naughty gifts, play scrabble online, or see your daily horoscope, a user has to hand over all their private profile data to some unknown company or developer. No need to worry though, because Facebook has safeguards in place, right?

"Before providing any information to any Developer through the Facebook Platform, Facebook requires each Developer to enter into an agreement...which...strictly limits their collection, use, and storage of Facebook Site Information." (Facebook application terms of service)

Ah, good. Facebook requires that each developer protect the privacy of the user information and requires that they not store a local copy. I'm sure Facebook enforces this vigorously, audits developers, and throws the book at anyone who violates this rule, right?

"[each application] has not been approved, endorsed, or reviewed in any manner by Facebook...we are not responsible for...the privacy practices or other policies of the Developer. YOU USE SUCH DEVELOPER APPLICATIONS AT YOUR OWN RISK." (Facebook application terms of service)

I asked Facebook's Kelly what his company is doing to ensure that application developers do not violate the rules by saving a copy of user data that passes through their servers. He cited "extensive security mechanisms operating behind the scenes," although, he refused to expand on this, due to "security reasons." He wasn't too happy when I accused him of practicing security though obscurity, a concept widely mocked in security circles. He dismissed my charge as a mischaracterization.

Kelly claimed that his company "has a variety of techniques to determine if [developers are saving user data.]" As a PhD student in Information Security, I can quite confidently say that from a technical perspective, this is impossible. Simply put, once the data leaves Facebook's servers, the company has no way of knowing what happens to it. Thus, giving Mr. Kelly the benefit of the doubt, I can only assume that Facebook has a team of trained psychics on staff who use their mysterious powers to ferret out rogue developers.

Who are the application developers

Kelly said that users can determine a developer's trustworthiness by looking at their profile page, and that somehow, users can combine to form some kind of intelligent hive mind. "One of the factors is what applications your friends are installing. Untrusted applications don't get added very often as the collective mind is choosing what is trusted in real time." He further added that it is "up to your friends to make that determination in real time. If an application is going to give them some utility, they'll know that the applications have to obey the rules."

Call me a cynic--but I fail to see how thousands of 18-year-olds can collectively assess the data protection practices of some random developer in a foreign land. Remember, these are the same 18-year-olds who post photos of themselves passed out drunk on their public profile pages.

Would I trust the hive mind of Indiana University students to tell me which bar in town has the cheapest beer? Sure. But to expect them to evaluate a company's privacy practices? No way.

A public outcry

Unfortunately, as alarming as this issue is to privacy activists, there is a good chance that it may fail to gain the attention of the millions of Facebook users necessary to actually force the company to fix its policies. While both the newsfeeds and Beacon scandals were "in your face," most users have no way of knowing what, if any, data is being transmitted to application developers by Facebook, and thus are unlikely to be motivated to complain.

Furthermore, even users who are aware of the privacy risks of Facebook applications may still end up installing them. To not do so is to isolate yourself, to cut off communication channels, and in some cases, to cause insult your friends.

In what can only be a great example of life imitating art (see below), I asked security researcher Adrienne Felt which, if any, applications she used. She told me that in spite of the fact that she had spent significant time investigating the privacy risks, she still ended up installing an application because her friends wanted to send her some virtual Christmas presents. Not wanting to offend them, she put aside her privacy concerns, and installed the app. As she told me, due to the peer pressure, "I had a hard time saying no." (source)

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Your private Myspace photos are not private.

(Wired) Pillaged MySpace Photos Show Up in Massive BitTorrent Download: A 17-gigabyte file purporting to contain more than half a million images lifted from private MySpace profiles has shown up on BitTorrent, potentially making it the biggest privacy breach yet on the top social networking site.

The creator of the file says he compiled the photos earlier this month using the MySpace security hole that Wired News reported on last week. That hole, still unacknowledged by the News Corporation-owned site, allowed voyeurs to peek inside the photo galleries of some MySpace users who had set their profiles to "private," despite MySpace's assurances that such images could only be seen by people on a user's friends' list.

"I think the greatest motivator was simply to prove that it could be done," file creator "DMaul" says in an e-mail interview. "I made it public that I was saving these images. However, I am certain there are mischievous individuals using these hacks for nefarious purposes."

The MySpace hole surfaced last fall, and it was quickly seized upon by the self-described pedophiles and ordinary voyeurs who used it, among other things, to target 14- and 15-year-old users who'd caught their eye online. A YouTube video showed how to use the bug to retrieve private profile photos. The bug also spawned a number of ad-supported sites that made it easy to retrieve photos. One such site reported more than 77,000 queries before MySpace closed the hole last Friday following Wired News' report.

By then, DMaul, a denizen of the online forum TribalWar.com who declined to reveal his name, used an automated script to run nearly 44,000 MySpace user profiles through one of the ad-supported sites, MySpacePrivateProfile.com -- a process he says took about 94 hours. He rolled those images into a single file and seeded it to The Pirate Bay, a popular BitTorrent tracking site, on Sunday, advertising it as "pictures taken exclusively from private profiles."

Despite the language, the script DMaul posted to TribalWar does not appear to discriminate between public and private profiles, making it likely that many of the photos were intended to be public. The script cycled through MySpace users sequentially by MySpace Friend ID number, and did not target users of a particular age group.

Even with some public photos in the mix, the haul represents a significant breach that affects users under 16 -- whose profiles are automatically set to private -- more than older users who must opt-in to the privacy option.

As of Wednesday morning, The Pirate Bay showed two users seeding the file, and another 40 downloading it. One commenter complained that the download could take "weeks or months" to complete, prompting another to predict that, "By the end of the week it should be well distributed."

DMaul made two smaller files available as direct downloads. One of them examined by Wired News contains more than 32,000 images ranging from the mundane to the intimate: vacation photos, infants in bathtubs, teenagers mugging for the camera.

Child-safety advocate Parry Aftab, executive director at WiredSafety.org (not affiliated with Wired News) said last week that MySpace and other social networking sites should have teams that do nothing but test for bugs and monitor web forums for discussions about privacy glitches.

Last week, MySpace chief security officer Hemanshu Nigam touted a deal with the attorneys general of 49 states in which MySpace agreed to a laundry list of safety improvements on the site. However, the settlement does not require MySpace to detect or promptly close its recurring security holes.

MySpace hasn't returned phone calls on the issue. A spokeswoman for Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal, co-chairman of the task force that forged the pact with MySpace, declined to comment on the bug this week. Noelle Talley, a spokeswoman for North Carolina Attorney General Roy Cooper, the other co-chair, noted MySpace's quick response in closing the bug after Wired News reported on it.

"We raised this particular issue with MySpace and they told us that the problem was fixed by the next day," Talley wrote in an e-mail. "We'll follow up with them on this issue."

"The process set up by our agreement gives us ready access to bring problems to the attention of MySpace," Talley added. "We believe this collaborative effort will move us more quickly toward safer social networking sites, but attorneys general won't hesitate to take further action if necessary."

MySpace plugged a similar security hole in August 2006 when it made the front page of Digg, four months after it surfaced. (source)

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Liberator blog posts make good stories.

Our editors have recognized that the quality of discussion here on The Liberator Blog is excellent. So they want to reach out and invite Liberator blog readers and Liberator blog contributors who have not yet contributed to the magazine, to publish a piece (or two).

So:
If you create a blog post that gets a lot of feedback and sparks some great discussion;

Or, if you come across a great blog topic that you think you could make into an even greater published article after some further research or by delving deeper then the internet sometimes allows;

Or, if you participate in (or lurk in) a discussion that sparks some new perspectives and questions in your mind;

Then:
We'd love to have you transform that "spark" into an article/essay worthy of being published. To remind you, and to let you know we're serious, you'll see this icon on the front page of the website from now on. The Liberator is all about its readers being its writers and vice versa. I think ideally, we'd have 15,000+ writers to match our 15,000+ readers. You get the point -- we want you to contribute! If you have ideas, you can be a writer.

[post continued...]

Liberator article deadline Feb 1st.

If you are a writer/blogger interested in submitting a piece for the magazine you should know that the next deadline for submissions to The Liberator Magazine is February 1st. (contribute)

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Ravaging Africa.

This four part series, Ravaging Africa, was taped in Kenya at the 2007 World Social Forum.

Militarizing Africa (listen/download)
Economic War (listen/download)
Corporate Plunder (listen/download)
African Resistance (listen/download)

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African fractals, in buildings and braids.

"I am a mathematician, and I would like to stand on your roof." This is how Ron Eglash greeted many African families while researching the intriguing fractal patterns he noticed in villages across the continent. He talks about his work exploring the rigorous fractal math underpinning African architecture, art and even hair braiding. (source)

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Kenya chaos caused by income inequality?

(New Vision) The wave of violence that engulfed Kenya after the presidential election has been widely described as tribal or ethnic in nature. But analysts point to basic economics as the true cause of the unrest.

Widespread violence and a humanitarian crisis were triggered by the 30 December announcement that incumbent, Mwai Kibaki, had won a hotly-contested presidential poll amid opposition claims of rigging and international observers' reports of serious irregularities in the vote-tallying process.

"In the urban areas, there was a lot of senseless burning and looting, which was people taking out their economic grievances during a leadership vacuum. They just let loose and attacked any targets, burning their neighbours' houses, regardless of whether they are PNU (Party of National Unity, Kibaki's party) or ODM (Orange Democratic Movement, the opposition)," Macharia Gaitho, a political columnist, said.

While specific ethnic groups - there are more than 40 in Kenya - were targeted during the violence, the tensions that led to such clashes were not the result of ethnicity per se, but, according an editorial in the Sunday Nation newspaper, an almost inevitable consequence of the country's economic system: "Kenya practises a brutal, inhuman brand of capitalism that encourages a fierce competition for survival, wealth and power. Those who can't compete successfully are allowed to live like animals in slums."

Inequality pervasive
In Nairobi, more than 60% of the population live in slums, some of which lie a stone's throw away from the city's most luxurious houses.

According to a report (Pulling Apart: Facts and Figures on Inequality in Kenya) by the Nairobi-based Society for International Development (SID), Kenya is the 10th most unequal country in the world in terms of wealth disparities. Of Africa's 54 states, it is the fifth most unequal.

The 2004 report, using UN Development Programme figures, states that Kenya's richest earn 56 times more than its poorest: the top 10% of the population controls 42% of the country's wealth, while the bottom 10% own 0.76%.

Inequality pervades every aspect of Kenyans' lives, according to the report, citing enormous disparities - both in the capital and at national level - in almost every sphere of life: income, access to education, water and health, life expectancy and prevalence of HIV/AIDS.

A person born in the western Nyanza province, the bedrock of ODM support, can expect to die 16 years younger than a fellow citizen in Central Province, Kibaki's home turf. Child immunisation rates in Nyanza are less than half those in Central.

Another impoverished region is North Eastern province. While almost every child in Central attends primary school, only one in three does in North Eastern. More than nine out of very 10 women in North Eastern have no education at all. In Central, the proportion is less than 3%. In these two provinces, there is one doctor for 120,000 and 20,000 people respectively.

Kibaki's role
Critics of Kibaki, who came to power in 2002, accuse his government of failing to address this inequality and of focusing instead on the economic growth seen over the past five years.

Before he came to power on a wave of euphoria and hope after 24 years of rule under the autocratic Daniel arap Moi, Kenya's growth stood at -1.6%. In 2007, it reached 5.5% and before the elections was predicted to hit 7% in 2008.

This growth has been concentrated in the service sector, with banks, tourism and communications companies making big profits. Prices of shares and property have also soared.

But rather than trickling down to the worst off, this boom appears to have been very selective in its beneficiaries while the poor have seen the purchasing power of their shilling shrink.

Before Kibaki came to power, "we used to buy sugar for 45 shillings," Agnes Naliaka, a long-term resident of Nairobi's Kawangware slum, said. "Now it's 65 shillings. A kilo of cooking fat was 50 shillings. Now it's over 100 shillings," she said, adding that rent in the slum had doubled.

For David Ndii, executive director of the Kenya Leadership Institute, "the Kibaki government has been very cavalier about the treatment of the poor. Hawkers' stalls were demolished and they were not given any alternatives. Economic policies have not been pro-poor. This growth has been biased in favour of profits as opposed to translated into jobs."

Fast growth
"When a poor economy starts to grow very fast like Kenya did, levels of inequality rise," MJ Gitau, a SID programme officer and contributor to the inequality report, said. "You need assets and property rights to participate in economic production and exchange. Only a few have assets, are educated, able to save and invest, to take advantage of the high growth rates of the last few years.

Those who have, get more. Those who do not, lose the little they have," Gitau explained.
Ethnicity came into play during the election violence because of the widespread perception that those who fared best under Kibaki were his own Kikuyu group, the country's largest, which dominated politics and the economy both under his administration and that of founding president, Jomo Kenyatta.

However, Kibaki's party says poverty levels have fallen from 56% to 46%, lifting some two million people out of abject poverty and that more than 1.8 million jobs were created. (source)

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Listen to Kenyan radio live.

The poor US coverage of the presidential election and aftermath in Kenya is just the most recent illustration of the need to be in touch directly with news and entertainment sources in other nations.

91.5 Homeboyz Radio (homepage | listen live)
98.4 Capital FM (homepage | listen live)

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White teen kills four people in South Africa slum.

(Mail & Guardian) Terror, anger and squalor best describe Skielik, an informal settlement of fewer than 50 shack dwellings on the outskirts of Swartruggens in the North West.

Skielek which lies between the main road and railway line to Swartruggens, was the scene of a brutal gun attack on recently. Residents barricaded the main road on Tuesday to protest against the killings, which occurred when a gun-toting youth allegedly went on a shooting spree, killing three residents and wounded six.

The violent attack was, most residents claimed, motivated by a general hatred for black people among the local white farming community.

Most of Skielik’s residents work on farms in the area and in the quarries as slate diggers. They rent the area from a landowner who charges them a monthly fee of R35. They get water from a tank, provided by the landowner.

The community, said 30-year-old Baswabile Wati, is very peaceful and appreciates the presence of white farmers because they “help us with employment”.

However, Wati, a quarry worker, said: “They [the whites] have threatened to beat us before and have promised to make us eat our shit for not following their orders, but we don’t hate them. All we need is peace and safety.” He supports five family members on his meagre weekly wages.

On Wednesday afternoon the main thoroughfare into the settlement was buzzing with reporters and photographers. Shattered neighbours, relatives and sweaty camera crews crowded the homes of the deceased. But there was not a police vehicle in sight.

“We are very angry and scared because we are sitting here not knowing what is going to happen to us next,” said a grieving Augustine Ntombeni, grandfather of 10-year-old Tshepo Motshelanoka, who died in the shooting. He had just returned from his daily 5km walk from school and was playing outside his neighbour’s house at the time. A white teenager, 18-year-old Johan Nel, is accused of the attack.

“Our children were killed like birds. Birds are even better because after shooting them you pick them up — our children were left there to die,” Ntombeni said.

Just up the road, at the Moiphitlhi residence, Thys Legwale and Abram and Esther Moiphitlhi were preparing to leave for Paul Kruger hospital in Rustenburg. On Monday three-month-old Keditlhotse Moiphitlhi was the second child to die in the shooting. The child’s mother, Ikgopoleng Moiphitlhi (31), was critically wounded.

Ikgopoleng’s father, Legwale, dressed in a torn dark blue South African Police Service shirt and duty boots, said he had given enough media interviews for the day. He complained of fatigue and said he was worried about the welfare of his family.

“According to me,” said Legwale, “the government has to really wake up this time. They should take charge of what happened to us on Monday; they should also cover hospital and funeral costs for our loved ones.”

Sivuyile Dinana (30) was the third victim of Monday’s shooting.

On Tuesday North West Premier Edna Molewa visited the families of the deceased, including the Moiphitlhis.

“I told Edna here yesterday that they should rather tell us to look after ourselves and stop promising us things they know they can’t deliver. It’s been 10 years since we arrived in Skielik and for years we’ve been told that we will be moved to a better place — how long should we wait?” a distraught Abram Moiphitlhi, an uncle of the deceased, said.

An angry neighbour, Selina Molefe, said the community needed to stand together and be vigilant about the local white community.

“It’s clear that these people are out to get us. Look what they did to us in just a few minutes. What if they come back and finish off what they have started?

“Yesterday [Tuesday] at court I wanted to see the suspect. We wanted to burn him alive and see him die. I’ll make sure that I go to court tomorrow [Thursday] to see the face of this bastard who shot my nephew on the leg,” said Molefe.

Across the road a shattered Vakusukume Phahloti (41) was sitting metres from where his cousin, Dinana, was shot dead. Phahloti could only utter a silent “kuzolunga [it will be all right]”.

Dinana was shot when he tried to get the children out of harm’s way after he heard gunshots from his shack. Minutes later he was lying in a pool of blood next to a dying Tshepo Motshelanoka.
When Maria Serote arrived from work in Swartruggens she found Dinana and Motshelanoka’s bodies sprawled in the dirt outside her yard.

“We quickly picked them up and put them in a safe place in my house,” she said, crying.

Serote’s granddaughters, Kgomotso (23) and Kelebogile (21), were working in the house when the suspect shot them.

Kelebogile said the suspect kept on shouting “hulle’s baie stout, hulle hoor nie [they are very naughty, they don’t hear]”, while he allegedly shot at everybody in sight. “I am afraid they [the whites] might come back. Nothing can stop these people from repeating what they did because there are no police here,” she said.

But Serote said she is grateful that none of her family members died in the shooting.

“My children are all lying in hospital with bullet holes on their buttocks. I am deeply hurt but I console myself that at least none of them died,” she said, pointing at a bullet hole in the corrugated iron house. (source)

[post continued...]

Karibu Books closing its doors.

I know the US economy is in a recession right now, but receiving this email this morning was still a shock. I can't believe this bookstore -- with 5 regional locations in the DC/Maryland area -- is not highly economically successful. Karibu may have been one of the best independent bookstores in the US, IMHO. If they can't survive, what of the rest of 'em?

January 23, 2008
Dear Karibu Customer,

After 15 years of service within the Washington, DC metropolitan area, Karibu Books, a Black bookstore chain will be closing its doors. We sincerely thank each and every one of you for your patronage and support. We are optimistic that our mission to empower and educate through a comprehensive selection of books by and about people of African descent will continue to resonate within the communities we proudly served.

Since 1993, we have been blessed to help thousands of local, regional and national authors share their incredible stories of faith, hope, love, peace, politics and race. We cannot begin to express our gratitude for the countless authors who have graced our six stores and enriched our customers’ lives.

On Sunday, January 27th, We will be closing our Security Square (Baltimore, MD) and Forestville locations. The remaining locations, Bowie Town Center, The Mall at Prince Georges and Iverson Mall will close on Sunday, February 10th. Our Pentagon City store is already closed.

Effective immediately, all inventory at all locations will be 50% off. All fixtures will also be available for purchase on February 10th. See individual store managers for more information.

Again, we respectfully thank you for your loyalty, laughter and love. What an honor and privilege it has been to serve our community!

Sincerely,
Simba Sana
CEO
Karibu Books

Karibu Locations:
Security Square Mall, 6901 Security Boulevard, Baltimore, Md 21244
Centre’ at Forestville, 3289 B Donnell Drive, Forestville, Md 20747
The Mall at Prince George’s, 3500 East West Hwy, Hyattsville, Md 20782
Iverson Mall, 3817 Branch Ave., Hillcrest Heights, Md. 20748
Bowie Town Center, 15624 Emerald Way, Bowie, Md 20716

[post continued...]

Mumia: Iran, An Imminent Nuclear Threat?

Iran, An Imminent Nuclear Threat? (listen/download)

[post continued...]

Unlike Reznor, Saul Williams isn't disheartened.

(CNET) Saul Williams chuckles when asked about the word "disheartening."

That's the word Trent Reznor chose to describe the sales generated by William's new album, The Inevitable Rise and Liberation of NiggyTardust, which the two men collaborated on.

The public has the choice of obtaining the digital release for free or pay $5 for a higher quality download. Reznor, the artist behind the band Nine Inch Nails, ignited wide debate about the effectiveness of Radiohead-esque giveaways and the value of music when he revealed last week that 80 percent of those who downloaded the album were unwilling to pay.

Reznor said in an interview with CNET News.com on Thursday that while he was generally pleased with the response, he also expected a larger number of people would dig into their wallets to support good music.

Williams, in contrast, says he's isn't bothered by the numbers. He suggested that Reznor tends to worry too much and jokingly referred to him as the 'king of emo.' Williams said he is taking a longer view. He says it's too early in the album's economic lifespan--or in the search for new music business models--to call the promotion a bust.

In an interview on Wednesday with News.com, Williams revealed he is grateful for the opportunity to promote his music using groundbreaking techniques and also to technology for setting him free from the "constraints of race."

What do you think about what Trent said...and are the numbers accurate?
Williams: They were for that day and the thing is the numbers change every day. But yeah, they're accurate.

The public jumped on Trent's use of the word "disheartening." What do you make of it?
Williams: I'm actually extremely optimistic. The only thing that I really have kept in mind is that, one, we're two months into a project. An album is not like a film, so that like, 'Oh, we did it, two months and it's done, now it's going straight to DVD.' The marketing campaign starts this month with the premiere of our video of Sunday Bloody Sunday on MySpace, MTV and all the major networks.

The marketing campaign that we started begins this month as well. We start touring in March starting with South By Southwest and then move across the country and then on to Europe. So the album has gotten a great deal of writes up and had a huge response from people immediately. But that was all from just releasing the album. That was with, like Trent said, with no marketing, no press, nothing spawned from us. It was all people like yourself saying, 'Can I talk to you about this?' But we hadn't paid a publicist as of yet.

I think it's early in the game. I'm not disappointed at all. I think Trent's disappointment probably stems from being in the music business for over 20 years and remembering a time that was very different, when sales reflected something different, when there was no such thing as downloads. Trent is from another school. Even acts that prospered in the '90s, you look at people like the Fugees or Lauren Hill selling 18 million copies. That sort of thing is unheard of today. But Trent comes from that world. So I think his disappointed stems from being heavily invested in the past. For modern times, for modern numbers we're looking great, especially for being just two months into a project.

Experts have told me that the economic lifespan of an album can last as long as two years.
Williams: Exactly, the lifespan from my last album, from touring, which is really how I made my income and everything, lasted for two years. I didn't start touring with that album with Trent until 2005. It came out in 2004.

Wasn't the online promotion of NiggyTardust an experiment? You guys originally were just testing the waters?
Williams: It was certainly an experiment, but you know, life is an experiment. I know that the life of this album has a lot to do with how it feels and looks and how it comes off on stage. That's what this album was for: to set the stage for me to perform in the way I like to perform and maybe get more people at a show than I normally would.

That was your goal. You mentioned that the last time we talked.
Williams: Exactly, so, it is an experiment and I think it was an experiment going great. Imagine a couple trying to have a baby and two months into it the husband goes to the press and media says: 'My wife can't have children!' (He laughs). You should give it a year. I mean you're trying to have a baby.

Are you guys friends?
Williams: Trent and I? Yeah.

How did you meet?
Williams: We met on the road, when he asked me to tour with him. From there our bonding was immediate. We immediately clicked over dozens of things, which led us...maybe the first day, the first or second day we met, was when he asked me if I wanted to do an album with him.

So he liked your stuff?
Williams: I would be on stage and look to the side of the stage and see him in the corners of the wings dancing and I'd say, 'Oh s**t, he's really listening.' Every night, it never failed.

Do you think some of his disappointment might be because he really wants to see you do well?
Williams: Okay, don't get me wrong. I don't think Trent is as truly disappointed as he sounds in that blog. You got to think of him this way...listen to his music (he laughs). In my opinion, oh, he might not like this, but I think he's the king of emo.

Of course he's going to voice his disappointment. And with all that being said, we've talked a great deal since the blog, and all he said is that, 'I wish we had better numbers.' But really his whole purpose of releasing that statement was that we could avoid some of the pretentiousness of some of the other groups that have perhaps done something similar, like Radiohead keeping numbers to themselves and us wanting to say, 'Hey, look this is an open experiment that all artists should know.' I think that this information is essential for all artists trying to do what we're doing and figuring out whether this is something that will work.

All that really was about was to say, 'Look, yeah it is disappointing because the imagination is amazing.' We could imagine 4 million downloads all paid. Any of that is imaginable. And there is a great deal possible because like I said we're two months into this thing. The video, like oh my God. The amount of work that I just put into this video "Sunday Bloody Sunday" is more than I ever put into a f***ing film. It is so intense.

What did you learn about how the technology helped or hurt you?
Williams: Tech wise, I think people were really pleased with the different bit rates that we offered. You can see for yourself the number of people that chose FLAC and all that. We've heard rave reviews from people about getting what they got for the cheap price that we offered. To me the coolest thing with the downloads is the lyrics. I don't think most people realize that if you do download the album and put it in your iTunes and on your iPod, if you keep clicking that center button of your iPod while the album is playing, you'll eventually see the lyrics. You can read the lyrics for every song while you're listening. Little stuff like that made it really exciting for me.

What would you change about the promotion?
Williams: I don't really see what we've done in past tense yet. It's really been a short time. And I'm really pleased with where we are. As a poet who releases books, I'm really familiar with how things spread by word of mouth.

The lifespan of an album can be as long as two years or more. You look at something like The Beastie Boys' first album, which sells a million copies every year. It's nothing like a movie, so I think we're doing great. We're off to a running start. We still have a physical release date to look forward to. We still have touring to look forward to. We still have marketing and promotion that all starts this year, so I don't regret anything. Not yet.

Do you still believe in these online giveaways? Will you do this again?
Williams: I don't know. I think the online giveaway for our project was perfect. Cause you're dealing with myself, an artist not everyone has heard of and not everyone is going to necessarily try if they have to pay for it. Giving them the opportunity to get it for free from us I think was a really positive and intelligent choice on our part. Would I do it again? I have no idea.

What about the costs that Trent talked about? Tell me about the 'sample clearance fees' you guys had to pay?
Williams: Yeah, I used a major sample from (the rap group) Public Enemy for the song 'Trigger.' A sample can cost you about $10,000 or more.

He also mentions the bandwidth costs. Were those expensive?
Williams: I would say they are not. We had a special deal with Musicane (a company that helps performers distribute music online and oversaw the Web site, credit-card transactions as well as other back-end chores for Williams). They can add up, but the reason we went with Musicane is that they had the best bandwidth costs. In fact, we didn't have to pay for bandwidth. That was our deal.

Trent talked about how happy he is that your music is in more iPods than ever before.
Williams: To me that's the real deal. That's how I see it. And that's what leaves me not feeling disappointed because we all know that artists earn the most from touring. So it doesn't work against me giving it away free to so many listeners. The more people that are into it, the more people that say 'I got to see this live.'

Trent also said you guys couldn't find any traditional record deals that appealed to you.
Williams: Everybody seemed to be interested, but in my opinion nobody seemed to be a visionary. If you look around you, you don't see a lot of black alternative acts out there.

It's not because black alternative acts don't exist. It's because there's this belief in the marketplace that, 'Oh, who are they going to sell to? People in the hood won't like them and so-and-so won't like them' and there's big confusion about who we appeal to.

For an artist like myself, the sort of attention that I'm getting, and who is not sticking to my guns--all puns intended--I think it says a lot.

Can that be a tough sell?
Williams: I had people at Sony take me into the office and tell me, 'But that's not hip-hop. Your album isn't hip-hop.' To me that's what this is really about. By releasing it online and not dealing with the labels, it gave me an opportunity for once as an artist that I didn't have to compromise in the face of people who have limited ideas and conceptions about what it is to be black and make music.

And to me that's the role of technology. Technology is here to free us from the grip of history. That's why I'm thankful to the Internet. That's why I'm thankful to this form of (music) release. Because in many ways it set me free.

I've been in meetings with reps at labels and they walk me to their urban department. Literally I'm like, 'But I'm not making something limited to urban music,' and they're like, 'Yeah, but you're black.'

That's why I'm grateful to technology because it freed me from the constraints of race. (source)

[post continued...]

Trent Reznor: Why won't people pay $5?

(CNET) UPDATE (1-22-08) at 2:25 p.m.: More than a week after this story was published, Trent Reznor accused CNET News.com of misquoting him about the issue of a music tax on ISPs. We have posted an audio excerpt of the Reznor interview here. He suggests in his post that he did not make statements supporting a music tax on ISPs that appeared in the January 10 article. He also implies that CNET had some kind of hidden agenda when he writes in his post that the story was "written before I was involved." For the sake of full disclosure, we have also updated this story to include the text of what he said following his remarks about the ISP tax.

Very early in a discussion with Trent Reznor, the front man for the band Nine Inch Nails, it's obvious how highly he prizes his collaboration with musician Saul Williams on the album The Inevitable Rise and Liberation of NiggyTardust.

Reznor produced and helped bankroll the album, which debuted November 1. All the more reason why he was stunned when fewer than one in five people who downloaded the music were willing to pony up $5, roughly the cost of a McDonald's Quarter Pounder.

Williams and Reznor were trying to follow the lead of Radiohead by distributing music online without the backing of a label. Like the British supergroup, Williams made the album available for free in one version but he also offered the option of buying a higher-quality digital download for $5. The promotions were groundbreaking and plenty of people predicted that a profitable outcome would convince many musicians to drop their labels and use the Internet to distribute their own artistic creations.

And then Reznor ended the hoopla last week when he reported on his blog that 154,449 people had downloaded NiggyTardust and 28,322 of them paid the $5 as of January 2. In the blog, Reznor suggested that he was "disheartened" by the results.

Now, in his first interview since releasing the sales data, Reznor on Wednesday talked about his rethinking of music in the digital age. (To see an interview with Williams, published Friday, click here: "Unlike Trent Reznor, Saul Williams isn't disheartened.")

Q: Trent, lots of fans were shocked and saddened by how disappointed you sounded with the sales results. Many piped up to tell you that the numbers may be misleading. Were the numbers that bad?
Reznor: I'm not disappointed with the numbers with Saul at all. I think, particularly looking at what he's done historically and in the climate of today's music scene, that's something to be proud of.

What disappointed me is that I had thought--and this is just based on how I experience music--given the opportunity (his voice trails off). Why do I end up stealing music? Usually because I can't get it easily somewhere else or the version I can get is an inferior one with DRM, perhaps, or I have to drive across town to get it to then put it on my computer or it's already out on the Internet and I can't pay for it yet.

If I think of it a month later walking through Amoeba (record store), hmm...do I want to just buy a piece of plastic and give most of the money to the record labels, who have to be thieves because my experience with them has always been that? And you have a lot of reasons why you didn't do it. So I thought if you take all those away and here's the record in as great a quality as you could ever want, it's available now and it's offered for an insulting low price, which I consider $5 to be, I thought that it would appeal to more people than it did. That's where my sense of disappointment is in general, that the idea was wrong in my head and for once I've given people too much credit.

Saul and I went at this thing with the right intentions. We wanted to put out the music that we believe in. We want to do it as unencumbered and as un-revenue-ad-generated and un-corporate-affiliated as possible. We wanted it without a string attached, without the hassle, without the bait and switch, or the "Now you can buy the s**** version if you buy..." No, no, we said: "Here it is. At the same time, it'd be nice if we can cover the costs and perhaps make a living doing it."

I'm not saying that this is a completely accurate test. Yes, there is a possibility that people downloaded it and the same people went back and downloaded it and paid for it and that can throw the numbers off. I get all that.

It kind of gets into the bigger picture that you've had to face as a musician over the last few years, which in my mind was a bitter pill to swallow, but it's pretty far down the hatch with me now: the way things are, I think music should be looked at as free. It basically is. The toothpaste is out of the tube and a whole generation of people is accustomed to music being that way. There's a perception that you don't pay for music when you hear it on the radio or MySpace.

There's a difficult transition in the mind of the musician and certainly in the mind of the record label. If that is the case, how does one adapt to that?

How are you going to adapt to that?
Reznor: For me, I choose the battles I can fight. In my mind, I think if there was an ISP tax of some sort, we can say to the consumer, "All music is now available and able to be downloaded and put in your car and put in your iPod and put up your a-- if you want, and it's $5 on your cable bill or ISP bill."

Someone asked me recently whether I've used 4-1-1 lately. I said 'Not really." They said do you know you're paying for that every month? 'I am?' Yeah, X-amount of your money goes to a service that you don't even use.'

Was everybody in the Williams camp happy that you disclosed the sales numbers?
Reznor: I didn't see the harm in not using this opportunity--and I'll name check Radiohead on this--they've done a pretty suave marketing plan on this new record.

I think generally it's been a pretty cool thing, but what they've done is used those (sales) numbers in a way that they can spin them anyway they want cause you don't know what they are. They can present themselves as the biggest band in the world. Someone leaks out a number of a million and someone says a number of visits and someone else says that must mean they made a million and someone else says the average price was $5 or $6 and that means they made $10 million.

I highly doubt that's what happened based on my own experience.

And I'm not saying that Radiohead and Saul Williams are in the same breath in terms of popularity by any means, but it felt to me like that, partially inspired by Radiohead, we tried this and here's the results we got and I assume there's a bunch of other bands that are intrigued by the idea that may want to follow down that path. I'm not saying it was a failure or a success. I think it was both. But it wasn't 90 percent of the people that showed up paid us what we asked for. Nor did I ever think it would be. I'm not sure what I did expect.

But I've found it entertaining reading different people's perspective on the Web, what they've thought of what I've said. There's been a wave of people that said, 'Oh, that's depressing. Only 18 percent chose to pay for it.' Another whole wave of people feel just the opposite. I don't really know. That was the point of it. I've heard people say, 'What was the point of that blog?' It was just to share information with you. It wasn't any kind of concrete analysis of anything.

I'm sure I didn't win any points with the aforementioned people by doing what I did. I questioned whether it was the right thing, but it felt morally like the right thing to do. I'm not ashamed of it. I find myself a bit defensive right now, like 'Did I f**k up? Should I not have said that?'

Talk about technology and your experience using the Web as a distribution method.
Reznor: When we started the idea, we liked the clean feel of the Radiohead experience. It didn't feel like we were a sidebar on the Snocap site. Somehow that kind of thing cheapened it in a sense for whatever reason. I'm not sure why. That's based on my own perception. I like the idea of feeling kind of homemade and simple. There is a beauty to the fact that everybody has got their own distribution network that is already set up. How simple and obvious to just do this. But the reality of that is building the infrastructure that has a store and accepts the right form of payment and fulfillment and all those boring kinds of things.

What did you learn from the experience?
If I could redo everything and start again, I think having a physical product is a good thing. I think that having some more coordination on our part--and I'll take the blame on that because there was an urgency to get this done and get it out that I was the ringleader for--I think if we could wave a magic wand and do it again I think being able to offer an inexpensive version in addition to a premium physical product that could be shipped out afterward.

On day one you can buy it online and it's also in the store. But the manufacturing (of CDs) is the leak (to file-sharing sites) for everything and the leak is important to get around. The leak blows momentum. It happens and it's going to happen on every release there is. It's a fact of life. But that leak happens once it leaves mastering and goes to manufacturing, if it hasn't by then, then it certainly does at that point. I like the energy of release day, the excitement of watching blogs light up and bulletin boards. I think that's an important spike in attention. And the only way I can see to accommodate a physical release if it goes to manufacturing after the thing is in the hands of people. But I do think there is a need for presence in physical retail.

Are you going to abandon this or will Nine Inch Nails offer a similar promotion as Williams?
If I had a record to put out today, I would do something very similar to what we just did cause I don't think there is a better option. I would include a physical piece as I just said and all of the components I would make sure had value.

Saul said he doesn't have any regrets about the way the album was released. He credits the Internet with setting him free from having to deal with the labels. Is this how you feel?
Reznor: I can't tell you how great it felt when Saul and I and his team said 'Let's do this. Let's go.'

There's not an army of people saying no for this reason. To feel in control of your own destiny for a change, that's an incredibly liberating feeling. Where it needs to be worked out and fine tuned is the right way to hopefully generate enough commerce from it to justify doing it and really working on the right way and right tone to get the word out to people that doesn't feel intrusive or old school.

But at the same time there is a little bit of an element with Saul's record of a tree falling in the woods...It hurt my feelings to see it not show up on everybody's Best Album Of The Year lists, because I think not enough people knew it was out there. (source)

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Mumia: The War Against Ourselves.

The War Against Ourselves (listen/download)

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Million $ Mano: "Flashing Lights" + "Shawty Is A 10"

Flashing Lights [remix] (listen/download)
Shawty Is A 10 [remix] (listen/download)

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Thinking About Capitalism.

This is an older conversation between Paul Gilroy and bell hooks.

"...This then forces us to acknowledge the very interrelatedness of structures of reality that Martin Luther King evoked in using that term, which is to say that however fierce racism is in this culture, it is mediated for some by class power. We begin to increasingly inhabit a social world where the interest of black people of privilege is antithetical at times to the interest of the poor. There is a kind of vulgar wisdom within capitalism that we are all vulnerable to the seduction of greed, of being allowed unprecedented forms of economic power within a system that has historically denied any group on the margins, but particularly African Americans, certain positions in place."


bell: Paul, we've both been rereading the work of Martin Luther King. I have been thinking a great deal about his critique of capitalism. How do you see this critique as you review his work?

Paul: The distrust of capitalism King expresses is rooted in his awareness that it is a source of misery. It is there in his later work. It is there in his growing interest in the politics of poverty on a global scale. It is there in the context of his death around the sanitation worker's strike in Memphis where he talks about “we as Christian ministers; we're God's sanitation workers.” There is a sense of not being able to retreat into an uncontaminated space. There is a sense of an activist Christianity there. It was once said that it was harder for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven. What would that feel like today when the romance of wealth and power seems to be such a complete mainstream feature?

There is no strong critique of capitalism emerging from the black church today. A critical link between the ministry of Farrakhan and black Christian ministers is an uncritical embrace of capitalism. This uncritical embrace comes at a time when the black left in the United States acts as though capitalism is a useless, boring word. I think, for example, of critics who have mocked my phrase white supremacist capitalist patriarchy. It is ironic that people are willing to talk about white supremacy, they're willing to talk about patriarchy. But when you put them together with capitalism, it becomes a term to ridicule.

Of course it isn't only black intellectuals who have suffered a crisis of political imagination after the “alternatives” to capitalism, that were imperfect and obviously deficient in many ways, were destroyed five years ago. It is as though the problem of how to negotiate a future outside of capitalism is something that we cede to political communities in other parts of the world. We leave this question of which bits of capitalism we can live with and which bits we have to give up to the South Africans, for example, to sort out for themselves. We pass it to the people of Eastern Europe for them to negotiate. I think we can meet that pressing question head on; we can defend some speculative, almost utopian alternatives to capitalism because of the misery created by that system and the market relations it promotes. It is affecting their lives by trying to transform things which can't be registered in economic terms into economic mechanisms.

A major reason contemporary black intellectuals and/or critical thinkers have been reluctant to push a critique of capitalism is that so many of us who are in the spotlight are well paid. But this is a confusion of what the struggle is about. The issue is about the use of resources, the imperialism of the wealthy. We have to make a distinction between labor, in which there are hierarchies of who's paid more and who's paid less, and the question of wealth and the kinds of political systems that support wealth and imperialism. A friend called me yesterday and said that she was reading about my “luxurious” apartment in New York City. I said, “You know if you consider my apartment in global terms it is luxurious, but not in terms of the U.S. or New York City.” What does it mean to try to negotiate, for those of us who live in the West, realms of privilege that are denied most people on the planet, and simultaneously situate that within a critique of capitalism? People feel coerced into silence. Particularly in this culture, where some black writers and intellectuals have been able to attain that which comes close to wealth, people feel they can't critique anything that has to do with capitalism anymore.

Your comments raise two issues for me. One is a question of class and what it means to say that you can transcend your class location, that you don't have to mechanistically act out what people imagine goes with the income you have. It's very clear that class for me, well I think class has always been -- in the Marxist versions of thinking about class -- about something other than the amount of money you have. The two things are connected, but one is not the other. Marx was going to write a volume about class just before he died, and there are a few sentences of the manuscript remaining that he was never able to complete. One sentence I will always remember is that class is about more than the size of your purse. It is a self justification to some extent, but it is also an important truth for us to remember.

I think that early radical feminist thinkers, like Charlotte Bunch and other people, kept trying to say that. That class isn't simply a question of money; that class has to do with attitudes and values. A lot of poor people who learn their class values and attitudes from television actually have a value system that does not correspond to their class. They can be dirt poor and yet think politically in a manner that allies them with the interest of the ruling class.

That's true. The second thing that I was going to say relates to this question of the celebrity -- of what the critique of capitalism and the market become, when you experience this process of being turned into a commodity for sale. This takes us back to the place we started with Martin Luther King, because he too has been turned into a commodity. In his case his image is charged with a certain kind of moral burden. In your case I think it is almost like a political commodity. I think this whole sense of identity which has circulated in political writings, so powerfully in the last few years, colludes with this idea. The ideas don't matter because the person -- the body of that person -- is a kind of repository of values that you don't need to go into; that you can almost imagine you know in advance; and that becomes a substitute for your own work, the difficult work of actually struggling with ideas. There is a short cut which is offered to you in the form of that icon. You can take that icon and you can use that icon. You can position it in relation to other icons; therefore, you don't really have to think. The world becomes a smooth and easier place, and your own moral choices are lubricated.

In keeping with what you just said in representations of Malcolm X, the aspect of his politics that gets totally erased (whether we are talking about how he is represented in independent cinema or how he is represented in the mainstream) is his profound critique of capitalism. And we have also talked about the histories of contemporary African Americans writers like Amiri Baraka and Toni Bambara, and the ways their careers and the degree to which they are allowed or disallowed celebrity status, have been negotiated by the fact that both of these writers have sustained a critique of capitalism. Despite any other changes, that critique of capitalism was always present. There again, that becomes something about their work that simply does not get attention.

That's right. You have mentioned the names of two people who stayed outside the glamour of power and wealth. In their work there isn't just a critical commentary against capitalism, it is a righteous anger about the violence of that system and the way it delimits people's choices. It's curious for me to come here from Europe at a time when things are getting worse for so many people, and yet finding that the political possibility of a complete break with the economic and social institutions in this country is completely unimaginable. It is unthinkable. It isn't just about people writing poetry or making films or a movement that was around 25 or 30 years ago that had a commentary on capitalism, because today those ideas, those images, those movements, those histories are still present, but they have actually been worked on so as to purge this sense of anti-capitalism. Look at what has been done to the black power movement.

This is true as well of the contemporary focus on W.E.B. Du Bois. His primary texts are ignored and he is evoked to support a kind of privileged.

...complacent elitism.

Absolutely. What we find in the work -- as in his repudiation of his own concept of the talented tenth -- was a critique of class. He has that beautiful moment when he says he imagined wrongly that black people would obtain certain privileges, and use those privileges (not unlike Amilcar Cabral when he talks about the willingness to die to ones class values and be reborn again in resistance) to support collective racial uplift, collectivity, the sharing of resources. Du Bois critiques the fact that he thought this would happen and it did not. He had to go back and critique class structure within black life. I see a real denial on the part of many black critical thinkers today who refuse to acknowledge class conflict in black life.

I was really amazed this past year when I was on a panel with several prominent black artists and I was the only person willing to argue for there being major class conflicts in black life and challenging the notion that being victims of racism solidifies us, so that we are not tearing one another apart on the basis of class. This is a popular fiction that denies the growing gap -- not just between black people in privileged classes and those who are poor, but the differences and contradictory similarities in attitudes and values that are separating those groups.

It would be very difficult to sustain the idea that there is a sort of continuous culture which embraces all of these class differences where they don't count for anything. What you said is right. It underlines how the privileged, the elite group, the group which is a bit like the neo-colonial petty bourgeoisie in a colonial country, that group is very heavily dependent on the poor for its cultural resources, for its vernacular, for its language, for its energy. It is interesting to see that kind of denial being played out.

That privileged group needs to deny class conflict in black life. That's why we see a great deal of writing by contemporary black writers from privileged classes who work only with representations of poor vernacular culture. The focus on vernacular black popular culture becomes a way to invoke qualities of cultural allegiance that may have nothing to do with how you actually ally yourself politically.

Well, I know it's a trivial example, but I have always been struck by the things that many privileged African American male intellectuals have said about their experience of catching a cab on the streets of New York. It is interesting to me how the idea that you can't catch a cab becomes the special site of enforced racism in your life.

Yes, it is used in a way to deny the quality of class privilege that can intercede in the system, because those folks can use car services and other kinds of things that allow us to intervene on the practice of racism. This then forces us to acknowledge the very interrelatedness of structures of reality that Martin Luther King evoked in using that term, which is to say that however fierce racism is in this culture, it is mediated for some by class power. We begin to increasingly inhabit a social world where the interest of black people of privilege is antithetical at times to the interest of the poor. There is a kind of vulgar wisdom within capitalism that we are all vulnerable to the seduction of greed, of being allowed unprecedented forms of economic power within a system that has historically denied any group on the margins, but particularly African Americans, certain positions in place.

I think we can go further. We can say that we are more vulnerable to that opportunity precisely because of the denial. That means it is not about blaming individual people who succumb to that particular form of temptation, from a moralistic point of view, but in recognizing how the histories of what we were, and the ways in which our choices, our opportunities have been restricted in the past, leave us vulnerable to the promise of their fulfillment and that seduction.

I think that it's dangerous, if not another form of cultural genocide, for privileged black leaders and thinkers to act as though black salvation in the United States lies in embracing capitalism. It's this evocation of a non-realistic myth of plenty available to all who work hard that leads to the demonization of everyone who is poor and destitute. Progressive insurgent black intellectuals must articulate the disservice that is being done to poor and underclass black people. When privileged class blacks act as though there is no possibility of a life of integrity in poverty, this group becomes part of the kind of mechanism of a culture that would have everyone believe value is only found in materialism, in what you have, as opposed to what you become. Here we are not denying the importance of economic self-sufficiency or even desires for luxury. I desire to live a materially secure and self sufficient life in many ways, and I believe participatory economics offers the hope of a world of shared resources.

If we are going to think about the claims of class-based dynamics and solidarity in our lives, these aren't just issues for the poor. These are issues for privileged groups too. I think it is also a point for people who earn their living from working with words and ideas, although they might not normally think of themselves as being part of the same class as people in the entertainment industry or other areas of the cultural industries. There is some sense that we won't do this as effectively as we could if we divorce the experience of black academics and writers, often too much, from other very privileged people. I would like to see people in the entertainment and sports industries, privileged people who actually feed the fantasies of iconization and the idea that you too can be a sports hero if you develop the right relationship to your body, the people who circulate those images and make vast amounts of money from their circulation in the culture, not only to other black people, but also to large numbers of whites and other people of color, as well. I would like to see those people put on notice about the kinds of accountability that flow from endorsing those particular fantasies at this stage in American history.

I would like to take that further and say that while I thought it was useful for cultural critics to point out the nihilism of the black underclass, I think that there is a way that we can talk about the nihilism of the black privileged classes that names itself through greed and a sense of hopelessness that says: “Political struggle is hopeless, therefore I may as well sell my product to the highest bidder, or to change my story, change my tune, whatever I need to do to get the largest sums of money.” I think we have to talk about that as a form of nihilism that is much more insidious than the nihilism of those people who are without certain forms of hope in their lives. Because this kind of nihilism sends the message that no matter how much you possess there is no reason to engage in political struggle, that there is never any place of comfort from which one can take a political stand. This way of thinking is much more life threatening to black political struggle in this society than the despair of the underclass.

Yes, and how do we raise community around those questions again, to ask people to feel free enough to speculate about the kind of world they want for themselves and for their future.

It's significant that the longing to engage a critique of capitalism within a context of continued commitment to global liberation in the black Diaspora and elsewhere has compelled us to dialogue with intellectuals working outside this country, especially black British thinkers.

The emergent forces of resistance to capitalism have to globalize into new patterns that are rather hard to see right now.

That recognition of the need for new visions and strategies is certainly a critical step, moving us towards the formation of global solidarity among progressive thinkers who are grappling with issues of race and class.(source)

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Lauryn Hill: Ms. Hill

Mainly looks like remixes and a few unreleased tracks. But it's Lauryn so, you know.
Ms. Hill (check it)

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Obama the first Democrat to run national ad.

Hillary is beefing, saying Obama's ad running nationwide during tonight's debate violates an agreement the candidates made to not campaign in Florida due to that state moving its primary up in the calendar in violation of Democratic Party national rules.

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Mumia: America's Martin and Martin's America.

America's Martin and Martin's America (listen/download)

"Challenge the loss of memory..."
(-Mumia Abu-Jamal)

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Any drum majors here?

As we approach the holiday weekend, it's only proper that we revisit this piece, I think.

Dr. King's holiday, Any drum majors here? (by Mac Walton): Well, it's 2008 and another Dr. Martin Luther King holiday. Marches will be held across the country. People will march in parades that will be so festive that you may mistake them for carnivals or the first day of a county fair. And between used-car dealer smiles, politicians will make long-winded speeches, looking into tv cameras where appropriate.

CNN will interview a few African Americans who were organizers and prime time players of the civil rights movement back in the day, asking "How was it to march with Dr. King?" "And "How long do you think it will it take us to overcome?"

But what the old guard civil rights leaders will only hint at and what CNN will not seriously discuss is Dr. King's focus in the last years of his short life: The US government's propensity to wage war abroad and shortchange the American's righteous quest for economic and social justice at home.

If we read Dr. King's major speeches and writing chronologically, we see the intellectual development of an outside-the-box- critical thinker moving from civil to human rights; from a black person's right to drink at a water fountain to the right of all Americans to a living wage; from the violence of police against people practicing civil disobedience to the violence against third world countries seeking independence from western dominance.

The corporate media will trot out old film footage of Dr. King preaching having dreams, but you won’t see much film about him preaching "Study war no more." And for good reason: It's too dangerous. Reporters could lose their jobs. News directors too. But Dr. King's intellectual evolution led him to three conclusions:

1. The US was a violent nation-state which engages in war for profit and control of third world resources;

2. Due to its ongoing war efforts abroad, poverty remained rampant at home (And let's be clear: Dr. King meant poverty was speaking of poverty and homelessness of all Americans, and not just African Americans. That's why his poor people's campaign included poor whites, Hispanics and Native Americans, as well as African Americans); and

3. Only a mass movement by grassroots organizations will move the country to tackle poverty in earnest. He concluded that US politicians had neither the moral fortitude nor the political will to end the disgraceful plight of millions of impoverished and homeless people in the richest country in the world.

Why Dr. King's Words and Actions Are Still Relevant Today

A self-described "drum major for justice" who just "wants to do God's will," Dr. King's criticisms against the US government for its pre-emptive, illegal and immoral warmongering in Vietnam is just as relevant today as it was in the sixties. Let us not forget: Dr. King was one of the first prominent US citizens to speak against our involvement in the war in Vietnam, saying it was immoral not only for us to kill the Vietnamese abroad, but also to let the poor live on the streets and go hungry at home. More than any other famous American, it was Dr. King who spoke out against the Vietnam war, making the connection between war and poverty, saying the cost of waging war in Vietnam siphoned off much-needed funds to tackle poverty, homelessness and inadequate education at home.

Will the mainstream media help us to make the connection between the Vietnam war in the sixties and our present war for dominance in Iraq? The billions wasted playing cowboys coming to save the day in Iraq and problems build at home: 47 million without healthcare, jobs moving like crazy to other countries, inadequate funding for No Child Left Behind, thousands of teachers being laid off, shortage of law enforcement officers in our neighborhoods?

Will CNN, for instance, bring on economists and political scientists to discuss the relationship between war and poverty? Will those guests mention that President Johnson's efforts to fight poverty (after much urging from Dr. King and other civil rights leaders) was cut short due to his decision to expand its illegal, pre-emptive costly and bloody war in Vietnam just as we’re doing today?

Will they help us to recognize that true greatness of Dr. King was not only his gifted oratory, not only his ability to hold together loose political coalitions, but his unmatchable intellectual ability to see the relationship between bloody wars abroad and crushing poverty at home? Of course not. But perhaps a more important question to ask is: Do we (African Americans) won’t to hear Dr. King's message, much less act on it?

What about us?

One reason we may not want to hear it is that it might challenge us to do more in 2008. But I think there’s another reason: Dr. King's work sets a high standard. Let’s face it: The guy read voraciously and thought critically about issues big and small. Why he could quote from a Shakespearan play as easily as the Holy Bible. He wrote articles, he wrote books, and, rather than sit around blaming the poor, he acted on their behalf.

He was jailed more than 30 times, hounded by the IRS, the CIA (who tried to get him to commit suicide), and received death threats almost daily. Yet, he continued to act as "a drum major for justice."

Of course this high bar shouldn't keep us from becoming drum majors in our own right, at home, in the workplace, in our communities. But some of use this standard not as motivation to do what they can but as rationale to do nothing. Of course, there is always the notion that to struggle for something beyond ourselves might cause us to lose our highly-mortgaged home, our beloved, gas-guzzling SUV (the only freedom ride some of us know) and that new, shiny barbecue grill from Wal Mart. But, like a tree by the water, Dr. King's bar will not be moved, nor his legacy in the fight for social justice for all Americans.

So have fun on this holiday. Barbecue, get reacquainted with neighbors, have a cold one and talk nice on manicured laws and comfortable patios. But don’t be surprised if some Americans trapped in poverty, homeless and despair may wonder if we really care. And don’t be surprised if a black minister’s overarching spirit drops by, walks through pillows of barbecue smoke, and asks:

Are there any drum majors here?

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Mumia: We Will Return In The Whirlwind (book).

Book Review: We Will Return In The Whirlwind -- Black Radical Organizations 1960-1975 (listen/download)

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The former Mr. Willie Jones meets Nkrumah.

The Former Mr. Willie Jones Meets Nkrumah: The Nation of Islam and Pan-Africanism

"You have to make yourself now a citizen of Africa, your native country. You can’t go back there calling yourself, “Mr. Willie Jones.” You can’t go to Africa today and get good friendship with them. They are afraid of you.” – Elijah Muhammad, 19741

"In order to enslave the African it was necessary for our enslavers to completely sever our communications with the African continent and the Africans that remained there. In order to free ourselves from the oppression of our enslavers then, it is absolutely necessary for the Afro-American to restore communications with Africa." – Restoration, the OAAU2

The Nation of Islam has been central to pan-African thought, affecting both continental African-Americans, Afro-Caribbean’s, Afro-Mexicans, Afro-Britains, and Africans of all hues within the mother continent. All incarnations of the Nation of Islam have had a Pan-African program: the Nation of Islam under Minister Farrakhan, former members under Imam Mohammed, smaller communities under Silas Muhammad, and disparate communities under the leadership of imams who broke away with Malcolm X (El Hajj Malik Shabazz). The leaders of the Nation of Islam have traveled globally and their reports to the Black community at large have served to keep prominent African leaders, such as former Ghanaian president Jerry Rawlings, Libyan leader Moammar Ghaddafi, intellectual Ali A. Mazrui, as well as African leaders who were removed by the US. government such as Kwame Nkrumah, in the consciousness of large numbers of African-Americans. The Nation of Islam, through the ever transforming Savior’s Days, has also allowed state-harassed Black leaders to reach out to their communities. Kwame Ture (Stokley Carmichael) and Prince Asiel Ben Israel often spoke at the annual Saviour’s Day (Saviours’ Day) conventions. This paper will examine relations between former President Kwame Nkrumah and African Americans and the way in which the Nation of Islam filtered both perspectives during and after the African independence movement.

The Nation of Islam was founded in 1930. Its founder was a foreigner born in Mecca at the end of the nineteenth century. However, the major figure and leader of the Nation of Islam for forty-one years, and many of the early followers, had been members of the United Negro Improvement Association. Others had been members of the Moorish Science Temple. Both of these earlier organizations stated that Blacks of the Americas were from Africa and descended from civilized peoples. Both had education wings and both argued for the unity of Black peoples.

Elliott P. Skinner states that in the nineteenth century many African-Americans fought the American Colonization Society’s efforts to repatriate freed people to Africa because they had been indoctrinated in the anti-African scholarship which upheld the systems of slavery a colonialism. Europeans had exercised the literal power of life and death over Afro-Americans for centuries. Thomas Jefferson, after declaring that “all men are created equal,” made it clear in Notes on Virginia that Africans were not “men” and therefore could not be freed.

“the blacks are inferior to the whites in the endowments both of body and mind… This unfortunate difference of color, and perhaps of faculty, is a powerful obstacle to the emancipation of these people.”3

The propaganda of Jefferson, Hegel, and other would-be white supremacists was constantly countered by determined literate African-Americans. Delany counseled returning to East Africa. Edward Wilmot Blyden counseled return to Africa and led the way. Henry Highland Garnett laid out a definitive statement on the civilized African and the importance of the continent to world history.

"By an almost common consent, the modern world seems determined to pilfer Africa of her glory. It was not enough that her children have been scattered over the globe, clothed in the garments of shame-humiliated and oppressed-but her merciless foes weary themselves in plundering the tombs of our renowned sites, and in obliterating their worthy deeds, which were inscribed by fame upon the pages of ancient history."4

Missionaries such as Blyden got to see the horrors of colonialism first hand. They were tainted by the prejudice that their sisters and brothers on the continent had been deprived of the ‘civilizing’ effects of enslavement in a European society. However, they were well equipped to recognize the imposition of the dialectic of white supremacy/black inferiority upon fellow Black people. From Liberia to South Africa, Black missionaries were pulled into the anti-colonial struggle. Bishop Coppin was outraged by the degraded position of Africans in South Africa.

"When we are told that an African in Africa is denied civil privileges because he is an African, we feel that besides being unrighteous and unworthy of our Christian civilization, it is ridiculous in the extreme."5

Edward Wilmot Blyden (1832-1912), progressed from asking the American Colonization Society to support his efforts to becoming so integrated into the culture of West Africa that he all but abandoned the European Christian doctrine for the African Islamic one.

DuBois took up the “protection” of Africans from white supremacist doctrines and convened a Pan-African conference in 1900. Africans from the Atlantic and the continent convened again in 1919 and in 1921. Unfortunately, they consistently met on the territories of the colonial powers, London and Paris.

The Nation of Islam was able to draw upon the folk memory and mythology of Africa that sustained much Nationalist thought. For example, this writer’s great grandmother, though from Mississippi was categorical in her belief that Blacks in the United States came from Africa. Though grandmother’s own grandfather had been a “full-blooded African” and had returned to the continent as a missionary, her knowledge of the continent was based upon the Bible and the conviction that it was a place of civilization and redemption.

Tony Martin says that Africa has been a central idea in African American thought. The hold that “the benighted continent” exercised upon the hopes and dreams of former slaves and their children inspired the doctrines of separation and return. The best examples at the beginning of the twentieth century were the UNIA, Nation of Islam, and sixty-five thousand strong Liberian exodus association of South Carolina. The UNIA was a foundational organization with the strongest pull on the imaginations and politics of Blacks in the Western Hemisphere and on the continent of Africa. At its height there were 1,100 UNIA branches in over forty countries. A UNIA delegation was sent to the 1922 League of Nations. Its unashamedly Pan-Black-African doctrines influenced the thought of Jomo Kenyatta, Ernest Ikoli (Nigeria), Kwame Nkrumah, and Elijah Muhammad. Muhammad redirected UNIA activity into the nascent Nation of Islam.6

The Honorable Elijah Muhammad was most likely aware of nineteenth century Pan-African writings or preaching. He had been a secretary in the UNIA and therefore had access to the study groups. The Los Angeles Herald Dispatch was edited by a female UNIA member, Pat Patterson, and carried Muhammad’s editorial column.7 In Our Saviour Has Arrived he critiqued the early back-to-Africa movement as unnecessary.8 Many of his lectures referred to the continent in broad terms. In a Table Talk, he made clear that all Black peoples who had suffered under slavery were part of the ‘elect’ who were being civilized to return to their peoples in Africa and Asia.

"West Indians are still our people only they were ruled under other than the American whiteman. They were ruled under the British but they are too drifters out of Africa."9

Islam had been introduced to small numbers of the African American community through the writings of Blyden, through the Moorish Science Temple, the Ahmadiyya Movement, and early Hollywood movies, such as The Sheikh (1921), that depicted North Africans. When hundreds of thousands of Black migrated from the South to the northern industrial centers, they provided new sources of transmission of information about Islam, Africa or any subject that could be popularized; isolated southern and western populations could now get some inkling of the continent in the east.

Kwame Nkrumah (1909-1972) came to America to study. He attended Lincoln university in 1935. Garvey had been deported in 1927. By the time Nkrumah reached the Western Hemisphere, the man who would inspire the Ghanaian “Black Star” shipping line was in London inspiring West Indian and South Asian temporary workers to fight for their rights.10 While he was at Lincoln, Nkrumah read the Philosophy and Opinions of Marcus Garvey.11 His time in America allowed him to make intimate contacts with African-American intellectuals, of whom W.E.B. DuBois was probably the most famous and perhaps the most significance. When the great DuBois, whose African ancestry was nearly subsumed by Europe, and who had fought the return to Africa under Garvey bitterly, accepted the offer to relocate to black Africa, Nkrumah scored his greatest victory – the cure of double consciousness.12

Though the Honorable Marcus Garvey had been discredited in the minds of many African-Americans, the Nation of Islam’s rise, and the oratory of Malcolm X (EL Hajj Malik Shabazz), became the main vehicle for transmitting news and analysis of events on the continent to the average African American. Most importantly, the Nation’s doctrine that the Original people were Black, that the God Tribe had settled in Africa and that features such as kinky hair, and muscular build were self-imposed in order to ensure eternal survival, continued the uncompromising tradition of “Race First” and Black strength that had been the doctrine of the UNIA.13 That uncompromising stance would become the backbone of the Nationalist Movement as outspoken proponents of Black Power such as Kwame Ture relied upon the Nation of Islam to attack the majority white population and its DuBois-type supporters if they attacked him. As African-American Nationalism and Black Power evolved into informed political Pan-Africanism, a range of Africaphiles began to meet. Some were old enemies, and ironically DuBois who had attacked Garvey relentlessly, even stooping to the level of pigment politics, died in Ghana. During the 1970 Congress of African People, Urban League executives, Democrats, Caribbean Nationals and Members of the Nation of Islam got together to discuss Africa and its importance to the entire Black world.

"Whitney Young, executive director of the National Urban League, to
Democratic party politicians such as Rev. Ralph Abernathy and
Rev. Jesse Jackson; representatives of the Diaspora such as
Roosevelt Douglas of Dominica… and Minister Louis Farrakhan of
the Nation of Islam"14

It would not be surprising that Garvey and Nkrumah would inspire Muhammad, and that through him later leaders of the Nation would be inspired to focus upon Africa. The three men had fundamental commonalities. All three had come form relatively obscure backgrounds. All three were imprisoned; Garvey in 1925, Muhammad in 1942, and Nkrumah in 1950-51. All three ran propaganda programs that associated their leadership with Messianic redemption.
In the UNIA weekly Negro World, Garvey was described as founder of a new religion:
"I do not know whether or not Marcus Garvey is aware of the fact that he has given the word a new religion; nevertheless, he has… To me true Garveyism is a religion which is sane, practical inspiring and satisfying.”15

Nkrumah used his state paper Evening News to describe himself:
"Some call him the Second Christ… as foretold in the bible. Others call him Son of God the Messiah, the Organizer, the Redeemer of Men…, yet Kwame Nkrumah puts t simply to every follower: “I am one of you; I belong to you and Africa.”"16

Muhammad’s Muhammad Speaks and books described him as:
"The Messenger of Allah" – Fall of America

All three fought with the wealthier Black elements. The NAACP and A. Phillip Randolph took part in the “Garvey Must Go” initiative; Thurgood Marshall accused Elijah Muhammad of being supported by ‘thugs,’ financed by ‘some Arab group,’ and Martin Luther King saw Elijah Muhammad as expressing ‘bitterness and hatred.’17 Nkrumah had to dismiss conservative members of the United Gold Coast Convention.18 Most importantly, all three were devoted to the end of colonialism; that was point 13 of the UNIA Declaration of Rights, a point in Elijah Muhammad’s 1969 Saviour’s Day lecture, and chapter 43 of the Fall of America. There were important differences, especially in regard to women. Nkrumah’s Convention People’s Party (CPP) relied upon a vocal female element, whereas the UNIA Black Cross Nurses were mostly morale builders and the Nation of Islam’s MGT-GCC were mostly concerned with domestic affairs.19

Kwame Nkrumah argued that imperialism and colonialism were motivated by the economic greed of Europe, America and Japan. The 20th century had been a century of war. In 1965 when Neo-colonialism: The Last Stage of Imperialism was written, Western Europe and America had gone through two wars of annihilation, fought in Korea and were involved in Vietnam. Nkrumah stated that military needs, especially nuclear development, were responsible for the demand for mineral resources. The steel industry which was providing jobs for African-American Migrants in the second great migratory wave, was being built on ore extracted at nearly no cost from Africa. Astute African Americans were made aware of how intricate they were to the resubjugation of Africa because the finished product that they were manufacturing were then sold back to Africans at exorbitant costs. This forced the African leadership into debt bondage, since they did not set the prices for the exports, nor did they exercise leverage for the prices they were willing to pay for finished goods.

"profits are forced out of Africa in the form of the inflated cost of finished goods, equipment and services she is forced to buy from the monopoly sources that extract the prime materials. This is the big squeeze in which Africa is caught, one that grew tighter from the eve of the First World War."20

Nkrumah lambasted industrial advertisements that encouraged exploration of the ‘jungles’ of Africa. European concerns and American media invested large amounts of time in warning the world away from the savages of the African jungles. However, they celebrated pioneering companies which went into Africa, followed the patterns laid down in colonial times, and acquired raw materials. The mechanization of ‘the jungle’ was celebrated because it allowed ease of transport of materials away from the continent.

"In lush verbiage, the… advertisement describes how "deep in the tropical jungle of Central Africa lies one of the world's richest deposits of manganese ore". The site, which is "being developed by the French concern, Compagnie Miniere de I'Ogooue, is located on the upper reach of the Ogooue River in Gabon. After the ore is mined, it will first be carried 50 miles by cableway. Then it will be transferred to ore can and hauled300 miles by diesel-electric locomotives to the port of Pointe Noire for shipment to the world's steel mills.""21

Nkrumah made unity the central point of his program. After leading the country to independence and assuming power in 1957. His marriage to Fathia Nkrumah in 1958 was designed to unify Nasser’s Afro-Arab state with Black Africa.22 His government hosted the Conference of Independent States and the All-African Peoples Conference (1958). He made several attempts to unify Ghana with other African nations: Guinea (1958), Guinea and Mali (1960). In 1961, he played a lead role in ending the brutal colonial regime in Congo.23 He advocated return, and offered Ghana as the home of all African Americans.

The independence of Ghana meant that it had recognized representation at the U.N.. John Hope Franklin says that the new state from whence many African-Americans likely descended, took an active interest in U.S. affairs. It may have influenced passage of the 1957 Civil Rights Bill.

"As Congress began to debate the proposed civil rights bill in the summer of 1957, the diplomatic representatives from Ghana had taken up residence at the United Nations and in Washington. This important fact could not be ignored by responsible members of Congress. It seemed that black men from the Old World had arrived just in time to help redress the racial balance in the New."24

However, some influential Civil Rights leaders with deep ties to liberal whites saw African differently. No less a figure that Dr. King admitted that the new African states were inspiring assertiveness among young African-Americans. He agreed that neocolonialism was a rising problem. Yet he warned that the former colonial powers, and white Americans, were unbeatable and told whites that emerging Pan-Africanists such as H. Rap Brown and Stokely Carmichael (Kwame Ture) were dangerous elements who went against U.S./Israeli colonial interests.25

"There is no colored nation, including China, that now shows even the potential of leading a violent revolution of color in any international proportions. Ghana, Zambia, Tanganyika and Nigeria are so busy fighting their own battles against poverty, illiteracy and the subversive influence of neocolonialism that they offer little hope to Angola, Southern Rhodesia and South Africa, much less to the American Negro."26



Elijah Muhammad, on the other hand, saw Africa as rising. His call for emigration increased after Ghana’s independence.27 In December 1957, he corresponded with Egypt’s Gamal Nasser, offering solidarity during the African-Asian conference.28 He traveled to Africa in 1959.29 While he put those with cultural nationalist ideas out of the temples for wearing ‘savage’ dress, he advocated working with ‘civilized’ Muslim and Christian Africans. He had a great deal of pull within the lower middle and working class Black community and his messages were always targeted towards the long-held strains of Nationalist thought. At the Nation of Islam’s height in 1974, Muhammad’s messages were broadcast on one-hundred-and-fourteen stations.30 With that sort of community influence, and proven fearlessness, many of the cultural Nationalists who would never have been accepted into the FOI or MGT-GCC still treated the NOI with great respect. Sometimes organizations such as CORE, under the leadership of James Farmer, were given positive press for their political views. Theodore Vincent writes that Stokely Carmichael often sought Muhammad’s approval fro his actions.31

"Take for example Carmichael. He stands pat. They say that will do such and such but yet they don't and he still is free. He is not even yet a spiritual believer, but he believes in the Black man. Allah has taken the fear out of him. They are more afraid of the black revolution than anything else."32

Disunity, or ‘balkanization’ was an idea that the Nation of Islam early seized upon and fought to counter. Nkrumah said that disunity was the major tool of neo-colonialists. The only way to counter it was through the unity of all African states. He called for and All-African Union Government. The echo of Garvey’s Africa for the Africans cold clearly be heard, and even members of the Black community who had never set foot on African soil could support the idea. It is likely that the struggle against “monopoly-capitalism” was the reason that the Nation of Islam moved from the relatively capitalist outlook of Elijah Muhammad to a distinctly anti-capitalist perspective under Louis Farrakhan.33 The formation of the Organization of African Unity in Addis Ababa 1963 brought a shadow of Nkrumah’s vision to the continent. It was weakened by the policies of pro-European blocs, such as the Monrovia Group, Brazzaville Group and the pro-French states led by the Ivory Coast. Further the East Africans had their own union, which Nkrumah opposed.34 However, even a tenuous attempt at African unity heartened African Americans who wanted to see a strong Black state. It certainly inspired Malik Shabazz’s formation of the Organization of Afro American Unity. He had traveled to Africa twice after breaking with the NOI in 1964.35

"Upon this establishment, the Afro-American people will launch a cultural revolution which will provide the means for restoring our identity that we might rejoin our brothers and sisters on the African continent, culturally, psychologically, economically, and share with them the sweet fruits of freedom from oppression and independence of racist governments.

1. The Organization of Afro-American Unity welcomes all persons of African origin to come together and dedicate their ideas, skills, and lives to free our people from oppression.

2. Branches of the Organization of Afro-American Unity may be established by people of African descent wherever they may be and whatever their ideology -- as long as they be descendants of Africa and dedicated to our one goal: freedom from oppression.

3. The basic program of the Organization of Afro-American Unity which is now being presented can and will be modified by the membership, taking into consideration national, regional, and local conditions that require flexible treatment.

4. The Organization of Afro-American Unity encourages active participation of each member since we feel that each and every Afro-American has something to contribute to our freedom. Thus each member will be encouraged to participate in the committee of his or her choice.

5. Understanding the differences that have been created amongst us by our oppressors in order to keep us divided, the Organization of Afro-American Unity strives to ignore or submerge these artificial divisions by focusing our activities and our loyalties upon our one goal: freedom from oppression."36

Nkrumah was overthrown by the CIA in 1966 while in China.37 However, his principles inspired Pan-Africanists in the United States. Ron Karenga credited Nkrumah with inspiring his philosophical creativity. He learned of the works of Garvey through Nkrumah and the need for complete renewal of the African self. Ron Karenga (Maulana Karenga), who conceived the Kwanzaa celebration, began with the concept of Kwaida.

"There is in Kwaida clear evidence of Nkrumah’s stress on “nationalism, pan-Africanism and socialism” as essential and interrelated pillars and projects for liberation; belief and rootedness in the masses of people; groundedness in the “elevated values” of traditional African culture; the power and possibilities of relentless organizing and organization; the collective responsibility of each one to teach one; and the commitment and call of “forward ever, backward never.”"38

After Elijah Muhammad’s death in 1975, Wallace Muhammad (Imam W.D. Mohammed) began transforming the Nation of Islam into a Sunni community. As a result the NOI split, with staunch anti-integration Nationalists breaking off to maintain the traditional teachings. Louis Farrakhan became the leader of the main body, though other former ministers also claimed the mantle of the Lost-Found Nation. All of the community maintained interest in Africa. In October 1975 Wallace Muhammad met with Egyptian President Anwar Sadat. In 1990, he contributed $85,000.00 to Nelson Mandela.39

Whether Elijah Muhammad, Malcolm X, Wallace Muhammad (Imam W.D. Mohammed) or Louis Farrakhan read Nkrumah’s work, the idea of neocolonialism had been well absorbed by the time of the 1995 Million Man March. The Nation of Islam has never become comfortable with the practical aspects of Nkrumah’s plan (according to Ghadaffi, African leadership has not become comfortable either 40). The idea of building economic strength by forming cartels of “interlocking directorships and cross-shareholdings” has not worked in America or on the continent. However, it did learn from the failures of Nkrumah, managing to retain the loyalty of its members even where projects have been costly failures. With the double-edged benefit of being a vocal group in a white supremacist state, with a broad membership base that remains against integration, NOI leadership has consistently managed to use the basic program of Black unity as a bulwark against attempts at dismantling its economic and political structure.

Despite the opposition of some old-guard African-Americans, the Nation of Islam instituted economic programs and used its ties to Africa for investment. Paul Robeson, Jr. came out against the Nation’s Power line of products, arguing that political power had precedent. However, the Nation of Islam had already endorsed the presidential bids of both Reverend Jesse Jackson and Lenora Fulani. When Ghaddafi, who offered to switch the importation of personal care items from Europe to the NOI, also offered to invest monetarily, the Clinton administration blocked the transfer, openly stating that it was against the interest of white ethnic groups.41

In 1994, Farrakhan made an economic assessment of West Africa. He and a delegation of 2,000 business people, visited Accra, Ghana in the first International Saviours’ Day (renamed from Saviour’s Day). There were high expectations about strengthening economic ties with the Nation of Islam and also with East coast American cities. Thirteen years after the trip, it seems that little came of the negotiations. But the symbolism is perhaps more important. In that Saviours’ day conference, all the elements of Pan-Africanism met, including the presence of integrated Afro-Americans. It suggests that the long desired unity across all classes, true Black-For-Black, is becoming a reality.

""Baltimore has the largest open-water port on the East Coast. We can make use of that with linkages with African and Asian nations, but we're not doing that right now. I'm hoping that Min. Farrakhan can build that bridge," State Sen. Mitchell said."42

Marcus Garvey, Kwame Nkrumah, and Elijah Muhammad were three central figures in African history who inspired people on both sides of the Atlantic. Garvey was the forerunner, calling for independence and Black-on-Black marriage. He envisioned Pan-African unity and named himself President because someone had to. Muhammad was the supporter who was inspired to reinvigorate the masses to Black Power and Black Pride in the 1930’s while his former President was in exile. Nkrumah was the student, the only continental African of the three and took Garvey’s call for unity to Africa. He inspired Afro-Americans in turn when he pulled out of the British Commonwealth as a show of Black racial support in the face of the 1965 British racial support of the white regime in Rhodesia.43 The economic requirements of Nkrumahism have been the greatest challenge. The continent and scattered communities are still working to implement the post-1963 requirements of “one voice for Africa, a single currency, an African monetary zone, an African central bank, a continental communication system.”44 Nkrumah’s success was in calling for the return home and cultural nationalism. Nearly every Nationalist organization which survived the CoIntelpro attacks took up cultural nationalism and a variety of holidays, manners of dress and visits to Africa have ensued. The NOI was theologically incapable of becoming true cultural nationalists, though representative Akbar Muhammad was sent to Ghana in 1995. Through the 2020 Investment group, the Nation has been able to work with cultural nationalists in order to consider Ghana’s land offer and consequently ending the double-consciousness of still more African-Americans.45

“But, whiles I must make this physical departure,
spiritually, I will not leave you and God will take
care of you. When you feel a cool breeze blow across
your face every now and then, just know that it comes
from the deep reservoir of love that I hold for you.
Oh, by the way, Christ is Black; I see him walking at
a distance with Nkrumah. I think they are coming over
to greet me.”

“My feet have felt the sands
Of many nations,
I have drunk the water
Of many springs.
I am old,
Older than the pyramids,
I am older than the race
That oppresses me.
I will live on…
I will out-live oppression.
I will out-live oppressors.
DETERMINATION”
John Henrik Clarke - July 16, 1998

from Dr. Conrad Worril, “Remembering Dr. John Henrik Clarke as a Source of Wisdom”

NOTES
1. Elijah Muhammad, “Our Saviour Has Arrived,” (Chicago, IL: Muhammad’s Temple, No. 2, 1974), 48

2. “Restoration,” Program of the Organization of Afro-American Unity, http://www.malcolm-x.org/docs/gen_oaau.htm

3. Joanne Grant, Black Protest: History, Documents, and Analyses, 1619 to the present, (NY: CBS Publications, 1968), 18

4. Elliott P. Skinner, “The Dialectic: Diasporas and Homelands,” in Joseph E. Harris, ed. Global Dimensions of the African Diaspora, (Howard University Press, 1993),
23

5. ibid

6. FADSI – First African Diaspora Studies Institute (FADSI), as described in Martin, Tony. Garvey and Scattered Africa, in Joseph E. Harris, ed. Global Dimensions of the African Diaspora, (Howard University Press, 1993), 441

7. Theodore G. Vincent, Black Power And The Garvey Movement. (Baltimore: Black Classic Press, 2006), 203

8. Muhammad, Our Saviour Has Arrived, 139

9. “This is taken from the Table Talks with our Beloved Messenger pages 5-6,” http://www.noiwc.org/nationofislamcaribbean.html

10. Sivanandan, A., A Different Hunger: Writings on Black Resistance, (London: Pluto Press Limited, 1983), part two, passim

11. Ian Duffield, “Marcus Garvey and Kwame Nkrumah,” History Today. (March, 1981), 24-30

12. Jamal Nkrumah, “Rekindling Kwame Nkrumah’s Pan-Africanism,” Crisis, (September/October 1998), 62

13. Tribe of Shabazz, Originally broadcast 1962, http://www.muhammadspeaks.com/Shabazz.html

14. Walters, Ronald W. Pan Africanism in the African Diaspora, (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1993), p. 68

15. Vincent, 116

16. March 7, 1960, Evening News, reproduced in Rupe Simms, “I am a Non-Denominational Christian and a Marxist-Socialist:” A Gramscian Analysis of the Convention People’s Party and Kwame Nkrumah’s Use of Religion.” Sociology of Religion, (2003, 64:4), 470-472

17. Martin Luther King, Jr. “letter from a Birmingham jail,” in Washington, James M., ed., A Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings and Speeches of Martin Luther King, Jr., (San Francisco: Harper Collins, 1986); Vincent,129]

18. Duffield, 26

19. Duffield, 27; see also http://www.noiwc.org/

20. Kwame Nkrumah, quoted in New African, (October 2005, 18-19), originally in
Neocolonialism, the last stage of imperialism (London: Tomas Nelson, 1965)

21. ibid

22. Nkrumah, Gamal. Fathia Nkrumah: Farewell to All That. weekly.ahram.org.eg/2000/499/profile.htm

23. Duffield, 25, 26

24. John Hope Franklin quoted by Skinner The Dialectic, 33

25. King “where do we go from here,” in Testament of Hope, 590; Gendler interview of King, in Testament of Hope, 667

26. “Where do we go from here,” in Testament of Hope, 591

27. Vincent, 121

28. ibid, 122

29. ibid, 140

30. radio schedule, http://www.muhammadspeaks.com/Radio.html

31. Vincent, 243
32. “Notes From The Messenger's Table” (August 24, 1968). http://www.muhammadspeaks.com/TableTalks8-24-68.html

33. Corey Muhammad, “Farrakhan says: This is our last chance,” www.finalcall.com/artman/publish/article_1995.shtml

34. Duffield, 29

35. The Last Interview; Malcolm X, Al-Muslimoon Staff (from the Malcolm X Museum)
Taken from Al-Muslimoon Magazine, February, 1965 http://www.malcolm-x.org/docs/int_almus.htm

36. Establishment, Program of the Organization of Afro-American Unity, http://www.malcolm-x.org/docs/gen_oaau.htm

37. A. Akbar Muhammad. (Africa Representative of the Nation of Islam). The CIA At 50: 50 Years of Dirty Tricks. http://www.globalafrica.com/AkbarDoc.htm; Karenga, Maulana, “Speaking Freedom, Celebrating the People: Ghana @ 50, Nkrumah @ First,” Los Angeles Sentinel, 3-8-07, A7 (www.us-organization.org/position/documents/SpeakingFreedom--CelebratingthePeople.pdf)

38. Maulana Karenga, “Ghana at 50”

39. Aleem, et al. A History of Muslim African Americans, (Calumet City, IL: WDM Publications, 2006), 177

40. “Al Gathafi Tells African Leaders “If We Had Only Listened to Nkrumah” New African, (August/September 2005), 30-33; and Kwame Nkrumah, quoted in New African, (October 2005, 18-19); All-African People’s Conferences. International Organization. Vol. 16, No. 2, Africa and International Organization (Spring 1962), 429-434

41. Richard W. Stevenson, Officials to Block Qaddafi Gift to Farrakhan, (August 28, 1996), http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9C05EEDE1139F93BA1575BC0A960958260

42. December 1997 [http://www.noi.org/mlfbio.htm]

43. “None of Us Can Stand Alone.” (July 2007, New African), 13

44. Ghaddafi, 32

45. Travel to Ghana, Africa with Akbar Muhammad on July 27-August 8, 2007
http://2020group.net/content.ihtml?cmemstep=1&nid=5936&pf=0

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[post continued...]

Africans in Asia.

Dynastic Africans in Asia:

(See, The African Presence in Early Arabia): Africans have traveled to Asia for millenniums and though the Queen of Heaven, Goddess, Lady has been mostly lost to the west, the concept of the Lord was used as the basis of the three "Abrahamic" religions. Abraham and Sarah (representing a nation or culture) might have half-learned their world view from their time in Kemet (and even their slave-wife Hagar).

Macronymphia: "enlarged labia"
Polydactyly: "extra fingers or toes"

Africans in Asia from the 1st Century AH:

What did Black women, and women in general, hold onto as the Goddess/Warrior/Queen was removed from southwest Asia? How did they express the feminine energy, ability of actuate the Divine, and forward thought once Manat was declared unbelief? And as the Virgin mother [such as Atana/ Athena of North Africa] was removed and the worth of women was increasingly based upon the birth of children, what happened to women's self esteem and the self-esteem of girls? By extension what happened to the male's ability to actuate the Divine? The real herstory of spiritual expression and confidence remains to be told.

Also check out: Moses Seenarine articles and Color Q World

Africans in Asia in the Twentieth Century CE:

Amputated women, excised women, raped women, inhibited women, prostituted women, enslaved women, starved women, illiterate women, b---ches and h-s, searching women virile with intellect, daughters of imbalanced theology, where is our Mawu, our Uadjit? Where is our recollection of Auset when she spoke of Herself as the "Manifestation of all the Gods and Goddesses", and not about her beloved Ausar?

The two hymns below speak to the Divine that we have lost faith in:

"I make obeisance to the Lord Guru, the wish-granting Tree of Suras, eternal Consciousness and Bliss Itself, the highest of the highest, Brahman, Śiva Himself. I make obeisance to Her who by Her Śakti of three Guṇas creates, maintains, and at the end of the Kalpa withdraws, the world and then alone is. Devoutly I call to mind Her, the Mother of the whole universe, Śivā Herself." - invocation by sir John George Woodruffe

Meditation Hymn of Adya Kali:
She is dark as a black rock, wearing a jeweled crown.
The sign of a third eye is on her forehead,
She, the Goddess with three eyes.
Like lotus petals, Her eyes are large,
They shine like two bright jewels.
Her glance showers compassion.
Three locks of matted hair adorn her.
Her face radiates contentment and,
She is gowned with much splendor.
Her raised left hand holds a sword,
a human head in the lower one.
Her right hands grant sanctuary and boons to all.
Her tongue shows between her lips,
the garland of skulls hanging to her feet
Bejeweled, of heavenly form, there is no skirt of human arms.
She st