No Justice, No Peace! Time to Confront the U.S. Rogue State

Let us give you a rundown of the current global state of affairs:

• The Trump Administration recently undermined a United Nations proposal for a global ceasefire to confront the ravages of COVID-19 and threatened the International Criminal Court if it investigates Israel’s crimes against humanity. 

• Meanwhile, Joe Biden, the Democratic Party’s presumptive nominee, has declared he will confront the Cubans, criticized the Trump administration for not being tougher on China and has committed to keeping Jerusalem as Israel’s capital. 

• The Obama administration committed $1 trillion to upgrade the U.S. nuclear arsenal. The Trump administration then pulled out of the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty. 

• Obama ordered the destruction of Libya that ended with the rape and murder of Muammar Gaddafi, greenlighted the Saudi war on Yemen, launched illegal “regime change” efforts in Syria, and labeled the Bolivarian revolutionary process in Venezuela and the Maduro government as extraordinary threats to U.S. national security. 

• Trump followed by putting U.S. boots on the ground to deny Syrians access to their oil, continued to support the immoral Saudi war on Yemen and murdered Iranian general Qasem Soleimani. He then brazenly stole Venezuela’s money out of U.S. banks, prevented Venezuelan oil company Citgo from sending its profits to Venezuela, and imposed draconian sanctions to punish the Venezuelan people for supporting their revolutionary process and national independence. 

This kind of bipartisan criminality took an even more bizarre turn last week when members from both parties demanded Israel be protected when the International Criminal Court announced it was considering investigating Israel for war crimes against Palestinians. 

For the people of the world, it is quite clear the United States is the primary threat to global peace. It is also clear to us it doesn’t matter who physically sits in the white people’s house because the commitment to protecting and advancing the objective interests of the capitalist ruling class will continue unless the organized masses meet them with an effective countervailing power.

The predatory relationship between the U.S. and the rest of humanity is best captured in Trump’s “America First” policy. This is not in any way a departure from post-World War II U.S. policies, just a cruder statement of fact absent the liberal subterfuge. 

Polls each year have shown the international public sees the United States as the greatest threat to peace. The U.S. sanctions regime continuing to target more than 30 countries—even in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic—reinforces that perception.

The Black Alliance for Peace (BAP) supports the only solution: Seizing the U.S. capitalist oligarchy’s destructive power for the good of humanity. But that will not happen through appeals to their morality because they are driven by profits. It is a parasitic system that needs, as Malcolm X said, some blood to suck.

PRESS AND MEDIA

Tunde Osazua, coordinator of BAP’s U.S. Out of Africa Network (USOAN), and Netfa Freeman, Co Coordinator of BAP’s Africa Team, take on U.S. Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) and, by extension, the entire Congress for their support of the expansion of U.S. military force in Africa and military actions that have caused African deaths and political destabilization. Netfa was interviewed 30 minutes into Sputnik Radio's “The Critical Hour with Dr. Wilmer Leon” about this article.

Margaret Kimberley, Black Agenda Report Senior Editor and BAP Coordinating Committee member, condemns the liberal left for its silence on a U.S. mercenary plot interrupted in Venezuela. 

BAP National Organizer Ajamu Baraka explains how cross-class white solidarity allowed Trump to build bipartisan consensus to support completing the Obama administration’s aggressive “Pivot to Asia” program.

Tunde was interviewed about BAP’s position on U.S. domestic repression of African/Black people, AFRICOM and U.S.-China tensions related to Africa 32 minutes into the “Class Wars” radio program, which was broadcast on WVKR 91.3 FM (Poughkeepsie, New York), WIOF 104.1 FM (Woodstock, New York) and the Progressive Radio Network. 

Kristian Davis Bailey, one of the founders of “Black for Palestine,” wrote about the Black perspective on Israel and Palestine for the 72nd anniversary of the Nakba, the 1948 military removal of 750,000 Palestinians off their land.

Historian and author Eric Zuesse argues the international community will only be able to address U.S. crimes in Iraq when U.S. officials are held accountable.

  EVENTS

• May 23: The All-African People’s Revolutionary Party (A-APRP) and the Maryland Council of Elders will hold a webinar to commemorate the upcoming African Liberation Day. BAP member organization Pan-African Community Action (PACA) has been invited to speak.

• May 25: The All-African People’s Revolutionary Party (A-APRP) and the All-African Women’s Revolutionary Union (A-AWRU) are hosting a webinar on African Liberation Day. The theme is "Imperialist Sanctions on Zimbabwe, Cuba and Venezuela are Acts of War: Africans Everywhere Must Fight!"

• June 12-14: The Black Is Back Coalition’s online electoral school, “The Ballot or the Bullet: Putting Black Self-Determination on the Ballot,” will focus on the COVID-19 impact.

TAKE ACTION

• Have you signed our petition to demand 2020 U.S. candidates take a position against war, militarism and repression? Take your anti-war activism further by asking your local, state and federal candidates to sign BAP’s 2020 Candidate Accountability Pledge. If you are a candidate, distinguish yourself from the other corporate warmongering candidates by signing the pledge. Check out BAP’s campaign and take action.

• BAP member Efia Nwangaza, founder of the Greenville, South Carolina-based Malcolm X Center for Self-Determination and its community radio station, WMXP, are facing their most serious challenge. The station has always depended on contributions from listeners and supporters. During this economic crisis, fundraising has dried up, putting the station in danger of shutting down. We call on everyone reading this newsletter to take a minute to give whatever you can to save an institution that has been around for over a decade. Sister Efia has been in this movement for over 50 years, so we must show her our love and appreciation. She needs at least $2,500 by Friday. Scroll to the bottom of her website to donate.

No Compromise, No Retreat!

Struggle to win,
Ajamu, Brandon, Dedan, Jaribu, Margaret, Netfa, Paul, Vanessa, YahNé

P.S. Freedom isn’t free. Consider giving today.



Photo credit: Associated Press

The Inevitable Logic of Capitalist Repression Under COVID-19

Capitalism—now in its neoliberal form—faces a structural crisis, which has caused a crisis of legitimacy for the capitalist rulers, who have been sealing into place the use of force as a permanent strategy for maintaining their dominance. Democrats and Republicans are waging war against the U.S. African/Black working class and poor as well as nationally oppressed peoples, workers and farmers abroad. This bipartisan assault requires the African/Black revolutionary left build a powerful anti-war, anti-imperialist formation that can defend the human-rights interests of the African/Black masses domestically and abroad. (Read: The Rationale for Launching the Black Alliance for Peace, April 4, 2017) 

The COVID-19 crisis has morphed into an intensified repression of African/Black and Brown colonized workers in the name of public health. This contrasts with the white-glove treatment the white settler population receives at the gloved hands of the police to enforce so-called social distancing.

The consequence? Social distancing policing is the new Stop-and-Frisk, giving the racist and brutal colonial servants of capitalist power a license to harass, beat and even kill with impunity in our communities. 

Interestingly enough, the authorities don’t enforce social distancing on public transportation during rush hours when sacrificial workers, who are cynically called “essential workers,” are forced to pack into trains and buses.

So not only are we dying from contracting COVID-19 and being neglected in hospitals, we are subjected to further humiliation at the hands of the colonial state’s snarling enforcers of white power today, yesterday and into the future.

We will fight because we cannot depend on anyone but ourselves!  
 
“The U.S. and all imperialist powers—new and old—must be expelled from Africa, and the U.S. domestic colonial occupation forces known as police must be driven out of our colonized communities as part of the struggle against colonialism and imperialism.”—Black is Back Coalition

 

PRESS & MEDIA

Over 90 percent of the tickets and arrests for social distancing violations in New York City have been meted out to African/Black and Latinx people. Videos have surfaced of New York City police politely handing out masks to white residents in parks and communities while videos show police literally beating people to the ground for violating social distancing in African/Black and Brown neighborhoods.

The U.S. South remains where the majority of the African/Black population resides. Facing South explores the possible impact reopening would have on the African/Black population in the South.

The situation in Venezuela remains dangerous with the arrests of mercenary forces a week ago and more arrests as recently as this past weekend. The Black Alliance for Peace (BAP) continues to closely monitor the situation. 

Margaret Kimberley, Black Agenda Report Senior Editor and BAP Coordinating Committee member, discusses the continued collaboration between Black misleaders and the ruling class, with a special focus on Stacey Abrams. 

 

EVENTS

The United National Anti-War Coalition conducted an excellent webinar on the issue of sanctions we urge everyone to watch. Representatives from seven countries facing draconian U.S. sanctions discussed the devastating impact as well as how to build people-to-people solidarity against U.S. lawlessness.
 
 

TAKE ACTION

Sign the U.S. Peace Council’s Open Letter to the Government of the United States and the United Nations, demanding all U.S. and U.N. sanctions against the targeted nations be lifted, and all U.S. military threats and actions against them cease immediately.

No Compromise, No Retreat!

Struggle to win,
Ajamu, Brandon, Dedan, Jaribu, Margaret, Netfa, Paul, Vanessa, YahNé

P.S. Freedom isn’t free. Consider giving today.

Photo credit: David Dee Delgado/Getty Images

COVID-19 and Class Collaboration

Capitalist globalization has produced three interrelated realities:

1. Global poverty as its greedy extractivist processes transferred surplus value from the global South to the North, 

2. A network of class-conscious elites in both Northern and Southern countries who share an interest in maintaining the neoliberal status quo, and 

3. An integrated, global military-intelligence apparatus to defend neoliberal capitalist relations under the control of the U.S. state.  

The COVID-19 pandemic has not only stripped away the veneer of respectability and promise that neoliberal capitalist development was supposedly going to offer workers and countries. It has revealed, in stark terms, the repressive reality and potential of a dying capitalist order. From Detroit in the United States to Durban in South Africa, capitalism has shown it cannot protect and realize human rights. That is why the elites are using the pandemic to police people under the pretext of protecting public health.

In the United States, the Black professional/managerial/administrative mis-leadership class openly collaborates with neoliberal Democrats against the interests of the African/Black working class and poor, who desperately need healthcare as well as protection from predatory capitalists.

Colonialism had either underdeveloped or altogether wiped out healthcare systems in Africa. Then came the neocolonial International Monetary Fund and World Bank’s structural adjustment programs that required state disinvestment in healthcare as a prerequisite for loans.

The neocolonial elites in Africa, like the neocolonial U.S. Black elites, have conspired in mutual class solidarity with white settler-colonial and imperial power to control, exploit—and when need be—repress the African masses on behalf of colonial power.

 

PRESS AND MEDIA

Pan-African News Wire Editor Abayomi Azikiwe reminds us that while many corrupt African states are strengthening military ties with the United States and are engaged in repressing their people, Cuba is providing support to those African states to combat the virus and maintain national sovereignty.  

Margaret Kimberley, Black Alliance for Peace (BAP) Coordinating Committee member and senior editor at Black Agenda Report, argues the people’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic must take the form of a mass struggle against capitalism.

BAP member Erica Caines warns in Hood Communist that the state’s reaction to the pandemic “is not protecting us from the virus.”

BAP National Organizer Ajamu Baraka writes the May 1 strike action should be placed within the context of the struggle for People(s)-Centered Human Rights, a framework that emanates from the bottom-up, not out of the imagination of human-rights lawyers or the state.

Writer, human rights lawyer and member of BAP’s Africa Team, Mark P. Fancher, discusses the proud history of African militancy in Detroit and the current reality of the desperate fight against COVID-19. Four decades of neoliberal economic policies that caused environmental destruction, job displacement, gentrification and federal-government neglect have made Detroit’s African/Black population especially vulnerable to contracting and dying from COVID-19.

The Obama administration did not cry out when Detroit was forced into bankruptcy by a Republican governor because it was busy intensifying the attack on the people of Venezuela. Ajamu Baraka recently discussed why Venezuela must be defended as it copes with COVID-19 in the midst of a U.S-imposed economic blockade. 

Kollibri Terre Sonnenblume conducted a wide-ranging interview with Margaret Kimberley on “The Persistence of White Supremacy” for Counterpunch.

Black Agenda Report Executive Editor Glen Ford writes the white settler class has always inflicted “excessive mortality” on non-white populations.

“The coronavirus is a death sentence on Black people,” who make up two-thirds of Louisiana’s prisoners, said Belinda Parker Brown, head of Louisiana United International during the Black is Back Coalition’s webinar. Attorney Zena Crenshaw-Logal called for the “evacuation” of prisons in the state, which holds the distinction of incarcerating more of its citizens than any place in the world.

 

EVENTS

May 10, 1 p.m., EST: “The Struggle Against Mass Incarceration’s Impact on African Women,” a webinar organized by the African National Women’s Organization. Register today.

 

TAKE ACTION

Sign the U.S. Peace Council’s Open Letter to the Government of the United States and the United Nations, demanding all U.S. and U.N. sanctions against the targeted nations be lifted, and all U.S. military threats and actions against them cease immediately.

No Compromise, No Retreat!

Struggle to win,
Ajamu, Brandon, Dedan, Jaribu, Margaret, Netfa, Paul, Vanessa, YahNé

P.S. Freedom isn’t free. Consider giving today.

Photo credit: AFP - Getty

COVID-19: ‘It’s the system, stupid!’

“The current disaster exists in large part because the U.S. healthcare system is the opposite of what is needed. It is fragmented, discriminatory and designed for corporate profits, not the well-being of the public. Even before the pandemic, the United States had the highest number of preventable deaths compared to other wealthy nations and a declining life expectancy.” —Margaret Flowers

While some U.S. lives may have been saved during the COVID-19 pandemic through a quicker and more coordinated action plan, the objective fact remains no plan could have been successfully implemented because a developed public healthcare infrastructure does not exist. Years of neoliberal austerity and privatization gutted public investment in healthcare for rural and urban working-class communities and led to thousands of hospital closings over the last few decades, decimating the already weak U.S. public healthcare system. 

That, as well as capitalist environmental racism—where toxic industrial processing plants, waste dumps and pollutants from industrial agricultural operations produced the so-called “underlying conditions” of cancers, asthma and a whole host of upper-respiratory illnesses—translated into death sentences for many poor and working-class Africans. 

Yet, the focus on Trump’s personality has shifted attention away from the structural violence of capitalist oppression and exploitation. In fact, it is not just Trump, but most of the capitalist class, pushing for a return to “normal.” That class consensus was reflected in opinion pieces and commentary in bourgeois rags ranging from the New York Times to the Wall Street Journal. While it was not openly echoed by Democratic congressional representatives, it helps to explain why the Democrats went along with the measly $1,200 checks to workers. Those insufficient payments help to keep people desperate and ready to return to work, even if it means jeopardizing their health. 

So, we must keep our focus on the system. That will ensure we are not confused by the diversionary politics of the rulers, who do not want us to notice their bipartisan collaboration to uphold corporate interests.

PRESS AND MEDIA 

The war being waged against the African/Black working class in the United States mirrors the anti-Black warfare being waged globally, thus producing similarly devastating health outcomes for Africans in Brazil.

BAP Coordinating Committee member Netfa Freeman places into historical context the U.S. state’s use of direct military intervention in response to what it sees as potential threats to social order during the COVID-19 pandemic. 

Ajamu Baraka, BAP’s National Organizer, argues the changing class structure of the African American population explains the questionable politics and policies of Black political representatives in response to the COVID-19 crisis. He gave this presentation as part of a two-day Black Is Back Coalition webinar.

Black public opinion has been whipped up against China while Black opinion makers have remained silent on the aggressive U.S. militarization of the African continent. Margaret Kimberley, in her latest piece in Black Agenda Report, uses a material, non-sentimental framework to understand how the U.S. state is using the COVID-19 issue to advance its commitment to confronting China.

If you were wondering why BAP launched the 2020 Candidate Accountability Pledge, BAP member Jose Monzon explained on U.S. Senate candidate Madelyn Hoffman’s livestream.

 

TAKE ACTION

General Strike 2020 is calling for all workers to remain sheltered in place (in accordance with current medical guidance), encouraging participation in nationwide strikes (including rent strikes, debt strikes and labor strikes) on May 1, and asks workers to hang white sheets or towels outside of their homes as a sign of solidarity.

Sign the U.S. Peace Council’s Open Letter to the Government of the United States and the United Nations, demanding all U.S. and U.N. sanctions against the targeted nations be lifted, and all U.S. military threats and actions against them cease immediately.

No Compromise, No Retreat!

Struggle to win,
Ajamu, Brandon, Dedan, Jaribu, Margaret, Netfa, Paul, Vanessa, YahNé

P.S. Freedom isn’t free. Consider giving today.

Photo credit: Paul Sancya / AP

COVID-19: The Symptom of the Capitalist Disease

The global capitalist system has produced fabulous wealth and so-called “development” for a handful of nations and their citizens along with degrading and dehumanizing poverty, violence and war on the vast majority of humanity. 

Here are some figures:

• 80 percent of humanity lives on less than $10 per day

• 30,000 children die every day from the effects of poverty, primarily lack of clean water and access to healthcare

• 62 individuals own more wealth than 3.5 billion people—half the world’s population

This is the reality of a global system developed after the marauding European powers grew rich and powerful through the invasion of the Americas in 1492 as well as the enslavement of Africans and genocide committed against the people of the Americas.

In the European settler-colony that became the United States of America, systematic brutality and structural violence were embedded in the economic relations and social institutions of the state. That millions of people lack adequate healthcare, have been subjected to racist decision-making that placed toxic industries in their communities—resulting in asthma, cancers and upper-respiratory diseases—while simultaneously closing down clinics and hospitals in those neighborhoods, represents the objective logic of capitalist decision-making that renders some people and communities disposable. 

Black Alliance for Peace (BAP) members are not moved by the pretend concern for African/Black and Brown workers deemed today “essential” when yesterday they were the disposables who couldn’t even get an increase in wages. And yet during a pandemic, these essential workers are still unable to get hazard pay, personal protective equipment and support for childcare while their children are forced to stay home from school.

PRESS

In the latest issue of Black Agenda Report, BAP National Organizer Ajamu Baraka argues that the capitalist state and its ruling oligarchy care very little about the human rights of the people, especially African/Black people who are supposed to be the “essential” workers today. What we are facing today in the U.S. is a human rights crisis that in another country would warrant so-called “humanitarian intervention.” He also appeared on RT America to discuss.

African/Black workers are less likely to be able to quarantine during the COVID-19 pandemic because they tend to work in fields such as mass transit, the postal service, retail and healthcare are exposing themselves to the virus.

Moreover, African/Black people are historically used as guinea pigs to test drugs, as BAP Coordinating Committee member Margaret Kimberley writes. 

BAP members continue to confront the failures of the last 40 years of neoliberalism that has produced the socio-economic conditions that make our populations especially vulnerable. 

Max Rameau of BAP member organization Pan-African Community Action (PACA) discussed the issues African/Black people in Washington, D.C., face as a result of COVID-19 with Mireille Fanon of the Frantz Fanon Foundation.

Ajamu Baraka spoke with Sputnik Radio’s “The Critical Hour with Wilmer Leon” about the billionaire-backed organization, Human Rights Watch, lobbying for lethal U.S. sanctions on leftist governments as the pandemic rages.

Netfa Freeman, BAP Coordinating Committee member representing member organization PACA, discussed on HispanTV the reasons and solutions for U.S. racial disparities amid the pandemic.

Watch Ajamu Baraka and other leaders during the Black is Back Coalition's two-day webinar (watch Day 1 and Day 2) held April 11-12.

EVENTS

5 p.m., EST, April 23: An Inside View of Resistance to US Imperialism in Venezuela and How to Build International Solidarity. Co-hosted by Popular Resistance, the Black Alliance for Peace, U.S. Peace Council, CODEPINK, International Action Center, United National Antiwar Coalition (UNAC) and Sanctions Kill. Featured speakers: Carlos Ron, the Venezuelan Vice Minister of Foreign Affairs for North America; Ajamu Baraka of Black Alliance for Peace; and Kevin Zeese and Margaret Flowers of Popular Resistance. Moderated by Bahman Azad of the U.S. Peace Council. 

6 p.m., EST, April 28: COVID-19: Southern Workers Fight Back and Organize, a webinar organized by the Southern Workers Assembly to launch a campaign to protect U.S. Southern workers.

May 1: General Strike 2020 is calling for all workers to remain sheltered in place (in accordance with current medical guidance), encouraging participation in nationwide strikes (including rent strikes, debt strikes and labor strikes), and asking workers to hang white sheets or towels outside of their homes as a sign of solidarity.

TAKE ACTION

Sign the U.S. Peace Council’s Open Letter to the Government of the United States and the United Nations, demanding all U.S. and U.N. sanctions against the targeted nations be lifted, and all U.S. military threats and actions against them cease immediately.

No Compromise, No Retreat!

Struggle to win,
Ajamu, Brandon, Dedan, Jaribu, Margaret, Netfa, Paul, Vanessa, YahNé

COVID-19: New Battle in Capitalism’s War on the Black Working Class

“No Compromise, No Retreat: Defeat the War Against the African/Black Working Class,” announced the campaign of the Black Alliance for Peace before the novel coronavirus, before the collapse of the global economy, before the lockdowns and calls for militarization of our communities, before the “discovery” by the country that African Americans had healthcare outcomes even more disastrous than colonized peoples in the global South.

BAP understood then, as we understand today, that structural violence is a permanent feature of the colonial/capitalist system. That understanding helps us to avoid the reformist fantasies held by many that the human rights crisis facing Africans in the U.S. can be resolved through piecemeal adjustments in state policies and expansion of “opportunities” by capitalism in its neoliberal form.

That is why we are not confused or demoralized by the circumstances we face at this COVID-19 moment.  For BAP, and the Black Left in general, the moment reaffirms the strategic prioritization of developing the capacities of the Black left in the U.S. There will be no radical change in the United States without an independent organized Black left.  

NO RETREAT, NO COMPROMISE: BAP on the Frontlines of Struggle 

There are close to 400,000 cases of COVID-19 in the U.S., with over 12,000 deaths. Fear is pervasive and the material deprivation unmistakable with the lines for food pantries and the stories of desperation being shared as people are out of money and food. But as Glen Ford pointed out, it is not the coronavirus that is the culprit but the disease of capitalism that is responsible for the absence of a national healthcare system and the insecurity of millions living paycheck to paycheck, that is if they had a job.
 
But there is resistance.

BAP individual and organizational members are involved in deep base-building work from Washington D.C. and Baltimore to Oakland, California. Those efforts at building community assistance programs and providing educational materials have been curtailed by the restrictions on movement and travel, but they continue in places like Baltimore where BAP member organization and BAP-Baltimore collective, the Ujima Peoples Party for Progress, is involved in support work with public housing residents in Douglas Homes. 
 
Cooperation Jackson, a BAP member organization, has taken the lead in calling for a general strike for May 1st. “A Call to Action: Towards a General Strike to End the COVID-19 Crisis and Create a New World,” provides the rationale and the broad demands that Cooperation Jackson says must ground the strike. The overall principle and strategic goal of the action is that the people must “make demands that will transform our broken and inequitable society, and build a new society run by and for us – the working-class, poor, oppressed majority.”

BAP and Political Education:

Liberals use the diversionary presence of Trump to place the blame for system failure on the mercurial leadership of that one individual. This is a position that oppressed people cannot afford to embrace.

On April 11 and 12th, the Black is Back Coalition for Peace, Social Justice and Reparations will host a national Zoom-based Webinar to build resistance to both the short-term COVID-19 crisis and the longer-term struggle to defeat the colonial/capitalist system that reproduces the conditions and relations of exploitation and oppression generation after generation.

BAP is a member of the BIB, and our National Organizer, Ajamu Baraka, will be a featured speaker. The event will be over two days and will begin at 10am EST on April 11th and 12th. You can find more information here and here.

Ajamu Baraka, BAP’s National Organizer, argues that COVID-19 has stripped away all pretenses to U.S. exceptionalism. For Baraka, millions are starting to see that the capitalist “emperor has no clothes.” That the coronavirus triggered the latest and most profound systemic failure and has in the process exposed that the interests of the rulers are very different from the interests and needs of the majority of the people. 

The message that the interests of Black workers are very different than those of the rulers has not been lost on Black workers. They see the phony and hypocritical appreciation white America is supposed to have for its “essential workers today,” the majority of whom are Black, when before the virus they were being treated like disposables. 
 
In her piece “I Mind Dying,” Erica Caines, BAP member and writer at Hoodcommunist, calls attention to the objective realities of those “heroes” who are out of necessity forced to work and face constant danger for themselves and their families as a result.

Pan African Community Action (PACA) and BAP Coordinating Committee member Netfa Freeman explores an important issue that BAP has been raising since the beginning of the current crisis. “Expect Police-Military Repression Amid the Crisis of COVID-19 and Its Aftermath” examines the likelihood that the state will use the coronavirus emergency to further strengthen its repressive capacity.

BAP continues to make the connection between the national or domestic and the international or global. In fact, an understanding of domestic issues and politics are impossible without contextualizing those issues and politics within that interconnected framework.

Margaret Kimberley, from Black Agenda Report (BAR) and member of BAP’s Coordinating Committee, keeps the focus on the deadly consequences of U.S. sanctions on the people of Venezuela and Iran in her piece, “Standing with Venezuela and Iran.”

The fact that these measures constitute crimes against humanity as collective punishments against the civilian population of those countries matters very little to the Trump Administration and its supporters in the Democrat Party because non-European lives have never “mattered.”

But BAP will never abandon the people of Iran and Venezuela. See the BAP statement on Venezuela here.

BAP in the News:

By Any Means Necessary on Radio Sputnik
Thursday, April 2, 2020 3:24 pm ·
Another episode of By Any Means Necessary with Sean Blackmon and Jacquie Luqman with special guest Netfa Freeman.
https://www.facebook.com/SputnikNews/videos/1067469073627719/  
 
Community Watch & Comment - Friday Edition  
Friday, April 3, 2020 11:00 am
Host Ron Pinkback and the others spoke with Ajamu Baraka to give a radical analysis of the economic moment we are in due to the COVID 19 pandemic and the economic stimulus package and related issue.
https://archive.wpfwfm.org/mp3/wpfw_200403_110000comcomfri.mp3  
 

No Compromise, No Retreat
Coordinating Committee, Black Alliance for Peace

Coronavirus, Militarism and the End of an Illusion

“The nation that considers itself to be the apex of capitalist achievement on planet Earth turns out to have no health care system worthy of the name – a testament to the sucking moral vacuum at America’s imperial, white settler colony core. A lowly virus – a form of being that exists at the very border between “life” and “not-life” – has revealed the world’s superpower as butt-naked and very much afraid. (Glen Ford)

Coronavirus and second economic collapse in just ten years should finally put to rest the fairy-tale of U.S. Exceptionalism.

Trump’s “Make America Great” and Obama’s “U.S. Exceptionalism” are slogans that reflect an ongoing commitment to the normalized assumption of white racial and civilizational superiority. The idea that the territory that became the United States, and its settler population, were specially anointed by a god who gave them providence over the land and the Indigenous people is so ingrained in the national imagination that its extension to rationalize and justify U.S. imperialist policies was seamless.

The U.S. over the years shamelessly boasted of its “greatness” and being number one in all things, including having the best healthcare system in the world. And even though Bernie Sanders and healthcare movements in the U.S. consistently revealed the devastating reality of a system that generated billions of dollars for the healthcare industry while simultaneously generating unnecessary deaths, bankruptcies and millions without coverage - the mythology that the U.S. had a workable system remained in place, until now.

The coronavirus has dramatically stripped away the veneer of the for-profit healthcare system to expose a patchworked and completely dysfunctional system held together by state programs and two national programs, Medicare and Medicaid, that are still unable to provide basic coverage to millions of citizens and non-citizens.

But it is not just the absence of a public healthcare system that exposes the lie of U.S. exceptionalism. Black Alliance for Peace Coordinating Committee and Black Agenda Report’s Margaret Kimberley writes that COVID-19 is not just a health emergency but it has exposed the causes of inequality and suffering in the U.S.  

And what is the source of inequality and suffering?   

Union del Barrio says that coronavirus has “unmasked the sick brutality of capitalism.”

The brutality and criminality of the colonial/capitalist system of state violence is reflected most graphically by the illegal and immoral policy of sanctions imposed on 39 nations by the U.S. and its Western allies. Sara Flounders from the International Action Center exposes the role of Big Pharma as part of U.S. effort to destroy the capacity of nations to protect their population’s health. She details the inhumane policies being imposed on nations like Venezuela and Iran, that are being denied the ability to import medicines and medical equipment to counter the COVID-19 pandemic. 

BAP is concerned with the troubling signs that the global recession and disruption of the national economy that has resulted from the coronavirus crisis is now seen as a serious security threat by the capitalist oligarchy. The state, with the full support of corporate media, appears to be a conditioning the public to accept draconian restrictions on basic civil liberties and human rights under the guise of the public health emergency.  

Ahjama Umi raises the very important point that we must resist efforts to panic the public into supporting a growing police state.

It is becoming clear that if the issue is really about containing the spread of the virus, there are effective protocols for combatting pandemics. Mark P. Fancher, a member of BAP’s Africa Team, discusses the measures that are in place in Africa, in nations like Nigeria, for preventing, tracking and containing infection; measures that could have been easily applied to the U.S.

But with the repressive proclivities of the U.S. national security state, it is important that we view critically some of the measures being called for: from the use of the military to national lockdowns.

The “sheltering in place” order is starting to look like a convenient tool for the state to manage the growing frustration, fear and anger as it becomes apparent that the economic and racially stratified healthcare delivery system are unable to protect the lives of the working class.

As the system finds itself immersed in a crisis that is deepening by the day, the propensity for violence and ferocious repression on the part of the U.S. state must be seen as a real threat to the people. BAP will continue to monitor the situation.

The oppressed should have no illusions.

The conservative pro-business measures offered by the capitalist class to deal with the consequences of COVID-19 are waking people up to the fact that the state and government does not belong to them but to a capitalist class that is only looking out for itself.

That revelation of truth will be the only positive that will emerge from the crisis.

Netfa, Brandon, Vanessa, Jaribu, Margaret, Dedan, YahNe, Paul, Ajamu

BAP Coordinating Committee

Dr. King Understood: U.S. is Threat to Global Humanity

The U.S. is “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today.” (Martin Luther King)
 
As the U.S. engages in its annual ritual of parading out the state-sanctioned “I have a dream” Dr. King, it attempts to accomplish the amazing feat of reconciling Dr. King’s commitment to peace and principled non-violence with the normalized violence of the U.S. settler-state’s bloody history. The events in just the last month reaffirm Dr. Kings assessment that the United States is “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today.”

During the last month, we witnessed several graphic reminders that King’s declaration is as relevant today as it was 52 years ago; the assassination of Iranian General Soleimani; the announcement by the Trump Administration that it would defy the Iraqi government’s demand to withdraw U.S. troops; and the unveiling of operation “Relentless pursuit,” the latest State version of the racist war on the Black working class in the guise of fighting crime.

And while the U.S. state with the support of the capitalist media still promotes the U.S. as a “force for good” domestically, as Secretary of State Pompeo declared after announcing that the administration had just murdered a foreign leader who the U.S. was not officially at war with, the international community views the U.S. as the primary threat to global humanity.    

For the past few years, international opinion polls have revealed that the U.S. is seen as the greatest threat to international peace. This analysis predates the Trump Administration and reflects a sophisticated understanding on the part of the international public that the rhetoric of U.S. exceptionalism and moral self-righteousness – which is used so effectively to obscure the agenda of the corporate and financial elite within the U.S. – had little relationship to how the U.S. actually behaved in the real world.  

But the U.S. is not alone in empire-building, as BAP continues to remind our members to the chagrin of some Western oriented “radical” apologists of European imperialism. It wasn’t surprising that most European heads of state supported the assassination of Soleimani, but it was disappointing that a number of European radical organizations were also either silent or gave “critical support” to his murder.

Western, white, cross-class collaboration in support of the Pan-European colonial/capitalist project is the reason why that even though BAP advocates for the principled unity of the working class and oppressed, we take the position that the Black working class and poor must be independently organized. We will work with friends and allies from an autonomous place of organizational strength. 

Some of the agitational and organizational work from BAP over the last few weeks include:
 
Oppose any war with Iran. BAP is clear -  we said: if you believe in peace you must defeat the warmongers: https://blackallianceforpeace.com/bapstatements/defeat-warmongers-no-war-with-iran

BAP National Organizer Ajamu Baraka points out the hypocrisy of the Democrats posing as anti-war advocates: https://blackagendareport.com/sheep-dogging-steroids-new-democratic-party-anti-war-activists

BAP African team member Mark P. Fancher provides a legal analysis of the hit on Soleimani: https://blackagendareport.com/beware-imperialist-gaslighting-assassination-not-legal

Margaret Kimberley reminds the public that organized resistance is the most effective weapon we have if we are to confront the pro-war and anti-people agenda of the corporate state: https://blackagendareport.com/freedom-rider-iran-and-need-black-activism

BAP members took part in actions against any possible war with Iran in various parts of the country. However, in our messages on Iran we also had to alert the public on the racist and reactionary plan by the Trump regime to initiate a domestic military surge against the Black community.

Baltimore was one of seven cities chosen by the Trump Administration for its domestic surge. BAP-Baltimore responded: https://blackallianceforpeace.com/bapstatements/bapbaltimore-trump-military-surge

In an expanded statement on the surge “Black Alliance for Peace - Baltimore Demand End to Policing Surge” by Ready for Revolution 
Thursday - January 9, 2020 - Hood Communist
http://hoodcommunist.org/2020/01/09/black-alliance-for-peace-baltimore-demand-end-to-policing-surge/

Two other interviews by BAP members Netfa Freeman and Brandon Walker elaborated on the interconnected issues of the war on Black people and the U.S. war on global democratic and human rights.

BAP Coordinating Committee member and Pan African Community Action organizer Netfa Freeman discusses the media “white out” on the subject: https://blackagendareport.com/us-surges-police-state-while-media-white-out-structural-racism

Ujima Peoples Progress Party organizer and BAP Coordinating Committee member Brandon Walker talked with BAP member and journalist Jacqueline Luqman on the impact of the surge on the people of Baltimore: $71 Million for More Cops; Not A Dime for Jobs and Healthcare - January 8, 2020 - The Real News Network: https://therealnews.com/stories/71-million-cops-not-jobs-healthcare
 
Other issues and actions that BAP members and supporters must be aware of:
 
The reactionary arsenal of U.S. and Western pro-war weapons also includes the use of economic sanctions meant to target and punish the people in states that have been designated for subversion.  Popular Resistance provides a historical overview and analysis of U.S. sanctions that result in the lost of thousands of innocent lives:  https://popularresistance.org/illegal-us-economic-war/

BAP is supporting the Embassy Defense Committee and its call for an International Day of Action on January 22 to demand that all charges against the Venezuela embassy protectors are dropped: https://defendembassyprotectors.org/urgent-call-for-action-on-january-22nd-international-day-of-action-in-support-of-venezuela-embassy-protectors/

The Embassy Protectors will be on a short east coast tour to raise money for their defense. See here for a city near you in the East and attend if you can: https://defendembassyprotectors.org/embassy-protectors-january-tour/

All out for the United National Anti-War Coalition (UNAC) conference February 21-23 in New York: https://www.unacpeace.org/home.html

Stop the School to Military Pipeline: The poverty and austerity draft that drives workers and the poor into the military makes this sector a priority for organizing resistance to the corporate capitalist imperial agenda. Rory Fanning talks about the need to incorporate veterans and active duty soldiers into the anti-war movement. https://truthout.org/articles/many-soldiers-want-to-stop-fighting-lets-build-a-movement-that-welcomes-them/

If you want to honor King and the movement for human rights that produced him, struggle for justice. There is a clear connection between the turn to global war by the ruling class and that includes the intensification of the war against workers, with Black workers and poor the principle target.

BAP makes that connection and will continue to prepare our resistance to the war being waged against the Black working class, the poor, and all other oppressed peoples, nations and classes by the white supremacist Western capitalist oligarchy.

Join or support us.
 

Netfa, Brandon, Vanessa, Jaribu, Margaret, Dedan, YahNé, Paul, Ajamu
BAP Coordinating Committee

The War Over Meaning

The struggle over interpretation or meaning has emerged as a critical terrain of struggle as the ruling class desperately attempts to maintain the dominance of the liberal capitalist/democratic discourse as the only legitimate interpretative framework.   
 
The ruling elite’s efforts to impose meaning and to control the narrative are becoming more difficult as a result of the irreconcilable contradictions of the global neoliberal capitalist order that is producing both mass opposition and state repression. But these forces have not given up. For example, corporate media attempts to suppress the scale and scope of the global popular rebellions against neoliberal rule by omission even while images of mass opposition and corresponding state repression inundate social media.
 
That is why independent channels of information are under attack. The divergence between information communicated via social media and information and interpretation conveyed by corporate media is being narrowed by more intense policing of social media by the capitalist corporations that control those platforms.
 
This war of information provides the context in which BAP must operate as we try to counter the pro-war, pro-imperialist agenda of the U.S. state. It is why we ask our members and supporters to assist with breaking the information barriers by aggressively circulating information and analysis that we provide.   
 
It is also why we are devoting this issue of our news blast to highlighting some of our efforts over the last few weeks to challenge the dominant narrative.
 
BAP member Erica Caines discusses the weaponization of the Hong Kong protests: http://hoodcommunist.org/2019/12/12/human-rights-hypocrisy-critical-analysis-of-hong-kong-protests/
 
Netfa Freeman, Pan African Community Action (PACA) and member of BAP Coordinating Committee takes on the collaboration of Northern leftists with imperialism: https://blackagendareport.com/abstract-leftism-leaves-bolivia-and-global-south-imperialist-crosshairs
 
In line with BAP's campaign to Defeat the War Against African/Black People in the U.S. and Abroad, Margaret Kimberley, Black Agenda Report’s senior editor and columnist, reminds us of the role of the police as an instrument of oppression: https://blackagendareport.com/freedom-rider-abolish-police
 
Max Rameau, organizer with Pan African Community Action (PACA) is interviewed by BAP member Jacqueline Luqman of the Real News Network to discuss the historic relaunching of the National Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kGTou97jBsg&feature=youtu.be  
 
BAP National Organizer Ajamu Baraka on why disarray of NATO is a good thing for the colonized and oppressed: https://blackagendareport.com/black-alliance-peace-its-good-nato-disarray
 
Erica Caines looks at how liberalism has become the dominant framework for many members of the Black petit bourgeoisie. A framework that she says can end up getting Black folks killed: https://blackagendareport.com/liberalism-will-get-us-killed
 
Margaret Kimberley, discusses the bipartisan commitment to advancing the U.S. imperialist agenda: https://blackagendareport.com/freedom-rider-liberals-love-military
 
Ajamu follows up on BAP’s concerns with U.S. interventionism on The Critical Hour, discussing issue of U.S. imperialism in Latin America: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1f9EievaLX4zPfa4ljENI67__6tX0CT8i/view
 
Ajamu joins Eugene Puryear and Sean Blackmon to discuss the implications of NATO and the need for ideological clarity in an era where capitalism finds itself in crisis: https://www.spreaker.com/user/radiosputnik/2019-nato-summits-highlights-and-lowligh
 
On CounterSpin, BAP Coordinating Committee member Netfa Freeman talks about the announcement by the Trump administration to implement a so-called surge by law officials to stamp out a non-existent increase in crime: https://fair.org/home/community-control-over-police-should-be-a-democratic-right/  
 
Margaret Kimberley again brings some clarity on the real terms of the coup in Bolivia: https://blackagendareport.com/freedom-rider-hybrid-warfare-bolivia-and-beyond

BAP issued a statement condemning the coup in Bolivia that was also made into an audio track and played on radio stations across the country. Listen and download: https://archive.org/details/BlackAllianceforPeaceSolidarityBolivia
 
Ajamu lays out some of the history of the anti-war movement in the United States going back to the Vietnam period. He outlines the importance of rooting all our progressive struggles in an understanding of colonialism and imperialism: https://www.globalresearch.ca/never-again-can-we-stop-the-war-when-big-business-profits-from-it/5694422
 
Netfa Freeman discusses the circumstances that led to Bolivia’s Indigenous President Evo Morales to resign and flee to Mexico on Watching the Hawks: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8t0EvY7dX6I&feature=youtu.be  
 
Voices With Vision: Jesus Chucho Garcia, Special Commissioner for the Venezuelan Ministry of Foreign Affairs for Africa joins host Netfa Freeman to discuss the “Congreso Internacional Afrodescendiente: Cimarronaje Contra El Imperialismo” that just took place in Venezuela: https://archive.wpfwfm.org/mp3/wpfw_191119_090000voiceswdiocoop.mp3
 
BAP will continue to attempt to engage the public with cutting edge alternative perspectives and educational materials to arm organizers involved in the critical work of building organization. If you see the importance of this work, please help us to amplify the voices and perspectives of BAP with a generous donation today.

Struggle to win,

Ajamu, Jaribu, Margaret, Netfa, Paul, Vanessa and YahNé
Coordinating Committee
Black Alliance for Peace

P.S. Freedom isn’t free. Consider giving today.

Photo credit: Piotr VaGla Waglowski, http://www.vagla.pl [Public domain]

Audio of BAP 2019 Statement in Revolutionary Solidarity With Bolivia

This is the audio version of the Black Alliance for Peace statement standing in revolutionary solidarity with the People of Bolivia against the U.S./EU/NATO Axis of Domination.

Click on the image below to listen:

Crises in Iraq and Haiti Expose the Failure of Militarized Neoliberalism

It should be no surprise that the new governments installed by all these U.S. wars and coups are among the most corrupt regimes on earth. by Medea Benjamin, Nicolas J S Davies | Common Dreams

This season could be called the Autumn of Discontent, as people from the Middle East to Latin America and the Caribbean have been rising up against corrupt neoliberal governments. Two of the countries in crisis, Haiti and Iraq, are on opposite ends of the earth but have something important in common. Not only are they reeling from protests against government corruption and austerity programs, like Ecuador and Algeria, but in both Haiti and Iraq, their corrupt neoliberal governments were imposed on them by the use of U.S. military force. READ MORE

BAP Newsletter - October 8, 2019

Weekly Blast October 8: “Rage Against the War Machine”

The theme of the Anti-war activities that activist Cindy Sheehan is a part of this weekend – Rage Against the War Machine – captures the spirit and responsibilities of all of us ensconced here at the center of empire. The theme also reflects the character of the activities that Anti-war activists have been engaged in over the last few years to reverse the acceptance and even legitimation of war and militarism that has been pushed by both capitalist parties.

So, we urge all of our members and supporters to come out this weekend in Washington D.C. to support the march and rally on October 11 and the “Anti-imperialist Revolutionary Summit” on Saturday October 12.  Here is more detailed information. 

Black is Back Coalition:

 “The U.S. and all imperialist powers – new and old – must be expelled from Africa, and the U.S. domestic colonial occupation forces known as police must be driven out of our colonized communities as part of the struggle against colonialism and imperialism.” 

This is the position of the Black is Back (BIB) Coalition that is guiding its march on the White House on November 2 followed by a conference on November 3 in Washington D.C. 

The theme of weekend is “Turn imperialist War into Wars against imperialism!” BAP serves on the leadership body of the BIB and is calling on all of our members and supporters to come out in numbers to support and participate in these actions. Now is the time to move from the defensive to offensive by demanding the public in the U.S. to break with the war agenda of the capitalist elite that is responsible for the death and destruction of non-European peoples and working classes across the planet. For more information click here. 

BAP condemns Turkey’s invasion of Syria and Calls on United Nations Security Council Intervention:

In yet another gross violation of international law, the repressive government and NATO state of Turkey is preparing to enter Syria territory under the false pretext of targeting so-called terrorists. However, from its own admissions, the government of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has consistently revealed that its main target is and has always been the Kurdish  “People's Protection Units (YPG)” associated with the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK), which has fought a war of national liberation against the Turkish state for the last three decades. 

We must be prepared to oppose any military actions by Turkish state and must assert again that all foreign forces not invited by the recognized state of Syria leave the country. 

Drop the Charges against Venezuela Embassy Protectors! 

The Trump Administration and their enablers in the democrat party who support U.S. rogue state actions, want to make examples of Kevin Zeese, Margaret Flowers, David Paul and Adrienne Pine, the last four members of the Embassy Protectors Collective that was arrested by Homeland Security when it and a host of other security agencies invaded the embassy of Venezuela. The protectors were upholding international law solidarity with the people of Venezuela with their solidarity action to protect the peoples property and the integrity of Venezuela’s democratic processes and sovereignty.  

BAP stands in unapologetic solidarity with the embassy protectors and the people of Venezuela who are being subjected to brutal draconian methods to break their will and surrender to U.S. bipartisan criminality. 

Demand that charges are dropped. Oppose U.S. white supremacist arrogance that believes it has the right to determine the governments of non-European peoples around the world. Circulate information on the case and send messages of solidarity to the protectors.  

We are coming to you again: 

BAP’s body of work cannot be disputed. In less than three years, we have made incredible progress with little money and no staff. But what we have had is you – our members and supporters – who have kept us afloat. But we need more from you just as we are giving more. 

If you are a monthly subscriber, we thank you and really appreciate you because your monthly provides us with a monthly baseline of support that we know is coming in. But we need more. Please consider increasing your support by 10% per-month. 

We are moving toward our biannual face-to-face membership meeting. We had one small meeting in Atlanta in November 2018 and are organizing a much bigger gathering to commemorate our 3rd anniversary April 4th, 2020. But even beyond this gathering, as you have seen, our members and supporters have been taking it to the streets as part of our campaign “No Retreat, No Compromise, Defeat the War Against African/Black People in the U.S. and Abroad.” We also launched a Candidate Accountability Campaign that calls on all candidates and representatives at every level of government to commit to our six demands if they want to receive support from the people that are fed up with war and militarism. 

With all of this, we need resources because we don’t have any illusions about any of the funders out there supporting a program that at its heart is calling for revolutionary change. 

So, we come to you. If you have donated, please increase your contribution by 10%. If you are a supporter and have not donated, please consider becoming a monthly supporter and/or give as much as you can at once. 

We are committed to peace. All rational, humane and moral individuals want to live in peace. But as members of an oppressed people, we understand that to realize peace we must struggle because we are guided by the dictum that without justice there will be no peace. 

“Now is the time to throw off all hesitation, open up new fronts of struggle and to launch every protest, demonstration, and anti-imperialist action – from the ballot box to the barricades -- as an act to deepen the crisis of imperialism. Every protest against police and white civilian murder of our people, every mass mobilization to demand the end to the cruel, bloody economic war against Venezuela, Zimbabwe, Cuba, Iran, Korea and Russia must be seen as our part in turning the imperialist wars into wars against imperialism! (Chairman Omali Yeshitela, Chair of the Black is Back Coalition) 

#bLEXIT Not Welcomed

*contributing writers include Brandon Walker, Ujima People’s Progress Party and Vanessa Beck, Black Alliance For Peace

Trump’s recent words about the city of Baltimore has caused its democratic public officials to band together in reactionary discourse, avoiding the root issues that burden the city. While the city watched its political representatives put on a show, they also watched another performance—- “white saviorship”. 

The ignorance and pervasive arrogance of the local political misleadership class in Baltimore City has apparently blown the dog whistle for conservative political pundits and followers of right-wing politics. Led by pro Trump right- wing conservatives Dustin Ffifer, Alex Buck and Scott Presler, more than 170 volunteers, many also being supporters of Trump, spent 12 hours cleaning parts of West Baltimore.

READ MORE AT HOODCOMMUNIST.ORG

BAP Organizer Recieves Peace Award

Ajamu Baraka Awarded 2019 US Peace Prize

The Board of Directors of the US Peace Memorial Foundation has voted unanimously to award the 2019 US Peace Prize to The Honorable Ajamu Baraka, “whose bold antiwar actions, writings, speeches, and leadership provide an inspiring voice against militarism.”

Michael Knox, Chair of the Foundation, presented the award on September 23 during the forum "A Path to International Peace: Realizing the Vision of the United Nations Charter," which was held at the Community Church of New York.

READ MORE AT US PEACE MEMORIAL

Failures of The US Left

Failures of The US Left

The “US Left” conveniently ignores that you can’t be a socialist and not also be anti-imperialist.

“#USOutOfAfrica is designed to end what we see as an invasion of Africa by way of US military occupation.”

Over the last year, my membership with The Black Alliance For Peace (BAP), a radical Black Led anti- war organization, has sharpened my stance on anti- imperialism. This ultimately informed my anti- war position. 

The “US Left” conveniently ignores that you can’t be a socialist and not also be anti-imperialist. It should be largely understood by the “US left” that fascism and capitalism rely on and support imperialism -- seeking to exploit nations we’ve come to view as “underdeveloped” for labor, benefiting only the most privileged few within the Western nations like the United States. The “US left must collectively denounce the US military and the long reach of the US military industrial complex which has caused detestation and displacement on a global scale. 

READ MORE AT BLACK AGENDA REPORT…

Freedom Rider: Trump and Baltimore

Margaret Kimberley, BAR editor and senior columnist 31 Jul 2019

Anyone feeling the need to defend Baltimore from Trump’s opinions ought to talk about what really ails that city.

“There is more reason to rise up in righteous indignation over the Keith Davis verdict than Trump’s latest rant.”

There is only one person worthy of being defended in the wake of Donald Trump’s twitter tirade against Congressional Black Caucus member Elijah Cummings and the city of Baltimore. That man is Keith Davis, Jr.

In 2015 Davis was shot by Baltimore police. When he survived the 30-shot fusillade they planted evidence and charged him with the murder of another man. After three bites at the prosecutorial apple Davis was convicted of the killing this week. 

When Trump isn’t telling black and brown Americans to “go back where they came from” he is getting into petty fights with members of Congress and making them look good, even when they are not deserving of great praise. 

Elijah Cummings is the latest recipient of the undeserved gift. Acting in his capacity as Chairman of the House Oversight Committee he criticized Trump immigration policy and treatment of asylum seekers at the border. He also subpoenaed documents from members of the administration and the president’s family and ended up in the crosshairs as a result. In his usual fashion Trump went on an unhinged, days long diatribe. He labeled the city “rat infested” and said “no human being”, that is to say anyone other than black people, should want to live there.

“The days of shock and outrage over every Trump utterance should end.”

The response was all too predictable. Baltimoreans defended their city and proclaimed that it is not rat infested and that they are in fact good, hard working people. A CNN anchor was moved to tears as he spoke of his hometown. Pundits and politicians competed with one another to see who could condemn Trump most vociferously.  

There is no reason to spend time defending Baltimore, uplifting Cummings, excoriating Trump, or wringing hands about his presidency. Trump received 2 million more votes in 2016 than Mitt Romney did in 2012 precisely because he made blatant racist appeals. He stripped the Republican Party down to its barest essence as the white people’s party and white people lined up right behind him.

The days of shock and outrage over every Trump utterance should end. Cool headed analysis is needed and that may mean that Elijah Commings and his cohort should not be elevated because of Trump’s latest evil musing. Cummings is nothing more than a go along to get along member of the black political class that has worked against the interests of the people they represent. 

“Cool headed analysis is needed.”

When Cummings constituents and other Baltimore residents rose up in protest after the 2015 police killing of Freddie Gray he was either silent or condemned the righteous protest. In 2017 a policeman was killed in the Harlem Parkneighborhood under very suspicious circumstances. He was scheduled to testify against his fellow officers and was then shot to death. Harlem Park was treated like a gigantic crime scene and was cordoned off as the police saw fit. Residents weren’t permitted to move about without police permission and Cummings was silent about this blatantly unconstitutional act.

Baltimore is a city in need. It suffers from the ills of deindustrialization, unemployment and gentrification which is displacing the black population. Anyone feeling the need to defend Baltimore from Trump’s opinions ought to talk about what really ails that city. Like many others it is majority black, for now, and is in the hands of black elected officials. 

Black Agenda Report has reported extensively on Baltimore’s suffering at the hands of the compliant black misleadership class. A former mayor vetoed a bill to increase the minimum wage. The banksterscontinue their practice of denying black residents mortgages in hopes of getting them out of that city altogether. 

“Baltimore suffers from the ills of deindustrialization, unemployment and gentrification which is displacing the black population.”

Baltimore is a microcosm of the urban areas abandoned by whites for decades but now targeted for their return and the expulsion of black people. The black people allowed to remain in positions of authority know the rules all too well. They are mayors or congressmen or police commissioners or city council people because they promise not to not rock any boats. 

Condemning Trump is akin to shooting fish in a barrel. Taking on the black district attorney who victimized Keith Davis requires more intestinal fortitude. Baltimore police violence and corruption are endemic and the cops are notoriously crookedas Black Agenda Report has also reported. But prosecutors work hand in had with the occupying police enemy in Baltimore and around the country.

There is more reason to rise up in righteous indignation over the Keith Davis verdict than Trump’s latest rant. Davis’s plight is that of all black people. Trump represents the white people who tell Cummings and company what to do. Despite all protestations to the contrary they do as they are told and deny minimum wage increases, and provide protection to police, banksters and other malefactors. This week we should not spend much time thinking about Elijah Cummings. It is Keith Davis who should be on our minds.

Margaret Kimberley’s Freedom Rider column appears weekly in BAR, and is widely reprinted elsewhere. She maintains a frequently updated blog as well at http://freedomrider.blogspot.com . Ms. Kimberley lives in New York City, and can be reached via e-Mail at Margaret.Kimberley(at)BlackAgendaReport.com.       

Venezuela Manifesto for Peace

II WPC and WFDY International Solidarity Mission Visits Caracas

This Just In: Russians Radicalize Gullible Africans

African/Black people in Haiti sit in darkness because the United States is blocking oil shipments. More than 40,000 of mostly our people have died in Venezuela because the United States is blocking medicine. Trump, with the support of the Democratic Party, has requested a war budget of $750 billion and is threatening another war in the Middle East that the working class and poor will be deployed to fight.

But what are the media elites doing?

They are still talking about the Mueller report, which Ann Garrison unpacks in this Black Agenda Report piece.

The latest in the line of Russian bogeyman fake news is that the Rooskies have gotten into our people’s heads, and convinced them to travel to Africa to get arms training, so they can overthrow the U.S. government and establish a Pan-African state in the U.S. South. Clearly, we are incapable of thinking for ourselves. Now, it is true that some folks aim to develop an African state in the South. And it is true that our people have long struggled for our liberation. But this Russian connection? Laughable. Yet this fake news isn’t new at all. It is, in fact, part of the thread of anti-communist and now anti-Russia propaganda the U.S. state has used since the early 20th century to attempt to repress African/Black people's struggle for liberation. Black Agenda Report executive editor Glen Ford tears this narrative apart in his latest piece. Then BAP Coordinating Committee member Netfa Freeman discusses the danger of this narrative with RT’s “Watching the Hawks.”

What the U.S. state doesn’t want is what has been happening in Colombia, where African/Black women leaders (“lideresas”) are in the center of resistance. Many have paid the ultimate price, but even more continue to provide leadership to our collective struggle for self-determination, dignity and the construction of a new world. Check out this report by the Proceso Comunidades de Negras (Black Communities Process) to understand the connections between the struggles in Colombia, Venezuela, Haiti and the rest of the African diaspora.

Because of escalating tension between marginalized groups, such as Afro-Colombians, and the right-wing state led by Ivan Duque, the U.S. Peace Council released a statement. The group is “concerned that Colombia is on the precipice of renewed conflict. The peace agreement of 2016 was a brave attempt to end 54 years of civil war. The USPC calls on the Colombian government, and its ally, the U.S. government, to begin immediately to fulfill its obligations under the peace agreement, including the protection of human rights, and to recommit to working for peace.”

The struggle to oppose U.S. intervention in Venezuela continues. But let’s be clear: What has kept Venezuela free has been the people—organized and ready to struggle—not the country's military. That's what BAP National Organizer Ajamu Baraka tells RT’s “The World According to Jesse.” Watch the interview.

A week after the U.S. government broke into the Venezuelan embassy in Washington, D.C., with a battering ram, and illegally entered and arrested remaining members of the Embassy Protection Collective, puppet ambassador Carlos Vecchio moved in. However, he cannot issue legitimate visas or passports. The people made sure to make Vecchio feel unwelcome. A few days before that, the government of elected Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro announced it had signed a Protecting Power Agreement with Turkey. The relationship must be recognized by the United States in order for Turkey to take temporary control of the building. Such agreements are put in place when countries cease diplomatic relations. Protecting powers allow embassy functions to continue. In early April, Switzerland signed a Protecting Power Agreement so it could be the custodian of the U.S. embassy in Caracas. We don’t know how this will work out, with the U.S. state having exposed its gangsterism over the last few months, beginning with recognizing little-known Venezuelan opposition leader Juan Guaido as the “interim president” and going on to violate international law. But we now ask you to sign this petition demanding the U.S. Department of State recognize the agreement. Popular Resistance, in collaboration with other groups, is also organizing a mass rally at the United Nations General Assembly in New York City on September 15 to demand an end to the gangsterism.

Finally, in the city of Rio de Janeiro, more than 400 Afro-Brazilian men have been killed by military police in 2019. This comes on the heels of neo-fascist President Jair Bolsonaro taking office. A Brazilian professor in New York City calls Brazil a “killing field” for African/Black people.

No compromise.

No retreat.

Struggle to win,
Ajamu, Jaribu, Margaret, Netfa, Paul, Vanessa and YahNé
Coordinating Committee
Black Alliance for Peace

P.S. Freedom isn’t free. Consider giving today.

Surprise: Venezuelan Neo-fascists Are Marketing Pros, Intel Agents

Actually, we aren’t surprised.

The state has long used sophisticated tactics to subvert people’s movements. You can read the Mint Press News exclusive report here.

Yesterday, our folks were out in the streets of Washington, D.C., to oppose the U.S. intervention in Venezuela. Watch a video encapsulating the day. It features Black Alliance for Peace member Asantewaa Mawusi Nkrumah-Ture and Netfa Freeman of Pan-African Community Action, a BAP member organization. They both spoke about how the struggle against U.S. intervention in Venezuela is connected to the global struggle for African liberation. Then check out our photos.

Yesterday’s action was especially important after the final four members of the Embassy Protection Collective were arrested Thursday on a Class A misdemeanor charge called “interfering with a federal law enforcement agent engaged in protective functions.” This dubious charge carries a maximum penalty of one year in prison and a $1,000 fine. Folks, notice the state didn’t try to charge activists with “trespassing.” That would have been a losing case!

The momentum generated by the Reverend Jesse Jackson showing up and successfully delivering food and supplies to the collective was clearly too much for the state. Watch the video featuring Rev. Jackson and BAP National Organizer Ajamu Baraka, who were accompanied by BAP Coordinating Committee members Netfa Freeman and Paul Pumphrey.

According to Margaret Flowers, one of the activists who was illegally arrested, the state knocked down the embassy’s rear door on Thursday with a battering ram. Once inside, officers were visibly ashamed when activists told them they were taking the unprecedented step in U.S. history of violating a foreign embassy and that their action could escalate toward an all-out military-to-military war between the United States and Venezuela. Clearly, other countries would see the need to get involved, turning it into a world war.

It is because of the high possibility of war that would disproportionately affect Black and Brown Venezuelans that BAP felt the need to issue an official statement on the matter.

Africans around the world will commemorate African Liberation Day on May 25. Please read a statement BAP released last year that provides context about this day.

Our folks are being threatened all over, including in Colombia, where African/Black social leaders must be protected by armed guards in order to avoid tragedy, as they did a few weeks ago. Activist Angela Davis writes in solidarity.

Check out the statement released May 2 by the U.S. contingent of the 14th May Day Brigade at the International Meeting of Solidarity at the Convention Center in Havana City, Cuba. BAP member organization Pan-African Community Action participated in this group. The statement also can be heard here. The U.S. contingent reflects “these last gasps of the empire depend on maintaining our alienation, exploitation, oppression and genocide.”

Finally, we invite you to listen to an interview on “By Any Means Necessary” featuring BAP members Netfa Freeman and Jacqueline Luqman. Then read articles on the latest developments in the U.S. war on African/Black people written by Ajamu Baraka and BAP Coordinating Committee member Margaret Kimberley.

No compromise.

No retreat.

Struggle to win,
Ajamu, Jaribu, Margaret, Netfa, Paul, Vanessa and YahNé
Coordinating Committee
Black Alliance for Peace

P.S. Freedom isn’t free. Consider giving today.

P.P.S. Watch our video.