{"id":995,"date":"2014-02-28T12:08:45","date_gmt":"2014-02-28T12:08:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rashidmod.com\/?p=995"},"modified":"2014-05-07T14:39:53","modified_gmt":"2014-05-07T14:39:53","slug":"uncle-sam-in-blackface","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/rashidmod.com\/?p=995","title":{"rendered":"Uncle Sam in Blackface: Barack Obama and the Designs of U.S. Imperialism"},"content":{"rendered":"

Author\u2019s 2014 publishing note:\u00a0 The rough draft of this article was originally written in early 2009, following Barack Obama\u2019s inauguration as the first Black U.S. President.\u00a0 It was not finalized nor published prior to 2014 because shortly after it was written prison officials mixed it in with documents that they took and withheld from me until latter 2013.\u00a0 It is being presented as it was originally written because I feel its analyses and predictions of over 4 years ago have been and continue to be confirmed.<\/em><\/p>\n

Destroying and Replacing our Leaders<\/strong><\/h3>\n

When contradictions between Blacks\/New Afrikans and the imperialist interests of Amerika sharpened in the 1960s, independent leaders emerged to guide our struggle.\u00a0 Under their direction we advanced towards seizing control of our history, destiny and identity, and organizing to break free of our oppressed conditions.<\/p>\n

In response, the U.S. government moved to destroy and replace these leaders with ones who\u2019d keep us in line as its continued dependents and victims.\u00a0 In advancing this plan FBI assistant director William C. Sullivan stated in 1964:<\/p>\n

When this is done, and it can and will be done, obviously much confusion will reign, particularly among the Negro people. . . . The Negroes will be left without a national leader of sufficiently compelling personality to steer them in the proper direction.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Under these designs Malcolm X and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., the two most influential independent Black leaders of that era, were both targeted and murdered.\u00a0 But it was Malcolm\u2019s image and example that resonated most deeply with the urban concentrations of New Afrikans\u2014especially the youth.<\/p>\n

A Resurgent Leadership<\/strong><\/h3>\n

The plan to destroy the movement by targeting its leadership did not initially succeed.\u00a0 Instead of demoralizing the movement and severing its head, Malcolm\u2019s assassination inspired a new mass based leadership to assume the front and with a clearer plan.<\/p>\n

Inspired by Malcolm\u2019s ideas and unfulfilled aspirations, Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale co-founded the Black Panther Party (for Self-Defense) the year after his death.\u00a0 In fact, Malcolm\u2019s murder so enraged Bobby Seale that he vowed, \u201cI\u2019ll make my own self into a motherfucking Malcolm X, and if they want to kill me, they\u2019ll have to kill me!\u201d\u00a0 Huey went on to explain:<\/p>\n

We read also the works of the freedom fighters who had done so much for Black communities in the United States.\u00a0 Bobby had collected all of Malcolm X\u2019s speeches and ideas from papers like The Militant<\/em> and Muhammad Speaks<\/em>.\u00a0 These we studied carefully.\u00a0 Although Malcolm\u2019s program for the Organization for Afro-American Unity was never put into operation, he had made it clear that Blacks ought to arm.\u00a0 Malcolm\u2019s influence was ever present.\u00a0 We continue to believe that the Black Panther Party exists in the spirit of Malcolm.\u00a0 Often it is difficult to say exactly how an action or program has been determined or influenced in a spiritual way.\u00a0 Such intangibles are hard to describe, although they can be more significant than any precise influence.\u00a0 Therefore, the words on the page cannot convey the effect that Malcolm has had on the Black Panther Party although, as far as I am concerned, the Party is a living testament to his life work.\u00a0 I do not claim that the Party has done what Malcolm would have done.\u00a0 We do not say this, but Malcolm\u2019s spirit is in us.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The Panthers also drew insight from the principles and methodology of Mao Tse Tung in China. The Party developed, expanded and refined programs for Black community control based upon the model Huey witnessed among national minorities in China under the Maoist revolution.<\/p>\n

The Party\u2019s achievements as a successful and uncompromising revolutionary Black leadership and an infectious example to not only other oppressed but even privileged peoples across Amerika quickly marked it for destruction by the U.S. government, under a secret war led by the FBI code-named COINTELPRO (CO<\/span>unter INTEL<\/span>ligence PRO<\/span>gram).<\/p>\n

The major problem that the Establishment had with the BPP was not only that it spoke to the needs of the most oppressed U.S. sectors, but that it was leading and teaching them and others by example how to (and that they could) meet their own needs and solve their own problems, free of dependence on the power structure.\u00a0 And that it was that very power structure at the source of many of their problems and a deliberate obstacle to their solutions.<\/p>\n

Leading by Example\u2014Serving the People<\/strong><\/h3>\n

The earliest example of the BPP to the poor of their ability to meet their own needs, was set in a New Afrikan community where several children were run over and killed by cars at an unregulated intersection.\u00a0 Parents and other community members had gone repeatedly to the local government pleading for a solution to the problem.\u00a0 The officials put them off each time with promises to look into the matter.\u00a0 No help ever came.<\/p>\n

Huey and Bobby resolved the problem by simply finding and posting a stop sign at the intersection themselves, as residents observed.\u00a0 No more children were run over.\u00a0 Other communities with the same problem followed the Panther\u2019s example, with the same successful results, and came to realize that by simply relying on their own efforts and resources, instead of blindly depending on the system, they could themselves have protected their children all along.<\/p>\n

Likewise, the BPP led and set the example of community self-reliance through socialist community service (Serve the People) programs, which independently pooled and organized the resources and labor power of the poor communities to feed their own hungry children; organize against police brutality, and murders of Black youth; operate liberation schools, health clinics, clothing, shoe and grocery distribution, senior citizen services, busing to prisons, sickle cell anemia testing and research, pest control, maintenance, day care, ambulance, news services, etc.<\/p>\n

The Empire Strikes Back<\/strong><\/h3>\n

The greatest fear of an enslaver is that his victims might realize that they can live free of dependence on his system, that he lives at their expense and needs them to survive, and not vice versa.\u00a0 This because he knows once the enslaved people realize this they will naturally struggle to break free of that illegitimate power and take control of their own destiny.<\/p>\n

This was the infectious example set by the Panthers, as Party chapters sprang up to replicate Serve the People programs in poor Black communities across Amerika, and similar organizations followed their example in poor Mexican, Puerto Rican, Asian, white, and other communities.\u00a0 Panther formations also arose in England, Australia, Bermuda, Israel.<\/p>\n

But as a young organization, inexperienced and untrained in the methods of (and countering) government subversion, and not even aware of official designs to crush them, the Panthers were viciously slandered, attacked, and ultimately destroyed.\u00a0 And our marginalizaed urban masses have since been left confused and divided, just as the FBI predicted would occur in the absence of our own authentic liberationist leadership.<\/p>\n

In the wake of its destruction of the BPP, the U.S. government implemented a policy in 1978\u2014National Security Council Memorandum #46 (NSC-46)\u2014calculated to keep our oppressed communities in leaderless chaos, and to prevent our learning from and joining forces with the liberation struggles fighting across Afrika against apartheid, and U.S. and European imperialist domination, and their theft of Afrika\u2019s natural resources and wealth.<\/p>\n

NSC-46 proposed, among other things, to exploit every option to prevent any independent leadership from ever emerging again that could unite our communities; to eliminate all desire among us to establish our own independent political party; to incorporate more Blacks into high U.S. political offices where their activities and images could be controlled and molded by the system, and then used to mislead and misdirect us into supporting and remaining dependent upon and loyal to the Establishment; and to create a broader Black middle class and more Black business leaders who would serve as tokens and \u201csuccess\u201d stories to inspire false hope of, and false aspirations toward, Black \u201cachievement\u201d within <\/em>the imperialist slave system, instead of fighting to break free of and destroy that system.<\/p>\n

Fear of a Reawakened Dragon<\/strong><\/h3>\n

Over the following decades our suffering continued and intensified:\u00a0 police brutality and murders of our youth, violent occupation of our communities by militarized police, increased poverty and social deterioration, medical neglect, polarization of society along racial lines exemplified in Jena 6, mass imprisonment of our youth, general government neglect of our basic needs and security, massive gentrification, forced depopulation and displacement of Black communities (ethnic cleansing), the abandonment and subsequent declaration of war against desperate poor victims of natural disasters (for example during the Hurricane Katrina crisis), flooding our communities with narcotics and inciting gang wars, etc.\u00a0 These conditions continued to reawaken and heighten our disaffection with the power structure and its endless stream of false promises, lies and empty rhetorical claims to respect for human and civil rights, racial and cultural diversity, democracy, the rule of law, and so on.<\/p>\n

Just beneath the surface lay the real danger of a resurgent Black\/New Afrikan liberation struggle of the sort that inspired the movements that shook the very foundations of the U.S. imperialist empire in the 1960s and \u201870s.\u00a0 And the powers that be knew this.<\/p>\n

Obama\u2014the Trojan Horse<\/strong><\/h3>\n

Yesterday, the answer to this insurgent threat proposed by the FBI was to create a Black liberationist leadership vacuum and fill the void with a Black corporate lawyer groomed by the system\u2014Samuel Pierce.\u00a0 Today the void is being filled by a pro-capitalist ex-Harvard law professor also groomed by the system\u2014Barack Obama.<\/p>\n

But the game, although the same, runs a bit deeper.<\/p>\n

Obama was pushed forward not merely to subvert and misdirect the initiatives of the disaffected Blacks here in Amerika, but also to woo the Afrikan nations in particular.\u00a0 Remember, Obama is not only half Black, he is also half Afrikan.<\/p>\n

As the U.S. economy spirals towards acute depression, as it struggles to maintain hegemony over world oil supplies, and as its efforts to secure control over Middle Eastern oil reserves become more remote\u2014in Iran in particular\u2014its interests in Afrika\u2019s largely untapped oil wealth increases by the day.\u00a0 The U.S. imperialists have long aspired to dominate world petroleum supplies and access.\u00a0 As the State Department expressed in an April 11, 1944 memorandum:<\/p>\n

United States policy should in general aim to assure to this country, in the interests of security, a substantial and geographically diversified holding of foreign petroleum resources in the hands of the United States nationals.\u00a0 This would involve the preservation of the absolute position presently obtaining, and therefore vigilant protection of existing concessions in United States hands coupled with insistence upon the Open Door principle of equal opportunity for United States companies in new areas.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

As Nigeria\u2019s president expressed a few years ago, a new \u201cScramble for Africa\u201d is underway, with the U.S. and other imperialist countries maneuvering for control over Afrika\u2019s oil.\u00a0 Having an Afrikan born father and Amerikan born mother, Obama is the perfect front man to promote U.S.\/Afrikan ties toward achieving U.S. control of the continent and its oil.<\/p>\n

In July 2007 the African Union held a conference to discuss a proposal to federate the 53 Afrikan nations into a United States of Afrika.\u00a0 The year before, the U.S. Defense Department formed a planning team to establish an Amerikan United Military Command for the Afrikan continent (USAFRICOM).\u00a0 On December 15, 2006, USAFRICOM was approved and established by President George W. Bush.<\/p>\n

USAFRICOM will set up, control and coordinate U.S. military operations within all 53 Afrikan nations, except Egypt which is already under U.S. control and has since the 1970s been the world\u2019s second largest recipient (next to Israel) of U.S. military and economic \u201caid.\u201d\u00a0 In fact, the role of Egypt alongside Israel has been to protect U.S. oil interest and allies in the Middle East (especially Saudi Arabia) from hostile neighbors.\u00a0 These are clearly the first steps towards consolidating U.S. neo-colonial domination across Afrika, to control its vast natural resources and squeeze out China, who is Amerika\u2019s main rival in the region.\u00a0 In turn, China recently hosted the Afrikan heads of state in a counter-attempt to coax them into its own camp.<\/p>\n

Also, China has been promoting itself as a kinder and gentler imperialist lite, by promoting humanitarian aid, debt forgiveness and low interest loans to Afrikan countries. But don\u2019t they wish they had an Obama!<\/p>\n

With Obama as President, and the U.S. government\u2019s operating its centralized military command across Afrika, he\u2019ll be overseeing the killing of kids and common people from Tripoli to Johannesburg, and giving protesters a taste of U.S. military crowd control for which it has won infamy across Iraq.\u00a0 All to ensure U.S. domination over and the \u201csafe\u201d extraction and removal of Afrika\u2019s natural resources and wealth.\u00a0 In February 2008, Robert Moeller, the first deputy to the Commander for Military Operations of AFRICOM stated that, \u201cprotecting the free flow of natural resources from Africa to the global market is one of Africom\u2019s guiding principles.\u201d\u00a0 On the other hand, the U.S. public will hear only of fighting terrorism (which means violent repression of those who oppose imperialist designs in Afrika) and U.S. Marines on peacekeeping humanitarian missions, with staged filmings of troops passing out chocolate bars and bottled water.<\/p>\n

Racism at Home Undermines U.S. Interests in Afrika<\/strong><\/h3>\n

U.S. interests to control Afrika and its vast natural resources are not new.\u00a0 Neither are its schemes to try and woo Afrikan political leaders to achieve this end.\u00a0 Using Obama as a frontman is just the latest scheme.<\/p>\n

As the Afrikans across the continent began struggling for independence from European colonialism in the 1950s, it became apparent to U.S. officials that Europe would not be able to maintain its valuable Afrikan colonies.\u00a0 With its eyes set on Afrika\u2019s wealth, the U.S. began maneuvering to take over in the region by promoting decolonization and coaxing Afrika\u2019s new and aspiring heads of state. As Vice President Richard Nixon declared to the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee in 1957:<\/p>\n

American interests in the future are so great as to justify us in not hesitating even to assist the departure of the colonial powers from Africa.\u00a0 If we can win native opinion in the process, the future of America in Africa will be assured.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

This scheme in part involved the State Department inviting Afrikan leaders and diplomats to visit Amerika intending to give them the red carpet treatment.\u00a0 This effort backfired in many cases, because these Afrikans came face-to-face with Jim Crow segregationist policies that barred them from eating in restaurants, staying in exclusive hotels and visiting establishments from which Amerikan Blacks were barred.<\/p>\n

Even in cases where the State Department was able to make special accommodations, the Afrikans saw how other Blacks were treated and excluded from these places.\u00a0 They were not fooled.\u00a0 In general the Afrikan ambassadors suffered the same humiliations and abuses as U.S. Blacks.\u00a0 In the face of the prevailing discriminations against these Afrikans, and its negative impact on U.S. plans in Afrika, Secretary of State Dean Rusk testified before a Senate committee on July 10, 1963, as reported the next day in the New York Times<\/em>:<\/p>\n

As matters stand racial discrimination here at home has important effects on our foreign relations. . . .I now turn to a special concern of the Department of State:\u00a0 the treatment of nonwhite diplomats and visitors to the United States. We cannot expect the friendship and respect of nonwhite nations if we humiliate their representatives by denying them, say, services in a highway restaurant or city caf\u00e9.<\/p>\n

Yet within the last two years, scores of incidents of racial discrimination involving foreign diplomats accredited to this country have come to the attention of the Department of State.\u00a0 These incidents have occurred in all sections of the United States.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Rusk also observed that racial oppression of U.S. Blacks was pushing Afrikan leaders to side with Black\/New Afrikan resistance leaders in Amerika against the U.S. government.<\/p>\n

During the same period Amerika\u2019s main rival\u2014the Soviet Union\u2014was exposing the reality of U.S. race relations to the Third World through its international media.\u00a0 U.S. Blacks and opposition leaders visiting and emigrating to the Soviet Union were also vocal about the stark contrast between racial equality in the S.U. versus the discrimination, segregation, lynching, and general violence against Blacks in Amerika.\u00a0 Also the majority of the nations within the newly created United Nations were non-white.\u00a0 And within the U.N., the S.U. consistently took the side of the dark Third World peoples and thus undermined Amerika\u2019s efforts to win their opinion to its side. Not to mention that the violent resistance of whites and government officials in the U.S. South to desegregation was being graphically exposed in the world media.<\/p>\n

It was in efforts to counter the negative impact of racism on its international economic schemes, that the federal government moved to break down, with much fanfare, legalized segregation beginning in 1954 with the Supreme Court\u2019s ruling in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas<\/em>, which ordered that the segregation in public institutions be dismantled \u201cwith all deliberate speed.\u201d<\/p>\n

Paul Robeson:\u00a0 A Fly in the Ointment<\/strong><\/h3>\n

U.S. efforts to curry favor with Afrikan leaders were also counteracted by such outspoken Blacks as Paul Robeson (one of Malcolm X\u2019s early heroes), who traveled around the world exposing the truth of racial oppression in the U.S., and revealing to Afrikans that our suffering in Amerika was much the same as their own suffering under European colonialism.<\/p>\n

In return, the State Department revoked Robeson\u2019s passport in 1950, and the FBI denounced his international activities as a \u201cthreat to national security\u201d and instituted a manhunt to capture him to prevent his leaving the country.\u00a0 The following year the State Department sent Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., its lackey in blackface, to tour Afrika on a \u201cgoodwill\u201d mission to repair Robeson\u2019s damaging exposures.\u00a0 The U.S. government denied Robeson\u2019s revelations as lies and \u201cCommunist propaganda.\u201d<\/p>\n

The height of U.S. embarrassment came when later that year, Robeson filed a petition with the U.N. on behalf of \u201cfifteen million black Americans\u201d charging the U.S. with \u201cgenocide.\u201d<\/p>\n

In return for his efforts on behalf of his oppressed people and to expose the true face of the U.S. power structure on others it was scheming to also prey upon, the government destroyed Robeson\u2019s career as one of Amerika\u2019s most accomplished Black entertainers.\u00a0 However, Robeson was honored in Afrika and the Soviet Union, and in December 1952 he was awarded the International Stalin Peace Prize.<\/p>\n

Malcolm X Takes up the Torch<\/strong><\/h3>\n

A decade and a half later Malcolm X took up Robeson\u2019s torch.\u00a0 He traveled Afrika exposing U.S. imperialist designs abroad, denouncing its treatment of Blacks in Amerika, and promoting our right to political independence just as Afrikans were fighting for across the continent.\u00a0 He sought to link our struggle up with that of Afrika against European colonialism and Amerikan imperialism.<\/p>\n

In return Malcolm too was hounded and persecuted, and counter-measures were taken at high levels of the government to silence him and subvert his efforts.\u00a0 At a 1964 summit of the Organization of African Unit, he pronounced:<\/p>\n

In order to keep the Organization of Afro-American Unity [which he founded that year\u2014Rashid] from gaining the interest, sympathy and support of the independent Afrikan states in our effort to bring the miserable plight of the 22 million Afro-Americans before the U.N., the racist element in the State Department very shrewdly gave maximum worldwide publicity to the recent passage of the Civil Rights Bill. . . .<\/p>\n

The racist element in the State Department realizes that if any intelligent, really militant Afro-American is ever permitted to come before the United Nations to testify on behalf of the 22 million mistreated Afro-Americans, our dark-skinned brothers and sisters in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, would then see America as a \u201cBrute Beast\u201d even more cruel and vulturuous than the colonial powers of Europe and South Africa combined.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Several attempts were made on his life as he moved to lodge a petition with the U.N. similar to the one Robeson pursued just over a decade earlier.\u00a0 The U.S. government was outspoken in its opposition because of the loss of credibility and international embarrassment it would suffer before the dark nations of the world at the U.N..\u00a0 The media was used to demonize Malcolm, and just a week before he was to attend a special Afrikan-Asian conference in Algeria, where he was to introduce his proposed U.N. petition, he was silenced by assassin\u2019s bullets under designs of the CIA.<\/p>\n

So today in continuing its decades-long designs to hide its racist and imperialist face, and to portray itself as a friend of Afrika in order to gain control over her natural wealth (oil in particular), the U.S. Establishment has promoted the half-Afrikan Obama as its front man and Trojan Horse.\u00a0 And he will be used to develop friendly ties with the heads of state across the continent and to oust \u201cunfriendly\u201d ones, thereby choosing governments that will bow to U.S. interests via \u201cregime change.\u201d\u00a0 Such imperialist designs will be called \u201cspreading democracy.\u201d<\/p>\n

Obama has never had the interests of Black people nor any others of the oppressed at heart.\u00a0 His own campaign strategy demonstrated this.<\/p>\n

The Obama Electoral Strategy<\/strong><\/h3>\n

Before going into the particulars of Obama\u2019s electoral strategy it is important that we understand that he is a tool of the faction of wealthy U.S. interests represented by the opportunistic Democratic Party. A party that until the 1960\u2019s was a rabid opponent of racial integration and granting Blacks voting and civil rights.<\/p>\n

The Democrats in Washington only became pretended supporters of the interests of Blacks when in 1963 millions of Blacks planned to converge on the capital.\u00a0 This \u201cMarch on Washington\u201d was originally planned at the grassroots by poor Blacks, millions of whom intended to converge on, lay siege to, and shut down all government and commercial operations in the U.S. Capitol, and not leave until the government resolved the problems of systemic poverty, racial oppression, and government abuse and neglect of Blacks.<\/p>\n

Such a movement would have driven the nail in the coffin for Amerika\u2019s designs to win over the dark nations, particularly where Dean Rusk had, just the month before the planned Black siege on Washington, spoken to the need to rein in discrimination against Blacks because of its negative effects on U.S. relations with those nations.<\/p>\n

It was in response to the situation that President John F Kennedy suddenly presented the Democratic Party as a champion of integration and Black civil and voting rights.\u00a0 Kennedy\u2019s corporate backers then funded the financially strapped Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and used the mainstream media to make King the leader and voice of the planned march.\u00a0 King was thereby used to convert the march from an angry militant siege into a one day peaceful rally where a few \u201cauthorized\u201d speeches would be made, Blacks would sing and cry out their frustrations alongside a few white sympathizers, and everyone <\/em>would be out of town by sundown.<\/p>\n

Malcolm X witnessed the entire scam and bitterly criticized King and his circle in his autobiography, and in his speech entitled \u201cMessage to the Grassroots.\u201d<\/p>\n

And here we should keep in mind that Obama is being used as the frontman by and of the same Democratic Party.<\/p>\n

To win broad electoral support in his presidential bid, Obama replicated the electoral \u201cAccommodation\u201d strategy used successfully by other Black Judases like David Dinkins in his bid for New York mayor, and Douglas Wilder in his 1989 campaign for governor of Virginia; which were rhetorically portrayed, like Obama\u2019s election, as triumphs over racism in Amerika.<\/p>\n

Just as Obama has done, both Wilder and Dinkins took advantage of an atmosphere of broad social disaffection with government policies implemented over several prior administrations.\u00a0 They ran moderate campaigns which appealed to a broad and diverse electoral base recognizing that the Black vote alone was too small to win their bids for office.<\/p>\n

Wilder promoted himself as a pro-corporate, anti-crime conservative, using a carefully crafted political image instead of his skin, to cross the color line and win broad white voter support.\u00a0 He avoided addressing the cause or needs of deteriorating conditions for Blacks\/New Afrikans.\u00a0 Like Obama, Dinkins and Wilder ran mainstream oriented campaigns, and avoided building coalitions specifically oriented towards Blacks, Latin@s, \u201cLeftists\u201d and workers.\u00a0 When both won their elections, neither provided any genuine advances for Blacks, workers or the poor, nor advanced policies to benefit the needy.<\/p>\n

As Wilder stated in 1989, comparing his campaign strategy with the failed 1985 and 1989 presidential campaigns of Jesse Jackson, Sr., \u201cJesse runs to inspire.\u00a0 I run to win.\u201d Meaning Wilder, like Obama, opportunistically said all the right things to win over the necessary sectors of a broad and diverse voter base to win his campaign.<\/p>\n

False Leadership Generates False Hope<\/strong><\/h3>\n

Today many Blacks and poor people are taken in by Obama\u2019s rhetoric that his win will mean a positive \u201cchange\u201d for the common people, such as economic improvement and expanded services for the needy.\u00a0 Nothing could be farther from the truth, which was proven by events that occurred when Bill Clinton took office in 1993, after running a campaign upon promises to improve conditions for Amerika\u2019s needy and resolve the \u201cdebt crisis\u201d generated from 1981 to 1993 under Ronald Reagan\u2019s and George H.W. Bush\u2019s \u201cReaganite\u201d policies.<\/p>\n

As past White House advisor Daniel Patrick Moynihan stated in a July 21, 1985 New York Times<\/em> op-ed piece:<\/p>\n

[The Reagan administration made a] deliberate decision to create deficits for strategic, political purposes. . . . The Reagan Adminstration came to office with, at most, a marginal interest in balancing the budget\u2014but with a very real interest in dismantling a fair amount of the social legislation of the preceding 50 years.\u00a0 The strategy was to induce a deficit and use that as grounds for dismantling.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

When Clinton took office the U.S. national debt was at an all-time high.\u00a0 Reaganite policies had transformed the U.S. into the world\u2019s largest debtor nation by 1987, after 70 years as a creditor nation.<\/p>\n

Right after Clinton won the presidential election a front page New York Times<\/em> article of November 6, 1992, made clear that the wealthy corporate powers that control the U.S. economy would defeat any attempts by Clinton to implement or revive social reform programs.\u00a0 As Moynihan admitted, Reaganite policies like those of Bush, Jr. today, were designed to create such immense U.S. debt that the social spending programs and laws passed in the 1960s and \u201870s to appease the protest and resistance movements of Blacks and other marginalized groups would have<\/em> to be dismantled, and government spending could be increasingly shifted to the wealthy corporate sector.<\/p>\n

The deliberate creation of massive debt under Reaganite policy was accomplished by the U.S. Treasury Department\u2019s selling hundreds of billions of dollars in securities\u2014U.S. Treasury notes, bonds, etc.\u2014to wealthy investors to be traded on the securities market.\u00a0 With this immense share of the U.S. debt in the hands of private investors, any efforts to shift government spending away from the corporate sector and back towards social needs would be quickly upset by investors selling off just a tiny amount of Treasury bonds, which would instantly increase the interest rate and U.S. deficit by tens of billions of dollars.<\/p>\n

Investors warned Clinton that if he attempted to live up to his campaign rhetoric of social reform, which he had no intentions of fulfilling anyway, he\u2019d find his administration in a worse economic predicament than the one that cost Bush Sr. his second presidential bid.\u00a0 Clinton not only toed the line but increased government spending with private corporations.<\/p>\n

He did<\/em> also balance the budget, however, but only<\/em> by cutting social spending to the bone through such methods as demonizing the poor (especially Blacks) and kicking millions of poor Black children\u2014average age of 7 years old\u2014off welfare, under the Welfare Reform Act of 1996, plunging urban Black Amerika deeper into the morass of poverty.\u00a0 In turn he expanded the police and prison systems beyond anything done by prior administrations to brutalize and confine the victims of his policies who\u2019d be unable to find \u201clegitimate\u201d work in the steadily shrinking U.S. job market, especially in and around urban areas.<\/p>\n

Yet all the while Clinton portrayed himself as a hero and champion of New Afrikans, whom Toni Morrison rhetorically called \u201cthe first Black president.\u201d<\/p>\n

Obama serves the same corporate forces, whose interests he will also prioritize over that of the common people.\u00a0 He will also face the same sort of corporate resistance if he attempted to implement social reforms: his empty campaign promise to institute \u201cchange\u201d if elected is nothing more than seeds of false hope.\u00a0 And it is a dangerous thing to give oppressed people false hope.<\/p>\n

Clinton did<\/em> cure the immense national debt generated by Reaganite policies, but he did so at the expense of Amerika\u2019s poor and working class\u2014with Blacks suffering the worst of it. \u00a0At that time there were remnants of a social safety net from which government funds could be diverted to \u201cservice\u201d the debt.\u00a0 But thanks to the last four administrations up to Bush Jr., that safety net has been rent to shreds.<\/p>\n

Indeed Bush Jr. has plunged the economy into its worst deficit to date in financing his War (for oil) on Terror and corporate spending, which debt he hasn\u2019t even put a dent in with his attendant cuts in social spending and privatization of public services.\u00a0 Obama has inherited an economy in a state of acute crisis of the sort that brought on the Great Depression of the 1930s.<\/p>\n

There now remains no non-essential areas of the economy from which Obama as president could service the unprecedented debt created by Bush Jr. . Any further cuts in spending not directed at corporate interests would only amount to the government cannibalizing itself and its own labor force.\u00a0 So his promises to cure the present economic and military crises haven\u2019t a leg to stand on.\u00a0 A major economic downturn is at hand.<\/p>\n

What we can<\/em> expect is greater social instability, a greater militarization of domestic Amerika, and enhancement of its surveillance and police state features.\u00a0 As the December 17, 2008 Phoenix Business Journal<\/em> reported, the U.S. Army War College has police departments on alert that anticipated economic crisis may lead to civil unrest requiring martial law (military intervention), with the general public the targeted \u201cenemy.\u201d\u00a0 Lest we forget, in 2007 the Bush Jr. Administration \u201crevised\u201d federal law to allow the U.S. president to occupy Amerikan cities with the military.\u00a0 The military occupation of New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina in 2005 was only a trial run.<\/p>\n

Exploiting our Desperation<\/strong><\/h3>\n

Many of us are so desperate for the slightest show of recognition from the Establishment that seeing someone of darker skin on pedestals of power traditionally reserved for the wealthy white male causes us to throw sanity and the lessons of history to the wind.\u00a0 As the Black Martinique revolutionary Frantz Fanon once observed, an oppressed and colonized people tend to feel a sense of blind over-appreciation for any crumbs and tokens thrown to them by the racist status quo.\u00a0 This is the euphoria we see across Black Amerika in blind reaction to seeing a Black face seated as U.S. President.<\/p>\n

Most of Afrika\u2019s 53 nations are headed today by Black presidents and prime ministers.\u00a0 Yet their people remain victims of desperate poverty, government neglect and exploitation, and massive unemployment because those \u201cleaders\u201d are but puppets of European imperialist countries and corporations who continue to rob them of their natural resources.\u00a0 And it has been so since Afrikans won their claimed independence.\u00a0 Quislings and Uncle Toms are nothing new.\u00a0 Dark faces in high places do not equal genuine liberation.\u00a0 Under imperialist power it only means the continuation and often intensification of their suffering, only with a dark face at the wheel (neo-colonialism).<\/p>\n

We Need Panther Power<\/strong><\/h3>\n

As our social deterioration and attendant crises accelerate, we need now more than ever Panther Power.\u00a0 We need to develop programs to serve the people and build self-sufficiency and self-reliance with a greater awareness of addressing also our security needs, under the leadership of an independent mass-based Panther vanguard party.\u00a0 There are no individual heroes in this struggle\u2014it is the masses through collective struggle, guided by correct and competent leadership, that make and change history.<\/p>\n

Barack Obama, as Uncle Sam in black face, cannot and will not meet our needs, nor win us the freedom we\u2019ve aspired toward against centuries of oppression and exploitation.\u00a0 His black skin serves only as a token of false hope, to pull us back into support for and dependence upon this imperialist slave system.\u00a0 A system that was built by the labor and blood of our ancestors.\u00a0 A system that has never<\/em> once met our needs, but has only devised to keep us under its thumb by destroying and replacing our genuine leaders, and subverting our every effort to break free and rise above our debased conditions, claim our own history and identity, and take our place in history as a leading force of change here and abroad.<\/p>\n

Obama can and will serve no interests but those of the obscenely wealthy 1% who own and control the economic, political, military, cultural and ideological institutions of this U.S. imperialist system.<\/p>\n

The people don\u2019t need an imperialist wolf dressed in a black sheep\u2019s clothing.\u00a0 We need freedom.\u00a0 Which means rebuilding our Panther vanguard into an international and intercommunal force, to unite our oppressed people everywhere into an allied struggle against imperialist domination and for Pan-Afrikan socialist unity.<\/p>\n

Dare to struggle; dare to win!
\nAll Power to the People!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Author\u2019s 2014 publishing note:\u00a0 The rough draft of this article was originally written in early 2009, following Barack Obama\u2019s inauguration as the first Black U.S. President.\u00a0 It was not finalized nor published prior to 2014 because shortly after it was written prison officials mixed it in with documents that they …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":315,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[6],"class_list":["post-995","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-articles","tag-party-articles","has-thumbnail"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/rashidmod.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/995","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/rashidmod.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/rashidmod.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rashidmod.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rashidmod.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=995"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/rashidmod.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/995\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1006,"href":"https:\/\/rashidmod.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/995\/revisions\/1006"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rashidmod.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/315"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/rashidmod.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=995"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rashidmod.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=995"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rashidmod.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=995"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}