Obama: The Empire’s New Face

by Kabir Joshi-Vijayan
Basics Issue #12 (Jan/Feb 2009)

On January 20th, Barack Hussein Obama will be sworn-in as the 44th President of the United States, realizing the hopes of millions of people who came out in record numbers to elect and support him in November. Americans were especially desperate for a change after eight years of war abroad and economic ruin at home. But unfortunately, Obama can not live up to such hopes. His government will not represent any real change for the people of the U.S. or the world. By every decision he has made since his election, and his alignments and positions during his campaign, Obama has assured that the United States of violence, terror, occupation and white-power will continue under his presidency.

We only have to look at who he’s picked to run the country with him. Obama’s Secretary of State (the government’s representative to the world) will be Hillary Clinton, a notorious supporter of the illegal occupation and invasion of Iraq, defender of the racist state of Israel and consistent champion of brutal American foreign policy. Robert Gates, Bush’s handpicked replacement for the criminal Rumsfeld, will remain as Defense Secretary. Not only is Gates against ending the Iraq war (Obama’s major election promise), but he was responsible for past crimes, including the Iran-Contra affair (where as the deputy-director of the CIA in the 1980s Gates encouraged his boss, Bush Sr., to finance the massacre of a democratically-elected government in Nicaragua, which was financed by selling weapons to Iran and pumping crack into ghettoes in the US). This pattern continues with the up and coming Homeland Security Secretary, Janet Napolitano, who allowed for the murder and torture of Mexican refugees in her home state of Arizona. These choices are not just bad decisions on Obama’s part, but they mean he made sure his new government will be led by war criminals, human rights abusers, anti-environmentalists and all-around imperialists.

Some say these corporate and military thugs would be kept in check by Obama. Yet when has the President-elect shown us that he is not a war monger and reactionary himself? During his election campaign he promised to eventually end the Iraq occupation, but only so troops could be increased in Afghanistan (a war just as brutal and illegal as in Iraq). Obama told the world racism was no longer an issue in America, at a time when more than 83,000 black people die from the black-white health gap each year, when prison concentration camps imprison black men 8 times more often than whites and just 4 years after the government let thousands of blacks in New Orleans die.

On January 20th, Obama will become the leader of the most violent and destructive empire in world history - one that has been designed for 200 years to rob, enslave and brutalize the world’s population - and that’s something that won’t “Change”!




On his trip to Israel in July 2008, Obama expressed his uncompromising support for the Israeli apartheid state.

Interview with an African-American Revolutionary: Muhammad Ahmad

Basics: This is Basics Community Newsletter, and I’m here with Muhammad Ahmad, a long time revolutionary brother from the U.S., involved in a number of organizations, including the Black Panther Party, the Revolutionary Action Movement, and the African People’s Party. I’m with him here at Ryerson University tonight, after finishing up a presentation. Good evening, Muhammad.

Muhammad Ahmad: Good evening.

Basics: During your presentation tonight, one brother came up during question period, trying to suggest the problems African peoples face on this continent in terms of the breakdown of the Black family. You had a good response to that question. What was it?

MA: The capitalist system is extracting more and more profit from the African-American community, because it is in structural crisis right now. Being in a structural crisis right now, it has to lower the wages of its domestic working-class. Now, whoever is on the lowest rung of the domestic working-class in each capitalist country receives the brunt of the exploitation. So you have the disintegration of the African-American, or African-Canadian family first…

Basics: And the indigenous peoples too…

MA: Definitely the indigenous peoples too. The market is such that to get around paying higher wages they have created the prison-industrial complex. Prisoners are put to work through the privatization of prisons and paid slave wages. This leads to a complete ruinization of the community. At the same time then, those on the outside – women – are reduced into the service economy being paid the lowest of wages in the domestic working-class.

Basics: Well those social forces would certainly ruin any family… Now the people up here, African-Canadians, indigenous peoples, new migrants from around the world, are facing the same sorts of victimization and brutalization as in the United States. What do people facing police brutality, gentrification, and exploitation need to do?

MA: Well, one: we need to build organizations that are based on collective leadership. Those organization that have been most successful have studied Marxism [dialectical and historical materialism] in conjunction with their own histories. The need is to develop cadre and leadership. One problem in the development of organizations has been the uneven level of development in organizations: you need to be able to have people who can carry on the organization if anything happens to the leadership, and that takes time.

More importantly is the choosing of issues that are winnable. Some of our biggest mistake is that we have attacked the stronger points of the system and been defeated, and this has demoralized people. So once building that organization we have to pick our issues strategically in order to get small victories, because getting five small victories is better than getting one big defeat. For the time being, we have to rebuild the people’s will now. We have to rebuild the movement now, picking our issues carefully so that we can see what we can win. We need to train people.

One really important thing is to get young people off of drugs, so that they can struggle to get into the working-class. In my day, we didn’t have to struggle to get into the working-class. You know, I could quit a job, and walk across the street and get another job. When I talk about ruinization, I’m talking about the young brothers and sisters today who have to fight and train themselves to even get a job. We have to struggle to even reach parity with white workers wherever they are.

Basics: I know that some of the work of organizations like the Black Panther Party, or the Puerto Rican Young Lords Party, back in your day where doing work to organize street gangs into revolutionary cadre. There are some groups in Toronto trying to do similar peace work amongst street gangs, such as the Bloods and the Crips. Can you say a few words about the history of that kind of work?

MA: First of all, those of us who have come through the struggle have come to the consensus that we have to be drug free. You can’t be a revolutionary and drink alcohol. You can’t be a revolutionary and smoke marijuana, or do other drugs.

Also, we have to teach basics, we have to teach reading and writing; we have to teach scientific thinking, and we have to teach leadership. And to do all this you have to have absolute moral superiority to the system that your fighting against. The Bloods and the Crips should know a little something about this: the esprit de corps. To break any military establishment you have to be able to break the esprit de corps. When you break the esprit de corps of your enemy, you have won 90% of the battle.

Basics: One of the terms that the Black Panther movement popularized was the term “Blaxploitation”, which was what they called capitalism and white supremacy culturally exploiting African-American peoples through images and music. You mentioned something in your presentation tonight about gangster rap and its relationship to capitalism. Can you elaborate?

MA: Well, gangster rap serves as a negative role model sending out counter-revolutionary message to young people and turning them against themselves. Its all about the glorification of gangsters, and there’s a big difference between a gangster and a revolutionary. A gangster is all about him or herself, against the people, and a gangster subdues the people through what he or she sells the people. It’s all about getting rich in capitalist society by any means. As revolutionaries, we are socialists and communists, and so we are anti-capitalists, anti-imperialists, anti-colonialists, and anti-oppression. And a revolutionary does this out of the spiritual will to serve the people. A revolutionary comes from the people and serves the people, not hurts the people. And the hope is that your work advances the interests of the people. So that’s the difference: a revolutionary is a positive role model, working for the collective, not money.

Basics: There are some more radical groups popping up in Toronto – anti-colonial, anti-imperialist, anti-gentrification, anti-police. Would you have any words of wisdom for them from your own history of revolutionary struggle?

MA: All I would say is that everything in the universe is constantly changing, and that we should not think about things abstractly or in sectarian terms, but to think dialectically: that we learn through change in our tactics and strategy as conditions change. If we do not change, if we do not constantly assess our work, constantly do criticism and self-criticism, as Fidel Castro said, our movement will not be around for long.

Basics: Well, let’s leave it at that then Mr. Ahmad.

MA: Salaam-aleykum

Basics: Wa-aleykum a salaam.

New Orleans Residents Fight Demolitions

Residents of New Orleans are fighting a plan approved by New Orleans City Council to demolish 4,500 public housing units. Going along with the US Department of Housing and Urban Development, the City is arguing that it wants to replace units damaged by Hurricane Katrina in 2005 with new mixed-income housing.
Critics of the plan have argued it would further restrict the stock of affordable housing, especially in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina
“It is beyond callous, and can only be seen as malicious discrimination,” said Kali Akuno of the Coalition to Stop the Demolition. “It is an unabashed attempt to eliminate the black population of New Orleans.”
In December, police used pepper spray and stun guns on workers and residents who came to City Hall to protest the proposal to destroy housing. Several people were treated for the effects of the pepper spray.
Politicians and supporters of the planned demolition argue developers will take advantage of tax breaks and build new neighbourhoods with portions of low-income housing. These arguments were similar to those used at Regent Park, where demolition has started in order to make way for ‘mixed income’ housing which will have some 400-500 less subsidized rental units.

Lakotah Declare Independence

On December 19, 2007 the Lakotah Sioux Indians broke of all of their treaties with the Government of the United States and declared the independent Republic of Lakotah, which encompasses territory from Nebraska, Wyoming, Montana, North Dakota, and South Dakota.

A four-member delegation of the Lakotah Sioux Indians visited Washington, D.C. to formally submit their withdrawal from their treaties with the American government. The Lakotah Sioux’s legal basis for the move is based on the U.S. Constitution itself, which indicates that treaties are the highest law of the land. One of the delegates, Phyllis Young, a former indigenous representative to the United Nations, stated that “We have 33 treaties with the United States that they have not lived by. They continue to take our land, our water, our children.’’

The Lakotah Sioux have suffered greatly under the rule of the U.S., with a life-expectancy of 44-years for men, one of the lowest in the world, and with an infant mortality rate five times that of the average American.

Russel Means, one of the representatives of the new country and one of the founders of the American Indian Movement, declared that “We are no longer citizens of the United States of America and all those who live in the five-state area that encompasses our country are free to join us.” Citizens of the new country will live tax-free, and will be issued new passports and driver’s licenses.

While in Washington, representatives of the new country visited the embassies of Venezuela, Bolivia, Chile, and South Africa to request diplomatic recognition. Ireland and East Timor have also expressed interest in the declaration.

Duane Martin Sr., one of the Washington delegates said “after 150 years of colonial enforcement, when you back people into a corner there is only one alternative...to bring freedom into its existence by taking it back to the love of freedom, to our lifeway.”

Falling Dollar, Falling Empire?

Losing status as world’s reserve currency spells big trouble for American Empire, good news for peoples in rest of the world.

It’s not often that a Brazilian super model reveals the approaching collapse of an empire. Such was the case when Gisele Bundchen - one of the richest models in the world - insisted that her $30 million dollar fees for the first half of 2007 be paid not in American dollars - but in euros.
Bundchen isn’t the only one wary of the dollar. Over the last few years the dollar has been slowly losing ground to the euro. With the sub-prime mortgage crisis, tremendous trade imbalances, and two grinding wars, the American Empire is starting to show its cracks.
But it is not so much the value of the dollar as the role that the dollar plays in the global economy that has kept the US dominant for the last several decades. Since 1970, when President Nixon took the dollar off the gold standard, the US has been able to do something that no other country on Earth can do - finance its debts by just printing more money. Every other country that has done the same has immediately faced hyper-inflation. For example, after WWI, Germany paid off its war debts by printing more money - so Germans started using the soon worthless currency to burn instead of firewood.
This doesn’t happen to the US because most oil producing countries are dominated by the US and conduct all their oil sales in dollars. Want to buy some oil from Saudi Arabia? You’ll need dollars. This forces other countries to buy massive amounts of dollars and accept dollars when they sell their exports to the US. This keeps the dollar artificially high and allows the US to support a massive trade imbalance that hit a record monthly high of $68.13 billion in October (The US has not exported more than it imported since 1975!). The inflation then gets put on to people outside the US when they pay higher prices for their commodities - a hidden tax on the people of the world to fund the wars and consumerism of the American Empire.
Once the dollar loses its status as the worlds’ reserve currency, inflation will explode in the US and their 737 foreign military bases would be unaffordable - something the US has been desperate to avoid. Saddam Hussein switched Iraqi oil sales to the euro. After the US bombed, invaded and occupied Iraq, the oil accounts were switched back to dollars. In 2002, the CIA backed a failed coup against the democratically elected government of Venezuela after that country’s ambassador to Russia spoke of switching to the euro for their oil sales. More recently, when Iran stated that they would start using the euro or the yen for their oil sales, the White House started a campaign to launch a war against Iran, using the same false propaganda that was used to justify the war against Iraq. The US would sooner kill millions of people through its wars than lose the tool that allows them to dominate the global economy. But as the saying goes: Todays’ empire, tomorrows’ ashes!

Wise Intelligent: Drugs, Gangs, and Gentrification

Part 2 of a 3 part series interviewing some of the progressive militants of the hip hop culture.

Basics: Could you speak about the kind of work that’s being done in New York or Jersey right now with gangs and youth?

Wise: The government is taking on this lock-em-up-and-throw-away-the-key policy. The prison industrial complex is alive and thriving, and the youth are a commodity now, an investment to the prison-industrial complex. So we’re giving the youth some political orientation and giving them some knowledge of the environment in which they are embedded that’s imposing a lot of negative behaviors on you… You’re not the one who is sick, it’s the society that you’re in that’s sick, and that’s what needs to be broken down and taken out of the way.

Basics: Right now, the government, is bringing in mandatory minimum sentencing, and is putting hundreds of millions of tax payers’ dollars into building up the prison system. Can you comment on how the whole prison industrial system developed in the 1980s and 1990s in New York, and how what the community’s going through now?

Wise: It was the psychologist BF Skinner who said that behavior is shaped by its consequences, which means that they can control your behavior by modifying certain aspects of your environment. When we look back on the late‘70s/early’80s, we see a lot of closings of factories and plants in the inner city that employed a lot of inner-city black families. This created a large population of unemployed African-American men, who were in supervisor and management positions in a lot of these companies. And these black men were bringing their sons in to these jobs. So it was a perpetual employment routine. We lost that economy in the black community. This is what started the ‘urban decay’, and ‘white flight’ and ‘suburban sprawl’ that followed the factories leaving.

The government understood that all they had to do was bring in drugs from Laos, from the war in Nicaragua, and flood the black community with those drugs, and then these unemployed, stressed-out black men are going to do one or the other: they gonna sell the drugs or they gonna smoke the drugs. Then they enforced their ‘War on Drugs’, which was a policy of designed to perpetuate the prison-industrial complex. At the exact same time they went public on the market with prison-building companies, like Wackenhut Corporation and Corrections Corporation of America. These companies are on the New York Stock Exchange. You can actually go and purchase stock in these companies and invest in the incarceration of young black youth throughout the country. So, it’s a business, it’s a very big business.

Basics: What do you see as the prospects for transforming the youth caught up in this struggle into revolutionary organizations to challenge their conditions?
Wise: The weapons of this day and time are information – the truth is the weapon. At this point, we have to disseminate the truth – like with your magazine, Basics. It was Marcus Garvey who taught us that to know thy enemy is part of the complete education of a man. In order to keep a people subjugated to you, you must keep that people ignorant of their culture. They imposed a state of ignorance on non-white people in order to create this slave-master relationship that we’re dealing with today. We have to really deal with the youth on a level of truth, get the truth and information out there because once they learn who they are, they’re going to know who their enemy is.

Next issue: Umi from P.O.W.

Dead Prez’s M-1: Community Unity and the Struggle for Justice

Part One of a Three Part series of interviews with the progressive militants of hip-hop culture.

M-1, aka Mutulu Olugabala, is an African rapper best known for his work with stic.man in the critically acclaimed underground conscious hip-hop duo Dead Prez. Based out of New York, M1 stopped by to perform and meet community members at the Black Action Defence Committee BBQ in Lawrence Heights before heading out to rock The Docks as part of the Jazz By Genre festival.

Basics: “We’re here with M-1 from Dead Prez…I see your reading the book Black and Brown: African Americans and the Mexican Revolution… During those times, there was some elements of Brown/Black solidarity. What do you see as the prospects for the coalescing of Latino organizations and black peoples organizations resisting capitalism?”

M-1: “There always has been. We have a historical relationship – the same relationship that ‘Cha-Cha’ Jimenez [Founder of the Puerto Rican-American revolutionary organization Young Lords Party -ed.] had with Fred Hampton [Founder of Chicago chapter of Black Panther Party -ed.]. We learned from each other’s struggles in creating the Young Lord Party and the Black Panther Party. For example, I recently connected with the Brown Berets out in Utah… So, these things are happening. Only, we must recognize the kind of propaganda that hinders those relationships between Black and Brown; such as the propaganda of Blacks versus Browns in Los Angeles, which has each other shooting one another down just because we speak another language. So that’s what we don’t want to happen. But we have always had that history of Black and Brown organizations that have worked side by side in very principled relationships.”

Basics: “Yesterday, you and Umi [of P.O.W./Peoples Army/RBG Fam - ed.] went to Lawrence Heights to perform for the community. As you may have heard from some of the people you have spoken to up there, Jungle is now undergoing a process of gentrification. As with all social housing, the Municipal government of Toronto is trying to push out a lot of the people who are there, and sell off a large portion of the area because it’s the largest housing project in Canada, and they’re trying to sell it to private developers. We’ve got Umi’s comments on what’s going on in the U.S. in terms of gentrification. What are some of your thoughts on gentrification?”

M-1: “Well, what happened with ‘white flight’ in the 1970s is that white people thought it would be safer out in the suburbs with black people being grouped up in the cities. But for black people it was convenient, we were so close to the work place. But now, for a number of different factors, there is a movement of white people back towards the inner city, causing gentrification. Communities which have been demonized and criminalized – left into shells of what they were and havens of zombied-out crack youth and other drug activity – and now they’re trying to raise the property value of these areas by pushing out the black people. Our bills are barely being paid now. So when the property values of the area goes up, it does a lot to be able to outstretch our means to live, driving us away from our communities.”

Basics: “You mentioned white people moving out to the suburbs because they thought it would be safer. And now, the argument that the Municipal government and other people are trying to use to justify gentrification is that the only way these communities are going to be safe is if they bring in “mixed-income housing”. What would be your response to that?”

M-1: “This is economic racism, because what it does is change the qualifications for people to be able to live in the community – it just says, no blacks allowed, basically.” 

Part Two, Next Issue: Wise Intelligent of Poor Righteous Teachers

Peoples’ Tribunal on Hurricane Katrina Indicts Bush Regime

Charges gross negligence, Crimes Against Humanity.

When governments deliver nothing but injustice, people sometimes take justice into their own hands. From August 29 to September 2, 2007, two years on from Hurricane Katrina, a team of lawyers, professors, and legal experts from around the world came together with activists, residents and victims of New Orleans to convene the International Tribunal on Katrina and Rita. Although the Tribunal was not ‘official’, (as the U.S. government would never sanction a legal process that might find itself guilty at so many levels), the organizations convening the Tribunal stated that it “is a critical step in the ongoing struggle for the right of return and a self-determining reconstruction process”, with it has the intent to “expose the human rights abuses committed against the peoples of New Orleans and the Gulf Coast by the US government and its agents”.
The Tribunal covered a wide range of crimes and abuses committed by the U.S. government. First, there was the racist and anti-poor discrimination of the government for not keeping up the maintenance of the levee in the poorer and black neighbourhood of the Lower Ninth Ward. Despite being a poor neighbourhood, the Lower Ninth Ward was home to one of America’s oldest settlements African-Americans. The area was also home to one of America’s highest black homeownership rates in the country. But many of these homes today, the public and the private, have disappeared – not simply because of the hurricane, but by the bulldozers of ‘redevelopers’ preparing New Orleans for a richer and whiter population. Gentrification and housing rights were major issues dealt with at the Tribunal. One of the major goals that the Tribunal is struggling for is the recognition of the ‘Katrina Diaspora’ as an ‘Internally-Displaced Peoples’ who have the right to return to New Orleans. The following map of the United States shows how far and wide Katrina victims have had to resettle.
The Tribunal also pointed out that while billions of dollars have been poured into New Orleans over the last two years, the money has mostly benefited the tourist industry. So while the annual Mardi Gras party has continued for middle-class tourists from around American, the displaced peoples of New Orleans have been actively kept out.
Roderick Dean testified on prisoners’ rights abuses, and how Katrina prisoners had to wade in their own feces for weeks on end and were denied medications. Other prisoners recounted stories of abuse and torture. Dean was eventually released from jail almost half a year later with no charges laid against him.
The African-American dentist Romell Madison testified that his brother Ronald was shot in the back five times by white police officers while he was stranded on a bridge. Political activist and head of Common Ground Collective Malik Rahim testified on the militarization of New Orleans after Katrina, which included the occupation forces of the National Guard (which had just returned from Iraq), local and state police, private mercenary companies, such as Blackwater, and armed white vigilantes and militias. Sobukwe Shukura of the National Network on Cuba recalled how the U.S. turned away massive amounts of medical aid offered by Cuba and Venezuela to the victims of hurricane Katrina.
The final verdict of the Tribunal will be presented on 10 December 2007, marking the anniversary of the Right of Return March two years ago in December 2005 when over two thousand survivors and their supporters rallied in New Orleans to demand their right to return home.

Immigrant Workers Organize Accross N. America For May Day

Across North America, immigrant workers, workers of colour, and their supporters came out in record numbers for this year’s May Day.
May Day started in 1886 as a commemoration for workers killed by Chicago police during a demonstration demanding an 8 hr work day and the later execution of several worker organizers on fraudulent charges. International workers day is celebrated as a holiday everywhere in the World and is a day when workers go to the streets to demand peace, equality and justice.

In Los Angeles, over 100 000 workers - largely comprised of Latinos - assembled in MacArthur Park during marches calling for the recognition of the rights of undocumented workers. The immigrant workers movement has been organizing to fight the Bush administration’s offensive against Mexican and Latino undocumented workers in the Southern US. Their work has included a massive show of working peoples power in 2006 with a day-long strike and demonstration that had the participation of millions across the United States.

This year’s L.A. demonstrations were met with force from the notoriously racist and brutal Los Angeles Police Department (L.A.P.D). Hundreds of riot police attempted to break up the peaceful demonstrations with batons, shields and rubber coated bullets.
According to eyewitness accounts, hundreds of people “were shot, beaten by night sticks and run out of the park.” Calls from Latino and progressive organizations to fire Police Chief Bratton have been largely ignored by the Mayor of Los Angeles Antonio Villaraigosa.

Sizeable demonstrations were held in Canadian cities as well, including a rally in Montreal that attracted 2000 workers. Hundreds of radical demonstrators staged a breakaway from the more conservative trade union led rally and marched to a nearby military base where they denounced the war in Afghanistan.

In Toronto, May Day organizing took place on the weekend beginning with a demonstration of workers, students and activists calling for the recognition of undocumented workers in Canada. Over 2500 people filled Christie Pitts Park calling for the end to the deportation of undocumented workers and their families that began under the Liberal governments and has continued under Harper’s Conservatives.

Also on the weekend, progressive Latino group Pa’delante organized a workshop at San Lorenzo Church on organizing in the Latino community around workers rights and livable wages. After addressing the mass of 150 workers and family members, organizers spoke with members of the community urging an organized response within the Latino community aimed at getting people to mobilize for a livable wage.

The increasing level of activity on and around May Day from workers in North America shows the rising level of consciousness and organization among working people. The government knows this, and they think that they can ‘discourage’ this by using measures like police brutality against the people. The people must show the police, the government and the bosses that they will not be deterred and that the struggle will continue.

Spike Lee's When the Levees Broke: Out on DVD

A four hour miniseries produced by HBO and directed by Spike Lee, When The Levees Broke chronicles the devastation of New Orleans, an event considered by many African Americans to be “black America’s 9/11”.
Lee drives the point home that the destruction of New Orleans was not primarily a result of Hurricane Katrina, but rather of government negligence. The levee system that protected the primarily poor and black residents of New Orleans had been badly designed by the Army Corps of Engineers and further weakened by lack of maintenance by the state. The stage was set for a catastrophy, the government knew it, but did nothing to prevent it.
Once the levees failed, residents had to battle not only the floodwaters, but also government indifference. People quickly realised that the rich and powerful really didn’t care if they lived or died. In emotionally powerful inverviews and archival footage, Spike Lee captures the fear, despair, and determination of the people of New Orleans. Despite the failures of the state, the working people remain committed to surviving and rebuilding.