Mumia Abu-Jamal's Radio Essays

    Ona Move!
 
    Thank you, Re-Create '68, for inviting me to join your efforts in Denver, to practice real democracy in the shadows of the Empire.
 
    When I think of the DNC, I'm reminded of the words of the great French writer, Voltaire, who, when speaking of the Holy Roman Empire, quipped it "was neither holy,  nor Roman, nor an empire."
 
    The Democratic National Committee is neither democratic, nor national, nor a committee.  If it were democratic why would it reject the voices of the people, who protest against its rule?  If it were national, it wouldn't be driven by imperialist and globalist corporate interests.  (Let us not forget William J. Clinton - perhaps the best known globalist (NAFTA?) in the country).  And if it were truly a committee then anybody could join it - not just the political puppets of corporate power.
 
    In 1968, a Democratic mayor named Daley unleashed brutal and vicious cops on people who dared protest against the Democratic Party's support for the atrocities in Vietnam.  Those young people were allegedly protected under the free speech 'guarantees' of the Constitution. Instead, they got the crap beat out them.
 
    It was imperial war then - and it's imperial war now, and only the names and faces have changed (some names - there's still a Mayor Daley in Chicago).
 
    In fact, things are more repressive today than they were in '68, for then, anti-war activists and students could at least march through the streets.  They got their asses whipped, but at least they marched.  Today, city governments have built cages for protest.  So much for respect for the constitution!
 
    Now, as in LA 2000, you can get your ass whipped -- in a cage!
 
    That is what American democracy looks like in 2008.
 
    For another idea, look at what Pakistan did a few days ago.  When the head-of-state violated the constitution, the people took to the streets.  When he brought out the troops, they continued to protest.  And they demanded impeachment!
 
    There, democracy forced a dictator to resign!
 
    There, democracy marches - ona move!
 
    Here, democracy is in cages, hidden in the boondocks, while alleged representatives sell their souls to the highest corporate bidder, to further the interests of imperial war.
 
    Here, politicians take the label of 'democrat', hire the cops to beat you, hire the media to slander you, so that they can send your children to war for oil pipelines, or to protect foreign despots and princes.
 
    Here, democracy is on life-support, while paid-for politicians give mouth to  mouth to imperialism, rampant globalization and the ravaging of the poor.
 
    Our revered ancestor Frederick Douglass said, "Power concedes nothing without demand.  It never has and never will."  Your protests are in that great spirit of resistance.
 
    We only need more!
 
    Ona Move!  Long Live John Africa!
 
    I thank you all!
 
    Mumia Abu-Jamal
 
 
 
(c) '08 maj
 

    With news of the abrupt resignation of Pakistani general-cum-president, Pervez Musharraf, comes the stark realization that, in Islamabad, democracy means the power of the people over that of a dictator.
 
    It also means that Pakistanis so believe in their Constitution that they were willing to confront a military dictator who violated it.
 
    Musharraf, buffeted by the bellows of opposition, chose to switch, rather than fight.  He knew  that parliamentary opposition parties were intent on impeaching him for violation of the national constitution.
 
    They protested in the streets from the elites to the poor, and Musharraf threw them into jails.  Former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto was assassinated under suspicious circumstances.
 
    Some 7,000 miles away, another president violates the constitution at will, and breaks both statutory and international laws on torture, secret prisons, renditions, illegal detentions, wiretaps -- and on and on. But,of course, in this other democracy, the constitution is an historical artifact, held under special glass in a vacuum of a special gas, something to be worshipped from a distance, while violated daily.
 
    And the national legislature? They favor false stability over all things -- and when the party in opposition recently gained the majority, they immediately announced impeachment was "off the table."
 
    In a nation based on precedent, this means every president -- from now on- can feel free to violate the constitution at will.  He - or she - can go to war on a whim - or lies.  She may order her subordinates to torture, to kidnap, to break any law with impunity, and be sure that she is protected by precedent.
 
    The political classes have decided that the only avenue left for the people is every four years or so, during an election where millionaires are the candidates.  In the meantime, anything goes.
 
    Right?
 
    In the US, democracy is a word that we throw out to justify armed invasions and illegal violations of international law -- it has no intrinsic meaning.
 
    In Pakistan, democracy is thriving and alive.  It marched in the streets, it spoke in the courts, and it ran in the actions of Parliament, demanding impeachment.
 
    In democracy, it seems, Americans have a great deal to learn.
 
--(c) '08 maj

The Foreign Policy of Fools

 
It is impossible to look at recent US diplomacy without discovering that it is one based more on whim and fancy, than reason.
 
That's because much of what passes for diplomacy and foreign policy is driven by the market, which is ultimately, the only true bipartisan feature of the nation's politics.
 
The market buys politicians by the bushel, and when they are slick enough to gain office, they serve corporate interests first, second, and always.
 
When you think about it, isn't this a perversity of democracy?
 
In Raj Patel's brilliant new book,  Stuffed & Starved: The Hidden Battle for the World Food System (Brooklyn, NY: Melville House Publ., 2008) we find a telling quotation from Robert Strauss, the former head of the Democratic National Committee, describing his relationship with the agricultural business giant, Archer Daniels Midland.  Speaking of the company's former chairman, Strauss said, "Dwayne Andreas just owns me. But I mean that in a nice way" (pp.112-13).
 
If you visited the nation's capital, you'd doubtless find hundreds of men and women who could quite effortlessly replace ADM with Lockheed-Martin, Northrop Grumman, Occidental Petroleum, Exxon Mobil, Halliburton ad infinitum.
 
And it is precisely on behalf of such interests that foreign policy is made.  It's not, and has never been, democracy.  It's not freedom.  It's none of these things.  It's what's good for business.
 
This may seem a hard truth, but it is the truth.
 
The Iraq war was a pipe dream of the energy corporations, and opposed by more Americans than almost any war in generations.  Who did the politicians listen to -- the people? -- or the corporations?
 
    The impact on US foreign policy  and democracy couldn't be more pronounced, as shown by incumbent President Bush's recent visit to the Middle East.  America's closest allies essentially gave him the brush-off, and one US-supported leader, Lebanon's Prime Minister, Fuad Saniora, actually told Bush that he didn't have time to rap -- he had another, more important meeting -- with Hezbollah.
 
Indeed, several weeks later Lebanon's Parliament voted to give more power to Hezbollah.
 
That's one side-effect of US foreign policy; here's another.
 
Virtually every elected forum in Pakistan has voted for the impeachment of Pakistan's so-called President (and US ally) Pervez Musharraf, the de facto dictator who locked up his opponents, tossed lawyers in jail, and removed Supreme Court judges who didn't vote his way.  Who has America supported - the dictator? -- or the People?
 
How's this supporting democracy?
 
Over the border in Afghanistan, the US supports what may be called a  narcocracy -- or a narco-state.
 
The preferred US ally is a military junta (or dictatorship) which oppressed its people with violence and terror.  We have nearly a century of examples to prove this all throughout Latin America.
 
What kind of foreign policy is this but an imperial one?  One designed to make millions of enemies, instead of a few isolated 'friends?'
 

Mumia Abu-Jamal (c) 8/16/08
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Source: "Hezbollah Gains Power in Lebanon,"  USA Today, 8/13/08, 5A; Mr. Patel's book, Stuffed & Starved, is available at:www.mhpbooks.com

The conflict between Russia and Georgia gives us some idea of things to come.

It shows, more than conflicts in Eastern Europe, the extra costs of the Iraqi Imperial adventure.

For America, though it would dearly love to intervene, hasn't the troops nor the material to engage the Russians on Georgia's behalf.

Instead, it is relegated to the sidelines while French President Nicolas Sarkozy mediates a cease fire between the two sides, while the US issues press releases.

The US media has, once again, echoed the administration line, which points Russians as the side which provoked the conflict. But most media can only do so if it ignores news reports from early August, which stated that Georgian troops attacked rebel fighters in South Ossetia, an impoverished mountainous region which won independence from Georgia after a bloody war in the early '90's.

The Russian incursion also shows that the country, now flush with cash, is a far cry from the debtor nation of a decade ago. This was a demonstration as much to Georgia as it was to the world, of a new Russia, aggressive, armed and willing to enter its former territories of the Soviet era.

Russian aggressiveness was made possible in part by its recent oil wealth. As a major oil power, it has profited from the rise in prices since the Iraq invasion, which sent prices soaring worldwide.

The actions of one state influences the fate and actions of other states.

And where was US outrage at military attacks on neighbors when Israel bombed Lebanon from coast to coast? When the Arab League begged the US to mediate peace between the two warring sides, America's Secretary of State, Condoleeza Rice, said what people in Lebanon were seeing weren't bombs, death and destruction, but "the birth pangs of democracy."

But that was then -- this is now.

Russia saw an opportunity, provided a justification; and seized it.
Sound familiar?

[Source: Schwirtz, Michael, "6 Die as Georgia Battles Rebel Group," Sun. New York Times, 8/3/08, p.12.]

(c) 8/13/08 Mumia Abu-Jamal

As we are on the eve of what may be the most powerful Black achievement in U.S. history, it would be well to examine the history of Black political leadership in this country.
 
Most historical researchers look to the 1967 election of Carl Stokes, (1927-1996), as Mayor of Cleveland, Ohio as the emergence of black political power in major American cities.  Many Blacks saw this as the beginning of an age of freedom for our people.
 
From the 1960's to now, we most certainly have been disabused of that notion.
 
For while black political leadership has surely been a source of pride, they have not been a source of black political power.
 
That's because as agents of the States, they must defend the interests of the State, even when this conflicts with the interests of their people.
 
For example, let's look at the experience of Mayor Stokes.
 
Shortly after taking office, Stokes appointed former U.S. Army Lt.-General Benjamin O. Davis, Jr. as his public safety director (a kind of super police chief).  Gen. Davis, fresh from the rigors of Vietnam, ordered 30,000 rounds of hollow point  (or dum-dum) bullets, items in violation of the laws of war.
 
The object of his ire?  The Cleveland branch of the Black Panther Party, and a local office of the National Committee to Combat Fascism, a Panther support group.
 
In Aug. 1970, Gen. Davis resigned from the post, and criticized Mayor Stokes for not giving him sufficient support in his battle against radicals (like the Panthers).
 
Stokes, the more politically adroit of the two, made Davis look bad for ordering ammo which violated the Geneva Conventions, but Stokes' personal papers revealed meetings between the two men, and their agreement on dum-dums as appropriate arms to be used against Panthers.
 
Just because he was a Black mayor, didn't mean he wasn't dedicated to destroying a Black organization.  Indeed, in times of Black uprising and mass discontent, Black mayors seem the perfect instrument of repression, for they dispel charges of racism.
 
If Barack Obama wins the White House, it will be a considerable political achievement.  It will be made possible only by the votes of millions of whites, most especially younger voters.
 
This does not diminish such an achievement, it just sharpens the nature of it.
 
But Black faces in high places does not freedom make.
 
Power is far more than presence.  It is the ability to meet people's political objectives of freedom, independence and material well-being.
 
We are as far from those objectives as we were in 1967.
 
8/6/08 (c) '08 Mumia Abu-Jamal

[Source: Nissim-Sabat, Ryan, "Panthers Set Up Shop in Cleveland," p.111; from Judson L. Jeffries, ed., COMRADES: Local History of the Black Panther Party  (Blomington/Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2007), pp. 89-144.]

Several days ago, a majority of the US House of Representatives approved a resolution apologizing for slavery.  The Senate has not yet moved on such a measure, and probably has no intention to do so.
 
That it comes today, some 143 years after slavery was prohibited in the Constitution (notice I said 'prohibited', and not stopped, for historians and scholars have uncovered that the trade continued long thereafter, as an underground one, kind of like drugs today), gives us some idea of how deeply slavery still resides in American consciousness, and how empty such an apology is in light of all that has intervened in the century and a half since the cessation of the Civil War.

It's like robbing someone, growing fat and rich on stolen wealth, and then passing that person on the street, who is now homeless, destitute and starving -- and tossing him a nickel. (Except, of course, in the case of the US House resolution, there isn't even a nickel!).

As the great Black historian, J. A. Rogers taught us (especially in his Africa's Gift to America {1961} ) the wealth of America was founded on African slavery.  One need look no further than the brilliant young W.E.B. DuBois, who published his doctoral thesis, The Suppression of the African Slave Trade to the United States of America: 1638-1870 (1896).    For, citing contemporary sources, DuBois quoted the following: "The number of persons engaged in the slave - trade, and the amount of capital embarked on it, exceed our powers of calculation.  The city of New York has been until of late {1862} the principal port of the world for this infamous trade..." [p. 179].

Centuries of slavery, the intentional destruction of families, tribes, and nations; ripping people asunder from their religions, their clans, their spouses, children, lands and all that they knew and loved -- for centuries -- to build and enrich a nation of strangers -- who enforced the practices of slavery for a hundred years after it's supposed abolition; only to consign the grandchildren of these people to the bitter half-lives of sub-par education, poor housing, second rate health care, under/employment, the cruelties of mass incarceration and a cynical judicial and political system that endlessly engages in white supremacy (without the labels)....

Yeah, a political apology should just about cover that.

8/9/08 (c) Mumia Abu-Jamal

The recent world tour of freshman Sen. Barack Obama, was, by any measure, a blockbuster.

The senator's trek to Iraq, Jordan, Israel, Germany, France, and England was a hit, from the word go.

What was more impressive, however, were the graphics.  The crowds (especially in Germany) were nothing if not spectacular.

In political terms, the senator's campaign could hardly have asked for more.

If it wouldn't seem to smarmy, perhaps they ought to give thanks to the Republican candidate, John McCain, who harped on Obama's lack of travel to Iraq for weeks.

What happens?

Obama goes to Iraq, and the U.S. supported Iraqi puppet, Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki, essentially endorses Obama's timetable to remove the bulk of US troops.

McCain sought airtime in ethnic eateries, or geriatric golf greens.

His comments attacking Obama seemed, by contrast, petulant and small.

It was, quite frankly, stunning to see world leaders fall under his sway, as if the election were a mere formality.

When he met Germany's Prime Minister, Angela Merkel, one could only flashback to lame duck President Bush's impolitic grasp of her shoulders, which forced her to grimace and gasp at the invasion of her personal and political space.

Right wingers have, predictably, attacked his tour on numerous counts.  "He thinks he's already president", some said.  "He's arrogant", said others.  Still others opined that he was 'inexperienced.'

If his global tour had one flaw, it was that it was too successful, for it cast an unflattering light on the incumbent Bush Administration, which is, to put it lightly, far from popular in the world today.  This, of course, also impacts McCain's campaign.

Whether he helped his domestic campaign is questionable.

What is not is the palpable hunger of many countries for a change from what has been.

7/27/08   (c)  '08 Mumia Abu-Jamal