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American Politics:
The Big Lie!
By Joe Williams III
The reason people are poor in America is
because the American political machine creates an image that
society will become greater next year, or in the near future.
This is a lie. America’s reality is based on a dual
premise. It is
often expressed in various terms: the rich versus the poor, the
haves versus the have-nots, the capitalist versus the workers,
the suburbs versus the slums (ghettos), or the whites versus
people of color.
No matter how you view reality, it is very
clear that American society, along with the rest of the world,
is based on the fight over property.
The fight over property, (natural resources) items,
products, commodities, is the majority element that divides
humans in societies.
However, unlike most societies in the
world, America’s conflict over commodity production and consumption
is not one of lack, or scarcity, but one of greed, plenty,
over-production. In
essence, we are a nation with mass poverty, while we are
over-producing. In
essence, our production is superior because of science and
technology, which includes farm technology, educational
techniques, and weapons of mass destruction, and mass production
of consumption items, pleasure, leisure, raw materials, and
commodities.
One major factor of commodity production
under capitalism, is that even the youth in high school are
trained to be an extension of the commodity process.
In other words, even the youth are raised to be
extensions of the “machine.”
So it is no wonder that “x” amount of youth are
guided towards entering prisons, gangs, law enforcement,
industrial workers, rappers, educators, addicts and
homelessness. The
whole face of society is a staged reality.
We have youth lingering in prisons because of poverty
related crimes, and capitalists, who live off the labor and
sweat of others, living a life of luxury, living as if they were
gods.
Under the capitalist system, unemployment
is a must. The
whole theory of commodity production is “produce low, sell
high.” In other
words, the huge amount of unemployed workers in society is a
planned and structured necessity.
Wages must be kept as low as humanly possible, so profits
will yield as great a dividend as possible.
The fact that so many working people are unemployed is a
plus for capitalists. The
capitalist forces the working class to fight and compete over
jobs, which, in many instances, only serves to lower wages and
working standards. In
the back of every capitalist mind, is the dream of having a
workplace free from unions, the organized self-defense of the
working class.
Above, I mentioned the influence of
capitalist society on youth, but society under capitalism reins
over all of society, and stand superior to ever economic
structure in the past. Capitalism
is the foundation of our families, our births, our deaths, and
even our marriages. Our
whole existence, spiritual (religious) rituals, cultural norms,
relationships, are all determined by the system of commodity
production (capitalism), even the way we have and enjoy, or not
enjoy, sex.
So, if I was to take these premises to
their most extreme conclusions, we are treated by the capitalist
class as robots, mentally programmed devices, or machines, to
cater our labor and life to the capitalist class, a class of
wealth, leisure, luxury, pleasure, idol time, and long, extended
live. While, we, the working class, the poor, die young with
little, if anything, to show for our suffering, our blood, our
sacrifice, our labor.
The deadly reality of capitalist society,
it that enough is never enough.
This is why we have so many wars, so many conflicts,
around the world. The rulers of various countries try to conquer
each other to enlarge their profits, they kill each other, and
us, to control the land, the productive forces, the human
(workers and consumers) resources, the commodities, and the
buying and selling of goods and services.
It is imperative that we as workers view
ourselves as a social class; we must stop seeing each other as
enemies. We are
divided by religion, by race, by economic status, by sex and
national boundaries. However,
if we are to seek out and attain our natural birth right, which
is a life of prosperity, security, peace, leisure, and love for
all humanity, we must control our work, our knowledge, and our
production and consumption of what we know, what we produce,
where and how we live.
* *
* * * I was born in New Orleans during the Jim
Crow segregated. I had to ride in the back of the bus, could
not attend movie theaters with whites, couldn't drink out the same
water fountains, and I had to learn how to read out of used books
that were handed down from white schools.
I moved to Chicago in the early 60s.
I joined Jesse Jackson's Operation Breadbasket. I helped
organize the economic boycotts of various supermarkets.
I later moved to Los Angeles and became
a radical. I was involved in the following movements:
1.
The peace and anti-war movement.
2.
The anti-police abuse and terror movement.
3.
The labor movement.
4.
The African Liberation Movement.
5.
The prison rights movement.
6.
The free all political prisoners movement
I also became a political and social
writer.
1. Political and social commentaries.
2. Social poetry.
3. News articles.
I now reside in San Diego, California.
tedoil@aol.com
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Salvage the Bones
A Novel by Jesmyn Ward
On one level, Salvage the Bones is a simple story about a poor black family that’s about to be trashed by one of the most deadly hurricanes in U.S. history. What makes the novel so powerful, though, is the way Ward winds private passions with that menace gathering force out in the Gulf of Mexico. Without a hint of pretension, in the simple lives of these poor people living among chickens and abandoned cars, she evokes the tenacious love and desperation of classical tragedy. The force that pushes back against Katrina’s inexorable winds is the voice of Ward’s narrator, a 14-year-old girl named Esch, the only daughter among four siblings. Precocious, passionate and sensitive, she speaks almost entirely in phrases soaked in her family’s raw land. Everything here is gritty, loamy and alive, as though the very soil were animated. Her brother’s “blood smells like wet hot earth after summer rain. . . . His scalp looks like fresh turned dirt.” Her father’s hands “are like gravel,” while her own hand “slides through his grip like a wet fish,” and a handsome boy’s “muscles jabbered like chickens.” Admittedly, Ward can push so hard on this simile-obsessed style that her paragraphs risk sounding like a compost heap, but this isn’t usually just metaphor for metaphor’s sake. She conveys something fundamental about Esch’s fluid state of mind: her figurative sense of the world in which all things correspond and connect. She and her brothers live in a ramshackle house steeped in grief since their mother died giving birth to her last child. . . . What remains, what’s salvaged, is something indomitable in these tough siblings, the strength of their love, the permanence of their devotion.—WashingtonPost |
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Incognegro: A Memoir of
Exile and Apartheid
By Frank B. Wilderson, III
Wilderson, a professor,
writer and filmmaker from
the Midwest,
presents a gripping account
of his role in the downfall
of South African apartheid
as one of only two black
Americans in the African
National Congress (ANC).
After marrying a South
African law student, Wilderson reluctantly
returns with her to South
Africa in the early 1990s,
where he teaches
Johannesburg and Soweto
students, and soon joins the
military wing of the ANC.
Wilderson's stinging
portrait of Nelson Mandela
as a petulant elder eager to
accommodate his white
countrymen will jolt readers
who've accepted the
reverential treatment
usually accorded him. After
the assassination of
Mandela's rival, South
African Communist Party
leader Chris Hani, Mandela's
regime deems Wilderson's
public questions a threat to
national security; soon,
having lost his stomach for
the cause, he returns to
America.
Wilderson has a
distinct, powerful voice and
a strong story that shuffles
between the indignities of
Johannesburg life and his
early years in Minneapolis,
the precocious child of
academics who barely
tolerate his emerging
political consciousness.
Wilderson's observations
about love within and across
the color line and cultural
divides are as provocative
as his politics; despite
some distracting
digressions, this is a
riveting memoir of
apartheid's last days.—Publishers
Weekly
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The White Masters of the
World
From
The World and Africa, 1965
By W. E. B. Du Bois
W. E. B. Du Bois’
Arraignment and Indictment of White Civilization
(Fletcher)
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Ancient African Nations
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Negro Digest /
Black World
Browse all issues
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Enjoy!
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The Death of Emmett Till by Bob Dylan
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The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll
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Only a Pawn in Their Game
Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson Thanks America for
Slavery /
George Jackson /
Hurricane Carter
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The Journal of Negro History issues at Project Gutenberg
The
Haitian Declaration of Independence 1804
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January 1, 1804 -- The Founding of
Haiti
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ChickenBones Store
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update
29 December 2011
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