The Con Game Continues
By Junious Ricardo Stanton
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Five months after the United
States was forced by lack of support to drop a U.N.
resolution seeking authority to attack Iraq,
administration officials say they do not want a repeat of
that battle. They say they expect the United States to
engage in quiet, behind-the-scenes negotiations on the
text of the resolution, to ensure it would be agreeable to
the veto-wielding permanent members and the rest of the
Security Council, and to project a unanimous,
internationally backed stand on what happens next in Iraq.
The effort to secure international assistance is "a
tacit admission that we don't have the forces there to get
the job done," Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., said
Wednesday on ABC's "Good Morning America."
"If we don't turn things around in the next few
months, we are facing a very serious long-term,
problem." Diplomats say placing reconstruction under
U.N. auspices would make it easier to garner contributions
from nations that opposed the war, notably France and
Germany. Belgium also said last week that it may be
willing to donate money if the United Nations was
"playing a central role" in reconstruction Associated
Press report date Sept. 3, 2003 |
The Bush administration in a
shameless about face is scrambling to garner UN participation in
what for them is becoming an increasingly embarrassing debacle in
Iraq. After calling the UN irrelevant because it did not rubber
stamp his aggression and planned pillage of Iraq, Bush now finds
himself in deep do-do. Militarily, he faces stiffening Iraqi
resistance, mounting US casualties, domestic fall out from the
war’s increasing costs, internal strife which is threatening to
turn Iraq into full blown guerrilla war ,and a major PR and
propaganda headache to put a positive spin on an obviously poorly
planned occupational strategy.
Bush and Co. are preparing to
bribe the UN and any nation willing to risk partnering in his
quagmire in Iraq. Seeing his re-election chances sinking as the
occupation costs and casualties escalate, Bush is forced to eat
crow and persuade France and Germany to back his new plan for UN
inclusion in the “reconstruction” of Iraq. For their part
“Old Europe” has been cool towards Bush’s overtures
preferring to make him sweat and squirm as they parley theirs
votes as veto-wielding permanent members of the UN Security
Council while they press for an even wider role for the UN in
Iraq.
For public consumption Bush
talks about “giving the UN a role in the reconstruction of
Iraq.” Behind the scenes Bush and Co. are desperately seeking
ways to minimize their costs of the Iraqi occupation and extricate
themselves from the folly and deepening negative consequences of
their “go it alone, winner take all” policies.
Foolishly listening to their own
trumped up intelligence and exiled Iraqi dissidents who told them
what they wanted to hear in return for promises of power and
support once Saddam Hussein was overthrown -- Bush, Cheney,
Rumsfeld, and Co now find themselves having to face the reality
that imperialism and nation molding on a grand scale are not the
same as doing little stuff like undermining the economy of a
country or covert regime change like they are attempting in
Venezuela and Zimbabwe.
Most of the media
focus has been on Iraq because their lies came unraveled
immediately not finding any WMD. But the media has yet to address
the situation in Afghanistan where the country has deteriorated to
the point the only turf the US forces control is the capital and
that is precarious.
The US media keeps the
AmeriKKKan public asleep and ignorant of what is really going on
in Afghanistan and is doing the best it can to minimize the
travesty in Iraq. Unfortunately for Bush the world is watching and
they see how inept his plan is.
Ahmed Chalabi -- the wanna-be
president of Iraq and his Iraqi National Congress, a creation of
an AmeriKKKan PR firm -- sold Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz on the idea
that US troops would be warmly welcomed and greeted with rose petals.
Instead the Iraqis resent their presence and want them out. The US
handpicked the ruling Iraqi Council but the inter-and-intra
factional intrigue Saddam Hussein ruthlessly kept in check is
erupting in the puppet council selected by the US.
Tensions are mounting:
resistance is growing despite of or perhaps because of the
conspicuous shows of force by the US invaders (like the displaying
of the bodies Hussein’s sons in blatant disrespect of
Muslim tradition) and vital services and a sense of normalcy have
not returned to the country. Anger and chaos abound and the
resistance forces are astutely taking advantage of the situation.
Bush and Co. are committed to
occupying and permanently controlling Iraq. They never developed
an exit scenario (remember the US has kept troops in Europe and
Japan for fifty years!). However they were stunned by the level
and effectiveness of the resistance which is growing daily. The
only way to save face and still accomplish their objectives of
expropriating Iraqi oil and establishing US hegemony in the region
is to persuade the UN to join their imperialistic quicksand party.
posted 11 September 2003
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The New Jim Crow
Mass Incarceration in the Age of
Colorblindness
By Michele Alexander
Contrary to the
rosy picture of race embodied in Barack
Obama's political success and Oprah
Winfrey's financial success, legal
scholar Alexander argues vigorously and
persuasively that [w]e have not ended
racial caste in America; we have merely
redesigned it. Jim Crow and legal racial
segregation has been replaced by mass
incarceration as a system of social
control (More African Americans are
under correctional control today... than
were enslaved in 1850). Alexander
reviews American racial history from the
colonies to the Clinton administration,
delineating its transformation into the
war on drugs. She offers an acute
analysis of the effect of this mass
incarceration upon former inmates who
will be discriminated against, legally,
for the rest of their lives, denied
employment, housing, education, and
public benefits. Most provocatively, she
reveals how both the move toward
colorblindness and affirmative action
may blur our vision of injustice: most
Americans know and don't know the truth
about mass incarceration—but her
carefully researched, deeply engaging,
and thoroughly readable book should
change that.—Publishers
Weekly |
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Blacks in Hispanic Literature: Critical Essays
Edited by
Miriam DeCosta-Willis
Blacks in Hispanic Literature is a
collection of fourteen essays by scholars and
creative writers from Africa and the Americas.
Called one of two significant critical works on
Afro-Hispanic literature to appear in the late
1970s, it includes the pioneering studies of
Carter G. Woodson and
Valaurez B. Spratlin, published in the 1930s, as
well as the essays of scholars whose interpretations
were shaped by the Black aesthetic. The early
essays, primarily of the Black-as-subject in Spanish
medieval and Golden Age literature, provide an
historical context for understanding 20th-century
creative works by African-descended, Hispanophone
writers, such as Cuban
Nicolás Guillén and Ecuadorean poet, novelist,
and scholar
Adalberto Ortiz, whose essay analyzes the
significance of Negritude in Latin America. This
collaborative text set the tone for later
conferences in which writers and scholars worked
together to promote, disseminate, and critique the
literature of Spanish-speaking people of African
descent. . . .
Cited by a
literary critic in 2004 as "the seminal study in the
field of Afro-Hispanic Literature . . . on which
most scholars in the field 'cut their teeth'."
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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
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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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