Edward Snowden is A Hero

Yesterday, the New York Times Editorial Board wrote:

Seven months ago, the world began to learn the vast scope of the National Security Agency’s reach into the lives of hundreds of millions of people in the United States and around the globe, as it collects information about their phone calls, their email messages, their friends and contacts, how they spend their days and where they spend their nights. The public learned in great detail how the agency has exceeded its mandate and abused its authority, prompting outrage at kitchen tables and at the desks of Congress, which may finally begin to limit these practices.

The revelations have already prompted two federal judges to accuse the N.S.A. of violating the Constitution (although a third, unfortunately, found the dragnet surveillance to be legal). A panel appointed by President Obama issued a powerful indictment of the agency’s invasions of privacy and called for a major overhaul of its operations.

All of this is entirely because of information provided to journalists by Edward Snowden, the former N.S.A. contractor who stole a trove of highly classified documents after he became disillusioned with the agency’s voraciousness. Mr. Snowden is now living in Russia, on the run from American charges of espionage and theft, and he faces the prospect of spending the rest of his life looking over his shoulder.

Considering the enormous value of the information he has revealed, and the abuses he has exposed, Mr. Snowden deserves better than a life of permanent exile, fear and flight. He may have committed a crime to do so, but he has done his country a great service. It is time for the United States to offer Mr. Snowden a plea bargain or some form of clemency that would allow him to return home, face at least substantially reduced punishment in light of his role as a whistle-blower, and have the hope of a life advocating for greater privacy and far stronger oversight of the runaway intelligence community.

In my eyes, Edward Snowden is a hero for exposing the NSA's illegal and unconstitutional conduct. The President should grant him clemency. However, American politics make that virtually impossible.

More people should be concerned about the NSA collecting private information on millions of innocent Americans. Unfortunately, Obama loyalists and conservatives are more interested in demonizing the messenger.  

Sadly, many of my fellow progressives are more interested in defending the nation's first African American president.  That trumps everything, including logic and principle.  From their prospective, constitutional principles are practically irrelevant or an afterthought.  If any other person was in the White House, I doubt that those so-called progressives would vigorously defend the NSA's despicable practices. I guess if you put a black face on Orwellian policies that makes them acceptable. Have we forgotten about Cointelpro and its devastating impact on the black community? I guess so.

Many assert that the NSA's massive surveillance program is necessary to prevent terrorist attacks. When people have been programmed to be fearful, they will voluntarily surrender their constitutional rights to Big Brother. Here is the truth.  As reported on NBC News Investigative Reports,

A member of the White House review panel on NSA surveillance said he was “absolutely” surprised when he discovered the agency’s lack of evidence that the bulk collection of telephone call records had thwarted any terrorist attacks.

“It was, ‘Huh, hello? What are we doing here?’” said Geoffrey Stone, a University of Chicago law professor, in an interview with NBC News. “The results were very thin.”

While Stone said the mass collection of telephone call records was a “logical program” from the NSA’s perspective, one question the White House panel was seeking to answer was whether it had actually stopped “any [terror attacks] that might have been really big.”

“We found none,” said Stone.

Wake up, people.

Marijuana Should Be Legalized

Happy New Year, folks. Colorado celebrated the New Year by blazing up some weed. The Huffington Post reports that:

For more than 70 years, the sale of marijuana for recreational use has been criminally prohibited in the United States. But that ban, as it has existed for decades, ended Wednesday in Colorado.

The historic first, legal sales of recreational marijuana to those 21-and-older began in the morning at select dispensaries in Colorado -- the first state in the nation, and the first government in the world, to control and regulate a legal recreational marijuana industry.

A couple of months ago, the Nation reported that:

Over the last fifteen years, police departments in the United States made 10 million arrests for marijuana possession—an average of almost 700,000 arrests a year. Police arrest blacks for marijuana possession at higher rates than whites in every state and nearly every city and county—as FBI Uniform Crime Reports and state databases indisputably show. States with the largest racial disparities arrest blacks at six times the rate of whites. This list includes Alabama, Illinois, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Minnesota, Pennsylvania, Nebraska, Nevada, New York and Wisconsin.

Big city police departments are among the worst offenders. Police in Los Angeles, Chicago and New York have arrested blacks for marijuana possession at more than seven times the rate of whites. Since 1997, New York City alone has arrested and jailed more than 600,000 people for possessing marijuana; about 87 percent of the arrests are of blacks and Latinos. For years, police in New York and Chicago have arrested more young blacks and Latinos for simple marijuana possession than for any other criminal offense whatsoever.

Other large urban areas that make huge numbers of racially biased arrests include Atlanta, Baltimore, Buffalo, Cleveland, Dallas–Fort Worth, Detroit, Fort Lauderdale, Houston, Las Vegas, Memphis, Miami, Nashville, Philadelphia, St. Louis, Tampa and Washington, DC. And across the United States, one-third of marijuana arrestees are teenagers; 62 percent are age 24 or younger; and most of them are ordinary high school or college students and young workers.

I do not condone the use of marijuana. I never have and will never use it. However, in light of the discriminatory enforcement of drug laws in this country, I believe that marijuana should be legalized and regulated like any other controlled substances. Everyone knows that the War on Drugs has been a complete failure. It has not stopped anyone from using drugs. As documented in Michelle Alexander's masterpiece The New Jim Crow, it has only led to the mass incarceration of black people.

The Ongoing Conflicts in the Motherland

"Yacub said, 'When you go back among them, lie about them to each other, and when they start fighting, ask them to let you be the mediator. And as soon as you become the mediator then you're the boss.' The white man has done this trick everywhere." Malcolm X

For the past couple of weeks, violent conflicts have erupted in the Central African Republic and South Sudan.

All Africa reports that:

The sectarian violence in the Central African Republic, CAR, is gaining in intensity in spite of the deployment of 1,600 French 'Opération Sangaris' troops in the capital, Bangui, beginning on December 5, 2013. The French were later followed on December 19, 2013 by the African Union, AU-led International Mission for Support to the Central African Republic, MISCA peacekeeping force.

Commanded by Cameroonian-born Brigadier Gen. Martin Tumenta Chomu, the 3,600-strong MISCA force whose strength is expected to reach 6,000 men, replaced the sub-regional FOMAC mission that had been battling to restore peace to the war-ravaged country. Both deployments were preceded by two days of unprecedented sectarian bloodletting in Bangui at the beginning of the month between Moslem and Christian gunmen and civilians.

Military Deployment, Rising Violence

Both 'Opération Sangaris' and MISCA have so far deployed hundreds of troops in the capital, but they are yet to restore a semblance of normalcy. Rather, Christian-on-Moslem and Moslem-on-Christian violence has been on the increase in recent days. Overwhelmed by the situation, French President, François Hollande, over the weekend called for the involvement of the UN to stem the growing spectre of violence.

Over 40 people were killed on Christmas Day 2013. A mass grave containing at least 30 Moslem corpses was discovered near the Roux Barracks on Panthers' Hill, close to the Presidential Palace on December 26, 2013. On the same day, two Congo (Brazzaville) police peacekeepers were killed in a clash with the Presidential Guard manned by former Séléka fighters. Prime Minister Nicolas Tiangaye, whose residence was earlier ransacked by militia men, now lives and operates from Bangui M'Poko International Airport under the protection of French troops.

The Wall Street Journal reports that:

In the space of two weeks, the world's youngest nation has tumbled from a promising protégé of the West to a broken state with little hope for peace.

South Sudan now stands divided between government and rebel-controlled territory. The battle between the president and his former deputy has split much of the nation along ethnic lines. And in a country where oil is power, the rebels control one oil-producing state and the government the other.

Now, many Sudanese worry that their chance at peace is over, and the new normal is ethnic warfare.

"This is something we were trying to prevent for a long time. And we did not manage to," said Garang Majak Bol, the government's head of legal affairs and human rights.

Fighting continues despite calls for a truce. More than 1,000 people have been killed in this nation of 10 million and well over 120,000 have fled their homes. The country's two largest ethnic groups—the Dinka and the Nuer—have gone on killing sprees against each other...

This wasn't the future South Sudan was supposed to have after Western governments used aid and influence to help carve the republic from Sudan in 2011 after its decadeslong struggle for independence. Without the religious battle with the largely Muslim regime to the north, the largely Christian south was expected to drill for oil and prosper.

Diplomats from the U.S., China, the East African region and elsewhere are now trying to broker a cease fire between President Salva Kiir and his former Vice President, Riek Machar. Mr. Kiir has said he is ready to stop fighting and talk. Mr. Machar has responded he will only enter negotiations if 11 of his compatriots who have been arrested are released. Both sides have moved to seize territory from the other in recent days.

Religious, ethnic and personality differences are a smoke screen.  Those differences are not the root cause of the violence.  Such conflicts are the result of the continuing legacy of colonialism.  It is no coincidence that former colonial power France has deployed troops to CAR.  The U.S., China and others are not negotiating a cease fire out of the goodness of their hearts.  Ultimately, it is about controlling Africa's resources. Those resources include oil, diamonds, gold, copper and silver. While CAR and South Sudan remain two of the poorest countries in the world, the West and others will plunder their natural resources.

Mr. President, Don't Turn Your Back on Us

USA Today reports that:

Some of President Obama's staunchest supporters Monday announced their opposition to his nominees for federal courts in Georgia.

The group, which included civil rights luminaries such as Rep. John Lewis, D-Ga., the Rev. Joseph Lowery and Rev. C.T. Vivian, Georgia's black congressional delegation and a long list of African-American civil rights groups and legal associations, is protesting six nominees to the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals and the Northern District of Georgia. They say the nominees lack diversity and that one defended Georgia's voter-identification law and another supported flying the Confederate flag at the state Capitol.

"Somebody has made a tragic mistake," said Lowery, speaking from the pulpit at Ebenezer Baptist Church, Martin Luther King Jr.'s one-time congregation. "We've not come to attack the president. Somebody did this for him. And we say that he must undo it. It is insulting to come into Georgia in 2013 and bring a slate of nominees that is so unrepresentative of the state."

Lowery backed Obama early in his first presidential campaign when many black leaders were supporting Hillary Clinton; in 2009, Obama awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Obama also presented Lewis with the award in 2011 and Vivian with it earlier this year.

The group says that only one of the six nominees is African American. Also, they say that nominee Mark Cohen, an Atlanta attorney, argued in favor of Georgia's Voter ID law, which they say aims to suppress black voting power, and that nominee Michael Boggs voted to keep the Confederate battle flag emblem on the state flag when he was a state representative. Cohen and Boggs could not be reached for comment Monday.

The White House supplied statistics to say that its judicial picks are more diverse than those of previous administrations — 18% of Obama's confirmed judges have been African American, compared with 8% for George W. Bush and 16% for Bill Clinton.

Yes, Mr. President. Overall, your judicial nominations have been more diverse than previous administrations. I commend that.

However, your past record does not excuse or justify your current Georgia judicial nominations. As you know, nominee Mark Cohen supported Georgia's voter ID law. Your Attorney General, Eric Holder, is fighting such laws in Texas and North Carolina. Clearly, you know that such laws are designed to suppress the black vote. Why on earth would you nominate a man like Mark Cohen? Why would you trust someone like Mr. Cohen to make crucial decisions on important civil rights cases?

Why would you nominate Michael Boggs, a man who voted to keep the Confederate battle flag emblem on the Georgia state flag? The Confederate flag is a symbol of slavery, racism, Jim Crow and treason. Anyone who embraces such a symbol is not worthy of being a federal judge. The last thing that we need is someone with a Confederate mentality making decisions in important civil rights cases.

Mr. President, African Americans are your most loyal supporters. As your poll numbers continue to decline, we remain by your side. Certainly, we deserve better than this. Mr. President, do not turn your back on us now. Our concerns should be more important than appeasing your political opponents.

President Obama Begins to Fight the New Jim Crow

Yesterday, President Obama took a step in the right direction.  Slowly, he is chipping away at the New Jim Crow.  For that, I commend the brother. The New York Times reports:

President Obama, expanding his push to curtail severe penalties in drug cases, on Thursday commuted the sentences of eight federal inmates who were convicted of crack cocaine offenses. Each inmate has been imprisoned for at least 15 years, and six were sentenced to life in prison.

It was the first time retroactive relief was provided to a group of inmates who would most likely have received significantly shorter terms if they had been sentenced under current drug laws, sentencing rules and charging policies. Most will be released in 120 days. The commutations opened a major new front in the administration’s efforts to curb soaring taxpayer spending on prisons and to help correct what it has portrayed as inequality in the justice system.

In a statement, Mr. Obama said that each of the eight men and women had been sentenced under what is now recognized as an “unfair system,” including a 100-to-1 sentencing disparity between crack and powder cocaine offenses that was significantly reduced by the Fair Sentencing Act of 2010.

“If they had been sentenced under the current law, many of them would have already served their time and paid their debt to society,” Mr. Obama said. “Instead, because of a disparity in the law that is now recognized as unjust, they remain in prison, separated from their families and their communities, at a cost of millions of taxpayer dollars each year.”

The commutations have come during a pendulum swing away from tough mandatory minimum sentencing laws enacted a generation ago amid the crack epidemic. The policies fueled an 800 percent increase in the number of prisoners in the United States. They also carried a racial charge: Offenses involving crack, which was disproportionately prevalent in impoverished black communities, carried far more severe penalties than those for powder cocaine, favored by affluent white users.

TMZ, We Are Not Niggers

During a TMZ interview, hip hop mogul and ex felon Suge Knight said that he prefers the word "nigga" over the term "African American". He further said, "We ain't from Africa." No one expects a thug and criminal like Suge Knight to drop any gems of wisdom. After all, we are talking about a man who got rich promoting, producing and selling so-called gangsta rap. That music constantly refers to black people as niggas, bitches, hoes, etc.  It celebrates murder, drug dealing, misogyny, pimping, stripping, etc. So again, I do not expect to hear enlightening words from Mr. Knight. 

However, I do expect more TMZ, much more. As reported on the Huffington Post, TMZ had the audacity to create a poll asking their readers if black people should be referred to as African Americans or niggas.

TMZ's poll is a prime example of thoughtlessness and cultural insensitivity. It is clearly racist. Imagine if TMZ created a poll asking if Jews should be referred to as Jews or kikes. Imagine if TMZ created a poll asking if lesbians and gays should be referred to as LGBTs or faggots.  Those groups would raise holy hell, and rightly so.

Where is our outrage? While the world is up in arms about a backwoods, red neck reality star for expressing his religious views, we do not hear a peep from those same people about TMZ's racist poll. Where are the letters or petitions to TMZ condemning TMZ's poll?  Where are the demands for an apology to the African American community?

TMZ, we are not niggers. We are African Americans. As Malcolm X said, we did not come to America on the Mayflower. Our ancestors were kidnapped from the motherland, Africa and dragged to America. We were stripped of our humanity and reduced to chattel property. We came to this country in shackles packed in slave ships like sardines. We were forced to wallow in our waste for long periods of time. When we finally arrived in America, we were beaten, raped, burned, shot, lynched, castrated and butchered.

Not only were we physically oppressed, we were mentally oppressed. Over time, our enemy tried to blot out our original African culture, identity and history. However, our African identity did not die. It evolved, adapted, survived and became African American. Africa is in our blood, physical features, food, music, dance, worship and superstitions. Despite our oppression, we managed to salvage fragments of our cultural identity.

Not only did our oppressor try to destroy our culture, our oppressor indoctrinated us with the myth of white supremacy. To further degrade and denigrate us, our oppressor created and used the most offensive word in the English language, nigger. For centuries, the slave masters and segregationists called us niggers and fed us a diet of self hatred. Eventually, many of us internalized our oppression and began to adopt the racist language of the oppressor. Sadly, we began to call ourselves niggers. Instead of fighting that ugly legacy, TMZ has decided to perpetuate it.

We should be outraged, but we are not.  We would rather jump on another group's bandwagon.

Mandela, Apartheid, The CIA and Israel

While the corporate media focuses on trivial matters like selfies, handshakes and fake sign language interpreters, Democracy Now is one of the few media outlets providing crucial information regarding the legacy of Nelson Mandela.

When you get a free moment, I recommend that you watch these important videos. In addition to discussing the life of Nelson Mandela, Democracy Now exposes how the C.I.A. helped the South African government capture Nelson Mandela.  Democracy Now also explains how the U.S. supported the Apartheid regime and how Israel provided military aid to racist South Africa. 

As we continue to mourn the passing of our dear brother Nelson Mandela, we must reflect on the past and continue to struggle for a better future.