Good links

Today I stumbled across a few good links. First up is James Clingman who argues quite correctly that blacks misplace their finances in their struggle against White Supremacy. Clingman writes in Black Press USA:

Blackonomics


Black folks have it all wrong; we reward our enemies and punish our friends.

We complain, demonstrate, and protest the same people we give our money to, in what amounts to payment for our own oppression.

Those who stand up, speak up, and sometimes make the ultimate sacrifice in support of Black people, we run away from, deny, castigate, and even participate in shutting them up and shutting them down.

We must reverse this scenario if we are going to make it in this country.

Many of us have experienced the negative aspects of standing up for Black people, and I am sure most of us have wondered why we have to fight against our own people in order to help save our race.

But remember Harriet Tubman and Marcus Garvey, just to name two; they had the same problems. Remember Denmark Vesey, Gabriel Prosser, John Brown, and Nat Turner; Black folks told on them.

So it is not surprising that we still do the same things to our warriors today. Thus, individually, we will continue to experience similar struggles among our people.

But what about the collective?

ow can we reverse the very sick practice of further enriching those who would just as soon wipe us off the face of the earth, at least move us out of this country, rather than simply speak to us on the street?

How can we come to the point where we are, at a minimum, considered an economic and political threat, rather than some monolithic voting bloc just waiting to be exploited?

How can we be perceived as something more than a humongous ATM where merchants can come and withdraw all the cash they want, no questions asked and no reciprocity given?

How can we reward our friends - politically and economically - with the resources we have at our disposal?


I made a similar argument a few days ago on a message board I frequent.

In the vein of the American Big Man posts ( you can read those here)
The following articles would be a relevant read. First we have the Future of Freedom Foundation which posted an article entitled: Illegal Surveillance: A Real Security Threat .

Americans seem to have forgotten why the Founding Fathers prohibited government from spying on them. Public opinion polls show that a rising percentage of Americans approve of the warrantless National Security Agency wiretaps of Americans that Bush ordered.

But such blind faith in government simply ignores the lessons of U.S. history. When the feds have unleashed themselves in the past, many innocent Americans’ lives were devastated.

During the 1960s and 1970s, the FBI carried out thousands of Counter Intelligence Program (COINTELPRO) operations, often combining illegal surveillance with efforts to subvert any opposition to the government. Covert FBI efforts sought to incite street warfare between violent groups, wreck marriages, portray innocent people as government informants, sic the IRS on citizens, and cripple or destroy left-wing, black, communist, or other organizations...Nixon aide Tom Charles Huston testified to Congress about COINTELPRO’s tendency “to move from the kid with a bomb to the kid with a picket sign, and from the kid with the picket sign to the kid with the bumper sticker of the opposing candidate. And you just keep going down the line.”


Meanwhile Alberto "La Torture" Gonzalez is still trying to evade the American people by pulling a Bill "Depends on what "is" is" Clinton. We find a report in The Washington Post where Gonzalez is doing exactly what we at Garvey's Ghost documented the Bush administration doing, namely admitting that it is, or had used tortured legal thinking to proceed with domestic spying And may be doing more than admitted to:

On Feb. 6, Gonzales testified that the Justice Department considered the use-of-force vote as a legal green light for the wiretapping "before the program actually commenced."

But in yesterday's letter, he wrote, "these statements may give the misimpression that the Department's legal analysis has been static over time."

Fein said the letter seems to suggest that the Justice Department actually embraced the use-of-force argument some time later, prompting Gonzales to write that the legal justification "has evolved over time."

One government source who has been briefed on the issue confirmed yesterday that the administration believed from the beginning that the president had the constitutional authority to order the eavesdropping, and only more recently added the force resolution argument as a legal justification.

I still say that the administration must have something on various Republicans and Democrats given their complete incompetence in dealing with this matter.

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