Omali Yeshitela joins the program to discuss the FBI’s raid of African People Socialist Party institutions in July 2022 and what it means amid the ongoing NATO war in Ukraine. The guest details a long list of appalling abuses unthinkable when applied to White upper middle class people. Join the rapid response to support the organization should indictments be handed over.
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JAMES TWEEDIE—Following victories in the civil rights campaign, in 1968 King and the SCLC took a bold step forward by organising the Poor People’s Campaign. He envisioned “a multiracial army of the poor” to march on Washington for mass acts of civil disobedience until Congress legislated for an “economic bill of rights” for those in poverty.
On March 29 of that year King, then aged 39, traveled to Memphis, Tennessee to support a strike by public sanitary workers. His flight was delayed by a bomb threat against the aircraft, and in his last speech at the city’s Mason Temple on April 3, King was fatalistic about the prospect of his assassination, saying that like Moses, he had “been to the mountaintop, and I don’t mind.”
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JARED BALL—Wakanda Forever is its own hopeful title. Forever are we to see our ambitions for a better world in a Wakandan fantasy, one, as Lawrence Grandpre suggests, is based not on culture, or I would add political organization, but on the random divine act of a meteor delivering a plant, and one based on quiet isolation, and ultimate service of empire. Forever are we to have our political aspirations defined, and diverted by Marvel, Disney, and characters created by now dead White men.
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GLEN FORD—The rulers would have you believe that the world is becoming more complex and dangerous all the time, compelling the United States to abandon previous (and largely fictional) norms of domestic and international legality in order to preserve civilization. In truth, what they are desperately seeking to maintain is the global dominance of U.S. and European finance capital and the racist world order from which it sprang. The contradictions of centuries have ripened, overwhelming the capacity of the “West” to contain the new forces abroad in the world. Therefore, there must be endless, unconstrained war – endless, in the sense that it is a last ditch battle to fend off the end of imperialism, and unconstrained, in that the imperialists recognize no legal or moral boundaries to their use of military force, their only remaining advantage.
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MARGARET KIMBERLEY—Police killings do not occur in a vacuum. They are a key part of the state’s plan to keep Black people under physical control. Of course there should be community control of the police, but that can’t happen unless there is a truly democratic state, one that gives the people control over every aspect of their lives. Obviously police should be prosecuted when they kill, but those instances will always be few and far between. The system can be counted on to act as it was intended.
