OPC

In the recent, Newsweek article, coauthored by Mark Pocan,“It's Time to Repeal the President's License for Endless War,” Barbara Lee calls for a dramatic cut in the $717 billion Pentagon budget. Lee is either urging Congress to move in a new direction or bolstering Biden’s election bid with newspeak.

Eugene Stovall
Oakland, California  October, 2020

   More Americans have now died from COVID-19 than     from the wars in Korea, Vietnam, Iraq and  Afghanistan combined. Yet the United States is poised  to continue spending more money on the Pentagon than the next 10 countries combined with some 1  million troops deployed in about 175 countries. In  other words, there's no end in sight for our forever wars.  Mark Pocan & Barbara Lee, Newsweek, September, 2020

Barbara Lee was the only member of Congress to vote against the post-9/11    She criticizes the blank check Congress gave the White House to deploy military personnel, assassinate foreign leaders and overthrow governments around the world. The AUMF sets up a national socialist economy for the benefit of the war profiteers embedded in the military industrial complex. With a nearly trillion-dollar war budget, the US military has caused hundreds of thousands of civilian casualties, created millions of refugees and destroyed property in the billions of dollars. In addition, the military industrial complex has stolen billions in gold bullion and oil from conquered territories. Barbara Lee says that while America wages its endless wars, homelessness, poverty, a global pandemic and a climate crisis threatens to destroy the homeland.

  

Air-To-Air Sidewinder missiles cost American taxpayers pay $420,000 each for Air-To-Air   missiles.      Air-To-Surface missiles cost $31,000 each. Hellfire      missiles cost $76,143 each. Precision-Guided bombs cost $39,000 each.

America has institutionalized white privilege through the process of systemic racism, which threatens to destabilize the entire society. Yet, America’s power elite continues to rely on repression, mass incarceration and domestic surveillance as a means of maintaining white supremacy while restoring domestic tranquility. The power elite does not share Barbara Lee’s concerns about America’s endless wars of terror on non-white populations around the world. The power elite wants to obtain a similar blank check to terrorize and murder non-white populations inside the United States. ICE, Homeland Security and local police departments have already tested the limits of racial profiling, ‘stop and frisk’ arrests, enhanced interrogations and arbitrary killings in suppressing civil rights and human rights. But public reaction to America’s sustained program of racial subjugation has heightened social instability around the country. The power elite believes that intensifying its propaganda will allay the growing impact of homelessness, hunger, sickness and despair that is turning American cities into powder kegs waiting to explode. Surfeit with a belief in its own invincibility, the power elite turns a blind eye to the nightmare that they have created. Instead, they are building multi-billion dollar sports arenas and heating up the stock market. But the gross injustices, economic inequities and institutionalized violence which the power elite has instigated will not disappear.

Increasingly the president of the United States promotes lawlessness and violence in defense of white supremacy and white privilege. Defending his nascent fascist government, he has announced that he will not be bound by any election result that does not return him to power. So while Lee is calling for democratic reform, the government continues to behave as if an authorization to use military force applies domestically as well as internationally.

A Biden Surrogate

  

During WWII, Karol Josef Wojtyla, the future Pope      John Paul II, was a young chemist working for the Solvay Chemical Company. In Nazi-controlled   Poland. Poles collaborated with, resisted or were   victims of the Nazis. Collaborators like Karol Wojtyla worked for Polish companies that supported the death   and work camps that the Nazis installed all   over      Poland. Solvay Chemical Company had a contract  with I.G. Farben to develop and produce poisonous  gas. Karol Josef Wojtyla fulfilled the contract by   producing Zyclon-B, which he distributed on   behalf of I.G. Farben to the death camps. After the  war, Karol Josef Wojtyla entered a Catholic seminary.   Within a year, he was ordained a priest. In 1958, Bishop Wojtyla became a cardinal. Following the mysterious death, some say poisoning, of Pope John   Paul I, Cardinal Karol Josef Wojtyla was consecrated Pope John Paul II, the only Polish pope in Catholic history.

Though Barbara Lee’s comments are positive and represent the humanistic approach that millions of Americans hope that a new Democratic administration might adopt, Joe Biden is a warmonger. Barbara Lee’s Congressional Black Caucus manipulated the black vote away from anti-war candidates like Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders and Kamala Harris to make Joe Biden, the Democratic nominee. Ignoring the fact that Joe Biden’s political mentors were the arch-racists, James O. Eastland and Herman Talmadge, the Black Caucus urged black voters to make Biden the Democratic Party’s presidential nominee.

  Negro Democrats Play ‘Plantation Politics’

 

  “How we gonna get them down on the farm after   they’ve seen Pariee…” Popular post-WWI song   expressing concern over black veterans returning   from the European War

Despite Barbara Lee’s call to end the 2001 and 2002 laws authorizing the use of military force, only 59 Democrats voted against the $717 billion Pentagon spending bill. Democrats were as supportive of the bloated defense budget and war profiteering as the Republicans. Barbara Lee was one of only 13 members of the Congressional Black Caucus opposed to the Pentagon budget.

Members of Congressional Black Caucus supporting the $717 Billion Pentagon Budget were:
Alma Adams (NC); Sanford Bishop (GA); Lisa Blunt Rochester (DE); Anthony Brown (MD); G.K. Butterfield (NC); Andre Carson (IN); Wm. Lacy Clay (MO); James Clyburn (SC); Danny Davis (IL); Val Butler Demings (FL); Dwight   Evans (PA); Marcia Fudge (OH); Al Green (TX); Alcee Hastings (FL); Sheila Jackson Lee (TX); E.B Johnson, ( TX); Robin Kelly (IL); Brenda Lawrence (FL); Al Lawson (FL); Donald McEachin (VA); Gregory Meeks (NY); Cedric Richmond (LA); Bobby Rush (IL); David Scott (GA); Bobby Scott (VA); Terri Sewell (AL); Bennie Thompson (MS); Marc Veasey (TX)

Only 11 Black Caucus members opposed the Protect and Serve Act, a law proposed by John Rutherford, a Florida Republican that makes any assault on a police officer, a hate crime. When the police beat up a citizen, The Protect And Serve Act will allow the police to charge the victim with a crime despite evidence to the contrary. The only Congressional Black Caucus Members opposing the law were:
Karen Bass (CA); Yvette Clarke (NY); Wm. Lacy Clay (MO); Alcee Hastings (FL); E.B. Johnson (TX); Barbara Lee (CA); Gwen Moore (WI); Donald Payne (NJ); Bobby Scott (VA); Maxine Waters (CA); Bonnie Watson Coleman (NJ)

The Congressional Black Caucus with its 55 members including two non-voting members fails to support key black issues. Increasingly, the caucus has become  reactionary supporting legislation like the Phase-in $15 Wage Act, proposed by black caucus member Terri Sewell. According to the Economic Policy Institute, Representative Sewell’s bill will force 40 percent of the workforce to earn $10.50 an hour or less beyond 2024. Sewell crafted her bill to nullify legislation introduced by Sen. Bernie Sanders and Rep. Bobby Scott to boost the national minimum wage from $7.25 to $15 an hour by 2024. The Sanders/Scott Raise the Wage Act also raised the federal minimum wage as the national median income increases. Yet with the help of other Congressional Black Caucus members, Terri Sewell passed legislation that would delay wage increases for millions of low wage Americans all over the country.

Punitive laws like Sewell’s Phase-in $15 Wage Act demonstrates that the NAACP and the SCLC not only have a reactionary influence on the Black political agenda, but is responsible for electing reactionary black politicians who play plantation politics. If Barbara Lee hopes to repeal military force laws, she would need the support of her fellow black representatives. But the reactionary Congressional Black Caucus is as unlikely to support a reduction in the military budget and a elimination of laws authorizing military force around the world as Speaker Nancy Pelosi is to support such legislation. Just as Army Intelligence and the Ku Klux Klan control the Congressional Black Caucus, the Vatican controls the Speakers office and the Supreme Court.

“The Squad”

Observers of Congress call congressional representatives Ilhan Omar, Ayanna Pressley, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Rashida Tlaib    as “The Squad.” Defiant and unapologetic, the squad voices the aspirations and concerns of communities that are traditionally unrepresented. These four progressive Democrats push for diversity, liberalism and progressivism. They are criticized by mainstream Democrats who want them to observe the traditions of Congress and mind their place, as do members of the Congressional Black Caucus.

However the squad has different values and a different agenda than many of the members of the Congressional Black Caucus and possibly even Barbara Lee, herself. Ayanna Pressley broke with tradition when she told her constituents we don’t need black faces that don’t raise a black voice; we need black voices to represent black faces. Rashida Tlaib’s “Lift + Act” bill advances the radical economic principle of a universal guaranteed income. Ilhan Omar condemned Elliott Abrams, a Trump official, for supporting Central American death squads in the 1980s. Though urged by Democrats and Republicans, alike, to stay in her place, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez violated protocol to introduce the Green New Deal without obtaining party leadership support. All of the squad, along with some few other Democrats, call for the outright abolition of Immigration and Customs Enforcement [ICE] because of its widely publicized torture and murder of immigrant families and the caging of their infant children. These congresswomen view their role in Congress differently than most black congressional representatives. They are uninterested in cozying up to the leadership for congressional perks and personal aggrandizement. They recognize that Congress exploits minority and low-income communities in order to support the wealthy with tax write offs, bailouts, farm and oil subsidies and guaranteed incomes.