Margaret Kimberley's blog

Freedom Rider: Prison Rape, America’s Torture

Tue, 08/31/2010 - 22:43 — Margaret Kimberley

prisons and jails

by BAR editor and senior columnist Margaret Kimberley

Americans look with horror at places like Congo where rape is a tool of warfare, yet are apt to make light of appalling levels of sexual abuse in U.S. prisons and jails. “In 2008 and 2009, 88,500 adults held in jails and prisons reported being sexually assaulted” – and this does not count endemic rape in juvenile detention centers. Yet Attorney General Eric Holder is dragging his feet on complying with the Prison Rape Elimination Act.

Freedom Rider: “Sacred” Ground Zero

Wed, 08/25/2010 - 09:17 — Margaret Kimberley

protesting flagheads in NYC

by BAR editor and senior columnist Margaret Kimberley

If American whites practiced what many of them preach to Muslims, they would ban themselves from building cultural institutions of any kind in much of the United States, since so many places are sites of depraved atrocities and mass killings of people of color by whites. Or, are only white folks’ “sensitivities” to be respected? Where is “hallowed ground” for descendants of Black slaves and Native Americans?

Freedom Rider: Israel, Big Money and Obama

Wed, 08/18/2010 - 15:52 — Margaret Kimberley

This Way To War in Iran

by BAR editor and senior columnist Margaret Kimberley

Wealthy Americans whose paramount issue is unlimited support for Israel create huge distortions in U.S. politics, bending presidents to their will. Barack Obama’s career has long been nurtured by one such billionaire hyper-Zionist, who hopes to instigate an attack on Iran.

Freedom Rider: Public Theft and the End of Empire

Wed, 08/11/2010 - 21:50 — Margaret Kimberley

Closed

by BAR editor and senior columnist Margaret Kimberley

If it feels like this economic roller coaster ride is stuck on down, you’re right. At the same historical moment that the public sector is put on a starvation diet, the demands of the military reach record levels. “The height of brute force brings with it the nadir of support for human needs.”

Freedom Rider: White Citizenship

Wed, 08/04/2010 - 13:54 — Margaret Kimberley

immigrant haters

by BAR editor and senior columnist Margaret Kimberley

After all is said and done, what much of the so-called Tea Party wants is a return to America as a White Man’s Country. There are a few obstacles in their way, including the U.S. Constitution, but that’s not insurmountable. “On a daily basis pundits and politicians rear their ugly heads to say that the children born of undocumented persons should no longer be given American citizenship.”

Freedom Rider: Shirley Sherrod’s Righteous Anger

Wed, 07/28/2010 - 12:49 — Margaret Kimberley

Sherrod fired

by BAR editor and senior columnist Margaret Kimberley

“Like ACORN, Sherrod was victimized by a Democratic administration which revels in its willingness to assist the right in throwing its own people under the proverbial bus.” Yet, even when the media narrative shifts to sympathy for Sherrod, it trivializes her heroism, just as it diminished Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. to a “dreaming preacher whose fondest wish was to see black and white children join hands and sing ‘Kumbayah.’”

Freedom Rider: Obama and the Nadir of Black America

Tue, 07/06/2010 - 22:01 — Margaret Kimberley

young crowd scene

by BAR editor and senior columnist Margaret Kimberley

For Black America, it is the worst of times, but a kind of collective insanity leads African Americans to believe they live in the best of times. A Pew Research Center study shows Blacks are the most upbeat on the economy of any major group, despite being the group most negatively affected by the economy. The root cause of the delirium: Obama.

Freedom Rider: Americans Have No Rights

Fri, 07/02/2010 - 01:14 — Margaret Kimberley

by BAR editor and senior columnist Margaret Kimberley

Under Barack Obama, the former professor of constitutional law, Americans’ civil liberties have shrunken drastically – to the point that his administration claims the right to execute its citizens without charge or due process of any recognizable kind. And citizens that leave the country cannot be sure they will be allowed back in. But where is the outrage among Democrats, when Obama out-Bushes Bush? “It seems that Democrats did not in fact feel any affront to Bush policies, only to his party affiliation.”

Freedom Rider: The Death of Black Politics

Tue, 06/22/2010 - 12:02 — Margaret Kimberley

by BAR editor and Senior Columnist Margaret Kimberley

New York Rep. Charles Rangel is among the many Black elected officials that make periodic figurative and actual pilgrimages to Israel, swearing undying loyalty. In a shamelessly groveling performance last week, Rangel took part in a Times Square press conference where he “claimed a bizarre connection between the freedom flotilla and the Cuban missile crisis of 1962.”

Freedom Rider: Killing Children

Tue, 06/15/2010 - 10:34 — Margaret Kimberley

a child's funeral

by BAR editor and senior columnist Margaret Kimberley

Western corporate media’s antennae are super-sensitive to atrocities committed against children – except when their own countries are the perpetrators. The deaths of tens of thousands – even millions – of children by bombings and blockades and other mega-aggressions are treated as non-events, while the alleged beheading of one seven-year-old by the Taliban makes international headlines. A genuine concern for the world’s children requires that “we must first acknowledge our own nation‘s history of violence.”

Freedom Rider: The Trouble with Arizona, and Obama

Wed, 06/09/2010 - 01:18 — Margaret Kimberley

American white nationalism

Brewer and Obama

by BAR editor and senior columnist Margaret Kimberley

The history of the state of Arizona is as much stained by the Confederacy as by the usual Old West pathologies, having once been claimed as a territory of the breakaway Slave Republic. Reconstruction never reached Arizona, which has enacted what might be called “Brown Codes” to shackle its Latino residents. “What Governor [Jan] Brewer and her anxious citizens really fear is too many brown faces.”

Freedom Rider: BP Rules

Tue, 06/01/2010 - 12:21 — Margaret Kimberley

oily president

by BAR editor and senior columnist Margaret Kimberley

BP and the mere humans that run it remain “in charge” of the scene of their crime, despite President Obama’s protestations to the contrary. “The Coast Guard only allows as much media access as BP will allow” – proof that the Obama regime treats the multinational corporation’s interests as paramount even to its own. BP has nothing to fear “because they know who is boss.”

Freedom Rider: America Kills Peace

Thu, 05/27/2010 - 11:27 — Margaret Kimberley

by BAR editor and senior columnist Margaret Kimberley

Nothing scares the United States more than the possibility that peace might break out. Turkey and Brazil committed an unforgiveable sin, by finding a way to resolve questions about Iran’s nuclear fuel stocks. The U.S. pushed the agreement aside, preferring to move closer to war – as if that is Washington’s desired result.

Freedom Rider: Elena Kagan is Obama’s Waterloo. And Ours

Tue, 05/18/2010 - 21:17 — Margaret Kimberley

by BAR editor and senior columnist Margaret Kimberley

Elena Kagan is the worst evidence that voting for Democrats is necessary to safeguard the U.S. Supreme Court. “Kagan is a blank slate careerist with political expediency as her only qualification,” who found it beyond her powers as Harvard Law School dean to hire any tenured Black faculty. In fact, she hired relatively few white women.

Freedom Rider: Endless Terror

Tue, 05/11/2010 - 01:09 — Margaret Kimberley

by BAR editor and senior columnist Margaret Kimberley

Once citizenship can be stripped away by the state, the Constitution becomes a dead letter. Yet that is the self-mutilation prescribed by American politicians who would jettison every U.S. citizen’s rights just to spite the alleged Times Square bomber, a naturalized U.S. citizen. Most Americans seem incapable of understanding why Pakistanis, Yemenis and others that are being killed by the U.S. might also feel the need for vengeance.