From Revolution Club, Bay Area:

Barack Obama comes to Oakland to make you think this meatgrinder of a system works!

February 19, 2019 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us

 

Editors’ note: This leaflet was passed out at a "My Brother's Keeper" national event in Oakland on February 20, 2019

My Brother’s Keeper has arrived to peddle the played-out notion that competing for some pitiful charity money will bring "systemic change," that the problem is an “opportunity gap,” "youth violence" and the need for “safe communities.”

To this WE CALL BULLSHIT

Welcome to Oakland, where Oscar Grant was shot in the back execution style by BART police. Welcome to the Bay Area, where the Vallejo police just pumped over 20 bullets into Willie McCoy, killing him for sleeping in his car. Welcome to America, where NO Black or Brown person is safe from being murdered by the police who do this over and over with impunity. Where racism is written into the law to protect the police, who serve and protect a capitalist system that vampire-sucks the wealth out of the planet, dominating, plundering, exploiting, and crushing the lives of billions. 

To the former President of the most predatory imperialist country to ever rule over the planet.

To the Commander-in-Chief who waged war on 7 countries, drone bombed wedding parties, presided over torture at Guantánamo, and backed Israel’s genocidal massacres in Gaza.

To chief demagogue & peddler of false "HOPE," whose MBK (My Brother’s Keeper) program is predicated on the notion that the problem is our youth, that it's their outlook and their "bad choices " that need to be reformed.

Who blamed and shamed Black people in a speech at Morehouse College saying, “We know too many young men in our community continue to make bad choices,” and now “There’s no time for excuses.”

Whose Justice Department supported every single act of police violence that came before the Supreme Court, but called the youth in Baltimore “thugs” after they dared to rise up in rebellion after the murder of Freddie Gray.

Who names his charity after a Bible quote in which God incites jealousy by favoring one brother (Abel) over another (Cain), and when Cain kills Abel, God banishes Cain and curses his descendants. Well, there is No God, but your fairytale is actually a good metaphor for this system that divides people, sets them up to fight each other, and then blames them for the “choices” they make.

To the Deporter-in-Chief who deported more immigrants, tearing apart more families than any president before him.

And then went on to normalize Donald Trump, the fascist white supremacist, saying “We are now all rooting for his success in uniting and leading the country… We have to remember that we’re actually all on one team.”

To Barack Obama, we say NO MORE EXCUSES. This system has enslaved, brutalized, tortured and betrayed Black people for 400 years! Your system can’t be REFORMED, it must be OVERTHROWN!

Your presidency is proof that mentoring a few “leaders,” and getting some Black and Brown faces in high places is one of the most useful cons from the oppressor’s playbook. It helps to spread the illusion that in America “you can make it if you try,” and if you don’t make it it's your fault.

As the leader of the revolution Bob Avakian said:

Determination decides who makes it out of the ghetto—now there is a tired old cliché, at its worst, on every level. This is like looking at millions of people being put through a meatgrinder and instead of focusing on the fact that the great majority are chewed to pieces, concentrating instead on the few who slip through in one piece and then on top of it all, using this to say that “the meatgrinder works”!

BAsics 1:11

If you want to be one of the chosen few who “make it” through the meat grinder, and then get held up as an example of how “the meat grinder works,” go with Obama. If you want to get rid of this meat grinder system, get with the real revolution—one with the leadership, strategy and blueprint for a radically different and better society that is actually possible.

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Revolution Club, Bay Area
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