Michelle Alexander is a civil rights attorney. She has serious vocational skills, i.e., independence and the capacity to pay the bills - when and if she says unpopular things or speaks truth to power. She has powerfully documented unpopular history, practice, and facts that directly speak truth to power - and done so in a way that is broadly accessible to the American public.
These are minimum baseline requirements for serious public intellectuals, doing serious work for the common good.
Compare and contrast that with booboo the fool who was crying and reading a tele-prompted apology to the Romneys this past Saturday morning. When it's your job to compromise, clown, and entertain to fill up time on teevee, when you're answerable to a media boss, and when you lack legitimate skills to practice or teach a trade independent of a patron i.e., when your scholarship is in the dubious fields of gender, race, or sexual identity (subjects which don't even qualify as liberal arts humanities) and which guarantee the requirement of a patron who wants to use you as an organ of propaganda - YOU DON'T QUALIFY AS A SERIOUS PUBLIC INTELLECTUAL PERIOD.
For damn certain nothing remotely approaching America's foremost public intellectual, and anybody pretending otherwise in public is simply exhibiting their own intellectual failings - until of course they get their ass handed to them in their own disqus comments which they then promptly and predictably close to forestall further humiliation....,
9 comments:
As soon as I saw "foremost public intellectual" I figured it was Chomsky.
priceless http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/01/what-it-means-to-be-a-public-intellectual/282907/#
How can a person get that title when she can't even be herself? They got rid of Alec Baldwin so you know nobody's safe on that channel. Can she really speak her mind the way ole dude did in that video?
They got rid of Alec Baldwin so you know nobody's safe on that channel.
rotflmbao..., yeah but old Alec said some stuff that would make Phil Robertson blush and Andrew Sullivan horny, you KNOW the Cathedral couldn't keep him around after that.
Noam Chomsky says “COINTELPRO was the worst government repression program in American history.” That’s precisely what I’ve been saying for the past 25 years.
Chomsky also says that the assassination of Fred Hampton was the most significant assassination of the COINTELPRO era. I don’t rank assassinations, but Fred’s murder was an extremely critical loss for our movement, as was the killing of Bunchy Carter, which gets even less attention than the Hampton assassination. The point is that it is very difficult to fight a war when your best generals are being taken out.
The courageous white radicals who broke into the Pennsylvania FBI office and liberated documents which exposed the Bureau’s Counter Intelligence Program, including the plans to destroy the Black Liberation Movement, have revealed themselves to the public.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KQk5cUMhI8k
http://www.theburglary.com/
[According to the Commission’s purloined documents, Hoover had directed all of the Bureau’s offices to “expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit and otherwise neutralize” African-American organizations and leaders, including the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, the Nation of Islam, Martin Luther King, Stokely Carmichael and H. Rap Brown.
Two years later, it was publicly revealed in an unrelated case that Chicago Black Panther Party Chief of Security William O'Neal was a paid informant for the FBI. At the time, I was a young lawyer working with my colleagues at the People’s Law Office on a civil rights lawsuit we had filed on behalf of the Hampton and Clark families and the survivors of the December 4th raid. We quickly subpoenaed the Chicago FBI’s Black Panther Party files. In response, the FBI produced a small number of documents that included a detailed floor plan of the BPP apartment specifically identifying the bed where Hampton slept, which O’Neal had supplied to Hanrahan before the raid by way of his FBI control agent.
The last volume produced by the government was O'Neal's control file. In it was yet another smoking gun: a memo from the Chicago office to FBI Headquarters requesting a $300 bonus to reward O'Neal for his information, which the memo asserted was of “tremendous value.” A return memo from Headquarters approved this request.]
http://bit.ly/19NWA5O
And the struggle continues:
[Using national security letters, the FBI can demand that individuals or organizations turn over credit, financial and internet subscriber information. In Fiscal 2012, the FBI issued 21,000 national security letters. They are a form of administrative subpoena, issued without court order. Comey, though, said that the current procedures allow the FBI to issue a national security letter "in hours or days" while proposed changes would slow the process down to "weeks."
"I don't see anything that is broken," Comey said.]
Neither did Hoover
http://bit.ly/19i4wSc
Awesome living memory historical detail Bro. Makheru - thanks for that. Bottomline, the BPP fought the law and the law won. Lot of valuable lessons to be taken from that historical episode.
When I was 17, I was a member of the BPP while we had a short-lived chapter in Charlotte. There is no question that the BPP was the primary target of Hoover’s minions as proven by the fact that most of America’s aging political prisoners, who will never be forgiven, were members of the BPP or the Black Liberation Army. However, Ms. Hoover’s boys cast a wide diabolical net. While few people are aware of the plot against Fred Hampton, only a tiny minority of that group are aware of what happened to people like Ralph Featherstone and Che Payne. Of course the police said that Feather and Che blew themselves up. What we know is that they were supposed to transport H. Rap Brown to trial in Maryland. Most activists assumed that the bombing was an assassination attempt on the life of Brown who just happened to not be in the car.
From Time Magazine:
[Two black militants were killed when their car was blasted to bits while they were riding on a highway south of Bel Air, Md. The dead were Ralph Featherstone, 30, and William (“Che”) Payne, 26. Featherstone, a former speech therapist, was well known as a civil rights field organizer and, more recently, as manager of the Afro-American bookstore, the Drum & Spear, in Washington. Both were friends of H. Rap Brown, whose trial on charges of arson and incitement to riot was scheduled to begin last week in Bel Air. Reconstruction of the car’s speedometer indicates it was traveling about 55 miles an hour when it blew up.
Police believed that Payne had been carrying a dynamite bomb on the floor between his legs and that it accidentally exploded. A preliminary FBI investigation supported that theory. Friends of the dead men contended that white extremists had either ambushed the pair or booby-trapped their car, perhaps trying to kill Brown. But police pointed out that Featherstone and Payne had driven in from Washington without notice, cruised around Bel Air briefly and seemed to be headed back. That assassins could plot and move so quickly defies belief.
Although Featherstone had not been known as an extremist, friends said that he had grown markedly more bitter in the past year. Police cited a crudely spelled typewritten statement found on his body: “To Amerika:* I’m playing heads-up murder. When the deal goes down I’m gon be standing on your chest screaming like Tarzan. Dynamite is my response to your justice.” Brown, meanwhile, was nowhere to be found.”]
“But police pointed out that Featherstone and Payne had driven in from Washington without notice.” And I have some prime real estate in the Okefenokee Swamp for sale.
This picture shows what was left of Featherstone’s car after the bombing.
http://www.daggerpress.com/wp-content/uploads/brown_explosion.jpg
When I was 17, I was a member of the BPP while we had a short-lived chapter in Charlotte. There is no question that the BPP was the primary target of Hoover’s minions as proven by the fact that most of America’s aging political prisoners, who will never be forgiven, were members of the BPP or the Black Liberation Army. However, Ms. Hoover’s boys cast a wide diabolical net. While few people are aware of the plot against Fred Hampton, only a tiny minority of that group are aware of what happened to people like Ralph Featherstone and Che Payne. Of course the police said that Feather and Che blew themselves up. What we know is that they were supposed to transport H. Rap Brown to trial in Maryland. Most activists assumed that the bombing was an assassination attempt on the life of Brown who just happened to not be in the car.
[Two black militants were killed when their car was blasted to bits while they were riding on a highway south of Bel Air, Md. The dead were Ralph Featherstone, 30, and William (“Che”) Payne, 26. Featherstone, a former speech therapist, was well known as a civil rights field organizer and, more recently, as manager of the Afro-American bookstore, the Drum & Spear, in Washington. Both were friends of H. Rap Brown, whose trial on charges of arson and incitement to riot was scheduled to begin last week in Bel Air. Reconstruction of the car’s speedometer indicates it was traveling about 55 miles an hour when it blew up.
Police believed that Payne had been carrying a dynamite bomb on the floor between his legs and that it accidentally exploded. A preliminary FBI investigation supported that theory. Friends of the dead men contended that white extremists had either ambushed the pair or booby-trapped their car, perhaps trying to kill Brown. But police pointed out that Featherstone and Payne had driven in from Washington without notice, cruised around Bel Air briefly and seemed to be headed back. That assassins could plot and move so quickly defies belief.
Although Featherstone had not been known as an extremist, friends said that he had grown markedly more bitter in the past year. Police cited a crudely spelled typewritten statement found on his body: “To Amerika:* I’m playing heads-up murder. When the deal goes down I’m gon be standing on your chest screaming like Tarzan. Dynamite is my response to your justice.” Brown, meanwhile, was nowhere to be found.”]
“But police pointed out that Featherstone and Payne had driven in from Washington without notice.” And I have some prime real estate in the Okefenokee Swamp for sale.
This picture shows what was left of Featherstone’s car after the bombing.
http://www.daggerpress.com/wp-content/uploads/brown_explosion.jpg
Talk to anyone who was in the movement during COINTELPRO and they can recite numerous stories about that war. .
When I was 17, I was a member of the BPP while we had a short-lived chapter in Charlotte. There is no question that the BPP was the primary target of Hoover’s minions as proven by the fact that most of America’s aging political prisoners, who will never be forgiven, were members of the BPP or the Black Liberation Army. However, Ms. Hoover’s boys cast a wide diabolical net. While few people are aware of the plot against Fred Hampton, only a tiny minority of that group are aware of what happened to people like Ralph Featherstone and Che Payne. Of course the police said that Feather and Che blew themselves up. What we know is that they were supposed to transport H. Rap Brown to trial in Maryland. Most activists assumed that the bombing was an assassination attempt on the life of Brown who just happened to not be in the car.
[Two black militants were killed when their car was blasted to bits while they were riding on a highway south of Bel Air, Md. The dead were Ralph Featherstone, 30, and William (“Che”) Payne, 26. Featherstone, a former speech therapist, was well known as a civil rights field organizer and, more recently, as manager of the Afro-American bookstore, the Drum & Spear, in Washington. Both were friends of H. Rap Brown, whose trial on charges of arson and incitement to riot was scheduled to begin last week in Bel Air. Reconstruction of the car’s speedometer indicates it was traveling about 55 miles an hour when it blew up.
Police believed that Payne had been carrying a dynamite bomb on the floor between his legs and that it accidentally exploded. A preliminary FBI investigation supported that theory. Friends of the dead men contended that white extremists had either ambushed the pair or booby-trapped their car, perhaps trying to kill Brown. But police pointed out that Featherstone and Payne had driven in from Washington without notice, cruised around Bel Air briefly and seemed to be headed back. That assassins could plot and move so quickly defies belief.
Although Featherstone had not been known as an extremist, friends said that he had grown markedly more bitter in the past year. Police cited a crudely spelled typewritten statement found on his body: “To Amerika:* I’m playing heads-up murder. When the deal goes down I’m gon be standing on your chest screaming like Tarzan. Dynamite is my response to your justice.” Brown, meanwhile, was nowhere to be found.”]
“But police pointed out that Featherstone and Payne had driven in from Washington without notice.” And I have some prime real estate in the Okefenokee Swamp for sale.
This picture shows what was left of Featherstone’s car after the bombing.
http://www.daggerpress.com/wp-content/uploads/brown_explosion.jpg
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