Protesters must be mindful of dirty tricks

5th January 2015   ·   0 Comments

By A. Peter Bailey
TriceEdneyWire.com Columnist

Immediately after hearing about the killing of two New York City police officers by a seemingly mentally-deranged Black male, I called my 48-year-old son whose work often requires him to be in the city at night.

“Unless there is an emergency situation,” I told him, “it will be best to avoid being on city streets at night for the next couple of days. And spread the message to your friends who live in the city.”

This may sound like an overreaction to some but I was convinced that some revenge-seeking police officers or some of their supporters would strike out at any Black male they came across.

This attitude was based on lessons I learned from Brother Malcolm X in the early 1960s on tactics used by the police and other government agencies to go after Black males. When hearing some of the protesters chanting “What do we want? Dead cops! When do we want it? Now!” I remembered Brother Malcolm warning his supporters in the Organization of Afro-American Unity to be very suspicious of anyone in attendance at one of our meetings or rallies who shouted out, “We should go bomb the subways.”

That person, he said, should be immediately removed from our gathering. Nine times out of 10, Brother Malcolm told us, that person is a plant working for either the police or other hostile government agencies. And if there is even the briefest discussion of his or her proposal everyone in the room could be charged with conspiracy.

Equally relevant are the events that occurred in Ferguson over the acquittal of the police officer who killed unarmed Michael Brown.

First, there was the announcing of the grand jury’s decision at 9 p.m. at night. In my nearly 50 years as a journalist I had never heard of such an explosive issue being publicly announced at 9 p.m.

Then, there were the fires. For more than a week before the decision was announced, there was constant news reports about extensive preparations by the police and National Guard to prevent any expression of violence. Despite all those precautions, fires were set and allowed to burn. It is entirely possible, and to me probable, that those fires were set off by supporters of the police.

In both New York City and Ferguson press coverage and commentary focused almost exclusively on the chants and the fires, respectively, instead of the police misconduct which led to the deaths of two unarmed Black males.

The chants and fires were huge propaganda gifts for fearmongering haters such as Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, clever Bill O’Reilly and their cohorts throughout the country.

What all this means is that those who challenge racial and economic injustices must understand clearly that a few hundred or even a few thousand people chanting “No justice, no peace” and “Hands up, don’t shoot,” won’t do it in 2014 and beyond. They must become very knowledgeable about the true devious tactics of the defenders of those status quos and develop strategies to counteract their destructive agenda.

Study says funding cuts helped to spread Ebola in West Africa

(Special to the Trice Edney News Wire from Global Information Network) – Spending cuts, pushed by an international lender, “weakened health care systems in the West African region”, leaving the countries “under-funded, insufficiently staffed and poorly prepared.”

In a report published this month in the journal Lancet Global Health, UK-based researchers blamed policies of the Washington-based International Monetary Fund that hobbled the development of an effective healthcare system in the three affected West African nations. The number of people who have died from Ebola has crossed the 7,500 mark, with over 19,000 infected.

“Even though the IMF provided financial support to Sierra Leone, Liberia and Guinea, the lending comes with strings attached—so-called “conditionalities”—that require recipient governments to adopt policies that prioritize short-term economic objectives over investment in health and education,” said the report’s lead author Alexander Kentikelenis.

By reviewing IMF policies from 1990 to 2014, the researchers from Cambridge, Oxford University and the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, identified three factors that weakened healthcare systems. These were IMF’s requirement for economic reforms, caps on public-sector wages and the decentralization of health care providers.

Wage caps limit the capacity of these nations to hire and adequately pay key healthcare workers such as doctors and nurses, the researchers said. These caps are linked to the “brain drain” of health workers in countries that need them most.

The IMF push to decentralize healthcare systems makes it difficult to mobilize coordinated responses to outbreaks of deadly diseases such as Ebola, the researchers said.

“All these effects are cumulative, contributing to the lack of preparedness of health systems to cope with infectious disease outbreaks and other emergencies,” Kentikelenis said. “The IMF’s widely proclaimed concern about social issues has had little effect on health systems in low-income countries.”

An IMF spokesman denied the claims, calling them “completely untrue.”

In a letter to the Lancet, an IMF deputy director insisted that health outcomes in Sub-Saharan Africa, including the three Ebola-hit countries “improved significantly” over the past decade or so, including improvements in mortality rates.

The deputy, Sanjeev Gupta, acknowledged that healthcare systems were fragile in the three Ebola-hit countries. “The IMF recognized the urgency of the situation—and moved quickly to help, making available an additional $130 million to the three countries to fight Ebola.”

The money was approved in September of this year. The Ebola outbreak started in Guinea by end-2013 and intensified sharply from July.

The IMF, which lends money to financially-strapped countries, came under strong criticism this year from African nations led by Nigeria’s Finance Minister Ngozi Okonjo-Ikweala.

The Minister cited the underrepresentation of African nations on the IMF board (two seats for 45 African countries), and an almost insignificant number of Africans in high decision making bodies and among staff.

“We welcome efforts to address diversity,” she wrote. “However further progress is needed.”

The remains of New Orleans’ first Black mayor moved to new mausoleum
By Mason Harrison
Contributing Writer

Two decades after the death of New Orleans’ first Black mayor, local civic, religious and political luminaries gathered December 29 to mark the reinterment of Ernest “Dutch” Morial at St. Louis Cemetery No. 3. The ceremony comes after the mayor’s original resting place, St. Louis No. 1, exhausted space to bury future generations of the Morial family and now allows members of the political dynasty to rest together. Pictures of the former mayor adorned the grounds of the cemetery first established in 1848.

Former New Orleans mayor and head of the National Urban League, Marc Morial, led the proceedings as more than 100 attendees encircled the former mayor’s new resting place. Local Muslim cleric Rafeeq Nu’Man offered prayers at the gathering and described the event as a “token of love and respect” for Morial. He also extended “salutations to those of the grave,” referring to the cemetery’s decedents.

St. Louis No. 3 is home to a number of religious leaders, including members of the Little Sisters of the Poor and the Missionary Sisters of the Sacred Heart. Restaurateur families Tujage, Prudhomme and Galatoire also call the cemetery home, which sits on the edge of the Esplanade Ridge near Bayou St. John.

New Orleans archbishop, Greg­ory Aymond, whose archdiocese is charged with upkeep of the city’s St. Louis cemeteries, applied holy water to Morial’s tomb and offered a blessing in prayer of the site. The ceremony also featured a wreath laying at the tomb and the sound of taps as the event drew to a close.

Xavier University president, Norman Francis, called Morial “one of the finest mayors of any Southern city, and perhaps the nation.” Francis said “it’s not as if there weren’t other great mayors,” but Morial, he said, stood out as someone who was both “a public and private figure” in his kind approach to others.

Francis told the former mayor’s grandchildren who attended the ceremony, and who read portions of his resume, that the road ahead “will be no easier for you than it was for your grandfather,” citing ongoing civil rights debates on voting and police brutality. He called Morial a “mayor for everybody.”

“This event takes us back to a great man,” said Orleans Parish Sheriff Marlin Gusman, when asked to share his thoughts about the ceremony. Morial, Gusman said, supported each constituent group throughout his career in public service. “It didn’t matter what your station in life was. I loved him.”

“Dutch redefined the city of New Orleans,” said Bishop Paul Morton, co-pastor of Greater St. Stephen Full Gospel Baptist Church in New Orleans East. “We are who we are today because of Dutch Morial.” Morton, who offered the event’s closing prayer, lauded Morial’s history-making career in politics.

Before becoming the city’s first Black mayor in 1977, Morial was the first Black graduate of the law school at Louisiana State University in 1954. More than a decade later, he became the first Black legislator in Louisiana’s statehouse since Reconstruction a century before. In 1970, Morial again made history when he was elected as the first Black juvenile court judge in Louisiana and followed that election four years later by becoming the first Black member of the state’s Fourth Circuit Court of Appeal.

This article originally published in the January 5, 2105 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.