Mr. President: Please Ratify UN Human Rights

President of the United States of America
Barack H. Obama
1600 Pennsylvania Ave.
Washington, D.C.


Dear Mr. President:

God bless you. God bless America. Once again, America is gleaming in new hope and ideals. Once again, we can shine a light like that city set on the hill. We can show the world who we truly are, as a nation, and as a people.

We can begin spreading goodwill by ratifying two important U.N. Human Rights covenants, for the sake of our humanity.

First, we ask that you sign the Convention on the Rights of the Child.

This doctrine merely reasserts the innocence, needs, and protection of children under the age of 18. It condemns exploitation of children for sex, labor, or military conscription.

Second, we ask that you sign the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights Optional Protocol on Justice For All Rights.

"That historic moment will help rectify the imbalance between civil and political rights and economic, social and cultural rights, which has particularly denied marginalized groups and those living in poverty the ability to demand an effective remedy when their rights are violated,” said Amnesty International.

"The Optional Protocol is an important tool for implementing the declaration made 15 years ago at the Vienna World Conference on Human Rights that 'all human rights are universal, indivisible and interdependent and interrelated'. The international community must treat human rights globally in a fair and equal manner, on the same footing, and with the same emphasis."

Sincerely,
Eddie G. Griffin

Musing over Mortality

By Eddie Griffin

Friday, November 21, 2008

Today would have been the day I marked the remembrance of the late John F. Kennedy, the only president I ever saw in the flesh, exactly 45 years ago. But instead, I mark this day with the remembrance of Aunt Birdie who passed away on last night. She was 91 years old.

History, it seems, is passing before my eyes and it makes me meditate upon the meaning of mortality, because I realize that on any give day I may go up on my own sick bed and never come down.

Aunt Birdie passed away peacefully, after spending a brief time in a coma, induced by a stroke. She was the last of the Haynes clan, an original Texas African-American pioneer family that goes back to East Texas to the time of the Emancipation Proclamation.

Marshall, Texas was the cultural center of the aristocratic black family. I never will forget Aunt Birdie’s strict table manners, with the spoon on this side and the fork on that side, and the table cloth in your lap, and do not drink your water while you’re eating, and other commandments from the book of civilized behavior that sounded like the Law of Moses from the mouth of Aunt Birdie.

Why did I think that our last conversations would be by phone, when she was in a nursing home only a few blocks away from me? God forgive me, I vowed to be at her 90th birthday party and something came up that give me an excuse, and now I bear a sense of guilt that I can never live down. Her last words to me: “Why haven’t you come to visit me?” I am in terrible contrition over that. So, I dedicate this portion of my memoirs to her memory, beginning at the place of her birth:

Marshall, Texas

If it came be said that six flags flew over Texas, then Marshall, Texas would have been the only city to fly the seventh flag, the “flag of Missouri”, the last flag of the Confederacy.

As the story goes: Before Jefferson Davis and his cabinet abandoned the capitol on the last train out of Richmond, a cache of treasury notes and stamps were shipped to Marshall, Texas.

This city that had arisen from a land grant by Isaac Van Zandt and his partners had become the cultural center of the Confederate gentry, nicknamed the “Athens of Texas”, with one of the largest concentrated holdings of slaves in the state. Historians believe that Marshall was designated to become the new Confederate capitol.

Post-Emancipation

On Emancipation Day, New Year’s morning, January 1, 1863, before any slaves in Texas could be set free by the decree of Abraham Lincoln, Confederate General J. B. Magruder and his Cottontails were in the process of recapturing the Union stronghold on Galveston. The Civil War would not end, nor the slaves freed, until Union General Gordon Granger marched back into Galveston, Texas on June 19, 1865, a day forever enshrined as Juneteenth.

Two days before the final surrender of Texas, on June 17th, Union forces took the city of Marshall. The city would later become the home office of the Freedmen’s Bureau in Texas, and even later a thriving city with rich African-American culture.

Slaves were instantly turned into free laborers who could contract their hire for wages. With Confederate money now being worthless, former slaves contracted to divide the harvest with their former slave masters, in an arraignment known as sharecropping. However, when black farmers sought a better price for their cotton by selling directly to black merchants in Galveston, East Texas became a hotbed for lynching.

Mr. Fort Worth

Major Khleber M. Van Zandt, son of Texas pioneer Isaac Van Zandt, father of the city of Marshall, had raised a company for the 7th Texas Infantry Regiment for the Confederacy in 1861. He was captured at Fort Donelson, Tennessee in 1862 and released in a prisoner exchange after the fall of Vicksburg. After the war, he returned to Marshall and later moved west to Fort Worth, where he became a merchant, banker, and railroad man. Today, he is known as “Mr. Fort Worth”.

Legacy of Wiley College

Marshall, Texas became the site of two Negro Colleges, Wiley and Bishop. This is from whence the Haynes family legacy came. Aunt Birdie and most of the Haynes clan attended Wiley College, which was founded in 1873 by Methodist Episcopal Church Bishop Isaac Wiley and later certified by the Freedman’s Aid Society in 1882.

Etiquettes and Ethics was a standard course taught in Texas schools to African-American children. It was a skill that would enable them to become house maids, butlers, and servants. It was a course on how to walk properly, how to speak the Queen’s language properly, use proper diction and dialect.

The foundation of our southern education probably derived from that fact that in 1907 Wiley College received the first Carnegie college library west of the Mississippi. By 1935, Wiley had spawn a national debate team second to none, headed by Professor Melvin B. Tolson, who also staged the first sit-in Texas at the Harrison County Courthouse, along with students from both colleges.

Family Heritage

Today, the Haynes family owns minerals rights on a 100-year lease of timberland in East Texas. How they managed to hang on to their property during the turbulent period of post-Reconstruction, when East Texas was the hotbed of racial violence, is yet another story, one that I would have to learn from research, and not from Aunt Birdie.

Dick Cheney and Alberto Gonzales indicted in Willacy County, Texas

By Eddie Griffin

Thursday, November 20, 2008

Since the story broke about the indictment of Vice President Dick Cheney and former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, the former prosecutor Juan Angel Guerra, who first brought the indictment, was a no-show on court day, provoking Judge Manuel Banales to declare, “The state of Texas is not present, which is a rarity... I will not have a hearing when one of the parties is not present.”

If this is not flabbergasting enough, Judge Banales adds this little bit of Texas intrigue. He ordered “Texas Rangers to go to his house, check on his well-being and order him to court on Friday.”

OMG! Angel Guerra could be missing or dead. You just don’t indict the Vice President of the United States on charges of “engaging in an organized criminal activity”. (Agnew) How disloyal! Unless, of course, the charges are true, then Guerro would be a hero. But, for now, it looks like he is in hiding.

What a helluva allegation in the indictment!

Can you believe that Dick Cheney would own stock in a company that builds and manages federal prisons? What is the Vanguard Group? What kind of business is it in? And, does the Vice President own shares in it?

Those are the questions, not whether Juan Guerra has lost his mind or is seeking revenge for losing his office. We need to know exactly what the Vanguard Group does in order to make its profits, and how those profits are distributed. Is Dick Cheney receiving any dividends from the company?

In order for there to be a criminal indictment, there must first be criminal activity. Vanguard must have been charged with prisoner brutality, and it is also reported that Attorney General Alberto Gonazales tried to use his authority of his office to block an investigation into an inmate’s death that would a resulted in a major lawsuit against Vanguard. (The suit went forward anyway and resulted in a large settlement for the decease family).

These are reports from various news sources. But hard to find is this Vanguard Group. If you find any information about it, please send it to me at eddiegriffin_basg@yahoo.com.

President Barack H. Obama: My Son

By Eddie G. Griffin

Tuesday, November 18, 2008

I have children and then I have children. Some of my children are adopted. As a servant of the Lord, sometimes a man has to adopt children who are not his own. And, so I have adopted Barack H. Obama, as my own son by kindred spirit, because he did all the things that would make a father proud.

He ran a good, clean, and honorable race to win the presidency of the United States. He has made his life an open book and has chosen to put his life under a microscope to lead by example. People will be watching him everywhere to see if he makes a mistake. I can understand that some people not too comfortable with having an African-American lead the greatest nation in the world.

But for these times, he is our chosen leader. He is my son by adoption, because he did everything I would have hoped to raise my own three sons would have done while growing up... to be honorable men and leaders in the community. In an age of foolish children, Barack stands out in a crowd.



Spiritually, I feel like King David, a man of war all my life, unfit to build a house for God. My adventures, as a Black Panther, was a life lived with fierce suicidal rage and rebellion, a desperado at war with the government, and at war with the world and myself.

But when all the wars are over and all of your enemies defeated, then there is still that war within, and it's hard to turn off a 62 year-old rage.

I had to find peace to make peace with myself. And, I am even more at peace now that I have found a wise son in Barack Obama, at least wiser than the previous leader, and surely wiser than his opponents. With him, he brings a refreshing attitude and sense of hope. Personally, it gives me great relief.

I need not study war any more. I must learn now to defend, and how to root our corruption, and vanquish the threat of terrorism, and build a new world.

But I would not rush to judgment as to who represents a terrorist threat when our own brutish ways make us a bigger threat to ourselves. We must do unto others as we would have others do unto us. The vanquished do not negotiate the terms and conditions of peace.

It was terribly hard for members of the Black Panther Party to renounce the use of violence against the government. Pride was the big factor. However, we were rotting in jails and prisons, classified as enemies of the state, domestic terrorists, convicted criminals, some with life sentences and beyond.

But one of our comrades was dying of cancer, and the government offered him a chance to go home before he died, only on one condition: that the revolutionaries renounce the use of violence to achieve their political objective.

The debate within our ranks ended in tears. We notified government lawyers that Rafael Cancel Miranda would speak for us all, to renounce the use of violence to overthrow the U. S. government. With this, President Jimmy Carter issued conditional pardons to many, but not all. And some of us left prison, recognized as international political prisoners.

The case of Mwana

A Panther prison rebel leader named Mwana was released from a refrigerated strip cell at Marion Federal Prison by a Writ of Habeas Corpus. Southern Illinois University professor Jim Roberts established the Prisoner Rights Project at SIU Law School. Roberts named Mwana to be a member of the board of directors, the first prisoner to serve on a board of a project at a major university.

This provided Mwana, a jailhouse lawyer, with free access to law students attending the university. All inmate grievances would go to Mwana for screening of prisoner rights violation and then to the law students who, in turn, prepared the cases for court.

Mwana had met Professor Roberts and his law students after a prison hunger strike in 1976. For Mwans's role in the protest, the warden had placed him in the long-term segregation unit, known as the Control Unit, which became increasing restrictive, over the years. When Finney blocked the professor entrance into the prison for a visit with Mwana, Prof. Roberts went to court and eventually won a $39,000 settlement against the Bureau of Prison, for denying him access to his prisoner client and thereby denying him the right to practice law. It was the first such successful lawsuit against the Bureau, and later withstood a Supreme Court challenge.

Around 1979, President Jimmy Carter released a select group of radical prisoners, on the condition that they renounce violence. Mwana was the one who convinced Rafael Miranda that this was the best choice. The dispute within the ranks of radical prisoners was fierce, because some did not want to give up the fight. But the fight was over.

The revolutionaries had won what we could win, a reprieve of sorts. They had won their freedom and some vindication and redemption for their politically motivated crimes. (Herman Bell of the BLA, and Leonard Peltier of AIM, remain incarcerated)

In any case, the Revolution of the 1970s ended with a public renounciation of violence.

I have been blessed to have survived the internment and the future shock effect of reentry, and to have helped teach a new generation.

I have raised children, and children’s children, and children’s children’s children, since my release almost 25 years ago. I am a new person, a new man. In prison, no one would even know me by the name of Eddie Griffin, except the wardens and the FBI. My inmate-in-arms, however, called me “Mwana”, a Swahili name given to me by the brothers incarcerated, known as the Marion Brothers.

I tell this story not to glorify my violent and riotous past, but that others might understand that it is hard to turn off WAR. For me, it is tempting to search for enemies and make new enemies if I find none, just to have somebody, something, or a cause to fight. But the only fight now is against the forces of nature and the state of the economy, and against the few who are aroused by a man skin-color, instead of his vision.

As I said before, so say I now: I have children and I have children... good children and bad children.

Barack Obama is a good son.

Racism Dead – Bigotry Abides

By Eddie Griffin

Monday, November 17, 2008

Well over half of America put their confidence in the leadership of an African-American by electing Barack Obama to be President of the United States. Over half of America believes that race is not a prerequisite to lead the most powerful nation in the world. The rule of racism, at last, took backseat to the will of a people who believe that all men are created equal in the sight of a Christian nation. A man named Barack Hussein Obama was judged by the content of his character, instead of prejudices aroused by his skin color.

Some people have yet to accept the outcome of the election. Race hatred is being fueled by hate groups, aimed at dividing the nation. Many people look away and pretend bigotry is not there. But it is there, and has been all along.

Some people confuse the two. This is obvious by mass reaction to the November 4 election results. The ideology of white supremacy was resoundingly discarded by the popular vote. It is no longer the dominant ideology that guides our nation.

We have always insisted that “racism” was predicated upon dominate-subordinate relationships between whites and blacks. From the perpetual occupation of the Whitehouse down to city hall, we have slowly migrated toward a “more equal” union. Now, from city hall to the Whitehouse, political power is no longer monopolized and abused to benefit one race or one culture.

Racism can only exist as long as skin color was the prerequisite for occupying the most powerful office in government. In the South, the political right to govern was a “white right to rule”.

In 1964, I was one of the scholars who debated the meaning of “Racism”. We were surprised that our definition was employed by the United Nations, except for one distinction. Global leaders would not accept racism being equated with white supremacy. Their counter argument was that any race can dominate or suppress another race.

In the U.S., it manifested itself in race relations between "the whites" and "the coloreds", and through a rough series of evolutionary progressions toward a truer sense equality. But the resistance to these changes has historically been violent. It is the outward aggression against change that we signify as “racist behavior” or bigotry.

This distinction is very important in this day and time, post-election. If racism is dead, as I have argued above, then the angry backlash is bigotry with a dangerous potential, similar to the election of Abraham Lincoln in 1860. All of Lincoln's days in office were haunted by plots of his assassination. No man should have to live with that threat hanging over his head.

I do not buy into the myth that there is no racist plot against Barack Obama’s life. This is why we continue to pray for him and for our nation. We know the truth of racism is about power.

Now racism is dead. Get over it.

If people cannot get over it, then there is a hate-crime conspiracy waiting to lure them in.

The Patriot Act gives the President of the United States almost absolute power in dealing with domestic terrorism. And, what is more threatening to our national security than to openly plot his assassination.

It is unpatriotic to threaten the life of the man who provides a security blanket over this country. In rapid order, these instigators and would-be assassins need to loose their “freedom of speech”, “right to privacy”, and, if suspicious enough, “freedom of movement”, making certain to respect due process of law.

A threat inside the nation should never exist. If we were aware of an al-Qaeda cell operating inside the United States, there is no doubt as to what we would do? And, these people are operating in board daylight? What is too shameless to be done in darkness is hereby brought out into the light, how arrogant!

A Working National & State Agenda

National Agenda
(1) A plan to revive the economy,
(2) To fix our health care,
(3) Education,
(4) Social Security systems,
(5) To define a clear path to energy independence,
(6) To end the war in Iraq responsibly and finish our mission in Afghanistan, and
(7) To work with our allies to prevent Iran from developing a nuclear weapon, among many other domestic and foreign policy objectives.

Texas State Agenda
(1) To promote educational opportunities for all Texans,
(2) Provide access to quality heath care,
(3) Implement smart energy policies,
(4) Help Texas families keep their homes,
(5) Improve our criminal justice system.

Rapidly Changing Economic Conditions or Plundering the U. S. Treasury

By Eddie Griffin

Thursday, November 13, 2008

Current economic activity is so fluid and rapid and so vast that skiddish market conditions change, every hour on the hour, and every minute in between.

Yesterday, there were calls drill here and drill there. But that’s when oil was topping $140 a barrel. Now oil prices at $56 a barrel the calls have died down and a return to sanity.

Nevertheless, we have committed $$$ billions to a bailout package, giving the Secretary of Treasury absolute power to spend the money as he saw fit. Since then, he’s been jumping from pillar to post, trying the figure out where to put the billions of taxpayer’s dollars to jumpstart the economic battery.

But wait! Haven’t we jumped the gun?

The Washington Post reports:

In the six weeks since lawmakers approved the Treasury's massive bailout of financial firms, the government has poured money into the country's largest banks, recruited smaller banks into the program and repeatedly widened its scope to cover yet other types of businesses, from insurers to consumer lenders.
Along the way, the Bush administration has committed $290 billion of the $700 billion rescue package.

Yet for all this activity, no formal action has been taken to fill the independent oversight posts established by Congress when it approved the bailout to prevent corruption and government waste. Nor has the first monitoring report required by lawmakers been completed, though the initial deadline has passed.

Now I'm not an alarmist. But this stinks to high heaven... taxpayers' money being disbursed without any oversight. I could swear somebody is trying to plunder the Treasury. Remember: The Shah of Iran in 1979, the Tea Pot Dome Scandal, and Lincoln’s great land giveaway.