What is the Anthropocene and Are We in It?

King Kendrick reigned supreme at the 2016 Grammys

Gina Yashere on laughing in the face of bigotry

Kevin Powell on redefining manhood and unlearning misogyny

'Taking one minute at a time' - freed death row inmate

This is Europe: dreams and deprivation

In Brussels, otherwise known as “the capital of Europe,” the destitution I see on a daily basis is unlike that I have seen anywhere else in the world. I’ve been to “Africa” and visited many parts of Europe and America but Brussels is the world in microcosm with all its associated poverty. In it, the complex convergence of people and politics, of individual hopes and communal dreams has created a city in which the recession’s collateral damage is concentrated in one, miniature place. With Europe’s combined wealth, even in these hard times, there is no excuse for the kind of poverty that has become an all too familiar sight on Brussels’ well-trodden streets.

In 2012 I bear witness to people who could have come straight out of a Walker Evans photograph. Four characters, in particular, stay in my mind:

• The kneeling youth: a man in his mid-twenties, tall and thin, genuflects in the middle of the busy Boulevard Anspach holding a sign that simply says: J’ai faim. He is jostled by shoppers and their overstuffed bags, overlooked as if he is not there, but he is. Every day the same man in the same street with the same troubles. Still, dignified, desperate for help.
• The polio-ravaged woman: she hobbles agonisingly down the length of the street dragging one leg in front of the other in a spectacle of suffering. She is stooped and without a cane. She relies on her arm held against her good leg for support. Mothers steer their children away from the old woman as she approaches passers-by, cup in free hand, soliciting financial aid.
• The horrifically burnt wheelchair-bound man: the grotesqueness of his injuries frightens small children who can’t help but stare at his disfigured visage. He is curiously bewitching. He is a vivid personality, animated and smiling, his face taut with deep scarring. He has a regular spot opposite the kebab shop, which does brisk trade but he doesn’t. People would rather give to the man with the cute dogs in sunglasses begging down the road.
• The human-shaped blanket heap beneath the post office awnings: it varies in size and shape but the form is always human. They take turns in securing the coveted spot between the post office and the bus station. It is dry and private compared to the place around the corner, where a group of roughsleepers reside, conducting their ablutions in full view of passing traffic.

Some will scoff at my characterisation of poverty in Brussels but I walk around with my eyes open. You need only stroll through Gare Centrale or around Anspach to see the levels of deprivation. The wilful blindness that many of us have adopted does not make the problem disappear; it is still there, we just choose not to see it. 

Could it possibly be worse than that of a megacity like London? The answer is one of scale. Because of its size, everything is concentrated in a small space making things more exaggerated, less subtle and more in-your-face than in the expansiveness of London. I’m particularly talking about homelessness and, in this context, roughsleepers and beggars. Brussels has a seething undercurrent, one that threatens to short-circuit at any moment.

In Brussels circles I hear Africa derided with stunning regularity. I have even heard it said that Europe’s problems are down to “Africans” not servicing “their debts.” I will point out that:

• In “Africa” there is no social security but there is family.
• In “Africa” there is unemployment but there is community.
• In “Africa” there is material poverty but there is hope and it springs eternal.
• In “Africa” there are myriad problems but there is faith in the ability to overcome them.

In Europe, we have all the opportunities but none of the corresponding responsibilities. Which of these – family, community, hope and faith - can Europe claim to have at this critical moment in our history?

Brussels, like Europe, is coming apart at the seams. The fabric of a patchwork society is under intense strain, not just from the economic crisis but from a fundamental crisis of belief in politics to change things, and in self. The sooner we own up to this and do something about it, the better for everyone, especially the most poor.

Baratunde Thurston at the SXSW Interactive Festival

What’s so disturbing about Coetzee’s Disgrace?

A couple of weeks ago, over a lobbyist-like lunch in a Commission-crowded coffee shop, my companion remarked: “Every time I tell friends to read Disgrace, and they go away and read it, they suddenly stop returning my calls. It’s one of my favourite books. You’re a literary person. Give it a go.”

So I did and I soon began to wonder whether I would take said friend’s calls again. Disgrace is indeed a disturbing read - and relentlessly so - but the way in which Coetzee crafts a taut and compelling narrative makes for an affecting novel that’s ultimately a work of art.

In just over 200 pages, Disgrace grapples with the big political issues of race, sex and power in post-apartheid South Africa but not gratuitously so and not without diffusing the blame. The protagonist, David Lurie is a repulsive man with few redeeming qualities, a respectable misogynist who sees women in exclusively sexual terms, including his own daughter. When the university professor has a relationship with a student, “an affair” which, to my mind, was begun by rape, he is forced out of his job in disgrace and goes to stay with his daughter on her smallholding in the veld. The father and daughter are attacked on the farm and it has devastating consequences that change both their lives forever.

Coetzee has mastered the art of saying so much while saying very little. This is how he manages to cram a great deal into a relatively thin volume. While economical with his prose, he doesn’t hold back on the moral questions, which are controversial and wide-ranging and where the uneasiness with Lurie’s character begins for the reader.  

Coetzee’s prose is stiflingly tight and subtle with no room for air. Not a spare word makes it on to the page which forces the reader to read between the lines and draw his or her own conclusions about the characters’ motivations. 

Which is what makes Disgrace such a challenging read. By giving the reader just enough (rope), Coetzee challenges him to make assumptions in the literary world that s/he would not feel comfortable making in the real world. Consequently, the reader feels complicit in the depravity of Coetzee’s fictional realm, so engaged is s/he with the true-to-life characters and situations that they take an emotional toll. He makes us question our norms, allegiances and values. He makes us question ourselves.

Well-structured and deftly executed, Disgrace is a classic, but it’s not without its flaws. Lurie’s failed obsession with Byron and Teresa is sometimes an unnecessary and intrusive distraction as is the tendency to rely on the reader to know a little too much to propel the book along. That said, Disgrace is so deep with dark layers that on a second reading new interpretations are bound to come to light.

Disgrace is a book that manages to polarise opinion but that is, undoubtedly, one of its strengths. A couple of weeks later, while extolling the virtues of the book to another friend, I mentioned how it made me see South Africa with new eyes.

“Don’t let the views of a white South African living in Australia put you off going to South Africa,” she said. “Go and see for yourself.”

End of discussion. I wonder if she’ll take my calls?

Going global

March-April 2012 issue of Brussels Airlines magazine

Yours Truly is featured in the current issue of Brussels Airlines magazine espousing the hidden treasures of Brussels in My City. Check it out here and feel free to agree or disagree with my picks.

Piers Morgan Vs. Toure - Piers Morgan Tonight (3/30/12)

Great debate with Viola Davis and Octavia Spencer on Tavis Smiley re. The Help

Watch Actresses Viola Davis & Octavia Spencer on PBS. See more from Tavis Smiley.

Small acts of kindness

I’ve been back in London less than twenty-four hours and I’m heartened to have borne witness to small acts of kindness that exemplify that, in north London, at least, we really are all in it together. Whether or not we’re part of the Big Society as expressed by the prime minister is another story but we’re certainly part of society as it exists for us in our local communities.

It’s been interesting to compare today with this time last year. The scenes that I recorded in my diary last winter were of a Dickensian gloom, a very individual despair. Times are harder than they were twelve months ago yet spirits are definitely higher. There’s been an almost imperceptible sea-change that has not gone unnoticed.

As my friend and mentor, Natalie, observed, we’re currently on a spectrum of extreme intolerance and small acts of kindness. At the opposite end, we, and millions around the world, see what transpired on a tram in south west London and a similar event on a bus further east. Some people no longer feel the need to conceal what they’re thinking when it comes to race and pointing the perceived finger of blame at people of colour and immigrants, whether they were, in fact, born British or whether they were newly arrived last week. At the other end, it is a pleasure to watch a stranger help a blind man board a busy Victoria line tube train. Not only did the sighted man discretely assist the blind man, but he also stood chatting to him for the length of his journey as if they were old friends. I only realised that they had just met when the sighted man helped ‘his friend’ off the train when he reached his stop and steered him in the right direction. It was at this point that the blind man thanked him for keeping him company and shook his hand saying, ‘Nice to meet you.’ Hardly Miracle on 34th Street but notable, nonetheless.

The following day, another incident occurred that restored my faith in Londoners. A man held a bus for me, a bus that I was certain to miss had he not intervened by standing half in and half out of the door as insurance while asking the driver to wait as I ran. It’s been a long time since that has happened since everyone is in a perennial rush these days, Christmas notwithstanding. But this gentleman didn’t stop there.

As we both ascended the stairs to the top deck of the overcrowded bus, we – and everyone else – noticed the shadowy, hunched figure of a young male stood on the stairway. He wore a dark hoodie and loose, cotton trousers and his face was covered by his hands, which were small and gloved. He was clearly distressed though silently so. We all ignored him, including myself. When the bus reached its terminus, everyone passed this figure on the way down, just as we had done on the way up and no one said anything.

It was at this point that the man who stopped the bus for me put his arm around this enigma, who turned out to be a young boy, no more than fourteen, and asked him, ‘Are you alright, brother?’ The boy looked up at the stranger, perhaps fifteen years older than himself, and said, ‘I’m alright, thank you.’ He clearly wasn’t but he looked grateful that someone had taken the time to ask. At a time when young people are falling prey to all kinds of temptations and tragic fates, sometimes all it takes is a small show of interest to reassure them that someone cares. I felt quietly rebuked.

These were the main episodes that struck me but by no means the only ones, including the young mother in a store in a notoriously deprived area who informed me that my bag was torn and offered me a carrier by way of substitute lest I fall victim to a thief. A small thing but then in our twenty-four hour, consumerist society every little helps, including small acts of involuntary kindness.

Africa rising: The hopeful continent

From this week's Economist:

THE shops are stacked six feet high with goods, the streets outside are jammed with customers and salespeople are sweating profusely under the onslaught. But this is not a high street during the Christmas-shopping season in the rich world. It is the Onitsha market in southern Nigeria, every day of the year. Many call it the world’s biggest. Up to 3m people go there daily to buy rice and soap, computers and construction equipment. It is a hub for traders from the Gulf of Guinea, a region blighted by corruption, piracy, poverty and disease but also home to millions of highly motivated entrepreneurs and increasingly prosperous consumers.

Over the past decade six of the world’s ten fastest-growing countries were African. In eight of the past ten years, Africa has grown faster than East Asia, including Japan. Even allowing for the knock-on effect of the northern hemisphere’s slowdown, the IMF expects Africa to grow by 6% this year and nearly 6% in 2012, about the same as Asia.

The commodities boom is partly responsible. In 2000-08 around a quarter of Africa’s growth came from higher revenues from natural resources. Favourable demography is another cause. With fertility rates crashing in Asia and Latin America, half of the increase in population over the next 40 years will be in Africa. But the growth also has a lot to do with the manufacturing and service economies that African countries are beginning to develop. The big question is whether Africa can keep that up if demand for commodities drops.

Read more...

Where are our Walker Evans?

Much has been written over the last few months about the lack of writers documenting the human impact of the financial crisis. The names most often brought out in these debates are Steinbeck and Orwell, two towering figures in the literary-documentary tradition against which no writers today justifiably compare.

But it occurred to me while walking around the Jeff Wall retrospective at the BOZAR in Brussels that, not only is it legitimate to question the dearth of literary chroniclers, we might also pause to consider the absence of photographers capturing the essence of the new great depression. Where are our Walker Evans? Where are our Cartier-Bressons?

The argument could be made, as it has about writers, that in the midst of the worst financial crisis in a generation, people don’t want to read, or see, their suffering reflected in their entertainment. The purpose, they argue, of literature and film and any other of the arts, is to take the consumer into the realms of fantasy not force them to wallow, to live, in their reality. This is a one-dimensional analysis. Surely, the job of an artist is to capture reality as well as help create it? And if, as is often said, the media set the agenda, then surely our writers and photographers are in a unique position to document the social and economic decline at the human level and give voice, shape and form to the suffering.

While many striking images have come out of Detroit, and there have been inevitable accusations of 'poverty porn', the new voyeurism, it may only be years from now that we come to rue the consequences of the suffering we chose to ignore.

The Repatriate Generation

From Time magazine.

By Vivienne Walt

The oil-rich African nation of Chad has rampant corruption, unclean water, few tarred roads and patchy electricity. It ranks as the world's second most dysfunctional country, after Somalia, according to the 2011 Failed States Index of the Washington-based nonprofit Fund for Peace. In short, Chad seems a nightmare location for business — unless, that is, you are Papa Madiaw Ndiaye, 45, or Patrice Backer, 44, of Advanced Finance & Investment Group, a private-equity fund-management company in Dakar, Senegal, that has so far invested about $72 million in African financial institutions, agriculture and mining. Ndiaye, the fund's CEO and founder, and Backer, the chief operating officer, have been plotting how to get rich ever since they became best friends as freshmen at Harvard University and worked together at JPMorgan. Decades later, their most lucrative prospect last year was a bank in Chad. "It's like low-hanging fruit," says Ndiaye, describing the investment climate in Africa. "There is no competition. If you know what you're doing, it is a bonanza." 

Such bonanzas — opportunities in troubled places with huge needs — are increasingly being sought out by a fast-growing group: Africans who have returned home after years of living, working and studying in the West. Though still a small subculture, African executives who have abandoned high-flying careers on Wall Street, in the City of London and in other financial hubs are becoming a force across the continent, their impact far outstripping their numbers. By moving home, they and others are bucking the trend of generations of Africans who headed west in search of brighter prospects, better education and decent jobs — and stayed abroad for good. Millions of African families have been kept afloat for decades by remittances from relatives working abroad as everything from street cleaners to physicians. Now with economic prospects and, in some cases, political stability improving in Africa while both are declining in the West, some of those relatives have concluded they are better off back home. "There is a momentum among young, upwardly mobile people to come home," says Rolake Akinola, a Nigerian business analyst with years of work experience in London. "We call ourselves the Repatriate Generation." 

The generation is a product of two colliding forces. The first is the global economic crisis of 2008, which resulted in millions of lost jobs in the U.S. and Europe and dampened employment prospects even for the best and the brightest. The other is the rocketing value of commodities, many of which are found in Africa. This has drawn new investment to the continent and pushed up growth. The upturn has been helped by deregulation in several countries, which has opened new industries to private investment, and also negotiations to end violent conflicts in places like Liberia and Rwanda. A report last year by McKinsey & Co. found that Africa's annual growth rate averaged 4.9% from 2000 to 2008 — more than twice the pace in the 1980s and '90s — and was likely to continue for some time as its middle class grows. Consumer spending on the continent could reach $1.4 trillion by 2020, the report claims. "If recent trends continue, Africa will play an increasingly important role in the global economy," it notes. 

Read more here.

Riots, racism and reporting: The Katrina Comparison

The leading article in yesterday’s Independent claimed that the English riots are Britain’s ‘Katrina moment.’ Others have drawn the comparison too. The media’s desperately trying to make sense of these unprecedented events. But having thought about it, I’ve come to the conclusion that the analogy to Katrina is deeply offensive to the people of New Orleans.

While I take the article’s point in terms of the potential impact of the riots, the comparing of the aftermath of a wholly natural disaster that was a life-and-death situation to that of what amounts to no more than common criminality and opportunism is unfortunate.

If there’s any comparison to be made to the aftermath of Katrina, it’s in the way in which the media reported both events. 

Just as displaced and marooned New Orleans blacks desperate for food were deemed ‘looters’ while whites were simply ‘foragers’, so too the English Defence League, racist thugs, were referred to as ‘groups protecting their communities’ without any analysis of their motivations. 

The BBC interview with Darcus Howe, in which the presenter was hell bent on painting the distinguished, veteran broadcaster as some kind of rude boy apologist for criminal disorder, is also a case in point.BBC Radio 5 Live didn’t cover itself in glory either. The tone of The Victoria Derbyshire Show, which went out live from Tottenham yesterday, was wholly questionable and revealed the presenter’s clear bias about who was to blame and why.

To their credit, those media you would expect to take this kind of line haven’t done as badly in their own reporting.

The Daily Mail and The Sun have sought to highlight the diversity of those involved in the criminality, across race, class and gender. Both papers have focussed on societal moral decay rather than pointing the finger at specific communities.

The McPherson Inquiry following the murder of Stephen Lawrence highlighted the extent of British institutional racism. At the time of its publication, I wrote an article for the British Journalism Review which argued that the media, as much as any other institution, needed to review its employment practices and its lack of diversity.

This week, it’s again been pointed out that the only time we see black people on British TV (such as on Newsnight and other news and current affairs programmes) is when something like this happens. Indeed. The media plays a large role in dictating how we see things. Until they make a concerted effort to balance the scales of representation – behind the scenes and in their overall output – we’ll still be talking about ten years’ from now, just as we are about the missed opportunities of the McPherson report.

Click below to watch the Darcus Howe stitch-up.

Why can't we face the famine?

Oh, what the starving masses of East Africa would give to trade their life-or-death existences for those with bigger problems, like not having the latest trainers, mobile phones or laptops to pose with! You get me doh! In the midst of the madness in England’s cities, let’s not forget that people with eminently more critical problems are on the brink of starvation. 

Aid agencies have been saying for weeks that international governments have not been forthcoming with the much-needed assistance to alleviate the suffering of millions in Kenya. While they’re happy to stump up the money for the markets, as we’ve seen time and again in the last two years, when it comes to the people who are so often the victims of the market it’s a completely different story. 

Though the anguish of the people in the aid camps is due, in large part, to war and corruption, that doesn’t let the West off the hook. It’s rarely the fault of the people at the bottom that countries without governments or those with fraudulent leaders are where they are. The worst drought the region has experienced in 60 years has the potential to claim the lives of 13 million, two million of whom are children, according to reports. Thirty thousand have already starved to death.

Events of the last few days, if not months, have shown that governments, like those they purport to govern can’t always be trusted to do the right thing. Individuals, and communities of individuals, need to step up to the plate and take ownership of these causes that, in the midst of a global recession, are likely to be met with much resistance. That doesn’t make them any less worthy.

Unfortunately, many people don’t like to feel that they’re giving, especially to causes they have no natural affinity with. They’ll happily buy a charity single featuring their favourite artists without sparing a thought for the real reason they’re being asked to part with their cash. But that doesn’t matter. Whatever the reason people part with their cash, it’s the cash that counts. We can all take inspiration from the 11-year-old boy from Ghana who’s determined to raise an ambitious $13 million for famine victims in his school holidays and has so far raised a laudable £300. Compare Andrew Andasi to another 11-year-old who appeared in a London court this morning on riot burglary charges and it really is a telling story.

We need to come up with creative ways to raise funds for those in need, whether they’re our next door neighbours, as in the case of the donations that have been made to those displaced in English riot areas, or whether they’re further away. I don’t have the answers but the debate is necessary. That being the case, all contributions in the form of ideas are welcome. Actual donations can be made here.

Cry, the beloved country: Why London's burning

What was Allied Carpets, a georgraphic landmark in Tottenham, destroyed

I can't tell you how it feels to watch London implode from the distance (and sanctuary) of abroad. Not only my hometown but my home boroughs have been destroyed by the mindless thuggery initially fuelled by legitimate concerns. My daily London life stretches from Enfield in the north through Tottenham to Hackney and Tower Hamlets in the east. All have been the scene of senseless, destructive violence and looting.

But what I can tell you is that it’s been both interesting and sickening to watch how the news of the riots has been reported abroad, and how it’s been presented as a race war of unruly black youths – the implication being ‘immigrant’ youths – against the British authorities.

What is true is that there’s a real problem with urban youth. And ‘urban’ isn’t being used as a euphemism for ‘black’ as is so often the case. Inner city youths today have extremely limited ambitions. There’s an undeniable culture of low aspiration. Their whole world consists of the boundaries of their borough and, perhaps, slightly beyond. And, unfortunately, the opportunities that exist within that borough are often few and far between. So, they retreat into the community, speak in tongues using a bastardised street language that won’t help them get a job and withdraw into a world in which the only rule of law is that of the streets. They’ve taken the worst from rap music, upon which much blame has (somewhat rightly) been heaped, while ignoring the message that rappers always aspired to transcend their circumstances through their music not stay in them. Add to this the chasm that exists between the politicians and the people and you have an incendiary situation, the flames of which will be fanned indefinitely if serious measures to extinguish them aren’t taken.

The political divide

People don't trust politicians. And no one has trusted this Coalition since it was hastily cobbled together just over a year ago. Three days of rioting highlight what’s long been obvious. MPs are nowhere to be seen in the darkness of night but are all over the place when the illumination of flashbulbs and television cameras appear: holding brooms aloft in Clapham to be seen to lead the clean-up charge, showing solidarity with the police whose salaries and numbers they’re irrationally cutting and fronting press conferences where more questions are asked than are ever answered. Outside of these photo opps, these politicians are invisible in the communities they’re supposed to be serving.

When I was growing up, our local MP, Rhodes Boyson, a Conservative (Brent North), knew every family on our street by name. We’d regularly see him in the local community (not just at election time) and he’d stop and greet us and chat and it was all very cordial and genuine. Even the neighbouring MPs - at the time Ken Livingstone (Brent East) and Paul Boateng (Brent South) - were always around, on the ground, highly visible and ready to talk to the people they represented.

But when was the last time Boris Johnson, David Cameron or Theresa May was seen walking the streets of Tottenham, talking to people and listening to their opinions, gauging their concerns?

This week, I heard that a friend was on the train with David Lammy, the MP for Tottenham. She asked him to talk to a young man she was mentoring, who was also on the train and slightly in awe of the MP. She said he declined.

The BBC reported a Hackney resident as saying: "When you've got bankers taking their bonuses and MP's taking money off people like me for their moats, and their chateaus and their castles, this is the result." This is no excuse for criminal behaviour. But the gulf between politicians and the people has become almost unbreachable. 

They just don’t get it

Hearing politicians pontificating on TV saying that parents should know where their kids are and get them off the street shows just how out of touch they are. The parents already know where the kids are because they're looting the city with their kids. The parents are part of the problem, not the immediate solution. Worklessness is endemic in parts of London. Generational joblessness has been bequeathed from father to son and mother to daughter. By calling on parents to get their kids off the streets reveals massive ignorance on the politicians’ part.

A classic example of the lax parenting that exists in some communities is this: One day, while walking through Edmonton, a young (white) mother was out with her two infant children, one in a pram and the other, a toddler, walking beside her. Out of nowhere, this woman launched into a foul-mouthed tirade against the elder child saying: ‘Come here you f*&!ng c@nt. I told you to stay near me, you b@st@rd!’ Her son was no more than four years old. What hope for that child?

The failure of regeneration

Millions of pounds have been poured into regenerating poor communities in the hope that economic investment will produce a human capital return. But when the majority of the investment is in the form of Bettfreds, Ladbrokes and knock-off KFC chicken-and-chip shops the prospects for urban renewal aren’t quite as good as the multimillion budgets and fancy architectural designs make out. Since leaving Edmonton twelve months ago, I’ve noticed over time the complete decimation of the high street. Where once shops competed for business, they now sit empty. And instead of using the vacant space for community projects at a time when libraries across the borough are being shut down, the empty shops serve to remind the community that they’re not worth investing in. When even the pound shops won’t come, you know you that the powers-that-be see people like you as ten-a-penny, worthless.

The class war

This from my friend Athena in relation to the audio of young female rioters boasting about their criminal activities:

I think there is an anti-intellectualism movement in the working class youth of today and this audio is an example of it. Rather than have aspirations to improve oneself through education or work, they aspire to destroy others and bring others to their level. It’s a combination of entitlement and jealousy. There is no connection between work ethic and success - they believe everyone has inherited wealth, rather than worked for it. It's probably New Labour’s fault. Bad schooling, lack of discipline, lowering of academic expectations, materialism etc.

Also, imagine the parents of these girls and what they must have learnt from them. The parents are probably giving them a negative message e.g. they think they're poor because of society, and not because of a lack of discipline/education/manners/class etc. So rather than teaching them to have ambition, they say "this is your lot, live with it". So the kids riot because they think they have nothing to lose.

I would say these girls are quite typical of low income youth in this country. So many of these kids don't have life/work skills by the time they are 18 they are worthless to society, so society is worthless to them.

A woman leaps from a burning building into the arms of police officers in Surrey Street, Croydon. Photograph: Amy Weston/WENN.com

Ed said it best

On a visit to Peckham, Labour leader Ed Miliband said what the government is afraid to admit. "The issue of deeper underlying causes of some of the activity that we have seen, of why people indulge in this criminal behaviour, is something that, of course, needs to be looked at," he says. "We need to look at issues of parenting, issues of aspiration, issues of prospects for people, but there can never be any excuse for the kinds of things we have seen."

There is no excuse for the wanton violence on the streets of the great city that is London, my home. But politicians must recognise their role in creating the conditions for mayhem if not the mayhem itself. It’s not just the cuts. It’s the rhetoric. Multiculturalism hasn't failed. This is nothing to do with multiculturalism and everything to do with opportunistic criminality and class. To deny that would be to deny the fundamental facts at work. And that, too, would be criminal.

Watch the clip below for a more eloquent voice of reason.

Smiley & West on the Iraq double standard

Tavis makes some interesting, thought-provoking points. For example: "I think that, again, as I have watched this the media has been more titillated by the leaks than by the deaths (of 66,000 Iraqi civilians, including women and children, exposed by Wikileaks)."
Do you agree? Listen below.

Fighting talk from BoJo or just talk?