ST. LOUIS—The U.S. government has chosen St. Louis, Missouri, still reeling from the 2014 African rebellions following the police assassination of Mike Brown, as the host city for a massive counterintelligence facility known as the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency (NGA).
The 90 acre spy agency is being constructed on the predominately African working-class north side.
Under the guise of offering “jobs” and “economic development” to the community, the city and federal government are collaborating with parasitic, predatory real estate investors to displace an entire traditionally black neighborhood to make way for the NGA military compound.
Just a few miles away from where the Uhuru Movement has been hard at work on the Black Power Blueprint project, the NGA is moving rapidly to complete its new building by 2024.
Currently headquartered in Springfield, Virginia, the NGA has had a base in St. Louis for at least seven years.
To fund its expansion, NGA has received a grand total of at least $1.75 billion to construct its massive headquarters.
Hundreds of Africans have been already forced out of their homes.
What is the NGA?
The NGA is a government agency that uses spy technology to assist the military in killing and torturing oppressed peoples.
It exists to crush our struggles for liberation and for control of our resources, lands, lives and dignity.
According to its own website, the NGA “delivers strategic intelligence” to the U.S. government enabling its “warfighters” to “plan missions, gain battlefield superiority, precisely target the adversary and protect our military forces.”
The NGA launches surveillance drones four to six miles up into the stratosphere. The drones remain in the sky for years, immune from damage by missiles, monitoring everything within a 15 mile proximity and able to zoom in on the details of a stick of butter on a plate.
In the real world, the NGA’s work enables the U.S. military to carry out “surgical strikes” on weddings, funerals and pharmaceutical factories in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Sudan and elsewhere.
The NGA’s trail of blood is smeared all throughout the Middle East, including in Gaza, where it locates “hot spots” and provides Israel or the “warfighter” with the coordinates of longitude and latitude to slaughter Palestinian men, women, children and babies.
The NGA works with white nationalist “border control” to enforce through violence the false, illegitimate, colonial border separating the Indigenous people of Occupied Mexico from their national homeland.
Why St. Louis?
The north side of St. Louis was chosen for the NGA for two obvious reasons: one, it is a preemptive strike on the potential for greater resistance by African workers; and two, the colonially imposed conditions of north St. Louis make our community vulnerable to prey by parasitic gentrifiers.
The African community of St. Louis is characterized by decaying infrastructure, a life expectancy at 17 years less than nearby white areas, over 25,000 vacant and abandoned properties and deep and profound colonial destitution.
These conditions spell big money for predatory investors who buy up properties, flip and sell for a higher cost, raising the property value and kicking Africans out of their homes.
When the NGA set its sights on St. Louis they were only willing to buy land from a single owner.
That’s why the city stepped in and took over the north side so they could sell it to the NGA at one fell swoop.
In order for the city to break a deal with the NGA, they had to acquire all 90 acres of land, which meant taking over 44 homes through coercion such as eminent domain.
This entailed making deals with a ruling class capitalist named Paul McKee and his lender, Bank of Washington, and purchasing from Titan Fish Two, a creditor who acquired properties through foreclosure.
Much of the land was being held by the Land Reutilization Authority in a “land bank” as part of a cynical plan called Team Four designed to allow north St. Louis to deteriorate until market conditions became ripe for “large scale development,” another term for gentrification.
A gaggle of neocolonial office holders with a stake in maintaining the colonial-capitalist status quo threw their weight behind the acquisition of this land by the city and eventual purchase by the NGA.
Otis Williams, executive director of the St. Louis Development corporation, received an award for his role in selling out our community to the NGA.
Gentrification is colonialism
The 90 acre site contained 551 parcels with 110 owners. Real estate predatory investor Paul McKee owned nearly half of those parcels and sold all of them to the city.
McKee praised the NGA headquarters for forwarding his “NorthSide Regeneration” gentrification scheme.
In 2015, Charlsetta Taylor, a 79-year-old African homeowner in St. Louis, collected thousands of signatures on a petition to fight the seizure of her home by eminent domain.
Taylor delivered over 95,000 signatures to the NGA asking that they refuse any offer from the city of St. Louis.
Of course, the NGA ignored her and soon after, 47 homes that had housed generations of African families were demolished.
Taylor was quoted in St. Louis Today saying, “Our homes are a lot more than brick and mortar. Our homes are our heritage…they represent the lives of our fathers and our grandfathers …”
The NGA claims it will offer “jobs” to the community, both in the construction and operation of its facility.
In reality, it will offer thousands of jobs to white people who will move in to north St. Louis, further pushing out Africans.
Moreover, the false promise of jobs to our impoverished, colonized community in exchange for bulldozing our neighborhood to make room for a spy agency is an example of “throwing poisoned meat to starving people,” to quote African People’s Socialist Party Chairman Omali Yeshitela.
The city starves us through gentrification, criminalizes those who would attempt to build an independent economy for African people and then offers “job opportunities” within a murderous U.S. military spy agency as a supposed way out of our imposed poverty!
We want economic development and the right to control our own resources and lives.
In response, the U.S. government attempts to bring us into a partnership with the murder and mayhem they are inflicting on the peoples of the world.
They want to use one colony (African people) to attack other colonized peoples!
They force African people into a corner so that out of desperation, we will sign up for any way to get some resources─even if it means participating in the killing and oppression of other peoples around the world.
NGA will intensify local police presence in African colony
The spectra of gentrification always brings with it more and more police into our neighborhoods.
The St. Louis government website stated that “the St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department and the NGA worked together to develop a crime fighting strategy that they outlined in a Memorandum of Understanding.
“The NGA Security Forces will have jurisdiction adjacent to the NGA site to protect both NGA employees and neighborhood residents.”
In other words, the city will establish an additional police buffer outside of the NGA that they claim is supposed to be beneficial to the community.
This is counterinsurgency on steroid injections! It is an obvious attack on the legitimate aspirations of African workers that rose to the surface in Ferguson of 2014 when the mantra, “Kill the Police,” was reported in the bourgeois press as the rallying cry of the rebellion.
NGA part of larger plan to make St. Louis white
The NGA project is part of a larger plan by the government of St. Louis to reduce the African population of this majority-black city.
Other systematic forms of black population removal by the city government include the bill currently being debated by the Board of Alderman to reduce the number of wards in the city from 28 to 14.
The reduction of the ward number would facilitate the gerrymandering of African wards and serve to neutralize the African vote.
Also in discussion by the Board of Alderman is a bill that would allow most of the city workers in St. Louis to live outside the city, primarily to allow cops from neighboring counties to occupy the African community in St. Louis and participate in the aggressive public policy of police terror that is part and parcel of colonial gentrification.
In the final analysis, the plot to “make St. Louis white again” concocted by the city government in collusion with real estate predators will be unsuccessful.
We are deepening the base of African resistance. Since 2014, the African People’s Socialist Party and its mass organization, the International People’s Democratic Uhuru Movement (InPDUM), have been building a meaningful political presence in St. Louis.
Our Black Power Blueprint Economic Development Program, spearheaded by Deputy Chair Ona Zené Yeshitela, has brought optimism to Africans in the city and beyond who have never before seen a glimpse of genuine economic development initiated by the advanced detachment of the African working-class.
The renovation of an abandoned 9000 square-foot building in the heart of the impoverished north side and its re-opening as the Uhuru House community center has served already as a bastion of hope and resistance in the face of the looming threat of colonial invasion.
Our Uhuru House hosts Sunday community meetings where community members come from all walks of life and participate in building the only movement on the ground that is objectively a countermeasure against the NGA, the ward reduction scheme, the police containment, the gentrification and all other examples of colonial hell into which we are forced to live.
The Black Power Blueprint is a plan to make African St. Louis ungentrifyable, to build a fortress against gentrification through practical, political and economic self-empowerment of the working-class African colony.
Defeat the NGA! Keep 28!
Keep St. Louis Black!
Defend the Black Power Blueprint!
We are Winning!
