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Occupy Wall Street Joins Occupy The Dream: Is It Cooptation, or Growing the Movement?

Wed, 01/11/2012 - 13:51 — Glen Ford

 

by BAR executive editor Glen Ford

The Occupy Wall Street movement has, to date, “been effective in warding off cooptation by Democratic Party fronts such as Rebuild The Dream and MoveOn.org.” But OWS’s recent alliance with Black clergy-based (and Russell Simmons-backed) Occupy The Dream raises serious questions in this election year. “It appears that Occupy Wall Street’s new Black affiliate is also in ‘lock-step’ with the corporate Democrat in the White House.”

Will Black Mecca Bail Out Its Gentrifiers and Their Jim Crow BeltLine Streetcars?

Wed, 01/11/2012 - 13:51 — Bruce A. Dixon

By BAR managing editor Bruce A. Dixon

Hailed by “smart growth” advocates around the country, the Atlanta BeltLine, is a massive & racist gentrification scheme funded by diverting billions out of Atlanta's Public School budget to banksters and crooked developers. But those billions aren't enough. To bail out the BeltLine, the governor and Atlanta's black mayor want to levy a one-cent sales tax on Atlanta for streetcars and light rail most of black Atlanta will never ride, for Jim Crow streetcars, when black Atlanta neighborhoods don't even get 24 hour bus or train service. Can the black misleadership class really pull this off?

Freedom Rider: Iran Fights Back

Wed, 01/11/2012 - 02:28 — Margaret Kimberley

 

by BAR editor and senior columnist Margaret Kimberley

“The signs that Iran will be a new target for the U.S. are ominous and unmistakable,” but there are no indications that the Islamic Republic will break under superpower pressure. Instead, the Iranian president is visiting with other heads of state on the U.S. hit list. Washington’s demonization machinery is at full throttle, yet the truth remains: “Iran continues to be inconvenient to the United States for the simple reason that it exists and asserts its rights as a sovereign nation.”

Haiti, Raped by the U.S. Since 2004, and Still Bleeding

Wed, 01/11/2012 - 02:28 — Glen Ford

 

A Black Agenda Radio commentary by Glen Ford

The horrific squandering of Haitian lives and earthquake relief and aid dollars by the occupying powers over the past two years are direct consequences of previous imperial crimes. “Since 2004, Haiti has been methodically stripped of its sovereignty, made into a protectorate of the United Nations,” which is merely a front for the United States. “The earthquake of January 2010 was a natural phenomenon that happened to take place while a rape was in progress.”

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The Role of Black Intellectuals

Wed, 01/11/2012 - 02:28 — Marsha Coleman-...

 

by BAR editor and columnist Marsha Coleman-Adebayo

What useful function do intellectuals serve in the life of the Black community? Clearly, “it is not our role to sweep by the poor in black limousines and to smile from behind cut glass, whether diamonds or Waterford.” Nor does the Black intellectual serve the people by groveling to Power, even its name is Obama. “He has failed to live up to the promises that could have helped stop African Americans still being systematically disadvantaged, thrown out of their homes by malicious banks, disproportionately unemployed and languishing in poor achieving public schools.” The Black intellectual shows her worth by contributing to the “distribution of knowledge and skills” – and by telling the truth.

Coming Soon: Obama’s Big Move in Central Africa

Wed, 01/11/2012 - 02:28 — Glen Ford

 

A Black Agenda Radio commentary by Glen Ford

President Obama would have you believe that 100 elite U.S. Special Forces soldiers are running around in the African Bush looking for what’s left of the Lord’s Resistance Army. “The real target is South Sudan, where the United States is setting the stage for an African proxy oil war with China.” The Green Berets are in central Africa to coordinate military operations by Washington’s African clients. “The United States and Europe can no longer compete economically with China in Africa, and must now resort to raw force, through African puppet armies.”

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Hell No, We Won’t Go To War Against Africa!

Wed, 01/11/2012 - 02:21 — Mark P. Fancher

 

by Mark P. Fancher

Elders and other influencers discouraged Black youth from becoming fodder for the Iraq war, but what of the looming U.S. imperial wars in Africa? The U.S. Africa Command propagates the lie that it only “advises” friendly forces on the continent, but “at the same time establishes bases in the Central African Republic and South Sudan” as part of a purported mission to hunt a guerilla force in the region. U.S. ground wars in Africa may be upon us before there is a chance “to throw up an anti-recruitment barrier around the community.” The education process must begin now, and become permanent.

Business is Booming for the Prison Profiteers

Wed, 01/11/2012 - 02:18 — Anonymous

 

by James Kilgore

Dotcoms came and went, good jobs have come and gone, but the prison industrial complex just keeps rolling along – at very high rates of return! Privatization of prisons and controlled-person services is bound to expand as public revenues for conventional mass incarceration dry up. Even the border is no boundary to penal profit-taking. “Immigration and alternatives to incarceration are the new windows of opportunity in the freedom deprivation sector.”

Listen to Black Agenda Radio on the Progressive Radio Network, with Glen Ford and Nellie Bailey – Week of January 9, 2012

Tue, 01/10/2012 - 10:51 — Nellie Bailey a...

 

Obama Would Prefer To Face Most Virulent Right-Wing Opponent

President Obama would prefer that Republicans nominate one of their most right-wing hopefuls “so that the Democrats can move further and further to the right and become completely indistinguishable from the Republican Party,” said political analyst Paul Street. “The further right the enemy they have in the general election, the more they can scare their liberal base.” Street is author of The Empire’s New Clothes: Barack Obama and the Real World of Power.

Both Parties in Flight from Poor People’s Issues

“There has been a bipartisan flight from working people and from poverty,” said Chicago-based labor activist and writer James Thindwa. “The words ‘poor people’ don’t even feature in the political discourse. Both parties are captive to corporate interests. There may be some variance here and there but, fundamentally, they are here to serve capital.” Thindwa is author of the recent In These Times article, “Why Conservatives Can’t Fix Poverty.”

Obama Military Cuts Don’t Lessen War Costs

The administration’s plans to create a leaner military “simply take us back to the very inflated level of 2008 – and that’s not really very much of an achievement,” said Catherine Lutz, editor of The Bases of Power: The Struggle Against U.S. Military Posts. The proposed cuts affect only the “base,” or basic military infrastructure budget. “The war budgets,” such as “the additional trillion dollars allocated for the wars in Iraq in Afghanistan, are not even included in these numbers. Those are off the table for the purposes of these discussions,” said Lutz. “With all the threatening words being exchanged about Iran and the articulated fears about China, we have to worry that there will be a new theater of war before we know it, and then that money will be added on top of” the base military budget.

Drone Warfare Will Lead to Blowback Against U.S.

“We’ve opened up this Pandora’s Box of bombing people all over the world and it’s definitely going to come back on us – blowback,” said Alice Slater, New York director of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation. “We’re bombing seven countries right now with drones – totally unauthorized by Congress.” The U.S. also pursues policies that discourage nuclear non-proliferation. “If Gaddafi had nuclear weapons, we wouldn’t have bombed Libya. It’s a signal to people on the other end of our aggressive power that they have to protect themselves as best they can.”

New Student Group Against Mass Imprisonment

Students Against Mass Incarceration (SAMI), created early last year at Washington DC’s Howard University, has since expanded to Morgan State University in Baltimore, western Massachusetts, and Columbia University, according to SAMI founder Benjamin Woods. “The prison-industrial complex is a direct outgrowth of the capitalist system,” said Woods, a doctoral candidate. “We want to see people who are most affected” by the repressive apparatus of the state, including political prisoners, providing leadership in the Black community.

P.O.P. Passes Halfway Mark in Newark Protest Marathon

The People’s Organization for Progress (P.O.P.) this week passed the 190-day mark in its daily demonstrations in Newark, New Jersey. “We understood more than a year ago that sporadic protests were not enough,” said P.O.P. chairman Larry Hamm. The grassroots community group has vowed to continue daily demonstrations for at least 381 days, the duration of the 1955 Montgomery, Alabama bus boycott. P.O.P.’s seven core demands include a federal jobs program, an end to U.S. wars abroad, protection of workers’ rights to unionize and bargain, a moratorium on home foreclosures, universal health care, and programs to preserve public education and make college affordable to all.

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Does the 2012 Election Mean Anything To African America?

Wed, 01/04/2012 - 16:52 — Bruce A. Dixon

With the First Black President having put social security cuts on the bargaining table before even being sworn in, ignoring record black unemployment and mass incarceration, and doubling down on every abhorrent Bush policy from imperial wars in Asia and Africa to letting corporate polluters and criminal banksters go unmolested, what is the 2012 election really about for black America? Bragging rights?

The GOP Savages Itself, While Wall Street Backs the Black Guy, Again

Wed, 01/04/2012 - 14:11 — Glen Ford

 

by BAR executive editor Glen Ford

The Republican Party presidential campaign has been relegated to a sideshow in the American power game. The white nationalist masses recoil at the scent of Wall Street denizens like Mitt Romney. “A deeper atavism is at play in Republican ranks, a far less malleable strain of reaction that is no respecter of the GOP establishment’s brand of bling.” Wall Street money is once again betting on Obama, the man that delivered them “resurrection from the 2008 meltdown and a pipeline in perpetuity to the financial innards of the U.S. treasury.”

Freedom Rider: Stopping Stop and Frisk

Wed, 01/04/2012 - 02:25 — Margaret Kimberley

 

by BAR editor and senior columnist Margaret Kimberley

New York is a majority non-white city with a liberal reputation that keeps electing illiberal white mayors. Pundits often fault Blacks and Latinos for failing to find common cause, and losing by default. That may or may not have merit, but one thing is sure: “Stop-and-frisk should be the deal breaking issue for black and Latino voters and all people of conscience in 2013.”

Stop-and-Frisk As a Weapon of Gentrification

Wed, 01/04/2012 - 02:25 — Glen Ford

 

A Black Agenda Radio commentary by Glen Ford

We all know that prisons are not for rehabilitation, and that the dynamic of mass Black incarceration has little to do with actual crime. Massive police stop-and-frisk campaigns in urban America are concerned with more than merely controlling Black and brown populations. They are “a regimented, calibrated mechanism for adding value to urban land by making city life untenable for young Black and brown men” and their families. Stop-and-frisk is a tool for Black removal.

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White Supremacists: Hating Themselves Into Bankruptcy

Wed, 01/04/2012 - 02:25 — Glen Ford

 

A Black Agenda Radio commentary by Glen Ford

White racists have always been known to “cut off their own noses to spite a Black man's face.” In a variation on that theme, rural white farmers in Alabama and Georgia elected the racist lawmakers who passed the anti-immigrant legislation that scared away the Hispanic agricultural workers the farmers depended on to harvest their crops. They might as well have burned their own fields. But southern-fried racism is making Alabama's foreign automakers nervous. “They like Alabama’s anti-union environment, but they don’t want to be associated too closely with white supremacists.”

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The World Went to Hell and the Black Man Didn’t Go Free

Wed, 01/04/2012 - 02:21 — Jemima Pierre

 

by BAR editor and columnist Jemima Pierre

Despite the fact that Barack Obama’s “approach to domestic economic and social policy has savaged the U.S. Black community on every front,” the election season will see increased demands that Blacks circle the wagons around “their” president. Narrow group thinking leads African Americans to behave as if “it does not matter that targeted assassinations and indefinite detention are the order of the day, or that a Black man is helping to foment war on the African continent.” Ignoring both the lessons of history and Obama’s role in the current Black economic catastrophe, “our establishment Blacks continue to be imprisoned in an imperialist capitalism.”

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