Black Agenda Report

Could International Criminal Court Deploy U.S. as World Law Enforcer?

by BAR executive editor Glen Ford

The chief prosecutor of the court that purports to bring the rule of law to the planet is actively campaigning to appoint the United States – ‘the world’s most prolific perpetrator and sponsor of war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide’ – as chief law enforcement agent. This, despite the fact that the United States is not, and does not intend to become, a member of the International Criminal Court, nor subject to its jurisdiction. But, no matter: thugs rule.

Freedom Rider: The Trouble with Arizona, and Obama

by BAR editor and senior columnist Margaret Kimberley
The history of the state of Arizona is as much stained by the Confederacy as by the usual Old West pathologies, having once been claimed as a territory of the breakaway Slave Republic. Reconstruction never reached Arizona, which has enacted what might be called “Brown Codes” to shackle its Latino residents. “What Governor [Jan] Brewer and her anxious citizens really fear is too many brown faces.”

Michelle & Leslie Alexander, Cynthia McKinney, and Detroit’s Dr. George Shirley

Listen to this week’s Black Agenda Radio, with Glen Ford and Nellie Bailey, on the Progressive Radio Network:

* Dr. Jared Ball interviews the dynamic political scholars Michelle and Leslie Alexander. The sisters discuss how mass Black incarceration has become “the New Jim Crow,” and why Black leadership is so reluctant to do anything about it.

* “The Israelis have gone absolutely stark raving mad” in their attempts to defend their murderous assault on a humanitarian fleet on its way to Gaza” says former Georgia Congresswoman and Green Party presidential candidate Cynthia McKinney, herself a former captive of the Israelis.

* Please, don’t let them stop the music in Motown! Music and arts classes are scheduled to be all but eliminated from Detroit’s public schools. “As an African American, I find this criminal,” says 90 year-old Dr. George Shirley, the first Black to serve as a music teacher in the Detroit system.

Click to download an mp3 copy of this BA Radio show from the Progressive Radio Network.

Time For A Corporate Death Penalty

A Black Agenda Radio commentary by BAR managing editor Bruce A. Dixon
There are more than 40 federal offenses for which the death penalty can be applied to human beings, most of them connected to homicide of one kind or another. But countless homicides committed by the artificial persons we call corporations go unpunished every day. Apparently “personal responsibility” applies only to humans who are not operating behind the legal shield of corporate personhood.

Click to download the MP3 of this BA Radio commentary.

South Africa On the Potomac: Washington, D.C. and Black Incarceration

A Black Agenda Radio commentary by BAR columnist Jared A. Ball, Ph.D.
Washington, DC, like other majority-Black metropolises, squeezes African Americans out of its borders through gentrification, while trapping growing proportions of those who remain in a rapacious criminal justice system. Activists charge that DC’s policy of hiring more white officers from surrounding states amounts to “coon hunting” in the nation’s capital.

Click to download an MP3 copy of this BA Radio commentary.

Two Black Caucus Members Ask Gaza Flotilla Probe, the Rest are Silent

A Black Agenda Radio commentary by Glen Ford
Terrified of offending the Israel lobby, Black congresspersons routinely vote for anti-Palestinian resolutions as “if they represented some Arab-hating constituency in Utah.” Two Black Representatives – Barbara Lee (CA) and Keith Ellison (MN) – last week dared to ask President Obama to support lifting Israel’s blockade of Gaza and an investigation into last week’s savage attack on the aid flotilla – but were careful to note they did not speak for the Congressional Black Caucus as a body.

Click to download an MP3 copy of this BA Radio Commentary.

“Felony is the New ‘N-Word”: Michelle Alexander on Mass Incarceration as “The New Jim Crow” in the Age of Obama

by Paul Street
The author – himself a renowned Left, anti-racist scholar and activist – calls Alexander’s work “as close to being a perfect book as you are going to see.” While established Black leadership spent most of its political capital defending affirmative action programs that never reached the masses of Black people, the U.S. was busy establishing a “new racial caste system” based on mass Black incarceration and “unimpeded by the Fourteenth Amendment and federal civil rights legislation”

The Failure of Negro Leadership

by Benjamin Woods
The crisis of Black American leadership is rooted in 1830s and 1840s political strategies designed to convince whites of Black people’s “humanity and worthiness” – an elitist approach that cut the masses of Blacks out of the picture. “In 1920 Harlem radical Hubert Harrison referred to the NAACP as the National Association for the Advancement of Certain People.”

Federal Authorities Paid Journalists To Sabotage Trial

by Linn Washington Jr.
Members of the rabidly anti-Castro Miami press got some extra incentives to make it impossible for the Cuban Five to get a fair trial, in 2001. The federal government spread plenty of cash around among the press to inflame opinions in an already hostile environment. “Extensive pre-trial publicity and publicity during the trial, coupled with prosecutorial misconduct, created a ‘perfect storm’ of gale-force unfairness against the defendants.”