The New Dark Age

30 June, 2010 — Black Agenda Report

A Blacks vs. Tea Party Free-for-All on the Mall?
by BAR executive editor Glen Ford
Will established civil rights groups physically confront Glenn Beck’s Tea Party crowd for control of the Washington Mall on August 28? Can the NAACP and labor unions figure out how to hold a March for Jobs in October while pretending that President Obama bears no responsibility doe economic woes? No, and Yes. Although there will be no physical fight, jousting with cardboard “cracker” villains like Beck and Rush Limbaugh allows civil rights leaders to appear valiant while avoiding confrontation with real Power in the White House.

Freedom Rider: Americans Have No Rights
by BAR editor and senior columnist Margaret Kimberley
Under Barack Obama, the former professor of constitutional law, Americans’ civil liberties have shrunken drastically – to the point that his administration claims the right to execute its citizens without charge or due process of any recognizable kind. And citizens that leave the country cannot be sure they will be allowed back in. But where is the outrage among Democrats, when Obama out-Bushes Bush? “It seems that Democrats did not in fact feel any affront to Bush policies, only to his party affiliation.”

Consensus Politics Are No Politics: A US Social Forum Diary
Fri, 07/02/2010 – 02:08
by BAR columnist Jared A. Ball, Ph.D.
There was both déjà vu and surprise at the U.S. Social Forum. Déjà vu, in the feeling of being caught up in a stultifying search for meaningless “consensus politics” with “no clear goals and no clear steps to reach them.” But there was also the excitement of “ideas, criticism, flyers, books, all forms of media in fact, all being passed back and forth, with a hurried fervor.”

Dockworkers vs. Israeli Piracy, Rep. Rangel Bows to Tel Aviv, Supreme Court Fuels Terror Witch-Hunt, Prison Rape Deadline Missed
Fri, 07/02/2010 – 01:06

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Israel’s Like South Africa…
Dockworkers at the Port of Oakland, California joined with community activists to temporarily halt unloading of cargo from an Israeli vessel. Union official Clarence Thomas said Israel was “just as vulnerable” to concerted worker and consumer protests as was South Africa during the apartheid era.
Rangel Makes Times Spectacle of Himself in Times Square
Harlem Congressman Rangel “in essence, denounced his own constituents” in favor of Israel at a recent Times Square press conference,” says BAR senior columnist Margaret Kimberley. Rangel joined New York politicians demanding that American flotilla activists attacked by Israeli should be investigated before being allowed back in the U.S.
High Court OKs Draconian Terror Law
The U.S. Supreme Court upheld the Obama administration’s broad interpretation of what constitutes giving “material assistance” to so-called “terror groups.” A Center for Constitutional Rights lawyer says the law amounts to “something very close to guilt by association” and “could have landed President Carter in prison for 15 years” for his peace-seeking missions.
U.S. Justice Department Fails to Come Up with Prison Rape Standards
Attorney General Eric Holder missed a deadline to submit national standards to combat sexual abuse behind bars. One hundred thousand prison inmates are raped every year, according to federal studies.
Black Agenda Radio on the Progressive Radio Network is hosted by Glen Ford and Nellie Bailey.

All Power to the Casinos! Death to the Social Safety Net!
Fri, 07/02/2010 – 00:37
A Black Agenda Radio commentary by Glen Ford
Global capital is attempting to sound the death knell for European social democracy and its much weaker American cousin, the safety net. Bankers dictate the terms of social and economic policy on both sides of the Atlantic. “Barack Obama is showing his corporate teeth and running hard with the global banking wolf pack.”

Obama’s Iran Diversion: Forget About the Gulf, Jobs
A Black Agenda Radio commentary by Glen Ford
If war with Iran is insane, why is Obama acting crazy? “Stepping to the brink of war with Iran only makes a kind of macabre sense if the Obama administration feels in desperate need of a diversion.” The bigger the better, since the diversion must call attention from the goo in the Gulf and the air in people’s wallets.

WBAIX Launches Daily Programming on the Net
by The Editors
More than a year after a new board majority assumed control of WBAI-FM, Pacifica’s New York radio station, the losing side in what they called “the coup” has set up shop on the Internet. Within two months, the “exiles” of WBAIX hope to offer “a 24-7 broadcast grid of programs.”

U.S. Citizen Falsely Accused of Rwanda Genocide Rape Crimes
by keith harmon snow
On June 24, 2010, U.S. agents in Manchester, New Hampshire arrested Rwandan genocide survivor Beatrice Munyenyezi, a Hutu and a U.S. citizen since 2004. Charged with lying on her immigration documents to conceal her alleged major role in genocide in Rwanda, Ms. Munyenyezi is also charged with rape as a war and genocide crime. Meanwhile, a federal prosecutor for the case is known for misconduct, falsification of evidence and perjury. Is it a crime to have a FACEBOOK profile? Is it a crime to use a computer?

Hubert Harrison: Key Link in the Two Great Trends of the Black Liberation Movement
A review by Larry A. Greene
In the first quarter of the 20th century, the major, competing trends of Black American political thought were already in vivid evidence: Black nationalist and socialist tendencies vied with corporate-backed accommodation. In Harlem, an extraordinary St. Croix-born activist-thinker named Hubert Harrison emerged on the scene, described as “more race conscious than [A. Philip] Randolph and more class conscious than [Marcus] Garvey.”

Saving the Congo, Or Not: One Piece At A Time
by Netfa Freeman
The most resource-rich region of Africa also “experiences the least socio-political and economic control over its ‘riches’ than any other part of Africa. Fifty years after nominal independence, the Democratic Republic of Congo – where five million have died in the past decade and a half – remains a victim of “the foreign political and economic machinations that have made peaceful progress in the Congo impossible.”