4 August, 2010 — Black Agenda Report
“Mongrels”: Historically, and from Obama’s Mouth by BAR executive editor Glen Ford
Barack Obama behaves as if he has no historical or cultural knowledge of “the nation over which he presides.” The president’s labeling of African Americans as “mongrels” reveals an astounding and fundamental disrespect for Black Americans as a distinct people. As an epithet, “mongrel” is an even “more powerfully shaped political charge than the ubiquitous ‘nigger!’”
Freedom Rider: White Citizenship by BAR editor and senior columnist Margaret Kimberley
After all is said and done, what much of the so-called Tea Party wants is a return to America as a White Man’s Country. There are a few obstacles in their way, including the U.S. Constitution, but that’s not insurmountable. “On a daily basis pundits and politicians rear their ugly heads to say that the children born of undocumented persons should no longer be given American citizenship.”
Shirley Sherrod Fallout
The Obama administration and the NAACP wound up shooting themselves in the feet when they falsely accused longtime Black rural activist and Agriculture Department official Shirley Sherrod of anti-white racism. NAACP President Ben Jealous claims he was “snookered” by the Right. But BAR’s Dr. Jared Ball argues the incident reveals the fundamental weaknesses of “liberalism.”
Anti-War Movement Rising
In Albany, New York, 700 participants in the National Peace Conference, demanded an end to all U.S. military, economic and diplomatic aid to Israel … The immigrant rights movement is “one of the most dynamic movements in this country, today,” said Teresa Gutierrez, of the International Action Center. Attacks emanating from the White House to Wall Street “amount to a war against immigrant workers.”
BAR’s Glen Ford, speaking as part of the Black is Back Coalition, told the conference that “breaking the Obama spell is the must-do task” for the Black Left. “President Obama’s very presence in the White House is a narcotic, a hallucinogen, that causes the traditional base of the Democratic Party to lose contact with reality.”
Rangel Twisting in Ethical Wind
Rep. Charles Rangel’s problems with the House Ethics Committee “frankly don’t mean much to this district,” says BAR columnist Margaret Kimberley, one of Rangel’s Harlem constituents. Rangel’s 40 years of seniority have not translated to “jobs for people or places for people to live,” and it is “sad for him to be going out this way.”
Beware of Invisible Negroes! A Black Agenda Radio commentary by Jared A. Ball, Ph.D.
Black people are no longer newsworthy. That’s the result of a Pew study, which found “stories defined as significantly focused on Black Americans accounted for only 1.9% of all news coverage.” And a majority of that coverage was of the Henry Louis Gates run-in with a Cambridge cop. The lesson: “A defeated people need no coverage.”
Wall Street reversed its fortunes by seizing total control of the U.S. state and its treasure. No greater conflict of interest can be imagined than that which exists between bought-off Democratic and Republican office holders and corporations that are deemed “too big to fail.” Yet “they’re trying to burn” Black Congresswoman Maxine Waters “for the crime of giving the little guy an opportunity to plead his own case.”
Three-quarters of the Congressional Black Caucus voted to deny the warmonger in the White House funds for his aggressions. Although Obama got his “blood money,” the pro-war faction in the Black Caucus numbers only six members. “So let’s call out their names, and drench them in shame and contempt.”
Haiti: The Gifts of Death Burned by C. Uzondu
The last thing Haiti needs is assistance from the likes of the Monsanto Corporation, purveyor of seeds that enslave the farmer. “Rather than facilitate the intensification of capitalist plunder of Haiti, tens of thousands of farmers chose to resist corporate power “- with fire.
War Crime Whistleblower in Obama’s Sights, War Criminals Not
The Obama administration is even more fixated on secrecy than its Republican predecessor, whose crimes go unpunished and in many case, repeated. The continuity of the two war-making regimes is obvious. As it turns out, there are only so many ways to run “the world’s greatest killing machine” – and they are all mass murderous.
Why We Sued to Represent Muslim Cleric Aulaqi by Bill Quigley
The Obama Administration wants to kill him, constitutional rights lawyers want to “stop the government from killing him,” but first, the attorneys must win the right to represent Anwar Aulaqi in court. As the young cleric’s father says, “If the government can find him to assassinate him, they can find him to bring him to justice.”
The New Dark Age 
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