The New Dark Age

18 November, 2010 — BAR

Black Agenda Report
News, analysis and commentary from the black left

Top Ten Reasons Why Black Leaders Are Ignoring President Obama’s Good Cop-Bad Cop Attack on Social Security

After a decades-long drumbeat led by the Peterson Foundation, corporate media, Wall Street and their minions of both parties, Social Security, Medicaid and Medicare are under attack. The current raid is being led by nobody less than Barack Obama himself. Only Nixon could go to China, only Clinton could end welfare, and only a black Democrat can undermine social security. But where is black leadership? Why are they silent? We think we know… Read more

Freedom Rider: President Bloomberg

by BAR editor and senior columnist Margaret Kimberley
If the United States is going to be run for the profit of Wall Street and the super-rich, why not dispense with all the groveling intermediaries? Let the plutocrats rule, directly. Multi-billionaire New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg personifies government “of the rich, by the rich and for the rich,” and hopes to take the model nationwide. (This is the guy who told Rupert Murdock that Barack Obama is the “most arrogant” man he ever met.)
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America’s Obligations to Haiti

A Black Agenda Radio Commentary by Glen Ford
The United States does as it pleases in Haiti, behaving as a conqueror while pretending to have no responsibilities for the welfare of the people whose government Washington has stolen. “The U.S. is obligated to spend as many billions as it takes on the human needs of the people of Haiti – not as a matter of charity, but as a solemn legal responsibility” – or set Haiti free.
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Psycho-Babbling Obama

A Black Agenda Radio commentary by Glen Ford
Still unwilling or unable to admit that they were “psyched out” by Barack Obama and his corporate handlers, Lefties search for psychological reasons that the First Black President has been such a disappointment. It’s the failure to fight thing, or the lack of vision thing, or the failure to communicate thing, they say. “It isn’t that Obama has trouble conveying his vision, it’s that his actual vision is unacceptable to progressives.” As for his willingness to fight, Obama fought his own left wing, and “stomped their butts into the dirt” over his corporate health care plan.
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Aristide Speaks from South Africa

Nicolas Rossier interviews deposed Haitian president
In this frank and wide-ranging discussion, the deposed president of Haiti addresses French racism and those forces in the U.S. and Haiti that oppose his return from South African exile, the devastations his countrymen have endured since his ouster, and the Haitian people’s desire for freedom and self-determination. The upcoming elections, which will once again exclude Aristide’s Fanmi Lavalas political party, are a farce. “They are not planning to have free and fair democratic elections. They are planning to have a selection.”
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Black Consciousness in Brazil
Tue, 11/16/2010 – 13:51 — Italo Ramos

by Italo Ramos
New census data show two million more Brazilians now describe themselves as black than did so ten years ago, when “they had said that were not blacks, but ‘mestiços’ or ‘mulattos,’ a category more favored, socially.” This is, the author believes, a significant number, proof of the deep impact of the black consciousness movement and Brazil’s relatively recent affirmative action programs. At the same time, “slowly but consistently, white people are admitting the real face of a segregationist and racist Brazil.”
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Poor “Shack”-Dwellers Advocate Decries “New Apartheid” in South Africa
“We seem to have a new apartheid” in South Africa, says S’bu Zikode, leader of the poor people’s organization Abahliali base-Mjondolo. In this new order, “the poor are not taken care of, are not part of society.” Zikode, who is touring the United States, says the African National Congress government “wants to create a ‘shack-free’ country where the poor can be hidden,” reserving the cities “for the better-off and the rich.”
Bloomberg Undermines Living Wage While Jockeying for President
Billionaire New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg, who is said to be eyeing a run for the White House in 2012, has hired a notorious opponent of minimum wages to study proposals to include subsidized development projects under Living Wage regulations. The mayor’s expert says higher wages kill economic development. But expanded wage protections have been “very successful” in Los Angeles and other cities, says Paul Sonn, of the National Employment Law Center.
Anti-War Committee Broadens Scope
A recent mass meeting of the United National Anti-War Committee (UNAC) showed progress in diversifying the peace movement. UNAC co-coordinator Joe Lombardo said a large fraction of participants at the Manhattan conference were Muslim, part of a newly-formed Muslim Peace Coalition with chapters in 16 states.
Plus…
Bruce Dixon examines the woeful irrelevance of the Black Misleadership Class; Jared Ball counters Michael Eric Dyson’s outrageous assault on Black youth; and Danny Schecter dissects the banksters’ fraudulent mortgages.
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