The New Dark Age

15 December, 2010 — BAR

GA Prison Inmate Strike Enters New Phase, Prisoners Demand Human Rights, Education, Wages For Work
Story by Bruce A. Dixon, audio interview by Glen Ford

Georgia prisoners who began a courageous, peaceful and nonviolent protest strike for educational opportunities, wages for their work, medical care and human rights have captured the attention of the world. Black Agenda Report intends to closely cover their continuing story. Glen Ford recorded a conversation with activist Elaine Brown and one of the striking inmates in Georgia on Wednesday, December 15.
Update story on the strike and support efforts of the newly formed Concerned Coalition to Protect Prisoner Rights below the fold. Click the flash player below to listen.
Read more

Elaine Brown on GA Prison Strike, December 14 Democracy Now Interview

The Left and Obama-Trauma

by BAR executive editor Glen Ford
It is amazing how many lefties are just now discovering the Obama that has always been there, the corporate politician with contempt for progressives and a very bad opinion of Black folks. Now that the Democrats have been shrunken in Congress, Obama is “in his element, where he can maneuver among fellow rightist Democrats and Republican Neanderthals, seeking ‘bipartisan’ nirvana.”
Read more

Freedom Rider: Obama and Clinton, The Evil Twins

by BAR editor and senior columnist Margaret Kimberley
The two corporate political twins, Barack Obama and Bill Clinton, held forth at a joint White House press conference – so tightly matched that no light could be seen to shine between them. Obama soon ceded the room to his comrade in collaboration with Republicans, the senior triangulator. Although competitors, Obama and Clinton “emerged from the same political system, and fed at the trough of the same wealthy individuals and corporate campaign check bundlers.”
Read more

Black Studies and the Canary in Our National Mine

by BAR editor and columnist Jared A. Ball
Cornell University’s acclaimed Africana Studies and Research Center has been stripped of its autonomy, a bad omen for survival of independent Black studies at institutions across the nation. Black Studies was born of the Black Freedom Movement, which is no longer capable of defending its constituent parts. The move at Cornell “is meant to finish off one of the few remaining vestiges of an insurgent struggle that forced Black Studies into the nation’s institutions of higher learning.”
Read more

Who Is the FBI Really Trying to Entrap?

A Black Agenda Radio commentary by Glen Ford
The FBI’s war of entrapment amounts to a huge extortion scheme targeting the American people. The object is to terrify the public into surrendering their civil liberties in a twilight struggle with a mostly nonexistent domestic enemy. “These are high crimes, as high as they come, which, in a just world, would warrant many counts of impeachment for both chief executives responsible: presidents Bush and Obama.”
Read more

Call Your US Senator – Last Chance for Low Power Community Radio, S- 592
by BAR managing editor Bruce A. Dixon
The answer to monotony and monopoly on your radio dial is not for profit low power FM community radio. Wealthy and powerful corporate interests have bought judges, regulators and legislators by the bag, and used them to block the people’s will for more choice and more power over how the people’s airwaves are used. In the last days of the current Senate, S-592, which will authorize the FCC to grant licenses to thousands of community broadcasters hangs by a thread.
Read more

What People of Color Should Know About Tax Cut and Deficit Reduction Proposals

by Dr. Maya Rockeymoore
Black and Latino lawmakers and their allies should weigh the racial impact of tax giveaways and deficit reduction schemes. Although minorities have benefitted the least from government deficit spending, they will suffer most from austerity measures. Racial wealth disparity, already extreme, can be expected to widen under measures like the Obama-GOP deal now moving through Congress, and “any weakening of Social Security would devastate communities of color.”
Read more

Is Warmaking Irrational?

by David Swanson
What’s behind our constant wars? Is it biology, culture, economic imperatives, ideology….madness? Whatever the initial motivation, wars are always sustained by lies.
Read more

Zimbabwe and the Steep Road to Vindication

by Netfa Freeman
Western corporate media assaults on Zimbabwe often center on the alleged corruption and recklessly “anti-white” nature of the country’s land reform program. But a recent British academic study tends to refute European and North American propaganda, arguing that land reform has not been a failure, and is not designed to benefit political cronies. Another study shows that, “compared to rural and urban violence in South Africa, Ireland or Brazil, the level in Zimbabwe has been quite low.”
Read more

Listen to Black Agenda Radio on the Progressive Radio Network, with Glen Ford and Nellie Bailey

Obama “Might As Well Switch Parties”
Black South Carolina political activist Kevin Alexander Gray says the president’s collusion with the GOP shows where he stands on the political spectrum. Blacks will be the “last to jump off” the Obama “bandwagon, even as we get rolled over by it.” What progressives need, says Gray, is “a movement that is external to” Obama.
Doug Henwood, editor of Left Business Review, says Obama is “pretty much at one with neoliberal economic policies.” The president’s “heart is on the right wing of the Democratic Party.”
Detroit Teachers May Buck Obama and National Union
“The problems of education are really problems of inequality,” says Steven Conn, candidate for Detroit teachers union president in the January 3 election. Conn’s Defend Public Education/Save Our Students slate hopes to join teachers in Chicago and Washington who have rebelled against national union leadership and the Obama administration’s educational policies. “Instead of a commitment to integration and equality we now have a commitment to charterization and the dollar,” says Conn.
New Orleans Schools Suspend Nearly 30 Percent of Students
A recent study by the Southern Poverty Law Center shows almost 30 percent of students in the New Orleans Recovery School District are suspended from class each year. Study author Shakti Belway says schools handcuff large numbers of students for minor infractions, some of them as young as six years old. Charter schools enforce “silent lunches” in cafeterias, forbidding children to speak to one another.
“Withholding education is not appropriate punishment” for behavioral problems, says Florida Family Court Judge Irene Sullivan, author of Raised by the Courts: One Judges Insight Into Juvenile Justice.
Read more