23 March 2011 — Black Agenda Report – News, commentary and analysis from the black left
NNPA: Black America’s Watchdogs, Or Lapdogs For AT&T?
By BAR managing editor Bruce A. Dixon
On March 21 AT&T announced its intent to gobble up T-Mobile and control, with Verizon, three quarters of the US cellular market and most of the wireless internet. NNPA, representing 200 local black newspapers, serving corporate power instead of local communities and families, instantly endorsed this massive corporate power grab. What does this say about our class of black media misleaders, and what should we do about it?
Obama’s Imperial Twist: “Humanitarian” Regime Change in Libya
by BAR executive editor Glen Ford
President Obama demanded regime change in Libya more than three weeks ago, but now acts as if that’s not his policy. He will use the assault on Muamar Khadafi’s forces to introduce so-called “humanitarian intervention” as an anchor of the Obama Doctrine. Regime change will remain a basic tool, while the “humanitarian” ruse expands imperial options. Obama may well opt to turn Libya into a kind of protectorate, as Haiti has become. Meanwhile, France interprets the UN mandate in Libya as allowing the Euro-Americans to act as air support for the rebel armed forces, as the French did at Benghazi.
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Freedom Rider: Obama’s War in Libya
by BAR editor and senior columnist Margaret Kimberley
The continuity between the Bush and Obama administration’s is now complete. Almost exactly eight years after Bush invaded Iraq, Obama’s Euro-American military alliance swooped down on Libya to enforce a western world order. “Obama definitely took a page out of the Bush administration recipe book,” including “peddling scary stories of poison gas stockpiled at a remote desert location.” All this may serve Obama well in domestic opinion polls, since “American blood lust is always just below the surface.”
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Hate Groups and the “Other Wars”
A Black Agenda Radio commentary by BAR editor and columnist Jared A. Ball
For five hundred years, Europeans made war on virtually all the other people of the planet, erasing whole societies and nations in a crime wave that has not yet ended. These ongoing depredations against people of color, worldwide, are the focus of a Black Is Back Coalition “Conference on the Other Wars,” Saturday, March 26, in Washington, DC. “Among those ‘other wars’ are the continuing settler colonial domination of Indigenous nations, abuse suffered at the hands of the police and broader system of mass incarceration and one we might need to add; the growing hate group phenomenon occurring across this country.”
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March 23: Anniversary of the Beginning of Apartheid’s End: The Battle of Cuito Cuanavale
A Black Agenda Radio commentary by Bruce Dixon
Apartheid South Africa responded to Angola’s 1974 independence from the Portuguese with a US-backed military invasion. Declaring that “the blood of Africa” flowed through Cuban veins, Fidel Castro dispatched the Cuban armed forces to confront the armies of racist South Africa in Angola. Between 1974 and 1988 more than 1100 Cubans laid down their lives in Africa to hasten the end of apartheid. This week is the anniversary of the historic battle of Cuito Cuanavale, in which Cuban, Angolan and Namibian forces routed the supposedly invincible land and air forces of white-ruled South Africa, eventually making possible the release of Nelson Mandela from prison, and the end of apartheid in South Africa itself, and earning for Cuba the lasting enmity of the United States. If we in the U.S. were serious about racial reconciliation, we too would celebrate the March 23 anniversary of Cuito Cuanavale.
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The Election Charade Masks U.S. War Against Haiti
A Black Agenda Radio commentary by Glen Ford
Barack Obama has the gall to claim that the U.S. supports democracy in Haiti when, as the world knows, “the United States snuffed out democracy in Haiti in 2004.” The farcical, U.S.-imposed elections have yielded grotesque results: “The most popular person in Haiti, Aristide, and his supporters are treated as political outlaws, while the presidency is guaranteed to go to an associate of the most hated man in Haiti, “Baby Doc” Duvalier.
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Aristide’s Return Will Bring Haiti’s Popular Organizations to the Front
by Kamau K. Franklin
Spirits are soaring among Haiti’s popular organizations, marking the end of former president Jean-Bertrand Aristide’s seven-year, U.S.-imposed exile. Aristide is a “voice that can be rallied around to challenge the eventual winner of the selection process between two U.S. backed right wing candidates.” Here in the U.S., our duty is to build “a solidarity movement that says ‘Hands off Haiti!’”
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Coalition of Crusaders Join with al Qaeda to Oust Qaddafi and Roll Back Libyan Revolution
by Gerald A. Perreira
The West – the former colonial powers and the United States – have not only coordinated their assault on Libya, but orchestrated the rebellion against Col. Qaddafi from the start, says the author. Qaddafi’s claim that al Qaeda is involved is only dismissed by those who fail to understand that “al Qaeda is a Wahhabi/Salafi ideological movement and it has reinvigorated Salafi movements and cells worldwide.” Qaddafi deserves support at this critical hour, as “a revolutionary leader who has consistently opposed western hegemony in the Arab and African World.”
U.S. Empire “Shrinking,” But Demise is “Not Imminent”
There is an antagonistic contradiction between U.S. imperialism and the interests of the vast majority of the people of this planet,” says Anthony Monteiro, Professor of African American Studies at Temple University, in Philadelphia. “North Africa and West Asia now become a center of resistance to American empire,” while “South America can no longer be considered a safe haven for neoliberal economic policies.” Prof. Monteiro spoke at a BAR panel at the Left Forum, New York City, last weekend.
Medical Bankruptcies Will Remain High Under Obama Health Plan
The Obama administration’s health care legislation will not prevent Americans from going bankrupt in large numbers due to illness, says Dr. David Himmelstein, an author of a study of the “almost identical” Massachusetts health care program implemented in 2005. “People get insurance but, basically, they got such lousy insurance that they ended up bankrupt if they got sick,” said Himmelstein. “For states “like Texas, Louisiana and California,” which have far worse health coverage than Massachusetts, “we’re not going to see much improvement” under the Obama plan.
Mass Female Incarceration Destabilizes Black America
The mass imprisonment of Black males has been a disaster, but “when a sister gets locked down, it rends the fabric of our community,” says Efia Nwangaza, of the Back Is Back Coalition for Social Justice, Peace and Reparations. “The children, if they are lucky, go to their grandmothers” when the mother is imprisoned, but many are “set adrift” because such support systems are increasingly unavailable. Ms. Nwangaza will address mass Black incarceration at the Black Is Back Coalition’s “National Conference on the Other Wars,” March 26, in Washington.
BAR’s Dr. Jared Ball explores “The Ten Commandments of Crunk,” promulgated by female rappers as part of a “feminist mode of resistance.”
The New Dark Age 
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