10 August 2011 — Black Agenda Report: News, commentary and analysis from the black left
Barack’s Satan Sandwich Only The First Course: Will We Re-Hire the Chef in 2012 Anyway?
Bruce A. Dixon
By BAR managing editor Bruce A. Dixon
Rep. Emmanuel Cleaver pronounced the debt deal a Satan Sandwich. The CBC is conducting its own “jobs tour,” without any government jobs, and the House progressive caucus is denouncing the series of rolling raids on Medicaid, Medicare and Social Security that the debt deal sets in motion. But will this, or anything stop progressives from re-hiring Chef Obama again in 2012?
Obama Slipping: Black America Waking Up – To the Nightmare
by BAR executive editor Glen Ford
“A consciously Black opposition to the First Black President, on issues of peace and economic justice, is taking shape.” Some of the players “on tour”: Cynthia McKinney’s “Eyewitness Libya” tour; Tavis Smiley and Cornel West’s “Poverty Tour”; and Congressional Black Caucus efforts to put distance between themselves and Obama on their “Job Fair/Town Hall” tour. Meanwhile, Obama’s minions attempt to maintain a “Black Wall” around the president, with diminishing results. “The realization that the dream was a chimera is one thing, but to awaken to a catastrophe in which the Great Black Hope is revealed as the Great Black Betrayer, is another magnitude of pain.”
Freedom Rider: Six More Years of Obama
by BAR editor and senior columnist Margaret Kimberley
It seems only a Republican president can free us from the downward Obama spiral of the Democratic Party. “When the ruling class who hire and fire politicians chose a black Democrat to serve as president, they pulled off what can only be thought of as stroke of genius, the perfect crime if you will.” House and Senate Democratic leaders Pelosi and Reid vow to appoint “Super Committee” members who will cut entitlements. All principle has evaporated. “If current trends continue, gay marriage will be legal but Social Security and Medicare will no longer exist.”
Black Britain Revolts: What If It Had Been New York?
A Black Agenda Radio commentary by Glen Ford
Britain’s Black rebellion shocked the nation, but has not produced the kind of carnage that routinely accompanies urban unrest in the United States. “Had London’s current disturbances occurred on a similar scale in New York City, with outbreaks across the various boroughs, the police would have unleashed a bloodbath.” Which is not to say that the United Kingdom’s criminal justice system is not as thoroughly racist as its American cousin. It’s just that white Brit society is – relatively speaking – less bloodthirsty.
Corporate Funding of Urban League, NAACP & Civil Rights Orgs Has Turned Into Corporate Leadership
A Black Agenda Radio Comentary by BAR managing editor Bruce A. Dixon
How did billionaire Bill Gates, who is heavily involved in the hijacking of Africa’s food supply, and the privatization of education here in the US get to be the keynote speaker at the National Urban League’s annual meeting in Boston the week before last? The answer is that the Urban League is utterly dependent on the generosity of corporate donors, and Bill Gates is potentially among the biggest.
Starving Somalia: U.S. “Other Wars” Kill More than Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iraq
A Black Agenda Radio commentary by Glen Ford
More people die because of U.S. military and economic attacks in places like Somalia and Congo than in the more widely acknowledged wars of American empire. These “Other Wars” consume “hundreds of thousands – millions – of lives, and have resulted in, or contributed to, the two worst humanitarian crises in Africa over the past four years.” President Obama’s announcement of $105 million for Somalia is a cynical diversion from the fact of U.S. use of food as a weapon of war.
Daily Demonstrations in Newark, New Jersey – for 381 Days!
People Organized for Progressive (POP) Launch a Daily “Campaign for Jobs, Peace, Equality and Justice.”
POP is prepared to protest every day for as long as the 1955 Montgomery, Alabama bus boycott lasted: 381 days. (See Larry Hamm interview in Black Agenda Radio.)
From Heroes to Villains: NOPD Verdict Reveals Post-Katrina History
by Jordan Flaherty
Guilty verdicts against New Orleans cops in the infamous Danziger Bridge murders of innocent Black citizens may lead to far reaching changes in law enforcement – and not just in New Orleans. “The Justice Department is looking at federal oversight of the NOPD, a process by which they can dictate vast changes from hiring and firing to training and policy writing.” Other cities may soon come in for similar attention. The NOPD was long known as the most violent and corrupt big city police force in the country. “For years every check and balance in the city’s criminal justice system failed to find any fault in this or other officer-involved shootings from the days after the storm.”
Starving Somalia: U.S. “Other Wars” Kill More than Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iraq
A Black Agenda Radio commentary by Glen Ford
More people die because of U.S. military and economic attacks in places like Somalia and Congo than in the more widely acknowledged wars of American empire. These “Other Wars” consume “hundreds of thousands – millions – of lives, and have resulted in, or contributed to, the two worst humanitarian crises in Africa over the past four years.” President Obama’s announcement of $105 million for Somalia is a cynical diversion from the fact of U.S. use of food as a weapon of war.
Daily Demonstrations in Newark, New Jersey – for 381 Days!
People Organized for Progressive (POP) Launch a Daily “Campaign for Jobs, Peace, Equality and Justice.”
POP is prepared to protest every day for as long as the 1955 Montgomery, Alabama bus boycott lasted: 381 days. (See Larry Hamm interview in Black Agenda Radio.)
Eritrea: An Island of Food in Africa’s Horn of Hunger
by Thomas C. Mountain
Drought kills, but spiraling food prices can also bring hunger. While Ethiopia exported food for cash as drought and famine loomed, Eritrea is like “an island the size of Britain where affordable bread is there for all and slowly but steadily, life gets better.” Meanwhile, in Ethiopia, “basics like wheat, barley, sorghum and chick peas become so expensive malnutrition rates for children spike.” Naturally, Ethiopia is a U.S. client state, while Eritrea is on the American hit list.
An Historic Betrayal
“Black people who invested so much in Obama are being betrayed in a way that they could never have imagined,” said Tony Monteiro, professor of African Studies at Temple University. “On the one side, you have the rightwing bargain made between the Obama White House and Congress that constitutes an assault on the social contract that Americans take for granted,” said the veteran scholar and social activist. “On the other side, you have an economy that could easily go back into recession, and maybe even depression, that could drag most of the world down with it.” If Obama is at the top of the ticket, “it is very probable that he will bring the rest of the Democratic Party down…. This is the political debacle that Obama’s presidency has wrought.”
Obama Leads Charge Against Social Security
The so-called “compromise” on federal spending has made it “yet more impossible and unimaginable to conceive of the government doing anything to help anybody except the unelected dictatorship of money in this country,” said Paul Street, author of The Empire’s New Clothes: Barack Obama in the Real World of Power. The president encouraged Republicans to hold up the debt ceiling process and “proposed regressive federal cuts that Republicans weren’t even talking about.” The Tea Party and other Republicans “are as much following in the wake of Obama as they are leading; he’s leading the charge,” said Street.
The Peace Movement and the “Other Wars”
The United National Anti-War Coalition (UNAC) welcomes the Millions March, in Harlem, August 13, Cynthia McKinney’s ongoing campaign against the bombing of Libya, and the Black Is Back Coalition’s August 20 “International Day of Action Against the ‘Other Wars’,” said UNAC spokesperson Chris Gavreau. “I think we’re at a place where greater numbers of people are prepared to understand” that American military interventions “on every continent are motivated by the same interest in defending U.S. and elite corporate interests,” said Gavreau.
Daily Demos in Newark: 334 Days to Go
Inspired by the 381-day bus boycott more than a half-century ago in Montgomery, Alabama, the Newark, New Jersey-based People’s Organization for Progress (POP) has launched a “People’s Campaign for Jobs, Peace, Equality and Justice,” with demonstrations every day of the week. “That’s a pretty big commitment,” said POP president Larry Hamm. “People will come out to a demo once a month, maybe once a week they’ll do a vigil, but we felt we had to do something to dramatize the seriousness of the situation.” The employment crisis in Newark “is so catastrophic that we felt we had to rachet up the pressure. The protests began June 27.
Let’s Build Our Own Media, Jared Ball Tells Black Psychologists
“Media and journalism reflect the political consciousness and organization of communities,” said Dr. Jared Ball, associate professor of communications at Morgan State University and columnist at Black Agenda Report. Ball spoke to the annual conference of the Association of Black Psychologists, outside Washington, DC. “Media and communications needs to be understood as weapons” – which is precisely how they are wielded by imperialism. “We have to politically organize to impose change on media and journalism,” and to create our own media.
Zimbabwe Should be Focus of Black Unity
Also speaking before the Association of Black Psychologists, journalist Obi Egbuna said, “Zimbabwe teaches us that outsiders do not determine who we embrace and reject.” The U.S. correspondent for The Herald, Zimbabwe’s state newspaper, declared, “Zimbabwe must become for Africans what Cuba and Venezuela are for Latin Americans, and what Palestine is for Arabs.”
The New Dark Age 