5 October 2011 — Black Agenda Report • News, commentary and analysis from the black left
By BAR managing editor Bruce A. Dixon
Is the independent media movement’s flagship radio-TV show Democracy Now! Pushing the State Department and Pentagon line on Libya instead of “going where the silence is” and telling the truth without fear or favor? Are its Libyan correspondents embedded with the US backed Libyan rebels to such an extent that they have minimized and failed to follow up persistent reports of ethnic cleansing in Libya or investigate whether alleged “mercenaries” ever existed or Khadaffi’s “massacres” ever took place?
Wall Street as Public Enemy Number One
by BAR executive editor Glen Ford
They are very young, very white, and largely inexperienced in organizing. But the Occupy Wall Street crew has picked the right target: finance capitalists, the class that is the common enemy of the human race. In that sense, “the Zuccotti Park campers are eons ahead of the faux radicals and ‘progressives’ who, in terror of the Tea Party and Republican presidential clown candidates, will soon return to the Obamite fold in their eternal search for lesser evils.” Obama was, and will remain, the candidate of Wall Street.
Freedom Rider: Occupying Wall Street
by BAR editor and senior columnist Margaret Kimberley
It is great that the Occupation “movement” exists, but unclear where it is going. Its leaderless nature may help to avoid cooptation and media manipulation, but there are equally serious drawbacks. “The movement may be doomed to become a permanent gripe session against an obvious villain, but with no means of planning how to end the system that increases income inequality, debt peonage and unemployment.” Most importantly: can the 99%ers bring themselves to abandon the Democrats?
The Black Power Mixtape Remix of Black Power
A Black Agenda Radio commentary by editor and columnist Jared Ball
The admittedly thrown-together film Black Power Mixtape provides some rare footage of the period, but is otherwise a lightweight. “Other than professor Robin Kelley’s short but powerful comments, the only interviewees representing today’s generation are the slightly more left-than-normal musicians like Talib Kweli, Questlove and Erykah Badu.”
Obama and Bush Administrations Are Complicit in Bankers’ Massive Foreclosure Scheme
A Black Agenda Radio commentary by Glen Ford
A new report shows the Obama administration has been just as protective as its Republican predecessor of bank robo-signing: forging the signatures of millions of homeowners in order to foreclose their homes. “Theft and fraud were standard practice on Wall Street, and both the Bush and Obama administrations knew it, and protected the criminals.” Obama didn’t just “inherit” Bush’s entanglement with Wall Street robo-gangsters. He joined the criminal enterprise.
The NYPD’s Muslim Dragnet That May Become A Siege
A Black Agenda Radio commentary by Glen Ford
The New York City Police Department’s secret “mapping” of Muslim neighborhoods looks very much like the prelude to a siege. African Americans, whose neighborhoods are also treated as “hot spots,” in NYPD parlance, know the drill. And, since an estimated 35 percent of U.S. Muslims are African American, these zones of hyper-surveillance overlap.
Quo Vadis, Mr O? Or: See How He Runs
Eshu’s blues by michael hureaux perez
Some of us predicted that Obama would be bad news, but few of us could imagine how bad. “Little as we trusted him, we never thought that Barrack Obama would descend into a Nixonian charade.”
Does Signing a Petition Give Parents a Voice in Schools?
by David Bacon
The so-called “parent trigger” appears designed to achieve one result: increase the spread of charter schools under the guise of parental empowerment. Charter boosters may use the language of people power, but their funding comes straight from the oligarchs. “At its birth, Parent Revolution had a $1 million budget supplied by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Wasserman Foundation, the Eli Broad Foundation, the Hewlett-Packard Foundation and the Walton Family Foundation.”
Season of Protest
Three thousand Bostonians protested Bank of America’s predatory policies, resulting in two dozen arrests. “Two-thirds of Bank of America foreclosures have been in minority communities,” said Rachel LaForest, executive director of the Right to the City Alliance. “They targeted these communities from the outset with bad loans, and now they have more homes in foreclosure than any other bank in the city.” Grassroots activists’ analysis is “clearer and sharper” these days, said LaForest. “They are calling out who the enemy is.”
New Bottom Line: An Economy that Works for All
The Boston demonstration was part of a larger, ten-city campaign by The New Bottom Line, a coalition of 1,000 community organizations, congregations and labor unions, to challenge banking interests, according to co-director Tracy Van Slyke. Activists blame “big banks for bankrupting our economy, draining wealth from the most vulnerable communities,” said Van Slyke. “We’re all fighting together for a new bottom line – and economy that works for all of us.”
Liberate Freedom Plaza Oct 6
The Wall Street occupation has spurred increased interest in planting the people’s flag in Washington, DC’s Freedom Plaza, starting October 6. The “core demand,” says national organizer Margaret Flowers, is that the U.S. “stop using our resources for war and exploitation of the planet, and start using them to serve human needs and clean up the planet.” Flowers said activists will address “about fifteen core crises” affecting the nation and world, and then try to design solutions at the Plaza or online, at http://www.Oct2011.org.
“Filibuster” Against Racism at USDA Oct 5
Minority federal employees kick off an open-ended protest against the U.S. Department of Agriculture on October 5, calling the agency “the last plantation” where “an ante bellum kind of culture” rules. Lawrence Lucas, president of the USDA Coalition of Minority Employees, said “this agency, even under the present administration, has been allowed to conduct reprisals, racism, sexism, sexual assaults, intimidation, and bullying” against agency workers and minority farmers. The daily filibuster, said Lucas, will not end until “someone from the White House or USDA comes out there and says, We’re willing to meet with you and fix the problem, once and for all.”
Prison Hunger Strike Renewed
Supporters of inmates on hunger strike against torture and inhumane treatment at California’s high-security prisons say 12,000 inmates in 14 facilities have joined the protest. Ed Mead, editor of Prison Focus magazine and himself a former inmate, said there is “some possibility that this might spread to the general population mainline in the form of a work strike.” Activist Clive Young, also an ex-prisoner, reported that “prisoners in Palestine who are on hunger strike have sent solidarity messages to prisoners in the California system.”
Obama Needs “Time Machine”
“The only way he could possibly get [his current ‘jobs’ bill] passed, is if he could go back in a time machine to when he had a Democratic majority in the House and Senate,” said South Carolina activist and writer Kevin Alexander Gray. Obama’s bill is actually a “poison pill” that bleeds payroll tax money from Social Security, said Gray. “In the end, you can claim there’s an emergency” in Social Security funding “and turn it over to Wall Street.”
UN Anti-Racist Process Affirmed, But U.S. Still Resists
Although the United Nations General Assembly has affirmed the language of the Durban Declaration and Program for Action against racism and xenophobia, worldwide, the U.S. and its “crony,” Israel, continue to resist implementation. Efia Wangaza, of the U.S. Human Rights Network, says America’s “toxic” influence led the UN to allocate only a “paltry” $97,000 for commemoration of the ten-year-long Durban process. The miserliness was doubly insulting, said Wangaza, in that the UN has proclaimed this the Year of Persons of African Descent.
The New Dark Age 
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