by BAR editor and senior columnist Margaret Kimberley

Some Americans feel, mistakenly, that they live in a different universe from Bangladeshis. However, “The American retailers supplied by the Bangladeshi workers routinely practice wage theft, reduce hours worked and prevent their employees from earning a living wage.” It is, so far, only a matter of degree.

A Black Agenda Radio commentary by Bruce A. Dixon

Black city hall, black police chief and mostly black cops, and black-landlords colluding to push working class African Americans out in favor of newer, whiter, more affluent residents? Sound familiar? You might be living under the new urban regime….

by Sikivu Hutchinson

1968, the year of the biggest high school walkout in U.S. history, was not so different than the present. “Then, as now, there was no room for analyses of sexism, racial apartheid, heterosexism, and patriarchy and how our lived experiences diverged from the corrupt pedagogy of the American dream.”

by Raymond Nat Turner

If you see’d him shob
Rev. Wright unda de weelz ob de Greyhoun —
Wink-wink- Nod-nod, it jes look lak dat fo’ to
Fool white folk

Listen to Black Agenda Radio on the Progressive Radio Network, with Glen Ford and Nellie Bailey – Week of 2/2913

The Looming Police State

“There’s a push to scare Americans into a police state,” said Dr. Johnny Williams, professor of sociology at Trinity College, in Hartford, Connecticut, referring to the overwhelming force brought to bear following the Boston Marathon bombing. State repression is designed to contain “a division within society that is expanding.” The only way to resist the police state, said Williams, “is to take it to the streets, to create chaos for them, because they understand nothing else.”

White Terror

“If we did a little racial profiling, in terms of the FBI’s list of groups and individuals that are engaged in domestic terrorism, they’re all white,” said Beau Grosscup, an author of several works on terror. “But, of course, that doesn’t fit the portrait that we have been encouraged to adopt in terms of who is responsible for U.S. terror.”

Operation Ghetto Storm

“Roughly 90 percent” of the extrajudicial killings of Blacks documented in “Operation Ghetto Storm,” an updated report by the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement, “are just straight-up coverups” of routine police practices, said Kali Akuno, one of the authors. The report concludes that a Black person is murdered by police, security guards or vigilantes every 28 hours in the United States. Police are “under no real pressure or threat” to change their practices, “except for what we organize as a community,” said Akuno, speaking on Your World News.

Stop the Torture of Solitary Confinement

Anti-mass incarceration forces must start now to build support for prisoners held in long term solitary confinement in California, who went on hunger strike in 2011, said Carl Dix, of Stop Mass Incarceration. “The authorities promised to change conditions” two years ago, “but they lied,” said Dix. This time, “we want to spread the word” before the inmates’ next tentative strike date, July 8.

Obama’s Behavior Predictable

President Obama is a deeply conservative politician who “has been making noise about rolling back” entitlement programs “pretty much from the beginning of his career,” saidPaul Street, author of The Empire’s New Clothes: Barack Obama and the Real World of Power. “Obama has damn near explicitly stated that, for all intents and purposes, he’s a Republican.”