Who’s opposed to mass incarceration and the prison state, and who is faking the funk? Our president and attorney general, who talk on one side of the issue and act on the other side? Our traditional civil rights outfits like the NAACP-LDF who won’t speak against the nation’s chief jailers as long as they have black faces?

by BAR executive editor Glen Ford

With startling speed, a bankruptcy judge has moved Detroit to the auction block, with the banksters pre-positioned to pick the bones of the Black metropolis. Racism makes Wall Street’s mission infinitely easier. “Detroit is the golden opportunity to shape anti-democratic legal precedents that can be applied, nationwide, with the least resistance from the white American public.”

Detroit has been delivered to the bankruptcy vultures, with a foreign bank first in line to scavenge the carcass. Yet, corporate media and white public opinion appear to consider the catastrophe to be the fault of Black “shiftless bums who must pay a price for just about anything that the reptile racist brain can imagine.”

A Black Agenda Radio commentary by executive editor Glen Ford

The Dominican Republic, which defines itself in opposition to Haiti, has enraged its Caribbean neighbors by preparing to deport a quarter million residents of Haitian descent. Dominican racial views are well known. “They are perpetually resentful that the deep Black presence of Haiti is always there to remind them of their own indelible African origins.”

Black unemployment at twice the levels of white unemployment is the old old normal. Black politicians not bothering to fight for reductions in black unemployment has now become the old normal. And the new normal, in this the age of black political empowerment, is tiny drops in unemployment driven in substantial part by large numbers of folks giving up the job search. Welcome to the new normal in unemployment.

Corporate media criticism of ObamaCare is mainly limited to the failures of its website. But the whole machinery has been rotten from its conception in a right-wing think tank. ObamaCare “is dedicated to a vision of ‘change’ that leaves the corporate and financial oligarchy free to extort massive profits.” It is working quite well for the insurance giants, whose stocks are up by 200%-300%.

Desmond Tutu’s defense of the International Criminal Court ignores the ICC’s record as an annex of white imperial power. The former South African archbishop defends the ICC’s selective prosecution of Africans and those who anger the western powers. In truth, the “ICC may have black representatives, but it is not a black court in its ultimate power and it does not represent the ‘interests of the [black] people.’”

Genocide is not only an ongoing policy of Israel, but is embedded in the institutions and history of the Zionist State, according to the Kuala Lumpur War Crimes Tribunal. The verdict provides “a lawful alternative to the current response of so-called humanitarian intervention, invasion, occupation and regime change” promoted by the U.S. and its allies, who are also complicit in Israel’s crimes.

The Los Angeles Unified School District is among the most heavily policed in the nation, with Black students 29 times more likely than white students to be charged with disturbing the peace. “Are they trying to set students up for success and education, or are they trying to set them up to go to prison?” asked Ashley Franklin, an organizer with the Labor Community Strategy Center and one of the authors of a report titled “Black, Brown and Over-Policed in LA Schools.” Despite the heavy hand of the law, students have organized throughout the district. “Our youth have read their history and they’re fighting back,” said Franklin.

Studies show the spread of charter schools exacerbates economic and racial segregation, said Stan Karp, of New Jersey’s Education Law Center. “Systematically, if you look at the demographics of the charter experiment, this is where you’re finding the increase in segregation, higher attrition rates, and the different populations that are being served,” said Karp, author of the recent Rethinking Schools article “How Charter Schools are Undermining Public Education.” The privatizers are deceiving inner city parents. “Investors and business interests have been able to attach their agenda for market reform in education to the urgent needs of communities that have not been well served by the existing system.”

The struggles – and defeats – of the Sixties must be put in context in order to chart a course towards liberation in the future, said Omali Yeshitela, chairman of the African People’s Socialist Party, which holds its 6^thCongress in St. Petersburg, Florida, December 7 – 11. “We had a movement that was crushed” by state repression and assassinations, and “we’re seeing the consequences of that defeat” in the corrupt Black leadership that has emerged over the past 40-plus years. “Occasional spontaneous outbreaks” of protest after incidents like the Trayvon Martin killing cannot “substitute for real revolutionary work,” said Yeshitela.

Mumia Abu Jamal, the nation’s best known political prisoner, who is serving a life term in the 1981 death of a Philadelphia policeman, noted that the State of Alabama recently granted posthumous pardons to the 9 Scottsboro Boys, convicted in a 1931 “rape that never happened.” Meanwhile, the four Black women and five men of the Move 9 are in the 35^thyear of prison sentences in the death of a Philadelphia policeman. “In 2058, will a future governor declare them pardoned, and grant them symbolic justice?” asked Abu Jamal, with deep sarcasm. “Justice delayed is still justice denied.”