by BAR executive editor Glen Ford

President Obama and his Republican friends agree that low-tax, low-wage, deregulated zones are the anti-poverty program for the 21^st century. Both parties are engaged in a race to the bottom. Rand Paul, “the free market barbarian from Kentucky, dispenses his poison unadulterated, while the banker’s man in the White House mixes arsenic with Kool-Aid.”

by BAR editor and senior columnist Margaret Kimberley

Forty three years ago, a group of brave activists clandestinely liberated documents from an FBI office that proved the existence of COINTELPRO, the government program to destroy the Freedom Movement. A new book recounts how most of the media refused to touch the story. Today, the chill is even deeper.

by Antony Monteiro

To truly honor Amiri Baraka, one must examine his travels, the political journeys he undertook in search of paths to self-determination for his people and all humanity. He sought a liberatory synthesis of culture and politics. “We need a Cultural Revolution in the US and internationally, to reorient the world and ultimately transform it where we and everybody else is self-determining.”

A Black Agenda Radio Commentary by BAR managing editor Bruce A. Dixon

Thanks to a ruling by the US Circuit Court of Appeals in DC, telecom companies are free to dictate every aspect of what you can and cannot see, hear or do over the internet. It’s an emergency. It’s time to demand immediate presidential intervention to head off the end of the internet as we know it.

A Black Agenda Radio commentary by executive editor Glen Ford

The United States, which boasts that South Sudan owes its independence to Washington, seems poised to repossess the new nation’s sovereignty. With Sudan’s uniformed warlords locked in combat, the usual American “experts” are calling for the U.S. to assume trusteeship of the country – especially its oil.

by Horace G. Campbell

The dissolution of the South Sudanese military and government into rival factions puts the future of the world’s newest country in question. We must ask “whether this scenario had been planned by the forward planners in Washington who felt that they had not profited enough from the support of the SPLA since independence.”

by Benjamin Woods

The “Left” resurgence in the U.S. is less than it’s cracked up to be. Not so long ago, luminaries like Bill de Blasio and Elizabeth Warren would have been, at best, referred to as liberals.” If you’re not pushing for redistribution of land and wealth and nationalization of the “commanding heights” of the economy, you’re not the real Left.

by Angola 3 News

One more to go. “Albert Woodfox remains the sole Angola 3 member still in prison.” His comrade, Herman Wallace, was released in October, just a few days before dying of liver cancer. Amnesty International declared, “Herman died a free man. Let’s help Albert live as one.”

by Bill Quigley

All told, pubic subsidies and props to the wealthiest Americans total in the trillions of dollars. Federal, state and local governments have become profit centers for corporations. “Each major piece of legislation contains new welfare for the rich and corporations.

by Norman (Otis) Richmond aka Jalali

Once upon a time, Africans from across the Diaspora and their allies united in a movement to abolish apartheid in South Africa. Toronto was a focal point of this movement.

by BAR poet-in-residence Raymond Nat Turner

Still the syn-tactical surgeon

With precision pen, atomic tenor,

Suturing my severed tongue

The Friends and Foes of Amiri Baraka

Larry Hamm, chairman of the Newark, New Jersey-based People’s Organization for Progress, wants there to be no mistake: His friend and mentor Amiri Baraka, the activist/poet/public intellectual who died last week at age 79, “was a revolutionary. In the days ahead, until he’s buried, everybody is going to look back upon him with fond remembrances. But, for some of those people, if Amiri Baraka was coming down the street, they would cross to the other side.” Baraka’s funeral will be held on Saturday, in Newark.

War on Poverty was Underfunded and Restrained

From the very beginning of President Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty, launched 50 years ago, “there was a push to keep the lid on new spending on anti-poverty programs – and that only got worse with the funneling of money to Vietnam,” said Alice O’Connor, professor of history at the University of California at Santa Barbara and author of Poverty Knowledge: Social Science, Social Policy and the Poor in Twentieth Century U.S. History. Although newly created federal agencies were mandated to give the poor a voice in anti-poverty efforts, “there was pressure from the localities to keep that money out of the hands of groups that were going to challenge the status quo,” said O’Connor.

From Many Struggles, One

Progressive forces can achieve victory by building a “movement of movements,” said Margaret Flowers, co-author with Kevin Zeese of the article “Task of a People-Powered Movement for 2014.” Flowers and Zeese, directors of It’s Our Economy, have identified ten “fronts of struggle,” ranging from health care to jobs to peace. “Our task is to help connect these individual struggles to the broader struggle,” said Flowers.

Worthless Democrats

President Obama’s recent promises about combating economic inequality are meaningless rhetoric,” said Doug Henwood, editor of the Left Business Observer. “The problem is, the Democrats are now so thoroughly a Wall Street party, that they can’t do anything serious” to help poor and working people. “I expect nothing out of the Democratic Party, nationally or locally.” Real social progress will require grassroots mobilization, said Henwood.

The Washington Post as a CIA Asset

RootsAction.Org co-founder Norman Solomon will this week present a petition to editors of the Washington Post, demanding the newspaper inform its readers of owner Jeff Bezos’ intimate business relationship with the CIA. Bezos is also the billionaire owner of Amazon, which last year concluded a $600 million contract with the CIA. “The responsibility of the CIA is to keep secrets, and the responsibility of journalism is to expose secrets,” said Solomon.Post journalists should be worried that it become commonly known as “being in bed with the CIA.”

Tutu Wrong About ICC, Says Herman

Edward Herman, professor emeritus at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, takes issue with former South African archbishop Desmond Tutu’s contention that the International Criminal Court is a force for justice in Africa. The ICC only indicts Africans, and only those Africans that are not allied with the United States, said Herman, co-author of The Politics of Genocide. “The bias has been blatant.” U.S. allies Uganda and Rwanda invaded the Democratic Republic of Congo and “killed literally millions of people,” with no response from the ICC, said Herman.

Mumia: Support the Dallas Five

On January 21, trial begins for five Pennsylvania inmates charged with riot and incitement stemming from a 2010 protest against violence by guards at a prison in the town of Dallas. The Dallas Five “are fighting for their lives,” said political prisoner Mumia Abu Jamal, reporting for Prison Radio.