Black Agenda Report for March 12, 2014: Reinstate Dr. Anthony Monteiro – Propaganda – Promises – Obama Does Something Right

12 March 2014 — Black Agenda Report

This week in Black Agenda Report

Reinistate Dr. Anthony Monteiro, and Reinvent U.S. Higher Education

by BAR executive editor Glen Ford

It’s not so easy to fire a professor of African American Studies who has forged strong ties with the surround Black community. Philadelphia’s Temple University is finding that out, in the case of Dr. Tony Monteiro. Protesters converged on campus, this week, and their anger was directed as much at “Afro-centrist” Prof. Molefi Asante as at Teresa Soufas, the Dean of Liberal Arts who fired Monteiro.

Freedom Rider: Propaganda

by BAR editor and senior columnist Margaret Kimberley

One of the reasons the U.S. government is such a danger to world peace, is U.S. “public acceptance and approval of nearly every crime committed by our government.” Americans pretend to believe in due process of law, but are quick to condemn to death any foreign leader that gets on the wrong side of the U.S. propaganda machine.

 
 

Promises To The Poor, or Promises to the Rich? Which Ones Does Barack Obama Intend To Keep?

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

There are three kinds of promises.  There are promises made among equals, freely kept and just as freely disregarded with no lasting hard feelings.  There are promises the poor are obliged to make to the rich and to the state, which are enforced at gunpoint.  And there are promises the wealthy and powerful make to the poor, which are almost invariably broken.  Turns out this is a handy guide for which promises the Obama Administration has chosen to keep.

In the Adegbile Affair, at Least, Obama More Honorable than Bill Clinton

A Black Agenda Radio commentary by BAR executive editor Glen Ford

Bill Clinton and Barack Obama are tweedle-dum and tweedle-dee, politically. However, Obama has behaved more honorably to his doomed nominee for civil rights chief than did Clinton, a generation ago.

Obama Ticket Prices and the Invisible Ruling Class

by Paul Street

Frederick Harris’ very useful book on the “high price” – to Black folks – of the nation’s First Black President has been reissued in paperback. However, Harris gives Obama too much credit as a president of all the people. “Like the great majority of U.S. presidents,” writes Paul Street, “Obama has been first and foremost a representative of the American white ruling class.”

Ukraine and the Pathology of the Liberal Worldview: An African American Perspective

by BAR editor and columnist Ajamu Baraka

The U.S. supported far-right forces in Ukraine against what they called the “dictatorship” of the elected president. But, “there was no outcry against the governor of Michigan when he engineered the passage of anti-democratic legislation that allowed him to impose a one-person dictatorial regime over the people of Detroit.” The contradiction is “rooted in the disease of white supremacy.”

Obama sides with the UN against Haiti in the cholera case

Èzili Dantò

The United States, which overthrew Haiti’s democracy ten years ago and then engineered the United Nations occupation of the country, now argues in court that the UN should enjoy impunity for inflicting Haiti with cholera.” The move was totally predictable. “It’s naive and silly to think that the U.S. would not block lawsuits brought against its imperial policies and their deadly consequences.”

Read this article on Black Agenda Report…

 

The Case Against Bill Bratton

by Josmar Trujillo

If Bill de Blasio is really a progressive, why did he bring back the architect of Stop-and-Frisk as his police commissioner? When it comes to aggressive policing gospel Bratton is the “pastor of the flock.” Bratton seems the least qualified to make the changes that are “desperately needed to relieve communities of color living in what many see as a racialized police state.”

Dr. Anthony Monteiro and the Assault on the Black Radical Tradition

by Eric Draitser

Dr. Anthony Monteiro was targeted for termination by the rightward politics of corporate higher education, with the help of an opportunistic fellow Black academic, Dr. Molefi Asante. “At best, Asante shows a complete disregard and utter betrayal of a colleague who, just a year earlier, led the charge to have him reappointed” as chairman of Temple University’s African American Studies Department.

Read this article on Black Agenda Report…

 

Reparations: A Long Overdue Moral Obligation

by Ron Lester Whyte

The need for reparations won’t go away, even if debate on righting the wrongs done to Black people is currently at low ebb. The harms inflicted were “systematic and deliberate” – and so must be the redress. “The federal government must be held to account for its role in the hobbling of the prospects and aspirations of a significant portion of its citizens.”

Read this article on Black Agenda Report…

 

Behind the Flash Mob Attack on Obama’s DOJ Attorney General Nominee Debo Adegbile

by Noelle Hanrahan and Stephen Vittoria

The U.S. Senate used hatred of Mumia Abu Jamal to defeat Debo Adegbile’s nomination as chief of civil rights at the U.S. Justice Department. “U.S. Senators and political pundits regurgitate blatant lies that seek to demonize Abu-Jamal because they face zero accountability regarding their use of the purported ‘facts.’” When it comes to Abu Jamal, they are free to lie at will.

From Radical Resistance to Propagating Imperialism: Latino/a Student Organizations and Venezuela

by Derek Ide

The children of the rich who fled socialist change in Venezuela now dominate Latino organizations at U.S. universities, “parroting the propaganda of corporate media outlets, slandering a radical government which has defied U.S. imperialism in the region.” The despise the fact that the Chavez-Maduro revolution has made Venezuela “one of the most equitable countries in South America.”

 

…In his head

by Raymond Nat Turner

Dr. King’s Dream come true,

In his head! Black folks way better

Off, in his head, Rev. Wright was

Wrong, in his head!

Listen to Black Agenda Radio on the Progressive Radio Network, with Glen Ford and Nellie Bailey – Week of 3/12/14 

U.S. Senate “Hypocrisy” Defeated Adegbile Nomination

The U.S. Senate rejected President Obama’s nomination of NAACP Legal Defense Fund lawyer Debo Adegbile to head the U.S. Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, based on the LDF’s involvement in the defense of political prisoner Mumia Abu Jamal. “This clear sends a chilling message in terms of who can be represented” by competent counsel in this country, said Linn Washington, a veteran Philadelphia reporter, Temple University journalism professor, and editor of the influential web site ThisCantBeHappening.net. Washington said some corporate journalists are envious of Abu Jamal, because he “knows more about what’s going on in the world than 95 percent of the journalists out there – and he doesn’t even have access to the Internet.”

In Life or Death, You Can’t Trust Mississippi

When the state coroner of Mississippi refused to do an autopsy on the body of Jackson Mayor Chokwe Lumumba, who died February 25, the family sought and found funds for an independent examination. The state’s action was not unusual, said Akinyele Umoja, a close Lumumba family confidant and chair of African American Studies at Georgia State University, because Black “lives are not considered that valuable” in Mississippi. Even if the state were willing to perform the autopsy, “there would still be questions, because it’s a matter of how much we trust them,” said Prof. Umoja. Some Black Mississippians believe Lumumba was assassinated.

Lynne Stewart Shut Out of Medical Care

A “bureaucratic morass” has prevented people’s lawyer Lynne Stewart from gaining access to Medicare or Medicaid since she left federal prison on compassionate release, December 31. Her husband and comrade, Ralph Poynter, said “we have been doing all the homeopathic things we can to beat this” Stage 4 breast cancer. However, Stewart has been told she can’t sign up for federal medical programs until July. “Welcome to America,” said Poynter.

Black Youth More Valuable in Prison

U.S. rulers “don’t want to supply jobs and education to inner city youth,” said Bonnie Kerness, of the American Friends Service Committee Prison Watch Project. “That 15 year-old in Newark is worth nothing on the streets to the United States economy.” However, “you put him behind bars and that kid is generating $30,000 a year” in contracts and wages for the prison industrial complex, said Kerness, author of the recent article, “Race and the Politics of Isolation in U.S. Prisons.”

Bayside is Worst Prison in New Jersey

Jean Ross, a lawyer and activist with the Newark-based People’s Organization for Progress, said some of her clients would rather be put in solitary confinement than be transferred to Bayside State Prison, in the southern part of the state. “The explicitness of racial epithets and the expression of racial hatred seems to be much more pervasive” at Bayside, where vicious beatings are routine, said Ross.

U.S. Proposed Another Coup in Haiti in 2010

The United States backed the 2004 coup that overthrew Jean Bertrand-Aristide, the democratically elected president of Haiti, and then forced him into exile in Africa. Six years later, in 2010, the U.S. attempted to depose Haitian president Rene Preval, and force him out of the country, said Dan Beeton, of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, in Washington. “Preval made clear he wasn’t going to be thrown out,” said Beeton, “but it was really diplomats from Brazil and Argentina who stopped this coup from happening.”

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