15 January 2015 — Black Agenda Report
by BAR editor and senior columnist Margaret Kimberley
Millions of citizens of one of the bloodiest empires known to man – the French colonial state – this weekend pretended to be the most enlightened, yet maligned, people on earth. “The convenient selective amnesia of the French people is as stunning as their sense of feeling more aggrieved than anyone else in the world.” Tell that to the Haitians, Libyans, Algerians, Vietnamese and the peoples still dominated by France in sub-Saharan African.
by BAR executive editor Glen Ford
The rich Black capitalists of South Africa’s ruling party and their counterfeit communist partners will soon have to confront real socialists. The nation’s biggest union “is pressing ahead with a conference on creating a united front and, possibly, a political party to build socialism in South Africa.” “Political power without economic power is an empty shell,” says metalworkers union leader Irvin Jim.
by BAR editor and columnist, Dr. Marsha Coleman-Adebayo
In the Obama administration’s hierarchy of worthy victims, unarmed Blacks slain by U.S. police rank far below French cartoonists. “When will politicians like President Obama or Attorney General Eric Holder condemn the murders of unarmed black boys, men and women with the same level of intensity and clamor that we have seen in Paris – followed by indictments of killer cops?”
By BAR editor and correspondent Ajamu Baraka
As leaders of the Russia, China, and Western powers and their client states like Israel, all of whom persecute and lock up their own journalists, celebrated the protection of hate-speech cartoonists in France, the real deal as always was not freedom of the press or protection of dissenters, but white Western hypocrisy.
by BAR poet-in-residence Raymond Nat Turner
“Step right up,
Get your 9-11 shirts and caps
9-11 speeches, photos, maps
Controlled demolition DVDs
Why, I even sell 9-11 PhDs
by Dr. Johnny E. Williams
Thanks to President Obama’s failures to defend Black rights and dignity, “black folks have taken to the streets because, for the first time since the modern civil rights era, we truly understand that ‘we are the ones we have been waiting for’ to bring about permanent structural change.” We also understand “the importance of forging domestic and global alliances” – especially with the similarly oppressed Palestinian people.
by Pascal Robert
Mario Cuomo, mourned as a quintessential liberal, was first and foremost a champion builder of prisons. Mass incarceration “was not simply an agenda of the evil Republicans, but also the imperative of bleeding heart liberals like Mario Cuomo, Bill Clinton, and Joe Biden.”
by Sam Mitrani
The cops have always worked for the rich and powerful. In the South, policing began with slave patrols. In Chicago, “businessmen donated money to buy the police rifles, artillery, Gatling guns, buildings, and money to establish a police pension out of their own pockets.”
by Jesse Hagopian
The author was a witness to the disaster that took hundreds of thousands of Haitian lives in 2010 – a catastrophe used by the U.S. as a pretext for massive military invasion. “I saw a virtual cornucopia of water and supplies piled up on the tarmac, none of it being transported to the people in need, who were seen as a threat by the US military.”
by Bill Quigley
The United States behaves as if it is an arbiter of “social justice” in the world. But, in reality, the U.S. is among the earth’s most unequal societies. How widespread is social injustice in America? Take the test.
by Thomas C. Mountain
It appears that the corporate guardians of international “human rights” have acted as paid operatives of the U.S. effort to destabilize the fiercely independent east African nation of Eritrea. The scandal is reminiscent of operations against Cuban during the same period.
Cop Body Cameras Threaten Civil Liberties
President Obama wants to spend $75 million to equip cops with body cameras. However, Shahid Buttar, executive director of the Bill of Rights Defense Committee warned that “body cameras will ultimately be used to create a mountain of new evidence” against citizens, leading to even higher rates of mass incarceration. “These cameras monitor people without any individualized basis for suspicion” of committing a crime, said Buttar. “The best thing to do is prohibit those police from arresting residents who capture police activities on their phone cameras.”
Mumia Abu Jamal’s Lawyers Challenge Silencing Act
The Pittsburgh-based Abolitionist Law Center and two other legal outfits filed a motion to halt Pennsylvania from enforcing the so-called Silencing Act, designed to muzzle the voice of the nation’s best known political prisoner, Mumia Abu Jamal. The law gives victims of personal injury crimes the right to sue people convicted of such offenses for inflicting “mental anguish” by virtue of their subsequent, undefined “conduct,” including by speech, written word, or other communication or action. Abolitionist Law Center executive director Bret Grote said the law is irredeemably unconstitutional. “The whole purpose of it was to target Mumia Abu Jamal, whose conduct has been recognized by the courts as constitutionally protected.” Thousands of other Pennsylvania prison inmates and convicts that have served their sentences, as well as civilians who do business with such persons, could also be prosecuted under the Silencing Act.
Mumia: Blowback in France
“Wars have a way of returning home in the most unexpected of ways,” said Mumia Abu Jamal, in a report for Prison Radio. The Iraq War still generates new violence, ten years after the invasion. “We’re seeing that now, in France,” said Abu Jamal. “Perhaps we shall see it here, as well.”
Racist Mythology Props Up U.S. Ruling Class
The U.S. social order is largely built on the myth that cops, judges, jailers and prosecutors “are all that stand between us and rampant crime, anarchy and ruin,” said BAR managing editor Bruce Dixon. Rather than provide a decent standard of living for its people, America brands Black and poor folk as unworthy and irredeemable. For that reason, said Dixon, “the burgeoning movement against police immunity and impunity really is a threat to so-called national security, a menace to the privileges of banksters and employers, of privatizers and gentrifiers, and of the prerogatives of the 1%.”
Lynne Stewart: Abolish Grand Juries
In an article published in Socialist Action newspaper, people’s lawyer Lynne Stewart called the grand jury system an “anachronism” that “puts another roadblock in the way of the people. It’s a way in which the prosecution keeps the playing field for itself; it controls all the moves,” said Stewart, who spent five years in prison before she was released a year ago, suffering from Stage Four breast cancer. Only two or three times in her 30 years as an attorney has a grand jury refused to go along with the prosecutions wishes, said Stewart.
The New Dark Age 
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