The New Dark Age

by BAR managing editor Bruce A. Dixon

In private practice Loretta Lynch was a “white collar crime specialist” keeping banksters, tax evaders and money launderers out of jail. She did exactly that at Obama’s Justice Department, passing get out of jail cards in the biggest money laundering cases in history. She’s pro-death penalty, against legalizing weed or demilitarizing cops, sees no evil in drone murder, war crimes or runaway surveillance. And she’s the next Attorney General.

by BAR executive editor Glen Ford

The Black Lives Matter movement has been remarkably successful in drawing tens of thousands of young people into direct confrontation with the coercive powers of the State: the police. One of the hardest tests lies ahead. “The principles undergirding Black community control of police are in stark conflict with the narrow vision of democracy upon which U.S. law is based.” Something has to give. Will it be bourgeois legality, or justice?

by BAR editor and senior columnist Margaret Kimberley

In its drive to eliminate all rivals, Washington does not hesitate to plunge the planet into war and economic catastrophe. “The capitalist nations want to make the world ungovernable in order to secure their place at the top of the international food chain.” Ukraine is trampled underfoot in the process.

A Black Agenda Radio commentary by BAR executive editor Glen Ford

What has the first Black U.S. attorney general accomplished? Nothing more nor less “than what Bill Clinton or any other center-right white corporate Democrat” would have done in service of the rich. His replacement seems cut from the same careerist cloth – and might be to the right of Holder. For the Congressional Black Caucus, however, it’s sufficient that Lynch is “an African American legal scholar.”

by the Real News Network

Blacks have launched a class action suit against the towns of Ferguson and Jennings, Missouri, demanding compensation for disproportionate traffic tickets, fines and jailings. BAR executive editor Glen Ford discussed the case on the Real News Network.

by the Editors

Political prisoner and former Black Panther Russell Maroon Shoatz #AF3855 was informed that he had prostate cancer on December 9, 2014. Prison medical staff has not provided any treatment to date. Cancer does not wait for the prison bureaucracy. Maroon’s health, his life, and his rights are being violated every moment he is denied necessary cancer treatment.

Please click the link below for the numbers of his jailers who you can call to demand his prompt treatment.

by Ezili Danto

Through 11 years of military occupation, the Haitian people have never stopped demanding the return of their national and human rights. “As world gas prices go down, and as the Haiti elites continue to block popular demands for sovereignty and participatory democracy, the demonstrators are boycotting businesses and agitating against the high cost of living, low wages and domestically high gas prices.”

by David Swanson

Is the US engaged in ghastly human experimentation at Guantanamo? Absolutely, says US Marine Sgt. Tom Hickman a tower guard supervisor the night in 2006 when three detainees, tortured beyond endurance apparently succeeded in taking their own lives. Hickman is the author of Murder at Camp Delta: A Staff Sergeant’s Pursuit of the Truth About Guantanamo Bay. Catch David Swanson’s show every week on SoundCloud.

by Candy Gonzalez

Veterans of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee have good reason to be unhappy with the group’s depiction in the movie Selma. The film “portrayed James Forman, the head of SNCC as a little boy when in actuality he was older than King.”

A radio interview courtesy of This Is Hell Radio, by Chuck Mertz

Chicago elects a mayor Feb 24. Barack Obama cut commercials for privatizer Rahm Emanuel? Rahm gave Chicago an “Infrastructure Trust Board” appointed by the mayor with power to overrule all local laws. His public schools chief invests heavily in privatizing companies, and everything but sunshine is privatized. Welcome to neoliberal Chicago. Chuck Mertz on This Is Hell interviews Rick Pearlstein, author of How To Sell Off A City

A documentary film by Oliver Stone

Filmmaker Oliver Stone’s 2013 biography of the late Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez details the origins and hopes of Venezuela’s Bolivarian Revolution, along with the ceaseless US campaigns of subversion to reverse it. Currently the US has lowered global oil prices in an act of economic warfare it hopes will accomplish what other means have not. The Bolivarian Revolution continues, as Chavez put it, “Peaceful, but armed.”

How to Get Racism Out of the Criminal Justice System

Michael Brown and Eric Garner died because of the actions of individual police officers, but “the broader issue is the excessive levels of contact that people of color have with the criminal justice system,” said Nazgol Ghandnoosh, research analyst for The Sentencing Project, in Washington. Ghandnoosh is author of the study, “Black Lives Matter: Eliminating Racial Inequity in the Criminal Justice System.” She said “excessive contact and excessive punishment happens at all stages” of the system, from arrest, trial, sentencing and incarceration.

NYPD Goes Machine Gun Crazy

Blacks and civil liberties advocates were shocked at New York City police commissioner Bill Bratton’s plans to establish a 350-man, machine-gun toting Strategic Response Group to deal with both terrorist attacks and peaceful Black Lives Matter demonstrations. Bratton has also endorsed raising the punishment for resisting arrest from a misdemeanor to a felony. Both measures are “public threats to protesters,” said Josmar Trujillo, of New Yorkers Against Bratton. If resisting arrest is made into a felony, it could act as “a checkmate” against claims of police brutality, said Trujillo, because it’s harder to sue cops for brutality when you’re facing felony charges.

The Long Death Penalty

“America’s prison problem isn’t going to be fixed by a few timid reforms around the edges,” said Kenneth Hartman, executive director of The Other Death Penalty Project, which advocates on behalf of the tens of thousands of men and women facing life in prison without possibility of parole. The nation must decide if it is wrong to dehumanize and torture human beings as a matter of policy, said Hartman. Nearly seven million Americans are under some form of criminal justice system control, a population larger than every U.S. city except New York.

Remembering Phil Africa

Memorial services were held for imprisoned Move Family member Phil Africa, who died under suspicious circumstances while serving a 30 to 100 year sentence in the 1978 death of a Philadelphia policeman. “His life is an example of true resistance,” said Pam Africa, a veteran organizer who is active with both the Move Family and the campaign to free political prisoner Mumia Abu Jamal. Demonstrations are set for May 13 to mark the 30th anniversary of the police bombing of the Move Family home that killed 11 people, including women and children. “Stand up, continue to fight,” said Pam Africa. “We’re gonna shut this mother down” on May 13th.

“Sweet Mickey” Should Step Down in Haiti

U.S.-backed Haitian president Michel “Sweet Mickey” Martelly, who has been ruling mainly by decree, promises to hold elections by the end of the year. But, will they be free and fair? “He can’t hold even an honest carnival, much less an election,” said Kim Ives, an editor of Brooklyn-based Haiti Liberte newspaper, quoting Senator Moise Jean-Charles. Martelly was “shoe-horned” into the presidency by the United States and United Nations occupiers, in 2011. “That is why most of the opposition is calling for Martelly to step down and for the UN to leave before elections are held,” said Ives.

Towards a Socialist South Africa!

Irvin Jim, secretary general of South Africa’s metalworkers union, NUMSA, the nation’s largest union, recently granted a series of interviews with Paul Jay, of the Baltimore-based Real News Network. NUMSA is leading a campaign to form a genuinely socialist political party to challenge the pro-capitalist African National Congress government. “We need the full implementation of the Freedom Charter,” the 1955 document advocating collective ownership of basic industry and finance and redistribution of the country’s land, said Irvin Jim. The South African regime is becoming more repressive, he said. “We are championing the interests of the working class. Yes, there is a risk of being killed, but we can’t be preoccupied by that.”

Black Agenda Radio on the Progressive Radio Network is hosted by Glen Ford and Nellie Bailey. A new edition of the program airs every Monday at 11:00am ET on PRN. Length: One hour.