18 March 2015 — Black Agenda Report
by BAR executive editor Glen Ford
Police, prosecutors, politicians and corporate propagandists seized on the shooting of two cops in Ferguson, to claim that the Black Lives Matter movement had suffered a “setback” – as if they have the moral authority to judge. But the movement is not about keeping its enemies happy, but to establish the power of the Black community over the police.
by BAR editor and senior columnist Margaret Kimberley
When it comes to Israel, the line separating Democrats from Republicans is essentially non-existent. Not one congressperson of either party will risk the wrath of the pro-Israel lobby. “To date, 15 Democrats have at various times expressed a willingness to go along with the Republicans and end any chance for negotiations with Iran.” If Obama’s own administration was not engaged in the talks, he’d probably be opposed, too, in deference to Israel.
A Black Agenda Radio commentary by executive editor Glen Ford
Black progress in the United States – the kind you can measure in numbers – is a myth. A new study confirms that Blacks have been steadily falling further behind whites in wealth for the past 30 years – which means the Great Black Regression has lasted about twice as long as the brief period of progress in the wake of the Sixties. Short of a revolution, Blacks will never achieve parity with whites.
A Black Agenda Radio Commentary by Bruce A. Dixon
Like the NAACP, the NAN and other corporate funded dinosaur civil rights outfits, the National Urban League mostly says and does what its wealthy donors need. So how surprising is it that Seattle’s well-connected Urban League CEO on her first run for public office, thinks she needs to knock out the city council’s only socialist? What’s wrong with that picture?
by BAR editor and columnist Ajamu Baraka
Whichever of the main Israeli parties gets to form a new government, the Jewish State’s colonial policy towards Palestinians will not change. Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud and the rival Zionist Union are in fundamental agreement on expanding the Jewish presence in the occupied territories and denying Palestinians a right to return to their homeland.
by BAR editor and columnist Dr. Marsha Coleman-Adebayo and Kevin Berends
The Obama administration has no intention of tampering with police immunity from prosecution for the slaughter of Black people. “We have by now seen the only real policy the government has to offer – waiting us out until the storm blows over.” Obama seasons the pot with “commemorative platitudes” on historically significant occasions.
by Danny Haiphong
President Obama milked the Selma commemoration for all it was worth, depicting the events of 1965 “as a symbol of American exceptionalism.” For this month’s participants, the contradictions of the occasion were acute. “While some didn’t march in the Selma celebration because of GW Bush’s presence, it is equally deplorable that these same critics marched alongside Obama.”
by Ajamu Nangwaya
The late Maya Angelou supported Clarence Thomas for U.S. Supreme Court Justice, because he’s Black. Afro-Canadians are making the same mistake in endorsing two Black cops for police chief in the nation’s largest city, Toronto. Both Black officers are supporters of “carding,” the Canadian version of stop-and-frisk.
by George Joseph and John Tarleton
The real teaching crisis in New York is “the failure to keep experienced and highly capable teachers and allow them to do their jobs.” The exodus of veteran teachers is by design. So-called “reformers” want to “transform teaching into a deskilled, low-wage job performed mostly by middle-class whites for a few years after college before moving on to other work.”
by Abayomi Azikiwe
During his four years as head of a revolutionary government in Burkina Faso, Captain Thomas Sankara captured the imaginations of Marxists and Pan-Africanists throughout the world. He was assassinated by treacherous comrades in 1987. The exhumation of his body could shed light on the circumstances of Sankara’s death, and breathe new life into his program for African liberation.
by Bill Quigley
The American state provides every imaginable support and subsidy for the capitalist class, but balks at mandating wages sufficient to provide a decent life for workers. “No corporations rely on the mythical ‘free market,’ so why should workers?
Rand Paul is Ally in Fight to Repeal Patriot Act
Congress will consider a bill to completely repeal the Patriot Act, which is up for renewal, this spring. President Obama campaigned on a platform to rein in U.S. intelligence agencies, but “will soon leave Washington in even worse shape than he found it” in terms of civil liberties, said Shahid Buttar, executive director of the Bill of Rights Defense Committee. Buttar said GOP presidential hopeful Sen. Rand Paul and elements of the Tea Party are more willing than most Democrats to stand up to the CIA and NSA.
A Multi-Generational Movement
“We need to create an intergenerational dialogue between those who represent the older movement and those who are representing the newer movement,” said Nyle Fort, a young minister from Newark, New Jersey, and contributor to the latest issue of the journal Socialism and Democracy. The journal is sponsor of a public forum on “Mass Incarceration, Police Violence and Political Imprisonment” at the Malcolm X and Betty Shabazz Center in New York City, March 20.
Mumia: What Was “Unsaid In Selma”
“Selma is a vivid example of an evil that still lives with us: that of police immunity for their violence,” said Mumia Abu Jamal. President Obama’s speech at the 50th anniversary ceremonies in Selma was a “masterwork” of oratory, said the nation’s best known political prisoner. The president “could have addressed police immunity, but that would have shattered his ‘we’re all better’” off than we used to be speech.
A 20-Year Cap on Prison Terms
No one should serve more than 20 years in prison, no matter what the crime, said Marc Mauer, executive director of The Sentencing Project. About 3,000 people sit on death rows in the U.S., while 160,000 are serving life sentences – comprising one out of every nine inmates, said Mauer. Sentences are a lot shorter in Europe, where “some countries have found life sentences to be unconstitutional, and those that still maintain it generally have only a few dozen people serving those kind of terms,” he said.
Obama goes Reagan on Venezuela
President Obama last week invoked the same language against Venezuela that President Ronald Reagan deployed against Nicaragua, in the Eighties, when the U.S. waged a proxy war against that country. In imposing economic sanctions against seven Venezuelan officials, Obama declared the country an “extraordinary threat” to the national security of the United States. Obama is attempting, like President George Bush, “to inoculate Latin America from the contagion that Venezuela represents in terms of social and political change,” said Miguel Tinker Sala, professor of history and Latin American Studies at Pomona College, in Claremont, California. However, all of Latin America has denounced U.S. sanctions against Venezuela. Mark Weisbrot, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, said the U.S. foreign policy establishment doesn’t under “that the hemisphere has changed drastically in the last 15 years, and is truly independent of the United States for the first time in 150 years.”
The New Dark Age 
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