The New Dark Age

After two generations of political decay, Black people finally realize they “need to find ways to protect themselves from the police agencies of the Mass Black Incarceration State.” The problem is, getting the police off the community’s back is often…illegal. “The U.S. system is full of ‘checks’ and ‘balances’ to keep the people in check and the rich men’s books balanced.”

By BAR editor and senior columnist Margaret Kimberley

From Athens to Detroit the financial crises used to justify privatizations, wage-and-pension-cutting, and general austerity are being created. Their purpose is always to transfer vast public wealth into the hands of banksters and investors.

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

So why is the Democratic National Committee, thoroughly committed to the Hillary Clinton campaign featuring Bernie Sanders in its fundraising emails? How can the California Democratic party raise money pretending to oppose the president on TPP without even pointing in his direction, let alone mentioning his name? Are they really that cynical? Are Democrat donors that gullible?

by BAR editor and columnist Dr. Marsha Coleman-Adebayo

For more than a quarter century, U.S. volunteers have delivered aid to the Cuban people, through the Pastors for Peace Caravan. Gail Walker, daughter of the late Rev. Lucius Walker, who initiated the caravans, speaks of the historical “link between Cuba and the African diaspora,” and the volunteers’ determination to continue “the solidarity that we feel for our Cuban brothers and sisters.”

by Danny Haiphong

by Raymond Nat Turner

BAR’s poet in residence examines the “hypnotizing, tranquilizing, narcotizing” antics of our preacher-in-chief, and the answers of those who will be neither fooled nor misled any longer.

by Benjamin Woods

By Thandisizwe Chimurenga

The stars and bars are not the substance of white supremacy itself. They are a deliberately odious signifier of the bloody suppression of black bodies, aspirations and lives from the end of Reconstruction and to the dawn of the Freedom movement of the 1950s and 60s. Some of the flag’s groupies are and always have been frankly dangerous.

by Netfa Freeman

Washington keeps harping about the benefits to Cuba of closer relations with the United States, but never considers “how Cuba might assist in transforming the social and moral essence of the U.S.A.” The United States and its people could learn a great deal from Cuba’s experience in providing universal health care and education, as well as in forging relations of friendship and solidarity with other nations.

by Mark P. Fancher

With the United States military command in the lead, “western troops and advisors continue their forward march across African.” But continental liberation is still possible: it just requires the spark of a decisive example. “At least one African country should, pursuant to its own national legislation, seize and nationalize all foreign oil operations, mines and processing facilities within its borders.”

by Filmon Zerai

The work of a Black lawyer named Lumumba from Detroit drew a young man from Eritrea to Jackson, Mississippi, last year. “I learned how Chokwe Lumumba valued Black diasporan engagement to build solidarity and power,” writes the author. “I experienced the egalitarian spirit of Eritrea in Jackson’s economic justice movement that’s being led by Cooperation Jackson.”

Shut Down the Prisons from the Inside

Prison inmates with the Free Alabama Movement have been placed in solitary confinement for advocating a national prison work strike. “Their argument is that all the attempts at prison reform and appealing to legislative bodies and courts to thwart the explosion of mass incarceration have failed, and that the only mechanism left is to shut down these prisons,” said formerNew York Times correspondent and veteran prisons activistChris Hedges, whose recent article is titled “America’s Slave Empire.” The prison gulag “can’t function without unpaid or poorly paid labor,” said Hedges. The imprisoned strike leaders urge outside supporters to boycott corporations that profit from prison labor, including the fast-food giant, McDonald’s.

Newark is the Destination, July 25

“We have a pandemic of police brutality all around the United States,” said Larry Hamm, chairman of the People’s Organization for Progress, drumming up support for a Millions March Against Police Brutality, Racial Injustice and Economic Inequality, July 25, in Newark, New Jersey. “We demand an end to the murder of unarmed people by the police, and to the use of excessive force by the police,” said Hamm, speaking in Plainfield, New Jersey. “First and foremost, we want community control and civilian oversight of all police forces in the United States. This is critical to any effort to reform the police.”

“Rise Up October” to End “Police Terror”

The co-founders of the Stop Mass Incarceration Network fired up an organizing meeting for the “Rise Up October” campaign against “police terror,” set for October 22-24. Veteran activistCarl Dix told the New York crowd: “We’ve got to do this because Black people continue to be targeted by racist killers, in and out of uniform, and this must stop.” The Charleston massacre was not simply the act of a “crazy, lone wolf. The rage that drove him was nurtured by the white supremacy that has coursed through the veins of America since the very first Africans were dragged to these shores in slave chains” said Dix.

Dr. Cornel West, the Union Theological Seminary-based public intellectual and activist and Network co-founder, said “young folk of all colors – but disproportionately chocolate – have been at the center of this movement for the last year or so. It’s been very much a new school leadership, and I like that.”

Twin Flags of White Supremacy

Dr. Jared Ball, a host for the Baltimore-based Real News Network, asked: Why the solitary focus on the Confederate flag, when Black people have been enslaved, Jim Crowed and mass murdered under the stars and stripes for the entire history of the United States? Marshall “Eddie” Conway, a former Black Panther political prisoner and current producer for the Network, replied: “That Confederate flag is flying over Chicago and wherever there is white supremacy. We need to recognize that as a distraction from who’s really getting the benefits” from the economic arrangement in the U.S. – the ruling class.

Dr. Gerald Horne, professor of history and African American Studies at the University of Houston, said: “We need to get to the nub of the question, which is the genocidal origins of the United States.”

Rwandan Suspect in Congo Genocide Arrested in Britain

Karenzi Karake, the intelligence chief for Rwanda, was arrested in Britain for overseeing mass murder of civilians in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Three Spanish aid workers were among the victims, prompting an investigation and issuance of warrants by a Spanish judge. “It is a great embarrassment to the British authorities, because the British government is the number one donor to the Rwandan government,” said Claude Gatebuke, founder of the African Great Lakes Action Network and a survivor of the Rwandan genocide of 1994. The Congo genocide followed. “Even when Rwanda was invading the Congo and causing mayhem, to the tune of six million dead, the British government continued to support” the
regime headed by Paul Kagame, Karenzi Karake’s boss.