6 August 2015 — Black Agenda Report
Where’s the #BlackLivesMatter Critique of the Black Misleadership Class, or Obama or Hillary?
By BAR managing editor Bruce A. Dixon
If #BlackLivesMatter is a movement, just what does that mean? Obama’s 2008 campaign said it was “the movement” too. If modern movements are indistinguishable from brands, to whom are they responsible besides “creators” and marketers? Are some #BlackLivesMatter leaders angling for spots in what Adolph Reed calls the race management elite? Could this be why #BlackLivesMatter has no critique of the black misleadership class, or of capitalism?
by BAR executive editor Glen Ford
Finally, Black perceptions of the actual racial situation in the United States are catching up with reality, after years of collective delusion under The First Black President. “Black perceptions on race have swung 20 percent – from 48 to 68 percent negative – in the year since the emergence of an incipient movement against police violence.” Black pessimism about race relations is up 38% since the “’we HAVE overcome’ days of delusion, in 2009.”
by BAR editor and senior columnist Margaret Kimberley
When word reached the U.S. that Cecil the lion had been shot to death in Zimbabwe, much of white America was reduced to tears. But few of them know or care about Samuel DuBose, a Black man gunned down in Cincinnati by a white security guard. “Many white people have a unique ability to humanize every other living thing except a black person.”
by BAR managing editor Bruce A. Dixon
Apart from the times he called himself the president of “clean coal”, President Obama always talked a better climate change game than his Republican opponents. But his lovely words are overshadowed and outweighed by his actions, which are largely consistent with his Republican and Democratic predecessors, and have mostly served the interests of Big Oil and Big Energy.
A Black Agenda Radio commentary by executive editor Glen Ford
As usual, the Black Misleadership Class is on the wrong side of democracy, urging Blacks to submit to a high stakes testing regime that is designed to fail Black students, their teachers, their schools, and public education itself. “Everybody losesexcept the hedge funds and other billionaire investors in the charter school marketplace” – which is why President Obama has become “the biggest public school privatizer of all time.”
by BAR editor and columnist Dr. Marsha Coleman-Adebayo
The Obama administration’s spy agencies have been keeping track of the movements, communications and activities of the new crop of Black activists. Although not surprising, the recent reports should give rise to “new strategies and tactics to exchange information among groups, and new modalities to circumvent infiltration and, ultimately, government sting operations.”
By BAR managing editor Bruce A. Dixon
Why did the US nuke the undefended cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki 70 years ago this week killing hundreds of thousands of civilians? If it looks and smells like a war crime, is it a war crime? What came of President Obama’s stated ambition, around the time he received his Nobel Peace Prize, to curtail nuclear weapons?
by Paul Street
by Danny Haiphong
The U.S imperial order is in a terminal state. Despite its overwhelming conventional military strength, the Empire needs the services of jihadist terrorists to promote its policies in the Middle East, “yet cannot allow them to take power as they did in Libya.” Latin America has largely freed itself from U.S. imperialism, which “can no longer unilaterally impose its will on its compliant allies like Israel or its historic foes such as Iran.”
by BAR poet in residence Raymond Nat Turner
Our poet in residence reflects upon the unique
and innovative skillsets deployed by those who
allegedly take their own lives in police custody
by Dr. T. P. Wilkinson
The clowns are gathering for the circus that tours the U.S. every four years. There will be sideshows aplenty, but the central theme of the extravaganza – its sacred core – is worship of the right to private property, including the human kind, “the biblical ecumenical movement that has kept white supremacy strong, healthy and unrepentantly racist since the Founding Oligarchs.”
by Eric Draitser
Turkey has long been the most important supporter of both ISIS and the other al Qaida off-shoot, al Nusra. Indeed, “since at least 2012, Turkey has been the principal conduit for weapons flowing into Syria.” Therefore, Turkey’s claim that it is now at war with ISIS is a ruse for deeper Turkish involvement in a conflict that it fomented. What Turkey really wants is “a ‘No Fly Zone’ along the Turkey-Syria border” – and outright war with Syria.
Predator Cops Fill Graveyards
U.S. police killed 412 people in 1976, 333 in 1984, and 385 in 1990, wrote Mumia Abu Jamal, the nation’s best known political prisoner, in an essay now republished for his new book,Writings on the Wall. The cops “obviously haven’t protected or served the thousands they’ve murdered over the years. They serve and protect the system, not the people,” he wrote. “They are predators.”
Stop Police Terror
Murder by police can only be stopped by “our independent action,” said Carl Dix, co-founder of the Stop Mass Incarceration Network. “We are not looking for Obama, Loretta Lynch or any governors or mayors to do this, because they preside over the horrors that we have to stop.” Dix spoke outside the recent national conference of the Movement for Black Lives, in Cleveland. He’s gearing up for “Rise Up October” campaign of actions to “stop police terror,” under the slogan: “Which side are you on?”
Baltimore Black Political Class Protected White Mayor O’Malley
Jill Carter, a young Black lawyer from Baltimore and the most progressive member of the Maryland state legislature, said it’s no wonder that former Maryland governor Martin O’Malley has trouble dealing with Black activists’ on the presidential campaign trail. During his term as mayor of Baltimore, between 1999 and 2007, O’Malley oversaw the arrest of 750,000 people, more than the total population of the city, many of them on charges that “were illegal or unwarranted,” said Carter. Nevertheless, the entire Black city leadership supported and protected O’Malley, “even when faced with the reality that he was destroying the city and the community’s relationship with the police department.” O’Malley’s protectors included the current and former mayors of Baltimore, the whole of the city council, plus all of the city’s delegation to the state legislature – except for Jill Carter.
Bernie Sanders Runs as Populist, not Socialist
Paul Street, the veteran political scholar and activist, said Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders is running as a populist, not a socialist. “He doesn’t say ‘socialism’” in his campaign speeches,” said Street, who was among the first to point out Barack Obama’s conservative political tendencies. Senator Sanders “identifies himself with the social democratic states of Scandinavia, particularly Denmark, Sweden and Norway, but does not refer to himself as a socialist,” said Street. “And, unlike the serious Socialist presidential candidate Eugene V. Debs, back in the day, I haven’t heard him mouth the term ‘capitalism’ once.”
New Black Movement Combines Mix of Older Tactics
The emerging Black political movement “combines the tactics of the Civil Rights Movement – mass marches, civil disobedience, shutting things down – with programs and ideas that did not always crystallize in the Black Power Movement, but were thought about” during that period, said Dr. Anthony Monteiro, former professor of African American Studies at Temple University, in Philadelphia. Protesters gathered on Temple’s campus to demand Dr. Monteiro’s reinstatement to what chairman Molefi Asante has renamed the “Department of Africology.”
The New Dark Age 
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