By BAR managing editor Bruce A. Dixon

The national fight against school privatization is focused on Chicago, were Sept 9 is the 24^th day of the #FightForDyett hunger strike. Parents and community members are resisting the national polices of school privatization being forced down our throats by the Obama administration and often black politicians across the country. Successful schools are a key to viable communities.

by BAR editor and senior columnist Margaret Kimberley

Americans are made uncomfortable by pictures of drowned refugee children, but most cannot accept that their own government’s “unrelenting effort at regime change in Syria is the cause of this crisis.” U.S. corporate media parrot Washington’s lies, keeping tally of the displaced and doomed, but blaming Syria’s government for defending itself against western-backed jihadists. Rather than demand the West leash its dogs, “they call for more war.”

by BAR editor and columnist Ajamu Baraka

Cornel West has thrown his support to Bernie Sanders, the nominal socialist – but unquestionable Democrat – running for president. Dr. West says Sanders “tells the truth about Wall Street, white supremacy, empire, patriarchy and homophobia.” Really? The author says West has some explaining to do. “Brother West, you can’t quote King on his stance against militarism and support a candidate that is unable to utter a word against U.S. militarism.”

A Black Agenda Radio commentary by executive editor Glen Ford

It is said that the Americans have no permanent friends, only permanent interests. Actually, the U.S. seems to have no friends at all, but only tools to be used and disposed of, especially in Africa. Hissène Habré helped the CIA inflict a serious defeat on Col. Muammar Gaddafi. A few years later, he was replaced by another Chadian warlord, and now sits before an Extraordinary African Chambers court to answer for his – and the U.S.’s – crimes.

by Jonas Persson

Hell-bent on quietly forcing the bipartisan neoliberal project of school privatization down the the unwilling and oft unwitting throats of mostly black constituencies across the land, the Obama Administration’s cynically misnamed Department of Education is handing out another wad of public money to private charter school operators.

by BAR editor and columnist, Dr. Marsha Coleman-Adebayo

A Nigerian mother started out at the bottom in the United States, raised and educated five children, and bought a spacious home in one of the nation’s wealthiest counties. But that didn’t stop a cop from shooting her son to death and claiming he had wielded an ice-pick in his broken right hand. Olubummi Comfort Oludipe has now found her voice and mission: “to make sure that no other Black family suffers the death of their children by killer cops.”

by BAR poet-in-residence Raymond Nat Turner

Rump playin’ “Great Wite Hope”, fo po lil’ wite men
Trickin’ dey dum asses into thinkin’ dat he dey frien…
‘Cause dey jus’ too stooped, hatin’ Brouns an Blaks—
Dummies stickin’ de 1% knife in dey own baks!

by the Real News Network

by Danny Haiphong

George Jackson was a giant that U.S. State could not contain – so it killed him. “It was Jackson who developed a foundational theory of the prison state in relationship to the design of the imperialist system.” Jackson said revolutionary movements require three elements: “an above ground organization that carries out political work, an independent media, and an underground organization committed to creating crises for the establishment.”

by Henry Giroux

Ten years after the Katrina catastrophe pushed 100,000 Black people out of New Orleans, it has become acceptable in polite society to advocate involuntary dispersal of Black and poor people. “This is the reasoning in support of creating the dehumanized Other, one that rationalizes not only an intolerable violence, but also supports producing new forms of disposability, new zones of social death, and terminal exclusion.”

by Thomas C. Mountain

Dedon Kamathi, the former Black Panther and All African Peoples Revolutionary Party activist who educated listeners weekly on KPFK radio, touched many lives, including the author’s. “His spirit, embodied in the revolutionary consciousness of Pan Africanism and revolutionary internationalism, lives on.”

by Dr. T.P. Wilkinson

The United States has been under no threat from any other nation since the end of World War Two, but has invented various menaces to mask its own unrelenting quest for world domination. The Soviets, the “Red” Chinese, falling dominos, and now “terrorists” (created by the U.S.) provide “imaginary enemies that would continue the super-profits that had begun in the West.”

by Bill Quigley

U.S. workers are in bad shape. Two-thirds of poor people have jobs that don’t lift them out of poverty. Actual unemployment is at least twice as high as the official figure. Blacks are twice as jobless as whites, as they have been for generations. CEO’s make hundreds of times more than their employees. The employment disaster is closely linked to the act that “union membership is at its lowest rate in 70 years.”

by the Imam Jamil Action Network

Imam Jamil Al-Amin, the former H. Rap Brown is an internationally recognized political prisoner. A former member of SNCC personally responsible for crank
ing up the early and mid-1960s organizng drives in Alabama, and longtime community leader and iman on the west end of Atlanta, he has lived an exemplary life in struggle for the betterment of of humanity. He must not be murdered in prison.

Solitary Confinement to be Sharply Curtailed in California

A settlement between activist inmates and California prison officials will sharply limit the use of solitary confinement in the state. “I do believe there is a deepening movement away from solitary confinement in this country, and I think this settlement is a key moment in that movement,” said Alexis Agathocleous, of the Center for Constitutional Rights. He credits the victory to prisoners at the infamous Pelican Bay lockup and elsewhere who have staged hunger strikes against solitary confinement and other abuses since 2011. California leads the nation in enforced isolation of prisoners, with nearly 3,000 inmates locked down for months, years or decades at a stretch. Nationwide, about 80,000 inmates are in solitary on any given day – more than the total prison population of most countries.

DC Mayor is a Fugitive Slave Catcher

Muriel Bowser, the Black mayor of Washington, DC, proposes targeting all 10,000 of the city’s residents on probation or parole for surprise day or night searches, in their homes or on the street. Ex-offenders caught breaking any number of rules could be held for 72 hours without charge, before being set on a path back to prison. The mayor claims she’s trying to get guns off the street. However, renowned whistleblower Dr. Marsha Coleman-Adebayo, an activist with the Hands Up Coalition-DC and an editor and columnist for Black Agenda Report, said Bowser’s “recommendation is basically just a warmed-over regurgitation of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1793,” which was based on the dictum “Once a slave, always a slave.” Bowser “is essentially saying, once you’ve been convicted of a crime, you are always a criminal,” said Coleman-Adebayo.

The Afro-Colombian Model for Self-Determination

Blacks in the U.S. can learn something from African descendants in Colombia, South America, the third-largest concentration of Black people outside of Africa, behind Brazil and the United States, said Ajamu Baraka, a founder of the U.S. Human Rights Network and editor and columnist for Black Agenda Report. Baraka lives in Colombia and took part in a conference of the Black Communities Process, or PCN, the country’s premier self-determinist organization. “They have built structures of organization in which they address, not just the political needs of their communities, but the material needs of their communities,” said Baraka. The PCN pursues a “dual power” strategy, building institutions outside of state control to confront challenges in education, culture, employment and food distribution. “PCN provides models that we can take a look at,” said Baraka.

New Film Documents Ferguson Rebellion

Independent filmmaker Ralph L. Crowder III has spent much of the summer screening his documentary Hands Up Don’t Shoot Our Youth Movement in cities across the country. Crowder says he set out to find what was unique to Ferguson, Missouri, that compelled “these strong Black people to make this kind of stand for justice.” But he soon learned that conditions in Ferguson “were the same as in the very city that I drove from,” Minneapolis. “The bottom line is that our youth are intelligent, they’re engaged with their own struggle, and in many ways they’re very disappointed and disengaged from the adults that claim to have leadership in our communities.”

High Stakes Testing Opt-Out Gains Momentum

The movement among parents to opt their children out of high stakes standardized tests is “growing by leaps and bounds,” saidDr. Pete Farruggio, a veteran educator and anti-privatization activist. “Experts in “psycho-metrics” – testing – “uniformly are opposed to the use of standardized tests to make any important decisions” in education, such as closing schools, firing teachers, and handing schools over to the private companies. The testing regime, said Farruggio, “is part of the whole neoliberal program of social control of the population, dumbing down the population, preventing critical thinking, and preventing the development of troublemakers – like you and me.”