The New Dark Age

by Shea Howell

The corporate privatizers played the anti-Black race card to justify shutting off water to tens of thousands of poor Detroiters. But they can’t play that game in Flint, Michigan, where the suffering cannot be denied or “explained away by easy racial stereotypes.” Flint has stripped away “all the corporate efforts to claim emergency managers are necessary.” But it took the poisoning of babies to make the point.

by Drew Franklin 

Twitterist and Campaign Zero honcho DeRay McKesson’s mayoral campaign platform for the Baltimore public schools “seems modeled in part on corporate education reforms under big-city mayors like Rahm Emanuel and Michael Bloomberg.” Teach for America alums like McKesson typically oppose community-based school reforms, and favor “partnerships” with big business. “Cultivating relationships with tech giants has become a ‘major tactic’ of Campaign Zero.”

A Bonnie Faulkner interview with Michael Hudson

When it comes to political economy, Dr. Michael Hudson is one of the most influential voices on the U.S. left. He warns that U.S. strategists have embarked on “a new Cold War with Russia,” a war in which Washington trashes all the rules of global trade. The idea is to wall Russia off from participation in international commerce by smashing “their economic linkages and communications.”

by Nia Imara and Robert Roth

The Haitian people forced the cancellation of yet another U.S.-imposed electoral fraud. A transitional government promises to hold another round of elections sometime in the future. But, “How can elections proceed to a second round if the first round was hopelessly illegitimate?” If there is a full investigation of the last bogus election, as grassroots organizations are demanding, Dr. Maryse Narcisse, of Fanmi Lavalas, might sweep the field.

by Janet Smith

In 2013, Ronnie Kasrils, a former commander of Umkhonto we Sizwe, the armed wing of the once-outlawed African National Congress who also served as minister of intelligence in the ANC government, declared that the post-apartheid ANC had ‘sold out’ the poor in a ‘Faustian pact’ with international capital. In a recent interview, Kasrils warns that South Africa cannot fully vanquish racism unless it tackles the root causes.

by Abayomi Azikiwe

African American political organizations played a key role in influencing Kwame Nkrumah from the 1930s, until his removal from power in 1966 and beyond. Although the coup was designed by the U.S. to halt the advance of the African Revolution and the internationalization of the struggle of African Americans, solidarity efforts accelerated from the late 1960s through the 1990s when the last vestiges of white-minority rule were eliminated in South Africa and Namibia.

by Ebrahim Shabbir Deen

AFRICOM, the U.S. military command in Africa, has subverted African militaries and enmeshed the continent in Washington’s ‘war on terror.’ It is a one-side partnership. “In many instances, these partnerships involve African militaries ceding operational command to AFRICOM.” The ‘scramble for Africa’ could intensify. Indeed, AFRICOM is part and parcel of that ‘scramble.’

by The Real News Network

Bernie Sanders is about to hit a wall. Polls show that the black vote in South Carolina, and across Black America is heavily skewed against him. The fearful lesser-evilism that pervades black politics will doom the Sanders candidacy long before the Democratic convention in July.

by BAR managing editor Bruce A. Dixon

Stanley Nelson’s documentary on the BPP is “history” by and for lazy American liberals. He turns the BPP into a pop culture icon a T-shirt. Nelson mentions guns hundreds of times, big naturals and swagger a few dozen times but not the word “socialism” once in 2 hours. The BPP described its Breakfast For Children and Free Medical Clinics every day as “socialism” in person and in our newspaper, to each other and to the neighborhoods we served.

by BAR editor and columnist Margaret Kimberley

The Democratic presidential primary has turned into a real battle, but not ideologically, since “there is no leftist among the Democrats.” Hillary Clinton clings to Barack Obama like a life raft, mentioning his name 21 times in a debate with Bernie Sanders, while the Congressional Black Caucus clings to Hillary like a dollar bill. The historical Black political consensus on peace and social justice is nowhere represented in the “quadrennial circus.”

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

Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders are expressing deep love for Black folks, who will dominate the South Carolina primary. Clinton hopes Black voters have “short or non-existent memories” of the horrors of her husband’s actual criminal justice and economic policies, while Sanders preaches that the Democratic Party can provide remedies for the crimes it has committed against Black people. It is a contest based on lies and illusions.

A Black Agenda Radio commentary by executive editor Glen Ford

What began as a U.S. scheme for regime-change in Syria now threatens to ignite global war. Turkey is poised to come to blows with Russia, as the U.S. revs up its “Plan B” to dismember Syria under the guise of attacking the Islamic State. “The Turks could block the Bosphorus Straits, closing off access to and from the Black Sea, bottling up Russian naval forces and provoking a world war.”

by BAR poet in residence Raymond Nat Turner

Prescient, pertinent and pointed questions to each other, and to our alleged betters about what we have, what we are, what we deserve, and what we settle for, posed by BAR’s poet in residence.

by Mark P. Fancher

The rulers of Michigan believed the quickest path to economic development was to place the state’s Black cities under the control of a single, appointed emergency manager. The policy is domestic colonialism in practice, “an implicit – but distinct – embrace of the idea that people of color are inferior, incompetent” – and disposable.

When Paul Robeson Denounced a President to His Face

Dr. Gerald Horne, the prolific professor of history and African American Studies at the University of Houston, has turned out another book. Paul Robeson: The Artist as Revolutionary, explores the career and politics of the actor, singer, athlete, linguist, author, public intellectual and human rights activist who was, at one time, probably the most famous American in the world, yet died in state-enforced obscurity in Philadelphia. Dr Horne recounts how, at the White House, Robeson ‘got in Harry Truman’s face and wagged his finger and castigated and denounced the U.S. president for his lethargy in prosecuting lynchers’ of Black soldiers ‘at the same time that the Truman administration was vigorously prosecuting Nazi war criminals at Nuremburg.’

White and Black Joblessness: Two Separate Worlds

The lowest Black state unemployment rate (Virginia) is equal to the high
est white state unemployment rate (West Virginia), at 6.7 percent, according to an analysis of employment statistics by Dr. Valerie Wilson, of the Economic Policy Institute. “When you put that in the broadest context, that 6.7 percent is the worst that whites are doing in the country, you more fully understand just how unacceptable rates of Black unemployment are,” said Dr. Wilson.

Turkey Tries to Wag U.S. Dog Into Wider War

Turkish President Recep Erdogan is threatening to invade Syria, in league with Saudi Arabian military forces. “Erdogan is trying to use a tail-wagging-the-dog situation where he can force the United States and NATO into a confrontation” with Russia, said political analyst Eric Draitser, speaking on Russia Today’s “Cross Talk” program. Erdogan wants to ‘double-down’ in order to save his failed Syria regime change strategy, said Draitser, publisher of StopImperialism.org.

Definition of Disaster: Hillary Clinton, Commander-in-Chief

A Hillary Clinton presidency ‘would be a real disaster,’ said Dr. Stephen Zunes, professor of International Studies at San Francisco University. “In many ways, her thinking parallels the neoconservatives,” he said. President Obama “is going to come off as downright enlightened and moderate compared to what we’re going to see under a Clinton administration.”

Beyoncé Video is Capitalist-Minded

In her “Formation” video, Beyoncé “talks about being a ‘Black Bill Gates in the making,’ clearly a reference to the hegemony and importance of a capitalist value framework,” said Ajamu Baraka, BAR editor and co-founder of the U.S. Human Rights Network. She tells oppressed people to “seek revenge through accumulating ‘paper,’ meaning money. These messages are quite conservative, quite accommodationist,” said Baraka, speaking on Jared Ball’s “I Mix What I Like” program on The Real News Network.

Kathleen Cleaver: Origins of a Panther

Former Black Panther Kathleen Cleaver, honored at the Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History, in Detroit, recounted how she was drawn to the Black movement in 1963 when, as a high school student, she saw a photo of three Black girls in the back of a paddy wagon, singing on their way to jail for protesting racial injustice in Georgia. “I wanted to be like them, I wanted to be in that organization,” she said. Three years later, Cleaver joined the Black Power-era SNCC, and met her future husband, Eldridge Cleaver, a top leader in the Black Panther Party.

Mumia Plugs Angela Davis Book

The nation’s best known political prisoner, Mumia Abu Jamal, gave a boost to former political prisoner Angela Davis’ new book, Freedom is a Constant Struggle. “At times history lesson, political education, world studies and gender theories, Angela Y. Davis gives us all a lot to ponder,” said Abu Jamal, in a Prison Radio commentary.

The Movement Needs Dragons

Khalil Bennet, one of several thousand prison inmates sentenced to life for offenses committed when they were juveniles, said many of his comrades “have been detained since the late 1970s, “raised and trained by the best revolutionaries in the worst conditions that America produced.” Many are now eligible for release in the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court ruling that such sentences are cruel and unusual punishment. The former “juvenile lifers” could become the cadre for an emerging movement. “When the prison gates open,” said Bennet, “the real dragons fly out.”