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Black Agenda Report for Sep 21, 2016: No Crime To Rob the Poor, US Rulers Split on Syria, Anti-Russian Hysteria, Murder By Cop in Tulsa

22 September 2016 — Black Agenda Report

The Obama Legacy: It’s No Crime For Corporations To Steal From the Public, or the Poor

A Black Agenda Radio Commentary by BAR managing editor Bruce A. Dixon
After 8 years of the first black president, it’s time to take stock of what we’ve won and lost, what’s changed and not. Today we look at the Obama administration’s abysmal record on corporate crime, in which Democrats went far beyond the atrocities of their Republican colleagues to protect and immunize corporate thieves from prosecution or lawsuits from their victims.

Was it Mutiny? U.S. Rulers Split Over Syria

by BAR executive editor Glen Ford
The American bombing of Syrian soldiers was no “mistake” – it was a mutiny by the War Party in the U.S. military and government, who want victory for the jihadists. “The war hawks have never forgiven Obama or ceased denouncing his failure to ‘finish off’ Assad” in 2013. They hope that a President Hillary Clinton “will launch the final, crushing strike” against Assad – “if the jihadists can just hang on until Inauguration Day.”

Freedom Rider: Anti-Putin Hysteria in Service to Hillary

by BAR Senior Columnist Margaret Kimberley
“Vladimir Putin is being used to normalize imperialism and to get Hillary in the Oval Office.” The pro-Clinton corporate media are fully complicit in the farce, acting as megaphones of a new McCarthyism. “Joy Ann Reid at MSNBC is so eager to please that she forgets the Soviet Union collapsed 25 years ago and ranted endlessly on twitter about ‘communist Russia.’” The Clintonites are willing to set the world ablaze to win the White House.

A Black Agenda Radio Commentary by BAR Executive Editor Glen Ford
The mayor of Tulsa is promising a “transparent” investigation into the police slaughter of another unarmed Black man, 40 year-old Terence Crutcher.  The U.S. Attorney for Oklahoma is making similar noises, promising to explore whether Crutcher’s civil rights were violated. No justice can come from any of these quarters, because Crutcher’s death is a war crime. Justice begins with an end to the Occupation.

by Danny Haiphong
The Democrats have made Vladimir Putin “the primary boogeyman of Clinton’s campaign,” insanely blaming Russia for Donald Trump’s white nationalism. The historical reality is that the U.S. “birthed the most extreme nationalism the world has ever known when its founding rulers created a state based on white supremacy.” And it was Secretary of State Hillary Clinton who oversaw the coup in Ukraine that brought neo-Nazi parties to power.

Journey to No FEAR: 9/11
by BAR columnist Dr. Marsha Abedayo
The final stage of the battle to pass the No FEAR Act, designed to protect those who blow the whistle on discrimination in the federal civil service, was overshadowed by the events of 9/11/01. Yet it was a near-miraculous victory, drawing together perhaps the strangest set of bedfellows in U.S. political history to confront “the outrageous abuse that is taking place in the federal government and its impact on national and international policy.”

Black Girls, Domestic Violence, and the Limits of Self-Defense

by Lindsey E. Jones
Recent scholarship in the history of black women and the carceral state illustrates the extent to which systems of criminal justice and law enforcement have both historically failed to protect black female victims of domestic violence and criminalized black women who rise up in their own defense.

Uganda: Revisiting the “Brilliant Genocide”

by Ann Garrison
The U.S. deploys demons to justify imperial conquest. In central Africa, the demon’s name is Joseph Kony, the guerilla who served as an excuse for Yoweri Museveni, the dictator of Uganda, to commit genocide against the Acholi people, with U.S. support. Museveni “drove nearly two million Acholi people, 90% of the population, into concentration camps.” He then set in motion a genocide that has killed more than six million Congolese and Rwandans.

Climate Change and Human Rights: A Call for International Solidarity

by Leonida Odongo
Overproduction and overconsumption in the rich, northern parts of the planet have “imbalanced the world as far as climate change is
concerned.” The poor of the Global South fight for mere survival, with the vulnerable populations losing the fight. “In the past we used to have people living up to 110 years and over; these people have died because their age-set system was dependent on the trees they planted” – which are now gone.

Black Agenda Radio for Week of September 19, 2016
Our one hour weekly radio show hosted by Glen Ford and Nellie Bailey.

Kaepernick’s Example Spreads “Like Wildfire”

The same reality confronts the U.S. today as in 1776, said Dr. Gerald Horne, professor of History and African American Studies at the University of Houston: “If you treat a people atrociously, you should not expect them to stand by you.” The third stanza of the “Star-Spangled Banner” “explicitly denounces Black people, since they fled en mass to British lines in the War of 1812 and helped to torch the White House in August, 1814,” because the British promised freedom for those who would fight the slave-holding white settlers. Football star Colin Kaepernick’s defiance of the national anthem and flag “is spreading like wildfire,” said Dr. Horne, “and hopefully it will help people to begin to interrogate our past and our present.”
 

Black Youth Activists “Lobby” for Legislation on Capitol Hill

Black Youth Project 100 and the National Black Justice Coalition launched a lobbying campaign, last week, coinciding with the Congressional Black Caucus’ yearly extravaganza. BYP100 spokesperson Samantha Master said the group’s legislative priorities include the College for All Act, the Health Equity and Accountability Act, the Healthy Families Act, and the Equality Act, among others. “We are going beyond just simple criminal justice reform,” said Master. “We are taking the stance to abolish the system that continually marginalizes Black people.” The lobbying work is intended to be “simultaneous with and intertwined with our base-building work and our grassroots advocacy work,” she said. The overall goal is to build “public policy agendas that create a world where Black people can live in dignity.”
 

Despite Video, Feds Will Not Charge Cop in Killing Jerame Reid

The police car video clearly showed Jerame Reid’s hands raised in surrender when a Bridgeton, New Jersey cop shot him dead at point blank range, on December 30, 2014.Yet, the local U.S. attorney has refused to charge the officer with any crime. “We categorically reject that decision not to bring a civil rights investigation,” said Larry Hamm, chairman of the People’s Organization for Progress, which has been holding weekly demonstrations at the Federal Building in Newark demanding “justice for Jerame Reid.” Hamm said the Justice Department sets the “bar so high” to prove police culpability, “it’s like a rigged game.”
 

Mother of Drowned Girl Finds Comradeship in Uhuru Movement

Kunde Ngudi Mwamvita, whose 16 year-old daughter, Dominique, and her two 15 year-old best friends drowned to death when the car they were driving was forced into a pond by Pinellas County, Florida, sheriff’s deputies, was a featured speaker at the Independent People’s Democratic Uhuru Movement’s annual conference and 25th anniversary, this past weekend, in Ferguson, Missouri. Ms. Mwamvita is suing the county. “We have to be strong,” she said. “But, I can’t be strong by myself. I had to join a group of people who said, ‘Enough is enough — not one more Black life!’”
 

Darren Seals is Sixth to Die Suspiciously in Ferguson

Upstairs from the Uhuru Movement conference at Ferguson’s Greater St. Marks Church, family, friends, and “movement” folks attended the funeral of Darren Seals, the 29 year-old activist, rapper and General Motors worker whose body was found in his car, shot and incinerated. Seals’ passing was noted on Kiilu Nyasha’s San Francisco Bay Area television show, “Freedom is a Constant Struggle,” by Cephus Johnson, the uncle of Oscar Grant, whose January 1, 2009, killing by a transit cop set off demonstrations that many believe mark the beginning of the current mass movement against police terror. “Darren Seals is the sixth young man since Michael Brown to be assassinated in Ferguson,” said Mr. Johnson. “It appears to be an assassination that is directly related to the police.”
 

Black Agenda Radio on the Progressive Radio Network is hosted by Glen Ford and Nellie Bailey. A new edition of the program airs every Monday at 11:00am ET on PRN. Length: one hour.

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