10 May 2017 — Black Agenda Report
Criminal Nation: Obama and Trump Both Should Be Jailed for War Crimes
by BAR executive editor Glen Ford
The corporate media feed us fake news and the lawyers provide us with fake legality. A group of former Obama White House lawyers — the same guys that defended the U.S. bombing of Libya, drone wars, and the “proxy” war against Syria — say Trump has not legally justified his attack on a Syrian airbase. The truth is, the U.S. has waged illegal wars with impunity for most of its existence. Obama’s former lawyers want only to whitewash the crimes.
Freedom Rider: Democratic Party Death Spiral
by BAR editor and senior columnist Margaret Kimberley
The Democrats are locked in a fatal contradiction: they cannot serve the people and their rich paymasters, too. The people want higher wages, affordable education and the right to healthcare. Instead, the Democrats “engage in wishful thinking that the same tired nostrums would work one more time.” The Democrats only run for office so they can “make deals on behalf of the corporate interests which feed them.”
War, Militarism and No Mainstream Opposition: Different Administration, Same Story
by BAR editor and columnist Ajamu Baraka
If asked, most Americans will say they want peace. But they consistently vote for the two parties of war. “Imperial privilege” allows “the U.S. public to ‘shrug off’ the consequences of U.S. wars. They will destroy whole societies while ostensibly rescuing a few “beautiful babies” — preferably white ones. We must build a new politics around the provable principle that killing other people is dangerous to one’s own moral and physical health.
Bernie Sanders: Loyal Democrat, Stalwart for Empire
by Danny Haiphong
Bernie Sanders will never break with the Democratic Party and its finance capitalist masters. Progressives have no choice but “to take the genuine demands for a living wage, socialized healthcare, and free higher public education out of the two-party duopoly and into the streets.” Sanders is also totally useless in the fight to save the planet from nuclear conflagration; he “has made his peace with war.”
2 Poems – About How and Why Some Things Work. And Some Others Don’t
By BAR poet in residence Raymond Nat Turner
In two works of poetry this week, Turner offers cogent observations on two phenomena, one that pretty much works as intended, and another enterprise that despite the wishes of many consistently and predictably goes awry.
Diana Johnstone: Financial Elite Created France’s New President, Emmanuel Macron??
An interview by Ann Garrison
Three out of four of the top vote-getters in the first round of French elections ran against the economic policies of the European Union. Yet the French and U.S. corporate media claim the election was all about race and “fascism.” Emmanuel Macron is “the whole globalizing elite’s own special candidate” – and bad news for the working class.
Review: Black Subjugation in America
by Kim Scipes
On a recent visit to Ho Chi Minh City’s (Vietnam) War Remnants Museum I was reminded Americans have never come to grips with our invasion and war on Vietnam. They have also never come to grips with our own history, specifically how Europeans stole this land from Native Peoples and then built this country on the backs of of African slaves, while institutionalizing white supremacy.
Black Agenda Radio for Week of May 8, 2017
Major Courtroom Victory Against “Wealth-Based Human Caging”
In a sweeping order, a judge has ruled that the bail system in Harris County, Texas, including the city of Houston, is unconstitutional. Because of the decision, “we are on the road to eradicating the notion of wealth-base human caging,” said Alec Karakatsanis, executive director of the Washington-based Civil Rights Corps. The ruling affects defendants charged with low level offenses. “On any given night in this country there are about 450,000 human beings who are sitting in a cage because they can’t come up with a particular amount of money that’s been required for their release,” said Karakatsanis.
Haiti Activists Seek to Block Clinton Commencement Speech
Protesters demanded that Medgar Evers College cancel Hillary Clinton’s scheduled commencement address at the mostly Black Brooklyn institution, next month. The Clintons are a criminal family, said Dahoud Andre, of Komokoda, the Committee to Mobilize Against Dictatorship in Haiti. If Medgar Evers College honors the former secretary of state, it will be condoning “the crimes of the Clinton family, and Hillary Clinton, personally, against the people of Haiti and against Black youth, who she called ‘animals’ and ‘thugs’ who should be ‘brought to heel,’” said Andre.
“Facts Don’t Matter” to U.S. Corporate Media
When the Trump administration claimed that Syria launched a chemical attack on civilians, in April, Dr. Theodore Postol conducted an investigation that debunked the official U.S. version of events. Postol is professor emeritus of science, technology and national security issues at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. However, the corporate media ignore Postol’s findings. “The facts don’t seem to matter at all to anybody,” he said. “It looks to me like a complete collapse of any kind of journalistic standards within the mainstream press.”
Mumia Remembers MOVE, Back in the Day
The nation’s best known political prisoner, Mumia Abu Jamal, marked the 45th anniversary of the MOVE organization with recollections of when MOVE members were undergound in Rochester, New York. There, they “lived a life of peace that was unthinkable in Philadelphia,” because “they lived out of the eye of a merciless media,” he said. “Absent the ‘zone of negativity by the media, people met MOVE as people, and loved them.” In contrast, police and media hostility to MOVE in the City of Brotherly Love led to life sentences for nine MOVE members in 1978, and the bombing of the MOVE residence in 1985, killing eleven members, including five children.
NYC Mayor is No Progressive, Says Challenger Gangi
Bill de Blasio has not earned the label “progressive,” said Robert Gangi, the former director of the Police Reform Organizing Project who has thrown his hat in the mayoral race. De Blasio has not “addressed the social, racial and economic inequities that do such great damage to large populations that live in our city,” said Gangi. “He supports ‘broken windows policing,’ which is blatantly racist policing.”
Free Mothers Day in The Bronx
Juanita Young, whose son was killed by New York City cops, is one of the organizers of a Free Mothers Day event at Hostos College, in The Bronx, this Saturday. “You’ve got people’s sons who’ve been murdered through gun violence; you’ve got young men locked up for these police raids,” said Young, whose group is called The Motherhood. “What is going on, that the system feels that our loved ones’ lives have no value?”
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.
The New Dark Age 