20 July 2017 — Black Agenda Report
White Liberal Guilt, Black Opportunism and the Green Party
by BAR managing editor Bruce A. Dixon
Building a new kind of left party isn’t easy, or it would have been done a long time ago. The Green party’s annual meeting in Newark last week revealed some of the deep problems caused by liberals whose goal is “diversity.” Diversity creates token blacks, browns, women and queers and pretends they are leaders, instead of nurturing and developing leadership from below. Liberal diversity creates phantom and undemocratic bodies responsible to nobody which are easily manipulated by cynical opportunists.
Black Women in the Killing Fields
by BAR executive editor Glen Ford
A white woman from Australia was gunned down by militarized police in Minneapolis – part of the collateral damage that flows from the U.S. mass Black incarceration regime. The intended targets are Black women like Charleena Lyles, killed by Seattle cops, last month. “Although Black women and girls make up only 13 percent of the U.S. female population, they account for 33 percent of all women killed by police.”
Freedom Rider: Kamala Harris and America’s Oligarchs
by BAR editor and senior columnist Margaret Kimberley
California’s new senator is actively being vetted as the “next Obama, “ or “Obama 2.0” — a youngish, biracial corporate Democrat and a woman. Democratic honchos are betting that “white people will consider her exotic enough to be acceptable and black voters will rally around her.” The oligarchic George Soros likes Harris, who did him a favor by refusing to indict one of his banks. Most importantly, Harris is all about “form” — not “reform.”
The Abandonment: Reflections on James Foreman’s “Locking Up Our Own”
by Paul Street
James Forman’s new book is indispensable “for those who want to get the whole story on the rise of the “the New Jim Crow.” The Black middle and upper classes, which have been largely exempt from the mass Black incarceration regime, “actively participated in the rise of the racist mass incarceration and felony-branding system.” Blacks demanded both crackdowns on crime and a Marshall Plan for Black America – but got only tough crime laws.
The Venezuelan Constituent Assembly: Pillars of a Communal Culture
by The Philosophical Gathering of The Poor
The U.S.-backed opposition has played its cards, unleashing terror and economic sabotage against the Bolivarian revolution. Now it is the people’s turn, with the convening of a National Constituent Assembly with “the option of eliminating the old laws that bureaucratically block the processes of change.” The people have taken history in their hands, and will “sow the pillars of communal culture, where there will be neither owners nor slaves.”
Organizing Pennsylvania’s 197: Cheri Honkala on Frontline Communities
by BAR contributor Ann Garrison
Cheri Honkala has always believed in taking direct action on behalf of the poor and dispossessed. A lifelong activist, currently with the Green Party, Honkala has tried to play by the duopoly’s rules. But the rule-makers are the biggest rule-breakers. “I learned about what it means to really run for office in a frontline community that’s run by the Democratic Party, also known as the local mob, and it has not a damn thing to do with Russia.”
Black Agenda Radio, week of July 17, 2017.This week’s hour long show includes interviews with Dr. jahi Issa on reparations, Kambale Musavuli, of Friends of Congo on the holocaust which has taken se en million African lives in that unhappy country, Chicago’s Kamm Howard on Black is Back and a brief audio essay by political prisoner Mumia Abu Jamal on the ongoing struggle to get medical attention for prisoners with hepatitis C.
Seeking Reparations by Dropping Slave ClaimsIn 2006, a federal court ruled that the descendants of Black slaves in the U.S. have no “standing” to sue for reparations. However, Dr. Jahi Issa and Reggie Mabry say they have devised a new legal strategy to overcome the courts’ objections. “Slavery in the United States was immoral, but it was legal,” said Mabry. What was not legal, however, was the importation of Africans as forced labor after the outlawing of the international slave trade in 1808. Issa and Mabry claim “the bulk” of U.S. Blacks are descended from these post-1808 victims of “human trafficking” — as distinct from slavery — and can make a successful case for redress in court.
Chicago to Host Black Is Back CoalitionThe Black Is Back Coalition for Social Justice, Peace and Reparations holds its national conference in Chicago, August 12 and 13, under the theme, “The Ballot and the Bullet: Elections, War and Peace in the Donald Trump Era.” Kamm Howard, of the Black Is Back steering committee, is active in NCOBRA, the National Coalition of Blacks for Reparations in America. “One of the ways we’re pushing reparations is a Black Is Back-led push to have a reparations referendum put on the Chicago ballot in March of 2018,” said Howard.
Missouri Prisoners Push Suit for Hep C TreatmentCiting Mumia Abu Jamal’s successful legal battle against Pennsylvania prison officials, a court has granted Missouri prisoners the right to pursue a class action suit to force the state to treat them for Hepatitis C. In an essay for Prison Radio, Abu Jamal noted that Pennsylvania continues, in practice, to delay treatment for Hep C until prisoners “are at death’s door.” However, the legal precedents have been set, and “we are winning,” he said.
Precious Minerals + Rogue President = Mass Death in CongoTwo million people have been displaced from their homes by violence in the Kasai province of the Democratic Republic of Congo, where 80 mass graves have recently been discovered. Not coincidentally, huge deposits of coltan and other precious minerals have been found in the region, said Kambale Musavuli, of Friends of Congo. The killings are widely blamed on soldiers of President Joseph Kabila, who refuses to step down despite having used up his two terms in office. “This is the same area where King Leopold II of Belgium caused the death of millions of Congolese, a hundred years ago,” said Musavuli.
by Todd Burroughs
The shock of the two largest Black rebellions of 1967 caused President Lyndon Johnson to assign the Kerner Commission to study race relations in the U.S. However, the commission’s report “was buried by Johnson because it was honest about the effects of white racism and poverty on oppressed Black people.” The rebellions are now sources of pride. “Newark and Detroit are still majority Black and brown cities, and therein lies the power.”
by Christopher F. Petrella
The Black Panther Party for Self Defense was deeply engaged in “education for liberation.” The party’s Intercommunal Youth Institute served children in East Oakland until 1982. Huey New and Bobby Seale “explicitly insisted upon ‘education for our people that exposes the true nature of this decadent American society [and] that teaches us our true history and our role in the present-day society.’”
Union sentiment is rising at the Nissan auto plant in Canton, Mississippi, where the mostly Black workforce has experienced “increasingly unstable working conditions and general deterioration in benefits and safety protections.” Much of the work is temporary, and “Nissan promotes a ‘mutual cooperation’ approach“ for dealing with employees “without the interference and disruptions that often result from a union.”
by Zwelinzima Vavi
The newly-formed South African Federation of Trade Unions rejected an invitation to attend a congress of the South African Communist Party (SACP), which is a stalwart ally of the ruling African National Congress and, until recently, President Jacob Zuma. Trade union leader Zwelinzima Vavi accused the SACP of being as guilty as Zuma of “implementing a neoliberal program that is anti-poor, anti-working class, pro-capitalist and anti-socialist.”
The New Dark Age 
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