9 April 2020– Origin: Black Agenda Report

Resistance Growing to Covid-Capitalism 

Glen Ford, BAR Executive Editor
Covid-19 has laid bare a fundamental truth: that capitalist healthcare is a contradiction in terms, since capital – like the killer virus —  cares for nothing but reproducing itself.

Freedom Rider: Standing with Venezuela and Iran 

Margaret Kimberley, BAR senior columnist
The Trump administration wants a hot war with Iran or Venezuela, or both, and those of us claiming to be anti-war must be on our guard and ready for action.

Andrew Cuomo and the Crisis of Liberalism 

Danny Haiphong, BAR Contributing Editor
The “liberal” champion is a corporate thug who pays prisoners slave wages to make hand sanitizer and is trying to cut Medicaid.

COVID-19 in DRC: Hoping for the Best, Preparing for the Worst 

Ann Garrison, BAR Contributing Editor
Deaths caused by the pandemic are likely to occur without assistance of any kind, without any administrative record, and without acknowledgment in the news cycle.

Mengele Medicine:  Death Panels of  Boss Tweet and Pence 

Raymond Nat Turner, BAR poet-in-residence

STOP! No testing! No testing for the infection—
big, big numbers could threaten the $election!
STOP! No testing for us poor, us working-class—

A Call to Action: Towards a General Strike to End the COVID-19 Crisis and Create a New World  

Cooperation Jackson
We must make demands that will transform our broken and inequitable society, and build a new society run by and for us – the working-class, poor, oppressed majority.

Expect Police-Military Repression Amid the Crisis of COVID-19 and Its Aftermath 

Netfa Freeman
The rulers are concerned about the class war becoming sharper in the current crisis and they are preparing to send in the military and police to quell dissent.

Letters from Our Readers  

Jahan Choudhry BAR Comments Editor
This week you discussed Black Marxism and the Bernie Sanders campaign.

BAR Book Forum: Xavier Livermon’s  “Kwaito Bodies” 

Roberto Sirvent, BAR Book Forum Editor
The author examines how Black youth in post-apartheid South Africa imagine freedom under tremendous systems of constraint.

BAR Abolition & Mutual Aid Spotlight: Chicago Community Bond Fund 

Dean Spade and Roberto Sirvent, BAR Contributors
This arena of the mutual aid movement is energized by “a vision of the absence of prisons, jails, detention, and criminalization.”

Students May Strike for “Social Welfare” During Crisis 

Black Agenda Radio with Margaret Kimberley and Glen Ford
Semassa Boko, a student activist and PhD candidate at the University of California at Irvine, wrote an article on the concept of a social welfare strike “under conditions where the United States is plunging into a Great Depression.” Boko envisions “the redirection of students’ withheld labor towards the social welfare” of those who have been abandoned by the system.

Working People Must Build Solidarity in Resistance 

Black Agenda Radio with Margaret Kimberley and Glen Ford
The general strike is “extremely promising” because “it is the surest way that workers have to protect their own health, since obviously the state and their employers are not interested in doing that,” said Peter Gelderloos, an anarchist activist now living in Spain who wrote an article on the global history of rent strikes.

Call for a General Strike Beginning May 1st 

Black Agenda Radio with Margaret Kimberley and Glen Ford
Cooperation Jackson, based in Jackson, Mississippi, issued the call and list of demands to protect the people from both the virus and disaster capitalism. “The society that emerges from this crisis is going to be different,” said Cooperation Jackson spokesman Kali Akuno. “This could be good or bad. We’re not going back to what was.”

Blacks May be Bearing the Brunt of Covid-19, But Access to Data is Limited 

Elizabeth Cooney 
The feds don’t keep racial data on the coronavirus, but local reports show Blacks are dying at multiple the rates of whites in some cities.

In 1918 and 2020, Race Colors America’s Response to Epidemics 

Soraya Nadia Mcdonald
A century ago, In cities across the nation, black people struck by the flu were often left to fend for themselves.

Moral Leaders Demand Coronavirus Relief for Most Vulnerable 

Jessica Corbett
The relief package “leaves out the majority of homeless, undocumented immigrants, the disabled, and anyone too poor to have to file taxes,”
says the Poor Peoples Campaign.

Trump Sends Gun boats to Venezuela While the World Partners to Fight a Deadly Pandemic 

Vijay Prashad, Paola Estrada, Ana Maldonado and Zoe PC
The Trump administration has used the fabricated narco-trafficking charges against Maduro and other officials as an excuse to intensify pressure on Venezuela.

Public Health? Anyone? Twelve Ways to Avoid Talking About Capitalism 

Philippe Gendrault
The failure of the American public health delivery system facing the Covid-19 is a socio-political and ideological failure born from the intrinsic contradictions of contemporary capitalism at large.

Affirmative Action for White People 

Barry Spector
Most whites have been able to live out their lives completely unaware of the long term, institutional factors that have kept people of color down – and themselves up.