The New Dark Age

Black Agenda Report July 4th Special Issue

The Editors

“This Fourth of July is yours, not mine. You may rejoice, I must mourn.” – Frederick Douglass 1852 speech

Barack Obama, George Washington and the 4th of July

Margaret Kimberley, BAR Executive Editor and Senior Columnist

The opening of the Obama Center has brought Barack Obama back into the spotlight although he offers nothing new. He will be in the pocket of the oligarchy for the rest of his life, and that means he must continue to erase the history of Black people in order to stay in their good graces. Now he praises George Washington, the slaveholding genocidaire.

LYRICS: Bicentennial Blues, Gil Scott-Heron, 1976

Editors, The Black Agenda Review

“George Washington/Slave-owner general/Ironic that the father of this country

Should be a slave owner/The father of this country a slave-owner.”

F$$K the Fourth: Declaring Our Collective Independence from the Sinking Ship of U.S. Empire

Anthony Karefa Rogers-Wright

The settler colonial state is now more corrupt and more unequal than even the genocidal “founding fathers” imagined.

Disaster Capitalism In Haiti Gives A Glimpse Into the Imperialist Shock Doctrine That Could Rattle Venezuela Long After The Earthquakes

Jacqueline Luqman

The same U.S. military that kidnapped President Maduro is now directing earthquake relief in Caracas, and if Haiti is any guide, that aid is a Trojan Horse bringing plunder and control.

Fujimorismo 2.0: The Age of Keiko Fujimori: The Hard Right Advances in Latin America and the Caribbean, strengthening the Shield of the Americas

Clau O’Brien Moscoso

Keiko Fujimori won the Peruvian presidency with help from the US ambassador. Her victory solidifies the US Shield of the Americas that is recolonizing the region.

Trump and America’s Fascist Forefathers

Glen Ford, BAR Executive Editor

Donald Trump is not an anomaly, but the heir of fascism which began in 1776 and continued throughout U.S. history.

The Indian Wars Continue: 150 Years After Victory at Greasy Grass

Nick Estes What the Indian wars teach us about today’s forever wars.

White supremacy and slavery: Gerald Horne on the real story of American independence

Elias Isquith

It’s time to revisit America’s heroic creation myth and what really happened in 1776.

Slaveholders Who Signed the Declaration of Independence: Washington, Jefferson, and the People they Owned

Ann Garrison, BAR Contributing Editor , Margaret Kimberley, BAR Executive Editor and Senior Columnist

Black Agenda Report editors Margaret Kimberley and Ann Garrison discuss the personal and institutional hypocrisy that allowed those who said, “All men are created equal,” to be slaveholders.

Cuba’s economic reforms and the prospects for socialist renewal

Carlos Martinez

The following article by Carlos Martinez, co-editor of Friends of Socialist China and author of The East Is Still Red, examines the most far-reaching changes to Cuba’s economic model in more than 60 years – a programme of 23 strategic axes and 176 measures approved unanimously this month by the National Assembly.