Black Agenda Radio

Black Agenda Radio - 03/18/13

Black Agenda Radio - 03/11/13

Black Agenda Radio - 03/04/13

Black Agenda Radio - 02/25/13

Blacks Rally to Save Camden NJ Police Department “This is a public safety issue, it’s a labor issue, and it’s a political issue,” said Larry Hamm, chairman of the People’s Organization for Progress and featured speaker at a rally to prevent the shutdown of the police department in mostly Black and Latino Camden, New Jersey. The financially distressed town would be patrolled by police from the surrounding, mostly white county. It’s a matter of self-determination, said Hamm. “They’re not going to stop with taking over the finance department; they’re not going to stop with taking over the schools; they’re not going to stop with the police force.” Obama’s Orwellian Peace President Obama’s claim that he will end the U.S. war in Afghanistan in 2014 makes sense only in the language of George Orwell’s 1984, said David Swanson, publisher of the influential website WarIsACrime.org. The president is actually planning to take U.S. troop strength “down to almost wh

Black Agenda Radio - 02/13/13

Black Agenda Radio - 02/04/13

Black Agenda Radio - 01/28/13

Black and Brown Schools Already Over-Policed “When we look at whose schools are policed and which students have to go through metal detectors, get pad-downs, get drug-searched on a routine basis, it’s our students of color and our communities of color across this country,” said Matthew Cregor, of the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund. The Newtown, Connecticut, massacre has led to renewed calls for an increased police presence in schools. However, what inner city students need are more social workers, psychologists and counselors, and teaching resources, said Cregor. Savage School Inequalities Intensify “Our schools are more segregated and less equal than they were in 1968, when Dr. King was taken from us,” said Jonathan Kozol, the educator, activist and author. “This kind of inequality is a theological abomination, a crime against the least of us,” said Kozol, author of the 1991 classic Savage Inequalities: Children in America’s Schools. He was interviewed on public radio’s Smiley 8 West show. Obama “Co-Conspirator” in Austerity Schemes “Austerity is, essentially, shifting of the burden of the economic depression from those who created it onto the working class and the poor,” said activist Eric Draitser, who has been organizing anti-austerity forums. “This is a concerted attack by financiers and the ruling class against the legacy of the New Deal.” President Obama is “a co-conspirator and collaborator with these austerity schemes.” Draitser is publisher of the web site StopImperialism.com. MLK vs. Obama Barack Obama and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. have nothing in common, politically, according to Omali Yeshitela, chairman of the Black Is Back Coalition for Social Justice, Peace and Reparations. “The only connection they would have in the real world be that Dr. King would be leading the demonstrations against the Obama regime, if he were alive,” said Yeshitela. Obama has “extended the war machine beyond anything in recent memory.” Lynn Stewart’s Cancer Spreads Human rights lawyer Lynn Stewart, serving ten years in a Fort Worth, Texas, prison for her zealous defense of an accused terrorist client, has suffered a relapse of cancer. “It has spread to her other lung and to parts of her back,” said Stewart’s husband, Ralph Poynter, speaking on the radio program Taking Aim. Prison regulations prevent Stewart from obtaining the care she needs. “We feel that it is a death sentence,” said Poynter. Happy Birthday to Ramsey Clark and Dr. King, from Mumia If MLK were alive, he would be 84 years old, a year younger than former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark, whose birthday was recently celebrated at New York City’s historic Riverside Church, along with the 20th anniversary of the International Action Center. Dr. King “would be with the people, with the IAC, with Ramsey Clark, at Riverside,” said political prisoner Mumia Abu Jamal in a message recorded for the event

What Would Dr. King Do? Were he alive today, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. would “highlight Wall Street criminality,” “war crimes coming out of the White House, the Pentagon, and the State Department” and “the social crimes of the New Jim Crow, the criminal justice system, which is itself criminal,” said Dr. Cornel West, of the Union Theological Seminary, in New York. “Martin would be very, very sad when he looked at the fraudulent character of Black leadership, the massive capitulation to the White House.” The slain civil rights leader “would be in righteous opposition to the American regime of austerity and war, and to a president and his administration that is in the vanguard of it,” according to Dr. Anthony Monteiro, professor of African American Studies at Temple University, in Philadelphia. “King was, at the end of the day, a democratic revolutionary. He was calling for an uprising to the forces of injustice and war,” said Monteiro. In contrast, today’s “Black petit bourgeoisie are more interested in their own comfort than they are in social justice.” Black Women’s Wage Gap The wage gap between men and African American women is 70 cents on the dollar, according to a study of U.S. Census Bureau data by the National Partnership for Women and Families. Sarah Crawford, the group’s director of workplace fairness, said “nearly 40 percent of households headed by African American women are living in poverty, so this lost pay in particularly critical for those families. The difference in earnings amounts to more than $14,000 each year.” Fictional Fiscal Crisis “The conservatives, the Republicans, the business lobby, have been allowed to control the debate” over fiscal policy “because they’ve created the idea that we have this big deficit crisis,” said Dean Baker, co-director of the Washington-based Center for Economic and Policy Research. “And it really is a fiction.” Such false assumptions are why “programs like Medicare and Social Security are on the chopping block.” Pace of Police Killings of Blacks Increases Kali Akuno, one of the authors of last year’s Malcolm X Grassroots Movement report on extrajudicial killings of Blacks, said “we are already noticing that, by our count, there’s been ten Black men who’ve been killed by police in 2013, and that’s faster than the pace of 2012.” Akuno spoke earlier this month on a National Forum on Police Brutality and Institutional Racism, on Your World News, hosted by Solomon Comissiong and Peter Fowler. Obama’s War Mongers “Virtually everybody on the top echelon of the Obama foreign policy team, they all backed the Iraq War,” points out Sam Husseini, communications director of the Institute for Public Accuracy. Republican Senator Chuck Hagel, tapped for Secretary of Defense, fits the bill. John Brennan, the White House intelligence advisor who got the president’s nod to head the CIA, meets every week with Obama “to decide who they are going to kill,” said Husseini. “He at one point claimed that there were no civilian deaths from the drone program, though we know there are civilian deaths.

Both Parties Sabotaging Entitlement Programs Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid “have been set up to take the fall for the nation’s deficit,” said Dr. Maya Rockeymoore, president of Washington-based Global Policy Solutions. President Obama “views it as his legacy to rein in entitlement programs while creating this grand bargain” with the Republicans. Those who expected a more progressive Obama in his second term are mistaken. “I think that the president did not make a Freudian slip in his first debate when he said that he and Mitt Romney actually agree on Social Security.” EPA Chief Used Alias Lisa Jackson was forced to resign as chief of the Environmental Protection Agency because she conducted some of her public duties under an alias, said famed whistleblower Dr. Marsha Coleman-Adebayo, of the NO FEAR Coalition. Jackson was “extremely upset” with the Occupy Movement, which staged demonstrations against “her cowardly behavior” as guardian of the environment. Dr. Coleman-Adebayo believes Jackson used her alias to cloak her role in government spying on movement activists. End Stop-and-Frisk “We feel that 2013 has to be a year of rising resistance to stop-and-frisk in the streets and in the courtrooms,” said Carl Dix, a founder of Stop Mass Incarceration Network. “We’re not talking about mending an injustice; we’re talking about ending it.” The capitalist system is incapable of providing a “future for millions and millions of young people growing up in the urban areas of the country,” said Dix. “You can put Black faces in high places, but if it’s the same system that has oppressed and exploited you, it’s not going to change. Revolution is the solution.” Big Brother Obama Hears All President Obama has shown himself to be a more aggressive foe of civil liberties than George Bush. “Absolutely, we’ve seen this to be true from the FISA authorization, to the use of drones, and with the NDAA” preventive detention bill, said Samantha Peetros, spokesperson for the Bill of Rights Defense Committee. Just before New Years, Obama signed a five-year extension of legislation allowing warrantless phone and email surveillance. Charters Crowding Out Public Schools in Philly “I think that there is a growing movement among decision makers to shut the door on public education,” said W. Curtis Thomas, a Black state lawmaker from Philadelphia. The city has targeted 60 public schools for closing, while expanding charter schools by 5,000 seats. “The decision to move kids towards these charter schools is really an effort to resegregate a system that was never totally integrated, anyway,” said Rep. Thomas

Black Agenda Radio - 12/31/12

Black Agenda Radio - 12/24/12

Fiscal Cliff is Diversion from Corporate Tax Avoidance “To some extent, the fiscal cliff debate is a farce,” said Eric LeCompte, executive director of Jubilee USA Network, which estimates that corporations and wealthy individuals avoid paying $150 billion a year to the U.S. Treasury through loopholes and offshore havens. “If we were to close the corporate offshore tax loopholes, not only would the fiscal cliff debate be over, but we would have more revenue than we would know what to do with,” said Compte. The fiscal cliff “gap” represents only $109 billion. UN Urges All Nations Provide Universal, Affordable Healthcare The United States joined in a United Nations resolution calling on member countries to establish “universal” and “affordable” healthcare systems. However, “the United States has actually taken us in the opposite direction,” said Dr. Margaret Flowers, of Physicians for a National Healthcare Program. Obamacare “further privatizes health care,” said Flowers. “Every industrialized nation that has an effective, universal national healthcare program uses a publicly-financed, not a market-based, approach.” UN Sets Goals for Haiti Cholera, But Avoids Culpability At least 7,000 people have signed a petition, backed by filmmaker Oliver Stone, to pressure the United Nations to accept responsibility for the cholera epidemic that has killed 8,000 Haitians and sickened half a million more. The UN announced plans to raise a $2.27 billion anti-cholera war chest, but fails to admit that the disease was brought to Haiti by UN soldiers, or to ensure that “this kind of disaster doesn’t happen again in another country where there are peacekeepers,” said Beatrice Lindstrom, staff attorney for the Institute for Justice and Democracy in Haiti. The Institute filed suit on behalf of cholera victims, a year ago. “The people of Haiti never asked for UN troops,” said Robert Naiman, policy director for Just Foreign Policy. Naiman said pressure should be brought on the United States and France, which backed a 2004 coup in Haiti and then called in UN troops to stabilize the coup regime. Post-Election Debate in Philly Attorney and talk show host Michael Coard faced off against veteran activist and professor of African American studies Anthony Monteiro, in a debate at Temple University. Coard attacked Monteiro’s revolutionary politics, saying: “If you despise what President Barack Obama has done, you should despise even more what Mitt Romney” and fellow Republicans would do. Dr. Monteiro pointed out that Martin Luther King Jr. broke with President Lyndon Johnson “in principle over the war in Vietnam,” and would surely break with Obama’s wars if he were alive, today. Israelis “On Thin Ice” Israel’s aggressive policies will backfire in the new conditions that prevail “in this Islamist Spring that is spreading throughout the region,” said Dr. Gerald Horne, of the University of Houston. “The Israelis aren’t going to be very pleased with their new neighbors, and their new neighbors will not be very pleased with the Israelis, either. So the Israelis would be advised to negotiate while there’s still time,” he said. Dr. Horne spoke on Regent Radio, in Toronto, Canada

Wal-Mart-Free Newark As “the leader in the retail industry in paying its workers the lowest wages,” Wal-Mart should be barred from doing business in Newark, New Jersey, said Larry Hamm, chairman of the People’s Organization for Progress. “We need living wage jobs,” said Hamm. “The minimum wage is a slave wage.” Wal-Mart Exploits Obamacare President Obama’s health care legislation has been a special boon to Wal-Mart, the world’s biggest corporation. “What changes with Obamacare is that anybody making up to 133 percent of the federal poverty level now qualifies for Medicaid,” said journalist Mary Wheeler. In recent months, Wal-Mart has cut the hours of large numbers of workers. “There’s a big incentive for Wal-Mart to make sure that as many of their employees are below the federal poverty level” as possible, said Wheeler. Multinationals Super-Exploit Third World Workers Labor unions, elected officials and grassroots activists in New York demanded that multinational corporations be made accountable for working conditions at factories in the developing world. “We must push them to sign the international Fire Safety Act and follow international labor laws,” said Fazi Foezia, a member of DRUM – Desis Rising Up and Moving – and a Bengladesh national. “They exploit our workers and don’t pay taxes to our governments.” Garment factory fires in Bengladesh and Pakistan have killed hundreds in recent months. Raising Retail Wages Would Boost Economy A study by Demos finds that “raising wages in the retails sector at the largest employers to a threshold of $25,000 a year for full-time, year-round workers would bring a million and a half people out of poverty, generate between $11 and $15 billion in GDP, and create between 100,000 and 132,000 new jobs.” Corporations would benefit, too, from a more loyal work force and greater consumer spending power. Disaster Officials Offer Loans, Not Aid Federal officials are more concerned with generating loans to fatten the $1 billion a year disaster loan service industry, than in providing direct aid to victims of Hurricane Sandy, according to a study by Strike Debt, an offshoot of the Occupy Movement. Credit-worthiness, rather than need, becomes the watchword, said Strike Debt spokesperson Pamela Brown. “By using the lens of debt, they are exacerbating any kinds of inequalities that are already existing” in disaster-struck areas, “putting renters and minority communities” in additional jeopardy. No Charge, No Trial, No Justice Civil and human rights activists gathered at Central Connecticut State University, at New Britain, for a conference on preventive detention, last weekend. President Obama’s preventive detention law, part of the National Defense Authorization Act, was designed to target “those who are engage in dissent,” said conference organizer Daniel Adams.  Activists should also oppose more recent legislation that might exempt U.S. citizens from detention without charge or trial. “It’s got to be all of us or none of us,” said Adams.