Black Agenda Radio

McKinney Sees New “Movement” in the Making If veteran community organizations and the Occupy movement can combine their strengths, “you have the beginnings of the makings of the movement that many of us have been longing to see,” said Cynthia McKinney, the former Georgia congresswoman and Green Party presidential candidate. McKinney is engaged in a nationwide Build People’s Power Tour. She said community groups have “experience and some expertise” while Occupy brings “youth and vitality and fresh ideas” to the table. POP Marks May Day in Home Stretch of Daily Newark Demos The People’s Organization for Progress marked its 310th day of daily demonstrations on May Day, just 71 days short of its goal to match the longevity of the 1955 Montgomery Bus Boycott. The campaign for jobs, housing, education, justice and peace, which has been endorsed by 175 community organizations, “has strengthened and disciplined our organization,” said POP chairman Larry Hamm. “We’ have an impact.” U.S. Moving in “Fascist Direction” “We need to build an anti-war movement that is also an anti-bankster, anti-plutocrat, anti-injustice movement – as it is all connected – and to push it hard on our representatives before it’s too late,” said David Swanson, publisher of the influential web site War Is A Crime. “Our country is moving in a dangerously fascistic direction and, at some point, fear may become overpowering.” Protest and Mumia’s Birthday at Justice Department “Why is George Zimmerman walking the streets and Mumia isn’t walking the streets?” saidMonica Morehead, of the International Action Center, at the Occupy the Justice Department demonstration. April 24 was also political prisoner Mumia Abu Jamal’s 58th birthday. “We want de-carceration, and the destruction of the mass incarceration complex,” said Jamal, in a recorded message. Fellow political prisoners Sekou Odinga, 67 years old, and Mutulu Shakur, 61, sent birthday greetings to Mumia. Public Enemy’s Chuck D told the crowd, “two and a half million people are incarcerated, but they’ve built facilities to hold five to seven million in the next ten years.”

"Backdoor" threat to Social Security Democratic Senator Kent Conrad, of North Dakota, head of the Senate Budget Committee, would raise full retirement eligibility for Social Security to age 69, under legislation based on the Simpson/Bowles Deficit Reduction Commission report. “It’s a backdoor attempt to reduce Social Security benefits,” said Don Owens, of Social Security Works, in Washington. “Not too many businesses are hiring 68 and 69 year old workers.” Obama Fails to Spend Funds on Hardest Hit Homeowners More than $7 billion in Troubled Asset Relief Fund money set aside for hardest hit homeowners, disproportionately Blacks and Latinos, was allow to sit in President Obama’s Treasury Department, unspent, for two years. The administration managed to spend only 3 percent of the $7.6 billion allocated. However, South Carolina writer and activist Kevin Alexander Gray doesn’t think the malfeasance will hurt Obama with Blacks at the polls. “As long as they have someone that cosmetically looks like them in the White House,” and “as long as Black people are not organized to make coherent demands of the system, he doesn’t have to worry,” said Gray. African Americans Have Right to Self-Determination Based on Article One of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, to which the U.S. is a party, “African Americans have the right to determine their political status and pursue their economic, social and cultural development,” said Dr. Francis Boyle, professor of international law at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Dr. Boyle spoke on the subject to a Chicago meeting of the International Human Rights Association of American Minorities. U.S. “On the Defensive” in Africa The rise of China, India, Brazil and other countries has made the U.S. desperate to maintain its domination of Africa, said Omali Yeshitela, chairman of the Black Is Back Coalition for Social Justice, Peace and Reparations. Because “Africans are capable of playing the China card,” they don’t necessarily have to buckle under to “the U.S., France or the other imperialist countries.” Chicago March Against NATO Wins Endorsements May 20 demonstrations against the summit meeting of NATO heads of state, in Chicago, has been endorsed by Rev. Jesse Jackson and Rainbow-Push, three major service employees international unions, the Chicago teachers, and a nurses union, said Chris Gavreau, spokesperson for the United National Anti-War Coalition. “This march is going to be the major Spring action against war and austerity,” she said

Tear Down U.S. Prison Gulag “It’s a counterinsurgency before there is an insurgency.” That’s how Los Angeles activist Clyde Young views America’s incarceration of 2.4 million people, most of them Black and Latino. The Stop Mass Incarceration Network plans actions in New York, Los Angeles, Atlanta, Chicago and the San Francisco Bay area on April 19, a National Day of Resistance to Mass Incarceration. Statutes like Florida’s Stand Your Grand Law encourage racist vigilantism, said Young. “They’re nothing but new forms of lynch laws, where any citizen…can shoot a person down on the street, and be exonerated.” In Atlanta, activist Joey Johnson said George Zimmerman, Trayvon Martin’s killer, was “acting out a larger, racist societal project. It requires a deeper, systemic change if we’re going to get to the root of it, and not constantly be dealing with the phenomenon.” Occupy Harlem to Rally for “All the Trayvons” “It’s essential for us to build a united front against racist killings,” said Dr. William Sales, an organizer of Occupy Harlem’s rally and march, April 21. “We have to move against what has emerged as a New Jim Crow. It’s really a form of terrorism that is more associated with the Old Jim Crow than with law enforcement,” said Sales, an associate professor of African Studies at Seton Hall University. For information, call 646.812.5188. Justice Wanted: Plan Needed “What appears to be an escalation of terror against Black people, is also routine practice,” said Kali Akuno, of the U.S. Human Rights Network, in Atlanta. Akuno is circulating a National Plan of Action for Racial Justice, which includes a data base on recent racist killings of Blacks. Young people “are being force fed this narrative that we have somehow magically emerged into some kind of post-racial society.” Instead, said Akuno, Blacks must “organize into formations that exercise power to create the kind of society that you want.” Housing Settlement Almost Worthless to Underwater Homeowners Activist David Hungerford led angry members of the Coalition to Save Our Homes to New Jersey’s state capital in Trenton, to demand reductions in mortgage principals. The $25 billion settlement between the nation’s state attorney generals and the big banks “broadly speaking, does almost nothing” for homeowners that are “underwater” to the tune of $700 billion. The top state law enforcement officers “talk with the people who perpetrated predatory lending, but they won’t talk to the victims,” said Hungerford. Black Teachers Pushed Out in Denver African American teachers are being “pushed, en mass to retirement, fired, put on disciplinary hearing or on leave” in the Denver public schools, because of the Obama administration’s so-called “turnaround” program, said Cozette Hammock-West, a retired teacher with the Alliance of Neighborhood Organizations for Justice for African Americans. Black educators are replaced by “young white teachers, most of them from the Teach for America program, where they are not even trained to teach.” A U.S. Chapter for ILPS On May 19, in Chicago, the International League of People’s Struggle, representing 200 organizations, worldwide, will welcome its newly organized U.S. chapter. “It’s not only people in those countries that are being invaded and bombed by the United States” that need solidarity, said Bill Doar, a vice-chairman of ILPS. “We, too, need international solidarity to fight against the power of Wall Street and U.S. corporations.” ILPS delegates will also take part in mass demonstrations against the NATO summit meeting in the city. A Real Socialist for President Stephan Durham, who’s seeking the presidential nomination on the Peace and Freedom Party line, says he is THE socialist candidate in the race. “Capitalism is addicted to war,” said the Freedom Socialist Party member. “Fundamental change” is needed in the U.S.,

Blacks Disappearing From California University Campuses “Even at African American Studies classes at UC Berkeley, it is now rare that Black students are a majority of the class,” said Yvette Felarca, one of the protesters that briefly occupied the Registrar’s office. African American enrollment has dropped to 3 percent since passage of Proposition 2009, the referendum that outlawed affirmative action in state higher education in 1996. A federal appeals court recently upheld the ban. George Washington, a lawyer for Detroit-based By Any Means Necessary (BAMN), calls the law “a direct attack on the political rights of Black and Latino people. Every other citizen of the state of California can say they want a special admissions program” – except racial and ethnic minorities. Look at Dick and Jane. See Their Privileges “Dick and Jane,” the old picture book primer, taught post-World War Two Americans that lily white suburban lives were the ones “that need to be protected from criminal Others like Trayvon Martin when they enter into gated communities,” said scholar and activist Sikivu Hutchinson. “This whole paradigm was really constructed upon the Othering of African Americans and other families of color.” Occupy the Justice Department The U.S. criminal justice system will be put on trial, on April 24, when demonstrators “Occupy” the U.S. Justice Department, in Washington.Benjamin Woods, of Students Against Mass Incarceration, hopes to put “prison abolition back on the table, as opposed to just prison ‘reform’ and ‘stop these brutalities.’” The Howard University doctoral candidate said the questions must be posed: “What is an alternative to prison? How can we transform society so that prisons are no longer necessary?” California Prisoners Take Torture Case to the UN Peter Schey, of the Center for Human Rights and Constitutional Law, has filed petitions asking the United Nations to intervene in California’s draconian prison solitary confinement practices. “The majority are placed in solitary confinement” – for years and even decades – “based on mere gang membership or association with gangs,” said Schey. His clients want the UN to issue a report stating that California’s policies “constitute torture in violation of international law.” The Rich, and Their Children, Get Richer The Senate should pass a bill that would restore taxes on inherited wealth to levels that would raise half a trillion dollars over the next ten years, said Tim Sullivan, of United for a Fair Economy, part of Americans for a Fair Estate Tax. “The concentrated wealth we are seeing right now is at epidemic proportions, the worst it has been since before the Great Depression, and the Estate Tax is near its weakest level since it was put into place 100 years ago,” said Sullivan. U.S. Hands Off Mali! The Tuareg rebellion that has cut the West African nation of Mali in two is the result of colonial boundaries and decisions that “left out a nomadic people without any kind of land base of their own,” said Anna Edwards, of Defenders of Freedom, Justice and Equality, in Richmond, Virginia. The “destabilization of Libya” by the U.S. and NATO left thousands of Malian Tuaregs jobless. Peace activists should demand that the U.S. not intervene in the conflict, said Ms. Edwards, who has visited Mali several times. “The bulk of U.S. aid to Mali is implemented through AFRICOM, and the desire to find a base on African soil.” Cholera Deaths Up in Haiti The return of the rainy season has brought an increase in deaths from cholera, which has killed 7,000 Haitians and sickened half a million since its introduction by MINUSTAH, the United Nations military occupation force. The UN has the responsibility to commit the resources to control the disease “because they brought it there, but they’re still denying it,” said Mark Weisbrot, co-director of the Center for Econ

Green Party Black Caucus Endorses Roseanne Barr Based largely on name recognition and a nod from former Georgia congresswoman Cynthia McKinney, the Green Party’s Black Caucus has thrown its support to celebrity Roseanne Barr for president. “The reality is, to break through the mainstream media, a person has to have that type of recognition,” said Black Caucus spokesman Thomas Muhammad. “The more attention she gets, the more attention the party gets, and that’s the reality of politics.” The heads-up from McKinney, the party’s 2008 presidential candidate, was key, said Muhammad. “It was very critical because, without that, some of our party members were going to look elsewhere.” UNAC Says “No” to Intervention or Sanctions Against Syria and Iran “We need an anti-war movement that is really against all U.S. wars – that simple,” said Sara Flaunders, of the International Action Center, at the Stamford, Connecticut, conference of UNAC, the United National Anti-War Coalition. “How does any U.S. official lecture any other country on prisoners, on human rights, or on democracy? This country has the largest prison population in the world.” Margaret Kimberley at UNAC: Choose Peace or Obama “You cannot be anti-war and pro-Obama,” said Margaret Kimberley, editor and senior columnist for Black Agenda Report. “The United States, France and the UK conspired to bring down a sovereign nation’s government, kill its leader, spread a race war and lynch law, and divide Libya into weak fiefdoms incapable of stopping their collaborators from turning over their resources to NATO and the G-8 countries,” said Kimberley. “These people will not be happy until the people of the world accept their rule without protest.” Glen Ford at UNAC: U.S. Society is Organized Around Racial Oppression “One out of every eight prison inmates on the planet is an African American,” said Glen Ford, executive editor of Black Agenda report. “That statistic alone serves to illuminate” that the U.S. is “a society that is largely organized around race and racial oppression. That’s what the Black American Gulag means.” Nellie Bailey at UNAC: Obama A “Servant of the 1%” In 2007, “when the U.S. imperialists introduced Barack Obama to us,” many “comrades and activists” succumbed to “our blind spot” and decided, “this is our man – when, in fact, Obama is a servant of the 1%,” said Nellie Bailey, Black Agenda Report editor and director of the Harlem Tenants Council. But resistance to Obama continues among African Americans, “and will not roll over to his disdain and disrespect.” Bruce Dixon at UNAC: The “Bipartisan” Prison State “The prison state is very much a bi-partisan thing,” said Bruce Dixon, Black Agenda Report managing editor. Corporations and their philanthropic arms, like the United Way, “present a lot of opportunities for hijacking and containing the anti-prison movement within the universe bound by the two political parties.” The movement “against mass incarceration has to be led, in large part, by the formerly incarcerated, themselves.” April 19: Day of National Resistance Against Mass Incarceration The Trayvon Martin killing is reminiscent of the 1857 Supreme Court Dred Scott decision, that Black have no rights that whites are bound to respect, said Carl Dix, of the Stop Mass Incarceration Network. Dix urged folks to “go from your anger around the injustice at the murder of Trayvon Martin, to anger around all of the abuse that the criminal injustice system is bringing down on Black and brown people.” Minneapolis Demo for Trayvon “As long as we can come together to show that we’re not going to stand for it, were going in the right direction,” said Sam Ndely, a student organizer of a protest that drew 5500 demonstrators to the University of Minnesota. A “Second Phase” for Occupy? The newly launched National Occupy Washington campaign of publi

Version:1.0 StartHTML:0000000183 EndHTML:0000010017 StartFragment:0000002776 EndFragment:0000009981 SourceURL:file://localhost/Users/PRNG5/Downloads/March%2028%20PRN%20Show.doc Doctors to Supreme Court: Single Payer, Not Individual Mandate In addition to arguments from the Right against President Obama’s health care plan, more than 50 medical doctors submitted a brief to the U.S. Supreme Court, contending the so-called “individual mandate” is unnecessary. “We could achieve the goal of guaranteed, universal, affordable health care by doing a single-payer program,” said Dr. Margaret Flowers, of Physicians for a National Health Program. Flowers warned that 20 million Americans stand to lose their job-related health care coverage, forcing them “into the individual market where the plans have less coverage and are more expensive.” Occupy EPA: Lisa Jackson Must Go Lisa Jackson should be fired as a “symbol of corruption” and an “ineffective and reactionary” administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, said Marsha Coleman-Adebayo, an organizer of March 30 demonstrations against the agency. Other Occupy EPA demands include “cessation of the war against whistleblowers” at EPA, an end to polluting of low income communities, and “justice for Trayvon Martin.” Occupy the Justice Department on Mumia’s Birthday On April 24, protesters will gather at the U.S. Justice Department to “link the Mumia Abu Jamal case to the broader crisis of criminalization of Black and Latino men, the criminalization of immigrants, the criminalization of protesters and occupiers, and the crisis of mass incarceration,” said Johanna Fernandez, professor of history at New York City’s Baruch College. The date is also Abu Jamal’s 58th birthday, his first outside of Pennsylvania’s death row in 30 years. Occupy Wall Street’s Race and Gender Problem Many whites in the Occupy movement believe, “If we just stop talking about race, then it won’t be a problem,” said journalist and activist Jordan Flaherty, co-author of the recent article, “Race, Gender and Occupy.” Flaherty, a producer of the Fault Lines series on Al-Jazeera English TV, has been “surprised and impressed that so many activists of color have continued to engage the movement despite all these problems. POP Prepares for April 4 MLK Rally and March in Newark The People’s Organization for Progress “has brought a consciousness to critical issues for Black and poor people who are stuck in the Bantustans” of urban New Jersey, said James Harris, president of the state NAACP and an endorser of POP’s daily demonstrations for jobs, housing, education and justice. Perry notes that “most young people have not participated in any demonstration of consequence since the execution of Troy Davis,” in Georgia. Louisiana Balks at Building New Housing The state is using most of its $750 million in Katrina housing money to elevate or repair homes, instead of “helping people to rebuild their homes on the vacant lots” that cover large sections of New Orleans. James Perry, executive director of the Greater New Orleans Fair Housing Action Center, said Louisiana is even “sending money to people who got no damage at all” in the hurricane. Reparations Movement in 23rd Year NCOBRA, the National Coalition of Blacks for Reparations in America, holds its 23rd annual conference in Philadelphia, June 22-24, at the Church of the Advocate. Ari Merretazon, male co-chair of the conference, said oppression of Black people has moved “from chattel slavery to public policy enslavement, like mass incarceration.” High Gas Prices Won’t Go Away “There’s no more easy oil,” said Michael T. Klare, author of The Race for What’s Left: The Global Scramble for the World’s Last Resources. Fossil fuels are “much more expensive to produce, and environmentally hazardous to develop.” Klare said “speculation is also playing a role, beca

Kony is Like Kindergartner Compared to U.S. Ally Museveni Lords’ Resistance Army leader Joseph Kony “looks like a kindergarten student compared to the crimes” of the man he has been fighting for decades, Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni, said Kambale Musavuli, of Friends of the Congo. President Museveni has been a U.S. ally and client since seizing power in 1986 with a guerilla force largely comprised of child soldiers. “Rather than holding the American government accountable for supporting a dictator who has committed more crimes than Kony and is still committing crimes as we speak, they are calling for military support for Museveni’s army and sending U.S. troops there,” said Musavuli. Uganda has been implicated by both the United Nations and the World Court in the deaths of some of the six million Congolese who have been killed since the mid-Nineties. McKinney on “Build People’s Power Tour” Former Green Party presidential candidate Cynthia McKinney has teamed with the International Action Center for a “Build People’s Power” campaign. “You can’t build a movement if people aren’t talking to each other,” said the former Green Party presidential candidate. “There is a kind of balkanization of the areas of protest.” The idea behind the tour, which has so far visited New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore and Los Angeles, is to bring various organizations into the same space to “plan an agenda, a calendar of actions that we’re going to do, and everybody participates,” said the former Georgia congresswoman. Obama Not a Lesser Evil “The Black Left cannot be rebuilt on the delusion of some ‘lesser of two evils,’” said Dr. Tony.Monteiro, professor of African American Studies at Temple University, in Philadelphia. “We have to fight to rebuild the historical Black politician consensus and a Black Left that is based on principle.” President Obama and Republican Mitt Romney “are like twins. We have to call for a boycott” of the presidential election, said Monteiro. EEOC a “Cesspool of Racism and Corruption” “If they can only find reasonable cause in racial complaints from African Americans and foreign born Blacks 3.5% of the time, that alone tells you what’s going on,” said Ricardo Jones, Sr., a former senior New York investigator for the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. “The perception at the EEOC is that all Black people lie,” said Jones. “Things got worse under Obama than Bush,” when “President Obama appointed his wife’s Harvard Law School girlfriend,” Jacqueline A. Berrien, as chairperson. “Because I wouldn’t take bribes and wouldn’t go along with the corruption, they fired me.” Newark Protests Gain Momentum Daily demonstrations for jobs, housing, education and justice have passed the nine-month mark, with a matching the 1955 Montgomery, Alabama Bus Boycott’s 381 days of protest. “Each day it seems the momentum picks up,” said Lee Herbert, political and human rights adviser to the local Utility Workers union. His members “see there’s somebody out there fighting on their behalf. I see a movement coming out of this, because you can’t stop after 381 days.” Mumia Live from Outside Death Row Political prisoner Mumia Abu Jamal made his first live radio appearance since release from Pennsylvania’s death row into the general prison population. Speaking on Atty. Michael Coard’s program on Radio Station WURD, in Philadelphia, Abu Jamal recounted how ‘the police beat me right into the Black Panther Party” as a teenager in 1968

Civil Rights Groups “Dropped the Ball” on Affirmative Action In their zeal to help the Democratic Party, mainline civil rights organizations have “dropped the ball” on affirmative action, said Donna Stern, of By Any Means Necessary. “They are very much responsible, in terms of their inactions, for the loss of rights that were gained during the civil rights movement. Their deep ties to the Democratic Party” means not talking about race, if they can avoid it,” said Stern. Detroit-based By Any Means Necessary mounted student demonstrations outside federal district court in Cincinnati, where lawyers argued that referendums on affirmative action be outlawed. “A white majority does not have the right to vote up or down whether minorities have equal rights,” said Stern. Obama: The Assassination President “When the history books are written, Obama is going to be known as the assassinations president,” said Kevin Alexander Gray, the Columbia, South Carolina-based writer and political activist. “Everything that he has done in regards to the Constitution and transparency and protecting human rights and the due process rights of all people, regardless of nationality, has been a failure.” Attorney General Eric Holder’s narrow definition of “due process” of law is really “the due process of the star chamber. Traditional civil rights organizations have not moved to “checked” Obama because “they are all in the tank for the administration,” said Gray. Call to Support May 1 General Strike In an Open Letter to Occupy Wall Street and the movement’s supporters, OWS activist Dennis Trainor called a proposed May 1 general strike “one of the biggest opportunities to demonstrate our power, and that we have not gone away.” Organized labor cannot be expected to be central to the action, because “the right to strike, for unions, has been all but taken away.” Rather, the strike would mobilize student and community groups in targeted cities. Trainor’s latest documentary, “Which Side Are You On?” is scheduled for release at the end of April. Bring Me the Head of Ed DeMarco! President Obama must fire Federal Housing Finance Agency acting director Ed DeMarco because he “has flatly refused to do any kind of principal reduction for the millions of ‘underwater’ homeowners that are suffering, that are drowning in debt because of how the banks crashed the economy,” said Tracy Van Slyke, co-director of New Bottom Line. The coalition of faith-based and community organizations demand a “minimum of $300 billion in principal reduction.” Van Slyke claims New Bottom Line and other Occupy Wall Street-related efforts have “moved the administration far along from where they were. We have moved the dial.” Obama and Wall Street Money Scholar and activist Paul Street finds it curious that at study of 68 most influential Wall Street firms shows the fat cats giving Mitt Romney 12 times as much money as Obama. “The real test will come when Obama and Romney go up against each other,” said Street, author of The Empire’s New Clothes: Barack Obama and the Real World of Power. He notes that Obama has held a record 191 fundraisers in the last year. “It would be pretty ironic” if Wall Street abandoned Obama, said Street, “because he has given them everything they wanted.” UNAC Conference March 23-25 The United National Anti-War Coalition’s conference, in Stamford, Connecticut, “is THE antiwar conference and, perhaps, the main conference on the left, this year,” said UNAC spokesperson Joe Lombardo. The Obama administration plans new aggressions, at home and abroad, which is why they are narrowing the definition of “due process” of law. “What they’re really doing,” said Lombardo, “is preparing for increased military and economic attacks, and they don’t want to see an opposition and a protest movement built up.