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Chokwe Lumumba Makes Bid for Mayor of Jackson

Human rights lawyer and former Republic of New Afrika official Chokwe Lumumba has his sights set on the top job in Mississippi’s biggest city. “It give us an opportunity to demonstrate that we are great in terms of administration of human rights – something that would Martin Luther King proud,” said Lumumba, who is a city councilman. Jackson, the state capital, is 80 percent Black. Back in 1971, when the Republic of New Afrika came to town, “there was only one Black on the police force, and he could only arrest other Black people,” said Lumumba.

Rally for Temple University African American Studies

“There has never been an educational institution in America that truly wanted to educate Black people properly,” said Dr. Molefi Asante, speaking to a student rally in support of Temple University’s beleaguered African American Studies program. Asante is credited with establishing Temple’s doctoral program in African American studies, in 1988. Since then, “every successive administration has sought to destroy the program,” he said.

Blacks Saddled with Obama for Eternity

President Obama’s “Kill List” and preventive detention legislation “have created conditions for people of color in this country that makes our survival very tenuous, indeed,” said Dhoruba bin Wahad, a former leader in the Black Panther Party and co-founder of the Black Liberation Army who spent 19 years in prison for his political activities. Speaking at a rally for political prisoners. bin Wahad said: “The sad part is, we’re going to be saddled with Obama for the rest of our lives, as the senior, elder statesman of Black politics in America.”

Double-Barreled Protest Against NAACP

Demonstrators will gather at the Washington offices and Baltimore headquarters of the NAACP, on April 3 and 4, respectively. Organizer Rev. Edward Pinkney, the former chief of the Benton Harbor, Michigan, NAACP, the civil rights organization has sold out its legacy to corporations. “The people on the top are being paid, and yet they don’t do anything” for the membership or the masses of Black people, said Pinkney.

Obama's "Race to the Top" is racist;

Ras Baraka for Mayor of Newark;

Anniversary of Trayvon Martin's death;

Students Against Mass Incarceration announce Conference on Criminal Justice at Howard U;

Is the EEOC dismissing racial discrimination cases en masse?;

The carving up of Africa has begun.

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 & 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 20^th 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.

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.

Arne Duncan an “Absolute Disaster” for Black Children

President Obama’s Race to the Top “has been an extension of, and even worse than,” President Bush’s public schools program, said veteran Black educator Dr. Donald Smith, an organizer of the upcoming Summit on Saving the African Child, October 11 and 12, in Chicago. “People will discuss charter schools, unions and corporations that have, in many instances, taken over the curriculum and instruction of schools of children of color and other children of poverty,” said Smith, who will keynote the conference. Education Secretary Arne Duncan “has been an absolute disaster” for Black students in public schools.

School Discipline Bias Pushes Black Kids into Prison

The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) has filed complaints with the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights, charging public schools in Okaloosa, Florida, with disciplining Black students far more harshly than whites. Forty-seven percent of students suspended by the district are Black, although African Americans make up only 12 percent of the student body. There is a link between racially biased school discipline and the so-called school-to-prison pipeline, said Atty. Stephanie Langer, of the SPLC’s Florida office. “Once these kids get into the system, it’s very hard to get out of the system.”

GOP and Dems Much Alike

The two major corporate parties agree on much more than they disagree, said journalist Arun Gupta, co-founder of The Occupied Wall Street Journal and The Indypendent. That’s one reason why “there’s been no discussion of regulating Wall Street and almost no discussion of the continuing home foreclosure crisis,” said Gupa. “Both parties are attacking public education, and neither party has any sort of plan to create more jobs” aside from “the mysteries and magic of the ‘free market.’”

U.S. Labor Movement Can’t Move

Harry Kelber, the 98 year-old labor organizer and publisher of LaborEducator.org, says American trade unions “are not fighting, they’re not organizing, and they don’t have a plan to organize.” Too many union officials, said Kelber, are simply “biding their time, waiting to retire with a fat pension.” Labor spends tens of millions electing Democrats, but “What are they getting out of it?”

Rwanda's Kagame Commits Genocide

Opposition parties from the Democratic Republic of Congo and Rwanda have asked the International Criminal Court (ICC) to charge Rwandan strongman Paul Kagame with genocide and crimes against humanity. Kagame’s regime is responsible for many of the six million deaths in neighboring Congo since the mid-Nineties, and for killing hundreds of thousands of Hutus in Rwanda, said Sixbert Musangamfura, a spokesman for the United Democratic Front of Rwanda, one of the complainants to the ICC. Rwanda is one of Washington’s closest allies in Africa.

Eric Holder’s Lack of Balls is Not the Problem

The Justice Department’s failure to bring criminal charges against Goldman Sachs is not due to the fact that Attorney General Eric Holder “has no balls,” as Matt Taibbi recently wrote in Rolling Stone, said Dr. Johnny Williams, professor of sociology at Trinity College, in Hartford, Connecticut. Rather, Holder “isn’t going to do anything that President Obama doesn’t like. These guys all depend on money from very wealthy people to get President Obama re-elected.” Instead of personalizing the issue, said Dr. Williams, “we need to concentrate on the systemic nature of the problem: our system is basically corrupt.”

Pennsylvania Voter ID Law Could Turn November Election

“They know that the number of people that do not have photo ID is almost the same population by which the president lost the state” in 2008, said State Representative W. Curtis Thomas, Democrat from Philadelphia. The GOP-backed photo ID legislation, recently upheld by a Republican Commonwealth judge, has the potential to “make or break the election,” said Thomas.

Voter Impersonation Fraud Virtually Non-Existent

The fraudulent voter behavior that photo IDs are supposed to prevent hardly exists in the real world, according to an exhaustive study by the journalism research organization News21.

The study found only 10 cases of voter impersonation in all of the country over the past ten years,

said News 21’s Corbin Carson, a masters degree candidate at Arizona State University. That represents “roughly one out of every 15 million registered voters,” said Carson – an “infinitesimal” number.

South African Government “Opportunism” Led to Massacre of Miners

When Jacob Zuma succeeded Thabo Mbeki as head of the African National Congress and president of South Africa, many assumed it would mean “a shift to the left and redistributionist policies…but that hasn’t happened,” said Dr. Gerald Horne, professor of history and African American studies at the University of Houston. Meanwhile, Zuma’s extended family is “feasting” on government contracts, symptomatic of “opportunism” in the ANC. Hopefully, the ANC will conduct an “inventory” of its policies and do some “self-criticism” in the wake of the police massacre of 34 miners.

American Christian Right Spreads Homophobia in Africa

“Homosexuality has been part and parcel of African history,” said Dr. Kapya Kaoma, author of a report on the U.S. religious Right’s campaign to spread anti-gay hysteria throughout the African continent. “The laws against homosexuality in African came with western colonialism,” yet U.S.-based Christian groups try to tap into African anti-colonial sentiment by claiming that liberals in the West have exported homosexuality to the continent, said Dr. Kaoma, an Anglican priest from Zambia.

Suit Against Preventive Detention Moves Forward

A federal judge ruled that plaintiffs attempting to overturn preventive detention without trial showed a “likelihood to prevail” in their suit. Former New York Times correspondent Chris Hedges, one of the plaintiffs, said the law would allow “anyone to be swept up” by government “acts of extraordinary rendition on American soil against American citizens.” Daniel Ellsberg, of Pentagon Papers fame, said the legislation has already had a chilling effect on reporters and activists, like himself, who don’t want to wind up in a “black hole.”

Father’s Day NYC March Against Stop-and-Frisk

Opponents of New York City’s stop-and-frisk practices plan a Father’s Day protest march. A new study of the nearly 700,000 individual stops, last year, shows that “wherever people of color are,” in the city, “they’re going to be stopped by police,” said Candis Tolliver, of the New York Civil Liberties Union.

Slain Prisoner’s Family Files Complaint

The family of John Carter, who died last month when guards at the Rockview, Pennsylvania state prison entered his solitary confinement cell firing pepper-spray and electric shock weapons, is seeking criminal charges against prison staff. Brete Grote, of the Human Rights Coalition, said “We’ve documented hundreds upon hundreds of human rights violations, many amounting to torture, in well over a dozen Pennsylvania prisons over the last five years.”

Report on Prison Sexual Abuse

A new study b the U.S. Justice Department shows about one in ten prison inmates is sexually assaulted during his or her term of confinement. Lovisa Stannow, executive director of Just Detention International, said the survey was more accurate than previous studies because it was conducted on former prisoners “who are no longer living with the active and acute fear of retaliation” by guards or inmates.

Housing Settlement Money Diverted

Troubled home owners expected that a $25 billion settlement between state attorneys general and the nation’s top banks would provide some relief from imminent foreclosure. But at least 29 of the states plan to divert at least some of their share of the money to non-housing uses. Arizona wants to spend much of it on prisons. “It’s an awful idea, and I think it’s unlawful,” said Tim Hogan, executive director of the Arizona Center for Law in the Public Interest. Alan Jenkins, executive director of Opportunity Agenda, in New York City, said the settlement funds were “intended to address a specific harm: an insult to the American dream and a violation of our belief in equal opportunity for all.

New Voter Bill

Democrats in the U.S. House have introduced a Voter Empowerment Act designed to “modernize voter registration,” said Nicole Austin-Hillery, of the Brennan Center for Justice. The Brennan Center helped develop parts of the legislation, such as eliminating “voter caging” – the purging of voter rolls of people whose mail is undeliverable.

Robin Hood Tax

Protesters mobilized by National People’s Action and the National Domestic Workers Alliance marched to the suburban, Washington DC home of Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, demanding a financial transaction tax on Wall Street trading. National People’s Action spokesperson Mary Moreno said the so-called “Robin Hood tax” would “generate a lot of revenue” to fund needed social programs.

“Death March” in Benton Harbor

Veteran activist Rev. Edward Pinkney blames the giant Whirlpool corporation’s jobs outsourcing policies for shrinking the population of mostly Black Benton Harbor, Michigan, down from 30,000 to less than 10,000 in recent years. Pinkney will lead a “death march” through the local PGA-affiliated golf course, this week, featuring a coffin filled with the names of dead or displaced citizens. A sign will declare, “Whirlpool Commits Genocide.”

It’s Expensive to be Poor

Gary Rivlin, author of Broke USA, said the added costs of poverty, such as check cashing fees and appliance rentals, amount to about $2,500 a year for a typical working poor household. The extra costs represent a “poverty tax.”

U.S. Veers Right as World Goes Left

Dr. Gerald Horne, professor of history and African American studies at the University of Houston, said “the world is moving to the left, but the U.S. is not.” Horne spoke on host Norman Richmond’s Saturday Morning Show, on Regent Radio, in Toronto, Canada. While Europe rebels against austerity, U.S. courts have drifted rightward and could conceivably rule that the remnants of America’s social safety net are unconstitutional.

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.” For information, call 866.841.9139 x 2670.

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 public education and direct action hopes to launch a “second phase” of the Occupy Wall Street movement, said organizer Kevin Zeese. “This is our view of the American Spring.” Preventive detention legislation is “a sign of the elite becoming afraid, and starting to put in place the powers they need to control the people. The only response we have is to get more active.”