Nellie Bailey and Glen Ford's blog

Obama to Face Increased Black Criticism

“I think we are going to hear more voices of opposition coming from all sectors of Black leadership, and certainly from the most hard pressed sections of the Black population,” said Dr. Tony Monteiro, professor of African American Studies at Temple University, in Philadelphia. “The decline and disappearance of the Black middle class is not going to go unnoticed.” Seventy-four percent of Blacks see the split between rich and poor as “a manifestation of a deep class conflict in society,” said Dr. Monteiro, citing recent studies by the Pew Center for Research. “You’ve got this residual radicalism, from the period of mass struggle, civil rights and anti-war activism that is manifested in Black identification with socialism. But then when it comes to Obama, everything gets irrational.” Fifty-five percent of African Americans have a positive attitude towards the word “socialism.”

Black Unemployed In Worse Shape Than When Recession ‘Ended’

Black joblessness is higher today than it was in June 2009, the month when the recession was officially declared over, said Dr. Steven Pitts, of the University of California at Berkeley Center for Labor Research and Education. Black unemployment was 15.8 percent in December, 2011, compared to 14.9 percent in June, 2009. The Center’s annual report on Black unemployment showed virtually “no movement” in 2011, standing at 15.7 percent at the beginning of the year and ending at 15.8. However, “the Black female rate rose and the Black male rate fell.”

Rulers Will Use Race to Exploit Crisis

Author and labor activist Jeffrey Perry, writing in Cultural Logic magazine, said “we are moving into a very deep and serious crisis” in which ruling circles in U.S. society can be expected to turn increasingly to white supremacist appeals. “Reliance on white supremacy has been the key to social control for the U.S. ruling class,” said Perry. “Newt Gingrich is the most outspoken.” Perry’s article focuses on the views of Hubert Harrison, a Harlem Black nationalist and socialist of the early 20^th century, and Theodore W. Allen, famous for his book The Invention of the White Race.

Food Stamps Enjoy Wide Support

“Until now,” said Timothy Casey, senior counsel of Legal Momentum, “food stamps have enjoyed strong, bipartisan support.” However, recent attacks by Newt Gingrich and “calls in the House by some Republican leaders to ‘reform’ food stamps” by turning them into block grants “could lead to a sharp reduction in the benefits people receive,” said Casey.

Amnesty International: Blacks Killed, Tortured in Libya

Sanjeev Bery, Amnesty International USA’s Advocacy Director for the Middle East and North Africa, said Black people have been subjected to “abductions, torture, unfair detention” and extrajudicial killings by U.S.-backed militias in Libya. The abuses stem from “wildly exaggerated rumors” that former Libyan leader Gaddafi employed large numbers of Black mercenaries, said Bery. Those rumors “intersected with pre-existing racism and xenophobia to make many dark-skinned Libyans, as well as sub-Saharan African” into targets of local gunmen. Bery was interviewed by Robert Knight, of Pacifica radio station WBAI, in New York.

Panther Baby, Dr. Jamal Joseph’s memoir on coming of age in the Black Panther Party, debuts in February. Dr. Joseph, an associate professor at Columbia University’s School of the Arts, was the youngest member of the New York 21, Panther Party members who were charged in 1969 – and later acquitted – of plotting to bomb public places.

Year 2042 Will Bring Non-White U.S. Majority and Apartheid Economy

Thirty years from now, the United States will have a non-white majority largely mired in poverty under an “apartheid” economy, said Tim Sullivan, co-author of a new report titled “State of the Dream: The Emerging Majority.” By 2042, the report predicts, Blacks will earn 61 cents for every dollar paid to whites – which is about the same racial earnings ratio that has existed since 1980. Hispanic workers will be even worse off, earning just 45 cents on every white dollar. “We simply won’t be able to sustain our standard of living, our place in the world” with such widespread poverty among the non-white majority, said Sullivan, of Boston-based United for a Fair Economy. Black and Latino wealth is projected to shrivel to pennies compared to white household wealth dollars.

MLK Fought Against Rule of the Wealthy

“Dr. King talked about concrete steps to challenge this Darwinian culture that we live in, where the corporations run the government and we are no longer governed by the rule of law,” said South Carolina Black activist and author Kevin Alexander Gray. “If Black folks are content to be quiet while they wait for President Obama” to tackle the multiple oppressions against African Americans, “then they are mad.” Gray is repulsed by “the idea that Black folks are supporting the idea of preventive war and preventive assassination.” Gray is author of The Decline of Black Politics: From Malcolm X to Barack Obama.

“Phase Two” for Occupy Movement

“The occupy movement is about more than just occupying a tent in a public park,” said Kevin Zeese, an organizer of the Occupy Washington DC encampment at Freedom Plaza. The purpose is “to organize, mobilize and educate people, and start a debate about the wealth divide.” In what Zeese calls “Phase Two” of the movement, in addition to maintaining the encampment on Pennsylvania Avenue, organizers will operate out of two DC area houses. The “Peace House” will focus on mobilization of a national occupation of the nation’s capital, beginning March 30, while another house is dedicated to “occupying the economy” – creating alternative economic solutions so that people can “create their own jobs and their own wealth.”

UN Occupation of Haiti is “Mission Without a Cause”

Two years after a killer earthquake and eight years after the U.S. invaded Haiti, MINUSTAH, the United Nations “peacekeeping” force in the country, is a “mission without a cause,” said Dan Beeton, of the Center for Policy and Economic Research. Why is MINUSTAH still there? “There is no real justification for their presence…except that the international community, especially the United States, doesn’t want to see the Haitian people take control of their own destiny.”

MINUSTAH soldiers from Nepal brought cholera to Haiti, which has killed 6,000 people and sickened half a million. The Institute for Justice and Democracy in Haiti sued the UN, but the world body has yet to admit responsibility for the epidemic, blaming Haiti’s poor infrastructure for allowing the disease to spread. “That’s like me going into a field of dry grass and lighting a fire, and when it turns into a forest fire, blaming the wind,” said Institute director Brian ConCannon, Jr.

McKinney: U.S. Troops Lurk Near Libya

Cynthia McKinney, the former Georgia congresswoman and Green Party presidential candidate, is alarmed at reports that 12,000 U.S. troops are temporarily stationed at Malta, an island nation in the Mediterranean Sea that has historically been a jumping off point to Libya. McKinney led a number of fact-finding delegations to Libya, before and during the U.S.-NATO bombing campaign that overthrew Col. Moammar Gaddafi’s government. “There is no real control by the National Transitional Council,” which recently signed an agreement allowing foreign troops to be stationed on Libyan soil, said McKinney. “The country has been ripped apart, the people are desperate for jobs, they need work,” in the absence of the Gaddafi government’s generous social welfare structures.

U.S. Guilty of “Ecological Genocide”

Michael Dorsey, a professor of environmental science at Dartmouth University who recently returned from a global climate conference in Durban, South Africa, denounced the Obama administration for refusing to seriously discuss measures to halt planetary warming. “That kind of brinksmanship diplomacy is really best characterized as a kind of apartheid for the planet, and particularly for Africa, where we know the unfolding climate change process will have catastrophic effects. It’s already playing out,” said Dorsey, director of the Climate Justice Research Project.

Lumumba Assassination Anniversary

Friends of Congo hold a rally and teach-in in Washington on Tuesday, January 17, to mark the 51^st anniversary of the murder of Patrice Lumumba, the popularly elected prime minister of newly independent Congo. Belgium, the former colonial power, apologized for its role in Lumumba’s death in 2002, but the U.S. “hasn’t even gotten close” to expressing remorse. Formerly classified records show President Dwight Eisenhower ordered a CIA hit on Lumumba in 1960. The murder “stifled the democratic aspirations of the Congolese people,” said Kambale Musavuli, of Friends of Congo, just as U.S. support for last November’s rigged elections that kept President Joseph Kabila in power has stifled those aspirations. “I firmly believe that the United States government is supporting a dictatorial regime in the Congo,” said Musavuli.

McKinney: Ethnic Cleansing Spreads in Libya

“Ethnic cleansing is taking place in Libya,” said former Georgia congresswoman Cynthia McKinney. “People are being killed because of the color of their skin.” Atrocities like the virtual erasure of the mostly Black city of Tawergha by rebels have “spread to other parts of Libya,” said McKinney, who has visited the country several times since NATO began its bombing campaign and maintains contacts with people inside Libya. “We are under a massive psychological warfare effort,” said the 2008 Green Party presidential candidate. “Therefore, we cannot believe anything that comes from the mainstream media, because they have been part and parcel of the invasion, ethnic cleansing, war crimes and crimes against humanity.”

Who is Next Target for “Responsibility to Protect”

“The military action in Libya sets a dangerous precedent,” said Prof. Marjorie Cohn, of Thomas Jefferson School of Law in San Diego, California. “What is to prevent the United States from stage managing some protests, magnifying them in the corporate media as mass actions, and then bombing or attack Venezuela, Cuba, Iran or North Korea?” NATO’s actions violate not only the UN General Assembly’s position on the “Responsibility to Protect” doctrine, but also UN Security Council Resolution 1973, which called for the exhaustion of all peaceful means of resolution, said Cohn. “Instead of immediately pursuing a cease fire, immediate military action was taken.”

Durban Plus Ten at “Make or Break” Point

Ten years after an historic United Nations conference in Durban, South Africa, the U.S. and its allies and Israel remain “hell bent on destroying” global efforts to fight racism, said Sam Anderson, of the Black Left Unity Network. The UN General Assembly is set to take up the so-called Durban Principles, this week. It’s a “make or break” moment, said Anderson, a New York City activist and educator. “The progressive movement, globally, has been fragmentized and atomized over the past ten years since the original Durban conference.”

Capitalism Isn’t Working – It’s Just That Simple

It makes no sense to keep throwing “incentives” and tax breaks at corporate America, in hopes of alleviating unemployment, since “this is a system that fundamentally isn’t working, and that’s the problem,” said economist Richard Wolff, professor emeritus at the University of Massachusetts, at Amherst. The demand for goods and services is low because “the real wages of Americans…are the same today as they were in 1978.” Those Americans that are employed are “working more hours than any working class in the world” and can’t borrow any more money.

Favored Obama Jobs Program Doesn’t Work, and is Illegal

The Georgia Works Program, praised by President Obama as a model for providing people collecting unemployment benefits with jobs and job training, “violates federal wage and hour law and federal unemployment insurance law,” said George Wentworth, of the National Employment Law Project. The program, which has since been largely phased out in Georgia, is a “bad model” that provided little meaningful job training or permanent employment. Workers “should be getting paid the minimum wage, and not an employment insurance benefit.”

Olugbala Runs for Mayor of Philly

Campaigning on a platform of inner city economic development and community control of police, Black activist Diop Olugbala said incumbent Mayor Michael Nutter’s imposition of a selective youth curfew is nothing but an election gambit. More funds are being spent on “stopping and frisking…and brutality against our people, than on overall economic development,” said Olugbala.

BAR columnist Jared Ball celebrates William Parker, the free Black Pennsylvania man who killed “man stealers” attempting to kidnap his family to the South, in 1851.

African American Collusion with Religious Right

“An elite white, male lynch mob has targeted Planned Parenthood to strike at the heart of reproductive justice,” says Sikivu Hutchinson, editor of BlackFemLens.org and a frequent contributor to Black Agenda Report. “This is part of the far-right, religious agenda to implement patriarchal rule.” These “fascistic” forces have enlisted Black helpers. “We have people like Alveda King, a niece of Martin Luther King, proclaiming that ending abortion is a civil rights initiative,” says Hutchinson, a disturbing sign of “collusion between African American forces and the religious right.”

Wisconsin Governor Poses Threat to a Century of Progress

It’s not just teachers and other public employees that are targeted by Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker’s Agenda, says Ben Manski, of Wisconsin Wave and the Liberty Tree Foundation. “Working people across the board, as well as the unemployed and the poor, are really hit by this agenda,” which threatens “everything the people of Wisconsin have created over the last 100 years.” Students, especially, do not favor intervention by President Obama, who has cut Pell Grants and frozen federal workers’ wages. “These people are saying to Obama, please stay out,” says Manski.

Public Unions Helped Build Black Middle Class

“The origins of public sector unions coincide with the civil rights movement,” says Nelson Lichtenstein, of the Center for the Study of Work, Labor and Democracy at the University of California, Santa Barbara. “The most famous strike in American history is the Memphis sanitation workers’ strike,” in support of which Dr. Martin Luther King was assassinated. Public employment, says Lichtenstein, has been “one of the main vehicles for making” Blacks and Latinos “part of the middle class.”

Dr. James Turner, founding director of the African Studies and Research Center at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, recounts the origins of Black Studies as a student initiative of the late 1960s.

Dr. Jared Ball, Black Agenda Report editor and columnist, explores the concept of African Americans as an internal colony of the United States.

Grand Juries as Political Weapons, Police Agents Provocateurs, and Privatized Wars

The grand jury process in the U.S. is “an incredibly repressive instrument, says Joe Iosbaker, one of 14 anti-war activist subpoenaed to appear before grand juries probing alleged “material support” to foreign “terrorists.” Iosbaker is a spokesperson for the Committee to Stop FBI Repression. He says “the grand jury is an undemocratic tool of repression” that has been used in the past to repress “the Puerto Rican liberation movement, the anti-war movement and Black liberation movement of the 1960s” and in “every decade since the founding of the Republic.”

The case of the 19-year-old Somali-American charged with planning to bomb a public gathering in Oregon is yet another example of police manufacture of “crimes that might never have existed, even as thoughts, without the instigation of police provocateurs," says Black Agenda Report managing editor Bruce Dixon.

War is a Lie author David Swanson says U.S. wars and occupations have become largely privatized affairs, which has increased profits, dramatically. “That’s become a huge motivation for corporate dollars [flowing] into political campaigns…to keep the wars going.”

Hands Off Social Security

Social Security doesn’t belong in any deficit reduction package, says Dean Baker, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research and author of Taking Economics Seriously. Baker says the deficit is a “response” to the housing bubble-induced collapse of the economy, “not a cause.”

“The whole hysteria around the deficit and the debt is misplaced,” says Jonathan Tasini. The real crisis facing the nation is “how do we stop the robbery of Americans and giving the top one percent all of our wealth?” Tasini is author of It’s Not Raining, We’re Getting Peed On: The Scam of the Deficit Crisis.

Obama’s Deficit Commission “Shows the Hand” of Corporate Democrats and Their Republican Allies, says Nader

The recommendations put forward by the two co-chairs of President Obama’s deficit reduction commission are so “over the top,” says consumer advocate Ralph Nader, “if there’s anything that ought to get the liberal left going, it’s this monstrosity, which Obama has to take some responsibility for.” The former presidential candidate says the assault on social programs “shows the hand of the corporate Democrats and their Republican allies in a very distinct way.” What’s not in the co-chairs’ proposal is as glaring as what’s included. “They didn’t say we should have a speculation tax on derivatives and other transactions of Wall Street,” for example, “which economists have estimated could raise $400 billion a year.”

Black Is Back Rally in Washington, DC

Eugenia Charles reports on the cholera epidemic in Haiti, where international aid “is not being used to support the Haitian people”; People’s Organization for Progress director Larry Hamm calls for renewed grassroots organizing to “build a movement stronger than the one we had in the Sixties”; and Black is Back chairman Omali Yeshitela says Barack Obama represents “white power in a Black face.”