Mass Incarceration

A Black Agenda Radio commentary by executive editor Glen Ford

The total U.S. prison inmate population held in solitary confinement on any given day exceeds 100,000 – “the equivalent of locking up every man, woman and child in Charleston, South Carolina, in their own little 8 by 12 foot box – for an eternity.” Prisoners in solitary at California’s Pelican Bay may once again go on hunger strike, July 8. They need support from the outside.

More Whites Swept Into U.S. Gulag

The racial incarceration gap has narrowed, slightly, with more whites and going to prison in recent years. “It’s almost like law enforcement is looking for more feeders for their beds,” said Soffiyah Elijah, executive director of The Correctional Association of New York. “As the economy continues to decline, poverty is closely associated with who law enforcement goes after,” she said. “So, you find more whites being swept up in the system.”

New Book Exposes Manning Marable’s Lies About Malcolm X

“The central lie” of Manning Marable’s book Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention, “is the idea that Malcolm X was not an African Internationalist, not committed to revolution, but that when push came to shove, he was really part of the American dream and the American structure,” said Dr. Todd Burroughs, a professor of communications at Morgan State University. Burroughs and Dr. Jared Ball are co-editors of A Lie of Reinvention: Correcting Manning Marable’s Malcolm X, a collection of essays by prominent Black intellectuals and activists. “It was a shame that we had to do the book,” said Burroughs. “For him to mess it up this badly is a travesty.”

U.S. Will Bring About World War Three

The U.S. and its allies are running amuk, much like the Axis powers in the 1930s, said Dr. Francis Boyle, professor of international law at the University of Illinois, at Champaign. “After 9/11, we’ve had the United States, Britain, France and NATO literally rampaging around the world, destroying and invading states,” said Dr. Boyle. “They are going to lead us into a Third World War over something.” Boyle’s newest book is titled Destroying Libya and World Order: The Three-Decade U.S. Campaign to Terminate the Qaddafi Revolution.

A Black Agenda Radio commentary by Glen Ford

There’s no getting around the fact that the United States is the Mother of All Police States. China can’t compete in the incarceration business. With four times the U.S. population, it imprisons only 70 percent as many people – about the same number as the non-white prison population of the U.S. Even worse, 80,000 U.S. inmates undergo the torture of solitary confinement on any given day.

New York Stop-and-Frisk Trial Ends in Convictions

After a 5-day trial, 20 activists were convicted of disorderly conduct charges in a protest at a Harlem police precinct, last October. “This was a political showcase, in which not only stop-and-frisk was on trial, but our First Amendment rights,” said defendant Nellie Bailey, of Occupy Harlem. “Mass incarceration plus silence equals genocide,” said Carl Dix, co-organizer of Stop Stop-and-Frisk, along with activist Dr. Cornel West. “We are simply trying to minimize the suffering of these young people out there,” said Dr. West. Among those who spoke at a press conference outside the courthouse were: Rev. Stephen Phelps, Riverside Church, Rev. Earl Kooperkamp, St. Mary’s Episcopal Church, Harlem, John Hector, Jamal Mims, Randy Credico, Jose LaSalle, Elaine Brower, and Sade Adona.

Welfare Drug Testing is Part of War Against Poor

Mandatory drug testing for public assistance recipients “has everything to do with an ongoing war against the poor in this country,” said Sara Totonchi, executive director of the Southern Center for Human Rights, in Atlanta. The Center is preparing potential legal action to thwart Georgia from imposing the tests, which courts have ruled unconstitutional. “Georgia politicians know that the way to win elections is to throw around this red meat, rhetoric-filled legislation,” said Totonchi. “Two years ago, the target was immigrants.”

Corporate Media Lose Interest in “Income Inequality”

A study by FAIR – Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting – finds corporate media make far less use of terms such as “income inequality” and “corporate greed” than when the Occupy Wall Street movement first brought these issues to the forefront. After an initial peak in interest in corporate behavior, media coverage returned to previous norms. “Income inequality, in the way that traditional journalists and editors see news, is not news. It’s a sort of given, a baseline,” said John Knefel, who covered the story for FAIR’s publication, EXTRA!. “They have no incentive to talk about income inequality or corporate malfeasance because, for one thing, they’re corporations.”

OWS in Danger of Cooptation by Democrats

“What is going on is a very sophisticated strategy to shunt a lot of this energy into the 2012 election,” said Arun Gupta, a co-founder of the Occupy Wall Street Journal who covers OWS for Salon.com. Moveon.org, for example, pushes the line that “Mitt Romney is Mr. 1% – like Obama isn’t part of the 1%?”

ICC Let’s Blair and Bush Go Free

“My beef with the International Criminal Court is its one-sided nature,” said Dr. Gerald Horne, prolific author and professor of history and African American studies at the University of Houston. “They seem to have a proclivity for indicting Africans or a handful of Europeans who were once involved with socialist regimes” – Serbia. However, international lawbreakers like Tony Blair and George W. Bush seem to enjoy immunity. The ICC recently convicted former Liberian President Charles Taylor of crimes against humanity. Dr. Horne appeared on Regent Radio’s Sunday Morning Show, hosted by Norman Richmond, in Toronto, Canada.