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Listen to Black Agenda Radio on the Progressive Radio Network, with Glen Ford and Nellie Bailey – Week of 6/10/13

Tue, 06/11/2013 - 10:08 — Glen Ford

Rice and Power Turn Blind Eye to Congo Genocide

President Obama’s choices of Samantha Power as United Nations ambassador and Susan Rice for National Security Council chief should trouble “those of us who are concerned about Africa” because they were “the two most aggressive individuals in the intervention in Libya,” said Maurice Carney, executive director of Friends of Congo. “Congo serves as a massive inconvenience for the likes of Power and Rice,” because U.S. allies Rwanda and Uganda are implicated in the genocide of millions in that country, site of “what the United Nations, itself, says is the deadliest conflict in the world since the Holocaust,” said Carney.

Rice, Power Implicated in Libya Genocide, Assault on Syria

Renowned professor of international law Francis Boyle says Susan Rice and Samantha Power were among those most responsible “for slaughtering 50,000 Libyans under the pretext of Responsibility to Protect [R2P]. We saw outright genocide inflicted on the black citizens of Libya and black foreign guest workers…these people were outright exterminated,” said Boyle. “These are the same people who will be pushing [R2P] against Syria.”

Tell Harvard: Stop Polling Black People

Eighty-six percent of Black respondents told a Harvard/Robert Wood Johnson Foundation poll they were “satisfied” with their lives – but the numbers do not mean Blacks are doing well, said South Carolina author and activist Kevin Alexander Gray. In southern poor communities “people used to sweep the dirt in their front yards,” said Gray. “They didn’t have lawns, but they swept the dirt because they wanted to keep up appearances. Some of these polls are like sweeping dirt in the front yard.” Harvard should refrain from polling African Americans, since it doesn’t “know how to measure well-being in the Black community,” said Gray.

Detroit City Council Useless

The Detroit City Council has remained largely passive while an appointed Emergency Financial Manager considers auctioning the city’s assets to pay corporate creditors. Local people’s lawyer Tom Stephens says the council is “willing to compromise with power” as long as “they keep a seat at the council table, and are still getting their salaries. I think, at this point, short of, perhaps, human sacrifice, they’re willing to go along with pretty much anything.”

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Saving Detroit’s Art Treasures – While the Rest of the City is Picked Clean

Wed, 05/29/2013 - 00:11 — Glen Ford

A Black Agenda Radio commentary by executive editor Glen Ford

Detroit’s Emergency Manager appears to covet the precious works housed in the city’s Institute of Art, “which could be valued at a billion dollars.” This has caused Michigan’s privileged patrons of the arts to mobilize, “not to free Detroit from the bankers’ yoke, but to find ways to separate the city’s artistic assets” from the bankruptcy process, and let the rest go to corporate creditors.

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Detroit: The Parable of the Banksters and the City

Tue, 04/16/2013 - 13:40 — Tom Stephens

by Tom Stephens

The corporate takeover of Detroit is “a completely unprecedented spectacle” of infinite corruption and brazen bullying by the 1%. “Jones Day and its megabucks corporate client list are perfectly positioned to profit from Detroit’s ‘restructuring’ thru land speculation, privatization, and related neoliberal scams.”

The Lords of Capital Seize Detroit

Tue, 03/26/2013 - 22:41 — Glen Ford

A Black Agenda Radio commentary by executive editor Glen Ford

Corporate conspirators have Detroit in their clutches. “Lawyers for Jones Day will be handling the sale of Detroit’s property and the cancelling of its contracts as ordered by another Jones Day lawyer, Kevyn Orr” – which means that “the same law firm is effectively serving as attorney, client, and local government in Detroit.” Democracy abolished, corporate rule installed.

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Torturing Detroit's Kids for Racist Fun and Profit

Wed, 02/23/2011 - 01:52 — Glen Ford

 

A Black Agenda Radio commentary by Glen Ford

While President Obama expounds on the need to “out-educate” the global competition, Detroit’s public schools have been ordered to pack each classroom with 60 students for the next four years – double the number most educators consider acceptable. “In a modern society, this is the equivalent of declaring Detroit – an overwhelmingly Black metropolis – a failed state.”

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Listen to Black Agenda Radio on the Progressive Radio Network, with Glen Ford and Nellie Bailey

Tue, 01/25/2011 - 12:37 — Nellie Bailey a...

Obama Made His Career “Collaborating with the GOP”

“I think he liked the 2010 election outcomes, that brought the Right back to power in the House,” says Paul Street, author of The Empire’s New Clothes: Barack Obama and the Real World of Power. “I think that’s his comfort zone. This is his career, collaborating with the GOP,” says Street, who worked for years as a researcher for the Chicago Urban League. Although “deluded liberals and progressives” continue to insist that Obama shares their values, “they just don’t get it. This guy is just very conservative.”

White House Retaliates Against Whistleblowers

The Obama administration is taking retaliation against whistleblowers “to a new level,” says Marsha Coleman-Adebayo, herself a renowned whistleblower and author of the book, No Fear. “The president has suggested that psychologists, psychiatrists and sociologists should be deployed throughout the federal government to ferret out whistleblowers,” says Coleman-Adebayo. “They want to see if there is even a potential that you might blow the whistle on injustice or corruption.”

“Baby Doc” Has Friends in High Places in Haiti

Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier, the dictator who returned to Haiti 25 years after being run out of the country, still has “cadres in power of some sort in the [Rene] Preval administration, and in business and many other venues in society,” says Haitian journalist and community activist Roger LeDuc. In addition, France, the United States “and, to some extent, Rene Preval,” are anxious to divert attention from the recent disastrous elections. Duvalier has been charged with corruption and embezzlement, and prosecutors say they are investigating possible crimes against humanity.

Progressive Candidate Claims Detroit Teachers Victory

Steve Conn, candidate for president of the Detroit Federation of Teachers on the Defend Public Education/Save Our Students ticket, says he is the rightful winner in the race, and that incumbent Keith Johnson rigged the vote count. Conn charges Johnson and national union president Randi Weingarten with “running the union as a tool of [education secretary] Arnie Duncan and the anti-public education privatizers.” A Day of Action is schedule for March 2, in Detroit.

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Consensus Politics Are No Politics: A US Social Forum Diary

Fri, 07/02/2010 - 02:08 — Jared Ball

by BAR columnist Jared A. Ball, Ph.D.

There was both déjà vu and surprise at the U.S. Social Forum. Déjà vu, in the feeling of being caught up in a stultifying search for meaningless “consensus politics” with “no clear goals and no clear steps to reach them.” But there was also the excitement of “ideas, criticism, flyers, books, all forms of media in fact, all being passed back and forth, with a hurried fervor.”

 

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D-Town: African American Farmers, Food Security and Detroit

Tue, 06/22/2010 - 11:48 — Monica M. White Ph.D

The Black metropolis of Detroit is, in many respects, a “food desert” where “both economic and physical barriers stand between people and their access to healthy and affordable foods.” But D-Town activists believe the people can grow and organize themselves out of the desert, through urban agriculture. “In the process of controlling the food supply, the farmers see themselves as developing self-reliance.”

 

Music Education in Detroit's Public Schools: The Struggle to Survive

Tue, 06/15/2010 - 10:19 — George Shirley

by George Shirley

Please, don’t stop the music. That’s the theme sounded by a host of Detroit citizens, as budget cutters move to shut down most of the Motor City’s public school music program. Under the new regime, only students with high test scores would be eligible to take part in music programs. “A musical education is not meant to be elitist,” says Dr. George Shirley. “This is the message we must pound incessantly into the awareness of bottom-liners tasked with reducing education to a robotic exercise devoid of creativity and imagination.”

 

Her Name Was Aiyana Jones

Thu, 05/27/2010 - 13:51 — Jared Ball

A Black Agenda Radio commentary by Jared A. Ball, Ph.D.

Rev. Al Sharpton preached that her death was a "breaking point" - but he's said that too many times before. Even the police execution of a child fails as a catalyst for change. "These issues are the result of a legacy of enslavement which has seemingly permanently inscribed an archetype of Black people as property and predators."

Click here to download the MP3 of this BA Radio commentary.

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The Media and the Murder of Aiyanna Jones

Thu, 05/27/2010 - 11:02 — Sikivu Hutchinson

by Sikivu Hutchinson

During the same week that CNN aired a program on children’s perception of the race and social values, the Detroit police provided their own lesson on the subject, callously killing a 7 year-old Black girl. Any kid might conclude that Aiyanna Jones was not a valuable person. Certainly, society had treated her as worthless.

 

 

BAMN: By Any Means Necessary. An Interview with Detroit's Shanta Driver on April 10 March and Rally Against Obama School Privatization Agenda

Wed, 03/31/2010 - 02:25 — Glen Ford

A Black Agenda Radio Interview by BAR Executive Editor Glen Ford

One of the Obama administration's clear, if unstated objectives, is to demolish public education in the U.S., and replace it with privatized, often militarized charter schools that put the “free market” and wealthy corporations rather than parents, teachers and communities in charge of education. Converting entire cities to charter schools pits every parent against every other parent in “competitiion” for the limited number of spots in what are supposed to be the best schools, and eliminates the neighborhood school as an anchor point for cooperation and social cohesion. So neighborhood public schools across the nation are being starved of resources to ensure that they can be labeled “failing” and their facilities handed over to charter schools, condominium developers, or whatever the “free market” will bear.

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