Black Agenda Report
Black Agenda Report
News, commentary and analysis from the black left.

  • Home
  • Africa
  • African America
  • Education
  • Environment
  • International
  • Media and Culture
  • Political Economy
  • Radio
  • US Politics
  • War and Empire

Listen to Black Agenda Radio on the Progressive Radio Network, with Glen Ford and Nellie Bailey – Week of January 7, 2013
08 Jan 2013
🖨️ Print Article

 

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.

 

Black Agenda Radio on the Progressive Radio Network is hosted by Glen Ford and Nellie Bailey. A new edition of the program airs every Monday at 11:00am ET on PRN. Length: One hour.


More Stories


  • Black Agenda Radio
    Margaret Kimberley, BAR Executive Editor and Senior Columnist , Austin Cole
    The Black Alliance for Peace Calls for a Boycott of the World Cup
    17 Jun 2026
    The Black Alliance for Peace and other organizations have called for a boycott of the 2026 World Cup being held in the United States. Before any matches were played, the U.S. banned players, fans,…
  • Margaret Kimberley, BAR Executive Editor and Senior Columnist
    The Knicks and New York's Disappearing Black Communities
    17 Jun 2026
    It is true that the New York Knicks' journey to a championship brought disparate communities together, but gentrification remains the norm in the city that is the capital of capital. Black people are…
  • Editors, The Black Agenda Review
    ESSAY: Reconstruction, Seventy-Five Years After, W. E. B. Du Bois, 1943
    17 Jun 2026
    “Without the help of the American Negro, the abolition movement would have been impossible.”
  • ​​​​​​​ Ajamu Baraka, BAR editor and columnist
    “Don’t Worry Be Happy”: The World Cup as an International Psy-Op
    17 Jun 2026
    FIFA uses the World Cup to present the United States as a legitimate nation, but the U.S. is a rogue state committing crimes against humanity. The call for a boycott is a call to decolonize football…
  • Ann Garrison, BAR Contributing Editor
    When the Revolution Comes
    17 Jun 2026
    Chris Smalls and his best friend, Derrick Palmer, led the first successful drive to unionize an Amazon warehouse. He believes that labor must decouple from the Democratic Party, as he explains in his…
  • Load More
Subscribe
connect with us
about us
contact us