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

BA Radio on the Progressive Radio Network, with Glen Ford and Nellie Bailey – Week of January 28, 2013
29 Jan 2013
🖨️ Print Article

Housing is for people, not banks

Obama's inagural speech shows him to be...

aiming to raise retirement age, according to Kevin Alexander Gray;

the drone war president, accordong to David Swanson;

double-talker on climate change, according to Marsha Coleman-Abedayo;

the same old neoliberal Obama, according to Paul Street.

Housing is for People – Not Banks

“Housing policy at its core should have as its primary end providing housing” for people, rather than as a national wealth-building mechanism, said Tim Sullivan, of Boston-based United for a Fair Economy. Sullivan is author of the group’ annual report, State of the Dream 2013: A Long Way Home. Black families possess only a small fraction of the wealth of whites, and housing makes up a much greater share of the small Black slice. Seventeen million homes are vacant, yet millions are homeless, said Sullivan. “First and foremost, housing should be seen as a human right.”

Obama’s inaugural speech showed him to be:

“…as big a war criminal as many of us on the Left consider George Bush,” said author and activist Kevin Alexander Gray, in Columbia, South Carolina. “I think the idea of a president giving a speech while simultaneously giving orders to kill people through the use of drones – of that being some kind of powerful, progressive speech, is absolutely ridiculous.” In suggesting that the age of retirement be raised for Social Security, Gray said Obama “is willing to say to Black people: you work till you die.”

…inventor of drone wars. Thousands of troops will remain in Afghanistan after 2014. “Meanwhile, President Obama has invented a brand new kind of war called the drone wars, and taken that new kind of war into new nations,” said activist and author David Swanson, publisher of the influential website War Is A Crime.org. “It’s an expansion of war,” not an ending of it.

…a climate change double-talker. Obama “talks out of both sides of his mouth on climate change,” said Marsha Coleman-Adebayo, former Environmental Protection Agency official turned whistleblower and a founder of the No Fear Coalition. “He says we have to protect future generations, but at the same time he’s most likely going to approve the Keystone pipeline, which is another assault on the atmospheric life of this planet. So there’s this constant double-talk.”

…the same old neo-liberal Obama. “It’s kind if surprising to see how willing folks that describe themselves as being of the Left are, after four years of a presidency that proceeded to be a monument to the unelected dictatorship of money and empire, to give credence to his words,” said Paul Street, activist and author of The Empire’s New Clothes: Barack Obama and the Real World of Power. If you read the speech closely, “it’s the same old deeply conservative, state capitalist, neo-liberal Obama.”

 

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


  •  Anti-Police Activists are Doing Post-Slavery “Wake Work”
    Black Agenda Radio with Margaret Kimberley and Glen Ford
    Anti-Police Activists are Doing Post-Slavery “Wake Work”
    15 Feb 2021
    Today’s Black Americans are living in “the wake” of centuries of slavery, said Dr Corey Miles, a professor of sociology and anthropology at Morgan State University.
  • Neoliberals Seek to Establish Their Own Brand of Fascism
    Black Agenda Radio with Margaret Kimberley and Glen Ford
    Neoliberals Seek to Establish Their Own Brand of Fascism
    15 Feb 2021
    The US State “is using the so-called insurrection at the Capitol…to impose an ideological conformity that supports and sustains the neoliberal project” at home and abroad, said Ajamu Baraka
  • The Kidnapping Club
    David Rosen
    The Kidnapping Club
    10 Feb 2021
    Northern free Blacks as well as self-liberated former slaves lived in fear of being kidnapped by organized slave catchers in New York City.
  • The Decline and Fall of the American Empire
    Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J. S. Davies
    The Decline and Fall of the American Empire
    10 Feb 2021
    The United States is a decadent, declining empire stumbling blindly into an agonizing death spiral.
  • Freedom Rider: Forced Labor in the U.S.
    Margaret Kimberley, BAR senior columnist
    Freedom Rider: Forced Labor in the U.S.
    10 Feb 2021
    Forced labor of Uyghurs in China is questionable, but there is absolute proof that incarcerated people in this country are forced to work for little or no pay.
  • Load More
Subscribe
connect with us
about us
contact us