NSA Spying Recommendations
Shahid Buttar, executive director of the Bill of Rights Defense Committee, was surprised at the scope of a presidential panel’s recommendations to limit spying by the National Security Agency. Some of the 46 proposals reached “beyond the NSA, to also suggest measures to curtail FBI abuses,” said Buttar, who noted that lots of agencies spy on Americans, “including the Postal Service.”
Detroit as Model for Urban Subjugation
A federal bankruptcy judge’s ruling could allow bankers and corporations to “go after pension funds around the United States,” said Abayomi Azikiwe, Detroit community activist and editor of the Pan African News Wire. Judge Steven Rhodes ruled that retiree pensions deserve no more protection than any other creditors. “We’re talking about hundreds of billions of dollars, if not trillions, that are tied up in these pension funds,” said Abayomi.
People’s lawyer Thomas Stephens said “capital is facing a catastrophe, that it created, in Detroit and everywhere else. Where better than Detroit to work out the model” for subjugating urban America?
Vast Inner City Land Grab
A new breed of Wall Street-backed mega real estate companies has been spending $100 million per week for over a year – for a total of $7.5 billion – buying up foreclosed homes to turn them into rental properties, said journalist and author Laura Gottesdiener. One firm, the Blackstone Group, has purchased more than 40,000 homes in 14 cities. The volume is such that “not only are they controlling home prices in these cities, pushing them up, but it’s very likely they’ll be able to price-fix the rental rates, as well.” Gottesdiener is author of A Dream Foreclosed: Black America and the Fight for a Place to Call Home.
New Oscar Grant Book
Five years after Oscar Grant was killed by a transit police officer, journalist Thandisizwe Chimurenga is publishing a new book on the subject. The Murder(s) of Oscar Grant “takes a look at the way the media and the court system also murdered” the young Oakland father, said Chimurenga, founder of the Ida B. Wells Institute. “I’m also looking a police murder in general through the lens of this case.”
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.
Revisiting a 1974 editorial on Black women and the international struggle against patriarchy, racism, imperialism, and capitalism on International Women’s Day.
In Africa as in the rest of the world, US machinations undermine its goals and bring other nations together as they seek to protect themselves from a desperate empire.
…
This week’s featured author is Biko Mandela Gray. Gray is Assistant Professor of Religion at Syracuse University. His book is Black Life Matter: Blackness, Religion, and the Subject.
China laid out 12 principles which could be a means of ending the conflict in Ukraine. The principles are based in international law and the belief in peaceful co-existence among nations,…
