Mass Incarceration + Silence = Genocide
“The conditions that are being forced on the Black masses today come down to a slow genocide that could easily become a fast one,” organizer Carl Dix told an audience at New York’s Riverside Church. Dix is a founding member of the Revolutionary Communist Party and a leader of the Stop Stop-and-Frisk campaign. The logic of global capitalism, he said, “can not only take things further in a genocidal direction, but it could greatly accelerate the pace of the direction if it isn’t stopped.”
UNAC Peace and Social Justice Conference in CT
“If we are going to meet the challenge of confronting the new war budget of the Obama administration and the strategic plans of Washington, we have to organize to confront drone war, special ops and preparations for war in most of the theaters of the world,” said Chris Gavreau, of the United National Anti-War Coalition. UNAC holds a National Anti-War and Social Justice conference in Stamford, Connecticut, March 23-25. The organization’s action program supports “compensation and reparations to people of the world whose countries the U.S. has attacked, destroyed, occupied and impoverished” and “to the victims of the trans-Atlantic slave trade.” Gavreau said “mass incarceration, stop and frisk other attacks all have been designed to demobilize the Black community, to rip them out of the struggle for social change in the U.S.”
Left-Right Unity Over Preventive Detention?
“Our Bill of Rights liberties are being stripped away,” by the recently passed preventive detention law, said Christina Tobin, of Free and Equal. She believes imprisonment without charge or trial can be rolled back by “uniting grassroots Occupy Wall Street, grassroots Tea Party, and grassroots media across the spectrum, for electoral reform. We need to kick Republicans and Democrats out of office, and we the people need to run for office.”
U.S. Attempting a Replay of Libya Regime Change in Syria
“What is going on here, is an organized attempt to overthrow the legitimate government of Syria, that is being coordinated by the United States, France, Turkey, Qatar – a dictatorship – and Saudi Arabia – another dictatorship,” said Francis Boyle, renowned professor of international law. “They have no intention of finding a peaceful resolution of this dispute,” said Boyle. “Who gives Obama the right to say that the government of Syria should step down.”
Day 247 for Marathon Newark Demonstrations
In 134 days, the People’s Organization for Progress (POP) will have kept its vow to match the duration of the 1955 Montgomery, Alabama Bus Boycott. POP’s daily demonstrations are an extension of the struggle that has been going on in Newark, New Jersey, “since the Sixties, really,” said Dr. Akil Khalfani, director of Africana Studies at Essex County College. “I think this is an awareness campaign, trying to get different factions within the larger community active – to get students active, to get unions active, but to realize that their activity is most effective when they are working together.” Nearly 200 organizations have endorsed or joined in POP’s protests.
Dictatorship Reigns in Michigan
Activists hope they have gathered enough petition signatures to force a referendum on Michigan’s Public Act 4, which allows the governor to replace elected officials with Emergency Managers. The mostly Black town of Benton Harbor is one of the disenfranchised municipalities run by a state appointee. “If you ever saw a dictator, he’s one,” said community activist Rev. Edward Pinkney. “Every job that city employees worked on has been outsourced. Nothing is left. We are in worse shape than when he came.”
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Foreign policy is our focus on Black Agenda Radio this week.
Dr. Gerald Horne is an author and historian who currently holds the John J. and Rebecca Moores Chair of History and African American Studies at the University of Houston.
Carlos Martinez is a co-editor of Friends of Socialist China, a co-founder of No Cold War, and a coordinating committee member of the International Manifesto Group. He joins us from London to discuss…
