Grand Juries as Political Weapons, Police Agents Provocateurs, and Privatized Wars
The grand jury process in the U.S. is “an incredibly repressive instrument, says Joe Iosbaker, one of 14 anti-war activist subpoenaed to appear before grand juries probing alleged “material support” to foreign “terrorists.” Iosbaker is a spokesperson for the Committee to Stop FBI Repression. He says “the grand jury is an undemocratic tool of repression” that has been used in the past to repress “the Puerto Rican liberation movement, the anti-war movement and Black liberation movement of the 1960s” and in “every decade since the founding of the Republic.”
The case of the 19-year-old Somali-American charged with planning to bomb a public gathering in Oregon is yet another example of police manufacture of “crimes that might never have existed, even as thoughts, without the instigation of police provocateurs," says Black Agenda Report managing editor Bruce Dixon.
War is a Lie author David Swanson says U.S. wars and occupations have become largely privatized affairs, which has increased profits, dramatically. “That’s become a huge motivation for corporate dollars [flowing] into political campaigns…to keep the wars going.”
Hands Off Social Security
Social Security doesn’t belong in any deficit reduction package, says Dean Baker, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research and author of Taking Economics Seriously. Baker says the deficit is a “response” to the housing bubble-induced collapse of the economy, “not a cause.”
“The whole hysteria around the deficit and the debt is misplaced,” says Jonathan Tasini. The real crisis facing the nation is “how do we stop the robbery of Americans and giving the top one percent all of our wealth?” Tasini is author of It’s Not Raining, We’re Getting Peed On: The Scam of the Deficit Crisis.
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Netfa Freeman is Co-Coordinator of the Black Alliance for Peace Africa Team. He joins us from Washington to discuss the 4th International Month of Action Against AFRICOM which kicks off with a…
Margaret Kimberley was recently a guest on the Sputnik News program Political Misfits. In these excerpts of her remarks, she discussed Joe Biden’s recent comments about Africa during his UN…
In this week’s Black Agenda Report Margaret Kimberley wrote about Canadian and Ukrainian Nazi connections after a former member of a Ukrainian SS unit was honored in Canada's…
Shayla Walker is Executive Director of Our Justice, an abortion fund and advocacy group which provides direct financial and logistical support for people seeking abortion care.
The Canadian government turned what should have been an ordinary photo opportunity with Ukraine's president into a political debacle when a Ukrainian Nazi collaborator was honored in parliament…
