Obama “Might As Well Switch Parties"
Black South Carolina political activist Kevin Alexander Gray says the president’s collusion with the GOP shows where he stands on the political spectrum. Blacks will be the “last to jump off” the Obama “bandwagon, even as we get rolled over by it.” What progressives need, says Gray, is “a movement that is external to” Obama.
Doug Henwood, editor of Left Business Review, says Obama is “pretty much at one with neoliberal economic policies.” The president’s “heart is on the right wing of the Democratic Party.”
Detroit Teachers May Buck Obama and National Union
“The problems of education are really problems of inequality,” says Steven Conn, candidate for Detroit teachers union president in the January 3 election. Conn’s Defend Public Education/Save Our Students slate hopes to join teachers in Chicago and Washington who have rebelled against national union leadership and the Obama administration’s educational policies. “Instead of a commitment to integration and equality we now have a commitment to charterization and the dollar,” says Conn.
New Orleans Schools Suspend Nearly 30 Percent of Students
A recent study by the Southern Poverty Law Center shows almost 30 percent of students in the New Orleans Recovery School District are suspended from class each year. Study author Shakti Belway says schools handcuff large numbers of students for minor infractions, some of them as young as six years old. Charter schools enforce “silent lunches” in cafeterias, forbidding children to speak to one another.
“Withholding education is not appropriate punishment” for behavioral problems, says Florida Family Court Judge Irene Sullivan, author of Raised by the Courts: One Judges Insight Into Juvenile Justice.
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Harry Haywood’s work is a guiding light to help Black people analyze our position in the U.S. and rethink how we might engage in electoral politics. Are we building power toward revolution or are we…
The Black Alliance for Peace and U.S. Out of Africa Network provided this report following their participation in the “Conference in Solidarity with the Peoples of the Sahel”.
Red Onion Prison in Virginia has the same history of racism, brutal violence, and inhumane conditions that characterize the entire mass incarceration system. But recently men held there in…
The IMF and the World Bank give the appearance of aiding Global South nations with economic relief for climate disasters, but in reality, they are burdening them with more debt.
