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

$campaigns & $elections
Raymond Nat Turner, BAR poet-in-residence
13 Apr 2016
🖨️ Print Article

by BAR's poet in residence Raymond Nat Turner

This week the poet briefly contextualizes the candidates and campaigns of the capitalist parties running for the White House in 2016.

$campaigns & $elections

by BAR's poet in residence Raymond Nat Turner

“Promises, promises, promises” morphing into big lies—

January snowing “appointments” of Wall Street guys

Bloody war criminals wedded in one Plutocratic Party

Warring their way to banks, laughing loud and hearty—

Playing a most reliable con game of bait and switch;

Sorting out which warlord faithfully serves the rich…

Their nonstop, smokescreen $elections and $campaigns

Red, white and blue Kool-Aid—for bathing of brains

With blather, drowning out the resonant radical voices

With Thug-in-a-Rug-Golda-Plated Iron Lady “choices:”

Mike and Ike, good cop, bad cop foils from the jump—

Bogeymen like Bush, McCain, Romney, and Trump!

Absent independent politics—November sows danger:

Reaping crimson “hope and change,” like Drone Ranger…

Pentagon pimps propagandizing through the Apollo

Proving again, where cash flows, “leaders” will follow—

But the 99% need not wait every four years to mobilize:

Strikes, boycotts, rallies, marches that build—organize,

Raise consciousness, raise money, canvass, phone bank

For salt of the earth, the masses, grassroots—the rank!

Raymond Nat Turner Š 2016 All Rights Reserved
Raymond Nat Turner is Artistic Director of the JazzPoetry Ensemble UpSurge, and a regular contributor to Dissident Voice, aaduna, and Struggle Magazine. Turner has opened for such people as James Baldwin, People’s Advocate Cynthia McKinney, radical sportswriter Dave Zirin and CA Congresswoman Barbara Lee following her lone vote against attacking Afghanistan and a Steering Committee member of the New York Chapter of the National Writers Union 

Do you need and appreciate Black Agenda Report articles? Please click on the DONATE icon, and help us out, if you can.


More Stories


  • Kamala Harris: Class Struggle and the Illusion of Identity in Capitalism / Photo: Kamala Harris with her Jamaican father, Prof. Donald Harris 
    Ahjamu Umi
    Kamala Harris: Class Struggle and the Illusion of Identity in Capitalism
    19 Aug 2020
    Some Africans in America identify with people like Harris because THEY see their class interests, as she does, as being intertwined with the interests of the American capitalist system.
  • Black Agenda Radio for Week of August 17, 2020
    Black Agenda Radio with Margaret Kimberley and Glen Ford
    Black Agenda Radio for Week of August 17, 2020
    18 Aug 2020
    You Can’t Understand Capitalism Without Race
  • Mumia: The Ravages of Capitalism-Fueled Contagion
    Black Agenda Radio with Margaret Kimberley and Glen Ford
    Mumia: The Ravages of Capitalism-Fueled Contagion
    18 Aug 2020
    Social discontent rises with the level of fatalities and government incompetence during the current epidemic, said the nation’s best known political prisoner, Mumia Abu Jamal.
  • US Lies About Political Prisoners – and Almost Everything Else
    Black Agenda Radio with Margaret Kimberley and Glen Ford
    US Lies About Political Prisoners – and Almost Everything Else
    18 Aug 2020
    The official US position, that this country holds no political prisoners, is part of “the lie and the founding mythology of US ‘democracy,’” said Nyle Fort, a Princeton Univer
  • Cuba Deserves Nobel Prize for Sharing Medicine With the World
    Black Agenda Radio with Margaret Kimberley and Glen Ford
    Cuba Deserves Nobel Prize for Sharing Medicine With the World
    18 Aug 2020
    “Cuba should be a shoo-in” to win a Nobel Prize for sending doctors to health trouble spots and poor countries around the globe, said Don Fitz, a scholar and Green Party activ
  • Load More
Subscribe
connect with us
about us
contact us