Jay-Z Seeks to Profit from the War Machine
Jay-Z isn’t just trying to make another billion bucks by undermining Colin Kaepernick and the “take a knee” movement, said Louis Jefferson, funder of the San-Jose, California-based African Liberation Lab for Revolutionary Qulture. The rapper is jockeying to join football league owners in glorifying the flag and luring volunteers into the US war machine. “A lot of that is being marketed through the NFL” and “through commercials that promote the military,” said Jefferson.
Green Party Gears Up for Eco-Socialism Conference
Anita Rios, national co-chair of the Green Party, says the Democrat’s version of the Green New Deal is mostly “rhetoric,” while her party’s “eco-socialist agenda is the only path that is truly inclusive of all the various populations in this country” and the world. The Green Party’s national conference on eco-socialism is set for September 28, in Chicago.
FBI Terror “Watch List” is Unconstitutional
“The US has always had a watchlist,” said BAR executive editor Glen Ford, following a federal judge’s ruling that the FBI’s anti-terror Watch List is unconstitutional. But the United States is always in search of “enemies” to surveil and repress, said Ford. “At one time it included every slave that wanted to be free and every Native American that insisted this land still belonged to his people.”
Slavery is Model for US Prison Book-Banning
Although First Amendment guarantees of freedom of expression apply to prisoners, the “catch is that these rights can be restricted in the interest of security,” said Professor Brittany Friedman, a sociologist at Rutgers University. Slavery sought to perfect the imprisoning of both mind and body, said Friedman, and is a model for pervasive book banning in US prisons.
The “Great Contradiction” of US Incarceration
Donte Mitchell, a longtime prisoner of the State of New York, finds essential truths in the poem, “The Great Contradiction,” as it applies to the two million prisoners in US. “We want them to be a part of our community, so we isolate them from our community; we want them to have self-worth, so we destroy their self-worth….”
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:am ET on PRN. Length: one hour.
Read against the terrible incineration of Rafah today, this poem of resistance and refusal, by Palestinian poet Samih al-Qasim, is as powerful now as it was fifty years ago.
I spoke to William Sakawa, a producer and reporter with the Nairobi-based media outlet African Stream, about Kenyan President William Ruto’s agreement to invade Haiti for the US.
"Hearing! Hearing! Hearing!" is the latest from BAR's Poet-in-Residence.
This week’s featured authors are Jeanelle K. Hope and Bill V. Mullen. Their book is The Black Antifascist Tradition: Fighting Back From Anti-Lynching to Abolition.
Despite the undeserved loyalty of Black people to the Democratic Party, lawmakers continue to push policy that ignores concerns about climate change and environmental damage in their communities.
