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.
"Sitting Shiva in South Florida for Our souls/slivers of democracy …" is the latest from BAR's Poet-in-Residence.
Politicians and the liberal media cite "voter apathy" as the cause of reduced voter turnout, but the reality is that their devotion to corporate interests over those of the people creates a seeming…
Settler colonialism has caused the destruction of indigenous lands around the world and, as a result, the environment in which we all live. The path forward is an global struggle against these forces.
For Africans in the U.S., anger is an important first step in mentally emancipating themselves from empire and declaring war on it.
The peoples of this world will never see true liberation and peace until we are free of the shackles of U.S. and Western colonial domination.
