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.
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 4:00pm ET on PRN. Length: One hour.
Homelessness isn’t policy failure—it’s policy. From 19th-century British 'clearings' to today’s police sweeps and Blackstone evictions, the playbook stays the same: displace the poor, privatize the…
To honor Kwame Ture is to condemn Zionism. Yet the lecture bearing his name platformed a speaker who calls anti-Zionism 'hate', erasing Ture’s clarity that Palestine’s liberation is inseparable from…
Decades of U.S. military aid and Israeli occupation created the conditions for the attack on Iran in an unbroken chain of imperial violence.
When oppression becomes unbearable, resistance erupts. The uprising at Delaney Hall exposes the brutality of immigrant detention and the power of collective defiance.
Three informed Arab officials, in touch with both the US and Iran, tell Middle East Eye that the White House appears to be moving closer to 'backing up' Israel.
