Obama Would Prefer To Face Most Virulent Right-Wing Opponent
President Obama would prefer that Republicans nominate one of their most right-wing hopefuls “so that the Democrats can move further and further to the right and become completely indistinguishable from the Republican Party,” said political analyst Paul Street. “The further right the enemy they have in the general election, the more they can scare their liberal base.” Street is author of The Empire’s New Clothes: Barack Obama and the Real World of Power.
Both Parties in Flight from Poor People’s Issues
“There has been a bipartisan flight from working people and from poverty,” said Chicago-based labor activist and writer James Thindwa. “The words ‘poor people’ don’t even feature in the political discourse. Both parties are captive to corporate interests. There may be some variance here and there but, fundamentally, they are here to serve capital.” Thindwa is author of the recent In These Times article, “Why Conservatives Can’t Fix Poverty.”
Obama Military Cuts Don’t Lessen War Costs
The administration’s plans to create a leaner military “simply take us back to the very inflated level of 2008 – and that’s not really very much of an achievement,” said Catherine Lutz, editor of The Bases of Power: The Struggle Against U.S. Military Posts. The proposed cuts affect only the “base,” or basic military infrastructure budget. “The war budgets,” such as “the additional trillion dollars allocated for the wars in Iraq in Afghanistan, are not even included in these numbers. Those are off the table for the purposes of these discussions,” said Lutz. “With all the threatening words being exchanged about Iran and the articulated fears about China, we have to worry that there will be a new theater of war before we know it, and then that money will be added on top of” the base military budget.
Drone Warfare Will Lead to Blowback Against U.S.
“We’ve opened up this Pandora’s Box of bombing people all over the world and it’s definitely going to come back on us – blowback,” said Alice Slater, New York director of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation. “We’re bombing seven countries right now with drones – totally unauthorized by Congress.” The U.S. also pursues policies that discourage nuclear non-proliferation. “If Gaddafi had nuclear weapons, we wouldn’t have bombed Libya. It’s a signal to people on the other end of our aggressive power that they have to protect themselves as best they can.”
New Student Group Against Mass Imprisonment
Students Against Mass Incarceration (SAMI), created early last year at Washington DC’s Howard University, has since expanded to Morgan State University in Baltimore, western Massachusetts, and Columbia University, according to SAMI founder Benjamin Woods. “The prison-industrial complex is a direct outgrowth of the capitalist system,” said Woods, a doctoral candidate. “We want to see people who are most affected” by the repressive apparatus of the state, including political prisoners, providing leadership in the Black community.
P.O.P. Passes Halfway Mark in Newark Protest Marathon
The People’s Organization for Progress (P.O.P.) this week passed the 190-day mark in its daily demonstrations in Newark, New Jersey. “We understood more than a year ago that sporadic protests were not enough,” said P.O.P. chairman Larry Hamm. The grassroots community group has vowed to continue daily demonstrations for at least 381 days, the duration of the 1955 Montgomery, Alabama bus boycott. P.O.P.’s seven core demands include a federal jobs program, an end to U.S. wars abroad, protection of workers’ rights to unionize and bargain, a moratorium on home foreclosures, universal health care, and programs to preserve public education and make college affordable to all.
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.
SCOTUS, Roe v Wade and left politics, Racism in UK immigration policy, and Workers' Struggle in Haiti in this week's Black Agenda Radio.
Pascal Robert is co-host of the This is Revolution podcast. He is also a long-time contributor to Black Agenda Report as well as to Newsweek. He joins us from Miami, Florida to discuss the recent…
Glenroy Watson is a Pan-African trade unionist who is Secretary of the Global Afrikan Congress, UK Chapter. He joins us to discuss the continuation of Hostile Environment immigration policies in the…
Dahoud Andre is a member of KOMOKODA, the Community to Mobilize Against Dictatorship in Haiti, and host of Eritye Papa Desalin, the Heirs of Jean Jacques Dessalines, a daily Haitian community radio…
Erica Caines, Editor of Hood Communist and Coordinating Committee Member for the Black Alliance for Peace, joins the stream to discuss the New McCarthyism and its implications.
