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

Listen to Black Agenda Radio on the Progressive Radio Network, with Glen Ford and Nellie Bailey – Week of 1/20/14
21 Jan 2014
🖨️ Print Article

IFCO Tax Exemption Imperiled

The IRS is threatening to revoke the tax-exempt status of the Interreligious Foundation for Community Organization, IFCO, the venerable anti-poverty and human rights group. The government is investigating IFCO’s aid to Palestinians in Gaza and its assistance to U.S. students that want to avail themselves of medical scholarships in Cuba. The web site of the pro-Israel Investigative Project on Terrorism accuses IFCO of links to Hamas. “To have the IRS utilize a blog to come after a 47-year old, faith-based, non-profit organization run by people of color since its inception, is an outrage and an insult,” said IFCO co-director Gail Walker.

Health Disparities Rooted in Racist Legacy

Racial income and wealth gaps lead to racial health disparities, said Brian Miller, executive director of United for a Fair Economy, UFE. “Vast economic disparities are still with us, and these disparities, coupled with racial segregation, create a toxic soup that is brewing up health problems and shortening people’s lives,” said Biller, at a press conference to debut UFE’s 2014 State of the Dream Report, “Healthcare for Whom? Enduring Racial Disparities.”

War on Poverty was Great Success

The War on Poverty accomplished many of its goals, according to Annelise Orleck, professor of history at Dartmouth University and co-editor of The War on Poverty: A Grassroots History, 1964 – 1980. President Lyndon Johnson’s community action programs made enemies. “It shook things up when poor people demanded representation in school boards and housing boards and welfare boards,” said Orleck. The War on Poverty was attacked “not because it failed, but because it succeeded.”

White Racism Undermined Anti-Poverty Effort

“White backlash” scuttled some War on Poverty programs, including job training for minorities in the skilled trades. White workers whose union hiring halls had “for decades hired their sons, their nephews” became Reagan Democrats, said Jill Quadango, professor of sociology at Florida State University and author of The Color of Welfare: How Racism Undermined the War on Poverty. White union members saw minority trainees as “a direct threat to their prerogative to choose who was hired.”

Mumia on COINTELPRO

A new book reveals the identities of three people who broke into an FBI office in Media, Pennsylvania, in 1971, and made off with files on the bureau’s COINTELPRO campaign against Blacks and the Left. Mumia Abu Jamal, America’s best-known political prisoner, recalled learning of the revelations, shortly after he left the Black Panther Party. “To read about people who you’ve known for years, who were FBI informants, was absolutely mindblowing,” Abu Jamal told Heidi Boghosian, executive director of the National Lawyers Guild and host of WBAI Radio’s Law and Disorder program.

Socialism Needed – Quickly

Capitalism “is utterly irrational, it’s out of control, and unless we democratically organize and plan this economy, they’re going to kill us, literally, through climate change,” said Michael Steven Smith, co-editor of Imagine: Living in a Socialist USA. The new book contains 31 essays by a wide range of Left activists and writers.

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 11:00am ET on PRN. Length: One hour.


More Stories


  • You Can’t Shame the Shameless Black Misleadership Class
    Glen Ford, BAR Executive Editor
    You Can’t Shame the Shameless Black Misleadership Class
    17 Dec 2020
    The Black misleaders have been busy selling out Black people for half a century, but are still only barely tolerated by the rich man’s Democratic Party and its racist figurehead, Joe Biden.
  • Freedom Rider: Master Biden Speaks
    Margaret Kimberley, BAR senior columnist
    Freedom Rider: Master Biden Speaks
    16 Dec 2020
    The civil rights groups’ rather basic requests for voting rights protections and the need for federal intervention to address police brutality were minimized and dismissed by the president-ele
  • Racial Capitalism, Black Liberation, and South Africa
    Editors, The Black Agenda Review
    Racial Capitalism, Black Liberation, and South Africa
    16 Dec 2020
    The phrase racial capitalism first emerged in the context of the anti-Apartheid and southern African liberation struggles in the 1970s.
  • When Austerity’s Chickens Came Home to Roost in the U.S., Bernie and “the Squad” were Unprepared
    Danny Haiphong, BAR Contributing Editor
    When Austerity’s Chickens Came Home to Roost in the U.S., Bernie and “the Squad” were Unprepared
    16 Dec 2020
    The theory of change that depicts the likes of Bernie Sanders and AOC as the leaders of the class struggle has failed to materialize in reality.
  • Imagine: The Town Crier’s Cabinet Selections
    Raymond Nat Turner, BAR poet-in-residence
    Imagine: The Town Crier’s Cabinet Selections
    16 Dec 2020
    Cut plastic cuffs from imaginations— Dream larger in dire situations… IMAGINE every cook governing— every governor cooking up people puzzles—right livelihood alchemy…
  • Load More
Subscribe
connect with us
about us
contact us