What Price Reparations?
Based on calculations by University of Connecticut researcher Thomas Craemer, reparations to African Americans for slavery would cost between $5.9 trillionand $14.2 trillion. Prof. Craemer’s formula multiplies the number of hours worked by every enslaved man, woman and child above the age of five, at prevailing unskilled labor wages, with interest compounded at three percent per year. It is widely recognized that the surplus produced by slave labor allowed the United States to rapidly develop into a world economic power. “You could look at this as a start-up loan that the United States took out with African Americans – and never repaid,” said Craemer.
The Afro-Americanization of “Momma Emanuel”
In 2011, a suburban Washington DC police officer shot to death Nigerian-American college senior Emanuel Okutuga. The cop was never charged with a crime. The youth’s mother, whom activists call “Momma Emanuel,” became a mainstay of demonstrations against police violence. “She’s a tower of strength,” said Dr. Marsha Coleman-Adebayo, the renowned whistleblower and activist with the Hands Up Coalition-DC, who is also an editor and columnist for Black Agenda Report. Momma Emanuel “now feels very African American,” said Coleman-Adebayo. “When she talks about white supremacy, she now understands what she’s talking about.”
New “WikiLeaks” Book shows U.S. Runs Amuck in Latin America
Diplomatic cables from the Bush and early Obama administrations document years of U.S. subversion and attempts at regime change in Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador, Honduras and El Salvador, according to The WikiLeaks Files, a new book by three analysts for the Center for Economic and Policy Studies. The U.S. funded right-wing NGOs that tried to topple the Venezuelan government, said co-author Dan Beeton. For example, a U.S. diplomat in Caracas cabled his superiors to report: “The streets are hot, and all the people organizing these demonstrations are our grantees.” Beeton cannot imagine that the U.S. would tolerate “Chinese or Iranian funding of NGOs that put up street blockades in Washington, DC.”
Post-Katrina Documentary: “Fear No Gumbo”
Kimberly Rivers-Roberts, the New Orleans filmmaker and hip hop artist also known as Queen Kold Madina, is raising funds to complete Fear No Gumbo, her new documentary on the city’s incomplete recovery from Hurricane Katrina. Her first film, Trouble the Water, depicting events during the first five days after the storm, was nominated for an Oscar and won several awards at the Sundance Film Festival. The new project aims to show “that the recovery isn’t over, even ten years later.” Rivers-Roberts considers her film “an educational piece to get people back to the table, get some positive change, and get the Lower Ninth Ward rebuilt.”
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.
What Haley crafts about the lives of incarcerated women is astounding in its archival literacy, analytical sophistication, and authorial courage.
Black people are without the shelter of rights and protection, whether invited into or locked out of ‘the human.’”
We are entering a terrifying and daunting time that requires a change in approach and tactics.
We have to reverse the strange alchemy where markets turn land, concrete, steel, and glass into money, while turning people out into the streets.
A bloc of countries, led by the United States of America, is stubbornly persisting in using force to maintain and extend their global dominance.
