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

Black Agenda Radio for Week of January 16, 2017
17 Jan 2017
🖨️ Print Article

The Democrats: Serving the One Percent, Blaming the Russians

The Democrats are using the Russians as a scapegoat to avoid confronting “the rightwing Wall Street-captive party that they’ve become,” said activist and educator Paul Street, author of several books on President Barack Obama. Essentially, Democrats are saying, “It’s not that we’re a rightwing, corporate, neoliberal party beholden to the nation’s unelected dictatorship of money and empire. It’s not that we abandoned the working class and the causes of social justice and peace decades ago.” Speaking at the Open University of the Left, in Chicago, Street said Donald Trump did not ride to victory on a “big rust belt rebellion of the white working class.” The real story “is that the Democrats lost those voters to non-voting.”

When Capitalism Gets Sick, the Democrats Get Mean

The Democratic Party’s sharp turn to the right is its response to the “existential crisis at the core of capitalism,” a global phenomenon that has left the ruling class and its servants with “hardly any space to reform the system,” said Dr. Anthony Monteiro, the Philadelphia-based Duboisian scholar and activist. With “no room to maneuver,” the capitalists resort increasingly to war and repression. “Monopoly capitalism must be undone, the banks broken up, and a large part of them nationalized,” said Monteiro. “In other words,” there must be “a profound and fundamental end to the neoliberal order, globally; a retreat from empire and war; and a seizing of the military budget and turning it towards economic development, jobs and a green economy.”

Political Prisoners Under Pressure in Indiana

Khalfani Malik Khaldun, serving time at Wabash Valley prison, in Indiana, said officials have carried out “a series of raids on targeted political prisoners,” including himself. Khaldun was told by “top brass” that they consider him to be the facility’s “most influential” inmate and are pressuring him to use that influence to “stop the proliferation of meth, a synthetic drug spreading throughout the prison.” Otherwise, “they had orders to put me and ten of my comrades in solitary confinement,” where he is now housed. Khaldun said prison officials “are making me out to be running some form of drug ring, in an attempt to destroy my political credibility as an activist on the inside.”

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.



Your browser does not support the audio element.

listen
http://traffic.libsyn.com/blackagendareport/black_agenda_radio_20170116.mp3

More Stories


  • Late-Stage Racial Capitalism Opened the Door to the Killer Virus
    Glen Ford, BAR Executive Editor
    Late-Stage Racial Capitalism Opened the Door to the Killer Virus
    30 Apr 2020
    The white settler state always inflicts excessive mortality on racially subject peoples, and capitalism inflicts death on large sections of its disproportionately non-white working class and poor.
  • Freedom Rider: Fighting COVID-19 with Mass Action and a People’s Strike
    Margaret Kimberley, BAR senior columnist
    Freedom Rider: Fighting COVID-19 with Mass Action and a People’s Strike
    29 Apr 2020
    The people’s mass fightback against the system that failed to protect them from the coronavirus and corporate predators begins May 1.
  • Joe Biden and Donald Trump’s Anti-China Campaign Strategy is Part of a Broader Imperialist War Against China
    Danny Haiphong, BAR Contributing Editor
    Joe Biden and Donald Trump’s Anti-China Campaign Strategy is Part of a Broader Imperialist War Against China
    29 Apr 2020
    Joe Biden and Donald Trump are taking aim at China to deflect attention away from the American nightmare.
  • DRC’s Virunga: Park, Gorillas, and Rangers All Under Attack
    Ann Garrison, BAR Contributing Editor
    DRC’s Virunga: Park, Gorillas, and Rangers All Under Attack
    29 Apr 2020
    Congolese officials are blaming armed Rwandan Hutu refugees for the massacre of twelve rangers and five civilians, but there are any number of other predators that covet the park.
  • May 1st General Strike: Claiming People(s)-Centered Human Rights for the Working Class
    ​​​​​​​ Ajamu Baraka, BAR editor and columnist
    May 1st General Strike: Claiming People(s)-Centered Human Rights for the Working Class
    29 Apr 2020
    The failure of the capitalist state to provide the people with elementary protections of their fundamental human rights renders the capitalist state illegitimate.
  • Load More
Subscribe
connect with us
about us
contact us