Black Agenda Radio for Week of January 16, 2017 | Black Agenda Report

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.

listen

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

More Stories

Thad Baltimore
Student Protests and the Rise of U.S. Authoritarianism
08 May 2024
The protests on college campuses across the country and the authoritarian crackdown on their calls for divestment reveal who the colleges and our government are truly accountable to.
Dhoruba bin-Wahad
Rise of Militarized Policing in Response to Black Dissent
08 May 2024
The United States continues to grow the police state to serve as a bulwark of counterinsurgency.
Margaret Kimberley, BAR Executive Editor and Senior Columnist
“Target Israel and we will target you”: U.S. Senators Play Schoolyard Bully Against the ICC
08 May 2024
The ICC recently revealed that U.S. Republican Senators sent a threatening letter to the ICC in response to Israel's concern that an arrest warrant may be issued against it. This pressure campaign on…
Center for Constitutional Rights
Imprisoned Workers Bring State Lawsuit to Abolish Involuntary Servitude in Alabama’s Prisons
08 May 2024
On International Workers’ Day, the suit challenges the constitutionality of government actions to punish resistance to forced labor among the majority-Black prison population.
Women United Against Genocide
In Solidarity with the Student Protests Against Genocide
08 May 2024
Women United Against Genocide issued this statement expressing solidarity with the campus protests calling for divestment from Israel and encouraging communities to provide material support.