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

Ramzy Baroud
The Injured Gaza Boy and His Drawing: Do Palestinians Have the Right to Self-Defense?
21 Feb 2024
It is interesting how the colonizers and the colonized continue to build relations and solidarity around the same old principles. The Global South is, again, rising in solidarity with the…
Palestinian Youth Movement
Free Palestine. Stop Cop City.
21 Feb 2024
It is clear that Stop Cop City represents one of conjunctural spear tips for expanding the existing systems of counterinsurgency that span Africa, Asia, and the Arab world.
Black Agenda Radio with Margaret Kimberley
Black Agenda Radio February 16, 2024
16 Feb 2024
This week we discuss the bipartisan consensus on punitive immigration policies and a community organizing solidarity event in the Bronx and call for freedom of a political prisoner. But first we talk…
Black Agenda Radio with Margaret Kimberley
Black and Brown Coalition for Palestine
16 Feb 2024
Frank Chapman and Hatem Abudayyeh join us from Chicago to discuss the city council vote calling for a ceasefire in Gaza and update us on events in Palestine and in Chicago.
Black Agenda Radio with Margaret Kimberley
Bipartisan Consensus for Punitive Immigration Policies Continues - Part 1
16 Feb 2024
Aly Wane is on the advisory board of the Immigrant Justice Network. He joins us from Syracuse, New York to discuss the failure of the recent immigration bill and the bipartisan consensus on punitive…