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

Caribbean Popular Organizations
Caribbean Popular Organizations: We Must Raise Our Voices to Defend Our Region!
26 Jul 2023
A group of popular Caribbean organizations released a statement against foreign intervention in Haiti and calling for an end to the militarization of the region by the U.S. and the West.
Socialist Workers Movement of the Dominican Republic
Stop the Dominican Government's Violence and Racist Lies Against Haitian Pregnant Women
26 Jul 2023
The Dominican Republic’s racist President is once again scapegoating Haitians and Dominicans of Haitian descent for his government’s terrible economic policies. This time, his target is poor pregnant…
Peoples Dispatch
Death Toll Mounts in Kenya as Police Intensify Crackdown on Protests Against US-IMF Backed Tax Regime
26 Jul 2023
Kenyans have been protesting President William Ruto’s Finance Act that increases taxes on essential goods while making concessions to foreign capital.
Jody Roumain
Africa is Burning! DRC in Environmental Crisis
26 Jul 2023
Quiet as it’s kept, the African continent is the most susceptible to the impacts of climate change. And it has a history of colonialism, capitalist extraction, and labor exploitation to blame for…
Nick Corbishley
Latin America Again Refuses to Fall In Line With the Collective West on Ukraine, This Time from Brussels
26 Jul 2023
The European Union failed to bully the members of the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC) into renouncing its neutral stance on the Ukraine conflict.