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

Margaret Kimberley, BAR senior columnist
Freedom Rider: The Democrats’ Supreme Failure
23 Sep 2020
The corporate Democrats refuse to back measures that appeal to huge majorities of their base, preferring instead to campaign against one evil man and his appointees.
Danny Haiphong, BAR Contributing Editor
.Biden and the Democrats Have No Plan to Stop the Bleeding—at Home or Abroad
23 Sep 2020
The Democrats say they’re running against the most “dangerous president in modern American history,” but Joe Biden has no prescription for resolving any of the crises facing Black and working class
Ann Garrison, BAR Contributing Editor
Demilitarizing the NFL
23 Sep 2020
Nation Magazine sportswriter Dave Zirin, speaking to Ann Garrison, says that militarism is a founding feature of American football, not just a bug, but we don’t have to accept it in f
Raymond Nat Turner, BAR poet-in-residence
OK to say the F-word?
23 Sep 2020
P.O.E.T. are the only letters behind my name— So you scowl; scold; spank my hands with rulers and switches worn smooth from serial beatdowns, dare I use the F-word…
Anthony Monteiro
Isabel Wilkerson’s Book "Caste" and the Discontent of a Ruling Class in Crisis
23 Sep 2020
Oprah gushes that this book by the latest darling of the ruling classes might “save us,” but all it’s really trying to save is capitalism.