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

Black Agenda Radio with Margaret Kimberley
Zohran Mamdani and the New York City Mayor's Race
31 Oct 2025
Margaret Kimberley was recently a guest on James Fauntleroy’s YouTube program, Jaybefaunt. They discussed the upcoming mayoral election in New York City that pits the Democratic Party nominee, Zohran…
Margaret Kimberley, BAR Executive Editor and Senior Columnist
The Shutdown and Neverending Hostility to the Welfare State
29 Oct 2025
The federal government shutdown is a fight between Trump and democrats, but it is also emblematic of the tenuous nature of the welfare state in the U.S. The duopoly parties are both committed to…
Ajamu Baraka, BAR editor and columnist
The United States and Israel: The Tale of Two Rogue Settler-Colonial States United by A Commitment to White Supremacy and Barbaric State Violence
29 Oct 2025
The genocide in Gaza, the threat to Venezuela, and the targeting of Iran are not isolated crises. They are coordinated fronts in a single war effort attempting to enforce imperial dominance.
Editors, The Black Agenda Review
STATEMENT: The Challenge to the Colonial Powers, Delegates to the Fifth Pan-African Congress, 1945
29 Oct 2025
“Africans, as a last resort, may have to appeal to force in the effort to achieve Freedom, even if force destroys them and the world.”
Ann Garrison, BAR Contributing Editor
The US Targets Colombians by Sanctioning Gustavo Petro
29 Oct 2025
“I do not have a dollar in the United States. There is no account to freeze for me.” - Colombian President Gustavo Petro, solidarity rally in Bogota, 10/24/2025