Black Agenda Report
Black Agenda Report
News, commentary and analysis from the black left.

  • Home
  • Africa
  • African America
  • Education
  • Environment
  • International
  • Media and Culture
  • Political Economy
  • Radio
  • US Politics
  • War and Empire

Black Agenda Radio for Week of May 8, 2017
10 May 2017
🖨️ Print Article

Major Courtroom Victory Against “Wealth-Based Human Caging”

In a sweeping order, a judge has ruled that the bail system in Harris County, Texas, including the city of Houston, is unconstitutional. Because of the decision, “we are on the road to eradicating the notion of wealth-base human caging,” said Alec Karakatsanis, executive director of the Washington-based Civil Rights Corps. The ruling affects defendants charged with low level offenses. “On any given night in this country there are about 450,000 human beings who are sitting in a cage because they can’t come up with a particular amount of money that’s been required for their release,” said Karakatsanis.

Haiti Activists Seek to Block Clinton Commencement Speech

Protesters demanded that Medgar Evers College cancel Hillary Clinton’s scheduled commencement address at the mostly Black Brooklyn institution, next month. The Clintons are a criminal family, said Dahoud Andre, of Komokoda, the Committee to Mobilize Against Dictatorship in Haiti. If Medgar Evers College honors the former secretary of state, it will be condoning “the crimes of the Clinton family, and Hillary Clinton, personally, against the people of Haiti and against Black youth, who she called ‘animals’ and ‘thugs’ who should be ‘brought to heel,’” said Andre.

“Facts Don’t Matter” to U.S. Corporate Media

When the Trump administration claimed that Syria launched a chemical attack on civilians, in April, Dr. Theodore Postol conducted an investigation that debunked the official U.S. version of events. Postol is professor emeritus of science, technology and national security issues at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. However, the corporate media ignore Postol’s findings. “The facts don’t seem to matter at all to anybody,” he said. “It looks to me like a complete collapse of any kind of journalistic standards within the mainstream press.”

Mumia Remembers MOVE, Back in the Day

The nation’s best known political prisoner, Mumia Abu Jamal, marked the 45th anniversary of the MOVE organization with recollections of when MOVE members were undergound in Rochester, New York. There, they “lived a life of peace that was unthinkable in Philadelphia,” because “they lived out of the eye of a merciless media,” he said. “Absent the ‘zone of negativity by the media, people met MOVE as people, and loved them.” In contrast, police and media hostility to MOVE in the City of Brotherly Love led to life sentences for nine MOVE members in 1978, and the bombing of the MOVE residence in 1985, killing eleven members, including five children.

NYC Mayor is No Progressive, Says Challenger Gangi

Bill de Blasio has not earned the label “progressive,” said Robert Gangi, the former director of the Police Reform Organizing Project who has thrown his hat in the mayoral race. De Blasio has not “addressed the social, racial and economic inequities that do such great damage to large populations that live in our city,” said Gangi. “He supports ‘broken windows policing,’ which is blatantly racist policing.”

Free Mothers Day in The Bronx

Juanita Young, whose son was killed by New York City cops, is one of the organizers of a Free Mothers Day event at Hostos College, in The Bronx, this Saturday. “You’ve got people’s sons who’ve been murdered through gun violence; you’ve got young men locked up for these police raids,” said Young, whose group is called The Motherhood. “What is going on, that the system feels that our loved ones’ lives have no value?”

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.

 


More Stories


  • Bidens and Trumps, Foxes and Wolves
    Glen Ford, BAR Executive Editor
    Bidens and Trumps, Foxes and Wolves
    08 Oct 2020
    The fox and wolf parties – both corporate canines – debate how best to acclimate the masses to their deepening state of precarity.
  • Freedom Rider: Liberal Sympathy for Trump
    Margaret Kimberley, BAR senior columnist
    Freedom Rider: Liberal Sympathy for Trump
    07 Oct 2020
    If Ava Duvernay really believes Trump is a white supremacist, why wish him well?  
  • Debate Lesson: 2020 Election is a Great Corporate Thug-a-thon
    Danny Haiphong, BAR Contributing Editor
    Debate Lesson: 2020 Election is a Great Corporate Thug-a-thon
    07 Oct 2020
    Trump and Biden avoided policy because neither had anything to offer the masses of people.
  • Fight the Power: Resistance Radio at the Virtual GRC Summit
    Ann Garrison, BAR Contributing Editor
    Fight the Power: Resistance Radio at the Virtual GRC Summit
    07 Oct 2020
    The Grassroots Radio Virtual Summit is for anyone looking for ways to resist heightening repression and anyone who feels that grassroots radio is vital to their community, writes Ann Garrison.
  • October Surprise? (or President Pence pardon?)
    Raymond Nat Turner, BAR poet-in-residence
    October Surprise? (or President Pence pardon?)
    07 Oct 2020
    They say he could use your thoughts  and prayers; like he used your taxes  Praying to big white Buddha bottles of bleach…They say he never, ever,
  • Load More
Subscribe
connect with us
about us
contact us