Will Black Agenda Report Be Here Next New Year? That's Up To Our Readers...
Glen Ford, Margaret Kimberley and I left Black Commentator to start Black Agenda Report in 2006. It’s 2018 and we’re still here. We want to be here at the start of 2019 too.
We opposed the permanent wars of US empire back when the president was a Republican named Bush. Unlike most others, we continued to oppose them when the president was a black Democrat named Obama.
While still at Black Commentator, our executive editor Glen Ford was among the very first to call attention to the well-funded right wing campaign to privatize public education, and its efforts to fund the careers of black Democratic politicians who would do the bidding of the billionaires when he exposed the right wing backers of the career of Newark’s Corey Booker, who now sits in the US Senate. Almost alone on the black left, we questioned the commitment of Barack Obama, then running for the US Senate in Illinois to his own promises about renegotiating NAFTA and stopping the war in Iraq.
At Black Agenda Report we continued going where almost nobody else dared with our CBC Monitor Reports on the performance of the Congressional Black Caucus. We developed and took the lead in popularizing a notion we called the black misleadership class, or the black political class which enables us to understand that black faces in high places not only don’t necessarily advance the broader interest of black communities, but that black faces in high places are absolutely essential to legitimizing and normalizing permanent war, frozen wages, declining black wealth, privatization and austerity.
When Congressional Democrats, got control of the Congress in 2007 Black Agenda Report was almost alone in pointing out that the entire Democratic caucus, led by the CBC suddenly switched its refrain from impeaching Bush-Cheney and making sure no other president exercised unconstitutional powers at home and abroad to simply electing a Democrat in 2008 who would inherit the illegal powers his predecessor had assumed.
Before Obama had even been sworn in, Black Agenda Report was the first to warn the nation that the appointment of Arne Duncan as Secretary of Education meant that the Chicago scheme of school privatization was about to go national. Almost alone, we pointed to the fact that the billionaire hedge funders, the charter school sugar daddies seemed to practically own the fist black president’s policies on education. Black Agenda Report published analyses of the so-called “Race to the Top” program, in which $4 billion in stimulus money was deployed by the Obama Department of Education to incentivize and compel school privatization across the country, and to create an “industry” of consultants and black celebrity charter school crooks.
Nearly alone among black media outlets Black Agenda Report dared to consistently and explicitly question the notion that the glittering careers of black celebs and politicians lifts all boats, and proposed that only collective action might result in collective uplift.
Black Agenda Report was telling people about network neutrality before most knew what that term meant or implied, and pointed out some of the specific exercises in corruption of the National Conference of State Legislators, the NAACP, the Urban League, NAN, PUSH, LULAC and others which identified these institutions of the black political class as trojan horses in our midst.
Black Agenda Report reported on Obama’s massive expansion of drone wars, and the fact that his so-called Libyan “freedom fighters” on the ground were lynching black Libyans and African migrants.
We interrogated the Movement for Black Lives and its funding sources, and questioned whether it was (and is) a movement or a marketing gambit masquerading as a movement.
When the drive to censor the left began in earnest about two years ago, Black Agenda Report was the only black owned and oriented publication to be singled out as an alleged tool of Russian propaganda. It’s a transparently ridiculous notion, but a very telling one. It means the powers that be aren’t afraid of VerySmartBrothas or TheRoot.Com or Ta Nehisi Coates or Henry Louis Gates. But they’re afraid of us.
For almost twelve years now Black Agenda Report has been asking the questions few others dared ask, and helping make ground breaking understandings into common and useful knowledge. It’s been fun.
We’d like to be around a few more years. But that doesn’t depend on the quality of our writers and their analyses. It depends on you, dear readers, and your willingness to support our mission.
It’s time to donate to Black Agenda Report
At the top of every page there is a teardrop shaped button that says “donate”. Hit that button, please. Send us $5 or $7 or $10 a month or a one time gift to help keep us out here. We haven’t thrown up a paywall yet, or segregated our content into free and paid sections. We haven’t run advertising either, or paid our contributing writers.
Google and Facebook have come up with algorithms that make much of our content invisible to search engines, so we are working on re-indexing it topic by topic. It’s work, but we know it’s worth it.
It’s time to subscribe to Black Agenda Report
With much of our content invisible (thanks to Google) to those who don’t regularly visit our site, the only way for you to be sure you get each week’s issue of Black Agenda Report is to subscribe to our free weekly email list. That’s what the “subscribe” button at the bottom of every page is for.
And finally due again to our being whited out of search engine results, the only way for us to get new readers is for YOU to share our articles on social media and forward our weekly emails to your friends, relatives, colleagues and comrades.
We’re going to be a lot more systematic and intentional about seeking funding from a broad base of our audience in the coming weeks because we like what we do, because we know we do it well, and because the powers that be clearly fear us. And you. Help us do this
Subscribe to our free weekly email list. Donate $5, $7 or $10 per month to Black Agenda Report. Do it now. Keep us out here.
Need to talk to us? Tweet us @blkagendareport, or email me at bruce.dixon(at)blackagendareport.com, or Glen Ford at glen.ford(at)blackagendareport.com. We’ll answer.
Respectfully,
Bruce A. Dixon
managing editor, Black Agenda Report.
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