Jay-Z Seeks to Profit from the War Machine
Jay-Z isn’t just trying to make another billion bucks by undermining Colin Kaepernick and the “take a knee” movement, said Louis Jefferson, funder of the San-Jose, California-based African Liberation Lab for Revolutionary Qulture. The rapper is jockeying to join football league owners in glorifying the flag and luring volunteers into the US war machine. “A lot of that is being marketed through the NFL” and “through commercials that promote the military,” said Jefferson.
Green Party Gears Up for Eco-Socialism Conference
Anita Rios, national co-chair of the Green Party, says the Democrat’s version of the Green New Deal is mostly “rhetoric,” while her party’s “eco-socialist agenda is the only path that is truly inclusive of all the various populations in this country” and the world. The Green Party’s national conference on eco-socialism is set for September 28, in Chicago.
FBI Terror “Watch List” is Unconstitutional
“The US has always had a watchlist,” said BAR executive editor Glen Ford, following a federal judge’s ruling that the FBI’s anti-terror Watch List is unconstitutional. But the United States is always in search of “enemies” to surveil and repress, said Ford. “At one time it included every slave that wanted to be free and every Native American that insisted this land still belonged to his people.”
Slavery is Model for US Prison Book-Banning
Although First Amendment guarantees of freedom of expression apply to prisoners, the “catch is that these rights can be restricted in the interest of security,” said Professor Brittany Friedman, a sociologist at Rutgers University. Slavery sought to perfect the imprisoning of both mind and body, said Friedman, and is a model for pervasive book banning in US prisons.
The “Great Contradiction” of US Incarceration
Donte Mitchell, a longtime prisoner of the State of New York, finds essential truths in the poem, “The Great Contradiction,” as it applies to the two million prisoners in US. “We want them to be a part of our community, so we isolate them from our community; we want them to have self-worth, so we destroy their self-worth….”
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:am ET on PRN. Length: one hour.
"State of the Union—or state of Capitalist decay?" is the latest from BAR's Poet-in-Residence.
A class consciousness among the working masses, one that takes the issue of race seriously, is critical at this moment. Still, the democrats are working to disrupt this effort to organize against the…
In this series, we ask acclaimed authors to answer five questions about their book. This week’s featured author is Atiya Husain. Husain is Associate Professor of Africana Studies at Williams College…
The Black Radical Tradition is the rich legacy passed down by revolutionaries. It is an important tool today as we struggle to turn the Americas into a Zone of Peace.
The trial of former Peruvian president Pedro Castillo, the victim of a 2022 lawfare-style coup, has begun. The legal process used against him is a sham covering up the human rights abuses…
