| Black Agenda Report

by BAR poet-in-residence Raymond Nat Turner
If all options are on the table…
13 Feb 2019
If “all options are on the table” Let’s hear filters usurping skull and crossbones drinking water 400 times before it flows from a single faucet If “all options are on the table” Let’s hear boots on the ground and on ladders, meddling smoggy skies with windmills and solar panels
by BAR executive editor Glen Ford
Pelosi Sabotages Medicare for All, But Corporate Media Pretend Not to Notice
14 Feb 2019
When the top Democrat secretly plots to subvert a proposal supported by the vast majority of her party, that’s supposed to be news -- unless the corporate media decide otherwise. “The plutocrat-owned press is protecting Pelosi from the extreme embarrassment.”
Behind the News with Doug Henwood
Los Angeles Teachers Use the Old Successful Organizing Methods
14 Feb 2019
Like the 2006 strike of 30,000 NYC transit workers, and the 2012 strike of 30,000 Chicago teachers, the 2019 Los Angeles teacher strike made the lives of tens and hundreds of thousands of ordinary people better. A nurse and librarian in every school, enforceable class size caps, some regulation on…
Patrick Walker
Venezuelan Coup Democrats Vomit on Green New Deal
20 Feb 2019
For our bought-off Republican and Democrat warmongers, humanity’s climate crisis changes nothing and US regime change remains the order of the day. “By not denouncing our imperialist coup in Venezuela, both Sunrise and the PPC are failing miserably in ‘radicalizing the mainstream.’”
Arnold August
Venezuela: A Unique Experience in Protagonist Democracy?
20 Feb 2019
The issue for us all is: No to military intervention in Venezuela and full support for the right of Venezuela to defend itself. “Maduro declared in his February 4 Caracas speech: ‘Not one Yaqui soldier will enter Venezuela.’”
George Joseph and Debbie Nathan
Prisons Are Building Databases of Incarcerated People’s Voice Prints
20 Feb 2019
Hundreds of thousands of inmates’ voices have been imprinted, potentially ensnaring millions of family members, friends and supporters in the huge surveillance net. “Some programs even analyze the voices of call recipients outside prisons to track which outsiders speak to multiple prisoners…
Paul Street
Buried Alive: The Story of Police State Racism in Chicago
20 Feb 2019
Chicago media care more about the safety of a killer cop and the Jesse Smollett saga than victims of the city’s rabidly racist police. “Van Dyke’s heinous crime was all too consistent with a longstanding pattern of excessive force and even murder on the part of the Chicago Police Department.” “I…
Roberto Sirvent, BAR Abolition Spotlight Editor
BAR Abolition Spotlight: Diana Block
20 Feb 2019
Society needs prison abolition in order to heal, but people living in prison need basic humane conditions in order to survive.” “The experiences of the people caged in women’s prisons tend to be the most under-reported and invisible.” In this feature, we ask abolitionists a few questions about…
Roberto Sirvent, BAR Book Forum Editor
BAR Book Forum: Roderick Ferguson’s “One-Dimensional Queer”
20 Feb 2019
Gay liberation didn’t originate as a single-issue movement, and must confront neoliberalism and gentrification as well as anti-queer violence. “We need to understand that sexism, transphobia and homophobia are rampant here in the U.S.”
Roberto Sirvent, BAR Book Forum Editor
BAR Book Forum: Ashon Crawley’s “Blackpentecostal Breath”
20 Feb 2019
The book is a meditation on a way of life that is joyous and abundant without ever asserting that we must all convert to Pentecostalism. “How can we encourage the flourishing of all life, of the creaturely world, against the violence of the state?”