| Black Agenda Report

by BAR executive editor Glen Ford
Free All Political Prisoners –- Including Julian Assange and Chelsea Manning
13 Feb 2020
Julian Assange and his protégés have made common cause with Black revolutionaries in their zeal to lay bare the dictatorial nature of the omni-pervasive national security state and the sheer, racist barbarity of the U.S. imperial project. “A huge struggle must be launched to claim the means of…
Alice Speri
New York Schools Gang Unit Pushes the Criminalization of Children
19 Feb 2020
A school handbook paints a picture of youth criminality that is steeped in law enforcement lingo and appears to have been written by police rather than educators. “You are essentially priming teachers who are otherwise supposed to be interacting with their students and teaching them to now…
Jeff Bryant
How Corporations Are Forcing Their Way Into America’s Public Schools
19 Feb 2020
Public school students are being “trained” for jobs at specific corporations rather than educated for a lifetime in a changing world. “Students led to believe that business-branded CTE courses guarantee future employment with the business are really buying into a ‘false promise.’”
Solomon Comissiong
Indoctrination Nation: The Institutionalization of US Imperialism
19 Feb 2020
Crimes that earned their perpetrators capital sentences at Nuremberg are celebrated as the sacred patrimony of the United States. “Those who speak out against the war-machine are often seen as outcasts and anti-American troublemakers who need to be silenced.”
Kevin Zeese and Margaret Flowers
Embassy Defenders Win Mistrial, But the Struggle Continues
19 Feb 2020
The jury felt they weren’t hearing the whole story, due to the suppression of nearly every relevant fact in the case. “The US charade claiming Guaido is the president and the judge refusing to challenge that fiction has dangerous and deadly consequences.”
Global Information Network
Nigeria Jailing Journalists
19 Feb 2020
Stories that embarrass high officials can earn reporters treason charges, imprisonment and death. “Alex Ogbu and Precious Owolabi were killed under similar circumstances.” Nigeria is rounding up journalists who investigate corruption – jailing them for indefinite periods of time and accusing them…
Roberto Sirvent, BAR Book Forum Editor
BAR Book Forum: Shana Redmond’s “Everything Man”
19 Feb 2020
It takes many voices from a world of disciplines to tell the story of Paul Robeson, the supreme talent ad intellect that the US State attempted to erase from history. “Over more than forty years, Robeson establishing a layered and compelling tradition that others have tapped into.”
Ashlie Sandoval
BAR Book Forum: “Books I Teach”
19 Feb 2020
An educator helps students navigate books that reveal Blackness as historicity, slavery as both obscured and ever-present, and the violence of race. “Students should see race as a paradigm for subjection rather than a biological trait or solely a social identity.”
Jahan Choudhry BAR Comments Editor
Letters from Our Readers
19 Feb 2020
This week readers discussed the Democratic Party’s theater and the new arms race in outer space.
Jeff Haas and Dennis Cunningham
The Torture Machine, Racism and Violence in Chicago
19 Feb 2020
Chicago’s torture machine was both a real mechanism to produce confessions through pain, and a racist political instrument. “For more than a decade, a group of Chicago police detectives regularly subjected black men to aggravated physical abuse until they would agree to confess under duress.” The…