| Black Agenda Report

Peoples Dispatch Staff
Venezuela Thwarts Invasion Attempt by Mercenaries
06 May 2020
Venezuelan officials reported that a group of mercenaries attempted to invade the country on Sunday but were stopped by the country’s army and police. “The terrorist group had sought to carry out selective assassinations to ‘unleash a spiral of violence and generate chaos in the population.’”…
Peter Young
Overcrowded DRC Prisons 'Ticking Time-Bomb' for COVID-19 Pandemic
06 May 2020
The Democratic Republic of Congo’s main prisons are filled at 432 percent on average, making them some of the most overcrowded in the world. “Munzenze was called the ‘most terrible’ prison in Africa by a UN official.”
Milton G. Allimadi
Tribute to My Beloved Sister Barbara Allimadi – Fighter for Justice in Uganda
06 May 2020
We owe it to Barbara to march those extra miles and create a new Uganda. “She was arrested multiple times for leading protests against the regime.” Many people who know my sister Barbara Allimadi who passed away on Monday night in Uganda will remember her as a tireless and fearless fighter…
Igor Derysh
Over 70 Percent of Jobless Americans Didn’t Receive March Unemployment Benefits
06 May 2020
The problem is even worse in Southeastern states like Florida, where fewer than 8% of applicants received benefits. “Congress left the distribution of the benefits to individual states, leaving unemployed Americans to face a ‘hodgepodge of different state rules.”
Wilmer J. Leon III
COVID-19 and America - The Fire This Time
06 May 2020
It is immoral if not criminal for the US to increase sanctions through its “maximum pressure campaigns” against Venezuela, Iran, Cuba and Palestine. “Weaponizing disease for political purposes to bring about regime change is the same as germ warfare and should be considered a crime…
Lauren Smith
Fighting the Invisible Enemy: Imperial Fascism 2020, Not Covid-19
06 May 2020
What could possibly be a more effective way to seal borders, discourage protest, and position the United States into perfect alignment for WWIII? “At minimum, one could convincingly argue that the arrival of COVID-19 is fortuitous for certain economic sectors within the United States.”
Marisa Fuentes
BAR Book Forum: Symposium on Sarah Haley’s "No Mercy Here"
06 May 2020
This is a book about the ideological construction of black women as “non-human” and exploitable for capitalist profit in the making of the New South. “Black women were maligned as non-normative, ‘outside the category woman,’ and sexually deviant.”
Roberto Sirvent, BAR Book Forum Editor
BAR Book Forum: Joshua Dubler and Vincent Lloyd’s “Break Every Yoke”
06 May 2020
The necessary political demand is not that we make better, more humane prisons and jails, but that we abolish prisons and jails altogether. “The neoliberal order that reigned from Reagan through Obama is rapidly coming unglued.”
Sarah Lustbader
US Prisons Are Vectors of Disease
06 May 2020
The penal system remains a source of diseases that spread among prisoners at rates far exceeding those in the communities from which they came. “As black men are disproportionately incarcerated, infectious disease spreads disproportionally in black communities.”
Erica Caines
The Makings of A Capitalist Dystopia
06 May 2020
Colonized people, with a horrific historical connection to both science and medicine in this country, must examine science in service of the state. “In the push to ‘re-open’ the economy, we are seeing many AI-driven technologies become more widely adopted and implemented as a response to COVID-19.”