Tag Archives: Black Agenda Report

Black is Back at the United Antiwar Conference: breaking the Obama Spell

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Black Agenda Report‘s Glen Ford speaking at UNAC in Albany: “A real movement breeds a culture of resistance, a widely held belief that it is right to resist, that it is virtuous to speak truth to power. That culture of resistance is what made Black America the most reliably progressive antiwar demographic in the United States. It was not that black people were smarter than anybody else, we were just less confused. We had a better and clearer idea of who the enemy was.”

Also, here’s a letter from activist lawyer Lynne Stewart, whose sentence was recently extended from two years to ten, for giving assistance to an incarcerated “terrorist.”

A 1930 Spirit of Christmas Past

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Black Agenda Report revisited this Christmas poem by Langston Hughes:

“Merry Christmas”: Published in New Masses (Dec. 1930), p. 4.

Merry Christmas, China,
From the gun-boats in the river,
Ten-inch shells for Christmas gifts,
And peace on earth forever.

Merry Christmas, India,
To Gandhi in his cell,
From righteous Christian England,
Ring out, bright Christmas bell!

Ring Merry Christmas, Africa,
From Cairo to the Cape!
Ring Hallehuiah! Praise the Lord!
(For murder and for rape.)

Ring Merry Christmas, Haiti!
(And drown the voodoo drums—
We’ll rob you to the Christian hymns
Until the next Christ comes

Ring Merry Christmas, Cuba!
(While Yankee domination
Keeps a nice fat president
In a little half-starved nation.)

And to you down-and-outers,
(“Due to economic laws”)
Oh, eat, drink, and be merry
With a bread-line Santa Claus—

While all the world hails Christmas,
While all the church bells sway!
While, better still, the Christian guns
Proclaim this joyous day!

While holy steel that makes us strong
Spits forth a mighty Yuletide song:
SHOOT Merry Christmas everywhere!
Let Merry Christmas GAS the air!

Are you Middle Class?

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Everybody’s Middle Class these days in America! Go to the Dollar Stores and everybody will tell you that they are mainly Middle Class. Go to Walmart and hear more of the same, whether you are in Sam’s Club or at the Walmart slums.

All the military people will also probably claim themselves to be the Great Middle Class, whether lowest grunt or if they be all the way on up. Right, Colin? Right, Ricardo? Right, David? (Petraeus) Yeah, it’s all one and the same, we are all Middle Class in America! Or so THEY say… Welcome to the USA, Where All the Classes are Middle

The ‘Save Darfur’ PR scam

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Alternet today published The Black Agenda Report’s commentary calling the ‘Save Darfur’ a US interventionist PR scam. Ten Reasons to Suspect “Save Darfur” is a PR Scam ‘Humanitarian intervention’ is getting to be a more and more difficult sale for the government to make.

It reminds me even of a new and used car dealership I once ran into. The salesman had this gigantic 3 foot by 2 foot Bible on his desk. Don’t buy it!

And don’t buy that the US government is some how the agent for progressive intervention anywhere around the globe. It just is not. Too bad that it is this way, but it just is.

Want to help the people of the world out? Then fight against giving this country’s government permission to go into other peoples’ territories to run their affairs. The ‘Save Darfur’ campaign is in great part a government funded PR scam that does the complete opposite of that. It wants our government to tell others just what to do, to do it our way, and to punish any of those who get in the way. It is a campaign to provide rationale for military interventionism into important parts of Africa that our corporate government wants to control.

Why?

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Black Americans are getting sick and fed up with the entire racist criminal injustice system of the US. Still fresh in memory is the picture of White cops with guns turning back Blacks trying to cross the Mississippi Bridge to get out of New Orleans. In mind, too, is the new blatantly open use of torture not only of American military held POWs, but also of Black common folk held in US prisons around the country.

Thousands marched against racial profiling this week In D.C., their protest fed by the movement to defend the Jena Six. Why?

Why? is the question that was asked in Miami this week, too, and got a young man shot down by the police there. Why? too another taser death, not just in Canada, but in Miami that same week, this time of a Black man? Why? Black Agenda Report reports these stories of the Miami events. Executed ‘Walking While Black’ in Miami

Why? The answer is simple. We live in a world ruled by corporations run by Whites of privilege. They control and run a police and judicial system run and controlled by Whites of privilege, too. We live in a US privleged White world where a White privileged and dominated system arrests and tortures prisoners of color without any sense of the human indecency of their actions, fed by an even larger White community that cheers this on. We live in a racist US society.

Nothing that much has changed from the past. MLK’s ‘dream’ is still a dream and not any reality. That is the answer to Why?

For Black Americans especially there is no national security under the so-called national security state. Instead, it is a state of criminal injustice Blacks live under and promises of change for the better cannot be fed when all the recent changes have been for the worse. Racial injustice cannot be disappeared, when class injustice is the norm.

Much of Black America, too, seems fed up with the Democrats

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‘Does the Black Congressional Caucus really represent Black America?’ Good question, and Black Agenda Report addresses why they think not. Follow this with ‘A Valley of Buzzwords: Obama’s Soulless Book’ that tears to shreds Obama’s efforts at image making in his recently published book. All the articles at Black Agenda report are consistently worth reading. Much of Black America just ignores the 2 party circus and charade altogether. Black Agenda Report of week 2/7 through 2/13 articulates well why that is so.

Gangster Capitalism

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When we watch the likes of an Alan Dershowitz or a Donald Rumsfield pontificating on the US government’s supposed need to use torture, even as they in the same breath deny that torture is torture or that they are advocating and using it in US prisons and elsewhere…. well… it is a sign that gangster capitalism now reigns supreme.

Other signs can be seen in countries like Mexico, Colombia, and Afghanistan…all puppet friends of the US government, btw, where mafiosos dump dead mutilated bodies daily into the streets victims of the continual drug turf wars. Well that too is another sign that today gangster capitalism is more the norm, than the exception. Too, we see gangster capitalism at work in the cases of Enron and HealthSouth. And remember the US Savings and Loan bailouts of a previous decade that opened the gates to the mafiosos? Billions hauled away by gangster capitalism’s thieves prowling the streets of our country. Gangster capitalism today has penetrated to the highest levels of our country’s political offices. It is not just a US problem. Go ask a Russian.

But the heart of gangster capitalism is ripping off the environment. It is easiest to rip off the commons, and that’s what nature is, the commons. The Pentagon is the leader in this type of gangster capitalism, as it mines, deploys toxins, explodes ordinance, and confiscates entire states and territories for its use everywhere around the planet. Gangster capitalism’s heart, if it has to be said, is a US military toxic waste dump. But the whole world has become that Pentagon dump now.

Here is a look, titled appropriately enough ‘Gangster Capitalism’, at how today’s capitalism is looting our environment. Check it out at Black Agenda Report.