What Would A Real Discussion on Reparations Look Like? Have We Ever Had One?

Submitted by Bruce A. Dixon on

By BAR managing editor Bruce A. Dixon

What would a serious discussion on reparations look like? Will anybody ever come up with a realistic roadmap to get there, or is reparations talk just that –- all talk? Is reparations an answer to class politics, or is it the politics of a particular class? And what if we fought for millions of new green jobs, rolling back the prison state, guaranteed annual income, decent housing and free education but didn't call it “reparations”?

Ethnic Cleansing: The Ultimate Environmental Racism

Submitted by Glen Ford on

by BAR executive editor Glen Ford

What happened in Flint was not a simple case of environmental racism, but ethnic cleansing by lethal means. The ethnic cleansing of the cities – otherwise known as gentrification – is an existential threat to Black people in the United States. Flint signals that the Black Removers are capable of anything in their quest to create cities that are “non-Black by design.”

Freedom Rider: Flint, Michigan and Democracy

Submitted by Margaret Kimberley on

by BAR editor and senior columnist Margaret Kimberley

Disaster capitalists demand – and get – government subsidies to carry out their crimes. However, the poor victims of corporate mayhem can’t count on their elected officials to demand even modest compensation. Flint, Michigan’s mayor “could have demanded full restitution for property owners and free health care for residents poisoned by the water supply.” Instead, she “acted like the supplicants that all black politicians end up becoming.”

The EPA Blame Game and the Flint Lead Atrocity: Criminal Prosecutions Must Follow

Submitted by Marsha Coleman-... on

by EPA editor and columnist Dr. Marsha Coleman-Adebayo and Kevin Berends

The law is clear: once officials at the federal Environmental Protection Agency were made aware of hazardous material in Flint, Michigan’s water, they were required by statute to take action to remove it. The chief of the EPA, as well as the regional administrator, failed to comply with the law. “Why hasn’t the president...recommended them both to the Attorney General for criminal prosecution?”

The Clintons: “We Came, We Stole, Haitians Died”

Submitted by Glen Ford on

A Black Agenda Radio commentary by executive editor Glen Ford

The Haitian people’s furious resistance to yet another fraudulent presidential election has scuttled U.S. plans to replace “Sweet Mickey” Martelly with another flunky named the “Banana Man.” The aborted fraud is a reminder that Secretary of State Clinton was an imperial bully who rigged the previous presidential election in Haiti and stole the country blind, along with her accomplice and husband, Bill. Those chickens may yet come home to roost.

 
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McKesson's Colbert Appearance is the Direction Imperialism Wants for the Black Lives Matter Movement

Submitted by Danny Haiphong on

by Danny Haiphong

DeRay McKesson, the twitterist whose followers have met twice with Hillary Clinton, appeared on Stephen Colbert’s show to conduct what looked like another of Campaign Zero’s “racial sensitivity sessions.” Outrageously, McKesson has compared charter schools to the Black Panther Party’s free breakfast program. He relies on the very architects of the racialized order to keep “his career prospects safe and power snugly in the hands of the oppressor.”

Adolph Reed on the Folly of Reparations, Steffie Woolhandler on the Inadequacies of Obamacare

Submitted by Doug Henwood on

by Doug Henwood

On an indispensable episode of Doug Henwood's weekly Behind the News on KPFA Radio, Adolph Reed dispels some of the black smoke around reparations and examines the bona fides of Ta Nehesi Coates. Dr. Steffie Woolandler, co-founder of Physicians for a National Health Care Plan dives into the many inadequacies of Obamacare, and the prospects for single payer.

 
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Uganda: Upcoming Elections and Ongoing U.S. Influence: An Interview with Milton Allimadi

Submitted by Ann Garrison on

Ann Garrison's picture

by Ann Garrison

President Gen. Yoweri Museveni, Washington’s dependable hit-man in Africa, has been in office for 30 years. Museveni could rig next month’s elections, as he has previously done. However, “even the U.S. is aware that Museveni is a spent force and that his major concern is how to protect his family, himself, and the ill-gotten gains” of his allies. As usual, opponents’ campaign workers are turning up dead.

The Blood of the Earth: Agriculture, Land Rights, and Haitian History

Submitted by Ricot Jean-Pierre on

by Ricot Jean-Pierre

This month marks the sixth anniversary of the earthquake that killed hundreds of thousands of Haitians. The survivors face the aftershocks of disaster capitalism, in which the Haitian elite and foreign corporations – backed by the US government, World Bank, and Inter-American Development Bank – are grabbing lands for extraction and mega-development projects. The author tells how inequitable control of land has devastated Haitians throughout history.

Black Agenda Radio for Week of January 25, 2016

Submitted by Nellie Bailey a... on

Dismantling Capitalism and Imperialism

This month’s conference on the Black Radical Tradition, held at Temple University, in Philadelphia, was an historic gathering of 21st century Black “anti-capitalists and anti-imperialists,” said Dr. Anthony Monteiro, one of the organizers of the event. “Not only were we talking about a different foreign policy, but about dismantling the military-industrial and police state in the U.S.,” said Monteiro. He envisions “massive civil disobedience that will take place over extended periods of time, where you make those who benefit from the police state and the military-industrial complex pay a price.”

Flint Takes U.S. Ethnic Cleansing to a New Level

The lead poisoning of Flint, Michigan’s water system is “a crime against humanity – part of the ongoing story of ethnic cleansing in the United States,” said Black Agenda Report editor and columnist Dr. Marsha Coleman-Adebayo, who two decades ago blew the whistle on corruption and racism at the Environmental Protection Agency. Dr. Coleman-Adebayo said the EPA “completely and totally abandoned its mission” to safeguard Flint’s water quality, and the agency’s regional administrator “should be sent to jail,” instead of just being forced to resign.

Uhuru! Sign the Genocide Petition

Despite frigid weather, the Uhuru Movement set up tent encampments in Jackson, Mississippi, New York City, Chicago and Washington, DC, where the United Nations has been holding hearings on human rights violations against Black people in the United States. International People’s Democratic Uhuru Movement president Herdosia Bentum said “this cold is not as brutal as the system that has been on our backs for 600 years.” Uhuru activists are collecting signatures on a petition charging the U.S. with genocide against Blacks.

Campus Tour: No More Stolen Lives

The Stop Mass Incarceration Network, founded five years ago by Carl Dix and Dr. Cornel West, is holding regional conferences in cities around the country “to forge the kind of movement that can stop the horror of police getting away with murder in this country, said Dix. The gatherings in New York, Charlotte, Chicago, San Francisco and Los Angeles will put the finishing touches on a “No More Stolen Lives” tour of college campuses, to bring more students into movement politics.

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Ta Nehesi Coates' Bernie Sanders Brain Fart Isn't Even About Reparations

Submitted by Bruce A. Dixon on

A Black Agenda Radio commentary by Bruce A. Dixon

When favored spokesnegro Ta Nehesi Coates urgently warns us that Bernie Sanders doesn't support reparations, but doesn't mention that his presumed candidate Hillary doesn't either, or that the Green Party candidate Jill Stein does, it's easy to see Coates doesn't really want to talk about reparations.  Coates just objects to the popularity of socialism, and wants to spread the old lie that socialism and socialists ignore the workings of white supremacy.

 
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Poisoning Black Cities

Submitted by Glen Ford on

by BAR executive editor Glen Ford

They emptied New Orleans. Now they have poisoned Flint, Michigan. The corporate campaign to ethnically cleanse U.S. cities knows no bounds. Michigan’s emergency financial manager law is “part of Wall Street’s tool kit to starve, bulldoze, redline, over-price, oppressively police, and even poison Black people out of the urban centers.”

Freedom Rider: Return of the “Happy” Slave

Submitted by Margaret Kimberley on

by BAR editor and senior columnist Margaret Kimberley

How does a writer make slavery a light and breezy read for children? By presenting a story that’s comforting to white bosses at corporate publishing houses, that’s how. The same racial hierarchy that prevailed under the slavocracy calls the shots in today’s book selling industry. The rules haven’t changed: don’t make Mr. Charlie angry, or hurt Miss Ann’s feelings.

Atlantic City Residents to Lose Their Water – and What’s Left of Their Right to Vote

Submitted by Glen Ford on

A Black Agenda Radio commentary by executive editor Glen Ford

New Jersey Republican Gov. Chris Christy “must have reasoned that nobody important would stand in the way of whatever he wanted to do to Atlantic City.” He’s stolen the residents right to vote, and is preparing to privatize the fire department. But top Democrats want to privatize the city’s water, too – and the local United-HERE union leader agrees. Black, Latino and poor people have no rights – and few allies – in corporate-ruled America.

 
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Flint River Poison and Governor Snyder’s New Clothes

Submitted by Frank X Murphy on

by Frank X Murphy

The whole world knows that Flint River water stinks and is full of lead. But, it is “the smell of Gov. Rick Snyder’s unprecedented, radically anti-democratic and cunningly racist ‘emergency management’ statutes” that has killed every vestige of democracy for cities like Flint. The great crime was to unite “all local government powers in a single, totally unaccountable gubernatorial appointee with the power to violate local laws and contracts.”

Behind the Lead Curtain

Submitted by Raymond Nat Turner on

by BAR poet in residence Raymond Nat Turner

I.
The scent of sulfur, scandalous Skippy-Gate brew—
With an arresting officer; some shit ain’t neurosurgery
or rocket science—ain’t as nuanced, or complicated as
Some claim.
Negroz are in the Way Back Machine—a moral morass—
Slipping into darkness at the speed of light, since the
‘08 date, November deal, with the Devil…

Power Ball and the American Psychosis of Capitalism

Submitted by Danny Haiphong on

by Danny Haiphong

When capitalism is sinking, the working class is drowning, and flails about for a life raft – like Power Ball. “Workers, especially the increasing numbers thrown out of the labor force, must possess a strong hope of individual gain within the confines of the capitalist system.” Power Ball and other gambling vices give them that hope – which relieves pressure on the system’s big winners: rich capitalists.

An Unbroken Line: New Afrikan Resistance from 1619 to the Present

Submitted by Kali Akuno on

by Kali Akuno

The current upsurge in Black “movement”-type politics has been in the making for a decade. Katrina “reawakened the Black radical imagination” in 2005. Like a wave, the momentum built through the Jena 6 campaign and the Justice for Oscar Grant and Trayvon Martin actions, culminating in the 2014 rebellion in Ferguson, Missouri. “This is a new moment where our people are learning more in a few days then they typically do in decades.”

MLK and the Black Misleaders

Submitted by Bryan K. Bullock on

by Bryan K. Bullock

The current crop of Black “leaders” ceremonially endorse Dr. Martin Luther King’s life and works – but he would not vouch for theirs. “They betray King’s legacy in their explicit and implicit support of U.S. imperialism and wars by condoning and making excuses for the current President’s rampant militarism in Libya, Syria, Afghanistan, Africa and the drone assassinations of Americans and of civilians in Pakistan, Somalia and Yemen.”

The Massive Discrepancies Between Media Coverage of Mythical Crack Babies and Opiate-Dependent Babies

Submitted by Kali Holloway on

by Kali Holloway

Three decades ago, hysteria about “crack-babies” helped launch another wave of racial vilification and oppression. Today, most new drug addicts are white, and “we have not witnessed the pervasive vilification or scaremongering of drug-addicted mothers and their babies that we saw during the crack-baby era, which helped drive the anti-black sentiment at the heart of issues from welfare reform to mass incarceration.”

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