A Republican Meltdown Won’t Make the Democrats Better

by BAR executive editor Glen Ford

The impending breakup of the Republican Party will not create more favorable conditions for Black and progressive electoral politics. Instead, it will compel the Democrats to build a “big tent” party, after the convention this summer. The strategy will “push Blacks and progressives back to the margins, smothering them with newly categorized ‘moderates’ who, before Donald Trump’s intervention, were Republicans.”

Turkey and Europe: Human Trafficking on a Scale Not Seen Since the Atlantic Slave Trade

A Black Agenda Radio commentary by executive editor Glen Ford

The agreement between Europe and Turkey to keep millions of refugees from entering Europe is a deal between devils. Europe, which has fattened itself on other people’s lands and blood for half a millennium, is allowed to wall out the “invaders.” Meanwhile, Turkey “springs its vast protections racket trap – agreeing to insulate Europe from further incursions from the formerly colonized peoples.” A human trafficking and protection scheme from Hell.

 
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Freedom Rider: Bernie Sanders and the End of the Democratic Party

by BAR editor and senior columnist Margaret Kimberley

If Bernie Sanders supporters are serious about making fundamental change, they should start a new party, one that does more than run in billion dollar elections every couple of years. Hillary Clinton’s impending primaries victory “is an opportunity to break with a system which is incapable of being truly democratic.” The alternative is to “do nothing but sulk in the event of a Clinton nomination or try once more to reform the unreformable.”

The “Negro Whisperer” from 1926 to 2016: Seasonal Workers

by BAR editor and columnist Dr. Marsha Coleman-Adebayo

MSNBC has decided that its stable of in-house Black Democrats is no longer in season, and can be discarded. Melissa Harris-Perry is hurt. She and others specializing in interpreting Black folks to white folks (and vice versa) are being pushed aside. “Harris-Perry believed, like so many before her, that the quality of her intellect could compete against a corrupt and racist system that only recognizes power, possession and ancestry.”

Countering the Confederate “Spring”: the Assault on Black Political Power in Jackson, MS

by the Jackson Human Rights Institute and Cooperation Jackson

Majority Black Jackson, Mississippi is about to be stripped of control of its most valuable assets by a Republican legislature. Everywhere, white capital is determined to retain their control over all the capital accumulating processes that define the local political economy. To fight back, “we believe will be the most effective is a mass, multi-faceted, non-compliant civil disobedient movement determined to engage in a sustained campaign of economic warfare.”

“All Lives Matter”: More Stupid White Noise

by Paul Street

Mountains of statistics testify to the national disregard for Black lives. But white supremacists fire back that Blacks have “brought it on themselves” and victimize their own people through “Black-on-Black” crime, ignoring the core reality that “intra-Back violence takes places within a White-Imposed context of racially concentrated poverty, joblessness and hyper-segregation that White America simply refuses to acknowledge.”

Huey Newton: A Revolutionary Hero

by Danny Haiphong

The film that does justice to Huey P. Newton and the Black Panther Party has yet to be created. Stanley Nelson’s PBS depiction “is riddled with distortion and inaccuracy” and virtually ignores the party’s enormous “contributions to the historic struggle for socialist liberation” and internationalist solidarity. “Newton envisioned that Black America would work together with a community of nations to develop a new world free of exploitation.”

Lead in Flint Water, Mold in Detroit Schools: An Anatomy of a Free Market Disaster


by David Bacon

Detroit’s schools have been laid waste, and democracy in every majority Black city has been destroyed, as have the brain cells of children in Flint. “Michigan cities have been used as a laboratory for market-based policies and the most extreme forms of austerity.” Water, even unleaded, is unaffordable to poor people in the state’s largest metropolis. Michigan proves that the rule of Capital is lethal.

Oil Price Manipulation and the Global Capitalist Crisis

by Caleb Maupin

The truly rich people – the ones who really run the capitalist world – are not the household names, or “the Illuminati, the Freemasons, or some secret society.” The bankers and big oil – the Lords of Capital – give the orders. “The alternative is when rational human beings run the economy, and force it to function for the good of society.”

The Coup That Set Ghana and Africa 50 Years Back

by Charles Quist-Adade

Nkrumah wanted to industrialize Ghana within a generation, and everything was on course until the Americans and their British cousins used some disgruntled and self-serving Ghanaian soldiers to stage that terrible coup on 24 February 1966. It was a major setback, not only for Ghana but the whole of Africa!

The Trump Movement: Not as Fringe as Some Might Think

by Solomon Comissiong

Donald Trump didn’t invent his racist followers – “U.S. society did.” Although “his rallies are like a gathering of racist village idiots,” they make up a huge proportion of the white population. “Even if he were to lose this presidential race, his followers will still be pervasive.”

Remembering Mama Africa Miriam Makeba

Remembering Mama Africa Miriam Makeba

Last week marked the 86th birthday of the late South African singer and Miriam Makeba, known to millions worldwide as “Mama Africa.” She “used her voice as a weapon in the struggle against apartheid” in her native land and came to personify the global African Liberation Movement. Napoleon Bonapart, said Makeba, was a “White” Chaka Zulu.

Why Are Black Elites in the Caribbean and the US Rewriting the Legacy of Walter Rodney?

By Dr. Matthew Quest

The current government of Guyana, along with black elites across the Caribbean, and black U.S. apologists for Obama are rewriting the legacy of Walter Rodney to suit their own purposes, The Rodney they celebrate in statues and symposiums only vaguely resembles the man who walked among and organized students and workers against some of these same black elites in his day.

Black Agenda Radio for Week of March 7, 2016

New FBI Guidelines for Targeting Classroom “Radicals”

The nation’s teachers will soon be getting revised FBI guidelines on how to spot “radicalized” students. “The modern FBI ‘counter-violence and extremism’ program is directed primarily at the Muslim community, right now,” said Michael German, a former FBI agent who is now a fellow at the Brennan Center for Justice. “But the conceptual part of it applies to any ideology, and in the past has applied to civil rights organizing, anti-war organizing and many other types of legitimate social advancement, in the name of protecting security.”

Executed for Sleeping While Black

Kisha Michael, a 31 year-old mother of three sons, and Marquitan Sandlin, a 32 year-old father of four daughters, were shot to death by an Inglewood, California, SWAT team after being discovered asleep in a car at 3:00 in the morning. “If they get away with this, they’ll say, ‘In two months we’ll go out there and kill us another couple,” said Ms. Michael’s aunt, Virginia Sewell. “It makes me feel really threatened because it seems as though they’re laughing about it.”

Were Marquitan and Kisha executed for failing to wake up? “Yeah, and that they were Black,” said Keith Jackson, of the Stop Mass Incarceration Network, who helped the victims’ families organize protests. “I say that because this is racially targeted throughout the country. It is really like a genocidal onslaught.”

Don’t Put it All on Trump: White Supremacy and Capitalism in Crisis

Beginning in the 1960s, according to Dubois scholar and Black Radical Organizing Committee member Dr. Anthony Monteiro, the Republicans methodically reorganized their party “based upon one ideological position: white supremacy.” Now, with both the capitalist economy and white supremacy in crisis, “working class and lower middle class Republicans are in an existential crisis.” Monteiro believes a “more positive rebellion” is occurring among Democrats. “The Black Left has to begin to shape and give guidance to a rebellion that will include Black people, as well as whites and Latinos and others.”

Why Europe Owes Africa and the Americas for its Wealth and “Civilization”

Although both presidents Bush and Obama did their best to sabotage United Nations conferences against racism, in Durban, South Africa, in 2001 and 2009, the “Durban process” still lives, and its 15th anniversary will be commemorated in the Netherlands, later this month. Veteran activist and BAR editor and columnist Ajamu Baraka, a founder of the U.S. Human Rights Network, will lead a panel at the event. “We said that ‘Europe’ was, literally, a creation of Africa and the America’s; that the hegemony of Europe was a consequence of the invasion of the Americas, the subjugation and attempted extermination of native people, and the importation and exploitation of African labor,” said Baraka. “That was the foundation for Europe’s ‘civilization’ and capitalism.” The analysis formed “the basis for the demand for reparations in terms of relationships between the states in the North and the various states in the African Diaspora.” That’s why the Europeans, Americans and Israelis undermined and boycotted Durban I and II.

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Trash the Party: One Wing of the Duoploy Almost Down, One to Go

by BAR executive editor Glen Ford

The “non-racist” Republicans (as if such a thing exists) are threatening to bail out of the Party rather than share it with Donald Trump. Can Bernie Sanders’ Democratic followers share a Party with the corporate shill, Hillary Clinton? “Once the two-party arrangement has been fractured on the Right – as has already begun – it will likely splinter on the Left, as well.”

Freedom Rider: Bye Melissa

by BAR editor and columnist Margaret Kimberley

When Melissa Harris-Perry publicly announced her resignation from MSNBC, the cable network that serves as the Democratic Party's house organ, she vowed not to be tokenized or silenced. But of course, the rich owners can silence whoever they want with the flip of a switch, just as Harris-Perry tried “to silence black people” and Edward Snowden “if doing so suited the purposes of the system in general or the Obama White House in particular.”

High Corporate Crimes In Michigan Must be Terminated with Extreme Prejudice

A Black Agenda Radio commentary by executive editor Glen Ford

“Under corporate rule, high finance is the motive for the highest of crimes, while the exercise of free speech and assembly and other fundamental democratic rights are criminalized.” That’s why two teachers may lose their democratic liberties for defending Detroit school children, next week, while a governor and his underlings commit crimes against humanity with impunity. The script of justice must be flipped.

 
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Did the People Who Took Home Oscars Really Deserve Them, Given How Biased the Process Was?

 

by Maya Rockeymoore

The people who control the selection of artists and project teams for Hollywood films  are 96 percent white and 87 percent male. They are not smarter or more creative than the rest of us, but their worldview dominates the mass culture of the planet. Their “product” is “effectively limiting the ability of our nation to form a true cultural democracy that validates the diverse experiences and views of all of its people.”

Yes, I Said “National Liberation”

by Robin D.G. Kelley 

Peace is not just the absence of violent warfare; peace is justice: No Justice – No Peace. In Palestine and in the U.S., what we seek is a new and better world, not just a cessation of armed hostilities. So, “How did we move from a solidarity firmly rooted in the commonalities of resistance to one based almost entirely on the commonalities of oppression?”

What is America doing in the South China Sea?

by Cynthia McKinney

Washington gives endless lip service to notions of democracy and the rule of law, while relentlessly pursuing global domination. “The US has embarked upon a strategy of containing the rise of Russia and China, rolling back any gains made by states friendly with them and willing to go against the neoliberal grain, and doing this by alternative means without overt or ‘hot’ war.”

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