Black Agenda Radio - 1/16/12

Download this episode (right click and save)

Black Agenda Radio - 1/09/12

Obama Would Prefer To Face Most Virulent Right-Wing Opponent

President Obama would prefer that Republicans nominate one of their most right-wing hopefuls “so that the Democrats can move further and further to the right and become completely indistinguishable from the Republican Party,” said political analyst Paul Street. “The further right the enemy they have in the general election, the more they can scare their liberal base.” Street is author of The Empire’s New Clothes: Barack Obama and the Real World of Power.

Both Parties in Flight from Poor People’s Issues

“There has been a bipartisan flight from working people and from poverty,” said Chicago-based labor activist and writer James Thindwa. “The words ‘poor people’ don’t even feature in the political discourse. Both parties are captive to corporate interests. There may be some variance here and there but, fundamentally, they are here to serve capital.” Thindwa is author of the recent In These Times article, “Why Conservatives Can’t Fix Poverty.”

Obama Military Cuts Don’t Lessen War Costs

The administration’s plans to create a leaner military “simply take us back to the very inflated level of 2008 – and that’s not really very much of an achievement,” said Catherine Lutz, editor of The Bases of Power: The Struggle Against U.S. Military Posts. The proposed cuts affect only the “base,” or basic military infrastructure budget. “The war budgets,” such as “the additional trillion dollars allocated for the wars in Iraq in Afghanistan, are not even included in these numbers. Those are off the table for the purposes of these discussions,” said Lutz. “With all the threatening words being exchanged about Iran and the articulated fears about China, we have to worry that there will be a new theater of war before we know it, and then that money will be added on top of” the base military budget.

Drone Warfare Will Lead to Blowback Against U.S.

“We’ve opened up this Pandora’s Box of bombing people all over the world and it’s definitely going to come back on us – blowback,” said Alice Slater, New York director of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation.  “We’re bombing seven countries right now with drones – totally unauthorized by Congress.” The U.S. also pursues policies that discourage nuclear non-proliferation. “If Gaddafi had nuclear weapons, we wouldn’t have bombed Libya. It’s a signal to people on the other end of our aggressive power that they have to protect themselves as best they can.”

New Student Group Against Mass Imprisonment

Students Against Mass Incarceration (SAMI), created early last year at Washington DC’s Howard University, has since expanded to Morgan State University in Baltimore, western Massachusetts, and Columbia University, according to SAMI founder Benjamin Woods. “The prison-industrial complex is a direct outgrowth of the capitalist system,” said Woods, a doctoral candidate. “We want to see people who are most affected” by the repressive apparatus of the state, including political prisoners, providing leadership in the Black community.

P.O.P. Passes Halfway Mark in Newark Protest Marathon

The People’s Organization for Progress (P.O.P.) this week passed the 190-day mark in its daily demonstrations in Newark, New Jersey. “We understood more than a year ago that sporadic protests were not enough,” said P.O.P. chairman Larry Hamm. The grassroots community group has vowed to continue daily demonstrations for at least 381 days, the duration of the 1955 Montgomery, Alabama bus boycott. P.O.P.’s seven core demands include a federal jobs program, an end to U.S. wars abroad, protection of workers’ rights to unionize and bargain, a moratorium on home foreclosures, universal health care, and programs to preserve public education and make college affordable to all.

Download this episode (right click and save)

Black Agenda Radio - 1/02/12

U.S. Waging Two-Prong War of Repression

With the signing of preventive detention legislation, Washington is “upping the stakes, where the United States homeland is now part of this so-called global war on terror,” said Tony Monteiro, professor of African American Studies at Temple University, in Philadelphia. “All of us who are in one way or another in solidarity with the Cuban revolution, with 21st Century socialism in Venezuela, are now at the top of a hit list of ‘terrorist supporters’ who could be arrested an detained indefinitely.” He expects the emergence of a “great global movement that has to oppose this international thrust of finance capital and the Obama administration and the other NATO countries. They have to crush the rising class conflict in the United States and in other western capitalist countries,” said Prof. Monteiro. “So you have this two-sided project What they are proposing is a regime of domestic and global repression, of fascism.”

Blacks Will Vote for Obama, But Without Enthusiasm

Most Blacks will still vote for President Obama this year, “but it will be different, this time,” said Omali Yeshitela, chairman of the Black Is Back Coalition for Social Justice, Peace and Reparations. “Before, people thought they had a real champion who was going to make a difference in the lives of Black people, but it didn’t happen. We’re not going to see the same kind of enthusiasm for Obama this time around.” In 2008, “we heard many of our Black leftist friends and many nationalists who were predicting that if Obama didn’t get elected, we would see a police state – but people have experienced that with Obama. We were told there would be economic catastrophe, but that has occurred even with Obama there.” In a lot of ways, said the Black Is Back chairman, “Obama has outdone Bush,” including “the declaration of the right to kill even U.S. citizens any time he wants to.”

UNAC Conference Against Preventive Detention

Preventive detention without trial “is the most serious blow to the Bill of Rights that we have experienced, and it’s no accident that it is occurring while” the U.S. is ”expanding military adventures abroad,” said Chris Gavreau, a spokesperson for UNAC, the United National Anti-War Coalition. “The language is so broad, they will use these laws against anyone that they seriously think is a threat to their ability to implement foreign policy.” UNAC will hold a conference March 23-25 in Stanford, Connecticut, to plan “a broad campaign to fight around indefinite detention” and other civil liberties violations.

For Whom The Whistle Blows

“While there is still a myth of freedom of speech, journalists’ voices worldwide are being drowned out” by imprisonment of those “that speak truth to power,” said veteran whistleblower Marsha Coleman-Adebayo. “We have a state-run media in this country – what we call the corporate media – that is influenced more by corporate pressures and by money and politics, than by a search for truth,” said the former Environmental Protection Agency official whose battle with the agency led to landmark protections for federal employees that speak out. “Journalists as whistleblowers, whistleblowers as journalists – at some point it would be lovely to see those communities merge.”

UN Force Should Leave Haiti

The United Nations has failed to acknowledge its responsibility for the cholera deaths of 6,000 Haitians and the sickening a half a million others, despite the fact that the world body’s “own report is the most persuasive evidence of the UN’s culpability,” said Fran Quigley, director of the Health and Human Rights Clinic at the University of Indiana Law School. Quigley recently returned from a fact-find trip to Haiti, where “a lot of people think its long past time for the peacekeepers to leave, even before this deadly cholera outbreak.” Haitians should have their rights protected, including from the United Nations,” said the law professor.

Download this episode (right click and save)