Black Agenda Radio

Black Agenda Radio - 03.23.15

“Liberal” Israeli Zionists Hoped to Prolong the Farce of Negotiations

Had the “liberal” Zionist Union defeated Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in last week’s elections, they hoped to “force the Palestinians back to the table for some more endless negotiations” and thus “reverse the shift in public opinion that has emerged from the last few years of Netanyahu,” said BAR editor and columnist Ajamu Baraka. Netanyahu’s declaration that he will never agree to a Palestinian state lays bare Israel’s colonialist intentions and long history of duplicity.

Hillary’s Missing Emails Hide Her and Bill’s Haiti Corruption

Protesters from the Committee to Mobilize Against Dictatorship in Haiti demonstrated at Clinton family headquarters, in Manhattan, last Thursday. The former Secretary of State kept her emails under a private server – and deleted tens of thousands of them – to hide details of the Clintons’ corrupt financial dealings in Haiti, said organizer Dahoud Andre. “We see that the Obama administration is covering up for Hillary, but the more they try to protect Hillary, the more they get themselves covered in that stuff.” Sec. Clinton’s brother was named a board member of a corporation prospecting for gold in Haiti.

In Johannesburg and Ferguson, Black Lives Matter

The United Front and Democratic Left Front of South Africa and the nation’s largest trade union marched on the U.S. consulate in Johannesburg in solidarity with the Black Lives Movement. “After 50 years of apartheid system racism, we understand fully what it means to be on the receiving end of racist police brutality,” said Trevor Ngwane, national secretary of the Democratic Left Front. Blacks have also suffered brutality under the Black-led African National Congress government, which was complicit in the 2012 massacre of 34 mine workers at Marikana. “The present government is actually dancing to the tune of the big capitalists,” said Ngwane.

Mumia: “Homicides of Black People are Always “Justifiable”

Speaking from Frackville State Prison, in Pennsylvania, political prisoner Mumia Abu Jamal recalled the night in 1969 when Chicago police, aided by the FBI, killed 21 year-old Panther leader Fred Hampton in his sleep. A grand jury called it “justifiable homicide” – just as grand juries would rule the deaths of Michael Brown and Eric Garner justifiable, 45 years later.

Prison Radio Targeted

Kerry “Shakaboona” Marshall, serving a life sentence in Pennsylvania’s Rockview State Prison, said prison authorities are disrupting inmate telephone access to Prison Radio, where he – like Mumia – is a correspondent. “What the Pennsylvania Department of Corrections is doing is effectively preventing 54,999 prisoners from calling Prison Radio to express their views” – a violation of their freedom of speech.

Tivoli Gardens Victims Demand Reparations

In May of 2010, Jamaican security forces killed at least 73 people in a siege of Tivoli Gardens, and then looted the Kingston apartment complex. Journalist Lloyd Aguilar has directed a video of survivors’ demands for reparations. Two of Nadine Sutherland’s nephews were gunned down after soldiers ordered them to run from her apartment. “I never saw them again until I identified [their bodies] on the computer,” she said.

Daughter of Hit Squad Victim Blames Rwanda’s Paul Kagame

Rwandan exile leader Col. Patrick Karegeya, a former high official in Paul Kagame’s Rwandan military dictatorship, was gunned down on New Years Eve, 2013, in South Africa – one of many dissidents to meet a similar fate. His daughter, Portia Karegeya, told Phil Taylor, of CIUT radio, in Toronto, Canada: “Once he and his colleagues formed a formal opposition party, it was pretty much written in stone that your life is under threat.”

Black Agenda Radio - 03.16.15

Rand Paul is Ally in Fight to Repeal Patriot Act

Congress will consider a bill to completely repeal the Patriot Act, which is up for renewal, this spring. President Obama campaigned on a platform to rein in U.S. intelligence agencies, but “will soon leave Washington in even worse shape than he found it” in terms of civil liberties, said Shahid Buttar, executive director of the Bill of Rights Defense Committee. Buttar said GOP presidential hopeful Sen. Rand Paul and elements of the Tea Party are more willing than most Democrats to stand up to the CIA and NSA.

A Multi-Generational Movement

“We need to create an intergenerational dialogue between those who represent the older movement and those who are representing the newer movement,” said Nyle Fort, a young minister from Newark, New Jersey, and contributor to the latest issue of the journal Socialism and Democracy. The journal is sponsor of a public forum on “Mass Incarceration, Police Violence and Political Imprisonment” at the Malcolm X and Betty Shabazz Center in New York City, March 20.

Mumia: What Was “Unsaid In Selma”

“Selma is a vivid example of an evil that still lives with us: that of police immunity for their violence,” said Mumia Abu Jamal. President Obama’s speech at the 50th anniversary ceremonies in Selma was a “masterwork” of oratory, said the nation’s best known political prisoner. The president “could have addressed police immunity, but that would have shattered his ‘we’re all better’” off than we used to be speech.

A 20-Year Cap on Prison Terms

No one should serve more than 20 years in prison, no matter what the crime, said Marc Mauer, executive director of The Sentencing Project. About 3,000 people sit on death rows in the U.S., while 160,000 are serving life sentences – comprising one out of every nine inmates, said Mauer. Sentences are a lot shorter in Europe, where “some countries have found life sentences to be unconstitutional, and those that still maintain it generally have only a few dozen people serving those kind of terms,” he said.

Obama goes Reagan on Venezuela

President Obama last week invoked the same language against Venezuela that President Ronald Reagan deployed against Nicaragua, in the Eighties, when the U.S. waged a proxy war against that country. In imposing economic sanctions against seven Venezuelan officials, Obama declared the country an “extraordinary threat” to the national security of the United States. Obama is attempting, like President George Bush, “to inoculate Latin America from the contagion that Venezuela represents in terms of social and political change,” said Miguel Tinker Sala, professor of history and Latin American Studies at Pomona College, in Claremont, California. However, all of Latin America has denounced U.S. sanctions against Venezuela. Mark Weisbrot, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, said the U.S. foreign policy establishment doesn’t under “that the hemisphere has changed drastically in the last 15 years, and is truly independent of the United States for the first time in 150 years.”

Black Agenda Radio - 03.09.15

Ferguson Activist: Holder Should “Go Quietly Into the Dark”

A U.S. Justice Department report accepts the St. Louis County prosecutor’s conclusion that Michael Brown didn’t put his hands up before officer Darren Wilson put a bullet in Brown’s brain – and, therefore, Wilson cannot be indicted on civil rights charges. Only a “perfect murder” would convince Holder to act, said Taurean Russell, a leader of Hands Up United, in Ferguson, Missouri. “They want a perfect victim. His hands have to be all the way up – a perfect death, a perfect killing, and you’re never gonna get that,” said Russell. What about outgoing Attorney General Eric Holder’s legacy? “He should go quietly off into the dark.”

New Yorkers Need Less Law Enforcement

Bill Bratton, New York City’s police commissioner, wants to hire 1,000 more officers. But there are already too many cops busying themselves arresting Black and brown people for minor offenses, said Josmar Trujillo, of New Yorkers Against Bratton, which favors redirecting resources to improving conditions in poor neighborhoods. Police are “harassing and ticketing us, they’re criminalizing us en masse,” said Trujillo, “We don’t want more copse, we want to move away from law enforcement” under the slogan, “Strong Communities Make Police Obsolete.”

Robert Gangi, of New York’s Police Reform Organizing Project, called Bratton’s “Broken Windows” policing philosophy “a brazenly racist practice.” Individual rogue cops are not the problem, he said: “It’s the system.”

Voices from the Gulag

Lawyers for Mumia Abu Jamal and other Pennsylvania prison inmates won the right to pursue their challenge to the state’s so-called Revictimization Relief Act, which would effectively silence the voices of those who make crime victims feel “mental anguish.” If allowed to prevail, the law could shut down Prison Radio and its roster of inmate correspondents. “We cannot cover the prison story, which is one of the biggest stories in America, without those first-person, on-the-ground voices,” said Prison Radio director Noelle Hanrahan.

Mumia: Americans “Feed on Fear”

Since 9/ll, “a kind of madness erupted in the country,” said political prisoner Mumia Abu Jamal, in a commentary for Prison Radio. “Newscasts have become fearcasts, as government and media converge to sow dragons’ teeth of fear into the minds of millions. It grows, eating us, as we eat it – and we are still not full.”

Dubois Blacklisted at Temple African American Studies

The model for liberatory Black Studies was created by W.E.B. Dubois at the turn of the 20th century, said Duboisian scholar and activist Dr. Tony Monteiro. However, under chairman Molefi Asante, Temple University’s African American Studies Department no longer teaches Dubois’ works, on the grounds that “he was not Afro-centric, he was a Marxist,” said Monteiro. Asante fired Monteiro last year, and wants to change the program’s name to Department of Africology.

Black Agenda Radio - 03.02.15

Triumph for Internet Neutrality

The Federal Communications Commission last week ruled that the Internet should be regulated like a public utility, with no fast or slow traffic lanes. “The Verizons and Comcasts of the world wanted to create a class system on the Internet,” said Kevin Zeese, of Popular Resistance. Far from opening the way for a government “takeover” of the Internet, “this is more like the First Amendment for the Internet, where people have freedom of speech and equal access.”

Black Self-Determination Requires Control of Police

The Black Is Back Coalition for Social Justice, Peace and Reparations has issued a call for Black community control of police. “We need to have the ability to hire, fire, train, set standards of behavior, fund, defund and establish the role of this force, so that it becomes a part of the fabric of the community, itself,” said chairman Omali Yeshitela. Control of police is a right of self-determination, he said.

Trayvon Martin Case Closed

Three years after George Zimmerman killed Black teenager Trayvon Martin, the U.S. Justice Department has leaked that it will not bring federal charges against the vigilante. “The feds are held out as that dangling thing that will give you justice after you’ve just been punched in the gut by the local cops,” said Carl Dix, of the Stop Mass Incarceration Network. “But, Malcolm told us that “the federal foxes cannot be relied on to deal with the injustice that the local wolves are bringing down on you.” The whole system needs to be dismantled.

No Quick Fix in Movement-Building

Kevin Alexander Gray, the Columbia, South Carolina activist and author who edited Killing Trayvons: An Anthology of American Violence, cautions that it takes time to build a movement. “The police are about introducing people into the criminal justice system, where they are tracked all their lives,” said Gray. “It’s about making people cower to power.” Building a sustainable movement to ensure that Black lives really matter, is a process. “It’s going to take a little bit longer than just two or three years,” said Gray.

No Justice in Benton Harbor

Rev. Edward Pinkney, the Benton Harbor, Michigan, activist who was sentenced to 2 ½ to 10 years in prison for allegedly tampering with an elections petition, said judges and prosecutors must be made to answer for their crimes against Black people. “In Berrien County, they have one job: to send every single Black person to prison,” said Pinkney, now housed at the state prison in Marquette. “In the Sixties, it was called Negro Removal. In Bosnia, it was called ethnic cleansing.” Pinkney incurred the wrath of police and prosecutors when he resisted the Whirlpool Corporation’s gentrification efforts in mostly Black Benton Harbor.

Denver Cops Kill Transgender Latino Youth

 

Black Agenda Radio - 02.23.15

U.S. and Europeans Seek Control of Nigeria

Boko Haram’s jihadist rebellion in northern Nigeria has caused “the fracturing of the Nigerian body politic,” making the country more vulnerable to manipulation by the United States and European powers, said Eric Draitser, a political analyst and publisher of the web site StopImperialism.com. “Nigeria is by far the most dynamic economy in Africa.” Therefore, “it is a major prize for the United States and the European powers,” said Draitser.

Rwandan Dictator Fears Loss of Immunity

Paul Kagame’s government allows “no freedom of movement, no freedom of association,” and “has massacred Rwandan Hutu refugees” in Congo, said Paul Rusesabagina, the real-life hero played by actor Don Cheadle in the movie Hotel Rwanda. The movie portrayed Kagame’s forces as the good guys, but Rusesabagina, now in exile, tells a different story. Kagame is trying to remain in power past constitutional limits because he fears indictment by foreign courts as soon as he loses presidential immunity, said Rusesabagina, in an interview on the Taylor Report, CIUT Radio, Toronto, Canada.

U.S. Helped Create ISIS “Monster”

What we see in the Middle East, today, “is the product of two and a half centuries of European and American intrusion” into the Arab and Muslim world, said Jennifer Lowenstein, who teaches Middle East Studies at the University of Wisconsin, at Madison. ISIS is “a Frankenstein’s monster that the U.S. helped create.” Lowenstein, who has lived and worked for many years in the region, said the U.S. is “becoming a pariah nation, despised by almost every other country in the world.”

Proposed Limits on Solitary Confinement in New Jersey

Atty. Jean Ross, a member of the Newark-based People’s Organization for Progress, testified recently in favor of legislation that would bar solitary confinement for prisoners under 21, people with mental illness, and pregnant women. The bill would “require that anyone in solitary confinement be reviewed every day by a clinician,” to monitor their mental and physical condition.

The Worst “Crap Hole” Among Pennsylvania’s Prisons

Prisoners rate Frackville State Prison as “a crap hole” and “perhaps the worst” facility in the state’s prison system, said inmate Bryant Arroyo, in a report to Prison Radio. Arroyo calls Frackville an “anonymous fiefdom” where “the guards seem to find great pride, even honor, in perpetrating their anti-prisoner culture” of “unrestrained authority, separate from the state correctional system.” Frackville is also home to Mumia Abu Jamal, the nation’s best known political prisoner.

Black Agenda Radio - 02.16.15

Black Agenda Radio - 02.09.15

Black Agenda Radio - 02.02.15

NYPD Creates Machine Gun-Toting Anti-Protest/Terror Unit

New York City police commissioner William Bratton announced formation of a 350-officer, machine gun-equipped Strategic Response Group unit to deal with Black Lives Matter protests as well as terror attacks. “That’s outrageous.” said Carl Messineo, legal director of the Partnership for Civil Justice Fund, a DC-based outfit that has won millions of dollars in damages against police departments that abuse protesters’ civil rights. “The police always conflate terrorism and protest.” The mayor needs to “disband this unit before it is put into place,” said Messineo. “This is a mission that is doomed to disaster.”

Ferguson Protest Leader Speaks on Holder’s Tricks and Oprah’s Insults

Taurean Russell, one of the leaders of Hands Up United, has been a key protest organizer since the day Officer Darren Wilson killed Michael Brown on a street in Ferguson, Missouri. Asked how Blacks in Ferguson reacted to word that Attorney General Eric Holder will not indict Wilson on civil rights charges, Russell said: “We really don’t care if the system brings charges or indicts him. The community has indicted him.” The protests “woke up a lot of people to the hypocrisy that is the system.” On media Tycoon Oprah Winfrey’s criticism, that young leaders of the new movement don’t know what they want, Russell said protesters’ demands have been widely circulated since August. “I assume that she has a billion distractions – literally,” he said.

Black Judas at the Justice Department

For months, the U.S. Justice Department has been telling selected media that there will be no federal civil rights indictment of former cop Darren Wilson in the death of Michael Brown. The latest leak prompted whistleblower and BAR editor and columnist Dr. Marsha Coleman-Adebayo to author an article titled, “Eric Holder’s Final Betraying Kiss to the People of Ferguson.” “The symbolism is obviously the kiss between Judas and Christ,” said Coleman-Adebayo. In a sense, the leak liberates the Brown family from an eternity of waiting. “Trayvon Martin’s family has been waiting for three years,” she said. All the martyrs’ families “should know they’ll get the same response” from Holder’s Justice Department as Michael Brown’s family.

Marissa Alexander Out of Prison on House Arrest

After spending three years and 65 days in a Florida prison, Marissa Alexander has been placed under house arrest. The Black mother had faced as much as 60 years in prison for firing a shot to ward off her abusive husband. Her supporters convened a People’s Movement Assembly to welcome Alexander back to Jacksonville. “When we got rid of capitalism and the prison system, we also have to dismantle patriarchy,” said Aleta Alston-Toure, co-leader of the Free Marissa Now Mobilization Campaign. “The National Rifle Association supports people having guns in their homes to protect themselves. But, why wasn’t Marissa in that equation? Because she’s a Black woman,” said Alston-Toure.

February 20 Event for Lynne Stewart and All Political Prisoners

On New Year’s Eve, 2013, people’s lawyer Lynne Stewart was released from federal prison on compassionate grounds, suffering from Stage Four cancer. “We are celebrating the year that Lynne has had out. The life expectancy was six months,” said her husband and lifelong comrade in struggle, Ralph Poynter. The celebration, at 6:pm on Friday, February 20, at St. Peter’s Church, 54th Street and Lexington Avenue, in Manhattan, will call for freedom for all political prisoners. “These are the people who gave their all, and we have to recognize them,” said Poynter. A new movement is afoot. But, how can young people be expected to put their liberty at risk, when the prisoners of two generations ago are still behind bars? “We cannot expect them to join in under those circumstances,” said Poynter. “So, let us do something about it, if we truly are a movement people.”

Three Arrested as Obama Tries to Ram Secret Trade Treaty Through Congress

Capitol Hill police charged three protesters with disrupting the Senate Finance Committee’s hearings on the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP), a huge trade treaty that is being negotiated in secret. President Obama wants Congress to give him authority to sign the pact, sight unseen. “It’s going to strip jobs out of the country; it will lower wages and increase the wealth divide; it’s going to deregulate banking; it’s terrible for food and health and water – it’s just a monster,” said Kevin Zeese, of Popular Resistance. He urged opponents to go to StopFastTrack.com to pressure their congresspersons.

Black Agenda Radio - 01.26.15

The $10 billion pledged by international donors for Haiti earthquake relief, five years ago, was “enough money to give every Haitian a check for $1,000,” said Jake Johnston, principal author of the Center for Economic and Policy Research report, “Haiti by the Numbers, Five Years Later.” Yet, 300,000 people are living on the outskirts of Port-au-Prince in appalling conditions, while “only 9,000 homes have been built by the international response.” Cholera, brought into the country by United Nations soldiers, is unchecked, and a U.S.-backed president rules largely by decree. Most American aid money was spent on U.S. firms, said Johnston. “Less than one percent of it went to Haitian organizations or Haitian government institutions.  ”

Newark to Get Cop Review Board

 Newark, New Jersey, Mayor Ras Baraka unveiled a draft plan for the city’s first Citizens Complaint Review Board, last week. The proposed board would have the power to subpoena witnesses and recommend punishment of abusive officers. However, the police director could, under some circumstances, veto the board’s recommendations – a serious point of contention, according to Larry Hamm, chairman of the People’s Organization for Progress. “We’re going to need the most effective review board possible, in order to change p  olice behavior,” said Hamm. “They see themselves as special, above the law, and above reproach. They don’t think citizens have the right to judge them.”

Charges Dropped Against Crusading Black Educator

Three years ago, Professor Jahi Issa was arrested while observing a student protest against the rapid “whitening” of Delaware State University, a nominally Black institution. A judge this month overrode prosecution objections and dismissed the misdemeanor resisting arrest charge. “My attorney wrote that the president of Delaware State and his chief of police need to go see Selma, the movie, because they neither understand nor respect history,” said Dr. Issa, who lost his job teaching history and Africana Studies. “If this is the new crop of HBCU leadership, then we are seriously in trouble.”

Mumia on MLK’s Ordeal

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was “hounded and tormented” by the United States government “until his dying day,” said Mumia Abu Jamal, the nation’s best known political prisoner, in a report for Prison Radio. The pressure increased after King’s 1967 Riverside Church speech in which he denounced the Vietnam War “and criticized capitalism.”

U.S. Constitution Legalizes Slavery

Another correspondent for Prison Radio, Kerry Shakaboona Marshall, who has served more than 25 years of a life sentence imposed when he was a juvenile, said the U.S. government has “perpetrated a fraud” on the public for the pat 150 years, with the claim that the 13th Amendment outlawed slavery. “While the 13th Amendment abolished the chattel labor form of slavery, it simultaneously legalized slavery as a punishment for a criminal offense conviction,” said Marshall. The result was “penal slavery, the prison slave labor system.”

Rev. Edward Pinkney Awaits Hearing in Prison

Benton Harbor, Michigan’s imprisoned community leader, Rev. Edward Pinkney, is “doing very well, they have not broken his spirit,” said his wife, Dorothy. Rev. Pinkney was sentenced to 2 ½ to 10 years in prison for an elections petition offense stemming from a campaign to recall the local mayor, an ally of the giant Whirlpool corporation, which dominates the mostly Black town. A hearing is scheduled for February 24 on two defense motions, including that one of the jurors was a close associate of the prosecution. Veteran activist Larry Pinkney – no family relation – is media contact for Rev. Pinkney. “He’s not getting his mail, they’ve moved him way up to Marquette, Michigan,” said Larry Pinkney. “But the brother is a warrior, he’s a fighter, he’s standing tall.”

Black Agenda Radio - 01.19.15

MLK Would be “Shutting It Down”

If Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. were alive, he would have joined in the 96-hour direct action and civil disobedience campaign coordinated by the ONYX Organizing Committee, in Oakland, California, this past weekend, according to activist Cat Brooks. “He’d be shutting it down” at federal buildings and taking over freeways,” said Brooks. “As in the later part of his life, he’d be connecting, loudly, the bloody dots of capitalism and gentrification with the systematic oppression and violence against Black and brown people in the cities.”

Man Who Recorded Eric Garner’s Death Has Court Date

Ramsey Orta, the Staten Island, New York, man who videotaped Eric Garner’s death by chokehold at the hands of a cop, appears in court January 25 on weapons charges. Orta maintains police set him up in retaliation. His lawyer, Alton Maddox, said “It’s time for a reawakening of the people in New York City as to how grand juries should be employed.” As it stands, prosecutors use grand juries as an excuse NOT to indict cops, said Maddox, whose license to practice law was revoked in 1990, in the wake of the Tawana Brawley case.

French Celebrate White Supremacy and Racist Values

“’Je Suis Charlie’ has become an arrogant rallying cry for white supremacy,” wrote Ajamu Baraka, editor and columnist for Black Agenda Report and co-founder of the U.S. Human Rights Network. The French “values” that are supposedly under attack are, in reality, “grounded in a colonial division between people who are recognized as humans, and those who have been consigned to the category of sub-humans and are eligible to be murdered, to have their lands taken, to be enslaved,” said Baraka. “Those are the values that many of those people who embraced ‘Je Suis Charle’ were, in fact, upholding.”

Right On! to Franz Fanon on His 90th Birthday

Dr. Lewis Gordon, professor of philosophy and African American Studies at the University of Connecticut, spoke at the Pan-African Bazara, in Nairobi, Kenya, on the 90th birthday of Franz Fanon, the psychiatrist from Martinique who fought alongside the Algerians against French colonialism and wrote The Wretched of the Earth and Black Skin, White Masks. Fanon taught that “every group has to understand that it has the responsibility to set the conditions for its own freedom and emancipation,” said Dr. Gordon. “He argues that it is not enough to fight for material change; you need also to set the conditions for very new concepts” of human existence. Fanon died of leukemia in 1961.

Black Colombian Women Defend Ancestral Land Rights

Illegal gold mining operations are poisoning the environment and infringing on the land rights of African-descended people in Colombia, South America. Charo Mina-Rojas, an organizer of women’s resistance to the incursions, said local authorities are collaborating with the mechanized mining operators. “They are armed, but we have to expose ourselves to make sure that these people understand that these are our territories, we have rights there, and we are ready to protect them by all means necessary,” said Mina-Rojas.