Blogs

by BAR editor and columnist Jemima Pierre

“The Palestinian cry for dignity especially demands Black support” – today, as thousands of Palestinian prisoners emerge from a long hunger strike, just as in the late Sixties, during the Black Freedom Movement. Under an apartheid legal system, the “Palestinians have been subjected to an arbitrary system of military law.”

by Dave Lindorff

While methodically mobilizing the Democratic Party’s left wing to politically co-opt the movement, the Obama administration simultaneously schemed with law enforcement to “disrupt and crush the Occupy Movement.” Heavily redacted documents from the Department of Homeland Security show the broad outlines of “a national campaign of spying, disruption and repression against Occupy activists.”

By BAR managing editor Bruce A. Dixon

Do the black political class, our preachers, leading business people, and thousands of appointed and elected officials actually do us much good? Do they protect or defend us? Do they carry our wishes and will to the seats of power. Or do they just “represent” us by merely being there doing the bidding of corporate funders?

by Dady Chery

Haiti’s mineral wealth is marked for super-exploitation by a Canadian corporation that has already wreaked havoc in the neighboring Dominican Republic. Mining companies claim the gold and silver reserves were only recently discovered, but “the story could just as well be that the mining executives were biding their time and waiting for a non-nationalistic government to take effect before initiating their projects.” The operation requires construction of a deep-water port in Haiti’s northeast, threatening the country’s marine ecosystems.

by Marjorie Valbrun

Researchers for a right-wing think tank that has always opposed government intervention against racism now proclaim that residential segregation is becoming a thing of the past. Their arguments are unconvincing. “In some disturbing ways” housing segregation “has intensified, particularly when one examines the confluence of racial and economic segregation.” The methodology assumes that Blacks are the only group that is segregated. What the numbers actually show is “that people of color are less segregated from each other” than they used to be.

by BAR editor and senior columnist Margaret Kimberley

A good time was had by all at the White House correspondents’ dinner. And why not? The corporate media and the White House both serve the same masters: corporate power and U.S. empire. “Is it any wonder that the New York Times, Washington Post and all the networks ignore torture, drone strikes, mass incarceration terror, continued bankster bailouts, high unemployment and endless war?”

by Mark P. Fancher

The U.S. military command in Africa, AFRICOM, has trained thousands of officers on the continent, including the young captain that overthrew his own government in Mali, this year. “If AFRICOM’s protégés have taken careful note of how the U.S. military is routinely used to try and take whatever the U.S. wants in Africa, often without regard for law, custom or prudence, it is not hard to imagine how or why Amadou Sanogo might do the same thing in his own country.”