Black Agenda Report
Black Agenda Report
News, commentary and analysis from the black left.

  • Home
  • Africa
  • African America
  • Education
  • Environment
  • International
  • Media and Culture
  • Political Economy
  • Radio
  • US Politics
  • War and Empire

Black Agenda Radio for Week of June 13, 2016
14 Jun 2016
🖨️ Print Article

FBI Widens Sting Operations Against Dissidents

The FBI appears to have widened its web of sting operations to entrap American dissidents in so-called “terrorist plots,” said Sue Udry, executive director of the Bill of Rights Defense Committee. Udry cited a study that analyzed about 400 alleged terror plots prosecuted by the FBI between 2003 and 2010, only four of which “did not have a component of FBI entrapment of the people who were eventually convicted.” Most were against poor, unsophisticated Muslim Americans. In more recent years, said Udry, the FBI and the Homeland Security Department have used “these entrapment stings against environmental and peace activists” and have been “monitoring and infiltrating Black Lives Matter, the Occupy Movement” and “groups that are fighting fracking.” The Committee is demanding Congress launch an investigation to find out “what other groups the FBI has been focused on.”

Black Is Back Coalition to Help Develop an Agenda for Self-Determination

Black America in recent decades has put forward “no basic political demand” of its own, but instead hopes and prays “that the Democratic Party will treat us well and the Republican Party will not treat us badly,” said Omali Yeshitela, chairman of the Black Is Back Coalition for Social Justice, Peace and Reparations. On August 13 and 14 the Coalition will hold a conference on a national Black political agenda for self-determination, in Philadelphia. In the Sixties, said Yeshitela, “the drive was for self-determination, and that’s been a missing element in the political discussion up until now.”

Broad Clemency Needed to Reverse Mass Incarceration

The Sentencing Project, a Washington-based prison reform organization, is calling for a broader, categorical approach to presidential clemency, like President Gerald Ford’s 1974 amnesty for war resisters. However, even comprehensive clemencies would not alter U.S. status as the world’s premier incarceration state, said executive director Marc Mauer. “We need to have more rational sentencing policies, we need more diversion from prison, and we need more public health approaches” to social problems,” said Mauer. “If we really want to address mass incarceration, it’s going to take much more on the front end than just rectifying some of these problems five or ten years after the initial sentence has taken place.”

Death Squads and Corporate Greed Prey on Black Colombians

Afro-Colombians and indigenous groups have been blocking roads in protest of violations of their land rights by multinational corporations and intimidation by paramilitary death squads. “You have a particular kind of predatory capitalism” in Colombia and other parts of Latin America, “where you have a relationship between corporations and the government, and paramilitary forces that do the bidding of these corporations in terms of cleaning people from land and terrorizing and murdering local organizers,” said Ajamu Baraka, a member of the Afro-Colombian Solidarity Network. “In Colombia, paramilitarism has been taken to an art form.” Baraka is a BAR editor and columnist and a founder of the U.S. Human Rights Network.

CLICK BELOW TO HEAR BLACK AGENDA RADIO
Black Agenda Radio on the Progressive Radio Network is hosted by Glen Ford and Nellie Bailey. A new edition of the program airs every Monday at 11:00am ET on PRN. Length: one hour.



Your browser does not support the audio element.

listen
https://blackagendaradio.podbean.com/mf/play/azt4rd/BAR_061316.mp3

More Stories


  • BAR Book Forum: Jasmine Mitchell‘s “Imagining the Mulatta”
    Roberto Sirvent, BAR Book Forum Editor
    BAR Book Forum: Jasmine Mitchell‘s “Imagining the Mulatta”
    09 Sep 2020
    The mulatta serves as a strategy of containment of Blackness through logics of racial management.
  • Black Spartacus: The Epic Life of Toussaint Louverture
    David A Bell
    Black Spartacus: The Epic Life of Toussaint Louverture
    09 Sep 2020
    The fierce fighter against slavery defeated European armies but died in a cold French prison.
  • End the Injustice of Nonunanimous Juries
    Calvin Duncan
    End the Injustice of Nonunanimous Juries
    09 Sep 2020
    Non-unanimous verdicts allow ten jurors to “simply ignore the views of their fellow panel members of a different race or class.”
  • The Stalinist Trial of Julian Assange
    John Pilger
    The Stalinist Trial of Julian Assange
    09 Sep 2020
    The collusion of powers wants to bury Julian alive in their war on the very principle of freedom of speech and freedom of thought, and democracy.
  • Decades-Old Gang Laws Are Being Used to Target Black Lives Matter Protesters
    Ali Winston
    Decades-Old Gang Laws Are Being Used to Target Black Lives Matter Protesters
    09 Sep 2020
    By using gang laws, authorities can do an end run around First Amendment protections on freedom of association
  • Load More
Subscribe
connect with us
about us
contact us