Detroit Residents Robbed of Equal Voting Rights
By drastically diminishing the power of Detroit’s elected officials, Michigan’s governor has violated the Voting Rights Act and constitutional guarantees of one man-one vote, said Butch Hollowell, general counsel for the Detroit NAACP. Kevyn Orr, a Black partner in the rightwing law firm Jones Day, was named the city’s emergency finance director, with near-dictatorial powers. Jones Day represents Wells Fargo – “which has done more foreclosures in Detroit and the state of Michigan than any other firm,” said Hollowell – as well as Bank of America, JP Morgan Chase and CitiGroup.
Stop-and-Frisk on Trial in NYC
Every year, New York City cops violate hundreds of thousands of Black and brown people’s fundamental constitutional rights, stopping and frisking them for “being likely to commit crimes, rather than having actually committed a crime,” said Vince Warren, executive director of the Center for Constitutional Rights. “The vast majority of those stops are for harassment and crowd-control purposes,” said Warren. The trial phase of a class action suit seeking damages for those unlawfully profiled, began this week.
Ten Years After Invasion, Most Americans Remain Terrifyingly Insane
“You have a majority of Americans believing that Iraqis benefited from this war, while the United States suffered,” said David Swanson, publisher of the influential website War Is A Crime. “A plurality of Americans believe Iraqis are grateful for the invasion,” which killed 1.4 million and maimed, sickened or displaced many millions more, said Swanson.
Venezuela Part of Global Shift
Venezuela’s resistance to U.S. domination is “a symptom of a real shift in the balance of power that has been occurring in the world for a while now, and has startled the United States,” said Omali Yeshitela, chairman of the Black Is Back Coalition for Social Justice, Peace and Reparations. Racial realities are part of the new dynamic. “Chavez himself was aware that one of the reasons there was so much antagonism between him and the upper classes, was that he was not white.”
Punish Civil Rights Violations, Obama!
Coalition for Change, or C4C, representing current and former Black federal employees, is circulating a petition urging President Obama to sign an executive order that mandates discipline for managers that violate workers’ civil rights. At present, it’s a “toothless mandate,” said C4C co-founder Tanya Ward Jordan. The petition drive is called Unleash No FEAR.
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.
The confusion goes all the way back to the Trans-Atlantic slave trade. “Most American supermarkets are selling you sweet potatoes, not yams.”
If the Left Doesn’t Critique Endless War, Who Will?
The peace activists that were persecuted in the McCarthy era were not fighting just for the absence of war, but were “anti-imperialist, anti-colonial, anti-capitalist and demanded an end to United
Delbert Africa, imprisoned along with eight other members of the Move organization in 1978 in the death of a Philadelphia policeman, is finally free to “tell his story,” said Mumia Abu
Back in the days when 90 percent of southern prison inmates were Black, socially conservative Black clubwomen fought for prison reform, believing that “putting Black women in jail was hurting the B
