A Black Agenda Radio commentary by executive editor Glen Ford
The electoral scenery must be quite depressing to those who think change must come through the ballot. The system disgorges “a multiracial cast of scoundrels from both major parties coiled up incestuously under the same corporate tent.” However, something different may be afoot in at least three points on the map.
A Tale of Three Cities: Newark, Jackson, Seattle
A Black Agenda Radio commentary by executive editor Glen Ford
The vote is hardly worth casting, these days.”
Electoral politics, the arena that half of Black America was barred from entering until only about 50 years ago, has become a vast wasteland, hopelessly polluted by corporate dollars. Black electoral politics is no exception. It’s been only a little over a decade since corporate America got serious about creating a new class idiot Harold Ford Congressional Black Caucus
That’s why what’s unfolding in Newark, New Jersey, Jackson, Mississippi, and Seattle, Washington, is so rare – and important.
In Seattle, there’s a group of folks who don’t mind working hard and building alliances, all the while telling the world that socialism is the only alternative to barbarism. Kshama Sawant, the newly minted city councilperson, and her Socialist Alternative comrades have forced corporate Democrats to pretend that they really would like to see the city’s minimum wage raised to $15 an hour. Socialist Alternative also demands that the rich pay for an overhaul of public education and transportation – a platform that most people would support, if they thought it had a chance of passing. Kshama Suwant and her comrades believe that people will vote in their own interests if the candidates have proven they are trustworthy.
In Jackson, Mississippi, 66 year-old Mayor Chokwe Lumumba cooperative economy
In Newark, New Jersey, which Cory Booker made into a playground for corporate educational experimentation, city councilman and high school principal Ras Baraka father’s funeral
For Black Agenda Radio, I’m Glen Ford. On the web, go to BlackAgendaReport.com.
BAR executive editor Glen Ford can be contacted at Glen.Ford@BlackAgendaReport.com
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
