Former Haitian President Aristide Coming Back Soon
That’s the prediction from Mark Weisbrot, of the Center for Economic and Policy Research. “The majority of this hemisphere is ruled by Left governments,” says Weisbrot, “and these governments have a very different attitude towards national sovereignty and towards this kind of interference” by the United States, which backed Jean-Bertrand Aristide’s overthrow and exile in 2004. Weisbrot believes Washington allowed the recent return to Haiti of former dictator Jean Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier “in order to build up a right wing presence in the country.”
Bush and Obama Educational Policies are Alike
“When you look at the education agenda from the perspective…of the Bush administration, you note that the Obama agenda is not that much different,” says Nathan Sanders, president of the Washington (DC) Teachers Union. “The changes are not drastically different, and possibly the old regime is now the new regime.” Sanders says private school vouchers and Obama’s Race to the Top program are part of a “corporate agenda” that is “interested in privatizing a large group of dollars in public education.”
If Only ACORN Had Survived…
President Obama is proposing to cut in half federal home heating assistance to the poor, the same program that President Bush unsuccessfully attempted to decimate in 2003. What stymied Bush seven years ago “was ACORN, and nothing but ACORN,” says David Swanson, former communications coordinator of the mass poor people’s organization that was forced to disband last year. “If ACORN was still around, Obama would not be able to do what he is proposing,” says Swanson, publisher of the influential web site War Is A Crime.
NAACP Legal Defense Fund retained by Mumia Abu Jamal Defense
The LDF will immediately assist in upcoming arguments over Abu Jamal’s death sentence in the 1981 killing of a Philadelphia policeman. “We’re going to examine this case from front to back,” says Christina Swarms, head of the LDF’s Criminal Justice Project.
Social Security Has Nothing To Do With Deficit
“Social Security is not contributing to the federal deficit,” says Virginia Reno, vice president of the National Academy of Social Insurance. “It has collected more in money since it began in 1933 than it’s paid out. It now has reserves of about $2.6 trillion.”
Dr. Jared Ball: U.S. Left Would Not Back African America Revolt
“Would the Left in this country really support a Black American uprising like the one they are supporting in Egypt?” asks BAR columnist Dr. Jared Ball. “I am doubtful.”
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 4:00pm ET on PRN. Length: One hour.
Ajamu Baraka, Chair of the Coordinating Committee of the Black Alliance for Peace, and columnist and editor at the Black Agenda Report, is on the ground in Venezuela and joined The Kim Iversen Show…
Sonya Massey’s brutal murder at the hands of the police has resulted in anguish and anger but no difference in how state violence is protested. Instead, we see surrender to the crumbs of condolences…
For the late Dr. Bernice Johnson Reagon, Black music was a tool in the struggle for Black liberation, and not what it has mostly become today: a retrograde appendage to neoliberalism and white power.
Ajamu Baraka, Black Agenda Report editor and columnist, discusses observing the recent elections in Venezuela and why the U.S. still seeks to undermine that democracy.
Rwanda weaponizes the Rwandan Genocide to justify its violence in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), just as Israel weaponizes the Holocaust to justify its violence in Gaza and the West Bank.
