Austerity Rendering Detroit Unfit for Habitation A serious fire raged out control due to chronic low water pressure in Detroit, despite the majority Black city’s location in one of the world’s major fresh water regions. “The whole process of so-called rebuilding of Detroit has not been clearly thought out,” said Abayomi Azikiwe , veteran activist and editor of the Pan African News Wire. “How can you rebuild a city when you don’t have fundamental infrastructure, such as fire services, public safety, education, emergency services, simple things like being able to go to a supermarket?” The economic elite are “doing everything possible to drive out the African American population,” he said, but poor infrastructure discourages white resettlement. “What you have is the anarchy of capitalism.”
Big Business Tries to Roll Back Socialist Alternative in Seattle Corporate contributions are pouring into Seattle Urban League chief Pamela Banks’ campaign to unseat Kshama Sawant , the Socialist Alternative councilwoman who championed the city’s $15 an hour minimum wage law. “It’s not so much about my opponent’s qualities,” said Sawant, “It’s because corporations, billionaires, the people who have an incentive to uphold the status quo, recognize that if we win re-election this year, then it really confirms to working people in Seattle and everywhere that we can prevail against the full might of big business and the political establishment.”
Mumia: “Flags and Rags” The heritage of the Confederate battle flag is “one of terror and violence in support of a system of organized theft of Black labor, in the name of white supremacy and Black subjugation,” said Mumia Abu Jamal , the nation’s best known political prisoner, in a report for Prison Radio. “Dylan ‘Dumb and Dumber’ Roof knew, instinctively, what the flag stood for.”
Justices OK Painful Death Drug The U.S. Supreme Court ended its term by allowing states to continue lethal injections with a cocktail that can cause horrific pain for condemned persons. “Prisoners remain less than human” in the High Court’s eyes, said Kenneth A. Hartman , a writer and prison activist serving life in California. “How else can a decision that allows for deliberate torture be explained?”
Fear of Blacks Triggered 1776 War of Independence White settlers turned against the their mother country partly in fear that the British Crown would put guns in the hands of Blacks, according to Dr. Gerald Horne , chairman of history and African American Studies at the University of Houston and author of more than 30 books, including The Counter-Revolution of 1776: Slave Resistance and the Origins of the United States of America . In 1775, the British colonial governor of Virginia established an “Ethiopian Regiment” to counter rebellious white settlers. “One of the factors that caused formerly patriotic British subjects to revolt against British rule was this ‘Black scare’ that, I argue, led to the formation of the United States of America,” said Dr. Horne, in a lecture at the University of California at Santa Barbara.
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.
Angola, one of Africa’s top oil producers, is in turmoil after protests erupted over a sharp fuel price hike driven by IMF-backed subsidy cuts.
In this week’s segment, we discuss football, why it isn’t popular in the US, how it can be, sports as consciousness raising, and the nation of Brazil and its Black population. But first, we have the…
Mary Frances Phillips is an associate professor of African American Studies at the University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana. She joins us from Detroit to discuss her biography of Ericka Huggins, "…
Robert Wilson is a U.S.-born philosopher who has lived in Brazil for many years. He is the author of “The Football Manifesto and Club Handbook: Bringing the Beautiful Game to the People and Making…
It is true that Barack Obama used the surveillance state apparatus in an effort to undermine the first Donald Trump administration with the Russiagate fraud.
