Black Agenda Radio for Week of June 6, 2016

07 Jun 2016

McKinney: Duopoly is Imploding, But What Comes Next?

The 2016 election is going to be “written about and studied for a very long time,” said six-term former Georgia Democratic Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney, the Green Party’s 2008 presidential candidate. “Black voters don’t have any stake at all in the continuation of either the Democratic or Republican Parties, as presently constituted,” said McKinney, who last year earned her doctorate in Leadership and Change. “The implosion of the duopoly is of great political import to the Black community,” she said. “The problem is, however, that we have to be organized in order to have an imprint on the outcome.”

2016 “Most Consequential” Election in a Century

“The two-party duopoly is at an end,” said Dr. Anthony Monteiro, the Dubosian scholar and Black Radical Organizing Committee activist who helped put together a national conference on the Black Radical Tradition, in Philadelphia, in January. Monteiro believes that 2016 will go down as “the most consequential election, certainly, in 100 years.” Monteiro noted that Donald Trump told Bloomberg News he would turn the Republican Party into a workers party. “This is huge, said Monteiro. “He has broken every Republican orthodoxy.” Bernie Sanders, meanwhile, “is challenging the elite and the power brokers and the moneybags within the Democratic Party, but he has not gone as far as Trump to challenge American hegemony and American empire.”

Free Rev. Edward Pinkney, Political Prisoner

“The system is rigged and corrupt,” said Rev. Edward Pinkney, the Benton Harbor, Michigan, community activist serving 30 months to 10 years on bogus election tampering charges that he believes stem from his defiance of the Whirlpool Corporations domination of the mostly Black town. “We must stand and demand the government serve the interests of the people, and not the corporations,” said Pinkney, who fears he will be assassinated at the Marquette Branch Prison in the upper peninsula of Michigan. “The attack on democracy in Benton Harbor and around the country shows that the corporate power structure is determined to crush anyone that stands in its way,” he said.

Schools Annually Eject Huge Numbers of Black Girls

Education Week magazine called on experts to explore why Black girls are expelled or suspended from public school six times as often as white girls. It’s “misguided” to think that “low income kids and kids of color need to be heavily disciplined and heavily surveiled,” said Adrienne Dixson, professor of Critical Race Theory at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. “Schools should recognize that these behaviors aren’t just because kids want to be bad, but that they are responding to an environment that doesn’t help them feel free.”

Horne: U.S. Subversion has Venezuela on the Ropes

The government of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro is clearly in trouble, said Dr. Gerald Horne, professor of history and African American Studies at the University of Houston. “With government offices being shut down three days out of the week; with electricity blackouts; with shortages of consumer goods, including toilet paper, this is obviously a reflection of that fact that, number one, the elite of Venezuela have turned against the Maduro regime” and, secondly, the United States is backing the effort to bring down the socialist government.

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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.

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