jBlack Agenda Radio for Week of March 26, 2018
Baraka on Leftists That Collaborate with Empire
“We have not made a revolution in the U.S., but we have all these ‘revolutionary theorists’ that know exactly how to do that,” said Black Alliance for Peace national organizer Ajamu Baraka, sarcastically. He recently returned from a conference in Caracas in solidarity with Venezuela. Baraka called “collaboration” with U.S. aggressions against Venezuela and Syria “really shameful on the part of people who call themselves leftists or radicals or whatever.” Any genuine left must oppose imperialism. “Our position, as citizens of empire, is to put a brake on empire.”
U.S. at Peace? Some Americans Think So
The U.S. Senate voted down, 55 to 44, a bill co-sponsored by Bernie Sanders that would have ended U.S. involvement in the Saudi Arabia-led war against Yemen. However, veteran anti-war activist David Swanson saw the action as a sign of progress, given that the Senate has never conducted such a vote based on the War Powers Act. Swanson, publisher of the influential web site WarIsACrime.org and director of World Beyond War, has found that Americans “around the country think that the U.S. is at peace, or think it’s engaged in a war somewhere, but can’t remember the name of the country.
Outlaw Poverty, Says Activist
Nyle Fort, an activist with the Poor People’s Campaign, was among the speakers at a New York City event designed to bring Black and immigrant communities together on issues of mass incarceration and deportation. Fort urged the crowd to “dream of a world where poverty is illegal.” The event, held at Manhattan’s Holy Rood Church, was titled “Break Down Walls and Prison Plantations: Mumia, Migrants and Movements for Liberation.”
Theft is Part of U.S. DNA
You can’t understand the present-day United States if you don’t know its bloody history, said Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, author of An Indigenous People’s History of the United States and her new book, Loaded: A Disarming History of the Second Amendment. The nation’s roots in organized theft of labor and land explains “why we have a real estate broker as president, just like our first president, the land speculator George Washington.”
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:am ET on PRN. Length: one hour.
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.
The visit of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to the United States highlights the role of imperialism in the genocide in Gaza.
"Psy-Op Satan’s Speech on Capitalist Hill" is the latest from BAR's Poet-in-Residence.
If Biden wins, Kamala Harris will be put forward as a kind of “co-president,” as a palliative for the lack of substantive relief from the forces that are plaguing Black lives.
