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There isn't a Biggest Story for Today, yet.
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| Saturday, November 11 | | · | The Real Meaning of a Democratic Sweep: NeoCons or Liberals? |
| Tuesday, June 27 | | · | Miami Seven Stand Accused of Thought Crime |
| Tuesday, April 11 | | · | Immigration and America's Bad Karma |
| Thursday, March 30 | | · | Seven Months After Katrina |
| Tuesday, February 07 | | · | Bush Gets Deserved Dressing Down at King Funeral |
| Sunday, February 05 | | · | Harry Belafonte on Bush, Iraq, Hurricane Katrina |
| Wednesday, January 18 | | · | Condi Rice: Christian-Zionist Pit Bull |
| Friday, December 23 | | · | The Double Standard of Righteous Indignation |
| Friday, December 16 | | · | Angela Davis on The Execution of Stanley Tookie Williams |
| Tuesday, December 13 | | · | Bush Sr. and North Should Join Tookie Williams |
Older Articles
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U.S.A.: Gun Rights: From the Black Panthers to the NRA
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State Violence, Individual Violence
By Patrick Higgins
July 30, 2012 - counterpunch.org
Just as misplaced debates about civilian gun control were emerging in the wake of the massacre in Aurora, a billboard was raised in Idaho by a libertarian organization placing the face of the Aurora shooting suspect beside that of President Obama. The text surrounding James Holmes’s reads: “KILLS 12 IN A MOVIE THEATER WITH AN ASSAULT RIFLE. EVERYONE FREAKS OUT.” The text surrounding Obama’s reads: “KILLS THOUSANDS WITH HIS FOREIGN POLICY. WINS NOBEL PEACE PRIZE.”
The reaction of the Village Voice—“extremely offensive,” one headline states—to the billboard is exemplary of the chronic softness of liberalism on issues of war. In the media overall, this softness has led to the current emphasis on civilian gun control, which is an emphasis that is now actively removing the spotlight from the violence of the state while increasing fear of the general public. Surely the Village Voice that hosted the late, great Alexander Cockburn would never have so unforgivably favored etiquette over truth.
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U.S.A.: Black America Still Paralyzed, Powerless, Irrelevant
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Black America Still Paralyzed, Powerless, Irrelevant: Year 4 of the Obama Era
By Bruce A. Dixon
January 20, 2012 - blackagendareport.com
Three years ago this week, more than 2 million souls, at least half of them African American, converged upon the nation's capital. They came, in what my colleague Glen Ford called the Great Black Hajj of 2009, to witness and celebrate the swearing in of the nation's first African American president. They wept and danced and sang and prophesied. They marveled at how far they had come. It was, their leaders assured them, the beginning of a new day.
Three years later, it's clear that this is indeed a new day, a new era. But for most of black America, it's not the one they hoped for. Nobody expected urban poverty would begin to vanish overnight, or that millions of acres of lost black farmland would be restored. But promises were made, and expectations were justifiably high, not because Barack Obama had promised to investigate Wall Street, prosecute banksters, or stop the imperial wars and illegal foreclosures, but because humans do have the right to expect justice at home and peace abroad, whether their leaders deliver these things or not.
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U.S.A.: Political Prisoners: Lessons for Occupationists and Us All
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A Black Agenda Radio commentary by BAR editor and columnist Jared Ball
December 15, 2011
blackagendareport.com
“We need to encourage a renewed focus on the politically incarcerated because we are likely to see those ranks increase.”
After this week's rally for Mumia Abu-Jamal in Philadelphia, at which much of the focus was his being removed from death row, at least one thing has again been made clear; going forward all movement building must deeply involve the plight of political prisoners. This point was made several ways by several different speakers, including Cornel West who described the more than 30 years of this particular fight, and Desmond Tutu who cautioned that the move of Mumia from death row was cool but not a real victory – and who better than a veteran of the freedom struggle in Azania to tell us about incomplete “victories.” And there was the tireless Ramona Africa who echoed Tutu’s sentiments by acknowledging that not being in solitary confinement was itself no guarantee of safety, and how Mumia’s enemies considered this move a close second to actual execution since he would now be in general population with “his own kind” and likely, hopefully, to be killed by one of them. So what was a rally and tribute to Mumia was also a lesson to be learned about the kinds of struggle required, a lesson we all can use at this time of outspoken frustration with the current world.
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U.S.A.: America’s New African Empire
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By Paul Craig Roberts
October 21, 2011 - counterpunch.org
Now that the CIA’s proxy army has murdered Gadhafi, what next for Libya?
If Washington’s plans succeed, Libya will become another American puppet state. Most of the cities, towns, and infrastructure have been destroyed by air strikes by the air forces of the US and Washington’s NATO puppets. US and European firms will now get juicy contracts, financed by US taxpayers, to rebuild Libya. The new real estate will be carefully allocated to lubricate a new ruling class picked by Washington. This will put Libya firmly under Washington’s thumb.
With Libya conquered, AFRICOM will start on the other African countries where China has energy and mineral investments. Obama has already sent US troops to Central Africa under the guise of defeating the Lord’s Resistance Army, a small insurgency against the ruling dictator-for-life. The Republican Speaker of the House, John Boehner, welcomed the prospect of yet another war by declaring that sending US troops into Central Africa “furthers US national security interests and foreign policy.” Republican Senator James Inhofe added a gallon of moral verbiage about saving “Ugandan children,” a concern the senator did not have for Libya’s children or Palestine’s, Iraq’s, Afghanistan’s and Pakistan’s.
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U.S.A.: High Court Allows Mumia to Breathe, But He is Still Condemned to Social Death
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By Glen Ford
October 16, 2011 - blackagendareport.com
“The ruling allows the Philadelphia district attorney to once again seek the death penalty in a new sentencing hearing.”
The United States Supreme Court has ruled that the death penalty imposed on Mumia Abu Jamal, the world’s most famous political prisoner, is unconstitutional because the sentencing jury was not allowed to consider evidence that supported a sentence of life in prison. But the ruling allows the Philadelphia district attorney, Seth Williams, a Black man who has based his career on executing Mumia, to once again seek the death penalty in a new sentencing hearing. If Williams does not seek, or fails to get, a another death penalty, Mumia Abu Jamal will automatically be sentenced to life with no possibility of parole in the 1981 death of a Philadelphia police officer.
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U.S.A.: Obama Humiliates the Black Caucus – and They Pretend Not to Notice
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By BAR executive editor Glen Ford
October 03, 2011 - blackagendareport.com
“Obama has very publicly commanded them to shut up and perform what he believes is their only legitimate function: to get him re-elected.”
This magazine spent much of the 2008 presidential campaign warning that reflexive, unquestioning, uncomplaining support for Barack Obama would render African Americans politically irrelevant for the next four years. “About 90 percent of Black America has allied itself with a candidate that never promised them a damn thing,” we wrote, back on April Fools Day, 2008. One year before, in Selma, Alabama, Obama had first deployed his pseudo-Baptist preacher delivery to announce that Blacks had already come “90 percent of the way” towards equality, strongly inferring that his election would take us the other ten percent of the way, while simultaneously sending “a signal to whites that the days of Black racial agitation were nearly over.”
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U.S.A.: Barack Obama and the Debt Crisis: a Successful Con Game Explained
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By Bruce A. Dixon
August 08, 2011 - blackagendareport.com
The phony debt ceiling crisis was, from beginning to end, a con. It was an elaborate and successful hoax in which the nation's first black president, the Democratic and Republican parties, Wall Street and corporate media all played indispensable parts. The object of the supposed “crisis” was to short circuit public opinion, existing law, democratic process and traditions of public oversight, in order to deal fatal blows to Medicaid, Medicare, social security, job growth and public expenditures for the common good. It worked. We've been conned.
President Barack Obama as First Actor in the Con
The key actor in the con was and is Barack Obama, leader of the Democratic party and president of the United States. When the Bush and Obama administrations bailed out the banksters in 2008, 2009 and 2010 they didn't print new warehouses of greenbacks and send them over in a fleet of trucks. The Federal Reserve simply opened its spreadsheets, and wrote numbers with lots of zeroes crediting the banksters' accounts. It literally created the new money by giving it away, and next proceeded to borrow those funds back from the banksters at interest. The debt ceiling crisis was nothing but those same banksters twirling their mustaches and oinking “Well, we don't think you (the government that created the money by giving it to them) can really afford to repay all these loans you've been taking out... We might have to downgrade your credit rating...”
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U.S.A.: U.S. Policy is Rooted in Lies, Injustice, and War
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By Cynthia McKinney
May 21, 2011 - blackagendareport.com
The following remarks were delivered to the International Conference on Global Alliance Against Terrorism for a Just Peace in Tehran, Iran, on May 15.
“The country is coming apart at the seams even as it terrorizes the world and applies the death penalty to whole countries.”
How wonderful to be at a Conference where the word "love" is used; we are here because we love humankind. We are here from all corners of the earth; we are against terrorism; we want peace.
However, we must clarify peace. What kind of peace do we want?
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U.S.A.: White Citizenship
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What "We Want Our Country Back" Really Means
By Margaret Kimberley
August 06, 2010 - blackagendareport.com
The founding fathers made one thing perfectly clear when they ratified the constitution in 1787. Full citizenship rights were meant only for white men of property. Over a period of nearly 200 years, people’s movements guaranteed that those rights were extended to everyone regardless of race or gender, but the fact that the struggle literally took centuries should not be forgotten. It is tempting to snicker at the sight of today’s Tea Party members, grown men wearing knee breeches and three-cornered hats. Yet their costumes tell an important tale. They evoke an era still seen as the high water mark of American society, the days of the enslavement of one race and the extermination of another. This movement has captured the Republican Party outright and leaves even some Democratic politicians and pundits in a state of fear and/or awe.
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U.S.A.: Terminally Dumb People
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The Anti-Empire Report
By William Blum
May 14, 2010 - killinghope.org
Terminally-dumb people have always been with us of, course. It can't be that we've suddenly gone stupid.
If you shake your head and roll your eyes at the nonsense coming out of the Teaparty followers of Sarah "Africa is a country" Palin and other intellectual giants like Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh … If you have thoughts of moving abroad after the latest silly lies and fantasies like "Obama the Marxist" and "Obama the antichrist" … If you share Noam Chomsky's feeling: "I have never seen anything like this in my lifetime" … keep in mind that the right wing has long been at least as stupid and as mean-spirited. Consider some of the behavior of the same types for half a century during the Cold War with its beloved — albeit imaginary — "International Communist Conspiracy".
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U.S.A.: The Right, the Left and the Ugly: Fear and Loathing in White America
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By BAR executive editor Glen Ford
March 12, 2010 - blackagendareport.com
"Are we witnessing a left-right convergence – or two fundamentally opposed camps intersecting at a certain point in time on the way to very different destinations?"
When President George Bush and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi first, unsuccessfully, attempted to ram a bank bailout bill through the U.S. House in late September 2008, only one-third of Republicans and three-fifths of Democrats voted for the measure. The Congressional Black Caucus was opposed, 21 to 18, with the more progressive CBC members mostly voting No. Former presidential candidate Rep. Dennis Kucinich asked, "Is this the U.S. Congress or the board of directors at Goldman Sachs?" Two-thirds of the GOP Caucus bucked their president.
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U.S.A.: Some Thoughts about Torture. And Mr. Obama
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By William Blum
May 05, 2009
www.killinghope.org
Okay, at least some things are settled. When George W. Bush said "The United States does not torture", everyone now knows it was crapaganda. And when Barack Obama, a month into his presidency, said "The United States does not torture",(1) it likewise had all the credibility of a 19th century treaty between the US government and the American Indians.
When Obama and his followers say, as they do repeatedly, that he has "banned torture", this is a statement they have no right to make. The executive orders concerning torture leave loopholes, such as being applicable only "in any armed conflict".(2) What about in a "counter-terrorism" environment? And the new administration has not categorically banned the outsourcing of torture, such as renditions, the sole purpose of which is to kidnap people and send them to a country to be tortured. Moreover, what do we know of all the CIA secret prisons, the gulag extending from Poland to the island of Diego Garcia?
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U.S.A.: A Leftist Looks at the Near Future
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Moving Beyond Hope
By Ron Jacobs
November 11, 2008
counterpunch.org
I can't deny the exhilaration I felt on Tuesday, November 4th when the presidential election was called for Barack Obama. When people in my working class multiethnic neighborhood started setting off firecrackers and shouting out their windows, my housemate's daughter joined them. The feelings most of us felt on knowing that the reactionary Bush regime was on its last legs were genuine emotions of hope and relief. Our job now is to turn the critical support that Obama received from many on the left into a movement that strives to return the focus of the movement away from the man and his victory and towards ending the war/occupations, etc. To do this, we must engage the issues. The most important issues are the issues of imperial war and capitalist failure. We should understand the difference between the symbolism of a black man winning the presidency of the United States and the reality of a moderate liberal free marketeer who believes that there is a war on terror and that it can be won by killing Afghanis and other people whose religion and culture are used to define them as the enemy.
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U.S.A.: The Perils of Racial Solidarity
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by Kevin Alexander Gray
June 15, 2008
blackagendareport.com
“[Obama] has to convince white folk that he’s 150 percent with them. So we should just all be quiet and let him do what he has to do.”
A lot of black people I know have hit the mute button. When Hillary brings up working class white voters, when commentators say we’re in the post-racial era, even when Barack had to kick his preacher to the curb. “Where were Obama’s friends?” The Wall Street Journal‘s Daniel Henninger asked. Quiet, quiet, quiet.
The current undertone in the black cultural cosmos reflects the old adage, “If you can’t say some good, don’t say anything at all.” The way to show racial solidarity? Shut up.
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By Rootsie
February 12, 2008
www.rootsie.com
WE wear the mask that grins and lies,
It hides our cheeks and shades our eyes,–
This debt we pay to human guile;
With torn and bleeding hearts we smile,
And mouth with myriad subtleties.
Why should the world be over-wise,
In counting all our tears and sighs?
Nay, let them only see us, while
We wear the mask.
We smile, but, O great Christ, our cries
To thee from tortured souls arise.
We sing, but oh the clay is vile
Beneath our feet, and long the mile;
But let the world dream otherwise,
We wear the mask.
Paul Laurence Dunbar (1896)
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