Black Agenda Radio – 02.06.17

Welcome, to the radio magazine that brings you news, commentary and analysis from a Black Left perspective. I’m Glen Ford, along with my co-host, Nellie Bailey. Coming up: A new report on mass incarceration in the United States, this time focusing on the 160-thousand men and women who are serving life sentences behind bars; Mumia Abu Jamal speaks with Eddie Africa, the Move activist who has been a prisoner of the State of Pennsylvania for 38 years; and New York City organizers launch a Campaign for Community Control Over the Police.

Who needs stress? We all do. Here’s why

If you could do something to decrease your risk of memory failure, to increase your self-confidence, to be a better public speaker, to improve your brain, to help you deal with back pain, to bust out of your comfort zone, to make your children more resilient … would you do it? What if it involved embracing what we all to …

Jon Queally – This Wondrous National Park… Brought to You By McDonald’s?

A controversial set of new rules quietly given final approval over the recent holiday—allowing national parks in the United States to expand corporate sponsorships and commercial contracts with private companies—is being called a “disgrace” by those who say the move is a betrayal of what the nation’s parks should be. Despite outcry from citizens, documented in public testimony and hundreds …

This Can’t Be Happening – 01.04.17

Sometimes “This Can’t Be Happening!” can refer to a bit of unbelievably good news and today’s show is one of those times. As Bret Grote, legal director of the Abolitionist Law Center, a Pennsylvania prisoner advocacy legal service and one of two attorneys fighting to force the state’s Corrections Dept. to provide effective anti-viral medication to inmate Mumia Abu-Jamal to treat his raging Hepatitis C infection, reports, a federal judge yesterday issued an injunction ordering the prison system to begin treating the internationally known prisoner within 14 days. This is a huge victory, even if the state tries to appeal it and it offers hope that Abu-Jamal, whose death sentence was overturned and replaced with life without parole, will not end up being medically executed by the state through willful neglect.

Black Agenda Radio – 01.02.17

Welcome, to the radio magazine that brings you news, commentary and analysis from a Black Left perspective. I’m Glen Ford, along with my co-host, Nellie Bailey. Coming up: Tens of thousands of Haitians remain in the streets protesting yet another rigged election by the foreign occupiers of that country; tensions increase in Milwaukee between police and the Revolutionary Black Panther Party: and, after eight years of Obama, all the Hope and Change has turned out to be Hype and a lower standard of living for Black and poor people.

Edward Baptist – America’s Economy Was Built on Slavery, Not White Ingenuity—Historians Should Tell It Like It Is

The following is an adapted excerpt from the new paperback edition of The Half Has Never Been Told by Edward Baptist (Basic Books, 2016):  A beautiful late April day in 1937, seventy-two years after slavery ended in the United States. Claude Anderson parks his car on the side of Holbrook Street in Danville. On the porch of number 513, he rearranges …

Chris Hedges – How Power Works

Heather Ann Thompson’s book “Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Its Legacy” is a detailed study of the inner workings of America. The blueprint for social control employed before and after the crushing of the Attica revolt is the same blueprint used today to keep tens of millions of poor people, especially poor people of …

James W Carden – Magical Thinking in US Foreign Policy

Despite America’s myriad problems domestically and internationally, its geo-strategic position remains the envy of the world. Protected in the east by the Atlantic, in the west by the Pacific, to the north by Canada and to the south by Mexico, the United States is, for all intents and purposes, impervious to a foreign invasion. Its advanced and mobile nuclear arsenal …

Michael Payne – The Specter of an American Police State Looms Over America

It’s coming, we don’t know when it will fully emerge, but it’s on the way. When this rampant societal violence, and especially these tragic mass shootings and slaughter of helpless, innocent Americans continues unabated, when this government refuses to address and attack the underlying causes, we will see the emergence of an American police state. Right now we’re witnessing what …