Black Agenda Radio – 6.27.16

This is Black Agenda Radio, the radio magazine that brings you news, commentary and analysis from a Black Left perspective. Your hosts are Glen Ford and Nellie Bailey, here they are with a weekly hour of African American political thought and action.

– The Great Britain will begin the process of leaving the European Union, after an historic referendum, last week. Capitalists all over the planet are upset. We spoke with Dr. Anthony Monteiro, the Duboisian scholar with the Black Radical Organizing Committee, and asked: “Why are rich people on both sides of the Atlantic so worried about BREXIT.

– In what looked like well-organized political theater, 51 diplomats in the U.S. State Department acted more like employees of the Pentagon, this month. They sent an orchestrated message through the departments complaint channels, calling on the U.S. to launch a bombing campaign against the government of Syria. Meanwhile, U.S. war planes came to the defense of al Qaida terrorists who are under attack by Russian air forces. Sara Flounders, of UNAC, the United National Anti-War Coalition, says the State Department letter-signers are risking war with Russia to save U.S.-backed jihadists in Syria.

– The prosecution against the cops involved in the killing of Freddie Gray, in Baltimore, is batting zero. A judge last week acquitted a police officer of depraved heart murder charges in Grays death. Carl Dix, of the Stop Mass Incarceration Network, spoke to us outside the courtroom.

– Bernie Sanders has conceded that he won’t be the Democratic presidential candidate – and, lots of his supporters are in mourning. But Mumia Abu Jamal, the nation’s best-known political prisoner, says activists must look “Beyond Bernie.”

– Some temporary employment agencies exclude Black job applicants. Instead, they send Latino workers to fill jobs for their clients. Alva Ayala is an attorney for the Workers Law Office, in Chicago. His firm has sued six temporary employment agencies and many of their clients for refusing to hire Blacks. Ayala says temp agencies do the employers’ dirty work, providing companies with the most insecure and easily exploitable workers.

Visit the BlackAgendaReport.com, where you’ll find a new and provocative issue, each Wednesday.

Black Agenda Radio – 05.02.16

Welcome to the radio magazine that brings you news, commentary and analysis from a Black Left perspective with Glen Ford and his co-host, Nellie Bailey.

– The Black American condition, especially Black people’s relations with the police, is more of an issue in the 2016 election campaign than it was in the two previous presidential races, when a Black man was running for president. Minister Louis Farrakhan, of the Nation of Islam, has said there are some things he likes about Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump. But Carl Dix, a co-founder of the Stop Mass Incarceration Network, says that Minister Farrakhan should be taken to task for those remarks.

– Six million Congolese have died since 1996, when the Rwandan regime led by Paul Kagame invaded the Democratic Republic of Congo. Three U.S. presidential administrations have been deeply involved in the genocides in the Congo, Rwanda and elsewhere in the Great Lakes region of Africa, but no one is more deeply implicated in the bloodbath than Bill and Hillary Clinton. Both Clintons are strong supporters of Rwandan president Paul Kagame, who opponents say is the man most responsible for the Rwandan and Congolese genocides. Kagame’s minority Tutsi rebel forces overthrew the government of Rwanda in 1994, which led to the deaths of millions. Claude Gatebuke is a survivor of the Rwandan genocide, and co-founder of the African Great Lakes Network. He says Paul Kagame’s crimes predate the events of 1994.

– Thousands of Blacks in the South American nation of Colombia blocked the Pan American highway, the major trade route that links North and South America, to protest threats to their ancestral land holdings in the country. Blacks make up the majority of Colombians that have been displaced by the decades-long guerilla war, which may soon be coming to an end. Both the guerillas and multinational corporations have eyes on the land that Afro-Colombians have occupied for more than 400 years. Charo Mina-Rojas is an Afro-Colombian activist. She says the Colombian government has broken its promises to respect Black people’s right to self-determination and to land.

– Prison activists gathered, recently, at the University of Pittsburgh Law School, for a discussion of solitary confinement. The panel was organized by the Abolitionist Law Center and the Center for Constitutional Rights. It focused on the harm and the suffering caused by solitary confinement in prison, from the inmates’ perspective. Albert Woodfox spent 44 years in Louisiana’s Angola Prison, most of it in solitary confinement, until he was finally released earlier this year.

Project Censored – 04.14.15

This week’s Project Censored Show focuses on police violence and prisons. The program begins with Carl Dix examining the fatal shooting of Walter Scott in South Carolina. Then Jeff Mackler gives an update on the medical condition of Pennsylvania inmate Mumia abu Jamal, and we hear abu Jamal’s latest recorded commentary. In the second half of the program, Maya Schenwar discusses her …