Just Like Bush: US Under Obama, Thumbs Its Nose at the World on Climate Change
Black Agenda Radio Commentaries
Release Date: 11/20/2013
The Battle For Ballot Access is a Century Old. It's Time to Break it Open
Black Agenda Radio Commentaries
A century ago, Republicans and Democrats passed ballot access restrictions to prevent socialists from getting on the ballot in the US. It's time to organize to break those barriers.
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The Battle For Ballot Access is a Century Old. It's Time to Break it Open
Black Agenda Radio Commentaries
A century ago, Republicans and Democrats passed ballot access restrictions to prevent socialists from getting on the ballot in the US. It's time to organize to break those barriers.
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Biden's Poll Balloon is Black Voters
Black Agenda Radio Commentaries
Joe Biden announced his candidacy for president last week. You might imagine that in the age of Bernie Sanders and Liz Warren, with some of the leading Democrats talking up free college tuition, the abolition of student debt, Medicare For All raising the minimum wage and taxing wealthy individuals and moonwalking even a little away from support of apartheid Israel that another frankly pro-corporate candidate would enter the race somewhere near the bottom of the polls. That would be right. You’d be imagining that. In the real world, Joe Biden announced last week and the first three polls...
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Is the Apartheid Colonial Settler State of Israel “Reparations” For Jews? ADOS Thinks So.
Black Agenda Radio Commentaries
When the faux reparationists of ADOS point to the colonial settler state of apartheid Israel as an example of restorative justice and reparations for Jews in support of their claim to reparations for blacks in the US they are either confused, cynical, or both.
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Tulsi Gabbard is a Sheepdog; Greens' Howie Hawkins is 2020's ONly Real Peace Candidate
Black Agenda Radio Commentaries
Tulsi Gabbard uses peace rhetoric to chase us back into the war party. That's the textbook definition of a sheepdog candidate.
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ADOS Shrinks Reparationist Politics to Fit the Cramped Horizon of Tribalism
Black Agenda Radio Commentaries
ADOS deprecates solidarity, ignores racist empire and capitalism. But without eliminating those, reparations will be impossible to achieve.
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Reparations Now? Maybe In Order to Get the Job Done It's Time To Call It Something Else
Black Agenda Radio Commentaries
If we seriously want to accomplish the heasv y lifting of reparations for the descendants of Africans in the western hemisphere it miht be time to call it something else
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Facing 2020 and Bernie 2.0: What the Greens Must Do
Black Agenda Radio Commentaries
Bernie has upped his game for 2020, forcing everybody else to do the same. The challenges are particularly steep for the Green Party, which must field a 2020 campaign aimed achieving national ballot access, and building a new kind of sustainable, viable party outside and independent of the parties of capital.
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HR 1 Cuts Green Party Funding, Sics Cops on Left Dissenters
Black Agenda Radio Commentaries
HR 1 pretends to be a voting rights bill, a take the money out of politics bill, but those are merely bait. Its real legislative payload are a funding cutoff to third party presidential candidates, and an institutional requirement that the Pentagon, the intel and police and prison and homeland security industry deliver an annual threat report on Americans working for change.
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Some Early Lessons From the Los Angeles Teachers Strike
Black Agenda Radio Commentaries
Los Angeles was not West Virginial or Oklahoma or Arizona. LA teachers followed the Chicago model, and spent many months organizing their membership, forging deep organic ties with school communities, and even advancing their vision of what they called the community school, as opposed to the market driven charter school
info_outlineJust Like Bush: US Under Obama, Thumbs Its Nose at the World on Climate Change
A Black Agenda Radio commentary by BAR managing editor Bruce A. Dixon
Is there really any place where electing Democrats to the White House really makes a difference? Sometimes, people who call themselves progressives get it twisted, and imagine that environmental affairs are one of those places. But are they, really?
The world was shocked when the oil-soaked administration of George W. Bush openly thumbed its nose at the Kyoto Protocol, claimed there was no such thing as man-made climate change and refused even to send representatives to global climate change summits. The current Democrat in the White House ran with vague promises, amplified by his “progressive” surrogates, to rein in the oil companies. But now all that looks like empty campaign rhetoric, the cultural fluff that temporarily distinguishes the two parties from each other when they campaign, but vanishes when they govern.
Barack Obama was president, with a thumping Democratic majority in both houses of Congress when the DeepWater Horizon exploded and thousands of square miles of the world's most productive fishing grounds were poisoned. The Obama administration lied to the public about the extent of the leak, used the Coast Guard and US Navy to keep reporters and experts from flying over or visiting into the affected areas, made sure the token settlement didn't much affect the assets of the guilty parties, and passed no law or regulations to make sure it couldn't happen again.
This week, internal memos of the US Secretary of State's office demonstrated continued US determination to thumb its nose at the future of humanity in the face of climate change, refusing even to discuss reparations to the poorer countries whose growing deserts, raging storms, rising sea levels and collapsing agriculture are direct results of massive overconsumption of fossil fuels by the wealthier parts of the world. So China joined 133 countries – basically the entire developing world, in walking out of this year's UN Summit on Climate Change.
There was, they concluded, nothing left to talk about with the representatives of wealthy countries like the United States, Canada, Japan, Australia and Britain, who have already burned enough coal and petroleum to make deserts in African and Asia larger, begin to melt large sections of the polar ice cover, decisively changing the world billions of poor people have to live in, while preaching to them about their solemn duty to conserve, and adapt. The developed countries will not “adapt” themselves, will pay no reparations for global damages already inflicted and to come, and led by the world's greatest environmental scofflaw, the United States of America, refuse to agree to any binding reduction in the rates and amounts of poison they dump into the planet's oceans and air.
Democrats or Republicans, environmental promises or none, the corporate elite of the developed world are rogues and outlaws. Suck it up, they tell the poorer countries. Adapt. We'll give you a loan (at ruinous interest) to do that. Conserve. We'll audit you. But nobody, the rich countries say, regulates or audits us.
No wonder the Chinese, and most of the world decided there was nothing more to talk about.
For Black Agenda Radio, I'm Bruce Dixon. Find us on the web at www.blackagendareport.com.
Bruce A. Dixon is managing editor at Black Agenda Report and a state committee member of the Georgia Green Party. Contact him via this site's contact page, or at bruce.dixon(at)blackagendareport.com.