Obama & Holder Win Court Case, Keep Thouands in Prison Under Unfair 80s Crack Sentencing Laws
Black Agenda Radio Commentaries
Release Date: 12/04/2013
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_outlineObama & Holder Win Court Case, Keep Thouands in Prison Under Unfair 80s Crack Sentencing Laws
A Black Agenda Radio commentary by BAR managing editor Bruce A. Dixon
Are establishment black “civil rights organizations” like the NAACP, the National Action Network and the NAACP Legal Defense Fund really opposed to mass incarceration and the prison state?
I got an email yesterday from the NAACP LDF, the outfit founded by none other than Thurgood Marshall, who litigated Brown V Board of Education back in the 1950s. The email said that the federal 6th Circuit Court of Appeals had just ruled that the so-called Fair Sentencing Act of 2010 reducing the racist laws fixing the penalties for crack cocaine at 100 times those for powder cocaine to a somewhat less unfair ratio of 18 to 1 would not be applied retroactively to the thousands of people still serving obscenely long prison sentences from the quarter century those laws were enforced.
The press release went on to say that they are heartened that 7 judges did favor the release of the prisoners suffering these unfair sentences, and that “...Their powerful dissents encourage us to remain steadfast in our effort to win the release of those held under draconian and discriminatory sentences.”
The NAACP LDF which represented the families of prisoners serving these unjust sentences knows very well that this is a political issue and a political struggle.
So why did the NAACP LDF fail to mention that their legal opponents in this case were President Barack Obama's and Attorney General Eric Holder's Justice Department, which opposed in court the application of the very law which the president signed and the attorney general lauded.
Let me say that again... First, it was the Obama-Holder Justice Department which first refused to retroactively reduce the unfair crack cocaine sentences under the law the president signed and the attorney general praised Secondly, it was the Obama-Holder Justice Department which went to court to keep those people in prison. They lost when the trial judge ruled they should be released. And third, the same Justice Department run by the same first black attorney general under the first black president appealed the order to reduce those sentences, instead seeking and obtaining yesterday's ruling by the 6th circuit court of appeals.
But you wouldn't know any of this from the NAACP-LDF's press release. Or NAN's or any of the rest of the corporate-funded black “civil rights' establishment. You could have read it in Black Agenda Report
On mass incarceration in general and the reduction of these unfair, unjust sentences, our first black president and attorney general are howling hypocrites, saying one thing and doing another. Their hypocrisy is enabled by traditional black civil rights organizations like the NAACP-LDF, who refuse to make a political issue out of Obama's and Holder's hypocrisy. The “civil rights” establishment is in a bind. They claim to oppose mass incarceration and the prison state, although they've only just learned the phrase “mass incarceration” and cannot fix their lips to say “prison state.”
But since their first priority is boosting the political fortunes and careers of their peers in the black political elite, who we affectionately call our black misleadership class, they are unable to call the devil in charge of mass incarceration by his name, if that devil has a black face.
For Black Agenda Report, 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 member of the state committee of the GA Green Party. He lives and works in Marietta GA and can be reached via this site's contact page, or at bruce.dixon(at)blackagendareport.com.