Mar 13 2012
Call a Georgetown law student a slut, and the liberal universe goes into supernova. Destroy Somalia and Libya, or obliterate due process of law, and the same people just yawn. Attorney General Eric Holder “asserts that the president can in fact decide to kill anyone he wants, as long as he claims that person is a terrorist.” Liberals love the guy.
How rare. Margaret Kimberley, we luvs you.
Sep 30 2011
SPECIAL GUEST BRUCE A DIXON live with Diane Gee on WWL Radio Friday, September 30th at 6pm EDT!
Listen live by clicking the link icon below:
Tonight I have the honor of interviewing Bruce A. Dixon co-founder of the wonderful (and wildly left) Black Agenda Report. His bio there:
“Managing Editor Bruce Dixon: Longtime Activist, Habitual Troublemaker
A habitual troublemaker and incorrigible activist, Bruce Dixon has been comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable since 1968.
As a rank and file member of the Black Panther Party in 1969-1970, a 1970s rank-and-file union activist in a string of factories, plants and workplaces, a 1980s community organizer in what were then some of the nation’s poorest neighborhoods, to organizing and consulting through the 1990s Dixon has built an impressive record of service in and to the cause of human liberation.
In 2002 he began writing articles for Black Commentator, the predecessor of this publication, and broke the first accurate analyses of the phenomena around the election of Denise Majette over Cynthia McKinney in Georgia that year.
As managing editor at BAR Dixon is chiefly responsible for maintaining this web site. He currently resides in metro Atlanta.
Bruce graciously allowed me to reprint his latest essay questioning the LOTE, lesser of the two evils with Barack Obama as perhaps the more effective evil. “Barack Obama VS Those Craaaazy Republicans: Is He the Lesser Evil, or the More Effective Evil?” I adored it. He is brilliant, outspoken, and a troublemaker like me. This should be an awesome show!
The call in number is 646-929-1264 to join the conversation!
Tip: In order to comment in adjoing chat, you must create a BTR account, its free and only takes seconds. I read chat while on air, so make yourself heard.
Miss the show? The podcasts are available at the link above, or at the Wild Wild Left
Join Wild Wild Left Radio every Friday at 6pm EST, via Blog Talk Radio, with Hostess and Producer Diane Gee to guide you through Current Events taken from a Wildly Left Prospective….
WWL Radio: Bringing you controversial, cutting edge, revolutionary, “out there where the buses don’t run” LEFT perspective since January of 2009!
Aug 28 2010
With a big “Thank you” to Glen Ford, executive editor of Black Agenda Report, for permission to post his recent essay here.
Black Agenda Report
Introduction by Glen Ford
A corporate offensive is rolling down upon us, aimed at wholesale privatization of the public sector. If the Left has learned anything in the last year and a half, it should be that President Obama is Wall Street’s guy, having “delivered the highest return on corporate campaign investment in the history of bourgeois democracy.” In this struggle, the people will be left to their own devices.
Ford’s essay is below the fold:
Jul 30 2010
While the Netroots Nation 2010 conference was happening in Las Vegas last weekend, another conference, even more important IMHO, was occurring in Albany, New York. The United National Anti-War Conference brought together a broad coalition of peace, anti-war, social justice, labor, ethnic, and other activists for the purpose of finding a new mode and presentation for our many, many righteous grievances.
From Glenn Ford to David Swanson to Noam Chomsky to Medea Benjamin, the hard core community of dissent and change gathered to explore why we have not been able to attain our goals and look for more productive roads to success.
Glenn Ford, one of my favorites, Editor of the “Black Agenda Report”, and an attendee at the conference reported on July 28th:
A renewed anti-war movement is under construction, one that breaks decisively from the Cult of Obama, demands an end to all U.S. aid to the Israeli “apartheid regime,” and calls for “immediate, total and unconditional withdrawal of all U.S. troops, mercenaries and contractors from Afghanistan, Iraq and Pakistan, and the immediate closing of all U.S. bases in those countries.”
…snip
The mission [of the nearly 600 delegates] is to rescue the anti-war movement from the rubble of its collapse with the ascent of Black Democrat Barack Obama to the presidency.
Ford goes on to name the anti-war defectors:
Leap with me beneath the fold…
Jan 05 2010
The Real News Network’s Paul Jay talks with Glen Ford, Executive Editor of Black Agenda Report, “The Journal of African American Political Thought and Action”, who evaluates the first year of Barack Obama’s presidency, and observes, for a variety of good reasons, that the first US black president “takes every opportunity available to spit in the faces of black people, and to do this quite ostentatiously, very dramatically…”
Jul 27 2009
The Real News Network talks to Executive Editor Glen Ford of the Black Agenda Report.
Ford has a little different take on the situation and analyzing the current political dynamics surrounding the issue says that by excluding a single payer plan, Barack Obama allowed the right to dominate the reform debate, and concludes that the longer the Democrats wait to reform the health care system, the more likely it is that the public is going to turn against the so-called reforms.
Apr 29 2008
Last night MSNBC (including Keith Olbermann) was all over Jeremiah Wright for going on a book tour and – gasp! – daring to criticize Barack Obama. Reading today’s hate-fueled rant on the web site, you’d think he had done something wrong. Why? Why shouldn’t the man who was publicly tossed overboard by his former parishioner return the favor?
Reading Kevin Alexander Gray’s assessment of the speech in which the Democratic candidate for president distanced himself from the man who presided over his marriage and baptized his children, I couldn’t help but conclude that Wright had been thrown under the proverbial speeding bus by Obama – who apparently decided long ago to adopt Bill Cosby’s out-of-touch, blame-the-victim rhetoric (an observation echoed by Adolph Reed, Jr., in the May issue of The Progressive).
“His political repertoire,” writes Reed, “has always included the repugnant stratagem of using connection with Black audiences in exactly the same way Bill Clinton did – i.e., getting props for both emoting with the Black crowd and talking through them to affirm a victim-blaming, ‘tough love’ message that focuses on alleged behavioral pathologies in poor Black communities.” Reed blasts Obama for going “beyond Clinton and rehears[ing] the scurrilous and ridiculous sort of narrative Bill Cosby has made famous.”
Gray pointed out in his April 2, 2008 Progressive online column:
Until the controversy broke about his ties to the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Obama himself frequently played the race card – on black people.
Shortly before the Texas and Ohio primaries, Obama was speaking to a mostly black audience and said, “I know some of ya’ll, you got that cold Popeye’s out for breakfast. I know. That’s why ya’ll laughing. … You can’t do that. Children have to have proper nutrition.”
In South Carolina, he told the state Legislative Black Caucus that a good economic development plan in the black community would be “cleaning up the garbage.”
Now, if white politicians had said these things they would have been pummeled.
And even in his much-heralded speech, Obama went out of his way to criticize welfare, decry “the erosion of black families” and stress the need for black fathers to spend more time with their kids.
This Bill Cosby routine goes down well with white voters, but it further stigmatizes blacks.
Obama managed to weasel his way out of trouble a month ago by dissing his former pastor as a bitter relic of a bygone era. So who can blame Jeremiah Wright when he goes on the talk circuit to defend himself and retaliate against his betrayer? For truly, did Obama not merely use his former pastor’s church as a means of establishing ties to a community whose political backing he wanted to strengthen his career (writers at Black Agenda Report and The New Republic certainly seem to think so)?
The point here is not to criticize Barack Obama so much as it is to defend Jeremiah Wright as he gives back what he received. The danger of dismissing him as an angry, bitter old man whose message is equally ignorable lies in continuing the cycle of racism in this country, and the suppression of very real issues pertaining to U.S. foreign and domestic policy.
The fact is that not only was Wright betrayed, so too was the whole of the Black community, and the legitimate criticisms of imperialist policy that have wrought suffering and devastation upon others. We may disagree with the reverend’s delivery, but we cannot deny that the attacks of September 11, 2001 were a direct consequence of our country’s meddling in Middle Eastern affairs that resulted in mass death and political oppression in the region. Nor can we deny that our nation was built on the backs of African slaves, and the genocide of the aboriginal peoples of this continent. The indignation over Jeremiah Wright’s fiery rhetoric clouds the truths contained in his diatribes.
So let’s cut the man some slack. He may not be the sort of person we’d prefer to point out these truths, his method of delivery far too blunt for our comfort. But sometimes we need that in order to face up to unpleasant facts about ourselves and our nation’s history. We should consider that Mr. Wright may be justified in going public with his side of the story, with his criticisms.
If that happens to hurt Barack Obama’s presidential campaign, whose fault is that?
Mar 21 2008
by BlackAgendaReport Managing Editor Bruce Dixon.
This is an interesting point-of-view of Obama’s campaign:
