Sep 24 2012
Adapted from Rant of the Week at The Stars Hollow Gazette
Black Agenda Report‘s executive editor, Glen Ford and Michael Eric Dyson, professor of sociology at Georgetown University and radio host debated the presidency of Barack Obama on Democracy Now! with host Amy Goodman.
Transcript can be read here.
Apr 05 2011
Glen Ford, co-founder of the Black Agenda Report and author of The Big Lie: An Analysis of U.S. Media Coverage of the Grenada Invasion, talks with Paul Jay of The Real News Network about the Libya “humanitarian intervention” by the US, the UK, France and the other “coalition” member countries, with his analysis of the causes and goals of the intervention, saying that…
…it is an imperial assault. We don’t need to lose sight of the forest just because individual trees are acting this way and that. What we’re seeing is a unified Euro-American assault on a major oil producer. But the context must include what people are calling the “Arab Spring”, this Arab nationalist reawakening. And that had Washington and all the smaller imperial capitals very, very confused and off-balance. They desperately wanted to find some way that they could appropriate to themselves some part of the Arab reawakening. Libya has provided that opportunity to them, or they have provided themselves with the opportunity to somehow identify with rising Arab nationalist forces, which they will of course call democratic, even though if they come to power in Libya it will be by force of United States and European arms.
[snip]
They targeted [Gaddafi] because they had the opportunity. They also, as I said earlier, were desperately seeking a way to put themselves on the right side of the Arab reawakening, and this was an opportunity. As well, it was what the Saudi’s wanted. It’s well known, it’s been known for a very long time, that the Saudi leadership and Gaddafi were at knife’s edge. Gaddafi liked to bait them and, well, badmouth them, and kings and monarchs don’t like that. So it was an opportunity to take him out. And just because he was collaborating with the United States and the Europeans, collaborating with AFRICOM in terms of operations to find al-Qaeda, just because he was doing that does not mean he was considered reliable. What the imperialists want is a regime that will totally open up the country to Western corporate penetration. They cannot tolerate independence of any kind. They can’t tolerate any nationalism except their own French nationalism or United States nationalism. And that’s why they’re so off balance with his reawakening of Arab nationalism.
Feb 18 2011
(cross-posted at boomantribune)
I think booman is correct in suggesting that in the struggle between Obama and House Republicans, Reagan will beat Glen Beck on relative merits. That’s good enough for booman to continue supporting the president. Of course, that is looking through an objective that can only resolve issues at the cellular level and range of center-right to right wing nut: one neuron is darkly stained with cresyl-crazy, whereas the one next to it took up less stain. One would need to zoom out with a much broader, less powerful lens to know whether these neurons were in the left or right hemisphere of the brain, to know which half of the brain stained most heavily for crazy overall.
For example, the very unstable situation in the Middle East is only likely to worsen over time, which was empirically predictable many decades ago, and predictable in principle from any arbitrarily selected moment in history after Malthus. Either prediction suffices to suggest that there is nothing “routine” about “managing” the Middle East, and demands very different policies to manage the transcendent problems, in any kind of adult-like, proactive fashion. In booman’s usage, “child’s play” is a relativistic term: Obama is like a cognitive nine-year-old to Boehner’s five-year-old. If one can call continuing decades of failed right wing policy for all the wrong reasons “statesman-like,” then maybe the right wing is correct in trashing the entire idea of governance.
Glen Ford rightly rips progressives supporting Obama’s center-right/right wing grand unification, and John Caruso presses him a tick further, but neither goes nearly far enough in their relatively tepid denunciations of statesmen and their supporters promulgating more right wing, empirically-failed solutions.
I’ll admit that on the concurrent schedules of permanent global economic collapse, peak oil, climate change, and the sixth great extinction event, it is difficult to imagine what a real statesperson might look like, but I doubt it’s the kind of person with a hankering for further high stakes military and financial gambling, who pines away for the support of the haves over the have-nots, and is therefore eager to take a blowtorch to governmental regulation, including safeguards against inequality and financial and ecological catastrophe, and who has proven utterly incapable of executing accountability, all in the name of personal or short-term gains.
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:
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.
Jul 05 2008
By Glen Ford of blackagendareport.com via dissidentvoice.org: http://www.dissidentvoice.org/…