Ending Poverty, Hunger and War = Racial Justice?

The Black Lives Matter slogan and the demand for “racial justice” echo as the defining characteristic of the ongoing resistance from Portland to Kenosha. But the drama of the moment obscures the limitation of these demands. What we mean is those demands can be easily manipulated by the same forces the resisters in the streets believe they are in opposition to.

Private corporations such as Uber and Amazon and professional sports teams have contributed money and lined up behind the demand that “Black Lives Matter.” But as these private companies, the media and right-wing neoliberal politicians in the Democratic Party all line up in favor of racial justice, isn’t it wise for someone to inquire what exactly they are backing? This question is especially important in the midst of the pandemic, in which the non-white working-class populations are suffering and dying in disproportionate numbers, with hundreds of African/Black people dying every week.

Extrajudicial murders of Black people at the hands of U.S. police number fewer than 300 per year, on average. The opposition to murders at the hands of police is understandable, given African/Black people make up 13 percent of the U.S. population but represent an average of 25 percent to 30 percent of lethal encounters with the police. These numbers don’t even account for the numbers of African/Black people shot and beaten by the police.

However, other disproportionalities are not being contextualized as racial justice issues. Astronomical rates of Black unemployment, Black people in lines for food assistance, Black people representing the most vulnerable so-called “essential” workers, Black people lacking health insurance, Black people impoverished and Black people unnecessarily dying during a pandemic are expressions of capitalist state violence. But they have been exempted from the category of racialized oppression.

This contradiction might explain why Amazon founder Jeff Bezos can make sure workers trying to organize themselves are fired, but then turn around and claim “Black Lives Matter.”

Black human-rights fighter Ella Baker famously said to Black people and to other oppressed people, “You and I cannot be free in America or anywhere else where there is capitalism and imperialism.” If the current demand for racial justice was identified with the position Ella Baker articulated, would the corporations, the media, liberal foundations, and right-wing Democrats like Joe Biden and Kamala Harris still support it?

The answer is obvious. That is why even the leading personalities of the Black Lives Matter movement have not publicly embraced Ella Baker’s position.

And that is why we have and must continue to develop a Black Alliance for Peace (BAP). Members of this alliance are clear there can be no justice, no peace or human rights as long as this rapacious, inhumane colonial/capitalist system is allowed to reproduce poverty, war and the structures of white supremacy.

 

PRESS AND MEDIA

BAP continues to act on our renewed commitment to our political prisoners during this 41st Black August by posting solidarity videos from our members on our Instagram account. Black Agenda Radio re-broadcast political prisoners advocacy organization Jericho Movement co-chair Jihad Abdulmumit’s talk given August 15 at the Black Is Back Coalition’s national conference. The Incarcerated Workers Organizing Committee (IWOC) “is committed to the militant organizing of prisoners that takes its leadership and focus from those on the inside.” Black Agenda Radio dove into it. Plus, Netfa Freeman, who represents Pan-African Community Action (PACA) on BAP’s Coordinating Committee, spread the word about Black August on RT Spanish; on a panel discussion held after the screening of “Let the Fire Burn,” a film about the MOVE bombing; featured BAP member, Black Is Back Coalition Steering Committee member and Black Agenda Report Executive Editor Glen Ford’s August 15 Black Is Back Coalition talk on WPFW’s “Voices with Vision”; and spoke on a webinar hosted by Africans Rising, “Black August: Standing in Global Solidarity” to connect the global struggle of Africans to the struggle of our political prisoners in the United States. During Black August, BAP collaborated with the Abolitionist Law Center, which made this video.

PACA organizer Olúfémi O. Táíwò published an article in In These Times, "Want to Abolish the Police? The First Step Is Putting Them Under Democratic Control: Abolition is part of a broader struggle for democracy." The work of the National Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression on Community Control of Police (CCOP) was featured in this article.

BAP National Organizer Ajamu Baraka discussed the Democrats, Trump, Black Lives Matter and identity politics as it relates to Kamala Harris on Law and Disorder Radio. BAP Coordinating Committee member Margaret Kimberley discussed on the Left Lens with BAP Supporter Network Co-Coordinator Danny Haiphong Harris’ nomination. Then Margaret analyzed Trump’s agenda to end all wars 89 minutes into Radio Sputnik’s “The Critical Hour.” She also discussed the 2020 elections on the “Wider View” podcast.

Netfa provided context on the protests in Kenosha, Wisconsin, following the police shooting of Jacob Blake. Watch him on here and here. Margaret discussed Kenosha and the significance of the March on Washington on RT’s “Watching the Hawks.”

BAP member Luci Murphy was featured in Billboard magazine for her work with the People's Music Network for Songs of Freedom and Struggle, where she serves on the steering committee.

BAP member Erica Caines explained on an ANTICONQUISTA livestream the relevance of Huey P. Newton’s book, “To Die for the People,” for today’s struggle. Hood Communist editors, one of whom is Erica, discussed in this video why they created the blog and the revolutionary potential of Africans in the United States. 

 

EVENTS

August 31: BAP’s August 23 webinar, “How the International War Against Black People is Being Waged Locally,” featured a well-received video explaining BAP’s mission. It will premiere at 7 p.m., EST, on Facebook, Instagram and YouTube. 

September 4: The Bethesda African Cemetery Coalition will host a demonstration demanding Montgomery County return land to the African/Black community. It will take place 12 p.m., EST, at 5204 River Road in Bethesda, Maryland. Learn more.

September 9: PACA's Assata Shakur Study Group will be held at 7 p.m, EST, online.

September 19-20: Labor and Community for An Independent Party is organizing a two-day online conference, “Break the Grip of the Two-Party System Program Agenda.” Registration is required.

November 7-8: The Black Is Back Coalition calls on all to march, rally and convene in Washington, D.C., during the “Black People's March On White House.” Registration is required.

 

TAKE ACTION

• The Black Latina Girls and Women Fund was created by BAP member organization AfroResistance, a Black Latina women-led organization in the service of Black Latinx women in the Americas. This fund offers financial support by giving money directly to Black Latin womxn, girls and femmes who are experiencing severe financial need across the region, especially due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Whether in Brazil, Colombia, United States or Panama, Black Latina girls, women, and femmes are organizing in their local communities in the fight against several forms of state violence. You can donate here and people are encouraged to use the hashtag #BlackLatinaGWFund.

• Ask your local, state and federal candidates to sign BAP’s 2020 Candidate Accountability Pledge. If you are a candidate, distinguish yourself from the other corporate warmongering candidates by signing the pledge.

• Sign up to join BAP’s U.S. Out of Africa Network to receive the bi-weekly AFRICOM Watch Bulletin in your inbox.

• Make sure you keep up with us throughout the week by subscribing to our YouTube channel, liking us on Facebook, and following us on Instagram and Twitter.

• We are raising $30,000 to help expand our membership support capacity and revamp our website. Donate and share our GoFundMe campaign with your networks today.

No Compromise, No Retreat!
 
Struggle to win,
Ajamu, Dedan, Jaribu, Margaret, Netfa, Nnamdi, Paul, Vanessa, YahNé

P.S. Freedom isn’t free. Consider giving today.

Photo credit: Stephanie Keith / Getty Images

The DNC and the Politics of Betrayal

The political and moral bankruptcy of the Democratic Party was on full display last week. First it was the convention of the Democratic Party, where the progressive wing of the party was pushed to the margins while the victorious, neoliberal right wing engaged in a surreal spectacle that came off oblivious to the economic, social and political crisis the country has been experiencing. The second thing that happened was the emergency reconvening of the U.S. House of Representatives to “save the post office.”

On the night Kamala Harris accepted the nomination as vice president, the Democratic Party devoted itself to demonstrating it was more militantly aggressive in its commitment to military threats, in the use of force and in reclaiming the U.S. global dominance that Trump supposedly has squandered. Neocons from the Republican Party also spoke to assure the country Joe Biden would commit to a stronger NATO, to completing the military pivot to Asia, and to standing up to the demon of the moment—Vladimir Putin.

The inspiring stories of democratic renewal and of happy days being just around the corner once Joe is in office seemed strangely disconnected from the fact that Congress had gone on vacation, leaving millions in economic limbo because the federal enhanced unemployment benefit had expired. Yet the House was called back by Nancy Pelosi not to pass a bill to end the confusion around extended unemployment and to protect against evictions, but to save the postal service so nothing would get in the way of electing the political class.

The racism, militarism, and materialism that Dr. King warned would be the diseases that would kill the body politic of the United States have created a zombie democracy.

War, the political betrayal of the working class, and an inane political posturing in the face of an intractable crisis are the politics of a society beyond salvation.

 

PRESS AND MEDIA

BAP continues to act on our renewed commitment to our political prisoners during this 41st Black August by posting solidarity videos from our members on our Instagram account. BAP member, Black Is Back Coalition Steering Committee member and Black Agenda Report Executive Editor Glen Ford’s talk during the Black Is Back Coalition national conference has been transcribed and published in Black Agenda Report. Plus, the official U.S. position that it holds no political prisoners is part of “the lie and the founding mythology of U.S. ‘democracy,’” Princeton University doctoral candidate, activist and minister Nyle Fort said during a Black Agenda Radio interview. Then Netfa Freeman, who represents BAP member organization Pan-African Community Action (PACA) on the BAP Coordinating Committee, interviewed Naji Mujahi, an attorney for the political-prisoner advocacy group The Jericho Movement, on WPFW’s “Voices with Vision.” 

Ahmed Malik Braxton, a PACA organizer, spoke on Pan-African Revolutionary Socialist Party’s “Africa Must Unite” podcast about how PACA is attempting to intervene into the struggle of our people in Washington, D.C.

BAP Coordinating Committee member Margaret Kimberley writes, “Kamala Harris was chosen precisely because she complements Biden’s determination to do nothing on behalf of the people.” Margaret also discussed Harris’ vice-presidential nomination on Sputnik Radio’s “The Critical Hour” (58 minutes into the show), Press TV, Lauren Steiner’s show, and the Hampton Institute’s “A Different Lens” podcast.

In the fourth episode of the Left Lens, co-hosts BAP Supporter Network Co-Coordinator Danny Haiphong and Margaret discuss some of the reasons people of conscience should oppose the U.S. cold war against China.

During Radio Sputnik’s “The Critical Hour,” BAP National Organizer Ajamu Baraka gave his general thoughts on the Democratic National Convention starting at 2 minutes into the Thursday show. Then Netfa appeared at 43 minutes into the show to discuss the U.S. relationship with Sudan while Sept. 11 victims and their families protest Congress’ impending move to take Sudan off the list of “state sponsors of terrorism.” 

EVENTS

August 26: “Free Them All: Film Screening & Panel Discussion”, will be hosted by BAP, PACA, Stop Police Terror Project, Current Movements, the Institute for Policy Studies and Eaton Workshop. The film, “Let The Fire Burn,” about the MOVE bombing will be virtually screened at 6 p.m, EST. A panel discussion featuring recently released political prisoner Debbie Africa, son of former political prisoners Mike Africa Jr., son of a political prisoner Russell Shoatz III and the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement-DC’s Jonathan Stith will take place 7:30-8:30 p.m., EST.

August 27: Netfa will speak on an Africans Rising online panel, “Black August: Standing in Global Solidarity” at 10 a.m., EST, to discuss the history and contemporary importance of Black August. Registration is required.

August 28: BAP member Dr. Karanja Keita Carroll will virtually deliver a keynote address at 5 p.m., EST, that will touch on BAP’s Black August work. Registration is required.

August 29: Cooperation Jackson is organizing an art exhibit to commemorate the 15th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina at 1 p.m. at the Ida B. Wells Plaza, 1128 W. Capitol Street, Jackson, Mississippi.

August 29: BAP member organization We Charge Colonialism will host a debate at 7 p.m., EST, on the internal colonization of Africans in the United States. Tune in on Facebook or YouTube to watch the debate between BAP member Dr. Jared Ball and Dr. Charles Pinderhughes.

August 30: Register for an online rally, “We Can’t Breathe! Keep it in the Streets – Against Racism, Evictions and War!” This is hosted by the United National Antiwar Coalition, BAP, Sanctions Kill, International Action Center, Coalition to March on the DNC, Peoples Power Assemblies NYC, and FIRE (Fight for Im/migrants and Refugees Everywhere).

September 19-20: Labor and Community for an Independent Party is organizing a two-day online conference, “Break the Grip of the Two-Party System Program Agenda.” Registration is required.

November 7-8: The Black Is Back Coalition calls on all to march, rally and convene in Washington, D.C., during the “Black People's March On White House.” Registration is required.

TAKE ACTION

• The Black Latina Girls and Women Fund was created by BAP member organization AfroResistance, a Black Latina women-led organization in the service of Black Latinx women in the Americas. This fund offers financial support by giving money directly to Black Latin womxn, girls and femmes who are experiencing severe financial need across the region, especially due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Whether in Brazil, Colombia, United States or Panama, Black Latina girls, women, and femmes are organizing in their local communities in the fight against several forms of state violence. You can donate here and people are encouraged to use the hashtag #BlackLatinaGWFund.

• Ask your local, state and federal candidates to sign BAP’s 2020 Candidate Accountability Pledge. If you are a candidate, distinguish yourself from the other corporate warmongering candidates by signing the pledge.

• Sign up to join BAP’s U.S. Out of Africa Network to receive the bi-weekly AFRICOM Watch Bulletin in your inbox.

• Make sure you keep up with us throughout the week by subscribing to our YouTube channel, liking us on Facebook, and following us on Instagram and Twitter.

• We are raising $30,000 to help expand our membership support capacity and revamp our website. Donate and share our GoFundMe campaign with your networks today.

No Compromise, No Retreat!
 
Struggle to win,
Ajamu, Dedan, Jaribu, Margaret, Netfa, Nnamdi, Paul, Vanessa, YahNé

P.S. Freedom isn’t free. Consider giving today.

Photo credit: Carlos Barria/Reuters

Trump or Biden: Any Difference for the Global South?

Congress decided to go on vacation while millions of U.S. workers are in economic limbo and while the United States continues to engage in criminal activity, such as when it seized four Iranian oil tankers that were on their way to Venezuela last week.

Yet the focus of the corporate press was on one story: Joe Biden’s selection of Kamala Harris as his running mate.

Amid this clear contradiction, we are not going to waste any space on the merits of Biden’s decision except to raise one question: For the people of the global South suffering because of U.S. sanctions, subversions, war and threats of war, will it matter who is sitting in the White House in January?

For the Black Alliance for Peace (BAP), both parties represent the interests of rapacious capital that have decided that force, coercion, lawlessness and war are the tools that must be deployed in order to hold on to he advantages they enjoy in the international order. For us, it doesn’t matter who sits in the White House in January because the criminality of the U.S. state will continue.

Joe Biden and Kamala Harris—representing the neoliberal, transnational wing of capital—already have their marching orders. 

The Obama-Biden administration oversaw U.S.-supported and/or -initiated coups in Brazil, Egypt, Honduras and Ukraine; intensified regime-change efforts in Iraq, Iran and Syria; attempted coups in Venezuela; the destruction of Libya; expanded drone warfare across northern Africa and western Asia; and a 1,900 percent increase in military activities in Africa through the U.S. Africa Command (AFRICOM). If history is a guide, nothing will be different if Biden and Harris are in the White House.

Regardless of who is in office, the wars, inhumane sanctions, death and destruction in what Frantz Fanon referred to as the “zones of non-being”—those spaces occupied by the non-European peoples of the world—will continue.

But what we also continue is the resistance. BAP will not collaborate with either of the parties. As an alliance, we maintain our independence. Individual members can do as they like. We say “No Compromise, No Retreat: Defeat the War on African/Black People in the U.S. and Abroad” and liberate all the laboring and oppressed of the world.

 

PRESS AND MEDIA

BAP has continued to lift up our political prisoners during the 41st Black August by posting solidarity videos from our members on our Instagram account. Meanwhile, BAP member, Black Is Back Steering Committee member and Black Agenda Report Executive Editor Glen Ford discussed during the Black Is Back Coalition’s national conference held this weekend why it is so important to defend our political prisoners. Plus, Glen and BAP Coordinating Committee member Margaret Kimberley interviewed Jihad Abdulmumit, chairperson of the Jericho Movement, which advocates for political prisoners.

The Burning Spear newspaper of the African People’s Socialist Party writes the bourgeoisie is attempting to ride the wave of success of the recent Black Lives Matter-associated mobilizations to prop up and solve the problems of the bourgeoisie, not the people. Meanwhile, Glen raised serious questions about the call to defund the police. He believes it can be used against the self-determination demands that the Black Liberation Movement has raised with the call for Community Control of the Police. Then BAP National Organizer Ajamu Baraka was quoted in a Final Call article that dove into a recent Amnesty International report that found 125 incidents of police misconduct took place during the U.S. uprisings after the murder of George Floyd.

BAP member Kyndelle Johnson discussed BAP’s upcoming August 23 webinar on radiojustice.org’s “Music to Resist By,” co-hosted by BAP member Bilal Mafundi Ali.

Margaret spoke 26 minutes into an online panel discussion, “Filipinx Solidarity with the Black Liberation Movement”. Then a discussion of BAP’s campaign work took place 69 minutes into the video.

BAP member Erica Caines wrote in Hood Communist that “Harris should be criticized for attempting to wipe her history clean, using ‘Black Girl Magic’ as a cloak and shield against any real accountability for the harm she’s caused. She’s attempting to rewrite her monstrous history in real-time and far too many are allowing it.” Then Margaret gave three interviews on the Biden-Harris ticket: One for Radio Sputnik’s “Loud and Clear”; another that starts at 72 minutes into Radio Sputnik’s “The Critical Hour”; and yet another starting at 61 minutes into Radio Sputnik’s “By Any Means Necessary,” which is co-hosted by BAP member Jacquie Luqman.

Ajamu also spoke to Jacquie on “By Any Means Necessary” (starting at 53:21 minutes) on the resignation of the Lebanese government amid widespread protests following the recent explosion, how the Israel lobby works to undermine longstanding links of solidarity between Black and Palestinian nationalist movements and isolate other anti-imperialist movements, and how individualism and celebrity culture are used to promote policies of white supremacy at home and abroad.

Netfa Freeman, who represents BAP member organization Pan-African Community Action (PACA) on BAP’s Coordinating Committee, discussed on Radio Sputnik’s “The Critical Hour” how more than 14 percent of U.S. commandos deployed overseas in 2019 were sent to Africa, the largest percentage of any region in the world except for the greater Middle East.

Margaret spoke with Chinese reporter Zhou Li about the Trump administration attempting to take over Chinese social-media giant Tik Tok amid the greater U.S. escalation against China. Meanwhile, BAP Supporter Network Co-Coordinator Danny Haiphong wrote in Black Agenda Report that the recent escalations provide NBA players with an opportunity to break with the dominance of U.S. exceptionalism and corporate discipline in U.S. sports culture.

  EVENTS

August 23: At 1 p.m. PST/4 p.m. EST, BAP will hold the first in our Educational Webinar Series. The topic is “How the International War Against Black People Is Being Waged Locally - & How We Unify Against It”. We will be focusing on organizing in Baltimore, Los Angeles, New York, Philadelphia and the San Francisco Bay Area, but participants from anywhere are welcome. Registration is required.

August 29: Cooperation Jackson is organizing an art exhibit to commemorate the 15th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina at 1 p.m. at the Ida B. Wells Plaza, 1128 W. Capitol Street, Jackson, Mississippi.

  TAKE ACTION

• The Black Latina Girls and Women Fund was created by BAP member organization AfroResistance, a Black Latina women-led organization in the service of Black Latinx women in the Americas. This fund offers financial support by giving money directly to Black Latin womxn, girls and femmes who are experiencing severe financial need across the region, especially due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Whether in Brazil, Colombia, United States or Panama, Black Latina girls, women, and femmes are organizing in their local communities in the fight against several forms of state violence. You can donate here and people are encouraged to use the hashtag #BlackLatinaGWFund.

• Ask your local, state and federal candidates to sign BAP’s 2020 Candidate Accountability Pledge. If you are a candidate, distinguish yourself from the other corporate warmongering candidates by signing the pledge.

• Sign up to join BAP’s U.S. Out of Africa Network to receive the bi-weekly AFRICOM Watch Bulletin in your inbox.

• Make sure you keep up with us throughout the week by subscribing to our YouTube channel, liking us on Facebook, and following us on Instagram and Twitter.

• We are raising $30,000 to help expand our membership support capacity and revamp our website. Donate and share our GoFundMe campaign with your networks today.

No Compromise, No Retreat!
 
Struggle to win,
Ajamu, Dedan, Jaribu, Margaret, Netfa, Nnamdi, Paul, Vanessa, YahNé

P.S. Freedom isn’t free. Consider giving today.

Photo credit: Buzzkenya

Where is Resistance to Structural Violence of Capitalism?

The reality in the United States has come to this: 160,000 dead in four months, thousands hospitalized, and many thousands sick or afraid to be sick because they have no sick days and no health insurance. Every week for 20 weeks, over 1 million people filed new claims for unemployment benefits. Real unemployment rates are around 32 percent. In some Black and Brown urban communities, youth unemployment is running between 60 percent and 80 percent. Yet, Congress and the White House are playing games with the extended, enhanced unemployment benefits. "Free market” capitalism has been exposed as a fraud: Instead of delivering the "good life," capitalism generates misery and systematic human-rights abuses. This has created a deep crisis of legitimacy.

During the Great Depression of the 1930s, the capitalist rulers made concessions to workers to ease the consequences of capitalist failure. Despite that, liberal historical revisionists claim the programs of the “New Deal” represented the enlightened leadership of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the racist, upper-class patrician who sat in the White House. What is striking today is instead of the people storming the citadels of power demanding their economic needs be met, Republicans and Democrats have been allowed to play—with impunity—the most obscene and cynical game with people’s lives. That is because unlike the 1930s—when the organized people forced concessions from the rulers—progressive and radical forces today lack the institutional capacity and ideological clarity to challenge the U.S. state and win. Even our most progressive expressions of political opposition represented in the so-called Black Lives Matter movement seem unable to pivot to a general opposition to the system, despite it killing more African/Black life than police violence has.

The Black Alliance for Peace (BAP) has taken on the task of building the organizational structure the African/Black working class needs to organize a new radical movement in the United States that combines the power of colonized peoples, the exploited working class, the oppressed and the marginalized into a force that will rid the planet of war, hunger and exploitation.

PRESS AND MEDIA

This week, BAP member and Black Agenda Report Executive Editor Glen Ford wrote about the mistake today’s activists are making in not giving enough weight to the plight of our political prisoners in his piece about Black August.

BAP’s recent newsletter on Black August was re-printed in Black Agenda Report.

Netfa Freeman, who represents BAP member organization Pan-African Community Action (PACA) on BAP’s Coordinating Committee, interviewed former political prisoner Jihad Abdulmumit, chairperson of the National Jericho Movement, as part of the Black August coverage on WPFW’s “Voices with Vision.”

The recent concern that Trump’s deployment of federal agents in cities like Portland marks the start of fascism in the United States is unfounded. Black and Brown communities have long dealt with disappearances at the hands of police like the NYPD’s “Jump Out Boys.”

BAP Coordinating Committee member Margaret Kimberley discussed the latest U.S. move to hijack Chinese social-media giant Tik Tok on CGTN here and here. Margaret also spoke about the U.S. demonization of China on a CodePink webinar. 

Margaret and BAP National Organizer Ajamu Baraka discussed on Radio Sputnik’s “The Critical Hour” how the rapid shift to absentee voting during the coronavirus pandemic has emerged as a central issue in the 2020 U.S. elections. The conversation starts at 59:35 minutes into the show.

Margaret’s talk from the July 25 “No to the New Cold War in China” webinar that Ajamu and Margaret participated in has been printed in the Global Times.

BAP Supporter Network Co-Coordinator Danny Haiphong wrote on how the silence of the U.S. left lays the foundation for a new cold war with China.

Netfa wrote about how the U.S. is using a Russian presence in Libya to further U.S. interests on the continent and globally. Black Star News re-printed his article. Netfa spoke about this issue on Radio Sputnik’s “Political Misfits” and this interview was cited in a Sputnik article. He also discussed the longstanding political issues behind the Zimbabwean government's decision to compensate white former landowners, why the move is generating outrage among many Zimbabweans as the country's economy continues to struggle under the burden of U.S. sanctions, and attempts to link the protests in Zimbabwe with the struggle against U.S. police. The interview with BAP member Jacqueline Luqman and co-host Sean Blackmon of Radio Sputnik's "By Any Means Necessary" starts at 37:57 minutes.
 

EVENTS

• August 15-16: The Black Is Back Coalition, of which BAP is a member organization, is holding its annual conference online with the theme, “Fight for Black Power: Free All Political Prisoners.” Register today.

• August 15: Cooperation Jackson is hosting a People’s Assembly on the housing crisis and on combating police terrorism at 1 p.m. at the Ida B. Wells Plaza, 1128 W. Capitol Street, Jackson, Mississippi.

• August 23: At 1 p.m. PST/4 p.m. EST, BAP will hold the first in our Educational Webinar Series. The topic is “How the International War Against Black People Is Being Waged Locally - & How We Unify Against It”. We will be focusing on organizing in Baltimore, Los Angeles, New York, Philadelphia and the San Francisco Bay Area, but participants from anywhere are welcome.

• August 29: Cooperation Jackson is organizing an art exhibit to commemorate the 15th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina at 1 p.m. at the Ida B. Wells Plaza, 1128 W. Capitol Street, Jackson, Mississippi.

TAKE ACTION

• The Black Latina Girls and Women Fund was created by BAP member organization AfroResistance, a Black Latina women-led organization in the service of Black Latinx women in the Americas. This fund offers financial support by giving money directly to Black Latin womxn, girls and femmes who are experiencing severe financial need across the region, especially due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Whether in Brazil, Colombia, United States or Panama, Black Latina girls, women, and femmes are organizing in their local communities in the fight against several forms of state violence. You can donate here and people are encouraged to use the hashtag #BlackLatinaGWFund.

• Ask your local, state and federal candidates to sign BAP’s 2020 Candidate Accountability Pledge. If you are a candidate, distinguish yourself from the other corporate warmongering candidates by signing the pledge.

• Sign up to join BAP’s U.S. Out of Africa Network to receive the bi-weekly AFRICOM Watch Bulletin in your inbox.

• Make sure you keep up with us throughout the week by subscribing to our YouTube channel, liking us on Facebook, and following us on Instagram and Twitter.

• We are raising $30,000 to help expand our membership support capacity and revamp our website. Donate and share our GoFundMe campaign with your networks today.

No Compromise, No Retreat!
 
Struggle to win,
Ajamu, Dedan, Jaribu, Margaret, Netfa, Nnamdi, Paul, Vanessa, YahNé

P.S. Freedom isn’t free. Consider giving today.

Photo credit: Spencer Platt/Getty Images

Black August and Black Liberation: “Study, Fast, Train, Fight.”

Each August since 1979, the surviving sectors of the Black Liberation Movement, our supporters, and the new entrants into the ranks of resistors to the ongoing oppression against the African/Black masses and colonized peoples of this territory now called the United States and its settler state, have paid homage to our fallen freedom fighters and those incarcerated for decades in the cages of this country.

The struggle for African/Black freedom in the United States began with the arrival of the first enslaved Africans to this territory in 1619. The tradition of resistance to the settler state is different from the tradition celebrated by the elites of this country in response to the death of U.S. Rep. John Lewis (D-GA). Our positionality first, as an enslaved people and after the formal period of slavery as a nationally oppressed people had forged for us a different interpretation of U.S. history and our relationship to this state. 

For the Black Liberation Movement, reconciliation with the settler state toward a “more perfect union” was not only an impossibility because white-supremacist settler power has been crystalized into the state. It also would have been an unprincipled betrayal of our ancestors, who had resisted the assaults on our collective dignity and struggled to destroy the oppressive system—and had no plans to integrate with it.
 
That struggle intensified in the 1960s and ‘70s, resulting in a vicious counter attack from U.S. state authorities that involved murder, incarcerations, organizational disruption, and an ideological and cultural program to create an “American” out of the rebellious Africans who had earned global prestige for rising up in over 350 cities and creating a revolutionary movement.
 
Black August was created to not only honor and commemorate those who fought for our human rights, national liberation and self-determination, such as Jonathan and George Jackson, W.L. Nolan, and William Christmas. It is meant to pay homage to all of our revolutionary ancestors and those still ensnared by the state.  
 
A central element of Black August is to call attention to our freedom fighters still held captive as political prisoners and Prisoners of War. Some have moved into their fifth decade shackled as the longest serving political prisoners on the face of the Earth.
 
This past weekend, Black Alliance for Peace (BAP) members unanimously decided to commit to raising awareness about our imprisoned fighters.
 
The theme of Black August is to “study, fast, train, fight.” That is what the members of BAP intend to do this month and every month until we rid the Earth of the malignant threat to all of humanity represented by the Pan-European, White-supremacist, colonial/capitalist patriarchy.

 

PRESS AND MEDIA

Because we celebrate August as Black August, we highlight this Hood Communist article by BAP member Erica Caines on Black revolutionary and prison abolitionist George Jackson.

The “No to the New Cold War in China” webinar that BAP National Organizer Ajamu Baraka and BAP Coordinating Committee member Margaret Kimberley participated in on July 25 has been viewed more than 70 million times in China and around the world. Ajamu’s talk was transcribed and published in the Global Times, Black Agenda Report and Monthly Review. Margaret’s talk was given Chinese subtitles. Our participation, featured on CGTN Europe, demonstrates how important it is to have African voices articulating the Black radical internationalist tradition. 

Ajamu also discussed Joe Biden’s vice-presidential choices on Radio Sputnik’s “Loud & Clear.”

We were dismayed to hear Zimbabwe’s current government has agreed to pay $3.5 billion to white farmers who were dispossessed of land during a decolonization process.

U.S. funding for Togo’s army continues, as this article suggests. When we say “U.S. Out of Africa,” we are clear it is also a call to confront the neocolonial leaders on the continent. That is why BAP's U.S. Out of Africa Network (USOAN), the organizational arm of our U.S. Out of Africa: Shut Down AFRICOM effort, has been building a base among organizations on the African continent itself.

Margaret recently had discussed this effort on the Canadian Voices of Women for Peace webinar. Margaret also appeared on The Convo Couch to discuss U.S. imperialism, the current Black Lives Matter movement and Russiagate.

The global economic depression sparked by the pandemic lockdowns is “a singular event in the history of world capitalism,” said Duboisian scholar Anthony Monteiro to Black Agenda Radio. “It might be the crisis that so disabled the world capitalist system that it will never be the same.”

Johanna Fernandez, host of WBAI’s “It's a New Day,” interviewed Margaret about the Portland arrests starting at 34 minutes. Margaret also discussed John Lewis’ legacy on Deutsche Welle.

We are not falling for the ruling-class agenda meant to de-politicize the resistance using the liberal petit bourgeois Black misleadership class, as Margaret Kimberley stated this week in Black Agenda Report.

Last week, WPFW’s “Voices With Vision,” co-hosted by Netfa Freeman, who represents Pan-African Community Action (PACA) on BAP’s Coordinating Committee, continued to feature a collage of BAP voices (Saladin Muhammad of BAP member organization Black Workers for Justice and BAP members Kwame Wilburg, Alicia Skeeter and Bilal Mafundi Ali) and National Alliance Against Racist & Political Repression voices. The show also included an interview about Community Control in general (schools, land, etc.), as well as the eviction apocalypse soon to be faced by many.

Netfa was also featured in an interview by TeleSUR that was then picked up by CounterPunch, Caribbean News Global, Rebeliòn, Portal Alba, ALAI, Globalizacion, Orinoco Tribune and The Canada Files.
 

EVENTS

• August 15-16: The Black Is Back Coalition, of which BAP is a member organization, is holding its annual conference online with the theme, “Fight for Black Power: Free All Political Prisoners.” Register today.

• August 15: Cooperation Jackson is hosting a People’s Assembly on the housing crisis and on combating police terrorism at 1 p.m. at the Ida B. Wells Plaza, 1128 W. Capitol Street, Jackson, Mississippi.

• August 23: At 1 p.m. PST/4 p.m. EST, BAP will hold the first in our Educational Webinar Series. The topic is “How the International War Against Black People Is Being Waged Locally - & How We Unify Against It”. We will be focusing on organizing in Baltimore, Los Angeles, New York, Philadelphia and the San Francisco Bay Area, but participants from anywhere are welcome. Save the date and look out for more information in future newsletters.

• August 29: Cooperation Jackson is organizing an art exhibit to commemorate the 15th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina at 1 p.m. at the Ida B. Wells Plaza, 1128 W. Capitol Street, Jackson, Mississippi.

TAKE ACTION

• The Black Latina Girls and Women Fund was created by BAP member organization AfroResistance, a Black Latina women-led organization in the service of Black Latinx women in the Americas. This fund offers financial support by giving money directly to Black Latin womxn, girls and femmes who are experiencing severe financial need across the region, especially due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Whether in Brazil, Colombia, United States or Panama, Black Latina girls, women, and femmes are organizing in their local communities in the fight against several forms of state violence. You can donate here and people are encouraged to use the hashtag #BlackLatinaGWFund.

• Ask your local, state and federal candidates to sign BAP’s 2020 Candidate Accountability Pledge. If you are a candidate, distinguish yourself from the other corporate warmongering candidates by signing the pledge.

• Sign up to join BAP’s U.S. Out of Africa Network to receive the bi-weekly AFRICOM Watch Bulletin in your inbox.

• Make sure you keep up with us throughout the week by subscribing to our YouTube channel, liking us on Facebook, and following us on Instagram and Twitter.

• We are raising $30,000 to help expand our membership support capacity and revamp our website. Donate and share our GoFundMe campaign with your networks today.

No Compromise, No Retreat!
 
Struggle to win,
Ajamu, Brandon, Dedan, Jaribu, Margaret, Netfa, Paul, Vanessa, YahNé

P.S. Freedom isn’t free. Consider giving today.

Photo Credit: Ruth-Marion Baruch available at UC Santa Cruz Archives

China, Militarism and Bipartisan Games

Trump militarized Portland last week and then threatened to send federal police and military forces to Chicago and other Democrat Party-led cities. Then Democrats squealed in opposition. But it’s phony. Both political parties are playing a cynical game designed to keep the public's attention on the drama of Trump while they work together to advance the agenda of the ruling class.

The public has been told the two parties can’t seem to agree on vital issues facing the working class, such as extending unemployment protection and a moratorium on rent and mortgage evictions. But there didn’t seem to be much problem for the parties in the U.S. House of Representatives when they decided a pathetic proposal to reduce the Department of Defense budget by 10 percent was too dangerous. In fact, 139 Democrats joined Republicans in voting down that amendment to the 2021 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) before approving another obscene military budget of $740 billion.

Rep. James Clyburn (D-SC), the Black mouthpiece for the right-wing neoliberal corporate wing of the Democratic Party, took the lead on advising Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-WA) that her proposal for a federal “paycheck guarantee,” while efficient in that it would cover workers’ salaries for three months, was much too expensive. The cost? For six months of coverage, it was estimated at $654 billion.

The priorities are clear. Money is available for the military-industrial complex, but lifesaving support for workers is just too expensive.

And yet the games continue. Trump shut down the Chinese consulate in Houston as both parties are in fierce competition to demonstrate their toughness on China. Neither party can explain to the people why China is such a threat today. Just a few months ago, Russia was the main threat.

That is why the Black Alliance for Peace (BAP) takes the unequivocal and unambiguous position that we will never allow the U.S. state and its ideological henchmen to push us into opposition against any external enemy. We say, “no to a new cold war with China,” no to militarism, no to domestic repression, and no to the continued neglect of millions of workers and poor people in the United States.

 

PRESS AND MEDIA

BAP Coordinating Committee member Margaret Kimberley and BAP National Organizer Ajamu Baraka appeared on “No to the New Cold War with China,” a webinar that was well attended and featured talks by many prominent people. Margaret explained why the U.S. left must oppose a new cold war with China, while Ajamu discussed how radical Black internationalists relate to China.

Dedan Waciuri, who represents BAP member organization Black Workers for Justice on BAP’s Coordinating Committee, recently made the connection between U.S. foreign interventions and U.S. domestic repression of colonized people.

BAP member Asantewaa Mawusi Nkrumah-Ture recently spoke on a webinar featuring members of social movements from Venezuela and the United States. She expressed BAP's support for Venezuela's people as they face deadly U.S. sanctions and the threat of regime change.

Netfa Freeman, who represents BAP member organization Pan-African Community Action (PACA) on BAP’s Coordinating Committee, discussed a number of issues with BAP member Jacquie Luqman, who co-hosts Sputnik Radio’s “By Any Means Necessary” with Sean Blackmon. They talked about Democrats and Republicans overwhelmingly voting against a proposal to cut military spending by 10 percent. They also discussed how the 2011 NDAA signed into law by President Barack Obama paved the way for indefinite detention, and BAP’s recent statement condemning Trump's deployment of federal agents to cities like Portland.

Netfa also broke down with his co-host, Craig Hall, on WPFW’s “Voices with Vision” a history of the Trump administration’s fascist militarized deployment against recent uprisings in U.S. cities. This included a creative historical analysis of U.S. policing, which featured voices from BAP and the National Alliance Against Racist & Political Repression.

Ajamu dug into the deployment of federal agents 30 minutes into Sputnik Radio’s “The Critical Hour”, while Margaret can be heard discussing her book, “Prejudential: Black America and the Presidents,” about 99 minutes into the interview.

PACA organizer Max Rameau was cited in a Nation article that discussed Community Control of Police (CCOP).

Then TeleSUR interviewed Netfa, during which he said, “Our struggle, seen from the context of the black left, is for power.” Check out the interview in Spanish and English.

Plus, we must be vigilant of how the U.S. government is attempting to force journalists to turn over their footage to out protesters.
 

EVENTS

August 23: At 1 p.m. PST/4 p.m. EST, BAP will hold the first in our Educational Webinar Series. The topic is “How the International War Against Black People Is Being Waged Locally - & How We Unify Against It”. We will be focusing on organizing in Philadelphia, New York, Baltimore, Los Angeles and the San Francisco Bay Area, but participants are welcome from anywhere. Save the date and look out for more information in future newsletters.

TAKE ACTION

• The Black Latina Girls and Women Fund was created by BAP member organization AfroResistance, a Black Latina women-led organization in the service of Black Latinx women in the Americas. This fund offers financial support by giving money directly to Black Latin womxn, girls and femmes who are experiencing severe financial need across the region, especially due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Whether in Brazil, Colombia, United States or Panama, Black Latina girls, women, and femmes are organizing in their local communities in the fight against several forms of state violence. You can donate here and people are encouraged to use the hashtag #BlackLatinaGWFund.

• Ask your local, state and federal candidates to sign BAP’s 2020 Candidate Accountability Pledge. If you are a candidate, distinguish yourself from the other corporate warmongering candidates by signing the pledge.

• Sign up to join BAP’s U.S. Out of Africa Network to receive the bi-weekly AFRICOM Watch Bulletin in your inbox.

• Make sure you keep up with us throughout the week by subscribing to our YouTube channel, liking us on Facebook, and following us on Instagram and Twitter.

• We are raising $30,000 to help expand our membership support capacity and revamp our website. Donate and share our GoFundMe campaign with your networks today.

No Compromise, No Retreat!
 
Struggle to win,
Ajamu, Brandon, Dedan, Jaribu, Margaret, Netfa, Paul, Vanessa, YahNé

P.S. Freedom isn’t free. Consider giving today.

Photo credit: Beth Nakamura | AP

Portland: A Harbinger of Things to Come?

Masked men in unrecognizable police uniforms jump out of unmarked vans and grab an activist who has been involved in demonstrations against a repressive state. That person is disappeared. Is this Pinochet’s Chile, apartheid South Africa or a scene from a John Clancy novel? 

No, this is happening in Portland, Oregon, a major U.S. city. The culprits apparently are agents of the federal government who have essentially invaded the streets of that city over the objections of the mayor and the governor. The goal? To “restore order” because, according to U.S. Acting Secretary of Homeland Security Chad Wolf, state and local authorities had refused to do it themselves.

We are not surprised. When we launched the Black Alliance for Peace (BAP), we were quite clear the trajectory of U.S. economic and political decline suggested the ruling classes would inevitably use violence and repression, as well as assault traditional liberal rights, to maintain control.    

What we also have related in our years of work is the tactics being deployed in Portland are not new. They have been perfected by U.S. forces and repressive states trained for decades by U.S. police, military and intelligence agencies. Now, because the ruling classes increasingly see liberal democracy and the rule of law as an impediment to their minority capitalist rule, the repressive practices normally reserved for the natives of the global South and for Black and Brown communities in the metropole are being used against insurgent white dissidents in Portland—and soon coming to a community near you.

That is why we say blowback is the inevitable consequence when social forces in the United States are silent or have the luxury of not being aware of the criminality of the U.S. state abroad.

No compromise with evil and no retreat from the enemies of collective humanity are the watchwords and slogan of BAP’s campaign work. We expect many more Portlands, but we also expect fierce opposition from the people. That is why we are organizing and building alternative power.

 

PRESS AND MEDIA

BAP Coordinating Committee member Vanessa Beck and BAP member Erica Caines—both of the BAP Baltimore chapter—spoke July 16 to the National Network for Justice about how the Trump administration's program, Operation Relentless Pursuit, is further militarizing several U.S. cities, including Baltimore. They also discussed how this program is connected to the broader U.S. agenda to repress colonized communities in the United States and around the world.

In his latest article for Black Agenda Report, BAP’s U.S. Out of Africa Network Coordinator Tunde Osazua asks, “If AFRICOM’s mission is to fight terrorism, then why have terror attacks increased five-fold since the U.S. began its military occupation of the continent?”

A presentation BAP National Organizer Ajamu Baraka gave to the online Electoral School of the Black Is Back Coalition for Social Justice, Peace and Reparations, held June 12-14, has been transcribed. Read “Building Power to Win Is the Revolutionary Approach to ‘Bourgeois Electoralism.’”

Ajamu also was interviewed by WPFW’s “Voices With Vision” radio program co-host Craig Hall about the play-turned-movie, “Hamilton,” and how it is intrinsically connected to the U.S. state’s attempts to stifle revolutionary fervor amid its crisis of legitimacy. The interview starts at 44 minutes and 53 seconds into the hour. Then Ajamu discussed “Hamilton,” as well as anti-Trump groups like the Lincoln Project and Biden’s real chances for the presidency with Sputnik Radio’s “Political Misfits”.

Black Agenda Report Executive Editor and BAP member Glen Ford writes, “...the movement must create a political crisis for the ruling oligarchy by agitating to actually end their rule.”

Watch BAP Coordinating Committee member and Black Agenda Report Senior Columnist Margaret Kimberley discuss with writer Danny Haiphong the developments related to the debate about free speech that has surfaced amid the mass uprising against white-supremacist policing in the United States. Margaret also appeared on the Freedom podcast to discuss the latest resurgence in demands for statues to be taken down and the connection to white supremacy.

In an interview with Black Agenda Radio, professor Clarence Taylor railed against the U.S. Congressional Black Caucus for protecting police, not people.

Writer Ann Garrison spoke with an expert on how the United States has helped to maintain a neo-colonial relationship with Africa through agricultural technology.

EVENTS

• July 20: Join BAP member organization Ujima People's Progress Party in an online study at 8:30 p.m. as it kicks off a critical review and discussion on Malcolm X’s pivotal speech, "The Ballot or The Bullet". The plan of action he launched in 1964 is relevant today for the African/Black community and for all working-class communities that have supported the capitalist Democratic Party, but have reaped no material value for such support. Register here.

• July 20: Ujima People’s Progress Party will continue distributing food, supporting community sustainability with window-box garden creations and giving away books for African/Black children through the #LiberationThroughReading program. For information, call 443.826.9654 or send a message to the organization’s Facebook page.

• July 21: The recent U.S. uprisings against police violence have shaken the halls of power. Ajamu and other speakers join U.S Senate candidate Lisa Savage (G-Maine), who signed the BAP 2020 Candidate Accountability Pledge, to discuss how to win real structural progress toward freedom and justice. Register here.

• July 25: Register for “International Meeting: No to the New Cold War,” featuring Ajamu, historian Vijay Prashad and other prominent speakers, who will discuss the U.S. drive toward a war with China.

TAKE ACTION

• The Black Latina Girls and Women Fund was created by BAP member organization AfroResistance, a Black Latinx women-led organization in the service of Black Latinx women in the Americas. This fund offers financial support by giving money directly to Black Latinx womxn, girls and femmes who are experiencing severe financial need across the region, especially due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Whether in Brazil, Colombia, United States or Panama, Black Latinx girls, women, and femmes are organizing in their local communities in the fight against several forms of state violence. You can donate here and people are encouraged to use the hashtag #BlackLatinaGWFund.

• Ask your local, state and federal candidates to sign BAP’s 2020 Candidate Accountability Pledge. If you are a candidate, distinguish yourself from the other corporate warmongering candidates by signing the pledge.

• Sign up to join BAP’s U.S. Out of Africa Network to receive the bi-weekly AFRICOM Watch Bulletin in your inbox.

• Make sure you keep up with us throughout the week by subscribing to our YouTube channel, liking us on Facebook, and following us on Instagram and Twitter.

• We are raising $30,000 to help expand our membership support capacity and revamp our website. Donate and share our GoFundMe campaign with your networks today.

No Compromise, No Retreat!
 
Struggle to win,
Ajamu, Brandon, Dedan, Jaribu, Margaret, Netfa, Paul, Vanessa, YahNé

P.S. Freedom isn’t free. Consider giving today.



Photo credit: Dave Killen / AP

"Hamilton" and the Crisis of Legitimacy

U.S. rulers are in complete disarray as the legitimation crisis of the system and the state deepens every day another person is killed by the police and the number of COVID-19 deaths is reported.

The U.S. national identity—always fragile because of the United States’ origin as a slavocracy built on genocide and extreme individualism—is rapidly disintegrating as the public’s anger has turned to the symbols of white supremacy. The Confederacy and its heroes were the first and—for many—the most obvious targets. But as people tore down those statues, it began to dawn on some that not much difference existed between the leaders of the Confederacy and the slave-owning “founding fathers.”

Here, the Disney Corporation came to the rescue. Disney, one of six major companies that controls over 90 percent of news and entertainment content in the United States, released the movie version of the play, “Hamilton,” on July 3, taking advantage of the July 4 holiday weekend. 

The play itself had broken records for attendance and profits on Broadway in portraying “founding father” Alexander Hamilton as an abolitionist. Puerto Rican artist Lin-Manuel Miranda, who wrote the play, dressed up African/Black actors as slave traders and appropriated hip hop in yet another attempt to whitewash the history of degradation and dehumanization that is at the center of the U.S. national project. Black writer and critic Ishmael Reed was correct in his brutal dismemberment of Miranda’s insulting piece of historical revisionism. Of course, liberals and particularly warmongers such as Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and John Bolton loved it.

It is clear the objective in rolling out the movie at this critical moment is to turn the tide of the U.S. public’s growing rejection of the United States’ white-supremacist origin story.

But people are seeing through the smoke and mirrors because the reality they are living through is too harsh to keep them disillusioned. That is why thousands took to the streets. It’s why the monuments are coming down and the crisis is deepening.

BAP is contributing to help people see through the nonsense with our weekly newsletter. By presenting alternative news and analysis, we are in our small way laying the foundation for a new movement that understands the fundamental difference between the people’s history and the lies peddled by the U.S. settler state.

 

PRESS AND MEDIA

Netfa Freeman, who represents BAP member organization Pan-African Community Action (PACA), interviewed BAP Advisory Committee member Mireille Fanon-Nendès France. A human rights lawyer and former member of the U.N. Working Group of Experts on People of African Descent, she appeared on Netfa’s WPFW radio show, “Voices with Vision,” to discuss the United Nations addressing U.S. police repression and its relationship to anti-Black policies internationally.

CodePink Radio interviewed Netfa on radio networks WBAI and WPFW about the demand for defunding the police and community control over police. The interview can be heard here and seen here. 

BAP Coordinating Committee member Margaret Kimberley examined the call to defund the police.

PACA organizer Olufemi Taiwo was featured on an online panel hosted by Dissident Magazine as part of its summer series, “Dismantle Racial Capitalism.”

BAP National Organizer Ajamu Baraka urged the public to stay vigilant against U.S. “attempts to control the narrative” of the Black Lives Matter movement during an online event organized by the Workers’ Party (Ireland). He also discussed the issue in his latest Black Agenda Report article.

U.S. Out of Africa Network Coordinator Tunde Osazua broke down how the U.S. Africa Command (AFRICOM) enforces the U.S. colonial project.

EVENTS

• July 16: The Embassy Protection Collective in the United States and the Committee for International Solidarity in Venezuela have organized a meeting, “Strengthening US Venezuela Social Movement Solidarity.”

• July 18-19: The International Committee for Peace, Justice and Dignity is hosting a two-day concert for Cuba to celebrate the revolutionary country’s achievements amid the COVID-19 pandemic. Register here.

• July 20: BAP member organization Ujima People’s Progress Party will continue distributing food, supporting community sustainability with window-box garden creations and giving away books for African/Black children through the #LiberationThroughReading program. For information, call 443.826.9654 or send a message to the organization’s Facebook page.

• July 25: Register for the “International Meeting: No to the New Cold War,” featuring Ajamu and other prominent speakers, who will discuss the U.S. drive toward a war with China.

TAKE ACTION  

• Ask your local, state and federal candidates to sign BAP’s 2020 Candidate Accountability Pledge. If you are a candidate, distinguish yourself from the other corporate warmongering candidates by signing the pledge.

• Sign up to join BAP’s U.S. Out of Africa Network to receive the bi-weekly AFRICOM Watch Bulletin in your inbox.

• Make sure you keep up with us throughout the week by subscribing to our YouTube channel, liking us on Facebook, and following us on Instagram and Twitter.

No Compromise, No Retreat!
 
Struggle to win,
Ajamu, Brandon, Dedan, Jaribu, Margaret, Netfa, Paul, Vanessa, YahNé

P.S. Freedom isn’t free. Consider giving today.

Photo Credit: GDA via AP

Black Lives Don’t Matter Because No Lives Matter for Imperialism

As COVID-19 cases increase in the United States, causing continued illness and death, the U.S. administration has moved to increase deadly sanctions against Venezuela, crippling that government’s ability to protect the lives of its people.

The difference between how Venezuela and the United States handled the virus is stark. In the United States, capital reigns, which means getting the economy going again. And if that means more workers sick and dying, so be it. 

The incessant drive for profits, which in turn disregards the lives of workers and the poor, is at the center of the calculations that went into forcing workers back to work and imposing additional sanctions on the people of Venezuela. It is behind the cynicism of corporations, public officials, religious figures, and even the police and military forces, all of whom feign “Black lives matter.” 

The poor, the working class and the non-white people of the global South see the lies. We only want to be free of U.S. and European domination.

And while Trump is the convenient fall guy for the policies of the U.S. ruling class, a growing awareness is developing among the people that the problems they face can’t be reduced to Trump because they were living precarious lives before his ascension.

The people—especially young people—are in no mood for the old solutions of voting for the lesser of two evils when they can see the evil is the whole rotten system.

BAP is making the connections between the police violence, U.S. military budget, the U.S. Department of Defense 1033 program, Israeli training of the police, and the U.S. Africa Command (AFRICOM). We are providing an organized expression for the realization that if there is going to be peace, social justice, democracy and human rights, power must be taken into the hands of the people.

The people of Venezuela understand what that struggle entails and are prepared to pay the ultimate price for freedom. We have no choice but to join them and strike at the oppressor from the belly of the beast.
 

PRESS AND MEDIA

Organizer Sara Flounders discussed whether COVID-19 was more virulent in Western capitalist countries including the United States in her piece.

BAP National Organizer Ajamu Baraka spoke to an audience at the University of Tehran, providing a social and historical analysis of the role of race and white supremacy in U.S. domestic and foreign policies.

How did three weeks of protests get de-fanged? Organizer Martin Schoots-McAlpine discussed in his piece how a movement that began with the burning of a police station has been transformed into one requesting minor amendments to municipal budgets.

U.S. Out of Africa Network Coordinator Tunde Osazua broke down AFRICOM’s relationship to the African people in this interview.
 
BAP Coordinating Committee member Margaret Kimberley wrote in her latest column that powerful forces see a withdrawal of U.S. forces from Afghanistan as a threat to long term U.S. interests in Central and West Asia. Undermining a peace agreement and denying Trump a foreign policy win is a win-win for the neoliberal right.

The mainstream corporate press continues to avoid discussing the role of the United States in Syria unless it is to mobilize the public to support the latest effort to undermine the Assad government. Even among the alternative press, new moves to censor political content are making it difficult to cover Syria.
 
Without any opposition from Congress, the Trump administration is moving to engage in high-seas piracy by blocking fuel shipments from Iran to Venezuela.

BAP member organization Pan-African Community Action's Max Rameau discussed the difference between Community Control of Police and the call to “defund the police” on WPFW's “Monday Morning QB” June 29 radio show. The interview starts at 27:43 minutes into the hour.
 

EVENTS

• July 9: BAP-Baltimore members will be speaking on a national webinar regarding Operation Relentless Pursuit. Register here.

• July 9: Watch the “Black Health Matters” roundtable in English and Spanish.

TAKE ACTION

• Take your anti-war activism further by asking your local, state and federal candidates to sign BAP’s 2020 Candidate Accountability Pledge. If you are a candidate, distinguish yourself from the other corporate warmongering candidates by signing the pledge.

• BAP’s U.S. Out of Africa Network has begun releasing a bi-weekly AFRICOM Watch Bulletin. Sign up to join the network.

No Compromise, No Retreat!
 
Struggle to win,
Ajamu, Brandon, Dedan, Jaribu, Margaret, Netfa, Paul, Vanessa, YahNé

P.S. Freedom isn’t free. Consider giving today.

Photo credit: Bill Hackwell

Why We Say the U.S. Is Guilty of Crimes Against Humanity

The U.S. continues to enjoy impunity for crimes against humanity, not only for its conduct outside its borders, but against people in the United States.

That is how Black Alliance for Peace (BAP) National Organizer Ajamu Baraka recently characterized U.S. government policies in response to the COVID-19 pandemic and systematic police violence. He said the decision to re-open the economy after thousands of African/Black people recently died satisfies the definitions of genocide and crimes against humanity.

The United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide defines genocide as “acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such: (a) Killing members of the group; (b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; (c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part…”

With the increasing death toll, over 80 million U.S. workers without adequate healthcare, and unemployment benefits and moratoriums on housing evictions coming to an end at the end of July, we can only expect hunger, homelessness and death among Black and Brown workers and the poor to be at catastrophic levels.

It is important to note what the Trump administration has done is in line with how capitalism operates. That is why BAP says that there can be no justice without ending an economic and social system that, by its very nature, does not ensure human rights for the people of the world.

PRESS AND MEDIA

BAP National Organizer Ajamu Baraka discussed the role of the electoral process in advancing progressive demands and building a movement.

Recent reports show the U.S. military spied on George Floyd-inspired protests in 15 cities using planes, helicopters and drones. But Baltimore has long been under aerial surveillance, according to BAP Coordinating Committee member Vanessa Beck.

Writer Danny Haiphong discusses in a Black Agenda Report piece that the movement to abolish the police must prioritize revolutionary politics. In it, he cites Netfa Freeman, who represents Pan-African Community Action on the BAP Coordinating Committee, and Max Rameau, a PACA organizer. Journalist Paul Jay recently interviewed Netfa and Max on his theanalysis.news podcast regarding Community Control of Police. Netfa also discussed the issue with Jimmy Durchslag on WMUD radio.

BAP says the oppressed and colonized must be clear peace cannot come into being without justice. Professor Nelson Maldonado-Torres writes, “Peace has to take the back seat until a new world is created.”

TAKE ACTION

Take your anti-war activism further by asking your local, state and federal candidates to sign BAP’s 2020 Candidate Accountability Pledge. If you are a candidate, distinguish yourself from the other corporate warmongering candidates by signing the pledge. BAP’s U.S. Out of Africa Network has begun releasing a bi-weekly AFRICOM Watch Bulletin. Sign up to join the network.

No Compromise, No Retreat!

Struggle to win,
Ajamu, Brandon, Dedan, Jaribu, Margaret, Netfa, Paul, Vanessa, YahNé

P.S. Freedom isn’t free. Consider giving today.

The Human Rights Crisis for African/Black People Deepens

Moves have been made on behalf of the human rights of African/Black people over the past week.

You may recall the Black Alliance for Peace (BAP) issued a statement on May 29, calling on the United Nations to address U.S. human-rights violations against African/Black people. Groups and individuals around the world had requested the United Nations Human Rights Council address the matter.

Then the 54-country African Group of the United Nations, led by Burkina Faso, submitted a resolution to the council calling for an urgent debate and an independent international commission of inquiry to investigate what it characterized as “systemic racism” against people of African descent in the United States and other parts of the world.

Establishing such a commission would have been historic. But the United States responded in its typical heavy-handed manner to bully African states to withdraw support for the request. Even though the United States had withdrawn its membership from the council upon Trump’s inauguration, it still lobbied European members of the council to reject the proposal. And its efforts paid off. The proposal did not garner enough council votes to establish an independent commission. But the council did order the Office of the High Commission on Human Rights to launch an investigation and issue a report to the council.

We are left with two lessons. First, in the global ideological struggle, the issue of human rights remains salient. This is especially the case when the critical lens is turned on the United States, which has incorporated a narrow and opportunistic version of “human rights” into its arsenal of imperialist tools to confuse the public. Secondly, while a U.N. inquiry would have been a significant development, the state-centric processes of this and other international bodies in which power politics rule demonstrates the importance of the People(s)-Centered Human Rights (PCHRs) framework.

Developed by BAP National Organizer Ajamu Baraka, PCHRs does not rely on state actions to address human-rights concerns. Instead, it relies on the organized people, in struggle, as not only the genesis of human-rights principles, but as the only guarantors of those rights.

BAP takes the position that if the U.N. is unable to establish a commission of inquiry, the people in the United States should consider taking up that work. But the objective would not be only to produce a report of human-rights abuses because we understand no report will induce U.S. authorities to voluntarily dismantle the structures of systemic racism.

The PCHRs position asserts human rights can only flourish when the people take state power and restructure the society through an ethical framework that centers the needs of the people and the values of cooperation, equality, participatory democracy, social justice, and collective self-determination of communities and peoples.

The PCHRs framework asserts community self-determination as a collective human right along with the human right to community self-defense against all forces—state or non-state.

That is why we say “No Compromise, No Retreat” until we create the conditions to realize People(s) Centered Human Rights for all.
 

PRESS AND MEDIA

If you missed our June 16 “Rise Up to Shut Down AFRICOM” event—attended by about 500 people from the Americas and Africa—you can catch the recording on Facebook.

BAP member Bilal Mafundi Ali explained to Prensa Obrera that the recent U.S. uprisings are the U.S. state’s “greatest nightmare.” BAP National Organizer Ajamu Baraka spoke with Fars News Agency about the uprisings being a “turning point” toward liberation.

Starting at 11:08 minutes into last week’s WPFW “Voices with Vision” radio show, Netfa Freeman, who represents Pan-African Community Action (PACA) on the BAP Coordinating Committee, interviewed BAP member Mark Fancher, who discussed the recent qualitative leap made in the Black liberation movement. Netfa also appeared on Press TV to discuss what must be done to prevent the neoliberal state from co-opting the movement against structural violence.

Ajamu joined Black for Palestine founder Kristian Davis Bailey on the Electronic Intifada Podcast to discuss the status of Black-Palestinian solidarity amid the U.S. uprisings. The interview starts at 24:12 minutes. Bailey wrote on how Palestinians can support the Black liberation struggle. 

Max Rameau, a PACA organizer, discussed Community Control of Police (CCOP) as a revolutionary, power-building alternative to the imperial state’s domestic security apparatus. Max and Netfa discussed their Black Agenda Report article about CCOP at 10:57 minutes into the “This is Hell” podcast. Then our friends at Popular Resistance cited Max and Netfa in the LA Progressive. Plus, Netfa discussed CCOP on KPFA’s “Flashpoints” radio show and at 12:51 minutes into the "WBAI News with Paul DeRienzo."

TAKE ACTION

• Take your anti-war activism further by asking your local, state and federal candidates to sign BAP’s 2020 Candidate Accountability Pledge. If you are a candidate, distinguish yourself from the other corporate warmongering candidates by signing the pledge.

• BAP’s U.S. Out of Africa Network has begun releasing a bi-weekly AFRICOM Watch Bulletin. Sign up to join the network.

No Compromise, No Retreat!
 
Struggle to win,
Ajamu, Brandon, Dedan, Jaribu, Margaret, Netfa, Paul, Vanessa, YahNé

P.S. Freedom isn’t free. Consider giving today.

Photo credit: Tsong-Taatarii/Star Tribune

Rise Up To Shut Down AFRICOM

June 16 is known as Soweto Day not only because the South African apartheid regime viciously attacked a youth demonstration in 1976. The youth played a critical role leading up to that day and on the days afterward, signifying a turn in the struggle of the African masses against the U.S.-supported white-colonial minority in South Africa.

In the midst of largely youth-led uprisings against the U.S. settler-colonial state, the Black Alliance for Peace (BAP) has determined June 16 to be the most appropriate day to hold an online symposium, “Rise Up to Shut Down AFRICOM”, to highlight BAP’s campaign against the U.S. Africa Command (AFRICOM).

Making the link between the interlocking domestic repression and U.S. foreign interventions—and building opposition to it—represents the crux of our mission. We are not confused by the cynical and patronizing cry of “Black Lives Matter” uttered by the same forces that have supported the militarization of U.S. police forces, the expansion of the U.S. military budget and the military re-colonization of Africa through AFRICOM.

We are clear: It is a moral and political contradiction to advocate for a kinder and gentler police force in the belly of the empire while it is unleashing murderous violence around the world against Africans and other colonized people.

We will continue making the connections and organizing despite the confusion being spread by opportunists aligned with white power and the U.S. state.

”Rise Up to Shut Down AFRICOM”, is a multimedia event including activist panelists based in Africa:

• Margaret Kimberley, Black Alliance for Peace and United National Antiwar Coalition (United States)

• Affiong L Affiong, Moyo Wa Taifa Pan Afrikan Women's Solidarity Network (Nigeria)

• Martin Bunziga Azaboyi, Coordinator, Telema Youth Movement (Democratic Republic of Congo)

• Aziz Fall, Group for Research and Initiative for the Liberation of Africa (GRILA) (Egypt/Senegal)

• Elias Amare, from the only African country with no AFRICOM (Eritrea)

English/French interpretation will be provided. Registration is required.

PRESS AND MEDIA

Mark P. Fancher is an attorney, writer, and a member of the All-African People’s Revolutionary Party as well as the Black Alliance for Peace’s Africa Team. He wrote about how this moment of U.S. uprisings presents an opportunity to understand U.S. imperialism operates a “global killing machine.”
 
Margaret Kimberley, Black Agenda Report senior columnist and member of BAP’s Coordinating Committee, wrote about neoliberal politicians taking advantage of the uprisings, only to sow confusion.
 
Max Rameau, an organizer with Pan-African Community Action (PACA), and Netfa Freeman, who represents PACA on BAP’s Coordinating Committee, explained why “Defund the Police” is not the revolutionary move forward.

EVENTS

• June 16: Join BAP for an online symposium, “Rise Up to Shut Down AFRICOM,” being held as part of our ongoing U.S. Out of Africa: Shut Down AFRICOM campaign. This multimedia event will include activist panelists based in Africa. The organizational arm of the campaign, the U.S. Out of Africa Network (USOAN), calls on Africans throughout the continent and the diaspora, as well as anti-imperialists everywhere, to register. Please use this hashtag on social media: #RiseUpToShutDownAFRICOM

• June 19: BAP’s Baltimore chapter will host “Operation Relentless Pursuit Virtual Teach In,” 5 p.m.-8 p.m., EST, on Sunday, June 19. Look out for more information on confirmed speakers and Zoom info.

  TAKE ACTION

• Take your anti-war activism further by asking your local, state and federal candidates to sign BAP’s 2020 Candidate Accountability Pledge. If you are a candidate, distinguish yourself from the other corporate warmongering candidates by signing the pledge.

• BAP’s U.S. Out of Africa Network has begun releasing a bi-weekly AFRICOM Watch Bulletin. Sign up to join the network.

No Compromise, No Retreat!
 
Struggle to win,
Ajamu, Brandon, Dedan, Jaribu, Margaret, Netfa, Paul, Vanessa, YahNé
 
P.S. Freedom isn’t free. Consider giving today.

No Turning Back from Radicalization in the Streets

The people are on the move, demanding accountability and justice—and the authorities are scared to death. They are desperate to make sure the resistance in the streets of the United States does not turn into a general rejection of the neoliberal order, like what happened in France with the Yellow Vests movement. So, from attempting to put tools of the state like the Rev. Al Sharpton in charge to passing meaningless legislation like the anti-lynching law, they are trying to keep the focus on cosmetic changes. They hope we forget about how the mis-leaders helped corporations loot trillions of dollars in “stimulus” out of public coffers during the COVID-19 lockdowns and how the profit-driven U.S. system won’t keep you alive if you aren’t generating profits.

But BAP members have been at the forefront of shifting the narrative back to the issue of the systemic violence that characterizes the lives of the African/Black working class and nationally-oppressed and colonized workers in the United States. We also remind everyone through our public statements and our press work that the cry for justice in the United States and the demand that the U.S. state cease its foreign subversions, warmongering, and murderous sanctions against the Black and Brown world are inextricably linked.  

In this newsletter, we share how international media outlets have framed the U.S. uprisings. It is a story of solidarity and common struggle that barely penetrates the corporate press.

During the last two months of state-enacted lockdowns, the rulers have made clear they do not value the lives of workers—particularly African/Black workers. But the people are starting to feel their own power. The radical awareness is out in the streets. There is no turning back.

 

PRESS AND MEDIA

BAP National Organizer Ajamu Baraka hit out with a piece explaining some of his recent social-media comments on the uprisings. He discussed further on RT America’s “The World According to Jesse” and TeleSUR. Ajamu was quoted extensively in an article that took a look at the uprisings from the African revolutionary perspective.

Netfa Freeman, who represents Pan-African Community Action (PACA) on the BAP Coordinating Committee, gave interviews on the uprisings to Press TV, IRINN, Sputnik Radio’s “The Critical Hour” and “By Any Means Necessary”, the Institute for Public Accuracy, and RT America's “Watching The Hawks.”

BAP Coordinating Committee member YahNé Ndgo appeared on Press TV on June 2 and again on June 3 to discuss the uprisings.

Our friends at Popular Resistance write about protecting the uprisings from the ruling class.

We think it’s important you also check out uprisings coverage in Greece, South Africa, the United Kingdom, Trinidad and Tobago, and the so-called Middle East.

EVENTS

• June 12-14: The Black Is Back Coalition’s online electoral school, “The Ballot or the Bullet: Putting Black Self-Determination on the Ballot,” will focus on the challenges to building Black independent power in the era of the structural violence of COVID-19 lockdowns.  

• June 16: Join BAP for a webinar, “Rise Up to Shut Down AFRICOM,” being held as part of our ongoing U.S. Out of Africa: Shut Down AFRICOM campaign. This will be a multimedia event that will include panelists from the heart of Africa. The organizational arm of the campaign, the U.S. Out of Africa Network (USOAN), calls on Africans throughout the continent and the diaspora, as well as anti-imperialists everywhere, to mark June 16, Soweto Day, with actions in the spirit of the African youth who rose up against the white supremacist South African government on June 16, 1976. We call for all to “Rise Up to Shut Down AFRICOM.” Registration is required: https://bit.ly/BAP0616 Please use this hashtag on social media: #RiseUpToShutDownAFRICOM

• June 19: BAP’s Baltimore chapter will host an “Operation Relentless Pursuit Virtual Teach In”, 5 p.m.-8 p.m., EST, on Sunday, June 19. Look out for more information on confirmed speakers and Zoom info.

TAKE ACTION 

• Take your anti-war activism further by asking your local, state and federal candidates to sign BAP’s 2020 Candidate Accountability Pledge. If you are a candidate, distinguish yourself from the other corporate warmongering candidates by signing the pledge.

• BAP’s U.S. Out of Africa Network has begun releasing a bi-weekly AFRICOM Watch Bulletin. Sign up to join the network.

No Compromise, No Retreat!

Struggle to win,
Ajamu, Brandon, Dedan, Jaribu, Margaret, Netfa, Paul, Vanessa, YahNé

P.S. Freedom isn’t free. Consider giving today.

From George Floyd Back to the Structural Violence of Capitalism

Third degree murder for 3/5 for a devalued life
Knee in throat air gone, gasping dying under the color of law!
George Floyd had no chance! The gang of state sponsored assassins had already signed his death warrant!
They think we should be grateful for watered down justice that has not and will never be color blind!
Cry out! Resist! Don’t make excuses or apologies for race-based killings!
Don’t attack those who dare to put their lives on the line to declare: George Floyd’s life mattered. Black Lives Matter—a just demand!

—Jaribu Hill, Mississippi Workers’ Center for Human Rights and Black Alliance for Peace Coordinating Committee

Across the country—in city after city—the people have erupted in righteous indignation to George Floyd’s recorded lynching. His extrajudicial murder set off a rebellion that had been primed by the highly publicized white-vigilante murder of Ahmaud Arbery and the botched, “no-knock” police raid that killed Breonna Taylor in her bed.

The call in all of these cases is for something called justice, which the Black Alliance for Peace (BAP) sees as an impossibility. We say this because the U.S. state’s repressive DNA is rooted in the non-recognition of Indigenous people’s humanity and the exploitation of kidnapped and enslaved Africans. These two interconnected experiences produced the racialized policing that is an integral part of the U.S. state. 

BAP was born in 2017 out of the recognition that the ongoing and deepening economic, social and political crisis of capitalism—sharpened by the 2008-09 economic collapse—would inevitably require the state to rely on the use of violence and force, both domestically and abroad. 

That prediction was correct. However, BAP also identified structural violence as an inherent characteristic of advanced capitalism. The COVID-19 pandemic, more than anything in decades, has revealed the endemic violence of neoliberal capitalism, whereby the state’s inadequate response to a virus has killed hundreds of African/Black people on a daily basis.

However, that systemic violence has been marginalized by the acute attention placed on the highly individualized case of George Floyd and the issue of police violence. But police violence is only a mechanism used to fulfill capitalism’s main mandate to contain and control the working class—in particular the Black and Brown colonized working-class communities—and to protect private property. 

For BAP, the narrow definition of “justice” as the prosecution and conviction of police involved in the Floyd murder is a conservative and even diversionary position. It takes attention away from the ongoing structural contradictions of the colonial/capitalist system that will continue to produce the deadly consequences of structural violence after 40 million newly unemployed people joined the ranks of the over 30 million people who lack any kind of basic health protection; high African/Black infant and maternal mortality rates; upper-respiratory illnesses caused by environmental pollution in African/Black communities; and hypertension, cardiovascular diseases and diabetes generated by the stresses of white-supremacist, capitalist oppression.

So, we say: Justice for George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, Tamir Rice, Sandra Bland; for our political prisoners; for the super-exploited Black and Brown working class; for oppressed Indigenous nations; and for the millions subjected to U.S. warmongering, sanctions and criminality. We say this to shift the focus from the individualization of this week’s rebellion back to the objective structures of white supremacist, global colonial/capitalist domination. 

To do otherwise plays right into the hands of the reformist liberal ideologues who want to engage us in pie-in-the-sky reformism that perpetuates the myth that justice will be served by merely tweaking the current system. We have seen the first iteration of such a call in the bourgeois New York Times calling for police reform.

BAP will not fall for that ideological trick bag. We say “No Compromise, No Retreat: Defeat the War Against African/Black People in the U.S. and Abroad.” 

PRESS AND MEDIA

The People(s)-Centered Human Rights (PCHRs) framework informs BAP’s approach to human rights. Read this primer. PCHRs centers the people’s struggle for radical change to determine how human rights are defined and won. The United States has cynically used the United Nations’ mission of protecting human rights to justify targeting states that defy U.S. global hegemony. Therefore, we thought it useful on Friday to issue a statement demanding consistency from the United Nations, calling for the body to intervene to protect the fundamental human rights of African/Black people in the United States against Trump’s threat to shoot protesters.

BAP National Organizer Ajamu Baraka discussed the George Floyd murder on KPFA’s “Hard Knock Radio.” Then BAP Coordinating Committee member Margaret Kimberley appeared on RT, Press TV and The Katie Halper Show. Netfa Freeman, who represents Pan-African Community Action (PACA) on BAP’s Coordinating Committee, also discussed the Floyd murder on Press TV.

We applaud Black Agenda Report Executive Editor and BAP member Glen Ford, Black Agenda Report Senior Columnist and Margaret Kimberley and BAP members as well as Black Agenda Report Contributing Editor and BAP supporter Danny Haiphong for receiving the Serena Shim Award for Uncompromising Integrity in Journalism. Last year, Ajamu Baraka received this award.

Earlier last week, BAP produced a statement for African Liberation Day in English and Spanish that was widely circulated in Cuba and the United States.

Queshia Bradley of BAP member organization PACA and BAP member Erica Caines addressed an African Liberation Day webinar hosted by the All-African People’s Revolutionary Party and the Maryland Council of Elders. Hear Queshia 33 minutes into the webinar and Erica at the 83-minute mark.

EVENTS

• June 5: BAP member organization AfroResistance continues its webinar series on Afro descendant women and COVID-19. The next webinar, “Moving to a Feminist Economy in the Americas Region: A Global Perspective of Health as a Human Right," will be held at 1 p.m., EST, on June 5. Panelists are Dominique Day of the United States, representing the Working Group of Experts on People of African Descent; Ms. Yuefen LI of China, the U.N. Independent Expert on Debt and Human Rights; and Sofia Garzon from Colombia. Janvieve Williams of AfroResistance from Panama will moderate. Register here.

• June 16: Join BAP for a webinar, “Rise Up to Shut Down AFRICOM,” being held as part of our ongoing U.S. Out of Africa: Shut Down AFRICOM campaign. This will be a multimedia event that will include panelists from the heart of Africa. The organizational arm of the campaign, the U.S. Out of Africa Network (USOAN), calls on Africans throughout the continent and the diaspora, as well as anti-imperialists everywhere, to mark June 16, Soweto Day, with actions in the spirit of the African youth who rose up against the white supremacist South African government on June 16, 1976. We call for all to “Rise Up to Shut Down AFRICOM.” Registration is required: https://bit.ly/BAP0616 Please use this hashtag on social media: #RiseUpToShutDownAFRICOM

TAKE ACTION

• Take your anti-war activism further by asking your local, state and federal candidates to sign BAP’s 2020 Candidate Accountability Pledge. If you are a candidate, distinguish yourself from the other corporate warmongering candidates by signing the pledge.

• BAP’s U.S. Out of Africa Network has begun releasing a bi-weekly AFRICOM Watch Bulletin. Sign up to join the network.

No Compromise, No Retreat!
Struggle to win,
Ajamu, Brandon, Dedan, Jaribu, Margaret, Netfa, Paul, Vanessa, YahNé

P.S. Freedom isn’t free. Consider giving today.

Photo credit: Matthew Hatcher / Getty Images

On African Liberation Day 2020, We Re-Dedicate Ourselves to Ending White World Supremacy

Under the threat of U.S. military action, Iranian tankers sailed to deliver fuel to Venezuela, which has the largest proven oil reserves in the world. The United States and its European vassal states have conspired to destroy Venezuela with sanctions and a growing naval blockade, preventing it from selling its oil around the world.

Meanwhile, in the suburbs of Paris, Saint Denis, Aubervilliers, Aulnay-Sous Bois, Clichy Sous Bois, the French police beat and terrorize working-class Africans and Arabs who have migrated from French neo-colonial territories. In the United States, colonial police are just as brutal as those in the Fanonian “zones of non being,” where colonized African, Latinx and Indigenous peoples live as the permanent “others.”

Despite pandemics, global climate change and nuclear war, nothing has moved Western capitalist societies to recognize colonized people’s common humanity.

Instead, it has become quite clear, public opinion in the United States has hardened toward China, which has economically eclipsed the United States. The U.S. capitalist class, along with growing numbers of the white public, are prepared to blow up the world before it surrenders its power.

This makes the United States and Europe existential threats to 90 percent of global humanity unless their power is curtailed or, better still, seized. 

But that will not be easy. 

The core of the colonial/capitalist project is violence backed by the state and embedded in all social institutions and practices of capitalist societies. 

The freedom of Africa and African peoples requires the structures of domination be identified and opposed. 

The U.S. Africa Command (AFRICOM) is one of those structures. Read BAP’s African Liberation Day statement.

This is the message the Black Alliance for Peace (BAP) brings on African Liberation Day (May 25). This day reminds all Africans and all still fighting to free themselves from the barbaric rule of Western capital that a free, united African nation—with a liberated and united Africa at its core—would be a force for progress in the world.

PRESS AND MEDIA

Glen Ford, Black Agenda Report Executive Editor and BAP member, calls for the indictment of the capitalist class for systematically violating African/Black people’s right to life, the ultimate human right.

Historian Gerald Horne notes the bubonic plague “set the stage for the erosion of feudalism in 14th century Europe,” leading to the rise of capitalism. He suggests COVID-19 is further setting the stage for the breakdown of capitalism.

Tunde Osazua, a member of the BAP’S Africa Team and the coordinator of BAP's U.S. Out of Africa Network, breaks down why U.S. Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN), in seeking accountability, only legitimized the U.S. military occupation of Africa. Watch it on YouTube, Twitter and Facebook.

To tackle China’s growing influence in Africa, the United States permanently stationed military units to assert its will on African politics. 

BAP National Organizer Ajamu Baraka writes the “elevation of anti-blackness as a kind of universal problem eliminates the basis for solidarity among the colonized” and puts some Africans in the United States on the side of U.S. imperialism.

A U.S.-led bloc of countries persists in using force to maintain and extend their global dominance, writes historian Vijay Prashad and Moroccan revolutionary and former political prisoner Abdallah El Harif.

Obama’s fans like to think of the first Black President as scholarly and above the fray of dirty politics, but he appears to have conspired with the FBI to set up the incoming Trump administration. BAP Coordinating Committee member and Black Agenda Report Senior Columnist Margaret Kimberley breaks it down.

BAP Research Team member Paul McLennan wrote about his evolution from a petty-bourgeois upbringing to being a revolutionary in the U.S. South.

The Council on Hemispheric Affairs hosted an exclusive interview with Venezuelan Foreign Minister Jorge Arreaza.

Venezuela’s opposition has long accused the Bolivarian government of corruption and mismanagement. Anya Parampil of the Grayzone reports, “with Citgo on the verge of liquidation, Guaidó’s officials are too incompetent—or too devious—to save it.”

The U.S. Peace Council released a statement that Iran’s decision to dispatch five oil tankers carrying much-needed fuel for the struggling Venezuelan people has created a “decisive test of the Trump administration’s willingness to continue its violations of international law and the UN Charter by taking military action against Iranian tankers.”

Trump withdrew from the Treaty on Open Skies, further escalating tensions between Russia and the U.S./EU/NATO axis. 

EVENTS

Webinars have taken place or will take place in lieu of annual marches and in-person events.

• 6 p.m., May 25: The December 12th Movement will host a webinar, “COVID-19, Sanctions, and the Human Right to Health Care,” featuring officials representing Namibia, Zimbabwe and the African Union.

• May 24: The All-African People’s Revolutionary Party and the Maryland Council of Elders hosted a webinar dedicated to African Liberation Day, featuring speakers from BAP and Pan-African Community Action (PACA), a BAP member organization.

• June 16: BAP will host a webinar, “Rise Up to Shut Down AFRICOM,” on Soweto Day. This is part of our ongoing U.S. Out of Africa: Shut Down AFRICOM campaign. Read our press release. We will roll out more information on this event in the coming weeks.

   TAKE ACTION

• Have you signed our petition to demand 2020 U.S. candidates take a position against war, militarism and repression? Take your anti-war activism further by asking your local, state and federal candidates to sign BAP’s 2020 Candidate Accountability Pledge. If you are a candidate, distinguish yourself from the other corporate warmongering candidates by signing the pledge. Check out BAP’s campaign and take action.

• BAP’s U.S. Out of Africa Network has begun releasing a bi-weekly AFRICOM Watch Bulletin. Sign up to join the network.

No Compromise, No Retreat!

Struggle to win,
Ajamu, Brandon, Dedan, Jaribu, Margaret, Netfa, Paul, Vanessa, YahNé

P.S. Freedom isn’t free. Consider giving today.

No Justice, No Peace! Time to Confront the U.S. Rogue State

Let us give you a rundown of the current global state of affairs:

• The Trump Administration recently undermined a United Nations proposal for a global ceasefire to confront the ravages of COVID-19 and threatened the International Criminal Court if it investigates Israel’s crimes against humanity. 

• Meanwhile, Joe Biden, the Democratic Party’s presumptive nominee, has declared he will confront the Cubans, criticized the Trump administration for not being tougher on China and has committed to keeping Jerusalem as Israel’s capital. 

• The Obama administration committed $1 trillion to upgrade the U.S. nuclear arsenal. The Trump administration then pulled out of the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty. 

• Obama ordered the destruction of Libya that ended with the rape and murder of Muammar Gaddafi, greenlighted the Saudi war on Yemen, launched illegal “regime change” efforts in Syria, and labeled the Bolivarian revolutionary process in Venezuela and the Maduro government as extraordinary threats to U.S. national security. 

• Trump followed by putting U.S. boots on the ground to deny Syrians access to their oil, continued to support the immoral Saudi war on Yemen and murdered Iranian general Qasem Soleimani. He then brazenly stole Venezuela’s money out of U.S. banks, prevented Venezuelan oil company Citgo from sending its profits to Venezuela, and imposed draconian sanctions to punish the Venezuelan people for supporting their revolutionary process and national independence. 

This kind of bipartisan criminality took an even more bizarre turn last week when members from both parties demanded Israel be protected when the International Criminal Court announced it was considering investigating Israel for war crimes against Palestinians. 

For the people of the world, it is quite clear the United States is the primary threat to global peace. It is also clear to us it doesn’t matter who physically sits in the white people’s house because the commitment to protecting and advancing the objective interests of the capitalist ruling class will continue unless the organized masses meet them with an effective countervailing power.

The predatory relationship between the U.S. and the rest of humanity is best captured in Trump’s “America First” policy. This is not in any way a departure from post-World War II U.S. policies, just a cruder statement of fact absent the liberal subterfuge. 

Polls each year have shown the international public sees the United States as the greatest threat to peace. The U.S. sanctions regime continuing to target more than 30 countries—even in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic—reinforces that perception.

The Black Alliance for Peace (BAP) supports the only solution: Seizing the U.S. capitalist oligarchy’s destructive power for the good of humanity. But that will not happen through appeals to their morality because they are driven by profits. It is a parasitic system that needs, as Malcolm X said, some blood to suck.

PRESS AND MEDIA

Tunde Osazua, coordinator of BAP’s U.S. Out of Africa Network (USOAN), and Netfa Freeman, Co Coordinator of BAP’s Africa Team, take on U.S. Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) and, by extension, the entire Congress for their support of the expansion of U.S. military force in Africa and military actions that have caused African deaths and political destabilization. Netfa was interviewed 30 minutes into Sputnik Radio's “The Critical Hour with Dr. Wilmer Leon” about this article.

Margaret Kimberley, Black Agenda Report Senior Editor and BAP Coordinating Committee member, condemns the liberal left for its silence on a U.S. mercenary plot interrupted in Venezuela. 

BAP National Organizer Ajamu Baraka explains how cross-class white solidarity allowed Trump to build bipartisan consensus to support completing the Obama administration’s aggressive “Pivot to Asia” program.

Tunde was interviewed about BAP’s position on U.S. domestic repression of African/Black people, AFRICOM and U.S.-China tensions related to Africa 32 minutes into the “Class Wars” radio program, which was broadcast on WVKR 91.3 FM (Poughkeepsie, New York), WIOF 104.1 FM (Woodstock, New York) and the Progressive Radio Network. 

Kristian Davis Bailey, one of the founders of “Black for Palestine,” wrote about the Black perspective on Israel and Palestine for the 72nd anniversary of the Nakba, the 1948 military removal of 750,000 Palestinians off their land.

Historian and author Eric Zuesse argues the international community will only be able to address U.S. crimes in Iraq when U.S. officials are held accountable.

  EVENTS

• May 23: The All-African People’s Revolutionary Party (A-APRP) and the Maryland Council of Elders will hold a webinar to commemorate the upcoming African Liberation Day. BAP member organization Pan-African Community Action (PACA) has been invited to speak.

• May 25: The All-African People’s Revolutionary Party (A-APRP) and the All-African Women’s Revolutionary Union (A-AWRU) are hosting a webinar on African Liberation Day. The theme is "Imperialist Sanctions on Zimbabwe, Cuba and Venezuela are Acts of War: Africans Everywhere Must Fight!"

• June 12-14: The Black Is Back Coalition’s online electoral school, “The Ballot or the Bullet: Putting Black Self-Determination on the Ballot,” will focus on the COVID-19 impact.

TAKE ACTION

• Have you signed our petition to demand 2020 U.S. candidates take a position against war, militarism and repression? Take your anti-war activism further by asking your local, state and federal candidates to sign BAP’s 2020 Candidate Accountability Pledge. If you are a candidate, distinguish yourself from the other corporate warmongering candidates by signing the pledge. Check out BAP’s campaign and take action.

• BAP member Efia Nwangaza, founder of the Greenville, South Carolina-based Malcolm X Center for Self-Determination and its community radio station, WMXP, are facing their most serious challenge. The station has always depended on contributions from listeners and supporters. During this economic crisis, fundraising has dried up, putting the station in danger of shutting down. We call on everyone reading this newsletter to take a minute to give whatever you can to save an institution that has been around for over a decade. Sister Efia has been in this movement for over 50 years, so we must show her our love and appreciation. She needs at least $2,500 by Friday. Scroll to the bottom of her website to donate.

No Compromise, No Retreat!

Struggle to win,
Ajamu, Brandon, Dedan, Jaribu, Margaret, Netfa, Paul, Vanessa, YahNé

P.S. Freedom isn’t free. Consider giving today.



Photo credit: Associated Press

The Inevitable Logic of Capitalist Repression Under COVID-19

Capitalism—now in its neoliberal form—faces a structural crisis, which has caused a crisis of legitimacy for the capitalist rulers, who have been sealing into place the use of force as a permanent strategy for maintaining their dominance. Democrats and Republicans are waging war against the U.S. African/Black working class and poor as well as nationally oppressed peoples, workers and farmers abroad. This bipartisan assault requires the African/Black revolutionary left build a powerful anti-war, anti-imperialist formation that can defend the human-rights interests of the African/Black masses domestically and abroad. (Read: The Rationale for Launching the Black Alliance for Peace, April 4, 2017) 

The COVID-19 crisis has morphed into an intensified repression of African/Black and Brown colonized workers in the name of public health. This contrasts with the white-glove treatment the white settler population receives at the gloved hands of the police to enforce so-called social distancing.

The consequence? Social distancing policing is the new Stop-and-Frisk, giving the racist and brutal colonial servants of capitalist power a license to harass, beat and even kill with impunity in our communities. 

Interestingly enough, the authorities don’t enforce social distancing on public transportation during rush hours when sacrificial workers, who are cynically called “essential workers,” are forced to pack into trains and buses.

So not only are we dying from contracting COVID-19 and being neglected in hospitals, we are subjected to further humiliation at the hands of the colonial state’s snarling enforcers of white power today, yesterday and into the future.

We will fight because we cannot depend on anyone but ourselves!  
 
“The U.S. and all imperialist powers—new and old—must be expelled from Africa, and the U.S. domestic colonial occupation forces known as police must be driven out of our colonized communities as part of the struggle against colonialism and imperialism.”—Black is Back Coalition

 

PRESS & MEDIA

Over 90 percent of the tickets and arrests for social distancing violations in New York City have been meted out to African/Black and Latinx people. Videos have surfaced of New York City police politely handing out masks to white residents in parks and communities while videos show police literally beating people to the ground for violating social distancing in African/Black and Brown neighborhoods.

The U.S. South remains where the majority of the African/Black population resides. Facing South explores the possible impact reopening would have on the African/Black population in the South.

The situation in Venezuela remains dangerous with the arrests of mercenary forces a week ago and more arrests as recently as this past weekend. The Black Alliance for Peace (BAP) continues to closely monitor the situation. 

Margaret Kimberley, Black Agenda Report Senior Editor and BAP Coordinating Committee member, discusses the continued collaboration between Black misleaders and the ruling class, with a special focus on Stacey Abrams. 

 

EVENTS

The United National Anti-War Coalition conducted an excellent webinar on the issue of sanctions we urge everyone to watch. Representatives from seven countries facing draconian U.S. sanctions discussed the devastating impact as well as how to build people-to-people solidarity against U.S. lawlessness.
 
 

TAKE ACTION

Sign the U.S. Peace Council’s Open Letter to the Government of the United States and the United Nations, demanding all U.S. and U.N. sanctions against the targeted nations be lifted, and all U.S. military threats and actions against them cease immediately.

No Compromise, No Retreat!

Struggle to win,
Ajamu, Brandon, Dedan, Jaribu, Margaret, Netfa, Paul, Vanessa, YahNé

P.S. Freedom isn’t free. Consider giving today.

Photo credit: David Dee Delgado/Getty Images

COVID-19 and Class Collaboration

Capitalist globalization has produced three interrelated realities:

1. Global poverty as its greedy extractivist processes transferred surplus value from the global South to the North, 

2. A network of class-conscious elites in both Northern and Southern countries who share an interest in maintaining the neoliberal status quo, and 

3. An integrated, global military-intelligence apparatus to defend neoliberal capitalist relations under the control of the U.S. state.  

The COVID-19 pandemic has not only stripped away the veneer of respectability and promise that neoliberal capitalist development was supposedly going to offer workers and countries. It has revealed, in stark terms, the repressive reality and potential of a dying capitalist order. From Detroit in the United States to Durban in South Africa, capitalism has shown it cannot protect and realize human rights. That is why the elites are using the pandemic to police people under the pretext of protecting public health.

In the United States, the Black professional/managerial/administrative mis-leadership class openly collaborates with neoliberal Democrats against the interests of the African/Black working class and poor, who desperately need healthcare as well as protection from predatory capitalists.

Colonialism had either underdeveloped or altogether wiped out healthcare systems in Africa. Then came the neocolonial International Monetary Fund and World Bank’s structural adjustment programs that required state disinvestment in healthcare as a prerequisite for loans.

The neocolonial elites in Africa, like the neocolonial U.S. Black elites, have conspired in mutual class solidarity with white settler-colonial and imperial power to control, exploit—and when need be—repress the African masses on behalf of colonial power.

 

PRESS AND MEDIA

Pan-African News Wire Editor Abayomi Azikiwe reminds us that while many corrupt African states are strengthening military ties with the United States and are engaged in repressing their people, Cuba is providing support to those African states to combat the virus and maintain national sovereignty.  

Margaret Kimberley, Black Alliance for Peace (BAP) Coordinating Committee member and senior editor at Black Agenda Report, argues the people’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic must take the form of a mass struggle against capitalism.

BAP member Erica Caines warns in Hood Communist that the state’s reaction to the pandemic “is not protecting us from the virus.”

BAP National Organizer Ajamu Baraka writes the May 1 strike action should be placed within the context of the struggle for People(s)-Centered Human Rights, a framework that emanates from the bottom-up, not out of the imagination of human-rights lawyers or the state.

Writer, human rights lawyer and member of BAP’s Africa Team, Mark P. Fancher, discusses the proud history of African militancy in Detroit and the current reality of the desperate fight against COVID-19. Four decades of neoliberal economic policies that caused environmental destruction, job displacement, gentrification and federal-government neglect have made Detroit’s African/Black population especially vulnerable to contracting and dying from COVID-19.

The Obama administration did not cry out when Detroit was forced into bankruptcy by a Republican governor because it was busy intensifying the attack on the people of Venezuela. Ajamu Baraka recently discussed why Venezuela must be defended as it copes with COVID-19 in the midst of a U.S-imposed economic blockade. 

Kollibri Terre Sonnenblume conducted a wide-ranging interview with Margaret Kimberley on “The Persistence of White Supremacy” for Counterpunch.

Black Agenda Report Executive Editor Glen Ford writes the white settler class has always inflicted “excessive mortality” on non-white populations.

“The coronavirus is a death sentence on Black people,” who make up two-thirds of Louisiana’s prisoners, said Belinda Parker Brown, head of Louisiana United International during the Black is Back Coalition’s webinar. Attorney Zena Crenshaw-Logal called for the “evacuation” of prisons in the state, which holds the distinction of incarcerating more of its citizens than any place in the world.

 

EVENTS

May 10, 1 p.m., EST: “The Struggle Against Mass Incarceration’s Impact on African Women,” a webinar organized by the African National Women’s Organization. Register today.

 

TAKE ACTION

Sign the U.S. Peace Council’s Open Letter to the Government of the United States and the United Nations, demanding all U.S. and U.N. sanctions against the targeted nations be lifted, and all U.S. military threats and actions against them cease immediately.

No Compromise, No Retreat!

Struggle to win,
Ajamu, Brandon, Dedan, Jaribu, Margaret, Netfa, Paul, Vanessa, YahNé

P.S. Freedom isn’t free. Consider giving today.

Photo credit: AFP - Getty

COVID-19: ‘It’s the system, stupid!’

“The current disaster exists in large part because the U.S. healthcare system is the opposite of what is needed. It is fragmented, discriminatory and designed for corporate profits, not the well-being of the public. Even before the pandemic, the United States had the highest number of preventable deaths compared to other wealthy nations and a declining life expectancy.” —Margaret Flowers

While some U.S. lives may have been saved during the COVID-19 pandemic through a quicker and more coordinated action plan, the objective fact remains no plan could have been successfully implemented because a developed public healthcare infrastructure does not exist. Years of neoliberal austerity and privatization gutted public investment in healthcare for rural and urban working-class communities and led to thousands of hospital closings over the last few decades, decimating the already weak U.S. public healthcare system. 

That, as well as capitalist environmental racism—where toxic industrial processing plants, waste dumps and pollutants from industrial agricultural operations produced the so-called “underlying conditions” of cancers, asthma and a whole host of upper-respiratory illnesses—translated into death sentences for many poor and working-class Africans. 

Yet, the focus on Trump’s personality has shifted attention away from the structural violence of capitalist oppression and exploitation. In fact, it is not just Trump, but most of the capitalist class, pushing for a return to “normal.” That class consensus was reflected in opinion pieces and commentary in bourgeois rags ranging from the New York Times to the Wall Street Journal. While it was not openly echoed by Democratic congressional representatives, it helps to explain why the Democrats went along with the measly $1,200 checks to workers. Those insufficient payments help to keep people desperate and ready to return to work, even if it means jeopardizing their health. 

So, we must keep our focus on the system. That will ensure we are not confused by the diversionary politics of the rulers, who do not want us to notice their bipartisan collaboration to uphold corporate interests.

PRESS AND MEDIA 

The war being waged against the African/Black working class in the United States mirrors the anti-Black warfare being waged globally, thus producing similarly devastating health outcomes for Africans in Brazil.

BAP Coordinating Committee member Netfa Freeman places into historical context the U.S. state’s use of direct military intervention in response to what it sees as potential threats to social order during the COVID-19 pandemic. 

Ajamu Baraka, BAP’s National Organizer, argues the changing class structure of the African American population explains the questionable politics and policies of Black political representatives in response to the COVID-19 crisis. He gave this presentation as part of a two-day Black Is Back Coalition webinar.

Black public opinion has been whipped up against China while Black opinion makers have remained silent on the aggressive U.S. militarization of the African continent. Margaret Kimberley, in her latest piece in Black Agenda Report, uses a material, non-sentimental framework to understand how the U.S. state is using the COVID-19 issue to advance its commitment to confronting China.

If you were wondering why BAP launched the 2020 Candidate Accountability Pledge, BAP member Jose Monzon explained on U.S. Senate candidate Madelyn Hoffman’s livestream.

 

TAKE ACTION

General Strike 2020 is calling for all workers to remain sheltered in place (in accordance with current medical guidance), encouraging participation in nationwide strikes (including rent strikes, debt strikes and labor strikes) on May 1, and asks workers to hang white sheets or towels outside of their homes as a sign of solidarity.

Sign the U.S. Peace Council’s Open Letter to the Government of the United States and the United Nations, demanding all U.S. and U.N. sanctions against the targeted nations be lifted, and all U.S. military threats and actions against them cease immediately.

No Compromise, No Retreat!

Struggle to win,
Ajamu, Brandon, Dedan, Jaribu, Margaret, Netfa, Paul, Vanessa, YahNé

P.S. Freedom isn’t free. Consider giving today.

Photo credit: Paul Sancya / AP

COVID-19: The Symptom of the Capitalist Disease

The global capitalist system has produced fabulous wealth and so-called “development” for a handful of nations and their citizens along with degrading and dehumanizing poverty, violence and war on the vast majority of humanity. 

Here are some figures:

• 80 percent of humanity lives on less than $10 per day

• 30,000 children die every day from the effects of poverty, primarily lack of clean water and access to healthcare

• 62 individuals own more wealth than 3.5 billion people—half the world’s population

This is the reality of a global system developed after the marauding European powers grew rich and powerful through the invasion of the Americas in 1492 as well as the enslavement of Africans and genocide committed against the people of the Americas.

In the European settler-colony that became the United States of America, systematic brutality and structural violence were embedded in the economic relations and social institutions of the state. That millions of people lack adequate healthcare, have been subjected to racist decision-making that placed toxic industries in their communities—resulting in asthma, cancers and upper-respiratory diseases—while simultaneously closing down clinics and hospitals in those neighborhoods, represents the objective logic of capitalist decision-making that renders some people and communities disposable. 

Black Alliance for Peace (BAP) members are not moved by the pretend concern for African/Black and Brown workers deemed today “essential” when yesterday they were the disposables who couldn’t even get an increase in wages. And yet during a pandemic, these essential workers are still unable to get hazard pay, personal protective equipment and support for childcare while their children are forced to stay home from school.

PRESS

In the latest issue of Black Agenda Report, BAP National Organizer Ajamu Baraka argues that the capitalist state and its ruling oligarchy care very little about the human rights of the people, especially African/Black people who are supposed to be the “essential” workers today. What we are facing today in the U.S. is a human rights crisis that in another country would warrant so-called “humanitarian intervention.” He also appeared on RT America to discuss.

African/Black workers are less likely to be able to quarantine during the COVID-19 pandemic because they tend to work in fields such as mass transit, the postal service, retail and healthcare are exposing themselves to the virus.

Moreover, African/Black people are historically used as guinea pigs to test drugs, as BAP Coordinating Committee member Margaret Kimberley writes. 

BAP members continue to confront the failures of the last 40 years of neoliberalism that has produced the socio-economic conditions that make our populations especially vulnerable. 

Max Rameau of BAP member organization Pan-African Community Action (PACA) discussed the issues African/Black people in Washington, D.C., face as a result of COVID-19 with Mireille Fanon of the Frantz Fanon Foundation.

Ajamu Baraka spoke with Sputnik Radio’s “The Critical Hour with Wilmer Leon” about the billionaire-backed organization, Human Rights Watch, lobbying for lethal U.S. sanctions on leftist governments as the pandemic rages.

Netfa Freeman, BAP Coordinating Committee member representing member organization PACA, discussed on HispanTV the reasons and solutions for U.S. racial disparities amid the pandemic.

Watch Ajamu Baraka and other leaders during the Black is Back Coalition's two-day webinar (watch Day 1 and Day 2) held April 11-12.

EVENTS

5 p.m., EST, April 23: An Inside View of Resistance to US Imperialism in Venezuela and How to Build International Solidarity. Co-hosted by Popular Resistance, the Black Alliance for Peace, U.S. Peace Council, CODEPINK, International Action Center, United National Antiwar Coalition (UNAC) and Sanctions Kill. Featured speakers: Carlos Ron, the Venezuelan Vice Minister of Foreign Affairs for North America; Ajamu Baraka of Black Alliance for Peace; and Kevin Zeese and Margaret Flowers of Popular Resistance. Moderated by Bahman Azad of the U.S. Peace Council. 

6 p.m., EST, April 28: COVID-19: Southern Workers Fight Back and Organize, a webinar organized by the Southern Workers Assembly to launch a campaign to protect U.S. Southern workers.

May 1: General Strike 2020 is calling for all workers to remain sheltered in place (in accordance with current medical guidance), encouraging participation in nationwide strikes (including rent strikes, debt strikes and labor strikes), and asking workers to hang white sheets or towels outside of their homes as a sign of solidarity.

TAKE ACTION

Sign the U.S. Peace Council’s Open Letter to the Government of the United States and the United Nations, demanding all U.S. and U.N. sanctions against the targeted nations be lifted, and all U.S. military threats and actions against them cease immediately.

No Compromise, No Retreat!

Struggle to win,
Ajamu, Brandon, Dedan, Jaribu, Margaret, Netfa, Paul, Vanessa, YahNé