blackagendareport.com

by Paul Street

Barack Obama likes to play basketball with his friend Arne Duncan, but does that make Duncan worthy of the nation's top education spot? If Obama's appointees are a reflection of the president-elect's own world view, this one is quite disturbing. Paul Street writes: "Privatization, union-busting (charter and contract schools operate union-free), excessive standardized testing, teacher-blaming, military schooling, and the rollback of community input on school decisions - these are the interrelated hallmarks of private school graduate Arne Duncan's six and a half years at the helm of" the Chicago Public Schools.

by BAR columnist michael hureaux perez

A teacher/activist offers some holiday ruminations on education: "Let us celebrate punitive testing, carved up tables and chairs, chain link fence in the stairwells and high strung civil servants who are just marking time until they can get away from the children of the great unwashed." Not cheered up, yet? Let's think of kinder times and inspiring educators, like Rex Fisher, who introduced the author "and my peers to the words of David Walker, Frederick Douglass, Martin Delaney, WEB DuBois, Marcus Garvey, Fannie Lou Hamer and Malcolm X -  and that was a rare thing from teachers in the public schools of 1973."

BAR features three radio commentaries per week for use by broadcast and Internet radio (schedule them as you please), or simply for our audience's listening convenience.

 Enjoy them, below:

 by Rady Ananda

The American Prison Gulag, already one-half Black, is becoming increasingly co-ed. "The US jailed one in 746 women in 2006, up from one in 100,000 back in 1925.  Compared to other nations, the female portion of the prison population is highest in the US - at 9%." Melissa Mummert's film, Perversion of Justice, tells the "story of Hamedah Hasan and her three children" to "exemplify the need to repeal the Sentencing Reform Act of 1984, and the mandatory minimum laws."

by Stephen Gowans

The corporate news media, especially in Britain, constantly rail against the state-owned press in Zimbabwe, charging The Herald and The Sunday Mail with acting as "mouth-pieces" for President Robert Mugabe. But "coverage of foreign affairs in the West is almost wholly dominated by news media that are controlled by the wealthy, operating to amplify the views of the Council on Foreign Relations and high state officials who are either wealthy themselves or owe their position to the patronage of the wealthy." In southern Africa, so-called "independent" media are in fact funded by the British or U.S. governments. The Zimbabwean state has every right to defend itself, through media.

by Anthony Fenton

The emerging doctrine of "Responsibility to Protect" (R2P) is an insidious pretext (and strategy) for imperial intervention in the affairs of weaker nations. Haiti was the laboratory for developing R2P as a rationale for theft of a people's sovereignty. Barack Obama may be a convert. "Some of Obama's key cabinet picks (namely Susan Rice, and Hillary Clinton) and advisors close to the incoming administration's camp (most notably top Clinton advisor Lee Feinstein, Samantha Power, and Anne-Marie Slaughter) are well-known advocates for R2P's "operationalization."