Tag: the U.S.

BlockReportRadio.com interviews author and professor Dr. Gerald Horne about his new book, "Confronting Black Jacobins". We discussed the Haitian Revolution, the origins of the Dominican Republic, and the doubling in size of the United States. We talk about Haiti's role in abolishing slavery in the western world. We talked about the role that Washington, London, Paris, and Madrid played in warring with the abolitionist nation. We talked about how Haiti and the U.S. both had plans to relocate U.S. Negroes to the Dominican Republic, at different times for different reason.

The Afghanistan war is due for a recycling, but it may not go the way the U.S. has planned. Begun under dubious circumstances, more as a demonstration war to set the stage for the real drama of Iraq, Afghanistan has almost always been more useful as a proxy war fought by others, rather than a direct war fought by Americans.

Coltan is a mineral necessary for making electronic things work – like cellphones, ipods, PS3s and laptops. Over 6 million Congolese have been murdered to assure that the corporations and governments involved have a corner on the market for the minerals that the Congo produces. This is "Break the Silence" Congo Week. Check out the events and get involved!

The San Francisco Bay Conservation and Development Commission (BCDC) predicts a 16-inch mid-century sea level rise, covering Bay Area coastal lands and eventually swamping downtown San Francisco up to Market Street. The primary global warming gas is carbon dioxide. Methane gas, heavily implicated in global warming, has been emitted for years from the Bayview Hunters Point Naval Shipyard. Sea level rise will release methane gas from wetlands and landfill, of which much of Hunters Point is composed.

Welcome M-1 of dead prez to the Bay Area – East and West Oakland, San Francisco, Sacramento, Sonoma, San Jose, Santa Cruz – for seven days, Sept. 23-29, of sharing his recent experiences in Gaza, Cairo and Europe and comparing them with ghetto life in the U.S., benefiting the SF Bay View and Block Report Radio. Read his own words and hear a KPFA interview.

On July 29 the House of the Lord Church in Brooklyn hosted a standing-room-only report-back meeting led by several participants in the historic Viva Palestina U.S. convoy who returned July 17 and 18 from Gaza City in Palestine. The audience was majority Black.

The racist assault on United States President Barak Obama by the Honduran military coup government, installed on June 28, 2009, was greeted by the U.S. media with what John Pilger called “contrived silence, a censorship by omission.” (Amy Goodman, Democracy Now, 7/6/09) The poisonous racist attack on the first Black U.S. president was based on racist preconceptions and was carried out by interim Honduran Foreign Minister Enrique Ortez Colindres on June 29, the day after the democratically elected president Manuel Zelaya was arrested and sent into exile in his pajamas.

What if they held an election and nobody came? That is exactly what happened on Sunday, June 21, when Haiti tried to hold run-offs for 12 of 30 Haitian Senate seats. Polling stations around Haiti had even fewer voters than they had on April 19, when Haitians massively boycotted the election's first round by respecting the Lavalas Family party's call for "Operation Closed Doors, Empty Streets." The CEP had disqualified the party, Haiti's largest, on arbitrary and unjustified technicalities.

As the temperature of war increases in Iraq and the U.S. increases troops in Afghanistan, an unanswered question looms. Not "what is a nation" so much as "why is this a nation, and when"?