Welcome to the radio magazine that brings you news, commentary and analysis from a Black Left perspective. I’m Glen Ford, along with my co-host Nellie Bailey. Coming up: a professor of international law says the U.S. acts like a rogue nation in the world, invading, assassinating and launching unjust wars at will; and, that includes the ultimate threat of nuclear war. We’ll speak with an activist who says the Trump administration is making human extinction more likely.
Public school teachers in cities across the country took part in a Black Lives Matter Week of Action, last week. In Washington, DC, the activities were organized by the DC Area educators for Social Justice, a project of Teaching for Change. We spoke with organizer Deborah Menkart.
U.S. forces attacked and claimed to have killed about 100 Syrian soldiers. Syria and Russia are warning that the U.S. is playing with fire, and has no right to station soldiers on another country’s territory. But the fine points of international law don’t seem to matter to Washington. We called Dr. Francis Boyle, the esteemed professor of international law at the University of Illinois, at Champaign.
The Trump Administration is moving forward with former President Obama’s plans for a trillion-dollar makeover of the U.S. nuclear arsenal. The administration’s views on nuclear war can be discerned in the recently released “Nuclear Posture Review.” Greg Mello, executive director of the anti-nuclear weapons Los Alamos Study Group, has read the document, and he finds it very scary. But Mello notes that it was President Obama who was determined to create an adversarial relationship with the Russians.
Historian Peter Hudson, a professor of African American Studies at the University of California, in Los Angeles, has a new book that explores how U.S. banks destabilized the economies and governments of the Caribbean and Latin America. It’s titled “Bankers and Empire: How Wall Street Colonized the Caribbean.” Dr. Deborah Thomas is a professor of Anthropology and Africana Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. She was on hand for a coming out event at UCLA for Dr. Hudson’s book.