World is awaiting leadership change

By David A. Love
Progressive Media Project
July 2, 2008

The results of the presidential election could go a long way toward improving America's image around the world.

Tragically, the Bush administration tarnished our reputation and squandered the global goodwill that came our way after Sept. 11.

Since then, President Bush has displayed a cavalier attitude toward the rest of the world. He has waged a senseless war against a nation that did not harm the United States, and has cost tens of thousands of innocent lives.

And in the name of keeping Americans free, Bush has run roughshod over the U.S. Constitution and international law, brazenly spying on Americans and torturing detainees.

As he subverted the rule of law, he undermined America's self-made image as a beacon of international human rights.

Consequently, even among America's closest allies in Western Europe, we receive a low favorability rating, according to a recent report by the Pew Global Attitudes Project.

For example, only 30 percent of people in Germany have favorable views of the United States, as do 34 percent in Spain and 39 percent in France. Britain is the only Western European country where a majority of respondents - 53 percent - thinks favorably of the United States.

America's favorability rating among another two of its closest allies, Japan and Mexico, has declined significantly in the past year, by 11 percentage points and 9 percentage points, respectively.

In much of the Muslim world, our reputation is near rock bottom. Less than one-quarter of people in predominantly Muslim nations such as Pakistan, Turkey, Egypt and Jordan have positive views of the United States. And in Pakistan and Turkey, large majorities view America as "more of an enemy" than "more of a friend." What is perhaps most compelling about the Pew study is that the world has its eyes - and hopes - on the U.S. presidential election.

About two-thirds of the people polled in France, Germany, South Africa and Spain believe that U.S. foreign relations will improve once Bush is out of office.

Across the board, people overseas express more confidence in Sen. Barack Obama over his rival, Sen. John McCain, regarding international affairs. For example, while 84 percent of people in France are confident in Obama, only 33 percent feel that way about McCain. In Australia, 81 percent trust Obama, while only 40 percent trust McCain.

So, why should Americans care about what the rest of the world thinks? Well, we're in a pickle now due to Bush's refusal to consider world opinion. And the next president will need better relations with other nations if we are to solve our global challenges together.

While McCain refuses to negotiate with adversaries of the United States, and gives little indication that he would veer from the catastrophic foreign policy of Bush, Obama believes in vigorous diplomacy - engaging America's allies and enemies alike. He also rejects Bush's system of secret and harsh offshore prisons and tribunals.

Obama's approach, as the Pew study suggests, resonates around the world.

Some of us may feel a hunger for change here at home. That hunger is also gnawing away at people in other countries.

In Philly, They’ll Cut Off Your Gas For A Laugh

Color of Law
By David A. Love
BlackCommentator.com Editorial Board
June 26, 2008

Recently, in Philadelphia I heard the most insulting radio commercial of all time.

It was an ad for Philadelphia Gas Works, or PGW, a local city-owned utility. The narrator, a woman, lectures to the audience that if they do not pay their gas bill, PGW will cut off their service. In the background, throughout the commercial, is the sound of a man singing in the shower. Suddenly, towards the end of the commercial, he starts screaming in agony, presumably because PGW shut off his hot water.

Now, PGW tried to make light of a matter which is anything but amusing. It would seem to represent the worst, most inappropriate and most poorly timed public relations strategy in recent memory, but no one seems to talk about it. The PGW people are inferring that people are trying to beat the system, to have gas heat without paying for it.

Here’s a novel idea: perhaps poor and working people cannot afford fuel costs. Philadelphia, like other cities, is hurting from the recession, but for many people, every day is a recession. One-third of the city is mired in poverty, and the city has the highest per capita incarcerated population in the nation. There are no summer jobs for the kids, and for many of them there may not be any free bus passes when they return to school.

But the problem is bigger than Philly. The city’s current administration is as able as any, and seemingly abler than those who preceded it, but they inherited problems that are shouldered by states and localities throughout this nation. It will take a national strategy to solve them.

To make it simple, people cannot afford to live in America.

There is the energy crisis, where profiteers and speculators are making out like bandits from the high price of oil, and companies such as Exxon Mobil are posting record profits, while common people cannot afford their energy needs. Alternative fuels will save the environment and unleash new industries and spur job creation, but the corporate giants that killed the street cars throughout the nation, and the electric cars in California, stand in our way.

The energy crisis relates to the food crisis, because the high cost of energy increases the cost of food.

Then, of course, there is the subprime mortgage crisis, where the financial giants and Wall Street banks defrauded millions of people with home loans with unconscionable terms they could not possibly afford. These people are continuing to lose their homes in cities throughout the country, in what has become a loss of wealth of historic proportions.

Related to the mortgage crisis is the emerging school loan crisis, where colleges and universities make unholy alliances with lenders. The result is tuition that rises well in excess of the rate of inflation, and students that graduate with a mortgage-sized, high-interest loan. The massive amounts of debt with which these young people are saddled - before they even start their career in a job market of fewer opportunities and outsourcing abroad - will gravely affect their life choices and career choices.

Finally, there is the crumbling infrastructure crisis. The levies broke in New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina, but now the levies are breaking everywhere. And our children and families are levies, too, and they cannot stand the pressure. There are inadequate public investments in physical infrastructure such as roads and bridges, and spending for social welfare and education takes a back seat to prison and war profiteering.

What caused this problem? To make a long story short, much of it has to do with the conservative revolution, perverse public policy choices that shift wealth upward, deregulation, hatred of government as a force for social change, and unscrupulous politicians who run the track each and every day to make that money for their corporate pimps.

The PGW commercial represents the common Dickensian strategy, American-style, of callously blaming the poor for their own problems, calling for personal responsibility, and criminalizing them as a means of shutting them up, shutting them down and keeping them in line. But what do you do when most people are poor or are becoming poor, as is the case with the U.S.?

But there is a better way. In this election season, as we are about to witness a potentially dramatic pendulum shift in the United States, there are clear choices as to what direction Americans want for the country. Whatever happens, people of good will must be part of a movement that brings sustained economic and social equity and justice, seeks quality jobs, healthcare and education as a human right, and ensures that government serves the people and is no longer used as a casino for multinational conglomerates. Although the next occupant of the White House can go a long way in setting the tone, an election result is not a magic wand, and there are no shortcuts for the hard work which must be done on the ground.

Breaking Down the Far Right’s Attacks on Michelle Obama

Color of Law
By David A. Love
BlackCommentator.com Editorial Board
June 19, 2008

Are the spouses of the presidential candidates fair game? Republican presidential candidate John McCain - as well as McCain surrogates at Fox News and elsewhere - seems to think they are open for attack, particularly when they are Black.

The Far Right decided to wage warfare against Michelle Obama after she stated in a Feb. 18, 2008 speech in Wisconsin that “for the first time in my adult lifetime I am really proud of my country. And not just because Barack has done well, but because I think people are hungry for change.”

The next day, Cindy McCain, wife of John McCain, took time from her busy schedule of plagiarizing recipes to attack Michelle Obama’s statement. This, despite the rule that people who live in glass houses should not throw stones. “I am proud of my country. I don’t know about you? If you heard those words earlier, I am very proud of my country,” Mrs. McCain said while introducing her husband to a crowd in Wisconsin. Sen. McCain reiterated, “I just wanted to make the statement that I have and always will be proud of my country.”

Taking cues from their candidate, McCain’s shadow campaign staff at Fox News fell in line and proceeded with racist and sexist attacks against Michelle Obama.

The attacks have relied on three stereotypes about African Americans. The first is the image of the angry, uppity Black woman. Fox host Bill O’Reilly, in a discussion with a listener about Mrs. Obama as an angry and militant woman, suggested that Mrs. Obama should be lynched:
O’REILLY: I don't want to go on a lynching party against Michelle Obama unless there's evidence, hard facts, that say this is how the woman really feels. If that's how she really feels - that America is a bad country or a flawed nation, whatever - then that's legit. We'll track it down.

During a June 14, 2008 discussion about Michelle Obama, Fox News commentator Cal Thomas said:

THOMAS: Look at the image of angry black women on television. Politically you have Maxine Waters of California, liberal Democrat. She's always angry every time she gets on television. Cynthia McKinney, another angry black woman. And who are the black women you see on the local news at night in cities all over the country. They're usually angry about something. They've had a son who has been shot in a drive-by shooting. They are angry at Bush. So you don't really have a profile of non-angry black women.

The second component of the McCain-GOP-Fox race card strategy against Michelle Obama is the offensive image of the “baby mama.” On June 11, Fox News displayed the words “OUTRAGED LIBERALS: STOP PICKING ON OBAMA’S BABY MAMA” several times while on-air. I decided to consult Urban Dictionary for a definition of baby mama. The primary definition of the term is:

The mother of your child(ren), whom you did not marry and with whom you are not currently involved.

The secondary definition is more telling:

A term used to define an unmarried young woman (but can be a woman of any age) who has had a child. As mentioned before in another definition, most of the time it is used for when it was simply a sexual relationship, compared to ex-wife or girlfriend. Usually this has a negative connotation, a lot of baby mamas are seen as desperate, gold digging, emotionally starved, shady women who had a baby out of spite or to keep a man. Sometimes they may act like this because of missed child support payments, unfulfilled promises by the father, or convenient sex by the father. Either or both may exist in any situation.

So, to use this term against anyone, in this case a dignified woman from the south side of Chicago with a Princeton and Harvard Law pedigree, the people at Fox know what they are doing.

Finally, the third racist stereotype that McCain’s people are utilizing is that of the unpatriotic and un-American Black person. Unveiled characterizations of Barack Obama in the Neanderthal conservative media as a Muslim terrorist who refuses to wear a flag lapel pin or place his hand over his heart during the pledge of allegiance have been plentiful. And when Michelle and Barack Obama pounded each other’s fists during a campaign event in St. Paul, Minnesota, one Fox commentator described the harmless and popular hand gesture as a “terrorist fist jab.”

It is common to characterize African Americans as un-American and unpatriotic (translation: ungrateful). And what exactly is patriotism? Samuel Johnson (1709-1784) said that “Patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel.” In the case of John McCain, perhaps patriotism is endorsing the use of torture, although he was a torture victim, or voting against the G.I. bill, or voting against women’s reproductive rights, or hoping to continue an immoral war in Iraq that has claimed thousands of lives and will certainly claim many more.

And McCain and the GOP have surrounded themselves with “patriotic” Americans such as Rev. Rod Parsley of the World Harvest Church in Columbus, Ohio, who said that America was founded to destroy Islam, which he calls a false religion; Pastor John Hagee of Cornerstone Church in San Antonio, Texas, who said in a late 1990s sermon that Adolph Hitler was sent by God to hunt the Jews and carry out the Holocaust; fundraiser Clayton Williams, who made a comparison between rape and weather, saying that “As long as it’s inevitable, you might as well lie back and enjoy it”; and ex-Hillary Clinton supporter turned McCain democrat Paula Abeles. Abeles, who facilitated a conference call between McCain and disgruntled Clinton supporters, led an effort by White descendants of Thomas Jefferson to exclude the Black descendants of Jefferson and his slave Sally Hemings from family gatherings. We won’t even get into Sen. Joe Lieberman.

And while McCain may not be able to control all of the statements and actions made by his surrogates or by independent organizations, this belies the point. McCain is the beneficiary of the attacks on Michelle Obama, and he can play good cop while the right-wing slime machine does the only thing it knows - sow the seeds of racial division. The conservative movement has employed this tactic, known as the Southern Strategy, for years, in order to win elections. (McCain knows what they are capable of doing. In the 2000 South Carolina primary, the Bush campaign spread rumors that rival McCain had fathered a Black child.) This time around, unencumbered by morality, ethics, scruples or good taste, it is literally all that they have left. They had the opportunity to rule, and they have turned the nation into a shambles. All out of ideas, and faced with major losses in the Senate, the House of Representatives, and possibly the presidency, they cannot run on the issues, the economy, or their energy policy, or domestic policy, or Iraq, or the environment.

Meanwhile, those who are members of political, cultural and ethnic minorities have every right to be angry at a nation which has for years locked them out of the mainstream, humiliated them, promulgated unjust laws against them, and treated them like anything but a child of God. Yet, these folks, shut out, have emerged as the greatest patriots of all - those who are angry because they see a nation that does not live up to its promise, and who decide to fight to make that promise a reality for all people.

Fannie Lou Hamer was one of those angry Black women that Fox News hates so much, as were Harriet Tubman, Sojourner Truth, Ida B. Wells-Barnett, Barbara Jordan, Shirley Chisolm, Ella Baker, Rosa Parks, Audre Lorde, and many others. In their day, they would have received a far better reception from the conservative White men, had they known their place, stayed at home, baked some biscuits and shut the hell up. I do not know if they wore flag lapel pins, although I am inclined to believe many did not.

I do know, however, that these women could have taught John and Cindy McCain, Bill O’Reilly and Cal Thomas a great deal about patriotism.

Republicans Would Chisel the Anger Out of Dr. King’s Face

By David A. Love
BlackCommentator.com
June 12, 2008

It is true that the dead are unable to defend their reputation. Such is the case with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. With four decades since his assassination, it is very easy for society to lose sight of the man’s philosophy and his great works. Just to take this a step further, there is a not-so-subtle attempt by conservatives to recast Dr. King either as a mild-mannered and milquetoast individual, obsequious and not easily roused, or as a conservative who, if alive today, would side with the interests he railed against in the 1950s and 1960s.

One example of these efforts is the controversy surrounding the King memorial. Chinese sculptor Lei Yixing has been commissioned to render a 28-foot sculpture of King, carved from Chinese granite, the cornerstone of the $100 million King memorial in Washington, DC.

Frankly, Lei’s proposed likeness of King is a bad piece of work, bad meaning good. King stands erect, back not bent, with a stern face and his arms crossed.

But the United States Commission of Fine Arts, which must give final approval of every facet of the memorial, said in a letter that the statue made Dr. King look “confrontational,” that “the colossal scale and Social Realist style of the proposed sculpture recalls a genre of political sculpture that has recently been pulled down in other countries.” The Commission, a federal body that supposedly provides “expert advice” on issues of design and aesthetics in the nation’s capital, “consists of seven ‘well qualified judges of the fine arts’ who are appointed by the President [in this case, that would be Bush] and serve for a term of four years.”

How deviously ironic that the Commission would show concern that a sculpture of King is too confrontational, too political, too angry. King was a man who confronted the three-headed beast of racism, economic exploitation, and militarism, from the unjust laws of Jim Crow segregation, to the White clergy in Birmingham who told him to wait, to the injustice faced by Memphis sanitation workers, to the atrocities of the Vietnam War, and was hunted by the government and gunned down in the process. Let us remember that J. Edgar Hoover called King “the most dangerous man in America, and a moral degenerate.”

Understandably, the artist is aggravated the Commission has asked him to alter King‘s appearance (a depiction they initially voted for unanimously) so that he doesn’t seem to have so much on his mind.

Meanwhile, the National Black Republican Association (NBRA) has kicked off a campaign to place billboards across the country that read “Martin Luther King Jr. was a REPUBLICAN.” One such billboard was placed off exit 145 of I-26 in Orangeburg, South Carolina. According to Frances Rice, who founded the NBRA in 2005, the association “is dedicated to promoting the traditional values of the black community which are in concert with the core Republican Party philosophy of strong families, personal responsibility, quality education and equal opportunities for all.” Further, according to Rice, “Our vision is to help black Americans become power players in the political arena and move into our ownership society, emphasizing small business and home ownership.”

The problem with the NBRA’s argument regarding King is that it is intellectually disingenuous and lacking in historical context. You get the sense that there are people operating the controls, the Republican National Committee perhaps, who hope you don’t see them behind the curtain. On its website, the NBRA states that “It should come as no surprise that Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was a Republican. In that era, almost all black Americans were Republicans. Why? From its founding in 1854 as the anti-slavery party until today, the Republican Party has championed freedom and civil rights for blacks.”

Proclaiming that King was a Republican is not so outlandish. Frederick Douglass was a Republican, as were the 22 Black members of Congress (two senators, including Blanch Kelso Bruce of Mississippi, a former slave, and 20 representatives, including John R. Lynch, who was speaker of the Mississippi House before coming to Washington) and one Black governor (Pinckney Benton Stewart Pinchback of Louisiana) who served during Reconstruction. The Republican Party also claimed Black lieutenant governors, a secretary of state, judges, state treasurers, superintendents of education, mayors and generals of state militias.

The Radical Republicans who were responsible for the Thirteenth, Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to the U.S. Constitution, the Freedmen’s Bureau, and other post-Civil War legislation, represented a brief glorious period for the Republican Party, but that was a long time ago. The party of Lincoln is not the party of the Bush-Cheney-Rove criminal enterprise. And in the twentieth century, the Republican Party that had a vibrant and viable liberal wing in the form of Sen. Jacob Javits and Mayor John Lindsay of New York, of Sen. Edward Brooke of Massachusetts and Arthur Fletcher, the “father of affirmative action,” is no more, and has not existed for some time. With no diversity on the national scene, the GOP can offer up only a paltry few prominent faces of color these days, token faces such as Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal, an Indian American.

To be sure, the Democrats must answer for their long history of racism, and even today, the 2008 presidential primaries revealed the problem of racial division that won’t go away. The NBRA likes to argue that “the Democrat Party is as it always has been, the party of the four S's: Slavery, Secession, Segregation and now Socialism.” But this analysis suffers from historical amnesia.

In its narrative, the NBRA conveniently omits the role of the GOP’s Southern Strategy in steering White segregationists from the Democratic Party to the Republicans, and winning elections by appealing to White fears of African Americans. It started with Nixon, following Johnson’s passage of the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Act, which ensured a massive loss of White Southern support for the Democrats. And the Southern Strategy was perfected by Reagan, who kicked off his presidential campaign by invoking states’ rights in Philadelphia, Mississippi, where three civil rights workers, Andrew Goodman, Michael Schwerner and James Chaney - two Jews and a Black - were murdered by domestic terrorists in 1964.

As the now-deceased Republican strategist Lee Atwater said in 1981, “You start out in 1954 by saying, ‘Nigger, nigger, nigger. By 1968, you can’t say ‘nigger’ - that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff. You’re getting so abstract now [that] you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things, and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites.”

The Southern Strategy has had a long run in American politics, and it may very well fail miserably in the midst of an Obama candidacy. And yet, this is the last idea the Republicans have left, aside from permanent war, tax cuts, and ending abortion and gay marriage.

The Republican brand, badly damaged, would be taken off the shelves if it were pet food. In this season of discontent, Americans are in dire straits and the economy is ready to jump off the deep end. Foreclosures and food stamps abound. It would seem that eight years of Republican rule have ruined the nation so badly that more parlor tricks, more bait and switch, more smoke and mirrors will not work this time.

McCain, the GOP standard bearer, has the unenviable task of attempting to distance himself from the most unpopular president in American history, a president whose policies are in line with his own. His party, like America’s two-party system as a whole, is a dinosaur. And it faces well-deserved extinction by clinging to anti-immigrant fervor at a time of changing demographics; anti-Muslim sentiment when the U.S. needs to reach out to the rest of the world; robber baron economics which is exacerbating the gap between rich and poor; the elimination of civil liberties ostensibly to make us free, and an unjust and immoral war in Iraq which is bankrupting the nation and sucking the life out of essential social programs.

Uninspiring, stiff and crotchety, McCain is, according to David Letterman, “the guy at the hardware store who makes the keys.” Unable to energize even his own base, McCain faces predictions that as many as 40 percent of evangelicals will support Obama in the general election. With a 50-state strategy and a massive voter registration drive, the Obama train hopes to change the electoral map and make it rain blue in the red states.

So, in light of this, the NBRA hopes for a McCain victory by siphoning off 25 percent of the Black vote in the 2008 election. A quixotic endeavor at best, such a feat would not have been possible even when the Democrats ran boring wooden candidates for president every four years. Their plan for achieving this - not unlike the conservatives who would eliminate affirmative action on the grounds that King wanted a “colorblind” society - is cynically to portray Dr. King as someone who had much in common with today’s atrociously regressive and bigoted Republican Party. Moreover, McCain voted against the King national holiday.

Like Bush’s art critics, expert lackeys who would use a chisel to remove all the anger from Dr. King’s face, it simply won’t work.

McCain’s Christian Zionist, Subprime Mortgage Pimping Problem

David A. Love
BlackCommentator.com
June 5, 2008

On the eve of the general election season, as much of the media focuses on the trivialities of Senator Barack Obama’s associations - and whether he should repudiate everyone he knows or doesn’t know - GOP candidate John McCain has been given a free ride. This, despite evidence that McCain, like George Bush, would open the White House to profiteers, influence peddlers, racists and religious extremists.

There was, at best, token coverage of statements made by two of McCain’s supporters, Rev. Rod Parsley of the World Harvest Church in Columbus, Ohio, and Pastor John Hagee of Cornerstone Church in San Antonio, Texas. Parsley said that America was founded to destroy Islam, which he calls a false religion. Meanwhile, Hagee - who is known for his homophobic, anti-Muslim, and anti-Jewish sentiments - said in a late 1990s sermon that Adolph Hitler was sent by God to hunt the Jews and carry out the Holocaust, leading to the establishment of the state of Israel. In his 1996 book, The Beginning of the End, he expressed praise for Yigal Amir, the assassin of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, and characterized the murder as a fulfillment of prophecy. And on March 16, 2003, Hagee proclaimed that the Antichrist will be gay, will “make Adolph Hitler look like a choirboy,” and “is at least going to be partially Jewish, as was Adolph Hitler, as was Karl Marx.”

Hagee, oddly enough, has spoken before the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), the largest pro-Israel lobbying organization, a fact which may speak more about AIPAC than anything else. He even received a standing ovation at the 2007 AIPAC convention. And McCain supporter, Sen. Joe Lieberman, who called Hagee “a man of God,” has decided to speak at Hagee’s July 2008 Christians United For Israel (CUFI) conference. Advocating confrontation with Iran and a denial of aid to the Palestinians, CUFI believes that Israel’s expansion into Palestinian territory is “a biblical imperative.”

J Street, a pro-peace, Jewish political group that hopes to reverse the rightward shift in U.S. Mideast policy and the influence of AIPAC, has called upon Lieberman to withdraw his participation in CUFI’s conference. Perhaps for Lieberman and others, Hagee’s unflinching support of the Israeli government’s hard line policies trumps his intolerance and anti-Semitism. While the media have seemed fixated on one pastor who rightly condemned U.S. foreign policy and racism (Dr. Jeremiah Wright) and another who condemned white-skin privilege (Father Michael Pfleger), very little is said of Hagee. The double standard is clear.

McCain repudiated Hagee and Parsley, but that is beside the point. Rather than focus on individuals, it is necessary to examine the interests they represent. Why would McCain and the Republicans seek the support of such loathsome people and embrace their twisted interests, inviting them to sit at the table? And why do they have such influence in mainstream U.S. politics, and the Mideast policy debate?

Hagee, Parsley, and people of that ilk are members of what is known as Christian Zionism. Christian Zionists support Israeli government acts of military aggression, do not want peace in the Mideast region, and reject self-determination and statehood for the Palestinian people. Most of all, and this is key, they believe that Muslims, Jews, and those who do not accept Jesus Christ as their savior will perish when Armageddon comes, and Jesus returns. These far Right Christians are part of the GOP base, the GOP faithful whose support McCain has coveted, and from whom McCain will be unable to distance himself, even if he repudiates a few of their leaders.

Although he has positioned himself as a reformer and an independent, straight-talking maverick, John McCain is little more than a Bush shill. A Johnny One Note of American politics, McCain might as well be the nominee for President of Iraq, offering few policies other than perpetual war in Iraq, no talking to enemies and more atrocious Supreme Court nominees.

McCain talks little about domestic policy, and admits he knows little about economics. But his campaign co-chair, former Senator Phil Gramm, knows a great deal about economics and has that covered. While advising McCain on economic policy, Gramm lobbied Congress on behalf of UBS, a Swiss Bank, in its effort to block legislation to help the victims of the subprime mortgage crisis. Gramm, who has a doctorate in economics and is a vice-chair at the UBS banking division, was the architect of the very deregulation in the banking industry which allowed the subprime disaster to take place. Further, UBS has advised its bankers to avoid traveling to the U.S., where they face questioning and possible arrest for helping clients evade taxes.

Another close McCain advisor, influence peddler Charlie Black, is a longtime associate of George Bush and Karl Rove. Black’s lobbying firm, BKHS, is owned by Burson-Marsteller, which in turn is chaired by Hillary Clinton campaign advisor Mark Penn. Black’s clients are a who’s who of barrel-scrapers, including dictators such as Mobutu Sese Seko of Zaire, Angolan rebel leader Jonas Savimbi, the late Filipino President Ferdinand Marcos, hustler Ahmed Chalabi of the Iraqi National Congress and fake-WMD fame, and Blackwater founder Erik Prince.

Coddling racists, homophobes and Holocaust revisionists on the one hand, and embracing corporate pimps, subprime profiteers and influence peddlers on the other - important Republican constituencies - McCain has a lot of repudiating to do.

Assassination Talk Shows Hillary’s True Colors

By David A. Love
BlackCommentator.com Cover Story
May 29, 2008

When Hillary Clinton invoked the 1968 assassination of Robert F. Kennedy as a justification for staying in the 2008 Democratic presidential race, she revealed how desperate she has become.

“My husband did not wrap up the nomination in 1992 until he won the California primary somewhere in the middle of June, right? We all remember Bobby Kennedy was assassinated in June in California. I don't understand it,” she said in an interview with the editorial board of the Argus Leader in Sioux Falls, S.D. Although some would chalk up her comment to fatigue or a lack of sleep, Clinton had similarly invoked the slain senator several times in recent months.

Talking assassination is serious business. Throughout the world and throughout history, the assassin’s bullet has made martyrs of positive change agents. The bullet has stopped leaders of democratic movements, and often those movements themselves, in their tracks. The names Gandhi, Biko, Lumumba, Allende, Rabin and Sadat are just several that come to mind.

And in the United States, a number of truth tellers and change agents have been assassinated, figures such as Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, Fred Hampton, and Medgar Evers. The FBI under J. Edgar Hoover had a policy of preventing the rise of a “Black messiah,” a matter of public record rather than urban legend or some wild-eyed conspiracy theory. Lovers of freedom are aware of the damage done to this nation because these individuals are no longer among us, taken from us before their time, before their work was completed, through violence and hatred.

To be a high-profile, charismatic leader of color in America is to find oneself under the gun, in a figurative and a literal sense. Sen. Obama and his family have received death threats, causing him to receive Secret Service protection earlier than any presidential candidate. Meanwhile Obama’s foot soldiers have experienced the full brunt of racial epithets, defamation, bomb threats and vandalism throughout the inhospitable underbelly of this nation. For Clinton to make light of this American reality - and to contemplate the assassination of her Democratic rival, an African American, as a political tactic - is to demonstrate a level of instability, insensitivity and cold-heartedness which belies, even betrays, her qualifications for the office which she seeks.

For the Clintons, it has been a long journey to the bottom of the barrel. It all started with Clinton’s “kitchen-sink” strategy to “mess up” her rival, Sen. Barack Obama, and render him unelectable.

The Clinton camp played the race card in a manner that would have made any Jim Crow politician blush. From the start, President Clinton did his part to stoke the fires of racial division in the South Carolina primary by comparing Obama to Jesse Jackson. At the same time, Sen. Clinton downplayed Martin Luther King’s role in the passage of civil rights legislation. This led to the revocation of the Clintons’ Black pass, and the exodus of Black voters to Obama. In an attempt to woo White voters, Sen. Clinton further disrespected African American voters by denouncing and scape-goating Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Obama’s pastor. Meanwhile, as BlackCommentator.com reported in its April 20, 2008 special investigative report, Senator Hillary Clinton Must Explain the Praising of a Group of KKK Supporters, in the 1990s President Bill Clinton expressed his support for the United Daughters of the Confederacy, a White supremacist organization that Hillary Clinton has yet to denounce. And Sen. Clinton won West Virginia and Kentucky by exploiting racism and appealing to what she referred to as “working, hard-working Americans, white Americans.”

But none of this could stop Obama. The Clinton camp tried to change the measure of success in the Democratic primaries, and manufactured all sorts of metrics, aside from the metric that really counts, the number of delegates, to define victory. Counting the votes in Michigan and Florida, states that were penalized by the Democrats for breaking party rules and holding early primaries, became a cause célèbre and civil rights issue for Clinton. This, despite her promise not to campaign in those states, a promise made when she was the frontrunner and thought she would win the nomination in February 2008.

It is not surprising to many observers that when all else failed, and there was no other way to catch up with Obama in the delegate count, Clinton’s strategy was to wait it out, hoping that something bad would happen to Obama to render him ineligible and otherwise unavailable for consideration for the presidency. Apparently, hoping for the demise of her opponent was part of the Clintonian calculus.

And Clinton’s latest assassination comments further reveal the contradictions regarding her candidacy. She cannot have it both ways. Hillary Clinton cannot claim to be a feminist whose candidacy has fallen victim to misogyny, yet engage in raw, unabashed appeals to white-skin solidarity, and endorse military aggression against innocent women and children in Iraq and Iran. Red meat, testosterone and hubris dressed in a pants suit do not equate to feminism.

Touting her civil rights record while waiting for her Black opponent to be slain, Clinton does nothing but debase the public discourse and show her true colors. It suggests an unhealthy desire for power at all costs, and at the very least, a sore loser with sour grapes over a poorly-run campaign.

Most of all, it suggests that Clinton has a lot on her mind these days, and no good can come out of what she has been thinking.

A Book Review of Prison Profiteers: Who Makes Money From Mass Incarceration, By Tara Herivel and Paul Wright

By David A. Love
Black Commentator
May 22, 2008

Incarceration is perhaps America’s leading method of social control. With 2.5 million in the nation’s jails and prisons - 7 million people when you include people on probation and parole - the U.S. accounts for a quarter of the world’s prisoners, the world’s largest prison population.

An important factor which is fuelling the alarming growth rate of America’s prisons is the profit motive. Making money, rather than deterring crime or promoting rehabilitation, is a guiding factor which determines why and how many prisons are built. In a book published by The New Press, Prison Profiteers: Who Makes Money from Mass Incarceration (2008, 352 pp.), editors Tara Herivel and Paul Wright present an anthology of essays which discuss the beneficiaries of the prison boom. Herviel, a public defense attorney, and Wright, the founder and editor of Prison Legal News, have assembled an impressive array of eighteen advocates, journalists, attorneys and prisoners for a comprehensive analysis of a $186 billion taxpayer-funded prison industry.

Punishment for profit is a sordid, unethical and immoral enterprise, and no other nation places more prisoners in the custody of private corporations than America. Consequently, this system produces winners and losers:

Primary winners include the politicians and prison corporations who benefit from the construction of new prisons, while Wall Street banks benefit from private prison funding schemes that lie outside of the public purview.

The private entities that administer and supply the prison industry attempt to evade public accountability.

Telephone companies benefit from an unregulated marketplace and charge exorbitant rates for prisoner calls, making it prohibitive for inmates to communicate with their families and thereby stifling the rehabilitation process.

Badly needed educational, rehabilitation and drug treatment programs are cut or eliminated in the prisons in order to realize cost savings.

Correctional officers’ unions advocate for more draconian sentencing that will fill prison cells and maintain their livelihoods. Meanwhile, as the book rightly argues, there is no relationship between crime and incarceration rates.

Often, prisoners - predominantly poor, of color, and unable to vote - are counted for census purposes in the mostly white and rural districts in which they are incarcerated. These prison towns receive more clout, more influence and more than their fair share of public resources in the process. Meanwhile, the inner city neighborhoods that produce these inmates suffer not only from a depletion of their population as a result of the exodus of men and women to the prisons, but a smaller share of government resources. This is similar to the three-fifths compromise of 1787, in which slave states were able to count three-fifths of their enslaved population, who could not vote, for purposes of determining distribution of taxes and representation in Congress. This compromise was codified in Article 1, Section 2, Paragraph 3 of the U.S. Constitution.

Depressed rural communities clamor to attract prisons to their town. Yet, they do not receive the benefits they believed the prison would create. Prison economies may stifle other forms of economic activity, and in any case, the true beneficiaries of are corporations, shareholders and executives. Besides, many industries are eager to use prison laborers, earning pennies a day, thereby displacing high-paying union jobs.

Prison growth, fuelled by Corporate America, has created the phenomenon of “one million dollar blocks.” In some inner city neighborhoods, so many residents of the same city block have been incarcerated that it costs up to $1 million each year to imprison them.

In an effort to shift the prohibitive cost of prisons away from taxpayers, some localities and states charge prisoners for their own incarceration, including room and board, healthcare, food and other necessities. Inmates, usually lacking resources and hailing from low socioeconomic backgrounds, are further punished through the imposition of court and administrative fees they cannot afford. Probation may be conditioned on the ability to pay restitution and fees, and failure to pay could result in a “go to jail card.” Thus, Neo-Dickensian debtors’ prisons are created.

And Prison, Inc. is particularly cruel towards the young and the ill. Private youth facilities, staffed with undereducated, untrained and underpaid staff in order to maximize corporate profit and executive pay, are rife with child abuse. Meanwhile, private prison healthcare providers, indifferent to human suffering, purposely deny medical care for the sake of the bottom line. The book provides accounts of particularly unconscionable acts of medical neglect and malpractice, in which babies are born and die in jailhouse toilets, and prisoners needlessly suffer and die from horrific infections.

Although an increasing number of Americans are going to prison, few Americans care to fully understand what actually happens in these institutions. Out of sight, out of mind, lock them up and throw away the key. Yet, the derivation of profit from the suffering and captivity of others is made more socially acceptable through conflicting images in the mass media. One set of image depicts and glorifies prisons as chic, fashionable, luxurious places where prisoners are coddled. Another image depicts prisons as horrible places, where male rape is viewed as a fitting, acceptable and even humorous form of punishment for violent lawbreakers.

Prison Profiteers provides the reader with a thoughtful, comprehensive and accessible analysis of the money trail behind the prison-industrial-complex. It is required reading for students of the criminal justice system, civil rights and civil liberties advocates, and those who desire a greater understanding of the underbelly of our nation’s prisons-for-profit system.

The Hard-Working White Americans

By David A. Love
Black Commentator
May 15, 2008

In desperation, those who cling to the old paradigm of gutter racial politics will do or say anything to get elected. We were told that this is the way the game is played, that we cannot nor should not expect anything more. If it works, it is fair game, and if you can’t take the heat, then stay out of the kitchen.

And certainly, the race card is a time-tested strategy for dividing people down the middle, ensuring that they are at each other’s throats, responding to fear rather than reason or self interest, and in tune with their reptilian brain. The clarion call that Whites are all in this together, against people of color - that they must hide their women from the Black boogeyman, protect their jobs from Mexican “illegals,” ensure that the unqualified affirmative action student does not steal their child’s seat in college, and defend their nation against the Yellow Peril, or Islamofascists, or the enemy du jour - has precipitated lynchings and riots, and won elections. Bereft of vision, of ideas, and often of charisma, these race-baiting politicians have stoked the fires of hate for generations, all to make a name for themselves and build their careers. Since the days of President Lyndon Johnson and the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Voting Rights Act of 1965, race-baiting has been the crack pipe of the Republican Party.

In a recent USA Today interview, Senator Hillary Clinton, that failed and bitter presidential candidate, decided to go for broke. She said that when compared to her rival Senator Barack Obama, “I have a much broader base to build a winning coalition on.” To prove her point, Clinton cited an Associated Press article “that found how Sen. Obama's support among working, hard-working Americans, white Americans, is weakening again, and how whites in both states who had not completed college were supporting me.”

“There's a pattern emerging here,” Senator Clinton said. A pattern, indeed, but not the one the senator had in mind. While some would give Clinton the benefit of the doubt and attribute her statement to a misstep, or perhaps lack of sleep from answering all of those 3 A.M. calls, I am willing to give her more credit than that. As a skilled lawyer and a cold, calculating politician, she, like Bill, chooses her words carefully; she knows that which she speaks. Plus, she has a track record.

As BlackCommentator.com has reported in recent months, since Bill Clinton’s race-based mischief during the South Carolina primary, in which he attempted to marginalize Obama as the Black candidate with limited appeal, the Clintons have exhibited a disturbing pattern of race-baiting against Barack Obama.

Hillary Clinton has offended millions of voters with her cynical appeal to White racial solidarity. Of course, she offended those members of the electorate who are not White, and presumably not hard-working Americans, including Latino Americans, the nation’s largest minority group, African Americans, Asian Americans and Native Americans.

But Clinton also insulted a multitude of White Americans as well, those who have voted for her not out of a visceral sense of whiteness, nor out of a fear of a Black planet in the form of Obama, but out of what they perceived as a legitimate reason, be it nostalgia for the 1990s, Clinton’s positions on the issues, the possibility of electing the first woman president, etc.

Furthermore, she offended the multiracial, multiethnic and multigenerational coalition that voted for Obama and gave him numerous victories in the primaries, including many overwhelmingly White states throughout the nation’s heartland. These voters, Democrats, Republicans and Independents, are disenchanted with eight years of catastrophic Bush policies and understand what is at stake. These voters have the potential to fundamentally alter the electoral map. Apparently, they did not fall for raw racial pandering, and understood that a crass appeal to white skin solidarity should be relegated to the past. Clinton has insulted their intelligence in the process.

To be sure, there are millions of White Americans who will not vote for a person of color under any circumstances. So what? The reality is that we don’t need them and we don’t want them. We cannot concern ourselves with votes that never were and never will be available. Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell, a key Clinton surrogate, was correct when he said that some Whites in his state would not vote for an African American, although his motives were questionable. In a state with entrenched racism - including hate groups and neo-Nazi activity in its middle “Alabama” region between Pittsburgh and Philadelphia - it is surprising that Obama trailed Clinton by a mere nine percentage points.

In the end, considering Clinton’s failure to surpass her party’s presumptive nominee in the primaries, the narrative of Obama as an unelectable Bantustan candidate who is unable to draw blue collar White votes rings hollow. Far more fascinating and relevant than Clinton’s edge among White voters in a limited number of contests is the nearly total evisceration of her Black support in only a few months. Early in the primary season, Senator Clinton enjoyed more African American support than Obama, when President Clinton was still the first Black president in the eyes of some. When the once-inevitable Hillary Clinton decided to become the Great White Hope in this presidential race, desperate in the face of the Obama steamroller, and her husband decided to assist her in sowing the seeds of division, things changed.

And indeed, the winds of change are upon us, and people are looking for a different way. We already know that the Clintons no longer own the Democratic Party that they so greatly influenced for two decades. Their “kitchen sink” strategy against Senator Barack Obama has tarnished their image and perhaps their legacy. Time will tell us if the Clintons’ cynical Southern Strategy against Obama will cost them their political future. One thing is certain: It is a long walk back to the Senate for one of the Clintons, and an even longer walk back to Harlem for the other.

Supreme Court's voter ID decision is a blow to democracy

By David A. Love
Progressive Media Project and McClatchy-Tribune News Service
May 7, 2008

By upholding Indiana's voter ID law, the Supreme Court struck another blow to civil rights and equality in the United States.

In its 6-3 decision in Crawford v. Marion County Election Board, the court ruled that the law, which requires Indiana voters to show photo identification at the polls, is constitutional.

But the law was devised with partisan motives in mind. The Republican-dominated legislature enacted it in 2005 against the wishes of Democrats and civil rights advocates who were concerned that it would deny equal access to the voting booth.

Why? Because the law places an unfair burden on the poor, minority groups, students, the disabled and the elderly, groups that are least likely to have proper ID.

Voter ID laws like Indiana's harken to the days of Jim Crow, when states required blacks to pay poll taxes and pass literacy tests, or answer questions as inane as "how many bubbles are in a bar of soap?" in order to vote.

In the majority opinion, Justice John Paul Stevens, joined by Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., and Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, said the burden the law imposes is minimal and even-handed, and that the law is justifiable since it aims to "protect the integrity and reliability of the electoral process itself." Also siding with the majority, Justices Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas and Samuel A. Alito Jr. wrote that the Indiana law is "eminently reasonable.

The burden of acquiring, possessing and showing a free photo identification is simply not severe, because it does not `even represent a significant increase over the usual burdens of voting.'"

The dissenting justices, Justices David H. Souter, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen G. Breyer, concluded that the law "threatens to impose nontrivial burdens on the voting right of tens of thousands of the State's citizens." They added that a "significant percentage of those individuals are likely to be deterred from voting."

The dissenting opinion also took issue with Indiana's provisional ballot system. Voters who do not have an ID can cast a provisional ballot. The ballot becomes validated only if the person appears in court or before the county election board within 10 days of the election and can establish his or her identity. Someone without an ID would be required to repeat this process in every subsequent election. This is a burden for indigent voters in a state that lacks public transportation in many areas.

Ironically, the issue of voter fraud - the reason that some Republican lawmakers use to justify voter ID laws - is a red herring. There is very little evidence of voter fraud in the United States. Yet the Supreme Court cited voter fraud as the primary reason for upholding the Indiana law.

It is unfortunate that the highest court in the land has turned its back on voting rights for all Americans. Voting should be made easier, not harder. By giving the green light for states to enact such repressive laws, they are enabling those who would turn the clock back on civil rights in this country.

In an election year where millions of new voters are being brought into the democratic process, this should concern us all.

On the Criminalization of Black Motherhood

By David A. Love
Black Commentator
May 8, 2008

On this Mother’s Day, it is fitting that we take time to think of all of the mothers, disproportionately poor, and disproportionately of color, who are behind bars in the United States. Victims of a failed war on drugs, pawns in a for-profit prison scheme that requires more and more warm bodies, locked up, to boost the bottom line, Black women are the fastest growing demographic in America’s prisons. They are twice as likely as Latina women, and three times as likely as White women to be incarcerated.

Meanwhile, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics in 2000, African American children (7.0%) were almost nine times as likely to have a parent in prison as White children (0.8%), while Latino children (2.6%) were three times as likely as white children to have a parent in prison.

And in a related matter, according to the Children’s Defense Fund at least 58 percent of children in foster care are children of color. Of this, Black children are 35 percent of children in foster care, even though they are only 16 percent of the population. Latino children make up 17 percent of foster children; 2 percent of the foster care population are American Indian/Native American children, although they represent only 1 percent of the general population, and 1 percent is Asian Pacific Islander.

In a 2002 opinion in Nicholson v. Scoppetta - which involved a class action suit by battered women against New York City’s unjust child welfare policies - federal district Judge Jack B. Weinstein characterized the excessive removal of children from their homes as “a form of slavery.” According to Northwestern University law professor Dorothy Roberts in a Colorlines magazine article, the role of racism in the child welfare system is a national disgrace: “Most white children who enter the system are permitted to stay with their families, avoiding the emotional damage and physical risks of foster care placement, while most black children are taken away from theirs. And once removed from their homes, black children remain in foster care longer, are moved more often, receive fewer services, and are less likely to be either returned home or adopted than any other children.”

In a society that seeks retribution, punishment and profit rather than rehabilitation and preservation of families as a desirable goal, women of color are penalized for their race, their gender, and even their motherhood. Women of color are more likely than White women to be monitored and supervised by the state, and more likely to experience state control over their bodies and their children. Call it a holdover from slavery, when Black women had no right to privacy, were violated at will, and could not make decisions regarding themselves, their bodies or their families.

Some states have enacted laws which criminalize drug-dependent expectant mothers and violate their civil liberties. Women’s eNews reported that eighteen states have laws that are racially discriminatory and potentially interfere with a woman's reproductive rights. Penalties may include arrest and termination of their parental rights. Driven by hysteria and misinformation regarding the so-called “crack baby” epidemic, these laws first became popular during the 1980s.

South Carolina was the first state to uphold the criminal conviction of a woman who has taken drugs while pregnant. In South Carolina v. Whitner (1997), that state’s highest court affirmed that child abuse laws apply to the behavior of a mother while the fetus is in her womb, and she may be prosecuted for harm to her viable fetus. In 1992, Cornelia Whitner was sentenced to eight years for unlawful child neglect— smoking crack cocaine during her pregnancy.

In 1989, a group of prosecutors in South Carolina, in cooperation with the police and public hospitals, decided to start punishing pregnant women who test positive for cocaine—most of them African American women who sought prenatal care. Proponents claimed the law was designed as a “family-friendly” measure to stop pregnant women from abusing drugs and to improve the health of the baby. Studies have shown the opposite: Such laws deter women from seeking prenatal care and the limited drug treatment that is available because they are afraid of going to jail.

Cocaine is by no means the leading cause of birth defects. Alcohol abuse is responsible for more birth defects. Tobacco is particularly damaging, as is poverty, malnutrition, stress and exposure to lead.

And the prosecution of pregnant women for drug use takes us down a slippery slope that leads to a logical conclusion of criminalizing alcohol and tobacco use.

But the issue is not a pregnant woman’s right to take drugs, but whether African Americans are accorded the same constitutional rights as everyone else. The issue is whether the state can intrude in the reproductive lives of women. Drugs already are illegal, and child abuse charges amount to piling on. Treatment for their disease, proper prenatal care and mental health services, rather than criminalization, will help make these mothers’ lives whole and productive. And as the Drug Policy Alliance has reported, “removing a child from his family may cause serious psychological damage - damage more serious than the harm intervention is supposed to prevent.”

Critics decry a police mentality that allows the state to monitor the behavior of parents, and all-too-readily separate parents from their children, rather than deal with systemic social ills. “Child welfare policy and practice in the United States can't be understood fully in isolation of other larger social phenomena in our country,” says NYU law professor Martin Guggenheim, author of What’s Wrong With Children’s Rights, in a PBS Frontline interview. “We are a country that proclaims a child-loving philosophy, which is belied by harsh statistics that suggest for an advanced, industrialized country, we do very poorly by and for our children. We have a shockingly high infant mortality rate; we have known environmental pollution conditions in many, many industrialized cities, in which children suffer from life-threatening asthma at shockingly high rates; we have inadequate housing; we have inadequate income assistance for many, many children in this country. Given our relative wealth, one could say objectively we are one of the poorest distributors of income to children in any advanced country. We have the highest rate of poverty among children in any advanced country.”

Malissa Ann Crawley, a mother of three healthy children, was one of the women prosecuted under the South Carolina law who petitioned the U.S. Supreme Court. She was sentenced to five years for testing positive for cocaine during pregnancy. At Crawley’s hearing, the judge remarked: “I’m sick and tired of these girls having these bastard babies on crack cocaine and until they change the law, the law they gave me, it said I could put them in jail.”

The Drug Policy alliance also noted that the Whitner decision “gave law enforcement a green light to arrest and prosecute pregnant women for child abuse who suffered from drug and alcohol dependence. The decision also opened the doors for prosecuting women for homicide by child abuse, as in the case of South Carolina vs. Regina McKnight.”

Also commenting on the devastating effect of Whitner, National Advocates for Pregnant Women says that infant mortality in South Carolina increased for the first time in a decade. In addition, the state has experienced a 20 percent increase in abandoned babies, and there has been a dramatic decline in the number of women seeking drug treatment program services.

The U.S. Supreme Court refused to hear the Whitner case on appeal. But in 2001, the nation’s highest court decided in Ferguson v. City of Charleston that a public hospital violated the Fourth Amendment of the Constitution by performing drug tests on women, and reporting the results of the tests to the police without the woman’s consent. Nevertheless, the criminalization of women struggling with addiction continues with the promulgation of unjust laws.

Punishing pregnant women for their addiction is unconscionable public policy. Locking up the mother, purportedly to save the baby, is primarily a violation against the Black mothers who are targeted, as well as their families and communities. But ultimately, it is an attack on us all.