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Books by
Barack
Obama
Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance
/
The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the
American Dream
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Books by Hillary Rodham Clinton
Living History /
It Takes a Village /
Dear Socks, Dear Buddy /
An Invitation to the White House
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The
Handwriting is On the Wall: It's a Clinton-Obama Ticket
in ‘08
By Bruce Dixon
With a full year to go before the 2008 presidential
election the handwriting is already on the wall. The
Democratic nominees and probable winners in 2008 will be
Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama.
In US presidential politics, elections are often
anticlimactic. For Democratic and Republican wings of
America's permanent ruling party, the all-important
selection which precedes the election isn't about poll
numbers, votes or the citizens that cast them. It's
about winning the favor of military contractors, the
banking and financial sectors and Big Oil. It's about
reassuring insurance and pharmaceutical companies,
cozying up to agribusiness, the cable and telecom
monopolies, allaying the fears of chambers of commerce,
and wooing Hollywood.
Only those who jump through these hoops merit favorable
coverage in the corporate media as so-called serious
candidates. For example, at a recent Democratic
presidential forum, when
directly asked whether they, if elected, would have
US troops out of Iraq by the end of their first term in
2013, Clinton, Obama, Edwards, Dodd and Biden all
admitted their intent to
continue the war at least that long.
Thus certified, these serious candidates are deemed
worthy of individual and bundled campaign donations from
corporate board members, wealthy investors, CEOs, their
family members, lobbyists, lawyers, employees, PACs,
trade groups and so on. The worthiest are those that
collect the most money from these sources, and are in
turn celebrated in the corporate media as hardheaded,
pragmatic and realistic presidential contenders, and
rise in the opinion polls.
Failure on a candidate's part to stick to the script is
severely punished. Any lack of will to reassure the
military contractors, Big Oil, Big Insurance, Big Pharma
and Big Money in general results in a candidate being
labeled “unelectable,” through boycotts by the big money
donors and the imposition of kiss-of-death news
blackouts on their campaigns. Four years ago ABC News
exec Ted Koppel
demanded Kucinich, Sharpton and Moseley-Braun
withdraw from the race and pulled ABC's coverage from
their campaigns the next day, as did NBC, CNN, and the
other networks. This season's antiwar and pro health
care Democrats
Mike Gravel and
Dennis Kucinich are routinely
disinvited to forums,
excised from coverage, omitted from public opinion
polls and surveys, and their
images deleted from news photos of presidential
forums.
When a boycott of big campaign contributors and media
censorship alone is insufficient to kill a presidential
campaign whose message is threatening to those in power,
the media have been known to step in more directly. For
a time in 2004, presidential candidate Howard Dean's
antiwar stance enabled him to raise buckets of cash in
small donations from millions of Americans opposed to
the war and lead the Democratic field in the public
opinion polls. Corporate media launched a torrent of
baseless ridicule over an arguably doctored “scream”
that cut his popular support by half in the space of two
weeks.
By contrast, this year's Democratic front runners
Clinton and Obama, having properly and repeatedly kissed
the rings of military contractors, big insurance, Big
Oil, agribusiness and the rest, are basking in a tide of
favorable media coverage. Journalism.org's October 29
article "The Invisible Primary" contains a wealth of
detail contrasting the relative extent and favorability
of media coverage garnered by both Republican and
Democratic contenders. It indicates that Barack Obama
alone receives
as much favorable coverage as the entire Republican
field, and that the volume of positive stories about
Hillary Clinton is not far behind his, and closing fast.
The race among presidential candidates for corporate
campaign contributions, aptly called “the wealth
primary,” shows the same results. Thomas Edsall in the
October 17 Huffington Post
detailed how the CEOs, lawyers, lobbyists and
bundlers who represent military contractors have
abandoned their long-held alliance with Republicans, and
placed their bets with Hillary Clinton. According to
Edsall:
“The strong support for Clinton indicates
that a majority of defense industry executives currently
believe Clinton is a favorite to win the Democratic
nomination and, in November, 2008, the general
election....”
The same picture is visible across a wider swath of
America's moneyed elite at
opensecrets.org, a web site devoted to tracking
influence of big money in politics.
·
Lobbyists of all kinds have donated
nearly as much to the Clinton campaign alone as to
any two Republicans combined.
·
Obama and Clinton, both proponents of
supposed “universal” health care plans
lead all Republicans in donations from the
pharmaceutical and health care industries.
·
Clinton and Obama together
lead the pack in donations from the securities and
investment industries, their combined total of $9.1
million well ahead of the $7.9 million garnered by the
top two Republican contenders.
·
Obama
leads all contenders in donations from the computer
and internet industries, closely followed by Clinton,
with either of them leading Republican contenders in
donations from this sector by a wide margin.
·
Commercial banks too, are bestowing their
largess upon Clinton and Obama
far more generously than they do on any Republican
candidate.
Whether the measure is favorable coverage in the
corporate media, or bundles of checks from wealthy
donors, the gap between Clinton-Obama and the rest of
the Democratic field is breathtaking and decisive.
Before a single primary vote has been cast, the
handwriting of America's elite is truly on the wall.
Clinton and Obama are the favored choices of our
corporate media and ruling circles, and thus will be the
Democratic ticket in 2008. And the defection of big
chunks of the elite consensus from the Republican camp,
the havoc and disarray sown among Republicans by eight
years of Bush-Cheney, and widespread popular disgust
with the Bush regime make prospects of a 2008 Republican
victory remote.
Make no mistake, Hillary Clinton will be at the top of
this ticket. The talk in circles close to Senator Obama
as far back as 1993 has been of a career trajectory
toward the office of vice president. But the way one
campaigns for that office nowadays is to run for the top
spot, lose and graciously accept the invitation of the
winner to serve. That is the scenario we expect to see
in the coming months.
Barack Obama is an invaluable asset to a Democratic
ticket, much too valuable to wait in line for 2012 or
2016. He enables Democrats to take advantage of the
historic black tendency to uncritically close ranks
around any prominent member of the club no matter how
undeserving, a relic of the Jim Crow era. Though he
famously declared that “there is no Black America” at
the last Democratic convention, Obama's mere presence on
the ticket locks up the African American vote, which as
usual will feel it has nowhere else to go.
Just as in 2004, antiwar voters will be forced to choose
between Republicans who will not apologize for the war,
and Democrats who will not end it. Bush and Cheney's
generation-long “war on terror” as the prism through
which to view American foreign and domestic policy is
fully accepted by the Democratic contenders. Single
payer health care on the French and Canadian model
remain off the table. The Bush Supreme Court, and a
thoroughly right wing federal judiciary stacked with
lifetime appointees remain firmly in place, as do laws
immunizing torturers, indemnifying telecoms who spy on
Americans, and much more. Millions of homeowners are
losing their homes to foreclosure, and the wealthy
players who bought those securitized loans will be
demanding a bailout from the next administration.
The
handwriting is on the wall. It says a new day is indeed
coming. But not all that new. Get ready for it.
* * *
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Bruce Dixon can be contacted at
Bruce.Dixon@BlackAgendaReport.com
Source:
Black Agenda
Report
posted 7 November
2007
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Super Rich: A Guide to Having it All
By Russell Simmons
Russell Simmons knows firsthand that
wealth is rooted in much more than the
stock
market. True wealth has more to do with
what's in your heart than what's in your
wallet. Using this knowledge, Simmons
became one of America's shrewdest
entrepreneurs, achieving a level of
success that most investors only dream
about. No matter how much material gain
he accumulated, he never stopped lending
a hand to those less fortunate. In
Super Rich, Simmons uses his rare
blend of spiritual savvy and
street-smart wisdom to offer a new
definition of wealth-and share timeless
principles for developing an unshakable
sense of self that can weather any
financial storm. As Simmons says, "Happy
can make you money, but money can't make
you happy." |
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The New Jim Crow
Mass Incarceration in the Age of
Colorblindness
By Michele Alexander
Contrary to the
rosy picture of race embodied in Barack
Obama's political success and Oprah
Winfrey's financial success, legal
scholar Alexander argues vigorously and
persuasively that [w]e have not ended
racial caste in America; we have merely
redesigned it. Jim Crow and legal racial
segregation has been replaced by mass
incarceration as a system of social
control (More African Americans are
under correctional control today... than
were enslaved in 1850). Alexander
reviews American racial history from the
colonies to the Clinton administration,
delineating its transformation into the
war on drugs. She offers an acute
analysis of the effect of this mass
incarceration upon former inmates who
will be discriminated against, legally,
for the rest of their lives, denied
employment, housing, education, and
public benefits. Most provocatively, she
reveals how both the move toward
colorblindness and affirmative action
may blur our vision of injustice: most
Americans know and don't know the truth
about mass incarceration—but her
carefully researched, deeply engaging,
and thoroughly readable book should
change that.—Publishers
Weekly |
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The White Masters of the
World
From
The World and Africa, 1965
By W. E. B. Du Bois
W. E. B. Du Bois’
Arraignment and Indictment of White Civilization
(Fletcher)
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Ancient African Nations
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The Death of Emmett Till by Bob Dylan
/
The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll
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Only a Pawn in Their Game
Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson Thanks America for
Slavery
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The Journal of Negro History issues at Project Gutenberg
The
Haitian Declaration of Independence 1804
/
January 1, 1804 -- The Founding of
Haiti
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ChickenBones Store
(Books, DVDs, Music)
update February 2012
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