Critical Support and Transformative Agendas

President-Elect Obama:
History, Challenges
and Possibilities

By Bill Fletcher, Jr.
BlackCommentator.com


I found myself facing a peculiar choice. Because I was taking Election Day off to do election work, I could have submitted an absentee ballot. In fact, that would probably have been the most logical thing to do. It would have saved me a lot of time. I kept procrastinating in filing for such a ballot until it was too late.

On Election Day I realized why I did not file the absentee ballot. Like millions of other voters, and particularly African Americans, I had to physically touch the voting machine. In my case, it was a touch-screen computer, but it would not have mattered whether it was that or an old-style lever that I had to push. November 4, 2008 was a moment when I had to make physical contact with the voting machine and actually see my vote counted. I had to know that it was actually happening. And I needed to stand on line - in our case for 2 1/2 hours - with hundreds of other African Americans and wait patiently for a moment to influence history.


Irrespective of any reservations one might have regarding the proposed policies of President-elect Obama (yeah, I get a kick out of writing and saying “President-elect”) there is no question but that the election victory had a profound emotional impact on Black America specifically, but this country generally. I can honestly say that I never expected to see a liberal Black person elected President of the USA, and I was not sure that a conservative Black person would be elected either. As the election returns were coming in, my stomach was tied up in knots unlike anything I have experienced since my daughter was born. I did not make predictions and I do not trust polls. More importantly, I did not trust the white electorate.

What to make of the election?

In reviewing the stats from the election, the results are quite interesting. Obama won the popular vote by 52% compared with McCain’s 46%. This is extremely significant and has not been replicated by a Democrat since Lyndon Johnson won the Presidency in 1964. Nevertheless, what it also shows is that the USA is quite divided. That 46% of the vote McCain won represented more than 55 million people. What is noteworthy is that while Obama won only 43% of the white vote, whites under the age of 30 backed him by a 66-32% margin. Latinos voted with Obama at a rate of 67% (an important increase over those who went with Kerry in 2004). Women voted with Obama at a rate of 55%, though he lost white women by 5% points (although this was better than Senator Kerry in 2004). It is also noteworthy that although Obama only received 45% of the veteran’s vote, compared with McCain’s 54%, this remains significant in light of the red-baiting and terrorist-baiting that was being targeted at him. Additionally, union voters went with Obama at 60% compared with McCain receiving 38%, a lower percentage than should have sided with Obama in light of the current economic crisis but that probably reflects racial divisions within the house of labor.

The election reflected several important concerns and tendencies:

*
The economy: there is no question but that the economic crisis had a significant impact on the electorate. 63% of voters indicated that the economy was a priority issue. McCain was never successful in crafting a message on the economy that resonated with the public.

*
A concern about the perception of the USA overseas: There was a sense among Obama supporters that there needed to be a change in the relationship of the USA to the rest of the world. This was, however, very unfocused.

*
A decline in the importance that voters attached to both the Iraq war and terrorism: With regard to Iraq this probably reflects a growing sense that the Iraq war is coming to an end and that the Occupation is not a critical issue.

*
The next Supreme Court appointments: For 47% of the electorate this was a critical issue. This was a hot-button issue with liberals and progressives who have been watching the Supreme Court make increasingly indefensible decisions that reflect its right-wing course.

*
Race matters...sort of: Particularly among younger voters, race was a less significant factor in influencing voter behavior than among older voters. It is also apparently the case that the economic meltdown led many white voters to put racial concerns on the back burner. That said, the “racial neutrality” of the Obama campaign took matters of racist oppression largely off the table for any significant discussion, a fact that may return to haunt the incoming administration.

Without question, the Obama victory needs to be understood as a tribute to exceptionally good organization; the initial positioning of Obama as, at least in the primaries, an anti-war candidate; the onset of the economic crisis; the candidate’s continuous message of optimism; and Obama’s ability to remain cool under fire.

Act II: Beginning right now

The implications of the Obama victory will need to be unpacked over the coming weeks and months. That said, there are a few points worth noting because they will have strategic implications:

Obama’s mandate is vague, yet identifiable: the mandate he has received is to (1) address the economic crisis immediately in a manner that favors regular working people. This is evident from the polls and from plenty of anecdotal information. In addition, the mandate involves (2) changing the relationship of the USA to the rest of the world. This particular point is very unfocused but it is evident that the US voters are increasingly concerned about the perception of the USA overseas and what that means for matters of national security.

Most people were unfamiliar with the actual programmatic steps Obama is advocating on the economy, yet they were unwilling to be swayed by the red-baiting rhetoric of McCain/Palin. This may offer an opportunity for progressives to advance one or another variant of a redistributionist approach toward the crisis.

With regard to foreign policy, this is extremely complicated and quite troubling. While Obama has emphasized the need for negotiations as a first step in international relations, when confronted by forces to his Right, he has tended to back down and often suggest highly questionable military and crypto-military options in handling crises, e.g., unilateral attacks on Al Qaeda bases in Pakistan. Some people around Obama seem to be advocating a get-tough approach toward Iran, which itself could lead to hostilities. While the people of the USA, by and large, are not looking for more war, the ability of the political Right to manufacture the ever-present threat from right-wing Islamists (including but not limited to targeting Iran) has successfully promoted a climate of fear. This will, more than likely, be a weak point for the President-elect and a place where pressure must be placed by anti-war forces.

The world is expecting a great deal from an Obama administration: All corners of the Earth erupted in glee upon news of the Obama victory. Obama will more than likely reach out to traditional US allies in order to repair the damage done by the eight years of the Bush administration. There will more than likely be outreach to Africa, though the character of that outreach is as yet to be determined. Obama, while Senator, expressed a great deal of interest and concern with Africa, and developed legislation focusing on the on-going crisis in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. He will probably try to alter the relationship of the US to Africa, though it is not entirely clear thorough how such an alteration will be. One should expect outreach to the African Union to offer support in cases of humanitarian disasters and crises, but unless Obama is prepared to break with the whole “war against terrorism framework” there may be continued militarization of the continent (through vehicles such as AFRICOM and the Trans-Sahel Military Initiative).

Progressives will need to perfect an approach of “critical support” towards the Obama administration: The corporate backers of President-elect Obama have no interest in a transformative agenda. They are interested in stabilizing capitalism generally, but especially stabilizing the financial sector. They are open to selective nationalizations as long as such nationalizations do not bring with them significant popular accountability. In light of this, progressive forces will need to be organized in such a way as to mount a challenge from the left side of the aisle. President Obama will need to be pushed on many areas, including foreign policy; healthcare; housing; jobs; and in general, the need for a pro-people approach to addressing the economic crisis. Taking this approach of critical support means, tactically, pointing out what has NOT been accomplished in the Obama agenda on the one hand, and, on the other, challenging the new Administration when it advances policies that are regressive, e.g., threatening Iran or Cuba and compromising with the insurance companies on healthcare.

Critical support also means raising issues that the Obama administration may tend to shy away from or avoid altogether, such as race/racism. Race is fused into the US system. Racist oppression and the differential in treatment between people of color and whites remains a major part of the US reality. For that reason, progressives must push the Obama administration to address the continuing impact of racist oppression. This may lead to clashes that at one and the same time appear to be tactical, i.e., matters of timing, but are actually quite fundamental, i.e., about whether there needs to be a systemic challenge to racist oppression.

None of this happens in the absence of organization. Those who rallied to the Obama campaign came from various political tendencies and experiences, and many of them will seek to return to their “everyday life.” At the same time, there are those who mobilized that are looking to be part of implementing the “dream” and they will be unable to do this as individuals operating alone. If one really wants to advance an approach of critical support for the incoming Administration, it will mean creating the grassroots organizational structures around the country that are capable of educating and mobilizing the millions of people who are seeking a new direction. This approach, what I have described elsewhere as a neo-Rainbow approach, can be used to exert pressure to ensure that the incoming Obama administration lives up to its full potential.

So many of us cried with joy and amazement on the evening of November 4th with this historic breakthrough. Our excitement cannot rest with the electoral success but must be fused with a genuine effort to create a new politics.


[BlackCommentator.com Executive Editor, Bill Fletcher, Jr., is a Senior Scholar with the Institute for Policy Studies, the immediate past president of TransAfrica Forum and co-author of, Solidarity Divided: The Crisis in Organized Labor and a New Path toward Social Justice (University of California Press), which examines the crisis of organized labor in the USA.]

Read More...

Summary only...

The Beginning of a New 'New Left'!

Photo: Victory in Chicago

Main Lesson:
Everything
Really Counted

By Tom Hayden

Friends, the lesson I draw from tonight's election returns is that everything really counts.

Look at the results at this point: Obama gets a huge electoral college victory because that's where he threw his resources [for example, $40 million into Florida, outspending McCain 4-to-1 in Virginia, etc]. He wins a bunch of battleground states by two percent, losing none. His popular vote is 51-48 percent. The best presidential campaign ever run, the Wall Street collapse in the foreground, and Barack sweeps – by two and three percent margins.

I think of Jessica Levy, a grad school dropout in North Carolina who took on the reddest part of the state, raised her own money, opened an office, set voter registration records, established a goal of running up Barack's numbers in an area still influenced by the KKK tradition.

Type rest of the post herePeople like Jessica made North Carolina 50-50 and, collectively, they made the difference for Barack in the key states. They are the foundation of our movement now and in the future.

It was everything they did - the 23,000 people who went through Obama's training, the millions poured in from MoveOn.org, AFSCME and SEIU, the quiet volunteers who worked the phones 24/7, and of course, the presence of an incredible candidate and superior campaign team.

Unfortunately, many of our progressive friends did little or nothing for the Obama campaign while spending so much of their time on his shortcomings. Many of them seemed more comfortable with a scenario where they could blame him for losing than credit him for winning.

I heard one of our friends tonight actually claiming that the election protection movement forced Karl Rove's minions to "throw in the towel" just this week rather than risk rigging another national election.

What a strange idea! The election protection movement was definitely an important factor in making theft more difficult, but the point is that there was an election worth protecting, and that's what made thousands of lawyers and ordinary citizens drop everything and become observers and litigators at sites around the country.

In my experience, only good things happen when 96 percent of the African American community is united, when two-thirds of Latinos are united, when unprecedented numbers of young voters are turning out, when thousands of activists are becoming a new generation of organizers. I am more interested in what these energized throngs of people throw themselves into next than what the sidelined Left proposes that they do.

I haven't heard any of the Obama grass-roots supporters proposing that we expand the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, extend NAFTA or tinker around with global warming. They are our newest best hope for creating the climate and the pressure necessary to achieve social change, and we need to listen, follow and work with them. A new New Left is at hand, and we need to avoid the irony of becoming the Old Left.

Great job fighting against racism, the war and for green jobs out there in Beaver County, Pennsylvania, Carl! You are one of the most practical theoreticians I know.

Read More...

Summary only...

Obama Wins Big, Decisive Victory!

Photo: Sign in Grant Park

Change
Has Come
to America

Obama Calls
For Democracy
of Participation

President-elect Barack Obama's Speech in Grant Park, Chicago, IL

November 4, 2008 - If there is anyone out there who still doubts that America is a place where all things are possible; who still wonders if the dream of our founders is alive in our time; who still questions the power of our democracy, tonight is your answer.

It's the answer told by lines that stretched around schools and churches in numbers this nation has never seen; by people who waited three hours and four hours, many for the very first time in their lives, because they believed that this time must be different; that their voice could be that difference.

It's the answer spoken by young and old, rich and poor, Democrat and Republican, black, white, Latino, Asian, Native American, gay, straight, disabled and not disabled - Americans who sent a message to the world that we have never been a collection of Red States and Blue States: we are, and always will be, the United States of America.


It's the answer that led those who have been told for so long by so many to be cynical, and fearful, and doubtful of what we can achieve to put their hands on the arc of history and bend it once more toward the hope of a better day.

It's been a long time coming, but tonight, because of what we did on this day, in this election, at this defining moment, change has come to America.

I just received a very gracious call from Senator McCain. He fought long and hard in this campaign, and he's fought even longer and harder for the country he loves. He has endured sacrifices for America that most of us cannot begin to imagine, and we are better off for the service rendered by this brave and selfless leader. I congratulate him and Governor Palin for all they have achieved, and I look forward to working with them to renew this nation's promise in the months ahead.

I want to thank my partner in this journey, a man who campaigned from his heart and spoke for the men and women he grew up with on the streets of Scranton and rode with on that train home to Delaware, the Vice President-elect of the United States, Joe Biden.

I would not be standing here tonight without the unyielding support of my best friend for the last sixteen years, the rock of our family and the love of my life, our nation's next First Lady, Michelle Obama.
Sasha and Malia, I love you both so much, and you have earned the new puppy that's coming with us to the White House. And while she's no longer with us, I know my grandmother is watching, along with the family that made me who I am. I miss them tonight, and know that my debt to them is beyond measure.

To my campaign manager David Plouffe, my chief strategist David Axelrod, and the best campaign team ever assembled in the history of politics - you made this happen, and I am forever grateful for what you've sacrificed to get it done.

But above all, I will never forget who this victory truly belongs to - it belongs to you.

I was never the likeliest candidate for this office. We didn't start with much money or many endorsements. Our campaign was not hatched in the halls of Washington - it began in the backyards of Des Moines and the living rooms of Concord and the front porches of Charleston.

It was built by working men and women who dug into what little savings they had to give five dollars and ten dollars and twenty dollars to this cause. It grew strength from the young people who rejected the myth of their generation's apathy; who left their homes and their families for jobs that offered little pay and less sleep; from the not-so-young people who braved the bitter cold and scorching heat to knock on the doors of perfect strangers; from the millions of Americans who volunteered, and organized, and proved that more than two centuries later, a government of the people, by the people and for the people has not perished from this Earth. This is your victory.

I know you didn't do this just to win an election and I know you didn't do it for me. You did it because you understand the enormity of the task that lies ahead.
For even as we celebrate tonight, we know the challenges that tomorrow will bring are the greatest of our lifetime - two wars, a planet in peril, the worst financial crisis in a century. Even as we stand here tonight, we know there are brave Americans waking up in the deserts of Iraq and the mountains of Afghanistan to risk their lives for us. There are mothers and fathers who will lie awake after their children fall asleep and wonder how they'll make the mortgage, or pay their doctor's bills, or save enough for college. There is new energy to harness and new jobs to be created; new schools to build and threats to meet and alliances to repair.

The road ahead will be long. Our climb will be steep.
We may not get there in one year or even one term, but America - I have never been more hopeful than I am tonight that we will get there. I promise you - we as a people will get there.

There will be setbacks and false starts. There are many who won't agree with every decision or policy I make as President, and we know that government can't solve every problem. But I will always be honest with you about the challenges we face. I will listen to you, especially when we disagree. And above all, I will ask you join in the work of remaking this nation the only way it's been done in America for two-hundred and twenty-one years - block by block, brick by brick, calloused hand by calloused hand.

What began twenty-one months ago in the depths of winter must not end on this autumn night. This victory alone is not the change we seek - it is only the chance for us to make that change. And that cannot happen if we go back to the way things were. It cannot happen without you.

So let us summon a new spirit of patriotism; of service and responsibility where each of us resolves to pitch in and work harder and look after not only ourselves, but each other. Let us remember that if this financial crisis taught us anything, it's that we cannot have a thriving Wall Street while Main Street suffers - in this country, we rise or fall as one nation; as one people.

Let us resist the temptation to fall back on the same partisanship and pettiness and immaturity that has poisoned our politics for so long. Let us remember that it was a man from this state who first carried the banner of the Republican Party to the White House - a party founded on the values of self-reliance, individual liberty, and national unity. Those are values we all share, and while the Democratic Party has won a great victory tonight, we do so with a measure of humility and determination to heal the divides that have held back our progress. As Lincoln said to a nation far more divided than ours, "We are not enemies, but friends...though passion may have strained it must not break our bonds of affection." And to those Americans whose support I have yet to earn - I may not have won your vote, but I hear your voices, I need your help, and I will be your President too.

And to all those watching tonight from beyond our shores, from parliaments and palaces to those who are huddled around radios in the forgotten corners of our world - our stories are singular, but our destiny is shared, and a new dawn of American leadership is at hand. To those who would tear this world down - we will defeat you. To those who seek peace and security - we support you. And to all those who have wondered if America's beacon still burns as bright - tonight we proved once more that the true strength of our nation comes not from our the might of our arms or the scale of our wealth, but from the enduring power of our
ideals: democracy, liberty, opportunity, and unyielding hope.

For that is the true genius of America - that America can change. Our union can be perfected. And what we have already achieved gives us hope for what we can and must achieve tomorrow.

This election had many firsts and many stories that will be told for generations. But one that's on my mind tonight is about a woman who cast her ballot in Atlanta. She's a lot like the millions of others who stood in line to make their voice heard in this election except for one thing - Ann Nixon Cooper is 106 years old.

She was born just a generation past slavery; a time when there were no cars on the road or planes in the sky; when someone like her couldn't vote for two reasons - because she was a woman and because of the color of her skin.

And tonight, I think about all that she's seen throughout her century in America - the heartache and the hope; the struggle and the progress; the times we were told that we can't, and the people who pressed on with that American creed: Yes we can.

At a time when women's voices were silenced and their hopes dismissed, she lived to see them stand up and speak out and reach for the ballot. Yes we can.

When there was despair in the dust bowl and depression across the land, she saw a nation conquer fear itself with a New Deal, new jobs and a new sense of common purpose. Yes we can.

When the bombs fell on our harbor and tyranny threatened the world, she was there to witness a generation rise to greatness and a democracy was saved.
Yes we can.

She was there for the buses in Montgomery, the hoses in Birmingham, a bridge in Selma, and a preacher from Atlanta who told a people that "We Shall Overcome." Yes we can.

A man touched down on the moon, a wall came down in Berlin, a world was connected by our own science and imagination. And this year, in this election, she touched her finger to a screen, and cast her vote, because after 106 years in America, through the best of times and the darkest of hours, she knows how America can change. Yes we can.

America, we have come so far. We have seen so much. But there is so much more to do. So tonight, let us ask ourselves - if our children should live to see the next century; if my daughters should be so lucky to live as long as Ann Nixon Cooper, what change will they see?
What progress will we have made?

This is our chance to answer that call. This is our moment. This is our time - to put our people back to work and open doors of opportunity for our kids; to restore prosperity and promote the cause of peace; to reclaim the American Dream and reaffirm that fundamental truth - that out of many, we are one; that while we breathe, we hope, and where we are met with cynicism, and doubt, and those who tell us that we can't, we will respond with that timeless creed that sums up the spirit of a people:

Yes We Can. Thank you, God bless you, and may God Bless the United States of America.

[Barack Obama is the President-elect of the United States of America.]

Read More...

Summary only...

Joe the Plumber's Sham Identity, Real Menace

GOP Swan Song:
New Messages,
New Threats

By Bill Fletcher, Jr.
Blackcommnetator.com

The 'Joe the Plumber' story has unraveled, yet Senator McCain continues to make reference to what is, in fact, a mythical character. Sure, there is a Joe, but he is not what he described himself to be. This has been exposed. Yet, McCain continues to reference 'Joe the Plumber' as if to lend credibility to his story.

It would be easy enough to laugh off the story of a white man who would like to believe that he will, someday, be the person that he presented himself to be, but the story tells us as much about the consciousness of many middle income and working class whites as it tells us about the propaganda strategy of the political Right. It is not just that Joe the Plumber, aka Joe Wurzelbacher, aka Sam J. Wurzelbacher, is not the person that Senator Obama believed him to be. Wurzelbacher, to paraphrase Frank Sinatra, seems to have 'high hopes,' that is, he is prepared to ignore his current situation of being a low to moderate income, working class, single parent who would benefit from Senator Obama's tax plan. Instead, he has embraced an identity that makes it easier for him to identify with the politics of McCain/Palin.

This incident highlights the desperate attempts by a section of the white working class to find some means to identify with a candidate who has a platform and approach contrary to their short and long-term economic interests. There are only three ways to pull that off, and Joe the Plumber found one: invent a new identity. A second way is to focus on issues that have little to do with one's living standard, i.e., so- called cultural issues. The third way is to simply acknowledge that one cannot vote for a Black man.



Yet the Joe the Plumber incident also tells us something about the messages being advanced by the Right, and specifically, by the McCain/Palin campaign. In a fit of desperation, the McCain/Palin campaign is suggesting that it does not matter whether or not Joe the Plumber is a myth. In fact, the McCain/Palin campaign has refused to acknowledge that the story is just this side of a hoax. Rather, they continue to reference this man as if his story is completely credible. In doing this, they raise, once again, the irrationalist side of their right-wing politics. In effect, the McCain/Palin campaign is saying that facts are irrelevant.

Wurzelbacher's aspirations speak to the dream of climbing the ladder of success and upward mobility, a dream that has proved to be a myth for many; a myth that has been preached to all citizens and residents of the USA, but absorbed largely by the white population. It is a myth that says if you work hard, you advance; if you are dedicated to your job, your living standard improves; and if you work hard and prove your value to the company (and to society) the living standard of your children will always be better than your own.

So, the question that arises is simple but profound: what happens when one finds out that this story line is true for only small numbers of people? There seem to be 2-3 answers. One can get angry and recognize that one has been hood-winked by the system and, as a result, turn on the system, i.e., move to the Left. In the alternative, one can feel betrayed and turn on those who one perceives to have been the source of the betrayal. Or, one can engage in fantasy, and pretend that one's current circumstances are only temporary, to soon be replaced by something a lot better.

Wurzelbacher is currently fantasizing, but this fantasy can easily morph into option #2, or the right-wing populism about which I and others have been warning. In either case, options #2 and #3 correspond to the message that sections of the political Right wish to advance. They say, in essence, that the only reason that you - the white worker or white small business person - are not succeeding has little to do with the system, but has to do with the 'other.' In the case of the current economic crisis, the problem for McCain and the Right is not the system, but a few greedy individuals. This is the sort of message that Wurzelbacher wants to hear. The message goes: there is nothing wrong with the system; there is nothing that should really stop him from becoming the person he wants to believe he can be; the only obstacles are some greedy, shady individuals, and, quite possibly, the tax plan of a Black man that allegedly might take money away from him...money that he does not currently possess.

The myth that surrounds Joe the Plumber is a powerful one. It is a myth that many people insist on believing despite a great deal of evidence that it is largely a fraud. Although whites have always had a relative advantage over people of color, this has never meant that whites automatically succeed or rise to the upper crust. Nevertheless, in challenging the myth, one is calling into question a belief system that so many people, particularly within white America, have grown to accept.

Senator Obama has described the current economic crisis as being far more than a crisis created by some individuals. He has pointed to the results of thirty years of deregulation. This is an important contrast with Senator McCain. Yet it is not enough. Wurzelbacher/Joe the Plumber, and others like him, deeply wish to believe the myth with which they have grown up. The myth in its entirety must be shattered. That can only happen by confronting the truth that the current economic crisis and the thirty plus year decline in the living standards of the average working person are not the result of some 'other', e.g., Jews, Blacks, minorities, immigrants, but, as I raised in my last commentary, are the result of a very amoral economic system.

[BlackCommentator.com Executive Editor, Bill Fletcher, Jr., is the Executive Editor of BlackCommentator.com, a Senior Scholar with the Institute for Policy Studies, the immediate past president of TransAfrica Forum and co-author of the book, Solidarity Divided: The Crisis in Organized Labor and a New Path toward Social Justice (University of California Press), which examines the crisis of organized labor in the USA.]

Read More...

Summary only...

It's Not Over Yet - Keep on Truckin'

Photo: Hayden at Antiwar Action

Obama Has FDR's Gifts:
Oratory & Pragmatism,
But Can He Restore US?

By Tom Hayden
Progressives for Obama

The collapse of American finance capitalism, being an event beyond the control of Karl Rove and the Republican apparatus, may well be the decisive factor in electing Barack Obama president. Or so say the pundits. That analysis, however, underestimates the risks that lie ahead this final week before the election and the qualities of Obama's campaign that enable him to take advantage of this crisis.

Despite the biggest crash since 1929, the closeness of the election already suggests that a masked American racism is alive and well. The hidden racial factor is immeasurable, and the threats to Obama will increase as he nears the victory line. There will be nothing easy on Election Day, as polling places will surely be overwhelmed with voters.



If John McCain wins, yet another generation will learn the bitter lesson of our continuing prejudice. The neoconservatives will have snatched victory from the jaws of defeat. The lines will be drawn. A larger Democratic Congress will try to counterbalance McCain, at best plunging the country straight into the 2012 confrontation.

But Obama has the edge.

He continues to break all fundraising records, a bottom-up trend which began with the internet-driven solicitations for MoveOn.org and the Howard Dean campaign, estimated to be $230 million in 2003-2004. Meanwhile, a silent army of Obama volunteers is preparing a historic get-out-the-vote campaign. Their effort is qualitatively different than past operations, which mostly consisted of out-of-state staffers occupying a handful of battleground arenas, ignoring local groups, treating voters like consumers and packing their bags the moment the election was over. While the Obama campaign deploys paid staff, too, the difference is that they are judged by community-organizing standards, which means empowering neighborhood teams from the streets up, leaving a vast new resource in place after the election.

Obama's story of rejecting a Wall Street career for community organizing in Chicago resonates now more than ever. He has introduced the model of community organizing not only as an alternative campaign model but as an alternative career model.

This new generation of Obama organizers will become the source of social activism for decades to come.

If Obama wins, November will be a turning point in the past decade's struggle to make every vote count, and a culmin-ation of voter-registration campaigns begun many years ago in the Deep South, where today it is possible that Obama will win actually one or two states. Voter turnout will swamp the polling places. Election chicanery is thriving again. It will be a brutal and contested day.

Third-party voters could still throw the election to McCain. The 2004 margins in close states are instructive: Kerry won Wisconsin by 0.38 percent, New Hampshire by 1.37 percent, Pennsylvania by 2.5 percent; he lost Iowa by 0.67 percent, New Mexico by 0.79 percent, Ohio by 2.11 percent and Nevada by 2.59 percent. Obama is bettering Kerry's numbers in those states, but the race could tighten and boil down to third-party voters. If there is an Obama victory, countless tears will flow among people carrying the deep post-traumatic stress disorder of our generation. To those now filled with hope and those allowing themselves to hope again, defeat might be unbearable. On the day after, the work will begin anew for those who really want change in America. The current debate over Wall Street contains a populist streak but little progressive content. The initial $750 billion bailout package - now climbing toward $2 trillion - was a gift to those responsible for the crisis, with only modest regulatory conditions attached. We are very far from the "Green New Deal" that some dream about. Congress has not suggested transferring funds from the Iraq war to energy conservation and renewables.

It is difficult to imagine waiting until late January for a progressive reworking of the Wall Street package. Immediately after the election, Congress is likely to go into special session with a president-elect among the sitting senators. Anti-war and environmental forces need to make themselves heard in the din of debate. The paradox is that the time has come for economic democracy, just as its advocates have waned in influence and resources.

The stark fact is that the current bailout package will so strain the federal budget as to threaten the health-care and green-jobs agendas. Perversely, the good news is that the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan and other fronts will become increasingly difficult to fund as well.

The New Deal began slowly and gradually, with personal acts of belt-tightening. The most famous New Deal programs - the Wagner Act, Social Security, the Works Progress Administration - were formulated conceptually in the heat of subsequent struggle. When America turned leftward in a time of factory occupations and liberal congressional majorities, Franklin Roosevelt had the ability to devise pragmatic yet radical measures to restore stability by extending democratic rights.

Obama has Roosevelt's gifts of oratory and pragmatism, but as yet there is little movement and no threat on the streets, only a predictable sense of personal shock when Obama needs a public storm.

Unlike Roosevelt, Obama cannot implement a traditional Keynesian public works program without an environmental underpinning, a green-jobs program which is just now being formulated. And unlike Roosevelt, Obama cannot prime the pump with more expenditures on war. Iraq alone costs $11 billion per month that could be invested in domestic priorities. The contradiction in the Obama campaign is that he generates a new historical force from below while relying on a small coterie of inside advisers at the top, individuals who are trained to believe in military intervention and market-based economics. The Obama campaign method, which has generated a superior ground game, is about mobilizing voters, not about generating policy input from the bottom up into the debates among his circle of advisers.

While Obama's 300 national-security advisers include many critics of the Iraq debacle, none would describe themselves as anti-interventionist, not to mention anti-imperialist. Nor are any of his economic advisers proposing to scrap or fundamentally revise the corporate-based protocols of the World Trade Organization or the North American Free Trade Agreement. They cautiously avoid attacking Sarah Palin on global warming and polar-bear extinction, while dropping their opposition to offshore drilling and nuclear power as too much "baggage." These counselors could be the newest version of The Best and Brightest.

Obama showed he could dissent from this Democratic orthodoxy when he stood against the Iraq war when it truly was out of fashion. He may prove willing to reconsider whether Afghanistan and Pakistan are winnable wars in any moral or strategic sense, or whether they are driven too much by the Democratic fear of looking weak. He may be forced, like Roosevelt, toward Keynesian economics with green amendments from Al Gore.

But to revise his course in a progressive direction, he will need a movement, clear and passionate, on the inside and outside, transcending the quibbling cliques that proclaim themselves national progressive organizations. He will have to allow the movement that elected him an effective, independent voice in setting the policy agenda.

The Republican fallback strategy will be to foil Obama by mobilizing an extreme countermovement against his agenda. Only a stronger social movement, empowered by rising expectations, might save his presidency from the strain of military, economic and political stalemates and deliver on the promise of real change in America. Tom Hayden is a lifelong peace and human-rights activist, former California legislator, professor and author of more than 15 books. scene@clevescene.com

Read More...

Summary only...

How Smear-Baiting Destroys the GOP

Cartoon: Faux News

McCarthyism Redux:
McCain Campaign's
Calumny Express

By Menachem Rosensaft
Huffington Post

"Those of us who shout the loudest about Americanism are all too frequently those who, by our own words and acts, ignore some of the basic principles of Americanism."

While these words seem tailor made for the divisive rhetoric of the McCain campaign, they were actually spoken more than 58 years ago on the floor of the United States Senate by Republican Senator Margaret Chase Smith from Maine in her historic repudiation of the vicious character assassinations hurled by Senator Joseph McCarthy against countless Americans. Speaking on behalf of herself and six other Republican Senators, she said that, "The American people are sick and tired of being afraid to speak their minds lest they be politically smeared as 'Communists' or 'Fascists' by their opponents."

The more popular epithets emanating from present-day Republican apparatchiks and the other flacks associated with the 2008 McCain campaign are "terrorist," "Muslim," and "anti-American," but their intent is the same as the red scare labels used so effectively by their McCarthyite role models: to depict their political adversaries generally, and Barack Obama specifically, as somehow dangerous, subversive, even evil.

The following are only a few examples:


• Sarah Palin has repeatedly - and falsely - accused Barack Obama of "palling around with terrorists." This charge is particularly reprehensible because both she and John McCain know full well that Obama only had, to use Colin Powell's description, a "very, very limited relationship" with Bill Ayers on the board of a respected Republican-funded educational foundation in Chicago, and that Obama has repeatedly referred to Ayers as "somebody who engaged in detestable acts 40 years ago, when I was 8."

• The Republican National Committee has been sending around a mailer with the image of what looks like a plane about to crash into a building and the menacing words "Terrorists - Don't Care Who They Hurt" on the cover. The inside of the mailer contains an oversized picture of Barack Obama and the words "Barack Obama. Not Who You Think He Is." When McCain was shown this brochure in Missouri earlier this week and asked if he was proud of it, he replied, "Absolutely."

• The McCain campaign and the RNC have launched a scurrilous automated telephonic robocall campaign charging "that Barack Obama has worked closely with domestic terrorist Bill Ayers, whose organization bombed the U.S. Capitol, the Pentagon, a judge's home, and killed Americans."

• Craig S. MacGlashan, the chairman of the Sacramento Republican Party in Northern California, posted a photograph of Senator Obama alongside one of Osama bin Laden on his group's website with the explanation, "The only difference between Obama and Osama is B.S." and "Waterboard Barack Obama." (This material was removed from the website after protests from Democrats and Republicans, but MacGlashan has yet to apologize or retract his unsubtle message.)

• "Who is the real Barack Obama?" McCain asked at a rally in Albuquerque, New Mexico, on October 6th. When the crowd loudly and clearly responded, "Terrorist," McCain smiled and went on with his speech. He had gotten the reaction he wanted. McCain, his campaign and the RNC keep asking the rhetorical question, "Who Is Barack Obama?" in speeches and ads as a fear mongering tactic. Every once in a while, McCain pulls back and reprimands a supporter who has gotten his message, but these are the exceptions. On the whole, McCain and Palin seem to revel in their crowds' vehemence. Sarah Palin has never, not once, reprimanded any of her fans who shout "traitor" or "kill him" when she mentions Obama's name in her stump speech.

• Sarah Palin has referred to those parts of the country that support her and John McCain as the "pro-America areas of this great nation."

• Jeffrey M. Frederick, the Chairman of the Virginia Republican Party, has likened Barack Obama to Osama bin Laden in a pep talk to campaign volunteers, explaining that "Both have friends that bombed the Pentagon. That is scary."

• Minnesota Republican Congresswoman Michelle Bachmann first told Chris Matthews on MSNBC's Hardball that she was "very concerned" that Senator Obama "may have anti-American views," and then went on to say that "I wish the American media would take a great look at the views of the people in Congress and find out: Are they pro-America or anti-America?"

• North Carolina Republican Congressman Robin Hayes from North Carolina told a crowd that "liberals hate real Americans that work and achieve and believe in God."

• Marcia Stirman, the chair of the Otero County Republican Women in New Mexico, wrote in the in the Alamogordo Daily News that "I believe Muslims are our enemies," and that "Obama isn't a messiah or a Democrat. He's a Muslim socialist."

• Republican U.S. Senator Mel Martinez from Florida denounced Obama's economic policies as "Socialism, Communism, not Americanism."

Any one of these incidents, viewed in isolation, might be dismissed as an aberration. Together, they form a disquieting, unmistakable pattern.

Most recently, we also witnessed the McCain campaign's unseemly eagerness to promote the crude hoax that a six foot four African American attacked a white female volunteer. Even John Moody, the Executive Vice President of Fox News, was uncharacteristically suspicious. "If the incident turns out to be a hoax," Moody warned when the story first came out, "Senator McCain's quest for the presidency is over, forever linked to race-baiting." Peter Feldman, the McCain campaign's Pennsylvania communications director, showed no such reticence when he urged at least two local Pittsburgh television stations, KDKA and WPXI, to feature a racially charged version of this train wreck, complete with fictional charges that the non-existent attacker had told the young woman that, "You're with the McCain campaign? I'm going to teach you a lesson," and that the backward "B" carved into her cheek supposedly stood for Barack. Much to the hapless Mr. Feldman's probable chagrin, it did not take long for the woman to confess that she had made the whole thing up, but by then, the Drudge Report and right wing radio talk show hosts had run with the sensationalist news flash.

Occasionally even the Republican trash machine realizes it has gone too far and they retreat a little. An email message from the Pennsylvania Republican Party's "Victory 2008" committee to Jewish voters in Pennsylvania that equated voting for Barack Obama with the "tragic mistake" of European Jews who "ignored the warning signs of the 1930s and 1940s" was repudiated by the state party, and the flack who had drafted the e-mail was fired because "he definitely went a little bit farther than the facts would support." Whew. We finally know the GOP's line in the sand. Comparing Obama to Osama bin Laden is ok, but summoning up Hitler is beyond the pale. Thank you so much for enlightening us.

In her 1950 Declaration of Conscience, Margaret Chase Smith said that "I don't want to see the Republican Party ride to political victory on the Four Horsemen of Calumny -- Fear, Ignorance, Bigotry and Smear." John McCain, Sarah Palin and the Republican Party have knowingly resurrected these demons with a vengeance. We must not, we cannot let them get away with it.

Menachem Rosensaft, a lawyer in New York City, is the Founding Chairman of the International Network of Children of Jewish Holocaust Survivors

Read More...

Summary only...

Get Out the Vote in a Big Way

Ten Reasons
to Vote for
Barack Obama

By Eric Mann
Los Angeles Labor Community Strategy Center
ericmannblog.blogspot.com


For those of us who are in the Civil Rights, Immigrant Rights, Women’s Liberation, Environmental Justice, and Anti-War Movements, for those of us on the Left, the election of Barack Obama is of the utmost urgency. Voting for Barack Obama is not enough. In the next two weeks we need to put all our energy into getting out the vote to elect Obama and defeat McCain.

Because of his brilliant organizing, the possibility of an Obama victory is palpable. Because of the racism of this country and the strong reactionary elements of the general population, the threat of a McCain victory is only too real.

The stakes leave no room for passive support. The Republicans coalescing against Obama are carrying out a calculated strategy to preserve and extend the victories of Reagan and Bush. If it can be imagined, they intend to take the country even further to the right. They want to destroy what is left of democratic liberalism, destroy the Civil Rights and Black Liberation movements, destroy the Immigrant Rights, Women’s Liberation, LGBT, Anti-War movements, to destroy the Left.

To his credit, unlike Al Gore and John Kerry, Barack Obama is fighting back against the Right. Whether or not he cedes too much to them, which I believe he does, his election is a direct challenge to the neo-cons, the racists, and bellicose fascists who have controlled the White House, the media, and the political discourse in this country for decades. For all of us who consider ourselves “on the Left” and “organizers,” for those of us who have a base, for those of us who are working in low-income Black, Latino, Asian/Pacific Islander communities and doing anti-racist work in white working-class communities—this is a turning point in history. We understand the stakes of a racist McCain victory only too well, and we are the ones who can be pivotal in turning the tide for Obama. It is time for the antiracist Left to show the muscle of our community organizing and put that energy into the Obama campaign for the next two weeks.

For some of us, we are already there. For others, you are needed. Obama needs and deserves our full support. As a strategist and tactician, you weigh all the arguments, all the options, but when the time comes, you must go into battle with great energy and enthusiasm. You must fight to win. Now is such a time.

We have to work for Obama’s election and fight to win. Right now the Obama campaign is calling for the most intense involvement by those of us who support his candidacy. Our job is very straightforward. The Obama campaign urgently needs us to contribute money, to phone bank, to protect the vote at ballot boxes where the Republicans will try to steal the election (that is, every ballot box), and to hit the ground in aggressive door-to-door organizing in swing states. For those of us who do not live in a swing state that means traveling to Florida, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Nevada, New Mexico, Virginia, North Carolina, Missouri, Indiana, West Virginia, Colorado and other states where the margins are still too close to call.

I am an organizer, that is what I do. In this election, reflecting my own views on the subject, I am committed to working on two major campaigns.

The Strategy Center ’s No on the Six Campaign.This is a state-wide campaign in California that opposes six reactionary ballot initiatives. We are doing citywide lawn signs, on-the-bus organizing, phone banking, and precinct walking to defeat The Six. Two initiatives, Propositions 6 and 9, would further criminalize Black and Latino youth. Two bond and sales tax proposals, Proposition 1A and Measure R in Los Angeles County , would pass regressive taxes and bonds for pork-barrel, environmentally dangerous rail and highway projects that would further attack the funding for a clean fuel bus system, the centerpiece of our environmental plan. Two propositions attack LGBT people and women. Prop 8 tries to overturn gay marriage, and Prop 4 threatens women’s reproductive rights through the onerous requirement of parental notification for minors. I work for this campaign through the Strategy Center in a broad coalition with many other progressive, grassroots groups. See www.noonthesix.org

The Obama Campaign. I am working to elect Barack Obama president of the United States . I have attended a two-day training at Camp Obama along with 350 people in Long Beach , along with thousands throughout the state and tens of thousands throughout the country at similar trainings. Many people are going from California to Nevada , a neighboring swing state with five electoral votes, to turn out the vote for Obama. I am working with the phone bank team to make phone calls to Nevada to elect Obama. I will be spending the last long weekend of this month through Tuesday, November 4 splitting my time between the No on the Six and the Obama phone bank teams.

Here Are Ten Reasons to Turn Out the Vote for Barack Obama

1) Because Barack Obama is Black and qualified, Black and liberal, Black and can be elected the first Black president in the United States.

Obama is a Black man running for president in a white settler state. Regardless of how much or little he chooses to campaign on race or against racism—and in my view it is far more than some of his critics think—Obama is Black. Everyone knows he is Black and the Republicans are making it a referendum against Blacks and for white supremacy.

The election of a Black president in a country built on conquest and slavery is almost unimaginable. And it cannot be imagined without the foundational work of Sojourner Truth and Harriet Tubman, Marcus Garvey and W.E.B. Du Bois, Fannie Lou Hamer, Martin Luther King Jr., Huey P. Newton, Malcolm X, and Rev. Jeremiah Wright; and it cannot be actualized after the election without the intervention of the Black radical and revolutionary perspective. Obama is running as a Black man at a time when one million Black people are in prison. He is Black at a time when the Black community is on the defensive and under siege, Black when many of its most gifted and dedicated organizers are tired, not discouraged, but exhausted from the assaults of the reactionary decades from Reagan to Clinton to Bush. Obama is Black as opposed to white, as in white supremacy, white racism, white chauvinism, white xenophobia, white fascism, white racist mobs, white McCain and white Palin.

Barack Obama is a Black Harvard graduate, a president of the Harvard Law Review, married to Michelle Obama, a Princeton graduate. They gave up jobs in corporate America to do work among the urban poor and working class. He is charismatic, a great debater, and a man of intellect. He is so much better qualified than John McCain that it is a testament to the racism of the U.S. that McCain is still in a close race. This is a white man who is clearly unhinged even in a prepared debate and has nothing to run on but the “Abuse of the Day” against Obama and his family.

Barack Obama is a gifted organizer who deserves the support of every dedicated organizer in the country. As a Black man in a white country, he out organized Hillary and Bill Clinton and their ostensibly unbeatable machine, a blow from which they may never recover. He is out organizing the Democratic Leadership Council, the anti-liberal caucus of Bill Clinton and Joe Lieberman that has dominated the Democratic Party since the defeat of Mondale and Dukakis. Obama has a very good chance of out organizing the entire white, Christian, conservative, aka fascist clique that has run this country since Reagan rose, Gingrich organized, Clinton capitulated, and Bush/Cheney took the dictatorship to its highest levels.

Electing a highly qualified, brilliant Black man against a Neanderthal white man is a major step forward in history and a high stakes fight that we need to be part of. It will be a major setback to the forces of white racism in the country and a real encouragement of the broad anti-racist coalition that is at the core of the Obama campaign. Let’s turn out the vote for Obama. Now.

2) Because a Black man is being attacked by a white lynch mob and we have to throw our bodies in front of them and beat them back.

The McCain/Palin campaign rallies are becoming Klan rallies. Shouts of “traitor,” “terrorist,” “treason,” “liar,” “Hussein” “kill him” and “off with his head” have rung from the rabid racists at McCain and Palin rallies. Palin whips them up and McCain sometimes doesn’t challenge them and sometimes goes through the motions, all the while praising them to the sky as “loyal Americans.” These are the very kind of people who have populated lynch mobs in the past. They are capable of carrying out their threats. What part of “off with his head” do we not understand?

If many in the Democratic Party in fact conciliate with this racism by refusing to call it by name, preferring to use the vague term “extremism,” Obama does not. At the last national debate he told McCain that some of his supporters have crossed a line by calling him a terrorist and proposing to kill him. McCain responded by saying how great and patriotic his supporters are. Do we really have to invoke King and Malcolm, Medgar Evers and Emmett Till, the Birmingham children and Bobby Hutton to understand that the assassination and lynching of Black people is deep in the DNA of white and U.S. culture and is a clear and present danger today?

John Lewis, the civil rights veteran from SNCC and now a U.S. congressperson from Atlanta saw it clearly,

“What I am seeing reminds me too much of another destructive period in American history. Senator McCain and Governor Palin are sowing the seeds of hatred and division, and there is no need for this hostility in our political discourse. George Wallace [the racist governor of Alabama ] never threw a bomb. He never fired a gun, but he created the climate and the conditions that encouraged vicious attacks against innocent Americans who were simply trying to exercise their constitutional rights. Because of this atmosphere of hate, four little girls were killed on Sunday morning when a church was bombed in Birmingham , Alabama .”

We cannot stand by while a rabid white mob attacks a Black man screaming “Hussein, Hussein,” “the one over there,” “the F-ing Harvard Graduate,” “the uppity one,” “terrorist” and—we must take this very seriously—“kill him” and “off with his head.” The McCain forces are the forces of evil and must be defeated.

McCain and Palin should be under arrest for encouraging, inciting, aiding, and abetting, racist hate crimes. Let’s turn out the Vote for Barack Obama, Now.

3) Because there are differences of life and death significance to our communities between Barack Obama and John McCain.

Obama is advocating many positions that are conservative, and some, like his proposals to expand the war in Afghanistan and violate the sovereignty of Pakistan , that are reactionary. But there is still a profound Left/Right battle going, albeit within the confines of U.S. electoral politics and the two-party system in 2008. While he does not have a comprehensive progressive program, there are some key issues on which the difference between Obama and McCain are Black and white.

Let’s look at some of the real choices Obama is making.

* Economic Crisis, Housing Crisis. Obama has supported the $750 billion bail out for U.S. financial markets. This is a major setback for working people. He is now arguing, however, that now it is time to bail out not “Wall Street” but “ Main Street .” He is calling for a 90-day moratorium on foreclosures by any bank or company that receives any U.S. government aid. Is that enough? Of course not, but he is the only candidate even talking about helping people losing their homes in the foreclosure tsunami. If such a moratorium is imposed, it can lead to far more stringent demands to extend and expand that moratorium. By contrast, McCain is talking about letting the free market run its course.

* Woman’s Right to Choose. Obama vigorously defends a woman’s right to choose. When asked in the last debate if they would make Roe v. Wade a “litmus test” in the selection of Supreme Court justices, both Obama and McCain, after considerable dancing, said yes. McCain said that he could not imagine a qualified candidate who would not want to overturn Roe v. Wade and Obama said he could not imagine a qualified candidate who would not defend a woman’s right to privacy—making abortion a right.

* Unions, Third World . McCain said free trade was great and accused Obama of holding up trade with Colombia . Colombia is governed by one of the worst military dictatorships in world, propped up by the CIA, the U.S. military, and cocaine traffickers. At this time, I do not assume Obama wants to dismantle Plan Colombia. If he does not, that will be a major post-election confrontation with him we will have to have. But Obama did say that he could not support trade with Colombia while its government was imprisoning and murdering trade unionists. This is significant. Obama has campaigned for the right to organize unions for workers in the U.S. and proposed laws to encourage those rights. While that in itself is major, there is no history I know of for a U.S. presidential candidate to openly expose the murder of trade union organizers in a country that is allied with the United States and to call for their right to organize against U.S. transnationals. In the middle of a high-profile nationally televised event, just the mention of trade unionists existing and being under attack in the Third World is a moment of rupture in the imperialist ideological sphere. By contrast, McCain is a union buster at home and a supporter of terror, torture, and the suppression of unions and the Left abroad.

* Equal Pay for Equal Work. Obama defends equal pay for equal work and McCain opposes it. In the final debate, Obama raised the example of a lawsuit filed by Lily Ledbetter, a woman who tried to sue her employer for paying her less for the same job that a male employee was getting paid more to do. Obama talked of working in Congress to extend the statute of limitations in Congress on her case so that it wouldn’t be dismissed. McCain snickered, What do we want to do, keep these cases going 20 or 30 years after the fact?

* International Relations. Obama talks about American exceptionalism, American power, and the “responsibility” of the United States throughout the world. In short, his view is imperialist and his objective is still U.S. world domination. But we should not underestimate what is at stake in his proposal for “unconditional conversations” with heads of states that the Bush administration has named in the “Axis of Evil.” Obama has held his ground on the importance of “conversations and negotiations” and has challenged the policy of sanctions and invasions. This is a clear signal to people in the Third World , and the European nations who disagree with the Bush doctrine. Under an Obama administration, there may be alternatives for people in the Third World to the decades of napalm, blockades, shock and awe, and invasions that they have suffered under Republicans and Democrats alike. Obama recognizes that the U.S. is a declining empire and is trying to signal that it can’t continue to throw its weight around in the failed policies, as he calls them, of Bush and McCain. Obama’s argument for greater use of negotiations and discussions—as well as some of his reservations about massive military deployments—is likely to reflect a tactical debate between pragmatic imperialism on his side versus neo-con messianic imperialism on that of McCain. Again, both share the imperialist goal of U.S. world domination and the control of the politics and economy of Third World nations.

But that is a split in the ruling class that is of great importance to anti-war, anti-imperialist organizers in the U.S. and to governments and movements in the Third World . Let’s be clear. McCain supports “the surge” and future unilateral military aggression. He talks always about the hard line and views the solution of every problem through a military lens. We cannot allow his unstable hand anywhere near the nuclear button.

I think that most Blacks, women, and trade unionists would argue there is a profound benefit for an Obama victory and a profound danger in a McCain election. I do not think that those who are working to overturn the right-wing clique controlling the Supreme Court that is ruling out of order every civil rights and civil liberties case will argue there is little difference between Obama and McCain. I think trade unionists in Colombia , militants and governments in Venezuela , Cuba , and South Africa , as well as those governments and NGOs who witness the daily bullying and dictatorial practices of the U.S. at the United Nations—all see a profound difference between the candidates and are deeply invested in an Obama victory and a McCain defeat.

Let’s turn out the vote for Obama, Now.

4) Because John McCain is a war criminal.

How do you think McCain ended up in a POW camp in North Vietnam in the first place? Did the North Vietnamese come to the Naval Academy to kidnap him? No, he was flying a mission over North Vietnamese territory, violating their sovereignty, dropping bombs on civilian populations in an attempt to destroy their power plants and utilities, impose terror from the air, and knowingly cause civilian illness, starvation, death and destruction.

McCain was part of a group of air pirates who flew missions of destruction over Vietnam . After already having bombed North Vietnam , as the L.A. Times reports, “In August 1967 the squadron he joined had destroyed a power plant in Hanoi . Two months later, the plant had been rebuilt and was back on the Navy’s sites. McCain begged for the mission. ‘The earlier raid was the pride and joy of the squadron. I wanted to destroy it again. I was feeling pretty cocky as well.’” He flew the mission and was shot down in his efforts to kill. He wasn’t feeling as cocky at that point. He was captured by the North Vietnamese. McCain is a war criminal for his actions; for he admits he begged for his mission and felt destroying the power plants of another country to be his “pride and joy.”

His actions stand in profound contrast to the millions of people in the U.S. who dedicated and, in some cases, gave their lives to end the war in Vietnam . He is a disgrace to the many GI’s who refused to kill civilians, to those who resisted the draft and risked exile and imprisonment, to those who joined the Vietnam Veterans Against the War and who testified in the Winter Soldier hearings (see Clay Claiborne’s film Vietnam: American Holocaust), and to the courageous veterans today who are speaking out against the war in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The actions of the United States government, the U.S. Navy, and pilots of death and destruction like McCain led to the murder of three million Vietnamese civilians and one million combatants all trying to protect their country from a U.S. invasion. McCain was part of the force that inflicted poison gas, assassination squads, napalm, Agent Orange, rape, and premeditated murder against the people of Vietnam . The U.S. systematically committed crimes against humanity in Vietnam and John McCain was a willing, enthusiastic perpetrator. John McCain should be tried for war crimes in violation of the Nuremburg statutes.

Let’s turn out the vote for Obama, Now.

5) Because Sarah Palin’s election would turn the women’s movement on its head—Palin is a fascist, a racist, a white separatist, and a misogynist.

There is nothing funny about Sarah Palin. (Tina Fey’s brilliant parodies are the exception.) But do not laugh at Palin any more than you should laugh at Bush. She is not stupid. She is deadly serious, armed and dangerous. She is tied to extreme vigilante groups who want to secede from the United States because they feel it is too liberal and too multi-racial. She uses oil revenues to buy the loyalties of people in Alaska , tying their futures to the global warming that will in fact destroy Alaska and the planet.

She and McCain will cut social services, already hanging by a thread. They will ramp up the police state and the war on terror. She has broken with John McCain by proposing a constitutional amendment against gay marriage and is moving ever further to his right. Some speculate she is doing this out of a lack of discipline. Others think she wants to position herself even more strongly with the extreme Right base in case McCain loses and she wants to pursue other national elected positions.

She has drawn the fascist mobs to the campaign and operates in the tradition of reactionary demagogues Father Coughlin and Lou Dobbs. She is the hit person against Obama, the warm-up act for McCain that gets the white mob into a racist rage. She will support a police state and will lock us up without a second thought. And the talk of her being one 72-year-old’s heartbeat away from the presidency is not a joke. She may be a future president of the United States if we don’t defeat McCain.

Governor Palin believes a woman who chooses to have an abortion is a sinner, period. She believes that such is the case even if the woman chooses to terminate a pregnancy forced on her through rape or incest. She is an enemy of the movement for reproductive rights. Her message to desperate, working class women is that being a loyal wife is a woman’s best chance for escaping poverty, your subjugation is liberation. She appeals to misogynist men and assures them that their domination of the family is God’s will. While she has been able to get out of the house with five children to pursue a professional career, her gender politics will prevent most women from doing the same—locking women in the home as single parents or prisoners of their husbands—as she leads choruses of “Stand by Your Man.” Her election will be an attack of Roe v. Wade, women’s reproductive rights, and women’s liberation.

Let’s turn out the vote for Barack Obama, Now.

6) Because the McCain campaign is an attack on the Left.

The McCain campaign wants to kill the Left in the U.S. and internationally, kill social security, the social safety net, and anything “social” including even the hope of social-ism. Obama is being attacked as an enemy because he is Black and because he is a moderate liberal. The attack on the Left broadly defined must be met by a counter-attack against McCain and for Obama in the last two weeks of this campaign.

Look at McCain’s targets:

* William Ayers, billed a “terrorist” by the McCain camp, worked against the war in Vietnam in which four million people were killed. Ayers is a symbol of the anti-war movement and its most militant wing.

* Reverend Wright. Reverend Wright is a respected theologian whose “crime” was saying that racism is “endemic” to the United States and that the U.S. sees the world through the eyes of an empire.

* ACORN is being attacked by the McCain campaign for registering Democratic-leaning voters. ACORN may have gotten some bad names in the voter registration process but none of those people could vote or be counted. By contrast, the Republicans prevent people from voting who are registered to vote, deny valid signatures and voters, and close down polling places in Black and heavily Democratic districts. They defy the electoral process and have stolen state and national elections.

* Socialism. McCain has begun attacking as “socialist” Obama’s efforts to make income taxes more progressive and to use some of the wealth to help the poor. McCain said, “At least in Europe the Socialist leaders who so admire my opponent are upfront about their objectives. They use real numbers and honest language.” McCain proposes cutting capital gains taxes and giving more subsidies to the rich.

Obama’s ties to Ayers were minimal and nothing to apologize for. His ties to Reverend Wright were profound and his disassociation from his mentor deplorable. Obama’s distancing himself from ACORN reflects weakness. But, as Reverend Wright pointed out, Obama is a politician running for office; he makes his tactical moves according to his strategic aim of getting elected. I wish that Obama would defend socialism but he is not a socialist and if he were, he would not be the Democratic nominee for president.

Whether or not Obama chooses to disassociate, denounce, or distance himself from the anti-Vietnam war movement, from the rhetoric and analyses of the Civil Rights and Black Liberation Movements, from grassroots voter registration, and from socialism—those of us on the Left have our own interests in this election that include but also go beyond Obama’s objectives.

Whether Obama chooses to identify with or to renounce these connections, we on the Left need to grasp that these attacks from McCain are against us, not just Obama. If McCain is elected, what do we think he will do to those of us who fought against the war in Vietnam and are fighting to end the U.S. occupation of Iraq ? What will he do to those who will continue to speak and act against the endemic racism of the United States , or to those of us who would study and advocate socialist alternatives to capitalism? I fear for those on the Left who do not see the writing on the wall.

Let’s turn out the vote for Barack Obama, Now.

7) Because an Obama victory will be a defeat for the Clintons .

Hillary and Bill Clinton have been treacherous opponents of Obama. They are threatened by his possible victory and are doing very little to help him. At a white tie dinner John McCain told a great joke. He brought down the house when he observed, "Even in this room full of proud Manhattan Democrats, I can't shake that feeling that some people here are pulling for me. I'm delighted to see you here tonight, Hillary!" Obama understood only too well the truth of that statement.

The Clinton ’s opened up the floodgates of racism against Obama during the Democratic primaries. I made the argument then that Hillary Clinton was forming a white bloc with John McCain to defeat Barack Obama. I wrote an article that documented this in great detail: Hillary and John: The White Bloc That Must Be Stopped.

Throughout Hillary’s campaign she argued that only she and McCain were qualified to be president and Obama was not. She ran that ridiculous ad campaign, “Who do you want to answer the phone at 3 in the morning?” She told the press that she and John McCain had the standing to be commander and chief and Obama did not. As she realized her dreams of victory were slipping away, her campaign reached its moral nadir. She told voters in Pennsylvania , West Virginia , and throughout the country that she did not think that “working, hard-working Americans, white Americans” would vote for Obama. Hillary and Bill Clinton have opened up the door for the racism of the McCain/Palin campaign, aiding and abetting their “dear friend” John McCain.

Hillary also made continued false claims that Obama was not supportive of women (meaning her). Only when it was absolutely clear she was losing did she come out as a born-again feminist, a white feminist, attacking Obama. In so doing she set the conditions for “her friend” John McCain to pick Sarah Palin to mine the anti-Obama sentiment Hillary had agitated among Democratic white women voters. Fortunately, Obama is winning more and more women voters. Needless to say these women include the Black, Latino, Asian/Pacific Islander, and Indigenous women among whom he is also polling strongly. Women recognize how important is his defense of choice and his support for equal pay, and they are impressed with the way he relates to the women in his life, a strong Black partner and his daughters.

The Clinton ’s, when they were in office, brought us the end of welfare, the Anti-Terrorism Act, the Effective Death Penalty Act, and the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act. They typify cynicism and opportunism. Hillary has demanded the vice-presidency and now has demanded an appointment to the Supreme Court as the price of her jaded support. Obama has refused.

When Bill Clinton was on David Letterman, Chris Rock was also a guest. During Clinton ’s interview with Letterman he barely could say anything good about Obama and kept referring to McCain as “my friend” and “a war hero.” After Clinton left, Rock went off on him, “Is it me or does Clinton have a problem saying the name Barack Obama? He doesn’t get it, he keeps talking about Hillary. Hillary lost! Hillary lost. It wasn’t sexism. She ran against a Black guy nobody ever heard of and he beat her. She lost.”

If Obama wins in spite of the Clintons ’ treachery it will strengthen his hand against the Democratic Leadership Council that they control—the hard core of conservative center-right Democrats. It is good to see Hillary Clinton campaigning for Obama. She has no other choice. She too fears eight years of a McCain/Palin ticket and fears her own isolation in the Democratic Party. The Clintons are a Trojan Horse inside the Obama campaign. But Obama is beating the Clintons, Yes He Can. An Obama victory would weaken the Clinton oligarchy.

Let’s turn out the vote for Barack Obama, Now.

8) A victory for Barack Obama will usher in a revolution of rising expectations.

If Obama is elected he will do so with the support of 95% of the Black vote and the highest Black vote in U.S. history, along with enormous numbers of white, Latino, Asian, and Indigenous peoples. He will attract a very large and energetic white vote with a strong anti-racist orientation. He will win over the majority of young people who are more influenced by the victories of the Civil Rights Movement than the crimes of the Klan and the White Citizens Councils.

Listen to how in every talk, besides his recitation of the obligatory “the American people” a dozen times, he goes out of his way to say, “My election is for everybody. The red states and blue, for the middle class, for Blacks, whites, Latinos, Asian/Pacific Islander, and Indigenous peoples.” The mentioning of specific oppressed nationality peoples and cultures is in itself a major breakthrough in the public discourse of race in the country. Notice that the Republicans and most Democrats will never acknowledge that those communities even exist because to do so creates a momentary awareness that whiteness is not the norm, that whites are not the boss. It also creates support for group-specific demand development among oppressed nationality peoples.

After an Obama election the entire field of “community organizing” will get a major boost. I was there when Kennedy was elected and Johnson beat Goldwater. Those elections raised hopes that helped the Civil Rights Movement and the New Left and later the Black Liberation, Women’s, LGBT, and Environmental Justice Movements. Obama will have to decide, after he is elected, what policies he wants to carry out. If he betrays his best promises or carries out his worst, I believe he will receive significant organized opposition with demands that he change his policies.

I was also there when John F. Kennedy moved to invade Cuba at the Bay of Pigs and tried to assassinate Castro. I was there when Lyndon B. Johnson initiated and then tried to disband the poverty programs, when Johnson escalated a genocidal war in Vietnam . These actions by Kennedy and Johnson led to more protests, not less. They led to the emergence of some very principled left liberal Democrats, and the radicalization of many formerly Democratic liberal students who came to see that more radical, structural, revolutionary change was needed.

I hope that Barack Obama understands that the U.S. is a declining superpower in a multi-polar world. I think he knows full well the economic crisis facing U.S. and world imperialism. I think he may propose a less bellicose and a less aggressive foreign policy if only to protect the system itself. Regardless, my argument is not that we work to elect Obama based on an ability to predict all of his actions or choices.

I think every successful organizer has to have an independent program and an independent grassroots base. I am part of the Labor/Community Strategy Center, and the Bus Riders Union. I work in alliance with thousands of grassroots groups reflected, in one instance, by the 12,000 social movement organizers who attended the first U.S. Social Forum in Atlanta in 2007.

I hope that Obama, as a former community organizer, will understand pressure from his left. Even if he does not always respond to our specific demands, it will be the job of the movements to assess his response and figure out our best tactics to win our demands.

I hope that we can make sure that Obama respects the civil rights and civil liberties of protestors and reigns in the campaign of terror against protestors by local police, the National Guard, and the U.S. military. An Obama administration cannot sanction the level of brutality and repression against demonstrators that the Bush police state has perfected. Under pressure from the Left, I believe he could expand civil rights and civil liberties and expand the rights of protest and demonstration, which in turn would help the movement further. Can I guarantee that? Of course not, but I do believe that the entire climate for anti-racist, anti-poverty, environmental justice, immigrant rights, anti-police state, anti-war organizing will be radically improved by an Obama victory.

Let’s turn out the vote for Barack Obama, Now.

9) Because I have faith in the Obama supporters, faith in the Black community, faith in the grassroots Left.

Obama supporters

I spent a weekend at a Camp Obama training program in Long Beach and have since been going to phone bank at the local Obama headquarters. They are a wide variety of folk coming from many different points on the political spectrum. They are decent, hard working, motivated, and wonderful people. There is a movement atmosphere among the group. I was deeply moved by the 350 of us who came to the Obama training. We worked together from 9:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. Saturday and Sunday in a very intensive organizer training program. On every break I asked people, What is the most important thing about an Obama victory for you? I was surprised by the number and diversity of answers. “Because he is so intelligent. I am sick of having a stupid president.” “He is the most ethical, the most humane.” “He will defeat Karl Rove.” “He is the most qualified Black man.” “Because he will help me not be ashamed to be an American.” “Because I was involved in the Civil Rights Movement and had lost hope. This brings me from ‘We Shall Overcome’ to ‘Yes We Can.’” “Because I want my children to see we can elect a Black president.”

Of the 350 people who attended, 100 were Black, 15 were Asian/Pacific Islander, 15 were Latino, and more than 200 were white. This election is drawing a line of demarcation among white people that is very profound—a civil war within a larger civil war, the anti-racist whites versus the racist whites. Just as in the Civil Rights Movement, a large anti-racist white bloc is consolidating itself as a critical ally of communities of color. Remember, these are white folk voting for a Black man for president of the United States . We should not underestimate the good intentions and high levels of activism and sacrifice of the Obama camp and their critical role in history in the years ahead.

The Black community

The Black community is driven like nothing I have seen since the March on Washington , the fight against segregation in the South, the fight against racism and police brutality in the North. The Obama Campaign has a mass character to it that is unprecedented in U.S. politics, having sprung from the traditions of Black protest, Black rebellion and Black organizing. In the past months I have spoken with many Black members of the Obama Campaign and the Bus Riders Union. Having grown up in Jim Crow segregation, many say how hard it is to believe that Black people could come from slavery to the possibility of electing the first Black president of the United States . While that makes them very hopeful, in the same sentence they also talk of wanting it so badly they cannot acknowledge it. They do not want to get their hopes up and let the white racist voters crush them. They fear something bad happening to Obama. They fear the white backlash and fear another set of hopes dashed against the rocks of racism by this country. They are working with all their heart and soul for Obama but do not want to acknowledge how much this election means to them because, if he loses, they don’t know if they can bear the pain.

There is no community stronger and tougher than the Black community. It has suffered more pain in America than at times is humanly imaginable. Today more than a million Black men are in prison and millions more are being hunted down by the police as we speak. And yet, the Black community has a power and resilience that is legendary, a long history of leading the anti-racist and Left movements in this country. Its capacity to recover and fight back is admired by friend and foe alike. Still, we cannot let a McCain victory happen, we just cannot. An Obama victory will raise the spirits and fighting capacity of the Black community.

There are some who worry that Obama will co-opt the Black community. They think that Black people who are against the growing police state or the occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan will look the other way if those policies are carried out by Obama. Some have expressed a fear that Black people will protect and defend Obama in a way that brooks no criticism, giving him a free pass at a time of crisis. But while that is possible, it would contradict everything I have seen in 40 years of organizing. My experience says that it all depends on how you organize and how well you grasp and assert your own independence and initiative in the united front.

I have been in social movements that helped elect and then challenge mayor of Newark Kenneth Gibson, and Los Angeles mayors Tom Bradley and Antonio Villaraigosa. Obama is a brilliant organizer, a brilliant politician. He has his own program, his own priorities, and he will fight to win support for them. Cooptation is not the most helpful concept, taking the focus off our own role. Obama will do what he has to do. It is for those of us who are organizing in low-income communities of color, those of us who consider ourselves good strategists, good tacticians and organizers—it is for those of us who have a grassroots base to drive our own programs, our own demands, and to develop the tactical plans to win those demands.

After the election, in just two weeks, thousands of grassroots groups that have been working on life and death issues for decades will be in the much stronger position of being able to place their demands on a more receptive Obama presidency. As just a few key examples of structural demands we must raise:

* Dramatically cut the $400-billion military budget. Massively expand social services and direct transfers of money to the unemployed, the poor, and those facing foreclosures and evictions.
* Release the vast majority of the one million Black and 500,000 Latino prisoners incarcerated in the U.S. gulag. Provide humane treatment for those who remain, including plans for parole and rehabilitation.
* Remove all combat and occupation forces from Iraq and provide support for the self-determination of the Iraqi people. End the U.S. occupation of Afghanistan . End the military threats against Iran , and Pakistan .
* Provide free, safe, and legal abortions for women. Do not impose parental notification. Provide U.S. funds for birth control and sex education in the U.S. and Third World .
* Pass a new provision of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, strengthening Title VI, that will allow grassroots parties to sue government agencies over racial discrimination and to block federal funding to racially discriminatory projects based on disparate racial impacts.
* Stop the environmental disaster of “clean coal” ethanol and nuclear power. Dramatically expand clean fuel bus transportation and dramatically restrict the auto.
* Stop the ICE raids and surveillance on the 12 million immigrants in the U.S. Offer them amnesty. Take down the wall with Mexico .
* End the blockade of Cuba and stop U.S. subversion of the Venezuelan revolution.
* Support self-determination for the Palestinian people and protect their right to a viable homeland.

Those of us who see ourselves in a united front alliance with Obama and with his millions of supporters should carry out a policy of simultaneous alliance and challenge, defending his candidacy and challenging some of its key policies. The Right is like a pack of attack dogs. They will not stop even after Obama is elected. If they lose the election, they will begin attacking the Obamas the day they take office. They will try to subvert his presidency at every turn. We want to build an alliance with Obama against the Right, a united front against racism and fascism that never loses sight of our unities with him and with our stand against the barbarians at the gate. At the same time, we want to build stronger grassroots movements to his left that can carry out their own independent programs and tactical plans. For grassroots organizers we are working with millions of other Obama supporters who can be won to a broader progressive and Left agenda in the process of fighting for an Obama presidency. We need organizers who do not sit on the sidelines of history but see their participation in this historical battle as a major development that can expand the chances for more radical and revolutionary changes in U.S. society.

Let us be able to rejoice in an Obama victory and then face the inevitable challenges together. I am convinced that many of the people who are working so hard for Obama—who are making millions of phone calls, contributing their money, and going door to door for his election—will expect the most of him. They will not go quietly into the night if he betrays their trust. Obama has argued to his supporters that he expects us to keep up the organizing to keep him on track, that the role of those who work to elect him will be to organize to push him once he is elected. There are millions of people working their heart out for his election who will be there to take him up on his post-election offer.

Let’s turn out the vote for Barack Obama, Now.

10) Because it’s time to act. Here is what you can do.

There are at least four major ways you can take positive action in the next two weeks to elect Obama and defeat McCain:

* Contribute funds to the Obama Campaign. Over three million people have donated already. Obama raised $150 million in September from 632,000 people, an average of $86 per contribution. My wife Lian and I have contributed to his campaign and plan to do so again in the next few days. Whether you give $25, $50 or $100, consider that another 600,000 people will be doing the same. If we each do this, we can raise another $150 million in the next two weeks to elect Obama and defeat McCain. Last minute ads to counter last minute attack ads from McCain are needed and funds are essential. Every McCain ad is an ad against liberals, against the Left, against Black civil rights leaders, against socialism, against any progressive future.

* If you are in a swing state, plug into the Obama Campaign now. For the next two weeks, get involved with phone banking and precinct walking. On the weekends before the election and on Election Day, volunteer with Get Out The Vote (GOTV) operations.

* If you are not in a swing state, phone bank into swing states with your local branch of the Obama Campaign. Also consider volunteering to travel to your nearest swing state the last weekends before the election or whenever you can to go door to door turning out voters. The more experience you have, the better, but the Obama campaign is good at plugging you in.

* Become a poll worker. There are millions of people who will vote for the first time or vote after years of absence. The polls will be jammed. The Republicans will commit any crime under the books to deter voters in Democratic districts and Black voters in particular. We need election protection. People who have signed up as poll workers in L.A. are already saying that South L.A. and East L.A. are under-staffed. We can assume that communities of color will need special attention and that this is a critical job.

There is work to be done, and it is great to be an organizer, not a bystander. Obama is making history and so should we. It our job to be part of this historic movement and to come home with a victory in hand.

* * * *

A respectful acknowledgment of the historic presidential campaign of Congressperson Cynthia McKinney.

The candidate with whose views I most agree is former Congressperson Cynthia McKinney, a dynamic Black woman running on the Green Party ticket. I know many people of good faith and good politics who are working for her. I encourage them to carry out their plan to its fullest and wish her campaign the greatest success. She should be encouraged for what she is doing. At this point this is not the choice I am making in my own tactical assessment of the best way to confront racism and empire. When the election is over, whether Obama is elected or McCain, we all have to work together in a broad united front against the war in Iraq and racism at home. Any tactical disagreements on this election, no matter how profound, should not divide us in our broader long-term objectives. At the end of the day, we are sisters and brothers in the struggle.

[This article was written to encourage strategic and tactical discussions about the election. The author strongly encourages comments to be posted here at ericmannblog.blogspot.com ]

Read More...

Summary only...