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Obama's Big Week Reveals A "Privileged" Response

President Barack Obama gives his State of the Union address to a joint session of Congress in the House Chamber

 of the U.S. Capitol, Jan. 27, 2010. (Official White House Photo by Chuck Kennedy)


Les Payne

February 4, 2009

       

Staring down Conservatives of both branches of government last week, President Obama confronted the steel teeth of powerful forces that, at bottom, consider him something of a squatter in the Oval Office that for 232 years had been reserved for white men only.

        

The Republicans at that House Caucus retreat in Baltimore, and the Supreme Court on the front row at the State of the Union Address gazed upon the first black president as if he had destabilized the group’s psyche about their entitlements. Obama’s ensuing call for a bi-partisan approach to solving the catastrophic problems facing the nation fell on the icy wasteland that is the heart of this brazen opposition.

       

It should be clear even to President Obama by now that this entrenched, government opposition—who know they’re backed by the 55-percent, white McCain-Palin majority that voted against him—will settle for nothing less than the kow-tow, or failing that, denying Obama re-election in hopes of reclaiming what they misguidedly consider their entitlement by dint of birthright.

       

This Black History Month calls for a frank assessment not simply of the challenges the first African-American president faces, but also an examination of the larger possibilities for those who dared elect him. Can they create a true Omni-America where for the first time democracy can be made to ensure “liberty and justice for all?”

       

There is a strong tendency to deny race as a key factor in such high matters of government; however...

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Reflections on President Barack Obama's First Year In Office

                                                                                                                                                                    Public Domain/Whitehouse.gov

Les Payne

January 22, 2010

 

A year to the day after President Obama was sworn in on that Lincoln Bible, the GOP elected Scott Brown in Massachusetts to step up its campaign, as G. K. Chesterton once said of Conservatives, to prevent mistakes from being corrected.

      

As Republicans over-hype their Brown decision, the filibuster-proof-breaking, 41st GOP senator has dimmed the hopes of Democrats counting on the clout of a 60-vote majority to correct such disasters of the Bush years as health care. Politics these days, save under dictatorships and in New York City, depends not on the bellow of the “strong man” but the grating interplay of opposing forces duly elected.

       

Thus, despite Americans’ support for health reform and even the “public option,” the minority GOP is hell-bent on obstructing change and freezing the status quo. And their hearts are gladdened this week by the D.C. arrival of the nude, male model from the Bay State.

       

This lone cock-robin from Massachusetts is said to bring not only spring but also summer and fall. No sooner had Brown’s lame opponent conceded prematurely in Boston, for example, than a few observers were concluding that, some 365 days into his first term, President Obama is a “lame Duck.”

      

The Democrats have lost their super-edge in the Senate, period. They have not lost their majority—and if their tactical skills hold, they likely will not lose the mid-term elections. All of this, of course, will be misread by the media as they impress their bosses and tilt public opinion to the delight of the Rush-McCain-Palin wing of the GOP.

     

Flapping his short arms like a bull penguin, Sen. McCain hasn’t been this exuberant since...

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Celebrating The Legacy of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.


January 17, 2010

 

Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Les Payne delivered a speech titled: "Civil Rights

and Politics: The Legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr." at UJA-Federation’s

headquarters in New York on January 14th to honor and remember Rev. Dr. Martin

Luther King Jr.

 

Payne, who grew up in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, offered that his speech was a personal

testimony about Dr. King’s tremendous effect on American politics. He spoke about

racist laws before Dr. King’s time, especially in the South, that made the lives of so many

African-Americans a “nightmare.” Payne recounted those laws that existed into the 1960s

dealing with public facilities, marriage, and cemeteries, adding, “From diapers to

shrouds, life was unequal.”

 

Payne — a reporter, editor, and columnist at Newsday for more than 40 years and a

longtime mentor of African-American journalists around the country — wondered what

Dr. King might think of this world were he alive in 2010 at age 82. “Still two years

younger than [former New York City mayor] David Dinkins, five years younger than

former mayor Koch,” and 32 years older than President Barack Obama — whose Nobel

Peace Prize, Payne says, Dr. King made possible.

 

Obama marks another step in fulfilling what Dr. King set in motion, Payne said. But as

he added, “It remains to be seen if we have made Dr. King proud.”

- as posted by UJA Federation of New York's website on January 15, 2010.

 

Lets go to the audio tape....

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When Race Becomes Real


Near midnight eastern time, Thursday, Oct. 29, 2008. Kissimmee, Fl. Bill Clinton introduces Barack Obama at a late night rally. (photo by Lynn Sweet)

 

Les Payne

January 12, 2010

 

It is Bill Clinton, not Sen. Harry Reid, who comes off as the poster child for the nasty-mouth “white boy” attacking the racial fitness of the black presidential candidate. The new book “Game Change,” examines the maneuverings of both men on the ’08 campaign trail.  

      

Major media, not surprisingly, choose to trail the GOP’s false pursuit of the Senate Majority Leader, comparing Reid’s favorable comments about candidate Barack Obama to Trent Lott’s segregationist vitriol from Mississippi of a century ago. News coverage can get down-right wacky when touching on race matters.

       

After the GOP strapped Sen. Reid to a chair, the media proceeded to pistol-whip an apology out of the wrong suspect, and for the wrong reason. Curiously, even the black commentators trotted out to testify dared not follow up on media critic Richard Prince’s early posting of Clinton’s trashy white dismissal of candidate Obama.

     

Praising Obama as a winnable candidate, Sen. Reid scored his acceptability by whites as owing to his lack of a “Negro dialect” and a dark register on the skin-tone palette. Try though I may, and I’m no novice at this; I cannot detect a violation here save for Reid’s bad manners in referring to African-Americans by the once-favored noun--never pejorative--that they no longer answer to. 

     

As for the “Negro dialect,” one need only tune in the popular Steve Harvey radio show for a dose of this retrograde, aural trauma. What surprises is not that it’s not spoken by a Harvard-trained, presidential candidate, but rather that comedian Harvey is not brought up on charges for his daily mocking of the brethren in this obscene manner.

     

As for the acceptability of Obama’s skin tone, Reid’s assessment is a fair reach for the judgment of his white compatriots. [Incidentally, what African-Americans make of such skin-tone shading is quite beside the point here.]

      

The more urgent case against Bill Clinton, as addressed in “Game Change,” smacks of a felony and cries for a grand jury.

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Is Harlem No Longer Black?

It depends on where you set the boundaries.

                                                                                                                                                            Getty Images

By Les Payne

January 8, 2010

 

The Negro invasion must be vigilantly fought, fought until it is permanently checked, or the invaders will slowly but surely drive the whites out of Harlem.

 

Harlem Home News, July 1911

 

Along the boulevards of Harlem these days, hands are wringing over the shifting demographics of the two races that still matter in this republic.  

 

“No Longer Majority Black; Harlem is in Transition” teased the headline from the New York Times. A profound and accelerating shift has gripped the neighborhood that for nearly a century has been synonymous with black urban America. The hometown paper then conceded, without apology, that this reported loss of Harlem’s black majority trumpeted in Tuesday paper actually occurred a decade ago, but was largely overlooked.

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Media Brands Tiger With Scarlet "A"



Les Payne

December 17, 2009

    

That scarlet “A” on Tiger Wood’s chest was imprinted there by a media unforgiving of his adultery against the alabaster Swedish au pair the golfer dared take as his wife. These Puritans are determined also to remove the swoosh of endorsements from Woods’ cap and golf gear and have him walk the greens for the rest of his life in sackcloth.

     

Like Hester Prynne, of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “Scarlet Letter,” the condemned Tiger Woods must now walk to the scaffold of the pillory and face the judgment of the community, either on the shoulders of Oprah, or under the scold of Steve Kroft.

      

The 17th Century crime of Tiger Woods’, as noted on the web of pillory, has been clocked as serial and in double figures.

        

Such patterns unfortunately are not unknown among entertainers these days when backpedaling superstars routinely catch scores of willing groupies overnight. This normalization of Puritan misbehavior among film, music and sports celebrities appears to have caught unaware a media far gone in the peck and sniff.  

       

Unfolding 24/7 since Thanksgiving, the volume and breathlessness of the news coverage, so-called, presents Woods as the poster child of...

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Nobel Chairman makes the best case for Obama


Barack H. Obama delivered his Nobel Lecture on 10 December 2009 at the Oslo City Hall, Norway. He was introduced by Thorbjørn Jagland,

Chairman of the Norwegian Nobel Committee.  Credits: Norsk Rikskringkasting AS (production)  --   Copyright Nobel Media AB 2009

                                                              

Les Payne

December 13, 2009

 

   

The best Nobel speech out of Oslo Thursday, and the least ironic, was delivered not by President Obama but by the Norwegian Committee chairman who introduced him.

    

Not only did Thorbjoern Jagland make a better case for awarding Obama the Prize, he also struck the clearer note for peace. And it was peace in the Nobel Prize tradition, bracketing the easing of both the nuclear threat abroad and human rights abuse at home. Jagland’s clarion call went unheralded by those who remain tone deaf to race and hot-wired chiefly for noise.

     

Professor Obama, however, did not sleep through the chairman’s sharp lecture. “I thought it was an excellent speech,” the U.S. President said at the banquet later. “I was almost convinced that I deserved [the Peace Prize].”

    

For his part, Obama opened his Nobel acceptance speech with apologies to previous winners, then turned hard-eyed intellectual to dress his Afghanistan efforts in the cloak of a “just war,” a cloak that simply does not fit his belated troop escalation.

     

“Compared to some of the giants of history who’ve received this prize—Schweitzer and King; Marshall and Mandela.” he said, “my accomplishments are slight…I cannot argue with those who find these man and women…to be far more deserving of this honor than me.”

        

And then, almost as if winking at the Academy to say, no thanks but thanks, suckers, Obama conducted a clinic, and a brilliant one, on how...

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Thoughts On The Troop Escalation In Afghanistan

President Obama outlines his strategy on Afghanistan and Pakistan from the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, N.Y.

December 1, 2009 (Public Domain).

 

Les Payne

December 8, 2009

    

While the military build-up in Afghanistan might reassure those who feared that the Nobel Prize would nudge President Obama toward peace, his hawkish move reveals a troubling unwillingness to cut the Gordian knot of war tied by his predecessor.

        

It has been duly noted that Henry Kissinger won his ’73 Nobel Prize after killing a lot of people during the Vietnam escalation, then suddenly stopping the slaughter; Obama has reversed the order. The Norwegian Committee awarded him the Peace Prize before the Chief Executive escalated the Afghanistan War to kill a lot of people.

       

There was nothing one-dimensional about Obama’s West Point speech in which the president who was elected to shut down the primary war in Iraq choose instead to escalate the secondary one in Afghanistan.

         

Nothing is ever straightforward about this politico-professor-tactician, whose discourse, and increasingly his policy, is distinguished by an uncanny knack for giving something to everyone even as he takes something away.

       

As an African-American—it must be said—President Obama draws attention even when peppering his speeches with patriotic phrases uttered routinely by the 43 chief executives preceding him; much of this rhetoric is patriotic folklore and palpably untrue.

     

“We have not sought world domination,” the U.S. president said without a snicker. “We do not seek to occupy other nations. We will not claim another nation's resources or target other peoples because their faith or ethnicity is different from ours.” Somehow, you’d expect this son of Africa to gag on such hooey.

       

Yet, in the midst of this geopolitical whitewash, Obama repeated a domestic myth that

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NY Post Discrimination Suit Recalls 22-Year Old Landmark Case

The Daily News 4 – Dave Hardy, Steve Duncan, Joan Shepard and Causewell Vaughan – wins landmark jury verdict against the New York

Daily News newspaper on April 15, 1987. The four had challenged management regarding the dearth of black journalists being promoted

into significant newsroom roles and beats. (Black Enterprise, July 1987 - p.15)

 

Les Payne

November 29, 2009    

 

The discrimination suit recently filed against the New York Post recalls the excesses in the city-room of that other Big Apple tabloid that was convicted of racism some 22 years ago.

     

Sandra Guzman, the former editor of the discontinued Spanish language section of the Post, charges that, among other reasons, she was fired for objecting to the paper’s infamous “Chimpanzee cartoon” that many considered a racist—and dangerously provocative--depiction of President Obama. Her 34-page brief against sexism at the Post speaks of a city-room rife with locker-room language and bar-room behavior of the type that enlivened the courtroom in the trial that pitted Dave Hardy against the News and in the 1980’s.   

     

The New York Daily stands as the only major American newspaper convicted of racism in a court of law. The tabloid earned this distinction not as the lone practitioner of white-job reservation but rather because it was the only race-drunk newspaper arrogant enough to submit to a breathalyzer by a jury at trial.

    

African-Americans sued other major publications; including the New York Times and Newsweek, but these violators cunningly settled out of court.

    

When David Hardy challenged the promotion policy of the News, its Chicago-based Tribune owners sought to crush the reporter and his three co-plaintiffs. Indeed, Tribune organized top executives from other papers (Thomas Winship, of the Boston Globe and Benjamin Bradlee, of the Washington Post, etc.) effectively to threaten all black journalists who would dare consider themselves entitled to promotions commensurate with comparable, white reporters and editors advancing up the ladder.

      

It was a pitched, courtroom battle between David and Goliath.

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Thoughts On President Obama's Trip To China

Chinese President Hu Jintao and U.S. President Barack Obama (Xinhua Photo)

 

Les Payne

November 14, 2009

     

When the two “most powerful people in the world” sit down in Beijing Sunday they will not likely elaborate on the coincidence that neither of the leaders of the two reigning economic superpowers on earth is a white male.

      

President Obama and China’s Hu Jintao have been ranked one-two on the power scale by Forbes magazine after surveying the other 6.2 billion humans on the planet. After disqualifying the rest of us, Forbes settled on Obama and Hu based on; their influence over other people; control of large financial resources; and their active use of power in multiple spheres.

     

Much has been made of Obama’s historic ascendancy, and the experts predict that the on-rushing China juggernaut threatens to overtake the U.S. as the economic superpower—thanks chiefly to the ladling away of U.S. jobs and capital by presidents running from Reagan to George W. Bush; all these leaders happened to have been white.

     

Were it left  solely  to the majority of  their ethnic group last year, a President John McCain  would have continued driving the republic down the rabbit hole. And, if someone had dared put a pistol to McCain's head, this former POW whose behavior was modified by his North Vietnamese captors would likely reap vengeance from the Asians at his sit-down with President Hu. Instead, Obama will register another historic moment  in China, one likely to slip  past the  near-sighted media.     

  

The moment has not, however...

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Now City Must Pay For Bloomberg's Third Term

Facade of the Bloomberg Tower                                                                                                                                                       Honda/Getty 

 

Les Payne

November 6, 2009

         

Winning City Hall by a narrower, 50.6 percent margin than predicted, Mayor Bloomberg may add New York voters to his hit list of people he’s not beholding to as worthy contributors to his victory.

           

The ends for the billionaire politician were achieved by means of his vast fortune which allowed him to slip past inattentive voters whose will he circumvented by running for a third term. The light turnout will prove costly to working- and middle-class residents already heavily targeted with nuisance fees that are continuing to render Bloomberg’s beloved Manhattan unaffordable for all but the truly wealthy.

          

After spending some $90M of his personal finances—roughly $150 for each of his 560,000-odd votes—Bloomberg may simply call it even and refuse to deliver on what trivial promises he did make during the campaign.

          

The expected 12-point victory the Quinnipiac survey indicated on Election Day was nearly destroyed by voters dissatisfied with Bloomberg buying his way around the term limits they thought they had imposed and verified in two separate referendums.

           

Voter anger over the mayor’s maneuver with the rubber-stamp City Council, however, did not move them to the polls in numbers sufficient to unseat him.

           

Now, unlike Bloomberg--who treats democracy as a mere nuisance to be circumvented when the vote doesn’t suit him—New Yorkers must live with the consequence of....

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Democracy Is Not 'An Obstacle To Be Circumvented'


  Mayor Michael Bloomberg - Salon.com                              Former Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, right, and former New York City Police

                                                                                             Chief Bernard Kerik at a news conference in Port of Spain, Trinidad.

                                                                                             Nov. 8, 2003 - Shirley Bahadur / AP

Les Payne

October 23, 2009

 

As Rudolph Giuliani trades his endorsement of Mike Bloomberg for the mayor’s tacit endorsement of him for New York governor, Giuliani’s most favored law enforcement official sits in jail as the first ex-police commissioner of the City to be locked up as a law-breaker

 

So it goes for Giuliani the crime fighter. And if his co-endorser sneaks under the democracy radar of the voters come Nov. 3, Mayor Bloomberg will have managed to nudge New York City another step closer to authoritarian rule. His very campaign for mayor overrides the will of the voters who twice went to the polls and limited his tenure to two terms.

 

Removing all doubt about his singular focus on personal interests above all else, Bloomberg declared during a recent debate that Giuliani would make a good governor. Oh really?

 

After the attack of 9/11, this Giuliani attempted to extend his stay in office unlawfully, by fiat apparently—a move that would have delayed the newly-elected Bloomberg from being seated in ’01. Already Mayor Giuliani had imposed the troubled Bernard Kerik upon the City, first naming the high-school dropout (who acquired a GED diploma) as head of the Department of Corrections, and then as police commissioner.  

 

Until Tuesday, Kerik walked the street on bail pending trial on a 15-count indictment for conspiracy and tax fraud, including failing to report $500,000 in income between 1999 and 2004.     

 

Attempting to garner sympathy and raise funds, Kerik allegedly ignored repeated warnings not to leak court-sealed information to associates. A fed-up Judge Stephen C. Robinson had Giuliani’s former top cop and chief warden thrown into the hoosegow. 

 

When revoking his $500,000 bail, the federal judge blasted Kerik in terms that, short of the specific criminal acts, could well apply both to his mentor Giuliani and the sitting Mayor Bloomberg.

 

“Self-minded focus and arrogance” is how Judge Robinson described Kerik’s behavior. This “toxic combination,” he said led the defendant “to believe...

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Should Obama Give Back The Nobel Peace Prize?

          
                                                                          Registered trademark of the Nobel Foundation

Les Payne

October 14, 2009

 

The Nobel Prize awarded President Obama is funded by the inventor of the most destructive war weapon of his age; so it is perhaps fitting that the winner in the “Peace” category is occasionally selected with a bit of, well, irony.  

 

Alfred Bernhard Nobel, the Swedish chemist who created the dynamite stick bequeathed his lofty award as a carrot for world peace in hopes of redeeming his reputation as the “Merchant of Death.” Nobel “became rich,” according to an 1888 French newspaper article, “by finding ways to kill more people faster than ever before.”

 

This irony flashed back when word of Obama’s selection reached me,  European Central Time, in Barcelona, a few hours before Malia and Sasha humbled their father with the news as only an off-spring can. The choice, upon reflection, struck me as inspired.   

 

First, the irony: as the Commander-in-Chief, Obama is mongering two wars, inherited or not. His daily White House briefing is laced with the body-count of those killed and wounded on the U.S. chosen battlefields. Granted, these casualties are being racked up as the continuum of the misadventure set in motion by the singular bad judgment of the previous Bush-Cheney regime.

 

Such is the nature of this mature republic. Unlike tin-horn dictatorships, incoming leaders are saddled with the commitments of their predecessors. Eight years of Bush-Cheney have unleashed a breath-taking series of calamities that have rocked the very foundation of the nation and corroded its reputation abroad.

 

As leader of the world’s lone superpower, with weapons that can destroy the planet many times over, the sitting U.S. President can loom for much of the world as the personification either of the necessity for war or the possibility of peace. Obama has forthrightly stated his intention to open choked valves between regional factions by relaxing the Executive state of war-mongering to a point of mediation.

 

The selection of Obama is inspired not because, as some claim, it backhands George W. Bush, the swaggering, know-nothing, would-be warrior; the Academy instead has cited Obama as a world leader who can envision the achievability of peace quite on his own, not as some inmate locked-down in Rangoon, but as the leader of the world’s lone superpower.

 

When Obama took the Oath on that Lincoln Bible back in January, an attorney buddy of mine teaching law in a remote village in Napal, said the occasion brought

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Michael Moore; No Bull


                                                                                                                                                          COPYRIGHT 2008/RICHARD HENRY/NEWYORKSPACEPAGES.COM

Les Payne

September 30, 2009

 

The gonzo movie “Capitalism: A Love Story” comes at us with the power not so much of guerrilla theater as its director may have intended but rather with the force of a secular sermon against Wall Street.

 

Michael Moore’s polemic against greed is not tidy. The intrepid documentary-maker surveys the land and sees everywhere the filthy rich “those” picking the pockets of the middle class and the working poor. 

 

The film pans across a wretched landscape of housing foreclosures, corporate bailouts gone wild, murderously underpaid commercial pilots, Wall Street traffickers who can’t explain their million-dollar derivatives schemes. And, just before the numbness sets in, Moore surprises us with an example of novice corporate greed such as the “dead peasant” scheme under which some U.S. companies bet on the death of their workers and stake themselves as insurance beneficiary in case of the demise of such employees.

 

Michael Moore, it turns out, did not miss his calling as the Jesuit priest he shunned in favor of the documentary-making Monsignor he has become. The text of his 120- minute homily is taken from Mathew 21:12 and he preaches not about “Love” but the brimstone evils of capitalism.

 

The artist in Moore moved him to spin a good yarn. The radical in him wants to overturn the very tables of capitalism and drive this unpardonable “evil” out of the republic. He is unwilling to settle for a mere tamping down on Wall Street greed.

 

It is precisely this gonzo spirit that saves Moore’s provocative art from lapsing into

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What Is Racism Without Any Actual Racists?

  

Former U.S. President Jimmy Carter delivers his Nobel Lecture after receiving the 2002 Nobel Peace Prize in the Oslo City Hall,

Oslo, Norway. Photo: EPA Scanpix Norway POOL/Bjoern Sigurdson.

Copyright© Pressens Bild AB 2002, S-112 88 Stockholm, Sweden,

 

Les Payne

September 16, 2009

 

Yelling “you lie” in a crowded Congress at the first black U.S. President was “based on racism” rooted in “an inherent feeling among many [whites] in the country that an African-American should not be president,” according to Jimmy Carter.

 

It took the wisdom of this Nobel laureate with gravitas as the 39th President of the republic--and its first deep-South choice in modern times--to dignify the point the media danced around. Namely, that Congressman Addison Graves Wilson, known as “Joe,” shares the inherent feeling among many whites in America.

 

On matters of race, the media will intelligently discuss no plain truth, no matter how obvious, unless it bears the imprint of a gray eminence or a white columnist for the New York Times column. So Maureen Dowd and Jimmy Carter, the oddest of couples, have called out “Joe” Wilson for going South Carolina on President Obama.

 

Unlike Dowd, who is a soul-mate of the officer who busted Professor Gates and plays footsy on radio with the pernicious Don Imus, Jimmy Carter has credibility in the area of race relations. The Southern diplomat who did not pander to the “inherent feeling” of his people even as state senator and governor of Georgia, responded to a question at his presidential library Tuesday about Wilson’s interruption of the president speech before a joint session of Congress.

 

The equating of Obama with Hitler and other Nazis at town hall meetings across the country, Carter said, “are not just casual outcomes of a sincere debate on whether we should have a national program on health care.”

 

Indeed, even when the despised Hillary Clinton set her First Lady shoulders to health care 15 years ago, similar opponents just as lathered up never got down to blasting her as an

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Obama Puts Down His Marker On Health Care

   

    President Barack Obama delivers a health care address to a joint session of Congress at the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C.,

    September 9, 2009. Photo: Official White House Photo by Pete Souza

 

Les Payne

September 10, 2009

 

The sun set Thursday on a U.S. Health Care President whose vigorous insurance-reform address before a joint session of Congress reassured his defenders, jolted his opponents and ended up splitting the difference on “public option,”--and quite unevenly in favor of the corporations.

 

President Obama came hard-eyed into the batter’s box, proving once again that when a loving son takes a swing for his mother he’s aiming for the fences. We’ve often heard the saga of his mom’s, who died of ovarian cancer, struggles against denial of coverage for a pre-existing condition, a common abuse of insured clients.

 

“As soon as I sign this bill,” President Obama said Wednesday, “it will be against the law for insurance companies to drop your coverage when you get sick or water it down when you need it most. They will no longer be able to place some arbitrary cap on the amount of coverage you can receive in a given year or a lifetime. We will place a limit on how much you can be charged for out-of-pocket expenses.”

 

Obama hit a homer for his mother.

 

This is not to diminish this needed reform as a presidential vendetta simply, or to chalk up Sen. Ted Kennedy’s long pursuit of health care as simply a personal sop to his relatives with cancer. Politicians oft times do high-minded service out of personal experiences and brushes with tragedy.

 

The noblest public service to humanity is rather that sacrifice that leaders make without personal provocation. Health care reform should benefit all Americans, especially those with

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When The Bell Rings, Which Obama Will Answer The Call?

    

      President Barack Obama is set to address a joint session of Congress in the House Chamber of the Capitol. AP/Charles Dharapak

Les Payne

September 9, 2009

 

President Obama’s significant address on health care before a rare joint session of the U.S. Congress Wednesday lays down a marker for the substance of his style as Chief Executive.

 

Will he waltz with the people who brought him or shimmy for the dance-hall owners?

 

The insurance fat-cats didn’t pay for the band but insist on calling the tunes. These shysters are counting on the president’s health plan to drive the 45M uninsured Americans into their private care to be fleeced till the end of time. Such a proposal would constitute a cowardly betrayal of the voters that swept Obama into Office.

 

The key to the President’s health proposal is revealed in two words:

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What Could Parents Have Against A President Addressing School Children?

        

Les Payne

September 8, 2009

 

With media over-blowing the protest of some white parents at President Obama’s back-to-school message to students, the day may soon come when these same forces combine to oppose his delivering the State of the Union Address; then the Saturday Radio talk.

 

Repeating the specious argument parents stated for blocking their kids’ ears against President Obama’s words Tuesday serves no sensible purpose. It is clear that even they—if not the media—realize that their real reason is better left unstated publicly—at this time.

 

Indeed, the media’s analysis of this parental opposition to Obama’s harmless message is hampered by their inability to factor in race intelligently. Opposition to words of this particular U.S. President passing to the alabaster ears of the little darlings of the protesting parents recalls nothing so much as the virgin days of rock ‘n roll.

 

White parents back then went to great lengths to block their children from

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What Do You Want, Hitler?

                        

Les Payne

August 31, 2009

 

New York—Comedian Woody Allen responded to a movie flame who dismissed him as too weak with: “What do you want, Hitler?”

 

President Obama might feel a double-edged frustration when hearing his critics on health care. As “progressives” press him from the left as too soft, the extremists on the right are blasting him as “Adolph Hitler,” complete with moustache.

 

Caricaturized during the campaign as “Obambi” by one New York Times columnist the president has recently come under the wall-eyed gaze of another such pundit. Paul Krugman warns the White House against backing away from the “public option” component of health care reform. 

 

The “progressive” columnist, who can be down-right insightful when not carrying water for the Clinton’s, considers such a back-step as Obama rolling over for the GOP.

 

“There’s a point at which realism shades over into weakness,” Krugman wrote in a recent Times column. “Progressives feel Obama is on the wrong side of the weakness line.”

 

That threshold is less clear for former Baltimore Mayor Curt Schmoke who is the current Dean of Howard University Law School. Under the Washington Post headline, “Who’s Afraid of President Obama,” Schmoke argues that

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The Challenges Facing Obama and Universal Health Care

     

         AP Photo President Barack Obama, with Senior Advisor Valerie Jarrett, take questions during a discussion on health care,

         Wednesday, July 1, 2009, at Northern Virginia Community College in Annandale , Va.

Les Payne

August 14, 2009

 

The health care debates plaguing the Democrats are the troubling by-products of the town-hall format the Obama Administration stages to speak directly to the citizenry—and over the heads of entrenched power interests vested in the status quo.

     

Such public meetings in ’09 USA are as wide open as the old Wild West, and just as raucous. That pistol-packer up in New Hampshire and that licensed Arizona cowboy are duly free to mix it up with unarmed seniors, the tried, true and the curious, along with those provocateurs trained in disruption at corporate seminars.

      

Lurking in the town-hall shadows are the genuine nuts and the hard-eyed survivalists who bivouac in their discount fatigues and consider themselves a trigger pull away from blocking a Marxist takeover.

      

Change in a democracy is never easy.

 

The Team Obama tactic of appealing to the powerless worked extraordinarily well in assembling its winning coalition for “change” during the ’08 election. It remains to be seen whether the White House can sustain this approach to bring about the fulfillment of the lofty campaign promises.        

              

The central problem is the makeup of the Obama coalition.

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After Rose Garden Beer Blast, America Returns To Blissful Denial

                   

         A Discussion Toward 'De-Escalation' - (AP Images)

         Professor Gates converses with President Obama, Vice President Biden and Sgt. Crowley over beer.

Les Payne

August 1, 2009

It is impossible to imagine another U.S. President, not even “Honest Abe Lincoln,” inviting the cop to the White House who’d humiliated “a friend” by arresting him at home on a charge so freakish that the DA tossed it as an embarrassment.

 

Yet, here was Sgt James Crowley knocking back Blue Moons Thursday as a white folk hero on the Rose Garden patio. The professor cuffed under false pretenses sat under the same magnolia tree across from the leader of the world’s lone superpower.

 

Did President Obama teach his point?

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Michelle, Guess Who's Coming Over For A Beer?

          

 Les Payne

July 27, 2009

 

As Prof. Gates fights the impulse to tell the truth—and risk Rev. Wright-type consequences--the stone-cold cop who arrested him continues to fib through his 15 minutes of fame.

 

The two antagonists will reunite this week at the White House.

 

The President of the United States will host this peculiarly American dialogue having everything and nothing at all to do with race. Black self-evident meets white denial. Each contender is a curious study in self-contradiction.

 

Fighting out of the Red Corner is:

 

James Crowley, whose idea it was for his host to provide beer after the White House switchboard tracked him down in Cambridge at Tommy Doyle’s Irish Pub. Not one to pass up a chance to put a nuisance behind him, President Barack Obama hooked up the meeting with Gates.

 

The tightly-wound, Irish cop insists that race in no way affected his handcuffing arrest of the slight, 58-year old, handicapped, black professor for trash-talking at his home.

 

Defending the character of Sgt Crowley, policewoman Kelly King, who appeared to have been rushed in from undercover duty as a vice lure, declared that President Obama had lost her vote by saying her fellow officer “acted stupidly.” Content to be outdone, Sgt Leon Ashley, the stony-faced black cop photographed at the arrest scene, said there was nothing “rogue” about the white sergeant.

 

Ironically, Crowley is a co-instructor at the Lowell Police Academy for a course on racial profiling. This standard shortcut in urban policing allows white cops to translate stereotypical hunches about African-Americans into probable cause sufficient for investigative action. Crowley reportedly instructs cadets not to engage in such racial profiling.

 

The charge, however, is likely to surface against him during the upcoming White House encounter.

 

Fighting out of the Blue Corner is:

 

Professor Henry Louis Gates, a master at engaging African-American matters professionally—and with remarkable results--while evading them personally.

 

Gates’ assemblage of black talent at Harvard University and his noteworthy, multi-volume anthology on Black Women Writers, along with autobiographical renderings, other books and periodic writings--most notably the long profiles in the New Yorker—constitute a most impressive body of scholarship. And there are the globetrotting TV documentaries, the encyclopedic chronicling of the African-American experience, all tempered by specious doodling with DNA back-tracking, and Gates’ boundless service as adviser to interests including newspapers struggling to survive, the Brookings Institution, the Whitney Museum and even the U.S. Postal Service trafficking in commemorative stamps.

 

This scholarly superhighway that Gates has paved professionally curiously diverges from the by-ways of his personal life.  

 

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The Arresting Truth Of Being Black In America

Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. found himself in the right place -- his own home -- at the wrong time: facing police suspicion

about his actions. (By B. Carter -- DemotixImages)

Les Payne

July 22, 2009

 

“I was quite surprised and confused with the behavior he exhibited toward me,” wrote the Boston cop after handcuffing Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates at his home and bundling him off to jail.

 

Neither the emotions described in the cop’s report—nor the ire he likely acted on—constituted grounds for the “disorderly conduct” charge laid against Gates. The bogus claim was dropped by the prosecutor with a wink to Sgt James Crowley, Badge # 467, of the Cambridge Police Dept.

 

With a name that TV host Chris Matthews said is about as “Irish as you can get,” Sgt Crowley escalated a clash of Cambridge cultures as cobbled as the old streets of South Boston. The 911 report about a break-in that drew him to the scene on Ware Street last Thursday turned out to be a damaged front door jimmied by its owner to gain entry to his home.

 

When Crowley arrived looking for “two black males with backpacks,” Prof. Gates, returning from a week in China, had carried in belongings from the car with the help of his driver.

 

At long last Gates’ weary bones were home. He assumed himself to be “secure in (his) persons…houses, papers and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures,” as promised all Americans by the Bill of Rights. If ever there’s a place where we feel free to raise our voices against an assumed injustice, or to throw down and get defensive; it’s in our homes.

 

Initially, Gates considered it unreasonable

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Remembering Walter Cronkite and the Lunar Landing 40 Years Later

     


Les Payne

July 19, 2009

 

As America fulfilled President Kennedy’s promise to put a man on the moon—40 years ago this week—Walter Cronkite was just as impressive in keeping the nation abreast of the progress.

 

With that momentous death bulletin on Kennedy behind him, Cronkite tracked the nightly unraveling of the Vietnam War and occasionally displayed his mastery of the mysteries of space reporting. His deep study brought clarity to viewers about the “telemetry” of NASA big rockets and the orbits of its space crafts.

 

The moon landing in ’69 found Cronkite at the top his very impressive game.

 

It was not so much style as it was smart work that thrust Cronkite into an orbit of trust at the dawn of the computer age. The complex NASA missions were made plain by the famed TV newsman walking across mock floor diagrams of the universe or toying with space modules in an age before iPods and Gameboy emulators. 

 

The wizardry of Cronkite inspired new generations of scientists as well as journalists.

 

At the time, I commanded a Nike-Hercules missile battery and longed to become a journalist. Cronkite impressed with his science knowledge as well as his command of the news art. 

 

The death of Cronkite Friday and the 40th anniversary of the U.S. moon landing this week reminded me of another more troubling aspect of that era.

 

When man landed on the moon, I was an army Ranger captain stationed at Ft. Bliss, Texas. Unbeknownst to the military,

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Why Ghana? Why Now?

    


Les Payne

July 15, 2009

 

As if Moscow, the G-8 and the Vatican were not enough, President Barack Obama swung by Ghana this weekend to touch a democratic nation making it's economic way up the development ladder.

 

Spinning the dial on current matters, Earl Caldwell opened our occasional WBAI discussion with a chat about this first official visit by a sitting U.S. President with roots and paternal branches in Africa. Why not Kenya, the east African homeland of his father’s? Well, we kicked it around.

 

On this centennial of the NAACP, Earl probed the relevancy of this granddaddy of all the civil rights organizations?

 

And he wanted to remember Robert Strange McNamara by conjuring memories of a Vietnam veteran who served on the staff of Gen. William C. Westmoreland during what came to be known as “McNamara’s War.”

 

Let’s go to the audio tape:

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