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.

It depends on where you set the boundaries.

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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.

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...

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...

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

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.

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...

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....

                                                                                             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...

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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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

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

    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

      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: