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Beware The Eyes Of Newt

2011-12-12T12:00:00Z

Newt Gingrich and Mitt Romney at the GOP debate for presidential in November. Credit:AP Photo/Paul Sancy

Les Payne

December 12, 2011

The eyes of Newt went devilish at the GOP debate Saturday when the former Speaker of the House slashed at Mitt Romney's tiresome and not-quite-accurate boast that he's spent his entire career in the private sector.

Slamming Newt Gingrich as a career politician, Romney claimed with his straight missionary face that "our real difference is our backgrounds. I spent my life in the private sector." This night, however, first-place Gingrich was taking none of this from his key challenger.

It has been duly noted that 68-year old Gingrich has the visage of a real-life "Chucky" of the Child's Play movie fame, and the senior citizen displays the same devilish tendency to wreck havoc. When the fit comes over him, as it did with Romney's "career" attack, Newt's eyes roll into a scowl and his face goes full Chucky.

"The only reason you didn't become a career politician," Gingrich shot back, "is because you lost to Ted Kennedy in 1994." He did indeed. And in something of a precursor, Romney's opponent nailed him for flip-flopping on abortion.

"I'm pro-choice," Sen. Kennedy said famously, "my opponent is multiple choice.”

So successfully had Romney been running his "career" fib past the assembled GOP debaters' week-after-week that the slashing from Gingrich caught him off guard. Once again, however, all that field work paid off for the former missionary who, in due course, recovered sufficiently to pump air back into his half-deflated white lie.

"If I had been able to get in the NFL as a kid," Romney said, "I would have been a football star, too. But I spent my life in the private sector.”

Well, not exactly.

Some nine years after losing that Massachusetts senatorial race to Kennedy, Romney followed in his father's footsteps and got himself elected governor. Following this term he ran for the U.S. presidency. And, yes, had he gotten elected, as with his NFL hypothetical, he would have been a continuing politician. Those very real four Romney years served as governor of Massachusetts were spent in the public and not "in the private sector."

Gingrich pursuit of the matter, as usual with the attention-deficit professor, did not go far enough. In fact, during the present decade when the former Speaker has been personally outside of electoral politics, it was this "private-sector careerist" who spent almost half that time as a sitting politician.

Perhaps Newt gave up on the "career" chase because he chose not to direct attention to his own dark closet of his political double-dealings. In addition to writing books, he has spent the last 13 years feeding at the government trough as a richly-compensated "historian." Curiously, the professor's lecture halls are indistinguishable from the plush lairs of the Capitol Hill lobbyists.

A lot, though no where near enough, has been made of the well-connected, former House Speaker pocketing some $1.6M from Freddie Mac, the mortgage giant that some experts link directly to the nation-wide housing scandal. Publicly, Gingrich has pretended to decry the excesses of Freddie Mac, even as he spent its loot at Tiffany's. During the '08 presidential campaign, he even suggested that Sen. John McCain ask then-Sen. Obama "are you prepared to give back all the money that Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae gave you?”

During that televised chat on Fox, the eyes of Newt started doing that "Chucky" thing as with the Romney attack the other night.

When first I laid eyes on Gingrich as House Speaker in the ‘90's, he was strolling in the fullness of his egomaniacal puissance, alongside then-President Bill Clinton in the White House. Within weeks, this Newt-turned-Chucky was forcing the longest shut-down of the government in U.S. history. Already Newt had hit on Congressional staffer Callista Bisek, an affair he would nurse under the nose of his ailing wife and through the impeachment trial of President Clinton for carrying on an affair of short durations with a female intern.

In fairness, Gingrich explains that he pursued his fellow horn-dog for "lying" about his illicit relation with Monica Lewinsky—though, at the time, he was not exactly forthcoming about his own fair-maiden on the side. Under attack for the Callista affair (they subsequently married), Newt chalked it up at the Saturday debate as something of a youthful indiscretion, back when he was 53. "I'm a 68-year old grandfather.”

Spared the opportunity to lie about his marital infidelity before Congress back then, Newt seized instead upon the chance to misrepresent his financial records to the House Ethics Committee that had fielded some 84 charges against him.

Under heavy pressure from his fellow Republicans, the Speaker was slapped with a $300,000 fine and allowed to resign from Congress and slink across K Street where for the next dozen years he could peddle his influence and twist his former cohorts' arms as a fork-tongued "historian."

So now, if we are to believe the polls in the year of our Lord 2011, the Republicans have searched all 50 states including Alaska, and could find no more worthy a bearer of the party standards than a recycled Newton Leroy Gingrich.

Beware of the "Revenge of Chucky!"

Cain Watches The GOP Shoot-Out In Vegas

2011-10-23T16:00:00Z

Republican presidential candidates businessman Herman Cain, left, watches as former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, center, and Texas Gov.
Rick Perry speak during a Republican presidential debate Tuesday, Oct. 18, 2011, in Las Vegas. (AP Photo/Chris Carlson)

Les Payne
October 23, 2011

In a GOP presidential race brimming with surprises as well as eccentrics, Herman Cain the carefree motivational speaker had a tough time motivating himself during the party debate in Las Vegas.

The former CEO of Godfather Pizza had slipped into the vacuum left by Gov. Rick Perry and came in for sharp and unwanted attention for which he was as unprepared for at the debate as he was to name the president of

Uzbekistan

. His front-runner's status caught Cain off-guard with shallow presidential hopes and pockets shallower still.

Hammered by his six opponents for the first round of the debate about his admittedly "simple" economic plan, the incurious Cain stuck by his guns -- his lone endearing quality as a campaigner. His 9-9-9 plan would replace the federal tax code with a flat 9 percent tax each on corporate earning, personal income and sales at the cash register.

Warming up for Romney, Gov. Perry lashed a body away to his right at the besieged Cain, who was struggling mightily to motivate himself under the floodlights.

"Herman, I love you, brother," Perry called out to the pizza man, countering Cain's plea for a complex examination of his "simple" plan. "You don't need to have a big analysis to figure this thing out. Go to New Hampshire, where they don't have a sales tax, and you're fixing to give them [a 9 percent] one. They are not interested in 9-9-9."

The entire stage piled on Cain's tax plan: Ron Paul of Texas, because it was "regressive"; Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania, because it was too tough on "families"; Romney, who reached to shield the middle class against it; while Michele Bachmann, who shares with Cain -- and apparently with Perry -- an ignorance of geography, said that the 9-9-9 plan would give Congress a "blank check."

Elaborating in her inimitable style, Rep. Bachmann of Minnesota reasoned that "a liberal president and a liberal Congress" would likely run Cain's 9 percent tax "up to maybe 90 percent? Who knows?"

As for Bachmann’s geography, the proud member of the Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence complained during the debate that President Obama "has put us in Libya; he is now putting us in Africa."

Misfiring on the issues with Bachmann and the others, candidate Mitt Romney appeared to have trouble even pinning down his bona fides.

At one point dismissing Perry as a career politician, Romney bragged that he would "post up well against President Obama" because he'd "spent my life in the private sector." Responding to Perry a few minutes later, Romney said, "I'm very proud of the fact -- actually, during the four years we were both governors ...” Thus he revealed, perhaps inadvertently, that he had not, in fact, “spent my life in the private sector."

The Las Vegas fireworks were left up to Gov. Perry.

The short-lived front-runner had sleepwalked through the last debate and was sinking in the polls with some $17 million from contributors who expected a better return on their investment.

So the Texan shot out of the debate chute like a Brahma bull, Bos indicus, ripping and snorting at chief rival Romney.

"Mitt," said Rick Perry, squaring off as he called him out, "you lose all of your standing, from my perspective, because you hired illegals in your home and you knew about it for a year." In a likely attempt to pre-empt Romney's attack on Texas' porous border with

Mexico

, Perry slammed his opponent's stance on immigration as the "height of hypocrisy."

The old charge that the former Massachusetts governor hired a grass-clipping service, employing workers without papers, was dealt with about as forthrightly as politics allow. During the set-to, however, each candidate was stripped down to his bare essentials: Perry, the gun slinging lightweight, versus Romney, the missionary on the make.

Perry's opening sucker punch loosed a stiff Romney belly laugh. The startled reaction is familiar to atheists whose counter-arguments have poleaxes street peddlers hawking their religion. What followed is just as familiar. The former missionary demanded order like a man accustomed to deflating, if not soothing, cantankerous sinners hell-bent on trashing the sacred message along with the messenger. Opening with a jab, Romney said: "I'm speaking, I'm speaking." Then he threw a countering hook: "This has been a tough couple of debates for Rick, and so I understand that you're going to get testy."

As the round wore on, Perry jabbed his right index finger at his taller opponent, who was standing adjacent. The missionary in Romney placed his open left hand on the shoulder of his antagonist, half scolding, half cajoling. All that field service had prepared Romney to confront the Texan as just another heathen in a barroom hankering for a brawl.

The tension between the two candidates would last the entire night -- and perhaps will last forever, unless they emerge someday as GOP running-mates; desperation has linked up stranger bedfellows.

So the debate went for two hours at the Venetian Resort Hotel, as the seven candidates chewed over each other's records on job creation, budget deficit, defense spending, Reaganism, foreign aid and the controversial fence, electrified or otherwise, on the Mexican border.

The contest and the GOP race itself resemble nothing so much as the start of a 26-mile marathon involving obese couch potatoes woefully out of shape. The grim reality for the Republicans is that one of these potatoes is likely the best they can bring to the market this time around.

Tavis Smiley gets his Clock cleaned on Obama

2011-09-13T12:00:00Z

This photo is from the show entitled TAVIS SMILEY which airs on PBS and is produced by The Smiley Group, Inc./TS Media, Inc. in association with WNET/New York.

By Les Payne

Bristling in the face of the calm scholar, Tavis Smiley was having none of the lesson that Randall Kennedy was teaching on Smiley's TV show originally aired on Thursday, Sept. 1, 2011. So the Harvard Law professor contented himself with taking PBS viewers to school on the complex relationship between the first black U.S. President and his African-American constituency.

Kennedy weighed in with the scholarship of his new book, The Persistence of the Color Line, noting that President Barack Obama has mastered the dual audience so troubling to black seekers of high office. African-American voters broke for him in the ’08 primary after largely white voters in Iowa favored him over John Edwards and Hillary Clinton.

Already, Kennedy argued, Obama was overcoming skepticism among grassroots blacks wary about his upbringing by a white mother and her parents. He heaped praise upon Dr. King and other civil rights leaders and displayed the requisite level of "comfort with black history, black culture, black rhythms, black colloquialisms." And whereas Obama did not choose his parents, the young politician had chosen a "very distinguished black woman, Michelle Robinson" as his wife.

None of this swayed host Smiley. Nor did it sway many prominent black political and church leaders at the time, including Rep. Maxine Waters and half of the Congressional Black Caucus where Obama was a card-carrying member. All favored Sen. Hillary Clinton over Obama. Indeed, Rep. Charles Rangel, then the most powerful African-American in Congress, had projected that one of his top career achievements would be the election of Hillary, who happens to be white, as the first, woman president of the United States.

One of the overlooked intrigues of American politics is how securely the Clinton’s have fastened their ring in the noses of so many key black leaders and how, even now, it seems difficult for some to remove it! Last week, Smiley was still defending Ms. Clinton’s chances against Obama in the ’08 primary: "Hillary was still ahead of him two or three to one in most polls, until the overwhelming numbers of white voters in Iowa gave him that victory and then said it was okay. What [does] it [say] about black folk along that color line that they didn’t break for Barack Obama until white folk essentially -- my words not yours -- gave them permission?"

The question, of course, could just as glibly been phrased: why indeed did Tavis Smiley and key black leaders await the white woman’s permission to support a black presidential candidate? Professor Kennedy was too dignified, however, to slide down into the mud with his host. Instead, he answered that the commitment to Obama after Iowa was based upon the grassroots’ perception of the young senator as a "winnable" candidate.

Such pragmatism recalls the 1969 mayoral primary in Atlanta when black voters favored the Jewish candidate, Sam Massell, over his highly touted black opponent, Dr. Horace Tate, because, as Julian Bond pointed out at the time, Massell was considered a "winnable" candidate.

"Black folks are like other folks," Kennedy told Smiley, "They like winners." An unpopular Republican had occupied the White House for eight years and when Obama won in the white Iowa electorate, Kennedy said it signaled "Hey, this guy can win. After all, the electorate in the United States is mainly a white electorate."

Also, policy issues were essentially equal between Clinton and Obama, both being "centrist, liberal-leaning Democrats, "and the value-added "difference [was] Barack Obama is black…many thought this would be a wonderful and extraordinary thing, for a black family to occupy the White House."

The disagreeable Smiley disagreed. He demanded that Kennedy explain "to Hillary supporters,"(like himself), "who were disappointed that black folk were siding with Barack Obama because they were tribal." And he stated, quite erroneously, that the community organizer turned Illinois politician, that some considered the most liberal in the U.S. Senate, brought only his color to the concerns of black constituents.

"Race aside," Kennedy answered, "many black people, on ideological grounds, would have been drawn to Obama anyway….as a wonderful, vivid way of repudiating our white supremacist past." Then the Harvard-trained lawyer exonerated the mass of black Democrats of the “tribalism” charge, singling out as practitioners instead those black, conservative Republicans who crossed party and ideology lines to vote for Obama chiefly because of the pull of group identity--and likely peace at home.

With no such inter- or intra-party policy differences between the two Democrats, Smiley and the other black Clinton devotees chose to stick with Hillary and the stable personal comforts of what Kennedy described as "the white supremacist past" boldly rejected by Obama supporters.

Why exactly do so many key black, Democrat leaders remain so steadfast in their immutable opposition to President Obama? Faced with similar opposition from key black leaders in the 1920’s, wildly popular Black Nationalist Marcus Garvey recalled the adage that "a thief does not like to see another man carrying a long bag."

Adrift now among their brethren, with scars to show for it, Smiley and these diehard Clinton loyalists seem vested not so much in acknowledging Obama's successes as they are in whooping along failures in order to redeem themselves with "I told you so's."

When Smiley dismissed Obama's successes as "symbolism," the Rhodes Scholar zapped him with the insight that: "A lot of black people realistically understand that symbolism can be quite substantive." Illustrating this point with staged sit-ins, mass arrests, suggestive images of truncheons, fire-hoses and snarling dogs, Kennedy bottomed his symbolism-as-substance paradigm on the transcendent fact of the black First Family climbing "the Mt. Everest of American politics" to the White House.

A roundly unimpressed Smiley laid down the gauntlet to "respect, protect and correct" the sitting U.S. president, with tongue-lashing emphasis on “KO-RECK.” After resisting every nudge for reason and restraint during Kennedy’s 26-minute clinic on the Obama presidency, the host offered the professor no choice but to flunk him respectfully as a cocksure student dead-wrong on every key question.

Seldom has such baloney passed through the grinder with such melancholy ignorance.

Les Payne is a frequent contributor to The Root.

Economic Equality grinds slowly for the South African majority

2011-04-29T00:00:00Z

Vice President Joe Biden meets with South Africa's Deputy President Kgalema Motlanthe, Tuesday, March 29, 2011, in the Roosevelt Room of the White House in Washington. (AP Photo/Charles Dharapak)

Les Payne
April 28, 2011

"You will not find one white South African today who supported apartheid—not one," said Deputy President Kgalema Motlanthe during his recent visit to increase trade between the U.S. and his post-apartheid country.

Such denials are common among the privileged that are cursed with former victims who rise to power or prominence. Where, for example, are those white Americans who despised the brash Cassius Clay when he refused the military draft as Muhammad Ali? Bring me the Germans who hated the Jews. Frog-march out of the bleachers those Old Geezers who used to race-jeer Jackie Robinson for desegregating Major League Baseball.

Once these bigots were everywhere; now they never existed.

Retreating from their victims to a state of denial, a growing number of privileged whites in South Africa are hard-pressed to recall their bloody devotion to apartheid. Indeed, some beneficiaries of this brutal, national system of racist exploitation are rising up nowadays to oppose the government's corrective "affirmative action," as an "immoral" tactic affording blacks unfair advantage over whites in the workplace.

And this in the country where a few short years ago, the law kept Africans from supervising any European working in the republic; and where all middle-class, skill jobs were set aside expressly for whites under a nasty little measure called the "Job Reservation Act."

Additionally, some 350 pieces of apartheid legislation disallowed Africans to vote, own land, join labor unions, or even apply the final coat of paint on a wall. Government buildings were officially segregated, as were private homes, theaters, bus terminals, toilets, hotels, restaurants, nightclubs, hospitals, soccer fields, mortuaries and cemeteries.

When a white South African rose at the New York University forum Monday to imply that the post-apartheid government is not committed to a "non-racial society," Deputy President Motlanthe worked diplomatically to jog her memory.

He reminded the questioner that the founding, 1955 "Freedom Charter," the core principles governing the now ruling ANC party, is totally committed to a "non-racial, democratic society" with equal rights for all.

"The ANC did not challenge the concept of white supremacy with black supremacy," said Motlanthe.

Indeed, the current government is widely criticized by supporters for not moving swiftly enough toward insuring equal access for the black majority—especially in the economic arena. While Africans have won political power, they have made pitifully small steps toward economic viability.

Why exactly has South Africa failed to involve its majority squarely in the nation's economic development?

"Seventeen years will never be enough...to turn around 350 years of oppression," said Jimmy Manyi, the chief government spokesman in a Johannesburg report recently. It was in 1994 that majority rule swept Nelson Mandela into the presidency following a protracted ANC struggle against apartheid.

A key impediment on the economic front, according to spokesman Manyi was the entrenched system the ANC inherited where "87-percent of the land was owned by whites, who made up 12-percent of the population."

Woefully, he added, "Not much has changed."

Also, in 1994, the white minority held down some 80-percent of the top jobs, and their companies got 87-percent of all government procurements, according to published reports. Black presence on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange was barely one-percent.

One 2007 survey of 3,500 South African firms, reportedly found that whites, whose more accurate demographic was listed at about nine-percent, owned some three-fourths of the companies, including all those listed on the stock exchange.

One tool the ANC government has employed to promote fairness in the job market is an adapted form of "affirmative action." During his current U.S. visit, Motlanthe drew sharp criticism from the Freedom Forum Plus group back home for advancing the government backed program. "The time has come for affirmative action to be phased out," the group spokesperson reportedly charged openly.

Citing the Constitutional provision "to promote the achievement of equality," spokesman Manyi defended affirmative action, but said he preferred the Afrikaans term "regstellende aksie," which translates roughly as, to correct. "If something must be put right," he said, "it means there is something wrong with that thing."

At his NYU talk, Deputy President Motlanthe cited a long history of inferior education as another pernicious obstacle hampering the integration of Africans into the increasingly more skilled workforce. While white students were prepared for a life of leadership and privilege, Bantu Education insured Africans a life of menial labor.

Under apartheid, as I reported from Johannesburg years go, education was compulsory for whites between the ages of 7 to 16. Books were free. Their parents paid no fees. Teachers were required to meet high certification standards. Facilities, textbooks and laboratory equipment were of the highest quality available.

Education for blacks was not compulsory. It was, in fact, discouraged. Black parents, who earned far less than whites, were required to purchase books and pay tuition. Also, students had to clean the classrooms, maintain gardens and endure ill-qualified teachers, who were themselves victims of woefully inferior education.

"We are saddled today with the problem of Bantu education that was set up in 1954 by [minister of education Hendrik] Verwoerd," Motlanthe said at NYU. The rural area and the black townships, he said, are especially riddled with ill-trained and "poorly motivated teachers."

"South Africa is two countries in one," the deputy president said, in explaining the difficulty of reducing economic inequality split sharply along racial lines. Though much is grim overall, he said that this mineral rich country with a population of 50 million has some bright spots for investors.

Motlanthe's trade mission took him by the NY Stock Exchange, the Chicago Board of Trade and the White House, where vice president Joe Biden "noted the importance of South Africa's leadership across Africa and within the international community."

Indeed, while the republic constitutes only five percent of the population of Africa, Motlanthe noted that it accounts for some 50-percent of trade on the continent sub-Sahara, with China as its leading partner.

In Soweto, Motlanthe said that when the government paved all the streets in this amalgam of neighborhoods with a population of two million residents, the black township was transformed. It houses a campus of the University of Johannesburg; workers take care of the wet-lands, and the open lots that once held garbage is now a park.

The white rugby team even played in Orlando Stadium and their fans were quite pleasantly surprised at the infrastructure and delighted at the cheaper beer prices. "It is now the favorite destination of whites within South Africa," he said. "Soweto is a microcosm of how South Africa should develop."

Still, the Deputy President is under no delusion about the time and the staggering difficulty South Africa must endure "to reduce economic inequality."

"As we say in South Africa," Motlanthe said, "It will hurry up slowly."

An Evening Of Art, Drama And Dance At Hofstra University

2011-02-21T16:00:00Z

Kevin Best and Les Payne; Kevin Best and dancers performing at the Emily Lowe gallery at Hofstra University

Les Payne

February 21, 2011

The 33-piece art exhibit raced my pulse as the dancers in the gallery frolicked into one of their interpretative numbers. The male actor in a turtle-neck sweater then eased into a monologue of words unmistakably familiar.

"When students in Soweto revolted against apartheid on June 16, 1976," deadpanned actor Kevin Best, "I requested that Newsday send me to Johannesburg to cover the story."

The familiar became real; for whom else could this Newsday character have been?

"The South African government balked at giving me a visa," the actor went on. The apartheid regime did exactly that back then. "After three months of wrangling that involved the intervention of international tennis star Arthur Ashe, said the actor continuing with, yes, my story, "Pretoria reluctantly granted me a visa."

"Under the South African system separating the races totally, I was designated an honorary white."

As student-actor Best wandered about the Hofstra University art gallery, pausing to engage a trio of dancers pirouetting before the paintings; his soliloquy took me back to those terrible days on assignment in South Africa. The Soweto artists whose works are on the walls, created art in the black township even as the students rose up against apartheid.

Johannesburg police enforcing European occupation relentlessly whipped them with sjamboks and shot them down with machine-gun bullets.

Hector Pieterson, 12, was gunned down that first day, along with 22 others in a slaughter that riveted global attention. Adapted from Sam Mzima’s famous photograph, a bronze rendering of the martyrdom of young Pieterson entitled "Uprising," by Percy Konqobe stood mute in a display case against the back wall.

The Soweto monologue and dance creation is the work of Dyane Harvey-Salaam, a professor in the Drama and Dance Dept. at Hofstra. She adapted the script from an introduction I had cobbled together for the brochure that the University had printed for the three-month exhibit of the South African artists at its Emily Lowe Gallery. (Had I known my prose would roll off the tongue of an actor I would have polished them lyrical.)

Years at the journalism shop have conditioned me to surprises but not to stage-craft. Yet, the Soweto monologue inspired something else. It was indeed pride, but a pride drained of the poison of conceit. Deep down, I was delighted by the creativity of the young dancers speaking of a struggle long before their time. Yet, they enlivened memory of that revolt and gave voice to the children of Soweto against the backdrop of the five artists who, all save one, have passed on to bliss eternal.

The gallery drama brought tears to my eyes. Unlike those of Rep. John Boehner, mine cannot conjure moisture upon command; in fact, they have been conditioned through war and heartbreak never to cry in

public. Yet, here I was caught up in the drama of the Soweto monologue.

The soliloquy took me 35 years back to Johannesburg.

In one of those bitter-sweet spots of journalism, I bore historic witness to that hopeless struggle leading instead to an inevitable triumph of the will and the word against the brute force of hatred and greed. Ensconced in their impregnable fortress of South African gold, the Europeans saw themselves maintaining their cruel white dominance for a thousand years.

Bent of preserving the myth of white supremacy, the over-zealous Boers thought nothing of shooting down township children for refusing to learn their Afrikaans language. When parents objected police turned their apartheid guns on the burgeoning revolution striking for a broader, all encompassing liberation long overdue. The one-sided fire-fight got bloody.

"The official body count carried as gospel truth in the New York Times, Newsweek, and other American newspapers and magazines was 350 Africans killed," the narrator reminded. "My investigation detailed the names, ages, circumstances and date of death of more than 853 black victims of the government crackdown and indicated that the actual number likely exceeded 1,000."

This truth got me and Newsday banned for years from South Africa for exposing the sanctimonious Boers as barbaric, child-murdering hypocrites who manipulated the world media with lies about the true depths of their raw racism and terror.

The children of Soweto—along with the artists answering their Muse—rose to their feet as that indomitable blade of grass punching irresistibly through the concrete of apartheid long thought to be immovable. [We see something of this redeeming force of the human spirit gathering in the Middle East, starting with Tunisia and Egypt.]

In the midst of this coverage of the carnage, "I happened upon a painting one Saturday that froze me at the window of an art gallery on a side street in Johannesburg."

Hofstra University Museum by Executive Director Beth E. Levinthal, Les and Violet Payne at the Emily Lowe gallery

The narrator-actor Best then bridged away from the grisly setting of the Soweto Uprising to the inspiration that had moved me to start systematically collecting the 32 paintings and sculpture lining the backdrop of the gallery walls. The art was selected from a much larger collection that my wife Violet and I have put together over the past 35 years.

The Soweto Artists exhibit was mounted at the Hofstra University Museum by Executive Director Beth E. Levinthal and curated by Karen T. Albert. It will remain on display at the Emily Lowe Gallery on campus, until April 21, 2011.

Reflections On A Recent Visit To President Obama's White House

2010-11-10T14:12:00Z

Ten members of the Monroe Trotter Group met with President Obama for an hour on Oct. 15, 2010, in the Roosevelt Room of the White House

as part of a White House outreach effort before the Nov. 2 midterm elections. (Official White House Photo by Chuck Kennedy)

Les Payne

November 10, 2010

Sitting across the table from President Barack Obama, I pondered what the presidency was like for the two Roosevelt’s back when Americans respected the Office even if they despised the Chief Executive.

The thought occurred in the Roosevelt Room recently where 10 columnists from the Monroe Trotter Group were hosted in this chamber named for the two presidents that were fifth-cousins. The windowless conference space across from the Oval Office of the White House has a false skylight and is dominated by an oblong table flanked by portraits of the two Roosevelt’s.

"Teddy" gazes from his galloping steed in a Tade Styka oil painting hanging over the mantel on the east wall.

Lest this equestrian be taken simply as the "Rough Rider," his 1906 Nobel Peace Prize, the first ever awarded to an American, is displayed with a ribbon in a case on the north wall. This 26th president who made it to Mt. Rushmore was credited with ending the Russo-Japanese War after hosting a sit-down between diplomats of the two nations at his Long Island estate that led to the Portsmouth Treaty.

Cousin Franklin Delano was the lesser athlete and his portrait painter arrayed him at his desk and cleverly disguises the crippling effect of FDR’s debilitating disease. Both ruling-class politicians were Anglican, though cousin "Teddy’s" Episcopalianism was tainted somewhat by his practice of the Dutch Reform religion that, if nothing else, enhanced his frontier image.

Had Gutzon Borglum started blasting away at that South Dakota mountain a few decades later, it is arguable that instead of Teddy, FDR might have made it upon Mt. Rushmore for his deft handling of the Great Depression and the cataclysmic events of WWII.

President Obama, of course, has inherited a modern version of this double plague: a great economic collapse along with two foreign wars. And he must await the judgment of history under quite different circumstances of fear and loathing.

Peering warily at our group of newspaper columnists recently, this 44th U.S. President, unlike the two Roosevelt’s, displayed a welcomed lack of the Anglican taint as well as of the white, so-called blue-blood lines. This latter blessing has not stood Obama in good stead with white Americans, chiefly the elderly, who, despite John McCain’s ’08 promise to continue the George Bush Death March, voted overwhelmingly at 55-43 percent to reject the one hope for avoiding a catastrophe—the first African-American president. And they continue now at the same 55-percent poll rate to thunder their "disapproval" of Obama’s White House performance—just as they voted against their own best interests at the mid-term elections.

Despite this peculiarity of the white majority, President Obama, as much as any recent Chief Executive, including George Herbert Walker Bush and his cipher of a lost-cause son, continues to look and to emote up close with that contemplative but unmistakable gift of a man born to this manner of power, even as leader of the so-called Free World.

(Official White House Photo by Chuck Kennedy)

Dressed in a blue serge suit and white shirt sans French cuffs, Obama’s executive look that autumn day was accented with metallic flag pin, silk tie, di rigueur wristwatch and wedding band. Visibly weary under his graying, close-cropped mane, he wore the weariness not of a man beaten down but rather one standing up to a blizzard of tough negotiations, oil spills, historic legislation at home, battlefield set-backs abroad, and a veritable rainy season of Fox-TV generated crisis both real and visually altered.

My White House visit was the fifth such sit-down with a U.S. President since Jimmy Carter invited in a group of journalists during his lone term in the late ‘70’s. The peanut farmer from Plains, Ga., a Bible-thumbing nice guy, appeared downright tickled proud that he didn’t quite belong in the rarified air of raw, Cold-War power pulsing in the Oval Office. His White House staffers were smart enough, but this country lot of good ‘ol boys such as Hamilton Jordon was as far in over their heads as First Brother Billy was deep in his cups.

Then there was Ronald Reagan who, both as Hollywood actor and California governor had thrown off early signs that here folks was Forrest Gump goes to Washington. As a pitch-man with ever-ready, 3-by-5 note cards, President Reagan, up close, had that jerkiness of a Baptist minister I once knew, and he seemed constantly to be looking over his actor’s shoulder for cues from the director to focus his best efforts as a grade "B" performer.

It is hard even now to think of this featherweight operator as a bona fide U.S. President. "Great Communicator," my foot; Reagan was but an amiable voice and face on a policy that stepped up the withering away of the republic from within.

By the time the klieg lights dimmed on Reagan’s eight years there were those avaricious, self-serving, unpatriotic defenders who declared a glowing success of the "Gipper's" Administration that gave the world "constructive engagement" in apartheid South Africa, the Iran-Contras scandal, and with his targeted deregulation and trickle-up tax breaks for the rich, set in motion the economic whirlwind that the nation will be reaping for the foreseeable future. God help us all!

West German Chancellor Helmet Schmidt once reportedly said after meeting with then U.S. President Carter as head of a super-power, that he returned to his hotel room and tearfully bemoaned the future of the whole of the Western world. A comparable meeting with Reagan in his cowboy dudes with his palsied finger on the nuclear trigger must surely have loosed an even greater fear for the entire universe extending from earth to the Gossamer Ring of Jupiter.

After Cowboy Gump blissfully retired to his jellybeans back in California, I had the privilege of twice visiting the White House of President Bill Clinton.

Given what Clinton has revealed himself to be; perhaps the less said about those on-the-record visits the better. Suffice it to say here that his White House turned out to be more of a frat house than it appeared to have been during that first visit. By the time the second visit rolled around, Clinton was fighting off an impending trial from House Speaker Rep. Newt Gingrich’s impeachment mob. Beating a retreat to save his lying, cheating skin, President Clinton cut desperate deals that sold the interest of his supporters, chiefly African-Americans, down the river of no return.

In the wake of this sorry trail of White House mediocrity, I found President Obama a fresh and so far principled breadth of intelligent air. He has come in for an unprecedented share of derisive put-downs from all sides, true enough. As friendly forces slash him from behind as "Obambi," and a man without a spine; his enemies of the Tea Party and elsewhere attack him frontally as "The Joker," a closet Muslim, an alien, the village witch-doctor, and, yes, even Adolph Hitler. If contempt from the devil is a form of flattery, President Obama should feel flattered indeed.

At the heart of these attempts at caricature, we find his rattled opponents unwittingly projecting onto him an unmistakable trace of dominance generated from some fearsome combination of charm, mysticism, trickery or just plain bare-knuckled brutality.

This is by no means to say that criticism of the Obama Administration is unjustified. It is instead to point out that the unjustified, over-the-top criticism should not be laughed off as harmless folly. There is far too much at stake here. We are not talking about the dank elements of right-wing fanaticism or the Tea Party that has resorted to sending in the clowns.

As stated earlier, the same 55 percent of fearful, white Americans at the heart of the Obama opposition from Day One continue, no-matter-what, to poll "disapproval" of his every job performance as he continues the first of what they are determined to make his last term in office.

(Official White House Photo by Chuck Kennedy)

So why exactly does Obama scare this particular white majority?

As with most such vitriol it appears that the slur-mongering is but a minor symptom of a base hatred bottomed on ignorance that wreaks havoc upon the psyche of the accuser majority. I suspect we see here a burgeoning, perceived sense of deflated self-worth among people losing a grip on power. Things could get very dangerous

We experience this phenomenon in America whenever yet another deeply-held and artificially enforced social myth of white supremacy falls to the reality of talent equanimity.

We witnessed the collapse of white supremacy in professional baseball, for example, when Jackie Robinson desegregated the "white man’s game" played in the Major Leagues. What President Obama endures is child’s play compared to what the Brooklyn Dodgers second baseman was put through on and off the field in major American cities no deeper South than St. Louis.

Here, for the first time, was a black professional performing at the highest level on the diamond a game that for generations white men had taught their sons—and fundamentally believed themselves—that only they could achieve. Jackie Robinson turning the double play or smashing a triple to centerfield shook the very psyche of this sterile majority of white fans. They had been conditioned in a twisted way to believe that the Gods had chosen only those of their racial stock to perform "America’s favorite pastime" at an ascribed level of excellence.

As Jackie Robinson was a troubling nightmare to white baseball fans back in the ‘40’s; so too is the first African-American playing the U.S. Presidential game in the White House—over the national objection of a 55 percent majority of white voters.

The Obama Presidency is indeed a scary and destabilizing trauma to the body politics of middle-aged and senior Americans. Interestingly, younger whites seem nowhere near as bothered by Obama’s racial aspects. Herein resides the hope for the future of this multi-racial republic.

Meanwhile, this generational disconnect has baby-boomer parents and grandparents worried sick about their slipping hold on the reins of political power in this erstwhile democracy. Why else would such citizens fight so hard to prevent a duly-elected, sitting U.S. President from addressing white school children about education?

Why lobby to quarantine the Chief Executive in the White House with such attempts as restricting him to Washington by penny-pinching his domestic and foreign travel budgets, or challenging the expense of his Secret Service security detail at a Broadway play?

Seizing upon this national discombobulating mood of the white majority, rattlesnakes such as Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell have come down out of the hills, fangs bared. This razor-lipped, cracker from Kentucky by way of Tuscumbia, Alabama, has mis-assigned himself the single-minded task of driving President Obama out of the White House, apparently by any means necessary.

In the face of all this, and despite contrary advice from white as well as black losers in politics and media, President Obama maintains that cool, unflappable calculation that got him to the White House in the first place.

"I think that it’s important not to see race behind every disagreement with me," President Obama urged our group of columnists in the Roosevelt Room. "My approach is always to take people at face value." What appears to be a naive granting of innocence to barbarians such as Sen. McConnell may well be Obama’s way of buying time as his younger supporters grow into the fullness of their political and economic power.

Here, folks, clearly is no fool. Obama is rather a driven President who grasps the meaning of his historic role perhaps even better than the wisest of his supporters. Even as he denies racism as a motive force for some of his key opponents, he accepts it for what it is: a dark-force reality beyond his control that cannot be reached by reason.

Thus, it is through sound achievement (one need only tick off the legislation he signed this first half of his term), that President Obama addresses the psychic fear that his success triggers in key opponents—and by such means he escalates that rate of success.

"When Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier in baseball," he told us in the White House, "my suspicion is [that] on a day-to-day basis what he was worrying about was hits—and how was [the] Brooklyn [Dodgers] going. He was thinking about winning games…I tend to be focusing on getting hits and making plays."

Play Ball!

Thoughts On The Fair Sentencing Act of 2010

2010-08-06T21:00:00Z

President Barack Obama signs the Fair Sentencing Act in the Oval Office, Aug. 3, 2010. Joining the President are, from left, Gil Kerlikowske,

Director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy, Attorney General Eric Holder, Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., Rep. Bobby Scott, D-Va.,

Senate Majority Whip Richard Durbin, of Ill., Sen. Jeff Sessions, R-Ala., Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, and Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee, D-Texas,

and Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-SC. (Official White House Photo by Pete Souza)

Les Payne

August 6, 2010

When signing into law that bill reducing disparity in penalties for crack and powder cocaine offenses, President Barack Obama narrowed the “racial” gap in drug sentencing Tuesday by some 82 percent. Yet, he did not close it.

Civil rights leaders struggling mightily for parity under this unjust federal policy filling the prisons overwhelmingly with blacks are premature in celebrating the bill as a total victory. While an improvement, this new legislation now punishes crack cocaine offenders—that cops racially target among black users and sellers in the first instance—by a ratio of 18:1, as compared with those abusing powder cocaine.

On the presidential level, this achievement, as with the health care bill, is another example of Obama surpassing Bill Clinton’s failed efforts, this time in the crucial, criminal-justice area affecting mainly African-Americans. As such, unlike with the health care bill affecting all Americans, the first black president, it was duly noted, made absolutely no public comment during the bill signing.

The savvy political observer understands Obama’s public reticence on such controversial matters given white denial about racism. However, it allows his critics, black and white, to down-play this break-through and continue harping about his alleged lack of sensitivity, especially in wake of the Shirley Sherrod affair.

In a rare show of bi-partisanship, the Fair Sentencing Act was passed by a Congress that the president and his attorney general managed at least to tilt toward fair sentencing. The bill revokes a five-year mandatory sentence for first offenders; and, instead of five grams of crack drawing the same mandatory sentence as 500 grams of powdered cocaine, the new minimum for rock has been set at 28 grams.

The Draconian 100:1 ratio of crack to powder has thus been reduced to a less cruel but still unjust bias of 18:1. Once again, the promise of equal justice remains evasive under the peculiar legislative-judicial system that moves like a glacier when it comes to dispensing parity between white and black citizens.

Race crept into this drug equation at the very inception of the disparate sentencing law in 1986, when, during the drug scourge, lawmakers prosecuted crack cases as the cocaine of choice for blacks and powder as the choice for whites. It was as if upon discovering during Prohibition, say, that blacks drank mainly Colt 45 and whites swigged Coors, the U.S Congress would proceed to enact legislation mandating that persons caught imbibing ’45 would be punished 100 times more severe than those knocking back Coors.

Contrary to law-enforcement assumptions, some 24 percent of crack cocaine users were reportedly black, and 72 percent were Latino or white, according to a statistical study of 198 counties comprising more than 50 percent of the nation’s population. Yet, the Justice Policy Institute says, "more than 80 percent of defendants sentenced for crack cocaine offenses were African-Americans."

Furthermore, the Institute revealed a national disparity in incarceration rates for drugs overall, despite a pattern showing no appreciable difference between whites and blacks in illegal drug possession, use and sale. Some 8.5 percent of whites were found to use illicit drugs in '02, compared to 9.7 percent for blacks. Despite this similarity, blacks, the report found, were "admitted to prison for drug offenses (at) nearly 10 times the rate for whites."

When signing the omnibus crime bill in his first term, President Clinton left the 100:1 crack-to-powder ratio in tact, despite the staggering numbers of blacks being hauled off to prisons.

This crackdown on young, first-time, non-violent offenders during the Clinton years was devastating. Black juveniles charged during that period jumped to 535,500 in 2000 from 456,072 in 1992. During the same period, black adults in the criminal justice system increased by 276,700 to 2,149,900, most of them drug offenders at various levels.

During a White House interview, I once asked President Clinton about this racially biased 100:1 cocaine sentencing disparity that he had approved. "The situation that exists is unfair, unjustifiable and should be changed," he said. Yet Clinton found no way to change it when he was in the White House. Instead, he resorted inanely to petition the incoming Bush administration to correct this policy of racial bias.

Instead, it took the conservative Supreme Court to whittle at the sentencing excesses under this disparate cocaine law. In the ’07 Kimbrough v. United States case, even Chief Justice John Roberts and Antonin Scalia joined the 7-2 majority ruling against the mandatory “crack/powder disparity,” allowing a Virginia judge to grant a sentence below the “mandated” minimum.

The majority opinion of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg denounced the shaky foundation upon which Congress drafted the ’86 bill. It was based upon the false assumptions, for example, that crack offenders were more likely to be violent; that it was significantly more dangerous and addictive than powder; and that “crack use was especially prevalent among teenagers.”

Already the U.S. Sentencing Commission had concluded that "crack cocaine has not caused the damage that the Justice Department alleges it has." Also, credible medical researchers and criminal justice experts have firmly established that there is no appreciable difference between the effects of crack and powder cocaine use and that the majority of those trafficking in both forms of the drug are nonviolent.

Yet, even though blacks make up less than a quarter of the crack users, some 85 percent of convicted federal crack offenders are black. The racial disparity starts with the arresting officer on the street long before the federal judges peer down at crack offenders they still feel mandated to punish 18 times more severely than someone caught with powder.

The Fair Sentencing Act is not fair. It should be made retroactive; and crack offenders should be punished the same as those convicted of abusing powder cocaine.

Papa Doc Bloomberg Strikes Out

2010-07-20T14:00:00Z

Les Payne

July 20, 2010

.0005!

That’s the batting average of the mayor and his police commissioner patrolling New York City the week George Steinbrenner died. The Yankees owner would have fired them both a thousand times over for weak hitting.

New Yorkers, to their credit, tried to fire their mayor by twice voting to limit his terms. He overrode this popular will, however with the rubberstamp consent of the City Council and continues to reign as Papa Doc Bloomberg, mayor, perhaps, for life.

As for the NYPD batting average, the New York Times reported the city’s shameful performance in an eight-block stretch of Brooklyn over a four-year period. The controversial “Stop, Question, Frisk” policy targets this predominantly black Brownsville area “at a rate unmatched anywhere else in the city.”

The city-wide program, according to the Times, is “most urgently meant to get guns off the streets.” Yet, “the arrest rate is less than one percent…in the more than 50,000 stops since 2006, the police recovered 25 guns.” The Times’ estimate of “less than 1 percent” understates the statistical rate of gun detection by a factor of more than a thousand!

Recovering a single gun in Brownsville requires the NYPD to stop, question and frisk an astounding 2,080 persons—often provoking and harassing such citizens and occasionally shooting them dead in Brooklyn and elsewhere. Meanwhile, the gun discovery rate of .0005 could likely be matched were cops randomly to frisk preachers, rabbis and Catholic priests, to say nothing of college deans, hacks, or Wall Street brokers.

So why in a supposedly open society promising all residents civil liberties are Bloomberg and Commissioner

Raymond Kelly violating the rights of innocent citizens to move freely about?

Clearly, the police state sweeps subjecting Brownsville —and other so-called “high-crime rate” neighborhoods with non-white populations—little serve the official purpose of keeping guns off the streets. The buy-back gun program, by comparison brought in some 600 weapons in Brooklyn just last Saturday.

Last year alone the NYPD stopped and questioned some 580,000 residents across the city, over 90 percent of them non-white, some 55-percent non-Hispanic blacks. With the overwhelmingly white force policing a city only 35 percent so, too many of these officers tend to view most black males as suspicious criminal types.

Thus, some 95 percent of those the NYPD stopped and frisked could not be hauled off to jail no matter how mightily the apprehending officer struggled to find weapons, drugs, contrabands, outstanding warrants or even over-due child-support payments. Still, Mayor Bloomberg and his police commissioner allowed no such innocence to go unpunished.

An even more pernicious City practice kept electronic NYPD records of the names of all innocent residents stopped and let go. The aggressive Bloomberg-Kelly axis strongly urged Gov. David Paterson to veto a bill outlawing such record-keeping, without providing a scintilla of evidence showing that such files, which clearly violate citizens’ rights, helped to reduce crime.

Mayor Bloomberg argues that if one life is saved, despite, apparently, the massive infringement of civil liberties guaranteed under the Constitution, then the massive police sweeps are justified. (This is a point Josef Stalin might have made.) In fact, the mayor and police commissioner have presented no evidence that stop-and-frisk has saved a single life despite the cost.

After reviewing City data supporting maintenance of the police files as essential to crime fighting, Gov. Paterson said the evidence “overwhelmingly’ proved the opposite. Even the Times news story stated that the supporting cases offered “provide strong evidence that the stop-and-frisk data played a less than essential role—and sometimes hardly any role at all.”

To his great credit, Gov. Paterson signed the bill last week that ended the police-state, record-keeping of massive files on innocent, law-abiding citizens. The chief offense of these overwhelmingly black and Hispanic residents appear to have been that they wandered under the suspicious gaze of jittery, overzealous, cops who would have difficulty distinguishing between Creflo Dollar and 50-Cent in his street-running days.

Meanwhile, the NYPD is free to go not so merrily about misidentifying massive numbers of innocent targets to be stopped, questioned, frisked; and if history serves, their names will be placed in some secret police data bank, despite the newly signed state law.

Just watch!

WBAI radio-host Earl Caldwell and I discussed the broader police intent in Brownsville sweeps and the broader implications for black and Hispanic youth across the city over which Bloomberg presides.

Let’s go to the audio tape.....

Limbaugh Mischaracterizes Steinbrenner's Legacy

2010-07-15T11:00:00Z

GETTY IMAGES

Les Payne

July 15, 2010

George Steinbrenner was saluted in death by a “recovering” drug addict, one Rush Limbaugh, as a “cracker” who made black players rich while firing “a bunch of white guys as managers left and right.”

The Limbaugh eulogy seems a sure sign that the illicit OxyContin addiction that likely made him deaf has clearly numbed him to shame. The penchant for lying, however, is a preexisting condition.

Gloating inaccuracies about the departed owner of the New York Yankees moved me to violate one of my rules of commentary: never kick a dog even when he’s up, especially a mangy one frothing at the mouth.

Unfortunately, Limbaugh’s untimely comment deserves attention this time because the base sentiment is deeply held by millions of Americans who swoon on every word that falleth from the Talkmeister’s lips.

First off, Limbaugh was born in Missouri and should know that, unlike himself, Ohio-born Steinbrenner—who owned the “Yankees” for crying out loud—is not technically a “cracker.” In terms of white-racist consciousness, again, it is Limbaugh, not Steinbrenner, who tops the leader-board.

As for black players, the Yankees owner did not make them millionaires. Steinbrenner earned his billions, and his teams won 7 World championships along the way, by paying the going rate for “free agents.” And if anyone, along with the players’ marketable skills, made this value assessment a reality—it was Curt Flood.

This superb centerfielder, who helped the St. Louis Cardinals win three pennants in the 1960’s, successfully challenged the reserve clause in court that had allowed owners to treat players as chattel property. (Some critics of the LeBron James decision would return sports to this human-as-commodity age when management was totally free to bind and loose labor as it desired.)

In Steinbrenner’s case, Herr Limbaugh, the Yankees paid million-dollar salaries to far, far more white players over the years than blacks. It is the peculiar impulse of bigots like Limbaugh to single out successful African-Americans in such cases as undeserving and to imply that their earnings are diverted from due compensation of privileged white players.

In his post-mortem salute to Steinbrenner, Limbaugh protests that the Boss, as he was commonly called, “fired a bunch of white guys as managers left and right." Here the radio lie-addict nods off under a near overdose.

While it’s true that Steinbrenner fielded some 20 managers in 27 years, firing Billy Martin a record 5 times; all of those he hired and fired—fully 100 percent--were white. Thus, the Boss can be criticized for firing too many managers; he cannot however be indicted for firing too many white managers which suggests that he fired them because they were white. As always, the toxicity of Limbaugh’s race bigotry gets the better of him.

If anything, the Boss could be criticized for never hiring an African-American to manage the Yankees; but Limbaugh, of course, won’t go there. And Steinbrenner’s record should not be laid to rest on this bitter note.

So committed to winning was this Yankees owner that ambition often blinded him even to standard patterns of racist practices in sports. When the shipbuilding tycoon brought his Cleveland Pipers into the American Basketball League, for example, Steinbrenner hired the first black head coach at the professional level of this game, allowing John McLendon to make sports history.

As one of the last baseball teams to desegregate its lily-white roster, the Yankees were not exactly a paragon of fairness when Steinbrenner took over as principal owner in 1973. Inserting such black thunder in the line-up as Reggie Jackson, sometimes starting as many as six non-Hispanic blacks, Steinbrenner revived the lackluster franchise and once again made the Yankees World Champions.

Granted, this towering man of excess was not shy about letting his team know who’s The Boss; but unlike Limbaugh, he was not concerned about winning with whites only; Steinbrenner was obsessed with winning as an absolute birthright, period.

Say It Ain't So, Bill!

2010-07-14T21:00:00Z

GETTY IMAGES

As posted on TheRoot.com

Les Payne

July 12, 2010

As the dirt settles on Robert Byrd's grave, let us reflect on the wisdom of a former U.S. president offering a post-mortem alibi for the man who began his public service as the Exalted Cyclops of the murderous Ku Klux Klan.

''They mention that he once had a fleeting association with the Ku Klux Klan, and what does that mean?'' Clinton said at Byrd's funeral on July 2. ''I'll tell you what it means. He was a country boy from the hills and hollows of West Virginia. He was trying to get elected. And maybe he did something he shouldn't have done, and he spent the rest of his life making it up. And that's what a good person does. There are no perfect people. There certainly are no perfect politicians.''

Byrd was hardly just "trying to get elected.'' First off, he recruited dozens of terrorists for the Klan over a rather lengthy span in his 20s and into his 30s. Furthermore, one did not attain the key ranks of Kleagle and Exalted Cyclops in this lynching bee with a mere ''fleeting association.''

Notwithstanding the racism of Byrd's era, Clinton is quite inaccurate in suggesting here that getting elected required a hooded apprenticeship in a cow pasture under a bedtick. Sympathizing with the Klan may well have been de rigueur for Southern politicians on the make; however, few actually took up shotgun and fagot with the zealotry of Robert Byrd, who recruited some 150 friends and associates into his klavern in the early '40s.

Was this wrong? Bill Clinton is not quite sure. ''And maybe he did something wrong,'' the former president hedged during his eulogy. It depends, I suppose, on what your definition of ''kill the niggers'' is. Yes, Bill Clinton, we're talking murderous provocation here.

So common was the abduction and terrorist killing of black men during the '40s that it was not until Jan. 2, 1954, that the Washington Post could editorialize that for the first time, the nation had gone two years without a reported lynching in the New South. Taking this downturn as an apparent affront, Mississippi racists lynched Emmett Till the very next year, followed by an epidemic of Klan murders throughout the South in the wake of the Brown v. Board decision and the civil rights movement that it inspired.

Where, Mr. Clinton, was your ex-Klansman Byrd in all this? The West Virginian politician opposed President Harry Truman's desegregation of the U.S. Army, having written a 1944 letter to arch-racist Sen. Theodore Bilbo of Mississippi, declaring: ''I shall never fight in the armed forces with a Negro by my side ... Rather I should die a thousand times, and see Old Glory trampled in the dirt never to rise again, than to see this beloved land of ours become degraded by race mongrels, a throwback to the blackest specimen from the wilds.''

Flame-throwing such racial vitriol for nigh on a half century, Sen. Byrd opposed every attempt to evolve the United States into a non-racial democracy -- including the mid-1960s civil and voting rights acts. He staged a 14-hour, 13-minute personal filibuster of the act when it came before the Senate in 1964.

Alas, it was this empowerment of black voters in West Virginia, as in Alabama with George Wallace and other Dixiecrat states, that likely moved Byrd to tone down his racist activity in public. His conversion, so-called, was not due to altruism and certainly not to Christianity, since he was a churchgoing Exalted Cyclops during his hellbent days of controlling Negroes with extreme prejudice.

After Byrd dropped out of the Klan, Bishop Clinton claimed that he ''spent the rest of his life making it up. And that's what a good person does.'' However, as recent as 1997, we find the senator regretting not so much the error of his ways as the happenstance of his getting caught up in a blow-back effect. ''Be sure you avoid the Ku Klux Klan,'' Sen. Byrd offered as advice to young white politicians on the make. ''Don't get that albatross around your neck. Once you've made that mistake, you inhibit your operations in the political arena.''

Would the Klan have been an albatross to Byrd had Negroes not won the vote? Probably not. Otherwise, according to Clinton, he would not have joined the terrorists in the first place. This flexibility of ethics and morals is precisely what troubles decent people about former President Bill Clinton. His values, such as they are, always seem to come down to a quibble. Did he evade the draft? Smoke pot? Have sex with that woman, Monica Lewinsky? And in the present case, wasn't Byrd indeed a committed white Southerner of his time whose life's work, as that of, say, George Wallace, was for the most part a racist attack upon the best interests of African Americans?

By granting Sen. Byrd a pass, Clinton, I submit, accommodates the senator's peculiar race behavior extending decades beyond his days as Exalted Cyclops. Instead of excusing the West Virginian, the understanding Arkansan should have called him out -- a step Clinton is disinclined to take.

Similarly, during a '95 White House interview, I asked President Clinton if he would name a single white racist other than David Duke and Mark Fuhrman. The politician who made his reputation opposing racism and its practitioners refused to cite a single offender individually. White Americans freely admit that racists still exist, but no one appears to know any personally.

A clear accounting of Clinton on this matter is important here because he once enjoyed unqualified black support but let it slip away on the '08 campaign trail, chiefly because of what Murray Kempton might have called his Machiavelomaniacal self-centeredness. It is not so much that Clinton lies; we all do. It is rather that he shifts about on tectonic plates of dishonor.

Even when caught red-handed, he admits to no foul deed, no matter who else gets hurt. The issue seems always to depend upon what your definition of ''is'' is. Self-righteousness and a seeming immunity to shame are hallmarks of the Clintonian style that have seen him through the good times and the bad.

While being ''too smart to admit anything'' made Clinton a winner with voters, Kempton once condemned him as a sinner with ''God frequently on [his] lips and a habitual tolerance for the seven deadly sins contending for attention within ... LBJ was haunted by his sins, Clinton has absolutely no sense of guilt.''

So now Bishop Clinton, world without end, has granted the dearly departed senator an Indulgence, absolving Byrd of violent sins committed against a people left out of this saintly bestowal of grace.

The Caldwell Chronicles – as Broadcast on WBAI 99.5FM NYC - June 25, 2009

2010-06-27T12:00:00Z

President Barack Obama meets with Army Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the Commander of U.S.Forces in Afghanistan,aboard

Air Force One in Copenhagen,Denmark on Oct.2, 2009

Les Payne featured on

The Caldwell Chronicles with Earl Caldwell

as broadcast on WBAI 99.5FM in N.Y.C.

Earl Caldwell and Les Payne have a discussion abou tjournalism, the military and President Barack Obama's replacing Army Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the Commander of U.S. Forces in Afghanistan,with General David Petraeus.

Denzel Brings His "A" Game To August Wilson's "Fences"

2010-06-22T20:03:00Z

Photographs by Joan Marcus

Les Payne

June 22, 2010

The performance of Denzel Washington is so insightful in August Wilson’s bitingly authentic play about black life that it is downright surprising, though quite fitting, that the actor won a Broadway “Tony.”

Authenticity usually gets the black artist nowhere with top awards judges soaked in what passes for white culture. Such shameless, self-absorption leaves little room for fair judgment especially of those considered outsiders. Such actors, starting with Hattie McDaniel, Oscar winner for "Gone With the Wind” and running with few exceptions down through Halle Berry and “Precious” Mo’Nique; the strong black actor is expected to play the demeaned character then crawl into the judgment hall hopefully to get rewarded.

Denzel Washington was skipped over, accordingly, for his authentic portrayal of Ruben “Hurricane” Carter, a twice-convicted boxer so convinced of his innocence that he bedazzled everyone who listened. Instead of rewarding that brilliant interpretation of a black man in full, Hollywood gave its “Training Day” Oscar to Denzel for casually playing the most corrupt cop in Los Angeles as a despicable black detective; so much for true-life in the LAPD.

In the current Broadway run of “Fences,” Denzel returns to his “first love” in a role made famous by one of his stage heroes. Nonetheless, he probes a rich vein of Wilson’s ’85 Pulitzer Prize winning work that was largely overlooked or incompletely explored by the great James Earl Jones in the original production. (Tip of the hat to the Tony’s for also selecting “Fences” as this year’s “Best Revival.”)

In the ‘80’s version, the roar-voice power of James Earl Jones amplified the athletic drive of the main character at the expense of his other prowess, leaving Troy Maxson as a washed-up baseball player, chiefly. Troy was hell-bent on getting back up at the plate and taking his swing at life and at death. Leaving little room for his stage wife to breathe air into her character, Jones played the ex-con failing at reforming his life with a wife and son in a performance dominated by the baseball aspects of the play.

However, in the current version, when Denzel’s Troy copped to messing around with another woman, his wife, Viola Davis, grounded him with a powerful response made all the more effective because of the vulnerable way Washington had set his character up.

“We’re not talking about baseball,” Rose countered her husband soaring in one of his sports metaphor, we’re talking about life.

It is precisely upon this greater canvas that the playwright paints his masterpiece. "Fences" is not baseball interpreting life, as in the hands of Jones, but rather art, and God what universal art, interpreting life in the magnificent dialogue of August Wilson.

Set in the 1950’s, "Fences" is a highly intelligent exploration of father-son relations as twisted by society, racism and circumstance, and passed along to succeeding generations. As worked out against the broader interplay of wife-mother, brother and cut-buddy, Denzel brings out more of what Wilson intended than the acting range of James Earl Jones would allow.

Never much by way of a romantic actor, say, Jones lacked Denzel’s range of witty tenderness needed to sell the ex-con’s conversion to solid citizen anchored by a job and his passionate commitment to wife Rose and their son. Thus when Troy Maxson relapses to form and fathers a child outside his marriage his fall from grace is much steeper and more dramatic when he breaks the news to his wife.

“I fooled them, Rose,” said Denzel uttering the same Troy lines Jones directed at those wishing to see him fail. “I bunted. When I found you and Cory and a halfway decent job... . I was safe. Couldn’t nothing touch me. I wasn’t gonna strike out no more. I wasn’t going back to the penitentiary. I wasn’t gonna lay in the streets with a bottle of wine. I was safe. I had me a family. A job. I wasn’t gonna get that last strike. I was on first looking for one of them boys to knock me in. To get me home.”

The confrontation leaves ample room for Rose’s sharp spousal response and Viola Davis earns her Tony slashing away as if with a straight-razor that barely leaves a scar.

Notwithstanding Denzel’s Hollywood celebrity, he, unlike Jones, does not suck all the air from the stage. Rose and the two sons even are allowed to shine through and more fully probe the complexity that August Wilson had in mind with this extraordinary play.

None of this critique is aimed at knocking the Tony-award performance of James Earl Jones—who dare knock “The Great White Hope”--but merely to contrast the contemporary interpretation with the original, as memory serves. Just as Heath Ledger struck a tone as the “Joker” quite different than that of Jack Nicholson’s in “Batman,” Denzel’s “Fences” is a rewarding departure from that played by James Earl Jones.

Still, we need not choose here anymore than we need pick the 10 American plays of August Wilson’s over the 38 Elizabethan works of Shakespeare—let’s just celebrate both masters and resurrect their creations as often as a stage on Broadway or anywhere else becomes available.

Now that’s how that goes!

The World Should Remember Hector Pietersen

2010-06-15T16:00:00Z

Les Payne

June 15, 2010

At about 10:30 a.m. Wednesday, June 16th, South Africa should silence the raucous fan-noise at the World Cup and pay homage to the blood-stained shroud of Hector Pietersen.

On the morning of that day of protest 34 years ago, as Soweto students massed in an open field—an agitated policeman fired a single shot that sent 13-year old Pieterson sprawling in his own blood. He was in the book of martyrs before he hit the ground.

As his buddy in overalls went screaming down the field with Pieterson’s body, the children of Soweto had marked the point of no return for apartheid. Spearheaded by the Boers, the racist white minority had locked away Nelson Mandela and his comrades for a dozen years; and thus they felt the black majority could be suppressed for a thousand years.

But on June 16th, some 20,000 unarmed students stepped forth to challenge the Europeans who stole their land and looted its mineral wealth. Initially, they protested the use of the Boers’ narrow, Afrikaans language as a medium of instruction. The killing of Pieterson ignited the Soweto Uprising that brought in adults and targeted the entire superstructure of racist apartheid.

The Boers exacted a terrible toll in blood as police gunned down hundreds of unarmed African men, women and children who dared rise up against tyranny and barbarism. Blood diamonds, minerals and Krugerrands bought needed U.S. technology and President Reagan—the worst Chief Executive in modern times—offered the racist regime complete White House support under a policy of “constructive engagement.”

Heroic American students of that era broke with the Reagan Administration and pressured Congress into overriding a White House veto and imposing stiff sanctions against South Africa .

Sports—and this is where the 2010 World Cup comes in-- dealt another blow to the solar plexus of this apartheid republic, as decent people around the world forced their governments to alienate this South African assault on all humanity. The national rugby team, the sporting pride of the insufferable Boers, was banned from international competition. And starting in 1964, racist republic of South Africa was banned from all Olympics games.

Destabilized by the revolt at home and going bankrupt under tough international sanction, the apartheid regime was forced to yield. Nelson Mandela and fellow political prisoners were released; their party, the African National Congress, was un-banned and the 350-odd pieces of legislation mandating total separation of the races were stricken from the books.

On the sports front, South Africa , in exchange, was allowed to return to the Olympics in 1992; and its rugby teams once again played overseas. As the Founding Father of the new South Africa , Mandela personified the stamp of dignity granted not only to his South African administration but also to its athletes on the global playing fields.

Thus, the absence of the 91-year old Mandela from the opening ceremony of the 2010 World Cup makes a poetic, if inadvertent statement about the unfinished business of the new South Africa . The majority has gained political authority, true enough, but blacks are quite a ways off from wresting economic independence from the entrenched, settler colony continuing to exploit and hoard the nation’s mineral wealth.

The founding father of the New South Africa, who stepped down as president a decade ago, missed the ceremony as he mourned the death of a 13-year old grandchild killed in an automobile accident. It is a mark of progress that the blood of such youngsters is no longer the price Africans must pay for the liberation of their country.

This price--of political freedom at least--was paid in full by the revolt of the people. It started that fateful morning at 10:30 a.m.; when Hector Pieterson made his way through the teargas wafting over that Soweto field and stood up to face the guns of the police even as they began to flash and roar.

Without Hector Pieterson the world may never have come to know Nelson Mandela; without them both South Africa most assuredly would not be hosting the 2010 World Cup.

What Happened To Artur Davis?

2010-06-07T21:00:00Z

Artur Davis - Eric Schultz / The Huntsville Times

Les Payne

June 7, 2010

When pondering the recent defeat of Artur Davis, I puzzle not so much over the politics of my home-state, as over the compromise of this Democrat vying to become the first black governor of Alabama.

Didn’t Davis learn anything from Barack Obama; or Harvard, even? What about Percy Sutton?

In addition to showing black candidates how to win, generally, Obama blazed a specific, Democratic trail for his fellow Harvard alum to win on in Alabama. Blacks stampeding to the polls constituted 51- percent of the ’08 primary voters when Obama smashed Hillary Clinton there.

With the nomination his for the running, Davis turned his back on this base constituency and spit over his shoulder into their eyes. Ignoring even his fellow black legislators, the four-term congressman refused to attend their political functions while chasing longingly after every such white gathering not burning a cross in a cornfield at midnight.

And in a bold, public turning of his coat, Rep. Davis tauntingly voted against Obama’s national health care bill. Already local, black politicians had smelled enough. The Davis stench drove Birmingham’s first black mayor, Richard Arrington, for example, to endorse the little-known, white, Agriculture Commissioner, proving yet again that African-Americans, as others, vote their interest; though most often, as with Arrington, they have to hold their nose and settle for their near-interest.

As the world now knows, Davis, the odd-on favorite to romp away with his party’s nomination and even to compete in Nov. against the Republican for the state house—was crushed 62-38 percent in the Democratic primary.

Davis has been considered a member of that new and winning generation of Ivy-league trained black politicians that include Obama and Corey Booker, the mayor of Newark, N.J.. Not surprisingly, each candidate tasted bitter defeat at the polls before President Obama laid down the rules for black American candidates, rules that Davis, the Harvard-trained lawyer, flatly refused to follow down in Alabama.

The compromise demands of politics, the Obama rules state, do not permit the African-American candidate to forsake the black community in chasing after white votes. Doing the math, Obama strategists figured that, as with Clinton in ’92 and again in ’96, he could win with a minority white vote—provided he excited black and other voters with the hope of not forsaking them yet again.

Obama won with 43-percent of the white vote and given his ’08 victory margin might have won with less than 40-percent, depending on how these votes were situated regionally. With the demographics of Alabama, Davis could possibly have won the general election in November with 33-percent of the white vote—provided, like Obama, he excited black voters into a historic turnout for him at the polls.

Instead, he panicked and chased single-mindedly after the white vote. In this he recalled not Obama in ’08, but Percy Sutton in 1977. Running for mayor of New York City that year, Sutton initiated his campaign office not in Harlem, his home base, but in white, suburban Queens.

The symbolic abandonment of his base was made real as candidate Sutton, hat in hand, chased hopelessly after the white vote. When someone suggested that his beard made the fair-skinned African-American look Arab, for example, Sutton promptly shaved it away. The abandonment complete, blacks chilled on Sutton, as they did on Davis; and the defeat was sad, sealed and delivered.

And now, just when Harvard was getting over its reputation as spoiling more Negroes than are ruined by bad whiskey—along comes Artur Davis.

A Vietnam Veteran's Reflections On This Memorial Day Weekend

2010-05-29T10:00:00Z

Lt. Les Payne accepts "Best Battery" honors from Ft. Bliss Commanding General, on post parade field. U.S. Army Photograph 6 Oct. 1965

Les Payne

May 29, 2010

Vietnam has been dragged back into the news this Memorial Day weekend not as foreign policy but as a bragging point for a politician on the make who back when it was time to put up—he shut up.

As a Vietnam veteran, I find Richard Blumenthal amusing.

Running for a senate seat in Connecticut, he has been exposed as claiming falsely that he served in Vietnam. Instead, as the New York Times revealed, young Richard hid out in the National Guard after exhausting all non-uniform means to duck the military call up of able-bodied men.

Draft avoidance was common, back then, among patriots immune to shame and irony. These middle-class heroes got the jobs and a career leg up on their brethren who leaped to the cannon roar. Two such opportunists became two-term, U.S. Presidents, one selecting as his number-two, one Cheney, a "hero" who avoided the military draft five times.

Blumenthal’s public boast about Vietnam should have been a tip-off; most veterans hold their tongue about involvement in this particular war.

Thus, I was caught off guard, when at the recent funeral of Lena Horne; a fellow Vietnam veteran asked me if I had been embittered about my battlefield experience. Neither of us had talked much about it over the years.

Perhaps, it was the moving tribute paid to Lena by the octogenarian members of the all-black Tuskegee Airmen that brought it all back. Ms. Horne had sung for the airmen during WWII and became their sepia pin-up girl.

I told my fellow veteran on the steps of St. Ignatius Cathedral that I house no bitter feelings about the war or, for that matter, much feeling about my service at all. Back then, the thought of avoiding the military obligation of citizenship no more crossed my mind than the thought of accepting less than my fair share of the civilian benefits.

It is over this citizenship equation that I part company with the likes of Bill Clinton, Dick Cheney and Richard Blumenthal, running for Sen. Christopher Dodd’s seat.

These narcissistic gluttons—as with the chicken-hawks—consistently place narrow group interests above country and themselves above all else. Yet, this Memorial weekend, each of them—along with the Tea Baggers and the whole of the Republican Party-- will station himself, flag pin in place, hand over heart, yakking some boilerplate about love of country.

As with all males of my family, I was determined to make my parents proud, and to shatter the Army stereotype about black leadership.

“Leadership is not imbedded in the negro (sic) race yet and to try to make commissioned officers to lead men into battle—colored men—is only to work disaster to both,” wrote U.S. Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson in his diary on Oct. 25, 1940. “Colored troops do very well under white officers.” (Substitute “coach” for “officer” and, with rare exception, you have the thinking of most team owners in professional sports in America today.)

As a 24-year old, 1st Lieutenant commanding a 138-man, multi-million dollar Nike Hercules missile unit, I repeatedly won quarterly honors as the “best battery” commander at Ft. Bliss, Texas. Up against seasoned captains, many of them West Pointers, my unit out-performed all others on technical inspections, administration, barracks upkeep, as well as accuracy in tracking and shooting down drones with anti-aircraft Ajax missiles.

White army officers, and more than a few Negroes, who somehow felt—as did Secretary Stimson—that “leadership is not imbedded in (African-Americans),” were irrevocably dumbfounded by my “best battery” commander citations.

Conversely, I was astounded at every turn by the level of white, male mediocrity, which by 2001 would make its way into the White House. Meanwhile, I had to make do with General William C. Westmoreland as my boss during the year I served in Saigon as the army’s version of a journalist.

This son of a South Carolina textile worker, who commanded the 500,000 U.S. troops in Vietnam, had harassed the only black cadet in his ’36 West Point class by giving him the “silent treatment.” Westmoreland and other white classmates didn’t speak to Benjamin O. Davis outside of duty because he was black and they hoped to drive him out.

Avoided like the Ebola plague, Davis never had a roommate, ate alone in the mess hall, and he rode to football games on crowded West Point busses—sitting alone on his bench seat. Despite four years of alienation, the man who became the first African-American general in the Air Force, finished 35th in a class of 278; Westmoreland finished 112th.

North Vietnamese General Vo Nguyen Giap had fun chasing this racist piece of mediocrity from delta to highlands and back again.

As for me, I arrived in Saigon as an Army Ranger Captain at the start of Tet, the Vietnamese New Year. Fireworks, 24-7, were not good for the nerves, however, fear has a short shelf life and we soon became numb even to the sounds of B-52 carpet-bombing.

From that first day to the last, it was clear that U.S. forces did not belong in Vietnam—and I said as much and often. By the hundreds of thousands the GIs arrived with the simple ambition to stay alive and get back to "the world.” LBJ and Westmoreland had ordered them to bend the Vietnamese to the will of Boeing, Raytheon and General Dynamics. No one told them the Vietnamese were unconquerable.

In its naïveté, America loosed its technology against a people about whom it knew zilch. And it trusted execution of that policy to mediocre generals out of West Point. Their nasty campaign against Vietnam ran counter to history and, as with all wars, its inhumanity was waged against what is right.

Conducting war against both history and right at the same time, as John Foster Dulles once counseled, will not achieve victory ever.

The question this Memorial Day weekend is: has America learned this lesson about what’s right--and about history--in Iraq and in Afghanistan?

It does not seem so.

What Is The Role Of Rand Paul?

2010-05-24T12:28:00Z

United States Senate candidate Rand Paul, at a press conference in Frankfort, Kentucky. Rand Paul portrait by

Gage Skidmore 12/30/09

Les Payne

May 24, 2010

Far too much is being made of Rand Paul; and at the expense of the greater threat to civil liberties that African-Americans won on paper only during the mid-1960’s.

Granted, the Republican senate nominee from Kentucky would likely vote to roll back the ‘64 legislation that allowed blacks to eat and drink at private restaurants open to the public. And the racist backwardness of nominee Paul should be avoided at all costs--and him along with it.

However, the bedeviling detail in the pursuit of Rand Paul has the media chase making him something of a scapegoat. Driving out this straight-talking libertarian would not get at the more organized, entrenched, white-racist forces bent on “retaking our country” with stealth.

The little-or-no-government Libertarian Party has long enjoyed a kook license to crack its pots in obscurity. It has been dragged out into the light of day now, as Rand Paul’s distaste for federal action--even against state-sanctioned racism--has intersected with the Tea-Party’s drive to make the first black U.S. president the last.

Unable, or unwilling, to expose the Tea Baggers’ racism by euphemisms, the corporate media could not ignore the blunt spoken bigotry of Rand Paul the libertarian.

Even here, it took the counter-cultured Rachel Maddow, of the somewhat irregular MSNBC, to nail Paul with his own words Wednesday night. By the weekend, much of corporate media, including the New York Times, had confirmed in the Tea Party what had been exposed under the smirk and glower of Rachel Maddow.

This racial defect clearly had been a key, motivating factor for Tea baggers all along; and Paul has now gained a foothold in the Republican Party.

Rand Paul told Maddow that he had concerns about the ’64 Civil Rights Act as it applied to private business. “Asked by Ms. Maddow if a private business had the right to refuse to serve black people,” according to the New York Times, “Mr. Paul replied, ‘yes’” The paper of record wrote that these “views reflect the libertarians philosophy that Mr. Paul and many Tea Party members have embraced.”

Returning to states-rights rule appears to constitute precisely what Tea Party loyalists consider “getting our country back.” And the freaky Rand Paul remains just as insensitive to the barbarism that the pre-1964 system allowed. Their white brethren empowered back then, ran a brutal, undemocratic system that deprived blacks of justice under law, equal protection, liberty, and, yes, even life.

Alabama law, for example, categorically excluded white female nurses from assignments on wards or rooms in hospitals, either private or public, in which male Negro patients were present. Beer and wine in Georgia were sold under racial exclusivity that did not allow merchants to dispense these spirits to blacks and whites "within the same room at any time."

In Florida, the state had to house white and black juvenile delinquents in separate buildings "not nearer than one-fourth mile to each other." White and black, amateur softball players in Georgia were barred from playing on any vacant lot or baseball diamond within two blocks of one used by the other race.

Louisiana had a thing about circuses, requiring that before the two races took their separate places under the Big Top; each had to be processed through a separate ticket booth, "with individual sellers," and said booths "shall not be less than twenty-five (25) feet apart."

In these post-Obama days, the Tea Party would likely go beyond denying African-Americans these rights, and zero in on the ’65 Voting Rights Act that gave them the ballot. It was, after all, the exercise of the black vote that got Barack Obama elected president—despite the 55 percent majority of whites who voted against him.

The inability of this white majority to prevent the election of the nation’s first black president has panicked the Tea Party and its Republican host into thinking—quite falsely—that whites have lost their country. Such unpatriotic fanatics, of course, place racial identity over national identity and purpose.

Just as Paul’s victory exposed the Tea Baggers’ bare-knuckle bigotry, their growing influence within the Republican Party lays bare the racial panic among the white majority that voted overwhelmingly for the goofy Sarah Palin and her pimp-mentor John McCain. (Just imagine this ditzy duo at the helms of the Republic in these trying hours, facing the cataclysmic mess left by the Bush-Cheney Administration.)

While denying Rand Paul a U.S. senate seat strikes a blow for decency, driving him out as a scapegoat only buys time for the cancerous racism spreading unabated within the tissue of the Tea- as well as the Republican Party.

The Clock is ticking.

PANEL DISCUSSION: ETHIOPIAN ART & CULTURE

2010-05-07T16:06:00Z

PANEL DISCUSSION: ETHIOPIAN ART & CULTURE

A panel of experts on Ethiopian visual arts will discuss aspects of the cultural, political, social, and economic forces that have influenced its people and the evolution of their unique art.

Noted scholar, Achamyeleh Debela, an artist himself with a brilliant international reputation, will participate, along with professor Yemane Demissie, of NYU, and Bill Karg, a local art dealer. Filmmaker Haile Gerima, whose latest work, “Teza, is currently running in selected theaters, has also been invited.

An exhibit of some 60 ETHIOPIAN paintings from Addis Ababa highlights the two-day event that is open to the public all day Saturday.

TIME: Saturday, May 8, 1pm-2:30pm

PLACE: Theater, Paley Center, 25 West 52^nd Street,

Manhattan.

Moderator: Les Payne

Panelists: Achamyeleh Debela, PhD, N.C. Central University, Dept. of Art

Professor Yemane Demissie, of NYU

Bill Karg, Contemporary African Art Gallery, NYC

The True Makeup Of The 2010 Tea Party Movement

2010-04-19T12:00:00Z

Les Payne

April 19, 2010

The “overwhelming majority of supporters” of the Tea Party reveal themselves as likely racist, according to data in the latest New York Times/CBS News poll.

This point was not made in the Times headlines saluting the supporters as simply “wealthier and more educated” than the general public. Nor did the story draw such a conclusion. However, the “detailed look at the profiles and attitudes” of the tea baggers went beyond anecdotal musings to indicate that their total dismissal of the 44th U.S. President has less to do with policy than with his race.

Nailing this broad-based sentiment among whites in deep denial about race is never easy. However, poll questions have been designed to detect a prevalence of racism among respondents.

Newsday once subjected white Long Islanders to the Gallup poll consisting of the control question: Do you feel blacks are better athletes? It was paired with four hardcore queries about false notions of blacks’ assumed values, intelligence, attitudes and work ethics. A “yes” on the control question coupled with acceptance of a hardcore negative stereotype indicated that the respondent housed strong “racist” tendencies.

The Gallup poll revealed that some 67-percent of whites in Nassau and Suffolk county were clearly “racist,” a result that shocked Newsday’s top editors. They declined to take the test themselves.

A recent Tea Party rally at the state office building in Suffolk County featured confederate flags on the Island built up after WWII as a series of segregated, white suburban townships. Another reminder of racial attitudes on Long Island showed up in the recent Times/CBS poll.

Question #47 put to the tea-baggers about President Obama is a variation of the standard poll query used to test white respondents for racism:

“Do you think Barack Obama shares the values most Americans try to live by, or doesn’t?”

Some 75 percent of the Tea Party supporters--with little to go on other than that Obama is black--slammed the duly-elected U.S. President as living by a different “value” system than most Americans. This racial bias, as indicated by the report, is overwhelmingly held by the supporters without regard to what Obama might say—or actually do.

This hardcore, “different values” question regarding Obama, while not conclusive singularly, is a strong, trace indicator of racism. Going beyond anecdotal evidence, the Times/CBS poll indicates a very high probability that “an overwhelming majority of the Tea Party supporters” would be graded “racist” by a fairly administered poll keyed to measure such tendencies.

Some 18 percent of all Americans—and thus a higher percentage of white Americans, some one out of four--support the ultra-Conservative “patriots” targeting the sitting U. S. President as a “socialist” who can do nothing right. Only 7 percent, in a poll with a 3-percent “margin of error,” have a “favorable” opinion of this Harvard lawyer-scholar ever eager to please his opponents.

This lily white Tea Party--with a statistically insignificant smattering of quite strange blacks--is made up mainly of middle-aged, married white Republicans who voted for McCain-Palin and get most of their news from Fox-TV.

And God, are they angry.

As the Times story indicated, they grant President Obama no benefit of the doubt, no margin of error, no possibility of learning-curve growth that all other presidents have experienced. For those attuned to polls, this new development about the racial tendencies of the tea-baggers should raise grave concerns about their true motivations and the dangers they pose to domestic tranquility.

There may well be a shit-storm coming.

My Brush With The Pulitzers, Won And Lost

2010-04-11T18:00:00Z

Les Payne

April 11, 2010

When the editor of Newsday phoned to say that I had not won the international Pulitzer Prize for my reporting from South Africa, I snubbed it off until he explained that the ’78 “selection committee” had indeed selected me as the winner.

Thus, I had lost the Pulitzer Prize.

The Advisory Board, headed by the President of Columbia University—which had been the target of determined anti-apartheid student demonstrations--gave no reason for taking away my Pulitzer for reporting on the Soweto uprising. Not surprisingly, this ruling clique gave it to the New York Times, a heavy contributor to the Pulitzer operation in terms both of finance and manpower. (The day may yet arrive when the Times get hauled in under the RICO statute for acting in concert with the Pulitzer Board.)

I recovered sufficiently to tell Editor Tony Insolia on the phone that my Rhodesia-Zimbabwe series, which Newsday had just published in ’78, was even stronger than the 11-part South Africa one. The Board, I said, would get a shot at correcting its error the following year.

Meanwhile, the Pulitzer selection committee, led by Chairman William E. Chilton, III, got angry at being over-ruled and went public—about my lost Pulitzer. It was by no means the first over-turn, there had been others that year; however, Chilton III was the first panelist to dare ignite a scandal over the issue.

The outcry of the International panel held that, as with other committees, the four editors drawn from across the country had been led to believe that they were indeed judging the 60 foreign entries to select a winner. They laid the deception at the feet of the Pulitzer Board.

Newsday loosed its intrepid media specialist onto the scandal and gained access to the Pulitzer Archives. The resulting series of Tom Collins’ reporting didn’t relieve me of my notions about the corrupt practices of the Board and the New York Times. It did, however, inspire certain reforms.

What I did not discover until recently was that my judgment to the editor about the strength of my Zimbabwe series was on the mark. Reading an on-line excerpt from a book by Heinz-Dietrich Fischer, entitled “The Pulitzer Prize Archive, Volume I: International Reporting, 1928-1985,” I found that my seven-part Rhodesia-Zimbabwe series was indeed one of the three finalists the following year.

The Advisory Board, in its wisdom rather than its malfeasance this time, passed me over again for the 1979 Pulitzer for International Reporting.

Publicly, I said little about having that ’78 Pulitzer for South Africa stripped from me without cause or explanation.

Some suggested I might have reacted differently had I not won a Pulitzer four years earlier. In fact, my wife had to talk me out of declining that ’74 Prize, for investigating the international heroin trade, because of a number of misgivings. The most laughable reason, keying on Jean Paul Sartre’s declining the 1964 Nobel Prize for Literature, was that people would view me differently as a winner of this obituary-defining award. (It would have been a serious mistake!)

Privately, I leaped to a pair of conclusions about that lost second Pulitzer, both larger than me, each as ironic as the other.

The first had to do with race.

My 11-part series keying on the Soweto uprising dealt with the African majority struggling against the white racist government of apartheid. And my coverage was not from the usual, white perspective of American journalism that, for example, had earned the ’70 international Pulitzer for Jim Hoagland, of the Washington Post.

Hoagland, in fact, had wandered to Johannesburg during the ‘78 crisis and like other white journalists was barred from entering the black townships such as Soweto—where, slipping undetected by the police, I spent most of my times reporting on the uprising from among the school-aged insurgents and their oppressed parents.

The Post's reports, as with other media, relied on misleading tips from apartheid government officials, white liberals, so-called, black laborers and, occasionally, loose conversations at the bar from a certain Newsday reporter. I first heard the foreign correspondent term “rocket,” from New York Times reporter John Burns, who said his news desk was firing these alerts querying him as to why he was not matching my reporting.

The credibility gap of these other journals was striking. They had all reported, for example, that at most, some “350 blacks” had been killed during the revolt. I tracked down more than 820 individual cases of Africans being killed by the Boers during the disturbances—documenting names, ages, circumstances and dates.

My reporting got me—and Newsday—barred from South Africa for years. However, upon the pending release of Nelson Mandela—after wide-spread student protest had inspired Congress to override President Reagan’s veto and impose economic sanctions against South Africa—the Boers ate crow and telephoned me personally to invite me back. Their intent was that my expulsion gave me the credibility to inform the skeptical that the apartheid regime was indeed turning “irreversibly” away from apartheid—a key demand of the international economic sanctions against South Africa.

Not only was that lost Pulitzer about racism in South Africa , it would have been the first such award for an individual reporter. The Board not only took the ’78 Pulitzer from me, it also skipped over the jury’s third choice, Leon Dash, of the Washington Post—another African-American. The Times reporter given the award, Henry Kamm, was placed 4^th on the list of the Selection Committee, well out of the running.

Thus the Church of Journalism was able to continue the mistaken notion that African-Americans, and certainly at the international level, were just not capable of reporting with the top achievers of the newspaper craft. Upon hearing that my Pulitzer was taken away, James “Scotty” Reston, whom I had admired until that moment, said to me at a Columbia University award ceremony: “young man, you’ll just have to await your turn.”

I took this comment from the old fool, perhaps mistakenly, as a broader insult to black journalists. Indeed, my ‘74 Pulitzer was won as a member of a team with two white investigative journalists; and, as a reporter who eschewed even-double by-lines, I was determined to win a Pulitzer singularly.

In the opinion of the 1978 Pulitzer Committee for International reporting, despite the actual award to Henry Kamm of the New York Times---I achieved my lofty goal (and may well have repeated it again the following year).

So, during this week of the Pulitzer Awards, and in appreciation of that courageous committee that had the courage to stand up and publicly defy the Pulitzer Board, I salute each member of the panel:

William E. Chilton III, Charleston Gazette, West Vir.; Michael T. Grehl, Commercial Appeal, Memphis , Tenn. ; Allan M. Lazarus Times, Shreveport, La.; and Celestine Sibley, Atlanta Constitution, Atlanta, Ga.

Thank you.

Landmark Health Care Reform - Yes, He Can!

2010-03-25T00:00:00Z

President Barack Obama signs landmark health care legislation into law Tuesday, March 23. White House Photo, Pete Souza, 3/23/10

Les Payne

March 24, 2010

The president who campaigns with the big speech used 22 pens Tuesday in signing the historic health care bill that proved he can govern with the outreach as well as the arm twist.

Applying torque at the last minute to reluctant members of his own party, President Obama eclipsed the 216 House votes needed to sign into law what some call the most sweeping health overhaul since Medicare. The controversy became reality without a single GOP vote, and this after Obama exhausted all means to reason with the party—even trekking in January to the caves of the House Republicans' retreat in Maryland.

Some have long considered Obama’s outreach to the GOP a fool’s errand; but it has now exposed the opposition party as foregoing all claims to common decency. Opting out of the etiquette of patriotism, the Republicans, not unlike Fox interviewer Bret Baier, flatly refuse to extend the minimum courtesies traditionally accorded Obama’s 43 predecessors to the office of the presidency.

It remains to be seen what Obama will make of this total rejection by the GOP; but his dramatic success with health care seems to have narrowed the gap with the progressive wing of his own party. Some Democrats were brought around with promises. Rep. Dennis Kucinich, the reluctant radical with no known, sell-out price, had to be walked to the precipice and made to peer over into the abyss.

The Ohio radical had declared on TV his resolute opposition to the health bill with no “public option.” Normally, under such conditions, this cold-eyed “Great Dissenter” with the concrete legs stays put. Opposing the previous House bill with 76 progressives, for example, Kucinich ended up as the last radical voting “no.”

Last week the dissenting Kucinich was visited by President Obama who staged public rallies in Ohio and called out his name from the podium. It was not so much a salute as the president speaking over the congressman’s head to get constituents to put a bug in Kucinich’s ear. Ohioans didn’t mince words. Hedging his bets, Obama took Kucinich for a ride on Air Force One.

In the White House parlance, this is called the “treatment,” with President Lyndon B. Johnson considered the past master.

“Its tone.” wrote one LBJ biographer, “could be supplication, accusation, cajolery, exuberance, scorn, tears, complaint and the hint of a threat…[Johnson] moved in close, his face a scant millimeter from his target, his eyes widening and narrowing, his eyebrows rising and falling. ..the genius of analysis made The Treatment an almost hypnotic experience and rendered the target stunned and helpless.”

One cannot imagine President Obama executing the LBJ “treatment” as captured in the 1964 photograph of the president glowing down at Richard Russell, the racist U.S. Senator from Georgia.

Yet, after the Obama Treatment, Rep. Kucinich displayed all the tell-tale signs of a politician who had undergone “an almost hypnotic experience that rendered the target stunned and helpless.” We’ll have to wait for the biographer’s account to get the details, but it seems that Kucinich now knows how Sen. Russell must have felt.

“This is not the bill I wanted to support,” a seemingly dazed Kucinich said at his Wednesday press conference announcing that he had totally reversed his opposition to the health care proposal. The session with the president moved the staunch radical to square up with his kitchen cabinet consisting of close friends and his wife, Elizabeth.

“Something is better than nothing,” is the haunting refrain Kucinich said he got from constituents after Obama left town. “One can argue with that,” he said, making it clear that he does. There were also expressions of “a real desire for our president to succeed,” the congressman repeated. “If the [bill] fails it is damaging not only to him but to the country.”

This deep concern about country and the success of this president are precisely the boundaries that separate the radicals on the Left from the GOP on the Right.

Since LBJ pushed through the Voting and Civil Rights bills of the ‘60’s, the Republicans, starting under President Ronald Reagan, have hardened into a party of bigots in denial. They have abandoned the unifying pursuit of the broad national interest in favor of narrow, white-class privileges.

Nothing makes the party crazier than the ’08 election of the first African-American president—that the 55-percent, white voting majority was unable to defeat. No matter the content of Obama’s style or character, his mere presence in the White House drives GOP fears beyond reason and patriotism even.

Thus, unlike Kucinich, say, who could be appealed to on grounds of national interest or respect for the office of the presidency, the lock-stepping Republicans are beyond hope. They will cast not a single vote offering the slightest comfort to the Obama Administration—no matter the impact such an act would exert on the broad range of the American people.

“It’s a dangerous moment,” Kucinich said on Pacifica Radio. “There’s been such an effort to delegitimize [Obama’s] presidency right from the beginning that…standing at the sidelines is not an option right now…you have to maturely look at the situation as it is…and not lose total legitimacy by taking everything over a cliff.”

The GOP seems hell-bent on taking the republic over the very precipice President Bush left the nation careening toward when he retired to Texas. Kucinich was persuaded to take a deep breath—and act not upon his radical beliefs and private obsessions, or even tribal interests.

As a practitioner of the art of compromise, the duly-elected, Ohio progressive—deeply committed to single-payer, national insurance—decided to buy time by voting for the possible while continuing to work for what he considers the ideal.

In his new and unexpected maturity, Rep. Kucinich was also a winner fully deserving of one of those 22 ballpoint pens.

Recovering From An Ill-Fated Trip Down The Stairs

2010-03-10T11:00:00Z

Les Payne

March 9, 2010

As I ran down the steps my heels slipped, whipping my legs skyward with such force that the left knee snapped like a twig. There was no doubt about the trauma the surgeon later compared to a hand grenade exploding inside the muscle and tendon.

Cold and helpless on the fifth step, I backed into the brownstone on my haunches and started the cover-up. Accepting only sympathy and an ice-pack, I rushed my wife off to work. I didn’t dare look at the knee speaking to me in throbs.

“I got this;” I muttered, faithful to race and gender. What’s the fun of being a black man if you can’t wax stupid about your health issues? The best advice I ever ignored as an editor came from Derrick Jackson, a vegan reporter who runs marathons. “We black men,” he cautioned, “have got to start taking better care of ourselves.” Sure.

Sneaking a peak at the wounded knee, I phoned two buddies about the bunching not the ache. Both journalists said that time was "wasting". Bill Rhoden, an ex-athlete who covers major league sports and head-knockings, said that muscle tears were not known to heal themselves, even under ice. My daughter, Tamara, under advice of my doctor, rushed me to the emergency room of Columbia- Presbyterian Hospital.

I chatted up the witty, examining physician, who skated non-emergency procedure and ordered up an MRI “What are they gonna do, fire me?” said the seasoned physician who took a special interest. Walking-wounded patients with neither punctures nor broken bones were to be released onto the street. The MRI from my comedic doctor who cared got me committed. It probably didn’t hurt that I have private coverage with an excellent insurance company.

The orthopedic surgeon, who heads the hospital’s sports medicine team, re-tied my quadriceps tendon with a string threaded through a hole drilled in the bone. As such procedures go, the operation reportedly went well.

The pain did not go so well. The four-hour waves were countered with a prescription for enough Oxycodone pills to keep Rush Limbaugh smiling throughout Lent. The Harlem pharmacist who hawked this legal drug demanded an extra $5 as a nuisance fee for “re-stocking” this “Limbaugh” painkiller. I went cold-turkey through all but the early, tsunami throbbings.

Despite all--and the ER ordeal will hold for another day--I remain grounded with an immobilized knee joint and crutches for the next five weeks. It just might turn out that the incident was a blessing in disguise.

Already, I’ve talked about the injury—and important matters--with Earl Caldwell on his radio show; so let’s go to the audio tape: