From The Niagara Falls Reporter
By Jim Hightower

Times are hard.

How hard, you ask? Well, you’ll be glad to know that professional economists have now reached a conclusion: America is technically in a recession. Of course, millions of Americans have known this for months, since they’ve lost jobs, businesses, homes Ñ and faith in economists.

While the professors pored over their reams of data, plenty of real-life indicators were shouting that, yes indeedy, the economy sure enough is in a heap of hurt. Start with this indicator: abandoned boats.

Thousands of vessels have been turning up in harbors, on beaches and on other waterfronts around the country Ñ minus any owners. They’ve been ditched. These are not junkers. They are fully functioning pleasure boats that have become money-sucking burdens to would-be mariners who find themselves sinking in today’s economic whirlpool. They are also commercial craft (trawlers, shrimp boats and such) that can no longer earn their keep because of the disastrous decline in America’s fishing market.

Why not just sell them? No market. As one marina owner notes, “You can just forget trying to sell a power boat right now. No one is buying.”

Most boats also have very little scrap value, and it’s expensive to haul them to a proper dump. So, many owners are slipping their rigs into a marina or river, removing the ID numbers, maybe even sinking them and scooting away.

Read more Sinking Boats

From True Blue Liberal
By Sherwood Ross

Who says there are no slaves in America? The greatest domestic issue facing President-elect Obama is not the bailout of the bankers and insurers but the task of lifting tens of millions of hard-working American wage-slaves out of dire poverty. These are the folks who hold one- and sometimes two or even three low-paying jobs, work their tails off 60 hours or more a week, and are still stuck in poverty on payday with no hope of climbing out.

Indeed, if enough workers were getting paid a living wage Wall Street and Detroit would not find themselves begging Washington for billions. Homeowners would have enough money to pay their mortgages and buy new cars. Today’s crisis is the bitter payback for decades of corporate greed. As former Labor Secretary Robert Reich has written, “Most of what’s been earned in America” in the past 35 years “has gone to the richest 5 percent.” Result: 37 million Americans are said officially to live in poverty but Catholic Charities of Saint Paul-Minneapolis notes a more realistic accounting puts the poor at 50 million.

During the Bush regime, five million more Americans slid into poverty, and the unemployment figure, charitably put at 6.5% (but actually much higher counting discouraged workers,) hit a 14-year high in October. And at least five million people are working part-time because they can’t find full-time jobs. What’s more, those fully employed have seen their overtime pay disappear and their working hours shrink as demand tanks for their goods and services. Each day, thousands of pink slips are being handed out.

Poverty is so virulent, there are 18,000 children sleeping in homeless shelters in New York City every night and 1.7-million New Yorkers are eligible for food stamps. “Twenty-five percent of all families with children in New York City—that’s 1.5 million New Yorkers—are trying to make it on incomes that are below the poverty threshold established by the federal government,” writes Bob Herbert of The New York Times. In Albuquerque, N.M., the Democratic Party is asking for 2,500 coats for public school children sleeping in cars or under bridges. Nationally, 21 percent of U.S. Hispanics and 24 per cent of African-Americans subsist in poverty. Read the rest of this entry »

From The Baltimore Sun
By Benjamin Todd Jealous

I looked around as the television screen flashed: “Obama projected winner of the presidency.” Some stood, in shock, unable to even applaud. Others hooted, high-fived, cheered and hugged, congratulating each other on what was obviously a communal victory. But it was the third response that was most captivating. They melted - some to the floor, some against the wall, some into another person’s arms. They sobbed with the force of centuries, unleashing tears of joy they never thought they’d get the chance to shed.

It couldn’t be real, could it? We couldn’t have overcome generations of prejudice and a legacy of slavery to elect a black American to the presidency, could we? There was a woman standing near me who, with pleading eyes, kept begging for reassurance. “It’s real, right? He won, right? They can’t take it away, right?”

No one can take it away. This moment was centuries in the making and the net result of three different movements. It cannot be taken away because it was not given. It was earned.

Youth turned out in droves. The 18- to 24-year-olds routinely dismissed as apathetic proved their worth and weight this election. They broke for Barack Obama 66 percent to 32 percent, a 34-point gap that contributed significantly to his victory.

This sort of preferential gap by age was unprecedented. The average gap from 1976 to 2004 was less than 2 points, with young people generally echoing the division of older demographics. Not this time. Young people disproportionately knocked on doors, worked phone banks, and posted Facebook messages - rallying for the first candidate of their lifetimes who actually spoke to them. They join the youth who came before them, in the Vietnam War protests and the civil rights era, to agitate for social progress. It’s a movement that deserves partial credit for the tremendous victory we celebrate.

Read more Further to Go

From The Boston Globe
By Derrick Z. Jackson

In calling President-elect Barack Obama a “house Negro,” Al Qaeda missed the memo from Grant Park. Before Obama’s victory speech in Chicago, the crowd of 125,000 people said the Pledge of Allegiance. In my 53 years I have never heard such a multicultural throng recite the pledge with such determined enunciation, expelling it from the heart in a treble soaring to the skies and a bass drumming through the soil to vibrate my feet. The treble and bass met in my spine, where “liberty and justice for all” evoked neither clank of chains nor cackle of cruelty, but a warm tickle of Jeffersonian slave-owning irony: Justice cannot sleep forever.

Spontaneous street bursts of the pledge and the national anthem came from notoriously liberal Madison, Wis., and the People’s Republic of Cambridge. The day after the election, children claimed they said the pledge in school like they never said it before, in places like majority-black Washington, which still does not have a vote in Congress, and Memphis, where Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated.

Eleven days after the election, University of Washington political scientist Christopher Parker stood for the national anthem and the unfurling of the American flag before the Washington-UCLA football game in Seattle. Parker, an African-American, served in the Navy for 10 years.

“In the Navy we were conditioned to revere the flag, but knowing what it often stood for, it was a tortured feeling,” Parker said over the telephone. “I’ve often had a hard time saying the words. But as I watched the flag being unfurled, time kind of slowed down. I thought of the race speech (by Obama), the Democratic National Convention, and the crowd in Denver. I thought about him at Grant Park. I felt free to be proud, free not to be angry. I can actually say the words. I’m thinking, ‘Oh, I guess it’s OK to be an American now.’ ”

Read more OK

From The Boston Globe
By Derrick Z. Jackson

Observers of African-American participation in politics are gushing over the long-term implications of the election of Barack Obama as president. “What we saw was really the emergence of the first multiracial, intergenerational, multiethnic political coalition of the 21st century,” Wade Henderson, president and CEO of the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, told the Trotter Group of African-American newspaper columnists this week. “It reflects the diversity of the country today . . . the trend line suggests that the coalition that Barack Obama and his supporters helped forge is unique, different, and recreated the political landscape. That’s why this is a transcendent, watershed election.”

David Bositis, a senior analyst at the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, the nation’s leading African-American think tank, detailed the collapse of Richard Nixon’s “Southern Strategy” that the Republicans have relied on for four decades. It did not matter that only 10 percent and 11 percent of white voters, respectively, voted for Obama in Alabama and Mississippi and white Americans nationwide still voted for Obama 55 percent to 43 percent. Bositis said Obama’s explosive turnout of voters of color and younger voters, educated voters, and independents and moderates of all colors made it so that Deep South white voters lost “the ability to bring the rest of the country along with them.”

Then there was scholar Ron Walters of the University of Maryland, deputy campaign manager for Jesse Jackson’s 1984 presidential bid. “I am hopeful this can be a return to the politics of human investment,” Walters said. “The war, the economic crisis are crystalizing into a very unique moment in American history. Very unique moment. I would argue the most unique moment in American history in terms of an election . . . Barack Obama was almost a perfect match for that moment.”

Read more Politics

From The Free Press
By William John Cox

Against all odds, American voters have elected a mixed-race, multi-cultural young man, who was born in modest circumstances, as their president to lead them through an economic and military crisis that threatens the future of their democracy.

Barack Obama campaigned on a platform of “Change”; however, the fact of his election proves that America has already changed.

I was born in my grandmother’s farmhouse in West Texas almost 68 years ago, and my father often said every American boy had a chance to be president, but I’m certain he never imagined the boy could be black.

I was cared for by a middle-aged African-American woman named Ora, and her husband, Tom, worked in our fields. I don’t recall where they lived, but it was probably in one of the barns. I do remember my father coming in the house one day to get his shotgun. He was angry because Tom had “talked back” to him, but my mother restrained him and the couple moved away.

I started to school when I was five years old after my mother died, and our school bus passed by the Bradford Colored School, a small frame building at the end of a dirt road in a cotton field.
Read the rest of this entry »

From The BBC News
By Kevin Connelly

There is no shortage of things which set this vast, eternally surprising country apart - strawberry-flavoured cream cheese, valet parking and a lack of respect for the usefulness of the kettle are three that spring to mind.

But the greatest difference of all is surely the fact that the founding idea of the state is to guarantee the right to the pursuit of happiness.

That is a brilliant piece of phrase-making, because it hints that the dour, crotchety old revolutionaries who wrote the Bill of Rights knew in their hearts that happiness is as elusive as a moose in hunting season.

You are not guaranteed to go to your eternal reward with a smile on your face, but you are encouraged, even inspired, to try.

So this is a place of dreamers and the idea of that great pursuit lies at the heart of the American dream.

Curious coalition

It is an idea that drew plenty of members of my own family here in the past - even though most of them went straight from the boat to a hole in the road with a shovel in their hands.

Read more Changing America

From The NY Times
By Maureen Dowd

I grew up in the nation’s capital, but I’ve never seen blacks and whites here intermingling as they have this week.

Everywhere I go, some white person is asking some black person how they feel.

I saw one white customer quiz his black waitress at length at a chic soul food restaurant downtown, over deviled eggs and fried chicken livers, about whether she cried when Barack Obama won. She said she did, and he said he wept like a baby.

He wondered how long she thought it would take the new president to scrape the government up off the floor. “Three years,” she replied authoritatively.

I saw three white women asking a black bartender at the Bombay Club, across Lafayette Park from the White House, if he was happy and what he thought about Jesse Jackson’s flowing tears at Grant Park, given his envious threat to cut off a sensitive part of Obama’s anatomy. “I think the tears were real,” the bartender said.

And did he feel it would be better to refer to Obama as half-white and half-black, or simply black, they pressed.

“Black,” the bartender responded. “Because it means more.”

But one of the women insisted, shouldn’t we call the new president African-American instead of black? And wasn’t he really, really excited about Obama? The bartender gently explained he was not even a Democrat; he was a libertarian

Read more Tears

From The Seattle PI
By Christina Patterson

When my friend Steve told his children that a black man had just become the most powerful man on the planet, they were confused. “But, Daddy, what about you?” said his three-year-old. They already knew that a black man was the most powerful man on the planet, and now he’d been supplanted. The response at the nursery, however, was more enthusiastic. The staff (all black) and the parents (nearly all black) were beaming. So were the “brothers” on the streets of Clapton, all, said Steve, holding their heads higher.

A few hours later, however, at a discussion on “What does the election result mean for us?”, I discovered that their enthusiasm was unwarranted.

“I never thought of America as a racist country,” said the historian Andrew Roberts. “I think that’s a 40-year-old story.” This, he explained, was evident from the fact that the BBC had, during its election night coverage, used black and white footage. “I was under the impression,” he also said, “that I was going to be speaking last. My opening line was that the panel are all extremely nice people, but they’re all completely wrong.” Nothing like a considered response to other people’s arguments, is there?

But then, like those McCain supporters who stood, grim-faced and petulant, through his gracious concession speech, moving their pursed lips only to boo Obama, he has reason for sour grapes. This, after all, is a man who has been guest of honor at the White House, one of President Bush’s favorite writers (along with the author of “The Very Hungry Caterpillar”) and one who has been spoken of as potential ghostwriter of Bush’s memoir. (Provisional title, perhaps, “They Misunderestimated Me.”) Roberts repeatedly told the president to ignore anti-U.S. sentiment abroad and opposition at home in pursuit of “the Manichaean world-historical struggle” — more popularly known as the “war on terror.” President Obama might not be quite such a fan.

Read more Cynicism

From The Boston Globe
By Derrick Z. Jackson

Four Centuries of discipline culminated in Barack Obama’s stride to the Grant Park podium Tuesday as president-elect. He smiled, but the slow swan’s grace of his waving made it clear he would not mimic the explosive jubilation from the sea of humanity before him. It was more than the weariness of the campaign and the laden years ahead. What connects all the pioneering African-American figures in US history is an unstinting discipline. Obama, in winning the presidency, did that tradition proud.

He had to be serious without being angry. He had to relate without being a clown. He had to be the soul brother for the nation without being a singer or preacher. He had to be cool without being cold, and, above all, he could never lose his cool.

Obama walked with the slaves who toiled for two-and-a-half centuries in the cotton fields, who could never lose their cool enduring the lash, family separation, castration, and rape. He had the focus of Underground Railroad conductor Harriet Tubman, who led over 300 black people into freedom in 19 trips. When she threatened to shoot a weary escapee who wanted to give up, Tubman is quoted as saying, “he jumped right up and went on as well as anybody.” Tubman boasted, “I never ran my train off the track, and I never lost a passenger.”

Ida B. Wells kept writing against lynching after her Memphis newspaper office was destroyed. Black soldiers fought for national unity or global security, even when segregation soiled them at home. My father, a Korean War veteran, left Mississippi for Milwaukee when he saw a black World War II veteran, who lost a leg fighting for his country, get kicked off a store porch into the dust. My father-in-law, who fought in the Buffalo Solders on the Italian front in World War II, said it was amazing how little racism he encountered in Italy compared with the United States.

Read more Discipline