For President, a Complex Calculus of Race and Politics
Damon Winter/The New York Times
President Obama in Iowa last week. As the nation’s first black president, he has walked a careful line on the subject of race.
By JODI KANTOR
Published: October 20, 2012
via For President Obama, a Complex Calculus of Race and Politics – NYTimes.com.
Finally Liberated From Facts, Mitt Romney the Pure Bull Artist Takes Flight
POSTED: OCTOBER 19, 11:20 AM ET
Mitt Romney during the second presidential debate at Hofstra University in Hempstead, New York.
Spencer Platt/Getty Images
You know those Balsa wood airplanes – not the glider-types but the deluxe models, powered by rubber bands, with little propellers on the nose? I thought of those planes watching Mitt Romney debate Barack Obama the other night.
Romney’s journey toward the presidency has been a marvel to behold. Dating back to his first political steps – his race against Ted Kennedy, followed by his assault on the Massachusetts governorship – Romney has been constantly twisting and contorting himself, exchanging position for position, trading pro-choice for anti-choice, flirting with pro-gay rhetoric before shifting swiftly the other way, pioneering state health care reform before bashing virtually the same plan designed on a national scale, claiming the center on everything from guns to global warming before careening right as a presidential candidate.
Then, just within this year, the contortions took him all the way around again, in a corkscrewish motion, as he first careened as far right as he could stand to win the primary season, and then twisted some more to come all the way back to his version of the center to run as a kindler, gentler sort of centrist alternative to Obama. I was shocked to hear him say aloud in the second debate that the richest people would not have their tax burdens reduced, especially since he spent the entire primary season running as a supply-sider who would create growth by cutting taxes on capital gains, interest, dividends, and eliminating the estate tax, cuts that overwhelmingly favor the very rich.
From the start of the first debate, Romney has almost seemed liberated, spouting line after line of breathless, ecstatic inventions – things that are, if not lies exactly, at the very least just simply made up out of thin air, and seemingly on the spot, too. The business about the $25,000 “bucket” of deductions which he prefaced, with seemingly half of America watching, with the phrase, “Let’s pick a number”: awesome. Then there was the jobs plan that creates 12 million jobs, another number seemingly plucked out of the ether: it turned out that when asked to justify the number, the Romney campaign cited three studies, none of which came anywhere near justifying claims of a 12 million-job increase. This is from Paul Krugman’s new column on the subject:
Just for the record, one study concluded that America might gain two million jobs if China stopped infringing on U.S. patents and other intellectual property; this would be nice, but Mr. Romney hasn’t proposed anything that would bring about that outcome. Another study suggested that growth in the energy sector might add three million jobs in the next few years — but these were predicted gains under current policy, that is, they would happen no matter who wins the election, not as a consequence of the Romney plan.
Greed and Debt: The True Story of Mitt Romney and Bain CapitalHow the GOP presidential candidate and his private equity firm staged an epic wealth grab, destroyed jobs – and stuck others with the bill
Comment6397
By MATT TAIBBI
AUGUST 29, 2012 7:00 AM ET
Mitt Romney illustration
Illustration by Robert Grossman
The great criticism of Mitt Romney, from both sides of the aisle, has always been that he doesn’t stand for anything. He’s a flip-flopper, they say, a lightweight, a cardboard opportunist who’ll say anything to get elected.
The critics couldn’t be more wrong. Mitt Romney is no tissue-paper man. He’s closer to being a revolutionary, a backward-world version of Che or Trotsky, with tweezed nostrils instead of a beard, a half-Windsor instead of a leather jerkin. His legendary flip-flops aren’t the lies of a bumbling opportunist – they’re the confident prevarications of a man untroubled by misleading the nonbeliever in pursuit of a single, all-consuming goal. Romney has a vision, and he’s trying for something big: We’ve just been too slow to sort out what it is, just as we’ve been slow to grasp the roots of the radical economic changes that have swept the country in the last generation.
The incredible untold story of the 2012 election so far is that Romney’s run has been a shimmering pearl of perfect political hypocrisy, which he’s somehow managed to keep hidden, even with thousands of cameras following his every move. And the drama of this rhetorical high-wire act was ratcheted up even further when Romney chose his running mate, Rep. Paul Ryan of Wisconsin – like himself, a self-righteously anal, thin-lipped, Whitest Kids U Know penny pincher who’d be honored to tell Oliver Twist there’s no more soup left. By selecting Ryan, Romney, the hard-charging, chameleonic champion of a disgraced-yet-defiant Wall Street, officially succeeded in moving the battle lines in the 2012 presidential race.
via Greed and Debt: The True Story of Mitt Romney and Bain Capital | Politics News | Rolling Stone.
See on Scoop.it – OUR COMMON GROUND Informed Truth and Resistance
How the GOP presidential candidate and his private equity firm staged an epic wealth grab, destroyed jobs and stuck others with the bill…
” By making debt the centerpiece of his campaign, Romney was making a calculated bluff of historic dimensions – placing a massive all-in bet on the rank incompetence of the American press corps. The result has been a brilliant comedy: A man makes a $250 million fortune loading up companies with debt and then extracting million-dollar fees from those same companies, in exchange for the generous service of telling them who needs to be fired in order to finance the debt payments he saddled them with in the first place. That same man then runs for president riding an image of children roasting on flames of debt, choosing as his running mate perhaps the only politician in America more pompous and self-righteous on the subject of the evils of borrowed money than the candidate himself. If Romney pulls off this whopper, you’ll have to tip your hat to him: No one in history has ever successfully run for president riding this big of a lie. It’s almost enough to make you think he really is qualified for the White House.
“
See on www.rollingstone.com
See on Scoop.it – OUR COMMON GROUND Informed Truth and Resistance
“Melissa Harris-Perry by Maria Lloyd In a posting on TheNation.com, Melissa Harris-Perry attempted to motivate President Obama’s reluctant African American supporters by telling them an Obama re-election is beyond what policies he does or does not …”
Watkins writes, and I am unsure of my agreement, ” What Harris-Perry fails to illustrate is that a zero percent interest in Mitt Romney in the black community does not equate to a 100% support of President Obama. A number of African American voters have decided not vote or to vote for a third party candidate. She went on to explain what an Obama re-election would mean to the black community and how the Democratic party has supported the black community since the 1960′s. ” It very well may be there it is not a point of agreement or disagreement that is important. BJPG
See on www.yourblackworld.net
Truthout combats corporatization by bringing you trustworthy news: click here to join the effort and meet our goal of 750 donations by the end of this week.
(Photo: jonathan lopez / Flickr)“Crack killed everything.”
– Nas, 2012
It was a chilly spring night in 1984 and I was returning uptown from my cashier job at Miss Brooks, a fast food coffee shop located near Rockefeller Center. Working from four to midnight, after closing a few of the staff usually went out for drinks. By two a.m., I’d downed one more pint before walking over to Columbus Circle with the short order cook Xavier.
Although we both lived on 151 Street off Broadway, Xavier was a recent transplant from the Bronx and I had dwelled in that neighborhood since I was four. Today that nether world between Harlem and Washington Heights is now “Hamilton Heights,” but in those days, we didn’t really call it anything but home.
When I moved there in 1967, the working class neighborhood was a literal melting pot of races, religions and cultures that included southern Blacks, like my grandmother, holdover Jewish families who hadn’t migrated to Long Island, more than a few Puerto Ricans and two Asian families.
“Crack killed everything.”
– Nas, 2012
It was a chilly spring night in 1984 and I was returning uptown from my cashier job at Miss Brooks, a fast food coffee shop located near Rockefeller Center. Working from four to midnight, after closing a few of the staff usually went out for drinks. By two a.m., I’d downed one more pint before walking over to Columbus Circle with the short order cook Xavier.
Although we both lived on 151 Street off Broadway, Xavier was a recent transplant from the Bronx and I had dwelled in that neighborhood since I was four. Today that nether world between Harlem and Washington Heights is now “Hamilton Heights,” but in those days, we didn’t really call it anything but home.
When I moved there in 1967, the working class neighborhood was a literal melting pot of races, religions and cultures that included southern Blacks, like my grandmother, holdover Jewish families who hadn’t migrated to Long Island, more than a few Puerto Ricans and two Asian families.
via Dark Days: Life in Crack City.
Two Steps Backward: Suppressing the Vote in 2012
Wednesday, 17 October 2012 14:50
By Arlene Ash and John Lamperti, Truthout | News Analysis
(Photo: Fabrizio Costantini / The New York Times)
The United States has a history of promoting free elections – and of restricting them. The Constitution of 1786 left elections up to the states, and generally, only white, male property owners could vote. Since then, constitutional amendments and enabling legislation have hugely extended citizen suffrage. But it has not been a steady climb.
Until 2000, the trend favored expanding the franchise: to African-Americans, women, 18 to 21 year-olds, and those who couldn’t pay poll taxes. Recently however, and especially since the 2010 elections, the tide has turned. New York University’s Brennan Center for Justice calls what’s happening “the biggest rollback in voting rights since the Jim Crow era.” At the state level – where most voting rules and regulations are defined – many recent laws make registering and voting more difficult. Much of this has been facilitated by the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), a corporate-funded think tank that supplies model legislation to conservative state legislators. ALEC also promoted, among other things, the “stand your ground” gun laws that have cost many lives.
via Two Steps Backward: Suppressing the Vote in 2012.
How Ghetto Politics Has Outlived the Ghetto, and Still Holds All Of Us Back
Wed, 10/17/2012 – 12:20 — Bruce A. Dixon
Black Misleadership Class | mass incarceration
Printer-friendly version
by BAR managing editor Bruce A. Dixon
The class of cultural, business and political hacks who pass themselves off as “black leaders” never tire of celebrating the sixties. But they have nothing to say about the seventies, eighties or nineties when the prison state and drug war engulfed the black lower classes and the gains of the New Deal and Great Society rolled back, all during their watch. They’re ghetto politicians, and ghetto politics have failed.
How Ghetto Politics Outlived the Ghetto, And Still Holds Us Back
by BAR managing editor Bruce A. Dixon
Remembering the sixties, forgetting the seventies, eighties and nineties.
Our black class of political and cultural misleaders never tire of evoking, recalling and celebrating the sixties Freedom Movement. It was after all, the era of unified and successful black opposition to Jim Crow which catapulted them into their current prominence. It opened the doors of legislatures, city halls, corporate boardrooms, elite universities and the entertainment industry to thousands of black faces in high places.
But why do our leaders have shockingly little to say about black progress during the seventies, the eighties, the nineties, and the new century, excepting the ascension of Barack Obama. One would almost believe nothing important happened in those decades of their actual leadership. One would be wrong. Plenty happened in that time, but almost none of it reflects well on the current crop of leaders and the outdated, self-serving version of black politics they have foisted upon us.
Black politics as we know it originated in the mid-twentieth century urban ghettoes of places like Chicago, Detroit, Harlem and Atlanta. The first World War cut off the supply of white immigrant labor at the same time it created demands for greatly increased production. The solution was to attract black labor to mostly northern cities. Blacks who came north, and to places like Atlanta and Birmingham as well, found they were still discriminated against, confined to certain areas of the city regardless of class. They developed their own institutions, their own consumer market and their own social relations which to some extent sheltered and protected inhabitants from interactions with hostile whites.
via How Ghetto Politics Has Outlived the Ghetto, and Still Holds All Of Us Back | Black Agenda Report.
See on Scoop.it – OUR COMMON GROUND Informed Truth and Resistance
News, analysis and commentary from the black left.
by BAR managing editor Bruce A. Dixon
The class of cultural, business and political hacks who pass themselves off as “black leaders” never tire of celebrating the sixties. But they have nothing to say about the seventies, eighties or nineties when the prison state and drug war engulfed the black lower classes and the gains of the New Deal and Great Society rolled back, all during their watch. They’re ghetto politicians, and ghetto politics have failed.
See on blackagendareport.com
See on Scoop.it – OUR COMMON GROUND Informed Truth and Resistance
by Dr. Boyce Watkins – Scholarship in Action When I first thought about getting a PhD in Business, I found out about the PhD Project.
See on www.yourblackworld.net
OCG 