Sowing the Seeds of Hatred, McCain-Palin Turn to the Dark Side

If anything else was needed as evidence that McCain and Palin seem utterly incapable of recognizing the dangers of the passions they are stirring up through the fear-mongering message of their campaign, the last week of terrorist-baiting language from the McCain campaign--even to the point of provoking hate-filled questions and howls from their own audiences when McCain dared to correct a woman who called Obama an "Arab"-- should be the final straw.

And while the corporate media are mostly too timid to call McCain and Palin out on the amazingly Orwellian specter they are raising-- of Obama as an "enemy of the country" and threat to the nation--even as the media offers apologies for McCain, and allows McCain to get away with criticizing the words of John Lewis for "going too far" (ie, for saying what needed to be said, what the media has been too timid to say), the words of Rep. John Lewis posted this weekend have hit the prophetic nail precisely on the head by naming the dangers of the passions that the McCain-Palin campaign is unleashing with its fear-mongering, terrorist-baiting rhetoric:

And while McCain himself remains obstinately unwilling to recognize or accept responsibility for the potential violence his own campaign is threatening to stoke up among crazy fringe elements in this country--through its desperate terrorist- and fear-mongering approach to the last weeks of the campaign-- Even some Republicans have been criticizing the dangerous tone of the McCain-Palin campaign. But rather than recognize the danger and renounce any further descent into this hell, McCain has chosen instead to criticize the prophetic words of warning uttered by Rep. John Lewis this past weekend--

Instead of recognizing the truth of the warning uttered by John Lewis, McCain has chosen to accuse Lewis of uttering absurd and harmful accusations against McCain!

We can find nothing more evocative of the ways the unjust kings of biblical Israel would condemn the prophets in order to justify their own oppression of their people than this kind of response from McCain: When the prophet speaks truth to power, condemn the prophet in order to cover your own injustice:

SHAME ON YOU JOHN MCCAIN AND SARAH PALIN! HAVE YOU LOST ALL SENSE OF HUMAN DECENCY?

You wish to deny that there is any justice to John Lewis's comparison of your campaign's rhetoric and tone with that of George Wallace?! Perhaps you need to take some time to refamiliarize yourselves with the kinds of language and rhetoric that Wallace and other fear-mongering and terrorist-baiting politicians of the past used to stoke up the hatred of individuals and crowds that ended up bombing and lynching blacks in the South, even as Wallace and politicians like him always denied having any such "intent..." Turning the blind eye to injustice, with a wink and a nod, has always been the way of white racist power in this country, as in many others!

But John McCain and Sarah Palin, you have been called out and warned--not only by John Lewis, but by decent and honorable Republicans in your own camp, of the potentially violent consequences of the approach you have taken--
And while you may deny you have any "intent" to stir up such violence, and we may all pray that the terrorist-mongering rhetoric of your campaign does not provoke violence, there can be no excuse for the way you and Sarah Palin are so unapologetically using the specter of terrorism in association with Obama to stir up the worst fears and passions of your followers.

Are you both truly so devoid of honor and decency as to stoop to this lowliest and most despicable of political tactics, and to refuse to reign in people in your crowds who shout such violent slogans as "kill him," and "bomb him"?!!

Any decent human being, hearing words such as these coming from an audience to which he or she is speaking, would do nothing less than immediately RENOUNCE and REJECT such sentiments and expressions! Yet only silence seemed to greet these expressions when they were uttered by people in the groups to which you and and Palin were speaking! Are you so in love with power at any cost that you have lost all sense of human decency and honor?!

I beg of you to demonstrate that you have not lost all sense of decency, by turning away from the terrible course you have taken your campaign in the last week. And please restore some basic sense of human decency and honor to your campaign by renouncing all such terrorist- and fear-mongering language for the rest of the campaign--

It's transparently clear from your speeches and ads that your campaign's fundamental goal has been to create the impression that Obama is not like most Americans, but is other, and is therefore to be suspected of all kinds of dark and shadowy things, including terrorist associations, and selfish intentions..... You seem to have studied the fear-mongering devices of the worst anti-semitic campaigns in setting up this kind of suggestive attack on Obama as the "strange Other," who is not to be trusted. Would you actually deny that this is the intent of your desperate campaign strategy? If so, then do not simply deny this is your intent, but show us you mean it by eliminating these kinds of fear-mongering tactics and rhetoric from your campaign!

And if you admit this is the intent of your campaign's strategy, can you not see how despicable and devoid of honor such a strategy is? If you need to take this kind of despicable approach to win this nation's most noble office, do you really think you deserve to hold the nation's highest Office? Is not this kind of Orwellian logic of denial and distraction precisely what has driven the Bush administration into such depths of darkness and failure? And while you seek to distance yourself from the Bush administration, every step your campaign has taken along these lines has only worked to confirm how a McCain administration would be even more desperately and darkly Orwellian, devoid of truth and honor, than the Bush administration has been!!

Power at any cost, words that deny and twist the truth at every turn of phrase, to the point where policy loses all grounding in reality, and the result is--as current reality is demonstrating--that reality itself rebels and turns against the system of lies by threatening to bring the entire false deck of cards crashing to the ground!

And to all those who listen to the words of McCain and Palin and say nothing or simply smile and let them get away with their dispicable accusations and lies, we ask: When will YOU begin to respond, and to ask, and to DEMAND that McCain and Palin respond, by asking them repeatedly, insistently, and constantly, until they respond--

"John McCain and Sarah Palin, What will it take for you to recognize the dark passions you are stoking? Will it take a bomb, or a hate-filled shot fired from a gun, before you recognize the dangerous consequences of the fire you've been playing with by constantly suggesting, over and over again, that Obama is someone who associates with, or accepts, terrorists, in the face of Obama's firm and repeated denunciations of all terrorism and terrorists?

Sarah Palin, and John McCain, What will it take for YOU to recognize the horror of what you are suggesting by this terrible and disgusting game of false association, in a political and war context that over the last eight years has constantly evoked the image of terrorists being killed?!

What kind of Orwellian game do you think you are playing by denying any respsonsibility for stoking violence by your version of the "big lie" that seeks to associate Obama with terrorists and terrorism?!

Far from being in any way outrageous or unfair, the words of Rep. John Lewis precisely hit the mark of the dangerous and violent passions your campaign has been working to stir up, whether you "intend" it to do so or not? Your personal "Intention" here is irrelevant, even if we were to believe you, since it is the FACT of the potential IMPACT of your campaign's approach and the passions it evokes that we all have to deal with. But when will YOU accept responsibility and uphold the honor and responsibility of "Country First" that you say you admire by restraining the dogs of personal violence and hatred that your campaign has been directly working to unleash.....

We at Policybusters thank John Lewis for his prophetic words, and unreservedly second them, and hope that all responsible and humane media outlets will do the same, for as Lewis concludes, "The American people deserve better."

Indeed we do deserve better! And if you--McCain and Palin--want to be treated seriously as people worthy of leading the American people, you must first recognize that we all deserve better, and reject and renounce the fear-mongering approach to politics in favor of something more honorable and decent, during the last weeks of this campaign.

Instead of rejecting and condemning Rep. Lewis's words, you should be thanking him for offering them, in prophetic warning, as the just kings of Israel thanked the prophets of old that warned them of the dangers of transgressing the laws of justice to which all nations and political leaders must ultimately be held to account--

Rep. John Lewis Responds to Increasing Hostility of McCain-Palin Campaign 10/11/2008

"As one who was a victim of violence and hate during the height of the Civil Rights Movement, I am deeply disturbed by the negative tone of the McCain-Palin campaign. What I am seeing today reminds me too much of another destructive period in American history. Sen. McCain and Gov. Palin are sowing the seeds of hatred and division, and there is no need for this hostility in our political discourse.

"During another period, in the not too distant past,
there was a governor of the state of Alabama named George Wallace who also became a presidential candidate. George Wallace never threw a bomb. He never fired a gun, but he created the climate and the conditions that encouraged vicious attacks against innocent Americans who only desired to exercise their constitutional rights. Because of this atmosphere of hate, four little girls were killed one Sunday morning when a church was bombed in Birmingham, Alabama.

"As public figures with the power to influence and persuade, Sen. McCain and Governor Palin are playing with fire, and if they are not careful, that fire will consume us all. They are playing a very dangerous game that disregards the value of the political process and cheapens our entire democracy. We can do better. The American people deserve better."

*****

So which approach will your campaign take, John McCain and Sarah Palin?

--the way of the unjust leaders of the past who condemned and sought to silence their prophets?

--or the way of all just leaders, who HONORED their prophets by CHANGING THEIR WAYS in accord with prophetic words?

This is the choice before YOU and the entire nation: Will you choose justice or injustice; Orwellian obfuscation, or the prophetic truth?

The choice is yours, and the consequences are those that YOU and all the American people will have to grapple with.....

Patriotism, Taxes, and Economic Policy according to Palin/McCain: Leading US to Depression

From Great Crisis of 2008:

This past week, as the financial system teetered on the verge of collapse because of the Republicans' anti-government, anti-regulation, anti-tax laissez-faire ideology, we were offered the spectacle of Republican VP nominee Sarah Palin underlining the irrationality of this Republican ideology by arguing that raising taxes on the wealthy would be both unpatriotic and harmful to the nation.

According to the Republican logic of Palin and McCain, asking the wealthy to pay more taxes (as Joe Biden proposed) "is not patriotism," but is "about killing jobs and hurting small businesses and making things worse." (And McCain said the idea of asking the wealthy to pay more taxes was "dumb.")

It must be nice for those like Palin and McCain to think such things, as the Republicans continue to uphold a policy of protecting the wealthy from taxation while the middle class and poor are burdened with the explosive growth of the national bill for fighting unnecessary wars and providing gigantic trillion-dollar bail-outs to pay for the consequences of failed Republican economic policies.

In response to these revealing comments on taxation and patriotism by Palin and McCain, the corporate media needs to be shamed into asking serious questions about the Palin/McCain-Hoover vision of tax policy and government finance, since we now know these questions will be at the center of the next administration's attention:

If taxation of the wealthy is now unpatriotic, how will the Republicans propose to pay the tremendous costs of fighting their wars and bailing out the financial system that has been brought to the brink of collapse under their watch? How will the Republican ticket of Palin/McCain pay the gigantic bill for the bail-out of the entire financial system that their own failed economic and war policies have now forced us into, as a new phase of the Republican "shock doctrine" is applied to the national economy?

And we would also like to ask the corporate media when they will begin to uphold their own patriotic duty by asking the Palin/McCain Republican ticket some fundamental questions about patriotism, taxation, and basic economics (since Palin has raised this issue for discussion, and the financial health of even the corporate media depends on the maintenance of an ordered national financial system):

--If taxation of the wealthy is now unpatriotic, how do the Republicans propose to pay for their 3 trillion-dollar war in Iraq? (Answer: continue to charge the cost to the Chinese-financed national credit card for the next generation to pay back!)

--If taxation is unpatriotic, is paying for the war in Iraq also unpatriotic? If it's unpatriotic for the wealthy to pay more taxes, is it not even more unpatriotic to be placing ever greater burdens of taxation on the next generation, and on the middle and lower classes?

Republicans like Palin and McCain would like to continue to avoid any responsibility for answering questions about how they expect the nation to pay the gigantic debt-load of the failed policies the Republicans have imposed on our country. (This involves, after all, some "looking backwards," which Palin and McCain would like to avoid at all costs, for obvious reasons.) And unfortunately the corporate media often seems completely willing to allow them to continue to avoid answering questions that require some "looking backwards" in order to understand how their past beliefs and decisions would influence future policies.

According to the logic of Palin/McCain, if it is unpatriotic to ask the wealthy to pay more taxes, guess who will end up paying these gigantic expenses under another Republican administration--even as the corporate CEOs are allowed to continue to walk away with million dollar salaries for running our financial system and country into the ground!

Palin/McCain would love to continue to get away with calling taxation of the wealthy unpatriotic, even while they continue to ignore the gigantic tsunami of expenses that Republican policies have imposed on the American people.

Republicans like McCain and Palin would like to separate themselves from the Bush legacy by claiming they will now come to the rescue of the middle class they have helped to destroy, even while they would also love to continue to be seen as the ones who will protect the wealthy while the middle class and poor are burdened with the ever-growing cost of paying for the failed Republican policies of the past.

Actually, the Republicans would like to be able to get away with having no one pay for the disastrous economic policies of the past eight years, which was also Hoover's strategy after the Crash of 1929--a do-nothing strategy that drove an economy in crisis into a great economic depression:

As John Kenneth Galbraith noted in his book The Great Crash 1929,

"In November of 1929, Mr. Hoover announced a cut in taxes ... [while he] asked business firms to keep up their capital investment and to maintain wages ... [both measures that] were largely without effect....

And, like McCain in the first debate, the Hoover policy insisted that there should be a major cut in government expenditures, to go along with the tax cuts....

As Galbraith summarizes, this combined commitment to tax cuts and decreasing government expenditures amounted to a fundamental rejection of the use of fiscal policy, and thus

"amounted precisely to a rejection of all affirmative government economic policy," and a disavowal of "all the available steps to check deflation and depression."

And it was this "triumph of dogma over thought" that turned the economic crisis of 1929-30 into the decade-long great depression of the 1930s (Galbraith, pp. 182-186).

In October 2008 the American nation faces a clear choice between a Democratic candidate who at least acknowledges and understands that the policies of the past have failed, and that we need a fundamentally new approach to things (even if he cannot yet be clear about what that approach will be (even Roosevelt was not clear about what he would do until AFTER he took office in 1933), and a Republican candidate who, up until a week or so ago, was still declaring--like the Bush/Hoover administrations--that the "fundamentals of the US economy were sound," and who would solve this crisis by applying the depression-creating policies of the Hoover administration: tax cuts and decreases in government spending.

And of course the Republicans rely on the silence of the corporate media and the stupidity of half of the American public to get them into office again in the face of their continuing commitment to burdening the middle class with the bills of failed policies favoring the superwealthy.

Why are the corporate media not asking the most fundamental questions about failed Republican economic policy? These media corporations (even FOX News) should recognize that the failure of the US and global financial system will also bring about the bankruptcy of much of the corporate media structure (while their CEOs walk away with whatever remains)??!!

It is precisely the corporate media's silence and lack of critical attention to the fundamentally irrational and unsustainable approach of Republicans to taxation, regulation, and economic policy that has allowed the country to fall into this mess, and even now--as things fall apart-- the corporate media continues to ignore the many ways the Palin/McCain team would simply like to continue this same absurd economy-killing set of Hooverian policies toward national finance and taxation!

When will the corporate media begin to challenge the way Republican policy is fundamentally undermining the future of this country and of their own corporate jobs and future?!--along with the ability of the vast majority of the people of this country to live decent lives?!! When will the media begin to challenge directly the fundamental lack of patriotism in Republican policies that continue to destroy the foundations that support national finance and economy?

What is more unpatriotic than a national media that continues to pass over the ways Republican policy has destroyed our national economy during the last eight years?

And so we need to challenge and shame the corporate media into asking these critical questions by challenging those in the corporate media: If you care at all about patriotism, why aren't you asking these kinds of critical questions of the Republicans, to make clear to the American public how utterly absurd is so much of what the McCain/Palin ticket is offering to the American public?!! If Palin/McCain think that taxing the wealthy is unpatriotic even in the face of this gigantic meltdown, what principles will guide another Republican administration when they are elected?!!

At a time when the entire economy of the nation and the globe is teetering on the edge of the abyss, the U.S. media continues to be facile and stupid in the face of the destructive irrationality of ideas and policy that the Republican candidates, and often also the Democratic party (since Robert Rubin, former Treasury Secretary under Clinton and now apparently an Obama advisor, is almost just as bad as the Republicans!) continue to dish out to us.

ENOUGH!!! When will the individual citizens and taxpayers who are part of the corporate media rise up against the destructive stupidity of their bosses and the policies that have been destroying our country? When will all members of the media, across the nation, get mad enough at what the Republicans are proposing to continue to do to our country, and begin to raise these fundamental questions in public, for all to hear??!!

The McCain/Palin ticket survives only because they think they can continue to get away with dishing out bullshit to the American people. When will the corporate media reveal the absurd emptiness of the Republican campaign as the bullshit it really is-- protecting the wealthiest while piling the expensive burden on generations to come of the middle class, until all but a small corporate and government elite in this country will be reduced to poverty (as in the last days of the Soviet Union)?

Democratic VP nominee Joe Biden made a clear, straight-forward and rational statement about the responsibility of ALL American citizens, including the wealthy, to take on a fair part of the burden of paying for the privilege of being a citizen of this country. Biden was making the point that the wealthy have not been asked by the Republicans or the Democrats to pay their fair share of the costs of war and failed economic policies that benefited the wealthy. (And intelligent and patriotic wealthy people like Warren Buffett would agree with Biden's point, and would favor higher rates of taxation for the wealthy.)

Paying taxes is the way we all support our country and our government. If this is unpatriotic, what does patriotism mean? And this is why we all have a stake in using our powers of citizenship to determine the character and quality of our government, since when it fails, we all end up paying the costs of this failure.

So it's high time for all people, and especially those in the corporate media, to ask the Republican candidates: if they think raising taxes on the wealthy is unpatriotic, how do they propose to pay the exploding costs of the gigantic failures of war and financial policy that their eight years of rule have imposed on the people of this country!!!?

When will the so-called "fourth estate" of the media begin to uphold its responsibility and patriotic duty by asking these basic questions of those who would have us elect them to continue to run the country into the ground by continuing the same irrational policies that have guided the Bush administration?!

If the corporate media cannot be responsible for patriotic reasons, they might at least realize they need to ask these questions for the sake of their own survival. For if there is a great crash of 2008 or 2009 (the crash of 1929 did not occur until several months after Republican Hoover took over from Republican Coolidge, on the promise of "change" that never came), employees of the corporate media will suffer right along with the rest of us.

MESSAGE TO CONGRESS: NO MEGA-BAILOUT BILL WITHOUT ADEQUATE PROTECTIONS FOR THE AMERICAN PEOPLE

Former Labor Secretary (under Clinton) Robert Reich has posted 3 excellent posts on his blog providing key perspective and suggestions for responding to the current crisis:

We tell poor nations they have to make their financial markets transparent before capital will flow to them. Now it's our turn. Lacking adequate regulation or oversight, our financial markets have become a snare and a delusion. Government only has two choices now: Either continue to bail them out, or regulate them in order to keep them honest. I vote for the latter.

Especially valuable right now--as our Congressional leaders rush like a flock of lemmings to embrace in fear whatever the Republican administration hands them, in a new application of the Shock Doctrine to our entire nation--are Reich's recommendations for the basic principles that should be incorporated into the coming Congressional "Bailout of All Bailout" Bills:

1. The government (i.e. taxpayers) gets an equity stake in every Wall Street financial company proportional to the amount of bad debt that company shoves onto the public. So when and if Wall Street shares rise, taxpayers are rewarded for accepting so much risk.

2. Wall Street executives and directors of Wall Street firms relinquish their current stock options and this year’s other forms of compensation, and agree to future compensation linked to a rolling five-year average of firm profitability...

3. All Wall Street executives immediately cease making campaign contributions to any candidate for public office in this election cycle or next, all Wall Street PACs be closed, and Wall Street lobbyists curtail their activities unless specifically asked for information by policymakers...

4. Wall Street firms agree to comply with new regulations over disclosure, capital requirements, conflicts of interest, and market manipulation. The regulations will emerge in ninety days from a bi-partisan working group, to be convened immediately. After all, inadequate regulation and lack of oversight got us into this mess.

5. Wall Street agrees to give bankruptcy judges the authority to modify the terms of primary mortgages, so homeowners have a fighting chance to keep their homes. Why should distressed homeowners lose their homes when Wall Streeters receive taxpayer money that helps them keep their fancy ones?

If Congress is truly interested in being responsible to their primary obligations to the American people, instead of doing (as usual) whatever is quickest and easiest so they can get out of Washington according to schedule for their long election vacation, they will avoid passing any Blank Check Mega-Bailout Bill that does not incorporate Reich's key principles.

Indeed, if the Republican administration balks at a bill that adds these provisions, then the Democratic Congress should be committed to keeping Congress in session as long as it takes-- right up to the election, if necessary--to keep this most important of all issues front and center before all the American people for discussion as people consider who they will be voting for in this election.

In this "once-in-a-century" crisis (according to Greenspan), the future of the nation and the world depends on the details of the Mega-Bailout Bill that Congress hands to the American people and the world in the coming days. So we all should not only hope but call our Congresspeople and demand that this time our Congressional representatives put the destiny of the nation and world in front of its own petty interest in getting out of Washington as quickly as possible for another long vacation, while the world's financial system collapses around us.

Time for All Americans to RISE UP & DEMAND "a New Politics for a New Time"

"All across America something is stirring -- Change happens because the American people demand it, because they rise up and insist on new ideas and new leadership, a new politics for a new time." (Barack Obama's Nomination Acceptance Speech, August 28, 2008)

While the pundits are for the most part missing this central call to action in Obama's speech, and Juan Williams on NPR today referred to the speech as one that will NOT be memorable (I suspect pundits said the same thing after FDR's early speeches), all Americans who are suffering and desiring a change from the failed Republican policies of the last eight years will beg to differ!

Unlike those media pundits and Republican operatives who are detached from the real sufferings of many Americans, Obama understands the roots of the demand for fundamental change, and in last night's speech finally addressed the call of many to spell out the details of the kind of change he will bring to Washington.

But, as he noted, he can't do this alone. Bringing change to Washington first requires that we make sure he is elected, and will then require that we all dig in to do the work of change, since even if Obama is elected, he will not be able to bring the change we need without the constant and firm pressure of all of us working to push progressive initiatives forward.

So its time for all of us to dig in and get to work. Obama last night provided a stirring call to action. Now we must all rise up to do the work required to get him elected, turn back all the efforts the Republicans will exert to prevent Obama's election--including lies, distortions, and interference with a fair voting process--and then get to work to transform the policy priorities of the nation. For we need not only a new politics, but also new policy for a new time....

Thank you, Barack Obama, for preserving the spirit of ML King's glorious speech 45 years ago, and for calling Americans to action in that spirit. I hope Americans will now prove themselves worthy of your faith and trust.

*****

Text of Barack Obama's Democratic Nomination Acceptance Speech

"The American Promise"
Democratic Convention
Thursday, August 28th, 2008
Denver, Colorado

To Chairman Dean and my great friend Dick Durbin; and to all my fellow citizens of this great nation;

With profound gratitude and great humility, I accept your nomination for the presidency of the United States.

Let me express my thanks to the historic slate of candidates who accompanied me on this journey, and especially the one who traveled the farthest - a champion for working Americans and an inspiration to my daughters and to yours -- Hillary Rodham Clinton. To President Clinton, who last night made the case for change as only he can make it; to Ted Kennedy, who embodies the spirit of service; and to the next Vice President of the United States, Joe Biden, I thank you. I am grateful to finish this journey with one of the finest statesmen of our time, a man at ease with everyone from world leaders to the conductors on the Amtrak train he still takes home every night.

To the love of my life, our next First Lady, Michelle Obama, and to Sasha and Malia - I love you so much, and I'm so proud of all of you.

Four years ago, I stood before you and told you my story - of the brief union between a young man from Kenya and a young woman from Kansas who weren't well-off or well-known, but shared a belief that in America, their son could achieve whatever he put his mind to.

It is that promise that has always set this country apart - that through hard work and sacrifice, each of us can pursue our individual dreams but still come together as one American family, to ensure that the next generation can pursue their dreams as well.

That's why I stand here tonight. Because for two hundred and thirty two years, at each moment when that promise was in jeopardy, ordinary men and women - students and soldiers, farmers and teachers, nurses and janitors -- found the courage to keep it alive.

We meet at one of those defining moments - a moment when our nation is at war, our economy is in turmoil, and the American promise has been threatened once more.

Tonight, more Americans are out of work and more are working harder for less. More of you have lost your homes and even more are watching your home values plummet. More of you have cars you can't afford to drive, credit card bills you can't afford to pay, and tuition that's beyond your reach.

These challenges are not all of government's making. But the failure to respond is a direct result of a broken politics in Washington and the failed policies of George W. Bush.

America, we are better than these last eight years. We are a better country than this.

This country is more decent than one where a woman in Ohio, on the brink of retirement, finds herself one illness away from disaster after a lifetime of hard work.

This country is more generous than one where a man in Indiana has to pack up the equipment he's worked on for twenty years and watch it shipped off to China, and then chokes up as he explains how he felt like a failure when he went home to tell his family the news.

We are more compassionate than a government that lets veterans sleep on our streets and families slide into poverty; that sits on its hands while a major American city drowns before our eyes.

Tonight, I say to the American people, to Democrats and Republicans and Independents across this great land:

ENOUGH!

This moment - this election - is our chance to keep, in the 21st century, the American promise alive. Because next week, in Minnesota, the same party that brought you two terms of George Bush and Dick Cheney will ask this country for a third. And we are here because we love this country too much to let the next four years look like the last eight. On November 4th, we must stand up and say: "Eight is enough."

Now let there be no doubt. The Republican nominee, John McCain, has worn the uniform of our country with bravery and distinction, and for that we owe him our gratitude and respect. And next week, we'll also hear about those occasions when he's broken with his party as evidence that he can deliver the change that we need.

But the record's clear: John McCain has voted with George Bush ninety percent of the time. Senator McCain likes to talk about judgment, but really, what does it say about your judgment when you think George Bush has been right more than ninety percent of the time? I don't know about you, but I'm not ready to take a ten percent chance on change.

The truth is, on issue after issue that would make a difference in your lives - on health care and education and the economy - Senator McCain has been anything but independent. He said that our economy has made "great progress" under this President. He said that the fundamentals of the economy are strong. And when one of his chief advisors - the man who wrote his economic plan - was talking about the anxiety Americans are feeling, he said that we were just suffering from a "mental recession," and that we've become, and I quote, "a nation of whiners."

A nation of whiners? Tell that to the proud auto workers at a Michigan plant who, after they found out it was closing, kept showing up every day and working as hard as ever, because they knew there were people who counted on the brakes that they made. Tell that to the military families who shoulder their burdens silently as they watch their loved ones leave for their third or fourth or fifth tour of duty. These are not whiners. They work hard and give back and keep going without complaint. These are the Americans that I know.


Now, I don't believe that Senator McCain doesn't care what's going on in the lives of Americans. I just think he doesn't know. Why else would he define middle-class as someone making under five million dollars a year? How else could he propose hundreds of billions in tax breaks for big corporations and oil companies but not one penny of tax relief to more than one hundred million Americans? How else could he offer a health care plan that would actually tax people's benefits, or an education plan that would do nothing to help families pay for college, or a plan that would privatize Social Security and gamble your retirement?

It's not because John McCain doesn't care. It's because John McCain doesn't get it.

For over two decades, he's subscribed to that old, discredited Republican philosophy - give more and more to those with the most and hope that prosperity trickles down to everyone else. In Washington, they call this the Ownership Society, but what it really means is - you're on your own. Out of work? Tough luck. No health care? The market will fix it. Born into poverty? Pull yourself up by your own bootstraps - even if you don't have boots. You're on your own.

Well it's time for them to own their failure. It's time for us to change America.

You see, we Democrats have a very different measure of what constitutes progress in this country.

We measure progress by how many people can find a job that pays the mortgage; whether you can put a little extra money away at the end of each month so you can someday watch your child receive her college diploma. We measure progress in the 23 million new jobs that were created when Bill Clinton was President - when the average American family saw its income go up $7,500 instead of down $2,000 like it has under George Bush.

We measure the strength of our economy not by the number of billionaires we have or the profits of the Fortune 500, but by whether someone with a good idea can take a risk and start a new business, or whether the waitress who lives on tips can take a day off to look after a sick kid without losing her job - an economy that honors the dignity of work.

The fundamentals we use to measure economic strength are whether we are living up to that fundamental promise that has made this country great - a promise that is the only reason I am standing here tonight.

Because in the faces of those young veterans who come back from Iraq and Afghanistan, I see my grandfather, who signed up after Pearl Harbor, marched in Patton's Army, and was rewarded by a grateful nation with the chance to go to college on the GI Bill.

In the face of that young student who sleeps just three hours before working the night shift, I think about my mom, who raised my sister and me on her own while she worked and earned her degree; who once turned to food stamps but was still able to send us to the best schools in the country with the help of student loans and scholarships.

When I listen to another worker tell me that his factory has shut down, I remember all those men and women on the South Side of Chicago who I stood by and fought for two decades ago after the local steel plant closed.

And when I hear a woman talk about the difficulties of starting her own business, I think about my grandmother, who worked her way up from the secretarial pool to middle-management, despite years of being passed over for promotions because she was a woman. She's the one who taught me about hard work. She's the one who put off buying a new car or a new dress for herself so that I could have a better life. She poured everything she had into me. And although she can no longer travel, I know that she's watching tonight, and that tonight is her night as well.

I don't know what kind of lives John McCain thinks that celebrities lead, but this has been mine. These are my heroes. Theirs are the stories that shaped me. And it is on their behalf that I intend to win this election and keep our promise alive as President of the United States.

What is that promise?

It's a promise that says each of us has the freedom to make of our own lives what we will, but that we also have the obligation to treat each other with dignity and respect.

It's a promise that says the market should reward drive and innovation and generate growth, but that businesses should live up to their responsibilities to create American jobs, look out for American workers, and play by the rules of the road.

Ours is a promise that says government cannot solve all our problems, but what it should do is that which we cannot do for ourselves - protect us from harm and provide every child a decent education; keep our water clean and our toys safe; invest in new schools and new roads and new science and technology.

Our government should work for us, not against us. It should help us, not hurt us. It should ensure opportunity not just for those with the most money and influence, but for every American who's willing to work.

That's the promise of America - the idea that we are responsible for ourselves, but that we also rise or fall as one nation; the fundamental belief that I am my brother's keeper; I am my sister's keeper.

That's the promise we need to keep. That's the change we need right now.

*****
So let me spell out exactly what that change would mean if I am President.

Change means a tax code that doesn't reward the lobbyists who wrote it, but the American workers and small businesses who deserve it.

Unlike John McCain, I will stop giving tax breaks to corporations that ship jobs overseas, and I will start giving them to companies that create good jobs right here in America.

I will eliminate capital gains taxes for the small businesses and the start-ups that will create the high-wage, high-tech jobs of tomorrow.

I will cut taxes - cut taxes - for 95% of all working families. Because in an economy like this, the last thing we should do is raise taxes on the middle-class.

And for the sake of our economy, our security, and the future of our planet, I will set a clear goal as President: in ten years, we will finally end our dependence on oil from the Middle East.

Washington's been talking about our oil addiction for the last thirty years, and John McCain has been there for twenty-six of them. In that time, he's said no to higher fuel-efficiency standards for cars, no to investments in renewable energy, no to renewable fuels. And today, we import triple the amount of oil as the day that Senator McCain took office.

Now is the time to end this addiction, and to understand that drilling is a stop-gap measure, not a long-term solution. Not even close.

As President, I will tap our natural gas reserves, invest in clean coal technology, and find ways to safely harness nuclear power. I'll help our auto companies re-tool, so that the fuel-efficient cars of the future are built right here in America. I'll make it easier for the American people to afford these new cars. And I'll invest 150 billion dollars over the next decade in affordable, renewable sources of energy - wind power and solar power and the next generation of biofuels; an investment that will lead to new industries and five million new jobs that pay well and can't ever be outsourced.

America, now is not the time for small plans.

Now is the time to finally meet our moral obligation to provide every child a world-class education, because it will take nothing less to compete in the global economy. Michelle and I are only here tonight because we were given a chance at an education. And I will not settle for an America where some kids don't have that chance. I'll invest in early childhood education. I'll recruit an army of new teachers, and pay them higher salaries and give them more support. And in exchange, I'll ask for higher standards and more accountability. And we will keep our promise to every young American - if you commit to serving your community or your country, we will make sure you can afford a college education.

Now is the time to finally keep the promise of affordable, accessible health care for every single American. If you have health care, my plan will lower your premiums. If you don't, you'll be able to get the same kind of coverage that members of Congress give themselves. And as someone who watched my mother argue with insurance companies while she lay in bed dying of cancer, I will make certain those companies stop discriminating against those who are sick and need care the most.

Now is the time to help families with paid sick days and better family leave, because nobody in America should have to choose between keeping their jobs and caring for a sick child or ailing parent.

Now is the time to change our bankruptcy laws, so that your pensions are protected ahead of CEO bonuses; and the time to protect Social Security for future generations.

And now is the time to keep the promise of equal pay for an equal day's work, because I want my daughters to have exactly the same opportunities as your sons.

Now, many of these plans will cost money, which is why I've laid out how I'll pay for every dime - by closing corporate loopholes and tax havens that don't help America grow. But I will also go through the federal budget, line by line, eliminating programs that no longer work and making the ones we do need work better and cost less - because we cannot meet twenty-first century challenges with a twentieth century bureaucracy.

And Democrats, we must also admit that fulfilling America's promise will require more than just money. It will require a renewed sense of responsibility from each of us to recover what John F. Kennedy called our "intellectual and moral strength." Yes, government must lead on energy independence, but each of us must do our part to make our homes and businesses more efficient. Yes, we must provide more ladders to success for young men who fall into lives of crime and despair. But we must also admit that programs alone can't replace parents; that government can't turn off the television and make a child do her homework; that fathers must take more responsibility for providing the love and guidance their children need.

Individual responsibility and mutual responsibility - that's the essence of America's promise.

And just as we keep our keep our promise to the next generation here at home, so must we keep America's promise abroad. If John McCain wants to have a debate about who has the temperament, and judgment, to serve as the next Commander-in-Chief, that's a debate I'm ready to have.

For while Senator McCain was turning his sights to Iraq just days after 9/11, I stood up and opposed this war, knowing that it would distract us from the real threats we face. When John McCain said we could just "muddle through" in Afghanistan, I argued for more resources and more troops to finish the fight against the terrorists who actually attacked us on 9/11, and made clear that we must take out Osama bin Laden and his lieutenants if we have them in our sights. John McCain likes to say that he'll follow bin Laden to the Gates of Hell - but he won't even go to the cave where he lives.

And today, as my call for a time frame to remove our troops from Iraq has been echoed by the Iraqi government and even the Bush Administration, even after we learned that Iraq has a $79 billion surplus while we're wallowing in deficits, John McCain stands alone in his stubborn refusal to end a misguided war.

That's not the judgment we need. That won't keep America safe. We need a President who can face the threats of the future, not keep grasping at the ideas of the past.

You don't defeat a terrorist network that operates in eighty countries by occupying Iraq. You don't protect Israel and deter Iran just by talking tough in Washington. You can't truly stand up for Georgia when you've strained our oldest alliances. If John McCain wants to follow George Bush with more tough talk and bad strategy, that is his choice - but it is not the change we need.

We are the party of Roosevelt. We are the party of Kennedy. So don't tell me that Democrats won't defend this country. Don't tell me that Democrats won't keep us safe. The Bush-McCain foreign policy has squandered the legacy that generations of Americans -- Democrats and Republicans - have built, and we are here to restore that legacy.

As Commander-in-Chief, I will never hesitate to defend this nation, but I will only send our troops into harm's way with a clear mission and a sacred commitment to give them the equipment they need in battle and the care and benefits they deserve when they come home.

I will end this war in Iraq responsibly, and finish the fight against al Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan. I will rebuild our military to meet future conflicts. But I will also renew the tough, direct diplomacy that can prevent Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons and curb Russian aggression. I will build new partnerships to defeat the threats of the 21st century: terrorism and nuclear proliferation; poverty and genocide; climate change and disease. And I will restore our moral standing, so that America is once again that last, best hope for all who are called to the cause of freedom, who long for lives of peace, and who yearn for a better future.

These are the policies I will pursue. And in the weeks ahead, I look forward to debating them with John McCain.

But what I will not do is suggest that the Senator takes his positions for political purposes. Because one of the things that we have to change in our politics is the idea that people cannot disagree without challenging each other's character and patriotism.

The times are too serious, the stakes are too high for this same partisan playbook. So let us agree that patriotism has no party. I love this country, and so do you, and so does John McCain. The men and women who serve in our battlefields may be Democrats and Republicans and Independents, but they have fought together and bled together and some died together under the same proud flag. They have not served a Red America or a Blue America - they have served the United States of America.

So I've got news for you, John McCain. We all put our country first.

America, our work will not be easy. The challenges we face require tough choices, and Democrats as well as Republicans will need to cast off the worn-out ideas and politics of the past. For part of what has been lost these past eight years can't just be measured by lost wages or bigger trade deficits.

What has also been lost is our sense of common purpose - our sense of higher purpose. And that's what we have to restore.

We may not agree on abortion, but surely we can agree on reducing the number of unwanted pregnancies in this country. The reality of gun ownership may be different for hunters in rural Ohio than for those plagued by gang-violence in Cleveland, but don't tell me we can't uphold the Second Amendment while keeping AK-47s out of the hands of criminals. I know there are differences on same-sex marriage, but surely we can agree that our gay and lesbian brothers and sisters deserve to visit the person they love in the hospital and to live lives free of discrimination. Passions fly on immigration, but I don't know anyone who benefits when a mother is separated from her infant child or an employer undercuts American wages by hiring illegal workers.

This too is part of America's promise - the promise of a democracy where we can find the strength and grace to bridge divides and unite in common effort.

I know there are those who dismiss such beliefs as happy talk. They claim that our insistence on something larger, something firmer and more honest in our public life is just a Trojan Horse for higher taxes and the abandonment of traditional values. And that's to be expected. Because if you don't have any fresh ideas, then you use stale tactics to scare the voters. If you don't have a record to run on, then you paint your opponent as someone people should run from.

You make a big election about small things.

And you know what - it's worked before. Because it feeds into the cynicism we all have about government. When Washington doesn't work, all its promises seem empty. If your hopes have been dashed again and again, then it's best to stop hoping, and settle for what you already know.

I get it. I realize that I am not the likeliest candidate for this office. I don't fit the typical pedigree, and I haven't spent my career in the halls of Washington.

But I stand before you tonight because all across America something is stirring. What the nay-sayers don't understand is that this election has never been about me. It's been about you.

For eighteen long months, you have stood up, one by one, and said enough to the politics of the past.

You understand that in this election, the greatest risk we can take is to try the same old politics with the same old players and expect a different result. You have shown what history teaches us - that at defining moments like this one, the change we need doesn't come from Washington. Change comes to Washington.

Change happens because the American people demand it - because they rise up and insist on new ideas and new leadership, a new politics for a new time.

America, this is one of those moments.

I believe that as hard as it will be, the change we need is coming. Because I've seen it. Because I've lived it. I've seen it in Illinois, when we provided health care to more children and moved more families from welfare to work. I've seen it in Washington, when we worked across party lines to open up government and hold lobbyists more accountable, to give better care for our veterans and keep nuclear weapons out of terrorist hands.

And I've seen it in this campaign. In the young people who voted for the first time, and in those who got involved again after a very long time. In the Republicans who never thought they'd pick up a Democratic ballot, but did. I've seen it in the workers who would rather cut their hours back a day than see their friends lose their jobs, in the soldiers who re-enlist after losing a limb, in the good neighbors who take a stranger in when a hurricane strikes and the floodwaters rise.

This country of ours has more wealth than any nation, but that's not what makes us rich. We have the most powerful military on Earth, but that's not what makes us strong. Our universities and our culture are the envy of the world, but that's not what keeps the world coming to our shores.

Instead, it is that American spirit - that American promise - that pushes us forward even when the path is uncertain; that binds us together in spite of our differences; that makes us fix our eye not on what is seen, but what is unseen, that better place around the bend.

That promise is our greatest inheritance. It's a promise I make to my daughters when I tuck them in at night, and a promise that you make to yours - a promise that has led immigrants to cross oceans and pioneers to travel west; a promise that led workers to picket lines, and women to reach for the ballot.

And it is that promise that forty five years ago today, brought Americans from every corner of this land to stand together on a Mall in Washington, before Lincoln's Memorial, and hear a young preacher from Georgia speak of his dream.

The men and women who gathered there could've heard many things. They could've heard words of anger and discord. They could've been told to succumb to the fear and frustration of so many dreams deferred.

But what the people heard instead - people of every creed and color, from every walk of life - is that in America, our destiny is inextricably linked. That together, our dreams can be one.

"We cannot walk alone," the preacher cried. "And as we walk, we must make the pledge that we shall always march ahead. We cannot turn back."

America, we cannot turn back. Not with so much work to be done. Not with so many children to educate, and so many veterans to care for. Not with an economy to fix and cities to rebuild and farms to save. Not with so many families to protect and so many lives to mend. America, we cannot turn back. We cannot walk alone. At this moment, in this election, we must pledge once more to march into the future. Let us keep that promise - that American promise - and in the words of Scripture hold firmly, without wavering, to the hope that we confess.

Thank you, God Bless you, and God Bless the United States of America.

Who Really Needs to Be Humanized?: The Media's Framing of Michelle Obama's Challenge

From PolicyBusters:

While the Media Class—with its usual flair for normalizing the most horridly racialized assumptions via blandly innocuous-sounding language—framed the drama of last night’s opening of the Democratic Convention around the question, "Will Michelle Obama be able to 'humanize' Barack Obama for the American public?", Michelle's brilliant speech not only put to shame the racialized assumptions supporting this media framing, but turned these assumptions on their head.

And by turning on their head the assumptions undergirding the media’s framing of last night’s Convention drama, Michelle Obama’s exemplary words highlighted the REAL question that this Convention and Presidential Election poses to the people of the American Republic [--and if the class of media pundits observing this Convention really wants to humanize itself and serve the interests of both its audience and the Republic, it will henceforth learn from the speech of Michelle Obama to substitute this REAL question for the horribly banal and racialized questions it otherwise seems so stupidly condemned to reproduce ad nauseum]:

Will the American public of 2008 and its media class rise to the humanizing challenge posed by the values (of family and patriotism) exemplified by the words of Michelle Obama, and thereby humanize the American republic?

If the Media Class wants to rehumanize itself and demonstrate its own true patriotism in the weeks of election coverage remaining, it will learn from the example of Michelle Obama’s words to begin confronting itself and the American public with the REAL questions that need to be asked after a decade during which our Republic--operating in defiance of law and human decency--has allowed itself to be dehumanized by a corrupt regime of excuses normalized under the administrative mask of the "war on terror."

As usual in its amazingly banal forms of racialized language, the American media class framed Michelle Obama's challenge to be that of "humanizing" her husband for the American public. This framing not only presumed that the American public perceives Barack Obama to be less than human, and therefore in need of being “humanized,” but then presumed to place the heavy burden of responsibility for rehumanizing an Obama that a racialized media and the reigning public discourse has been so responsible for dehumanizing, not on itself—but on the black woman who married the black man who presumed himself to be human enough to deserve the right of every citizen to run for this nation’s highest office.

This framing trope, which attempted to make the black wife of a black man responsible for “humanizing” her husband, dipped back into the ocean of racialized powers of discourse and politics going back to slavery times, and itself speaks deeply to how much re-humanizing and de-racializing of the media and our Republic is still needed today--all the more so in an era that so often and so blandly presumes itself—against all evidence to the contrary—to have achieved a level of human consciousness “beyond race and racism.”

Apart from the offensive absurdity of all the racialized assumptions inherent in the media class's framing of the drama of Michelle's challenge during the first night of the Democratic Convention, the presumptive stance taken by media pundits toward Michelle, as if they assumed that they could define and prescribe for Michelle what she was supposed to do with her speech, was made all the more absurd by the brilliance with which the humanizing spirit of Michelle Obama's words posed the real challenge of this election quite differently: Will the media class and the American people rise to the challenge of humanizing itself posed by the exemplary words of Michelle Obama last night?

While so much of last night’s TV coverage by the pundits of CNN, MSNBC, and even PBS, continued to be grounded in the same old clichéd framing that has managed to make this most exciting of election campaigns sound boring over the last seven months, Michelle's speech embodied the ennobling power and inspiration of the humanizing passion evoked by Teddy Kennedy's words, and reemphasized the reality underlying Kennedy's proclamation that what is now being presented to the American people in this Election is the most profound of choices:

A choice between a continuation of the destructive politics of racial and class division that has defined the past, and has been reexaggerated by the policies of the current administration, or a turn to a new politics that can begin to embody in policy and practice the hope inspired by the words of Martin Luther King uttered 45 years ago in Washington, D.C.

The REAL Question is: Has eight years of lies and corrupt administration been enough to wake more than half of the American people up to the horrible future into which we are heading without a change, or has it merely reinforced the worst tendencies and assumptions of American power and discourse, and hardened them under the guise of fear and the self-justifying rhetoric of a self-defensive war on terror?

This election, with all that is so immediately at stake for the Republic and the world in the four years ahead, may well determine whether the ennobling hope and dream of a just and equal American Republic, embodied in words by Martin Luther King, Jr., 45 years ago this Thursday, will remain merely a fading dream, or begin to be embodied in the policies and practices of a democratically renewed American Republic. Let us hope, at least, that in the days ahead, both the American public and its Media class will prove itself worthy of the ennobling gift presented to us all by Michelle Obama’s exemplary words last night. For it is not Barack Obama who needs to be humanized for the American public (since he has already shown himself to be abundantly human), but the American media and its public that needs to be humanized for the sake of the future of the American Republic and the rest of the world.

And if the words of Michelle Obama last night are any indication of the role she would play as “first lady” of this Republic, we can be sure of one thing: Our Republic would be deeply ennobled and humanized by her presence at the helm of this Nation’s ship of state.

So the real question is not about what Michelle Obama will do to "humanize" her husband, but what WE will do in the weeks ahead, culminating on November 4, to give ourselves and our country the opportunity to be humanized by the experience of living in a nation that embraces the challenges of making the DREAM real, over the misleading comforts of living in the mire of fear and self-deluding presumptions of totalizing power that have been fueling our so-called “war on terror.”

Such fear and self-delusion, if allowed to control us, will enslave us all to an ever more monstrously self-defeating police state that devotes our national resources to running away from, rather than embracing, the humanizing courage and creativity needed to meet the tremendous challenges of the twenty-first century. As guidance in the right direction, the words of Michelle Obama exemplify the humanizing courage and dedication our country so deeply needs for inspiration.

I hope our political work and choices in the weeks ahead will prove ourselves and our country worthy of the gift of Michelle's humanizing example and faith, as manifest last night. And I hope that for the remainder of this election campaign the Media class will substitute the humanizing insight and vision of her perspectives for the dehumanizing and blinding perspectives of the present.

Our Country’s Bitter Pill

“People who shut their eyes to reality simply invite their own destruction, and anyone who insists on remaining in a state of innocence long after that innocence is dead turns himself into a monster.”

These words were written, not by Rev. Jeremiah Wright in 2008, but by one of the most eloquent and famous American writers of the mid-twentieth century: James Baldwin (in his 1955 collection of essays titled Notes of a Native Son). After witnessing the frenzy with which the corporate media complex manufactured a major controversy out of a few poorly-chosen words by Obama during a private fund-raiser, we're now being forced to witness the explosion of the second phase of the manufacture of the Jeremiah Wright controversy.

We've seen how the corporate media has been struggling to structure this story in ways that set Obama and Wright against each other, so that our racialized Republic’s spectator-consumers can once again be entertained by the tragic spectacle of two black men fighting against each other. As Baldwin noted in the 1950s, “One of the things that distinguishes Americans from other people is that no other people has ever been so deeply involved in the lives of black men.” Baldwin’s words are being proven all too prophetically true once again.

But the American people, not the corporate media complex, are ultimately in charge of determining how this controversy plays itself out in the current presidential campaign. There is a clear alternative path to the one the media complex is trying to lead the American people down by manufacturing a racialized spectacle that positions Obama and Wright as combatants in a mutually destructive slug fest.

To follow this alternative path, Obama and Wright can refuse and denounce this racialized set-up by the media. But more importantly, all the rest of us--who value our democratic citizenship and don't wish to have our political future dictated by the corporate media--can reject and denounce the racist spectacle that is being manufactured for our consumption and corporate profit.

As citizens rather than mere consumers, we have the power to choose a different path by refusing to participate in the production and consumption of such a racialized spectacle. And we need to be urgently asking--with Baldwin's words in mind--whether the U.S. media is not now in the process of turning itself and its public (once again) into monsters.

Citizens of this country are being invited to participate in the production of a slug fest between two black men. Instead of cooperating with this manufactured and racist media spectacle, there is another option for all citizens who care about the future of this democratic Republic: REFUSE TO PARTICIPATE in the creation of this spectacle, and direct criticism at the structural sources of power in society and the media that are working to produce this racialized spectacle.

Jeremiah Wright is part of a long tradition of critique of the injustice of specific American policies, dating back to the time of slavery. From the long biblical tradition originating with the Jewish prophets who understood the bitterness of oppression, to the ringing cries against the bitterness of slavery that founded the American tradition of social protest and provided foundation to the great twentieth-century American civil rights movement, an understanding of the "bitter" fruits of injustice and suffering has had deep roots in American culture.

Yet our national media pundits and certain politicians, seemingly "innocent" of this history, have suggested that Obama must be terribly "out of touch" with reality. Because Obama dared to state bluntly that many Americans are "bitter" about the current state of our economy and country mired in an unnecessary war draining the resources needed to address much more important issues.

Just as media pundits focused on Obama's clumsy choice-of-words while ignoring the primary emphasis of his statement in San Francisco, they also seem to ignore a fundamental message of Obama's campaign--which is rooted in the historical power of previous successful efforts at responding to the sufferings of the American people.

Faced with a government insensitive to the needs of the majority of this country's people--not to mention the billions of people of the rest of the world who will be most impacted by the effects of global climate change--and unwilling to play its proper role in altering the way we do business in the world, the very roots of the American Republic are turning bitter.

James Baldwin frequently used the word "bitter" in his essays. In doing so, he was reflecting a long tradition of American commentary that had already made "bitter" a fundamental adjective for describing the fruits of this country's unjust and racialized structures of power and privilege. In 1955 Baldwin had begun to understand both the bitterness and passion that fueled the creative drive of the civil rights revolution in the 1950s and 1960s.

But bitterness in response to injustice was certainly not a new phenomenon in the 1950s. Nor is it now. And it should therefore not be surprising that a major political candidate IN TOUCH with the suffering of the majority of the American public, should NOW use specifically this word to describe the current state of many Americans. What IS surprising is that major media outlets and punditry appear so ignorant and "innocent" of this bitterness in 2008.

This pretended "innocence" continues to reveal just how deeply rooted are the racialized structures of power in our dominant corporate media. And what remains unexamined is how profitable the production of such racialized spectacles remains in our unreconstructed Republic. If there is any justice in the universe, one positive outcome of this 2008 campaign season will be a significant breakthrough in understanding that brings the public to the kind of turning point that caused it to reject overt forms of segregation in the 1950s. But to bring about such a change in 2008, all citizens of this Republic need to utterly reject the racialized spectacle in which the corporate media complex would like to embroil us in the name of profit.

Since this media complex is driven by profit, one clear way for the American public to reject this racialized spectacle, along with all those who stand to profit from its production, is to withdraw financial support from any media sources that seek to propagate this spectacle.

If the American public clearly rejects this racialized spectacle, and turns its criticism against the structures of media power that seek to profit from the manufacture of this kind of spectacle, perhaps this Republic will yet be able to build the foundation for a better future of opportunity for all its citizens--free of the kinds of racialized inequity that will otherwise continue to reproduce inequality and injustice.

The willingness of certain political currents to label Obama "elitist" because he dared to name the disease embittering the soul of this country--along with the new attempt of the media to manufacture a black-on-black slug fest between Obama and Wright--offers the American public the opportunity for a fundamental turning in this election. Which direction the majority of the American public chooses to allow itself to be taken will determine not only the outcome of this election, but the character of the American Republic for decades to come.

After we were forced to witness the ridiculous facade of the staged ABC "debate" on April 16, we can only hope a majority of the American public will note how desperately the corporate media are attempting to distract us from our interest in discussing real issues during this campaign. If the American public allows its corporate media to continue to lead it by the nose along this absurd path of distraction, our Republic will betray its own best hope for transcending much of what has plagued its previous history.

We can only hope that enough of our fellow citizens will have the wisdom to see through this racialized spectacle being offered up to the white Republic for its titillation. And we can work to ensure that our Republic turns the tables on the media by rejecting and denouncing this spectacle in ways that demand greater accountability from our media corporations.

And wouldn't it be nice if our collective rejection of this media-produced spectacle would help to draw the entire country back to what should be the central concerns of this campaign year--regarding the future of this country and all of its people:

How will our newly chosen President work together with, and inspire, the American people to rise to the challenge of successfully tackling the major problems of global climate change, the energy crisis, increasing poverty and war that otherwise threaten to draw the entire country and world into a century of chaos?

The character of our new President will be determined by the character of our own collective action in the months ahead. And where our new President takes us will determine the conditions, for better or worse, in which we will live out our shared future.

RESPONSE TO ATTACKS ON OBAMA AS "ELITIST": M.L.KING'S 1963 LETTER FROM BIRMINGHAM JAIL

Lessons for Response from Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s "Letter from Birmingham Jail" (April 16, 1963)

“I had hoped that the white moderate would see this need. Perhaps I was too optimistic; perhaps I expected too much. I suppose I should have realized that few members of the oppressor race can understand the deep groans and passionate yearnings of the oppressed race, and still fewer have the vision to see that injustice must be rooted out by strong, persistent and determined action.” (Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., 1963 "Letter from Birmingham Jail")

The now raging debate over the decontextualized posting of Obama's words regarding the "bitterness" of American voters who have seen their jobs, their sources of livelihood, and their way of life continually chipped away over the last decade of Republican rule is amazing on several counts.

This media frenzy over a snippet of decontextualized words is amazing for the way it demonstrates how the politics of this campaign--even as the pundits claim they would like to begin a national "conversation about race"--can be so easily manipulated and framed by the worst kinds of media misrepresentation and pandering (by some unethical bloggers, followed by most of the media) to time-worn racialized cliches that would attempt to put the "uppity black man" back in his place for daring to critique the status quo of power and economic relations in this country.

This debate over a few decontextualized words is also amazing for the way it has helped to distract media coverage of the campaign away from the kind of substantive critique of Republican policies and their impacts on everyday people that is at the heart of Obama's campaign. This criticism of Republican policies and their bitter impact on the lives of everyday Americans was the basic context of the Obama conversation, which has now been completely silenced by the media distraction created by the unethical posting of a blogger who, without the knowledge of Obama, recorded and posted Obama’s conversation. And this blogger defends her right to do this by claiming she is a citizen-journalist, as if this label somehow frees her from the common decency and ethics that govern the behavior of other professional journalists.

This whole incident seems to have been perfectly designed to distract public debate and attention from precisely the criticisms of Republican policy that have been making the lives of many Americans so bitter over the last years. Obama has been focusing attention on the need to attack the sources of bitter impoverishment and injustice that many Americans in cities and small towns and rural areas across the country are suffering as a result of the policies of several decades that have neglected the economic interests of the vast majority of Americans in favor of the interests of the millionaires of the country!

And now, behold, we have a media spectacle that seems to have been created to suggest exactly the opposite: that Obama is an elitist who has no concern for, or understanding of, the things that have been causing Americans to suffer over the last decade. Thus does the manufactured spectacle of media coverage attempt to convert the one Presidential candidate with a background as community organizer and advocate for everyday people into an elitist. And who, we may ask, are the ones who are most likely to benefit from such distortions of the truth?

In order to deflate such manufactured distortions of reality, it would be nice if bloggers and the media would take up the challenge of serving their proper critical function in a democracy, by drawing the attention of the public back to what is really at stake in the current political campaign and this new incident of distortion. One excellent way of doing this would be to recall the words of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. in response to similar attempts to silence and distort his message of change. King refused to be silent when he was criticized for daring to challenge the negative aspects of American reality that kept all Americans from realizing the Dream of American possibility. And King was called not simply an elitist, but an “extremist,” for advocating his message of change.

In 1963, when Dr. King was confronted by an organized group of mostly white church leaders who questioned the validity and wisdom of his nonviolent tactics for confronting racial segregation head-on in Birmingham, Alabama, King responded with his "Letter from a Birmingham Jail" (April 16, 1963). As we approach the 45th anniversary of this inspiring letter, we should note how it continues to ring with words and ideas prophetically relevant to any true attempt to begin a "national conversation on race."

Dr. King's Birmingham letter also reminds us how representatives of the status quo naturally seek to disguise their attempts to silence challenges to their power by representing themselves as defenders of tradition and “the people” against unwise, elitist and even extremist “outsiders” who would dare to criticize the present order of things.

King provided a clear and direct response to those who suggested that leaders of the civil rights movement were unpatriotic because they criticized the current structures of power and poverty in the country. King’s response provides a telling lesson for all who would today try to label Obama an “elitist” because he dares to suggest that the current structures of economic policy, power, and privilege are bringing bitterness to the lives of many Americans across the country (not just in Pennsylvania and Indiana).

Is it any surprise that Obama should be attacked by millionaires as an elitist at the very moment when it is becoming clear that his critical message of change is connecting with a majority of Americans?! Is it any surprise that Obama should be attacked as an elitist when it has become clear that his campaign consistently refuses to say that hard-working Americans should be asked to “wait” any longer to have their concerns and interests addressed?!

If the media really wants to contribute light rather than distracting heat to debates over what truly differentiates the presidential candidates, we challenge the media and other bloggers to draw attention to the exemplary power and lessons of King’s words for this year’s campaign. We challenge the media to use King’s words to draw attention to the real substance of what is at stake in the current election: Which candidate will be successful at redefining the character of this country? Which candidate will provide the kind of inspiration that will allow us to lead this country to a democratic future of well-being for all people?

King begins his letter by noting that his approach to change was being criticized by white church leaders as “unwise and untimely,” while he was also being painted as an “outsider coming in.” Critiques of King suggested he was not simply an “outsider,” but a very educated, well-spoken, and eloquent “outsider”—and attacked him as, in essence, a black “elitist” coming into a city like Birmingham to challenge and change the unjust structures of white power. Instead of responding directly to King’s challenge, white church leaders tried to change the subject by accusing King of being an unwise outsider who had no business involving himself in efforts to change the status quo.

This was the basic strategy of attacks directed at the entire civil rights movement throughout its insurgent history. And this remains the distracting strategy of many in power who wish to retain it by resisting change, as King noted: “Lamentably, it is an historical fact that privileged groups seldom give up their privileges voluntarily.”

In writing these words, King no doubt had in his mind the words of another deeply eloquent black civil rights and antislavery leader from the nineteenth century: In 1857, before the bloody Civil War finally abolished slavery and won a partial victory for African-American civil rights, Frederick Douglass spoke words that remain as true today as they have ever been (and I’m sure Douglass was also called an elitist for daring to criticize the system of slavery and the structures of national power that supported it):

“Let me give you a word of the philosophy of reform. The whole history of the progress of human liberty shows that all concessions yet made to her august claims have been born of earnest struggle. . . . If there is no struggle there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom and yet deprecate agitation are men who want crops without plowing up the ground; they want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters. This struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one, and it may be both moral and physical, but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.”

In the great and eloquent tradition of Douglass and the long African-American struggle for civil rights that came after him (and made King’s struggle possible), King’s response to those who would have silenced him embodied the greatness of this critical tradition of struggle, while also referencing some of the greatest wisdom from the mid-twentieth century. Without any access to books, he filled his letter from jail with references not only to the Bible and the prophets and civil rights leaders of the past, but to some of the greatest theologians and thinkers of his own era, including Paul Tillich, Reinhold Niebuhr, and the poet T.S. Eliot--

And King’s response to the basic claim that he was an outsider who had no business interfering with the way of things in Birmingham was cuttingly direct in order to slice through the obfuscation of attempts to divert attention from the central issue of INJUSTICE—

“I am in Birmingham because injustice is here. . . . Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. Never again can we afford to live with the narrow, provincial ‘outside agitator’ idea. Anyone who lives inside the United States can never be considered an outsider anywhere within its bounds.”

Certainly this passage from King is more relevant to understanding what is truly at stake in attempts to paint Obama as an “elitist” today: Building on prior attempts to paint Obama as an outsider with foreign roots, a strange name, and to suggest he has an “extremist” background (through tactics of excerpting decontextualized snippets of speeches from his pastor), the Clinton campaign (and then the McCain campaign, which has been delighted to follow the Clinton lead on these attacks) has avoided any mention of its privileged background (the Clintons were both educated at elite ivy league schools, and have millionaire incomes) in order to try to paint Obama as an elitist!

Instead of blindly reiterating whatever the Clinton and McCain campaigns might like to say about Obama, is it too much to hope that the media could be a bit more creative and actually develop its own critical perspective on what is happening with this manufactured and staged debate? And perhaps both the media and the Obama campaign could learn some important lessons from looking carefully at the way King responded to attempts to silence him:

1) Instead of allowing those who accused him of being unpatriotic or “extremist” to deflect him from offering direct criticisms of his country’s unjust policies, King transformed attempts to silence him into opportunities to further his critical message:

“I have earnestly opposed violent tension, but there is a type of constructive, nonviolent tension which is necessary for growth. Just as Socrates felt that it was necessary to create a tension in the mind so that individuals could rise from the bondage of myths and half truths to the unfettered realm of creative analysis and objective appraisal, so must we see the need for nonviolent gadflies to create the kind of tension in society that will help men rise from the dark depths of prejudice and racism to the majestic heights of understanding and brotherhood.”

2) To calls for him and the civil rights movement to wait or slow down its push for change, King replied: “For years now I have heard the word ‘Wait!’ …This ‘Wait’ has almost always meant ‘Never.’ We must come to see, with one of our distinguished jurists, that ‘justice too long delayed is justice denied.’ We have waited for more than 340 years for our constitutional and God given rights.”

3) And to the charge that Obama should silence any references to the “bitterness” of the experience of poverty and deprivation caused in this country by the unwise and unjust policies of the past, perhaps we can all learn something especially important from the way King responded--

Instead of turning away from such criticisms, King emphasized how the bitter experience of his “brothers smothering in an airtight cage of poverty in the midst of an affluent society,” along with the sense that “you are forever fighting a degenerating sense of ‘nobodiness’," made it impossible for the civil rights movement to wait any longer. “There comes a time when the cup of endurance runs over, and men are no longer willing to be plunged into the abyss of despair.” Instead of cooling his criticisms in response to such attacks upon him, King used his Birmingham letter to insist on the movement’s “legitimate and unavoidable impatience,” and the justice of its calls for immediate change:

In emphasizing the immediate necessity of the movement for change, King was not addressing this letter to the racists of the Ku Klux Klan or the White Citizen’s Council, but to the “white moderates” who by their inaction in the face of injustice showed that they were “more devoted to ‘order’ than to justice.” King argued that moderate whites who preferred “a negative peace [in] the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice” had become a “great stumbling block” to the struggle for freedom.

King criticized moderates for believing that they could “paternalistically . . . set the timetable for another man's freedom,” and for living “by a mythical concept of time” that fundamentally misrepresented the relationship between social struggle and social change. This passage from King’s 1963 letter is worth quoting in its entirety because of its direct relevance to the campaign debates of 2008:

“I had also hoped that the white moderate would reject the myth concerning time in relation to the struggle for freedom. I have just received a letter from a white brother in Texas. He writes: ‘All Christians know that the colored people will receive equal rights eventually, but it is possible that you are in too great a religious hurry. It has taken Christianity almost two thousand years to accomplish what it has. The teachings of Christ take time to come to earth.’ Such an attitude stems from a tragic misconception of time, from the strangely irrational notion that there is something in the very flow of time that will inevitably cure all ills. Actually, time itself is neutral; it can be used either destructively or constructively. More and more I feel that the people of ill will have used time much more effectively than have the people of good will. We will have to repent in this generation not merely for the hateful words and actions of the bad people but for the appalling silence of the good people. Human progress never rolls in on wheels of inevitability; it comes through the tireless efforts of men willing to be co-workers with God, and without this hard work, time itself becomes an ally of the forces of social stagnation.

“We must use time creatively, in the knowledge that the time is always ripe to do right. Now is the time to make real the promise of democracy and transform our pending national elegy into a creative psalm of brotherhood. Now is the time to lift our national policy from the quicksand of racial injustice to the solid rock of human dignity.”

4) And to the accusation that he, Rev. King, was an extremist, he replied:

“Though I was initially disappointed at being categorized as an extremist, as I continued to think about the matter I gradually gained a measure of satisfaction from the label. Was not Jesus an extremist for love: ‘Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you.’ Was not [the prophet] Amos an extremist for justice: ‘Let justice roll down like waters and righteousness like an ever flowing stream.’ …So the question is not whether we will be extremists, but what kind of extremists we will be. Will we be extremists for hate or for love? Will we be extremists for the preservation of injustice or for the extension of justice? …Perhaps the South, the nation and the world are in dire need of creative extremists.

“I had hoped that the white moderate would see this need. Perhaps I was too optimistic; perhaps I expected too much. I suppose I should have realized that few members of the oppressor race can understand the deep groans and passionate yearnings of the oppressed race, and still fewer have the vision to see that injustice must be rooted out by strong, persistent and determined action.”

This was Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., in 1963! So if you want to attack Rev. Wright for being extremist for his criticisms of the unjust policies of the United States, you will have to attack Reverend King as well! And we must ask of all Americans, “Do you hear your own prophets, O America?! Do you understand the words of your own Declaration of Independence?!

And lest the media think that opening up a “conversation about race” can be an easy thing accomplished in a 90-minute episode of MSNBC, we should pay attention again to the words from Dr. King’s 1963 letter:

“Like a boil that can never be cured so long as it is covered up but must be opened with all its ugliness to the natural medicines of air and light, injustice must be exposed, with all the tension its exposure creates, to the light of human conscience and the air of national opinion before it can be cured.”

In 1963 King excoriated the lack of courage of the majority of the religious status quo, for failing to actively support the freedom and anti-poverty struggles:

“When I was suddenly catapulted into the leadership of the bus protest in Montgomery, Alabama, a few years ago, I felt we would be supported by the white church… Instead, some have been outright opponents, refusing to understand the freedom movement and misrepresenting its leaders; all too many others have been more cautious than courageous and have remained silent behind the anesthetizing security of stained glass windows.

“In spite of my shattered dreams, I came to Birmingham with the hope that the white religious leadership of this community would see the justice of our cause and, with deep moral concern, would serve as the channel through which our just grievances could reach the power structure. …. [But instead] So often the contemporary church is a weak, ineffectual voice with an uncertain sound. So often it is an archdefender of the status quo. Far from being disturbed by the presence of the church, the power structure of the average community is consoled by the church's silent--and often even vocal--sanction of things as they are.”

But King did not end his letter from the Birmingham Jail on a note of despair. He always tried to frame his critiques within his greater message of creative challenge and critical hope. And this hope was not an unfounded hope because it was based in the history and example of the entire tradition of African-American struggle, perseverance, and victory in the face of the cruelest adversity:

“One day the South will know that when these disinherited children of God sat down at lunch counters, they were in reality standing up for what is best in the American dream and for the most sacred values in our Judaeo-Christian heritage, thereby bringing our nation back to those great wells of democracy which were dug deep by the founding fathers in their formulation of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence.”

May we all hope that in 2008, as this campaign progresses toward the November election, that the media will help the candidates and all of us to focus ever more directly on the real issues facing this country and the world: the threats of global warming and the savage inequalities caused by the persistent structures of poverty and war, and the dire need for change in policies that continue to reproduce structures of power so detrimental to the well-being of all humanity.

And may we hope that the media will live up to the democratic challenge of holding themselves and our candidates accountable for addressing these real issues in the campaign? Or should we give up hope and expect that the media will only continue to provide aid and comfort to the structures of power that prefer to manufacture superficial controversies in order to distract us from confronting the real issues of power that will determine the future of us all?