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?

Global Disaster or Sustainability?: The Need for Deep Political Reform to Save the World

Will we take up the challenge, personal and political, of building the movement for fundamental political and policy change that is needed to address the crisis that faces us all? James Speth argues on the basis of current science that if we continue along our current path of political and economic decision-making, we will have made the world unlivable by the end of this century. While so much of the discussion of global climate change misses the forest for the trees by focusing on such a narrow range of elements that we never get to see the big picture that results from this science, Speth brings the big picture into focus, and challenges us to ACT NOW, or face the fact that we and our children will be witnessing the decline of the world into global disaster over the coming decades.

According to James Speth, we need to build a "mighty political force" for fundamental political and economic change, and this is now our most basic task and challenge. The environmental movement has been far too timid politically, and unless all environmentalists team up with the environmental justice movement and begin to work for more fundamental forms of political and policy change, we will have little chance of saving our world for even this century.

Summary of book from Yale Press: How serious are the threats to our environment? Here is one measure of the problem: if we continue to do exactly what we are doing, with no growth in the human population or the world economy, the world in the latter part of this century will be unfit to live in. Of course human activities are not holding at current levels—they are accelerating, dramatically—and so, too, is the pace of climate disruption, biotic impoverishment, and toxification. In this book Gus Speth, author of Red Sky at Morning and a widely respected environmentalist, begins with the observation that the environmental community has grown in strength and sophistication, but the environment has continued to decline, to the point that we are now at the edge of catastrophe.

Speth contends that this situation is a severe indictment of the economic and political system we call modern capitalism. Our vital task is now to change the operating instructions for today’s destructive world economy before it is too late. The book is about how to do that.

James Gustave Speth, a distinguished leader and founder of environmental institutions over the past four decades, is dean of the School of Forestry and Environmental Studies at Yale University. He was awarded Japan’s Blue Planet Prize for “a lifetime of creative and visionary leadership in the search for science-based solutions to global environmental problems.”

Today NPR's Diane Rehm Show hosted Speth for a discussion of his book and his vision of what we need to do--Check out this program for an introduction to the major themes of Speth's book.

The "Fierce Urgency of NOW"!

Now, more than ever--in the face of global climate change, the new energy crisis, and the increasing militarization of our lives under the shadow of a perpetual war on terrorism eroding all we have cherished about our democratic way of life--we live in urgent need of a creative new vision and approach to politics and policy in the United States.

While the campaign of Barack Obama has inspired many of us by its invocation of Martin Luther King Jr.'s words and spirit, it still remains unclear whether the Obama campaign or the Democratic Party will in 2008 be able to live up to the spiritual wisdom and challenge embodied in King's phrase, "the fierce urgency of now."

Given the wild cards of the superdelegates and the Michigan and Florida primary debacle, the arithmetic of the Democratic campaign indicates that neither Obama nor Clinton will have enough delegates by this summer to wrap up the nomination simply by virtue of completing all the state primaries. This means the decisions of the Democratic Party leaders in the coming weeks about how the Party will resolve this likely standoff and deal with both the superdelegate and the Michigan/Florida wild cards will be pivotal to ensuring a Democratic nomination process that has legitimacy with both Democratic and national voters.

Two things are already clear: 1) If the Democratic Party fails to resolve the superdelegate wild card in a way that ensures that the majority decision of the Democratic primary voters (of at least 48 states, if not 50) will be the determining decision in this nomination process, the Democratic Party will help to ensure a Republican victory in November by alienating many voters from the entire Democratic nomination process. Voters in Michigan and Florida are already in danger of being alienated because of the disenfranchising mess the state and national parties have made of the primary process in those states. If the Democratic Party wants to add insult to injury and ensure nation-wide alienation, all the Party has to do is allow the superdelegates to overrule the choice of the majority of the country's Democratic voters.

2) If the Clinton and Obama campaigns continue in the direction of the politics of mutually-assured destruction, they will together be helping to deliver the country and the world to another four years of Republican rule and Bush-style policy on the war.

Last fall I thought there would be little the Democratic Party could do to lose this election in the face of the almost universal failure of the Republicans in Congress and the White House to serve the public interest on issues like the environment, the war, and public health. But the old saw about the Democratic Party's amazing ability to find a way to pull loss out of the jaws of victory seems once more to be proving itself to be true....

The Democratic Party lost in both 2000 and 2004 because of overconfidence in its ability to win against an "incompetent" and "dumb" Bush. Overconfidence in the upcoming election campaign against McCain (who has already proven in the primary that he is neither incompetent nor dumb) will almost certainly ensure another Republican victory....

So now it is time for a fiercely urgent appeal to all voters inspired by Obama's call for a new politics of vision to act to ensure that the Democratic Party and its two competing candidates will act wisely in the months ahead to avoid the kinds of self-destructive folly that will deliver the Democratic Party over to another bitter loss to the Republicans in November.

Given the stakes of this election not only for the future of this country, but for the world and the global environment, Democrats--and especially the two remaining Democratic candidates--cannot afford to be selfish. It is time for both candidates, all leaders and members of the Democratic Party, and all voters who care about the future to act to ensure that the usual degrading selfishness and small-minded politics does not now take over the Democratic nomination process. To whatever extent this downward spiral is allowed to happen, the Republicans will grow in the strength of their prospects for the general election in November.

It's up to all of us who care about and desire a new politics and vision of government to make sure this nightmarish politics of mutually-assured destruction does not take control of the remaining months of the Democratic primary process. The drive downwards has already begun, with the stated intent of both candidates to deepen the politics of attack and counter-attack in the weeks ahead. The Clinton, who seem to represent the establishment politics of the status quo, have been taunting Obama for some time now to join battle in the mud. And Obama has been getting drawn in. Now it seems both campaigns are fully engaged in the usual political war that surrenders the high ground of a visionary politics in order to engage the narrow-minded tooth-and-nail battle for momentary victory on the low ground of the status quo.

If both candidates follow this downward spiral, one will emerge victorious in the politics of the moment, but at the fundamental price of betraying the meaning embodied in the Fierce Urgency of Now--and that betrayal will turn the momentary victory of one of these candidates into a terrible loss for the Party, this country, and the world at large. We will all be the ultimate losers in such a pyrrhic victory.

So let us all work in whatever ways we can to make sure that the politics of THIS moment and this campaign stand for more than a pyrrhic victory. Both Democratic candidates have their own responsibility to guard against engaging in this pyrrhic struggle, but all of us share the responsibility to make sure we do not allow these candidates to drag THIS political moment down to the level of those that have come before. This moment requires and DEMANDS better from all of us. And the Fierce Urgency of Now demands that we all not merely stand by as spectators and allow what is politically inevitable (according to the status quo) to happen.

The audiences of the debates between Obama and Clinton were great at letting the candidates know that we demanded more of them. But now that the candidates are free from our guidance and restraining influence during the debates, they seem to be throwing off all restraint and slip-sliding into the same old political muck. We need to find new ways of reminding them that if they do this, they will be battling each other in the muck alone. THIS time we will not follow them there. If they go there, they both risk rejection by us. If they wish to fight for a pyrrhic primary victory only to lose the general election, and betray us all, then we must conclude that neither one of them is wise enough to lead us into the new politics we so desperately need.

Let us remind these candidates of these truths loudly and clearly--the fierce urgency of Now demands nothing less than this from all of us.

In Face of Collapse of Major Antarctic Ice Shelf, UN Climate Chief Warns of "Accelerated Melting" of Ice Caps

BRUSSELS (AFP) — The head of the UN intergovernment climate change body on Wednesday voiced strong concern at the accelerated melting of the polar ice caps, calling for international tariffs on carbon emissions.

"Now there's enough evidence to show that there is accelerated melting of some of these large bodies of ice; west Antarctic ice-sheet, the Greenland ice-sheet," Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), told reporters at the European Parliament in Brussels.

His comments came after satellite images by the University of Colorado's National Snow and Ice Data Center showed Antarctica's massive Wilkins Ice Shelf has begun disintegrating under the effects of global warming.

The collapse of a substantial section of the shelf was triggered February 28 when an iceberg measuring 41 by 2.4 kilometers (25.5 by 1.5 miles) broke off its southwestern front.

Pachauri spoke of the possibility of "irreversible and abrupt changes... that would result in several metres of increase in sea levels," as a result of global warming, blamed in part on carbon dioxide emissions.

He refused to speculate on how soon such catastrophic changes could take place but insisted on the urgent need to introduce an international system for charging polluters for carbon emissions.

Major Antarctic Ice Sheet Collapses while the US Democratic Presidential Primary Process Self-Destructs

While the two US Democratic presidential candidates are wrapped up in the small and petty politics of mutually assured destruction for the Democratic Party in November (as new polls are indicating), a vast hunk of floating ice has broken away from the Antarctic peninsula, threatening the collapse of a much larger ice shelf behind it, in a development that has shocked climate scientists.

Satellite images show that about 160 square miles of the Wilkins ice shelf has been lost since the end of February. The collapsing shelf suggests that climate change could be forcing change much more quickly than scientists had predicted.

"The ice shelf is hanging by a thread," said Professor David Vaughan of the British Antarctic Survey (BAS). "We'll know in the next few days or weeks what its fate will be." The Wilkins shelf covers an area of 5,600 square miles (14,500 square kilometers). It is now protected by just a thin thread of ice between two islands.

Vaughan was a member of the team that predicted in 1993 that global warming could cause the Wilkins shelf to collapse within 30 years.

Climate scientists around Antarctica were taken by surprise by the new find. "Wilkins is the largest ice shelf on the Antarctic peninsula yet to be threatened," said Vaughan. "I didn't expect to see things happen this quickly. We predicted it would happen, but it's happened twice as fast as we predicted."

Six other Antarctic ice shelves have already been lost entirely - the Prince Gustav Channel, Larsen Inlet, Larsen B, Wordie, Muller and Jones shelves.

But Vaughan said the Wilkins Shelf is "bigger than any ice shelf we've seen retreating before, and in the long term it could be a taste of other things to come. It is another indication of the impact that climate change is having on the region."

In the face of the real problems the United States and the world are facing, all of us should be demanding and calling upon both the Democratic presidential candidates to focus on these real problems, and on what they will do to address them--instead of on what they can do to tear down their opponent with petty tactics that will only work to make a Republican victory more likely in November.

We should all be asking both candidates: How will history judge you, even if you win the primary, if in the process of winning you use tactics that help to insure a Republican victory this November?! In what is perhaps the most important election of this century for determining our ability to achieve the fundamental policy changes on global warming, war, and social spending that are needed IMMEDIATELY in the next five years?!!

Any candidate who cannot maintain focus on the real problems that face humanity and the citizens of the United States ought to drop out of the race NOW! For if the only way a particular candidate can win the Primary is by attacking and destroying the other Democratic candidate, what does that say about the desperate character of that candidacy and that candidate?! Have you no shame?! And the last thing the United States or the rest of the world needs now is another President who lacks shame and refuses to take responsibility for lies and errors of judgment!