Blogs

by BAR editor and senior
columnist Margaret Kimberley

Barack Obama seems to believe that his personal
charm can resolve the myriad contradictions of his presidential campaign. A
phony "anti-war" candidate who wants to vastly enlarge the war machine, a
constitutional lawyer who needs Rev. Jesse Jackson to remind him that something
awful happened in Jena, Louisiana - Obama's disconnect from any actual
constituency becomes more visible by the day. His choice of the raving anti-gay
(but himself formerly closeted) gospel singer and pastor Donnie McClurkin to
headline a campaign fundraising tour reveals Obama as a not just a panderer,
but inept as well. The fact that McClurkin was a Bush supporter just three
years ago makes Obama appear to be totally unprincipled.

by Paul Street

What's good for corporate globalization is
good for Chicago and the rest of the nation - unless you live on the Black side
of town. As the Color-Blind Curtain descends on American discourse, it has
become taboo to even mention that map color-codes designating affluence or
poverty coincide almost perfectly with the race of neighborhood residents. In
the corporate celebration of Chicago's "global" status, it becomes ever more
necessary to gloss over the true facts of urban life in an industry-robbed
nation. For every leap into hi-tech, hi-finance, and hi-living among the
gentrifying rich, the places we once called "ghettos" fall deeper into misery
and marginality.

by Nick Turse

In the early 20^th Century
Philippines, U.S. troops called "enemy" fighters "niggers" and "injuns," as
surrogates for the people they despised back home. In Vietnam, the "Cong" were
"gooks" and "dinks" - never human. The "bad guys" in Iraq and Afghanistan are
"hajjis" and "rag-heads" - similarly dehumanized and now openly described as
"game," to be hunted as such by a new crop of Marine Bwanas on killing safaris.
Marine kill-scientists have enlisted the help of inner city police officers and
"big-game hunters" as troop trainers for the "urban
jungles" of Iraq. Under the slogan, "Every Marine a Hunter," the
U.S. military continues its proud perversion of civilized values: Every Target
a Non-Human.

A Black Agenda Radio Commentary by Glen
Ford

{mp3}054x_gf_stop_thief{/mp3}

Aware that Republicans have little chance of hanging
onto the White House without yet another massive minority voter suppression
campaign, the Bush men are busily deploying their criminal cadre in key
election-stealing positions. Arch vote-thief Hans von Spakovsky, who helped
turn the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division into a Dixie-style klavern
of hostility to Blacks and browns, was set to sail through Senate confirmation to a seat
on the Federal Election Commission, where he could protect GOP ballot-snatchers
in 2008. As if in the grip of a death wish, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid
OK'd the deal to allow Spakovsky to set up shop in the FEC - only to be defied
by Senators Russ Feingold and Barack Obama.

by Paul Street

Barack Obama's sole claim to being an "anti-war"
candidate is an October, 2002, speech he delivered in Chicago, opposing the
congressional vote to give George Bush Iraq War Powers. No sooner had Obama's
U.S. Senate campaign been declared "viable" by the corporate media, than the
speech disappeared from Obama's web site. Ever since, the presidential candidate
has been fully as much a warmonger as his top-tier rivals, calling for a bigger
military and refusing to rule out the "nuclear option" in an attack against
Iraq. Obama's five-year-old speech is no more than a fig leaf to hide a
hawkishness every bit as dangerous as Hillary Clinton's.

by Jason Miller

Mr. Miller has studied the American personality, and
the prognosis does not look good. Miller identifies nine characteristics of
what he calls Americanistic Personality Disorder (type 1776.0), "a dangerous
perversion of character" that may become pathological. Practitioners of "deeply
conservative Christianity" and residents of the South and certain other states
are especially susceptible to the disorder, which presents itself in displays
of racism, flag-waving, nationalistic, and militaristic fervor." There's no
point in quarantining the afflicted since, according to the author, they make
up about 35 percent of the U.S. population.