by BAR Managing Editor Bruce Dixon

As the Democratic wing of America's permanent ruling party convenes in
Denver, Democrats have dominated the Congress for almost two years.
There are more US troops in Iraq and Afghanistan than in 2006 but no
Democratic deadline to end these useless, predatory wars. 1.1 million
African Americans languish behind bars while the dispossession and
exile of hundreds of thousands of blacks from the Gulf Coast begins its
fourth year. The convention will be a media circus and will culminate with the co-branding of Barack Obama with Dr. King's 1963 "I Have A Dream" speech is intended to establish deep symbolic references between the two in the minds of voters, despite their diametrically opposed politics.

Hope is a
powerful drug indeed.

by Mel Reeves

Big Business media are coming to resemble the National
Enquirer more each day. Former senator and presidential aspirant John Edwards'
marital indiscretions loomed larger in the corporate media mind than matters of
war and peace, fiscal solvency or human rights. There seems to be no
correlation between spousal fidelity and presidential performance. "It does
appear that the current president has been faithful to his wife - yet George
Bush has committed every transgression imaginable against the U.S.
Constitution, and has behaved faithlessly towards to the citizenry he is sworn
to protect."

by Paul Street

The author, no fan of Barack Obama's "neoliberal
centrist" ambitions, believes that "hubris and overreach" as well as race
"could play a role in a hypothetical Obama defeat." Like other Democrats of his
corporate bent, "Obama has done everything he can to reassure the nation's
ruling bipartisan political class that he is fully on board with the American
Empire Project." An Iraq and Afghanistan war funder, Obama "deserves to lose
Iraq as an issue working in his favor." If he loses, "it will be important
for progressively inclined citizens and activists to understand that it was
corporate-imperial centrism, not the left and not the People, that got defeated." 

by David Weiner

"Authoritarianism, the soil of racism, makes dominant
white culture in the United States an easy pawn of fascism." So said
social-psychiatrist Erich Fromm and others who argued that racism "renders its
proletarian benefactors passive and weak, ready to coalesce into angry or
obedient mobs but unable to pursue the goals of a self-actualized citizenry."
The U.S. has been a nurturing culture for white racism, an environment that
taught young whites to believe that, "If black people, or brown for that
matter, did poorly it was because of bad attitude, poor parenting, and cultural
degeneracy."

by Mel Reeves

The New York Times magazine predicts that Black
politics will fade into "mainstream" American politics as happened with the
Italians and Irish, conveniently forgetting that "the Irish and Italian machines
were white!" Moreover, the article seems to maintain that "electoral politics
is the primary form of black political struggle" when "the most significant
black struggle has occurred in the streets." Black electoral politicians aren't
rated too highly in the ‘hood. "If asked to name black heroes off the top of
their heads, most blacks would instantly nominate Martin Luther King Jr. and
Malcolm X - neither of whom held elective office."

by
Diop Olugbala, International People's Democratic Uhuru Movement

The Uhuru Movement, which forced Barack Obama to
defend his record in Black America at a campaign stop in Florida, are preparing
for their national convention, next month. Party spokesman Diop Olugbala says
the candidate has a lot more to answer for. "If anyone looks
seriously at the positions, programs and advisors of Barack Obama, they will
see that he does not stand for any kind of real change, but for the defense of
the same old status quo, with a new face." The Uhuru Movement works toward an
"independent political agenda" that addresses in depth the question, "what
about the black community?"