Registering Voters and Building a Movement for Change in 2008

by Chuleenan Svetvilas

On Saturday, May 10 I participated in the Obama campaign's 50-state voter registration drive. I had never registered voters before but when I got an email from Asian Americans for Obama informing me about the event I decided I had to do it. After all, I thought, if Barack Obama gets the nomination, he'll need all the votes he can get in November.

The email stated when and where we were to meet -- at the Ella Hill Hutch Community Center in San Francisco -- and that after a short training session, "we will send teams of volunteers to public events in selected neighborhoods." We were also told to "bring a pen, clipboard and an Obama button if you have them." I clicked on a link to RSVP for the 11 am to 3 pm shift. The other shift was 2:30 pm to 6 pm.

I took the BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit) train from Oakland to San Francisco's Civic Center stop -- about a 25-minute trip. At Civic Center, in the area in between City Hall and the public library, people were in the midst of setting up for some event. I wondered if it was an anti-war event because I saw some tent with something on it about people killed. Then I walked several blocks to the center carrying my messenger bag, which held my camera, clipboard, pen, and bottled water. It was a very hot day and I was sweating wearing my long-sleeved black Obama t-shirt and my "Asian Americans Pacific Islanders for Obama" button pinned to my hat.

The Ella Hill Hutch Community Center serves the Fillmore community providing outreach programs for students and adults and offering shelter to homeless people at night.

This picture shows the striking mural on one of the center's walls. It depicts African Americans who have made important contributions to San Francisco. The people sitting on the ground are some of the volunteers filling out paperwork and waiting for training to begin so they can start registering voters.

Here are people waiting to sign in and pick up their paperwork and clipboards. We also got to wear the requisite rectangular name tag sticker. And if you didn't have an Obama button, you got a round Obama sticker to wear in addition to the name tag one.

I met Monica and Ricky (pictured above with name tags) after I signed in and picked up my paperwork -- blank registration forms and a form I had to sign detailing my responsibilities as a voter registration volunteer. Monica came all the way from San Jose and Ricky came from Santa Clara. Like me, neither of them had registered voters before. Monica, who was born in Guatemala, said she came because she wanted to get involved in the campaign. "I have never been involved in something like this before."

She is a student at City College in San Jose. Monica told me that in June she would be traveling to Washington, D.C. with Bread for the World, a Christian organization aimed at ending poverty and hunger. She went to meet with representatives "to advocate the issue of global hunger." Monica says they were going to request a $5 billion increase on the current Global Poverty Act (S.2433) to cut in half the number of people living on less than $1 a day by 2015. I emailed Monica for an update on her trip and here's what she said:

"I was in training from June 14-16. The training consisted of workshops and lectures to be prepared for Lobby Day, which took place on June 17th at the Capitol. On this date, all the constituents from California met with Richard W. Harper, Jr, Legislative Assistant for Senator Dianne Feinstein and Ann Norris, Senior Legislative Assistant for Senator, Barbara Boxer. We presented them our request for the $5 billion increase and addressed the impact of Global Hunger in the US and how $5 billion could benefit us by decreasing illegal immigration and building up our reputation and economy."

Monica told me to mention that she encourages people to get involved and take action "on matters that affect us directly" and write their congresspeople.

Ricky revealed that he was a Republican. He says foreign policy is a big concern of his so he voted for Obama in the primary. "The only person who can best save the country is Obama," says Ricky, and that's why he came to register voters. Ricky also says that Obama is the "most humanitarian of all the candidates." He mentioned that he wanted to show his support so that eight years later, he could say that he had a small part in getting Obama elected. Ricky describes himself as a businessman with a website for musicians called chartspace.com. (In the Bay Area, it's hard not to run into someone who has a website or a blog.)

When I signed in, I was told that I would be going to the Civic Center area. So I went to sit over by the hand-painted sign that said "Civic Center" and had a circle with a few red lines like the campaign logo. Other signs said "Ferry Building," "Visitacion Valley," "Ball Park," and "Bay View."

Eventually we were told that our brief training would begin. One half went to one side of the grassy area and the other half, including me and my small "Civic Center" group of eight people, was near the "stage" of the building. Here we are on our feet, waiting to hear from Angelica, one of the folks who helped organize this event.


And here's Angelica telling us to be positive, don't debate people, and give the voter registration form to anyone who asked for one -- even if they said they were voting for McCain. And to make sure that people fulfilled the eligibility requirements so they wouldn't be disappointed should their registration not go through. In case you're wondering, you have to be a U.S. citizen, a resident of California, be at least 18 years old at the time of the next election,not be imprisoned or on parole for a felony conviction, oh, and my favorite "not currently be judged mentally incompetent by a court of law."

In addition, you have to write down your driver's license number, your state ID number, or the last four digits of your social security number on the form. This must be a new thing as I don't remember having to write down that info before.

My small group was led by "Team Captain" Jay, a young white man who had traveled to Texas and Pennsylvania for the primaries. He says he started working for the campaign two days after Bill Clinton started talking about race. "This is about the long term," says Jay. "It's about getting people involved. I've met people from 18 to 87 years old who are getting involved for the first time. That's why I'm here."

My group was racially diverse, including two white women from San Francisco -- Katie, a blond, pony-tailed, graphic designer wearing a short-sleeved black t-shirt that had "Obama" in red and "08" below in huge blue football-style numbers; and Gayle, a petite, dark-haired woman wearing the same Obama t-shirt as me. Gayle is semi-retired, does consulting work for higher education, and has a blog called Pastry Studio. "I've been involved since I saw [Obama] last September," says Gayle. "I went to headquarters in San Francisco and did phone banking."

It was exciting to discover that the majority of the people in our group had not registered voters before. We were nearly all first-time volunteers in this endeavor. I really started to feel that I was part of a movement. We had two young people in the group as well -- 18-year-old Filipino high school students Marc and Paula. Paula told me that she had worked the polls at the Super Tuesday primary and that she had donated to the Obama campaign. Marc said that Obama was "relatable" to people of different backgrounds, and like himself, Obama grew up with a single parent and spent time in another country.

Another member of my group was K.C., an African American woman who served as a precinct captain earlier this year. She also volunteered in June 2007 in the "Walk for Change" event in San Francisco. Here's a picture of K.C. (right) after our shift was over. Kenya, the young man with her, was a "Team Captain," overseeing the voter registration volunteers for the Fillmore area that day. He mentioned that he was a precinct captain as well.

As our group walked to the Civic Center area, Jay was figuring out who would go where and who had cell phones on them. Gayle didn't have her cell phone with her so I was paired with her. We were dressed alike -- black Obama t-shirts and jeans. I told Jay that some event was going on in Civic Center and he told us that we could start there. Katie and K.C. also joined us in working that event. The teenagers were sent to the area between the public library and the Asian Art Museum.

It turns out that the event was the Free Palestine, Peace and Solidarity Festival and it was difficult to find people to register there. I kept running into people who were already registered to vote or they were international students or immigrants who weren't American citizens. When I went around to the folks staffing various information tables, I got a couple hostile responses from people who were against Obama because of his support of Israel and because at that time, he had made some statement about not meeting with Hamas. I called Jay and told him about the challenges we were facing after about 30 minutes of walking up to strangers. In response to the Hamas statement, Jay told me that Obama didn't say that he wouldn't meet with Hamas, he said he wouldn't meet with them unless they recognize Israel's right to exist.

Then he decided to split us up. Gayle was to go to Hayes Valley and I had to traipse nearly 20 blocks (more than half of them uphill) to the Whole Foods store on California St. But just before we were about to leave, I finally found someone to register! A Chicana was staffing a table and she said there was some problem with her registration so she needed to fill it out again. So I gave her a form and a pen. It took her several minutes to fill it out. Then I checked to make sure she filled out all the appropriate sections, signed it and gave her the stub at the bottom. I didn't realize it would be so hard to find people to register. Gayle and I had wondered if the ten blank forms on our clipboards were enough. It soon dawned on us that it would be really hard to register ten people.

And on I went to Whole Foods, where I spent the next hour and a half or so trying to talk to as many people as possible. I've done canvassing years ago -- during a college winter break I went door-to-door in Massachusetts talking about the Toxics Use Reduction bill and getting donations for MassPIRG. Finding people to register to vote was a numbers game. I later found out that San Francisco has one of the highest rates of voter registration. But besides that, it was hard to get people to stop. They were either rushing into the store or they were on their way out with a cart or armful of groceries. Not an ideal situation for striking up a conversation with a perfect stranger.

I didn't count how many people I talked to because I was so focused on talking to people. But I know I talked to dozens and dozens of people during that time. That store is quite busy and seems to have its share of well-heeled, predominately white customers. I saw plenty of BMWs and Mercedes in the parking lot. Many of the people I talked to were already registered. A few weren't but said they didn't want to register. Some people wouldn't give me any eye contact. I think my Obama t-shirt gave some people the impression that I was campaigning for Obama. So I tried to tell them as quickly as possible that I was registering people to vote.

After about 45 minutes, I finally found someone who said they needed to register and she was grateful that I could register her. She had recently moved and needed to reregister. I was thrilled to hand over my clipboard. While she was filling out the form, I entertained her year-old daughter who was sitting in the grocery cart.

Then I went back to trying to buttonhole people and maintain a cheery smile despite the constant flow negative responses. A couple Whole Foods employees were on break so I approached the. One was already registered and another pointed out a fellow employee and told me that he wasn't registered and said I should ask him. So I went up to the guy and he said he had to get back to work so he couldn't fill it out. So I handed him the form and told him he could take it and mail it in himself.

Eventually I found a 20-something year old white guy who had never voted in an election before. I asked him if he would like to register to vote, holding out the clipboard. He paused and I held my breath, trying to act casual and not too excited (voter number three!!). Then he took the clipboard. And that was the last voter I registered that day before a Whole Foods employee came out and told me that he supported Obama but I needed to go over to the sidewalk about 100 feet away, and not be right in front of the store. I wasn't in a public area so I could see why he told me to move. I was standing in the store's parking lot.

So I stood around on the sidewalk but soon came to the conclusion that I wouldn't get much out of that. I called Jay and told him the situation and that I was essentially done for the day. It was after 2:30 pm and I was beat. I headed back to the center. At one traffic light as I waited for the light to change, a van rounded the corner and an older white guy leaned out and said to me, "I like your shirt." I thanked him and walked back with a smile on my face.

Back at the center I ran into K.C. who had been sent to the Harvest Urban Market grocery store south of Market. She didn't didn't have any luck finding folks to register. Then I didn't feel so bad about my low number. I dropped off my forms around 2:45 p.m. One of the Obama volunteers who was taking the filled out voter registration forms seemed a little glum about the low numbers and joked that at least it meant less data entry work.

I walked back to Civic Center so I could catch BART back home. Around 3:15 p.m. I ran into Marc and Paula. Marc had registered seven voters and Paula, four! I was duly impressed and told them that they did a great job.

I didn't have anyone take my picture when I was in San Francisco but Kofi took my picture when I got home. So here I am in my Obama t-shirt and with my clipboard.

I will participate in other voter registration efforts in the months leading up to the election. The key to winning this election is registering new voters.

Amiri Baraka on the American Left, Barack Obama, and the role of Ideology in American Politics today

All,

Amiri Baraka (formerly Leroi Jones, b. 1934) is one of the major and most important writers of the past half century in the United States, as well as a longtime political and cultural activist and teacher since the early 1960s. Highly gifted and creatively proficient in many different genres of literature--poetry, playwriting, cultural criticism, the essay, fiction, music and literary theory, history, and criticism, as well as journalism --Baraka is also a consummate social organizer, theoretician, and strategist who has founded and/or been an integral part of many different social, cultural, and political organizations and is widely considered the leading force behind the legendary Black Arts Movement (BAM), a national cultural phenomenon that revolutionized American writing and cultural expression in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Amiri is the legendary and prolific author of over 30 books (!), an esteemed member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and a past winner of the American Book Award, the Langston Hughes Award, and fellowships from the Rockefeller Foundation and the National Endowment of the Arts. Baraka also taught literature, music history, cultural history, politics, and African American Studies for over 30 years at SUNY--Stony Brook, Columbia, Yale, and Georgetown universities.

The following two political essays were written in response to the Obama campaign for the U.S. Presidency. The first one entitled "Left Out, Left Back, Left Behind" initially appeared in the specific context of the national 'Black Left' political conference in Chapel Hill, North Carolina on May 30-31, 2008 and the second called "The Parade of Anti-Obama Rascals" was first published on June 21, 2008.

Cogent, insightful, feisty, toughminded, rigorous, and incisive these essays continue Baraka's profound intellectual and activist legacy of always speaking truth to power and challenging us all to seriously wrestle with, investigate, and engage the complex and often conflicted and even ambivalent dimensions of public discourse on radical politics, ideological committment, and the larger struggle for true Democracy in our society and culture. It is in that spirit of dialogue and shared hopes, dreams, anxieties, fears, and desires that we are proud to feature Mr. Baraka's most recent commentary in the online pages of The Panopticon Review.

Kofi


LEFT OUT, LEFT BACK, LEFT BEHIND
by Amiri Baraka
May 30, 2008

The Left is still playing infantile games, maddening antics, childish in their pronouncement, backwards in their effect. But to play games in this bitter material world, a world imperialism has recreated as Hell, is to risk being regarded as a candidate for the loony pen.

At a recent Harlem debate about the presidential primary campaign, two “Leftists” and a righty journalist disguised as a purveyor of hard facts trashed Obama. In fact he came out Wednesday with another mighty tome proving that Obama is unworthy as he ends it he “smells a thug”. But as my grandmother would say he probably smells his own upper lip.

At the debate he said that Obama and Clinton’s records are identical. But she voted for the war, he did not. And at that time, she had not sunk into the gutter of race baiting including poisonous speculation about a campaign saving assassination.

All three of these speakers at the Harlem debate were Black, at least one who back in the day was a member of the CP and who explained that imperialism would not permit Obama to change anything. Was he signifying that imperialism would allow the other candidates to bring more effective change?

Didn’t he also understand that even imperialism has its contradictions and splits that might enable significant political gain with the correct political line and massive popular support. Were the gains made against formal apartheid in this country in the 60’s by the Civil Right and Black Liberation Movements made only because imperialism permitted them?

A Harlem housing activist leaped to her feet, hands on hips, defiantly shouting, “You are not calling Obama a progressive are you?”

But in the context of Clinton & McCain, of course he is a progressive. A would be progressive anti war activist said we shd forget Obama and get back to being against the war. What does that mean if the only candidate to be against the war is Obama? What would prevent a presumably intelligent person from understanding this?

But there is a culture that only regards protest as real politics and marginalization as the only correct political stance. Why do these people first infer that there is a whole spectrum of candidates to choose from? There are only three, McCain, Clinton & Obama, take yr pick. But for some of us the idea of actually soiling our idealism by plunging into Bourgeois politics is sickening. But how can it be more sickening than standing around full of good slogans which nobody hears but ourselves, some of the time.

No one can resent or be more disgusted by US bourgeois politics than I, but there must be some deeper understanding of politics, as Karenga sd, “The gaining, maintaining and use of power". But also what Lenin said is that the goal of any true revolutionary is the seizure of power. But we exist throughout this land animated by protest, to whatever extent, but do not yet comprehend at large that we must wrestle power from bourgeois forces at whatever level as anchor for our protest mode. As a Left “force” the protest is almost our sole modes operandi.

We must begin to understand that we have to oppose the maintenance of the bourgeoisie at the lowest possible level to the highest. The highest is revolution. But in The Civil War in France, Marx said the Bourgeoisie knew what to do about street fighting in the 19th century, but what they have remained vulnerable to is the possibility of the masses of the people organizing and using the hypocritical bourgeois cry of democracy to actually access varieties of actual power!

To use voting for McKinney, whom I have always admired, as a suitable stance in this present conflict is to play games—don’t even mention the Nadir of political liberal unreality (Bah, Humbug!)

As much as I respect Cynthia McKinney, we need to take real action not make symbolic gestures merely to reassure ourselves we’re on the side of the Angels (not Engels) while permitting the outright devil to remain in power.

We can see now the surrounding media has taken off its gloves and is pounding Obama, using Clinton’s victory in Pennsylvania to suggest she has made a stunning comeback. But with their usual trickery, where last month they were saying that Hilary was 34 pts ahead, now they trumpet the 10 point victory as a triumph of triumph.

New Jersey’s Star Liar had headlines after the West Virginia debacle of poor whites voting against their own interests, Clinton Wins Big in West Virginia, but only a miniature heading mentioning Obama’s Oregon victory. The fact is that neither West Virginia nor Pennsylvania changed the distance and relationship of Obama’s lead. And the 10 points in Penna , if that indeed was what it was, given the reports of voting machine break down in the inner cities, has merely kept the separation between Clinton & Obama exactly where it was.

What I understood in that Harlem debate is that the three I discussed have never been in the Black Liberation Movement, so the struggle is more abstract. They don’t see Obama’s candidacy as an aspect of the BLM. That is, a struggle to raise the level of contradictions in the society and to push race theory to the wall.

We have not had a white anything running local politics in Newark for 38 years. Our children have been raised understanding the duplicity & lugubrious cowardice, & ignorance of the negro petty bourgeois, defining home rule as flawed by that class’ shallowness & fear. Now with Corey Booker bringing in a “occupied Newark” we see the real meaning of Cabral’s observation of how imperialism can rule through “Native Agents”. But we have had the opportunity to be taught about classes and class struggle without having to be objectively oppressed directly by the acid addition of straight out racial fascism.

(In contrast, the top 10 police officials in Newark now, under Booker- Stanford, Yale, Rhodes scholar where he was president of the Oxford University Jewish Student Organization- are white , not even Latino, in a city 60% Black. Booker defines comprador)

But we see now, in the last weeks since Pennsylvania , the forces of straight out racism begin to represent themselves almost openly as that, no longer citing Obama’s lack of experience and being cheerful about his “post racial” message. Now they openly say Obama cannot win because he cannot convince white people (at first the white working class, now just white people..which includes Charlie Rangel and Andy Young) to vote for him. Add to that the feminists who want to describe Hilary Clinton as a “woman” but Obama as a “Black Man. This just in, Hilary is a white woman.

It is time that the BLM (Black Liberation Movement), and the would be “Black Left”as the most advanced sector of the BLM, made its presence felt in the campaign, celebrating the post racial potential of the Obama campaign, but also clarifying the exact things we want to achieve with an Obama nomination. Because it is the possibility of such nomination that shd bring us to explain precisely what we expect from that nomination, which is an explanation , at the same time, why we support him even, as the Phila leftist sd, as a member of an imperialist party. Which of these candidates is not? This reminds me of the negro preacher in Harlem who was on You Tube screaming “Obama had a white mother”. This just in….so did Hilary and McCain! What foolishness!

The Left must stop pretending that this campaign is other than bourgeois politics in a country ruled by Monopoly Capitalism and Imperialism, by two parties who are surely representatives of that. We must use our resources of communication & organization to broaden, solidify and draw to the Left the pro-Obama coalition, trying to electrify it with a Left Bloc, as Lenin counseled, to maximize the influence of real left politics even within the bourgeois election.

Does anyone believe that Malcolm X and Dr. King operated within another system? The question remains what we can do within this system to force some change within it, not to be so “shot out” by discovering we live under monopoly capitalism that all we do is call our enemies names & refuse to struggle directly to transform it.

If we do not directly participate in the only slender corridor where the bourgeosie, as Marx pointed out in The Civil War in France pretends to endanger itself by touting democracy, we are foolish not to try to take whatever advantage of it we can. Must we be content merely to celebrate our Leftism by participating in acknowledged rituals of impotence , no matter how high sounding & Left they may seem. We shd be fighting McCain & Bonnie &Clyde with all our might, maximizing our Unity & preparing to struggle. We shd understand by now how tough the primary campaign has been, we had better prepare for the general election campaign which will be much much worse.

We must hold meetings to set tactics and strategy in place, in a number of cities and consolidate our decision & resolve. We must even go to Denver & be ourselves to make certain they do not just steal the nomination before our eyes.

There are already forces in Denver and preparing to bring more in. It would be important to hold a number of rallies by late July to mobilize Denver rallies Aug 25 to 29 at the site of the National Democratic Convention. We must make the entire world understand the dangerousness of trying to steal the nomination from Barack Obama.

We shd also begin to make concrete suggestions about Obama’s campaign, where it is faltering we shd be open & give advice. We shd take issue, obviously with issues like the backwardness of part of the Cuba speech. We shd have come together forcefully to fight those forces black and white who thought Rev Wright’s sermon or his press conference were racist. Or to defend Michelle Obama’s expression of realistic pride in her husband’s candidacy.

It is time for Obama to get tougher, more incisive in his commentary. He can no longer be satisfied with merely taking “the high road”. Hilary Clinton is a very flawed candidate. If Obama is Black she must be White . Her reliance on feminist racism must be exposed. We must begin to see her as the plantations owners “better half” & only that.

McCain’s Viet Nam lobotomy must be cited. Not only is he a right wing Bush man in almost everything he says - no help for those unhoused in the subprime scandal- not even the banks - OOPS! Change that . That was so screwy under monopoly he had to withdraw that immediately.

The Bill scandals, Hilary’s loyal Goldwater membership while that dinosaur righty even opposed Dr. King’s birthday. We must see this also as an opportunity to hammer at the old guard sell out civil rights negroes whose years of betrayal now have become the scarlet letter of the Hilary support. Rangel, Fenty, Maxine, Bob Johnson, Philly’s Mayor Nutter, Andy with Tavis Smiley as Amos, and the rest, all must be drummed out of any respectful status they now obtain among the Afro American people. Let their obsession with Clinton be their paean of retirement , their public walking papers. So we can kill several birds with one stone. (John Lewis and Donald Payne came to their senses they say.)

Plus, we must create some widely distributed document of specific demands for Obama. He cannot be permitted to take us, as the Democratic party usually does, for granted. This document shd be , at once, a defense of his candidacy, but dialectically, give the more exact parameters of what we expect his candidacy (and his presidency) to do-- which at the same time we know the others will not.

The New Orleans reconstruction effort, Reparations, the rise of White Supremacy, the subprime mortgage scandal. Specifically calling for reversals of Bill Clinton’s legislative legacy, the crime bill, the destruction of welfare (having welfare recipients sell racist newspapers like the Star Ledger and describing it as workfare). There should be WPA type reconstruction efforts, but also raise these questions to put Hilary Clinton in the vise of having to repudiate Bill’s work & by inference her co-responsibility for it.

The entire explanation of what can be done now, even under monopoly capitalism , to change US political culture. The elimination of the electoral college, the elimination of the winner take all system, the elimination of private monies in elections which ensure the candidates will be controlled by private interests, the support for one person- one vote, the elimination of the US Senate (an American House of Lords) in exchange for a single, unicameral House of Representatives, the restoration of Voting rights for ex-felons, the making of voting mandatory…if taxation is mandatory, so too shd be voting. These are things that can be done even under monopoly capitalism as concrete steps toward a Peoples Democracy.

We shd project the replacement of the present two party dictatorship with a parliamentary system which will allow as many parties as there are ideologically significant blocs, so that governance must be done as it is in Europe, by coalition, rather than by two wings of the same vampire bat- not just a third party, but a multiparty system.

The restoration of Affirmative action as a class oriented reform, not racially, to break down the resistance to it the bourgeoisie can inspire in poor whites, who also need it Plus a strong plank for support of reparations, the impartial review of cases and freeing of Political prisoners like Mumia Abu Jamal & H Rap Brown. Such a Black Left developed platform could gain wide support by some of the same forces within Obama’s present “post –racial coalition”

One of those Harlem debaters has come out with a long paper on Black Self Determination, essentially using that discussion as yet another forum to put Obama down. But the question of Self Determination is not understood. Starting with DuBois’ description of a Double Consciousness, that the Afro American people, since slavery, have grown with this “Twoness” being both Black and American. Without any advanced understanding this could just function as just some form of schizophrenia. But the truth is we are both Black and American, though this has been historically a painful contradiction. The reality of this consciousness, as a reflection of real life, is that we have a double edged sword to face the twinned obstructions to our national liberation. So that we must fight for both Equal Citizenship Rights on one hand and Self Determination on the other.

If we think our struggle is simply for Equal Citizenship rights, then we are too dependent on the paths seemingly offered by the status quo to move forward as swiftly as we must. Even voting rights were brought by the self determined struggle of the Civil Rights Movement and Black Liberation movements. Just waiting for the governing bodies to reach the humanistic conclusion that we needed the right to vote would see us still waiting for it.

But if we think our struggle is only for Self Determination then we have marginalized ourselves into thinking that we need not struggle within and with the mainstream of US political life and that somehow we are not even defined by our lives and history in this society. We are US citizens.

It is the balance of these two struggles which are actually part of the same struggle that we must understand and make use of to make our advance, turning this way then that way but always moving forward with the twin goals of Democratic rights and Self Determination.

So we think the struggle to support Obama and thereby commit ourselves to challenging him is well within the responsibilities we take on when we claim advanced political consciousness. What I predicted in the first debates last year about Obama has certainly come to pass, that his candidacy would cause wide excitement in the national Afro American community and it is this excitement which is everywhere prevalent which the Black Left, in conjunction with the whole of the Left and whatever other progressive and middle forces cohere, to reignite not only the BLM but the entire spectrum of progressive US politics.

So we are proposing a general People for Obama network which will go up on the net very soon. We are also proposing rallies for fundraising and communication by late July, focusing on the 27 cities where Black people are a majority or a large plurality, these are the largest cities in the US. We are also proposing a mass gathering of forces in Denver

Aug 25-29, to put exclamation point on our determination that Obama receive the nomination and that no Deus ex Machina , the ancient Greek term for the metaphysical symbol they used to project out on the stage where there was a problem humans cd not solve in the old dramas. We cannot let that Deus or his Machina get in the way of democracy this time.

We hear Clyde calling idiotically from the wings “Hilary won the popular vote”, as he tries to savor the results of the racist mongering he and Bonnie have been doing after Pennsylvania and West Virginia. Perhaps he thinks he is that Deus and all he needs is his machine. But we have a larger machine, all those democratic and would be “post racist” forces , plus the will and strength of the Afro American people. Black folks who have been the irresistible force behind Obama’s campaign, some 90%. And let us not forget we are a people of close to 50 million with 600 billion dollars a year, the 16th largest GNP in the world. 15th is General Motors. It is time we, along with our most trusted allies, made some impact on the mainstream of US politics, again.


Amiri Baraka
at the Black Left conference
Chapel Hill, NC 5/30-31/08


The Parade of Anti-Obama Rascals
by Amiri Baraka
June 21, 2008

We certainly know the animals of the right, the US Reich, the Foxes and Klan in Civilian clothes, e.g., O’Reilly, Hannity, Limbaugh &c and certainly a coon or two Tavis & Andy, some people even came up with the slogan Strangle Rangel. Happily w/the departure of Bonnie & Clyde more of these Negro retainers will replace their “ HillJig” buttons with the shit eating grin of exposed Toms as they try to ease painlessly into at least the margin of the masses who support Obama .

But I’m talking about another substantial pimple of soi disant, dare I say, intellectuals & self advertised radicals who are quite audible & wordy in opposition to Obama. You might say, ‘but how is that, since now there is only the prisoner of war, McCain , whose proves every time he opens his mouth that he is still a prisoner of the Viet Nam war’ that Obama faces. McCain’s major campaign plank is that Americans need to keep dying in Iraq and our tax monies need to keep being fed to Halliburton and the other oilies and cronies. McCain also holds that we continue the Bush type savaging of the US constitution by denying habeas corpus and the legal rights of prisoners in Guantanamo. Keep it open as a Bush-Cheney concentration camp. McCain also wants to maintain the widespread hatred of the US by the world, as well as making Bush’ giveaway Tax cuts for the super rich permanent.

Here’s a charming character who on returning from Viet nam soon dumped his lst wife who had been severely crippled in an automobile accident, to run off with, among others, a beer brewery heiress who cd support his political barn storming. Here’s a man, who for all the media clap about him being “an independent” is the spiritual follower of the man whose seat he sits in as Senator from Arizona, Barry Goldwater.

I mention all this because it is criminal for these people claiming to be radical or intellectual to oppose or refuse to support Obama. I hope we don’t have to hear about “the lesser of two evils” from people whose foolish mirror worship wd have us elect the worst of two evils.

For those who claim radical by supporting McKinney or, brain forbid, the Nadir of fake liberalism, we shd have little sympathy. As much as I have admired Cynthia McKinney, to pose her candidacy as an alternative to Obama is at best empty idealism, at worst nearly as dangerous as when the Nader used the same windy egotism to help elect Bush.

The people who are supporting McKinney must know that that is an empty gesture. But too often such people are so pocked with self congratulatory idealism, that they care little or understand little about politics (i.e. the gaining maintaining and use of power) but want only to pronounce , to themselves mostly, how progressive or radical or even revolutionary they are.

Faced with the obvious that McKinney cannot actually do anything by running but put out lines a solid left bloc shd put out anyway, their pre-joinder is that Obama will be running as a candidate of an imperialist party, or Imperialism will not let Obama do anything different or progressive…that he will do the same things any democrat would do and that the Democrats are using Obama to draw young people to the Democratic party. Also that there is a sector of the bourgeoisie supports Obama to put a new face on the US as alternative to the Devil face Bush has projected as the American image.

Some of these things I agree with, but before qualifying that let me say that no amount of solipsistic fist pounding about “radical principles” will change this society as much as the election of Barack Obama will as president of the US. Not to understand this is to have few clues about the history of this country, its people, or the history of the Black struggle in the US. It is also to be completely at odds with the masses of the Afro-American people, let us say with the masses of black and colored people internationally. How people who claim to lead the people but who time after time tail them so badly must be understood. It is because they confuse elitism with class consciousness.

And at this point, the US body politic has been taken too far in this present election campaign to easily dissolve this heavy challenge to its historic race & class exclusivity. The positive aspect of Hillary Clinton’s candidacy and commitment to work in the Obama campaign has certainly shredded some of the gender exclusivity as well, so that there is in reality a prospect that some substantive change can be made. Obama is the democratic nominee. Only repeats of the outright election theft of Florida in 2000 and Ohio in 2004 can put McCain in the white house. In 2 weeks, since the Democratic Party primaries ended, McCain’s poll numbers have dropped from a dead heat w/ Obama to trailing by 18 points.

It is up to revolutionaries and progressives and radicals of all stripes to make it difficult for another larceny in November. We should agitate for serious disruption across this country and internationally if such a criminal attempt to steal the US presidency is mounted.

For the so called left and would be radicals (and some grinning idiots who say they don’t even care about politics) the McKinney gambit is to label oneself “Quixote of the loyal opposition” to pipsqueak a hiss of disproval at the rulers while being an enabler of the same. Neither McCain nor McKinney will help us. Only Obama offers some actual help.

Even the dumbest things Obama has said re: Cuba and the soft shoe for Israel must be seen as the cost of realpolitik, that is he is not running for president of the NAACP and not to understand that those are the stances that must be taken in the present political context, even though we hold out to support what he said about initiating talks with the Cubans, the Palestinians. After years of Washington stupidity and slavish support for the Miami Gusanos and Israeli imperialism, there is in Obama’s raising of talks with the US Bourgeois enemies something that must be understood as the potential path for new initiative. It is the duty of a left progressive radical bloc to be loud and regular in our demands for the changes Obama has alluded to in his campaign. We must take up these issues and push collectively, as a Bloc, or he will be pushed inexorably to the right.

Some people were grousing about the father’s day address and the stance he took lecturing Black men to actually become fathers not just disappearing sexual partners. But can anyone who actually lives in the hood, and has raised children there really claim that what Obama said is somehow an “insult to half a race”. We need to take up that idea of making Black men stand up and embrace fatherhood (a lifetime gig) as men and quit winking at the vanished baby makers that litter our community with fatherless children. This is where a great deal of the raw material comes from for the gangs that imperil our communities.

As I answered one irate e-mailer who was pissed off at Obama for leveling that challenge, a Negro man killed my only sister, a Negro man killed my youngest daughter. I can’t give no mealy mouth slack about that, we need to Stand Up!

Obama has addressed the Israeli lobby and the Gusano (anti Cuba) lobby. But where is the Black left and general progressive, radical and revolutionary lobby? That is the real job we need to address. We must bring something to the table. It is time for the left to really make some kind of Left Bloc to support Obama. I was at the Black Left meeting in North Carolina and had to argue with a group of folks who want to be revolutionary as heck with a Reconstruction Party supporting Cynthia McKinney. Though there was some good discussion, nothing concrete has been offered especially around the Obama campaign.

There were even a few badly disguised nationalists, posing as part of the left who think such posturing somehow more revolutionary than getting Obama into the oval office and dealing with getting him there and the rocking and rolling that will go on in this country whether he makes it or not. We ought to be putting together a left bloc document that can be circulated as soon and as widely as possible and in Denver and depending on the circumstances, beyond. Using this as a means of drawing the excited masses to the left.

We always knew that the Obama campaign had the potential to do this. And the closer we get to the convention and then the election even more excitement will be generated. We shd not let our role be to stand on the sidelines and mumble how hip we are, we can’t be so hip we let this cross roads of US history pass us by and possibly even let the lobotomized Robocop of right wing Republicanism serve us up more Bush’it.


I am sending this document right after I finish writing it to the Black Radical Congress who is meeting in St. Louis this weekend. I would hope it could be circulated.

Amiri Baraka 6/21/08

The Iconic Beauty of Tennis Phenom Venus Williams

All,

Venus Ebone Starr Williams born June 17, 1980 is not only an extraordinary tennis player and one of my absolute favorite athletes in the United States but is also one of the most beautiful women in the world. Finally there is a major new book of photographs that does this inspiring and truly iconic figure of African American culture justice--both on and off the court...BTW: Don't forget to see this champion play at Wimbledon in England beginning June 23.

Kofi
 
From The Times
London 
June 7, 2008  
The fashion rebirth of Venus Williams


When fashion photographer Koto Bolofo spotted tennis star Venus Williams in a London street, he saw in her a grace and elegance that none had captured before. The result: a book of revelatory images of the world's most iconic female tennis player

By Hilary Rose

To most people, Venus Williams is the Amazonian tennis player, who has won Wimbledon four times, with a whomping serve and muscle-bound limbs that go on for ever. Yet, as a new book of photographs shows, she also has an astonishing elegance and beauty.

The book, Venus Williams, is a collaboration between the tennis player and South African-born photographer Koto Bolofo. The two first met four years ago when he spotted her walking down the street in London.

"I turned a corner in Covent Garden and there was this tall, beautiful black woman," remembers Bolofo, "and I thought, 'I fancy her!' I'd never seen such a graceful woman. She was wearing a bright fluorescent pink raincoat and stood out like a sore thumb." Bolofo contacted her agent, suggesting the project. He had wanted to photograph her ever since he watched her win Wimbledon on the TV. "There was such a strength of woman in her," he says. "I had never seen anyone like this. She was like a gazelle, so pure. But I wanted to photograph her my way - not as a sports star with lots of muscles, but as a woman."

"He wanted to work with me, a lowly tennis player!" is Williams's self-mocking take on the matter. "He saw something in me that no one else has ever seen, the side that's classic tennis player, with elegance and grace."

The two became friends and did a few magazine shoots together, including one for Italian Vogue. But Bolofo wanted more: he wanted to do a book. He had "a vision", Williams says, of doing a chronicle of her life.

"I thought the photographs I'd seen of Venus were missing the point," he says. "I wanted to say, 'This is a woman, not a sports machine.' I wanted to make an art book of a beautiful woman, not just someone who whacked a ball around."

Over the next three years, while Williams, now 27, toured the world, Bolofo tailed her, popping up in London, Istanbul, Paris and New York with photographic suggestions, a small team of helpers and a rack of clothes. He took inspiration from the Jacques Henri Lartigue photographs of junior tennis champion Suzanne Lenglen in 1915: the shot of Williams dancing round the court in a ball dress was one of the first they collaborated on. "Lartigue captured that sense of social class with a spontaneity and energy," says Bolofo. "That was the foundation of the book."

Then there are the Josephine Baker-inspired shots, taken in Paris when she was playing in the French Open. "I remember seeing clips of Josephine Baker doing the funky chicken sort of dance," says Bolofo. "The shots of Venus in the beret and with the dumbbells are a modern interpretation of that." Williams herself sums up the dumbbells shot by saying, "Surreal. I like that a lot."

Sometimes it was just Williams in jeans and a vest, strolling round Paris with Bolofo, doing her own hair and make-up, taking photographs wherever they fancied; other shots were more staged. Williams is an ardent fan of fashion, and the book itself is being launched with a swanky party hosted by Ralph Lauren, which is the official outfitter to Wimbledon and is clearly delighted to support a stylish celebration of a sporting icon. However, she was content to let Bolofo direct her. "I respect him so much. I just couldn't wait to find out what his next ideas were. It was just easy," she says of the process. "It was go with the flow, laid back." During the sessions they would talk about everything - photography, tennis, Africa, children. And is Bolofo a tennis fan? "He is now," she jokes.

But Williams finds that away from the camera she no longer enjoys the rigmarole of red-carpet events, such as the recent Costume Institute Gala at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. She says she spends most of her time wearing her own clothing line, EleVen (named after a childhood home address), which is brightly coloured sports/casualwear. "Event" dressing is no longer the fun it used to be. "I can hardly sit still long enough for all the hair and make-up," she says. "There are so many things I have to do that there doesn't seem to be enough time to get it all done."

As for tennis, she'll be defending her Wimbledon title this year. "I love playing there. I love winning there," she says. But is she going to win? She laughs raucously. "That's always the plan."

Venus Williams by Koto Bolofo, published by Steidl, is available exclusively from Ralph Lauren, New Bond Street, London W1, from June 19. Williams will be writing exclusively for The Times Sport during Wimbledon

American Racial Psychosis--The Real Danger Facing Barack Obama and his Family

http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/06/12/fox-apologizes-for-michelle-obama-headline/

All,

QUESTION: JUST HOW CRIMINALLY RACIST AND SLEAZY ARE THE RIGHT WING REPUBLICAN ATTACKS ON THE OBAMAS GOING TO GET?

ANSWER: AS VICIOUS AND DEADLY AS WHITE AMERICAN RACISM HAS ALWAYS BEEN TOWARD AFRICAN AMERICANS...

Kofi


June 12, 2008

Fox Forced to Address Michelle Obama Headline
By JIM RUTENBERG

For the third time in less than three weeks, Fox News Channel has had to acknowledge using poor judgment through inappropriate references to Senator Barack Obama.

The network has released a statement saying it should not have referred to Mr. Obama’s wife, Michelle, as “Obama’s Baby Mama,’’ as it did on Wednesday in an on-screen headline commonly called a “chyron.”

“A producer on the program exercised poor judgment in using this chyron
during the segment,” Bill Shine, a Fox News senior vice president, said in a statement.

The chyron appeared during a discussion between the conservative columnist Michelle Malkin and the Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly about political attacks against Mrs. Obama. It read in full, “Outraged Liberals: Stop picking on Obama’s baby mama!” It was first publicized on Wednesday by Alex Koppelman of Salon.

The Oxford English Dictionary defines the term as one “chiefly in African-American usage” that refers to, “The mother of a man’s child, who is not his wife nor (in most cases) his current or exclusive partner.”

Earlier this week, the Fox News anchor E.D. Hill had apologized for raising the possibility that the Obamas affectionate fist bump during the senator’s victory rally in St. Paul on June 3 was “a terrorist fist jab.’’ Two weeks prior, the Fox News analyst Liz Trotta said she regretted making a joke about a possible assassination of Mr. Obama.

Her mea culpa followed that of former Gov. Mike Huckabee of Arkansas a week earlier after he made a similar crack at a gathering of the National Rifle Association.

In other news, Fox News Channel announced today that it was hiring Mr. Huckabee as a contributor.


http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0608/11044.html

All,

To All Americans (and ESPECIALLY white, Latino, and Asian American citizens in this country):

ARE YOU GOING TO PUBLICLY SPEAK OUT AGAINST THESE KIND OF BLATANT CHARACTER ASSASSINATION ATTEMPTS AND VICIOUS, RACIST LIES IN SUPPORT OF THE OBAMA FAMILY'S HUMANITY-- OR SIMPLY SIT BACK AND DO NOTHING?

Kofi


Michelle Obama becomes GOP target
By: Carrie Budoff Brown
June 13, 2008

It’s less than a week into the general election campaign, but already Michelle Obama is a Republican target.

Former Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger leveled the first blow, introducing Republican John McCain’s wife at a fundraiser this week as someone who is “proud of her country, not just once but always.” Obama wasn’t mentioned by name, but the audience got it.

The dig signaled the start of what Democrats expect will be a concerted effort to cast Michelle Obama — and, by extension, Barack Obama — as an unpatriotic radical. It also pointed out the urgency to define Michelle Obama to general election voters before the opposition goes too far in doing it for her, strategists said.

“We live now in an era where everything and everyone is fair game,” said Douglas E. Schoen, who was a pollster and adviser to former President Bill Clinton from 1994 to 2000. “It is certainly the case that Teresa Heinz Kerry was probably not an asset in John Kerry’s campaign, at least publicly, and the jury is still out on how the public will view Michelle Obama.”

Despite being a steady presence at her husband’s side on primary election nights, and sitting for occasional media interviews, Michelle Obama remains an unfamiliar figure to most voters, strategists said. When she campaigned in recent months, it was almost always alone and in small settings. The most sustained attention she received on cable news shows was for her controversial February statement leaving the impression that she wasn’t proud of her country until this year.

“There is no reason to expect her to have a brand. But the campaign needs to start doing that,” said Erik Smith, a Democratic strategist and aide to former Rep. Richard Gephardt during his 2004 presidential campaign. “Defining Michelle Obama goes a long way in defining Barack Obama. I am sure it is a campaign priority.”

Indeed, when the campaign launched a website today to combat rumors about Barack Obama's patriotism, his religion and his family, the first entry dealt with his wife.

Other efforts are on tap. She joins the candidate Friday for a roundtable in Ohio with senior citizens and appears as a guest host next week on "The View," the popular daytime talk show, giving her access to friendly, high-profile platforms. Campaign aides said they are “staffing up across the board,” including for Michelle Obama — a move that Schoen said reflects the need to “manage the image and utterances of the spouse.”

The heightened scrutiny “requires a level of staffing and attention to detail that goes beyond what spouses have typically gotten,” Schoen said.

Most voters likely won't decide which candidate to support based on wives. Only 22 percent of respondents in a Rasmussen Reports survey released Wednesday said their perception of the spouse is very important to how they vote. But the more people learn about her, the more people understand her husband, strategists said.

The Rasmussen survey showed Michelle Obama, at this point, as a more polarizing figure than Cindy McCain. Forty-eight percent of voters hold a favorable impression of the presumptive Democratic nominee’s spouse, while 42 percent view her unfavorably, including a “startling” 25 percent with a very unfavorable opinion, Rasmussen wrote in its release.

Cindy McCain earned a favorable assessment from 49 percent of voters and an unfavorable review from 29 percent, including 10 percent who held a very unfavorable opinion.

Michelle Obama receives lower ratings than first lady Laura Bush did during the 2004 campaign but fares better than did Heinz Kerry, whose numbers dropped as Election Day drew closer. Obama is drawing comparisons to another presidential spouse: Hillary Rodham Clinton, who, like Obama, was 44 years old, was Ivy League-educated, earned more money than her husband and raised a child in the spotlight. Clinton also became a lightening rod for the conservative right.

But unlike 1992, the debate isn’t a proxy battle about the traditional bounds for women. Obama, to a greater degree than Clinton, makes her family life the centerpiece of her public image, talking frequently about family-work life balance and her two young daughters.

This time, the criticism is rooted in a combustible mix of race and patriotism.

The Obama campaign and PolitiFact, an independent fact-checking website, have debunked chain e-mails in the last month claiming she advocated racial separatism in her college thesis. Long the domain of rumors about her husband, the e-mails also focused on her February remark: “For the first time in my adult lifetime, I am really proud of my country.”

Michelle Obama later clarified her statement, saying that her pride was in the political process and that she was “absolutely” always proud of the country.

The Tennessee Republican Party picked up on the remark, however, and posted a Web video last month that juxtaposed her statement with average voters claiming pride in their country.

The video reaped considerable national media attention and drew a sharp response from Barack Obama (“Lay off my wife,” he said at the time). He did the same last week when he was forced to respond to rumors of a video showing his wife using a derogatory term for white people.

“There is dirt and lies that are circulated in e-mails, and they pump them out long enough until finally you, a mainstream reporter, asks me about it,” Barack Obama said to a reporter who asked about the purported video, for which there is no evidence to support its existence. “That gives legs to the story. If somebody has evidence that myself or Michelle or anybody has said something inappropriate, let them do it.”

His comments followed a month of chatter from conservative pundits that the video's release was imminent. The fact that Barack Obama was personally pressed on the matter is said to be a reason why the campaign launched the website, which states on the front page: "No Such Tape Exists."

Chris Lehane, a veteran of Bill Clinton’s 1992 presidential campaign, said the Obama campaign faces a choice similar to the one they faced with Hillary Clinton. As she, too, became a target of Republicans, “we made the decision to put her out there and not go into the bunker,” Lehane said.

The campaign gave her “an entire support system,” including more than a dozen aides, he said. By the late summer, attacks on Hillary Clinton at the Republican National Convention backfired as polls showed the criticism had turned off moderate and independent voters.

“They are going to try to make her a focal point of the campaign,” Lehane said of Michelle Obama. The McCain campaign will likely avoid attacks, but independent expenditure groups “will take selectively used phrases, manipulate and exploit them.”

The biggest concern for McCain, said a Republican media consultant, “will be controlling renegade county chairmen and people who have a tendency to be less disciplined about the right thing to say."

“This is an area where people have to be extremely careful," said John Brabender, who is serving as an informal adviser to the McCain campaign. "Voters have grown to believe that spouses are often well off-limits.”

Campaign aides said they expect Michelle Obama to maintain her schedule of several days a week on the campaign trail, at least until her daughters finish the school year. They view her as Barack Obama’s best character witness, introducing him as a father and a husband, and making connections with other women, particularly as the campaign attempts to lock down Clinton voters.

Tucker Bounds, a McCain spokesman, said the Arizona senator is “committed to running a respectful campaign” that is focused on the issues. Bounds, however, did not respond to a request for comment on Eagleburger’s remark.

“She is more likely to be an issue during the slow summer months than the real campaign after Labor Day,” Brabender said. “It is a distraction that campaigns can just not afford.”

© 2008 Capitol News Company, LLC

http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0608/11041.html

All,

Just how sleazy and criminal is the Republican attack on Obama going to get? GUESS....

Kofi

Rezko: Feds pushed for dirt on Obama
By KENNETH P. VOGEL | 6/12/08


Rezko was a prominent fundraiser for Obama’s campaigns for state Senate, U.S. House and U.S. Senate, though not for Obama’s presidential campaign.


Imprisoned Chicago businessman Antoin “Tony” Rezko has accused federal prosecutors of improperly pressuring him to implicate Barack Obama in a corruption case.

In a letter to the U.S. District judge who presided over his trial, Rezko, who was convicted this month of 16 corruption-related counts, including fraud and money laundering, called prosecutors “overzealous.” And he singled out what he said were their efforts to get him to turn on Obama, an Illinois senator and the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, and Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich.

“They are pressuring me to tell them the ‘wrong’ things that I supposedly know about Gov. Blagojevich and Sen. Obama,” Rezko wrote in an undated letter released by the court this week. “I have never been party to any wrongdoing that involved the governor or the senator. I will never fabricate lies about anyone else for selfish purposes. I will take what comes my way, but I will never hurt innocent people.”

Randall Samborn, a spokesman for the U.S. attorney’s office in Chicago, wouldn't comment on Rezko's allegation.

Rezko was a prominent fundraiser for Obama’s campaigns for state Senate, U.S. House and U.S. Senate, though not for Obama’s presidential campaign.

Though Obama was not implicated in any wrongdoing in the Rezko case, his name was mentioned sporadically during Rezko’s trial.

Obama’s campaign released a statement after the letter was made public, stressing that Obama hasn’t been accused of “any improper action or conduct involving Tony Rezko” and reiterating that he hasn’t been contacted for an interview or for any information about Rezko. “Nothing in this letter indicates anything to the contrary.”

Still, Republicans have seized on the relationship between the two, which includes a real estate deal that enlarged the Obama’s Chicago homestead, to question Obama’s judgment.

Blagojevich — who, like Obama, staked out an image as a political reformer — repeatedly found himself the subject of plenty of unwanted scrutiny during the trial, which prosecutors used to detail a complicated pay-to-play scheme involving state government boards and commissions.

Chicago media have reported that Rezko is being pressured to cooperate with ongoing investigations of Blagojevich’s campaign and administration.

But Rezko’s lawyer, Joe Duffy, told the Chicago Tribune that he did not know of any investigation into Obama’s dealings with Rezko.

“I'm not aware of any impropriety related to Rezko and Obama,” Duffy told the Tribune. "At no point has the government ever asked me a single question about Obama or any wrongdoing involving Rezko and Obama."

It’s not uncommon for prosecutors to try to get defendants to implicate more powerful or wealthy officials, said Stan Brand, who has represented scores of public officials both in private practice and as legal counsel to the U.S. House.

“Prosecutors are always interested in trading up,” Brand said. “They put subtle and sometimes not-so-subtle pressure on people.”

But proving that “they’ve actually crossed an ethical line and asked this guy to embellish or shade the truth in a way that’s helpful to them in some other case,” Brand said, is “a very difficult case to make absent some express coercion, which is very rare.”

The letter, apparently written during the two-month trial, was actually a plea to allow Rezko to see his family.

But its allegations about pressure to implicate Obama will surely give ammunition to partisans on both sides.

For Democrats, Rezko’s claim dovetails with allegations that the Department of Justice targeted high-profile Democrats.

For Republicans, it will be used to suggest Obama’s relationship with Rezko drew warranted federal scrutiny.


http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/05/nyregion/05exhibit.html?_r=1&oref=slogin


All,

This is the actual country and world we live in...Don't forget that...PASS THE WORD...

Kofi

June 5, 2008

Secret Service Detains Artist Over ‘Assassination’ Exhibit
By SEWELL CHAN

New York City police detectives and Secret Service agents briefly detained and questioned an artist on Wednesday morning as he installed an exhibition with the title, “The Assassination of Hillary Clinton/The Assassination of Barack Obama.”

The artist, Yazmany Arboleda, tried to set up the exhibition in a vacant storefront at 264 West 40th Street in Midtown Manhattan, and had finished stenciling letters of the title on the plate glass windows at street level.

The police and Secret Service agents arrived about 9:30 a.m., and building workers quickly covered over the title with large sheets of brown paper and masking tape.

At first, police officers would not permit Mr. Arboleda to speak with reporters. But later, Mr. Arboleda, 27, talked about his exhibition in an interview.

“It’s art,” he said. “It’s not supposed to be harmful. It’s about character assassination — about how Obama and Hillary have been portrayed by the media.”

Mr. Arboleda said the exhibition was to open on Thursday and run all day. The interview ended abruptly as Mr. Arboleda was led to the Midtown South police precinct station for questioning.

Shortly after 11:30 a.m., Mr. Arboleda called reporters to say he had been released. “The Secret Service had to do a whole questionnaire with me,” he said. “It was about an hour of questioning. They asked if I owned guns, if I was a violent person, if I had ever been institutionalized.”

Mr. Arboleda said he answered “no” to the questions. Nonetheless, he said, the Secret Service asked him to take down the exhibition’s title from the window.

“I’m renting that space; the space was allocated for an exhibition, and it’s my right to put those words up,” he said. “They said it could incite someone to do something crazy, like break the window. It’s terrible, because they’re violating my rights. If someone breaks a window, they’re committing a crime.”

He added: “The exhibition is supposed to be about character assassination. It’s philosophical and metaphorical.”

Eric Joza, the manager of the 40th Street building, between Seventh and Eighth Avenues, said of Mr. Arboleda: “I had no idea what he was going to do. All I knew is that he was an artist and was going to use the store.”

Special Agent Eric P. Zahren, a spokesman for the Secret Service in Washington, emphasized in a telephone interview that the agency was not seeking to shut down the show.

“We did not shut down that exhibit or request that anybody else shut it down,” Agent Zahren said. “This was brought to our attention, we went out there and had a conversation with the individual, but we did not shut it down.”

Speaking to reporters around noon, Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly said Mr. Arboleda had been questioned because the police wanted to determine his motives. “Obviously, they could be interpreted as advocating harm to protectees,” Mr. Kelly said. “Both of the senators, of course, are now being provided Secret Service protection.”

According to Web sites on Mr. Arboleda’s shows, including Yazmany.com, he was born in Boston in 1981 and lives in New York City. His family moved to Medellín, Colombia, shortly after he was born, and lived there until 1992. He holds a master’s degree in architecture and has been trained in photography, painting, fashion design and graphic design.

Comments touching on assassination during this political season have hit a nerve, and the safety of Senator Obama, the presumptive Democratic Party presidential nominee, has been an issue. When he was assigned Secret Service coverage in May 2007, it was the earliest point in a campaign that a candidate had been given protection.


Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company

An Open Letter to Certain White American Women Voters--Your Whiteness is Showing

http://www.counterpunch.org/wise06072008.html

All,

Every single word in the following essay is not only TRUE but way overdue. To say I agree 100% with every single syllable by Mr. Wise is understating it by a very wide margin. There are so many white (and Latino and Asian) Americans who are completely fulla shit about the ugly reality of their heartfelt anti-African American racism that not even a massive national enema could possibly eradicate it at this very late date in our collective history.

As Sister Souljah (remember her?) once said so powerfully and accurately way back in '92 when "the first black minstrel President" (a certain blackedup and arrogant political cretin by the name of Bill Clinton) denounced her in order to publicly humiliate Jesse Jackson (he succeeded):

"IF THE TRUTH HURTS YOU'LL BE IN PAIN AND IF THE TRUTH DRIVES YOU CRAZY YOU'LL JUST BE INSANE..."

Ain't that the truth?...

Kofi



An Open Letter to Certain White Women Who Are Threatening to Withhold Support from Obama in November

Your Whiteness is Showing
By Tim Wise
June 7 / 8, 2008
Counterpunch magazine

This is an open letter to those white women who, despite their proclamations of progressivism, and supposedly because of their commitment to feminism, are threatening to withhold support from Barack Obama in November. You know who you are.

I know that it's probably a bad time for this. Your disappointment at the electoral defeat of Senator Hillary Clinton is fresh, the sting is new, and the anger that animates many of you--who rightly point out that the media was often sexist in its treatment of the Senator--is raw, pure and justified.

That said, and despite the awkward timing, I need to ask you a few questions, and I hope you will take them in the spirit of solidarity with which they are genuinely intended. But before the questions, a statement if you don't mind, or indeed, even if (as I suspect), you will mind it quite a bit.

First, for those of you threatening to actually vote for John McCain and to oppose Senator Obama, or to stay home in November and thereby increase the likelihood of McCain winning and Obama losing (despite the fact that the latter's policy platform is virtually identical to Clinton's while the former's clearly is not), all the while claiming to be standing up for women...

For those threatening to vote for John McCain or to stay home and increase the odds of his winning (despite the fact that he once called his wife the c-word in public and is a staunch opponent of reproductive freedom and gender equity initiatives, such as comparable worth legislation), all the while claiming to be standing up for women...

For those threatening to vote for John McCain or to stay home and help ensure Barack Obama's defeat, as a way to protest what you call Obama's sexism (examples of which you seem to have difficulty coming up with), all the while claiming to be standing up for women...

Your whiteness is showing.

When I say your whiteness is showing this is what I mean: You claim that your opposition to Obama is an act of gender solidarity, in that women (and their male allies) need to stand up for women in the face of the sexist mistreatment of Clinton by the press. On this latter point--the one about the importance of standing up to the media for its often venal misogyny--you couldn't be more correct. As the father of two young girls who will have to contend with the poison of patriarchy all their lives, or at least until such time as that system of oppression is eradicated, I will be the first to join the boycott of, or demonstration on, whatever media outlet you choose to make that point. But on the first part of the above equation--the part where you insist voting against Obama is about gender solidarity--you are, for lack of a better way to put it, completely full of crap. And what's worse is that at some level I suspect you know it. Voting against Senator Obama is not about gender solidarity. It is an act of white racial bonding, and it is grotesque.

If it were gender solidarity you sought, you would by definition join with your black and brown sisters come November, and do what you know good and well they are going to do, in overwhelming numbers, which is vote for Barack Obama. But no. You are threatening to vote not like other women--you know, the ones who aren't white like you and most of your friends--but rather, like white men! Needless to say it is high irony, bordering on the outright farcical, to believe that electorally bonding with white men, so as to elect McCain, is a rational strategy for promoting feminism and challenging patriarchy. You are not thinking and acting as women, but as white people. So here's the first question: What the hell is that about?

And you wonder why women of color have, for so long, thought (by and large) that white so-called feminists were phony as hell? Sister please...

Your threats are not about standing up for women. They are only about standing up for the feelings of white women, and more to the point, the aspirations of one white woman. So don't kid yourself. If you wanted to make a statement about the importance of supporting a woman, you wouldn't need to vote for John McCain, or stay home, thereby producing the same likely result--a defeat for Obama. You could always have said you were going to go out and vote for Cynthia McKinney. After all, she is a woman, running with the Green Party, and she's progressive, and she's a feminist. But that isn't your threat is it? No. You're not threatening to vote for the woman, or even the feminist woman. Rather, you are threatening to vote for the white man, and to reject not only the black man who you feel stole Clinton's birthright, but even the black woman in the race. And I wonder why? Could it be...?

See, I told you your whiteness was showing.

And now for a third question, and this is the biggie, so please take your time with it: How is it that you have managed to hold your nose all these years, just like a lot of us on the left, and vote for Democrats who we knew were horribly inadequate--Kerry, Gore, Clinton, Dukakis, right on down the uninspiring line--and yet, apparently can't bring yourself to vote for Barack Obama? A man who, for all of his shortcomings (and there are several, as with all candidates put up by either of the two major corporate parties) is surely more progressive than any of those just mentioned. And how are we to understand that refusal--this sudden line in the proverbial sand--other than as a racist slap at a black man? You will vote for white men year after year after year--and are threatening to vote for another one just to make a point--but can't bring yourself to vote for a black man, whose political views come much closer to your own, in all likelihood, than do the views of any of the white men you've supported before. How, other than as an act of racism, or perhaps as evidence of political insanity, is one to interpret such a thing?

See, black folks would have sucked it up, like they've had to do forever, and voted for Clinton had it come down to that. Indeed, they were on board the Hillary train early on, convinced that Obama had no chance to win and hoping for change, any change, from the reactionary agenda that has been so prevalent for so long in this culture. They would have supported the white woman--hell, for many black folks, before Obama showed his mettle they were downright excited to do so--but you won't support the black man. And yet you have the audacity to insist that it is you who are the most loyal constituency of the Democratic Party, and the one before whom Party leaders should bow down, and whose feet must be kissed?

Your whiteness is showing.

Look, I couldn't care less about the Party personally. I left the Democrats twenty years ago when they told me that my activism in the Central America solidarity and South African anti-apartheid movements made me a security risk, and that I wouldn't be able to get clearance to be in some parade with Governor Dukakis. Yeah, seriously. But for you to act as though you are the indispensible voters, the most important, the ones whose views should be pandered to, whose every whim should be the basis for Party policy, is not only absurd, it is also racist in that it, a) ignores and treats as irrelevant the much more loyal constituency of black folks, without whom no Democrat would have won anything in the past twenty years (and indeed the racial gap favoring the Democrats among blacks is about six times larger than the gender gap favoring them among white women, relative to white men); and b) demonstrates the mentality of entitlement and superiority that has been long ingrained in us as white folks--so that we believe we have the right to dictate the terms of political engagement, and to determine the outcome, and to get our way, simply because for so long we have done just that.

But that day is done, whether you like it or not, and you are now left with two, and only two choices, so consider them carefully: the first is to stand now in solidarity with your black brothers and sisters and welcome the new day, and help to push it in a truly progressive and feminist and antiracist direction, while the second is to team up with white men to try and block the new day from dawning. Feel free to choose the latter. But if you do, please don't insult your own intelligence, or ours, by insisting that you've done so as a radical political act.

Tim Wise is the author of: White Like Me: Reflections on Race from a Privileged Son (Soft Skull Press, 2005), and Affirmative Action: Racial Preference in Black and White (Routledge: 2005). He can be reached at: timjwise@msn.com

One Historic Night, Two Americas

All,

Still more outstanding evidence of why Frank Rich (former award winning drama critic and author of the extraordinary 2006 book "The Greatest Story Ever Sold: The Decline and Fall of Truth in Bush's America") remains one of the finest writers and most insightful political journalists in the United States.

Kofi

OP-ED COLUMNIST
By FRANK RICH
New York Times
June 8, 2008

WHEN Barack Obama achieved his historic victory on Tuesday night, the battle was joined between two Americas. Not John Edwards’s two Americas, divided between rich and poor. Not the Americas split by race, gender, party or ideology. What looms instead is an epic showdown between two wildly different visions of the country, from the ground up

On one side stands Mr. Obama’s resolutely cheerful embrace of the future. His vision is inseparable from his identity, both as a rookie with a slim Washington résumé and as a black American whose triumph was regarded as improbable by voters of all races only months ago. On the other is John McCain’s promise of a wise warrior’s vigilant conservation of the past. His vision, too, is inseparable from his identity — as a government lifer who has spent his entire career in service, whether in the Navy or Washington.

Given the dividing line separating the two Americas of 2008, a ticket uniting Mr. McCain and Hillary Clinton might actually be a better fit than the Obama-Clinton “dream ticket,” despite their differences on the issues. Never was this more evident than Tuesday night, when Mrs. Clinton and Mr. McCain both completely misread a one-of-a-kind historical moment as they tried to cling to the prerogatives of the 20th century’s old guard.

All presidential candidates, Mr. Obama certainly included, are egomaniacs. But Washington’s faith in hierarchical status adds a thick layer of pomposity to politicians who linger there too long. Mrs. Clinton referred to herself by the first-person pronoun 64 times in her speech, and Mr. McCain did so 60 times in his. Mr. Obama settled for 30.

Remarkably, neither Mrs. Clinton nor Mr. McCain had the grace to offer a salute to Mr. Obama’s epochal political breakthrough, which reverberated so powerfully across the country and throughout the world. By being so small and ungenerous, they made him look taller. Their inability to pivot even briefly from partisan self-interest could not be a more telling symptom of the dysfunctional Washington culture Mr. Obama aspires to mend.

Yet even as the two establishment candidates huffed and puffed to assert their authority, they seemed terrified by Mr. Obama’s insurgency, as if it were the plague in Edgar Allan Poe’s “Masque of the Red Death.” Mrs. Clinton held her nonconcession speech in a Manhattan bunker, banishing cellphone reception and television monitors carrying the news of Mr. Obama’s clinching of the nomination. Mr. McCain, laboring under the misapprehension that he was wittily skewering his opponent, compulsively invoked the Obama-patented mantra of “change” 33 times in his speech.

Mr. McCain only reminded voters that he, like Mrs. Clinton, thinks that change is nothing more than a marketing gimmick. He has no idea what it means. “No matter who wins this election, the direction of this country is going to change dramatically,” he said on Tuesday. He then grimly regurgitated Goldwater and Reagan government-bashing talking points from the 1960s and ’70s even as he presumed to accuse Mr. Obama of looking “to the 1960s and ’70s for answers.”

Mr. Obama is a liberal, but it’s not your boomer parents’ liberalism that is at the heart of his appeal. He never rattles off a Clinton laundry list of big federal programs; he supports abortion rights and gay civil rights with a sunny bonhomie that makes the right’s cultural scolds look like rabid mastodons. He is not refighting either side of the domestic civil war over Vietnam that exploded in his hometown of Chicago 40 years ago this summer, long before he arrived there.

He has never deviated from his much-quoted formulation in “The Audacity of Hope,” where he described himself as aloof from “the psychodrama of the baby boom generation” with its “old grudges and revenge plots hatched on a handful of college campuses long ago.” His vocabulary is so different from that of Mrs. Clinton and Mr. McCain that they often find it as baffling as a foreign language, even as they try to rip it off.

The selling point of Mr. Obama’s vision of change is not doctrinaire liberalism or Bush-bashing but an inclusiveness that he believes can start to relieve Washington’s gridlock much as it animated his campaign. Some of that inclusiveness is racial, ethnic and generational, in the casual, what’s-the-big-deal manner of post-boomer Americans already swimming in our country’s rapidly expanding demographic pool. Some of it is post-partisan: he acknowledges that Republicans, Ronald Reagan included, can have ideas.

Opponents who dismiss this as wussy naïveté do so at their own risk. They at once call attention to the expiring shelf life of their own Clinton-Bush-vintage panaceas and lull themselves into underestimating Mr. Obama’s political killer instincts.

The Obama forces out-organized the most ruthless machine in Democratic politics because the medium of their campaign mirrored its inclusive message. They empowered adherents in every state rather than depending on a Beltway campaign hierarchy whose mercenary chief strategist kept his day job as chief executive for a corporate P.R. giant. Such viral organization and fund-raising is a seamless fit with bottom-up democracy as it is increasingly practiced in the Facebook-YouTube era, not merely by Americans and not merely by the young.

You could learn a ton about the Clinton campaign’s cultural tone-deafness from its stodgy generic Web site. A similar torpor afflicts JohnMcCain.com, which last week gave its graphics a face-lift that unabashedly mimics BarackObama.com and devoted prime home page real estate to hawking “McCain Golf Gear.” (No joke.) The blogs, video and social networking are static and sparse, the apt reflection of a candidate who repeatedly invokes “I” as he boasts of his humility.

Mr. Obama’s deep-rooted worldliness — in philosophy as well as itinerant background — is his other crucial departure from the McCain template. As more and more Americans feel the pain of spiraling gas prices and lost jobs, they are also coming to recognize, as Mr. Obama does, that the globally reviled American image forged by an endless war in Iraq and its accompanying torture scandals is inflicting economic as well as foreign-policy havoc.

Six out of 10 Americans do want their president to talk to Iran’s president, according to the most-recent Gallup poll. Americans are sick of a national identity defined by arrogant saber-rattling abroad and manipulative fear-mongering at home. Mr. Obama closed his speech on Tuesday by telling Americans they “don’t deserve” another election “that’s governed by fear.” Of the three candidates, he was the only one who did not mention 9/11 that night.

Mr. Obama isn’t flawless. But it’s hard to see him hitching up with Mrs. Clinton, who would contradict his message, unite the right, and pass along her husband’s still unpacked post-presidency baggage. A larger trap for Mr. Obama is his cockiness. His own tendency to preen and to coast could be encouraged by recent events rocking the Straight Talk Express: Mr. McCain is so far proving an exceptionally clumsy candidate prone to accentuating everything that’s out-of-touch about his American vision.

Mr. McCain’s speech in a New Orleans suburb on Tuesday night spawned a cottage industry of ridicule, even among Republicans. The halting delivery, sickly green backdrop and spastic, inappropriate smiles, presumably mandated by some consultant hoping to mask his anger, left the impression that Mr. McCain isn’t yet ready for prime-time radio.

But the substance was even worse than the theatrics. Incredibly, Mr. McCain attacked Mr. Obama for being insufficiently bipartisan while speaking to the most conspicuously partisan audience you can assemble in today’s America: a small, nearly all-white crowd that seconded his attack lines with boorish choruses of boos. On TV, the audience came across as a country-club membership riled by a change in the Sunday brunch menu.

Equally curious was Mr. McCain’s decision to stage this event in Louisiana, a state that is truly safe for the G.O.P. and that he’d last visited less than six weeks earlier. Perhaps he did so because Louisiana’s governor, the 36-year-old Indian-American Bobby Jindal, is the only highly placed nonwhite Republican he could find to lend his campaign an ersatz dash of diversity and youth.

Or perhaps he thought that if he once more returned to the scene of President Bush’s Katrina crime to (belatedly) slam that federal failure, it would fool voters into forgetting his cheerleading for Mr. Bush’s Iraq obsession and economic policies. This time it proved a levee too far. The day after his speech Mr. McCain was caught on the stump misstating and exaggerating his own do-little record after Katrina. Soon the Internet was alight with documentation of what he actually did on the day the hurricane hit land: a let-us-eat-cake photo op with Mr. Bush celebrating his birthday in Arizona.

Anything can happen in politics, and there are five months to go. But Tuesday night’s McCain pratfall — three weeks in the planning by his campaign, according to Fox News — should be a clear indication that Mr. Obama must accept Mr. McCain’s invitation to weekly debates at once. Tomorrow if possible, and, yes, bring on the green!

Mr. Obama must also heed Mr. McCain’s directive that he visit Iraq — as long as he avoids Baghdad markets and hits other foreign capitals on route. When the world gets a firsthand look at the new America Mr. Obama offers as an alternative to Mr. McCain’s truculent stay-the-course, the public pandemonium may make J.F.K.’s “Ich bin ein Berliner” visit to the Berlin Wall look like a warm-up act.

The dynamics of translation

by Dr. Tyrone Williams

Long before Barack Obama secured the Democratic Party presidential nomination, long before Hillary Clinton began using him as a barometer of racial parochialism, pundits of all persuasions were overtly or covertly asking and wondering one thing: Can Obama translate a party nomination into a viable national campaign? The words translate and translation are rarely used in local campaigns but they show up frequently during statewide and national election years. Their usage presumes, from the start (actually, even before the start), that a particular candidate has “limited” appeal, which in turn presupposes a “general” consensus. And as the term translation suggests, limitation and generality are both linked to language. Despite the ritualistic appeals to “personality” and “likeability,” everyone recognizes the centrality of language during campaigns, which is why the media and voters tend to focus on what words are spoken by candidates. Of course, words do not alone constitute a language. If that were true, translations would be relatively easy. But translations are hard because of the different kinds of contexts that make words “mean.” And it is precisely certain contexts that the media excises, and certain contexts that it exaggerates (or invents), in much the way that media photographs are cropped to narrow “readings” down to incontrovertible and particular meanings. Recontextualizing words from one frame of reference to another, like cropping a photograph, is a form of translation, one which always has specific political, cultural and social—in sum, historical—effects.

The very act of translation opens up an aperture through which we glimpse the dynamics of history as an endless replaying of the slave-master dialectic—that is, the slavemaster and Master—or Mister—Slave. That is, one language, however defined, is always “master” and one language is always “slave.” One translates from one language into another for those who cannot—do not—will not—speak the language of origin. Capability, status and volition straddle the nurture/nature divide aslant—as though one “leg” were shorter than the other, as one though one language were “taller” (perhaps closer to divinity), as though one linguistic system were “normal,” another, “disabled.” One does not have to be conscious of this intrinsically unequal relationship between any two languages; inequality is the presupposition of translation.

Consider the examples of two men: Jeremiah Wright and Barack Obama. Among all the accusations and finger-pointing, I want to cite three commentaries that illustrate the ends of translation—and the beginning of the slave-master dialectic. In his New Republic essay “Cool We Can Believe In” novelist/poet Paul Beatty attempts to pin down Obama’s apparent invulnerability to closet skeletons, his anti-Tar Baby immunity, to that most ineffable of blues and jazz attitudes-sans-attitude—cool. This updated stoicism, for Beatty, is the very antithesis of translation—it does not convert, change or represent. It is before all morality, outside any ethos. It is the analogue to reading a poem in a language you do not understand. Or as Adam Clark, a theologian at Xavier University, put it: “The language of the black church that conveys this oppositionality [to empire] does not translate well into the arena of presidential politics. It was never intended to.” Cool cannot be translated—you either get it or you don’t. And so, writes Kofi Natambu, both men should have simply agreed to disagree. I concur but such a possibility depends on black men recognizing—no, remembering—that they are individual black men. But a preacher and a politician have a hard time remembering this since, in their chosen professions, they presume to speak for others, to surrender their individual selves for a larger cause. Of course, as everyone from the editors of the New York Times to FOX News has recognized, it would not have mattered much anyway since, truth to tell, in America there are no individual black men or women allowed in public. There are only translators who speak at least two languages, and those dead, as dead as Latin, as labor, so goes the story. The facts of his particular case aside, Mike Tyson’s arrest and conviction on rape charges several years ago was read by the media itself (and no doubt certain segments of the American public) as a referendum on the O.J. Simpson case, on that black man having “gotten away” with murder. I repeat: there are no individual black men or women allowed in public.

Ethnic minorities and women have known this for sometime, which is one reason why this particular presidential nomination race was so bitter. The fact is, rightly or wrongly, gender politics does figure into American public life—including elections—which does not obviate its racial politics (cf. Tyson and Simpson above). This dynamic is never easily “translated” from one sphere into the other, for as my comments above about translation in general suggest, translation between two “languages” (e.g. the black church and hegemonic “public” discourse, gender and race) is never performed on an even playing field. One language is always presumed “inferior” to the other (e.g., the American fascination with British English and royalty, the Diana cult, etc.). The Obama-Clinton campaigns thus resembled, all too cannily, the Susan B. Anthony-Frederick Douglass debates and ugly back-and-forth recriminations of the 19th century, a debate over “who” deserved the vote first—black men or white women, a debate which erased black women, as Sojourner Truth reminded both Anthony and Douglass. To argue over which was “worse”—the race-baiting or the subtle (and not so subtle) woman-baiting—is to fall into the translation trap, to assume that one has to choose one “language”(race or gender) over another.

If translation always presumes an uneven playing field, then it will not be difficult to judge which “language” plays the role of the inferior in the upcoming presidential campaign. The fact that John McCain doesn’t even have to deal with the question of “translation” speaks volumes. Obama will have to put black people and other people of color, to say nothing of working class people and young people in general, on the back burner, so goes the conventional political wisdom. But what if there is no dominant language out there? What if there are only particular ethnic, gender and economic groups all vying for their share of that ever-dwindling American pie. What if one refused to pick? What is translation in that scenario?



Dr. Williams is a poet, literary theorist, cultural critic, and Professor of English at Xavier University in Ohio.