King Championed the Dream, Beck, A Scheme

August 26th, 2010 - by: danny

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ECONOMY BLUES

FRIDAY MORNING: Washington Post Finds a Shred of A Silver Lining

The Commerce Department slashed its estimate for U.S. GDP growth in the second quarter from a 2.4 percent annual rate to 1.6 percent.

While the numbers pointed to a grim outlook for the economy, they were better than the annualized rate of 1.4 percent that economists had forecast.

Two weeks ago, I challenged the idea that the economy was in “recovery.”

This morning, Paul Krugman devastates the notion, too, in the NY Times.

Bloomberg: Nouriel Roubini, the New York University economist who predicted the global financial crisis, said U.S. growth will be “well below” 1 percent in the third quarter and put the odds of a renewed recession at 40 percent.

REASSURING RESPONSE TODAY BY BEN BERNANKE OF THE FEDERAL RESERVE BANK

WP: Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke acknowledges that the pace of the country’s economic growth “recently appears somewhat less vigorous” than expected, but that it is on track to continue growing.

He said the central bank would only take new action if conditions worsen further.

• New WIKILEAK leaked: Does The US “Export Terrorism?” via Al Jazeera: Wikileaks Posts Classified CIA Memo

The whistle blower organization Wikileaks has released a classified CIA document asking what would happen if foreign countries began to view the US as an “exporter of terrorism.” [More here Ã¢â€ â€™]

I did not see this new Wikileak in the NY Times. It was in the Washington Post. The Times carried more on sex charge against the founder of Wikileaks in Sweden,

• NY Times: Key Karzai Aide in Graft Inquiry Is Linked to C.I.A.

The aide to President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan at the center of a politically sensitive corruption investigation is being paid by the Central Intelligence Agency, according to Afghan and American officials.

Mohammed Zia Salehi, the chief of administration for the National Security Council, appears to have been on the payroll for many years, according to officials in Kabul and Washington. It is unclear exactly what Mr. Salehi does inexchange for his money, whether providing information to the spy agency, advancing American views inside the presidential palace, or both. [More here Ã¢â€ â€™]

• Mossad in America By Philip Giraldi – Former CIA Officer

Israeli intelligence steps up its activity in the U.S. – and gets away with it.

• BIRTHDAYS: Heard yesterday from Tiana Thi Thanh Nga, director of the path breaking documentary, “From Hollywood to Hanoi.” She is in the Vietnamese capital and was invited to attend the 100th birthday party of General Giap, who defeated the US and South Vietnamese armies in 1975. He outlived them all. He is their living link with Ho Chi Minh.

Yesterday was also the anniversary of the death of Massachusetts Senator Ted Kennedy.

• REMEMBERING THE MARCH ON WASHINGTON

We are approaching the anniversary of the 1963 March on Washington on August 28.

“The march was initiated by A. Philip Randolph, the president of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, president of the Negro American Labor Council, and vice president of the AFL-CIO. Randolph had planned a similar march in 1941. The threat of the earlier march had convinced President Roosevelt to establish the Committee on Fair Employment Practice and bar discriminatory hiring in the defense industry. Randolph said “I pledge my heart, and my mind, and my body, to the achievement of social peace through social justice.” The 1963 march was an important part of the rapidly expanding Civil Rights Movement. In the political sense, the march was organized by a coalition of organizations and their leaders including: Randolph, James Farmer (president of the Congress of Racial Equality), John Lewis (president of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee), Martin Luther King, Jr. (president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference), Roy Wilkins (president of the NAACP), Whitney Young (president of the National Urban League).”

This year, Glenn Beck pre-empted any anniversary celebration by legally appropriating the space for his own rally in which he no doubt wants to co-opt the occasion for his own agenda, one that, had he lived, Dr. King would be at odds with.

There will be a confrontation, to be sure, another war of words especially by those offended by the “insensitivity” of this use of the “Hallowed Ground” of the Lincoln Memorial. Rev. Al Sharpton knows a media moment when he sees one. (Jesse Jackson will be marching with the UAW in Detroit for jobs.)

Already, radio host, Randi Rhodes tells us, the Tea Partiers are bring prepared for the realities of the town some call Chocolate City:

“Good news for xenophobes who would like to get out more – a tea party blogger has put together a handy guide to Washington, DC for visitors who are coming for Glenn Beck’s rally this weekend. It covers the basics – inexpensive places to eat, and how to avoid black people, Arabs, and other minorities. Really. It’s kind of a Frommer’s guide for racists. The guide warns attendees about which subway lines and neighborhoods to avoid. It doesn’t specify why they should be avoided, but I don’t think it’s because of pricey restaurants. Classic. So Glenn Beck and the Tea Partiers have stolen the Lincoln Memorial for the anniversary of Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream” speech. And they mark the occasion with a handy-dandy guide to avoiding black people. Hey Tea Partiers, you don’t have to worry about avoiding black people. Just go out in your crazy colonial outfits, and the black people will avoid you. But then so will any sane person.

This guide basically confines visitors to the area around the National Mall and all the monuments. So, if a person follows these directions, they will probably only run into white people – extremely white people, as in “carved out of marble.” And, they won’t see any minorities, unless you count Franklin D. Roosevelt in his wheelchair. Tea Partiers are warned that “Most taxi drivers and many waiters/waitresses (especially in local coffee shops like the Bread and Chocolate chain) are immigrants, frequently from east Africa or Arab countries.” So don’t be shocked when your waitress isn’t Flo from Mel’s Diner. And do people really have to be alerted that taxi drivers may be immigrants? I don’t think there’s been a white guy taxi driver since Travis Bickle. I’ll stick with the immigrants, thank you.”

I was a youth organizer for that 1963 March and remember it as key point in my own politicalization. I suggest you read Charles Euchner’s excellent new book, Nobody Turn Me Around, about the meaning of the march.

Two yeas ago, just before Obama’s inauguration, I wrote about his claim, if any, on the King Heritage a question worth revisiting as the Beckian bastardization of the anniversary approaches.

That blog, written in the winter of 2008, a marker in my own thinking, as well. I was hopeful then. I am less so now.

WHAT IS THE KING-OBAMA LINEAGE? Waiting for Barack,

Can The Breach Between Jesse Jackson And Barack Obama Be Healed?

Somehow, a man with three names has been reduced to four words. Say, “Martin Luther King, Jr.” and the phrase “I have a dream” comes to mind as if that sums up his life or his relevance to the events swirling around his memory next week in Washington with the inauguration of Barack Obama who many mistake as his spiritual son.

As the nation marks King’s birthday, and as he is elevated to the pantheon of officially sanctioned heroes, many forget that he was a man who led a movement, who never sought office, and whose contribution was as a teacher of moral laws and an activist in righteous struggles. We mark his birthday only because so many fought for it as we remember the spirit of Stevie Wonder’s birthday song and Nina Simone’s sad lament.

The movement that King led is, in fact, still alive and meeting as a shell of its former self in New York This week at a Summit organized in New York by Jesse Jackson, one of his disciples, there is a discussion on the economy and how its collapse is impacting on the people King gave his life for, like the striking garbage men of Memphis.

It is also battling to redefine its program at a time when activists, have moved from the streets to digital platforms, from face to face to Facebook, from tumult to Twitter, from agitation in the streets to deal-making in the suites.

Jackson, of course, knows about this divide and tried to cross it boldly in 1984 and 1988 in two historic Presidential campaigns that shook up the Democratic Party, won primaries, and party rule changes that permitted the proportional allocation of primary votes that enabled Obama’s victories.

Just as Barack reached into fellow organizer’s Cesar Chavez’s tool kit for the phrase “Si Se Puede!” (Yes We Can!), Jesse’s living legacy is a largely unacknowledged building block in the chain of history that has taken us to this point. His tears at the victory rally in Chicago were connected to a history that our media often buries.

I spoke to Jesse for a film I am making with Videovision’s Anant Singh about the Obama campaign. I asked him about what was going through his mind on that joyous night in Grant Park where many heads were broken by the police back in 1968.

“Really, it was two things,” he told me. “It was the draw of the moment. In my mind’s eye, I saw martyrs, whose caskets I walked behind, and friends with whom I worked whoa are somewhere in poverty or dead. Children in villages of Kenya, Haiti, who could not afford a television, or somewhere around some radio, hoping that there’d be this great redemptive, transformative breakthrough.

So, it was the draw of that moment, and most of the people I knew who live down in the Alabama or Mississippi who made this moment happen couldn’t afford to be there. And I felt them. And it was also a journey, the journey to get us there.”

Memories flooded in, and he spoke with an almost stream of consciousness:

“I was jailed trying to use a public library along with seven of my classmates. We couldn’t take a picture in the state capitol, but dogs could. Many of us killed about the right to vote. James Meredith shot. Two Jews were killed because they were seen as meddling in Mississippi politics. Reverend James Reeve, Jimmy Lee Jackson, these people, these mostly nameless, faceless maters, they made the big part of it possible.

And often those who make the big party possible, are not invited to the party. They can’t afford to come to the party.

“And I wept again for them, because I wanted them to be there and I thought that if Doctor came, Chavez maybe just be there for a moment in time, and I just kept thinking about Martin Luther King, just like if they were just there for a moment in time, my whole life would have been fulfilled. So, I was thinking about the joy and the journey. That kind of took me to a level of ecstasy and joy.”

This was not a history referenced by most commentators in covering the Obama campaign.

There is a complicated tension between civil rights leaders and President-elect Obama. Their difference is more about how change can made—will it all come from the inside, through an inherently conservative, compromised and bureaucratic political process, or does there need to be pressure from the outside at the grass roots or “street heat” as one of the Reverend’s supporters put it?

With Obama mounting a charm offensive to neutralize enemies and seduce opponents on the right, it seems as if he is running away from progressive supporters. After he met with hard right commentators, Katrina vanden Heuvel, editor of the Nation, the first publication to endorse Jackson years back, asked why progressive supporters are being ignored.

Obama came out of the Saul Alinsky tradition of community organizing. While Alinsky’s most famous book was called, Reveille For Radicals, by the time I met and worked with him in a real organizing school in 1965, he had become a reformer and pragmatist, quiet on the Vietnam war, solicitous of liberal Democrats and hostile to student movements.

Jesse Jackson remains an organizer in the more big tent Movement tradition. He was preaching rainbow for decades before Obama made the idea jell politically.

P.U.S.H. is an acronym for People United to Save Humanity, and is firmly pro-peace and economic justice. Obama has so far been eloquent at tapping movement rhetoric, but he seems distant, even dismissive, of movement culture. Many of his most devoted backers, want to know if he is married to promoting change or just shucking and jiving. Will he remain an advocate for transforming the system or a prisoner of power?

Will he turn his back on King’s commitment to non-violence, or has he already?

Can the Obama generation and the King-Jackson culture, one with an outside-in strategy the other inside-out merge or are they inherently in conflict? Will Barack give his predecessors the props they deserve? Can the fight for change that both Jackson and Obama embrace work together on many levels? If Barack can reconcile with Republicans, why not with the long marchers of the Rainbow?

These are questions that will soon be be tested in a new Administration that gets underway in less than a week.

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