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Those favorable conditions do not obtain today.  The congress, courts and the president are far to the right of where they once stood, and the US has no superpower rival it must try to look better than on the world stage.  The mobilized black masses have long since been sent home by their leaders, who have assured them that all they need do is come out and vote every now and then.

But today, the federal obligation to protect minority voting rights is enshrined in settled law, placing its opponents at a disadvantage.  This is however, a political climate in which coal and petrochemical interests are tapped to write the administration's air pollution laws and allowed to call it the Clear Skies Initiative.  The police state bill can be named the Patriot Act, and legislation to dismantle and defund public education is touted as No Child Left Behind.  With demagogic lies the principal tissue of everyday political discourse, Republican opponents of the Voting Rights bill unconvincingly tried to pull sheepheads over their wolfish snouts and pose as protectors of minority voting rights in order to advance legislative poison pill amendments to kill it.

The Voting Rights Act has worked so well for minorities in Georgia, a couple of Republicans from that state disingenuously proclaimed, that they introduced amendments to extend its provisions nationwide to every jurisdiction with substantial numbers of blacks, Asians, Native Americans and Hispanics.  They knew that with no documented history of disenfranchisement openly and admittedly undertaken in the name of white supremacy, such as exists for Georgia, Mississippi and other places covered by the pre-clearance provisions of the VRA, it wouldn't be long before the current right wing crop of judges ruled most or all of the VRA invalid.  Another killer amendment would have banned or restricted the provision of voting materials in languages other than English, and still another revealed the white supremacist wolf beneath the sheep's clothing by howling for the end of the VRA's pre-clearance provisions everywhere.

We should be grateful that all four of the poison pill amendments failed in the House of Representatives last week, with the support of all or nearly all Democratic legislators and some Republicans.  The three to one margin by which the VRA passed, its vital pre-clearance provisions intact, and the similar margins by which the killer amendments failed should not deceive us.  Many Republican and perhaps some Democratic legislators sit completely on the fence, voting for the winning side only once they are certain a bill will prevail without them.  Thus a three to one vote in the House of Representatives in favor of keeping the Voting Rights Act of 1965 intact does not mean three fourths of the Congress are our allies. 

Still, if the congressman of either party from your district voted for the VRA intact, and voted against the poison pill amendments, we recommend that BC readers call and congratulate him or her on their wisdom and common sense.  Black America dodged a bullet aimed at our ability to exercise our vote without fear or fraud early this month in the House of Representatives, and we must do the same in the Senate and conference committee.  The Voting Rights Act in its present form is irreplaceable.  Now is the time to contact both senators from your state, of whichever party and urge them to pass it intact and without crippling amendments as the House did.  The VRA must pass the Senate, and a conference committee before proceeding to George Bush in the White House for his signature.

The Descent of Barack Obama

The career of Barack Obama, junior senator from Illinois and apparent candidate for vice president on a 2008 Hilary Clinton ticket, raises many questions about the nature and function of and our relationship to what passes for black leadership in this era.  Is the senator a “black leader” whether or not he pushes or advances the views of the Black Consensus?  Who has anointed, denoted and promoted black leaders and for what reasons in the past?  Who's doing it now, and why?  Can one be a “black leader” and be pro-corporate privilege, pro-empire and pro-war, as Obama is, when the vast majority of African Americans are unequivocally on the political left and in fundamental opposition to American empire and war?

In her July 6 Freedom Rider column, Obama Gets Religion BC's Margaret Kimberley took the senator to task.

But as Kimberley astutely observes,

The Big Lie that the major fault line in American life, culture and politics is between the godly and the ungodly is never a surprise when we hear it from Republican lips in between their personal professions of faith.  But when leading Democrats preach to us from the Republican gospel about the shortcomings of those godless progressives, it gets attention.  It should.  Our Margaret Kimberley was far from the only one to point out how unprincipled and truly dangerous the senator's remarks were.  As the popular Democratic blog myDD.com observed:

Most BC readers seemed to agree with Ms. Kimberley.  According to John Farabee:

And Joe Binder wrote:

But there are those who imagine it is BC's and perhaps their duty to “build up” leaders, whether or not those figures represent the needs, wants and desires of our people.  Reader Ruth Rodriguez appears to be among that number:

In a similar vein, Greg Kelley sent us this communication:

BC and Barack Obama: Ain't No “Animus” Here

Journalism is the only profession with its own protective constitutional amendment.  This is not to encourage us to say nice things about the powerful.  It's to enable us to fearlessly monitor the centers of power and speak the truth.  It's not our job to “build up” so-called leaders with uncritical praise, and it never has been.  BC is a journal of investigation and analysis, like it says on our masthead.  We don't do “animus.”  “Animus” is a kind of unreasoning, instinctual dislike and aversion.  If our coverage of Barack Obama is less than flattering, that's because it's been such a long time since the junior senator from Illinois showed us much of anything we can agree with. 

BC first took note of Obama's Democratic primary campaign for the US Senate shortly after the invasion of Iraq back in June of 2003. We observed that candidate Obama had apparently scrubbed his web site clean of any mention of his early stand against the war and for single payer health care.  We offered Obama space in our pages for a brief reply and a follow-up the next week, after running another article detailing the baneful influence of the Democratic Leadership Council, which had claimed candidate Obama as one of their own.  We posed him three “bright line” questions about support for the war, for NAFTA and for single payer health care.  After a little squirming, Obama gave the answers one would expect of a progressive and renounced any affiliation with the DLC, and we endorsed him.

This editor, a native Chicagoan now living in Georgia, went home for Barack Obama's Democratic primary election day and was present at his March 2004 Chicago victory party.  I saw dozens, perhaps hundreds of people I knew that night and can testify with absolute certainty those activists believed they had given their time and treasure, and mobilized their networks to elect a fighting Democrat in the tradition of Paul Wellstone or Harold Washington.

They were deceived. Instead of another Harold Washington we got an acolyte of Connecticut's Senator Joe Lieberman.  

Lieberman has the distinction of being the first and only Democrat who, as committee chairman back when Democrats still ran the Senate in the first two years of the Bush Administration, might have brought the Bush administration down by summoning Enron executives to testify under oath on how they extorted tens of billions from California rate payers and taxpayers by manufacturing that state's “energy crisis” in 2001. But Enron, top contributor to the career of Republican George W. Bush, was also a big donor to the Democratic senator from Connecticut.  So the subpoenas were never sent, the questions under oath went unasked, and the opportunity to unravel that nexus of corruption back to the White House was slipped.  California taxpayers, teacher pension funds, and California ratepayers will continue to pay for Enron's criminal shakedown for decades.  And last week Enron CEO Ken Lay died, laundering his vast stolen fortune into a piece of “legitimate” inheritance.  Thanks a lot, Joe. 

Newly elected US senators choose a mentor from among more senior ones. Revealingly, rather than following the example of the late Senator Paul Wellstone, Obama chose Joe Lieberman as his mentor, and is raising money right now to defend the Connecticut senator from a challenge by antiwar Democrat Ned Lamont. Lieberman has made a name for himself criticizing Democrats from the right on such issues as affirmative action and whether Dems ought to disagree publicly with the president. He is widely known as “Holy Joe” for his willingness to burst into hymns and prayers and profess his religious devotion in front of audiences at the slightest provocation. If the sincerest flattery is imitation, Senator Obama must have his mentor blushing furiously and often.

Bait & Switch

It's time to face the unpleasant truth.  The candidate that progressives in Illinois and elsewhere supported was not the senator they got.  Barack Obama has played the game of bait and switch with the progressive activists and voters who launched his political career. 

As candidate and constitutional law professor, he campaigned against the Patriot Act.  But as senator,  Obama could not find a reason to vote against its reauthorization.  As a candidate he posed as champion for ordinary working families.  But as senator, he voted for so-called “tort reform,” designed to protect corporations from paying for their misdeeds by making it nearly impossible for employees, ratepayers, consumers and ordinary citizens to file class action suits against them in state courts. 

Candidate Obama told us how important the advice and consent function of the Senate was, but only remembered the consent part once elected.  Senator Obama voted to confirm Condi Rice and one of Bush's Supreme Court appointments.  Obama blew the chance to expose Rice, and Supreme Court Chief Justice Roberts for their parts in formulating policies that included war crimes, torture and lies that facilitated an illegal war, the use of military and intelligence agencies to spy on dissidents and civilians in general or the unconstitutional expansion of presidential power.  He let these two and the despicable Joseph Alito get by with nothing in the way of memorable questions, let alone a filibuster.

Obama's speech even went so far as to endorse “voluntary” prayer in public schools, laud the Bush administrations shift in emphasis to faith based programs in preference to all others, and favorably mention of one of the president's favorite black preachers.  The senator is much too smart and well informed not to know that it's difficult for many of these "voluntary" school prayer deals to stay wholly voluntary, or not to know that in many areas, the faith-based programs which often require you to profess your faith in Jesus are the only ones available to people emerging from prison precisely because the feds have starved secular programs for funds and lavished them upon favored churches as a form of Republican patronage.  What Obama did in his speech was to legitimize the patronage operations by lauding rather than exposing them.  He may also have intended to signal some of the pastors who are recipients of millions of dollars in faith-based Republican patronage apiece that he wouldn't mess with their stuff.

BC's Margaret Kimberley, who is very much the committed Christian, pointed out the obvious contradiction between the senator's effusive profession of religious faith and his endorsement of the continuing slaughter in Iraq.  Regrettably, the senator's version of Christian love is no better than most pastors in American churches.  You can walk into any church on Sunday and never fail to hear the American troops lifted up in prayer, as they should be.  But how many pastors, how many congregations remember to pray for the people of Iraq, for their dead and wounded who may outnumber the American dead by as much as a hundred to one?  Maybe Barack meant to lift up the hundreds of thousands of Iraqi dead in his speech too, but forgot.

But to suggest, as the senator did in a later interview, that anything in Obama's speech was offhand or mistaken, or that the senator had no idea how his remarks would be taken is really dead wrong.  Barack is a smart and serious guy with an office full of bright people working for him.  He is running an undeclared campaign for vice president in 2008.  His people did a spitload of advance and after-event work on that keynote address, and you can bet every word and phrase was carefully considered.  If Obama is to get credit for his words, he also has to be responsible for them. 

The truth is that no matter what candidate Obama said or says, he does not work for the people who elected him.  He works for someone else.  Maybe keeping his new friends, like Warren Buffet and Bill Gates comfortable is the new priority.  There have always been two Democratic parties.  There is the electoral party, in which they expect us to come and take part in every two or four years for a day or two.  And there is the permanent party of lobbyists and big ticket contributors, military contractors and the like.  Maybe Barack Obama is a Democratic party leader after all.  But which Democratic party?

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