JFC

How many black votes do you think that cost him?

The Dems have put up perhaps the second worst candidate since Hillary Clinton last time.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

To black voters: Say no to Joe

On the issue of character...

Also...

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Is This As Bad As It Gets?

Personally, I don't think we've seen the worst even now. I've been saying it can't get worse ever since George W Bush went to the White House the first time. And I've been wrong every time. I'm facing facts now. It can, and it most likely will, get worse.



Here's my take: If he loses, he goes up again in 2020. But he will go up against a smarter (not necessarily younger) demagogue from the Republican party. Although there probably will be younger versions in the running as well.  Perhaps even one of his sons will have decided to have a go at it by then. Or maybe the son-in-law who seems to be the top man in the Trump underling closet.

And whoever that GOP candidate is will win, because in four years, if Hillary has not done anything to alleviate the plight of the black voters who hand her the election (and without a miracle awakening or unbeatable opposing force, she won't have), those sure bet voters are going to have finally wised up about the Democratic Party. This year is the last one that the Dems can use and abuse them. The younger voters coming on aren't as gullible.



No. He's not.

What's Left of King's Dream

The commemoration of the March on Washington has been ruined. President Obama, the global assassin, protector of Wall Street, and reigning Great Mass Incarcerator, will star in the production on the National Mall. “Dr. Martin Luther King serves as a mere prop in the ceremony.” In their embrace of Power, the organizers have desecrated the Black American legacy of struggle.

[...]

For those who seek an independent Black politics that is faithful to the historical Black consensus for peace and social justice, the inclusion of President Barack Obama in the 50th anniversary of the 1963 March on Washington is a desecration. The ancestral sanctum is to be utterly defiled by the presence of the very personification of imperial savagery and a ballooning domestic police state.

[...]

When the [1963 march on Washington] is taken out of the context of what happened before and after, all that remains is the “picnic” and the self-censored, deliberately non-confrontational speeches – most notably Dr. King’s vague “dreaming.” Which perfectly suits the needs of today’s Black Misleadership Class, who have no intention of confronting Power – ever! On the contrary, they cling to the garments of Power, in the person of the First Black President, and wrap themselves in the flag of Empire.

[...]

Dr. King rejected U.S. empire, and broke with President Lyndon Johnson over the "inter-related" issues of foreign war and and domestic poverty. There is not a shadow of a doubt that King would denounce Obama in the strongest terms, were he alive, today. Yet, those who pose as his political and moral descendants hug the presidential scorpion to their bosoms.

[...]

Malcolm [X]’s critique of the 1963 March does not seem so dated if one substitutes the words “Obama” or “Democrats” for “white liberals”:

“The white liberals [Democrats/Obama] control the Negro and the Negro vote by controlling the Negro civil rights leaders. As long as they [Democrats/Obama] control the Negro civil rights leaders, they can also control and contain the Negro's struggle, and they can control the Negro's so-called revolt.”

This August 28th will be a day of control and containment – amid a love-fest with Power.

  Black Agenda Report

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

They're Not Happy Over at Black Agenda Report

The rulers had, at long last, found our Achilles Heel, the weakest spot in African Americans’ political armor. Our reflexive racial solidarity (actually, an aspect of Black nationalism), which had served us so well, for so long, short-circuited our progressive political instincts. We became fodder for Obama, the slicker-than-Slick-Willie corporate guy with the brown face.

[...]

Dutifully, Black folks set aside the last vestiges of their vaunted distrust of Power. Henceforth, African Americans would consider themselves as a Palace Guard – the antithesis of independent political actors. Thus was Obama empowered to become the “More Effective Evil.”

With little resistance on the Left, and virtually none from organized Black America, Obama has worked miracles for the resuscitation of the Lords of Capital and their imperial apparatus – feats that only a Black corporate Democrat could accomplish.

[...]

Despite his background, Obama knew enough about African Americans to pay us no attention and less respect. There would be no penalty. Black folks had convinced themselves that Obama needed our protection; it never occurred to most of us that we needed protection from him – not during the primaries, when he praised Ronald Reagan’s reaction to the “excesses” of the Sixties, or when he refused to endorse even a voluntary halt to home foreclosures (while Hillary Clinton and John Edwards endorsed “voluntary” and mandatory moratoriums, respectively); not in the last weeks before his inauguration, when Obama announced that Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and all “entitlements” would be “on the table” for chopping under his administration.

[...]

President Obama has attempted to render international law a dead letter. No nation has any rights that he feels bound to respect. Obama, with his drone armadas and multiplying Special Forces troops, represents a far greater threat to global civilization – which must be rooted in law! – than the failed conquerer George Bush (who actually negotiated the U.S. withdrawal from Iraq).

[...]

Statutory authority to imprison Americans without charge or trial was beyond Bush’s reach, and he knew it. But Obama guided a bill through the Congress with very little Democratic opposition. He is the more effective secret police warden.

Now Obama has won another “mandate,” which he will use to finish the projects he started: wider wars, a more profound government subservience to finance capital, and that “new legal architecture” on national security that he warned about on the Daily Show, a few weeks ago.

[...]

African Americans have made themselves irrelevant – not just for the second Obama presidency, but possibly deep into the future. “Power concedes nothing without a demand,” and Black folks have failed to demand even elementary respect from this president, much less concrete programs, or peace.

  Black Agenda Report

 

 

The "Black Vote"

State of the Union speeches usually throw bones in every direction, to every constituency that matters to a president. But even though black male unemployment is at record levels, even higher than when the president declared the “recession” over, it remains beneath the notice of the First Black President.

  Bruce A. Dixon, Black Agneda Report

The white half is president.

Whether you're a a dependable friend or a despicable enemy, or if your cause is just worth a prevaricating presidential applause line, you'll get it. If the president judges you worth patting on the head, pointing to as an example, or lying to or about, it will happen then and there. And if you're not mentioned at all, anyplace from the beginning to the end, well, you just don't matter much.

[...]

Black concerns, as we noted a couple weeks ago, are irrelevant to the president, and black communities powerless. Since the First Black President is pretty much guaranteed the black vote anyhow, record black unemployment wasn't even worth acknowledging, much less lying about.

There you go. The SOTU this year was a campaign speech, and he doesn’t think he needs to waste words and time pandering to a constituency he apparently believes is captive. Perhaps unemployed black people should think twice before they vote this year.

I think this article is a bit off the mark. I don't believe black communities are powerless.  But further, it’s not Obama who is responsible for the fact that black male unemployment is at record levels. Even though it may strike them especially hard, unemployment is not about blacks. But let the author argue…

[O]stensibly “color-blind” approaches to black unemployment simply don't cut it, and in some cases aren't even meant to. The United States has libraries of color-blind criminal code on the books. But still we manage year after year to arrest, convict and imprison disproportionate numbers of black and brown people for crimes that go unpoliced and unprosecuted among whites.

We have a very, very long way to go to address why and how blacks are disproportionately unemployed, uneducated and jailed in this country and what could be done about it. That’s another issue. A serious important issue that is so hard to tackle we don’t really try. It’s easier to enact laws to try to force a different condition. (And I’m not being glib.) But as we can clearly see, the laws don’t really fix it. They can’t. Laws can’t eliminate deep-seated and sometimes unrealized prejudice. Laws can’t erase generations of substandard education and health care and differing cultural views and values.

It’s a fair point, however to claim that “’color-blind’ approaches to black unemployment simply don't cut it, and in some cases aren't even meant to.” Indeed, any approach to black unemployment coming out of Washington is very likely not “meant to” solve it.

Further into this article, the author gets to what I think is the real argument against Barack Obama for all unemployed Americans, and if black males are disproportionately unemployed, then they should be disproportionately looking for another president because of it.

Barack Obama pledged to raise the minimum wage to $9.50 an hour in his first term, and to fight for measures that would make it possible for millions to organize unions on the job. Despite a thumping majority in Congress his first two years, the president chose not to pick those fights.

[...]

This is the real Barack Obama. A second term won't unleash him. The uncritical black support Obama has received throughout his campaign and his presidency thus far have already set him free to be who he really is ---- a craven servant of Wall Street, a torturer and militarist, a “war president” that even Condi Rice and Dick Cheney now have kind words for, a president who demonizes teachers and federal workers and protects telecoms and mortgage fraudsters from prosecution.

And there you have it.  So, support him at your own peril.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Yo! The Empire Wants YOU

Dr. Martin Luther King shall never RIP.