I’m on the run so I'm going to make this short and sweet.
I want to give thanks for my good health and the continued recovery of my mentor, Milton Bins.
I also want to thank you--my readers--for taking time out of your day to read my blog.
I want to especially thank those who have made a donation to keep me online. Your generous support helps me attend conferences, etc., and gives me breathing space to tell our story.
About a quarter of black Americans live in poverty — nearly three times the rate for whites — at a time when rising budget deficits and expensive corporate bailouts are going to leave little federal money for anti-poverty programs. The federal budget deficit is likely to hit a record $1 trillion next year.
Black adults are less likely than whites to have college degrees and more likely to be in prison. Blacks are less likely than whites to have health insurance and, on average, they don't live as long as whites. Homicide is the leading cause of death among black males ages 15 to 34 — and it has been for years.
It’s encouraging that a black woman, Melody Barnes, was named to President-elect Barack Obama’s economic team. As director of the Domestic Policy Council, Barnes will coordinate domestic policymaking in the White House and provide advice to the President on a wide range of issues, including education,subprime mortgage crisis, health care, poverty and criminal justice.
It should be noted that Barnes will not be the first African American to hold this position. Claude Allen served as President Bush’s domestic policy adviser until he resigned to, er, spend more time with his family.
President-elect Obama also appointed Desirée Rogers as White House Social Secretary. While I’m the hoodie and leggings type, I still think it’s a big deal a black woman will follow in the footsteps of Letitia Baldrige.
As I walked past the Princeton Club, I thought about New York Times columnist David Brooks lauding President-elect Barack Obama for assembling a Cabinet of Washington insiders and members of the club:
If a foreign enemy attacks the United States during the Harvard-Yale game any time over the next four years, we’re screwed.
Truth be told, a lot of black folks already feel screwed. There is growing concern among black women leaders about whether a black woman will have a seat at the table.
It bears repeating that sisters had President-elect Obama's back from the South Carolina primary to Election Day.
Erica Williams, Study Director for the Institute for Women’s Policy Research, said:African American women in particular played a large role in this election, especially in several key battleground. More African American women voted in this presidential election than in any other.
I shared black women leaders' concerns with Ron Hayduk, a keen political observer and longtime democracy reform activist. Ron teaches at the Borough of Manhattan Community College, which is about as far from the rarified air of the Ivy League as one can get.
Ron told me:
He’s being very cautious to his detriment and to ours because he needs black women…A working class agenda has to have women of color for that to happen. What’s he going to do? Do it later if he gets around to it? How long do black woman have to wait. It’s nothing new.
What’s new is that we were expecting something different. People are fired up, black women especially are mobilized…It’s their time. It’s the people’s time. It’s going to be an opportunity lost. A chance missed. He’s going to go down if he doesn’t do it, and he’s going to take us with him.
Those appointments don’t reflect the electoral coalition. It doesn’t look like the electoral coalition will be a part of the governing coalition…It’s more of the same. Maybe not the same old but it’s the same monied interests. Some are just retreads from the Clinton administration.
Ron’s observations were echoed by Bill Fletcher Jr. who, BTW, is a Harvard grad:
It’s up to us to realize our job is to shape Obama and not the other way around. He’s constructing a center-right administration. We’ve got to get organized, shape the discussion, and help the man be who he has to be for this moment.
For President-elect Obama’s three million donors and hundreds of thousands of campaign volunteers that would be "change we can believe in."
February will mark the 200th anniversary of the birth of the Great Emancipator, but Abraham Lincoln is already the rage. From Newsweek to President-elect Barack Obama’s alma mater and transition team, people are talking.
President-elect Obama reportedly is considering appointing a “team of rivals” that would include Hillary Clinton. The reports have reprised the drama of their epic nomination battle.
Gerard Baker, Washington-based editor of the Times of London, writes:
But with his election as president, Mr. Obama surely demonstrated that the victory was his and his alone, and that the country would be spared the prospect of yet another chapter in the Clinton saga that has dominated American politics for the best part of two decades.
And yet, here we are, a couple of weeks after that historic election, and once again all we are talking about is - the Clintons.
It would be an understatement to say that the sudden and unexpected emergence of Senator Clinton's name as the President-elect's apparent choice to be his secretary of state has caused consternation among some of Mr. Obama's most loyal followers.
They are aghast that, as they see it, having wisely steered clear of giving her the vice-presidency, their man has supposedly offered her what is, in all but the constitutional succession stakes, a much bigger job. The State Department is a vast bureaucracy that supports a Cabinet member who is the most frequently seen face of America in the world. One can only guess, by the way, what Joe Biden, the man who got the vice-presidential slot over Senator Clinton, in large part because of his foreign policy credentials, now thinks about the idea of sitting quietly in his vice-presidential office suite watching Mrs. Clinton strut her global stuff on television.
While Obama loyalists may be “aghast,” a new Gallup poll found that 57 percent of Americans want Clinton to hold court at Foggy Bottom. Nearly 80 percent of Democrats think it would be a good play.
But some want to run them off the road. Rep. Gary Ackerman castigated them for their profligacy:
There’s a delicious irony of seeing private luxury jets flying into DC, and people coming off of them with tin cups in their hands, saying that they’re going to be trimming down and streamlining their businesses. It’s almost like seeing a guy show up at the soup kitchen in high hat and tuxedo. Kind makes you a little bit suspicious as to whether or not…we’ve seen the future. There’s a message there. Couldn’t you all have downgraded to first class or jet-pooled to get here? It would have at least sent the message that you do get it.
Michael Moore, writer, producer and director of “Roger and Me,” skewered the less than dynamic trio on CNN’s "Larry King Live."
Moore continued:
They don’t believe in free enterprise or free market. They want socialism for themselves. They want a handout and a net for themselves. To hell with everybody else, but give it to them.
ABC News’ Brian Ross broke the story of the corporate excess. He told King:
This is the way all three of the CEOs live. They talked about sacrifices. They talked about the sacrifice of laying off tens of thousands of their workers. They’re not talking about their own sacrifices…For a company that says it’s running out of cash, it seems incongruous.
It’s indeed incongruous to ask taxpayers, who have to pay for a bottle of water on a cramped commercial plane, to bail out auto execs who are cut from the same fine cloth as AIG executives.
Consider: a new Rasmussen poll found that Americans have flipped the script. Forty-eight percent think the failure of General Motors would be good for the country.
Holder served as deputy AG during the Clinton administration. More recently, he co-chaired Obama’s vice presidential search committee.
Republicans are not waiting for the official announcement to attack Holder. Fox News’ Sean Hannity has dredged up Elián Gonzalez and the Marc Rich pardon.
With Senate Democrats increasing their majority, Republicans will not be able to block Holder (or any other nominee). Sure, some embittered sore losers will bring up chewed over controversies, but at the end of the day, Obama will get his man.
Bush political appointees have looked for "voter fraud" in every polling place. They're still looking.
As the nation’s top law enforcement officer, Holder would be in a position to address the disproportionate incarceration of black men, the "cycle of incarceration," and a criminal justice system that targets just us.
Predictably, some Republicans fret about not getting their, er, message out. Their wannabe savior Michael Steele, former lieutenant governor of Maryland, told a group of conservatives meeting at the Breakers Hotel in Palm Beach:
The cause of the conservative movement in this country is alive and
well. It is strong only if we let it be strong, only if we acknowledge
its principles only if we prepare to go into the town squares and the
halls of America and speak truth to power. If we are to regain the
trust of the American people and restore the credibility of our ideas,
we must break with that which went wrong and once again stand for what
is right.
Did you see the crowd shots during speeches at the Republican National Convention in St. Paul? It resembled an America that no longer exists. The Census Bureau issued a press release in the summer of 2008 that projects that by 2042, the United States will no longer be a White majority nation. Of course, you would have never known that by watching the Republican National Convention. African Americans, for example, comprised just 1.5 percent of the delegates to this year’s convention. Relying on a graying base of a shrinking demographic to win elections is a losing proposition when the other side is collecting virtually all of the groups that are growing…If the GOP doesn’t get serious about diversity, then it will have to write off sections of the far west. How can a party win a national election if it’s not competitive in the northeast, mid-Atlantic, or far west?
Fauntroy adds:
The Republicans have a bigger problem than they think. Continuing with the same ideological leadership and ignoring the demographic reality facing the country will only make things worse. While I do take a bit of a perverse delight in the current state of the party, I also understand that two parties competing for the center of the electorate is, ultimately, better for the country than one. The GOP is so far out of the mainstream and riven with delusion about how they got there that a reality is necessary. Let’s hope someone is listening.
Fauntroy expects Republicans will ignore his advice. That’s a safe assumption. I was a national vice chair of the Republican National Committee’s New Majority Council and they didn’t listen to me. Perhaps if they had, they wouldn’t be facing the abyss.
