CLEAN UP LABOR AND JUSTICE LEADERS AS WE SHAKE NEO-LIBERAL POLITICIANS OUT OF THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY!
Regarding the captured labor and justice organizations in MD:
As my next post will show, Maryland and the Federal government has a capture of labor and justice leaders that work with Obama and Wall Street to advance the dismantling of all that is public and pushing a re-writing of TPP ending WE THE PEOPLE AND BILL OF RIGHTS. As we work to restore democracy and rebuild our domestic economy now that global markets are dead from massive fraud and corruption,.....we need to look as well at the people placed in leadership positions that are not working for their membership......whether NAACP, NAN, CAN, Casa de Maryland, Hispanic Chamber of Commerce.....or National Labor Union leaders who seem to think unions are now tied to Wall Street profit and work against the interest of their membership.
No one can blame a black leader for supporting Obama during the campaign. Everyone assumed the US still had free and fair elections and that Obama's campaign platform would be his policy. So, when NAACP and NAN for instance supported some of Obama's policies in the beginning the idea was that Obama was compromising to get something later. Well, as soon as Obama loaded his Administration with Wall Street and Clinton....black leaders knew people of color were in trouble as were we all. Yet, they are still shouting for Obama as black communities are under attack and having lost all civil rights and even rights as citizens. Al Sharpton is Obama as is Donna Edwards and Rawlings-Blake here in Maryland. Obama was named the most corrupt US President in history followed by Bush because of the neo-liberal/neo-con conspiracy to grab all the money and run----the world knows this so any pol still supporting Obama and his neo-con/neo-liberal policies is part of the corruption and hurt people of color. Again, I want to guess that these black middle-class will be thrown under the bus when these rich, white 1% are through dismantling all democratic structures so
BLACK AND HISPANIC LEADERS ACTING LIKE WALL STREET SHILLS HAD BETTER WAKE UP!!! WORKING WITH PEOPLE IGNORING CIVIL LIBERTIES/RIGHTS DOES NOT BODE WELL FOR PEOPLE OF COLOR.
I spoke earlier about attending a Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond meeting in Baltimore that was Baltimore Development Corporation and Hopkins with its many private non-profits. Present were Casa de Maryland, the NAACP, Black Charities, and MECU with others. Since I'm picking on leaders of color this time with labor unions next.....I will say that when I shouted at the meeting against a Baltimore Development that has no public input, that is steeped in fraud and corruption in using public taxpayer funds, and that allow wide-spread immigrant and domestic worker fraud and abuse throughout all Enterprise Zone development....THESE BLACK AND HISPANIC LEADERS ENRICHING THEMSELVES ON THIS ABUSE.....WERE SHAME-FACED. Casa de Maryland reps hanging their heads and Black Charities reps feeling the pain of the victims of wide-spread abuse in city development.
WE NEED CITIZENS OF COLOR TO SHAKE THESE BUGS OUT OF THE RUG AS THEY ARE ONLY WORKING TO ENRICH THEMSELVES AT EVERYONE ELSE'S LOSS. STOP ALLOWING THE BALTIMORE DEMOCRATIC PARTY MACHINE CHOOSE YOUR CANDIDATES----THEY ARE WORKING FOR NEO-CONSERVATIVE JOHNS HOPKINS FOR GOODNESS SAKE! THEY ARE NOT DEMOCRATS!
The Hispanic Chamber of Commerce and Casa de Maryland know, and are the ones abusing Hispanic immigrants. These Hispanic leaders are the ones made rich from stealing immigrant wages and offering no workplace protection and Casa de Maryland backs all of Maryland's neo-liberals like Obama and O'Malley who are simply inviting Hispanics into the state and then turning their heads to the fleecing.
CASA DE MARYLAND KNOWS THE SENATE'S IMMIGRATION BILL IS BAD FOR IMMIGRANT AND DOMESTIC WORKERS AND YET, THERE THEY ARE SHOUTING TO PASS THIS IMMIGRATION REFORM.
I attend meetings where Casa de Maryland admits that what needs to be met for immigrants to see citizenship in moving further and further away and the compromises are tied to TPP, not what republicans force on neo-liberals. THEY KNOW THIS IS A GAME FOR NEO-LIBERALS AND NEO-CONS AT THE EXPENSE OF PEOPLE OF COLOR AND THEY STILL GET OUT THE VOTE FOR THESE CORRUPT POLS.
NEO-LIBERALS AND NEO-CONS ARE THE FACE OF TPP AND GLOBAL CORPORATE TRIBUNALS AND WORK FOR WEALTH AND PROFIT-----NOT LABOR AND JUSTICE!!!!!
We appreciate the black leaders that are outing Obama and national black leaders that have been captured by Wall Street. If people of color do not stand up against captured leaders....whether black or Hispanic....TPP will end WE THE PEOPLE AND BILL OF RIGHTS and that will hurt all of us, but people of color the most!
Please visit this video.....
Al Sharpton Gets Thunderstruck by Chicagoans
youtube.com
Video Description - Watch the video first, otherwise you remove all doubt when you speak. This...
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There is not a person in the world who do not now know Obama and Eric Holder are the face of massive corporate fraud and corruption and aiding and abetting the fleecing of all middle-class and working class wealth. They are why people lost their homes.....why police brutality and wide-spread immigration deportation is happening. They are why no civil liberties/rights laws are enforced and why massive Medicare/Medicaid fraud, social services fraud, and Food Stamp fraud that takes all benefits from the poor occur. THESE TWO ARE THE FACE OF ALL LOSS OF CITIZENSHIP RIGHTS FOR BLACKS AND HISPANICS.
HERE IS NAN AND AL SHARPTON SINGING PRAISES!!!!
Heavy-Hitting Obama Officials Kick Off This Year’s National Action Network Convention
Apr 6, 2012
By NewsOne Staff
Eric Holder and a cadre of heavy-hitting Obama Administration officials will kick off the annual National Action Network’s (NAN) national convention next week in Washington, D.C. Most of the panel discussions will focus on issues that voters, especially African-Americans, will have in mind when they step into ballot box come November.
The four-day convention, beginning Wednesday, April 11 at the Walter E. Washington Convention Center, is free and open to the public.
The Rev. Al Sharpton, President and Founder of NAN, has been particularly active this year in the wake of the Trayvon Martin tragedy. The convention’s “Criminal Justice” session, featuring President Barack Obama‘s former professor at Harvard Law School Dr. Charles J. Ogletree, will likely focus on Martin and other issues of injustice facing African-Americans. Alfred C. Liggins III, Chief Executive Officer of Radio One, will be featured in the “Media: Race & Politics” session along with Washington Post staff writers Jonathan Capehart and Nia-Malika Henderson, and other leading media professionals. [EDITOR'S NOTE: Radio One is the parent company of NewsOne.]
U.S. Secretary of Labor Hilda L. Solis and Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius will lead back-to-back plenary sessions. With African-Americans ranking highest among the unemployed and those experiencing healthcare disparities, both sessions will give attendees the opportunity to hear from Obama’s top advisors. Six current cabinet members in total will participate in the convention.
While the Rev. Sharpton has enjoyed a close relationship with the President and his administration — Obama having kicked off his re-election campaign at last year’s NAN convention — Sharpton says that this year’s gathering isn’t meant to be a cozy get-together where Obama’s team can address convention attendees unchallenged.
“Otherwise, we’re just having a soundbite forum,” Sharpton said. “We determined when we started making the movement three years ago to stop the soundbites where everyone sits on the stage, give their best lines, and nothing happens. Our people need accountability and concrete progress.
“We do not need just… people with soundbites,” Sharpton continued, adding that if speakers were coming to simply spout platitudes, that “they ought to be in the rap industry not in civil rights work.”
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We need people of color to shout out against neo-liberals......these are not democrats, they simply have captured the democratic party and it is captured Hispanic leaders being elected and acting just the same.
We all have to be better in choosing and voting for these candidates. If you run good people from your community in these primaries to get rid of the wealth and profit pols......
WE CAN TURN THIS AROUND!
Hispanics are tired of Obama’s lip service on immigration reform
By Hispanic Link on January 30, 2014
Hispanic Link
By Kay Bárbaro
For Borderzine from Hispanic Link
WASHINGTON – WE’RE STILL WAITING: Cecilia Muñoz, longtime vice president of the National Council of La Raza whose appointment in Jan. 20, 2009, to President Obama’s initial cabinet was seen as a payoff to the Hispanic community for its huge role in Obama’s winning a front-door key to the White House.
Cecilia Muñoz, Assistant to the President and Director of the Domestic Policy Council. (www.whitehouse.gov)
Cecilia Muñoz, Assistant to the President and Director of the Domestic Policy Council. (www.whitehouse.gov)
This, we and many others innocently believed, would ensure that el presidente nuevo would move quickly to make good on his repeated promises to end our undocumented immigrant agony by delivering genuine immigration reform legislation.
Did he?
Of course not.
Back then and frequently thereafter, we heard that Obama’s key non-Hispanic inner brain trust, including current Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel, insisted that political expediency required him to reduce his reform priorities to one. Choose it: a decent, legitimate immigration bill or healthcare reform.
For obvious reasons, health care won. The Latino community’s welfare was reverted to its accustomed position at the tag-end of the line.
Could both goals have been achieved? We’ll never know.
As consolation prize, 53 million U.S. Latinos and Latinas have been awarded more Obama lip service and a basically nativist Senate immigration bill.
An increasing number of Latino ex-believers now have figured out that the White House has betrayed them.
The Obama administration continues by the hour to add to its record of deporting more refugees – predominantly Hispanic ones – than has any past president in our “give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to be free” history.
The President’s current diabolic catch-and-ship-out strategy tore nearly two million productive immigrant families to shreds in 2012. He would like us to believe that his “racist” Republican adversaries are the real cause of his inhumane inaction.
Now he has lateraled the initiative to House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio), who wants to spend billions more to lock shut our border with Mexico and piece-meal immigration reform to death. He has shown zero interest in permitting the 11 million undocumented immigrants drawn here ever to become U.S. citizens with a right to vote.
On cue, Cecilia Muñoz, now promoted to Obama’s domestic policy director, gushes the Administration’s joy. She tells the press, “It’s a very big deal.”
Over time, Cecilia’s Casa Blanca position calls on her to do little more than appease fellow Hispanics. She covers Obama’s tracks as his lack of ganas or cojones even drives innocent, born-in-the-USA children “back” to countries where they’ve never been as he imprisons and deports their already exploited parents. He allows our desert floors to be carpeted with refugees’ bones.
Muñoz’s familial roots trail back to La Paz, Bolivia. Does her fealty to her boss and her White House title, with its $172,000 paycheck, trumps that?
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New Americans know as the article above states that something stinks in Denmark and Maryland is ground zero for the immigrant stink. Immigrants are marching in the streets giving testimony to how bad the state of the state for immigrants in Maryland and Casa de Maryland is never there!!! It is always behind O'Malley, Rawlings-Blake, and as you see Anthony Brown....
THE WORST WALL STREET SHILLS IN THE NATION. NEO-LIBERALS ARE TRYING TO END THE US CONSTITUTIONAL BILL OF RIGHTS AND WE THE PEOPLE GOOD FOR ALL AND THESE LEADERS THINK THAT WILL WORK FOR HISPANICS? OF COURSE NOT. GET RID OF THESE HISPANIC LEADERS.
Yet here you see a shout out for the most repressive city in the country......A COMPANY TOWN IS NOT THE LAND OF THE FREE! Where you can get a job but don't expect to actually get paid for doing it! Remember, having immigrants with drivers licenses is not for the person and justice....it is so immigrants can be expolited in more job categories for goodness sake.
THIS IS PURE PROPAGANDA!!!
Anthony Brown is O'Malley and we all know that O'Malley is a raging Wall Street pol. Yet here is Casa de Maryland lining up Wall Street votes. I think Hispanics have figured out that the Dream Act was for TPP's flooding of the US labor market with immigrants from around the world and not so much with Hispanics.
2012 National Immigration Integration Conference
September 23rd, 2012
Baltimore, MD
Good morning. It’s great to be with you. How many of you are visiting our great city and State from out of state?
Awesome. Well, we’re glad you’re here. Welcome to Maryland and to Baltimore, the greatest city in America.
We are the original land of the free and the home of the brave. And it was in our waters out there in our port that that national anthem was penned, and I’m going to come back to that in a second.
But let me say a very special word of thanks right off the bat to the National Partnership for New Americans, and to our host, Gustavo Torres, and everybody that works with CASA de Maryland. Thank you very, very much.
Thanks in particular for the very important work that CASA does, and that the Partnership is accomplishing throughout our country and, of course, here in our State,… helping to empower our neighbors and helping to reinvigorate the American dream.
You know, in my first term we created a Council for New Americans and they did some great work. Tom Perez was our Secretary of Labor, Licensing and Regulation, and he went on to become a prominent member of the Obama Administration in the Justice Department, as have many of our cabinet members. I regret that I have but one cabinet to give to my country.
But among the recommendations for the Maryland Council for New Americans were workforce recommendations on improving licensing, credentialing, and the like. Another one was citizenship recommendations, creating a more robust network to allow people who can apply for citizenship to apply for citizenship. Financial services recommendations, because we saw the way the sub-prime market was affecting so many new American families,… and also Government access recommendations.
And one intervening force that happened in the meantime was a couple of years ago, two legislative sessions ago, we passed a State version of the Dream Act in our legislature.
And now that is up on the ballot, because those who were afraid of the Dream Act got up the signatures to petition it to the ballot. I know that there are other states that have had some version of the Dream Act when it comes to in-State tuition for immigrant children. This is the first one, I believe, that’s ever actually gone to the ballot, where the people will be asked straight-up what kind of country they want their children to live in and inherit.
Let me share with you a quick story, since Gustavo got me in a, you know, memory lane sort of thing.
I was running for re-election in 2010, after having created the Council for New Americans, and after doing some good work, including driving way down the infant mortality rate among Latino moms, which had been spiking in our State until we attacked that and did a better job of reaching out.
But in the debates with my opponent in 2010, one of the final televised debates, he was mocking me—can you believe it—for using the term New Americans. And as I recall the moment, he, with a sneer, and with his in-house studio audience partly packed with people that were as like-minded as he was, he said, New Americans—New Americans, with a sneer. He said, “When someone breaks into your house in the middle of the night, do you call them a new family member?”
I knew that the second he said that that Anthony Brown and I would get 99.9 percent of all New Americans in the State of Maryland.
And, in fact, we did. The first time out we had been victorious by a seven point margin. Four years later it was a fourteen point margin.
And I’m absolutely convinced that a part of that victory was attributable to the very clear difference between the two visions that we offer the people of our State. One was a vision of an America that’s shrinking, where there are less opportunities, and where we’re moving back. The other was a vision of an America that’s always growing and expanding more opportunities and moving forward.
From our founding we have always been a State, even when others were falling back, that chooses to move ahead.
So your work is important to that life-changing opportunity, expanding, dream-achieving work that is at the heart of the American dream. It is the work that bolsters the U.S. economy and also our country’s fiscal situation through the $90 billion that immigrants pay in taxes throughout our country year after year.
That’s one of the few times you’ll ever use a tax line as an applause line, but we’ll make the most of it.
It is work that we believe in here in Maryland. In 2008, as I mentioned, we created the Council for New Americans. And I wanted to talk with you today about a truth that really lies at the heart of the American Dream and it is this—the stronger we make our country, the more she gives back to us, and the more she gives back to our children and our grandchildren.
I mentioned before that it is fitting and right and proper that you’re here, since we’re 45 days away from passing the Dream Act, but you also arrived here during the Bicentennial of the War of 1812. And as Governor here, it is my official duty to encourage you to spend as much money in our economy seeing the sights as possible.
And one of those sights is just down at the end of the peninsula, you go down right here on Light Street, take a left on Fort Avenue and take it until it takes you right directly into the front gates of Fort McHenry.
In 1814 Washington had been burned to the ground, the people of Baltimore could see the glow from the fires coming up from the south—from the direction over Camden Yards. And then the British General at the top said that he was going to march on Baltimore, he was going to dine in Baltimore—because even then we had great restaurants—and then he was going to burn Baltimore to the ground.
But the people of Baltimore had something else in mind. Instead of running away, they hunkered down. Instead of moving back, they rushed forward to Fort McHenry, to the ramparts there, they dug trenches across what is current-day Patterson Park. And, get this, 50 percent of the defenders of Baltimore were immigrants, had not even been born in this country. Many were African American citizens of a still very imperfect, slave-holding country.
The Star Spangled banner—that giant, giant flag that they had commissioned by Mary Pickersgill, a woman-owned business in Baltimore, and her daughters. There was another little set of hands that sewed that flag together, and they were the hands of Grace Wisher, a 13 year old indentured African American servant girl.
So your very flag, the stars and stripes, were sewn together by black and white hands; hands of bondage, hands of freedom. And I would submit to you that the common thread that held those stars and stripes together is the same common thread that holds us together now, and it is the thread of human dignity.
Is it the dignity of work, it is the dignity of a job, it is the dignity of every child’s home, and it is the dignity of every individual.
We progress on the strengths, not on the weakness of our neighbors. That, too, is an American truth. We move forward when we expand opportunity to more people, rather than to fewer, regardless of where they or their grandparents or parents happen to have been born.
And with this in mind, you picked this ideal time to come here. The Dream Act is on the ballot here in November. Often throughout our State’s history, we have been the State that first sets the example. And I believe that we will do so with the Dream Act. Why it is important? I know I’m preaching to the choir here, but as Dr. Martin Luther King once said, sometimes it’s “it’s important that you preach to the choir because if you don’t, they could stop singing.”
So the Dream Act is important, because in our changing world, our ability to create jobs and move our country forward depends on our willingness to educate, innovate and rebuild for our future and our children’s future.
Back in the 1880′s, in Baltimore when we were seeing successive waves of German immigrants coming to Baltimore, the leading mothers and fathers of Baltimore created some 15 public elementary schools that taught reading and math in German. Why did they do that? Well, because they were decent people, yes. But they also were people of pragmatic, practical common sense. They knew that these immigrant children would be inheriting this country, along with their own children. And they wanted their children to grow up in a country that was stronger, more inclusive, with more opportunities and higher levels of education, because they understood the more highly educated a citizenry, the more economic opportunity for everyone.
So we need your help. As you leave here today, as you go back to take that break in your hotel room before going off with your friends to see Fort McHenry, I’d like you to help us here with the Dream Act by going online and encouraging people to contribute to the campaign. Right now we’re running at about 57 percent, some polls would say higher. But it is not over until it’s over. And we need your help.
You know, in a very real sense, because of the blood we share, not only with one another, but the blood we share with our parents and grandparents, we were all once strangers in a strange land. My parents’ grandparents were mostly all immigrant people, Irish and Germans, and their first language might not have been English—but the hopes and dreams they had for their children, they were purely American.
And so, too, are the hopes and dreams of Marylanders like my friend Maria Welch, the daughter of new American parents who came to the United States from Costa Rica and Columbia. And at one time Maria was homeless. Today she’s the CEO of a $10 million small business, located in Columbia, Maryland. Her business has served more than 24,000 patients. In 2008, I had the distinct honor of swearing her in as Chair of the Governor’s Commission on Hispanic Affairs.
Second story. The American dream is also woven in our State through the story and the actions and the hard work of Prem Agarwal. Prem came to the United States from India in 1967 with a suitcase and $1,000 to his name. A few years later, while working for a grocery company, he tried unsuccessfully to convince his employer to build an ice manufacturing plant in Maryland. And when they declined to do so, he decided to do it himself. And for the next 10 years he ran a successful ice manufacturing business. Today he is President and CEO of a successful lumber and tire company in Prince George’s County, Maryland, called G.E. Frisco.
Third story. The American dream is also a story told in the healing innovation of a Maryland company called Fyodor, which was launched by Dr. Eddy Agbo. Dr. Agbo is an immigrant from Nigeria. Fyodor is working on cost effective ways to test for malaria, reminding us all that our greatness as a people isn’t about how many smart bombs we’re able to send against our enemies half way around the globe, it is determined by how and to what degree we can unleash the weapons of mass salvation, to heal these sorts of diseases that take so many lives, especially of children all around the world, that we have the power and the ability, as Americans, to actually cure and solve and prevent.
In conclusion, we live in changing times, and that is undeniable. The question is what sort of change will we make of it? As we search for the good intentions of our neighbors, especially those who might disagree with us about policy choices that we need to make together for a better country,… as we search for common ground and a better way forward, we need to ask one another—including the leaders of the Republican party—we need to ask without any anger, meanness or fear, how much less do you really think would be good for our country?
How much less education would be good for our children? How many fewer college degrees will make our economy more competitive? How much less public safety would improve living in our towns and cities? How many family farms can we no longer afford to save? How many hungry American children can we no longer afford to feed?
Our parents and grandparents did not come across an ocean, settle a continent and do hard, back-breaking, oftentimes life-threatening work, so their children and grandchildren could live in a country of less.
America is not a country of less opportunities, America is a country of more opportunities. The opportunity to work, the opportunity to build up a secure and more loving home. The opportunity to give your own children a better future.
And the United States of America, despite some of those who would doubt it, is still the greatest job-generating opportunity-expanding country ever created by a free people in the history of civilization.
And that is true, not despite new Americans—that is true because of new Americans. That is true--
That is true not despite immigrant people, but because of immigrant people. That is true not because of those who would have some of us live in the shadows of darkness, but it is true because of the heart that every human being possesses, and the desire we have to raise our children in the fullness and the life of opportunity, where they can become all that they can be.
That’s what America is about. That’s why the Star Spangled Banner was defended. And that’s why the Stars and Stripes is still stitched together today by the thread of human dignity that each of you sews into the fabric of a great and growing nation.
Thanks very, very much.
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Have you heard Maryland State Assembly people from Baltimore....lately Barbara Robinson and Jill Carter shouting with their media headlines......PEOPLE ARE DYING FROM LACK OF ACCESS TO HEALTH CARE! Of course they are Barbara and Jill.....that is what the Affordable Care Act is about.....ending public health and making sure health industry profits soar from lack of access to ordinary medical procedures for most citizens.
AND YOU KNEW THAT FOR GOODNESS SAKE SO STOP TRYING TO PRETEND YOU SUPPORTED ACA NOT KNOWING PEOPLE WOULD DIE BECAUSE MASSIVE CORPORATE FRAUD RAIDED ENTITLEMENTS OF TRILLIONS OF DOLLARS AND NOW THEY HAVE TO PRETEND THERE ISN'T ENOUGH MONEY.
Now, Carson is honest about his stance with republicans and Johns Hopkins that medicine is for profit and not public benefit, but neo-liberals like Donna Edwards, Jill Carter, and Barbara Robinson are just pretending to work for their constituents while actually working against them.
GET RID OF THESE BLACK LEADERS THAT ARE WORKING FOR WALL STREET ------NEO-LIBERALS WILL BE THE DEATH OF YOU AND ME-----LITERALLY!
EVERYONE UNDERSTANDS BY NOW THAT ACA IS A REPUBLICAN POLICY TO END ENTITLEMENTS AND MAXIMIZE PROFITS!
Dr. Benjamin Carson VS Donna Edwards on Barack Obama's Remarks and Black Crime in America
Published on Jul 21, 2013
July 21, 2013 - Is Zimmerman verdict a diversion to the real issue facing the African American Community today? asks Fox News Sunday Host, Chris Wallace as he is joined by Dr. Benjamin Carson, and Congresswoman Donna Edwards (D-MD), member of the Congressional Black Caucus, to share their opinions on the President's recent comments about racism in this country.
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As you see below, this is why Maryland is silent on the worst of policies....Race to the Top. Ending Brown vs Board of Education and Equal Opportunity in Education is a big thing. We are calling these black leaders to WAKE UP because you will not be dancing with these stars for long! We need to rebuild the justice movement and we hope today's black leaders for justice will shake these captured leaders out of the rug!
RUN LABOR AND JUSTICE CANDIDATES IN ALL PRIMARIES. ALL POLS IN MARYLAND ARE NEO-LIBERALS AND NEO-LIBERALS ARE NOT YOUR FRIENDS!
From Race Men to Debased Men, Obama at Morehouse, Arne Duncan at Morgan State
Tue, 05/07/2013 - 22:04 — Bruce A. Dixon
A Black Agenda Radio Commentary by BAR managing editor Bruce A. Dixon
Back in the day, the “race men” and women, graduates of America's historically black colleges and universities imagined it was their duty to stand and lift up the interests of African Americans and their communities as a whole. If the choice of commencement speakers means anything, that's not what HBCU leaders expect of their graduates nowadays. It's not about fighting the power, it's about serving that power.
From Race Man to Debased Man, Obama at Morehouse, Arne Duncan at Morgan State
A Black Agenda Radio Commentary by BAR managing editor Bruce A. Dixon
A good friend in Atlanta observed that when President Bush used to visit, his inbox would be flooded with alerts and notices about vigils, picket lines and demonstrations. But when the current president comes to town, there's nothing.
President Obama will punctuate the commencement at Atlanta's Morehouse College next week. The only ripple that's made news is whether some preacher who criticized the president for not making enough black appointments to elite high offices should be allowed to set foot on campus that weekend. Commencement week, Morehouse officials solemnly say, is about the graduates, not politics.
At Morgan State University, another historically black institution of higher learning in Baltimore, Obama's basketball buddy and Secretary of Education Arne Duncan is scheduled to deliver the commencement address. There's not much publicly visible dissent behind that either, despite the fact that President Obama's Race To The Top program has closed and privatized more public schools than any other president in US history, and Arne Duncan chucks that spear. Baltimore is reportedly closing 32 schools in the near future while building only 15 new ones. One wonders whether Baltimore and Morgan State would be protesting if the same destructive policies were forced upon them by a white president without the soothing presence of a compliant black political elite as intermediaries.
There's no shortage of of pressing issues at Morgan State, Maryland state delegate Jill P. Carter informed Black Agenda Report. The school is suing the state of Maryland and its Democrat governor, charging that the state's historically black colleges and universities have been chronically underfunded. According to Carter, HBCUs across the country are watching and waiting to file similar suits if this one succeeds.
“There's no shortage of bright, successful HBCU alumni who could deliver powerful, inspiring commencement address,” said Carter. “It's too bad Morgan State didn't go there instead.”
Delegate Carter has a point. It is too bad. What it's not is the least bit surprising.
The leaders of Morgan State University, of Morehouse College and many similar institutions are not really leaders at all, not the way the old style “race men” and women supposed themselves to be once upon a time, standing up and lifting up all our people. They are followers, members of a black misleadership class which values conformity, silence and careers over courageous advocacy and struggle, and prizes individual enrichment over investment in a community's collective wealth and power.
The race men have become debased men, unable even to stand up for the interests of their own institutions, let alone for public education, or against gentrification, or the interests of African Americans as a whole. Commencement addresses for them are not about inspiring the graduates about to go forth into the world and accomplish things about which their elders can only dream. They're about genuflecting to power and repeating the stale old narratives that validate and justify our class of elite black misleaders.
For Black Agenda Radio, I'm Bruce Dixon. Find us on the web at www.blackagendareport.com.
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REMEMBER COMMUNITY ORGANIZING AS AN OBAMA CAMPAIGN PLUS? WE DID NOT KNOW THIS WAS AN AUTOCRATIC ORGANIZING! USING PRIVATE NON-PROFITS TO END THE PUBLIC SECTOR!
Obama is creating a number of non-profits most of which are designed to go into underserved communities and convince them that his policies ending the War on Poverty and New Deal are good for them. Race to the Top and Affordable Care Act, Immigration Reform and TPP. I heard last week Obama was sending in a non-profit that taught inner city children to have integrity. THIS FROM THE LYING, CHEATING, STEALING COMMANDER-IN-CHIEF. Indeed, these private non-profits are filling underserved communities and I have yet to find one working class or poor person that wants these groups.
THIS IS PURE PROPAGANDA AND IT IS DESIGNED TO CONTROL IDEAS AND COMMUNICATIONS IN POOR COMMUNITIES.
Obama campaign creating nonprofit to support president's agenda
Obama campaign non-profit:
President Barack Obama's campaign manager Jim Messina tours the floor at the Democratic National Convention in Charlotte, N.C., Sept. 3, 2012.
The president is transforming his presidential campaign operation into a nonprofit that will promote his second-term agenda.
WASHINGTON — In an unprecedented move, President Barack Obama's vaunted political organization is being turned into a nonprofit group — funded in part by corporate money — to mobilize support behind the president's second-term agenda.
The tax-exempt organization will be called Organizing for Action and seek to harness the energy of Obama's re-election campaign for future legislative fights. Officials said the group will be separate from the Democratic National Committee and advocate on key policy issues such as gun control and immigration, train future leaders and devote attention to local issues around the country.
"Following in the footsteps of the campaign you built, Organizing for Action will be an unparalleled force in American politics," Obama said in an email to supporters Friday. "It will work to turn our shared values into legislative action, and it'll empower the next generation of leaders in our movement."
Obama campaign manager Jim Messina will serve as the group's national chairman, and White House official Jon Carson is leaving the administration to become its executive director. Democratic officials familiar with the group said the organization plans to accept donations from individuals and corporations — and disclose their identities — but not take money from lobbyists and political action committees, a move in line with donor rules set up for the president's inaugural committee. It will have offices in Washington and Chicago, the officials said.
The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the plans in advance of a public announcement on Friday.
Messina said in separate email to supporters that the group would support Obama "in creating jobs and growing the economy from the middle out, and in fighting for issues like immigration reform, climate change, balanced deficit reduction, and reducing gun violence."
Coming just days before Obama's second inauguration, the move represents the first time a sitting president has ever transformed his presidential campaign operation into an outside group with the express purpose of promoting his agenda.
Obama campaign aides and volunteers are expected to discuss the group at a conference on Sunday focused on the future of the campaign organization and the president's legacy.
The group's board of directors will include several former White House and campaign aides, including former White House press secretary Robert Gibbs, top campaign officials Stephanie Cutter, Jennifer O'Malley-Dillon and Julianna Smoot, Obama campaign adviser and Democratic strategist Erik Smith and Frank White, a businessman and prominent Obama donor.
White House aide David Plouffe, the 2008 campaign manager, is expected to join the board after he leaves the administration later this month.
Obama's political apparatus, which paired traditional grassroots techniques with cutting-edge technology, was groundbreaking when it was created for the 2008 campaign. It signed up legions of backers, collected information about them and linked them to each other through the Internet. It also used sophisticated new tools — and mounds of data it had culled — to identify sporadic or new voters, and ensure they turned out on Election Day.
Huge numbers of minority, young and first-time voters went to the polls to carry Obama to victory.
After he won, Obama decided to house the backbone of his campaign — his massive email list, which at the time included roughly 12 million to 13 million contacts, its technological functions and its network of neighborhood team leaders — at the DNC, which historically has served as the president's political arm.
The grass-roots mobilizing and fundraising operation was dubbed Organizing for America, and it sought to marshal support for Obama's health care overhaul during the first term. But it struggled to have much impact on the divisive debate and essentially became a campaign-in-waiting for Obama ahead of his re-election race.
When Obama launched his 2012 campaign, he had a full-scale political operation at the ready. It raised more than $1 billion and used high-tech tools to identify supporters and turn them out in droves. He also used it to mobilize grassroots supporters behind efforts to extend the payroll tax cut, federal student aid benefits and recent efforts to raise taxes on the wealthy.
Since Obama's re-election, one question in Democratic circles has been whether Obama would turn over his operation to the DNC to build the party for the future — or whether he would use it to protect his legacy.
After surveying its members, Obama's re-election campaign team considered housing the organization within the DNC but decided to become a nonprofit because it was the best way for campaign volunteers to stay together as a group and advocate for issues they care about.
Yet the decision to be separate from the DNC could rile some Democrats who have grumbled that the president was more interested in protecting his own "brand," in political speak, than in building the party.
The group will be a 501 (c) (4) under the federal tax code, which grants tax-exempt status as long as organizations are not primarily involved in activity that could influence an election. As a nonprofit, it could run ads advocating support for an issue but could not be involved in political activity aimed at electing Democratic candidates.
Campaign finance experts said the creation of a nonprofit group with close ties to the president could raise questions about how donations from corporations might influence federal policy. Craig Holman, who lobbies on ethics and campaign finance for the watchdog group Public Citizen, said if the group receives corporate and special interest money, it could "pose some very serious problems."
The decision by the group to accept corporate donations also reflects Obama's shifting stance on campaign finance. He criticized pay-for-access activities during his first campaign and was a vocal opponent of "super" political action committees, which can raise and spend unlimited funds to help candidates. Obama later signed off on Democrats creating super PACs when he faced tens of millions of dollars in spending by allies of his Republican campaign challengers.