I Have Issues (A Political Blog)
Coverage and opinion of political and social issues, as well as commentary on local, state and world news and coverage of the ongoing 2008 political campaign.
Sounding and looking vigorous, Mandela told a small group of reporters he was fortunate to have reached 90, crediting his "behavior" for his longevity.
"If you are poor, you are not likely to live long," he said.
His message was simple — the wealthy must do more.
"There are many people in South Africa who are rich and who can share those riches with those not so fortunate, who have not been able to conquer poverty," Mandela said during the 10-minute interview, his first such exchange with journalists in years.
Former South African President Nelson Mandela reacts during an interview with the media at his house in Qunu, rural southeastern South Africa, Friday, July 18, 2008. (AP Photo/Themba Hadebe, Pool)
“It is from numberless diverse acts of courage and belief that human history is shaped. Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope.”
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“Progress is a nice word. But change is its motivator. And change has its enemies.”
-- Sen. Robert Francis Kennedy
Photo: AP - In this June 5, 1968 file photo, presidential hopeful Sen. Robert F. Kennedy holds two fingers up in a victory sign as he talks to campaign workers at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, prior to his assassination.
For a great resource on RFK's visit through our region as part of his poverty tour, I highly suggest checking out the Robert F. Kennedy Performance Project at www.rfkineky.org.
Great video of the '68 campaign trail, including what many consider to be his finest hour - the Indianapolis speech following Martin Luther King's assassination:
"After a brief recuperation, he will begin targeted radiation at Massachusetts General Hospital and chemotherapy treatment," [Dr. Allan] Friedman said. "I hope that everyone will join us in praying for Senator Kennedy to have an uneventful and robust recovery."
Family spokeswoman Stephanie Cutter said Kennedy spoke to his wife, Vicki, and told her: "I feel like a million bucks. I think I'll do that again tomorrow."
In a May 21, 2008, file photo Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, D-Mass., waves toward members of the media while arriving by car at the Kennedy family's compound, in Hyannisport, Mass.
In her latest, Amy Goodman reports the legendary folksinger and activist has died:
Utah Phillips was a living bridge, keeping the rich history of labor struggles alive. He told me: “The long memory is the most radical idea in America. That long memory has been taken away from us. You haven’t gotten it in your schools. You’re not getting it on your television. You’re being leapfrogged from one crisis to the next. Mass media contributed to that by taking the great movements that we’ve been through and trivializing important events. No, our people’s history is like one long river. It flows down from way over there. And everything that those people did and everything they lived flows down to me, and I can reach down and take out what I need, if I have the courage to go out and ask questions.” On his radio show “Loafer’s Glory,” he once said, work on this planet has been to remember.”
A week before he died, Utah Phillips wrote in a public letter to his family and friends: “The future? I don’t know. Through all of it, up and down, it’s the song. It’s always been the song.”
If King had survived to hear the war drums beating for the invasion and occupation of Iraq - amplified by TV networks and the New York Times front page and Washington Post editorial page — there’s little doubt where he’d stand. Or how loudly he’d be speaking out.
And there’s little doubt how big U.S. media would have reacted. On Fox News and talk radio, King would have been Dixie Chicked. . .or Rev. Wrighted. In corporate centrist outlets, he’d have been marginalized faster than you can say Noam Chomsky.
Friday marks the 40th anniversary of the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr.
King has in the time since received much deserved honors, from everything including a federal holiday to being featured on a U.S. postage stamp.
However, important aspects of his legacy tend to get overlooked This side of King is especially relevant today.
Amy Goodman recalls King's "Beyond Vietnam" speech in her latest column:
He said: “A few years ago, there was a shining moment in that struggle. It seemed as if there was a real promise of hope for the poor, both black and white, through the poverty program. There were experiments, hopes, new beginnings. Then came the buildup in Vietnam, and I watched this program broken and eviscerated as if it were some idle political plaything of a society gone mad on war. And I knew that America would never invest the necessary funds or energies in rehabilitation of its poor so long as adventures like Vietnam continued to draw men and skills and money like some demonic, destructive suction tube. So I was increasingly compelled to see the war as an enemy of the poor and to attack it as such.”
He went on, “I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today: my own government.”
In recent years, King's message has been softened and depoliticized by the media. The same media who praise him now attacked him viciously in 1968.
As Goodman points out:
Time magazine called the speech “demagogic slander that sounded like a script for Radio Hanoi.” The Washington Post declared that King had “diminished his usefulness to his cause, his country, his people.”
One can't help but think of the race-bating that goes on today in the coverage of civil rights issues at FOX News. I can't count how many times I've heard a current black leader attacked in similar terms by the network (and other cable channels). It's usually followed by some comment that if Dr. King were alive, he'd disown today's civil rights leaders.
If King were alive, these same commentators would be attacking him just as hard and in the same manner.
In today's AP story the Rev. Jesse Jackson put it this way:
“He is a beloved man today, but a hated man when he was killed,” Jackson said.
However, the softening of King's message is not limited to the media. Even organizers of King Day events tend to shy away from the relevance of his activism to today's issues, perhaps out of fear of controversy.
I'm reminded of 2003, just prior to the outbreak of war with Iraq. I was part of M.A.P.S., a student antiwar group at Marshall University. The organization decided to take part in the King Day observances in Huntington that year. However, some organizers of the event tried to forbid antiwar messages of any kind from being a part of it, out of fear that it would become too politicized.
Apparently, some of us overlooked the part of King's life where he went to great lengths to avoid hot issues.
The contemporary version of King seems to end with the "I Have a Dream" speech and omits the years leading up to his death, one of the most active periods of his life.
In addition to his opposition to the war, another overlooked part of King's life is his work to address the issue of wealth disparity and poverty in America.
At the time of his death, King was preparing to take part in the "Poor People's March on Washington."
My father spent his life in the trenches of a war that poses a true threat to our peace and security as a nation. He fought the war on poverty with the sanitation workers in Memphis, and he was moved to continue that fight as he witnessed barely clothed children in Marks, Miss., and a mother in Newark, N.J., raising her children in a rat-infested apartment.
Four decades have come and gone, but as I have traveled the country continuing the fight on poverty, I have seen firsthand that the poverty remains the same.
I urge our nation, our citizens, our businesses, our government and our presidential hopefuls to remember my father’s caution in his final sermon: There is no such thing as a conscientious objector in the war on poverty.
If you're here via a link from another political blog, be sure to go to the H-D front page and read Dave Lavender's story on the PBS film honoring Ken Hechler.
As the 4,000th American soldier dies in Iraq, Sen. Robert C. Byrd reflects on the war:
As we mark this painful milestone, we must ask ourselves: what is the moral justification for allowing this war to continue? Can we honestly say that the disastrous mission in Iraq warrants the sacrifice of more of our troops and the heartache and loss that so many loved ones continue to suffer?
In March of 2003, just prior to the invasion of Iraq, I made a final plea to the administration and my colleagues in Congress to avert a war that I believed would reap sorrowful consequences for our nation. In a speech entitled "We Stand Passively Mute", I expressed my outrage at the fact that the United States Senate -- the world's greatest deliberative body -- stood "for the most part-silent-ominously, dreadfully silent" on this monumental question.
Sadly, my worst fears have been realized. The decision to invade Iraq may go down as one of the gravest foreign policy blunders in our nation's history.
This month marks the 75th anniversary of The New Deal. Kind of timely, as we're looking for a way out of another depression.
And just like 1929, we're looking at another economic downturn caused by a generation's worth of conservative economic policies of deregulation and Wall Street running free of public safeguards like labor, environmental and consumer standards.
You surely won't hear about this milestone from our media conglomerates. The legions of rightwing commentators dominating cable news have spent the last 28 years glorifying the corporatist scheme of conservative economics that began with Ronald Reagan.
Recalling FDR's policies might not be something they'd want to have burst their Gipper-idolizing bubble.
What's even more disturbing is the lack of mention given to the anniversary by Democratic Party leaders. You'd think the most popular president in the party's history (and one who frequently makes the top 3 in historians' greatest presidents lists) might be someone they want to look up to and learn from.
But after a generation of leadership by the conservative Democratic Leadership Council and its "me, too" approach to pandering to big business, the party has been running away from Roosevelt's sensible policies. Abandoning FDR-style liberalism led to the loss of both houses of Congress for the first time in 40 years. Still there are apologists for the conservative approach like James Carville and the Clinton team of advisers who try to scare the rank-and-file into shying away from the values of the Left.
Thankfully, with the rejection of Hillary Clinton's candidacy, it looks like things might be swinging back to a grassroots approach to Democratic politics.
The Nation has an excellent piece on Roosevelt's legacy and why The New Deal still matters:
Poll after poll, after all, shows that Americans are ready for more government of the kind the New Deal represents--more caring, more equitable, more willing to counterbalance the private power of corporations and concentrated wealth--and they are, frankly, tired of GOP pieties (and invective) about high taxes, big government and endless deficits. (Quick quiz for your conservative relative: who was the last Republican President to actually balance the budget? Answer: Eisenhower.) By twenty-point margins or more, voters are telling pollsters they trust Democrats over Republicans to tackle the big issues of our time.
This tectonic shift in public opinion today isn't the only good reason for celebrating what Roosevelt did. Most historians, after all, rank him as the greatest of our modern Presidents. And for Democrats, constantly fretting about "electability," he is the only President to have been elected four times. So he must have done something right--something we can learn from and use in this new century.
Historian Howard Zinn says The New Deal was a result of nationwide organizing at the grassroots level and calls for another such effort.
How refreshing it would be if a presidential candidate reminded us of the experience of the New Deal and defied the corporate elite as Roosevelt did, on the eve of his 1936 re-election. Referring to the determination of the wealthy classes to defeat him, he told a huge crowd at Madison Square Garden: “They are unanimous in their hatred for me–and I welcome their hatred.” I believe that a candidate who showed such boldness would win a smashing victory at the polls.
The innovations of the New Deal were fueled by the militant demands for change that swept the country as FDR began his presidency: the tenants’ groups; the Unemployed Councils; the millions on strike on the West Coast, in the Midwest and the South; the disruptive actions of desperate people seeking food, housing, jobs–the turmoil threatening the foundations of American capitalism. We will need a similar mobilization of citizens today, to unmoor from corporate control whoever becomes President. To match the New Deal, to go beyond it, is an idea whose time has come.
Heath Harrison is a writer whose work has appeared in Bejeezus magazine, Freepress.net, The Herald-Dispatch and West Virginia Blue, among others. He is a former student activist, campaign worker and graduate of the master’s program at Marshall University. In addition to writing, he is a published cartoonist and photographer and Herald-Dispatch page designer.
