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Slaveowning Ancestors and The American Way

Originally posted by Nadir at LastChocolateCity.com

As Black History Month came to a close, two news items prove that the legacy of slavery in America is far from over.

The first was former presidential candidate, the Rev. Al Sharpton’s, revelation that one of his ancestors was owned by a relative of late South Carolina Senator and segregationist Strom Thurmond.

Professional genealogists working for Ancestry.com found that Sharpton’s great-grandfather, Coleman Sharpton, was a slave owned by Julia Thurmond, whose grandfather was Strom Thurmond’s great-great-grandfather. Coleman Sharpton was later freed.

In the second report, a geneaologist claims that an ancestor of current presidential hopeful Barack Obama’s white mother owned slaves.

According to the research, one of Obama’s great-great-great-great grandfathers, George Washington Overall, owned two slaves who were recorded in the 1850 Census in Nelson County, Ky. The same records show that one of Obama’s great-great-great-great-great-grandmothers, Mary Duvall, also owned two slaves.

None of this should be a surprise to anyone. If your ancestors were in the United States before 1860, then it is highly likely that their lives were touched by the peculiar institution in one way or another. So why is this such a big deal? Continue reading

Payola Scamola

Big radio and the FCC are still giving independent music artists the shaft.

The announced payola settlement between the Federal Communications Commission and four of the nation’s largest media groups won’t help the cause of indies and it won’t undo any of the damage caused by payola in radio. Just like the dog and pony show agreements signed by major record labels in recent years, this deal is a pile of manure.

In the proposed settlement Clear Channel, CBS Radio, Entercom Communications and Citadel Broadcasting agree to pay $12.5 million to the FCC and to provide 8400 half-hour segments for the play of independent music on their stations. The music will be chosen by the American Association of Independent Music. No details about how formats will be split up have been mentioned.

First of all, $12.5 million doesn’t even begin to approach the amount of money radio stations have received in payola over the years. And the nature of the game is no longer just a few disc jockeys receiving bags of coke in record jackets or hookers in the broadcast booth. The new payola is corporate policy. Continue reading

Dropping Out

It’s February 2007, 17 months before the presidential election of 2008, and the race already has a casualty. The AP reports that Iowa’s former governor, Democrat Tom Vilsack is calling it quits.

“It is money and only money that is the reason we are leaving today,” Vilsack told reporters at a news conference, later adding, “We have a debt we’re going to have to work our way through.”

Vilsack, 56, left office in January and traveled to early voting states, but he attracted neither the attention nor the campaign cash of his top-tier rivals – Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, Sen. Barack Obama and John Edwards. He even faced obstacles in his home state.

In the most recent financial documents, Vilsack reported raising more than $1.1 million in the last seven weeks of 2006 but only had around $396,000 in the bank. Some campaign finance experts contend candidates will need $20 million by June 2007 to remain viable.

The money, in what analysts say will be the most expensive presidential campaign in history, is separating the coulda-beens from the also-rans even before some candidates have even declared their intention to run.

Greens? Libertarians? Are you fundraising yet???

But where did Vilsack’s million go? Check out: www.tomvilsack08.com

Obama Isn’t Black?? Part 3


Imani Perry raises some good points in a recent Afro-Netizen article:

I don’t believe the authenticity problem lies with African Americans. The authenticity problem lies with white Americans. The real question is: Why have White pundits, journalists and newscasters been so eager to comment on Obama’s being biracial and the son of an immigrant, rather than his history of civil rights activism or his long time involvement in African American social and political communities? Does it reveal a desire, among whites, that he not be authentically black (whatever that means), but somehow “different?”

The fixation on Obama as “different” appears to be an effort to exceptionalize him. He is seen as acceptable, in part, because he is considered to be unlike other African Americans, and in particular, African American men, who have been so widely commented upon as a “social problem” in the most prestigious news media in recent months. Joe Biden got in trouble for saying what many Americans are thinking, and that is a much bigger problem than a foot in the mouth.

While there is no particular tradition of African Americans being suspicious of immigrant political activists and leaders, there is a long tradition of African Americans being suspicious of Black leaders who seem to be eagerly touted by Whites as the “next best thing.” Why, we wonder, do people who seem to hold animosity for us as a group, make an exception for this individual?

Good question… Why is Obama being treated as if he is the second coming?

I’m still not drinking the Kool-Aid…

Click HERE to read all of Imani’s post

Martial Law: Coming to America

I was minding my own business, just driving to a meeting when I heard a brief headline on Democracy Now:

In news from Capitol Hill, Congress is coming under criticism for approving a little noticed provision last year that makes it easier for President Bush to declare martial law and to send US troops into American cities. At the administration’s request, Congress approved the changes to a law known as the Insurrection Act without ever holding a public hearing.

Under the new law, the president now has the authority to use both active-duty armed forces and the National Guard on American soil – not just during a rebellion – but also a natural disaster, terrorist attack, pandemic or other chaotic situation.

All 50 of the nation’s governors have opposed the rule changes. Earlier this month Senators Patrick Leahy, the chair of the Judiciary Committee, and Republican Christopher Bond introduced legislation to repeal the changes Congress approved last year.

WHAT??? Wait, how did I miss this?

Oh, yeah. This bill was signed into law on the same day as the infamous Military Commissions Act of 2006. I was so outraged that my Democratic Michigan Senator Debbie Stabenow had voted “Yes” on that measure that I didn’t notice this other law. While I was writing Stabenow a heated letter telling her that she had lost my vote forever, the Bush regime was getting away with murder… again!! Continue reading

Obama Isn’t Black?? Part 2

The cards are on the table.

Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential candidacy is going to be about race. I’m sure he doesn’t want it that way, but that is how it’s going to play out.

Already his ethnicity is being attacked from all sides. I’ve blogged previously about Black folks like Debra Dickerson of Salon.com who say Obama isn’t Black.

Now the darling of race-baiting conservatives, Rush Limbaugh, encourages the biracial Obama to renounce his Blackness and declare that he is white. Continue reading

Obama Isn’t Black?? Part 1

Originally posted by Nadir at LastChocolateCity.com

Let me start by saying that I am not sipping the Barack Obama Kool-Aid. I agree with Glen Ford of Black Agenda Report who calls the junior Senator from Illinois “…an imperialist at heart who offers George Bush at least another year or two to wage war in Iraq, while warning Iraqis that they can expect no more American ‘coddling’”.

But when people like Debra Dickerson say “Obama isn’t Black”, it just confuses the issue.

According to Dickerson’s Jan. 22 article on Salon.com:

“Black,” in our political and social reality, means those descended from West African slaves. Voluntary immigrants of African descent (even those descended from West Indian slaves) are just that, voluntary immigrants of African descent with markedly different outlooks on the role of race in their lives and in politics. At a minimum, it can’t be assumed that a Nigerian cabdriver and a third-generation Harlemite have more in common than the fact a cop won’t bother to make the distinction. They’re both “black” as a matter of skin color and DNA, but only the Harlemite, for better or worse, is politically and culturally Black, as we use the term.

Hogwash. Continue reading

Dr. Dahlia Wasfi

I met Dr. Dahlia Wasfi at Camp Democracy this summer. As a medical doctor of Jewish and Iraqi heritage, she has a unique perspective on the Iraq war.

She has visited her father’s family in Iraq several times. Dr. Wasfi left a promising medical career to devote her life to ending the US war against the Iraqi people.

Click HERE to see footage of her speaking at an Iraq War forum.

Click HERE to visit her website, www.liberatethis.com.

It’s Time for the Democrats to Make Their Move

With Republican leadership stumbling, bumbling and ducking for cover on issue after issue, it is difficult to conceive how the Democrats could blow the election on November 7.

Difficult, but unfortunately, not impossible.

In his “€œThe Buck Stops Here"€ speech at Batavia, Illinois, GOP House Speaker Dennis Hastert joined the chorus that has implied the Dems may have had a hand in the escalation of the Foley fiasco from Capitol Hill gossip to major congressional sex scandal. It is an election year, Mr. Speaker, and the political chess match is approaching the final gambit. We’re sure Karl Rove has a few tricks up his sleeve as well.

This Foley foolishness obviously won’t play well with the GOP’€™s homophobic, sex-inhibited, radically religious right-wing base. Republican candidates in close races were already trying to distance themselves from the failures of George Bush. Now they have to find a way to look independent, isolated and insulated from the sins of party leadership.

Still it is most striking that while the Dems stand to gain much from the exposure of Republican wrongdoing, they have failed to highlight the real differences between them and their opponents across the aisle. Their strategy seems to be to let the Republicans hang themselves, and so far the Republicans are cooperating. Continue reading

The Democrats are Punks Revisited

Charles Pierce’s post on The American Prospect and Greg Saunders blog “Don’t Vote Democrat” on Huffington Post are right on the money.

The Democratic Party allowed some so-called “maverick” Republicans to co-opt the torture issue, and we wind up with Bush getting exactly what he wants: the ability to torture and amnesty for his own human rights offenses.

As Pierce says:

… the Democratic Party was nowhere in this debate. It contributed nothing. On the question of whether or not the United States will reconfigure itself as a nation which tortures its purported enemies and then grants itself absolution through adjectives – “Aggressive interrogation techniques” – the Democratic Party had…no opinion. On the issue of allowing a demonstrably incompetent president as many of the de facto powers of a despot that you could wedge into a bill without having the Constitution spontaneously combust in the Archives, well, the Democratic Party was more pissed off at Hugo Chavez.

Saunders has the right idea about what our response should be:

Since the Democrats don’t seem to be interested in convincing the public to vote for them, then here’s a better idea : This November vote against every incumbent on the ballot. Whether they’re part of the Republican, Democrat, or Connecticut for Lieberman parties, throw out the whole damn lot of them. If the choice is between a party that openly supports the destruction of habeas corpus or a party that’s too timid to take a stand in favor of basic human decency, then I’d rather just roll the dice and try to start over with a clean slate. Continue reading

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© Nadir Omowale