Tag: Civil Rights

What To Look For In Denver

Obama has cast himself as the agent of change and has promised much, but ask yourself if he can truly deliver on what he has said.

These promises are:

1–withdrawal of troops from Iraq

2–to reduce the inequality between the classes

3–Universal healthcare–this will not be a priority in the Obama campaign.

4–a green environmental policy

5–End torture and abuse of civil liberties–but voted for FISA

6–commitment to woman’s rights

7–a more humane immigration policy

8–improving conditions is the urban communities

9–Reform drug laws

10-reform political system

Now you have the major points of the Obama camp.

The Democratic convention itself—a carefully scripted and corporate-funded media extravaganza—is to be the culmination of a systematic shift to the right by the Obama campaign.

In this election, once again, the vast majority of the American people who oppose the war in Iraq and the global escalation of American militarism are to be politically disenfranchised.

The political trajectory of the Obama campaign and the preparations for the reactionary media spectacle to be staged in Denver underscore the impossibility of carrying out any struggle against war, political reaction and the destruction of the living standards and basic rights outside of the independent political mobilization of the working class.

JUst remember you heard it first from the mouth of the Professor.

Jesse Helms Dead

Former Sen. Jesse Helms (R-N.C.), a conservative icon who represented the Tarheel State in the Senate for 30 years, died early this morning at the age of 86.

Helms served in the Senate from 1972 to 2002, where he became a leading voice of the right wing of the Republican Party. Nicknamed “Senator No” by his many critics, Helms was a fierce anti-communist whose support for Ronald Reagan in 1976 proved a critical juncture in Reagan’s eventual rise to the Oval Office. To many on the right, it was Helms, not Reagan, who was the true heart of the conservative movement.
But as much as he was lionized by the right, Helms was vilified by the left for his “Old South” racial politics, as well as his open scorn for the press, gays, liberals, and the United Nations. During his 1990 reelection battle with Democrat Harvey Gantt, the black former mayor of Charlotte, his campaign ran an infamous ad that shows a pair of white hands crumpling up a job rejection letter, as the narrator says, “You needed that job, and you were the best qualified, but they had to give it to a minority, because of a racial quota. Is that really fair? Harvey Gantt says it is.”

In the early 1960s, Helms became an on-air commentator for WRAL-TV in Raleigh and began to gain a statewide following. Helms vehemently opposed the civil-rights movement, and he made a frequent target of the University of North Carolina, which he saw as a bastion of liberalism in an otherwise conservative state. “The Negro cannot count forever on the kind of restraint that’s thus far left him free to clog the streets, disrupt traffic, and interfere with other men’s rights,” Helms said in a 1963 TV editorial.

Slowly, but slowly the “Old South” good old boys, the people that fought against civil rights and such, are slowly dying off.  In a way it is good, maybe then we can put the racial BS behind us and move on to a better country.

The Anti Civil Rights Movement

.Over the last few months one of the most important electoral struggles of 2008 played out in Missouri. The deceptively-named Missouri Civil Rights Initiative (MoCRI), which would have outlawed affirmative action programs here was blocked May 4 because petitions to get the measure on the ballot were not submitted.

Ward Connerly, an African American multi-millionaire lobbyist for the construction industry, who also financed successful anti-affirmative-action initiatives in California, Washington and Michigan, was the main backer of the measure here.

For Connerly’s anti-civil-rights movement, this year was supposed to be a watershed moment eventually leading to a majority of states banning affirmative action policies, and eventually a federal law.

Also, the prospect of an African American or woman Democratic presidential nominee meant that the extreme right wing in the GOP needed to mobilize voters using racism and sexism, with the belief that they would vote for the Republican candidate in November.

After Connerly made his intentions known, Missouri labor, community, civil rights and faith groups came together to form Working to Empower Community Action Now (WeCAN) and decided the best way to stop the initiative was to do direct action voter education.

By tirelessly searching out anti-civil-rights petitioners and then giving Missouri voters information about the true intent of the petition, we informed thousands of Missourians, most of whom said to the petitioners, “No, thank you.”

Why did we do this? Because the petitioners if seldom ever said that the initiative would ban affirmative action. Most said it would end workplace discrimination. It was necessary to speak with voters at the point of contact, so that they would be aware of the true meaning of the petition.

Missouri became the poster child for the national right-wing campaign. Outside money and resources began pouring into MoCRI’s coffers. They not only increased the amount they paid per signature (some petitioners were being paid as much as $10 per signature) started to pay for flights and lodging for signature gatherers to come to Missouri.

Missouri is known as the Show Me State, where you have to try hard to win trust and back up your promises with action. Right-wing forces believed that they would easily triumph here. But, in the end, it was the voters of Missouri who showed them.

FLDS UpDate

Texas policy holds that when children are taken from their parents for investigation of possible abuse, geographic distances should be kept to a minimum to allow supervised visitation. That has not, by a wide Texas mile, been the experience of Nora Jeffs, who was among the dozens of women attending court hearings here on Monday. Since her eight children were taken in the raid at a polygamist compound last month, Ms. Jeffs has been transformed into more or less an itinerant traveler, trying to visit her children, who are 18 months old to 14 years old, according to a state case worke

The children themselves, who are not allowed to travel while in state custody, are being encouraged to use conference telephone calls to stay in touch and to send drawings and letters.The hearings, technically meant as a 60-day check-up of the state’s plan in handling the children and families of the raid, have exposed the clanking machinery of the Texas child welfare apparatus, which has strained at the seams and spent millions of dollars to handle one of the biggest and most complex child welfare cases in the nation’s history.

State officials said the raid and the taking of all the children in the church’s compound, called Yearning for Zion, were necessary because the culture of the sect led to illegal under-age marriage for girls and acceptance of that practice by boys — a pattern that state officials have said endangers both sexes.

Once again, I state that I am NOT a follower of the FLDS, my problem is one of civil rights, if there was abuse then those abusing should be held accountable.  My problem is making children pay for the state’s dislike of a religious sect.  It happened to these people, it could happen to you.