Since we’re talking about Obama. I couldn’t figure out why my spidey sense won’t let me accept this. I ask my self Xenophon, old boy, is this just hateration??
To which my self responds in true Chicago fashion, that motherfucker couldn’t beat Bobby Rush. And the number one law in Chicago is we can always take this shit to the streets. Capone, Daley, Washington, Hampton, Hoover, Fort, Jones, Rostenkowski, Emmanuelle all great Chicago politicians have a touch of the streets. Not Obama. Why couldn’t a Columbia, Harvard educated (He never mentions Charles Hamilton Houston, hmmm) law professor beat a mumble mouthed COINTELPRO refugee?
Because Black folk knew he was shady as hell and stood for his own advancement. And what was worse he would do it pimping the legacy of a civil rights movement he had no skin in. As Glenn Ford put it:
Barack Obama is a windblown politician. The junior Illinois senator avoids anchoring himself to any principle, lest his political sails fail to catch the slightest breeze blowing from the left or the right. His political direction is always tentative, although his ultimate destination is never in doubt: he will be a formidable national presence—maybe even president.
Barack Obama represents: neoliberalism with a human face. It’s an attempt to revive an unpopular free-market, pro-business agenda behind the leadership of someone whose personal history suggests an affinity with the exploited and oppressed.
Link
So after the hysteria has died remember I told you so. Till then, Barack – Keep on Pimpin’. I get it.
This is America!
So far, I’m not seeing any of us giving ammunination to the Forces Of Darkness in our postings. (One can hardly imagine a Republican attack ad that reads: “Obama uses Republican talking points!”) So let’s watch out for that, and not repeat the rookie mistake of, for example, attacking Edwards hair, and so on.
[x] Any (D) in the general. [ ] Any mullah-sucking billionaire-teabagging torture-loving pus-encrusted spawn of Cthulhu, bless his (R) heart.
Bobby Lee Rush (born November 23, 1946) has been a Democratic member of the United States House of Representatives since 1993, representing the 1st District of Illinois, located principally on the south side of Chicago. His district has a higher percentage of African American residents (65%) than any other congressional district in the nation.
Rush was born in Albany, Georgia, was educated at Roosevelt University, the University of Illinois and McCormick Theological Seminary (all in Chicago), served in the United States Army from 1963 to 1968, was a co-founder of the Illinois chapter of the Black Panther Party, and was an insurance agent and member of the Chicago City Council before entering the House. He is a member of the Congressional Black Caucus.
Obama’s friends had told him it was a bad idea to challenge Bobby Rush in 1999.
[Obama] lived in its most rarefied neighborhood, Hyde Park. He was taking on a local legend, a former alderman and four-term incumbent who had given voters no obvious reason to displace him.
Mr. Rush’s name recognition started off at 90 percent, Mr. Obama’s at 11. Then Mr. Rush’s son was murdered, leading Mr. Obama to put his campaign on hold. Later, while vacationing in Hawaii with his family, he missed a high-profile vote in the Legislature and was pilloried.
(Missed a “high profile” vote while on vacation. How the hell do you do that? Nobody thought to call him to come back for it?)
Charles Hamilton Houston (September 3, 1895–April 22, 1950) was an African American lawyer, Dean of Howard University Law School and NAACP Litigation Director who helped play a role in dismantling the Jim Crow laws and helped train future Supreme Court justice Thurgood Marshall. He was educated at Amherst College, where he was valedictorian, and at Harvard Law School, where he graduated cum laude and was a member of the Harvard Law Review. Known as “The Man Who Killed Jim Crow.”[1], he played a role in nearly every civil rights case before the Supreme Court between 1930 and Brown v. Board of Education (1954). Houston’s brilliant plan to attack and defeat Jim Crow segregation by using the inequality of the “separate but equal” doctrine (from the Supreme Court’s Plessy v. Ferguson decision) as it pertained to public education in the United States was the masterstroke that brought about the landmark Brown decision.
is the fact that he was targeted for assassination by Chicago police in the same action that killed Panthers Mark Clark and Fred Hampton. Tough way to gain street cred.
As for Houston, he was, i believe the first black admitted to the Harvard Law Review. A feat Obama bettered by becoming the first Black editor. Houston engineered the assault on Jim Crow and was one of the finest constitutional minds ever. He mapped the strategy and trained the staff that won the war against Jim Crow. He made the statement that Lawyers were either social engineers of prasites. Houston pretty much gave us the legal foundation of our modern racial society. No colored only, no overt discrimination, demonstrating that racism was detrimental the psychic, physical and moral well being of black folk and the nation.
“If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State.” — Joseph Goebbels
for putting up the biographies in the first place, I just thought the addendum would be of historical interest. As you know there’s a lot of history to Bobby Rush, but the key element in my view is that he’s genuine. From crazy self-appointed soldier in a shooting war against the police to born-again Baptist minister advocate of gun-control, there have been some zigs and zags but he has always been straightforward - what you see is what there is.
I don’t agree with his god’s-will stuff now any more than I did with his positions on violence 40 years ago, but he was man enough to recognize he was on a wrong path back then, reject it, apologize and try to do right ever since; can’t ask more than that, everyone has to find their own path to righteousness, and so he has my admiration in spite of the differences. Bobby Rush is a good man. The connection with Obama is that Rush kicked his ass in an election, took him to street school and taught him some lessons. To Obama’s credit, he paid attention and learned them.
The thing that’s important about Charles Houston is that he was by far the single most important architect of the civil rights movement from a legal standpoint. He conceived the strategy of using “equal protection” as the wedge and wrote every key argument all the way through and past Brown. His construction was that racial discrimination (any discrimination, pay attention gay people) wasn’t just damaging to blacks but that it was inimical to the principles of freedom and liberty under the Constitution – it was anti-American and thus a detriment to the whole nation.
The connection with Obama is that there isn’t one, that Obama claims the mantle of the civil rights struggle without ever mentioning the people who actually fought the fight from which he has so profoundly benefited. Some say that’s just a form of shorthand, some say Obama is coasting on the work of others. Either way, when thinking of our civil rights the name of Charles Hamilton Houston should come as easily to mind as Martin Luther King.
Long journey from calling for open warfare in the streets to being a Baptist minister calling for gun-control, no? And in both those aspects of his life, Rush has been entirely earnest. That was my point, not an overall assessment of the Panthers, which I know - and you know that I know - is one of if not the most complex and puzzling chapters of the entire civil rights movement.
The idea that handful of people, however right they thought they were, would reap anything but sorrow and horror from engaging in armed warfare on the police was, well, crazy. The Panthers did good things, hell, they did great things, but calling for open war was not one of them. It was a bad idea, it was not helpful to the cause, good people got killed because they fell in love with their own rhetoric and even sadder the rhetoric of others. Crazy shit.
Can’t talk intelligently about the Panthers, who they were and what they meant, without discussing both the good and the bad. Seeing as how their names aren’t widely recognized here, maybe a longer tutorial would be a useful thing. Huey and Melvin Newton and Bobby Seal and what they envisioned, how they came to conflict with Cleaver and Stokely, and how things might have gone differently if the focus on community activism through positive community service had been the first step instead of armed revolution. I’d love to hear your thoughts, the Chicago people I never knew except through reputation.
Short of a bullet or a riot, how does one stop the police from lynching a community? I don’t mean to be a downer but, that is why there was armed resistance against the police. LAPD, NYPD, CPD were notorious for their abiltiy to “handle” niggers. Every major gang that exits to day is the direct result of law enforcemnt terrorizing black communities. Every peacful avenue of reistence met with assasination and counter intelligence operations from the FBI, CIA, and local police. These weren’t guys that just fell in love with their own rhetoric. These were people that had organized within the bounds of the law and found themselves hunted by their own government. This was a systematic destruction of legal, peaceful, political dissent by the government of the United States. In other countries people go to the Hague for shit like that. (Milosovitch, Sadam, Pol Pot, Pinochet) That is what the police were like, are like, J.Edgar Hoover, Allen Dulles, Papa Daley, Richard Riordan the list goes on.
Reputation is what others know about you. Honor is what you know about yourself.
Guard your honor. And outlive the bastards.
We can admit that we’re killers … but we’re not going to kill today. That’s all it takes! Knowing that we’re not going to kill today! ~ Captain James T. Kirk, Stardate 3193.0
and another round of absinthe wouldn’t hurt either.
This conversation may not go well; please be gentle, or at least non-violent. I was around and about in Oakland back in the day when Huey and Bobby got their bright idea and wrangled brother Marvin into organizing their thinking for them. It was bad then, in the old primitive bad way, but I’m here to tell you that pulling out the guns didn’t make it any better and violence was the first tactic the Panthers tried, the community service stuff came after.
My poor white trash perspective opinion, made everything worse. Good people died. Other good people got their asses shot up. Police got frightened, even the good ones and there always were more good than bad, but a frightened man with a gun and a badge is a dangerous combination good or not. The evil cops were handed “legitimate” reason to be even more brutal, empowered by the frightened suburban whites who were being played by the emerging Plutocratic operatives. Without the violence (my opinion) history plays out much differently.
Gandhi liberated an entire subcontinent without instigating violence. MLK, and others, turned violence back on itself – at a horrible personal price for many, but the cause itself won. Net it out and, my opinion, the instigation of violence from the left and the poor and the oppressed of the 60s and 70s ended up costing more than it gained. Almost always does. The nightmare of the ghetto, poverty in all its forms, really, is big and nasty and brutal and horrific. Shooting at the cops, and at each other, is not a solution; rather it adds to the problem and punishes most those who are trapped within and cannot escape. In Oakland today there are near as many innocents getting killed by random drive-bys as actual gangsters, and the whole population lives in terror of their own neighbors. Violence is not the answer.
But “Gandhi liberated an entire subcontinent without instigating violence. MLK, and others, turned violence back on itself”
Gandi always kept a violent option waiting in the wings, suciceide bombers, etc. and King got assasinated by the United States. To read the Panthers outside the response to continued violence in the face of nonviolent protest is disingenuous. They didn’t just one day decide to go violent, they emerged as violent because peaceful means had been ineffective.
With that said. I think the work they did, all of them, has paved the way for a peaceful solution. We could easily clean up the hood and stop the violence if you could stop the cargo planes and tractor trailors of heroin and cocaine, and stop the CIA or whoever is managing the drops to stop running guns and drugs in the black community, stop the police that patrol black neighborhoods from treating the residents as enemy combatants, and let a brother get a fair trial every once and a while.
I say this without hyperbole or exaggeration. Every effort of black america at self determination has been thwarted by the malicous systematic intervention of the American government. We are out numbered and out gunned and a prisoner in our own house. All we can do now is wait for the rest of america to wake up.
I keep trying to tell people. The shit you see happening is what happened first in the black community. We weren;t always bastards, dope dealers and gang bangers. The conventional wisdo mis that niggers are just savage animals - this could never happen to us. Look around. It’s happening. White america is going insane and it’s the corporations that are pushing it. Black folk don’t make any of this shit. We don’t put out gangster rap, we don’t import drugs, we don;t run education, the economy, the gun manufactures. Tell me how an israeli made uzi ends up in the ghetto and has a street price of less than $100.00? You know I was 20 years old before I knew an AK was Russian. You could buy them by the dozen where I grew up. Couldn’t get an american made gun for shit.
All I’m saying is how does this stuff go in if the rest of america isn’t complicit? It used to be you either didn’t know or didn’t care. America knew. Now it’s everywhere.
Now we have neither bullets or Ballots
Chicago police will split up an elite unit of officers that has been at the heart of a corruption case involving allegations of kidnappings, home invasions and robberies, the department announced Tuesday.
The Special Operations Section will be dismantled, perhaps as soon as Tuesday afternoon. The SOS was the unit tasked with policing drug and gun crimes throughout the city, but seven of its officers were arrested last year on corruption charges. link
The documentary also chronicles the role of the Los Angeles Police Department and the FBI in the evolution of gang culture. During his tenure from 1950 to 1966, Chief Robert Parker bolstered the ranks of the LAPD with white recruits from the south, who brought their racist attitudes with them. Parker’s racist sympathies laid the groundwork for the volatile relationship between the black community and the LAPD that persists today. link
Submitted by chicago dyke on Wed, 2008-01-09 22:38.
“malcom x,” and although i’m not sure if it’s totally factual, i hope you’ll grok my point. in it, denzel channels malcom and asks, ’what is the right response to 000s of years of our women being raped by white men?’ when there was nothing to be done for that but ’grin and bear it?’
i bring this up not because i think that line of argument is “justified.” indeed, i’m with you on the whole ’violence solves as much as tears’ thinking. still, i’m human, and i know other people are human.
white folks, whomever: think about what it would feel like for you to know that your mother/sister/daughter couldn’t walk down the street without a sincere and well grounded fear of being raped…by those with governmental authority and protection. indeed- as part of a gov’t approved plan to humilate, oppress, and otherwise keep down a certain population.
i bring this up b/c i think it’s almost cliched- that whole “i’m a brother and i’m sick of being arrested while walking down the street.” that’s a valid concern, and X speaks for it here better than i ever will. instead, i’ll speak from my own experience as a not-wholly-“white” person who lived on the south side. what was my greatest moment in fear? not being kidnapped (i was), not being held up by a crack addict (i was), not being beaten by an abusive husband (i was). honestly, the fear that outpaced them all: being raped by police. it happened to more than one nonwhite sister and neighbors of mine, and almost to me. when i was doing nothing more than walking home two blocks from friend’s house late at night.
seriously- i’ve walked a lot of streets (go on, i am giving you that opening to mock me, feh), and plenty late at night, and often in skimpy clothes, not sober. the only time i’ve ever felt that afraid, including nights out in DC, NYC, Chicago, inner city Detroit, is that night in Hyde Park. two of the CPD’s finest…wouldn’t leave me alone. they followed me for several blocks, they kept asking me questions, doing the whole ’good cop, bad cop’ thing, but most of all, they were dripping with authority. directly experiencing the patriarchy’s rape-privilege + gun-toting state-granted authority = no more scary moment in my life. really.
i’m from a “cop” family, i know how they are, um, when the uniform is off. don’t dismiss “violent” reaction on the part of brown, poor or black men, when it comes to the “police” forces in their communities. i won’t say it’s “all the time,” but i do grok the anger and humiliation men feel, hearing stories like mine.
which would be: every day, in the ’hood. are you any less inclinded to be violent, when the women you love are directly, specifically, and personally threatened?
Quoth Bringiton:
Net it out and, my opinion, the instigation of violence from the left and the poor and the oppressed of the 60s and 70s ended up costing more than it gained. Almost always does.
to which I say,
on this continent, anyhow.
Worked out that way for the tribes.
From the Iroquois League to the Apache, from the Hmong to the Lao, when the moneyed come and you fight them, you damned well better fight long enough, hard enough and smart enough to win — call it intifada, call it insurgency, call it guerilla warfare, call it never-say-die, or whatever else you want to — when the moneyed come to the fight, you either need to be them or be ready to serve them unto the seventh son of the seventh son, for you will not win. The Mujahedeen? Bah. Puppets of the richer of the two governments in that 1980s “brush war” between US and USSR.
The so-called “American Revolution” of the 1770s was a guerrilla war, and if the Brits had done their logistics worth a flying frack, we’d all be speaking the Queen’s English today.
Works out that way for the homeless, the veterans, the dispossessed, the displaced, the very young, the very old, the sick, the injured, and the rest of us non-elites every time.
What it will take for it not to work out that way, in 40 years or so in Iraq, I don’t know. I’d like to think we’d put somebody in the White House and in charge in Congress who’d stop before we spill all that blood in the name of fraud and waste, but … sometimes, it’s too much to hope for.
We can admit that we’re killers … but we’re not going to kill today. That’s all it takes! Knowing that we’re not going to kill today! ~ Captain James T. Kirk, Stardate 3193.0
That was the line in Hillary’s Moment that nobody seems to have comented on. It follows “I see what’s happening” and “we have to reverse it.”
I’m guessing that Our Betters are scared shitless. They’ve built Richistan to protect themselves, but in the end that’s a sort of gated community, and gates can be crashed.
The difficulty with a procedure like, say, everybody becomes a franc-tireur is (a) history hasn’t been kind to either the winners or the losers and (b) people with a lot of money and guns and helicopters and tasers and camps are likely to be a lot “better” at that game than a bunch of dirty fucking hippies. Things would have to get a lot worse, third world worse, for people to throw their hostages to fortune — kids, old parents, houses — away for that.
Also, such a movement would be closed by definition; nobody serious would talk about it in a blog. But I think only an “open source” model could prevail against the corps.
I keep coming back to Ghandi and MLK. I do notice that Barack Obama is invoking those names (along with the OFB invoking the boddisatva) but it’s extremely difficult for me to take that as anything other than, well, oratorical namedropping. Yet again our discourse is pre-empted and polluted. Sigh.
[x] Any (D) in the general. [ ] Any mullah-sucking billionaire-teabagging torture-loving pus-encrusted spawn of Cthulhu, bless his (R) heart.
he squirms around to reload, and take another toke. The thing about starting a war is that you have to win it. Attacking and losing is always worse than negotiation, cf Carthage. I don’t make the rules, I just observe them.
No argument here about the magnitude of injustice in our nation. Fucked up, and it sucks. The answer, call me Old Skool I don’t care, is economics and not firepower. Believe MJS has been quietly, gently, repeatedly pointing this out in his Gnome posts to no response except from a t-shirt vendor and an aging druggie with memory problems.
Follow the money. It isn’t in your pockets, nor in mine; it’s not in our neighborhoods, or our schools, or our health care; it’s all going into a very few bank accounts and most of them are offshore. This is what Edwards is talking about, what Obama is trying really hard not to talk about, and what Hillary just realized she’d better start talking about. Who the hell knows if any of them mean it? But it just may be that the top of the pile is thinking that the current trends are, ah, unsustainable and a big chunk of the rest of the country seems to be waking up to that as well.
America is like the butt of every cuckold joke ever told, always the last to figure things out. But once we do, we are capable of great things. In terms of mobilizable capacity, it was only the people of America that won WWII. Well, that and a million dead Russians but in the end it was winter and inadequate supply lines that stopped Hitler’s eastern advance, same as Napoleon. Had the Nazis never opened a second front we still would have beaten them, it just would have taken longer. We defeated two maniacal empires, both at the same time. Very, very impressive.
Now we’re in another battle for survival, not so very different from where we were in say 1936. Like then, most of the country still hasn’t come to grips with the seriousness of the situation. Unlike then, most of the world is out in front rather than already conquered or ineffective, only waiting for the US to get its act together and start dealing. When we do, we will be unstoppable.
I believe that the answers to global warming, poverty, un(inadequate)employment, health care inequity, and foreign adventurism are all part of the same tangled web, as do all of you. But also when I look at it I see that the solution to one is the solution to all. We can generate an enormous wave of wealth, real wealth, from solving the global warming/fossil fuel/oil war problem, enough to redistribute it and reconstitute the middle class to include the vast majority of our nation. I believe that with real jobs and lowered cost of living will come less crime, less street violence, less drug and alcohol abuse, less need for prisons, more money for education and a better life for all. And I believe that people like Edwards and yes Hillary recognize that if we don’t get started down that road real quick, they won’t be leaders any more; they’ll be targets. If Barak doesn’t understand what that’s like, maybe Bobby Rush needs to explain it to him.
Time comes to take to the barricades, I’ll be there; but that time is not yet. I walked away from that option 40 years ago, and everyone I know who took the path of violence is either dead or very sorry. I can’t claim that I’m a whole lot happier than they are, but I am alive and no one innocent is dead at my hand so that’s something. I believe shooting up the place isn’t going to be helpful, at this particular time; organizing would, however, be a really good idea as would mass protests; nothing like filling the streets to get the attention of those with the most to lose. And better songs, we need better songs.
Dark days, friends, I know and I agree, but as a country we’ve seen darker and come through better than we were before. I have not yet lost faith that we will again.
BIO - real talk. Uh 40 years? You keep sharing the wisdom. I’ll get you an afghan(joking).
Problem is this time we are the Nazis and the world is coming against us. And only one segment of the population has seen days I fear that are going to be as dark as this - Blacks in slavery after 1822, the lighterr momemnt would be reconstruction after 1876 as Jim Crow descended and all civil rights were lost.
So yeah I’ll be doing my Sarah Connor thing in the bunkers.
We can’t stop global warming it’s a natural phenomena. And we really need to be dealing with the loss of arable farm land, dry land and clean water. Look at Syria. Somalia, and Kenya.
Those colors compliment my eyes and what’s left of my hair. Whippersnapper.
Don’t claim any wisdom but there is a little of been there done that, don’t mean to preach, this is a tough medium for me to use so apologies if any of it sounds too, ah, authoritative. I appreciate the frank exchange.
That link above advertises a digital frame scam shop. There was a time when spam scammers at least *sucked up* to the prevailing conversation and posters.
That post’s not even coherent English — which means that the spam sweatshops overseas now know how to mimic the dominant political conversation… which is to denigrate and mock Clinton supporters without a second thought.
Thanks, bud. You’ve done more than anyone I’ve read today to hone my anger at Obama dirty tactics men into a bright blue sharp flame….
[x] Any (D) in the general. [ ] ?????. [ ] Any mullah-sucking billionaire-teabagging torture-loving pus-encrusted spawn of Cthulhu, bless his (R) heart.
This week, we’re back in The Mighty Corrente Building with FrenchDoc, TODAY, Thursday, August 21, at 8PM EDT, for another in our continuing series of discussions on PB 2.0. It’s time to talk about principles!
Feed the hamsters…
… that work the wheels that keep the Mighty Corrente servers turning. Help us cover monthly hamster kibble anxiety:
Front page
Talking points
So far, I’m not seeing any of us giving ammunination to the Forces Of Darkness in our postings. (One can hardly imagine a Republican attack ad that reads: “Obama uses Republican talking points!”) So let’s watch out for that, and not repeat the rookie mistake of, for example, attacking Edwards hair, and so on.
[x] Any (D) in the general. [ ] Any mullah-sucking billionaire-teabagging torture-loving pus-encrusted spawn of Cthulhu, bless his (R) heart.
Watch out for?
Be clear I’m a little foggy.
Forgot to say check your mail, Xenophon
Sorry, I was unclear.
Words are edged weapons, but you can design the weapon so not just anyone can pick it up. Check your mail…
[x] Any (D) in the general. [ ] Any mullah-sucking billionaire-teabagging torture-loving pus-encrusted spawn of Cthulhu, bless his (R) heart.
I need a scorecard, please
Let’s get the oppo dealt with, ’cause it’s sure as shit coming.
Who’s Bobby Rush? Charles Hamilton Houston?
[x] Any (D) in the general. [ ] Any mullah-sucking billionaire-teabagging torture-loving pus-encrusted spawn of Cthulhu, bless his (R) heart.
Who's who
Bobby Rush
Obama’s friends had told him it was a bad idea to challenge Bobby Rush in 1999.
(Missed a “high profile” vote while on vacation. How the hell do you do that? Nobody thought to call him to come back for it?)
Charles Hamilton Houston
Still not sure of the Charles Hamilton Houston connection?
Does he mention Lawrence tribe? I’m not versed in any of this, Xenophon, so I’m missing the connctions you’re making, even with a few dots.
[x] Any (D) in the general. [ ] Any mullah-sucking billionaire-teabagging torture-loving pus-encrusted spawn of Cthulhu, bless his (R) heart.
Missing from Bobby Rush's CV above
is the fact that he was targeted for assassination by Chicago police in the same action that killed Panthers Mark Clark and Fred Hampton. Tough way to gain street cred.
Corinne!
Thank you much.
As for Houston, he was, i believe the first black admitted to the Harvard Law Review. A feat Obama bettered by becoming the first Black editor. Houston engineered the assault on Jim Crow and was one of the finest constitutional minds ever. He mapped the strategy and trained the staff that won the war against Jim Crow. He made the statement that Lawyers were either social engineers of prasites. Houston pretty much gave us the legal foundation of our modern racial society. No colored only, no overt discrimination, demonstrating that racism was detrimental the psychic, physical and moral well being of black folk and the nation.
You're welcome
And bringiton, I didn’t want to take up huge amounts of space with Rush’s CV but thanks for bringing it up.
Never Forget
“If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State.” — Joseph Goebbels
Corinne, Thank You
for putting up the biographies in the first place, I just thought the addendum would be of historical interest. As you know there’s a lot of history to Bobby Rush, but the key element in my view is that he’s genuine. From crazy self-appointed soldier in a shooting war against the police to born-again Baptist minister advocate of gun-control, there have been some zigs and zags but he has always been straightforward - what you see is what there is.
I don’t agree with his god’s-will stuff now any more than I did with his positions on violence 40 years ago, but he was man enough to recognize he was on a wrong path back then, reject it, apologize and try to do right ever since; can’t ask more than that, everyone has to find their own path to righteousness, and so he has my admiration in spite of the differences. Bobby Rush is a good man. The connection with Obama is that Rush kicked his ass in an election, took him to street school and taught him some lessons. To Obama’s credit, he paid attention and learned them.
The thing that’s important about Charles Houston is that he was by far the single most important architect of the civil rights movement from a legal standpoint. He conceived the strategy of using “equal protection” as the wedge and wrote every key argument all the way through and past Brown. His construction was that racial discrimination (any discrimination, pay attention gay people) wasn’t just damaging to blacks but that it was inimical to the principles of freedom and liberty under the Constitution – it was anti-American and thus a detriment to the whole nation.
The connection with Obama is that there isn’t one, that Obama claims the mantle of the civil rights struggle without ever mentioning the people who actually fought the fight from which he has so profoundly benefited. Some say that’s just a form of shorthand, some say Obama is coasting on the work of others. Either way, when thinking of our civil rights the name of Charles Hamilton Houston should come as easily to mind as Martin Luther King.
crazy self-appointed soldier?
WE’ve reduced the Panthers to that?
Please, Xeno; it was compare/contrast
Long journey from calling for open warfare in the streets to being a Baptist minister calling for gun-control, no? And in both those aspects of his life, Rush has been entirely earnest. That was my point, not an overall assessment of the Panthers, which I know - and you know that I know - is one of if not the most complex and puzzling chapters of the entire civil rights movement.
The idea that handful of people, however right they thought they were, would reap anything but sorrow and horror from engaging in armed warfare on the police was, well, crazy. The Panthers did good things, hell, they did great things, but calling for open war was not one of them. It was a bad idea, it was not helpful to the cause, good people got killed because they fell in love with their own rhetoric and even sadder the rhetoric of others. Crazy shit.
Can’t talk intelligently about the Panthers, who they were and what they meant, without discussing both the good and the bad. Seeing as how their names aren’t widely recognized here, maybe a longer tutorial would be a useful thing. Huey and Melvin Newton and Bobby Seal and what they envisioned, how they came to conflict with Cleaver and Stokely, and how things might have gone differently if the focus on community activism through positive community service had been the first step instead of armed revolution. I’d love to hear your thoughts, the Chicago people I never knew except through reputation.
Oh, and Xenophon
You have anything else to say about what I’ve written above, beyond harshing on me for taking an argumentative shortcut?
Don’t haze me, bro!
Dude
I’m just breaking your balls - puf puf pass.
But BIO?
Short of a bullet or a riot, how does one stop the police from lynching a community? I don’t mean to be a downer but, that is why there was armed resistance against the police. LAPD, NYPD, CPD were notorious for their abiltiy to “handle” niggers. Every major gang that exits to day is the direct result of law enforcemnt terrorizing black communities. Every peacful avenue of reistence met with assasination and counter intelligence operations from the FBI, CIA, and local police. These weren’t guys that just fell in love with their own rhetoric. These were people that had organized within the bounds of the law and found themselves hunted by their own government. This was a systematic destruction of legal, peaceful, political dissent by the government of the United States. In other countries people go to the Hague for shit like that. (Milosovitch, Sadam, Pol Pot, Pinochet) That is what the police were like, are like, J.Edgar Hoover, Allen Dulles, Papa Daley, Richard Riordan the list goes on.
Xeno, I refer you to Adm. Aral Vorkosigan:
Reputation is what others know about you. Honor is what you know about yourself.
Guard your honor. And outlive the bastards.
We can admit that we’re killers … but we’re not going to kill today. That’s all it takes! Knowing that we’re not going to kill today! ~ Captain James T. Kirk, Stardate 3193.0
OK Sarah
I’m going to go look at this. If “Spook Who Sat by the Door” saved Geronimo’s ass. I should be able to glean wisdom from a Vor.
Ah, well, Xeno, Puff, Puff indeed
and another round of absinthe wouldn’t hurt either.
This conversation may not go well; please be gentle, or at least non-violent. I was around and about in Oakland back in the day when Huey and Bobby got their bright idea and wrangled brother Marvin into organizing their thinking for them. It was bad then, in the old primitive bad way, but I’m here to tell you that pulling out the guns didn’t make it any better and violence was the first tactic the Panthers tried, the community service stuff came after.
My poor white trash perspective opinion, made everything worse. Good people died. Other good people got their asses shot up. Police got frightened, even the good ones and there always were more good than bad, but a frightened man with a gun and a badge is a dangerous combination good or not. The evil cops were handed “legitimate” reason to be even more brutal, empowered by the frightened suburban whites who were being played by the emerging Plutocratic operatives. Without the violence (my opinion) history plays out much differently.
Gandhi liberated an entire subcontinent without instigating violence. MLK, and others, turned violence back on itself – at a horrible personal price for many, but the cause itself won. Net it out and, my opinion, the instigation of violence from the left and the poor and the oppressed of the 60s and 70s ended up costing more than it gained. Almost always does. The nightmare of the ghetto, poverty in all its forms, really, is big and nasty and brutal and horrific. Shooting at the cops, and at each other, is not a solution; rather it adds to the problem and punishes most those who are trapped within and cannot escape. In Oakland today there are near as many innocents getting killed by random drive-bys as actual gangsters, and the whole population lives in terror of their own neighbors. Violence is not the answer.
Ball in your court, puff, puff, pass.
Hack- Cough- Choke, Damn ...
this is some good shit!
But “Gandhi liberated an entire subcontinent without instigating violence. MLK, and others, turned violence back on itself”
Gandi always kept a violent option waiting in the wings, suciceide bombers, etc. and King got assasinated by the United States. To read the Panthers outside the response to continued violence in the face of nonviolent protest is disingenuous. They didn’t just one day decide to go violent, they emerged as violent because peaceful means had been ineffective.
With that said. I think the work they did, all of them, has paved the way for a peaceful solution. We could easily clean up the hood and stop the violence if you could stop the cargo planes and tractor trailors of heroin and cocaine, and stop the CIA or whoever is managing the drops to stop running guns and drugs in the black community, stop the police that patrol black neighborhoods from treating the residents as enemy combatants, and let a brother get a fair trial every once and a while.
I say this without hyperbole or exaggeration. Every effort of black america at self determination has been thwarted by the malicous systematic intervention of the American government. We are out numbered and out gunned and a prisoner in our own house. All we can do now is wait for the rest of america to wake up.
I keep trying to tell people. The shit you see happening is what happened first in the black community. We weren;t always bastards, dope dealers and gang bangers. The conventional wisdo mis that niggers are just savage animals - this could never happen to us. Look around. It’s happening. White america is going insane and it’s the corporations that are pushing it. Black folk don’t make any of this shit. We don’t put out gangster rap, we don’t import drugs, we don;t run education, the economy, the gun manufactures. Tell me how an israeli made uzi ends up in the ghetto and has a street price of less than $100.00? You know I was 20 years old before I knew an AK was Russian. You could buy them by the dozen where I grew up. Couldn’t get an american made gun for shit.
All I’m saying is how does this stuff go in if the rest of america isn’t complicit? It used to be you either didn’t know or didn’t care. America knew. Now it’s everywhere.
Now we have neither bullets or Ballots
Chicago police will split up an elite unit of officers that has been at the heart of a corruption case involving allegations of kidnappings, home invasions and robberies, the department announced Tuesday.
The Special Operations Section will be dismantled, perhaps as soon as Tuesday afternoon. The SOS was the unit tasked with policing drug and gun crimes throughout the city, but seven of its officers were arrested last year on corruption charges. link
The documentary also chronicles the role of the Los Angeles Police Department and the FBI in the evolution of gang culture. During his tenure from 1950 to 1966, Chief Robert Parker bolstered the ranks of the LAPD with white recruits from the south, who brought their racist attitudes with them. Parker’s racist sympathies laid the groundwork for the volatile relationship between the black community and the LAPD that persists today.
link
puff, puff, here - your turn.
BIO: there's this great scene in the movie
“malcom x,” and although i’m not sure if it’s totally factual, i hope you’ll grok my point. in it, denzel channels malcom and asks, ’what is the right response to 000s of years of our women being raped by white men?’ when there was nothing to be done for that but ’grin and bear it?’
i bring this up not because i think that line of argument is “justified.” indeed, i’m with you on the whole ’violence solves as much as tears’ thinking. still, i’m human, and i know other people are human.
white folks, whomever: think about what it would feel like for you to know that your mother/sister/daughter couldn’t walk down the street without a sincere and well grounded fear of being raped…by those with governmental authority and protection. indeed- as part of a gov’t approved plan to humilate, oppress, and otherwise keep down a certain population.
i bring this up b/c i think it’s almost cliched- that whole “i’m a brother and i’m sick of being arrested while walking down the street.” that’s a valid concern, and X speaks for it here better than i ever will. instead, i’ll speak from my own experience as a not-wholly-“white” person who lived on the south side. what was my greatest moment in fear? not being kidnapped (i was), not being held up by a crack addict (i was), not being beaten by an abusive husband (i was). honestly, the fear that outpaced them all: being raped by police. it happened to more than one nonwhite sister and neighbors of mine, and almost to me. when i was doing nothing more than walking home two blocks from friend’s house late at night.
seriously- i’ve walked a lot of streets (go on, i am giving you that opening to mock me, feh), and plenty late at night, and often in skimpy clothes, not sober. the only time i’ve ever felt that afraid, including nights out in DC, NYC, Chicago, inner city Detroit, is that night in Hyde Park. two of the CPD’s finest…wouldn’t leave me alone. they followed me for several blocks, they kept asking me questions, doing the whole ’good cop, bad cop’ thing, but most of all, they were dripping with authority. directly experiencing the patriarchy’s rape-privilege + gun-toting state-granted authority = no more scary moment in my life. really.
i’m from a “cop” family, i know how they are, um, when the uniform is off. don’t dismiss “violent” reaction on the part of brown, poor or black men, when it comes to the “police” forces in their communities. i won’t say it’s “all the time,” but i do grok the anger and humiliation men feel, hearing stories like mine.
which would be: every day, in the ’hood. are you any less inclinded to be violent, when the women you love are directly, specifically, and personally threatened?
So Oakland is different from Nasiriya how, exactly?
Quoth Bringiton:
Net it out and, my opinion, the instigation of violence from the left and the poor and the oppressed of the 60s and 70s ended up costing more than it gained. Almost always does.
to which I say,
on this continent, anyhow.
Worked out that way for the tribes.
From the Iroquois League to the Apache, from the Hmong to the Lao, when the moneyed come and you fight them, you damned well better fight long enough, hard enough and smart enough to win — call it intifada, call it insurgency, call it guerilla warfare, call it never-say-die, or whatever else you want to — when the moneyed come to the fight, you either need to be them or be ready to serve them unto the seventh son of the seventh son, for you will not win. The Mujahedeen? Bah. Puppets of the richer of the two governments in that 1980s “brush war” between US and USSR.
The so-called “American Revolution” of the 1770s was a guerrilla war, and if the Brits had done their logistics worth a flying frack, we’d all be speaking the Queen’s English today.
Works out that way for the homeless, the veterans, the dispossessed, the displaced, the very young, the very old, the sick, the injured, and the rest of us non-elites every time.
What it will take for it not to work out that way, in 40 years or so in Iraq, I don’t know. I’d like to think we’d put somebody in the White House and in charge in Congress who’d stop before we spill all that blood in the name of fraud and waste, but … sometimes, it’s too much to hope for.
We can admit that we’re killers … but we’re not going to kill today. That’s all it takes! Knowing that we’re not going to kill today! ~ Captain James T. Kirk, Stardate 3193.0
"the potential for it really spinning out of control"
That was the line in Hillary’s Moment that nobody seems to have comented on. It follows “I see what’s happening” and “we have to reverse it.”
I’m guessing that Our Betters are scared shitless. They’ve built Richistan to protect themselves, but in the end that’s a sort of gated community, and gates can be crashed.
The difficulty with a procedure like, say, everybody becomes a franc-tireur is (a) history hasn’t been kind to either the winners or the losers and (b) people with a lot of money and guns and helicopters and tasers and camps are likely to be a lot “better” at that game than a bunch of dirty fucking hippies. Things would have to get a lot worse, third world worse, for people to throw their hostages to fortune — kids, old parents, houses — away for that.
Also, such a movement would be closed by definition; nobody serious would talk about it in a blog. But I think only an “open source” model could prevail against the corps.
I keep coming back to Ghandi and MLK. I do notice that Barack Obama is invoking those names (along with the OFB
invoking the boddisatva) but it’s extremely difficult for me to take that as anything other than, well, oratorical namedropping. Yet again our discourse is pre-empted and polluted. Sigh.
[x] Any (D) in the general. [ ] Any mullah-sucking billionaire-teabagging torture-loving pus-encrusted spawn of Cthulhu, bless his (R) heart.
the seventh son of the seventh son
Damn. Sarah.
But yeah, that’s my assesment of the situation. Unless Bolivarians get their shit together. I think I’m going to go into I banking.
Pinned down by withering crossfire
he squirms around to reload, and take another toke. The thing about starting a war is that you have to win it. Attacking and losing is always worse than negotiation, cf Carthage. I don’t make the rules, I just observe them.
No argument here about the magnitude of injustice in our nation. Fucked up, and it sucks. The answer, call me Old Skool I don’t care, is economics and not firepower. Believe MJS has been quietly, gently, repeatedly pointing this out in his Gnome posts to no response except from a t-shirt vendor and an aging druggie with memory problems.
Follow the money. It isn’t in your pockets, nor in mine; it’s not in our neighborhoods, or our schools, or our health care; it’s all going into a very few bank accounts and most of them are offshore. This is what Edwards is talking about, what Obama is trying really hard not to talk about, and what Hillary just realized she’d better start talking about. Who the hell knows if any of them mean it? But it just may be that the top of the pile is thinking that the current trends are, ah, unsustainable and a big chunk of the rest of the country seems to be waking up to that as well.
America is like the butt of every cuckold joke ever told, always the last to figure things out. But once we do, we are capable of great things. In terms of mobilizable capacity, it was only the people of America that won WWII. Well, that and a million dead Russians but in the end it was winter and inadequate supply lines that stopped Hitler’s eastern advance, same as Napoleon. Had the Nazis never opened a second front we still would have beaten them, it just would have taken longer. We defeated two maniacal empires, both at the same time. Very, very impressive.
Now we’re in another battle for survival, not so very different from where we were in say 1936. Like then, most of the country still hasn’t come to grips with the seriousness of the situation. Unlike then, most of the world is out in front rather than already conquered or ineffective, only waiting for the US to get its act together and start dealing. When we do, we will be unstoppable.
I believe that the answers to global warming, poverty, un(inadequate)employment, health care inequity, and foreign adventurism are all part of the same tangled web, as do all of you. But also when I look at it I see that the solution to one is the solution to all. We can generate an enormous wave of wealth, real wealth, from solving the global warming/fossil fuel/oil war problem, enough to redistribute it and reconstitute the middle class to include the vast majority of our nation. I believe that with real jobs and lowered cost of living will come less crime, less street violence, less drug and alcohol abuse, less need for prisons, more money for education and a better life for all. And I believe that people like Edwards and yes Hillary recognize that if we don’t get started down that road real quick, they won’t be leaders any more; they’ll be targets. If Barak doesn’t understand what that’s like, maybe Bobby Rush needs to explain it to him.
Time comes to take to the barricades, I’ll be there; but that time is not yet. I walked away from that option 40 years ago, and everyone I know who took the path of violence is either dead or very sorry. I can’t claim that I’m a whole lot happier than they are, but I am alive and no one innocent is dead at my hand so that’s something. I believe shooting up the place isn’t going to be helpful, at this particular time; organizing would, however, be a really good idea as would mass protests; nothing like filling the streets to get the attention of those with the most to lose. And better songs, we need better songs.
Dark days, friends, I know and I agree, but as a country we’ve seen darker and come through better than we were before. I have not yet lost faith that we will again.
I am alive
BIO - real talk. Uh 40 years? You keep sharing the wisdom. I’ll get you an afghan(joking).
Problem is this time we are the Nazis and the world is coming against us. And only one segment of the population has seen days I fear that are going to be as dark as this - Blacks in slavery after 1822, the lighterr momemnt would be reconstruction after 1876 as Jim Crow descended and all civil rights were lost.
So yeah I’ll be doing my Sarah Connor thing in the bunkers.
We can’t stop global warming it’s a natural phenomena. And we really need to be dealing with the loss of arable farm land, dry land and clean water. Look at Syria. Somalia, and Kenya.
But, BIO - very instructive exchange - Danke.
I'd like that afghan in blues and grays
Those colors compliment my eyes and what’s left of my hair. Whippersnapper.
Don’t claim any wisdom but there is a little of been there done that, don’t mean to preach, this is a tough medium for me to use so apologies if any of it sounds too, ah, authoritative. I appreciate the frank exchange.
Blues and Grays _ Got it
Keep sharing the wisdom.
Has it come to this? That even the spam assholes
who post their crap here decide to be pro-Obama?
That link above advertises a digital frame scam shop. There was a time when spam scammers at least *sucked up* to the prevailing conversation and posters.
That post’s not even coherent English — which means that the spam sweatshops overseas now know how to mimic the dominant political conversation… which is to denigrate and mock Clinton supporters without a second thought.
Thanks, bud. You’ve done more than anyone I’ve read today to hone my anger at Obama dirty tactics men into a bright blue sharp flame….
Spam deleted, thanks
People who want to advertise can pay.
[x] Any (D) in the general. [ ] ?????. [ ] Any mullah-sucking billionaire-teabagging torture-loving pus-encrusted spawn of Cthulhu, bless his (R) heart.