On Bill Moyers Journal last night, Moyers played a clip of John F. Kennedy. He did it as a way of talking about how far-and how surprisingly we've come to have a black presidential nominee. But I noticed something different. See if you can spot it:
BILL MOYERS: Welcome to the Journal.
I never thought we'd see this in my lifetime. When I was growing up in the segregated south the Democratic Party was the bastion of white male supremacy. The inequality of the races was a given, God-ordained and immutable. Women were okay, as long as they kept to their place. And now look what's happened. A black man and a white woman battled each other to the wire for the nomination by a party that turned itself upside down, inside out, and around in my lifetime. Barack Obama was born the year John F. Kennedy took the oath of office as President of the United States.
JOHN F. KENNEDY: I, John Fitzgerald Kennedy do solemnly swear. . .
BILL MOYERS: At his inauguration, I stood in the clear, cold weather and felt a shiver, not from the weather, but from the hint of things to come. Two years later, Obama was a toddler, and I was 27, and there was Kennedy on television proposing a civil rights bill to end the awful discrimination enforced on black people throughout America's history. It was 45 years ago next week - June 11, 1963 - and the President asked, "Are we to say to the world - and much more importantly to each other - that this is the land of the free, except for the Negroes; that we have no second-class citizens, except Negroes; that we have no class or caste system, no ghettoes, no master race, except with respect to Negroes."
JOHN F. KENNEDY: The Negro baby born in America today, regardless of the section of the State in which he is born, has about one-half as much chance of completing a high school as a white baby born in the same place on the same day, one-third as much chance of completing college, one-third as much chance of becoming a professional man, twice as much chance of becoming unemployed. . .
BILL MOYERS: Tragically, Kennedy was assassinated as Congress was still battling over his civil rights bill and Lyndon Johnson was thrust into the White House. I went with him and saw Johnson take up the cause. Martin Luther King marched, and Lyndon Johnson maneuvered, and on the 2nd of July in 1964 the President signed the Civil Rights Act into law. The fight wasn't over; he knew it. The President told me, "I think we've just handed the South to the Republican Party for the rest of my life - and yours." Sure enough, the backlash was so bitter, and the Republican Party, once the party of Lincoln, so exploited it, that I figured this country would have a serious woman candidate for President long before any person of African descent. As the choice came down this year to one or the other, is one of those shifts that democracy and history take when we least suspect it.
BARACK OBAMA: Because of you, tonight I can stand before you and say that I will be the Democratic nominee for President of the United States.
One reason the 2008 election is vitally important can be summed up in two words: Global warming. Another reason can also be summed up in two words: Supreme Court. I hope to write about global warming as well this weekend, but this diary is about Supreme Court.
Both, however, have the same underlying theme: while winning the 2008 is vitally important, it is necessary, but not sufficient. Indeed, neither global warming nor the Supreme Court should be the real focus of our attention, as they are but the most prominent outer manifestations of larger systemic struggles.
What is really needed is a much more sweeping and fundamental reshaping of our collective thinking--and that can only come about through a reshaping of our public institutions.
I now want to turn my attention to global warming, by way of revisitng a recent, diary from Joe Brewer, of the Rockridge Institute, Why We Are Losing the Global Warming Battle. In it, Joe argues:
Right now, things don't look very promising. It isn't just that we've reached the tipping point, as James Hansen suggests. (warning - large PDF file) It isn't just that the first-ever climate bill is about to arrive DOA on the Senate floor--maybe not such a bad thing since Lieberman-Warner is built on the wrong ideas. The real problem is in the way we think about the problem and, therefore, the solutions.
There are two problems with "the way we think"-the actual lack of a well-developed framework of ideas, and the lack of an institutional framework for propagating the ideas we do have. These are, ever and always, the two sides of what Marxist philosopher Antonio Gramsci described as a "culture war" or "war of position"-a struggle to control the institutions that shape our culture, including not just the ideas we think, but the ideas we can think. In this case, I would argue that the later-the institutional framework- is much more of a problem than the framework ideas itself is.
For example, Joe goes on to say:
Consider this sampling of Big Ideas conservatives have pushed into public discourse:
* Nature is a resource to be exploited.
* Wealth is measured simply by money.
* The economy and environment are distinct and inevitably in conflict with one another.
* Polluting is a right, so companies should be compensated for the cost of clean-up.
* Markets are natural and naturally good.
* Government is distinct from markets and intrudes upon them.
These ideas are at the heart of the climate debate.
It is not hard to think of ideas counter to those. What is hard is to envision powerful organizations engaged in systematically refuting them with a vigour equal to that of conservatives pushing them.
(2) But if three decades seems like a long recession, what about a permanent one? That's the subject of a March 6 post at Facing South, the blog of the Institute for Southern Studies/Southern Exposure, "Black America is in a permanent recession"
Combining the two perspectives, it is obvious that Black America as a whole remains in very dire circumstances. Yet, we can look forward to another round of anti-affirmative action initiatives this year, particularly in certain swing states, even as Barack Obama tries to run a campaign that is not about race. This constellation of facts gives us clear warning of how necessary it is to begin establishing a more realistic foundation for discussing both race and economics.
Bush's State of the Union was jam-packed with old Republican lies about economics, less as direct assertions that can be fact-checked in a bullet-point manner, but more as deep, insistent, persistent framing. Republicans get away with this for a variety of reasons (they get away with just about everything, don't they?) but one of the big ones is that progressive activists really don't grasp just how bad Republicans are when it comes to the economy.
And so, to make that point rather emphatically, I've put together a table, comparing what the economy would be like under three different scenarios-all involving smooth, unvarying rates of growth. One takes the average growth rate under all Presidents since 1932, another takes the average growth rate under all Democratic Presidents since 1932, and the last takes the average growth rate under all Republican Presidents since 1932,
I don't want to spoil the surprise by saying anything more. The table is on the flip....
