Get ready for some reading!!!!
From shakesville and angryblackbitch
If a black person is running for office that does not automatically mean that she or he is going to make affirmative action, poverty and pay-day loan scams the foundation of their platform.
But DAYUM…
wouldn’t that be NICE for a “change”?
Given Obama’s recent statements to the nation’s Governors…maybe ol Ralphie (never was a fan, I still remember when my HS best friend told me he was planning on voting Green…but I digress) has a point.
The CHA’s $1.6 billion Plan for Transformation is replacing the city’s public housing high-rises with developments that mix public housing, affordable and market-rate units to attract residents from across the economic spectrum. But the mixed-income communities risk imposing “a tyranny of the middle class” on the new communities’ low-income residents, Pattillo said.
Pattillo lives in one of these developments, and she said neighbors always are discussing what constitutes appropriate behavior. When is the music too loud? Where is it OK to barbecue? These questions, rooted in race and class, arise because of residents’ different backgrounds, yet it’s usually the poorer residents who are expected to change, Pattillo said.
Continuing
It costs up to $150,000 to rehab a public housing unit and up to $300,000 to build a new one, Gist Gilliam said. But there’s little money for public housing at the federal level, because in the past two decades voters have rejected political candidates who favor it. Housing is not on the national agenda; the presidential candidates aren’t talking about it, though more Americans live in substandard housing than lack health care.
“It comes back to the people you send to Congress,” she said.
What does Obama say:
Drawing on his years as a community organizer on the South Side of Chicago, Mr. Obama, the presumptive Democratic nominee for president, said that while he intended to be a supportive partner if he won the White House, the mayors should not count on significant additional help from Washington. Change, he said, comes from the bottom up, not the top down.
Mr. Obama also said the federal government’s ability to help cities would be limited in part by a long-term budget deficit left by the Bush administration, which he called “the most fiscally irresponsible administration in modern times.”
“Yes we need to fight poverty; yes, we need to fight crime,” Mr. Obama, of Illinois, said in a midday address to the United States Conference of Mayors. “Yes, we need to strengthen our cities. But we also need to stop seeing our cities as the problem and start seeing them as the solution. Because strong cities are the building blocks of strong regions, and strong regions are essential for a strong America.”
Free Market! Baby!
But take, for instance, the fact that at recent Republican debates, we’ve heard class-warfare rhetoric aimed at Mitt Romney from the party’s current frontrunner, Senator McCain: “I led for patriotism, not for profit.” By contrast, here in the Garden State, Senator Obama announces that “I love the free market” and “I love capitalism.
New Orleans can now be “renewed” along the gentrification lines favored by its elite and paid for by regressive taxes. That has always been the way of “urban renewal” in the US (with infrequent, minor, and mostly cosmetic concessions to “peoples’” interests when politically required).
Obama? Skipped the State of the Black Union (held in NO), wonder why? Might be asked to actually weight in? Oh Noes!
Shark-Fu continues:
All people running for office…any office…should be expected to build a platform that addresses the needs of the people they wish to serve.
…
That isn’t acting white…speeches about the shit are not examples of talking white…and this bitch is going to move past anger into some serious rage if one more motherfucker insults me and mine through the assertion that only white people discuss the economy, healthcare, the war and international diplomacy.
Ahem…
The problem isn’t that Obama DOESN’T discuss THOSE issues. He does. (Ralph’s critique was more specific, but whatever)
The problem is what ends up coming out of Obama’s mouth WHEN HE DOES! (see UHC, NATFA, FISA, etc etc etc)
Which I think was Ralph’s original point. A tangent to Tavis’ point. And a whole bunch of other people’s points. Linguistic quibbles aside. (love how black folk get all (ir)rational about race at the funniest of times)
Ask Obama to throw poor blacks a bone? Shiiiiiiiiiiit. That’s like askin Jesus to turn more water into wine! The NERVE of some (non-)niggaz!!!
Shark-Fu goes on:
He (Nader) ought to be ashamed of himself for putting forth the notion that a black person isn’t fully black if they don’t act like he expects them to and society has instructed them to.
Errrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr…
What a loaded sentence. Should Obama NOT be expected to address issues that largely affect poor blacks? If not him, who? Isn’t HE the ONE we’ve been waiting for? What have we been “waiting” for him to do, exactly?
Shark-Fu goes on:
For the record, this is an example of a race card this bitch is familiar with…the one that has so-called allies maintaining low expectations and out-dated assumptions that they dress up in the language of the Civil Rights Era but which are actually built on a foundation of bigotry that’s been masquerading as tolerance far too long.
But Uh-OHHHH!
The Black man who wants to be president spends Father’s Day at church in loud and general denunciation of Black males. For added insult, he describes them as “boys.” Barack Obama’s primary audience isn’t the conservative Black Pentecostal congregation, but “white social conservatives in a race where these voters may be up for grabs,” says the New York Times. In America, even the “Black” corporate candidate runs against Black people. How did such madness come to pass in 2008? Blame the Black “progressive” misleaders who failed to challenge Obama when they had the chance. Now it’s too late, and African Americans are reduced to objects of derision.
Continuing:
Even the New York Times could see through Obama’s transparent bid for white approval at Black people’s expense. Reporter Julie Bosman noted that Obama “laid out his case in stark terms that would be difficult for a white candidate to make” - terms (such as boy?) that “his campaign hopes [will] resonate among white social conservatives in a race where these voters may be up for grabs.”
Continuing:
Can one imagine Obama or any other presidential aspirant repeatedly hectoring any other ethnic group on moral issues? Singling out Jews for excessive materialism? The Irish for excessive drinking? Of course not; that would be unfair and politically suicidal. But there are large regions of the white body politic in which it is not only acceptable, but damn near required, that politicians demonstrate their impatience with the alleged moral shortcomings of Black people. Barack Obama trolls for votes in those foul waters, at the cost of Black people’s dignity.
What’s the problem with all that…niggaz don’t take care of their kids…RIGHT??!!??
A month before Obama made this stereotypical and plainly false assertion, Boston University professor Rebekah Levine Coley, in a comprehensive study on the black family, found that black fathers who aren’t in the home are much more likely to sustain regular contact with their children than absentee white fathers, or for that matter, fathers of any other ethnic group. The study is not an obscure study buried in the thick pages of a musty academic journal. It was widely cited in a feature article on black fathers in the May 19, 2008 issue of Newsweek. There was no excuse then to spout this myth. The facts are totally contrary to Obama’s knock.
So maybe when Ralph Nader says that Obama is “talking white”…
it’s a tad more nuanced and complicated (and correct) than one might want believe.
Serveral issue overlap and intersect when talking about all of this, and the rush for political correctness might be counter-productive to fleshing out the truth, in this instance.
**long exhale**
Pass the blunt nigga!
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