5 years after Katrina, does Obama care about black people?

From theGrio:

It is hard to believe that five years have passed since Hurricane Katrina swept over the Gulf Coast, devastating the region, killing over 1,800, displacing thousands and leaving $80 billion in property damage. But five years it has been nonetheless. And of course, we all remember the breaking of the levees in New Orleans, which led to the flooding of that great city and the deaths of hundreds, many of whom were poor and people of color with nowhere to hide.

Those levees--seemingly constructed of little more than lego, silly puddy and tape, not exactly a marvel of American engineering--stood and fell as a symbol of years of government neglect. The Bush administration's lack of a response to the plight of the mostly chocolate city of New Orleans following Katrina of was a potent example of America's callousness towards poverty and black and brown people.

Speaking of then-President Bush's bungling of the Katrina aftermath, Kanye West said that "George Bush doesn't care about black people." Well, now we have an African-American president named Barack Obama. And while much has changed in the Gulf Coast region since 2005, many things have remained the same as far as black people are concerned. And while the president has taken steps to improve the quality of life in the region, he has been criticized for not doing enough to help African-Americans who are being left out of the recovery efforts. Plus, the recent BP oil disaster in the Gulf Coast hasn't exactly helped things. Now is a good time to ask the question, does President Obama really care about black people?

Despite a $10.5 billion relief aid package under the previous president, the Bush legacy in the Gulf is one of incompetence, with some racism and classism mixed in. Public perceptions combined with a healthy dose of reality made it appear that the fix was in for the disproportionately black victims of the region. It speaks to a conservative hatred of government and claims that government does not work. So, when politicians who subscribe to that ideology get into office, they find the worst people to run the agencies they don't like, in order to blow it all up and create a self-fulfilling prophecy.

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Will the New Black Panthers become another ACORN?

From theGrio:

Did the New Black Panther Party intimidate Philadelphia voters on Election Day in 2008? Is the Obama Justice Department guilty of an anti-white voter bias when it dropped most of the charges against the Panthers? A former Justice Department lawyer would have you believe that the answer to both of these questions is yes. And he would also have you believe he is a whistle-blower, but don't believe the hype.

On Tuesday, J. Christian Adams testified before the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights. A career official at DOJ, Adams claims that the department's civil rights division instructed its lawyers to ignore voter intimidation cases involving black defendants and white victims. He quit his position in May 2010.

All of this stems from an incident on Election Day 2008 in the Fairmount section of Philadelphia, which, oddly enough, is my neighborhood. King Samir Shabazz and Jerry Jackson, two members of the New Black Panther Party for Self-Defense, placed themselves at the entrance to a polling place in a heavily African-American area. They were dressed in black militant attire, and Shabazz was carrying a nightstick. The two men allegedly hurled color-coded slurs and insults such as "white devil" and "you're about to be ruled by the black man, cracker." Police told Shabazz to leave but allowed Jackson to stay.

On its way out the door, the Bush administration brought a case against the group, accusing them of violating the Voting Rights Act. The Obama administration -- under the nation's first black attorney general, Eric Holder -- dismissed most of the charges for lack of evidence.

I certainly heard about the incident when it happened, but as the police officer says, "Keep moving, nothing to see here." And if there was anything to see, certainly we would have been talking about it in Philly, don't you think? Certainly, the right-wing noise machine at FOX News will attempt to make something out of this, but they will try in vain.

"The New Black Panther case was the simplest and most obvious violation of federal law I saw in my Justice Department career," Adams said in a recent Washington Times opinion piece following his resignation. "Based on my firsthand experiences, I believe the dismissal of the Black Panther case was motivated by a lawless hostility toward equal enforcement of the law.... The department abetted wrongdoers and abandoned law-abiding citizens victimized by the New Black Panthers. The dismissal raises serious questions about the department's enforcement neutrality in upcoming midterm elections and the subsequent 2012 presidential election." But Adams' allegations appear weak. He failed to mention that when he worked under the Bush Justice Department in 2006, they declined to charge the Minutemen for voter intimidation against Latinos in Arizona, a case similar to the Panthers.

If Adams believes that the New Black Panther case was the worst case he has seen in his career, then he must not get out that much. The watchdog group Media Matters calls the whole thing a "manufactured story" from "a political operative with an ax to grind" and who wants to make Obama look bad right before the midterm elections. And even Abigail Thernstrom--Senior Fellow at the Manhattan Institute, and a conservative member of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights who has shown nothing but open hostility towards minority voting rights--called this case "very small potatoes." Thernstrom said in the National Review that "There are plenty of grounds on which to sharply criticize the attorney general -- his handling of terrorism questions, just for starters -- but this particular overblown attack threatens to undermine the credibility of his conservative critics."

Nevertheless, under the Bush administration, Karl Rove politicized the Justice Department. In those days, officials purposefully ignored racial discrimination against people of color, did not enforce the civil rights laws, and ran the department based on a mixture of smoke and mirrors, and incompetence. They filled the once-prestigious department with 150 graduates of televangelist Pat Robertson's Regent University Law School. They focused on distractions and scams such as reverse discrimination, anti-Christian religious discrimination, and voter fraud, which is little more than right-wing codeword for suppression of the black and Latino vote. Remember all of the drama over the community nonprofit group ACORN and those bogus charges of voter fraud? Conservatives were really angry because ACORN registered all of those new black, brown and poor voters that subsequently brought about an Obama victory.

So, it is no surprise that the Bush attorneys would care so much about the New Black Panthers. And conservative witch hunters, conspiratorial and deceptive as they are, are trying to make the Panthers the new ACORN. In the end, they are prejudiced against the president because he's black, and they believe, as Glenn Beck once claimed, that Obama is a racist who doesn't like white people. It doesn't help that his attorney general is black either.

Like the saying goes, where there is smoke, there is a fire. But with the case against the New Black Panthers, there's only smoke and mirrors, and lots of racial hating on Barack Obama--a man who has restored integrity, competence and the rule of law to the White House. So let's keep moving.

The Lawyers Who Would Torture

America’s current economic meltdown has crippled many professions, and the legal professional is no exception. As major law firms are engaging in the wholesale layoffs of lawyers, and freezing hiring for two years, newly minted lawyers must seek employment at department stores and fast food restaurants. One cannot help but conclude that collectively, lawyers are paying the price for the crimes of an errant minority.

I speak of that group of lawyers that, over the past decade, wrote the 30-page credit card contracts that are destroying millions of lives—contracts that are so intentionally murky and deceptively convoluted that even Elizabeth Warren, Harvard law professor and Congressional TARP overseer, cannot understand them. There were the Ponzi-scheming lawyers who conspired to swindle honest, hard-working citizens out of billions of dollars in life savings. And there were the lawyers and judges who knowingly placed the innocent behind bars—or even worse, sent them to their untimely death.

And finally, there were the government lawyers who wrote memos to the President, justifying the torture of terror suspects, and giving the green light to lawbreaking. These documents were not mere academic exercises, but rather weapons used to harm and oppress others. Further, these memos were a violation of international treaties and federal criminal statutes, denying its victims a fair trial governed by the rule of law. If there is a hell, whether actual or metaphysical, such a place would undoubtedly reserve a special wing for such lawyers. And they will be made to wear those proverbial gasoline drawers on their journey to that select subterranean locale.

To coincide with the Obama administration’s release of a report on the CIA’s brutal and coercive interrogations techniques, Georgetown legal scholar David Cole has presented a new book called Torture Memos: Rationalizing the Unthinkable (The New Press, 2009). As its name suggests, the book discusses and presents in their entirety the actual legal memoranda that Bush administration lawyers wrote to justify torture. An important point which Cole makes is that while the actual CIA torturers should be held accountable for their brutal and illegal acts, the authors of these memos are culpable for their contortions of the law to sanction human rights abuses.

“Law at its best is about seeking justice, resolving disputes pursuant to principle and reasoned judgment, regulating state power, respecting human dignity, and protecting the vulnerable”, Cole says (p. 35). “Law at its worst treats legal doctrine as infinitely manipulable, capable of being twisted cynically in whatever direction serves the client’s desires….[T]hey used law not as a check on power, but as a facilitator of brutality, deployed against captive human beings who had absolutely no other recourse.”

Acting in bad faith, the legal hacks who crafted the torture memos engaged in sham analysis and tricky legal gymnastics. Motivated by a desire to please their superiors and little else, they merely invented law out of thin air, and created a law-free zone where perpetrators could act as they pleased. No superior legal analysis was presented from these allegedly superior legal minds. Ignoring that the prohibition on cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment is absolute, they began with a false, predetermined conclusion that torture is acceptable. They proceeded to twist the law to rationalize their predetermined conclusion. Most of all, the analysis always absolved the CIA torturers— and the officials who authorized torture— of any wrongdoing. It makes you wonder what some people actually learn in law school, and what they hope to do with their law degree.

A nation is only as good as the laws that govern it. Unfortunately, throughout history we have witnessed the ways in which societies compromise their legal systems to oppress the many, benefit the few, and sanction the unconscionable. The law becomes a political game in which the powerful are exempt from the rules, and some are more equal than others. An arbitrary and capricious legal system can cloak injustice and the unjust with a veneer of legitimacy, fully backed by the apparatus of the state and the prestige of the courts. The Torture Memos reminds us through its post-game analysis that a free society must guard against such abuses of the law. Failure to do so will ensure that official criminal wrongdoing will occur. And as a matter of fact, it just did over the course of the Bush years.

Cross-posted from BlackCommentator.com and Huffington Post.

Governor Rick Perry And His Texas Death Machine Are In Big Trouble

When criminals are about to be caught, they try to hide their wrongdoing. When drug dealers hear the police sirens, they dump the stash in the alley or flush it down the toilet. When the Nazi officers in the concentration camps heard the allied forces approaching, they destroyed—and in many cases murdered—the evidence. There’s something about the light of day when it shines its truth upon you.

And when a Texas state commission started looking into a report that a faulty arson investigation apparently put an innocent man to death, Gov. Rick Perry replaced the commission and called the dead man a monster.

Because that’s what Southern hick town justice is all about.

Cameron Todd Willingham is now a free man, but unfortunately it took death to release him from the confines of his prison bars. He was executed on February 17, 2004 for the 1991 arson deaths of his three children. Gov. Perry refused to grant him a 30-day stay, despite questions about his guilt. According to a bogus forensics report, Willingham’s house was intentionally burned down.

In 2005, Texas instituted a forensic science commission to investigate mistakes and wrongdoing by forensic scientists. Baltimore fire expert Craig Beyler, who was hired by this commission to look into the Willingham case, concluded that there were no scientific grounds to characterize the fire as an act of arson. As The New Yorker reported, Beyler said the approach of the arson investigator in the case denied rational reasoning, was based on "folklore and mysticism rather than science," and violated "not only the standards of today but even of the time period." This, in a state whose fire investigators typically had a high school diploma, and unlike other states, no requisite experience and no specialized training or qualifications.

So, the Texas commission was reviewing Beyler’s report, and Gov. Perry, running for reelection, eliminated the members of the commission before they could issue their findings. Pure politics. After all, we don’t want people going around and talking about the execution of innocent people.

Meanwhile, Judge Sharon Keller, presiding judge of the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals, that state’s highest criminal court, could find herself in deep trouble. The State Commission on Judicial Conduct initiated impeachment proceedings against Keller for incompetence, violating her duties as a judge and casting public discredit on the court. For a state such as Texas— with such abysmal standards of integrity in its criminal "justice" system—you must wonder what she did to stand out among the crowd.

Keller refused to keep the court open after 5pm when she knew Michael Richard, a death row inmate, sought a last-minute appeal challenging the constitutionality of his punishment of lethal injection. The inmate was unable to file an appeal and was executed. Also, Keller rejected a new trial for Roy Criner, a mentally retarded man convicted of rape and murder, even though DNA evidence showed that he did not rape the victim. "We can’t give new trials to everyone who establishes, after conviction, that they might be innocent," Judge Keller said. "We would have no finality in the criminal justice system, and finality is important. When witnesses testify, and when jurors return a verdict, they need to know that they can’t come back later and change their minds."

Keller was unrepentant, and Perry said the execution of Willingham was appropriate based on the "totality of the issues". Ex-governor Mark White suggests that Texas might have to do away with the death penalty altogether, given that it does not deter crime and is unfairly administered, with a risk of executing the innocent. Bad habits are hard to break, and with 423 executions since 1974, including 152 under Gov. George W. Bush, Texas has the most voracious appetite for capital punishment. But perhaps the Willingham case is what is needed to end the barbaric practice.

My take on this subject is that the death penalty never was intended to be fair, as it is a holdover from Jim Crow lynching. Capital punishment was an effort to transplant lynchmob justice into the courtroom and make lynching official, if not respectable. A broken system that was designed to be broken—just clean it up and no one will notice, they thought. Guilt or innocence is of little concern here, as finality reigns supreme. And Judge Keller essentially said as much. It is no accident that the states of the former Confederacy— the states with the most violent racial history, a deep legacy of extrajudicial terror and killings— have been among the most enthusiastic executioners. Interestingly, those states also seem to have the lowest educational and health standards. Typically, the inmates on death row are people of color, and poor white folk like Mr. Willingham, those who lack resources and are unable to afford the best justice money can buy. We will never know how many people have been wrongfully executed. But Cameron Todd Willingham certainly would not have been the first. And perhaps we will never know how many opportunistic individuals have built their political careers on the corpses of the executed, whether guilty or innocent.

Rick Perry and Sharon Keller now have ethical clouds hanging over their heads. They utilized death as a political tool, but now, ironically, the death machine that helped bolster their careers could be their undoing. Yet, both are appropriate spokespersons for the death penalty. They have helped perpetuate an inherently unjust, incompetent and capricious system that legalized the lynchmob.  

Cross-posted from BlackCommentator.com.

An Inaugural Poem

Color of Law
By David A. Love
BlackCommentator.com
January 23, 2009

America is the greatest country in the world…
Or at least that's what they tell me.

The greatest country?
Now, exactly what yardstick were you using just now?
Such a bold statement with such paltry evidence!
Sounds like the words of someone who hasn’t been anywhere,
Yet those who have lived, traveled and studied
Beyond these shores know better than that.

America. This is the home of the potholes,
Of the crumbling roads and falling bridges,
Of the levees made of duct tape, Lego bricks and popsicle sticks.
Children go to bed hungry in the land of plenty,
Because their parents weren’t smart enough to have been born rich,
And there are few jobs to be had, but plenty of prison beds to fill.

You see, I live in the land that values property rights over human rights,
Where people can’t afford to live and can’t afford to get ill,
And you’re out of luck if the plant closed,
And the sheriff is knocking on the door of your soon-to-be foreclosed life.

But we got your check if you’re a billionaire in need of a Wall Street bailout,
To maintain the lifestyle to which you are accustomed,
Complete with corporate jets and golden parachutes,
And foxhunting retreats in the English countryside.

And here’s some more money if you already have more money than you need,
Or to make more stuff that nobody wants to buy,
Or to start a war to jack some oil,
Or if you want to shoot some Native American, I mean Vietnamese,
I mean Iraqi children,
Or bomb some families in Gaza,
Oh my bad, I forgot all those people are “terrorists.”

America is the greatest country in the world…
Or at least that’s what they tell me.

Free market economics,
A dinosaur if ever there was one,
About to go the way of the Soviet Union,
And the Berlin Wall and Apartheid,
And the Edsel and the Pinto,
And the folks who brought you the Edsel and the Pinto.

A big failure, to be sure,
Bankrupt as the nation that swore by it,
Yet the system worked just as the manufacturer intended,
For the benefit of the few.
“The market, unfettered, can do no wrong,” they proclaimed,
And now in this big Ponzi scheme called American capitalism,
They have all of us yelling “We was robbed!”
Call it the free market, laissez-faire or supply-side economics,
Call it the Invisible Hand, or trickle down, or trickle on,
Or the ownership society,
Or just call it a hustle.

America is the greatest country in the world…
Or at least that’s what they tell me.

Now, we can’t go any further without mentioning Number Forty-Three,
A.k.a. The Decider,
A.k.a. George W. Palin,
The man who could dodge a flying shoe but will try to dodge history,
And rewrite history,
And will do so in vain.
The man who would make Nero proud,
As he fiddled a tune of indifference while NOLA drowned,
And read a children’s book during Armageddon,
On the day that New York burned.

But that’s all fine, don’t you worry,
Number Forty-Three is God’s President, we all know it’s true,
Taking his orders from the Good Lord Jesus Christ himself.
And America is God’s country, so we’re all set.
So step up Mr. Preacher Man, come feed at the trough,
Let’s get you some of this faith-based hush money.

America is the greatest country in the world…
Or at least that’s what they tell me.

Never was I one to be proud of this or any other country,
As patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel.
But I see a game changer here,
You’ve given me something to work with,
And this is as good a time as any to break old habits.
They always asked the Black man to clean up the mess,
But never was that mess the entire country,
Or the whole world for that matter.
Now, these are the things of which progress is made…

As for our adversaries,
Even a deck full of race cards wouldn’t work this time,
No longer enough Southerners for a good ol’ Southern strategy,
Or at least that type of Southerner,
The type that would protect the women and children from the boogeyman.

Yes, people are wising up, and America is browning up.
Race is but a social construct,
Skin-tone solidarity will get you but so far,
It didn’t get some people very far, so far,
And it even set them back a bit,
When they realized that being White and angry—
Angry at the gays, and at the immigrants,
At the Latinos, the Muslims, the Arabs—
Just isn’t enough to pay the bills.
And since we’re all in this together,
Might as well love the one you’re with.

America is the greatest country in the world…
Or at least that’s what they tell me.

In forty years we’ve gone from four little Black girls
Dead in a Birmingham church,
To two little Black girls living in the White House,
Getting dibs on Lincoln’s desk.
A little sister’s gotta study somewhere.
Now that’s some history right there,
And daddy’s gonna borrow Abe’s Bible for the big day.

Just a few generations separated they are
From bondage in South Carolina,
From the rice plantations of the Gullah lowcountry.
Who would have thought!

But let us not forget what brought us to this place,
And the size of the mess before us.
We’ve had some bad times around here, to be sure,
And now we got some hope and the promise of change,
But it will get worse before it gets better,
You’d better believe it, my fellow prisoners.

So let us spill our cups for those who didn’t make it,
The 2,000 souls in New Orleans who drowned over a heckuva job,
And the 4,000 soldiers who died over foolishness and lies,
Not to mention the hundreds of thousands of Iraqis,
Unwilling subjects of some neocon’s mad experiment,
And don’t forget the ones who were kidnapped, tortured and brutalized.

America, are you the greatest country in the world?
Well, now is the time to prove it to me.
Now is the time to put people ahead of balance sheets, bottom lines and profit statements.
Let’s make it real, in words and in deeds,
The way Dr. King said it should be.

Iraqi Journalist Muntadhar al-Zeidi Captures the Moment

By Angus R. Love and David A. Love BlackCommentator.com

January 8, 2009

Jailed Iraqi journalist Muntadhar al-Zeidi has thrust himself into history and become an international overnight celebrity. Thousands protest for his release. A Saudi businessman offers $10 million for one of his shoes. Libya nominates him for a medal. Why? Because al-Zaidi threw his shoes at President Bush, capturing a moment for which millions have yearned. 

“This is your farewell kiss, you dog!” Al-Zeidi shouted at Bush. “This is from the widows, the orphans, and those who were killed in Iraq.”  

Apparently, the significance of the act—considered a supreme insult in Arab culture—was lost on Bush, who called it “amusing” and a “bizarre moment.” For Bush, Al-Zeidi’s gesture is a very small price to pay for waging one of the biggest blunders in American history - the Iraq war. No one has been held accountable for the hundreds of thousands of needless deaths, the destruction of a country and its culture, the blood of over 4,200 U.S. soldiers and tens of thousands wounded and maimed. Meanwhile, all that Bush and his administration can do is brag about his nimbleness in dodging the shoes, or joke about their failure to find weapons of mass destruction. No one to blame, no indictments, no investigation, not even a firing or a reprimand.

So, not unlike his dismissal of the shoe-throwing incident, Bush seems to shrug his shoulders over the legacy of carnage he has left in Iraq.  

In a confluence of historical forces, Al-Zeidi has captured the moment. But he does not stand alone. Al-Zeidi is but the latest in a line of people who were placed in the spotlight because of the inaction of the powerful, because the intelligentsia and the media decided to take a pass when injustice was present, and accept things as they were. 

Rosa Parks was thrust into the center of the civil rights struggle after years of a nation accepting Jim Crow as an alternative to Reconstruction. Segregation was the law of the land, wholeheartedly endorsed by the Ivy league-educated Supreme Court in Plessy v. Ferguson. Despite the fact that “separate but equal” was impossible in a system that depended on the suppression of the rights of African Americans, the media accepted the proposition and perpetuated a lie for years.

Similarly, the public outrage over the brutal beating of Rodney King came after years of police brutality as standard practice in poor communities and communities of color. Many had accepted police brutality as a buffer against Negro uprising, a way to keep Black people in line and maintain order. The mainstream media did its part by refusing to report on incidents of police brutality, or reporting such stories in a way which characterized Black victims as criminals and the offending police officers as heroes. And the court system had failed to correct these injustices due to patronage and political influence, corruption, and the acceptance of the status quo as a means of advancing in the system.

Back to the matter at hand regarding Iraq: Bush bamboozled the media through his push for war in Iraq, his manufacturing of a reason for war, and his constant changing of the rationale for war. One day the rationale was a link between Saddam Hussein, al Qaeda and 9-11. Another day it was weapons of mass destruction and the threat Saddam posed to America, and still another day the rationale for going to war was bringing democracy to the Mideast. Iraq has been far too chaotic to form voices in opposition. 

Meanwhile, the intelligentsia in the U.S. was mostly silent and acquiescent during the Bush years due to their desire for personal financial comfort. And the corporate media were too entangled with the people in power, and in some cases too entangled financially in the machinery of war, to serve a proper watchdog role. The war, and the massive loss of lives it created, was valued for its television entertainment value, and opposition to the war was regarded as unpatriotic.

Meanwhile, Al-Zeidi, who was a victim of a kidnapping by unknown assailants in November 2007, and was arrested twice by the U.S. military, knows and lives the occupation. His reports on the death and destruction of the war in Iraq— including the story of Zahra, a young Iraqi girl killed by the occupation forces on her way to school—have earned him the respect of the people.

Muntadhar al-Zeidi is Rodney King, and he is Lech Walesa. And he is Rosa Parks and the anonymous protestor who stopped the tank in Tiananmen Square. A journalist who stands up for the widows, the orphans, and the children of the Iraq War, this ordinary man is doing extraordinary things that the power elite and lame stream media ignored. He sees through the deception of the war, and the disastrous consequences for the country he loves.

BlackCommentator.com Guest Commentator Angus R. Love is the Executive Director of the Pennsylvania Institutional Law Project, a non-profit organization which seeks to deliver civil legal services to the institutional population of Pennsylvania, and ensure equal justice for low income residents of prisons, jails, and state hospitals and state centers. Angus has been a longtime advocate for improved prison conditions in the state. 

BlackCommentator.com Editorial Board member David A. Love, JD is a journalist and human rights advocate based in Philadelphia. Angus and David are not related, to their knowledge. 

World is awaiting leadership change

By David A. Love
Progressive Media Project
July 2, 2008

The results of the presidential election could go a long way toward improving America's image around the world.

Tragically, the Bush administration tarnished our reputation and squandered the global goodwill that came our way after Sept. 11.

Since then, President Bush has displayed a cavalier attitude toward the rest of the world. He has waged a senseless war against a nation that did not harm the United States, and has cost tens of thousands of innocent lives.

And in the name of keeping Americans free, Bush has run roughshod over the U.S. Constitution and international law, brazenly spying on Americans and torturing detainees.

As he subverted the rule of law, he undermined America's self-made image as a beacon of international human rights.

Consequently, even among America's closest allies in Western Europe, we receive a low favorability rating, according to a recent report by the Pew Global Attitudes Project.

For example, only 30 percent of people in Germany have favorable views of the United States, as do 34 percent in Spain and 39 percent in France. Britain is the only Western European country where a majority of respondents - 53 percent - thinks favorably of the United States.

America's favorability rating among another two of its closest allies, Japan and Mexico, has declined significantly in the past year, by 11 percentage points and 9 percentage points, respectively.

In much of the Muslim world, our reputation is near rock bottom. Less than one-quarter of people in predominantly Muslim nations such as Pakistan, Turkey, Egypt and Jordan have positive views of the United States. And in Pakistan and Turkey, large majorities view America as "more of an enemy" than "more of a friend." What is perhaps most compelling about the Pew study is that the world has its eyes - and hopes - on the U.S. presidential election.

About two-thirds of the people polled in France, Germany, South Africa and Spain believe that U.S. foreign relations will improve once Bush is out of office.

Across the board, people overseas express more confidence in Sen. Barack Obama over his rival, Sen. John McCain, regarding international affairs. For example, while 84 percent of people in France are confident in Obama, only 33 percent feel that way about McCain. In Australia, 81 percent trust Obama, while only 40 percent trust McCain.

So, why should Americans care about what the rest of the world thinks? Well, we're in a pickle now due to Bush's refusal to consider world opinion. And the next president will need better relations with other nations if we are to solve our global challenges together.

While McCain refuses to negotiate with adversaries of the United States, and gives little indication that he would veer from the catastrophic foreign policy of Bush, Obama believes in vigorous diplomacy - engaging America's allies and enemies alike. He also rejects Bush's system of secret and harsh offshore prisons and tribunals.

Obama's approach, as the Pew study suggests, resonates around the world.

Some of us may feel a hunger for change here at home. That hunger is also gnawing away at people in other countries.

The United States has a shameful human rights record

By David A. Love
Published by the Progressive Media Project
February 5, 2008

America does not practice what is preaches when it comes to human rights. Despite its noble stated goal of promoting democratic principles around the world, the United States is actually stifling them.

In the name of the war on terror, the Bush administration has made bedfellows with tyrants, according to an annual report by the group Human Rights Watch.

The report, which is based on research conducted in 75 countries, names abusers throughout the world who claim to give their people basic human rights, yet fail when it comes to guaranteeing civil liberties. Rather, they deny freedom of the press, imprison thousands of political dissidents, shut down political opposition parties and hold sham elections to bolster their legitimacy.

These allies of Washington include Vladimir Putin of Russia, Hosni Mubarak of Egypt, Islam Karimov of Uzbekistan, Meles Zenawi of Ethiopia and Pervez Musharraf of Pakistan.

What's worse, it is difficult for the United States to act as an effective cheerleader for human rights when it maintains a prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, takes detainees to secret CIA detention centers, and engages in torture of terror suspects.

"The United States has rightly attracted massive international criticism for its appalling and illegal conduct in the `war on terrorism," says Julia Hall, senior counterterrorism counsel at Human Rights Watch who contributed to the report.

U.S. support of antidemocratic regimes is, unfortunately, nothing new.

-In 1953, the United States and Great Britain eliminated a democratic government in Iran by staging a coup, overthrowing Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh and installing a puppet regime under the Shah.

-In 1954, America staged the overthrow of Jacobo Arbenz Guzman, the democratically elected president of Guatemala.

-In 1965, the U.S. Embassy supported Indonesia's strongman General Suharto rise to power, and encouraged him in his massacre of hundreds of thousands of people. A decade later, America gave Suharto military weapons to aid in his invasion of East Timor, which also cost hundreds of thousands of lives.

-In 1966, the CIA was complicit in the overthrow of President Kwame Nkrumah in Ghana through a military coup.

-In 1973, the Chilean military, with the support of the United States, staged a coup against the democratically elected President Salvador Allende.

-In the 1980s, the United States supported death squad leaders in places such as El Salvador and Haiti, and sponsored the Nicaraguan Contras, providing them with assassination manuals in Spanish.

The United States can't have it both ways.

It can't use lofty rhetoric about spreading freedom and democracy and then engage in the cold-hearted and cold-blooded policy of supporting tyrants.

It can't criticize the human-rights records of some nations, like Cuba, ignore the records of others, like China, and then turn around and engage in torture, disappearances and indefinite detention without trial.

As Americans, we like to think of ourselves as upholders of democracy and freedom. But our history of support for dictators does not back up that claim. And the Bush administration's actions mock it.

Our next president has a moral obligation to end this hypocrisy.

Nothing Good Comes Out of Texas

bushorchimp.com

By David A. Love
Published in BlackCommentator.com
September 13, 2007

Eddie Murphy once said, "My friends always told me: 'You better not go to Texas! They'll f*** you up!'" For African Americans in particular, that state has a troubling legacy of racism and violence.

In recent years, there was the dragging death of James Byrd in Jasper, Texas, and the mass arrests of the Black population of Tulia, Texas on bogus drug charges.

These days, it seems that the individuals and ideas that are doing the most damage to America come out of Texas. Is it something in the water? The air, perhaps? Sadly, the people of Texas are determined to scrape the bottom of their state barrel, collect whatever it is they have scraped up, and present it to the rest of the country as a cruel and tasteless gift.

Of course there was Karl Rove, the "dirty-tricks" Nixon protégé who masterminded the criminal enterprise that is the current White House.

There was attorney general, Alberto Gonzales, crony extraordinaire who placed loyalty to the president above all else, including the Constitution. There was Tom Delay, exterminator and former G.O.P. congressman who gerrymandered the Texas electoral map into a Republican majority, and was indicted for money laundering and conspiracy to violate election laws.

There was No Child Left Behind, a sham program based on smoke and mirrors, a Texas model for high-stakes, corporate-style accountability in the schools that cooked the books, Enron-style, and covered up the high dropout rates of Black and Latino students.

Most of all, there is the Decider himself, the commander-in-chief who arguably was elected to the presidency twice through theft, and appealed to some people, at least initially, because he was the type of person with whom you wanted to have a beer. Of course, and not surprisingly, history already has been written on the worst presidency in American history, before the repudiated Bush presidency has even ended.

As governor of Texas, Bush presided over a killing machine that is the state's death penalty system. Recently, Texas executed its 400th person since reinstating capital punishment in 1982. And the state, while only 10 percent of the U.S. population, has been responsible for one third of the executions. We will never know how many innocent people have been sent to their deaths under the hick town justice of the Lone Star state.

A direct descendant of the extrajudicial lynchings so popular in the Jim Crow-era South, the death penalty in Texas is a product of frontier justice: racist, expedient, and arbitrary. And it is particularly popular among conservative evangelical Christians. It is no accident that 41 percent of death row inmates in Texas are Black, or that 79 percent of Texas executions involve a white victim. And a public defender system is a new concept in Texas. Remember, this is the state where a court once upheld the conviction of a man whose lawyer slept during trial. And they had no trouble executing juveniles and the mentally retarded until prevented from doing so by the Supreme Court.

The case of inmate Kenneth Foster is a good example of all that is bad about the death penalty, and the way in which Texas metes out its curiously arbitrary, sketchy and racially-tinged form of punishment. Foster was sent to death row under a questionable Texas law known as the law of parties. Under that law, the death penalty is imposed on anyone involved in a crime where a murder took place. This means that you don't actually have to kill anyone in order to receive a death sentence. As for Foster, who is Black, he was driving a car with three passengers, one of whom left the car, got into an altercation and shot a man to death in 1996.

Apparently, the law of parties was too problematic even for the current manager of the Texas killing machine, Gov. Rick Perry. Foster's state-sponsored murder was scheduled for August 30, 2007, amid statewide protests and calls from the European Union that Texas enact a moratorium on the death penalty. Perry responded to these outside agitators: "230 years ago, our forefathers fought a war to throw off the yoke of a European monarch and gain the freedom of self-determination. Texans long ago decided that the death penalty is a just and appropriate punishment for the most horrible crimes committed against our citizens. While we respect our friends in Europe, welcome their investment in our state and appreciate their interest in our laws, Texans are doing just fine governing Texas."

Then, days later, despite his tough talk, the governor stopped Foster's execution, the first such intervention of his seven-year tenure. This happened following a 6-to-1 vote by the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles, recommending a commutation of his sentence to life. An unusual occurrence, to be sure, but it shows that even a backward state such as Texas is susceptible to public pressure and international outrage.

Sparing Foster's life is a step in the right direction, but it can't stop there. Texans must resist the stranglehold that its regressive forces have on their state. The Texas Republican Party runs Texas. The state party's platform, which can be viewed as a blueprint for Bush's policies, proclaims that "the United States of America is a Christian Nation," and that "Our party pledges to exert its influence to...dispel the 'myth' of the separation of church and state." It also states that "We reject the establishment of any mechanism to process, license, record, register or monitor the ownership of guns."

Further, "[t]he Party supports the termination of bilingual education programs" and "urges Congress to repeal government-sponsored programs that deal with early childhood development, and phase them out as soon as possible." The Texas GOP platform also prohibits reproductive health care services in high schools, opposes the Endangered Species Act, and hopes to rescind U.S. membership in the United Nations.

To be sure, there is a long tradition of great Texans who have dared to speak truth to power and fight to make things right. The late Barbara Jordan, Mickey Leland and Molly Ivins, as well as Bill Moyers and Jim Hightower are but a handful of people who come to mind. However, it seems that the generous spirit these people represent is being forsaken. The good people in Texas need to have their voices heard, and must refuse to allow the state's bottom feeders to speak for them. Come on Texans, prove me wrong.

Copyright © 2007 by David A. Love