AAC Blog
Hazel Trice Edney, NNPA Editor-in-Chief
blackpoliticsontheweb.com
Despite record numbers of voters who turned out during the presidential primaries last spring, eight million African-Americans are still not registered to vote.
This according to Rick Wade, African-American vote director for the Obama for America presidential campaign.
“Our principle focus has been a 50-state voter registration initiative. I think we all appreciate that if we increase the number of African-American registered voters and then increase turnout and get people to the polls on Nov. 4, then Sen. Obama will be the next president of the United States,” Wade says.
Wade explains that the eight million unregistered Black voters accounts for 32 percent of eligible Black voting population nationwide
Wade explains that the eight million unregistered Black voters accounts for 32 percent of eligible Black voting population nationwide.
“In 2004, African-Americans made up approximately 11 percent of the overall vote nationwide. If the percentage of African-Americans was a mere two-and-a-half percent higher at 13-and-a-half percent, Democrats would currently be running for re-election at this time,” he said. “For example in the state of Ohio in 2004, we lost by two percent or 100,000 votes. There were 270,000 unregistered African-Americans. I use that as an illustration to show how the African-American vote can make the difference in a state and across this country.So the African-American vote can absolutely make the difference in this election.''
But, the Democrats are not alone in going after the Black vote. Republicans, who barely get a tenth of Black voters in presidential elections, say they are not giving up.
''The [Republican National Convention] is working to turn out voters of all races to support Sen. John McCain and all of our Republican candidates, by focusing on using a strong grassroots program that relies on neighbor to neighbor interactions, putting out surrogates on a daily basis, and registering and mobilizing voters,” says RNC spokesman Sean Conner. “Chairman Duncan has visited 38 states in the last 16 months, and our Party’s nominee has participated in important African-American national events such as the NAACP conference and the National Urban League Convention. We’re looking forward to increased support from the African-American community, and will compete for each vote within the various ethnic communities of our country.''
As both parties prepare for grassroots mobilization efforts at their back to back conventions (Democrats, last week of August and Republican, first week of September), non-partisan groups have intensified their efforts with grassroots campaigns year round.
Melanie Campbell, executive director of the non-partisan National Coalition on Black Civic Participation, says because of the intensity of voter registration efforts, there’s a great possibility to take voter registration to a whole new level, particularly in the Black community, by intensifying voter education and focusing on issues.
“The potential is that you will create a whole new expanded electorate. It’s something that we’ve been trying to have happen for a lot of years,” Campbell says. “Because traditionally, there’s been about 15 million people not voting in the general election. So, this has potential for that number to go down tremendously…If the trend continues, because it’s so competitive, it’s going to drive the turn out and that’s going to be across all demographics.”
The intensity of the current election and get-out-to-vote efforts have caught fire from coast to coast and doesn’t begin and end with the presidential election.
“They’re elections from the school board to the presidency that impacts your life,” Campbell says. “We know the presidency is a big deal. But, it is one of many elections that’s taking place on Nov. 4.”
“This is an enormously solemn day for Members of Congress, the Congressional Black Caucus family, Ohio residents and the world. Chairwoman Tubbs Jones was undoubtedly a true steward of the people. She dedicated her life to ensure that life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness was afforded to every American. Her command of the law was only matched by her boundless sense of integrity.”
“Chairwoman Tubbs Jones’ illustrious career included a crowd of firsts. She was the first African American woman elected to the United States House of Representatives from Ohio. She was the first African American female to serve on the House Ways and Means Committee. She was the first African American and the first female to serve as Cuyahoga County, Ohio Prosecutor. She was the first African American woman to sit on the Common Pleas bench in the State of Ohio.
“In the halls of Congress she was revered by her colleagues as a fair, yet firm Chair of the Standard of Official Conduct Committee. Throughout Ohio communities, she was celebrated for her tireless advocacy and intervention. Within the Congressional Black Caucus family she will be forever cherished and gravely missed.”
“Our collective prayers and condolences are extended to her son Mervyn Jones, II, her sister Barbara, her entire family, her staff and the host of loved ones who knew and loved her.”
“Members of the Congressional Black Caucus will proudly continue to uphold the legacy of our leader, Congresswoman Stephanie Tubbs Jones and earnestly pay tribute to her life and service through all our endeavors.”
“This is an enormously solemn day for Members of Congress, the Congressional Black Caucus family, Ohio residents and the world. Chairwoman Tubbs Jones was undoubtedly a true steward of the people. She dedicated her life to ensure that life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness was afforded to every American. Her command of the law was only matched by her boundless sense of integrity.”
“Chairwoman Tubbs Jones’ illustrious career included a crowd of firsts. She was the first African American woman elected to the United States House of Representatives from Ohio. She was the first African American female to serve on the House Ways and Means Committee. She was the first African American and the first female to serve as Cuyahoga County, Ohio Prosecutor. She was the first African American woman to sit on the Common Pleas bench in the State of Ohio.
“In the halls of Congress she was revered by her colleagues as a fair, yet firm Chair of the Standard of Official Conduct Committee. Throughout Ohio communities, she was celebrated for her tireless advocacy and intervention. Within the Congressional Black Caucus family she will be forever cherished and gravely missed.”
“Our collective prayers and condolences are extended to her son Mervyn Jones, II, her sister Barbara, her entire family, her staff and the host of loved ones who knew and loved her.”
“Members of the Congressional Black Caucus will proudly continue to uphold the legacy of our leader, Congresswoman Stephanie Tubbs Jones and earnestly pay tribute to her life and service through all our endeavors.”
http://www.alternet.org/story/95109/how_anti-intellectualism_is_destroying_america/
August 15, 2008 | AlterNet | INTERVIEW
By Terrence McNally, AlterNet
"It's like these guys take pride in being ignorant." Barack Obama finally said it.
Though a successful political and electoral strategy, the Right's stand against intelligence has steered them far off course, leaving them -- and us -- unable to deal successfully with the complex and dynamic circumstances we face as a nation and a society.
American 15-year-olds rank 24th out of 29 countries in math literacy, and their parents are as likely to believe in flying saucers as in evolution; roughly 30 to 40 percent believe in each. Their president believes "the jury is still out" on evolution.
Steve Colbert interviewed Georgia Rep. Lynn Westmoreland on "The Colbert Report." Westmoreland co-sponsored a bill that would require the display of the Ten Commandments in both the House of Representatives and the Senate, but, when asked, couldn't actually list the commandments.
This stuff would be funny if it weren't so dangerous.
In the 2004 election, nearly 70 percent of Bush supporters believed the United States had "clear evidence" that Saddam Hussein was working closely with al Qaeda; a third believed weapons of mass destruction were found in Iraq; and more than a third that a substantial majority of world opinion supported the U.S.-led invasion, according to the Program on International Policy Attitudes at the University of Maryland. The political right and allied culture warriors actively ignore evidence and encourage misinformation. To motivate their followers, they label intelligent and informed as "elite," implying that ignorance is somehow both valuable and under attack.
Susan Jacoby confronts our "know-nothingism" -- current and historical -- in her new book, The Age of American Unreason.
A former reporter for the Washington Post and program director of the Center for Inquiry-New York City, Jacoby is the author of five books, including Wild Justice, a Pulitzer Prize finalist, and Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism. Her political blog, The Secularist's Corner, is on the Web site of the Washington Post.
Terrence McNally: Have things gotten worse? How were things different as you were growing up?
Susan Jacoby: Well, I have just been told that all of my memories of growing up are wrong, because memory is absolutely inaccurate. It's only a "narrative."
I'll give you an example of how stupid this country has become. I'm one of the village atheists on Faith, a panel sponsored by the Washington Post and Newsweek. In a recent post I wrote that when I was 7 years old, I was taken by my mom to visit a friend who had been stricken by polio and was in an iron lung. Polio has basically been eradicated, but I grew up when polio was still a real threat to children, before the Salk vaccine.
This childhood friend had been playing and running only three weeks before, and now he was in an iron lung. And I asked my mom, "Why would God let something like that happen?" And to her credit, instead of giving me some moronic answer, my mother said, "I don't know."
After posting this on Faith, I received an e-mail saying, "All childhood memories are unreliable. We construct narratives to justify what we now think."
Of course it would be stupid if I'd said I became an atheist at the age of 7. But I hadn't said that, only that I remembered this childhood experience as making me begin to question what I'd been taught. The whole tone of the e-mail was that nobody's memory about anything could possibly be accurate -- no fact could possibly be true.
TM: That doesn't sound like a typical evolution doubter. It sounds like an attack on rationality from a rational person.
SJ: That's right. One of the points I make in my book is that unreason pervades our culture. It's not just a matter of right-wing religious fundamentalism. There are all kinds of unreason and suspicion of evidence on both the Right and the Left.
TM: Misinformation may well have been the deciding factor in a close election in 2004. I worry not just about the lack of information and knowledge, but also the active disparagement of those who would even care about such things.
SJ: Contempt for fact is very important.
I'll give you a great example that's already obsolete. At the end of the primaries, both Hillary Clinton and John McCain endorsed a gas tax holiday for Americans this summer. Every economist, both liberal and conservative, said this would do nothing to help matters. And when Hillary Clinton was asked by the late Tim Russert, "Can you produce one economist to support the gas tax holiday?" she said, "Oh that's elite thinking."
Now to say that economists have nothing intelligent to say about whether a gas tax will give people economic relief is like saying that you don't ask musicians about music; you don't ask scientists about science. It's not just an attack on a political idea; it's an attack on knowledge itself.
TM: And this from a woman who was in the top of her class at Yale Law School.
SJ: Of course, she doesn't believe it for a minute. It shows that a lot of politicians think they have to play to ignorance and label anything that goes against received opinion as elitism.
I was quite encouraged that the actual majority of Americans -- both Republicans and Democrats -- said the gas tax was just a stupid gimmick.
TM: They were already getting a tax rebate check. At a certain point we see through this.
SJ: Elite simply means "the best," not the political meaning that's been ascribed to it. If you're having an operation, you don't want an ordinary surgeon. You want an elite surgeon. You want the best.
TM: I suspect the connotation is better known now than the actual definition. "Elite" now implies stuffy, superior, arrogant -- and, most importantly, not one of us.
SJ: These basic knowledge deficits -- the fact that American 15-year-olds are near the bottom in mathematical knowledge compared with other countries, for example -- actually affect our ability to understand larger public issues. To understand what it means that the top 1 percent of income earners are getting tax breaks, you have to know what 1 percent means.
TM: Richard Hofstadter's 1963 classic, Anti-Intellectualism in American Life, described our anti-intellectualism as "older than our national identity." Yet our founders developed a form of government that demanded an informed citizenry. How do these two things fit together?
SJ: That's really the American paradox. For example, there is no country that has had more faith in education as an instrument of social mobility. No country in the West democratized education earlier, but no country has been more suspicious of too much education. We've always thought of education as good if it gets you a better job, but bad if it makes you think too much.
Hofstadter was writing at the dawn of video culture, so he could not talk about one of the key things in my book. The domination of culture by mass media, video and 24/7 infotainment has been added to the American mix in the last 40 years. Video culture is the worst possible means for understanding anything more complicated than a sound bite.
TM: I recall the book The Sound Bite Society (by Jeffrey Scheuer, 2000) said that television inherently prefers simplistic arguments, simple solutions, simple answers.
SJ: As we're talking, I happen to have my computer on. News stories are flashing and off the screen. If they're on for two seconds, you're going to miss a lot, and that's the problem with video culture as translated through computers.
TM: Having all that information at our fingertips is a plus. What's the negative?
SJ: I love that I don't have to go through half a dozen books to find a date that I've forgotten. The ability to get quick information is great, but if you don't have a framework of knowledge in which to fit that information, it means nothing.
I'll give you an example. In my talks to people, I often mention a statistic from the National Constitution Center that almost half of Americans can't name even one of the rights guaranteed by the First Amendment. A student stood up at a university in California and said, "That doesn't matter because you can just look it up on the Internet." But if you don't know what the First Amendment is in the first place, you don't know what question to ask the Web.
Garbage in, garbage out. The Web's only as good as our ability to ask questions of it. The ability to access information means nothing if you don't have an educated framework of knowledge to fit it into.
TM: Why America? Other countries have television and the Internet.
SJ: The network of infotainment has no national boundaries, it's all over the world. But there are a couple of things that make America particularly susceptible.
A fundamentalist is one who believes in a literal interpretation of sacred books, and a third of Americans believe in a literal interpretation of the Bible. That's about 10 times more than any other developed country in the world. It's entirely possible to be a religious believer and to accept science, but not if you're a literal religious believer. You can't believe that the world was literally created in six days, and be open to modern knowledge.
There's also something else: We've always had more faith in technology than other countries. One of our problems with computers is that we believe in technological solutions to what are essentially non-technological problems. Not knowing is a non-technological problem. The idea that the Web is an answer to knowing nothing is wrong, but it's something that Americans -- with our history of believing in technology as the solution to everything -- are particularly susceptible to.
TM: I'm beginning to feel like the child who keeps asking "Why?" You say that a much larger percentage of Americans believe in the literal word of holy books. In your investigations, have you come up with some sense of why that is?
SJ: That's in my previous book, Freethinkers. One reason, oddly enough, is our absolute separation of church and state. In secular Europe -- as it's often called sneeringly by people like Justice Antonin Scalia -- religious belief and belief in political systems were united. So if you opposed the government, you also had to oppose religion. That wasn't true in America because we had separation of church and state. Many forms of religious belief survived in America, because you could believe anything you wanted and still not be opposed to your government.
TM: So because religion wasn't tied to government we had more freedom ...
SJ: And more religion.
TM: But what is it in our culture? Is our geographical isolation part of it?
SJ: You anticipated what I was going to say. There's also the idea of American exceptionalism -- that America is different from every other country.
I say in my book that Americans are unwilling to look at how really bad our educational system is because we've all been propagandized with the idea that we're number one. That may have been true after World War II, but not anymore. The idea that we're number one and special and better than everybody else is a very powerful factor in American life, and it prevents us from examining certain respects in which we're not number one.
TM: Politicians in particular tend to preface any comment by saying, "Well, of course we have the best education system," "We have the best health care," the best this and that. And people accept that even though we have clear evidence that it is no longer true.
SJ: Evidence involving infant mortality and life expectancy. Though the very rich in this country get the best health care in the world, by all of the normal indices of health, we are worse off than Europe and Canada.
TM: Our universities and particularly our graduate schools are still the envy of the world, but with the education available to everyone, that's no longer so.
SJ: Right, and to call arguments like mine elitist is wrong. I think that the basis of a society is what people with normal levels of education understand. That means we need to be concerned about elementary schools, secondary schools and community colleges -- not what people at Harvard and Yale might be learning.
TM: What are the possible solutions?
SJ: There are solutions at a social level, but they have to begin at an individual level.
After the Wisconsin primary, Barack Obama was asked a question about education, and I was very encouraged when he said, "There's a lot we can do about education, but first of all, in our homes we have to turn off the TV more ..." Not altogether, but turn it off more, put the video games on the shelf more and spend more time talking and reading to our kids.
With my book, more than making a prescription, I wanted to start a conversation about how we spend our time. I'm not one of these people who think that you should raise your kids without ever watching TV. We all have to live in the world of our time. I'm saying people ought to look about how much time we spend on this. There is nothing wrong with a parent coming home and putting a kid in front of a video for an hour so they can have a drink and an intelligent conversation with their partner. It's wrong when the hour turns into two hours or three hours or four hours or five hours, as in too many American homes.
TM: When it becomes just a habit.
SJ: Moderation. I know it's very unfashionable and it seems like a small idea, but I think more than what people watch on video, what matters is how much they watch it.
TM: I believe we're finding that as kids become more addicted to television and other screens, they become less familiar with nature, with their own bodies, with what we would call the real world.
It strikes me that intelligence has been defined by so many as just cognitive intelligence. Is part of the solution that we begin to shift our way of thinking, so that intelligence includes emotional intelligence and other forms of intelligence?
SJ: No. I don't actually recognize these different forms of intelligence. Emotional intelligence depends largely on whether we are brought up to empathize with other people. But it doesn't matter if you're kind to others and you understand them if you don't know anything about your society and history.
These are actually different things, and my point is, one doesn't substitute for the other. They're all important. In terms of society, having emotional intelligence without knowledge is useless. And, of course, having knowledge without emotional intelligence is also useless. But they're not the same thing.
I think spending eight hours a day in front of television -- the amount of time the average American family has a television on in its home -- is probably bad for both emotional intelligence and knowledge. I don't think these things are in opposition, they're both necessary. Neither of them is adequate without the other.
Interviewer Terrence McNally hosts Free Forum on KPFK 90.7 FM, Los Angeles (streaming at kpfk.org). Visit terrencemcnally.net for podcasts of all interviews and more.
http://harpers.org/archive/2008/08/hbc-90003387
August 12, 2008 | Harper's Magazine | Scott Horton's 'No Comment' blog
By Scott Horton
Prior to his confirmation, Michael Mukasey fessed up, in a written response to Senator Dick Durbin, to a meeting the White House arranged with a group of movement conservatives. The team he met with had a simple agenda: They wanted his assurance that he would not appoint special prosecutors to go after administration figures involved in serious scandals at the Justice Department, including the U.S. attorneys scandal and the introduction of torture with formal Justice Department cover, and they wanted his assurance that Justice would continue to provide legal cover to “the Program.” The team who met Mukasey included figures on the periphery of the scandal who may have had personal reasons to fear an investigation. But Mukasey is clearly keeping the understanding that brought him to the cherished post of attorney general. And that’s bad news for the Justice Department and its reputation.
Today he addressed the annual convention of the American Bar Association, and expanded upon what may be known to future generations as the “Mukasey Doctrine.” This doctrine holds that political appointees in the Justice Department who breach the public trust by using their positions for partisan political purposes face no punishment for their crimes. In the Mukasey view, this is all simple political gamesmanship—“boys will be boys”—and sufficient accountability is provided by exposing their games to the public limelight.
After reviewing in the briefest terms the recent internal Justice Department probe into the politicization of the hiring process in the honors program, with respect to immigration judges and in other areas, here’s what Mukasey has to say:
The conduct described in those reports is disturbing. The mission of the Justice Department is the evenhanded application of the Constitution and the laws enacted under it. That mission has to start with the evenhanded application of the laws within our own Department. Some people at the Department deviated from that strict standard, and the institution failed to stop them.
I want to stress that last point because there is no denying it: the system failed. The active wrong-doing detailed in the two joint reports was not systemic in that only a few people were directly implicated in it. But the failure was systemic in that the system–the institution–failed to check the behavior of those who did wrong. There was a failure of supervision by senior officials in the Department. And there was a failure on the part of some employees to cry foul when they were aware, or should have been aware, of problems.
Note how Mukasey plays the entire affair down and uses the traditional language of the criminal defendant–for him it was a “system failure.” His language is passive: things evidently just happened. But in fact a closer read of the Inspector General’s report shows that the figures involved and the schemes adopted had a clear provenance in the White House, and specifically in the warren of Karl Rove. The actors under investigation, Kyle Sampson and Monica Goodling, had come with Alberto Gonzales from the White House. They benefited from an extraordinary delegation of authority from Gonzales that allowed them, two thirty-somethings with little experience, to exercise the authority of the attorney general in the hiring and firing process. This didn’t “just happen.” It was the result of a careful plan for partisan entrenchment at Justice—consciously pursued in defiance of the law. A serious investigation would have focused on the senior figures responsible for this program. So what is the penalty for such a systematic violation of the law? Well, according to Mukasey, there isn’t one. Those involved have already suffered enough. Yes, they suffer because their misdeeds are now known.
Their misconduct has now been laid bare by the Justice Department for all to see.
But in fact, the Justice Department didn’t willingly lay this bare. It had to be dragged kicking and screaming to the truth. Its instincts throughout the entire process were to cover up and lie about what was being done—as the inspector general documented in excruciating detail. And while Michael Mukasey praises the career professionals around him, the facts are that he has surrounded himself with political flacks who were deeply enmeshed in the cover up.
Mukasey insists that the process of partisan entrenchment has been checked following his arrival. A measure of skepticism on this point is warranted. In fact, the problem is far broader than the two probes undertaken by the Justice Department’s internal investigators. In a recent interview with a former first assistant U.S. attorney, I collected details of a widespread buy-out program used by the Gonzales and Ashcroft Justice Department to remove career professionals in several U.S. attorneys offices. In one case I have examined, this tool was used to replace career professionals with hacks who were obviously hired in violation of the civil service rules. But this matter has not yet even been probed.
Still, the two IG reports on hiring are a mere prelude to the forthcoming report on the U.S. attorney’s scandal. The message that Mukasey is sending seems to be this: he will refuse to appoint a special prosecutor to look into the matter, whatever the inspector general suggests. In the Mukasey view, it will be enough punishment for the truth to come out.
Yet in a single sentence, Mukasey gave a different signal.
If anyone—whether Democrat or Republican, whether appointed through a flawed process or a flawless one–is found to be handling or deciding cases based on politics, and not based on what the law and facts require, there will be a swift and unambiguous response.
How serious is Mukasey about this promise? He’s had plenty of opportunities so far, and there is no sign of action from the attorney general. Indeed, the entire thrust of his speech gives grave reason to doubt there will ever be any action at all. And with the next report, Mukasey’s promise may be put squarely to the test.
