blackagendareport.com

by Pam Martens

The candidate that claims to be the only presidential contender who doesn't take money from lobbyists is in fact the biggest recipient of lobby-related contributions. Barack Obama rakes in millions from law firms serving the interests of Wall Street, including the financial institutions that gave us the subprime lending crisis. Lawyers that work for firms that earn hundreds of millions of dollars for lobbying may technically not be lobbyists, but they share in their colleagues' earnings as influencers of Congress - a legal loophole that allows Obama to claim his hands are clean of lobby loot. "The top contributors to the Obama campaign are the very Wall Street firms whose shady mortgage lenders buried the elderly and the poor and minority under predatory loans."

by Nikki Ayanna Stewart

When the Black Freedom Movement withered away from disuse and neglect, it left a generation of enthusiastic young activists-to-be with unprecedented "access" to white dominated institutions, but no movement with which to affiliate. What's a determined mover-and-shaker to do? Get a job, that's what. While the author's friends settled in as corporate lawyers, management consultants and other odd jobs, she was fortunate enough to become - for a time - a "professional feminist" working for "reformist" non-profits. But financial pressures pushed her towards academia, and the realization that "I and others in my group" are "repositories for the Civil Rights generation's left-over hopes and dreams." Barack Obama, she now understands, has been the "symbolic beneficiary and repository" of those dreams - which is not the same thing.

by Shannon Prince

Some supporters of Barack Obama have seized the occasion of the confrontation with Rev. Jeremiah Wright to air a litany of old grievances. In an op-ed article for Newsday, Michael Meyers, head of the New York Civil Rights Coalition, who despises anything that smacks of Black Nationalism, labeled Rev. Wright a "crackpot" along with the rest of what he calls the "blacker-than-thou crowd." According to Meyers, Rev. Wright is an "endangered species" - there is no place for his ilk in the 21^st Century. Meyers believes that Blacks who attend elite colleges agree with him, that racism is not endemic in America. However, one of those Black Ivy leaguers is determined to set Meyers straight: "What Reverend Wright said about America isn't divisive or fiery or anti-white but merely factual truth."

by Ali Abunimah

If Liberation Theologians like Rev. Jeremiah Wright feel discarded by Barack Obama, consider the Palestinians. By all accounts, as an Illinois State Senator Obama was at least open-minded about the plight of Palestinians - to the distress of Israel lobbyists. No more. Obama managed to inject pro-Israel, anti-"radical Islam" remarks into his speech on race relations in the U.S. He speaks of a history of "tensions" between African Americans and Jewish Americans, but fails to trace these conflicts to Israel's support for apartheid South Africa. And then there is Min. Louis Farrakhan. "Why must every black candidate to a major office go through the ritual of denouncing Farrakhan, a marginal figure in national politics?" Rejection of Farrakhan and unquestioning support for Israel is the price of admission to mainstream U.S. politics.

by Nikolas Kozloff

 

Sometimes it seems the bigger the Congressional Black Caucus (CBC) becomes, the worse it gets. Gone are the not-so-long-ago days when the CBC could be counted on to present a virtually unified, progressive front on domestic and foreign policy issues. While Black activists increasingly embrace the Latin American sector of the global African Diaspora, the CBC as a body remains parochial, as if unaware that millions of Blacks live in South America. Most shameful is the CBC's failure to take a firm stand on behalf of Afro-Colombians, targeted by rightwing death squads allied with the U.S.-backed government. A significant faction in the CBC supports corporate-written trade deals with Colombia that would displace and further impoverish much of the Black population, whose representatives have repeatedly beseeched the Black Caucus for help.