We Shall Overcome!Time for Third World including South Asia to Kill Manusmriti and Apartheid Hegemonies!My Black Untouchable Father Pulin Babu also had a DREAM that WE All WOULD BE LIBERATED, EMPOWERED AND EQUAL Some Day!He Could Not Prove Himself Neither a Martin Luther King Nor a BARRACK OBAMA. Are the DREAMS of our Ancestors DEAD for Ever? Just Awaken, Educate and Organise!Then Mobilise RESSISTANCE GALAXYWIDE! The Thundering Spring from Americas would Visit Asia Some day or other day! HOW Long we would remain Predestined to be STARVED, DISPLACED and KILLED?
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PalashKL
Nov 6, 2008, 2:36:52 PM11/6/08
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We Shall Overcome!Time for Third World including South Asia to Kill
Manusmriti and Apartheid Hegemonies!My Black Untouchable Father Pulin
Babu also had a DREAM that WE All WOULD BE LIBERATED, EMPOWERED AND
EQUAL Some Day!He Could Not Prove Himself Neither a Martin Luther King
Nor a BARRACK OBAMA. Are the DREAMS of our Ancestors DEAD for Ever?
Just Awaken, Educate and Organise!Then Mobilise RESSISTANCE
GALAXYWIDE! The Thundering Spring from Americas would Visit Asia Some
day or other day! HOW Long we would remain Predestined to be STARVED,
DISPLACED and KILLED?
Troubled Galaxy Destroyed Dreams: Chapter 102
Palash Biswas
Bush On Transition Of Office
http://in.youtube.com/watch?v=zfJc9Sjw4DU
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NEW: Obama claims Indiana, 349-163 electoral vote advantage
Barack Obama scores wins with women, African-Americans, young voters
Obama to voters: "Change has come to America"
Obama will be working with heavily Democratic Congress
We Shall Overcome!Time for Third World including South Asia to Kill
Manusmriti and Apartheid Hegemonies!My Black Untouchable Father Pulin
Babu also had a DREAM that WE All WOULD BE LIBERATED, EMPOWERED AND
EQUAL Some Day!He Could Not Prove Himself Neither a Martin Luther King
Nor a BARRACK OBAMA. Are the DREAMS of our Ancestors DEAD for Ever?
Just Awaken, Educate and Organise, The Thundering Spring from Americas
would Visit Asia Some day or other day! HOW Long we would remain
Predestined to be STARVED, DISPLACED and KILLED?
Chandrayaan takes pictures of moon!
The Terrain Mapping Camera (TMC) on board Chandrayaan-1 has started
taking pictures of the moon. On Tuesday evening, when the spacecraft
was in the lunar transfer orbit, it photographed the crescent moon
from a distance of some 2.5 lakh km.
The TMC took pictures of the earth when it was made operational on
October 29. The pictures showed the northern and southern coasts of
Australia.
The Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) performed the fifth and
final orbit-raising manoeuvre of Chandrayaan-1 early Tuesday morning,
which put the spacecraft in the lunar transfer orbit. In the evening,
the TMC, one of its 11 scientific instruments, took images of the
moon.
M. Annadurai, Project Director, Chandrayaan-1, said: “The pictures
were taken when the spacecraft was more than 2.5 lakh km away from the
moon. We did again the entire chain of tests of the 11 instruments,
data handling, data storage, downlinking, radio frequency and so on.”
Chandrayaan-1 will reach the moon’s vicinity on November 8. According
to ISRO’s present plans, the spacecraft will be lowered into its final
orbit on November 15, in which it will go round the moon at an
altitude of 100 km.
I saw him haunted lifelong as the DREAM of Liberation continued to
boil within him. As a child I was fortunate enough to share his
dreams! But as soon as I developed my vision and committed myself to a
certain IDEOLOGY alienated from our Black Untouchable Aboriginal
Indigenous social fabrics, we were separarted as two islands. I could
never help him in his lifelong struggle to bring a CHANGE in our
people`s life and I could never realise this in his lifetime. But I
always felt the POWER and the Inspiration of the DREAM! It was not so
loud as I SHALL OVERCOME! Rather we used to sing this Black Song to
liberate India! Liberation was not to come in our way as we lost our
roots in Negroid Anarya Dravid Indigenous Life and Heritage. We were
never so Black to identify with the Blacks and untouchables worldwide.
so we let the KILLING Machine go on! So, we still wait for a CHANGE so
Visulised by our Parents and ancestors! The CHANGE rather has come
from a land well known for the centre of Global ruling Class, Global
hegemony and Global Fascism, Manusmriti, Aparteid, Zionism, Corporate
Imperialism, Capitalism, Star Wars, Nuclear Biological Chemical
Warfare! It was possible just because our Brothers and Sisters in
United States of America never forgot the DREAM!
We always chanted the Song: We SHALL OVERCOME!
BUT WE NEVER BELIEVE THAT WE COULD BRING THE CHANGE! THUS THUNDERING
SPRING FAILED IN OUR HEART!
I saw my father struck by CANCER in his Spinal Chord and brething
last, DREAMING all the Time! He could Visualise the CHANGE which our
generation could not. rather we contributed to strengthen the chains
of Enslavement being the tools and parts of the Brahaminical syatem in
India!
My Father and his people were ejected from their Home Land in East
Bengal just because they Elected DR Bhimrao Ambedkar to the
Constitution Assembelly. They were deprived of Citizenship,
Reservation, political representation, Mother Tongue, cultural
identity, history and geography , civil and human rights!
My father led a Movement in SILIGURI Bengal when the Brahmin leaders
tried to convert our Agrarian Bengali outcaste Refugges into TEA
GARDEN Coolies. He continued the fight in ranaghta Coopers Camp and
entire bengal until he was sent to Orissa, in CHARBETIA Refugee camp
near Cuttak. He was once agian the leader of all agitation and was
dumped into the Jungles of Nainital Terai, famous to be linked with
GIM CORBETT in 1954. He led the Bengali refugees in a strong movement
for rehabilitation in 1956 before my birth. My Village Basantipur was
established after that movement where I was Born and my mother Basanti
Devi never left the village, inhibited by my father`s lifelong
comrades!
In 1958, My father and his comrades led the famous DHIMRI BLOCK
peasant`s insurrection inspired by TELENGANA Uprising! They not only
faced unprecedented STATE and MILITARY Repression, but they had to
bear with the Betrayal by the COMMUNIST PARTY OF INDIA undivided and
led by Comrade PC Joshi, the Brahmin General secretary.
He went to Riot Torn Assam to stand with his people in 1960 and was
ousted from the party. I was growing up. He would take me with him in
every local tour however important or tedious or dangereous. He wanted
to train me in Mobilising Affairs! I miserably failed as I tended to
be much more Academic with systematic education. I was studious but he
studied life. He was involved with the social fabrics. I saw him to
interact with the common masses, all Black, Untouchable, indigenous
castes and communities, minorities as well as the topmost Political
leaders in India including all the Prime Ministers of India since
pandit Jawahar lal Nehru. He dared to block Lucknow Charbagh RLY
Station for more than two days while a Bengali chief Minister Sucheta
Kriplani was in office asnd eventually who was pulled back due to the
refugee movement. I also felt his hurt feelings while he used to visit
Barabanki or Meerut during riots to stand with the minorities. But I
never could realise how the SIKHS in Terai considered him as the
Gandhi of Terai as I hated gandhi as well as Gandhians most. Since I
was a Marxist since Schooldays, I never believed his version of
Indigenous Indian history and read Ambedkar and Jogendra Nath manadal
along with the history of subaltern social movement very late, yes,
after the demise of my father.
Yes, my friend, we happen the poor fellows who never understand the
social activism of our parents! Who never understand the Dreams of our
Ancestors!
I never know whether BARRACK OBAM is enough Black for the DREAM of
Martin Luther King. I never know whether he would be able to deal with
the Zionist White HOUSE, PENTAGON, World Bank, IMF, WTO, UN,
NASA ,GATT or CIA, but he has proved himself a Man who inspired the
Black Untouchables, Indigenous, aboriginan communities and Minorities
to believe that NOTHING IS IMPOSSIBLE and WE CAN! He made us believe
that the DREAMS of our parents and anchestors are never dead. It is
ALIVE and it is within our Heart. Just we have to feel it and activate
our real Identity for Awakening, Education, Organisation and Movement
for the CHANGE!
Latin American leaders expressed optimism Wednesday that Barack
Obama's election to the presidency of the United States would lead to
better relations.
Veneuzelan President Hugo Chavez says the election of "an African
descendent" is historic.
1 of 2 "It is a message of hope," said Jorge Taiana, Argentina's
minister of foreign affairs.
"A message of hope and evidence that a cycle in the world is closing,
a cycle dominated by a neoliberal ideology and by a policy of
unilateralism and imposition of its positions."
Bolivian President Evo Morales, who recently stopped cooperating with
U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration agents working to stem the flow
of cocaine northward, called Obama's triumph "historic."
"In the name of the government of Bolivia, I congratulate him," he
said about Obama's victory.
"It is historic. My great desire is that the new government end the
blockade of Cuba and withdraw its troops from other countries, and I
hope that relations with the United States improve."
In Venezuela, the foreign ministry of the government of President Hugo
Chavez congratulated Obama and called for the establishment of new
relations between the two countries.
"The historic election of an African descendent to lead the most
powerful nation in the world is the symptom that the change that has
been gestating from the south of the Americas could be knocking at the
doors of the United States," Chavez said, referring to the
hemisphere's increased number of leftist governments.
The Colombian government, which has been the Bush administration's
closest ally in Latin America, also congratulated Obama and reiterated
its readiness to continue working on matters of mutual interest to
strengthen ties between the two countries.
Brazilian Foreign Minister Celso Amorim indicated that, despite good
relations with the United States, he hopes "that the change in
government results in an easing in relations with Latin America,
especially with Venezuela and Cuba."
Obama's election redraws America's electoral divide
CHICAGO, Illinois (CNN) -- Barack Obama did more than thump John
McCain in the Electoral College tally; he also handily won the popular
vote and redrew the great divide between red states and blue states.
Barack Obama addresses a crowd of more than 200,000 at Grant Park in
Chicago, Illinois.
1 of 3 more photos » Riding a Democratic tide that bolstered the
party's presence in both houses of Congress, Obama snared about 63
million votes to McCain's 55.8 million, according to totals early
Wednesday.
According to exit polls, Obama crushed McCain among women voters (56
percent to 43 percent); voters under 30 (66 percent to 32 percent);
African-American voters (95 percent to 4 percent); Latino voters (66
percent to 32 percent); first-time voters (68 percent to 31 percent);
and voters making less than $100,000 a year (55 percent to 43
percent).
"I think this is the passing of an old order," CNN senior political
analyst David Gergen said as the results rolled in Tuesday night and
the outcome became increasingly evident. Read what analysts had to
say about the victory »
"I think what we see ... is a new coalition, a new order emerging. It
isn't quite there, but with Barack Obama, for the first time, it's
won. It is the Latino vote we just heard about. It is the bigger black
vote that came out. Very importantly, it's the youth vote, the 18-
to-29-year-old," said the Harvard University professor and former
presidential adviser. Watch Obama pay tribute to McCain »
Early voting totals in the East suggested things would go
traditionally, with McCain taking most of the Southeast, Obama most of
the Northeast.
But then things quickly changed, as the senator from Illinois struck
-- first in Pennsylvania and then in the Midwest state of Ohio, states
McCain had to win in his bid for the Oval Office. Obama then delivered
an uppercut in Virginia, a state that had not voted for a Democratic
president since 1964. See your state's county-by-county totals
Don't Miss
Read Obama's victory speech
Read McCain's speech
Audio Slide Show: Obama's speech
Democrats pick up Senate seats
House Republicans lose seats
Complete video coverage
As polls closed from East to West, Obama kept hammering McCain, as he
snatched away Iowa, Colorado, New Mexico and Nevada -- states that had
been in President Bush's column in 2004.
And Wednesday morning, Obama added Indiana to the list of states he'd
turned from red to blue. Indiana hadn't voted for a Democrat since
Lyndon Johnson in 1964.
(Missouri and North Carolina were still counting votes Wednesday, but
it appeared one or two of them could become blue-state converts as
well.)
With McCain on the ropes, an Obama victory in Florida sounded the
death knell. What's next for Illinois and Delaware? »
When Indiana fell into Obama's column Wednesday morning, he had a
349-163 lead over his rival in electoral votes, with only 26
undecided.
As he claimed victory Tuesday night, Obama told supporters, "change
has come to America."
"The road ahead will be long. Our climb will be steep. We may not get
there in one year or even one term, but America -- I have never been
more hopeful than I am tonight that we will get there. I promise you
-- we as a people will get there," Obama said in Chicago before an
estimated crowd of up to 240,000 people.
With Obama's win, he becomes the first African-American to win the
White House.
McCain pledged Tuesday night to help Obama lead. Watch more on the
balance of power »
"Today, I was a candidate for the highest office in the country I love
so much, and tonight, I remain her servant," McCain said.
The senator from Arizona called Obama to congratulate him, and Obama
told him that he was eager to sit down and talk about how the two of
them can work together.
Obama will also be working with a heavily Democratic Congress.
Democrats picked up Senate seats in New Hampshire, New Jersey, North
Carolina and Virginia, among others. Read about the Senate races
But Obama pledged to work across party lines and listen to the 46
percent of voters who chose McCain.
"While the Democratic Party has won a great victory tonight, we do so
with a measure of humility and determination to heal the divides that
have held back our progress," Obama said.
"To those Americans whose support I have yet to earn -- I may not have
won your vote, but I hear your voices, I need your help, and I will be
your president, too," he said. Watch Obama tell voters "all things
are possible" »
And he recited the words of Abraham Lincoln, the first Republican in
White House, to call for unity.
"As Lincoln said to a nation far more divided than ours, 'We are not
enemies, but friends ... though passion may have strained it must not
break our bonds of affection,'" Obama said. Watch a discussion of
what Obama should do first »
Supporters in Chicago cheering, "Yes, we can," were met with cries of
"Yes, we did."
Bush also called Obama to offer his congratulations.
The president told Obama he was about to begin one of the great
journeys of his life, and invited him to the White House as soon as it
could be arranged, according to White House spokeswoman Dana Perino.
More than 1,000 people gathered outside the White House, chanting
"Obama, Obama!"
Sen. Hillary Clinton, Obama's former rival for the Democratic
nomination, said in a statement that "we are celebrating an historic
victory for the American people." iReport.com: Share your Election Day
reaction with CNN
"This was a long and hard fought campaign, but the result was well
worth the wait. Together, under the leadership of President Barack
Obama, Vice President Joe Biden and a Democratic Congress, we will
chart a better course to build a new economy and rebuild our
leadership in the world."
Sen. Edward Kennedy said Americans "spoke loud and clear" in electing
Obama.
"They understood his vision of a fairer and more just America and
embraced it. They heard his call for a new generation of Americans to
participate in government and were inspired. They believed that change
is possible and voted to be part of America's future," the
Massachusetts Democrat said in a statement.
Voters expressed excitement and pride in their country after casting
their ballots in the historic election. Poll workers reported high
turnout across many parts of the country, and some voters waited hours
to cast their ballots. Read about election problems
Tuesday marked the end of the longest presidential campaign season in
U.S. history -- 21 months.
Obama, 47, will begin his transition to the White House. He will be
sworn in as the 44th president on January 20.
http://edition.cnn.com/2008/POLITICS/11/05/election.president/index.html
We Shall Overcome
The black church has been at the forefront of black leadership and
social protest in America. In fact, Abyssinian Baptist Church was
founded out of protest.
Noah Adams traces the history of the civil rights song, "We Shall
Overcome." It began as a folk work song, became a hymn, and then was
used politically for the first time on the picket lines of the tobacco
workers' strike in South Carolina in 1945. In the early 1960s, it
became an inspirational force in the civil rights struggle. We hear
from Pete Seeger, Guy and Candi Carawan of the Highlander Center, and
Dr. Bernice Johnson-Reagon, one of the founding members of the Freedom
Singers.
We Shall Overcome
Lyrics derived from Charles Tindley's gospel song "I'll Overcome Some
Day" (1900), and opening and closing melody from the 19th-century
spiritual "No More Auction Block for Me" (a song that dates to before
the Civil War). According to Professor Donnell King of Pellissippi
State Technical Community College (in Knoxville, Tenn.), "We Shall
Overcome" was adapted from these gospel songs by "Guy Carawan, Candy
Carawan, and a couple of other people associated with the Highlander
Research and Education Center, currently located near Knoxville,
Tennessee. I have in my possession copies of the lyrics that include a
brief history of the song, and a notation that royalties from the song
go to support the Highlander Center."
1.
We shall overcome
We shall overcome
We shall overcome some day
CHORUS:
Oh, deep in my heart
I do believe
We shall overcome some day
2.
We'll walk hand in hand
We'll walk hand in hand
We'll walk hand in hand some day
CHORUS
3.
We shall all be free
We shall all be free
We shall all be free some day
CHORUS
4.
We are not afraid
We are not afraid
We are not afraid some day
CHORUS
5.
We are not alone
We are not alone
We are not alone some day
CHORUS
6.
The whole wide world around
The whole wide world around
The whole wide world around some day
CHORUS
7.
We shall overcome
We shall overcome
We shall overcome some day
CHORUS
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
SOURCES:
Eileen Southern, The Music of Black Americans: A History, Second
Edition (Norton, 1971): 546-47, 159-60.
The International Lyrics Server. <http://www.lyrics.ch/query/normal?
artist=&album=&song=We+Shall+Overcome>. March 1998.
Donnell King, email message, 29 Nov. 1999.
Meanwhile, Indian Ruling Brahaminical Hegemony led by Superslave DR
Manmohan Singh and Worldbank Chettiar Gangsters continue to FEED the
Miney Machine our Blood, Flesh and Bones as we never understand the
subversion, divide and rule game of Manusmriti based Brahminism, the
other face of the APartheid COIN! Continuing the consultation process
with India Inc, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh is likely to meet
corporate veterans including Keshub Ma
hindra, N Vaghul and Ashok S Ganguly tomorrow to seek their views on
the current crisis and also the steps that may be taken to neutralise
the impact of the global meltdown on the country.
Singh has already met some captains of Indian industry earlier this
week and assured them that the government will take steps to improve
liquidity and promote growth.
The Prime Minister has now called a meeting of a smaller group
comprising doyens of the Indian corporate world to discuss the current
economic scenario in the backdrop of the financial crisis in the US
and European countries.
Keshub Mahindra, who will be attending the meeting, is chairman of
automobile major Mahindra and Mahindra and had served on various
government committees including the Sachar Commission on Company Law
and MRTP and Central Advisory Council of Industries.
Veteran banker N Vaghul, who has been associated with the financial
sector for long years, is currently chairman of ICICI Bank.
ICI India Chairman Ashok Ganguly was chairman of the erstwhile
Hindustan Lever and is currently a member of the Investment
Commission.
Meanwhile, Chief Economic Adviser Arvind Virmani held a meeting with
chief financial officers (CFOs) of various companies to take stock of
the current credit crunch and work out steps to deal with the
problem.
Singh, while addressing India Inc, had said: "We recognise that the
situation is abnormal and we need to be constantly on the alert. The
situation is being watched on a day-to-day basis and more steps will
be taken if required."
On the other hand, Indian Ruling Class has to cheer for something!
Bobby Jindal has to wait for another Five Years with enhanced hope due
to the CHANGE!But Eighty Nine Percent NRIs voted for Barrack Obama
despite intense Black hatred just to have a slice of the changing
Future after the demise of Ambushed War Criminal BUSH, the mastermind
of Global Corporate Zionist Mass Destruction! It has already began!
Indian-American Sonal Shah, an eminent economist who heads Google’s
philanthropic arm, has been appointed an advisory board member by US
President-elect Barack Obama to assist his team in smooth transition
of power. 40-year-old Shah is part of a panel comprising individuals
with significant private and public sector experience who will offer
their expertise in their respective fields to Obama’s transition team,
US media reported on Thursday.
She along with other members of the advisory board will help the
transition team headed by former White House chief of staff John
Podesta, longtime Obama adviser Valerie Jarrett, and Pete Rouse, the
President-elect’s Senate chief of staff.
Shah, who was named the ‘Person of the Year 2003’ by ‘India Abroad’
publication, currently works for Google.org on their Global
Development team, where she is engaged in defining their global
development strategy and promoting the firm’s philanthropy work.
Prior to joining Google, she was Vice President at Goldman, Sachs and
Co. and developed and implemented its environmental strategy. She has
also served as the Associate Director for Economic and National
Security Policy at the Centre for American Progress, where she worked
on trade, outsourcing and post-conflict reconstruction issues.
In the past, she also worked with the Department of Treasury on
various economic issues and regions of the world.
Shah is the co-founder of the US-based non-profit organisation
Indicorps which offers one-year fellowships for Indian-origin
Americans to work on specific development projects in India.
Her father moved from Gujarat to New York in 1970 and she along with
her sister and mother joined him in 1972. She also has a brother.
World stock markets tumbled on Thursday, following Wall Street lower
as U.S. presidential election euphoria gave way to worries about the
global economy and company profits. Japan's Nikkei stock average
retreated 6.5 percent to 8,899.14, and Hong Kong's Hang Seng Index
lost 7.1 percent to 13,790.04. South Korea's benchmark Kospi index
broke a five-session winning streak to dive 7.6 percent. Markets in
Singapore, Australia and mainland China also dropped sharply.
European stocks got off to a weak start, with benchmarks in Germany,
Britain and France down about 3 percent. The pullback was in line with
weakness on Wall Street, where investor optimism surrounding the
election of Democrat Barack Obama as president quickly evaporated in
the face of gloomy economic news.
The U.S. service sector, the largest component of America's gross
domestic product, contracted sharply in October as new orders and
employment fell. Closer to home, a series of profit warnings from
major companies such as Japan's Toyota Motor Corp. and Isuzu Motors
Ltd. and Hong Kong carrier Cathay Pacific Airways Ltd. yanked the
markets back to the reality of depressed economic conditions. After
seeing some strong gains in recent days, many investors moved to take
profits.
News results for Obama
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Obama's election recalls so much pain, so recent
NEW YORK (AP): At this astonishing moment, let us pause to reflect:
Just 40 years ago, the kind of marriage that brought Barack Obama into
the world _ one between a black man and a white woman _ was illegal in
16 states.
We have come such a long way, in so very little time.
Not all the way, of course. There is still racism in America, as we
are reminded again and again _ most recently, during Obama's campaign
itself (``I'm afraid if he wins, the blacks will take over,'' one
woman told a camera crew at an Ohio rally for John McCain).
But there was a time when blacks had to defer to white drivers at
intersections in some states; when by law, circuses in Louisiana had
to maintain separate entrances and ticket offices for the races; when
the Lonestar Restaurants Association of Dallas posted signs that read,
``No Dogs Negroes Mexicans.''
And it is all within living memory.
Segregation laws extended from the 19th century until the mid 1960s.
It wasn't just the South; as recently as 1949, 29 states outlawed
intermarriage. The toughest penalties _ 10 years in prison _ were
levied in Indiana and the Dakotas.
And it wasn't just the state and local governments. Until 1948, the
U.S. military was segregated. Until the last year of World War II, the
U.S. Navy did not commission a single black officer. By the end of the
war, there were just 58 black ensigns or lieutenants out of 160,000
black sailors.
Blatant discrimination was everywhere. In 1948, dancer Josephine Baker
and her French husband went to 36 hotels in New York City before
finding one where they could stay.
And racist violence was nearly as widespread. The Tuskegee Institute
counted the lynchings: Between 1882 and 1964, 3,446 blacks were killed
in 36 states.
But it was the South where the blood flowed freely, where 4-year-old
Emmett Till was beaten beyond recognition because he whistled at a
white woman in 1955, where Sgt. Isaac Woodard, returning from the war
in 1946, was arrested by a police chief for disrespecting a bus driver
_ and then was blinded by a blackjack's blows. The chief was acquitted
in 28 minutes.
It was the South that perfected myriad ways to bar blacks from voting.
Intimidation usually worked: The best way to keep a black person from
voting _ and here, Theodore Bilbo used an infinitely more offensive
word for black person _ was ``to see him the night before election.''
Bilbo parlayed such tactics into eight years as Mississippi's governor
and 12 years in the U.S. Senate, ending in 1947.
If that didn't succeed, whites-only primaries, poll taxes and literacy
tests did the trick _ the last requiring would-be voters to recite the
state or national constitutions from memory, or translate nonsensical
Latin phrases like ``Itar, E. Quar Tum Enteria Ventricular'' (whites
were never asked such questions).
It worked for a long while. In 1960, only 22,000 Mississippi blacks
were registered to vote out of a population of 915,743. Then came the
Voting Rights Act of 1965 and, by 1966, 175,000 Mississippi blacks
were registered. By 2008, it was believed that blacks were as likely
to be registered voters as whites.
It wasn't enough to turn that red state blue on Tuesday. But across
the country, blacks whose parents and grandparents were once denied
the franchise went to the polls in enormous numbers.
And overwhelmingly, they voted for the first black president of the
United States.
Obama begins assembling team
WASHINGTON (AP): President-elect Barack Obama barely had time to
savour his victory before he began filling out his new administration
and getting a sobering look at some of the daunting problems he will
inherit when he takes office in just 10 weeks.
As president-elect, Obama begins receiving highly classified briefings
from top intelligence officials on Thursday.
Already, Russia was threatening to put missiles alongside U.S.-ally
Poland if President George W. Bush's plan for a missile defence shield
in Europe is not repealed. In Afghanistan, U.S.-backed President Hamid
Karzai demanded that Obama ``put an end to civilian casualties'' by
changing U.S. tactics to avoid airstrikes in the hunt for militants.
Obama on Tuesday night made history by being elected the first black
U.S. president. But times are bleak: the country is in the grips of
its worst economic crisis since the Great Depression of the 1930s and
is fighting wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Emanuel as new White House chief of staff?
Obama got a quick start with the transition Wednesday, calling on Rep.
Rahm Emanuel, a fellow Illinois politician, to serve as White House
chief of staff.
While several Democrats confirmed that Emanuel had been offered the
job, it was not clear he had accepted. But rejection would amount to
an unlikely public snub of the new president-elect swept toward power
in an electoral college landslide.
Obama's staff said he would address the media by the end of the week,
but Cabinet announcements were not planned that soon.
With hundreds of jobs to fill before his Jan. 20 inauguration, Obama
and his transition team confronted a formidable task complicated by
his anti-lobbyist campaign rhetoric.
The official campaign Web Site said no political appointees would be
permitted to work on ``regulations or contracts directly and
substantially related to their prior employer for two years. And no
political appointee will be able to lobby the executive branch after
leaving government service during the remainder of the
administration.''
Because they often have prior experience in government or politics,
lobbyists have routinely filled out the list of potential appointees
for past presidents of both parties.
In offering the post of White House chief of staff to Emanuel, Obama
turned to a fellow Chicago politician with a far different style from
his own, a man known for his bluntness as well as his single-minded
determination.
Emanuel was a political and policy aide in Bill Clinton's White House.
Leaving that, he turned to investment banking, then won a Chicago-area
House seat six years ago. In Congress, he moved quickly into the
Democratic leadership. As chairman of the Democratic campaign
committee in 2006, he played an instrumental role in restoring his
party to power after 12 years in the minority.
Emanuel maintained neutrality during the long primary battle between
Obama and Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, not surprising given his long-
standing ties to the former first lady and his Illinois connections
with Obama.
Cabinet appointments
The day after the election there already was jockeying for Cabinet
appointments.
Several Democrats said Sen. John Kerry of Massachusetts, who won a new
six-year term on Tuesday, was angling for secretary of state. They
spoke on condition of anonymity, saying they were not authorized to
discuss any private conversations.
Kerry's spokeswoman, Brigid O'Rourke, disputed the reports.
In light of the financial crisis, Obama is expected to quickly name
members of his economic team. Former Treasury Secretary Lawrence
Summers, who served in the Clinton administration, and Timothy
Geithner, president of the New York Federal Reserve Bank, are among
the names being mentioned for Treasury secretary.
Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson has pledged to work with Obama to
ensure a smooth transition. He has already set up desks and phone
lines at the department where Obama's incoming Treasury team can work
between now and the inauguration.
Obama's transition team is headed by John Podesta, who served as chief
of staff under former President Bill Clinton; Pete Rouse, who has been
Obama's chief of staff in the Senate, and Valerie Jarrett, a friend of
the president-elect and campaign adviser.
Several Democrats described a sprawling operation well under way.
Officials had kept deliberations under wraps to avoid the appearance
of overconfidence before the election.
They said the group was stocked with longtime associates of Obama, as
well as veterans of Clinton's White House.
In addition to the many decisions he faces in getting the Obama
administration up and running, he has personal decisions to make, too.
Such as when to move his family to Washington and where his 10- and 7-
year-old daughters will go to school.
SBI cuts PLR by 0.75 per cent, more banks to follow suit
Loans from premier public sector lender, State Bank of India, will be
cheaper with the bank deciding to cut its Prime Lending Rate (PLR) by
0.75 per cent from Monday. Accordingly SBI's PLR will stand reduced to
13 per cent from the present 13.75 per cent, bank's Chairman O P Bhatt
said on Thursday.
SBI being the largest lender, more banks are expected to follow suit
by this week-end.
Several public sector banks such as Punjab National Bank, Union Bank,
UCO Bank and Syndicate Bank, have already effected a cut in their
PLRs.
On Tuesday, Finance Minister P Chidambaram met heads of PSU banks
following which bankers had promised to cut their lending rates by up
to 0.75 per cent.
On Wednesday, Finance Secretary Arun Ramanathan also got assurance
from private sector and foreign banks that they would consider an
interest rate cut in a fortnight.
The earlier hardening
Will US have its first woman SG, that's too an Indian?
India-born Preeta Bansal, a Harvard-educated lawyer who was part of
Barack Obama's dazzling team of advisers during his election campaign,
is being seen as a potential candidate for the office of the Solicitor
General, a post yet to be filled by a woman in US.
42-year-old Bansal, who has advised the President-elect on foreign
policy and judiciary matters, is among possible appointees to the
post, 'The Am Law Daily' reported citing some unnamed advisers of the
Obama campaign.
"The Solicitor General is the only position where the statute requires
that the officer be learned in the law," it quoted O'Melveny and
Myers's Walter Dellinger as saying.
Bansal, a product of Harvard Law School and a partner at the
international law firm of Skadden Arps, has earlier served as the New
York state Solicitor General.
Dellinger said that for the post, experience as a state Solicitor
General would be valuable, as would be a record of advocacy before the
court, the report said.
Morrison and Foerster partner Beth Brinkmann and Harvard Law school
dean and professor Elena Kagan's names have also been attached to the
post, which has never been filled by a woman, the report in the
daily's online edition said.
Other possibilities, according to 'Legal Times', include Stanford Law
School professors Kathleen Sullivan and Pamela Karlan, as well as
MetLife litigation counsel Teresa Wynn Roseborough.
Bansal, a member of what an Obama lawyer playfully calls the 'Harvard
Law School mafia', was part of Bill Clinton's White House and Justice
Department in 1993-96. She was also the first Indian-American to head
the US Commission on International Religious Freedom.
Taliban asks Obama to end war in Afghanistan
Islamabad (PTI): Hoping that a new era of peace will dawn with the
election of Barack Obama as the US President, the Taliban has asked
the President-elect to change his country's policies towards it and
end the war in Afghanistan.
Reacting to Obama's victory in the American polls, top Taliban
spokesman Qari Muhammad Yousaf Ahmadi told reporters: "We want to tell
the world and the West to pull out their troops from Afghanistan as
the (party of US President George W Bush) has lost the race because of
their flawed polices."
Another Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid said it would be "unwise"
if Obama tried to solve the Afghan problem militarily. He said it
would be "wrong thinking" if Obama tried to increase US forces in
Afghanistan to "make Afghans slaves".
Mujahid pointed out that the Russians too tried to suppress Afghans by
deploying thousands of soldiers but could not succeed.
"We are hopeful that Obama will withdraw forces from Afghanistan. The
US should try to solve its financial crisis instead of keeping troops
in Afghanistan," he said.
Ahmadi said the new President should bring an end to fighting and
begin a new era of peace in the world. "The US President should end
the continuing era of war and begin a new era of peace," he said.
Asked whether he thought Obama would pull out troops, Ahmadi said: "We
do not have much expectations. But despite that we will see. If Obama
sends more troops to the war-ravaged country, jehad and resistance
will be continued."
Ahmadi said there was neither joy nor sorrow in the Taliban ranks over
the election of Obama.
Obama should respect the mandate from the public and spend the
taxpayers' money on social welfare and development rather than weapons
and war, Pakistani Taliban spokesman Muslim Khan said.
Rice off to Mideast as peace deadline looms
Washington (AP): Fighting irrelevance and a ticking clock, Secretary
of State Condoleezza Rice embarks on yet another Middle East
peacemaking trip, hoping to secure fragile Israeli-Palestinian
negotiations and leave a viable process for the incoming Obama
administration.
With just 77 days left in office, Rice will be making her eighth trip
yesterday to Israel and the Palestinian territories since the parties
set a year-end goal of reaching a peace deal at last November's US-
sponsored peace conference. She will also visit Egypt and Jordan to
shore up Arab support for the talks.
Meeting the target date for an agreement is now highly unlikely,
especially with political uncertainty in Israel and the lame duck Bush
administration's waning influence, but Rice intends to press the two
sides to carry on and, if possible, come up with an outline of how
they can move ahead after Jan 20.
"We're going to try to put this process in the best possible place
going forward so that whomever comes next can formulate their
policies, take a look at the process, and possibly use it, take it
further," State Department spokesman Sean McCormack told reporters.
"Our focus is going to be on moving the process forward as far as it
can be moved forward in a responsible way, while preserving the
process," he said. "That has great value."
The Israeli-Palestinian situation is one of several Middle East
trouble spots that the Bush administration will bequeath to President-
elect Barack Obama. The war in Iraq, Iran's nuclear program and
troubles with Syria are among the most troublesome.
Majority in Pakistan 'Obamaistic'
Islamabad (PTI): Despite Barack Hussain Obama's resolve that he would
send US troops to Pakistan to hunt down terrorists, citizens here are
revelling in the fact that America's President-elect has a Pakistani
link that dates back to 1981 and more so because his middle name
suggests he is a 'Muslim'.
Obama's Pakistan connection has been widely speculated about in the
local and international media since his remark last year that if
elected as President, he may send troops to Pakistan to hunt down
terrorists. Obama is believed to have visited Pakistan in 1981.
"Mr Obama visited Pakistan in 1981, on the way back from Indonesia,
where his mother and half-sister, Maya Soetoro-Ng, were living. He
spent about three weeks there.. staying in Karachi with the family of
a college friend, Mohammed Hasan Chandoo but also traveling to
Hyderabad, in India," a report in the New York Times quoted his
campaign manager as saying.
Interest in the 47-year-old first black President of US rose in
Pakistan after reports said Obama's mother Ann Dunham had spent five
years in the country. Dunham, who died in 1995, was in Pakistan
between 1987 and 1992. She was hired as a consultant by the Asian
Development Bank and travelled often from Lahore to Gujranwala.
"I have a dream that the damage wrought in the US and other countries
will be overturned in the next four years to a great extent. You are
black. You are white. Your father is from Kenya. Your mother is from
Kansas. You have seen Muslim. You have seen Christian," wrote Soniah
Kamal in an e-magazine.
"They called you terrorist because once you crossed streets with a
domestic terrorist. They called you socialist because you care about
all and not just an elite few. They called you Muslim as if this is a
four letter word," she added.
Sensex closes below 10,000 mark
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Reuters
Posted: Nov 06, 2008 at 1624 hrs IST
New Delhi, November 6: The benchmark indices fell 3.8 per cent on
Thursday to its lowest close in a week, caught in a broad global sell-
off on fears of a deep US recession, while higher-than-expected
inflation data added to the pain late on.
Heavyweights Reliance Industries and Infosys Technologies lost
heavily, shedding 7.7 per cent and 5.5 per cent respectively, and were
major contributors to the losses in the main index.
Top vehicle maker Tata Motors fell 12.2 per cent to 159.15 rupees
after it said it was shutting down its commercial vehicle plant in
eastern India for three days to avoid a build-up of inventory.
Tata Steel, the world's sixth-largest steel maker fell the most among
frontliners. The stock closed 13.7 per cent lower, while aluminium
maker Sterlite Industries declined 11.3 per cent on concerns that a
global slowdown would lower demand for metals.
"It's going to be pendulum-like trading for sometime," said K.K.
Mital, head of portfolio management services at Globe Capital. "Global
concerns still remain. Every day we are hearing this guy is cutting
production, that guy is cutting jobs ... so people are booking
profits."
The 30-share BSE index closed down 3.81 per cent, or 385.79 points, at
9,734.22, its lowest close since Oct. 29.
It had shed as much as 4.8 per cent but in late afternoon trade
suddenly trimmed losses to be down just 0.1 per cent at one point on
expectations that annual inflation data would show a substantial fall
from a week earlier.
But data released 30 minutes before the market closed showed wholesale
price inflation rose 10.72 per cent in the 12 months to Oct. 25,
marginally above the previous week's annual rise of 10.68 per cent and
outpacing market expectations for around 10.5 per cent.
The main index had fallen 4.81 per cent on Wednesday to 10,120.01,
snapping a five-day winning run after a surge that had lifted the
market more than 40 per cent off a three-year low hit on Oct. 27. It
is down about 52 per cent in 2008.
"When you are in the grip of full-fledged bear market, you see sharp
rallies. But that does not mean that things have turned around," said
Daljeet Kohli, head of research at Emkay Global Financial.
"Markets work on both fundamentals and sentiments. Sentiments have
improved after all the measures taken, but fundamentals have not
changed," he said referring to liquidity-boosting measures taken by
central banks in many countries.
Citigroup said corporate India had posted its lowest earnings growth
in four years in the September quarter, as high interest rates and
input costs hit demand, and Kohli said the current quarter could be
even worse as firms could not raise prices.
Data showed foreign funds were net sellers of $23 million of stocks on
Tuesday, in a market that had risen 2.8 per cent, after buying nearly
$500 million worth shares in the previous two sessions.
All but six stocks in the main index closed in red, while in the
broader market there were almost two losers for every one gainer on
normal volume of 319 million shares.
The 50-share NSE index closed 3.42 per cent down at 2,892.65.
Terror-funding scanner on two Indian expats
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Express News Service
Posted: Nov 06, 2008 at 0909 hrs IST
Both NRIs had bank accounts in the Gulf and these were being used to
channel funds to IM members in Mumbai, the police said. The police
have frozen both accounts and issued lookout notices against the two
NRIs but refused to name them.
The crime branch said the NRIs opened accounts in a nationalised bank
about a decade ago, and absconding IM operative Riyaz Bhatkal kept
withdrawing small amounts regularly in the city for terror
operations.
The police have identified six other accounts which were allegedly
used by IM operatives.
“Of the eight accounts under our scanner, two are in the name of NRIs
in the Gulf. These two accounts were opened in a nationalised bank in
the late ‘90s, and small amounts of money were deposited and withdrawn
from them regularly by Bhatkal in the city. The amounts ranged from Rs
5,000 to Rs 50,000 at a time. A total of Rs 27 lakh was in the
accounts when we froze both on October 4; we issued the lookout
notices a day later,” said Joint Commissioner of Police (Crime) Rakesh
Maria.
The Crime Branch has also seized a cheque for Rs 1 lakh in the name of
Bhatkal from one of the arrested.
“Riyaz Bhatkal had been given signed blank cheques for the purpose of
withdrawing money from both accounts whenever he wanted. We have
seized one such cheque for Rs 1 lakh issued in Bhatkal’s name from one
of the other arrested accused,” said Maria.
According to crime branch officials, they have so far tracked
transactions dating back till 2006 from the two accounts, and
investigations are on with regard to matching dates of withdrawals
from the accounts to the dates of different blasts.
http://www.expressindia.com/latest-news/Terrorfunding-scanner-on-two-Indian-expats/381946/
We Shall Overcome
History of an American Folk Song
By Kim Ruehl, About.com
See More About:civil rights songspete seegerjoan baezafrican-american
folk music"We Shall Overcome" became particularly popular in the
1960s, during the Civil Rights movement in America, after Pete Seeger
picked it up, adapted it, and taught it to his audiences to sing.
However, the song had a half century (or so) to evovle and expand its
meaning before Seeger and Joan Baez popularized it during the folk
revival.
The melody dates back to before the Civil War, from a song called "No
More Auction Block For Me." Originally, the lyrics were "I'll overcome
someday," which dates back to a turn-of-the-20th-century song by the
Reverend Charles Tindley of Philadelphia.
The song didn't appear on a large scale until 1946, during a labor
strike at the American Tobacco Company. One of the women striking that
day – Lucille Simmons – began singing slowly, "Deep in my heart I do
believe we'll overcome some day."
Zilphia Horton, whose husband was the co-founder of the Highlander
Folk School (aka Highlander Research and Education Center), learned
the song from Simmons and, a year later, taught it to folk singer Pete
Seeger.
The adaptation of the song to its current lyric is often attributed to
Pete Seeger, but there is some debate over whether Seeger changed the
lyric to "We Shall Overcome," or whether this was the doing of others
at the Highlander School. At any rate, Seeger taught the song to other
folksingers and, a decade later (1959), the song was brought back to
the Highlander School.
Since then, "We Shall Overcome" has spread from folksinger to
folksinger, through protests and peace rallies, song circles, and open
mics. It was recorded by Joan Baez in 1963 and became a major anthem
of the Civil Rights movement.
Full lyrics of "We Shall Overcome"
More Folk Music Quick Tips
More on Folk Song History
"This Land is Your Land"
African-American Folk Music History
Brief History of American Folk Music
Articles Related to "We Shall Overcome"
Pete Seeger Biography and Profile
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http://folkmusic.about.com/od/folksongs/qt/WeShallOvercome.htm
“And We Shall Overcome”: President Lyndon B. Johnson’s Special Message
to Congress
Although the 15th Amendment, ratified in 1870, guaranteed citizens the
right to vote regardless of race, by 1957 only 20 percent of eligible
African Americans voted, due in part to intimidation and
discriminatory state requirements such as poll taxes and literacy
tests. Despite the passage of the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964,
which outlawed discrimination in employment and public accommodations
based on race, religion, national origin, or sex, efforts to register
African Americans as voters in the South were stymied. In 1965,
following the murder of a voting rights activist by an Alabama
sheriff’s deputy and the subsequent attack by state troopers on a
massive protest march in Selma, Alabama, President Lyndon B. Johnson
pressed Congress in the following speech to pass a voting rights bill
with teeth. As Majority Leader of the Senate, Johnson had helped
weaken the 1957 Civil Rights Act. When he assumed the presidency
following the assassination of John F. Kennedy in November 1963,
however, Johnson called on Americans “to eliminate from this nation
every trace of discrimination and oppression that is based upon race
or color,” and in the following speech adopted the “We Shall Overcome”
slogan of civil rights activists. His rhetoric and subsequent efforts
broke with past presidential precedents of opposition to or lukewarm
support for strong civil rights legislation. Johnson signed the Voting
Rights Act of 1965 into law on August 6.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
[As delivered in person before a joint session at 9:02 p.m.]
Mr. Speaker, Mr. President, Members of the Congress:
I speak tonight for the dignity of man and the destiny of democracy.
I urge every member of both parties, Americans of all religions and of
all colors, from every section of this country, to join me in that
cause.
At times history and fate meet at a single time in a single place to
shape a turning point in man’s unending search for freedom. So it was
at Lexington and Concord. So it was a century ago at Appomattox. So it
was last week in Selma, Alabama.
There, long-suffering men and women peacefully protested the denial of
their rights as Americans. Many were brutally assaulted. One good man,
a man of God, was killed.
There is no cause for pride in what has happened in Selma. There is no
cause for self-satisfaction in the long denial of equal rights of
millions of Americans. But there is cause for hope and for faith in
our democracy in what is happening here tonight.
For the cries of pain and the hymns and protests of oppressed people
have summoned into convocation all the majesty of this great Government
—the Government of the greatest Nation on earth.
Our mission is at once the oldest and the most basic of this country:
to right wrong, to do justice, to serve man.
In our time we have come to live with moments of great crisis. Our
lives have been marked with debate about great issues; issues of war
and peace, issues of prosperity and depression. But rarely in any time
does an issue lay bare the secret heart of America itself. Rarely are
we met with a challenge, not to our growth or abundance, our welfare
or our security, but rather to the values and the purposes and the
meaning of our beloved Nation.
The issue of equal rights for American Negroes is such an issue. And
should we defeat every enemy, should we double our wealth and conquer
the stars, and still be unequal to this issue, then we will have
failed as a people and as a nation.
For with a country as with a person, “What is a man profited, if he
shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?”
There is no Negro problem. There is no Southern problem. There is no
Northern problem. There is only an American problem. And we are met
here tonight as Americans—not as Democrats or Republicans—we are met
here as Americans to solve that problem.
This was the first nation in the history of the world to be founded
with a purpose. The great phrases of that purpose still sound in every
American heart, North and South: “All men are created
equal”—“government by consent of the governed”—“give me liberty or
give me death.” Well, those are not just clever words, or those are
not just empty theories. In their name Americans have fought and died
for two centuries, and tonight around the world they stand there as
guardians of our liberty, risking their lives.
Those words are a promise to every citizen that he shall share in the
dignity of man. This dignity cannot be found in a man’s possessions;
it cannot be found in his power, or in his position. It really rests
on his right to be treated as a man equal in opportunity to all
others. It says that he shall share in freedom, he shall choose his
leaders, educate his children, and provide for his family according to
his ability and his merits as a human being.
To apply any other test—to deny a man his hopes because of his color
or race, his religion or the place of his birth—is not only to do
injustice, it is to deny America and to dishonor the dead who gave
their lives for American freedom.
THE RIGHT TO VOTE
Our fathers believed that if this noble view of the rights of man was
to flourish, it must be rooted in democracy. The most basic right of
all was the right to choose your own leaders. The history of this
country, in large measure, is the history of the expansion of that
right to all of our people.
Many of the issues of civil rights are very complex and most
difficult. But about this there can and should be no argument. Every
American citizen must have an equal right to vote. There is no reason
which can excuse the denial of that right. There is no duty which
weighs more heavily on us than the duty we have to ensure that right.
Yet the harsh fact is that in many places in this country men and
women are kept from voting simply because they are Negroes.
Every device of which human ingenuity is capable has been used to deny
this right. The Negro citizen may go to register only to be told that
the day is wrong, or the hour is late, or the official in charge is
absent. And if he persists, and if he manages to present himself to
the registrar, he may be disqualified because he did not spell out his
middle name or because he abbreviated a word on the application.
And if he manages to fill out an application he is given a test. The
registrar is the sole judge of whether he passes this test. He may be
asked to recite the entire Constitution, or explain the most complex
provisions of State law. And even a college degree cannot be used to
prove that he can read and write.
For the fact is that the only way to pass these barriers is to show a
white skin.
Experience has clearly shown that the existing process of law cannot
overcome systematic and ingenious discrimination. No law that we now
have on the books—and I have helped to put three of them there—can
ensure the right to vote when local officials are determined to deny
it.
In such a case our duty must be clear to all of us. The Constitution
says that no person shall be kept from voting because of his race or
his color. We have all sworn an oath before God to support and to
defend that Constitution. We must now act in obedience to that oath.
GUARANTEEING THE RIGHT TO VOTE
Wednesday I will send to Congress a law designed to eliminate illegal
barriers to the right to vote.
The broad principles of that bill will be in the hands of the
Democratic and Republican leaders tomorrow. After they have reviewed
it, it will come here formally as a bill. I am grateful for this
opportunity to come here tonight at the invitation of the leadership
to reason with my friends, to give them my views, and to visit with my
former colleagues.
I have had prepared a more comprehensive analysis of the legislation
which I had intended to transmit to the clerk tomorrow but which I
will submit to the clerks tonight. But I want to really discuss with
you now briefly the main proposals of this legislation.
This bill will strike down restrictions to voting in all elections—
Federal, State, and local—which have been used to deny Negroes the
right to vote.
This bill will establish a simple, uniform standard which cannot be
used, however ingenious the effort, to flout our Constitution.
It will provide for citizens to be registered by officials of the
United States Government if the State officials refuse to register
them.
It will eliminate tedious, unnecessary lawsuits which delay the right
to vote.
Finally, this legislation will ensure that properly registered
individuals are not prohibited from voting.
I will welcome the suggestions from all of the Members of Congress—I
have no doubt that I will get some—on ways and means to strengthen
this law and to make it effective. But experience has plainly shown
that this is the only path to carry out the command of the
Constitution.
To those who seek to avoid action by their National Government in
their own communities; who want to and who seek to maintain purely
local control over elections, the answer is simple:
Open your polling places to all your people.
Allow men and women to register and vote whatever the color of their
skin.
Extend the rights of citizenship to every citizen of this land.
THE NEED FOR ACTION
There is no constitutional issue here. The command of the Constitution
is plain.
There is no moral issue. It is wrong—deadly wrong—to deny any of your
fellow Americans the right to vote in this country.
There is no issue of States rights or national rights. There is only
the struggle for human rights.
I have not the slightest doubt what will be your answer.
The last time a President sent a civil rights bill to the Congress it
contained a provision to protect voting rights in Federal elections.
That civil rights bill was passed after 8 long months of debate. And
when that bill came to my desk from the Congress for my signature, the
heart of the voting provision had been eliminated.
This time, on this issue, there must be no delay, no hesitation and no
compromise with our purpose.
We cannot, we must not, refuse to protect the right of every American
to vote in every election that he may desire to participate in. And we
ought not and we cannot and we must not wait another 8 months before
we get a bill. We have already waited a hundred years and more, and
the time for waiting is gone.
So I ask you to join me in working long hours—nights and weekends, if
necessary—to pass this bill. And I don’t make that request lightly.
For from the window where I sit with the problems of our country I
recognize that outside this chamber is the outraged conscience of a
nation, the grave concern of many nations, and the harsh judgment of
history on our acts.
WE SHALL OVERCOME
But even if we pass this bill, the battle will not be over. What
happened in Selma is part of a far larger movement which reaches into
every section and State of America. It is the effort of American
Negroes to secure for themselves the full blessings of American life.
Their cause must be our cause too. Because it is not just Negroes, but
really it is all of us, who must overcome the crippling legacy of
bigotry and injustice.
And we shall overcome.
As a man whose roots go deeply into Southern soil I know how agonizing
racial feelings are. I know how difficult it is to reshape the
attitudes and the structure of our society.
But a century has passed, more than a hundred years, since the Negro
was freed. And he is not fully free tonight.
It was more than a hundred years ago that Abraham Lincoln, a great
President of another party, signed the Emancipation Proclamation, but
emancipation is a proclamation and not a fact.
A century has passed, more than a hundred years, since equality was
promised. And yet the Negro is not equal.
A century has passed since the day of promise. And the promise is
unkept.
The time of justice has now come. I tell you that I believe sincerely
that no force can hold it back. It is right in the eyes of man and God
that it should come. And when it does, I think that day will brighten
the lives of every American.
For Negroes are not the only victims. How many white children have
gone uneducated, how many white families have lived in stark poverty,
how many white lives have been scarred by fear, because we have wasted
our energy and our substance to maintain the barriers of hatred and
terror?
So I say to all of you here, and to all in the Nation tonight, that
those who appeal to you to hold on to the past do so at the cost of
denying you your future.
This great, rich, restless country can offer opportunity and education
and hope to all: black and white, North and South, sharecropper and
city dweller. These are the enemies: poverty, ignorance, disease. They
are the enemies and not our fellow man, not our neighbor. And these
enemies too, poverty, disease and ignorance, we shall overcome.
AN AMERICAN PROBLEM
Now let none of us in any sections look with prideful righteousness on
the troubles in another section, or on the problems of our neighbors.
There is really no part of America where the promise of equality has
been fully kept. In Buffalo as well as in Birmingham, in Philadelphia
as well as in Selma, Americans are struggling for the fruits of
freedom.
This is one Nation. What happens in Selma or in Cincinnati is a matter
of legitimate concern to every American. But let each of us look
within our own hearts and our own communities, and let each of us put
our shoulder to the wheel to root out injustice wherever it exists.
As we meet here in this peaceful, historic chamber tonight, men from
the South, some of whom were at Iwo Jima, men from the North who have
carried Old Glory to far corners of the world and brought it back
without a stain on it, men from the East and from the West, are all
fighting together without regard to religion, or color, or region, in
Viet-Nam. Men from every region fought for us across the world 20
years ago.
And in these common dangers and these common sacrifices the South made
its contribution of honor and gallantry no less than any other region
of the great Republic—and in some instances, a great many of them,
more.
And I have not the slightest doubt that good men from everywhere in
this country, from the Great Lakes to the Gulf of Mexico, from the
Golden Gate to the harbors along the Atlantic, will rally together now
in this cause to vindicate the freedom of all Americans. For all of us
owe this duty; and I believe that all of us will respond to it.
Your President makes that request of every American.
PROGRESS THROUGH THE DEMOCRATIC PROCESS
The real hero of this struggle is the American Negro. His actions and
protests, his courage to risk safety and even to risk his life, have
awakened the conscience of this Nation. His demonstrations have been
designed to call attention to injustice, designed to provoke change,
designed to stir reform.
He has called upon us to make good the promise of America. And who
among us can say that we would have made the same progress were it not
for his persistent bravery, and his faith in American democracy.
For at the real heart of battle for equality is a deep-seated belief
in the democratic process. Equality depends not on the force of arms
or tear gas but upon the force of moral right; not on recourse to
violence but on respect for law and order.
There have been many pressures upon your President and there will be
others as the days come and go. But I pledge you tonight that we
intend to fight this battle where it should be fought: in the courts,
and in the Congress, and in the hearts of men.
We must preserve the right of free speech and the right of free
assembly. But the right of free speech does not carry with it, as has
been said, the right to holler fire in a crowded theater. We must
preserve the right to free assembly, but free assembly does not carry
with it the right to block public thoroughfares to traffic.
We do have a right to protest, and a right to march under conditions
that do not infringe the constitutional rights of our neighbors. And I
intend to protect all those rights as long as I am permitted to serve
in this office.
We will guard against violence, knowing it strikes from our hands the
very weapons which we seek—progress, obedience to law, and belief in
American values.
In Selma as elsewhere we seek and pray for peace. We seek order. We
seek unity. But we will not accept the peace of stifled rights, or the
order imposed by fear, or the unity that stifles protest. For peace
cannot be purchased at the cost of liberty.
In Selma tonight, as in every—and we had a good day there—as in every
city, we are working for just and peaceful settlement. We must all
remember that after this speech I am making tonight, after the police
and the FBI and the Marshals have all gone, and after you have
promptly passed this bill, the people of Selma and the other cities of
the Nation must still live and work together. And when the attention
of the Nation has gone elsewhere they must try to heal the wounds and
to build a new community.
This cannot be easily done on a battleground of violence, as the
history of the South itself shows. It is in recognition of this that
men of both races have shown such an outstandingly impressive
responsibility in recent days—last Tuesday, again today.
RIGHTS MUST BE OPPORTUNITIES
The bill that I am presenting to you will be known as a civil rights
bill. But, in a larger sense, most of the program I am recommending is
a civil rights program. Its object is to open the city of hope to all
people of all races.
Because all Americans just must have the right to vote. And we are
going to give them that right.
All Americans must have the privileges of citizenship regardless of
race. And they are going to have those privileges of citizenship
regardless of race.
But I would like to caution you and remind you that to exercise these
privileges takes much more than just legal right. It requires a
trained mind and a healthy body. It requires a decent home, and the
chance to find a job, and the opportunity to escape from the clutches
of poverty.
Of course, people cannot contribute to the Nation if they are never
taught to read or write, if their bodies are stunted from hunger, if
their sickness goes untended, if their life is spent in hopeless
poverty just drawing a welfare check.
So we want to open the gates to opportunity. But we are also going to
give all our people, black and white, the help that they need to walk
through those gates.
THE PURPOSE OF THIS GOVERNMENT
My first job after college was as a teacher in Cotulla, Texas, in a
small Mexican-American school. Few of them could speak English, and I
couldn’t speak much Spanish. My students were poor and they often came
to class without breakfast, hungry. They knew even in their youth the
pain of prejudice. They never seemed to know why people disliked them.
But they knew it was so, because I saw it in their eyes. I often
walked home late in the afternoon, after the classes were finished,
wishing there was more that I could do. But all I knew was to teach
them the little that I knew, hoping that it might help them against
the hardships that lay ahead.
Somehow you never forget what poverty and hatred can do when you see
its scars on the hopeful face of a young child.
I never thought then, in 1928, that I would be standing here in 1965.
It never even occurred to me in my fondest dreams that I might have
the chance to help the sons and daughters of those students and to
help people like them all over this country.
But now I do have that chance—and I’ll let you in on a secret—I mean
to use it. And I hope that you will use it with me.
This is the richest and most powerful country which ever occupied the
globe. The might of past empires is little compared to ours. But I do
not want to be the President who built empires, or sought grandeur, or
extended dominion.
I want to be the President who educated young children to the wonders
of their world. I want to be the President who helped to feed the
hungry and to prepare them to be taxpayers instead of taxeaters.
I want to be the President who helped the poor to find their own way
and who protected the right of every citizen to vote in every
election.
I want to be the President who helped to end hatred among his fellow
men and who promoted love among the people of all races and all
regions and all parties.
I want to be the President who helped to end war among the brothers of
this earth.
And so at the request of your beloved Speaker and the Senator from
Montana; the majority leader, the Senator from Illinois; the minority
leader, Mr. McCulloch, and other Members of both parties, I came here
tonight—not as President Roosevelt came down one time in person to
veto a bonus bill, not as President Truman came down one time to urge
the passage of a railroad bill—but I came down here to ask you to
share this task with me and to share it with the people that we both
work for. I want this to be the Congress, Republicans and Democrats
alike, which did all these things for all these people.
Beyond this great chamber, out yonder in 50 States, are the people
that we serve. Who can tell what deep and unspoken hopes are in their
hearts tonight as they sit there and listen. We all can guess, from
our own lives, how difficult they often find their own pursuit of
happiness, how many problems each little family has. They look most of
all to themselves for their futures. But I think that they also look
to each of us.
Above the pyramid on the great seal of the United States it says—in
Latin—“God has favored our undertaking.”
God will not favor everything that we do. It is rather our duty to
divine His will. But I cannot help believing that He truly understands
and that He really favors the undertaking that we begin here tonight.
Source: National Archives and Records Administration, The Lyndon B.
Johnson Library and Museum ( http://www.lbjlib.utexas.edu/johnson/archives.hom/speeches.hom/650315.htm
)
We Shall Overcome
Peter Ling, Lecturer in American Studies at the University of
Nottingham and the author of a forthcoming biography of Martin Luther
King
Introduction
Nonviolence and Self-Defense
Nonviolent direct action and the 1960 watershed
Economic Coercion as an aspect of nonviolent direct action
Nonviolence as a pragmatic position for a minority group
Alternatives to nonviolence
The psychology and ethics of nonviolence
King’s Political Coalition of Conscience
Why did King’s nonviolence achieve no equivalent successes after 1965?
King’s Final Year: Did his Nonviolence Fail?
Martin Luther King is remembered today for his championing of the
cause of non-violent direct action as a means of advancing the
struggle for Civil Rights, but his views were not shared by all in the
movement. This article attempts to set King's views into the context
of the struggle, analyses his philosphy and considers what his lasting
legacy to Civil Rights has been.The paper was first presented at the
ASRC Annual Schools Conference Oct 31st 2001 on the topic of Martin
Luther King, the Civil Rights Movement and Black Nationalism.
Introduction
Listen to a sound file of his "I have a dream" speech
Real Audio needed
“We Shall Overcome” was the anthem of the southern civil rights
movement, and it captured its religious idealism. Almost as soon as
the Montgomery Bus Boycott of 1955-56 catapulted him to fame, the
Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. was a major symbol of, and spokesman
for, this aspect of the movement because of his championing of the
philosophy and tactics of non-violence. Accordingly, I want to examine
the role and practice of non-violence over the course of King’s
career, which (as you all know) was tragically cut short by his
assassination on 4 April 1968.
Nonviolence and Self-Defense At the time in 1960, the press sometimes
referred to non-violence as “passive resistance,” and the sight of
people not striking back when attacked tended to underline that word:
“passive.” It was this perception of non-violence that made King’s
approach so controversial inside the African American community.
Figures such as Malcolm X vilified King for what they regarded as a
demeaning denial of the basic human right to self-defence. In contrast
to King’s rejection of violence, which won him praise among white
liberals and the mainstream media, Malcolm’s advice that “If the Man
puts a hand on you, - send him to the cemetery,” had been warmly
applauded by appreciative black audiences. The violent resolution of
conflict was deeply embedded in the American tradition and although
African Americans had developed supplementary tactics of resistance
during slavery, they generally shared with other Americans the
expectation that a man of courage would fight back and that, by
fighting back, you won your opponents’ respect.
This was certainly the view of Robert Williams, leader of a local
National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP)
chapter in Monroe, North Carolina, who was suspended by national NAACP
officials for organizing a paramilitary group to deter white attacks
and by advocating armed self-defence. Williams had been in the US Air
Force and in a published debate with King in1959, he spoke openly of
how America had taught him to fight. We need to acknowledge that there
were many such men in African American communities across the nation
in 1960 and that they were probably more representative of black
attitudes than King was. But we need also to recognize that the
argument is essentially a false one. In his exchange with Williams,
King had declared that not even Gandhi denied the right to self-
defence, and had openly admitted that the kind of principled pacifism
that refused any use of force was not going to attract a large
following. At the same time, King insisted that if you chose to become
involved in a non-violent demonstration, you agreed to control your
actions and reactions during that protest. This kind of pragmatic use
of non-violence was what Gandhi had called “the non-violence of the
weak.”
Nonviolent direct action and the 1960 watershed I also chose this
excerpt because the sit-in wave of 1960 represented a real watershed
in terms of the use of non-violence. The Montgomery Bus Boycott drew
on the repertoire of non-violence because it was an act of non-
cooperation, but like later consumer boycotts that attracted
relatively widespread community support, it was essentially a
strategic withdrawal. In contrast, the sit-in was an act of
engagement: you put yourself in harm’s way.
This helps to explain why many civil rights activists in 1960
disapproved of the term: passive resistance. They preferred to speak
of “non-violent direct action,” with the emphasis equally on “direct
action” to indicate that the key elements were the decision to act
rather than to accept or accommodate, and the insistence that such
action should be aimed directly at the instances or sites of
oppression: e.g. segregated lunch counters. The rejected alternative
here was not just violence, but the older generation’s tactics of
lobbying and lawsuits, which had dominated the formal politics of
resistance under the leadership of the NAACP. Civil rights groups had
used non-violent direct action tactics before 1960, but after the
widespread demonstrations of that year non-violent demonstrations
could be said to set the tone.
Economic Coercion as an aspect of nonviolent direct action Of course,
what the bus boycotts and sit-in demonstrations had in common was a
calculated use of economic pressure. Since two-thirds of bus riders in
Montgomery were African American, the bus company suffered enormous
losses during the Boycott and became more eager to settle the dispute
than were the city’s white politicians. Similarly, the sit-ins were
often accompanied by a formal boycott of the downtown stores that
refused to desegregate their lunch counters, including national
boycotts in the case of department store chains such as Woolworth’s,
and by a sometimes much larger decline in general business as shoppers
avoided publicized “trouble-spots.” Such economic pressure was not a
function of non-violence as a philosophy, however, and it is worth
pointing out that white segregationists used economic intimidation as
their principal means of disciplining anyone, black or white, who
questioned the racial status quo. Nevertheless, King, like Gandhi
before him, was very aware of the potential of economic pressure
tactics throughout his career.
Nonviolence as a pragmatic position for a minority group The
increasingly violent and excessive tactics of King’s white opponents
in Montgomery had made him into a public champion of non-violence. In
February 1956, a bomb had exploded at the King home, nearly killing
his wife, Coretta, and baby daughter, Yolanda, yet King had calmed an
angry mob of his followers, urging them to put away their guns. On one
level, his non-violence was a tactical and pragmatic choice, which
rested on the belief that the facts of demography and history made
violence by African Americans (not much more than 10% of the US
population in 1960) a very high-risk option, given the repeated
examples of the white population responding to isolated instances, or
even just the threat, of black violence, with extraordinary
brutality.
In later protest campaigns, King and his SCLC lieutenants struggled to
contain African American anger in part by stressing the firepower
literally ranged against them. Thus, Andrew Young writes of how after
the “Bloody Sunday” attack in Selma in March 1965, he talked to men
who wanted to go outside and shoot it out with Sheriff Jim Clark’s
deputies. You had to be specific, he explains, about what guns you
had, and what guns they had, and how yours would hold up against high-
velocity, repeat-action rifles. Similarly, earlier in the same
campaign, King and James Bevel are said to have restrained local men
who wanted to go to the aid of a black woman who was being beaten by
Clark while being held to the ground by his men. If we intervene,
Bevel warned, they’ll call us a mob and that’s all the excuse they
need to kill us.
Alternatives to nonviolence Of course, others disagreed. King
reportedly laughed when SCLC’s executive director Wyatt Walker told
him of a rumoured encounter on a bus in Petersburg, Virginia. The
story went that a white driver was complaining that black passengers
were giving him a hard time when one of the stars of the local black
college football team strolled over and lifted the white man off his
feet with one hand. “Two things you need to know,” he allegedly said,
“one, I can break your neck, and two, I ain’t one of Dr. King’s non-
violent niggers!”
In the summer of 1963, Malcolm X repeatedly expressed the view that
what had forced the Kennedy administration to intervene in the
Birmingham confrontations was not King’s non-violent demonstrations,
but the inter-racial violence that erupted in May. It was only when
black men started “busting crackers’ heads,” Malcolm alleged, that the
Kennedy administration suddenly found that it had the authority to
act. This was consistent with Malcolm’s larger view not only that
African Americans could deter white attacks by uniting and organizing
in a militant fashion, but that there was a larger world community to
which African Americans could turn. With strong Garveyite roots,
Malcolm, in his final persona of Malik al-Shabazz, turned increasingly
to this vision of a global, anti-colonial alliance.
Similarly, Robert Williams strongly argued that the realities of Cold
War politics made it unthinkable that the federal government would
stand aside and allow African Americans to be massacred, if the self-
defence efforts of the latter provoked whites into a wholesale race
war. This was a continuation of a well-established argument since the
1930s that had previously prompted civil rights groups to use the
leverage of international public opinion to induce federal actions and
concessions. Summed up in the1968 cry: “The whole world is watching”,
it became a key axiom of protesters in the television era.
The psychology and ethics of nonviolence Perhaps the most contentious
aspect of non-violence was its rationale and supposed effects in
psychological terms. The motto of King’s SCLC was “To Redeem the Soul
of America,” and this reflected not only the fact that it was
primarily an organization of black churches, but also its commitment
to orthodox Gandhian beliefs that non-violence could transform the
oppressor. At times, King’s rhetorical defence of non-violence slipped
into an interesting blend of a classic evangelical Christian scenario
of renouncing one’s sins and a more recently developed
psychoanalytical outlook that implied that confronting and admitting
the wrongs of one’s past was a vital stage in the recovery process.
More persuasive in a secular sense was the claim that non-violent
direct action intruded upon the process of reification, whereby it
becomes easier to act unethically towards someone by blanking out
their humanity and making them into something else. Essential to
racism, reification not only facilitated oppression, it also
psychologically damaged the oppressed person, who became prone to
believing the negative stereotyping that accompanied racism. Defenders
of non-violence argued that their technique simultaneously enabled
them to affirm their moral dignity as human beings and forced their
antagonists to acknowledge their humanity. Sit-in demonstrators, such
as Franklin McCain in Greensboro, spoke of how they felt “cleansed”
and empowered by the stand they took, and relished the shock they
detected in white police officers, who were unsure how to respond.
As public encounters, non-violent demonstrations actually involve
three separate groups of people: 1) the demonstrators, 2) the other
actors such as store staff or police who are trying to end the
demonstration, and 3) the usually much larger group of bystanders or
spectators, especially when this includes those who “see” the
encounter on television or in newspapers. This third group was
especially important in the politics of non-violence since it was
hoped that the spectacle of one-sided violence would sway their
loyalties. As disengaged spectators, they might be psychologically
more uncomfortable with the action taken against the demonstrators.
King’s Political Coalition of Conscience
The classic phase of King’s career - 1963-1965 - tends to be
discussed in terms of the March on Washington speech, and the
Birmingham and Selma campaigns, which mobilized a bipartisan political
coalition in favour of federal legislation. King’s ability to induce
segregationists to attack civil rights protesters on camera is usually
deemed to be central to this success, especially when his lack of
success in Albany in 1961-62 is contrasted with his subsequent
campaign in Birmingham the following year. Extremely wary about the
political costs of introducing a civil rights bill, President Kennedy
was reportedly “sickened” by the sight of Bull Connor’s use of dogs
and water cannon against young demonstrators in Birmingham. Worried
too by the international reaction to such images, Kennedy eventually
introduced a civil rights bill in the summer of 1963. One important
factor in Lyndon Johnson’s eventual passage of the Civil Rights Act of
1964 was Midwestern Republican support in Congress, much of it
mobilized via church groups appalled by what they had seen on
television.
The same process of recruiting the guilty bystander was even more at
work in the Selma campaign. Not just the televised violence of the
March 7 “Bloody Sunday” attack on demonstrators on the Edmund Pettus
Bridge, but earlier incidents involving the explosive Sheriff Clark
and the murder of white clergyman James Reeb and white housewife Viola
Liuzzo, ensured that President Johnson could press through the Voting
Rights Act of 1965 on a national wave of public sympathy. When Johnson
closed his address to both houses of Congress on March 15, he
deliberately aligned himself with the movement through his final
words: “And we shall overcome.” Watching the President on television,
King is reported to have wept.
Why did King’s nonviolence achieve no equivalent successes after 1965?
By the summer of 1965, it was widely acknowledged that King’s use of
non-violence had secured important political gains, but at the same
time non-violence seemed to work only under certain conditions and the
gains it obtained seemed very partial and incomplete.
a. Choosing one’s opponent
Targeting an opponent who would discredit his own position through
brutality seemed one key condition. Some newspaper commentators had
been hostile and cynical towards non-violence since 1961 because they
saw it as disingenuous. The New York Times had complained in the
summer of that year that the continuing Freedom Rides were primarily
publicity stunts that tried to provoke violence. When King announced
that he would target the Northern metropolis of Chicago in1966, the
media were already alert to the idea that he was largely engaged in
public relations manoeuvres. They therefore applauded Chicago Mayor
Daley’s astute counter-moves that effectively undermined King’s
initial efforts to expose the evils of ghetto poverty in the city.
b. Choosing and limiting one’s objectives
Another key factor was finding a symbolic objective, one where
immediate concessions might be forthcoming but which would
simultaneously highlight, and engage with, the larger issue. In the
early months of 1966, there were too many issues - education, housing,
employment, social services - for the Chicago campaign to generate a
clear message. Compounding this weakness, Mayor Daley skilfully
avoided a direct confrontation by stressing that he too wanted
improvements and was already at work. He also used patronage jobs to
tighten his hold on black constituents and undermine King. When King’s
campaign narrowed to concentrate on housing discrimination and staged
marches into all-white residential neighbourhoods in August, it
succeeded in creating a political crisis along the lines of Birmingham
and Selma, but it did not generate the same national coalition of
conscience.
c. Attracting external support.
Watching the fury of white residents against the open housing marchers
did not induce a majority of Americans to side with King’s demands.
Particularly after Mayor Daley stepped up the level of police
protection given the demonstrators, public sympathy went not just to
the protesters but to the police, caught between the two sides.
Moreover, whereas earlier demands for the desegregation of public
accommodations or the protection of the equal right to vote had seemed
modest, legitimate, and unthreatening to many non-southern whites, the
new demands had an economic dimension that many whites found
threatening, wherever they lived. Racism was built into the housing
market to such an extent that the arrival of black residents was
widely perceived as economically and socially destructive. Property
values would fall, it was assumed, and crime and delinquency would
increase.
d. Avoiding violence that casts doubt on the campaign’s legitimacy.
The climax of the Chicago campaign in August 1966 suggested that
King’s non-violence had shifted from the cultivation of external
sympathy, which was arguably the key in Selma, to the creating of
social crisis, which was an important feature of the Birmingham
campaign. This analogy allows us to review Malcolm X’s claim that it
was the black-on-white retaliatory violence that forced a resolution
of the crisis in 1963. Certainly, escalating social disorder alarmed
both Mayor Daley’s political machine and the Birmingham city fathers
and readied them for negotiations with civil rights leaders. However,
whereas the non-violence of King’s 1963 campaign gave some legitimacy
to the eruption of black anger in Birmingham, the July Chicago ghetto
disturbances tarnished King’s efforts in 1966. King’s claim in his
“Letter from Birmingham Jail” that sometimes it was necessary to
create a crisis in order to generate the momentum for action was
called into question in his later campaigns as the mass perception
ceased to be that the underlying cause of the crisis was white
brutality (symbolized by Bull Connor or Jim Clark), and reverted to
the, always present, suspicion that the crisis was caused by African
American demands.
e. Maintaining discipline and unity through common goals.
By 1966, King’s cultivation of external sympathy had become a key
element behind the larger antipathy that his non-violent stance
engendered in black militants. Northern-based black activists, outside
of the NAACP and National Urban League, had always doubted King’s
faith in white liberals, and leading figures among the battle-
hardened, southern movement veterans had experienced too much white
brutality and too little liberal commitment by 1966 to retain their
faith in non-violence. They either experienced a kind of “burn-out”
like Robert Moses of SNCC or like Moses’ colleagues, Stokely
Carmichael and James Forman, they declared non-violence to be just one
part of a repertoire of protest that shook concessions from the
establishment by creating a crisis. This was not a new position by any
means but it was more widely publicized in 1966, and in the generally
alarmist reaction to Carmichael’s calls for “Black Power” and the
emergence of such paramilitary groups as the Black Panther Party in
California, rejecting non-violence was presented by the media as
tantamount to embracing violent tactics. The big press “story” then
became the splits: between King and Carmichael, between integration
and separatism, between non-violence and armed struggle in the Che
Guevara style.
What King sensed about “Black Power” was its huge strategic
miscalculation. It relied upon a level of African American solidarity
that had never existed, yet fuelled white solidarity in an acutely
damaging way. Conservative politicians like Governor Ronald Reagan of
California prospered, while progressive white figures such as Mayors
Kavanagh of Detroit and Lindsay of New York saw their careers
destroyed by the backlash against a black militancy that produced
massive disturbances in Detroit and a huge disruption of New York
schools in 1967.
g. Exploiting divisions and appealing beyond one’s opponent’s
jurisdiction.
Ever since the abolitionist fight against slavery, African Americans
had tried to profit from the divisions within the white majority. The
guarantees and proscriptions added to the federal Constitution after
the Civil War strengthened a trend for black Americans to appeal to
the federal government either through the courts or increasingly after
World War II via the Presidency, an office secured via a voting system
that gave the black vote leverage in key electoral college states like
California or other non-southern heavily populated states. Between
1963 and 1965, King had appealed to a national coalition to mobilize
the federal government against what were perceived to be
anachronistic, Southern injustices. Between 1966 and 1968, on the
other hand, he spoke out against national and international evils that
were condoned and perpetrated by the federal government. After nearly
a year of vacillation, he spoke out strongly against the Vietnam War
in the spring of 1967, branding his own country as “the greatest
purveyor of violence in the world today” and calling on America to get
on the right side of the coming revolution of values. However, his
denunciation of the war was too prescient to secure a sympathetic
reception and he was lambasted as a Communist fellow traveller, a
venal publicity seeker, or simply, a fool.
King’s Final Year: Did his Nonviolence Fail? Subsequent events largely
support King’s analysis of the dire consequences of the Vietnam War,
but in the year that elapsed from his great Riverside speech against
the war and his assassination in Memphis, he did not develop an
effective non-violent strategy either to end the war or to transform
America’s political agenda from militarism to a genuine war on
poverty. In terms of direct action, King did not go on a Gandhi-style
hunger strike and flirted with only a few ideas. He talked about
taking a highly trained group of volunteers to Vietnam, where they
would encamp on bridges and at other strategic sites to provide “human
shields” to stop the bombing. His supposedly Communist white advisor,
Stanley Levison told him not to be ridiculous. He indicated his
support for conscientious objectors and visited other protesters
arrested for demonstrations at military installations. He led marches,
gave speeches, signed petitions, and lobbied, but although the rallies
were growing larger, King did not follow his colleague Jim Bevel’s
advice to attack the US war machine non-violently. The largest anti-
war demonstrations occurred after his death.
The Poor People’s Campaign, which King was planning at the time of his
death, shows that he was striving to demonstrate that non-violence
could address the key issues of social and economic injustice. Here,
too, his emphasis shifted between a coercive non-violence that created
widespread disruption through mass civil disobedience and a persuasive
non-violence that generated a coalition of conscience through
publicizing undeniable injustice. Thus, the idea of bringing the poor
to Washington was sometimes presented in terms of protests that would
stop the federal government from functioning, and at others was seen
as bringing the forgotten Americans - the poor - before Congress,
which would act once it saw firsthand the malnutrition, dilapidated
housing, and lack of income or employment, and heard about the level
of exploitation.
King himself spoke of the Poor People’s Campaign as “going for broke,”
a phrase that highlighted his desperation. The looting and violence
that disrupted his march in support of striking black workers in
Memphis on March 28 gravely damaged his reputation and probably
ensured that he would have backed further away from radical coercive
non-violence in the upcoming Washington campaign. King knew how thin
was the tightrope he walked in 1968. If his protest degenerated into
violence, it would provide a justification for reactionary measures.
If it failed to generate a crisis that extracted concessions, however,
it would strengthen the appeal of his black separatist rivals.
Since American politics in 1968 went through a crisis from which
conservative forces and a revitalized Republican Party ultimately
emerged victorious, it is tempting to see King as a failure rescued by
martyrdom. That would be too hasty a judgment, even though it might be
the kind of harsh verdict that King would have made of himself. To
emphasize only the conservative forces in American life at this time
would be to ignore how close Congress came to passing a guaranteed
income plan, how the movement’s economic and legal pressures have
generated the conditions for the subsequent emergence of an expanded
African American middle class, and how schemes to secure social
stability through expanded welfare and education programs endured into
the Reagan years. Certainly, the absence of racial justice in the
United States today cannot be taken as a sign of the failure of non-
violent direct action. Evil prospers, King once wrote, when good men
do nothing.
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http://www.americansc.org.uk/Online/We_shall_overcome.htm
Joan Baez - We shall overcome
http://in.youtube.com/watch?v=RkNsEH1GD7Q
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Why We Shall Overcome ....
By Donald Winkfield
October 11th, 2008
Barack Obama continues the Long March to American unity started by
Dr. King
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[On The Spot: Election 2008]
"I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence
of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to
the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today - my own
government."--- April 4th, 1967, A Time To Break The Silence, Dr.
Martin Luther King, Jr.
The United States of America has lost the respect of countries around
the world.
The selected few who have literally run the USA into the ground are
trying their best to keep control of the many – the voters. Yet, over
eight millions African Americans were not even registered to vote as
of October 10, when many states had their deadline.
I stated back in November 2007 that before this presidential race
comes to an end – it will turn into a race-race. Senator Barack Obama
is clearly the better candidate for the White House – but because of
his race, some in the Democratic Party, calling themselves “Reagan
Democrats,” wanted to cross over to vote for Senator John McCain. Now
that is modern day racism at its best.
Anyone who has been really paying close attention to the last two
debates know Obama’s and McCain’s policies are very different.
McCain’s policies will be a continuation of George Bush’s eight years
– and the USA cannot take four more years of the same administration
we now have in place simply because they are operating under different
names.
For the too many, who are still undecided – after the Wall Street
mess, which has a lasting effect on an already troubled economic
crisis – those people need to debate within their own mind to find out
what is really stopping them from facing the truth. McCain is not
that convincing or persuasive, what with people like former Mayor
Rudolph Giuliani as one of his close advisors – another reason to call
for alarm.
Witness the blatant disrespect we are witnessing from McCain and his
dismal Vice-Presidential pick Sarah Palin. During a moment in the
debate, McCain referred to Obama as, “That one there.” In his mind, he
may have wanted to say, “that n-word there.”
This is how far we have come in this world. No matter what McCain
thinks of Obama, he still should show the world he respects him as a
person and a senator and a serious candidate who may actually end up
as our president.
But, when you run a race from behind, you say and do things out of
frustration. Palin has been rehashing some old political dirt on Obama
which has been used before and has never proven to hold water. However
Palin chose to take the low road –obviously on orders from McCain—
because it is the only road she knows. This ugly McCain-Palin strategy
to incite racial animosities tapped into some lawless thinking people:
someone in one of her campaign gatherings yelled out, “Kill him,” in
reference to Obama. Palin and McCain never issued a statement
disavowing such ugly sentiments; it’s only yesterday that McCain
started backing off the ugly strategy he’s unleashed.
An elderly woman at one of McCain’s gatherings had said she was afraid
of Obama because “he’s an Arab.” When McCain took away the microphone
and assured the woman Obama was not an Arab and that he was a “decent
American” and “family man” with whom they had political disagreements,
many in the crowd booed McCain.
What a sad moment it was: the crowd wanted McCain not to disavow
something they all knew not to be true –that Obama is an Arab; and
it’s even sadder that apparently being an Arab is some sort of crime—
and McCain himself seemed surprised by the episode.
The chickens coming home to roost; he is now reaping the fruits of the
hatred he and his running mate sowed.
In terms of the second debate itself, I watched it with some young
people who are very clear as to whom they are going to be voting for
on November 4th. “Look how he just stood there to answer the question
the Black guy asked him. He didn’t even want to look him in the eyes,”
observed Lester J. “I’m happy to be voting for a Black president for
the first time.”
Another viewer noted that McCain seemed more relaxed when he answered
questions from Whites. “He walked right up to where one lady was
sitting and was looking directly at her when he answered her question.
Then on another question asked by a White guy, McCain patted him on
the back and shook his hand just because he asked him a question about
Israel,” said Montel W.
There are a lot of young people who are first-time voters and so
energized - they are talking as if they can wait to vote. But we have
to keep in mind the results of the last two presidential elections.
The last two elections have not been investigated nor have there been
any real protective measures put in place by the Board of Elections to
prevent the past from reoccurring at the polls.
There needs to be notices sent over the television and internet to
police agencies, and known hate groups – if you are caught tampering
with the election or preventing anyone from casting a vote, you will
be arrested.
From the start of his campaign, Obama called for unity – asking all
Americans to come together for a common cause. “We are not just red
states and blue states; we are the United States of America,” Obama
has said. Those were not just words – that was reality. For decades
we as Americans have been tricked into believing we can grow as a
nation being separate and unequal, while the rest of the world grows
and surpasses us on human issues so embedded in our own
constitution.
Since September 11, 2001, we have lost many of our civil liberties and
everywhere you go it feels as if you are in a foreign country. The
Patriot Act is an act against the very people who believe in freedom,
and who believe in having the right to petition the government, rally,
free speech, press, to bear arms and to vote.
American did not change after 9/11; the people who run the government
did. This is why November 4th is going to feel like a new day. There
are people who did not believe in change, but they are singing another
tune now, “Obama, Obama” and chanting “Yes we can,” which is actually
the modern equivalent of Dr. Martin Luther King’s “We Shall
Overcome.”
Young people are so fired up. I got an email message showing a young
man with an interesting hair cut; he had the image of Obama carved
onto the back of his head.
This is real. Make sure your vote is cast and counted.
Give peace a chance.
Contact Winkfield if you have a serious story or expose for his
column. (347) 632-2272 or On The Spot, Post Office Box 230149, Queens
County 11423. Email: Bsnont...@aol.com or mil...@blackstarnews.com
or (212) 481-7745.
Together we can get the justice everyone just talks about.
To subscribe to or advertise in New York’s leading Pan Global weekly
investigative newspaper, please call (212) 481-7745 or send a note to
Mil...@blackstarnews.com
“Speaking Truth To Empower.”
We Shall Overcome
Historical Period: Postwar United States, 1945-1968Songs and Poems |
Analysis Tools | Activity Ideas | About Song and Poetry
"We Shall Overcome"
song sheet, date unknown.
Courtesy of Ludlow Music, Inc.,
11 West 19th Street
New York, NY 10011
Learn more.
It was the most powerful song of the 20th century. It started out in
church pews and picket lines, inspired one of the greatest freedom
movements in U.S. history, and went on to topple governments and bring
about reform all over the world. Word for word, the short, simple
lyrics of "We Shall Overcome" might be some of the most influential
words in the English language.
"We Shall Overcome" has it roots in African American hymns from the
early 20th century, and was first used as a protest song in 1945, when
striking tobacco workers in Charleston, S.C., sang it on their picket
line. By the 1950s, the song had been discovered by the young
activists of the African American civil rights movement, and it
quickly became the movement’s unofficial anthem. Its verses were sung
on protest marches and in sit-ins, through clouds of tear gas and
under rows of police batons, and it brought courage and comfort to
bruised, frightened activists as they waited in jail cells, wondering
if they would survive the night. When the long years of struggle ended
and President Lyndon Johnson vowed to fight for voting rights for all
Americans, he included a final promise: "We shall overcome."
In the decades since, the song has circled the globe and has been
embraced by civil rights and pro-democracy movements in dozens of
nations worldwide. From Northern Ireland to Eastern Europe, from
Berlin to Beijing, and from South Africa to South America, its message
of solidarity and hope has been sung in dozens of languages, in
presidential palaces and in dark prisons, and it continues to lend its
strength to all people struggling to be free.
As you listen to "We Shall Overcome," think about the reasons it has
brought strength and support to so many people for so many years. And
remember that someone, somewhere, is singing it right now.
http://www.loc.gov/teachers/lyrical/songs/overcome.html
Lyndon Baines Johnson
Address to a Joint Session of Congress on Voting Legislation
"We Shall Overcome"
delivered 15 March 1965, Washington, D.C.
Audio mp3 of Address
click for pdf click for flash
[AUTHENTICITY CERTIFIED: Text version below transcribed directly from
audio.]
Mr. Speaker, Mr. President, Members of the Congress:
I speak tonight for the dignity of man and the destiny of democracy. I
urge every member of both parties, Americans of all religions and of
all colors, from every section of this country, to join me in that
cause.
At times history and fate meet at a single time in a single place to
shape a turning point in man's unending search for freedom. So it was
at Lexington and Concord. So it was a century ago at Appomattox. So it
was last week in Selma, Alabama. There, long-suffering men and women
peacefully protested the denial of their rights as Americans. Many
were brutally assaulted. One good man, a man of God, was killed.
There is no cause for pride in what has happened in Selma. There is no
cause for self-satisfaction in the long denial of equal rights of
millions of Americans. But there is cause for hope and for faith in
our democracy in what is happening here tonight. For the cries of pain
and the hymns and protests of oppressed people have summoned into
convocation all the majesty of this great government -- the government
of the greatest nation on earth. Our mission is at once the oldest and
the most basic of this country: to right wrong, to do justice, to
serve man.
In our time we have come to live with the moments of great crisis. Our
lives have been marked with debate about great issues -- issues of war
and peace, issues of prosperity and depression. But rarely in any time
does an issue lay bare the secret heart of America itself. Rarely are
we met with a challenge, not to our growth or abundance, or our
welfare or our security, but rather to the values, and the purposes,
and the meaning of our beloved nation.
The issue of equal rights for American Negroes is such an issue.
And should we defeat every enemy, and should we double our wealth and
conquer the stars, and still be unequal to this issue, then we will
have failed as a people and as a nation. For with a country as with a
person, "What is a man profited, if he shall gain the whole world, and
lose his own soul?"
There is no Negro problem. There is no Southern problem. There is no
Northern problem. There is only an American problem. And we are met
here tonight as Americans -- not as Democrats or Republicans. We are
met here as Americans to solve that problem.
This was the first nation in the history of the world to be founded
with a purpose. The great phrases of that purpose still sound in every
American heart, North and South: "All men are created equal,"
"government by consent of the governed," "give me liberty or give me
death." Well, those are not just clever words, or those are not just
empty theories. In their name Americans have fought and died for two
centuries, and tonight around the world they stand there as guardians
of our liberty, risking their lives.
Those words are a promise to every citizen that he shall share in the
dignity of man. This dignity cannot be found in a man's possessions;
it cannot be found in his power, or in his position. It really rests
on his right to be treated as a man equal in opportunity to all
others. It says that he shall share in freedom, he shall choose his
leaders, educate his children, provide for his family according to his
ability and his merits as a human being. To apply any other test -- to
deny a man his hopes because of his color, or race, or his religion,
or the place of his birth is not only to do injustice, it is to deny
America and to dishonor the dead who gave their lives for American
freedom.
Our fathers believed that if this noble view of the rights of man was
to flourish, it must be rooted in democracy. The most basic right of
all was the right to choose your own leaders. The history of this
country, in large measure, is the history of the expansion of that
right to all of our people. Many of the issues of civil rights are
very complex and most difficult. But about this there can and should
be no argument.
Every American citizen must have an equal right to vote.
There is no reason which can excuse the denial of that right. There is
no duty which weighs more heavily on us than the duty we have to
ensure that right.
Yet the harsh fact is that in many places in this country men and
women are kept from voting simply because they are Negroes. Every
device of which human ingenuity is capable has been used to deny this
right. The Negro citizen may go to register only to be told that the
day is wrong, or the hour is late, or the official in charge is
absent. And if he persists, and if he manages to present himself to
the registrar, he may be disqualified because he did not spell out his
middle name or because he abbreviated a word on the application. And
if he manages to fill out an application, he is given a test. The
registrar is the sole judge of whether he passes this test. He may be
asked to recite the entire Constitution, or explain the most complex
provisions of State law. And even a college degree cannot be used to
prove that he can read and write.
For the fact is that the only way to pass these barriers is to show a
white skin. Experience has clearly shown that the existing process of
law cannot overcome systematic and ingenious discrimination. No law
that we now have on the books -- and I have helped to put three of
them there -- can ensure the right to vote when local officials are
determined to deny it. In such a case our duty must be clear to all of
us. The Constitution says that no person shall be kept from voting
because of his race or his color. We have all sworn an oath before God
to support and to defend that Constitution. We must now act in
obedience to that oath.
Wednesday, I will send to Congress a law designed to eliminate illegal
barriers to the right to vote.
The broad principles of that bill will be in the hands of the
Democratic and Republican leaders tomorrow. After they have reviewed
it, it will come here formally as a bill. I am grateful for this
opportunity to come here tonight at the invitation of the leadership
to reason with my friends, to give them my views, and to visit with my
former colleagues. I've had prepared a more comprehensive analysis of
the legislation which I had intended to transmit to the clerk
tomorrow, but which I will submit to the clerks tonight. But I want to
really discuss with you now, briefly, the main proposals of this
legislation.
This bill will strike down restrictions to voting in all elections --
Federal, State, and local -- which have been used to deny Negroes the
right to vote. This bill will establish a simple, uniform standard
which cannot be used, however ingenious the effort, to flout our
Constitution. It will provide for citizens to be registered by
officials of the United States Government, if the State officials
refuse to register them. It will eliminate tedious, unnecessary
lawsuits which delay the right to vote. Finally, this legislation will
ensure that properly registered individuals are not prohibited from
voting.
I will welcome the suggestions from all of the Members of Congress --
I have no doubt that I will get some -- on ways and means to
strengthen this law and to make it effective. But experience has
plainly shown that this is the only path to carry out the command of
the Constitution.
To those who seek to avoid action by their National Government in
their own communities, who want to and who seek to maintain purely
local control over elections, the answer is simple: open your polling
places to all your people.
Allow men and women to register and vote whatever the color of their
skin.
Extend the rights of citizenship to every citizen of this land.
There is no constitutional issue here. The command of the Constitution
is plain. There is no moral issue. It is wrong -- deadly wrong -- to
deny any of your fellow Americans the right to vote in this country.
There is no issue of States' rights or national rights. There is only
the struggle for human rights. I have not the slightest doubt what
will be your answer.
But the last time a President sent a civil rights bill to the
Congress, it contained a provision to protect voting rights in Federal
elections. That civil rights bill was passed after eight long months
of debate. And when that bill came to my desk from the Congress for my
signature, the heart of the voting provision had been eliminated. This
time, on this issue, there must be no delay, or no hesitation, or no
compromise with our purpose.
We cannot, we must not, refuse to protect the right of every American
to vote in every election that he may desire to participate in. And we
ought not, and we cannot, and we must not wait another eight months
before we get a bill. We have already waited a hundred years and more,
and the time for waiting is gone.
So I ask you to join me in working long hours -- nights and weekends,
if necessary -- to pass this bill. And I don't make that request
lightly. For from the window where I sit with the problems of our
country, I recognize that from outside this chamber is the outraged
conscience of a nation, the grave concern of many nations, and the
harsh judgment of history on our acts.
But even if we pass this bill, the battle will not be over. What
happened in Selma is part of a far larger movement which reaches into
every section and State of America. It is the effort of American
Negroes to secure for themselves the full blessings of American life.
Their cause must be our cause too. Because it's not just Negroes, but
really it's all of us, who must overcome the crippling legacy of
bigotry and injustice.
And we shall overcome.
As a man whose roots go deeply into Southern soil, I know how
agonizing racial feelings are. I know how difficult it is to reshape
the attitudes and the structure of our society. But a century has
passed, more than a hundred years since the Negro was freed. And he is
not fully free tonight.
It was more than a hundred years ago that Abraham Lincoln, a great
President of another party, signed the Emancipation Proclamation; but
emancipation is a proclamation, and not a fact. A century has passed,
more than a hundred years, since equality was promised. And yet the
Negro is not equal. A century has passed since the day of promise. And
the promise is un-kept.
The time of justice has now come. I tell you that I believe sincerely
that no force can hold it back. It is right in the eyes of man and God
that it should come. And when it does, I think that day will brighten
the lives of every American. For Negroes are not the only victims. How
many white children have gone uneducated? How many white families have
lived in stark poverty? How many white lives have been scarred by
fear, because we've wasted our energy and our substance to maintain
the barriers of hatred and terror?
And so I say to all of you here, and to all in the nation tonight,
that those who appeal to you to hold on to the past do so at the cost
of denying you your future.
This great, rich, restless country can offer opportunity and education
and hope to all, all black and white, all North and South,
sharecropper and city dweller. These are the enemies: poverty,
ignorance, disease. They're our enemies, not our fellow man, not our
neighbor. And these enemies too -- poverty, disease, and ignorance: we
shall overcome.
Now let none of us in any section look with prideful righteousness on
the troubles in another section, or the problems of our neighbors.
There's really no part of America where the promise of equality has
been fully kept. In Buffalo as well as in Birmingham, in Philadelphia
as well as Selma, Americans are struggling for the fruits of freedom.
This is one nation. What happens in Selma or in Cincinnati is a matter
of legitimate concern to every American. But let each of us look
within our own hearts and our own communities, and let each of us put
our shoulder to the wheel to root out injustice wherever it exists.
As we meet here in this peaceful, historic chamber tonight, men from
the South, some of whom were at Iwo Jima, men from the North who have
carried Old Glory to far corners of the world and brought it back
without a stain on it, men from the East and from the West, are all
fighting together without regard to religion, or color, or region, in
Vietnam. Men from every region fought for us across the world twenty
years ago.
And now in these common dangers and these common sacrifices, the South
made its contribution of honor and gallantry no less than any other
region in the Great Republic -- and in some instances, a great many of
them, more.
And I have not the slightest doubt that good men from everywhere in
this country, from the Great Lakes to the Gulf of Mexico, from the
Golden Gate to the harbors along the Atlantic, will rally now together
in this cause to vindicate the freedom of all Americans.
For all of us owe this duty; and I believe that all of us will respond
to it. Your President makes that request of every American.
The real hero of this struggle is the American Negro. His actions and
protests, his courage to risk safety and even to risk his life, have
awakened the conscience of this nation. His demonstrations have been
designed to call attention to injustice, designed to provoke change,
designed to stir reform. He has called upon us to make good the
promise of America. And who among us can say that we would have made
the same progress were it not for his persistent bravery, and his
faith in American democracy.
For at the real heart of battle for equality is a deep seated belief
in the democratic process. Equality depends not on the force of arms
or tear gas but depends upon the force of moral right; not on recourse
to violence but on respect for law and order.
And there have been many pressures upon your President and there will
be others as the days come and go. But I pledge you tonight that we
intend to fight this battle where it should be fought -- in the
courts, and in the Congress, and in the hearts of men.
We must preserve the right of free speech and the right of free
assembly. But the right of free speech does not carry with it, as has
been said, the right to holler fire in a crowded theater. We must
preserve the right to free assembly. But free assembly does not carry
with it the right to block public thoroughfares to traffic.
We do have a right to protest, and a right to march under conditions
that do not infringe the constitutional rights of our neighbors. And I
intend to protect all those rights as long as I am permitted to serve
in this office.
We will guard against violence, knowing it strikes from our hands the
very weapons which we seek: progress, obedience to law, and belief in
American values.
In Selma, as elsewhere, we seek and pray for peace. We seek order. We
seek unity. But we will not accept the peace of stifled rights, or the
order imposed by fear, or the unity that stifles protest. For peace
cannot be purchased at the cost of liberty.
In Selma tonight -- and we had a good day there -- as in every city,
we are working for a just and peaceful settlement And we must all
remember that after this speech I am making tonight, after the police
and the FBI and the Marshals have all gone, and after you have
promptly passed this bill, the people of Selma and the other cities of
the Nation must still live and work together. And when the attention
of the nation has gone elsewhere, they must try to heal the wounds and
to build a new community.
This cannot be easily done on a battleground of violence, as the
history of the South itself shows. It is in recognition of this that
men of both races have shown such an outstandingly impressive
responsibility in recent days -- last Tuesday, again today.
The bill that I am presenting to you will be known as a civil rights
bill. But, in a larger sense, most of the program I am recommending is
a civil rights program. Its object is to open the city of hope to all
people of all races.
Because all Americans just must have the right to vote. And we are
going to give them that right. All Americans must have the privileges
of citizenship -- regardless of race. And they are going to have those
privileges of citizenship -- regardless of race.
But I would like to caution you and remind you that to exercise these
privileges takes much more than just legal right. It requires a
trained mind and a healthy body. It requires a decent home, and the
chance to find a job, and the opportunity to escape from the clutches
of poverty.
Of course, people cannot contribute to the nation if they are never
taught to read or write, if their bodies are stunted from hunger, if
their sickness goes untended, if their life is spent in hopeless
poverty just drawing a welfare check. So we want to open the gates to
opportunity. But we're also going to give all our people, black and
white, the help that they need to walk through those gates.
My first job after college was as a teacher in Cotulla, Texas, in a
small Mexican-American school. Few of them could speak English, and I
couldn't speak much Spanish. My students were poor and they often came
to class without breakfast, hungry. And they knew, even in their
youth, the pain of prejudice. They never seemed to know why people
disliked them. But they knew it was so, because I saw it in their
eyes. I often walked home late in the afternoon, after the classes
were finished, wishing there was more that I could do. But all I knew
was to teach them the little that I knew, hoping that it might help
them against the hardships that lay ahead.
And somehow you never forget what poverty and hatred can do when you
see its scars on the hopeful face of a young child. I never thought
then, in 1928, that I would be standing here in 1965. It never even
occurred to me in my fondest dreams that I might have the chance to
help the sons and daughters of those students and to help people like
them all over this country.
But now I do have that chance -- and I'll let you in on a secret -- I
mean to use it.
And I hope that you will use it with me.
I want to be the President who helped the poor to find their own way
and who protected the right of every citizen to vote in every
election.
I want to be the President who helped to end hatred among his fellow
men, and who promoted love among the people of all races and all
regions and all parties.
I want to be the President who helped to end war among the brothers of
this earth.
And so, at the request of your beloved Speaker, and the Senator from
Montana, the majority leader, the Senator from Illinois, the minority
leader, Mr. McCulloch, and other Members of both parties, I came here
tonight -- not as President Roosevelt came down one time, in person,
to veto a bonus bill, not as President Truman came down one time to
urge the passage of a railroad bill -- but I came down here to ask you
to share this task with me, and to share it with the people that we
both work for. I want this to be the Congress, Republicans and
Democrats alike, which did all these things for all these people.
Beyond this great chamber, out yonder in fifty States, are the people
that we serve. Who can tell what deep and unspoken hopes are in their
hearts tonight as they sit there and listen. We all can guess, from
our own lives, how difficult they often find their own pursuit of
happiness, how many problems each little family has. They look most of
all to themselves for their futures. But I think that they also look
to each of us.
Above the pyramid on the great seal of the United States it says in
Latin: "God has favored our undertaking." God will not favor
everything that we do. It is rather our duty to divine His will.
But I cannot help believing that He truly understands and that He
really favors the undertaking that we begin here tonight.
http://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/lbjweshallovercome.htm
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
We Shall Overcome
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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Please help improve this article by adding reliable references.
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For the Bruce Springsteen album, see We Shall Overcome: The Seeger
Sessions.
"We Shall Overcome" is a protest song that became a key anthem of the
US civil rights movement. The lyrics of the song are derived from a
gospel song by Reverend Charles Tindley. The song was published in
1947 as "We Will Overcome" in the People's Songs Bulletin (a
publication of People's Songs, an organization of which Pete Seeger
was the director and guiding spirit). It appeared in the bulletin as a
contribution of and with an introduction by Zilphia Horton, then music
director of the Highlander Folk School of Monteagle, Tennessee, a
school that trained union organizers. It was her favorite song and she
taught it to Pete Seeger (see Where Have All the Flowers Gone: A
Musical Autobiography by Pete Seeger, 1993-97, p. 34), who included it
in his repertoire, as did many other activist singers, such as Frank
Hamilton and Joe Glazer, who recorded it in 1950. The song became
associated with the Civil Rights movement from 1959, when Guy Carawan
stepped in as song leader at Highlander, and the school was a the
focus of student non-violent activism. It quickly became the
movement's unofficial anthem. Seeger and other famous folksingers in
the early 1960s, such as Joan Baez, sang the song at rallies, folk
festivals, and concerts in the North and helped make it widely known.
Since its rise to prominence, the song, and songs based on it, have
been used in a variety of protests worldwide.
Contents [hide]
1 Origins
2 Role of Highlander Folk School
3 Widespread adaptation
4 Copyright and royalties
5 See also
6 Notes
7 External links
8 References
9 Further reading
[edit] Origins
The phrase "We Will Overcome" is derived from the lyrics to a 1901
hymn or gospel music composition by Rev. Charles Tindley of
Philadelphia. Tindley was an African Methodist Episcopal Church
minister who composed many hymns and lyrics, some 50 of which are
known to have survived. The lyrics to "We Shall Overcome" were
combined with Tindley's original melody at a later date. Newer lyrics
contained the repeated line "I'll overcome someday," and the phrase,
"Deep in my heart," which more likely derive from a later gospel song.
Whatever the case, various versions can be traced to integrated
meetings of black and white coal miners in the early 1900s and to
black churches in the 1800s.[1]
According to James J. Fuld, Tindley wrote words that are similar to
the song we now know, but his tune was a different one.[2] Sometime
between 1900 and 1946, someone married Tindley's words to a tune with
a noticeable family resemblance to that of Michael Praetorius's famous
hymn "O Sanctissima." Atron Twigg is possibly responsible for the
change.[3] Note that Praetorius (1571-1621) himself, however, could
well have taken his tune from the folk tradition, as was a common
practice. Some hymn melodies have been traced to sixth-century
Gregorian chants and were probably old even then.
[edit] Role of Highlander Folk School
In the fall of 1945 in Charleston, South Carolina, members of the Food
and Tobacco Workers Union (who were mostly female and African
American), began a five-month strike against the American Tobacco
Company. To keep up their spirits during the cold, wet winter of
1945-46, one of the strikers, a woman named Lucille Simmons, led a
slow "long meter style" version of the gospel hymn, "We'll
Overcome" (I'll Be All Right") to end each day's picketing. Union
organizer, Zilphia Horton, who was the wife of the co-founder of the
Highlander Folk School (later Highlander Research and Education
Center), learned it from Lucille Simmons. Horton was (1935-56)
Highlander's music director, and it became her custom to end group
meetings each evening by leading this, her favorite song. During the
Presidential Campaign of Henry A. Wallace, "We Will Overcome" was
printed in Bulletin No. 3 (Sept., 1948), 8, of People's Songs with an
introduction by Horton saying that she had learned it from the CIO
Food and Tobacco Workers' Union workers and had found it to be
extremely powerful. Pete Seeger, a founding member, and for three
years Director of People's Songs, learned it from Horton's version in
1947.[4]Seeger writes: "I changed it to 'We shall'. . . . I think I
liked a more open sound; 'We will' has alliteration to it, but 'We
shall' opens the mouth wider; the 'i' in 'will' is not an easy vowel
to sing well [...]."[5] Seeger also added some verses ("We'll walk
hand in hand" and "The whole wide world around").
In 1950, the CIO's Department of Education and Research released the
album, Eight New Songs for Labor, sung by Joe Glazer ("Labor's
Troubador"), and the Elm City Four (songs on the album were: "I Ain't
No Stranger Now," "Too Old to Work," "That's All," "Humblin' Back,"
"Shine on Me," "Great Day," "The Mill Was Made of Marble," and "We
Will Overcome"). During a Southern CIO drive, Glazer taught the song
to country singer Texas Bill Strength, who cut a version that was
later picked up by 4-Star Records.[6]
The song made its first recorded appearance as "We Shall
Overcome" (rather than "We Will Overcome") in 1952 on a disc recorded
by Laura Duncan (soloist) and the The Jewish Young Singers (chorus)
conducted by Robert De Cormier co-produced by Ernie Lieberman and
Irwin Silber on Hootenany Records (Hoot 104-A) (Folkways, FN 2513,
BCD15720), where it is identified as a Negro Spiritual.
Frank Hamilton, a folk singer from California who was a member of
People's Songs and later the Weavers, picked up Seeger's version.
Hamilton's friend and traveling companion, fellow-Californian Guy
Carawan, learned the song from Hamilton. Carawan and Hamilton,
accompanied by Ramblin Jack Elliot, visited Highlander in the early
fifties and would also have heard Zilphia Horton sing the song there.
When, in 1959, Guy Carawan succeeded Horton as music director at
Highlander, he reintroduced it at the school. It was the young (many
of them teenagers) student-activists at Highlander, however, who gave
the song the words and rhythms we know it by today, when they sang it
to keep their spirits up during the frightening police raids on
Highlander and their subsequent stays in jail in 1959-60. Because of
this, Carawan has been reluctant to claim credit for the song's
widespread popularity. In the PBS video We Shall Overcome, Julian Bond
credits Carawan with teaching and singing the song at the founding
meeting of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee in Raleigh,
N.C., in 1960. From there, it spread orally and became an anthem of
Southern African American labor union and civil rights activism.[7]
Seeger also has publicly, in concert, credited Carawan with the
primary role in teaching and popularizing the song within the Civil
Rights Movement.
[edit] Widespread adaptation
In August of 1963, folksinger Joan Baez memorably led a crowd of
300,000 in singing "We Shall Overcome" at the Lincoln Memorial during
Martin Luther King's March on Washington. President Lyndon Johnson
used the phrase "we shall overcome" in addressing Congress on March
15, 1965[8], following violent, "bloody Sunday" attacks on civil
rights demonstrators during the Selma to Montgomery marches, thus
legitimizing the protest movement. Farmworkers in the United States
later sang the song in Spanish during strikes and grape boycotts of
the late 1960s.[citation needed] The Northern Ireland Civil Rights
Association adopted "we shall overcome" as a slogan and used it in
title of their retrospective autobiography publication, We Shall
Overcome - The History of the Struggle for Civil Rights in Northern
Ireland 1968-1978.[9][10] The film Bloody Sunday depicts march leader
MP Ivan Cooper leading the song shortly before the Bloody Sunday
shootings. Bruce Springsteen re-interpreted the song, which has been
included on Where Have All the Flowers Gone: A Tribute to Pete Seeger
and his 2006 album We Shall Overcome: The Seeger Sessions.
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. made use of "we shall overcome" in the
final Sunday March 31, 1968 speech before his assassination[11] In a
1965 speech[12] King explained the reasons why he believed "we shall
overcome" in terms very similar to those used in a 1957 speech to
support his belief in "an other-loving God working forever through
history for the establishment of His kingdom".[13] These were:
Because the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward
justice.
Quoting Thomas Carlyle, because no lie can live forever.
Quoting William Cullen Bryant, truth crushed to earth will rise again.
Quoting James Russell Lowell, truth is forever on the scaffold, wrong
forever on the throne - yet that scaffold sways the future, and behind
the dim unknown, stands God within the shadow keeping watch above His
own.
"We Shall Overcome" was notably sung by the U.S. Senator for New York
Robert F. Kennedy, who led anti-apartheid crowds in choruses from the
rooftop of his car while touring the country in 1966.[14]It was also
the song Abie Nathan chose to play as the Voice of Peace on October 1,
1993.[citation needed], and as a result it found its way to South
Africa in the later years of the anti-apartheid movement.[15]
"We Shall Overcome" later was adopted by various anti-Communist
movements in the Cold War and post-Cold War. In his memoir about his
years teaching English in Czechoslovakia after the Velvet Revolution,
Mark Allen wrote:
In Prague in 1989, during the intense weeks of the Velvet Revolution,
hundreds of thousands of people sang this haunting music in unison in
Wenceslas Square, both in English and in Czech, with special emphasis
on the phrase "I do believe." This song's message of hope gave
protesters strength to carry on until the powers-that-be themselves
finally gave up hope themselves. In the Prague of 1964, (former
Communist) Seeger was stunned to find himself being whistled and booed
by crowds of Czechs when he spoke out against the Vietnam War. But
those same crowds had loved and adopted his rendition of "We Shall
Overcome". History is full of such ironies -- if only you are willing
to see them. Prague Symphony (Praha:Praha Publishing, 2008[citation
needed]
In India, its literal translation in Hindi "Hum Honge Kaamyab / Ek
Din" became a patriotic/spiritual song during the 1980s, particularly
in schools. In Bengali-speaking India and in Bangladesh there are two
versions, both popular among school-children and political activists.
"Amra Karbo Joy" (a literal translation) was translated by the Bengali
folk singer Hemanga Biswas and re-recorded by Bhupen Hazarika. Another
version, translated by Shibdas Bandyopadhyay, "Ek Din Surjyer
Bhor" (literally translated as "One Day The Sun Will Rise") was
recorded by the Calcutta Youth Choir arranged by Ruma Guha Thakurta
during the 1971 Bangladesh War of Independence and became one of the
largest selling Bengali records. It was a favorite of Bangladeshi
Prime Minister Sheikh Mujibur Rahman and regularly sung at public
events after Bangladesh gained independence.[citation needed] In the
Indian State of Kerala, the traditional Communist stronghold, the song
became popular in college campuses in late 1970s. It was the struggle
song of the Students Federation of India SFI, the largest student
organisation in the country. The song translated to the regional
language Malayalam by N. P. Chandrasekharan, an activist of SFI, in
1980. The translation followed the same tune of the original song.
Later it was also published in Student, the monthly of SFI in
Malayalam.[citation needed]
The melody was also used (with due credit to Tinsley) in a symphony by
American composer William Rowland[citation needed]. In 1999 National
Public Radio included "We Shall Overcome" on their NPR 100 list of
most important American songs of the 20th century.[16]
[edit] Copyright and royalties
"We Shall Overcome" was originally written by Rev. Charles Tindley, of
the African Methodist Episcopal Church. As the work was composed in
1901, it is now in the public domain, according to current (2008) US
Copyright law, which provides 100 years for musical works before they
become public domain. The present version is an adaptation by Zilphia
Horton, Guy Carawan, Frank Hamilton, and Pete Seeger, who share the
artists' half of the rights, and TRO (The Richmond Organization, which
includes Ludlow Music, Essex, Folkways Music, and Hollis Music), which
holds the publishers rights (or 50% of the royalty money). Pete Seeger
explained that he took out a defensive copyright on advice of his
publisher, TRO, to prevent someone else from doing so and "At that
time we didn't know Lucille Simmons' name."[17] All royalties go to
the "We Shall Overcome" Fund, administered by Highlander under the
trusteeship of the "writers" (i.e., the holders of the writers' share
of the copyright, who, strictly speaking, are the arrangers and
adapters). Such funds are used to give small grants for cultural
expression involving African Americans organizing in the U.S. South.
[18]
[edit] See also
American Civil Rights Movement Timeline
Pete Seeger
We Shall Overcome: The Seeger Sessions
Guy Carawan
Sing for Freedom, Folkways Records, produced by Guy and Candie
Carawan, and the Highlander Center. Field recordings from 1960-88,
with the Freedom Singers, Birmingham Movement Choir, Georgia Sea
Island Singers, Doc Reese, Phil Ochs, Pete Seeger, Len Chandler, and
many others. Smithsonian-Folkways CD version 1990.
We Shall Overcome: The Complete Carnegie Hall Concert, June 8, 1963,
Historic Live recording June 8, 1963. 2-disc set, includes the full
concert, starring Pete Seeger, with the Freedom Singers, Columbia #
45312, 1989. Re-released 1997 by Sony as a box CD set.
Voices Of The Civil Rights Movement: Black American Freedom Songs
1960-1966 [BOX CD SET] With the Freedom Singers, Fanny Lou Hammer, and
Bernice Johnson Reagon, Smithsonian-Folkways CD ASIN: B000001DJT
(1997).
[edit] Notes
^ We Shall Overcome, Bruce Springsteen's official website.
^ The Book of World-Famous Music: Classical, Popular, and Folk (1966;
Dover, 1995).
^ Tindley
^ Dunaway, 1990, 222-223; Seeger, 1993, 32; see also, Robbie
Lieberman, My Song is My Weapon: People's Songs, American Communism,
and the Politics of Culture, 1930-50 (Urbana: University of Illinois
Press, [1989] 1995) p.46, p. 185
^ Seeger, Pete and Blood, Peter (Ed.), Where Have All the Flowers
Gone?: A Singer's Stories, Songs, Seeds, Robberies (1993). Independent
Publications Group, Sing Out Publications, ISBN 1-881322-01-7
^ Ronald Cohen and Dave Samuelson, Songs for Political Action:
Folkmusic, Topical Songs And the American Left 1926-1953 (This lavish
book is published as part of Bear Family Records 10-CD box set
published in Germany in 1996. It includes a selection of of satirical
Trotskyist songs from 1953 by Joe Glazer and Bill Friedland that are
bitterly critical of the Popular Front from the point of view of the
ultra-left (for example, for cooperating with FDR and for agreeing not
to strike during the war) and makes fun of folk singers and folk
songs.
^ Dunaway, 1990, 222-223; Seeger, 1993, 32.
^ Lyndon Johnson, speech of March 15, 1965, accessed March 28, 2007 on
HistoryPlace.com
^ CAIN: Civil Rights Association by Bob Purdie
^ CAIN: Events: Civil Rights - "We Shall Overcome" published by the
Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association (NICRA; 1978)
^ "A new normal"..
^ "A New Addition to Martin Luther King's Legacy".
^ ""Give Us the Ballot,"". Address Delivered at the Prayer Pilgrimage
for Freedom, Washington D.C. (1957-05-17).
^ Thomas, Evan. Robert Kennedy : His Life. New York: Simon & Schuster,
322. ISBN 0-7432-0329-1.
^ Dunaway, 1990, 243.
^ The NPR 100 The most important American musical works of the 20th
century
^ Seeger, 1993, p. 33
^ Highlander Reports, 2004, p. 3.
[edit] External links
Authorized Profile of Guy Carawan with history of the song, "We Shall
Overcome"
Freedom in the Air: Albany Georgia. 1961-62. SNCC #101. Recorded by
Guy Carawan, produced for the Student Non-Violent Coordinating
Committee by Guy Carawan and Alan Lomax. "Freedom In the Air . . . is
a record of the 1961 protest in Albany, Georgia, when, two weeks
before Christmas, 737 people brought the town nearly to a halt to
force its integration. The record's never been reissued and that's a
shame, as it's a moving document of a community through its protest
songs, church services, and experiences in the thick of the civil
rights struggle."—Nathan Salsburg, host, Root Hog or Die, East Village
Radio, January 2007.
Susanne´s Folksong-Notizen, excerpts from various articles, liner
notes, etc. about "We Shall Overcome".
Musical Transcription of "We Shall Overcome," based on a recording of
Pete Seeger's version, sung with the SNCC Freedom Singers on the 1963
live Carnegie Hall recording, and the 1988 version by Pete Seeger sung
at a reunion concert with Pete and the Freedom Singers on the
anthology, Sing for Freedom, recorded in the field 1960-88 and edited
and annotated by Guy and Candie Carawan, released in 1990 as
Smithsonian-Folkways CD SF 40032.
NPR news article including full streaming versions of Pete Seeger's
classic 1963 live Carnegie Hall recording and Bruce Springsteen's
tribute version.
"Something About That Song Haunts You", essay on the history of "We
Shall Overcome," Complicated Fun, June 9, 2006.
"Howie Richmond Views Craft Of Song: Publishing Giant Celebrates 50
Years As TRO Founder", by Irv Lichtman, Billboard, 8, 28, 1999.
Excerpt: "Key folk songs in the [TRO] catalog, as arranged by a number
of folklorists, are 'We Shall Overcome,' 'Kisses Sweeter Than Wine'
'On Top Of Old Smokey,' 'So Long, It's Been Good To Know You,'
'Goodnight Irene,' 'If I Had A Hammer,' 'Tom Dooley,' and 'Rock Island
Line.'"
[edit] References
Dunaway, David, How Can I Keep from Singing: Pete Seeger, (orig. pub.
1981, reissued 1990). Da Capo, New York, ISBN 0-306-80399-2.
Seeger, Pete and Blood, Peter (Ed.), Where Have All the Flowers Gone?:
A Singer's Stories, Songs, Seeds, Robberies (1993). Independent
Publications Group, Sing Out Publications, ISBN 1-881322-01-7
___, "The We Shall Overcome Fund". Highlander Reports, newsletter of
the Highlander Research and Education Center, August-November 2004, p.
3.
We Shall Overcome, PBS Home Video 174, 1990, 58 minutes.
[edit] Further reading
Sing for Freedom: The Story of the Civil Rights Movement Through Its
Songs: Compiled and edited by Guy and Candie Carawan; foreword by
Julian Bond (New South Books, 2007), comprising two classic
collections of freedom songs: We Shall Overcome (1963) and Freedom Is
A Constant Struggle (1968), reprinted in a single edition. The book
includes a major new introduction by Guy and Candie Carawan, words and
music to the songs, important documentary photographs, and firsthand
accounts by participants in the Civil Rights Movement. Available from
Highlander Center.
We Shall Overcome! Songs of the Southern Freedom Movement: Julius
Lester, editorial assistant. Ethel Raim, music editor: Additional
musical transcriptions: Joseph Byrd [and] Guy Carawan. New York: Oak
Publications, 1963.
Freedom is a Constant Struggle, compiled and edited by Guy and Candie
Carawan. Oak Publications, 1968.
Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/We_Shall_Overcome"
Categories: 1903 songs | American folk songs | American patriotic
songs | History of African-American civil rights | Pete Seeger songs |
Protest songs | Joan Baez songs | Songs against racism and xenophobia
Hidden categories: Articles needing additional references from June
2008 | All articles with unsourced statements | Articles with
unsourced statements since January 2008 | Articles with unsourced
statements since June 2008 | Articles with unsourced statements since
September 2008
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/We_Shall_Overcome
We shall overcome: But we must have real leadership to do so
October 28th, 2008 · 10 Comments
(As published today in San Diego CityBeat.)
Poor ACORN. The social-justice organization has been an unfortunate
victim of John McCain’s inflammatory tactics.
The poster child for a GOP-invented voter-registration fraud, ACORN is
this election’s lanky geek who’s being bloodied and brutalized by the
puffed-up neighborhood bullies. And as The Huffington Post reports,
the bullies are feeling dangerously emboldened.
Not only have at least two of its offices been vandalized in recent
weeks, but ACORN has also been the recipient of extremely disturbing e-
mails and voicemails that can only be attributed to Real Americans.
You know, the ones Sarah Palin is talkin’ to and, also, winkin’ at,
the ones who reside in the “pockets” of Real America. Because those of
us Fake Americans in the Fake America? We don’t believe in hate speech
or intimidation as a means to an end.
The e-mails to ACORN contained, among other things, a threat to the
life of a manager and a directive that all “blue gums” and “porch
monkeys” high-tail it back to Africa. Alas, the voicemails weren’t any
subtler. One caller’s favorite word rhymed with a comparative form of
the adjective “big,” and she spoke of things other than acorns that
she hoped would hang from oak trees. I heard her; she was horrid.
Thankfully, the Internet is available in both Americas so we can come
together as one, listen to these comments and be not the least bit
confused as to how far we still have to go in this diverse nation.
Given this country’s violent racial history and the fact that we are
one swing-state combo away from electing a black man to lead us out of
this morass, it’s not shocking that racism would become a flashpoint
in this election. But the fact that a candidate would intentionally
incite the bigoted few—and not be widely condemned for it—is
appalling.
After the second presidential debate, I asked readers of my blog
whether they felt McCain’s reference to Obama as “that one” was a
racially charged remark. Though a few people expressed concern that it
might be, the overwhelming opinion was that he is just an out-of-touch
geezer. I happen to disagree with this naïve assessment: I believe his
remark was specifically intended to degrade Obama, a belief that’s
been underscored by unfolding events. Given the kinds of statements he
and his representatives had been making up until that night, I had
little doubt that calling Obama “that one” was an effort to delineate
him—and, in effect, other brown people—as an “other” to be feared.
While McCain and his pathological liar of a running mate haven’t
themselves uttered obvious words of racism, they have smilingly relied
on coded language. They’ve used words—and combinations of them—with
double entendres nearly as indiscernible as a dog whistle when taken
individually. But collectively they’re as plain as the melanoma scar
on McCain’s jaw.
McCain the Matador waved his red flag before the glazed-over eyes of
the smoldering bull with sneering references to “community
organizing.” And the bull was frenzied by the time the candidate
offered his pre-debate battle cry of, “I’m gonna whip his you-know-
what!” An interesting choice of words, given historical context, and I
would argue this was not accidental.
Meanwhile, when asked why he does not immediately denounce unsavory
outbursts at his rallies, McCain blinks and clenches and takes the I-
have-no-idea-what-you’re-talking-about approach.
To be fair, he did attempt to correct a few bigots at one of his
rallies. But he didn’t go far enough. McCain stood down when he had an
opportunity to stand for something. He could have publicly stated that
further outbursts would be met with expulsion from events. He could
have publicly stated that Arab-Americans and Muslim-Americans are, in
fact, Americans. He could have publicly stated that there is no room
for bigotry and hate in civil discourse. He could have publicly stated
that lawyers will address any wrongdoing at ACORN but the death
threats and vile accusations toward the organization, it’s workers,
it’s beneficiaries and, yes, his opponent must absolutely,
unequivocally, immediately stop.
He could have led, but he didn’t.
In contrast, upon hearing his supporters boo his opponent during a
speech on Oct. 21, Obama told the crowd, calmly but firmly, “No, no,
we don’t need that. We need you to vote.” Certainly, not an issue as
inflammatory as the one created and perpetuated by McCain, but Obama’s
already been tested in this way.
Time journalist Joe Klein recently asked Obama about his gut feeling
on dealing with the explosive remarks of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright.
Obama said, “My gut was telling me that this was a teachable moment
and that if I tried to do the usual political damage control instead
of talking to the American people like an adult—like they were adults
and could understand the complexities of race—that I would be not only
doing damage to the campaign but missing an important opportunity for
leadership.”
This was no gut feeling that put us in an endless war or gave us an
unqualified nominee for vice president. No indeed. From this gut
feeling came one of the most important and meaningful speeches on race
that I’ve ever heard anyone deliver in my lifetime. Apparently, those
Real Americans who called ACORN with their snippets of wisdom missed
it.
The next four years will hold many opportunities for leadership, one
of them being bridging the chasm between Real and Fake America. The
choice couldn’t be more obvious. To paraphrase the conservative writer
Andrew Sullivan, Obama is the future and we must decide if the future
will begin Nov. 5.
http://www.aarynbelfer.com/2008/10/we-shall-overcome-but-we-must-have-real-leadership-to-do-so.html
Victor Obama reassures world
K.P. NAYAR
Barack Obama at the victory rally in Chicago. (Reuters)
Washington, Nov. 5: Americans voted their country back into reckoning
as the leader of the free world when they elected Barack Obama as the
44th president of the US last night in a turnout that set a record in
48 years.
With the counting of provisional and absentee ballots still going on
across America, 64 per cent of eligible voters cast their votes,
braving the elements, long queues and snags at polling stations.
The last time Americans turned out in similar numbers to elect their
commander-in-chief was when they voted John F. Kennedy to the
presidency.
But if Kennedy’s election was “return to Camelot”, the idealisation of
his White House as emblematic of King Arthur’s legendary court, the
election of America’s first black President represents the redemption
of this country where slavery was legal.
If the percentage is much higher than the figure given at the time
going to the press, yesterday’s voting statistics could set a record
in 100 years for a country that is notorious for its indifference to
exercising adult franchise.
The 63 million plus popular votes polled for Obama, a nearly seven
million lead over John McCain, represented a comprehensive rejection
of eight years of Republican unilateralism that made the US government
an object of revulsion in virtually every country in the world.
An hour after McCain conceded defeat, Obama sought to assure the world
that he would turn his back on policies which have made people around
the world lose faith in America and turn against it.
“To all those watching tonight from beyond our shores, from
parliaments and palaces to those who are huddled around radios in the
forgotten corners of our world — our stories are singular, but our
destiny is shared, and a new dawn of American leadership is at hand,”
the President-elect said in an acceptance speech at midnight before a
raucous audience estimated at 200,000 in Obama’s home town of
Chicago.
“And to all those who have wondered if America’s beacon still burns as
bright — tonight we proved once more that the true strength of our
nation comes not from our the might of our arms or the scale of our
wealth, but from the enduring power of our ideals: democracy, liberty,
opportunity, and unyielding hope,” Obama said.
Today, with only 76 days left for his swearing-in, Obama immediately
set about assembling his presidency, but he made a point of taking his
two daughters, 10-year-old Malia and seven-year-old Sasha, to school
in the knowledge that he cannot do that regularly any more after
January 20 next year.
From tomorrow itself, top US intelligence officials will begin to give
him top-secret daily briefings and share critical overnight
intelligence reports as if he is already in the White House. Obama
will also begin a practice of daily briefings to the media on
Thursday.
Obama is expected to immediately name Illinois Congressman Rahm
Emanuel as his White House chief of staff, traditionally the first
appointment by an incoming President. Emanuel was political and policy
adviser to Bill Clinton when he was President.
In another move that will bring Clinton’s top aides back into the
White House, Obama is also expected to name John Podesta, who was
Clinton’s chief of staff, to head his transition team. Meanwhile, a
group of Americans have begun an online petition drive through an open
letter to the next President to draft Fareed Zakaria as the next
secretary of state.
Zakaria is an Indian-born American journalist, currently editor of
Newsweek International. It is an effort that is unlikely to go very
far in view of his earlier support for the policies of President
George W. Bush. The Democratic party establishment is said to be
pressing for recruiting Senator John Kerry for the job.
Bush, meanwhile, talked to Obama on telephone and pledged “complete co-
operation” in the transition and called Obama’s victory a “triumph of
the American story”.
At the time of writing, Obama has secured 349 votes in the electoral
college of 538 persons in results that are still incomplete. McCain
got 163.
Results from Missouri and North Carolina are still awaited because the
race in the two states is very close and counting of provisional and
absentee votes is in progress.
Virginia voted for Obama and if North Carolina follows suit, two
states which had very dark histories during the slave era would have
especially redeemed their dishonourable past.
Obama’s victory sparked instant, late night celebrations all across
the US, which continued today. A few thousand people marched to the
White House and claimed that the American people had retaken the
presidential home. CNN quoted Secret Service officers as saying that
they had never seen anything like it before.
http://www.telegraphindia.com/1081106/jsp/frontpage/story_10071143.jsp
Maya to Obama, signs of the new millennium
GAIL OMVEDT
Obama has won! I was in the US in May 2007, when Mayavati became chief
minister of UP, and Obama was coming forward in the US primary. With
my daughter’s friends, mostly young and radical South Asian Americans,
and all Obama supporters we celebrated Mayavati’s achievement. After
years of depressing Republican presidencies, war and neoliberalism,
something new was happening in the world.
An African American was aiming for the presidency, while a Dalit (and
a woman!) was heading India’s largest state and promising to become
Prime Minister in 10 years. Old barriers of caste and race were being
not only challenged, but surmounted. Obama has made history: will
Mayavati?
It seems that we were truly entering a new millennium! Obama’s victory
itself reflects not only his own impressive leadership, but also a
long history. I remember the 1960s: Thirty to forty years ago there
were huge “race riots” in the US. In fact, they were urban ghetto
uprisings, protests against the continued racism of American society.
A bloody civil war — the bloodiest in American history — had been gone
through a century earlier; but in the reaction afterwards segregation
was reimposed in the south and the former slaves were deprived of the
voting rights. It took decades to make really solid changes. W.E.B.
Dubois, as a militant, Left-leaning leader of African Americans, and
Dr. Babasaheb Ambedkar can well be compared; theoretically and
practically there were great similarities.
Yet while Ambedkar could become the head of the Constitution drafting
committee and a minister, first in British Indian, then in independent
India, Dubois could not get a job as postmaster in Washington D.C.
which he had applied for. Bitter at the end, Dubois ended as a
Communist in Africa.
The 1960s saw the civil rights movement; Martin Luther King (moved by
a brave woman named Rosa Parks) emerging to leadership of a Montgomery
bus strike as Blacks revolted against being forced to sit at the back
of the bus; then came sit-ins by militant Black students resolving not
to move away from restaurants refusing to serve them coffee.
In Freedom Summer, an event organised by the Student Nonviolent
Coordinating Committee to bring whites and Blacks together to fight
segregation in Mississippi, four men — three whites and an African
American — were killed. One of the slogans of SNCC was the sarcastic,
“there’s a town in Mississippi called Liberty; there’s a Department in
Washington called Justice” — a comment on the lack of support they
were getting from the Federal government. Little children moving to
integrate schools were forced to go through mobs of cursing and
shouting white segregationists. And then came the uprisings in
northern ghettos, cities outside the Deep South which had their own
harsh forms of racism.
They were historic years, a time of spreading militancy. A youth group
I was working with in Berkeley, calling themselves “Youth Council for
Community Action” (they had wanted “Youth Party for Youth Protection”
but it was felt too militant), had the saying: “There are Negroes,
niggers and Black people. We have a lot of niggers in this
organisation, but we at least we don’t have any Negroes!”
Negroes, once the preferred term, had gotten the connotation of a
middle class sellout; “nigger” was a derogatory term when used by
whites (known insultingly as “honkies”) but when used among themselves
had a rather desirable connotation of someone who was (ironically)
“bad” — tough, riotous, uncontrollable, one who never gave in or gave
up. And “Black” by then was the preferred term, someone who was
“together”, a real “brother”.
America has come a long way since then. Sparked by the protests and
uprisings, which had the support of growing groups of whites, the
government responded with a number of “affirmative action” programmes.
Some sections preferred to build “Black Capitalism”, which radicals
such as myself at the time saw as rather a sellout. Yet all of these
had their effect, Blacks — now calling themselves “African Americans”
— began to move ahead in many fields. Emerging writers, men and women
alike began to make their impact. Films such as Roots brought home the
reality of slavery to millions of viewers; the Color Purple (from the
novel by Alice Walker) saw Black women coming in masses and crying
through its showing — and sterling first performers by Whoopee
Goldberg and Oprah Winfrey. Oprah went on to become the highest paid
TV personage in the country, said to be worth a million dollars an
hour, her endorsement for Obama worth a million votes.
Among the youth of the country, the change in attitude was often
profound; people began to choose their friends and mates without
looking at colour. According to Census bureau figures, for example,
black-white marriages increased from 65,000 in 1970 to 422,000 in
2005. Racism is hardly dead; but it is under challenge as never
before.
Then came a young Senator of mixed parentage, white and African, with
a history of community organising, with a Kenyan father and a
childhood in Indonesia and Hawaii. When he announced his candidacy as
a Democrat for the presidency in 2007, he was a “dark horse”, a
relative unknown; Hillary Clinton was the overwhelming favourite. Yet
Obama began to waken tremendous enthusiasm, drawing huge crowds and
provoking emotion. His slogan was simple: “change”.
By the time of the vote, Obama’s victory was no surprise. Charged with
being young and inexperienced, he won over his primary and main
election opponents not only with the most impressive funding seen in
history, but also with powerful organisation, going to the grassroots
with a practical machine and using the Internet, YouTube and SMS
cellphone messages. He remained cool and unflappable in the face of
every challenge. And he awakened something like a new dream among
Americans, mostly young, but of every class, Black and white and
Hispanic.
Throughout the campaign, he drew crowds like a rock star or a famous
preacher, emotional, swaying. The night of the election itself tens of
thousands gathered in Chicago and New York, singing and weeping,
hugging each other as the results became clear. When he stated in his
acceptance speech “change has come -- we have proved today it is a new
and real ‘United’ States of America”, the emotional achievement of
breaking through three hundred years of American slavery and
oppression was visible in many faces.
As one columnist, Frank Rich in the New York Times, wrote: “Obama
doesn’t transcend race. He isn’t post-race. He is the latest chapter
in the ever-unfurling American racial saga. It is an astonishing
chapter.”
For African Americans, it was symbolised in a message sent from phone
to phone: “Rosa sat so Martin could walk. Martin walked so Barack
could run. Barack ran so your children can fly.” Hopefully, this will
symbolise the new millennium, not only for people of every colour in
the US but for people of all castes in India.
Gail Omvedt is an America-born sociologist whose essential work has
centred on Dalit empowerment movements in India. Among her many books
is a political biography of B.R. Ambedkar. Omvedt became an Indian
citizen in 1983 and lives in Maharashtra.
http://www.telegraphindia.com/1081106/jsp/frontpage/story_10071201.jsp
Pat from PM, but no love
RADHIKA RAMASESHAN
New Delhi, Nov. 5: Prime Minister Manmohan Singh did not tell Barack
Obama Indians “deeply love” him, but he did promise the US President-
elect “a warm welcome” in the country.
In his congratulatory message to Obama, the Prime Minister said: “Your
extraordinary journey to the White House will inspire people not only
in your country but also around the world.”
“I hope you will find an opportunity to visit India soon. A warm
welcome awaits you,” Singh added, saying he looked forward to working
with Obama. “We have strong ties between our people and I look forward
to working with you to realise the enormous potential for co-operation
that exists between India and the US.”
A little over a month ago, when Singh met the outgoing President at
the White House, he had told George W. Bush: “The people of India
deeply love you, and all that you have done to bring our two countries
closer to each other.”
Congress spokespersons were asked why the Prime Minister got so
effusive about a leader whose approval ratings had plummeted when he
was about to demit office.
Bush and Singh had worked closely to seal the nuclear deal, an issue
so close to the Prime Minister’s heart that he staked his government
on it.
If Singh’s message to Obama was unlike his emotional interactions with
Bush, the ruling Congress and the Opposition BJP were not effusive
either.
Congress chief Sonia Gandhi congratulated Obama and both parties
hailed as “historic” the election of the first black President of the
US but were weighing what the regime change would mean for India.
Bush, sources in the Congress and the BJP agreed, meant a lot to both
parties. Relations between India and the US got a boost when he was
first elected President in 2000. At the time, the BJP’s Atal Bihari
Vajpayee was Prime Minister. Indo-US ties reached a high when the
nuclear deal was sealed this year.
BJP spokesperson Prakash Javadekar said: “India has to be careful
because the Democrats will pressure India to sign the CTBT
(Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty).”
Congress sources said that while the deal could not be abrogated, the
Democrats might thwart its implementation. Since every nuclear
transaction will require a licence from the US government, Washington
could leverage its position to pressure India to sign the CTBT, they
feared.
Congress sources also pointed out that “a Democrat dispensation tends
to lean towards China”.
Other areas of concern were Obama’s hints at third-party mediation on
Jammu and Kashmir and curtailing outsourcing of jobs.
Congress spokesperson Manish Tewari pinned his hopes on Indian
Americans: “Indo-US relations have grown and consolidated over the
last two decades. If there are differing perceptions, we will have to
work towards their reconciliation. The Indian diaspora has enough
strength to work on the US establishment towards reconciliation.”
http://www.telegraphindia.com/1081106/jsp/frontpage/story_10069513.jsp
Indians shrug off BPO worry
AMIT ROY
Shefali Kapadia watches election night coverage with Indian techies in
New York
New York, Nov. 5: As President, Barack Obama will not be able to
reverse the whole process of outsourcing to India whatever he may have
indicated during the election campaign, many Indian Americans feel.
Explaining why Indian “techies” took this view, Kartik Kilachand,
member of South Asians for Obama, told The Telegraph: “Indians
comprise 2.4million — about 0.8 per cent of America’s 300 million
population. Yet out of the $650million campaign funds collected by
Obama, Indians raised nearly $30million — about 5 per cent of the
total.”
Kilachand, who had gathered for an Indian election-night party in
Brooklyn Heights, an affluent New York suburb, said: “We now have a
seat at the table. We will be consulted on important policy issues,
such as outsourcing.”
The Indians clearly felt part of the US political process. A rousing
cheer went up at 8.45pm when CNN called Pennsylvania for Obama. At
9.20pm, Ohio, another crucial battleground state, followed.
One of the guests, Shefali Kapadia, combining the glamour of New York
and Mumbai, the two cities between which she — like many other Indian
Americans — practically commutes, said she worked for two NGOs,
Chakshu and Blazing Hope, which focused on 64 villages in
Maharashtra.
“I often work in the village of Shivkar in the Panvel area and know
bright children,” she said. “All they need is a break. I am confident
they could be the Indian Obamas of tomorrow, the outsider who has come
from nowhere.”
Last night’s party was hosted by Ashok Vasvani, a “financial analyst
for hedge funds”, and his wife Bansi, an art dealer. Many of the
guests were entrepreneurs in software development.
Whether Obama really will consult his Indian supporters on outsourcing
remains to be seen but the main argument advanced last night was that,
in office, he would be unlikely to adopt policies that would damage
American companies by restricting their ability to engage with
business partners in India.
There was no jingoism on display, only a presentation of the realities
of burgeoning Indo-US trade and business. And it came at a celebration
where the mood was genuinely pro-Obama.
Kilachand’s business partner, Samir Hutheesing, stressed that US
corporations outsourced to India “not because it was cheaper but
because they received quality”.
He said: “Obama has talked of rewarding American companies that don’t
send jobs abroad but I don’t think US companies have a choice. The
Wipros and the Infosyses of this world are multi-billion-dollar
companies. Indian companies are very competitive. Indian companies can
offer good service with excellent technical skills, which are often
things you cannot get in the US.”
http://www.telegraphindia.com/1081106/jsp/frontpage/story_10070953.jsp
PROMISE OF THE PRESENT
- Barack Hussein Obama’s election completes a cycle of history
Mukul Kesavan
This is the richest and the most powerful country which ever occupied
this globe. The might of past empires is little compared to ours. But
I do not want to be the President who built empires, or sought
grandeur, or extended dominion.
I want to be the President who educated young children to the wonders
of their world.
I want to be the President who helped to feed the hungry and to
prepare them to be tax-payers instead of tax-eaters.
http://www.blackstarnews.com/?c=125&a=4988
The day before Barack Obama was elected the 44th president of the
United States of America, I asked a class of post-graduate students if
they thought an Obama win (were it to happen) would amount to a
historically significant event, a landmark of sorts, a watershed. Ever
since the great materialist historians of France and Britain
discredited a style of history-writing that reduced history to a
chronicle of kings and queens and governments, students of history
have been careful not to freight individuals with more historical
significance than they can bear.
Two students in a class of six argued that Obama’s election would make
no material difference to race relations in America, nor to America’s
relations with the world. Both of them had specific reasons for their
view: the boy, a Maoist, said that America’s military-industrial
complex was too entrenched for any individual to affect, and the girl
(of no explicit political affiliation) was content to argue that
Obama’s election would be, at best, a kind of tokenism practised by a
society keen to buy cheap absolution for its racist past and present.
Since I had been following Obama’s career obsessively for more than
four years, ever since I read a magazine profile of him written around
the time he was running for the US Senate, I felt both disappointed
and chastened by their unillusioned take on an Obama presidency.
Disappointed because in a corny way I expected ‘young people’ to be
excited by the prospect of a relatively young black man becoming the
president of the most powerful country in the world, and chastened
because their answers made my excitement feel like middle-aged
hyperventilation.
Even middle-age wasn’t an excuse because there were many grown-up
people whose views on Obama’s campaign were similarly clear-eyed. In
an interview with the New Statesman, the writer, Arundhati Roy,
refused to endorse Obama. For the American electorate, the choice
between Obama and McCain was no better than the humiliating choice
Indians faced between the Congress and the Bharatiya Janata Party, she
said. If Obama was elected, he would, metaphorically, turn into a
white man because “He’ll have to prove that he is whiter than the
white man.”
If Arundhati Roy’s argument about the irrelevance of Obama’s colouring
came from the Left, Christopher Hitchens disdained Obama’s blackness
from the Right. A Trotskyist who became a neo-conservative a few years
ago, Hitchens declared with fine rhetorical flourish in the Wall
Street Journal that “I shall not vote for Sen. Obama and it will not
be because he — like me and like all of us — carries African genes.”
For Hitchens the idea that Obama’s mixed race identity or his colour
made his candidacy historic was ignorant and sentimental because
science had taught us otherwise: “The enormous advances in genome
studies have effectively discredited the whole idea of ‘race’ as a
means of categorizing humans. And however ethnicity may be defined or
subdivided, it is utterly unscientific and retrograde to confuse it
with color.”
Having scientifically demonstrated (at least to his own satisfaction)
that since everyone was African, no one was black, Hitchens went on,
in another article, to dismiss the excitement about the significance
of Obama’s candidacy as a feeble-minded capitulation to identity
politics: “The more that people claim Obama’s mere identity to be a
‘breakthrough,’ the more they demonstrate that they have failed to
emancipate themselves from the original categories of identity that
acted as a fetter upon clear thought.”
So why was I thrilled by Obama’s victory? And what reason was there to
believe that a hundred years from now, his election as president would
merit a page or even a footnote in a history of the 21st century? It’s
salutary to be reminded of the historical cruelties of the American
State, and the suffering it has inflicted on people within its borders
and beyond them. In the headlined hysteria of the moment, it’s useful
to be reminded that Obama’s ascension won’t, in the foreseeable
future, reduce the population of African-Americans in jail, extend
their life-expectancy or magic blacks out of inner-city ghettoes into
prosperous suburbs. And in Obama’s declared foreign-policy intentions
— his determination to wage an unwinnable war in Afghanistan, his
keenness to bomb Pakistan in pursuit of bin Laden — there is enough to
depress the most enthusiastic supporter.
And yet, shouldn’t a historically informed scepticism about Obama,
founded in an understanding of the past nature of the American State,
be nuanced and complicated by another history, one that feeds directly
into this election? To acknowledge the history of American empire and
the heartbreak it has visited on this world is proper. But surely we
should simultaneously recall the struggle against slavery and
segregation, recognize that span of history, which now includes Obama
in its arc, remember Frederick Douglas, Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther
King, Bayard Rustin and Rosa Parks, and try to imagine what the
election of a black man to the American presidency would have meant to
them? Because unless we make that effort, our scepticism of
individuals and the politics of identity remains depthless,
unempathetic, ahistorical.
Ironically it was a conservative American writer, Michael Gerson, a
supporter of McCain, who summed up the historical symbolism of Obama’s
victory: “An African American will take the oath of office blocks from
where slaves were once housed in pens and sold for profit. He will
sleep in a house built in part by slave labor, near the room where
Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation with firm hand. He will
host dinners where Teddy Roosevelt in 1901 entertained the first
African American to be a formal dinner guest in the White House;
command a military that was not officially integrated until 1948.
Every event, every act, will complete a cycle of history.”
A few days before the election, the great American novelist, Toni
Morrison was asked roughly the same question I asked my students.
Morrison, whose wrenchingly beautiful novel about slavery, Beloved, is
arguably the best American novel written in the past half century, had
this to say. “This election is critical, vital to more than just
people in the United States. It’s going to make a big, big difference
which way it goes… I think the promise with Senator Obama is that we
return to an idea known as ‘the common good’…” Toni Morrison is a
black woman, who, despite Christopher Hitchens’s dazzling
deconstruction of race and colour, has no doubt at all about her
blackness, the history of that blackness and the significance of
Barack Obama’s bid for the presidency of the United States of America
to that history. Asked what she was going to do on election night,
this grand old woman of American letters who has won every distinction
that a writer can hope for, said: “I have three choices: I can go to
some friends; I was invited to go on a TV show; but I think under the
bed may yet prove the safest place to be.”
She can come out from under the bed now, and I can tell my students
tomorrow that I had asked them the wrong question, that there are
times when, like a good reader, it’s good to briefly suspend
disbelief, to resist the pleasure of knowingness, to give yourself up
to the promise of the present. The election of Barack Hussein Obama is
one of those times. For a day (or a week), history can take care of
itself.
http://www.telegraphindia.com/1081106/jsp/opinion/story_10068405.jsp
Beacon of an equal world
Struggle makes victory special
Barack Hussein Obama has made it. The child of a black man will enter
the White House as President of the USA on January 20, 2009. This is
not an ordinary event, nor is it a symbolic one. Indeed, it is an
epoch-making event signifying a real change, not only for America but
for the entire world, especially for the disempowered people across
nations.
What does the Obama victory mean for the disempowered masses
worldwide? In one word: Hope.
It was probably the first election in the history of the United States
that witnessed long and winding queues of African American voters,
who, until now, had felt largely disenfranchised and under-represented
in the election process and to an extent, even shut out of mainstream
America. It is also for the first time in American history that
African American youth have an empowered leader they can look up to
and strive to aspire to become.
Not since John F. Kennedy has there been such anticipation and
speculation around a presidential candidate as was the case with
Obama. But the comparison between Kennedy and Obama really ends with a
minority background and highly energetic youthfulness which they
shared.
Kennedy had a strong and wealthy family background. On the other hand,
as the child of a black man and white woman, raised by a single mother
and with a father having a Muslim-sounding name — Hussein — besides an
extremely modest economic background, Obama had to beat many more
seemingly insurmountable odds and overcome vicious personalised
criticism. That is precisely why this victory is so special, and truly
unprecedented.
Obama represents a beacon of hope to millions of sidelined or
marginalised masses throughout the world just for who he is. As he
explains his multicultural background and family structure in his
book, The Audacity of Hope, “I have no choice but to believe this
vision. As the child of a black man and white woman, born in the
melting pot of Hawaii, with a sister who is half-Indonesian, but who
is usually mistaken for Mexican, and a brother-in-law and niece of
Chinese descent, with some relatives who resemble Margaret Thatcher
and others who could pass for Bernine Mac, I never had the option of
restricting my loyalties on the basis of race or measuring my worth on
the basis of tribe.”
Obama’s wife, Michelle, also symbolises the true 21st century woman:
intelligent, independent, and the pillar of strength for her husband.
Women throughout the world can look up to her poise and intellect, and
can have similar dreams of their own.
Obama supporter Joyce Nichols cries as she watches the election
results in Houston. (AP)
Needless to say that the accomplishment does not lie with the person
alone and the praise must legitimately also go to the nation that
elects such a leader despite racial or religious or caste barriers.
This is symptomatic of the welcome maturity of the American democracy.
Nevertheless, as former secretary of state Colin Powell stated while
endorsing Obama’s candidature, Obama was not supported “because of his
race”.
Obama studiously refrained from using the “Black Card” and charged the
American public opinion by conveying a new image of American
leadership and also a new vision for America’s role in the world.
“This election is not about me, it is about you,” he convinced the
American people. This great contribution is entirely Obama’s own.
“President” Obama would certainly represent the “melting pot” that
America has become and is hoped to be a harbinger of a change
indicating that centuries of prejudice and hate that have besieged
American society and culture have finally begun to end. No longer will
a typical American just be thought of as a Caucasian, Anglo-Saxon,
Protestant man. It could be an Indian businessman, or Chinese
professional or even a Muslim woman wearing a burqa.
Rahul Gandhi recently said that in India “there are hundreds of Obamas
in the making”. Well, Barack Obama’s election as the President of the
US is a great source of inspiration to the thousands of Obamas in the
making all over the world. Indeed, the making of the man — “President”
Barack Hussein Obama — is the message!
Dr Narendra Jadhav, economist and educationist, is vice-chancellor of
the University of Pune. His autobiography Outcaste is the saga of a
Dalit family, and their triumphs and tribulations
http://www.telegraphindia.com/1081106/jsp/nation/story_10069812.jsp
All for Obama, Amartya counts the gains
AMIT ROY
Sen, Obama: In support of Barack
New York, Nov. 5: Amartya Sen today told The Telegraph he was
delighted with Barack Obama’s victory and that it had important
consequences for India.
“It was a big night. I went to bed late. It’s an excellent result. I
obviously don’t have a vote in America — I am an exclusively Indian
citizen — but I have been a supporter of Barack Obama’s candidature
right from the beginning,” the Nobel laureate, who teaches at Harvard,
said from his home in Boston.
“He (Obama) brings three very important things for America. First, a
kind of democratisation by the inclusion of African Americans now in
the highest political positions of this country. This is a wonderful
change since there were racist laws excluding blacks from their
rightful place in society even a few decades ago,” Sen said.
“Second, the alienation of the world from the US was based on an
American policy that had been extraordinarily unilateral. For example,
world opinion was quite contrary to the intervention in Iraq. Obama
had been critical of this unilateralism and it is quite clear that in
his vision of a good world, multilateralism plays a big part and that
is very important for the world given the fact that the US is still
the strongest country.
“Third, the unilateral policies chosen by the government have often
been peculiarly daft. Often they were not well thought out, for
example, attacking Iraq was not only a unilateral decision, it was
also a stupid decision. Iraq had no involvement with 9/11 since it did
not allow al Qaida to function in the country; and the running of Iraq
essentially by an American administration was bound to be deeply
problematic and resented.
“Similarly, it is not smart to do nothing about the deteriorating
environment and just watch the calamity develop. It is also not very
astute to let all the regulations of financial markets go away,
allowing people to make huge amounts of unaccounted profits and then
complain about the greed of the money-makers.
“Greed is not a new phenomenon but what it needs is decent regulations
which make people responsible for their decisions.
“So, in all these respects, by making America more democratic (and)
American policy more multilateral, we can expect major advances from
an Obama administration. The most distinguishing feature of Obama has
not been the fact that he is black or that he has a liberal voting
record but that he brings a reasoned approach to taking decisions. And
this America needs today. And so does the world.
“Since I have been involved in the civil rights movement in America
for a long time — I visited this country many times and I was very
much present at Berkeley in 1964-65 when the free speech movement
occurred and at Harvard during 1968-69 when there were also
participatory movements on the campuses — it is a moment of particular
joy to see what is ultimately a success of the fruits of the civil
rights movement.
“I can’t say like some of my friends that I wept, I didn’t, but I am
delighted and extremely happy.
“I think this victory has implications for India. The Bush
administration has not been particularly hostile to India at all. And
therefore it is not so much that the last administration was more anti-
Indian than the Obama administration would be. But it is in the
interests of all countries, including India, that American policy be
based on reasoning.
“We all have much to benefit from intelligent decisions taken by each
country and it is the likelihood of a more reasoned approach to world
problems on which world peace, including suppression of terrorism in
an intelligent and effective way, depends. And India has a huge stake
in that.”
http://www.telegraphindia.com/1081106/jsp/nation/story_10069737.jsp
Karat drives the knife in ‘deep’
JAYANTH JACOB
Singh, Karat: American battle
New Delhi, Nov. 5: As compliments go, this one was as left-handed as
it gets.
CPM general secretary Prakash Karat chose the momentous events of the
American stage to extend his favourite sub-plot today and battle on
with his pet villains. He got Barack Obama’s historic victory quickly
out of the way with a clipped “significant event” label and dwelt with
relish on its implications for George Bush and Manmohan Singh.
“I wonder where this will leave our Prime Minister because he has
expressed his profound love for George Bush… this election has shown
how deeply unpopular George Bush is after eight years….”
Karat appeared to have chosen his words to drive the knife deep —
“deeply unpopular” was, after all, a play on Prime Minister Singh
telling President Bush that the people of India “deeply” loved him.
While many in the foreign policy establishment and in the hall of
experts have hailed Bush for taking Indo-US relations to a new high,
the Left has been deeply critical not only of his presidency but also
of the Bush-Manmohan compact.
The CPM boss kept his judgement on Obama suspended — “what the Obama
presidency will do, what policy directions it will take, we will have
to wait, watch and see. Changes have been promised but we will have to
see what kind of change” — but he may actually be ruing the prospect
of Bush exiting the scene.
Bush in the White House afforded the Left a daily turkey shoot. Alas,
he’s turned lame duck now. And Obama will take time and effort to
paint into a villain symbolic of the evil empire. The President-elect
has, after all, been “accused” of being a socialist and a capital re-
distributionist.
Karat’s party colleague and Bengal chief minister Buddhadeb
Bhattacharjee appeared happy enough though. “For the first time, a
black President with his black family members will enter the White
House,” he said as soon as he came on stage at the opening of an
exhibition in Calcutta.
http://www.telegraphindia.com/1081106/jsp/nation/story_10069437.jsp
MNS stir: All of us are Indians says Supreme Court
6 Nov, 2008, 2014 hrs IST, AGENCIES
NEW DELHI: In the wake of the Raj Thackeray-led Maharashtra Navnirman
Sena's hate campaign against north Indians and non-Marathis, the
Supreme Court
on Thursday struck a patriotic note by saying that "all of us are
Indians" and there is no difference between people coming from various
regions.
"What's the difference between north Indians and Indians? All of us
are Indians," a bench of Justices B N Aggrawal and G S Singhvi
quipped, while posting for Monday a PIL seeking judicial inquiry into
the killing of a Bihari youth, Rahul Raj, in a police encounter and
the murder of another north Indian in Mumbai last month.
On Tuesday the apex court had observed that if there was a "political
will" such hate campaign would not occur in the country. It had also
cited Article 355 to drive home the point that the Union government
had adequate powers to give necessary directions to the State to
prevent such incidents.
The bench of Justices Aggrawal and Singhvi said it would hear the
matter along with another related PIL which had earlier sought
appropriate directions to the government to ensure that the country's
unity was not threatened by vested interests fomenting regional
chauvinism.
Incidentally, the apex court had directed the petitioners in both
cases to suitably amend their petition and come before it when the
matter is taken up for further hearing.
During the brief arguments on Thursday, the petitioner, Sanjeev Kumar
Singh, submitted that he was compelled to approach the Supreme Court
as the authorities in Maharashtra had failed to respond to his request
for providing adequate protection to north Indians in the state.
"When I made representation to all senior officials including the
Mumbai police commissioner, I was threatened that I would meet the
same fate if I do not get out of the place," Singh told the bench
after being asked as to why he did not approach the authorities
concerned with his plea.
Singh asserted that he had every right to approach the apex court as a
number of his relatives staying in Maharashtra were under constant
fear due to the ongoing hate campaign.
The apex court queried Singh as to whether he was aware that Article
355 of the Constitution to which the latter replied in the affirmative
and read out the portion in the court on the advice of the bench.
According to Article 355, 'It shall be the duty of the Union to
protect every state against external aggression and internal
disturbance and to ensure that the government of every state is
carried on in accordance with the provisions of this Constitution.'
Rahul Raj, 23-year-old resident of Patna was killed in a shootout in a
BEST bus on October 27 and a day later Dharam Dev Rai (25), a resident
of Faizabad in UP, was beaten to death on a local train in Mumbai.
On Tuesday, the apex court had observed that the issue was political
in nature and "political will" was required to curb it.
"Can it be done through an order of this court? It is a political
question, not a court issue. If there is a political will it can be
tackled," a bench of Justices B N Aggrawal and G S Singhvi observed.
US business productivity growth slowed in Q3
6 Nov, 2008, 1917 hrs IST, REUTERS
WASHINGTON: US non-farm business productivity grew at the slowest pace
this year during the third quarter as output fell at the sharpest rate
in seve
n years, a Labor Department report on Thursday showed.
Productivity increased at an annual rate of 1.1 percent, less than a
third of the second quarter's 3.6 percent rate and down from 2.6
percent in the first quarter. That was still ahead of forecasts by
Wall Street economists who had expected only a 0.8 percent annual rate
of productivity growth for the third quarter.
Output fell at a 1.7 percent rate in the third quarter, the biggest
decline since a 2.9 percent fall in the third quarter of 2001.
Productivity is a measure of hourly output per worker. Rising
productivity helps to keep inflation in check.
Unit labor costs, a gauge of inflation and profit pressures that the
Federal Reserve monitors closely, jumped at a 3.6 percent annual rate
in the third quarter after declining 0.1 percent in the second
quarter. That was well ahead of forecasts for a 2.8 percent annual
rate of increase.
BoE, ECB slash key rates as EU economy slows
6 Nov, 2008, 1828 hrs IST, REUTERS
FRANKFURT: The European Central Bank cut its main lending rate by 50
basis points on Thursday as the euro zone economy slows. UK bailout
The move takes the ECB's benchmark rate to 3.25 percent and is the
second cut in just under a month following an emergency 50 basis
points reduction made on Oct. 8 in tandem with a host of other central
banks.
The Bank of England earlier cut rates by 150 basis points and the
Swiss National Bank by 50 basis points.
ECB President Jean-Claude Trichet will explain the Governing Council's
decision at a news conference at 1330 GMT.
He is expected to say the move is in response to falling economic
growth and justified by the fact that inflation worries have eased
sharply.
The euro zone's economy, which had grown every year since the bloc's
creation in 1999, contracted by 0.2 percent in the second quarter this
year. Most economists expect further shrinkage in third quarter GDP
figures when they are released on Nov. 14.
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? Britain slashes interest rates, Europe set to follow
Annual inflation is now at 3.2 percent, well above the ECB's target of
just under 2 percent, but economists expect it to drop rapidly in the
coming months.
SWIFT ACTION
Obama's landslide win on Tuesday along with the Democrats' tighter
grip on Congress, raised hopes of a speedier injection of billions of
dollars to shore up the struggling economy.
The first black US president has to wait until Jan. 20 to move into
the White House. In the meantime, though, he must decide on a
successor for Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, one of the architects
of a $700 billion state rescue package inconceivable before the crisis
broke.
Timothy Geithner, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York,
former Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers and former Fed Chairman
Paul Volcker are among those mooted for the Treasury post. Obama may
announce his pick on Thursday.
The ECB, staring at the first euro zone-wide recession since its
inception in 1999, is seen certain to cut its benchmark rate by half a
point to a two-year low of 3.25 percent. But interest rate traders are
pricing in a 75 basis point cut.
A half-point reduction would match the Oct. 8 emergency cut made in
unison with the Fed and other major central banks. A larger reduction
would be the ECB's biggest ever.
The slump is already encroaching on Main Street. World number two
sporting goods maker Adidas stood by its 2008 forecasts, but retracted
targets for next year, declaring that conditions were too difficult to
predict.
A Swedish central bank official said the shape of a Nordic aid package
to crisis-hit Iceland had been decided. Norway said earlier this week
it would provide Iceland with a 500 million euro ($643 million) loan
to help the country rebuild an economy in tatters following the
collapse of its biggest banks.
The International Monetary Fund also approved a hefty $16.5 billion
loan for Ukraine.
Inflation spooks market; Nifty ends below 2900
6 Nov, 2008, 1820 hrs IST,Mohammed Sabir, ECONOMICTIMES.COM
MUMBAI: Equities retraced intraday gains and ended sharply lower for
the second straight session Thursday as a higher-than-expected
inflation rate weighed on investor sentiments. Metals and oil & gas
stocks took a hit while realty and healthcare ended flat.
Domestic inflation rate for the week ended Oct 25 was 10.72 per cent
against 10.68 per cent a week ago. The figure disappointed traders who
expected it to come in single digit.
Stocks opened gap-down following correction in global markets on fears
of recession, which came to the fore after the US elections were
over.
Shares of Tata group companies Tata Steel and Tata Motors were under
tremendous pressure. Investors also continued to exit Reliance
Industries.
Bombay Stock Exchange’s 30-share Sensex closed the day at 9,734.22,
down 385.79 points or 3.81 per cent from the previous close. The Index
touched a high of 10,109.45 and low of 9,635.22.
National Stock Exchange’s Nifty ended at 2,892.65, down 102.30 points
or 3.42 per cent. The 50-share index touched an intra-day low of
2,860.25 and high of 3,007.80.
BSE Midcap Index was down 2.24 per cent and BSE Smallcap Index closed
2.13 per cent down.
“We are in normal correction after a phenomenal rise and may retrace
below today’s low to 2746 and 2560, which forms a strong support base
for the Nifty. For a higher bottom formation, Nifty has to turn from
any of these above levels and should close above 3240 for two
consecutive days, which would raise possibility of a 700-800 points
rally on the Nifty. If market doesn’t breach low of 2860 on Friday
then the levels of 3008, 3051 and 3122 will act as sell area. Close
above 3122 will be positive for the market. Short term averages are
trending flat and long term 200 DMA and 30 DMA are downwards,” said
Bharat Gala, head technical analyst, Ventura Securities.
European shares down after huge British rate cut
6 Nov, 2008, 1818 hrs IST, REUTERS
LONDON: European shares traded lower at midday on Thursday, having
pared losses after a surprisingly large Bank of England rate cut, and
investors sw
itched their sights to a European Central Bank rate decision due at
1245 GMT.
By 1219 GMT, the FTSEurofirst 300 index of top European shares was
down 1.7 percent at 937.03 points, off a earlier low of 911.3 points.
The Bank of England slashed rates by 1.5 percentage points to 3
percent. Most economists polled by Reuters had forecast a half-point
BoE cut although several had changed their forecasts following a
series of gloomy data.
Analysts said the move suggested that the European Central Bank would
cut by more than the 0.5 percentage points most expected before the
BoE move.
"The amazing decision by the BoE to slash rates by 150 basis points
leads us to believe that the ECB will be cutting by 100 basis points
today. That is now our expectation," Royal Bank of Scotland said in a
note.
Britain's central bank has never cut interest rates by more than half
a point since it was made independent in 1997. The last time rates
were slashed by a percentage point was in 1993, when the country was
struggling to emerge from a recession.
"It looks like the Bank of England monetary policy committee has
completed abandoned its policy of incremental changes. This is good
decisive action. This decision is unprecedented and the market is
going to be confused for a time by it," said Jim Wood-Smith, head of
research at Williams de Broe.
"On the one hand it is good news; on the other hand it is confirmation
that we are up a gum tree."
Banks were the biggest losers on the index. HSBC, BNP Paribas, UBS and
Banco Santander were down 2.8-8.2 percent.
Elsewhere in financials, the world's biggest listed hedge fund firm
Man Group lost 29.7 percent after it said its pre-tax profit fell 24
percent to $622 million in the six months to end-September.
"Financials are under pressure especially in this environment. But,
would have thought a hedge fund company like Man Group would have done
well in these type of circumstances. The group has not lived up to the
expectations everyone had for them and now there is a question of huge
redemptions," said Mike Lenhoff, strategist at Brewin Dolphin.
AXA, Europe's biggest insurer by market capitalisation, dropped 4.9
percent after it reported lower 9-month sales.
Across Europe, the FTSE 100 index was down 2.7 percent, Germany's DAX
was 2.75 percent and France's CAC 40 was 2.55 percent lower.
Energy stocks also contributed to heavy losses on the index as crude
fell 2.45 percent as the dollar strengthened and dismal economic data
pointed to a deeper U.S recession than feared.
BG Group, BP, Royal Dutch Shell and Total were down 2.5-3.3 percent. A
retreat in metal prices also weighed on mining shares with with copper
down 3.2 percent. Vedanta Resources slipped 9.5 percent after the
group posted a 24.7 percent drop in first half profit.
Rio Tinto, BHP Billiton and Xstrata were between 6.3-8.4 percent
lower. On the upside, brewer InBev gained 0.07 percent as it insisted
its $52 billion takeover of Anheuser-Busch was on track after third-
quarter results slightly exceeded expectations despite rocketing
costs.
Investors also turned to defensive stocks considered a safe bet in
times of economic turmoil, with the pharmaceutical sector regaining
some of the ground which it lost on Wednesday. Roche and Novartis were
up between 0.8-0.95 percent.
US stocks future briefly cut losses on UK rate cut
6 Nov, 2008, 1816 hrs IST, AGENCIES
NEW YORK: US stock index futures briefly trimmed losses on Thursday
after the Bank of England slashed interest rates, a move expected to
be followed
by a cut by the European Central Bank as authorities try to ease the
impact of a global recession.
The Bank of England cut borrowing costs by a more than expected 150
basis points to 3.0 percent. The boost from the rate cut, however, was
offset by disappointing outlooks from companies including technology
bellwether Cisco Systems pointing to a deepening global economic
downturn.
S&P 500 futures fell 13 points and were below fair value, a formula
that evaluates pricing by taking into account interest rates,
dividends and time to expiration on the contract. Dow Jones industrial
average futures declined 102 points, and Nasdaq 100 futures were down
25.25 points.
Grim reality hits global stocks
6 Nov, 2008, 1642 hrs IST, REUTERS
LONDON: European stocks followed Asia into sharp declines on Thursday
and oil extended losses as weak U.S. data intensified fears about the
impact of recession in major economies hit by the worst financial
crisis in 80 years.
The euro and sterling fell against the dollar as investors braced for
the European Central Bank and the Bank of England to cut interest
rates by at least half a percentage point.
Euphoria after a landmark victory of Democrat Barack Obama in the U.S.
presidential vote evaporated as Wednesday's data showed cuts in
employment by private employers and a sharp contraction in the service
sector, revealing the scale of a slowdown in the world's biggest
economy.
"We're back to the grim reality of economic data showing recessionary
conditions and lower earnings guidance," said Bernard McAlinden,
investment strategist at NCB Stockbrokers.
"The counterbalance is interest rate cuts. We're no longer in a
situation where big cuts would cause panic." MSCI world equity index
fell 2.4 percent while emerging stocks lost more than 5 percent. Asian
stocks fell 7 percent.
Russia's largest stock exchange MICEX halted trading of stocks for one
hour after stock prices fell sharply.
BIG CUTS?
The euro fell half a percent to $1.2898 while sterling ticked down to
$1.5933. The dollar rose slightly against a basket of major
currencies.
Some analysts are looking for a UK interest rate cut of as much as 100
basis points and a euro zone rate cut of 75 basis points. Many say
drastic action from central banks is key in restoring investor
confidence.
"The more significant the banks cut rates and the more dovish related
statements the better the chance of seeing equity markets stabilising
and currencies rallying thereafter," BNP Paribas said in a note to
clients.
"A more conservative approach could lead to substantial equity losses
taking currencies with it."
U.S. crude oil lost 2 percent to $63.96 a barrel, having fallen all
the way from its record high above $147 set in July.
The December bund futures fell 20 ticks ahead of the ECB rate
decision.
Entrepreneurs should go slow to overcome financial crisis: Experts
6 Nov, 2008, 1955 hrs IST, PTI
KOLKATA: The entrepreneurs should adopt a wait-and-watch policy to
recover from the ongoing global financial meltdown and think beyond
their short-te
rm interests, analysts said on Thursday.
"The small and medium entrepreneurs should take a long-term view at
this particular juncture. So, when the good time comes, they will be
able to utilise that. If they look at short-term compulsion of their
companies they will lose focus. Now it's just time to watch," US-based
executive and service firm Tatum's chairman Douglass M. Tatum said at
a programme here.
Speaking at the Fortune High Growth Series organised by the the
women's arm of the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and
Industry (FICCI), Tatum said India was innovating everywhere and
people should look at innovation in a broad sense.
Fortune High Growth Series was targeted at providing a clear view to
the company chief executives and senior executives on how to turn
growth crisis into competitive advantage. The session was addressed by
global business magazine Fortune's contributing editor John Elliott,
Robert Bierman who was the vice-president of Live Media, Fortune
magazine and many other noted dignitaries.
"At least 100 companies from all over eastern region participated in
the series. It was designed for company executives from small to
medium-sized growth firms to get a first hand view about the
successful global high-growth companies," said FICCI women's body
(Kolkata chapter) chairperson Rajkumari Saharia.
Obama victory and Indo-US relations
6 Nov, 2008, 0025 hrs IST,C Uday Bhaskar,
LONDON: European shares traded lower at midday on Thursday, having
pared losses after a surprisingly large Bank of England rate cut, and
investors sw
itched their sights to a European Central Bank rate decision due at
1245 GMT.
By 1219 GMT, the FTSEurofirst 300 index of top European shares was
down 1.7 percent at 937.03 points, off a earlier low of 911.3 points.
The Bank of England slashed rates by 1.5 percentage points to 3
percent. Most economists polled by Reuters had forecast a half-point
BoE cut although several had changed their forecasts following a
series of gloomy data.
Analysts said the move suggested that the European Central Bank would
cut by more than the 0.5 percentage points most expected before the
BoE move.
"The amazing decision by the BoE to slash rates by 150 basis points
leads us to believe that the ECB will be cutting by 100 basis points
today. That is now our expectation," Royal Bank of Scotland said in a
note.
Britain's central bank has never cut interest rates by more than half
a point since it was made independent in 1997. The last time rates
were slashed by a percentage point was in 1993, when the country was
struggling to emerge from a recession.
"It looks like the Bank of England monetary policy committee has
completed abandoned its policy of incremental changes. This is good
decisive action. This decision is unprecedented and the market is
going to be confused for a time by it," said Jim Wood-Smith, head of
research at Williams de Broe.
"On the one hand it is good news; on the other hand it is confirmation
that we are up a gum tree."
Banks were the biggest losers on the index. HSBC, BNP Paribas, UBS and
Banco Santander were down 2.8-8.2 percent.
Elsewhere in financials, the world's biggest listed hedge fund firm
Man Group lost 29.7 percent after it said its pre-tax profit fell 24
percent to $622 million in the six months to end-September.
"Financials are under pressure especially in this environment. But,
would have thought a hedge fund company like Man Group would have done
well in these type of circumstances. The group has not lived up to the
expectations everyone had for them and now there is a question of huge
redemptions," said Mike Lenhoff, strategist at Brewin Dolphin.
AXA, Europe's biggest insurer by market capitalisation, dropped 4.9
percent after it reported lower 9-month sales.
Across Europe, the FTSE 100 index was down 2.7 percent, Germany's DAX
was 2.75 percent and France's CAC 40 was 2.55 percent lower.
Energy stocks also contributed to heavy losses on the index as crude
fell 2.45 percent as the dollar strengthened and dismal economic data
pointed to a deeper U.S recession than feared.
BG Group, BP, Royal Dutch Shell and Total were down 2.5-3.3 percent. A
retreat in metal prices also weighed on mining shares with with copper
down 3.2 percent. Vedanta Resources slipped 9.5 percent after the
group posted a 24.7 percent drop in first half profit.
Rio Tinto, BHP Billiton and Xstrata were between 6.3-8.4 percent
lower. On the upside, brewer InBev gained 0.07 percent as it insisted
its $52 billion takeover of Anheuser-Busch was on track after third-
quarter results slightly exceeded expectations despite rocketing
costs.
Investors also turned to defensive stocks considered a safe bet in
times of economic turmoil, with the pharmaceutical sector regaining
some of the ground which it lost on Wednesday. Roche and Novartis were
up between 0.8-0.95 percent.
US stocks future briefly cut losses on UK rate cut
6 Nov, 2008, 1816 hrs IST, AGENCIES
NEW YORK: US stock index futures briefly trimmed losses on Thursday
after the Bank of England slashed interest rates, a move expected to
be followed
by a cut by the European Central Bank as authorities try to ease the
impact of a global recession.
The Bank of England cut borrowing costs by a more than expected 150
basis points to 3.0 percent. The boost from the rate cut, however, was
offset by disappointing outlooks from companies including technology
bellwether Cisco Systems pointing to a deepening global economic
downturn.
S&P 500 futures fell 13 points and were below fair value, a formula
that evaluates pricing by taking into account interest rates,
dividends and time to expiration on the contract. Dow Jones industrial
average futures declined 102 points, and Nasdaq 100 futures were down
25.25 points.
Grim reality hits global stocks
6 Nov, 2008, 1642 hrs IST, REUTERS
LONDON: European stocks followed Asia into sharp declines on Thursday
and oil extended losses as weak U.S. data intensified fears about the
impact of recession in major economies hit by the worst financial
crisis in 80 years.
The euro and sterling fell against the dollar as investors braced for
the European Central Bank and the Bank of England to cut interest
rates by at least half a percentage point.
Euphoria after a landmark victory of Democrat Barack Obama in the U.S.
presidential vote evaporated as Wednesday's data showed cuts in
employment by private employers and a sharp contraction in the service
sector, revealing the scale of a slowdown in the world's biggest
economy.
"We're back to the grim reality of economic data showing recessionary
conditions and lower earnings guidance," said Bernard McAlinden,
investment strategist at NCB Stockbrokers.
"The counterbalance is interest rate cuts. We're no longer in a
situation where big cuts would cause panic." MSCI world equity index
fell 2.4 percent while emerging stocks lost more than 5 percent. Asian
stocks fell 7 percent.
Russia's largest stock exchange MICEX halted trading of stocks for one
hour after stock prices fell sharply.
BIG CUTS?
The euro fell half a percent to $1.2898 while sterling ticked down to
$1.5933. The dollar rose slightly against a basket of major
currencies.
Some analysts are looking for a UK interest rate cut of as much as 100
basis points and a euro zone rate cut of 75 basis points. Many say
drastic action from central banks is key in restoring investor
confidence.
"The more significant the banks cut rates and the more dovish related
statements the better the chance of seeing equity markets stabilising
and currencies rallying thereafter," BNP Paribas said in a note to
clients.
"A more conservative approach could lead to substantial equity losses
taking currencies with it."
U.S. crude oil lost 2 percent to $63.96 a barrel, having fallen all
the way from its record high above $147 set in July.
The December bund futures fell 20 ticks ahead of the ECB rate
decision.
Entrepreneurs should go slow to overcome financial crisis: Experts
6 Nov, 2008, 1955 hrs IST, PTI
KOLKATA: The entrepreneurs should adopt a wait-and-watch policy to
recover from the ongoing global financial meltdown and think beyond
their short-te
rm interests, analysts said on Thursday.
"The small and medium entrepreneurs should take a long-term view at
this particular juncture. So, when the good time comes, they will be
able to utilise that. If they look at short-term compulsion of their
companies they will lose focus. Now it's just time to watch," US-based
executive and service firm Tatum's chairman Douglass M. Tatum said at
a programme here.
Speaking at the Fortune High Growth Series organised by the the
women's arm of the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and
Industry (FICCI), Tatum said India was innovating everywhere and
people should look at innovation in a broad sense.
Fortune High Growth Series was targeted at providing a clear view to
the company chief executives and senior executives on how to turn
growth crisis into competitive advantage. The session was addressed by
global business magazine Fortune's contributing editor John Elliott,
Robert Bierman who was the vice-president of Live Media, Fortune
magazine and many other noted dignitaries.
"At least 100 companies from all over eastern region participated in
the series. It was designed for company executives from small to
medium-sized growth firms to get a first hand view about the
successful global high-growth companies," said FICCI women's body
(Kolkata chapter) chairperson Rajkumari Saharia.
Obama victory and Indo-US relations
6 Nov, 2008, 0025 hrs IST,C Uday Bhaskar,
Audacity of Hope — the title of Barack Obama’s biography published in
2006 captured the collective mood on Tuesday, November 4, when the US
elected i
ts first black President. The much-awaited ‘change’ that the American
voter was seeking became real. The anxiety and unease that persisted
till the very end that the US was not yet ready to put its shameful
racial and colour prejudices behind it, has finally been put to rest.
The world’s oldest democracy has now regained the moral high ground as
far as the treatment of its minorities is concerned and this has an
embedded message for the largest democracy — though hopefully this
breakthrough in India will not take as many decades to be realised.
The sub-text of the Obama biography is ‘Thoughts on reclaiming the
American dream’ and the current mood in the US is one of hope, born
out of weariness and despondency after eight years of the Bush
presidency and the many excesses associated with the current White
House. When he assumes office, Mr Obama, the Democrat President-elect
will have his hands full with urgent domestic issues and none more
stark than a bankrupt economy with a trillion dollar deficit and the
steady erosion of the prevailing global financial turmoil.
Capitals the world over are making their individual assessments about
what an Obama victory will mean for their bilateral relations with the
US and on balance, it would be fair to aver that there is no
indication of any major or radical changes in US external policies.
The perceived US national interest will be the lodestar for any
incumbent in the White House and it will be no different for Mr Obama
who will inherit many crosses from his predecessors.
As regards the Indo-US bilateral, there has been some anxiety
expressed about the implications of the Obama victory. Reference has
been made to his campaign statements regarding the India-Pakistan
relationship and the desirability of both countries working “towards
resolving their dispute over Kashmir.” In like fashion, the Obama
amendment during the US Congressional debate over the Hyde Act that
was once described as ‘killer’ has also come up on the radar screen to
add to the disquiet. However linear extrapolations that are over-
interpreted may not be valid at this stage in the Indo-US bilateral
relationship. The Obama victory needs to be contextualised against the
larger backdrop of the 60-year-old tumultuous New Delhi-Washington DC
relationship to better comprehend the texture of the potential
implications.
Yes, it is true that India and the US had a very estranged
relationship for almost 40 years and much of this was derived from the
ontological divergences over the nuclear nettle. To his everlasting
credit, President Bush in his second tenure was able to innovatively
recast the template of the bilateral and after the NSG waiver of
September this year and the signing of the 123 agreement, Indo-US
relations have been qualitatively transformed. They have moved from
long estrangement to preliminary engagement. This basic orientation
will not be altered by the Obama victory. Thus the Black and White
reduction, that Democrat Presidents have been less favourable to
India, would be a simplistic conclusion. The global architecture, US
strategic interests, and India’s own profile have changed irrevocably.
http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/Opinion/Obama_victory_and_Indo-US_relations/articleshow/3678885.cms
Beyond Obama's triumph
6 Nov, 2008, 0003 hrs IST, ET Bureau
If the discourse of race, which so dominates American polity, is only
about minority, particularly Black, access to state institutions and
their repr
esentation within, the issue has been spectacularly resolved with
Barack Obama’s landslide victory.
Yet, the question remains as to how far this epochally symbolic moment
represents a genuinely transformative event for both American politics
as a whole and for the disadvantaged minorities, and what the future
now portends for the issue of race within the US. To be sure, a Black
man becoming the President of the US, hitherto a probability confined
to sci-fi narratives, is an event that has enraptured the entire world
and even raised expectations of heralding a fundamental change within
the US and its relationship with the rest of the world.
But such expectations also have to do with the justifiable euphoria of
the moment. Any genuinely transformative change within the US, in the
inequities within its classes and social orders, can only occur if
this euphoria is harnessed by American civil society to transform the
electoral mandate into one for essential socio-economic change.
Institutional representation, while significant, cannot by itself
deliver this transformation. Barack Obama is, in effect, the
consequence of the hard-fought, decades-old civil rights movement.
And, it would be the task of such movements to consolidate and deepen
the undeniably symbolic nature of Obama’s victory.
The new President’s most immediate task is undoubtedly the financial
crisis. He has inherited an economy that is certainly in recession,
and which could get worse by the time he takes office. Indeed, the
desire to do away with the disastrous economic legacy of the Bush era
seems to have been a primary reason for the sweeping verdict in
Obama’s favour. And despite his plans, among other measures, for
another stimulus package, a national insurance programme to remedy the
disastrous state of healthcare, and promise of tax benefits for the
middle class, it is a huge challenge.
Beyond the ramifications of the state of the US economy for the rest
of the world, it is weariness with the results of the foreign policy
of the Bush administration that has rendered Obama a hopeful prospect
for the world. The Bush era has seen the lowering of the prestige and
image of the US abroad in its bellicose and unilateral pursuit of the
‘war on terror’. Along the way, significant damage has been done to
international institutions like the UN.
http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/Opinion/Editorial/Beyond_Obamas_triumph/articleshow/3678836.cms
Obama's potent symbolism
5 Nov, 2008, 0056 hrs IST, ET Bureau
The fact of Democrat Barack Obama being the clear favourite in the US
presidential race has been the source of a range of progressive
expectations. B
ut beyond the immense symbolic import of the moment, it is debatable
whether an Obama win will radically alter US paradigms, more so abroad
than at home.
That said, even the purely symbolic significance of the event is truly
momentous. In a country where racial segregation is still within
living memory, and deprivation for ethnic minorities still a reality,
having the first black President would still send out a clear signal
of change within the US.
Indeed, the Democratic Party, on the face of it, seemed to represent
sweeping change in this election, what with Obama’s intense fight for
the nomination being with the first-ever female candidate, Hilary
Clinton.
There will certainly be a welcome move away from the George Bush
legacy, with many Americans seeing it has having endangered their
constitutional rights and battering the image and prestige of the US
abroad.
Obama has been able to project a transformative aura, giving rise to
hopes of a break with the neocon tradition of trampling over
international institutions and increasing global strife.
However, even as an Obama presidency might rethink some foreign policy
issues like Iraq and relations with Latin American nations, there is
unlikely to be any structural readjustment in Washington’s policies.
India can hardly get a President as keen as George Bush was on
cementing strategic partnerships.
And there is hardly any variation between the Democrat and Republican
positions on critical, and deeply divisive, issues like the larger
West Asian policy. Indeed, Obama has had to singularly disavow any
possibility of change here.
It is also indicative of the more disturbing aspects of the public
consensus in the US that Obama had to repeatedly insist that he was,
indeed, not a Muslim. Breaking away from the lobbyism that so deeply
shapes US politics, as well as from the hold of the military-
industrial complex, would need much more than Democratic symbolism.
Oil prices would soar to $200 by 2030: IEA
6 Nov, 2008, 1852 hrs IST, AGENCIES
PARIS: The International Energy Agency predicted Thursday that oil
prices would swing wildly until 2015 at an average of more than 100
dollars beforWorld's top 10 oil producers
e soaring above the 200-dollar mark by 2030.
The Paris-based energy policy advisor said there would be enough oil
for decades to come but warned that global prosperity and the state of
the planet hang on radical change in energy production and usage.
"The world's energy system is at a crossroads. Current global trends
in energy supply and consumption are patently unsustainable --
environmentally, economically, socially," it warned in a summary of
its annual World Energy Outlook report.
"But that can -- and must -- be altered: there's still time to change
the road we're on."
"The future of human prosperity depends on how successfully we tackle
the two central energy challenges facing us today: securing the supply
of reliable and affordable energy; and effecting a rapid
transformation to a low-carbon, efficient and environmentally benign
system of energy supply."
It declared: "Preventing catastrophic and irreversible damage to the
global climate ultimately requires a major decarbonisation of the
world energy sources."
Also Read
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? Inflation rises to 10.72%
It pointed to huge strides being made in electricity production, and
projected that "modern renewable technologies grow most rapidly,
overtaking gas to become the second-largest source of electricity,
behind coal, soon after 2010."
The IEA, the energy monitoring and policy arm of the Organisation for
Economic Co-operation and Development, also forecast in an executive
summary of a full annual report to be published on Wednesday, that:
- The world will continue to be massively dependent on oil and gas for
a long time but there are enough resources to meet rising demand for
many years to come;
- Most of the growth in production will come from the Middle East,
Africa and Russia and most of the growth in demand and carbon
emissions from China, India and the Middle East;
- Inaction on environmental problems would result in a doubling of
greenhouse gases by the end of the century and an eventual average
temperature increase of up to six degrees centigrade;
- Huge investment is required in oil and gas production, and in other
energies urgently needed to diminish "shocking" threats to the planet,
but national companies may not be able to invest fast enough in oil
and gas.
- The cumulative investment effort needed to 2030 exceeds 26 trillion
dollars (20 trillion euros) (in 2007 money values), or 4.0 trillion
dollars than estimated 12 months ago;
- International oil groups will be increasingly squeezed by national
factors;
Indian exporters to bear burns of US bankruptcies: D&B
6 Nov, 2008, 1548 hrs IST, ECONOMICTIMES.COM
MUMBAI: Indian exporters will have to bear the burns of bankruptcies
with the worsening financial crisis in US, heading towards
recession.
In this scenario, it comes as no surprise that the number of companies
filing for Chapter 11 and Chapter 7, under Federal bankruptcy laws,
has gone up considerably.
According to a Dun & Bradstreet research report, the Chapter 11
filings for commercial businesses has increased from 3,600 in 2006 to
an estimated 6,700 in 2008, registering a 84 per cent rise. Chapter 7
filings have increased from 11,400 to an estimated 25,000 during the
same period, a rise of 116 per cent.
US is the single largest export destination for Indian exporters that
accounts for about 13 per cent of the total Indian exports in FY
2008.
Considering the magnitude of trade transactions and the current
economic environment in the US, it has become even more imperative for
Indian businesses especially exporters to exercise abundant caution in
all cross-border transactions, says D&B.
Potential Obama appointments draw keen speculation
By DAVID ESPO – 3 hours ago
WASHINGTON (AP) — While President-elect Barack Obama enjoyed a few
days with his family after a hard-fought election, speculation swirled
in the nation's capital around potential administration appointees.
Obama pivoted quickly to begin filling out his team on Wednesday,
selecting hard-charging Illinois Rep. Rahm Emanuel as White House
chief of staff while aides stepped up the pace of transition work that
had been cloaked in pre-election secrecy.
Several Democrats confirmed that Emanuel had been offered the job.
While it was not clear he had accepted, a rejection would amount to an
unlikely public snub of the president-elect within hours of an
Electoral College landslide.
Obama has promised to hold a news conference later in the week. As
president-elect, he begins receiving highly classified briefings from
top intelligence officials Thursday.
In offering the post of White House chief of staff to Emanuel, Obama
turned to a fellow Chicago politician with a far different style from
his own, a man known for his bluntness as well as his single-minded
determination.
Emanuel was a political and policy aide in Bill Clinton's White House.
Leaving that, he turned to investment banking, then won a Chicago-area
House seat six years ago. In Congress, he moved quickly into the
leadership. As chairman of the Democratic campaign committee in 2006,
he played an instrumental role in restoring his party to power after
12 years in the minority.
Emanuel maintained neutrality during the long primary battle between
Obama and Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, not surprising given his long-
standing ties to the former first lady and his Illinois connections
with Obama.
The day after the election there already was jockeying for Cabinet
appointments.
Several Democrats said Sen. John Kerry of Massachusetts, who won a new
six-year term on Tuesday, was angling for secretary of state. They
spoke on condition of anonymity, saying they were not authorized to
discuss any private conversations.
Kerry's spokeswoman, Brigid O'Rourke, disputed the reports. "It's not
true. It's ridiculous," she said.
Announcement of the transition team came in a written statement from
the Obama camp.
The group is headed by John Podesta, who served as chief of staff
under President Clinton; Pete Rouse, who has been Obama's chief of
staff in the Senate; and Valerie Jarrett, a friend of the president-
elect and campaign adviser.
Several Democrats described a sprawling operation well under way.
Officials had kept deliberations under wraps to avoid the appearance
of overconfidence in the weeks leading to Tuesday's election.
president-elect Barack Obama down to businessArticle from: Font size:
Decrease Increase Email article: Email Print article: Print Submit
comment: Submit comment Stephanie Balogh
November 07, 2008 12:00am
BARACK Obama picked up his suitcase yesterday and got on with the job
of building a new team to lead America.
As the world rejoiced over the first black US president, the Democrat
leader started on the "Obama Revolution".
He called on former Clinton White House aide Rahm Emanuel to be his
chief of staff, a vital post that helps set the tempo of the
administration.
Top intelligence officials gave him highly classified briefings as he
prepared battle plans for the daunting problems he will face.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Pictures: Awaiting history | US votes
US election: Special report with full coverage
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Hours after Senator Obama claimed victory, Russia threatened to put
missiles alongside US ally Poland unless President George W. Bush
repealed a US plan for a missile defence shield in Europe.
In an immediate reminder of the grave economic crisis he will inherit,
Wall St plunged again on fears of a deep recession.
As well as the worries of America and the world, the president-elect
also has a personal to-do list before he moves into the White House in
January.
It includes finding a school for his daughters in Washington, getting
the puppy he promised they could take to the White House, and
arranging his grandmother's funeral.
While Senator Obama confronted the enormity of his new role, the
knives came out for failed Republican vice-presidential candidate
Sarah Palin.
The former mayor of Wasilla, Alaska, was accused of spending tens of
thousands of dollars on clothes for herself and her husband in out-of-
control shopping sprees during the campaign.
It was like "Wasilla hillbillies looting (department store) Neiman
Marcus from coast to coast", a source said.
Senator Obama began his first full day as president-elect by having
breakfast with his wife and daughters. He left his Chicago home and
hit the gym before heading to his campaign office.
Asked how much sleep he had on the night of his historic victory, he
said: "Not as much as I'd like."
Senator Obama and his incoming vice-president, Senator Joe Biden, must
work quickly to douse the economic blaze while winding down the war in
Iraq and renewing the fight against al-Qaida and the Taliban in
Afghanistan.
He is promising to renew bruised ties with US allies, and to engage
some of the nation's fiercest foes such as Iran and North Korea.
He has vowed to tackle climate change, cut taxes for 95 per cent of
working Americans, and guarantee near-universal health care at a time
when many thousands are losing their insurance as their jobs
disappear.
With hundreds of jobs to fill before his inauguration, the jockeying
for appointments has already started.
Chief-of-staff nominee Ralph Emanuel is known as a master of the back
corridors of power in Washington. He was said to be mulling over the
offer.
Congratulations for Senator Obama poured in from world leaders.
Prime Minister Kevin Rudd is yet to be allocated a time to personally
congratulate the president-elect.
But it's not a case of the cold shoulder -- he appears to be in the
same boat as every other world leader.
China pledged "constructive" dialogue with the new government.
Iran said his victory showed Americans wanted basic changes in
policy.
Praise came even from communist Cuba, whose government said it hoped
for an eventual easing in the decades-old US trade embargo.
http://www.news.com.au/heraldsun/story/0,21985,24614198-661,00.html
Officials: Emanuel Offered Chief of Staff Job
http://in.youtube.com/watch?v=i0g7Hfj6rPs
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U.S. Again Hailed as 'Country of Dreams'
Around the World, Obama's Victory Is Seen as a Renewal of American
Ideals and Aspirations
Gallery
World Celebrates New U.S. President
People around the world spilled into the streets to celebrate the
victory of U.S. president-elect Barack Obama, many saying the win was
an inspiration for minorities and a powerful signal that the United
States intended to change direction.
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Who's Blogging» Links to this article
By Kevin Sullivan
Washington Post Foreign Service
Thursday, November 6, 2008; Page A26
LONDON, Nov. 5 -- Through tears and whoops of joy, in celebrations
that spilled onto the streets, people around the globe called Barack
Obama's election Tuesday a victory for the world and a renewal of
America's ability to inspire.
This Story
Obama Makes History
World Reacts to Obama's Historic Win
U.S. Again Hailed as 'Country of Dreams'
Half a World Away, Kenya Exults at U.S. Outcome
U.S. Troops Too Busy for Vote Returns
A Vote Decided by Big Turnout And Big Discontent With GOP
With Obama Win, Elation and a Lingering Divide
Reality Suspended, Until It Prevailed
On a Day Like No Other, Obama Is Typically Serene
PHOTOS: Election Day 2008
VIDEOS: Campaign 2008
Excerpts: McCain Speech
HOW HE WON: Measured Response To Financial Crisis Sealed the Election
Sporadic High-Tech High Jinks Don't Cast Outcome in Doubt
Early Transition Decisions to Shape Obama Presidency
The Bellwethers
Biden Sees Vice President's Role as 'Adviser in Chief,' Aides Say
McCain Asks His Backers to Get Behind Obama
View All Items in This Story
View Only Top Items in This StoryThis Story
U.S. Again Hailed as 'Country of Dreams'
Half a World Away, Kenya Exults at U.S. Outcome
Thursday, Nov. 6 at 2:30 p.m. ET: PostGlobal: World Reactions to the
U.S. Election
Thursday, Nov. 6 at 1:30 p.m. ET: Books: 'Memo to the President'
World Celebrates New U.S. President
World Reacts to Obama's Historic Win
Russia Gives Obama Brisk Warning
U.S. Troops Too Busy for Vote Returns
End Civilian Deaths, Karzai Tells Obama
View All Items in This Story
View Only Top Items in This Story
From Paris to New Delhi to the beaches of Brazil, revelers said that
his victory made them feel more connected to America and that America
seemed suddenly more connected to the rest of the world.
"As a black British woman, I can't believe that America has voted in a
black president," said Jackie Humphries, 49, a librarian who was among
1,500 people partying at the U.S. Embassy in London on Tuesday night.
"It makes me feel like there is a future that includes all of us," she
said, wrapping her arm around a life-size cardboard likeness of the
new U.S. president-elect.
"Americans overcame the racial divide and elected Obama because they
wanted the real thing: a candidate who spoke from the bottom of his
heart," said Terumi Hino, a photographer and painter in Tokyo. "I
think this means the United States can go back to being admired as the
country of dreams."
Kenya, where Obama's father was raised as a goatherd, declared
Thursday a national holiday, and in Obama's ancestral village of
Kogelo, people danced in the streets wrapped in the American flag.
In South Africa, Nelson Mandela, the civil rights icon who helped
bring down his country's apartheid regime, released a letter to Obama
in which he said, "Your victory has demonstrated that no person
anywhere in the world should not dare to dream of wanting to change
the world for a better place."
Desmond Tutu, another iconic anti-apartheid leader and the retired
Anglican archbishop of Cape Town, said Obama's victory tells "people
of color that for them, the sky is the limit."
"We have a new spring in our walk and our shoulders are straighter,"
Tutu said, echoing a sentiment heard across Africa.
The world sees Obama as more than a racial standard-bearer, of course.
Many people praised his policies on matters ranging from Iraq to
health care, which they appeared to know in remarkable detail.
Others expressed concerns. In China, some people worried about Obama's
positions on the delicate issues of Tibet and Taiwan. Some Indians and
Egyptians said they had questions about his views on Pakistan and the
Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/story/2008/11/06/ST2008110600708.html
Prop. 8 Appears Headed For Passage
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Of Gandhi, spirituality and sexuality!
Font Size -A +A
Press Trust of India
Posted: Nov 06, 2008 at 1816 hrs IST
Print Email To Editor Post CommentsMost Read ArticlesRelated Articles
New Delhi, November 6: To Mahatma Gandhi the greatest obstacle in his
spiritual striving was the promptings of his sexuality, says
psychoanalyst Sudhir Kakar.
"The manner in which he conceived the struggle and the weapons he
chose to employ in a lifelong conflict with the god of desire have
earned him the derision of many, especially in the West, who have
discerned crankishness, if not worse, in his ideas that relate to
sexuality," writes Kakar in ‘Mad And Divine: Spirit And Psyche In The
Modern World’.
"For an explanation of his failure to influence people and the course
of events, Gandhi would characteristically probe for shortcomings in
his sexual abstinence, seeking to determine whether Kama, the god of
desire, has perhaps triumphed in some obscure recess of his mind,
depriving him of his spiritual powers," the book, published by
Penguin, says.
According to the author, in the midst of widespread political turmoil
and religious frenzy, Gandhi wrote a series of five articles on
celibacy in his weekly newspaper.
"But more striking than his public evidence of his preoccupation were
his private experiments wherein the aged Mahatma sought to reassure
himself on the strength of his celibacy by having close women
associates (his 19-year-old granddaughter among them) share his bed
and try to ascertain in the morning whether any trace of sexual
feeling had been evoked, either in himself or in his companions.”
"In spite of criticism by his co-workers, Gandhi stubbornly defended
these experiments which he regarded as exercises in self-purification
and tests of his celibacy and insisted that they be public even if
they met general condemnation from his close associates."
Besides the contemplative and ecstatic spiritual traditions, Gandhi
was a pioneer of a new spirituality, Kakar writes.
Strains Between McCain and Palin Aides Go Public
Report: Palin's Wardrobe Is to Be Audited by GOP
By KATE SNOW
Nov. 6, 2008
350 comments FONT SIZE
SHARE
RSS Now that the defeated team of Sen. John McCain and Gov. Sarah
Palin have gone their separate ways, the knives are out and Palin is
the one who is getting filleted.
U.S Republican presidential nominee Senator John McCain (R-AZ) speaks
to the crowd during his election night rally in Phoenix, on Tuesday.
Joining McCain is U.S. Republican vice presidential nominee Alaska
Gov. Sarah Palin.
(Mike Blake/Reuters)
More PhotosRevelations from anonymous critics from within the McCain-
Palin campaign suggest a number of complaints about the Alaskan
governor:
Fox News reports that Palin didn't know Africa was a continent and
did not know the member nations of the North American Free Trade
Agreement -- the United States, Mexico and Canada -- when she was
picked for vice president.
The New York Times reports that McCain aides were outraged when Palin
staffers scheduled her to speak with French President Nicholas
Sarkozy, a conversation that turned out to be a radio station prank.
Newsweek reports that Palin spent far more than the previously
reported $150,000 on clothes for herself and her family.
Several publications say she irked the McCain campaign by asking to
make her own concession speech on election night.
The tension is likely to continue or get worse. Lawyers for the
Republican National Committee are heading to Alaska to try to account
for all the money that was spent on clothing, jewelry and luggage,
according to The New York Times.
Related
Obama Offers Chief of Staff to Rahm EmanuelFor Dems, Does Majority
Always Rule? WATCH: George on the GOP's FutureReports of agitation
between the two camps bubbled up in the final weeks of the campaign as
Barack Obama began pulling away and the GOP duo was unable to regain
the momentum.
But those reports are no longer in the rumor stage as McCain loyalists
are now blasting away at the Alaska governor, who was a favorite of
the Republican right during the campaign, but was cited in numerous
polls as a reason why many Americans wouldn't vote for the Arizona
Republican.
Perhaps the most dangerous allegation for Palin are reports in The New
York Times and Newsweek that when she was urged by McCain adviser
Nicole Wallace to buy three suits for the Republican convention and
three suits for the campaign trail, she went on the now-infamous
shopping spree at swank stores like Saks Fifth Avenue and Neiman
Marcus.
A Republican donor who agreed to foot a majority of the expenses was
stunned when he received the bill, Newsweek reported. Both the Times
and Newsweek report that the budget for the clothing was expected to
be between $20,000 and $25,000. Instead, the amount reported by the
Republican National Committee was $150,000.
That wasn't the whole tab, however, according to Newsweek. The
magazine claims that Palin leaned on some low-level staffers to put
thousands of dollars of additional purchases on their credit cards.
The national committee and McCain became aware of the extra
expenditures, including clothes for husband Todd Palin, when the
staffers sought reimbursement, Newsweek reported.
http://www.abcnews.go.com/GMA/Politics/story?id=6196407&page=1
Extra! Extra! Barack Obama's election win sends newspaper sales
soaring
Email Picture
Jay L. Clendenin / Los Angeles Times
Kimberly Huie of Echo Park buys the Los Angeles Times at a newsstand
in Hollywood. Readers across the nation snapped up copies of
newspapers documenting a watershed moment in U.S. history a day after
the presidential election, and press runs were extended to meet the
demand.
News racks run out of copies as readers scoop up the 'physical record
of history being made.'
By James Rainey
November 6, 2008
Apparently looking for something old to go with something new (Barack
Obama) and something blue (a more Democratic Congress), the American
people bought newspapers in huge numbers Wednesday, a day after the
historic election of the nation's first black president.
From the nation's largest daily, USA Today, to its more modest
broadsheets, newspapers expanded press runs to accommodate enormous
sales. Some papers even sold special gift editions and framed front
pages.
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But news racks -- even if they were replenished with copies -- became
barren in the blink of an eye as people scrambled to snag mementos for
their memory books and mantelpieces. In Los Angeles, Miami and all
points in between, people lined up to buy copies of their daily
paper.
The Chicago Tribune sold framed front pages for as much as $99. A
single copy of the New York Times is said to have sold on EBay for
$249.99, and another copy of that paper drew more than 20 bids before
the auction closed -- for $400.
One man bought 100 copies of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution at 75
cents apiece and immediately began selling them at a 25-cent markup.
"I think what this really says, at a huge moment in history, is that
people want something to keep and to remember," said Julia Wallace,
editor of the Journal-Constitution and the newspaper's online
editorial operations. "A newspaper has a very historic, commemorative
feel to it. More than anything, it's about having this to pass on to
their children and grandchildren."
The Atlanta paper initially printed an additional 55,000 copies to
supplement its weekday press run of 375,000. But heavy sales forced
the paper to print 150,000 more copies to meet demand.
USA Today boosted by 500,000 its weekday press run of roughly 2
million. The Washington Post, the fourth-largest paper by circulation,
planned to print 350,000 papers and then sell them for $1.50, triple
the regular newsstand price.
The Los Angeles Times printed 107,000 papers in addition to its
weekday press run of 750,000, and sold some at retail outlets because
copies were being pilfered from newsstands. Meanwhile, a steady stream
of customers came to the Times' headquarters in downtown L.A. to buy
copies of the paper.
"For the past two years, our campaign team provided outstanding and
insightful coverage," said Times Editor Russ Stanton, "and we are
grateful that readers want to savor this moment in our nation's
history."
Newspaper executives and employees enjoyed the surge of interest in
their Wednesday print editions. The industry has been suffering as
earnings from print readership and ad sales plummet, and online ad
sales (which generate much slimmer profits) and readership soar.
"I think there is an authority and finality, a sort of last word that
comes from the printed edition of the newspaper," said Steve Hills,
president and general manager of Washington Post Media.
Those among the parade of customers who bought copies of the Los
Angeles Times on Wednesday agreed.
"This is a physical record of history being made," said Robert de la
Madrid, who had tried five different locations before finally landing
copies of The Times at the paper's headquarters. "As soon as you close
the computer screen, that image is gone. And you can't frame the
Internet."
Chris Garcia, 28, who purchased five copies of The Times, said he
tried to keep papers marking history.
"You can hold it in your hand," he said. "It's real."
Some readers of The Times and other papers bought dozens of copies for
friends and relatives. A black woman near San Francisco City Hall held
up a copy of the Chronicle, posing for a picture in front of a statue
of Abraham Lincoln.
Even as interest in print editions soared, newspaper executives said
their websites remained the key outlet for the majority of readers.
Several papers reported their online editions were drawing record
traffic, including the Washington Post, which topped its previous high
of 15.2 million daily page views.
The Times recorded 8.3 million page views, slightly above the high
reached during the Southern California wildfires last year, and the
Atlanta Journal-Constitution recorded 5 million page views.
Said the Journal-Constitution's Wallace: "There's an understanding
that people want information in all sorts of ways."
Rainey is a Times staff writer.
james....@latimes.com
http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/asection/la-na-newspapers6-2008nov06,0,3206942.story
Medvedev`s address to nation
From: RussiaToday
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Today we will talk about the state of the nation address by the
Russian President. In his first address to the Federal Assembly,
Dmitry Medvedev proposed a set of political reforms aimed at
widenin...
http://in.youtube.com/watch?v=8tXUc9_JAfI
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Michelle Obama sparks fashion debate with red and black victory dress
2 hours ago
WASHINGTON (AFP) — Barack Obama's victory speech may have electrified
the nation, but the dress worn by his wife, Michelle, has attracted
almost as much feedback in Internet chatrooms and among fashion
aficionados.
Michelle Obama appeared onstage at a huge Chicago rally late Tuesday
wearing a black cardigan over a scoop-neck black sheath with splashes
of red in the upper and lower half separated by a band of black at the
hips.
The outfit was a slightly modified version of a dress presented by
designer Narciso Rodriguez in September for the 2009 Spring season.
"I voted for Obama, but I didn't vote for that dress," homemaker and
mother of three Jessica Bettencourt from Wisconsin told The New York
Times.
"I don't know what was worse," Chicago lawyer Karla Wright told the
paper, "that stupid criss-cross band around the middle or that black
sort of border coming up from the hem."
Not all comments were negative.
"That dress was unpretentious," Julie Gilhart, fashion director of New
York's top-price Barneys clothing store, told the Times. "It said, Be
who you are -- don't let someone else tell you how to be.'"
The Italian daily La Stampa dubbed the dress "the look of victory" and
said the black symbolised mourning for Obama's grandmother, who died
on the eve of the election, while the red was for passion.
A contributor to the website of the German newsweekly Focus also
suggested there was hidden meaning in the colours, perhaps red for the
political left and black for the first African-American to win the US
presidency.
"It is more about the symbolic effect of the colour combination red/
black. Because the daughters were also in red or black. Very unusual
and surely no accident," the reader said.
Others were dismissive, describing the subject as superficial besides
the historic importance of Barack Obama's election win.
"The USA must be doing pretty well if it is worrying about the First
Lady's dress!" one typical Focus posting said.
One fashion expert described the interest attracted by the frock as
"depressingly trivial... and yet fascinating" because of what it told
us all about Obama.
"You may like or dislike Michelle Obama's dress, but that's not as
interesting as the agenda behind it, because you can be sure there was
one," wrote fashion editor of the London Times Lisa Armstrong.
"This was one of the most choreographed First Family Elect Appearances
in history," she said, adding that "even seven-year-old Sasha Obama
had been dragooned into that monochromatic colour scheme."
Carola Long of the London-based Independent said Michelle Obama's
fashion sense was a far cry from the traditional first lady look
"reminiscent of the uptight Bree from Desperate Housewives," a
reference to a popular television series.
"The presidential race may only just have come to an end, but the
battle for fashion supremacy was sewn up months ago," she wrote.
Whatever the significance of the dress, one thing is certain -- the
world is going to hear much more on the subject over the next four
years.
"At the least, it promises four lively years of fashion-watching at
the White House," added the New York Times.
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TheStreet.com - ? 56 minutes ago ?
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Bush clearing path for successor to take command
By BEN FELLER – 52 minutes ago
WASHINGTON (AP) — The Bush administration is providing security
clearances, working space and policy briefings to President-elect
Barack Obama's team as the transformation of the White House gets
fully under way. World leaders are calling for Obama, and the White
House is helping to get them connected.
"All of us here at the White House have a special responsibility to
ensure that the next president and his team hit the ground running,"
White House press secretary Dana Perino said Thursday.
Preparation for the complex transition process has quietly been
unfolding for about a year, but only accelerated with the nation's
election on Tuesday of Obama, the Democratic senator from Illinois. He
will be sworn in as the country's 44th president in 75 days.
President Bush was scheduled to address about 1,000 employees from his
executive office — a combination of a thank-you and an admonition to
ensure a smooth transfer of power. He and his wife, Laura, also have
invited Obama and his family to visit the White House as soon as they
can.
Obama on Thursday was receiving the first of what will become regular
briefings on highly classified information from top intelligence
officials. The process of getting White House security clearances for
staff members of Obama and McCain, depending upon who won, already had
begun long before the election took place.
Perino said world leaders are reaching out to the White House, the
State Department and other federal agencies to get in touch with
Obama.
"People are very excited about our next president," she said. "They're
interested in getting to meet him and putting their ideas and their
agenda in front of him to make sure that they continue to have a good,
seamless relationship with the United States of America. And we're
going to help facilitate that."
Meanwhile, officials at the Department of Homeland Security warn that
the U.S. is in a heightened state of alert against terrorism. The fear
is that enemies could exploit the transition period to test the
country's defenses.
"That is something that we're very concerned about," Perino said in
underscoring the seriousness of a smooth transition.
During the campaign, Obama relentlessly blistered the Bush
administration for what he called failed, tired policies that have
harmed the country. The White House has sought to make clear that
politics will not affect the transition in any way.
The transition involves a delicate dance, in which the White House
keeps the president-elect in the loop, and even solicits his input,
while decisions still remain solely Bush's to make.
"He doesn't change his principles nor his policies," Perino said. "But
what we have pledged to do and we are doing is to work and consult
with the Obama team on issues as we move forward."
And even as Bush offers advice, he is mindful he can't go too far.
"I don't think that President Bush will be presumptuous in tying to
talk to Barack Obama about how he makes his decisions or how Barack
Obama should make decisions," Perino said. "The American people
decided that this is the man that they want to be president of the
United States and that he'll be the one that they trust to make
decisions."
Record TV ratings for Obama's victory
BY RICHARD HUFF
DAILY NEWS TV EDITOR
Thursday, November 6th 2008, 2:47 AM
An estimated 71.47 million viewers - a record number - watched
President-elect Barack Obama's historic White House victory, the
Nielsen Co. said Wednesday.
That's up dramatically from the 59.17 million who tuned into the
broadcast, cable and Spanish-language networks when President Bush
faced Sen. John Kerry in 2004.
Tuesday's audience was also up from the 61.57 million who watched the
prime-time portion of the trouble-plagued 2000 election.
RELATED: OPRAH LETS LOOSE AFTER OBAMA VICTORY
Some 38.11 million watched the four broadcast networks - ABC, CBS, NBC
and Fox - which turned the night over to election coverage, with ABC
leading the way with 13.1 million viewers. NBC averaged 12 million,
CBS 7.82 and Fox 5.13. Nielsen did not release a figure for PBS.
ABC News President David Westin said Wednesday the large audience
could be attributed to a wide-open race, a bevy of critical issues
facing the country and compelling candidates.
"It's always about the story," Westin said. "It's not nearly as much
about the presentation."
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CNN averaged 12.29 million viewers in prime time Tuesday, the highest
ever in the network's 28-year history. The Fox News Channel averaged
9.02 million and MSNBC 5.88.
Even fake news generated big ratings.
Comedy Central's "Indecision 2008: America's Choice," was the most-
watched election special in the history of the network's political-
comedy franchise, drawing 3.1 million viewers.
AN INSIDER'S GUIDE: WHO'S WHO IN THE OBAMA ADMINISTRATION-IN-WAITING
The massive election night audience came during an election season in
which ratings for virtually everything went up, in some cases to
record levels.
Interest in the political conventions hit all-time highs, and the vice
presidential debate was the most-viewed in decades.
NBC's "Saturday Night Live," which poked fun at each of the
presidential candidates and had a field day with GOP veep nominee
Sarah Palin, hit its highest ratings in 14 years.
The question facing the industry now is how to capitalize on those
high audience levels - and whether the audience will stick around.
"It's hard to predict what interest will be around the corner," ABC's
Westin said. "There will be plenty of interest in the economy as long
as 401(k)s are going down. When things effect people in their own
lives, the interest is very high."
CNN's John King said before the election that keeping viewers watching
was going to be an issue for all TV news operations.
"As a business, we have a huge challenge and a responsibility," King
said. "More people are watching, and they're interested, and they're
asking smart questions."
"Our challenge is trying to find a way to keep them tuned in during a
transition [phase] that's less sexy than when you have a candidate
before a crowd of 100,000 people," he added.
rh...@nydailynews.com
http://www.nydailynews.com/news/politics/2008/11/05/2008-11-05_record_tv_ratings_for_obamas_victory.html
Twitter - Barack Obama
Brief reports from the presidential candidate on what he's doing and
thinking.
twitter.com/BarackObama - 41k - Cached - Similar pages - Note this
Barack Obama | Change We Need | Welcome to Obama for America
Official Website of Barack Obama 2008 Presidential Campaign. ... PAID
FOR BY OBAMA FOR AMERICA Skip Signup, Go to the Website.
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If John McCain faces Barack Obama, Obama wins 280 to 256. McCain
carries 26 states. Obama carries 24 states plus the District of
Columbia … and then there ...
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Global recession in 2009, forecasts IMF
6 Nov, 2008, 2154 hrs IST, AGENCIES
WASHINGTON: The International Monetary Fund (IMF) released its global
economic forecast Thursday in the face of a growing credit crisis and
predicted
a recession in the US and the world in 2009.
In an update of its World Economic Outlook from October, the IMF said
global growth would slow to 2.2 percent in 2009, down from the 3-
percent forecast made last month. Growth of under 3 percent is
considered a global recession.
The US, the world's largest economy, will contract by 0.7 percent and
the euro area by 0.5 percent in 2009. Advanced economies as a whole
will contract 0.3 percent, compared to 1.4-percent growth this year,
it said.
All figures represent a downward revision of more than 0.7 percent
from the IMF's October forecast. Developing and emerging economies by
contrast will continue to lead growth in the world, increasing 5.1
percent in 2009. But that is still down from a forecast of 6.1 percent
made in October. Growth in the developing world was forecast at 6.6
percent this year.
A global financial crisis has severely impacted the availability of
credit around the world, curbing spending in wealthy nations and
restricting poorer nations' access to foreign investment.
"There has been a sharp worsening of credit conditions to emerging
countries," said chief IMF economist Olivier Blanchard.
The IMF expects sharp slowdowns in Eastern Europe as well as Russia
and its neighbours. China's economy will continue to grow at 8.5
percent in 2009, down from 9.7 percent this year and 11.9 percent in
2007.
Palash Biswas
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