By Harry C. Alford, NNPA ColumnistMay 14, 2007
This caught us by surprise. The Washington Post quotes Barack Obama, "In Chicago, sometimes when I talk to the black chambers of commerce, I say, 'You know what would be a good economic development plan for our community would be if we make sure folks weren't throwing their garbage out of their cars'".
First of all this sounds very derogatory ala Amos 'n Andy or Stepin' Fetchit. Our chambers have sound and progressive economic development plans and they are far more intricate than stopping litter. Second and most importantly, Senator Barack Obama refuses to meet with any and all Black chambers of commerce.
There are 21 Black chambers of commerce in the state of Illinois which is the most for any state in the nation. They are well run, hardworking and dedicated to the economic development of Black communities throughout the entire state. They are respected by their Governor, the entire Illinois Legislative Black Caucus and the powerful Chicago political machine. But they get no props from Senator Barack Obama. He appears to despise Black chambers of commerce.
There are 100 senators on Capitol Hill and the National Black Chamber of Commerce can make appointments with 99 of them. "Brother Man" refuses to allot time while we interact with the leadership of the Senate on a daily basis. I guess it's the syndrome "The White man's ice is colder". Yes, I think it is clinical.
The best example of his problem happened in New Orleans last July at our 14th Annual Conference. It was co-incidental that three US Senators were in the area, Sens. John Kerry, Mary Landrieu and Barack Obama. Two of them, Senators Kerry and Landrieu, jumped at the opportunity to visit our conference. In fact, Sen. Kerry gave an inspiring keynote address while Sen. Landrieu was eloquent with her welcoming remarks. They stayed one and a half hours networking with chamber executives and entrepreneurs from around the nation.
Where was Barack? He refused to come. He actually peeled off from their touring party while the other senators met with us. He just couldn't do it even though 15 Black chambers from Illinois were there.
At first, we thought it might be a heritage thing. He isn't a descendent of slaves, sharecroppers and victims of Jim Crow like us. But no that can't be it because he will run from the Kenya National Chamber of Commerce and Industry, an affiliate of ours, in like fashion. The next time he goes to Kenya he might want to allot 15 minutes with them.
They will tell him that the Africa Growth and Opportunity Act, AGOA, is flawed with serious loopholes. China brings in raw materials such as cotton and produces fabrics to be sold to US companies tariff free under AGOA. This assault has killed jobs for hundreds of thousands of African workers and has decimated agri-business in various nations including Kenya. It's kind of insulting to go over there, smile and give out some cheers but be brain dead on the economic issues.
If Sen. Obama ever decides to really speak to any of the Illinois Black chambers, he had better come correct. The topics will be Tax Incremental Financing, TIF, for neighborhood developments; the $280 million in annual contracts the Chicago Housing Authority denies local Black-owned businesses; the front scandals at O'Hare Airport that denies real Black owned franchises; the terrific job the Black chambers have done in Central Illinois by employing every Black contractor at 100 percent capacity on Illinois highway projects (this should be expanded state wide); the opportunities along the rebuilding of the Dan Ryan Expressway in Chicago; restructuring and improving our dismal school system. It can go on and on but be assured it will be real business. It won't be about "throwing their garbage out of cars".
We don't need him! We are doing fine and making great strides. The NBCC accounts for more Black dollars in the Gulf Rebuilding than the federal government. We are providing opportunities at every level of the American economy. The NBCC is the largest Black business association in the world and no one senator who has a phobia about meeting a group of Black business persons is going to stop us. The Illinois State Black Chamber just took 60 Black business owners to the capital, Springfield, and met with the Illinois Legislature to discuss a business agenda. We are having proud moments and great successes. He has a problem but it is his problem not ours. Let's pray for him.
Senator, you don't have to meet with us. But don't say you do, when you don't. We don't need the lies or the jive.
Harry Alford is the co-founder, President and CEO of the National Black Chamber of Commerce. Website: www.nationalbcc.org.
On today's This Week with George Stephanopoulos, Senator Barack Obama sat down with Stephanopoulos in an interview that illuminated his political philosophy and thought processes in a very interesting way.
What is most compelling to me about Senator Obama, and the chief reason that I support his candidacy over the many other quality candidates we have in our field this cycle, is his understanding of both an overall vision of what America fundamentally is, as well as the nuts and bolts of how to get things done.
Barack Obama is not an either/or thinker; he is wholistic in his approach, a quality that could serve us well in a President.
Stephanopoulos' questions addressed a number of issues, including Obama's "experience" to handle the job; his war funding votes; taxes; social security; affirmative action and larger questions regarding race in America. Obama's responses revealed a depth of intellect and wisdom that we rarely witness in politicians. I believe the discussion also gave us a glimpse of what someone who is primarily dedicated to public service, and at the same time wise to the way politics are played, really looks like.
In response to the interviewer's claim that getting 16 GOP Senators to vote in favor of a funding bill that puts limits on the President is something "that is not gonna happen, Obama discussed why continuing to "ratchet up the pressure" on Bush loyalists to end this war is a smart part of the overall strategy to bring the occupation to an end. Asked whether he would be willing to give Bush a "blank check" on funding, the answer was a firm "No".
The host also tried to box Obama in on taxes, social security and affirmative action. Stephanopoulos asked about why Obama's daughters should get preferential treatment when applying to college, to which Obama responded that they should actually be treated as advantaged in the application process. His approach would be to also look at the disadvantaged white student who qualifies but may not be able to afford higher education.
Take a look at the whole interview; I think you'll see a candidate who can see both the forest and the trees. And in my opinion, that ability is precisely what we need in our chief executive at this juncture.
THE PARTIAL-BIRTH ABORTION RULING
Echoes of the senseless killings at Virginia Tech last week were still ringing in our ears when the Supreme Court upheld a federal ban on a second-trimester abortion procedure. While I'm saddened by the loss to a university so similar to my own alma mater, Oregon State, I'm more personally affected by the Supreme Court's action.
Last April, my husband and I learned late in my fourth month of pregnancy that we were having twins. Everyone was thrilled. But we soon learned that the amniotic sac around one of our twins had ruptured, and it was very unlikely he would survive. In fact, we were told, it was very unlikely either twin would survive. Our physician recommended that we induce labor and deliver the boys.
My husband and I firmly said, "No thank you," and my family quickly gathered from all over the world to lend support.
Three weeks later the sac around our other twin ruptured, and again we were told that inducing labor would be the safest coarse of action, otherwise I might develop an infection, risking infertility and possibly death. Again, we stood firm as a family and let the doctors know that, until my life was in danger, we would go forward with the pregnancy.
Two days later, my white blood cell count was found to be rising drastically; it was obvious that an infection was setting in. That forced us to make the most difficult choice we'll ever face: We chose my life over our sons.
I am now healthy and fertile, and we're expecting a new baby boy this August. The decision we made almost a year ago made this possible. But not a day goes by that I don't miss my boys, and if I could, I'd have them here with me today.
The Supreme Court's decision last week wouldn't have allowed me to be where I am now. Now, a woman in that position would not only have to face the devastation of losing her child, but also very possibly the hope of future babies as well. That's an act of violence more sinister and underhanded than the mass murder at Virginia Tech.
The incidents last week have left our country in a state of peril, and they're not unrelated. They're acts of violence predominantly perpetuated by our society's constructions of masculinity.
Eight men and one woman sat and decided the medical fate of all women in this country, and the lone woman's voice in their midst was drowned out by the men.
In the past 26 years there have been dozens of school shootings; all the attackers were male.
Somehow, we're sending a message to boys and men across the country that oppression and violence are suitable forms of retaliation, that control and subjugation are the epitomes of power.
Our society teaches these lessons to men. We're all responsible for what's happened.
Let us change that.
Stephanie Duckett lives in Corvallis.
I t was a bad week to be an American woman.
Last week, the headlines were dominated by events of great relevance to women, but many Americans may well have missed the women's side of the story.
At Virginia Tech, the media made much of the killer's Korean nationality and his multimedia manifesto, but one had to read more carefully to find the back story: Cho Seung-Hui had a history of harassing and stalking female students and frightening his mostly female professors with his violent writings. Unlike the circumstances in the school shootings at Columbine, to which the event was relentlessly compared, but quite like the more mundane violence women everywhere experience every day, Cho apparently had a problem with women.
So does the new Supreme Court.
On Wednesday, the court issued a landmark abortion ruling in Gonzales v. Carhart whose significance was overshadowed by the horrifying events at Virginia Tech. While most newspapers found room to report that the decision upheld Congress' ban on so-called partial-birth abortion, the real meaning and breadth of the court's ruling received short shrift.
Make no mistake, it is sweepingly significant and breathtakingly arrogant. Most notably, the decision -- by a majority made up of five men and with the court's lone woman writing in dissent -- brushes aside the health of real women in real circumstances who may need the banned procedure. Indeed, the court set aside its own 30-year promise to protect women's health for the first time since Roe v. Wade.
From 1973 until as recently as 2006, the court has consistently upheld one central tenet in abortion law: When weighing the constitutionality of a given restriction, the state's interest in the integrity of women's health has trumped other considerations, including the state's interest in emerging fetal life. But with Gonzales, the court now holds that banning the safest second-trimester abortion procedure does not constitute an undue burden on a woman's right to end her pregnancy.
Apparently, sacrificing a woman's health -- whether that be her future ability to carry a fetus to term or her odds of beating cancer -- is just not as important to these guardians of justice as protecting a future, potential citizen.
A decade ago, in his first veto of the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act, President Clinton warned that women facing unbearable circumstances would be hurt by such a ban. Arguing that the procedure was "potentially life-saving, certainly health-saving" and needed by only "a small but extremely vulnerable group of women," Clinton surrounded himself with these very women as he vetoed the bill. These women are nowhere to be found in the text of Justice Anthony Kennedy's majority decision in Gonzales. Their devastating circumstances, their hopes and dreams for a pregnancy gone horribly awry or their own tragic health conditions that make continued pregnancy impossible are never fully considered.
Rather, the court blithely implies that reproductive tract infections, perforated uteruses and lacerated cervixes are reasonable sacrifices when Congress nobly seeks to impose morality and sound medical practice from the nation's Capitol.
But it was not enough to ignore the often tragic health considerations that bring women to what Kennedy describes as a "a conscious choice." The decision ignores science as well. It ignores the overwhelming evidence, produced in three lower courts, that the banned procedure is safer for women than its alternative. Instead, the court relies upon biased congressional testimony to argue that there is still a debate about the safest procedure. Echoing the "debate" that the Bush administration claims scientists are still having about the existence of global warming, scientific consensus and expert opinion is once again taking a back seat to manufactured controversy.
What's lacking in the media's coverage of this issue is not merely a problem of labeling. The medical terminology for partial-birth abortion -- intact dilation and extraction -- does little to put the Gonzales decision in context, because the ruling doesn't simply outlaw a particular medical procedure. It makes Congress the arbiter of proper medical practice -- much as a Republican-controlled Congress attempted to do when it intervened in the ending of Terri Schiavo's life -- and for the first time since Roe, the ruling tells women that their health is secondary to "regulating the medical profession in order to promote respect for life, including life of the unborn."
We have turned a corner, and the public may have missed it.
-------------
Melody Rose is an associate professor at Portland State University and author of "Safe, Legal, and Unavailable? Abortion Politics in the United States." Regina G. Lawrence is an associate professor at PSU and author (with W. Lance Bennett and Steven Livingston) of "When the Press Fails: Political Power and the News Media From Iraq to Katrina."
By Tom CurryNational affairs writerMSNBC
Senate Democratic newcomer joins forces with GOP's Lugar on WMD issue
WASHINGTON - For senators seeking the presidency, becoming a foreign policy wonk isn't necessarily the route to success: Democrats Joe Biden, Joe Lieberman, and John Kerry and Republican John McCain all had foreign policy credentials and all fell short in their quests for the White House.
Although in office for only 10 months, Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., who some democrats see as a future presidential prospect, is emerging as a foreign policy wonk in his own right.
He is building up his expertise on Russia and other parts of the dangerous world.
Helping Obama is a foreign policy elder statesman who himself once tried for his party's presidential nomination, Sen. Richard Lugar of Indiana.
Although few remember it now, the gentlemanly and cerebral Hoosier made a run for the 1996 GOP nomination.
Obama and Lugar have formed a political joint venture and mutual admiration society: the white-haired chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, who has served in the Senate since 1977, and the man 30 years younger than he, the glamorous Great Hope for Democrats in 2012 and beyond.
This week Obama and Lugar reported on their trip to Russia, Ukraine and Azerbaijan to inspect weapons dumps and sites where nerve gas, as well as smallpox, plague and other deadly pathogens are kept, under not very secure guard in some cases.
Back in 1991, Lugar, along with then-senator Sam Nunn of Georgia, devised the cooperative threat reduction program under which the United States has spent $5.7 billion to buy up and dispose of former Soviet nuclear warheads and other weapons. Otherwise they might be sold to, or fall into the hands of al Qaida.
Praise for a white-haired 'rock star'"Few people understand these challenges better than the co-founder of the cooperative threat reduction program, my colleague and the chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee Dick Lugar," Obama told the crowd at an event Tuesday hosted by the Council on Foreign Relations in Washington.
"If anybody has ever accompanied Sen. Lugar on a trip, you know that he is a rock star wherever he goes," he added. That use of a term more often applied to Obama himself drew a laugh from the staid foreign policy elders.
"The demand for these weapons has never been greater," Obama warned. "Right now rogue states and despotic regimes are looking to begin or accelerate their own nuclear programs."
It sounded like the rationale the Bush administration offered in the months leading up to the invasion of Iraq, but Obama stood apart this week from the Senate fracas over investigating 2002-2003 pre-war intelligence.
He seems more concerned about the present.
"As we speak, members of al Qaida and other terrorist organizations are aggressively pursuing weapons of mass destruction, which I think all of us believe they would use without hesitation," he said.
"Some experts believe terrorists are likely to find enough fissile material to build a bomb in the next ten years and we can imagine with horror what the world would be like if they succeeded."
Obama called nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons within the borders of the former Soviet Union "the greatest threat to the security of the United States."
He said the Nunn-Lugar program ought to be expanded to include civilian research reactors in Russia and former Soviet states which hold large quantities of highly enriched uranium -- "the quickest way to a nuclear weapon."
Embraced by the mandarinsObama's speech was an occasion for his ceremonial investiture into the bipartisan foreign policy elite by mandarins of past presidential administrations.
Former Deputy Secretary of State from the Clinton administration Strobe Talbott, former Reagan national security advisor Bud McFarlane, and nuclear weapons expert Spurgeon Keeny of the National Academy of Sciences were among the experts in attendance.
"It was very impressive," said Talbott, now president of the Brookings Institution, of Obama's performance. "This was an issue that a lot of people in that room had worked on and followed for a long time. He has clearly mastered both the technology and the strategic context."
Also in the audience and impressed by the Obama-Lugar talk was Jay Parker, vice president of the Center for the Study of the Presidency, a Washington think tank.
A retired Army colonel and former professor of international affairs at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, Parker said after seeing Obama and Lugar, "What was particularly encouraging was the fact that the effort was bipartisan and the dialogue was civil - in sharp contrast to the other news yesterday" -- a reference to the acrimony sparked Tuesday when Minority Leader Harry Reid forced the Senate into closed session as a protest against slow progress in investigation of pre-war Iraq intelligence.
Parker added that Obama's intense work on foreign policy and national security issues was not unusual for a freshman senator, "regardless of their presidential ambitions, real or perceived."
"He's making a serious effort and he has quickly grasped a lot of important points," added Parker. "He's doing it for the right reasons" -- among them: in Obama's hometown of Chicago, a city that might be the target of an al Qaida attack.
Challenging Rice on IraqObama and Lugar were in harmony two weeks ago when the senators challenged the Iraq rationales offered by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice at a Foreign Relations Committee hearing.
"Are we committed to holding Iraq together in perpetuity, even if the parties involved, the Iraqi people, determine they don't want to form the sort of visionary Iraqi nation that you and the president envision?" Obama asked Rice.
This question came about an hour after Lugar had put her on the spot with this statement: "Let's say that the Iraqis, after all is said and done, really don't want to have a united country.... Some Americans would say, 'why are we there, if these folks not only don't appreciate us, but they're hashing the whole thing up, they literally don't want to have the sort of Iraq that was envisioned by the British and French years ago?'"
Later that day in an interview, Obama told me that there seemed to be two different measures of success in Iraq.
"One measure of success would be to make sure that the insurgency can't overtake Iraq. A second measure of success would be a coherent national government," he said.
"If we are going by the first measure of success, in terms of getting our troops out, then we should be able to establish some timetable to actually get out of there because that is a military issue that is premised on Iraqi troops getting strong enough just to stabilize the country."
But he warned that if the goal is a coherent national government, "then we could be there for a very long time. And I do not think that is something that even the supporters of the original invasion signed up for."
As the so-called Partial Birth Abortion Ban Act enters the campaign-season debate, three women who have had third-trimester abortions are fighting to preserve access to a procedure that may have saved their lives.
(WOMENSENEWS)--Tammy Watts sat and seethed.
Perched on the edge of her couch in Queen Creek, Ariz., she could barely contain her frustration as she watched the last two presidential debates.
When President George W. Bush and Senator John Kerry discussed the Partial Birth Abortion Ban Act, Watts clenched her fists.
When Bush used the term "partial-birth abortion" and called it a "brutal practice," she buried her head in her hands.
Unlike many American voters, Watts knows that "partial-birth abortion" does not exist. Coined by anti-choice activists, this term cannot be found in any medical dictionary. Its imprecision, according to defenders of choice, could target a whole host of procedures.
In political forums like the presidential debates, this catchphrase has worked its way into usage and is widely assumed to mean late-term abortions, that is, those occuring in the last three months. Though Bush calls these procedures "brutal," they maybe necessary to save the lives of women such as Watts, whose pregnancy entailed a rare complication.
"This ban threatens the lives of women who need emergency procedures," says Watts. "It's also so vaguely-worded that it could be used to outlaw any type of abortion."
If the ban were in place in 1995, Tammy Watts would likely be dead, she says.
In March of that year, Watts was in the eighth month of a much-wanted pregnancy and was eagerly anticipating the birth of her first child. During a routine ultrasound (the only way to detect abnormalities that require late-term abortion), she discovered her baby had Trisomy 13, a chromosomal abnormality that causes severe deformities and carries no hope of survival.
Because her baby was already dying and because this put her own life at stake, Watts had an intact dilation and extraction (D and X), the procedure that Bush condemns as "brutal."
"Losing my baby at the end of my pregnancy was agonizing," says Watts. "But the way the right deals with this issue makes it even worse. When I heard Bush mention 'partial birth abortion' during the debates, I thought 'How dare you stand there and tell flat-out lies?' There is no such thing as this procedure! Why won't the politicians listen to us?"
Watts and other women affected by this issue have tried to make legislators listen.
When Congress first considered the ban in 1995, Watts testified on Capitol Hill. So did Viki Wilson of Fresno, Calif., who had a late-term abortion because the brain of the fetus she was carrying had developed outside the skull. So did Vikki Stella of Naperville, Ill., whose fetus had dwarfism, no brain tissue and seven other major abnormalities.
All three women told legislators they owed their health to late-term abortions and that a continuation of their doomed pregnancies posed grave health risks such as stroke, paralysis, infertility or even death.
As they campaign to save access to these procedures, Watts, Stella and Wilson point out that in virtually all cases, late-term abortions are the only way to respond to unanticipated complications: the death of the fetus inside the womb, problems that mean the fetus can't live outside the womb, or serious threats to the mother's health.
"No women has these procedures for frivolous reasons," says Stella. "They have them because it's their only choice."
In its Roe v. Wade decision, the Supreme Court acknowledged this fact, giving states permission to regulate--or even proscribe--terminations of pregnancies except "where necessary, in appropriate medical judgment, for the preservation of the life or health of the mother."
Watts, Stella and Wilson note that late-term abortions are sanctioned by many medical professional groups. The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, Washington, D.C., calls intact D and X--a commonly used late-term procedure--"the most appropriate and safest" option in some cases. The American Nurses Association, Silver Spring, Md., and the American Medical Women's Association, Alexandria, Va., also approve the practice.
Pro-choice advocates also note that despite all the political hoopla, intact D and X procedures are very rare, accounting for only 2,200 of the 1 million U.S. abortions performed each year.
When Congress approved the Partial Birth Abortion Ban Act in October 2003--and when Bush signed it into law in November--Watts, Stella and Wilson were horrified.
Relief came immediately with court injunctions. This summer federal judges in California, Nebraska and New York all ruled the ban unconstitutional because it contradicts a Supreme Court decision that rejected similar legislation in 2000.
Now, with Bush pledging to "vigorously defend" the ban, Watts, Stella and Wilson are throwing their support behind John Kerry, who has criticized the ban because it "fails to make a clear exception" for the health of women.
The Supreme Court (which remains pro-choice by a narrow 5-4 margin) may rule on the constitutionality of the ban this winter or next spring. Since three of the court's nine justices are rumored to be nearing retirement--and since the president appoints Supreme Court justices--the fate of all abortion laws will rest on the judicial appointments of the next commander-in-chief.
If the ban is ruled constitutional by the High Court, it could conceivably be used to outlaw most abortions performed after the first 12 weeks, at a minimum, make obtaining a legal, safe abortion that much more difficult.
The ban doesn't mention any known medical procedure, it does prohibit any "overt act" to "kill the partially-delivered living fetus." Anti-choice advocates claims this is a reference to intact D and X, which requires removing the fetus from the womb and sometimes collapsing the skull. Pro-choice activists fear this wording could be used to apply not only to intact D and X but also to dilation and evacuation (another late-term procedure, in which the fetus is removed in one piece) as well as any abortion performed past 12 weeks.
"Because the ban outlaws an undefined range of techniques, doctors can hardly know if what they are doing is illegal or not," says Gloria Feldt, president of the Washington, D.C.-based Planned Parenthood Federation of America.
During the final stretch of the presidential campaign, women who support the right to late-term abortions will continue battling for their cause. Wilson will keep working as a nurse at her local Planned Parenthood. Stella will continue campaigning for a local pro-choice politician. And Watts will keep speaking out at pro-choice rallies.
They say they must be vocal because pro-choice politicians have failed them. Many liberal legislators bowed to conservative pressure and voted for the ban in Congress. Even Kerry--who voted against the ban and has consistently supported abortion rights--has failed to publicly correct Bush for using the misnomer "partial birth abortion."
"When it comes to this issue, politicians who might otherwise not be anti-choice pander to anti-choice interests because they want to win," says Feldt. "The anti-choice majority delivers a solid block of votes--and a big pile of cash--to whoever adopts its agenda."
This week, the agenda for Watts, Wilson and Stella will be getting the word out. "We must fight to keep late-term abortions legal," says Stella. "If we don't, innocent women will die."
Molly M. Ginty is a freelance writer based in New York City.
