All history as reconstruction of the past is of course myth

And we are back to Obama, and who does it a better job than Black Agenda Report? –> The best! news source you can find on internet, and it gets better and better each week, so remember people to donate. OK, here we go:

1) First, a special investigation on Obama’s Money Cartel (How Barack Obama Fronted for the Most Vicious Predators on Wall Street) by Pam Martens. Or you can read the whole two part series here and here at Counterpunch. Excerpts (emphasis mine):

‘Those critical thinkers over at the Black Agenda Report for the Journal of African American Political Thought and Action have zeroed in on the making of the Obama bubble:

“The 2008 Obama presidential run may be the most slickly orchestrated marketing machine in memory. That’s not a good thing. Marketing is not even distantly related to democracy or civic empowerment. Marketing is about creating emotional, even irrational bonds between your product and your target audience.”

And slick it is. According to the Obama campaign’s financial filings with the Federal Election Commission (FEC) and aggregated at the Center for Responsive Politics, the Obama campaign has spent over $52 million on media, strategy consultants, image building, marketing research and telemarketing.’

and:

‘Walk into any of the largest Wall Street brokerage firms today and you’ll see a self-portrait of upper management racism and sexism: women sitting at secretarial desks outside fancy offices occupied by predominantly white males. According to the EEOC as well as the recent racial discrimination class actions filed against UBS and Merrill Lynch, blacks make up between 1 per cent to 3.5 per cent of stockbrokers - this after 30 years of litigation, settlements and empty promises to do better by the largest Wall Street firms.The first clue to an entrenched white male bastion seeking a black male occupant in the oval office (having placed only five blacks in the U.S. Senate in the last two centuries) appeared in February on a chart at the Center for Responsive Politics website. It was a list of the 20 top contributors to the Barack Obama campaign, and it looked like one of those comprehension tests where you match up things that go together and eliminate those that don’t. Of the 20 top contributors, I eliminated six that didn’t compute. I was now looking at a sight only slightly less frightening to democracy than a Diebold voting machine. It was a Wall Street cartel of financial firms, their registered lobbyists, and go-to law firms that have a death grip on our federal government.Why is the “yes, we can” candidate in bed with this cartel? How can “we,” the people, make change if Obama’s money backers block our ability to be heard?’

I guess he meant $change$.
2) A foretaste of what will happen to Africa if Obama becomes president (God Help us, ameen): The Shameful Failure of the Black Congressional Caucus, by Nikolas Kozloff, at Counterpunch.
3)The third article, also from BAR, really moved me and brought tears to my eyes. It reminded me my own mother who had similar experiences… I spare you the details. Shannon Prince on Black Ivy Leaguer: Rev. Wright Speaks Truth.

4) The dilemma Barak Obama has, which ironically Rev. Jesse Jackson in his 1984 and 1988 presidential campaigns did not face (Running to the Right: Brack Obama and the DLC Strategy, by Bruce Dixon):

It worked for a while. Barack Obama followed the DLC script to the letter for the last two years, publicly scolding Democrats for their insufficient piety, liberally borrowing from Republican talking points. He advertised himself as grounded by his personal relationship with Jesus, and by the faith tradition of the Black Church. But after Obama’s Philadelphia speech on race, in which he characterized his pastor as a crazy old uncle stuck in the fifties and sixties, the Black Church was compelled to speak for itself. Rev. Jeremiah Wright, retiring pastor at Trinity UCC made a series of speeches and appearances in which he likened US Marines to Roman soldiers, described hundreds of US bases around the world as “empire” before the National Press Club, and refused to retreat from the contention that 9-11 was a preventable consequence of US foreign policy.

To preserve his support among whites which Obama won without challenging any of their fundamental beliefs about America, empire, Obama was forced to denounce his pastor’s words as “akin to hate speech” and disavow his church, and with it the prophetic tradition of Christianity and the Black Church in particular. But this, and joining a prosperity-Gospel mega-church will not be enough. From this point on, all Republicans have to do is prove to their base that Obama is not as conservative as he once appeared, which they will do by pointing to his pastor and the prophetic tradition of the Black Church in general. They can, in fact, point to any stirrings of black or grassroots outrage or militancy anywhere, which Obama will want to ignore anyway, and demand a ringing denunciation from Barack Obama. When Obama gets his way, he will be silent, sticking to content-free appeals to “unity”. And when Republicans prevail they will force him to denounce at every turn the grassroots activists he should be supporting.

By contrast, the 1984 and 1988 presidential campaigns of Rev. Jesse Jackson won white support too, but embraced the burden of challenging white American assumptions about the essential goodness of America, about empire, and race and class.’

and he is not even the president but acts already like an Uncle Tom:

‘Taking the politics out of politics, and out of black politics in particular is what Barack Obama must do to carry out his DLC strategy and retain his white base without teaching them anything they don’t want to know. When the NYC police officers who pumped 51 bullets into an unarmed man and a hail of bullets into adjacent homes and a transit station were exonerated, Barack Obama could not bring himself to suggest that black life ought to be respected, that police officers should obey the law, that an Obama Justice Department would look carefully at this kind of thing, or even to feign concern for the victims and their families. His only comments where that we were “a nation of laws” and that we should “respect the verdict”. When 25,000 longshoremen on the US West Coast staged a one-day strike on May 1 against the war in Iraq, the Obama campaign said nothing about the power of people standing together to “bring change”. When US warplanes, which fire missiles and drop bombs almost daily over oil-rich Somalia killed 15 civilians last week, Obama was silent, despite having traveled in the region as recently as last year.’

5) Transcript of Jeremiah Wright’s speech to NAACP.

6) Africa’s Worst Dictator: No, it’s not Mugabe:

‘You probably haven’t heard much about the weekend voting in Equatorial Guinea, the pro-American, oil-rich nation led for the past 29 years by Brigadier General Teodoro Obiang Nguema. “The West African state voted Sunday in parliamentary and local elections whose outcome was a foregone conclusion for observers, amid opposition charges of voting irregularities and harassment,” reports AFP. “According to first partial official results, the president’s [party] won 100 percent of the vote in some constituencies in the election to parliament.”

The best result by the “major” opposition party came in the Luba district, where it won 0.7 percent of the vote. (Incidentally, that party’s leader, Placido Miko has been repeatedly arrested and tortured by Obiang’s security forces.) Maybe I missed it but so far I haven’t heard any wailing and gnashing of teeth about the results in Equatorial Guinea from Bush or from the nation’s op-ed pages.

Gary Busch writes of the weekend voting in Equatorial Guinea:

Strangely enough there were no protests from a cowed and beaten population nor street demonstrations. Apathy and disgust were the rules. There was also no protest or demonstrations by the ‘international community’ against this travesty of the political process. No UN Security Council protests were made… Poor Zimbabwe doesn’t have oil, ergo it can be a target for the ‘international community’. Equatorial Guinea has masses of oil and this buys them immunity from scrutiny and protest. The ‘international community’ is corrupt and morally bankrupt. It is unlikely to change.’