The sorrow of which I speak flows not from the fact that liberation has not yet been achieved but from a fear that the possibility of liberation may be lost forever, that our world may have passed the point of no return, psychologically and ecologically. Such fears are not grounds for abandoning politics, however. If you believe there is something to what I’ve said, it suggests only that we should think more carefully about where we put our political energies. I believe that the last place we should be sinking our energy is into presidential politics. When the political leaders vying for our votes make it clear they are committed to systems and institutions that keep us locked in the death trajectory, why should we offer them anything that is precious to us?

The most common response I get to that challenge is the claim that these candidates actually have a more radical agenda but realize that they must keep it under wraps in order to get elected. Just wait, I’m told, until after an election victory. That is likely to be a long wait, for there is no historical precedent for such a development, and nothing in the biography of either candidate that suggests a break with history. This observation typically is dismissed as cynicism, but I am not cynical. I am simply trying to deal with reality.

If only a center/right candidate who p lays to the greed and delusional self-indulgence of the United States can win, that is more evidence that this empire cannot be transformed into a decent society in the time available and that it is time to say of conventional politics, simply, “game over.” If that is the case—and I believe it’s a reasonable account of our society—more than ever the work is not to turn over our time, energy, and resources to any political candidate but to build alternatives on the ground. That is a political response to a political problem. It isn’t a question of hope v. no hope. It’s a question of reality v. delusion. To believe that an unsustainable system can be sustained indefinitely—and to support political candidates who believe that—is a sign not of hope but of desperation and defeat. To be realistic and hopeful, one must be radical.

read the entire article: The sorrows of race and gender in the 2008 presidential election by Robert Jensen.

Tax Day Gifts for the Rich

When it comes to cutting taxes for the wealthy, President Bush can truly say, “Mission accomplished.”

The richest 1 percent of Americans received about $491 billion in tax breaks between 2001 and 2008. That’s nearly the same amount as U.S. debt held by China—$493 billion—in the form of Treasury securities.

Do you want our government to mortgage more of our nation’s future to finance tax breaks for the rich?

Tax cuts have already helped the richest 1 percent—whose annual incomes average about $1.5 million—increase their share of the nation’s income to a higher level than any year since 1928 on the eve of the Great Depression.

Wall Street’s five biggest firms paid “a record $39 billion in bonuses for 2007, a year when three of the companies suffered the worst quarterly losses in their history” and are eliminating thousands of jobs as losses mount from the subprime mortgage market collapse, reports Bloomberg.

The International Monetary Fund says the United States is in the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression. Yet, we are borrowing money with interest to finance tax cuts for Wall Street executives.

For Americans below the top 1 percent, the tax cuts have been a giant swindle. The bottom 99 percent of taxpayers were left with a bill of $3.74 in debt for every $1 in federal tax cuts from 2001 to 2006, reports Citizens for Tax Justice. Only the top 1 percent came out ahead.

Meanwhile, the federal budgets for environmental protection and housing for the elderly have been slashed more than 20 percent since 2001, adjusted for inflation, the Community Development Block Grant budget is down 32 percent, and the lack of health insurance is an epidemic.

Most households aren’t even earning as much as they did in 1999, adjusting for inflation. But the 400 taxpayers with the highest incomes doubled their incomes between 2002 and 2005.

According to the latest IRS data, which excludes tax-exempt interest income from state and local government bonds, the richest 400 taxpayers reported an average $214 million each on their federal income tax returns in 2005—up from $104 million in 2002.

As the Wall Street Journal observed, “It’s also important to remember that these figures don’t represent wealth or even lifetime earnings—merely income for a single year.”

Thanks to tax cuts, it’s now common for the nation’s richest bosses to pay taxes at a lower rate than workers. The 400 richest taxpayers paid only 18 percent of their income in federal individual income taxes in 2005 --- down from 30 percent in 1995.

“The drop in effective tax rates for the top 400 filers,” the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities reports, “worked out to a tax reduction of $25 million per filer in 2005.” It would take 673 average workers earning $37,149 a year to reach $25 million today.

While tax cuts help the superrich compete over who has the biggest submarine-carrying superyacht, Katrina survivors are being hit with foreclosures, and neglected levees and bridges around the country are a disaster waiting to happen.

Most of the provisions of the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts are scheduled to expire at the end of 2010. President Bush wants to make them permanent.

The richest 1 percent of households would receive nearly $1.2 trillion in tax cuts from 2009 through 2018, reports the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.

How much is $1.2 trillion? More than all the debt accumulated in the nearly 200 years from George Washington through Ronald Reagan’s first two years in office. That’s before adding interest payments on the borrowed $1.2 trillion.

Tax cuts for the wealthy fuel rising inequality along with rising debt and neglect. Taxpayers with annual incomes above $1 million in fiscal year 2012, for example, would increase their after-tax income by 7.5 percent thanks to an average tax cut of $162,000. The poorest 20 percent of taxpayers would get an average tax cut of $45—and decaying public services.

Democratic presidential candidates Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama promise to end the tax breaks for the wealthy. Republican candidate John McCain wants to extend them. What do you want?

Holly Sklar is co-author of “Raise the Floor: Wages and Policies That Work for All of Us” and “A Just Minimum Wage: Good for Workers, Business and Our Future.”

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Obama and Wright: Different Worldviews

“We did not have to go through any of the violent upheavals that Europe was forced to endure as it shed its feudal past. Our passage from an agricultural to an industrial society was eased by the sheer size of the continent, vast tracts of land and abundant resources that allowed new immigrants to continually remake themselves.” Barack Obama, The Audacity of Hope, p. 55

Jeremiah Wright summarized the difference between him and Obama in his interviews last weekend as, “I do what pastors do. He does what politicians do. I am not running for office.”

But there is more to it than this.

Rev. Wright is an unapologetic African American preacher who has no hesitation speaking the truth in the best of the religious prophetic tradition. He uses the word “imperialism.” He talks about “oppressors” and “oppressed” and “God’s desire for a radical change.” He says, accurately, that “you cannot do terrorism on other people and expect it never to come back on you.”

Barack Obama, as is clear from a close reading of “The Audacity of Hope” and a review of his Democratic Party political career, is all about rising up within the world of the Democratic and Republican parties, the corporate duopoly. And if you are committed to that political world and becoming President through it, it is not surprising that you would do things like whitewash U.S.history, as the quote above does. Genocidal policies toward Indigenous people, the hideous reality of slavery and Jim Crow, the invasion of Mexico and takeover of much of its territory, even the Civil War and Reconstruction: nowhere in Obama’s book does he address these truths of our history.

Obama said at his April 29th press conference where he broke with his pastor of 20 years that, “What became clear to me was that he was presenting a world view that contradicts who I am and what I stand for. And what I think particularly angered me was his suggestion that my previous denunciation of his remarks were somehow political posturing. . . so where I start hearing comments about conspiracy theories and AIDS and suggestions that somehow Minister Farrakhan has been a great voice in the 20th century, then that goes directly at who I am and what I believe this country needs.”

It is true that a handful of statements made by Wright in response to questions from the press at the National Press Club gave them an opening to caricature him as too radical, too out of touch with the U.S. political mainstream, the political mainstream that Obama has been laboring mightily, for years, particularly over the past 16 months, to steer in a somewhat more progressive direction.

It is also true that, faced with near-certain, continued media attention on the Obama/Wright relationship, Obama needed to address the “worldview” differences between them, which are real. But was it really necessary for him to use words like these in doing so:  “divisive and destructive,” “the spectacle that we saw yesterday,” and “a bunch of rants that aren’t grounded in truth”?

Obama said that “when you start focusing on the plight of the historically oppressed, you lose sight of what we have in common. . . it doesn’t describe properly what I believe, in the power of faith to overcome but also to bring people together.”

If he truly believes that he’s different in this way than Wright, then he didn’t read all of Wright’s National Press Club speech, or he deliberately discounted major parts of it, like this conclusion:

“The prophetic theology of the black church has always seen and still sees all of God’s children as sisters and brothers, equals who need reconciliation, who need to be reconciled as equals. . . Reconciliation means we embrace our individual rich histories, all of them. We retain who we are, as persons of different cultures, while acknowledging that those of other cultures are not superior or inferior to us; they are just different from us. We root out any teaching of superiority, inferiority, hatred or prejudice. And we recognize for the first time in modern history, in the West, that the other who stands before us with a different color of skin, a different texture of hair, different music, different preaching styles and different dance moves; that other is one of God’s children just as we are, no better, no worse, prone to error and in need of forgiveness just as we are. Only then will liberation, transformation and reconciliation become realities and cease being ever elusive ideals.”

Barack Obama has made a genuine effort to run a different kind of campaign, one which is more issue-oriented and less about the divisive and dishonest personal attacks that often characterize what passes for “political debate” in this country. But in this case, the case of Rev. Wright, Obama has failed his own test. The corporate media has made him bend his principles.

If Obama wins the Democratic nomination and if he wins the Presidency, which I continue to hope he does as the best candidate when compared with Clinton and McCain, we can expect to see more examples of Obama rejecting consistently progressive positions. Hopefully, he will feel that it is incumbent that he follows through on much of his generally progressive campaign rhetoric and fights for generally progressive government policies. But like Jeremiah Wright, we need to be prepared, no matter who is elected President, “November 5th, I’m [we’re] coming after you, because you’ll be representing a government whose policies grind under people.”

Government of, by and for the people: that must be the objective. We aren’t going to get it on November 4th, 2008, but if we don’t lose our critical consciousness, if we don’t defend indefensible positions, if we speak truth to power, whether Democrat or Republican, and if we keep working to find the ways to come together into a powerful, grassroots-based, multi-cultural independent progressive movement, we can make progress this year toward that long-term objective.

Ted Glick is active in the climate movement. He is a supporter of Cynthia McKinney’s Power to the People/Green Party Presidential campaign.

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