OBAMA HIS OWN MAN

Obama warns of 'quiet riot' among blacks By BOB LEWIS, Associated Press Writer
Tue Jun 5, 7:03 PM ET
HAMPTON, Va. - Democratic presidential hopeful Barack Obama (news, bio, voting record) said Tuesday that the Bush administration has done nothing to defuse a "quiet riot" among blacks that threatens to erupt just as riots in Los Angeles did 15 years ago.
The first-term Illinois senator said that with black people from New Orleans and the Gulf Coast still displaced 20 months after Hurricane Katrina, frustration and resentments are building explosively as they did before the 1992 riots.

"This administration was colorblind in its incompetence," Obama said at a conference of black clergy, "but the poverty and the hopelessness was there long before the hurricane.

"All the hurricane did was to pull the curtain back for all the world to see," he said.

Obama's criticism of Bush prompted ovation after ovation from the nearly 8,000 people gathered in Hampton University's Convocation Center, particularly when he denounced the Iraq war and noted that he had opposed it from the outset.

Repeatedly, he referred to the riots that erupted in Los Angeles after a jury acquitted four police officers of assault charges in the 1991 beating of Rodney King, a black motorist, after a high speed chase. Fifty-five people died and 2,000 were injured in several days of riots in the city's black neighborhoods.

"Those 'quiet riots' that take place every day are born from the same place as the fires and the destruction and the police decked out in riot gear and the deaths," Obama said. "They happen when a sense of disconnect settles in and hope dissipates. Despair takes hold and young people all across this country look at the way the world is and believe that things are never going to get any better."

He argued that once a hurricane hits or a jury renders a not guilty verdict, "the frustration is there for all to see."

Obama, who is bidding to become the first black president, took the stage after a succession of ministers repeatedly brought the crowd to its feet, singing, praying and swaying to music.

Repeatedly, with evangelical zeal, he raised issues that roused the crowd: increasing the minimum wage and teacher pay, funding for public schools and college financial aid for the poor, ending predatory lending and expediting the reconstruction of New Orleans and the Mississippi coast.

He introduced his own pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright of Chicago's Trinity United as "Unashamedly Black and Unapologetically Christian." He credited Wright with introducing him to Christ, and peppered his speech with Scriptural references, at one point invoking the opening lines of the Lord's Prayer.

Obama noted that during the riots, a bullet pierced the abdomen of a pregnant woman and lodged in the elbow of her fetus. The baby was delivered by caesarian section, the bullet was removed and the child, Jessica Glennis Evers-Jones, has only a small scar on her arm to show for it.

Using the incident as a metaphor, Obama said society's problems are worsening because "in too many places across the country, we have not even bothered to take the bullet out."

"When we have more black men in prison than in college, then it's time to take the bullet out," he said.

Obama doesn't regularly focus on racial themes in his standard campaign speeches. He did speak out on black issues in Selma, Ala., in March, when he told a largely black audience that he was a product of the civil rights movement and lectured blacks for failing to vote in large numbers.

Several ministers at the conference said Obama's message and style plays well among black voters and with their spiritual leaders.

The Rev. Robert Abbott, pastor of the Holy Trinity Baptist Church in Amityville, N.Y., said Obama connects with black audiences because of the preacher's style he uses when addressing them.

"The way he sounds, it's like he can reach out and encourage people," Abbott said.

Why Blacks are Hesitant about Barack

Jesse's Nod Won't Help Obama
By Earl Ofari Hutchinson, New America Media
Posted on April 3, 2007, Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama beamed as he sat beside Jesse Jackson as Jesse announced that he was formally endorsing Obama's candidacy. The idea was that Jackson's endorsement would give Obama a rocket boost with black voters.

It won't. And there are two glaring reasons why.

The first is Jackson himself. While some polls show that Jackson is still popular among many blacks, he's not the Jackson of a decade ago or even four years ago. That Jackson could instantly heat up a crowd with a timely slogan, catchy rhyme, or well-timed phrase and he had the instant ear of presidents and heads of state.

However, the taint of sexual scandal and his fade from the headlines has wiped much of the luster off of his racial star. Jackson belongs to the older civil rights generation, and he's found it tough sledding trying to sell his civil rights pitch to upwardly mobile, younger blacks that have little inkling of past civil rights struggles.

Jackson hinted at that in his little talk endorsing Obama, when he said that it was time to pass the torch to a new generation of black politicians. That was self-serving and disingenuous. Jackson has no intention of passing any torch on now. He will continue to do everything he can to micromanage a role for himself on the national political scene. In the next breath he boasted that he'd work with whichever Democrat ultimately emerges on top and that he is talking to the other Democratic contenders about his agenda.

The second problem is Obama. Even if Jackson was a rock solid Obama man, and still had the sheen on his leadership badge, he wouldn't be much help to him. A Democratic presidential contender must not be afraid to dump strategies on the nation's public policy table to combat the astronomical high black unemployment rate, soaring incarceration for black men, the HIV/AIDS plague, and failing public schools, as well as a plan for drug and criminal justice system overhaul.

These are the issues that stir the political juices of most blacks. Obama hasn't as yet stirred them on these issues. Obama is a good liberal with a commendable record on some issues. The problem is there's just not enough of a record to gauge his effectiveness as a presidential possibility, or even as a good Senator at this still very early point in his jump to the national political stage.

Black voters, indeed all voters, crave and deserve a candidate with a proven track record or at least a defined plan for dealing with the crucial issues. The initial reluctance of many black voters, top black Democrats, civil rights leaders, and that includes Jackson for a while; to leap on the Obama bandwagon is due to the freshman Senator's paper thin legislative record.

As Obama's rock star allure fades in the gruel and heat of the presidential campaign, the questions will loom bigger about his plan for an exit from Iraq, nuclear proliferation, stimulating the economy, battling inflation, environmental and labor problems, campaign finance reform and the always explosive minefield of racial relations.

The contrast between Obama and his Democratic presidential rival John Edwards on the issues has been glaring. Edwards was a full term senator, a seasoned presidential ticket campaigner in 2004, and in the years since the election has barnstormed the country talking and listening to labor and health care advocates about working conditions and the urgent need for affordable health care for the estimated fifty million uninsured Americans.

Blacks and Latinos make up a significant percent of the uninsured. He's crafted a thoughtful and detailed comprehensive plan for national health care and has talked it up at campaign stops in Iowa and New Hampshire. At a Democratic presidential candidates forum in Las Vegas in March he spelled out the plan.

Obama has detailed no plan on health care, and stumbled badly when asked about it at the Las Vegas confab. Obama backers counter that the knock that their candidate lacks political seasoning and a firm handle on the issues is unfair. They say that Bush was equally inexperienced in national and international problem solving before grabbing the Oval Office.

That's a lame counter. The White House is no place for on-the-job-training. Voters, and even top Republicans, should have demanded more of candidate Bush. They didn't, and his towering public policy fumbles, initially on the war on terrorism, and on Iraq, Social Security and Tax reform has been nothing short of disastrous, has cost taxpayers dearly, and has caused much political and public rancor and division.

When the presidential campaign turns torrid in next year's primaries, Obama will have to spell out clearly where he stands on the hot-button issues, and tell how he'll make things work in the White House if he gets there. The voters will and should demand that much of him as well as the other candidates. Jackson can't and won't help Obama there.

Earl Ofari Hutchinson is a political analyst and social issues commentator, and the author of the book, The Emerging Black GOP Majority (Middle Passage Press, September 2006), a hard-hitting look at Bush and the GOP's court of black

Youths views on Obama - Webtalk

Howard Dean 2.0: Obama Engages Youth on the Web
By Sam Graham-Felsen, The Nation
Posted on February 21, 2007, '
More than a week before Barack Obama announced his candidacy in Springfield, Illinois, 3,500 students--many of whom had driven for hours from out of state--packed into George Mason University's Johnson Center in Fairfax, Virginia, brimming with idealism. As the Senator took the stage to address the frenetic young crowd, he was visibly taken aback.


The Obama campaign had done nothing to help with the event. Students for Barack Obama, which began as a group on the social networking site Facebook, had organized every aspect of the rally, from the slick, union-printed posters to the all-student speaker lineup preceding Obama. "This was a serious campaign-level rally," said 22-year-old Adam Conner, who attended the rally and runs the RunObama.com blog, "something you expect to see towards October of an election year rather than February of an off-year."

Obama started to deliver his usual stump speech, but soon he began to address his audience directly. Crediting young people for shaping history "more often than not," from the civil rights movement to the Vietnam protests, he beckoned them to take the lead in fighting against the war in Iraq. Obama ended by recalling, as he often does, Martin Luther King Jr.'s prophecy that "the arc of the moral universe…bends towards justice." Yet as his speech reached a crescendo, there was a palpable sense that he believed, perhaps more than ever before, in his own message. "Here's the thing, young people, it doesn't bend on its own, it bends because you put your hand on that arc and you bend it in the direction of justice," Obama boomed. "Think about all the power that's represented here in all of you…. If you all grab that arc, then I have no doubt, I have absolutely no doubt, that regardless of what happens in this presidential year and regardless of what happens in this campaign, America will transform itself."

The room exploded, and if it hadn't fully registered before, Obama and his staffers understood that there was genuine potential for something like a Howard Dean 2.0 movement that could be anchored by an even younger grassroots base empowered with newer, sharper online tools.

What happened at George Mason provided physical evidence that Obama's youth following is more than a bunch of kids who clicked a button. Before the rally, Obama's campaign already knew they had a massive presence on Facebook. Students for Barack Obama (SFBO) had around 60,000 members, and even more astonishingly, a 26-year-old named Farouk Olu Aregbe had assembled more than 200,000 in his Facebook group "Barack Obama (One Million Strong for Barack)" in little more than two weeks (the group now has more than 272,000 members). According to Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes, the growth was "unprecedented." As a point of comparison, the Facebook group for Hillary Clinton has fewer than 4,000 students and the largest group for John Edwards has half that.

Joe Trippi, the architect of Dean's web-driven grassroots campaign in 2004, marveled at the activity: "The Obama campaign had nothing to do with it, and they're already at 250,000 people. That's amazing--the Dean campaign, it took us six months to get to 139,000 people."

Meredith Segal, a junior at Bowdoin College, started the SFBO group on Facebook in the summer of 2006, in hopes that it would serve as a petition to encourage Obama to run. Thanks largely to Facebook's "news feed" technology, which sends out automatic alerts about the activities of all of one's Facebook "friends," the word spread fast. Soon, she was being inundated with messages and e-mails from students across the country who were eager to help. Segal and others began convening conference calls, and before long, a sophisticated operation with chapters across the country, a regional leadership structure, a field team, a communications department, a finance department and a website had evolved. The group even has a student at Gallaudet University in Washington, a school for the deaf, who specifically coordinates students with disabilities. "We started as a Facebook group, but as the rally demonstrates, we're a whole lot beyond Facebook at this point," says Segal. "We're in the real world."

Agrebe's "Barack Obama (One Million Strong)" group [registration required], which is collaborating with SFBO, is also leveraging its online manpower into tangible results. Within hours of launching a fundraising initiative--with the goal of collectively raising $1 million with small donations from members--students had already given $2,000 to the Obama campaign.


While they may be running their operations like seasoned political operatives, both Agrebe and Segal are essentially new to the process. Agrebe was class president of his college, Missouri Western State, and he did some fundraising work around Hurricane Katrina relief; Segal, a neuroscience major, had been involved in community service and a bit of antiwar organizing. The Obama campaign is their first real foray into electoral politics.

The same could probably be said for much of Obama's youth following. Indeed, Obama's candidacy is stirring young people more than any other politician in recent memory.

"He has unimaginable appeal to my generation," says Brian Klaas of Carleton College, editor of the Carleton Progressive. For many 18- to 26-year-olds--who are among the most diverse and, according to numerous polls, most tolerant American generation in history--Obama's multiracial background embodies the personal and political identity of the Generation Y cohort known as "Millennials." For a politically disillusioned generation that came of age throughout the impeachment of Bill Clinton, the 2000 election debacle, 9/11 and the invasion of Iraq, Obama's post-partisan rhetoric is profoundly appealing. To a civic-minded generation that engages in community service at record levels but generally doesn't vote or trust in politics as a force to change the world--Obama's past as a community organizer in the South Side of Chicago resonates.

"We've got a movement--when you've got over a quarter of a million people there's no better word for it--and this is a calling," says Agrebe. "You don't expect it, but when it comes, you take the responsibility."

Young people are responding to Obama, but is he responding to them? So far, his campaign has allowed a youth-led grassroots following to sprout organically without interference. He's done little with his official Facebook site: He hasn't personalized his profile, and instead of sending youth-specific messages to potential followers, his staffers have been cutting and pasting standard campaign e-mails and speech transcripts.

But by attending the George Mason rally, Obama signaled to students that he respects their ability and power as organizers, and acknowledges what a grassroots youth movement could bring to his campaign. It's clear that Obama will have to run a nontraditional, decentralized campaign if he wants to see this kind of energy flourish. He'll have to communicate consistently and directly with students, in their medium. Blogger Matt Stoller at MyDD.com suggests Obama give concrete tasks for his youth following to accomplish. "He should say, 'We need a million new primary voters registered by July or August,' set up a tool to count new primary voters, and periodically call the people that are registering the most voters," Stoller says. "That would show real trust."

On the day Obama announced his candidacy, his campaign launched my.barackobama.com, a social networking site that allows supporters to post blogs, organize fundraising drives, create offline meetings and link up with other supporters. The appearance of my.barackobama.com indicates that the campaign is taking social networking seriously in the wake of Obama's surge on Facebook. The site and online strategy are being run by former Deaniacs, and a co-founder of Facebook has reportedly been brought on board as well. Young people are already dominating activity on the site: Of thousands of groups already formed, three of the top ten are student groups, and SFBO, the top group on the site, has nearly twice as many members as the second-largest group.


The mainstream media tends to portray the Obama youth movement as a pack of groupies, fawning over the latest rock star. But these students have shown that they're not interested in being spectators.

In a Chicago Reader interview from 1995, Barack Obama wondered, "What if a politician were to see his job as that of an organizer?" If Obama can show his young followers that he's still that grassroots organizer--a rock star perhaps, but one who listens to, trusts and empowers his base to come on stage and rock with him--it's going to be one hell of a show.

Credit Rating Hurts Blacks & Latinos

Study says credit scores used against minorities
The Denver Business Journal - January 9, 2007by Renee McGawDenver Business Journal
Credit scores are used to deny African-Americans and other minorities access to credit and financial services, according to a study conducted by the University of Denver Center for African American Policy and released Tuesday by the National Black Caucus of State Legislators.

"Our research found that, while banks site branches in minority and lower-credit-score communities, they do not provide the same access to their services as those in higher-credit-score communities," Mississippi state Rep. Mary Coleman, immediate past president of the caucus, said in a statement. "And even worse, there is often no way for those trapped with sub-prime credit scores to establish a prime credit score -- which would enable wealth creation."

Key points of the study, which was conducted by Rickie Keys of DU's Center for African American Policy, included:

Credit scores are more closely correlated to lack of access to financial services for unbanked and underbanked communities than other factors, such as race, income and ethnicity.
Credit scores today are used for an increasing array of basic necessities, such as determining eligibility to obtain employment, rent a home, obtain insurance and open accounts for checking accounts, as well as basic utilities like telephone service or electricity.
The more than 130 million Americans lacking prime credit scores (also the unbanked and underbanked) are disproportionately African-American and Hispanic.
Although banks may be located in areas with high concentrations of low Fair Issac & Co. (FICO) scores, they do not provide proportional access to their services in these underserved areas, compared with higher-FICO-score, higher-income communities.
Researchers constructed maps overlaying FICO scores with race, income, employment, ethnicity and other variables with the availability of traditional banking and fringe financial institutions in various communities. Data came from a variety of sources including the U.S. Census Bureau, U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis, Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, Credit Union National Association, state banking agencies and telephone directories, officials said.

"Having identified the problem, we found it especially disconcerting that there is no endorsed method by which consumers can move from a sub-prime credit score to a prime credit score," said Colorado Senate President Pro Tem Peter Groff, D-Denver, who is also executive director of the University of Denver Center for African American Policy. "It's a Catch-22. To build a prime score, banks require consumers to demonstrate positive credit; but banks won't extend credit to these consumers without a prime credit score, leaving many trapped.

"Exacerbating the problem is that consumers' on-time payment histories for things like rent, utilities, and non-traditional loans are not reported to credit bureaus," Groff said. "They're responsible borrowers, but they are being prevented from graduating to a prime credit score, and thus from gaining access to the financial services and products needed to establish wealth."