Alliance of White Anti-Racists Everywhere – Los Angeles
Obama
Obama Skips GOP, Appoints Consumer Watchdog Cordray
01 month ago
On Wednesday the White House announced President Barack Obama will use his executive power to bypass Congress and put Richard Cordray in charge at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB). Senate Republicans rejected Cordray’s confirmation last month but the President used his constitutional powers so Cordray can begin serving as CFPB director later this week.
“By using his Constitutional authority to bypass the unprecedented and hyperpartisan obstruction to any nominee to this post, President Obama is putting our nation’s financial well-being before politics,” Wade Henderson, president and CEO of The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, said in a statement. “This is the right choice for Americans who have been battered in this economy and bamboozled by Wall Street’s more unscrupulous practices, and we celebrate it.”
Colorlines.com’s editor Kai Wright offers some context on why this appointment and the CFPB is important to people of color in the U.S.:
From payday lending to rapid refund services to for-profit colleges,
there is an enormous and growing industry that preys upon poverty–and
importantly, on people’s efforts to work their way out of it. Not
coincidentally, they are overwhelmingly clumped in communities of
color. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is the sole reform to
come out of the financial crisis that aims to deal with that fact. The
banks and broader financial sector have fought tooth and nail against
it, including spending millions of dollars to lobby Congress to weaken
the agency. Of course, the agency is already pretty weak–existing
regulators have veto power over its decisions and the vast majority of
its work will be in forcing disclosure, rather than stopping predatory
practices. But it’s a start down the road of saying we have to care
about consumers’ well being in an economy driven by dangerous financial
products. We’ll see if the president’s decision stands up to court
challenge.
“Republicans have been trying to make an end run around the law by denying this watchdog a leader,” Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) said in a statement. “I support President Obama’s decision to make sure that in these tough economic times, middle-class families in Nevada and across the country will have the advocate they deserve to fight on their behalf against the reckless practices that denied so many their economic security.”
Obama Skips GOP, Appoints Consumer Watchdog Cordray
01 month ago
On Wednesday the White House announced President Barack Obama will use his executive power to bypass Congress and put Richard Cordray in charge at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB). Senate Republicans blocked Cordray’s confirmation last month but the President used his constitutional powers so Cordray can begin serving as CFPB director later this week.
“By using his Constitutional authority to bypass the unprecedented and hyperpartisan obstruction to any nominee to this post, President Obama is putting our nation’s financial well-being before politics,” Wade Henderson, president and CEO of The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, said in a statement. “This is the right choice for Americans who have been battered in this economy and bamboozled by Wall Street’s more unscrupulous practices, and we celebrate it.”
Colorlines.com’s editor Kai Wright offers some context on why this appointment and the CFPB is important to people of color in the U.S.:
From payday lending to rapid refund services to for-profit colleges,
there is an enormous and growing industry that preys upon poverty–and
importantly, on people’s efforts to work their way out of it. Not
coincidentally, they are overwhelmingly clumped in communities of
color. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is the sole reform to
come out of the financial crisis that aims to deal with that fact. The
banks and broader financial sector have fought tooth and nail against
it, including spending millions of dollars to lobby Congress to weaken
the agency. Of course, the agency is already pretty weak–existing
regulators have veto power over its decisions and the vast majority of
its work will be in forcing disclosure, rather than stopping predatory
practices. But it’s a start down the road of saying we have to care
about consumers’ well being in an economy driven by dangerous financial
products. We’ll see if the president’s decision stands up to court
challenge.
“Republicans have been trying to make an end run around the law by denying this watchdog a leader,” Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) said in a statement. “I support President Obama’s decision to make sure that in these tough economic times, middle-class families in Nevada and across the country will have the advocate they deserve to fight on their behalf against the reckless practices that denied so many their economic security.”
After Birtherism, Conservatives Question Obama’s Academics
09 months ago
Wrapping up a history of birtherism, Dave Weigel writes at Slate: “The next era of Obama conspiracies starts with the president in a much more exposed position. Now, conspiracy theorists know that all kinds of people will listen to them if they toss an idea out there–even if the idea is proved to be baseless.” So what’s the new angle? Why, that Obama, a professor of consitutional law at Columbia and the editor of the Harvard Law Review, is dumb!
At the Daily Beast, Michelle Goldberg lays bare the lunacy of the new accusations, including ghostwritten memoirs and scary Muslims. Leading the charge is, of course, Donald Trump:
Now Donald Trump has opened up a new line of attack on President Obama, accusing him of being a “terrible student” who shouldn’t have gotten into Columbia University or Harvard Law School. “How does a bad student go to Columbia and then to Harvard?” he asked the Associated Press. “I’m thinking about it, I’m certainly looking into it. Let him show his records.” He continued darkly, “There are a lot of questions that are unanswered about our president.”
Pat Buchanan, seeing a chance to be on TV, gets into it with Hardball’s Chris Matthews:
“What I want to know is why you don’t want to see the test scores?” Buchanan shot back. “Why don’t you want to see any of these things? You’re supposed to be a journalist! The people’s right to know!”
“What am i supposed to become a master of his paperwork?” Matthews said. He told Buchanan that his arguments were one of the reasons that black Americans were often driven “crazy” by political discourse. Obama, he pointed out, had, by all accounts, had a stellar academic career, “and you still don’t buy it. You don’t buy him.” He noted that “I got my job here without ever showing any paperwork from school.
Here’s Mother Jones’ Suzy Khimm, interviewing self-proclaimed “birther king” Andy Martin. Martin’s officially satisfied by the birth certificate, almost:
Martin, however, says that the birth certificate doesn’t put to rest other questions about Obama’s past and rise to power. Echoing Donald Trump’s recent demands to see Obama’s college grades, Martin said he wants to see the “admission files and the transcripts” of Obama’s college years. “The pressure for his college records is going to become relentless,” he vows.
Martin says that he also has questions about Khalid Abdullah Tariq al-Mansour, whom fringe activists claim is a black Muslim nationalist who paid for Obama’s law degree.
And here’s pundit Mickey Kaus writing at conservative politics-gossip rag the Daily Caller, asking why Obama seems so bad at politics:
The answer is distressingly obvious: Obama’s the biggest affirmative action baby in history. When other pols are trying, failing, learning, while climbing up the middle rungs of the ladder, he got a pass.
Some are saying that Obama’s the product of affirmative action–but affirmative action, in its actual exercised form, only gets you through the door. As Melissa Harris-Perry has said, the only people who should be ashamed of affirmative action are the racist societies who need it to be just, and Obama’s brilliance at Harvard and beyond shows that it works as advertised. Others are saying that all of his success is due to the pulled strings of a shadowy cabal seeking to put a black Democrat in power, to, uh, deport record numbers of people and wage three wars. You know, liberal stuff.
The arguments don’t make sense on their own, because they’re really just empty shells designed to convey a different idea entirely. As always, anyone calling Obama an academic fraud, a foreigner, or a Muslim is likely using that term because the n-word is off the list.
Yes, Again: Tea Party GOP Member Sends Racist Email
09 months ago
A Southern California GOP member sent out an email to fellow party members last Friday, depicting President Obama as the child of apes. It’s just the latest in a series of highly racialized attempts to discredit the president’s legitimacy to hold office.
“Now you know why — No birth certificate!” Marilyn Davenport, tea party activist and member of the central committee of the Orange County Republican Party, wrote under the image sent out last Friday.
Local Republican leaders are now calling for her resignation. While the group’s laws prevent a vote to remove Davenport, Orange County Republican Party Chairman Scott Baugh told the Associated Press that he wants to launch an ethics investigation about the incident and thinks Davenport should step down from the committee. Former Chairman of the California Republican Party Michael Schroder has also demanded her resignation in a CBS interview.
Davenport, however, refuses to resign and instead blasted “the liberal left” for picking up the story and called on “the coward” who leaked the message to come forward, in a second email sent out after news broke.
“I’m sorry if my email offended anyone,” Davenport wrote. “In no way did I even consider the fact that he’s half black when I sent out the email . . . We all know a double standard applies regarding this president.” She also told the OC Weekly, “Oh, come on! Everybody who knows me knows that I am not a racist. It was a joke. I have friends who are black. Besides, I only sent it to a few people–mostly people I didn’t think would be upset by it.”
Schroder said that Davenport had previously defended the racist rhetoric of other Orange County republicans. During Obama’s inauguration, Los Alamitos Mayor Dean Grose sent out an email showing a watermelon patch in front of the White House. She also defended Newport Councilman Richard Nichols, amid controversy regarding his racist comments against Mexicans.
Orange County tea party members were also accused of slinging racist taunts and threats at a Muslim fundraising event last month. And as if anyone still needed proof, late last year the Institute for Research & Education and Human Rights released an official report documenting the tea party’s racism.
Obama Criticizes His Own Pro-Testing Agenda At Town Hall
010 months ago
On Monday President Obama criticized portions of his own policy platform when he told the crowd at Bell Multicultural High School in Washington, D.C., “Too often what we have been doing is using these tests to punish students or to, in some cases, punish schools,” the AP reported.
The event was a town hall focusing on Latino education specially televised by Univision. From the AP:
“One thing I never want to see happen is schools that are just teaching the test because then you’re not learning about the world, you’re not learning about different cultures, you’re not learning about science, you’re not learning about math,” the president said. “All you’re learning about is how to fill out a little bubble on an exam and little tricks that you need to do in order to take a test and that’s not going to make education interesting.”
“And young people do well in stuff that they’re interested in,” Obama said. “They’re not going to do as well if it’s boring.”
It’s a laudable if uncontroversial statement, notable because central portions of Obama’s education reform plan demand that standardized tests be used to measure student learning and track their progress, and keep tabs on teacher performance. For years education advocates have criticized the ways that standardized test score have led to the shrinking of education curriculum as schools face increasing pressure to raise test scores in reading and math. Under Race to the Top, the $4.3 billion competitive grants program that the Obama administration initiated in 2009, states have been rewarded with money for adopting laws that call for standardized test scores to be taken into consideration in teachers’ evaluations. Increasingly, teachers’ job security depends on their students’ test scores. Under Obama’s education policy proposals, an entire school’s teaching staff can be fired, schools can be shut down, and new charter schools brought in, if test scores don’t improve adequately. A number of recent scandals involving potential test tampering and impropriety suggest that the charter schools and traditional public schools alike are feeling immense pressure to show yearly gains in test scores.
Obama’s great at co-opting his critics’ arguments even if he doesn’t take to heart their policy suggestions. It’s an excellent strategy for cornering his critics and closing off the political space that critics of standardized tests have carved out for themselves in the often confounding education debate.
During the event Obama also said he was opposed to the idea of granting administrative relief to undocumented immigrant youth facing deportation. He also turned down the idea of offering young people who would have been eligible for the DREAM Act temporary protected status.
“With respect to the notion that I can just suspend deportations through executive order, that’s just not the case,” Obama told Karen Maldonado, an undocumented immigrant youth who held up her deportation order and asked him why students were still receiving them.
“There are enough laws on the books by Congress that are very clear in terms of how we have to enforce our immigration system that for me to simply through executive order ignore those congressional mandates would not conform with my appropriate role as president.”
Obama supports the DREAM Act, however, which would have allowed students like Maldonado who clear a host of hurdles to become eligible for citizenship after a thirteen-year wait.
Napolitano: In Two Years We’ve Deported More Than Ever Before
01 year ago
On Monday, Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano told a gathering in El Paso what is not new news, but what is staggering every time it’s repeated. “In both fiscal years 2009 and 2010, Immigration and Customs Enforcement removed more illegal immigrants from our country than ever before, with more than 779,000 removals nationwide in the last two years,” Napolitano said, the AP reported. It’s certainly not the first time Napolitano’s boasted about her agency’s immigration enforcement.
“The Obama administration must prove it is tough on illegal immigrants and can secure the country’s porous borders if it is to stand a chance of passing a comprehensive overhaul of America’s tattered immigration system,” the AP piece says, reporting as fact a political argument that is actually in great dispute.
There is what the Obama administration thinks it must do, and there is what it refuses to use its power to actually change. The odds of comprehensive immigration reform happening this or last year were nil. And still the Obama administration pressed forward with ever more enforcement and expansion of Secure Communities, the new program that allows Immigration and Customs Enforcement to peer into the databases of local precincts of anyone who’s detained, fingerprinted, or arrested.
The Obama administration has steadfastly refused to consider administrative options, which are completely within the president’s power, to halt the mass deportations. According to Napolitano, among the deported have been people who were convicted of violent crimes. They make up a tiny percentage of the people who are ejected from the country every year. The majority have been convicted of no crime whatsoever. Those who did have criminal record had been found guilty of petty crimes and traffic violations.
What’s more, talk of a “porous border” ignores the fact that migration into the country is actually down. And the country has beefed up enforcement along the border to the tune of an extra $600 million Congress set aside for border militarization. The Border Patrol is the country’s largest uniformed law enforcement agency.
Compare Obama’s SOTU with Past Presidents’, in Tag Clouds
01 year ago
The State of the Union address has been interpreted differently since President George Washington delivered the first speech in 1790. And though the speech is required by the constitution: every president in each address has offered his own spin. Lincoln discussed the emancipation of slaves. In 1978, Jimmy Carter assured the country that “militarily, politically, economically, and in spirit” the state of our Union was sound.
In 2002 and 2003 George W. Bush used his speech to argue the moral case for war against Iraq. And yesterday, Obama focused on innovation.
If you ever wanted to see just what those varied themes looked like in real time, you’re in luck. Take a look at the “tag clouds” below to see how Tuesday’s State of the Union compares to previous speeches. The size of the text changes according to how many times the word was used in a speech. And the content speaks volumes.
President Obama, 2011:
President George W. Bush, 2002:
Jimmy Carter, 1978
John F. Kennedy, 1962
Abraham Lincoln, 1862
George Washington, 1790
More Love for the Modest Heros of Tucson
01 year ago
Daniel Hernandez continues to charm his way into the national spotlight. Nearly a week after he helped save Rep. Gabrielle Giffords’ life during the deadly shooting rampage in Tucson, he earned the praise of President Obama during a memorial service Thursday night at the University of Arizona. In front of thousands of mourners, the president commended Hernandez for his bravery. “Daniel, I’m sorry and you may deny it but we’ve decided that you are a hero because you ran through the chaos to administer to your boss and tended to her wounds and helped keep her alive,” the president said to a rousing applause. Watch more in the video above.
Hernandez’s stoic reaction to the president’s comments is also noteworthy. He stood solemnly with his hands clasped in front of him while thousands of people cheered around him. Our own Jorge Rivas called it “Operation Shock and Awe” because Hernandez appeared to be too jarred to react to such high praise. But the love rang loud and clear, for Hernandez, and Patricia Maisch, the woman who wrestled away the alleged gunman’s ammunition.
He has a similar approach, albeit slightly less stunned, in interviews over the past week. It’s refreshing to see that at only 20-years-old, the University of Arizona student exhibits more maturity than most politicians who seem to be looking only to feast off of tragedy for political gain.
And with that, Daniel Hernandez gets a second dose of love this week, celebrating the big love showed to him on Wednesday night.
We’re ending the day as often as possible by celebrating love. We welcome your ideas for posts. Send suggestions to submissions@colorlines.com,
and be sure to put Celebrate Love in the subject line. You can send
links to videos, graphics, photos, quotes, whatever. Or just chime in to
the comments below and we’ll find you. Be sure to let us know you’ve
got the rights to share any media you send.
To see other Love posts visit our Celebrate Love page.
Dems Suffer Without Young Voters of Color Who Stole the ’08 Show
01 year ago
Today, as Democrats are solemnly tallying up their losses, there’s one inescapable fact about what the midterm electorate looked like: it was overwhelmingly whiter and older than 2008. The questions for President Obama now are what happened to the energetic base of young voters of color who thrusted him to power in 2008? And what will it take to bring them back into his party’s fold before 2012?
According to exit polls’ early tabulation, people under the age of 29 accounted for only 11 percent of voters on Tuesday, a decrease from the 18 percent mark of 2008. More than 20 percent of voters who showed up at the polls this time were over the age of 65, a marked increase from the 15 percent who showed up on Election Day in 2008. These numbers may shift as more data becomes available, but the larger picture is clear: The youth wave of 2008 receded.
Granted, it’s dangerous to compare presidential elections to midterms. Voter turnout is always much lower. The Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement (CIRCLE) released a report this morning arguing that exit poll numbers aren’t really that bad, when taken into context. The group estimates that the youth voter turnout in 2010 was only three percentage points lower than in 2006.
But to many observers, the numbers still suggest Democrats are widely underestimating the importance of one of its key constituencies.
“My sense is that young people did turn out where there was infrastructure,” says Rob “Biko” Baker, executive director of the League of Young Voters. Baker noted that the 2012 presidential election begins in March of 2011, and that the youth organizations that helped drive massive numbers of voters in 2008 need to once again be taken seriously.
“We need a bold leadership that inspires young people from both sides of the aisle to fight for our interests,” Baker continued. “Without that, we’re gonna lose a whole generation of young people we just activated in 2008.”
As I reported last week from Milwaukee, young voters of color were the unsung heroes of the Democratic cause two years ago. An historic 66 percent of voters under the age of 29 supported Obama in 2008. Young African Americans between the ages of 18 and 24 voted in higher numbers than any other ethnic group, and two million more headed to the polls in 2008 than 2004. Two million more young Latino voters headed to the polls in 2008, too, along with over half a million more young Asian voters.
That demographic shift was unprecedented and offered encouraging political potential to progressives broadly and Democrats in particular. In a recent New York Times letter to the editor, political scientist and University of Chicago professor Cathy Cohen urged the party to pay special attention to the black youth vote.
“If the party is able to mobilize these young people, it can build a cadre of committed political activists that can carry its message forward for years to come,” Cohen wrote. “Just as the Reagan Revolution embraced people in their 20s who today run the Republican Party, President Obama has the chance to embrace a different group of young people so that they can help shape a transformative political agenda supported by the Democratic Party of the future.”
But so far, it seems that party leadership has completely missed that message. And now, Democrats are paying for it.
Some youth voting organizers have called the president out for his seemingly top-down approach. A recent New York Times story, for instance, featured young voters sounding off against Democrats for focusing the heated healthcare debate so intently on older adults, and for limiting Obama’s late campaign outreach to massive campus rallies. That type of approach stifles innovation and creativity, two elements that made 2008 so appealing to a part of the electorate that had long felt alienated from civic life.
“[Obama] made young people feel important, then he got into office and there was no one talking to us,” Jessica Kirsner, a 21-year-old college student from Florida, told the Times.
The president’s outreach to African American voters overall also seems to have been lackluster. Though the Democratic National Committee spent an unprecedented $3 million dollars on advertising aimed at African Americans during this year’s midterm elections, at least some of the organizers I met in Milwaukee expressed frustration with being talked at, instead if engaged with.
“The future is yours to shape,” President Obama said in an eleventh hour appeal to black radio listeners in Los Angeles on Tuesday. “But if you don’t get involved, then somebody else is going to shape it for you.”
Right now, that appears to be exactly what’s happening.
Obama Lectures Young Voters on Political Apathy
01 year ago
It’s campaign season, so it shouldn’t come as a surprise that President Obama is reaching into his bag of reliable tricks to rekindle the optimism that got him elected. Yesterday he held a massive rally at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. The Washington Post reports that it was an mostly an effort to corral a base of young voters who enthusiastically made the difference at the polls two years ago. And in a gathering that held 20,000 strong, was replete with a musical guest appearance by Ben Harper and throwback 2008 campaign slogans, Obama chided voters for being too lazy.
The biggest mistake we could make right now is to let disappointment or frustration lead to apathy and indifference. That is how the other side wins. And I want everybody to be clear, make no mistake: If the other side does win, they will spend the next two years fighting for the very same policies that led to this recession in the first place. The same policies that left the middle class behind for more than a decade. The same policies that we fought so hard for to change in 2008.
…You know what the other side is counting on this time around? They’re counting on you staying home. They’re counting on your silence. They’re counting on amnesia. They’re betting on your apathy, especially because a lot of you are young folks.
It’s an ingratiating position on Obama’s part, but one that he’s become especially fond of lately.
In a recent Rolling Stone interview, fashioned specifically to target younger voters, the president beat the apathy drum again.
“People need to shake off this lethargy. People need to buck up,” Obama told Rolling Stone in an interview to be published Friday. Adding that change is hard, the president scolded that “if people now want to take their ball and go home, that tells me folks weren’t serious in the first place.”
Not exactly the all-inclusive, “Yes, We Can” mantra from the 2008 campaign trail.
While President Obama’s dip in popularity certainly has a lot to due with the nation’s dismal economy and Congress’s inability to move even relatively conservative legislation through its ranks, there’s not clear evidence that voters, especially young ones, are growing apathetic. Voters under the age of 30 came out in strong numbers for the 2006 and 2008 elections, and while that’s certainly due to a Democratic resurgence of sorts, the president hasn’t always given young voters reason to be amped up for his cause.