By Bankole Thompson
DETROIT, Jun 27 2010 (IPS)

The 2010 U.S. Social Forum ended Saturday in Detroit, a city viewed by many as a metaphor for the excesses of U.S. capitalism, with strong parting words from Pablo Solon, Bolivia’s permanent representative to the United Nations.

Bolivian ambassador Pablo Solon said the great challenge of this century is to build a new environmental and social contract. Credit: Bankole Thompson/IPS

Solon said the British Petroleum oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, which is wrecking livelihoods and ocean and shore ecosystems alike, is a perfect example of the kind of issue that should be brought before an international court designed to address such environmental cases.

“There has to be justice. This is something we cannot accept,” Solon said. “The message is we need to build an environmental court of justice when it comes to nature and mother earth.”

The Bolivian diplomat said the great challenge of this century is to “build a new environmental and social contract”, dismissing the vision promoted by Group of Eight (G8) wealthy industrialised nations – also meeting this weekend in Canada, along with the slightly larger G20 bloc – of a “green economy”.

“What do they mean by a green economy? That means we have to bring capitalism to nature. They want a price placed on nature,” Solon said. “We are in the middle of a new offensive and it’s going to be the Washington consensus – privatisation and commodification of water. We have to find a new alternative.”

He added that his nation is urging the U.N. to declare that access to adequate water and sanitation is a human right.

Solon reiterated Bolivian President Evo Morales’s commitment to the environment, which he said was the idea behind the World People’s Summit on Climate Change and Rights of Mother Earth held in Tiquipaya in April.

“In order to guarantee human rights, we have to defend mother earth’s rights,” he said.

Solon also railed against the U.N. Security Council and its five permanent members, which he called “anti-democratic” because they were not elected by the General Assembly.

Critics of the Security Council have long labeled that most powerful body in the U.N. as an example of “Western hegemony and control”, questioning why regions like Latin America and Africa cannot have a permanent seat instead of a rotating membership.

“You can’t have a small group of nations think they are going to decide for the rest,” Solon said, referring to the U.S., Britain, China, Russia and France.

The ambassador’s remarks were reflective of the fiery issues with tremendous national and international implications tabled at this year’s forum, where activists tried to connect the dots between what is happening locally and on the global scene.

Vanessa Nisperos from New York said she got what she hoped for at the forum.

“I met a lot of people who are like me – street fighters – who are committed to make a change,” Nisperos said.

She said one of the sessions on transformative organising models made her reconsider her approach to social justice issues.

“Sometimes people involved in social justice causes don’t necessarily treat people who work for them with respect. That session helped me understand how to sit back and think about how we deal with each other with respect and also take a break,” Nisperos said.

She is going home to New York with a lot of connections and a “renewed passion for things that I’m committed to”.

Maureen Taylor, head of the Michigan Welfare Rights Organisation and chair of the U.S. Social Forum organising committee in Detroit, described the gathering as a success and economic boost for the city, which has shed thousands of jobs in its lifeblood auto industry over the last few years.

“We secured 3,000 hotel rooms in downtown Detroit, except for the MGM Grand Hotel who wouldn’t work with us,” Taylor said. “It was good to come to Detroit. We are validated. We’ve got love, commitment and anger.”

Taylor said the recommendations that arose from the 20,000- plus attendees will all be codified into a report that will be issued in the next three or four months.

“Many issues, local and national, were identified in the different plenary sessions,” Taylor said. “But certainly the clarion call on what to do next will be released soon.”

Taylor also said one focus of the forum was unity of purpose, which she said was on display at the tents set up by activists.

“In the tents we have some Detroit Muslims sharing candles and prayer rugs with the Quakers,” Taylor said. “That is what the social forum is about.”

She said that kind of camaraderie is needed to fight the bigger and sometimes seemingly overwhelming issues they are facing as activists.

Mary Kramer, an organiser for the forum, said Detroit will be remembered as a gathering that birthed new ideas and reaffirmed people’s commitment to real change.

“We talked about a world court for abuses against women. You could see the enthusiasm amongst the people and for it to be in Detroit was big. We truly see another world is possible,” Kramer said.

Excerpt:

By Bankole Thompson
DETROIT, Jun 25 2010 (IPS)

As heads of state from the Group of 20 (G20) most developed and economically powerful emerging nations meet in Toronto, Canada this weekend, some activists at the U.S. Social Forum in Detroit are urging a more realistic look at the roots of the global economic crisis – and an end to the free-wheeling capitalist model embodied by Wall Street.

The USSF host city of Detroit has become a metaphor for the excesses of American capitalism. Credit: Courtesy of Sasha Y. Kimel

“The G20 has advanced the idea that its agenda is narrow and relates exclusively to economics and finance. Yet our experience with the World Trade Organisation (WTO), the IMF and World Bank has taught us that finance and economics touches every aspect of human and community endeavor and therefore determines who in the world will eat, beg, work and have access to life itself, including water, food and shelter,” Dawkins said.

“The G20 has a major democracy deficit and legitimacy crisis to overcome. Until it specifically declares and demonstrates that its intent is to advance the work of the United Nations (the G192), it, by definition, undermines the global framework of multilateralism that they have each pledged to uphold,” she said.

Dawkins has a to-do-list for the G20 leaders that she said will be a step forward to aiding marginalised nations.

“One concrete and credible action would be to adopt and integrate the Global Economic Coordinating Council, which enjoys broad support globally and strengthens the U.N.’s role,” Dawkins said. “Another concrete action would be to pledge its support for ensuring that changes the global financial architecture increase the capacity of countries to meet and achieve their Millennium Development Goals (MDGs).”

“This includes special accountability for MDG Goal 8 which speaks to finance, debt and technology transfer,” she added. “Still another would be to commit their individual countries to support a modest assessment on certain financial transactions that would raise billions to support a range healthcare, job creation and a range of other needed interventions globally.”

Nicola Bullard, senior associate with Focus on the Global South, an independent think tank based in Bangkok, Thailand, traveled from Australia to Detroit for the U.S. Social Forum.

She said the impact of the world economic crisis is being felt everywhere and that since the Asian financial crisis in 1997, there has been a push among different sectors to regulate and localise the global economy.

“It had a trickle effect in Asia,” Bullard said. “The fact is that the financial markets and the speculative economy have been completely detached from the productive where people live and work shows that Wall Street has failed.”

Bullard cited the financial meltdown in Greece, saying that it exposes the contradiction of wanting to be attractive to other developed nations and at the same time dealing with a declining tax base.

“The cost of all of this is being pushed on ordinary people who are being hit with the bill, whether it’s in Thailand, Greece or the U.S.,” Bullard said. “There is a common thread. We have to take a realistic look at the financial sector where money moves from one profit to another without any kind of conscience.”

She said the U.S. Social Forum is not a gathering of a “bunch of leftist activists” but “real life people who are living the struggles. It’s so real. We actually have to get rid of Wall Street. The era of endless growth and profit is not socially or ecologically viable.”

Ron Scott, a Detroit historian, said given the financial crisis, coming to “Motor City” for the Social Forum could not be more timely.

“What people in the U.S. are realising is that just about everything that is happening to them is tied to financial institutions and the banks’ role in the active reconstruction of urban centres through foreclosure and disinvestment policies,” Scott said. “The city (of Detroit) that once boasted the largest amount of individually owned homes has now become a metaphor for American capitalism.”

Delegates at the Social Forum, Scott said, “were essentially joining those who have contended that Detroit was a centre of the war zone on the working class. And a new industry is being created from the ground up and not from the top down.”

He said these new industries “will not be focused on making more dollars for corporate entities but building communities that have been destroyed in the last 50 years. Particularly to African Americans, public policy associated with disinvestments has now led to the desire to control this population.”

Dawkins said changes to the global economic and financial architecture must be based on accountability and effective avenues for citizens, civil society and government to effectively incorporate local issues and impacts into the regional, national and international decision-making processes that affect every aspect of life.

Excerpt:

By Bankole Thompson
DETROIT, Jun 25 2010 (IPS)

Africa’s continued struggle for political and economic independence in many ways mirrors the very own struggles of communities in the U.S. that are now being tabled at the 2010 U.S. Social Forum in Detroit.

Tanya Dawkins, an Africa advocate, is among many who attended the U.S. Social Forum's Detroit/Dakar project meeting. Credit: Bankole Thompson/IPS

The D2D project catalogues a host of issues and organisations working to change U.S. foreign policy toward Africa for the better.

Ahead of the 2011 World Social Forum to be held in the Senegalese capital of Dakar Feb. 7-11, the project is aimed at not only enhancing participation at the ongoing forum but also to promote issues related to Africa and the African Diaspora.

“What do we see as our priorities? This is meant to be a people’s movement assembly,” said Emira Woods, a noted foreign policy analyst on Africa with the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington D.C.

Woods, who is one of the leaders of D2D, challenged activists at the forum to ensure that coming out of Detroit there are clear-cut goals to spotlight the challenges facing Africa and even beyond the Dakar summit next year.

“Part of the dynamism of the social forum is coming together as a family reunion,” Woods said. “Another world is inevitable and the steps that we are taking now will do that.”

Woods reminded her fellow advocates that their children would be impacted by the decisions being made today by political leaders.

The D2D project issued a report with a list of action- oriented recommendations on issues that are most germane to present-day Africa, including Economic Justice, Africom (the U.S. military’s Africa Command), HIV/AIDS, Food and Land Security, Climate Change and Migration.

On economic justice, the report details how Africa’s massive external debt continues to burden the continent’s development and hinder the fight for human rights, health and education.

Under World Trade Organisation (WTO) rules, the report says the U.S. and other Western nations continue to pursue policies that are antithetical to Africa’s interests and perpetuate the extraction of resources from the continent without any benefit to its people.

“The International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank persist with neo-liberal economic policies prioritising profits over people’s needs. Such measures continue to increase poverty and inequality across the African continent. Consequently close to 80 percent of the population on the continent lives on under two dollars a day,” the report stated.

The global financial crisis threatens to wipe away gains made by African nations in recent decades, and has exposed the myth that deregulation and free market policies serve the masses of the people, the report said.

The Black Alliance for Just Immigration (BAJI) said while debt cancellation for Africa should be at the forefront of the foreign policy debate on Africa, advocates should not forget about communities in the U.S. that have been burdened by debt from huge financial institutions.

“We also have the similar situations here in the U.S. with mortgage loans that were forced on people without them understanding what it means,” a representative from BAJI said, adding that communities of colour hit hardest by the mortgage crisis are now paying a high price.

Concerns about the activities of Africom are also a focus of the Detroit/Dakar project.

“U.S. foreign policy and development aid is increasingly directed by the security agencies and often conducted by private military contractors that are not accountable to congressional and public oversight rather than the appropriate agencies (the Department of State and the Agency for International Development),” the report said.

Briggs Bomba, director of campaigns for Africa Action, said Africans in the diaspora have a unique opportunity to press Washington for a more just and equitable policy toward the continent.

“It is very important that we lift Africa as the place in need of our solidarity,” Bomba said. “The corporate-led globalisation project has shifted to the less developed countries. It is important that those of us who are here play a role in changing the policy.”

He called on the forum to be the “platform for the generation of alternatives” so that activists are not only seen as opposing policies but suggesting real alternatives to current policies.

What they are fighting for now, Bomba said, will help “that poor woman in the village to reclaim a life of dignity”.

On HIV/AIDS in Africa, the report indicated that the U.S. and other wealthy nations control the medications that can keep people living with HIV alive and healthy for decades.

“Yet currently less than one-third of those in need of these drugs in the global south have access to these drugs with the greatest need in Africa. As the leading killer of women in Africa, the question of whether the resources exists to provide AIDS treatment and whether corporations are able to exercise global control over the price of medicines is a human rights, gender rights and economic justice question,” the report stated.

The report called on the administration of President Barack Obama to make good on his campaign promises to increase funding for HIV/AIDS and fight corporate control of over essential medicine to treat the deadly disease. Anything less will allow “global inequity and medical apartheid” to continue, it said.

Akua Budu-Watkins, a Detroit political activist, said efforts must also be stepped up to fight HIV/AIDS in the U.S., where African American women some of the primary victims.

“The Detroit to Dakar effort represents an important opportunity to connect the dots between a flawed economic model and an ideology that has failed to deliver real development in the United States and on the African continent. Unsound and short-sighted trade policies have given rise to distorted patterns of joblessness, migration, rising inequality and devastation of entire communities all over the world,” said Tanya Dawkins, an independent analyst and director of the Global-Local Links Project.

She added, “The organisers of the Detroit to Dakar initiative have created a much needed space and an important opportunity to define and articulate a new narrative for community rights and community reparations on both sides of the Atlantic.”

Excerpt:

By Bankole Thompson
DETROIT, Jun 24 2010 (IPS)

The U.S. labour movement needs to be reorganised from the bottom up to include domestic workers, day labourers, restaurant workers, taxi drivers, farm workers, incarcerated workers, guest workers and those in the “right to work” states.

(Right to left) Felix Salvador, Mackenzie Baris, Christian Vasquez and Socorro Garcia came from Washington to highlight excluded workers' plight. Credit: Bankole Thompson/IPS

The coalition held a fierce discussion at the Social Forum about the need for reform and how workers who are not part of the federally recognised labour movement in the country are being denied decent wages and benefits.

“We need to protect all workers under labour law. I think this is a historic demand because it’s about time the public recognises that you can’t respect some workers and deny others,” said Camilo Viveiros, director of Jobs with Justice based in Rhode Island. Guided by the mantra “We need a domestic bill of rights,” labour activists say they want to break down the legislative barriers that have made it difficult for some sectors of the workforce to effectively demand equal protections.

“There are labour laws that need to be reformed for all of labour,” Viveiros said.

Last year, as part of the Inter Alliance Dialogue (IAD), representatives from the National Day Labourer Organising Network (NDLON) and the National Domestic Workers Alliance (NDWA) met with Jared Bernstein of the White House Task Force on the Middle Class. At the meeting, Bernstein showed interest in the possibility of organising a White House briefing on “excluded workers” or those excluded from the right to organise, participants said.

Engaging the administration of President Barack Obama on such an issue is key for the coalition.

Randy Jackson, president of IAD, said it is important to bring these issues to the Social Forum because different sectors of excluded workers face many common challenges.

“Labour exclusion has its roots in slavery. Therefore it is a moral, economic and racial justice obligation for us to break the chain of that history and create a framework of organising in which the right to organise is a fundamental right,” Jackson said. In 2008, representatives from six grassroots groups – the Grassroots Global Justice Alliance, Jobs with Justice, the National Day Labourer Organising Network, the National Domestic Workers Alliance, the Pushback Network and the Right to the City Alliance – came together to identify a response to the crisis of excluded workers, Jackson said.

That meeting launched IAD, he said, to ensure that their base constituencies that have been historically marginalised – communities of colour – are united for social change.

Jackson said mainstream labour organisations have either been reluctant or don’t think it is profitable to include excluded workers in their movement.

But there is some legislative action already taking place in Albany, New York where the State Senate passed a bill that would require paid holidays, sick days and vacation time for domestic workers. They will also be able to get overtime pay.

Under the legislation, a domestic worker is entitled to 14 days notice or termination pay before they can be fired.

The State Assembly passed similar legislation last year which, when signed by Gov. David Patterson, will be the first such protection for domestic workers in the U.S.

Mackenzie Baris, an organiser with Jobs with Justice in Washington DC, said, “It is really exciting to have so many different workers all talking about their concerns and struggles. This is an opportunity for the movement to come together and have greater collaboration.”

Jaribu Hill from the Mississippi Workers Centre for Human Rights said of the campaign to get recognition for excluded workers, “I think we are off to a good start. We just need more representation from workers of African descent.”

Guillermina Castellanos, who sits on the steering committee of the International Domestic Workers Network, said it is time for excluded workers to be heard.

“We have been in the shadows for a long time. We have faced sexual, verbal and all kinds of abuses,” Castellanos said. “We need to recognise that domestic work is decent work but it has never been valued since slavery.”

With an estimated 2.5 million women labouring as domestic workers in the U.S., serving as nannies, housekeepers, and caregivers for senior citizens, Castellanos said it is time for the federal government to address their concerns.

She said the goal of coming to the forum is to unite and organise to win.

“There is a lot of energy at the U.S. Social Forum,” Castellanos said. “It is important that we are here in order to end the slavery.”

A new report “Organising with Love: Lessons from the New York Domestic Workers Bill of Rights Campaign”, talks about the collaboration between excluded workers and organised labour.

In the report, John Sweeney, president of the powerful AFL- CIO trade union, speaking at a Domestic Workers United town hall meeting, revealed that his mother had been a domestic worker for more than 40 years and pledged to support a domestic workers rights bill as the son of an immigrant domestic worker.

The report credited the passing of protections for domestic workers to a Democratic administration in Albany, which is raising hopes for millions across the country that the Obama administration will answer to their 3 a.m. call for fairness and equity in the workplace.

Excerpt:

By Bankole Thompson
DETROIT, Jun 24 2010 (IPS)

The committed determination of young people in the environmental justice movement is emerging as a highlight of the 2010 U.S. Social Forum, which opened in Detroit this week with some 20,000 activists meeting in ‘Motor City’ to network and share their visions for social change.

Loreen Dangerfield, 15, is among a group of dedicated young people leading the charge against environmental injustice in San Francisco. Credit: Bankole Thompson/IPS

“Pollution Has No Borders: Black, Chinese and Latino Youth Organising for Environmental Justice in San Francisco” was the theme of the workshop that spotlighted the west coast city’s environmental issues as a national concern.

“In the Bayview district where minorities live, they are targeted the most with pollution and many of the people who live there don’t even know it,” said 18-year-old Ingried Seyundo, a youth organiser with People Organising to Demand Environmental and Economic Rights (PODER).

“Big corporations with power plants are polluting minority districts and little kids are getting sick, mostly with cancer, [while other problems include] heart attack and high blood pressure,” Seyundo said.

The situation is evocative of the notorious “cancer alley” in the U.S. South, where an 85-mile stretch of the Mississippi River between Baton Rouge and New Orleans is home to some 140 companies that produce a quarter of the petrochemical products manufactured in the United States. In 1993, a federal commission found that the industry had a disproportionate impact on the area’s minority residents.

Now, five communities in San Francisco – Bayview Hunter’s Point, Portola, Excelsior, Visitation Valley and Mission – are in the eye of another environmental battle, in large part because they are heavily populated with working-class people of colour, activists charge.

“It is important for us to educate ourselves about these environmental issues. You don’t have to be living in an unbearable condition and not raising your voice,” said 18- year-old Tiffany Ng of the Common Roots Programme of the Chinese Progressive Association of San Francisco (CPAS).

Ng said her group develops cross-cultural solidarity, deepens young people’s understanding of the social and political issues facing their community and enhances their leadership skills.

After a long fight, Ingried said the community successfully demanded truck routes through their residential neighbourhoods that featured hybrid buses and trucks with less environmental impact, instead of those with diesel fuel.

“We campaigned against trucks running in residential areas,” Ng said. “We created truck routes that now allow these trucks to drive away from places where there are lots of children, like schools, and also where the elderly live.”

Loreen Dangerfield, 15, with People Organised to Win Environmental Rights (POWER), said at issue right now is the building of condominiums on a toxic site by Lennar Corporation, a Florida-based housing redevelopment company. According to the young activists, the site is on the Hunters Point Naval shipyard where the atomic bombs to Hiroshima and Nagasaki were shipped from.

“The shipyard itself is toxic and it’s a landfill,” Dangerfield said. “In Miami, Lennar built houses on top of undetonated bombs and people started getting sick.”

Lennar wants to build 8,500 homes, including some high-rise towers. The plans feature 300 acres of open space, 80,000 square feet of retail and 150,000 square feet of office space.

But first the youth organisers are demanding an independent environmental impact report – one they say is not manipulated to suit the interests of the developers but fully addresses the health risks associated with building on toxic sites.

“We don’t want Lennar to build the condominiums. They bought the shipyard – 700 acres – for a dollar,” Dangerfield said.

Lennar has been digging into asbestos-rich serpentine rock, the young people said, sending up plumes of carcinogenic dust near residential areas and schools.

Ingreid said the Bay Area Quality Management District has been under pressure to monitor Lennar. BAAQMD voted to fine the firm for not properly monitoring toxicity levels emerging from its massive construction of the condominiums.

California law requires the redevelopment company to monitor toxins and inform residents when asbestos reaches a dangerous level, but community members were kept in the dark, according to the youth activists.

Teresa Almaguer, youth programme coordinator for PODER, said it was important to share the environmental justice concerns of San Francisco’s poor neighbourhoods with other activists at the U.S. Social Forum.

“What is taking place in San Francisco is happening all over the world. Environmental racism is institutionalised,” Almaguer said. “It’s decisions being made all over by planning departments in cities across the nation. We want to stress the importance of building because we are all equally getting sick.”

Almaguer said working class families are being displaced by gentrification in San Francisco because they would never be able to afford the cost of condominiums in addition to the environmental threats arising from such developments.

“As we are fighting to create safe and healthy neighbourhoods, we are being displaced. This is a global issue,” Almaguer said. “We also want to bring attention to Lennar. We need to struggle and work together because we can accomplish big things.”

Even though not all members of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors are supporting their push, Almaguer said they are holding elected officials accountable by issuing a report card on their environmental stance.

Sandar Sebastian from New York who is attending the weeklong forum in Detroit told IPS she was impressed to observe the energy and knowledge the San Francisco youth showed at the workshop to educate their fellow young people from all around the country.

“I think it is really powerful to find young people who are so engaged with this kind of analysis of environmental justice and linking environmental racism to the impact on their daily lives,” Sebastian said.

She added that their struggle amplifies how “racist policies threaten the daily lives of people in low-income communities”.

Excerpt:

By Bankole Thompson and Mitch Moxley
DETROIT/BEIJING , Jun 20 2010 (IPS)

As thousands of people from around the world prepare to converge in Detroit, where expectations are high for the Jun. 22-26 U.S. Social Forum, activists and auto workers hope the meet will be an opportunity to chart a sustainable future for an industry that provides 1.7 million U.S. jobs.

Assembly line at Hyundai Motor Company's car factory in Ulsan, South Korea, which ranks fourth largest in the world in car production. Credit: Taneli Rajala/creative commons

According to the Centre for Automotive Research (CAR), in 2007, for the first time in history, international firms like Toyota, Honda and Hyundai sold about half of the cars bought in the U.S. By the end of 2009, the U.S. carmakers’ share had fallen further, to an estimated 42 percent.

Many critics of the Big Three say their own design failures and disinterest in fuel efficiency are at least partly to blame – in 2006, for example, Consumer Reports declared that all 10 of the cars that it considered to be the 10 best were built by Japanese companies.

One result has been a hemorrhaging of U.S. auto industry jobs – between 1993 and 2008, the state of Michigan (home to the city of Detroit) lost 83,000 auto manufacturing jobs. By 2008, the entire U.S. car industry was operating at less than 50 percent capacity, according to CAR figures.

“Worldwide, new markets are emerging and the U.S. will remain stagnant, unstable because wealth and income continues to shift from working people to the rich. Oil supplies and prices will remain a wild card too,” Frank Joyce, who served as spokesperson for the United Auto Workers (UAW) union, told IPS.

“The benchmarks on quality, production systems, design and marketing are now quite comparable across the globe,” Joyce said. “Even the gap in labour costs is narrowing as U.S. auto wages are driven down and wages in China and elsewhere are moving up.”

Labour activists say they are looking at the big picture and considering the kinds of policies that fit with the current highly globalised economy, which is vastly different from the industrial economy that once improved living standards for U.S. workers and helped to stabilise families.

Richard Feldman, a UAW member and participant in the upcoming U.S. Social Forum, said the struggles faced by automotive workers in the U.S. are similar to what workers in Asia are going through despite the seeming growth of the Asian automotive market.

“Toyota closed their only union represented facility in the U.S. and we now need to deepen our commitment to organise the Asian and European multinational corporations in the South,” Feldman said. “I don’t think it is about losing to Asia but recognising we need to create new concepts of transportation that respect the limits of planetary resources and where workers and communities are respected and given a voice at the table.”

Indeed, a wave of unrest at foreign-owned factories in China is now showing signs of spreading into the poorer interior regions.

The disputes are a black eye for China’s Communist Party, which has long sought to discourage worker activism and has dealt out harsh punishments to protestors. The unrest has not been reported widely in local media.

Honda Motor Company, for instance, has struggled with several labour disputes at four China factories. A spate of worker suicides has hounded other firms.

There have been 12 suicide attempts since January at two sprawling Foxconn campuses in Shenzhen. The factories, which employ about 400,000, produce products for companies including Apple, Dell and Hewlett-Packard.

In response to the unrest, Beijing has promised higher wages for workers and farmers, even as local officials continue to attract investors with promises of cheap labour. Foxconn raised salaries by 66 percent and Honda by at least 20 percent.

Following the disputes at Honda and Foxconn, strikes were also reported at other foreign run factories far from the wealthier Pearl River Delta region, including the factory of a Taiwanese-owned sports goods supplier in Jiangxi province and at Brother Industries, a Japanese sewing machine maker in Xian. The disputes focus on low pay and high living costs, long hours with little to no rest, and employers trying to rein in costs.

Experts say the unrest is reflective of a new generation of workers who are unable or unwilling to handle the conditions their predecessors faced.

“The majority of migrant workers now are young people born in the late 1980s and early 1990s. They went to school but lacked enough schooling. They want a decent salary and life in cities. If they feel treated unfairly, they will stand up and fight against it,” says Xiao Qingshan, a labour activist based in Guangdong.

Zhou Xiaozhen, a sociology professor at Renmin University in Beijing, says the recent unrest occurred in part because the factories belonged to foreign owned companies, adding that labour protests would have been halted quickly at state- owned enterprises. But he also attributed the disputes to poor working conditions and bad management. He adds that the ban on labour unions makes it difficult for workers to improve their work conditions.

“China’s workers are at a disadvantaged position, and they can’t unite together. Employers can do whatever they want, which makes suicides and labour unrest break out,” Zhou says.

Building alliances among workers around the world is one of the goals of the second U.S. Social Forum, a spin-off of the World Social Forum movement.

Joyce said the week-long gathering in Detroit will help forge a strong democratic response to propel a new wave of social and economic justice and progress, because the automakers need to be “more green, far more oriented toward mass transit and more economically fair to workers”.

Feldman added that while technology and outsourcing has been an issue for the U.S. auto industry – 16 percent of North American vehicle production is currently in Mexico and expected to grow to 20 percent in coming years – the challenge now is to create a local sustainable economy with green transportation.

“Work is a human right,” Feldman said. “A new American dream is being created… to increase our standard of living to create a new quality of life where we live more simply.”

*Mitch Moxley reported from Beijing.

Excerpt:

By Bankole Thompson
DETROIT, Michigan, Aug 26 2009 (IPS)

The message machine of the Barack Obama administration appears to need oiling, as the U.S. president's push for a Sep. 15 deadline for a bipartisan deal on healthcare reform in the U.S. Congress continues to meet stiff resistance.

The debate is playing out like the "battle of Armageddon" between forces who want serious changes in the healthcare system to cover an estimated 47 million U.S. citizens without health insurance, and those with vested interests in preserving the status quo.

According to an analysis by Plunkett Research Ltd, total U.S. healthcare expenditures will increase from 2.39 trillion dollars in 2008 to 2.72 trillion dollars in 2010, with annual increases averaging about 7 percent.

More than a fifth of all federal government spending in 2007 was poured into the Medicaid and Medicare programmes – the first for very low-income people and the second for senior citizens.

The firm noted that health expenditures in the U.S., representing about 16.5 percent of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) in 2008, will grow to 19.6 percent by 2016 "unless drastic reforms take place".

By contrast, the average of 33 OECD nations – including the U.S., – was 8.9 percent of GDP spent on healthcare.

"Healthcare spending in America accounts for a larger share of GDP than in any other major industrialised country," the analysis said.

Last year, President Obama campaigned on a mantra to alter the way Washington does business as usual.

At rallies across the country, the Democratic nominee repeatedly gave the example of his own mother whom he watched battle with insurance companies while dying of cancer in a hospital bed.

Obama related his mother's experience with the insurance industry to underscore the urgency of the issue and to convince voters that he is personally familiar with their pain.

As the battle for a meaningful overhaul of the healthcare system rages in towns and cities across the country, many who supported the Democratic Party want Obama to stick to his campaign mantra of a public option healthcare plan.

The "public option" plan would create an affordable government-run insurance programme similar to Medicare through a health exchange where everyone can buy insurance – private or public – based on their medical needs.

The Republican Party and its right-wing defenders contend that such a plan would drive insurance companies out of business and that employers may be induced to drop private insurance already in place for the "public option" plan.

Supporters argue the competition would force insurance companies to drop their exorbitant rates.

According to the AFL-CIO, pharmaceutical company CEOs average 4.36 million dollars a year in compensation. For health insurance companies, it's 8.75 million dollars a year.

The labour union cited one insurance company CEO, Aetna's Ronald Williams, who takes home more than 32 million dollars a year.

Meanwhile, an estimated 47 million people have no health insurance, including 8.7 million children. The AFL-CIO predicts that by 2013, 56 million will be without health insurance.

In Detroit, where the unemployment rate in June rose to 17 percent – the highest rate among major U.S. cities – and bankruptcy filings are on the rise, some due to exorbitant medical fees, most people don't want the president to waver on the public option.

"It's the most important thing to me after my salary," said Janie Jones, a recent University of Michigan-Dearborn graduate. "That would determine which job I would take depending on the level of benefit."

"I think we should have a public option because it keeps the healthcare industry competitive and it would keep prices down," she said. "Everybody out here needs healthcare because it determines your quality of life."

The president's supporters insist he has the political capital to push his plan through. But it remains unclear how effective the White House message machine is in rallying the troops when Republicans and their conservative allies appear to be shaping the debate.

Last year, in the middle of the heated presidential campaign, Obama had a conference call with reporters during which he said his healthcare plan would cost 65 billion dollars and would be paid for by rolling back the tax cuts of President George W. Bush.

"We would be able to pay for our healthcare plan as well as eliminate programmes like the Medicare Advantage programme – which basically is just a subsidy of the insurance companies under the Medicare plan," Obama said.

"It was pushed through by George Bush and it hasn't saved any money or improved quality of care. So we're going to change that," candidate Obama said at the time.

In presenting himself as an agent of change who is coming to Washington to take on the lobbyists and their status quo friends, voters gave Obama an overwhelming mandate and bestowed the kind of confidence in him no other president has recently enjoyed.

On Nov. 4, 2008, voters responded to Obama's message of change, giving him 364 electoral college votes to Republican nominee John McCain's 162.

There is a sea of difference between those who want change, including revamping the healthcare system, and those who want things to remain the same.

Some observers are therefore baffled that the White House and the Democrats in Congress have not been able to channel the momentum that manifested on Election Day.

Instead, their opponents seem to be winning the public relations battle, aided by polls that suggest that the president is losing ground on the healthcare debate because supposedly most people now want the healthcare system to remain the same.

However, the media has given little or no information about the demographics of the polls being conducted, and whether respondents include the estimated one in three citizens who lacked health insurance at some point in 2007-08.

Added to this political conundrum is an estimated 25 million so-called "underinsured" in this country – those who have limited health insurance, but cannot afford their high medical bills.

Again there is little information in the media about whether these people are being polled as well.

Today's debate recalls the 1990s, when then first lady Hillary Clinton championed a similar overhaul during her husband's tenure.

But the difference is that Hillary Clinton was not elected. She did not have the institutional power of the Oval Office that Obama has as an elected president.

The success of this reform will presage things to come for the Obama administration in seeking any other major changes within the body politic.

Not surprisingly, there has been a strong pushback from the insurance industry because of the competition a public option would create. Yet competition in the marketplace is the thrust of free market enterprise.

Obama said, "If you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor. If you like your private health insurance plan, you can keep your plan."

*Bankole Thompson is a noted journalist, public lecturer and host of "Center Stage with Bankole Thompson" a weekly public affairs show airing on WADL TV 38 in Michigan and reaching over two million households in Detroit and Canada.

Excerpt:

By Bankole Thompson
DETROIT, Michigan, Dec 23 2008 (IPS)

After debating whether it was wise for the Republican administration to let the U.S. automotive industry collapse under its watch, Pres. George W. Bush, who leaves office next January with a battered legacy marked by an unpopular war in Iraq that has consumed billions of tax dollars and an economic meltdown at home, finally came to the aid of General Motors and Chrysler with a 17.4-billion-dollar rescue package.

The Centre for Automotive Research (CAR) issued a report in the midst of the Congressional debate on the auto bailout about how serious it could be if the government allows GM, Chrysler and Ford to fail or go bankrupt.

“Our model estimates that a complete shutdown of Detroit Three U.S. production would have a major impact on the U.S. economy in terms of lost wages, reductions in social security receipts, personal income taxes paid, and an increase in transfer payments,” said Sean McAlinden, CAR’s chief economist who directed the study.

“The government stands to lose 60 billion dollars in the first year alone, and the three-year total is well over 156 billion,” he said.

Bush stepped in with an aid plan for the cash-strapped carmakers Dec. 19, marking the end of an anxious week for the industry. He said that 13.4 billion dollars will be disbursed this month to GM and Chrysler.

But the aid package aimed at stabilising the operations of the auto industry, keeping the lights on and paying its workers for the next three months came with some heavy strings attached.

Evidently playing to the gallery of Republican members of Congress who wanted the United Auto Workers (UAW) contract with the carmakers reopened for negotiations, Bush said one of the conditions for the bridge loans would be a more competitive labour contract between the UAW and the carmakers.

For the UAW, that would mean more wage cuts in a hard-pressed economy, on top of the existing concessions it members have made in the last three years.

“The time to make hard decisions to become viable is now, or the only option will be bankruptcy,” Bush said. “The automakers and unions must understand what is at stake and make hard decisions necessary to reform.”

UAW President Ron Gettelfinger dismissed the president’s call for union concessions, saying it would ask the incoming administration of President-elect Barack Obama to remove any onerous conditions.

“We are disappointed that President Bush has added unfair conditions singling out workers,” Gettelfinger said. “We will work with the Obama administration and the new Congress to ensure that these unfair conditions are removed, as we join the coming months with all stakeholders to create a viable future for the U.S. auto industry.”

Gettelfinger said it doesn’t make sense for the federal government to keep asking union workers to sacrifice.

U.S. Senator Debbie Stabenow, a Democrat of Michigan whose 2000 Senate campaign was run by Obama’s new press secretary Robert Gibbs, told reporters in a conference call that she will ensure that unions are not required to take another pay cut in the loan.

“That part of it I don’t believe is fair and I will be asking our new president to have flexibility and make changes in those provisions,” Stabenow said. “To single our workers with very specific short-term targets I think is the one disappointing part of this.”

Congressman John Dingell, another lawmaker from Michigan, called Bush’s push for wage cuts “irresponsible”.

“We all want to see the Big Three restructure and be competitive in the future, but it is irresponsible during a time of economic crisis for the White House to insist that workers take further wage cuts on top of the historic concessions they have already made,” Dingell said.

“No one is asking corporate executives to reduce their salaries to levels similar to that of their Japanese counterparts, and no one required the employees of Citibank or AIG to take a pay cut. I strongly urge President-elect Obama to revisit this issue as his first priority upon being sworn in, and to ensure that assistance to the automakers is provided in a way that is fair to working Americans.”

Obama, who ran as a labour candidate, said in his first post-election interview on CBS’s 60 Minutes programme that he supports assistance for the auto industry that has built-in protections for labour and suppliers as well.

Responding to Bush’s aid package, Canada also said it will provide the Canadian subsidiaries of the Detroit automakers with 2.7 billion dollars in emergency loans.

Canada’s Prime Minister Stephen Harper said his country’s bailout plan, the equivalent of 20 percent of the U.S. aid plan, will help keep Canadian Auto Workers (CAW) on their jobs while the automakers restructure their companies to retain a valued sector in Canada’s economy.

“We cannot afford, in the United States or Canada, the catastrophic short-term collapse of the Big Three automakers,” Harper said. “The U.S. has signaled that they are not going to allow these companies to fail, and we will do our share of the North American package to see that this doesn’t happen either.”

About 400,000 auto workers are based in Ontario and the auto industry has been rated as the lifeline for a dozen communities in the Ontario area.

What happens with Detroit’s car makers could have ripple effects on thousands of lives in Ontario, Canadian officials said in making the case for their counterpart rescue package. GM and Chrysler CEOs Rick Wagoner and Robert Nardelli both indicated they will have a plan ready for their Mar. 31 deadline.

Obama urged the executives to go to work and make the industry profitable, reminding them that taxpayers are running out of patience to save failed companies. He said his first priority is to create over two million jobs and he wants some of those to be in the auto industry.

Excerpt:

By Bankole Thompson
DETROIT, Michigan, Dec 2 2008 (IPS)

For the last six years, Ron Gettelfinger has been president of the 640,000-member United Auto Workers (UAW), the union that has been the face of the working men and women manufacturing cars in U.S. factories for decades.

UAW President Ron Gettelfinger Credit: Bankole Thompson/IPS

As auto executives from General Motors, Chrysler and Ford make another pitch to Congress this week for a 25-billion-dollar loan, Gettelfinger, who was on Capitol Hill last week testifying before Congress, tells IPS correspondent Bankole Thompson that refusal of a loan could spell devastating consequences for the U.S. economy and millions of families who will lose their incomes.

IPS: What do you make of some members of Congress seeking to reopen the labour agreements in auto bailout plan? RG: Well, first of all it’s a bridge loan. It’s not a bailout. The second thing is I’m sure that there are some members of Congress – the anti-union group – that would like to see the agreement opened. But the thing that they are not giving consideration to is the fact that in the mid-term contract in 2005 and then in 2007, the union – the men and women of the UAW – stood up and made significant changes in our contract.

And those are ongoing changes. It’s not like the companies receive the benefit of everything and then walked away and the agreements stayed in place. And as a result of the changes, it put the companies in a position where they are very competitive with the foreign brands that operate in this country.

IPS: Do you agree that the Big Three executives failed to make a compelling case before Congress? RG: I think first of all if you look at the hearing, everybody – including myself – went there not knowing what the expectation was. We are each given a total of five minutes to make a statement and then members of the Senate Banking Committee as well as the House Finance Committee were able to then ask questions.

Like in the case of the House, each member that wanted to ask a question had five minutes. But if they used four minutes of that time and then asked a question, all you could do is answer it and there isn’t a lot of time. So it’s not like anybody was asked to make a case other than to say that there is a critical need for us to get this bridge loan – that’s not brought about by the UAW, not brought about because of the [auto] industry, it’s brought about because of the economic downturn.

If you look at the vehicles sales in this country, we went from 16 to 17 million vehicles sales down to a seasonal rate during the month of October at 10.8 million. That’s dramatic and it came about because consumers cannot get reasonable rates on loans. It came about because of the sub-prime mortgage issues. It came about because of Wall Street, the failure of the banks. It came about because of volatility in the stock market, the energy prices, the lack of consumer confidence.

The fact is that since December of last year, we lost 1.2 million jobs in this country, most of which were in the private sector. And if you go to the month of October alone, it was 42,000. So there are other factors here other than just saying that the industry didn’t make the case.

IPS: Labour has always been the base of the Democratic Party. President-elect Barack Obama ran as a labour candidate. Do you expect a return on investment in this bailout talk? RG: I don’t think this is a political issue. This is about America. The economy is in the tank. Barack Obama is going to have the worst job of anybody in America. The expectations are very high for his ability to turn things around. I think he’s got a grasp of what’s going on, he’s going to hit the ground running. And I think we’ll see some really immediate impact about what he is doing.

But the fact that we [supported his candidacy] doesn’t mean we should get any special treatment than anyone else. And again this is a problem about millions of Americans. This will impact our nation as a whole. We are losing the middle class. I hope that Obama can do something about this. He indicated he’s aware of what these free trade agreements are doing to our country.

IPS: What is your take on fuel efficiency and clean energy? RG: Well, you know we are there and we are working hard in that regard. I know what the industry has done because I’m privileged to go around to their product development centres. I was privileged to go to Chrysler along with vice president General Holiefield in July and we drove the electric vehicles around the test track out there well before they introduced them to the media.

General Motors has got more vehicles on the road today that get over 30 miles to the gallon than any other manufacturer. They’ve got the two mode hybrid – the Tahoe. It does better. It got green car of the year award. It does better in the city on EPA, the mileage, than the I4 Toyota Camry. So here’s a big Tahoe and here’s a small Toyota Camry and in the city this vehicle [Tahoe] gets there. Ford has got the first hybrid out there in the SUV market – they are continuing to make improvements on it.

IPS: Critics say labour leaders are disconnected from their members for failing to answer to issues facing their members in the workplace. What is your reaction? RG: Well, first of all, some of that is probably warranted. But I think for the most part our polling doesn’t show that. Our polling doesn’t show that we are disconnected. You know we have a very democratic union. We have our regional directors, our board members who are regional directors spread out across the country in 11 different regions. We got our officers and we interface with the leadership more than we do with the average member. But our officers get out. We work the lines. We go to rallies. If we ask people to work the phone banks, we work the phone banks. And look, I come in contact with a lot of our members just getting around in the community because our members are a slice of society.

Excerpt:

By Bankole Thompson
DETROIT, Michigan, Nov 20 2008 (IPS)

The vote on a 25-billion-dollar loan for cash-strapped General Motors, Chrysler and Ford Motor Company – known as the “Big Three” U.S. automakers – has been put on hold by the Senate, after Congressional leaders chastised industry executives for failing to heed early warnings of crisis and for flying to Capitol Hill on private jets to beg for tax dollars.

Union leader George McGregor warns that the collapse of the automotive industry would devastate millions of workers and thousands of retirees. Credit: Bankole Thompson/IPS

President-elect Barack Obama said in his first post-election interview on CBS’s 60 Minutes programme that he supports an assistance package for the auto industry – but one that has built-in protections for workers and suppliers, among other things.

“Our model estimates that a complete shutdown of the Detroit Three U.S. production would have a major impact on the U.S. economy in terms of lost wages, reductions in social security receipts, personal income taxes paid, and an increase in transfer payments,” said Sean McAlinden, CAR’s chief economist, who directed the study.

“The government stands to lose 60 billion dollars in the first year alone, and the three-year total is well over 156 billion dollars,” he said.

Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, a former chief executive officer at Goldman Sachs who strongly advocated – initially with no strings attached – for a taxpayer bailout of Wall Street companies like insurance giant American International Group (AIG), is now vehemently opposed to a loan for the automotive industry that comes from the 700 billion dollars approved for Wall Street, a move also supported by the White House.

“Our industry needs a bridge to span the financial chasm that has opened up before us,” GM CEO Rick Wagoner urged the Senate Banking Committee this week.

In May 2007, in the early stages of his presidential run, Obama criticised the Big Three and said they should invest in clean energy and alternative fuel vehicles that would reduce dependence on foreign oil, in a speech before the influential Detroit Economic Club.

“For years, while foreign competitors were investing in more fuel-efficient technology for their vehicles, American automakers were spending their time investing in bigger, faster cars. And whenever an attempt was made to raise our fuel efficiency standards, the auto companies would lobby furiously against it, spending millions to prevent the very reform that could’ve saved their industry,” Obama said in his DEC speech. “Even as they’ve shed thousands of jobs and billions in profits over the last few years, they’ve continued to reward failure with lucrative bonuses for CEOs.”

He added, “The consequences of these choices are now clear. While our fuel standards haven’t moved from 27.5 miles per gallon in two decades, both China and Japan have surpassed us, with Japanese cars now getting an average of 45 miles to the gallon. And as the global demand for fuel-efficient and hybrid cars have skyrocketed, it’s foreign competitors who are filling the orders. Just the other week, we learned that for the first time since 1931, Toyota has surpassed General Motors as the world’s best-selling automaker.”

Since Obama’s speech, there has been a growing consensus that the auto industry must tackle its own issues of competing globally and any possible loan now is being predicated on the assurance that the industry would change its business model.

George L. McGregor, president of United Auto Workers Local 22 in Detroit, whose members at the Hamtramck/Detroit GM plant manufacture the Cadillac DTS, told IPS in an interview that those opposed to the bailout need to look beneath the surface.

He said Congress should consider the devastating impact a bankrupt automotive industry could have on millions of workers and thousands of retirees whose healthcare continues to be provided by the automotive industry through the payment of monthly premiums.

McGregor, whose work at GM has spanned four decades starting in 1968, when he first joined the automotive company at age 20 after returning from the Vietnam War, questioned the wisdom of denying the carmakers a 25-billion-dollar loan that would protect millions of families from going homeless and hungry – while taxpayers are being made to finance the war in Iraq at the tune of 10 billion dollars a month.

“I can’t understand how we can spend 10 billion dollars a month in Iraq and yet we can’t find money to save American jobs in the auto industry,” McGregor said. “The money we are spending in Iraq, we are not getting it back. But we are willing to spend that much in Iraq where people are dying and still would not loan the auto industry money that they will pay back. The people running this country are absolutely backward.”

He said auto workers are beginning to feel the pinch of the crisis within the industry.

For example, union shops are laying off staff members and forcing essential positions to a part-time basis. Other necessary amenities, such as toll-free numbers for retirees and those who are not mobile to call in and discuss their monthly health benefits with union stewards, are being eliminated, he said.

“This same Congress voted for the war in Iraq, gave AIG a bailout and no one is saying anything about it,” McGregor said. “I am not saying GM did not make its own mistakes, but let’s face it, if they don’t give the loan there will be a ripple effect for retail stores where most of our workers shop.”

A source familiar with the negotiations in Washington said part of the delay is that the Republicans are exploiting the crisis to break down the UAW by tailoring the bailout to allow for a renegotiation of the labour agreement with all three carmakers.

“They [The Republicans] don’t want the unions to exist. The last union contract we had was competitive. That’s the other piece in this difficult negotiation,” an official said.

UAW President Ron Gettlefinger who was also before Congress alongside GM’s Rick Wagoner, Chrysler’s Robert Nardelli and Ford’s Alan Mulally, addressed the issue of wages and benefits in his testimony.

“Because the recent contracts negotiated by the UAW are now competitive with the rest of the auto industry in the U.S., we do not believe there is any justification for conditioning assistance to the Detroit-based auto companies on further deep cuts in wages and benefits for active and retired workers,” Gettlefinger said.

“We would also note that in cases where the Treasury Department has acted to rescue financial institutions, it has only imposed restrictions on executive compensation. It has never mandated cuts in wages or benefits for rank and file workers and retirees,” he added.

Marcus Amick, a national automotive industry analyst, said a bailout must come with strings attached.

“Any bailout plan needs some serious stipulations,” Amick said. “At this point it’s imperative for their survival and the economy on a whole that they get help from the federal government. Just the thought of a company like GM or Ford having to shut its doors is scary considering how many companies and people depend on them for work.”

Excerpt:

By Bankole Thompson
DETROIT, Michigan, Nov 10 2008 (IPS)

Last Tuesday’s ascension of Democratic Sen. Barack Obama to the presidency of the United States – the first African American in history to command the White House – sent a shock wave around the world that a political change of such magnitude could happen in a nation often traumatised by racism.

Jubilant Obama supporters in downtown Detroit. Credit: Bankole Thompson/IPS

The son of a black man from the East African nation of Kenya and a white woman from Kansas, Obama’s massive defeat of Republican Sen. John McCain – capturing 364 electoral votes to McCain’s 162 – is being viewed in the context of King’s didactic “I Have a Dream” speech delivered 40 years ago.

“It’s a really important watershed and a climatic moment which shows that change has come,” said former King top aide Dr. Bernard LaFayette Jr. in a phone interview with IPS from Bethlehem in the West Bank. “It was already in the hearts of people that the election of Barack Obama brought out the best in people. It was not unrelated to the difficult campaign and battle we had in the 1960s.”

LaFayette, who leads the Centre for Non-Violence and Peace Studies at the University of Rhode Island, was a member of King’s executive staff and served as the national coordinator of the 1968 Poor People’s Campaign with King.

“People said everything they could to discredit and try to convince the American people that he [Obama] was not the best and they even went to say he was dangerous and tried to associate him with terrorists,” LaFayette said. “What was ironic was that here was a U.S. senator voted by the people of Illinois to represent them and was [later] chosen by the Democratic Party as their candidate and they tried to say he was not American.”

King, he said, was also accused of many of the things Obama was accused of.

“King was accused of being a communist when he was a Baptist preacher. They said he knew nothing about foreign affairs when he took a stance against the war in Vietnam,” LaFayette said. “Even some black ministers and their groups, like the National Baptist Convention, did not accept King because they were against his integration message.”

The trials Obama went through were a real test of his character, LaFayette said. “Most people did not read his book. What they saw was his character more than his colour and how he responded to the false accusations.”

In Detroit, where King first delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech at Cobo Hall before the March on Washington, 26-year-old Eddie Connor, host of the Youth on the March show on 1500AM radio, called Tuesday’s victory a “historical marriage between the philosophies of Dr. King and president-elect Obama.”

“He’s [Obama] been able to do what King had done where in some cases he moved beyond race to relationships, bringing young people together despite their race,” Connar said. “I truly believe that president-elect Obama has reenergised the focus and fire of the young people in America.”

In January, during the fight for the Democratic nomination, Obama began to address race in the campaign at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, where King and his father once preached.

“Every day, our politics fuels and exploits this kind of division across all races and regions; across gender and party. None of our hands are clean,” Obama said. “We can no longer afford to build ourselves up by tearing someone else down. We can no longer afford to traffic in lies or fear or hate. It is the poison that we must purge from our politics; the wall that we must tear down before the hour grows too late.”

Robert Johnson, an Atlanta resident, said the implication of the U.S. presidential election results goes beyond its symbolic nature.

“It shows that people who are disenfranchised and working families can find their way into the ‘American Dream’. That is why this election has generated so much excitement than any election I have seen,” Johnson said. “Atlanta’s exuberance, level of joy among people of all races and persuasions has been so vividly expressed and you could see it in the streets.”

But LaFayette maintained that it should not be lost in the celebration that the United States voted for a man who had character.

“Although his skin was black people did not come out and say, ‘we want a black president’. What they said was ‘we want someone who will help get us out of this problem’,” LaFayette said. “Obama’s colour became dwarfed. They saw the colour of his heart and someone they could trust.”

The civil rights deputy said he had not believed he’d be alive to see a black person elected president of the world’s leading superpower.

“I have been surprised in my lifetime to see people who were elected president in this country, like the Bushes. We made great progress with John F. Kennedy and even Jimmy Cater,” LaFayette said. “But we had great setbacks and I was disappointed and pessimistic.”

Excerpt:

By Desmond Tutu and Bankole Thompson
DETROIT, Michigan, Oct 30 2008 (IPS)

Archbishop Desmond Tutu is South Africa's first black Anglican bishop. An elder statesman whose moral voice and advocacy against the racist apartheid regime in South Africa first brought him to the world stage in the 1980s, Tutu received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1984.

Archbishop Desmond Tutu Credit: Bankole Thompson/IPS

IPS correspondent Bankole Thompson had a one-on-one interview with the man Nelson Mandela trusted with the Truth and Reconciliation Commission to bring racial healing to South Africa. Tutu was in Michigan Wednesday to receive the University of Michigan's Wallenberg Medal in Ann Arbor for his humanitarian work.

Tutu told IPS that the current global financial crisis shows something is wrong with the "free market" system and called for a review of the fundamentals of capitalism. He said African governments should form cartels to protect their institutions if Western nations are protecting their own financial companies, lamented that Africa's political and religious leadership failed Zimbabweans, and hailed the prospect of a Barack Obama presidency in the U.S.

IPS: How do you think the global financial crisis will affect the Millennium Development Goals of the U.N.? DT: Of course, if there is no money from the rich countries then it is going to be very difficult for the developing countries to reach those goals. But I would hope people would look more carefully at the international economic system, because that is in many ways at the bottom of this. Or you could say they have to look at the fundamental principles of capitalism, because I think capitalism tends to encourage some of the less noble aspects of our characters.

IPS: Western nations are fighting the financial crisis through governments and central bank interventions. But in Africa, the European Union keeps prescribing more trade liberalisation and less government intervention. Is there a willingness on the part of African governments to resist such policies? DT: We are meant to live in a community of interdependence. If we continue to treat others as outsiders – and as you see, when they are outsiders, they will tend to get the thin end of the stick – then we will be in trouble. I hope that although we will be speaking from a position of weakness, we should be saying, 'No, we want a fundamental revamp of the economic system."

Because they say 'liberalise, don't put up trade barriers.' But what do they do? In the European Union they have all of these massive agricultural subsidies where they pay two dollars a day for every cow. There are people in the world, millions of people who live on less than that, and they say nothing of their kind of regulation that puts barriers, that makes it difficult for the goods from developing countries to compete fairly in their markets. But now I think they are going to be finding it [uneasy] to say central governments must not intervene. They've intervened massively and they've said they have 'free enterprise'. I don't know how 'free' enterprise really is.

IPS: The Economic Partnership Agreements (EPA) being negotiated between Africa and Europe are largely viewed as undermining Africa's potential for growth and development. Does Africa have a responsibility to put in place safeguards when it enters such international agreements? DT: I think they have now a far better possibility of doing that. We have to admit that to some extent we are to blame in the sense that we have allowed people [to lead] who were engaging in massive corruption, people who were looking out for themselves and were not servants of the people. Look at what happened to Zaire [now the Democratic Republic of Congo], for instance, a very rich country but we know that a lot of its wealth was stashed in Swiss bank accounts and things of that kind. And so we've also got to say to our leaders 'you are going to be accountable to your people and you are not going to use the positions that you have for self enrichment, for self aggrandisement, you are there for the sake of the people.'

IPS: African governments have been criticised for not taking a hard stance against Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe. The political settlement there is very fragile. What do you suggest? DT: I said right at the beginning that the way we were behaving as leaders made me want to hang my head in shame. And I was speaking not just of the political leaders, because I thought that religious leaders and others needed to point out that we can't look on and see so many of our people suffering so grievously just in order to retain in power someone who certainly had an outstanding record as a liberation fighter and for maybe the first 10 years of freedom in Zimbabwe under oath, when we don't think about the massacres. He had helped to make Zimbabwe a bread basket and now it's awful when you think of what happened. I would hope that they would become more vocal.

IPS: On the eve of African independence, most companies created by African leaders were sold to multinational corporations. With the current financial crisis, Western nations are protecting their own companies. French President Nicolas Sarkozy told the European Parliament last week to create sovereign wealth funds to protect their companies from foreign "predators". What is Africa's lesson? DT: Well I hope that our leaders will have learned and that they ought to form…maybe cartels. Let them join forces and say 'we refuse to be pushed around any longer'. Many of our countries still have the resources that the developed world requires. And we ought to be able to say 'look, we want to have a fairer deal than we have had up to now'.

IPS: What are the implications for Africa for a Barack Obama presidency? DT: I just want to say I pray that the American voters do the right thing. It is going to be, I believe, a fantastic thing for people of colour around the world. But when you saw how he was received in Germany you realise that it is not just for people of colour, it is going to be a new epoch. A new era will dawn when Obama enters the White House.

People sometimes speak about anti-Americanism abroad. There is not in my experience any anti-Americanism. There certainly is resentment in most parts of the world [toward] an arrogant unilateral America that is seen as a big bully boy refusing to sign Kyoto Protocols when the rest of the world is saying climate change is a very real threat to the continuous existence of human kind – when most of the world signed their own statutes establishing the International Criminal Court and the United States says we'll jump in the lake, and goes and does what many people have said should not happen – the invasion of Iraq – which has become such a horrendous disaster.

And one hopes that the new administration would be one that would say 'we will rid America of the awful mark of Guantanamo Bay, that we will not be a country that makes it possible for things like Abu Ghraib to happen.'

IPS: South Africa has been in the news a lot lately and you've been very critical of former president Thabo Mbeki. What do you expect out of the new transition? DT: One of the remarkable things has been the fact that change happened with no bloodshed or whatever. It is quite unusual for a president in our part of the world, whose term has not ended, to step down as Thabo Mbeki did. [Normally] they invoke the military and there is usually a great deal of bloodshed. So the transition has taken place.

But I have to say that our new president is an attractive person. He is a modest man, personable and some of the changes that they have made are very important as in the health ministry – that we should get a new health minister who talks sense about AIDS and so on. There are many pluses. The concern about the transition is obviously with regard to Jacob Zuma. We don't know whether the national prosecuting authority will again indict him and that could cause some turmoil.

IPS: After the African National Congress (ANC) rose to the pinnacle of power, some argue that there has been a steady yearning by South Africa's poor black majority to achieve economic equality. But the problem, critics say, is that the ANC leadership is disconnected from the grassroots. What do you think? DT: A very disturbing thing has been the gap between the rich and the poor widening. And I have said that people are going to be resentful and say 'where is this peace dividend?' If you go to South Africa one of the first things that strikes you – when you are flying to Cape Town – you see the shacks.

A case could be made for a special Marshall plan. Europe got back on its feet after World War II because Europe got this helping hand of the Marshall Plan. You have a government that has to deal with the legacy of apartheid, but also has to deal with contemporary demands and needs and expectations of its people. And that's tough.

I keep having to say to people 'remember though we've been free for only 14 years'. America became free in the 1700s and it is still dealing with inequities. The levels of poverty here [in America] can be quite shocking. So we say give us time because one of the amazing things is that South Africa should have the stability that it has. That is still amazing. You see headlines 'vicious race riots' and you think that is South Africa. And you read on, you find it is Manchester, England.

**NOT FOR PUBLICATION IN ITALY

Excerpt:

By Bankole Thompson
DETROIT, Michigan, Oct 23 2008 (IPS)

For a man who said he watched his mother battle with insurance companies while dying of cancer in a hospital bed, and whose 85-year-old grandmother is said to be in serious condition, healthcare for all citizens has become a defining issue in the historic campaign of Democratic presidential nominee Sen. Barack Obama.

Obama suspended his campaign for two days Thursday and Friday to attend to his sick grandmother, Madelyn Dunham, at his birthplace in Hawaii, after she reportedly fell and broke her hip.

At the second presidential debate, Obama said healthcare should be a right for all citizens – referring to the estimated 47 million people in this country without health insurance – while Republican presidential nominee John McCain said it’s more a responsibility for individuals and employers.

In a CNN poll taken earlier this month, 57 percent of respondents said they believed Obama would do a better job on health care issues, while just 37 percent had confidence in McCain.

“To be honest with you, I can’t wait for Obama to become president because not only is his health plan a good one, but the fact that he’s going to lower rates by 2,500 dollars per person, that’s huge for someone like me who is self-employed,” said Ann Marie Stephens, a California real estate broker.

“I am looking forward to him implementing his healthcare plan so that insurance is more affordable. The national housing market is in crisis and in California we are in a very challenged and depressed market,” she said.

Regardless of their political affiliation, most citizens are clearly dissatisfied with the status quo. Another CBS News/New York Times poll taken in September found that 50 percent said the current system required “fundamental changes”, while 35 percent said it should be “completely rebuilt”. Only 14 percent opted for “minor changes”.

During a recent conference call with reporters around the country, Obama said his healthcare plan would cost about 65 billion dollars and would be paid for by rolling back the tax cuts of President George W. Bush.

“We would be able to pay for our healthcare plan as well as eliminating programmes like the Medicare Advantage programme – which basically is just a subsidy of the insurance companies under the Medicare plan,” Obama said. “It was pushed through by George Bush and it hasn’t saved any money or improved quality of care. So we’re going to change that.”

Alonzo Harris, a diabetic who worked for the City of Detroit Department of Public Lighting from 1996-2006 before leaving because of the severity of his illness, doesn’t have health insurance now.

Harris that said while working for Detroit, he was paying 250 dollars per month out of his paycheque for Blue Care Network insurance instead of opting for the city’s health plan which would have lowered his monthly premiums – but the plan does not give employees the option of choosing their own doctors.

“After I left the city to become a tax accountant I was receiving a COBRA plan [partial coverage] from the city and my monthly premium increased from 250 to 400 dollars a month,” Harris told IPS. “The city covered me for 18 months as long as I paid my share.”

With no regular stream of income, Harris said he stopped paying the premium and went without coverage.

“When I shopped around, I found out that it would cost me about 600-700 dollars a month to have my own insurance,” Harris said. “My business is not making that money and I can’t have insurance. I’m 56 years old and I hope nothing catastrophic happens to me.”

Under the McCain plan, employees will receive a 5,000-dollar tax credit and insurance companies are not mandated to cover preexisting conditions, unlike Obama’s plan. McCain has argued that it is better for individuals to decide their own health care instead of the government-driven plan his opponent is pushing.

But Harris doesn’t buy the McCain plan, which he called “help for the insurance industry to make a steady flow of money.”

“If you are within a 25 percent tax bracket as a single person your taxes will increase with McCain’s plan. If the cost of your health insurance is above the 5,000-dollar tax credit, not only would you pay the difference but you also pay taxes on it,” Harris explained. “You will be taxed for money you did not receive and that will decrease your net pay check every two weeks and you end up with less purchasing power. Any medical benefit becomes a taxable income.”

Harris added, “This is a typical Republican ploy. They very seldom help the little people.”

Obama’s plan, he noted, would help a lot of people who are self-employed and making less in the workplace.

However, Iowa-based health expert Shanita Eze, whose service in the health industry covered stints in Britain as a medical researcher, said prevention should be emphasised, a point Obama makes on the campaign trail.

“We have to stop the fire brigade approach to healthcare,” Eze said. “If we have to wait until people get to a critical situation, it becomes expensive to take care of them.”

Obama told reporters on the conference call that his administration will provide incentives to make sure that prevention is covered.

“It’s one of the biggest problems in our healthcare system,” Obama said. “People go to the ER [Emergency Room] for treatable illnesses, or they put off visiting their doctor if they do have a healthcare plan because they can’t afford co-pays and deductibles.”

The Democratic nominee said he wants to “make it free to go get screenings from your doctor.”

Eze agreed that it is high time for a universal healthcare plan.

“You want to bail out the banks [but] you cannot bail out sick people? It doesn’t make sense,” she said.

She cited the homeless, who lack healthcare because “if you don’t have an address you cannot fill out an application for Medicaid. You have to have a physical address. That shows us that we have many people who are falling through the cracks.”

Stephens, the California real estate broker, said McCain’s plan defeats the purpose.

“You are giving me a credit I am going to be taxed on? What I need is [for] my rates to be lowered,” She said. “What is the point of having insurance? They want your money but they don’t want to cover you.”

Excerpt:

By Bankole Thompson
Detroit, Michigan, Oct 22 2008 (IPS)

Sahibzada Anwar Hamid is the former vice president of the Supreme Court Bar Association of Pakistan. One of three imprisoned leaders of the Pakistan Lawyers’ Movement, the group whose advocacy for an independent judiciary against the interference of former Gen. Pervez Musharraf helped to oust the former military dictator from power.

Sahibzada Anwar Hamid Credit: Bankole Thompson/IPS

The Pakistan Supreme Court advocate called for a new and sound U.S. foreign policy toward Pakistan, denied criticism that his group has lost its mission among the Pakistani people, said Musharraf should face trial, and gave his take on the 2008 U.S. presidential election.

IPS: It is being said that the present parliament owes its existence to the deposed chief justice Iftikhar Muhammad Chaundry for saying “no resignation”. What do you think? SAH: Basically, if Iftikhar Muhammad Chaundry had not resisted the pressure exerted upon him [to] resign his post, the movement of the lawyers would not have started. And because of the movement of the lawyers, a very strong military dictator, Gen. Musharraf, who could not be uprooted by the political parties, [was ousted]. And when members of civil society joined the struggle of the lawyers, it became a big movement. Definitely the credit of uprooting and making Gen. Musharraf resign I give to the lawyers’ community.

IPS: Is the lawyers’ movement retreating from the cause? There is criticism that it seems to be floundering and the various Black Days observed seem to go unnoticed. Even the media seems to have lost interest. What’s your reaction? SAH: No, it is not so. If you look at the newspapers of Pakistan, they all cover. The media has been a great source of our strength and it is still covering all the news items of the lawyers. And I don’t think till such time as we are able to create an entirely independent judiciary and we are able to strengthen it also, the movement of the lawyers will stop. It will continue. In a democratic setup, there are people who are for it, there are people who are against it. So by saying that some people criticise us, it hardly matters.

IPS: But at one point, the whole of Pakistan had pinned their hopes on the “black coats” – somehow there is the impression that they let the people down. Don’t you agree? SAH: No. This is entirely a wrong impression. If at all the public of Pakistan believe somebody, that is lawyers, because lawyers have got no personal interest. They don’t have to get any seats in the assembly. What the lawyers do is for the betterment of the public at large. I still recollect when we were taking out processions and people used to join us, they always used to tell us they had come on the call of lawyers and not on the call of politicians because politicians have always not fulfilled their commitments, their promises made to the public.

IPS: Do you think the judges taking their oaths is a betrayal of the reformists’ cause? SAH: Well, what I feel is that these judges who have taken oath, they have taken oath under the constitution. But most of the lawyers think there was no need for taking a new oath when they were already under oath previously. There was no requirement of oath and they further think that if they had kept unity within themselves it would have easier for the lawyers’ community to have all the judges of the courts restored to their original positions.

But in any case there is a section of society of lawyers who say there is no harm in taking a fresh oath. There is always in a democratic country, a difference of opinion. But it doesn’t mean there is any division among the lawyers.

IPS: The present leadership’s political affiliations seem to have polarised the lawyers and resulted in cracks in the movement. Even the Pakistan Bar Council has disassociated itself from the movement. What’s your comment? SAH: The Pakistan Bar Council has not disassociated itself from the movement. It has deferred in the methodology of our protest. They say since lawyers have suffered a lot and regular strikes will further be causing a financial drain on them and therefore the methodology of staying away from the court should be changed to other forms of protests. So far as the Peoples’ Party government is concerned, it has always said that they want all the judges to be restored. And they are working on it. They have never said that the other remaining judges could not be restored.

IPS: The leaders keep saying the movement will only end after the restoration of Chief Justice Chaundry. Is there a time frame, a plan how that can be accomplished? SAH: We could not give a time plan for removal of the president [Musharraf] and obviously you know he had to resign under the pressure of the lawyers and the public, which of course was also supported by political parties. So no time limit can be given, and we’ve seen in Pakistan there is always radical change. In any case, the prime minister has stated in parliament that all the judges will be restored.

IPS: Is the movement going to push for Gen. Musharraf to face trial? SAH: This is what our demand is: that he should be tried under Article 6A of the constitution for high treason for subverting the constitution.

IPS: Will this government try Musharraf or is it too risky? SAH: Well, I have not spoken to the prime minister. But the demand of the lawyers to our political government is that it should hold trial under Article 6A of the constitution. Ninety-nine percent of the masses are deadly against Musharraf because they feel that he is the usurper.

IPS: Both U.S. presidential candidates, Sen. John McCain and Sen. Barack Obama, have contended that Pakistan needs to do more on the war on terrorism. Do you agree? SAH: They should first look at the ground realities there. Daily you look at how many of our forces, police officers, innocent people are being killed. Isn’t that a glaring proof that Pakistan is doing its best?

If you look up the Pakistani newspapers you’ll find so many news items about terrorist attacks. There are also vested interests that do not want America to come out of this crisis – to resolve it amicably. If America remains involved, there is a complete drain of capital from America by spending on this war. Obviously, people of America will suffer. People of our country are already suffering. [One] dollar has gone from 60 to 80 Rupees in Pakistan and you can really imagine people are withdrawing their investments because there is no stability.

IPS: So what should the U.S. foreign policy priority be toward Pakistan? SAH: I have found American people to be excellent and loving. In my view, what I feel is that the government of Pakistan should be given free hand to deal with terrorism. The soldier who is on the forefront knows when to fire and where to fire. Effort should be made to give aid not only for fighting the war on terrorism but for development of those areas.

If people get education, employment they would stop getting aid from anti-Pakistan/American forces because the basic problem of those areas is poverty. Those are almost barren hills. Once we provide them with factories, hospitals amenities of life, they would not like them to be damaged.

Excerpt:

By Bankole Thompson
DETROIT, Michigan, Oct 17 2008 (IPS)

At 76, Daniel Ellsberg is still vocal. The man who leaked the Pentagon Papers in 1969, leading to the fall of President Richard Nixon, is speaking out this time on the 2008 presidential election.

Daniel Ellsberg Credit: Bankole Thompson/IPS

The celebrated whistle-blower has reservations about the candidacies of both Democrat Barack Obama and Republican John McCain. But he still believes an Obama presidency would better deal with the constitutional crisis of the last eight years.

IPS: In your speech to the NLG, you said Nov. 4 will be an election between 'two monarchies.' Explain? DE: The last seven years have expanded the powers of the president well beyond the bounds of the American constitution. Even [McCain's running mate] Sarah Palin said the other day 'well, it's rather flexible.' Well, it is not flexible enough to accommodate their view of the constitution of the president's role, which is that of a king – exactly what the constitution meant to exclude was a ruler [who is] essentially beyond the laws. That's what the checks and balances were meant to reject.

With the cooperation of Congress, they really have said in the age of terrorism the president is a law unto himself. The fact is neither [Obama nor McCain] will inherit the limitations that are implicit in the constitution. If that's going to change, I do not think it will be by the efforts of the next president. No president has voluntarily cut back on the powers that they inherited when they came into office. It takes Congress to do that.

Again they won't do it without the public pressing them. There is some movement now for impeachment and for investigations that Congress has not responded to. I can't tell you whether it's because the movement is so small, and it is a minority or because Congress is so resistant. Why is Congress so uninterested in defending their own rules, their own powers?

IPS: If Obama won't do much to curtail presidential powers, why do you contend that it's 'urgent' for him to be elected? DE: I disagree with Obama on many points of foreign policy and I'm very sorry that he has not stood up for the constitution. But in comparison with the Republicans, except Ron Paul who took the constitution seriously, any of the Democratic candidates [would be better].

To say the Republicans are no worse or no different is absurd. They've been consistently very much worse. I think if McCain were elected the chances of war with Iran alone would be much higher. I don't think there is chance with Obama. I think with McCain there is a high chance of war with Iran. That alone is reason to make it urgent to elect Obama.

It is not just a matter of his being better than McCain. That's a very low standard. He of course in many ways looks much more promising than people we've had.

IPS: What issues do you disagree with Obama on? DE: On Iraq, he talks about ending the war. I don't think he intends to end the war in Iraq, but to keep our bases there. He wants to increase our forces in Afghanistan. I think that's a terrible mistake and could ruin his own presidency as well as kill a lot of Afghans. He wants to enlarge the size of the armed forces. That's the wrong way to go. He wants to increase the defence budget – wrong way to go.

He can't achieve anything he wants to do significantly without doing something that he has so far not talked about doing – and that is greatly reducing and converting the military budget. I don't even think he's likely to do that. And yet he can't achieve his goals by keeping the military budget at the level it is.

IPS: Has any government in the past reduced the military budget? DE: Interestingly, the last one seriously to do it was Harry Truman just before the Korean War. Now you may not believe this, but he was getting the budget down to 10 billion dollars. And Korea came along and his backers used that as an excuse to quadruple the budget in a year and a half to two years. It went up to 40 billion dollars and never came down again. So that was an example after World War II.

The then secretary of defence [Louis Johnson] wanted to run as a president and his campaign was going to be "I reduced the defence budget" and that was the last we heard of that. There was some talk of doing it after the Cold War and that didn't last very long. Otherwise it's going nowhere but up.

IPS: Which of the two, Obama or McCain, would be more prone to secrecy? DE: Whether Obama would really, greatly change the system I don't know. But he has raised the secrecy issue and proposed to look at our regulations and not allow allegations of national security to trump everything. I think it's possible he would be much more open.

Both Clintons are rather secretive themselves in their own political world. But in terms of declassifying [President Clinton] was pretty good on that. And that was all reversed of course by George W. Bush.

For example, something Obama could do right in office is he could change the executive order Bush put in which made it much harder to get into presidential archives. George W. Bush, obviously in order to protect his own father, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, made it very much harder to get at a president's papers once he was out of office. Obama could change that with an executive order. He has nothing personally to worry about there. He is not related. It is not a dynasty here. Clinton would never do that now because they have too much to hide.

Excerpt:

By Bankole Thompson
DETROIT, Michigan, Oct 14 2008 (IPS)

A federal judge ruled Monday that the current practices to purge the voter rolls in Michigan are illegal and ordered Republican Secretary of State Terry Lynn Land to immediately stop the cancellation of registered voters whose voter identification cards are returned as undeliverable in the mail.

The purging of registered voters, many of whom lost their homes to bank foreclosure, in the state of Michigan prompted the federal lawsuit by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), United States Student Association Foundation and the Advancement Project, and resulted in calls in Congress for a Justice Department investigation.

Civil rights groups feared the removal programmes could have a potentially devastating impact in minority and low-income areas hardest hit by the mortgage crisis like Wayne County, home to large African American and Hispanic communities – key voting blocs for Democrats.

“Disenfranchisement undermines our democracy and [the judge’s] opinion restores some confidence in our electoral system,” said Michael Steinberg, Michigan ACLU legal director.

U.S. District Judge Stephen J. Murphy III told state election officials to restore the names of 1,438 people who have been removed from the rolls under the practice since January, and desist from further purging, Murphy ruled.

“We are very pleased with the court’s ruling. It was a thoughtful and powerful opinion,” said Bradley Heard, the Advancement Project’s lead attorney in the case. “The judge basically said both programmes we challenged were in apparent violation of federal law.”

The first programme used by the state, according to the lawsuit, is the immediate cancellation of voter registration cards of Michiganders who have obtained driver’s licenses in other states without the appropriate confirmation of registration notices.

“There is no reason to believe that the kind of ‘residence’ that any given state requires in order to issue a driver’s license is identical to ‘residence’ for voting purposes,” Murphy said in a 43-page ruling.

He noted that “Michigan itself permits out-of-state driver’s license applicants to retain their active status in the QVF [Qualified Voter File] by affirming that their out of state addresses are only temporary, and that they remain eligible to vote in Michigan. Thus, even the state recognises that voters can be eligible both to vote in Michigan and to apply for a driver’s license in another state.”

Under the second removal programme, election clerks automatically eliminate names of voters from the files who may have moved from their registered addresses, instead of sending them a warning notice by forwarded mail.

Murphy also found this second programme illegal, but rather than ordering it to be cancelled, he said the plaintiffs and the defendants should try to reach an agreement in the litigation.

He also ordered the state to immediately discontinue their practice of cancelling or rejecting a voter’s registration based upon the return of the voter’s original voter identification card as undeliverable; and remove the “rejected” marking in the QVF from the registrations of all voters whose original voter IDs have been returned as undeliverable since Jan. 1, 2006 until the present, unless rejection was warranted for some other lawful reason.

The New York Times reported last week that election officials in at least nine states, including Michigan, are violating federal law by either improperly using Social Security data to screen newly registered voters or removing thousands of voters after the federal deadline expired.

“Regrettably, our past and recent history is filled with examples of partisan bias driving voter purging and vote suppression,” said Laughlin McDonald, director of the ACLU Voting Rights Project. “If these practices are allowed to continue, we could see thousands of eligible voters show up on Election Day only to find that they were removed from the rolls.”

Kelly Chesney, spokesperson for the Michigan Secretary of State, told IPS that the state is reviewing the federal court’s decision.

“We are reviewing Judge Murphy’s opinion and have not yet determined what our next step would be,” Chesney said.

Asked if failure to act on the decision will deter those voters affected under the programme, she replied, “I don’t think so because in every election we have a balloting option. I can’t imagine it affecting the election.”

Excerpt:

By Bankole Thompson
DETROIT, Michigan, Oct 13 2008 (IPS)

An alleged purge of registered voters, many of whom lost their homes to bank foreclosure, in the state of Michigan has prompted a lawsuit and calls in Congress for a Justice Department investigation.

John Conyers, chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, wants the Justice Department to investigate possible illegal voter purges in Michigan. Credit: Bankole Thompson/IPS

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and the Advancement Project filed a suit in U.S. District Court in Detroit last month against Land, her director of elections Christopher Thomas, and Ypsilanti City Clerk Frances McMullen for using two programmes to remove voters from the rolls without proper federal procedure.

The first programme used by the state, according to the lawsuit, is the immediate cancellation of the drivers' licenses of Michiganders who have obtained licenses in other states without the appropriate confirmation of registration notices.

Under the second removal programme, election clerks automatically eliminate names of voters from the files who may have moved from their registered addresses, instead of sending them a warning notice by forwarded mail.

"The National Voter Registration Act of 1993 states that, if a registrar receives information suggesting a voter has moved from their registration address, they should send them a confirmation of registration notice by forwarded mail, including a postage-prepaid return card, and ask them to confirm the address," said Bradley Heard, the Advancement Project's lead attorney, in the lawsuit.

"The registrar also can flag the voter's record for confirmation if the voter appears to vote. If the voter does not either respond to that notice or appear to vote within two federal general elections from the date of the notice [the ones that occur in November of even-numbered years], the voter can be removed from the rolls."

These removal programmes could have a devastating impact in minority and low-income areas hardest hit by the mortgage crisis like Wayne County, home to large African American and Hispanic communities – key voting blocs for Democrats.

The federal lawsuit is before Judge Stephen Murphy, the immediate past U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Michigan. Murphy said he will review arguments from both sides before ruling whether to stop the two programmes.

IPS found that from January to September of this year, 17,691 homes have been foreclosed in Wayne County, the state's largest county which led the nation in 2007 in foreclosures for large metropolitan areas.

Recently, Macomb County, a swing county home to many conservative-leaning so-called Reagan Democrats, was in the news for the reported statements of its Republican Party chairman James Carabelli that the party is planning to use a list of foreclosed homes to prevent people from voting in the November presidential election.

"We will have a list of foreclosed homes and will make sure people aren't voting from those addresses," Carabelli reportedly told the Michigan Messenger in a phone interview. He would later deny the comments.

In 2004, John Pappageorge, a Republican state senator from Oakland County, a Republican stronghold – where polls now show Obama beating McCain among independents (48 percent to 25 percent) and women (55 percent to 37percent) – called for suppression of the Detroit vote to win the election.

"We are deeply troubled by recent media reports that the chairman of the Michigan Republican Party in Macomb County is planning to use a list of foreclosed homes as a basis to challenge voters and block them from participating in the election," House Judiciary Committee chairman John Conyers wrote to U.S. Attorney General Michael Mukasey.

"We are writing to request that the Department of Justice launch a full scale investigation into the matter. Given the number of voting rights complaints filed after the 2004 election it is critical that the Department take proactive steps now to prevent voting rights violations in November," Conyers wrote.

The letter added, "The plan should be investigated as a possible violation of the Voting Rights Act."

The Justice Department will meet with Conyers this week to address concerns about voters being challenged on their foreclosure status.

The Centre for Responsible Lending said Michigan, California, Washington D.C., New Jersey, and Nevada have high mortgage defaults. The report estimated that 10 percent of African American borrowers and 8 percent of Hispanic borrowers will be affected by foreclosures compared to 4 percent of white borrowers.

It is not clear how many voters have been purged.

But Thomas, the state election director, said about 70,000 people are removed on an annual basis because of the change in their driver's license, and that about 1,400 people have been removed since the start of this year because of their returned ID card. "We think the actual numbers will be higher, but that will be the subject of the discovery in the case," Heard said.

The New York Times reported that based on its own findings Michigan removed 33,000 people from the voter roll.

Thomas denied the report and said overall only 11,000 were removed because of death or authorised change notifications.

The Times ranked Michigan among five other swing states – Colorado, Indiana, Ohio, Nevada and North Carolina – that unintentionally purged voters.

Detroit City Clerk Janice Winfrey, who has registered 28,000 new voters, told IPS that 1,567 records have been purged from the Detroit voter file because they are considered "inactive", meaning the person is deceased or notified election officials they've moved out of state.

To date, Winfrey said Detroit has 634,444 registered voters for Nov. 4. and only 90,000 of that figure voted in the primary election.

"We need to make sure every vote counts and that people are registered to vote," said Mildred Madison of the League of Women Voters in Detroit.

Excerpt:

By Bankole Thompson
DETROIT, Michigan, Oct 6 2008 (IPS)

Republican presidential nominee Sen. John McCain is facing a backlash from top Republicans, conservative media and party supporters for pulling out of Michigan, a key battleground state in the 2008 presidential election.

Republican Sen. John McCain has essentially ceded the state of Michigan to his opponent, Democratic Sen. Barack Obama. Credit: Bankole Thompson/IPS

Anuzis said he was not consulted over the decision after recent polls showed McCain trailing behind Democratic presidential nominee Sen. Barack Obama by 15 points.

"We were not aware of it," Anuzis told IPS. "We are going to put our own campaign together on Monday and move forward."

He said the state Republican Party is mobilising resources to reenergise the presidential campaign in a state that reportedly lost 30,000 jobs in January alone.

Michigan has 17 electoral votes in the U.S. electoral college system, under which the winning candidate must reach at least 270 votes, allocated to states according to their size. The McCain campaign says it will instead focus on other key battleground states.

Nolan Finley, editorial page editor of the Detroit News, the state's conservative newspaper, went after McCain on Flashpoint, a top-rated Sunday morning television show.

"They've just ran a lousy campaign in Michigan," Finley said. "This is a state that went for his charisma and he never exploited that. That would have played here. All he's done since he's been here is talk about Obama and that was not a good strategy."

Alice Benbow, who voted twice for the Republican presidential ticket in 2000 and 2004, was once an active party member and who was awarded the "number one Republican" in suburban Rochester Hills, is now an independent.

She said McCain and the Republican Party have lost touch.

"The Republican Party has gotten so big business, anti-citizen and it is absolutely repulsive," Benbow said. "I'm in favour of business and companies making money, but not at the expense of taxpayers. The City of Rochester Hills just gave [retail giant] Wal-Mart a tax break and we are paying for it."

She also cited the right of habeas corpus appeal, which came under serious attack by the George W. Bush administration as seen in the plethora of lawsuits brought against the government by detainees at the Guantanamo prison camp seeking due process.

"I believe in our constitution. We need to have habeas corpus restored and the party should go back to less government spending," Benbow said.

Akindele Akinyemi, an African American conservative blogger, called McCain's decision to leave Michigan "another Rudy Giuliani move that would cost him the election."

"The strategy for McCain was to pull out of Michigan because he is behind in the polls. Michigan is more than a battleground state," Akinyemi said. "We are talking about people who vote straight ticket whether they are Democrats or Republicans."

McCain essentially ceding the state hurts the entire Republican ticket in Michigan in the coming election, where many Republican lawmakers – state and federal – are locked in tough races, Akinyemi said.

Two Republican members of Congress – Joe Knollenberg, whose Ninth District includes suburbs of Oakland County, a Republican stronghold that Democrats have been trying to take away, and Tim Walberg from the Seventh District, which covers places like Jackson, home to some of the state's biggest prisons – are fighting for their political lives.

Knollenberg, an eight-term incumbent, has over four million dollars in his campaign war chest to defend his seat from former lottery commissioner Gary Peters, a Democrat who has established an effective campaign machine and raised over two million dollars. That race is shaping up to be one of the most expensive congressional races in Michigan history.

Walberg, who told the Ann Arbor News recently that McCain's presence in Michigan will help candidates like him win, is facing former Democratic State Rep. Mark Schauer. An estimated 45 House seats in Lansing, the state capital, are up for grabs.

"By him [McCain] pulling out he has created a triple effect in making these races very difficult for Republican candidates to win," Akinyemi said. "I'm not going to switch my support to Obama but it is a poor execution in terms of what needs to be done." With 30 days left to the general election on Nov. 4, McCain will lose Michigan, Akinyemi said.

"The GOP [Grand Old Party, a Republican moniker] dropped the ball," Akinyemi said. "John McCain does not have an urban policy to address issues in African American communities. John McCain not one time toured urban communities in Michigan to help him shape an urban policy."

He said Obama is different. "Whether I agree with him or not, he has presented a plan to African American and other minority communities," Akinyemi said. "This boils down to state and GOP leaders that are out of touch."

In the countdown to Election Day, one of the most exciting presidential elections in U.S. history is turning out to be a referendum on the Republican Party's handling of the nation's economy and the 700-billion-dollar taxpayer bailout of Wall Street.

"We have foreclosures everywhere. Whatever it is, our government needs to be responding to us," Benbow said. "The Republican Party has totally lost compassion with the people. I'm not for Obama, but he is very appealing to a lot of people. He can win Michigan."

McCain's running mate, Alaska Governor Sarah Palin, reportedly disagreed with the campaign's decision to drop Michigan and focus instead on Florida, Ohio and Wisconsin. Palin said she wants to come back.

Sarah Lenti, McCain's Michigan Great Lakes regional spokesperson, did not return repeated IPS requests for an interview.

Excerpt:

By Bankole Thompson
GRAND RAPIDS, Michigan, Oct 3 2008 (IPS)

Democratic presidential nominee Sen. Barack Obama sat down with IPS correspondent Bankole Thompson again on Thursday for a one-on-one interview in Grand Rapids, Michigan, where over 15,000 enthusiastic Obama supporters turned out to hear his message of change at downtown's Calder Plaza.

Sen. Barack Obama Credit: Bankole Thompson/IPS

Obama answered questions ranging from what U.S. relations would be like with Pakistan if he wins the White House, to how Washington could re-engage with Latin America as China's influence also grows in that part of the world, cutting the massive subsidies for big oil companies like ExxonMobil, and increasing U.S. foreign aid to bolster the floundering U.N. Millennium Development Goals (MDGs).

IPS: There are supposed to be built-in-protections for the middle class and poor in the bailout of Wall Street. How would a Barack Obama administration ensure that those protections are maintained?

BO: What I've done is written into the legislation, that there is going to be an independent oversight board to monitor what the Treasury is doing. We have legislation that says that the money from the sale of assets that are purchased all goes back into reducing the national debt so that taxpayers are getting their money back.

But it's going to require that the next administration is diligent about these protections and it's going to be very important that the next administration does everything it can to strengthen the underlying housing market and to prevent the foreclosures that have been devastating in so many communities, particularly in the African American and Hispanic communities.

IPS: You talk about oil companies a lot. What about the 20 to 40 billion dollars they get from the U.S. government in subsidies every year? Under an Obama administration, would that be eliminated or cut to invest in alternative energy?

BO: Well, I think there is no doubt that we should not be giving them tax breaks when they are making 12 billion dollars a quarter. You've had three consecutive quarters now where ExxonMobil made almost 12 billion dollars a quarter and the notion that they need subsidies makes no sense. And so we would, I think, be trying as part of a comprehensive energy plan to make sure that those subsidies are shifted to alternative fuels like solar and wind, biodiesel that can be so important to our long-term energy future.

IPS: Would the United States under an Obama administration increase foreign aid given the importance of achieving the U.N. Millennium Development Goals to ease global poverty?

BO: Well, I have said that I think it is important for us to increase foreign aid. Now I have to say that my plans were structured prior to this recent financial crisis. So we are going to have to see what is possible in next year's budget. I can make an assurance that we will not cut foreign aid, that we will increase it. We may not be able to increase it as quickly or by as much that I wanted to do when I put my plans together last year.

IPS: You've said China is engaged with South America and the United States is absent. What would your administration do?

BO: Well, I think it is a matter of reaching out to these countries and asking, how can we not only work with them around critical issues like anti-drug efforts, cracking down on criminal gangs; I think we also have to be thinking, how do we help these countries that still have millions of poor people in them? Provide job opportunities and growth opportunities. And part of that is trade structured not just for corporations but for workers. Part of it is basic infrastructure, public health infrastructure, educational infrastructure. That makes a huge difference.

IPS: Switching quickly to labour. You've talked about the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and that there will be some modifications when your administration takes over. What about the Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA)?

BO: I think any of our trade agreements has to have strong labour provisions, strong environmental protections and we have to enforce it. We have not been good at enforcing our agreements. That's something that is going to change in my administration.

IPS: How do you intend to address the repercussions of the Wall Street bailout on Mexico's economy, since the two economies are tied together?

BO: Well, I think it's not just Mexico. The entire world economy is now tied together. Europe is now seeing huge problems similar to what we've been seeing on Wall Street. So that's why it is important for us to coordinate with the G-20 countries [a bloc of developing nations] to do everything we can to make sure that when we have regulations in place here, that they are mirrored overseas that there is just one system of rules that all of global capital has to play by.

IPS: Pakistan has been in the news a lot, and it came up in your Sep. 26 debate on foreign policy. Under your administration, what would the relationship be between Washington and Pakistan, in light of the fact that a lot of U.S. tax dollars are going there?

BO: Well, Pakistan is a difficult problem. You've got a fragile democracy after years of military rule. These hills and mountains of Pakistan where the Taliban and al Qaeda have made base camps are very difficult to access. I think Pakistanis are worried that if they go after them too hard that they would see more of the bombings like they saw at the Marriott Hotel.

So what we are going to have to do is to work diligently with them, explaining, "We would continue to provide you support and aid but you have to take this issue of terrorism much more seriously than you are taking it right now." And in fact conditioning it on their willingness to cooperate and hunting down those who killed 3,000 Americans [on 9/11].

*NOT FOR PUBLICATION IN ITALY

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By Bankole Thompson
DETROIT, Michigan, Oct 1 2008 (IPS)

In 2004, hip-hop mogul Sean P. Combs, known as "Puff Daddy", accompanied by R&B megastar Mary J. Blige and actor Leonardo DiCaprio, told thousands of students at Wayne State University in Detroit it was time to elect a new president.

Puff Daddy speaking at Wayne State University in 2004. Credit: Bankole Thompson/IPS

In 2008, with a historic presidential election just weeks away, and a few days before the Oct. 6 voter registration deadline in Michigan, another international hip-hop icon, Jay-Z, will bring a similar message with an open concert at Detroit's Cobo Convention Centre to help Sen. Barack Obama win Michigan.

"Jay-Z will perform for thousands of Michigan voters for free," Obama's Michigan campaign said in a release about Saturday evening's event. "Jay-Z will promote voter registration and encourage young people to get involved with the campaign."

This latest unveiling of star power by the Obama camp, dubbed "Operation Registration", not only shows how liberal Hollywood has lined up behind the Democrats, but also underscores the nexus between hip-hop and politics.

Over the years, hip-hop has evolved not only as a musical genre but a political voice for young people who feel disenfranchised by the political system. As a mainstay in black politics, prominent black elected officials and activists have often used hip-hop artists to convey their protest messages to the government for ills faced by poor blacks in urban centres across the United States.

"There is a lot of excitement this time [in the hip-hop community] because of who is running for president and their desire to see change," said Nadir Omowale, cultural critic and MTV News correspondent. "Hip-hop is a natural way to get out the vote because it speaks to people. It speaks to that demographic because of their desire to see change."

Omowale said the Democrats understand that if they can get everyone out in Detroit to vote, together with southeast Michigan, that would counter the rest of the Republican counties in the state.

"Michigan still in some areas has a legacy of the Ku Klux Klan [racist militia] and right-wing groups," Omowale said. "That is the reason we see Obama here so much."

Artists like Jay-Z are organising people within their realm of influence, he said, citing the Saturday concert as an example.

The Hip-Hop Summit Action Network (HSAN) is a leading organisation in the country dedicated to the exclusive mission of using hip-hop as a "catalyst for education advocacy and an enormously influential agent for social change which must be responsibly and proactively utilised to fight the war on poverty and injustice."

Founded by hip-hop mogul Russell Simmons and led by former president of the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People, Dr. Benjamin Chavis, HSAN hosts the annual "Get Your Money Right" summit that brings hip-hop stars to major cities and universities across the country to address young people about their financial savings and credit.

This year, HSAN, the Hip-Hop Research and Education Fund and PowerPAC launched the "National Hip-Hop Team Vote 2008 Campaign" to get the hip-hop generation to register to vote. It is estimated that the 18- to 29-year-old segment of that generation will reach 50 million this year, representing one-third of the electorate.

"The truth is, four years ago in the last national election we witnessed the largest youth voter turnout in American history. We know beyond the shadow of any doubt the evolution of hip-hop culture helped to create that reality," Chavis said.

"We are already witnessing now in 2008 how young voters are building and expanding on the foundation laid four years ago. Civic engagement is a part of what it means to be a responsible citizen."

Chavis added, "And in defiance of some of the myths about the responsibility of the hip-hop generation, it is in fact a significant testimony that the youth of today are not only rising to the occasion of responsibility, they are taking charge and will make the biggest difference in the outcome of the 2008 presidential election."

Corey Ealons, director of African American media for Obama, told IPS in an interview that the campaign is excited about recruiting the seven-time Grammy Award-winning artist to get out the vote.

"Jay-Z is one of the most popular artists in the world. We are very excited that he is coming to Michigan," Ealons said. "As a hip-hop artist he has the ability to reach not just African Americans, but young people across the country who appreciate not only his talent as an artist but his entrepreneurial spirit as well. When it comes to motivating young people to vote, Jay-Z is one of the best in the business."

Obama has shown that he has a soft spot for hip-hop music, a genre that has produced artists who sometimes engaged in misogyny, using the N-word and glorifying "thuggery".

At the beginning of this year, after meeting Jay-Z and Kanye West, Obama acknowledged the negatives of hip-hop to Black Entertainment Television.

"There are times, even on the artists I've named, the artists that I love, that there is a message that's sometimes degrading to women, uses the N-word a little too frequently. But also something that I'm really concerned about is [they're] always talking about material things, about how I can get something: more money, more cars," Obama said.

In April, the campaign confirmed in a Washington Post article that the candidate did have some Jay-Z songs downloaded on his iPod.

Before Obama gave his acceptance speech at the Aug. 28 Democratic National Convention in Denver, he and delegates were entertained by Motown legend Stevie Wonder, and Will.I.Am, lead singer for the rap group Black Eyed Peas at the Invesco Field at Mile High. Later that evening R&B singer John Legend performed at a post-nomination party for delegates and guests.

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By Bankole Thompson
DETROIT, Michigan, Sep 30 2008 (IPS)

If the presidential election is close enough on Nov. 4, racism could hand the Republican nominee Sen. John McCain a victory, according to recent polls showing that Democratic nominee Sen. Barack Obama is having a hard time winning over older white Democrats because of his race.

In key states like Michigan and Ohio – often referred to as "old states" because of the high concentration of retirees there – Obama may have to bank on younger whites who are mostly excited about his campaign to come out in droves on Election Day, or face the grim possibility of losing thanks to a Democratic voting bloc of white senior citizens who may defect to McCain.

An Associated Press-Yahoo News poll last week found that one-third of whites, both Democrat and Republican, have negative views about African Americans, describing them as "lazy" and "violent" and responsible for their own predicaments. The national poll found that Obama could lose six percentage points in the general elections simply because of his race.

"Racism is the elephant in the room that nobody wants to talk about in this election. There are whites who are not comfortable voting for an African American as president of this country," said Steve Mitchell, a 50-year veteran pollster of Mitchell Research and Communications Inc.

Mitchell said during the Democratic presidential primary race every exit poll conducted overstated white support for Obama and understated Hillary Clinton's white backing.

"Some voters were not honest about their true choices in the presidential race," Mitchell said. "My son is 26. He finds Obama exciting. But older whites don't. To say these things can happen in 2008 is true. This is America."

Mitchell said most of those older white voters resettled in battleground states of Ohio and Michigan after migrating from the South during Jim Crow in the 1960s. As they migrated to the Midwest, they brought with them strong racial sentiments resulting from tensions between whites and blacks over issues of equality and justice.

"These older voters grew up in a different society in the South. It's hard to undo those racial feelings they brought to these states [Michigan and Ohio]," Mitchell said. "They'd prefer to vote for McCain than an African American candidate for president. Some of them vote Republican anyway."

Political analyst DeAmo Murphy who worked as a consultant for the Democratic National Committee in Iowa during Sen. John Kerry's 2004 presidential bid, said it will be a grave mistake for Democrats to vote against Obama because of his race.

"The true reaction to watch, however, is not that of the black voters (franchised or not). It will be those who share the pain and disillusionment of the last eight years in common with blacks, yet on Election Day, may find themselves voting for the white candidate even if it is in direct conflict with their own self-interest," Murphy said.

"On Election Day, black voters will celebrate or decry, however, there may be more white undecided voters who will enter the polling booth as progressives but leave as incidental racists," he said.

Obama and McCain have probably visited Michigan more frequently in the last month than any other state in the union.

Obama and his running mate Sen. Joe Biden, with their spouses Michelle Obama, and Jill Biden, held a rally of 35,000 people Sep. 28 in Detroit, Michigan's largest city and the nation's biggest African American metropolis, where former vice president Al Gore endorsed Obama.

A populous city of 850,000, Detroit is known as the state's Democratic stronghold with 600,000 registered voters. Local analysts predict if Obama's campaign with Detroit's new Mayor Kenneth Cockrel Jr. can get more people out on Election Day, Obama will win Michigan.

But that will depend on the charisma of Mayor Cockrel to woo voters.

Cockrel is a far cry from his predecessor, Kwame Kilpatrick, who was an energising political presence. Often dubbed "America's hip hop mayor", he could connect with the average Detroiter, as he did for Michigan's Democratic Governor Jennifer Granholm during her tough 2006 re-election against right-wing Republican candidate Dick DeVos, the brother-in-law of Erik Prince, founder of Blackwater U.S.A.

"I'm going to do whatever I can to get the vote out for Obama," Cockrel told IPS at the rally on Sunday.

After the rally, Obama's campaign announced that he will be back in Michigan Thursday for a rally in Grand Rapids, a liberal town of old blue-collar whites with a mix of young progressive whites as well as conservatives. John Edwards, the now tainted former Democratic presidential candidate, made his highly sought-after endorsement of Obama for president in Grand Rapids.

Despite the most recent Detroit Free Press/WDIV poll showing Obama has doubled his lead with Michigan voters by 15 points against McCain (51 to 38 percent), the Democrats are not taking anything for granted in the Wolverine state that lost 600,000 jobs in January this year.

"We strongly believe the economy will decide this election. We are working very hard and I'm confident in the end that Democrats would vote for Obama because of the terrible economy," said Mark Brewer, chair of the Michigan Democratic Party.

Brewer said the economic meltdown manifesting itself in the array of giant financial institutions falling apart on Wall Street reinforces Obama's message that change is needed in Washington. He added that McCain, who has supported deregulation of Wall Street which led to the financial mess the nation is in, will offer more of the same Republican policies.

Will Democrats vote against their own economic interest because of Obama's colour in an election where the economy is gradually defining campaign messages, as the candidates make the final stretch to Nov. 4?

Brewer is optimistic that will not be the case. "In the end, the economy will trump every other issue. That's why it is important for us to get out and talk about it," he said.

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By Bankole Thompson
DETROIT, Michigan, Sep 19 2008 (IPS)

After losing over a million jobs in the manufacturing industry in the last eight years, U.S. labour leaders are saying no more to another Republican administration.

Barack Obama joins national union leaders for a Sep. 1 Labour Day rally in Detroit. Credit: Bankole Thompson/IPS

That is why the 2008 presidential campaign has seen the U.S. labour movement taking a central role in strongly backing Democratic nominee Sen. Barack Obama as the candidate for labour. Obama has agreed to sign the Employee Free Choice Act allowing workers to freely form unions in the workplace, unlike his Republican opponent Sen. John McCain who participated in a filibuster to kill the bill.

"The labour movement has been under sustained corporate and right-wing attack for the greater part of the last 60 years, and these attacks have intensified during the [Ronald] Reagan and Bush II Republican eras," said Sheldon Friedman, a noted economist and research coordinator for the American Federation of Labour and Congress of Industrial Organisations (AFL-CIO).

"Against this backdrop, it is remarkable that we still have a labour movement in this country. It is easy, but fundamentally incorrect to blame the [union] leadership for the troubles of the labour movement and the dire straits of America's working class," he said.

Friedman said while the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) did its part to outsource jobs from the working class in the U.S. to other nations like Mexico, rising trade deficits with Canada and Mexico, according to the Economic Policy Institute, have also cost the U.S. about one million jobs, two-thirds of them in manufacturing. That figure represents non-union as well as union jobs.

"Sen. Obama has said that if he becomes president, he will renegotiate NAFTA to provide better protections for American workers, consumers and the environment," Friedman said. "The AFL-CIO certainly would be in favour of that. McCain by contrast was and remains a staunch supporter of the NAFTA we have now."

AFL-CIO President John Sweeney said labour's future would be safe with Obama.

"Sen. Obama has a plan to increase jobs and put necessary checks on Wall Street. He is calling for 1,000-dollar tax breaks for middle class families to bridge the crisis; re-regulation of Wall Street so the savings, pensions and 401(k)s of working people are safe; fast-tracking investments in clean American energy that will create millions of jobs; cracking down on lobbyists; and ending the Iraq war so we can rebuild our own country and its bridges and highways and schools that are crumbling," Sweeney said.

"America doesn't have to be country where hard working people have to struggle," he added.

Obama has secured the endorsements of virtually every union in the U.S., small and big, including United Auto Workers (UAW), Teamsters, American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME), Service Employees International Union (SEIU) amongst others.

Friedman said amid a dire economic climate with the recent fall of the major investment bank Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc and the brokerage firm Merrill Lynch & Co, Obama will address what he calls "the imbalance of power that has developed between workers and corporations."

"Worker productivity has risen by 20 percent since 2000, but after nearly eight years of Bush misrule, median family incomes are lower today than they were," Friedman said.

"An additional nine million Americans lack health insurance coverage. Home foreclosures have skyrocketed, billions of dollars of home equity owned by working families has evaporated, gas prices are in the stratosphere, and the financial system is in the grip of its most serious crisis since the Great Depression of the 1930s," he noted.

Ron Gettlefinger, UAW president, told thousands of Obama supporters at a Labour Day rally in downtown Detroit Sep. 1 that, "28 million union voters have made a choice" to send Obama to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

"We love our country too much just to accept things as they are today," Gettlefinger said. "Barack Obama can count on organised labour and working people to stand with him on the road to change."

In return Obama told the crowd, "I'm a labour guy. I believe in the labour movement. I believe in the American worker. I believe they have a right to organise. I believe they have a right to collectively bargain. I believe it's important to have a president who doesn't choke on the word union. And I believe we've got to have a Department of Labour that believes in labour."

With Michigan losing about 400,000 manufacturing jobs under the Bush economy, Gettlefinger's UAW members accounted for a significant number of that loss.

As the seat of the country's automotive industry, Michigan's largest city Detroit has been in the limelight lately because of the toll the economic crisis has taken on carmakers General Motors, Ford Motor Company and Chrysler – known as the Big Three.

Recently GM Chairman and CEO Rick Wagoner testified before a U.S. Senate committee for a 50-billion-dollar loan request to the automakers from the federal government. All three carmakers are arguing that the loan guarantees are not a bailout because it would speed up the production of fuel-efficient cars and reduce dependence on foreign oil.

Obama has criticised McCain for not supporting the full loan request. Others have questioned the wisdom of the federal government's foot-dragging on the issue because unlike Washington's takeover of ailing Wall Street firms, the auto industry has repeatedly emphasised that it is only seeking a loan from Congress, not a bailout.

Some analysts have said Congress's failure to authorise the loans could mean more drastic cuts in the industry, consequently affecting union jobs.

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By Bankole Thompson
DETROIT, Michigan, Sep 16 2008 (IPS)

Dr. Susan Rice, senior foreign policy advisor to Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama, says the U.S. would make every effort to avoid resorting to a military attack on Iran under an Obama administration.

Dr. Susan Rice Credit: Bankole Thompson/IPS

In a recent interview, Rice said Obama would galvanise support from the international community to stop Iran from laying its hands on nuclear weapons – an objective Tehran denies – as one of its priorities for the greater Middle East region.

"Sen. Obama's view is that we need to toughen our sanctions collectively and step up our direct diplomacy so that we do our utmost politically and economically to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon capability without immediate resort to war," Rice said.

Despite the increase in rhetoric against Tehran, a new National Intelligence Estimate released last year contradicted President George W. Bush's repeated assertions that Iran was looking to develop nuclear weapons capability. The NIE report concluded, "We do not know whether [Iran] currently intends to develop nuclear weapons."

"Senator Obama has been very clear," Rice said. "He believes we have time still for a robust diplomacy backed by tougher sanctions to try to prevent Iran from pursuing its nuclear programme. But he has been clear that we cannot take any options off the table."

Outlining other priorities in the greater Middle East region under an Obama administration, Rice, a former African Affairs director at the National Security Council under President Bill Clinton, pointed to Iraq security.

"Clearly and safely deploying U.S. combat brigades from Iraq, working diplomatically with the Iraqis and the countries and the region to help support the political settlement that bridges the division between [Shias and Kurds] and help to stabilise Iraq," Rice said.

"Vitally important and related to that is a necessity of stepping up our efforts to counter al Qaeda and the Taliban, which are resurgent in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and helping to stabilise Afghanistan, and at the same time we work effectively with Pakistan authorities to root out resurgent al Qaeda Taliban elements in the border regions of Pakistan."

Nazar Janabi, a Next Generation fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, a generally hawkish think tank, said it is possible for an Obama administration to bridge the gap among warring factions in Iraq, but real problems lie ahead.

"The challenge would be to find the common ground between these factions. It seems to me that striking that balance without sacrificing some of the U.S. key interests in the Middle East would be very difficult without some form of long-term engagement and presence," Janabi said. "That said it is my understanding that Mr. Obama has a better image in the Middle East and is likely to be more credible to the audience there."

Janabi said Obama's position of withdrawing U.S. troops from Iraq "responsibly" is a very good idea. "However, this might mean maintaining a sizable contingent for a few years down the road," he added. "The security achievements in Iraq are still fragile and still could go either way depending on the circumstances."

On the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, Rice said Obama would be "supporting the Israelis and Palestinians in their effort to broker a lasting peace based on two states – the Jewish State of Israel and the Democratic Palestinian State living side by side in peace and security."

Osama Siblani, editor and publisher of the Arab American News in Dearborn, Michigan – home of the largest concentration of people of Middle Eastern descent outside of the Middle East – said Obama would have to do a lot of work convincing the Israeli government in Jerusalem to work for peace.

"I don't see Obama as a broker. He needs a partner first. You must have a partner first that is willing to give and compromise before making any peace deal," Siblani said. "You have to have a player like Israel, that is violating international law, willing to participate."

Siblani said it is in the interests of both Israel and Palestine to reach a deal that creates two peaceful states.

"I think the carelessness and procrastination of the Bush administration makes it impossible for a Palestinian state to be created," Siblani said. "There is the question of refugees, Jerusalem, no resources in Gaza and total poverty there that needs to be addressed. You have to have the guarantees for peace and security from both states."

Should Obama get elected, Siblani said he will have some leverage because "a U.S. president carries a lot of weight" in the Middle East and he will likely have a Democratic Congress to help him push things through.

After the fall of military strongman and key U.S. ally Pervez Musharraf, Pakistan elected Asif Ali Zardari as president, widower of that nation's political star Benazir Bhutto. It is unclear what Pakistan's relations with Washington would be now in the fight against terrorism.

"He [Obama] opposed and objected to a policy that put all of our eggs in the basket of a dictator – Pervez Musharraf – and a policy supported by George Bush and John McCain that really slow walked our support for the Democratic aspiration of the Pakistani people," Rice said. "Barack Obama's view has been and remains that it is in our interest – the best long-term interest – that Pakistan becomes a stable, sustainable democracy."

Musharraf, who ruled with an iron hand after overthrowing then Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif in October of 1999, was forced to resign Aug. 18 following threats of impeachment from the government of Pakistan. The low point of his rule was when he attempted to subvert Pakistan's judiciary into a political tool by firing the Supreme Court.

Rice said she hopes that under President Zardari, the U.S. will see more effective concerted efforts to combat terrorism and terrorists inside of Pakistan, including elements of al Qaeda and the Taliban.

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By Bankole Thompson
DENVER, Colorado, Aug 28 2008 (IPS)

With Sen. Barack Obama's formal anointing as the first African American presidential nominee of a major political party in U.S. history, delegates to the 2008 Democratic National Convention in Denver say Obama can win in November on universal issues like the economy and health care.

Steve Lucas, 20, is a delegate from Pennsylvania who is working to get Obama elected in November. Credit: Bankole Thompson/IPS

U.S. Rep. Ben Chandler, a delegate from the state of Kentucky, said Obama's biggest hurdle after the Denver nomination would be to "give a comfort level to a lot of people across the country who may not feel comfortable electing an African American for president."

That sentiment rings true in crucial battleground places like western Pennsylvania, where Sen. Hillary Clinton defeated Obama in the primary election.

"Racism is so strong and ingrained in Western Pennsylvania that he will need to convince voters that as much as they don't want to vote for him, they cannot afford to have another Republican administration," said 20 year-old Steve Lucas, one of Pennsylvania's youngest delegates. "A lot of people are going to make excuses because he is black and that would make it harder to get him elected."

Lucas said he is already campaigning among the blue-collar working-class people in that state to get them to realise that the stakes are too high in 2008.

"I'm telling people to support Obama because he has a real progressive message for change," Lucas told IPS. "He is inspiring."

Health care, gay rights and education are issues that matter to a lot of people in Pennsylvania, Lucas said.

Obama has demonstrated he's not afraid of being a liberal.

Patricia Tupacz Scribner, a 20-year United Auto Workers veteran and delegate from Michigan – which Republican presidential candidate John McCain has carried before – said voters in the Wolverine state should not be stuck on the candidate's race in this election.

"The average worker needs to know that they need to support Obama because we would not get anything from John McCain except hardship for most of us," Scribner said. "I hope our country is better than that. But I don't trust the Republicans. They would do anything to inject fear in people to not vote for Obama."

Michigan, which has lost thousands of manufacturing jobs in the recent economic downturn, is considered a "swing state", with no secure majority for either candidate. A recent WDIV/Detroit Free Press poll showed Obama leading with 46 percent, McCain with 39 percent and 12 percent undecided. About 31 percent of those polled indicated they could have a change of mind by Election Day.

"What we need to focus on as a country is on the issues and not race. All people are created equal," Scribner told IPS. "I'm upset that in this country we don't have healthcare for all. We have senior citizens who don't have health insurance, and that's a shame."

Issues like healthcare that Democrats have trumpeted in this presidential campaign could impact how some voters will cast their votes. An estimated 40 million U.S. citizens have no health insurance and the Democrats have lambasted the Republicans for rewarding insurance companies and the drug industry instead of insisting on an affordable health insurance for all. For voters like Scribner, that is the issue she believes Obama will tackle if he gets elected.

In Florida, which decided the 2000 presidential election by 537 votes and has a large Hispanic population, Democrats are focusing on registering new voters to take out the Republicans in that battleground state.

"I'm a strong supporter of Obama and a member of his national steering committee for Hispanics," said Luis Laredo, a Florida delegate. "We are very energised and excited and we're going to come out of Denver united."

Laredo said, "I know for a fact that there is no such thing as an easy election," but he'll work hard to ensure that Hispanics in that state cast their vote for Obama.

Pres. George w. Bush carried Florida in 2004, but Laredo said that Hispanics, a key voting bloc with leverage due to the recent immigration overhaul debate, will decide the election there.

"The GOP [Republican Party] are geniuses in negative campaigning, but we'll do everything we can to get Obama elected," Laredo said. "Race will always play [a role] in politics. But Obama as a nominee is a very good thing for America."

"Eminently qualified," is how Laredo describes Obama.

"I'm a conservative Democrat. I don't care what the colour of his skin is," he said.

Illinois Rep. Karen Yarbrough, who served with Obama when he was a state legislator, said what she's observed as a delegate to the convention is that people are coming together for Obama.

"This is not about black or white," Yarbrough said. "This is about green [money and the economy] more than anything else. We can't be scared about voting for him. I've seen him fight for people. He didn't just start here."

The Illinois legislator said Obama will bring about meaningful change at a time when economic woes are driving citizens from their homes, with escalating foreclosures.

Delegate D.A. Logan Dobbs from Nebraska said the state of the economy is perhaps the most important issue in November. A student of Hastings College, Dobbs said most college students are poised to vote for Obama. "Race is not an issue for us," Dobbs told IPS.

He cited the U.S. Basketball team, at the recently concluded Beijing 2008 Olympic Games, saying, "The team was all black. But they were representing America. No one said they were representing blacks."

Obama will accept the Democratic nomination at Denver's Invesco Field on Thursday night, the same day civil rights icon Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. gave the didactic "I Have a Dream" speech 45 years ago in Washington.

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