We Shall Overcome!Time for Third World including South Asia to Kill Manusmriti and Apartheid Hegemonies!My Black Untouchable Father Pulin Babu also had a DREAM that WE All WOULD BE LIBERATED, EMPOWERED AND EQUAL Some Day!He Could Not Prove Himself Neither a Martin Luther King Nor a BARRACK OBAMA. Are the DREAMS of our Ancestors DEAD for Ever? Just Awaken, Educate and Organise!Then Mobilise RESSISTANCE GALAXYWIDE! The Thundering Spring from Americas would Visit Asia Some day or other day! HOW Long we would remain Predestined to be STARVED, DISPLACED and KILLED?
Troubled Galaxy Destroyed Dreams: Chapter 102
Palash Biswas
Bush On Transition Of Office
http://in.youtube.com/watch?v=zfJc9Sjw4DU
NEW: Obama claims Indiana, 349-163 electoral vote advantage
Barack Obama scores wins with women, African-Americans, young voters
Obama to voters: "Change has come to America"
Obama will be working with heavily Democratic Congress
We Shall Overcome!Time for Third World including South Asia to Kill Manusmriti and Apartheid Hegemonies!My Black Untouchable Father Pulin Babu also had a DREAM that WE All WOULD BE LIBERATED, EMPOWERED AND EQUAL Some Day!He Could Not Prove Himself Neither a Martin Luther King Nor a BARRACK OBAMA. Are the DREAMS of our Ancestors DEAD for Ever? Just Awaken, Educate and Organise, The Thundering Spring from Americas would Visit Asia Some day or other day! HOW Long we would remain Predestined to be STARVED, DISPLACED and KILLED?
Chandrayaan takes pictures of moon!
The Terrain Mapping Camera (TMC) on board Chandrayaan-1 has started taking pictures of the moon. On Tuesday evening, when the spacecraft was in the lunar transfer orbit, it photographed the crescent moon from a distance of some 2.5 lakh km.
The TMC took pictures of the earth when it was made operational on October 29. The pictures showed the northern and southern coasts of Australia.
The Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) performed the fifth and final orbit-raising manoeuvre of Chandrayaan-1 early Tuesday morning, which put the spacecraft in the lunar transfer orbit. In the evening, the TMC, one of its 11 scientific instruments, took images of the moon.
M. Annadurai, Project Director, Chandrayaan-1, said: “The pictures were taken when the spacecraft was more than 2.5 lakh km away from the moon. We did again the entire chain of tests of the 11 instruments, data handling, data storage, downlinking, radio frequency and so on.”
Chandrayaan-1 will reach the moon’s vicinity on November 8. According to ISRO’s present plans, the spacecraft will be lowered into its final orbit on November 15, in which it will go round the moon at an altitude of 100 km.
I saw him haunted lifelong as the DREAM of Liberation continued to boil within him. As a child I was fortunate enough to share his dreams! But as soon as I developed my vision and committed myself to a certain IDEOLOGY alienated from our Black Untouchable Aboriginal Indigenous social fabrics, we were separarted as two islands. I could never help him in his lifelong struggle to bring a CHANGE in our people`s life and I could never realise this in his lifetime. But I always felt the POWER and the Inspiration of the DREAM! It was not so loud as I SHALL OVERCOME! Rather we used to sing this Black Song to liberate India! Liberation was not to come in our way as we lost our roots in Negroid Anarya Dravid Indigenous Life and Heritage. We were never so Black to identify with the Blacks and untouchables worldwide. so we let the KILLING Machine go on! So, we still wait for a CHANGE so Visulised by our Parents and ancestors! The CHANGE rather has come from a land well known for the centre of Global ruling Class, Global hegemony and Global Fascism, Manusmriti, Aparteid, Zionism, Corporate Imperialism, Capitalism, Star Wars, Nuclear Biological Chemical Warfare! It was possible just because our Brothers and Sisters in United States of America never forgot the DREAM!
We always chanted the Song: We SHALL OVERCOME!
BUT WE NEVER BELIEVE THAT WE COULD BRING THE CHANGE! THUS THUNDERING SPRING FAILED IN OUR HEART!
I saw my father struck by CANCER in his Spinal Chord and brething last, DREAMING all the Time! He could Visualise the CHANGE which our generation could not. rather we contributed to strengthen the chains of Enslavement being the tools and parts of the Brahaminical syatem in India!
My Father and his people were ejected from their Home Land in East Bengal just because they Elected DR Bhimrao Ambedkar to the Constitution Assembelly. They were deprived of Citizenship, Reservation, political representation, Mother Tongue, cultural identity, history and geography , civil and human rights!
My father led a Movement in SILIGURI Bengal when the Brahmin leaders tried to convert our Agrarian Bengali outcaste Refugges into TEA GARDEN Coolies. He continued the fight in ranaghta Coopers Camp and entire bengal until he was sent to Orissa, in CHARBETIA Refugee camp near Cuttak. He was once agian the leader of all agitation and was dumped into the Jungles of Nainital Terai, famous to be linked with GIM CORBETT in 1954. He led the Bengali refugees in a strong movement for rehabilitation in 1956 before my birth. My Village Basantipur was established after that movement where I was Born and my mother Basanti Devi never left the village, inhibited by my father`s lifelong comrades!
In 1958, My father and his comrades led the famous DHIMRI BLOCK peasant`s insurrection inspired by TELENGANA Uprising! They not only faced unprecedented STATE and MILITARY Repression, but they had to bear with the Betrayal by the COMMUNIST PARTY OF INDIA undivided and led by Comrade PC Joshi, the Brahmin General secretary.
He went to Riot Torn Assam to stand with his people in 1960 and was ousted from the party. I was growing up. He would take me with him in every local tour however important or tedious or dangereous. He wanted to train me in Mobilising Affairs! I miserably failed as I tended to be much more Academic with systematic education. I was studious but he studied life. He was involved with the social fabrics. I saw him to interact with the common masses, all Black, Untouchable, indigenous castes and communities, minorities as well as the topmost Political leaders in India including all the Prime Ministers of India since pandit Jawahar lal Nehru. He dared to block Lucknow Charbagh RLY Station for more than two days while a Bengali chief Minister Sucheta Kriplani was in office asnd eventually who was pulled back due to the refugee movement. I also felt his hurt feelings while he used to visit Barabanki or Meerut during riots to stand with the minorities. But I never could realise how the SIKHS in Terai considered him as the Gandhi of Terai as I hated gandhi as well as Gandhians most. Since I was a Marxist since Schooldays, I never believed his version of Indigenous Indian history and read Ambedkar and Jogendra Nath manadal along with the history of subaltern social movement very late, yes, after the demise of my father.
Yes, my friend, we happen the poor fellows who never understand the social activism of our parents! Who never understand the Dreams of our Ancestors!
I never know whether BARRACK OBAM is enough Black for the DREAM of Martin Luther King. I never know whether he would be able to deal with the Zionist White HOUSE, PENTAGON, World Bank, IMF, WTO, UN, NASA ,GATT or CIA, but he has proved himself a Man who inspired the Black Untouchables, Indigenous, aboriginan communities and Minorities to believe that NOTHING IS IMPOSSIBLE and WE CAN! He made us believe that the DREAMS of our parents and anchestors are never dead. It is ALIVE and it is within our Heart. Just we have to feel it and activate our real Identity for Awakening, Education, Organisation and Movement for the CHANGE!
Latin American leaders expressed optimism Wednesday that Barack Obama's election to the presidency of the United States would lead to better relations.
Veneuzelan President Hugo Chavez says the election of "an African descendent" is historic.
1 of 2 "It is a message of hope," said Jorge Taiana, Argentina's minister of foreign affairs.
"A message of hope and evidence that a cycle in the world is closing, a cycle dominated by a neoliberal ideology and by a policy of unilateralism and imposition of its positions."
Bolivian President Evo Morales, who recently stopped cooperating with U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration agents working to stem the flow of cocaine northward, called Obama's triumph "historic."
"In the name of the government of Bolivia, I congratulate him," he said about Obama's victory.
"It is historic. My great desire is that the new government end the blockade of Cuba and withdraw its troops from other countries, and I hope that relations with the United States improve."
In Venezuela, the foreign ministry of the government of President Hugo Chavez congratulated Obama and called for the establishment of new relations between the two countries.
"The historic election of an African descendent to lead the most powerful nation in the world is the symptom that the change that has been gestating from the south of the Americas could be knocking at the doors of the United States," Chavez said, referring to the hemisphere's increased number of leftist governments.
The Colombian government, which has been the Bush administration's closest ally in Latin America, also congratulated Obama and reiterated its readiness to continue working on matters of mutual interest to strengthen ties between the two countries.
Brazilian Foreign Minister Celso Amorim indicated that, despite good relations with the United States, he hopes "that the change in government results in an easing in relations with Latin America, especially with Venezuela and Cuba."
Obama's election redraws America's electoral divide
CHICAGO, Illinois (CNN) -- Barack Obama did more than thump John McCain in the Electoral College tally; he also handily won the popular vote and redrew the great divide between red states and blue states.
Barack Obama addresses a crowd of more than 200,000 at Grant Park in Chicago, Illinois.
1 of 3 more photos » Riding a Democratic tide that bolstered the party's presence in both houses of Congress, Obama snared about 63 million votes to McCain's 55.8 million, according to totals early Wednesday.
According to exit polls, Obama crushed McCain among women voters (56 percent to 43 percent); voters under 30 (66 percent to 32 percent); African-American voters (95 percent to 4 percent); Latino voters (66 percent to 32 percent); first-time voters (68 percent to 31 percent); and voters making less than $100,000 a year (55 percent to 43 percent).
"I think this is the passing of an old order," CNN senior political analyst David Gergen said as the results rolled in Tuesday night and the outcome became increasingly evident. Read what analysts had to say about the victory »
"I think what we see ... is a new coalition, a new order emerging. It isn't quite there, but with Barack Obama, for the first time, it's won. It is the Latino vote we just heard about. It is the bigger black vote that came out. Very importantly, it's the youth vote, the 18-to-29-year-old," said the Harvard University professor and former presidential adviser. Watch Obama pay tribute to McCain »
Early voting totals in the East suggested things would go traditionally, with McCain taking most of the Southeast, Obama most of the Northeast.
But then things quickly changed, as the senator from Illinois struck -- first in Pennsylvania and then in the Midwest state of Ohio, states McCain had to win in his bid for the Oval Office. Obama then delivered an uppercut in Virginia, a state that had not voted for a Democratic president since 1964. See your state's county-by-county totals
Don't Miss
Read Obama's victory speech
Read McCain's speech
Audio Slide Show: Obama's speech
Democrats pick up Senate seats
House Republicans lose seats
Complete video coverage
As polls closed from East to West, Obama kept hammering McCain, as he snatched away Iowa, Colorado, New Mexico and Nevada -- states that had been in President Bush's column in 2004.
And Wednesday morning, Obama added Indiana to the list of states he'd turned from red to blue. Indiana hadn't voted for a Democrat since Lyndon Johnson in 1964.
(Missouri and North Carolina were still counting votes Wednesday, but it appeared one or two of them could become blue-state converts as well.)
With McCain on the ropes, an Obama victory in Florida sounded the death knell. What's next for Illinois and Delaware? »
When Indiana fell into Obama's column Wednesday morning, he had a 349-163 lead over his rival in electoral votes, with only 26 undecided.
As he claimed victory Tuesday night, Obama told supporters, "change has come to America."
"The road ahead will be long. Our climb will be steep. We may not get there in one year or even one term, but America -- I have never been more hopeful than I am tonight that we will get there. I promise you -- we as a people will get there," Obama said in Chicago before an estimated crowd of up to 240,000 people.
With Obama's win, he becomes the first African-American to win the White House.
McCain pledged Tuesday night to help Obama lead. Watch more on the balance of power »
"Today, I was a candidate for the highest office in the country I love so much, and tonight, I remain her servant," McCain said.
The senator from Arizona called Obama to congratulate him, and Obama told him that he was eager to sit down and talk about how the two of them can work together.
Obama will also be working with a heavily Democratic Congress. Democrats picked up Senate seats in New Hampshire, New Jersey, North Carolina and Virginia, among others. Read about the Senate races
But Obama pledged to work across party lines and listen to the 46 percent of voters who chose McCain.
"While the Democratic Party has won a great victory tonight, we do so with a measure of humility and determination to heal the divides that have held back our progress," Obama said.
"To those Americans whose support I have yet to earn -- I may not have won your vote, but I hear your voices, I need your help, and I will be your president, too," he said. Watch Obama tell voters "all things are possible" »
And he recited the words of Abraham Lincoln, the first Republican in White House, to call for unity.
"As Lincoln said to a nation far more divided than ours, 'We are not enemies, but friends ... though passion may have strained it must not break our bonds of affection,'" Obama said. Watch a discussion of what Obama should do first »
Supporters in Chicago cheering, "Yes, we can," were met with cries of "Yes, we did."
Bush also called Obama to offer his congratulations.
The president told Obama he was about to begin one of the great journeys of his life, and invited him to the White House as soon as it could be arranged, according to White House spokeswoman Dana Perino.
More than 1,000 people gathered outside the White House, chanting "Obama, Obama!"
Sen. Hillary Clinton, Obama's former rival for the Democratic nomination, said in a statement that "we are celebrating an historic victory for the American people." iReport.com: Share your Election Day reaction with CNN
"This was a long and hard fought campaign, but the result was well worth the wait. Together, under the leadership of President Barack Obama, Vice President Joe Biden and a Democratic Congress, we will chart a better course to build a new economy and rebuild our leadership in the world."
Sen. Edward Kennedy said Americans "spoke loud and clear" in electing Obama.
"They understood his vision of a fairer and more just America and embraced it. They heard his call for a new generation of Americans to participate in government and were inspired. They believed that change is possible and voted to be part of America's future," the Massachusetts Democrat said in a statement.
Voters expressed excitement and pride in their country after casting their ballots in the historic election. Poll workers reported high turnout across many parts of the country, and some voters waited hours to cast their ballots. Read about election problems
Tuesday marked the end of the longest presidential campaign season in U.S. history -- 21 months.
Obama, 47, will begin his transition to the White House. He will be sworn in as the 44th president on January 20.
http://edition.cnn.com/2008/POLITICS/11/05/election.president/index.html
We Shall Overcome
The black church has been at the forefront of black leadership and social protest in America. In fact, Abyssinian Baptist Church was founded out of protest.
Noah Adams traces the history of the civil rights song, "We Shall Overcome." It began as a folk work song, became a hymn, and then was used politically for the first time on the picket lines of the tobacco workers' strike in South Carolina in 1945. In the early 1960s, it became an inspirational force in the civil rights struggle. We hear from Pete Seeger, Guy and Candi Carawan of the Highlander Center, and Dr. Bernice Johnson-Reagon, one of the founding members of the Freedom Singers.
We Shall Overcome
Lyrics derived from Charles Tindley's gospel song "I'll Overcome Some Day" (1900), and opening and closing melody from the 19th-century spiritual "No More Auction Block for Me" (a song that dates to before the Civil War). According to Professor Donnell King of Pellissippi State Technical Community College (in Knoxville, Tenn.), "We Shall Overcome" was adapted from these gospel songs by "Guy Carawan, Candy Carawan, and a couple of other people associated with the Highlander Research and Education Center, currently located near Knoxville, Tennessee. I have in my possession copies of the lyrics that include a brief history of the song, and a notation that royalties from the song go to support the Highlander Center."
1.
We shall overcome
We shall overcome
We shall overcome some day
CHORUS:
Oh, deep in my heart
I do believe
We shall overcome some day
2.
We'll walk hand in hand
We'll walk hand in hand
We'll walk hand in hand some day
CHORUS
3.
We shall all be free
We shall all be free
We shall all be free some day
CHORUS
4.
We are not afraid
We are not afraid
We are not afraid some day
CHORUS
5.
We are not alone
We are not alone
We are not alone some day
CHORUS
6.
The whole wide world around
The whole wide world around
The whole wide world around some day
CHORUS
7.
We shall overcome
We shall overcome
We shall overcome some day
CHORUS
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
SOURCES:
Eileen Southern, The Music of Black Americans: A History, Second Edition (Norton, 1971): 546-47, 159-60.
The International Lyrics Server.
Donnell King, email message, 29 Nov. 1999.
Meanwhile, Indian Ruling Brahaminical Hegemony led by Superslave DR Manmohan Singh and Worldbank Chettiar Gangsters continue to FEED the Miney Machine our Blood, Flesh and Bones as we never understand the subversion, divide and rule game of Manusmriti based Brahminism, the other face of the APartheid COIN! Continuing the consultation process with India Inc, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh is likely to meet corporate veterans including Keshub Ma
hindra, N Vaghul and Ashok S Ganguly tomorrow to seek their views on the current crisis and also the steps that may be taken to neutralise the impact of the global meltdown on the country.
Singh has already met some captains of Indian industry earlier this week and assured them that the government will take steps to improve liquidity and promote growth.
The Prime Minister has now called a meeting of a smaller group comprising doyens of the Indian corporate world to discuss the current economic scenario in the backdrop of the financial crisis in the US and European countries.
Keshub Mahindra, who will be attending the meeting, is chairman of automobile major Mahindra and Mahindra and had served on various government committees including the Sachar Commission on Company Law and MRTP and Central Advisory Council of Industries.
Veteran banker N Vaghul, who has been associated with the financial sector for long years, is currently chairman of ICICI Bank.
ICI India Chairman Ashok Ganguly was chairman of the erstwhile Hindustan Lever and is currently a member of the Investment Commission.
Meanwhile, Chief Economic Adviser Arvind Virmani held a meeting with chief financial officers (CFOs) of various companies to take stock of the current credit crunch and work out steps to deal with the problem.
Singh, while addressing India Inc, had said: "We recognise that the situation is abnormal and we need to be constantly on the alert. The situation is being watched on a day-to-day basis and more steps will be taken if required."
On the other hand, Indian Ruling Class has to cheer for something! Bobby Jindal has to wait for another Five Years with enhanced hope due to the CHANGE!But Eighty Nine Percent NRIs voted for Barrack Obama despite intense Black hatred just to have a slice of the changing Future after the demise of Ambushed War Criminal BUSH, the mastermind of Global Corporate Zionist Mass Destruction! It has already began!Indian-American Sonal Shah, an eminent economist who heads Google’s philanthropic arm, has been appointed an advisory board member by US President-elect Barack Obama to assist his team in smooth transition of power. 40-year-old Shah is part of a panel comprising individuals with significant private and public sector experience who will offer their expertise in their respective fields to Obama’s transition team, US media reported on Thursday.
She along with other members of the advisory board will help the transition team headed by former White House chief of staff John Podesta, longtime Obama adviser Valerie Jarrett, and Pete Rouse, the President-elect’s Senate chief of staff.
Shah, who was named the ‘Person of the Year 2003’ by ‘India Abroad’ publication, currently works for Google.org on their Global Development team, where she is engaged in defining their global development strategy and promoting the firm’s philanthropy work.
Prior to joining Google, she was Vice President at Goldman, Sachs and Co. and developed and implemented its environmental strategy. She has also served as the Associate Director for Economic and National Security Policy at the Centre for American Progress, where she worked on trade, outsourcing and post-conflict reconstruction issues.
In the past, she also worked with the Department of Treasury on various economic issues and regions of the world.
Shah is the co-founder of the US-based non-profit organisation Indicorps which offers one-year fellowships for Indian-origin Americans to work on specific development projects in India.
Her father moved from Gujarat to New York in 1970 and she along with her sister and mother joined him in 1972. She also has a brother.
World stock markets tumbled on Thursday, following Wall Street lower as U.S. presidential election euphoria gave way to worries about the
global economy and company profits. Japan's Nikkei stock average retreated 6.5 percent to 8,899.14, and Hong Kong's Hang Seng Index lost 7.1 percent to 13,790.04. South Korea's benchmark Kospi index broke a five-session winning streak to dive 7.6 percent. Markets in Singapore, Australia and mainland China also dropped sharply.
European stocks got off to a weak start, with benchmarks in Germany, Britain and France down about 3 percent. The pullback was in line with weakness on Wall Street, where investor optimism surrounding the election of Democrat Barack Obama as president quickly evaporated in the face of gloomy economic news.
The U.S. service sector, the largest component of America's gross domestic product, contracted sharply in October as new orders and employment fell. Closer to home, a series of profit warnings from major companies such as Japan's Toyota Motor Corp. and Isuzu Motors Ltd. and Hong Kong carrier Cathay Pacific Airways Ltd. yanked the markets back to the reality of depressed economic conditions. After seeing some strong gains in recent days, many investors moved to take profits.
News results for Obama
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Obama's election recalls so much pain, so recent
NEW YORK (AP): At this astonishing moment, let us pause to reflect: Just 40 years ago, the kind of marriage that brought Barack Obama into the world _ one between a black man and a white woman _ was illegal in 16 states.
We have come such a long way, in so very little time.
Not all the way, of course. There is still racism in America, as we are reminded again and again _ most recently, during Obama's campaign itself (``I'm afraid if he wins, the blacks will take over,'' one woman told a camera crew at an Ohio rally for John McCain).
But there was a time when blacks had to defer to white drivers at intersections in some states; when by law, circuses in Louisiana had to maintain separate entrances and ticket offices for the races; when the Lonestar Restaurants Association of Dallas posted signs that read, ``No Dogs Negroes Mexicans.''
And it is all within living memory.
Segregation laws extended from the 19th century until the mid 1960s. It wasn't just the South; as recently as 1949, 29 states outlawed intermarriage. The toughest penalties _ 10 years in prison _ were levied in Indiana and the Dakotas.
And it wasn't just the state and local governments. Until 1948, the U.S. military was segregated. Until the last year of World War II, the U.S. Navy did not commission a single black officer. By the end of the war, there were just 58 black ensigns or lieutenants out of 160,000 black sailors.
Blatant discrimination was everywhere. In 1948, dancer Josephine Baker and her French husband went to 36 hotels in New York City before finding one where they could stay.
And racist violence was nearly as widespread. The Tuskegee Institute counted the lynchings: Between 1882 and 1964, 3,446 blacks were killed in 36 states.
But it was the South where the blood flowed freely, where 4-year-old Emmett Till was beaten beyond recognition because he whistled at a white woman in 1955, where Sgt. Isaac Woodard, returning from the war in 1946, was arrested by a police chief for disrespecting a bus driver _ and then was blinded by a blackjack's blows. The chief was acquitted in 28 minutes.
It was the South that perfected myriad ways to bar blacks from voting. Intimidation usually worked: The best way to keep a black person from voting _ and here, Theodore Bilbo used an infinitely more offensive word for black person _ was ``to see him the night before election.'' Bilbo parlayed such tactics into eight years as Mississippi's governor and 12 years in the U.S. Senate, ending in 1947.
If that didn't succeed, whites-only primaries, poll taxes and literacy tests did the trick _ the last requiring would-be voters to recite the state or national constitutions from memory, or translate nonsensical Latin phrases like ``Itar, E. Quar Tum Enteria Ventricular'' (whites were never asked such questions).
It worked for a long while. In 1960, only 22,000 Mississippi blacks were registered to vote out of a population of 915,743. Then came the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and, by 1966, 175,000 Mississippi blacks were registered. By 2008, it was believed that blacks were as likely to be registered voters as whites.
It wasn't enough to turn that red state blue on Tuesday. But across the country, blacks whose parents and grandparents were once denied the franchise went to the polls in enormous numbers.
And overwhelmingly, they voted for the first black president of the United States.
Obama begins assembling team
WASHINGTON (AP): President-elect Barack Obama barely had time to savour his victory before he began filling out his new administration and getting a sobering look at some of the daunting problems he will inherit when he takes office in just 10 weeks.
As president-elect, Obama begins receiving highly classified briefings from top intelligence officials on Thursday.
Already, Russia was threatening to put missiles alongside U.S.-ally Poland if President George W. Bush's plan for a missile defence shield in Europe is not repealed. In Afghanistan, U.S.-backed President Hamid Karzai demanded that Obama ``put an end to civilian casualties'' by changing U.S. tactics to avoid airstrikes in the hunt for militants.
Obama on Tuesday night made history by being elected the first black U.S. president. But times are bleak: the country is in the grips of its worst economic crisis since the Great Depression of the 1930s and is fighting wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Emanuel as new White House chief of staff?
Obama got a quick start with the transition Wednesday, calling on Rep. Rahm Emanuel, a fellow Illinois politician, to serve as White House chief of staff.
While several Democrats confirmed that Emanuel had been offered the job, it was not clear he had accepted. But rejection would amount to an unlikely public snub of the new president-elect swept toward power in an electoral college landslide.
Obama's staff said he would address the media by the end of the week, but Cabinet announcements were not planned that soon.
With hundreds of jobs to fill before his Jan. 20 inauguration, Obama and his transition team confronted a formidable task complicated by his anti-lobbyist campaign rhetoric.
The official campaign Web Site said no political appointees would be permitted to work on ``regulations or contracts directly and substantially related to their prior employer for two years. And no political appointee will be able to lobby the executive branch after leaving government service during the remainder of the administration.''
Because they often have prior experience in government or politics, lobbyists have routinely filled out the list of potential appointees for past presidents of both parties.
In offering the post of White House chief of staff to Emanuel, Obama turned to a fellow Chicago politician with a far different style from his own, a man known for his bluntness as well as his single-minded determination.
Emanuel was a political and policy aide in Bill Clinton's White House. Leaving that, he turned to investment banking, then won a Chicago-area House seat six years ago. In Congress, he moved quickly into the Democratic leadership. As chairman of the Democratic campaign committee in 2006, he played an instrumental role in restoring his party to power after 12 years in the minority.
Emanuel maintained neutrality during the long primary battle between Obama and Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, not surprising given his long-standing ties to the former first lady and his Illinois connections with Obama.
Cabinet appointments
The day after the election there already was jockeying for Cabinet appointments.
Several Democrats said Sen. John Kerry of Massachusetts, who won a new six-year term on Tuesday, was angling for secretary of state. They spoke on condition of anonymity, saying they were not authorized to discuss any private conversations.
Kerry's spokeswoman, Brigid O'Rourke, disputed the reports.
In light of the financial crisis, Obama is expected to quickly name members of his economic team. Former Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers, who served in the Clinton administration, and Timothy Geithner, president of the New York Federal Reserve Bank, are among the names being mentioned for Treasury secretary.
Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson has pledged to work with Obama to ensure a smooth transition. He has already set up desks and phone lines at the department where Obama's incoming Treasury team can work between now and the inauguration.
Obama's transition team is headed by John Podesta, who served as chief of staff under former President Bill Clinton; Pete Rouse, who has been Obama's chief of staff in the Senate, and Valerie Jarrett, a friend of the president-elect and campaign adviser.
Several Democrats described a sprawling operation well under way. Officials had kept deliberations under wraps to avoid the appearance of overconfidence before the election.
They said the group was stocked with longtime associates of Obama, as well as veterans of Clinton's White House.
In addition to the many decisions he faces in getting the Obama administration up and running, he has personal decisions to make, too. Such as when to move his family to Washington and where his 10- and 7-year-old daughters will go to school.
SBI cuts PLR by 0.75 per cent, more banks to follow suit
Loans from premier public sector lender, State Bank of India, will be cheaper with the bank deciding to cut its Prime Lending Rate (PLR) by 0.75 per cent from Monday. Accordingly SBI's PLR will stand reduced to 13 per cent from the present 13.75 per cent, bank's Chairman O P Bhatt said on Thursday.
SBI being the largest lender, more banks are expected to follow suit by this week-end.
Several public sector banks such as Punjab National Bank, Union Bank, UCO Bank and Syndicate Bank, have already effected a cut in their PLRs.
On Tuesday, Finance Minister P Chidambaram met heads of PSU banks following which bankers had promised to cut their lending rates by up to 0.75 per cent.
On Wednesday, Finance Secretary Arun Ramanathan also got assurance from private sector and foreign banks that they would consider an interest rate cut in a fortnight.
The earlier hardening
Will US have its first woman SG, that's too an Indian?
India-born Preeta Bansal, a Harvard-educated lawyer who was part of Barack Obama's dazzling team of advisers during his election campaign, is being seen as a potential candidate for the office of the Solicitor General, a post yet to be filled by a woman in US.
42-year-old Bansal, who has advised the President-elect on foreign policy and judiciary matters, is among possible appointees to the post, 'The Am Law Daily' reported citing some unnamed advisers of the Obama campaign.
"The Solicitor General is the only position where the statute requires that the officer be learned in the law," it quoted O'Melveny and Myers's Walter Dellinger as saying.
Bansal, a product of Harvard Law School and a partner at the international law firm of Skadden Arps, has earlier served as the New York state Solicitor General.
Dellinger said that for the post, experience as a state Solicitor General would be valuable, as would be a record of advocacy before the court, the report said.
Morrison and Foerster partner Beth Brinkmann and Harvard Law school dean and professor Elena Kagan's names have also been attached to the post, which has never been filled by a woman, the report in the daily's online edition said.
Other possibilities, according to 'Legal Times', include Stanford Law School professors Kathleen Sullivan and Pamela Karlan, as well as MetLife litigation counsel Teresa Wynn Roseborough.
Bansal, a member of what an Obama lawyer playfully calls the 'Harvard Law School mafia', was part of Bill Clinton's White House and Justice Department in 1993-96. She was also the first Indian-American to head the US Commission on International Religious Freedom.
Taliban asks Obama to end war in Afghanistan
Islamabad (PTI): Hoping that a new era of peace will dawn with the election of Barack Obama as the US President, the Taliban has asked the President-elect to change his country's policies towards it and end the war in Afghanistan.
Reacting to Obama's victory in the American polls, top Taliban spokesman Qari Muhammad Yousaf Ahmadi told reporters: "We want to tell the world and the West to pull out their troops from Afghanistan as the (party of US President George W Bush) has lost the race because of their flawed polices."
Another Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid said it would be "unwise" if Obama tried to solve the Afghan problem militarily. He said it would be "wrong thinking" if Obama tried to increase US forces in Afghanistan to "make Afghans slaves".
Mujahid pointed out that the Russians too tried to suppress Afghans by deploying thousands of soldiers but could not succeed.
"We are hopeful that Obama will withdraw forces from Afghanistan. The US should try to solve its financial crisis instead of keeping troops in Afghanistan," he said.
Ahmadi said the new President should bring an end to fighting and begin a new era of peace in the world. "The US President should end the continuing era of war and begin a new era of peace," he said.
Asked whether he thought Obama would pull out troops, Ahmadi said: "We do not have much expectations. But despite that we will see. If Obama sends more troops to the war-ravaged country, jehad and resistance will be continued."
Ahmadi said there was neither joy nor sorrow in the Taliban ranks over the election of Obama.
Obama should respect the mandate from the public and spend the taxpayers' money on social welfare and development rather than weapons and war, Pakistani Taliban spokesman Muslim Khan said.
Rice off to Mideast as peace deadline looms
Washington (AP): Fighting irrelevance and a ticking clock, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice embarks on yet another Middle East peacemaking trip, hoping to secure fragile Israeli-Palestinian negotiations and leave a viable process for the incoming Obama administration.
With just 77 days left in office, Rice will be making her eighth trip yesterday to Israel and the Palestinian territories since the parties set a year-end goal of reaching a peace deal at last November's US-sponsored peace conference. She will also visit Egypt and Jordan to shore up Arab support for the talks.
Meeting the target date for an agreement is now highly unlikely, especially with political uncertainty in Israel and the lame duck Bush administration's waning influence, but Rice intends to press the two sides to carry on and, if possible, come up with an outline of how they can move ahead after Jan 20.
"We're going to try to put this process in the best possible place going forward so that whomever comes next can formulate their policies, take a look at the process, and possibly use it, take it further," State Department spokesman Sean McCormack told reporters.
"Our focus is going to be on moving the process forward as far as it can be moved forward in a responsible way, while preserving the process," he said. "That has great value."
The Israeli-Palestinian situation is one of several Middle East trouble spots that the Bush administration will bequeath to President-elect Barack Obama. The war in Iraq, Iran's nuclear program and troubles with Syria are among the most troublesome.
Majority in Pakistan 'Obamaistic'
Islamabad (PTI): Despite Barack Hussain Obama's resolve that he would send US troops to Pakistan to hunt down terrorists, citizens here are revelling in the fact that America's President-elect has a Pakistani link that dates back to 1981 and more so because his middle name suggests he is a 'Muslim'.
Obama's Pakistan connection has been widely speculated about in the local and international media since his remark last year that if elected as President, he may send troops to Pakistan to hunt down terrorists. Obama is believed to have visited Pakistan in 1981.
"Mr Obama visited Pakistan in 1981, on the way back from Indonesia, where his mother and half-sister, Maya Soetoro-Ng, were living. He spent about three weeks there.. staying in Karachi with the family of a college friend, Mohammed Hasan Chandoo but also traveling to Hyderabad, in India," a report in the New York Times quoted his campaign manager as saying.
Interest in the 47-year-old first black President of US rose in Pakistan after reports said Obama's mother Ann Dunham had spent five years in the country. Dunham, who died in 1995, was in Pakistan between 1987 and 1992. She was hired as a consultant by the Asian Development Bank and travelled often from Lahore to Gujranwala.
"I have a dream that the damage wrought in the US and other countries will be overturned in the next four years to a great extent. You are black. You are white. Your father is from Kenya. Your mother is from Kansas. You have seen Muslim. You have seen Christian," wrote Soniah Kamal in an e-magazine.
"They called you terrorist because once you crossed streets with a domestic terrorist. They called you socialist because you care about all and not just an elite few. They called you Muslim as if this is a four letter word," she added.
Sensex closes below 10,000 mark
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Reuters
Posted: Nov 06, 2008 at 1624 hrs IST
New Delhi, November 6: The benchmark indices fell 3.8 per cent on Thursday to its lowest close in a week, caught in a broad global sell-off on fears of a deep US recession, while higher-than-expected inflation data added to the pain late on.
Heavyweights Reliance Industries and Infosys Technologies lost heavily, shedding 7.7 per cent and 5.5 per cent respectively, and were major contributors to the losses in the main index.
Top vehicle maker Tata Motors fell 12.2 per cent to 159.15 rupees after it said it was shutting down its commercial vehicle plant in eastern India for three days to avoid a build-up of inventory.
Tata Steel, the world's sixth-largest steel maker fell the most among frontliners. The stock closed 13.7 per cent lower, while aluminium maker Sterlite Industries declined 11.3 per cent on concerns that a global slowdown would lower demand for metals.
"It's going to be pendulum-like trading for sometime," said K.K. Mital, head of portfolio management services at Globe Capital. "Global concerns still remain. Every day we are hearing this guy is cutting production, that guy is cutting jobs ... so people are booking profits."
The 30-share BSE index closed down 3.81 per cent, or 385.79 points, at 9,734.22, its lowest close since Oct. 29.
It had shed as much as 4.8 per cent but in late afternoon trade suddenly trimmed losses to be down just 0.1 per cent at one point on expectations that annual inflation data would show a substantial fall from a week earlier.
But data released 30 minutes before the market closed showed wholesale price inflation rose 10.72 per cent in the 12 months to Oct. 25, marginally above the previous week's annual rise of 10.68 per cent and outpacing market expectations for around 10.5 per cent.
The main index had fallen 4.81 per cent on Wednesday to 10,120.01, snapping a five-day winning run after a surge that had lifted the market more than 40 per cent off a three-year low hit on Oct. 27. It is down about 52 per cent in 2008.
"When you are in the grip of full-fledged bear market, you see sharp rallies. But that does not mean that things have turned around," said Daljeet Kohli, head of research at Emkay Global Financial.
"Markets work on both fundamentals and sentiments. Sentiments have improved after all the measures taken, but fundamentals have not changed," he said referring to liquidity-boosting measures taken by central banks in many countries.
Citigroup said corporate India had posted its lowest earnings growth in four years in the September quarter, as high interest rates and input costs hit demand, and Kohli said the current quarter could be even worse as firms could not raise prices.
Data showed foreign funds were net sellers of $23 million of stocks on Tuesday, in a market that had risen 2.8 per cent, after buying nearly $500 million worth shares in the previous two sessions.
All but six stocks in the main index closed in red, while in the broader market there were almost two losers for every one gainer on normal volume of 319 million shares.
The 50-share NSE index closed 3.42 per cent down at 2,892.65.
Terror-funding scanner on two Indian expats
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Express News Service
Posted: Nov 06, 2008 at 0909 hrs IST
Both NRIs had bank accounts in the Gulf and these were being used to channel funds to IM members in Mumbai, the police said. The police have frozen both accounts and issued lookout notices against the two NRIs but refused to name them.
The crime branch said the NRIs opened accounts in a nationalised bank about a decade ago, and absconding IM operative Riyaz Bhatkal kept withdrawing small amounts regularly in the city for terror operations.
The police have identified six other accounts which were allegedly used by IM operatives.
“Of the eight accounts under our scanner, two are in the name of NRIs in the Gulf. These two accounts were opened in a nationalised bank in the late ‘90s, and small amounts of money were deposited and withdrawn from them regularly by Bhatkal in the city. The amounts ranged from Rs 5,000 to Rs 50,000 at a time. A total of Rs 27 lakh was in the accounts when we froze both on October 4; we issued the lookout notices a day later,” said Joint Commissioner of Police (Crime) Rakesh Maria.
The Crime Branch has also seized a cheque for Rs 1 lakh in the name of Bhatkal from one of the arrested.
“Riyaz Bhatkal had been given signed blank cheques for the purpose of withdrawing money from both accounts whenever he wanted. We have seized one such cheque for Rs 1 lakh issued in Bhatkal’s name from one of the other arrested accused,” said Maria.
According to crime branch officials, they have so far tracked transactions dating back till 2006 from the two accounts, and investigations are on with regard to matching dates of withdrawals from the accounts to the dates of different blasts.
http://www.expressindia.com/latest-news/Terrorfunding-scanner-on-two-Indian-expats/381946/
We Shall Overcome
History of an American Folk Song
By Kim Ruehl, About.com
See More About:civil rights songspete seegerjoan baezafrican-american folk music"We Shall Overcome" became particularly popular in the 1960s, during the Civil Rights movement in America, after Pete Seeger picked it up, adapted it, and taught it to his audiences to sing. However, the song had a half century (or so) to evovle and expand its meaning before Seeger and Joan Baez popularized it during the folk revival.
The melody dates back to before the Civil War, from a song called "No More Auction Block For Me." Originally, the lyrics were "I'll overcome someday," which dates back to a turn-of-the-20th-century song by the Reverend Charles Tindley of Philadelphia.
The song didn't appear on a large scale until 1946, during a labor strike at the American Tobacco Company. One of the women striking that day – Lucille Simmons – began singing slowly, "Deep in my heart I do believe we'll overcome some day."
Zilphia Horton, whose husband was the co-founder of the Highlander Folk School (aka Highlander Research and Education Center), learned the song from Simmons and, a year later, taught it to folk singer Pete Seeger.
The adaptation of the song to its current lyric is often attributed to Pete Seeger, but there is some debate over whether Seeger changed the lyric to "We Shall Overcome," or whether this was the doing of others at the Highlander School. At any rate, Seeger taught the song to other folksingers and, a decade later (1959), the song was brought back to the Highlander School.
Since then, "We Shall Overcome" has spread from folksinger to folksinger, through protests and peace rallies, song circles, and open mics. It was recorded by Joan Baez in 1963 and became a major anthem of the Civil Rights movement.
Full lyrics of "We Shall Overcome"
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http://folkmusic.about.com/od/folksongs/qt/WeShallOvercome.htm
“And We Shall Overcome”: President Lyndon B. Johnson’s Special Message to Congress
Although the 15th Amendment, ratified in 1870, guaranteed citizens the right to vote regardless of race, by 1957 only 20 percent of eligible African Americans voted, due in part to intimidation and discriminatory state requirements such as poll taxes and literacy tests. Despite the passage of the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964, which outlawed discrimination in employment and public accommodations based on race, religion, national origin, or sex, efforts to register African Americans as voters in the South were stymied. In 1965, following the murder of a voting rights activist by an Alabama sheriff’s deputy and the subsequent attack by state troopers on a massive protest march in Selma, Alabama, President Lyndon B. Johnson pressed Congress in the following speech to pass a voting rights bill with teeth. As Majority Leader of the Senate, Johnson had helped weaken the 1957 Civil Rights Act. When he assumed the presidency following the assassination of John F. Kennedy in November 1963, however, Johnson called on Americans “to eliminate from this nation every trace of discrimination and oppression that is based upon race or color,” and in the following speech adopted the “We Shall Overcome” slogan of civil rights activists. His rhetoric and subsequent efforts broke with past presidential precedents of opposition to or lukewarm support for strong civil rights legislation. Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act of 1965 into law on August 6.
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[As delivered in person before a joint session at 9:02 p.m.]
Mr. Speaker, Mr. President, Members of the Congress:
I speak tonight for the dignity of man and the destiny of democracy.
I urge every member of both parties, Americans of all religions and of all colors, from every section of this country, to join me in that cause.
At times history and fate meet at a single time in a single place to shape a turning point in man’s unending search for freedom. So it was at Lexington and Concord. So it was a century ago at Appomattox. So it was last week in Selma, Alabama.
There, long-suffering men and women peacefully protested the denial of their rights as Americans. Many were brutally assaulted. One good man, a man of God, was killed.
There is no cause for pride in what has happened in Selma. There is no cause for self-satisfaction in the long denial of equal rights of millions of Americans. But there is cause for hope and for faith in our democracy in what is happening here tonight.
For the cries of pain and the hymns and protests of oppressed people have summoned into convocation all the majesty of this great Government—the Government of the greatest Nation on earth.
Our mission is at once the oldest and the most basic of this country: to right wrong, to do justice, to serve man.
In our time we have come to live with moments of great crisis. Our lives have been marked with debate about great issues; issues of war and peace, issues of prosperity and depression. But rarely in any time does an issue lay bare the secret heart of America itself. Rarely are we met with a challenge, not to our growth or abundance, our welfare or our security, but rather to the values and the purposes and the meaning of our beloved Nation.
The issue of equal rights for American Negroes is such an issue. And should we defeat every enemy, should we double our wealth and conquer the stars, and still be unequal to this issue, then we will have failed as a people and as a nation.
For with a country as with a person, “What is a man profited, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?”
There is no Negro problem. There is no Southern problem. There is no Northern problem. There is only an American problem. And we are met here tonight as Americans—not as Democrats or Republicans—we are met here as Americans to solve that problem.
This was the first nation in the history of the world to be founded with a purpose. The great phrases of that purpose still sound in every American heart, North and South: “All men are created equal”—“government by consent of the governed”—“give me liberty or give me death.” Well, those are not just clever words, or those are not just empty theories. In their name Americans have fought and died for two centuries, and tonight around the world they stand there as guardians of our liberty, risking their lives.
Those words are a promise to every citizen that he shall share in the dignity of man. This dignity cannot be found in a man’s possessions; it cannot be found in his power, or in his position. It really rests on his right to be treated as a man equal in opportunity to all others. It says that he shall share in freedom, he shall choose his leaders, educate his children, and provide for his family according to his ability and his merits as a human being.
To apply any other test—to deny a man his hopes because of his color or race, his religion or the place of his birth—is not only to do injustice, it is to deny America and to dishonor the dead who gave their lives for American freedom.
THE RIGHT TO VOTE
Our fathers believed that if this noble view of the rights of man was to flourish, it must be rooted in democracy. The most basic right of all was the right to choose your own leaders. The history of this country, in large measure, is the history of the expansion of that right to all of our people.
Many of the issues of civil rights are very complex and most difficult. But about this there can and should be no argument. Every American citizen must have an equal right to vote. There is no reason which can excuse the denial of that right. There is no duty which weighs more heavily on us than the duty we have to ensure that right.
Yet the harsh fact is that in many places in this country men and women are kept from voting simply because they are Negroes.
Every device of which human ingenuity is capable has been used to deny this right. The Negro citizen may go to register only to be told that the day is wrong, or the hour is late, or the official in charge is absent. And if he persists, and if he manages to present himself to the registrar, he may be disqualified because he did not spell out his middle name or because he abbreviated a word on the application.
And if he manages to fill out an application he is given a test. The registrar is the sole judge of whether he passes this test. He may be asked to recite the entire Constitution, or explain the most complex provisions of State law. And even a college degree cannot be used to prove that he can read and write.
For the fact is that the only way to pass these barriers is to show a white skin.
Experience has clearly shown that the existing process of law cannot overcome systematic and ingenious discrimination. No law that we now have on the books—and I have helped to put three of them there—can ensure the right to vote when local officials are determined to deny it.
In such a case our duty must be clear to all of us. The Constitution says that no person shall be kept from voting because of his race or his color. We have all sworn an oath before God to support and to defend that Constitution. We must now act in obedience to that oath.
GUARANTEEING THE RIGHT TO VOTE
Wednesday I will send to Congress a law designed to eliminate illegal barriers to the right to vote.
The broad principles of that bill will be in the hands of the Democratic and Republican leaders tomorrow. After they have reviewed it, it will come here formally as a bill. I am grateful for this opportunity to come here tonight at the invitation of the leadership to reason with my friends, to give them my views, and to visit with my former colleagues.
I have had prepared a more comprehensive analysis of the legislation which I had intended to transmit to the clerk tomorrow but which I will submit to the clerks tonight. But I want to really discuss with you now briefly the main proposals of this legislation.
This bill will strike down restrictions to voting in all elections—Federal, State, and local—which have been used to deny Negroes the right to vote.
This bill will establish a simple, uniform standard which cannot be used, however ingenious the effort, to flout our Constitution.
It will provide for citizens to be registered by officials of the United States Government if the State officials refuse to register them.
It will eliminate tedious, unnecessary lawsuits which delay the right to vote.
Finally, this legislation will ensure that properly registered individuals are not prohibited from voting.
I will welcome the suggestions from all of the Members of Congress—I have no doubt that I will get some—on ways and means to strengthen this law and to make it effective. But experience has plainly shown that this is the only path to carry out the command of the Constitution.
To those who seek to avoid action by their National Government in their own communities; who want to and who seek to maintain purely local control over elections, the answer is simple:
Open your polling places to all your people.
Allow men and women to register and vote whatever the color of their skin.
Extend the rights of citizenship to every citizen of this land.
THE NEED FOR ACTION
There is no constitutional issue here. The command of the Constitution is plain.
There is no moral issue. It is wrong—deadly wrong—to deny any of your fellow Americans the right to vote in this country.
There is no issue of States rights or national rights. There is only the struggle for human rights.
I have not the slightest doubt what will be your answer.
The last time a President sent a civil rights bill to the Congress it contained a provision to protect voting rights in Federal elections. That civil rights bill was passed after 8 long months of debate. And when that bill came to my desk from the Congress for my signature, the heart of the voting provision had been eliminated.
This time, on this issue, there must be no delay, no hesitation and no compromise with our purpose.
We cannot, we must not, refuse to protect the right of every American to vote in every election that he may desire to participate in. And we ought not and we cannot and we must not wait another 8 months before we get a bill. We have already waited a hundred years and more, and the time for waiting is gone.
So I ask you to join me in working long hours—nights and weekends, if necessary—to pass this bill. And I don’t make that request lightly. For from the window where I sit with the problems of our country I recognize that outside this chamber is the outraged conscience of a nation, the grave concern of many nations, and the harsh judgment of history on our acts.
WE SHALL OVERCOME
But even if we pass this bill, the battle will not be over. What happened in Selma is part of a far larger movement which reaches into every section and State of America. It is the effort of American Negroes to secure for themselves the full blessings of American life.
Their cause must be our cause too. Because it is not just Negroes, but really it is all of us, who must overcome the crippling legacy of bigotry and injustice.
And we shall overcome.
As a man whose roots go deeply into Southern soil I know how agonizing racial feelings are. I know how difficult it is to reshape the attitudes and the structure of our society.
But a century has passed, more than a hundred years, since the Negro was freed. And he is not fully free tonight.
It was more than a hundred years ago that Abraham Lincoln, a great President of another party, signed the Emancipation Proclamation, but emancipation is a proclamation and not a fact.
A century has passed, more than a hundred years, since equality was promised. And yet the Negro is not equal.
A century has passed since the day of promise. And the promise is unkept.
The time of justice has now come. I tell you that I believe sincerely that no force can hold it back. It is right in the eyes of man and God that it should come. And when it does, I think that day will brighten the lives of every American.
For Negroes are not the only victims. How many white children have gone uneducated, how many white families have lived in stark poverty, how many white lives have been scarred by fear, because we have wasted our energy and our substance to maintain the barriers of hatred and terror?
So I say to all of you here, and to all in the Nation tonight, that those who appeal to you to hold on to the past do so at the cost of denying you your future.
This great, rich, restless country can offer opportunity and education and hope to all: black and white, North and South, sharecropper and city dweller. These are the enemies: poverty, ignorance, disease. They are the enemies and not our fellow man, not our neighbor. And these enemies too, poverty, disease and ignorance, we shall overcome.
AN AMERICAN PROBLEM
Now let none of us in any sections look with prideful righteousness on the troubles in another section, or on the problems of our neighbors. There is really no part of America where the promise of equality has been fully kept. In Buffalo as well as in Birmingham, in Philadelphia as well as in Selma, Americans are struggling for the fruits of freedom.
This is one Nation. What happens in Selma or in Cincinnati is a matter of legitimate concern to every American. But let each of us look within our own hearts and our own communities, and let each of us put our shoulder to the wheel to root out injustice wherever it exists.
As we meet here in this peaceful, historic chamber tonight, men from the South, some of whom were at Iwo Jima, men from the North who have carried Old Glory to far corners of the world and brought it back without a stain on it, men from the East and from the West, are all fighting together without regard to religion, or color, or region, in Viet-Nam. Men from every region fought for us across the world 20 years ago.
And in these common dangers and these common sacrifices the South made its contribution of honor and gallantry no less than any other region of the great Republic—and in some instances, a great many of them, more.
And I have not the slightest doubt that good men from everywhere in this country, from the Great Lakes to the Gulf of Mexico, from the Golden Gate to the harbors along the Atlantic, will rally together now in this cause to vindicate the freedom of all Americans. For all of us owe this duty; and I believe that all of us will respond to it.
Your President makes that request of every American.
PROGRESS THROUGH THE DEMOCRATIC PROCESS
The real hero of this struggle is the American Negro. His actions and protests, his courage to risk safety and even to risk his life, have awakened the conscience of this Nation. His demonstrations have been designed to call attention to injustice, designed to provoke change, designed to stir reform.
He has called upon us to make good the promise of America. And who among us can say that we would have made the same progress were it not for his persistent bravery, and his faith in American democracy.
For at the real heart of battle for equality is a deep-seated belief in the democratic process. Equality depends not on the force of arms or tear gas but upon the force of moral right; not on recourse to violence but on respect for law and order.
There have been many pressures upon your President and there will be others as the days come and go. But I pledge you tonight that we intend to fight this battle where it should be fought: in the courts, and in the Congress, and in the hearts of men.
We must preserve the right of free speech and the right of free assembly. But the right of free speech does not carry with it, as has been said, the right to holler fire in a crowded theater. We must preserve the right to free assembly, but free assembly does not carry with it the right to block public thoroughfares to traffic.
We do have a right to protest, and a right to march under conditions that do not infringe the constitutional rights of our neighbors. And I intend to protect all those rights as long as I am permitted to serve in this office.
We will guard against violence, knowing it strikes from our hands the very weapons which we seek—progress, obedience to law, and belief in American values.
In Selma as elsewhere we seek and pray for peace. We seek order. We seek unity. But we will not accept the peace of stifled rights, or the order imposed by fear, or the unity that stifles protest. For peace cannot be purchased at the cost of liberty.
In Selma tonight, as in every—and we had a good day there—as in every city, we are working for just and peaceful settlement. We must all remember that after this speech I am making tonight, after the police and the FBI and the Marshals have all gone, and after you have promptly passed this bill, the people of Selma and the other cities of the Nation must still live and work together. And when the attention of the Nation has gone elsewhere they must try to heal the wounds and to build a new community.
This cannot be easily done on a battleground of violence, as the history of the South itself shows. It is in recognition of this that men of both races have shown such an outstandingly impressive responsibility in recent days—last Tuesday, again today.
RIGHTS MUST BE OPPORTUNITIES
The bill that I am presenting to you will be known as a civil rights bill. But, in a larger sense, most of the program I am recommending is a civil rights program. Its object is to open the city of hope to all people of all races.
Because all Americans just must have the right to vote. And we are going to give them that right.
All Americans must have the privileges of citizenship regardless of race. And they are going to have those privileges of citizenship regardless of race.
But I would like to caution you and remind you that to exercise these privileges takes much more than just legal right. It requires a trained mind and a healthy body. It requires a decent home, and the chance to find a job, and the opportunity to escape from the clutches of poverty.
Of course, people cannot contribute to the Nation if they are never taught to read or write, if their bodies are stunted from hunger, if their sickness goes untended, if their life is spent in hopeless poverty just drawing a welfare check.
So we want to open the gates to opportunity. But we are also going to give all our people, black and white, the help that they need to walk through those gates.
THE PURPOSE OF THIS GOVERNMENT
My first job after college was as a teacher in Cotulla, Texas, in a small Mexican-American school. Few of them could speak English, and I couldn’t speak much Spanish. My students were poor and they often came to class without breakfast, hungry. They knew even in their youth the pain of prejudice. They never seemed to know why people disliked them. But they knew it was so, because I saw it in their eyes. I often walked home late in the afternoon, after the classes were finished, wishing there was more that I could do. But all I knew was to teach them the little that I knew, hoping that it might help them against the hardships that lay ahead.
Somehow you never forget what poverty and hatred can do when you see its scars on the hopeful face of a young child.
I never thought then, in 1928, that I would be standing here in 1965. It never even occurred to me in my fondest dreams that I might have the chance to help the sons and daughters of those students and to help people like them all over this country.
But now I do have that chance—and I’ll let you in on a secret—I mean to use it. And I hope that you will use it with me.
This is the richest and most powerful country which ever occupied the globe. The might of past empires is little compared to ours. But I do not want to be the President who built empires, or sought grandeur, or extended dominion.
I want to be the President who educated young children to the wonders of their world. I want to be the President who helped to feed the hungry and to prepare them to be taxpayers instead of taxeaters.
I want to be the President who helped the poor to find their own way and who protected the right of every citizen to vote in every election.
I want to be the President who helped to end hatred among his fellow men and who promoted love among the people of all races and all regions and all parties.
I want to be the President who helped to end war among the brothers of this earth.
And so at the request of your beloved Speaker and the Senator from Montana; the majority leader, the Senator from Illinois; the minority leader, Mr. McCulloch, and other Members of both parties, I came here tonight—not as President Roosevelt came down one time in person to veto a bonus bill, not as President Truman came down one time to urge the passage of a railroad bill—but I came down here to ask you to share this task with me and to share it with the people that we both work for. I want this to be the Congress, Republicans and Democrats alike, which did all these things for all these people.
Beyond this great chamber, out yonder in 50 States, are the people that we serve. Who can tell what deep and unspoken hopes are in their hearts tonight as they sit there and listen. We all can guess, from our own lives, how difficult they often find their own pursuit of happiness, how many problems each little family has. They look most of all to themselves for their futures. But I think that they also look to each of us.
Above the pyramid on the great seal of the United States it says—in Latin—“God has favored our undertaking.”
God will not favor everything that we do. It is rather our duty to divine His will. But I cannot help believing that He truly understands and that He really favors the undertaking that we begin here tonight.
Source: National Archives and Records Administration, The Lyndon B. Johnson Library and Museum ( http://www.lbjlib.utexas.edu/johnson/archives.hom/speeches.hom/650315.htm )
We Shall Overcome
Peter Ling, Lecturer in American Studies at the University of Nottingham and the author of a forthcoming biography of Martin Luther King
Introduction
Nonviolence and Self-Defense
Nonviolent direct action and the 1960 watershed
Economic Coercion as an aspect of nonviolent direct action
Nonviolence as a pragmatic position for a minority group
Alternatives to nonviolence
The psychology and ethics of nonviolence
King’s Political Coalition of Conscience
Why did King’s nonviolence achieve no equivalent successes after 1965?
King’s Final Year: Did his Nonviolence Fail?
Martin Luther King is remembered today for his championing of the cause of non-violent direct action as a means of advancing the struggle for Civil Rights, but his views were not shared by all in the movement. This article attempts to set King's views into the context of the struggle, analyses his philosphy and considers what his lasting legacy to Civil Rights has been.The paper was first presented at the ASRC Annual Schools Conference Oct 31st 2001 on the topic of Martin Luther King, the Civil Rights Movement and Black Nationalism.
Introduction
Listen to a sound file of his "I have a dream" speech
Real Audio needed
“We Shall Overcome” was the anthem of the southern civil rights movement, and it captured its religious idealism. Almost as soon as the Montgomery Bus Boycott of 1955-56 catapulted him to fame, the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. was a major symbol of, and spokesman for, this aspect of the movement because of his championing of the philosophy and tactics of non-violence. Accordingly, I want to examine the role and practice of non-violence over the course of King’s career, which (as you all know) was tragically cut short by his assassination on 4 April 1968.
Nonviolence and Self-Defense At the time in 1960, the press sometimes referred to non-violence as “passive resistance,” and the sight of people not striking back when attacked tended to underline that word: “passive.” It was this perception of non-violence that made King’s approach so controversial inside the African American community. Figures such as Malcolm X vilified King for what they regarded as a demeaning denial of the basic human right to self-defence. In contrast to King’s rejection of violence, which won him praise among white liberals and the mainstream media, Malcolm’s advice that “If the Man puts a hand on you, - send him to the cemetery,” had been warmly applauded by appreciative black audiences. The violent resolution of conflict was deeply embedded in the American tradition and although African Americans had developed supplementary tactics of resistance during slavery, they generally shared with other Americans the expectation that a man of courage would fight back and that, by fighting back, you won your opponents’ respect.
This was certainly the view of Robert Williams, leader of a local National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) chapter in Monroe, North Carolina, who was suspended by national NAACP officials for organizing a paramilitary group to deter white attacks and by advocating armed self-defence. Williams had been in the US Air Force and in a published debate with King in1959, he spoke openly of how America had taught him to fight. We need to acknowledge that there were many such men in African American communities across the nation in 1960 and that they were probably more representative of black attitudes than King was. But we need also to recognize that the argument is essentially a false one. In his exchange with Williams, King had declared that not even Gandhi denied the right to self-defence, and had openly admitted that the kind of principled pacifism that refused any use of force was not going to attract a large following. At the same time, King insisted that if you chose to become involved in a non-violent demonstration, you agreed to control your actions and reactions during that protest. This kind of pragmatic use of non-violence was what Gandhi had called “the non-violence of the weak.”
Nonviolent direct action and the 1960 watershed I also chose this excerpt because the sit-in wave of 1960 represented a real watershed in terms of the use of non-violence. The Montgomery Bus Boycott drew on the repertoire of non-violence because it was an act of non-cooperation, but like later consumer boycotts that attracted relatively widespread community support, it was essentially a strategic withdrawal. In contrast, the sit-in was an act of engagement: you put yourself in harm’s way.
This helps to explain why many civil rights activists in 1960 disapproved of the term: passive resistance. They preferred to speak of “non-violent direct action,” with the emphasis equally on “direct action” to indicate that the key elements were the decision to act rather than to accept or accommodate, and the insistence that such action should be aimed directly at the instances or sites of oppression: e.g. segregated lunch counters. The rejected alternative here was not just violence, but the older generation’s tactics of lobbying and lawsuits, which had dominated the formal politics of resistance under the leadership of the NAACP. Civil rights groups had used non-violent direct action tactics before 1960, but after the widespread demonstrations of that year non-violent demonstrations could be said to set the tone.
Economic Coercion as an aspect of nonviolent direct action Of course, what the bus boycotts and sit-in demonstrations had in common was a calculated use of economic pressure. Since two-thirds of bus riders in Montgomery were African American, the bus company suffered enormous losses during the Boycott and became more eager to settle the dispute than were the city’s white politicians. Similarly, the sit-ins were often accompanied by a formal boycott of the downtown stores that refused to desegregate their lunch counters, including national boycotts in the case of department store chains such as Woolworth’s, and by a sometimes much larger decline in general business as shoppers avoided publicized “trouble-spots.” Such economic pressure was not a function of non-violence as a philosophy, however, and it is worth pointing out that white segregationists used economic intimidation as their principal means of disciplining anyone, black or white, who questioned the racial status quo. Nevertheless, King, like Gandhi before him, was very aware of the potential of economic pressure tactics throughout his career.
Nonviolence as a pragmatic position for a minority group The increasingly violent and excessive tactics of King’s white opponents in Montgomery had made him into a public champion of non-violence. In February 1956, a bomb had exploded at the King home, nearly killing his wife, Coretta, and baby daughter, Yolanda, yet King had calmed an angry mob of his followers, urging them to put away their guns. On one level, his non-violence was a tactical and pragmatic choice, which rested on the belief that the facts of demography and history made violence by African Americans (not much more than 10% of the US population in 1960) a very high-risk option, given the repeated examples of the white population responding to isolated instances, or even just the threat, of black violence, with extraordinary brutality.
In later protest campaigns, King and his SCLC lieutenants struggled to contain African American anger in part by stressing the firepower literally ranged against them. Thus, Andrew Young writes of how after the “Bloody Sunday” attack in Selma in March 1965, he talked to men who wanted to go outside and shoot it out with Sheriff Jim Clark’s deputies. You had to be specific, he explains, about what guns you had, and what guns they had, and how yours would hold up against high-velocity, repeat-action rifles. Similarly, earlier in the same campaign, King and James Bevel are said to have restrained local men who wanted to go to the aid of a black woman who was being beaten by Clark while being held to the ground by his men. If we intervene, Bevel warned, they’ll call us a mob and that’s all the excuse they need to kill us.
Alternatives to nonviolence Of course, others disagreed. King reportedly laughed when SCLC’s executive director Wyatt Walker told him of a rumoured encounter on a bus in Petersburg, Virginia. The story went that a white driver was complaining that black passengers were giving him a hard time when one of the stars of the local black college football team strolled over and lifted the white man off his feet with one hand. “Two things you need to know,” he allegedly said, “one, I can break your neck, and two, I ain’t one of Dr. King’s non-violent niggers!”
In the summer of 1963, Malcolm X repeatedly expressed the view that what had forced the Kennedy administration to intervene in the Birmingham confrontations was not King’s non-violent demonstrations, but the inter-racial violence that erupted in May. It was only when black men started “busting crackers’ heads,” Malcolm alleged, that the Kennedy administration suddenly found that it had the authority to act. This was consistent with Malcolm’s larger view not only that African Americans could deter white attacks by uniting and organizing in a militant fashion, but that there was a larger world community to which African Americans could turn. With strong Garveyite roots, Malcolm, in his final persona of Malik al-Shabazz, turned increasingly to this vision of a global, anti-colonial alliance.
Similarly, Robert Williams strongly argued that the realities of Cold War politics made it unthinkable that the federal government would stand aside and allow African Americans to be massacred, if the self-defence efforts of the latter provoked whites into a wholesale race war. This was a continuation of a well-established argument since the 1930s that had previously prompted civil rights groups to use the leverage of international public opinion to induce federal actions and concessions. Summed up in the1968 cry: “The whole world is watching”, it became a key axiom of protesters in the television era.
The psychology and ethics of nonviolence Perhaps the most contentious aspect of non-violence was its rationale and supposed effects in psychological terms. The motto of King’s SCLC was “To Redeem the Soul of America,” and this reflected not only the fact that it was primarily an organization of black churches, but also its commitment to orthodox Gandhian beliefs that non-violence could transform the oppressor. At times, King’s rhetorical defence of non-violence slipped into an interesting blend of a classic evangelical Christian scenario of renouncing one’s sins and a more recently developed psychoanalytical outlook that implied that confronting and admitting the wrongs of one’s past was a vital stage in the recovery process.
More persuasive in a secular sense was the claim that non-violent direct action intruded upon the process of reification, whereby it becomes easier to act unethically towards someone by blanking out their humanity and making them into something else. Essential to racism, reification not only facilitated oppression, it also psychologically damaged the oppressed person, who became prone to believing the negative stereotyping that accompanied racism. Defenders of non-violence argued that their technique simultaneously enabled them to affirm their moral dignity as human beings and forced their antagonists to acknowledge their humanity. Sit-in demonstrators, such as Franklin McCain in Greensboro, spoke of how they felt “cleansed” and empowered by the stand they took, and relished the shock they detected in white police officers, who were unsure how to respond.
As public encounters, non-violent demonstrations actually involve three separate groups of people: 1) the demonstrators, 2) the other actors such as store staff or police who are trying to end the demonstration, and 3) the usually much larger group of bystanders or spectators, especially when this includes those who “see” the encounter on television or in newspapers. This third group was especially important in the politics of non-violence since it was hoped that the spectacle of one-sided violence would sway their loyalties. As disengaged spectators, they might be psychologically more uncomfortable with the action taken against the demonstrators.
King’s Political Coalition of Conscience
The classic phase of King’s career - 1963-1965 - tends to be discussed in terms of the March on Washington speech, and the Birmingham and Selma campaigns, which mobilized a bipartisan political coalition in favour of federal legislation. King’s ability to induce segregationists to attack civil rights protesters on camera is usually deemed to be central to this success, especially when his lack of success in Albany in 1961-62 is contrasted with his subsequent campaign in Birmingham the following year. Extremely wary about the political costs of introducing a civil rights bill, President Kennedy was reportedly “sickened” by the sight of Bull Connor’s use of dogs and water cannon against young demonstrators in Birmingham. Worried too by the international reaction to such images, Kennedy eventually introduced a civil rights bill in the summer of 1963. One important factor in Lyndon Johnson’s eventual passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was Midwestern Republican support in Congress, much of it mobilized via church groups appalled by what they had seen on television.
The same process of recruiting the guilty bystander was even more at work in the Selma campaign. Not just the televised violence of the March 7 “Bloody Sunday” attack on demonstrators on the Edmund Pettus Bridge, but earlier incidents involving the explosive Sheriff Clark and the murder of white clergyman James Reeb and white housewife Viola Liuzzo, ensured that President Johnson could press through the Voting Rights Act of 1965 on a national wave of public sympathy. When Johnson closed his address to both houses of Congress on March 15, he deliberately aligned himself with the movement through his final words: “And we shall overcome.” Watching the President on television, King is reported to have wept.
Why did King’s nonviolence achieve no equivalent successes after 1965? By the summer of 1965, it was widely acknowledged that King’s use of non-violence had secured important political gains, but at the same time non-violence seemed to work only under certain conditions and the gains it obtained seemed very partial and incomplete.
a. Choosing one’s opponent
Targeting an opponent who would discredit his own position through brutality seemed one key condition. Some newspaper commentators had been hostile and cynical towards non-violence since 1961 because they saw it as disingenuous. The New York Times had complained in the summer of that year that the continuing Freedom Rides were primarily publicity stunts that tried to provoke violence. When King announced that he would target the Northern metropolis of Chicago in1966, the media were already alert to the idea that he was largely engaged in public relations manoeuvres. They therefore applauded Chicago Mayor Daley’s astute counter-moves that effectively undermined King’s initial efforts to expose the evils of ghetto poverty in the city.
b. Choosing and limiting one’s objectives
Another key factor was finding a symbolic objective, one where immediate concessions might be forthcoming but which would simultaneously highlight, and engage with, the larger issue. In the early months of 1966, there were too many issues - education, housing, employment, social services - for the Chicago campaign to generate a clear message. Compounding this weakness, Mayor Daley skilfully avoided a direct confrontation by stressing that he too wanted improvements and was already at work. He also used patronage jobs to tighten his hold on black constituents and undermine King. When King’s campaign narrowed to concentrate on housing discrimination and staged marches into all-white residential neighbourhoods in August, it succeeded in creating a political crisis along the lines of Birmingham and Selma, but it did not generate the same national coalition of conscience.
c. Attracting external support.
Watching the fury of white residents against the open housing marchers did not induce a majority of Americans to side with King’s demands. Particularly after Mayor Daley stepped up the level of police protection given the demonstrators, public sympathy went not just to the protesters but to the police, caught between the two sides. Moreover, whereas earlier demands for the desegregation of public accommodations or the protection of the equal right to vote had seemed modest, legitimate, and unthreatening to many non-southern whites, the new demands had an economic dimension that many whites found threatening, wherever they lived. Racism was built into the housing market to such an extent that the arrival of black residents was widely perceived as economically and socially destructive. Property values would fall, it was assumed, and crime and delinquency would increase.
d. Avoiding violence that casts doubt on the campaign’s legitimacy.
The climax of the Chicago campaign in August 1966 suggested that King’s non-violence had shifted from the cultivation of external sympathy, which was arguably the key in Selma, to the creating of social crisis, which was an important feature of the Birmingham campaign. This analogy allows us to review Malcolm X’s claim that it was the black-on-white retaliatory violence that forced a resolution of the crisis in 1963. Certainly, escalating social disorder alarmed both Mayor Daley’s political machine and the Birmingham city fathers and readied them for negotiations with civil rights leaders. However, whereas the non-violence of King’s 1963 campaign gave some legitimacy to the eruption of black anger in Birmingham, the July Chicago ghetto disturbances tarnished King’s efforts in 1966. King’s claim in his “Letter from Birmingham Jail” that sometimes it was necessary to create a crisis in order to generate the momentum for action was called into question in his later campaigns as the mass perception ceased to be that the underlying cause of the crisis was white brutality (symbolized by Bull Connor or Jim Clark), and reverted to the, always present, suspicion that the crisis was caused by African American demands.
e. Maintaining discipline and unity through common goals.
By 1966, King’s cultivation of external sympathy had become a key element behind the larger antipathy that his non-violent stance engendered in black militants. Northern-based black activists, outside of the NAACP and National Urban League, had always doubted King’s faith in white liberals, and leading figures among the battle-hardened, southern movement veterans had experienced too much white brutality and too little liberal commitment by 1966 to retain their faith in non-violence. They either experienced a kind of “burn-out” like Robert Moses of SNCC or like Moses’ colleagues, Stokely Carmichael and James Forman, they declared non-violence to be just one part of a repertoire of protest that shook concessions from the establishment by creating a crisis. This was not a new position by any means but it was more widely publicized in 1966, and in the generally alarmist reaction to Carmichael’s calls for “Black Power” and the emergence of such paramilitary groups as the Black Panther Party in California, rejecting non-violence was presented by the media as tantamount to embracing violent tactics. The big press “story” then became the splits: between King and Carmichael, between integration and separatism, between non-violence and armed struggle in the Che Guevara style.
What King sensed about “Black Power” was its huge strategic miscalculation. It relied upon a level of African American solidarity that had never existed, yet fuelled white solidarity in an acutely damaging way. Conservative politicians like Governor Ronald Reagan of California prospered, while progressive white figures such as Mayors Kavanagh of Detroit and Lindsay of New York saw their careers destroyed by the backlash against a black militancy that produced massive disturbances in Detroit and a huge disruption of New York schools in 1967.
g. Exploiting divisions and appealing beyond one’s opponent’s jurisdiction.
Ever since the abolitionist fight against slavery, African Americans had tried to profit from the divisions within the white majority. The guarantees and proscriptions added to the federal Constitution after the Civil War strengthened a trend for black Americans to appeal to the federal government either through the courts or increasingly after World War II via the Presidency, an office secured via a voting system that gave the black vote leverage in key electoral college states like California or other non-southern heavily populated states. Between 1963 and 1965, King had appealed to a national coalition to mobilize the federal government against what were perceived to be anachronistic, Southern injustices. Between 1966 and 1968, on the other hand, he spoke out against national and international evils that were condoned and perpetrated by the federal government. After nearly a year of vacillation, he spoke out strongly against the Vietnam War in the spring of 1967, branding his own country as “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today” and calling on America to get on the right side of the coming revolution of values. However, his denunciation of the war was too prescient to secure a sympathetic reception and he was lambasted as a Communist fellow traveller, a venal publicity seeker, or simply, a fool.
King’s Final Year: Did his Nonviolence Fail? Subsequent events largely support King’s analysis of the dire consequences of the Vietnam War, but in the year that elapsed from his great Riverside speech against the war and his assassination in Memphis, he did not develop an effective non-violent strategy either to end the war or to transform America’s political agenda from militarism to a genuine war on poverty. In terms of direct action, King did not go on a Gandhi-style hunger strike and flirted with only a few ideas. He talked about taking a highly trained group of volunteers to Vietnam, where they would encamp on bridges and at other strategic sites to provide “human shields” to stop the bombing. His supposedly Communist white advisor, Stanley Levison told him not to be ridiculous. He indicated his support for conscientious objectors and visited other protesters arrested for demonstrations at military installations. He led marches, gave speeches, signed petitions, and lobbied, but although the rallies were growing larger, King did not follow his colleague Jim Bevel’s advice to attack the US war machine non-violently. The largest anti-war demonstrations occurred after his death.
The Poor People’s Campaign, which King was planning at the time of his death, shows that he was striving to demonstrate that non-violence could address the key issues of social and economic injustice. Here, too, his emphasis shifted between a coercive non-violence that created widespread disruption through mass civil disobedience and a persuasive non-violence that generated a coalition of conscience through publicizing undeniable injustice. Thus, the idea of bringing the poor to Washington was sometimes presented in terms of protests that would stop the federal government from functioning, and at others was seen as bringing the forgotten Americans - the poor - before Congress, which would act once it saw firsthand the malnutrition, dilapidated housing, and lack of income or employment, and heard about the level of exploitation.
King himself spoke of the Poor People’s Campaign as “going for broke,” a phrase that highlighted his desperation. The looting and violence that disrupted his march in support of striking black workers in Memphis on March 28 gravely damaged his reputation and probably ensured that he would have backed further away from radical coercive non-violence in the upcoming Washington campaign. King knew how thin was the tightrope he walked in 1968. If his protest degenerated into violence, it would provide a justification for reactionary measures. If it failed to generate a crisis that extracted concessions, however, it would strengthen the appeal of his black separatist rivals.
Since American politics in 1968 went through a crisis from which conservative forces and a revitalized Republican Party ultimately emerged victorious, it is tempting to see King as a failure rescued by martyrdom. That would be too hasty a judgment, even though it might be the kind of harsh verdict that King would have made of himself. To emphasize only the conservative forces in American life at this time would be to ignore how close Congress came to passing a guaranteed income plan, how the movement’s economic and legal pressures have generated the conditions for the subsequent emergence of an expanded African American middle class, and how schemes to secure social stability through expanded welfare and education programs endured into the Reagan years. Certainly, the absence of racial justice in the United States today cannot be taken as a sign of the failure of non-violent direct action. Evil prospers, King once wrote, when good men do nothing.
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Joan Baez - We shall overcome
http://in.youtube.com/watch?v=RkNsEH1GD7Q
http://in.youtube.com/watch?v=TmR1YvfIGng
Why We Shall Overcome ....
By Donald Winkfield
October 11th, 2008
Barack Obama continues the Long March to American unity started by Dr. King
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[On The Spot: Election 2008]
"I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today - my own government."--- April 4th, 1967, A Time To Break The Silence, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
The United States of America has lost the respect of countries around the world.
The selected few who have literally run the USA into the ground are trying their best to keep control of the many – the voters. Yet, over eight millions African Americans were not even registered to vote as of October 10, when many states had their deadline.
I stated back in November 2007 that before this presidential race comes to an end – it will turn into a race-race. Senator Barack Obama is clearly the better candidate for the White House – but because of his race, some in the Democratic Party, calling themselves “Reagan Democrats,” wanted to cross over to vote for Senator John McCain. Now that is modern day racism at its best.
Anyone who has been really paying close attention to the last two debates know Obama’s and McCain’s policies are very different. McCain’s policies will be a continuation of George Bush’s eight years – and the USA cannot take four more years of the same administration we now have in place simply because they are operating under different names.
For the too many, who are still undecided – after the Wall Street mess, which has a lasting effect on an already troubled economic crisis – those people need to debate within their own mind to find out what is really stopping them from facing the truth. McCain is not that convincing or persuasive, what with people like former Mayor Rudolph Giuliani as one of his close advisors – another reason to call for alarm.
Witness the blatant disrespect we are witnessing from McCain and his dismal Vice-Presidential pick Sarah Palin. During a moment in the debate, McCain referred to Obama as, “That one there.” In his mind, he may have wanted to say, “that n-word there.”
This is how far we have come in this world. No matter what McCain thinks of Obama, he still should show the world he respects him as a person and a senator and a serious candidate who may actually end up as our president.
But, when you run a race from behind, you say and do things out of frustration. Palin has been rehashing some old political dirt on Obama which has been used before and has never proven to hold water. However Palin chose to take the low road –obviously on orders from McCain—because it is the only road she knows. This ugly McCain-Palin strategy to incite racial animosities tapped into some lawless thinking people: someone in one of her campaign gatherings yelled out, “Kill him,” in reference to Obama. Palin and McCain never issued a statement disavowing such ugly sentiments; it’s only yesterday that McCain started backing off the ugly strategy he’s unleashed.
An elderly woman at one of McCain’s gatherings had said she was afraid of Obama because “he’s an Arab.” When McCain took away the microphone and assured the woman Obama was not an Arab and that he was a “decent American” and “family man” with whom they had political disagreements, many in the crowd booed McCain.
What a sad moment it was: the crowd wanted McCain not to disavow something they all knew not to be true –that Obama is an Arab; and it’s even sadder that apparently being an Arab is some sort of crime— and McCain himself seemed surprised by the episode.
The chickens coming home to roost; he is now reaping the fruits of the hatred he and his running mate sowed.
In terms of the second debate itself, I watched it with some young people who are very clear as to whom they are going to be voting for on November 4th. “Look how he just stood there to answer the question the Black guy asked him. He didn’t even want to look him in the eyes,” observed Lester J. “I’m happy to be voting for a Black president for the first time.”
Another viewer noted that McCain seemed more relaxed when he answered questions from Whites. “He walked right up to where one lady was sitting and was looking directly at her when he answered her question. Then on another question asked by a White guy, McCain patted him on the back and shook his hand just because he asked him a question about Israel,” said Montel W.
There are a lot of young people who are first-time voters and so energized - they are talking as if they can wait to vote. But we have to keep in mind the results of the last two presidential elections. The last two elections have not been investigated nor have there been any real protective measures put in place by the Board of Elections to prevent the past from reoccurring at the polls.
There needs to be notices sent over the television and internet to police agencies, and known hate groups – if you are caught tampering with the election or preventing anyone from casting a vote, you will be arrested.
From the start of his campaign, Obama called for unity – asking all Americans to come together for a common cause. “We are not just red states and blue states; we are the United States of America,” Obama has said. Those were not just words – that was reality. For decades we as Americans have been tricked into believing we can grow as a nation being separate and unequal, while the rest of the world grows and surpasses us on human issues so embedded in our own constitution.
Since September 11, 2001, we have lost many of our civil liberties and everywhere you go it feels as if you are in a foreign country. The Patriot Act is an act against the very people who believe in freedom, and who believe in having the right to petition the government, rally, free speech, press, to bear arms and to vote.
American did not change after 9/11; the people who run the government did. This is why November 4th is going to feel like a new day. There are people who did not believe in change, but they are singing another tune now, “Obama, Obama” and chanting “Yes we can,” which is actually the modern equivalent of Dr. Martin Luther King’s “We Shall Overcome.”
Young people are so fired up. I got an email message showing a young man with an interesting hair cut; he had the image of Obama carved onto the back of his head.
This is real. Make sure your vote is cast and counted.
Give peace a chance.
Contact Winkfield if you have a serious story or expose for his column. (347) 632-2272 or On The Spot, Post Office Box 230149, Queens County 11423. Email: Bsnonthespot@aol.com or milton@blackstarnews.com or (212) 481-7745.
Together we can get the justice everyone just talks about.
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We Shall Overcome
Historical Period: Postwar United States, 1945-1968Songs and Poems | Analysis Tools | Activity Ideas | About Song and Poetry
"We Shall Overcome"
song sheet, date unknown.
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New York, NY 10011
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It was the most powerful song of the 20th century. It started out in church pews and picket lines, inspired one of the greatest freedom movements in U.S. history, and went on to topple governments and bring about reform all over the world. Word for word, the short, simple lyrics of "We Shall Overcome" might be some of the most influential words in the English language.
"We Shall Overcome" has it roots in African American hymns from the early 20th century, and was first used as a protest song in 1945, when striking tobacco workers in Charleston, S.C., sang it on their picket line. By the 1950s, the song had been discovered by the young activists of the African American civil rights movement, and it quickly became the movement’s unofficial anthem. Its verses were sung on protest marches and in sit-ins, through clouds of tear gas and under rows of police batons, and it brought courage and comfort to bruised, frightened activists as they waited in jail cells, wondering if they would survive the night. When the long years of struggle ended and President Lyndon Johnson vowed to fight for voting rights for all Americans, he included a final promise: "We shall overcome."
In the decades since, the song has circled the globe and has been embraced by civil rights and pro-democracy movements in dozens of nations worldwide. From Northern Ireland to Eastern Europe, from Berlin to Beijing, and from South Africa to South America, its message of solidarity and hope has been sung in dozens of languages, in presidential palaces and in dark prisons, and it continues to lend its strength to all people struggling to be free.
As you listen to "We Shall Overcome," think about the reasons it has brought strength and support to so many people for so many years. And remember that someone, somewhere, is singing it right now.
http://www.loc.gov/teachers/lyrical/songs/overcome.html
Lyndon Baines Johnson
Address to a Joint Session of Congress on Voting Legislation
"We Shall Overcome"
delivered 15 March 1965, Washington, D.C.
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[AUTHENTICITY CERTIFIED: Text version below transcribed directly from audio.]
Mr. Speaker, Mr. President, Members of the Congress:
I speak tonight for the dignity of man and the destiny of democracy. I urge every member of both parties, Americans of all religions and of all colors, from every section of this country, to join me in that cause.
At times history and fate meet at a single time in a single place to shape a turning point in man's unending search for freedom. So it was at Lexington and Concord. So it was a century ago at Appomattox. So it was last week in Selma, Alabama. There, long-suffering men and women peacefully protested the denial of their rights as Americans. Many were brutally assaulted. One good man, a man of God, was killed.
There is no cause for pride in what has happened in Selma. There is no cause for self-satisfaction in the long denial of equal rights of millions of Americans. But there is cause for hope and for faith in our democracy in what is happening here tonight. For the cries of pain and the hymns and protests of oppressed people have summoned into convocation all the majesty of this great government -- the government of the greatest nation on earth. Our mission is at once the oldest and the most basic of this country: to right wrong, to do justice, to serve man.
In our time we have come to live with the moments of great crisis. Our lives have been marked with debate about great issues -- issues of war and peace, issues of prosperity and depression. But rarely in any time does an issue lay bare the secret heart of America itself. Rarely are we met with a challenge, not to our growth or abundance, or our welfare or our security, but rather to the values, and the purposes, and the meaning of our beloved nation.
The issue of equal rights for American Negroes is such an issue.
And should we defeat every enemy, and should we double our wealth and conquer the stars, and still be unequal to this issue, then we will have failed as a people and as a nation. For with a country as with a person, "What is a man profited, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?"
There is no Negro problem. There is no Southern problem. There is no Northern problem. There is only an American problem. And we are met here tonight as Americans -- not as Democrats or Republicans. We are met here as Americans to solve that problem.
This was the first nation in the history of the world to be founded with a purpose. The great phrases of that purpose still sound in every American heart, North and South: "All men are created equal," "government by consent of the governed," "give me liberty or give me death." Well, those are not just clever words, or those are not just empty theories. In their name Americans have fought and died for two centuries, and tonight around the world they stand there as guardians of our liberty, risking their lives.
Those words are a promise to every citizen that he shall share in the dignity of man. This dignity cannot be found in a man's possessions; it cannot be found in his power, or in his position. It really rests on his right to be treated as a man equal in opportunity to all others. It says that he shall share in freedom, he shall choose his leaders, educate his children, provide for his family according to his ability and his merits as a human being. To apply any other test -- to deny a man his hopes because of his color, or race, or his religion, or the place of his birth is not only to do injustice, it is to deny America and to dishonor the dead who gave their lives for American freedom.
Our fathers believed that if this noble view of the rights of man was to flourish, it must be rooted in democracy. The most basic right of all was the right to choose your own leaders. The history of this country, in large measure, is the history of the expansion of that right to all of our people. Many of the issues of civil rights are very complex and most difficult. But about this there can and should be no argument.
Every American citizen must have an equal right to vote.
There is no reason which can excuse the denial of that right. There is no duty which weighs more heavily on us than the duty we have to ensure that right.
Yet the harsh fact is that in many places in this country men and women are kept from voting simply because they are Negroes. Every device of which human ingenuity is capable has been used to deny this right. The Negro citizen may go to register only to be told that the day is wrong, or the hour is late, or the official in charge is absent. And if he persists, and if he manages to present himself to the registrar, he may be disqualified because he did not spell out his middle name or because he abbreviated a word on the application. And if he manages to fill out an application, he is given a test. The registrar is the sole judge of whether he passes this test. He may be asked to recite the entire Constitution, or explain the most complex provisions of State law. And even a college degree cannot be used to prove that he can read and write.
For the fact is that the only way to pass these barriers is to show a white skin. Experience has clearly shown that the existing process of law cannot overcome systematic and ingenious discrimination. No law that we now have on the books -- and I have helped to put three of them there -- can ensure the right to vote when local officials are determined to deny it. In such a case our duty must be clear to all of us. The Constitution says that no person shall be kept from voting because of his race or his color. We have all sworn an oath before God to support and to defend that Constitution. We must now act in obedience to that oath.
Wednesday, I will send to Congress a law designed to eliminate illegal barriers to the right to vote.
The broad principles of that bill will be in the hands of the Democratic and Republican leaders tomorrow. After they have reviewed it, it will come here formally as a bill. I am grateful for this opportunity to come here tonight at the invitation of the leadership to reason with my friends, to give them my views, and to visit with my former colleagues. I've had prepared a more comprehensive analysis of the legislation which I had intended to transmit to the clerk tomorrow, but which I will submit to the clerks tonight. But I want to really discuss with you now, briefly, the main proposals of this legislation.
This bill will strike down restrictions to voting in all elections -- Federal, State, and local -- which have been used to deny Negroes the right to vote. This bill will establish a simple, uniform standard which cannot be used, however ingenious the effort, to flout our Constitution. It will provide for citizens to be registered by officials of the United States Government, if the State officials refuse to register them. It will eliminate tedious, unnecessary lawsuits which delay the right to vote. Finally, this legislation will ensure that properly registered individuals are not prohibited from voting.
I will welcome the suggestions from all of the Members of Congress -- I have no doubt that I will get some -- on ways and means to strengthen this law and to make it effective. But experience has plainly shown that this is the only path to carry out the command of the Constitution.
To those who seek to avoid action by their National Government in their own communities, who want to and who seek to maintain purely local control over elections, the answer is simple: open your polling places to all your people.
Allow men and women to register and vote whatever the color of their skin.
Extend the rights of citizenship to every citizen of this land.
There is no constitutional issue here. The command of the Constitution is plain. There is no moral issue. It is wrong -- deadly wrong -- to deny any of your fellow Americans the right to vote in this country. There is no issue of States' rights or national rights. There is only the struggle for human rights. I have not the slightest doubt what will be your answer.
But the last time a President sent a civil rights bill to the Congress, it contained a provision to protect voting rights in Federal elections. That civil rights bill was passed after eight long months of debate. And when that bill came to my desk from the Congress for my signature, the heart of the voting provision had been eliminated. This time, on this issue, there must be no delay, or no hesitation, or no compromise with our purpose.
We cannot, we must not, refuse to protect the right of every American to vote in every election that he may desire to participate in. And we ought not, and we cannot, and we must not wait another eight months before we get a bill. We have already waited a hundred years and more, and the time for waiting is gone.
So I ask you to join me in working long hours -- nights and weekends, if necessary -- to pass this bill. And I don't make that request lightly. For from the window where I sit with the problems of our country, I recognize that from outside this chamber is the outraged conscience of a nation, the grave concern of many nations, and the harsh judgment of history on our acts.
But even if we pass this bill, the battle will not be over. What happened in Selma is part of a far larger movement which reaches into every section and State of America. It is the effort of American Negroes to secure for themselves the full blessings of American life. Their cause must be our cause too. Because it's not just Negroes, but really it's all of us, who must overcome the crippling legacy of bigotry and injustice.
And we shall overcome.
As a man whose roots go deeply into Southern soil, I know how agonizing racial feelings are. I know how difficult it is to reshape the attitudes and the structure of our society. But a century has passed, more than a hundred years since the Negro was freed. And he is not fully free tonight.
It was more than a hundred years ago that Abraham Lincoln, a great President of another party, signed the Emancipation Proclamation; but emancipation is a proclamation, and not a fact. A century has passed, more than a hundred years, since equality was promised. And yet the Negro is not equal. A century has passed since the day of promise. And the promise is un-kept.
The time of justice has now come. I tell you that I believe sincerely that no force can hold it back. It is right in the eyes of man and God that it should come. And when it does, I think that day will brighten the lives of every American. For Negroes are not the only victims. How many white children have gone uneducated? How many white families have lived in stark poverty? How many white lives have been scarred by fear, because we've wasted our energy and our substance to maintain the barriers of hatred and terror?
And so I say to all of you here, and to all in the nation tonight, that those who appeal to you to hold on to the past do so at the cost of denying you your future.
This great, rich, restless country can offer opportunity and education and hope to all, all black and white, all North and South, sharecropper and city dweller. These are the enemies: poverty, ignorance, disease. They're our enemies, not our fellow man, not our neighbor. And these enemies too -- poverty, disease, and ignorance: we shall overcome.
Now let none of us in any section look with prideful righteousness on the troubles in another section, or the problems of our neighbors. There's really no part of America where the promise of equality has been fully kept. In Buffalo as well as in Birmingham, in Philadelphia as well as Selma, Americans are struggling for the fruits of freedom. This is one nation. What happens in Selma or in Cincinnati is a matter of legitimate concern to every American. But let each of us look within our own hearts and our own communities, and let each of us put our shoulder to the wheel to root out injustice wherever it exists.
As we meet here in this peaceful, historic chamber tonight, men from the South, some of whom were at Iwo Jima, men from the North who have carried Old Glory to far corners of the world and brought it back without a stain on it, men from the East and from the West, are all fighting together without regard to religion, or color, or region, in Vietnam. Men from every region fought for us across the world twenty years ago.
And now in these common dangers and these common sacrifices, the South made its contribution of honor and gallantry no less than any other region in the Great Republic -- and in some instances, a great many of them, more.
And I have not the slightest doubt that good men from everywhere in this country, from the Great Lakes to the Gulf of Mexico, from the Golden Gate to the harbors along the Atlantic, will rally now together in this cause to vindicate the freedom of all Americans.
For all of us owe this duty; and I believe that all of us will respond to it. Your President makes that request of every American.
The real hero of this struggle is the American Negro. His actions and protests, his courage to risk safety and even to risk his life, have awakened the conscience of this nation. His demonstrations have been designed to call attention to injustice, designed to provoke change, designed to stir reform. He has called upon us to make good the promise of America. And who among us can say that we would have made the same progress were it not for his persistent bravery, and his faith in American democracy.
For at the real heart of battle for equality is a deep seated belief in the democratic process. Equality depends not on the force of arms or tear gas but depends upon the force of moral right; not on recourse to violence but on respect for law and order.
And there have been many pressures upon your President and there will be others as the days come and go. But I pledge you tonight that we intend to fight this battle where it should be fought -- in the courts, and in the Congress, and in the hearts of men.
We must preserve the right of free speech and the right of free assembly. But the right of free speech does not carry with it, as has been said, the right to holler fire in a crowded theater. We must preserve the right to free assembly. But free assembly does not carry with it the right to block public thoroughfares to traffic.
We do have a right to protest, and a right to march under conditions that do not infringe the constitutional rights of our neighbors. And I intend to protect all those rights as long as I am permitted to serve in this office.
We will guard against violence, knowing it strikes from our hands the very weapons which we seek: progress, obedience to law, and belief in American values.
In Selma, as elsewhere, we seek and pray for peace. We seek order. We seek unity. But we will not accept the peace of stifled rights, or the order imposed by fear, or the unity that stifles protest. For peace cannot be purchased at the cost of liberty.
In Selma tonight -- and we had a good day there -- as in every city, we are working for a just and peaceful settlement And we must all remember that after this speech I am making tonight, after the police and the FBI and the Marshals have all gone, and after you have promptly passed this bill, the people of Selma and the other cities of the Nation must still live and work together. And when the attention of the nation has gone elsewhere, they must try to heal the wounds and to build a new community.
This cannot be easily done on a battleground of violence, as the history of the South itself shows. It is in recognition of this that men of both races have shown such an outstandingly impressive responsibility in recent days -- last Tuesday, again today.
The bill that I am presenting to you will be known as a civil rights bill. But, in a larger sense, most of the program I am recommending is a civil rights program. Its object is to open the city of hope to all people of all races.
Because all Americans just must have the right to vote. And we are going to give them that right. All Americans must have the privileges of citizenship -- regardless of race. And they are going to have those privileges of citizenship -- regardless of race.
But I would like to caution you and remind you that to exercise these privileges takes much more than just legal right. It requires a trained mind and a healthy body. It requires a decent home, and the chance to find a job, and the opportunity to escape from the clutches of poverty.
Of course, people cannot contribute to the nation if they are never taught to read or write, if their bodies are stunted from hunger, if their sickness goes untended, if their life is spent in hopeless poverty just drawing a welfare check. So we want to open the gates to opportunity. But we're also going to give all our people, black and white, the help that they need to walk through those gates.
My first job after college was as a teacher in Cotulla, Texas, in a small Mexican-American school. Few of them could speak English, and I couldn't speak much Spanish. My students were poor and they often came to class without breakfast, hungry. And they knew, even in their youth, the pain of prejudice. They never seemed to know why people disliked them. But they knew it was so, because I saw it in their eyes. I often walked home late in the afternoon, after the classes were finished, wishing there was more that I could do. But all I knew was to teach them the little that I knew, hoping that it might help them against the hardships that lay ahead.
And somehow you never forget what poverty and hatred can do when you see its scars on the hopeful face of a young child. I never thought then, in 1928, that I would be standing here in 1965. It never even occurred to me in my fondest dreams that I might have the chance to help the sons and daughters of those students and to help people like them all over this country.
But now I do have that chance -- and I'll let you in on a secret -- I mean to use it.
And I hope that you will use it with me.
I want to be the President who helped the poor to find their own way and who protected the right of every citizen to vote in every election.
I want to be the President who helped to end hatred among his fellow men, and who promoted love among the people of all races and all regions and all parties.
I want to be the President who helped to end war among the brothers of this earth.
And so, at the request of your beloved Speaker, and the Senator from Montana, the majority leader, the Senator from Illinois, the minority leader, Mr. McCulloch, and other Members of both parties, I came here tonight -- not as President Roosevelt came down one time, in person, to veto a bonus bill, not as President Truman came down one time to urge the passage of a railroad bill -- but I came down here to ask you to share this task with me, and to share it with the people that we both work for. I want this to be the Congress, Republicans and Democrats alike, which did all these things for all these people.
Beyond this great chamber, out yonder in fifty States, are the people that we serve. Who can tell what deep and unspoken hopes are in their hearts tonight as they sit there and listen. We all can guess, from our own lives, how difficult they often find their own pursuit of happiness, how many problems each little family has. They look most of all to themselves for their futures. But I think that they also look to each of us.
Above the pyramid on the great seal of the United States it says in Latin: "God has favored our undertaking." God will not favor everything that we do. It is rather our duty to divine His will.
But I cannot help believing that He truly understands and that He really favors the undertaking that we begin here tonight.
http://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/lbjweshallovercome.htm
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We Shall Overcome
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For the Bruce Springsteen album, see We Shall Overcome: The Seeger Sessions.
"We Shall Overcome" is a protest song that became a key anthem of the US civil rights movement. The lyrics of the song are derived from a gospel song by Reverend Charles Tindley. The song was published in 1947 as "We Will Overcome" in the People's Songs Bulletin (a publication of People's Songs, an organization of which Pete Seeger was the director and guiding spirit). It appeared in the bulletin as a contribution of and with an introduction by Zilphia Horton, then music director of the Highlander Folk School of Monteagle, Tennessee, a school that trained union organizers. It was her favorite song and she taught it to Pete Seeger (see Where Have All the Flowers Gone: A Musical Autobiography by Pete Seeger, 1993-97, p. 34), who included it in his repertoire, as did many other activist singers, such as Frank Hamilton and Joe Glazer, who recorded it in 1950. The song became associated with the Civil Rights movement from 1959, when Guy Carawan stepped in as song leader at Highlander, and the school was a the focus of student non-violent activism. It quickly became the movement's unofficial anthem. Seeger and other famous folksingers in the early 1960s, such as Joan Baez, sang the song at rallies, folk festivals, and concerts in the North and helped make it widely known. Since its rise to prominence, the song, and songs based on it, have been used in a variety of protests worldwide.
Contents [hide]
1 Origins
2 Role of Highlander Folk School
3 Widespread adaptation
4 Copyright and royalties
5 See also
6 Notes
7 External links
8 References
9 Further reading
[edit] Origins
The phrase "We Will Overcome" is derived from the lyrics to a 1901 hymn or gospel music composition by Rev. Charles Tindley of Philadelphia. Tindley was an African Methodist Episcopal Church minister who composed many hymns and lyrics, some 50 of which are known to have survived. The lyrics to "We Shall Overcome" were combined with Tindley's original melody at a later date. Newer lyrics contained the repeated line "I'll overcome someday," and the phrase, "Deep in my heart," which more likely derive from a later gospel song. Whatever the case, various versions can be traced to integrated meetings of black and white coal miners in the early 1900s and to black churches in the 1800s.[1]
According to James J. Fuld, Tindley wrote words that are similar to the song we now know, but his tune was a different one.[2] Sometime between 1900 and 1946, someone married Tindley's words to a tune with a noticeable family resemblance to that of Michael Praetorius's famous hymn "O Sanctissima." Atron Twigg is possibly responsible for the change.[3] Note that Praetorius (1571-1621) himself, however, could well have taken his tune from the folk tradition, as was a common practice. Some hymn melodies have been traced to sixth-century Gregorian chants and were probably old even then.
[edit] Role of Highlander Folk School
In the fall of 1945 in Charleston, South Carolina, members of the Food and Tobacco Workers Union (who were mostly female and African American), began a five-month strike against the American Tobacco Company. To keep up their spirits during the cold, wet winter of 1945-46, one of the strikers, a woman named Lucille Simmons, led a slow "long meter style" version of the gospel hymn, "We'll Overcome" (I'll Be All Right") to end each day's picketing. Union organizer, Zilphia Horton, who was the wife of the co-founder of the Highlander Folk School (later Highlander Research and Education Center), learned it from Lucille Simmons. Horton was (1935-56) Highlander's music director, and it became her custom to end group meetings each evening by leading this, her favorite song. During the Presidential Campaign of Henry A. Wallace, "We Will Overcome" was printed in Bulletin No. 3 (Sept., 1948), 8, of People's Songs with an introduction by Horton saying that she had learned it from the CIO Food and Tobacco Workers' Union workers and had found it to be extremely powerful. Pete Seeger, a founding member, and for three years Director of People's Songs, learned it from Horton's version in 1947.[4]Seeger writes: "I changed it to 'We shall'. . . . I think I liked a more open sound; 'We will' has alliteration to it, but 'We shall' opens the mouth wider; the 'i' in 'will' is not an easy vowel to sing well [...]."[5] Seeger also added some verses ("We'll walk hand in hand" and "The whole wide world around").
In 1950, the CIO's Department of Education and Research released the album, Eight New Songs for Labor, sung by Joe Glazer ("Labor's Troubador"), and the Elm City Four (songs on the album were: "I Ain't No Stranger Now," "Too Old to Work," "That's All," "Humblin' Back," "Shine on Me," "Great Day," "The Mill Was Made of Marble," and "We Will Overcome"). During a Southern CIO drive, Glazer taught the song to country singer Texas Bill Strength, who cut a version that was later picked up by 4-Star Records.[6]
The song made its first recorded appearance as "We Shall Overcome" (rather than "We Will Overcome") in 1952 on a disc recorded by Laura Duncan (soloist) and the The Jewish Young Singers (chorus) conducted by Robert De Cormier co-produced by Ernie Lieberman and Irwin Silber on Hootenany Records (Hoot 104-A) (Folkways, FN 2513, BCD15720), where it is identified as a Negro Spiritual.
Frank Hamilton, a folk singer from California who was a member of People's Songs and later the Weavers, picked up Seeger's version. Hamilton's friend and traveling companion, fellow-Californian Guy Carawan, learned the song from Hamilton. Carawan and Hamilton, accompanied by Ramblin Jack Elliot, visited Highlander in the early fifties and would also have heard Zilphia Horton sing the song there. When, in 1959, Guy Carawan succeeded Horton as music director at Highlander, he reintroduced it at the school. It was the young (many of them teenagers) student-activists at Highlander, however, who gave the song the words and rhythms we know it by today, when they sang it to keep their spirits up during the frightening police raids on Highlander and their subsequent stays in jail in 1959-60. Because of this, Carawan has been reluctant to claim credit for the song's widespread popularity. In the PBS video We Shall Overcome, Julian Bond credits Carawan with teaching and singing the song at the founding meeting of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee in Raleigh, N.C., in 1960. From there, it spread orally and became an anthem of Southern African American labor union and civil rights activism.[7] Seeger also has publicly, in concert, credited Carawan with the primary role in teaching and popularizing the song within the Civil Rights Movement.
[edit] Widespread adaptation
In August of 1963, folksinger Joan Baez memorably led a crowd of 300,000 in singing "We Shall Overcome" at the Lincoln Memorial during Martin Luther King's March on Washington. President Lyndon Johnson used the phrase "we shall overcome" in addressing Congress on March 15, 1965[8], following violent, "bloody Sunday" attacks on civil rights demonstrators during the Selma to Montgomery marches, thus legitimizing the protest movement. Farmworkers in the United States later sang the song in Spanish during strikes and grape boycotts of the late 1960s.[citation needed] The Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association adopted "we shall overcome" as a slogan and used it in title of their retrospective autobiography publication, We Shall Overcome - The History of the Struggle for Civil Rights in Northern Ireland 1968-1978.[9][10] The film Bloody Sunday depicts march leader MP Ivan Cooper leading the song shortly before the Bloody Sunday shootings. Bruce Springsteen re-interpreted the song, which has been included on Where Have All the Flowers Gone: A Tribute to Pete Seeger and his 2006 album We Shall Overcome: The Seeger Sessions.
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. made use of "we shall overcome" in the final Sunday March 31, 1968 speech before his assassination[11] In a 1965 speech[12] King explained the reasons why he believed "we shall overcome" in terms very similar to those used in a 1957 speech to support his belief in "an other-loving God working forever through history for the establishment of His kingdom".[13] These were:
Because the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.
Quoting Thomas Carlyle, because no lie can live forever.
Quoting William Cullen Bryant, truth crushed to earth will rise again.
Quoting James Russell Lowell, truth is forever on the scaffold, wrong forever on the throne - yet that scaffold sways the future, and behind the dim unknown, stands God within the shadow keeping watch above His own.
"We Shall Overcome" was notably sung by the U.S. Senator for New York Robert F. Kennedy, who led anti-apartheid crowds in choruses from the rooftop of his car while touring the country in 1966.[14]It was also the song Abie Nathan chose to play as the Voice of Peace on October 1, 1993.[citation needed], and as a result it found its way to South Africa in the later years of the anti-apartheid movement.[15]
"We Shall Overcome" later was adopted by various anti-Communist movements in the Cold War and post-Cold War. In his memoir about his years teaching English in Czechoslovakia after the Velvet Revolution, Mark Allen wrote:
In Prague in 1989, during the intense weeks of the Velvet Revolution, hundreds of thousands of people sang this haunting music in unison in Wenceslas Square, both in English and in Czech, with special emphasis on the phrase "I do believe." This song's message of hope gave protesters strength to carry on until the powers-that-be themselves finally gave up hope themselves. In the Prague of 1964, (former Communist) Seeger was stunned to find himself being whistled and booed by crowds of Czechs when he spoke out against the Vietnam War. But those same crowds had loved and adopted his rendition of "We Shall Overcome". History is full of such ironies -- if only you are willing to see them. Prague Symphony (Praha:Praha Publishing, 2008[citation needed]
In India, its literal translation in Hindi "Hum Honge Kaamyab / Ek Din" became a patriotic/spiritual song during the 1980s, particularly in schools. In Bengali-speaking India and in Bangladesh there are two versions, both popular among school-children and political activists. "Amra Karbo Joy" (a literal translation) was translated by the Bengali folk singer Hemanga Biswas and re-recorded by Bhupen Hazarika. Another version, translated by Shibdas Bandyopadhyay, "Ek Din Surjyer Bhor" (literally translated as "One Day The Sun Will Rise") was recorded by the Calcutta Youth Choir arranged by Ruma Guha Thakurta during the 1971 Bangladesh War of Independence and became one of the largest selling Bengali records. It was a favorite of Bangladeshi Prime Minister Sheikh Mujibur Rahman and regularly sung at public events after Bangladesh gained independence.[citation needed] In the Indian State of Kerala, the traditional Communist stronghold, the song became popular in college campuses in late 1970s. It was the struggle song of the Students Federation of India SFI, the largest student organisation in the country. The song translated to the regional language Malayalam by N. P. Chandrasekharan, an activist of SFI, in 1980. The translation followed the same tune of the original song. Later it was also published in Student, the monthly of SFI in Malayalam.[citation needed]
The melody was also used (with due credit to Tinsley) in a symphony by American composer William Rowland[citation needed]. In 1999 National Public Radio included "We Shall Overcome" on their NPR 100 list of most important American songs of the 20th century.[16]
[edit] Copyright and royalties
"We Shall Overcome" was originally written by Rev. Charles Tindley, of the African Methodist Episcopal Church. As the work was composed in 1901, it is now in the public domain, according to current (2008) US Copyright law, which provides 100 years for musical works before they become public domain. The present version is an adaptation by Zilphia Horton, Guy Carawan, Frank Hamilton, and Pete Seeger, who share the artists' half of the rights, and TRO (The Richmond Organization, which includes Ludlow Music, Essex, Folkways Music, and Hollis Music), which holds the publishers rights (or 50% of the royalty money). Pete Seeger explained that he took out a defensive copyright on advice of his publisher, TRO, to prevent someone else from doing so and "At that time we didn't know Lucille Simmons' name."[17] All royalties go to the "We Shall Overcome" Fund, administered by Highlander under the trusteeship of the "writers" (i.e., the holders of the writers' share of the copyright, who, strictly speaking, are the arrangers and adapters). Such funds are used to give small grants for cultural expression involving African Americans organizing in the U.S. South.[18]
[edit] See also
American Civil Rights Movement Timeline
Pete Seeger
We Shall Overcome: The Seeger Sessions
Guy Carawan
Sing for Freedom, Folkways Records, produced by Guy and Candie Carawan, and the Highlander Center. Field recordings from 1960-88, with the Freedom Singers, Birmingham Movement Choir, Georgia Sea Island Singers, Doc Reese, Phil Ochs, Pete Seeger, Len Chandler, and many others. Smithsonian-Folkways CD version 1990.
We Shall Overcome: The Complete Carnegie Hall Concert, June 8, 1963, Historic Live recording June 8, 1963. 2-disc set, includes the full concert, starring Pete Seeger, with the Freedom Singers, Columbia # 45312, 1989. Re-released 1997 by Sony as a box CD set.
Voices Of The Civil Rights Movement: Black American Freedom Songs 1960-1966 [BOX CD SET] With the Freedom Singers, Fanny Lou Hammer, and Bernice Johnson Reagon, Smithsonian-Folkways CD ASIN: B000001DJT (1997).
[edit] Notes
^ We Shall Overcome, Bruce Springsteen's official website.
^ The Book of World-Famous Music: Classical, Popular, and Folk (1966; Dover, 1995).
^ Tindley
^ Dunaway, 1990, 222-223; Seeger, 1993, 32; see also, Robbie Lieberman, My Song is My Weapon: People's Songs, American Communism, and the Politics of Culture, 1930-50 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, [1989] 1995) p.46, p. 185
^ Seeger, Pete and Blood, Peter (Ed.), Where Have All the Flowers Gone?: A Singer's Stories, Songs, Seeds, Robberies (1993). Independent Publications Group, Sing Out Publications, ISBN 1-881322-01-7
^ Ronald Cohen and Dave Samuelson, Songs for Political Action: Folkmusic, Topical Songs And the American Left 1926-1953 (This lavish book is published as part of Bear Family Records 10-CD box set published in Germany in 1996. It includes a selection of of satirical Trotskyist songs from 1953 by Joe Glazer and Bill Friedland that are bitterly critical of the Popular Front from the point of view of the ultra-left (for example, for cooperating with FDR and for agreeing not to strike during the war) and makes fun of folk singers and folk songs.
^ Dunaway, 1990, 222-223; Seeger, 1993, 32.
^ Lyndon Johnson, speech of March 15, 1965, accessed March 28, 2007 on HistoryPlace.com
^ CAIN: Civil Rights Association by Bob Purdie
^ CAIN: Events: Civil Rights - "We Shall Overcome" published by the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association (NICRA; 1978)
^ "A new normal"..
^ "A New Addition to Martin Luther King's Legacy".
^ ""Give Us the Ballot,"". Address Delivered at the Prayer Pilgrimage for Freedom, Washington D.C. (1957-05-17).
^ Thomas, Evan. Robert Kennedy : His Life. New York: Simon & Schuster, 322. ISBN 0-7432-0329-1.
^ Dunaway, 1990, 243.
^ The NPR 100 The most important American musical works of the 20th century
^ Seeger, 1993, p. 33
^ Highlander Reports, 2004, p. 3.
[edit] External links
Authorized Profile of Guy Carawan with history of the song, "We Shall Overcome"
Freedom in the Air: Albany Georgia. 1961-62. SNCC #101. Recorded by Guy Carawan, produced for the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee by Guy Carawan and Alan Lomax. "Freedom In the Air . . . is a record of the 1961 protest in Albany, Georgia, when, two weeks before Christmas, 737 people brought the town nearly to a halt to force its integration. The record's never been reissued and that's a shame, as it's a moving document of a community through its protest songs, church services, and experiences in the thick of the civil rights struggle."—Nathan Salsburg, host, Root Hog or Die, East Village Radio, January 2007.
Susanne´s Folksong-Notizen, excerpts from various articles, liner notes, etc. about "We Shall Overcome".
Musical Transcription of "We Shall Overcome," based on a recording of Pete Seeger's version, sung with the SNCC Freedom Singers on the 1963 live Carnegie Hall recording, and the 1988 version by Pete Seeger sung at a reunion concert with Pete and the Freedom Singers on the anthology, Sing for Freedom, recorded in the field 1960-88 and edited and annotated by Guy and Candie Carawan, released in 1990 as Smithsonian-Folkways CD SF 40032.
NPR news article including full streaming versions of Pete Seeger's classic 1963 live Carnegie Hall recording and Bruce Springsteen's tribute version.
"Something About That Song Haunts You", essay on the history of "We Shall Overcome," Complicated Fun, June 9, 2006.
"Howie Richmond Views Craft Of Song: Publishing Giant Celebrates 50 Years As TRO Founder", by Irv Lichtman, Billboard, 8, 28, 1999. Excerpt: "Key folk songs in the [TRO] catalog, as arranged by a number of folklorists, are 'We Shall Overcome,' 'Kisses Sweeter Than Wine' 'On Top Of Old Smokey,' 'So Long, It's Been Good To Know You,' 'Goodnight Irene,' 'If I Had A Hammer,' 'Tom Dooley,' and 'Rock Island Line.'"
[edit] References
Dunaway, David, How Can I Keep from Singing: Pete Seeger, (orig. pub. 1981, reissued 1990). Da Capo, New York, ISBN 0-306-80399-2.
Seeger, Pete and Blood, Peter (Ed.), Where Have All the Flowers Gone?: A Singer's Stories, Songs, Seeds, Robberies (1993). Independent Publications Group, Sing Out Publications, ISBN 1-881322-01-7
___, "The We Shall Overcome Fund". Highlander Reports, newsletter of the Highlander Research and Education Center, August-November 2004, p.3.
We Shall Overcome, PBS Home Video 174, 1990, 58 minutes.
[edit] Further reading
Sing for Freedom: The Story of the Civil Rights Movement Through Its Songs: Compiled and edited by Guy and Candie Carawan; foreword by Julian Bond (New South Books, 2007), comprising two classic collections of freedom songs: We Shall Overcome (1963) and Freedom Is A Constant Struggle (1968), reprinted in a single edition. The book includes a major new introduction by Guy and Candie Carawan, words and music to the songs, important documentary photographs, and firsthand accounts by participants in the Civil Rights Movement. Available from Highlander Center.
We Shall Overcome! Songs of the Southern Freedom Movement: Julius Lester, editorial assistant. Ethel Raim, music editor: Additional musical transcriptions: Joseph Byrd [and] Guy Carawan. New York: Oak Publications, 1963.
Freedom is a Constant Struggle, compiled and edited by Guy and Candie Carawan. Oak Publications, 1968.
Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/We_Shall_Overcome"
Categories: 1903 songs | American folk songs | American patriotic songs | History of African-American civil rights | Pete Seeger songs | Protest songs | Joan Baez songs | Songs against racism and xenophobia
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We shall overcome: But we must have real leadership to do so
October 28th, 2008 · 10 Comments
(As published today in San Diego CityBeat.)
Poor ACORN. The social-justice organization has been an unfortunate victim of John McCain’s inflammatory tactics.
The poster child for a GOP-invented voter-registration fraud, ACORN is this election’s lanky geek who’s being bloodied and brutalized by the puffed-up neighborhood bullies. And as The Huffington Post reports, the bullies are feeling dangerously emboldened.
Not only have at least two of its offices been vandalized in recent weeks, but ACORN has also been the recipient of extremely disturbing e-mails and voicemails that can only be attributed to Real Americans. You know, the ones Sarah Palin is talkin’ to and, also, winkin’ at, the ones who reside in the “pockets” of Real America. Because those of us Fake Americans in the Fake America? We don’t believe in hate speech or intimidation as a means to an end.
The e-mails to ACORN contained, among other things, a threat to the life of a manager and a directive that all “blue gums” and “porch monkeys” high-tail it back to Africa. Alas, the voicemails weren’t any subtler. One caller’s favorite word rhymed with a comparative form of the adjective “big,” and she spoke of things other than acorns that she hoped would hang from oak trees. I heard her; she was horrid.
Thankfully, the Internet is available in both Americas so we can come together as one, listen to these comments and be not the least bit confused as to how far we still have to go in this diverse nation.
Given this country’s violent racial history and the fact that we are one swing-state combo away from electing a black man to lead us out of this morass, it’s not shocking that racism would become a flashpoint in this election. But the fact that a candidate would intentionally incite the bigoted few—and not be widely condemned for it—is appalling.
After the second presidential debate, I asked readers of my blog whether they felt McCain’s reference to Obama as “that one” was a racially charged remark. Though a few people expressed concern that it might be, the overwhelming opinion was that he is just an out-of-touch geezer. I happen to disagree with this naïve assessment: I believe his remark was specifically intended to degrade Obama, a belief that’s been underscored by unfolding events. Given the kinds of statements he and his representatives had been making up until that night, I had little doubt that calling Obama “that one” was an effort to delineate him—and, in effect, other brown people—as an “other” to be feared.
While McCain and his pathological liar of a running mate haven’t themselves uttered obvious words of racism, they have smilingly relied on coded language. They’ve used words—and combinations of them—with double entendres nearly as indiscernible as a dog whistle when taken individually. But collectively they’re as plain as the melanoma scar on McCain’s jaw.
McCain the Matador waved his red flag before the glazed-over eyes of the smoldering bull with sneering references to “community organizing.” And the bull was frenzied by the time the candidate offered his pre-debate battle cry of, “I’m gonna whip his you-know-what!” An interesting choice of words, given historical context, and I would argue this was not accidental.
Meanwhile, when asked why he does not immediately denounce unsavory outbursts at his rallies, McCain blinks and clenches and takes the I-have-no-idea-what-you’re-talking-about approach.
To be fair, he did attempt to correct a few bigots at one of his rallies. But he didn’t go far enough. McCain stood down when he had an opportunity to stand for something. He could have publicly stated that further outbursts would be met with expulsion from events. He could have publicly stated that Arab-Americans and Muslim-Americans are, in fact, Americans. He could have publicly stated that there is no room for bigotry and hate in civil discourse. He could have publicly stated that lawyers will address any wrongdoing at ACORN but the death threats and vile accusations toward the organization, it’s workers, it’s beneficiaries and, yes, his opponent must absolutely, unequivocally, immediately stop.
He could have led, but he didn’t.
In contrast, upon hearing his supporters boo his opponent during a speech on Oct. 21, Obama told the crowd, calmly but firmly, “No, no, we don’t need that. We need you to vote.” Certainly, not an issue as inflammatory as the one created and perpetuated by McCain, but Obama’s already been tested in this way.
Time journalist Joe Klein recently asked Obama about his gut feeling on dealing with the explosive remarks of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright. Obama said, “My gut was telling me that this was a teachable moment and that if I tried to do the usual political damage control instead of talking to the American people like an adult—like they were adults and could understand the complexities of race—that I would be not only doing damage to the campaign but missing an important opportunity for leadership.”
This was no gut feeling that put us in an endless war or gave us an unqualified nominee for vice president. No indeed. From this gut feeling came one of the most important and meaningful speeches on race that I’ve ever heard anyone deliver in my lifetime. Apparently, those Real Americans who called ACORN with their snippets of wisdom missed it.
The next four years will hold many opportunities for leadership, one of them being bridging the chasm between Real and Fake America. The choice couldn’t be more obvious. To paraphrase the conservative writer Andrew Sullivan, Obama is the future and we must decide if the future will begin Nov. 5.
http://www.aarynbelfer.com/2008/10/we-shall-overcome-but-we-must-have-real-leadership-to-do-so.html
Victor Obama reassures world
K.P. NAYAR
Barack Obama at the victory rally in Chicago. (Reuters)
Washington, Nov. 5: Americans voted their country back into reckoning as the leader of the free world when they elected Barack Obama as the 44th president of the US last night in a turnout that set a record in 48 years.
With the counting of provisional and absentee ballots still going on across America, 64 per cent of eligible voters cast their votes, braving the elements, long queues and snags at polling stations.
The last time Americans turned out in similar numbers to elect their commander-in-chief was when they voted John F. Kennedy to the presidency.
But if Kennedy’s election was “return to Camelot”, the idealisation of his White House as emblematic of King Arthur’s legendary court, the election of America’s first black President represents the redemption of this country where slavery was legal.
If the percentage is much higher than the figure given at the time going to the press, yesterday’s voting statistics could set a record in 100 years for a country that is notorious for its indifference to exercising adult franchise.
The 63 million plus popular votes polled for Obama, a nearly seven million lead over John McCain, represented a comprehensive rejection of eight years of Republican unilateralism that made the US government an object of revulsion in virtually every country in the world.
An hour after McCain conceded defeat, Obama sought to assure the world that he would turn his back on policies which have made people around the world lose faith in America and turn against it.
“To all those watching tonight from beyond our shores, from parliaments and palaces to those who are huddled around radios in the forgotten corners of our world — our stories are singular, but our destiny is shared, and a new dawn of American leadership is at hand,” the President-elect said in an acceptance speech at midnight before a raucous audience estimated at 200,000 in Obama’s home town of Chicago.
“And to all those who have wondered if America’s beacon still burns as bright — tonight we proved once more that the true strength of our nation comes not from our the might of our arms or the scale of our wealth, but from the enduring power of our ideals: democracy, liberty, opportunity, and unyielding hope,” Obama said.
Today, with only 76 days left for his swearing-in, Obama immediately set about assembling his presidency, but he made a point of taking his two daughters, 10-year-old Malia and seven-year-old Sasha, to school in the knowledge that he cannot do that regularly any more after January 20 next year.
From tomorrow itself, top US intelligence officials will begin to give him top-secret daily briefings and share critical overnight intelligence reports as if he is already in the White House. Obama will also begin a practice of daily briefings to the media on Thursday.
Obama is expected to immediately name Illinois Congressman Rahm Emanuel as his White House chief of staff, traditionally the first appointment by an incoming President. Emanuel was political and policy adviser to Bill Clinton when he was President.
In another move that will bring Clinton’s top aides back into the White House, Obama is also expected to name John Podesta, who was Clinton’s chief of staff, to head his transition team. Meanwhile, a group of Americans have begun an online petition drive through an open letter to the next President to draft Fareed Zakaria as the next secretary of state.
Zakaria is an Indian-born American journalist, currently editor of Newsweek International. It is an effort that is unlikely to go very far in view of his earlier support for the policies of President George W. Bush. The Democratic party establishment is said to be pressing for recruiting Senator John Kerry for the job.
Bush, meanwhile, talked to Obama on telephone and pledged “complete co-operation” in the transition and called Obama’s victory a “triumph of the American story”.
At the time of writing, Obama has secured 349 votes in the electoral college of 538 persons in results that are still incomplete. McCain got 163.
Results from Missouri and North Carolina are still awaited because the race in the two states is very close and counting of provisional and absentee votes is in progress.
Virginia voted for Obama and if North Carolina follows suit, two states which had very dark histories during the slave era would have especially redeemed their dishonourable past.
Obama’s victory sparked instant, late night celebrations all across the US, which continued today. A few thousand people marched to the White House and claimed that the American people had retaken the presidential home. CNN quoted Secret Service officers as saying that they had never seen anything like it before.
http://www.telegraphindia.com/1081106/jsp/frontpage/story_10071143.jsp
Maya to Obama, signs of the new millennium
GAIL OMVEDT
Obama has won! I was in the US in May 2007, when Mayavati became chief minister of UP, and Obama was coming forward in the US primary. With my daughter’s friends, mostly young and radical South Asian Americans, and all Obama supporters we celebrated Mayavati’s achievement. After years of depressing Republican presidencies, war and neoliberalism, something new was happening in the world.
An African American was aiming for the presidency, while a Dalit (and a woman!) was heading India’s largest state and promising to become Prime Minister in 10 years. Old barriers of caste and race were being not only challenged, but surmounted. Obama has made history: will Mayavati?
It seems that we were truly entering a new millennium! Obama’s victory itself reflects not only his own impressive leadership, but also a long history. I remember the 1960s: Thirty to forty years ago there were huge “race riots” in the US. In fact, they were urban ghetto uprisings, protests against the continued racism of American society.
A bloody civil war — the bloodiest in American history — had been gone through a century earlier; but in the reaction afterwards segregation was reimposed in the south and the former slaves were deprived of the voting rights. It took decades to make really solid changes. W.E.B. Dubois, as a militant, Left-leaning leader of African Americans, and Dr. Babasaheb Ambedkar can well be compared; theoretically and practically there were great similarities.
Yet while Ambedkar could become the head of the Constitution drafting committee and a minister, first in British Indian, then in independent India, Dubois could not get a job as postmaster in Washington D.C. which he had applied for. Bitter at the end, Dubois ended as a Communist in Africa.
The 1960s saw the civil rights movement; Martin Luther King (moved by a brave woman named Rosa Parks) emerging to leadership of a Montgomery bus strike as Blacks revolted against being forced to sit at the back of the bus; then came sit-ins by militant Black students resolving not to move away from restaurants refusing to serve them coffee.
In Freedom Summer, an event organised by the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee to bring whites and Blacks together to fight segregation in Mississippi, four men — three whites and an African American — were killed. One of the slogans of SNCC was the sarcastic, “there’s a town in Mississippi called Liberty; there’s a Department in Washington called Justice” — a comment on the lack of support they were getting from the Federal government. Little children moving to integrate schools were forced to go through mobs of cursing and shouting white segregationists. And then came the uprisings in northern ghettos, cities outside the Deep South which had their own harsh forms of racism.
They were historic years, a time of spreading militancy. A youth group I was working with in Berkeley, calling themselves “Youth Council for Community Action” (they had wanted “Youth Party for Youth Protection” but it was felt too militant), had the saying: “There are Negroes, niggers and Black people. We have a lot of niggers in this organisation, but we at least we don’t have any Negroes!”
Negroes, once the preferred term, had gotten the connotation of a middle class sellout; “nigger” was a derogatory term when used by whites (known insultingly as “honkies”) but when used among themselves had a rather desirable connotation of someone who was (ironically) “bad” — tough, riotous, uncontrollable, one who never gave in or gave up. And “Black” by then was the preferred term, someone who was “together”, a real “brother”.
America has come a long way since then. Sparked by the protests and uprisings, which had the support of growing groups of whites, the government responded with a number of “affirmative action” programmes. Some sections preferred to build “Black Capitalism”, which radicals such as myself at the time saw as rather a sellout. Yet all of these had their effect, Blacks — now calling themselves “African Americans” — began to move ahead in many fields. Emerging writers, men and women alike began to make their impact. Films such as Roots brought home the reality of slavery to millions of viewers; the Color Purple (from the novel by Alice Walker) saw Black women coming in masses and crying through its showing — and sterling first performers by Whoopee Goldberg and Oprah Winfrey. Oprah went on to become the highest paid TV personage in the country, said to be worth a million dollars an hour, her endorsement for Obama worth a million votes.
Among the youth of the country, the change in attitude was often profound; people began to choose their friends and mates without looking at colour. According to Census bureau figures, for example, black-white marriages increased from 65,000 in 1970 to 422,000 in 2005. Racism is hardly dead; but it is under challenge as never before.
Then came a young Senator of mixed parentage, white and African, with a history of community organising, with a Kenyan father and a childhood in Indonesia and Hawaii. When he announced his candidacy as a Democrat for the presidency in 2007, he was a “dark horse”, a relative unknown; Hillary Clinton was the overwhelming favourite. Yet Obama began to waken tremendous enthusiasm, drawing huge crowds and provoking emotion. His slogan was simple: “change”.
By the time of the vote, Obama’s victory was no surprise. Charged with being young and inexperienced, he won over his primary and main election opponents not only with the most impressive funding seen in history, but also with powerful organisation, going to the grassroots with a practical machine and using the Internet, YouTube and SMS cellphone messages. He remained cool and unflappable in the face of every challenge. And he awakened something like a new dream among Americans, mostly young, but of every class, Black and white and Hispanic.
Throughout the campaign, he drew crowds like a rock star or a famous preacher, emotional, swaying. The night of the election itself tens of thousands gathered in Chicago and New York, singing and weeping, hugging each other as the results became clear. When he stated in his acceptance speech “change has come -- we have proved today it is a new and real ‘United’ States of America”, the emotional achievement of breaking through three hundred years of American slavery and oppression was visible in many faces.
As one columnist, Frank Rich in the New York Times, wrote: “Obama doesn’t transcend race. He isn’t post-race. He is the latest chapter in the ever-unfurling American racial saga. It is an astonishing chapter.”
For African Americans, it was symbolised in a message sent from phone to phone: “Rosa sat so Martin could walk. Martin walked so Barack could run. Barack ran so your children can fly.” Hopefully, this will symbolise the new millennium, not only for people of every colour in the US but for people of all castes in India.
Gail Omvedt is an America-born sociologist whose essential work has centred on Dalit empowerment movements in India. Among her many books is a political biography of B.R. Ambedkar. Omvedt became an Indian citizen in 1983 and lives in Maharashtra.
http://www.telegraphindia.com/1081106/jsp/frontpage/story_10071201.jsp
Pat from PM, but no love
RADHIKA RAMASESHAN
New Delhi, Nov. 5: Prime Minister Manmohan Singh did not tell Barack Obama Indians “deeply love” him, but he did promise the US President-elect “a warm welcome” in the country.
In his congratulatory message to Obama, the Prime Minister said: “Your extraordinary journey to the White House will inspire people not only in your country but also around the world.”
“I hope you will find an opportunity to visit India soon. A warm welcome awaits you,” Singh added, saying he looked forward to working with Obama. “We have strong ties between our people and I look forward to working with you to realise the enormous potential for co-operation that exists between India and the US.”
A little over a month ago, when Singh met the outgoing President at the White House, he had told George W. Bush: “The people of India deeply love you, and all that you have done to bring our two countries closer to each other.”
Congress spokespersons were asked why the Prime Minister got so effusive about a leader whose approval ratings had plummeted when he was about to demit office.
Bush and Singh had worked closely to seal the nuclear deal, an issue so close to the Prime Minister’s heart that he staked his government on it.
If Singh’s message to Obama was unlike his emotional interactions with Bush, the ruling Congress and the Opposition BJP were not effusive either.
Congress chief Sonia Gandhi congratulated Obama and both parties hailed as “historic” the election of the first black President of the US but were weighing what the regime change would mean for India.
Bush, sources in the Congress and the BJP agreed, meant a lot to both parties. Relations between India and the US got a boost when he was first elected President in 2000. At the time, the BJP’s Atal Bihari Vajpayee was Prime Minister. Indo-US ties reached a high when the nuclear deal was sealed this year.
BJP spokesperson Prakash Javadekar said: “India has to be careful because the Democrats will pressure India to sign the CTBT (Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty).”
Congress sources said that while the deal could not be abrogated, the Democrats might thwart its implementation. Since every nuclear transaction will require a licence from the US government, Washington could leverage its position to pressure India to sign the CTBT, they feared.
Congress sources also pointed out that “a Democrat dispensation tends to lean towards China”.
Other areas of concern were Obama’s hints at third-party mediation on Jammu and Kashmir and curtailing outsourcing of jobs.
Congress spokesperson Manish Tewari pinned his hopes on Indian Americans: “Indo-US relations have grown and consolidated over the last two decades. If there are differing perceptions, we will have to work towards their reconciliation. The Indian diaspora has enough strength to work on the US establishment towards reconciliation.”
http://www.telegraphindia.com/1081106/jsp/frontpage/story_10069513.jsp
Indians shrug off BPO worry
AMIT ROY
Shefali Kapadia watches election night coverage with Indian techies in New York
New York, Nov. 5: As President, Barack Obama will not be able to reverse the whole process of outsourcing to India whatever he may have indicated during the election campaign, many Indian Americans feel.
Explaining why Indian “techies” took this view, Kartik Kilachand, member of South Asians for Obama, told The Telegraph: “Indians comprise 2.4million — about 0.8 per cent of America’s 300 million population. Yet out of the $650million campaign funds collected by Obama, Indians raised nearly $30million — about 5 per cent of the total.”
Kilachand, who had gathered for an Indian election-night party in Brooklyn Heights, an affluent New York suburb, said: “We now have a seat at the table. We will be consulted on important policy issues, such as outsourcing.”
The Indians clearly felt part of the US political process. A rousing cheer went up at 8.45pm when CNN called Pennsylvania for Obama. At 9.20pm, Ohio, another crucial battleground state, followed.
One of the guests, Shefali Kapadia, combining the glamour of New York and Mumbai, the two cities between which she — like many other Indian Americans — practically commutes, said she worked for two NGOs, Chakshu and Blazing Hope, which focused on 64 villages in Maharashtra.
“I often work in the village of Shivkar in the Panvel area and know bright children,” she said. “All they need is a break. I am confident they could be the Indian Obamas of tomorrow, the outsider who has come from nowhere.”
Last night’s party was hosted by Ashok Vasvani, a “financial analyst for hedge funds”, and his wife Bansi, an art dealer. Many of the guests were entrepreneurs in software development.
Whether Obama really will consult his Indian supporters on outsourcing remains to be seen but the main argument advanced last night was that, in office, he would be unlikely to adopt policies that would damage American companies by restricting their ability to engage with business partners in India.
There was no jingoism on display, only a presentation of the realities of burgeoning Indo-US trade and business. And it came at a celebration where the mood was genuinely pro-Obama.
Kilachand’s business partner, Samir Hutheesing, stressed that US corporations outsourced to India “not because it was cheaper but because they received quality”.
He said: “Obama has talked of rewarding American companies that don’t send jobs abroad but I don’t think US companies have a choice. The Wipros and the Infosyses of this world are multi-billion-dollar companies. Indian companies are very competitive. Indian companies can offer good service with excellent technical skills, which are often things you cannot get in the US.”
http://www.telegraphindia.com/1081106/jsp/frontpage/story_10070953.jsp
PROMISE OF THE PRESENT
- Barack Hussein Obama’s election completes a cycle of history
Mukul Kesavan
This is the richest and the most powerful country which ever occupied this globe. The might of past empires is little compared to ours. But I do not want to be the President who built empires, or sought grandeur, or extended dominion.
I want to be the President who educated young children to the wonders of their world.
I want to be the President who helped to feed the hungry and to prepare them to be tax-payers instead of tax-eaters.
http://www.blackstarnews.com/?c=125&a=4988
The day before Barack Obama was elected the 44th president of the United States of America, I asked a class of post-graduate students if they thought an Obama win (were it to happen) would amount to a historically significant event, a landmark of sorts, a watershed. Ever since the great materialist historians of France and Britain discredited a style of history-writing that reduced history to a chronicle of kings and queens and governments, students of history have been careful not to freight individuals with more historical significance than they can bear.
Two students in a class of six argued that Obama’s election would make no material difference to race relations in America, nor to America’s relations with the world. Both of them had specific reasons for their view: the boy, a Maoist, said that America’s military-industrial complex was too entrenched for any individual to affect, and the girl (of no explicit political affiliation) was content to argue that Obama’s election would be, at best, a kind of tokenism practised by a society keen to buy cheap absolution for its racist past and present.
Since I had been following Obama’s career obsessively for more than four years, ever since I read a magazine profile of him written around the time he was running for the US Senate, I felt both disappointed and chastened by their unillusioned take on an Obama presidency. Disappointed because in a corny way I expected ‘young people’ to be excited by the prospect of a relatively young black man becoming the president of the most powerful country in the world, and chastened because their answers made my excitement feel like middle-aged hyperventilation.
Even middle-age wasn’t an excuse because there were many grown-up people whose views on Obama’s campaign were similarly clear-eyed. In an interview with the New Statesman, the writer, Arundhati Roy, refused to endorse Obama. For the American electorate, the choice between Obama and McCain was no better than the humiliating choice Indians faced between the Congress and the Bharatiya Janata Party, she said. If Obama was elected, he would, metaphorically, turn into a white man because “He’ll have to prove that he is whiter than the white man.”
If Arundhati Roy’s argument about the irrelevance of Obama’s colouring came from the Left, Christopher Hitchens disdained Obama’s blackness from the Right. A Trotskyist who became a neo-conservative a few years ago, Hitchens declared with fine rhetorical flourish in the Wall Street Journal that “I shall not vote for Sen. Obama and it will not be because he — like me and like all of us — carries African genes.” For Hitchens the idea that Obama’s mixed race identity or his colour made his candidacy historic was ignorant and sentimental because science had taught us otherwise: “The enormous advances in genome studies have effectively discredited the whole idea of ‘race’ as a means of categorizing humans. And however ethnicity may be defined or subdivided, it is utterly unscientific and retrograde to confuse it with color.”
Having scientifically demonstrated (at least to his own satisfaction) that since everyone was African, no one was black, Hitchens went on, in another article, to dismiss the excitement about the significance of Obama’s candidacy as a feeble-minded capitulation to identity politics: “The more that people claim Obama’s mere identity to be a ‘breakthrough,’ the more they demonstrate that they have failed to emancipate themselves from the original categories of identity that acted as a fetter upon clear thought.”
So why was I thrilled by Obama’s victory? And what reason was there to believe that a hundred years from now, his election as president would merit a page or even a footnote in a history of the 21st century? It’s salutary to be reminded of the historical cruelties of the American State, and the suffering it has inflicted on people within its borders and beyond them. In the headlined hysteria of the moment, it’s useful to be reminded that Obama’s ascension won’t, in the foreseeable future, reduce the population of African-Americans in jail, extend their life-expectancy or magic blacks out of inner-city ghettoes into prosperous suburbs. And in Obama’s declared foreign-policy intentions — his determination to wage an unwinnable war in Afghanistan, his keenness to bomb Pakistan in pursuit of bin Laden — there is enough to depress the most enthusiastic supporter.
And yet, shouldn’t a historically informed scepticism about Obama, founded in an understanding of the past nature of the American State, be nuanced and complicated by another history, one that feeds directly into this election? To acknowledge the history of American empire and the heartbreak it has visited on this world is proper. But surely we should simultaneously recall the struggle against slavery and segregation, recognize that span of history, which now includes Obama in its arc, remember Frederick Douglas, Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King, Bayard Rustin and Rosa Parks, and try to imagine what the election of a black man to the American presidency would have meant to them? Because unless we make that effort, our scepticism of individuals and the politics of identity remains depthless, unempathetic, ahistorical.
Ironically it was a conservative American writer, Michael Gerson, a supporter of McCain, who summed up the historical symbolism of Obama’s victory: “An African American will take the oath of office blocks from where slaves were once housed in pens and sold for profit. He will sleep in a house built in part by slave labor, near the room where Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation with firm hand. He will host dinners where Teddy Roosevelt in 1901 entertained the first African American to be a formal dinner guest in the White House; command a military that was not officially integrated until 1948. Every event, every act, will complete a cycle of history.”
A few days before the election, the great American novelist, Toni Morrison was asked roughly the same question I asked my students. Morrison, whose wrenchingly beautiful novel about slavery, Beloved, is arguably the best American novel written in the past half century, had this to say. “This election is critical, vital to more than just people in the United States. It’s going to make a big, big difference which way it goes… I think the promise with Senator Obama is that we return to an idea known as ‘the common good’…” Toni Morrison is a black woman, who, despite Christopher Hitchens’s dazzling deconstruction of race and colour, has no doubt at all about her blackness, the history of that blackness and the significance of Barack Obama’s bid for the presidency of the United States of America to that history. Asked what she was going to do on election night, this grand old woman of American letters who has won every distinction that a writer can hope for, said: “I have three choices: I can go to some friends; I was invited to go on a TV show; but I think under the bed may yet prove the safest place to be.”
She can come out from under the bed now, and I can tell my students tomorrow that I had asked them the wrong question, that there are times when, like a good reader, it’s good to briefly suspend disbelief, to resist the pleasure of knowingness, to give yourself up to the promise of the present. The election of Barack Hussein Obama is one of those times. For a day (or a week), history can take care of itself.
http://www.telegraphindia.com/1081106/jsp/opinion/story_10068405.jsp
Beacon of an equal world
Struggle makes victory special
Barack Hussein Obama has made it. The child of a black man will enter the White House as President of the USA on January 20, 2009. This is not an ordinary event, nor is it a symbolic one. Indeed, it is an epoch-making event signifying a real change, not only for America but for the entire world, especially for the disempowered people across nations.
What does the Obama victory mean for the disempowered masses worldwide? In one word: Hope.
It was probably the first election in the history of the United States that witnessed long and winding queues of African American voters, who, until now, had felt largely disenfranchised and under-represented in the election process and to an extent, even shut out of mainstream America. It is also for the first time in American history that African American youth have an empowered leader they can look up to and strive to aspire to become.
Not since John F. Kennedy has there been such anticipation and speculation around a presidential candidate as was the case with Obama. But the comparison between Kennedy and Obama really ends with a minority background and highly energetic youthfulness which they shared.
Kennedy had a strong and wealthy family background. On the other hand, as the child of a black man and white woman, raised by a single mother and with a father having a Muslim-sounding name — Hussein — besides an extremely modest economic background, Obama had to beat many more seemingly insurmountable odds and overcome vicious personalised criticism. That is precisely why this victory is so special, and truly unprecedented.
Obama represents a beacon of hope to millions of sidelined or marginalised masses throughout the world just for who he is. As he explains his multicultural background and family structure in his book, The Audacity of Hope, “I have no choice but to believe this vision. As the child of a black man and white woman, born in the melting pot of Hawaii, with a sister who is half-Indonesian, but who is usually mistaken for Mexican, and a brother-in-law and niece of Chinese descent, with some relatives who resemble Margaret Thatcher and others who could pass for Bernine Mac, I never had the option of restricting my loyalties on the basis of race or measuring my worth on the basis of tribe.”
Obama’s wife, Michelle, also symbolises the true 21st century woman: intelligent, independent, and the pillar of strength for her husband. Women throughout the world can look up to her poise and intellect, and can have similar dreams of their own.
Obama supporter Joyce Nichols cries as she watches the election results in Houston. (AP)
Needless to say that the accomplishment does not lie with the person alone and the praise must legitimately also go to the nation that elects such a leader despite racial or religious or caste barriers. This is symptomatic of the welcome maturity of the American democracy. Nevertheless, as former secretary of state Colin Powell stated while endorsing Obama’s candidature, Obama was not supported “because of his race”.
Obama studiously refrained from using the “Black Card” and charged the American public opinion by conveying a new image of American leadership and also a new vision for America’s role in the world.
“This election is not about me, it is about you,” he convinced the American people. This great contribution is entirely Obama’s own.
“President” Obama would certainly represent the “melting pot” that America has become and is hoped to be a harbinger of a change indicating that centuries of prejudice and hate that have besieged American society and culture have finally begun to end. No longer will a typical American just be thought of as a Caucasian, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant man. It could be an Indian businessman, or Chinese professional or even a Muslim woman wearing a burqa.
Rahul Gandhi recently said that in India “there are hundreds of Obamas in the making”. Well, Barack Obama’s election as the President of the US is a great source of inspiration to the thousands of Obamas in the making all over the world. Indeed, the making of the man — “President” Barack Hussein Obama — is the message!
Dr Narendra Jadhav, economist and educationist, is vice-chancellor of the University of Pune. His autobiography Outcaste is the saga of a Dalit family, and their triumphs and tribulations
http://www.telegraphindia.com/1081106/jsp/nation/story_10069812.jsp
All for Obama, Amartya counts the gains
AMIT ROY
Sen, Obama: In support of Barack
New York, Nov. 5: Amartya Sen today told The Telegraph he was delighted with Barack Obama’s victory and that it had important consequences for India.
“It was a big night. I went to bed late. It’s an excellent result. I obviously don’t have a vote in America — I am an exclusively Indian citizen — but I have been a supporter of Barack Obama’s candidature right from the beginning,” the Nobel laureate, who teaches at Harvard, said from his home in Boston.
“He (Obama) brings three very important things for America. First, a kind of democratisation by the inclusion of African Americans now in the highest political positions of this country. This is a wonderful change since there were racist laws excluding blacks from their rightful place in society even a few decades ago,” Sen said.
“Second, the alienation of the world from the US was based on an American policy that had been extraordinarily unilateral. For example, world opinion was quite contrary to the intervention in Iraq. Obama had been critical of this unilateralism and it is quite clear that in his vision of a good world, multilateralism plays a big part and that is very important for the world given the fact that the US is still the strongest country.
“Third, the unilateral policies chosen by the government have often been peculiarly daft. Often they were not well thought out, for example, attacking Iraq was not only a unilateral decision, it was also a stupid decision. Iraq had no involvement with 9/11 since it did not allow al Qaida to function in the country; and the running of Iraq essentially by an American administration was bound to be deeply problematic and resented.
“Similarly, it is not smart to do nothing about the deteriorating environment and just watch the calamity develop. It is also not very astute to let all the regulations of financial markets go away, allowing people to make huge amounts of unaccounted profits and then complain about the greed of the money-makers.
“Greed is not a new phenomenon but what it needs is decent regulations which make people responsible for their decisions.
“So, in all these respects, by making America more democratic (and) American policy more multilateral, we can expect major advances from an Obama administration. The most distinguishing feature of Obama has not been the fact that he is black or that he has a liberal voting record but that he brings a reasoned approach to taking decisions. And this America needs today. And so does the world.
“Since I have been involved in the civil rights movement in America for a long time — I visited this country many times and I was very much present at Berkeley in 1964-65 when the free speech movement occurred and at Harvard during 1968-69 when there were also participatory movements on the campuses — it is a moment of particular joy to see what is ultimately a success of the fruits of the civil rights movement.
“I can’t say like some of my friends that I wept, I didn’t, but I am delighted and extremely happy.
“I think this victory has implications for India. The Bush administration has not been particularly hostile to India at all. And therefore it is not so much that the last administration was more anti-Indian than the Obama administration would be. But it is in the interests of all countries, including India, that American policy be based on reasoning.
“We all have much to benefit from intelligent decisions taken by each country and it is the likelihood of a more reasoned approach to world problems on which world peace, including suppression of terrorism in an intelligent and effective way, depends. And India has a huge stake in that.”
http://www.telegraphindia.com/1081106/jsp/nation/story_10069737.jsp
Karat drives the knife in ‘deep’
JAYANTH JACOB
Singh, Karat: American battle
New Delhi, Nov. 5: As compliments go, this one was as left-handed as it gets.
CPM general secretary Prakash Karat chose the momentous events of the American stage to extend his favourite sub-plot today and battle on with his pet villains. He got Barack Obama’s historic victory quickly out of the way with a clipped “significant event” label and dwelt with relish on its implications for George Bush and Manmohan Singh.
“I wonder where this will leave our Prime Minister because he has expressed his profound love for George Bush… this election has shown how deeply unpopular George Bush is after eight years….”
Karat appeared to have chosen his words to drive the knife deep — “deeply unpopular” was, after all, a play on Prime Minister Singh telling President Bush that the people of India “deeply” loved him.
While many in the foreign policy establishment and in the hall of experts have hailed Bush for taking Indo-US relations to a new high, the Left has been deeply critical not only of his presidency but also of the Bush-Manmohan compact.
The CPM boss kept his judgement on Obama suspended — “what the Obama presidency will do, what policy directions it will take, we will have to wait, watch and see. Changes have been promised but we will have to see what kind of change” — but he may actually be ruing the prospect of Bush exiting the scene.
Bush in the White House afforded the Left a daily turkey shoot. Alas, he’s turned lame duck now. And Obama will take time and effort to paint into a villain symbolic of the evil empire. The President-elect has, after all, been “accused” of being a socialist and a capital re-distributionist.
Karat’s party colleague and Bengal chief minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee appeared happy enough though. “For the first time, a black President with his black family members will enter the White House,” he said as soon as he came on stage at the opening of an exhibition in Calcutta.
http://www.telegraphindia.com/1081106/jsp/nation/story_10069437.jsp
MNS stir: All of us are Indians says Supreme Court
6 Nov, 2008, 2014 hrs IST, AGENCIES
NEW DELHI: In the wake of the Raj Thackeray-led Maharashtra Navnirman Sena's hate campaign against north Indians and non-Marathis, the Supreme Court
on Thursday struck a patriotic note by saying that "all of us are Indians" and there is no difference between people coming from various regions.
"What's the difference between north Indians and Indians? All of us are Indians," a bench of Justices B N Aggrawal and G S Singhvi quipped, while posting for Monday a PIL seeking judicial inquiry into the killing of a Bihari youth, Rahul Raj, in a police encounter and the murder of another north Indian in Mumbai last month.
On Tuesday the apex court had observed that if there was a "political will" such hate campaign would not occur in the country. It had also cited Article 355 to drive home the point that the Union government had adequate powers to give necessary directions to the State to prevent such incidents.
The bench of Justices Aggrawal and Singhvi said it would hear the matter along with another related PIL which had earlier sought appropriate directions to the government to ensure that the country's unity was not threatened by vested interests fomenting regional chauvinism.
Incidentally, the apex court had directed the petitioners in both cases to suitably amend their petition and come before it when the matter is taken up for further hearing.
During the brief arguments on Thursday, the petitioner, Sanjeev Kumar Singh, submitted that he was compelled to approach the Supreme Court as the authorities in Maharashtra had failed to respond to his request for providing adequate protection to north Indians in the state.
"When I made representation to all senior officials including the Mumbai police commissioner, I was threatened that I would meet the same fate if I do not get out of the place," Singh told the bench after being asked as to why he did not approach the authorities concerned with his plea.
Singh asserted that he had every right to approach the apex court as a number of his relatives staying in Maharashtra were under constant fear due to the ongoing hate campaign.
The apex court queried Singh as to whether he was aware that Article 355 of the Constitution to which the latter replied in the affirmative and read out the portion in the court on the advice of the bench.
According to Article 355, 'It shall be the duty of the Union to protect every state against external aggression and internal disturbance and to ensure that the government of every state is carried on in accordance with the provisions of this Constitution.'
Rahul Raj, 23-year-old resident of Patna was killed in a shootout in a BEST bus on October 27 and a day later Dharam Dev Rai (25), a resident of Faizabad in UP, was beaten to death on a local train in Mumbai.
On Tuesday, the apex court had observed that the issue was political in nature and "political will" was required to curb it.
"Can it be done through an order of this court? It is a political question, not a court issue. If there is a political will it can be tackled," a bench of Justices B N Aggrawal and G S Singhvi observed.
US business productivity growth slowed in Q3
6 Nov, 2008, 1917 hrs IST, REUTERS
WASHINGTON: US non-farm business productivity grew at the slowest pace this year during the third quarter as output fell at the sharpest rate in seve
n years, a Labor Department report on Thursday showed.
Productivity increased at an annual rate of 1.1 percent, less than a third of the second quarter's 3.6 percent rate and down from 2.6 percent in the first quarter. That was still ahead of forecasts by Wall Street economists who had expected only a 0.8 percent annual rate of productivity growth for the third quarter.
Output fell at a 1.7 percent rate in the third quarter, the biggest decline since a 2.9 percent fall in the third quarter of 2001.
Productivity is a measure of hourly output per worker. Rising productivity helps to keep inflation in check.
Unit labor costs, a gauge of inflation and profit pressures that the Federal Reserve monitors closely, jumped at a 3.6 percent annual rate in the third quarter after declining 0.1 percent in the second quarter. That was well ahead of forecasts for a 2.8 percent annual rate of increase.
BoE, ECB slash key rates as EU economy slows
6 Nov, 2008, 1828 hrs IST, REUTERS
FRANKFURT: The European Central Bank cut its main lending rate by 50 basis points on Thursday as the euro zone economy slows. UK bailout
The move takes the ECB's benchmark rate to 3.25 percent and is the second cut in just under a month following an emergency 50 basis points reduction made on Oct. 8 in tandem with a host of other central banks.
The Bank of England earlier cut rates by 150 basis points and the Swiss National Bank by 50 basis points.
ECB President Jean-Claude Trichet will explain the Governing Council's decision at a news conference at 1330 GMT.
He is expected to say the move is in response to falling economic growth and justified by the fact that inflation worries have eased sharply.
The euro zone's economy, which had grown every year since the bloc's creation in 1999, contracted by 0.2 percent in the second quarter this year. Most economists expect further shrinkage in third quarter GDP figures when they are released on Nov. 14.
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Annual inflation is now at 3.2 percent, well above the ECB's target of just under 2 percent, but economists expect it to drop rapidly in the coming months.
SWIFT ACTION
Obama's landslide win on Tuesday along with the Democrats' tighter grip on Congress, raised hopes of a speedier injection of billions of dollars to shore up the struggling economy.
The first black US president has to wait until Jan. 20 to move into the White House. In the meantime, though, he must decide on a successor for Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, one of the architects of a $700 billion state rescue package inconceivable before the crisis broke.
Timothy Geithner, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, former Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers and former Fed Chairman Paul Volcker are among those mooted for the Treasury post. Obama may announce his pick on Thursday.
The ECB, staring at the first euro zone-wide recession since its inception in 1999, is seen certain to cut its benchmark rate by half a point to a two-year low of 3.25 percent. But interest rate traders are pricing in a 75 basis point cut.
A half-point reduction would match the Oct. 8 emergency cut made in unison with the Fed and other major central banks. A larger reduction would be the ECB's biggest ever.
The slump is already encroaching on Main Street. World number two sporting goods maker Adidas stood by its 2008 forecasts, but retracted targets for next year, declaring that conditions were too difficult to predict.
A Swedish central bank official said the shape of a Nordic aid package to crisis-hit Iceland had been decided. Norway said earlier this week it would provide Iceland with a 500 million euro ($643 million) loan to help the country rebuild an economy in tatters following the collapse of its biggest banks.
The International Monetary Fund also approved a hefty $16.5 billion loan for Ukraine.
Inflation spooks market; Nifty ends below 2900
6 Nov, 2008, 1820 hrs IST,Mohammed Sabir, ECONOMICTIMES.COM
MUMBAI: Equities retraced intraday gains and ended sharply lower for the second straight session Thursday as a higher-than-expected inflation rate weighed on investor sentiments. Metals and oil & gas stocks took a hit while realty and healthcare ended flat.
Domestic inflation rate for the week ended Oct 25 was 10.72 per cent against 10.68 per cent a week ago. The figure disappointed traders who expected it to come in single digit.
Stocks opened gap-down following correction in global markets on fears of recession, which came to the fore after the US elections were over.
Shares of Tata group companies Tata Steel and Tata Motors were under tremendous pressure. Investors also continued to exit Reliance Industries.
Bombay Stock Exchange’s 30-share Sensex closed the day at 9,734.22, down 385.79 points or 3.81 per cent from the previous close. The Index touched a high of 10,109.45 and low of 9,635.22.
National Stock Exchange’s Nifty ended at 2,892.65, down 102.30 points or 3.42 per cent. The 50-share index touched an intra-day low of 2,860.25 and high of 3,007.80.
BSE Midcap Index was down 2.24 per cent and BSE Smallcap Index closed 2.13 per cent down.
“We are in normal correction after a phenomenal rise and may retrace below today’s low to 2746 and 2560, which forms a strong support base for the Nifty. For a higher bottom formation, Nifty has to turn from any of these above levels and should close above 3240 for two consecutive days, which would raise possibility of a 700-800 points rally on the Nifty. If market doesn’t breach low of 2860 on Friday then the levels of 3008, 3051 and 3122 will act as sell area. Close above 3122 will be positive for the market. Short term averages are trending flat and long term 200 DMA and 30 DMA are downwards,” said Bharat Gala, head technical analyst, Ventura Securities.
European shares down after huge British rate cut
6 Nov, 2008, 1818 hrs IST, REUTERS
LONDON: European shares traded lower at midday on Thursday, having pared losses after a surprisingly large Bank of England rate cut, and investors sw
itched their sights to a European Central Bank rate decision due at 1245 GMT.
By 1219 GMT, the FTSEurofirst 300 index of top European shares was down 1.7 percent at 937.03 points, off a earlier low of 911.3 points.
The Bank of England slashed rates by 1.5 percentage points to 3 percent. Most economists polled by Reuters had forecast a half-point BoE cut although several had changed their forecasts following a series of gloomy data.
Analysts said the move suggested that the European Central Bank would cut by more than the 0.5 percentage points most expected before the BoE move.
"The amazing decision by the BoE to slash rates by 150 basis points leads us to believe that the ECB will be cutting by 100 basis points today. That is now our expectation," Royal Bank of Scotland said in a note.
Britain's central bank has never cut interest rates by more than half a point since it was made independent in 1997. The last time rates were slashed by a percentage point was in 1993, when the country was struggling to emerge from a recession.
"It looks like the Bank of England monetary policy committee has completed abandoned its policy of incremental changes. This is good decisive action. This decision is unprecedented and the market is going to be confused for a time by it," said Jim Wood-Smith, head of research at Williams de Broe.
"On the one hand it is good news; on the other hand it is confirmation that we are up a gum tree."
Banks were the biggest losers on the index. HSBC, BNP Paribas, UBS and Banco Santander were down 2.8-8.2 percent.
Elsewhere in financials, the world's biggest listed hedge fund firm Man Group lost 29.7 percent after it said its pre-tax profit fell 24 percent to $622 million in the six months to end-September.
"Financials are under pressure especially in this environment. But, would have thought a hedge fund company like Man Group would have done well in these type of circumstances. The group has not lived up to the expectations everyone had for them and now there is a question of huge redemptions," said Mike Lenhoff, strategist at Brewin Dolphin.
AXA, Europe's biggest insurer by market capitalisation, dropped 4.9 percent after it reported lower 9-month sales.
Across Europe, the FTSE 100 index was down 2.7 percent, Germany's DAX was 2.75 percent and France's CAC 40 was 2.55 percent lower.
Energy stocks also contributed to heavy losses on the index as crude fell 2.45 percent as the dollar strengthened and dismal economic data pointed to a deeper U.S recession than feared.
BG Group, BP, Royal Dutch Shell and Total were down 2.5-3.3 percent. A retreat in metal prices also weighed on mining shares with with copper down 3.2 percent. Vedanta Resources slipped 9.5 percent after the group posted a 24.7 percent drop in first half profit.
Rio Tinto, BHP Billiton and Xstrata were between 6.3-8.4 percent lower. On the upside, brewer InBev gained 0.07 percent as it insisted its $52 billion takeover of Anheuser-Busch was on track after third-quarter results slightly exceeded expectations despite rocketing costs.
Investors also turned to defensive stocks considered a safe bet in times of economic turmoil, with the pharmaceutical sector regaining some of the ground which it lost on Wednesday. Roche and Novartis were up between 0.8-0.95 percent.
US stocks future briefly cut losses on UK rate cut
6 Nov, 2008, 1816 hrs IST, AGENCIES
NEW YORK: US stock index futures briefly trimmed losses on Thursday after the Bank of England slashed interest rates, a move expected to be followed
by a cut by the European Central Bank as authorities try to ease the impact of a global recession.
The Bank of England cut borrowing costs by a more than expected 150 basis points to 3.0 percent. The boost from the rate cut, however, was offset by disappointing outlooks from companies including technology bellwether Cisco Systems pointing to a deepening global economic downturn.
S&P 500 futures fell 13 points and were below fair value, a formula that evaluates pricing by taking into account interest rates, dividends and time to expiration on the contract. Dow Jones industrial average futures declined 102 points, and Nasdaq 100 futures were down 25.25 points.
Grim reality hits global stocks
6 Nov, 2008, 1642 hrs IST, REUTERS
LONDON: European stocks followed Asia into sharp declines on Thursday and oil extended losses as weak U.S. data intensified fears about the impact of recession in major economies hit by the worst financial crisis in 80 years.
The euro and sterling fell against the dollar as investors braced for the European Central Bank and the Bank of England to cut interest rates by at least half a percentage point.
Euphoria after a landmark victory of Democrat Barack Obama in the U.S. presidential vote evaporated as Wednesday's data showed cuts in employment by private employers and a sharp contraction in the service sector, revealing the scale of a slowdown in the world's biggest economy.
"We're back to the grim reality of economic data showing recessionary conditions and lower earnings guidance," said Bernard McAlinden, investment strategist at NCB Stockbrokers.
"The counterbalance is interest rate cuts. We're no longer in a situation where big cuts would cause panic." MSCI world equity index fell 2.4 percent while emerging stocks lost more than 5 percent. Asian stocks fell 7 percent.
Russia's largest stock exchange MICEX halted trading of stocks for one hour after stock prices fell sharply.
BIG CUTS?
The euro fell half a percent to $1.2898 while sterling ticked down to $1.5933. The dollar rose slightly against a basket of major currencies.
Some analysts are looking for a UK interest rate cut of as much as 100 basis points and a euro zone rate cut of 75 basis points. Many say drastic action from central banks is key in restoring investor confidence.
"The more significant the banks cut rates and the more dovish related statements the better the chance of seeing equity markets stabilising and currencies rallying thereafter," BNP Paribas said in a note to clients.
"A more conservative approach could lead to substantial equity losses taking currencies with it."
U.S. crude oil lost 2 percent to $63.96 a barrel, having fallen all the way from its record high above $147 set in July.
The December bund futures fell 20 ticks ahead of the ECB rate decision.
Entrepreneurs should go slow to overcome financial crisis: Experts
6 Nov, 2008, 1955 hrs IST, PTI
KOLKATA: The entrepreneurs should adopt a wait-and-watch policy to recover from the ongoing global financial meltdown and think beyond their short-te
rm interests, analysts said on Thursday.
"The small and medium entrepreneurs should take a long-term view at this particular juncture. So, when the good time comes, they will be able to utilise that. If they look at short-term compulsion of their companies they will lose focus. Now it's just time to watch," US-based executive and service firm Tatum's chairman Douglass M. Tatum said at a programme here.
Speaking at the Fortune High Growth Series organised by the the women's arm of the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry (FICCI), Tatum said India was innovating everywhere and people should look at innovation in a broad sense.
Fortune High Growth Series was targeted at providing a clear view to the company chief executives and senior executives on how to turn growth crisis into competitive advantage. The session was addressed by global business magazine Fortune's contributing editor John Elliott, Robert Bierman who was the vice-president of Live Media, Fortune magazine and many other noted dignitaries.
"At least 100 companies from all over eastern region participated in the series. It was designed for company executives from small to medium-sized growth firms to get a first hand view about the successful global high-growth companies," said FICCI women's body (Kolkata chapter) chairperson Rajkumari Saharia.
Obama victory and Indo-US relations
6 Nov, 2008, 0025 hrs IST,C Uday Bhaskar,
LONDON: European shares traded lower at midday on Thursday, having pared losses after a surprisingly large Bank of England rate cut, and investors sw
itched their sights to a European Central Bank rate decision due at 1245 GMT.
By 1219 GMT, the FTSEurofirst 300 index of top European shares was down 1.7 percent at 937.03 points, off a earlier low of 911.3 points.
The Bank of England slashed rates by 1.5 percentage points to 3 percent. Most economists polled by Reuters had forecast a half-point BoE cut although several had changed their forecasts following a series of gloomy data.
Analysts said the move suggested that the European Central Bank would cut by more than the 0.5 percentage points most expected before the BoE move.
"The amazing decision by the BoE to slash rates by 150 basis points leads us to believe that the ECB will be cutting by 100 basis points today. That is now our expectation," Royal Bank of Scotland said in a note.
Britain's central bank has never cut interest rates by more than half a point since it was made independent in 1997. The last time rates were slashed by a percentage point was in 1993, when the country was struggling to emerge from a recession.
"It looks like the Bank of England monetary policy committee has completed abandoned its policy of incremental changes. This is good decisive action. This decision is unprecedented and the market is going to be confused for a time by it," said Jim Wood-Smith, head of research at Williams de Broe.
"On the one hand it is good news; on the other hand it is confirmation that we are up a gum tree."
Banks were the biggest losers on the index. HSBC, BNP Paribas, UBS and Banco Santander were down 2.8-8.2 percent.
Elsewhere in financials, the world's biggest listed hedge fund firm Man Group lost 29.7 percent after it said its pre-tax profit fell 24 percent to $622 million in the six months to end-September.
"Financials are under pressure especially in this environment. But, would have thought a hedge fund company like Man Group would have done well in these type of circumstances. The group has not lived up to the expectations everyone had for them and now there is a question of huge redemptions," said Mike Lenhoff, strategist at Brewin Dolphin.
AXA, Europe's biggest insurer by market capitalisation, dropped 4.9 percent after it reported lower 9-month sales.
Across Europe, the FTSE 100 index was down 2.7 percent, Germany's DAX was 2.75 percent and France's CAC 40 was 2.55 percent lower.
Energy stocks also contributed to heavy losses on the index as crude fell 2.45 percent as the dollar strengthened and dismal economic data pointed to a deeper U.S recession than feared.
BG Group, BP, Royal Dutch Shell and Total were down 2.5-3.3 percent. A retreat in metal prices also weighed on mining shares with with copper down 3.2 percent. Vedanta Resources slipped 9.5 percent after the group posted a 24.7 percent drop in first half profit.
Rio Tinto, BHP Billiton and Xstrata were between 6.3-8.4 percent lower. On the upside, brewer InBev gained 0.07 percent as it insisted its $52 billion takeover of Anheuser-Busch was on track after third-quarter results slightly exceeded expectations despite rocketing costs.
Investors also turned to defensive stocks considered a safe bet in times of economic turmoil, with the pharmaceutical sector regaining some of the ground which it lost on Wednesday. Roche and Novartis were up between 0.8-0.95 percent.
US stocks future briefly cut losses on UK rate cut
6 Nov, 2008, 1816 hrs IST, AGENCIES
NEW YORK: US stock index futures briefly trimmed losses on Thursday after the Bank of England slashed interest rates, a move expected to be followed
by a cut by the European Central Bank as authorities try to ease the impact of a global recession.
The Bank of England cut borrowing costs by a more than expected 150 basis points to 3.0 percent. The boost from the rate cut, however, was offset by disappointing outlooks from companies including technology bellwether Cisco Systems pointing to a deepening global economic downturn.
S&P 500 futures fell 13 points and were below fair value, a formula that evaluates pricing by taking into account interest rates, dividends and time to expiration on the contract. Dow Jones industrial average futures declined 102 points, and Nasdaq 100 futures were down 25.25 points.
Grim reality hits global stocks
6 Nov, 2008, 1642 hrs IST, REUTERS
LONDON: European stocks followed Asia into sharp declines on Thursday and oil extended losses as weak U.S. data intensified fears about the impact of recession in major economies hit by the worst financial crisis in 80 years.
The euro and sterling fell against the dollar as investors braced for the European Central Bank and the Bank of England to cut interest rates by at least half a percentage point.
Euphoria after a landmark victory of Democrat Barack Obama in the U.S. presidential vote evaporated as Wednesday's data showed cuts in employment by private employers and a sharp contraction in the service sector, revealing the scale of a slowdown in the world's biggest economy.
"We're back to the grim reality of economic data showing recessionary conditions and lower earnings guidance," said Bernard McAlinden, investment strategist at NCB Stockbrokers.
"The counterbalance is interest rate cuts. We're no longer in a situation where big cuts would cause panic." MSCI world equity index fell 2.4 percent while emerging stocks lost more than 5 percent. Asian stocks fell 7 percent.
Russia's largest stock exchange MICEX halted trading of stocks for one hour after stock prices fell sharply.
BIG CUTS?
The euro fell half a percent to $1.2898 while sterling ticked down to $1.5933. The dollar rose slightly against a basket of major currencies.
Some analysts are looking for a UK interest rate cut of as much as 100 basis points and a euro zone rate cut of 75 basis points. Many say drastic action from central banks is key in restoring investor confidence.
"The more significant the banks cut rates and the more dovish related statements the better the chance of seeing equity markets stabilising and currencies rallying thereafter," BNP Paribas said in a note to clients.
"A more conservative approach could lead to substantial equity losses taking currencies with it."
U.S. crude oil lost 2 percent to $63.96 a barrel, having fallen all the way from its record high above $147 set in July.
The December bund futures fell 20 ticks ahead of the ECB rate decision.
Entrepreneurs should go slow to overcome financial crisis: Experts
6 Nov, 2008, 1955 hrs IST, PTI
KOLKATA: The entrepreneurs should adopt a wait-and-watch policy to recover from the ongoing global financial meltdown and think beyond their short-te
rm interests, analysts said on Thursday.
"The small and medium entrepreneurs should take a long-term view at this particular juncture. So, when the good time comes, they will be able to utilise that. If they look at short-term compulsion of their companies they will lose focus. Now it's just time to watch," US-based executive and service firm Tatum's chairman Douglass M. Tatum said at a programme here.
Speaking at the Fortune High Growth Series organised by the the women's arm of the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry (FICCI), Tatum said India was innovating everywhere and people should look at innovation in a broad sense.
Fortune High Growth Series was targeted at providing a clear view to the company chief executives and senior executives on how to turn growth crisis into competitive advantage. The session was addressed by global business magazine Fortune's contributing editor John Elliott, Robert Bierman who was the vice-president of Live Media, Fortune magazine and many other noted dignitaries.
"At least 100 companies from all over eastern region participated in the series. It was designed for company executives from small to medium-sized growth firms to get a first hand view about the successful global high-growth companies," said FICCI women's body (Kolkata chapter) chairperson Rajkumari Saharia.
Obama victory and Indo-US relations
6 Nov, 2008, 0025 hrs IST,C Uday Bhaskar,
Audacity of Hope — the title of Barack Obama’s biography published in 2006 captured the collective mood on Tuesday, November 4, when the US elected i
ts first black President. The much-awaited ‘change’ that the American voter was seeking became real. The anxiety and unease that persisted till the very end that the US was not yet ready to put its shameful racial and colour prejudices behind it, has finally been put to rest. The world’s oldest democracy has now regained the moral high ground as far as the treatment of its minorities is concerned and this has an embedded message for the largest democracy — though hopefully this breakthrough in India will not take as many decades to be realised.
The sub-text of the Obama biography is ‘Thoughts on reclaiming the American dream’ and the current mood in the US is one of hope, born out of weariness and despondency after eight years of the Bush presidency and the many excesses associated with the current White House. When he assumes office, Mr Obama, the Democrat President-elect will have his hands full with urgent domestic issues and none more stark than a bankrupt economy with a trillion dollar deficit and the steady erosion of the prevailing global financial turmoil.
Capitals the world over are making their individual assessments about what an Obama victory will mean for their bilateral relations with the US and on balance, it would be fair to aver that there is no indication of any major or radical changes in US external policies. The perceived US national interest will be the lodestar for any incumbent in the White House and it will be no different for Mr Obama who will inherit many crosses from his predecessors.
As regards the Indo-US bilateral, there has been some anxiety expressed about the implications of the Obama victory. Reference has been made to his campaign statements regarding the India-Pakistan relationship and the desirability of both countries working “towards resolving their dispute over Kashmir.” In like fashion, the Obama amendment during the US Congressional debate over the Hyde Act that was once described as ‘killer’ has also come up on the radar screen to add to the disquiet. However linear extrapolations that are over-interpreted may not be valid at this stage in the Indo-US bilateral relationship. The Obama victory needs to be contextualised against the larger backdrop of the 60-year-old tumultuous New Delhi-Washington DC relationship to better comprehend the texture of the potential implications.
Yes, it is true that India and the US had a very estranged relationship for almost 40 years and much of this was derived from the ontological divergences over the nuclear nettle. To his everlasting credit, President Bush in his second tenure was able to innovatively recast the template of the bilateral and after the NSG waiver of September this year and the signing of the 123 agreement, Indo-US relations have been qualitatively transformed. They have moved from long estrangement to preliminary engagement. This basic orientation will not be altered by the Obama victory. Thus the Black and White reduction, that Democrat Presidents have been less favourable to India, would be a simplistic conclusion. The global architecture, US strategic interests, and India’s own profile have changed irrevocably.
http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/Opinion/Obama_victory_and_Indo-US_relations/articleshow/3678885.cms
Beyond Obama's triumph
6 Nov, 2008, 0003 hrs IST, ET Bureau
If the discourse of race, which so dominates American polity, is only about minority, particularly Black, access to state institutions and their repr
esentation within, the issue has been spectacularly resolved with Barack Obama’s landslide victory.
Yet, the question remains as to how far this epochally symbolic moment represents a genuinely transformative event for both American politics as a whole and for the disadvantaged minorities, and what the future now portends for the issue of race within the US. To be sure, a Black man becoming the President of the US, hitherto a probability confined to sci-fi narratives, is an event that has enraptured the entire world and even raised expectations of heralding a fundamental change within the US and its relationship with the rest of the world.
But such expectations also have to do with the justifiable euphoria of the moment. Any genuinely transformative change within the US, in the inequities within its classes and social orders, can only occur if this euphoria is harnessed by American civil society to transform the electoral mandate into one for essential socio-economic change. Institutional representation, while significant, cannot by itself deliver this transformation. Barack Obama is, in effect, the consequence of the hard-fought, decades-old civil rights movement. And, it would be the task of such movements to consolidate and deepen the undeniably symbolic nature of Obama’s victory.
The new President’s most immediate task is undoubtedly the financial crisis. He has inherited an economy that is certainly in recession, and which could get worse by the time he takes office. Indeed, the desire to do away with the disastrous economic legacy of the Bush era seems to have been a primary reason for the sweeping verdict in Obama’s favour. And despite his plans, among other measures, for another stimulus package, a national insurance programme to remedy the disastrous state of healthcare, and promise of tax benefits for the middle class, it is a huge challenge.
Beyond the ramifications of the state of the US economy for the rest of the world, it is weariness with the results of the foreign policy of the Bush administration that has rendered Obama a hopeful prospect for the world. The Bush era has seen the lowering of the prestige and image of the US abroad in its bellicose and unilateral pursuit of the ‘war on terror’. Along the way, significant damage has been done to international institutions like the UN.
http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/Opinion/Editorial/Beyond_Obamas_triumph/articleshow/3678836.cms
Obama's potent symbolism
5 Nov, 2008, 0056 hrs IST, ET Bureau
The fact of Democrat Barack Obama being the clear favourite in the US presidential race has been the source of a range of progressive expectations. B
ut beyond the immense symbolic import of the moment, it is debatable whether an Obama win will radically alter US paradigms, more so abroad than at home.
That said, even the purely symbolic significance of the event is truly momentous. In a country where racial segregation is still within living memory, and deprivation for ethnic minorities still a reality, having the first black President would still send out a clear signal of change within the US.
Indeed, the Democratic Party, on the face of it, seemed to represent sweeping change in this election, what with Obama’s intense fight for the nomination being with the first-ever female candidate, Hilary Clinton.
There will certainly be a welcome move away from the George Bush legacy, with many Americans seeing it has having endangered their constitutional rights and battering the image and prestige of the US abroad.
Obama has been able to project a transformative aura, giving rise to hopes of a break with the neocon tradition of trampling over international institutions and increasing global strife.
However, even as an Obama presidency might rethink some foreign policy issues like Iraq and relations with Latin American nations, there is unlikely to be any structural readjustment in Washington’s policies. India can hardly get a President as keen as George Bush was on cementing strategic partnerships.
And there is hardly any variation between the Democrat and Republican positions on critical, and deeply divisive, issues like the larger West Asian policy. Indeed, Obama has had to singularly disavow any possibility of change here.
It is also indicative of the more disturbing aspects of the public consensus in the US that Obama had to repeatedly insist that he was, indeed, not a Muslim. Breaking away from the lobbyism that so deeply shapes US politics, as well as from the hold of the military-industrial complex, would need much more than Democratic symbolism.
Oil prices would soar to $200 by 2030: IEA
6 Nov, 2008, 1852 hrs IST, AGENCIES
PARIS: The International Energy Agency predicted Thursday that oil prices would swing wildly until 2015 at an average of more than 100 dollars beforWorld's top 10 oil producers
e soaring above the 200-dollar mark by 2030.
The Paris-based energy policy advisor said there would be enough oil for decades to come but warned that global prosperity and the state of the planet hang on radical change in energy production and usage.
"The world's energy system is at a crossroads. Current global trends in energy supply and consumption are patently unsustainable -- environmentally, economically, socially," it warned in a summary of its annual World Energy Outlook report.
"But that can -- and must -- be altered: there's still time to change the road we're on."
"The future of human prosperity depends on how successfully we tackle the two central energy challenges facing us today: securing the supply of reliable and affordable energy; and effecting a rapid transformation to a low-carbon, efficient and environmentally benign system of energy supply."
It declared: "Preventing catastrophic and irreversible damage to the global climate ultimately requires a major decarbonisation of the world energy sources."
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It pointed to huge strides being made in electricity production, and projected that "modern renewable technologies grow most rapidly, overtaking gas to become the second-largest source of electricity, behind coal, soon after 2010."
The IEA, the energy monitoring and policy arm of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, also forecast in an executive summary of a full annual report to be published on Wednesday, that:
- The world will continue to be massively dependent on oil and gas for a long time but there are enough resources to meet rising demand for many years to come;
- Most of the growth in production will come from the Middle East, Africa and Russia and most of the growth in demand and carbon emissions from China, India and the Middle East;
- Inaction on environmental problems would result in a doubling of greenhouse gases by the end of the century and an eventual average temperature increase of up to six degrees centigrade;
- Huge investment is required in oil and gas production, and in other energies urgently needed to diminish "shocking" threats to the planet, but national companies may not be able to invest fast enough in oil and gas.
- The cumulative investment effort needed to 2030 exceeds 26 trillion dollars (20 trillion euros) (in 2007 money values), or 4.0 trillion dollars than estimated 12 months ago;
- International oil groups will be increasingly squeezed by national factors;
Indian exporters to bear burns of US bankruptcies: D&B
6 Nov, 2008, 1548 hrs IST, ECONOMICTIMES.COM
MUMBAI: Indian exporters will have to bear the burns of bankruptcies with the worsening financial crisis in US, heading towards recession.
In this scenario, it comes as no surprise that the number of companies filing for Chapter 11 and Chapter 7, under Federal bankruptcy laws, has gone up considerably.
According to a Dun & Bradstreet research report, the Chapter 11 filings for commercial businesses has increased from 3,600 in 2006 to an estimated 6,700 in 2008, registering a 84 per cent rise. Chapter 7 filings have increased from 11,400 to an estimated 25,000 during the same period, a rise of 116 per cent.
US is the single largest export destination for Indian exporters that accounts for about 13 per cent of the total Indian exports in FY 2008.
Considering the magnitude of trade transactions and the current economic environment in the US, it has become even more imperative for Indian businesses especially exporters to exercise abundant caution in all cross-border transactions, says D&B.
Potential Obama appointments draw keen speculation
By DAVID ESPO – 3 hours ago
WASHINGTON (AP) — While President-elect Barack Obama enjoyed a few days with his family after a hard-fought election, speculation swirled in the nation's capital around potential administration appointees.
Obama pivoted quickly to begin filling out his team on Wednesday, selecting hard-charging Illinois Rep. Rahm Emanuel as White House chief of staff while aides stepped up the pace of transition work that had been cloaked in pre-election secrecy.
Several Democrats confirmed that Emanuel had been offered the job. While it was not clear he had accepted, a rejection would amount to an unlikely public snub of the president-elect within hours of an Electoral College landslide.
Obama has promised to hold a news conference later in the week. As president-elect, he begins receiving highly classified briefings from top intelligence officials Thursday.
In offering the post of White House chief of staff to Emanuel, Obama turned to a fellow Chicago politician with a far different style from his own, a man known for his bluntness as well as his single-minded determination.
Emanuel was a political and policy aide in Bill Clinton's White House. Leaving that, he turned to investment banking, then won a Chicago-area House seat six years ago. In Congress, he moved quickly into the leadership. As chairman of the Democratic campaign committee in 2006, he played an instrumental role in restoring his party to power after 12 years in the minority.
Emanuel maintained neutrality during the long primary battle between Obama and Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, not surprising given his long-standing ties to the former first lady and his Illinois connections with Obama.
The day after the election there already was jockeying for Cabinet appointments.
Several Democrats said Sen. John Kerry of Massachusetts, who won a new six-year term on Tuesday, was angling for secretary of state. They spoke on condition of anonymity, saying they were not authorized to discuss any private conversations.
Kerry's spokeswoman, Brigid O'Rourke, disputed the reports. "It's not true. It's ridiculous," she said.
Announcement of the transition team came in a written statement from the Obama camp.
The group is headed by John Podesta, who served as chief of staff under President Clinton; Pete Rouse, who has been Obama's chief of staff in the Senate; and Valerie Jarrett, a friend of the president-elect and campaign adviser.
Several Democrats described a sprawling operation well under way. Officials had kept deliberations under wraps to avoid the appearance of overconfidence in the weeks leading to Tuesday's election.
president-elect Barack Obama down to businessArticle from: Font size: Decrease Increase Email article: Email Print article: Print Submit comment: Submit comment Stephanie Balogh
November 07, 2008 12:00am
BARACK Obama picked up his suitcase yesterday and got on with the job of building a new team to lead America.
As the world rejoiced over the first black US president, the Democrat leader started on the "Obama Revolution".
He called on former Clinton White House aide Rahm Emanuel to be his chief of staff, a vital post that helps set the tempo of the administration.
Top intelligence officials gave him highly classified briefings as he prepared battle plans for the daunting problems he will face.
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Pictures: Awaiting history | US votes
US election: Special report with full coverage
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Hours after Senator Obama claimed victory, Russia threatened to put missiles alongside US ally Poland unless President George W. Bush repealed a US plan for a missile defence shield in Europe.
In an immediate reminder of the grave economic crisis he will inherit, Wall St plunged again on fears of a deep recession.
As well as the worries of America and the world, the president-elect also has a personal to-do list before he moves into the White House in January.
It includes finding a school for his daughters in Washington, getting the puppy he promised they could take to the White House, and arranging his grandmother's funeral.
While Senator Obama confronted the enormity of his new role, the knives came out for failed Republican vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin.
The former mayor of Wasilla, Alaska, was accused of spending tens of thousands of dollars on clothes for herself and her husband in out-of-control shopping sprees during the campaign.
It was like "Wasilla hillbillies looting (department store) Neiman Marcus from coast to coast", a source said.
Senator Obama began his first full day as president-elect by having breakfast with his wife and daughters. He left his Chicago home and hit the gym before heading to his campaign office.
Asked how much sleep he had on the night of his historic victory, he said: "Not as much as I'd like."
Senator Obama and his incoming vice-president, Senator Joe Biden, must work quickly to douse the economic blaze while winding down the war in Iraq and renewing the fight against al-Qaida and the Taliban in Afghanistan.
He is promising to renew bruised ties with US allies, and to engage some of the nation's fiercest foes such as Iran and North Korea.
He has vowed to tackle climate change, cut taxes for 95 per cent of working Americans, and guarantee near-universal health care at a time when many thousands are losing their insurance as their jobs disappear.
With hundreds of jobs to fill before his inauguration, the jockeying for appointments has already started.
Chief-of-staff nominee Ralph Emanuel is known as a master of the back corridors of power in Washington. He was said to be mulling over the offer.
Congratulations for Senator Obama poured in from world leaders.
Prime Minister Kevin Rudd is yet to be allocated a time to personally congratulate the president-elect.
But it's not a case of the cold shoulder -- he appears to be in the same boat as every other world leader.
China pledged "constructive" dialogue with the new government.
Iran said his victory showed Americans wanted basic changes in policy.
Praise came even from communist Cuba, whose government said it hoped for an eventual easing in the decades-old US trade embargo.
http://www.news.com.au/heraldsun/story/0,21985,24614198-661,00.html
Officials: Emanuel Offered Chief of Staff Job
http://in.youtube.com/watch?v=i0g7Hfj6rPs
U.S. Again Hailed as 'Country of Dreams'
Around the World, Obama's Victory Is Seen as a Renewal of American Ideals and Aspirations
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World Celebrates New U.S. President
People around the world spilled into the streets to celebrate the victory of U.S. president-elect Barack Obama, many saying the win was an inspiration for minorities and a powerful signal that the United States intended to change direction.
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By Kevin Sullivan
Washington Post Foreign Service
Thursday, November 6, 2008; Page A26
LONDON, Nov. 5 -- Through tears and whoops of joy, in celebrations that spilled onto the streets, people around the globe called Barack Obama's election Tuesday a victory for the world and a renewal of America's ability to inspire.
This Story
Obama Makes History
World Reacts to Obama's Historic Win
U.S. Again Hailed as 'Country of Dreams'
Half a World Away, Kenya Exults at U.S. Outcome
U.S. Troops Too Busy for Vote Returns
A Vote Decided by Big Turnout And Big Discontent With GOP
With Obama Win, Elation and a Lingering Divide
Reality Suspended, Until It Prevailed
On a Day Like No Other, Obama Is Typically Serene
PHOTOS: Election Day 2008
VIDEOS: Campaign 2008
Excerpts: McCain Speech
HOW HE WON: Measured Response To Financial Crisis Sealed the Election
Sporadic High-Tech High Jinks Don't Cast Outcome in Doubt
Early Transition Decisions to Shape Obama Presidency
The Bellwethers
Biden Sees Vice President's Role as 'Adviser in Chief,' Aides Say
McCain Asks His Backers to Get Behind Obama
View All Items in This Story
View Only Top Items in This StoryThis Story
U.S. Again Hailed as 'Country of Dreams'
Half a World Away, Kenya Exults at U.S. Outcome
Thursday, Nov. 6 at 2:30 p.m. ET: PostGlobal: World Reactions to the U.S. Election
Thursday, Nov. 6 at 1:30 p.m. ET: Books: 'Memo to the President'
World Celebrates New U.S. President
World Reacts to Obama's Historic Win
Russia Gives Obama Brisk Warning
U.S. Troops Too Busy for Vote Returns
End Civilian Deaths, Karzai Tells Obama
View All Items in This Story
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From Paris to New Delhi to the beaches of Brazil, revelers said that his victory made them feel more connected to America and that America seemed suddenly more connected to the rest of the world.
"As a black British woman, I can't believe that America has voted in a black president," said Jackie Humphries, 49, a librarian who was among 1,500 people partying at the U.S. Embassy in London on Tuesday night.
"It makes me feel like there is a future that includes all of us," she said, wrapping her arm around a life-size cardboard likeness of the new U.S. president-elect.
"Americans overcame the racial divide and elected Obama because they wanted the real thing: a candidate who spoke from the bottom of his heart," said Terumi Hino, a photographer and painter in Tokyo. "I think this means the United States can go back to being admired as the country of dreams."
Kenya, where Obama's father was raised as a goatherd, declared Thursday a national holiday, and in Obama's ancestral village of Kogelo, people danced in the streets wrapped in the American flag.
In South Africa, Nelson Mandela, the civil rights icon who helped bring down his country's apartheid regime, released a letter to Obama in which he said, "Your victory has demonstrated that no person anywhere in the world should not dare to dream of wanting to change the world for a better place."
Desmond Tutu, another iconic anti-apartheid leader and the retired Anglican archbishop of Cape Town, said Obama's victory tells "people of color that for them, the sky is the limit."
"We have a new spring in our walk and our shoulders are straighter," Tutu said, echoing a sentiment heard across Africa.
The world sees Obama as more than a racial standard-bearer, of course. Many people praised his policies on matters ranging from Iraq to health care, which they appeared to know in remarkable detail.
Others expressed concerns. In China, some people worried about Obama's positions on the delicate issues of Tibet and Taiwan. Some Indians and Egyptians said they had questions about his views on Pakistan and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/story/2008/11/06/ST2008110600708.html
Prop. 8 Appears Headed For Passage
http://in.youtube.com/watch?v=2h06J2KdHlc
Of Gandhi, spirituality and sexuality!
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Press Trust of India
Posted: Nov 06, 2008 at 1816 hrs IST
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New Delhi, November 6: To Mahatma Gandhi the greatest obstacle in his spiritual striving was the promptings of his sexuality, says psychoanalyst Sudhir Kakar.
"The manner in which he conceived the struggle and the weapons he chose to employ in a lifelong conflict with the god of desire have earned him the derision of many, especially in the West, who have discerned crankishness, if not worse, in his ideas that relate to sexuality," writes Kakar in ‘Mad And Divine: Spirit And Psyche In The Modern World’.
"For an explanation of his failure to influence people and the course of events, Gandhi would characteristically probe for shortcomings in his sexual abstinence, seeking to determine whether Kama, the god of desire, has perhaps triumphed in some obscure recess of his mind, depriving him of his spiritual powers," the book, published by Penguin, says.
According to the author, in the midst of widespread political turmoil and religious frenzy, Gandhi wrote a series of five articles on celibacy in his weekly newspaper.
"But more striking than his public evidence of his preoccupation were his private experiments wherein the aged Mahatma sought to reassure himself on the strength of his celibacy by having close women associates (his 19-year-old granddaughter among them) share his bed and try to ascertain in the morning whether any trace of sexual feeling had been evoked, either in himself or in his companions.”
"In spite of criticism by his co-workers, Gandhi stubbornly defended these experiments which he regarded as exercises in self-purification and tests of his celibacy and insisted that they be public even if they met general condemnation from his close associates."
Besides the contemplative and ecstatic spiritual traditions, Gandhi was a pioneer of a new spirituality, Kakar writes.
Strains Between McCain and Palin Aides Go Public
Report: Palin's Wardrobe Is to Be Audited by GOP
By KATE SNOW
Nov. 6, 2008
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RSS Now that the defeated team of Sen. John McCain and Gov. Sarah Palin have gone their separate ways, the knives are out and Palin is the one who is getting filleted.
U.S Republican presidential nominee Senator John McCain (R-AZ) speaks to the crowd during his election night rally in Phoenix, on Tuesday. Joining McCain is U.S. Republican vice presidential nominee Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin.
(Mike Blake/Reuters)
More PhotosRevelations from anonymous critics from within the McCain-Palin campaign suggest a number of complaints about the Alaskan governor:
Fox News reports that Palin didn't know Africa was a continent and did not know the member nations of the North American Free Trade Agreement -- the United States, Mexico and Canada -- when she was picked for vice president.
The New York Times reports that McCain aides were outraged when Palin staffers scheduled her to speak with French President Nicholas Sarkozy, a conversation that turned out to be a radio station prank.
Newsweek reports that Palin spent far more than the previously reported $150,000 on clothes for herself and her family.
Several publications say she irked the McCain campaign by asking to make her own concession speech on election night.
The tension is likely to continue or get worse. Lawyers for the Republican National Committee are heading to Alaska to try to account for all the money that was spent on clothing, jewelry and luggage, according to The New York Times.
Related
Obama Offers Chief of Staff to Rahm EmanuelFor Dems, Does Majority Always Rule? WATCH: George on the GOP's FutureReports of agitation between the two camps bubbled up in the final weeks of the campaign as Barack Obama began pulling away and the GOP duo was unable to regain the momentum.
But those reports are no longer in the rumor stage as McCain loyalists are now blasting away at the Alaska governor, who was a favorite of the Republican right during the campaign, but was cited in numerous polls as a reason why many Americans wouldn't vote for the Arizona Republican.
Perhaps the most dangerous allegation for Palin are reports in The New York Times and Newsweek that when she was urged by McCain adviser Nicole Wallace to buy three suits for the Republican convention and three suits for the campaign trail, she went on the now-infamous shopping spree at swank stores like Saks Fifth Avenue and Neiman Marcus.
A Republican donor who agreed to foot a majority of the expenses was stunned when he received the bill, Newsweek reported. Both the Times and Newsweek report that the budget for the clothing was expected to be between $20,000 and $25,000. Instead, the amount reported by the Republican National Committee was $150,000.
That wasn't the whole tab, however, according to Newsweek. The magazine claims that Palin leaned on some low-level staffers to put thousands of dollars of additional purchases on their credit cards. The national committee and McCain became aware of the extra expenditures, including clothes for husband Todd Palin, when the staffers sought reimbursement, Newsweek reported.
http://www.abcnews.go.com/GMA/Politics/story?id=6196407&page=1
Extra! Extra! Barack Obama's election win sends newspaper sales soaring
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Jay L. Clendenin / Los Angeles Times
Kimberly Huie of Echo Park buys the Los Angeles Times at a newsstand in Hollywood. Readers across the nation snapped up copies of newspapers documenting a watershed moment in U.S. history a day after the presidential election, and press runs were extended to meet the demand.
News racks run out of copies as readers scoop up the 'physical record of history being made.'
By James Rainey
November 6, 2008
Apparently looking for something old to go with something new (Barack Obama) and something blue (a more Democratic Congress), the American people bought newspapers in huge numbers Wednesday, a day after the historic election of the nation's first black president.
From the nation's largest daily, USA Today, to its more modest broadsheets, newspapers expanded press runs to accommodate enormous sales. Some papers even sold special gift editions and framed front pages.
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But news racks -- even if they were replenished with copies -- became barren in the blink of an eye as people scrambled to snag mementos for their memory books and mantelpieces. In Los Angeles, Miami and all points in between, people lined up to buy copies of their daily paper.
The Chicago Tribune sold framed front pages for as much as $99. A single copy of the New York Times is said to have sold on EBay for $249.99, and another copy of that paper drew more than 20 bids before the auction closed -- for $400.
One man bought 100 copies of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution at 75 cents apiece and immediately began selling them at a 25-cent markup.
"I think what this really says, at a huge moment in history, is that people want something to keep and to remember," said Julia Wallace, editor of the Journal-Constitution and the newspaper's online editorial operations. "A newspaper has a very historic, commemorative feel to it. More than anything, it's about having this to pass on to their children and grandchildren."
The Atlanta paper initially printed an additional 55,000 copies to supplement its weekday press run of 375,000. But heavy sales forced the paper to print 150,000 more copies to meet demand.
USA Today boosted by 500,000 its weekday press run of roughly 2 million. The Washington Post, the fourth-largest paper by circulation, planned to print 350,000 papers and then sell them for $1.50, triple the regular newsstand price.
The Los Angeles Times printed 107,000 papers in addition to its weekday press run of 750,000, and sold some at retail outlets because copies were being pilfered from newsstands. Meanwhile, a steady stream of customers came to the Times' headquarters in downtown L.A. to buy copies of the paper.
"For the past two years, our campaign team provided outstanding and insightful coverage," said Times Editor Russ Stanton, "and we are grateful that readers want to savor this moment in our nation's history."
Newspaper executives and employees enjoyed the surge of interest in their Wednesday print editions. The industry has been suffering as earnings from print readership and ad sales plummet, and online ad sales (which generate much slimmer profits) and readership soar.
"I think there is an authority and finality, a sort of last word that comes from the printed edition of the newspaper," said Steve Hills, president and general manager of Washington Post Media.
Those among the parade of customers who bought copies of the Los Angeles Times on Wednesday agreed.
"This is a physical record of history being made," said Robert de la Madrid, who had tried five different locations before finally landing copies of The Times at the paper's headquarters. "As soon as you close the computer screen, that image is gone. And you can't frame the Internet."
Chris Garcia, 28, who purchased five copies of The Times, said he tried to keep papers marking history.
"You can hold it in your hand," he said. "It's real."
Some readers of The Times and other papers bought dozens of copies for friends and relatives. A black woman near San Francisco City Hall held up a copy of the Chronicle, posing for a picture in front of a statue of Abraham Lincoln.
Even as interest in print editions soared, newspaper executives said their websites remained the key outlet for the majority of readers. Several papers reported their online editions were drawing record traffic, including the Washington Post, which topped its previous high of 15.2 million daily page views.
The Times recorded 8.3 million page views, slightly above the high reached during the Southern California wildfires last year, and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution recorded 5 million page views.
Said the Journal-Constitution's Wallace: "There's an understanding that people want information in all sorts of ways."
Rainey is a Times staff writer.
james.rainey@latimes.com
http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/asection/la-na-newspapers6-2008nov06,0,3206942.story
Medvedev`s address to nation
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Added: November 05, 2008
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Today we will talk about the state of the nation address by the Russian President. In his first address to the Federal Assembly, Dmitry Medvedev proposed a set of political reforms aimed at widenin...
http://in.youtube.com/watch?v=8tXUc9_JAfI
Michelle Obama sparks fashion debate with red and black victory dress
2 hours ago
WASHINGTON (AFP) — Barack Obama's victory speech may have electrified the nation, but the dress worn by his wife, Michelle, has attracted almost as much feedback in Internet chatrooms and among fashion aficionados.
Michelle Obama appeared onstage at a huge Chicago rally late Tuesday wearing a black cardigan over a scoop-neck black sheath with splashes of red in the upper and lower half separated by a band of black at the hips.
The outfit was a slightly modified version of a dress presented by designer Narciso Rodriguez in September for the 2009 Spring season.
"I voted for Obama, but I didn't vote for that dress," homemaker and mother of three Jessica Bettencourt from Wisconsin told The New York Times.
"I don't know what was worse," Chicago lawyer Karla Wright told the paper, "that stupid criss-cross band around the middle or that black sort of border coming up from the hem."
Not all comments were negative.
"That dress was unpretentious," Julie Gilhart, fashion director of New York's top-price Barneys clothing store, told the Times. "It said, Be who you are -- don't let someone else tell you how to be.'"
The Italian daily La Stampa dubbed the dress "the look of victory" and said the black symbolised mourning for Obama's grandmother, who died on the eve of the election, while the red was for passion.
A contributor to the website of the German newsweekly Focus also suggested there was hidden meaning in the colours, perhaps red for the political left and black for the first African-American to win the US presidency.
"It is more about the symbolic effect of the colour combination red/black. Because the daughters were also in red or black. Very unusual and surely no accident," the reader said.
Others were dismissive, describing the subject as superficial besides the historic importance of Barack Obama's election win.
"The USA must be doing pretty well if it is worrying about the First Lady's dress!" one typical Focus posting said.
One fashion expert described the interest attracted by the frock as "depressingly trivial... and yet fascinating" because of what it told us all about Obama.
"You may like or dislike Michelle Obama's dress, but that's not as interesting as the agenda behind it, because you can be sure there was one," wrote fashion editor of the London Times Lisa Armstrong.
"This was one of the most choreographed First Family Elect Appearances in history," she said, adding that "even seven-year-old Sasha Obama had been dragooned into that monochromatic colour scheme."
Carola Long of the London-based Independent said Michelle Obama's fashion sense was a far cry from the traditional first lady look "reminiscent of the uptight Bree from Desperate Housewives," a reference to a popular television series.
"The presidential race may only just have come to an end, but the battle for fashion supremacy was sewn up months ago," she wrote.
Whatever the significance of the dress, one thing is certain -- the world is going to hear much more on the subject over the next four years.
"At the least, it promises four lively years of fashion-watching at the White House," added the New York Times.
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Bush clearing path for successor to take command
By BEN FELLER – 52 minutes ago
WASHINGTON (AP) — The Bush administration is providing security clearances, working space and policy briefings to President-elect Barack Obama's team as the transformation of the White House gets fully under way. World leaders are calling for Obama, and the White House is helping to get them connected.
"All of us here at the White House have a special responsibility to ensure that the next president and his team hit the ground running," White House press secretary Dana Perino said Thursday.
Preparation for the complex transition process has quietly been unfolding for about a year, but only accelerated with the nation's election on Tuesday of Obama, the Democratic senator from Illinois. He will be sworn in as the country's 44th president in 75 days.
President Bush was scheduled to address about 1,000 employees from his executive office — a combination of a thank-you and an admonition to ensure a smooth transfer of power. He and his wife, Laura, also have invited Obama and his family to visit the White House as soon as they can.
Obama on Thursday was receiving the first of what will become regular briefings on highly classified information from top intelligence officials. The process of getting White House security clearances for staff members of Obama and McCain, depending upon who won, already had begun long before the election took place.
Perino said world leaders are reaching out to the White House, the State Department and other federal agencies to get in touch with Obama.
"People are very excited about our next president," she said. "They're interested in getting to meet him and putting their ideas and their agenda in front of him to make sure that they continue to have a good, seamless relationship with the United States of America. And we're going to help facilitate that."
Meanwhile, officials at the Department of Homeland Security warn that the U.S. is in a heightened state of alert against terrorism. The fear is that enemies could exploit the transition period to test the country's defenses.
"That is something that we're very concerned about," Perino said in underscoring the seriousness of a smooth transition.
During the campaign, Obama relentlessly blistered the Bush administration for what he called failed, tired policies that have harmed the country. The White House has sought to make clear that politics will not affect the transition in any way.
The transition involves a delicate dance, in which the White House keeps the president-elect in the loop, and even solicits his input, while decisions still remain solely Bush's to make.
"He doesn't change his principles nor his policies," Perino said. "But what we have pledged to do and we are doing is to work and consult with the Obama team on issues as we move forward."
And even as Bush offers advice, he is mindful he can't go too far.
"I don't think that President Bush will be presumptuous in tying to talk to Barack Obama about how he makes his decisions or how Barack Obama should make decisions," Perino said. "The American people decided that this is the man that they want to be president of the United States and that he'll be the one that they trust to make decisions."
Record TV ratings for Obama's victory
BY RICHARD HUFF
DAILY NEWS TV EDITOR
Thursday, November 6th 2008, 2:47 AM
An estimated 71.47 million viewers - a record number - watched President-elect Barack Obama's historic White House victory, the Nielsen Co. said Wednesday.
That's up dramatically from the 59.17 million who tuned into the broadcast, cable and Spanish-language networks when President Bush faced Sen. John Kerry in 2004.
Tuesday's audience was also up from the 61.57 million who watched the prime-time portion of the trouble-plagued 2000 election.
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Some 38.11 million watched the four broadcast networks - ABC, CBS, NBC and Fox - which turned the night over to election coverage, with ABC leading the way with 13.1 million viewers. NBC averaged 12 million, CBS 7.82 and Fox 5.13. Nielsen did not release a figure for PBS.
ABC News President David Westin said Wednesday the large audience could be attributed to a wide-open race, a bevy of critical issues facing the country and compelling candidates.
"It's always about the story," Westin said. "It's not nearly as much about the presentation."
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CNN averaged 12.29 million viewers in prime time Tuesday, the highest ever in the network's 28-year history. The Fox News Channel averaged 9.02 million and MSNBC 5.88.
Even fake news generated big ratings.
Comedy Central's "Indecision 2008: America's Choice," was the most-watched election special in the history of the network's political-comedy franchise, drawing 3.1 million viewers.
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The massive election night audience came during an election season in which ratings for virtually everything went up, in some cases to record levels.
Interest in the political conventions hit all-time highs, and the vice presidential debate was the most-viewed in decades.
NBC's "Saturday Night Live," which poked fun at each of the presidential candidates and had a field day with GOP veep nominee Sarah Palin, hit its highest ratings in 14 years.
The question facing the industry now is how to capitalize on those high audience levels - and whether the audience will stick around.
"It's hard to predict what interest will be around the corner," ABC's Westin said. "There will be plenty of interest in the economy as long as 401(k)s are going down. When things effect people in their own lives, the interest is very high."
CNN's John King said before the election that keeping viewers watching was going to be an issue for all TV news operations.
"As a business, we have a huge challenge and a responsibility," King said. "More people are watching, and they're interested, and they're asking smart questions."
"Our challenge is trying to find a way to keep them tuned in during a transition [phase] that's less sexy than when you have a candidate before a crowd of 100,000 people," he added.
rhuff@nydailynews.com
http://www.nydailynews.com/news/politics/2008/11/05/2008-11-05_record_tv_ratings_for_obamas_victory.html
Twitter - Barack Obama
Brief reports from the presidential candidate on what he's doing and thinking.
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Barack Obama | Change We Need | Welcome to Obama for America
Official Website of Barack Obama 2008 Presidential Campaign. ... PAID FOR BY OBAMA FOR AMERICA Skip Signup, Go to the Website.
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Op-Ed Columnist - The Terrorist Barack Hussein Obama - NYTimes.com
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If John McCain faces Barack Obama, Obama wins 280 to 256. McCain carries 26 states. Obama carries 24 states plus the District of Columbia … and then there ...
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Barack Obama lines up a cabinet of stars as John McCain struggles ...
19 Oct 2008 ... With the economy on the brink of recession and the country in the midst of two foreign wars, Barack Obama is considering appointing a ...
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snopes.com: Obama's 50 Lies / Obama Not Exactly
E-mail lists fifty lies told by Barack Obama. ... There is a Cuban Flag with Che Guevara Displayed at Barack Obama Campaign Office which you allow to be ...
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Project Vote Smart - Senator Barack H. Obama, Jr. - Biography
Provides his biography, committee assignments, campaign finances, voting record, issue positions, interest group ratings, speeches and public statements.
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Global recession in 2009, forecasts IMF
6 Nov, 2008, 2154 hrs IST, AGENCIES
WASHINGTON: The International Monetary Fund (IMF) released its global economic forecast Thursday in the face of a growing credit crisis and predicted
a recession in the US and the world in 2009.
In an update of its World Economic Outlook from October, the IMF said global growth would slow to 2.2 percent in 2009, down from the 3-percent forecast made last month. Growth of under 3 percent is considered a global recession.
The US, the world's largest economy, will contract by 0.7 percent and the euro area by 0.5 percent in 2009. Advanced economies as a whole will contract 0.3 percent, compared to 1.4-percent growth this year, it said.
All figures represent a downward revision of more than 0.7 percent from the IMF's October forecast. Developing and emerging economies by contrast will continue to lead growth in the world, increasing 5.1 percent in 2009. But that is still down from a forecast of 6.1 percent made in October. Growth in the developing world was forecast at 6.6 percent this year.
A global financial crisis has severely impacted the availability of credit around the world, curbing spending in wealthy nations and restricting poorer nations' access to foreign investment.
"There has been a sharp worsening of credit conditions to emerging countries," said chief IMF economist Olivier Blanchard.
The IMF expects sharp slowdowns in Eastern Europe as well as Russia and its neighbours. China's economy will continue to grow at 8.5 percent in 2009, down from 9.7 percent this year and 11.9 percent in 2007.
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