There is a whole world we need candidates to discuss.
Commentary by Black Kos Editor Denise Oliver Velez
After watching the POTUS put a whuppin' on Mitt Romney last night (Romney was obviously foreign to foreign policy) I thought about how superficially these debates are framed, and how damaging they are to the perceptions of our citizens, and young people in particular, about our role in the world, and what parts of the world merit the national debate stage.
"U.S. foreign policy" seemed to shrink the world to solely the Middle East and North Africa (yes Libya is in Africa, as is Egypt) with China thrown into the hopper.
I kept hoping the POTUS would throw some other parts of the world into the mix, but the pre-arranged, pre-announced topic areas precluded that.
Topic selection was made by Bob Schieffer:
CBS’s Bob Schieffer, the moderator of the third presidential debate, has selected the five topics he plans to discuss with President Obama and Mitt Romney on Oct. 22 in Boca Raton, Fla., CNN reports.
Although the Commission on Presidential Debates said the topics could change because of news events, Schieffer will outline five foreign policy-related areas: “The Changing Middle East and the New Face of Terrorism,” “Our longest war – Afghanistan and Pakistan,” “Red Lines – Israel and Iran,” “The Rise of China and Tomorrow’s World,” and “America’s role in the world.”
Even the
Washington Post pointed out:
In the debate, there was not a word on other major foreign policy topics confronting the United States – climate change and the euro crisis among them.
Foreign aid, the War on Drugs, our hemisphere- Canada, Latin America and the Caribbean (including the ongoing Cuba embargo, and our role in Haiti's recovery) the future of the United Nations...so many things that could be addressed, but aren't.
I wonder if we can in the future push for getting rid of the current Commission on Presidential Debates, and replace them with a group who would be open to designing something more relevant and educational?
What do you think?
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News by dopper0189, Black Kos Managing Editor
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Khadijah Red chronicles what she says was the eye-opening shopping experience of being targeted and treated disrespectfully by a detective who also happened to be African American. Clutch: The Curious Case of SWB (Shopping While Black).
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My family and I walked around Burlington Coat Factory looking to return and exchange a few baby items. If you're like me, you like to circle around aisles more than once to make sure you've seen everything the store has to offer before making your final choice. I scooped up the starship fleece baby onesie that I was looking for and placed it on top of my stroller along with the other baby clothes I wanted to return.
I then handed my items to Derrick as he approached the customer service cashier. As usual, Derrick forgot something. This time it was his receipt. However, with the use of his credit card, the cashier allowed Derrick to make a return and exchange. As I waited for Derrick with our son, I spotted a cute little Hispanic guy browsing through the women's section. "Hmm," I thought to myself, "he's probably shopping for his girlfriend. And damn is he short."
As Derrick and I made our way to the exit doors, we were stopped abruptly by undercover loss prevention detectives. That cute little Hispanic guy I was eyeing happened to be an undercover cop (Detective Perez*). He, along with another African-American male, Detective Harris*, escorted us to the back office in Burlington Coat Factory where we were questioned. All I could think of was that this was a big misunderstanding that could be resolved swiftly. I was wrong. Detective Harris questioned Derrick about his original missing receipt and asked him where the items were. It went downhill from there.
Clutch
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There is a lot at stake in this election. ColorLines: Food Stamp Bashing, Race, and the Bi-Partisan Attack on the Safety-Net.
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It’s at first a little perplexing why Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan are the only ones to talk explicitly about poverty in recent debates. The two of them mentioned poverty and low-income and poor people about 18 times in the three debates so far, compared to absolutely zero explicit mentions of poverty or poor people by Obama and Biden. No, 18 is not particularly generous considering the highest rate of poverty in two decades, but compared to their Democratic rivals, the GOP’s looking downright compassionate.
Of course, the Romney campaign’s talk of poor people is not part of a progressive economic vision. Nearly each and every time the Republicans bring up poverty, it’s wielded as an attack on Obama’s economic policy and in support of a conservative, “pro-growth” agenda. The same is true of programs for poor and low-income families. Romney has talked about food stamps eight times in the debates, each time as proof that Obama’s policies have failed. As for Obama? Not one mentioned the hunger-fighting program.
The campaigns’ disparate rhetorical treatment of poverty is worth talking about because it helps us understand what’s happening to safety-net policy. Obama’s acting scared of poverty. He’s all about ladders to opportunity and apparently also about closing the gender gap in earnings. He’ll talk around economic equity issues, but he doesn’t want to talk about poor people, and certainly not welfare and other poverty programs. Why? Because poor people and some of the programs that they depend on—food stamps, cash assistance, housing vouchers— are popularly imagined as people of color issues. And race is one thing that Obama still can’t talk about.
It’s not by accident that food stamps and the safety-net have been stigmatized and made into a racial issue. Let’s recall for a moment the Republican primary, when Newt Gingrich told an audience in New Hampshire, “If the NAACP invites me, I’ll go to their convention and talk about why the African-American community should demand paychecks and not be satisfied with food stamps.” And when Romney told a crowd that imposing mandatory drug tests on the recipients of safety-net programs is “a great idea.” And more generally, remember the wave of bills—in 30 states earlier this year—to impose drug testing requirements on applicants to the food stamps, Medicaid, welfare and other programs, despite scant evidence of high rates of drug use among the programs’ applicants.
When Romney waxes indignant about poverty and food stamps, this is the context. He’s wielding a double-edged sword, at the same time lambasting the President for steering the country into economic chaos and then attacking the very programs that struggling people need. “We don’t have to settle” for 47 million people on food stamps, he declared, just weeks after deriding 47 percent of the country for being mooches.
For a moment, let’s think about what expanded food stamp rolls really mean. Yes, 46,681,833 people using food stamps is a sign that things are not good, a direct result of staggering levels of poverty: 46 million people living below the poverty line, over 40 percent of whom survive in deep poverty. It’s also a sign of consistently high unemployment that only just dropped below eight percent and remains much higher in low-income communities and communities of color.
ColorLines
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Voter intimidation. MotherJones: Voter Fraud Billboards in Ohio Target Minorities.
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In Ohio, possibly the decisive swing state in this year's presidential race, 10 billboard ads around Cleveland warn in big block letters and exclamation points that voter fraud is a felony punishable by up to three and a half years in jail and a $10,000 fine.
That might seem like an odd way to spend election-year advertising money, given that in-person voter fraud is less common than UFO sightings. Yet evidence suggests that the creators of the billboards, who identify themselves only as a "private family foundation," care less about voter fraud per se than scaring away certain voters from the polls.
In 2008, nearly 70 percent of voters in the county that includes Cleveland cast ballots for Barack Obama. While that on its own might suggest a partisan motivation behind the billboards, a closer examination of their locations indicates something worse: a calculated effort to target Democratic-leaning racial and ethnic minorities.
Phyllis Cleveland/Twitter
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Some of the biggest corporations in America say that having a diverse payroll helps boost sales, and they want the Supreme Court to keep that in mind as it considers this term’s affirmative-action case. BusinessWeek: Big Business Backs Affirmative Action at Supreme Court.
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The justices heard oral arguments on Oct. 10 that addressed whether the University of Texas may favor racial minorities in admissions. Aetna, Dow Chemical, General Electric, Halliburton, Merck, Microsoft, Northrop Grumman, Procter & Gamble, Wal-Mart Stores, Xerox, and 47 other companies filed a friend-of-the-court brief arguing that the case has bottom-line business implications as well.
“The only means of obtaining a properly qualified group of employees,” the businesses said in the brief, written by the law firm Jenner & Block, “is through diversity in institutions of higher education, which are allowed to recruit and instruct the best qualified minority candidates and create an environment in which all students can meaningfully expand their horizons.”
Merck says having people of South Asian and Arab descent on the payroll has helped drive sales. The company had anticipated that Muslim women would be hesitant to use its Gardasil, a vaccine that protects against the virus that causes cervical cancer. So, Merck told the court in the brief, it “sought the assistance of its Muslim employees in obtaining halal certification”—the Islamic equivalent of the kosher stamp of approval—for the vaccine. “Having a diverse workforce helped us get this product to market faster and ensure that it would be well-received by customers around the world,” says Bruce Kuhlik, Merck’s executive vice president and general counsel.
Photo illustration by 731; Photograph by Jon Elswick/AP Photo
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Voices and Soul
by Justice Putnam
Black Kos Poetry Editor
I come from a strong Matriarchy; so strong in fact, one might say I come from a feminist extended-family. There was no division of labor by gender when doing chores, growing up; all of us mowed the lawn, washed dishes, cooked, cleaned. When we lived on the farm outside of Corvallis; all of us learned to sew and sow.
The great Matriarch of the Family, our Great Aunt Mabel, lived to be 102. Shortly after marriage in the late 1880's, she and her new husband provisioned a covered wagon and trekked across the plains on their way to California. Along the way, as she put it, "he wasn't up to snuff, so I had to kick him out." She took up with another fellow during the almost year long voyage; and he was "worse than the first", so he was sent packing as well. It took a special man to be with this special woman; as it has been, as it is and as it will be with all the women in my family.
I've heard the accusation, on more than one occasion, that the women in the family are "full of themselves."
"Yes," is their unabashed reply, resonating across the generations, "yes we are!"
Poem For A Lady Whose Voice I Like
so he said: you ain’t got no talent
if you didn’t have a face
you wouldn’t be nobody
and she said: god created heaven and earth
and all that’s Black within them
so he said: you ain’t really no hot shit
they tell me plenty sisters
take care better business than you
and she said: on the third day he made chitterlings
and all good things to eat
and said: “that’s good”
so he said: if the white folks hadn’t been under
yo skirt and been giving you the big play
you’d a had to come on uptown like everybody else
and she replied: then he took a big Black greasy rib
from adam and said we will call this woeman and her
name will be sapphire and she will divide into four parts
that simone may sing a song
and he said: you pretty full of yourself ain’t chu
so she replied: show me someone not full of herself
and i’ll show you a hungry person
-- Nikki Giovanni
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