US Socialist Worker #659 Jan 25th 2008
The latest Socialist Worker from the ISO leads on racism in American politics.
Lee Sustar says: "THE ISSUE of race and racism emerged openly at the heart of U.S. politics in the Democratic presidential campaign in January. But as any serious student of U.S. history knows, racism is always beneath the surface of U.S. politics.
The trigger for the current debate was a comment by Sen. Hillary Clinton that “Dr. [Martin Luther] King's dream began to be realized when President Lyndon Johnson passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964. It took a president to get it done.”
The paper's editorial focuses on the anti-war movement: "MoveOn's backward move on the war"
"A COLLECTION of liberal antiwar groups, including MoveOn.org, Win Without War and Americans Against Escalation in Iraq, decided at a meeting in mid-January to retreat from their campaign to get Congress to cut war funding and impose a timetable for withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq.
In 2008, the groups say, their new emphasis will be to keep the Bush administration from entering into a long-term agreement with the Iraqi central government that would keep U.S. troops there for a decade.
Last year, these organizations spent a jaw-dropping $12 million on a lobbying and advertising campaign to get the newly elected Democratic Congress to vote against more war funding.
That strategy proved to be an utter failure.
The tragedy, of course, is that such a massive sum could have helped fund any number of grassroots activist campaigns and organizations. Instead, it was squandered.
The explanation offered as a justification is as simple as it is misleading. “We got our heads together and decided to go a different way,” said John Isaacs, executive director of Council for a Livable World, whose group attended the meeting. “The consensus was not to keep beating our heads against the wall trying to block every funding bill--not because we don't agree with it, but because we don't have the votes.”
There's more: basically saying, 'don't trust the Democrats".
Lee Sustar says: "THE ISSUE of race and racism emerged openly at the heart of U.S. politics in the Democratic presidential campaign in January. But as any serious student of U.S. history knows, racism is always beneath the surface of U.S. politics.
The trigger for the current debate was a comment by Sen. Hillary Clinton that “Dr. [Martin Luther] King's dream began to be realized when President Lyndon Johnson passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964. It took a president to get it done.”
The paper's editorial focuses on the anti-war movement: "MoveOn's backward move on the war"
"A COLLECTION of liberal antiwar groups, including MoveOn.org, Win Without War and Americans Against Escalation in Iraq, decided at a meeting in mid-January to retreat from their campaign to get Congress to cut war funding and impose a timetable for withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq.
In 2008, the groups say, their new emphasis will be to keep the Bush administration from entering into a long-term agreement with the Iraqi central government that would keep U.S. troops there for a decade.
Last year, these organizations spent a jaw-dropping $12 million on a lobbying and advertising campaign to get the newly elected Democratic Congress to vote against more war funding.
That strategy proved to be an utter failure.
The tragedy, of course, is that such a massive sum could have helped fund any number of grassroots activist campaigns and organizations. Instead, it was squandered.
The explanation offered as a justification is as simple as it is misleading. “We got our heads together and decided to go a different way,” said John Isaacs, executive director of Council for a Livable World, whose group attended the meeting. “The consensus was not to keep beating our heads against the wall trying to block every funding bill--not because we don't agree with it, but because we don't have the votes.”
There's more: basically saying, 'don't trust the Democrats".
Labels: US anti-war, US ISO
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