Monroe Anderson

Snakes eyes sure bet for poor at Chicago casino

 

 

 

 

    Mayor Rahm Emanuel wants to build a gambling casino in Chicago to help offset the monstrous city's employees pension debt. Not only is that comparable to bailing out the Titanic with a water bucket, but it also will be yet another gambit at balancing the budget on the backs of the poor. Here's my take in my Chicago Defender column this week.

 

 

Gambling casino quite a crap shoot for Chicago’s poor

by Monroe Anderson

 

 

  I’ve got to admit that I wasn’t convinced when Mayor Rahm Emanuel pinky swore that he was going to listen to Chicago’s everyday people, then act on their best interests--his corporate running buddies and the Loop dwellers be damned.

So as I watched Monday’s news clips on the mayor being sworn in for his second term, I was doggedly determined to stick with my resolve to give the man a second chance. He said that he was going to listen to the people. I’m all eyes.

One of the things I hope the people who claim they care for the people, like those Black men of faith who threw their full support behind Emanuel, tell him to fold ‘em when it comes to his plan to bring a gambling casino to Chicago. I hope they quit winking and nodding long enough to tell Mayor Emanuel the truth: a Chicago casino will do more evil than good to the city’s poor.

If these mayoral supporters have trouble manning up to tell Emanuel like it will be, I suggest they take note of the alarming conclusion business writer, Derek Thompson, came to last week in his report, titled “Lotteries: America's $70 Billion Shame,” on the Atlantic.com website.

“States are making their most hopeless citizens addicted to gambling to pay for government services,” he concluded, after referring to a Duke University study that found that the poorest third of households buy half of all lotto tickets.

For those of us lucky enough to have money in the bank, it’s recreational gambling and a voluntary payment of just one more hidden tax. But, for the poor, the lottery is virtually the first and last hope of attaining disposable income.  

 I can remember when Blacks played the policy game for nickels and dimes before the state took it over, renamed it the lottery and jacked up the cost of a bet to a buck. It was okie dokie back then because all the money gambled away was going to pay for state and local schooling.

That promise lasted about as long as topless bars in the 1970s remained tourist attractions. Then the Illinois State Legislature pulled a three-card Monte, moving the take from education to general revenue. Over the years, the state legislators, fearful that the voter’s might wise up and throw the bums out, never got around to raising taxes to cover the pension pool for state employees. Now the Baby Boomers among the state workers want to go home to roost. They’re retiring in hoards as soon as they can. The same holds true for Chicago’s Baby Boomers who were police and fire and education employees. Their promissory notes keep on coming, stamped "due."

The state has an estimated $6 billion deficit and over $110 billion in unfunded pension liabilities. Chicago has a $30 billion pension crisis. It’s easy to see the wall at the end of the road. It has a big flashing neon sign that says “raise property and income taxes right now.”

              All that debt with no easy way out leaves Mayor Emanuel and his city waist-deep in junk bond ratings. When he was in full-attack mode during the mayoral campaign, Emanuel pointed to Springfield and hinted at Washington as he pretended that the posse was coming. Although a Republican, Gov. Bruce Rauner is Mayor Emanuel’s pal. The two men have shared vacations and pricey bottles of wine together. It was easy to assume that Rauner would give a fellow one-percenter a hand. If not, Emanuel’s old boss, President Barack Obama, would have his back.

It’s obvious now that the only thing either the governor or the president can do is wish the mayor the best of luck. Emanuel is now pretending that a casino will come to the rescue because unlike Gov. Pat Quinn, who vetoed a measure that would have allowed a Chicago casino, Gov. Rauner has said he’s open.

Mayor Emanuel would have us believe that the outflow of money to suburban casinos could end up in the coffers of a Chicago casino, bringing in more than $450 million a year in revenue.

I’m no mathematician but with the help of my cell phone calculator I know the numbers don’t add up. Let’s see, $30 billion minus $450 million, leaves the city’s pension crisis at a paltry $29 billion, $550 million.

On the upside, those Chicagoans with the least to lose, won’t have to cross state lines or trek out to Joliet or Elgin to pursue their dreams while blowing the rent and grocery money.

              Should Chicago open a gambling casino--near McCormick Place, right where the new Marriott Hotel and DePaul University basketball stadium are to be built--luck won’t be a lady that night or any other night to follow. At least not for the vast majority who can’t afford to blow the little money they have on a dream where the house always wins.

 

Black teen unemployment is the real crime

 

America's treatment of its urban Black youth has been anything but benign. Far too many of them have no jobs, no future and little to lose. Here's my take in the Chicago Defender.

 

Black teen unemployment comes with a price

By Monroe Anderson

 

This summer threatens to be long and hot. Not climate change hot but heated and angry, Baltimore Spring hot.

             Three days ago, a Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll reported that 96 percent of us believe that there will be more racial disturbances as seen on TV.

             After we see more episodes of police routinely showing up on the nightly news after they’ve killed yet another Black male, there will be more repeats of Black teens with little more than time on their hands and outrage on their minds acting out their frustration. We’ll see more squad cars stomped to death. More buildings going up in smoke. More stores ransacked and looted.

“A resounding 96% of adults surveyed said it was likely there would be additional racial disturbances this summer, a signal that Americans believe Baltimore’s recent problems aren’t a local phenomenon but instead are symptomatic of broader national problems,” the Journal reported.

            That’s the Fourth Estate’s way of saying poor Black people are about to behave poorly and that while everybody knows it, not everybody knows why. So the opinions are about as racially divided as the nation. Sixty percent of Blacks saw the urban uprising as “long-standing frustrations about police mistreatment of African Americans,” while 58 percent of whites said the riots were "an excuse to engage in looting and violence.”

            There are all sorts of evidence and reasons that underscore the Black interpretation while undermining the white one. There are also studies and events to inform us that the frustrations go far beyond the wanton and routine police killing of unarmed Black males to these core problems: No jobs, no hope.

There’s this year’s annual report released jointly by the Chicago Urban League and the Alternative Schools Network in January titled, “A Frayed Connection: Joblessness among Teens in Chicago,” revealed that In 2012-13, just one in ten of Chicago’s Black teens had a job--nine out of 10 did not.  

“One half of 20-to 24-year old black male residents of the city are not working and not enrolled in school,” the report warned, adding that “Black teen employment rates in Chicago have reached historically low levels.”

A Kids Count policy report that was a dead ringer to the one in Chicago told the same sad story about young Black males in Baltimore in 2012, “unemployment among those ages 16 to 24 is the highest in the country since World War II.”

            The Supreme Commander of the Allies during WWII, Dwight Eisenhower, in his farewell address as POTUS warned Americans about the future dangers of massive military spending, especially deficit spending and government contracts to private military manufacturers. The unemployed Black males are getting short-changed by the military-industrial complex Ike warned us about.

Less than two years after President Lyndon Johnson launched his ambitious War on Poverty in 1964, those resources were shifted to the war in Vietnam. A generation later, President Bill Clinton managed to downsize the military but Republicans later took their pound of flesh, forcing him to end the Summer Youth Employment and Training Program as a stand-alone initiative which resulted in 600,000 kids being laid off.

The bulk of today’s economic challenges in our urban areas can be traced directly back to President George W. Bush. The 43rd president’s surplus-busting wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, which were never in his administration’s budget, sucked up much of the tax dollars that had been returning to the cities and states.

Depending on who’s calculating those two wars have cost America between four and six trillion dollars. American commanders handed out $3.5 billion with next-to-nothing oversight to purportedly to rebuild the country we illegally invaded.

Meanwhile, back at home, our pavements feel like something out of a war zone. Our outdated bridges are in danger of collapsing. Our transportation system is last millennium. And, of course, our urban areas are teeming with Black men who want and need jobs that they can’t get.

In Chicago, Mayor Rahm Emanuel is making jobs available for 24,000 Chicago teens through his One Summer Chicago initiative. In the scheme of things, that’s not a big number.

Maybe all those other unemployed teens, will understand it’s the thought that counts. We’ll see soon enough. Summer is just around the corner.

Post post-racial America

 

Half a century after the Selma March, race still matters in America as events in Selma, Alabama, Madison, Wisconsin and Norman, Oklahoma demonstrated. Here's my take in my Chicago Defender column

 

From Selma to Madison to Norman

Monroe Anderson

Defender Columnist

 

The march, a shooting and a song summed up this past weekend just how far this nation has gone and just how far it has yet to go.

 

The nation’s first African American president stood near the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma to mark the 50th anniversary of “Bloody Sunday,” one of the most important feats of the Civil Rights Movement. Out of the epic confrontation between forces of peace and progress and the agents of brute force, Blacks won the right to vote in the South.

 

“We just need to open our eyes and our ears and our hearts to know that this nation’s racial history still cast it’s long shadow upon us,” President Barack Obama told the integrated crowd of thousands who had gathered to commemorate, along with him, the Selma to Montgomery March. “We know the march is not yet over. We know the race is not yet won.”

 

As if to underscore the president’s point, some 898 miles north from Selma, in Madison, Wisconsin, another white cop shot and killed another unarmed black teenager and some 783 miles northwest of Selma, in Norman, Oklahoma, a YouTube video went viral exposing tuxedo-clad white frat boys chanting a bus-trip song about racial exclusion and lynching.

 

The lyrics to the song were not exactly surprising, considering that Sigma Alpha Epsilon is 159 years old and is the only national fraternity founded in the Antebellum South. The fraternity boasts on its website that during the Civil War 92 percent of SAE members fought for the Confederate states.

 

In case you missed the video or didn’t catch the lyrics, here they are in all of their good ol’ boy, old-fashioned, garden-variety racist glory:

"There will never be a ni**** in SAE.

There will never be a ni**** in SAE.

You can hang him from a tree, but he can never sign with me

There will never be a ni**** in SAE."

 

I find this alarming because this isn’t a bunch of curmudgeonly, bitter old white men hating on hope and change but young guys who are white America’s future. After these frat boys graduate from college, they’ll move on into the corporate pipeline where some day some of them will have the power to hire and fire with “there will never be a ni**** “ playing like the soundtrack to their lives in their heads.

 

The SAE chanters may represent a throwback to mid-century American racism, but times have changed. Rather than stonewall the Unheard, a group of Black student activists at OU who had learned of the video and posted it online, or buy time with a three-month investigation, David Boren, the university president, immediately shut the fraternity down.

 

The national headquarters of SAE, which prides itself in having a membership of “gentlemen and leaders.” followed Boren’s lead and immediately suspended the OU chapter.

 

With no blood thirsty state troopers or Selma police waiting to do battle, what was supposed to be a march was so well attended by so many movers and shakers that it turned into an extravaganza. Not only was America’s current president there but also former President George W. Bush, along with Capitol Hill lawmakers galore.

 

It was plainly easier to take photo-ops  than it has been to pass a new voter’s rights law that would repair the damage the five right wing activists on the Supreme Court did two years ago to the 1965 Voting Rights Act. By a 5-4 vote, the Supreme Court ruled that southern states that had historically suppressed the Black vote no longer had to prove they were no longer suppressing the Black vote. Since then, southern states like Texas has come up with all sorts of creative, new-fangled ways to diminish the number of Blacks and Browns casting their votes at the ballot box.

 

We can vote now but we can’t stop the unjustifiable killings of black men and boys by frightened or ferocious cops.

 

Even with the “Black Lives Matter” and “Hands Up, Don’t Shoot” protests becoming this generation’s civil rights movement, policemen across the nation continue to create more martyrs.

 

Friday night a Madison policeman shot Tony Robinson, an unarmed biracial teen, five times in the chest. The 19-year-old Robinson had a file on his with a conviction last year for armed robbery and a diagnosis that he suffered from attention-deficit disorder and anxiety and depression.

 

Officer Matt Kenny, a 12-year veteran, has been put on paid administrative leave while the Wisconsin Department of Justice investigates the Robinson’s death. Kenny was involved in another fatal shooting in 2007, that was found justified; a so-called suicide by cop case.

 

So while Selma was throwing a grand party, 2,000 protesters, mainly Wisconsin students, have been peacefully marching in Madison while chanting, “Black lives matter.”

 

Some students’ chants are far better than others.

 

Ten years after 9/11, America needs 911

 

 

    On the fifth anniversary of the 9/11 tragedy, the Chicago Sun-Times assigned all its Sunday op-ed columnists to write on the subject. Below is what I wrote. I've cut and pasted it from a wingnut website, Free Republic. If you'll notice, I got honored with a very grown-up "Barf Alert."

    Well, five years have passed. We're Bush-free but still stuck in Iraq and Afghanistan.

    We're also still afraid.

    We can't catch a flight without going shoeless first and we're more than likely to have to show our private parts to a TSA agent before we're allowed to board. Osama bin Laden is dead but his terror lives on. So does his toll on American freedom and finances. We've spent ourselves into a hole by occupying two countries in our pursuit of invisible men. While we've been blowing things up for the past decade, China has been building and building and building.

We're still stuck in the quagmire with President Obama afraid to pull the plug, rightly fearing that the Republicans will successfully label him our soft on terror, anti-American, pro-Arab, freedom-hating commander-in-chief.

Ten years after 9/11, we're still nation-building in the Middle East while the Midwest in our nation is falling apart. So, for this next presidential election, I think Obama should be making a 911 call for America--we need the emergency services.

   

Just in time for elections, Bush campaigns on fear (BARF ALERT)
Chicago Sun-Times ^ | September 10, 2006 | MONROE ANDERSON

Posted on Sun Sep 10 09:47:18 2006 by Chi-townChief

 

Just in time for elections, Bush campaigns on fear

by Monroe Anderson

Five years after the 9/11 tragedy, the kingpin of Abraham Lincoln's party is still dead set on fooling most of the people most of the time.

President Bush and his chorus of Republican pols, Cabinet members and neo-con sycophants would have us believe we're safer or, depending on political expediencies, not that safe. According to the president's pre-9/11 anniversary speeches on the progress of the war on terror, we're safer than we were before the attacks but not yet safe enough to steer clear of his failed stay-the-course strategy. As Bush explains it, al-Qaida's leadership is decimated but remains dangerous enough to destroy the entire civilized world.

There he goes again.

With midterm congressional elections less than two months away, the Bush subterfuge machine is in full spiel and spin. Too incompetent to manage problems that are all too real to mainstream America, such as high gas prices, 45 million citizens without health insurance and a sliding income for middle-class workers -- or capturing Osama bin Laden for that matter -- the president and his forces are back to wheeling and dealing terror. They're playing the same fear-mongering three-card monte game that worked so well in the 2002 and 2004 elections: See if you can find the terrorist threat under here or here or there. Find Saddam Hussein's ethereal weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Watch the politically timed color alert rise and fall on cue.

There's a book just out with a title that sums it all up: Hubris: The Inside Story of Spin, Scandal and the Selling of the Iraq War. Authors Michael Isikoff and David Corn report that Bush hated Saddam so much that he privately let loose expletive-laden tirades against the dictator. In March 2002, months before Bush asked Congress for authority to attack Saddam, he bluntly exposed his true intentions in an unguarded moment with two aides. When told that White House correspondent Helen Thomas was questioning the need to oust Saddam, Bush snapped: ''Did you tell her I intend to kick his sorry m - - - - - - - - - - - - ass all over the Mideast?''

The president's anger was understandable. ''After all,'' Bush said six months later while speaking at a fund-raiser in Houston, ''this is the guy who tried to kill my dad.''

I think that's admirable that Bush 43 loves his dad, Bush 41, enough to try to revenge Saddam's botched assassination attempt in 1993. I loved my late dad as much as Bush loves his, and while I too would have been livid if the Iraqi dictator tried to whack my father, I wouldn't have set into motion a wave of international shock and awe that would result in the deaths of more than 2,600 U.S. military men and women and more than 41,000 innocent Iraqi civilians.

I also love my two sons as much as I'm sure he loves his twin daughters. If we're really in danger of Apocalypse Soon, as Bush keeps insisting, then we ought to act like it. The president should re-institute a mandatory military draft. I'll tearfully send my sons off to war, right after Bush tearfully sends his daughters to sign up in our co-educational military. If the war against Islamic terrorists compares to the fight against Nazis, as Bush insists, and if a withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq would lead to its conquest by our nation's worst enemies, then we ought to have a military reflecting that clear and present danger. There were 16 million Americans fighting to keep the world safe for democracy in World War II. There are 130,000 in Iraq.

I'm afraid Bush's plan to save the world from Islamic fascism is way too modest. He wants Congress to pass his terrorist surveillance act and authorization to try the al-Qaida detainees held in his secret CIA torture prisons. For reasons too simple for many Americans to understand, he's not interested in following the 9/11 Commission's recommendations to shore up security at U.S. harbors or keep a close watch on checked airplane luggage. Those measures, which would obviously make America safer from the inevitable al-Qaida strikes in the future, would cost big business big money.

But what fool would want to take those measures when it's so much more politically practical to scare most of the people one more time?

In Search of Intelligence in the Multiverse--Not anywhere where Glenn Beck just happens to be

 
 

    During yesterday's fleeting hour, while he was interviewing the very troubled former New York congressman, Eric Massa, Glenn Beck was out of his mind. 

This was the first time the whining, weeping conservative talk show host sounded, sounded, sounded, well.....thoughtful as he tried to get freshly-resigned Massa to dump all over his fellow Democrats and the Obama Administration.

When I say Beck sounded thoughtful, let me be clear: I'm speaking relatively here.

Any other time Beck favors staying stuck on stupid, saying stuff like President Barack Obama is a racist who "has a deep-seated hatred for white people."

As Media Matters points out, Beck "has flirted with the idea that FEMA is building detention camps, suggested that President Obama is purposefully "tanking" the economy to force young people to work for ACORN and AmeriCorps, and said that Obama and former President George W. Bush are 'moving us away from our republic and into a system of fascism.'"

Beck, who was named Media Matters' Misinformer of the Year, also thought the Tea Baggers march on Washington was 1.7 million strong--about seven times as much as the number of anti-reform protesters that actually showed up. He apparently thinks the ideas enumerated in his banal 912 Project, with its nine principles and 12 values, are something new, necessary or profound.

But right after I saw Beck's broadcast yesterday, which left me hoping against hope that he wasn't the dullest knife in the drawer, I read that on Monday he was urging the listeners of his syndicated radio show to leave churches that preach social justice.

As it turns out, Beck thinks that the term many Christian churches use to describe efforts to tackle poverty and promote human rights is a "code word" for communism and Nazism. 

Who would dare think the teachings of Jesus Christ were the ambitions of commies and Nazis? Glenn Beck.

This commentary was cross-posted on the AgoraVox website.

GOP did a heck of a job on Dems for Brownie

 
 

We saw what was to come a year ago when Chief Justice John G. Roberts, Jr. sworn in President Barack Hussein Obama, Jr. 

What should have been a smooth and seamless ceremony wasn't. Chief Justice Roberts got the words wrong. The new President had to go through the swearing-in later--one more time--in the Inaugural day to make sure everything was all right.

That omen to the chief from the chief would be replayed and replayed and replayed with different verses, but the same tune throughout Obama's first 365 days in office. While I seriously doubt that the swearing-in trip-up by Roberts, an activist conservative Supreme Court appointee, was designed to be an obstructionist gesture, it symbolizes what the activist, conservative Republican Party and its media movers and shakers had in store for Obama.

Since the double-dose Inaugural, day in and day out, week in and week out, month in and month out, our nation and its chief executive have been bludgeoned by one Republican road block to the next in a right-wing plot to assure that Obama's promise for change goes nowhere fast.

Right off there was the Birthers. According to them, Obama was not born in the United States therefore wasn't a legal citizen therefore was ineligible to be president. A little more than six months into office, the first African American president was still in early attempts to get the health reform legislation he promised through Congress when GOP Sen. Jim DeMint declared if Republicans and conservatives stop Obama on health care reform, it would “break him” and be Obama’s “Waterloo.”

After DeMint's declarations, the Birthers were joined by the Deathers--those that claimed that the Healthcare Reform Bill was designed to let senior citizens die--and the tea-baggers who were mad as hell as not going to take it any more because Obama was a foreign-born, socialist who was out to kill the unborn, old folks and truth, justice and the American way.

All along, the Republicans voted no while providing no variable alternative to all they were rejecting. As we come to the end of Obama's first year, the Republicans have helped to assure that 177 of the White House's nominees have not been appointed--that's 107 more than the 70 Bush nominees that were still waiting after his first year in office and one heck of a way to make sure that Obama can't do a good job.

So when Massachusetts' Brownie became the first Republican to win a U.S. Senate seat since Edward Brooke retired in 1979, on cue the conservatives to healthcare. Following suit, many of the MSM reports failed to point out months before Scott Brown beat Democrat Martha Coakley that the majority of Americans were in favor of healthcare reform until the right-wingers nay-sayed it to its deathbed. Nor did enough MSM reports explain that Massachusetts already has a healthcare reform law in place so the voters in that state were either fearful that a national reform law may cost them more or were pretty much into a "I got mine, I could care less about yours" state of mind.

As if we didn't know, the main history we've learned in the past year is that negative works; that it's easier to tear down than to build up and that nice guys get to experience firsthand that old saw about if at first you don't succeed, then try, try, try again.

 
 

This column has been cross-posted on the Newsvine and the African American Opinion.com websites.

Obama should not take responsibility for Bush's 9/11 failure

    

    Watching today's commemorations of the eight anniversary of the 9/11 terrorists attacks, I am reminded of how badly the Bush Administration blew it. The most incompetent presidency in our nation's history presided over the worst failure in national security since Pearl Harbor.

    Keeping this in mind, I shake my head, then my fist, whenever Dick Cheney or his darling daughter show up on some TV news talk show bragging about how the Bush Administration's criminal torture practices kept us safe. This isn't just another exercise in tortured logic, it's a sputtering lurch of the right wing old fear trying to journey just a bit further on a road well traveled. The Cheneys, in presenting their mythology about keep us safe since 9/11 have never gotten around to telling us who kept us safe from February 26, 1993, when the World Trade Center was first bombed, until September 11, 2001, when the Towers were tragically toppled.

    That stretch of safety, by my count, was one days short of eight years, six months and two weeks. We're not there yet.

    I'm also reminded on this day that the Bush Administration failed to pull off the president's bullhorn braggadocio: "And the people who knocked these buildings down will hear all of us soon."

    Well, either Osama bin Laden was deaf or President George W. Bush and Vice President Cheney substituted the bullhorn for the dog whistle. The mastermind of the 9/11 attacks never heard from the Bush Administration. Now it's President Obama's turn. He wants to send more troops to Afghanistan. He wants to shift our misguided war efforts from Iraq back to where they should have been concentrated all along.

    I'm afraid it's too little, too late. The Bushies had a chance to make a surgical strike right after 9/11. They let the cancer metastasize. They created more terrorists and gave bin Laden and his henchman a chance to slip into Pakistan. The Obama Administration has inherited a bad situation that can only get worse. Sending more of our young men and women into the land where Empires go to die is a losing proposition.

     I'm having trouble writing this, but I agree with George Will: We need to bring the troops home. President Obama should adapt the common sense sensitivities of State Senator Obama and apply them to Afghanistan. Should the Taliban regain power in Afghanistan and should al Qaeda crawl out of the caves in Pakistan, we've can always hit them again.

    We're very good at shock and awe--but not at all good at occupation.

This post was also published on the UK Progressive  and the African American Opinion.com websites.

In Search of Intelligence in the Multiverse--Not in Steelers' linebacker position

When this year's Superbowl champions, the Pittsburgh Steelers, run through the meet and greet ceremony Thursday at the White House, the team's star linebacker will be sitting it out. James Harrison says that he's not going to the Nation's Capitol to hang out with the nation's first African American president because....well, because....WTF?

"This is how I feel -- if you want to see the Pittsburgh Steelers, invite us when we don't win the Super Bowl. As far as I'm concerned, [Obama] would've invited Arizona if they had won," Harrison told WTAE-TV in Pittsburgh.

Has this player suffered one concussion too many?  Had the Cardinals beat the Steelers in Superbowl 43, then President 44 would have been glad-handing with them in the Rose Garden. That's the way it works. The winners gets to the White House. The losers gets to go home. So, yeah, without Harrison's record 100 yard touchdown return, and an Arizona, 23, Pittsburgh, 20, final score, the Cardinals would have gotten the Barack Obama invite.

It was pointed out that Harrison passed on going to Washington three years ago, the last time the Steelers won the Superbowl, to meet with President George W. Bush. Harrison's agent insists that his client's decision to skip the trip to Washington wasn't political. The agent should have insisted that it was downright stupid.

Actually, his agent should have explained it all to his client like he was a six-year-old. If you win the Superbowl, you get a Superbowl ring. If you lose, the other team gets it. If you win, your team gets the Superbowl trophy. If you lose, the other team gets it. If you win, you get to be in the Superbowl parade. If you lose, the other team's town has a parade for them.

      If you win the Superbowl, then you get to go to Disney World. 

      My guess is that since Harrison won, he's been there and doesn't want to ever, ever leave.

(This post was also published on the AgoraVox and Newsvine websites.)

Obama's inaugural poet--Here's a hot one

A few days ago I got an email from my friend Sandra Jackson-Opuku, a Chicago novelist, pointing out that the blogosphere was all ablaze about who should be the inaugural poet. Sandra said she is nominating Chicago poet and attorney Ginger Mance.

            "Ginger had a central role in protesting a media decision to "black-out" Senator Obama's convention speech back in 2004. She was also a campaign volunteer on his presidential campaign," Sandra wrote. "I'm impressed with both her tireless work on behalf of Obama's candidacy in many of his political races, and the considerable poetic talent demonstrated in "Awakened Sun," a praise poem written for Obama on his election to US Senate."

            I gave Sandra suggestion some thought, then thought about other possible poets who would speak to the times should Barack decide to have a bard at his inaugural. I even checked out some of the suggestions out in cyberspace. After thinking long and hard, and loving to be the contrarian commentator I sometimes am, I chose William "Smokey" Robinson.  My commentary was posted on ebonyjet.com this morning. 

Obama's Inaugural Poet
only one man is right for the job 
December 9, 2008 
By Monroe Anderson

We should have known it was a bad sign when there was no poetry at George W. Bush’s swearing in as president in 2000 and again four years later.  Bill Clinton, the smarter and more competent predecessor to Bush, had two. Maya Angelou read her poem, "On the Pulse of Morning," at Clinton's 1992 inaugural. Four years later, Arkansas poet Miller Williams read his verse, "Of History and Hope" at Clinton's second swearing in.  Robert Frost, John F. Kennedy's inaugural poet, was the first.

On January 20, during the ceremony when he is sworn in as POTUS, Obama should have a national wordsmith step forward as the warm-up act. Someone to signal that we're trying something new before the soul-stirring words Obama will serve up during his acceptance speech to inspire a nation. Like Obama, that poet should be exceptional. Exceptional poets are out there. Names like Alice Walker, Amiri Baraka, Nikki Giovanni, Toni Morrison, poetry slam champion Patricia Smith and that great American songwriter who is one of Obama's favorite musicians, Bob Dylan.

All those poets are good but, in my opinion, not quite good enough. There's only one American poet great enough and big enough and beloved enough to share the stage with Barack Obama when he swears in next month. That man is the Poet Laureate of Soul—William "Smokey" Robinson.

Dylan has called Smokey "the greatest poet" of our times. Unlike Robert Frost, whose poem, "The Gift Outright," which was read at Kennedy's inaugural and turned out to be a white-privilege paean to the principles of Manifest Destiny, Smokey's poetry is an ode to the common man. His prose provides pragmatic inspiration to every American from Joe the Plumber to George the President.

Smokey has not only written about love won and love lost, but American employment and unemployment. The lyrics to "Got a Job" plaintively sums up the plight of having a minimum wage gig. His "Abraham Martin and John" lyrics were American social observation at its purest. And the lyrics to "Shop Around" are way better advice than Bush's post-911 edict that Americans be about the business of serious consumption to show the terrorists that they could not undermine our economy.

Like the Spoken Word poem, "A Black American," that he performed live on Def Poetry Jam, Smokey could do a new but similar verse that would educate the nation about its African roots and its diverse, multi-cultural future.

Or he could just sing his poetry. We know the man can sing what he writes.  In the 50 years that he's been out there, Smokey boasts a song catalog of 4,000 tunes with 36 Top 10 hits.

Plus, with Smokey, there's a bunch of material Obama can draw from and expand on in his inaugural speech. He could take "Quiet Storm" and discuss the economic climate we're in right now. Or Smokey could sing an updated, make-it-plain version of  "Who's Gonna Take the Blame" to remind us how Washington's old school politics propelled our nation to this moment of change.  Or, Smokey could stick with the upbeat mood at Obama's inaugural with a "Goin’ to a Go-Go"-inspired rhyme reminding us that the good times are about to begin.

And, since George W. Bush didn't have a poet at his inauguration, Smokey's appearance could represent the transformation from chump to change.  And as Bush is overcome with emotion watching Obama take his place, a few lines from "Tears of a Clown" should second that emotion.

Monroe Anderson is an award-winning journalist who penned op-ed columns for both the Chicago Tribune and the Chicago Sun-Times. Check out his blog at monroeanderson.typepad.com

UPDATE: My friend, Dawoud Bey was right. As Bey predicted in the comments section on this blog, Elizabeth Alexander has been named the inaugural poet. Small wonder.  She's Obama's buddy and yet one more of his Ivy League prof and/or alum selections. I still believe that Smokey would have been a better choice. Sure Alexander was a finalist for 2005 Pulitzer prize for poetry but Smokey is a 2006 Kennedy Center Honoree. That makes Alexander predictable while Smokey would have been the change we need.

Here's a YouTube video of Smokey's Def Poetry Jam performance.

Except for the voting and the celebration, it's all over

     

     This is the historical day we've been anxiously awaiting. If you haven't voted yet, read my post then go do it. I'd suggest that you vote early and often but, apparently, that's only legal in Chicago. 

     Here's my ebonyjet.com commentary and have I got a prognostication for you. It was posted on the website this morning.

A Simple Prediction
a bold proclamation on Election Day 
November 4, 2008 

By Monroe Anderson

At the risk of ending up with egg on my face and having to eat crow come tomorrow morning, allow me to go out on a limb and make this prediction: This time, it won't be close.  Barack Obama's margin of victory is going to be so wide that the GOP won't be able to steal the election.

To make myself perfectly clear, can you spell l-a-n-d-s-l-i-d-e?

That's what I see coming and that's what the Republicans no less deserve.

In one national opinion poll after the next, from last week to last night, Obama has enjoyed somewhere between a double-digit to a high single-digit lead over John McCain. The O-Man also had an edge in six of the eight battleground states.

The advantage to Team Obama doesn't stop there.  More than 153 million Americans, a record, have registered to vote with about 10 percent being newbies most anxious for a change. You've seen, maybe even waited in, those long lines of early voters in state after state, night after night, as seen on TV. Nearly a third of the Americans registered to vote have already been there and done that, giving Obama a 20 percent advantage even before the polls opened this morning.

But McCain and the gang would like to have you believe that all the polls are wrong; that the Mavericks have better than a chance of drawing an inside straight for ending up with the winning hand. "They may not know it, but the Mac is back," McCain has taken to boasting in his final-hour rallies.

Believe not what they say, but what they don't do.  The Republicans have not been campaigning in Obama country because they've been working overtime in defending their own turf. Since the credit crisis hit and the stock market did a belly flop, McCain and Sarah Palin have been forced to campaign in the states that George Bush owned in 2000 and 2004.

But eight years of Bush have proven to be eight years too many.  After lying about the weapons of mass destruction, mishandling the New Orleans rescue after Hurricane Katrina and driving America to the poor house, the president has thoroughly ruined the Republican brand.

There are scores of other reasons why any politician with an R at the front of his party's name is wearing a scarlet letter.  But, I'll just tick off three color-coded terror alerts for McPalin and the rest of the GOP.

*Black pride. The enthusiasm among African American voters alone may help turn some red states blue. In North Carolina, for instance, half of the state's registered African American voters have already cast their ballots.

*Brown anger. The incessant rants against illegal immigration by the rabid right's pet radio hosts, Rush Limbaugh, Lara Inghram et al have infuriated Americans of Mexican descent—seventy-five percent of their votes will be cast for the black man.

*White fear. The hockey mom from nowhere may have ginned up McCain's presidential prospects in early September, but by late October Gov. Palin was a total drag on the ticket. Once she'd been exposed as the pitbull who was all bark with no intellectual bite, true blue white American patriots shuddered at the thought of her possibly having her hand on the nuclear trigger.

That's why I'm predicting an Obama blowout--with one not-so-minor caveat: For those of you who haven't voted yet, it's up to you. If you don't go out to vote and encourage all your family members and friends to do the same, by Wednesday you'll find me plunging off the end of a broken limb, gagging on a nasty breakfast of raw egg and cold crow.

Monroe Anderson is an award-winning journalist who penned op-ed columns for both the Chicago Tribune and the Chicago Sun-Times. 

     And, before you go, take a look at this hilarious YouTube video, Hockey Moms Against Sarah Palin, which is just one more bit of evidence as to why the Republicans won't rule this day. (h/t to An Average American Patriot)