Monroe Anderson

It's must-be TV for Blacks in Hollywood

For the past Century, Hollywood and African Americans have had a star-crossed relationship with the movie industry waging an image war against Blacks. Here's my Chicago Defender column on this sad situation.

Selma boycotted but Hollywood still got Glory

 

Monroe Anderson

Defender Columnist

 

 

    Hollywood’s snub of the very important Black film, Selma, about the extremely important march to demand voting rights for African Americans 50 years ago, was so absurd, so ironic, that it was joke worthy.

    On cue, Host Neil Patrick Harris literally opened Sunday night’s 87th Academy Awards show with this pale one-liner: “The best and the whitest...sorry brightest.”

    It was a feeble attempt to sugar coat the bitter truth. Although the president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Cheryl Boone Isaacs, is a Black woman, the actors nominated for best performances this year were all white.

    The Blacks-are not-worthy judgement was determined by the Academy voters who are 94 percent white. Last month’s Golden Globe Awards paid a little homage at least. David Oyelowo’s brilliant performance as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Ava DuVernay inspired direction at least garnered two nominations.

    “Why are we still begging white people for approval?” asks Sergio Mims, who writes for a Black film website, Shadow and Act, and is a co-founder of Chicago’s Black Harvest Film Festival, before shrugging off the Oscars brush off as no big deal.

    Mims might be right. There are the obvious bragging rights, but there is no guarantee that an Oscar will get an actor more work or a higher salary.

    And long after all the sound and the fury over this year’s Oscars have come and gone, the real action will remain where it already is: at home on our big flat-screen TV sets.

    Going out to see a movie, with servings of popcorn, soda and candy, can cost a family of four as much as $80 so we’re staying away in droves. According to a CBS News Poll, 84 percent of Americans see movies at home, four percent at the theater and 10 percent pretty much divided between home and the theaters.

    Television is also giving the theatrical movies a run for the fame and fortune as far as actors and producers are concerned.

    More than two and a half viewers watched Laurence Fishburne’s Hannibal every week as the veteran Black actor pulled down $175,000 per episode. Fishburne is also a co-star along with Anthony Anderson on the TV sitcom, Black-ish. He and Anderson are also producers..

    Producer Lee Daniel’s new drama, Empire, starring Terrence Howard and Taraji P. Henson, has been building its viewership from week to next. The Hip-Hop mogul show, which MSNBC’s Melissa Harris-Perry summed up as a combination of Breaking Bad, Glee, House of Cards and The Real Housewives,  is the new “it” show for Black viewers.

    Since she created Grey’s Anatomy, Writer and Producer Shonda Rhimes has her own cottage industry on network TV with Private Practice and Scandal. She is also an executive producer on How to Get Away with Murder, the new TV drama that last month earned the show’s star, Viola Davis, a Screen Actors Guild Award.

    More than nine and a half million viewers watch Kerry Washington’s Scandal religiously. She reportedly earns $150,000 per show which means no one’s going to be throwing a rent party for her anytime soon. But, this is where the money gets really funny.  While the audience for ratings champion, The Big Bang theory, is twice that of Scandal, all three of the white stars, Jim Parsons, Kaley Cuoco, Johnny Galecki are paid  $1 million each per episode.

    That’s entertainment. Hollywood won’t be winning many awards for treating African Americans fairly over the past century. America’s movie industry has been waging an image war on Blacks since D.W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation first hit movie theaters 100 years ago. Griffith’s movie, originally named The Clansmen, espoused white supremacy while  glorifying the KKK. One scene features white actors in blackface who are supposed to be newly elected Black legislators during Reconstruction, sitting around, barefoot, eating chicken, drinking whiskey and recklessly eyeballing white women.

     Donald Bogle’s, Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies, and Bucks: An Interpretive History of Blacks in American Films, pretty much sums up much of Hollywood’s presentation of Blacks well into the 1980s.

    It’s that history and what took place on the Pettus Bridge that brought tears to some in the audience as they watched John Stephens and Lonnie Lynn-- aka John Legend and Common--perform, and later accept Oscar for Best Original song, Glory.  

    “We know that right now the struggle for freedom and justice is real. We live in the most incarcerated country in the world,” Legend said during their acceptance speech. “There are more black men under correctional control today than were under slavery in 1850. When people are marching with our song, we want to tell you that we are with you, we see you, we love you, and march on.”

    Common and Legend are right on. The struggle continues. But every now and then, we do get to witness some glory.

 

Sikh Slayings: White Anxiety Gone Extreme

Here's my Root commentary on the Sikh tragedy. No more commentary here. It speaks for itself.

 

Sikh Slayings: White Anxiety Gone Extreme

America's browning drives a backlash that found its most virulent strain in Wade Michael Page.

By: Monroe Anderson | Posted: August 10, 2012 at 12:26 AM

 

(The Root) -- When Wade Michael Page walked into a Wisconsin temple last wesek, murdering six Sikh worshippers and critically wounding three others, it was an incident waiting to happen.

As the neo-Nazi loser marched through the temple randomly shooting one Sikh after the next, perhaps the "14 words" motto of white supremacists was running through his warped mind: "We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children."

To the insecure and frightened haters in our nation, the end of white dominance in America is increasingly inevitable. Besides being red, white and blue, the good old US of A is steadily becoming brown, black and yellow -- a majority-minority nation.

During a 12-month period that ended July 2011, for the first time in America's modern history, more minority babies were born than white babies. Casually referred to by white supremacists as members of "the mud races," Hispanic, black and Asian newborns made up 50.4 percent of the nation's births during that period. Just 22 years ago, minority births accounted for a much lower figure -- 37 percent.

"White supremacist groups have been having a meltdown since the Census Bureau predicted that non-Hispanic whites would lose the majority by 2050," said Mark Potok, spokesman for the Southern Poverty Law Center, which monitored Wade Michael Page in particular for the past 12 years, and hate groups in general for much longer than that. "The demographic change in this country is the single-most-important driver in the growth of hate groups and extremist groups over the last few years," he told ABC News.

Last year Potok's organization reported that hate groups in America had exploded to more than 1,000 from 602 at the beginning of the millennium.

Domestic terrorist Page, a 40-year-old U.S. Army reject, who died from a self-inflicted wound during the Oak Creek massacre, could take credit for some of that growth. For more than a decade, Page had been playing hate music. He played with white-power heavy-metal bands affiliated with Hammerskins Nation, and he led a couple of bands of his own, Definite Hate and End Apathy. His music appealed to other young white losers, creating new haters every day. It also raised money to help bankroll other hate groups like the National Alliance, the violent hate group that inspired Timothy McVeigh to blow up a Oklahoma City federal building in 1995.

According to the Anti-Defamation League, which also monitors America's white supremacy groups, the names of these racists bands reveal what's on their minds and in their hearts, names like Grinded Nig, Jew Slaughter and Aggravated Assault. "In keeping with its attempts to reach out to young people, one label, named Resistance Records, even markets a white supremacist video game, 'Ethnic Cleansing,' " the ADL reports on its website. "The game is a first-person-shooter in which the player takes on the role of a white warrior in a future 'Race War,' who must kill all nonwhites to ensure 'the survival of your kind.' "

Although these virulent, malicious white supremacists, who wear their hate on their tattoo sleeves and everywhere else, are more or less a limited group of bigots, they may merely be the underbelly of a larger phenomenon.

When the Tea Party and other conservatives cry, "We want our country back," it doesn't take much imagination to translate what that means as the nation's demographics and culture continue their colorful shift.

Mainstream conservatives have been spewing coded, dog-whistle racist messages since Ronald Reagan's "Welfare Queen" speech in 1976 and the Willie Horton ad employed in the George H.W. Bush 1988 campaign against Michael Dukakis. More recently, the billionaire Koch brothers and their right-wing organization, Americans for Prosperity, were accused of buying a North Carolina school board in an effort to resegregate the Wake County school system.

So I wasn't exactly shocked when conservatives attacked Department of Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano when she issued a report in April 2009 warning that right-wing extremists threaten American security. The nine-page report, titled "Rightwing Extremism: Current Economic and Political Climate Fueling Resurgence in Radicalization and Recruitment," documented the smoldering hate among the nation's extreme right-wing groups, warning that some individuals might commit violent acts. "If such violence were to occur," the report said, "it likely would be isolated, small-scale, and directed at specific immigration-related targets."

Conservative commentator Michelle Malkin posted a blog with this headline: "Confirmed: The Obama DHS Hit Job on Conservatives Is Real."

Another conservative website, Alex Jones' Prison Planet, is headlined, "Homeland Security Report Lists 'Liberty Lovers' as Terrorists."

And then-top Republican of the House Intelligence committee, former Michigan Rep. Pete Hoekstra, charged "unsubstantiated conclusions and political bias," worthy of a House investigation.

I would like to attribute all this hate to good old-fashioned American exceptionalism, but I would be wrong.

A year ago, Norwegian Anders Behring Breivik went on a shooting and bombing spree that left 77 people dead, many of them teenagers, almost all of them Muslims. Like his brethren in the U.S., he hated Muslims, he hated people who didn't look like him and he hated cultural diversity.

I fear this is just the beginning. Not only are some white Americans threatened by the encroaching "mud races," but there is a quickening recognition around the planet that the world is yellow, brown and black.

Less than a quarter of the world's population is white. By 2060, fears conservative Pat Buchanan, that percentage may dip into the single digits.

Cyber columnist Monroe Anderson is a veteran Chicago journalist who has written signed op-ed-page columns for both the Chicago Tribune and Chicago Sun-Times and executive-produced and hosted his own local CBS TV show. He was also the editor of Savoy Magazine. Follow him on Twitter.

What would Allah say about Chick-Fil-A?

    I’d heard about Chick-Fil-A long before I tasted it. It was being touted by a few of my friends as so good it would make you want to slap your momma.
    Last year, while driving out east,  my wife, Joyce Owens, and I stopped at one of its franchises and much to my surprise, I discovered Chick-Fil-A tasted like, well, it tasted like....chicken.
    It wasn’t bad. But it wasn’t special either. Harold’s Chicken Shack on the South Side or Marcello’s chicken on the North Side both serve a tastier bird.
    So when I noticed that a Chick-Fil-A had opened a couple of blocks off the Mag Mile, I made no beeline to grab a bite. And, when there was a call to boycott the fast food chicken chain because its CEO, Dan Cathy, exposed himself as being anti-gay, it was as easy for me to ignore as to not vote for Mitt Romney.
    But when Mayor Rahm Emanuel and Alderman Joe Moreno started making noises about cancelling Chick-Fil-A’s order for a second restaurant in Chicago, my interest was piqued.
    The two Chicago pols took it beyond the boycott to the political stage. Should a restaurant be barred from doing business in Chicago’s Logan Square neighborhood because Cathy--who takes prides himself in being a good Christian and family man--is a bigot?
    There would be no easy answer if Cathy’s bigotry was just a matter of religious belief. But this man puts his money where his mouth is. In 2010, the fast food chain donated nearly $2 million to anti-gay groups.   
    The bottom line: Cathy’s nearly 2,000 restaurant chain is funding bias against gays.
    And while there is no proof that any Chick-Fil-A has refused to take money from homosexuals, the contributions speak volumes in and of themselves.

All you have to do is look at it a little differently.

Instead of Chick-Fil-A CEO being a family man and a Christian, let’s imagine that he was a family man and a Muslim. As a good Muslim, let’s say he bragged about being anti-Israel, rather than anti-gay. Let’s think of what the reaction would be when it was discovered that he contributed money to anti-Israeli groups. Not terrorists groups but pro-Palistinian groups.

I wonder how important it’d be that Chick-Fil-A had no record of discriminating against Jews. And I wonder if the same people who flocked into the Chick-Fil-A Appreciate Day would be lining up to show their support and contributing to record sales.

There’s that old axiom about not discussing religion or politics at the dinner table. Dan Cathy might want to make it his food for thought.

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?

'Fox And Friends' Defends News Corp. In Phone Hacking Scandal (VIDEO)

Fox and Friends clumsily defended News Corp. on Friday morning, inaccurately defending the company as a victim of hacking instead of the one that did the hacking. Host Steve Doocy said, “It’s too ...

Fox and Friends clumsily defended News Corp. on Friday morning, inaccurately defending the company as a victim of hacking instead of the one that did the hacking. Host Steve Doocy said, “It’s too ...

Dilenschneider also said that News Corp has done "all the right things" in its response to the scandal. He then likened News Corp. to companies that have been the victims of hacking, such as Citigroup, American Express and Bank of America. It was an odd analogy, given that News Corp is not a hacking victim, but has been found guilty of hacking others.

via www.huffingtonpost.com

Looks like Rupert Murdock is going down. It's about time. But Fox and Friends are making a clumsy attempt to defend the big bad boss and the evil media empire's unethical practices. Is Doocy right? Is this much to do another nothing? Or should the MSM keep reporting on this and should the Justice Department make sure it gets to the bottom of the barrel of rotten apples.

Movie Monsters, Barack Obama, Mother Nature and other terrifying things

 

The original The Mummy, starring Boris Karloff, was on satellite TV the other morning. My wife, Joyce, watched. I didn't.

Even when I was a young, easy-to-frighten child, The Mummy didn't scare me much. As long as I didn't let myself get cornered, The Mummy wasn't about to get me. I could outrun the dead man walking. Same thing with the Frankenstein Monster. He was way too slow and clumsy to catch me with the quick reflexes and the fast feet.

But, the Werewolf was different. He was fast, strong and vicious. Unlike the embalmed moving mannequin and the blockhead assembled from the booty of grave robbers, The Wolf Man was VERY scary--when the moon was right.

I remember my eight-year-old imagination playing havoc with me after seeing a rerun of the 1941 Wolf Man on our black-and-white TV set. During the next full moon, as I undressed for bed, I'd stare at my feet, just checking to make sure they were not sprouting wolf hair ala Lon Chaney. And I had no interest in wandering around our small, Gary, Indiana backyard when the moon was bright and round. I often would toss and turn before finally getting to sleep.

That fear, of course, was a once a month or so event. The rest of the time, I lived a fairly fright free life--unless I happened to catch a Dracula movie on the boob tube.

Talk about scary; there was no movie monster more blood curdling than the Count. He was lightening-fast. He could morph into a bat. He could vaporize into a mist and slip underneath your bedroom door. There was no evading or escaping him.

Thank God he feared the cross. I took to wearing one for weeks after seeing any of the Hollywood reincarnations of Bram Stoker's masterpiece. The Crucifix was comforting but not a panacea for the lingering terror the movie had injected into my psyche. Even now, as a card-carrying AARP member who's on the brink of senior citizenship, celluloid vampires can put me on edge. I watch True Blood for fun and for the sheer adrenaline rush.

All that's to say, when I hear the wingnuts going on about President Obama and how they fear for America, I understand. Rush Limbaugh, Glen Beck and Sarah Palin routinely contribute to the mass hysteria by summoning up imaginary monsters that make The Werewolf look like the family Labrador retriever and Dracula look like the Count Muppet on Sesame Street.

To hear the Birthers, the Deathers, the Tea-Baggers and the Republican leadership tell it, President Obama is a James Cameron creation. Or as Kyle Reese put it: "Listen, and understand. That terminator is out there. It can't be bargained with. It can't be reasoned with. It doesn't feel pity, or remorse, or fear. And it absolutely will not stop, ever, until you are dead."

The wingnut terrors, of course, are about as real as my youthful fears of the wolf man and the vampire.

Meanwhile, today's headlines force me to recall another low-budget movie monster: The Zombie. In these old black-and-whites, Voodoo sorcerers from Haiti summoned up the dead to wreak havoc and to reckon revenge.

The devastation and horror of the worst earthquake to hit Haiti in 200 years, and the countless number of lives lost, put fear and power in the proper perspective: There are real horrors in life; horrors that don't come with popcorn or silly little tea-bags hanging from your straw hat.

---

 

 This commentary was cross-posted on the AgoraVox and Newsvine 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.

GOP's stingy stance is not a cure-all at all for swine flu

    In the movie, My Big Fat Greek Wedding, as far as the father of the bride was concerned, Windex was the miracle cure for anything from "psoriasis to poison ivy."

    In real life, among the dwindling membership of the Party of No, lower taxes is their Windex. 

    No matter what political, economic or social challenge confronting our nation, the GOP mantra calls for lowering taxes, cutting taxes or flatlining taxes. As individual American citizens, the Republicans tell us, we can spend our money much better than the bureaucrats in Washington. 

    So, right now, right here, we have a threatening crisis that could further cripple our sick economy and, btw, who knows kill how many of us along the way: the swine flu outbreak.

    At this moment, more than 100 have died in Mexico from the influenza virus, but so far there has been no fatalities in the United State. Should this public health emergency take a turn for the worst by developing into a pandemic that leaves tens of thousands or millions of Americans dead in its wake, the only measure that will outpace finger-pointing will be vaccination shots.

    Hopefully, we'll only need vaccination shots in limited regions throughout the states. In the meantime, allow me to be one of the first to point a finger: The Know-Nothing party thwarted one preventative measure, fearing it might lead to more taxes.

    In a post entitled, GOP Know-Nothings Fought Pandemic Preparedness on the website of The Nation, John Nichols reports:

    When House Appropriations Committee chairman David Obey, the Wisconsin Democrat who has long championed investment in pandemic preparation, included roughly $900 million for that purpose in this year's emergency stimulus bill, he was ridiculed by conservative operatives and congressional Republicans.

Obey and other advocates for the spending argued, correctly, that a pandemic hitting in the midst of an economic downturn could turn a recession into something far worse -- with workers ordered to remain in their homes, workplaces shuttered to avoid the spread of disease, transportation systems grinding to a halt and demand for emergency services and public health interventions skyrocketing. Indeed, they suggested, pandemic preparation was essential to any responsible plan for renewing the U.S. economy.

But former White House political czar Karl Rove and key congressional Republicans -- led by Maine Senator Susan Collins -- aggressively attacked the notion that there was a connection between pandemic preparation and economic recovery.

    We don't know where this swine flu outbreak is going or how soon it will end. But the World Health Organization has been extremely concerned and vigilant since the outbreak has already crossed international borders.     

    In a special report to the GlobalPost, Christine Gorman writes: 

    Although no fatalities have been reported in the U.S., the latest reports from Mexico suggest that more than 100 people have died and at least 1,400 may have been infected with the never-before-seen flu.

 

On Sunday, Canadian health officials confirmed six cases of human swine flu — four in Nova Scotia  and two in British Columbia — while public health officials in New Zealand, Israel, France and Spain began testing several patients with flu-like illnesses who had recently traveled to Mexico to determine whether or not they also had swine flu.

 

Part of what concerns health officials is that most of the fatalities in Mexico have involved adults under the age of 60, which does not fit the usual profile of a seasonal flu outbreak. That pattern is, however, reminiscent of the flu pandemic of 1918-1919, in which the very young and the very old tended to be spared while most of the fatalities occurred in adults in their 20s to 50s.

    We've got to hope for the best here; hope that this flu virus does not mutate into something as virulent, Infectious and deadly as the 1918 flu pandemic, which resulted in more than 100 million dead worldwide, before it is over. But we've also got to hope that the mantra of the Johnny-one-note conservatives continue to ring false for more and more Americans.         

    I, like most of the rest of us, don't like paying taxes. But, besides paying for wars of aggression that I personally oppose, taxes pay for police and firemen, roads and bridges, and they help fund safety nets for those who may not be as fortunate as we are.        

    And, from time-to-time, money that we send to Washington comes back to us in a preventive measure that may be life saving for millions and therefore worth its weight in gold.

(This post was also published on the AgoraVox and the African American Opinion.com websites.) 

Much ado about hugging

    Michelle Obama is a hugger. I know this personally because, the last time I saw Michelle, she gave me a hug.

   So yesterday's international incidence with some of the British tabloids tsk-tsking her because she, gasp, hugged the Queen, doesn't come as much of a big whoop to me.

I think I'll explain my hug first. 

Last year, I was on the Obama press bus in New Hampshire during the Democratic primary. We had stopped at Jack's Coffee Shop in New London, one of those quaint, picturesque New England towns so that Barack could do a photo op.

    The joint was too small for all 40 or 50 of us in Obama's traveling media entourage.  As usual, the campaign staff established the pecking order. TV and still cameras up front, radio and TV reporters next. I took up the rear with all the other print reporters.

    I was freelancing for the Afro American News, one of the nation's oldest black newspapers. I was way, way in the back there. In fact, I was so far back that all I could really see was the backs of the other journalists' heads. I definitely couldn't see what would be going on when the candidate got off his lead bus in our three bus convoy to press the flesh with locals. I was so far back I was closer to the back door of the shop next door to Jack's, Vessels & Jewels, a quaint little gift shop, brimming with arts and crafts, then I was to the inside of the coffee shop.

    I ended up wandering into the gift shop, knowing I wouldn't be getting much of an opportunity to photograph Barack with my digital camera from where I stood. I hadn't been in Vessels & Jewels long enough to complete my speed-window shopping before the front-runner walked in. He'd made an unscheduled detour to the gift shop so that he could buy Malia and Sasha a little shiny something.

    While the press corps were gently pushing and shoving each other for position as they waited for him next door, except for the shop clerks and a couple of Secret Service agents, I had the candidate all to myself. Obama asked me how I was doing and gave me a cordial handshake then went on to find a couple of jeweled bracelets for his daughters and a jeweled key ring for his wife. I clicked away with my small digital camera. By that time, a few of the TV and print photogs had spotted him and joined me on the shoot.

    Obama paid the $36 tab with a debit card, and then headed over to Jack's. I was standing outside when I saw Michelle and her Secret Service agents coming my way.

"How're you doing," she said.

"Good," I said as she gave me the same kind of hug the Queen would get more than a year later.

    I knew Michelle before I knew Barack. Back in 1993, when she was the Executive Director of Public Allies, and I was the host of Common Ground, a public affairs TV talk show, I'd agreed to address her group of young people who had been identified and were being developed as the next generation of leadership in Chicago. Back then, Michelle had greeted me warmly, but there was no hug. Instead, after I'd finished speaking, she gave me a black Public Allies sweat shirt that still hangs in my closet. She was then, and still is now a down-to-earth, warm and friendly South Side Chicago woman who is the FLOTUS.

Now, to the Queen's hug.

   You would not necessarily know from reading the British press that Michelle was just as big a deal as the Queen. The Daily Mail, for one, called the hug "an electrifying moment of palpable majesté: A breach of centuries-long protocol ..."

Other British reports followed suit, noting that protocol "has been set in stone for generations. 'Whatever you do,' courtiers are apt to warn, 'don't touch the queen.'"

The notion of the POTUS or the FLOTUS not touching the Queen is as quaint as the scenic little towns in New England.  It's so... so last millennium. You know, back in the day when Great Britain had an empire and we were a colony trying to do our own thing or when our soldiers had to keep the German troopers from goose-stepping into 10 Downing Street and the Buckingham Palace.

Today, the Kingdom is not all that United and Britain is not all that great. It's a used-to-be empire that--save for the expense of it all--is a nice place to visit to see the historic sites. But, in my proud-American-frame-of-mind, maybe there should be some etiquette rule that warns, "do not touch the FLOTUS."

But that's not Michelle's style or the American way. Even on the TV show, Entourage, Ari Gold, the super-jerk of an agent, likes to hug it out. 

 

(This post was also published on Huffingtonpost.com, UK/EU Progressive and Newsvine.com.)

AIG: Insuring that the rich get richer

Everybody's angry about AIG. The people are seething. The politicians are demanding a payback. Even Edward Liddy, AIG's chairman and CEO, says the bonuses are "distasteful."

Well, while you and me and most of the rest of America are mad as hell and not wanting to give it anymore, the bonusees are scowling all the way to the bank, proving once again that if you want to rob somebody the pen is mightier than the sword--or the gun for that matter. Bernie Madoff didn't even say "stick 'em up" as he hauled off a cool $50 billion. Nor did the AIG muckety mucks wield any weapons as they stuck us up for 173 billion in bail out bucks before slipping $165 million of our money to their executives for a job disastrously done.

This is a classic example of how the rich get richer and the rest of us get screwed.

Let's roll away from Wall Street and head to Motown. A tenth of the bailout money AIG got went to the folks that actually make something. In return for the $17 billion GM and Chrysler got, the auto worker's union and its members are being strong-armed into chucking their contractual agreements with the Big Two while chinning and grinning to show their gratitude that they will still had lower paying jobs.

Mind you, the UAW and its members had done nothing wrong. They built the cars that the car corporations designed. The GM and Chrysler CEO's, who had been stuck on stupid when they first came to the nation's capitol in their private jets, wised up, making commercial airlines their transportation of choice and choosing to pay themselves a buck a year. 

Meanwhile at AIG, there was the $440,000 conference last October at the St. Regis resort at Monarch Beach. That little extravagance turned out to be a pittance compared to the latest revelation that at least 73 employees from AIG's London-based Financial Products unit--the division that sold the derivatives that are responsible for the insurance giant's threatening collapse--got bonuses of $1 million or better each. Eleven of those London employees were received the so-called retention bonuses have already flown the coop.

Big time pay for a big time F-up. How would you like to have a job like that?

As the argument goes, we have to pay the bonuses because they have a contract and there's this magical, mysterious obligation to honor that legal agreement. Why there was no reason to honor the United Auto Workers contract remains a greater mystery--or maybe not.

We know how it works: white collar crime pays. Blue collar labor gets paid not so much.

(This post was also published on my cyber column at Newsvine.com, UK/EU Progressive and Agoravox.)