TheNextReport

WE HAVE OVERCOME The tears in Jesse Jackson’s eyes said it all. Centuries of pain cleansed; damaged faith in humanity salvaged; a prophet’s dream redeemed. The election of Barack Obama as America’s first African American president has rained like a beneficent storm over a long parched waste land, offering relief to millions of people of color and others around the world who have believed in the value of racial equality and who yearn for human solidarity. Mr. Obama’s accomplishment is a testament to his grace and intelligence, to his unflappable demeanor and to his unparalleled oratorical gifts. He scaled a mountain burdened with history and human ignorance in a country that gave little indication it was truly ready for the change that he represented. Many thought that America wasn’t enlightened enough for a man of Obama’s caliber. I was one of them. There is something eminently biblical to Senator Obama’s victory. At the moment when the world’s economy has fallen apart, a new leade

The Redistributor in Chief It is certainly an embarrassment. The ease with which John McCain and his team have elicited jeers from his supporters at the mention of “sharing the wealth” is an apt indicator of the brain damage sustained by a certain portion of the American populace over the years. With its roots in the Red Scare of the 1940s and 50s, the McCain campaign has pushed the buttons of the Cold War, tarring Barak Obama as a “socialist” for advocating what has been a part of the American landscape since 1903: the graduated income tax that places a larger tax burden on citizens with greater wealth. After enduring years of Bush administration policies that effectively transferred inordinate amounts of the nation’s wealth to those already wealthy, after witnessing the handover of $700 billion in a bailout of investment bankers and Wall Street manipulators, after seeing the loss of millions of jobs and the foreclosure of millions of homes, one would think that the great majorit