bberry is the 44th and current President of the United States. The first African American to hold the office, he had previously been the junior United States Senator from Illinois, serving from January 2005 until November 2008, when he resigned after his election to the presidency.
he is a graduate of Columbia University and Harvard Law School, where he was the first African American president of the Harvard Law Review. He was a community organizer in Chicago before earning his law degree. He worked as a civil rights attorney in Chicago and also taught constitutional law at the University of Chicago Law School from 1992 to 2004.
he served three terms in the Illinois Senate from 1997 to 2004. Following an unsuccessful bid for a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives in 2000, he ran for United States Senate in 2004. His victory, from a crowded field, in the March 2004 Democratic primary raised his visibility. His prime-time televised keynote address at the Democratic National Convention in July 2004 made him a rising star nationally in the Democratic Party. He was elected to the U.S. Senate in November 2004 by the largest margin in Illinois history.
He began his run for the presidency in February 2007. After a close campaign in the 2008 Democratic Party presidential primaries against Hillary Rodham Clinton, he won his party's nomination, becoming the first major party African American candidate for president. In the 2008 general election, he defeated Republican candidate John McCain and was inaugurated as president on January 20, 2009.
by Joel Wendland
1. Stay committed to the timetable for withdrawal from Iraq.
2. Reject calls for a "surge" in Afghanistan, and draw up plans for eliminating military involvement there.
3. Move forward a realistic pace process in Israel and Palestine.
4. Engage multilaterally and unhypocritically to enforce the provisions of the Non-Proliferation Treaty, i.e., provide energy alternatives for countries seeking nuclear power and reduce and eliminate the nuclear weapons arsenals of the nuclear states (even the US).
5. Engage honestly and cooperatively with countries that do not share the ideological or political or economic values of the US capitalist class (e.g. Cuba, Venezuela, China, etc.).
6. Break with the free trade ideology and neoliberal trade policies that enforce conditions that are hostile to working families, farmers and the poor in any country.
7. Use every ounce of "political capital" to reform, as quickly as possible, modes of economic production to stop climate change through carbon reduction, investments in alternative energy resources, and promotion of a "green" economy.
8. Promote human rights globally, but refuse to use the issue as an excuse for unilateral intervention in other countries.
9. Promote democratic rights and civil rights over the private profit motives of capital.
10. Reject global appeals to end economic stimulus projects in favor of monetary, trade and public investment policies that create jobs as quickly as possible.
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"[...] This emptiness of language is a gift to demagogues and the corporations that saturate the landscape with manipulated images and the idiom of mass culture. Manufactured phrases inflame passions and distort reality. The collective chants, jargon and epithets permit people to surrender their moral autonomy to the heady excitement of the crowd. “The crowd doesn’t have to know,” Mussolini often said. “It must believe. ... If only we can give them faith that mountains can be moved, they will accept the illusion that mountains are moveable, and thus an illusion may become reality.” Always, he said, be “electric and explosive.” Belief can triumph over knowledge. Emotion can vanquish thought. Our demagogues distort the Bible and the Constitution, while their demagogues distort the Quran, or any other foundational document deemed to be sacred, fueling self-exaltation and hatred at the expense of understanding. The more illiterate a society becomes, the more power those who speak in this corrupted form of speech amass, the more music and images replace words and thought. We are cursed not by a cultural divide but by mutual cultural self-destruction."
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