“It Ain’t My Fault”
Tag Archives: American Progressive Politics
Adolph Reed and Cathy Cohen | Long Time Coming? | Identity & Politics
Professors Adolph Reed and Cathy Cohen discuss the election of President Barack Obama in the context of race relations and identity politics in America. Eschewing the facile generalizations that characterize much of the medias coverage of the election, Professors Cohen and Reed give critical and refreshingly novel insight into the role race played in the election, and the possible long-term ramifications of the election in terms of racial discourse and progressive politics in America.
Dr. Adolph Reed is a professor of political science at the University of Pennsylvania.
Dr. Adolph Reed is a professor of political science at the University of Pennsylvania. 
Dr. Cathy Cohen is the David and Mary Winton Green Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago. This discussion was held at the Franke Institute for the Humanities at the University of Chicago, on February 20th, 2009. Sponsored by the Chicago Center for Contemporary Theory (3CT) as part of the Identity & Politics Lecture Series.
Angela Davis | Women, Privilege and Prisons
Renowned civil rights and womens rights leader Angela Davis spoke at Ebenezer Baptist Church in downtown Atlanta on March 24, 2009 for the keynote address of Emory Universitys Womens History Month. Davis’ long-standing commitment to prisoners’ rights dates to her involvement in the campaign to free the Soledad Brothers, which led to her own arrest and imprisonment in 1970.
Ralph Nader | Obama’s Surrender to Insurance and Drug Companies
By RALPH NADER
Never much of a fighter against abusive corporate power, Barack Obama is making it increasingly clear that right from his start as President, he wanted health insurance reform that received the approval of the giant drug and health insurance industries.
Earlier this year he started inviting top bosses of these companies for intimate confabs in the White House. Business Week magazine, which proclaimed recently that “The Health Insurers Have Already Won” reported that the CEO of UnitedHealth, Stephen J. Hemsley, met with the President half a dozen times.
These are the vendors. They and their campaign slush funds cannot be ignored in the power struggle over the legislation percolating in the Congress. One public result of these meetings was that the drug industry promised $80 billion in savings over ten years and the health insurance moguls promised $150 billion over the same decade. Mr. Obama trumpeted these declarations without indicating how these savings would be guaranteed, how the drug companies could navigate the antitrust laws and what was given to the health care industry by the White House in return.
We have now learned that one Obama promise was to continue the prohibition on Uncle Sam from bargaining for volume discounts on drugs that you the taxpayer have been paying for in the drug benefit program enacted in 2003.
(Ralph Nader photo by John Murray)
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