Barack Obama

Last Tuesday, Intelligence Squared sponsored a debate on whether or not President Barack Obama’s foreign policy signaled America’s decline as the driving force in global affairs: Dan Senor and Mort Zuckerman argued yes; Wesley Clark and Bernard-Henri Levy argued no.

"This is not a decision that I've made lightly. But the bottom line is this: given our energy needs, in order to sustain economic growth, produce jobs, and keep our businesses competitive, we're going to need to harness traditional sources of fuel even as we ramp up production of new sources of renewable, homegrown energy," (President Barack Obama on his decision to allow oil and gas exploration off U.S. coasts, April 2, 2010).

Audio interview with Muhammad Ahmad, the former Field Chairman of the Revolutionary Action Movement and founder of African People's Party in the 1970's. Muhammad worked closely with Malcolm X, Amiri Baraka, James and Grace Lee Boggs and Kwame Ture (Stokely Carmichael). He is the author of We Will Return in the Whirlwind, African Americans Since 1900, and Selected Writings, Volume 1. He is a member of the Philadelphia Community Institute of Africana Studies and of N'COBRA.

Audio interview with Richard Grossman, a man that lectures widely on issues of corporate power, law and democracy. He is co-author of Fear at Work: Job Blackmail, Labor and the Environment and Taking Care of Business: Citizenship and the Charter of Incorporation as well as former co-director of the Program on Corporations, Law and Democracy and co-founder of the Daniel Pennock Democracy Schools at the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund.

Further Reading:

Audio interview with Kevin Alexandar Gray, a writer and activist living in South Carolina. He managed the 1988 presidential campaign of the Reverend Jesse Jackson in the state. He is the author of Waiting for Lightning to Strike: The Fundamentals of Black Politics and The Decline of Black Politics: From Malcolm X to Barack Obama.

Further Resources:

Counterpunch

Further proof that Shawn "Jay-Z" Carter doesn't lie on his records, he did go to the White House and he does have "Obama on the text."

Interestingly enough in these photos it shows that he also brought along Beyonce, her mother, RNB singer Trey Songz, and manager Kevin Liles

Props to Politico and Rap Radar.

In politics, as in everyday life, a convergence of circumstances can prove fateful -- gleefully so for the winners, and maddeningly unfair in the view of the defeated. This is one of the many observations one may divine from John Heilemann's and Mark Halperin's newly-released book on the 2008 U.S. presidential race, Game Change: Obama and the Clintons, McCain and Palin, and the Race of a Lifetime.

Last week I talked about a few stories from 2009 that didn’t receive the attention that perhaps they should have. This week I’ll take a look forward and discuss a few of the events likely to shape global politics in 2010.