I sogni di mio padre: un racconto sulla razza e l'eredita

foof2you: This is Obama's life story and how became the man he is today.

whitewavedarling: While these works may be in regard to entirely different cultures and nations, and one of fiction while the other is nonfiction, both are literary coming-of-age tales that are not only beautiful written, but relevant to today's issues and diversity, and memorable for their tales and messages.… (altro)

PlaidStallion: To his credit, his first name means ‘one who is blessed by God’ in Swahili.

“We are an attractive empire, the one everyone wants to join,” crowed neocon Max Boot in the aftermath of 9/11. But now, after two long and disastrous wars, trillions of dollars in military spending, a network of more than 1,000 foreign military bases, torture and abuse of prisoners on several continents, assault on both international law and the U.S. Constitution, a near economic collapse, drone attacks killing alleged terrorists and civilians alike, disparities between rich and poor unheard of in an advanced industrial country, appallingly low test scores for students, government surveillance on an unprecedented scale, collapsing infrastructure, domestic uprisings on both the Left and the Right, and an international reputation left in tatters, the U.S. empire does not look all that attractive.

George W. Bush, who canceled his 2011 speaking engagement in Switzerland to avoid massive protests and the risk of being indicted as a war criminal, and his empire-friendly advisors bear a lot of responsibility for this sorry state of affairs. They saddled Barack Obama and the American people with an incredible mess. Obama confided to one of his closest aides: “I’m inheriting a world that could blow up any minute in a half dozen ways . . .”

The country Obama inherited was indeed in shambles, but Obama took a bad situation and, in certain ways, made it worse. Swept into office on a wave of popular euphoria, he mesmerized supporters throughout the campaign with his exhilarating rhetoric, surpassing intelligence, inspiring biography, commitment to defending civil liberties, rejection of unilateralism, and strong opposition to the Iraq War—qualities that made him seem the antithesis of Bush. The election of Barack Hussein Obama, the child of a black Kenyan father and a white Kansan mother, who was raised in Indonesia as well as Hawaii and went on to graduate from Columbia and become president of the Harvard Law Review, felt like a kind of expiation for the sins of a nation whose reputation had been sullied, as we have shown throughout this book, by racism, imperialism, militarism, nuclearism, environmental degradation, and unbridled avarice. The suffering caused by misguided U.S. policies had been immense. For many, Obama’s election offered redemption. It attested to the other side of America and its place in history, a side marked by idealism, egalitarianism, constitutionalism, republicanism, humanism, environmentalism, and the embrace of freedom and democracy as universal principles. Progressives hoped Obama would become the heir to a tradition represented by Franklin Roosevelt and Henry Wallace and by the post-Cuban Missile Crisis John F. Kennedy.

Yet rather than repudiating the policies of Bush and his predecessors, Obama has perpetuated them. Rather than diminishing the influence of Wall Street and the major corporations in U.S. life, Obama has given them latitude to continue most of their predatory practices. Rather than restoring the civil liberties that Bush had eviscerated and limiting the executive powers that Bush usurped after 9/11, Obama, with few exceptions, has tightened the grip of the domestic security/surveillance apparatus, stifling civil liberties and the right to dissent.

… (altro)