An Article by:

Steve Hammons

Originally published in the AmericanChronicle.com

http://americanchronicle.com/articles/53747

The recent controversial remarks from Cincinnati radio personality Bill Cunningham about Barack Obama at a McCain rally can be instructive about the Cincinnati region and Ohio.

I was born and raised in the Cincinnati area, was given the mandatory Ohio history classes in school and later went to college in southern Ohio at nearby Ohio University in Athens, a couple of hours east of Cincinnati.

The Cincinnati and southern Ohio region has a unique history that may be relevant in the run-up to the Democratic primary and the 2008 elections. This history and current flavor of the whole state might also be of interest.

We know that Ohio has been in the news during recent elections. Concerns about questionable election processes in Ohio have been part of this.

After Cunningham made his comments at the McCain rally, another Ohio politician followed him to address the crowd … former Congressman Rob Portman who represented the Cincinnati area.

Portman has been mentioned as a possible vice-presidential running mate with McCain, and a possible presidential candidate in 2012.

SPECIAL ELECTION

Portman left his congressional seat in 2005 to take a position in the George W. Bush administration as U.S. trade representative, which carries the rank of ambassador.

From 2006 to 2007, he took another position in the Bush administration as director of the Office of Management and Budget. He currently is working at a law firm in Cincinnati.

What is interesting is that when a special election was held for Portman’s congressional seat in 2005, the solidly Republican-voting area almost elected another attorney and Marine Corps Reserve major who had served in Iraq, and was running as a centrist Democrat.

That person was Paul Hackett, and during the campaign he said that he had opposed the Iraq war, yet felt it was his duty to volunteer to serve there.

In the congressional race in August 2005, Hackett, who notably opposed gun control, gained attention by referring to George W. Bush as a “chicken hawk” for avoiding combat service in Vietnam during that war.

Hackett also said Bush made “stupid” remarks such as “bring it on,” challenging insurgents in Iraq to attack U.S. troops there.

Hackett reportedly bluntly stated about Bush, “I’ve said I don’t like the S.O.B.”

Hackett’s opponent, Jean Schmidt, strongly supported Bush and the Iraq war.

Hackett lost by about 3,500 votes, getting about 48 percent of the vote in a district that routinely elected the previous Republican congressman there by about 70 percent.

This was a very surprising development in southwestern Ohio.

Obama’s stance on the invasion and occupation of Iraq may resonate in Ohio, where many active duty and reserve Army and National Guard personnel have been killed and wounded. Active duty Marines and Marine reservists from Ohio have also been killed and injured in high numbers in Iraq.

GEOGRAPHY AND DEMOGRAPHICS

The hilly country of southwestern Ohio around Cincinnati is very much like southern Indiana next door and northern Kentucky, just south across the Ohio River.

If you go further east, the southern neighbor becomes West Virginia and southeastern Ohio is considered part of the Appalachian region, as the western foothills of the Appalachian Mountains start there. There is coal mining in this region.

Many people in southern Ohio speak with a slightly or markedly southern-type accent.

An ancient glacier that flattened central and northern Ohio stopped just short of the still-hilly southern part of the state.

In that flat central Ohio area, there are plenty of farms, small and medium-size towns with the state capitol of Columbus right in the middle.

Northern Ohio has a lot of the industrial areas around Lake Erie that have had historical links with Detroit and other centers of the old “rust belt” regions.

Many people here speak with a somewhat northern type of accent.

There are many good union people in Ohio. Sometimes their social and political views are centrist and they might find positions and candidates of either major party to be valid.

Some Ohioans who have benefited from unions and have a middle class or even upper middle class economic status are educated enough to know that the struggles of the union and labor movements over the decades resulted in the benefits they have now.

Some realize that the social, economic and political forces in America that supported or opposed working people and the unions were associated in certain patterns with the two major political parties. Some Ohioans who have benefited from unions may not fully understand this history.

Obama’s efforts and results in Ohio will be related to many of these these factors.

OHIO HISTORY AND ETHNICITY

Will Obama’s mixed-ethnicity be a factor? Probably. There are not too many Ohioans who had a father from Kenya, Africa.

Although Ohio is not as diverse as Hawaii, where Obama mostly grew up, raised by his grandparents from Kansas, there is some interesting ethnic and historical background.

Today, you can find people of virtually every ethnic background living in Ohio.

Italian-Americans in northern Ohio, German-Americans in southwestern Ohio, you name it. People from Eastern Europe often came to work in Ohio’s steel mills and mines.

In the early 1800s, Germans were a dominant ethnicity that settled early Cincinnati.

There reportedly were German or even Nazi sympathizers there before and during U.S. entry into World War II.

At the same time, some local German-Americans, including some distant relatives of mine, thought about changing their very German names to avoid problems during the war years, such as being thought of as “the enemy.”

It could be that some German-Americans in Cincinnati then went overboard the other way, feeling that being a “super American patriot” required certain political and social positions.

Going further back in history, during slavery, for a period of time, laws provided that escaping slaves who crossed north of the Ohio River into southern Ohio could not be returned to slave owners and were, as a practical matter, free.

Subsequent laws required escaping slaves to reach Canada to be free from slave catchers.

Amish and Quakers are found throughout areas of Ohio. The Underground Railroad was very active in southern Ohio during the slavery era. Some Quaker relatives of mine, according to stories and rumors, were involved in the Underground Railroad in the rural areas of southwestern Ohio.

There is a problematic element here. Next door in southern and central Indiana, the KKK is quite strong and active. This is also an aspect of the region in general.

My grandfather told a story about a relative of ours who, decades earlier, had run for sheriff in Kentucky. One night the KKK came to visit him, white robes and all. They told him if he was not on board with the KKK, he would not get elected.

He apparently told them he was not on their side … and he did not get elected sheriff.

Many people entering southern Ohio in the 1800s and 1900s were migrating from the Appalachian Mountain regions in Kentucky, such as some relatives of mine, and from elsewhere in the Appalachian region.

In more recent decades, many Appalachians chose to escape the poverty, oppression and violence of the coal-mining regions. Cincinnati was a center for these escapees too.

Among these migrating groups were people who were mixed-ethnicity European and Native American Indians such as the Cherokee whose native lands were in the Appalachian region.

Many early explorers in the 1700s had intermarried with the Cherokee and generations of mixed English-Scottish and Cherokee families lived in the region.

In the years before the 1839 “Trail of Tears” forced march west, and the confiscation of Cherokee lands and homes, many mixed-ethnicity families blended into the mainstream society, with only a few family stories or suspicions remaining about the Indian connections in the family tree, such as my own family.

Another interesting aspect of Ohio is that after the American Revolution, many Revolutionary War veterans and their families moved over the mountains to settle in eastern Ohio. Today, in the cemeteries of southeastern Ohio, you can find the gravestones of many who fought in the American Revolution.

Ohio University, where I went to college, was founded by Revolutionary War veterans.

I am happy to say that I had ancestors who fought in the Revolutionary War and were associates and relatives of George Washington and the other American leaders of that period.

I also recently learned that, according to a genealogy researcher in the family, Obama and I are distantly related too.

How do all of these and many other cultural, ethnic, geographic and historical elements fit together in our current political landscape as we approach the Democratic primary and then the general election?

We will soon be finding out.

Obama will probably have significant support in Ohio from a wide variety of people.

I bet that many Ohioans will be thinking long and hard about Obama, about the invasion and occupation of Iraq, about the direction our country has been going in for the last few years and about themselves and their core beliefs, deep down inside.

Tags: democracy, ohio, politics, race, race relations, society, sociology, Steve Hammons
Categories: Commentary, Society, Democracy, Politics, Sociology, Steve Hammons
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An Article by:

By Steve Hammons

As Barack Obama continues to move ahead in the Democratic presidential primaries, we note that ethnic background and gender still seem to be playing important and interesting roles.

The many domestic and foreign affairs issues we face, such as the candidates’ positions on the invasion and occupation of Iraq, are also key parts of the debates and campaigns.

According to recent surveys and demographic studies, Hillary Clinton’s support, in part, comes from white women and older Democrats.

Reasons for this seem obvious.

Some white women see one of their own and feel that giving her support is appropriate. They identify with her. This seems like a natural response.

Older Democrats may feel comfortable with “another Clinton” and, should we say it? – they might feel more comfortable voting for an all-white candidate. This may be a factor for some Democrats with lower educational levels, which is also a group supporting Clinton to some degree.

Obama gets support from younger voters and increasingly from men. Since Obama is a relatively young father of two young kids, these voters might naturally identify with him. His youthful manner might also be attractive.

Men probably identify with him not just because he is a male, but because he is a male who appears to be admirable and a “regular guy.”

INVASION, OCCUPATION OF IRAQ

Some of the main differences between Obama and Clinton, of course, are their positions and actions regarding the invasion and occupation of Iraq.

Many Americans now believe that intelligence information was inaccurate about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. There is significant evidence that indicates this was intentional on the part of some people within the Bush administration and those connected to it.

Many people believe that the Bush administration was willing to send our troops to Iraq, to die and be terribly injured, for access oil, to assist other governments in the Middle East and to “finish the job” that former president George H.W. Bush wisely did not undertake – invading and taking over Iraq.

Some researchers say there were those in and associated with the Bush administration who wanted to pour monies of the U.S. Treasury into war profiteering and those who wanted to establish permanent U.S. bases in Iraq to influence and police the Middle East region for decades to come.

It has been said that there were Bush administration people and others who wanted to show they were “macho” – the “chicken hawks” – even though few of them had ever served in combat environments themselves. Many even avoided military service in Korea and Vietnam.

Other aspects of the invasion and occupation seemed to indicate the huge egos and incompetence of those associated with the Bush administration.

The deceptive and dishonorable nature of some of these players also seems evident to many people.

We have spent hundreds of billions of dollars on the invasion and occupation of Iraq. This has been, in large part, borrowed money. There are many hidden costs as well.

The Bush administration’s Iraq fiasco has nearly broken our Army, Army Reserve, National Guard and has broken the bodies, minds and spirits of many good American soldiers, Marines and their families.

According to some research, hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqi civilians, including children, have been killed as a result of the invasion and occupation of Iraq. Many more have been terribly injured.

Though she may not have intended all of these results, this is what Hillary Clinton supported when she voted to authorize military action by the Bush administration against Iraq.

This is what Barack Obama opposed.

STIRRING THE MELTING POT

Obama’s support includes African-Americans. This is not surprising since his father was from Kenya, Africa.

Obama’s father and mother were divorced when he was two years old.

After the divorce, his father went on to get a Ph.D. from Harvard in economics and then returned to Kenya to pursue a career there.

Obama spend formative childhood and teen years in Hawaii, and was raised by his mother and her parents, Stanley and Madelyn Dunham, who were originally from Wichita, Kansas.

Obama has noted that his grandfather, Stanley Dunham, joined the Army in WWII after Pearl Harbor and served under Gen. George Patton in Europe. Obama’s grandmother, Madelyn, worked on a bomber assembly line during the war.

This reminds us that it can be fairly and accurately said that Obama is a mixed-ethnicity American. He straddles a sometimes wide divide of Americans from different ethnic backgrounds.

But, he is not the only one. Nowadays, after many generations of mixing the different ethnic groups of people in the U.S., there are millions of mixed-ethnicity Americans.

If your family has some Scottish, Cherokee and Swedish, you have a mixed-ethnicity. Are you part African, part English with maybe some Dutch in the family tree? Same thing. Was great-grandma half-Mexican and grampa Joe part-Navajo? Join the club.

Obama is in good company here.

Along these lines, Hispanics seem to be a swing vote of sorts in the Democratic primaries. Many Mexican-Americans and African-Americans sometimes compete for the same turf, whether it is access to decent blue-collar jobs or other resources. This can create friction.

It should, though, create teamwork. The “divide and conquer” strategy seems to be in play at times when wedges are driven between the Hispanic and African-American communities. They should be working together to obtain better jobs, educational opportunities, housing and health care.

Many Native American Indians have very substandard resources and opportunities too.

And, we might want to remember that the majority of poor and underprivileged Americans, adults and children, are white.

An interesting development in the ongoing discussions about Mexican-Americans and Mexican immigration is that two states with two of the largest populations of Native American Indians, Oklahoma and Arizona, have recently passed some of the toughest anti-immigrant laws in the country.

Isn’t it interesting that many Hispanic, Mexican and other immigrants from south of Mexico are of part-Native American Indians and part Spanish ancestry. They have darker skin, like Indians of North America. They have straight black hair and some of the facial characteristics of North American Indians.

And at the same time, Oklahoma and Arizona passed some of the most stringent laws against these immigrants. This just seems like an interesting dynamic.

After all, let’s not forget, amid all the talk about securing our borders and saving the English language from destruction, it is probably safe to say that some people just don´t like others who have different color skin, who look different, speak in a different way and have different cultural and social characteristics.

The ethnic factors in play seem to need a fresh perspective from many of us.

Whether the ongoing presidential race is focusing on the invasion and occupation of Iraq, the multi- and mixed-ethnicity of Americans or the other issues of the day, it might be helpful to look carefully and objectively at all the elements involved.

Americans do face dangers from enemies, foreign and domestic. Our democracy, our freedoms, our Constitution and our peace and prosperity are at risk.

As we select our next president and other federal, state and local government officials, our wisdom and intelligence, or lack thereof, can have very serious consequences, as we have seen in recent years.

Tags: clintons, empire, Global, governing, government, imperialism, politics, Steve Hammons
Categories: Commentary, Global, Politics, Imperialism, Steve Hammons, clintons
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An Article by:

Steve Hammons

December 21, 2007

According to a recent Scripps Howard News Service/Ohio University poll, “Nearly two-thirds of Americans think it is possible that some federal officials had specific warnings of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, but chose to ignore those warnings.”

That was the conclusion explored in a Nov. 20, 2007 article by Kevin Crowe, a reporter for Scripps Howard News Service, and Guido H. Stempel III, director of the Scripps Survey Research Center at Ohio University, Athens, Ohio.

Crowe and Stempel noted that in a Scripps Howard/Ohio University survey in July 2006, “more than one-third of Americans thought federal officials assisted in the 9/11 attacks or took no action to stop them so the United States could go to war in the Middle East.”

The survey looked at Americans’ distrust of the federal government in general and at specific topics like the 9/11 attacks, the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, rigging of international oil prices and questions about what the federal government knows about UFOs and extraterrestrial visitation to Earth.

Crowe and Stempel reported that the survey “was conducted by telephone Sept. 24 to Oct. 10 among 811 adult residents of the United States who were selected at random. The survey was conducted by the Scripps Survey Research Center at Ohio University under a grant from the Scripps Howard Foundation and has a margin of error of about 4 percent.”

In their article, Crowe and Stempel quote several experts and authors on facts and theories involved that may affect Americans’ views on alleged cover-ups and conspiracies.

Of course, when we say “the federal government,” we must look at many individuals, groups, departments and agencies as well as forces behind the scenes. There are many good and honorable people and groups within the federal government. There may also be people and groups that do not fit into these categories.

Two apparently unrelated topics of interest addressed in the survey were the 9/11 attacks and questions about UFOs and extraterrestrial visitation. Looking at these might provide examples of the reasons for doubts by Americans.

QUESTIONS ABOUT 9/11

Various questions have been raised by the 9/11 Commission, experts, investigators and the general public. These questions apparently have fueled mistrust of the “official story” of the 9/11 attacks.

Some of these questions include, but are not limited to, the following:

- FBI agents, intelligence officers, national security officials and international intelligence personnel reportedly were raising red flags about a pending attack, but their intelligence allegedly was not responded to by the appropriate civilian chains of command.

- Certain people and groups publicly indicated that “a new Pearl Harbor” was needed to provoke Americans to expand certain military operations and defense spending.

- There reportedly was a desire by some to invade Iraq (and possibly Iran and/or Syria) and a justification for the American people and the international community was needed.

- Several air defense military maneuvers and training activities were ongoing around the time frame of 9/11. These exercises depleted available U.S. Air Force air assets and caused confusion among military and civilian air traffic controllers and air defense personnel.

- Stock market transactions, known as “put options,” were made regarding the stock of the two airlines involved prior to the 9/11 attacks. These particular transactions were especially unusual.

- Certain officials were reportedly advised not to fly around the time frame of 9/11.

- At the Pentagon, the debris and type of damage done to the building is not consistent with the impact of a passenger jet, according to some determinations by experts.

- In Shanksville, Pennsylvania, the debris field at the alleged impact site seemed inconsistent with the crash of a passenger jet, some people state.

EXTRATERRESTRIAL VISITATION

Since the late 1940s, the sightings of unusual objects in the sky have been a topic of great interest in the U.S. and around the world. There have been many indications that some of these objects could possibly be related to spacecraft from outside our normal understanding. That is, they may not be conventional human-made craft or other technology.

Some of the questions and discussion about so-called “unidentified flying objects (UFOs)” include, but are not limited to the following:

- References to unusual flying objects can be found throughout human history in written material and art.

- American WWII pilots reported seeing “foo fighters” during military operations. These were unusual objects flying near U.S. aircraft.

- In 1947, Army Air Corps personnel at Roswell Army Air Base in Roswell, New Mexico, apparently concluded that a “flying saucer” that may have been extraterrestrial in origin had crashed nearby.

- After that event, some researchers allege that President Harry Truman created a special group of scientists and top military officials to try to understand and coordinate this challenging situation.

- There are reports that as part of the evolving developments, further U.S. diplomatic contact was made with more than one extraterrestrial race that was visiting Earth. According to some of these claims, advanced technology was provided to U.S. officials in exchange for cooperation.

- Sightings and contacts of various kinds between people around the world and what are alleged to be extraterrestrial activities have been reported in many countries.

- Other aspects of the alleged situation involve efforts to prepare the American people, and people around the world, about the surprising development of contact with extraterrestrial civilizations. Books, articles, movies and other communications platforms reportedly have been used to help in this process.

NEED TO KNOW

The concept of “need to know” is one used in various military, intelligence and other circles. That is, some information is sensitive and if a person does not have a need to know it, don’t tell them.

Certainly, information security can be important and this has its place. At the same time, freedom of information, knowledge and understanding are also important for us, especially in a democracy. Secrecy can sometimes be unwise, unethical or dangerous.

The distrust of certain elements of the federal government reported in the Scripps Howard News Service/Ohio University poll are both cause for concern and might also be a healthy and natural response to our current situation. There may very well be valid justifications for this distrust.

As we decide what we have a need to know and what we do not, Americans will undoubtedly continue to be vigilant in protecting their Constitutional rights and liberties, perceiving various internal and external dangers, and maintaining a healthy understanding about the dangers of excessive secrecy and power on the part of the federal government.

Research like that in the Scripps Howard News Service/Ohio University poll can help us “get on the same page” and recognize that many of us are thinking along similar lines. This might unify us and move us toward success, peace, progress, preparedness and prosperity in the future.
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To read the article on the Web site of the Scripps Survey Research Center at Ohio University, visit:

http://newspolls.org/story.php?story_id=66

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AmericanChronicle.com
http://www.americanchronicle.com/articles/viewArticle.asp?articleID=46800

Tags: agency, anomalous cognition, citizens, government, military, Steve Hammons, Terrorism
Categories: Commentary, government, Terrorism, military, Steve Hammons
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