Missing the Racist Forest for the Trees

I imagine by quitting time today most people will have heard about the NY Post cartoon that ran yesterday. It depicted two police officers with guns drawn and a bullet-riddled monkey. One cop is saying "They'll have to find someone else to write the next stimulus bill." I don't believe I've seen such as racist cartoon since the publication of the anti-Muslim Danish cartoons of a few years back.

CNN's Roland Burris and Al Sharpton have called out the cartoonist and the Post for the vile history in the US of referring Blacks as 'monkeys' and the vigilante and state terror that have gone hand in hand with it. A relatively unreported fact has been that hate crimes against Blacks has INCREASED after the election. Sean Delonas, the cartoonist, claims that it is standard practice to mix two current events in a political cartoon. We all know about OBAMA's stimulus bill (many defenders of the cartoon point to the fact that the 'kill Obama' implication is patently false because the legislature, not Obama wrote the bill. Pure bollocks.) But, who the fuck has heard of the other story, the Connecticut monkey attack incident? I surely haven't.

My biggest beef with the backlash against the cartoon (and admittedly I have not done a wide survey of the responses online) is that no one is calling out the implication of police brutality!!! Police have ramped up their killings and shootings of young Black men. Look at Oscar Grant. Delonas and his 'freedom of speech' defenders are apologists for the very real racism that continues to exist despite the historic election of Obama and are actively contributing to the climate where cops get off scot free for murder.

Getting to Know Dr. King

It's Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Day and, for the first time I can remember, the holiday isn't being greeted with an avalanche of cant. Yahoo News ran a good story about Dr. King's frequently forgotten commitment to economic justice, and CNN has an article interviewing SCLC leaders and King's sister. The right wing, meanwhile, which never wastes an opportunity to hijack King's legacy, has been curiously silent, with the exception of Michelle Malkin, who wants to paint King as an enemy of teacher's unions (right. he supported sanitation workers but drew the line at educators.)

Clearly, this has something to do with Obama's election, which has helped make clear the drastic changes in American racial attitudes over the past few decades. Viewing this sea change, I am reminded of Marx's appropriation of Hamlet: "Well grubbed, old mole!"

Given the reprieve we've been granted from right wing idiocy about King, now is a perfect time to familiarize yourself with the radical Dr. King.

Brian Jones - The Martin Luther King They Won't Celebrate

FAIR - Martin Luther King and Affirmative Action

Kai Wright - Dr. King, Forgotten Radical

Brian Kelley - Unfinished Business: Martin Luther King in Memphis

Stevie Wonder also has something to say:

Is the US post-racial? Think again.

Following the historic election of Barak Obama in a country built on slavery, many in the media, Right and Left have argued that racism has ended and the 'divisive' concept of race has been rendered irrelevant. This article in the New Republic takes this argument to absurd lengths, suggesting that since neo-fascists and white supremacists such as David Duke do not hate Obama, we have somehow entered a new age of tolerance. The author suggests that

white supremacists feel compelled to explain away the confounding notion of an immensely gifted and appealing black man. Yet it also reflects the fact that, unlike Jesse Jackson, Obama simply lacks certain cultural signifiers--not to mention an urban-centric policy agenda--that would viscerally threaten racist whites obsessed with maintaining "white rights," ending affirmative action, and cutting off nearly all non-European immigration.

Frankly, in a country where millions of Americans stand to lose their homes, child hunger is skyrocketing, and jobs are being slashed in the tens of thousands, this country needs more 'urban centric' policies. And pissing off white supremacists is a great thing in my book.

But that's neither here nor there. On the question of racism, a recent incident of police brutality brings to the fore the weaknesses of Obama and his campaign to confront racist attacks from the McCain camp and Hillary Clinton and also to take up issues pertaining to the virulent racism of the criminal justice system (Sean Bell, the Jena Six, Troy Davis).

The father of Green Bay Packers star receiver Donald Driver was brutally beaten by Houston cops on Sunday. Police allegedly picked him up on a warrant for traffic violations and then took him behind a gas station and beat him mercilessly:

As they beat him and forced him to swallow something, the officers told Marvin Driver Jr. he was "going to see Jesus," according to relatives and community activist Quanell Evans, who identified himself as Quanell X.

"Mr. Marvin Driver Jr. is now at Hermann Hospital in ICU where he can't even speak," relatives said in a statement. "Doctors say there is some bleeding on his brain from blunt force trauma."

The two accused officers are still on the street, pending investigation. However, according to a community activist, "One of the officers named in the arrest report is Hispanic and has a history of harassing African-Americans."

This event is a sobering wake up call to people who believe that Obama's election could instantly bring and end to the systemic racism embedded in the US from housing and hiring to the criminal justice system.

In another sense, however, this event presents an opportunity to expose this. As Dave Zirin has argued time and time again, professional sports presents a huge platform for athletes to take a stand on against oppression and political injustice, like Tommie Smith and John Carlos in the 1968 Olympics, Billie Jean King's victory in the "Battle of the Sexes". Who knows how the Driver family will respond to this tragedy, especially given the pressures on athletes from their coaches, team mates, and the talking heads in the sports writing world (See Brandon Marshall and Josh Howard?) Despite these pressures, athletes are also affected by the sense of hope and joy that Obama's election brought about nor can they ignore the anger and mass outpouring of activism against the draconian Proposition 8. If Driver's brother's response is any indication of the sentiment shared by the family, we could be in for a battle: "if we can't trust these people, who can we trust? ... I think that my father was targeted for being black."

Profiling Obama's Economic Team

A recent Counterpunch essay by Patrick Bond gives some important insights into the ominous track records of Obama's economic advisers and potential heads of the Fed - Lawrence Summers and Paul Volcker.

On Volcker,

Conference calls and face-to-face meetings of the Obama economic team are often reorganized to accommodate his schedule. When the team discusses the financial crisis, 'The most important question to Obama: What does Paul Volcker think?' says Jason Furman, the campaign's economic-policy director... When Sen. Obama raised the prospect of a package of spending and tax measures to 'stimulate' the economy, Mr. Volcker disapproved. 'Americans are spending beyond their means,' he told the group. A stimulus package would delay the belt-tightening and savings needed, he added, proposing instead better regulation and assistance to banks."

On Summers:

Summers is best known for the sexism controversy which cost him the presidency of Harvard in 2006. But fifteen years earlier he gained infamy as an advocate of African genocide and environmental racism, thanks to a confidential World Bank memo he signed when he was the institution's senior vice president and chief economist: "I think the economic logic behind dumping a load of toxic waste in the lowest-wage country is impeccable and we should face up to that... I've always thought that underpopulated countries in Africa are vastly underpolluted, their air quality is vastly inefficiently low..."
After all, Summers continued, inhabitants of low-income countries typically die before the age at which they would begin suffering prostate cancer associated with toxic dumping. And in any event, using marginal productivity of labour as a measure, low-income Africans are not worth very much anyhow. Nor are African's aesthetic concerns with air pollution likely to be as substantive as they are for wealthy northerners.
Such arguments were said by Summers to be made in an 'ironic' way (and in his defense, he may have simply plagiarized the memo from a colleague, Lant Pritchett). Yet their internal logic was pursued with a vengeance by the World Bank and IMF long after Summers moved over to the Clinton Treasury Department, where in 1999 he insisted that Joseph Stiglitz be fired by Bank president James Wolfensohn, for speaking out against the impeccable economic logic of the Washington Consensus.

To contextualize the inter-imperial ambitions of the US and it's competitors toward Africa, check out this article from the International Socialist Review.

Why Obama's Health Care Plan is Deadly

In a great interview, Physicians for a National Health Plan's Steffie Woolhandler explains why Obama's health care plan could be worse than no change at all. The gist of her argument is that trying to expand public programs while maintaining the private industry is incoherent and a fiscal black hole:

There’s no reason to think that would work. I think the private health insurance industry is not going to allow the government to run a program that really competes with them. That’s not just my opinion. If we look historically, when state governments have tried to run public programs side-by-side with private programs, the private health insurance industry has intervened to make sure that the public program is very low quality, with very limited coverage, because the private insurance industry doesn’t want the competition.

Woolhander argues that the US, which spends twice as much per capita on health care as other industrialized countries, doesn't need to spend a dime more, but instead to spend the money wisely.

One consequence of Obama-type plans that she doesn't mention is their ideological impact. Given that these state run programs in competition with private ones tend to become totally fiscally unsustainable, they serve as fodder for right wing arguments that government run programs are simply too expensive and inefficient.

Obama’s Mandate: Why “Going Slow” is a Recipe for Going Nowhere Fast

Less than 24 hours after Barack Obama won the presidency with a greater share of the popular vote than any candidate in 20 years, talking heads from all quarters (including his own) began the mad rush to contain the tremendous popular energy that had infused his campaign. On November 5th, Robert Gibbs, a senior advisor to the campaign, told the New York Times that the masses of people across the country who spontaneously took to the streets in celebration of Obama's victory need to have "a realistic expectation of what can happen and how quickly.” William Galston of The New Republic, in a rather strange piece, argues that the economic crisis effectively precludes Obama from taking any effective action to remedy the crisis' effects on working Americans. Scott Winship, also of TNR, in one of the denser (as in more stupid) articles I've seen post-election, argues that since the Dems have a lesser margin in the House and Senate today than they did in 1992, 2010 could well see another "Republican Revolution" and its ensuing Contract on America.[1] Paul Krugman writes an effective riposte to such technocratic gibberish: "John McCain denounced his opponent as a socialist and a “redistributor,” but America voted for him anyway. That’s a real mandate."

The comparison of Obama and Clinton has become nothing less than a mantra among those seeking to convince the former to play ritardando. "Remember Hillarycare!" they mouthe with solemnity. The narrative is as follows: Bill Clinton was elected in 1992 promising sweeping changes (universal health care, federal anti-scabbing legislation, and a federal freedom of choice act, etc) and the end of Reaganism. He tried to move too fast, however, and gave the Republicans an opportunity which they took in 1994. Unfortunately, he had to spend the rest of his time in office battling a hostile congress (tear, cue violin.)

Very little of this narrative has anything to do with reality. Beginning with the end, it ignores the boatload of quite unsavory things Bill Clinton did accomplish during his presidency (the 1996 Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act, NAFTA, Don't Ask Don't Tell, the destruction of welfare, the assault on Yugoslavia, etc). Based on this record, one would have the impression that Clinton worked quite happily with a Republican congress.

Beyond this, the core of the narrative is, quite simply, a fantasy. Bill Clinton did not move quickly to enact the progressive promises of his campaign. As Vincente Navarro, the "token leftist" of the Clinton's health care taskforce reminds us in a crucial article, "President Clinton made his first priority a reduction of the federal deficit (a policy not even included in his program), approved NAFTA (against the opposition of the AFL-CIO, the social movements, and even the majority of the Democratic Party), and committed himself to perpetuation of the for-profit health insurance system." If anything, Clinton brought on the Republican Revolution not by moving too quickly to the Left, but by executing a sharp turn to the Right.

Navarro's analysis rings true in several ways. First, Clinton's own staffers admit it. In the same article quoted earlier about the Obama campaign trying to dampen expectations, we find a curious admission from Paul Begala, one of Bill's senior advisors. Begala recounts Bill's reaction to his advice that the candidate needed to cool his backers' expectations:

“I remember talking about this to him in the closing days of the campaign,” Mr. Begala said. “And he started saying, ‘We didn’t get into this overnight and we’re not going to get out of it overnight.’ ”

“So I remember him talking about it and doing it — and it didn’t have any effect on the citizens,” Mr. Begala said. That was one reason, he said, that Democrats lost control of Congress two years later.

This rather extraordinary admission invites no comment from the Times' reporter, who is apparently intent on sustaining the goals of the Obama team.

Begala's comment is vindicated by an electoral analysis of the 1994 Congressional elections. Hailed by the Republicans as a mandate for a return to Reagan, the election illustrates the deadly effect Clinton's triangulation had upon his base. Voter turnout among those making $22,000 (2007 dollars) or less a year dropped sharply, by 21%. A drop in African American voting rates. And a drop in voting rates for women. Democratic turnout was down in every part of the country except the Mid-Atlantic and the Far West, where gains were minute. By turning sharply away from the positions which had fueled his campaign, Clinton drove a nail into his own political coffin. If Obama wishes to avoid a similar fate, he would do well to ignore the advice of the "go slow" crowd.

What Obama does or doesn't decide to do, however, is far less important than what those of us on the ground decide. Based upon the conduct of his advisors and his selection of Clintonite DLC hack Rahm Emmanuel for Chief of Staff, he's already made his decision. What is urgently needed now is for all of us who celebrated Tuesday night to turn a deaf ear to the go-slow liberals both inside and outside of Obama's administration and get down to the hard work of rebuilding the American Left.


[1] Less relevant to my argument, but perhaps more entertaining, is Ramesh Ponnuru's delusional fantasy that the American electorate is best characterized as "center-right."

Who is Rahm Emanuel?

Two great articles highlighting Emanuel's hard-line zionism and his anchoring of the conservative, anti-grassroots wing of the Democrats.

Obama's Terrorist Friends

McCain Tries to Put Out a Fire He Started

Ruling Class Media Turns Against the Republicans

Finally! Though it's been evident for about two years now that there's been a major shift of ruling class support away from the Republicans (who've fouled things up not a little for the American Empire), I've been quite disappointed so far this election cycle with the timidity of ruling class attacks on the conservatives. Remember Mark Foley in 2006? Why haven't the institutions of ruling opinion begun trotting out the skeleton's in the Republican closet yet this time around? While I don't have an answer for that, I think it is has finally begun.

CNN has regularly been carrying "Fact Check" segments where it subjects McCain campaign claims about Obama to empirical verification, where they typically come up quite thin. The latest regards Obama and gun control.

McCain's campaign hasn't helped itself by going on the attack against the ruling class media, calling the New York Times "a pro-Obama organization that every day attacks Sen. McCain, attacks Gov. Palin, and excuses Sen. Obama.” The irony here is that there is a rational kernel to McCain and co's conspiracy theories of the liberal media. The media's owners have made a real shift to the Democrats, and the Republicans are finally beginning to pay.

Sarah Palin: Anti-woman trogolodyte

Here is one of the more appalling nuggets discovered about McCain's VP: as Mayor of Wasilla, she oversaw the policy of having rape victims pay for their rape kits (that can run as high as $1000). See multiple sources here and here.

The fact that the Obama camp can't muster any kind of response is simply disgusting. The Democrat's are showing themselves to be impotent to this neanderthal. The election is still theirs to lose, but if the so-called "party of the people" cannot figure out how to win in November, the coffin in which the Republicans should have been buried might see a different occupant.

The New York Times and the End of White Guilt

Having just moved to Newark, New Jersey, I recently found myself confronted at a newsstand with this week's New York Times magazine's Profound Quandary: "Is Obama the End of Black Politics?" Since Obama secured the nomination, this kind of article has been appearing in every pesudo-intellectual magazine in the country.

I loathe these writings with an intensity I find hard to describe. What makes them such, vile, foetid pools of intellectual sewage is the barely contained celebratory air over the supposed death of the "Civil Rights Generation"-style politics (i.e. holding America responsible for its racism) present in every one of them. The NYT piece is merely the culmination of an underground party that's been going on in White Middlebrow America for the last few months, the invitation to which reads "The Guilt is Over!" (The card, it should be noted, is signed by Barack himself.)

The piece itself is unremarkable in its banalities. Lots of quotes from conservative Black mayors, like Newark's own Cory Booker, exalting their own supposed novelty and relevance. A profound ignorance of the history of Black politics (seemingly a job requirement for being hired by the NYT). And of course, a great deal of feigned chin-scratching over "what this all means now."

One item that jumped out at me from the article was author Matt Bai's tortured attempt to demonstrate Black economic progress. In a classic case of the proof disproving itself, Bai writes "According to an analysis by Pew’s Economic Mobility Project, almost 37 percent of black families fell into one of the three top income quintiles in 2005, compared with 23 percent in 1973." First of all, who ever uses a category as utterly arbitrary, and confusing, as "top three economic quintiles" unless they are trying to pull a fast one? I can picture Bai at his desk, working late into the night, trying desperately to find some articulation of the statistics that can make Black economic progress seem impressive. Second, and most importantly, the stat, while appearing to suggest something like a twofold growth in Black income parity, actually reveals the tremendous gap that still exists. The top three economic quintiles should represent 60% of the population. Yet Bai's example shows that Black folks constitute almost half of the proportion they should of these brackets. Hardly something to celebrate.

Glenn Ford of the Black Agenda Report does an excellent job taking apart the specific logic of Bai's article, so I'll point readers there for more. In closing, I just want to note the article's denkverbot on any of the actual issues facing Black America today. The Black Gulag isn't mentioned. The mortage companies' swindling is no where to be found. Likewise for Katrina. And Black poverty is whitewashed. These issues are the real reason that, when I walk down 125th street in Harlem, I see street vendor after vendor selling shirts juxtaposing Dr. King and Obama. Black America doesn't celebrate Obama because they think he's going to leave Civil Rights politics behind, but because they hope he will complete them.

Mark Ames on Georgia

Mark Ames, one of my favorite writers, has good piece in the Nation last week on the invasion of South Ossetia. He does a good job of providing some of the crucial context that's missing from the media's ebullient celebrations of Georgian nationalism, such as the long history of South Ossetian oppression. He goes a bit overboard, however, in his attacks on McCain, which, while hilarious, ignore Obama's similar response to the fighting. He has, as the Chicago Sun-Times notes, stepped on board the "Blame Russia"* train along with the rest of the ruling class. Even more disturbing is this interview with Obama's main man on foreign policy,Zbigniew Brzezinski, who, in a daring simile never before attempted by a ruling class politician, compared his enemy to Hitler. Brzezinski is an old hat at Russia-bashing, going back to his days in the Carter administration when he helped engineer the bloodbath in Afghanistan in the eighties. Ultimately, while Obama may be immeasurably more well-spoken than his fossilized opponent, he is no less dangerous when it comes to projecting American power.

*To be sure, Russia has imperialist ambitions for Ossetia and ultimately Georgia, but that hardly means the United States does not.

*UPDATE*
Ames has a newer piece on the Nation that is equally valuable. I particularly like his description of Saakashvili:

While Bush and McCain speak of Saakashvili as if he's a combination of Thomas Jefferson and Nelson Mandela, he's seen by his own people as increasingly authoritarian and unbalanced. Last year, Saakashvili sent in his special forces to violently disperse opposition protesters in the capital city, followed by a declaration of martial law. He sacked the opposition television station (partly owned by Rupert Murdoch), exiled or jailed his political opponents, and stacked the courts with his own judges while removing neutral observers, leaving even onetime neocon cheerleaders like Bruce Jackson and Anne Applebaum feeling queasy. Hardly the image of the "small democratic nation" that everyone today touts.

A good antidote to the know-nothing delusions of that blonde ass-hat on CNN Glenn Beck.

Adolph Reed on Obama

Adolph Reed is, in the words of my advisor, a smart cat. His collection Class Notes, one of my first introductions to modern Marxist polemic, contains brilliant chapters on the rise of Louis Farrakhan, the myth of "blackantisemitism" (one word), and above all, his devastating critique of the ebony tower, "What Are the Drums Saying Booker?" Of late I've been lamenting his failure to produce anything noteworthy on the Obama phenomenon. His only contribution to the debate that I'd seen before today was an essay for the Progressive (sic) "Obama No," for which the sole point of substance is that Obama is an opportunist (not exactly a surprising thing to accuse a politician of).

Today, however, I checked the Black Agenda Report and found that my dolor over Reed's lack of output could now end. He's posted a very long essay on Obama that goes right for the jugular. It's masterful in how it situates Obama within the larger retreat of the organized Left. My favorite passage is below (on Obama being praised for being "politically unorthodox" with his Father's Day speech):

this is the "Obama we want to see more of," the one who takes positions that are "unorthodox" and "not politically safe." Since when has it been unorthodox or unsafe politically to malign black poor people in public? Who the fuck has been doing anything else for at least twenty years?

Brian Jones on "Obama and Personal Responsibility"

From Socialist Worker:

Whose responsibility?

Barack Obama's calls for Blacks to focus on "personal responsibility" ought to be the subject of a genuine debate, not a media-driven uproar about the caught-on-tape words of Rev. Jesse Jackson.

July 18, 2008

IN SEVERAL high-profile speeches, Barack Obama has gone out of his way to chastise Black fathers in particular and call for Black people in general to focus on personal responsibility.

Columnist: Brian Jones

Brian Jones is a teacher, actor and activist in New York City, and a frequent contributor to the International Socialist Review. For years, he performed in Howard Zinn's play Marx in Soho, and he has lent his voice to readings and recordings of the book Voices of a People’s History of the United States.

The full implications of that phrase, "personal responsibility," ought to be the subject of an intense debate. There ought to be a more serious discussion about the state of Black America and the causes of that state. Unfortunately, since Obama's former pastor dared to speak on the subject and was roundly denounced for embarrassing The Candidate, there has been an absence of public figures willing to disagree on camera.

So in place of a real debate, we get a bizarre, profane utterance of disagreement, available to the public only because a microphone was on that was presumed to be switched off. Yes, I'm referring to none other than Rev. Jesse Jackson Sr.'s caught-on-tape grumble that Obama is "talking down to Blacks," and that he wanted to do violence to the man's genitalia.

This stupid slip (if you can call it that) only serves to undermine any actual criticism of Obama's increasingly conservative talking points and makes it easy for those who want to stifle the discussion, or even just defend Obama's position, to paint any criticism as personalistic--the result of the Old Guard's jealousy of the New.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

THE OTHER day I opened my email inbox to find an open letter to Jackson, written by Najee Ali. Ali is executive director of a national civil rights organization, Project Islamic H.O.P.E. I knew something of Najee, having marched with him on several demonstrations when I lived Los Angeles. So I was disappointed to read this vitriolic letter, which spares no effort to smear Jackson and staunchly defends Obama's line.

Ali says he speaks for himself and a "growing number of African Americans" for whom Jackson's comments are the "last straw." And, not surprisingly, he throws in the reverend's face the accusation that Jackson is "jealous that Obama has eclipsed you and both your campaigns for the Democratic nomination by actually preparing to win it as the 2008 presumptive nominee."

Ali attacks Jackson as an opportunist and "ambulance chaser," and points out that back in 1968, he appeared on TV one day after Dr. Martin Luther King's murder with his mentor's blood still smeared on his shirt. True enough--but does that serve to clarify the question of whether Obama is talking down to black people?

Ali joins in Obama's criticism of Black fathers, taking aim at Jackson as a father:

Obama's recent comments about Black fathers not abandoning their children and accepting moral responsibility in our lives is a lesson you apparently needed to learn when you were younger. If you had, it may not have caused you to cheat on your wife and father a child out of wedlock with a former staffer.

Maybe that's what really bothered you about Obama's message to the church that Black fathers should be responsible for their children; you certainly haven't been.

But even if Jackson was the world's greatest dad, something tells me he would still be in Ali's crosshairs. Ali couldn't attack Jeremiah Wright's moral credentials when Wright spoke out about racism in America, but that didn't stop him joining the tell-Wright-to-shut-up bandwagon. "Wright needs to realize," Ali wrote last April, "that if Obama can win the nomination and presidency, he has the ability to give hope to change and improve the whole world. This is why I hope someone can make the call and tell Rev. Wright to sit down and shut up!"

Actually, what Wright had to say was important and needs to be said louder in America: that for the vast majority of black people, structural barriers still exist.

Jackson's gaffe has, for a time, made it easier to portray this as a "mindset mired in the past." But just two years ago, Hurricane Katrina temporarily silenced Bill Cosby's blame-the-victim routine. Who failed to maintain the levies? Who was slow to mobilize the rescue? Only the coldest hearts dared to blame New Orleans' poor for their predicament.

Today, the mortgage crisis ought to be Exhibit A for the counter-Cosby argument. Here, we have, according to some estimates, the single greatest destruction of Black wealth in a single stroke. The effects of this (and other countless social crises we've faced) on families are fairly predictable, but can hardly be counted as "personal" failings.

For too long, progressive voices have been all too willing to shut up for Democratic Party candidates. The silence of the antiwar movement during John Kerry's presidential bid is one of the most horrendous examples. But when we shut up, it just makes the right wing voices louder. That's how we end up in a lose-lose situation, even if "our" candidates win.

Shutting up on matters of principle may be good strategy for politicians, but it's death for movements. Martin Luther King, facing similar pressures, actually went one step further, saying, "A time comes when silence is betrayal."

When King dared to speak against the Vietnam War, many of his allies in the civil rights movement attacked him. The Southern Christian Leadership Conference (King's own organization!) issued a statement disassociating itself from his antiwar position. The NAACP's Roy Wilkins said, "Civil rights groups do not have enough information on Vietnam, or on foreign policy, to make it their cause."

King's real sin? Embarrassing the Democratic president, Lyndon Johnson. Whitney Young of the Urban League put it plainly: "Johnson needs a consensus. If we are not with him on Vietnam, then he is not going to be with us on civil rights."

What has been particularly refreshing about this election cycle is the willingness of progressives to openly criticize Obama from the left. Actually, tens of thousands of Obama supporters have banded together on his Web site to challenge their candidate for voting to protect the telecommunications companies that participated in Bush's domestic spying program. They refused to shut up--that's a good thing!

Ali admits that Obama is "not above reproach. He is a politician and is fair game to be fairly criticized by you or anyone else. But to personally attack Obama is crossing the line."

But in truth, Ali doesn't disagree with Obama's emphasis on personal responsibility. "Obama is not talking down to Black people; he wants you and other deadbeat dads to spend time and care for your children properly," he writes. "The destruction of the Black family and absentee fathers is a major problem in our community. It's a problem that King spoke out and fought against. Forty years after King's murder, I can see why King didn't trust you. If you can't and won't sincerely help Obama in this historic run, then at least stop attacking him."

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

ALI'S ATTITUDE that Obama is saying the right thing probably reflects the views of a lot of people, many Blacks included. After all, where on TV or any other part of the media can you hear any other explanation for the state of Black America besides the personal responsibility angle? We've been bombarded with these conservative ideas for the last 40 years.

The idea that the pathological Black family--not poverty or racism--is the source of Black problems became the unofficial line of the U.S. government in the mid-1960s. The Black movement had put the establishment on the defensive, arguing that the situation of Black people was a social responsibility.

Unable to continue to claim that Blacks were genetically inferior, politicians started promoting the idea that Black people were culturally inferior. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, a liberal Democrat who became a darling of the Nixon administration, first made this argument in what became known as the "Moynihan Report."

The right wing loved his logic--why fund public services or anti-poverty programs or desegregate the schools if the real problem is poor Blacks themselves? Moynihan, like Nixon, saw the Black movement as a threat to law and order. He worried that the social movements were hurting the morale of the military forces in Vietnam and lamented the "erosion of the authority of the institutions of American society" in general.

The whole idea of refocusing attention away from social responsibility and toward personal responsibility was a conscious strategy promoted by the enemies of the civil rights movement. Cleverly, the excuse for rolling back the gains of the movement was dressed up in language that sounded like genuine concern for black people.

King also talked about the state of Black families. But he saw the agenda behind Moynihan's line of thinking. In an often over-looked book, Where Do We Go From Here? he warned:

As public awareness of the predicament of the Negro family increases, there will be danger and opportunity. The opportunity will be to deal fully rather than haphazardly with the problem as a whole--to see it as a social catastrophe brought on by long years of brutality and oppression and to meet it as other disasters are met, with an adequacy of resources. The danger will be that the problems will be attributed to innate Negro weaknesses and used to justify further neglect and to rationalize continued oppression.

I can't think of a better way to summarize the conservative obsession with promoting "personal responsibility" in all facets of life (education, health care, housing) than that it has been "used to justify further neglect and to rationalize continued oppression."

Obama's candidacy has raised the hopes of millions of people who are looking for real change. Even so, progressives must resist the pressure to hold their tongues. In the end, history isn't made by politicians, but by movements. And movements need to know the truth.

King, as much a product of the civil rights movement as a leader of it, had an idea of the kinds of changes we need. Forty years ago, he wrote:

If the society changes its concepts by placing responsibility on its system, not on the individual, and guarantees secure employment or a minimum income, dignity will come within reach of all.

His voice, and others like it, needs to be louder.

Mumia Abu-Jamal on Ralph Nader

Obama and Black Fathers: Targets of Opportunity

There is no rhetorical maneuver in American politics that comes more naturally than blaming Black men for the problems of society. The foundation of the republic upon the slavocracy in the South and that regime's rationalization of the brutality of slavery with the alleged indolence of Africans, the use of tropes of Black irresponsibility to motivate the overthrow of reconstruction, the segregation and race riots fed by myths of Black sexual depravity, and the shadow of the Black criminal constantly projected onto the white imagination today have given those who would scapegoat African Americans an incredible arsenal of oratorical tactics. The latest politician to wield this arsenal? Barack Obama.

Obama's now-famous Father's Day speech, as Glen Ford points out, falls into his now familiar routine of throwing Black folks under the bus in order to prove his allegiance to corporate America. First Reverend Jeremiah Wright, then Obama's entire Trinity United Church of Christ, and now fully half the Black race finds itself slandered in the interests of passing the test of political correctness for the ruling class. In African American history, there is an old and developed discourse of "lifting as we climb": that is, Black folks who manage to achieve prosperity in spite of racism have a duty to help those of the race who are not so fortunate. Obama is not so much lifting as he climbs as tossing Black America onto a mound from which he can climb to the presidency.

Indeed, the cynicism of the Father's Day speech was so naked that even the New York Times reporter felt compelled to comment "While Mr. Obama’s remarks were directed at a black, churchgoing audience, his campaign hopes they resonate among white social conservatives in a race where these voters may be up for grabs." (Note: the Times removed this passage from the version of the article accessible from its website.)

The irony of all this is that in performing the useful service of legitimizing racism for the ruling class, Obama is lending a helping hand to the McCain campaign, which will most certainly employ every trick in the book to demonize Obama as "the Black candidate." While the right wing certainly has no lack for racist lunacy, in this election cycle it has undoubtedly been the Democrats (led first by the Clinton campaign, and now by Barack) who have done the most to resuscitate racism on the campaign trail. To prove his worthiness of being head of the "committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie," Obama must debase himself by providing the slings and arrows of his opposition. Such is the lot of the Black Bourgeoisie.

To round out the critique of Obama's speech, Michael Eric Dyson has written a wonderful article in which he debunks the main propositions put forward by the candidate of "change." Dyson points out several relevant details. First, Black fathers are much more likely than those of other races to maintain contact with children from a former relationship. Second, the reason said fathers often leave such relationships is not, as Obama suggests, some lack of "manhood," but a real and devastating despair over being unable to provide for their families due to the lack of economic opportunities afforded to African Americans. As Dyson puts it, "these men needs jobs, not jabs." Finally, the reference to Black men as "boys" is belittling in the extreme, reminiscent of the rhetoric of racist Southerners in the early twentieth century. If Obama continues in this direction, it will be an open question as to how long he can maintain the mantle of "change" and avoid the company, in Black opinion, of Condoleeza Rice and Clarence Thomas.

*UPDATE*
Keeanga Yamahtta-Taylor from Socialist Worker and Ishmael Reed both have excellent articles thoroughly debunking Obama's speech.

What unity looks like to Obama's campaign

According to the AP, at a Detroit, Michigan event, the Obama campaign denied two Muslim women wearing hijabs seats behind the candidate because of the 'sensitive political climate.'

Obama's Advisors

Two new articles this week expose just who is sitting in Obama's inner circle. In the Nation, Naomi Klein points out Obama's main economic advisor, Jason Furman, is a neoliberal in the Milton Friedman tradition. Furman has called Wal-Mart a "progressive success story," and slammed union activists trying to raise wages: "efforts to get Wal-Mart to raise its wages and benefits" are creating "collateral damage" that is "way too enormous and damaging to working people and the economy more broadly for me to sit by idly and sing 'Kum-Ba-Ya' in the interests of progressive harmony." Perhaps this guy just hasn't heard of Wal-Mart refusing to pay the medical costs of disabled employees, deceiving its workers to get them to donate to its PAC, locking immigrant workers in it's stores, or its long record of gender discrimination that has earned it the label of 'merchant of shame' from the National Organization for Women. Maybe Furman (and Obama) are simply unaware of all of this. But I doubt it.

On foreign policy the picture is much the same. Socialist Worker has a detailed article on the hawks who make up Obama's 'war cabinet.' I don't have much to add to this, except to conclude with a broadside against former top advisor Samantha Power. Power, an advocate of humanitarian intervention, receives fawning accolades from liberals wherever she goes. This is because her narrative is one of victims all around the world that the US has not done enough to save. As Edward Herman points out, however, she is all too willing to ignore those victims of the US empire:

The cruise missile left also adheres closely to the party line on genocide, which is why its members thrive in the New York Times and other establishment vehicles. This is true of Paul Berman, Michael Ignatieff and David Rieff, but I will focus here on Samantha Power, whose large volume on genocide, "A Problem From Hell": America and the Age of Genocide won a Pulitzer prize, and who is currently the expert of choice on the subject in the mainstream media (and even in The Nation and on the Bill Moyers show).

Power never departs from the selectivity dictated by the establishment party line. That requires, first and foremost, simply ignoring cases of direct U.S. or U.S.-sponsored (or otherwise approved) genocide. Thus the Vietnam war, in which millions were directly killed by U.S. forces, does not show up in Power's index or text. Guatemala, where there was a mass killing of as many as 100,000 Mayan Indians between 1978 and 1985, in what Amnesty International called "A Government Program of Political Murder," but by a government installed and supported by the United States, also does not show up in Power's index. Cambodia is of course included, but only for the second phase of the genocide: the first phase, from 1969-1975, in which the United States dropped some 500,000 tons of bombs on the Cambodian countryside and killed vast numbers, she fails to mention. On the Khmer Rouge genocide, Power says they killed 2 million, a figure widely cited after Jean Lacouture gave that number; his subsequent admission that this number was invented had no effect on its use, and it suits Power's purpose.

A major U.S.-encouraged and supported genocide occurred in Indonesia in 1965-66 in which over 700,000 people were murdered. This genocide is not mentioned by Samantha Power and the names Indonesia and Suharto do not appear in her index. She also fails to mention West Papua, where Indonesia's 40 years of murderous occupation would constitute genocide under her criteria, if carried out under different auspices. Power does refer to East Timor, with extreme brevity, saying that "In 1975, when its ally, the oil-producing, anti-Communist Indonesia, invaded East Timor, killing between 100,000 and 200,000 civilians, the United States looked away" (146-7). That exhausts her treatment of the subject, although the killings in East Timor involved a larger fraction of the population than in Cambodia, and the numbers killed were probably larger than the grand total for Bosnia and Kosovo, to which she devotes a large fraction of her book. She also misrepresents the U.S. role: it did not "look away," it gave its approval, protected the aggression from any effective UN response (in his autobiography, then U.S. Ambassador to the UN Daniel Patrick Moynihan bragged about his effectiveness in protecting Indonesia from any UN action), and greatly increased its arms aid to Indonesia, thereby facilitating the genocide.

Power engages in a similar suppression and failure to recognize the U.S. role in her treatment of genocide in Iraq. She attends carefully and at length to Saddam Hussein's use of chemical warfare and killing of Kurds at Halabja and elsewhere, and she does discuss the U.S. failure to oppose and take any action against Saddam Hussein at this juncture. But she does not mention the diplomatic rapproachement with Saddam in the midst of his war with Iran in 1983, the active U.S. logistical support of Saddam during that war, and the U.S. approval of sales and transfers of chemical and biological weapons during the period in which he was using chemical weapons against the Kurds. She also doesn't mention the active efforts by the United States and Britain to block UN actions that might have obstructed Saddam's killings.

The killing of over a million Iraqis via the "sanctions of mass destruction," more than were killed by all the weapons of mass destruction in history, according to John and Karl Mueller ("Sanctions of Mass Destruction," Foreign Affairs, May/June 1999), was arguably the greatest genocide of the post-World War 2 era. It is unmentioned by Samantha Power. Again, the correlation between exclusion, U.S. responsibility, and the view that such killings were, in Madeleine Albright's words, "worth it" from the standpoint of U.S. interests, is clear. There is a similar political basis for Power's failure to include Israel's low-intensity genocide of the Palestinians and South Africa's "destructive engagement" with the frontline states in the 1980s, the latter with a death toll greatly exceeding all the deaths in the Balkan wars of the 1990s. Neither Israel nor South Africa, both "constructively engaged" by the United States, show up in Power's index.

Samantha Power's conclusion is that the U.S. policy toward genocide has been very imperfect and needs reorientation, less opportunism, and greater vigor. For Power, the United States is the solution, not the problem. These conclusions and policy recommendations rest heavily on her spectacular bias in case selection: She simply bypasses those that are ideologically inconvenient, where the United States has arguably committed genocide (Vietnam, Cambodia 1969-75, Iraq 1991-2003), or has given genocidal processes positive support (Indonesia, West Papua, East Timor, Guatemala, Israel, and South Africa). Incorporating them into an analysis would lead to sharply different conclusions and policy agendas, such as calling upon the United States to simply stop doing it, or urging stronger global opposition to U.S. aggression and support of genocide, and proposing a much needed revolutionary change within the United States to remove the roots of its imperialistic and genocidal thrust. But the actual huge bias, nicely leavened by admissions of imperfections and need for improvement in U.S. policy, readily explains why Samantha Power is loved by the New York Times and won a Pulitzer prize for her masterpiece of evasion and apologetics for "our" genocides and call for a more aggressive pursuit of "theirs."

National Review on Race

Obama has been praised to the high heavens the last few days for his speech on race. The New York Times, The Boston Globe, and the Washington Post heaped approbation on the speech, noting especially Obama's declaration that the idea that racism is "endemic" in America today is "profoundly distorted."

Praise from liberal newspapers is par for the course for Obama, but this time around he's picked up a few unlikely fans: columnists for the conservative rag National Review. Indeed, Charles Murray, author of The Bell Curve, a book which argued Black folks are genetically inferior to whites, described the speech as follows: "As far as I'm concerned, it is just plain flat out brilliant—rhetorically, but also in capturing a lot of nuance about race in America. It is so far above the standard we're used to from our pols." Abigail Thernstrom, who gained fame in the 1970s attacking the Voting Rights Act, was right on Murray's heels. National Review, remember, was a journal started in the 1950s to provide intellectual support to the terrorist campaign of massive resistance in the South.

For decent analysis of Obama's speech, check out Prisoner of Starvation, Lenin's Tomb, and Once Upon a Time...