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Obama Gets Some Blood on His Hands
By Paul Street at Jan 26, 2009 |
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So it took Empire's New Clothes what, four days to become a war criminal?
The day after Obama was elected, the Toronto Star reported, "Afghan President Hamid Karzai urged U.S. president-elect Barack Obama to end civilian casualties once and for all amid reports that dozens of women and children were killed in U.S. air strikes on a wedding party in southern Afghanistan."
Within less than four days of Obama's bungled presidential oath-taking, the U.S. launched an attack between 3 and 4 in the morning (the usual time) in the Mehtar Lam district of Laghman province, about 40 miles northeast of Kabul. As usual, the Empire claimed that all the resulting mangled corpses were comprised solely of precision-targeted militants.
Also as usual. this unlikely claim was clearly and passionately refuted by on-the-ground civilians, stuck on the wrong side of Freedom's Guns. According to Los Angeles Times reporters M Karim Faiez and Laura King, "the Village elders provided a much different account to provincial officials, saying there were no Taliban fighters in the area, which they described as a hamlet populated mainly by shepherds. Women and children were among the 22 civilian dead, they said, according to Hamididan Abdul Rahmzai, head of the provincial council."
"Two other officials, including a spokesman for the Laghman governor, later said 11 of the dead had been identified positively as civilians."
Hundreds of angry villagers demonstrated Sunday against the latest U.S. mass murder of Afghan civilians, this one perpetrated under the direction of the supposed (so many liberals and "progressives" wish to believe) "antiwar" President Obama, not Bush -- a landmark moment in the annals of Hope and Change.
As Barack No Apology Obama moves forward with his plan to flood 30,000 colonial gendarmes into Afghanistan (the site of what he considers Bush II's "good" and "proper" war), the New York Times reports, "Afghan officials and some Western coalition partners are voicing concern that the additional troops will only increase the levels of violence and civilian casualties, after a year in which as many as 4,000 Afghan civilians were killed."
There was also an Obama attack on Pakistan, with the usual claims that the world's "last greatest hope" (as Obama has described "this magical place" the United States) miraculously targeted and killed only "mlitants."
Meanwhile the corporate War Hack Joe Biden "concedes," Antiwar.com reports, "that Americans should expect a higher death toll this year than in years past. ' I hate to say it, but yes, I think there will be. There will be an uptick,' Biden insists. Yet the 2008 death toll was already 151 American soldiers, the most yet in the seven year long war, so any further increase from the Obama escalation is likely to be viewed as more than just 'an uptick.'"
Plus ca change plus c'est la meme chose.
Fellow anti-imperialists, I Hope you didn't think Obama's election meant you could celebrate and relax
Interesting discussion
By Street, Paul at Feb 07, 2009 16:43 PM
Okay , I made an adjustment that allows all the comments to appear. I am learning my way around the blog system.
In the last two comments (with the Sirota link and quotes) and in the earlier comment giving the Chris Hedges - Sheldon Wolin Truthdig article, I am trying to make it clear that it isn't just "hard left" folks who are quite concerned about the Obama phenomeon.
On that note,. see also the interesting left-liberal discussion on last night's Bill Moyers' Journal:
http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/02062009/transcript1.html
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Sirota piece, ctd.
By Street, Paul at Feb 07, 2009 08:56 AM
To follow up with material from the Sirota article linked in my last comment:
As veteran left-liberal Washington- and Obama-watcher David Sirota notes, the venture capitalist Leo Hindery – a top economic advisor to presidential candidates John Edwards and (later) Obama – was banned from serious consideration for a top economic post in the new administration because he is “one of the few business leaders to use his wealth to challenge deregulation, corporate trade deals, and anti-worker policies” and “dared to clash with the same Wall Street Democrats whose corporate-backed policies destroyed the economy” by standing “in opposition to Obama’s top [corporate-neoliberal economic advisors, many of home were associated with The Hamilton Project, an economic think-tank that was the inheritor of former Treasury Secretary [and former Goldman Sachs CEO Robert] Rubin’s generally pro-trade positions." As Sirota elaborates:
“…the Hindrey scalping is only one chapter in what has been one long narrative arc whereby economic progressives have been deliberately shut out of top administration jobs. Juststep back and think about it for a minute: Amid a stable of eminently qualified and well-respected progressives like James Galbraith, Joseph Stiglitz, Dean Baker, Robert Reich, Paul Krugman and Larry Mishel, Obama has chosen Rubin sycophants like Larry Summers and Tim Geithner to run the economy - the sameLarry Summers who pushed the repeal of the Glass-Steagal Act, the same Geithner who masterminded the kleptocratic bank bailout, the same duo whose claim to fame is their personal connections to Rubin, a disgraced Citigroup executive at the center of the current meltdown. And the list of Rubin sycophants keeps getting longer, from Peter Orszag to Jason Furman.”
“Its the same in other key regulatory positions, as free market fundamentalists who created the problem take the helm of the regulatory agencies they tried to destroy. Indeed, the only movement progressive in a top economic position is Jared Bernstein, and he was relegated to an amorphous job in the Vice President's office.”
“And now we see that's not an accident. Though Obama won states likeOhio , Pennsylvania and Indiana
trade policies, there has been a deliberate and calculated effort to stack the
administration with the very Wall Street Democrats who created the problems he
lamented, and shun those who have been fighting the good fight.”
Wow.
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Blacklisting Progressives
By Street, Paul at Feb 07, 2009 08:39 AM
Veteran liberal-left Washiington- and Obama-watcher David Sirota (not "hard left") on the "blacklisting of progressives" from Obama's economic policy tream: http://www.commondreams.org/view/2009/02/04-1
We now see just 11 or so of the 30 plus comments on this blog post.... The first comment in chronological order is now C. Davidson saying that Chris Hedges and Sheldon Wolin needs to "get out more" but the Wolin piece I posted before that is gone along with 20 or so other comments, many incuding all kinds of links and quotes etc....
The incentive to comment (which takes time, especially if you do links and make more than cursoty arguments) will end if the risk is high that the comment will disappear.
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Re: Obama Gets Some Blood on His Hands
By Street, Paul at Feb 06, 2009 15:33 PM
From the Wall Street Journal yesterday; "As Mr. Obama prepares to lay the ground work for the second phase of government assistance, his tough stance on [executive] pay may help build support from a Congress weary of bailouts."
"Obama Lays Out Limits on Executive Pay," WSJ, February 5, 2009, p. A1.
By "government assistance" the WSJ means Wall Street welfare. The second phase is the "bad" or aggregator bank Krugman has been warning about --- a very raw deal for taxpayers,
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Re:
By Servo, Tom at Feb 06, 2009 18:52 PM
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"That Certainly Didn't Take Long"
By Street, Paul at Feb 04, 2009 15:34 PM
It's amazing how quickly disillusionment with the great (not-so) liberal Hope can set in. Continuing with my last note's theme of dismay in Democratic (not just "hard left") ranks, this from Maureen Dowd in the New York Times today:
The Democratic president has been spending so much time trying — and failing — to win over Republicans that he may not have noticed the disillusionment in his own ranks.
Betrayed by their bankers and leaders, Americans were desperate to trust someone when they made Barack Obama president. His debut has left them skeptical about his willingness to smack down those who would flout his high standards or waste our money.
Companies that have gotten bailouts continue to make a mockery of taxpayers.
Until it came to light Tuesday, Wells Fargo, which received $25 billion in federal funds, was blithely planning a series of “employee recognition outings” to Las Vegas luxury hotels this month.
As ABC reported, Bank of America took its $45 billion in bailout funds and sponsored a five-day carnival outside the Super Bowl stadium, and Morgan Stanley took its $10 billion in bailout money and held a three-day conference at the Breakers in Palm Beach. (Morgan Stanley had also still planned to send top employees to Monte Carlo and the Bahamas, events just canceled.)
The New York Post revealed that Sandy Weill, former chief executive of Citigroup, took a company jet to fly his family for a Christmas holiday to a $12,000-a-night luxury resort in San José del Cabo, Mexico. No matter that the company just got a $50 billion federal bailout and laid off 53,000 worldwide.
The interior of the 18-seat jet, as described by The Post, is posh, with a full bar, fine-wine selection, $13,000 carpets, Baccarat crystal glasses, Cristofle sterling silver flatware and — my personal favorite — pillows made from Hermès scarves.
Aux barricades!
---- Mareen Dowd, "Well, That Certainlly Didn't Take Long," New York Times, February 4, 2009, p. A25
Aux barricades indeed,,,plus ca change plus c'est la meme chose.
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Winning as Losing
By Street, Paul at Feb 04, 2009 11:35 AM
I'm "hard left" but I talk about the new regime to plenty of old fashioned progressives, many of whom are genuinely revolted by what is passing for "change we can believe in"....
From: Edwards Caucuser
Subject: and now....
To: paulstreet99@yahoo.com
Date: Wednesday, February 4, 2009, 9:42 AM
"Isn’t it interesting—and heartbreaking—to listen to progressives gasping in disbelief at Obama’s mistakes and mistaken 'bipartisanship'? This latest fiasco with Judd Gregg has me seething. No way would someone of this voting record be put anywhere near a John Edwards cabinet."
"Everything we all knew—and predicted—about Obama—turned out to be true. "
"If only primary voters had been as well informed as were, not to mention progressive endorsers!"
Edwards Caucuser
I responded:
From: paulstreet99@yahoo.com
To: Edwards Caucuser
Date: February 24,2009, 11:03 AM
Hi Edwards Caucuser:
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Re: Winning as Losing
By Servo, Tom at Feb 04, 2009 21:33 PM
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A Chilling Interview with Sheldon Wolin
By Street, Paul at Feb 03, 2009 08:05 AM
To continue with my last note's theme that its not just the "hard left" (the Trots and left anarchs and radical permaculturalists I like due to my own peculiar history) that has a jaundiced take on the Obama extravaganza and the political culture it reflects and epitomizes, here (below) is an interesting Truthdig interview by the liberal-left journalist Chris Hedges - himself the author of an excellent critique of the Obama campaign's corporate captivity) of the liberal left political scientist Sheldon Wolin, author of Democracy Incorporated: Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism. Note that Wolin has no personal distaste for Obama and even seems to like him a little (I readily confess to distate and dislike going back to Chicago) but that that doesn''t matter...its about deeper structural power and the broader political culture and the limits it imposes. I do find the underlying pessimism hard to deal with but also quite a challenge to refute (though refute it we must) :
It’s Not Going to Be OK
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20090202_its_not_going_to_be_ok/
Posted on Feb 2, 2009
By Chris Hedges
The daily bleeding of thousands of jobs will soon turn our economic crisis into a political crisis. The street protests, strikes and riots that have rattled France, Turkey, Greece, Ukraine, Russia, Latvia, Lithuania, Bulgaria and Iceland will descend on us. It is only a matter of time. And not much time. When things start to go sour, when Barack Obama is exposed as a mortal waving a sword at a tidal wave, the United States could plunge into a long period of precarious social instability.
At no period in American history has our democracy been in such peril or has the possibility of totalitarianism been as real. Our way of life is over. Our profligate consumption is finished. Our children will never have the standard of living we had. And poverty and despair will sweep across the landscape like a plague. This is the bleak future. There is nothing President Obama can do to stop it. It has been decades in the making. It cannot be undone with a trillion or two trillion dollars in bailout money. Our empire is dying. Our economy has collapsed.
How will we cope with our decline? Will we cling to the absurd dreams of a superpower and a glorious tomorrow or will we responsibly face our stark new limitations? Will we heed those who are sober and rational, those who speak of a new simplicity and humility, or will we follow the demagogues and charlatans who rise up out of the slime in moments of crisis to offer fantastic visions? Will we radically transform our system to one that protects the ordinary citizen and fosters the common good, that defies the corporate state, or will we employ the brutality and technology of our internal security and surveillance apparatus to crush all dissent? We won’t have to wait long to find out.
There are a few isolated individuals who saw it coming. The political philosophers Sheldon S. Wolin, John Ralston Saul and Andrew Bacevich, as well as writers such as Noam Chomsky, Chalmers Johnson, David Korten and Naomi Klein, along with activists such as Bill McKibben and Ralph Nader, rang the alarm bells. They were largely ignored or ridiculed. Our corporate media and corporate universities proved, when we needed them most, intellectually and morally useless.
Wolin, who taught political philosophy at the University of California in Berkeley and at Princeton, in his book “Democracy Incorporated” uses the phrase inverted totalitarianism to describe our system of power. Inverted totalitarianism, unlike classical totalitarianism, does not revolve around a demagogue or charismatic leader. It finds its expression in the anonymity of the corporate state. It purports to cherish democracy, patriotism and the Constitution while cynically manipulating internal levers to subvert and thwart democratic institutions. Political candidates are elected in popular votes by citizens, but they must raise staggering amounts of corporate funds to compete. They are beholden to armies of corporate lobbyists in Washington or state capitals who write the legislation. A corporate media controls nearly everything we read, watch or hear and imposes a bland uniformity of opinion or diverts us with trivia and celebrity gossip. In classical totalitarian regimes, such as Nazi fascism or Soviet communism, economics was subordinate to politics. “Under inverted totalitarianism the reverse is true,” Wolin writes. “Economics dominates politics—and with that domination comes different forms of ruthlessness.”
I reached Wolin, 86, by phone at his home about 25 miles north of San Francisco. He was a bombardier in the South Pacific during World War II and went to Harvard after the war to get his doctorate. Wolin has written classics such as “Politics and Vision” and “Tocqueville Between Two Worlds.” His newest book is one of the most important and prescient critiques to date of the American political system. He is also the author of a series of remarkable essays on Augustine of Hippo, Richard Hooker, David Hume, Martin Luther, John Calvin, Max Weber, Friedrich Nietzsche, Karl Marx and John Dewey. His voice, however, has faded from public awareness because, as he told me, “it is harder and harder for people like me to get a public hearing.” He said that publications, such as The New York Review of Books, which often published his work a couple of decades ago, lost interest in his critiques of American capitalism, his warnings about the subversion of democratic institutions and the emergence of the corporate state. He does not hold out much hope for Obama.
“The basic systems are going to stay in place; they are too powerful to be challenged,” Wolin told me when I asked him about the new Obama administration. “This is shown by the financial bailout. It does not bother with the structure at all. I don’t think Obama can take on the kind of military establishment we have developed. This is not to say that I do not admire him. He is probably the most intelligent president we have had in decades. I think he is well meaning, but he inherits a system of constraints that make it very difficult to take on these major power configurations. I do not think he has the appetite for it in any ideological sense. The corporate structure is not going to be challenged. There has not been a word from him that would suggest an attempt to rethink the American imperium.”
Wolin argues that a failure to dismantle our vast and overextended imperial projects, coupled with the economic collapse, is likely to result in inverted totalitarianism. He said that without “radical and drastic remedies” the response to mounting discontent and social unrest will probably lead to greater state control and repression. There will be, he warned, a huge “expansion of government power.”
“Our political culture has remained unhelpful in fostering a democratic consciousness,” he said. “The political system and its operatives will not be constrained by popular discontent or uprisings.”
Wolin writes that in inverted totalitarianism consumer goods and a comfortable standard of living, along with a vast entertainment industry that provides spectacles and diversions, keep the citizenry politically passive. I asked if the economic collapse and the steady decline in our standard of living might not, in fact, trigger classical totalitarianism. Could widespread frustration and poverty lead the working and middle classes to place their faith in demagogues, especially those from the Christian right?
“I think that’s perfectly possible,” he answered. “That was the experience of the 1930s. There wasn’t just FDR. There was Huey Long and Father Coughlin. There were even more extreme movements including the Klan. The extent to which those forces can be fed by the downturn and bleakness is a very real danger. It could become classical totalitarianism.”
He said the widespread political passivity is dangerous. It is often exploited by demagogues who pose as saviors and offer dreams of glory and salvation. He warned that “the apoliticalness, even anti-politicalness, will be very powerful elements in taking us towards a radically dictatorial direction. It testifies to how thin the commitment to democracy is in the present circumstances. Democracy is not ascendant. It is not dominant. It is beleaguered. The extent to which young people have been drawn away from public concerns and given this extraordinary range of diversions makes it very likely they could then rally to a demagogue.”
Wolin lamented that the corporate state has successfully blocked any real debate about alternative forms of power. Corporations determine who gets heard and who does not, he said. And those who critique corporate power are given no place in the national dialogue.
“In the 1930s there were all kinds of alternative understandings, from socialism to more extensive governmental involvement,” he said. “There was a range of different approaches. But what I am struck by now is the narrow range within which palliatives are being modeled. We are supposed to work with the financial system. So the people who helped create this system are put in charge of the solution. There has to be some major effort to think outside the box.”
“The puzzle to me is the lack of social unrest,” Wolin said when I asked why we have not yet seen rioting or protests. He said he worried that popular protests will be dismissed and ignored by the corporate media. This, he said, is what happened when tens of thousands protested the war in Iraq. This will permit the state to ruthlessly suppress local protests, as happened during the Democratic and Republic conventions. Anti-war protests in the 1960s gained momentum from their ability to spread across the country, he noted. This, he said, may not happen this time. “The ways they can isolate protests and prevent it from [becoming] a contagion are formidable,” he said.
“My greatest fear is that the Obama administration will achieve relatively little in terms of structural change,” he added. “They may at best keep the system going. But there is a growing pessimism. Every day we hear how much longer the recession will continue. They are already talking about beyond next year. The economic difficulties are more profound than we had guessed and because of globalization more difficult to deal with. I wish the political establishment, the parties and leadership, would become more aware of the depths of the problem. They can’t keep throwing money at this. They have to begin structural changes that involve a very different approach from a market economy. I don’t think this will happen.”
“I keep asking why and how and when this country became so conservative,” he went on. “This country once prided itself on its experimentation and flexibility. It has become rigid. It is probably the most conservative of all the advanced countries.”
The American left, he said, has crumbled. It sold out to a bankrupt Democratic Party, abandoned the working class and has no ability to organize. Unions are a spent force. The universities are mills for corporate employees. The press churns out info-entertainment or fatuous pundits. The left, he said, no longer has the capacity to be a counterweight to the corporate state. He said that if an extreme right gains momentum there will probably be very little organized resistance.
“The left is amorphous,” he said. “I despair over the left. Left parties may be small in number in Europe but they are a coherent organization that keeps going. Here, except for Nader’s efforts, we don’t have that. We have a few voices here, a magazine there, and that’s about it. It goes nowhere.”
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Re: A Chilling Interview with Sheldon Wolin
By Davidson, Carl at Feb 03, 2009 12:52 PM
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Re: Re: A Chilling Interview with Sheldon Wolin
By Servo, Tom at Feb 03, 2009 14:54 PM
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Re: Re: Re: A Chilling Interview with Sheldon Wolin
By Davidson, Carl at Feb 03, 2009 16:13 PM
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Re: Re: Re: Re: A Chilling Interview with Sheldon Wolin
By Servo, Tom at Feb 03, 2009 17:41 PM
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Re: Obama Gets Some Blood on His Hands
By Street, Paul at Feb 02, 2009 16:16 PM
Jeffrey: As Juan Santos pointed out nearly a year ago, Obama the candidate (a supporter of a border Wall actually) took much the same approach to Mexican immigrants that much of white America has taken to blacks in this not so post-racial/post-racist era: the "good ones" (the ones who play by our rules and don't threaten us) can be tolerated and "the bad ones" get incarcerated and otherwise repressed (deported and denied entry in the case of immigrants) . Edwards took much the same line (which pissed me off) but he at least led with employer sanctions and tied immigration rights to labor rights and the need to rollback employer power/exploitation.
Obama. it should be noted, comes in for serious and substantive (and deserved) criticism not just from the hard left (ie me and my "lunantic fringe" friends at BAR, Socialist Worker, and the local anarch infoshop) but also from the more mainstream center left...from left-liberal Keynesian people like Paul Krugman (a neoliberal not that long ago). Have a look at Krugman's excellent column in The New York Times today and at the ridiculous capitalism-worshipping quotes he gives from Obama's top economic figures (Timothy Geithner and that horrendous bastard Lawrence Summers) in regard to the new Administration's planned bad-bank-bailout (very expensive) See also the leading left economist and former Kucinich advisor Michael Hudson's account of the Obama bailout plan in CounterPunch.
I also highly recommend the always reasonable Noam Chomsky's excellent breakdown of "Elections 2008 and Obama's 'Vision,'" in the latest (February) issue of Z Magazine, on newstands now. It is a devastating and brilliant analysis. (There is nobody in or around "Progressives For Obama" that can come remotely close to this stunning level of synthesis and insight on the Obama phenomenon).
Tom there is horrible sin and stupidity also at the middle levels of the managed electorate. A few weeks back I ran into a 20-something University of Iowa Obama campaign kiddy who once told dreamily me that the election of Obama meant "the end of racism" in the U.S. (He's not the only white person around here who told me that)
I asked him if he was going to enlist in the military and risk getting his ass blown off to help Obama deepen the attack on Afghanistan (a central campaign theme) or if he was just going to leave that (supposedly) noble work to working-class kids from rural towns around here (Kolona and Riverside and West Liberty and so on).
No, he said, he will not be competing for a position in the Armed Forces. He's not enlisting but he is applying to graduate school in anthropology and hopes to work for a corporation someday in the developing world (where anthropogists are employed helping multinational corporations expand the market reach of such wonderful products as the Chicken McNugget)
While so many of the middle class white kiddies here got all into The One (who ran to the right of Edwards and even to some extent Hillary, not just Kucinich, in Iowa), those terrible left anarchs and Trots and other assorted bad and insufficiently "pragmatic" and "realiistic" "ideologues" around here (recently infiltrated by an Obamaist FBI snitch, we learned from the RNC 8) just plug away doing silly things like sustainable agirculture and counter-recruitment and other stuff like that. Imagine.
They are amused that I have (seemed to) care as much as I have about presidential politics over the last two years and they are right to be. I agree with them. It's a little silly sometimes. I don't really think the tasks of left true progressives are much if any different if The One is who John Nichols thinks he is or if he is who I think he is. Still, it is important not to have delusions and in fact very many of the progressives I speak to in IC and other places are in fact quite deluded about Obama and their delusion --- their refusal or inability to see him and the broader culture of quadrennial corporate-crafted candidate-centered-election speactacles "in the world of power as it really is" (to quote John Pilger) --- undermines their capacity to function as democratic citizens to some degree. Many "left" Obamaists are very realistic and without illusion. But many are not.
Some Obamaists are cynics who get all the bourgeois and imperial limits and love it; I've spoken to more than a few highlly privileged Obamaists who agree completely with any negative left judgement you could throw at candidate and president Obama and then say "that's why he's my guy. I hate radicals and populists and I hate you. I hope he sweeps you SOBs into the dustbin of history once and for all." (Which could happen).
Some Obamaists just saw him on TV and like him like they like Brad Pitt or Rachel Ray or The Rock.
There's all kinds of Obama fans.
To me Obama has been an alternately useful and dangerous (depending on the meaning you use) Stalking Horse. I'd better not elaborate
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Strange
By Davidson, Carl at Feb 02, 2009 13:33 PM
You know, one thing I find strange. I've worked in the Obama campaign and now in the Obama Alliance, for want of a better term, for some time now, and I have yet to meet anyone saying we should 'give Obama a pass' on anything--and I meet a lot of people. I hear things like, 'don't forget, he's still a politician, we have to keep the pressure on' or 'we got him in there, now we have to make him do the right thing' or 'we got to bring up the left flank, cover his back and push him to hit the right harder.' Maybe in the liberal policy wonk and blogger world they talk about giving passes, but not where I am.
I'm also webmaster for 'Progressives for Obama', and we don't have any problems making criticisms of Obama, from day one. We've published some of the best ones out there, from Gaza to Afghanistan to Iraq to any number of domestic issues. Sometimes we push him to do better, somes we just flat-out say he's wrong. And we support him where he's right. Moreover, we don't have much of a problem with the 'color question' making our points.
So what's the problem?
Here's where I think the difference lies; it's in having a view of who and what is the main enemy today. In my view, it's low-road speculative capital, global and national, the neoliberal supply siders, and neo-con unilateral hegemonism. That means we see Obama in the political center, especially its upper crust. He contends with the right; you can watch it every day, in how the House GOP supply siders are trying to bloc and gut the stimulus and recovery.
Now being in the center means his team also has elements of the left and right, and is pulled in both directions, and has little factions in both directions. I'd even guess that on some matters, Obama's of two minds himself.
Now some on the left see the main problem today as capitalism, period, no distinctions required, and as chief executive officer of the standing committee of capitalism, the US government, Obama's White House itself is the main enemy, and Obama's color is just a clever way for them to get over. Since our main task then is to take him down, and to keep taking them all down, one after the other, until we have ________ (Fill in your choice: socialism, communism, anarchism, PARECON, some combination of these with 'liberatory' as an adjective), then we have to unmask him as a phoney, and if he does something right, then it's just all the more devious, and we have to unmask it more. That's pretty much what I get from reading Glen Ford on Black Agenda report, and most of the newspapers in the country with 'socialist,' 'worker', 'revolution' or 'communist' in the title.
The problem is most left and progressive activists have more sense than this, and aren't bound by this ideological strait jacket. When the hard left is going about it's 'unmasking,' they're asking, 'What's wrong with these guys? Sure, Obama's got problems, but this is going off the deep end."
So that's it. We have very different underlying strategies and tactics. And as long as we do, it's going to bubble up as conflict in various ways. In addition, I still think a lot of the left has yet to come to terms with the implication of the persistence in this world of both oppressed and oppressor nations, including oppressed nationalities within oppressor nations, and how that plays out in a division of labor regarding tasks, but we'll leave that for another time or place.
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Re: Strange
By Servo, Tom at Feb 02, 2009 15:58 PM
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Re: Obama Gets Some Blood on His Hands
By Street, Paul at Feb 01, 2009 20:17 PM
Well said, Jokerman.
The color thing in regard to the ruling class’s use of (and investment in) the corporate “player” Obama is somewhat tricky to discuss. It is hard to talk about it all in an open and honest way without getting falsely accused by Obamaist hacks of being some kind of racist. The Davidson character has implied the charge in a few of his numerous past digs on me. The charge is absurd in light of my intense resume of militantly anti-racist speaking/ writing/publishing, my long history working for a black anti-racist organization, and the fact that I contribute to the militantly anti-racist, black-run zine Black Agenda Report.
By my observation (and by that of the distinguished black left political scientist Adolph Reed Jr.), the Obama campaign --- for which Davidson functioned as an Orwellian thought-cop on leftist Internet outlets (that’s my take, which he would of course dispute) ---- played a duplicitous game on color. It claimed to be above and beyond race and of course went to remarkable lengths to win white votes with official post-Civil Rights race-neutralism (and worse – the “black but not like Jesse” Obama went well over to the white side on many key questions) but it still kept the race card around to use against those who dared to substantively criticize Obama. I know all about the race game they were playing and how it is done. I’ve played it myself. Rev. Wright's unjustly battered reputation was the most well known victim, but the costs are much deeper. (It was very smart, by the way. It works.)
Without denying the shining historical and symbolic importance of a black family taking up residence in the White House (an unimaginable development until quite recently), we should realize that the Obama race card has been and is useful to U.S. elites in four interrelated ways: (1) helping keep domestic constituencies in check by making oppressed Americans more reluctant (as Jokerman suggests) than they would be otherwise to criticize and resist the new corporate-imperial White House ; (2) helping the foreign policy establishment "re-brand" the toxic American Empire Project in a predominantly non-white world; (3) helping the new president (a well-funded friend of Wall Street as well as a man of Empire) look more progressive than he actually is, thereby assisting the ruling class’s pacification-of-the-populace project (repressive de-sublimation and cooptation of majority progressive sentiments)…what better than the deceptive rebel’s clothing of the first black president to sell the full-blown taxpayer bailout of the Wall Street parasites and to make progress on “entitlement reform” and the like? (4) encouraging the new attachment of many within the electorate’s leftmost demographic – black Americans – to the corporate-imperial state.
Another racial downside is that the Obama success story (like predecessors Oprah and Condi Rice and Colin Powell) adds more fuel to the fire of the longstanding white majority sentiment that racism no longer poses significant barriers to racial equality and black advancement in supposedly post-racial America. “Look,” Wanda Sykes viciously told Conan O’Brian and a predominantly white studio audience last fall, “black folks don’t have any excuses anymore for being poor and stupid.” That’s a crude way of saying something you can here voiced in more refined terms by ferocious white commentators like Abigail Thernstrom, George Will and Charles Krauthammer: “now that we have a black president can people please stop talking once and for all about racism?”
I think a few white radicals want to say what I say on all this but are prevented from doing so by the fear of being falsely accused of politically incorrect race sentiments by people like my self-appointed ideological guardian from "Progressives For Obama." Folks like him naturally don’t aim the same charge – how could they? – at the many left black Americans who share my basic perspective (like the black radicals who write at Black Agenda Report) I'm less intimidated than others because (a) I’m just more personally reckless in the pursuit of truth (there’s no way around getting smeared and slandered when you decide to tell the truth) and (b) I’ve got a strong left record on and against white supremacy (better inoculation than most whites enjoy against the ridiculous charge of being racist because you dare to strongly criticize The One, as white left writer Greg Palast calls Obama)..
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Re:
By Servo, Tom at Feb 02, 2009 09:14 AM
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Reflection
By Street, Paul at Jan 27, 2009 10:59 AM
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Reflection
By Street, Paul at Jan 27, 2009 11:06 AM
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Re: Reflection
By Street, Paul at Jan 27, 2009 21:48 PM
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Marc Herold's Afghanistan body count - an update
By Street, Paul at Jan 28, 2009 12:26 PM
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Re: Marc Herold's Afghanistan body count - an update
By minot, Minot at Jan 28, 2009 19:54 PM
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Race-related reluctance to rip new prez
By Street, Paul at Jan 28, 2009 22:08 PM
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Re: Race-related reluctance to rip new prez
By Davidson, Carl at Jan 29, 2009 13:51 PM
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Re: Re: Race-related reluctance to rip new prez
By Street, Paul at Jan 30, 2009 10:19 AM
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Re: Re: Re: Race-related reluctance to rip new prez
By Davidson, Carl at Jan 30, 2009 12:34 PM
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Re: Re: Re: Re: Race-related reluctance to rip new prez
By Street, Paul at Jan 30, 2009 14:01 PM
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Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Race-related reluctance to rip new prez
By Davidson, Carl at Feb 01, 2009 06:41 AM
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Re: Race-related reluctance to rip new prez
By Servo, Tom at Feb 01, 2009 08:20 AM
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Race-related reluctance to rip new prez
By Ellis, John at Feb 03, 2009 17:31 PM
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By Shapiro, Tali at Jan 27, 2009 04:38 AM
That’s the problem with centrist jello- it can always jiggle to the right…
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Re: bloody hands
By minot, Minot at Jan 27, 2009 05:46 AM
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