Filed under: Fantasy, Age of Conan, Patches, News items
Age of Conan’s game director Craig Morrison has penned a ’state of the game’ letter for April, primarily to discuss progress on the upcoming patch 1.05. Undoubtedly the biggest piece of information to come out of the letter is the news that players will be able to create a new character that starts at level 50 when the patch hits. There are, of course, a couple of caveats to this; the option is only available to players that have a character who is level 50 or higher, and it only works once. Players who reach level 50 for the first time after the patch will also get their chance to roll a new 50 of any class, but it sounds like it’s a one-per-account offer, not per-character.
Morrison explained that the re-roll is being offered so that people can try out a new class with updated 1.05 feats and skills, without enduring the first 50 levels again. Some form of concession on feat re-training will also be given so that players can decide how to tackle the new options available to existing characters. Morrison leaves us with the hint that more news relating to character options will be revealed come May, around the time of AoC’s first anniversary.
AoC’s April game director letter: roll a new level 50 in the next patch originally appeared on Massively on Thu, 30 Apr 2009 11:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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The nation’s first Black president proceeds unmolested by the Left as he moves mountains of money in a crusade to save the investment banking class. Anti-war forces dissolve into nothingness as Barack Obama extends the U.S. occupation of Iraq indefinitely. A new theater of war called Af-Pak coagulates in South Asia, yet benumbed "progressives" praise their president as the consummate man of peace. "By demanding nothing of Obama and the Democrats except that they not technically be Republicans, our so-called "progressive" organizations effectively grant advance approval to whatever corporate and imperial policies the new president and the Democrats execute."
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Status QuObama: A Hundred Days of Fake-Progressive BS and Liberal-Left Surrender
by Paul Street
"The new White House, with its first black president, its first black Attorney General, and its first black Ambassador to the UN decided not to be present at the world’s leading forum to address international race relations."
Barack Obama’s media maven David Axelrod recently told the Los Angeles Times that "Barack Obama wasn’t elected to stand guard over the status quo; he was elected to change it." Insofar as Axelrod is right on why millions of voters supported Obama, the obvious question is "so what?" Obama was selected by the predominantly corporate and imperial establishment in advance precisely to, well, preserve the capitalist, imperial, and racial status quo.
THE "HIDDEN PRIMARY"
Every four years, many Americans are fooled into investing their hopes in an electoral process that does not deserve their trust. These voters are led by the dominant (so-called "mainstream") corporate media and the broader U.S. political culture and thought-control system to hope that a savior can be installed in the White House - someone who will raise wages, roll back war and militarism, provide universal and adequate health care, rebuild the nation’s infrastructure, produce high-paying jobs, fix the environmental crisis, reduce inequality, guarantee economic security, and generally make daily life more livable.
The dreams are regularly drowned in the icy waters of historical and political "reality." In the actuality of American politics and policy, the officially "electable" candidates are vetted in advance by what Laurence Shoup calls "the hidden primary of the ruling class." By prior Establishment selection, all of the "viable" presidential contenders are closely tied to corporate and military-imperial power in numerous and interrelated ways. They run safely within the narrow ideological and policy parameters set by those who rule behind the scenes to make sure that the rich and privileged continue to be the leading beneficiaries of the American system.
"All of the ‘viable’ presidential contenders are closely tied to corporate and military-imperial power in numerous and interrelated ways."
In its presidential as in its other elections, U.S. "democracy" is "at best" a "guided one; at its worst it is a corrupt farce, amounting to manipulation, consistent with the larger population projects of propaganda in a controlled and trivialized electoral process. It is an illusion," Shoup claims - correctly in my opinion - "that real change can ever come from electing a different ruling class-sponsored candidate." (Laurence H. Shoup, "The Presidential Election 2008," Z Magazine, February 2008).
While he advances the illusion of change through corporate-controlled elections with a special flair, "Brand Obama" is no special or magical exception to this harsh reality.
As recent reports on Obama’s "first 100 days" make clear, the dominant (so-called "mainstream") corporate media is propagating the foolish notion that the new president has in fact acted impressively on his purported mandate to "change the status quo." The deeper reality of the new administration is straight out of Shoup: preservation of the existing order.
My article in last week’s Black Agenda Report (titled "Race Cowardice From the Top Down") was dedicated to Obama’s deep conservatism on race. This essay focuses on Obama service to the related and combined structures of American empire and capitalism, both of which are of course richly racialized.
OBAMA AND THE EMPIRE
The Occupation Lives On
Obama won his epic primary battle with Hillary Clinton largely because he was able to convince much of the Democratic Party’s liberal base to believe in the fairy tale that he was a strong and consistent opponent of George W. Bush and Hillary’s arch-criminal invasion of Iraq. The fantasy lives on. Reading the fine print on Obama’s Iraq plan, however, it is evident that he intends to sustain the occupation of that country into the indefinite future. He will keep at least 50,000 troops in Iraq well after the August 2010 combat troop withdrawal date he campaigned on.. Many of the troops who stay will be in combat units re-designated as "Advisory" brigades, a new classification that George Orwell would appreciate. Obama’s "withdrawal" plan "says nothing about the private contractors and mercenaries that are an essential part of the occupation and whose numbers may even be increased to cover functions previously provided by active-duty troops. …It will leave in place the world’s largest foreign embassy, as well as the world’s largest CIA foreign station, in Baghdad." The U.S will maintain critical control over Iraqi skies and a significant naval and air presence "over the horizon."
"It is evident that he intends to sustain the occupation of that country into the indefinite future."
So much for a rapid end to the occupation, long supported by the great majority of Iraqis, not to mention most Americans since 2005.
The Doctrine of Good Intentions
Recently, Obama added occupation insult to injury during his visit to so-called "Camp Victory" in Iraq. Consistent with his longstanding support for the Doctrine of America’s Good and Democratic Intentions on the global stage, Obama said that its time for the Iraqis to step up to the plate and "take responsibility" for the "democracy" and "sovereignty" the noble United States has so benevolently granted them. This was a nauseating thing to say more than six years into a brazenly imperial and petro-colonial invasion that Obama is finding ways to continue against the expressed will of the Iraqi people. Beyond the fact that Iraqis have been standing up against the foreign invaders in the name of national sovereignty since the beginning of the U.S. invasion, Obama’s claim of benevolent U.S intent is Orwellian in light of the unimaginable havoc we have wreaked in Mesopotamia, including more than 1 million killed, a vast out-exodus of the professional class and the near-collapse of Iraqi infrastructure, all following in the wake of an earlier devastating U.S. military attack and more than a decade of mass-murderous U.S.-led "economic sanctions. As the respected veteran Middle East journalist Nir Rosen recently said on Democracy Now two weeks ago, we’ve created a Hell in Iraq, not a free democracy.
Kooky Conspiracy Talk on "Af-Pak"
Meanwhile, Obama is increasing the level of imperial violence in Afghanistan and in nuclear Pakistan. He brushed off Afghanistan president Karzai’s plea for the U.S. to stop killing Afghans and for the U.S. to propose some sort of timeline for ending our illegal occupation of that country. Karzai’s minimal assertions of national independence have irked Obama, who is increasing the U.S. force presence in Afghanistan, a legendary graveyard of empires. Noam Chomsky reasonably expects Karzai to be placed under the supervision of a U.S. imperial surrogate who will essentially run the country from Washington.
"Obama is expanding the United States’ not-so covert war in Pakistan."
It would be nice to report that the real source of Obama’s irritation with Karzai was that the Afghan president recently signed a law that worsens the terrible oppression of women in Afghanistan. But when asked about that law, Obama made it clear that women’s right have little to do with his "new strategy" for Afghanistan, which is all about "defeat[ing] al Qaeda ."
At the same time, Obama is expanding the United States’ not-so covert war in Pakistan. As the Middle East expert and University of Michigan historian Juan Cole has been saying of late, Obama has bought into a recycled version of the crackpot Cold War conspiracy and "domino theory." In Obama’s "updated, al Qaida version" of the domino thesis, Cole notes, "the Taliban might take Kuna Province, and then all of Afghanistan, and might again host al-Qaida, and might then threaten the shores of the United States."
Pakistan is added on to Afghanistan by Obama like Cambodia was added on to its neighbor Vietnam by President Nixon. This time however, the dangerous territorial expansion is openly acknowledged with Obama merging the two nations "into one theater of war, called Af-Pak" (Glen Ford).
As Cole observes, Obama’s call to arms is no more credible than Dick Cheney and John McCain’s raving about the danger of an "al-Qaida victory in Iraq." The Taliban and al Qaeda are nowhere close to being able to take over Afghanistan and Pakistan. If anything, Cole notes, the greatest thing working on the weak Pakistani Taliban’s behalf is the occurrence of U.S. Predator drone strikes on Pakistani territory, which help the extremists seem like sympathetic victims to parts of the Pakistani public.
Standard Double Standards on the Middle East, Race, and Cuba
Obama is continuing core Bush policies on Israel and Iran. He refuses to pay honest attention to the legitimate grievances of the Palestinian people, about whose fate he stayed sickeningly mute during the savage U.S.-Israel assault on Gaza last December and January - an attack that conveniently ended on the day of his inauguration.
"Obama refuses to pay honest attention to the legitimate grievances of the Palestinian people."
Obama lectures Arabs on their duty to "unclench [their] fist[s] but says nothing about Israel’s murderously employed fists and refuses to acknowledge the well-known fact that Israel is a heavily nuclearized state in the Middle East. He continues the Bush administration practice of ignoring the Palestinians’ elected government and refuses to acknowledge that continuing illegal Israeli incursions into the West Bank make the official U.S. goal of a two-state Israel-Palestine solution impossible.
Obama is continuing the basic Bush policy of encouraging an anti-Iran alliance between the Israeli occupation state and so-called "moderate" Arab states. These "moderate" states include Egypt’s atrocious dictatorship and Saudi Arabia, the most reactionary government on Earth. All of these states continue to be lavishly funded by the U.S.
Obama has followed in George W. Bush’s footsteps by boycotting the second international United Nations conference on racism, the so-called "Durban II" gathering in Switzerland this month and for the same two basic reasons as Bush. First, the conference dares to raise the issue of slavery reparations. Second, the conference dares to discuss the racism experienced by Arab Palestinians under the apartheid-like system in the occupied territories. And so the new White House, with its first black president, its first black Attorney General, and its first black Ambassador to the UN decided not to be present at the world’s leading forum to address international race relations.
Meanwhile, Obama resorts to off-the-books, so-called supplemental funding of the colonial Iraq and Afghanistan Wars - a deceptive war-financing method that Bush pioneered and which Obama said he would abandon.
He sustains the crushing 47-year trade embargo and the American travel ban on Cuba, rejecting broad Latin American sentiment and even the opinion of some Republicans. He insists on trying to punish and undermine Cuban socialism, which can never be forgiven for daring to modernize and develop outside and against the supervision of Uncle Sam.
A Tortuous Record on Habeas Corpus and Torture
Then there’s Obama’s interesting record on human rights and torture. Last February the Obama administration filed a federal brief that embraced the Bush administration’s position against habeas corpus as long as the "enemy combatants" are seized abroad and flown to the Bagram Air Force prison in Afghanistan instead of to Guantanamo.
Two Thursday ago, the Obama Justice Department expressed its determination to protect CIA torturers from prosecution after it released memorandums on the Bush administration’s extreme torture practices. Those memorandums only saw the light of day because of a lawsuit by the American Civil Liberties Union. By announcing in advance that it will not go after the direct torturers, the Obama administration has destroyed its ability to use the threat of prosecution as a way of getting CIA personnel to testify against the top officials who formulated the Bush torture policy. It also disturbingly echoes the Nazi’s defense of human right perpetrators on the grounds that the criminals were just following orders.
"The Obama administration has destroyed its ability to use the threat of prosecution as a way of getting CIA personnel to testify against the top officials."
As the Justice Department released the memos spelling out brutal CIA interrogation methods a couple weeks ago, Obama said that "nothing will be gained by spending our time and energy laying blame for the past" (New York Times, April 17, 2009). This from a former and supposedly liberal law professor, someone who should be expected to understand that one investigates and punishes past human rights crimes precisely in order to discourage and prevent their occurrence in the present and future. It’s true that Obama subsequently seemed to relent a bit in the face of a wave of civil-libertarian disgust and said that his Attorney General Eric Holder might want to investigate the Bush administration lawyers who approved torture. But don’t look for much from Holder. As one of my regular ZNet readers recently noted, "Holder was a key figure in the early days of Bush’s ‘dark side’ policies, breaking ranks (if one can call the weak Democratic Party opposition ‘ranks’) to support Bush’s denial of Geneva protections to detainees."
As the New York Times reported nine days ago, citing top White House aides, moreover, Obama "opted to disclose the memos because his lawyers worried that they had a weak case for withholding them and much of the information had already been published in the New York Review of Books, in a memoir by George Tenent, the former CIA Director, and even in a 2006 speech by President George W. Bush." (New York Times, April 21, 2009, A1).
Now we have Obama and the Democratic leadership in the Senate signaling that they will block efforts to set up an independent commission to investigate the Bush torture policy. Obama spokesperson Robert Gibbs justifies this sickening position by saying that "this is not a time for retribution" and that "we’re all best suited looking forward."
"My Most Agonizing Decision"
Revealingly enough, when Obama went to Langley last week to reassure CIA staffers of his safety to their interests, Obama said that his decision to release the torture memos was the "most agonizing" call of his presidency so far. I heard that line on the evening news and turned off my television. "Wow," I said. "The was his ‘most agonizing’ decision so far - reluctantly agreeing under legal compulsion to release documents showing a previous administration’s human right crimes. Not his decision to launch missiles and expand illegal wars certain to kill children and other civilians in Pakistan and Afghanistan. Not his decision to hand out yet more hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars to Wall Street parasites while poverty rises across the nation and the world. Not his decision to increase the war and military budget while destitution expands at home and abroad.
OBAMA AND CAPITALISM
"Keeping Perpetrators Afloat"
Turning to the home front, Obama refuses to advance the obvious cost-cutting and social democratic health care solution - single-payer national health insurance (improved Medicare for all). Consistent with his recent description of himself as a "New [that is corporate] Democrat," Obama will spend untold trillions of dollars on further taxpayer handouts to the giant Wall Street firms who spent millions on his campaign and who drove the economy over the cliff. He is too attached to those firms and to their so-called "free market" ideology to undertake the elementary bank nationalizations and public financial restructuring that are obviously required to put the nation’s credit system on a sound and socially responsible basis. Obama’s plan to guarantee the financial, insurance, and real estate industries’ toxic, hyper-inflated assets while keeping existing Wall Street management in place amounts to a giant effort (according to liberal economist James K. Gailbraith) to "keep perpetrators afloat" at a cost of at least one trillion taxpayer dollars. The program amounts to what leading liberal economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman calls a "coin flip" in which "investors win if its heads and taxpayers lose if its tails." The government (identical to the people in a functioning democracy) takes more than 90 percent of the risk but private investors reap at least half the reward.
Fake-Progressive Chest-Pounding/ "No Peace Dividend"
Obama pounds his chest about executive bonuses and makes carefully orchestrated visits expressing concern about poverty and job-loss to places like Pomona, California and Elkhart, Indiana. But it’s all a public relations game crafted to provide fake-progressive cover for his corporate, Wall Street agenda and for his related commitment to the unmentionable 1$ trillion-a-year Pentagon budget, which pays for more than 760 bases across more than 130 nations and accounts for nearly half the military spending on earth - all in the name of "defense." The leading Wall Street investment firm and bailout recipient Morgan Stanley reported one day after Obama’s election victory that Obama [quote] "has been advised and agrees that there is no peace dividend."
"Change Means More of the Same"
Early last April the New York Times published an article with an ironic title: "In Cuba, Change Means More of the Same." This "news" item reports that "rather than dismantling Cuba’s socialist framework," Cuba’s President Raul Castro "seems to be trying to make it work more efficiently." Castro, the Times reports, seeks to keep power concentrated "at the top." But what is U.S. President Barack Obama - Mr. "Change" himself - trying to accomplish other than to make the American corporate profits system "work more efficiently" without "dismantling the [capitalist] framework" and with power (and wealth) still concentrated "at the top?"
"It’s all a public relations game crafted to provide fake-progressive cover for his corporate, Wall Street agenda."
As the Times acknowledged last March in an article titled "English-Speaking Capitalism on Trial," Obama and his neoliberal partner Gordon Brown, the British Prime Minister, have "focused on ways of revitalizing the [existing] system…. Even as both men have embarked on enormous increases in public-sector spending," Times correspondents John Burns and Landon Thomas noted, "they have maintained that the solutions to the crisis lie in reawakening the markets and recapitalizing the banks rather than tearing at the system’s foundations. And both, when they respond to private anger at the private sector, have seemed more geared to managing anger than stoking it."
As the prolific Marxist geographer David Harvey recently observed on "Democracy Now," "what [the Obama team is] trying to do is to reinvent the same system" - to "reconstitute the same sort of capitalism we have had over and over again over the last thirty years in a slightly more regulated, benevolent form" that doesn’t "challenge the fundamentals"
"Conservative Solutions to Radical Problems"
Meanwhile, Obama’s tepid and undersized stimulus plan is dysfunctionally over-loaded with business-friendly tax cuts and too short on labor-intensive projects to put people to work right away. He says nothing or close to it about the overdue labor law reform he campaigned on, the Employee Free Choice Act, which ought, as Noam Chomsky recently argued, to be at the heart and center of any reasonably progressive economic recovery program. Worse, Obama speaks in support of the anti-union, teacher-bashing, and test-based corporate education agenda, advocating teacher "merit pay" and charter schools. He makes a public visit (in support of his stimulus bill) to the headquarters of Caterpillar, a provider of bulldozers for illegal Israeli settlements. Caterpillar was also the first large U.S. manufacturer in decades to break a major strike with scabs.
"Obama says nothing or close to it about the overdue labor law reform he campaigned on, the Employee Free Choice Act."
Praised by political and media elites for the skill with which he and his handlers are "managing [betrayed popular] expectations," Obama fails to advance elementary and urgently needed progressive measures like a moratorium on foreclosures, a capping of credit card interest rates and finance charges, and the rollback of capital income tax rates to 1981 (not just 1993) levels. He won’t let the government enter into the business of making direct mortgage loans. Even before the inauguration, Obama committed himself to so-called "entitlement reform," code language for claiming to cut the federal deficit by chipping away at Medicare and Social Security - by taking a pound of flesh from the incomes and health of senior citizens.
His federal restructuring of the auto industry is bound to lead to yet more wage and pension cuts for current and retired auto workers. His refusal to undertake such restructuring on Wall Street, which collapsed the economy, reflects the enormous political power of the street’s great firms but many labor progressive also think it may reflect the fact there are no great institutions of working class power like the UAW to be undermined on Wall Street. Consistent with that suspicion, Obama’s aides defend him against the charge that he is wimpy when it comes to confronting powerful institutions by praising him for "picking fights" with "main components of the Democratic base, like organized labor" (New York Times, April 19, 2009, Sec.1, p.1) - as if unions instead of capitalist corporations were the real source of money and power in Washington.
The liberal-progressive economist Robert Kuttner, who hoped passionately for a "progressive" Obama presidency, is sorely disappointed, noting that the new chief executive is advancing "conservative solutions to radical problems." Kuttner’s thwarted dreams for Obama are summarized in a rapidly written book published before the election under the revealing (see below) title "Obama’s Challenge."
Socialism for the Rich and Capitalism for the Rest
Meanwhile, a rising number of citizens in "the world’s richest nation" face new challenges in the struggle simply to keep a roof over their heads and food in their bellies. Badly damaged by a vicious 1990s welfare "reform" (elimination) that Obama has repeatedly praised as a great policy success, the nation’s public family cash assistance system is too weak to match the expansion of destitution across America even as the new president advances a new level of Wall Street Welfare. Tent cities, modern-day Hoovervilles for the evicted and foreclosed, have sprung up in more than a dozen U.S. cities. Foreclosures dipped briefly while the mortgage companies waited for the details on Obama’s tepid housing plan. But foreclosures are surging again and unemployment continues to expand as Obama speaks of "glimmers of [economic] hope" and while Fed Chief Bernake claims to discern "green shoots" of recovery.
"Wall Street paychecks and bonuses are soaring back to 2007 levels."
And yet last Sunday’s New York Times reports on page one that pay at the nation’s leading investment banks, after falling off last year, is, yes, bouncing back to stratospheric heights. Wall Street paychecks and bonuses are soaring back to 2007 levels, thanks in no small measure to the fact that the bankers can borrow cheaply, with all those federal guarantees. It’s party time again on the street, thanks to the $600 billion committed under the TARP, the vast credit lines proffered by the Fed, expanded F.D.I.C. guarantees, the government bailout of AIG, and the like…thanks to not-so Temporary Assistance for not so Needy Banks,
A recent glowing Los Angeles Times assessment of Obama’s first hundred Days reproduces an interesting statement from Obama to the leaders of the banking industry last March. As the financial chieftains began to complain to him about the public’s failure to understand their industry’s need for high levels of compensation, Obama cut them off. "Be careful how you make those statements," Obama said. "The public isn’t buying that. My administration is the only thing between you and the pitchforks."
As a student who told me about this Los Angeles Times story writes, "The question for me (and I assume for many leftists) is why is Obama using his administration to protect the bankers from the angry rabble (us)? Why doesn’t his administration simply address the people’s needs and leave the bankers to their fate? These are, of course, rhetorical questions. We know that he is serving to protect and legitimate the highly undemocratic and destructive class system of state capitalism through another crisis."
"What’s the Dollar Value of a Starry-Eyed Idealist?"
It’s not for nothing that Obama received a record-setting $38 million from the financial, real estate, and insurance industries in the last election cycle, including close to $1 million from Goldman Sachs alone. Government Sachs and Morgan Stanley and AIG are not in the business of handing over the White House to progressive enemies of Empire and Inequality, Incorporated.
"Morgan Stanley and AIG are not in the business of handing over the White House to progressive enemies."
"It’s not always clear what Obama’s financial backers want," Ken Silverstein noted in the fall of 2006, "but it seems safe to conclude that his campaign contributors are not interested merely in clean government and political reform - a reasonable judgment given well-known facts on the purposes behind election finance at the upper levels. "On condition of anonymity," Silverstein reported, "one Washington lobbyist I spoke with was willing to point out the obvious: that big donors would not be helping out Obama if they didn’t see him as a ‘player.’ The lobbyist added: ‘What’s the dollar value of a starry-eyed idealist?’"
The Invisible Color of the Crisis
Two and a half years later, the crisis of black and Latino communities deepens with special pain and invisibility. Following the usual racial pattern in the long history of American business cycles, the Great Recession is hitting people of color harder than it is hitting whites. The rising official black poverty and unemployment rates continue (as usual) to hover around double that of whites.
This "little" problem is rarely discussed in the "mainstream" political and media culture. It doesn’t help, of course, that the new administration stays militantly silent on the nation’s savage racial inequalities and the institutional racism that continues to feed those disparities in the age of Obama, consistent with the extreme race-neutralism of the Obama campaign (see Paul Street, "
Race Cowardice from the Top Down," Black Agenda Report. April 22, 2009) - this even after Obama’s technically black Attorney General made a speech (last February) arguing that the U.S. in a "nation of cowards" on race.
"The new administration stays militantly silent on the nation’s savage racial inequalities."
Domestic Private Assault Weapons Live On
With rising economic insecurity, the population becomes more and more dangerously unraveled. Domestic gun violence is in the rise and yet even as we endure a record epidemic of mass shootings, the "pragmatic" Obama has recently suggested that he will abandon yet another campaign promise by failing to fight in Congress to renew the ban on assault weapons that expired in 2004.
LEFT" SURRENDER: OUR CHALLENGE, NOT OBAMA’S
"We Were Warned"
Progressive activists and intellectuals are right to be angered about the new president’s short but already clear record of centrist imperial and state-capitalist governance and "expectation management." But as Naomi Klein noted some weeks ago, they have no right to be disappointed or surprised. Obama’s post-election trajectory is thoroughly predictably given well-known limits and incentive in the dominant, corporate-crafted U.S. political culture and party system and in light of numerous warnings about the Obama phenomenon that various Left activists and intellectuals over recent years.
As Scott Horton noted last March on
Antiwar.com, "those who bought into the slogans ‘Hope’ and ‘Change’ last fall should have read the fine print. We were warned."
Indeed, candidate Obama’s speeches to elite establishment bodies like the Council on Foreign Relations and his presentations to institutions like NASDAQ and wealth funders and newspaper editorial boards sent strong signals of his basic underlying safety to - and belief in - dominant domestic and global hierarchies and doctrines.
"Obama has consistently surrounded himself with elite agents of corporate and imperial power."
From the start of his campaign and through his cabinet selections and appointments, moreover, Obama has consistently surrounded himself with elite agents of corporate and imperial power, people like James Jones, Rahm Emmanuel, Lawrence Summers and Timothy Geithner. Obama’s claim that he will provide the "vision" to move such corporate and imperial operatives in a "progressive" direction is like a baseball manager claiming that he’s going to build a team based on speed and defense with a roster full of clumsy, slow-footed 280-pound power hitters.
"Incapable of Action or In Obama’s Pocket"
Furthermore, progressives need to take a certain degree of responsibility for Obama’s behavior. The absence of spine and intelligence on the part of what passes for a Left in the U.S. is quite remarkable. By demanding nothing of Obama and the Democrats except that they not technically be Republicans, our so-called "progressive" organizations effectively grant advance approval to whatever corporate and imperial policies the new president and the Democrats execute.
Real progressive change is our challenge, not Obama’s. But many of us on the left don’t seem terribly interested in meeting the test. As John Judis has argued in even the centrist journal The New Republic, a major reason that Obama has been able to go forward with a conservative and inadequate economic plan "is that there is no popular left movement agitating for him to go" further…"Sure," Judis writes, "there are leftwing intellectuals …beating the drums for nationalizing the banks and for a $1 trillion-plus stimulus. But I," Judis argued, "am…referring to movements that stir up trouble and get people angry. Instead, what exists of a popular left is either incapable of action or in Obama’s pocket." By Judis’ analysis, the U.S. labor movement and groups like "Moveon.Org" are repeating the same "mistake that political groups often make" - the mistake of "subordinating their concern about issues to their support for the Democratic Party and its leading politician."
"What exists of a popular left is either incapable of action or in Obama’s pocket."
The antiwar movement is disbanding itself, essentially defeated by the nation’s first black president. The Congressional Quarterly claims that the anti-war movement is paying the price of "its own success." But that’s baloney. As BAR’s Glen Ford points out. "The anti-war movement has hit rock-bottom because of its failure to challenge this particular president, an imperialist with charm, a warmonger with a winning smile. Obama has whipped them, but good."
This is exactly what John Pilger and I predicted would result from an Obama presidency last year - the abject surrender and pacification of the antiwar movement based on the fairly tale notion of Obama as an antiwar president.
Meanwhile, the dominant U.S. labor federations are on board with Obama’s inadequate corporate health care and economic stimulus plans.. They remain remarkably respectful and relatively mute in their public commentary on Obama’s apparent reluctance to push the EFCA. Grotesquely enough, SEIU president Andy Stern is an open and vicious opponent of single-payer national health insurance, itself supported by most Americans.
Meanwhile, the left Democratic journal The Nation has absurdly called Obama’s tepid budget proposal "an audacious plan to transform America" in progressive ways. Progressive filmmaker Michael Moore proclaimed absurdly that Obama’s auto restructuring plan sends the message that "the government of, by, and for the people is in charge here, not big business."
"You Can Carp and Gripe"
According to the liberal historian Alan Lichtman, assessing Obama’s First Hundred Days for two Los Angeles Times reporters, "you can carp and gripe. But you really have to go back as far as Franklin Roosevelt for this much coming out of a newly elected president." Besides forgetting the example of Lyndon Johnson, Lichtman elegantly obliterates the question of the empire- and inequality-friendly content and power-preserving nature of what it is exactly that is and isn’t coming out of the White House. The liberal academic’s pithy comment also managed to identify substantive criticism of the new administration as negativistic fault-finding and complaining - a standard charge against anyone who dares to criticize concentrated power from the left.
"Progressives Can Only Hope…"
"The most progressive aspects of the New Deal owed their existence to working class protest."
Leading left-liberal Democratic economists/public intellectuals Robert Kuttner and Paul Krugman hope for "a new New Deal" under Obama. They fail, however, to mention the significant extent to which the most progressive aspects of the New Deal owed their existence to working class protest and to related left-wing activism during the 1930s. In a New York Times column titled "Franklin Delano Obama" six days after the election, Krugman wrote that "Mr. Obama’s chances of leading a new New Deal depend largely on whether his short-term economic plans are sufficiently bold. Progressives," Krugman counseled, "can only hope that he has the necessary audacity."
Just yesterday (I am writing on the morning of April 28, 2009), Krugman said the following at the end of a column that criticized Wall Street bankers for believing that they will soon be able to return to their pre-2008 norm of making outrageous profits off other people’s money: "We can only hope that our leaders prove them wrong, and carry through with real reform."
In "Obama’s Challenge," Kuttner hoped that the onset of "the greatest economic crisis since the Great Depression," will lead Obama to shows his colors as "that rare transformational leader" who "educates" the "people on behalf of expansive uses of progressive government" through the "force of [his] own character,"
Progressives can only hope that the great, wise, and wonderful wizard of Obama can have the audacity to save the day? Hello?
"Only When it Has Encountered Rebellion From Below"
Krugman and Kuttner might want to take a look at Howard Zinn’s bestselling volume A People’s History of the United States or at Francis Fox Piven and Richard Cloward’s classic study Poor Peoples’ Movement: How They Succeed and Why They Fail, to review some elementary lessons on how big progressive change occurs. These studies demonstrate in rich historical detail how direct action, social disruption, and the threat of radical change from the bottom up forced social and political reform benefiting working- and lower-class and black people during the 1930s and the 1960s. They show the critical role played by grassroots social movements and popular resistance in educating presidents and the broader power elite on the need for change. As Zinn noted two springs ago, "The Democratic Party has broken with its historic conservatism, its pandering to the rich, its predilection for war, only when it has encountered rebellion from below, as in the Thirties and the Sixties."
As Obama himself (along with John Edwards) repeatedly noted during the campaign, in a comment that has not fallen from his lips since he reached the White House, "change doesn’t happen from the top down. Change happens from the bottom up." And here we might add that change from the bottom up happens through the painstaking creation and expansion of grassroots social forces and organizations beneath and beyond the great quadrennial corporate-crafted mass marketed narrow-spectrum and candidate centered electoral and media extravaganzas that pass for the only politics that matter in the United States.
Paul Street (
paulstreet99@yahoo.com) is a political commentator and author in Iowa City, IA. He is the author of
Empire and Inequality: America and the World Since 9/11 (Paradigm, 2004);
Segregated Schools: Educational Apartheid in the Post-Civil Rights Era (Routledge, 2005);
Racial Oppression in the Global Metropolis: A Living Black Chicago History (Rowman & Littlefied, 2007), and
Barack Obama and the Future of American Politics (Paradigm, 2008).
by BAR columnist michael hureaux perez“KRS One gave the best definition when he said rap is something you do, hip hop is something you live,” says Alonzo Ybarra, a prime mover in Seattle’s chapter of the Zulu Nation. “ Ybarra is determined to chart a positive course for the chapter, but he’s realistic about hip hop’s vulnerabilities. “I think rap in general has been commercialized, it’s probably one of the easiest cultural art forms to take on, certainly you don’t have to be in particularly great shape to think that you can rap, you certainly don’t have to be in very good mental condition to make words rhyme, so it’s no wonder that, very often in pretty much any community you go to in the United States, you’ll go out and hear rot as rap.”
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Eshu’s blues: Zulu Nation in Seattle Takes a Big Step Forward
by BAR columnist michael hureaux perez
“The positive images and messages of hip hop don’t all reach the mainstream, they’re not pushed through the media, and they’re not celebrated by the mass culture at all.”
Somewhere it’s been observed that when an empire begins to collapse, we can expect alchemy to appear in its ghettos. The creation of light within leaden experience rings true for most urban youth in this country – and internationally, for that matter – in the cultural forms created by Hip Hop DJs, MCs, Graffiti Writers and B-Boys. If anyone ever knew about making a way out of no way, it was DJ Kool Herc, Afrika Bambaataa, Grandmaster Flash and the many others who created Hip Hop in the rubble of the South Bronx thirty years ago.
The longtime energetic pioneers and associates of this cultural trend make up a national unity of locals, or chapters that call themselves the Universal Zulu Nation, which, loosely speaking, is an assembly of street artists who have forever talked the gospel of personal discovery and autonomy over outward political organization as the key to cultural renewal. Whatever roles they openly take on as the bankster empire moves towards its penultimate savagery, Hip Hop artists are and will be some of the more important urban leaders to emerge in the coming period – even when they don’t personally identify themselves as such. Our times will require the leadership and wisdom of people who know how to make a way out of no way.
“Alonzo Ybarra, or Big Zo, as he is known to his compatriots, was a central organizer of the Hip Hop Summit.”
Several weeks ago, the Zulu chapter in Seattle (
206 Zulu) hosted a national Hip-Hop summit, which involved the energies of local Hip Hop artists and a roster of legends in the disciplines of Hip Hop artistry; dance, poetry, scratching and visual art. Ambitious in scope as a promotional venture, the summit also aimed to offer youth in Seattle and the King Country region a celebration of a way of life that seeks to rise above the contradictions of inner city experience. Alonzo Ybarra, or Big Zo, as he is known to his compatriots, was a central organizer of the Summit. He spent a little time one afternoon answering a few questions about the broader aims of the Zulu effort. This is part one of an interview that will run in two parts.
mhp: Tell us about Zulu Nation in Seattle.
Ybarra: The Zulu Nation has been around for 35 years, and it has always had a mission. The mission has changed a bit over that time, but basically its components are to protect the integrity of Hip Hop as a culture, one that embraces peace, unity, and having fun as a way of encouraging people to change negative into positive. So today you can find Zulu Nation chapters in Poland, Korea, Japan, the UK, and all over the United States. We were founded here about five years ago by King Khazm and his whole idea was to mobilize like minded hip hop artists and activists and supporters to accomplish a positive image of hip hop in the Seattle community. Traditionally, chapters celebrate anniversaries. We decided to act, bring the chapter together, remind people that we’re here. And so this fifth year anniversary, we decided to really step it up, push as far as we possibly could, to walk the ledge so to speak, in terms of organizing this event.
“You can find Zulu Nation chapters in Poland, Korea, Japan, the UK, and all over the United States.”
mhp: This next question is pretty pedestrian, but it ties into this cultural integrity piece you mentioned. A lot of people don’t understand the difference between rap music and hip hop as a culture. Since you’ve already defined the defense or celebration of hip hop as a culture as part of the mission of Zulu Nation, could you take a second and break that down?
Ybarra: KRS One gave the best definition when he said rap is something you do, hip hop is something you live. There might be a whole lot of brothers out there writing lyrics on a lined pad who write some rhymes and spit them out on a tape recorder to a beat and call themselves rappers, but who have no ties or experience in hip hop culture. And how that might come out, for example, is in making a record that comes out making music that when it’s listened to, could be perceived as anti-human, negative, celebrating the worst in humanity, celebrating anti-social behavior and murder. Which is not to say that gangsta rap, as we now know it, stands completely outside of hip hop, it knew its foundations in hip hop. But the whole point of gangsta rap in the eighties and nineties, was to document the realties of life on the street, don’t do as we say we’re doing; there’s sort of a moral lesson involved in it.
I think rap in general has been commercialized, it’s probably one of the easiest cultural art forms to take on, certainly you don’t have to be in particularly great shape to think that you can rap, you certainly don’t have to be in very good mental condition to make words rhyme, so it’s no wonder that, very often in pretty much any community you go to in the United States, you’ll go out and hear rot as rap. But hip hop as a culture, the rapper mcs, tend to be bound by a love for the culture, they come from all walks of life, they represent different perspectives, their music is very diverse, there’s no pigeon holing of things, everyone tends to fall back on an idea of respect. You definitely can tell an mc who has been proud of the culture because they’re multi-talented, they are more than just rappers in the studio, they are performers, they can spontaneously move a crowd, they can become the middle man between the dj and the crowd at a party, which elevates the enjoyment of everyone at a party, they are positive people.
“You can find Zulu Nation chapters in Poland, Korea, Japan, the UK, and all over the United States.”
mhp: Maybe you’ll unpack this business of what the “positive” is for me a little more now. I have some small exposure to hip hop culture, and don’t know anything about it really, but what I have seen from some of the guys I’ve seen up in this over the last 15, 16 years is that it contains pretty universal elements, a few taken from what used to be called “secret societies,” so this business of the positive: is that a spiritual feature, is there a political philosophy beyond the party or celebration? Could you be called a secret society, or are you more open than that?
Ybarra: There are certain actions that are kept private for good reasons, but I wouldn’t say that we fall into the category at all of a secret society because what we strive to do is be out in front of the public doing good things. So it seems to me that if you were a secret society, you’d be striving not to be seen so much. There might be times when we have to have members-only meetings, that doesn’t mean that it’s a secret society, but here in Seattle, we have a monthly meeting, and that meeting is always kept open to the public. It’s no big problem. So if anyone wants to come into the Zulu Chapter, bring issues to the forefront, maybe sometimes people will come to our meetings to propose that we get involved in something they’re doing, something to that effect, and we’ll work with them.
But, I think there are lessons that anyone can go too far, for example, there are lessons that we call public lessons and there are others that people can find that are passed down from the beginning, by the founders of the Zulu Nation, that are messages to the followers to keep quiet, it’s almost like parables or something, I guess the best way to describe those lessons are as words of wisdom, once you understand them, they should reinforce the goodness, which is what it’s all about. The idea would be that there are some people in the chapter, there’s a lot of people in hip hop in general who didn’t necessarily get the best educational opportunities, so the quieter elements of the chapter are there to give people a chance to stop and reflect, think a little about the bigger human ideas, to contemplate larger concepts. You can call this spiritual, you can call it political (laughs), I definitely don’t like to pigeonhole it.
“What we’re focused on the most is trying to figure out how to make this chapter accountable to the community.”
It means different things to different people, but it’s universal, meaning there’s no dominant religious angle involved. There’s no doubt if you do research you’ll find there are a lot of people at the forefront, putting a lot of political and spiritual stuff together, and they share that, but I don’t spend as much time focusing on that sort of thing as I do focusing on what we do here in Seattle. And what we’re focused on the most is trying to figure out how to make this chapter accountable to the community, and as active as possible without burning ourselves out doing community service.
mhp: As regards community service, once of the concerns you and I have spoken about recently as you and your folks have been organizing this summit has been the emergence of the small gang war that was going on here for a few weeks. At one point, you were speaking of the potential of hip hop culture in intervention with youth violence. Is that one of the things that was brought to the table?
Ybarra: Well, you know, in commercial music, one of the ideas that is pushed through the mass media, commercial media, violence, anti-social behavior is glorified, there’s definitely a lot of negative energies being pushed upon young people. There’s got to be a reason for this, I mean, obviously you can’t blame any one thing, you can’t blame just the media or just music for the way young people behave, it’s just as much the fault of a situation wherein people are having to live with poverty, there’s no jobs, obviously these things play a part in the escalation of violence. And a lot of people in this town would like to tie this mess to hip hop. In fact, it has nothing to do with hip hop. If a kid decides to kill a kid, it has very little or nothing to do with hip hop.Anything from mental illness, completely falling off the planet emotionally and psyche wise, these things are real, and the last thing a lot of kids like this are thinking about is a rap song.
“If a kid decides to kill a kid, it has very little or nothing to do with hip hop.”
At the same time, kids who join a gang, or aim to do violence, they’re going down a path. And as they’re going down that path, they encounter music and images that celebrate that path. Whereas, the positive images and messages of hip hop don’t all reach the mainstream, they’re not pushed through the media, and they’re not celebrated by the mass culture at all. There are various reasons for that, I think most of it has to do with, at some point corporate America decided they didn’t want to support positive images of black people, people who lean to celebration of the worst sides of gangsta rap, celebration of negativity just to be negative.
But here in Seattle, what the Zulus wanted to do was set positive examples, the best things we can do and bring to this town with its small growing music scene. But there’s not enough people in this town, in this city, in this government, in our school system, supporting the possibility that positive hip hop can exist. So we took it upon ourselves to put together a demonstration of what we can do without any direct support from these institutions. We wanted to make the event free We had to take it upon ourselves to fundraise, to put together a weekend of activities all rooted in hip hop culture and keep it free, so that wide numbers of youth could come in and experience that kind of energy.
“At some point corporate America decided they didn’t want to support positive images of black people.”
mhp: Who did come forward to support you all? Was there anybody at all from media, were there corporate sponsors of any kind, what about labor or community organizations?
Ybarra: We had a couple of corporate donors, some of whom wanted it to be kept on the quiet, as they didn’t think it fit their marketing, but we didn’t care, just the fact that they were giving us money was a good thing. We got fairly good support from the city, indirectly, in that we were part of Festival Sundiata so we were approached by some folks from Festival Sundiata, which is a large black cultural festival in Seattle. But I don’t know that we got any support from the city directly. A lot of persons, small businesses that have connections to hip hop came out for us, but no, I wouldn’t say we got any union or labor support, though we did put some calls early on out there.
mhp: I sent a few emails out myself asking for support of the hip hop summit effort from factions in black organized labor, one of which included the press package you all created, to the local leadership of the A. Phillip Randolph Institute in the King County Labor Council, but I got no replies or acknowledgement from anyone in APRI and you certainly didn’t. Did you get any support from James Bible of the NAACP or the Urban League?
Ybarra: No, not from James or the NAACP – though James has been to some of our events in the past and in fairness to the NAACP, they were working on a big legal thing in town much of the time we were preparing. The Urban League, no. Labor unions, no. On the flip side, I suppose we could have been more aggressive in seeking that kind of support, but we had to execute this thing, and we didn’t have time to do too much lobbying. We had a pretty nice press package that we sent out that went out all over, but that was pretty much all we could do to reach as many people as possible in the short time we had.
(End of part one)
BAR columnist michael hureaux perez is a writer, musician and teacher who lives in southwest Seattle, Washington. He is a longtime contributor to small and alternative presses around the country and performs his work frequently. Email to: tricksterbirdboy@yahoo.com
If you want to measure the distance between George Bush and Barack Obama on domestic political issues, Katrina provides the best test. What emerges is a startling continuity of policy toward New Orleans between the Republican and Democratic White Houses – especially regarding the fate of public housing. This continuity of policy “is particularly the case in New Orleans where public services have been or are on their way to being privatized or eliminated, and where, primarily due to this disaster capitalist agenda, almost half the population has been unable to return home, disproportionately female, black and, poor.”
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Has Change Come to Post-Katrina New Orleans?
by Jay Arena
“The gap between the rhetoric of change, and continuity in practice, may be most glaring in post-Katrina New Orleans.”
As people in the U.S. and around the world make their evaluation of President Barack Obama’s first one-hundred days, many – that is, those that truly wanted a break from the racist, militarist, anti-working class policies of the Bush regime – are coming to the conclusion that the “change” his campaign promised seems to have turned into “more of the same.” An examination of his substantive policies, from the continued military occupation of Iraq and expanded wars in Afghanistan and Pakistan, to the trillions more to bailout Wall Street while a promised health care plan is put on the back burner, to an unwillingness to prosecute criminals, from George Bush on down, that carried out torture, underscores the extent of continuity, rather than change, embodied by the administration of the United States’ first African American president.
Yet, you might ask, does Obama’s track record of continuity over substantive change extend to even still-devastated New Orleans? Evaluating what is happening in New Orleans is a particularly significant measure of the new president since the city became so emblematic of everything that was wrong with the U.S. under Bush. In fact, even Bush’s own aides, such as Scott McClellan, have acknowledged that Katrina and Bush’s response was a key turning point in the administration’s descent. Thus, evaluating what change – or lack thereof – the Obama administration has introduced to New Orleans provides an important window into the political character of the new regime in Washington. In fact the record shows, as I will elaborate, the gap between the rhetoric of change, and continuity in practice, may be most glaring in post-Katrina New Orleans.
Obama, Public Housing, and the Racist Disaster Capitalism Agenda
The central thrust of the Bush administration’s post-Katrina “reconstruction” plan—and shared, to a great degree by state and local officials, Democrat and Republican, black and white, alike—has been to use the disaster as an opportunity to privatize and eliminate such vital public services as education, housing and health care. The dismantling of the public sector is central to what many call “disaster capitalism” where corporations, and their public servants, use the disruption and disorientation produced by a disaster among the working class to grab and pillage public resources, award sweetheart contracts, and to lift labor, environmental or any other constraints on profit making.
“The dismantling of the public sector is central to what many call “disaster capitalism.”
The Obama administration has not deviated fundamentally from this agenda, with their stance toward public housing being a prime example. To understand the level of continuity we need to briefly review Bush’s post-Katrina policy toward public housing in New Orleans. At the time of the storm New Orleans had about 7,000 public housing apartments, down by about half following the Clinton administration’s so-called HOPE VI program that led to the elimination of wide swaths of the system, while rebuilding only a fraction of affordable units under the new “mixed income” replacements. The sturdy, brick, three-story apartment buildings that make up most of traditional Public Housing in New Orleans provided poor people, besides housing, a key source of hurricane protection. Yet, despite this role in still hurricane-vulnerable New Orleans, and despite coming through the storm in much better shape than most of the private housing stock, the federally controlled local housing authority–HANO–closed down four housing developments, the St. Bernard, Lafitte, BW Cooper and CJ Peete, immediately after the storm. The Bush regime followed this – after an intense two year anti-racist, poor people fight back, that included scores of protests, building occupations, and the police tasering, macing, beating and arrest of people for having the temerity to speak out at the December 20, 2007 New Orleans City Council hearing – with the demolition of some 5,000 apartments in the Spring of 2008.
“Despite coming through the storm in much better shape than most of the private housing stock, the federally controlled local housing authority closed down four housing developments.”
Demolition was a clear violation of international law, which requires the government to facilitate the return of the displaced – not demolish their homes. Of course, it is not a surprise that the Bush regime, which flouted international law and public opinion to carry out the war against Iraq, would break international treaties when dealing with its own citizens, especially poor African American families in New Orleans. Yet, despite a change in discourse, the new Obama administration stands in violation of international law as well, by continuing the demolition of public housing and thus preventing the return of poor, displaced, predominately black, people to the city.
Of course, considering the makeup of the Obama administration, this stance should not come as a surprise either. Obama, as a state senator and during his presidential campaign, defended “public-private partnerships” that involve providing public subsidies to private developers, as an alternative to public housing. Indeed some of his top advisors and supporters, such as Valerie Jarrett, the CEO of The Habitat Company, one of Chicago’s largest real estate redevelopment firms, has made millions managing government-funded private replacements for public housing, such as the squalid Parc Grove apartments in Chicago. Jarrett self-servingly defended her role, arguing, “Government is just not as good at owning and managing as the private sector because the incentives are not there” (see the Boston Globe exposé by Binyamin Applebaum, June 27, 2008).
Policing the Movement: Obama and His Non-Profit Partners
Thus, unsurprisingly Obama, like Bush before him, has been pushing forward with more demolitions and replacement with “public-private partnerships” that enrich private developers. His new Secretary of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), Shaun Donovan, is well prepared for that role having been a HUD under secretary for the Clinton administration in the 1990s, overseeing the demolition of tens of thousands of public housing apartments, and displacement of poor families from highly valued inner city real estate, such as at New Orleans St. Thomas development. Most recently he worked as billionaire New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s Housing czar, overseeing the continued underfunding and undermining – the demolition by neglect strategy – of the country’s historically best public housing, while providing generous subsidies to developers to create an insufficient number of “affordable” housing units, out of reach for many poor New Yorkers. Donovan’s other key credential, from Obama’s perspective, is that he is a graduate of Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, a major incubator of neoliberal government housing policy. This outfit specializes in churning out “scholars” that can effectively legitimate the starving of the public sector, and the providing of generous subsidies to developers, as an exercise in “good government” and implementing “best practices.”
“Donovan only met with ‘responsible’ non-profit leaders that agree with this neoliberal framework for (inadequately) addressing affordable housing needs in post-Katrina New Orleans.”
Thus, it is no surprise, that when Donovan visited the city in early March he only met with “responsible” non-profit leaders that agree with this neoliberal framework for (inadequately) addressing affordable housing needs in post-Katrina New Orleans and the US. On March 5th he sat down to chat with a collection of responsible non-profits that would not raise uncomfortable issues, like public housing, and who refused, in order to protect the secretary from any embarrassing protests, to divulge any information to grass roots organizations about when a where they would meet with Donovan. These vetted non-governmental “civil society” leaders included Janey Bavishi of the State of Louisiana funded “Equity and Inclusion” campaign—the same state that refused to give one dime for renters as part of the so-called Road Home program – Kalima Rose of Policy Link, another non-profit think tank and advocacy group that refused to support the defense of public housing, and a host of other non-profits from New Orleans and the Gulf.
In their meeting with Donovan, as explained in the Equity and Inclusion web newsletter of March 19th, they did not raise one word of protest against the Obama administration’s plan to demolish more public housing in New Orleans, while, at the same time, raising some important equity issues, including the state of Mississippi receiving federal government waivers that allowed them to redirect federal money intended for low and moderate income people to rebuild ports for the shipping industry. Thus, this meeting exemplified the crucial role of the non-profiters in suppressing any challenges to the pro-corporate neoliberal model by shaping their demands to fit within the policy framework that Obama and his neoliberal appointees, such as Donovan, find acceptable. Therefore, seeing the effective policing role the non-profits play, it is not a surprise that Obama, more so than even under Bush, is working to promote the non-profit sector. They act, particularly in post-Katrina New Orleans, as key adjuncts, partners, to the disaster capitalist agenda.
Obama/Donovan Shut Door on Grass Roots Activists Clamoring to Be Heard
Donovan’s – and by extension Obama’s – treatment of public housing tenant leaders Sharon Jasper, Sam Jackson, Stephanie Mingo, Katrina survivor and holdout Mike Howells, and other members of the public housing movement during his March visit, underscores most dramatically the Obama administration’s continuity with Bush when dealing with New Orleans. During the last visit of Bush’s notoriously corrupt HUD secretary, Alphonso Jackson, to the city in the Spring of 2007, the public housing movement was relegated to screaming at the secretary and local public officials from across a police barricade. The protestors denounced HUD’s plans to demolish 5,000 viable public housing apartments while the Bush appointee stood with Mayor Nagin and other local officials at a ribbon cutting ceremony for the reopening of a handful of apartments at a new mixed income community in the 9th ward. Shockingly, activists found themselves in the same position, literally, during Donovan’s visit. On March 5th, at the same “mixed income community,” Donovan surrounded himself with the some of the same local officials that Jackson had gathered, along with some new faces, including UNITY for the homeless director Martha Kegel. This nonprofit official earned her place at the gathering by playing an indispensable role for Mayor Nagin evicting the homeless – who have doubled in number from their pre-Katrina levels – from various “unsightly,” highly visible locations in the center of the city.
“The protestors denounced HUD’s plans to demolish 5,000 viable public housing apartments.”
On the other side of the police barricades the public housing movement, just as they had during Alphonso Jackson’s visit, raised the uncomfortable issues that the non-profit “advocates” would not. These included the demand that the Obama administration support Senate Bill 1668 that guarantees one-for-one replacement of all the public housing apartments demolished since Katrina as PUBLIC housing apartments – that is, ones in which residents pay 30% of their income for rent and utilities. Second, they demanded that the remaining 100 apartments at the Lafitte development, to which residents moved only a short six months before, not be demolished and the residents be allowed to stay in their homes. Third, they wanted the federal stimulus money allocated for the local housing authority to be used to include the repair of the Iberville development, the only fully intact traditional public housing development, which sits outside the French Quarter. This money is badly needed to repair and reopen over 200 empty apartments at the 800-plus complex, units that are desperately needed by the thousands of families that are on the public housing waiting list, which has not accepted new applicants since Katrina.
(For an excellent critique of the non-profit sector’s solutions to housing, and a plan that places the reconstruction of the public sector at the center of any solution, see “Comments On the Draft “Policy Recommendations to Support Gulf Coast Housing Recovery’: A New Orleans Perspective,” put out by May Day New Orleans).
Iberville and the Obama/Donovan Demolition-By-Neglect Strategy
The public housing movement quickly received a response from Donovan/Obama to their demands: keep the bulldozers moving! At the end of March a notoriously repressive housing authority manager, Lois Watson, swept through the Lafitte development threatening these traumatized Katrina survivors with arrest if they did not immediately vacate the premises (Times Picayune, March 29, 2009). By April 1st all residents had moved out, and by late-April authorities placed a metal fence around the development to prepare for demolition of this historic, architectural gem, built by Creole artisans from the Treme neighborhood in the early 1940s, whose demise New York Times architecture critic Nicolai Ouroussoff denounced as “a human and architectural tragedy of vast proportions.” Yet, Obama was not finished with this “change you can believe in” for New Orleans. Diane Johnson, the federally imposed one-person board of New Orleans housing authority, announced at an April 8th hearing that the Iberville and the remaining apartments at the BW Cooper developments, the only remaining traditional developments, would not get one dime of the $34 million federal stimulus money awarded to HANO. Bush imposed Johnson as the new one-person board chair in May 2008, where, upon taking office, she chillingly pronounced that “I understand demolition…just watch and see Diane Johnson.” Johnson, with the full support of Obama, who has kept on this Bush appointee, as he is done in so many other areas, has kept her demolition promises. The failure to provide any money for Iberville is a thinly veiled attempt to carry out demolition by neglect and thus pave the way for “redevelopment” that will allow the ethnic and class cleansing of the community and the seizing of this long sought after property by real estate interests.
Obama Expands the Neo-Apartheid, ‘Public-Private’, Charter School System
Duncan and other neoliberal education reformers – including, especially, Obama – promote pouring public monies into for-profit and non-profit companies.
The appointment of Arne Duncan, the former CEO of the Chicago school district, and a major proponent of privatized charter schools, made clear where Obama stands on “education reform.” Proposals made by May Day New Orleans, C3/Hands Off Iberville and other grass roots organizations, to use public funds to create well-funded, democratically-run, broadly accessible, and useful public works, public schools and other public goods, is not even entertained. Instead, through a top-down strategy, as with housing, Duncan and other neoliberal education reformers – including, especially, Obama, as he made clear in his speech to the Business Roundtable – promote pouring public monies into for-profit and non-profit companies to administer, and profit from, the delivery of education services.
Thus, Duncan’s approach by no means represents a divergence from what has happened to public education in post-Katrina New Orleans, but rather deepens the processes initiated by his predecessor. After the storm the State of Louisiana, under Democratic Governor Kathleen Blanco, and with the full support of the majority African American New Orleans delegation in the State House and Senate, tore up the teachers union contract, fired all the teachers and support staff from cafeteria to janitors, and had the state, through the Recovery School District, take over almost all the schools. Of those that have reopened, most – only half of the over 120 pre-storm schools were reopened – are now charter schools, run by an array of non- and for-profit companies, and overseen by a Byzantine complex of unaccountable, self appointed boards, and advised by elite, corporate-linked think tanks, such as the Cowen Institute. Bush Education secretary Margaret Spelling stepped in and helped make this transformation a truly bipartisan effort by providing $40 million, all of which was earmarked for charters, shortly after Katrina.
Yet, despite, or rather because of, this scenario, Education Secretary Duncan, during his March 20th swing through New Orleans, praised the “phenomenal innovation going on” and “the set of adults that are pushing a very strong reform agenda’,” in a city that has witnessed the widest and most rapid privatization of the any public school system in the country. Duncan also underscored his opposition to democratically controlled local school boards and that “reform” requires authoritarian “leadership from the top” (Times Picayune, March 21, 2009). He was right on the mark. His touting of authoritarianism is a recognition of the unpopularity of these neoliberal educational reforms and the need for strong arm tactics to impose them. The New Orleans case, in which the local elected school board was stripped of its control by the state executive, and Governor Blanco’s lifting of the rule – while most New Orleanians were still in exile – that gave parents and teachers at targeted schools the right to vote on whether they want their schools to become charters, underscores the undemocratic nature of the whole agenda and the need for an authoritarian state to impose it.
“Duncan also underscored his opposition to democratically controlled local school boards.”
This lifting of local control allowed maybe the most blatant racist takeover of all – the chartering of the formerly all-black, low-income, Fortier High School, located next to Tulane University, by the elite, “magnet,” selective admission, Robert Lusher School, named after, appropriately, a post-civil war era segregationist. Fortier H.S., taken over through a collaboration with Tulane University, denies entry to former students, while guaranteeing admission, in a typical phony “anti-racist” neoliberal multicultural form, to students of full time employees of Tulane and Loyola Universities, as well as the historically black universities of Dillard and Xavier. This school, which before Katrina regularly went without even toilet paper, now operates in a renovated facility, with plenty of amenities, and a “progressive” multicultural student body, that excludes, in a neo-apartheid manner, the former low-income black students, many of whom remain in the post-Katrina diaspora.
New Orleans Public Hospital Remains Closed
Obama’s failure to change course and tackle the pressing post-Katrina health care needs is especially ominous considering that addressing health care was a major component of his campaign. After Katrina, Governor Blanco intervened, ordering out the Oklahoma national guard, German engineers and hospital staff that were cleaning out the main public hospital – Charity Hospital – which in fact incurred little damage. The Democratic Governor then declared Charity Hospital, which provided critically needed care for the poor and uninsured, beyond repair and announced it would be permanently closed. Since then, New Orleans has had no major public health care facility to deal with those without health insurance, and lost its major source of psychiatric care, in a city where psychiatric illnesses have skyrocketed due to the varied problems people face in a post-disaster environment, problems further acerbated by the government’s failure to reopen public services.
“New Orleans has no major public health care facility to deal with those without health insurance, and has lost its major source of psychiatric care.”
Here again, New Orleanians find no relief from the Obama administration. The State of Louisiana’s plan, which the new Republican Governor Bobby Jindal – an apparent Obama challenger – supports, will turn Charity into a much smaller teaching hospital, as part of a new medical complex to be built in conjunction with the local Veterans Hospital. Although it is a state-level initiative, the federal government, through control of Medicaid dollars, the critical role of the Veterans hospital in the plan, and the moral power of the new president, has a variety of methods at their disposal to get the state to change course. Nonetheless, despite this leverage, the Obama administration has not exercised this power, but has, instead, continued the same federal government support begun by Bush.
Obama, Non-Profits, and Need for Building a Political Alternative
An honest evaluation of Barack Obama’s administration, one that looks at substance over symbolism reveals, at both home and abroad, a striking continuity with his predecessor. Although one can find differences in the style and discourse of the two leaders, the underlying program of the new administration continues to be that of militarism, of anti-working class attacks, and yes, substantively, a deeply racist one. He has put a new face on a still brutally racist, capitalist system. This continuity, as I have shown, is particularly the case in New Orleans where public services have been or are on their way to being privatized or eliminated, and where, primarily due to this disaster capitalist agenda, almost half the population has been unable to return home, disproportionately female, black and, poor. Yet, at the same, as I have shown, New Orleans’ public housing movement, the campaign to reopen Charity hospital, and other struggles, along with the nationally reviving immigrant rights and anti-war movements, represent the kernels of a real political alternative – not the mirage of Obamania. But, as the New Orleans case reveals, for these movements to make gains they will have to effectively traverse, expose and combat an array non-profit apologists that provide political cover and protection for the new progressive face of the system. Indeed, many of these outfits are lining up for funding as part of the non-profit-state-network that Obama, a particularly intelligent and foresighted representative of the ruling class, is cultivating as an effective social buffer in the face of the deepening capitalist crisis.
Jay Arena is a member of C3/Hands Off Iberville. For more information on supporting the New Orleans public housing struggle, contact the author at 504-520-9521.
If you want to measure the distance between George Bush and Barack Obama on domestic political issues, Katrina provides the best test. What emerges is a startling continuity of policy toward New Orleans between the Republican and Democratic White Houses – especially regarding the fate of public housing. This continuity of policy “is particularly the case in New Orleans where public services have been or are on their way to being privatized or eliminated, and where, primarily due to this disaster capitalist agenda, almost half the population has been unable to return home, disproportionately female, black and, poor.”
Has Change Come to Post-Katrina New Orleans?
by Jay Arena
“The gap between the rhetoric of change, and continuity in practice, may be most glaring in post-Katrina New Orleans.”
As people in the U.S. and around the world make their evaluation of President Barack Obama’s first one-hundred days, many – that is, those that truly wanted a break from the racist, militarist, anti-working class policies of the Bush regime – are coming to the conclusion that the “change” his campaign promised seems to have turned into “more of the same.” An examination of his substantive policies, from the continued military occupation of Iraq and expanded wars in Afghanistan and Pakistan, to the trillions more to bailout Wall Street while a promised health care plan is put on the back burner, to an unwillingness to prosecute criminals, from George Bush on down, that carried out torture, underscores the extent of continuity, rather than change, embodied by the administration of the United States’ first African American president.
Yet, you might ask, does Obama’s track record of continuity over substantive change extend to even still-devastated New Orleans? Evaluating what is happening in New Orleans is a particularly significant measure of the new president since the city became so emblematic of everything that was wrong with the U.S. under Bush. In fact, even Bush’s own aides, such as Scott McClellan, have acknowledged that Katrina and Bush’s response was a key turning point in the administration’s descent. Thus, evaluating what change – or lack thereof – the Obama administration has introduced to New Orleans provides an important window into the political character of the new regime in Washington. In fact the record shows, as I will elaborate, the gap between the rhetoric of change, and continuity in practice, may be most glaring in post-Katrina New Orleans.
Obama, Public Housing, and the Racist Disaster Capitalism Agenda
The central thrust of the Bush administration’s post-Katrina “reconstruction” plan—and shared, to a great degree by state and local officials, Democrat and Republican, black and white, alike—has been to use the disaster as an opportunity to privatize and eliminate such vital public services as education, housing and health care. The dismantling of the public sector is central to what many call “disaster capitalism” where corporations, and their public servants, use the disruption and disorientation produced by a disaster among the working class to grab and pillage public resources, award sweetheart contracts, and to lift labor, environmental or any other constraints on profit making.
“The dismantling of the public sector is central to what many call “disaster capitalism.”
The Obama administration has not deviated fundamentally from this agenda, with their stance toward public housing being a prime example. To understand the level of continuity we need to briefly review Bush’s post-Katrina policy toward public housing in New Orleans. At the time of the storm New Orleans had about 7,000 public housing apartments, down by about half following the Clinton administration’s so-called HOPE VI program that led to the elimination of wide swaths of the system, while rebuilding only a fraction of affordable units under the new “mixed income” replacements. The sturdy, brick, three-story apartment buildings that make up most of traditional Public Housing in New Orleans provided poor people, besides housing, a key source of hurricane protection. Yet, despite this role in still hurricane-vulnerable New Orleans, and despite coming through the storm in much better shape than most of the private housing stock, the federally controlled local housing authority–HANO–closed down four housing developments, the St. Bernard, Lafitte, BW Cooper and CJ Peete, immediately after the storm. The Bush regime followed this – after an intense two year anti-racist, poor people fight back, that included scores of protests, building occupations, and the police tasering, macing, beating and arrest of people for having the temerity to speak out at the December 20, 2007 New Orleans City Council hearing – with the demolition of some 5,000 apartments in the Spring of 2008.
“Despite coming through the storm in much better shape than most of the private housing stock, the federally controlled local housing authority closed down four housing developments.”
Demolition was a clear violation of international law, which requires the government to facilitate the return of the displaced – not demolish their homes. Of course, it is not a surprise that the Bush regime, which flouted international law and public opinion to carry out the war against Iraq, would break international treaties when dealing with its own citizens, especially poor African American families in New Orleans. Yet, despite a change in discourse, the new Obama administration stands in violation of international law as well, by continuing the demolition of public housing and thus preventing the return of poor, displaced, predominately black, people to the city.
Of course, considering the makeup of the Obama administration, this stance should not come as a surprise either. Obama, as a state senator and during his presidential campaign, defended “public-private partnerships” that involve providing public subsidies to private developers, as an alternative to public housing. Indeed some of his top advisors and supporters, such as Valerie Jarrett, the CEO of The Habitat Company, one of Chicago’s largest real estate redevelopment firms, has made millions managing government-funded private replacements for public housing, such as the squalid Parc Grove apartments in Chicago. Jarrett self-servingly defended her role, arguing, “Government is just not as good at owning and managing as the private sector because the incentives are not there” (see the Boston Globe exposé by Binyamin Applebaum, June 27, 2008).
Policing the Movement: Obama and His Non-Profit Partners
Thus, unsurprisingly Obama, like Bush before him, has been pushing forward with more demolitions and replacement with “public-private partnerships” that enrich private developers. His new Secretary of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), Shaun Donovan, is well prepared for that role having been a HUD under secretary for the Clinton administration in the 1990s, overseeing the demolition of tens of thousands of public housing apartments, and displacement of poor families from highly valued inner city real estate, such as at New Orleans St. Thomas development. Most recently he worked as billionaire New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s Housing czar, overseeing the continued underfunding and undermining – the demolition by neglect strategy – of the country’s historically best public housing, while providing generous subsidies to developers to create an insufficient number of “affordable” housing units, out of reach for many poor New Yorkers. Donovan’s other key credential, from Obama’s perspective, is that he is a graduate of Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, a major incubator of neoliberal government housing policy. This outfit specializes in churning out “scholars” that can effectively legitimate the starving of the public sector, and the providing of generous subsidies to developers, as an exercise in “good government” and implementing “best practices.”
“Donovan only met with ‘responsible’ non-profit leaders that agree with this neoliberal framework for (inadequately) addressing affordable housing needs in post-Katrina New Orleans.”
Thus, it is no surprise, that when Donovan visited the city in early March he only met with “responsible” non-profit leaders that agree with this neoliberal framework for (inadequately) addressing affordable housing needs in post-Katrina New Orleans and the US. On March 5th he sat down to chat with a collection of responsible non-profits that would not raise uncomfortable issues, like public housing, and who refused, in order to protect the secretary from any embarrassing protests, to divulge any information to grass roots organizations about when a where they would meet with Donovan. These vetted non-governmental “civil society” leaders included Janey Bavishi of the State of Louisiana funded “Equity and Inclusion” campaign—the same state that refused to give one dime for renters as part of the so-called Road Home program – Kalima Rose of Policy Link, another non-profit think tank and advocacy group that refused to support the defense of public housing, and a host of other non-profits from New Orleans and the Gulf.
In their meeting with Donovan, as explained in the Equity and Inclusion web newsletter of March 19th, they did not raise one word of protest against the Obama administration’s plan to demolish more public housing in New Orleans, while, at the same time, raising some important equity issues, including the state of Mississippi receiving federal government waivers that allowed them to redirect federal money intended for low and moderate income people to rebuild ports for the shipping industry. Thus, this meeting exemplified the crucial role of the non-profiters in suppressing any challenges to the pro-corporate neoliberal model by shaping their demands to fit within the policy framework that Obama and his neoliberal appointees, such as Donovan, find acceptable. Therefore, seeing the effective policing role the non-profits play, it is not a surprise that Obama, more so than even under Bush, is working to promote the non-profit sector. They act, particularly in post-Katrina New Orleans, as key adjuncts, partners, to the disaster capitalist agenda.
Obama/Donovan Shut Door on Grass Roots Activists Clamoring to Be Heard
Donovan’s – and by extension Obama’s – treatment of public housing tenant leaders Sharon Jasper, Sam Jackson, Stephanie Mingo, Katrina survivor and holdout Mike Howells, and other members of the public housing movement during his March visit, underscores most dramatically the Obama administration’s continuity with Bush when dealing with New Orleans. During the last visit of Bush’s notoriously corrupt HUD secretary, Alphonso Jackson, to the city in the Spring of 2007, the public housing movement was relegated to screaming at the secretary and local public officials from across a police barricade. The protestors denounced HUD’s plans to demolish 5,000 viable public housing apartments while the Bush appointee stood with Mayor Nagin and other local officials at a ribbon cutting ceremony for the reopening of a handful of apartments at a new mixed income community in the 9th ward. Shockingly, activists found themselves in the same position, literally, during Donovan’s visit. On March 5th, at the same “mixed income community,” Donovan surrounded himself with the some of the same local officials that Jackson had gathered, along with some new faces, including UNITY for the homeless director Martha Kegel. This nonprofit official earned her place at the gathering by playing an indispensable role for Mayor Nagin evicting the homeless – who have doubled in number from their pre-Katrina levels – from various “unsightly,” highly visible locations in the center of the city.
“The protestors denounced HUD’s plans to demolish 5,000 viable public housing apartments.”
On the other side of the police barricades the public housing movement, just as they had during Alphonso Jackson’s visit, raised the uncomfortable issues that the non-profit “advocates” would not. These included the demand that the Obama administration support Senate Bill 1668 that guarantees one-for-one replacement of all the public housing apartments demolished since Katrina as PUBLIC housing apartments – that is, ones in which residents pay 30% of their income for rent and utilities. Second, they demanded that the remaining 100 apartments at the Lafitte development, to which residents moved only a short six months before, not be demolished and the residents be allowed to stay in their homes. Third, they wanted the federal stimulus money allocated for the local housing authority to be used to include the repair of the Iberville development, the only fully intact traditional public housing development, which sits outside the French Quarter. This money is badly needed to repair and reopen over 200 empty apartments at the 800-plus complex, units that are desperately needed by the thousands of families that are on the public housing waiting list, which has not accepted new applicants since Katrina.
(For an excellent critique of the non-profit sector’s solutions to housing, and a plan that places the reconstruction of the public sector at the center of any solution, see “Comments On the Draft “Policy Recommendations to Support Gulf Coast Housing Recovery’: A New Orleans Perspective,” put out by May Day New Orleans).
Iberville and the Obama/Donovan Demolition-By-Neglect Strategy
The public housing movement quickly received a response from Donovan/Obama to their demands: keep the bulldozers moving! At the end of March a notoriously repressive housing authority manager, Lois Watson, swept through the Lafitte development threatening these traumatized Katrina survivors with arrest if they did not immediately vacate the premises (Times Picayune, March 29, 2009). By April 1st all residents had moved out, and by late-April authorities placed a metal fence around the development to prepare for demolition of this historic, architectural gem, built by Creole artisans from the Treme neighborhood in the early 1940s, whose demise New York Times architecture critic Nicolai Ouroussoff denounced as “a human and architectural tragedy of vast proportions.” Yet, Obama was not finished with this “change you can believe in” for New Orleans. Diane Johnson, the federally imposed one-person board of New Orleans housing authority, announced at an April 8th hearing that the Iberville and the remaining apartments at the BW Cooper developments, the only remaining traditional developments, would not get one dime of the $34 million federal stimulus money awarded to HANO. Bush imposed Johnson as the new one-person board chair in May 2008, where, upon taking office, she chillingly pronounced that “I understand demolition…just watch and see Diane Johnson.” Johnson, with the full support of Obama, who has kept on this Bush appointee, as he is done in so many other areas, has kept her demolition promises. The failure to provide any money for Iberville is a thinly veiled attempt to carry out demolition by neglect and thus pave the way for “redevelopment” that will allow the ethnic and class cleansing of the community and the seizing of this long sought after property by real estate interests.
Obama Expands the Neo-Apartheid, ‘Public-Private’, Charter School System
Duncan and other neoliberal education reformers – including, especially, Obama – promote pouring public monies into for-profit and non-profit companies.
The appointment of Arne Duncan, the former CEO of the Chicago school district, and a major proponent of privatized charter schools, made clear where Obama stands on “education reform.” Proposals made by May Day New Orleans, C3/Hands Off Iberville and other grass roots organizations, to use public funds to create well-funded, democratically-run, broadly accessible, and useful public works, public schools and other public goods, is not even entertained. Instead, through a top-down strategy, as with housing, Duncan and other neoliberal education reformers – including, especially, Obama, as he made clear in his speech to the Business Roundtable – promote pouring public monies into for-profit and non-profit companies to administer, and profit from, the delivery of education services.
Thus, Duncan’s approach by no means represents a divergence from what has happened to public education in post-Katrina New Orleans, but rather deepens the processes initiated by his predecessor. After the storm the State of Louisiana, under Democratic Governor Kathleen Blanco, and with the full support of the majority African American New Orleans delegation in the State House and Senate, tore up the teachers union contract, fired all the teachers and support staff from cafeteria to janitors, and had the state, through the Recovery School District, take over almost all the schools. Of those that have reopened, most – only half of the over 120 pre-storm schools were reopened – are now charter schools, run by an array of non- and for-profit companies, and overseen by a Byzantine complex of unaccountable, self appointed boards, and advised by elite, corporate-linked think tanks, such as the Cowen Institute. Bush Education secretary Margaret Spelling stepped in and helped make this transformation a truly bipartisan effort by providing $40 million, all of which was earmarked for charters, shortly after Katrina.
Yet, despite, or rather because of, this scenario, Education Secretary Duncan, during his March 20th swing through New Orleans, praised the “phenomenal innovation going on” and “the set of adults that are pushing a very strong reform agenda’,” in a city that has witnessed the widest and most rapid privatization of the any public school system in the country. Duncan also underscored his opposition to democratically controlled local school boards and that “reform” requires authoritarian “leadership from the top” (Times Picayune, March 21, 2009). He was right on the mark. His touting of authoritarianism is a recognition of the unpopularity of these neoliberal educational reforms and the need for strong arm tactics to impose them. The New Orleans case, in which the local elected school board was stripped of its control by the state executive, and Governor Blanco’s lifting of the rule – while most New Orleanians were still in exile – that gave parents and teachers at targeted schools the right to vote on whether they want their schools to become charters, underscores the undemocratic nature of the whole agenda and the need for an authoritarian state to impose it.
“Duncan also underscored his opposition to democratically controlled local school boards.”
This lifting of local control allowed maybe the most blatant racist takeover of all – the chartering of the formerly all-black, low-income, Fortier High School, located next to Tulane University, by the elite, “magnet,” selective admission, Robert Lusher School, named after, appropriately, a post-civil war era segregationist. Fortier H.S., taken over through a collaboration with Tulane University, denies entry to former students, while guaranteeing admission, in a typical phony “anti-racist” neoliberal multicultural form, to students of full time employees of Tulane and Loyola Universities, as well as the historically black universities of Dillard and Xavier. This school, which before Katrina regularly went without even toilet paper, now operates in a renovated facility, with plenty of amenities, and a “progressive” multicultural student body, that excludes, in a neo-apartheid manner, the former low-income black students, many of whom remain in the post-Katrina diaspora.
New Orleans Public Hospital Remains Closed
Obama’s failure to change course and tackle the pressing post-Katrina health care needs is especially ominous considering that addressing health care was a major component of his campaign. After Katrina, Governor Blanco intervened, ordering out the Oklahoma national guard, German engineers and hospital staff that were cleaning out the main public hospital – Charity Hospital – which in fact incurred little damage. The Democratic Governor then declared Charity Hospital, which provided critically needed care for the poor and uninsured, beyond repair and announced it would be permanently closed. Since then, New Orleans has had no major public health care facility to deal with those without health insurance, and lost its major source of psychiatric care, in a city where psychiatric illnesses have skyrocketed due to the varied problems people face in a post-disaster environment, problems further acerbated by the government’s failure to reopen public services.
“New Orleans has no major public health care facility to deal with those without health insurance, and has lost its major source of psychiatric care.”
Here again, New Orleanians find no relief from the Obama administration. The State of Louisiana’s plan, which the new Republican Governor Bobby Jindal – an apparent Obama challenger – supports, will turn Charity into a much smaller teaching hospital, as part of a new medical complex to be built in conjunction with the local Veterans Hospital. Although it is a state-level initiative, the federal government, through control of Medicaid dollars, the critical role of the Veterans hospital in the plan, and the moral power of the new president, has a variety of methods at their disposal to get the state to change course. Nonetheless, despite this leverage, the Obama administration has not exercised this power, but has, instead, continued the same federal government support begun by Bush.
Obama, Non-Profits, and Need for Building a Political Alternative
An honest evaluation of Barack Obama’s administration, one that looks at substance over symbolism reveals, at both home and abroad, a striking continuity with his predecessor. Although one can find differences in the style and discourse of the two leaders, the underlying program of the new administration continues to be that of militarism, of anti-working class attacks, and yes, substantively, a deeply racist one. He has put a new face on a still brutally racist, capitalist system. This continuity, as I have shown, is particularly the case in New Orleans where public services have been or are on their way to being privatized or eliminated, and where, primarily due to this disaster capitalist agenda, almost half the population has been unable to return home, disproportionately female, black and, poor. Yet, at the same, as I have shown, New Orleans’ public housing movement, the campaign to reopen Charity hospital, and other struggles, along with the nationally reviving immigrant rights and anti-war movements, represent the kernels of a real political alternative – not the mirage of Obamania. But, as the New Orleans case reveals, for these movements to make gains they will have to effectively traverse, expose and combat an array non-profit apologists that provide political cover and protection for the new progressive face of the system. Indeed, many of these outfits are lining up for funding as part of the non-profit-state-network that Obama, a particularly intelligent and foresighted representative of the ruling class, is cultivating as an effective social buffer in the face of the deepening capitalist crisis.
Jay Arena is a member of C3/Hands Off Iberville. For more information on supporting the New Orleans public housing struggle, contact the author at 504-520-9521.
Any credit Barack Obama gets for revealing information on U.S. torture practices, Is “undeserved.” Freedom of Information suits brought by the ACLU and others “had already forced the governments hand.” But Obama has no intention of making the war criminals pay for their crimes – and for that, he is responsible in the eyes of the law. “As a signatory to the United Nations Convention Against Torture, the United States is obligated to investigate, prosecute and punish officials who direct or commit acts of torture.” Obama, like most Americans, thinks obedience to the law is optional for the United States – an imperial mindset identical to that of his predecessors.
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Freedom Rider: Tortured Justice
by BAR editor and senior columnist Margaret Kimberley
“The United States is obligated to investigate, prosecute and punish officials who direct or commit acts of torture.
The corruption endemic to the Democratic Party has once again come back to haunt us. Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid and other Democratic leaders had considerable power even in the minority, and could have put a stop to almost all Bush administration actions from taking place. As we are now told incessantly by the Obama administration, senators in the minority can filibuster legislation and prevent a president from doing what he wants to do. Democrats chose not to exercise that option during the Bush administration.
Those handshakes and winks are responsible for the United States government running torture chambers around the world, in clear violation of national and international law. Barack Obama recently released documents which proved that torture took place and he did so because the law required it. Freedom of Information Act lawsuits
brought by the ACLU and others had already forced the governments hand. Any credit he gets is undeserved.
He also deserves nothing but scorn for refusing to even investigate the extent of the crimes committed. He and the rest of his administration are breaking the law if they continue in their failure to act.As a signatory to the United Nations
Convention Against Torture, the United States is obligated to investigate, prosecute and punish officials who direct or commit acts of torture. It doesn’t matter that President Obama believes investigation and prosecution to be nothing more than “
retribution” or that he claims his precious agenda may be ruined if he acts as the law stipulates. His opinion shouldn’t count; the dictates of the law should.
“Obama and the rest of his administration are breaking the law if they continue in their failure to act.”
During his presidential campaign Obama never passed up an opportunity to point out that he was once a professor of Constitutional law. Apparently he did not spend much time emphasizing that the United States Constitution clearly bans “cruel and unusual” punishments. Water boarding individuals 180 times in a 30 day period, slamming people into walls, and placing them in boxes filled with insects certainly qualify as cruel.
It had to have also been clear to Democrats like Reid, Pelosi and John D. Rockefeller that these are cruel acts. In 2002 they and other Democrats were told by Bush administration officials that the government was torturing and they were given specific information about how the torture was carried out. Their complicity not only ensured that Bush and Cheney would get away with committing war crimes, but that the Democratic Party would became complicit – and neuter itself, in the process.
When Congressman Dennis Kucinich introduced an impeachment resolution on the House floor it was squelched by Democratic leadership. It would have been hard for Nancy Pelosi to support impeachment based in part on the commission of war crimes she was aware of yet did nothing to stop. Democrat leaders were accessories and now when the crime calls for punishment, those few who want to act cannot. Calls for truth commissions and bipartisan working groups would be distractions, public relations efforts that would harm the cause of justice. The law is clear and calls for investigation and, if necessary, prosecution by the government of the United States.
“Democrat leaders were accessories and now when the crime calls for punishment, those few who want to act cannot.”
Former Vice President Dick Cheney should be reserving his words for an attorney planning his defense for an upcoming criminal trial. Instead he is unafraid, going before the cameras on a daily basis, happily boasting that he is an unrepentant war criminal. Why shouldn’t he? President Obama has told him that he has nothing to fear.
The insults from the Obama administration are never ending. The president claims that he can’t follow the law and investigate Bush and Cheney because doing so would be a distraction from his oh so wonderful agenda. If Obama has an agenda worth saving, he needs to show us what that is. Will we have an
Employee Free Choice Act if he lets Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Powell and Rice off the hook? Will there be single payer health care if the crimes are ignored?
“The way to move out of the nightmare of the Bush years and neuter the Republicans is to fearlessly take them on once and for all.”
Actually we are far more likely to have an agenda in place that meets the needs of the people if the Bush regime is completely discredited. The way to move out of the nightmare of the Bush years and neuter the Republicans is to fearlessly take them on once and for all. That will mean dumping Pelosi, Reid, Rockefeller and the others who aided and abetted them. So much the better. Their presence is a guarantee of continued failure and their departures would be as liberating as the day that Bush left Washington.
The Democratic Party is as much to blame as Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Powell and Rice in making the United States a perpetrator of war crimes. They did nothing to oppose them, they stopped those who were willing to oppose them, and now they go along with allowing them to go unpunished. The old saying is wrong. It seems that crime does pay. It pays off very well indeed, at least for those at the top.
Margaret Kimberley’s Freedom Rider column appears weekly in BAR. Ms. Kimberley lives in New York City, and can be reached via e-Mail at Margaret.Kimberley(at)BlackAgandaReport.Com.
A Black Agenda Radio commentary by Glen Ford
Click the flash player to listen to or the mic to download a copy of this Black Agenda Radio commentary.
The former and present colonizers and enslavers of the world - Europe and its white settler colonies - rose in bogus indignation to denounce the Iranian president’s remarks on Israeli racism. But it was a sham and farce, part of the choreographed Obama White House plan to wreck the Durban II international anti-racism conference. "In sabotaging Durban II, Barack Obama succeeded in avoiding coming to grips with grievances registered against the United States, eight years ago."
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Obama’s America Joins White Walkout on UN Conference on Race
A Black Agenda Radio commentary by Glen Ford
Of the 15 nations that either boycotted or walked out of the anti-racism conference, in Geneva, only two – Poland and Finland – were not tainted by or products of colonialism and the slave trade.
What a spectacle it was! Diplomats from the colonizing countries of Europe and the white settler regimes they founded rose in
indignation in Geneva, Switzerland, last week, to denounce a Persian leader for racism. Envoys from France, Britain, Spain and Denmark, whose nations are responsible for orgies of rape and pillage that killed untold millions in the centuries-long European
war against the darker regions of the planet, pretended that their sensibilities had been assaulted by a speech from Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. The irate Europeans joined with their brothers and sisters in historical genocide and mass murder, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Sweden – kidnappers of nations, invaders, enslavers of whole peoples – who had boycotted the Geneva conference on racism, commonly known as Durban II. The world is stained with oceans of blood because of these Europeans, yet they have the nerve, the gall, to attempt to demonize the Iranian president for the words he spoke about Israel. Leading the sabotage of the conference was the United States, along with Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and, of course, Israel – the European settler colonies that became nations on the bones and stolen land of previous inhabitants.
What a display of unbounded arrogance! Of the 15 nations that either boycotted or walked out of the anti-racism conference, in Geneva, only two – Poland and Finland – were not tainted by or products of colonialism and the slave trade. All the rest are complicit in the death of millions, and most continue to profit from their crimes.
”Most of the world considers the slave trade to have been a crime against humanity.”
The object of European and white settler anger, the Islamic government of Iran, has not attacked anyone in several hundred years. Its president told the conference that an entire nation was made “homeless under the pretext of Jewish suffering … in order to establish a totally racist government in occupied Palestine." Most of the world agrees with that assessment – just as most of the world considers the slave trade to have been a crime against humanity. But that verdict is not accepted by the governments of the nations that built fabulous wealth on commerce in genocide.
The walkout in Geneva was all but
choreographed by the United States and its Zionist partners, who began subverting the conference from the moment Barack Obama was sworn into office. The U.S. and its allies made sure that President Ahmadinejad’s speech would get lots of corporate media attention. He was the only head of state to address the conference, that day; nobody else came.
In sabotaging Durban II, Barack Obama succeeded in avoiding coming to grips with grievances registered against the United States by delegates to the previous international anti-racism conference, in Durban, South Africa, eight years ago. The U.S. was supposed to report last week on progress made in fighting residential housing segregation, police brutality, the crimes associated with Katrina, and other American racial problems. But it was more important to Barack Obama to whitewash Israel. Now we know who serves whom.
A Black Agenda Radio commentary by Glen Ford
Click the flash player to listen to or the mic to download an mp3 copy of this Black Agenda Radio commentary.
The maritime powers busily looting Somalia’s fishery are preparing to formalize their theft. Spain and France, the "biggest thieves of Somali fish" plan to assume responsibility for the fisheries at an upcoming conference. Under cover of preserving order on the high seas, "the French, the Spanish and the rest of the freeloaders are reverting to a kind of piracy of their own, like in the good old days when whites sailed the world and took what they wanted."
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European Pirates in Somali Waters
A Black Agenda Radio commentary by Glen Ford
“The biggest thieves of Somali fish choose themselves as protectors of the fisheries.”
The U.S. corporate media treat the world like a big comic book, with America as the super-hero who doesn’t know his own strength, but means well. Much of the time, the corporate media analysis doesn’t even reach the level of comic book – more like cartoons. In fact, just a few nights ago, I saw a cartoon on the Comedy Central channel that provided a much more sophisticated analysis of so-called “piracy” in Somalia, than anything offered by the television evening news.
In an episode of
South Park, the eight-year-old kid protagonists set off for Somalia, where they hope to live the care-free life of pirates. A teenaged Somali boy who has become a pirate in order to feed his desperate family, can’t understand why one would
want to engage in piracy, if given the choice. At the end of the episode, American sharpshooters kill all the Somalis, leaving the would-be American child-pirates unharmed. The American commander tells his gunmen, “Be careful not to hit the white ones.”
Thus, the cartoon succeeds in describing the life and death struggle of the Somalis and the arbitrary power of the Americans and others patrolling the Somali coast. The Americans here at home are totally ignorant of the true situation in Somalia, while the Americans manning warships and war planes have no problem with killing people they don’t know – people who are made to look like cartoon cut-outs.
“Since the early Sixties, U.S. policy in Africa has been to sow chaos in those regions it cannot effectively control.”
It is impossible to discuss lawlessness in Somali coastal waters without confronting the U.S. and European role in destroying the rule of law in the country. The chief culprit is the United States, which encouraged Ethiopia to invade Somalia, in 2006, in order to depose the first government the country had had since 1991. Since the early Sixties, U.S. policy in Africa has been to sow chaos in those regions it cannot effectively control. The Somalis drove the Ethiopians out, much to the chagrin of Washington. With the increase in ship hijackings, the Americans and Europeans spin the situation as one in which they must
impose order on Somalia – when, in fact, it is outsiders’ attempts to dominate Somalia that have led to such grave
disorder.
We now learn that France and Spain, among the maritime powers most guilty of illegally poaching Somalia’s fisheries, have
designated themselves as the guardians of the Somali coast. The French and Spanish have enjoyed a bounty of fishing off Somalia, with no Somali coast guard to keep them from taking as much as they want of the national resource. So, the biggest thieves of Somali fish choose themselves as protectors of the fisheries. France and Spain both base their fishing fleets in the nearby Seychelles Islands.
Any dispassionate observer would conclude that the French, the Spanish and the rest of the freeloaders are reverting to a kind of piracy of their own, like in the good old days when whites sailed the world and took what they wanted. But then, that’s a cartoonish way of looking at the world – or is it?
A Black Agenda Radio commentary by Glen Ford
Click the flash player above to listen to or the mic to download this Black Agenda Radio commentary.
Don’t let the apolitical facades fool you. Virginia’s four Black colleges are hotbeds of "militancy and rebellion" and magnets for "a wide variety of terror or extremist groups." So says a government-funded outfit called the Virginia Fusion Center, which also cautions against the national security dangers inherent in diversity. "While the vast majority of these individuals are law-abiding, this ethnic diversity also affords terrorist operatives the opportunity to assimilate easily into society, without arousing suspicion." Safe, secure communities are uniformly white and English-speaking.
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Black Colleges Profiled as Suspected Havens for “Extremists”
A Black Agenda Radio commentary by Glen Ford
“The Fusion Center appears to believe that Black colleges are by definition hotbeds of militancy and rebellion.”
Those deep thinkers in the Homeland Security Department are paying good money for some very bad advice on what constitutes a threat to American society. An inkling of the kind of madness that passes for research at Homeland Security, is provided by a recent report to the Virginia State Police. The report, which emanates from the basement offices of something called the Virginia Fusion Center, claims that “a wide variety of terror or extremist groups" have ties to the Hampton Roads region of the state. Specifically, the report claims that the area’s two historically Black universities are virtual magnets for terrorists and “extremists” – as are the two Black universities in the Richmond area.
For those who are familiar with the four schools – Norfolk State University, Hampton University, Virginia State University in Petersburg and Virginia Union University in Richmond – the very thought of them as havens for “extremist” politics is laughable. Political action is not what these schools are known for. And that’s too bad. But the Fusion Center, whoever they are, appears to believe that Black colleges are by definition hotbeds of militancy and rebellion. I wish that were true, but it’s not. It appears the researchers at Virginia’s Fusion Center believe that Black institutions are inherently suspect. The Homeland Security Department is paying these guys millions of dollars a year to give vent to their own racist paranoia – and to sic the political bloodhounds on a bunch of apolitical Black students.
“The presumption seems to be that dangerous people are not white, and white people are not dangerous.”
The creeps at the Fusion Center see security dangers in diversity, which they believe creates special national security perils. The Hampton Roads region of Virginia has attracted a wide diversity of population from all parts of the globe. The Fusion Center report says, “While the vast majority of these individuals are law-abiding, this ethnic diversity also affords terrorist operatives the opportunity to assimilate easily into society, without arousing suspicion." The statement reveals the screaming racist posing as a researcher. Clearly the report’s authors believe that the safest communities, national security-wise, are those that are uniformly white and English-speaking. Presumably, in such surroundings it’s hard for the “dangerous” people to hide in a crowd. The presumption seems to be that dangerous people are not white, and white people are not dangerous. White communities are the ones that need protecting, while the non-white or diverse communities represent some degree of danger.
This is pure racist crap, and dangerous stuff to have circulating among the police. The logic of the Fusion Report, if taken seriously, would lead the State to aggressively infiltrate the student ranks at Black colleges. They wouldn’t discover much in the way of subversive anything, but it is in the nature of the spy to invent what he can’t find.
Virginia’s crackpot Fusion Center is one of at least 58 such idiot-tanks that have sprung up around the country since 9/11, at a cost of $250 million dollars in public funds. That quarter billion dollar investment has led to the discovery of a single fact: Some white people are not comfortable, in general, with diversity, and are still nervous as hell around Black people.
For Black Agenda Radio, I’m Glen Ford. On the web, go to www.BlackAgendaReport.com.
BAR executive editor Glen Ford can be contacted at Glen.Ford@BlackAgendaReport.com.
by Dr. Ron DanielsProgressives should create a ‘third force’ in American politics – an independent political organization that focuses on developing and advocating reformative and transformative policy proposals and actively educates, agitates, organizes and lobbies to enact its agenda.” The Left should have learned by now “that the change President Obama believes he can achieve is incremental, not fundamental.” There’s a problem, however. Although “the crucial task is creating a third force as a 21st century version of the Rainbow Coalition… the left tends to be too fractious and contentious to build this kind of umbrella formation.”
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Creating a Third Force in American Politics
by Dr. Ron Daniels
“I believe progressives need something akin to the National Rainbow Coalition as a unifying vehicle to advance the progressive cause.”
I continue to believe that the election of President Barack Obama provides a major opening for progressives to make significant gains towards shaping a more just and humane society in the U.S. The repudiation of George Bush and company and their greed driven, "free market" economic policies have opened the door for progressives to advance a progressive agenda for far ranging change. However, it would be a mistake to believe that the change we seek will be advanced by President Obama. Though he is clearly on the liberal side of the political spectrum, which is a welcome shift from the eight-year reign of the rabid right, Obama never promised bold "change" during the campaign. And, early indications are that the change President Obama believes he can achieve is incremental, not fundamental. For example, at his recent summit on health care, proponents of single payer had to fight just to get in the room to have their voices heard – a clear indication that the President’s idea of "reform" is likely to be well within the framework of the existing health care for profit system.
President Obama’s cautious, pragmatic, incremental approach is understandably infuriating to some progressives. The problem is that these progressives expect Obama to carry the weight for making far ranging change, rather than building a movement that will compel him to embrace and advance a more bold and visionary agenda. It is useful to remember that much of what was accomplished by progressives under FDR in the era of the New Deal was because of massive, unrelenting pressure from a multifaceted liberal-progressive movement. That lesson should not be lost on progressives at this potentially milestone moment in history.
”It would be a mistake to believe that the change we seek will be advanced by President Obama.”
But, here progressives are confronted with another problem. To the degree that a progressive movement exists, it is incoherent and disjointed/fragmented. There is no overarching, inclusive umbrella organization with a broad consensus agenda to translate the desire for far ranging change into effective action. This does not mean that there are not groups, organizations, think tanks, publications, philanthropists, etc. that are advocating progressive policies and causes. I simply have no sense that there is anything resembling a functional united front among these various entities, particularly as it relates to the connection with and inclusion of African Americans and other people of color.
I make the latter observation because I believe progressives need something akin to the National Rainbow Coalition as a unifying vehicle to advance the progressive cause. Bill Fletcher and Danny Grover made this point a couple of years ago in an article they circulated on recreating a Rainbow Coalition type formation. Without question, the demobilization of the National Rainbow Coalition by its architect Rev. Jesse L. Jackson was one of the great failures of leadership in the latter half of the 20th century. Borrowing from Mel King’s weekly rainbow dialogues and initiatives in Boston, Rev. Jackson was able to utilize his presidential campaigns to build a formidable, progressive, multi-racial policy, advocacy and electoral coalition that captured the imagination of millions of people across the country. Unlike many movements on the left, African Americans and other people of color, constituencies disproportionately affected by issues of race, class and gender inequality, were prominent in the membership and leadership of the Rainbow Coalition. The opening presented by the election of President Barack Obama cries out for such a formation again.
”Progressives should create a ‘third force’ in American politics – an independent political organization that focuses on developing and advocating reformative and transformative policy proposals and actively educates, agitates, organizes and lobbies to enact its agenda.”
To revive a term from another era, at a minimum, progressives should create a "third force" in American politics - an independent political organization that focuses on developing and advocating reformative and transformative policy proposals and actively educates, agitates, organizes and lobbies to enact its agenda. Such a formation should adopt an "inside/outside" approach, working to advance its agenda inside the major political parties while simultaneously promoting the agenda through liberal-left political parties and institutions/organizations outside of the major parties. In terms of electoral politics, a third force would support major and third party candidates based on its agenda as well as utilize the option to run independent candidates.
Moreover, a third force would not depend on electoral politics as the sole means of advancing a progressive agenda; it would employ non-electoral strategies and tactics such as mass protests, supporting strikes and labor actions, mobilizing/organizing around issues at the local, state, national and international level as a means of broadening the base of the progressive movement to effectuate real change. The creative use of the Internet to disseminate information, galvanize action and raise funds must also be part of the strategy if a third force is to be successful. There are several other elements I could propose, but these ideas should suffice to make the case for the concept.
”A third force would not depend on electoral politics as the sole means of advancing a progressive agenda; it would employ non-electoral strategies and tactics such as mass protests, supporting strikes and labor actions.”
Beyond the idea, the crucial task is creating a third force as a 21st century version of the Rainbow Coalition. This is a major challenge because the left tends to be too fractious and contentious to build this kind of umbrella formation. Though the left legitimately bemoans the flaws of charismatic leadership, in reality it was the force of ideas and charismatic leadership of Rev. Jesse Jackson that motivated progressives to defy their "nature" to become part of the big tent - the Rainbow Coalition. Surveying the scene today, there does not appear to be a leader who can unite the left. And, I am skeptical that there is presently a collective or collaborative of leaders with the vision, skill and capacity equal to such a daunting task. Nonetheless, some of us will continue to articulate the vision in the hope that the idea of a third force will gather momentum and come to fruition. Capturing the opportunity presented by the election of President Obama may well depend on it.
Dr. Ron Daniels is President of the Institute of the Black World 21st Century and Distinguished Lecturer at York College City University of New York. He is the host of An Hour with Professor Ron Daniels, Monday-Friday mornings on WWRL Radio 1600 AM in New York and Night Talk, Wednesday evenings on WBAI 99.5 FM, Pacifica New York. His articles and essays also appear on the IBW website www.ibw21.org and www.northstarnews.com. He can be reached via email at info@ibw21.org.
by BAR Managing Editor Bruce A. Dixon
Why a Report Card At All?
The hundred day report card is an enduring tradition in American journalism for a very good reason. It’s journalism’s job to help citizens make sense of the world, to seek the truth and tell it without fear or favor no matter where it leads. Three months and a week into a new administration, everybody knows where the mens and ladies rooms are, most of the key hires are in place, and the bus has definitely cleared the station. There’s plenty of evidence by now to assess where it’s going, and whether it’s anyplace we really ought to be headed.
Should We Grade President Obama on What He Promised, or on What People Need?
The answer to this should be easy. It all depends on whether we imagine government derives its authority from the blessedness of anointed men and women in office, or whether legitimacy comes from the informed consent of the governed. Most of us who were not home schooled learned it the latter way: governments are legit only insofar as they serve the people. Limiting the scope of a report card to what politicians promise confers upon them the power to lock down our collective imagination and deny our hunger and thirst for justice before we can even express it.
Why These Categories?
Because these are the issues that matter to our people. As the journal of African American political thought and action, they are what our authors write about every week.
1. Health Care Reform (9 points)
2. Creating New Jobs and Preserving Old Ones (5 points)
3. Fully Funding and Preserving Public Education (6 points)
4. War & Peace (9 points)
5. Transportation (5 points)
6. Caribbean and Latin America (4 points)
7. Obama’s Africa Policy; Our Brotherman and the Motherland (5 points)
8. Wall Street Bailout (6 points)
9. Debt and Foreclosure Crises (6 points)
10. Investigating Bush-era Crimes (5 points)
11. Criminalizing Immigration, Militarizing the Border (5 points)
12. Broadband For Everyone and a Just and Fair Media (5 points)
13. Environment (5 points)
14. Agricultural Policy, and Policy Toward Black Farmers (5 points)
15. Mass imprisonment (5 points)
16. Employee Free Choice Act (5 points)
17. Urban Policy (5 points)
18. Privatization of Government Agencies and Services (5 points)
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1. Health Care Reform
President Obama himself declared that we should judge his first term on whether we get a national health care plan. While the exact specs of the Obama campaign have not been formally introduced, it’s been no secret for a couple years now that Barack Obama and his advisors abhor any form of Medicare-For-All or single payer health care. When the president’s people ordered their activists to convene a wave of health care house meetings in December, the demand most often voiced was for single payer, everybody-in and nobody out. Despite this, and despite polling data that shows a majority of physicians and a majority of the American people favor single payer health care, the Obama administration buried the results of those house meetings. Obama’s series of regional health care "summits," although billed as the chance to get input from all the relevant have pointedly excluded any voices for single payer health care.
Currently, private insurance companies consume a third of every health care dollar for advertising, lawyering, salaries and bonuses, bad investments and the vast bureaucratic machinery they have created to deny coverage to the sick. We are the only nation where half the bankruptcies are caused by illness. The Obama health care plan, modeled on the failed "individual mandate" health insurance experiments of Massachusetts, Tennessee and other states will make health insurance like car insurance.
Everyone will have to buy a policy from a private company or face tax and other penalties, with no guarantee the policy will be either affordable or comprehensive. The myriad shortcomings of this plan are detailed in a report from Physicians for a National Health Care Plan, and in several previous BAR articles. When asked during the campaign whether he thought health care was a human right, Barack Obama said he thought it was. His health care plan does preserve the prifits of insurance companies.
Five points for admitting health care is a human right, minus one for suppressing discussion of single payer. Four out of nine.
2. Creating New Jobs and Preserving Old Ones
When Franklin D. Roosevelt took office in 1933, the nation had been in the Depression almost four years. The new president created some 800,000 jobs in the space of a few months. To be fair, this Depression hasn’t been in effect nearly as long, and there are no insistent mass movements waging extralegal campaigns of strikes and civil disobedience going into the spring of 2009. So it’s more complicated than measuring the hundreds of thousands of new jobs Roosevelt created against the hundreds of thousands Obama hasn’t.
What we see is a failure of imagination on the part of the Obama administration. Not only does the First Black President declare it’s the job of the private sector, never government, to create jobs, a stand closer to Herbert Hoover than to Franklin Roosevelt — his "stimulus packages" have refused to fully fund the operations of local and state governments. Full funding for local governments would preserve the jobs of teachers, water department workers, librarians, coaches and park district workers, public safety employees and others who are being sent home in the tens of thousands. It’s a piece of low hanging job and vital service preserving fruit the Obama administration refuses to harvest.
One point out of five for the Obama rhetoric on green jobs, and the $10 billion directed toward high speed rail..
3. Fully Funding and Preserving Public Education
There is no good news here. While Obama’s Secretary of Education has not called teachers unions "terrorists" as his Bush-era counterpart did, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan is as committed to de-funding and privatizing public education as his predecessors. Obama’s pick for Secretary of Education is an underqualified stooge whose longest lasting job was as a pro basketball player, and who has not a single hour of classroom teaching experience. Duncan’s innovations as Chicago Public Schools CEO, detailed in a December BAR interview with longtime Chicago teachers union activist George Schmidt, include the closing and privatizations of dozens of schools in African American communities and the summary firing of their mostly black teachers and principals, and the handing over of several inner-city Chicago middle and high schools to the Army, Navy and Marine Corps.
No Child Left Behind, the bipartisan corporate Bush era "education reform," which allows schools and entire districts to be threatened with closure and privatization, seems destined to remain intact for the forseeable future under an Obama administration.
Zero points here of a possible six.
4. War and Peace
From 2003 onward, Barack Obama staked his political career on conveying to voters the impression that he opposed the war in Iraq, while vigorously signalling to the bipartisan freign policy establishment that he was really one of them. By early 2008 Obama closed the circle, openly endorsing the Bush "surge" and war aims in Iraq, confirming that thirty or fifty or seventy thousand troops, depending, could remain in Iraq throughout his first term. Unlike John McCain, who said the US should increase troop levels in Afghanistan because "we" are "winning," Obama wanted to boost the number of American boots on the ground there because "we" are losing. Halfway though his first week in office, Obama was launching missiles from drones at Pakistani mountain villages.
While the US spends more on things military than the rest of the world combined, the Obama military budget is higher than Bush’s. Though the laughable "war on terror" is gone from our government propaganda, all or most of its machinery remains in motion under the new administration.
Barack Obama has kept Robert Gates, a bloodstained Reagan-era war criminal as chief of the Pentagon, and designated the bloodthirsty Susan Rice as National Security Advisor. Susan Rice is an enthusiastic advocate of genocidal military intervention practically everywhere on the African continent under the monstrously hypocritical cover of "stopping genocide."
The president says he will talk to Iran, which is worth a point, but continues the Bush policy of threatening Russia with NATO expansion right up to its borders, which takes away the single point.
Zero out of nine points.
5. Transportation
After more than a half century of disinvestment, the US passenger rail network is the laughing stock of the developed world. Passenger railcars have not been manufactured in the US for decades, and no high speed rail exists at all outside a single line in the northeast. Investment in high speed intercity rail was one of the first promises broken by the Clinton administration.
The initial investment of $10 billion, apparently pushed at the president’s personal initiative is a modest start, with the potential to create tens of thousands of new jobs, though not right away. Obama probably knows that $100 billion over his first term would be a minimally reasonable down payment on a world class passenger rail network, which will be cheaper and more sustainable than America’s dependence on highways and air travel. Assuming he does have the vision, the question are whether he has the political will, and whether, after allowing Wall Street to pillage and loot the US Treasury under the guise of a "bailout," whether we have the money, and how much of it can be executed before the price of fuel makes air and highway travel prohibitive.
Also, existing urban mass transit is in tatters, thanks to management that believes transit is a profit center rather than an economic right. Those awaiting an Obama commitment to the future of urban mass transit on the scale of his pledges to intercity rail may have a long wait. After all, urban mass transit is identified, in the minds of many, with African Americans, a political identification the First Black President determined to avoid wherever possible.
Four points out of five.
6. Caribbean and Latin America
Given that one black person in ten in the US has a spouse, sibling or parent born abroad, most often from Africa or the Caribbean, administration policies toward these regions have a special resonance in the African American community. Obama deserves a half point for shaking hands with Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez, and another half point for not striking the usual full frontal crudity pose toward Cuba at the inter-American summit earlier this month. But massive taxpayer subsidies of US agribusiness to dump millions of tons of genetically modified corn, soybeans and other products on Jamaica, Haiti, Mexico, Central and South America continue to crush local agriculture, deepening food dependency in and driving immigration from these countries. There is no sign that an Obama administration is reconsidering any of these policies.
The brutal occupation of Haiti by a US financed proxy force of so-called peacekeepers, also continues unmentioned by the US press, and unremarked upon by the Obama administration.
Lots of room for improvement here. One and a half points out of four.
7. Obama’s Africa Policy: Our Brotherman and the Motherland
In recent years the US has provided arms transfers, military training and military assistance to more than 50 out of Africa’s 54 nations. Hence Africa is the most war-torn region on earth, containing millions of square miles in which hospitals, schools, agriculture, industry and civil society have collapsed into vast law-free zones, such as the eastern Congo, where 5 million souls have perished since the mid 1990s. These law-free zones have proven an ideal business-friendly environment for the extraction of Congo’s timber and mineral wealth, including 90% of the world’s coltan, an essential strategic mineral found in every cell phone, computer, aircraft and modern electronic device. Resources extracted from law free zones in the Congo and elsewhere in Africa invariably find their way into "legitimate" markets of Western Europe and the US.
While the death toll in neighboring Darfur the death toll is a twentieth or a hundredth that of the Congo, according to Mahmood Mandani and others who are in a position to know, but the Obama Administration, just like the Bush Administration before it, calls Darfur a "genocide," and not the Congo. The difference, say many, is that the Sudanese oil is being pumped out by the Chinese, while the profits from 5 million Congolese dead end up here. The "genocide" label is about as truthful as Saddam’s WMD, another excuse for military intervention.
Barack Obama has been to Somalia, but his administration continues the twenty year low-intensity war against that unhappy country. Somalia hasn’t had a central government in two decades not because its people don’t want one, but because successive US Republican and Democratic administrations brand as "terrorist Al Qeada sympathizers" any Somali government that won’t grant the US the exclusive rights to the untapped lake of oil beneath the country.
The Bush administratin established AFRICOM, the US imperial command on the continent, a move so unpopular that only one African government in 54 will dare openly accept it, fearing the wrath of their own constituents. Although it is a military command headed a black US general AFRICOM is seconded by a civilian from the State Department, and liberally sprinkled with representatives of every US civilian governmental, and some ostensible non-governmental entity which does business in Africa. Thus AFRICOM deliberately blurs the line between US civilian and military involvement on the African continent, and even more thoroughly militarizes US policy toward Africa.
Nobody who thinks half a minute about it imagines that the militarization of Africa, and of US policy toward Africa is a good thing. It has been US policy for more than two decades. Among the bipartisan designers of this policy are Obama’s top foreign policy advisors including Madeline Albright and Susan Rice. You can look awfully hard for some good news in Obama’s policy toward Africa so far, and find no reason for optimism.
We’ll give him one point out of five anyway, for no good reason. Call it hope.
8. Bailing Out Wall Street
The extent to which Wall Street and the Obama administration are in bed with each other is deeply disappointing to most Americans, according to a recent NBC News Gallup poll.
Not a single economist, regulator, or financial analyst who predicted the bursting of the bubble economy, and there were many, has been hired by Obama’s financial gurus, and every financial policy seems aimed at rescuing speculators rather than the American people. Rather than recognize the systemic crisis of capital for what it is, the end of business as usual, all the Obama ’stimulus" paackages are offered in the folorn hope that that lending can be re-started, another bubble re-inflated, and business can be resumed as usual.
Zero points out of six.
9. Debt and Foreclosure Crises
For ordinary people, the financial crisis has become a debt crisis. Mortgage, consumer and credit card debt have mounted to unpayable levels, as the parasitic masters of capital attempt to extract an interest payment out of every transaction. Acquiring a college education, for example, has become virtually impossible for most Americans without incurring a five figure debt at usurious interest rates. The Obamas, despite their much higher than average income, were unable to pay off their college loans till a couple years ago, when they received royalties from his best-selling book. Until there is a commitment on the part of the Obama administration to lower interest rates on current and new consumer, mortgage, and student loans, to restricting interest rates in future lending, and a restoration of bankruptcy laws that enable individuals to liquidate their debt and start anew, we cannot give Barack Obama any more than a single hopeful point out of six.
10. Investigatng the Bush Era Crimes
Unlike the nation’s political elite, a substantial majority of the American people want the Bush crimes against humanity and the Constitution at least investigated, But the Obama administration on every front seems to affirm a bipartisan elite consensus that government officials are above the law. The Obama vision of reconciliation without truth incentivizes further violations of law on the part of government, If there were negative points, we would award them here.
Zero out of five.
11. Criminalizing Immigration and Militarizing the Border
Despite some promising campaign rhetoric in which Obama declined to adopt the racist and scapegoating language of Republican and many Democratic politicians toward immigrants, the Obama administration designated Janet Napalitano, the evil twin sister of Phoenix sheriff Joe Arpaio to head the Department of Homeland Security. In our opinion, this is an executive agency which should never have been formed, and ought to now be dissolved. Under the Obama administration, construction of the border wall continues.
Obama gets one point for rhetoric, and another point for not deploying troops to the border. Two out of five.
12. Broadband For Everyone, Low Power Radio, and a Just and Fair Media
One of the administration’s professed goals is the extension of broadband availability to underserved rural and urban areas. The designation of $7 billion for this purpose, and the nomination of former FCC commissioner Jonathan Adelstein to supervise its dispensation is a promising start. But the failure thus far to neutralize corporate forces who want to keep any broadband mapping data concealed from the public is a loathsome concession to cable companies and telcos. Obama’s new FCC chief has not yet been confirmed, and so cannot be judged. The administration says it is for network neutrality, and has not opposed low power FM radio as far as we know. Its position on media consolidation and the future of music remain unknown.
Two points awarded here for substance, and one for hope. Three out of five.
13. Environment
The so-called "Cap And Trade" scheme favored by the Obama adminstration enacts the reprehensible suggestion of Obama advisor Larry Summers’ that African and other less developed countries are I"underpolluted" by establishing a corporate "right" to pollute, along with a financial market to buy, sell, trade and speculate on the value of these imaginary pollution "rights." It doesn’t appear to have reduced carbon emissions in Europe, according to Dartmouth’s Dr. Michael Dorsey, but it has made a lot of traders and speculators rich. , and is a product of the same market-as-solution-to-everything exhibited during the Bush years. A tax on carbon emission s would be more straightforward. No points there, and none for "clean coal" either.
The Obama adminstration gets a single point for talking up fuel economy standards and green jobs, with another thrown in for hope. One point out of five.
14. Agricultural Policy, and Policy Toward Black Farmers
The broad Obama policy toward agribusiness is unlikely to be good news. Obama is committed, for instance, to ethanol, which often takes more energy to produce than it does when burned. On the other hand, one of the first acts of Obama’s new Secretary of Agriculture was to meet with black farmers of the Southern Federation of Rural Cooperatives. After decades of malign neglect toward African American farmers, a single meeting isn’t much, but it’s hopeful, worth two points of a possible five.
15. Mass Black Imprisonment
Some things are too hot for a First Black President with no real allegiance to African Americans as a community to touch, but too important to the lives of millions in that community to ignore. Not long ago, Obama declared that despite an incarceration rate seven to nine times that of white America, blacks were "90% of the way to equality." If the First Black President cannot grow a pair on this issue, and come out for restorative justice, elimination of disparate penalties, banning of incarceration of juveniles with adults or an end to indeterminate sentencing, he deserves no points. It’s tough, it’s a high standard, but a fair one.
Zero out of five.
16. The Employee Free Choice Act
The EFCA would better enable workers to form unions across the country. It would give them some of the same vital tools for raising their own living standards that workers in other countries like Canada have — the ability to exercise democracy on the job and assert their economic rights to security and survival. On the campaign trail President Obama endorsed the EFCA, but gererally, only when asked or when appearing at union halls and labor functions. Since assuming office he has rarely mentioned it. The Chamber of Commerce and other employers including Wal-Kart and Home Depot are spending tens or hundreds of millions on deceitful PR campaigns to misrepresent and distort the issue. They are not being countered by the Obama administration. Some Democrats have declared against EFCA, and others appear ready to trade off pieces of it for goodness knows what. This is a time when presidential leadership can enable tens of millions to lift up their own living standards.
We are waiting for President Obama to show this leadership. Still waiting…. Two points of a possible five, and slipping.
17. Urban Policy
Despite the elevation of tens of thousands of African Americans to public office in cities and states and counties across the land, the creation of thousands of black millionaires, along with an educated and empowered black middle class, the only model of urban economic development any of us have seen consists of moving poorer people out of urban neighborhoods and richer ones in. The black misleadership class seems not to know how to create jobs or low income housing, or how to develop, to value, to stabilize communities where they are. They just know how to get paid, and they do that by playing the development game as their white counterparts have handed it to them. Sadly, Barack Obama’s administration brings little to the table on this score. We award the Obama administration two points for establishing an office of Urban Policy, and take away one of those for appointing a New York pol with ties to real estate developers to the post.
One out of five.
18. Privatization of Government Agencies and Services Including the Military
A hallmark of the Bush, and before that, the Clinton administration has been the conversion of public wealth, public property, even public services and the military, to centers of private profit. In principle, most Americans know that privatization of public resources is a bad idea. Publicly transparent processes become proprietary information. Public services are cut back to wring profits from every transaction, and needed services that don’t turn big enough profits are cut back. Vast portions of the nation’s intelligence, prisons and military establishments, for example, have been privatized. This is an issue never mentioned by candidate Obama or President Obama, but one vital to the future of any sort of democracy.
Zero points out of five.
A hundred days is far too early for anyone to score a hundred points on a list of concerns like these.
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