Freedom Rider: Ahmadinejad Wins
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by BAR editor and senior columnist Margaret Kimberley“Few Americans were aware that Iran has even a limited democracy.” Yet, today most of them have an opinion as to whether or not Iran’s recent election was rigged. In typical egocentric fashion, Americans and their corporate media believe the Iranian election revolved around that country’s relations with – guess who? - the United States. “The opinions of Americans may not have entered the mind of the average Iranian voter at all. Perhaps the constant attack from the American media and politicians make Ahmadinejad even more popular in his country than he would be otherwise.”
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Freedom Rider: Ahmadinejad Wins
by BAR editor and senior columnist Margaret Kimberley
“The American corporate media went into overdrive accepting that fraud was a fact.”
The sorry state of American journalism has been on full display in its coverage of the recent Iranian presidential election. Rarely do media tell us much of anything about Iran beyond using Bush era terms such as “axis of evil” to define this country. Iran’s development of a nuclear capability is used to frighten us and to make the case for more war. President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is vilified because he very publicly excoriates the United States and Israel for their violations of international and human rights law and for their very public threats against his nation.
Good journalism would require an at least cursory lesson in the history of America’s relations with Iran. Instead it is so rarely discussed that it is impossible for all but the most determined to learn anything that might be useful in analyzing election results or any other issues pertaining to Iran.
The most important thing to know about Iran is that it had a thriving secular democracy in the early 1950s until the United States and Great Britain overthrew the government of President Mohammed Mossadegh. In the 1980s, America used its then ally Saddam Hussein to wage a nearly ten year long war against Iran that resulted in the deaths of one million people. When Saddam used his weapons of mass destruction it was under the auspices of American support and Iranians were his primary victims.
For the past thirty years since the Islamic revolution, Iran has been under theocratic rule. Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei decides who can and cannot be a candidate for high office. Neither Ahmadinejad nor his main rival Mir Hossein Mousavi would have waged their fierce electoral battle unless the mullahs had decided to allow both men into the contest.
“It is wise to be skeptical of the analysis which is said to prove fraud.”
Yet few Americans were aware that Iran has even a limited democracy. The media usually don’t bother to cover Iran’s presidential elections at all. It was quite different this year, however. Suddenly there was hours of footage of a “green” revolution waged by Mousavi’s supporters. News stories about opinion polls and debates made headlines.
When Ahmadinejad was declared the winner, Mousavi and his supporters claimed the election was stolen, and the American corporate media went into overdrive accepting that fraud was a fact. The Obama administration, which like those before it loves unelected hereditary dictators in the Middle East, jumped on the band wagon and used the fraud charge as a weapon against Ahmadinejad, as if democracy is really a criteria for American financial and military support.
It is difficult for anyone in this country to know who Iranian voters support or why, or to acknowledge that their political preferences may have nothing to do with the United States. Perhaps they act just like Americans and determine who has the best educational, health care, or economic policies before they cast their ballots. The opinions of Americans may not have entered the mind of the average Iranian voter at all. Perhaps the constant attack from the American media and politicians make Ahmadinejad even more popular in his country than he would be otherwise.
“Americans do not have the right to butt in yet again and create even more disasters .”
Because Ahmadinejad has been declared an enemy of America, it is wise to be skeptical of the analysis which is said to prove fraud. The arguments are so specious as to be laughable. We are told that it is impossible for Mousavi to have lost the vote in his home region. Al Gore lost his home state in 2000, why could the same thing not happen in Iran? The media in this country declare winners moments after polls close when not one vote has been counted. Yet the Iranian government early declaration of a winner is presented as proof of a stolen election.
Americans should be commended for being interested in Iran, but they should also be viewed with suspicion. We are propagandized to believe that our country is good and right and can and ought to interfere with people all over the world. Liberal bloggers crying foul for Mousavi’s sake will likely be the first to defend the Obama administration if it makes real its threats against Iran. Iran has a right to decide its own destiny, it has the right to develop a nuclear capability that may some day include nuclear weapons. Americans do not have the right to butt in yet again and create even more disasters for this nation than it has in the past.
So instead of claiming to be experts on subjects about which they know little, Americans should work to keep their own government in check, and prevent any further invasions, occupations, or drone attacks in that part of the world. Iranians will determine who their presidents ought to be and what kind of political system they should have. Americans claiming good intent always bring nothing but disaster.
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.
Eshu’s blues: It’s a jungle out here
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by BAR columnist michael hureaux perezThe imperial menu offers us a range of dishes, from prime cut mass murder (Congo, Af-Pak), to trailer park cold cuts a la Sarah Palin and her abstinence-preaching daughter-momma. And then there’s “Golden Tonsils Obama, whose Cairo speech just two weeks ago fell into that realm the character in Mel Brooks’ movie Blazing Saddles was talking about when he said another character in the film had a ‘prettier tongue then a fifty dollar whore.’”
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Eshu’s blues: It’s a jungle out here
by BAR columnist michael hureaux perez
“The leaders of both major political parties are bombing and strafing their way around the world and bankrupting the general public.”
Would-be Vice President Sarah Palin usually endorses the sort of zoo that the bourgeois political world has become, but things have been quiet on her end for a few weeks and if she’s going to stay in the running for the Republican nomination in 2012, she’s got to come on like she’s actually about something other than burning Arab children or preventing gay people from getting married here in the good old U.S. of A. The leaders of both major political parties are bombing and strafing their way around the world and bankrupting the general publichere at home with a bailout of speculators and bank thieves, but Sarah Palin’s in a lather about some comment David Letterman made about her daughter. It’s a funny thing - of course, Palin wasn’t very upset about her old running mate Johnny McCain’s joke that “Chelsea Clinton was ugly because she was Janet Reno’s daughter.” But there are priorities when you dearly want to be vice president, or president, or something other than the obvious white right-wing whack hack job you are, so family honor is now a political issue that should concern us all. And it’s a jungle out there.
Oh, vice presidential ambition can be such a burr under the saddle. Vice President Joseph Biden, having actually won power, has many things over which to have a power-mongering tizzy. The vice president of the largest holding interest in the world needs to look like he’s doing something besides counting votes in the Senate. So, what to do? Well, there’s plenty. Mahmoud Ahmedinejad just handily won reelection over in Iran, and from many an account, the West appears to be shocked at the results because apparently votes outside of Teheran count as much as votes in the urban center, and out in the hinterlands, Ahmedinejad had the support Mir Hussein Mousavi didn’t. Apparently the only people who weren’t surprised were people in Iran.
“Perhaps the teeming mass will be swayed by Golden Tonsils Obama.”
Out here in the western world, where many of us who reject grand narrative labor under the delusion that Ahmedinejad should have been defeated because he’s a sexist and homophobic jerk, we might have to reckon with class realities that operate outside of postmodern theory or identity politics as an end in itself. But that’s not going to happen for awhile. In the meantime, there will be many of us who crusade merrily behind Vice President Biden as he supports Mousavi’s call to cancel the election. What a guy! I’m sure pseudo-democratic moralisms from the vice president of a superpower which ices hundreds of thousands of people in the Middle East, and forces hundreds of thousands more into refugee status, will carry some real weight. And if such bromides don’t sway the folks of the Middle East, perhaps the teeming mass will be swayed by Golden Tonsils Obama, whose Cairo speech just two weeks ago fell into that realm the character in Mel Brooks’ movie Blazing Saddles was talking about when he said another character in the film had a “prettier tongue then a fifty dollar whore.” Maybe. But it’s a jungle out there.
If all else fails, the hijinx of the North Korean stalinoid Kim Jong II, who has been testing nuclear weapons at a rate that the imperialists of the West find quite alarming, ought to get people panting. God forbid any government in the non-white world find a way to defend itself from a clear aggressor like the United States, and by god, Vice President Joe Biden promised us that the Obama administration would find itself tested in a serious way in its first six months. Joe wants us to know this might be the test. But why this Kim Jong the Second is such a pain is a mystery. Why North Korea would feel threatened by the West is beyond anybody’s guess, apparently, leaving out the war the United States conducted against the country fifty years ago which cost a couple million lives, or the permanent stationing of thirty thousand troops all these decades since. Some people are just too touchy.
Yes, it’s a jungle out there, and Tarzan just really doesn’t know what to do. Tarzan has tried not to bundolo (word for “kill” in Edgar Rice Burroughs’s ape-man novels) but some people just have to be bundolo’d. Especially those restless natives, who, in the absence of a revolutionary working class movement, have a nasty habit of supporting anybody who will say anything even remotely critical of the empire. If that means supporting the Kim Jong IIs and the Mahmoud Ahmenidejads, so it goes. And it can go no other way, so long as the world needs a revolutionary, democratic socialism, and the merchant’s empire insists on doing everything its own way, and works actively to suppress any secular resistance with a cutting edge.
“God forbid any government in the non-white world find a way to defend itself from a clear aggressor like the United States.”
Politics abhors a vacuum. So long as postmodern political culture insists on an alleged neutral quality found in the apocalyptic vomit of the world ruling class dictatorship, the main beneficiaries of the resistance will always be led by the loudest emotional shouters, in this instance, Kim Jong II and Mahmoud Ahmenidejad. Thus have the ruling class and all its followers made the world.
None of this would surprise Franz Fanon, dead nearly half a century now, but still more alive than many of the critics of his marxist methodology:
“The leader pacifies the people. For years on end after independence has been won, we see him, incapable of urging on the people to a concrete task, unable really to open the future to them or of flinging them into the path of national reconstruction, that is to say, of their own reconstruction; we see him reassessing the history of independence and recalling the sacred unity of the struggle for liberation. The leader, because he refuses to break up the national bourgeoisie, asks the people to fall back into the past and to become drunk on the remembrance of the epoch which led to independence. The leader, seen objectively, brings the people to a halt, and persists in either expelling them from history or preventing them from taking root in it…(pg 169, Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, Grove Press Edition, 1963).
Yes, indeed. The leader, objectively speaking, brings the people to a halt, and persists in either expelling them from history or preventing them from taking root in it. The tale is told of you and me. Screw Palin, the same for Biden, and Obama, and the mediocre clown Letterman, who only the disaffected believers in professional class foppery find amusing, and Ahmenidejad, and Kim Jong II. The whole story is told of you and me, the collective memory of the working class. And, for the time being, at least, it’s a jungle out here.
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
ObamaCare: A Non-Existent Health Plan That Begins with Cuts
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A Black Agenda Radio Commentary by Glen Ford Click the flash player below to listen to or the mic to download an mp3 copy of this BA Radio commentary.
There is no Obama healthcare plan, “just mouthfuls of generalized rhetoric that changes with the moment, as Obama constantly woos the insurance, drug and hospital corporations.” However, Obama’s proposed cuts to Medicare and Medicaid will take on lives of their own. That’s what Republicans have “been clamoring for for generations,” and Obama offered it to them, upfront. “In his rush to mollify the private healthcare profiteers, Obama has given away the pubic store.”
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ObamaCare: A Non-Existent Health Plan That Begins with Cuts
A Black Agenda Radio Commentary by Glen Ford
“To protect the profiteers, Obama turned on the progressive wing of his own party.”
Just as Barack Obama went from ostensible peace candidate to a president that greatly expanded the American theater of war in Asia, so has he been transformed, in front of our eyes, from self-proclaimed healthcare reformer to Medicare and Medicaid budget cutter. Along the way, he has used his White House bully pulpit to silence advocates of genuine healthcare reform, and to make common cause with the profit-gougers that have made healthcare in the United States the most expensive, and least generally accessible, in the developed world. While putting forward no defined plan of his own, Obama has encouraged the political allies of the insurance, pharmaceuticals and hospital industries to present their own plans in the guise of “reform.”
From the day he took office, President Obama has pursued a two-part healthcare strategy. First, he would categorically reject a single-payer solution to the healthcare crisis, one that would treat healthcare as a right, and would pay for it by breaking the stranglehold of the private sector. To protect the profiteers, Obama turned on the progressive wing of his own party, ruthlessly eliminating them from White House-sponsored healthcare events, to give the impression that the Obama plan was the only option. But in fact, there was – and still is - no Obama plan, just mouthfuls of generalized rhetoric that changes with the moment, as Obama constantly woos the insurance, drug and hospital corporations.
Congressman John Conyers, the Dean of the Congressional Black Caucus, has gathered 79 co-sponsors for his House version of a single payer healthcare bill, HR 676. President Obama tried to make Conyers a non-person, and encouraged committee chairmen to keep Conyers and other single payer advocates out of their healthcare hearings. Conyers, who entered Congress when Obama was only four years old,lambasted the Presidentfor taking single payer “off the table before we start, without a hearing.” As long as “the corporate healthcare people” dominate the discussion, said Conyers, “you are going to have some sad version of the same crap you were supposed to be fixing in the first place.”
“The White House is engaged in an assault on the main public healthcare plan in existence, while as yet there is nothing to replace it.”
In the end, it may be worse than Conyers fears, because the second part of Obama’s healthcare strategy was to start off the discussion by announcing his intention to make big cuts – trillions of dollars worth - inMedicare and Medicaid. Amazingly, he gave the Republicans what they’ve been clamoring for for generations, upfront! Now the White House is engaged in an assault on the main public healthcare plan in existence, while as yet there is nothing to replace it.In his rush to mollify the private healthcare profiteers, Obama has given away the pubic store.
Obama continues to insist that he will hold out for some kind of public healthcare plan. In the end, it will likely be quite modest, a scheme that will only wind up extending coverage to a portion of the 45-plus million currently uninsured. Most of the rest of the public will remain with the private insurers. Single payer, whose time had come, will have been buried for at least the remainder of Obama’s term in office. But the cuts to Medicare and Medicaid will take their course through the Congress, with Obama’s blessing. Like Congressman Conyers said, we’ll wind up with “some sad version of the same crap” that we started out with. Or maybe worse. 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.
Harlem’s Mae Jackson: When Obama Speaks, Whose Lips Move?
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If you don’t see the video above, click here.
Mae Jackson is a New York City based writer, poet, dreamer and doer whose record of activism on behalf of her people stretches back to SNCC. A founder of Art Without Walls, an art program for the children of imprisoned women, she is well acquainted with the difference between surface change, and fundamental, revolutionary change.
Here are a few minutes of her address to the crowd at May 31, 2009 event memorializing the early 20th century Harlem activist Hubert Harrison, in which she lays out a clear understanding of whose lips move when our First Black President speaks. Referring to some of Barack Obama’s widely acclaimed orations at the Democratic convention, atop Lincoln’s tomb, and other places, she tells us
“..those wonderful speeches made by the young man from Chicago were actually crafted, that’s written, by three young white men 25, 26 and 31 years old. We got the unfortunate opportunity once again to see the world through their eyes. Obama was the spokesperson. Same as when you buy a painting, that doesn’t make you the painter…”
She explains how the establishment turned took the politics out of activism, neutralizing and de-politicizing young political activists by turning them into “community organizers."
Obama Charges Backward On Health Care
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by BAR executive editor Glen Ford
Barack Obama, like the little kids that used to appear on Art Linkletter’s TV show, says “the darndest things.” He has discovered that the “root cause” of America’s health care cost problem isn’t the insurance companies, or the drug barons, or the hospital corporations. Medicare is the villain. “Disastrously, he has created a situation in which health care ‘reform’ is predicated on stripping Medicare down to the bone.”
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Obama Charges Backwards on Health Care
by BAR executive editor Glen Ford
“Obama called on Congress to squeeze half a trillion dollars over the next ten years out of Medicare.”
President Obama this past weekend made a big to-do about taking charge in the health care debate. His phrase-mongers were busy at their specialty: shaping air for their boss to blow without hurting anyone powerful. "Simply put, the status quo is broken," said Obama on Saturday. "We cannot continue this way. If we do nothing, everyone’s healthcare will be put in jeopardy."
The problem is, status quos are usually arrangements that serve the purposes of those in power, and do not break by themselves. Breaking the status quo requires doing battle with entrenched interests. One cannot cajole, lie or primp one’s way out. There is one exit, and that is through struggle.
“We must attack the root causes of skyrocketing health costs,” the president told his radio audience, correctly. But of course, fighting the powers-that-be in health care – the corporations whose quest for mega-profits is the “root cause” of wildly overpriced and criminally ill-distributed health services in the United States – has never been on Obama’s agenda. Instead, like a McCarthyite searching for communists under the bed, the president pointed a long finger at the imagined culprit: Medicare. Obama then called on Congress to squeeze half a trillion dollars over the next ten years out of Medicare, whose overhead is a fraction of the for-profit health sector.
Obama succeeds only in further alarming what’s left of the Left in his party – a sport of his, that no doubt makes him feel courageous. Disastrously, he has created a situation in which health care “reform” is predicated on stripping Medicare down to the bone. That’s a game the Right would love to play, and Obama has given them the invitation.
“Obama, himself, is a principle impediment to real discussion of health care.”
He has given progressives nothing but the finger – and some lefties are finally gathering up enough self-respect to get angry about it. They have come to the realization that Obama, himself, is a principle impediment to real discussion of health care. In crudely freezing single payer advocates out of White House mediated realms of discussion, he has drastically thinned the ranks of serious potential allies in any future throwdown with the corporations. One can only conclude that Obama and his advisors are either bad strategic planners, or that they never intended to confront Big Pharma, Big Insurance, and Big Hospitals in any serious manner.
My own belief is that Obama and his circle understood that any winning Democrat would be required to seem to embrace something that sounded like “universal” health care. A master of ambiguity, Obama convinced those who were not listening closely that he is, at heart, a reformer – whatever that is. Yet even before winning the general election, Obama prepared to govern, as the New York Times noted, from the “center-right” of his party – through Democratic Leadership Council (DLC) operatives like his chief of staff, Rahm Enamuel, Blue Dogs, Wall Street’s many servants on Capitol Hill, and Republicans. It has been quite clear for some time (and crystal clear in hindsight) that Obama’s general legislative and public relations strategy was to silence and neutralize the Democratic Party’s Left. This was thought to be necessary in order to prepare the pubic for some grand proclamation by Obama on his forging of a national consensus – a coming together of business and labor, rich and poor, all regions and sectors, in time of crisis. That’s his kind of music.
When that didn’t happen in the health care arena, Obama’s people simply invented a “consensus” and political “breakthrough” that never occurred. In what we described as “Obama’s Health Care Charade” (BAR, May 13, ’09), the White House in May proclaimed that industry leaders had “agreed” to save the public $2 trillion over the next ten years, out of the goodness of their hearts. Of course, this was nonsense on the face of it, and corporate executives found themselves compelled to announce they had made no such promise.
“Obama’s general legislative and public relations strategy was to silence and neutralize the Democratic Party’s Left.”
Obama will play tricks on his friends in the boardrooms in hopes of making them appear more public-spirited than he knows them to be, but he will never challenge their power, which he sees as legitimate and benign (the “genius of capitalism”). The social peace he seeks, therefore, must come at the expense of those who would upset the status quo: chiefly, Blacks and progressives.
However, the real world intrudes on Obama’s political theater. He was so busy putting single payer Democrats in quarantine, he allowed the so-called “centrists” to make their own deals with the health care industry. For example, Montana Sen. Baucus, whose Finance Committee followed Obama’s lead in banning single payer supporters from testifying at its “hearings,” is vowing to come up with a bill weak enough to draw substantial Republican support. Sen. Ted Kennedy’s plan would expand Medicare, the program Obama wants to scapegoat. New York’s Sen. Charles Schumer swears that he will not allow a national plan that would undercut private insurance companies.
The big secret is that Barack Obama doesn’t have a health care plan, just a bunch of vague statements. In this regard, he is truly the hollow man. Every corporate interest in Washington now has the opportunity to write their profits into the legislation that finally emerges.
The 80-strong Congressional Progressive Caucus and the 41-member Congressional Black Caucus both endorsed a national health care plan along the lines of Medicare for all. The two caucuses heavily overlap, and strong majorities favor single payer. In a more sensible world, progressives on The Hill would have made their presence felt much earlier, before the obituaries had been written on single payer. At the vortex of the confusion is Obama, both the actual corporate politician and the imagined ally. With smoke, mirrors, and duplicity, he has spread confusion among the enemy – which as far as he’s concerned, is us.
BAR executive editor Glen Ford can be contacted at Glen.Ford@BlackAgendaReport.com.
Freedom Rider: Obama Insults Muslims
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by BAR editor and senior columnist Margaret Kimberley
“Barack Obama seems to think that Muslims are stupid, stupid enough to accept invasions and occupations without complaint if an American president shows up and quotes from the Koran.” It is amazing how Americans and their presidents keep a straight face while urging non-white foreigners to tolerate the intolerable. ““Palestinians must abandon violence. Resistance through violence and killing is wrong and does not succeed,” Obama preaches – while his drones and soldiers kill women and children around the globe.
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Freedom Rider: Obama Insults Muslims
by BAR editor and senior columnist Margaret Kimberley
“The only group instructed to eschew extremism and violence was the Palestinians.”
During the 2008 presidential campaign, Barack Obama went to great lengths to deny rumors he was then or ever had been a Muslim. He certainly proved he was telling the truth with his abysmally offensive speech to the “Muslim world.”
Team Obama certainly knows how to make very little seem like quite a lot. Obama’s speech in Cairo was a case in point. It was nothing more than standard American propaganda, full of lies about this country and its ally Israel, and notions of exceptionalism and superiority towards people of color.
Barack Obama seems to think that Muslims are stupid, stupid enough to accept invasions and occupations without complaint if an American president shows up and quotes from the Koran. America is the most violent nation on earth and poses the greatest danger to world peace. Israel runs a close second.
Israel continues to steal Palestinian land, and to wall off Palestinians into a hellish occupation. One million Gazans are kept in an open air prison, prevented from fleeing whenever Israel chooses to start another killing spree. Outsiders, including the world’s media, are not allowed to chronicle their suffering or even bring them food and medical care.
Yet Obama’s speech said nothing about American backed Israeli violence. The only group instructed to eschew extremism and violence was the Palestinians. “Palestinians must abandon violence. Resistance through violence and killing is wrong and does not succeed.” If Obama really believed that violence is wrong and doomed to failure, United States troops would be gone from Iraq and Afghanistan. American drones would not be on the prowl in Pakistan, bringing death to the civilian population. “It is a sign of neither courage nor power to shoot rockets at sleeping children, or to blow up old women on a bus.” Israeli bombs killed 1,400 in Gaza, including many children, and blew up many old women on buses and elsewhere.
“Israelis brazenly tell Obama they will do what they want.”
While Muslims were expected to listen to drivel, Israelis brazenly tell Obama what they have told all his predecessors. They will do what they want, whether Washington approves or not. Obama was informed that Israel will continue building settlements on Palestinian land, claiming that approval from the Bush administration gives them carte blanche to do so. In any case, Obama’s weak effort to appear evenhanded is a joke to anyone who is paying close attention. The complete absence of criticism of Israel and nonsensical descriptions of Palestinian “dislocation” prove the much talked about speech was nothing more than the latest Obama marketing extravaganza.
The world knows that presidents are lying when they claim to promote democracy. While the greatly demonized Iranian president is in a closely contested electoral fight, Egyptian president for life Hosni Mubarak used his security forces to keep Egyptians off the streets during the speech. He couldn’t risk allowing any public expression of dislike for his latest Oval Office sugar daddy. Before the Cairo visit, Obama was in Saudi Arabia and praised its dictatorial king as a man of “wisdom.” True democracies are threatened by American power, yet dictators are praised.
The contradictions of Obama’s speech are so obvious that it is hard to believe he intended to reach only a Middle Eastern audience. He was also speaking directly to Americans. Obama’s ascendancy and the reaction to his policies makes it clear that very few people in this country are interested in changing anything of substance. Even most progressives want a president they can like more than they want a president who will bring the change they claim to have wanted so badly.
“Even most progressives want a president they can like more than they want a president who will bring change.”
When Obama inevitably escalates his wars in Afghanistan and Pakistan or attacks Iran, he will have a group of willing accomplices. The people who should challenge him will instead go along with more American state terror and point to his speech in Cairo as a reason. They will remember him praising Arabic numbers and saying nice things about Islam and happily justify yet another reason to surrender. Actually they will do worse than surrender, they will assist him in making the case for continued violence perpetrated by their country.
Professor As’ad AbuKhalil knew the truth about the “new beginning” before Obama spoke even one syllable. “Who cares about what Obama will say or not say? I mean, why should people care about what the visiting White Man (yes, as soon as you run for the American presidency you assume the role of the White Man regardless of the color of your skin) will preach to Egyptians and Muslims? I await that speech the way I await sequels to Rocky movies.”
AbuKhalil is wrong about one thing. It is far more logical to await a sequel in a bad movie franchise than to hang on to the words of a president of the United States.
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.
Eshu’s blues: Media circus throws another temper tantrum over Sotomayor nomination
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Opponents of Sonia Sotomayor’s nomination claim to be fighting against the rise of an “activist court” – “which is what the ruling class of this country calls any court which occasionally intervenes on behalf of historically repressed peoples.” Such politicians are much more comfortable with jurists such as Chief Justice Roger B. Taney, who famously proclaimed that Blacks have no rights that a white man is bound to respect. The modern-day Taneys don’t have much tolerance for uppity Puerto Ricans, either.
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Eshu’s blues: Media circus throws another temper tantrum over Sotomayor nomination
by michael hureaux perez
“The country is standing at an explosive crossroads regarding questions of race, class, and gender, both domestically and internationally.”
The current fuss over Sonia Sotomayor’s U.S. Supreme Court nomnation has much less to do with her philosophy of law as expressed in any decisions she may have been part of, than to a speech which contained a low-key discourse on race, class and gender oppression. The speech was delivered before a group of Latino law students at the University of California in Berkeley eight years ago. Sotomayor is being pilloried for speaking hypothetically about the role that personal experience can play in the life of a jurist. Reflecting on her own experience as a woman of Puerto Rican ancestry who came up in the South Bronx forty years ago, Sotomayor offered the following comment in the closing moments of her address:
“Whether born from experience or inherent physiological or cultural differences, a possibility I abhor less or discount less than my colleague Judge Cedarbaum, our gender and national origins may and will make a difference in our judging. Justice (Sandra Day) O’Connor has often been cited as saying that a wise old man and a wise old woman will reach the same conclusion in deciding cases… I am not so sure I agree with the statement. First, as Professor Martha Minnow has noted, there can never be a universal definition of wise. Second, I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a man who has never had that life.”
Sotomayor was speaking quite cautiously in defense of the idea that experiences of race, gender, and class can make one more sensitive to arbitrary or capricious effect within the constraints of the law. Her address at Berkeley was largely a response to her colleague Judge Miriam Cedarbaum, who apparently has often expressed guarded concerns about the potential effect of individual experience in interpretations of the law. Judge Cedarbaum, according to Sotomayor, has a deep and abiding concern about the need of judges to achieve a greater degree of fairness and integrity based upon what both woman call “the reason of law.” In her speech Sotomayor chose to ask whether it is possible to achieve such a goal in all, or even most, cases – which is a reasonable question for a legal mind to pursue. If Sotomayor’s question is rooted in racist theory, as the blogosphere is whining about right now, let it be said unequivocally that the Supreme Court has had far worse contaminants in its history.
“The late Chief Justice William Rehnquist was a great admirer of his predecessor Roger B. Taney, of the notorious Dred Scott decision.”
For example, the preceding Chief Justice of the United States, the late William Rehnquist, was a great admirer of his predecessor Roger B. Taney (he of the notorious Dred Scott decision). Everyone knows Taney said black people had no rights white people were bound to respect. Fewer folks know that Taney argued that way because he believed that the original framers of the Constitution never intended for the document to be “liberally” interpreted by succeeding generations. Taney, in denying Scott’s petition for freedom, was declaring his intent to embalm the Constitution, and Rehnquist, in his sojourn as Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, did his best to defend Taney’s contributions to a petrified philosophy of law and justice.
The common idea among Rehnquist and his disciples like Anton Scalia and Clarence Thomas is that they are defending us all from what they call an “activist” court, which is what the ruling class of this country calls any court which occasionally intervenes on behalf of historically repressed peoples. Sotomayor may well offer half of an attentive ear to such populations, and that can’t be tolerated. Hence all the pissing and moaning about her appointment at a moment when the country is standing at an explosive crossroads regarding questions of race, class, and gender, both domestically and internationally.
The funny unfunny part of all this is that nothing underscores Sotomayor’s concerns more precisely then the firestorm that her nomination has engendered. Here is a woman who rose from one of the toughest ghettos in the country to become a Yale law student and a nominee to the Supreme Court, someone who has met any “merit” criteria that the right wing geniuses of the “new federalism” would care to haul out. And yet a relatively innocuous statement she made about the impact of race, gender and class upon the common philosophy of the law is blown entirely out of proportion, and a woman who grew up around the racist destruction of the neighborhoods of the Bronx is reviled as a racist. Only in Amurrika.
“Obama suggested to the media that Sotomayor would no doubt have ‘re-spoken’ her words had she known they would cause such furor.”
Well, Sonia Sotomayor may not be a jurist who meets with some abstract legal standard overseen by big time oxycodeine dealers like Rush Limbaugh, but she declares that she wants to interrogate the racial and class based presumptions that continue to play a role in the interpretation of law. As one of my students informed me, Sotomayor did not claim that simply being Latina would make her a better judge than a white man. She implied – or hoped – that the experience of a Latina would grant such a judge broader insight into the workings of the law. Oh, the horror! How dast anyone insist on an institutionalization of nuance in what remains of the corporate justice system?
Meanwhile, Sotomayor’s so-called sponsor, Barack Obama continues to play his usual lukewarm role. The other day, Obama suggested to the media that Sotomayor would no doubt have “re-spoken” her words had she known they would cause such furor.
Unfortunately for President Phony, the actual meaning of Sotomayor’s words is crystal clear to anyone who has the gumption to look them up. Barack Obama could have defended the statement as a whole, and he chose not to, with one of his usual displays of spinelessness that come into play whenever the more rabid elements of the corporate right start barking. One would think a big, bad Harvard law professor could find the strength to energetically defend his choice of a candidate for a position that could be affecting lives into the next three decades. But as usual, the president is playing the Clinton card. Methinks I hear the rattling chains of the spirit of the Lani Guinier nomination.
In the meantime, the usual mediated fit that the more demented elements of late capitalist culture throw whenever they don’t get their way continues to drive the national discussion around the Sotomayor nomination – yea, verily, the circus has once again come to town. Ladies and gentlemen, in the center ring, the usual Sound and Fury, signifying nothing.
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.
GM Could Have Become a “Green” Industrial Machine
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A Black Agenda Radio commentary by Glen Ford
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President Obama has passed up his chance to become a transformational president, by failing to convert the excess capacity of General Motors – 60 percent-owned by the U.S. public – to “green” manufacturing. Instead, the public has paid $50 billion, and counting, for 14 industrial junkyards where car factories used to be. Obama’s refusal to rise to the historic occasion shows that he “worships at the alter of private capital – the same corporate developmental model that has been de-industrializing the United States for the last four decades.”
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GM Could Have Become a “Green” Industrial Machine
A Black Agenda Radio commentary by Glen Ford
“Did the people pay $50 billion for a bunch of junkyards?”
President Obama’s super-cynical chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, is fond off saying that a serious crisis should not be allowed to go to waste. By that, he means that crises provide opportunities to accomplish big changes that would be impossible in less stressful times. It is safe to assume that his boss feels that way, too. It is, therefore, fair to conclude that the terms of the bailout and reorganization of General Motors reflects Barack Obama’s core beliefs regarding the role of government in the economy. Certainly, Obama would not allow a crisis to be wasted. So, when Obama failed to make any attempt to put GM’s unused plants and people to work as the epicenter of a new, “green” industrial machine, it was because he opposes a strong federal role in transforming the economy. Obama worships at the alter of private capital – the same corporate developmental model that has been de-industrializing the United States for the last four decades.
Obama’s wishful supporters on the left fantasized that their hero would seize the historic opportunity created by the crisis to transform the auto industry into a mighty nexus of green manufacturing. After all, the public has already committed $50 billion to General Motors, with more to come. But the end result is the loss of 21,000 GM workers, many times that number at factories that supply GM, and about 100,000 lost jobs at shuttered GM car dealerships. Obama had the perfect opportunity, born of crisis, to retool General Motors and retain its disciplined workforce in green industry, building public transportation vehicles and infrastructure. After all, the American public owns 60 percent of the company. Having paid for the property, most Americans would prefer that GM’s factories and workers be put to good use, rather than putting padlocks on 14 auto plants. Did the people pay $50 billion for a bunch of junkyards?
“Obama had the perfect opportunity, born of crisis, to retool General Motors.”
Obama would have been thought of as a new Franklin Roosevelt, had he seized the time and opted for industrial transformation, rather than the junking of yet more of the country’s industrial base. But Obama is no Franklin Roosevelt; there is no political resemblance whatsoever between Obama and the president who put 8 million Americans directly to work on the federal payroll during the Great Depression, at the same time transforming the national infrastructure in ways that still serve us, today.
Obama engineered a one-shot stimulus whose effects are undetectable among the growing army of the unemployed. His approach is to massively bribe corporations and banks to do the right thing, and then pretend he is helpless when the fat cats take the money and run. At any rate, no amount of bribery will change the behavior of people who have spent their entire lives shutting down and selling off the U.S. manufacturing sector. Such a transformation must occur against the wishes of the finance capitalists that created the crisis. Massive federal intervention, through direct investment and control of the new, green enterprises, is the only solution.
The auto industry crisis was the perfect opportunity to retain industrial jobs and begin a green economic transformation. But Barack Obama is not a transformational leader. He works for the banks. 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.
Freedom Rider: The Sotomayor Hype
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by BAR editor and senior columnist Margaret Kimberley
Blacks and progressives should prefer a "wise Latina" to the usual Supreme Court fare, any day. "The white male perspective has ruled unchallenged for centuries and has done great damage to human beings around the world." However, just because Sonia Sotomayor is under attack from raging racists, doesn’t mean she should get a free pass from the Left. "Sotomayor should not be allowed to escape scrutiny because of race pride and meaningless swooning from white liberals."
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Freedom Rider: The Sotomayor Hype
by BAR editor and senior columnist Margaret Kimberley
“She is called a ‘centrist,’ a label which tells us little in an age when the political pendulum doesn’t ever swing back to the left.”
The nomination of Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court should be an opportunity to assess her record, and to critically assess the Obama administration and develop strategic responses to his actions. Instead, most of the discussion post nomination has focused on one speech Sotomayor gave in 2001 and the person of color boot strap story so beloved by the corporate media and liberal whites.
Appeals Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor has been considered a possible Supreme Court justice for some time. She was always at the top of the list of possible replacements for retiring Justice David Souter. The White House floated the Sotomayor trial balloon and when it wasn’t shot down, decided to move forward.
Sotomayor has impressive credentials, that is to say she attended the universities that ambitious people have to attend if they expect to be appointed to the federal judiciary or anything else of note. If confirmed by the Senate she will be only the third woman and the first Latina Supreme Court justice. The media love the story of a Puerto Rican whose widowed mother lived in a housing project while she worked two jobs to support her children.
The pulling up by the bootstraps story can be a very dangerous one. Inherent in the “she came from the projects” exultation is a racist, class conscious condemnation of people who happen to live in public housing. Many public housing residents are productive, honest people. Some end up leaving, some don’t and those who don’t shouldn’t be vilified if they don’t attend ivy league schools and sit on the federal bench.
“The media love the story of a Puerto Rican whose widowed mother lived in a housing project while she worked two jobs to support her children.”
Praise for the humble beginnings story is also dangerous because it provides an easy way out for white America. Like voting for Barack Obama, singing the praises of Sonia Sotomayor allows white people to let themselves off the hook when they ought to examine their nation’s continuing racism and their role in it.
Sotomayor’s nomination is historic, just as Obama’s elevation to the presidency is historic. However historic her rise, it should not be allowed to absolve her from acting on behalf of citizens and not on behalf of corporations and an oppressive government. Obama’s hyped up “historic” accomplishment has allowed him to be a wolf in sheep’s clothing, spreading war and codifying the worse aspects of Bush era rules on indefinite detention. Sotomayor should not be allowed to escape scrutiny because of race pride and meaningless swooning from white liberals.
Lacking in the media is any substantive reports of her decisions on the federal bench. She was originally appointed by president George H.W. Bush 1991 and later to the court of appeals by Bill Clinton in 1997. She is called a “centrist,” a label which tells us little in an age when the political pendulum doesn’t ever swing back to the left. In the fifty most recent discrimination cases (*link scouts blog) on which she ruled, she and her colleagues accepted a finding of discrimination only three times.
“The white male perspective has ruled unchallenged for centuries and has done great damage to human beings around the world.”
Yet one statement she made is getting particular attention, and for all the wrong reasons, giving rightwing talking heads much to wring their hands over. In a 2001 speech she made the following statement:
“I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn’t lived that life. Let us not forget that wise men like Oliver Wendell Holmes and Justice Cardozo voted on cases which upheld both sex and race discrimination in our society. Until 1972, no Supreme Court case ever upheld the claim of a woman in a gender discrimination case.”
While her rulings in discrimination cases receive scant attention, this one comment is repeated over and over again. The statement rings true. The thoughts of white men have been deemed normative, the only thoughts worthy of consideration. White male jurists kept slavery in place, and segregation and sex discrimination. What is wrong with a Latina perspective determining the law? The white male perspective has ruled unchallenged for centuries and has done great damage to human beings around the world. The “wise Latina” argument should work just fine, but when Republicans attacked the president didn’t defend her very strongly. Instead, in typical Obama fashion he insisted that she would “restate” the remark. The fact Obama chose her means that she is probably not the second coming of Thurgood Marshall. He told us early on that he would not pick anyone who could be called a liberal jurist:
"I will seek somebody who is dedicated to the rule of law, who honors our constitutional traditions, who respects the integrity of the judicial process and the appropriate limits of the judicial role. I will seek somebody who shares my respect for constitutional values on which this nation was founded, and who brings a thoughtful understanding of how to apply them in our time.
As I make this decision, I intend to consult with members of both parties across the political spectrum."(Emphasis mine.)
As I make this decision, I intend to consult with members of both parties across the political spectrum."(Emphasis mine.)
Republicans will make racist hay and compare Sotomayor to a KKK member, but that is no reason to dismiss accountability from her or from Obama. The rush to defend her from attacks by Newt Gingrich or Rush Limbaugh should not be a reason to let her escape hard questioning. After all, the power to make lifetime judicial appointments is supposed to be a reason to put Democrats in the Oval Office. If Obama has to ask Republican permission before he makes a nomination, then we have one more argument against the importance of Democrats being in office.
Sotomayor is an unknown quantity whose long history of court rulings demand full examination. If that doesn’t happen, we will have another Obama, and one of those is quite enough.
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.
R.I.P. Industrial USA. The Banksters Win, Even When They Fail
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A Black Agenda Radio commentary by Glen Ford
Click the flash player below to listen to or the mic to download an mp3 copy of this BA Radio commentary.
General Motors is just the latest in a long line of casualties in the lopsided war between finance capital and manufacturing capital. "The handwriting was on the wall for General Motors and the entire industrial sector of the U.S. economy back in the mid-Eighties, when GMAC, the financial arm of General Motors, surpassed the car-making part of the company in profits." The "crux of the current crisis of capitalism" is finance capital’s refusal to invest in productive enterprise "except under conditions of extremely low wage labor.
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R.I.P. Industrial USA. The Banksters Win, Even When They Fail
A Black Agenda Radio commentary by Glen Ford
”It was crystal clear that the finance capitalists would eventually destroy the industrial capitalists.”
The corporate media’s stories on General Motor’s bankruptcy read like obituaries. But they are covering the wrong funeral. The automaker’s passing as an industrial giant marks the last gasp of industrial capitalism in the United States. And it was not a natural death.
General Motors became the biggest corporation is the world when the United States was by far the biggest industrial power in the world. There has always been conflict between industrial capital, which actually manufacturers things, and finance capital which, left to its own devises, will reduce the manufacturing base to its various parts to be squeezed of value, sold off or shut down. Two generations ago, finance capital got the upper hand in its battle with manufacturing capital, and began to deindustrialize the United States.
It was a long process, but a steady one, part of finance capital’s global “race to the bottom” that would transfer the world’s production to the low-wage South and East of the planet.
The handwriting was on the wall for General Motors and the entire industrial sector of the U.S. economy back in the mid-Eighties, when GMAC, the financial arm of General Motors, surpassed the car-making part of the company in profits. Almost immediately, GMAC went into the mortgage business. From that moment on, it was crystal clear that the finance capitalists would eventually destroy the industrial capitalists.
Then a funny thing happened on the way to finance capital’s total conquest of America. With the keys to state and federal government in their hands, and the Black, soon-to-be president in their pockets, the investment banking class imploded of its own contradictions. Having succeeded in amassing trillions while creating nothing useful, the finance capital parasites proceeded to the next stage of their pathology, creating vast amounts of fictitious capital called derivatives, based on – nothing. The house of cards collapsed.
“Barack Obama put the finance capitalist Steve Rattner in charge of finally bankrupting the auto industry.”
The financial meltdown was near-total, but their political power was undiminished. Just as they had controlled the outgoing Republican White House, they took charge of economic policy under the incoming Democrat. Barack Obama put the finance capitalist Steve Rattner in charge of finally bankrupting the auto industry – which left economist Stanley Aronowitz has described as the largest exercise in union busting in U.S. history. President Obama’s own website brags that his White House was even “more aggressive” than the Bush Administration in wrenching concessions from the United Auto Workers union. The “New GM,” now 60 percent owned by the people of the United States, will be allowed to build small cars – in China. Obama apologists actually believed that the unused auto infrastructure might be massively converted to building public transportation, or other green industries. They failed to understand that Obama is the bankers’ president, and the bankers build nothing useful or productive. That is the crux of the current crisis of capitalism: the refusal of capital to invest in productive enterprise except under conditions of extremely low wage labor. Nothing will replace General Motors until the bankers – and the politicians who serve them – are driven out of power.
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.
