Absent from the conversation around the Sotomayor nomination are all but the most cursory review of her legal career before being appointed a federal judge by George Bush — a mere twelve years of legal experience, five as a prosecutor for the D.A.’s office in Manhattan, and another seven as partner at the international law firm of Pavia & Harcourt. Summaries of her decisions are hard to find. Although much is made of the fact that she will be only the fifth judge not a white man to sit on the high court, few detailed comparisons are made between her legal career and those of Thurgood Marshall and Clarence Thomas. Finally there are no attempts to discuss the unique, and not always positive role that the US Supreme Court plays or ought to play in the life of the country.

All these concerns are outside the bubble, not only for corporate media, but for the blogs and commentators who allow corporate media to draw the limits of their universe.

Sotomayor’s first job out of law school was as a prosecutor in the Manhattan D.A.’s office. Her time as a prosecutor roughly coincides with the end of the first decade of New York’s infamous Rockefeller drug laws, a time when our nation’s historically discriminatory law enforcement apparatus began locking up larger percentages of black and Latinos than anywhere else on the planet. From there she moved on to a spot as associate, then partner at the international law firm of Pavia & Harcourt, and international law firm offering “…a full range of legal services to companies, individuals, and Italian and French governmental organizations and agencies… who do business in the United States as well as American clients who do business in the U.S. and abroad.”

Among Pavia & Harcourt’s areas of special focus are the enforcement of intellectual property laws, and obtaining writs of confiscation and seizure of goods believed to be in violation of such laws. In this selection from Ed Shanahan’s IP Law & Business he assembles quotes from the Wall Street Journal, the National Journal and the New York Times that paint a picture of Sotomayor’s passionate involvement on behalf of her corporate clients:

[A]s the Wall Street Journal Washington Wire blog further explains in this colorful post, the “peak” of her career at the firm “came in representing Fendi in trademark actions against makers and sellers of counterfeit handbags and other items, according to George Pavia, the firm’s managing partner.”

Sotomayor, the WSJ reports, didn’t just fight for her clients in court.

“Firm founder George Pavia told the paper that when the firm would get a tip about suspect cargo, investigators “would trace where the shipment had gone — for example, to a warehouse or a store. Then, working with police, the firm would seek a warrant to view and attach the items. Often, the lawyers learned through experience, such visits would prompt angry responses from the merchants involved. But Sotomayor, who became a high-profile defender of the brand, seemed to enjoy going along. ‘On several occasions,’ Pavia said, ‘she went in wearing a Kevlar vest and seized the goods.’”

“(In this profile of Sotomayor, The New York Times adds to the judge’s legend: “One incident that figures largely in firm lore was a seizure in Chinatown, where the counterfeiters ran away, and Ms. Sotomayor got on a motorcycle and gave chase.”)

“The Journal also reports that Sotomayor played an integral role in what might be termed an IP publicity stunt aimed at calling attention to the then-growing problem of high-fashion knockoffs:

“With Sotomayor in charge, the firm decided in 1986 to stage a bonfire — to be known as the ‘Fendi Burn’ — in the parking lot of the Tavern on the Green restaurant. There was a catch, however: the New York Fire Department refused to permit it.

“So the firm decided on the next best thing, crushing the items in garbage trucks, in an event that came to be known as the ‘Fendi Crush.’

“‘In the presence of the press . . . we threw masses and masses of handbags, shoes, and other items into these garbage trucks,’ Pavia said. ‘It was the pinnacle of our achievement, and Sonia was the principal doer.’

No place on earth has more lawyers than the U.S., and in the late 80s, early 90s, New York City had more lawyers than anywhere in the country. This is how a young former prosecutor gets noticed and considered for the federal bench. Maybe Democratic senators and the White House of George H.W. Bush took note of her on their own. Maybe lobbyists and campaign contributors affiliated with her clients recommended her as someone who would look out for their interests. Take your pick. Either way, Bush put her on the federal bench in 1992.

For the twelve years she was a prosecutor and in private practice, right up until her appointment to the U.S. District Court, Sotomayor spent evenings, weekends and personal time, as an active board member of the Puerto Rican Legal Defense and Education Committee. During those years PRLDEF publicly opposed police brutality, the death penalty, felony disenfranchisement, and discrimination in housing and employment. It filed lawsuits to protect the voting rights of minorities in New York and the human rights of migrant workers. PRLDEF even sued an official of the Reagan administration for defamation over his public statement that most Puerto Ricans were on food stamps. No reports we have seen say that she personally filed those suits or that she ever appeared in court on behalf of litigants in discrimination and other lawsuits. As a board member she was reportedly involved in the planning and overall supervision of these activities.

After his graduation from Yale Law School in 1974, Clarence Thomas attached himself directly to the Republican Party as a black man squarely against equal rights under the law. He became assistant attorney general in Missouri in 1974, chief counsel for Senator Sam Brownback in 1978, and in 1982, chairman of the Office of Economic Opportunity under Ronald Reagan, where he publicly defied the Congress by sitting on thousands of age and race discrimination complaints till the statute of limitations ran out on them. After only fourteen years as an attorney, Thomas had earned his appointment to the federal bench in 1989, and shortly after that to the Supreme Court.

The only other nonwhite person to serve on the US Supreme Court in two centuries has been Thurgood Marshall. Marshall’ graduated Howard University law school in 1933, where he was mentored by Charles Hamilton Houston. Houston was the architect of a decades-long crusade to use the courts to overthrow America’s Jim Crow segregation laws. After less than a year of private practice, Marshall joined Houston at the NAACP, where he spent the next quarter century crisscrossing the country, sometimes at the risk of his own life, defending African Americans in court who were falsely accused of murder and rape. Marshall took their cases, along with those of black people who directly challenged Jim Crow laws all the way to the Supreme Court where he won a phenomenal 29 out of 32 cases, including the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education, which ruled that separate school systems for blacks and whites were unconstitutional.

After 28 years of legal practice, far longer than either Thomas or Sotomayor, Marshall was named to the US Court of Appeals in 1961, US Solicitor General in 1965, and in 1967 was nominated to the Supreme Court by Lyndon Baines Johnson. Before donning the black robe Marshall had already fundamentally changed the American legal landscape. He had directly represented the poor and disenfranchised in the courts of dozens of states, raised money and public support for their legal defense. By the 1950s, Marshall was known around the country as “Mr. Civil Rights.” He is said to have taken a dim view of civil disobedience and many of the tactics of the Freedom Movement in the 1950s and 60s, but generally refrained from publicly voicing those sentiments, and defended some of them in court.

The comparative pre-judicial careers of these three seem to indicate that the speedy road to the federal bench is to be a useful right wing political operative like Thomas or a zealous advocate of multinational business, like Sotomayor. Defending the poor and changing history seems to be a longer and much less certain way to get a federal judgeship.

Sonia Sotomayor is no Clarence Thomas, to be sure. The PRLDEF did great work during the years she served on its board, but she can hardly claim sole credit for it. In any case, PRLDEF wasn’t her full time job, and certainly not what got her on the federal bench. She is no Thurgood Marshall either, not by a long shot. There are still lawyers who devote most of their practice to defending the poor and disenfranchised, and an even larger number who file suits against giant corporations on behalf of ordinary people. No matter their legal brilliance, those attorneys rarely get judicial appointments. Why? No Supreme Court Justice since Marshall has represented a defendant in a criminal case, let alone a death penalty case. Why? No Supreme Court Justices sued wealthy and powerful corporations on behalf of ordinary working and poor people either.

Why?

Why should representing poor people as defendants in a court of law, or suing wealthy corporations on behalf of the ordinary people whose rights these powerful and immortal institutions trample upon every day rule a judgeship out of any lawyer’s future? Was that the founding fathers’ intent? More importantly, should it be ours?

A frank discussion of what a democratic society should expect from its court system is also long overdue. For the last generation, the courts have squatted squarely on the necks of working class Americans, relentlessly affirming the unearned privileges of a wealthy corporate elite over the rest of us, often in ways no governor, president or legislature would dare attempt. To name just a few instances, the courts have ruled that equal funding of public schools between wealthy and poor neighborhoods cannot be accomplished, even when state constitutions require it. Judges have affirmed that the First Amendment gives corporations the right to lie to and deceive the public for commercial gain, and that patent laws allow US corporations to claim exclusive rights to crops grown by farmers for dozens of centuries in various parts of the world. The Supreme Court recently ruled that money, in the form of campaign contributions, is free speech, setting major roadblocks in the path of campaign finance reform.

We need to take note of the historic significance of the first Latina to be nominated to the Supreme Court. Like the embrace of a black president by most of the nation’s ruling elite, it does signify a departure from a kind of old fashioned nineteenth and twentieth century racism, at least insofar as the admittance of carefully vetted and well-qualified minorities to that elite goes. But the advancement of a few is not necessarily the advancement of democracy, or of the many.

The easy out for progressives around the Sotomayor nomination is to waste all their time and oxygen debating Republicans, ridiculing and refuting their racism. While this is important, it mustn’t be allowed to take all the air from the room. If we really want more than a change in the color of the faces at the top of American society, we’ll have to spend a lot more energy evaluating their corporate connections of our judges on every level, and determining who they really serve.

Mamdani called Save Darfur “the most successful piece of single issue organizing since the Vietnam era antiwar movement, really more successful than the antiwar movement.” But Save Darfur, with slogans like “boots on the ground,” “out of Iraq, into Darfur” and persistent demands for the creation of “no fly zones” is far from being an antiwar movement.

As Black Agenda Report (BAR) pointed in a 2007 article, “Ten Reasons Why ‘Save Darfur’ is a PR Scam to Justify the Next US Oil and Resource Wars in Africa,” Save Darfur is no grassroots movement either.

The backers and founders of the ‘Save Darfur’ movement are the well-connected and well-funded U.S. foreign policy elite. According to a copyrighted Washington Post story this summer,

The “Save Darfur (Coalition) was created in 2005 by two groups concerned about genocide in the African country — the American Jewish World Service and the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum . . .

The coalition has a staff of 30 with expertise in policy and public relations. Its budget was about $15 million in the most recent fiscal year . . .

‘Save Darfur will not say exactly how much it has spent on its ads, which this week have attempted to shame China, host of the 2008 Olympics, into easing its support for Sudan. But a coalition spokeswoman said the amount is in the millions of dollars.’

Though the “Save Darfur” PR campaign employs viral marketing techniques, reaching out to college students, even to black bloggers, it is not a grassroots affair, as were the movement against apartheid and in support of African liberation movements in South Africa, Namibia, Angola and Mozambique a generation ago. Top heavy with evangelical Christians who preach the coming war for the end of the world, and with elements known for their uncritical support of Israeli rejectionism in the Middle East, the Save Darfur movement is clearly an establishment affair, a propaganda campaign that spends millions of dollars each month to manufacture consent for US military intervention in Africa under the cloak of stopping or preventing genocide.

None of the funds raised by the “Save Darfur Coalition”, the flagship of the “Save Darfur Movement” go to help needy Africans on the ground in Darfur, according to 2008 stories in both the Washington Post and the New York Times.

The Appeal of Save Darfur to US Audiences

Mamdani explained the unique appeal of the Save Darfur Movement to US audiences by noting that unlike US responsibility for the one million Iraqi dead over the last six years, the Save Darfur Movement does not demand that we understand Darfur’s history, ethnography, or the complexities of the current conflict there, or acknowledge any culpability of our own. Unlike the killings in Iraq, Save Darfur does not demand that Americans respond as citizens, with a need to account for responsibilities and actions, but merely as human beings with a need to feel powerful and justified. Save Darfur, Mamdani argued, has de-historicized and de-politicized the conflict for its American audience, presenting them with a simple morality play in which they can be the heroes.

Everybody wants to be a hero. Nobody wants to be a citizen.

And what could be more heroically self-justifying and self-affirming than intervening on the side of the angels in the picture of straight-up racial conflict presented to us by the Save Darfur Movement? The trouble is, it’s an utterly false picture. The historic and present uses and definitions of race in America are not nearly the same as those in Africa. Most of Darfur’s janjaweed who committed atrocities against civilians in Darfur are as black as those they murdered, and just as indigenous. The prosecutors at the International Criminal Court who recently indicted the Sudanese president are accountable only to the wealthy nations of the UN Security Council, not to anybody on the African continent. And the casualty figures thrown out by Save Darfur are wildly inflated.

Darfuri Casualties Inflated by Save Darfur and US Authorities

Professor Mamdani noted that in response to a request from members of Congress, GAO, the independent US government agency whose job it is to monitor the accuracy of information disseminated by other organs of government assessed the widely varying casualty figures coming out of Darfur in 2006. 2004-2006 was the time when the atrocities in Darfur were at their height. They took the low-end figures of 50 to 70 thousand dead, which came from the World Health Organization, and the much higher ones of 200 to 400 thousand coming from people affiliated with Save Darfur, and submitted them to the National Academy of Sciences. The scientists told GAO that the lower figures were more accurate, and those were used in its 2006 assessment of the Darfur situation.

The State Department however, produced reports with two different sets of casualty figures, low numbers for the use of its policymakers, and the higher ones produced by Save Darfur and its allies for public consumption.

To this day, Mamdani contended, the US public is being fed grossly inflated on Darfuri casualties. He recounted a briefing he attended where the commander of the African Union’s forces reported 1,500 deaths in Darfur in all of 2008, as many as Save Darfur and the US government claim are dying every month.

Comparing Darfur and the Congo, Fake vs Real Genocides

Nobody disputes that there is a bipartisan military industrial complex in the US, which creates the “facts” it requires to justify interventions around the world. The Save Darfur coalition, comprising as it does figures who trace their activism to the Freedom Movement like Congressman John Lewis, along with the compatriots of the late Jerry Falwell, would not hold on any other issue under the sun. It is a creation of the bipartisan foreign policy establishment, which urgently needs “humanitarian” cover for its imperial ambitions to control Africa’s oil and other resources.

The blatant hypocrisy of the Save Darfur Movement is most evident when one compares the manufactured concern over 50 to 70 thousand dead in Darfur to the ink and air devoted to five million dead in neighboring Congo. But using professor Mamdani’s yardstick, it’s not hard to understand. Intervening in Darfur makes us heroes. But in the Congo, proxies of the US and the West have been instigated the invasion and depopulation and plundering of the whole of Eastern Congo. There is a lake of oil beneath Sudan, much of it in Darfur. But the Chinese are pumping that oil, not Chevron or BP or Exxon.

To return to our own 2007 article on the Save Darfur movement”

The selective and cynical application of the term “genocide” to Sudan, rather than to the Congo where ten to twenty times as many Africans have been murdered reveals the depth of hypocrisy around the “Save Darfur” movement. In the Congo, where local gangsters, mercenaries and warlords along with invading armies from Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi, Angola engage in slaughter, mass rape and regional depopulation on a scale that dwarfs anything happening in Sudan, all the players eagerly compete to guarantee that the extraction of vital coltan for Western computers and cell phones, the export of uranium for Western reactors and nukes, along with diamonds, gold, copper, timber and other Congolese resources continue undisturbed.

Former UN Ambassador Andrew Young and George H.W. Bush both serve on the board of Barrcik Gold, one of the largest and most active mining concerns in war-torn Congo. Evidently, with profits from the brutal extraction of Congolese wealth flowing to the West, there can be no Congolese “genocide” worth noting, much less interfering with. For their purposes, U.S. strategic planners may regard their Congolese model as the ideal means of capturing African wealth at minimal cost without the bother of official U.S. boots on the ground.

Responding to the very real genocide in the Congo would require ordinary Americans to think like citizens rather then heroic self-affirmers. But that’s a hard sell.

We can only hope that the members of the Congressional Black Caucus and other members of Congress who last month lent their credibility to the Save Darfur people can get over their self affirming “heroism” and begin to meet Dr. Mamdani’s challenge: to act like citizens and the leaders of citizens, to do the homework, to help others do the homework and to face up to our responsibilities for real genocide in the Congo, and prolonging the war in Sudan. It’s not too late.

When the Obama campaign asked for house meetings across the nation on health care, the option suggested most often was indeed single payer. So you didn’t hear much of anything about the outcomes of those meetings. If that’s not dishonest hating on single payer health care it’s hard to imagine what is.

Instead, the Obama Administration’s emerging health care plan is expected to be based upon a model that has failed multiple times, most recently in Massachusetts, which includes “individual mandates” requiring people above a certain income level to purchase private insurance or face a fine, and provides some kind of care at subsidized rates to those with the lowest incomes. A recent study by physicians at Harvard Medical School meticulously exposes the predictable failure of the Massachusetts Plan to live up to any of its promises, and explains succinctly why no “individual mandate” that subsidizes private insurance companies should be a model for any national health care plan.

It’s called “Massachusetts’ Plan”: A Failed Model for Health Care Reform,” and you can find it online here.

In it, Drs. Rachel Narden, David Himmelstein and Steffie Woolhandler, all of Harvard Medical School, deliver a withering assessment of the plan’s failure, and explain why it must not be a model for any national health care plan worthy of the name.

These are the key features of the Massachusetts Plan upon which Obama’s health care plan is modeled.

1. Subsidized private insurance is made available for the poorest at reduced or no cost through a state agency.

2. Unsubsidized private insurance at controlled costs was to be made available for those who made a little more.

3. As with automobile insurance, those not qualifying for subsidized insurance would be fined ($912 a year in 2008, $1,068 in 2009, collected with your state income tax) for failing to purchase insurance.

4. Employers were required to pay $295 a year for each employee they didn’t give health insurance to.

5. To control costs, funds to pay for the program were taken from the existing pool that previously financed “safety net” care for the poor and uninsured, leaving many with fewer options and less care than was available before the “reform”.

But the subsidized health insurance policies available to the poor in Massachusetts often covered fewer services than they were already receiving under previously existing conditions, and the greater the “income” of these poor people, the lower the subsidy and higher the deductibles. Under the Massachusetts Plan, the subsidies vanish altogether when one makes 300% of the ridiculously low Federal Poverty Level — about $31,000 per year.

Despite the fines for persons who fail to buy health insurance under the so-called “individual mandate” plans, many remain uninsured because coverage is simply not affordable.

[T]he reform law specifically exempts uninsured families from fines if no affordable private plan is available. About 79,000 Massachusetts uninsured residents received this exemption in 2007, which excused them from fines, but left them uninsured.

“The private insurance plans available through the Commonwealth Choice program can be extremely expensive. According to the Connector website (accessed December 29, 2008) the cheapest plan available to a middle-income 56-year-old now costs $4,872 annually in premiums alone. However, if the policy holder becomes sick, (s)he must pay an additional $2,000 deductible before insurance kicks in. Thereafter the policy holder pays 20% co-insurance (i.e. 20% of all medical bills) up to a maximum of $3,000 annually ($9,872 in total annual costs including premium, deductible and co-insurance). A need for uncovered services (e.g. physical therapy visits beyond the number covered) would drive out-of pocket costs even higher. It is not surprising that many of the state’s uninsured have declined such coverage.

How can someone making $31,000 a year pay $90 a week in premiums alone, plus $20% of all medical bills up to $3,000 if they get sick? Is calling this “reform” even the least bit honest? Or is it hypocrisy?

The study makes the point again and again that access to health insurance is not the same as access to health care. A full third of every health care dollar is already diverted to private insurance companies. The Massachusetts Plan, and the emerging Obama Plan seem intended to preserve this cut for private insurers, even at the expense of needed care. “[T]he new inssurance policies that replced the (previous) free care system require co-payments for office visits and prescriptions, which are difficult for many low income patients to pay . . . ” says the study, hence patients suffering from HIV-AIDS and other chronic conditions have had to reduce doctor visits or skip their meds due to the high co-payments that the “reform” required.

The report outlines how the advocates of these private insurance industry endorsed versions of health care reform have lied in state after state where this has been tried — in Oregon, Maine, Vermont, Tennessee and elsewhere. We encourage our readers to download and read it, at only 18 pages, as an antidote to whatever form of “individual mandate” health plan is finally proposed by the Obama Administration.

Plans of this type have not lowered overall health care costs, either. They provide no incentive to tone down the over-reliance on expensive techniques and specialists, and produce more primary care physicians, the doctors who provide day-to-day, person-to-person coverage. Obama’s offer to “let’s computerize medical records” as a cost-saving procedure sounds nice, but falls flat. Most of the unnecessary paperwork is between caregivers, hospitals and insurers with a vested interest in saying no to this or that treatment, test, or medicine.

During the presidential campaign, Barack Obama declared we should judge his first term by whether, under his leadership, the nation finally enacted national health care system that takes care of everybody and lowers the cost of health care. Now we are in the middle of a completely foreseeable economic crisis caused in part by many of the people who are advising the president. Single payer health care has come to the fore as a viable means to create 2.6 million new jobs, a proposal that Obama’s advisors neither address nor discuss.

Sixty days into his presidency, the clock is ticking. Lofty rhetoric and lawyerly evasions are giving way to actual policies, many of them deeply disappointing to the people who campaigned and voted for this president. It looks like national health care for everybody is a dream that, if left up to this president and his advisors, will be deferred again. The question is: should we leave it up to them at all?

This is a transcript of a December 22, 2008 Bruce Dixon interview with longtime Chicago educator and activist George Schmidt broadcast on WRFG 89.3 FM Atlanta.

Bruce Dixon: Our next guest George Schmidt was a Chicago Public School teacher for 28 years. A longtime union activist, he was once a candidate for presidency of the 28,000 member Chicago Teachers Union, one of the largest union locals of any kind in the nation. He is a founding member of Substance and Substance News, an organization and a newspaper originally founded to represent the views of Chicago’s substitute teachers. Substance News, which you can find online at substancenews.net is still required reading for anybody who wants an unfiltered view of the road public education has taken in Chicago and nationwide over the last two decades. How you doing Mr. Schmidt?

George Schmidt: It’s been a fun week, to be sure.

BD: We’ve got a lot to cover. Can you tell us about your own background for the first minute or so of this?

GS: Well, I spent almost all my public school teaching career in the inner city high schools of Chicago, starting at Dusable in the upper grade center, and teaching at schools like Manley, Marshall, Collins and Tilden. My last years of teaching were at Bowen High School on the city’s far south side near the Indiana border where I taught English and where I also served as union delegate and what we called the school security coordinator. During those years I was also very active in the union, as you pointed out. At one point I got over 40% of the vote in a race for president of the Chicago Teachers Union, but I didn’t win.

BD: Yeah, it takes a little more than 40%. Well, we’re talking to Mr. Schmidt because last week president-elect Barack Obama tapped Arne Duncan, who heads the Chicago Public Schools to be his Secretary of Education. Now Chicago has the third largest school system in the nation, so if you can make it work for the citizens of Chicago maybe you ought to get a chance to do it nationwide. So how’s it working in Chicago, man?

GS: Basically, it’s not. It’s not working for the majority of children in the city and it’s certainly not working for the majority of teachers. In order to understand how that particular sentence can be nuanced, you have to understand two things. The first is the dominance of the corporate narrative of “school reform”. In 1995 democratic control of the Chicago Public Schools was taken out of the hands of parents, teachers and citizens and put into the hands of Chicago mayor Richard M. Daley. A new law which was passed by the all-Republican state government at the time gave Mayor Daley the power to appoint a seven member school board eventually — at first he appointed a five member thing that was called the School Reform Board of Trustees — and the power to appoint a newly created chief executive officer based on the corporate model to run the Chicago Public Schools. Daley was also given power over the entire school system’s budget, and for the first time in 17 years, the school system was freed from the oversight of an outside entity called the School Finance Authority.

What Daley did since then was basically massively increase the public relations spin that was put on every activity performed in Chicago, to the point where the gap between the reality of the public schools we have in our city and the claims that have been made about them is as great as any between fact and fiction anywhere on the planet.

BD: We hear a lot about “reforming education.” I’m from Chicago, and back in the 80s when I was involved in school reform, school reform meant giving more power to parents and to rank and file teachers, power to determine curriculum, even to let parents evaluate the performance of teachers and programs and principals. You talked about the corporate narrative of school reform. Just what is that?

GS: The corporate narrative is the dictatorial model that you get in any corporation under a chief executive officer or CEO. And just as it’s failed now miserably in corporate America, with the collapse of Wall Street and the finance industry, it’s failed in the public schools as well. But just as a year ago you would find very few dissenters on the private sector analogy so today we still find not a loud enough voice for those who dissent against the claims that the corporate model (of education reform) has succeeded. Basically what you’re talking about by the late 1980s we had one of the most democratic models – with a small d – of school improvement anywhere in the United States. In 1988 Illinois passed a law which gave an elected Local School council of ten or eleven members the power at every school to hire and fire the principal to set curriculum and to have an enormous say over the budget. The majority of those Local School Council members were parents. Those of us who were active at the time participated in those elections and those processes.

BD: So that was school reform in the eighties.

GS: That was school reform in the eighties, and that grew primarily out of the work of Harold Washington who we elected mayor of the city of Chicago in 1983 in a mass movement that locally rivaled the mass movement which just elected Barack Obama president of the United States.

BD: So now we’ve replaced democratic school reform that gave parents the power with what exactly? I understand one of Arne’s pet things is giving public high schools over to the US military.

GS: Yeah, that’s one example of several and it’s a very good one. Beginning in the first days of the 21st century, literally Chicago instituted military high schools. And we’re not talking about high schools that have ROTC programs, we’re talking about high schools that are run by and for the military. The first of those was established in the heart of Bronzeville, the south side community at 35th and Giles, in the old armory there. It’s now the Chicago Military Academy. Since then they’ve set up two more army high schools. Carver and Phoenix, a Marine high school and a naval academy which is named the Hyman Rickover Naval Academy inside Senn High School.

BD: Except for the naval academy operation inside Senn High School all of these are in African American communities, are they not?

GS: Yes they are.

HG: George this is Heather Gray. Is this a model that’s in other parts of the country as well? Are other cities doing this?

GS: No.

HG: So this is unique to Chicago.

GS: This is unique to Chicago. Most places where you have more democracy, even where you have this CEO type dictatorship now, the citizens are better positioned to resist it than we are here in Chicago.

BD: In Chicago, for the benefit of our audience, we’re in Atlanta, GA now, the mayor is Richard Daley. 2009 marks his 20th year in office. His father was the mayor too for almost as long, from about 1956 if I remember right to 1975, I think, eighteen or nineteen years. So out of the last fifty or so years, for forty of them the city of Chicago has been run by the Daley clique, the Daley Regime, or as we call it in Chicago, the Machine. Arne Duncan, is he a product of the Machine.

GS: Exactly, Daley as I pointed out, in 1995 was given dictatorial power over the Chicago Public School system. It was based upon the lie that the system as a whole had failed, and the repetition of that lie from the eighties on. Daley has appointed two CEOs and roughly two school boards since then. Both of the CEOs have been white non-educators who replaced African American educators. Both of the CEOs had no experience in education or in corporate America. This is an important point since it’s supposedly a corporate model. They were fundamentally political puppets who would do his bidding.

BD: The predecessor to Mr. Duncan (in Chicago) he’s a guy named Paul Vallas, isn’t he?

GS: That’s true. Mr. Vallas came to the chief education job in Chicago through his position as budget director at City Hall under Mayor Daley.

HG: George, just going back to the military model (of education) again. What have been Barack Obama’s comments about this, if any at all.

“The gap between the reality of the public schools we have in our city and the claims that have been made about them is as great as any between fact and fiction anywhere on the planet.”

GS: I haven’t heard comment from Barack Obama himself, and I’ve known him since he was in the Illinois State Senate, and I was working for the Chicago Teachers Union. Never to my knowledge, and that may be contradicted by something on the record did he comment on this assault on the openness of Chicago high schools. But his newly incoming chief of staff Rahm Emmanuel has been a proud proponent of the military academies and even bragged on one occasion I was covering a press conference and he was with Mayor Daley that he got a million dollar earmark specifically for the military academies while he was in the US House of Representatives as my congressman.

BD: So it does say something that out of all the superintendents of school systems, CEOs or whatever nationwide, Barack Obama reached around and found one that not only liked the corporate model but liked the military model too. Since we’re talking about Chicago’s unique contribution to education on the national stage, let’s stick with Paul Vallas. You said Paul Vallas got his start just an average guy on the budget team on the City Hall budget team, where did Mr. Vallas go after leaving the Chicago Public Schools”

GS: After Daley dumped Vallas in 2001, he was picked up by Tom Ridge, the governor of Pennsylvania who was trying to privatize the Philadelphia school system. Vallas was made head of the Philadelphia school system in mid 2002 after a failed attempt to get himself elected governor of Illinois. He ran Philadelphia for four years I believe, the chronology may be a little off. Presently he’s been sent to New Orleans where the public school system has been obliterated after Hurricane Katrina and replaced by a system of primarily charter schools, many of which have been modeled on the charter school privatization plans originally hatched here in Chicago.

BD: Arne Duncan is going to be the nation’s number one guy on education. Surely this guy must have years and years of classroom and administrative experience,

GS: Wrong. He has none.

BD: So he’s never been in a classroom?

GS: No.

BD: Except as a student, perhaps.

GS: He talks now, as he tries to brush over his resume, about how when he was a student at the privileged University of Chicago Lab School where his father was a professor at the University of Chicago, that after school he would go to a tutoring program his mother ran in that area north of the University of Chicago called Kenwood, where he apparently, according to Arne’s narrative helped poor black children with their homework. That’s the extent of Arne Duncan’s actual educational experience or praxis. His career after Harvard, where he supposedly got a BA in Sociology, I’ve never got to see a resume, was in professional basketball…

HG: What do you mean you haven’t been allowed to see a resume? Why do you say that? You’ve asked for a resume and you’ve never seen one?

GS: For the past 14 years we’ve asked for the curriculum vitaes and resumes of top officials of the Chicago Public Schools under the Freedom of Information Act. And the answer we get every time we repeat this request is that this is classified privileged personnel information.

BD: Of course the new Obama administration is pledged to openness and transparency everywhere, so I’m sure that Arne’s resumes and cv’s and all that will surface really soon.

GS: If that’s the case, people are going to find out that he spent most of his adult life either playing basketball or working with some very wealthy financiers from his old neighborhood of Hyde Park in Chicago.

BD: Since we are talking about applying this Chicago model of public education nationwide, what has the regime of high stakes testing and closing schools that don’t meet testing goals which is now national policy thanks to No Child Left Behind meant to Chicago — oh, and one other thing I’d like to see if I can get your comment on is that Hillary Clinton at one point said let’s repeal No Child Left Behind while Barack was saying, well, he didn’t quite say mend it but don’t end it, but something like that. So what has the regime of high stakes testing done for African Americans in Chicago and public education in Chicago?

GS: Basically the vast majority of the schools that have been closed for supposed academic failure, which means low test scores, have been those schools which served a population of 100% poor black children via a staff that was almost always majority black teachers and usually a black principal. Since Arne Duncan took over in 2001, he has closed over 20 elementary schools. Most of them have been privatized into charter schools, and he’s closed six high schools. In all the cases I know of, the majority of the staffs of those schools who were then kicked out of union jobs and forced on the road to try to get new jobs, were majority black teachers and principals, many of which I knew personally. The six high schools he closed, Austin HS, Calumet HS, Collins HS, Englewood HS, Orr HS, and Harper HS, were either all black, in the case of five of them, or majority black and Latino in the case of Orr. That’s the active record of what Arne Duncan has done in his school closings for which Barack Obama has praised him. .

BD: We’re not seeing much of any criticism of Barack Obama’s nominations, especially not this nomination…I understand there was a meeting of the Chicago Board of Education soon after the nomination was announced, and some people who were at that meeting took issue with the nomination. Can you tell us about that?

GS: If you don’t mind I’ll give you a six day backup of that. The teaser stories began on December 11. On that day, Margaret Spelling, who’s George Bush’s Secretary of Education came to Chicago to stand on stage with Arne Duncan and Mayor Daley and praise the (teacher) merit pay plan that they’d introduced jointly, and to say that Arne Duncan was the same type of educational leader that she and George Bush favored. By Monday the 15th, word was out around Chicago that Duncan was probably the front runner for the Secretary of Education…

BD: He plays ball with the president-elect

GS: Exactly. On the night of the 15th it was made official. Barack Obama held a press conference with Joe Biden at Dodge School on the 16th. On the 17th, the Board of Education had its regular monthly meeting scheduled for downtown Chicago. Even though they apparently, expected it to be a love fest for Arne Duncan, what happened was that more than a dozen teachers and community activists from seven schools got up and exposed Duncan’s public record of sabotaging public education, of privatizing schools, of union busting, and of fraudulently cooking the educational statistics books. By the middle of the meeting Duncan had walked out for an hour and these testimonies continued to go on. By the end of the meeting members of the board were heatedly arguing with the teachers, and after the meeting two of the teachers were threatened. Members of Duncan’s staff called their principals demanding to know why they had been allowed to take the day off work to talk about Arne Duncan’s crimes (against public education) before a school board meeting.

BD: Now I haven’t been to a meeting of the Chicago Board of Education in a long time, but it’s hard to believe that the day after Duncan had been tapped to be Secretary of Education, it’s hard to believe that room wasn’t full of corporate media. We haven’t seen or heard anything about this. Have we? Or did I miss it?

GS: No, the dog and pony shows were on the 16th, at Dodge School where Barack Obama made the announcement with Duncan sitting there. At the Board of Education (meeting), one of the most interesting things that happened… was that not one of the TV stations was there to film or video any of this activity during the board meeting. The only photographer there besides me, because I cover every board meeting for Substance, was a woman from the Chicago Tribune and the only photograph the Tribune did was of Barbara Easton Watkins, who according to speculation here is in line to succeed Duncan here in Chicago. The TV stations boycotted the meeting completely, the story in the Tribune was a wacky one that ignored most of what happened in the meeting. The Sun-Times which is our other major daily newspaper covered the meeting slightly accurately, and NPR had a reporter there who missed 98% of what was actually going on, typical for the way Chicago Public Radio has been covering this type of story.

BD: The regime of high stakes testing and closing schools that came into national prominence which became national policy with No Child Left Behind, then is going to be with us for a while. What does that do to public education? Does it work?

GS: First of all, it has gradients. As soon as I say this you’ll know what I am talking about. Public education in the United States is not a unified system of equal access for all children. It’s a highly stratified system of at least four or five components. In the wealthy suburbs of any major city you’ll find some of the best public schools anywhere on the planet. In Chicago we’re talking about Wilmette, Winetka, the north shore, Glen Ellyn in the western suburbs, where the high schools are just everything you could want for your children if you could only afford a home in those areas.

BD: OK.

GS: You move from there and you have rural schools in some of the most challenging schools in some of the most desolate parts of rural North Dakota or Montana. When you get to our cities and the immediate suburbs which have declined industrially too, right now what we have is a three part system, Chicago is the exemplar of that. We have a magnet school system which selects kids on the basis of IQ scores and test scores in kindergarten or the first grade, and keeps them in that magnet school system for twelve years, and that’s one of the best school systems you’ll find anywhere. Michelle Obama is a graduate of Whitney Young High School, which is a part of that system, the magnet and elite schools in Chicago…

BD: We’re down to our last minute and a half…

GS: Well then, basically… the place where the impact of high stakes testing has been most devastating has been in those schools which serve the poorest children with the fewest resources and in the most challenging environments. In that area, the schools have not been improved, but instead the teachers and schools have been under attack for failing at things the society has never taken responsibility for.

BD: Last question, if you can do this in ten or twenty seconds or so, people in their millions or tens of millions voted for change. Insofar as education goes, are we gonna get it?

GS: If this the kind of change we needed, then I am still glad I voted for Barack Obama. I’m proud I was able to publish pictures of him and our colleagues. But this is not the kind of change we needed or we hoped for here in Chicago, we the people who supported that man, and who’ve known him and his wife for years and years.

Foreign banks, he said, were beginning to wake up to the fact that the balance sheets of their US counterparts were full of wholly imaginary earnings, wildly overvalued assets and unpayable loans. Before summer Hudson claimed that US banks had ceased daily reconciliation of their interbank transfers at the end of each day because they lacked the cash to pay them. Months in advance, Hudson forecasted with reasonable accuracy the character of the bipartisan bailout — that some institutions would go under, but that government would try to rescue investors and shareholders while leaving homeowners and consumer creditors — ordinary people — under a mountain of unpayable debt. Foreign bankers, he predicted, would gradually begin to withdraw from funding the US economy.

Hudson is not one of the financial geniuses that gave us the present mess. Perhaps for that reason, he hasn’t been invited to join Barack Obama’s economic transition team, which looks a lot like the speed dial list on former Goldman & Sachs CEO Robert Rubin’s cell phone. Still, even if Barack Obama isn’t listening to Hudson, maybe we should.

The president-elect has made the welcome promise of an ambitious jobs and public works program, with emphases on infrastructure improvements and repair which will begin laying the basis for transition to a post-petroleum economy. With a month to go before his term starts, it will be a while before anybody sees what the legislation and rule changes to make this happen will look like. We do know it won’t come cheap. What we don’t know is how an Obama administration intends to pay for any jobs and infrastructure programs. Michael Hudson, an economist who predicted the mess and the bailout, thinks he knows how that will go down.

Paraphrasing him a little, he says that there are four ways to pay for an ambitious jobs and infrastructure program.

The first way is to borrow the money from foreigners, the same as we do for everything else, including the US military budget, which now dwarfs all the money spent on things military by the other 95% of humanity. This may prove difficult, as our creditors in Europe and China are increasingly certain they will never be repaid all that they are owed already.

The second way to pay for an ambitious New Deal style jobs and work program is to tax the rich. When income taxes were introduced at the beginning of the twentieth century, they did just that. If the income tax laws of 90 years ago were applied today, nobody who made in today’s money, under $30,000 a year, paid any income tax at all. But in the last 90 years, income tax laws have been rigged to exclude most of the income of the wealthy. Taxes have become something that “little people” must pay, and that wealthy people can avoid. Hudson thinks that an Obama administration will increase taxes on the rich, but only marginally, not enough to relieve them on the rest of us, not enough to fund any New Deal, and certainly not enough to hurt his standing among the Wall Street insider types his administration is already filling up with. Hudson’s predictions are already being borne out by Obama’s recent announcement that Bush’s infamous tax cuts for the rich, rather than being repealed as he promised during the campaign, will be allowed to persist for one more year. Tellingly, Obama has also renounced a campaign promise of a windfall profits tax on oil companies.

The third way to pay for an ambitious jobs program is to cut the military budget, and use those funds to pay for jobs, education, health care, infrastructure and the conversion to a green economy. That won’t happen either. Obama’s entire foreign policy team is drawn from old-schoolers from the Clinton era, and his Department of War, is headed by Robert Gates, formerly deputy director at CIA for most of the Reagan and the first Bush administration. Obama says he will increase the military budget and he pledges to be able to fight multiple foreign wars simultaneously. Just as the Vietnam war sank Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society, the Pentagon budget will severely curtail domestic expenditures for human needs. So this is not in the plans of the Obama administration either.

The last way to pay for an ambitious jobs program is to give away the last scraps of public resources and public power to the wealthy corporate actors who have already driven the US economy into the ground. Obama can privatize whatever public assets still exist, leasing or giving them outright to multinational corporations for an up front fee. Once the money is spent, of course, the public assets are no longer public at all.

Despite being a bad and profoundly anti-democratic notion, the privatization of public assets, euphemistically called “public-private partnerships” have become a favorite tactic of Republicans and Democrats alike. There may be a time and place where privatization is a good idea, but we haven’t seen it.

The Clinton administration, whose hacks have filled up Obama’s transition team, started the privatization ball rolling in a big way with its “Reinventing Government” initiative. Clintonistas decreed that every federal government function had to be analyzed with a view to what could be spun off to a private vendor, and whatever could be privatized must be. They next declared that in order to get federal funds, state and local governments would have to do the same, thus creating a from nothing a multibillion dollar industry of contractors that did prisons, prison medical care, fleet operations, government payroll, child support enforcement, handed out birth certificates, parking tickets, in short every single function of government.

The pirates of the Bush administration substituted their cronies for those of the Democrats, and carried the mania for privatization even further, into the military and intelligence establishments, something else an Obama administration will have to address, but that’s another story.

Privatization has long been a mania among the kinds of unimaginative establishment Democrats who make up the Obama transition team and his cabinet so far. Obama’s adopted home town of Chicago is a great example.

In the last year or so, Chicago’s Mayor Daley has sold off major public assets to well connected corporate insiders, including

* the Chicago Skyway Bridge (Interstate 90 from the Indiana state line into the south side)

* Midway Airport, just after billions in public money had been spent to refurbish it

* The Grant Park Underground Garages which park just under 10,000 cars on the edge of the Loop

* All the city’s parking meters and parking meter enforcement for the next 75 years.

Fran Spielman of the Chicago Sun-Times points out that the city got a one-time payment of $6 billion for all this, and that the city loses another half billion a year in property taxes to other wealthy and well-connected insiders through its special taxing districts, or TIFs, which have become a standard feature in US cities everywhere. As a result the city is rolling in cash for a moment, but faces a bleak future in which subsequent mayors and city councils will have few resources to water privatization dispose of on behalf of the people that elect them, and multinational corporations can funnel contributions to politicians to keep their control of public resources indefinitely.

Chicago is not unique. Gwinnett County in suburban Atlanta just turned the express lanes of Interstate 85 into toll lanes and leased them to a well-connected contractor. Atlanta’s previous mayor even privatized the city’s water and sewer operations, a disastrous move that had to be undone by the current mayor Shirley Franklin. An enthusiastic fan of privatization herself, Franklin’s mayoral transition report, the Bain Report called for “opportunistic” privatization of the city’s parks, garbage collection and more, but the water privatization fiasco made those “opportunistic” privatizations politically impossible. Texas has been turning public roads into private toll roads for some time. This, to the kind of Democrats that surround Barack Obama, is what progress and prosperity look like.

For the big time corporate bosses, large scale privatization of government services and the public sector is a necessity because of their declining rates of domestic profit. Aside from consumer debt and military expenditures, privatization is the only industry where profits are expected to grow and remain secure, even in hard times.

But for the rest of us, the widespread privatization of public resources are bad news indeed. Privatizations are bad for democracy, bad for everybody except the contractors who get paid, and the politicians who get paid off.

Privatizations remove workplaces, their budgets, policy making and decision implementation out of spaces where public accountability is possible, and into private boardrooms immune from oversight. When the fleet operations of your county or city are privatized, for example, repair and maintenance schedules and procedures, which were once open to democratic public scrutiny, become proprietary information, so nobody can question any longer how public monies are being spent.

When government operations are privatized, wages and benefits fall through the floor, and the possibility of democracy in workplaces disappears. Privatizations remove large resources built and developed with generations of public funding from even the possibility of democratic control, and place them under irresponsible corporate shareholders and managers whose only goal is profit. Often, as was the case with the Chicago Skyway and Midway Airport, privatizations only occur after a major public investment to improve the asset. Private managers typically rape the asset, extracting as much profit as quickly as they can while providing as little service as possible and reinvesting next to nothing. When the asset fails to perform because of their refusal to reinvest in it, they go back to the same politicians who signed the deal (and to whom they have contributed generously) for an infusion of cash, to renegotiate the terms of the deal, or sometimes to hand the asset back after they’ve milked it dry.

Historically, a large proportion of African Americans who can afford to live modestly well have been government employees of one sort or another. Their livelihoods are the first ones threatened by privatizations. Obama and his economic team are smart people. They know all of this. If they are, as Michael Hudson believes, counting on a Chicago-style wave of privatizations to pay for a jobs and clean energy program, they’ll need some fancy footwork and a smokescreen of lies.

In the black community, Obama’s presidency is frankly billed as “the fulfillment of Dr. King’s Dream.” But the real Dr. King and the Freedom Movement opposed the war in Vietnam, the US military budget and the worldwide US empire of their day, as fiercely as they did racial discrimination, both because it consumed the resources to be used for human needs and because the work of empire is inevitably genocide and war. The real Freedom Movement and the real Dr. King fought against economic injustice at home as boldly and tenaciously as they did Jim Crow. Dr. King died in Memphis, in the midst of a near general strike situation, with the city’s high schools and some (not that many) churches in the streets over the wages and benefits paid to the city’s black sanitation workers.

To sell a phony program of economic recovery through privatization, an Obama administration will have to deploy the remanufactured and sanitized ghost of Dr. King against the man’s historical work, and against the tens of millions who voted for Barack Obama because they wanted change. Wholesale privatizations of this kind are also the toxic “medicine” the IMF and World Bank (and some of Obama’s advisors) have historically provided for third world countries in economic distress. It didn’t help them. It won’t help us.dont

If we take the advice of Dr. Hudson seriously, we ought to insist that the Obama economic recovery program be funded by a wholesale restructuring of the US tax system, so that the wealthy, however their income is derived, are taxed more than the incomes of people who depend upon wages. We ought to insist on debt relief for consumers and homeowners, not bonus and salary relief for bank execs and shareholders, which is all the Wall Street bailout seems to have accomplished. It’s not too early for us to think and talk, not only about what we expect from an Obama administration, but how we demand that it unfold.

Given the old-school makeup of Obama’s cabinet, his economic and foreign policy advisors, the hedge funders, the Wall Street wise guys and corporate interests of all sorts already have both his ears. It’s not at all too early for the people to begin grabbing his lapels, and giving him some other input.

“Tamping Down Expectations” Since 2004

It is not an exaggeration to say that Barack Obama’s career since 2004 has been all about soaring promises to capture ardent voters followed by lowering standards to please his biggest financial contributors. An early foe of the Iraq war and Patriot Act during his US Senate campaign, Obama voted to continue one and pass the other once in office. Obama’s pledge to withdraw from Iraq has more loopholes by now than Swiss cheese. His promise to filibuster warrantless eavesdropping and immunity for telecom lawbreakers morphed into a vote for both, and his campaign trail promise to pursue Dr. King’s unfinished quest for economic justice flipped into lobbying the congress in support of the multi-trillion dollar no-strings-attached Wall Street bailout.

The first appointments of the new regime are truly disturbing. Illinois congressman Rahm Emanuel, the new White House chief of staff is a certifiable Democratic neocon who helped strong-arm NAFTA, welfare reform and the Telecom Act of 1996 though congress for Bill Clinton. He served on the board of Freddie Mac while it was busy inflating the housing bubble, and was an early and unrepentant advocate of invading Iraq and bombing Iran. As head of the DCCC, responsible for recruiting and funding 2006 Democratic congressional candidates, Emanuel used corporate contributions to try to knock more than a twenty antiwar Democrats out of primary races in favor of pro-war Democrats. Confronted with choices between pro-war Democrats and pro-war Republicans, voters rejected most of Emanuel’s picks, costing Democrats as many as ten Congressional seats.

Larry Summers, early front-runner to succeed Bush Treasury secretary Henry Paulson, was happy to be Enron’s eyes and ears at Treasury, according to a handwritten note to his pal Ken Lay you can find at OpenLeft.com. Summers famously remarked that third world countries were “underpolluted”. His solution to this “problem” is encouraging them to sell their share of “rights” to poison the planet’s oceans and air to wealthy western corporations through a system like the present futures and commodities exchanges. Both the outgoing Bush and the incoming Obama administrations are enthusiastic advocates of this “market-based” approach. So much for a Change We Can Breathe In.

Wild-eyed but unrealistic optimists insist that hacks like Summers and Emanuel are just the smartest guys around, and their policies are not Obama’s anyhow. But that fails the laugh test. There are plenty of smart political operators, and many equally brilliant economists who have called the mess right all along and would relish the chance to begin setting it right. Economists like Paul Krugman, Michael Hudson, or Paul Stiglitz, for instance. You don’t hire smart people for the new administration to do the opposite of what they built their careers doing. It defies common sense to expect anything else. Larry Summers will be looking out for his old friends and colleagues. Rahm Emanuel will be kneecapping advocates of single payer health care, opponents of the war, teachers, union members and anyone left of that rightward moving target they call “the center”.

In a note titled “How To Treat A President-Elect,” David Swanson put his finger on why the worst thing we can do now is sit back and pray for president-elect Obama, to leave him alone and wait to see what he does. It’s time to remind him in no uncertain terms why he was elected.

“There is no such thing as giving a democratic president a chance by leaving him alone. Precisely the way you give him a chance is by lobbying him to do what you want to see done. Anything else is an insult to him and to ourselves.

During the past eight years, we could have built the most powerful citizens’ movements ever seen and never influenced our government’s policy in the slightest. A powerful movement for peace and justice was simply ignored. Now suddenly we have a government that might listen, and now is the moment in which we should go silent? What sort of an awful antidemocratic sense of timing is that?

The best elected official in a democracy is one who listens to the changing opinion of constituents. The worst is the principled superior creature who scorns polls and prefers not to be called or faxed or Emailed or visited because he knows better than you what’s good for you, and he can get more done if you leave him alone. We have to decide which kind of president we want to have come January.

The campaign to elect the president is over. The campaign to make the president DO what he was elected FOR is underway.

How We Can Do It: Basic Principles

There isn’t any one way to do this, but there are some basic principles. We can never let our respect for high office, our admiration of his family and education, or reverence for the those that preceded him trump the urgency of our demands for peace, justice and democracy. No president or president-elect speaks from a burning bush, and nobody who works for a president is named Moses.

We should want to see an Obama presidency succeed, but that success is defined by how well he serves our interests, not his own and certainly not how he serves those who engineered the state of permanent war and economic depression we find ourselves in today. The constitution names the president “commander-in-chief of the army and navy and militia of the several states.” Civilians don’t have a commander-in-chief and don’t need one. Power may come from the top down, but authority and legitimacy flow only from the bottom up. A president either works for us, or he is as illegitimate as the disgraced Bush-Cheney regime.

It’s not enough to send the Obama transition team your suggestions on its web site, since only the administration knows who is sending them what, and you never meet or exchange information with anyone else who sends in suggestions. Very little of the organizing done for the Obama campaign will be useful in the coming period. Only the Obama campaign, and now the Obama administration possesses the email and phone lists. Organizers who don’t work for the administration but who want it to serve the people, unless they have obtained and copied those lists, will be working from scratch.

It’s time to call meetings and make demands. It’s time organize group visits to your members of Congress. It’s time to raise expectations, not lower them, to build and crank up the phone banks and email lists with messages to pressure the new administration to do what it was elected to do and not disappoint its base, as has happened so many times before.

Here’s an issue to start with — making it possible for people to fight in their own communities to raise their own incomes. The administration should make its top priority passage of the Employee Free Choice Act in the first month of the new Congress.

How the Obama Administration can Enable Its Allies and Build a Permanent Movement For Economic Justice: Passing The Employee Free Choice Act

The biggest thing the Obama administration can do to succeed in its first month, to boost the incomes and secure the economic well-being of millions of US families is to speedily pass the Employee Free Choice Act. Under the Reagan, Clinton and Bush regimes, the right of Americans in a workplace to organize a union, even to think out loud about a union, has almost disappeared. Working people have no leverage against employers, who, according to Labor Department stats, fired someone every ten minutes in 2005 for suspected union activity. Right now, that’s illegal, but the fines are so light that employers wantonly violate the law and willingly pay the fine rather than allow workers to organize.

Swift and early passage of the Employee Free Choice Act will empower families to fight their own fights for economic parity on more equal ground than we have seen in a generation. While the productivity of American workers has nearly tripled over the last thirty years, wages have remained, when adjusted for inflation, flat. All the profits of increased productivity have flowed upward to the bosses. US executives often make 400 to 1000 times the wage of their workers, as opposed to only 40 to 100 times as much in Germany or Japan, which are still out-competing the US anyway.

If the Employee Free Choice Act is passed early, an Obama administration will create thousands of local organizing opportunities and thousands of institutional allies to help hold it on the course of peace and economic justice it was elected to take. If you want to see an Obama presidency succeed on the terms of the voters who elected it, the thing to do this week is sign the petition and join the one million others who want to lift up not just the fortunes of Wall Street, but those of ordinary families.

Visit the site of American Rights At Work and Learn more about the difference unions make in access to health care and education and democratic rights in the workplace. Forward the information, the videos and the petition to everyone on your list. Blog it and put the “one million strong” ad and the videos on your own web site, if you have one. And yes, call and email the Obama Transition Team. Organize something, or join something already organized to pressure the new administration to keep its promises. If you want change, be the change.

Every week for the next several weeks BAR will print a new suggestion or two on how you can help the Obama administration make good on the promise of “Hope” and “Change” that swept it into office. Whether it intends to, or not.

The First Black President carries with him into the Oval Office the hopes and dreams and aspirations of many people he will never meet, but who imagine they know his heart and intentions. Although these things were not on the ballot, and were kept largely out of the discussions by the media and the candidates themselves, the tens of millions who voted for Obama did so because in the main, they want an end to the war. They want to see the military budget and the prison population reduced. They want single payer national health care. They want a more just economy and they objected strenuously to Bush’s — and Obama’s bailout of Wall Street.

Their expectations of social and economic justice at home and peace abroad are, in Dr. King’s famous language, a gigantic and long-overdue promissory note. A check. The Obama Check. Barack Obama was elected in the hopes that he could help us cash this check. That is the change his voters believed in, that’s what they expect to see, and that is how an Obama presidency will be judged by history.

Can we ever cash the Obama Check?

The day Obama takes office, there will be an incredible 1.1 million African Americans behind bars, a proportion eight times that of whites. Before the mortgage market meltdown the wealth of black families was about one eleventh that of whites. Since then, it’s fallen off a cliff. Whether we look at education, at wages, at morbidity, mortality, unemployment or mass incarceration the gaps between whites and blacks in the US are wide and still growing. With the nation’s First Black President installed, many whites will solemnly assure us that the US is not now, if it ever was, a racist society. The First Black President-elect seems to agree with them, having told us all a year before electing him that we were “90% of the way” to a non-racist society.

Will the First Black President be of any use cashing the check for real racial justice, not just for black faces in high places? The clock is already ticking, and every day is an opportunity to lead lost.

The day the First Black President is sworn in the US economy will still be, in the words of economist Michael Hudson a polite fiction, based on phantom assets, phony profits, inflated valuations, and outright fraud, a house of marked cards where even the bankers know not to trust each other. Millions of families will still face foreclosure, eviction and bankruptcy. Tens of millions more are in debt up to their necks, afflicted with ever-rising interest rates thanks to the tireless efforts of Obama’s running mate Joe Biden, sometimes known as the Senator from MasterCard.

In his first true test of presidential leadership, while still a candidate the First Black President lobbied reluctant Democrats and urged them to pass the Bush-Cheney trillion dollar no-strings-attached parting gift to Wall Street, money that could have been used to fund education, jobs, infrastructure, human needs, and debt relief for ordinary families.

Do we really expect Obama to help us cash the check on economic justice, to be an advocate of measures that lift up ordinary families? The outlook here is not bright either.

Dr. King told us more than forty years ago that “a nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual doom.” On the day the First Black President, supposedly the fulfillment of King’s dream, takes office, the US will be spending more on arms and the military than the rest of the planet combined. But by declaring that he would increase the Pentagon’s budget even over what Cheney and Bush spent at the expense of housing, education and whatever else, the First Black President has already stopped payment on this part of the check.

The day after the election, and the day the First Black President takes office, at least 44 million Americans will have no health insurance at all, and tens of millions more are underinsured. One third of every health care dollar spent in the US goes to maintain private insurance companies, indisputable parasites on the process of health care delivery, making the US health care system the most expensive in the world, even though it takes care of a smaller percentage of its population than any other advanced industrial country. But instead of single payer health care, the First Black President plans to borrow billions with which to pay the Obama Check directly to parasitic insurance companies, and call that “universal health care”.

The day the First Black President takes office there will be over 800 US military bases spanning the globe, more troops in Iraq than were there in 2005 or 2006, US fleets menacing Iran and intermittently bombing Somalia, and a war in Afghanistan. The First Black President will draw down troops in Iraq to send them to Afghanistan, his threats to Iran are identical to those of George Bush — though he hasn’t put them to song, as McCain did – and he does not speak of the ongoing US military involvement in the Horn of Africa. Our First Black President, every but as much as Dick Cheney, has embraced the phony “war on terror” as the organizing principle of American life.

The peace loving grandmothers who imagine they see God’s Hand on the First Black President will have time to take a longer and more careful look. There will be no peace dividend under an Obama administration. This is a debt our First Black President is unwilling even to acknowledge, much less help us collect on.

Many of the same voices who assured us that the First Black President would be a epoch-making breakthrough — who helped sell us the Obama Check — now caution us not to expect too much. He is after all, only a politician. He’s not president of the movement, he is President of All the People, including the very rich, and obliged to serve the interests of the Pentagon, of parasitic insurance companies, of soulless multinational corporations, and conniving investment bankers.

All indications are that the Obama Check is going to be a difficult one to cash. But it’s what the people voted for, and many of us do intend to collect. With the help of our First Black President, or without it.

Back in the mid 1990s, the owners of TV stations promised Congress that the advent of DTV would bring with it wide selection of new programming, educational and children’s shows, frequently updated local newscasts and interactive content, all free over the new digital broadcast airwaves. Of course, they lied.

“Broadcasters have no idea how they will fill the extra channels they’ll get on February 18, 2009,” Communications Workers of America’s Carrie Biggs-Adams told BAR. They don’t have the content and they don’t have a clue. There are only so many reruns, reality shows and home shopping networks.”

An article by David Hatch in the June 7 National Journal confirms this

With the February 17 shift to digital broadcasting just over eight months away, broadcasters are finding that the business model for multiple channels is not panning out. An often-repeated refrain is that there’s no money in it. “You’re not creating any new advertisers, and you’re not creating any new viewers,” said Shaun Sheehan, vice president of the Tribune Co., which carried an all-music channel called The Tube on some of its secondary digital stations before the network folded in October.

“It’s just a pure business decision,” said James McQuivey, a media analyst with Boston-based Forrester Research. “Do I run the risk of rolling out new channels that will dilute my audience base?”

The National Association of Broadcasters cited statistics from BIA Financial, a Chantilly, Va.-based research firm, indicating that 351 television stations are multicasting.

But that figure includes public broadcasters, which have invested heavily in extra stations and account for a large chunk of the ones available–compared with their commercial counterparts.

When commercial outlets do multicast, it is often to transmit redundant weather maps, which involves minimal investment and little or no on-air talent. These radar scopes are so widespread that they’ve saturated the airwaves in some markets, including Washington, where viewers have three to choose from. Commercial broadcasters “can say that they do have some content on there,” the FCC source said derisively.

Although the airwaves are the property of the public under US law, and broadcasters receive their licenses from the FCC only on the condition that they serve the public interest, neither Congress nor the FCC, have attached any public service or public interest requirement to the thousands of new DTV channels that current broadcasters will receive. And current broadcasters, according to the deal worked out by Congress and the FCC back in the 1990s, are the only ones upon whom the new stations made possible by DTV will be bestowed. They’re in. Congress and the FCC, in their wisdom didn’t think local governments, schools, colleges, libraries, unions, community organizations, local churches, blacks, Latinos or females deserved a shot at any of the thousands of new DTV channels. They’re out. That’s it and that’s all.

The DTV transition has been engineered at every level to shield broadcasters from public scrutiny or accountability. You’d think four times as many TV stations would mean the FCC would have to issue four times as many broadcast licenses. But the issuance of new licenses would make public debate about who gets them and under what conditions unavoidable. So the new stations will be brought online under existing licenses.

The simple fact that DTV means the number of available channels will increase three or four times without a single broadcast license being issued to any new players is being carefully and deliberately concealed from the American people, lest there be a public debate on whether broadcasters actually deserve the new channels, and to what other use the newly available public spectrum might be put. For example, to find a reference to and definition of “digital multicasting”, the technical name for the ability to place multiple channels in the bandwidth formerly occupied by a single analog channel, you have to hit the “What is DTV” page on the FCC web site, then click the link on the word “multicasting” and read the pop-up to learn that DTV

“allow(s) each digital broadcast station to split its bit stream into 2, 3, 4 or more individual channels of programming and/or data services. (For example, on channel 7, you could watch 7-1, 7-2, 7-3 or 7-4.)”

BAR had to spend 30 minutes on the phone, calling a half dozen FCC numbers and speaking to nine staffers just to find that reference. There are others, but few are easily discovered.

What’s easy to find in the press and on the FCC’s DTV site are the empty promises of broadcasters that DTV will mean more programming choices for the public, along with hundreds of thousands of words about whether old and new TV sets will be able to receive the new DTV signals and how well, who needs set-top converter boxes and who doesn’t and who pays for them and how.

The broadcast industry is a closed club which reaps vast private profits from its monopoly use of a limited public resource, namely the public airwaves. No clever entrepreneur or smart engineer invented the broadcast spectrum that carries radio, TV and other wireless communications. The spectrum is a fundamental property of the physical universe. The FCC is charged with regulating the use of the spectrum in the public interest.

But the FCC is effectively the captive and sock puppet for the broadcasters club. The FCC has managed to spend millions on informing the public about the impending transition to DTV, with a staff of hundreds, public meetings, extensive web sites, dozens of videos, and complete “outreach toolkits” full of sample press releases for government and community organizations to conduct DTV transition awareness programs. The FCC’s desired level of public “awareness” is limited to how to acquire a converter box or a DTV-capable set and turn it on. This treatment of the American people as “consumers” — as commodities to be manipulated rather than empowered citizens, the actual owners of the broadcast spectrum is conclusive evidence that the FCC is wholly captured by and run in the interest of the broadcast industry.

Although the FCC’s digital TV web site and handouts repeat the empty promises of broadcasters for more variety, for educational and public service programming on DTV they do it without mentioning that there will be three or four times as many channels, let alone entertaining the question whose channels those will be. The questions of who owns the limited resource of broadcast airwaves, who is entitled to broadcast licenses and under what conditions, and in whose interest the public spectrum must be managed are entirely absent from the FCC’s public “awareness” programs. The fix is definitely in.

On February 18, 2009, 1700 existing TV broadcasters get multiple new channels with no public service obligation. The rest of us get nothing, unless you count set-top converter boxes and more channels to watch infomercials, “reality” shows, the jewelry channel and the home shopping network in beautiful high-def TV. Although broadcast TV is a local medium with most station footprints only a few dozen miles in radius, the transition will occur simultaneously nationwide. This will make local organizing aimed at opening up distribution of new licenses for the new channels or forcing some degree of broadcaster accountability extraordinarily difficult. But there is one bright spot.

The FCC, in its wisdom, has designated an early test rollout of the new broadcast regime to take effect in a single city; Wilmington NC, on September 8, 2008. Wilmington is an historic port city with a population of about 100,000, a quarter of whom are black.

If there is truly a nationwide movement for media justice it must rear its head in the next few weeks. The people of Wilmington NC know they deserve more choices, more localism, more news and more control over their media than they have now. Right now, they don’t know know that Wilmington’s four local TV stations are about to become sixteen stations with no increase in local accountability, no new local news or public service, no local arts, and certainly no local ownership. They must be told.

If there is a nationwide media justice “movement” worthy of that name it will concentrate its resources in a public education campaign and a mass mobilization, first in Wilmington NC and then nationwide with the aim of overthrowing the cozy deal broadcasters have worked out with their puppets in the FCC and the Congress. There will be another new Congress soon, and another president. This is a political moment when much is possible, but only in the context of a broad and sustained demand to overthrow the secretive sweetheart deal broadcasters have cooked up for themselves to monopolize the newly available digital TV channels. That’s what real movements do — they seize key political moments, they conduct mass education campaigns to take us someplace we would never go without them.

The FCC, the current Congress and candidates for the next one, presidential candidates and everybody else should be forced to explain repeatedly over the next few months why thousands of newly available digital TV channels should not go to thousands of new local broadcasters — to community organizations, local entrepreneurs, local churches, schools and unions, to blacks, Latinos, Native Americans and to women. It’s our spectrum. It’s our public space. It’s our right.

If a nationwide movement for media justice really exists, it must begin to expose the privatization of the public airwaves hidden in plain sight under the guise of the “transition” from analog to digital TV. It must harness the power of the people to challenge this grand theft of our digital destiny.

Back in the mid 1990s, the owners of TV stations promised Congress that the advent of DTV would bring with it wide selection of new programming, educational and children’s shows, frequently updated local newscasts and interactive content, all free over the new digital broadcast airwaves. Of course, they lied.

“Broadcasters have no idea how they will fill the extra channels they’ll get on February 18, 2009,” Communications Workers of America’s Carrie Biggs-Adams told BAR. They don’t have the content and they don’t have a clue. There are only so many reruns, reality shows and home shopping networks.”

An article by David Hatch in the June 7 National Journal confirms this:

With the February 17 shift to digital broadcasting just over eight months away, broadcasters are finding that the business model for multiple channels is not panning out. An often-repeated refrain is that there’s no money in it. “You’re not creating any new advertisers, and you’re not creating any new viewers,” said Shaun Sheehan, vice president of the Tribune Co., which carried an all-music channel called The Tube on some of its secondary digital stations before the network folded in October.

“It’s just a pure business decision,” said James McQuivey, a media analyst with Boston-based Forrester Research. “Do I run the risk of rolling out new channels that will dilute my audience base?”

The National Association of Broadcasters cited statistics from BIA Financial, a Chantilly, Va.-based research firm, indicating that 351 television stations are multicasting.

But that figure includes public broadcasters, which have invested heavily in extra stations and account for a large chunk of the ones available–compared with their commercial counterparts.

When commercial outlets do multicast, it is often to transmit redundant weather maps, which involves minimal investment and little or no on-air talent. These radar scopes are so widespread that they’ve saturated the airwaves in some markets, including Washington, where viewers have three to choose from. Commercial broadcasters “can say that they do have some content on there,” the FCC source said derisively.

Although the airwaves are the property of the public under US law, and broadcasters receive their licenses from the FCC only on the condition that they serve the public interest, neither Congress nor the FCC, have attached any public service or public interest requirement to the thousands of new DTV channels that current broadcasters will receive. And current broadcasters, according to the deal worked out by Congress and the FCC back in the 1990s, are the only ones upon whom the new stations made possible by DTV will be bestowed. They’re in. Congress and the FCC, in their wisdom didn’t think local governments, schools, colleges, libraries, unions, community organizations, local churches, blacks, Latinos or females deserved a shot at any of the thousands of new DTV channels. They’re out. That’s it and that’s all.

The DTV transition has been engineered at every level to shield broadcasters from public scrutiny or accountability. You’d think four times as many TV stations would mean the FCC would have to issue four times as many broadcast licenses. But the issuance of new licenses would make public debate about who gets them and under what conditions unavoidable. So the new stations will be brought online under existing licenses.

The simple fact that DTV means the number of available channels will increase three or four times without a single broadcast license being issued to any new players is being carefully and deliberately concealed from the American people, lest there be a public debate on whether broadcasters actually deserve the new channels, and to what other use the newly available public spectrum might be put. For example, to find a reference to and definition of “digital multicasting”, the technical name for the ability to place multiple channels in the bandwidth formerly occupied by a single analog channel, you have to hit the “What is DTV” page on the FCC web site, then click the link on the word “multicasting” and read the pop-up to learn that DTV

“allow(s) each digital broadcast station to split its bit stream into 2, 3, 4 or more individual channels of programming and/or data services. (For example, on channel 7, you could watch 7-1, 7-2, 7-3 or 7-4.)”

BAR had to spend 30 minutes on the phone, calling a half dozen FCC numbers and speaking to nine staffers just to find that reference. There are others, but few are easily discovered.

What’s easy to find in the press and on the FCC’s DTV site are the empty promises of broadcasters that DTV will mean more programming choices for the public, along with hundreds of thousands of words about whether old and new TV sets will be able to receive the new DTV signals and how well, who needs set-top converter boxes and who doesn’t and who pays for them and how.

The broadcast industry is a closed club which reaps vast private profits from its monopoly use of a limited public resource, namely the public airwaves. No clever entrepreneur or smart engineer invented the broadcast spectrum that carries radio, TV and other wireless communications. The spectrum is a fundamental property of the physical universe. The FCC is charged with regulating the use of the spectrum in the public interest.

But the FCC is effectively the captive and sock puppet for the broadcasters club. The FCC has managed to spend millions on informing the public about the impending transition to DTV, with a staff of hundreds, public meetings, extensive web sites, dozens of videos, and complete “outreach toolkits” full of sample press releases for government and community organizations to conduct DTV transition awareness programs. The FCC’s desired level of public “awareness” is limited to how to acquire a converter box or a DTV-capable set and turn it on. This treatment of the American people as “consumers” — as commodities to be manipulated rather than empowered citizens, the actual owners of the broadcast spectrum is conclusive evidence that the FCC is wholly captured by and run in the interest of the broadcast industry.

Although the FCC’s digital TV web site and handouts repeat the empty promises of broadcasters for more variety, for educational and public service programming on DTV they do it without mentioning that there will be three or four times as many channels, let alone entertaining the question whose channels those will be. The questions of who owns the limited resource of broadcast airwaves, who is entitled to broadcast licenses and under what conditions, and in whose interest the public spectrum must be managed are entirely absent from the FCC’s public “awareness” programs. The fix is definitely in.

On February 18, 2009, 1700 existing TV broadcasters get multiple new channels with no public service obligation. The rest of us get nothing, unless you count set-top converter boxes and more channels to watch infomercials, “reality” shows, the jewelry channel and the home shopping network in beautiful high-def TV. Although broadcast TV is a local medium with most station footprints only a few dozen miles in radius, the transition will occur simultaneously nationwide. This will make local organizing aimed at opening up distribution of new licenses for the new channels or forcing some degree of broadcaster accountability extraordinarily difficult. But there is one bright spot.

The FCC, in its wisdom, has designated an early test rollout of the new broadcast regime to take effect in a single city; Wilmington NC, on September 8, 2008. Wilmington is an historic port city with a population of about 100,000, a quarter of whom are black.

If there is truly a nationwide movement for media justice it must rear its head in the next few weeks. The people of Wilmington NC know they deserve more choices, more localism, more news and more control over their media than they have now. Right now, they don’t know know that Wilmington’s four local TV stations are about to become sixteen stations with no increase in local accountability, no new local news or public service, no local arts, and certainly no local ownership. They must be told.

If there is a nationwide media justice “movement” worthy of that name it will concentrate its resources in a public education campaign and a mass mobilization, first in Wilmington NC and then nationwide with the aim of overthrowing the cozy deal broadcasters have worked out with their puppets in the FCC and the Congress. There will be another new Congress soon, and another president. This is a political moment when much is possible, but only in the context of a broad and sustained demand to overthrow the secretive sweetheart deal broadcasters have cooked up for themselves to monopolize the newly available digital TV channels. That’s what real movements do — they seize key political moments, they conduct mass education campaigns to take us someplace we would never go without them.

The FCC, the current Congress and candidates for the next one, presidential candidates and everybody else should be forced to explain repeatedly over the next few months why thousands of newly available digital TV channels should not go to thousands of new local broadcasters — to community organizations, local entrepreneurs, local churches, schools and unions, to blacks, Latinos, Native Americans and to women. It’s our spectrum. It’s our public space. It’s our right.

If a nationwide movement for media justice really exists, it must begin to expose the privatization of the public airwaves hidden in plain sight under the guise of the “transition” from analog to digital TV. It must harness the power of the people to challenge this grand theft of our digital destiny.

If you work hard enough, if you prepare long enough, if you visualize astutely and pray on it resolutely, it really can happen for you. At least that’s the way it works in the world of Oprah Winfrey. In the Age of Oprah, author Janice Peck explains, there’s no such thing as collective problem-solving; there are only individual, market-driven and spirit-centered solutions. Water polluted? Buy it bottled. Dissatisfied with your kids’ school? Find a private one or home school. Dead-end job with no respect and no benefits? Polish that resume and assume an attitude of gratitude, or get ready to start your own business. House falling down? Maybe you can qualify for an extreme makeover. Is the world view of Oprah really uplifting after all? Or does it disempower individuals and disarm communities?

Bruce Dixon: Unless you’ve lived the last 25 years in some cave under a mountain with no cable TV, Oprah Winfrey is one of those figures in American life that need no introduction. We’re all familiar with the outlines of her life and career: how she rose from rural poverty in Mississippi to head a vast media empire of radio networks, TV and movie production houses, multiple magazines, a web site and of course a long running syndicated talk show with multiple spin-offs. We know Oprah is a billionaire, and we’re acquainted with various, intimate personal details of her life, her favorite colors, how many dogs, cats and houses she has, and how she likes to shop and especially how she likes to give away money and things to the less fortunate.

Don’t we already know just about all there is to know about Oprah? What else is there?

Janice Peck: You’re right the vast popular literature on Oprah is enormous. I think there are things we (still) want to know, and that’s what drove me to write this book about her.

What I wanted to do is not look at Oprah from a personal perspective, but to situate her historically and politically, to understand how she became this very powerful world and international icon in relation to some political and economic developments in the US over the last twenty-five years. In some ways what I’ve done is tried to write a political history of the enterprise of Oprah and what she’s done, something quite different from most of the things we usually see written about her.

BD: Since this is a political history of Oprah, how Oprah relates to culture and politics, does that mean that you had to sit down and talk to her about this?

JP: I actually did not interview Oprah Winfrey for this project, for a couple reasons. One is very simple. In the ’90s when I was teaching at the University of Minnesota and first got interested in studying television talk shows, I wanted to go to Chicago to be in the audience and interview Oprah Winfrey, and I was told by her publicist at the time that Ms. Winfrey did not talk to academics, she did not give interviews to academics. Well, I thought, that’s alright, I don’t really need to talk to her. But also because the kind of book I’ve written is not really a biography, where you need to talk to the individual and learn a lot about her personally. I’m writing about her as a cultural phenomenon and public figure. I’m looking at her through the lens of this enormous amount of media coverage we have on her. In some sense talking to her wasn’t what my book was about. It’s more an observation about her power, her cultural significance from the perspective of a media analysis.

BD: So if we want to know where her favorite shoe store is or something like that, we’ll have to read the magazine, huh?

JP: Yeah, there are plenty of other places where you can find those kinds of things. I didn’t think I needed to repeat them.

BD: We probably couldn’t afford to go to her favorite shoe store anyway.

JP: Most people cannot . . . I chose the title “The Age of Oprah, cultural Icon for the Neo Liberal Era” because in 2000 Newsweek magazine had a cover story that referred to our age as the “Age of Oprah.” I thought that was a perfect title because I’m trying to make the argument that Oprah Winfrey represents certain important things about our era. That’s where I got the first part of the title.

BD: You’re calling her a cultural icon for the neoliberal era. Now we understand that you’re not calling her liberal, or even neoliberal, but that neoliberal is a label for the times in which we are living. So what are some of the hallmarks of this neoliberal era that we’re living in, and what makes Oprah a cultural icon for neoliberalism.

JP: Neoliberal and neoliberalism are terms that refer to an economic theory and also a set of policies. We can historically situate that with the election of Ronald Regan in the US and of Margaret Thatcher in England. It’s a theory about what kind of relationship the government should have to the economy. It’s a response to what was seen as a kind of economic crisis in the ’70s with high inflation, what was called stagflation. This was seen as a way to correct that.

After World War II, in the US the idea of the relationship of the government to the economy was that the government needed to intervene in the economy to make sure that we avoided crises like the Great Depression, for example. So it was the responsibility of the government to focus on full employment and economic growth, on the welfare of citizens, and that would guarantee economic and political stability. When there was this crisis in the ’70s with rising prices and inflation (falling profits) neoliberalism was presented as the solution. It’s got several things that are very familiar to us. First of all, very drastic tax cuts, especially for big corporations and those at the top of the economic ladder. Deregulation, where government holds back from regulating the airlines, the banking industry and so on. Privatization of services that had been the responsibility of the government, so utilities and mail service and prisons and defense — we now have all these privately owned prisons, for-profit prisons, and we have contractors fighting the war in Iraq. And finally, large cutbacks in spending on social programs. Most people can see that in cuts of education. At the public university where I teach only seven percent of its budget comes from the state of Colorado. And we especially have seen cutbacks in the services that were to assist the most needy citizens.

BD: So neoliberalism basically started with Reaganomics and the descendants of Reaganomics — privatization and militarization — are still with us. So what is it that makes Oprah the cultural icon of neoliberalism? She doesn’t talk about the army or about privatization, so what’s that got to do with her?

JP: That’s a great question. That’s the project I am trying to accomplish with this book. Basically Oprah has risen from the middle and early ’80s from somebody who was just a talk show host. Today she is seen as somebody who is a kind of world figure, everybody knows her by her first name. My argument is that the way to understand the journey of this woman is to understand neoliberalism as a political and economic project. For example, if we start looking at neoliberalism it argues that any political or social issue that we encounter today must be seen through the lens of the market, the free market. It turns all problems into individual ones that can be solved in the market. If there’s contamination of the water table, for instance, we should buy bottled water. That kind of attitude, that we should solve problems with the market and through individual activity and individual transformation is ultimately the same message that Oprah Winfrey sells to us.

BD: So you’re saying that Oprah is the messenger, she brings us the message of what’s required for us to adjust our attitudes neoliberalism and this neoliberal order require of us ordinary people, how it requires us to look at all of our problems as individual problems. None of our problems, then, need to be addressed by organizing and communicating with each other.

JP: Neoliberalism emphasizes a kind of minimal government, a stripped down, hollowed out government and maximum personal responsibility. I think this term personal responsibility will probably ring familiar with your listeners. We hear it all the time, we hear it from politicians and also we hear it from Oprah. If we have problems, if our lives are not going well if, we don’t have the things we want in our lives, then what we need to do is take personal responsibility, put our minds to it, have the right attitude and so on. That is the key to bringing about positive change. To give you an example of this, where Oprah very much exemplifies this idea that the market and individual positive attitudes are the solutions to social problems, your listeners may be familiar with a show that was on this season called Oprah’s Big Give. It’s a “reality” show where people are competing, who can give the most, who can find the neediest people, and so on. There are a couple of points in that series that really stood out.

One was in Houston, where one of the contestants decided that they were going to help this public school, this grade school in the city that needed computers, and had no playgrounds and basically had very few resources. You’ve got all these kids at the end, they built the playground, the kids were screaming with joy, the teachers were sobbing, they were so pleased. It’s a city school. It’s a public school where most of the kids we see are black or Latino. We’ve got this really “feel good” moment where the kids get this, but if you step back from it one of the things we might ask is why are public schools in the United States are so drastically underfunded and why is this seen as a solution, this charity, as opposed to taxation, where (through) the government, that we all pay taxes to we are all collectively responsible for things like education.

That is the way in which Oprah models the [neoliberal] attitude we should have toward the world. We can be personally generous with others when we find people who are the deservingly needy but we don’t ask questions about the way our society is organized and the way resources are distributed.

BD: There are even imitators . . . the Extreme Makeover (Home Edition) show where they build somebody a new house every week

JP: Other people have studied this too. They call it “charity TV.” In the final episode (of Extreme Makeover) this season they went to New Orleans. They found a couple of families who were made homeless by Katrina. They built them new houses, and everybody feels real good, but they don’t step back and ask the questions most of us would like to have answered.

BD: Such as, why whole neighborhoods never got their sewer and water service restored, or why vast square miles of real estate that black families actually owned are gone?

JP: And what parts of the city are going to be rebuilt and which citizens of New Orleans are going to be welcomed back. None of those questions are asked, nor why the levees were in such terrible shape to begin with, because of this gutted government that doesn’t pay for things.

BD: Oprah’s life and career are offered as living proof of the maxim that if you can dream it, you can envision it; you can pray on it, it’ll happen for you, no matter what the odds. Most people will agree that this is a message that has no politics, liberal, neoliberal or otherwise, that it’s a profoundly positive and empowering message. What, if anything are these people missing?

JP: There’s nothing wrong with saying we should dream, have dreams and aspire to fulfill them, but I think it’s important not to decontextualize that. Because of the misallocation of resources in our society you have to begin with those kinds of questions. The idea that the only thing that stands in the way of someone like me, who is at this point a professional middle class white woman with lots of education and a good salary, that there’s no difference between me and some woman, also my age, in her fifties, a woman without all those resources, that we’re the same and all we have to do is take personal responsibility and dream big, that’s actually a very harmful message, because it’s a de-socialized message, it’s a depoliticized message. I

Part of what I’m arguing here is not that she’s personally a liberal or a conservative or whatever, but that there is a politics to her message…

BD: Like you just said, it’s a de-socialized politics that puts the personal responsibility for being poor and oppressed exclusively on the poor and oppressed.

JP: Yeah, and it’s a comforting message for those who don’t have to feel that they have any responsibility or any obligation to their fellow citizens, because we’re all simply about personal responsibility. I’m trying to argue that that is a political move which ultimately denies that we are all responsible for one another.

BD: Speaking of comforting messages, Oprah is also one of those characters who, like a certain presidential candidate this season, is said to have “transcended race.” Now, “transcending race” should be a good thing, shouldn’t it? Why is this not a good thing with Oprah?

JP: I have a chapter in my book that’s about this question of “transcending race.” The idea that we should aspire to live in a world in which we all regard each other as equals and fellow citizens regardless of race — that’s a very nice idea. I’m not opposed to that. But to say that Oprah “transcends race” in my analysis has a lot to do with the fact that she is a very comforting presence to her majority white following. The way she accomplishes that is not to do or say anything that would make her white followers uncomfortable. So to present the world as though it’s a post-racial world, and race is no longer a problem, that we’ve solved all that in the sixties and so on, is a very comforting thing for her white followers.

So Oprah has disassociated herself from a lot of the political aspects of the civil rights movement, even as she mentions certain kinds of heroic figures, like Sojourner Truth or Martin Luther King. Early in her career she talked about going to an all-black college and not feeling comfortable with her fellow students…

BD: Why not?

JP: Because they were angry…

BD: Oh dear. All those angry black people

JP: And she was not comfortable around those kinds of students. At the beginning of her career she gave interviews distancing herself from that kind of black history and black experience, so when you say she has “transcended race” I say in my book that in some ways that just means that white people like her. We don’t live in a society that has transcended race, so it’s only possible to do so if you cover up, if you avoid certain kinds of issues. That’s been very much the case with Oprah Winfrey.

BD: So Oprah can keep enough of her black self to be able to do that neck thing that sistas do, or to drop a couple paragraphs in fluent ebonics if she needs to, but she makes folks comfortable, she’s a comforting figure for people who maybe shouldn’t be all that comfortable.

JP: You don’t get to be popular the way she is if you make too many people uncomfortable. It’s the same sort of thing with the Cosby show, (which) was the number one TV show for years. In order to be number one, to have that massive audience, it’s got to be careful not to upset people.

BD: There’s a saying that goes “nothing succeeds like successs.” Oprah’s done very well for herself in building audience share and influence, and a vast personal fortune. So isn’t the lesson for bright young people, especially black people, who are looking to change the world through media, isn’t the message to follow in her footprints, right? To be upbeat and positive, to give the market what it wants. Isn’t that the lesson of Oprah’s career?

JP: It’s certainly the lesson that she would like to pass on. But as a media critic, I guess I would encourage not only black young people, but all young people who are interested in going into media to think about some other kinds of contributions they could make to society as well.

BD: So thank you for this half hour, this twenty-five minutes, really. Say the name of the book again, please.

JP: The book is the Age of Oprah, Cultural Icon for the Neoliberal Era. It seems to be selling OK. I was interviewed by the New York Times last week about a story that has to do with Oprah’s ratings declining over the last few years.

BD: Why would Oprah’s ratings decline?

JP: There’s been a flurry of news stories in the past week that began with a Times story . . . her ratings have declined for the last three years straight. She is still the number one talk show, but she has lost a quarter of her female audience age 25 to 54 over the last three years. Her circulation for the magazine is down too. There are questions too as to whether her endorsement of Obama has hurt her, but I guess we’ll have to discuss that in another venue, since we are out of time now.

* Dr. Janice Peck is Associate Professor at the School of Journalism and Mass Communications of the University of Colorado at Boulder. If you don’t see her book, the Age of Oprah at your local bookstore, ask for it. They’ll be glad to get it.

Far from being a problem to flee from any more, the central cities now have what America’s elite covet. Everything in the US runs on oil, but dense urban populations enable a far more sustainable transit infrastructure in this era of increasingly expensive fuel. The cities also have public assets in the form of public health networks and infrastructure, tax revenue streams, public education systems, public housing and public lands, all of which chambers of commerce nationwide are eager to privatize.

Given this agenda, any degree of democratic control over local resources by the current residents of inner cities is an obstacle to the goals of gentrification and privatization which are the intended future for the nation’s cities. And while chambers of commerce are traditionally Republican bastions, Democrats, have often been enthusiastic boosters of handing the public assets of cities over to private control.

On the federal level, the cynically misnamed HOPE 6 (Housing Opportunities For People Everywhere) law, passed during the Clinton administration, enabled the destruction of tens of thousands of units of public housing nationwide, and the unmonitored dispersal of hundreds of thousands of their former residents into existing stocks of substandard housing by erasing the requirement that replacement housing be built when such units are demolished. Rather than protect residents of the cities who made their own careers possible, black Democratic elites in cities across the nation have more often than not been eagerly complicit in the looting of urban resources which accompanies gentrification. Communities looking to their local black Democrats for leadership, or just for useful information to protect themselves against dispossession and dispersal have been repeatedly disappointed and betrayed.

Corporate media do their part to ensure that the only voices heard in public discussion of how cities should be developed are members of their own chorus, lauding the virtues of the elite’s economic plan for the cities, which in every case amount to moving poorer people out and richer ones in, giving the process names like “revitalization”.

In Atlanta for instance, where two out of twelve metro counties (the two with black majorities) taxed themselves to build and operate 90% of the region’s transit assets with no state funding whatsoever, the state, along with suburban and exurban counties and the local Chamber of Commerce have performed a legal carjacking which gives them ultimate control of those assets. For the most part, black Atlanta’s well-developed black political elite, just like the black political class nationwide has been silent on questions of gentrification and the privatization of public assets. Although Atlanta’s string of black mayors stretches back to the mid-1970s, its visionary leadership seems to be coming from outside the political establishment altogether.

In response to a multi-year campaign in the state legislature and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution to bring the city’s transit agency under the control of the chamber of commerce and suburban counties which contributed no revenue to build the system, Atlanta Jobs With Justice (JWJ) put together the Atlanta Transit Riders Union (ATRU). JWJ-ATRU’s organizing effort reached out to the area’s unionized transit workers, to the disabled and transit dependent, to the black clergy and to the tens of thousands who use public transit daily.

Over the course of several years, JWJ-ATRU has stopped a transit fare increase, and flexed its community organizing muscle to persuade the transit authority to restore bus service to areas it cut.

“That was a good start, but not nearly enough,” Terence Courtney of Atlanta JWJ told us. “We could see the need not just to react to service cuts and the atrocity of the month, but to make the peoples’ voice heard on the planning and policy level. Private, unrepresentative and un-elected bodies like the Chamber of Commerce are always coming out with their master plans for housing, transit and education which provide the framework for what little discussion takes place on these issues.

“The voices of those who use transit, not just the individual voices, but the voices of entire communities are nowhere in their master plans. The voices of the workers who drive the buses, maintain the tracks and stations, repair the buses and trains, and who also live in the communities the transit system serves, these voices are nowhere to be heard. So we began to understand that if we are going to have a public discussion, if we are going to pick a political fight over the future of our city and the region we had to come up with and to advance the peoples plan for sustainable regional public transit. We understood that it had to be a plan that serves the needs of communities already here, not the communities that will be built after they’ve used our tax money to gentrify this place and evict us all, not the interest of bond holders and real estate speculators.

“So that’s what we did. We got the assistance of some good people at Georgia Tech, most notably Laurel Paget-Seekins who did a lot of the heavy lifting, putting all the pieces of this plan together. We got the input of the Amalgamated Transit Workers Union, of faith based organizations, of communities of disabled and transit-dependent people and tried to put all this in a context of democracy. The result is the plan we presented on April 29, and which you can download from our web site. We think it should be a template for these kinds of organizing efforts across the country where decision making is being passed from public and accountable bodies to private and unaccountable ones to silence and marginalize the voices of real people.”

“This study presents a future vision of transit in Atlanta that is accountable, affordable and accessible,” said Laura Paget-Seekins, a graduate student at Georgia Tech. “It’s accountable by having a democratic decision making structure that values the knowledge and experience of workers and riders. It’s affordable both in terms of its fare structures and its funding sources which are equitable, and it’s accessible to people regardless of physical ability and to all parts of the region.

“We propose to do this do this not by drawing route lines on a map, but by ensuring that there are service standards throughout the region ensuring that no matter what growth takes place in terms of jobs, no matter where affordable housing is pushed out of, that there will be transit access in the future based on the criteria that there should be no new service for riders of choice at the expense of service for riders who are transit dependent.”

Putting forth the plan is an important step, but only a step. There will be months and years of political struggle over which plans are finally implemented, and how. If the mostly complicit silence of the black political establishment on other questions of gentrification and privatization of urban public assets is any guide, it will be a sharp struggle, and it will have to be waged against some African American elected and appointed officials.

The democratic and people-centered approach of the ATRU transit plan is the polar opposite of the market-driven models favored by America’s bipartisan political elite. For the American elite, economic development has long been a matter of selling the land out from under poorer urban residents and “revitalizing” neighborhoods by filling them with richer neighbors from somewhere else. Despite the fact that these processes have unfolded nationwide and in plain view for more than a generation, our black political class of elected officials and candidates, our black “think tanks” and academics, our black political elite, their stunted political imaginations limited to the gains and losses of the next funding or election cycles, have offered us no alternative models of urban economic development, much less any plan of action for implementing them.

Could it be that just as the emergence of the decentralized, civilly disobedient grassroots movements of the fifties and sixties heralded the passing of old and less relevant leadership, that Atlanta’s transit workers, transit riders, its faith and community based entities and others are showing the nation a way forward?

* You can download a copy of the ATRU Transit plan here. To contact the Atlanta Transit Riders Union, email terencecourtney(at)yahoo.com. And the best place to keep abreast of the struggle against privatization of public assets in Atlanta is the web site of Atlanta Progressive News.

DLC endorsement is the gold standard of political reliability for Wall Street, Big Energy, Big Pharma, insurance, the airlines and more. Though candidates normally undergo extensive questioning and interviews before DLC endorsement, Obama insisted the blessing of these corporate special interests had been bestowed on him without these formalities and without his advance knowledge, and formally disassociated himself from the DLC. But like Hillary Clinton, and every front running Democrat since Michale Dukakis in 1988, Barack Obama’s campaign has adopted the classic right wing DLC strategy.

In the DLC playbook, the road to winning elections is appealing to Republican-leaning white voters – demographic groups which pollsters and consultants in previous elections called “suburban soccer moms”, NASCAR dads,” and before that “Reagan Democrats.” Candidates do this by decrying excessive partisanship, embracing “free trade” and “conservative” values, and displays of public piety, Though Obama has no formal ties with the DLC he has assiduously followed this prescription. Till a month ago Obama led every candidate among white men, an unprecedented achievement for a Democrat.

But after less than a month of sustained and often racist attacks from the likes of Fox News, CNN, Republican pundits and Hillary Clinton supporters, Obama’s support among Republican-leaning white voters has sharply eroded. Dr. Adolph Reed, a black professor of Political Science at the University of Pennsylvania explained why an April 30 Democracy Now interview,

…Obama opened himself to this by leaning to—on the premise that he can appeal to Republicans and to conservatives and by parading his personal faith around. And frankly—this is, I guess, the crux of my argument in The Progressive column—that this is precisely the tactic that has been the undoing of every Democratic candidate since Dukakis, and I would frankly even include (Bill) Clinton in that, were it not for the fact that Ross Perot siphoned votes away from the Republicans each time. I mean, this is what happened with Gore in 2000, it’s what happened with Kerry in 2004. You present yourself as electable because you can appeal to conservative voters, and then the Republicans attack you for not being a true conservative and can characterize you as someone who’s trying to put something over on the American people.

It worked for a while. Barack Obama followed the DLC script to the letter for the last two years, publicly scolding Democrats for their insufficient piety, liberally borrowing from Republican talking points. He advertised himself as grounded by his personal relationship with Jesus, and by the faith tradition of the Black Church. But after Obama’s Philadelphia speech on race, in which he characterized his pastor as a crazy old uncle stuck in the fifties and sixties, the Black Church was compelled to speak for itself. Rev. Jeremiah Wright, retiring pastor at Trinity UCC made a series of speeches and appearances in which he likened US Marines to Roman soldiers, described hundreds of US bases around the world as “empire” before the National Press Club, and refused to retreat from the contention that 9-11 was a preventable consequence of US foreign policy.

To preserve his support among whites which Obama won without challenging any of their fundamental beliefs about America, empire, Obama was forced to denounce his pastor’s words as “akin to hate speech” and disavow his church, and with it the prophetic tradition of Christianity and the Black Church in particular. But this, and joining a prosperity-Gospel mega-church will not be enough. From this point on, all Republicans have to do is prove to their base that Obama is not as conservative as he once appeared, which they will do by pointing to his pastor and the prophetic tradition of the Black Church in general. They can, in fact, point to any stirrings of black or grassroots outrage or militancy anywhere, which Obama will want to ignore anyway, and demand a ringing denunciation from Barack Obama. When Obama gets his way, he will be silent, sticking to content-free appeals to “unity”. And when Republicans prevail they will force him to denounce at every turn the grassroots activists he should be supporting.

By contrast, the 1984 and 1988 presidential campaigns of Rev. Jesse Jackson won white support too, but embraced the burden of challenging white American assumptions about the essential goodness of America, about empire, and race and class. If you were organizing against police brutality or farm foreclosures, organizing a union or protesting the illegal war in Central America, the campaign in many cases came to you and augmented your local efforts. The Obama must campaign avoid this kind of activism like Dracula avoids crosses, because its candidate’s appeal is based on challenging none of the fake history, none of the racism, injustice and unearned privilege at the heart of American life.

The Jackson campaign, at least, was honest about the obstacles to a real politics of transformation in America.

For the 21st century’s first black presidential candidate, “change” is to be accomplished through a content-free sort of “unity”. Again, Dr. Reed helps us understand what is happening.

…the contention that the candidate can bring us all together despite our partisan differences is the same thing that the Democrats have been claiming consistently since at least, you know, Dukakis, to be post-partisan, to be post-political. And frankly, I think it appeals—it’s an appeal that gets greatest traction among people who want to take politics out of politics…

Taking the politics out of politics, and out of black politics in particular is what Barack Obama must do to carry out his DLC strategy and retain his white base without teaching them anything they don’t want to know. When the NYC police officers who pumped 51 bullets into an unarmed man and a hail of bullets into adjacent homes and a transit station were exonerated, Barack Obama could not bring himself to suggest that black life ought to be respected, that police officers should obey the law, that an Obama Justice Department would look carefully at this kind of thing, or even to feign concern for the victims and their families. His only comments where that we were “a nation of laws” and that we should “respect the verdict”. When 25,000 longshoremen on the US West Coast staged a one-day strike on May 1 against the war in Iraq, the Obama campaign said nothing about the power of people standing together to “bring change”. When US warplanes, which fire missiles and drop bombs almost daily over oil-rich Somalia killed 15 civilians last week, Obama was silent, despite having traveled in the region as recently as last year.

When he does speak, it won’t be good news. Republicans are sure tol escalate their demands, insisting that Barack Obama denounce a list of black and progressive organizations, activities, beliefs and individuals to retain his share of their base. And as long as Obama is wedded to the DLC strategy, he will eagerly comply.

If there was an actual mass-based progressive movement in the US, operating on the ground and independent of political parties and campaigns, it might have a prayer of holding Barack Obama accountable. But there isn’t.

Of the nine countries where armed conflicts are now in progress, US-supplied arms and training are a factor in every one. In the Ethiopian civil war, in the invasion of Somalia by Ethiopia, in Chad, in Morocco and Western Sahara and Sudan, in the continuing Algerian civil war and of course in the Congo’s holocuast, which has accounted, conservatively, for six million dead since about 1996, the highest death toll of any conflict since World War 2. The US has equipped, trained and supplied every one of the national armies that have invaded and occupied parts of the Congo, from Kenya and Uganda to Rwanda, Burundi, Angola and even Namibia. US arms are also in the hands of non-government gangs and private armies that ravage and depopulate whole regions to facilitate the extraction of the coltan for our cell phones and computers, the titanium for our aircraft, and the uranium for our nukes.

America’s militarized foreign policy on the African continent does not benefit Africans. The inauguration of AFRICOM, the US military headquarters for the African continent, was met with universal condemnation and scorn by ordinary Africans across the continent, and their governments. Africans don’t want US arms, they don’t want US intervention, and they don’t want US bases.

African opposition to US military presence was the reason Bush did not set foot in the continent’s most populous country, Nigeria or in South Africa during his recent visit, and why he stayed only a matter of hours in Kenya, Tanzania and Burundi. Not one African country has dared the wrath of its people by requesting to host AFRICOM. But the ring of US bases, from Mombasa to Djibouti on the east to Angola and the Gulf of Guinea on the west, continues to grow. US forces regularly fly bombing missions over Somalia in support of the Ethiopian invasion.

America’s foreign policy elite, its multinational corporations, the Pentagon and its constellation of military suppliers and mercenary contractors know what they want. They want the coltan, the oil, the gold, and the diamonds. They want to privatize every state and social resource, down to the water supplies. They want to tie African agriculture to genetically engineered American crop varieties, and collect royalties for the use of these “patented” plants. They want to prevent African nations from spending their own wealth from their own resources on health and education infrastructure, on food subsidies, on growing jobs and healthy internal economies. And they want to keep Africa a war-torn hell on earth, because it’s good for business. If you’re not a “failed state” yet, they’ll make you one.

On the other hand, Africans know what they want for themselves. They are keen observers of the US political scene, and well aware that the next president may be a man with more direct ties to the African continent than most of us. Africans are waiting for the American people, especially African Americans to speak up and support their demands for the US to keep its bases, its military “assistance” and its arms to itself. How long will they have to wait?

It’s time this year to build a from-the-ground-up movement to hold the little clay feet of the Congressional Black Caucus to a higher standard on Africa policy, on African demilitarization, and on African debt, pressing the US and international bodies to cancel the debts and loan-shark interest owed by African nations, many of which have already been repaid several times over.

The Jubiliee Movement is one such effort on the part of hundreds of churches and community organizations to do just that.

Next year a new administration will be in the White House. Should we wait and see what its elite advisers, its policy wonks and campaign contributors and contractors convince it to do in Africa? Or should we make it plain what ought to be, what must be done?

For now, a good start would be calling your Congressman, and a random member of the Black Caucus about the Jubilee Act now before that body. And later this year, we’ll be covering visits to Congressional representatives, especially members of the Black Caucus, asking them to help in the demilitarization of US policy in Africa.

Whether it is truly possible to hold elected officials accountable in a political system where big money, big media, big corporations and the very rich call all the shots is uncertain. But we have tried and will keep trying. So will others. The stakes are too high not to.

How We Held Obama’s Feet to the Fire in 2003

Although close friends and confidants had been talking up a run for national office since the early 1990s, Barack Obama in 2003 was still an Illinois state senator running in the Democratic primary for the U.S. Senate. This reporter, a longtime and former Chicago community and political organizer, had worked with Obama in 1992’s highly successful Project VOTE Illinois registration drive. After moving to Georgia in 2000, I managed to keep in touch with events at home, and was well aware of Obama’s run for the US Senate.

While researching a story on the Democratic Leadership Council for the internet magazine Black Commentator in April and May of 2003, I ran across the DLC’s “100 to Watch” list for 2003, in which Barack Obama was prominently featured as one of the DLC’s favorite “rising stars”. This was ominous news because the DLC was and still is the right wing’s Trojan Horse inside the Democratic party.

The DLC exists to guarantee that wealthy individuals and corporations who make large campaign donations have more say in the Democratic party than do flesh and blood Democratic voters. The DLC achieves this by closely examining and questioning the records, the policy stands and the persons of officeholders and candidates to ensure that they are safe and worthy recipients of elite largesse. The DLC also supplies them with right wing policy advisers beholden to those same interests, and hooks up approved candidates with the big money donors.

Then as now, the DLC favors bigger military budgets and more imperial wars, wholesale privatization of government functions including social security, and in so-called “free trade” agreements like NAFTA which are actually investor rights agreements. Evidently, the giant insurance companies, the airlines, oil companies, Wall Street, military contractors and others had closely examined and vetted Barack Obama and found him pleasing.

I revisited Obama’s primary election campaign web site, something I had not done for a month or two. To my dismay I found the 2002 antiwar speech, the same one which Barack Obama touts to this day as evidence of his antiwar backbone and prescience, which had been prominently featured before, had vanished from his web site, along with all other evidence that Obama had ever taken a plain spoken stand against the invasion and occupation of Iraq. With the president riding high in the polls, and Illinois’ Black and antiwar vote safely in his pocket, Obama appeared to be running away from his opposition to the war, and from the Democratic party’s base. Free, at last.

After calls to Obama’s campaign office yielded no satisfactory answers, we published an article in the June 5, 2003 issue of Black Commentator effectively calling Barack Obama out. We drew attention to the disappearance of any indication that U.S. Senate candidate Obama opposed the Iraq war at all from his web site and public statements. We noted with consternation that the Democratic Leadership Council, the right wing Trojan Horse inside the Democratic party, had apparently vetted and approved Obama, naming him as one of its “100 to Watch” that season. This is what real journalists are supposed to do — fact check candidates, investigate the facts, tell the truth to audiences and hold the little clay feet of politicians and corporations to the fire.

Facing the possible erosion of his base among progressive Democrats in Illinois, Obama contacted us. We printed his response in Black Commentator’s June 19 issue and queried the candidate on three “bright line” issues that clearly distinguish between corporate-funded DLC Democrats and authentic progressives. We concluded the dialog by printing Obama’s response on June 26, 2003. For the convenience of our readers in 2007, all three of these articles can be found here.

It was our June 2003 exchange with candidate Obama that prompted him to restore the antiwar speech on his web site, though not as prominently as before, the same antiwar speech which is now touted as evidence of his early and consistent opposition to the war. Our three “bright line” questions invited him to distinguish himself as an authentic progressive on single payer national health care, on the war in Iraq, and on NAFTA. And it was our public exposure of the fact and implications of the DLC’s embrace of Obama’s career which caused him to explicitly renounce any formal ties with the Democratic Leadership Council. We didn’t do it because we were haters. We were doing our duty as agitators.

Holding Barack Obama Accountable in 2008

That was then. This is now.

The 2008 Obama presidential run may be the most slickly orchestrated marketing machine in memory. That’s not a good thing. Marketing is not even distantly related to democracy or civic empowerment. Marketing is about creating emotional, even irrational bonds between your product and your target audience. From its Bloody Sunday 2007 proclamation that Obama was the second coming of Joshua to its nationally televised kickoff at Abe Lincoln’s tomb to the tens of millions of dollars in breathless free media coverage lavished on it by the establishment media, the campaign’s deft manipulation of hopeful themes and emotionally potent symbols has led many to impute their own cherished views to Obama, whether he endorses them or not.

To cite the most obvious example, the Obama campaign cynically bills itself as “the movement”, the continuation and fulfillment of Dr. King’s legacy. But the speeches of its candidate carefully limit the application of all his troop withdrawal statements to “combat troops” and “combat brigades”, omitting the six figure number of armed mercenary contractors in Iraq, along with “training”, “counterinsurgency” and other kinds of troops. Obama also presses for an expansion of the US Army and Marines by more than 100,000 troops and a larger military budget even than the Bush regime. The fact that both these stands fly in the face of the legacy of Martin Luther King, and flatly contradict the wishes of most Democratic voters is utterly invisible in the establishment media, and in the discourse of established Black leaders on the Obama campaign. The average voter is ill-equipped to read Obama’s statements on these and other issues as closely as one might read a predatory loan application or a jacked up insurance policy, trying to determine exactly what is covered.

As we pointed out back in December

The Obama campaign is heavy on symbolism, and long on vague catch phrases like “new leadership,” “new ideas,” “a politics of hope,” and “let’s dream America again” calculated to appeal to millions of disaffected Americans without actually meaning much of anything. Corporate media actively bill Obama as “the candidate of hope,” and anointed representative of the “Joshua generation.” There are good reasons campaign placards at Obama rallies say “change we can believe in” instead of “stop the war — vote Obama” or “repeal NAFTA – Barack in ‘08.” The first set of messages are hopeful and vague. The second are popular demands among the voters Obama needs against which his past, present and future performance may be checked. When the comparison is made, the results are dismaying to many who want to support Barack Obama.

Who Will Speak Truth to Power? And When?

No less a luminary than Dr. Michael Eric Dyson last month asserted that the time to pressure Obama to cut the military budget would not come till after the election when, as he said “we have a seat at the table.” We think this is transparently wrong. Obama responded to our calling him out in 2003 because he was still in an election campaign, and needed every vote he could get. The day after the election, he could have ignored us with relative safety, just as Cheney and Bush ignore their approval ratings in the twenty and thirty percent range the last three years and more.

But in 2003 Obama was a mere mortal. Now corporate media have made him a rock star, Joshua, a prince on his way to a coronation. Those who raise questions about Obama’s commitment to a progressive agenda will have to struggle to be heard. That’s just the way it is. They may even have to be impolite at times. That’s just the way it is too. Rock stars, royalty and the uncritical adulation they require make little room for polite criticism or democratic discussion.

Third party runs for the presidency have sometimes succeeded in exerting leftward pressure on Democratic presidential candidates. The best example is 1948, when Henry Wallace campaigned for president on the Progressive Party ticket with Paul Robeson at his side defying Jim Crow laws in dozens of states. It was this credible threat on the part of the Progressive Party to peel Black voters away from the Democratic party which led Truman to issue his election year executive order de-segregating the armed forces. This year, Cynthia McKinney and Ralph Nader have both declared their intention to explore presidential candidacies this year outside the Democratic party. Both have exemplary records of public service. Neither is a hater. Both are agitators in the best sense of that word. If Barack Obama, or for that matter Hillary Clinton is to be the Democratic presidential nominee, it’s time they felt the heat to line up with Democratic voters, rather than with the DLC and the party’s biggest donors.

Ironically, Hillary Clinton, also a corporate DLC candidate to the core, may have been more responsive to some heat from the party’s grassroots on a few questions than Barack Obama. Clinton has at least promised to repeal No Child Left Behind, the legislation that has forced an unproven and unworkable “teach to the test” regime upon public schools nationwide, and carved tens of billions nationwide from the budgets of schools to foster a privatized, for-profit education industry. By contrast, Obama is still mumbling about “adequately funding” this failed and malevolent educational experiment. Similarly, in a California debate which showed the tiny differences between the Democratic front runners, it was Hillary Clinton who broke the corporate taboo by at least mentioning single payer, the workable universal health care system implemented by every other advanced industrial country on earth and favored by most American voters. Clinton didn’t do this because she loves us, or because she is innately more progressive than Obama. She did it because she hard pressed and because activists are less confused and less likely to he silenced by the pernicious notion that her campaign is “the movement” itself.

It’s time for a little less respect for the high and mighty of either party, and a little more action. It’s high time for activists inside and outside the Democratic party to look for creative, innovative, sometimes impolite and civilly disobedient ways to reach larger audiences as they speak truth to the powerful. Even and especially when those in power are nominal Democrats.

Below are links to the original pages in which we called Barack Obama out for apparently running away from his early opposition to the war, and his ties with the DLC:

This is the June 5, 2003 issue of Black Commentator, with the story “In Search of the Real Barack Obama”
http://www.blackcommentator.com/45/issue_45.html

This is the June 12, 2003 issue of Black Commentator with the DLC story
http://www.blackcommentator.com/46/issue_46.html

On June 19, 2003 we printed Obama’s response and his reason for eliminating the speech from his web site. He said the web site was for current stuff implied with the “formal” end to hostilities in Iraq it was “outdated” and removed by his staff to make room for more current stuff. Yeah. Right.
http://www.blackcommentator.com/47/issue_47.html

And we wrapped it up by printing Obama’s response to our three follow-up questions, intended to delineate the “bright line” between being an authentic progressive and being something else. We wrung from him an explicit renunciation of the DLC at this time.
http://www.blackcommentator.com/48/issue_48.html

Media determine our pubic consciousness. America’s billionaire-owned media maintain a nearly seamless bubble of false reality in which we are invited to live large parts of our lives. Resources devoted to journalism and news coverage have radically shrunk, so that the corporate-created culture of celebrity has come to dominate our daily discourse.

Inside the bubble, corporate resources devoted to news gathering have been relentlessly shaved, so that far fewer journalists are at work today than a generation ago. Inconvenient and unprofitable news operations have been trimmed, often replaced with no notice to audiences with corporate PR print, audio and multimedia productions, and infected by the passive celebrity worship that permeates the rest of our mediascape.

Air time devoted to political news in election years, according to the Pew Center, actually drops in many cases, obliging candidates for office to purchase expensive commercial slots to be assured of getting their messages out to voters.

The Obama campaign is heavy on symbolism, and long on vague catch phrases like “new leadership,” “new ideas,” “a politics of hope,” and “let’s dream America again” calculated to appeal to millions of disaffected Americans without actually meaning much of anything. Corporate media actively bill Obama as “the candidate of hope,” and anointed representative of the “Joshua generation.” There are good reasons campaign placards at Obama rallies say “change we can believe in” instead of “stop the war — vote Obama” or “repeal NAFTA – Barack in ‘08.” The first set of messages are hopeful and vague. The second are popular demands among the voters Obama needs against which his past, present and future performance may be checked. When the comparison is made, the results are dismaying to many who want to support Barack Obama.

An audience question at recent New Hampshire candidate forum exposed the depth of antiwar hypocrisy on the part of Obama and other leading Democratic presidential candidates. They were all asked to pledge that U.S. troops would be out of Iraq not in 60 days or 6 months, but by the end of their first presidential term in January 2013. Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, John Edwards, Christopher Dodd, and Joe Biden demurred, effectively conveying their intention to continue the failed policies of the administration they pretend to oppose. Needless to say, this didn’t get much coverage in the mainstream press.

By comparison, the entry of Oprah Winfrey into the presidential fray has been the big news for more than a week. Speculation is rife about whether the supposed “Oprah effect” will carry Barack Obama to victory in New Hampshire, Iowa and South Carolina. But sadly, mainstream journalism is no likelier to fact check Oprah than it is to report and discuss the actual stands of candidates on war, peace, heath care or housing.

“Over the years,” Oprah told her mostly white Iowa audience Dec. 9, “I’ve voted for as many Republicans as I have Democrats.” A smart marketer, Winfrey knows her audience. Working from the same script before an overwhelmingly black South Carolina crowd two days later she wisely dropped that line, and like Hillary Clinton in front of an African American audience, Oprah shifted into a noticeably blacker cadence than the one used in Iowa and New Hampshire.

“Long before it was the popular thing to do,” declared Oprah in each city, Obama “stood with with clarity and conviction against this war in Iraq.” It was the biggest applause line in her speech up to that point and good one. Trouble is, it just wasn’t true.

When Barack Obama was a state legislator running for the U.S. Senate in Illinois in 2003 opposition to the war in Iraq was extremely popular in African American communities and among the progressive voters he needed in order to win. Brother Obama was on the case, doing what he had to do to sew up that vote early, showing up at local antiwar meetings and rallies, and making speeches like the one opposing “a dumb war” which is now trotted out as evidence of his fervent and prescient antiwar stand.

Bush invaded Iraq in March 2003, and by late May declared “mission accomplished” and victory in “the battle of Iraq” from the deck of the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln. With the president riding high in national polls, this reporter checked Obama’s campaign web site and noted that all the evidence of and references to candidate Obama’s prior opposition to the invasion of Iraq had been deleted. The visionary Barack Obama appeared to be leaning rightward with the prevailing wind, distancing himself from his prior opposition to the war.

After calls to Obama’s campaign office yielded no satisfactory answers, we published an article in the June 5, 2003 issue of Black Commentator effectively calling Barack Obama out. We drew attention to the disappearance of any indication that U.S. Senate candidate Obama opposed the Iraq war at all from his web site and public statements. We noted with consternation that the Democratic Leadership Council, the right wing Trojan Horse inside the Democratic party, had apparently vetted and approved Obama, naming him as one of its “100 to Watch” that season. This is what real journalists are supposed to do — fact check candidates, investigate the facts, tell the truth to audiences and hold the little clay feet of politicians and corporations to the fire.

Facing the possible erosion of his base among progressive Democrats in Illinois, Obama contacted us. We printed his response in Black Commentator’s June 19 issue and queried the candidate on three “bright line” issues that clearly distinguish between corporate-funded DLC Democrats and authentic progressives. We concluded the dialog by printing Obama’s response on June 26, 2003. For the convenience of our readers in 2007, all three of these articles can be found here.

Four years after senatorial candidate Barack Obama had to be summoned back into open opposition to the war in Iraq, scant weeks after his admission that he would not bring the troops home before the end of 2013, and in the face of dozens of public statements between 2003 and the present advocating an extra hundred thousand bodies to the Army and Marines, a higher Pentagon budget than even Bush is asking for, and the bombing of Iran and Pakistan, history has been rewritten to make Obama an early, consistent and principled voice for peace. This history is written, of course, by the same media that sold us the lies which enabled the war to begin with.

After years of dishing out celebrity gossip and advice on relationships, decorating, cuisine, fashion and what books to read, Oprah fits nicely into the corporate PR juggernaut behind the Obama campaign. Winfrey didn’t become a billionaire by speaking truth to power. She is a master marketer whose skill is assembling and influencing vast audiences on behalf of her corporate sponsors. She knows how to stick to a script, or if need be how to write one. Oprah skillfully employs fake controversies such as Obama’s alleged “lack of experience” to draw attention away from questions of real import, like her candidate’s serial equivocations on war, peace, health care and NAFTA. She helps create the illusion of difference between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama when the two are, on almost every issue closer than Siamese twins.

Winfrey and Obama work well together. Both are accomplished manipulators of narratives and symbols with immense emotional value in the minds of their audiences. Barack can claim to Blacks that he represents the “Joshua generation” out of one side of his mouth, while telling whites that “there is no Black America” out of the other. Oprah can put on her best girlfriend-church lady persona and come “stepping out of my pew” to declare Obama’s election is the ultimate fulfillment of Dr. King’s dream.

In the absence of independent media with broad reach, without real old-fashioned fact-checking, non-partisan adversarial journalism, the corporate PR messages of co-celebrities Oprah and Obama may be the only ones that reach many ears, including many black ones. At this time, Obama appears certain to have earned the number one or two spot on any Democratic ticket. Democratic voters, who turned out in record numbers in 2006 and voted to end the war will once again be compelled to choose between a pro-war Republican presidential ticket and a pro-war Democratic presidential ticket including Barack Obama.

What his media-generated and corporate-funded ascendancy will mean for Black aspirations, and for the future of Black leadership is uncertain.

Among the latest false realities being pushed upon the American people are the simplistic pictures of Black vs. Arab genocide in Darfur, and the proposed solution: a robust US-backed or US-led military intervention in Western Sudan. Increasing scrutiny is being focused upon the “Save Darfur” lobby and the Save Darfur Coalition; upon its founders, its finances, its methods and motivations and its truthfulness. In the spirit of furthering that examination we here present ten reasons to suspect that the “Save Darfur” campaign is a PR scam to justify US intervention in Africa.

1. It wouldn’t be the first Big Lie our government and media elite told us to justify a war.

Elders among us can recall the Tonkin Gulf Incident, which the US government deliberately provoked to justify initiation of the war in Vietnam. This rationale was quickly succeeded by the need to help the struggling infant “democracy” in South Vietnam, and the still useful “fight ‘em over there so we don’t have to fight ‘em over here” nonsense. More recently the bombings, invasions and occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq have been variously explained by people on the public payroll as necessary to “get Bin Laden” as revenge for 9-11, as measures to take “the world’s most dangerous weapons” from the hands of “the world’s most dangerous regimes”, as measures to enable the struggling Iraqi “democracy” stand on its own two feet, and necessary because it’s still better to “fight them over there so we don’t have to fight them here”.

2. It wouldn’t even be the first time the U.S. government and media elite employed “genocide prevention” as a rationale for military intervention in an oil-rich region.

The 1995 US and NATO military intervention in Kosovo was supposedly a “peacekeeping” operation to stop a genocide. The lasting result of that campaign is Camp Bondsteel, one of the largest military bases on the planet. The U.S. is practically the only country in the world that maintains military bases outside its own borders. At just under a thousand acres, Camp Bondsteel offers the US military the ability to pre-position large quantities of equipment and supplies within striking distance of Caspian oil fields, pipeline routes and relevant sea lanes. It is also widely believed to be the site of one of the US’s secret prison and torture facilities.

3. If stopping genocide in Africa really was on the agenda, why the focus on Sudan with 200,000 to 400,000 dead rather than Congo with five million dead?

“The notion that a quarter million Darfuri dead are a genocide and five million dead Congolese are not is vicious and absurd,” according to Congolese activist Nita Evele. “What’s happened and what is still happening in Congo is not a tribal conflict and it’s not a civil war. It is an invasion. It is a genocide with a death toll of five million, twenty times that of Darfur, conducted for the purpose of plundering Congolese mineral and natural resources.”

More than anything else, the selective and cynical application of the term “genocide” to Sudan, rather than to the Congo where ten to twenty times as many Africans have been murdered reveals the depth of hypocrisy around the “Save Darfur” movement. In the Congo, where local gangsters, mercenaries and warlords along with invading armies from Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi, Angola engage in slaughter, mass rape and regional depopulation on a scale that dwarfs anything happening in Sudan, all the players eagerly compete to guarantee that the extraction of vital coltan for Western computers and cell phones, the export of uranium for Western reactors and nukes, along with diamonds, gold, copper, timber and other Congolese resources continue undisturbed.

Former UN Ambassador Andrew Young and George H.W. Bush both serve on the board of Barrcik Gold, one of the largest and most active mining concerns in war-torn Congo. Evidently, with profits from the brutal extraction of Congolese wealth flowing to the West, there can be no Congolese “genocide” worth noting, much less interfering with. For their purposes, U.S. strategic planners may regard their Congolese model as the ideal means of capturing African wealth at minimal cost without the bother of official U.S. boots on the ground.

4. It’s all about Sudanese oil.

Sudan, and the Darfur region in particular, sit atop a lake of oil. But Sudanese oil fields are not being developed and drilled by Exxon or Chevron or British Petroleum. Chinese banks, oil and construction firms are making the loans, drilling the wells, laying the pipelines to take Sudanese oil where they intend it to go, calling far too many shots for a twenty-first century in which the U.S. aspires to control the planet’s energy supplies. A U.S. and NATO military intervention will solve that problem for U.S. planners.

5. It’s all about Sudanese uranium, gum arabic and other natural resources.

Uranium is vital to the nuclear weapons industry and an essential fuel for nuclear reactors. Sudan possesses high quality deposits of uranium. Gum arabic is an essential ingredient in pharmaceuticals, candies and beverages like Coca-Cola and Pepsi, and Sudanese exports of this commodity are 80% of the world’s supply. When comprehensive U.S. sanctions against the Sudanese regime were being considered in 1997, industry lobbyists stepped up and secured an exemption in the sanctions bill to guarantee their supplies of this valuable Sudanese commodity. But an in-country U.S. and NATO military presence is a more secure guarantee that the extraction of Sudanese resources, like those of the Congo, flow westward to the U.S. and the European Union.

6. It’s all about Sudan’s strategic location

Sudan sits opposite Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States, where a large fraction of the world’s easily extracted oil will be for a few more years. Darfur borders on Libya and Chad, with their own vast oil resources, is within striking distance of West and Central Africa, and is a likely pipeline route. The Nile River flows through Sudan before reaching Egypt, and Southern Sudan water resources of regional significance too. With the creation of AFRICOM, the new Pentagon command for the African continent, the U.S. has made open and explicit its intention to plant a strategic footprint on the African continent. From permanent Sudanese bases, the U.S. military could influence the politics and ecocomies of Africa for a generation to come.

7. The backers and founders of the “Save Darfur” movement are the well-connected and well-funded U.S. foreign policy elite.

According to a copyrighted Washington Post story this summer

“The “Save Darfur (Coalition) was created in 2005 by two groups concerned about genocide in the African country – the American Jewish World Service and the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum…

“The coalition has a staff of 30 with expertise in policy and public relations. Its budget was about $15 million in the most recent fiscal year…

“Save Darfur will not say exactly how much it has spent on its ads, which this week have attempted to shame China, host of the 2008 Olympics, into easing its support for Sudan. But a coalition spokeswoman said the amount is in the millions of dollars.”

Though the “Save Darfur” PR campaign employs viral marketing techniques, reaching out to college students, even to black bloggers, it is not a grassroots affair, as were the movement against apartheid and in support of African liberation movements in South Africa, Namibia, Angola and Mozambique a generation ago. Top heavy with evangelical Christians who preach the coming war for the end of the world, and with elements known for their uncritical support of Israeli rejectionism in the Middle East, the Save Darfur movement is clearly an establishment affair, a propaganda campaign that spends millions of dollars each month to manfacture consent for US military intervention in Africa under the cloak of stopping or preventing genocide.

8. None of the funds raised by the “Save Darfur Coalition”, the flagship of the “Save Darfur Movement” go to help needy Africans on the ground in Darfur, according to stories in both the Washington Post and the New York Times.

None of the money collected by Save Darfur goes to help the victims and their families. Instead, the coalition pours its proceeds into advocacy efforts that are primarily designed to persuade governments to act.

9. “Save Darfur” partisans in the U.S. are not interested in political negotiations to end the conflict in Darfur President Bush has openly and repeatedly attempted to throw monkey wrenches at peace negotiations to end the war in Darfur.

Even pro-intervention scholars and humanitarian organizations active on the ground have criticized the U.S. for endangering humanitarian relief workers, and for effectively urging rebel parties in Darfur to refuse peace talks and hold out for U.S. and NATO intervention on their behalf.

The PR campaign which depicts the conflict as strictly a racial affair, in which Arabs, who are generally despised in the US media anyway, are exterminating the black population of Sudan, is slick, seamless and attractive, and seems to leave no room for negotiation. But in fact, many of Sudan’s ‘Arabs”, even the Janjiweed, are also black. In any case, they were armed and unleashed by a government which has the power to disarm them if it chooses, and refusing to talk to that government’s negotiators is a sure way to avoid any settlement.

10. Blackwater and other U.S. mercenary contractors, the unofficial armed wings of the Republican party and the Pentagon are eagerly pitching their services as part of the solution to the Darfur crisis.

“Chris Taylor, head of strategy for Blackwater, says his company has a database of thousands of former police and military officers for security assignments. He says Blackwater personnel could set up perimeters and guard Darfurian villages and refugee camp in support of the U.N. Blackwater officials say it would not take many men to fend off the Janjaweed, a militia that is supported by the Sudanese government and attacks villages on camelback.”

Apparently Blackwater doesn’t need to come to the Congo, where hunger and malnutrition, depopulation, mass rape and the disappearance of schools, hospitals and civil society into vast law free zones ruled by an ever-changing cast of African proxies (like the son of the late and unlamented Idi Amin), all under a veil of complicit media silence already constitute the perfect business-friendly environment for siphoning off the vast wealth of that country at minimal cost.

Look for the adoption of the Congolese model across the wide areas of Africa that U.S. strategic planners call “ungoverned spaces”. Just don’t look expect to see details on the evening news, or hear about them from Oprah, George Clooney or Angelina Jolie.

In US presidential politics, elections are often anticlimactic. For Democratic and Republican wings of America’s permanent ruling party, the all-important selection which precedes the election isn’t about poll numbers, votes or the citizens that cast them. It’s about winning the favor of military contractors, the banking and financial sectors and Big Oil. It’s about reassuring insurance and pharmaceutical companies, cozying up to agribusiness, the cable and telecom monopolies, allaying the fears of chambers of commerce, and wooing Hollywood.

Only those who jump through these hoops merit favorable coverage in the corporate media as so-called serious candidates. For example, at a recent Democratic presidential forum, when directly asked whether they, if elected, would have US troops out of Iraq by the end of their fist term in 2013, Clinton, Obama, Edwards, Dodd and Biden all admitted their intent to continue the war at least that long.

Thus certified, these serious candidates, are deemed worthy of individual and bundled campaign donations from corporate board members, wealthy investors, CEOs, their family members, lobbyists, lawyers, employees, PACs, trade groups and so on. The worthiest are those that collect the most money from these sources, and are in turn celebrated in the corporate media as hardheaded, pragmatic and realistic presidential contenders, and rise in the opinion polls.

Failure on a candidate’s part to stick to the script is severely punished. Any lack of will to reassure the military contractors, Big Oil, Big Insurance, Big Pharma and Big Money in general results in a candidate being labeled “unelectable,” through boycotts by the big money donors and the imposition of kiss-of-death news blackouts on their campaigns. Four years ago ABC News exec Ted Koppel demanded Kucinich, Sharpton and Moseley-Braun withdraw from the race and pulled ABC’s coverage from their campaigns the next day, as did NBC, CNN, and the other networks. This season’s antiwar and pro health care Democrats Mike Gravel and Dennis Kucinich are routinely disinvited to forums, excised from coverage, omitted from public opinion polls and surveys, and their images deleted from news photos of presidential forums.

When a boycott of big campaign contributors and media censorship alone is insufficient to kill a presidential campaign whose message is threatening to those in power, the media have been known to step in more directly. For a time in 2004, presidential candidate Howard Dean’s antiwar stance enabled him to raise buckets of cash in small donations from millions of Americans opposed to the war and lead the Democratic field in the public opinion polls. Corporate media launched a torrent of baseless ridicule over an arguably doctored “scream” that cut his popular support by half in the space of two weeks.

By contrast, this year’s Democratic front runners Clinton and Obama, having properly and repeatedly kissed the rings of military contractors, big insurance, Big Oil, agribusiness and the rest, are basking in a tide of favorable media coverage. Journalism.org’s October 29 article “The Invisible Primary” contains a wealth of detail contrasting the relative extent and favorability of media coverage garnered by both Republican and Democratic contenders. It indicates that Barack Obama alone receives as much favorable coverage as the entire Republican field, and that the volume of positive stories about Hillary Clinton is not far behind his, and closing fast.

The race among presidential candidates for corporate campaign contributions, aptly called “the wealth primary,” shows the same results. Thomas Edsall in the October 17 Huffington Post detailed how the CEOs, lawyers, lobbyists and bundlers who represent military contractors have abandoned their long-held alliance with Republicans, and placed their bets with Hillary Clinton. According to Edsall:

The strong support for Clinton indicates that a majority of defense industry executives currently believe Clinton is a favorite to win the Democratic nomination and, in November, 2008, the general election…

The same picture is visible across a wider swath of America’s moneyed elite at OpenSecrets.org, a web site devoted to tracking influence of big money in politics.

*Lobbyists of all kinds have donated nearly as much to the Clinton campaign alone as to any two Republicans combined.

*Obama and Clinton, both proponents of supposed “universal” health care plans lead all Republicans in donations from the pharmaceutical and health care industries.

*Clinton and Obama together lead the pack in donations from the securities and investment industries, their combined total of $9.1 million well ahead of the $7.9 million garnered by the top two Republican contenders.

*Obama leads all contenders in donations from the computer and internet industries, closely followed by Clinton, with either of them leading Republican contenders in donations from this sector by a wide margin.

*Commercial banks too, are bestowing their largess upon Clinton and Obama far more generously than they do on any Republican candidate.

Whether the measure is favorable coverage in the corporate media, or bundles of checks from wealthy donors, the gap between Clinton-Obama and the rest of the Democratic field is breathtaking and decisive. Before a single primary vote has been cast, the handwriting of America’s elite is truly on the wall. Clinton and Obama are the favored choices of our corporate media and ruling circles, and thus will be the Democratic ticket in 2008. And the defection of big chunks of the elite consensus from the Republican camp, the havoc and disarray sown among Republicans by eight years of Bush-Cheney, and widespread popular disgust with the Bush regime make prospects of a 2008 Republican victory remote.

Make no mistake, Hillary Clinton will be at the top of this ticket. The talk in circles close to Senator Obama as far back as 1993 has been of a career trajectory toward the office of vice president. But the way one campaigns for that office nowadays is to run for the top spot, lose and graciously accept the invitation of the winner to serve. That is the scenario we expect to see in the coming months.

Barack Obama is an invaluable asset to a Democratic ticket, much too valuable to wait in line for 2012 or 2016. He enables Democrats to take advantage of the historic black tendency to uncritically close ranks around any prominent member of the club no matter how undeserving, a relic of the Jim Crow era. Though he famously declared that “there is no Black America” at the last Democratic convention, Obama’s mere presence on the ticket locks up the African American vote, which as usual will feel it has nowhere else to go.

Just as in 2004, antiwar voters will be forced to choose between Republicans who will not apologize for the war, and Democrats who will not end it. Bush and Cheney’s generation-long “war on terror” as the prism through which to view American foreign and domestic policy is fully accepted by the Democratic contenders. Single payer health care on the French and Canadian model remain off the table. The Bush Supreme Court, and a thoroughly right wing federal judiciary stacked with lifetime appointees remain firmly in place, as do laws immunizing torturers, indemnifying telecoms who spy on Americans, and much more. Millions of homeowners are losing their homes to foreclosure, and the wealthy players who bought those securitized loans will be demanding a bailout from the next administration.

The handwriting is on the wall. It says a new day is indeed coming. But not all that new. Get ready for it.

The good news is that members of America’s political elite from both parties are finally admitting that mass imprisonment of the Black poor is bad public policy, is inherently unjust, and ought to be some kind of political issue. Many also concede that the remarkable expansion of and the alarming racial imbalance within America’s prison population have nothing at all to do with rates of drug use or violent crime.

In a one-of-a-kind October 4 House and Senate Joint Committee hearing on the subject of mass incarceration, Virginia Senator Jim Webb (D) observed that the sevenfold growth of America’s prison population over the last generation was, “only nominally related” to crime rates. It was a point so important he repeated it in his very next sentence, quoting a high Justice Department official as saying that the increase in US prison population since 1975 “…wasn’t really about crime. It was about how we chose to respond to crime.”

It’s good news that politicians are willing at last to discuss the costs to Black families and communities of mass imprisonment of the Black poor.

The bad news is that many are inclined to blame the black poor themselves, directing attention away from the corporations who profit from the growth of the prison state, the politicians who built careers selling it to us, and the edifice of white American culture which fundamentally defines itself as the opposite in every way of its poor, unworthy, and now dangerous Black citizens.

As Berkeley’s Loïc Wacquant observed at Stanford University’s Tanner Lectures earlier this year, (Audio available free at itunes.stanford.edu) it’s not unequal educational opportunities in Black communities that are feeding the prisons, joblessness, or the absence of two parent or the lack of suitable peer networks. Most of those indicators have been relatively stable for generations. In the mid 1960s, white men were the majority of American prisoners, and crime has remained relatively stable since then. But for every 1,000 crimes America now locks up five times as many people as it did in 1975. Most of that increase, as we all know, has been Black and poor.

In every era, Blacks have been viewed as apart, inferior and unworthy, as fringe players in the American narrative. But in the last 35 years the Black communities have been stripped of jobs, seen their poor isolated, resegregated, and redefined as unworthy and inherently dangerous. Government, the state itself has been refashioned into a punitive and carceral machine whose main function is to contain and control this unworthy, dishonored and dangerous poor and black population.

Physical isolation of the Black poor enables racially selective policing, prosecution and imprisonment without the need of special laws explicitly targeting blacks. And white America’s sense of itself as profoundly unlike and distinct from the Black and unworthy poor, along with the silence of our Black leadership class, make it politically possible.

It’s high time mass incarceration of the young Black poor is put on the political front burner and kept there till something changes. That’s what Jena was about. It’s time for a new mass movement in our Black communities that will expose the complicit silence of Black leadership on mass Black imprisonment, one that will begin to make continuation of these unjust public policies impossible.

How do we get elected one more time without giving Democratic voters any of what they want? How do we get elected without ending the war and the policies which led to it, without impeaching Cheney and Bush, without delivering health care? How do we run a woman presidential candidate who’s not quite pro-choice, or a black one who’s not really not all that committed to addressing issues like the nation’s policies of black mass incarceration?

Unfortunately, they seem to have it all figured it out.

After more than five years of lies and a million dead Iraqis, most Americans are ready have the troops brought home. But Democratic House and Senate leaders, along with Democratic presidential candidates, except Mike Gravel and Dennis Kucinich, have cynically decided to let the war continue through the rest of George Bush’s term in office, to give them something to shadowbox with, proposing ineffectual time lines, irrelevant benchmarks and gimmicks like “more rest for the troops”.

Corporate media obligingly depict this as real, if ineffectual opposition to the war in Iraq, while continuing to promote the so-called “war on terror” that will lead to more Iraqs in Africa, Latin America and elsewhere.

Though Democratic voters overwhelmingly favor impeachment of Cheney and Bush, as do a majority of Americans, party leaders want no part of this either. Even Detroit’s John Conyers, who sponsored impeachment bills last year when he was in the minority, and is now chair of the powerful House Judiciary Committee, refuses to do so this year, he reaffirmed to more than 300 disappointed citizens at his office on Monday. Shortly after that announcement, 30 of them, including Rev. Lennox Yearwood were arrested on the spot.

The focus-group tested phrase “universal health care” is also once again on the lips of every Democratic presidential candidate because they know this is what the vast majority of the American people want. Still, with the sole exception of Dennis Kucinich, a co-sponsor of the Medicare-For-All bill in the House, not a single Democratic candidate for president is willing to take on the parasitic private health insurance industry, which sucks up twenty to thirty cents of every American health care dollar in advertising, billing and profits.

With Democratic leaders and corporate media omitting all discussion of Medicare-For-All or any form of single payer health care, private insurance companies can confidently switch a portion of their generous campaign donations from Republicans to Democrats without fear that anything will change.

In the same spirit, candidate presidential candidate Barack Obama’s commercials on South Carolina black radio begin with the drive-by observation that there are more young black men in prison than in college before abruptly changing the subject, leaving trusting, and hopeful souls to imagine that electing him will somehow address that issue. After all, as Obama supporter Oprah Winfrey has assured us, wishful thinking really does make it so.

mic01This is the substance of mainstream political discussion in the Democratic party. Deceit, denial, omission, and wishful thinking. So far, it’s working. Corporations who till recently only donated to Republicans candidates are including Democrats in their portfolios. Front runners Clinton and Obama are raising more cash than any Republicans this year, most of it from the very wealthy. So you see that the Democratic Party, and democracy really do work. Never mind what Democratic voters want.