Nigeria’s environmental degradation is a by-product of the moral and political rot that flows from neocolonialism. It is the physical manifestation of the total surrender of national sovereignty to foreigners — like Shell oil — by those native classes that rule the land for the benefit of foreigners. To put one’s country’s resources at the disposal of foreigners is the ultimate corruption — which leads to every other conceivable crime.

It is a false dichotomy to separate the corruption of Nigeria’s governments — military or civilian — from the predatory presence of Big Oil. The two are locked in the deepest embrace. The foreign corporations pay the regime to maintain peace — and the regime reciprocates by imposing on the people a “peace of the dead.” There are other sources of corruption in the developing world, other contradictions between people and their governments, but the dominance of economic resources by foreigners exacerbates every other division in society. The competition to get into the foreigners’ money flow becomes the Great Game of national political life. The bigger the money flow, the greater the imperative to keep the people in check. The police and army serve as paid thugs for the foreigners’ protection. The national debasement is total. Nigeria’s most important city, Lagos, is also one of the most expensive in the world — yet 70 percent of Nigerians subsist on a dollar or less a day. There is no greater corruption imaginable.

In court, Shell oil will seek to present itself as an innocent party — even a victim of African brutality and corruption. Shell is more properly compared to a businessman who hires a hit man to kill a union organizer. The businessman and the hit man are both guilty of capital murder. The greater onus is on the businessman, whose money made the crime possible.

In the Niger Delta, Ogoni rebels have cut Nigeria’s oil production in half, putting the squeeze on US-based Chevron Oil (where, incidentally, Condoleezza Rice used to work). According to Amnesty International, hundreds of civilians have been killed in the fighting. The Nigerian government has declared the entire delta a military zone. No doubt, great crimes are being committed at the behest of Big Oil. Before he was put to death, Ken Saro-Wiwa predicted it would come to this.

* This article was a Black Agenda Radio commentary by Glen Ford

Translation: although the document, under relentless U.S. pressure, has been watered down to the point of irrelevance, it remains unacceptable because it reaffirms declarations of the first World Conference Against Racism, in Durban, South Africa, in 2001. There is virtually no chance President Obama will reverse his decision to boycott Durban II, April 24-25.

We must first ask: Why is the White House reporting to “Jewish leaders” on an issue that is of interest to all Americans, most especially people of color? Has Obama arranged such briefings on Durban II for “Black leaders,” “Latino leaders,” or “Native American leaders” — representatives of constituencies that have suffered genocide, slavery, discrimination, forced displacement and all manner of racist assaults right here on American soil? No, he has not. Barack Obama knows full well that he risks nothing by disrespecting African Americans at will. Across the Black political spectrum, so-called leadership seems incapable of shame or of taking manly or womanly offense at even the most blatant insults to Black people when the source of the affront is Barack Hussein Obama.

Several weeks ago, popular Sirius Radio Black talk show host Mark Thompson (“Make It Plain”) wondered aloud if Obama’s threat to boycott Durban II should be a “deal breaker” — a “last straw” offense against Black interests and sensibilities. It should have been. The Obama administration’s fawning, damn near servile behavior when accommodating Zionist demands — and I use the word “demands” quite purposely — was a lesson in how Power responds to constituencies it favors, fears, or at least, respects. Blacks get nothing from Obama’s White House except permission to worship him as the ultimate role model. Less than nothing, as the unfolding Durban outrage demonstrates.

Obama has done more damage to the Durban process than George Bush, who pulled out of Durban I after the conference had begun. Important language survived the 2001 disruption, such as:

“We acknowledge that slavery and the slave trade, including the transatlantic slave trade, were appalling tragedies in the history of humanity not only because of their abhorrent barbarism but also in terms of their magnitude, organized nature and especially their negation of the essence of the victims, and further acknowledge that slavery and the slave trade are a crime against humanity and should always have been so, especially the transatlantic slave trade and are among the major sources and manifestations of racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance, and that Africans and people of African descent, Asians and people of Asian.”

and,

“Urges States to adopt the necessary measures, as provided by national law, to ensure the right of victims to seek just and adequate reparation and satisfaction to redress acts of racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance, and to design effective measures to prevent the repetition of such acts”

As University of Dayton, Ohio law professor Vernellia R. Randall has pointed out, pressures from the Obama White House caused revisions in the Durban II draft that

* withdrew language related to reparations;

* removed the proposed paragraph related to the transatlantic slave trade being a crime against humanity;

* removed proposed paragraphs designed to strengthen the Working Group of Experts on People of African Descent; and,

* overall weakened the efforts related to people of African Descent.

And of course, language related to Palestinian rights and Israeli racism was totally eviscerated. (Samantha Power: “..it did drop all references to Israel and all anti-Semitic language.”) But none of that was enough to satisfy the Zionists, who hope to utterly destroy Durban II, and erase Durban I from the record. (Power, on remaining U.S. objections: “But it continued to reaffirm, in toto, Durban I.”)

George Bush’s walkout at Durban I provided a sour ending for the event, but allowed participants to make some important statements and carry out additional work over the next eight years. The United States and other countries were to report to Durbin II on residential segregation, criminal justice, police brutality, felony disenfranchisement and Katrina displacement. That cannot happen if the official American delegation is not in Geneva. Samantha Power told her Jewish leadership friends, who don’t want Durban II to occur, at all, not to worry. “In order for us to participate in the negotiations, to sit behind the placard, to be involved in a frontal way, much more would need to be done. And all four of our red lines will need to be met.”

Israel and the White House speak of “red lines” that they will not tolerate being crossed in politics and diplomacy. But where are the “red lines” that so-called Black leaders will not allow to be breached? Where Barack Obama is concerned, such lines do not exist — which is why he is permitted to walk all over Black folks, with impunity.

Yes, Durbin II should have been a deal breaker. Instead, it was mostly cause for sniveling lamentation and words of “concern” or wishful predictions by Black notables that Obama would change his mind (after the damage had already been done!) and attend the conference.

The National Conference of Black Lawyers (NCBL), although initially registering “profound disappointment” (oh, my!) with Obama’s boycott of Durbin II, cheerily added, “we are confident that your Administration will be reversing its decision in time to participate in the conference and its remaining preparatory meetings….” That was on March 27, by which time Obama’s vandals had caused the shredding of almost every word of value in the documents. The Black lawyers’ “Open Letter to President Barack Obama” was signed by an impressive list of many scores of prominent organizations and individuals – but in its determined, concentrated meekness, should never have been expected to have any impact on the White House. And of course, it had none.

“Where are the ‘red lines’ that so-called Black leaders will not tolerate being breached?”
The likes of the NCBL would be flattered to have Obama’s people string them along — any attention would do. But Samantha Power and her boss won’t even bother, understanding perfectly well that the meek inherent nothing but contempt. In her thorough and collegial report on Durban to Jewish leaders — who are anything but meek — Power said: “We will make our decision [to attend] up closer to the date of the conference, we want to show good faith to our allies and the people who are working hard to improve the text . . . But we are also not interested in being involved or associated with fool’s errands.”

Obama’s White House has not seen fit to show the slightest glimmer of good faith to Black people (at least, those not in his immediate family or employ), and seems to consider salvaging Durbin II a “fools errand.” You know what color the “fools” are.

TransAfrica chairman Danny Glover placed an article in the April 8 issue of The Nation magazine that read like a letter to President Obama. “This should be a moment for the United States to rejoin the global struggle against racism, the struggle that the Bush administration so arrogantly abandoned,” wrote Glover. “I hope President Obama will agree that the United States must participate with other nations in figuring out the tough issues of how to overcome racism and other forms of discrimination and intolerance, and how to provide repair to victims.”

Let’s see if Glover calls Obama “arrogant” when the president finishes sabotaging Durbin II. My bet is, “disappointed” is about as strong as Glover will muster. Obama sucks the spine out of Black people.

And as long as Black notables (let’s drop the “leadership” charade) turn into invertebrates at the mere thought of Barack Obama, so long will he treat the entire group as inconsequential, harmless ciphers.

In tone and substance, Linda Burnham’s recent, widely circulated piece, “Notes on an Orientation to the Obama Presidency” is several cuts above last summer’s vicious rant by Amiri Baraka, “The Parade of Anti-Obama Rascals.” But both assaults on Left critics of Obama are based on the same false assumptions and willful illogic, and although no one can trump Baraka in argumentative foul play and sheer nastiness, Burnham’s article is nonetheless littered with sneers at those who “are stranded on Dogma Beach . . . flipping out over every appointment and policy move [Obama] makes.”

Burnham launches immediately into a denigration of non-Obamites, claiming Obama’s election “occasioned some disorientation and confusion” among those on the Left who “have become so used to confronting the dismal electoral choice between the lesser of two evils that they couldn’t figure out how to relate to a political figure who held out the possibility of substantive change.”

Burnham’s method is to invent straw men and then place words and thoughts in their fictitious mouths and brains. Certainly, we at Black Agenda Report were anything but “confused” by either Obama’s political conduct or his extraordinary popularity, having placed the young upstart under intense scrutiny beginning in the early Summer of 2003, while he was still a low-ranked candidate for the Democratic senatorial nomination in Illinois. His phenomenal talents, hitched to a transparently corporatist, imperial worldview — and a practiced dishonesty about his rightist alliances — made Obama a person worth watching. The BAR team, then operating out of Black Commentator, had Obama pegged as a potential vector of confusion in Black and progressive ranks long before his worldwide debut at the 2004 Democratic National Convention. And we were right. It is in Burnham’s political neighborhood that confusion reigns, not ours.

Burnham claims that many on the Left “were taken by surprise at how wide and deep ran the current for change.” Either she’s talking about herself, or she hangs around a very cloistered crowd. Or, more likely, Burnham is conflating the word “change” with “Obama” — an effect of drinking too much Kool-Aid. In either case, none of it applies to folks like us at BAR — and there are a number of others on the Left — who more than five years ago understood both Obama’s mass appeal and the mass desire for real change, and feared that one would thwart the other.

Left critics of Obama, according to Burnham, fail to recognize that he is not the “lesser of two evils,” but rather holds out the “possibility of substantive change.” This is a core position, central to the “progressive” Obamite argument. Beyond the fact of having broken the presidential color bar, which in the American context is a positive development on its face, Obama is near-identical to Hillary Clinton on virtually every policy issue, as became evident in the primaries. Their compatibility was revealed as something closer to political intimacy when Obama erected his Cabinet — a house as Clintonian as anything Bill ever built, with plenty of room reserved for friends from the Bush gang. Color aside, whatever kind of “evil” Hillary and Bill are, Obama is.

Burnham outlines what she says is the “active conversation on the left about what can be expected of an Obama administration and what the orientation of the left should be towards it.” We will have to take her word for it, although her mischaracterization of Left Obama critics (certainly those at BAR) makes us less than confident that the “conversation” is as she describes. Below are the “two conflicting views” on Obama, on the Left:

First, that Obama represents a substantial, principally positive political shift and that, while the left should criticize and resist policies that pull away from the interests of working people, its main orientation should be to actively engage with the political motion that’s underway.

Second, that Obama is, in essence, just another steward of capitalism, more attractive than most, but not an agent of fundamental change. He should be regarded with caution and is bound to disappoint. The basic orientation is to criticize every move the administration makes and to remain disengaged from mainstream politics.

The first viewpoint is no doubt held by Burnham. It is essentially mooted by the reality that most Left Obamites only weakly “criticize” and virtually never “resist” Obama’s rightist policies and appointments in the crucial military and economic arenas — which was, first, the fear and, later, the main complaint of the non-Obamite Left. The Obama Effect is to neutralize Blacks and the Left (Blacks being the main electoral base of the American Left) by capturing their enthusiasm for Obama’s own corporate purposes. Obama and his Democratic Leadership Council allies (and their corporate masters) monopolize the “motion,” all the while shutting out even mildly Left voices (as in the recent White House Forum on Health, from which single payer health care advocates were initially barred). Blacks and the Left have not been in any kind of effective forward “motion” since Election Day. As we shall see, Burnham’s definition of “motion” does not involve confronting Power, but rather, attaching oneself to it.

Policy-wise, Obama no more “represents a substantial, principally positive political shift” than his political twin, Hillary — again, color aside.

The second viewpoint is supposedly held by the opposition, and partially reflects the views of the BAR team. Yes, Obama is “just another steward of capitalism, more attractive than most, but not an agent of fundamental change.” This has been easily observed, since Blacks and the Left have allowed Obama to act upon his corporate and imperial instincts, unimpeded by even the mildest counter-pressures. His presidency takes shape to the Right of Democratic congressional leaders, who have made more noise over Obama’s Iraq trickle-out and his clear threats to Social Security and other “entitlements,” than have many Left Obamites.

Obama is not simply “bound to disappoint” — he has already been cause for great disappointment, even among those of us who scoped his essential corporatist nature years ago. Who would have predicted that he would play the most eager Gunga Din for the bizarre Bush/Paulson bank bailout decree, last year? Who would have foreseen that Obama would retain the loathsome international criminal Robert Gates as Secretary of Defense? That he would continue Bush’s policies on Africa — Zimbabwe, Sudan, Somalia, AFRICOM — without missing a beat? That he would so quickly offer to put Social Security “on the table” for “reform” (in the Republican sense of the term)?

But Burnham would have you believe the Left opposition are nothing but nitpickers, inflating executive pinpricks into major assaults. Thus, she seeks to make the opposition look silly, as if we “criticize every move the administration makes.” In truth, her argument is designed to excuse her and her Left allies failure to “resist” or confront Obama in any meaningful way.

Like many of her cohorts, Burnham is quick to grant that Obama “is a steward of capitalism,” but maintains that “his election has opened up the potential for substantive reform in the interests of working people and that his election to office is a democratic win worthy of being fiercely defended.”

Again, if Obama’s election opened up the “potential” for reform, so would have Hillary’s. They were (and remain) political brother and sister under the skin. The Obamites would be utterly helpless if unable to deploy (and abuse) the term “potential,” given the actuality of Obama’s presidency. Conveniently, “potential” lives in the future, where it can’t be pinned down. That’s why Obama’s “potential” is a central theme of his Left camp followers — it allows them to claim that the opposition’s critiques of their hero might harm the “potential” good he might do in the future.

At any rate, the Obamite Left can claim no credit for Obama’s progressive “potential,” since they did little or nothing that might have caused him to abandon his relentless rightward drift.

Burnham & Co. want us to accept Obama’s corporate orientation as “what he was elected to do.” Burnham urges us to be “clear” about Obama’s “job description”: “Obama’s job is to salvage and stabilize the U.S. capitalist system and to perform whatever triage is necessary to restore the core institutions of finance and industry to profitability.”

That is certainly what Obama and his big campaign funders believe his job is, but a progressive’s task is to cause him to serve the people — an assignment that I am not convinced Burnham and her allies have accepted.

On the international scene (i.e., The Empire), Obama’s job — as Burnham says should be clear to “us” — is “to salvage the reputation of the U.S. in the world; repair the international ties shredded by eight years of cowboy unilateralism; and adjust U.S. positioning on the world stage [so far, so good, but here Burnham slips down the proverbial slope] on the basis of a rational assessment of the strengths and weaknesses of the changed and changing centers of global political, economic and military power – rather than on the basis of a simple-minded ideological commitment to unchallenged world dominance.”

Obama’s military budget, bigger than Bush’s, his escalation in Afghanistan/Pakistan, the unraveling of his Iraq “withdrawal” promises, and his provocations in Africa all signal that this president has no intention of relinquishing the goal of global U.S. hegemony. To paraphrase his famous statement on war, “I’m not opposed to imperialism, just dumb imperialism.”

Burnham should bring herself to admit that Obama is, indeed, merely a more charming face pasted on the imperial monster — with the same teeth (weapons), appetite and ambitions. In an indirect way, she does offer a version of the truth, packaged in what sounds like genuine, praiseful admiration:

“Obama has been on the job for only a month but has not wasted a moment in going after his double bottom line with gusto, panache and high intelligence. In point of fact, the capitalists of the world – or at least the U.S. branch — ought to be building altars to the man and lighting candles. They have chosen an uncommonly steady hand to pull their sizzling fat from the fire.”

Burnham then sets up the Left straw men, so as to knock them down. These one-note Charlies, real or imagined, are incapable of sophisticated thought and analysis:

“For the anti-capitalist left that is grounded in Trotskyism, anarcho-horizontalism, or various forms of third-party-as-a-point-of-principleism [sic], the only change worthy of the name is change that hits directly at the kneecaps of capitalism and cripples it decisively. All else is trifling with minor reforms or, even worse, capitulating to the power elite. From this point of view the stance towards Obama is self-evident: criticize relentlessly, disabuse others of their presidential infatuation, and denounce anything that remotely smacks of mainstream politics.”

Such people may exist, but they don’t resemble BAR or any of our allies and correspondents. Burnham is employing the cheapest trick of argumentation: she picks (or invents) the weakest, most unreasonable, narrow opponent, and savages him. I know of no serious activist that believes “the only change worthy of the name is change that hits directly at the kneecaps of capitalism and cripples it decisively.” If that were so, then such activists would have nothing to do for most of their lives, since chances to “cripple” capitalism “decisively” are few and very far between.

But crises of capitalism do occur, and we are living through one of them. Capitulationists are also real, and reveal themselves at the worst possible junctures. One great tragedy of the current episode is that the crisis occurred at a moment when the remnants of the Left and Black movements in the U.S. have been neutralized by the “uncommonly steady hand” of imperialism’s Black champion, to whom Burnham and countless others have, yes, capitulated.

In order to defend the capitulation, the Burnhams of the Left must credit Obama with achievements he has not made, plus the amorphous “potential” achievements to which he has “opened the door” and which will magically occur even in the absence of organized people making a demand. A hilarious Burnham example of an Obama feat: He has “wrenched the Democratic Party out of the clammy grip of Clintonian centrism. (Although he himself often leads from the center, Obama’s center is a couple of notches to the left of the Clinton administration’s triangulation strategies)….”

Ha! Burnham imagines “notches” that aren’t there. Obama’s government IS Clintonian. And the new president is as skilled and ruthless a triangulator as Bill ever was, consistently finding a position to the Right of whatever passes for Left on Capitol Hill, but nestled near to the corporate bosom.

Burnham spends additional pages working the same themes of Left “anticipatory disillusionment” and other psycho-babble to mask her own cohort’s capitulation. Many Obama critics did anticipate his center-right behavior, and we were correct — but never disillusioned. Political groupies, however, are fated to suffer disillusion and betrayal.

Burnham reveals inklings of her own emotional state when she gratuitously urges “those who missed interacting with the motion of millions against the right, against the white racial monopoly on the executive branch, and for substantive change,” to re-examine their political orientation. In addition to her condescending tone, which seems to assume that her targets have no experience with the “motion of millions” in actual political movements, rather than a corporate-shaped and funded presidential election campaign, Burnham appears to think of the non-Obamite Left as people who didn’t RSVP for the best party of the year, and are now resentful.

In the last hundred words of the piece, we discover that her idea of “building the left” requires folding up the tent in or near the Obama camp. Examine this extraordinary passage:

“The current political alignment provides an opportunity to break out of isolation, marginalization and the habits of self-marginalization accumulated during the neo-conservative ascendancy. It provides the opportunity to initiate and/or strengthen substantive relationships with political actors in government, in the Democratic Party, and in independent sectors, as well as within the left itself – relationships to be built upon long after the Obama presidency has come to an end. It provides the opportunity to accumulate lessons about political actors, alignments and centers of power likewise relevant well beyond this administration. And it provides the opportunity for the immersion of the leaders, members and constituencies of left formations in a highly accelerated, real world poli-sci class.”

This sounds uncannily like Obamite Prof. Leonard Jeffries’ admonition that all Black folks “study Obama-ism.” Burnham’s gushings are remarkable for their abject surrender, not just to Obama’s persona and mystique, but to the institutional trappings and annexes of corporate-tethered rule. She wants us all to take lessons from the corporate-bought structures — to better serve the people? No. Burnham is telling us that now that she’s seen the Big Party, she doesn’t want to leave. She’s tasted that vintage wine, drank the good stuff, and is determined not to go back to movement rations.

I do agree that Burnham can use some political education. “For the anti-capitalist left,” she writes, “this is a period of experimentation. There is no roadmap; there are no recipes.” Maybe, but there are abiding truths that she has willfully forgotten: “Power concedes nothing without a demand.”

Those elements that refuse to make demands of Power ought to stop calling themselves part of the Left. Unless the Left is in power, it is a contradiction in terms.

Washington’s blatant and longstanding campaign for regime-change must be denounced and resisted in all its manifestations — no ifs, ands or buts. The economic sanctions are, as the letter describes them, “collective punishment of the Zimbabwean people.” The signers correctly and “unequivocally denounce these sanctions as war crimes and the officials who initiated them as war criminals.”

Well said — but there’s a great disconnect between the words and some of the names listed as endorsing the letter. A number of the signers are full-throated, religious-like followers of Barack Obama, one of the “war criminals” that has supported and, as president, extended U.S. sanctions against Zimbabwe.

These unabashed Obamites, several of whom I debated at a large forum in Harlem in December, make a great noise about “imperialists” in general while pledging undying “solidarity” in the struggle against such “criminals”, yet in their daily practice labor mightily to absolve President Obama of culpability for his crimes. It requires rivers of obfuscation and oceans of purposeful omission to separate the Commander-in-Chief and President of the United States from the crimes planned and carried out in his office. The perpetrators of this bizarre fantasy — that the “imperialists” are out to get Mugabe, but Obama isn’t one of them — deepen confusion among the public, especially African Americans, and make a mockery of true solidarity. In the light of ever-unfolding events, they make themselves and progressive politics appear ridiculous, as they tiptoe around the mountainous facts of Barack Obama’s actual presidency — not the wishful one they have invented.

Obama’s implacable hostility to Zimbabwean independence and sovereignty is undeniable. He has consistently spoken and acted in lockstep with George Bush on the subject, and as president is preparing new ground for aggression against that country and elsewhere in Africa and the developing world.

On June 24, 2008, following a US-UK-led United Nations Security Council resolution declaring that violence fostered by Mugabe’s government had made fair runoff elections “impossible”, candidate Obama took South Africa to task for failure “to pressure the Zimbabwean government to stop its repressive behavior.” The U.S., he said, should tighten its economic sanctions. Obama told the press: “If fresh elections prove impossible, regional leaders backed by the international community should pursue an enforceable, negotiated political transition in Zimbabwe that would end repressive rule and enable genuine democracy to take root.” That’s regime change.

Obama’s behavior was in perfect synch with the Bush Administration, and with Republican presidential candidate John McCain’s statements on the issue.

At the United Nations on July 10, Russia and China vetoed punitive American and British sanctions against Zimbabwe. Frustrated and outraged, Bush used his executive powers to expand U.S. sanctions, joined by Britain and the European Union.

On January 15 of this year, days before Obama took the oath of office, his nominee for Ambassador to the UN, Susan Rice, told a confirmation hearing on Capitol Hill it was still possible that Russia and China might be persuaded to change their votes on Zimbabwe sanctions. There can be no doubt she was speaking for the incoming administration, which looked forward to winning sanctions where George Bush had failed.

On January 26, Mugabe and the opposition agreed to form a unity government, threatening to derail the U.S.-British strategy to further isolate and then topple Mugabe. When the unity talks briefly fell apart, Obama, now president, let it be known that he hoped the opposition would remain out of government, so that momentum toward UN sanctions might be revived. That would be Susan Rice’s job. “Susan is extremely aware of what is going on in Zimbabwe and she feels very strongly that there is a tremendous miscarriage of justice in that country and that it has to end,” an Obama foreign policy aide told The Times [UK]. “Once she has her feet on the ground she is going to turn her attention to this issue.” The January 28 story was titled, “President Obama leads US drive to topple Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe.”

When, a few days later, unity talks successfully resumed with the support of African organizations, the Obama administration reacted with bitterness and frustration. “Mugabe is not getting a reprieve from President Obama,” said an aide. For the time being, however, UN sanctions were off the table, and the momentum of American aggression was spent.

But not necessarily for long. Susan Rice, an ardent supporter of AFRICOM, like her boss, is a leading advocate of “humanitarian” military intervention, the doctrine that big powers have a duty to intervene when a government fails to protect its people from . . . whatever. In the run-up to unity talks, the Brits and Americans appeared to be trial-ballooning Zimbabwe’s cholera outbreak as a pretext for intervention — but in Africa, a “humanitarian” rationale for imperial interference can always be found, or invented.

It is beyond dispute that Obama, as candidate and president, has been a fierce proponent of sanctions against Zimbabwe. George Bush’s sanctions by executive order are now Barack Obama’s sanctions — fully qualifying the new president as a “war criminal,” as defined by the signers of the recent “Open Letter to the People of Zimbabwe.” Yet some of the signers are apparently capable of compartmentalizing facts as it suits them, in order to avoid painful confrontation with the truth: Obama is not only our first Black president, but also our first Black war criminal president.

Who are these deeply conflicted persons? I am specifically referring to five signatories of the Open Letter, whose irrational Obama-Love I have personally witnessed in the context of debate over Obama’s foreign and domestic policies, the first four at Harlem’s Great Debate in December, the last encounter at Audubon Ballroom, Harlem, in early 2008.

Prof. Dr. Leonard Jeffries, City College CUNY. Dr. Jeffries refuses to present any substantive critique of Obama’s actual policies on Africa or any other issue. He proclaims that every Black person should study “Obama-ology,” meaning “how Obama does things.”

Dr. James McIntosh, Committee to Eliminate Media Offensive to African People (CEMOTAP). Dr. McIntosh tells audiences to look out for Obama’s “winks” — those confidential messages meant especially for Black folks. The rest is just Obama doing what he has to do.

Viola Plummer, December 12th Movement. Ms. Plummer has the uncanny ability to call for revolution and declare the near-divinity of Obama in the same breath.

Atty. Malik Zulu Shabazz, New Black Panther Party. Atty. Shabazz and his party bear no resemblance to the original. His evaluation of Obama: “He is a good father and husband.”

Amiri Baraka, playwright & poet. The one-time Prince of Schisms now pillories Cynthia McKinney for failing to get on the Obama-wagon. His capacity for both insult and reason appears to be failing.

Not one of these five people, all prolific speakers with followings in their own arenas, would call President Barack Obama a war criminal in the usual course of their political work. Instead, to varying degrees, they publicly praise and even express adoration for him. Yet they sign an Open Letter affirming solidarity with the people of Zimbabwe in the face of sanctions by “war criminals” — like Obama. Such solidarity is worthless on its face, because it means less than nothing in their actual domestic practice, which is filled with expressions of love for the war criminal and endless excuses and rationalizations for his behavior.

One line of the Open Letter is especially poignant in light of the contradictions personified by the Five Obamists: “We face the same enemies at home as do the people of Zimbabwe — the worldwide clique of bankers and bosses who put their greed for profits before meeting people’s needs.”

The Obamites are fully capable of damning the banksters till midnight, all the while pretending that Barack is not Wall Street’s protector and co-conspirator. Resisting reality, they spread further confusion.

The moral imperative to answer the call “to impose broad boycotts and implement divestment initiatives against Israel similar to those applied to South Africa in the apartheid era,” is overwhelming — so much so that failure to act amounts to a kind of self-mutilation, a defiling of one’s legacy. Every iota of African American past and present existence tells us that no people can be allowed to superimpose themselves, their history, their supra-national rights on another people and their land, thus negating the Other’s humanity — the essential facts of Zionism.

1948 saw the creation of civilization’s greatest document to date – possibly the founding document of the truly modern era — the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The year also witnessed the founding of a state based on the antithesis of those values: Israel.

Both Malcolm X and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. tapped the deep reservoirs of the Declaration in their struggle for African Americans’ human rights, and both understood the indivisibility of freedom. “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere,” wrote Dr. King in his “Letter from a Birmingham Jail.” “We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny.” Malcolm counseled Black activists that “if they would expand their civil rights movement to a human rights movement it would internationalize it.”

That movement was internationalized, culminating in the 1980s South Africa corporate disinvestment and boycott campaign. As Black writer/activist Kevin Alexander Gray wrote in a piece earlier this year, calling for a similar campaign against Israel:

“What’s happening in Palestine is not fundamentally different from what occurred in apartheid South Africa. Kids are being killed. People have been herded into the (more deadly) equivalent of Bantustans. Political leaders are targeted for assassination…. Israel’s behavior demands the same response from the world human rights community as was mustered against South Africa.”

The obligation to respond is felt most intensely among Black Americans, who have experienced apartheid at home and fought successfully against it in Africa — but who are represented in public offices by abject cowards. Thirty members of the Congressional Black Caucus shamed themselves and us by endorsing a Resolution affirming the Jewish State’s “right to defend itself against attacks from Gaza” and absolving Israel of any blame for the slaughter. Seven Black lawmakers sought cover in voting “present” — as if that would cloak their slavish fear of the Israel lobby — while only two voted Nay: Reps. Maxine Waters (D-CA) and Gwen Moore (D-WS).

The man- and womanhood was scared out of the Black misleadership class in general, and the Congressional Black Caucus in particular, in 2002, when the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) joined with corporate moneybags to unseat two Black lawmakers. Reps. Cynthia McKinney, of suburban Atlanta, and Earl Hilliard, from Alabama, could not be counted on to bend their knees to Israel. They had to go.

As Hilliard told me in July 2002, tons of money suddenly rained down on his opponent, Artur Davis, “not just [from] corporations, but organizations like AIPAC. Mostly Republican operatives and Jewish operatives that were sent by different organizations and groups and corporations.”

Was it their intention to make a public display of their power, I asked? “Oh, definitely — the seed of fear,” Hilliard replied. “It sends a message to every member of Congress.”

The same message was sent the next month, with Cynthia McKinney’s defeat in Georgia. “I was targeted by AIPAC and others for my opposition to the Israeli occupation of and genocidal policies toward Palestine,” said McKinney, who last year ran for president on the Green Party ticket.

2002 was the beginning of a joint corporate/pro-Israel offensive to subdue or eject “unreliable” Black Democrats. The dramatic deterioration of the Congressional Black Caucus, as an agent for progress on Capitol Hill, dates from that year. The corporate Right and the Israel lobby act in tandem. Their purge of Black politicians has been so successful, they’re running out of live targets. Maxine Waters and Gwen Moore are the last two righteous sisters standing on Capitol Hill — where Black manhood is extinct. Down the street at the White House, chief of staff Rahm Emanuel stands guard — although President Obama appears to be an entirely voluntary captive of Israel.

So we see that the tentacles that strangle Gaza and once helped South Africa build nuclear weapons, are throttling the life out of independent Black politics in the United States. Boycott and disinvest in Israel! If not in solidarity, in self-defense.

Most literate Black people are familiar with Frederick Douglass’s maxim, “Power concedes nothing without a demand.” But Black Obamites cannot conceive of making demands on “their” president, whom many believe is literally a God-send. Who would even think to make demands of an emissary from Jesus? Religion, that vaunted “rock” of Black society, once again knocks us senseless.

Shorn of defenses and politically neutered, Blacks become befuddled spectators to Obama’s version of economic “recovery” — a desperate effort to resurrect from near-death the investment bankster class that ultimately made like Richard Pryor and, driven by its accumulated contradictions, set itself on fire. Obama must also fulfill his obligations to American Empire, which sustained through threat and force of arms the artificial, unjust U.S. global advantages that allowed the Wall Street banksters to believe they could forever feast on the world’s sweat and resources while producing nothing themselves.

Between the multi-trillion dollar pincers of an addicted military and the limitless cost of detoxifying a universe of derivative, fictional assets, the real economy and those that depend on it will be squeezed beyond endurance.

Obama’s mission is truly impossible: to bring back from the dead the mighty investment banks that were until lately the arbiters of economic development in the United States. As Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin proclaimed at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, “[T]oday, the pride of Wall Street — the investment banks — have practically stopped existing.” The composition of Obama’s economic team, which is suited only to the warped world of investment banking, shows the new president is determined to raise the dead. But even if such a resurrection were desirable, it cannot be done. By the end of 2007, the banksters had created $596 trillion in over-the-counter derivatives — 12 times the value of the gross planetary product of Earth. Bailout is a nonsensical proposition. What is occurring is a desperate effort to save the core institutions of the financial capitalist class at the unlimited expense of the real economy and its dependents — the rest of us.

It is logical, therefore, that the misdirected “recovery” of the real economy is by design rudderless, lacking any guiding federal institutional structure or general plan for economic development, despite unprecedented projected spending. The Obama team’s overarching goal, like the Bush team before it, is to recreate the primacy of investment bankers in guiding economic development, not to replace them with governmental mechanisms. Since the investment banksters “have practically stopped existing,” the real economy’s recovery effort will ultimately degenerate into a free-for-all grab fest amidst dwindling spoils.

In the process of attempting to breathe life into the bankster zombies, Obama and his bipartisan buddies will exhaust the capacity of the federal government to make money out of nothing. At that point, it will be too late to pay for band-aid “reforms” to mend a gravely wounded economy and society. The self-immolation of the banksters, and the futile attempt to save them, will have destroyed the larger system.

Black folks will be powerless to affect the trajectory of disaster, so long as the Obama delusion holds sway. In any case, from its conception the Obama plan contained no transformational elements that might have narrowed the institutional gaps between Blacks and whites, nothing that would alter the two-to-one ratio of Black unemployment to white joblessness, or shrink the Black Prison Gulag, or bring Blacks closer to wealth parity with whites. African American economic standing relative to whites is likely to slip further, given the fragility of the Black middle class.

Obama will preside over a society that is poorer, less fair, and likely to be engulfed in war, as the U.S. military tries to retain America’s unjust advantages in the absence of any recovery.

The debacle will be exceedingly painful for Obama, who entered office with the apparent idea of creating a 21st Century “Era of Good Feeling,” much like the harmony that was said to reign over (the white sectors of) the nation from around 1815 to 1824. Back then, with the collapse of the Federalists, American politics was dominated by the Republican-Democrat Party. President James Monroe won the White House in 1820 with only one electoral vote against him — the kind of bi- or non-partisan heaven (except for slaves and Indians) that Obama craves, and attempts to recreate in his own small way by populating his cabinet and advisory ranks with Republicans.

Those wishful souls that convinced themselves Obama would become the vessel in which to pour progressive ideas and programs in time of economic crisis, did not give him credit for having notions of his own — ideas that would sacrifice the people for the benefit of the banksters. Obama pursues his bankster rescue crusade in plain sight, yet white “progressive” supporters insist he’s up to something else, and Black Obamites avow he’s doing the work of God.

Not quite. More like the work of Goldman Sachs, in hopes it will rise again.

Obama, the one-word incantation — Oh-Bah-Mah! — would not be denied. The sea of humanity lapped at his feet, as the mountain had come to Muhammad.

The Black multitudes waited to be told who they were, and why they were there. They learned that “Our economy is badly weakened, a consequence of greed and irresponsibility on the part of some, but also our collective failure to make hard choices and prepare the nation for a new age.” They cheered in acknowledgement of their shared culpability in the “collective failure” that had destroyed the global financial system, the workings of which were beyond their capacity to comprehend, much less influence. Yet, they must be guilty of something. Obama said so.

He informed his followers that, “Homes have been lost, jobs shed, businesses shuttered.” This they already knew, many through painful, personal experience. What is to be done? Well, “in the words of Scripture,” Obama proclaimed, “the time has come to set aside childish things.” Things like boorishly interrupting the nation’s business (now Obama’s business) with complaints about particular African American grievances such as chronically high jobless rates, neglected schools, gross criminal injustice, housing segregation. Citing the litany is bad form — damn near un-American, Obama seemed to indicate.

He pressed the point. “On this day, we come to proclaim an end to the petty grievances and false promises, the recriminations and worn-out dogmas that for far too long have strangled our politics.” Who was Obama talking about? In hindsight, possibly Obama was referring to those whom he knew would in less than a week be complaining that he had delayed congressional action on “universal” health care, dashed the hopes of besieged homeowners in need of a law that would allow judges to adjust their mortgages, abandoned the Gulf Coast Civic Action bill to create 100,000 jobs and affordable housing for Katrina-ravaged Americans, and put organized labor’s Employee Free Choice Act on the back burner. Yes, that would be cause for “recriminations” and deployment of “warn-out dogmas” regarding the people’s rights to health care, housing, jobs and dignity.

Obama, object of the Great Hajj, personification of Black Mecca, continued: “Our capacity remains undiminished. But our time of standing pat, of protecting narrow interests and putting off unpleasant decisions — that time has surely passed.” Even far out near the Washington Monument, pilgrims understood that Obama was preparing to lower the boom on some undeserving, “narrow interests” that had malingered on the public dole for too long. What they may not have noticed in preparing to join the Hajj — at considerable sacrifice, for some — was that two weeks before, Obama had revealed the “unpleasant decisions” he was contemplating. Social Security and Medicare were “a central part” of his planned overhaul of federal spending.

Those who thought the battle of Social Security had been fought, and won, back in George W. Bush’s first term, were mistaken. This time, Obama the Democrat is putting “entitlements” on the chopping block, on his own initiative. Few on the Mall understood his meaning. No surprise — Obamites characteristically invest their own meanings to his speeches, while remaining oblivious to his actual political positions.

In 17 minutes, it was over, and the pilgrims began to disperse. Obama had spoken of “a nagging fear that America’s decline is inevitable, that the next generation must lower its sights.” In fact, Black people haven’t lowered their expectations, but instead, imagine that their wildest dreams have come true in the form of Obama. It is an unsustainable delusion, which Obama himself will dispel over time. But you couldn’t tell the 2009 hajjis that. As with the Jewish farewell, “Next year in Jerusalem,” they left Washington making plans for January 20, 2013.

The coincidence of the calendar makes for good copy and grand sermons, but in fact reveals a great moral and political dissonance. It is true that there could have been no Obama presidency had Dr. King and the movement he sprang from not existed, but that simple fact of history does not amount to a King benediction from the grave for Obama’s moral character and political policies. Indeed, Dr. King’s life and words are indelible evidence that he and Obama represent opposing moral and political camps.

Tens of millions of African Americans – who did not choose the little-known Obama to be their champion, but supported him near-universally at the polls once his candidacy had been made “viable” — will celebrate vicarious attainment of power when Obama is sworn in. Yet when confronted on Obama’s political agenda, enough of which has been put in motion and otherwise made plain since Election Day, few Black Obama supporters can mount a cogent defense. “Better than McCain” doesn’t cut it, anymore.

When the New York Times describes the emerging Obama administration as “center-right,” there is not much for an honest progressive to defend — and most African Americans are progressive on economic issues and questions of war and peace. Beyond a ritual counting of the president-elect’s African American appointees, most African Americans seem oblivious to the political nature of his Cabinet, his policy pronouncements and shameful silences. More likely, they pretend to be oblivious so as not to lose that once-in-a-lifetime feeling that happened when the Black man won.

Blacks who have taken on the task of defending Obama, often wind up revealing themselves as persons of little moral or political substance, in the process. New York’s Dr. Leonard Jeffries is one of the more prominent Obamists, a self-styled Pan-Africanist. In my second debate involving Jeffries, in Baltimore, December 20 (the first was the week before, in Harlem), he repeated his mantra, that Blacks should “study Obama-ology.” I asked him to define this area of study. “Obama-ology,” said Jeffries, visibly exasperated by my questioning of the obvious, “is the study of Obama. How he raised so much money . . . how he used the Internet . . . .”

Dr. Jeffries’ response revealed his position to have no political or moral content. He genuflected before Obama because the candidate raised hundreds of millions of dollars (from whom and in return for what?) and created an Internet network (to what end, beyond Election Day?). Most importantly, Obama was a hero because he won. What else is there to know or say?

At the Harlem debate, an Obama defender kept shouting into her mic, “Obama won! Black people have spoken!” — as if any discussion of his political positions was extraneous, or racially subversive, on its face. The woman was a leader of the group that organized the debate, but like others in her organization clearly did not really want a debate. None of the Obamites were even minimally capable of defending their guy’s record on the bailout, his retention of George Bush’s defense secretary and plans to expand U.S. military manpower, his positioning of bankers at the controls of his new administration’s economic machinery, his support for AFRICOM, his key advisors’ advocacy of “humanitarian” military intervention — on not one point did the Obama camp offer anything that could reasonably be called a defense, coherent or otherwise.

It is not simply that the Obamites failed to muster a defense in Harlem or Baltimore or other venues; admittedly, it is difficult to defend the indefensible. What is most shocking — maddening — is their rejection of any political or moral standard for evaluating the soon-to-be Black president. All that remains is the fact of Obama’s power and the delusion that Blacks somehow share in that power. There is no thought of speaking Truth to Power, and certainly no place for a moral compass in such a valueless void.

We can understand, then, how such people would imagine Obama and Dr. King to be soul mates. The fact that one of these men fought his whole life against the forces of militarism and economic exploitation, while the other empowers, and is empowered by, bankers and militarists, does not register on their anesthetized moral and political sensors.

If the Obamites had more presence of mind, they would avoid comparisons with Dr. King, which can only redound to Obama’s great detriment. King’s break with his onetime ally, President Lyndon Johnson, set the standard for both political and moral behavior. When it became clear that the War on Poverty was doomed by the war in Vietnam, which acted “like some demonic destructive suction tube,” devouring all available resources, King publicly declared against the war. In doing so, he severed what had been the most productive relationship between an American president and a Black leader in U.S. history. But the war gave him no choice, since military expenditures made “rehabilitation” of the American poor impossible. Both morality and politics led to the same conclusion: the Movement could not coexist with war.

The lesson is directly applicable today, but Americans, Black and white, find it difficult to recognize the characters. Obama is Lyndon Johnson. National revitalization, including redress of historical African American grievances, is impossible unless military expenditures are dramatically reduced. But Obama is committed to putting 100,000 new pairs of Marine and Army “boots on the ground,” an expanded war in Afghanistan/Pakistan, a beefed up AFRICOM, and a generally bigger U.S. military footprint on the planet. This, in the midst of global economic collapse.

Dr. King would find creative ways to confront President Obama’s militarism, and to actively resist further diversion of public wealth to the bankers. Were he to survey the current political scene, King would be most impressed, not with the Obama’s party plans for the night after his birthday, but with the way that a daughter of Georgia salvaged Black America’s moral reputation at the beginning of Israel’s assault on Gaza.

Cynthia McKinney’s attempted voyage of solidarity with the besieged people of Gaza on the medical relief boat Dignity, rammed and almost sunk by Israeli warships, reminds the world that not all African Americans have morphed into warmongering clones of Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice. Thanks to the presence of the former Georgia congresswoman and Green Party presidential candidate on the mission, millions of Arabs have been made aware of a different Black America, one that is not silent, like Barack Obama, in the face of a purposely inflicted human rights catastrophe.

Cynthia McKinney is Black America’s moral emissary to the world. She exemplifies the Black America that consistently opposes U.S. military adventures abroad, a people that recognize organized racism when they see it, and therefore condemn Israel’s treatment of Palestinians — the Black America that Martin Luther King came from.

Some of us are still in our right minds. Hopefully, most of the others will recover, sooner rather than later.

Progressives must become city planners, and in the process of devising these plans forge unity among the various contesting communities that comprise the city. Corporations have always dominated the mechanisms of urban planning, not just through bribery and subversion of all potential opposition, but because capital always has a plan. It is the giant investment banking firms that provided the generalship, the strategic and tactical headquarters, for most of the grand schemes to purge the Harlems of America of non-white working class populations. Before residents and community organizations have any inkling they are about to be exiled from their neighborhoods, corporate planners have already researched every aspect of the targeted area, rationalized the new corporate project’s impact on conditions (and profits) elsewhere in the city and region, drawn up enabling zoning and other laws and regulations to legalize the theft, and enlisted local non-white allies to run political interference.

The investment bankers, the generals of finance capitalism, had their Waterloo in September, victims of fundamental contradictions made more explosively lethal by greedy genius. At the moment, the “system” has no command center — the strategic function of investment bankers, now dead, dying, or on “capital injection” support. Disoriented, capital’s various sectors behave like chickens with their heads cut off — because that is almost literally what has happened. If there is any juncture in history for progressives to formulate their own “development” plans, it is now, while the beast lies crippled and incoherent.

In New York’s Harlem, epicenter of the national corporate vision to remake the cities without their existing populations — the New Orleans exodus without the flood – finance capital’s darker political vassals are experiencing their own crisis. Sugar daddies like Lehman Brothers and Wachovia Bank were great sources of bribes, and gave critical support to dependent social service and cultural outfits, as sweeteners for their toxic scheme to reap billions from the methodical expulsion of Black and brown residents. While working class folks should be savoring a reprieve from exile — dancing at the Wall Street wakes! — the bankers’ Black and brown political dependents mourn the “tragic” loss of “their” fat cats. It is a pitiful sight, like house servants tearfully burying the “good” master who only sold off the field slaves.

The “crash” — of which we have seen only the beginning — is more than an opportunity for progressives and popular forces to seize the initiative in planning the nuts and bolts of a new dispensation. The void left by finance capital’s catastrophe demands that the Left — most particularly, the Black, urban left — make sense of the chaos and stench left by wounded and dying corporate elephants. The banker-bought ghetto politicians and poseurs are now at their weakest, cut off from their sources of funds and ghetto fabulousness. With the corporate trickle-down dried up, these masterless samurai lose their reasons for existence. Progressive organizers are obligated to step into the vacuum while the bamboozlers are still reeling and scratching, to provide explanations (analysis) of what has occurred and introduce the process of democratic, informed, inclusive community planning — the indispensable first step toward community empowerment.

The discipline of city planning forces various organizers from diverse ethnic backgrounds to find rational solutions to common problems. Personalities and prejudices diminish as obstacles when people are compelled to tackle the complex, material problems of making neighborhoods and cities work for the folks who live there. During a discussion of the “Wall Street Bust and the End of the NYC Real Estate Boom” at the City University of New York (CUNY) Social Forum earlier this month, a young Chinese American organizer recounted how she and her colleagues debated how to resist corporate efforts to gentrify Chinatown. “Some said, ‘We need to unite as Asians…I don’t care about the Latinos or the Blacks,’” said the activist. Her organization chose “the alternative, to unite as working people to fight this racism.”

Unity around principle is always easier when the practical tasks at hand demand common action. The systemic demise of the investment banking mechanism of urban gentrification requires the various affected communities to engage their constituents in a common project of community planning — to show what alternative development looks like, and how people can be tangibly served. If this cannot be accomplished now, when the corporations are in confusion and disarray, then it can never be done.

But of course, it can and will happen, because the moment demands it. People cannot forever tolerate living under constant threat of removal. Corporate gentrification requires the deployment of what Harlem Tenants Council executive director Nellie Hester Bailey calls “weapons of mass displacement” in the form of zoning laws and abuse of eminent domain. Organizers must counter such corporate weapons with inclusive community planning that excites and involves the people so that they combine as an even more powerful weapon: communities in defense of themselves and each other.

But there’s gotta be a plan.

[I]n many respects, working with [Barack Obama] will be very much like working with President Clinton…. I think he will be just fine.

– Top Obama adviser Robert Rubin, former Clinton Treasury Secretary and Goldman Sachs chair, currently an executive with Citigroup, August 28, 2008.

The “progressive” Barack Obama that many supporters imagine is itching to break free once his corporate host’s body is securely in the White House, remains dormant. Not even the groans of finance capital’s collapse can waken him — a strong indication that no such progressive inner Obama exists.

Certainly the progressive Obama was nowhere to be found when the candidate endorsed the $700-plus billion “cash for trash” Wall Street bailout. So eager was Obama to “save” the bankers, he forgot which party he was supposed to belong to and offered to allow Bush Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson to keep his job in an Obama administration. Although the offer was coached in terms of facilitating a smooth “transition” from one regime to another, it is yet another telling indication that, in January, the baton will essentially be passed from one finance capital team wearing red shorts to another finance capital team in blue.

Goldman Sachs doesn’t much care which of the big business parties wins, so long as the rich remain in power. Paulson is a former CEO of Goldman Sachs, as is Obama’s top economic advisor, Robert Rubin, who served as Bill Clinton’s Secretary of Treasury. Corporate politics is nothing if not incestuous. When Rubin says that working with a President Obama “will be very much like working with President Clinton,” he means that the elected players are eminently replaceable, while corporate guys are permanent. Obama “will be just fine” as a front for finance capital’s continued rule.

When the crunch came in September, Obama performed the bailout functions expected of him by his biggest financial backers: Wall Street. After the first attempted heist was thwarted when an outraged citizenry laid electronic siege to the U.S. Capitol, Obama smothered the holdouts with promises to make things right once in the Oval Office. All but eight members of the Congressional Black Caucus (CBC) sent up the white flag. This was not unexpected, since the CBC as a body had ceased to play a progressive role years ago – neutered by corporate influence. It is sadly poetic that the final collapse of the Black Caucus occurred under the ministrations of history’s most successful Black corporate politician, Barack Obama — a player so masterful he was able to enlist, silence or co-opt virtually all of Black “leadership” before one primary vote was cast.

Now Obama picks up an imaginary sword to fight a phony battle on behalf of the victims of his investment banker friends’ crimes. With his lead widening in the polls, Obama offers a 90-day reprieve on foreclosures to those homeowners who were working with lenders that are part of the bailout deal. Homeowners would also have to show that they were making an effort to pay their mortgages. But at the end of the 90 days the family would still be out of luck if there was no agreement on terms with the lender.

Earlier this year, Obama rejected moratoriums on foreclosures and a freeze on rates, measures supported by his primary opponents John Edwards and Hillary Clinton (Obama called Clinton’s rate freeze “disastrous”). Nearly two million foreclosures and evictions later, after facilitating a trillion-dollar corporate raid on the public treasury, and caught in a bidding war with McCain on spending what remains, Obama still can’t venture any farther left than his corporate leash allows. Obama derides McCain’s proposal to spend up to $300 billion buying up homeowners’ mortgages at face value and repackaging them at terms consistent with current home values, calling it too expensive and a boon to lenders (the latter part is certainly true). But he championed the original $700 billion “cash for trash” scheme that was designed as a pure bailout for speculators – his investment banker friends – and would save not a single family from losing its home.

How bizarre it is to observe Obama playing the people’s crusader in the morning and colluding with his top economic advisers, Robert Rubin and Lawrence Summers, in the afternoon. In February 1999, Rubin and Summers flanked Fed Chief Alan Greenspan on the cover of Time magazine, heralded as, “The Committee to Save the World.” Summers was then Secretary of the Treasury for Bill Clinton, having succeeded his mentor, Rubin, in that office. Together with Greenspan, the trio had in the previous year labored successfully to safeguard “derivatives,” the exotic “ticking time bomb” financial instruments, from federal regulation. Less than a decade later, unregulated derivatives would expand – like the Mother of All Bubbles – to notional values 10 to 15 times greater than the world’s total economic output. The global order would be brought to its knees, in a financial conflagration that has just begun to show its full dimensions and destructive potential. (See New York Times, October 9, “Taking Hard New Look at a Greenspan Legacy“)

So you might want to thank Obama’s main men on the economy, Rubin and Summers, for the current crisis. Be assured that this crew will deliver another catastrophe from their positions of influence, if Obama is elected.

The November 4 election will change nothing in the configurations of power in the United States. It is Barack Obama’s mission to ensure that the political transition effects no substantive alteration of power relationships, but rather, provides a new (Black) face for the old, fast-failing system. To the extent that self-identified progressives attempt to ignore or obscure the facts of Obama’s very public allegiance to finance capital, they objectively weaken the people’s ability to resist — or even recognize — the overarching menace of continued corporate rule.

It is absurd to claim that a progressive “movement” with a potential for profound social change can coalesce behind a candidate who repeatedly and reflexively aligns with the worst corporate malefactors on the planet, the very same individuals who brought about the current catastrophe. The great damage that has been done to African American political coherence, may never be repaired. At this crucial juncture in human history, the Black Sampson plants himself firmly among the wobbly pillars of the rich man’s crumbling edifice — to prop it up!

Obama can no more succeed than John McCain in resolving the contradictions of capital by feeding the beast the last remnants of the national wealth. But his “progressive” apologists, by papering over the “real” Obama in favor of the wishful one that only exists in their fantasies, politically disarm the people, and make the inevitable task of organizing against an Obama presidency vastly more difficult.

The world of finance has accumulated a gigantic mass of fictitious capital that does very little to improve the human condition and the preservation of the environment.

– from “Mad Finance Must Not Rule Us,” an open letter from former German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt, five former European prime ministers, two former presidents of the European Commission, and five former economics or finance ministers, published in Le Monde (Paris), May 21, 2008.

The Mother of All Bubbles

The same corporate forces that brought us one gargantuan financial bubble after another, each more destructive than the last, also surround the United States in a semi-sealed information bubble, impervious to facts that are inconsistent with the corporate narrative. Thus, few Americans outside the marginalized Left were even vaguely aware of what Europe’s most distinguished social democratic politicians were shouting at the top of their lungs: a huge bubble of “fictitious capital” in the form of “derivatives” and other complex instruments “notionally” valued at $500 to $750 trillion menaced the world — and especially the US — economy. Schmidt and his colleagues warned that the West must not succumb to “rule” by this Mad — fictitious! — Capital, which “represents 15 times the gross domestic product (GDP) of all countries” – for, “when everything is for sale, social cohesion disintegrates and the system collapses.”

Just four months later, the “fictitious capital” bubble has definitively burst, the system collapsed, but corporate henchmen brazenly bum-rush the populace into accepting direct and absolute “rule” by the corporate El Cid, Henry Paulson, Secretary of the Treasury and former warlord of the Wall Street marauder, Goldman Sachs. The sheer brutality and arrogance of Paulson’s grasp for powers unfettered by any Earthly Entity – powers greater than “even the president enjoys,” said one shocked economist – mimics the bank robber’s deployment of instantaneous terror to demoralize and cow customers and tellers. “Down on the floor! Shut up! Give me all the money!” No time or presence of mind to do anything but accept the inevitable.

The criminals relentlessly press their advantage, aided by the enveloping information bubble that has rendered Americans wholly unprepared for their Night of the Living Dead, in which the denizens of deceased corporations rise from the rubble of their socially destructive rampage to put the bite on the still-living and infect the entire society with their stinking morbidity.

There is no organized opposition within the two business parties to the Wall Street Extortionists; no alternative proposition that refuses to accept the centrality — the absolute indispensability — of the “banksters” to the resuscitation of a “system” they have already killed and eaten. Instead, the Democrats and Republicans want to give the bandits $700 billion to try to blow their balloon up again, wipe off the guts and gore, and emerge from the dead. Then they’ll extort $300 billion more.

In the process, the business parties will kill off what’s left of the productive part of the US economy. The only sane course is for the public sector to embrace its de facto stewardship of productive society, as the only big economic engine still running — a captaincy already bought and paid for in the bailouts already undertaken.

Under no circumstances should the public attempt to re-inflate the housing bubble, although no feasible efforts should be spared to alleviate the misery inflicted on home buyers (and renters) by the predators of Wall Street, now (and hopefully forever) deceased.

Menaces to Society

Wall Street, meaning finance capital, is currently dead in the sense that it is incapable of organizing non-fictitious money in ways that can even sustain itself, much less promote productive economic value and growth. Its incessant bubble making is a symptom of finance capital’s terminal state. No longer capable of meeting investor demands for ever-increasing rates of return in anything remotely resembling productive ways, the Lords of Capital conspire (yes, every board meeting is a conspiracy) to artificially raise the “value” of…anything! (Remember Helmut Schmidt’s admonition, that “when everything is for sale, social cohesion disintegrates and the system collapses.”) In manipulating land and housing prices ever upward, the banksters multiplied the price of property almost by fiat, reaping huge benefits while inflicting society with grotesque housing affordability problems and spiraling debt. Then the banksters bundled mortgages and all kinds of other debts as money, to feed the mega-bubble that grew to “15 times the gross domestic product (GDP) of all countries [$750 trillion, compared to the Global Domestic Product of only $50 trillion],” as Schmidt reported.

It is important to understand that the Mother of All Bubbles is comprised of a universe of derivatives and other trickster finance exotica. Subprime mortgages, although a big problem in the US, can only represent a small fraction of a bubble-construct so galactic in notional size it dwarfs the value of the puny efforts of every living human being to supply actual goods and services to the planet. The US subprime crisis provided an early warning of the much larger bubble’s existence — a global menace that compelled Schmidt and his fellow social democrats to sound the alarm. But US banksters and their political servants persist in leading the public to believe that the crisis is largely limited to mortgages, and can be overcome on that discreet scale and ground. It’s a lie. The financial crisis became acute when capital institutions stopped buying each other’s exotic instruments, whatever was bundled inside.

It is “notional” (or fictitious) money as a general category of curse, not just bundled bad mortgages, that choked the system. And a measly one trillion Federal Reserve dollars can do nothing but disappear when deployed against the humongous $500-$750 trillion dollar Mama Bubble. The bankster’s criminal enterprise will still be dead — that is, incapable of acting as an engine of productive growth — but the U.S. public sector will have, as Barack Obama put it, Tuesday, “shot its last bullet.” At that point, the country will have difficulty saving itself, while the bankers will have spent a cool trillion in ways designed to serve themselves in their next lives.

Nature of the Beast

John McCain and Barack Obama now rage in much the same words about Wall Street “greed” and “corruption” as the fountains of failure — as if the core imperatives of the investment banking system did not dictate executive behavior. Finance capital’s refusal to invest in productive, socially useful enterprise is rooted in the corporate capitalist necessity to realize ever-increasing rates of return. Ultimately, they must be bribed by the public sector to engage in any useful project. As parasites that produce nothing, they (quite logically) attempt to suck up and absorb every public dollar in sight, while constantly working to weaken the public sector’s ability to perform its legitimate functions.

Why, then, should anyone be surprised when Goldman Sachs alumnus Henry Paulson demands the last drop of blood — the “last (trillion dollar) bullet” — from the American public, and dares to attach dictatorial terms to his acceptance of the money? It is the nature of the bankster beast to manipulate political and market conditions to achieve unfair advantage – and the nature of the multinational corporation to be devoid of national loyalties.

If We The People must bet our futures on schemes to revive productive economic activity, then let us bet on our collective selves, rather than on the thieving bankers who are, in any case, no more useful to society at this juncture than an unburied body. With the Federal Reserve now the lender and investor of last resort, progressives should welcome the people’s technical ownership of mechanisms for growth, and fight to make The Fed responsive in fact to the development needs of the larger society. As Green Party presidential candidate Cynthia McKinney has declared:

This means that the people are becoming the owners of the primary instruments of U.S. capital and finance. This now means that the people have a say in how these instruments are to be used and what their priorities ought to be. The people should now have more say in how their tax dollars are spent and what the priorities of government and the public sector must be. We the people must now set our demands to ensure and promote the public good.

In place of the of the self-serving bankers’ moribund capital formation mechanisms, why not “seize the time,” as McKinney urges, to push for a public mega-development corporation, funded in amounts rivaling that which the banksters are attempting to steal. “The Federal Reserve should operate in the interests of the U.S. taxpayer and not the interests of the private, international bankers that it currently represents,” said the former Georgia congresswoman. “This, of course means that the Federal Reserve…must undergo a fundamental ownership and mission change.”

Let us break, fully and finally, with the rule of “Mad Finance and Fictitious Capital.”

The biggest theft of the public airwaves in US history is nearly complete, a crime perpetrated in semi-secret that transfers a brand new universe of the digital broadcast spectrum into the possession of wholly undeserving corporations. As a result Blacks, other minorities, unions, community organizations and all other non-rich societal stakeholders may be shut out of the main streams of television for the foreseeable future.

The Congressional Black Caucus and most of what passes for African American “leadership” have done virtually nothing to thwart the scheme to gift corporate media four high-quality digital TV channels for every single full-power channel license they currently hold. Where science has made possible a new age of programming possibilities — a chance, finally, to create islands and archipelagos of meaningful news, information and cultural TV programming that serves and reaches all the people — corporate-bought politicians have snatched away the prize. Acting as agents of the broadcasting industry, rather than representatives of the people, Congress awarded the already filthy rich a digital TV bonanza valued at $80 billion. It is an unearned gift of a priceless resource made possible by digital technology’s capacity to deliver far more information than analog technology. The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is overseeing the mega-theft.

Ironically, corporate media, already in possession of 1,700 highly profitable, full-power TV channels, doesn’t know what to do with its 5,100-channel windfall. But the industry is united in its determination to keep the channels out of anyone else’s hands. Such is the nature of monopolies.

This historically unprecedented heist of the airwaves has been hidden in plain sight. By now, everyone that owns a television set knows that something big will happen early next year, that viewers who are not hooked up to cable or already own a digital converter box might find themselves without a TV signal when stations shut down their analog broadcasts and switch to digital, on February 17. Far fewer people are aware that the digital changeover will multiply the number of broadcast channels four-fold. And most Americans will be totally shocked to learn that these thousands of additional channels have already been given away — stolen, really — further enriching the corporations that have turned American commercial TV into a “vast wasteland.”

Daylight Robbery

The women of the Harlem Consumer Education Council, gathered last week in a meeting room of the massive Church of the Intercession, at 155th Street and Broadway, certainly had no idea they were being robbed of the possibility of seeing their lives and organizing activities reflected through a vastly expanded array of digital New York City TV channels. They were vaguely aware of the (inadequately funded) campaign to inform consumers about coupons available for digital conversion. But only the council leadership, veteran organizers Florence Rice and Marjorie Moore, knew anything about the broader outlines of the digital transition – possibly the biggest public rip-off since the Congress conspired to grant millions of acres to the railroad barons. And Rice and Moore had only learned about the scheme through Bruce Dixon’s June 11 article in Black Agenda Report, “Grand Theft Digital: How Corporate Broadcasters are Hijacking Digital TV.”

“For more than a decade they have kept the public misinformed about the most important development in TV since the first commercial broadcast, in 1941.”

The broadcasting industry and its servile accomplice, the FCC, are committing daylight robbery. In the public arena, the conspirators educate consumers on the technical aspects of the digital changeover. At the same time, they are engaged in a conspiracy of silence about the ownership and obligations of the new digital TV regime.

The thieves have been spectacularly successful. For more than a decade they have kept the public out of the loop — purposely misinformed — about the most important development in TV since the first commercial broadcast, in 1941. The official FCC website on the digital transition, DTV.gov, claims to contain “What you need to know about DTV.” Yet there is not a word to explain how and why the same corporations that controlled the airwaves before the transition are to be enriched with 5,100 new channels. Nor is there any discussion of the corporate license holders’ obligations to the public. The FCC and the station owners think the public doesn’t “need to know” about such matters, which might lead to questions like, “Why wasn’t the citizenry given an opportunity to decide how they would like to use the new channels?”

Unearned Resource

Everyone in the broadcast business has known since the mid-Nineties that the digital transition was inevitable. Big Media was, however, anything but eager to take on the responsibility of additional channels: Channel 2.1, Channel 2.2, Channel 2.3, Channel 2.4. Back then – and now – commercial TV owners viewed the prospect of quadrupling their channels as more of an imposition than an opportunity. From an advertising standpoint, the industry felt it had nothing to gain from taking control of so many new channels. Audiences don’t grow when new channels are added; they fracture. Corporate broadcasters would much prefer to preserve the “general audience” approach to television — bland content aimed at huge numbers of people — than be compelled to create program content targeting much slimmer demographic slices. Additional channels were extraneous and potentially costly, according to their business model.

But the digital future could not be avoided. What would be circumvented was public interference in the disposition of the new stations. As far as Big Media were concerned, the only thing worse than being burdened with thousands of new channels, each of them begging for programming dollars, was the prospect of others getting possession of the resource. The industry’s strategy, slavishly implemented by the FCC, illuminates how monopoly capitalists actively frustrate scientific advances that threaten existing business models. Corporate media compelled the Congress and FCC to structure the transition so that current owners would inherit three additional channels for each license they held, with no obligations to the public as to the channels’ content. Home shopping network clones outsourced weather maps — whatever the licensee chooses to splash on the screen is his business. The great channel expansion made possible by science — humanity’s common patrimony — would be contained and rendered useless.

The Dream Derailed

As various U.S. media and technical organizations gradually reached agreement on standards for digital television in the late Nineties (the Americans lagged behind Europe and, especially, Japan in this regard), it became apparent that the multiplication of channels could usher in a brand new day for ethnic (and political) minorities in television. Corporate television had always defended the “general market” — a euphemism for “white” — character of its programming, including its news orientation, as necessitated by the limited number of television frequencies. Minority-oriented programming was better suited for radio, we were told, where there were plenty of places on the dial.

Suddenly, with digital transmission, the television spectrum promised to become as accommodating to minorities as the radio spectrum. Cities with six or seven full-power stations would be transformed into 24- or 28-channel markets. Surely, at least a few of these new channels in scores of markets would, based on local market forces, cater to Blacks! It seemed that the digital television business model could one day soon resemble the radio model, with multiple Black-oriented stations in markets with significant African American populations. The demand for informational and cultural content for these outlets could fuel a renaissance in Black creative and political expression.

For once, the “free market” might work in African Americans’ favor, since the same logic that led to ethnic segmenting of radio markets should also apply to an expanded television channel universe — especially with the rapid fall in equipment costs. One could easily envision at least a hundred Black-oriented TV channels throughout the nation.

But of course, monopolies abhor “free” markets; their entire purpose is to cage and destroy them. The FCC is a captive of broadcasting monopolists, who instructed their federal minions to deliver the new channels to the old masters — as if all products of science and technology belong to them, as a right.

By 1999, a coalition of civil rights and public interest groups were demanding hearings to establish a “digital public interest standard” to govern the new channels. These groups included People for Better TV, Consumer Federation of America, American Academy of Pediatrics, U.S. Catholic Conference, NAACP, Civil Rights Forum on Communications Policy, National Organization for Women, National Association of the Deaf, Project on Media Ownership, and League of United Latin American Citizens. However, nothing resembling full hearings on the obligations to the public of digital channel license holders ever occurred – much less a national conversation on who should receive those licenses.

The corporate media were too powerful, the FCC too devious, and civil rights groups too weak and beholden to corporations. Only supporters of children’s programming succeeded in winning concessions on advertising and a requirement of three hours per week of children’s shows on each of the new channels. Blacks and other minorities got nothing.

In 2005, 15 members of the Congressional Black Caucus (CBC) sent a letter to powerful committee chairmen, requesting the setting aside of portions of the outgoing analog TV spectrum for bids by minority entrepreneurs. The CBC members made no requests regarding the public obligations of the new digital television spectrum — thus revealing that they cared more about making a couple of Black businessmen into millionaires than for putting some democracy into the operations of the television system that the entire nation would soon be watching.

Why was the CBC so reluctance to demand elementary fairness in the disposition of 5,100 new channels? The next year, 2006, told the tale. Two-thirds of the Black Caucus sided with the telecom companies to vote for the infamous COPE Act, which would have rolled back Black gains in cable TV access and endangered Internet neutrality. The CBC’s support for the telecom giants was proportionately greater than among Democrats as a whole. The Black Caucus showed itself to be largely in Big Telecom’s pocket.

In 2007, the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights (LCCR) took the lead in pressing for some semblance of public accountability in digital TV. Mark Lloyd, writing for the Center for American Progress, noted that the FCC and the Bush administration constantly spoke of the “benefits” that would accrue from the corporate-owned digital regime that was being established:

“Yet the biggest problem with the transition to digital television in the United States…is that the Federal Communications Commission under the Bush administration has locked the public out of the process of determining what those benefits might be. What’s more, yesteryear’s Republican-controlled Congress set the rules regarding this transition. Thus the public interest obligations of digital broadcasters remain undefined and insufficient money has been set aside for the digital conversion. Both problems need to be addressed by Congress this year.”

“The FCC,” said Lloyd, “has yet to reopen the proceeding begun in 1999 to define the public interest obligations of digital broadcasters.”

The FCC is determined to keep the new channels in the old corporate family. The single “concession” granted by FCC Chairman Kevin Martin, last year, was to “encourage” broadcasters to lease time on stations’ digital channels to “new entrants in the broadcast area” — meaning, those who have been shut out of the digital cornucopia by Chairman Martin and his corporate friends. The Gannett Company and Media General Inc., corporations that own TV stations and newspapers, promptly responded to Martin’s “trial balloon” by offering to support leasing time to minorities and women if restrictions were lifted on their ability to buy more TV stations. Imagine the gall of these corporate blackmailers. Having used their political and economic power to take possession of digital channels they have done absolutely nothing to earn, they demand more privileges in return for allowing minorities and women the honor of paying them rent!

However, GOP malice, FCC deviousness and corporate media greed do not excuse Black capitulation to Big Media. There has been no sustained African American resistance to corporate Grand Theft Digital. Instead, a Who’s Who of Black and Latino organizations have joined with the Titans of monopoly broadcasting to shift all attention to making sure that everyone is equipped to consume the digital television experience, on February 17, 2009. This consumer project is, of course, a matter of simple justice and of great importance to the 20 percent of the public that is in danger of losing TV reception, entirely. But there is no reason to treat the digital TV transition as a simple consumer issue while abjectly abandoning the arena of media democracy. Much of so-called Black leadership is collaborating with the same corporations that are busy stealing 5,100 of the people’s channels.

Don’t Steal Anything Small

Two weeks ago, the FCC held hearings in Rep. Edolphus Towns’ district, in Brooklyn. The Black Congressman expressed no irritation at corporate theft of the digital TV spectrum. Instead, his greatest fear was petty criminals. “There is no shortage of swindlers willing to capitalize on the confusion and fears that could surround the DTV transition,” said Towns. “With vulnerable populations as their main prey, people are already scheming to dupe people into the purchase of unneeded televisions or converter boxes or scheming to siphon coupons from the limited supply that is supposed to be for people who really need it.”

All this is, of course, quite true, and requires vigorous government and community attention. But Rep. Towns would rather rail against ghetto converter box swindlers than offend the corporate criminals who are stealing $80 billion worth of TV spectrum. Unfortunately, Towns’s behavior is the norm in the CBC, which as a body is utterly incapable of confronting Power.

Almost as an afterthought, the FCC decided to do a “test” roll-out of the new digital regime in one city, on September 8. They chose Wilmington, North Carolina, a town with a population of about 100,000, one-quarter Black. Wilmington has no Black-oriented radio station, and no Black college. The head of the local NAACP knew nothing about the FCC’s “test” when telephoned by BAR in June. The state NAACP chief was only slightly better informed. Clearly, FCC Chairman Martin knows how to pick his test locations — to avoid concentrations of organized minorities and other stakeholders who might demand media democracy.

But then, New York City these days seems no better organized than Wilmington.

There is one bright spot on the horizon. Corporate TV still has no idea what to do with the thousands of channels it has stolen. They have no business plan to exploit their plundered booty. Program-wise, the transition should be a disaster, a bleak digital expanse of uselessness and waste. The shock may finally bring home the enormity of the crime, and cause the public to awaken to the challenge — to take possession of the pilfered spaces and fill them with programming that means something.

Obama chuckled last week at the very thought of having been “tagged as being on the Left” — and then unceremoniously jettisoned those Leftists that had taken it upon themselves to claim him as one of their own. In case “the Left” didn’t get the message, Obama wrapped the insulting rejection in a Zanesville, Ohio speech announcing his “faith-based” appeal to Reagan Democrats and Bush Republicans.

But the most important reason that “Progressives for Obama” should have never existed is its utter lack of content. Leftists attempted to impose themselves on an electoral campaign where they were not wanted, and yet persisted in identifying with an organization over which they had no control, no ability to provide content. It was a game of make-believe that has run its illogical course. Frankly, the project can also be seen as an act of opportunism, an attempt to graft the Left onto a corporate campaign that at some point must eject it like a foreign body.

If it were just that lonely Lefties, tired of fighting in a thoroughly corporate-saturated political culture, simply wanted to hitch a ride with the younger Obamite crowd, they might be forgiven. But these veteran progressives deployed their reputations to spread falsehoods that they knew to be untrue. They provided a veneer of progressive credibility to a candidate who was nothing of the kind.

We were subjected to ideological nonsense such as: the Obama campaign is inherently progressive because it has excited millions of new potential voters. Therefore, progressives must publicly identify with Obama, take care to be seen as allies, and never do or say anything that might harm his candidacy. We were even told that the excitement surrounding Obama constituted a “movement.” But of course, there was never a social movement that was devoid of content, and excitement is a politically neutral quality that can be generated by the Left or the Right — or in wholly apolitical circumstances.

If popularity and excitement are hallmarks of progressivism, then “American Idol” is a valuable progressive institution. (In reality, it is a great diversion, and to that extent, harmful.)

This illusionary progressivism — as vapid as the candidate, himself — posits a movement without regard to content, objective direction, or a even simple analysis of who profits and who pays the campaign’s bills and determines its ultimate goals and priorities.

Remember that Hip Hop was also called a “movement” — and some continue to insist that it still is. It is true that Hip Hop contained a great deal of progressive political content during the heyday of the late Eighties-early Nineties, before the major labels bought out the independents. Today, commercial Hip Hop is saturated with anti-social lyrics and themes; its content is overwhelmingly non-progressive, although the musical form remains much the same as during the genre’s progressive era. Content is everything.

What “Progressives for Obama” have collectively done, is to allow Obama to “pass” for what he is not: a progressive. It was a foolish project from the start, since it required the candidate’s ongoing collaboration. How could the organizers have imagined that a politician like Obama, who takes such great care to speak the language of ambiguity (a form of lying), would feel an obligation to protect progressives from ultimate embarrassment of their own making?

Bill Fletcher, the former TransAfrica president and current executive editor of BlackCommentator.com, was a founder of “Progressives for Obama.” Although Fletcher declared that he was not an Obama supporter on January 17 of this year, by March 24 he and others were hallucinating a “movement.”

“Even though it is candidate-centered, there is no doubt that the campaign is a social movement, one greater than the candidate himself ever imagined.”

If the candidate isn’t aware if the nature of the “movement” he is leading, then who is? If the “movement” that Obama is supposedly at the head of is essentially “progressive,” does that mean Obama is a closet progressive — so closeted it is a secret to himself? Or are there progressive Rasputins furtively whispering progressive thoughts in the ears of the candidate and his key people?

Apparently, all that is necessary to have a movement, is to declare one.

Tom Hayden, another “Progressives for Obama” founder, also imagines a kind of donut movement, a progressive circle with a non-progressive middle, where the candidate stands:

“I first endorsed Obama because of the nature of the movement supporting him, not his particular stands on issues. The excitement among African-Americans and young people, the audacity of their hope, still holds the promise of a new era of social activism. The force of their rising expectations, I believe, could pressure a President Obama in a progressive direction and also energize a new wave of social movements.”

Nothing of that nature will occur, because Hayden and other progressives are not organizing to make it occur. They are too concerned with remaining “for” Obama. Not only are Hayden’s and Fletcher’s peculiar “movements” without political content – they emerge like magic, requiring none of the hard work of organizing.

And just how were those popular “rising expectations” that Hayden speaks of supposed to express themselves? Progressives waited until it was far too late to bring these “expectations” – to whatever extent they exist — to bear on the candidate. Obama coasted through the primaries with virtually no dissent from his loyal progressives, and now sees his way clear to publicly dismiss them, so as to never again be “tagged as being on the Left.”

Obama now challenges his critics on the Left to go back and read his previous policy pronouncements. He is on firm ground, here. The folks who were misreading his Iraq, NAFTA and other positions were largely progressives who were pretending that Obama was one of them. Writers such as Paul Street, Kevin Alexander Gray and our own BAR crew have understood Obama all along: that he is an imperialist, a corporatist, and opposes measures designed to redress specific Black grievances in the U.S. society. It is the “Progressives for Obama” who have tended to distort his record.

Is Obama a liar? Of course he is. As a gifted orator, a superb word-smith, Obama’s slickness is purposeful — he means to fool people! However, so did many of the progressives that supported Obama, knowing perfectly well that his carefully chosen words were designed to hide more than they revealed. Such progressives lent their reputations to discourage criticism of Obama from other Leftists, or from the “expectant” rank and file. Therefore, they are guilty of offenses against truth.

For straight language and unambiguously progressive politics, support Cynthia McKinney, who is expected to win the Green Party presidential nomination, this week in Chicago. There is little chance that the courageous former congresswoman from Georgia will win the White House, but she won’t lie to you, and from her truly progressive campaign a real “movement” may grow.

We have to bring the war in Iraq to a respectable, responsible and honorable end," said Barack Obama, sharing a platform with Hillary Clinton in Unity,
New Hampshire, last week.  The list of qualifiers and impediments to a quick exit from Iraq lengthens with each Obama lurch to the Right. The closer the Illinois senator gets to the White House, the farther he projects the Iraq occupation into a future just as murky as that envisioned by George Bush and John McCain. In Obama's endlessly conditional world, withdrawal from Iraq must be done "responsibly" — meaning, in actuality, that the U.S. must retain the power to keep the Iraqis "responsive" to American military, economic and political demands. A U.S. military pullout (of who knows how many troops, since Obama has always been elusive on the question) must be "honorable" — meaning, it should not give the appearance of weakness or admission of criminality. Most important, the U.S. must emerge from the withdrawal (or reduction, or draw-down, or other conjure-word) in a position of "respect" — a total impossibility, unless respect actually means evoking terror throughout the neighborhood at the very thought of ever again provoking the Americans into violating the laws of modern civilization.

Such is the endless elasticity of terms like "peace" and "withdrawal" when mouthed by Barack Obama, a master of bait-and-switch, a game he apparently believes he can play indefinitely on the people of the United States and the planet. The general debasement of language in the U.S. political culture — a degeneration that devalues meaning and facts, cause and effect, in favor of bells, whistles, hype and prettily-packaged but hollow "hope" — provides a perfect soundstage for Obama's politics of vapidity, in which no term has reliable, lasting definition. Only in a flim-flam market culture, in which old products are packaged as "new and improved" and senile reactionary farts like Ronald Reagan are deemed "revolutionaries," could Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and Democratic congressional leadership masquerade as proponents of peace == even as virtually the entire senatorial Party endorses another $162.5 billion for Iraq-Afghanistan war funding.

Obama is confident he can retain the "peace candidate" label while erecting successive obstacles to actual, physical withdrawal from Iraq, and while simultaneously pledging to add 92,000 troops to the U.S. Armed Forces in order "to fight two wars and defend our homeland." His confidence is well-placed, not just because he is the Big Money Candidate in the current historical shift of corporate dollars from Republicans to Democrats — money that buys a mass version of reality — but because generations of two-party homogenized gibberish has rendered millions of Americans incapable of distinguishing between fact and fantasy, between waging war and pursuing peace.

The true voices of peace speak clearly, in simple language. "The U.S. should withdraw all troops and mercenaries from Iraq in as orderly a fashion as possible," says former Georgia congresswoman Cynthia McKinney, candidate for the Green Party's presidential nomination. "This withdrawal should be quickly accomplished, since the troops and the equipment were all pre-positioned in the area to start with, at the start of the invasion."

No flim-flam, no equivocations, no inventing of excuses to prolong the crime against peace (a Nuremburg capital offense). McKinney speaks as both a former U.S. Representative and a movement activist, one of the architects of the Reconstruction Party's Power to the People Platform, which declares:

We need an end to all wars and occupations by U.S. forces, including in Iraq and Afghanistan. We need an immediate cessation of funding for war. We need prosecution for all individuals guilty of violating the law, including having committed or authorized crimes against humanity, crimes against the peace, torture, or war crimes. We need a complete renunciation of the pre-emptive war doctrine. We need an end to all wars and war's utility. We need to dismantle the apparatus that implements schemes of regime change around the world, and that instead assists in self-determination of all peoples.

The platform on which McKinney runs is straightforward, eminently understandable, and in conformance with the substance and spirit of international law. It is what Barack Obama used to pretend to say, in front of progressive audiences, only without his mitigating language designed for ease of reversal — commonly called flip-flop, but more accurately, betrayal — terms that ultimately smother peace in a pillow of words like "respectable, responsible and honorable."

This is how Obama uses his impressive language skills: to lure constituencies that seek peace into the maelstroms of war; to assault the integrity of language itself with his relentless tinkering with meanings, until finally, his original peaceful promises turn into their warlike opposites.

Obama’s modus operandi is consistent and, especially after his recent flurry of policy reversals, transparent to all who care to observe him dispassionately. He is a word-hustler, a slickster, a politician/actor who has always been eager to serve the global aims of the very rich. That's why, back in the summer of 2003, while a candidate for the Illinois Democratic U.S. senatorial nomination, he had to be pressured (by Bruce Dixon and me) to have his name removed from the corporatist Democratic Leadership Council membership list. And that's why, five years later, he stripped off his anti-NAFTA clothing to announce on CNBC, the businessman's cable source: "Look. I am a pro-growth, free-market guy. I love the market."

As Naomi Klein wrote in "Obama's Chicago Boys" (June 14, The Nation), Obama "is thoroughly embedded in the mind-set known as the Chicago School," established by Ronald Reagan's favorite economist, Milton Friedman, at the University of Chicago, where Obama taught constitutional law for ten years. Obama's chief economic adviser, Austan Goolsbee, is on the faculty. It was Goolsbee who, back in February, urged the rightwing Canadian government not to pay too much attention to Obama's campaign critiques of NAFTA, explaining that the candidate's rhetoric was "more reflective of political maneuvering than policy."

Goolsby spoke the truth. Obama has maneuvered himself out of the anti-NAFTA camp, entirely. As he told Nina Easton of Fortune, the quintessential ruling class magazine:

"Sometimes during campaigns the rhetoric gets overheated and amplified," he conceded, after I reminded him that he had called NAFTA "devastating" and "a big mistake," despite nonpartisan studies concluding that the trade zone has had a mild, positive effect on the U.S. economy.

Does that mean his rhetoric was overheated and amplified? "Politicians are always guilty of that, and I don't exempt myself," he answered.

Obama used to say he would reexamine NAFTA in its totality. Now he says, "I'm not a big believer in doing things unilaterally." He has capitulated.

But there is an unwavering progressive in the race. "The  practical effect of NAFTA is that it is an anti-union policy," says Green candidate Cynthia McKinney. "Why US unions would support a political party [the Democrats] that has decisively contributed to their own demise, is beyond me.  I support the international right to unionize.  My legislation, the Corporate Responsibility Act and the TRUTH Act sought to compel US corporations operating abroad to abide by U.S. labor, environmental standards, thereby lifting up workers in other parts of the world, not exploiting them.  The Reconstruction Movement Draft Manifesto also calls for repeal of Taft Hartley, to strengthen workers' rights in this country."

McKinney cites the Power to the People Platform: "We need to promote and enact laws for U.S. corporations that keep labor standards high at home and raise them abroad. Toward that end, it is clear that we need a repeal of NAFTA, CAFTA, the Caribbean FTA, and the U.S.-Peru FTA and justice for immigrant workers, including an end to the guest-worker program riddled with abuses."

Both Black and white progressives deliberately made themselves irrelevant to the Democratic campaign by failing to challenge Obama before and during the primary season. Now there is one remaining chance to put a healthy fear into Obama and to help build a Black-led movement that will fight for progressive values after the election is over: solidarity with Cynthia McKinney.

Surely no one with a brain any longer believes that Obama is a closet progressive, or even a genuine liberal. Last month he finally confessed that Black Agenda Report has been right about him all the time: he's Hillary Clinton's political clone "If you look at my positions and Senator Clinton's, there's not a lot of difference, which is why it's so easy for advisers, senior advisers of Senator Clinton, to support my candidacy," said Obama, unveiling his roster of national security advisors.

And what a "Back to the Future" crew of Bill Clinton and Bush #1 retrograde hacks he has chosen! Obama's core group of foreign policy gurus is non-change personified — U.S. imperialism from the pre-Bush #2 era in the flesh. (See "Background of Obama's Foreign Policy Group," Institute for
Public Accuracy.) Endless war is written on their faces. Progressives should have taken Obama seriously when he announced to everyone who would listen, back in March, "The truth is that my foreign policy is actually a return to the traditional, bipartisan, realistic foreign policy of George Bush's father, John F. Kennedy, of in some ways Ronald Reagan."

Obama had the gall to praise Reagan and the elder Bush while on a "Stand for Change" bus tour.

Cynthia McKinney offers real change — peace for a change.

"The United States should and must engage the world, but not in empire, not in military," said McKinney, who was first elected to the U.S. Congress from a suburban Atlanta district in 1992. "Ninety percent of the US security budget is dedicated to some military engagement with the world.  The United States should stop arming factions, supporting factions, new elections should be held [in Iraq] with international advisors, and the "coalition of the willing" should work with the United Nations to disarm and restore to the extent possible the Iraqi civil sector. 

The Reconstruction Draft Manifesto calls for an end to US militarism and the establishment of a Department of Peace by restructuring the US State Department."

So it does. The manifesto is a comprehensive movement document, a basis for political action beyond the narrow confines of electoral contests. "Sadly," says the manifesto, "the Bush-Pelosi war policy is a formula for endless global conflict, deterioration of the rule of law among nations, and growing impoverishment, indebtedness and evisceration of civil liberties at home."

More and more each day, "the Bush-Pelosi war policy" is also Barack Obama's policy, as further evidenced by his about-face on Bush spying on U.S. citizens with the aid of U.S. telecom companies.

In going the extra, unrequested mile for AIPAC, the Israel lobby, Obama moved to the Right of every U.S. president in history. Obama's blustering vow that Jerusalem will remain forever an "undivided" "Jewish" city would lock the U.S. into a position unacceptable to every Arab or Muslim government on Earth. His bellicosity regarding Iran differs from John McCain's, only in that Obama would theoretically deign to hold talks with Iranians "at a time and place of my choosing," while refusing to rule out a preemptive strike.

Every Obama foreign policy instinct seems to support the "special" and unlimited "relationship" with Israel, robust defense of American Manifest Destiny, ever-increasing war expenditures, and inherent supra-national, extra-legal U.S. rights — formulas for planetary doom. On not one major foreign policy front does Obama any longer advocate positions consistent with peaceful planetary development. Not one!

It’s time for people claiming to be progressives who supported Obama, to accept that they were bamboozled by a champion slickster. Actually, that's putting the best face on the situation, since most of Obama's progressive credentials were simply wished into existence by folks who were tired of even pretending to fight. Obama now dares to drop all pretense of progressivism, trusting that there will be no ramifications on the Left, especially among the otherwise most dependable progressive constituency, African Americans.

Will the next few weeks and months prove Obama right? Cynthia McKinney deserves Black and Left support, while Obama manifestly does not.

McKinney, whose last act in Congress was to submit articles of impeachment against George Bush in 2006; who courageously questioned the White House version of events before and after September 11, 2001; who acted as a one-person conscience of the House Armed Services Committee, speaking out against corporate and military mega-theft under both Clinton and Bush; who has with amazing consistency always placed principle above her own personal and electoral fortunes, is at this juncture in history the only vehicle through which progressives can both register their outrage at Obama and begin the process of rebuilding a mass, Black-led movement for real social change. (Ralph Nader cannot, for reasons of temperament and race, achieve such dual purposes.)

On Venezuela, the difference between Obama and McCain is narrow, indeed: Obama has reflexively included popularly (and repeatedly) elected President Hugo Chavez among the world's "rogue" leaders, deriding his "predictable yet perilous mix of anti-American rhetoric, authoritarian government, and checkbook diplomacy," while McCain's pitiful verbal skills
at first allowed him only to sputter that Chavez is "wacko." More recently, McCain vowed to "work to impede Venezuela and Bolivia from following the same path of failure that Castro followed in Cuba." McCain criticized Obama for, again, being theoretically prepared to meet with Chavez. Not to be outdone, Obama held a match to the region, condoning the Colombian narco-state's armed intrusion into the territory of Ecuador, a nation friendly to Venezuela.

McKinney’s position on the region is as follows:

It is totally irresponsible to call Hugo Chavez an ‘oil tyrant' as published some time ago.  Totally irresponsible to support the violation of the territorial integrity of Ecuador,
a country that has signaled its desire to join the framework for peace and against destabilization by pulling out of the school of the Americas…  I pledge untiring support for self-determination in Bolivia, wracked now by a secessionist-type ‘autonomy' movement, probably fomented outside Bolivia’s borders.

Obama wholeheartedly backs the militarization of Africa through the new U.S. Africa Command, AFRICOM. "There will be situations that require the United States to work with its partners in Africa to fight terrorism with lethal force. Having a unified command operating in Africa will facilitate this action," said Obama.

McKinney has acted as a sentinel for Africa, on guard against U.S. recolonization of the continent. She correctly regards AFRICOM as a threat to the region. "More than likely, this force will be used in just the same way as Plan Colombia is used — to police dissent and punish the innocent solely for pecuniary reasons.  The last thing Africa needs is AFRICOM, U.S. soldiers, or a School of the Americas-type relationship with Africa."

When Obama is not carrying imperial water in the bullying of weaker nations, he is silent on burning global issues — especially those of keen interest to African Americans.

The December 2006 U.S.-instigated Ethiopian invasion of Somalia, which according to the United Nations created "the worst [and still ongoing] humanitarian crisis in Africa," elicits not a peep from Obama. In fact, the only comments from Obama on Somalia that we have found are his complaints about pictures taken during a trip to his father's homeland, Kenya, depicting Obama in the ceremonial tribal garb of the overwhelming Muslim Somalis.

McKinney has repeatedly denounced the U.S. overthrow of Haiti's elected government in 2004, the kidnapping and exile of President Jean Bertrand Aristide, and Brazil's and the United Nation's role in occupying the country on behalf of the Americans.

Obama's last recorded comments on Haiti, from 2005, were summarized on his Senate web site:

"Obama said he favors a congressional fact-finding mission to Haiti. He said additional aid is needed there, but it must come with strings attached to ensure it is used properly and not to line the pockets of politicians, as happened in his father's native Kenya."

This is apparently all that Obama has to say about the bloody suppression of the Haitian nation by the U.S. and its allies.

There can be no effective reasoning with those African Americans who want only that a member of The Race occupy the Oval Office — no matter the character and politics of that Black individual. But self-described progressives of all races cannot excuse their own docility in the face of Obama’s rightward lunge — especially when there exists one last opportunity to threaten the Democratic nominee-to-be with a backlash against his betrayals of progressive principles — one last chance to affect Obama's behavior before Election Day, November 4, and beyond. Cynthia McKinney has made herself available to the Green Party's convention in Chicago, July 10-12, and will almost surely be their nominee.

If progressives cannot bring themselves to vote honorably, they can at the very least go to McKinney's campaign site and send money. Even a little principled behavior is better than none at all.

Barack Obama, whose disdain for what he calls the “excesses of the 1960s and 1970s” is palpable, seeks to eradicate all vestiges of Black self-determination, root and branch. The Senator has never made a secret of his intentions, dating from his 2004 Democratic National Convention declaration that “there is no Black America,” to his categorical rejection of the Black counter-narrative of American history, as preached by Rev. Jeremiah Wright and understood by most African Americans.

Obama has revealed himself as a rabid nationalist of the standard, white America variety. “I categorically denounce any statement that disparages our great country,” says Obama — which pretty much says it all. The candidate has repeatedly telegraphed his contempt for any worldview that fails to glorify the U.S. rise to global dominance — a ritual that collides instantly with truth as it actually exists, with history as Black people have known it, and with Black aspirations to make their own way in the world unencumbered by the burden of white lies. Obama promises that he will oppose, with all the powers of his office, those who, like Rev. Wright, “use incendiary language to express views that have the potential not only to widen the racial divide, but views that denigrate both the greatness and the goodness of our nation; that rightly offend white and black alike.” (Philadelphia “Race” speech, March 18.)

If Obama were already president, dissidents would have cause to shop for a safehouse or foreign getaway.

Victims as Perpetrators

Clearly, if the United States is inherently good, then Black people and Native Americans must have done something catastrophically wrong to bring down upon themselves such suffering at the hands of the U.S. government – not to mention the sins committed by Vietnamese, Nicaraguans, Angolans and all the other peoples that have gotten in the way of white American Manifest Destiny.

President Obama will wage war against the heresies of deviant worldviews that dare to question America’s moral superiority – as exemplified by Rev. Wright’s “profoundly distorted view of this country — a view that sees white racism as endemic, and that elevates what is wrong with America above all that we know is right with America.”

If racism is merely an aberration in American life, as Obama believes — and which is the greatest concession that general white society is prepared to make to Blacks — then all the fuss about institutional racism, endemic police brutality and such are insults to the “national honor.” Certainly, Obama behaves as if he thinks so. Every manifestation of Black entitlement to self-determination – that is, the right to rely on one’s own people’s collective memory and sense of the truth – must, from Obama’s standpoint, be resisted, denounced and suppressed as “divisive” and, in general, against the national interest.

In order for Obama’s vision of America to be true, most of Black America must be liars, Black self-determination equals treason, and the Sixties era was the Mother of Corruption.

Sixties Transformation

A half-century ago, in a veritable end-of-marathon sprint to self-emancipation, Black Americans not only achieved full legal citizenship within barely the space of a decade, but in the process threw off the chains of subservience to the oppressor’s national historical narrative, the legitimizing mythology of white American Manifest Destiny. Inevitably, and in the glare of a global anti-colonial firestorm, African Americans finally perceived en masse the true nature of the centuries-old crime still-in-progress – that distinct and peculiar monstrosity, U.S. imperialism. Born of the Middle Passage and Pilgrims making bonfires of Pequot Indian women and children, 20th Century U.S. aggression against mainly non-white peoples abroad was inextricably linked to chain gangs and street cop justice at home. African Americans focused their “third eye” that could see across oceans and centuries, a political optic that discerned not just blood kin on The Continent, but peoples on other, distant shores, also victims of Euro-American predation, and equally deserving of Black solidarity.

African American solidarity with continental Africans — and with Vietnamese who “never called me nigger” — grew in tandem with the Black domestic struggle for self-determination: the fight for political rights with which to defend, control and shape the futures of Black communities. It is a truism that those who are engaged in struggle for their own people’s self-determination are most sincerely empathetic towards others seeking liberation — especially when it is understood that the two peoples share a common antagonist. The period loosely defined as The Sixties saw not only unprecedented popular mobilization on domestic issues (10,000 separate demonstrations in 1965, alone, the vast bulk of them “civil rights” related), but soaring Black identification with liberation movements elsewhere in the world. African Americans were preparing themselves to become full fledged citizens of the planet, not just the United States.

The language of self-determination, always a strong current in historical Black political thought, entered the popular Black vocabulary through Malcolm X. “We assert that we Afro-Americans have the right to direct and control our lives, our history, and our future rather than to have our destinies determined by American racists,” declared Malcolm’s Organization of African-American Unity (OAAU), in a document scheduled for release on the day of his assassination, February 21, 1965. “[W]e are determined to rediscover our true African culture, which was crushed and hidden for over four hundred years in order to enslave us and keep us enslaved up to today….”

Self-determination was item number one of the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense Ten-Point Program, promulgated in 1966:

“We Want Freedom. We Want Power To Determine The Destiny Of Our Black Community. We believe that Black people will not be free until we are able to determine our destiny.”

Two years later, 100 Black nationalists in Detroit declared the founding of the Republic of New Africa (RNA), to further Blacks’ entitlement to the full rights of a nation. Following the Nation of Islam’s ideological lead and citing Malcolm X as the “Father of the Black Nation,” the RNA identified five southern states – Mississippi, Louisiana, Alabama, Georgia and South Carolina – as the “Promised Land” for Black Americans.

The embrace of self-determination was not limited to the Black Left and land-seeking nationalists, but resonated throughout Black society, from Black capitalists to Marxists and everyone in between. There can be no doubt that the people who Dr. Martin Luther King was certain would “get to the promised land” were on a conscious, mass journey of self-determination. It was up to Black people to decide precisely where the ultimate destination might be — a question over which Dr. King agonized during the last years of his life. “I think we’ll be integrating into a burning house,” King told entertainer/activist Harry Belafonte, in 1968 — a clear acknowledgement that African Americans were not simply a darker variety of citizens, but a distinct people within the United States. King imagined that Blacks would play the role of firemen in the “American” house — but at any rate, that would be their choice to make.

By definition, the right to self-determination is independent of minority or majority status – otherwise, no such right can exist in the face of white majority power. Therefore, self-determination transcends simple one-man, one-vote rule which, in the United States, affords historically hostile white majorities a permanent veto over Black aspirations. U.S. history has provided ample proof that electoral “democracy” is no cure for institutionalized suppression of racial minorities. With Voting Rights legislation secured by the mid-Sixties and understanding the limits of winner-take-all ballots, African Americans, including Dr. King, insisted on the right of Blacks to exercise effective power over their own lives as Blacks. Naturally, such rights would obtain in the growing number of localities in which Blacks were emerging as majorities. However, the principles of self-determination, as interpreted at the time, demanded that Blacks and others claiming “peoplehood” be entitled to control those resources necessary for the development of their group independent of the majority’s wishes — “rather than to have our destinies determined by American racists,” as Malcolm’s organization put it.

The domestic Black American application of self-determination principles were adapted from United Nations language that states: “All peoples have the right of self-determination. By virtue of that right they freely determine their political status and freely pursue their economic, social and cultural development.”

The UN’s International Covenant on Economic, Cultural and Economic Rights fit the Black liberationist sentiments of The Sixties to a tee. Just as small nations have rights that powerful nations are required to respect, so the Black minority in the United States has the right to speak and act for itself, and to claim a share of the national treasure for itself, regardless of majority claims and sentiments. In a world of evolving standards of civilization, true “democracy” does not allow the big to lord it over the small.

Although there was not to be a land-based Black “nation” within U.S. borders, the core principles of Black self-determination have been largely incorporated into the political outlook and expectations of African Americans, and grudgingly acquiesced to by most whites. Blacks and, later, other minority groupings in white institutions, most notably academia, demanded and received resources based on their standing as Blacks within the larger body. The autonomy of Black political sentiment has, until recently, been at least paid lip-service by whites throughout U.S. society. Indeed, much of what some whites mean-spiritedly call “playing the race card” is simply Black assertion of group rights and prerequisites that should not be curbed by white majorities. Television programs produced by and for Blacks, now nearly extinct, were responses to demands that Black people be allowed to speak for themselves — a right under the umbrella of self-determination. In Democratic Party circles, at least, “the Blacks” cannot appear to be left out of decision making exercises, which usually require the (cosmetic) presence of trustworthy African Americans as a semblance for Black group inclusion. The moral authority of Black caucuses (including that which has been frittered away by the Congressional Black Caucus) is derived from the larger authority of self-determination principles.

Solidarity

The 1960s Black embrace of political self-determination freed African Americans from the burdensome inheritance of United States’ enemies. As Muhammad Ali is said to have declared in 1966, “No Vietnamese ever called me nigger.” Self-determination meant the right to declare solidarity with whomever one chooses, to side with African kin in the struggle for decolonization of the continent while the U.S. thwarted true liberation at every turn; and to identify as friends those who shared status as designated enemies of the U.S. government, abroad.

During the Sixties, it was discovered that African Americans, whose foreign policy opinions had previously been only sporadically surveyed, were more opposed to American military adventures abroad than any other U.S. ethnic group. The basis of Black anti-war sentiment was rooted in, not some vague group pacifism, but the conclusion that Washington is a bully who revels in abusing persons of color (and gets rich doing it). African Americans had amassed centuries of experience as victims of U.S. government policy, treated as foreigners in their own land. Blacks, therefore, harbor the healthiest skepticism about U.S. motives, especially regarding non-white peoples. The right of self-determination, as African Americans understood it, liberated Blacks from any obligation to support Washington’s depredations around the world. Moreover, bonds of solidarity with Africa required active opposition to U.S. foreign policy.

For many Blacks, the “newfound” knowledge of self-determination principles meant, literally, the right to enjoy freedom of speech for the first time! African Americans had always understood that Washington cared as little for the interests of foreign non-whites as it did for “colored” folks at home. Now, they could shout it, without fear of being branded traitors — at least, not by other Black people. By 1967, Dr. Martin Luther King found his true voice and began speaking in what was essentially solidarity with the Vietnamese people.

Two generations later, the contradictions of ailing U.S. imperialism become ever more acute. The United States challenges as never before the rights of smaller nations to manage their own resources and political affairs as they see fit. International law is treated as a dead letter, by corporate Democrats as well as Republicans. Barack Obama is no different — except in the imaginations of his fans.

Obama plans to leave 60-80,000 U.S. troops in Iraq indefinitely, retain the services of many of the 140,000 private mercenaries (contractors) currently in the country, and add 92,000 additional soldiers and Marines to overall U.S. force structures — the same number the Bush regime requested from Congress. Far from being a peace candidate, Obama favors a huge increase in U.S. war-making capacity, in order to fight yet a third war while still mired in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Washington will have no problem finding locations for its new war(s).

Outside of the Middle East, the fault lines run through Africa and Latin America. George Bush has already begun the occupation of the Horn of African under the ruse of “anti-terror,” with Ethiopia’s brutal dictatorship acting as U.S. surrogate. Backed by every military resource of the United States, including the huge American base in Djibouti, the might of U.S. Indian Ocean naval and air power, and with U.S. Special Operations “advisors” deployed down to the company level, Ethiopia in late 2006 crushed the only stable government Somalia has had since 1994. The US-Ethiopian aggression created what United Nations officials describe as the “worst humanitarian situation in Africa” – worse than Darfur.

Barack Obama has had nothing to say about Somalia except to express outrage at his opponents posting pictures of himself dressed up in the garb of a Somali elder, during a visit to neighboring Kenya (Obama’s father’s homeland) several years ago. Suppression of Somali resistance to occupation threatens to destabilize Kenya, with its large Somali population, and Ethiopia, itself, where ethnic Somalis and others are in rebellion against the dictatorship.

It is fair to say that Somalia is the first African war to be tackled by the new American military command, Africom. So widespread is public opposition on the continent, fearing an attempt to re-colonize the region, no country has agreed to host Africom. But Barack Obama fully supports the robust U.S. military presence. “There will be situations that require the United States to work with its partners in Africa to fight terrorism with lethal force,” said Obama. “Having a unified command operating in Africa will facilitate this action.”

Obama’s enthusiasm for swamping Africa in an ever-expanding “war on terror,” is obvious.

On the western shores of the continent, Obama was rumored in early May to have proposed a cease fire in the guerilla war over oil resources in Nigeria’s Niger River delta. The insurgents, who claim the central government excludes delta residents from the benefits of oil production, have also asked former President Jimmy Carter to mediate the dispute. Whether anything comes of either request, it is certain that Nigeria, Africa’s number one oil producer, will always be a leading candidate for Africom intervention. The presence of guerillas in the delta is all the Americans – including Obama, based on his own words – will need to invoke the terror threat.

Venezuela claims that recent explorations confirm that the South American nation has surpassed Saudi Arabia in oil reserves. Barack Obama is nearly as bellicose as John McCain when it comes to Venezuela’s “rogue” leader, President Hugo Chavez, a hugely popular politician who was fairly elected three times under the watchful eyes of international observers. But democratic credentials don’t matter to American politicians anxious to prove they can play warmonger with the meanest blowhards in the pack.

Obama growls about bringing sanctions against Venezuela for allegedly undermining its neighbor, Colombia, Washington’s narco-death squad-client-state. With the U.S. guzzling down 60 percent of Venezuela’s oil exports, and plenty of other customers willing to take America’s place, the sanctions threat is just plain silly. But Obama’s hostility to Chavez (who does not return the insult, even when Obama derides Chavez’s “predictable yet perilous mix of anti-American rhetoric, authoritarian government, and checkbook diplomacy”) is a bad omen for peace in the region.

The U.S. supports secessionist efforts by the moneyed classes in Venezuela and two of its closest allies, Ecuador and Bolivia. Not coincidentally, all three plots are centered in the countries’ main oil or gas-producing regions. Another coincidence: after 60 years deactivation, the U.S. Navy this month revived its Fourth Fleet, with responsibility for South and Central America. Eva Morales, President of Bolivia, called it “the Fourth Fleet of intervention.”

The spark can come any time the Americans decide to set off a regional conflict. Barack Obama, the phony peace candidate, is already providing warlike rhetoric, vowing to support Colombia if it repeats incursions into neighboring Ecuador or Venezuela in search of FARC “terrorists.”

“We will support Colombia’s right to strike terrorists who seek safe-haven across its borders,” Obama promised Cuban exiles and their progeny in Miami. “And we will shine a light on any support for the FARC that comes from neighboring governments. This behavior must be exposed to international condemnation, regional isolation and — if need be — strong sanctions. It must not stand.”

The Southern Color Line

The renewed American threats to Latin American sovereignty occur when Black, brown and indigenous (Indian) populations throughout the region are in the midst of a political awakening, a deep social transformation in which Venezuela’s Chavez, Bolivia’s President Evo Morales and Ecuador’s President Rafael Correa are major players. The non-whites of Latin America are asserting their rights to self-determination — that is, their rights as Indians, or as persons of African descent, regardless of majority or minority status in society. Where they are majorities, non-whites are seizing political power.

Long retarded by the fiction that Latin America has no racial problem, people of color are finally confronting the racial dimensions of Latin American poverty (disproportionately non-white) and oligarchy (always white).

As usual, the U.S. is on the white oligarchy’s side. So is Barack Obama, whose support for the oligarchic, super-corrupt Colombian regime amounts to backing a barbaric, color-coded caste system. One need not be fluent in Spanish to understand the meaning of political cartoons in the newspapers of the rich that portray Hugo Chavez as a monkey.

African Americans and Solidarity

Wider war is coming to South American and Africa, an inevitability given the Democrats’ failure to choose a real alternative to the Republicans. There is absolutely no indication that Barack Obama (or his fading political twin, Hillary) will disassemble the U.S. foreign policy elements that were put in place specifically as tripwires for and facilitators of wars. Quite the opposite. Obama will maintain over one hundred thousand military and civilian personnel in Iraq, with others “over the horizon”; step up the militarization of Africa through Africom, continue backing the Ethiopian occupation of Somalia, and possibly draw neighboring Eritrea into a larger conflict; attempt to destabilize Hugo Chavez and other progressive leaders of mostly non-white constituencies in Latin America, with the aim of seizing control of fossil fuel resources.

African Americans, despite their relative quiescence compared to the roiling Sixties, will respond to these aggressions through solidarity with Washington’s victims on both continents. After 40-plus years, we have still not forgotten our self-determination right to declare solidarity as Black people with whomever we choose. We can confidently predict that President Obama will overreact to dissent, especially to significant Black protest. He already revealed his character and core worldview in the confrontation with Rev. Jeremiah Wright. Let us revisit the incident:

Barack Obama’s denunciation of Rev. Wright’s narrative on American society’s genesis in genocide and slavery — a narrative with which the vast majority of Blacks are in general agreement — was in fact a demand that Blacks cease telling their own story, in deference to white opinion and the foreign policy interests of the United States.

In framing Rev. Wright’s critique of the United States as “not only wrong but divisive,” Obama came perilously close to charging the minister and those who think like him with something resembling “un-American” activities. Wright’s worldview, said Obama, is “divisive at a time when we need unity; racially charged at a time when we need to come together to solve a set of monumental problems — two wars, a terrorist threat, a falling economy, a chronic health care crisis and potentially devastating climate change; problems that are neither black or white or Latino or Asian, but rather problems that confront us all.”

In short, Blacks of Wright’s political persuasion are culpable for more crimes against the planet than Hitler’s propagandists blamed on the Jews. If any of this were even half-true, most people would agree that all those who sympathize with Rev. Wright should be silenced and imprisoned, for the sake of humanity!

Barack Obama is not yet president, or even the Democratic nominee, but he has already made it clear that he believes African Americans are obligated to uphold the honor and reputation of the United States under any and all circumstances, refrain from actions or statements that might create “division,” and avoid agitation for either their own rights to self-determination or anybody else’s.

I think I smell a thug.

That day came on Tuesday, April 29, when a battered and truly bitter Barack Obama made his final, irrevocable break with his former pastor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, whose televised Black Liberation Theology tour de force the preceding Friday, Sunday and Monday had laid bare the contradictions of Obama’s hopeless racial “neutrality.” It was the masterful preacher and seasoned political creature Wright – not the racists who had endlessly looped chopped snippets of the reverend’s past sermons together in an attempt to make him appear crazed – who forced Obama to choose in the push and pull of black and white American worldviews. Obama was made to register his preference for the white racist version of truth over Rev. Wright’s, whose rejection of Euro-American mythology reflects prevailing African American perceptions, past and present.

Obama was less than eloquent. “All it was is a bunch of rants that aren’t grounded in truth,” said Sen. Obama, low-rating Rev. Wright’s remarks at the National Press Club, in Washington, the morning before. Rev. Wright had become a “caricature” of himself, said the wounded candidate – another way of calling the minister a clown.

Under questioning from reporters in Winston Salem, North Carolina, Obama swore up and down that he had never before, in 16 years as a member of Wright’s Trinity United Church of Christ congregation, observed his pastor behave in such a way. The declaration rang patently false, as even a red-state Republican white evangelical observer would have recognized Wright’s Press Club performance as that of veteran pulpit-master with a vast repertoire of church-pleasing moves and grooves to draw upon, all of them honed over decades for the entertainment of his parishioners – including Obama. But the senator was intent on giving the impression that Rev. Wright was – unbeknownst to Obama – a Jekyll and Hyde character, whose statements “were not only divisive and destructive, but I believe that they end up giving comfort to those who prey on hate.”

An amazingly Bush-like turn of phrase! The man who married Barack and Michelle and baptized their children is now rhetorically linked to Osama bin Laden or the Ku Klux Klan.

Clearly, this is what panic looks and sounds like when Obama’s flimsy tissues of “race neutrality” are stripped away. He berates Rev. Wright and other black voices for self-centeredness in failing to strike a balance between African American grievances and whatever ails white people. “When you start focusing so much on the historically oppressed,” said Obama, “we lose sight of the plight of others.” Obama is desperate to convince these “others” that he rejects anything that smacks of an Afro-centric worldview, as represented by Rev. Wright. “What became clear to me was that he was presenting a world view that contradicts what I am and what I stand for.”

Rev. Wright succeeded in drawing a line in the sand, whether that was his intention or not, daring Obama to take his stand on one side or the other. Race “neutrality” – an impossibility in the actually existing United States – went out the window as Obama in extremis positioned himself at the political/historical fault line alongside the defenders of the Alamo and American Manifest Destiny. As dictated by the logic of power, Obama furiously maneuvered toward “white space,” shamelessly taking cover in a kind of populist white patriotism that has always branded black grievances as selfish, even dangerous distractions from the larger national mission. Rev. Wright’s “rantings” amounted to “a complete disregard for what the American people are going through,” said Obama. “What mattered to him was him commanding center stage.”

Obama had belabored the same theme in his Philadelphia speech on race, a few weeks earlier – a widely applauded piece of oratory that was at root an exercise in moral equivalence that equated white and Black grievances in the U.S., as if history and gross power discrepancies did not exist. Obama is as quick as any smug corporate commentator to dismiss as the ravings of extremists and those who “prey on hate” the very idea that U.S. imperialism is an historical and current fact. Chickens cannot possibly come home to roost in terroristic revenge as a response to American crimes against humanity, since “good” nations by definition are incapable of such crimes. It is beyond the pale to contemplate that the United States has Dr. Deaths on its covert payrolls dealing in ghastly biological warfare – the AIDS genesis theory.

In order for his race-neutral strategy to appear sane, Obama must constantly paint a picture of an America that does not exist. This cannot be accomplished without mangling the truth, assaulting the truth-tellers, and misrepresenting America’s past and present.

Since Obama’s candidacy is predicated on minimizing the pervasiveness of racism in American life, it is necessary that he cast doubt on the legitimacy of those with race-based grievances. Otherwise, he would be morally compelled to abandon his neutrality and side with the oppressed minority. Thus, he announces in Selma, Alabama that Blacks “have already come 90 percent of the way” to equality – a non-truth by virtually any measurement. He says the “incompetence was color-blind” in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, thereby deracializing all that occurred in New Orleans from the moment the winds died down to this very second. He claims that 1980s Ronald Reagan voters had understandable grievances due to “the excesses of the 1960s and 1970s,” in the process cleansing the Reagan victory of any racist content.

Race neutrality requires that Barack Obama become a cleanup boy for racists, historically and in the present day. At the same time, Obama is driven to loathe most those people and facts that might lead to divisiveness. America’s worst enemies are not the racists, but those who point out the facts of racism, as Obama explained in mid-March in Philadelphia:

Reverend Wright’s comments were not only wrong but divisive, divisive at a time when we need unity; racially charged at a time when we need to come together to solve a set of monumental problems – two wars, a terrorist threat, a falling economy, a chronic health care crisis and potentially devastating climate change; problems that are neither black or white or Latino or Asian, but rather problems that confront us all.

Rev. Wright and his ilk, by this reasoning, are Public Enemy Number One, standing in the way of the racial harmony that is the natural order of things in Obama’s mythical America.

Ironically, in practice, race-neutrality also requires that Obama disarm himself in the face of racist attacks. “If I lose,” he told reporters with a straight face, “it would not be because of race. It would be because of mistakes I made along the campaign trail.”

Perhaps it is fitting that, having absolved American racists of all manner of crimes against others, Obama also holds them blameless for their assaults on himself. That’s his prerogative, as long as he’s the only one being assaulted. But Obama was also trailed over the long weekend by the ghost of Sean Bell, whose death in a 50-shot New York City police fusillade was held blameless by a white judge. Many African Americans anxiously awaited Obama’s reaction to the three police officers’ acquittals on all charges. “We’re a nation of laws, so we respect the verdict that came down,” said Obama, when asked about the case by reporters in Indiana. “Resorting to violence to express displeasure over a verdict is something that is completely unacceptable and is counterproductive.” That was it.

Hillary Clinton, aware that the Sean Bell verdict was an outrage to Black America, issued a prepared statement:

This tragedy has deeply saddened New Yorkers – and all Americans. My thoughts are with Nicole and her children and the rest of Sean’s family during this difficult time. The court has given its verdict, and now we await the conclusion of a Department of Justice civil rights investigation. We must also embrace this opportunity to take steps – in our communities, in our law enforcement agencies, and in our government – to make sure this does not happen again.

It is difficult not to conclude that Obama distanced himself from the facts of the acquittal – except to counsel against violence and urge folks to “respect” the verdict, whatever that means – while Clinton had the sense to prepare a statement that sounded sensitive to black anger and on top of developments in the story. The Sean Bell police and judicial atrocity revealed with horrific clarity that black life continues to be systematically devalued by police in the United States, even when the officers involved are of African descent, as were two of the three shooters in the Bell case. The New York verdict shows that black lives are devalued by all actors in American society, including black actors: the essence of institutional racism.

Institutional racism is alien to Barack Obama’s version of the nation, a fantasy place where racial oppression has never been so endemic to the political culture as to overshadow the “promise” of America. In Obama’s public vision, his Democratic caucus victory in 98 percent white Iowa, which began the cascade of Obama wins, proves that the U.S. is ready for profound racial “change.” Left unnoted is the fact that Iowa incarcerates African Americans at 13 times the frequency that it locks up whites, the worst record in the nation.

For people like Rev. Jeremiah Wright, mass black incarceration and slavery are seamlessly linked, part of the continuity of racial oppression in the U.S. Most African Americans see the world the way Rev. Wright does – that’s why he’s among the five top rated preacher-speakers in black America. This black American world view, excruciatingly aware of the nation’s origins in genocide and slavery, is wholly incompatible with the American mythology championed by Barack Obama. When the two meet, they are mutually repellant.

The relationship between Rev. Wright and Sen. Obama has undergone “great damage,” says Obama, understatedly. But the break was inevitable and is no tragedy, because it reveals the incompatibility of Obama’s adapted world view with the body of knowledge amassed by African Americans since before the landing of the Mayflower. The truth is always a revelation.

Specifically, Tavis challenged Obama’s rationale for refusing to appear, for the second year in a row, at Smiley’s “State of the Black Union” (SOBU) gathering in February. Obama claimed his time would be better spent campaigning in Texas and Ohio, where Hillary Clinton was the primary favorite. Clinton, on the other hand, accepted the invitation to speak to Smiley’s celebrity guests and thousands-strong audience, in New Orleans. The previous year, Obama had chosen to announce his candidacy for president in Springfield, Illinois, on the same day as the SOBU event, in Hampton, Virginia. On both occasions, many suspected that Obama’s race-neutral campaign’s intention was to avoid association with Black-specific affairs, or to expose the candidate to questioning by Cornel West or other’s among Smiley’s loquacious stable of “leaders” and “thinkers.”

Obama’s decision to withhold his presence was a huge blow to SOBU’s prestige value, which is the same as cash in Smiley’s line of business. Smiley’s genius is his knack for turning money-making events and projects into established Black institutions — he is a superb self-marketer who has made important political contributions to Black America through his heavy production schedule of radio and TV programs, books and mass events over the years. Politically eclectic, sometimes to the point of seeming to be apolitical, Smiley would never purposely alienate any public Black personality with a sizeable following — that’s bad for business — and certainly was not fool enough to deliberately provoke Barack Obama’s worshipful fans. Smiley, however, failed to realize that, among Obama’s core followers there exists zero tolerance for criticism of The Leader — real or perceived. In the more cultish corners of Obamaland, Tavis Smiley became The Enemy when he said of Obama, “I think it is a miscalculation on his part not to appear [at SOBU] and a missed opportunity.”

Poor Tavis, who had labored so long and hard to become a Black media darling, suddenly found himself condemned as “a hater, sellout and traitor,” he told inquiring bloggers. “They are harassing my momma, harassing my brother. It’s getting to be crazy.”

Of course Obama fans are crazy. Fan is short for fanatic. Smiley failed to realize until it was too late that this was not politics as usual; that his past good deeds counted for nothing among the cultified; and that he was about to encounter the stinger ends of a mass of agitated scorpions.

The media entrepreneur only made things worse for himself by attempting to mount a defense on Tom Joyner’s hugely popular syndicated radio program, of which Smiley had been a fixture for 12 years. “My job is to ask the critical question, to raise these issues and keep these guys focused,” said Smiley, pleading the First Amendment. “There are some people who are disappointed that I’m not jumping up and down saying, ‘Vote for Barack Obama.’ That’s not my role as a journalist. That’s not what I do.”

Joyner, the legendary disc jockey, knows all about fans and fanatics — folks who will assassinate you for hinting that their favorite performer is no longer a hot commodity. Obama-maniacs are more vicious, having convinced themselves that the hopes and dreams of The Race are perfectly embodied in The Candidate. In an April letter, Joyner blamed Smiley’s sudden resignation from the radio show on “the hate he’s been getting” from Joyner’s audience. Joyner wasn’t about to get on the wrong side of such an intensity of hatred. He assured the fanatics where he stood: “I’ll also admit that I wanted Tavis to show a little more love to Barack Obama, and I was frustrated over his failure to do so.”

Amazing, isn’t it, that appearing to cross Barack Obama gets a highly respected Black demi-icon run out of Black radio on a rail, yet all parties involved continue to speak endlessly of “love.” Joyner struggled to convince his fans to fulfill their Tavis Smiley love quota. “I want you to call him, e-mail him, text him, hug him, kiss him, get him in a corner and wrestle him and tell him how much you love him and appreciate his love for black people.”

This is the kind of nonsense that passes for political speech and analysis in the Age of Obama, an historical period populated by lovers and haters – but very few thinkers. “We’re so emotional about this Barack Obama candidacy,” said Joyner, in an understatement to his audience. “If you don’t say anything for Barack Obama, you’re considered to be a hater.”

Don’t worry about Tavis Smiley. Nationwide insurance has agreed to provide “exclusive sponsorship of Smiley’s PBS television program as a provider of property & casualty insurance products.” That’s because “Nationwide and Tavis Smiley share common values and a common purpose” — as does Smiley and Wal-Mart, Exxon-Mobil and McDonald’s. Smiley embarks on a five-city tour with Nationwide in mid-May. In other words, Smiley will be alright on the money front, despite his close brush with social death at the hands of mad Obamites. However, concerning the condition of Black politics in general — well, that’s a much more dire situation.

Recall that just a handful among Obama’s current legions of Black zealots even knew his name a few years ago – and yet they have become so psychologically bonded to some idea of Obama — that is, to the man they imagine Obama to be — that they were prepared to cast out a previously anointed Major Black Personage, Tavis Smiley, as an example of what happens to infidels.

Consider that the vast majority of Black Obama supporters, based on indicators such as polls, statements at public meetings and traffic on the blog-stream, are unaware of Obama’s actual positions on military spending, economic justice, and public policy to reverse the effects of centuries of racism. Instead, they apparently rely on their imaginations to provide them with Obama’s positions on any given issue. For example, most Black Obama supporters appear to believe that the candidate favors a smaller, rather than larger, U.S. military establishment and budget, is an active opponent of corporate power, and favors race-based remedies to historical and current race-based problems. None of it is true, as Obama has publicly stated on many occasions.

I have purposely focused on African American supporters of Barack Obama, in the firm belief that most have arrived at Obama obsessions and delusions through a very different route than their non-Black counterparts. As political scientist Michael Dawson has noted, there is a strong current of “middle-class black nationalism” circulating among African American Obamites — a phenomenon that obviously has no counterpart among non-Blacks. And although both Black and non-Black Obama supporters have twisted logic and history to maintain that massive Black and “progressive” support for Obama’s campaign equals a renewed Black-progressive “movement,” the assault on Tavis Smiley is a purely “Black thing” that has nothing to do with progressive politics or any specific issues whatsoever.

There is no doubt this visceral, nationalist Obamism is the dominant strain in Black America — as should have been expected ever since Obama emerged fully packaged on the national scene, in 2004.

Black nationalism is a logical response to intractable, racist white American nationalism, and the inevitable product of centuries of Black internal nation-building. Black nationalism comes in progressive, internationalist manifestations, and in backward, rightist flavors.

Apparently, there’s also a purely crazy kind that only comes out when an African American has a serious chance of capturing the White House. It is this strange brand of Black nationalism that threatened Tavis Smiley’s momma and ran him off of Black radio.

Obama is smart, but his basic game plan is quite simple. Knowing full well the group most hostile to Black progress in the U.S. has always been white males, he aims to neutralize much of this demographic by assuring them an Obama presidency would be aggressively race-neutral. In practice, that means Obama ascribes all racial offenses to the past, where the only guilty white people are dead. The accumulated white wealth and privilege that is the result of hundreds of years of racist exploitation also was due to actions (crimes) of people now mostly dead. Obama forgives the dead racists, and has never expressed any intention of readjusting the ten to fifteen to one disparity in median white to Black household income. Yes, Obama knows perfectly well that wealth disparity, if not aggressively dealt with as a racial problem, will take centuries – if ever – to disappear. But Obama accepts the racial status quo as a fait accompli that can only be altered by methods that do not penalize living white people who benefited from their dead ancestors’ crimes. In practice, this means Obama would leave American race relationships frozen in time.

White men, the recipients of the most unearned privilege, wealth and power over the four centuries of English-speaking settlement (theft) in North American, therefore have nothing to fear from Barack Obama. Obama makes it quite clear that he not only considers white men’s riches to be sacrosanct, but he believes every word of the mythical origins of the white settlers who seized power from the British Crown. These men were “farmers and scholars; statesmen and patriots who had traveled across an ocean to escape tyranny and persecution finally made real their declaration of independence at a Philadelphia convention that lasted through the spring of 1787,” said Obama. No mention of slaveholders or slave traders in the bunch. By dishing out a historical narrative of race in America that omits the theft of the continent and genocide of Native Americans Obama tacitly accepts the lie that most European settlers were escaping religious persecution – a fairy tale that even children’s schoolbooks seldom tell anymore – and pretends that the whites acquired Indian lands by legal means. But what’s the point of arguing about such matters, since everyone involved – especially the Indians – is dead.

Having taken “off the table,” so to speak, almost every aspect and resource of American life that over many generations created a thoroughly racist society, Obama then encourages Americans to engage each other in mutual self-help, all the while deftly avoiding any speech that might upset whites, especially males, jealous of their privileges. “I believe deeply that we cannot solve the challenges of our time unless we solve them together – unless we perfect our union by understanding that we may have different stories, but we hold common hopes; that we may not look the same and we may not have come from the same place, but we all want to move in the same direction – towards a better future for of children and our grandchildren.” What does that mean? Nothing, except that people should be nicer to each other and avoid hurting anybody’s feelings by bringing up racial privilege.

Obama’s central message for white consumption, here, is that everybody’s story is equally compelling, whether you are the grandchild of slaves or slaveholders. This is sometimes called “moral equivalence,” and is especially favored by whites of European immigrant descent who remember how hard their fathers worked at jobs that wouldn’t hire native-born, English-speaking Blacks. But hey! Everybody’s families have had problems, right? Forgetaboutit!

Obama claims his political beliefs are based on an “unyielding faith in the decency and generosity of the American people.” Of course, he never asks white people to acknowledge, let alone give up an iota of privilege in order to even the score after all these years, so we’ll have to accept the existence of this vast reservoir of decency on faith.

Even Obama can’t deny that slavery was an evil institution – although he abhors the very idea of slave descendants making claims to present day remuneration for their dead relatives’ free labor. After all, that would tend to create unnecessary tensions that might stand in the way of the quest for change. The quest for change should be calm, quiet, cost nobody anything, and allow everyone to leave with a good feeling.

Preserving good feeling requires that Black people avoid at all cost telling the truth about the United States. Euro-Americans have an absolute right to tell bald faced lies, especially at the expense of Blacks. That’s Obama’s version of democracy – the sacred right to lie, especially about dead people.‘

Obama’s great friend and once-mentor Rev. Jeremiah Wright has gone beyond the pale, and represents a one-man threat to racial harmony in the United States. Rev. Wright went a lot farther than speaking out “against perceived injustice…They weren’t simply a religious leader’s effort to speak out against perceived injustice.” Oh, no. “Instead” Rev. Wright “expressed a profoundly distorted view of this country – a view that sees white racism as endemic.”

Let’s take this slowly, so as not to distort Obama’s core beliefs. He denies that racism is or has been “endemic” to American life. The MSN Encarta dictionary defines “endemic” as “characteristic of a particular place, or among a particular group, or area of interest or activity.” Since slavery was legal in every single colony that became the United States in 1776, it is safe to say that slavery was “endemic” to the original United States. Nevertheless, Obama is outraged that Rev. Wright has the nerve to “elevate what is wrong with America above all that we know is right with America” – in other words, Rev. Wright is more angry about slavery than the nice things that white folks did for Blacks during and after slavery. What those nice things were, Obama doesn’t mention, so we’ll have to take that on faith, too.

“Reverend Wright’s comments,” says Obama,” were not only wrong but divisive, divisive at a time when we need unity; racially charged at a time when we need to come together to solve a set of monumental problems – two wars, a terrorist threat, a falling economy, a chronic health care crisis and potentially devastating climate change; problems that are neither black or white or Latino or Asian, but rather problems that confront us all.”

It is at this point that I suspect Obama is playing stupid, but maybe he’s just too sophisticated for my limited understanding. It appears he’s saying that Rev. Wright and other Black complainers are responsible for divisions in the nation. If memory serves, it was white folk who extended Jim Crow and all manner of racial division to every aspect of American life, including the toilet bowl, but Barack Obama maintains Blacks have become the present day divisionists. Exactly what year that happened, he doesn’t say. However, this great division by Blacks has, according to Obama, interfered with “two wars, a terrorist threat, a falling economy, a chronic health care crisis and potentially devastating climate change.” Black America overwhelmingly opposed the two most recent wars; I suppose that amounts to creating divisions. Blacks haven’t blown up anything on the scale of the Oklahoma City Federal Building, but maybe our constant complaining about racism scares people into fearing we have divisive intentions. We must admit, however, that high Black unemployment and home foreclosures, as well as high infant mortality and shorter life spans, tend to clutter up the landscape with unattended Black bodies, alive and dead, a source of unnecessary divisions in society and stinking to high hell in the warming climate, for which we are also culpable. We should all thank the eloquent and wise Barack Obama for pointing out our collective failure to keep track of all these excessive, bloated Black bodies.

“Rev. Wright is more angry about slavery than the nice things that white folks did for Blacks during and after slavery. What those nice things were, Obama doesn’t mention?

One has to admit, Obama worked extra hard to earn such an historically unprecedented proportion of white male votes. He admonishes us that “to wish away the resentments of white Americans, to label them as misguided or even racist, without recognizing they are grounded in legitimate concerns – this too widens the racial divide, and blocks the path to understanding.” Obama would have us cease and desist all criticism of what might appear to be racist behavior, since there always exists a small chance that a few of us might be mistaken. Such mistakes by Blacks could cause climate warming to go entirely out of control, not to mention war with China.

Quite understandably, white males appeared to love Obama’s “race” speech. No wonder. Every conceivable mode of eliminating racial disparities has been methodically taken off the table by the Illinois Senator. We are left only with an opportunity to conduct a “dialogue” about race, as long as we do so politely and without a hint of redistributive thought or intention.

Marlin Adams seems to have figured out Obama’s complicated racial diplomacy. “Barack Obama, as the Grand Mediator, is proposing a racial settlement agreement, Black folks get acknowledgment of our historical struggles, and recognition of that legacy’s impact on our condition; White society, for its willingness to listen, gets a cease and desist of the criticism of America’s racial past, and full allegiance to a White ethnocentric version of the future.”

So far, I have heard nothing of facilitating the release of some of the one million Black men and women held captive behind bars on any given day in America. Any references to crim I submit, where all is plain there is nothing to be argued. What point in the anti-slavery creed would you have me argue? On what branch of the subject do the people of this country need light?e – or innocence of crime – causes great stress among many white males. Therefore, the Black American Gulag, the largest on the planet, is ineligible for dialogue.

Malcolm X, in the year before he was assassinated, found himself and other Black notables under pressure to “sit-down” (rather than stand up) and have calm deliberations about what should be presented to white authorities. Sounds very much like Obama’s admonitions that Blacks and whites engage in some meaningless “dialogue.” “They’ll have you sitting in everywhere,” said Malcolm. “It’s not so good to refer to what you’re going to do as a ‘sit-in.’ An old woman can sit. An old man can sit. A chump can sit. A coward can sit. Anything can sit. Well you and I been sitting long enough, and it’s time today for us to start doing some standing, and some fighting to back that up.”

But then, Malcolm was not a modern Negro like Senator Obama. Neither was the great Frederick Douglass, who had little patience for idle sitters or time-wasting dialoguers. Called upon by white “friends” in Rochester to speak on the 4th of July, 1852, Douglass delivered a speech that would have caused Barack Obama some sort of seizure:

What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July? I answer; a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sound of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciation of tyrants brass fronted impudence; your shout of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanks-givings, with all your religious parade and solemnity, are to him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy — a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages. There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices more shocking and bloody than are the people of the United States, at this very hour.

Clearly, Obama would conclude that Frederick Douglass specialized in unnecessary racial divisions. However, the illustrious Mr. Douglass was an efficient speaker, who did not waste words on fools, no matter how well-meaning. When whites demanded that Douglass convince them just how bad slavery was, he recoiled. “I submit, where all is plain there is nothing to be argued. What point in the anti-slavery creed would you have me argue? On what branch of the subject do the people of this country need light?”

In the same manner, what is it about pervasive racism in American life that honest people do not already understand? What does Barack Obama think is within acceptable bounds of dialogue, and what is not? Is he aware of some racial mysteries that have evaded the rest of us? To tell the truth, Obama couldn’t manage to keep his own hind parts from being singed when he tried to find some middle ground between the vicious, thieving, genocidal, slaveholding God revered by most white Americans, and the truthful Black narrative of four centuries in an American hell.

Barack Obama has literally nothing to contribute to such a conversation.

Russia’s imprisonment practices grew out of the Tsarist Siberian and later, Stalinist model. America’s model is directly derived from slavery – the virtual imprisonment of an entire people. From the post-Emancipation “Black Codes” through the 1960s, Blacks have always been locked up in vastly disproportionate numbers. Still, white inmates were in the majority until at least 1964. Then, beginning in the early 70s, the prison population exploded, multiplying seven times. By 1996, African Americans comprised 53 percent of all persons admitted to state and federal prisons. One out of nine Black males between the ages of 20 and 34 now resides behind bars, compared to just one of every 30 whites.

The debate over U.S. prison growth and wildly disparate Black incarceration – to the extent there is a debate – usually centers on draconian and racially-engineered drug sentences. That’s descriptive of one modality of prison growth, addressing the “how” of the problem, but doesn’t address the “why” of it, the political intentions of massive imprisonment of African Americans.

Countless studies have shown beyond statistical doubt that the U.S. “justice” system is stacked against African Americans at every stage of the process: hyper-surveillance of Black neighborhoods, leading to disproportionate arrests, a nationwide pattern of prosecutorial fervor to charge Blacks with more serious crimes than white defendants, harsher sentences once convicted, and far fewer opportunities for Blacks to avoid hard time through “diversion” programs that are skewed to allowing far more whites to escape long term stints in prison. Once again, these factors explain how Blacks have become majorities in prison, even in states and localities with relatively small Black populations, but do not address why Black mass incarceration began to accelerate at breakneck speed in the early 70s, and continues no matter whether crime is up or down.

“Mass Black incarceration,” I wrote in February, 2007,” is America’s answer to the Black Freedom Movement of the Sixties and early Seventies.” Just as the “Black Codes” were the white South’s response to Emancipation, and as massive incarceration of Black “loiterers” to prison plantations and chain gangs followed the crushing of Reconstruction, whites got revenge against the Black Freedom Movement of the Sixties by throwing as many as possible African Americans in prison. This “nigger-caging” response was near-uniform across the country – North, South, East and West. It is the Mother of All White Backlashes – no, the Grandmother, showing no signs of diminishing in racist fury after more than 30 years.

“Reform” measures are surely needed, such as elimination of mandatory sentencing, broader application of prison “diversion” programs, abolition of racist crack cocaine super-sentences, a requirement that “racial impact” studies be instituted at all prisons and jails, repeal of state laws depriving convicted felons of the right to vote, and many other proposals. However, if mass Black incarceration, the “engine” of prison growth, is not understood as an ongoing, institutionalized crime whose purpose is wholly racial, the discussion will be limited to reformers who attempt to tinker around the edges of the historical catastrophe and Black clergy who think they can preach successive Black generations out of going to prison.

It is as if Nazis could be convinced to “rehabilitate” Jews rather than kill them. The whole purpose of the death camp was to kill Jews. The purpose of U.S. prisons is to socially erase masses of Blacks, to subject them to social death. The demonic project has mutilated two generations of African American youth, and damaged Black America to its very core – just as was planned when masses of whites were traumatized in the 60s at the nightmare sight of Black men, women and youth standing tall, demanding full rights and recognition of their humanity. OK, you can be human, if you insist, the mass incarcerators conceded, but it will have to be behind bars.

To effectively battle a system, one must understand its nature. Those states that are attempting to slow or halt the growth of their prisons are doing so only because mass incarceration is becoming too expensive for public coffers to sustain, including the explosive growth of private prisons. But the nature and purpose of the beast goes largely unchallenged.

Mass Equal Opportunity Lockups

The Pew Center on the States report on prisons was released one day after an ABC News story on the FBI’s listing of nearly a million persons as “terrorist threats.” The ACLU extrapolated the figure from the Department of Justice Inspector General’s statement, last September, that FBI watch list then stood at 700,000 names, and growing at 20,000 names per month.

Again, one must understand the nature of the beast. To believe that the FBI and the National Counterterrorism Center possess a lists of 900,000 genuine “terror suspects,” by name or alias, is absurd. ABC concluded that “it appears the FBI may be adding tens of thousands of names belonging to U.S. persons it suspects of being domestic terrorists — people who have no known ties to international terrorist organizations.” No doubt the feds have many hundreds of thousands of “names,” but it is impossible to accept that the U.S. government has identified almost a million people with actual ties to real terrorism, domestically or worldwide. There aren’t that many on the planet, much less in U.S. “sleeper” cells. The domestic names are clearly a list of people to be picked up. These “action lists” are of people to be arrested when politically possible, whose politics is deemed suspect by the regime in power.

Will a Democratic administration order the lists destroyed? Not likely. Reacting to the FBI’s arrest of a group of Black Miami men for plotting to blow up the Sears Tower, in Chicago, Barack Obama said:

The men and women of the FBI have done a great job infiltrating and taking down this home-grown terrorist cell. But this is a stark reminder that landmarks in our nation’s great cities, like the Sears Tower in Chicago, remain tempting targets for terrorists and would-be terrorists.

The Liberty City Seven trial ended in a mistrial and one acquittal, broadly viewed as a farcical, Keystone FBI attempt at entrapping impoverished African American men who had no capacity to plan or carry out such an attack.

Those who ask only that the federal government shorten its purely political lists of “terror” suspects – actually, all the names of progressives they can get their hands on, for convenient mass arrest – refuse to acknowledge the nature of the beast.

The police state that has long existed in Black America may one day soon extend well beyond racial borders.

Once whites demonstrated their willingness to vote for a “certain type” of Black man, in Iowa back in January, it was a foregone conclusion that African Americans would line up in overwhelming numbers behind the Illinois Senator. Before then, all that had held back the tides of Black mass commitment to Obama’s candidacy were lingering doubts that whites would support any “type” of Black person’s elevation to the nation’s highest office. When that dam broke, the African American celebration began. After 400 years in slave hell and Jim Crow purgatory, we’ve finally got a chance! Or so the crowd believes.

Obama wasn’t taking any chances. His strategy from the very beginning has been to flip the historical script by appealing directly to the most backward demographic in electoral politics: white males. This “white male strategy” – smelling eerily of a previous Republican “southern strategy” – required constant assurances to white men that Obama’s run would signal the end of race as a point of political contention in the United States. No longer would whites, especially males, be compelled to answer for their privileged status. A 40-plus year annoyance was nearly over, since Blacks had “already come 90 percent of the way” to equality. Obama told them so.

Reagan-loving whites – especially the white men who have always led the “backlash” against real and perceived African American gains – found themselves wooed by a Black man who understood their sense of revulsion at “the excesses of the Sixties and Seventies.” Wow! That’s the kind of change we’ve been waiting for, exclaimed increasing numbers of white males. A new day beckoned, free at last of psychological harassment from the likes of Reverends Jesse and Al.

Obama is a world-class wooer. His white male wooing is made much easier by the fact that those who consider themselves his “sisters” and “brothers” demand nothing whatsoever from him. Just come home when you get ready, brother. Obama is free to concentrate his attentions on the hard-to-get demographics, especially white men with their peculiar notions of “change.” No need for Obama to promise the hood a damn thing, except that he’ll cut a dashing figure in the Oval Office and make the homefolks proud that he’s there, symbolically representing them.

Republicans and GOP-leaning “independents” (meaning, deep-dyed whites) are crossing over in herds to vote for Obama. They’ve gotten the message: happy days are here again, when the darkies smiled and were careful not to hurt our feelings by telling the truth. That’s the kind of “change” we’ve always “hoped” for, by golly!

The white liberal/left, ineffectual and geographically scattered, are drawn irresistibly to the Black man who regales them with sweet nothings – literally, nothing in the way of the concrete policies for peace and social justice they claim to champion. His presence in their midst is enough. Besides, Obama is someone who is “capable of forging a progressive majority,” they say.

That’s a strange concept, since Obama doesn’t act like a progressive, or claim to be one. But he has no problem with folks gathering around him. He’s a real party guy.

The no-nonsense white men that rule society and cling to ownership of the world were harder nuts to crack; you’ve got to sign a prenuptial to get skin-tight with them. No problem. Before Obama even began to strut on the national runway, he’d won the approval of the Wall Street and military/industrial (and nuclear power) branches of the Money Family. Run-of-the-mill citizens will be barred from state court relief, so as not to jam up big corporations with their silly lawsuits. Energy companies can count on their usual subsidies. The “sanctity of contracts” will not be violated to save homeowners from foreclosure, no matter how deep the credit crisis becomes. The voracious military will be fed an additional 92,000 soldiers and Marines, regardless of what happens in Iraq, to be available for more wars. Most importantly – and this is the really smooth part of Obama’s game – the ever-increasing military budget will make moot all of Barack’s and Hillary’s (near identical) promises about health care, affordable housing, the whole public agenda that has been dangled in front of those fans and groupies in the cheap seats.

Once he gets in office, many of the swooners will find out that he’s already married to the Power Mob.

But that’s OK. Obama knows his most enthusiastic supporters – the ones that claim him as their own as a matter of blood – will stick by him without complaint. Hell, their “leaders” show every sign of allowing him to wine and dine and make promises to everybody else BUT them, at least until he is comfortably in office – maybe for the entirety of his first term. For the time being, though, Black folks aren’t even hearing what he’s saying to the white men or anybody else – they’re just enjoying the music: “It’s been a long, a long time coming, but I know, a change gonna come.”

Oh no it ain’t.