The dawning of the Age of Obama will not change this.

GOOD TIMES ON CAPITOL HILL

A picture, the saying goes, is worth a thousand words. On the front page of last Tuesday’s New York Times, you can see United State House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi sitting with a giant grin between a smiling President-Elect and the grinning Republican Representative John A. Boehner. U.S. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid gazes into the distance with a look of contentment and victory.

They had gathered to discuss what Mr. Equanimity himself, Barack Obama, called a “very sick” economy. They would never say it but their subject was a state-capitalist corporate system acting in accord with its institutional DNA by inflicting enormous material pain on working and lower class people. Many of those people – already in precarious straits before the onset of the latest recession (this one truly “epic”¹ two Decembers ago – are being pushed into destitution by a system Obama (a leading Wall Street bailout-supporter who proclaims that “I love free markets”) and the rest of the political class are sworn and duty-bound to defend.

Meanwhile, the rich and powerful Few who provide most of the above politicians’ campaign funding – like George W. Bush in 2004, presidential candidate Obama received just a quarter of his campaign finance haul from small donors – continue to enjoy lives of spectacular opulence. The world is mired in savage socioeconomic disparity and plutocracy, careening toward an intimately related ecological collapse because the Few want it that way.²

The smiles are even bigger on p. A15, where Times photographer Doug Mills captured millionaires Obama, Joe Biden, and Reid appearing to enjoy an especially delicious inside joke. Good times on Capitol Hill.

On p. A16 we see a bemused looking Bill Richardson speaking to reporters about the collapse of his bid to head the plutocratic U.S. Commerce Department.

On p. A17 it’s a smiling Obama again, standing next to his smiling wife Michelle while talking to their daughters about their first day at the posh private Sidwell Friends School .

Below this photo there’s a story reporting that Mr. Equanimity “has raised more than $24 million for his inauguration so far, much of it with single checks of $25,000 or $50,000 from executives from Silicon Valley, Wall Street and Hollywood as from former supporters of Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton.” We see pleasant photos of four top donors, including international mega-billionaire George Soros, Hollywood uber-mogul Stephen Spielberg, and Hollywood superstar Halle Berry.

“While the inauguration committee bars money from corporations,” the Times reports, “it accepts money from corporate executives …Top executives from Microsoft, for example, have given $300,000 and those from Google have given $150,000.”

Nice. More good times are on the way for the powers that be. But something tells me that a large number of social workers and related nonprofit human service providers could think of some better uses for $24 million right now in America ’s many poor communities.

THREE SMALL CHILDREN “KILLED BY AN ISRAELI TANK SHELL”

There were some different imagery and information to process on page A8 in last Tuesday Times. Down at the bottom, that page contained a disturbing picture snapped by Mahmud Hams of the Agence France-Presse in the open-air prison that is the Gaza Strip, where 80 percent of the population subsists on less than $2 a day under apartheid and siege conditions imposed by Israel .

Hams’ shot makes me want to wipe the self-satisfied grins off the faces of Obama, Reid, Pelosi and the countless other U.S. politicians who underline “support for Israel ” on their ruling-class resumes.

It shows a Palestinian man being restrained by two other men. He is kneeling over the dead bodies of three very small children – his two sons and a nephew. The children, the photo caption matter-of-factly reports, were “killed by an Israeli tank shell early Monday.” Note the deletion of murderous human agency: the ordnance did the dirty work, not the state of Israel and its U.S. sponsor and supplier.

An accompanying Times story briefly and bloodlessly reports how a Palestinian family was ordered last Sunday by Israeli troops to evacuate their building for another one. This they did, moving in with relatives. Tragically, eleven members of their extended family were killed at six on Monday morning when “a missile fired by an Israeli airplane struck the relatives’ house.” Again note the omission of human and political agency.

Above this sickening story – just one small part of a U.S.-supported Israel attack that has butchered many hundreds of Palestinian civilians³ – we see a picture taken by Mohammed Salem of Reuters. Its shows two discouraged Palestinian women who “took refuge in a United Nations school as Israel ’s offensive continued with artillery, helicopter and tank fire.” Was this perhaps the same UN school that Israel demolished on Tuesday, killing more than 40 children?

Obama absurdly maintains that “institutional constraints” prevent him from commenting on the Gaza situation (“one president at a time”) even as he gives televised proto-presidential speeches on the economy.

THE NEW YORK TIMES EDITORIAL BOARD TIMES WEIGHS IN

Last Tuesday, the New York Times editorial board (NYTEB) said that it “sympathized” with Israel ’s goal of silencing “Hamas rockets that have terrorized its people for years.” The NYTEB blamed Hamas for “ending a six month cease-fire.”

But Israel , as the Israeli dissident group Gus Shalom noted, broke the truce by firing missiles into Gaza on the evening of the U.S. presidential election.⁴

As the Times could never acknowledge, moreover, Israel is a much bigger terrorist than Hamas. It has killed 600 or more Palestinians in less than a week while just 17 Israelis have been killed by Palestinian rockets over the last seven years. The “Israel-Palestine conflict” is a rather asymmetrical affair.

The NYTEB worried that Israel ’s assault, if not tempered, could increase Hamas’ popularity and alienate “moderate Arab states” (“moderate” is an interesting description to apply to the arch-repressive neo-feudal U.S. client-state Saudi Arabia ).

The NYTEB expressed “understand[ing]” for “Mr. Obama’s decision to leave the current crisis to President Bush.”

The NYTEB was concerned, finally, that the attack “will also make it harder for President-elect Barack Obama to pick up the pieces of peacemaking when he takes office on January 20.”

The NYTEB voiced no concern over the immoral criminality of Israel ’s absurdly disproportionate response. It said nothing about:

• The four ways in which Israel’s policies and actions violate the Geneva Convention: (i) the imposition of collective punishment on the whole Gaza population for actions of a few militants; (ii) the targeting, both explicit (as with schools, police stations and television broadcast centers) and inadvertent (but unavoidable), of civilians; (iii) disproportionate “response;” iv) failing to ensure adequate food and medical supplies to the subject population – a leading requirement of occupying powers⁵
• The continuing siege and starvation of many of Gaza’s 1.5 million ghettoized inhabitants, who live in conditions of abject misery that make “anti-Israel” “extremism” less than surprising within and beyond the occupied territories of Palestine.
• Israel ’s criminal interference with the Palestinians’ right to choose their own elected officials.
• How the U.S. Human Rights and Security Assistance Act requires ending military aid to states that consistent violate internationally recognized human rights.
• How the U.S. Arms Export Control Act prohibits U.S. weapons from being used for any purpose other than national self-defense inside the borders of the arms-receiving nation (Israel has done much of its Arab-killing with weapons supplied by its leading sponsor and protector the United States, which provides its top Middle East client state with F-16s, Black Hawk Attack Helicopters and other materials).

The Times also expressed no concern over the fact that Obama would seem to be a poor candidate for even-handed “peacemaking” in the Israel-Palestine conflict. Mr. Equanimity’s pronounced reluctance to rock the imperial boat and question conventional U.S. foreign policy wisdom⁶ has been sharply evident in his statements and actions relating to Israel-Palestine. As a U.S. Senator and presidential candidate, Obama has gone to practically grotesque lengths to demonstrate support for Israel’s government on nearly every important policy matter (including Israel’s aerial murder of more than 800 people, mostly civilians, in Lebanon in the summer of 2006) relating to Palestinian issues.⁷

DAVID BROOKS’ “GAME” AND THE “RECUPERATIVE POWER OF DEMOCRACY”

Last Tuesday’s New York Times also included a despicable opinion piece by the Republican Obama-fan and Times columnist David Brooks.⁸ “By trial and error,” Brooks proclaimed, “ Israel is learning to keep an even keel” – a nauseating statement (typically enough for Brooks) amidst that nation’s ongoing butchery in Gaza .

Brooks considered the Israel-Hamas “game” – yes, his term: “game” – to be not “a war of attrition. It’s a struggle for confidence, a series of psychological exchanges designed to shift the balance of morale. The material destroyed in an episode can be replaced, but the psychological effects are more lasting. What is really important is how each episode ends, because the ending defines the meaning – who mastered events and who was mastered by them.”

Brooks praised “Israeli leaders” for having “adjusted to the new game with the new rules. The initial incursion into Gaza was an effective display of prowess. According to The Jerusalem Report, in the first wave, 80 Israeli planes hit more than 100 targets and nearly all of the Hamas military compounds within 3 minutes 40 seconds. The I.D.F. has clearly addressed many of the weaknesses exposed by the Winograd Commission,⁹ showing the recuperative powers a democracy is capable of.”

Yes, what a wonderful testament to “the recuperative powers” of “democracy” that “even-keel[ed]” Israel could launch a monumentally criminal assault on poor and defenseless Arabs it was already starving to death!

I wonder if Brooks would like to talk to the grieving parents of Palestinian children murdered by Israel about how “material destroyed in an episode can be replaced.”

Would he like to discuss with them “the lasting psychological effects” of seeing your children blown to bits by U.S.-delivered F-16s piloted by Top Guns from the Israeli “Defense” Forces?

David Brooks is an offense against humanity, thanks in part to blithering, egg-headed equanimity with which he relentlessly transmits the deadly doctrines of the rich and powerful. Still, he is representative of the establishment institutions that employ him (the New York Times and the “Public” Broadcasting System) and of the broader political class of which he is a dutiful and smiling part.

One of our many jobs as citizens is to wipe the happy know-it-all smiles off our privileged masters’ faces. Their oblivious sense of composure is offensive in light of the stunning misery they inflict at home and abroad. Still, it’s our fault to no small extent. We the People let them take pleasure in illegitimate wealth and power when we should be preparing their abolition and otherwise scaring the living Hell and equanimity out of them.

1. See Jack Rasmus, “Epic Recession Revisited,” Z Magazine (January 2009): 29-34. Rasmus lays out 10 points that make the current recession atypically “epic” and therefore capable of deepening into a legitimate depression: duration, depth, debt, deflation, defaults, financial credit instability, monetary policy, fiscal policy, currency instability, synchronized globality.
2. See Herve Kempf, How the Rich Are Destroying the Earth (White River Junction, VT: Chelsea Green, 2007), dedicated among other things to the proposition that we cannot meaningfully defend our gravely threatened biosphere (livable ecology) without confronting the deadly and unjust concentration of economic and political power in the hands of the Western capitalist oligarchy.
3. There are many other terrible incidents. Human Rights Watch (HRW) reported one Gaza story from shortly before midnight on Sunday, December 28. That’s when “Israeli warplanes fired one or more missiles at the Imad Aqil mosque in Jabalya, a densely populated refugee camp in the northern Gaza Strip. The attack killed five of Anwar Balousha’s daughters who were sleeping in a bedroom of their nearby house: Jawaher, 4; Dina, 8; Samar , 12; Ikram, 14; and Tahrir, 18… ‘We were asleep and we woke to the sound of bombing and the rubble falling on the house and on our heads,’ Anwar Balousha told Human Rights Watch.”
   An hour or so after, an Israeli Blackhawk fired two missiles into the Rafah refugee camp. One struck the home of the al-Absi family, killing three brothers – Sedqi, 3, Ahmad, 12, and Muhammad, 13 – and wounding two sisters and the children’s mother. See Human Rights Watch, “Israel/Hamas: Civilians Must Not be Targets,” December 30, 2008.
4. Gush Shalom, “The War in Gaza – Vicious Folly of a Bankrupt Government,” (December 29, 2008).
5. Marjorie Cohn, “Israel ’s Collective Punishment of Gaza,” ZNet Commentary (January 7, 2008).
6. See Paul Street, Barack Obama and the Future of American Politics (Boulder, CO: Paradigm, 2008), Chapter 4, titled “How ‘Antiwar?’ Obama , Iraq , and the Audacity of Empire;” Paul Street, “There is No Peace Dividend: Reflections on Empire, Inequality, and ‘Brand Obama,’” Z Magazine (January 2009): 24-28.
7. For details, see Stephen Zunes, “Barack Obama and the Middle East,” Foreign Policy in Focus, January 10, 2008;
   Ali Abunimah, “How Barack Obama Learned to Love Israel,” Electronic Infitada (March 4, 2007);
   Ali Abunimah, “What Obama Missed in the Middle East,” Electronic Intifada, 24 July 2008;
   Paul Street , “Obama-Gaza: No Surprise,” ZNet Sustainer Commentary (January 4, 2009);
   “Prepared Text of Barack Obama’s Speech for the AIPAC Policy Forum,” March 2, 2007; Obama Letter to UN Ambassador (January 2008);
   Agence France-Presse, “Jerusalem Must Remain the Undivided Capital of Israel: Obama,” June 4, 2008.
8. David Brooks, “The Confidence War,” New York Times, January 6, 2009, A21.
9. The Winograd Commission was an Israeli government-appointed agency set up to investigate the failures of Israeli military policy during Israel’s savage bombing of Lebanon in the summer of 2006 – an action that was widely understood to have damaged Israel’s status in the Middle East and the world.

“That stuff” included Obama declaring his readiness to bomb Iran, saying that black Americans had come “90 percent” of the way to equality, treating Jeremiah Wright’s anger over American racism as inappropriate for the current era, proclaiming that the U.S. invaded Iraq with noble intentions, and saying that “the Surge” was “succeeding beyond our wildest imagination.” Other parts of the Obama campaign package: advancing nuclear power and Ethanol, claiming that leading Wall Street firms and other large corporations were as interested as anyone else in “American renewal” (they “just hadn’t been asked” to help the country, Obama said last year), supporting the unilateral use of military power even in “situations beyond self-defense” (in a 2007 Foreign Affairs essay), and calling for an expansion of U.S.-imperial armed forces.

Neoliberal From the Start

There were four key problems with this alternatively naïve and cynical defense of candidate Obama’s centrism. First, it neglected Obama’s history as a deeply conciliatory and conservative, privilege-friendly politician. From his Harvard Law School days through his state legislative career and his brief stint in the U.S. Senate, Obama has exhibited what liberal journalist Ryan Lizza rightly calls “an eagerness to accommodate himself to existing institutions.”

Those who think Obama is a “true progressive” whose left and democratic orientation has been “squandered” or carefully hidden thanks to his national political ambitions and/or the influence of his political handlers might want to consider an interesting description of the young phenomenon penned by the veteran black political scientist Adolph Reed Jr. just as Obama’s political career began. By Reed’s account, Obama came to the political game with an already advanced and highly cultivated bourgeois taste for incremental change and compromise with concentrated power. Alternately praised (by moderates) as “pragmatism” and “realism” and reviled (by left progressives and radicals) as “selling out” and “cooptation,” his finely honed centrism was a habit of thought that flowed naturally from his elite socialization in a corporate-neoliberal post-Civil Rights era at privileged private institutions like Columbia, Harvard, and the metropolitan foundations (including the Woods Fund of Chicago and the Joyce Foundation) on whose boards he sat and in whose circles he moved (a rarely noted aspect of Obama’s biography) while he worked as a Chicago lawyer.

This is how Reed described the 30-something Obama in early 1996, shortly after the latter won his first election to the Illinois legislature and more than eight years before the world beyond Springfield and the Chicago and Washington money-politics elite discovered the “Obama phenomenon”:

In Chicago , for instance, we’ve gotten a foretaste of the new breed of foundation-hatched black communitarian voices: one of them, a smooth Harvard lawyer with impeccable credentials and vacuous-to-repressive neoliberal politics, has won a state senate seat on a base mainly in the liberal foundation and development worlds. His fundamentally bootstrap line was softened by a patina of the rhetoric of authentic community, talk about meeting in kitchens, small-scale solutions to social problems, and the predictable elevation of process over program — the point where identity politics converges with old-fashioned middle class reform in favoring form over substances. I suspect that his ilk is the wave of the future in U.S. black politics here, as in Haiti and wherever the International Monetary Fund has sway.¹

There’s little basis for many progressives’ desire to share some right-wingers’ picture of Obama as a closeted true-progressive waiting for the White House ascendancy to unveil his left agenda.

Path Confusion

Second, to quote a Buddhist maxim, “the path is the goal.” The point can be exaggerated, but it is hard to end up on the left turn ramp while driving in the center and right lanes. It is difficult (thought not impossible) to rally the troops for progressive change while steering again and again — however stealthily (see my next point) – to the corporate and imperial right.

Third, the bigger truth is that candidate Obama tended to run to the rhetorical left of his actual policy agenda. Especially during the primary campaign, he sounded far more progressive than he actually was. He posed for the liberal base as an “antiwar candidate” even while he signaled clearly to the foreign policy establishment that he would continue the Iraq occupation for an indefinite period. He ran as an advocate of universal heath insurance even while he advanced a plan that left critical cost-driving power in the hands of the big insurance and pharmaceutical corporations.

Things He Didn’t “Have” to Say and Do

Last but not least, U.S. Senator and presidential candidate Obama repeatedly said and did things more reactionary than required to make a viable presidential run and still pass muster with concentrated power. The imperial plutocracy didn’t require Obama to vote for the expansion of federal domestic wiretapping powers with retroactive immunity to the big telecommunications corporations last spring.

Harsh political power realities did not mean that Obama “had” to tell CNN’s Candy Crowley last summer that the U.S. should never apologize for any of its actions abroad. (Why wouldn’t a supposedly “benevolent” empire want to occasionally and disingenuously apologize for such “occasional” “mistakes” as the recurrent indiscriminate bombing of Afghan wedding parties?).

Obama did not “have” to provocatively tell the Chicago Council on Global Affairs in the fall of 2006 that the American people were “resolved” in support of “well-intentioned” U.S. foreign policy since they “have seen their sons and daughters killed in the streets of Fallujah” (a city that suffered massive U.S. imperial assaults, with a giant civilian death toll, in April and November of 2004).

Obama didn’t “have” to blow up the public presidential election financing system once and for all, though he would have been crazy (from an “in it to win it” perspective) not to given his remarkable private funding advantage over John McCain.

In the process of torpedoing federal election funding, moreover, Obama didn’t “have” to create the dark deception that his fundraising operation constituted “a parallel system of public financing.” The truth of the matter, reported on ABC’s evening news last week, is that Obama got just a quarter off his campaign finance haul from small donors. That was the same share small donors contributed to George W. Bush’s funding take in 2004 — a telling little detail that gets lost in Obama’ recurrent trumpeting of the fact that he received 91 percent of his contributions from small givers. Too bad those small givers comprised just a fourth of his total money.

And Obama hasn’t “had” to go to the remarkable lengths he has gone to deny the depth and degree of U.S. racial disparities and continuing relevance of racism in explaining those inequalities.

I could go on.

“Honeymoans” and Violins

Five weeks away from Obama’s inauguration, some progressives are disturbed to learn that his corporate-imperial cabinet picks epitomize what former Clinton administration official and Kissinger Associates Managing Director David J. Rothkopf calls “the violin model: Hold power with the left hand, and play the music with your right” (NYT, November 22, 2008, A1). It bothers a growing number of Obama’s liberal backers to learn that, as Wall Street Journal editorial board member Matthew Kaminski notes, “the Obama camp says the future president, who won running from the left, intends to govern from the center” (WSJ, December 6/7, 2008, A8).

“This Wasn’t Quite the Change We Pictured,” whines the title of a recent Washington Post editorial by leading left-liberal writer David Corn.²

It’s long past time for Corn and other “concerned” and “disappointed” Obama liberals to trade in their rose-colored campaign glasses for the demystifying shades donned by the ideology-decoding rebels in John Carpenter’s classic left science fiction movie “They Live.” The balmy feel-good people’s rhetoric of the electoral contest has faded as always before the big chill of corporate-imperial governance.

A little more due diligence research on their candidate’s longstanding centrist history and how well it matches the narrow parameters imposed by the American political tradition and party system might have prevented some of the current left and liberal “honeymoaning” (Alexander Cockburn’s useful term³) about Obama. For all his claims to be a noble and “pragmatic” reformer “above the fray” of America’s imperial plutocracy and “ideological” politics, Obama is no special exception to — and is in many ways an epitome of — what Christopher Hitchens called (in his 1999 study of the Bill and Hillary Clinton phenomenon) “the essence of American politics. This essence, when distilled,” Hitchens explained, “consists of the manipulation of populism by elitism.”Christopher Hitchens, No One Left to Lie To: The Values of the Worst Family (New York: Verso, 2000), pp. 17-18.

It’s nothing new. Relying heavily on candidates’ repeated promise to restore “hope” to a populace disillusioned by corporate control, corruption, and inequality — a standard claim of non-incumbent Democratic presidential candidates — this dark essence of United States political culture goes back further than the corporate-neoliberal era into which Obama came of political age. It is arguably as old the Republic itself, always torn by the rift between democratic promise and authoritarian realities of concentrated wealth and power.

Underlying systemic contradictions related to the deepening economic crisis may well drive Obama to introduce measures that will seem comparatively progressive in relation to the last thirty-five years of U.S. economic policy. For real and genuinely progressive recovery to occur, however, popular agency on the model of the recent factory occupation at Chicago’s Republic Door and Window plant⁴ will be required, as in previous periods of reform. Today as in the 1930s and 1960s, rank and file citizens’ agency will be a critical element forcing progressive change that can be reasonably believed in.⁵ Obama may be left-handed but its’ time to stop waiting for a mythical White House lefty and to get to the work of actual left organizing and vision from the bottom up.

1. Adolph Reed, Jr., “The Curse of Community,” Village Voice (January 16, 1996), reproduced in Reed, Class Notes: Posing as Politics and Other Thoughts on the American Scene (New York, 2000). For an (I hope) useful summary of Obama’s relatively tepid and centrist career as a state legislator, please see Paul Street , “Statehouse Days: The Myth of Barack Obama’s ‘True Progressive’ Past,” ZNet (July 20, 2008).
2. David Corn, “This Wasn’t Quite the Change We Pictured,” Washington Post (December 5, 2008).
3. Alexander Cockburn, “Honeymoans From the Left,” CounterPunch (December 5/7, 2008).
4. Lee Sustar, “Chicago Factory Occupied,” Socialist Worker (December 6, 2008).
5. Howard Zinn, “Election Madness,” The Progressive (March 2008).

McCain, the Times reported, “seized on the response to reprise the he-will-raise-your-taxes attack that has historically had resonance in states like Florida, Iowa , and New Hampshire ” (A. Nagourney, “How McCain Hopes to Defy the Polls and Win,” NYT, 10-24-2008, A1, A19)

For the record, here’s exactly what Obama said to “Joe the Plumber” earlier this month:

“It’s not that I want to punish your success. I just want to make sure that everybody who is behind you, that they’ve got a chance for success too. My attitude is that if the economy’s good for folks from the bottom up, it’s gonna be good for everybody … I think when you spread the wealth around, it’s good for everybody.”

Obama as a “Socialist”

The Times understated the Republicans’ reactionary use of Obama’s comment. More than merely claiming that Obama is going to “raise taxes,” the Republican propaganda machine has been using the militantly centrist and “deeply conservative” Obama’s remark to bolster their preposterous neo-McCarthyite claim that he is a leftist proponent of wealth redistribution. Sarah Palin, Sean Hannity and other hard-right attack dogs have been suggesting that Obama’s comment reflects the likelihood that the junior senator from Illinois is “a socialist.”¹

McCain spokesman Michael Goldfarb tried to make a twofer out of Obama’s “inopportune remark.” Goldfarb used it to connect the absurd claim that the Democratic contender is a “leftist” to the equally ridiculous charge that Obama is an “appeaser” of official global enemies. “If Barack Obama’s goal as President is to ‘spread the wealth around,’” Goldfarb told FOX News, “perhaps his unconditional meetings with Hugo Chavez, Raul Castro, and Kim Jong-Il aren’t so crazy — if nothing else they can advise an Obama administration on economic policy.”

Rising Tide and Equality of Opportunity vs. Radical Redistribution and Equality of Condition

I have four comments from the real Left on Obama’s remark, its treatment in U.S. political culture, and the problem of inequality. First, contrary to the right-wing’s hysterics, calling for “spread[ing] the wealth around” is not the same as advocating the egalitarian redistribution of wealth. In the dominant Western state-capitalist ideology to which both McCain and Obama subscribe (no candidate who rejects that ideology can make a serious run at the U.S. presidency), “mainstream” (corporate-approved) policymakers have long contended that the solution to poverty and material insecurity is “economic growth” — expanding the pie instead of slicing it up in a more equitable fashion. “A rising tide,” the argument runs, “lifts all boats,” so that nobody has to worry about who has the biggest and most luxurious vessels. The claim is that political-economic managers can generate enough employment and income that peoples’ material needs can be met without social conflict over the “obsolete” problems of distribution.

When American capitalist elites and politicians talk about increasing equality, moreover, they only mean equality of opportunity, not equality of condition. For the authentic historical left, by contrast, meaningful “equality” involves outcomes, not just “opportunity.” It’s not just about granting everyone an identical chance to become fabulously rich or miserably poor in accord with their particular combination of talent, hard work, and luck.

Radicals believe that the massive socioeconomic disparities that scar American and global life today would be no less offensive and damaging if everyone at the top had risen to their positions from a mythical “level playing field.”” As Noam Chomsky noted in response to a questioner who characterized American inequality by using the metaphor of “two runners in a race: One begins at the starting line and other begins five feet from the finish line:”

“That’s a good analogy, but I don’t think it gets to the main point. It’s true that there’s nothing remotely like equality of opportunity in this country, but even if there were the system would still be intolerable. Suppose that you have two runners who start at exactly the same point, have the same sneakers, and so on. One finishes first and gets everything he wants: the other finishes second and starves to death.”²

Referring to himself as a “free market guy” and reminding elites and others that he “loves the market,”³ Obama does and advocates nothing that remotely questions the sincerity of this terrible paean to the profits system. His embrace of the federal bailout of elite U.S. financial firms (including many of his top contributors) is a recent example of his strict adherence to the heavily indoctrinated state-capitalist mindset of Harvard Law and his leading sponsor Goldman Sachs.

“I Meant ‘Spreading Around Opportunity’”

Obama has also consistently advanced a militantly bourgeois take on social inequality and mobility. After claiming that the U.S. is a “beacon of freedom and opportunity” for those who exhibit “hard work and perseverance,” his instantly famous 2004 Democratic Party keynote address praised Americans for believing that “with just a slight change in priorities, we can make sure that every child in America has a decent shot at life, and that the doors of opportunity remain open to all.” This theme was repeated in The Audacity of Hope.⁴

Picking up on this standard conservative perspective on the meaning of equality as equality of opportunity (not of condition), Obama had this to say in his own defense after the Republicans started making hay with Obama’s “inopportune remark” to “Joe the Plumber:”

The simple point I was trying to make was that even assuming he’s at a point that he wants to buy a business that he hopes will generate more than $250,000, the point I was making was that ten years or five years ago or even a year ago when he was making a lot less than that, he was having a tough time…We don’t mind people getting enormously wealthy because of their skills and talents and their drive. But we always want to make sure that playing field is such where everybody’s who’s got a good idea has a chance to succeed. Everybody’s got a chance to get financing. Everybody who works hard is able to raise a family. Everybody has an opportunity if they act responsibly to send their kids to college and retire with dignity and respect. And in that sense, that does involve us spreading around opportunity.⁵

Of course, anyone who seriously examines America’s candidate selection and election processes knows that the chances of a “radical redistributionist” making it to the cusp of the presidency are slim to none. Nobody promising to break up concentrated wealth and distribute resources equitably across the population is going to receive the corporate sponsorship and media approval required to make a viable bid for the presidency under American “market democracy.”⁶ Obama and his handlers are fully aware of this, we can be quite sure. They are in it to win it.

Inequality vs. Democracy

Third, it’s a damn shame Obama can’t call for equality even if he wants to. There’s a strong Western and American philosophical and political tradition — hardly just socialist — that can be cited in support of the redistribution of wealth. In Aristotle’s Politics, the foundation for much subsequent Western political theory (including that of the U.S. Founders), it was understood that a meaningful democracy would have to be fully participatory and directed toward the common good. That could not be attained, Aristotle argued, in the absence of relative social equality, including “moderate and sufficient property” for all (of course Athens denied participation and benefits to women and slaves).

Aristotle thought you couldn’t talk seriously about democracy in a society characterized by extremes of rich and poor. Great wealth inequality and democracy could not coexist because within a society because people with inordinate wealth possess superior resources to influence politics and policy in their own selfish interests.

If Aristotle was right, there are good reasons to “mind people getting enormously wealthy” — through whatever means (and most private wealth in primarily attributable to external social circumstances, not the individual agency of wealthy individuals) — in a society containing other citizens who are poor or merely less wealthy.

The notion that there is a core conflict between economic inequality and political democracy was shared by subsequent giants of Western thought and politics, including Adam Smith, Alexis de Tocqueville, Wilhelm von Humboldt, John Stuart Mill, Thomas Jefferson, and John Dewey — none of whom were socialists.⁷Six leading global financial firms (one recently closed) can be found among Obama’s top 15 contributors: Goldman Sachs (#2 at $743,000), Citigroup (#4 at $500,000), JP Morgan Chase (#6 at $478,000), UBSAG (#9 at $419,000), Lehman Bros (#10 at $392,000), and Morgan Stanley (#15 at $344,000). See www.opensecrets.org.⁸For more details and sources on the disconnect in American democracy, see Paul Street, “Americans’ Progressive Opinion vs. ‘The Shadow Cast on Society by Big Business’,” ZNet (May 15, 2008).

The nation’s “mainstream” (dominant and corporate) media is full of news and commentary fretting about the possible demise of — and the need to “rescue” — “capitalism”. It does not fret much about the need to save the poor and the working class. It says nothing about the need to move funds from the nation’s colossal and sacrosanct “defense” (Empire) budget to the meeting of social needs at home and abroad.

If we want to talk seriously about the existence of democracy in the US, we very much need to redistribute wealth in this country.

Capitalism vs. Democracy

Last but not least, as no leading “mainstream” corporate candidate or commentator can seriously acknowledge, there lurks behind all of this a fundamental conflict between (i) the social equality required for meaningful democracy and (ii) capitalism. Twelve years ago, the liberal economist Lester Thurow noted that “democracy and capitalism have very different beliefs about the proper distribution of power. One believes in a completely equal distribution of political power, ‘one man [sic] one vote,’ while the other believes that it is the duty of the economically fit to drive the unfit out of business and into extinction. ‘Survival of the fittest’ and inequalities in purchasing power are what capitalist efficiency is all about. Individual profit comes first and firms become efficient to be rich. To put it in its starkest form, capitalism is perfectly compatible with slavery. Democracy is not.” (Thurow, The Future of Capitalism, New York, 1996)

In a similar vein, onetime Chicago Tribune economics correspondent R.C. Longworth, also no radical, noted a decade ago that the “struggle of democracy and capitalism” is “at the heart” of “debate over the global economy. In theory,” Longworth claims, “they are meant to go together, indeed to be inseparable. But democracy’s priorities are equality before the law, the right of each citizen to govern the decisions that govern his or her life, the creation of a civilization based on fairness and equity. Capitalism’s priorities are inequality of return, profit for the suppliers of capital, efficiency of production and distribution, the bottom line” (Longworth, Global Squeeze ,Chicago, 1998).

Here’s how Webster’s Unabridged Second Edition defines capitalism: “the economic system in which all or most of the means of production and distribution are privately owned and operated for profit, originally under fully competitive conditions: it has generally been characterized by a tendency toward a greater concentration of wealth and, in its later phase, by the growth of great corporations. . . ”

Great corporations, like The New York Times, the leftmost “mainstream” newspaper in a national political and media culture so reactionary that top “liberal” journalists find it “inopportune” for a candidate to be heard advocating a bit more economic opportunity for people below the opulent pinnacles of the nation’s steep class hierarchy. A political culture so reactionary that a stridently bourgeois corporate candidate risks being accused of the supposed crime of being a dangerous “radical” for daring to advocate a slightly more egalitarian version of capitalism.

Don’t just take it from an actual radical like me. Take it from Aristotle and Jefferson: we need a significant redistribution of wealth if we want like democracy in the United States .

And take it from Webster’s: that’s going to mean breaking with capitalism, the real disease (by the way) behind the financial symptoms and the related plutocratic policy responses that have developed over the last six weeks.

These are harsh realities that can never be acknowledged by the ruling US media and propaganda system. Perhaps we can turn to these urgent issues in a serious way when the confetti of the current quadrennial electoral extravaganza clears and the cold facts of life under American state-capitalist Empire and Inequality comes into clearer focus.

1. 1. For a careful portrait of Obama as “deeply conservative,” see Larissa MacFarquhar, “The Conciliator: Where is Barack Obama Coming From?” The New Yorker, May 7, 2007. See also Ryan Lizza, “Making It: How Chicago Shaped Obama,” The New Yorker, July 21, 2008; Paul Street, Barack Obama and the Future of American Politics ( Boulder, CO; Paradigm, 2008). For reflections on the Republican campaign and public relations structure as neo-McCarthyist, see Paul Street, “Proto-Fascism in the United States: Campaign Reflections,” ZNet (October 17, 2008); Paul Street , “The Madness of Jerome Corsi,” ZNet (August 25, 2008).
2. Noam Chomsky, The Common Good (Berkeley: Odonian, 1998), pp. 9-10.

   The true Left has never sought merely a more superficially equal — fair start but unequal finish — rat race.

   “Our Greatest Asset”: Capitalism

   Second, the heavily corporate-sponsored Obama has given repeated evidence that his concept of “sharing the wealth does not go beyond the limited bourgeois notions of expanding the pie and equality of opportunity. Listen (for one example among many) to the following revealing passage from Obama’s relentlessly power-worshipful 2006 campaign book The Audacity of Hope:

   Calvin Coolidge once said that ‘the chief business of the American people is business,’ and indeed, it would be hard to find a country on earth that’s been more consistently hospitable to the logic of the marketplace. Our Constitution places the ownership of private property at the very heart of our system of liberty. Our religious traditions celebrate the value of hard work and express the conviction that a virtuous life will result in material rewards. Rather than vilify the rich, we hold them up as role models…as Ted Turner famously said, in America money is how we keep score.”

   The result of this business culture has been a prosperity that’s unmatched in human history. It takes a trip overseas to fully appreciate just how good Americans have it; even our poor take for granted goods and services –– electricity, clean water, indoor plumbing, telephones, televisions, and household appliances — that are still unattainable for most of the world. America may have been blessed with some of the planet’s best real estate, but clearly it’s not just our natural resources that account for our economic success. Our greatest asset has been our system of social organization, a system that for generations has encouraged constant innovation, individual initiative and efficient allocation of resources…our free market system.”3. Barack Obama, The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream (New York: Crown, 2006), pp. 149-150. The Audacity of Hope left it to left progressives — characterized by Obama and many of his elite supporters as insufficiently “realistic” and excessively “moral absolutist” carpers, “cranks,” and “zealots” — to observe some of the undesirable and less-than-“efficient” outcomes of America’s heavily state-protected “free market system” and “business culture.” Those results include the climate-warming contributions of a nation that constitutes five percent of the world’s population but contributes more than a quarter of the planet’s carbon emissions. Other notable effects include the generation of poverty for tens of millions of US children while executives atop “defense” firms like Boeing, Lockheed-Martin, and Raytheon rake in billions of taxpayer dollars for helping the United States maintain the deadly and criminal occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan. “The Audacity of Hope” left it to insufficiently “pragmatic” Left thinkers and activists to note the American System’s arguably wasteful and destructive allocation of more than a third of the nation’s wealth to the top 1 percent of the U.S. population and its systematic subordination of the common good to private profit. “Unreasonable” “radicals” were left to observe that business-ruled workplaces and labor markets steal “individual initiative” from millions of American workers subjected to the monotonous repetition of imbecilic and soul-crushing operations conducted for such increasingly unbearable stretches of time — at stagnating levels of material reward and security — that working people are increasingly unable to participate meaningfully in the great “democracy” Obama trumpets as the Founders’ great legacy. They were left also to “complain” about the fact that US social mobility rates are actually quite low in comparison to other leading industrialized states, indicating a relatively fixed class structure in what Obama considers “the magical place” called America.

3. 4. As Laurence Shoup recently noted in Z Magazine, Obama’s declaration of “love” for the market “failed to note that the market loves and rewards those who already have money and power, not those lacking these advantages. To say that you ‘love the market’ is akin to saying that you love the ruling class (the top 1 percent of the population that controls 20 percent of the country’s wealth and nearly 40 percent of the country’s wealth) and do not care about the great majority (the 60 percent of the population that controls only 25 percent of the income and 5 percent of the wealth). To say ‘I love the market’ — at a time when the financial system is deflating because of decades of lies about how great unregulated markets are which fueled rampant speculation, phony valuations, and deceitful assurances — is to be deaf to the reality of powerful interests are protected by the government while everyone gets a lecture on personal responsibility. ‘Change we could believe in,’ would involve confronting the perversity of market-driven capitalism….” See Laurence H. Shoup, “Obama and McCain March Rightward,” Z Magazine (September 2008), p. 27.
4. Barack Obama, Democratic Convention Keynote Address: “Time to Reclaim America’s Promise” ( Boston, MA , July 27, 2004); Obama, The Audacity of Hope, p. 7.
5. Link.
6. Edward S. Herman, “How Market Democracy Keeps the Public and Populism at Bay,” ZNet Sustainer Commentary (August 13, 2007).
7. 8. See Noam Chomsky, The Common Good, pp. 5-10; Noam Chomsky, Class Warfare (Monroe, ME: Common Courage, 1996), pp. 123-24; Noam Chomsky, Powers and Prospects: Reflections on Human Nature and the Social Order (Boston, MA: South End, 1996), pp. 72, 87-89, 93, 117-118; Noam Chomsky, Chomsky on Democracy and Education (New York: Routledge-Falmer, 2003). Even James Madison, who advocated a government that would “protect the minority of the opulent against the majority,” came to loathe the wealthy Few’s takeover of early American policy and opinion. By the 1790s, he denounced the “daring depravity of the times” as “the rising class of business people become ‘the tools and tyrants’ of government, overwhelming it with their force and benefiting from its gifts.”

   Aristotle, Jefferson, and classic Western liberalism’s concerns about the crippling impact of concentrated wealth and economic disparity on popular governance are richly born out by current-day U.S. politics and policy. The top 1 percent controls 40 percent of U.S. wealth and 57 percent of claims on wealth (interest, dividends and the like), leaving the remaining 99 percent to fight it out for less than two–thirds of the nation’s net worth. The top 10 percent owns more than two-thirds of the nation’s wealth and a probably larger share of the nation’s politicians and policy makers.

   Contrary to popular myth, America’s stark class structure is relatively immobile. The “American Dream” of rising from poverty to wealth is actually less attainable in the U.S. than in most other advanced capitalist states.

   The “greatest democracy money can buy” (Greg Palast’s description of the U.S. political system) grants giant tax breaks to the already super-wealthy. It pays for a massive war and empire budget ($622 billion this year) that supports more than 730 military bases spread across nearly every nation on Earth and accounts for half the world’s military spending (all in the Orwellian name of “defense”). This is because the privileged American Few aren’t content to own a disproportionate share of US wealth. They and their imperial planners seek to control as much of the world’s treasure and resources (petroleum reserves in particular) as possible. At the same time, war, militarism, arms sales, and conquest are lucrative investments in and of themselves. The Pentagon budget is a giant public subsidy — a powerful mechanism of regular public wealth transfer to the high-tech corporate sector.

   Americans are currently watching “their” government grant hundreds of billions of public dollars to the “unavoidable” bailout of parasitic Wall Street firms who engineered a financial meltdown that is helping trigger a deep recession that will throw millions out of work. By more than mere coincidence, many of us barely get by from one paycheck to the next. Evictions, foreclosures, bankruptcies and suicides are on the rise in the working, lower, and middle classes.

   Tens of millions of U.S. citizens will stand in food lines each year. Many of those deeply disadvantaged Americans are part of the “working poor,” a group that “plays by the rules” and still can’t keep their heads above water in “the world’s richest nation.”

   Meanwhile the current quadrennial corporate-crafted narrow-spectrum, personality-centered presidential election spectacle renders the nation’s more than 37 million officially poor nearly invisible. The candidates talk regularly about helping the middle class but do not speak seriously about rising mass poverty and the plight of the poor. Like the bloated “defense” (Empire) budget, the depth and degree of economic inequality is “off the table” of serious debate in dominant U.S. political and media culture.

   The great “progressive” hope Obama’s top Wall Street backers

8. are granted tens of billions of dollars from the U.S. Treasury, but there is no serious or remotely equivalent bailout being planned for the non-affluent majority.

   Meanwhile, working class sons and daughters are economically drafted into deadly service into bloody colonial wars of Terror on Iraq and Afghanistan — illegal and imperial wars that both business candidates will clearly maintain.

   Both of the dominant two business parties and their leading candidates stand well to the big business- and Empire-friendly right of the popular U.S. majority on critical policy issues.

Domesticated Democracy

It is by now commonplace to observe that democracy is in a weakened state in the United States. But could it be that the U.S. is no longer a democracy at all, if it ever truly was? According to Princeton emeritus political scientist Sheldon Wolin’s chilling new volume Democracy, Inc: Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism (2008), the United States is becoming a totalitarian state posing as a democracy. Under the rules of what Wolin calls “inverted totalitarianism,” corporate and state power have become deeply “co-joined” and practically “unbridled.” The popular majority of the citizenry — the People — in whose name U.S. “democracy” purports to function is politically uninterested, infantilized, obedient, distracted, and divided. An increasingly spectator-ized and subordinate public is shepherded by the professional political class across a painfully narrow business- and Empire-friendly field of political, policy, and ideological “choices.” Those harshly limited options are presented in periodic superficial, candidate-centered and corporate-crafted elections that function as anti-democratic exercises in capitalist marketing and managerial control. These spectacular rolling extravaganzas privilege candidate image and other trivial matters over substantive questions of policy and ideology, with campaign consultants and advertisers selling candidates like they sell candy or cars. They help keep the interrelated issues of the ever-growing rich-poor gap, corporate power, and imperial militarism (the last two topics are taboo in “mainstream” U.S. political life) “off the table” of acceptable debate and public scrutiny even though they are of primary interest to most American citizens. By Wolin’s account:

The citizenry, supposedly the source of governmental power and authority as well as participant, has been replaced by the ‘electorate,’ that is, by voters who acquire a political life at election time. During the intervals between elections the political existence of the citizenry is relegated to a shadow-citizenship of virtual participation. Instead of participating in power, the virtual citizen is invited to have ‘opinions’: measurable responses to questions predesigned to elicit them. (p. 59)

…In elections parties set out to mobilize the citizen-as-voter, to define political obligation as fulfilled by the casting of a vote. Afterwards, post-election politics of lobbying, repaying donors, and promoting corporate interests — the real players — takes over. The effect is to demobilize the citizenry, to teach them not to be involved or to ponder matters that are either settled or beyond their efficacy. (p. 205)

Once votes have been counted (or not) in America’s totalitarian system, the people” fade back into the woodwork. Politicians from both sides of the nation’s corporate-sponsored “one-and-a-half party system” — the more explicitly authoritarian Republicans or the “inauthentic opposition” advanced by neoliberal corporate Democrats (whose 2004 presidential candidate made a point of stating his opposition to the redistribution of wealth) — proceed to do precisely what the American ex-citizenry wishes them not to do. They advance empire, inequality, and repression, concentrating riches and power ever further upward in what has long been the industrialized world’s most unequal and wealth-top-heavy society.

American “democracy” has been “domesticated” by modern managerial business technique. Its wild democratic risk has been removed for and by the Few. It has been quietly subsumed by corporation, whose mission is to guarantee returns on capital by minimizing chance and maintaining a “stable” environment (including a safely supine domestic population) for investors. Democracy has been incorporated.

In this pseudo-democratic Brave New America, corporate power no longer answers to political controls. The needs of the popular majority are relentlessly subordinated to the “quest for ‘economic growth’” and to the foreign policy elite’s imperial perceptions of “Superpower’s” needs and the so-called “national interest.” “Economic growth” and “national interest” are code words for whatever capital wants and cloak the regular state-capitalist practice of funneling wealth and power from the Many to the Few. The demoted “people” are kept in perpetual fear and prodded to cower under the umbrella of the National Insecurity State by an endless so-called “War on Terror,” heir to the imperial Cold War. The Few steal elections, shred civil liberties, and launch illegal, immoral, and aggressive wars and occupations without serious fear of popular resistance. Young black males — formerly a leading source of protest — are dragooned into the burgeoning mass incarceration state. The use of state power to alleviate poverty and ameliorate inequality is shamed as dangerous public overreach but the use of that power to shamelessly advance corporate interests and pay off big money election investors is celebrated in the ironic name of the “free market.” Working peoples’ living standards are savagely rolled back and working-class sons and daughters are shipped off to kill and die in bloody campaigns of colonial conquest — wars that are waged on false pretexts and serve the interests of the Few while the costs are spread across society and fall with special force on the poor. It’s a “Hood-Robin” system.

Policy-relevant political power is “monopolized by the Few,” who “possess the skills, resources, and focused time that enables them to impose their will on a society the vast majority of whose members are overburdened and distracted by the demands of day-to-day survival” (p. 277). Those demands grow ever more difficult as corporate and imperial masters deepen their stranglehold over American politics, policy, culture, and “life.” It’s a vicious circle that threatens to blow out democracy’s last glowing embers in the “land of the free.”

This American “totalitarianism” promotes more than just specific policies and practices that serve the corporate and financial “elite.” It also advances a “totalizing” and authoritarian notion of the perfect and final society. The 2002 National Security Strategy of the United States defines America’s grand historical mission as advancing “freedom” and the “single sustainable model of for national success: freedom, democracy, and free enterprise” along with “development, free trade, and free markets.” As Wolin notes, “the freedoms dangled before the unfree are, in reality, disguised power” — the heavily state-protected and publicly subsidized power of multinational corporations, global high finance, and the military empire required to advance and protect capitalist profit (”development”) on a global scale. “When the NSS document presents the ‘free market’ as one of the three components of the ideal political system,” Wolin observes, “the market is a surrogate, a stand-in for globalization/empire.” (p. 85)

And the deeply authoritarian reality of empire, Wolin notes, is an unmentionable topic under American totalitarianism.. “The subject of [U.S.] empire,” Wolin observers, “ is taboo in [U.S. political] debate. No major politician or party has so much as publicly remarked on the existence of an American empire.” (p. 192)

Brave New America

Wolin calls the American pseudo-democratic political system “inverted totalitarianism” to differentiate it from the openly statist totalitarianism of classic European fascism (principally German Nazism) and Soviet Stalinism. The earlier totalitarian systems mobilized millions to rally behind centralized state power and a single personal ruler. They explicitly and rapidly demolished democratic and parliamentary institutions and elevated personalized state rule over markets and private profit.

The American model, by contrast, has evolved more slowly and under the guise — and in the name of — of democratic institutions and ideals, without open authoritarian intent. It “succeeds by encouraging political disengagement rather than mass mobilization.” It “relies more on ‘private’ media than on public agencies to disseminate propaganda reinforcing the official version of events.” (p. 44) It makes “capitalism” its official “regime ideology,” trumpeting the virtues of “free markets,” “free trade,” and “free enterprise” (code words for authoritarian state-capitalist corporate-managerial rule), which are falsely conflated “democracy.”

“Inverted totalitarianism” wraps itself in the language and lingering, watered-down legacy of democratic freedom and constitutionalism. It advances “leaders” who are the products but not the architects of the system. It does not crush popular government under the iron heel of dictatorship but rather renders democracy ever-more feckless and irrelevant through regular systemic corruption, popular exhaustion, cultural privatism, popular division/diversion, mass misinformation, and mass entertainment.

Unlike classic 20th century fascist and Soviet (red fascist) totalitarianism, it requires no great sacrifice or strength on the part of its subject populace. It creates a “soft,” childish, and fearful citizenry that is asked mainly to buy things, to watch their telescreens (which largely filter and package the world in terms fit for corporate and imperial hegemony), and perhaps to occasionally vote for its favorite corporate-vetted and “misrepresentative” political candidates every few years.

“Inverted totalitarianism’s” ideal “good Americans” pretty much stay at work, home, the bank, and the mall. They are happy to leave big political and policy decisions and public affairs to designated experts and protectors from the professional political class that has emerged to serve the combined and interrelated interests of the corporate and imperial Few. In Wolin’s view, they represent the corporate-era fulfillment of the British political philosopher Thomas Hobbes’ arch-authoritarian notion — developed in Hobbes’s book Leviathan (1651) — of the good society as one that combines the absolute power of the ruler with a populace that loathes and runs from political engagement:

Leviathan was the first image of superpower and the first intimation of the kind of privatized citizen congenial with its requirements, the citizen who finds politics a distraction to be avoided, who if denied ‘a hand in public business,’ remains convinced that taking an active part means to ‘to hate and be hated,’ ‘without any benefit,’ and ‘to neglect the affairs of [his] own family.’ Hobbes had not only foreseen the power possibilities in the oxymoron of private citizen, but exploited them to prevent sovereign power from being shared among its subjects. Hobbes reasoned that if individuals were protected in their interests and positively encouraged by the state to pursue the wholeheartedly, subject only to laws designed to safeguard them from the unlawful acts of others, then they would soon recognize that political participation was superfluous, expendable, not a rational choice. Civic indifference was thus elevated to a form of rational virtue,… [justifying the emergence of] an apolitical citizenry… [immersed in] private concerns.” (p.75)

Classic totalitarianism assembled, rallied, and projected the “masses.” It beat up, intimidated, arrested, tortured, and killed dissenters. By contrast, the American model of totalitarianism demobilizes and inverts the populace, keeping it (us) focused on personal, private, and family concerns — and on its corporate telescreens. Antiwar and social justice activists don’t generally have to be beaten and jailed; they are deleted and occasionally mocked and marginalized on the Ten O’ Clock News, leaving little mark on degraded public perceptions and history.

“Inverted totalitarianism’s” pacified, apathetic, ignorant, and deceived public is content to leave history to be made by supposedly wise and benevolent masters like Dick Cheney, Karl Rove, James Baker, and Donald Rumsfeld, who follow in the Nazis’ footsteps by launching criminal and supposedly “preventive” wars of aggression sold on brazenly false pretexts that are dutifully advanced by dominant media, including the Orwellian claim to be exporting democracy through colonial conquest. Since the Few learned from Vietnam not to send a citizen’s army into bloody colonial “service,” today’s wars are fought by a safely segregated caste of mostly working class imperial mercenaries.

In Brave New America, the People do not need to be hardened and rallied to inflict violence on designated ideological and ethnic enemies of the state at home or abroad. Their main jobs are to buy stuff, watch their telescreens and pursue their private interests. The definition of meaningful popular participation in the polity is reduced largely to casting an occasional vote in carefully crafted elections where none of the candidates are foolish enough to think they could run viably funded and broadcast campaigns in the name of the social-democratic and anti-imperial beliefs that most Americans privately and passively tell pollsters they hold. Meanwhile the ex-citizenry is encouraged to believe that it is in charge of the nation.

There is no serious push back in the corporate media, naturally enough, or even in the universities, since “the Academy ha[s] become self-pacifying.” (p. 68) As for the Democrats, Wolin observes that they offer no real or relevant opposition to the more explicitly plutocratic and militarist despotism of the Republicans. If anything, Wolin argues, the Democratic Party deepens “inverted totalitarianism’s” hold by capturing and co-opting reformist impulses within a broadly corporatist framework and by enhancing the illusion of meaningful popular representation within a system designed to keep the populace and democracy at bay:

“The Democrats’ politics might be described as inauthentic opposition in the era of Superpower. Having fended off its reformist elements and disclaimed the label of liberal, [the Democratic Party] is trapped by new rules of the game which dictate that a party exists to win elections rather than to promote a vision of the good society. Accordingly, the party competes for an apolitical segment of the electorate, ‘the undecided,’ and puzzles how best to woo religious zealots. Should Democrats somehow be elected, corporate sponsors make it politically impossible for the new officeholders to alter significantly the direction of society. At best, Democrats might repair some of the damage done to environmental safeguards or to Medicare without substantially reversing the drift rightwards. By offering palliatives, a Democratic administration contributes to plausible denial about the true nature of the system. By fostering an illusion among the powerless classes that the party can make their interests a priority, it pacifies and thereby defines the style of an opposition part in an inverted totalitarian system. In the process it demonstrates the superior cost-effectiveness of inverted totalitarianism over the crude classic versions.” (p. 201)

Capitalism v. Democracy: “The Dictatorship of the Bourgeoisie”

Wolin’s book is not without problems. Its annotation and detailed reference to current and recent events is painfully thin. It spends too much time on classical antiquity and past thinkers (the U.S. Founders, Machiavelli, Hobbes, and Tocqueville) relative to more modern U.S. business and political history and current events. It pays essentially no attention to the concrete empirical record of corporate evolution and rule and narrow-spectrum, business-friendly politics in U.S. history — a record that predates the Progressive Era (1900-1920), when the American philosopher John Dewey rightly proclaimed that U.S. “politics are the shadow cast on society by big business.” As the historian Richard Hofstader noted sixty years ago in his widely read text The American Political Tradition: “the range of vision embraced by the primary contestants in the major [U.S.] parties has always been bounded by the horizons of property and enterprise… They have accepted the economic virtues of capitalist culture as necessary qualities of man… That culture has been intensely nationalistic.”¹

Wolin seems remarkably unaware of, or unwilling to cite, Left thinkers who have written valuable works on capitalism, imperialism, and the trumping of American and Western “democracy” by concentrated economic and political power. Some of the ignored names that come to mind are Charles Derber (who writes in interesting and informative ways about successive “corporate regimes” that have ruled American politics since the late 19th century), C. Wright Mills, G. William Domhoff, Ralph Milliband, Ellen Meiksens-Wood, Alex Carey (an expert on corporate propaganda’s longstanding war on U.S. democracy), William T. Robinson, Jeff Faux, Joel Bakan, William Greider, David Montgomery, and (last but not least) Noam Chomsky.

Given Wolin’s taste for historical texts and theories on politics, I was disappointed that he did not join Chomsky in citing Aristotle and Thomas Jefferson on the core contradiction between wealth inequality (an inherent characteristic and tendency of capitalism) and democracy. Then there’s the largely invisible (in Wolin’s book) Karl Marx, for whom capitalist democracy, being a system of class rule, amounted to a “dictatorship of the bourgeoisie.” Democracy and capitalism have never mixed and never will, as generations of progressive thinkers have long argued.

Wolin underestimates or ignores the significant extent to which German Nazism reflected and acted on the desires of the German bourgeoisie.

Wolin writes in often excessively abstract and academic language despite his book’s popular, general-audience title. This style cannot help but ironically limit his book’s relevance as an antidote to elitism.

He missed, I think, a good opportunity to capture the often forgotten significance of Aldous Huxley’s novel Brave New World, as relevant to the United States’ particular brand of authoritarianism as George Orwell’s more Soviet-focused Nineteen Eighty Four. In Huxley’s dystopia, corporate-state masters divert people away from meaningful matters of serious public concern, transporting them to politically harmless states of childish amusement, personal preoccupation, and drugged, narcissistic fascination.

Wolin shows no appreciation of left “cultural theory” since Antonio Gramsci and the Frankfurt School, ignoring thinkers (themselves admittedly often hyper-abstract) who contributed critically to the analysis of corporate totalitarianism and capitalist cultural hegemony.

Wolin ignores the large number of Americans who do seem to represent efforts towards a mobilized far-right project. I am thinking here especially of the evangelical “American fascists” that Chris Hedges has warned us about across the vast swaths of so-called “Red State America.” And I can’t escape the possibility that a harder form of more explicitly fascist-like totalitarianism (already experienced by millions of very disproportionately black inmates and permanent felons in the United States’ Prison Nation) awaits Americans who have been softened up by the “inverted” variant Wolin describes.

The iron fist lives on beneath the silk glove of corporate neoliberal paternalism. I wonder how many (if any) mass antiwar or immigrant rights or global justice demonstrations Wolin has attended in the last decades. It is not uncommon to directly confront the reality of state repression right here in the U.S. during such events, as I would guess many Dissident Voice readers can attest. (We shall see how many protestors get tasered, beaten, and perhaps even [we hope not] killed in Denver and St. Paul over the next few weeks).

Last but not least, Wolin’s terminology is problematic. Charles Derber’s more concrete historical notion (developed in his 2005 book Hidden Power) of successive and inherently authoritarian corporate regimes — Derber places us in the age of the “third corporate regime,” dominated by the transnational corporation, aggressive global Empire, and rampant social insecurity at home — is much better than Wolin’s somewhat abstract and potentially bewildering concept of “inverted totalitarianism.” As a Kansas-based progressive- Democratic activist (who prefers to remain anonymous) recently wrote to me in a thoughtful reflection on Wolin’s book:

Wolin’s term ‘totalitarian’ is a fabulous contribution, but to say it is ‘inverted’ is not a viable, easily grasped, understandable label. It is too easily interpreted as ‘opposite.’ I think it is far better to say the corporate regime IS a form of totalitarian governance or is totalitarian via managed, intentional propaganda, apathy, ignorance, passivity, a lack of spare time, and a two-party, money-controlled, corrupt, plutocratic system. If I had to pick one adjective to distinguish American ‘totalitarianism’ from the fascist, violence-based systems of Hitler and Stalin I wouldn’t say ‘inverted’ but would say (ala Huxley) ‘pacified totalitarian’ or ‘propaganda-based totalitarian’ or ‘money-controlled totalitarian.’ ‘Inverted’ seems confusing at best.

Still, Wolin has done some very important and properly dark descriptive work on the United States’ dangerously constricted political culture at this terrible stage in the development of Brave New America. As the liberal political scientist Robert Dahl noted in 1959: “[If] political preferences are simply plugged into the system by leaders [business or other] in order to extract what they want from the system, then the model of plebiscitary democracy is substantially equivalent to the model of totalitarian rule”²

That’s pretty much where we are half a century later in “America, the greatest democracy that money can [and did] buy.” In its presidential as in its other elections, Laurence Shoup noted last February, U.S. “democracy” is “at best” a “guided one; at its worst it is a corrupt farce, amounting to manipulation, with the larger population projects of propaganda in a controlled and trivialized electoral process. It is an illusion,” Shoup claims — correctly in my opinion — “that real change can ever come from electing a different ruling class-sponsored candidate”³ Beneath and beyond the regular, much-ballyhooed election spectacles, wealth and power are concentrated ever-further upward over and above the sadly irrelevant U.S. public’s secretly progressive, social-democratic and anti-imperial policy preferences. Because of this chasm between public opinion and policy, the People find no meaningful institutional and political expression in “Superpower’s” “managed” and “ersatz-,” “pseudo’” and even “anti-”democracy” — thus the reality of its totalitarian nature.

And it is probably useful to have the full authoritarian darkness of this harsh reality acknowledged and described by someone like Wolin, who has long operated in the belly of the beast. He is an Ivy League academician who has long functioned within the elite mainstream of U.S. social science and not on the “lunatic fringe” to which serious left-progressive thinkers are sadly consigned in the American ideological system — consistent with the notion that U.S. government and political culture are totalitarian.

Brave New HOPE?

For what it’s worth, my new book Barack Obama and the Future of American Politics suggests that the ongoing “Obama phenomenon” is more than consistent with Wolin’s bleak thesis. It exposes Barack Obama as a conservative, corporate, militarist Democrat posing as a democratic progressive and suggests that the phenomenon is helping de-mobilize, co-opt, and contain (incorporate) the citizenry at the same time that it may be expanding the electorate.

In the United States’ dangerously narrow, corporate-totalitarian political culture, many people can’t process serious and substantive criticism of the Obama phenomenon from the left as anything but an argument to elect John McCain and/or a purely personal assault on Obama. But my dichotomy is not Obama versus McCain. It is (i) corporate- “managed democracy” versus grassroots popular activism against Dr. Martin Luther King Jr,’s “triple evils that are interrelated” (capitalism, racism, and imperialism) and against other and related evils (sexism, corporate-eco-cide, state terrorism and repression) as well. It is also about the timeworn battle between capitalism and democracy. Understood in terms of these deeper dichotomies and conflicts, what people do for two minutes on the holy day of the quadrennial election spectacle is a secondary matter.

My main concern is that citizens and activists find or maintain some relevant way to be and stay true to the actual historical Left’s commitment to popular resistance and mobilization under either an a McCain or an Obama presidency. And while a conservative corporate-neoliberal Obama victory may be preferable to an extremist and neoconservative McCain triumph in the short term, I fear that an Obama ascendancy carries serious related risks of excessive progressive self-pacification and threatens to dangerously re-legitimize the totalitarian politics of corporate rule and Empire. As Greg Guma recently noted in a thoughtful reflection on Obama as “The New Jimmy Carter”: “the truth is that, in Obama, a worried establishment has found the vessel through which they hope to restore international and domestic stability.” As Guma rightly observes, “Obama, like Carter, can be useful [to the U.S. power elite] in calming things down and re-establishing confidence in the legitimacy of the current political order. In short, he can reinforce the argument that ‘the system’ still works.”⁴

Our current corporate-totalitarian political order doesn’t “work” for any but the Few. It is a grave threat to human survival and peace, justice, and democracy at home and abroad.

1. Richard Hofstader, The American Political Tradition and the Men Who Made It (New York: Vintage, 1989 [1948]), pp.xxxiii-xl.
2. Robert Dahl, “Business and Politics: a Critical Appraisal of Political Science,” in Robert Dahl, ed., Social Science Research on Business: Product and Potential [New York, 1959], p. 53.
3. Laurence H. Shoup, “The Presidential Election 2008,” Z Magazine, February 2008, p. 31.
4. Greg Guma, “Barack Obama: The New Jimmy Carter,” ZNet, July 28, 2008.

Recently Obama was asked by CNN’s Candy Crowley if “there’s anything that’s happened in the past 7 1/2 years that the U.S. needs to apologize for in terms of foreign policy?” Obama responded by saying, “No, I don’t believe in the U.S. apologizing. As I said I think the war in Iraq was a mistake. We didn’t keep our eye on the ball in Afghanistan. But, you know, hindsight is 20/20, and I’m much more interested in looking forward rather than looking backwards.” The United States, Obama told Crowley, “remains overwhelmingly a force of good in the world.”¹

“SHOT AS THEY RAN”

I would like the Afghan “war”² enthusiast³ Barack Obama to write a Letter of No Apology to Orifa Ahmed. On October 7, 2001, Orifa’s house in the Afghan village of Bibi Mahru was destroyed by a 500-pound bomb dropped by an American F-16 plane. The explosion killed her husband (a carpet weaver), six of her children and two children, who lived (and died) next door. Away visiting relatives when the bombing occurred, Orifa returned to find pieces of her children’s flesh scattered around the killing site. She received $400 from U.S. authorities to compensate her for her losses.⁴

I would also like Obama to write a “Letter of No Apology” to Gulam Rasul, a school headmaster in the Afghan town of Khair Khana. On the morning of October 21, 2001, the United States dropped a 500-pound bomb on his house, killing his wife, three of his sons, his sister and her husband, his brother, and his sister-in-law.⁵

Another “Letter of Apology” should go to Sher Kahn, an old man who lost seven relatives when the United States assaulted the Afghan village of Niazi Qala on December 29, 2001. Here is how the British author and filmmaker John Pilger describes the attack:

The roar of the planes had started at three in the morning, long after everybody had retired for the night. Then the bombs began to fall — 500-pounders leading the way, scooping out the earth and felling a row of houses. According to neighbors watching from a distance, the planes flew three sorties over the village and a helicopter hovered close to the ground, firing flares, then rockets. Women and children were seen running from the houses towards a dried pond, perhaps in search of protection from the gunfire, but were shot as they ran.⁶

“Letters of No Apology” should also go from the “antiwar” Obama campaign to survivors of:

• 35 Afghan refugees who were bombed by the U.S. for riding in a bus in flight from U.S. assault.
• 160 Afghanis killed in repeated U.S. bombings of the village of Karam.
• 93 people killed when U.S. Ac 130 gun-ships strafed the small farming village Chowkar-Karaz. (The Pentagon said the community was “supporting terrorists” and therefore deserved its fate: “those people are dead,” a Pentagon spokesman told reporters, “because we wanted them dead.”)
• Rampant U.S. torture of civilians and non-combatants employed as part of the “war on terror” at the Bagram military base, near Kabul, since the fall of 2001.
• 64 civilians killed when the U.S. bombed a wedding party in eastern Afghanistan in early July of this year (This was the fourth wedding party blown up by the U.S.-led “coalition” since the fall of 2001).
• 19 women who died in the gynecology wing of a Kabul hospital bombed by the U.S. in October of 2001.
• The countless other U.S. attacks on Afghan villages that have added to a civilian death toll that certainly goes well into the thousands since the U.S. initiated its “liberation” of Afghanistan from a Taliban government the U.S. largely put into place during the 1990s.⁷

The people of Afghanistan can be forgiven for thinking it might not be all bad if Uncle Sam has occasionally taken his eye off “the ball in Afghanistan.”

U.S.-”liberated” Afghanistan remains desperately poor and violence-plagued under the control of religious extremists, warlords and the deadly U.S. Empire. Women are less safe there now than under the Taliban.⁸

“AS ILLEGAL AS THE INVASON OF IRAQ”

For what it’s worth, prominent legal scholar Marjorie Cohn notes that “the invasion of Afghanistan was as illegal as the invasion of Iraq.” As Cohn explains:

“The U.N. Charter provides that all member states must settle their international disputes by peaceful means, and no nation can use military force except in self-defense or when authorized by the Security Council. After the 9/11 attacks, the Council passed two resolutions, neither of which authorized the use of military force in Afghanistan.”

“The invasion of Afghanistan was not legitimate self-defense under article 51 of the Charter because the attacks on September 11 were criminal attacks, not ‘armed attacks’ by another country. Afghanistan did not attack the United States. In fact, 15 of the 19 hijackers came from Saudi Arabia. Furthermore, there was not an imminent threat of an armed attack on the United States after September 11, or Bush would not have waited three weeks before initiating his October 2001 bombing campaign. The necessity for self-defense must be ‘instant, overwhelming, leaving no choice of means, and no moment for deliberation.’ This classic principle of self-defense in international law has been affirmed by the Nuremberg Tribunal and the U.N. General Assembly.”⁹

Sold as a legitimate defensive response to the jetliner attacks of September 11, 2001, the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan was undertaken without definitive proof or knowledge that that country’s largely U.S.-created Taliban government was responsible in any way for 9/11. It occurred after the Bush administration rebuffed efforts by that government to possibly extradite accused 9/11 planners to stand trial in the U.S. The U.S. sought to destroy the Taliban government with no legal claim to introduce regime change in another sovereign state. The invasion took place over the protest of numerous Afghan opposition leaders and in defiance of aid organizations who expected a U.S. attack to produce a humanitarian catastrophe. And, as Noam Chomsky noted in 2003, U.S. claims to possess the right to bomb Afghanistan — an action certain to produce significant casualties — raised the interesting question of whether Cuba and Nicaragua were entitled to set off bombs in the U.S. given the fact that the U.S. provided shelter to well-known terrorists shown to have conducted murderous attacks on the Cuban and Nicaraguan people and governments.¹⁰ Under Bush’s rationale for launching his assault on Afghanistan (an attack that Obama wishes to significantly expand), citizens of Latin American states whose dictatorships were schooled in torture at the School of the Americas (Ft. Benning, Georgia) would be free to attack American cities and villages.

“IRAQ HAS BEEN KILLED”

As for the U.S. “mistake” in Iraq, where to begin with the Letters of No Apology that Obama and his staff need to write? The U.S. has undertaken a highly criminal occupation of that country against the wishes of the “liberated” nation’s own populace. In a marvelous example of what Obama called (in Berlin last week) U.S. “sacrifice” for “freedom,”¹¹ the U.S. has inflicted a bloody Holocaust on Mesopotamia, killing (directly and indirectly) as many as 1.2 million Iraqis and maiming and displacing many millions more. According to the respected journalist Nir Rosen last December, “Iraq has been killed, never to rise again. The American occupation has been more disastrous than that of the Mongols who sacked Baghdad in the thirteenth century. Only fools talk of solutions now. There is no solution. The only hope is that perhaps the damage can be contained.”¹²

I wonder what Rosen would have had to say about the following comment offered by Barack Obama to autoworkers assembled at the General Motors plant in Janesville, Wisconsin on February 13, 2008, just before that state’s Democratic primary: “It’s time to stop spending billions of dollars a week trying to put Iraq back together and start spending the money putting America back together.”¹³

“We should support the millions of Iraqis,” Obama told 200,000 rapt listeners in Berlin, “who seek to rebuild their lives even as we pass on responsibility to the Iraqi government.”¹⁴

“Rebuild their lives” from exactly what, pray tell? Senator Obama did not elaborate on the two U.S. military attacks, the decade plus of murderous “economic sanctions” (which killed more than half a million children — a cost that the current Obama advisor and supporter Madeline Albright called a “price worth paying”), and the ongoing invasion’s ever-climbing death toll. Obama will continue the occupation as president, something known by those who care to read between the lines of his populace-pleasing campaign rhetoric.

Reading Obama’s line about “freedom”-loving America’s overseas “sacrifice” in his Berlin Address, I was reminded of something he said in a speech to The Chicago Council on Global Affairs in the fall of 2006: “The American people have been extraordinarily resolved [in alleged support of the Iraq "war" - P.S.]. They have seen their sons and daughters killed or wounded in the streets of Fallujah.¹⁵

This was a spine-chilling selection of locales. Fallujah was the site for colossal U.S. war atrocity — the crimes included the indiscriminate slaughter of civilians, the targeting even of ambulances and hospitals, and the practical leveling of an entire city — by the U.S. military in April and November of 2004. The town was designated for destruction as an example of the awesome state terror promised to those who dared to resist U.S. power. Not surprisingly, Fallujah became a powerful and instant symbol of American imperialism in the Arab and Muslim worlds. It was a deeply provocative and insulting place to choose to highlight American “sacrifice” and “resolve” in the brazenly imperialist occupation — described as “a colonial war” by the grand U.S. imperial strategist Zbigniew Brzezinski (an Obama foreign policy advisor) — of Iraq.¹⁶

Recycling the imperial discourse of elite Democratic “doves” during and on the Vietnam War,¹⁷ Obama insists that the monumentally illegal and transparently petro-colonial occupation of Iraq was a “strategic blunder” resulting from “our” over-zealous “good intentions” (sometimes we just get a little crazy with our noble passion to spread liberty).

Not true: Operation Iraqi Liberation (O.I.L.) is an imperial CRIME (aggressive warfare was the top crime for which Nazi leaders were executed at Nuremburg) obviously dedicated to deepening U.S. control over hyper-strategic oil resources in the world’s energy heartland while serving the ongoing interests of the American military-industrial complex.¹⁸

Barack No Apology (Because We Are Good) Obama wants badly to expand what he calls George W. Bush’s “good” and “proper” war on Afghanistan while claiming to want to reduce America’s “mistake[n]” presence in Iraq.

The world should beware. Superpower may be getting ready to take on some outwardly new faces, but its dangerous national narcissism will live on along with its empire of bases, bullets, and bombs.

1. “Transcript of Obama Interview on CNN” (July 25, 2008), The Page. Regarding “force for good”: never mind that the hyper-consumerist automobile-addicted U.S. is home to 5 percent of world’s population but generates a quarter of the planet’s climate-baking carbon emissions. Forget the brazenly imperial 720-plus U.S. military bases that are stationed in nearly country on Earth, the threat and recurrent reality of U.S. military assault, the U.S.-spread mass culture of commodified nothingness, and the dedicated U.S. advance of a negative (corporate) globalization model that consigns billions to extreme poverty while the ever richer planetary Few enjoy spectacular opulence (and related political hyper-power) and you begin to get a sense of why many world citizens might think “America is part of what has gone wrong in the world.”
2. It is getting tiresome to hear Obama repeatedly refer to the United States as living “in a time of war.” The U.S. is engaged in one-sided imperial violence against Iraq and Afghanistan. The “force for good” is “waging a colonial war” (Zbigniew Bzrezinski) on relatively defenseless others in distant imperial hinterlands. Ordinary Americans are not living through “wartime conditions” and are in fact being encouraged to stay soft, consumerist, spectator-ized, and demobilized, though a relatively small and disproportionately working-class segment of the U.S. populace is enlisted into the hard culture of militarism (the U.S. power elite having learned from Vietnam not to involve the general populace in ugly colonial campaigns abroad). For some useful reflections, see Sheldon Wolin, Democracy Incorporated: Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008) and (on class, Vietnam, and military recruitment) Noam Chomsky and David Barsamian, Imperial Ambitions: Conversations on the Post-9/11 World (New York: Metropolitan, 2005), pp. 133-134.
3. For some interesting details from the primary campaign trail, see Paul Street, “Obama’s Good and ‘Proper’ War,” ZNet (March 5, 2008).
4. John Pilger, Freedom Next Time: Resisting the Empire (New York: Nation Books, 2007), pp. 284-85.
5. Pilger, Freedom Next Time, pp.285-86.
6. Pilger, Freedom Next Time, p. 286.
7. Pilger, Freedom Next Time, pp. 287-293; John Pilger, “Obama, The Prince of Bait and Switch,” The New Statesman, July 26, 2008. For details on sources on hundreds of U.S. and related “coalition” and Northern Alliance attacks leading to many civilian deaths between the fall of 2001 and the U.S. invasion of Iraq, see University of New Hampshire professor Marc Herold, “Daily Casualty Account of Afghan Civilians Killed by U.S. Bombing and Special Forces Attack, October 7 [2001] Until Present Day” (March 15, 2003).
8. Pilger, Freedom Next Time, pp. 264-293.
9. Marjorie Cohn, “End the Occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan,” ZNet (July 30, 2008).
10. Noam Chomsky, Hegemony Over Survival: America’s Quest for Global Dominance (New York: Metropolitan, 2003), pp. 199-206. See also Rajul Mahajan, The New Crusade: America’s War on Terror (New York: Monthly Review, 2002), p. 21.
11. Remarks of Barack Obama: “A World That Stands As One,” Berlin, Germany (July 24, 2008).
12. Nir Rosen, “The Death of Iraq,” Current History (December 2007), p. 31.
13. WIFR Television, CBS 23, Rockford, Illinois, “Obama Speaks at General Motors in Janesville,” February 13, 2008.
14. Obama, “A World That Stands As One.”
15. Barack Obama, “A Way Forward in Iraq,” Speech to Chicago Council on Global Affairs, Chicago Illinois (November 20, 2006).
16. Zbigniew Brzezinski, “Five Problems With the President’s Plan,” Washington Post (January 12, 2007). On Fallujah, see Michael Mann, Incoherent Empire (New York: Verso, 2005, p. xii; Anthony Arnove, Iraq: The Logic of Withdrawal (New York: New Press, 2006), pp. 27-28; Paul Street, “Vilsacking Iraq,” ZNet Magazine (December 22, 2006).
17. Noam Chomsky, “‘Good News’: Iraq and Beyond,” ZNet (February 16, 20088); Noam Chomsky, “The Mechanisms and Practices of Indoctrination” (1984), pp.207-208 in Noam Chomsky, Chomsky on Democracy and Education, ed. C.P. Otero (New York: RoutledgeFalmer, 2003).
18. For details and sources, see Paul Street, “Largely About Oil: Reflections on Empire, Petroleum, Democracy, and the Occupation of Iraq,” Z Magazine (January 2008): 38-42.

Maybe it’s some sort of “progressive victory” that Daily Kos publisher Markos Moulitsas is a contributing columnist at the longstanding “mainstream” (corporate) media outlet Newsweek magazine. That’s what a liberal I know tells me.

I wouldn’t really know if he’s right since I almost never get to Daily Kos. I’m too busy with the leading dominant media organs and (the only antidote that works for me) explicitly left outlets like Z Magazine, ZNet, CounterPunch, Black Agenda Report, International Socialist Review, and Dissident Voice. So I’m not in the best position to comment on how much of a left attainment it is that “the world’s most powerful liberal blogger” (Jack Tapper, “Inside the Mind of the World’s Most Powerful Liberal Blogger,” ABC News, June 24, 2006) is a regular presence in corporate news and commentary.

“Liberal Media” Operative Karl Rove: “Stay Strong on Iraq”

But two things tend to dampen my excitement over Moulitsas’ job at Newsweek. First, the magazine has also just given regular column space to a new and most definitely NOT progressive “writer”: Karl Rove, the smiling, semi-Satanic architect of the Bush II administration’s monumentally plutocratic, regressive, arch-authoritarian, and messianic-militarist political strategy from 2000 through late 2006. Rove made his lovely debut working for “the liberal media” last week, penning a Newsweek column in which he counseled Republicans to defeat that great radical Hillary Clinton by “staying strong on Iraq.” He still has the revolting chutzpah to call Iraq a “vital battleground in the war on terror.” (Karol Rove, “How to Beat Hillary (Next) November,” Newsweek, November 26, 2007, p.39)

Anti-Government Ideology

The second thing is that Moulitsas follows other American liberals in fundamentally misunderstanding the nature of the right-wing/Rove-ian/Republican beast he claims to be fighting. I know this because Moulitsas’ November 26th Newsweek column (placed right next to Rove’s opening piece) accuses Republicans of embracing a socially dysfunctional “antigovernment ideology” — a self-fulfilling world view claiming that “government” doesn’t and can’t work. In support of this analysis, Moulitsas quotes Ronald Reagan saying that “government is not the solution; government is the problem.” He notes that Bush II “gutted the effectiveness of the Mine Safety and Health Administration,” put an “incompetent horse lawyer” (Mike Brown/“Brownie”) in charge of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), and “staff[ed] the Iraqi Reconstruction effort not with experts but with twenty-something ideologues” (Markos Moulitsas, “Make the Bush Record the Issue,” Newsweek, November 2007, p.39)

Starve the Left Hand of the State, Feed the Right

The anti-statist language he quotes and the public incompetence he criticizes is real. But Moulitsas has committed an egregious if widespread liberal mistake here: the confusion of rhetoric with reality and propaganda with policy. “Conservative” Republicans can pontificate and preach all they want about their desire to, in leading right wing strategist Grover Norquist’s words, “cut government down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub.” But they don’t mean it.

Beneath their deceptive anti-statist, quasi-libertarian discourse about the great conflict between “government bureaucracy” (bad) and “free market” capitalism (good), they wish to aggressively wield and expand state policy of a specifically regressive, plutocratic, and authoritarian — state capitalist — sort. When people like Norquist say they want to “starve the beast” of government, real (Left) progressives need to call them on their bluff. We need to make the elementary observation that the American Right targets some parts of the public sector for malnourishment but is perfectly happy to continue feeding — and getting fed by — other components of government. Republicans and other US reactionaries are concerned to dismantle those branches of government that serve the social and democratic needs of the non-affluent poor and working class majority.

But the Right is more than happy to sustain — and in some cases expand — those branches that serve the corporate order and the privileged few. It wants to de-fund and de-legitimize what the late French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu called “the left hand of the state” — the programs and services won by past popular struggles and social movements to social justice, equality, and inclusion. But it does not wish to take the budgetary or policy axe to the “right hand of the state,” the parts that provide service and welfare to concentrated wealth and dole out punishment (including rampant mass incarceration and felony-marking) for the poor (and right handed functions tend to rise when left-handed functions fall). It does not wish to dismantle America’s military-industrial and imperial complex.

It’s not about whether or not government can or should “work”. It’s about WHO GOVERNMENT SHOULD WORK FOR: the US public or the nation’s leading centers of concentrated wealth and power.

The Right’s wishes have been met to a shocking degree in recent decades. According to a common progressive lament, positive democratic change is next to impossible in the United State because the Right has stripped “government” of its capacity to act. American “government” can’t really do anything anymore because it doesn’t have the resources, including money and competency, to carry out key objectives. The national and global governing class’s supposed “government-busting” (Moulitsas) ideological preference for free markets, the story goes, has hopelessly disabled American government’s ability to act.

Perverted Priorities

Really? Tell it to the United States’ two million prisoners or to the survivors of the one million Iraqis who died at the hands of the illegal US invasion and occupation of their country.

The lament is exposed as myth when we ask WHOSE objectives American government can and supposedly can’t carry out. In the wealthiest nation on earth, the public sector lacks the money to properly fund education for all of the country’s children. It lacks the resources to provide universal health coverage, leaving 47 million American without basic medical insurance. It can’t match unemployment benefits to the numbers out of work. It lacks (claims to lack) the money to provide meaningful rehabilitation and reentry services for its many millions of very disproportionately black prisoners and ex-prisoners, marked for life with a criminal record. The list of unmet civic and social needs goes on and on.

But listen (fellow “Americans”) to what “our” public sector can pay for. American government is weak and cash-strapped when it comes to social democracy for the people but its cup runs over in powerful ways when it comes to meeting the needs of wealth, racial disparity and empire. It can afford to spend trillions on arch-plutocratic tax cuts rewarding the top 1 percent in the disingenuous name of “economic stimulus.” It can spend more on the military than on all possible enemy states combined many times over, providing massive subsidy to the high-tech corporate sector, including billions on weapons and “defense” systems that bear no meaningful relation to any real threat faced by the American people. It can afford to incapacitate and incarcerate a greater share of its population than any nation in history and to spend hundreds of millions each year on various forms of corporate welfare and other routine public subsidies to “private” industry.

And of course it can afford hundreds of billions and perhaps more than a trillion dollars for an invasion and occupation of distant devastated nation that posed minimal risk to the US and even to its own neighbors.

Pentagon Capitalism

Today as always in the age of “the Pentagon system,” inherently statist militarism supplies the useful function of diverting government priorities away from social needs and towards the selfish interests of the privileged few. Beneath disingenuous “free market” rhetoric disseminated to de-legitimize the undesirable direction of public resources to the broad populace, the “business community” has long (since at least the Great Depression) understood that government must play a central role in sustaining the system of private profit. It makes a critical distinction, however, between left-handed government service to social needs and right-handed government investment in the wasteful and destructive missions of militarism. The first form of government activity interferes with the authoritarian prerogatives of investors and managers and is therefore rejected as a “functional” policy option by the politically super-influential business elite.

The second form is welcomed by the domestic power elite because it provides no challenge to business rule while diverting public resources to dominant private interests. It offers added lovely benefits to the American ruling class. It encourages the manufacture of mass fear and mindless nationalistic conformity while legitimizing the use of coercion against those who dare to criticize existing social hierarchies and doctrines at home and abroad (for useful discussions, see Noam Chomsky, Deterring Democracy. [New York: Hill and Wang, 1991], pp. 32, 81, 82, 108-109) It also underpins a global and remarkably expensive state-run empire, replete with more than 700 global bases located in nearly every country on earth. (Chalmers Johnson, The Sorrows of Empire [New York: Metropolitan, 2004], pp. 151-184) The costs of that empire are distributed over the entirety of American society but its profits “revert to a few within. In this respect,” Noam Chomsky noted in 1969, “the empire serves as a device for internal consolidation of power and privilege.” (Noam Chomsky, For Reasons of State [New York: New Press, 1970-, p. 47) It's not for nothing that big business feels repeatedly threatened by the ironic specter of peace -- the terrible threat of a social-democratic “peace dividend.”

Consistent with those “perverted priorities” (Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.), the imperial adventures in Iraq and Afghanistan have proven to be profit bonanzas for leading “defense” and petroleum corporations like Boeing, Raytheon, Exxon-Mobil, and Conoco-Phillips (See Paul Street. "Profit Surge," Empire & Inequality Report, No. 10, ZNet, February 10, 2007). Military spending and oil prices have risen hand in hand in the new age of permanent US-led state-terrorist “war on terror” -- a war that happens by more than pure coincidence to be focused on the super-strategic heart of the world's energy center.

Bipartisan Spiritual Death

“It will be a good day,” as the venerable peacenik bumper sticker says, “when the Pentagon has to hold a bake sale to pay for its next B-52 bomber.” And as Dr. Martin Luther King noted on April 4, 1967, exactly one year before his state execution in Memphis, “a nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.”

As King knew all too well while observing Great Society president Lyndon Baines Johnson squash the stillborn War on Poverty with the imperial War on Vietnam, liberal Democrats were deeply participatory in the “spiritual death” of privileging militarism over justice. The creation of the Pentagon System and the permanent war economy was of course a richly bipartisan affair, just like the criminal U.S. occupation of Iraq, which many liberal Democrats continue to defend and fund even while they criticize the incompetence of its management.

How interesting in that regard that Moulitsas -- a former Republican who speaks with pride of his three year “service” (1989-1992) in the US Army (see Tapper, “Inside the Mind”) -- is upset that the Iraq occupation has not been handled by competent experts but by ineffective government operatives. Like the ill-fated Kerry campaign of 2004, Moulitsas -- who tells ABC that Daily Kos “support[s] every Democrat who runs for office” and who praises George Bush Senior’s invasion of Mesopotamia for “contain[ing] Iraq and with a minimum loss of life” (tell it to the survivors of the thousands of surrendered Iraqi troops the US slaughtered from the skies on the infamous “Highway of Death”) — seems to think that American government should have been more effective in its illegal imperial takeover of another sovereign state.

As usual, liberals need to choose: they must become part of the solution, not part of the problem.

Here are 49 words to inspire dismay and disgust:

“House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., and her lieutenants maneuvered to avoid a floor fight that would have forced Democrats to choose between their liberal base, which might cheer a Cheney impeachment, and a broader electorate, which might view the resolution as a partisan game in a time of war.”

I read these words on the fourth page of the front section of the November 7th edition of the Iowa City Press-Citizen. They are part of a story titled “GOP Tries to Outfox Foes: VP’s Impeachment Vote Beat Back.” They are attributed to the following author: “Washington Post/LA Times.”

The story is about how the Republican Party tried to force a vote on progressive Congressman Dennis Kucinich’s (D-Ohio) call for the House to pass a resolution to impeach Vice President Dick Cheney for “fabricating a threat of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction” to justify the invasion of Iraq.

House Republican (GOP) leaders knew that the Democrats lack the votes and willpower to work for the impeachment of Cheney and/or Bush. The Republicans wanted to embarrass the Democrats and expose the fissures in their party by forcing a vote on Kucinich’s bill.

Pelosi succeeded in defeating the Republicans by getting Kucinich’s measure sent to the Judiciary Committee. According to House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-Md.), “impeachment is not on our agenda. We have some major priorities. We need to focus on those.”

House Judiciary chair John Conyers agreed, claiming that “let[ting]‘ this thing” — Kucinich’s resolution — “out of the box…could create a split that could affect our productivity for the rest of the Congress.”

Hallelujah! The evil Kucinich-Republican impeachment alliance was defeated by the noble forces of Democratic liberalism, whose “major priorities” right now do not include defending the United States Constitution against the abuse of power.

If We Can’t Impeach Cheney-Bush…

There are a number of problems with this. I will mention three.

First, there’s no point in having the weapon of impeachment on the constitutional books if it can’t be wielded against Cheney and Bush. As Glen Ford observed last Spring, “if Cheney-Bush can’t be impeached, nobody can.”

Let us recall some elementary facts.

The current messianic-militarist White House’s invasion of Iraq is not merely a foreign policy “mistake” — a “strategic blunder,” as it commonly described by our great liberal saviors in the corporate-imperial Demcoratic Party. It is an ongoing act of high state arch-criminality that has killed more than a million Iraqis as well as nearly 4000 U.S. GIs.

Regarding Iraq and the so-called “war on terror,” Cheney and Bush have:

* lied this country into an illegal, unprovoked war of aggression (the supreme crime under Nuremburg principles) with blatantly fraudulent claims about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction.

* fabricated in the minds of the American people false links between Saddam Hussein, al Qaeda, Iraq, and 9/11.

* falsely claimed that the U.S. was engaged in an effort to spread freedom and democracy to Iraq and the Middle East.

* fired generals who told them that their plans for Iraq were seriously inadequate.

* subverted the Constitution, not out of some genuine and sincerely-motivated effort to fight terrorists, but to repress dissent.

* incited fear among the U.S. populace, generating the very terror they claim to fight.

* exploited that unreasoning fear as a political instrument to slander their critics and libel their opponents.

As Elizabeth de la Vega has argued, “the proposition that it is not good political strategy to insist that government official obey the law is highly debatable. More important, strategizing in the face of an ongoing crime is wrong” (Elizabeth de la Vega, United States v. George W. Bush [New York: Seven Stories, 2006], p.19).

“To Rescue the Rule of Law”

What are we saying to future presidencies by not exercising our basic constitutional duty to purge Cheney and Bush? “Impeachment, like all criminal processes,” Ford notes, “is designed not just to punish current lawbreakers, but to prevent future criminality. George Bush and his gang have been running a massive criminal enterprise for more than six years, effectively nullifying the Constitution. The Constitution does not automatically come back to life after the two top criminals leave. It must be enforced, or it is just an old, moldy piece of paper. The question is not whether there is time to impeach Bush and Cheney, but whether there is time to rescue the rule of law.”

Encoded in Article II, Section 4 of the U.S. Constitution, impeachment is on the books because the United States’ “founders” feared the remarkable potential for disastrous abuse of executive branch power the Constitution created. Cheney and Bush have justified that fear like few previous White House occupants. They have committed a vast array of technically impeachable offenses in 12 criminal categories — “not 12 crimes,” Ford adds, “but 12 whole categories of crimes, each containing many separate instances and counts of crimes, any one of which is enough to send Bush and Cheney back where they came from before January, 2009.”

“If laws can be broken at will,” Ford reminds us, “there is no law. Congress may as well stop enacting them, and go home, themselves.”¹

Currently planning to criminally attack Iran before the end of their second illegally attained terms, Darth Cheney and The Worst President Ever have raised for us the question that Archibald Cox posed in October of 1973 after Richard Nixon fired Cox for his role in investigating the Watergate break-in: “shall we live under a government of laws or a government of men?”

Naked Imperial Aggression: Where’s the War?

Second, the notion the United States is experiencing “a time of war” is absurd. Beneath administration and media-fanned rhetoric about the U.S . as “a nation at war” and Bush as “a wartime president,” Operation Iraqi Liberation (O.I.L.) is naked imperial aggression. The “[United States of] American people” are under no attack from Iraq or Iraqis at home or abroad and never have been. We are not dodging Iraqi IEDs and sniper fire on the way to and from our shopping malls, workplaces, and schools. Where’s the war?

As most of the morally and politically cognizant planet knows, U.S. soldiers have been sent to Iraq to participate in a brazenly imperialist, monumentally illegal, and inherently mass murderous occupation of a formerly sovereign nation that posed zero threat to the U.S. — an action sold on false and manufactured pretexts. Beneath the official reasons given, the invasion is, in Alan Greenspan’s words, “largely about oil.” More precisely, O.I.L. is about deepening and sustaining U.S. control of super-strategic Middle Eastern petroleum reserves located in the world’s energy heartland.

If we insist on calling this bloody petro-imperialist assault a “war,” we should admit that it is a very one-sided U.S. war of colonial aggression. And if the “broader [ U.S.] electorate” actually thinks Americans are currently living under wartime conditions, then it is not being adequately informed to make reasonable distinctions between external imperial violence and the reality of war as actually experienced by its leading victims past and present.

Catch-22: War as the Pardon for War Criminality?

Third, it is ridiculous to claim that we can’t properly penalize and remove Cheney-Bush in “a time of war” when the crimes for which they would be impeached are their use of fraudulent and illegal means to put the U.S. into a so-called “wartime” period.

Talk about a self-negating Catch-22: “Gee, we’d like to impeach Cheney-Bush for illegally taking the United States into a criminal ‘war,’ but we dare not undertake such potentially divisive proceedings during ‘a time of war.’”

Yes, the way to avoid prosecution for crimes perpetrated on the way to committing a homicide is to successfully execute the murder.

That’s a nice little bit of Orwellian checkmate.

The invasion of Iraq is an ongoing, mass-murderous act of supreme state violence and a crime against humanity. It is a gross violation of international law and civilized norms. Mere impeachment and removal from office are mild penalties compared to what Cheney-Bush deserve for their barbarian Iraq policy. The terrible fact that they are committing their crimes in an age of organized mass murder is no excuse and should offer no pardon.

1. Glen Ford, “If Cheney-Bush Can’t Be Impeached, Nobody Can,” Black Agenda Report, June 20 2007.

Sometimes, however, the skids of betrayal are greased in advance of the attainment of the presidency, with no small assistance from a weak and myopic Left and power-worshipping “liberal” media.

Look, for example, at an interesting article that appeared on the first page of the most recent Sunday New York Times. “Even as they call for an end to the war and pledge to bring the troops home,” Times reporters Jeff Zeleny and Marc Santora note, “the Democratic presidential candidates are setting out positions that could leave the United States engaged in Iraq for years” (Jeff Zeleny and Marc Santora, “Democratic Field Says Leaving Iraq May Take Years,” New York Times, 12 August, 2007. p. A1).

“May take tears?” Interesting… A review of the leading Democratic presidential candidates’ campaign remarks about Iraq over the last six months leaves what Zeleny and Santora call “little ambiguity in their message: If the president refuses to end the war, they will” (Zeleny and Santora).

Lately, however, those “anti-war” candidates are saying something rather different. John (“Support the Troops, End the War”) Edwards is citing the need to “prevent genocide” as a reason to keep US troops in Iraq .

Barrack (“It’s Time to Bring the Troops Home”) Obama says that the need to provide “security for American personnel” and to “train Iraqis” will require maintaining a military presence in Iraq .

Hillary (“I’m Sorry, it’s Over… if this president does not end the war, I will”) points to the need to fight terrorism and stabilize the Kurdish section of Iraq as justifications for keeping the U.S. military in Mesopotamia into the next presidency.

“These positions,” Zeleny and Santora observe, “suggest that the Democratic bumper-sticker message of a quick end to the conflict — however much it appeals to primary voters — oversimplifies the problems likely to be inherited by the next commander in chief.”

Zeleny and Santora’s Sunday Times article is disturbing in at least four ways. The first depressing thing is their suggestion that the desire for a rapid U.S. withdrawal from Iraq is limited to the nation’s Democratic primary voters. In reality, the majority of all Americans support an expeditious U.S. withdrawal.

The second problem is the Times’ unsurprising failure to acknowledge that the leading Democratic presidential candidates’ duplicity on Iraq is thoroughly predictable in light of the richly bipartisan nature of the U.S. Global Dominance Project. As Tuft’s University political scientist Tony Smith noted in the Washington Post last March, there’s little if any real foreign policy difference between the Republicans and the Democrats when it comes to “doctrinal questions.” The leaders of both parties are equally committed to U.S. world supremacy. Both wings of the narrow-spectrum U.S. party system strongly embrace U.S. interventionism, militarism and (when “necessary”) unilateralism in the name of spreading “democracy” and “free markets.”

If anything, the “neoliberal” Democrats’ main foreign policy claim is that they can do a better job of conducting this imperialist foreign policy than the “neoconservative” Republicans. “We are the better, more effective and competent Men and Women of Empire” is the basic claim. Such was the essence of the John F. Kerry “Reporting to Duty” campaign in 2004.

Currently, Smith notes, aggressive militarist neoliberals (Hillary Clinton is an especially dangerous example) are probably more influential within the Democratic Party than aggressive militarist neoconservatives are inside the Republican Party. By Smith’s candid account:

Although they now cast themselves as alternatives to President Bush, the fact is that prevailing Democratic doctrine is not that different from the Bush-Cheney doctrine… Many Democrats, including senators who voted to authorize the war in Iraq, embraced the idea of muscular foreign policy based on American global supremacy and the presumed right to intervene to promote democracy or to defend key U.S. interests long before 9/11, and they have not changed course since. Even those who have shifted against the war have avoided doctrinal questions.

“But without a coherent alternative to the Bush doctrine, with its confidence in America ’s military preeminence and the global appeal of ‘free market democracy,’ the Democrats’ midterm victory may not be repeated in November 2008. Or, if the Democrats do win in 2008, they could remain staked to a vision of a Pax Americana strikingly reminiscent of Bush’s” (Tony Smith, “It’s Uphill for the Democrats: They Need a Global Strategy, Not Just Tactics for Iraq,” Washington Post, 11 March 2007).

The Democrats’ mealy-mouthed waffling on Iraq is predictable in light also of what a still left Christopher Hitchens once (in his 1999 study of Bill and Hillary Clinton) called “the essence of American politics. This essence, when distilled, consists of the manipulation of populism by elitism. That elite is most successful,” Hitchens explained, “which can claim the heartiest allegiance of the fickle crowd; can present itself as ‘in touch’ with popular concerns; can anticipate the tides and pulses of opinion; can, in short, be the least apparently elitist.” (Christopher Hitchens, No One Left to Lie to: the Values of the Worst Family [( New York : Verso, 2000], pp. 17-18).

The leading Democratic presidential candidates are walking the standard timeworn U.S. tightrope between their captivity and commitment to standard elite agendas (including imperial agendas) and their need to win enough popular support to gain and maintain power.

The third alarming thing about the Sunday Times article is Zeleny and Santora’s accurate observation that “antiwar advocates have raised little challenge to such positions by Democrats…Four years after the last presidential race featured early signs of war protest, particularly in the candidacy of Howard Dean,” Zeleny and Santora note, “a new phase of the debate seems to be unfolding, with antiwar groups giving the Democrats latitude to take positions short of a full and immediate withdrawal.”

The half-dead “antiwar movement’s’” cringing captivity to the imperial Democrats is clear in the following pathetic comment from Moira Mack, a spokesperson for Americans Against Escalation in Iraq: “we are in a good position when leaders are debating the best way to bring our troops home rather than whether or not to bring them home” (Zeleny and Santora, p.A15).

The fourth problem is the absence of any discussion of ways the U.S. might meet what the Times calls “ America ’s responsibility to Iraqi civilians” (Zeleny and Santora, A15) other than maintaining a bloody, widely hated colonial invasion.

Given the shockingly narrow moral and ideological parameters of acceptable debate in U.S. political culture, it is unthinkable that “our” “liberal” press and presidential candidates would honestly acknowledge the United States ’ obligation to pay reparations to Iraq as compensation for decades of devastating, mass-murderous U.S. assault.

Those candidates and that press naturally accept as unassailable doctrine the basic precept that the invasion of Iraq was launched for the good of Iraqis and in pursuit of noble and idealistic goals of freedom and democracy. Never mind that the occupation is widely and accurately understood around the world to be a brazenly imperialist effort to deepen U.S. control of super-strategic Middle Eastern energy resources and to advance the arch-plutocratic Bush agenda at home and abroad.

It’s all unmentionable. Such, alas, is the profound moral and ideological poverty of the dominant political culture in the failing imperial-state “homeland” of the “world’s greatest democracy.”

It was a crime for the United States to invade Iraq and it’s a crime to continue waging a brutal war for oil…I refuse to offer my children or anyone else’s children as fodder for the war machine.

– Rosemary Persaud, mother and activist, prior to sentencing for “criminal trespass” at the Linn County Courthouse, Cedar Rapids, Iowa, July 6, 2007

We are not politicians, but citizens. We have no office to hold on to, only our consciences, which insist on telling the truth. That, history suggests, is the most realistic thing a citizen can do.
– Howard Zinn, March 2007

OUR CANDIDATE HAS A PLAN TO END THE WAR

With next January’s Iowa presidential caucuses looming ever closer, Iowa’s cities, and towns are crawling with Democratic campaign activists. Most of these staffers claim to be strongly against the U.S. war on Iraq. It’s important, they tell you — and they’re right by my estimation – that the Republican Party not continue to hold the nation and world’s most powerful office after January 27th 2007.

Among other things, they want Iowans to believe that a vote for their candidate in January and again in November 2008 is a vote against the war. Sounding a bit like the Richard Nixon campaign in 1968, they tell Iowans that their candidate has a plan to wind the war down and bring the troops home… soon. Too many Iowans and Americans have died, their candidates say, in George W. Bush’s “mistaken” and “stupid” war to “liberate” the Iraqi people.

These activists, many of them progressive young adults, get movement salaries, paid offices, and valuable work experience that looks good on a law- or graduate-school application. They get a chance to feel like they are part of something big as the national media focuses with increasing sharpness on their candidates’ bid to scale the heights of national and global power. Ever-careful not to offend potential voters, they are doing their best to sound uncontroversial while advancing their standard-bearer as the man or woman to heal the nation’s deepening wounds at home and abroad.

STRATEGIZING IN THE FACE OF A CRIME IS WRONG

Meanwhile a different activist tradition lives on below the dominant media radar screen in Iowa. Another and considerably less well-funded cadre of Iowa activists is not backed by the opulent financial and corporate (including military-industrial) interests that back pseudo-progressive corporate-imperial populists like Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. It is not especially concerned with the nation’s quadrennial, plutocratic and candidate-centered “electoral extravaganzas” (Noam Chomsky). It is focused on confronting high-state criminality in the here and now. It is not especially impressed by the liberal, pro-labor John Edwards, the corporate militarist Hillary or the mendacious, mush-mouthed centrist Obama. It believes that eighteen months or one more day is too long for the United States to continue its deadly and illegal occupation of Iraq.

Contrary to the public positions of the leading Democratic candidates, it understands that the invasion of Iraq has nothing to do with protecting Americans at home or spreading freedom and democracy abroad. “Operation Iraqi Freedom,” it knows, is a brazen imperialist crime — not merely a strategic “mistake” (as Hillary-Obama regularly describe “Operation Iraqi Freedom”) — reflecting Washington’s determination to deepen its control of strategic Middle Eastern oil resources. The occupation, it recognizes, is fundamentally opposed to democracy and lessens Americans’ security by inciting new terrorist attacks.

The second cadre understands that that the occupation is a richly bipartisan transgression, launched and continued with significant and indispensable support from the Democratic Party. The Democratic Party, it rightly suspects, has as much interest in ending the Iraq War before the November 2008 elections as George W. Bush had in capturing Osama bin-Laden after 9/11.

The second cadre agrees with impeachment advocate and former federal prosecutor Elizabeth de la Vega that political “strategizing in the face of an ongoing crime is wrong” (de la Vega 2006, p. 19). While Democratic leaders position themselves for the 2008 elections — cautiously keeping impeachment “off the table” (House Speaker Nancy Pelosi) and taking their time initiating investigations into the Bush administration’s fraudulent case for invasion — members of the second Iowa activist cadre are determined to contest the occupation now. They refuse to behave like the neighbors of Kitty Genovese — the woman who was viciously assaulted, stabbed three times, and finally killed on the way to her Queens, New York home one terrible night in 1964. Thirty-eight neighbors heard or watched Ms. Genovese’s ordeal, but no one called the police until the attack was essentially over (de la Vega 2006, p.18).

NO FREE PASS TO THE DEMOCRATS

The second cadre insists on holding politicians of both dominant U.S. political parties accountable for the crimes being committed in and against Iraq. It agrees with Howard Zinn that the Democrats’ recurrently proposed “timetables for withdrawal” are “morally reprehensible in the case of a brutal occupation: would you give a thug who invaded your house, smashed everything in sight, and terrorized your children a timetable for withdrawal?… It’s as if,” Zinn notes, “before the Civil War, abolitionists agreed to postpone the emancipation of the slaves for a year, or two years, or five years, and coupled this with an appropriation of funds to enforce the Fugitive Slave Act.”

“When a social movement adopts the compromises of legislators,” Zinn adds, “it has forgotten its role, which is to push and challenge the politicians, not to fall in meekly behind them” (Zinn 2007).

CONVICTION OVER ECONOMIC ADVANCE

Most members of the second Iowa-activist cadre, many of them young adults, receive no financial compensation for their efforts. They do occasionally garner fines and criminal arrest and conviction records for acting on their beliefs. Their actions receive marginal coverage in at best local media and carry no long-term employment value beyond and marginal, poorly funded antiwar Left, where salaries tend toward minimum wage. If anything their activism works against their future economic chances.

THE “CEDAR RAPIDS 11”

Late last February, as the leading Democratic presidential campaigns set up shop across Iowa, Cedar Rapids Police arrested eleven Iowa activists, including seven University of Iowa (UI) students, for occupying the Cedar Rapids office of U.S. Sen. Charles Grassley (R-IA). During a three-hour sit-in at the downtown Federal Building, the protesters — mostly members of the University of Iowa Antiwar Committee (UIAC) — insisted that Iowa’s senior senator pledge to support the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq. After the war resisters refused to leave the American peoples’ Federal Building unless Grassley agreed to hear their demands, U.S. Marshals called the Cedar Rapids Police.

Eleven protesters (subsequently dubbed “The Cedar Rapids 11”) were charged with criminal trespass and held in the Linn County jail on $325 bond.

Their action was part of the national Occupation Project, a branch of the Chicago-based Voices for Creative Nonviolence meant to spur nonviolent protests against the war.

Deputy U.S. Marshal Toby Michael told the Iowa City-based Daily Iowan that it was “the only time he’d seen protesters arrested in 23 years working in the Federal Building” (Kerns 2007).

One of the protesters, UI graduate student Joshua Casteel, had received Grassley’s 1998 nomination to attend the prestigious West Point military academy.

“IS NOT A LIFE WORTH MORE THAN A DOLLAR?”

Toby Michael recently got to see protestors arrested at the Cedar Rapids Federal Building for a second time when the Occupation Project held a day-long reunion.
I drove up from Iowa City to join the party.

The festivities began at 9 in the morning last Friday at the Linn County District Associate Court, where 40 or so supporters watched seven of the “Cedar Rapids 11” (CR11) get sentenced for last February’s “criminal trespass.”

Prior to his sentencing, the Des Moines-based Catholic Worker activist and long time civil disobedience practitioner Frank Cordero accused the judge of disciplining the wrong people. The “real criminals,” Cordero noted, are found in Washington, conducting the monumentally illegal occupation of not-so incidentally oil-rich Mesopotamia.

A second “CR11” member, former U.S. Army interrogator and Arabic translator Josh Casteel, reminded the judge that individuals have human rights duties that transcend the laws and policies of nation states. Casteel related his own experience of being ordered to illegally torture Iraqis at the Abu Ghraib prison. He observed that the U.S. occupation of Iraq violates numerous domestic and international laws and argued that civil disobedience in defiance of the invasion was justified by the legal subordination of “civic order” to “the common good.”

A third CR11 member brought some courtroom observers to tears with her passionate call for peace. “As a mother,” Rosemary Persaud Iowa City said, “I have to speak against this war and ALL wars. I have the responsibility to teach my children to be understanding of other people and to find ways to solve problems non-violently. It’s hard to teach your kids these lessons,” Persaud added, “when their culture is violent and when their government is provoking war as a means to an end.”

“I refuse,” Persaud declared, “to offer my children or anyone else’s children as fodder for the war machine.”

Ms. Persaud registered a basic point: “Congress has the power to end this unjust war and illegal occupation. They can stop funding it.”

“The American people want our troops HOME, to live, Ms. Persaud said, “and we want the Iraqi people to live. It was a crime for the United States to invade Iraq and it’s a crime to continue waging a brutal war for oil.”

Persuad told the judge that she had wanted “to ask Senator Grassley, as someone who has spent years of service investigating fraud and waste in government spending, why he sees no waste in human life as this war goes on and on, year after year. Is not a life worth more than a dollar? It seems,” she added, “our Congress has lost its ability and courage to measure what matters and has lost its moral compass.”

Then Iowa City-based CR11 member Timothy Gauger spoke briefly. He praised his fellow activists for engaging in “purely idealistic action” and ended by suggesting that “we do it again sometime soon.”

Seeming half-sympathetic to their cause, the judge on duty let the Cedar Rapids 11 off with $190 in fines apiece. The civil disobedience tradition, he intoned, “comes with consequences.”

A BIPARTISAN OCCUPATION

Guager’s “sometime soon” came three hours later, when forty or so antiwar Iowa Occupation Project (IOP) supporters and activists approached the Cedar Rapids Federal Building for a second effort to confront Grassley about his longstanding support of the bloody Iraq invasion.

Federal marshals initially refused to allow more than one IOP member into Grassley’s office, forcing the rest to wait outside in stifling July heat. Reminded by activists that the U.S. Constitution upholds free speech and the right of assembly for “We the People,” not “We the Person,” the authorities later granted admission to Grassley’s office to a handful of other citizen occupiers.

While he was present in eastern Iowa last Friday, Grassley was unavailable to the antiwar activists either in person or by phone. Refusing to leave without at least speaking to their Republican War Senator, the activists were forcibly removed, arrested and released with new criminal trespass citations.

This time, however, the Occupation Project was not content to challenge Republican trespass alone. After installing citizen-occupiers in Grassley’s office, most of the activist contingent headed to the nearby office of liberal Democratic Senator Tom Harkin.

The reasons for this addition are not mysterious. Late last spring, Harkin, who voted to authorize Bush to attack Iraq in October 2002 (as did Hillary Clinton and, much to his public regret, John Edwards), betrayed majority U.S. antiwar sentiment (the very sentiment that created a Democratic majority in the U.S. Congress last fall) by voting to continue funding the Iraq invasion. The $125 billion (more than Bush requested) “supplemental war authorization” bill that Congress passed with Harkin and other Democrats’ votes contained no timetables (binding or even non-binding) for troop withdrawal, despite the fact that most U.S. citizens have long supported a rapid U.S. exit.

The bipartisan war-escalation (“Surge”) funding bill said nothing about ending the air war against Iraq (likely to escalate in the wake of partial troop reductions) or dismantling the United States’ numerous permanent military bases in that country. It dropped an earlier provision requiring Bush and Cheney to seek congressional authorization before attacking Iran. It handed a remarkable imperialist policy victory to an astonishingly unpopular president on the theory that the administration would be able to absurdly accuse them of failing to “support the troops” in an illegal war most Americans have long rejected.

“OUR BRAVE MEN AND WOMEN” AND “THE TASK FOR WHICH THEY WERE SENT TO IRAQ”

It was a different feeling at Harkin’s Cedar Rapids office, housed in a private downtown bank building. Activists there were allowed to immediately enter an air-conditioned office where Harkin staffer Tom Larkin said he’d “been expecting” us. Larkin gave activists a two-page position paper titled “Tom Harkin on Iraq: Change the Course, Not Stay the Course.”

This document began by praising “our brave men and women” [soldiers] for “having brilliantly completed the task for which they were sent to Iraq.” It said that Harkin “has fought hard to pass legislation containing a timetable to extricate our troops from the civil war in Iraq” and claimed that “it is not time for Iraq’s leaders to resolve their political differences and take responsibility for their own future.”

Neither Larkin nor his handout offered any serious justification for Harkin’s decision to continue funding a criminal, brazenly imperialist oil occupation without even non-binding timetables for eventual withdrawal. Larkin seemed flustered when I reminded him that many American and world citizens know that “the task for which [US troops were] sent” is criminal and imperialist in nature and that the U.S. bears enormous responsibility — and owes reparations — for the enormous damage (including the creation of civil war in Iraq) it has inflicted on Iraq.

I told Larkin that Harkin’s late spring vote defied the majority antiwar citizen opinion that created his party’s congressional majority last fall. I asked him why the Democrats had lacked the elementary political courage to have put the onus of not “supporting the troops” on George W. Bush. I reminded Larkin of John Edwards’ useful slogan, “Support the Troops, End the War” and suggested that votes likes Harkin’s last spring help explain why the Democratic-majority Congress now receives lower U.S. approval rates than the least popular President in U.S. history.

Larkin said something about Harkin’s history as a World War II veteran and disappeared behind a wall. A handful of UI students and activists sitting on the floor of Harkin’s Cedar Rapids office then held an informal teach-in on U.S. foreign policy, politics and society. Students read aloud the names of hundreds of Iraqi children and Iowa soldiers killed by the illicit war of aggression and occupation that Harkin and Grassley have voted to fund over and over again. At 5 PM, the citizen and student occupiers were arrested and given citations for criminal trespass.

IRRATIONAL BEHAVIOR

The local media coverage of the IOP’s Grassley-Harkin occupations was predictably spotty, uninspired, and conservative. Most of the activists’ key points and purpose were deleted and ignored in the standard Orwellian translation — the usual degrading and condescending media mistreatment.

One local paper even gave the activists an authoritarian lecture on their failure to be “constructive.” Not content merely to disregard the basic reasons for the Cedar Rapids actions, the University of Iowa-affiliated Daily Iowan (DI) accused the protestors of “demeaning the antiwar movement” with “behavior” that was portrayed as “superficial” and “irrational” in local media. For “whatever reason,” the DI Iowan pronounced, the Iraq War “seems to leave the majority of America in an [sic] passive state of disapproval” that leads protesters to be “judged harshly by the masses”.

Never mind that “mainstream” U.S. media (of which the conservative DI is a small part) is a leading institutional agent behind “the masses’” dangerous “passivity.” And never mind that that media works powerfully to prevent serious and respectful discussion of antiwar activists’ arguments and falsely portrays those activists as unreasonable, shallow, and ill-informed.

Reading the Cedar Rapids action’s press local clippings last Monday, I was reminded yet again that dominant media can never be trusted to get the antiwar Left’s message out to those who most need to hear it. I’ve long argued with activists that the media they so desperately want to impress (for highly understandable reasons) is in many ways the leading institutional culprit in the militarization of U.S. society and foreign policy they are fighting.

CRIMINAL TRESPASS: “WE ARE CITIZENS, NOT POLITICIANS”

Reflecting my own left-Marxist and left-anarchist background(s), I’ve never been a particularly big fan of pacifist and religiously inspired civil disobedience and “speaking truth to power.” As Zinn has cogently observed, “the left is in a position of continually opposing war after war after war, without getting to the root of the problem — which is the economic system under which we live, which needs war and makes war inevitable” (Arnove 2006, p. 102).

It’s going to take some kind of a revolution to get to “the root of the problem,” and revolutions are about dismantling oppressive systems of concentrated economic and political power, including military power. They are not about persuading existing public officials — who are generally beholden to dominant corporate interests with a major stake in militarism and war — to behave in more proper accord with majority peace and justice sentiment.

Still, I commend the Iowa Occupation Project for acting with the courage of their convictions beneath and beyond the plutocratic, imperial and winner-take-all cycles of our candidate-centered politics and “dollar democracy.” Occupation Project members are doing what they can (with little external reward) to expose and resist imperial, high state criminality of the highest order and to show that citizens can act in accord with their beliefs against policy evil and political calculation. Defying the practically moribund “peace movement’s” cringing captivity to the corporate-imperial Democratic Party (Cockburn 2007), they know that the war crimes they are compelled to oppose are not being committed only by the rightmost of the United States’ two dominant political parties.

“When a social movement adopts the compromises of legislators,” Zinn reminded us last March, “it has forgotten its role, which is to push and challenge the politicians, not to fall in meekly behind them.”

“We who protest the war are not politicians,” Zinn added. “We are citizens. Whatever politicians may do, let them first feel the full force of citizens who speak for what is right, not for what is winnable, in a shamefully timorous Congress…”

“We have no office to hold on to, only our consciences, which insist on telling the truth. That, history suggests, is the most realistic thing a citizen can do.”

The United States government has been inflicting a mass-murderous form of criminal trespass against the people of Iraq since March 19th, 2003. Citizen-activists who privilege “the common good” over “civic order” by trespassing against their unlawful war-making misrepresentatives in Congress are “brave men and women” too. Their efforts to advance freedom, security and peace deserve as much recognition as those who have been led to believe they serve democratic ideals by enlisting in the armed forces of the U.S. government, still “the leading purveyor of violence in the world today” (King 1967). Conservative editorialists, academicians and other ideological authorities will always deem committed action against imperial violence “irrational” and “self-indulgent” and the like. What else is new?

SOURCES

Anthony Arnove 2006. Iraq: the Logic of Withdrawal (New York: New Press, 2006).

Alexander Cockburn 2007. “The Unquiet Americans: Why So Few Protests Against a Hated Invasion,” Le Monde Diplomatique, reproduced on ZNet (July 8 2007).

Elizabeth de la Vega 2006. United States v. George W. Bush et al. (New York: Seven Stories, 2006).

“Editorial: Some Protests Demeaning to Antiwar Movement,” Daily Iowan (July 9 2007), p. 4.

Mason Kerns 2007. “Eleven Arrested in Grassley Office Protest,” Daily Iowan (February 27, 2007).

Martin Luther King Jr. 1967. “A Time to Break the Silence,” April 4 1967 speech to the Riverside Church, pp. 231-244 in James M. Washington, ed., A Testament of Hope: the Essential Writings and Speeches of Martin Luther King Jr. (San Francisco, CA: Harpercollins, 1991), pp. 231-244.

Howard Zinn 2007. “Are We Politicians or Citizens?” The Progressive (April 2007), reproduced on ZNet (March 27, 2007).

I once did an article on Obama that elicited the following response from a white Republican science professor in a Detroit suburb: “If Obama gets elected President, it would be a big — probably the biggest since the Emancipation Proclamation — step toward race equality in the U.S. If a half-black man gets elected President,” the professor elaborated, “we could stop focusing so much on race in this country and focus on other things.”

A different essay critical of Obama provoked an angry response from a black man who thought I was African-American. “How can you betray your race like this?” this individual asked. “Why are you undermining a brother with a shot at the most powerful job in the world?” By this writer’s estimation, Obama’s black identity was in itself sufficient reason for a responsible black journalist to swallow any criticisms of the junior Senator from Illinois.

The racial meaning of “the Obama phenomenon” is an interesting question that merits careful consideration. It is significantly more complicated than my three commentators grasped.
Is there anything positive about the fact that droves of whites are willing to embrace a black presidential candidate? Sure. Forty years ago, as the United States entered the racially turbulent summer of 1967 and the movie Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner disturbed conventional racial norms by portraying a black doctor (played by Sidney Poitier) dating a white woman (Joanna Drayton), it would have been impossible for a black politician to become a viable presidential contender. Nothing a black candidate could have done or said would have prevented him from being excluded on the basis of the color of his or her skin. The fact that this is no longer true is a sign of some (admittedly slow) racial progress more than fifty years after the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts. But there are at least three reasons not to get overly excited about Obama’s cross-racial appeal from a racial justice perspective.

“HE’S NOT ALL THAT BLACK”

The first difficulty is that part of Obama’s appeal to white America has to do with the widespread Caucasian sense that Obama “isn’t all that black.” Many whites who roll their eyes at the mention of the names of Jesse Jackson or Al Sharpton — former presidential candidates who behave in ways that many whites find too African-American — are by the cool, underplayed blackness and ponderous, quasi-academic tone of the half-white, Harvard-educated Obama. Obama doesn’t shout, chant, holler or drawl. He doesn’t rail against injustice, bring the parishioners to their feet and threaten delicate white suburban and middle-class sensibilities. He stays away from catchy slogans (like Jackson’s “Keep Hope Alive”) and from emotive “truth”-speaking confrontations with power. To use Joe Biden’s revealing terminology, Obama strikes many whites as “clean” and “articulate” — something different from their unfortunately persistent image of blacks as dirty, dangerous, irrational and unintelligible.

Obama has no moral or political obligation to shed his biracial identity, “multicultural” background and elite, private school education to “act [more classically and stereotypically] black.” But whites’ racial attitudes are less progressive than might be assumed when their willingness to embrace a black candidate is conditioned by their requirement that his or her “blackness” be qualified. When ingrained gender sensibilities lead you (all other things equal) to prefer your “straight-acting” gay uncle over your outwardly “effeminate” gay nephew, your tolerance for non-traditional sexual orientations might be less enlightened than you think.

“WHAT AILS BLACKS IS NOT FUNDAMENTALLY DIFFERENT”: ACCOMMODATING RACISM

A second and related reason not to do racial justice cartwheels over Obama’s popularity with whites is the candidate’s deep willingness to accommodate white supremacy. In his ponderous, power-worshipping and badly titled campaign book The Audacity of Hope (Henry Crown, 2006), Obama ignores elementary U.S. social reality and strokes the master race by claiming that “what ails working- and middle-class blacks is not fundamentally different from what ails their white counterparts.” Equally calming to the white majority is Obama’s argument that “white guilt has largely exhausted itself in America” as “even the most fair-minded of whites . . . tend to push back against suggestions of racial victimization and race-based claims based on the history of racial discrimination in this country” (p. 247). Part of the reason for this “push back” — also known as denial — is, Obama claims, the bad culture and poor work ethic of the inner city black poor (Obama 2006, pp. 245, 254-56).

White fears that Obama will reawaken the tragically unfinished revolutions of Reconstruction and Civil Rights are further soothed by his claim that most black Americans have been “pulled into the economic mainstream” (Obama 2006, pp. 248-49). During a speech marking the anniversary of the Selma, Alabama Voting Rights march, Obama claimed that 1950s and 1960s civil rights activists — who he referred to as “the Moses Generation” — had brought black America “90 percent of the way” to racial equality. It’s up to Obama and his fellow “Joshua Generation” members to get past “that 10 percent in order to cross over to the other side” (Barack Obama, 2007)

And then there’s Obama’s claim that “conservatives and Bill Clinton were right about welfare.” The abolished Aid for Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) program, Obama claims, “sapped” inner-city blacks of their “initiative” and detached them from the great material and spiritual gains that flow to those who attach themselves to the noble capitalist labor market, including “independence,” “income,” “order, structure, dignity and opportunity for growth in peoples’ lives”. He argues that encouraging black girls to finish high school and stop having babies out of wedlock is “the single biggest that we could do to reduce inner-city poverty” (Obama 2006p. 256).

Never mind that blacks are afflicted with a shocking racial wealth gap that keeps their average net worth at one eleventh that of whites and an income structure starkly and persistently tilted towards poverty (Loewen 2005, p. 130; Shapiro 2005). Never mind that lower-, working-, and middle-class blacks continue to face numerous steep and interrelated white-supremacist barriers to equality. Or that multidimensional racial discrimination is still rife in “post-Civil Rights America,” deeply woven into the fabric of the nation’s social institutions and drawing heavily on the living and unresolved legacy of centuries of not- so “past” racism (Feagin 2000; Brown et al. 2003, Street 2005; Street 2007),

Never mind that the long centuries of slavery and Jim Crow are still quite historically recent and would continue to exercise a crippling influence on black experience even if the dominant white claim that black “racial victimization” is a “thing of the past” was remotely accurate (Brown et al. 2003; Feagin 2000). Never mind the existence of numerous left Caucasians (e.g. Joe Feagin, Tim Wise, Michael Albert, Stephen Steinberg, yours truly and many more), not to mention a large number of black Americans, who support not simply the “race-based” claims of affirmative actions but the demand for reparations to address the living and powerful legacy of slavery and Jim Crow.

And never mind the absence of social-scientific evidence for the “conservative” claim that AFDC destroyed inner city work ethics or generated “intergenerational poverty.” Forget the existence of numerous studies showing that the absence of decent, minimally well-paid, and dignified work has always been the single leading cause of black inner city poverty and “welfare dependency” (Handler 1995, 32-55; Jencks 1992, 204-235; Stier and Tienda 2001). Disregard research showing that high black teenage pregnancy rates reflect the absence of meaningful long-term life and economic opportunities in the nation’s hyper-segregated inner-city and suburban ring ghettos. Forget that the single biggest thing that could be done to reduce inner city poverty would be to make the simple and elementary moral decision to abolish it through the provision of a decent guaranteed income — something once advocated by Martin Luther King, Jr. and that other dangerous left “moral absolutist” (Obama’s description of 1960s New Left peace and justice activists) Richard Nixon.

Racial hierarchy isn’t the only oppression structure that Senator Obama is willing to eagerly accommodate. As I’ve been arguing for some time now (Street 2004, 2006, 2007a-2007e), he plays the same essential opportunistic and power-worshipping game in relation to related inequality structures of class and empire. Beneath peaceful and populist sounding claims to the contrary, he’s largely on the dark and neoliberal side of power when it comes to each of what the democratic socialist and anti-imperialist Martin Luther King, Jr. called “the triple evils that are interrelated”: racism, economic exploitation/inequality (capitalism), and militarism (King 1967, 250-251; Garrow 1986 p. 546) It’s not for nothing that Obama was recently described as a “conservative” in a flattering New Yorker write-up titled “The Conciliator.” (MacFarquar 2007)

THE POST-CIVIL RIGHTS ERA

In accommodating white supremacy, Obama is playing to the perverse racial politics of the post-Civil Rights era, wherein the leading architects of policy and opinion have declared “race” over as a barrier to black advancement. It is a time when large number of Americans, including many blacks, claim “exhaustion” with race issues. Race- and racism-avoidance have become the orders of the day in an officially “color-blind” neoliberal age when conventional wisdom ascribes people’s status and wealth to purely private and personal success or failure in adapting to the permanent, inherently human realities of inequality in a “free market” system of reactionary corporate rule to which “there is no alternative.” In the dominant public discourse of this era, the nation’s “pervasive racial hierarchies collapse,” in the words of Henry A. Giroux, “into power-evasive strategies such as blaming minorities of class and color for not working hard enough, refusing to exercise individual initiative, or practicing reverse racism.” Even as an enveloping, increasingly invisible racism “functions” as “one of the deep and abiding currents in everyday [American] life,” this discourse works “to erase the social from the language of public life as to reduce all racial problems to private issues [of] . . . individual character and cultural depravity.”

This “neoliberal racism,” as Giroux calls it, “can imagine public issues only as private concerns.” It sees “human agency as simply a matter of individualized choices, the only obstacle to effective citizenship being the lack of principled self-help and moral responsibility” on the part of those most victimized by structural oppression and the amoral agency of those super-empowered actors who stand atop the nation’s steep and interrelated hierarchies of class and race. Under its rule, “human misery is largely defined as a function of personal choices,” consistent with “the central neoliberal tenet that all problems are private rather than social in nature.” (Giroux 2003; Giroux 2004).

The technically biracial Obama’s campaign and persona are perfectly calibrated for this era of victim-blaming neoliberal racism. He allows whites to assuage their racial guilt and feel non-racist by liking and perhaps even voting for him while signaling that he won’t do anything to tackle and redress the steep racial disparities and systemic racial oppression that continue to deeply scar American life and institutions. “What . . . me and my country racist? You can’t be serious: we’re thinking seriously about voting for a black man as president. My wife and son just love Oprah and Jamie Fox.”

RACISM’S DIFFERENT LEVELS: “STATE OF BEING” v. “STATE OF MIND”

This brings me to the third reason not to sing racial justice hosannas over the sudden rise of Obama. His election could actually worsen racism’s power in ways that are unintentionally suggested at the end of the professor’s comment given at the beginning of this article. The main problem with the conventional white wisdom holding that racism no longer poses relevant barriers to black advancement and black-white equality in post-Civil Rights America is a failure to distinguish adequately between overt “state of mind” racism and covert institutional, societal, and “state-of-being” racism (Street 2002; Street 2004a; Street 2007).

The first variety of racism has a long and sordid history. It includes such actions, policies and practices as the burning of black homes and black churches, the murder of “uppity” blacks and civil rights workers, the public use of derogatory racial slurs and epithets, the open banning of blacks from numerous occupations, the open political disenfranchisement of blacks and the open segregation of public facilities by race. It is largely defeated, outlawed and discredited in the “politically correct” environment created partly by the victories of the Civil Rights Movement.

The second variety lives on, with terrible consequences. It involves the more impersonal operation of social, economic and institutional forces and processes that both reflect and shape the related processes of capitalism in ways that “just happen” but nonetheless serve to reproduce black disadvantage in numerous interrelated key sectors of American life. It includes racially segregating real estate and home-lending practices, residential “white flight” (from black neighbors), statistical racial discrimination in hiring and promotion, the systematic under-funding and under-equipping of schools predominately attended by blacks relative to schools predominately attended by whites, the disproportionate surveillance, arrest and incarceration of blacks and much more.

Richly enabled by policymakers who commonly declare allegiance to anti-racist ideals, this deeper racism has an equally ancient history that has outlived the explicit, open and public racism of the past and the passage of justly cherished Civil Rights legislation. It does not necessarily involve individual white bigotry or even subtly prejudiced “ill will” against blacks. Consciously or even unconsciously prejudiced white actors are not required and black actors are more than welcome to help enforce the New Age societal racism of the post-King era. This entrenched, enduring, and more concealed societal racism does not depend on racist intent in order to exist as a relevant social and political phenomenon. The racism that matters most today does not require a large portion of the white population to be consciously and willfully prejudiced against blacks or any other racial minority. It only needs to produce racially disparate outcomes through the operation of objectively racialized processes. It critically includes a pivotal failure and/or refusal to acknowledge, address, and reverse, the living (present and future) windfall bestowed on sections of the white community by “past” racist structures, policies and practices that were more willfully and openly discriminatory toward blacks.

“State-of-being” or structural racism generates racially disparate results even without racist intent – “state-of-mind” racism – on the part of white actors. It oppresses blacks with objectively racialized social processes that work in “routine” and “ordinary” fashion to sustain racial hierarchy and white supremacy often and typically without white racist hostility or purpose. (Carmichael and Hamilton 1967; Feagin 2000; Brown et al. 2003; Street 2007; Steinberg 1995)

JANUS-FACED VICTORIES

Sadly, the fact that level-one (overt) racism has been defeated while the deeper (level-two) racism survives is not just a matter of the social and racial justice glass being half-full. It’s more darkly complicated than that. The second and deeper level of racial oppression’s power may actually be more firmly entrenched by celebrated Civil Rights victories and related black upward mobility into the middle and upper classes insofar as those victories and achievements encourage the illusion that racism has disappeared and that the only obstacles left to African-American success and equality are internal to individual blacks and their community — the idea that, in Derrick Bell’s phrase, “the indolence of blacks rather than the injustice of whites explains the socioeconomic gaps separating the races”(Bell 2004, pp. 77-78). “It’s hard,” Leonard Steinhorn and Barbara Diggs-Brown have noted, “to blame people” for believing (falsely in Steinhorn and Diggs-Brown’s view) that racism is dead in America “when our public life is filled with repeated affirmations of the integration ideal and our ostensible progress towards achieving it.” (Steinhorn and Barbara Diggs-Brown 1999, 6-7)

In a similar vein, Sheryl Cashin notes that “there are [now] enough examples of successful middle-class African-Americans to make many whites believe that blacks have reached parity with them. The fact that some blacks now lead powerful mainstream institutions offers evidence to whites that racial barriers have been eliminated; the issue now is individual effort.” (Cashin 2004, p. xi)

The white-run culture’s regular rituals of self-congratulation over the defeat of overt, level-one racism — the Martin Luther King national holiday, the playing of King’s “I Have a Dream” speech over school sound systems and on television, the demotion of Trent Lott, the routine reference to integrationist ideals in political speeches, and now the presidential viability of the “conservative” Obama, etc. — reinforce the dominant white sentiment that the United States no longer has much of anything to answer for in regard to its treatment of black America and the ubiquitous white American notion that racism is something only from the now relatively irrelevant and distant “past.” “Now we can finally forget about race completely” is the basic white wish seeking fulfillment in the election of someone like Obama.

This is a problem that Martin Luther King, Jr. anticipated. By the middle 1960s, King and other civil rights leaders were most concerned about the deeper institutional and societal racism that existed across the entire United States. King and others feared that the defeat of open segregation and racial terrorism in the South would reinforce the majority white nation’s tendency to avoid more covert, established, invisible and nationwide forms of racial oppression while encouraging whites to falsely conclude that all the nation’s racial problems have been “automatically solved” (King 1969, pp. 321-322).

King also worried that early Civil Rights victories over level-one racism would encourage white Americans to deny the powerful and living legacy and material relevance of “past racism.” As he knew and as is still true today, the older, more open racism of the long pre-Civil Rights past continues to cast more than just an incidental shadow over contemporary racial inequalities. Most white Americans object strenuously to the idea that “past racial discrimination matters in the present.” (Feagin 2000, 261) But anyone who examines capitalism in an honest way knows that what people get from the present and future so-called “free market” is very much about what and how much they bring to that present and future market from the past. “Long ago” racism continues to exact a major cost on current-day black Americans, raising the question of whether unresolved historical inequity is really “past.” Slavery and then Jim Crow segregation in the South — and the racial terrorism, discrimination and apartheid imposed on black northerners in places like Chicago and Detroit and the thousands of northern all-white “Sundown Towns” that were formed between 1890 and 1968 (see James Loewen’s masterly study Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension of American Racism, Touchstone, 2005) — “long ago” continue to shape present-day racial inequality.

As Michael K. Brown and his colleagues note in their study Whitewashing Race: The Myth of a Color-Blind Society (2003), racial “inequalities are cumulative, a fact adherents of the new public wisdom on race ignore in their rush to celebrate [racial] progress.” Because the “inequalities accumulate over time,” the authors argue, the distinction frequently made by “racial conservatives” between “past and present racism” is often inadequate and deceptive” (Brown et al. 2003). The ongoing need for historical acknowledgement and correction, commonly called reparations, is developed quite well in the following useful analogy advanced by political scientist Roy L. Brooks (Brooks 1996, p. ix):

Two persons — one white and the other black — are playing a game of poker. The game has been in progress for some 300 years. One player — the white one — has been cheating during much of this time, but now announces: “from this day forward, there will be a new game with new players and no more cheating.” Hopeful but suspicious, the black player responds, “that’s great. I’ve been waiting to hear you say that for 300 years. Let me ask you, what are you going to do with all those poker chips that you have stacked up on your side of the table all these years?’ ‘Well,’ said the white player, somewhat bewildered by the question, ‘they are going to stay right here, of course.” “That’s unfair,’ snaps the black player. “The new white player will benefit from your past cheating. Where’s the equality in that?’ “But you can’t realistically expect me to redistribute the poker chips along racial lines when we are trying to move away from considerations of race and when the future offers no guarantees to anyone,” insists the white player. “And surely,” he continues, “redistributing the poker chips would punish individuals for something they did not do. Punish me, not the innocents!” Emotionally exhausted, the black player answers, “but the innocents will reap a racial windfall.”

Seen against the backdrop of Brooks’ living “racial windfall,” there is something significantly racist about the widespread white assumption that the white majority society owes African-Americans nothing in the way of special, ongoing compensation for singular black disadvantages resulting from past explicit racism. Roy Brooks’ surplus “chips” are not quaint but irrelevant hangovers from “days gone by.” They are weapons of racial oppression in the present and future. Given what is well known about the relationship between historically accumulated resources and current and future success, the very distinction between past and present racism ought perhaps to be considered part of the ideological superstructure of contemporary white supremacy functioning as an ongoing barrier to black advancement and equality.

It is important to remember that the explicit and overt racism that made it impossible for a black man to seriously consider running for higher office in the not-so distant past was about more than the sadistic infliction of racial terror in and of itself. That racism served and enforced the economic exploitation and material subordination of blacks Americans. That long exploitation gave rise to a steep, living and historically cumulative racial wealth and power gap whereby stark contemporary disparities are deeply fed by past inequalities. Such is the deep and dark reality behind what Barack “The Conciliator” Obama calmly terms the tendency of “even the most fair-minded of whites . . . to push back against suggestions of racial victimization and race-based claims based on the history of racial discrimination in this country”

THE WHITE-SUPREMACIST FUNCTIONAL UTILITY OF BLACK “SUCCESS STORIES”

Thinking about white America’s superficial “post-racism” and the related distinction between level-one and level- two racism, a Left black political writer recently told me that the election of a black Democrat like Obama to the presidency would be a “disaster” for the cause of black equality. It would be a big negative from a racial justice perspective, this writer feels, because it would deeply reinforce the pervasive majority white notion that racism is essentially over as a relevant barrier to black equality in the U.S. The writer was thinking also about the perverse role that the related success of a minority of privileged blacks and the related class bifurcation of the black community has long played in the preservation of white privilege. As Stephen Steinberg noted in his important book Turning Back: the Retreat from Racial Justice in American Thought and Policy (Steinberg 1995, pp.149-150):

The success of the black middle-class [since the Civil Rights Movement is not] proof of…a more favorable opportunity structure for blacks. After all, racism has never been indifferent to class distinctions, and it may well be that blacks who have acquired the ‘right’ status characteristics are exempted from stereotypes and behaviors that continue to be directed at less privileged blacks. [But] there is nothing new in this phenomenon. Even in the worst days of Jim Crow, there were blacks who owned land, received favored treatment from whites and were held forth as ‘success stories’ to prove that lower-class blacks had only themselves to blame for their destitution…The existence of this black elite did not prove that racism was abating (thought illusions to this effect were common even among blacks). On the contrary, the black elite itself was a vital part of the system of [racial] oppression, serving as a buffer between the [ruling white] oppressor and [most truly black] oppressed and furthering the illusion that blacks could surmount their difficulties if only they had the exemplary qualities of the black elite.

The remarkable success of power-respectful, bourgeois, non-threatening (to whites) and (in short) “good” blacks like Barack Obama, Oprah Winfrey and (once) Colin Powell helps white Americans believe that blacks have only themselves to blame on the whole for black America’s persistently separate and unequal status in the U.S. For many whites, loving national media stars like Oprah and Barack is the nice reverse side of hating inner-city Darnell and Lakisha.
The sophisticated and opportunistic Obama knows this very well. He’s not going to complicate his comfortable funding relationships with the likes of Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Henry Crown and Co. and General Dynamics et al (Street 2007d and 2007e). by substantively criticizing empire and/or class inequality at home and abroad. In a similarly calculating and power-seeking vein, he’s not about to undermine his favorable post-Civil Rights situation with the white electoral majority by making strong public reference to the persistently powerful and pervasive role of anti-black racism in American life. He’s going to try to ride white America’s self-serving racial confusion and denial as far as he can — all the way, he hopes, to the White House.

SOURCES

Derrick Bell 2004. Silent Covenants: Brown V. Board of Education and the Unfulfilled Hopes for Racial Reform ( New York , NY : Oxford University Press, 2004).

Roy Brooks 1996. Integration or Separation: A Strategy for Racial Equality (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996).

Michael Brown et al. 2003. Whitewashing Race: The Myth of a Color-Blind Society (Berkeley , CA : University of California-Berkeley Press, 2003).

Stokely Carmichael and Charles Hamilton 1967. Black Power: The Politics of Liberation in America (New York, NY: Vintage, 1967),

Sheryll Cashin 2004. The Failures of Integration: How Race and Class are Undermining the American Dream (New York: Public Affairs, 2004).

Bruce Dixon 2006. “Kucinich: A Blacker Candidate than Obama,” Black Agenda Report (December 20, 2006).

Joe Feagin 2000. Racist America: Roots, Current Realities, and Future Reparations (New York, NY: Routledge, 2000).

David Garrow 1986. Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (New York, NY: HarperCollins, 1986).

Henry A. Giroux 2003. The Abandoned Generation: Democracy Beyond the Culture of Fear ( New York, NY: Palgrave-MacMillan, 2003).

Henry A. Giroux 2004. The Terror of Neoliberalism: Authoritarianism and the Eclipse of Democracy (Boulder, CO: Paradigm, 2004).

Joel Handler 1995. The Poverty of Welfare Reform (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995).

Christopher Jencks 1992. Rethinking Social Policy: Race, Poverty, and the Underclass (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 1992).

Martin Luther King, Jr. 1967. “Where Do We Go From Here?” 1967 Address to Southern Christian Leadership Conference, reproduced in Martin Luther King Jr., A Testament of Hope: The Essential Writing and Speeches of Martin Luther King Jr. (San Francisco, CA: HarperCollins, 1991), edited by James N. Washington.

Martin Luther King, Jr. 1969. “A Testament of Hope,” posthumous essay reproduced in Martin Luther King Jr., A Testament of Hope: The Essential Writing and Speeches of Martin Luther King Jr. (San Francisco, CA: HarperCollins, 1991), edited by James N. Washington.

James Loewen 2005. Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension of American Racism ( New York , NY : Touchstone, 2005),

Lisa MacFarquar 2007. “The Conciliator: Where is Barack Obama Coming From?” The New Yorker (May 7, 2007).

Barrack Obama 2006. The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream (New York , NY: Crown, 2006),

Barack Obama 2007. “Selma Voting Rights Commemoration,” Brown Chapel A.M.E. Church , Selma , Alabama, March 4, 2007.

Tom Shapiro 2004. “Running in Reverse,” Center for American Progress Action Fund, October 22, 2004.

Paul Street 2004. “Keynote Reflections,” (Featured Article), ZNet Magazine (July 29th, 2004).

Paul Street 2004a. “Skipping Past Structural Racism: Center Trumps Left in Recent PBS Series in Race in America ,” Black Commentator (April 8, 2004).

Paul Street 2005. Still Separate, Unequal: Race, Place, Policy and the State of Black Chicago (Chicago, IL : Chicago Urban League, 2005).

Paul Street 2006. “Obama’s Path to Hell,” ZNet Sustainers’ Commentary (June 18, 2006).

Paul Street 2007. Racial Oppression in the Global Metropolis: A Living Black Chicago History (New York, NY: Rowman and Littlefield, 2007).

Paul Street 2007a. “The Obama Illusion,” Z Magazine (February 2007): 29-33.

Paul Street 2007b. “Obama’s Audacious Deference to Power: A Critical Review of Barack Obama’s Audacity of Hope,” Black Agenda Report (January 31, 2007).

Paul Street 2007c. “The Pale Reflection: Barack Obama, Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Meaning of the Black Revolution,” ZNet Magazine (March 16 2007).

Paul Street 2007d. “Sitting Out the Obama Dance in Iowa City,” ZNet (April 28 2007)

Paul Street 2007e. “‘He’s a Mouse:’ Russell Simmons’ Speaks Some Truth on Obama,” Black Agenda Report (May 9, 2007).

He speaks honestly about and against the growing chasm between rich and poor within the United States. He has the most progressive health care proposal among the top-tier Democratic candidates and says he’s willing to raise taxes to fund universal coverage.

He calls for rolling back some of the worst tax cuts that George W. Bush granted to the wealthy and says he refuses to privilege deficit reduction over poverty reduction.

He criticizes Congressional Democrats for agreeing to fund the continued U.S. war in Iraq without timetables for withdrawal. He says that “its time for Americans to be patriotic about something other than war” and that “the way to support the troops is to end the war.”

Good for him. He’s the only “top tier” presidential candidate I (personally to the left of Dennis Kucinich) could imagine myself voting for in 2008.

“A DAY OF WRATH”

Still, reading John Edwards’ recent (May 23rd) speech to the Council of Foreign Relations (CFR) yesterday, I was unfortunately reminded of an interesting argument Chris Hedges makes in his new book American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America (New York: Free Press, 2006).

It will not do, Hedges says, for “mainstream Christians” who are appalled by the Christian Right’s use of scripture to “cherry pick the Bible to create a Jesus and God who are always loving and compassionate. Such Christians,” Hedges argues, “often fail to acknowledge that there are hateful passages in the Bible that give sacred authority to the rage, self-aggrandizement and intolerance of the Christian Right” (Hedges, p. 6).

The Bible is loaded with such material. Some of the worst is found in the Book of Revelation, which portrays a final and bloody battle between the forces of Good – led by a Warrior Christ that would make George the Crusader Bush II proud – and the forces of evil. Concluding with great birds of prey feasting on the flesh of vanquished non-Christians, it is “a story of God’s ruthless, terrifying and violent power unleashed on nonbelievers” (p. 5).

In Hedges’ view, religious authorities should “denounce the biblical passages that champion apocalyptic violence and hateful political creeds…As long as scripture, blessed and accepted by the church, teaches that at the end of the time there will be a day of Wrath and Christians will control the shattered remnants of a world cleansed through violence and war, as long as it teaches that all non-believers will be tormented, destroyed and banished to Hell,” Hedges warns, “it will be hard to thwart the message of radical apocalyptic preachers or assuage the fears of the Islamic world that Christians are calling for its annihilation.” (p. 7)

“THEY RESISTED THE IMPERIAL TEMPTATION”

When it comes to the secular doctrines and imperial record at the heart of the history of U.S. foreign relations, Senator Edwards and most of his fellow Democratic candidates are like mainstream Christians who want to believe that their faith’s core documents are inherently peaceful and just and that the Christian Right does not draw on real and significant material in Christian scripture.

Edwards is angry at George W. Bush and the neoconservatives for weakening America’s power by perverting the basic goodness of U.S. foreign policy once epitomized and advanced by Cold War leaders like “the great Dean Acheson,” “President Harry Truman,” “General George Marshall,” and George Kennan. Edwards is upset because Bush II’s toxic combination of corruption, arrogance, and crass, incompetent imperialism has “risk[ed] squandering our [U.S.] prestige” and “strained our military to the breaking point.” Edwards told the CFR that Bush’s Iraq policy has compromised the United States’ global “force structure,” and “distracted” the nation from the broader tasks of global management, which require the direction that only America can provide.

For Edwards, Bush’s reckless invasion of Iraq (too focused on “military power alone”) and global unilateralism have damaged Washington’s ability to “spread the dream of freedom across the globe.”

Thanks to Bush’s mismanagement and abuse of U.S. power, Edwards feels, the next president will have to “chart a course for America to regain the global stature and legitimacy that we’ll need to lead and shape the world our children and grandchildren will inherit.”

The path toward righteous and effective foreign policy – a world where America rules through “moral leadership” and “example” – has already been shown to us, Edwards argues, by the leaders of the “Greatest Generation” during and after World War Two. By Edwards’ account, these ”wise” policy elites understood that “the military…must work alongside – and reinforce – America’s moral leadership.” They “resisted the imperial temptation to force our will by virtue of our unmatched strength. Instead, they built bonds of trust founded on restraint, the rule of law and good faith.” They “saw the truth: that it would require not only America’s military might, but our ingenuity, our allies, and our generosity to rebuild Europe and keep it safe from tyrants who would prey on poverty and resentment.”

It was through this “moral leadership,” mixed to judicious use of military strength, Edwards told the CFR, that “America deterred the Soviet Union from its quest for world domination.” We saw that leadership, Edwards said, “when we established the United Nations and NATO, which have done so much for peace and human rights. After the Cold War,” Edwards added, “we saw it in Bosnia, where we helped broker a lasting peace. And we saw it again in Kosovo, where we joined our NATO allies to stop a brutal war criminal from perpetrating another campaign of ethnic cleansing.”

“This,” Edwards told the CFR, “is the America where I grew up as a young boy – a strong nation whose moral promise seemed to fill the hearts of almost everyone I knew. We believed that America, like a beacon, could light up even the darkest corners of the world.”

It is important, Edwards feels, that “the U.S. military [remains] the most modern and capable fighting force on the planet.” This is because, “as Robert F. Kennedy once wrote, ‘Our answer is the world’s hope.’

“Our answer is the world’s hope.” Edwards repeated the phrase for the CFR, adding what he considered a hopeful line at the end of his speech: “Like a beacon, America can once again provide a clear light for the world – dissolving the fog of injustice, illuminating the path to a new century” (John Edwards, speech to the Council on Foreign Relations, May 23, 2007, read online at http://www.johnedwards.com/news/speeches/20070523-cfr/).

OBAMA: “HUMILITY REGARDING AMERICA’S ABILITY TO CONTROL EVENTS AROUND THE WORLD”

Edwards is hardly alone among the Democrats in heaping praise on U.S. Cold War foreign policy makers and in framing Bush’s foreign policy negatively against the noble background of the “Greatest Generation.” You could find similar phrases and formulations in the phrases in the foreign policy speeches of Hillary Clinton, Bill Richardson, Chris Dodd and Barack Obama. They all read from the same doctrinal bible when it comes to post-WWII America’s glorious and benevolent role in the world.

None of them kiss the portraits of past U.S. foreign policy elites more energetically than Senator Obama. In his ponderous, power-worshipping campaign book The Audacity of Hope, Obama’s obedient reverence for the great white masters of the past peaks with the rise of the glorious Cold War. He “ponders” with a sense of awe “the work” of Cold War architect George Kennan, which he contrasts with what he sees as the repulsive nihilism of the 1960s New Left. He applauds the wonderful (for him) “post-[World War Two] leadership of president Truman, Dean Acheson, George Marshall and George Kennan” for “craft[ing] …a…new…order that married [Woodrow] Wilsonian idealism to hardheaded realism, an acceptance of American power with a humility regarding America’s ability to control events around the world.” He praises the architects of the Cold War for checking the Soviet Union’s nefarious designs “to spread [in Obama’s words] its totalitarian brand of communism.”

DELETED IMPERIAL REALITIES: THE NOT-SO GOLDEN POST-WWII ERA

The problem with this mainstream Democratic take on post-WWII U.S. foreign policy is the same problem that Hedges finds with many Christians’ take on the Bible. It’s a whitewash. It leaves out the full and ugly truth. It’s Orwellian. It airbrushes out terrible facts that don’t fit the happy, nationally narcissistic story line.

Atomic Criminality

There’s a lot to delete. The post-World War II era and the Cold War began, after all, with Truman’s perpetration of one of the greatest war crimes in history. He ordered the monumentally mass-murderous bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki well after U.S. authorities knew that Japan was decisively defeated and looking to surrender. He did so with full knowledge that the Japanese only required assurances that the institution of the Emperor could remain intact in postwar Japan – a condition Truman met after but not before dropping the bombs. His decision to use the atom bomb (which he called the “greatest thing in the world” after radioactively murdering tens of thousands of “Jap” civilians) was about advancing U.S. global power vis-à-vis Russia and the rest of the world in the post-WWII era. It was not about saving American or Japanese lives.

The Cold War Truman, Eisenhower and Kennedy administrations’ determination to use nuclear weapons as a tool of unilateral imperial advancement hatched a nuclear arms race that almost turned fatal in October of 1962. We are still living with the consequences of that lethal atomic build-up, which could have been prevented if the U.S. had agreed to put atomic power under responsible international control.

Threat Inflation: “Scaring the Hell Out of the American People”

“Greatest Generation” U.S. planners and policymakers restored fascist power structures in “liberated” Italy and intervened for elite class rule and against popular social revolution in the Balkans. In proclaiming the militantly U.S.-globalist Truman Doctrine, Washington smeared democratic struggles in Greece as a Soviet “Communist” export. It did this to “Scare the Hell out of the American people” (in the wonderful terminology of US Senator Arthur Vandenburg) so they would accept the permanent imperial re-militarization of U.S. society and policy – helping thereby to sustain and expand the powerful “military-industrial complex” that Dwight Eisenhower left the White House warning Americans about.”

Consistent with that goal, Truman and two key members of his cabinet, including Edwards’ hero Marshall, “systematically deceived Congress and the public into thinking that the USSR was about to launch World Wear III with an invasion of Europe in 1948.” They did this, Frank Kofsky has shown, in order “to push through their foreign policy program, inaugurate a huge military buildup and bail out the near bankrupt airline industry” (Frank Kofsky, Harry S. Truman and the War Scare of 1948 [New York, NY: St. Martin’s, 1993]. It was another early example of the well-known Washington game of “threat inflation.”

“Regime Change” in the Post-WWII Era

From the Truman Doctrine on, the basic Cold War pattern was set for the U.S. subversion of democracy and national independence across the planet. Some of the most egregious subsequent examples came in Iran (CIA coup 1953), Guatemala (U.S.-sponsored and directed coup and military takeover 1954), Chile (U.S.-sponsored coup and military takeover, 1973), Indonesia (U.S. sponsored military takeover 1965) are just some of the more spectacular examples in a long list. Hundreds of thousands of peasants, workers, leftists and intellectuals paid with their lives for the brutal U.S. covert war against independent development and social justice in the Third World. The Bushcons did not invent U.S.-imposed “regime change.”

“The Interests of Other Nations are an Incident, Not an End”

In the case of Cuba, U.S. Cold War efforts to impose U.S.-friendly regime change helped bring the world close to nuclear war in the fall of 1962. The following year, the then elder liberal statesman Acheson offered an interesting justification for illegal U.S. efforts to undermine the Cuban government. He told the International Society of International Law that no “legal issue” emerges when Uncle Sam is responding to a challenge to his “power, position, and prestige” (Acheson is quoted in Noam Chomsky, Hegemony or Survival: America’s Quest for Global Dominance [New York: Metropolitan, 2004, p.14).

It was not a novel position. In making the case for a bloody U.S. invasion of Haiti, Woodrow Wilson’s Secretary of State Robert Lansing argued that the effective meaning of the Monroe Doctrine was simply that “the United States considers its own interests. The integrity of other American nations is an incident, not an end” (Lansing is quoted in Noam Chomsky, What Uncle Sam Really Wants [Berkely, CA: 1992], p. 11). Wilson agreed, but found it politically unwise to say so publicly. Such sentiments informed Wilson’s military intervention against the Russian Revolution in 1918 and 1919, part of a shameful imperialist record that does not prevent Obama from praising Wilson for supposedly seeing that “it was in America’s interest to encourage the self-determination of all peoples.”

The “indispensable nation” (as Bill Clinton’s Secretary of State Madeline Albright once described the U.S.) has always been for “international law” when that law supports Washington’s concept of U.S. interests. When the law is seen as an obstacle to U.S. designs it has consistently been treated as dispensable by U.S. policymakers.

Who Deterred Who?

When Third World proxies were unavailable or inadequate for the task of deterring democracy in the Third World, U.S. forces intervened directly with truly massive imperial assaults, as in Korea (1950-1954) and Vietnam (1962-1975). The resulting body counts ran well into the millions.

Cuba was spared such direct U.S. intervention largely because the Soviet Union was present to deter the United States from launching a full-scale attack on the Cuban Revolution.

In the U.S.-USSR Cold War relationship, it was the Soviets not the Americans who could most accurately have been described as the power exercising deterrence against a globally ambitious other – a basic truth that is unmentionable outside the officially marginal circles of the Left.

The Real Soviet (and Third World) Menace

Washington consistently justified its post-WWII record of global criminality with a great myth that Edwards and Obama predictably embrace: the Soviet-communist campaign for world conquest. But honest U.S. assessments at the time acknowledged that the real Soviet danger was rather different. It was that the USSR modeled the possibility of independent national development outside the parameters of U.S.-led world-capitalist supervision.

The actual Soviet threat arose not from any Soviet commitment to world revolution (long since abandoned with the defeat of Trotsky) but from “Marxist” Russia’s determination to follow its own path and its concomitant refusal “to complement the industrial economies of the West.”

This refusal was a terrible example for the Third World, as far as Kennan and Acheson et al. were concerned. The illusory specter of the Soviet quest for “world domination” and the related “domino theory” were always covers for the real specter haunting “Greatest Generation” planners: the danger that peripheral states would follow their own road of development, outside and against the selfish “needs’ of the inherently noble industrial-democratic (state-capitalist) core, run by and for the United States.

“Our Real Task”

To grasp some of the “hardheaded realism” behind the such supposedly sensible and benevolent U.S. Cold War policies as the sponsorship of vicious military dictatorships in Indonesia, Iran, Greece and Brazil (to name just a few “Free World” partners), we can consult an interesting formulation from Obama’s wise “Wilsonian” hero Kennan. As Kennan explained in Policy Planning Study 23, crafted for the State Department planning staff in 1948:

“We have about 50 percent of the world’s wealth, but only 6.3 percent of its population…In this situation, we cannot fail to be the object of envy and resentment. Our real task in the coming period is to devise a pattern of relationships which will permit us to maintain this position of disparity…to do so we will have to dispense with all sentimentality and day-dreaming; and our attention will have to be concentrated everywhere on our immediate national objectives…We should cease to talk about vague and…unreal objectives such as human rights, the raising of living standards, and democratization. The day is not far off when we are going to have to deal in straight power concepts. The less we are hampered by idealistic slogans, the better…We should not hesitate before police repression by the local government” (Quoted in Chomsky, What Uncle Sam Really Wants, pp. 9-11).

The Marshall Plan, the U.S. reconstruction project for the war-ravaged European core, was loaded with selfish imperial content. U.S. assistance was predicated on investment and purchasing rules that favored U.S.-based corporations and on the political marginalization of Left parties that had gained prestige leading the fight against fascist forces the U.S. had initially appeased and even welcomed as counters to the European Left. U.S. forces stood ready to intervene directly in the event of Left electoral victories in Western Europe.

Throughout the war against fascism – a war won primarily by the workers, soldiers and peasants of the Soviet Union – U.S. planners worked behind the scenes to make sure that the U.S. would emerge as the unchallenged hegemon in the world investment and trading system.

“The Greatest Purveyor of Violence in the World”

So much for Truman and Acheson et al.’s “humility regarding America’s ability to control events [and developments] around the world.” And so much for their determination to resist “imperial temptations.”

This unpleasant history provides some background for understanding the America where I grew up as a young boy in the 1960s – an imperial nation whose moral hypocrisy seemed to chill the hearts of almost everyone I knew. We followed Martin Luther King, Jr. in observing that the U.S. government had become “the leading purveyor of violence in the world” and in thinking that government had no business lecturing others on “freedom” when its own domestic landscape was fractured by what the great civil rights leader called “the triple evils that are interrelated:” racism, economic inequality and militarism.

“THE ROGUE SUPERPOWER’S” CLINTON-ERA “CONTEMPT FOR WORLD ORDER”

Moving to more recent events, NATO and Clinton’s assault on Yugoslavia in 1999 is a much less noble story than Edwards claims to believe. Expressing Washington’s timeworn determination to “choose military solutions when diplomatic ones were possible,” it led to masses of unnecessary deaths. Thousands of ethnic Albanians paid a severe price when the U.S.-ordered bombing escalated the pace of ethnic cleansing in Kosovo. Prior to the air attack, the U.S. and NATO and presented flatly impossible “peace” terms at Rambouillet. Clinton’s proposal to Serbia included NATO control of all of Kosovo and NATO military occupation of all the rest of Yugoslavia. The Serbian National Assembly’s counterproposal for negotiations leading to wide-ranging Kosovo autonomy was ignored by U.S. policymakers and dominant U.S. war media. The bombing of Yugoslavia, including the Serbian capital Belgrade, produced untold civilian casualties. Weapons containing depleted uranium were used to terrible effect against the Serbian people.

Meanwhile the Clinton administration and that supposed noble humanitarian agency the United Nations continued to impose U.S-led “economic sanctions” that killed more than a million Iraqis and weakened domestic Iraqi opposition to Saddam Hussein.

As Noam Chomsky noted in 2000, “the rogue state doctrine” of the Reagan and Bush I administrations “remained in force when the Democrats returned to the White House.” That doctrine reserved the United States’ right to contravene international law whenever it liked. Clinton embraced it when he “informed the United Nations in 1993 that the US will act ‘multilaterally when possible, but unilaterally when necessary,’ a position reiterated a year later by UN Ambassador Madeline Albright and in 1999 by Secretary of Defense William Cohen, who declared that the US is committed to ‘unilateral use of military power’ to defend vital interests, which include ‘ensuring uninhibited access to key markets, energy supplies, and strategic resources,’ and indeed anything that Washington might determine to be within its ‘domestic jurisdiction.’”

“The contempt of the world’s leading power for the framework of world order has become so extreme,” Chomsky noted in the aftermath of the bombing of Serbia, “that there is little left to discuss. While the Reaganites broke new ground, under Clinton the defiance of world order has become so extreme as to be of concern even to hawkish policy analysts. (Chomsky, Rogue States: The Rule of Force in World Affairs [Boston MA: South End Press, 2000], pp. 3, 47).

Along with the grisly Cold War record treated above and continued under Reagan and Bush I, Clinton’s policies help us understand why the United States was feared and loathed across the world well before Bush II seized power and invaded Iraq. Even the arch-reactionary and hawkish Harvard political scientist Samuel P. Huntington became concerned by Clinton’s aggressive imperialism. He wrote a Foreign Affairs article noting that the U.S. was “becoming the rogue superpower” in the eyes of the world’s people, who saw the U.S. as “the single greatest external threat to their societies.”

2007: “PREVAILING DEMOCRATIC DOCTRINE IS NOT THAT DIFFERENT”

It is questionable how discontinuous Bush’s reckless foreign policy is with the imperial practices and doctrines of the “liberal” Greatest Generation and the neoliberal Clinton administration. It is just as questionable how different the Democratic Party’s current foreign policy positions are from those of the current War Criminal in Chief. As Tuft’s University political scientist Tony Smith notes in a recent Washington Post commentary: “Although they now cast themselves as alternatives to President Bush, the fact is that prevailing Democratic doctrine is not that different from the Bush-Cheney doctrine.”

Smith’s analysis merits lengthy quotation:

Many Democrats, including senators who voted to authorize the war in Iraq, embraced the idea of muscular foreign policy based on American global supremacy and the presumed right to intervene to promote democracy or to defend key U.S. interests long before 9/11, and they have not changed course since. Even those who have shifted against the war have avoided doctrinal questions.

…without a coherent alternative to the Bush doctrine, with its confidence in America’s military preeminence and the global appeal of ‘free market democracy, the Democrats’ midterm victory may not be repeated in November 2008. Or, if the Democrats do win in 2008, they could remain staked to a vision of a Pax Americana strikingly reminiscent of Bush’s.

Democratic adherents to what might be called the ‘neoliberal’ position are well organized and well positioned. Their credo was enunciated just nine years ago by Madeleine Albright, then President Bill Clinton’s secretary of state: ‘If we have to use force, it is because we are America. We are the indispensable nation. We stand tall and we see further into the future.’ She was speaking of Bosnia at the time, but her remark had much wider implications.

Since 1992, the ascendant Democratic faction in foreign policy debates has been the thinkers associated with the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC) and its think tank, the Progressive Policy Institute (PPI). Since 2003, the PPI has issued repeated broadsides damning Bush’s handling of the Iraq war, but it has never condemned the invasion. It has criticized Bush’s failure to achieve U.S. domination of the Middle East, arguing that Democrats could do it better.

… these [Democratic] neoliberals are nearly indistinguishable from the better-known neoconservatives…Sources for many of the critical elements of the Bush doctrine can be found in the emergence of neoliberal thought during the 1990s, after the end of the Cold War. In think tanks, universities and government offices, left-leaning intellectuals, many close to the Democratic Party, formulated concepts to bring to fruition the age-old dream of Democratic President Woodrow Wilson ‘to make the world safe for democracy.’ These [Democratic] neolibs advocated the global expansion of ‘market democracy.’ They presented empirical, theoretical, even philosophical arguments to support the idea of the United States as the indispensable nation [, helping provide] …the intellectual substance of much of the Bush doctrine…

Dealing with Serbia in the 1990s cemented the neocon-neolib entente. By Sept. 11, 2001, these two groups had converged as a single ideological family. They agreed that American nationalism was best expressed in world affairs as a progressive imperialism. The rallying call for armed action would be promoting human rights and democratic government among peoples who resisted American hegemony.

And so we may appreciate the Democrats’ difficulty in their search for an exit strategy not only from Iraq but also from the temptations of a superpower.

… There is a precedent for the Democrats’ dilemma as 2008 approaches. When Richard M. Nixon ran for president 40 years ago, he, too, needed to formulate a policy that distinguished him from the unpopular war in Vietnam prosecuted by an unpopular Democratic administration. He promised that ‘a new leadership will end the war,’ hinting that he had a secret plan to do so. But it turned out that Nixon’s ‘new leadership’ was as committed to prevailing in Southeast Asia as Lyndon B. Johnson had been.

(Tony Smith, “It’s Uphill for the Democrats: They Need a Global Strategy, Not Just Tactics for Iraq,” Washington Post, 11 March, 2007, p. B01, available online at http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/ 2007/03/09/ AR2007030901884_pf.html).

Smith’s reflections provide some useful context for Edwards’ insistence on maintaining U.S. military superiority – not remotely threatened by any nation or coalition on earth – and for Edwards’ reference to America’s alleged mission of spreading “freedom across the globe.”

Smith also provides background for the following statement in Edwards’ CFR address: “once we are out of Iraq, the U.S. must retain sufficient forces in the region to prevent a genocide, deter a regional spillover of the civil war, and prevent an Al Qaeda safe haven. We will most likely need to retain Quick Reaction Forces in Kuwait and in the Persian Gulf. We will also need some presence in Baghdad, inside the Green Zone, to protect the American Embassy.”

Beneath claims of humanitarian and anti-terrorist concern, Edwards does not call for full withdrawal from the occupied nation or the region. He proposes to adjust, not reject Washington’s imperial presence in the super-strategic because fabulously oil-rich Middle East. The U.S., he feels, must stand ready to strike in and against a region we claim the special right to police and colonize for a reason neither he nor any of the Democratic candidates except Kucinch and Gravel can acknowledge given dominant Washington and media “taboos.”

That reason is the American Empire’s perceived need to deepen its control of the Middle East’s stupendous oil reserves, which Cold War icon George Kennan once rightly described as the “greatest strategic material prize in history.” Domination of that “prize,’ Kennan noted – in a Greatest Generation formulation fit for Obama’s ponderous “awe” – would give the U.S. de facto political-economic “veto power” over leading industrial competitors in the world system.

Smith’s analysis also provides some context for Edwards’ comment that “the worst thing about [Bush’s] Global War on Terror approach is that it has backfired – our military has been strained to the breaking point and the threat from terrorism grows.”

That is an unfortunate formulation. The worst thing about Bush’s foreign policy is that it has killed more than 700,000 Iraqis, a not-so-little detail that helps explain why millions around the world and especially in the Middle East will not mourn when the United States is hit by its next 9/11 – an eventuality that the Clintons are now saying will “probably” happen shortly “after the next president is sworn in” (Karen Tumulty and James Carney, “Hillary Pushes Back,” Time, May 7, 2007, p. 43).

Imperial doctrine forbids honest recognition of the extent of U.S. violence inflicted on officially “unworthy victims” on the wrong side of Uncle Sam’s inherently noble and “freedom”-loving guns.

America’s longstanding “imperial temptations” are alive and well on both sides of the corporate-imperial party system. This is no small part of why the Democrats can’t muster meaningful opposition to Bush’s Iraq War policy. Their inability and/or refusal to acknowledge the Iraq invasion’s criminal, immoral, mass-murderous and imperial nature makes them vulnerable to the charge of “losing Iraq.”

THE PRICE OF HISTORICAL AIRBRUSHING

Maybe it’s because my formal academic training is in History, but I think there’s an intimate relationship between bad history, bad politics and bad policy. As Tariq Ali notes in the latest issue of Z Magazine:

“It’s been obvious for some time, certainly since the end of the Cold War, that throughout the world, history has been either rewritten or forgotten. Many crucial things that happened in the 20th century have been airbrushed out. This is something that irks a lot of people, especially in the Arab world where a sense of history is quite strong. Much of what is going on in the world today has historical roots. One has to go back and see what these roots are because, unless you do, there is no way of solving some of the problems that affect the world” (Ali and David Barsamian, “Jihad: Theirs and Ours,” Z Magazine [June 2007], p. 45).

(Readers should note the parallel with Chris Hedges argument that western Christians’ need to stop airbrushing the Bible if they want to stop avoiding the Bible’s uglier passages if they want to “assuage the fears of the Islamic world that Christians are calling for its annihilation.”)

A policy maker who denies the existence and/or relevance of past racism is not a good candidate to seriously address racial oppression in the present. A politician, journalist or citizen who knows nothing or wrong things about the history of European fascism and the Nazi regime (initially welcomed by U.S. foreign policymakers) is not in a good position to intelligently evaluate George W. Bush’s effort to equate Saddam Hussein with Adolph Hitler and the so-called “Axis of Evil” with the fascist Axis of the 1940s.

A candidate or office-holder who thinks the American historical story is one of endless progress and opportunity, classlessness, democracy and gentle cultural melding is not in a good position to meaningfully represent, understand and serve disadvantaged people or advance justice and democracy in the present and future.

U.S. presidential hopefuls who trumpet whitewashed perspectives on past U.S. imperialism are candidates to advance “rogue superpower” behavior in the future.

Christians seeking to advance a morally respectable version of their faith must acknowledge and repudiate scriptural passages that justify and promise mass messianic-militarist devastation for supposed spiritual enemies. In a similar vein, moral politicians who wish to change the dangerous and authoritarian course of current messianic-militarist U.S. foreign policy must acknowledge and then repudiate past and current U.S. imperial crimes.

Those in global power who fail to acknowledge the imperial crimes of the past are likely to repeat them.

THE REPAIR OF BROKEN SOCIETIES BEGINS AT HOME

Acknowledging those crimes, I suspect, means dropping the arrogant imperial assumptions that the United States’ “answer” is “the world’s hope” and that the “world” is ours to “inherit.” It means asking more, listening more and telling less when interacting with the world beyond our borders.

It also means taking an honest look in the mirror. With a deeply and increasingly unequal domestic society still badly damaged by Martin King’s “triple evils” and by what the New Left historian William Appleman Williams called “Empire as a Way of Life,” we have no business trumpeting ourselves as a potential “beacon” to anyone. The repair of broken societies and failed states begins at home.

Like the Democratic Party’s leadership and top presidential candidates, Herbert takes seriously — as no serious Left commentator would — the Bush administration’s claims to have invaded Iraq out of an interest in exporting “freedom” and “democracy.”

His often eloquent reflections on the human costs of Bush’s terrible war on Iraq are practically always about U.S. soldiers. They rarely mention Iraqis, whose body count from “Operation Iraqi Freedom” (OIF) is likely well over 700,000 by now.

And Herbert harkens back in disturbingly positive terms to the supposedly noble foreign polices of past Democratic presidents Harry Truman and John Fitzgerald Kennedy, both of whom inflicted massive racist and imperial mayhem abroad.¹

“Once you launch [an illegal] war … you need the collective effort of a nation … to achieve an objective”

Herbert’s military nationalism was on special display during a question and answer session that took place two years ago at (appropriately enough) the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library (Herbert 2005). Explaining why he was angrier about the Bush administration’s Iraq War in 2005 than he had been in 2003, Herbert made a curious argument. “Once you launch a war, once you you’re in a war,” Herbert told his audience, “you have to win the war. I mean, I don’t want the United States out there losing wars, that’s insane.”

Herbert followed this “patriotic” statement with some rambling reflections on the virtues of “the [Colin] Powell Doctrine.” “If you’re going to go to war,” he said, “you’ve got to win the war… you need an overwhelming force going in.”

Speaking of the George W. Bush and Dick Cheney’s Iraq fiasco, Herbert expressed anger at the irony of “the most powerful and wealthiest nation in the history of the world” going “to war with not enough troops.”

“This is not a left or right issue,” Herbert said. “If the country is at war, it really is a collective effort and you need to prosecute this war in the best, most efficient way possible.”

Part of the problem, Herbert complained, was that everyday Americans were living self-absorbed lives of consumerism and entertainment. They were engaged in “trivial” personal and cultural pursuits “rather than [embracing] the idea of a collective effort of a nation at war trying to achieve an objective.”

Who’s “Insane?”

I wonder if anybody in Herbert’s Kennedy Library audience grasped how truly disturbing and, well, “insane” this argument was. Once you start an illegal, immoral, and mass-murderous war, then you need to “win” the resulting conflict and the whole nation needs to rally behind that war in a “collective effort” to “achieve an objective?”

It would have been interesting to ask Herbert how Germans were supposed to react to that argument being made in connection with the Third Reich’s invasion of Poland. Is that how the people of China should be expected to react if their government were to invade Canada or California?

Herbert made this argument well after some of the worst U.S. atrocities in Iraq (the bloody siege of Fallujah and the Abu Ghraib torture operations) had come to light and long after the administration’s case for the war had been exposed as thoroughly fraudulent (de la Vega 2006). It was clear to most of the actual (and therefore officially irrelevant) Left from the beginning of course that the occupation of Iraq was a brazenly imperialist effort to deepen U.S. control over Middle Eastern oil and hence over the world economic and political system.

“Everybody else is watching ‘American Idol’”

Two years after his disgraceful performance at the Kennedy Library, Herbert is still significantly stuck in the moral quagmire of liberal-militarist empire-denial. In a May 3rd column titled “An Invisible War,” he seconded Iraq War veteran’s activist Paul Rieckhoff’s complaint that the military is at war without the American people behind them.

As quoted in Herbert’s flattering column, Rieckhoff wishes the Iraq War was more like World War II, when “we could be in this place and there would be a guy sitting at the table who was in the war, or the bartender had been in the war. Everybody you saw would have had a stake in the war.”

“Right now,” Rieckhoff tells an approving Herbert, “you could walk around New York for blocks and not find anybody who has been in Iraq. The president can say we’re a country at war all he wants. We’re not. The military is at war. And the military families are at war. Everybody else is shopping.”

By Rieckhoff’s account, “one of the key things” Iraq war veterans “have in common is this frustration with the detachment we all see around us, this idea that we’re at war and everybody else is watching ‘American Idol.’”

According to Rieckhoff, some returning soldiers are so alienated by the triviality they perceive at home that they end up volunteering to go back to Iraq. Life seems at least seems real on the imperial front.

One of the problems that most troubles Rieckhoff and Herbert is the difficulty Iraq War veterans have dealing with the fact that they have killed people in Iraq. Large numbers of troops come back to the land of “American Idol” and “Deal or No Deal” carrying the psychological and spiritual burden of having carried out orders to murder Iraqis. Some soldiers are concerned that their “service” in Bush’s war has cost them the right to enter heaven.

Rieckhoff blames George W. Bush for the “detachment” because “he hasn’t asked the American people to do anything.” Herbert agrees, adding that American GIs sent to Iraq “have felt that they were carrying out an important task on behalf of the nation.” After lunching with Rieckhoff in Manhattan, Herbert notes, “I signaled for the check and we left the restaurant. It was a beautiful, sunlit afternoon. New Yorkers were smiling and enjoying the spring weather. There was no sign of war anywhere.” (Herbert 2007).

Criminal and Imperial War

Herbert and Rieckhoff are right to note what Herbert calls “the gigantic and extremely disturbing disconnect between the experiences of the men and women in uniform and the perspectives of people here at home.”

They are correct to observe the unsettling contrast between the murderous misery of the Iraq War and the American “homeland’s” frivolous mass culture. They are right to argue that American war veterans are being given “short shrift” by government agencies.

They are correct to suggest the chilling contradiction between (1) Bush and Cheney’s claim that the soldiers are engaged in a life or death war to save civilization and (2) the administration’s refusal to ask for serious sacrifice on the part of all but a relatively small section of the population — the mostly working-class households who provide most of the members of the nation’s “volunteer” (non-draft) armed forces.

Herbert loses moral credibility and substance, however, when he fails to note the obvious — that U.S. soldiers in Iraq have NOT in fact been involved in “an important task on behalf of the nation.” Rieckhoff and Herbert can pine all they want for the lost national solidarities aroused by the good U.S. war against fascism (1941-1945), but these troops have been deployed in a spectacularly criminal, mass murderous invasion that has always been and remains fundamentally about imperial control of global energy resources (Arnove 2006; Schwartz 2007; Street 2007b). The costs of this expensive and disastrous occupation are spread across American society, falling with special harshness on military families. The profits go to select privileged elites atop the nation’s leading “defense,” “reconstruction” and petroleum corporations.

That’s how imperialism has always played out in the imperial “homeland.”² And it’s why the Bush administration has not asked for serious sacrifice from the American people beyond the military. Its planners know very well that they exploited 9/11 and built a fraudulent (de la Vega 2006) case to justify a vicious oil invasion based on cynical imperial and political calculations most Americans would find deeply offensive. They thought they could pull the whole thing off with relative ease.

Thanks to the Iraqi resistance, however, things have not played out as Cheney and Bush hoped. “If there had been no resistance,” Tariq Ali has observed, “the [White House] warmongers would have claimed that that the occupation was a triumph, established a collaborationist regime and moved on to change the regime in Syria and, possibly, Iran. Dissent in the U.S. and Britain would have been neutered, the media would have remained friendly and the lies to justify the war would have been happily forgotten. The means, we would have been told, justify the ends. And the snapshots of Iraqis being tortured would have remained a family secret” (Ali and Barsamian 2005, p. 220).

Because Iraqis fought back, Americans were able to learn that the administration’s case for war was based on deception. And with the original impeachment-worthy (de la Vega 2006) lies behind the criminal invasion exposed (the subsequent false administration claim that the U.S. invaded to export “democracy” has yet to be adequately exposed) it is not politically recommended for the Bush administration to lecture U.S. citizens on their need to sacrifice for the supposedly great war to save civilization and against terrorism.

The obvious response of fully informed and self-respecting citizens to such lectures would run something like this: “What great war to save civilization, you vicious war criminals? Do you mean this grand petro-imperial and state-terrorist transgression you have been committing under brazenly bogus pretexts in Iraq — the terrible operation you tell us to endorse when you say that we must ‘support the troops’? No, sorry ‘Mr. President,’ the real way to ‘support the troops’ is get them out of that bloody nightmare you created. Then we need to get you and Cheney and Rice and the rest out of public office and before an international tribunal.”

Choosing a “Distraction” over the “Alternative of Constant Weeping”

The really existing response of most generally less than fully informed U.S. citizens to the Iraq War may not be framed at this level of sophisticated vitriol. But that response is not all or mainly about mass-consumerist Paris Hiltonian narcissism either.

New York Times reader Lisa Hamilton suggests some of the more complex and muddled middle ground inhabited by real-life Americans on the Iraq War in an interesting letter to the editor responding to Herbert’s “Invisible War” column:

“While I feel terrible for Mr. Rieckhoff and his fellow soldiers and the sacrifices they have made, I and almost everyone I know opposed the war in Iraq from the beginning. I marched, I protested, I wrote my Congressional representatives, I voted in 2004 and 2006 with the intent to signal my discontent with the direction the country had taken on the war. Since nothing I did and nothing I felt, wrote or signaled has made the least amount of difference, I have indeed detached from the situation.”

“While I honor the good intentions behind the military service of Mr. Rieckhoff and others in Iraq, I disagree that they’re carrying out ‘an important task.’ The reason that Americans are distracting themselves is that the importance of the Iraq war is no longer (and perhaps has never been) apparent to many, and it’s too painful to watch the unnecessary killings of so many Americans and Iraqis. Of course we’d rather watch the fake conflict of ‘American Idol.’ Or Buy shoes” (Letter to the Editor, NYT, 7 May 2007).

For Ms. Hamilton, the problem is that the war, which she and her cohorts opposed without (she thinks) impact, is just too painful.

A different Times reader, “T. Roman,” expressed similar sentiments. He or she wrote to the Times to criticize Rieckhoff and Herbert’s idea that “the majority of Americans are happily ignoring this war.” The real problem, Roman argued, is that “many nonmilitary citizens feel absolutely powerless to do anything in the face of a president and an administration that don’t seem to answer to the people, and so use ‘American Idol’ and other forms of distraction as a balm against the alternative of constant weeping. Americans — even Americans who did not support this war from the start — do want to support the troops, but are at a loss as to how to go about doing so.” (Letter to Editor from T. Roman, NYT, 7 May 2007).

By “T. Roman’s” account, the problem isn’t so much mass U.S. ignorance of U.S. soldiers’ terrible reality as a sense of inability to do anything about the horrors of the war.

Consistent with Hamilton and Roman’s reflections, there is a deep and potentially radicalizing disconnect between public opinion and state behavior when it comes to United States foreign policy. Considerable U.S. majorities reject “their” government’s imperial militarism, unilateralism and interventionism (Chomsky 2006, pp. 228-230; Chicago Council on Foreign Relations 2004; Street 2004). They are badly misinformed by dominant media about the degree and impact of U.S. imperial criminality, however, and they feel (as “T. Roman” says) powerless to stop the criminality and incompetence they are still able to perceive.

It doesn’t help that the Democratic non-“opposition” Party refuses to act in meaningful accord with the majority antiwar sentiment it rode to a Congressional majority last November. That predictable failure is intimately related to the party’s unwillingness and/or inability to acknowledge that the occupation of Iraq is a great imperial crime, not merely (to use Barack Obama’s language) a “strategic blunder” (Brecher and Smith 2007; Street 2007c).

Why the Warmongers Prefer a Mercenary Army

There’s something else significant missing from Herbert and Rieckhoff’s take on the civilian-military disconnect. The American majority’s underlying opposition to imperialism and militarism — widely evident in the relevant opinion data — is also part of why the U.S. military prefers to rely on a mercenary (volunteer) army of mostly working-class soldiers and not on a compulsory national draft. As Noam Chomsky observed in explaining why he doubted that Bush administration planners would call for a draft in response to the deepening quagmire in Iraq in December 2004:

“The military command, and the civilian leadership, learned an important lesson in Vietnam: you can’t expect a citizen’s army to fight a vicious, brutal colonial war. Their predecessors knew that. The British, French, etc., provided the officer corps, special forces, and professional military, but relied on the Foreign Legion, Ghurkas, Indian troops, and other mercenaries. That’s standard. The US made a serious tactical error in this regard in Vietnam — though it had plenty of mercenaries too: South Korean, Thai, and others. In Iraq, the US is using what amounts to a mercenary army of the disadvantaged, and the second largest military force is the ‘private’ companies made up of ex-military officers, South African killers, etc.”

“In Vietnam, the army collapsed from within: drugs, killing officers, etc. Citizens are not trained killers, and they are not sufficiently dissociated from the civilian culture at home to fight colonial wars properly. The top brass wanted the army out, before it fell apart. And the civilian leadership agreed.” (Chomsky 2004).

Chomsky elaborated on these comments in his 2005 interview book Imperial Ambitions (Chomsky and Barsamian 2005. p. 133-134):

“A citizens’ army has ties to the civilian culture. In the late 1960s, for example, during the Vietnam War, a kind of rebellious culture in many respects and civilizing culture in many respects spilled over into the military, and it helped undermine the military, which is a very good thing. That’s why no imperial power has used the citizens’ army to fight an imperial war. If you take a look at the British in India, the French in West Africa, or South Africans in Angola, they essentially relied on mercenaries,which makes sense. Mercenaries are trained killers, but people who are too close to civilian society are not really going to be good at killing people.”

Chomsky’s comments provide some useful background for Herbert and Rieckhoff’s concern about soldiers’ struggling with having killed. If even “trained killers” are haunted by their actions (ordered from above), then we can imagine the greater difficulties people more strongly tied to “the civilian culture” would have fighting an inherently murderous imperial war like Occupation Iraqi Freedom.

Ruling class preference for the use of professional, non- citizen soldiers (both public and private) to enforce global empire lay behind the fact that so many ordinary Americans are experientially removed from the realities of the Iraq invasion. That preference gives rise to the emergence of a de facto mercenary army, composed of a separate class or stratum of people for whom preparation for and execution of war is a distinct way of life and a source of material support.

If we must have a military, it would be better for it be based on a citizen’s draft, something that would make it much more difficult for warmongers (and Chicken Hawks) like Bush and Cheney to launch criminal adventures like the invasion of Iraq.

U.S. reliance on a mercenary army helps explain the civilian-military chasm that Rieckhoff and Herbert bemoan. As it turns out, this reliance is intimately related to something else Herbert fails to register: the imperialist nature of the Iraq War and indeed of U.S. foreign policy in general.

For what it’s worth, 72 percent of Americans surveyed by the Chicago Council on Foreign Relations in the fall of 2004 said that the U.S. should remove its military from Iraq if that’s what a clear majority of Iraqis want (Chicago Council on Foreign Relations 2004, p. 17). Interestingly enough, a poll conducted for the British Ministry of Defence in 2005 found that fully 82 percent of Iraqis were “‘strongly opposed’ to the presence of foreign troops in their country and less than 1 percent believed the troops were responsible for improvement in security” (Taylor 2005). This is more context for understanding why Washington prefers to use a mercenary, not a citizens’ army abroad.

Embrace Defeat: It’s Patriotic

Most of the morally cognizant human race and certainly all serious Left thinkers reject Herbert’s 2005 contention that it would be “insane” to ever wish military defeat on Uncle Sam. The U.S. is widely and all-too understandably seen around the world as a rogue imperial superpower (for reasons that are readily discernible in a large number of monographs, articles, and documentaries that are routinely dismissed by news and book review editors at Herbert’s conservative newspaper), a gross violator of human rights, an agent of global inequality, and the greatest threat to peace on earth.

Hoping that resistance forces in U.S.-targeted states might educate the U.S. on the limits of empire is hardly a sign of madness or even of anti-Americanism. The carnage inflicted by the insufficiently checked U.S. empire includes the dead of Hiroshima and Nagasaki (criminally butchered by “Give’Em Hell Harry” Truman in atomic assaults that occurred after Japan had been defeated and were meant mainly to preemptively discipline Soviet foreign policy in the emerging post-WWII world order), 2-3 million dead Indochinese, hundreds of thousands of Iraqis killed by Desert Storm (conducted in accord with Powell’s doctrine of “overwhelming force”) and perhaps close to 2 million Iraqis (with “economic sanctions” fatalities included) from Bush I to Bush II (Blum 2000; Blum 2004; Barnett 1972; Chomsky 1992; Chomsky 2006).

At the same time, the massive taxpayer fortune that is spent from year to year on real and potential U.S. war-making comes at a spectacular domestic social “opportunity cost” in the industrialized world’s most unequal and wealth-top-heavy society, where tens of millions of children live in poverty while “defense” executives and other captains of industry and finance enjoy lives of richly parasitic hyper-opulence. Imperial conflict and the militarism it feeds and reflects also tend to deeply encourage the erosion of liberty and democracy and the advance of fear and repression at home (Street 2004a).

Collective Action for Things Worth Achieving

Complaints about “irrelevant” past protest aside, it is still the responsibility of citizens like Ms. Hamilton and T. Roman to turn off “American Idol” and engage policy from the bottom up. They should in fact unite in a “collective effort” to “achieve an objective.”

In doing so, however, they would do well to remember that such actions as the invasion of Iraq do in fact carry out “important tasks.” Imperial wars like O.I.F. work to distribute wealth and power upward for the benefit of privileged elites, not for American society as a whole, and certainly not for the mostly working-class soldiers ordered to die and kill in the name of “freedom” (Street 2007d).

What the “collective effort” most needs to achieve is a meaningful democratic counter to the vicious, mutually reinforcing imperatives of Empire and Inequality at home and abroad.

Many GI and veterans’ organizations (including Military Families Speak Out, Courage to Resist, GI Rights Hotline, Different Drummer, Citizen Soldier, Iraq Veterans Against the War, Gold Star Families for Peace, Veterans for Peace, Bring Them Home Now, Veterans Against the Iraq War, and others) are calling for the de-funding of the occupation of Iraq and bringing the troops home now. This is not the position of Rieckhoff’s comparatively “mainstream” group, Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America (IAVA), which mouths imperial rhetoric about maintaining a large and strong U.S. military and restricts its activism mainly to veterans’ issues. “The mission of Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America,” IAVA’s web site says, “is to ensure the enactment of policies that properly provide for our Troops & Veterans, keep our military strong, and guarantee our national security for the purpose of a stronger America.”

Citizens should remember that they are far from powerless in the face of the war. Through protest and resistance, they can force de-funding of the Iraq occupation and bring the troops home. They can bring about the impeachment and removal of Bush and Cheney et al. Along the way they could form a powerful movement to change the nation’s “perverted priorities” (Martin Luther King, Jr.) from war, empire and corporate plutocracy to peace, justice, and democracy.

Popular pressure and activism inside the homeland has tempered and helped end imperial violence in the past. It will continue to do so until the welcome day when the “Masters of War” are “lowered down to their death beds” (Bob Dylan 1963) once and for all. It will, that is, unless the people give up.

Liberals like Herbert need to think more deeply and critically about the meaning of U.S. behavior in the world, past and present. At the same time, less strategically placed and more ordinary citizens like Lisa Hamilton make a terrible mistake if they think that the wrongness of Bush’s war means that the invasion of Iraq is “not important.” The occupation is a remarkable expression of the American Empire’s determination to act in defiance of civilized norms, democratic principles and national and international law. There’s little justification for being “at a loss” about what can and should be done. And “detach[ing] from the situation” is not a respectable response, to say the least.

Silence in the face of Washington’s continuing imperial criminality is complicity, regardless of whether or not one resisted the Iraq war in the past.

SOURCES

Tariq Ali and Davis Barsamian 2005. Speaking of Empire and Resistance: Conversations with Tariq Ali (New York: The New Press, 2005).

Antony Arnove 2006. Iraq: The Logic of Withdrawal (New York: New Press, 2006).

Richard J. Barnett 1972. Intervention and Revolution: America’s Confrontation With Insurgent Movements Around the World (New York: Meridian, 1972).

William Blum 2000. Rogue State: A Guide to the World’s Only Superpower (Common Courage 2000).

William Blum 2004. Freeing the World to Death: Essays on the American Empire (Common Courage 2004).

Jeremy Brecher and Brendan Smith 2007. “The Stab in the Back Trap,” ZNet (April 28, 2007), available online at http://www.zmag.org/content/ showarticle.cfm?SectionID=51&ItemID=12689.

Chicago Council on Foreign Relations 2004. Global Views 2004: American Foreign Policy and Public Opinion (October 2004).

Noam Chomsky 1970. For Reasons of State (New York: New Press, 1970).

Noam Chomsky 1992. Deterring Democracy (New York: Hill and Wang, 1992).

Noam Chomsky 2004. “The Draft,” ZNet (December 17 2004), available online at http://blog.zmag.org/ee_links/the_draft.

Noam Chomsky and David Barsamian 2005. Imperial Ambitions: Conversations on the Post-9/11 World (New York: Metropolitan, 2005).

Noam Chomsky 2006. Failed States: The abuse of Power and the Assault on Democracy (New York: Metropolitan 2006).

Bob Dylan 1963. “Masters of War,” lyrics available online.

Bob Herbert 2005. “A Conversation With Bob Herbert,” John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum” (May 9, 2005), accessed online on October 25 2006.

Bob Herbert 2007. “An Invisible War,” New York Times, 3 May 2007.

Bruce Miroff 1976. Pragmatic Illusions: The Presidential Politics of John F. Kennedy (New York: Longman, 1976).

Michael Schwartz 2007. “The Prize of Iraqi Oil,” TomDispatch.com (May 6, 2007).

Paul Street 2004. “Dear Europe,” Dissident Voice (November 18, 2004).

Paul Street 2004a. Empire and Inequality: America and the World Since 9/11 (Boulder, CO: Paradigm, 2004).

Paul Street 2006a. “Bob Herbert Doesn’t Get it: it’s About Empire, Not Democracy,” ZNet (March 18, 2006).

Paul Street 2006b. “What About Bob (Herbert)? Reflections on History, Policy and the Progressive Illusions of a Times Liberal,” ZNet (November 26 2006).

Paul Street 2007a. “‘We’ve Done A Lot More Than Talk’ The Democratic Party Line on the United States’ Commitment to Peace and Democracy Within and Beyond Iraq,” Empire and Inequality Report, ZNet (March 27, 2007).

Paul Street 2007b. “Blood for Oil Control,” Empire and Inequality Report No. 16, CounterCurrents.org (April 17, 2007).

Paul Street 2007c. “Strategizing in the Face of Crimes: Reject the Democrats’ Call for Calm,” Empire and Inequality Report No. 17, ZNet (May 4, 2007, available online at
http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?ItemID=12746.

Paul Street 2007 d. “Profit Surge,” Empire and Inequality Report No. 10, ZNet (February 10, 2007).

Richard Norton Taylor 2005. “British Forces Arrest Nine Iraqis As Poll Shows Hostility to Troops,” The Guardian (October 24, 2005), accessed online January 10 2006).

Elizabeth de la Vega 2006. United States V. George Bush (New York: Seven Stories, 2006).

1. After ordering the two most heinous single-moment war crimes in history — the atom bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki (in announcing the attack on the first city Truman proclaimed the atom bomb “the greatest thing in history”) — the Truman administration concocted a Soviet “communist” threat in Greece to justify a massive permanent imperial militarization campaign called the Cold War. Millions died in the execution of that policy, which assaulted civil liberties, diverted billions of dollars away from attacking poverty and racism and checked the positive, social-democratic impulses of the New Deal. The super-hawk JFK used false claims of a Soviet missile advantage to attain a presidency that sparked a deadly and expensive arms race, initiated the giant and prolonged U.S. military assault on the peasant nation of Vietnam, attempted repeatedly to undermine the sovereign government of Cuba, and helped bring the human race as close to nuclear annihilation as it ever came. Domestic needs suffered accordingly in a time when more than a fifth of the U.S. population lived below the poverty line. Kennedy intervened against the racist U.S. South only reluctantly and mostly on the basis of the imperial calculation that his aggressive foreign policy was harmed when Third World people saw racist violence occurring within the supposed homeland and headquarters of world freedom. The beneficiaries of his overseas policy included the corrupt ruling-class of South Vietnam and the authoritarian military states of Latin America (See Barnett 1972, Chomsky 1992, Miroff, 1976, and Blum 2000).
2. “Perhaps,” Noam Chomsky wrote in 1970, “a word might be added with regard to the commonly heard argument that the costs of the Vietnam War prove that United States has no imperial motives… The costs, of course, are profits for selected segments of the American economy, in large measure. It is senseless to describe government expenditures for petroleum, jet planes, cluster bombs or computers for the automated air war simply as ‘costs of intervention.’ There are, to be sure, costs of empire that benefit no one: 50,000 American corpses or the deterioration of the strength of the United States economy relative to its industrial rivals. The costs of empire to the imperial society as a whole may be considerable. These costs, however, are social costs, whereas, say, the profits from overseas investment guaranteed by military success are again highly concentrated in certain special segments of society. The costs of empire are in general distributed over the society as a whole, while its profits revert to a few within. In this respect, the empire serves as a device for internal consolidation of power and privilege, and it is quite irrelevant to observe that its social costs are often great or that as costs rise, differences may also emerge among those who are in positions of power and influence.” (Chomsky 1970, p. 47).

“Simmons gives a well-deserved shot to the ever-deepening myth of the progressive Barockstar.”

Leave it to a leading cultural capitalist to call Barack Obama out on his reactionary disregard for the material circumstances that create inner-city misery and for hypocritical reliance on big capitalist political cash. Look at the following recent exchange between New York Times writer Deborah Solomon and Russell Simmons, the co-founder of Def Jam Recordings and the so-called “CEO of Hip-Hop:

Solomon: “What do you make of Barack Obama, who recently said that rap musicians should reform their lyrics?”

Simmons: “What we need to reform is the conditions that create these lyrics. Obama needs to reform the conditions of poverty. I wish he really did raise his money on the Internet, like he said. I wish he really did raise his money independently.”

Solomon: “What are you saying?”

Simmons: “I think about one-fourth of his campaign contributions came from small donations made over the Internet, even though he collected more than any other Democratic candidate from Wall Street people. So at the end of the day, he’s controlled, too. That’s my point. He’s a mouse, too, like everybody else.”

Solomon: “Are there any presidential candidates who inspire you?”

Simmons: “I talk to John Edwards more than I talk to anyone. He has said more things about the conditions we need to think about.”

It’s too bad he doesn’t talk to Dennis Kucinich more than anyone, but Simmons here gives a well-deserved shot to the ever-deepening myth of the progressive Barockstar, who recently garnered yet more free national media love by successfully applying for Secret Service protection on the grounds that his racism-accommodating (see below) candidacy is threatened by white racists.

I’ve been saying similar things about Obama from the officially invisible Left where nothing you say – e.g. “Bush’s case for the invasion of Iraq is completely fraudulent” (widely observed on the U.S. Left in 2002 and early 2003) – matters in the political present.

‘A mouse like everybody else’

Simmons is more right than he may care to know about Obama. Let’s start with his second point – “progressive” Obama’s mousy reliance on corporate political cash.

“Obama’s reliance on deep-pockets supporters is certainly part of why he opposed an amendment to the Bankruptcy Act that would have capped credit card interest rates at 30 percent.”

The junior Senator from Illinois denounces the corrosive influence of private political cash on U.S. democracy while cozying up to Chicago’s notoriously corrupt Big Money Mayor Richard M. Daley (with whom he shares the same high-priced campaign consultant (David Axlerod) and raking in campaign largesse from wealthy world-capitalist interests. His top career sponsors include Goldman Sachs, Exelon (the world’s leading nuclear plant operator), the Soros Fund Management, J.P Morgan Chase & Co., leading corporate law and lobbying firms (Kirkland & Ellis and Skadden, Arps, Sidley Austin LLP and others), top Chicago investment interests (including Henry Crown & Co and Aerial Capital Management) and the like.

Obama’s reliance on such deep-pockets supporters helps explain why he voted for a business-driven “tort reform” bill that rolled back working peoples’ ability to obtain reasonable redress and compensation from misbehaving corporations. It is certainly part of why he opposed an amendment to the Bankruptcy Act that would have capped credit card interest rates at 30 percent. It is undoubtedly related to his vote against a bill that would have killed an amendment to the 2005 energy bill that Taxpayers for Common Sense and Citizens Against Government Waste called “one of the worst provisions in this massive piece of legislation.” Under the amendment, which passed with Obama’s help, U.S. taxpayers are providing millions of dollars in loan guarantees to power plant operators. They “risk losing billions of dollars if the companies default,” as Ken Silverstein wrote in the November, 2006 issue of Harper’s Magazine (”Barack Obama Inc.: The Birth of a Washington Machine”).

Special interest influence is certainly behind Obama’s constant plugging of federally subsidized ethanol (”E-85″) as an environmentally friendly “alternative fuel.” Reliance on corporate cash and power is also likely related to Obama’s opposition to the introduction of single-payer national health insurance on the curious grounds that such a welcome social-democratic change would lead to employment difficulties for workers in the private insurance industry and that “voluntary” solutions are “more consonant” with “the American character” than “government mandates.” The latter judgment is advanced despite the fact that a large U.S. majority supports government-mandated universal health insurance.

Obama, it is worth noting, received $708,000 from medical and insurance interests between 2001 and 2006, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. His wife Michelle, a fellow Harvard Law graduate, is a Vice President for Community and External Affairs at the University of Chicago Hospitals, a position that paid her $273, 618 in 2006. For what it’s worth, she also received $51,200 for attending a few board meetings of TreeHouse Foods, a giant firm where she was made a director after Obama was elected to the U.S. Senate.

One day after Obama denounced Big Money control of U.S. politics in Iowa City, Iowa, the Los Angeles Times reported that Obama “raised more than $1 million in the first three months of his presidential campaign from law firms and companies that have major lobbying operations in the nation’s capital.” Obama has also received a combined $170,000 so far this year from financial giants Goldman Sachs and Citigroup, who together spent $4.6 million on federal lobbying in 2006.

“Obama received more than two-thirds (68 percent) of his first quarter 2007 fundraising total ‘from donations of $1000 or more.’”

The Los Angeles Times also reported that Obama received more than two-thirds (68 percent) of his first quarter 2007 fundraising total “from donations of $1000 or more.” Obama has “played up populist themes of [campaign finance] reform,” trumpeting his “large number of small donations” and claiming (in the Senator’s words) to be “launch[ing]a fundraising drive that isn’t about dollars.”. But his astonishing first-quarter campaign finance haul of $25.7 million included $17.5 million from “big donors” ($1000 and up) – a sum higher than the much more genuinely populist and remarkably pro-labor John Edwards’ total take ($14 million) from all donors.

According to Chicago Sun Times columnist Lynn Sweet, “Obama talks about transforming politics and touts the donations of ‘ordinary’ people to his campaign, a network of more than 100 elite Democratic ‘bundlers’ is raising millions of dollars for his White House bid. The Obama campaign prefers the emphasis be on the army of small donors who are giving – and raising – money for Obama. In truth, though, there are two parallel narratives – and the other is that Obama is also heavily reliant on wealthy and well-connected Democrats.”

Two weeks ago, Sweet reported that Obama had received large donations from at least eight executives at Island Def Jam, a hip-hop recording firm that markets rap artists that Obama has accused of “degrading their sisters” with sexist slurs. I assume (incorrectly perhaps) that Simmons was not among the contributors.

It also merits mention that Obama’s ponderous and Janus-faced campaign book The Audacity of Hope commends “the need to raise money from economic elites to finance elections” for “prevent[ing] Democrats…from straying too far from the center” and for marginalizing “those within the Democratic Party who tend toward zealotry” and “radical ideas” (Obama 2006, p. 38) – like peace and justice.

‘The conditions we need to think about’

Simmons is also on the mark when he says that Obama lacks adequate focus on the real circumstances of class and race that give rise to urban misery. In Audacity of Hope, Obama claims that the United States’ “greatest asset has been our system of social organization, a system that for generations has encouraged constant innovation, individual initiative and efficient allocation of resources” (Obama 2006, pp. 149-150). The junior U.S. Senator from Illinois leaves it to alienated carpers, “cranks” and “moral absolutists” of the “unreasonable” left (Obama’s description of the Left) to observe such “efficient” outcomes of the United States’ distinctively anti-social and (incidentally) heavily state-protected “free market system” as the generation of poverty for tens of millions of Americans. This poverty exists while “defense” executives rake in taxpayer millions for helping Uncle Sam kill and maim hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians and the top 1 percent of Americans possesses more than a third of the nation’s wealth.

In a chapter titled “Race,” Obama’s Audacity claims that “what ails working- and middle-class blacks is not fundamentally different from what ails their white counterparts.” He also claims that “white guilt has largely exhausted itself in America” as “even the most fair-minded of whites…tend to push back against suggestions of racial victimization and race-based claims based on the history of racial discrimination in this country” (Obama 2006, p. 247). Part of the reason for this “push back” (also known as denial) is, Obama claims, the bad culture and poor work-ethic of the inner-city black poor (Obama 2006, pp. 245, 254-56).

“Obama claims that ‘what ails working- and middle-class blacks is not fundamentally different from what ails their white counterparts.’”

Meanwhile, lower-, working-, and middle-class blacks continue to face numerous steep and interrelated white-supremacist barriers to equality. Multidimensional racial discrimination is still rife in post-Civil Rights America. It is deeply woven into the fabric of the nation’s social institutions and draws heavily on the living and unresolved legacy of not- so “past” racism. The long centuries of slavery and Jim Crow are still quite historically recent and would continue to exercise a crippling influence on black experience even if the dominant white claim that black “racial victimization” is a “thing of the past” was remotely accurate. This is why this white author (yours truly) and numerous other Left Caucasians (e.g. Joe Feagin, Tim Wise, Michael Albert and many more) join a large number of black Americans in supporting “race-based” policies of affirmative action and reparations.

Obama’s lack of adequate attention to harsh social conditions and persistent race-class oppression leads him to claim that black Americans have been “pulled into the economic mainstream” (Obama 2006, pp. 248-49). He says this despite the fact that blacks are afflicted with a shocking racial wealth gap that keeps their average net worth at one eleventh (!) that of whites and an income structure starkly and persistently tilted towards poverty.

Also reflecting his insensitivity to real conditions at the bottom of steep socioeconomic and racial pyramids is Obama’s claim that “conservatives and Bill Clinton were right about welfare.” The abolished Aid for Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) program, Obama claims, “sapped” inner-city blacks of their “initiative” and detached them from the great material and spiritual gains that flow to those who attach themselves to the noble capitalist labor market, including “independence,” “income,” “order, structure, dignity and opportunity for growth in peoples’ lives.” He argues that encouraging black girls to finish high school and stop having babies out of wedlock is “the single biggest that we could do to reduce inner-city poverty” (Obama 2006, p. 256).

There’s no social-scientific evidence for the reactionary claim that AFDC destroyed inner-city work ethics or generated “intergenerational poverty.” Numerous studies show the absence of decent, minimally well-paid, and dignified work has always been the single leading cause of black inner-city poverty and “welfare dependency.” Research also shows that high black teenage pregnancy rates reflect the absence of meaningful long-term life and economic opportunities in the nation’s hyper-segregated inner-city and suburban ring ghettos. And the single biggest thing that could be done to reduce inner-city poverty would be to make the elementary moral decision to abolish it through the provision of a decent guaranteed income – something once advocated by Martin Luther King, Jr. and even Richard Nixon.

“Obama claims that black Americans have been ‘pulled into the economic mainstream.’”

Obama’s Audacity adds insult to injury by lecturing poor people on their “duty” to feel “empathy” for wealthy oppressors (Obama 2006, p.68) – including Bush and Cheney, who are “pretty much like everyone else”(Obama 2006, p. 48) – and on their need to understood how well off and “free” they are compared to their more miserable counterparts in Africa and Latin America (Obama 2006, pp. 54, 150). Obama deletes less favorable contrasts with Western Europe and Japan (the most relevant comparisons), where societal policies and practices produce significantly slighter levels of poverty and inequality than is normative in the militantly hierarchical U.S.

Obama’s indifference to the depth and degree of racial inequality in the U.S. was reflected in his recent Selma, Alabama speech in which he claimed that 1950s and 1960s civil rights activists – who he referred to as “the Moses Generation” – had brought black America “90 percent of the way” to racial equality. It’s up to Obama and his fellow “Joshua Generation” members, the Senator said, to get past “that 10 percent in order to cross over to the other side.”

Ten percent? Maybe that’s how it looks to Obama and his big money friends in the black super-bourgeoisie like leading Obama financier John Rogers, the chairman of Aerial Capital Management. By the latest count of the leading wealth gap-expert Tom Shapiro, however, it appears that black America still has 93 percent of the way to go. “In 2002,” Shapiro noted for the mainstream Center for American Progress, “a typical Hispanic family owned 11 cents of wealth for every dollar owned by a typical white family, and African-American families owned only 7 cents.”

Part of the problem may be who Obama hangs out with. The Audacity of Hope is peppered with favorable references to Obama’s many good friends in the black super-bourgeoisie, including one wealthy “black friend” (probably Aerial Capital Management chairman John Rogers) who lent him an airplane “one of the first times I needed a corporate jet.”

Material indifference ‘beyond our borders’

Obama’s blindness to poverty-generating conditions is not restricted to the U.S. In its audaciously imperialist and power-worshipping chapter on “The World Beyond Our Borders,” The Audacity of Hope criticizes “left-leaning populists” like “Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez” for daring to think that developing nations “should resist America’s efforts to expand its hegemony” and for trying to “follow their own path to development.” Such dysfunctional “reject[ion] [of] the ideals of free markets and liberal democracy” will only worsen the situation of the global poor, Obama claims (Obama 2006, p. 315).

“Obama lamely instructs ‘developing nations’ that ‘the system of free markets and liberal democracy’ is ‘constantly subject to change and improvement.’”

Obama ignores a preponderance of evidence of showing that the imposition of the “free market” corporate-neoliberal “Washington Consensus” has deepened poverty, exacerbated inequality, and slowed growth across the desperately impoverished “developing world.” Millions are left to live in ever-more extreme poverty as Obama lamely instructs “developing nations” that “the system of free markets and liberal democracy” is “constantly subject to change and improvement.”

Obama likes to lecture the American people on the danger that their rejection of the war on Iraq will turn into support for an “isolationist” retreat from America’s responsibility to counter terrorist threats with military force. One problem with this counsel is that Americans tend to support non-militarist internationalism, not isolationism. Another problem is that U.S. and world policymakers need (to paraphrase Russell Simmons) to reform the conditions that create terrorism. U.S.-led neoliberalism contributes richly and powerfully to Islamic and other forms of terrorism within and beyond the Middle East.

Even Edwards is Better

It is interesting that the race-conscious Simmons would be willing to say that John Edwards, a southern white politician, is better on the real conditions that give rise to black urban misery than the technically black former urban community organizer Obama. Simmons is right. Recently endorsed by the well known Left black actor and activist Danny Glover, Edwards announced his candidacy in New Orleans. He cited the federal government’s betrayal of that city’s largely black poor before and after Hurricane Katrina as an example of the extreme social disparity and perverted elitist policy priorities he claims to oppose. He has made deepening wealth and social inequality the rallying cry of his campaign and speaks at length in populist terms about the difficult circumstances faced by millions at the bottom of the American System. He draws more sincerely and substantively than Obama on the anti-poverty legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Civil Rights Movement. Along with his repeated favorable references to the accomplishments and history of the labor movement and his description of himself as “real Democrat, not a ‘new’ [centrist and pro-business] Democrat,” this makes big U.S. and global capitalist money considerably less comfortable with Edwards than with Obama. Edwards’ universal health insurance proposal is more specific and progressive than Obama’s and unlike Obama he does not flinch at the mention of single-payer coverage.

“Big U.S. and global capitalist money considerably less comfortable with Edwards than with Obama.”

It’s not for nothing that Goldman Sachs et al. prefer to invest their surplus political capital in the more explicitly centrist candidates Hillary Clinton and Obama. Edwards isn’t Eugene Debs. He isn’t the genuinely progressive Dennis Kucinich, an open single-payer advocate who calls for the impeachment of Cheney-Bush and calls for the immediate de-funding of the imperialist, bipartisan oil occupation of Iraq. But he’s better than the Barockstar on domestic poverty and other issues.

Take it from the “CEO of hip-hop” or take it from an officially marginal radical like yours truly: Obama is not the great progressive hope so many desperate and/or confused left-liberals and others seem to think he is. If they must proceed with electoral politics – and its not clear that the narrow spectrum U.S. version merits much Left investment – real progressives would do better to support the 2008 Green Party candidate, Kucinich or even (closer to the “mainstream”) Russell Simmons’ friend John Edwards.