By Paul Street [print_link]

No one should claim they were fooled by candidate Barack Obama – least of all, Black people. “Obama’s political team has always taken an official position of cowardice on race.” His avoidance of racial realities is long-standing. The president’s supporters simply ignored the evidence of their own eyes and ears, and let their imaginations do the thinking.

“They all said no.”

As we hurtle towards the first anniversary of Barack Obama’s inauguration, journalists and commentators will advance recollections of – and retrospective reflections on – the ascendancy and early days of the United States’ first black president. One of my earlier memories of the Obama administration was provided by Eric Patton, who worked as substitute teacher in a segregated public school in Cincinnati last February. “Today,” Patton wrote me, “I asked a class for which I was subbing (high-school English students, about a dozen, all-black) what they thought of Obama. Their initial reaction was one of, for lack of a better way to say it, pride and joy. But upon closer inspection, this turned out to be a rather shallow sentiment. For when I asked them if they expected any real changes under Obama, they all said no. So while they are (currently) happy he is in the White House, they know full well that he will be no different from any other president — and it’s not something they only know ’deep down.’ They know it pretty close to the surface.”

“President Says He Shouldn’t Put Focus on Blacks’ Troubles”

I was reminded of Eric Patton’s observation in early December of 2009, when the nation’s first black president received some interesting criticism from the Congressional Black Caucus. Accusing the White House of ignoring the economic plight of nonwhites, ten members of the caucus boycotted a key House committee vote on financial regulations. The group expressed frustration at the White House and Congress’ failure to tackle minority-specific economic problems including a black unemployment rate of 16 percent, higher than the (understated official) national rate of 10 percent. “We can no long afford for our public policy to be defined by the world view of Wall Street,” the black caucus announced, adding that “policy for the least of these must be integrated into everything we do.”

“We can no long afford for our public policy to be defined by the world view of Wall Street.”

Reflecting the dominant “post-racial” sentiments he rode into office, Obama flatly rejected the criticism in a special interview with USA TODAY and the Detroit Free Press prior to a White House “jobs summit” in early December. “It’s a mistake,” Obama told the newspapers, “to start thinking in terms of particular ethnic segments of the United States rather than to think that we are all in this together and we are all going to get out of this together.” Just because he happened to be black, Obama was announcing, black Americans should have no reason to think that he would be any more willing than George W. Bush or Bill Clinton to acknowledge and act upon the distinctive oppression and inequality still experienced by many in the nation’s still highly segregated and relatively impoverished black population. The title of the USA TODAY article reporting Obama’s response to the Congressional Black Caucus’ criticism was on point: “President Says He Shouldn’t Put Focus on Blacks’ Troubles.”[1]

“Precisely the Programs That Are Missing”

Last February in a speech to his new employees at the Justice Department, the United States’ first black Attorney General Eric Holder caused a momentary media stir by saying that the U.S. “is a nation of cowards on race.” Most Americans, Holder argued, avoid honest and serious discussion of the nation’s continuing racial problems.

Sadly enough, the administration in which Holder has served has done little indeed to move itself or the nation past racial cowardice beyond the simple fact of being headed by an African American.

There was no “betrayal” on this score, however. Obama’s political team has always taken an official position of cowardice on race. With rare, unavoidable, and highly qualified exceptions (Obama’s conservative speech on race and Reverend Wright in Philadelphia in March of 2009), it has refused to honestly engage the question of racism beyond the symbolically powerful advance of a black (“but not like Jesse”) candidate for the presidency. And, as the left-liberal Canadian commentator and author Naomi Klein noted in a September 2009 interview with Amy Goodman on “Democracy Now,” the actual behavior of the Obama White House has had nothing to do with the preposterous charge of right wing talk radio hosts and other Republican commentators and activists that Obama is a reparations activist fanatically preoccupied with making white people pay for past and current institutional racism. The truth is quite the opposite.

“[The right accuses] Obama of being obsessed with race and [claims] that he has this covert agenda of taking white wealth and giving it to black people,” said Klein. “And what’s so ironic about this, actually, is that, in fact, Obama has completely turned his back on the entire reparations discussion, which is what was happening in 2001.

“John Conyers, as we know, has tried to get HR 40, the resolution that would open up a discussion on what kind of reparations are due to African Americans. You know, often people think that people are talking about a check in the mail. And, in fact, what most reparations activists are talking about, overwhelmingly, are group solutions, investments in communities, in education, in healthcare, precisely the programs that are missing from the Obama administration in its response to the current economic crisis, which, let’s remember, began because of the enormous wealth gap, the net worth gap, between minority communities and the dominant sectors of society, because people did not have access to traditional credit.” [1A]

Olympic Evasions: A Big Chicago Chill

I was also reminded of Eric Patton’s February reflections at the end of last September. That’s when Michelle Obama and then the president himself flew to Copenhagen to join Oprah Winfrey in high-profile lobbying of the International Olympic Committee (IOC) in support of Chicago’s corporate-Democratic Mayor Richard M. Daley’s failed bid to make Chicago home for the 2016 Olympics. As progressive social justice and civil rights activists and community organizers across the city had been pointing out for years, a Chicago Olympics would have primarily benefited the city’s downtown business elite at the expense of taxpayers. The city’s plans particularly targeted inner-city black residents on Chicago’s South Side for clearance and removal, escalating an ongoing urban gentrification project that was pushing hundreds of thousands of impoverished African Americans out of black neighborhoods and to the margins of the metropolis and its glittering, ever-expanding corporate downtown [1B].

“A Chicago Olympics would have primarily benefited the city’s downtown business elite at the expense of taxpayers.”

As Chicago’s black bourgeois superstars the Obamas and Winfrey joined the white mayor-for-life in pitching the Midwestern metropolis as a glorious global city, hundreds of black Chicagoans planned to attend the funeral of a young black teenager, Derrion Albert, an honor student and innocent bystander who had recently been clubbed to death in a videotaped gang melee outside his South Side school. Chicago public schools staffers noted that bloody battles were common in and around schools set in black Chicago’s deeply impoverished ghetto areas, including communities where real unemployment had certainly climbed to 40 percent and higher. Albert had attended one of those ill-fated educational institutions: Fenger High School. [2]

“Chicago,” the president told the IOC, “is that most American of American cities, but one where citizens from more than 130 nations inhabit a rich tapestry of distinctive neighborhoods.” Further:

Each of those neighborhoods…has its own unique character, its own unique history, its songs, its language. But each is also part of our city – one city – a city where I finally found a home. …

“Chicago is a place where we strive to celebrate what makes us different just as we celebrate what we have in common….

“Chicago is a city where the practical and the inspirational exist in harmony…It’s a bustling metropolis with the warmth of a small town; where the world already comes together every day to live and work and reach for a dream — a dream that no matter who we are, where we come from; no matter what we look like or what hand life has dealt us; with hard work, and discipline, and dedication, we can make it if we try.

“That’s not just the American Dream. That is the Olympic spirit.” [3]

“We Can Make it If We Try” in Riverdale.

Never mind that Chicago remains home to a sky-high segregation index of 82.3, distributing opportunity and wealth with savage inequality across sharply demarcated barriers of class, race, and place. While the nation’s first black president trumpeted his “home town” (he’s really from Honolulu) as a fit and warm setting for the summer games, the cold October reality of black living conditions in that city’s de facto apartheid communities spoke to the persistence and deepening of the concentrated urban misery Dr. Martin Luther King. Jr. tried without success to overcome in black Chicago in the mid 1960s. [4]

Fenger High takes many of its students from a neighborhood called Riverdale. One of the twenty-two 90 percent plus black neighborhoods that house three-fourths of Chicago’s black population (this in a city with seventy-seven officially designated community areas), Riverdale is quite a monument to the president’s notion of Chicago as a wholesome collection of united villages in which obedient citizens know that “we can make it if we try.” It’s a real touching symbol of Obama’s “American Dream.” In the 2000 Census, 97 percent black Riverdale was the most desperately impoverished neighborhood in Obama’s “one city,” where “we celebrate what we have in common.” Its official unemployment rate was 34 percent. Its poverty rate was 56 percent. Its child poverty rate was 71 percent. More than half of its children lived in what poverty researchers call “deep poverty” – at less than half of the federal government’s notoriously inadequate poverty measure. Riverdale was one of eight Chicago neighborhoods, all disproportionately black, where a third or more of the children endured “deep poverty.”

“Black Riverdale was the most desperately impoverished neighborhood in Obama’s city.”

These communities have little in common with Chicago neighborhoods like the Near North Side (69 percent white with a median home value of $626,000) and Lincoln Park (85 percent white with a median home value of $518,063). [5]

Things have certainly gotten worse in Riverdale since the 2000 Census, taken at the peak of the long “Clinton boom.”

An Arne Duncan “Turnaround School”

Interestingly enough, Derrion Albert’s murder took place outside one of the Chicago Public Schools (CPS)’ “turnaround schools” on the far South Side. As part of the aggressive schools privatization (“reform”) agenda pursued by former CPS CEO and current Obama Education Secretary (and presidential basketball buddy) Arne Duncan, Fenger High School (the scene of Albert’s brutal murder) was “subjected,” in the words of Chicago Teachers Union activist Deborah Lynch, “to the CPS’ latest attack on struggling schools by dumping all the staff, even the engineers, and keeping the same students. The ‘reform’ was after probation, restructuring, reconstitution, and a host of other unsuccessful Daley-team draconian, top-down efforts” – efforts that stripped Fenger’s highly troubled and poor, black student population of connection to teacher and other staff who had known them for years. “No one at Fenger this year has known their kids for more than three weeks,” Lynch noted, adding that “this is a tragedy for all the students, not to mention the effects of the staff elimination on the staff.” [6]

“U all Think Derrion Albert’s Mother will be Invited to the White House for Beer?”

The best that the Olympics-focused White House could muster in response to news of Albert’s murder was a weak comment from White House Press Secretary Gibbs. President Obama found the video of Albert’s beating “chilling,” Gibbs assured the nation. This comment came only in response to a reporter’s question and not as part of any formal statement.

The first black president’s chilling silence on the widely watched fatal beating as he sold his ghetto-ridden “home” metropolis’ “small town” warmth to the IOC was not lost on some black Chicagoans. As the liberal columnist Ruben Navarette, Jr. reported on the same day that the Obamas tried to wow the IOC in Copenhagen:

“Back in Obama’s adopted hometown of Chicago, Illinois, some members of the black community are incensed at the president for not personally speaking out about the murder of Derrion Albert….

“What really set them off was that Obama, in an awkward case of bad timing, instead flew to Copenhagen to pitch Chicago to the International Olympics Committee as the ideal city to host the games in 2016….

“There is plenty for Obama to say about this tragedy in the Windy City. And the longer the president waits before he starts talking, the more damage he does to his reputation, even among some of his most ardent supporters.

“Judging from what’s being said on talk radio, Web sites and blogs frequented by residents of Chicago, the fact that Obama put the Olympics ahead of responding to the breakdown of the social order in Chi-Town is a slap in the face.

“Just yesterday, a self-identified African-American called into ‘The Rush Limbaugh Show’ and complained about how Obama flew off to ‘a foreign country’ while black kids in Chicago are being consumed by violence. The caller wondered when other African-Americans were going to realize that Obama wasn’t like them, because he’s an elitist living an extraordinary life and breathing rarified air.

“That sentiment was all over black-oriented blogs. One blogger [3]wrote: ‘More children died violent deaths in Chicago this year than in any other city in America. But all Obama cares about is bringing the Olympics to a city where basic services like water, sanitation and power often don’t work. … If Chicago does win the bid there will be plenty of police and National Guard on hand to protect the international visitors. That’s more than they are willing to do for their own residents.’

“…someone compared Obama’s reaction to this societal problem to how he reacted to another one a while back, racial profiling. The person wrote: “u all think that Derrion Albert’s mother will be invited to the White House for beer?” [6A]

Beer, that is, like the one Obama served to the black academic racism-down-player Henry Louis Gates and a white Cambridge, Massachusetts police officer who arrested an enraged Gates in his own home last summer.

New Orleans: “We’ve Got To Go Through Procedures”

I was reminded of Eric Patton’s observation from Cincinnati all over again two weeks after the Obamas’ IOC shenanigans and the Derrion Albert tragedy. That’s when Obama made his first presidential visit to New Orleans, site of tropical storm and societal disaster Katrina – the August 2005 hurricane and federal fiasco that left tens of thousands of disproportionately black and poor inner-city residents trapped in deadly floodwaters and penned up at the Superdome. Seeking to deflect criticism claiming that he had not paid sufficient attention to the city and the broader Mississippi Delta region, Obama enjoyed overwhelming initial applause at a town hall. But the event’s happy feeling was interrupted when a local black resident asked a reasonable question: “Why is it four years after Katrina, we’re still fighting for money to repair our devastated city? “I expected as much from the Bush administration,” the questioner added: “But why are we still being nickeled and dimed?”

“Not Going to Be Fixed Tomorrow”

Obama’s response was less than impressive. It waxed dry, wonkish and technocratic as he referred to “complications between the state, the city, and the feds in making assessments of the damages.”[7]According to The New York Times:

“The president, in a rare moment on the defensive in a format that is usually friendly to him, said many people in New Orleans were ‘understandably impatient’ and said he had inherited a backlog of problems.

“’These things were not going to be fixed tomorrow,’ Mr. Obama said. ‘So we are working as hard as we can, as quickly as we can.’ He added, ‘I wish I could just write a check.’

“When some shouted ‘Why not?’ Mr. Obama replied, ‘There’s this whole thing about the Constitution.’

“He added that ‘We’ve got to go through procedures.’”[8]

Surely many in the town hall were well aware that the new president, the Democratic-majority Congress, and their constitutionally-encoded “procedures” had managed to quickly grant trillions of taxpayer dollars to the nation’s predominantly white financial barons and to the Pentagon and thus to the nation’s powerful “defense” contractors. Some most certainly reflected on the fact that Obama, the U.S. House, and the U.S. Senate were spending vast federal resources on overseas wars of occupation while black ghettos, Latino barrios and working class communities of all races and ethnicities deteriorated across the imperial “homeland.”

The imperial and state-capitalist federal procedures have been working overtime under Obama. The anti-poverty and social justice procedures are all messed up, however. Boeing, Raytheon, Lockheed Martin, Halliburton, and XE Services (formerly known as Blackwater Worldwide) and the other high-tech “defense” (empire) corporations are certainly getting their checks written for them by the new war president. The Lower Ninth Ward and Riverdale will have to wait a little longer….well, forever.

Anti-racist procedures? To activate those would be to show that one is “thinking in terms of particular ethnic segments of the United States rather than to think that we are all in this together.” It would be to forget that great American cities like Chicago are really just big happy small towns where everybody shares and gets along.

“Broken Promises”

Tellingly enough, Obama the U.S. Senator and presidential candidate made five visits to New Orleans after Katrina – a great symbol of Republican and Bush administration incompetence and callousness towards the poor. After waiting nine months to visit the devastated majority-black city he’d found so politically useful to speak from during his campaign, President Obama now stayed for only a few hours before jetting off to a posh ruling-class fundraiser ($30,400 per couple) in San Francisco. During his short stop in New Orleans, Obama did manage to promote his and Arne Duncan’s corporate-crafted schools privatization agenda by visiting the oxymoronically named “Martin Luther King Jr. Charter School” in the city’s predominantly black, flood-ravaged Lower Ninth Ward. “The school,” Times reporters Peter Baker and Campbell Robertson noted, was “surrounded by boarded-up houses, empty lots with overgrown grass and dilapidated storefronts with for-rent signs.” [9]Baker and Cambell might have noted that corporate education forces had seized on Katrina as a great opportunity, using the crisis to advance their privatization model on the reconstitution of New Orleans’ school system.[10]

Activists from a group of non-profit organizations seeking relief on the Mississippi coast held up signs outside Obama’s “town hall” in New Orleans. The signs read “The Recovery is Not Over” and “Mississippi Will Not Be Forgotten.” Their holders’ had been unable to secure tickets to the president’s public relations event. [11]As Maureen Dowd noted three days after Obama’s brief stopover, the White House Web site that went up during Obama’s first week in office boasted of four trips to New Orleans as U.S. Senator. It pledged to “keep the broken promises made by President Bush to re-build New Orleans.”[12]

“The final piece of evidence that America has reached full racial equality.”

In one key sense at least, it seems possible that Obama’s ascendancy has brought not simply “no change” for poor blacks but, counter-intuitively enough, change for the worse. The election of a technically black president reinforces the longstanding conventional white 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.” [13]“It’s hard,” Leonard Steinhorn and Barbara Diggs-Brown noted in 2000, “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.” In a similar vein, the black scholar Sheryl Cashin observed six years ago 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.”[14]

And what could trump the attainment of the U.S. presidency – the most powerful office on Earth – in feeding and locking in that belief? The black Urban Studies professor Marc Lamont Hill said it well on CounterPunch in early February of 2008:

“After Obama’s recent success with white voters, particularly his win in Iowa, many have announced America’s transition into a post-racial moment. Even Obama himself has claimed that race will no longer prevent the fair-minded citizenry from supporting his bid. In reality, however, an Obama presidency is already being treated as a racial talisman that would instantly heal the scars of a nation wounded by racism.

“For whites, an Obama victory would serve as the final piece of evidence that America has reached full racial equality. Such a belief allows them to sidestep mounds of evidence that shows that, despite Obama’s claims that ‘we are 90 percent of the way to equality,’ black people remain consistently assaulted by the forces by white supremacy. For many black people, Obama’s success would provide symbolic value by showing that the black man (not woman!) can make it to the top. Although black faces in high places may provide psychological comfort, they are often incorporated into a Cosbyesque gospel of personal responsibility (‘Obama did it, so can you!’) that allows dangerous public policies to go unchallenged.”[15]

The white-run political 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 routine reference to integrationist ideals in political speeches, and the presidential viability and the victory of Obama, for example – have long reinforced the dominant post-Civil Rights 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” is the basic widespread white wish that sought fulfillment in the election of someone like Obama. As one white Obama supporter told The Washington Post at a campaign event, he hoped that an Obama presidency would help America “erase all this nonsense about race.” [16]How nice to imagine that racial oppression is something so nonsensical and superficial that it could be expunged by the mere act of putting into the White House a technically black politician who has gone out of his way not to threaten white sensibilities.

“A place where all things are possible.”

I recently (and belatedly) started reading John R. MacArthur’s important book You Can’t Be President: The Outrageous Barriers to Democracy in America (Brooklyn, NY: Melville House, 2008). Written in an engaging, personal style, MacArthur’s volume takes you on a tour of numerous and interrelated obstacles to popular self-rule and democratic governance in the United States. MacArthur examines massive campaign finance barriers that make it impossible to make serious bids for national and often enough local office without the sponsorship of the very rich; concentrated corporate control and ownership of the “mainstream” media; “winner take all” election rules that prohibit viable third and fourth parties from coming into existence; educational hyper-disparity; and the paralyzing depredations of a mass consumer culture that infantilizes and privatizes the populace while reducing politics to a childish game of mass marketed candidate-branding.

While MacArthur has penned a many-sided critique of American pseudo-democracy, his book takes (as its title suggests) particular aim at the still prevalent notion that “anyone” can make a viable run for elective office in the U.S. That standard civic-text idea – given a nice boost by the 2007-08 presidential candidacies of Hillary Clinton (a potential first female president) and Obama (to become the first black president) – is, MacArthur shows, completely false. There are no viable runs for the U.S. without elite financial backing, something Obama himself knew very well as he defeated the Clintons and John McCain in the race for “organized financial support in the upper reaches of American society” and “tap[ped] deeply into Hillary Clinton’s base of banks, corporations, and Washington lobbying firms” (MacArthur 2008, 216-217). Obama set new corporate and Wall Street and fundraising records and we all know – or we all should know – what happened since, as the Bush-Paulsen bailouts of the big banks went through an escalation as big or bigger than Obama’s “Af-Pak” surge(s).

“Anyone Out There Who Still Questions the Power of Our Democracy”

Reading MacArthur’s book, I was reminded of the day when Obama was confronted by a group of working and lower-class black Americans organized in a group called “Blacks Against Obama” during a 2008 campaign rally in Florida. Among other things, the future president – a graduate of Harvard Law who had been hobnobbing with (and raising big dollars from) the upper bourgeoisie for many years – told his distinctly non-affluent black critics that they could do like him and run for elective office, even the presidency. “You can be president, like me,” he was saying – a total fairy tale.

I was reminded also of Obama’s election-night speech.[17]The first public words out of president-elect Obama’s mouth on the evening of his election were revealing. “If there is anyone out there who still doubts that America is a place where all things are possible…..who still questions the power of our democracy,” Obama intoned, “tonight is your answer.” The supposed “left” President-Elect’s first statement was NOT a call for peace, justice, and equality. It was a declaration bolstering the American plutocracy’s ridiculous claim that the U.S. – the industrialized world’s most unequal and wealth-top-heavy society by far – is home to limitless opportunity for those who buckle down and accept that they can “make it” if they just “try.”

The use (twice) of the word “still” in Obama’s assertion was interesting, yes? It wasn’t exactly like the case for the U.S. being a great popular democracy had been made with special, self-evident strength in recent times. The last three and a half decades prior to Obama’s election had brought the deepening top-down infliction of a sharply of regressive corporate-neoliberal policies that are widely (but irrelevantly) repudiated by the majority of U.S. citizens. The current century had witnessed the execution of a monumentally criminal petro-imperialist Iraq Invasion sold to the U.S. populace by a spectacular state-media propaganda campaign (including preposterous claims of democratic intent Obama has embraced) that mocked and subverted the nation’s democratic ideals. Dominant U.S. media’s role in the invasion of Iraq marks perhaps the all-time low point of the “free press” in the U.S. [18]

The “democracy disconnect” – the gap (chasm really) between majority public opinion (which supports things like national universal health care, significant reductions in military expenditure and imperial commitment, massive public works, reduced corporate power, etc.) and “public” policy (which brazenly defies the majority in service to the rich and powerful Few) – is a core problem in American political life [19]. The “specter” of homeland totalitarianism, detailed in Sheldon Wolin’s book Democracy Incorporated: Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism (Princeton, NJ, 2008),has never loomed larger than in the opening decade of the 21st century.

“In all of the post-election noise,” a student wrote me after the election, “I think one thing Obama said in his acceptance speech was completely right on: the election itself is not the ‘change’ but simply the chance to make the changes we have to make. I know, I know, Obama was the ruling class candidate, but you have to admit that this represents at least symbolically a very good (first) step.”

In the fifth paragraph of his acceptance oration, however, the President-Elect said that “because of what we did on this day, in this election, at this defining moment, change has come to America.” That line made the election itself change.

Later in the speech Obama said that his election “proved that…a government of the people, by the people and for the people has not perished from this Earth.” That was very premature. Whether or not that judgment proves accurate remains to be seen and the answer is up to citizens, not politicians.

“I’ll Be In Touch Soon On What Comes Next”

The real, less than radical-egalitarian nature of the next president’s take on his “progressive base “was suggested in the following comment contained in a mass e-mail he sent to out to his supporters before speaking to the jubilant masses in Chicago’s downtown Grant Park on November 4, the evening of his election:

“I’m about to head to Grant Park to talk to everyone gathered there, but I wanted to write to you first.

“We just made history.

“And I don’t want you to forget how we did it.

“You made history every single day during this campaign — every day you knocked on doors, made a donation, or talked to your family, friends, and neighbors about why you believe it’s time for change.

“I want to thank all of you who gave your time, talent, and passion to this campaign.

“We have a lot of work to do to get our country back on track, and I’ll be in touch soon about what comes next.” [20]

“I’ll be in touch soon about what comes next” – a revealingly top-down sentiment for someone who won the election on the basis of his call for “change from the bottom up.” Of course, during the presidential campaign, commonly described in dominant media as a great popular upsurge, Obama’s “grassroots army of millions” (The Boston Globe) “took instructions, but contributed essentially nothing,” Noam Chomsky noted last February, “to formulating his program.”[21]

“Our campaign was not hatched in Washington.”

MacArthur’s book reminds me of something else Obama said on the evening of his election. “Our campaign,” Obama announced in Grant Park, “was not hatched in the halls of Washington.”

That statement was flatly false. “One evening in February 2005, in a four-hour meeting stoked by pepperoni pizza and great ambition,” the Chicago Tribune reported in the spring of 2007, “Senator Barack Obama and his senior advisors crafted a strategy to fit the Obama ‘brand.’” The meeting took place just weeks after Obama had been sworn into the upper representative chamber of the United States government. According to Tribune Washington Bureau reporters Mike Dorning andChristi Parsons, in an article titled “Carefully Crafting the Obama Brand:”

“The charismatic celebrity-politician had rocketed from the Illinois state legislature to the U.S. Senate, stirring national interest. The challenge was to maintain altitude despite the limited tools available to a freshman senator whose party was in a minority.

“Yet even in those early days, Obama and his advisors were thinking ahead. Some called it the ’2010-2012-2016′ plan: a potential bid for governor or re-election to the Senate in 2010, followed by a bid for the White House as soon as 2012, not 2016. The way to get there, they decided, was by carefully building a record that matched the brand identity: Obama as a unifier and consensus builder, and almost post-political leader.

“The staffers in that after-hours session, convened by Obama’s Senate staff and including Chicago political advisor David Axlerod, planned a low-profile strategy that would emphasize workhorse results over headlines. Obama would invest in the long-term profile by not seeming too eager for the bright lights.”[22]

This Tribune story was disturbing on numerous levels. It suggests a degree of cynicism, manipulation, and ambition that does not fit very well with the progressive and hopeful likeness that the Obama campaign has projected. It calls to mind a tension between virtuous public claims and selfish goals behind the scenes. The politician being sold would make sure to seem non-ambitious – “not seeming too eager for the bright lights” and privileging hard work over “headlines” – and respectful toward fellow members of the political class (“establishing good relationships with my colleagues.” But, by Dorning and Parsons’ account, Obama and his team were actually and quite eagerly all about “the bright lights” and “the headlines” in a “long-term” sense. They were already scheming for the presidency less than a month into his Senate seat.

“For Obama and his team the Senate was largely a marketing platform for the Next Big Thing.”

The image of Obama as a humble and hardworking rookie who got along with his colleagues across partisan lines part of their marketing strategy on the path to higher – the highest – office. The great “reformer” Obama may have just become only the third black to sit in the august U.S. Senate since Reconstruction, but for Obama and his team the Senate was largely a marketing platform for the Next Big Thing – a place to build his image as a “unifier” and “consensus builder.” They seemed unconcerned about the authoritarian implications of the concept of a “postpolitical leader,” a commercialized trademark who would rise above democratic and ideological contestation on the path to power atop “the most powerful nation in history.”

At the same, the term “Obama brand” suggested the commodified nature of a political culture that tends to reduce elections to corporate-“crafted” marketing contests revolving around candidate images and characters packaged and sold by corporate consultants and public relations experts. It implied an office-holder politician for sale and moreimmersed in he world of money than commerce and capitalism than public service.

It was right out of MacArthur’s book. The United States and its first black president have no business lecturing anyone on “democracy” (or racial progress or peace) in the wake of Obama’s election and first year in office.

Paul Street (paulstreet99@yahoo.com [4]) is a political commentator and author in Iowa City, IA. He is the author of Empire and Inequality: America and the World Since 9/11 (Paradigm, 2004); Segregated Schools: Educational Apartheid in the Post-Civil Rights Era (Routledge, 2005); Racial Oppression in the Global Metropolis: A Living Black Chicago History (Rowman & Littlefied, 2007), and Barack Obama and the Future of American Politics (Paradigm, 2008). His next book is titled The Empire’s New Clothes: Barack Obama in the Real World of Power (Paradigm, 2010).

NOTES

1. USA TODAY, December 4, 2009, 4A

1A. “Naomi Klein on Minority Death Match: Jews, Blacks, and the ‘Post-Racial Presidency,” Democracy Now (September 14, 2009), read at http://www.democracynow.org/2009/9/14/naomi_klein_on_minority_death_match

1B. David Zirin, “Olympics in Chicago: ‘Obama’s Folly?” The Nation (September 22, 2009); No Games Chicago, Press Release. April 2, 2009, read at http://nogames.files.wordpress.com/2009/03/rally_press_release.pdf; [5] ABC 7 News, “Michelle, Oprah Arrive in Copenhagen” (September 30, 2009), http://abclocal.go.com/wls/story?section=news/local&id=7040148; [6] Paul Street, Racial Oppression in the Global Metropolis: A Living Black Chicago History (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2007), pp. 51, 107. 164, 172, 260, 293, 296

2. CNN, “Police Seek 3 More in Teen’s Death,” (September 29, 2009), read at http://www.cnn.com/2009/CRIME/09/29/chicago.teen.beating/index.html#cnnSTCText [7]; J. Coyden Palmer, “Are Chicago Public School Policies to Blame for Melee That Killed Derrior Albert?” Chicago Crusader Newspaper, October 5, 2009, reproduced at http://www.theskanner.com/article/view/id/10458.

3. “Remarks by the President and First Lady to the International Olympic Committee” (Copenhagen, Denmark, October 2, 2009), read at http://www.whitehouse.gov/the_press_office/Remarks-By-the-President-And-the-First-Lady-to-the-International-Olympic-Committee

4. Street, Racial Oppression in the Global Metropolis. The 82.3 segregation index means that 82 of every 100 Chicago blacks would have to move to a different census tract in order to live in a tract whose racial composition matched that of the city as a whole.

5. See Paul Street, Still Separate, Unequal: Race, Place, Policy and the State of Black Chicago (Chicago, IL: Chicago Urban League, Department of Research and Planning [now defunct], April 2005), pp.9, 13, 39, 52-54, 59. The median home value in Riverdale is $54, 601. Street, Still Separate, Unequal, p. 61.

6. Deborah L:ynch, “ ‘ Turnaround’ – the Deadliest Reform of All,” Substance: The Newspaper of Public Education in Chicago (October 2009), pp. 1, 13.

6A. Rubin Navarette, Jr., ”Obama’s Silence on Chicago Crime,” October 2, 2009 http://www.cnn.com/2009/POLITICS/10/02/navarrette.chicago.obama.olympics/index.html#cnnSTCText

7. Quoted in Maureen Dowd, “Fie, Fatal Flaw!” New York Times, October 18, 2009.

8. Peter Baker and Campbell Robertson, “Obama Tells New Orleans Progress is Being Made,” New York Times, October 16, 2009, A16.

9. Baker and Robertson, “Obama Tells New Orleans.”

10. Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (New York: Metropolitan, 2007), p. 5.

11. Baker and Robertson, “Obama Tells New Orleans.”

12. Dowd, “Fie, Fatal Flaw!”

13. Derrick Bell, Silent Covenants: Brown V. Board of Education and the Unfulfilled Hopes for Racial Reform (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2004), pp. 77-78.

14. Sheryl Cashin, The Failures of Integration (New York: Public Affairs, 2004), pp. xi-xii. See also Leonard Steinhorn and Carbara Diggs-Brown, By the Color of Our Skin (New York: Penguin, 2000), p. 7; Stanley Aronowitz, “Race: the Continental Divide,” The Nation (March 12, 2001); Paul Street, “A Whole Lott Missing: Rituals of Purification and Raciem-Denial,” Race and History (January 2, 2003), read at http://www.raceandhistory.com/selfnews/viewnews.cgi?newsid1041528833,27894,.shtml [8].

15. Marc Lamont Hill, “Obama’s Politics of Cunnung, Compromise, and Concession Not My Brand of Hope,” CounterPunch (February 11, 2008), read at http://www.counterpunch.org/hill02112008.html [9].

16. John B. Judis, “American Adam: Obama and the Cult of the New,” The New Republic (March 12, 2008), p. 24

17. “Obama Victory Speech – Video, Text,” Huffington Post (November 4, 2008), read at http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/11/04/obama-victory-speech_n_141194.html

18. For a comprehensive account, see Anthony Dimaggio’s forthcoming book When Media Goes to War: Hegemonic Discourse, Public Opinion, and the Limits of Dissent (New York: Monthly Review, 2010).

19. See Noam Chomsky, “Chapter 5: Democracy Promotion at Home,” pp. 205-250 in Chomsky, Failed States: The Abuse of Power and the Assault on Democracy (New York: Metropolitan, 2006). See also Paul Street, “Life is Simple in a Fake Democracy,” ZNet (December 1, 2009), read at http://www.zcommunications.org/znet/viewArticle/23246 [10]; Paul Street, “Americans’ Progressive Opinion vs. ‘The Shadow Cast on Society by Business,” ZNet Commentary (May 15, 2008), read at http://www.zcommunications.org/zspace/commentaries/3491 [11].

20. Barack Obama, “Email Message to His Supporters This Evening” (November 4, 2008), read at http://isaac.blogs.com/isaac_laquedem/2008/11/barack-obamas-e-mail-message-to-his-supporters-this-evening.html

21. Noam Chomsky, “Elections 2008 and ‘Obama’s Vision,’” Z Magazine (February 2009), read at http://www.zmag.org/zmag/viewArticle/20424.

22. Mike Dorning and Christi Parsons, “Carefully Crafting the Obama Brand.” Chicago Tribune, 12 June, 2007, sec.1. p.1.

* Obama on race

* Obama war

* Obamarama

Source URL: http://tns1.blackagendareport.com/?q=content/%E2%80%9Cyou-can%E2%80%99t-be-president%E2%80%9D-race-class-and-memories-obama

Links:

[1] http://tns1.blackagendareport.com/?q=print/content/“you-can’t-be-president”-race-class-and-memories-obama

[2] http://www.zmag.org/znet

[3] http://sandrarose.com/2009/09/30/obama-makes-pitch-for-olympics-while-children-are-dying-in-chicago/

[4] mailto:paulstreet99@yahoo.com

[5] http://nogames.files.wordpress.com/2009/03/rally_press_release.pdf;

[6] http://abclocal.go.com/wls/story?section=news/local&id=7040148;

[7] http://www.cnn.com/2009/CRIME/09/29/chicago.teen.beating/index.html#cnnSTCText

[8] http://www.raceandhistory.com/selfnews/viewnews.cgi?newsid1041528833,27894,.shtml

[9] http://www.counterpunch.org/hill02112008.html

[10] http://www.zcommunications.org/znet/viewArticle/23246

[11] http://www.zcommunications.org/zspace/commentaries/3491

Why Christians should care about animals

On Animal Welfare Sunday, worshippers should reconsider their kinship with their fellow creatures, says Andrew Linzey

SO THE CAMDEN COUNCIL IS NOT GOING TO ALLOW a St Francis of Assisi poster to be displayed in its public buildings (News, 18 September). The poster gives details of a weekend of environmental events, including an animal-blessing service, at Our Lady Help of Christians Roman Catholic Church in Kentish Town. The ostensible reason is the council’s policy of not allowing posters with the words “God” and “Christian” to be dis played in public buildings. Political correctness gone mad, you might think. Not entirely, perhaps: there has always been something a bit too radical about St Francis for religious and non-religious people alike. We all know the stories of Francis preaching to the birds and befriending the wolf. They are normally derided as hagiographical gloss. But the underlying theology packs a punch: closer union with God ought to lead to a greater communion with God’s creatures. Francis, writes St Bonaventure, called “creatures, no matter how small, by the name of ‘brother’ and ‘sister’ because he knew they had the same source as himself”. Long before Darwin and the discoveries of evolution, Francis grasped that divine love establishes a kinship between all living things. Perhaps Francis acts out that strange verse in Mark 1.13 that Jesus was “with the wild beasts”. Jesus does not fight the wild beasts or seek to tame them. He is just “with” them. This, as Professor Richard Bauckham explains, almost certainly had messianic overtones, since the Messiah was believed to inaugurate universal peace between all creatures (as prophesied in Isaiah 11.1-9). Mark, therefore, provides a snap shot of the eschatological possibility of living peaceably with animals, which Francis dramatically actualises in his own life (see Professor Bauckham’s chapter in Animals on the Agenda, SCM Press, 1998). Perhaps if Camden Council had grasped the radical implications of the Franciscan message, it might have been discomfited long before now. Even within the Churches, Francis has been variously invoked, lauded, and canonised, but the idea that living peaceably with animals is a Gospel imperative that has been widely disregarded. The Church of England has spent decades in liturgical renewal, but does not offer even one prayer for animal welfare. We pray as if God were uninterested in the millions of other species. There is, of course, plenty of sensitivity for the misnamed “our environment”, but when it comes to confronting our responsibilities to individual crea tures, official publications fall silent. A classic example was when the Church of England published prayers this summer for those suffer ing from swine flu (www.cofe.anglican.org/worship/prayers/#swineflu). Here was an opportunity to also remember the thousands of pigs suffering appalling conditions, since their maltreatment was one of the causal links to the disease from which human beings now suffer. In the words of one scientist at the United States Food and Drug Ad min istration, “high-density inten sive animal operations” are “hotbeds for pathogens” (www.oxfordanimalethics.com/index.php?p=news&item=47). Some note of penitence that our gastronomic greed might have helped land us in the mess in the first place would have been wholesome. Despite official indifference, we are witnessing a grass-roots change, especially among lay people. “You know animals are not my thing,” commented a parish priest to me a while ago, “but your animal service was one of the most popular things I ever did.” This unsolicited testimony is one of many I receive every year from clerics who use the Service for Animal Welfare (downloadable at www.rspca.org.uk/animalwelfaresunday). This is not just a British phenom enon. Thousands of lay people have responded to the Humane Society of the United States’ religion and animals initiative, co-opting reli gious leaders of all denominations into signing a new public statement in defence of animals. One rector of a parish in Australia recently asked permission to revise some sentences in my liturgy. He changed: One: the world of skylarks soaring above us; All: the world of foxes playing around their dens, to: One: the world of kookaburras and eagles soaring above us; All: the world of wombats playing around their burrows. “It sounds more Australian,” he commented, understandably. I congratulated him on his skilful use of contextual theology. YET SOME still ask whether such sensitivity to animal life and suf fering is theologically well-grounded. One argument, which I find persuasive, comes from John Henry Newman. Preaching in Oxford in 1842 on the text from Isaiah 53.7, which compares the Messiah to “a lamb that is led to the slaughter”, Newman says that since scripture compares Christ to this “inoffensive and unprotected animal”, so we may “without presumption or irreverence take that image as a means of conveying to our minds those feelings which our Lord’s suffering should excite within us”. Narrating examples of suffering, Newman exclaims: “For what was this but the very cruelty inflicted on our Lord?” He concludes: “Think, then, my brethren, of your feelings at cruelty practised on brute animals, and you will gain one feeling which the history of Christ’s Cross and Passion ought to excite within you.” Although Newman elsewhere seems to endorse the usual Christian position of animals, his view here is unmistakable: the innocence of the suffering of animals is Christlike. It follows that those who are sensitised to the sufferings of the Crucified ought to be sensitive to the suffering of all innocent, vulnerable beings. The feast of St Francis next Sunday (World Animal Day and Animal Welfare Sunday) is a good time to celebrate our fellow creatures, recognise their Christ like suffering, and repent of our cruelty. The Revd Professor Andrew Linzey is Director of the Oxford Centre for Animal Ethics, and the author of Why Animal Suffering Matters (OUP, 2009).

By JEFF COHEN

For the new year, let’s resolve: Don’t defend Democrats when they don’t deserve defending. And that certainly includes President Obama.

Let’s further resolve: Put principles above party and never lose our voice on human rights and social justice. When we mute ourselves as a Democratic president pursues corporatist or militarist policies, we only encourage such policies.

If it was wrong for Bush to bail out Wall Street with virtually no controls, then it’s wrong for Obama.  If indefinite “preventative detention” was wrong under Bush, then it’s wrong under Obama.  If military occupation and deepening troop deployments were wrong under Bush, then they’re wrong under Obama.

Imagine if McCain had defeated Obama in 2008 and soon tripled the number of U.S.  troops in Afghanistan.  I have little doubt that activists would have mobilized major opposition, denouncing the reality of more U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan and Iraq combined than even Bush had deployed.

But as Obama goes about tripling the troops in Afghanistan, with more U.S. soldiers in war zones that Bush ever had – and proposes the biggest military budget in world history – many activists have lost their voices.

When Obama’s West Point speech on Afghanistan paid lip service to benchmarks and a timeline (as even Bush learned to do on Iraq), how did the once independent MoveOn react?  Its leaders sent out a muted petition urging – benchmarks and a timeline.  The email might as well have been written by Rahm Emanuel in the West Wing.

Taking cues from the Obama White House, liberal groups went quiet on Wall Street bailouts and bonuses – thus helping rightwing teabaggers and corporate-fronts to pose as populist saviors of the middle class.

By going soft on the White House or Democratic Congressional leaders, most netroots groups have undermined genuine progressives in Congress – on issues from Iraq and Afghanistan to Wall Street and healthcare.

Instead of launching their healthcare reform efforts behind an easily-explained, cost-effective “Enhanced Medicare for All” bill co-sponsored by dozens of progressive Congress members, netroots leaders meekly made a “public option” their starting demand and pretended not to notice when Rahm Emanuel began signaling last spring that the White House had no intention of pushing for it.

Predictably, we’ve ended up with corporate-enrichment legislation that forcibly delivers tens of millions of customers to big insurers and big pharma – with almost no cost controls because of private deals cut in the White House.  In the New York Times before Christmas, beneath an accurate header “Corporate Glee,” a news article asserted:  “The insurance companies were probably among the merriest of industries last week . . . But the drug companies were certainly joyful, too.”  Insurance stocks are soaring on Wall Street.

It’s tragically ironic that netroots forces joined Democratic leaders in killing Medicare for All as an unrealistic starting demand and now are belatedly urging “kill the bill.”

I’m old enough to remember that when Democrats are in majority power – controlling both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue – they are capable of horrific policies.  With Lyndon Johnson in the White House, most Democrats in

Congress went along with Vietnam escalation.  And with President Clinton,

some leading Congressional Democrats joined mostly Republicans in backing the anti-worker, anti-environmental NAFTA.

The good news – during the eras of Vietnam and NAFTA – is that large numbers of progressive activists stood fast to their principles and vocally opposed those wrong-headed Democratic policies.  They didn’t follow Democratic leaders over the cliff or pretend that Democratic presidents are automatically “on our side” or well-intentioned.

And back then we lacked the most awesome tool ever invented for independent grassroots mobilization: the Internet.

The Net has helped unleash a golden age for independent media – and for journalists unafraid to challenge leaders of both parties: folks like Glenn Greenwald, Jeremy Scahill, Arianna Huffington, Matt Taibbi and Amy Goodman, to name a few. [Add: Steven Gowans, Dave Lindorff, Patrice Greanville, Glen Ford, Margaret Kimberley, Bruce Dixon, Rowan Wolf, and otehrs of equal merit, many published on this site]

Thanks to the Internet and independent media, progressive activists are more fully and more quickly informed about national and global issues than ever. Yet many activists are poorly represented by national netroots groups that often function as appendages of the Democratic leadership.  [Read: Moveon.org; Truthmajority.org; DailyKos, etc.]

While independent progressive media are booming on the Internet, the largest netroots political-action groups are sorely lacking in independence.

Be it resolved: In 2010, we will not apologize for indefensible Democratic policies, and we will no longer support netroots groups that fail to resist such policies.

Jeff Cohen is an associate professor of journalism at Ithaca College and former board member of the Progressive Democrats of America. He can be reached through his website.

Chlorinated tap water is bad for you, research shows, but bottled water is no solution, either

EarthTalk®
From the Editors of E/The Environmental Magazine

Dear EarthTalk: I am very concerned about the amount of chlorine in my tap water. I called my water company and they said it is safe just let the tap run for awhile to rid the smell of the chlorine. But that just gets rid of the smell, perhaps, not the chlorine? – Anita Frigo, Milford, CT

<< Researchers have now linked chlorine in drinking water to higher incidences of bladder, rectal and breast cancers. A recent study found that women with breast cancer have 50-60 percent higher levels of organochlorines (chlorination by-products) in their breast tissue than cancer-free women. (Getty Images)

Thousands of American municipalities add chlorine to their drinking water to get rid of contaminants like nitrates, arsenic and pesticides. But this inexpensive and highly effective disinfectant has a dark side. “Chlorine, added as an inexpensive and effective drinking water disinfectant, is also a known poison to the body,” says Vanessa Lausch of filter manufacturer Aquasana. “It is certainly no coincidence that chlorine gas was used with deadly effectiveness as a weapon in the First World War.” The gas would severely burn the lungs and other body tissues when inhaled, and is no less powerful when ingested by mouth.

Lausch adds that researchers have now linked chlorine in drinking water to higher incidences of bladder, rectal and breast cancers. Reportedly chlorine, once in water, interacts with organic compounds to create trihalomethanes (THMs)—which when ingested encourage the growth of free radicals that can destroy or damage vital cells in the body. “Because so much of the water we drink ends up in the bladder and/or rectum, ingestions of THMs in drinking water are particularly damaging to these organs,” says Lausch.

The link between chlorine and bladder and rectal cancers has long been known, but only recently have researchers found a link between common chlorine disinfectant and breast cancer, which affects one out of every eight American women. A recent study conducted in Hartford, Connecticut found that women with breast cancer have 50-60 percent higher levels of organochlorines (chlorine by-products) in their breast tissue than cancer-free women.

But don’t think that buying bottled water is any solution. Much of the bottled water for sale in the U.S. comes from public municipal water sources that are often treated with, you guessed it, chlorine. A few cities have switched over to other means of disinfecting their water supplies. Las Vegas, for example, has followed the lead of many European and Canadian cities in switching over to harmless ozone instead of chlorine to disinfect its municipal water supply.

As for getting rid of the chlorine that your city or town adds to its drinking water on your own, theories abound. Some swear by the method of letting their water sit for 24 hours so that the chlorine in the glass or pitcher will off-gas. Letting the tap run for a while is not likely to remove any sizable portion of chlorine, unless one were to then let the water sit overnight before consuming it. Another option is a product called WaterYouWant, which looks like sugar but actually is composed of tasteless antioxidants and plant extracts. The manufacturer claims that a quick shake of the stuff removes 100 percent of the chlorine (and its odor) from a glass a tap water. A year’s supply of WaterYouWant retails for under $30.

Of course, an easier way to get rid of chlorine from your tap water is by installing a carbon-based filter, which absorbs chlorine and other contaminants before they get into your glass or body. Tap-based filters from the likes of Paragon, Aquasana, Kenmore, Seagul and others remove most if not all of the chlorine in tap water, and are relatively inexpensive to boot.

CONTACTS: Aquasana, www.aquasana.com; WaterYouWant, www.wateryouwant.com.

SEND YOUR ENVIRONMENTAL QUESTIONS TO: EarthTalk®, P.O. Box 5098, Westport, CT 06881; earthtalk@emagazine.com. Read past columns at: www.emagazine.com/earthtalk/archives.php. EarthTalk®is now a book! Details and order information at: www.emagazine.com/earthtalkbook.

By Glen Ford Created 12/22/2009  [print_link]

The Pentagon has methodically insulated its wars from most of U.S. civil society. “For the United States, war has devolved to a matter of contracts, a multi-trillion dollar cash cow for corporations, a self-perpetuating financial bubble that feeds the planet’s most dangerous and nonproductive, useless classes.” The mercenary is the ideal corporate warrior.

It is now beyond question that civilian military contractors – mercenaries – are permanently embedded in the structure and longterm planning of the United States Armed Forces. In recent years, about half the U.S. personnel in the combined South Asia theaters of war – Afghanistan and Pakistan – have been civilians, according to Pentagon figures. The one-to-one ratio of military to civilians – a percentage that would have been unthinkable prior to the invasion of Iraq – may become even more lopsidedly mercenary with President Obama’s troop escalation in Afghanistan. The Congressional Research Service [2] estimates that as many as 56,000 civilian contractors may accompany the 30,000 uniformed troops scheduled for deployment to Afghanistan. That’s a ratio of almost two-to-one civilian to military. The Afghanistan/Pakistan theater has become the modern world’s first large scale corporate/civilian war.

“The mercenary war is a simple commercial transaction – a private affair between employee and management.”

 

The official statistics on civilians in the war zones do not include covert operations, or “black ops,” which have been steadily increasing since President Obama took office, especially in Pakistan. The Pakistani military is extremely sensitive to the influx of thousands of American mercenaries. Much of the Pakistani press and public believe the Americans are sneaking in mercenaries to threaten the Pakistani state and seize its nuclear arsenal [3], which is likely one reason the Pakistanis have systematically delayed the processing of American travel documents. The mercenary outfit formerly known as Blackwater is one of the most hated names in Pakistan.

For the United States, war has devolved to a matter of contracts, a multi-trillion dollar cash cow for corporations, a self-perpetuating financial bubble that feeds the planet’s most dangerous and nonproductive, useless classes.

“Those who are most likely to be killed in U.S. wars are from families and towns that are least likely to complain.”

Ever since the near disintegration of the U.S. military in Vietnam, the rulers of the United States have schemed to make war an activity that directly touches only a small proportion of the population. In 1972, the all-volunteer system made it possible for the Pentagon to socially engineer the demographics of the military. In the post-9/11 era, as any viewer of PBS News Hour can observe, the troops most likely to die are small town whites and Latinos – demographics that are not prone to political protest and, at any rate, wield little power in American society. To put it bluntly, those who are most likely to be killed in U.S. wars are from families and towns that are least likely to complain, and are in no positioned to protest effectively, anyway. Recent brown immigrants and white kids from nowheresville are precious to the Pentagon precisely because they present so few political problems.

Mercenaries are even better – ideal. The vast majority have already been trained in the combat arms. They are separate from the military chain of command, which can always disavow their crimes with no prejudice to the honor of the uniformed services. Most importantly, the mercenary war is a simple commercial transaction – a private affair between employee and management, and none of the general public’s business. Notions of democracy, shared national culpability, citizen’s obligations to one another and to the human species – none of this enters the equation in corporate war-making. It is pure killing for profit – or pure profit for killing – on an industrial scale.

For Black Agenda Radio, I’m Glen Ford. On the web, go to www.BlackAgendaReport.com [4].

BAR executive editor Glen Ford can be contacted at Glen.Ford@BlackAgendaReport.com.

 

Source URL: http://tns1.blackagendareport.com/?q=content/obama-continues-privatize-americas-imperial-wars

Links:
[1] http://media.libsyn.com/media/blackagendareport/20091223_gf_Mercs.mp33
[2] http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/12/15/AR2009121504850_pf.html
[3] http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/17/world/asia/17visa.html
[4] http://www.BlackAgendaReport.com/
[5] http://www.addtoany.com/share_save?linkurl=http://tns1.blackagendareport.com/?q=content/obama-continues-privatize-americas-imperial-wars&amp;linkname=Obama Continues to Privatize America’s Imperial Wars

Who are these Mexicans who disturb the tranquility of the USA enough to necessitate a wall to separate the two North American peoples? Who are literally “dying” to get into fortress USA? What is their country like that they so readily abandon in order to work in Yankee supermarkets and California orchards, on New York skyscrapers and in households of the Atlantic seaboard? How is it possible that these two neighboring peoples are so dramatically different one from the other? In this essay I offer some personal answers. Image: General Villa, Commander of the División del Norte, meets with General Pershing.

Gen. of the Northern Armies Francisco Villa (Center) in a rare photo with US Gen. Pershing.

GAITHER STEWART [print_link] PART ONE  |  READ PART TWO

THE FIFTEEN MONTHS I SPENT IN MEXICO deepened and consolidated a fundamental transformation long underway in me. The Italian writer Ignazio Silone was right: I had to step backwards from what I once was and where I was before in order to see myself and the world. Or maybe it was simply the altitude of Mesoamerica … and the winds … and also new inclinations toward unrestraint. Or maybe what happened to me in Mexico was simply because it is not necessary to live south of the border very long in order to begin to see American imperialism at work, contributing to the existing economic disparity between north and south. It is a mystery why things are the way they are. Still, it became clear that powerful evil forces combine to compel millions of Mexicans to sneak into the United States and live a dog’s life just to eat. Though it is true that because of the missing social idea America’s poor are poorer than Europe’s poor, Mexico’s poor are still worse off. Their poverty makes them seem to grovel for sustenance. Most certainly Mexicans don’t work on the skyscrapers of Dallas and New York City and wash dishes in cafeterias in Atlanta and in Charlotte and pick fruit in California because they are enamored with Yankee life. They prefer Mexico. They are north of the formidable Rio Grande border with its growing wall for the simple reason that though man does not live by bread alone, he must eat. For anyone with eyes to see it is clear that something is startlingly and tragically out of whack in North America.

Contrary to what some smug bien-pensants pseudo-sociologists and self-righteous capitalists pontificate, Mexicans do not choose to be poor. Otherwise why the perilous nocturnal crossings over the Rio Grande, risking drowning, betrayals by the same bandits who organize their passage, beatings and arrest by the Texas Rangers, and being shot down by military reservists along America’s Berlin style Wall—a Wall to keep Mexicans out, they say, but soon, who can say for sure? maybe also to keep Americans in.

The old saying about Mexico’s ills still holds: “Pobre Mexico tan lejos de dios y tan cerca de los Estados Unidos.” Poor Mexico, so far from God and so near the United States. (The aphorism has been credited to Porfirio Diaz, but some historians argue it was Simon Bolivar who coined the witticism, with all of “Latin America” as the victim instead of just Mexico.) For there is no better place than Mexico to see first-hand the negative results of the pact between American capitalism and the tiny “have” class of Mexican society that has exploited the country’s hard working people for one hundred and fifty years. John Mason Hart’s monumental Empire and Revolution that I once reviewed answers the question many Americans are asking today: “Why do they hate us so much?” At the outset Professor Hart, University of Houston, quotes a passage from Mexican writer Carlos Fuentes’ masterpiece, The Death of Artemio Cruz, the gist of which is that one cannot commit what North Americans (and the Mexican elite) have committed against Mexico and expect to be loved. Hart sees the historical attitudes of the United States toward its southern neighbor as the model for America’s drive for world hegemony today. It was in Mexico that the historic compulsion of American elites toward external wealth and global power was first expressed.

“From the beginnings of the nineteenth century until the present era, the citizens of the United States attempted to export their unique ‘American dream’ to Mexico. Their vision incorporated social mobility, Protestant values, a capitalist free market, a consumer culture, and a democracy of elected representation….The evolving pattern of American behavior in Mexico has reflected and usually anticipated the interactions of U.S. citizens in other Latin American and Third World societies.” Hart traces from its origins the role of America’s economic-financial elite in Mexico, for whom annexation has been the traditional goal. Many Americans have favored outright political annexation of parts or of all of Mexico. Many have considered it a question of time. If one is amazed by the number of Mexicans immigrating to the United States today, Professor Hart reminds us of the mass immigrations of Americans to Mexico. In the Nineteenth and early Twentieth centuries Americans purchased large tracts of land in Mexico and then immigrated there in increasing numbers. The idea was to buy Mexico! By 1910, 40,000 Americans had swarmed into the new frontier territories—12,000 in Mexico City itself—where rich Americans settled in the plush Las Lomas quarter of the capital. Foreigners came to own thirty-five per cent of Mexico. Many opened bars and nightclubs, dance halls, bordellos and casinos—as later in Cuba—rather than investing in agriculture and industry. Thus many became early on exploiters of the common people. Hart documents how privatization and foreign investment policies of the regime of Porfirio Diaz in Mexico City from the latter part of the Nineteenth century up to the Revolution in 1910 enriched the oligarchy but left little for the people. The Mexican elite and the North American capitalists took all. Foreigners had the benefits and the power.

At the same time American financiers and industrialists in Mexico were gaining influence in Central America and the Caribbean, and participated with their British partners in expansion into South America, Africa and Asia. (A fine old tradition, British and American cooperation: one people, one empire!) Thus, when the Mexican Revolution exploded the people’s ire was directed against both the Diaz regime and foreign capitalists—chiefly Americans. Shouts of “Long Live Mexico” and “Death to the Yankees” are echoed today in similar protests ringing out from Afghanistan to Africa to the Middle East. Mexican rioters then attacked American targets as do Islamic terrorists today. When the revolutionary Emiliano Zapata proclaimed that the rich of Mexico City treated their horses better than the people, he attracted poor peasants from all over Mexico. No wonder the Mexican government has never ceased to fear the Zapatistas, as the movement for “tierra y libertad” (land and freedom) is still called today, and who periodically march on the capital to demand their rights.

Empire and Revolution shows how American-Mexican relations anticipated the issue of globalization that emerged in the 1990s. Now globalization, the division of wealth and the economic disparity between the United States and the Third World are sharpening the conflictual relationship between the rich and the poor worlds in general.

Before we moved to Mexico, Milena and I flew there to look around for a place to live. Since I had benefits with KLM Airlines as a Dutch journalist, we traveled a mysterious but revealing route of Rome-Amsterdam-Detroit-Mexico City. The approach from the north to the geographic triangle of Mexico was a peculiar physical-metaphysical happening. After overflying the Rio Grande and the Tropic of Cancer, the earthen mass below surged upwards to us hovering motionless in the air. Suddenly the whole world was in movement. Change was underway. Five, six, seven, ten ridges, spreading, swelling, narrowing toward the south, rolled toward us from western skies like huge oceanic waves, a lonely image of abandonment among the elements; the black mountains clamped us in their grasp; the past skipped away across spinning gossamer clouds; in contrast to everyday life on earth the planet moved while the plane hung over the earth like a giant prehistoric bird; invisible worlds zoomed around us; white vapor trails crisscrossed the blue southern skies; Mexico narrowed and the sky retreated heavenwards; transient white clouds cast menacing dark shadows on the undulating green and brown fields below, spaced by narrow rivers winding toward the Gulf; billowing chains of darkness approaching from the west collided with the east, and together rolled southwards, and then, again climbing toward the sky, combined to form the great plateau that is Mesoamerica, the heart of Mexico.

Bluish-black mountains filled the triangular plateau to form a gigantic pyramid surrounded by the seas. It was the top of the world, the center, where time stands still. In the vacuum you feel a sensation of enormous power. Finally, under the last layer of smog and mist, the sun was hazy and matted. A buoyant voice concealing a note of irony announced that we might see the pyramids as we flew over the city.

No such luck. No signs of pyramids. Only smog.

And, on the ground, the long dreamlike black and yellow airport corridors leading into the New-Old World generated simultaneous sensations of challenge and hesitation.

I must have been looking for the comfortable old city I had visited decades earlier. It was nothing of the sort. Though Mexico City seemed familiar, it was another world from what I remembered. The rhythm had changed—the traffic, the noises, the masses on the streets, the way people moved, the park of the Alamos, the arcades, the sudden vistas, the Italian style palazzos. Still, though it was the Old World located in the New World, there was something there I didn’t feel before. The city had something universal about it absent in ephemeral Detroit, something it would never occur to any sane person to search for in the city of the automobile.

Benito Juárez García (March 21, 1806 – July 18, 1872) was a Zapotec Amerindian who served five terms as president of Mexico: 1858–1861 as interim, 1861–1865, 1865–1867, 1867–1871 and 1871–1872.[1] Benito Juárez was the first Mexican leader who did not have a military background, and also the first full-blooded indigenous national to serve as President of Mexico and to lead a country in the Western Hemisphere in over 300 years.[citation needed] For resisting the French occupation, overthrowing the Empire, and restoring the Republic, as well as for his efforts to modernize the country, Juárez is often regarded as one of Mexico’s greatest and most beloved leaders. >>>

For despite their poverty, Mexicans, in my experience, are the first to say: “Not by bread alone.” Earthly bread is necessary but not enough for a man. Universality resides in the Mexican people. Everything changes, south of the Rio Grande. I had just read a sociologist who labels the Mexican a historical chameleon who changes his skin according to circumstances. Mexico’s Nobel writer, Octavio Paz stresses that the Mexican is more Indio than Spanish, which must have something to do with his strangeness and adaptability and also his universality … with his venerable 30,000 years of age.

Paz, as most Mexican artists, was obsessed with the differences between Mexicans and their North American neighbors: “Mexicans lie out of fantasy, desperation, or to conquer the squalor of their lives; North Americans don’t lie about the true truth that is always unpleasant but about social truth. North Americans want to understand; we to contemplate. Americans are credulous; we believers. We, as their forefathers did, believe that sin and death constitute the foundation of human nature.”

Since we both felt immediately at home, Milena and I quickly concluded that the Mexican is nonetheless more European. On the other hand, the Mexican nature also makes one wonder if it is positive to be so universal that you can accept anything philosophically? For universality has not brought great fortune to Mexico, no more than has its proximity to the USA. It seems only ancient peoples like perhaps Sicilians or Sardinians are capable of being simply men. Men who don’t strive for perfection. It came to seem to me that men who just lead good lives are perhaps universal without realizing it. It makes them free, but at the same time vulnerable to the claws of the hawks.

After a week, the initial resemblances with Italy began fading. Then, suddenly, they were gone. The light changed. Eyes burned. Beggars besieged the entrances to marvelous museums; the dirt and grime from the earthquake zone sullied the white walls of Palacio de Bellas Artes; the revolutionary murals of Siquieros, Rivera and Orozco didn’t make the public water drinkable; the daintiness of Sanborn’s eatery seemed precarious and anachronistic; the spring temperatures didn’t freshen smog-filled throats; the white-capped volcanoes, gigantic and invisible, were only legend; the blasé rich in Zona Rosa restaurants ignored the withered women on the streets rationing tortillas to tiny children. One day, after visiting the Frida Kahlo Museum, we sat at a café on the plaza of Coyoacan watching flashy people sauntering in and out. In the village atmosphere the air seemed purer than it was. One could even smell cotton candy. On the opposite sidewalk under a row of trees an old man in a cowboy shirt with two small children licking red ices was begging. We decided we didn’t want to get used to the beggars, the eternal problem of living in places of widespread poverty.

Most of all I wanted to know who these Mexicans are who make this another world from the rest of North America. In his El Laberinto de la Soledad, Octavio Paz explains that just as behind the Greeks stood the Egyptians or behind the Romans stood the Etruscans or behind the Russians, the Varangians and Mongols, behind the Aztecs and the Spanish conquerors who formed today’s Mexicans there stand millennia of peoples in a long and crazy past. In the end I came to see Mexico as a tragic country. It has do with its ancient origins. Or its solitude on its highlands and in its jungles. Rich in an ancient culture and, as you see on Mexico City’s eighty-kilometer long Avenida Insurgentes, at the vanguard of modernity, Mexico is a political caveman. A modern dictatorship based on corruption and retention of power. But somehow—my hope is that some of the reasons become clear in this writing—it is not decadent as were the Aztecs by the time the Spanish arrived. I see Mexico as a viable society, on its way up. While the United States has passed its zenith, Mexico can still rise again.

Most everything that reflects Mexico happens in its capital city of between twenty-two and thirty million people—no one knows how many since its uncounted people in its uncounted shantytowns extend the limits of the city each day. Still, as New York is not America and Paris is not France, Mexico City is not Mexico either.

Milena and I decided to investigate a town a French-Italian woman artist who lived there part of the year had told us about: San Miguel de Allende, a tourist town four hours north of Mexico City. Before the reader scoffs at our choice, read further. We boarded a first-class, darkened, air-conditioned Flecha Amarilla bus headed north. The town looked right—church steeples and towers, red tile roofs, white and pastel-colored houses, green parks and gardens. A lake shimmered in the distance. Blue mountains lay to the west and canyons to the east. A block from the main square we found the kind of colonial hotel I had imagined. Since this was off-season, there was a wide choice of rooms and we finally took an apartment on the hotel roof overlooking the town. When evenings the sun fell toward the ridge of the mountains and dropped in a burst of flames before disappearing into nothingness I understood why the Indios worshipped it.

In those first days of discovery I liked to sit at the jardín, the park in the town center, and watch people and events. Toward evening when the Gringos stood up from the benches and began discussing restaurants for the evening, the Mexicans, as if according to a preordained plan, moved in unison from the shade of the trees in the park to places in the cooling sun. Two worlds occupy San Miguel, one Mexican, one gringo—two worlds apart, coexisting so peacefully in the same time and space that it made me feel guilty for the subterfuge and duplicity it conceals. Under the arches around the main plaza Mariachi bands hang around waiting for evening engagements. The men stand along the walls, divided in groups according to the colors of their suits, some smoking long cigars. So elegant. So mysterious. The sad-serious expressions on their faces seem like the masks of old Mexico. Milena loved the hundreds of buttons on the tight jackets and pants and the serapes thrown so casually over their shoulders against the cool nights. I think there is nothing more Mexican, nothing more lonely, than a serape.

A few months later, Milena and I moved, we thought definitively, to Mexico. I was bored of Italy, my romance with the Bel Paese was over. I was no longer deceived by it; the façade of Italy had fallen in shreds at its feet and the peninsula seemed nude and barren. My newspaper had anyway begun dismantling its network of foreign correspondents. It was just as well. I was tired of reporting on the repetitiveness of Italy’s changing governments. My views on the country were no longer fresh and the newspaper devoted little space to Italy once terrorism finished and the so-called Second Republic was born.

Revolutionary leaders Gens. Francisco Villa and Emiliano Zapata (r), representing the northern and southern peasant armies. Treason would ambush both. Their greatness, despite continued efforts at tarnishment, grows with the passing of time.

Still, it was not only disillusionment with Italy. The time had arrived to escape from Europe itself. Time to abandon my beloved Europe. I wanted to go beyond Europe. I imagined that going to Mexico was like going to war used to be for young men—escape from the dead-end-you of home when your hopes and possibilities begin to decline and your dreams fade and you have to do something, anything, to survive. My boyhood dream of Mexico became reality. The Mexican Revolution and Emiliano Zapata and Pancho Villa had fascinated me as a boy in Asheville. Besides, I had begun writing my first novel, part of which was to be set in Mexico. It was not our intention to just visit Mexico. We rented out our house in Rome with the plan of settling in Mexico where also our meager retirement would suffice, as it did not in Europe. I believe I thought of Mexico as another exile. Exile has an aura about it; it projects a kind of halo over the exiled one. There is something romantic and gratifying to one’s vanity in it. You seem to stand on a kind of pedestal over the heads of others, free and unfettered. Free from involvement in local issues. Throughout history the exile has been a literary archetype, a character of Greek myth and Bible stories. My rare critics have noted that nearly every character in my fiction is an exile in one way or another, concerned with departure and the impossibility of return. For that reason the exile dwells more on the past than the present or the future. The danger arises from the stamp of nostalgia (the yearning to return) and the resulting melancholy that hangs over the past and the exile’s longing for something indefinite that never existed in reality and is enormously, gigantically absent in the present. What the exile says of the present, as of the past, is somewhat off-base, out of tune with real reality. His is also a different view, seen from another angle, another slant. He works with quarter notes. He works from memory, though a fading memory, misapprehended memory, frustrating, elusive and deceptive. His attempt to grasp his often unreal and artificial present creates in his mind chaos. So I hang onto my exile characters standing at the intersection between their own vague history and an eternal embryonic present and who in their struggles seem to have lost the power of choice.

At the same time my move to the old part of the New World reflected also my own search for myself. Something was missing and I hoped to find it in the ancient mystery of Mexico. I was searching for a new exile where I would become a new person. But to do that I had to discover that person or thing I felt in me. The mysterious thing dangling just out of reach, the thing whose presence I think everyone must feel but never recognize. It must have to do with who we are and where we come from, and also my conviction that we are more than Shakespeare’s “Imperial Caesar, dead and turned to clay, might stop a hole and keep the wind away.”

THE DRIVE TO MEXICO IS A PIECE OF CAKE. Straight southwest to Dallas, then turn left south toward San Antonio and Laredo. For me crossing the border by car was precisely the perplexing sensation I had imagined: you drive across the International Bridge over the narrow Rio Grande and magically step into another world. Once past Monterrey, each new curve of the climb onto the plateau called Mesoamerica presents a new vista, grayish colored hills, mesquite trees and narrow ravines transformed into hillsides of giant agaves and majestic organos. Twisting upwards, the road winds through the raw passes of the Sierra Madre. As if from nowhere dark people appear along the highway with animal skins on sale or they lead laden donkeys along dusty paths. They are not primitive; they have been doing the same things forever; they have held fast to what was theirs; nothing has ever happened to change it. Not distance or trains running on time count here, but the passing of centuries and volcanic eruptions and migrations of peoples. Purity must live here, I thought.

At mid-day, the old town of San Miguel de Allende stands exposed as if at the summit of an Aztec temple. Father Sun is insidious. Beguilingly yellow, soft and warm, the sun hovers low for a few hours in the crisp morning before at noon its concentrated rays explode, violent, burning white. The fulgor of the tropical noonday sun is ambiguous. It burns black. For hours then the town lies helpless as if under a giant magnifying glass. Then after the damage has been done the sun slides toward the West, gradually at first, serenely, almost innocently, before in an instant plummeting behind the Sierra Madre in orange splendor leaving the Bajío Region in darkness.

Some people blame the sun for the generalized folly infecting San Miguelians—perhaps many Mexicans. The high sky over the great plateau of Mexico exudes stillness. Yet the repose of the heavens never descends to the dusty noisy earth to soothe people’s hearts. The dust of Mexico! The fearsome noises imprisoned within the town’s stone walls—gaseous cars and buses and bellowing motorcycles, construction echoes, barking dogs, fiesta music, fireworks, winds and rains—unite to crush mind and spirit. Old gods seem to have infused secret purposes in the hearts of its self-ostracized peoples. Playful and deadly Tezcatlipoca, Lord of the Here and Now, who places children in the womb of Mexican women, willed to them an atmosphere that slays thought and withers impulses of reaction to oppression.

Bogart, Huston and Tim Holt in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. Written by a mysterious German emigré, B. Traven, and with a cast of Mexican and American stars, the story mirrors the way many foreigners have looked at Mexico: a land in which the law is often fragile and anything goes.

Afternoons, all kinds of people of San Miguel sit on the iron benches under the trees of the central plaza. The Gringos sit in the front row along the street facing the church towers—Texans, Yankees, Canadians and a few stray Europeans, engaged in looking at one another. Right over there is one with a long gray beard and hair bound in a pigtail wearing an off-shoulder Mexican shirt. And sitting on a low wall is a red-faced fat lady in a straw hat eating a huge cone of ice cream, sensually licking around the edges. And there are the predictable young blond tourists in jeans artificially torn at the knees, playing guitars and singing folk songs, largely ignored by the Mexicans sitting on the Town Hall side of the plaza and in the center under the trees around the bandstand. They too are watching one another—whites, various shades of mestizos and white, negro and white, negro and indigenous, migrants from Mexico City and Monterrey, from Guadalajara and Chihuahua, grandfathers and grandchildren, school girls in blue and white uniforms, street vendors, cowboys in white sombreros, policemen, and, at evening hours, the Mariachi. Each of the two distinct worlds lives against the background of the other, forever present, yet ignoring each other as if each were invisible to the other’s eyes. Purposeless peoples, exiled peoples, hounded and chased in search of asylum, and yet united by the shadow of past discontent, mistakes, misunderstandings, abuses, crimes, and now by the pigeons and stray dogs wandering indiscriminately under the feet of all, searching for a morsel of food here, or there, a careless caress.

Maria Felix, of Yaqui indian and Spanish descent, was the stuff that not only Mexican dreams are made of. For several decades she was rightly regarded as one of the most beautiful and distinctive actresses in the world. In 1946 she married the great Mexican composer Agustin Lara. Felix said of him that although he was not a handsome man, she was totally in love with him. She told her sister his music entranced her. During their one-year marriage, he composed some of his most beautiful songs, most of them inspired by her.

The town of San Miguel de Allende is five hundred years old. But the territory was long inhabited by peoples descended from the men who 30,000 years ago crossed the Bering Straits from Asia and filtered to the South. Men with Mongoloid features discovered today’s Mexico 21,000 years before Columbus by chance reached America. When the Genoese navigator arrived the peoples were not “Indians.” Instead, Otomí, then Nahoas, then Chichimecs—the latter name allegedly means “uncivil dirty dogs”—and Guachichils or “red-painted faces,” lived around today’s San Miguel de Allende. According to Spanish priests, “going naked, eating rats and snakes, worshipping pagan gods, and scalping the whites” who were pushing through their lands in search of gold and silver.

After time slowed, ironclad armies on horses and priests armed with the cross combined to discover the silver and, with boiling lead, to wash their civilizing religion down the throats of the indigenous peoples. The pax catholicus took root and the natives added Jesus Christ to their pantheon of gods. The Franciscan Juan de San Miguel founded the town of San Miguel in homage to his Patron Saint and dedicated his life to exhorting the native peoples to cooperation with their bloody conquerors: baptism was synonymous with civilization. The Friar wandered over the countryside singing the Franciscan canticle for the pleasure and edification of the “naked, pagan, rat-eating, Christian-scalping, uncivil dirty dogs of Chichimecs:”

Highest, Omnipotent, good Lord,

Praises, glory and honor and every blessing are Yours.

Praise be to You, my Lord, with all Your creatures,

Especially to Lord brother Sun,

Who is the day, which illuminates us.

Praise be to You, my Lord, for sister moon and the stars:

You created them bright, precious and beautiful in the heavens.

And so on and so on goes the canticle, for brother wind, for the air, the clouds, the sky, and all the weather, which sustains His creatures. For water, fire, the earth. At the end of the canticle come the bleakness and blackness new to the pagans:

Praise be to You, my Lord, for our sister, corporal death from which no mortal creature can escape.

Ay! for those who die in mortal sin!

Fortunate those who will be in Your Holy Will.

Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera, iconic figures in Mexico’s art heritage. Their dramatically intertwined lives, art and politics (both active communists) left a powerful mark on the 20th century. Rivera’s murals remain matchless for their sweeping scope, artistic merit, and fearless topicality.

For the people the history of San Miguel was implacable. As the Spanish swarmed over the country more land went to the conquerors and less remained for the natives, until finally Spanish exploitation led to the uprising of future Mexicans. Mexico’s War of Independence was forged in the rich silver and agricultural territory around San Miguel. In 1810, the Grito, the Cry for Independence, resounded through New Spain from the nearby town of Dolores Hidalgo, and San Miguel de Allende became the cradle of the struggle.

Still, independence never resolved the ills of racism, exploitation, corruption, the system of latifundio whereby a few rich landlords owned vast rural properties, and the tradition of foreign intervention. In the turbulent Nineteenth century, French, American and “Allied” forces intervened repeatedly in Mexico but San Miguel remained silent and apart. So that finally, in 1910, with predictable unforeseenness in the Mexico that was already Third World, the explosion of the Great Revolution shook the country, seven years earlier than in Russia. The revolution rode on waves of revolt against the Old and dreams of the New as depicted in the murals of Diego Rivera, David Siquieros and Clemente Orozco.

But the long wide sweep of Mexico’s tragic history proved to be more powerful than its Great Revolution. The revolutionaries became tyrants and the revolution degenerated into a new tyranny. Old ills returned to haunt its heirs. Soon Mexico again languished under the rule of another oligarchy, described so vividly in Carlos Fuentes’ The Death of Artemio Cruz. The Great Revolution was put away in a museum and institutionalized in 1929 under corrupt one-party rule supported by police and military power and above all by its rapacious neighbor, the United States of America.

At the beginning of the new millennium reformists again sparked hopes for renewal for this country demographically the size of Italy and France together. If nothing of the Great Revolution remains, something is going on under the surface of social fabric that may reemerge as in recent years in Bolivia, Brazil, Chile and Venezuela, something enormous, something as gigantic and unstoppable as the winds sweeping down the Bajío.

Yet San Miguel de Allende is once again distant from change. History has passed it by. It is a long way to Mexico City from this conservative backwater territory still living in the shadow of its past of silver mines and water sparkling from natural springs. Of rich landlords and barefoot Indians scratching a living from barren earth. Of conservatives and imperialists who want Mexico to remain static and of poor illiterate half-castes and Indios who have no concept of changing times.

For logistical reasons Milena and I, unfortunately, changed our original plan to live in the nearby beautiful and placid state capital of Guanajuato and opted for tourism-oriented San Miguel de Allende, today a town of 60,000 people, a sort of Mexican Santa Fe. It was intended to be a short-term stay in order to get a feel for the country and learn Spanish better before moving southwards to Chiapas. Meanwhile North American residents in San Miguel had changed its former sleepy atmosphere: over two thousand Gringos live there year round and many more winter there. Their presence in turn attracts also rich Mexicans. San Miguel’s attractions are its year round temperate climate of warm winters and cool summers, its colonial architecture, and its quaint stores and art galleries. Since a majority of the Gringos are retirees, many live there because of the low cost of living and cheap household help. People, who are just ordinary in Des Moines where they barely get by on their pensions, in Mexico feel rich and extraordinary; many like to believe that in Mexico they are living on the outer edge of existence. If for most people San Miguel is not a place for action, it is the locale for dreams of heroism and momentous deeds and imaginary achievements, which make people drunker and crazier than they once were, somewhere else. Therefore there is little serenity in San Miguel de Allende. Its peoples are never content. Neither rich Gringos who find no fulfillment once their new houses in the hills or in the historic center are finished, nor retirees who want the houses of the rich, nor middle class Mexicans who, in their love-hate relationship with the Gringos, imitate their tormentors.

The only apparently normal ones are the poor Mexicans who serve the rich. Not only do the poor Mexicans live their lives against the background of the rich, amused and influenced by their follies, but each class depends on the other: Gringos and rich Mexicans simultaneously depend on the cheap labor and are the source of the livelihood of the poor. Though these peoples share the same sun and thin air and the winds and the rains and the pollution and the dust and the noise, in reality they are as different from one another as are the planets glittering above them.

World traveller and witness GAITHER STEWART is Cyrano’s Journal Online’s European Correspondent, as well as Senior Editor with the Greanville Post. His latest novel is THE TROJAN SPY (Callio Press, 2010).

GO TO PART TWO

OpEds—

BY PETER PAVIMENTOV, Senior Editor

Large scale protests in the shadow of power buildings are easily contained as all governing classes have learned to control the impact of such demonstrations by using stealth, violence and propaganda.  So perhaps the road is to learn the guerilla tactics from the overlords, like in the unfortunate occupied territories in near Asia, while trying to reduce damage to oneself and others.

Though the excellent article by David Harvey on organizing a transition to a non-capitalist type of society contains seeds for a reversal of the capitalist mode, I personally feel that one emerging major new movement as an ideology to oppose capitalism is not what is needed. The world is so fragmented that capitalism in fact forms (and much more so than a re-invented communism) the significant unifying ideology for emerging economies.

Forming, as Harvey writes, a support system for the surplus capital that Western elites will invest abroad for extracting more surplus value from indigenous workers and where satraps will keep control for them. In an obscene way all workers from all countries are consequentially united in late capitalism, they all are reduced to become proletarians, or worse, to become beggars. And because it was used as a political move against China, the Obama administration has proven once again to be the big bully during the Copenhagen climate change conference, reinforcing the material destruction wrought by humanity at large. (See our articles on this topic, including Naomi Klein’s For Obama, no opportunity too big to blow).

Because of the concentration of capital and the fragility of modern data technologies, it appears to me that many small scattered revolts of divergent ideologies would be more effective as a force against capitalist domination which is so universally and dangerously supported by the managerial classes of society. The linkage between surplus capital and exploitation to produce more surplus value can be broken—or at least seriously disrupted— even by small uprisings.  As for the extensive speculations by surplus capital funds to generate more capital through the ease of electronic linkage (as the boys from Wall Street have demonstrated more often than we would like) the fate of hackers is cleverly publicized as an antidote for those who might try this route, but so far no brilliant and courageous African or Asian hacker has emerged.

It is clear by now that in the US, more than anywhere else you can buy almost anything and anybody, because money speaks far louder than words. This deafening roar of surplus funds in the hands of the ever fewer (comparatively to a population of three hundred million) drowns out any protests from the exploited. That is also why it appears logical and more productive —from the perspective of those sworn to disrupt the system—that acts of hidden sabotage should eventually crop up with regularity, as revolutionists will inevitably copy the common criminals who have practically pioneered the field. Complex societies are duly worried about this as, after all, it is very easy to bring our intricate system of transport and communication to a halt.

Large scale protests in the shadow of power buildings are easily contained as all governing classes have learned to control the impact of such demonstrations by using stealth, violence and propaganda.  So perhaps the road is to learn the guerilla tactics from the overlords, like in the unfortunate occupied territories in near Asia, while trying to reduce damage to oneself and others.

That is far from easy, nor is accepting the concept of small and isolated resistances all-over, chiseling away at the hard fully integrated surface of modern dominance.  These acts may cause small cracks that will ultimately bring the bondage down.

This demolition is not possible within a day and that is why grand schemes for rebellion may remain ineffectual and in fact perhaps provoke and strengthen the methods of oppression. The irrationality of the system is hard to comprehend for anyone living within it because it became a completely self-perpetuating sine qua non dogma. Though Harvey assumes that all functional change is only possible within seven co-dependent spheres, which is absolutely true, it can only be applied after a series of rebellions are starting to take place. It necessitates that a barren mental ground is made fertile again by fresh thought unrelated to what dominates at present, as it is impossible to proceed towards liberation within the crippling mental limits imposed by the capitalist system.  We are all poisoned by it to a greater or lesser extent–from the foods we eat to the air we breath and the thoughts we formulate.

Class-rooted organizations and self-aggrandizing leadership tie us down; they are what brought us to the present bankrupt societal system. What makes guerilla action important, also as a weapon against the hierarchical military, is exactly its refusal to be categorized. It is free from all collateral liberal contamination, too often seen in progressive methods and organizations. The decision for or against cooperation tolerates divergent opinions and few leaders have ever brought deep harmony amongst the led, except by coercion.

The movements that Harvey and Schell discuss on Znet are all within a capitalist setting, whether they are in the West, in Africa or Asia, and with many exceptions still perform either for a temporary or cosmetic change, not a permanent and radical one. Indeed the relief of the most injurious laws here such as the one preventing abortions are a result of such large movements, but not a minute passes without it is being gnawed at, as we just saw with the [Sen. Ben] Nelson amendment to a rotten senatorial health care bill which is meant at least to partially cripple it.

Other examples are easily found. For example, the “equal rights bills” which leave the basic discriminations in place. In this context, as in similar ones derived from the same structural boundaries imposed by the system’s needs, only the complete shattering of the capitalist structure itself will prevent a continual readjustment of the past to suit the establishment and placate a trusting public.

It is far too late to go on accommodating the managerial classes who profit by and perpetuate the status quo via the selection of incremental solutions (and often not even that) to the excesses of capitalism. These “solutions” only extend and prolong the suffering of the masses and now of living nature itself.  The oppressive de-sublimation must be forced to end by showing that capitalism is not the monolithic monster it pretends to be, but quite a fragile, vulnerable edifice.  But it is fear that holds people in thrall to what is, and it is fear that prevents them from realizing how very redundant and circular capitalist thought has become. Still, the more repression is absorbed, the more equivalent internal resistance may be built up. That must be recognized and the people encouraged to invent successful resistance methods. The pure revolutionary song Die Gedanken sind frei, wer kann sie erraten? (Thoughts are free, who can guess what they are?) must be revived (it was sung by the young White Rose resistance fighters in Germany in 1942). In fact the White Rose has a lot to teach us in our day.