By Black Agenda Report executive editor Glen Ford

Obama’s key apologists on the Left have released their 2012 position paper, in which “the facts of the Obama presidency – his actual behavior on war, austerity, and civil liberties – are deemed irrelevant.” We need four more years of Obama, they say, to open up “space” for progressive action. In reality, Obama’s “great legacy has been to create vast political space for Wall Street and the Pentagon.”
 
“Fletcher and Davidson want Blacks and progressives to respond with hysteria to GOP ‘irrationalism,’ keeping the traditional Democratic base in the Obama camp through raw fear.”

Bill Fletcher and Carl Davidson are two Left opportunists with a problem. Unlike four years ago, when Fletcher co-founded Progressives for Obama [7], their guy now has a record – and it is indefensible. Solution: nullify the issues right up front in the title to their reworked rationale for backing the Bill of Rights-destroying, Wall Street-protecting, Africa-bombing, regime-changing corporate Democrat. Their August 9 article [8], “The 2012 Elections Have Little To Do With Obama’s Record … Which Is Why We Are Voting For Him” frames the campaign as a contest between “revenge-seeking” white supremacists and – well…those of us who are not revenge-seeking white supremacists. The facts of the Obama presidency – his actual behavior on war, austerity, and civil liberties – are deemed irrelevant, and the president himself becomes a mere stage prop in the battle against “Caligula,” the Republicans.

Fletcher and Davidson want Blacks and progressives to respond with hysteria to GOP “irrationalism,” to keep the traditional Democratic base in the Obama camp through raw fear. They claim the current campaign “will be unlike anything that any of us can remember.” In truth, the abject Black failure to make a single demand of Obama, and the vapid excuses and rationalizations for the Left’s political collapse in his presence, then and now, makes 2012 very much resemble 2008. Back then, Fletcher & Co. wrote [7]:

“Barack Obama’s very biography reflects the positive potential of the globalization process that also contains such grave threats to our democracy when shaped only by the narrow interests of private corporations in an unregulated global marketplace. We should instead be globalizing the values of equality, a living wage and environmental sustainability in the new world order, not hoping our deepest concerns will be protected by trickle-down economics or charitable billionaires. By its very existence, the Obama campaign will stimulate a vision of globalization from below.”

Four years later, we are admonished to forget the facts as they actually transpired – and as we at BAR predicted – and pretend the current campaign is a crusade against the Tea Party, with Obama as the incidental beneficiary.

“2012 very much resembles 2008.”

Right-wing populism is the bogey man, in opposition to which we must re-embrace Obama. The GOP isn’t just racist, it is “irrational,” crying for “a return to the past.” They write:

“Obama represents an irrational symbol for the political right, and a potent symbol that goes way beyond what Obama actually stands for and practices. The right, while taking aim at Obama, also seeks, quite methodically and rationally, to use him to turn back the clock.”

Of course, the meaning of the term reactionary is to “turn back the clock,” a promise Republicans have been making for 50 years. And racism is fundamentally irrational, causing white supremacists to see that which is not there, be blinded to facts that are right in front of their noses, and to invent whole narratives of history. But, this time is different, Fletcher and Davison insist, because the Right is so intensely focused on the symbolism of Obama, the Black man – and so “irrational” about it that they make up ridiculous things about him, like his non-citizenhood.

Therefore, our response, as progressives, must be to forge a “common front based on resisting white revanchism… on political misogynism, on anti-‘freeloader’ themes aimed at youth, people of color and immigrants, and a partial defense of the so-called 1%.” The fact that Obama is demonstrably not a part of that common front must not dissuade us from joining his campaign. If the Right has made Obama its symbolic focus, we must, in response, make him the focus of our “common front.” If the Right hates Obama with an irrational passion, we must hug him to our breasts.

Just in case the logic of such reasoning escapes you, Fletcher and Davidson remind us that the Republicans are not merely irrational – they are crazy like Caligula.

“November 2012 becomes not a statement about the Obama presidency, but a defensive move by progressive forces to hold back the ‘Caligulas’ on the political right. It is about creating space and using mass campaigning to build new grassroots organization of our own. It is not about endorsing the Obama presidency or defending the official Democratic platform. But it is about resisting white revanchism and political misogynism by defeating Republicans and pressing Democrats with a grassroots insurgency, while advancing a platform of our own, one based on the ‘People’s Budget’ and antiwar measures of the Congressional Progressive Caucus. In short, we need to do a little ‘triangulating’ of our own.”

“Only charlatans preach that progressive movements must install preferred personalities from the menus of the ruling circles before they can find space to move.”

So, it’s not about “endorsing the Obama presidency” – but about voting for Obama while claiming that the facts of what he did as president don’t matter. It is about the nonsense of “creating space” so that the Left can do what it ought to do anyway, but which it didn’t do in the two years leading up to the 2008 election, or in the first two and a half years of the Obama presidency, until the Occupy Wall Street activists came out of left field in disgust with both parties’ subservience to finance capital. The anti-war movement seems largely to oppose only Republican wars.

The great fallacy, here, is that Democratic presidents in general, and Obama in particular, somehow create “space” for progressive activism. Movements create space for themselves, by acting. Only charlatans preach that progressive movements must install preferred personalities from the menus of the ruling circles before they can find space to move.

The great tragedy of the Obama era, is that his presence has had the effect of shutting down progressive – and, most dramatically, Black – opposition to the prevailing order. This does not happen by the magic of charisma. Political operatives identified with the Left work diligently to maintain such silence – people like Fletcher and Davidson, who are once again guarding the left flank for Obama, whose great legacy has been to create vast political space for Wall Street and the Pentagon, with a minimum of resistance from white progressives, Blacks and the rest of the Democratic base.

That’s why we at BAR call Obama the more effective evil.

BAR executive editor Glen Ford can be contacted at Glen.Ford@BlackAgendaReport.com [9].
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By Black Agenda Report managing editor Bruce A. Dixon

When you match Republican brands against those of Democrats, who claim to stand for tolerance on racial and sexual fronts, who cloak their imperial wars in the garb of “humanitarian interventions,” but who agree with Republicans that wealthy corporations do have the right to rule over us, that presidents possess the right to imprison, torture or kill us at a whim, the difference isn’t black and white, but it’s clear enough. The Republican brand is odious and deeply scary, easily more frightening than that of Democrats.

In today’s political ecology, the job of Republicans is to provide political camouflage to right wing Democrats like the last two Democratic presidents Clinton and Obama, by moving still further rightward, even past the boundaries of lunacy. When Bill Clinton was busy passing NAFTA and ending welfare as we knew it, both measures tried and failed at by Bush 1, Newt Gingrich provided covering babble about taking poor children from their homes. While Barack Obama offered to put Medicare and social security on the deficit cutting table and enacted a so-called “Affordable Care Act” first passed as an insurance company bailout by Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney in 2004, Republicans threaten the piecemeal repeal of Rove V. Wade and cuts to unemployment compensation.

The fact is that 120% evil Republicans offer the only justification for our support of 100% evil Democrats. And with the dissolution of what used to be the black consensus for equality, civil liberties, full funding for public education, and opposing war spending and corporate privilege, Obama-era Democrats continue to flee rightward toward war, privatization and austerity.

This deformed puzzle is not the political logic of free and responsible people. It’s the cramped and twisted reasoning of someone trapped in a box urgently trying to convince himself that it’s not really a box, that pragmatic acceptance of the box as the whole of the great and free universe is really all that can be hoped, struggled and strived for. It’s not. Only a beaten, cowed and enslaved people can imagine their forbears sacrificed and struggled for them to choose among greater and lesser, but both still monstrous evils.

We at Black Agenda Report spend more time denouncing Democrats because they act like and enable Republicans. We don’t spend as much time denouncing the party of white supremacy because Republicans rarely bother to pretend to be anything else. African Americans haven’t voted Republican in 50 years. But we’re more unemployed than we’ve been in seventy years, and more imprisoned than we’ve ever been.

That’s what choosing “lesser evils” has earned us. It’s time to chuck the fake choice between evil Republicans and slightly less evil Democrats. It’s time not just to think, but to climb outside the two-party, lesser-evil box, to breathe the free air and get ready for something new.
For Black Agenda Radio, I’m Bruce Dixon. Find us on the web at www.blackagendareport.com.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

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John Pilger describes the augmented Anglo-American government and media campaign against Julian Assange and WikiLeaks as Assange is granted political asylum by Ecuador and remains in that country's London embassy.

By Paul Craig Roberts

You have to admire and to appreciate the spunk of the women. But you have to bemoan their gullibility. Washington needed a popular issue with which to demonize the Russian government for standing up to Washington’s intention to destroy Syria, just as Washington destroyed Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya, and as Washington intends to destroy Lebanon and Iran.

By intentionally offending religious worshipers–which would be a hate crime in the US and its European, Canadian, and British puppet states–the women violated a statutory Russian law.

Prior to the women’s trial, Russian President Putin expressed his opinion that the women should not be harshly punished. Taking the cue from Putin, the judge gave the women, deceived and betrayed by the amerikan-financed NGOs, two years instead of seven years.

The women were not waterboarded, raped, or forced to sign false confessions, all well-established practices of amerikan “justice.”

The chances were good that after six months Putin would see that the women are released. But, of course, that would not serve the propaganda of the Amerikan Empire. The instructions to the Washington-financed fifth column in Russia will be to make any government leniency for Pussy Riot impossible.

Washington-organized protests, riots, property damage, assaults on state and religious images by Washington’s Russian dupes can make it impossible for Putin to stand up to nationalist opinion and commute the sentences of the Pussy Riot women.

Distrust of the Russian government and dissension within Russia are what Washington wants. As Washington continues to murder vast numbers of people around the globe, Washington will point its finger at the fate of Pussy Riot. The western bought-and-paid-for presstitute media will focus on Russia’s evil, not on the evil of Washington, London, and the EU puppet states who are slaughtering Muslims by the bucket-full.

The disparity between human rights in the west and in the east is astonishing. When a Chinese trouble-maker sought protection from Washington, the Chinese “authoritarian” government allowed the person to leave for America. But when Julian Assange, who, unlike the presstitute western media, actually provides truthful information for the western peoples, was granted political asylum by Ecuador, Great (sic) Britain, bowing to the country’s amerikan master, refused the obligatory free passage from the UK.

The UK government, unlike the Chinese government, doesn’t mind violating international law, because it will be paid buckets of money by Washington for being a pariah state.

As Karl Marx said, money turns everything into a commodity that can be bought and sold: government, honor, morality, the writing of history, legality. Nothing is immune to purchase. This development of capitalism has reached the highest stage in the US and its puppet states, the governments of which sell out the interest of their peoples in order to please Washington and be made rich, like Tony Blair’s $35 million. Sending their citizens to fight for Washington’s empire in distant parts of the world is the service for which the utterly corrupt European politicians are paid. Despite the wondrous entity known as European Democracy, the European and British peoples are unable to do anything about their misuse in Washington’s interest. This is a new form of slavery. If a country is an amerikan ally, its people are amerikan slaves.

The international attention focused on Pussy Riot, an obscure rock group which apparently has no recordings on the market, demonstrates the complicity of the Western media in US propaganda. Pussy Riot is not the Beatles of the 1960s. I doubt that most of the young people demonstrating in favor of Pussy Riot had ever before heard of the group or have any understanding of how they are being manipulated.

There are so many more important issues on which media attention should be focused. There is Bradley Manning’s illegal detention and torture by the US government. Manning has already been in prison without trial for longer than Pussy Riot’s sentence!

What is Manning’s “crime.” No one knows. Washington accuses him of doing his duty under the US Military Code and revealing the war crime of the “thrill killing” of civilians by US military personnel and of releasing documents to WikiLeaks revealing the mendacity of the US government. In other words, Manning is a hero, and so off he is dragged to the torture chamber.

WikiLeaks Julian Assange, accused of posting on the Internet the leaked documents, is confined to the Ecuadorean embassy in London. The British “human rights” regime refuses to abide by international law and allow Assange, who has been granted political asylum by Ecuador, safe passage. Everyone familiar with international law knows that asylum takes precedence over the other legal claims, especially specious ones.

Washington has armed and financed outsiders to destroy Syria and to break the country up into warring factions. Instead of protesting this heinous act by Washington, the world protests the Syrian government for resisting its overthrow by Washington. I don’t think that even George Orwell imagined that the peoples of the world were this utterly stupid.

In “freedom and democracy” amerika, President Obama refuses to obey a federal court order to cease and desist from violating the clear, unambiguous Constitutional rights of US citizens. Instead, the President of the United States defies the court’s order and continues to hold US citizens in indefinite detention, and there is no movement to impeach this tyrant. To the contrary, amerika is presented as the example of democracy to the world.

Where are the protests?

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy and associate editor of the Wall Street Journal. He was columnist for Business Week, Scripps Howard News Service, and Creators Syndicate. He has had many university appointments. His internet columns have attracted a worldwide following.

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Ryan: a winning card for American corporatists or the new Typhoid Mary of conservatism, or maybe both. A hungry politician with plenty of fascistoid potential.

STEVEN JONAS, TGP Senior Contributor

For years now, the GOP has been running on what I have called the “Rightward Imperative” (2, 3). In brief, increasingly they have been running on the issues of religious prejudice (commonly, and incorrectly, referred to as the “social issues”): religious authoritarianism on abortion rights, homophobia, Islamophobia, and on racism, to cover up and distract attention from what their real agenda is, an agenda that reflects those interests the GOP really represents, politically and in policy.

As is well-known, the GOP represents major sectors of the US economy: the extractive industries, the military industrial complex, the prison-industrial complex, corporate agriculture, the “health” insurance and pharmaceutical industries, and so on. But they could and can hardly run on a platform of “let the oil and coal companies do whatever they want to,” “we want the rich to get richer, donchaknow,” “we want to export as much American capital overseas where it can make larger profits than it can here, so we really want to de-industrialize our country,” “we don’t care about the health of the American people but we do care about the profits of the health care industry,” “we would like to have permanent war if we can get it,” “we want to convert the US economy from industrial capitalism to finance capitalism,” “we want our already low taxes [and yes, those folks do know how low their real taxes already are] to be even lower and really do want to get even wealthier because we deserve to be,” and so on an so forth. Couldn’t run on it openly, or very openly — that is, up to now. So since the time of Reagan they have been pushing the issues of religious prejudice more and more to the forefront of their campaigns. And Romney has been going along with this strategy, certainly on abortion rights, gay marriage, and so on.

Then there’s the Ryan pick. Well yes, he’s “good” on the religious prejudice issues, but he is primarily the poster boy for the true GOP economic/fiscal agenda, as summarized above. He doesn’t make any excuses for it. He goes out of his way to promote it, in legislation, with his personal stamp on it. Romney, from time-to-time, has made it clear that he knows that it’s in trouble in certain sectors of the electorate, like those on Social Security, and those who think that maybe, just maybe, rich people like him get away with lots of stuff on their taxes. And he picks Ryan!?! Something has happened here, I’m thinking. Thus I came up with this imaginary sequence of thought and conversation.

There’s Mitt, sitting by himself in his darkened study (well, who knows, but when one sees him in public one can only imagine that he most comfy when he’s alone). And he’s thinking to himself: “Golly. The Convention is approaching. I’ve got to pick someone for Veep. Let’s see. Can’t make the same mistake McCain did. It’s got to be someone the team has really vetted right. It’s got to be someone smart. It’s got to be someone who would know what newspapers he read. And it’s got to someone like me. So, who do I have?

“Christie? Well, he’s hardly like me and anyway they found out about that background stuff on him. So there’s no there there. Portman? Well, he was Bush’s Budget Director so those damn Dems. would bring Bush directly down around my head. Can’t have that label even though I’m going more or less with what Bush did anyway. Daniels? He’s got some kind of a wife problem. Left him. Came back. OY! (See, I did learn something in Israel.) Even though the team dug very deep, couldn’t really find out exactly what it is/was, but can’t have that kind of thing around. Ryan? Ohmygosh. Too young, too good-looking, and much-too-much dug in on the Right. With him and that abolish-Social-Security/Medicare nonsense we would be washing the elder vote right down the river. (I know I said something like it once. But backed off pretty quick. There’s an advantage with being able to switch positions so readily.) So that leaves Pawlenty. Good old Tim. Not much with the personality, but he is good-looking, has Exec. experience, and is a good conservative, like me. But he doesn’t put people on edge like, well, that Ryan fella. OK. I’ll tell the staff (instead of them telling me like they always do) that we’ll go with Pawlenty.”

Then the phone rings. A deep voice says: “Willard? We’ve decided on your vice-president.” “Huh?” Mitt says while thinking (gee, I know that voice from somewhere). “Yes, we’ve had enough of the religion stuff; you know what everyone calls the ‘social issues.’ They’re not going to win the election for you, because if you and the party continue down that lonesome road, you’re not going to get the money you need from us.” Mitt is thinking hard. “You want tons of our money, right?” “Whose money?” Mitt thinks. “Well, to get it, you’re going to pick that nice young man from Wisconsin. He’s been ours for some years now and this time around we are going to make sure that we have our voice right there in the White House, right next to you, where it belongs. Like we had our oil man, last time around. So that once you are there, and we are going to put you there, with our man Paul looking over your shoulder, the old Romney flip-flops are going to go right out the window. Otherwise, dear Willard, the money is going to dry up, and fast. Not that we can’t trust you, but we don’t.” And so Mitt “chooses” the “nice young man from Wisconsin.”

And so, there I am after the announcement, thinking “why Ryan?” Not someone Romney really wanted, knowing that he would be so hemmed-in on policy, not able to make his patented oh-so-convenient-depending-upon-the-audience changes. And then by the Monday after the Saturday announcement, I’m thinking, “Game Change, II.” Romney didn’t really want to have this guy, but, I’m thinking, the Koch Brothers, Inc. has gotten tired of playing second fiddle within the party to the Religious Right. (And oh yes, along with everything else, Ryan is a died-in-the-wool global warming denier.) Since the advent of their artificially grown Tea Party the economic far-right has been pushing for a larger and more open role in the party and in its campaigns. They think that it is time to drop the pretence. And so, I’m thinking, they dropped this bomb on Romney, as per the above script or something like it, just like the Palin bomb was dropped on McCain, who really had wanted to have his old buddy the turncoat Democrat Joe Lieberman on the ticket.

Of course, we’ll never know for sure (at least until after the election, and if Romney does win we will likely never know). But then on the Tuesday after the announcement, there’s an article in the New York Times entitled “Ryan Has Kept Close Ties to Donors on the Right” (4). Who are these “donors on the right?” Why a rogues’ gallery of the Economic Right, not the Religious Right: The Koch Brothers’ “Americans for Prosperity;” hedge-fund (otherwise known as the totally un-regulated inside trader funds) so-called “libertarians” (except of course for personal rights like the right to choose in the outcome of pregnancy) like the billionaires Cliff Asness and Paul Singer, the “Club for Growth” (of the wealth of the wealthy, of course), “Freedom Works” (for the Ritchie Riches of this world), the Economic Club of Chicago (murder capitol of the U.S.), and maybe even Sheldon Adelson, if he isn’t hauled into court on charges of bribery of foreign (Chinese) officials first.

For the last several weeks, many observers, including certain GOPers, have been writing off Romney’s chances and some say they are even worse with this choice. I say, not so fast. Koch Brothers Inc. now is going to absolutely flood the political marketplace with money. They’ve got the vote of the religious rightists, of the “get the colored guy out of the White House” bigots, and for sure the voters on the economic right (even if there are not too many of them). Add to this, voter suppression and vote count cheating. Yes, they could definitely win. And if they do, they will have a GOP House and Senate with them and Democratic Minority in the Senate that would never in a million years wield the filibuster the way the GOP has for the past four years. With Ryan in the White House, watch out. Oh, he’s only the Vice-President, you say? Just remember the last GOP Vice-President.

Now of course I could be wrong. Maybe Romney really does love the guy and is happy that he will not be able to keep changing his positions on major policy issues. But if there is a Game Change II, I would like to get some credit in a footnote somewhere and maybe even be able to get into the movie as an extra.

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References:

Published on BuzzFlash.com on Fri, 08/06/2010, URL: http://blog.buzzflash.com/jonas/200.

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Senior contributing editor Steven Jonas, MD, MPH is a Professor of Preventive Medicine at Stony Brook University (NY) and author/co-author/editor/co-editor of over 30 books, including The 15% Solution, a volume of historical fiction outlining how the radical religious right could come to power. It is currently slated for republication, in a substantially revised edition,  by Punto Press in the Spring of 2013. In addition to being a columnist for BuzzFlash/Truthout (http://www.buzzflash.com, http://www.truth-out.org/), he is also the Managing Editor of and a Contributing Author to TPJmagazine.net.

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