That view has “infected” many of Maher’s “policy views,” Greenwald wrote on The Guardian on Saturday morning. On the show, Maher said the United States is not responsible for the prevalence of dictatorships throughout the Middle East.

Greenwald responded: “We were supporting and propping up Mubarak for 30 years. Even as we were cheering for all the Tahrir Square demonstrators as if we were on their side, it was our government that kept Mubarak in power, just like we’ve done across the entire Muslim world. And it’s amazing for you to say that, ‘Look at all these Muslims. The minute you give them a little freedom they go wild and they start being all violent.’ How can you be a citizen of the United States, the country that has generated more violence and militarism in the world over the last five or six decades and say, ‘Look at those people over there. They are incredibly violent.’ ”

Greenwald correctly says his exchange with Maher, which starts at the 4:45 mark below, captures the crux of this debate.

BestViews4Life:

MARK EPSTEIN

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Wherein Mark Epstein discovers the limits and fragility of liberals…

[dropcap]I[/dropcap] thought Michael Moore was supposed to be a director…    I thought he was supposed to have made some documentaries…

I guess Michael Moore, having become “Inc.”, now has other priorities, such as propagandizing for those institutions that have “honored” him and his ‘fellow’ club-members (please don’t try any more “captatio benevolentiae”, Mike, of the kind my “fellow leftists” etc…; after the way you have treated Ralph Nader and even more after this piece, I doubt there will be any somewhat sane members of the human race who would consider you a ‘leftist’ of any kind…).    I must say both the movie he defends and the essay he wrote to defend it are the ones that at this point should more appropriately be entitled “Sicko”…

Michael Moore has come out to “defend” Kathryn Bigelow’s “Zero Dark Thirty”.    So let us take a look at this “defense” and contrast it with what is actually a careful, thorough, calm, balanced but devastating assessment, that of David Bromwich.

One of Moore’s chief arguments, following the desperate attempts to grab at straws by the director herself, is that actually “Zero Dark Thirty” is against torture, and in fact is an ethical film, a film that looks at the “morality” of torture instead of its “practicality”…

To ‘factually’ anchor this contention, Moore frames it by the alleged contrast in “torture” policies of the W Bush administration and those of the Obama administration.

For someone with the sort of background in documentary filmmaking and the at least partial investigative work this entails (at least done by others, consultants, etc.) this pseudo-factual architecture is perhaps the most egregious web of deceit in his whole essay…     In fact its factual basis is as nonexistent as that in those political “vote for us, we have no achievements of our own to run on, but be scared, oh so scared of what the OTHER party could do…” ads, these days the bread-and-butter of autho-totalitarian electoral manipulation of fear that the one-party system with two right-wings the Empire has become (or party-politics as torture…)

[dropcap]H[/dropcap]as Michael Moore not been following any political news for the last 4 years?     Has he digested even one story in the non-Korporate or “less-Korporate media”??

Moore’s essay is basically founded on the Obama promises (from his 2007-8 run) in the area of rights and foreign policy, vs. some of the W administration facts.    Let’s start with torture: did the Obama administration actually stop the use of torture?    Given what has leaked out of prisons in Afghanistan and those of proKonsular allies, that contention seems completely devoid of credibility and unfounded…

On the other hand what we DO know is that the Obama administration did everything it possibly could to NOT prosecute all those in the W administration that were guilty of masterminding, implementing, “legally” defending, etc. said practices of torture…

John Kiriakou, a former CIA agent, has instead been persecuted by the Obama administration, for REVEALING facts about the torture program(s).   Kiriakou who, being a person who actually does have moral convictions, also was outraged by the government’s persecution of Aaron Swartz.    Instead both the journalists and White House personnel guilty of revealing the identity of Valerie Plame Wilson, as in the case of those involved in the torture program(s), were never touched by US “justice” under either W Bush or Obama…

So much for the ‘moral high ground’…

One of the other major oppositions Moore tries to sell in this horror-travesty dressed as a fairy-tale, is that the film shows the opposition of: 1) the W administration, characterized by torture (immoral), no will to find or pursue Bin Laden, incapable of engaging in any “detective work”, and therefore complete lack of results vs. 2) the Obama administration, characterized by opposition to torture (moral), the will to find and pursue Bin-Laden, deeply engaged in “detective work”, and therefore … hey presto, Bin-Laden’s head on a platter… (yes the biblical echo is intentional dear Mike…)

Well Mr. Moore must think his ‘pals’ on the “left” really all are embodiments of the insults that Rahm Emanuel hurled at them…  if he thinks his story amounts to any “detective work” of any kind whatsoever…

I think virtually any (I mean literally any) issue of “CounterPunch” in the last four years would have at the very minimum one article that would totally disprove Moore’s fantasies about the Obama administration.

Let’s start with those issues most closely related to torture and human rights in foreign policy, in other words Moore’s much touted alleged “morality”.

* Guantanamo?    Never closed, still open for business, complete betrayal of electoral promises.

* Similar prisons, as for instance at Bagram in Afghanistan, or similar facilities in Pakistan, other third party proKonsular “allies” (i.e. accomplices):    Open for business as usual, same as under W.    (For one of many accounts cf. Andy Worthington “Bagram and Beyond”.)

* Renditions?     Continue as before, or rather, more secretively than ever…     Again, absolutely no prosecution or even the faintest attempt at enforcing legal accountability in this area…

*Drone strikes (remember the Nazi V1 and V2 programs: those are the sort of powers that like state-terror and legal non-accountability): at their acme under Obama, with the overwhelming majority of victims being innocent civilians (except in the tyrannical Obama administrations serial lies about the results and consequences).    Decidedly Mr. Moore’s moral arguments are getting more ballistic by the minute…

* Targeted assassinations: the exact opposite of the Moore narrative.    It is Obama who has introduced them, boasts of personally approving them, and in the processes has put the Constitution through the shredder (he has on so many different issues it is difficult to keep count…), something the W administration, at least officially, did not engage in.    Obama actually has a US citizen assassinated without any proof or having to defend (as if it really could be defensible in any case, unless Mr. Moore’s morality comes with a defense of the death penalty, etc.) its proofs, decisions, courses of action, etc. in a court of law…    In fact Obama has reversed to worse than Richard Nixon, since it was the Church committee and other similar developments that led to the exposure and shut-down (at least from what we know overtly) of the sorts of programs that the Obama administration is now pursuing with a vengeance (Bigelow’s kind of ‘vengeance’…).   For a discussion of some of these continuing practices cf. Noah Gimble “Obama and Rendition”.

Then let’s proceed to Al-Qaeda, and Bin-Laden, whom Moore conveniently relegates to the PAST of US government (CIA, etc.) involvement.    Once again pure concocted fairy-tales on the part of Moore.     Well after Afghanistan (at the time of the creation of Al-Qaeda0, in the former Yugoslavia, the US used Al-Qaeda connected assets against the legitimate government of Yugoslavia and then Serbia, as one of its many prongs in the strategy to destabilize and break-up that country (since judging from this essay Moore’s reading in political affairs seems to be non-existent, let me recommend Diana Johnstone’s work and research in that general area, as well as many more specific articles relating to the Al-Qaeda and fundamentalist asset connection, should he ever decide to read anything more than Obama’s self-promotional literature…), the clear precursor, along with the Contra strategy in Central America, to the US – NATO aggression, terrorist destabilization, etc. pursued under Obama in Libya first and now in Syria (with its ultimate targets being Iran, Russia and China).     Not only is the US fully cognizant of the role of these groups, but given its past ties, it is just completely non-credible that those have been completely severed (yes, talk is easy, and in “intelligence-speak” it is called ‘plausible deniability”, though of course for those with a minimum of savvy in foreign affairs and some time to read, there isn’t much that’s plausible about  it….), and in fact it is far from a coincidence that Al-Qaeda is such a convenient dual-purpose tool: deniable asset in current state-terrorist destabilization programs, and much inflated “bugaboo monster” to continue pursuing the War on Terror, whose ultimate real objective is the complete dismantling of the Constitution and the nation as a “country of laws” domestically.    Al-Qaeda and other fundamentalist groups/assets are used by the US and its “allies”/proxies in NATO etc. also in countries like Chechnya, etc.     Let me add that Moore’s trying to pretend the “War on Terror” pretext and charade was something just being pursued under the W administration, and that it is not just as vigorously pursued (of course its real objectives being those just stated above, not those sold to the public under propaganda pretences…) under Obama is just as patently false and ridiculous as the rest of his essay.    In fact the drone escalation is precisely a CONTINUATION and EXPANSION of that “War on Terror” which remains just as undefined and obviously a pretext for ever increasing totalitarian Kontrol by the National Security State.

Then finally let us move to the more general area of human rights, government transparency, accountability of government, freedom of and access to information, etc.

As most serious advocates in the area of access to information, whistleblower protection, etc. have proven, the Obama administration is the WORST of any administration in US history in this regard, far WORSE than that of W Bush.    In fact the whole persecution of Bradley Manning (a trial that in its perversion of justice and the law has nothing to envy any of the trials held under Stalin), Julian Assange, and many others, the latest tragic example being the thuggish persecution engaged in by Carmen Ortiz (by the way Michael, a woman…!!) which led to the suicide of Aaron Swartz…     Yet another area in which Obama, that alleged “constitutional scholar”, has shredded the Constitution….

Glenn Greenwald just published an essay in the “Guardian” today in which he discusses how Obama’s Defense Department is going to be adding 4,000 employees to the current 900 in its Cyber Command unit.    A move which as is usual for the Empire uses the rhetoric of “Defense” (as the War Department in bygone times actually engaged in a minuscule fraction of the foreign aggressions the US Defense Department has engaged in, so “defense” in cybercrime is of course actually a pretext for massive escalation, militarization of the Internet, and attacks of the kind the US/Israel already launched against Iran) to promote aggression, escalation, systematic perversion of the law(s) and justice (cf. Manning, Aaron Swartz, Assange, Wikileaks, etc, etc.) that pertain to the Internet and its infrastructure.

Once again Michael Moore’s “do-no-wrong” Obama shredding yet another area of civil society, of democracy, of an at least partial informational “commons”, to replace it with an autho-totalitarian, public-private, unaccountable, monstrum (as Greenwald explains a huge amount of this unaccountable governmental snooping and harassment on the Internet is being carried out by private corporations whose funding comes exclusively from the government, i.e. our tax dollars: just guess where their priorities lie…; of course Moore will tell us they have “moral concerns” about information, oh, and of course, “terrorism”…)

The Obama administration has a horrific record in terms of deportations…    In persecuting the Muslim community…     In setting up FBI traps against activists, ecologists, civil rights lawyers, etc…

Of course 99% of all the other betrayals of his electoral promises, from Wall Street, to Korporate Giveaways packaged as “health-care reform” to the vandalistic destruction of the public education system to replace it with a completely dysfunctional, corrupt, unaccountable “privatized” brainwashing vampire-squid of its own… are beyond the purvey of this essay and less immediately relevant to Moore’s argument, though very relevant to the context he so desperately tries to conceal in this web of fabrications…

In the concluding segments of this fabrication, Moore then tries to layer the icing even thicker, with feel-good pronunciamientos about how the film should really be praised and given (probably given the Obama administration’s real proclivities, at gun point…) our uncritical and unencumbered blessing because it is the work of so many “women”…!!    Of course there is also a film-induced reason for this identitarian “segue”, namely that the protagonist Maya, is portrayed in a monomaniacal light, that puts her ‘above’ everything and everyone else, including the institutions she works for, a point persuasively and somewhat differently expressed by David Bromwich in his review of the movie.

Of course this propaganda trying to pass for “moral argument” is exactly of the same tenor as “don’t criticize Obama”, i.e. engage in the most despicable and hypocritical double-standards, because he is “African-American”…

Mr. Moore, I am convinced there are enough adult, responsible, women with dignity, intelligence, a moral compass and achievement(s) of many sorts in their life to their credit, that they do not need to be talked down (“up”…) to in this sordid manner.     One of the most ridiculous, disgusting, self-defeating, pompous trends of the postmodern “left” in the last several decades has been all the pontificating PC speech being bandied about in a variety of identitarian guises.     A morally despicable act, creation or product remains so if it is performed, created or produced by a man, woman, white, black, green, purple, straight, gay, transsexual, otherwise able, etc.     Nothing will change that.   Listing the “women” associated with the movie (a “co-chairman”, oops Michael, did your PC kowtowing slip up here, weren’t you meant to write “chairperson”, if not “chairhuman” or, if it was meant to be as tilted and factually inaccurate as your piece generally, “chairwoman”…?, of Sony pictures: what a profession and position in a capitalist system to boast of…) as if that somehow proved its worth is beyond pathetic and ridiculous.     Madeleine Albright, Condoleeza Rice, Hillary Clinton, Carmen Ortiz, Imelda Marcos, Margaret Thatcher, the US soldier making the front pages torturing Iraqi prisoners of war (Lynndie England),… Mata Hari (oh by the way, Mike, guess who, Leni Riefenstahl…), Eva Braun, Golda Meir, Oriana Fallaci, Phyllis Schlafly… are all WOMEN, unless Moore had conveniently forgotten the fact (and the first ones listed I would add, by all most scrupulous and relevant standards of international law, also all WAR-CRIMINALS, who, if we did really live in an “ETHICAL WORLD”, dear Michael, and one that really did have a fair, rigorous, and impartial judicial system, would all be standing in the equivalent of a contemporary Nuremberg Trial, along with a very large portion of the higher echelons of the Obama administration…).

The abstract argument that feminists are now celebrating, i.e. US women being able to join their male cohorts in war-crimes, pillage and aggression in the service of Empire in foreign lands, namely “equality before the law” is one thing.    Yes, there should not be any legal impediments to seeking equal “opportunities” in engaging in the pursuits given to other sexes (or other races, ethnicities, etc.).    We have seen with Colin Powell and Condoleeza Rice, and of course Obama himself, just how well “racial equality” has allowed some individuals to join the war-criminals running the Empire…, and in the case of Condi, obviously a woman also.

Having agreed on the point of law however, doesn’t make a woman doing what her male counterparts do in the service of Empire any less morally despicable, repugnant and disgusting than when men engage in it.    The same goes for aspiring to the governmental or Korporate higher echelon positions in an Empire based on ever more astronomically brutal oppression both abroad and at home (blowback with a vengeance)…      The “glass ceiling” is a completely morally depraved phrase when it hides the sort of practices women “aspire” to join men in performing.

As for all the supposed ‘cleverness’ of Moore’s arguments about ‘framing’ the torture issue in “moral” vs “practical” (i.e. what works terms), it has basically nothing to do with the criticism(s) aimed at Bigelow and “Zero Dark Thirty”.    Most of her critics of course DO object to torture on moral grounds, AS WELL as arguing that most of the time it is also a useless and counterproductive method of interrogation.

The fact is infinitely more able, and meticulous critics (i.e. not propagandists, critics…) than Mr. Moore have reviewed the film, and found it to be precisely a work that defends and advocates for torture on “practical” grounds, from David Bromwich, who pretty much shows us what the “detective work” Moore is trying to inflate boils down to, as well as Bigelow’s self-promoting “macho” pseudo-‘feminist’ agenda,  to most recently Dave Clennon on the pages of CP; all critics whose detailed discussion of the movie’s plot, dialogues, details show that Moore’s account of it is pure fabrication and fantasy (and Clennon describes some the imaginary “Obama dialogues” Moore inserted in his essay).

And those oh so heroic Yanquis having to engage in it ‘despite themselves’ in their ‘quiet regular’ way, the sort of defense Bigelow has invoked, and Moore now abetted, which is basically a variant of the completely morally repugnant and bankrupt “yellow ribbon” crowd, who under the slogan “defend our troops” essentially give a blank cheque for anyone wearing a US military uniform, now of course, to Moore’s undoubted great pleasure, including women, to engage in the sort of everyday war-crimes, torture, massacres, rapes, pillage, that were party exposed by  A REAL AMERICAN HERO, BRADLEY MANNING, not some fictional figment of the Yanqi Leni Riefenstahl’s feel-good pseudo-vendetta … for Empire…     A form of rhetoric I might add (the “yellow ribbons”…) that Moore had trumpeted far and wide he was no longer supporting at this beginning of this month (January 2013).    Apparently he was planning all along to replace it with much worse…   Not to speak of the “omerta’” as to the reasons for killing and not capturing OBL, correctly often underscored in recent and critical articles on the assassination of an unarmed Bin-Laden, that point to the fact that this extrajudicial execution was carried out the way it was to prevent an inconvenient witness to the maneuverings of the Empire’s covert-ops to be able to testify….     Let alone the connections, as argued by many disbelievers in the “official 9/11 propaganda”, to the real background this act of most likely state-terrorism, on the model of those the US and NATO engaged in repeatedly during the times of Gladio and the so-called “strategia della tensione” in Italy.    So that the ‘false flag’ explanatory model is far from either irrational, unprecedented, or having many items of evidence, from nano-thermite to engineering guidelines, to rates and manner of building collapse, on its side…     So even if Moore and Bigelow didn’t personally believe in this explanation (a kill mission exclusively, as once again Bromwich has underscored, which, given past CIA connections, poses the very obvious and logical question….), they might at least have attempted to prove why it was not logically relevant or valid…

Of course ex post facto Bigelow has tried every mealy-mouthed rhetorical trick to argue that her movie is what it is not.     A part from the fact of torture, the “Hurt Locker” and “Zero Dark Thirty” are essentially propaganda pieces for the grunts in the aggressions of Empire, giving the individual perpetrators of these atrocities and war-crimes preemptive absolution and (im)moral blank cheques to commit more, because after all war is “dirty”, war is “complex”, and “we” do the “hard work” behind the scenes…

If Bigelow were really a genuine pacifist, or really had ANY of the ethical concerns Moore tries to pretend/propagandize she has, how come they are NOWHERE reflected in her filmography?     Are these great moral sentiments conveniently just dreams she has after her film comes under fire…?

By engaging in this despicable web of falsification, Moore just proves how much he despises the REAL HEROES in contemporary Amerika, those being PERSECUTED, TORTURED (yes, the designation by the UN’s own special rapporteur), BY THE OBAMA ADMINISTRATION’S MILITARY AND “JUSTICE” SYSTEM(S), in other words the BRADLEY MANNING’S OF THIS COUNTRY, who have REALLY PUT THEIR ENTIRE LIVES, EXISTENCE, IN JEOPARDY  TO DENOUNCE THE VICIOUS WAR-CRIMES AND TOTALITARIANISM OF AN EMPIRE AIMING AT WORLD DOMINATION AND EXEMPTING ITSELF FROM ANY FORM OF ACCOUNTABILITY WHATSOEVER, LET ALONE “MORAL”…

While he praises the contemporary Yanqi Leni Riefenstahls for their work of most abject propaganda, albeit with forms of particularly pervasive and perverse hypocrisy which even the Nazi propagandist could not quite contort herself into….

In a PS, Moore has the audacity to compare Oliver Stone (who has constantly had the courage to buck Hollywood tacit imperatives from “Salvador” to “JFK” (talk about the “conspiracy-theory” Korporate mass-media chorus it raised…), to his recent brilliant historical series on “Showtime”…      To even compare Bigelow’s work to his is a major insult, since Bigelow’s propaganda has absolutely no critical historical perspective or knowledge as regards the Empire whatsoever (a point repeatedly made by Bromwich): in fact it takes pride in not having any, and glorifying the totalitarian culture of secrecy.    It stands in the exact same relation to the Obama (and W) administrations as Riefenstahl did to Hitler’s Third Reich.    Except that in the history of cinema Riefenstahl continues to hold an important place for her aesthetic and technical innovations, regardless of her despicable associations, contributions that are certainly nowhere to be found in Ms. Bigelow’s products…

In his PS Moore also adds yet another straw-man (pardon… “woman”…) to his arsenal, namely that we should not force directors to “dumb down” their movies.

Michael, if any one of your readers even believes one sentence of your essay, they are already so “dumbed down” that they would be willing to think Bigelow is Orson Welles (forgive me many times, Orson…).

Mark Epstein can be reached at: mwepstein@verizon.net.

“He’s had four years and proved himself to be a Wall Street President!”

by SHOZAB RAZA and PARMBIR GILL
This interview with Dr. Cornel West was conducted following the Oxford Union Debate on November 22nd 2012.

SR: Why are you here speaking in favour of the Occupy Wall Street movement?

CW: The Occupy movement being the major public response to a 30 year class war against poor and working people, not just in the American Empire but around the world, that to have this space – this space has of course been consecrated by the Malcolm X’s of the world, the Desmond Tutus, and so many others who have come through here – it has a certain visibility, an international form, and so I figured it would be right.

SR: There have been some critiques of Occupy Wall Street from the Left: for example, that it failed to significantly engage with the labour movement and trade unions in the US or that its radically decentralized structure made it very difficult to arrive at decisions to accomplish particular objectives. And so moving forward, what are the lessons that we, as participants in Occupy and supporters of it, can learn from the movement?

CW: I think we have to draw a distinction between social motion and social movements. Social movements are very rare because they require a sophisticated level of organization, of leadership, of persons who are highly courageous and willing to actually pay a price. Social motion is very important because it helps shape the climate of opinion and that’s exactly what the Occupy motion has been all about – it helps shape the climate of opinion. But it was in many ways so heterogeneous, so diverse in all of its various voices and perspectives. What I loved about it was that there was a lot of respect. It wasn’t dogmatic, imposed from above, professional revolutionaries coming in with Truth (with a capital ‘T’) and imposing it on everybody. That’s what we were wrestling with in the 60’s and 70’s. You didn’t have that kind of thing this time around – and that was very important.

On the other hand, it was difficult to sustain it. But I think that the next wave of social activism will be among young people and it’s going to take a variety of different forms. I’m old school so I have to learn from young people – for example, about social networking to forms of democratic expression that I haven’t even thought of in that regard. I have a respect for the anarchists precisely because – though I’m not one – they have a powerful critique of concentration of power in the nation-state. And as a black man in America dealing with the repressive apparatus, you live under death threat every day from your own government. You know governments can be vicious – and that’s the history of black people in America. So then the anarchists say ‘we want democratic accountability, not just of the corporations (which, coming out of the socialist tradition, I accept) but we want to make sure that the government doesn’t have a concentration of power, especially instrumentalities of violence which can be brought to bear on dissidents, who are then criminalized and assassinated.’ And that’s very important. Yet at the same time, as a radical democrat or a deep democrat, in the end I’m not an anarchist but anarchism has some deep truths that one has to take into consideration.

PG: Cornel, you campaigned for Obama in 2008 but unlike many other critical supporters of the President, your critique of his policies eventually eclipsed your support as his first term unfolded. And as a result you’ve found yourself in confrontation with former comrades – but still brother – like Michael Eric Dyson, Al Sharpton and others, who remain allied to the Obama regime while purporting to be critical of it from within.

CW: You don’t see too much criticism coming from either one of them though! (laughs). I think they’ve sold their soul for a mess of Obama pottage!

PG: Right, and it’s obvious that these confrontations have led many in the mainstream American press to denounce you, but even then your popularity among poor and working people in America and across the world continues to grow. How do you account for that?

CW: Well, one important thing to keep in mind is that in the 65 events that I did, at each stop I would tell them that we must bring Reaganism to a close – McCain and Palin were the last moments of Reaganite policy (unregulated markets, indifference towards the poor, stagnating wages) – and that if Obama won, I would break dance in the afternoon and be his major critic the next morning. That’s how I ended every speech. And so I broke dance in the afternoon [when Obama won in 2008] because we did stop McCain and Palin. But the next morning I knew the social forces behind him (Wall Street and so forth) needed to be called into question. So when I went after Larry Summers, went after Tim Geithner, went after Gary Gensler and all the Wall St. folk who inhabited his space, his cabinet, Rahm Emanuel, his chief of staff, and so forth, they [his supporters] said ‘you’re turning on the President!’. I said ‘no, I’m just being consistent. I’m being true to what I said’. But then that’s where the demonization set in. But, you know, that goes with the territory.

PG: Was there a break-dance this November?

CW: God, no! He’s had four years and he’s proved himself to be a Wall St. President, he’s proved himself to be imperial to the core, he’s proved himself to be a war criminal. And you have to call that for what it is. And people say ‘oh you hatin’ ’ and I say ‘I’m a Christian. I hate the deed; I don’t hate the person’, because he has the potential to change. Malcolm X was a gangster for a long time; he was wrong, he changed and he became a great freedom fighter. All of us have the capacity to change, you see. And so in that sense, you know, as a Christian, ‘you love your enemies’ which means you better have some! (laughs) Because if you take a stand for poor and working people, you gonna’ have some enemies! That was part of what Jesus had in mind – if you go through life with no enemies, you’re probably not living a good life. You’re going to have enemies if you take a stance. And, the question about loving them is not sadomasochistic: you’re not loving your oppressors because they’re beating you down but because they’re still human beings and you know you have the capacity, inside of you, to actually engage in those same kinds of vicious forms of revenge, envy, domination, hatred and so forth. And therefore that allows a self-critique within your own soul. But, you know, I don’t want to get too theological here but the point is that it’s been a challenge. But what’s interesting now is that more and more people are coming around. I gave a talk in San Francisco with 4,000 people; in New York, 3,000 people. You think, ‘wow, this thing is getting bigger and bigger and bigger!’.

PG: Right, and the enemies grow apace.

CW:Absolutely! In this recent moment with the Middle East, you see it so very clearly that US policy is imperial to the core and Obama is right at the centre of it. And yet he puts up with these criminal massacres of precious folk. That doesn’t mean you have to be pro-Hamas – Hamas has gangsta’ proclivities too, but they’re a resistance movement against occupation. No mention of the occupation at all in the US discourse. That’s a sign that they’re hiding and concealing a fundamental reality that not just Hamas but the Palestinian people are wrestling with. My God, I am against occupation no matter what! The sad thing is that if it was Palestinian occupation of Jewish brothers and sisters, Hamas would probably be heroes in America. In that case, I would be in solidarity with my Jewish brothers and sisters. I wouldn’t be supportive of Hamas’ attack on innocent people but I would be calling for an end to Palestinian occupation of Jewish brothers and sisters. But that kind of double standard, that’s the hypocrisy that needs to be pointed out.

SR: On Democracy Now!, with Amy Goodman, you referred to Obama as a ‘Rockefeller Republican in blackface’. Can you explain why that description is fitting?

CW: Well because discourse in America has moved so far to the Right that Romney is far Right, and Obama is centrist. And a Rockefeller Republican in the 60’s and 70’s was in many ways very much what Obama is now. He’s calling for cuts with little bit of revenue increase with the tax from the well-to-do, but it’s going to be very modest, he keeps saying. There’s no serious talk about a massive investment, private or public, for jobs, for decent housing, and for education. And his foreign policy is not only continuous with Bush but in some ways even worse.

PG: For that much, Rockefeller Republican would’ve been sufficient. So, why ‘blackface’?

CW: Well, because he’s a black man. Because, you see, a black face in America makes a difference. Race matters in America. You can get away with a lot. Just by being black, people just assume you’ve got some connection to folk catching hell. Because when you get to New York, as soon as you get there, just go to the chocolate side of town and see the levels of social misery: the 50% of unemployment amongst young people, the 20% unemployment for everybody, the 40% of young kids in poverty, and so forth. So with a black face, they just figured that Obama must be progressive. Not necessarily! Clarence Thomas? No! Barack Obama is much more progressive than Clarence, but he’s in the centre. He’s a centrist.

PG: So you mentioned race. And it’s clear to everyone that, among other things, the relationship between race and class is fundamental to any understanding of US society in the present. You manage, more than many other critics, to hold the two categories together very well – affirming, on the one hand, the irreducibility of race to class, how the suffering of Native Americans, Blacks and Latinos is about more than just exploitation, while maintaining, on the other hand, that poor and working whites have little in common with white elites and so are indispensable to the struggle against racism as well as capitalism. What do you find to be the challenges of thinking in this way and are you ever tempted to cast one category, race or class, as the more decisive political force?

CW: Well, I think it shifts from historical context to historical context. I don’t think that history has any kind of essentialist narrative that always reflects the relation between race, class, gender, empire, region, and nation. All of these various categories have to be dipped in space and time, which is to say they have to take historical forms. And so various moments, for example slavery in 1860’s, it’s fairly clear, that’s racialized. They’re workers, but it’s racialized because it was white supremacist slavery. And so the issue of race split the country right down the middle – barbaric civil war, 750,000 now dead but it was still a class issue (as Dubois points out in Black Reconstruction). It was still a class issue but it took a racial form. And more and more these days, race is taking a class form because you’ve got a black middle class that is often times indifferent to the black poor. I’ll give you an example: that if middle class brothers and sisters, who I love deeply, were going to jail at the same level as Black poor brothers and sisters going to jail, who I love deeply, we’d have a different kind of black leadership. A qualitatively different kind of black leadership. Because the mass incarceration of America is class incarceration, for the most part. And so in that sense, you see my god the class divide is much deeper now than it was before and therefore you have to raise those issues in the name of justice, in the name of truth and in the name of love, because it’s not a matter of hating the black bourgeoisie, it’s just hating their cowardice, it’s hating their indifference, it’s hating their complacency. It’s hating the fact that somehow they think their child has more weight and value on the moral scale than Jamal and Latisha on the block. And that to me is just wrong.

Now of course that’s also true for the larger society. Can you imagine white young brothers and sisters going to jail at the same level as the black poor? Oh shoot, there’d be a White House conference every three days! Every three days! Oh my god, Suzy’s going to jail! Johnny’s going to jail! (laughs) One out of three whites incarcerated? Oh my god!

SR: There’s been a revival of Marxism: for example, commentators have noted that since 2008, sales of Das Kapital and the Communist Manifesto have risen. You describe yourself as a ‘non-Marxist socialist’. Can you elaborate?

CW: I think that a Marxist analysis is indispensable for any understanding, not just in the modern world but for our historical situation. I think in the end it’s inadequate but it is indispensable because how do you talk about oligarchy, plutocracy, monopolies, oligopolies, asymmetrical relations of power at the workplace between bosses and workers, the imperial tentacles, profit maximizing and so forth. That’s not Adam Smith. That’s not John Maynard Keynes. That’s Karl Marx.

It’s inadequate in the end because of the cultural issues. You have to deal with death, you have to deal with dread, despair, and disappointment. You have to deal with anxiety, insecurity, fears and so forth. And Marx just didn’t go in that direction. And people say, ‘well, you can go with Freud’. Yeah Freud got some interesting things to say, no doubt about that. But it’s indispensable and, in the end, inadequate. But it’s a beautiful thing to see the revival of a Marxist analysis. I think Marx was the great secular prophet of 19th century Europe. And that makes a difference.

PG: One predicament a lot of students like us have been having is that we want to get involved in political struggles for emancipation of various kinds. But we find ourselves in the university, and there’s this sense that the University is somehow in contradiction with those struggles, that there’s a gulf between them. Of course, you have the Marxist notion of the unity of theory and practice, which suggests these things can’t actually be separated in a productive way. And then you have the French Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser who argues that ‘philosophy represents class struggle in theory.’ In his view, academic disciplines within the university are themselves terrains on which struggles for emancipation must be fought. As a student, teacher and writer of philosophy yourself, and as someone who has maintained an active presence outside the university while still teaching within it, would you agree with Althusser? How important do you think it is to theorize our present predicaments and the means of overcoming them in relation to the more immediate struggles for better wages, shelter, food, status etc?

CW: Well, I think firstly you need to have an analysis of your workplace, and the academy is a professional managerial site in capitalist society, with deep ties to the military-industrial complex (in the US at least) , with deep ties to a US government with contracts, and more and more of them being bought out by the powers that be.

Now, what happens to the Humanities is that it is more and more marginalized because its more about science, technology, computers, so the Humanities are left very much on the periphery in this regard. But I believe any context is one of struggle. After teaching in prison all these years, if they can struggle in prison, we can struggle at Oxford, or Harvard, Yale or Princeton, or whatever it is, you see what I mean! (laughs). But you just have to be aware of what the structural constraints are.

Now the wonderful thing about universities is that they have a self-understanding (whether it’s true or not) of robust, uninhibited critical exchange, just like what we had tonight. That’s a beautiful thing. That’s 1823 to have that space. And of course it’s very fragile: you know it still has its structural constraints, it’s not always going to be workable, and they’re going to have certain censorship that’s still functioning in various ways. But that means then that you’re able to think critically. And then you can use whatever results you have as a form of weaponry in the struggles that you choose. So I highly encourage one to be in the academy, if one is so inclined. I’ve spent a lot of time with hip-hop artists, and they say ‘we’re more free than the academy’. Oh really? Radio, video and recording industry all owned by the same oligarchs. Now, how’re you going to get a deal? And when you get the deal like Lupe [Fiasco], he gets a deal and then they try to push him out. That’s a different kind of context but it’s the same struggle because he’s trying to be real. They want him to do g-string records and everything else. And he says ‘well, I don’t want to sell out like that’ but he’s got to, you know, support his family.

PG: And then they sign Chief Keef.

CW: (laughs) Yeah we’ve got to pray for that Chicago brother! But he’s so young, he’s only 16, we gonna’ straighten him out!

Shozab Raza and Parmbir Gill are Oxford University graduate students of Anthropology and History, respectively.

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By Joseph Kishore, wsws.org
Published by the International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI)

With just weeks to go before the US presidential election on November 6, the Nation magazine is ramping up its campaign for the reelection of Obama.

Four years ago, the Nation—the standard-bearer of left-liberal support for the Democratic Party—hailed the election of Obama as a transformative event that would end the right-wing consensus in American politics. “Make no mistake,” wrote the magazine’s editor, Katrina vanden Heuvel, in August 2008, after Obama had secured the Democratic Party nomination, “[Obama’s] election will open a new era of reform.”

In the 2008 election, the Nation sought to cultivate support for Obama’s campaign. At that time, Obama’s claim to represent “hope” and “change” found some popular resonance, particularly among youth, reflecting a deep popular hatred of the policies of the Bush administration and a belief that an African American would be more sympathetic to the plight of working people.
The election of Obama, the Democrats and their “left” supporters such as the Nation argued, would bring with it a sea change in American politics.

Four years later, these illusions have been shattered. Genuine popular support has largely dissipated as a consequence of the policies of the Obama administration itself. No less committed to Obama’s reelection, however, the supposedly “left” supporters of Obama must now contend with this record. This is what lends their arguments a particularly dishonest and internally contradictory character.

The Nation magazine’s October 22 issue, which includes 10 articles by various Nation writers and “left” activists, is devoted to arguing in favor of support for Obama’s reelection. The main article, by Deepak Bhargava, bears the headline, “Why Obama?” Bhargava is executive director of the Center for Community Change, a “community building” organization with close ties to the Democratic Party.

His piece is preceded by an editorial entitled “Re-elect the President” (analyzed separately by the WSWS in “The class issues in the 2012 US elections”).

The Nation’s argument for Obama’s reelection runs along the following lines: Yes, Obama has done certain “disappointing” things, but these are balanced by positive and “progressive” things. Whatever concerns might exist, it is necessary to “lean into this election without ambivalence,” Bhargava writes, since a “defeat will be catastrophic for the progressive agenda and movement.”

Economic and social devastation, bank bailouts, expanding war, police state measures, wholesale attacks on teachers, auto workers and workers in general—for the Nation writers, all this falls under the euphemistic category of “disappointments.”
Bhargava, for example, notes that the administration has failed “to hold Wall Street accountable for crashing the economy,” while doing nothing for “millions of homeowners facing foreclosure.”

Another writer in the same issue, Robert Borosage, acknowledges that the administration “turned toward austerity…in the midst of mass unemployment, rising poverty and declining wages. [Obama] joined the ‘elite consensus’ on austerity early and has shown that he’s ready to put Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid ‘on the table.’”

On the administration’s assault on the Bill of Rights, Bhargava writes that Obama has “failed…to reverse the erosion of civil liberties in the ‘war on terror.’” This “failure” includes continuing the Bush administration’s policies of domestic spying, keeping Guantanamo Bay open, and opposing the prosecution of those responsible for torture.

Bhargava downplays the extent of Obama’s assault on democratic rights, describing it as a lack of action, when, in reality, the current administration has expanded the buildup of police powers begun under Bush, including Obama’s assertion of the president’s “right” to assassinate anyone, including US citizens, without any judicial process.

The Nation is hustling votes for a man who holds weekly meetings at which he personally signs off on drone assassinations, knowing that those killed will include innocent men, women and children.

What are the supposed “gains” cited by the Nation? They fall into two main categories: right-wing policies that are palmed off as reforms, and token measures taken to placate the liberal-left milieu and address its lifestyle and identity politics concerns.
Chief among the former is Obama’s health care overhaul, which Bhargava claims will “provide coverage to 35 million people.” In fact, Obama’s health care measures require individuals to purchase insurance from private companies or face a penalty, thereby strengthening the hand of the insurance corporations. The main purpose of these measures is to cut health care costs for the government and private corporations.

Nothing is said by the writers of the Nation of the hundreds of billions of dollars in cuts to Medicare included in Obama’s plan, or the campaign being waged by Democrats against supposedly “unnecessary” tests and procedures. Little if anything is said of the bipartisan plans after the elections to slash trillions of dollars in domestic spending, taking an axe to Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security.

The second category of “gains” consists of sops from the administration to its middle-class “left” supporters, with something for each of the various constituencies that make up this political milieu.

Many of the articles cite what Bhargava calls Obama’s “executive action to protect more than 1 million immigrant youths from deportation.” This thoroughly cynical maneuver requires undocumented immigrant youth who meet stiff eligibility requirements to file with the Department of Homeland Security—thereby exposing themselves and their families to potential victimization—in the hope of receiving a two-year reprieve from deportation.

In defending Obama, the Nation is led to absurd contradictions. According to Bhargava, Obama is defending immigrant youth even as he oversees an “alarming increase in deportations.” The administration has supposedly carried out significant “financial reform,” even as it has “failed to hold Wall Street accountable for crashing the economy.”

Then there is Obama’s repeal of the military’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy, which banned openly gay individuals from serving, and Obama’s verbal expression of support for gay marriage, which actually committed the administration to nothing.

These measures are entirely compatible with the interests of the financial aristocracy. To the extent that democratic issues involved, the Nation never seeks to explain how democratic rights can be defended by a party dedicated to serving the corporate elite, lowering the living standards of the broad masses of the people, and upholding staggering levels of social inequality.

As in 2008, chief among the arguments for Obama’s reelection is the fact that he is African American. The elevation of race to the fundamental social category in the United States has been central to the politics of the Democratic Party for decades. The fact that the president is black has been hailed as the high point of social progress, even as the vast majority of African Americans suffer devastating poverty and unemployment.

The crudest example of the racialist argument for Obama’s reelection is provided by Bill Fletcher, a former assistant to AFL-CIO President John Sweeney and cofounder of “Progressives for Obama.” He writes, “The 2012 election is not really about Obama and Obama’s record.” Rather, it is about countering the Republicans, who are based on “the racists and the fearful within white America.” These racists “not only despise the idea of an African-American serving as president of what they believe to be a white republic; they are terrified that the demographics of the country are changing in favor of people of color.”

This injection of racial politics is aimed at tarring any opposition to Obama—particularly from the working class—as racist.
Notably absent from any of the articles in the Nation is a serious analysis of military policy, outside of a reference to the administration’s supposed “ending” of the war in Iraq. This is because the Nation and the social forces that it represents fully support the administration’s expansion of war, including the assault on Libya and the current stoking up of a civil war in Syria.
None of the writers refers to plans underway for launching military action against Iran in the aftermath of the elections, regardless of who is elected. Such a war could quickly escalate into a confrontation with China and Russia, which the Nation would find a way to support.

Behind the sophistry and lies, the arguments of the Nation boil down to insisting that it is necessary to support Obama to ensure the gains of “progressives.” As one of the writers puts it, “A GOP victory robs us of the oxygen required to grow deeper and broader roots for the progressive movement.”

What is this “progressive movement?” There are real social interests involved, but they have nothing to do with the working class.

The Nation speaks for a layer of the upper-middle class that has done quite well under Obama—sections of the trade union bureaucracy, tenured professors at elite universities, well-paid journalists in the orbit of the political establishment and employed by Democratic Party think tanks, better-off sections of minority populations. Obama has offered them “space,” soliciting their services in policing the working class and maintaining the political order.

They are upset at the prospect of a Romney victory, but not because of Romney’s viciously anti-working class agenda, which Obama shares. Rather, they are concerned about their own positions and privileges, which are linked to the fortunes of the Democratic Party.

In the end, the anti-working class and militarist policies of the Obama administration are not disappointments at all. The writers of the Nation are far more concerned about the danger of an independent movement of the working class than they are about wage cutting, unemployment and attacks on education and health care.

The upper-middle class layers for which the Nation speaks are sensitive to the potential for a movement from below, outside of the Democratic Party, which would threaten their own social and political position. Their social grievances, and their opposition to the Republicans, reflect dissatisfaction with the distribution of wealth within the top 10 percent, not the lowering of the living standards of the bottom 60 percent. They exclude any genuinely popular and democratic alternative to the two-party system—that is, a socialist alternative.

The elections—an undemocratic and highly manipulated contest between two right-wing representatives of the American financial oligarchy—do present workers and young people with a real choice. But it is not, as the Nation would have it, between the “lesser of two evils.”

It is the choice of taking up the struggle to build a mass socialist movement of the working class in opposition to the capitalist system, which is incapable of meeting the basic needs of the people, and the political establishment that defends the system, including the Nation magazine and its milieu.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

JOE KISHORE is a senior activist with the Social Equality Party (SEP), and a member of the world socialist web site.

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