Black pundits rally around the president

Three high-profile African-American members of the punditocracy have reacted to the mounting chorus of criticism against Obama, particularly over the tax deal with the Republicans. Although they have different political backgrounds and adopt varying tones, they agree that challenges to Obama are ill-advised, except for what amounts to friendly criticism. In other words, they would prefer that the left treat Obama in more or less the same way that Fox News treated Bush. You could find an Ann Coulter or a Rush Limbaugh disagreeing with Bush over, for example, immigration policy but there was never any question about whether or not he was The Man.

On Friday, Washington Post op-ed columnist Colbert I. King issued a Memo to the left: Hands off Obama. It turns out that the left he was referring to was not the kind of people who write for Counterpunch but the Democratic Party left that might back someone against Obama in the 2012 primaries. He writes:

Sabotage the nation’s first black president and the Democratic Party might as well bid farewell to its most loyal base of supporters: African Americans.

In 2008, the turnout for young black eligible voters was higher than that of young eligible voters of any other racial or ethnic group, according to the Pew Research Center. Consider them gone in future congressional and presidential elections if the left dooms Obama in 2012.

Of course, Obama seems to be doing a pretty good job himself convincing Blacks to stay home, with Black turnout decreasing from 13 percent in 2008 to 10 percent in the 2010 midterm elections.

King, as might be expected, warns that if Obama had not been elected, all sorts of really terrible things would be happening to the country. But, thanks to Obama, Wall Street has been reformed and billions have been spent to fight homelessness and hunger. It should be mentioned at this point that Colbert I. King was once the Executive Director of the World Bank so he should have a pretty good handle on fighting poverty. (Insert irony symbol here.) He is also a big fan of Obama’s efforts on behalf of peace, confirming the wisdom of placing the Nobel Peace Prize upon his saintly shoulders:

Would the United States be on its way out of lraq under a McCain presidency? Or pursuing a strategy to disengage from Afghanistan, even while thrashing al-Qaeda and rounding up home-grown terrorists?

I should mention that the misspelled “LRAQ” above is in the original article, a sign no doubt that the Washington Post’s editing standards are on a par with its politics. The idea that the U.S. is “disengaging” from Afghanistan, of course, has the same credibility as Obama waging a war on poverty. None.

Now all this is par for the course for an op-ed writer at the Washington Post. We wouldn’t expect anything different. But another op-ed piece that appeared in the N.Y. Times this weekend might have thrown some for a loop, since it was written by Ishmael Reed, one of those people who do write for Counterpunch. In What Progressives Don’t Understand About Obama, Reed says that calls for Obama to “man up” against the Republicans (a term I doubt that Rachel Maddow has ever used) will backfire since “he’d be dismissed as an angry black militant with a deep hatred of white people”. This strikes me as somewhat puzzling since Obama campaigned vociferously about a tax break for millionaires up until very recently. When he was speaking out in that manner, nobody ever likened him to Louis Farrakan, now did they?

This is not the first time that Reed has expressed his displeasure with Obama critics. Last May he was interviewed by Jill Nelson on Counterpunch about his new book Barack Obama and the Jim Crow Media: The Return of the Nigger Breakers. It’s not just the mainstream media that is racist. It is also the alternative media:

The white males who dominate the progressive media are used to black guys playing basketball. Their opinions dominate NPR, Pacifica, The Nation even though it has a feminist editor. They’re crazy about Michael Jordan.

NPR and The Nation I understand but Pacifica? There are all sorts of problems with the network, but excluding Black voices is not one of them—at least it wasn’t when I listened to the local station. It turns out that the offending party at Pacifica is our good friend and comrade Doug Henwood, about whom Reed had this to say in the aforementioned book:

On January 1 during her annual retrospective program Obama was subjected to withering criticism by her guests and this was followed the next day on progressive Pacifica radio by Doug Henwood, a marxist economist, who was just as unrelenting in his criticism of Obama.

Even while admitting on his Pacifica show, aired on Jan 9, that manufacturing jobs were beginning to return, he, using the kind of language that slave masters used when trapping the movements of a fugitive slave, referred to Obama as slippery and like some others who are treating non-white voters as invisible, noted that Obama was losing his friends.

This is what Doug said. I will let others judge whether this is the “kind of language that slave masters used”:

Though the right has been energized by fighting against Obama’s phantasmic radical leftism, he is of course no such thing. But his very vaguness and slipperiness has come to haunt him. Since he stands for little other than compromises aimed at shoring up the status quo, his ranks of enthusiastic supporters shrink every day. He has more enemies and fewer friends all the time. This is what happens when you’re a brand rather than someone with principles.

And finally there is the inimitable Bill Fletcher Jr., who unlike King and Reed does represent himself as some kind of Marxist, although never so gauche as to actually cite Lenin or Mao in his communications to the left.

Over on ZNet, he holds forth on Obama the Tax Cuts, & the Federal Pay Freeze. You can find the same riff about avoiding the “angry black man” image as in Reed’s piece:

Emotion from a black person is often perceived by whites as threatening and since President Obama wanted to assure whites as to his stability, he could not afford to show emotion. Thus, the anger that millions are feeling, regarding the collapse of their lives, is not something that he can channel because to do so would be to raise the spectre of the Mau Mau, literally and figuratively in light of his Kenyan background…at least that seems to be his fear.

All this is sheer nonsense. Nobody ever asked Obama to howl at the cameras as if he were Howard Beale in “Network”. All he had to do was calmly and coolly—just like Mr. Spock—tell the insurance companies and the American people that he was pushing ahead with a single-payer plan, for example. But the problem was not in his emotions but in his intellect. The guy believes deeply in U. of Chicago economics and his fans on the left had a hard time figuring that out before they got involved with nonsense like Progressives for Obama. You might as well have launched Progressives for Milton Friedman.

Fletcher concludes his article with a warning that a primary challenge to Obama would not be a good idea since it “is unlikely that a good, multi-racial, progressive challenge – that has credibility – can be mounted against Obama.” My own position is that would not be a good idea but for a different reason, namely that it would be a god-damned waste of time and energy. More about that here.

Bill Fletcher Jr. has reacted to an open letter to the Left Establishment by calling attention to his criticisms of the president:

So, assuming that there is loving intent from the authors–and i am certainly not critical of the signatories–then i would say, i agree with many of the criticisms they have offered of the Obama administration; i have offered many of those criticisms already; i have been active, as have most of my colleagues, in trying to engage liberal and progressive social forces in the need to both combat the political Right as well as put the pressure on the Democrats; and, guess what?  I will continue to, and i am assuming that my colleagues will as well.

As I said at the outset, leftist supporters of Obama have not been shy about making criticisms. But this is not adequate to the task. Instead what is needed is a posture of opposition, no different in fact from that taken against George W. Bush. This is a bridge too far for people like Fletcher and obviously why the open letter was written. Nobody believes that Fletcher, Vanden Heuvel and Michael Moore will ever budge on the basic question of supporting Obama but it is important to raise awareness about their obligations to the left, in whose name they presume to speak.

There are clear signs that Obama has made up his mind to wash his hands entirely of the “professional left”. Whether they continue to carry a torch for him is their business, not ours. But at least one professional rightwing pundit has it all figured out, even if they don’t. In a mailing to Weekly Standard readers, Matthew Continetti, a rightwing asshole of biblical proportions, professed an admiration for Obama that exceeded the Establishment Left’s. This is a contradiction for them to resolve, not us:

Well, I’m in a good mood. It only took about a month after the midterm election for President Obama to start moving to the center-right. In the last week, the president has (a) frozen salaries for non-defense federal employees, (b) negotiated a major trade deal with South Korea, and (c) agreed to a two-year extension of current tax rates along with a temporary reduction in the payroll tax. At this rate he’ll be haggling with Paul Ryan over the fine points of the Roadmap for America’s Future by next August.

The tax deal, moreover, falsifies two myths. The first is that Obama is incapable of moving to the center. I confess, I had my doubts. The man is too professorial, too committed to the liberal view of the world. What I forgot was that he is also a politician who seeks reelection. If his speech announcing the tax deal is any indication, Obama will kick and scream as he works with Republicans in the next Congress. He does not like ceding ground to American conservatism. But that’s fine. He doesn’t have to like it. What’s important is that conservative ideas will have an opportunity to work.

The other myth? That the left matters. Oh, they’ll howl that Obama is abandoning his base. They’ll point to the emerging center-right fiscal consensus, the lack of a public option in the health care bill, the president’s continued intervention in Afghanistan. They’ll make a fair case, especially when it comes to Obama’s relations with Wall Street, that the president is an elitist who has no connection or sympathy with the common man. The talk shows and headlines will be filled with chatter that Obama’s “betrayal” will hurt him in 2012.

But none of it will make any difference. For the fact is that, while the center-left is overrepresented in the public discourse, the liberal core is limited to around 20 to 30 percent of the electorate. There are far more votes to mine in the places where voters identify as conservative. Anyone can see that—even the president. So the question isn’t whether Obama can survive the disaffection of the left. It’s whether Republicans will be ready when the president tries to poach the center-right.

Dick Riding Obama

A left establishment member reacts to the open letter

John

So I started reading this letter which sounded pretty good and it looked like I signed it, so I read further and discovered that it was to as a member of a group I didn’t know I belonged to called the “Left Establishment.” As I kept reading, it was a vile, toxic diatribe ending with a demand that I, along with the rest of the “Left Establishment”, endorse a demonstration this week in Washington featuring civil disobedience at the White House fence.

To whomever sent the letter, I have to say I’m sorry that I just don’t respond positively to nasty invitations. I hope you can understand. Calm down and tell me who you are before the conspiracy theories mushroom.

Actually, I thought the Dec. 16 action seemed somewhat justifiable in light of current events – the WikiLeaks releases and erupting divisions within the Democratic Party. And I love the people who plan to get arrested. Maybe a big crowd will show up, but not because it was a smart idea to begin with. Mid-December is not the best time to turn out masses of people. But stuff happens, and now many people are boiling.

My personal best to those who are being arrested. They include a former Pentagon official, former CIA agent, a former New York Times reporter, and a mother who lost a son to war and was radicalized as a result. The lesson for me is that people can change from hawks to doves, from spies to whistleblowers, if organizers organize and events reshape their perceptions. That’s the lesson of WikiLeaks, that folk on the inside sometimes come find their situation intolerable and break away from old thinking.

Civil disobedience is a moral expression, and can be a personal healing. Sometimes it ignites a larger movement, or inspires other individuals to step up. We need more of it.

But I also think we need an outside/inside strategy that shifts public opinion more and more against the war. We need to persuade the undecided, not simply to create images of dissent. The peace movement will grow steadily in the months ahead, on its own, but also in its relation to other compelling causes, among them: Wall Street regulation, clean energy/green jobs, and the steady shift towards an unfettered market philosophy over our lives. Civil disobedience can light a flame, but the case for thoroughgoing radical reform must be made on our streets, our workplaces, our religious institutions, and yes, within the Democratic Party – whose overwhelming majority support progressive objectives. Members of the Progressive Democrats of America, and the Congressional Progressive Caucus, are vital elements of our movement.

I would like every person who signed this letter to read it again, and be kind enough to retract their signatures or explain why.

This is not the time to inflict internal damage on a community which is already weak enough. It’s important to get a grip.

The peace and justice community is a fragile form of social ecology, with diversity being an essential quality. Everyone is entitled to a different approach, but there also is an essential unity that can be achieved, unless a malign force is introduced.

I have been working every day since 2002 to end these wars. I will never stop. I supported Barack Obama for president in 2008, and am glad I did so. At the time I also said progressives should disagree with him on Afghanistan, NAFTA, global warming and Wall Street, and I have pursued progressive alternatives every day. I have been so busy on the WikiLeaks crisis since August that I just haven’t had time to drop by the White House and pick up my marching orders.

TOM HAYDEN
Director
Peace and Justice Resource Center

* * * *

Dear Mr. Hayden,

You refer to our letter urging you to strongly support militant protest against the Obama administration as “vile” and “toxic”.

These words are misapplied.

Rather these are adjectives appropriately directed at the policies of the Obama administration, those which we mentioned, and provide documenting links to, along with others which we don’t. (For many of us, the omission the Obama administration’s disgraceful policies with respect to Israel and Palestine was regrettable.)

We note that you do not attempt to defend any of these noting merely that you remain “glad . . . that you supported Barack Obama for President.”

Rather, the main focus of your response is protest directed against Obama’s expansion of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, in particular, the civil disobedience action on Dec. 16 which you refer to as “somewhat justified.”

This action, and other protests to come, are not “somewhat” but absolutely justified on any reasonable moral, practical and political grounds.  They need strong unqualified support, from you and the others who claim to speak for the left,  not the provisional, weak endorsement you provide here.

You then accuse us of undermining the “fragile social ecology” required for growth of the peace movement.

Again, this is a charge which is not appropriately directed at us but at you.

For citizens do not protest only when they feel their protests are “somewhat” justifiable.  They do so when they are aware of the fact of the matter: that protest against this and numerous other Obama administration policies is now, and has been for some time, an urgent necessity.

We hope that you reconsider your continuing failure to come to terms with not only with the catastrophe which is the Obama administration but also for the damage which your insufficiently critical support has inflicted on the only force which has the capacity oppose it:  mass, organized, and militant expressions of popular protest.

We therefore thank you for this response which demonstrates far better than we could why you are a deserving recipient of our letter.

Best Regards,

John Halle

 

15 year old British student raps it down

White Material

French director Claire Denis would appear tailor made for the film studies departments of the most prestigious universities, starting from the fact that she herself is a Professor of Film at the European Graduate School in Saas-Fee, Switzerland. Her particular specialty is postcolonialism, a perfect expression of which is “White Material” now showing at Lincoln Plaza and IFC theaters in New York, two premier locales for art films.

My first encounter with a Claire Denis film was the 1999 Beau Travail, an adaptation of Herman Melville’s “Billy Budd” using French Legionnaire characters stationed in Africa. As a Lacanian strongly influenced by the philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy, who was influenced in turn by Derrida and Bataille among others, Melville’s homoerotic tale was made to order for someone preoccupied with what they call The Body in postmodernist studies. I have to give credit where credit is due. Although I much preferred Melville’s original, her adaptation was compelling in its own art-house manner as the trailer would indicate:

Denis’s interest in African “problems” has a lot to do with growing up as the daughter of a French civil servant who was stationed in Burkina Faso, Somalia, Senegal and Cameroon. Her decision to make “White Material” was obviously influenced by current events, namely the civil wars in Liberia and Sierra Leone, as well as Mugabe’s crackdown on white farmers. Since she has essentially made an amalgam of two very different processes, a criticism might be raised that she is not very interested in African reality. In all likelihood, this film maker might accept this criticism but deem it beside the point because she is—after all—striving for Deeper Truths.

The movie’s main character is Maria Vial (Isabelle Huppert), a coffee plantation owner in an unnamed African country (perhaps it might have been called Zimberia since it is an amalgam of Zimbabwe and Liberia) that is being ravaged by civil war. The insurgents, mostly children or teenagers in makeshift uniforms, are streaming toward the plantation in order to hook up with “The Boxer”, the wounded leader of the rebellion (played by the renowned Ivory Coast actor Isaach De Bankolé). The Boxer is the nephew of one of Maria Vial’s hired hands and she does not seem bothered by the fact that he is a rebel leader and wounded.

Indeed, nothing seems to bother her. Despite the fact that the army has warned her to leave her property and despite the fact that “survival packs” are being dropped all over her land from helicopters, all she seems concerned about is harvesting her coffee beans. When her pickers depart in order to save their necks, she scolds them about being nervous nellies and goes to the nearby town in order to recruit a new crew.

As all this transpires, we hear from a disk jockey in a nearby micro-radio station who rants against white settlers and the government while reggae is playing. If most of the movie evokes Zimbabwe and Liberia, these segments evoke Rwanda where disk jockeys incited mass murder.

Her ailing father is more in touch with reality than her but refuses to leave the plantation because he is practically on his death bed and sees no need to flee. Her ex-husband, who lives on the property, has taken steps to sell the property to the mayor of the nearby town who refuses to pay him anything. In a time of social collapse, the property is worthless.

Finally, there is her son Manuel (Nicolas Duvauchelle), the most compelling figure in the cast. In his early 20s, Manuel is a total lout covered in tattoos who sleeps to noon each day and generally refuses to take part in plantation chores.

At one point he is set upon by two armed child rebels—one bearing a home-made spear, the other a machete—who cut off a piece of his blond hair in a kind of postcolonial symbolic action. Later on, apparently driven mad by this act, he shaves off the rest of his hair and stuffs a big clump of it into the mouth of the family’s Black housekeeper who storms off, only after urging her mixed-race son to become part of the rebel movement.

And to top it all off, Manuel goes off on his motorcycle, hunting rifle strapped to his back, in search of the rebels. Once he finds them, he invites them back to the plantation where they will merrily sack and torch the place together in the spirit of “Zero For Conduct”. Why this turn of heart for the tattooed settler? Who knows? At this point, Claire Denis is far more interested in striking imagery rather than narrative logic and she is quite good at it, I must say.

So, what drives this rather over-the-top movie forward is the conflict between a batty group of white settlers and a band of feral youth who function in this movie in pretty much the same fashion as the zombies in AMC’s excellent series “The Walking Dead”. When will the teenaged rebels finally knock down the doors of the plantation villa and eat the inhabitants? Oooh. Scary, Lacanian stuff.

As one might expect, not a single African has more than a line or two of dialog in the entire movie, except for the mayor who is a kind of mediator between the scary Blacks and the plantation owning family. It is really shocking to consider that not a single word comes out of the mouth of The Boxer, played by one of Africa’s finest actors. One has to wonder whether Claire Denis’s failure to make such an important character speak for himself is a function of her own post-postcolonial attitudes. If she had seen the excellent documentary War Don Don, about a Sierra Leone militia leader railroaded by an imperialist court, she might have gotten some ideas about how to develop such a character. My guess is that her film tastes run to Wim Wenders and Jim Jarmusch, not such material.

Having said all this, I can recommend this film despite its questionable politics. Claire Denis is an excellent story-teller and cinematographer who is capable of spellbinding work. It is too bad that she is not one-one hundredth the talent of a Gillo Pontecorvo who certainly would have known how to bring a character like The Boxer to life. But then again, Pontecorvo’s brand of Marxist agitprop is not very fashionable in film school nowadays…

An Irishman tells it like it is

(Hat tip to Counterpunch)

 

An open letter to the left establishment

From http://protestobama.org/

A call to Michael Moore, Norman Solomon, Katrina van den Heuvel, Michael Eric Dyson, Barbara Ehrenreich, Thomas Frank, Tom Hayden, Bill Fletcher Jr., Jesse Jackson Jr., and other high profile progressive supporters of the Obama electoral campaign to actively support protests against the Obama administration.

With the Obama administration beginning its third year, it is by now painfully obvious that the predictions of even the most sober Obama supporters were overly optimistic. Rather than an ally, the administration has shown itself to be an implacable enemy of reform.

It has advanced repeated assaults on the New Deal safety net (including the previously sacrosanct Social Security trust fund), jettisoned any hope for substantive health care reform, attacked civil rights and environmental protections, and expanded a massive bailout further enriching an already bloated financial services and insurance industry. It has continued the occupation of Iraq and expanded the war in Afghanistan as well as our government’s covert and overt wars in South Asia and around the globe.

Along the way, the Obama administration, which referred to its left detractors as “f***ing retarded” individuals that required “drug testing,” stepped up the prosecution of federal war crime whistleblowers, and unleashed the FBI on those protesting the escalation of an insane war.

Obama’s recent announcement of a federal worker pay freeze is cynical, mean-spirited “deficit-reduction theater”. Slashing Bush’s plutocratic tax cuts would have made a much more significant contribution to deficit reduction but all signs are that the “progressive” president will cave to Republican demands for the preservation of George W. Bush’s tax breaks for the wealthy Few. Instead Obama’s tax cut plan would raise taxes for the poorest people in our country.

The election of Obama has not galvanized protest movements. To the contrary, it has depressed and undermined them, with the White House playing an active role in the discouragement and suppression of dissent – with disastrous consequences. The almost complete absence of protest from the left has emboldened the most right-wing elements inside and outside of the Obama administration to pursue and act on an ever more extreme agenda.

We are writing to you because you are well-known writers, bloggers and filmmakers with access to a range of old and new media, and you have in your power the capacity to help reignite the movement which brought millions onto the streets in February of 2003 but which has withered ever since. There are many thousands of progressives who follow your work closely and are waiting for a cue from you and others to act. We are asking you to commit yourself to actively supporting the protests of Obama administration policies which are now beginning to materialize.

In this connection we would like to mention a specific protest: the civil disobedience action being planned by Veterans for Peace involving Chris Hedges, Daniel Ellsberg, Joel Kovel, Medea Benjamin, Ray McGovern, several armed service veterans and others to take place in front of the White House on Dec. 16th.

Should you commit yourselves to backing this action and others sure to materialize in weeks and months ahead, what would otherwise be regarded as an emotional outburst of the “fringe left” will have a better chance of being seen as expressing the will of a substantial majority not only of the left, but of the American public at large. We believe that your support will help create the climate for larger and increasingly disruptive expressions of dissent – a development that is sorely needed and long overdue.

We hope that we can count on you to exercise the leadership that is required of all of us in these desperate times.

Best Regards,

Sen. James Abourezk
Michael Albert
Rocky Anderson
Jared Ball
Russel Banks
Thomas Bias
Noam Chomsky
Bruce Dixon
Frank Dorrel
Gidon Eshel
Jamilla El-Shafei
Okla Elliott
Norman Finkelstein
Glen Ford
Joshua Frank
Margaret Flowers M.D.
John Gerassi
Henry Giroux
Matt Gonzalez
Kevin Alexander Gray
Judd Greenstein
DeeDee Halleck
John Halle
Chris Hedges
Doug Henwood
Edward S. Herman
Dahr Jamail
Louis Kampf
Allison Kilkenny
Jamie Kilstein
Joel Kovel
Mark Kurlansky
Peter Linebaugh
Scott McLarty
Cynthia McKinney
Dede Miller
Russell Mokhiber
Bobby Muller
Christian Parenti
Michael Perelman
Peter Phillips
Louis Proyect
Ted Rall
Michael Ratner
Cindy Sheehan
Chris Spannos
Paul Street
Sunil Sharma
Jeffrey St. Clair
Len Weinglass
Cornel West
Sherry Wolf
Michael Yates
Mickey Z
Kevin Zeese

Please sign the Open Letter to the Left Establishment.

James Moody passes on

NY Times December 10, 2010

James Moody, Jazz Saxophonist, Dies at 85

By PETER KEEPNEWS

James Moody, a jazz saxophonist and flutist celebrated for his virtuosity, his versatility and his onstage ebullience, died on Thursday in San Diego. He was 85 and lived in San Diego.

His death, at a hospice in San Diego, was confirmed by his wife, Linda.

In November 2010, Mr. Moody revealed that he had pancreatic cancer and had decided against receiving chemotherapy or radiation treatment. He underwent surgery in February to have his gall bladder and blockage in his digestive system removed.

Mr. Moody, who began his career with the trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie shortly after World War II and maintained it well into the 21st century, developed distinctive and equally fluent styles on both tenor and alto saxophone, a relatively rare accomplishment in jazz. He also played soprano saxophone, and in the mid-1950s he became one of the first significant jazz flutists, impressing the critics if not himself.

“I’m not a flute player,” he told one interviewer. “I’m a flute holder.”

The self-effacing humor of that comment was characteristic of Mr. Moody, who took his music more seriously than he took himself. His fellow musicians admired him for his dexterity, his unbridled imagination and his devotion to his craft, as did critics; reviewing a performance in 1980, Gary Giddins of The Village Voice praised Mr. Moody’s “unqualified directness of expression” and said his improvisations at their best were “mini-epics in which impassioned oracles, comic relief, suspense and song vie for chorus time.” But audiences were equally taken by his ability to entertain.

Defying the stereotype of the modern jazz musician as austere and humorless (and following the example of Gillespie, whom he considered his musical mentor and with whom he worked on and off for almost half a century), Mr. Moody told silly jokes; peppered his repertory with unlikely numbers like “Beer Barrel Polka” and the theme from “The Flintstones”; and often sang. His singing voice was unpolished but enthusiastic, and his noticeable lisp, a result of having been born partly deaf, added to the comic effect.

The song he sang most often had a memorable name and an unusual history. Based on the harmonic structure of “I’m in the Mood for Love,” it began life as an instrumental when Mr. Moody recorded it in Stockholm in 1949, improvising an entirely new melody on a borrowed alto saxophone. Released as “I’m in the Mood for Love” (and credited to that song’s writers) even though his rendition bore only the faintest resemblance to the original tune, it was a modest hit for Mr. Moody in 1951. It became a much bigger hit shortly afterward when the singer Eddie Jefferson wrote lyrics to Mr. Moody’s improvisation and another singer, King Pleasure, recorded it as “Moody’s Mood for Love.”

“Moody’s Mood for Love” (which begins with the memorable lyric “There I go, there I go, there I go, there I go …”) became a jazz and pop standard, recorded by Aretha Franklin, George Benson and others, and a staple of Mr. Moody’s concert and nightclub performances as sung by Mr. Jefferson, who was a member of his band for many years. Mr. Jefferson was shot to death in 1979; when Mr. Moody, who was in the middle of a long hiatus from jazz at the time, resumed his career a few years later, he began singing the song himself. He never stopped.

James Moody — he was always Moody, never James, Jim or Jimmy, to his friends and colleagues — was born in Savannah, Ga., on March 26, 1925, and raised in Newark. Despite being hard of hearing, he gravitated toward music and began playing alto saxophone at 16, later switching to tenor. He played with an all-black Army Air Forces band during World War II. After being discharged in 1946, he auditioned for Gillespie, who led one of the first big bands to play the complex and challenging new form of jazz known as bebop. He failed that audition but passed a second one a few months later, and soon captured the attention of the jazz world with a brief but fiery solo on the band’s recording of the Gillespie composition “Emanon.”

Mr. Moody’s career was twice interrupted by alcoholism. The first time, in 1948, he moved to Paris to live with an uncle while he recovered. He returned to the United States in 1951 to capitalize on the success of “I’m in the Mood for Love,” forming a seven-piece band that mixed elements of modern jazz and rhythm and blues. After a fire at a Philadelphia nightclub destroyed the band’s equipment, uniforms and sheet music in 1958, he began drinking again and checked himself into Overbrook, a psychiatric hospital in Cedar Grove, N.J., for several months. He celebrated his recovery by writing and recording the up-tempo blues “Last Train From Overbrook,” which became one of his best-known compositions.

In 1963 he reunited with Gillespie, joining his popular quintet. He was extensively featured as both a soloist and the straight man for Gillespie’s between-songs banter, sharpening his musical and comedic skills at the same time. He left Gillespie in 1969 to again try his luck as a bandleader, but met with limited success; four years later he left jazz entirely to work in Las Vegas hotel orchestras, first at the Flamingo and later at the Hilton.

“The reason I went to Las Vegas,” he told Saxophone Journal in 1998, “was because I was married and had a daughter and I wanted to grow up with my kid. I was married before and I didn’t grow up with the kids. So I said, ‘I’m going to really be a father.’ I did much better with this one because at least I stayed until my daughter was 12 years old. And that’s why I worked Vegas, because I could stay in one spot.”

After seven years of pit-band anonymity, providing accompaniment for everyone from Milton Berle to Ike and Tina Turner to Liberace, Mr. Moody divorced his wife and returned to the East Coast to resume his jazz career. The final three decades of his life were active and productive, with frequent touring and recording (as the leader of his own small group and, on occasion, as a sideman with Gillespie, who died in 1993) and even a brief foray into acting, with a bit part in the 1997 Clint Eastwood film “Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil,” set in Mr. Moody’s birthplace, Savannah.

The National Endowment for the Arts named him a Jazz Master in 1998. “Moody’s Mood for Love” was named to the Grammy Hall of Fame in 2001. His last album, “Moody 4B,” was recorded in 2008 and released in 2010 on the IPO label.

Mr. Moody, who was divorced twice, is survived by his wife of 21 years, Linda, and three sons, Patrick, Regan and Danny, all of California.

Starving the beast

For the most part, the liberal-left has denounced Obama’s deal over taxes with the Republicans but it will probably have enough votes from the Republicans and Blue Dog Democrats like Ben Nelson to pass. Of course, according to the NY Times’s Matt Bai, the president himself has described himself as essentially a Blue Dog Democrat so it should not come as any great surprise that he struck a deal with Mitch McConnell and company.

It is of some interest that some on the liberal-left and even on the radical left have bought into the deal as well. Kevin Drum, a blogger at Mother Jones, wrote:

In the end, this is the second stimulus we all wanted. It’s not a very efficient stimulus, and it sadly caves into the conservative snake oil that the sum total of fiscal policy is tax cuts, but them’s the breaks. Anyone who doesn’t like it needs to spend the next two years persuading the public not just to tell pollsters they don’t like tax cuts for the rich, but to actually vote out of office anyone who supports tax cuts for the rich. That’s the only way we’ll win the replay of this battle in 2012.

Dean Baker, an economist generally associated with populist attacks on wealth and privilege, wrote a piece provocatively titled In Defense of Giving Money to Rich People that reasons: “extending the tax cuts to the richest 2 percent for another 2 years is not especially harmful. It will hand money to people who will spend at least some it, thereby creating demand and generating jobs.”

Moving over a few steps to the left, the Communist Party joins Drum and Baker in putting a positive spin on the deal. Art Perlo, the son of the late Victor Perlo, the party’s long-time economics expert, put it this way:

Spending money on tax cuts for the rich stinks. It is offensive to the majority of working Americans who are suffering in this economic crisis. And it is bad economics. But if it is a price necessary to continue unemployment benefits for millions of families, and to prevent a tax increase for all workers, it might be worth it.

Now it should be understood that the CPUSA no longer makes any pretenses of being some kind of revolutionary organization and seems intent on carving out a space on the left once occupied by Irving Howe, but it still has some influence in the trade union movement and in the Democratic Party where its aging cadres have sunk their tentacles.

Most interesting of all is the article by Michael Meerpol that appears on The Nation website titled Obama’s a Sell-Out on Taxes? Not So Fast that repeats the talking points found above, including the same formulation as Dean Baker’s about doing no harm:

I also think, however distasteful it is on moral grounds, extending the Bush tax cuts does not do much harm. Even after Clinton persuaded Congress to raise taxes on the highest income earners and well before the estate tax cuts passed in 2001, the super-rich were continuing to increase their share of the nation’s income and wealth. Long term trends in inequality have more to do with the decline of union membership, financial deregulation and increased trade in labor intensive goods, while increasing protectionism for high salaried professionals (doctors, accountants, professors) and the fraying of the social safety net. Tax policy plays some role, but it is nowhere near the whole story.

Meerpol seems to have a soft spot for Obama even though his policies are basically warmed over Clintonism, and arguably a continuation of the Bush administration. In 1998 Meerpol wrote a rather good book called “Surrender: How the Clinton Administration Completed the Reagan Revolution.” Perhaps he has changed his mind about the role of these DLC types in the interim since the same kind of book can be written about Obama, especially in consideration of his nod to the Gipper. In “Audacity of Hope”, Obama expresses sympathy for Reagan’s antagonism toward high corporate tax rates since they “distorted investment decisions” and led to tax shelters. In the same paragraph, he blamed welfare for creating “perverse incentives” when it came to the “work ethic”. One wonders if the “progressives for Obama” ever read this crap before they made fools of themselves.

Considering the fact that tax breaks are seen as a job-creating stimulus by these people, one wonders what they make of the fact that under the New Deal tax rates were at an all-time high. And what’s even more interesting is that they were raised under Herbert Hoover, a politician that Obama has been likened to. Sigh. If only Obama were half as progressive as Hoover or Nixon, for that matter. The Tax History website reports:

Some of the most important elements of the New Deal tax regime were engineered by Herbert Hoover. Congress passed the Revenue Act of 1932 five months before Franklin Roosevelt won his bid for the White House. But key elements of the law — including an array of regressive consumption taxes — remained a cornerstone of federal finance throughout the 1930s.

The 1932 act imposed the largest peacetime tax increase in American history. Congress expected it to raise roughly $1.1 billion in new revenue, much of it from the rich. Lawmakers raised income tax rates across the board, with the top marginal rate jumping from 25 percent to 63 percent; overall effective rates on the richest 1 percent doubled, according to economic historian Elliot Brownlee. Meanwhile, estate tax rates also climbed sharply, while the exemption was cut by half.

For all its progressive features, Hoover’s revenue swan song — which passed with strong support from the Democratic majority in Congress — also included an array of regressive excise taxes. The law created new levies (including taxes on gasoline and electricity), while raising rates for old ones. As a group, most of these consumption taxes fell squarely on the shoulders of Roosevelt’s famous Forgotten Man. Yet once in office, the new president did nothing to reduce them. Indeed, excise taxes provided anywhere from a third to half of federal revenue throughout the 1930s.

But the most important question is whether or not such tax breaks to the rich “do no harm”. Lost in the discussion is the overall political context for tax reduction, a driving policy goal of the Republican Party since Reagan’s election. Some of the motivation obviously is a desire to become even more obscenely rich in the manner of the gangster Johnny Rocco in “Key Largo”, played by Edward G. Robinson, who has this exchange with the hero Frank McCloud, played by Bogie:

Johnny Rocco: There’s only one Johnny Rocco.

James Temple: How do you account for it?

Frank McCloud: He knows what he wants. Don’t you, Rocco?

Johnny Rocco: Sure.

James Temple: What’s that?

Frank McCloud: Tell him, Rocco.

Johnny Rocco: Well, I want uh …

Frank McCloud: He wants more, don’t you, Rocco?

Johnny Rocco: Yeah. That’s it. More. That’s right! I want more!

Greed counts for a lot but there is something else going on. It is what is known as “starving the beast”, a ploy to reduce federal spending on entitlements like Social Security through budget deficits caused by tax revenue shortfalls.

When Obama’s role model Ronald Reagan was a candidate in 1980, he likened Social Security recipients to children (is this worse than Alan Simpson’s teat analogy, it is hard to say): “John Anderson tells us that first we’ve got to reduce spending before we can reduce taxes. Well, if you’ve got a kid that’s extravagant, you can lecture him all you want to about his extravagance. Or you can cut his allowance and achieve the same end much quicker.”

But the man most associated with this policy is Grover Norquist, the president of Americans for Tax Reform, who once said: “My goal is to cut government in half in twenty-five years, to get it down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub.” This character was closely associated with Jack Abramoff and accompanied him on junkets to meet with counter-revolutionaries around the world, including the contras in Nicaragua Savimbi’s UNITA and Renamo in Mozambique, as well as facilitating Abramoff’s crooked ties to various politicians including Tom DeLay. It is wonder that he did not end up in a prison cell next to Abramoff.

Norquist was crucial in helping George W. Bush draft his tax cuts during the first term. He was also the liaison to the conservative movement. This movement has developed close and organic ties to the Republican Party and serves as a kind of “vanguard” pushing it to the right, whether through the Tea Party or various other think tanks like the one that Norquist runs.

While Dean Baker and Michael Meerpol claim that the tax deal will do no harm, there are others who see it as a dagger aimed at the heart of a key New Deal measure, Social Security. Richard Eskow, a Senior Fellow with the Campaign for America’s Future and not someone open to the “do no harm” arguments of Baker and Meerpol, wrote an article titled Obama’s “Tax Holiday”: A Poison Pill for Social Security in the Huffington Post on Wednesday. In it he takes up the question of the threat to social security posed by the payroll tax reduction in the “compromise” worked out between the Reagan fan Barack Obama and his even more ardent fans in the Republican Party. Described as a “payroll tax holiday” by its corporate backers, the provision amounts to a kind of Trojan Horse described by Eskow:

It’s no accident that the “payroll tax holiday” was first proposed by sworn enemies of retirement benefits on the deficit commission. We should be asking ourselves: When tax breaks can be designed in so many different ways, why did they choose this way? Why single out the only source of Social Security’s funding? Could it be part of a long-term game plan?

Let’s play out a likely scenario if this deal is enacted:

The 2% tax holiday expires in 2012, an election year. Meanwhile the government debt will have increased by $120 billion, the amount that will be paid into Social Security to cover the cost of this “holiday.” Bear in mind: Never before in Social Security’s 75-year history has it taken any funds from the overall Treasury. It’s forbidden by law from adding to the deficit. That’s why it has its own trust fund, which currently holds a surplus of $2.6 trillion. That’s money the Federal government has borrowed, and which it’s morally (and legally) obligated to pay back so we can receive our retirement benefits.

Flash-forward to 2012: The “holiday” is set to end. Republicans aren’t likely to acknowledge that this was a temporary program, any more than they did with the Bush cuts. Any attempt to let the 2% cut expire will be spun as an “Obama tax hike” on the middle class. In order to believe this “holiday” is really temporary, you have to believe that Obama and other Democrats will be willing to take that kind of heat, under enormous pressure in an election year. Any takers?

Extending this 2% cut would gut Social Security’s finances forever. But whatever happens, look at what Social Security’s enemies will have accomplished:

• The “lockbox” principle between Social Security and the overall budget will have been erased forever. A relatively small infusion of cash into the trust fund will be the poison pill that erases the “trust fund” principle.  Once the program has contributed to the deficit, it’s no longer separately funded.
• The enemies of Social Security will have painted a bull’s eye on its only source of funding. People will see it as a “new tax” — in a year when the economy’s not expected to have fully recovered.
• They’ll be in a position to argue, once again, that “America can’t afford” to provide financial security for middle-class seniors.

Starving the beast, indeed. Of course, these seniors can always afford cat food…

Fela!