Barry

COUNTERPUNCH NOVEMBER 11, 2016

Obama and the Common Affairs of the Whole Bourgeoisie

by LOUIS PROYECT

Around this time every year I begin to be deluged by DVD’s and Vimeo links geared to the sort of middle-brow films that Hollywood studios submit for consideration to members of New York Film Critics Online for our annual awards meeting in early December. If you’ve ever seen something by Merchant-Ivory, you’ll probably know the kind of movie I’m talking about.

When Netflix sent me an email with a link to “Barry”, a biopic about Obama’s time at Columbia University that premieres on Friday, December 16, 2016, my first reaction was to put in the trash just like one of those solicitations I used to get from Nigerian generals before SpamAssassin kicked in.

But since it was received so close to election day, I decided to watch the film and give it the spanking I am sure it would deserve as well as use it as a peg for some ruminations on the Obama presidency and the ascendancy of Donald Trump. Studio boss Sam Goldwyn once said “Just write me a comedy. Messages are for Western Union”. Although I don’t write films, I do like to review them and wouldn’t dream of not including a message while I am at it.

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The Jeffrey Goldberg-Barack Obama interviews: the truth comes out

Jeffrey Goldberg, the unctuous Zionist liberal and diehard supporter of George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq, gained extraordinary access to President Obama for an Atlantic Magazine interview titled “The Obama Doctrine”. This 20,000-word document has been hailed by Patrick Cockburn as evidence that Obama has “turned his back on Saudi Arabia and its Sunni allies”. If that is the case, one might expect to see him, Patrick L. Smith, Robert Parry, Seymour Hersh, Robert Fisk, Tariq Ali and David Bromwich on the unemployment line soon.

Although the prospects of wading through 37 pages of an article consisting of these two stroking each other’s ego filled me with dread, it behooved me as a chronicler of the Syrian debacle to lift up the rock and see what’s crawling around.

To start off, it confirms what I have argued for the longest time. Samantha Power, who was widely regarded as an aggressive “regime change” proponent who had Obama’s ear, was regarded as a king-sized annoyance by Obama who would only consider intervention if it improved the corporate bottom line. Rescuing impoverished Syrian farmers and shopkeepers fighting for their lives and a better future for their children was not even worth considering.

Referring to her book “A Problem from Hell” that defended a liberal interventionist “right to protect” policy that supposedly he agreed with, Obama rebuked her for advocating a war that was not in America’s interest from a realpolitik standpoint:

Power sometimes argued with Obama in front of other National Security Council officials, to the point where he could no longer conceal his frustration. “Samantha, enough, I’ve already read your book,” he once snapped.

The clash should have been obvious to anybody closely following White House foreign policy as I reported nearly two years ago. I seemed to be the only person who had read a NY Times article from October 22nd 2013 that stated “from the beginning, Mr. Obama made it clear to his aides that he did not envision an American military intervention, even as public calls mounted that year for a no-fly zone to protect Syrian civilians from bombings.” The article stressed the role of White House Chief of Staff Dennis McDonough, who had frequently clashed with the hawkish Samantha Power. In contrast to Power and others with a more overtly “humanitarian intervention” perspective, McDonough “who had perhaps the closest ties to Mr. Obama, remained skeptical. He questioned how much it was in America’s interest to tamp down the violence in Syria.”

Within the thousands of articles in CounterPunch, DissidentVoice, Salon, ZNet, World Socialist Website and Global Research warning about Obama following in the footsteps of George Bush, there was a fundamental flaw they shared. They got the name right but only partially:

Obama, unlike liberal interventionists, is an admirer of the foreign-policy realism of President George H. W. Bush and, in particular, of Bush’s national-security adviser, Brent Scowcroft (“I love that guy,” Obama once told me). Bush and Scowcroft removed Saddam Hussein’s army from Kuwait in 1991, and they deftly managed the disintegration of the Soviet Union; Scowcroft also, on Bush’s behalf, toasted the leaders of China shortly after the slaughter in Tiananmen Square.

This is the same Brent Scowcroft who deftly parried Ali G.’s advice that the US of A bomb Canada ‘cuz they wasn’t expectin’ it. Perhaps this is what inspired Obama to study his example. On a more fundamental level, Obama’s foreign policy boiled down to the precept he passed on to anybody who would listen—but privately: “Don’t do stupid shit.” I am sure that Bill Maher was one of the people Obama shared this wisdom with. I can just see the two high-fiving each other and braying like jackasses.

Almost sounding like Trump and Rubio, Obama went after Hillary Clinton when she wrote an article in the August 2014 Atlantic urging military aid to the Syrian rebels. According to Goldberg, Obama became “rip-shit angry” but afterwards made up with her, the woman he probably understood would carry on the Clinton/Bush/Obama legacy of neoliberalism and realpolitik. It boiled down to this. Obama had no interest in toppling Assad because he did not see him as a threat to American security. In fact, although Goldberg does not mention it, the Syrian dictator had collaborated with the CIA’s “extraordinary rendition” program, had gotten the red carpet treatment from Obama’s counterpart Tony Blair and even been written up with his wife in Mademoiselle magazine as the Middle East’s Beautiful Couple. More like the people who would have been invited to the White House than bombed.

Goldberg analyzes Obama’s retreat from the “red line” stance he took after the Baathists used sarin gas in an attack on Ghouta in August 2013 as one dictated by a fear of “going it alone”. It seemed that his allies had little interest in a war on Syria. Also, his Director of National Intelligence James Clapper entertained the idea that the rebels might have gassed themselves in a “false flag” operation. Had he been reading Global Research? I wouldn’t put it past him. This is the same James Clapper who had a “huge concern” that ISIS would exploit the refugee crisis to sneak terrorists into Europe and who lied to Congress in 2013, telling it that the NSA does not collect private data. In other words, just the sort of person who Obama would take at his word.

What’s missing from Goldberg’s account, however, is the more obvious explanation for Obama’s misgivings. It might jeopardize the rapprochement with Iran that was in its early stages. In September 2013, when all the usual left websites were besides themselves over the possibility of Obama invading Syria to impose “regime change”, he was on the telephone with Iran’s president discussing how to move things forward as the Guardian reported:

Barack Obama and Hassan Rouhani held the first direct talks between American and Iranian leaders since the 1979 Islamic revolution, exchanging pleasantries in a 15-minute telephone call on Friday that raised the prospect of relief for Tehran from crippling economic sanctions.

Speaking at the White House shortly after the historic call, Obama said his discussion with Rouhani had shown the “basis for resolution” of the dispute over Iran nuclear programme.

At least for me, this carried a lot more weight than anything else. The White House had made up its mind that a tilt toward Iran was in its interest. Why overthrow Assad and alienate a country that had already proved itself as a flexible partner back when Oliver North was hammering out deals to supply weapons to the Nicaraguan contras?

For Obama’s critics on the interventionist right, his inaction was a blow to American credibility. Such “dithering” made the USA look weak and indecisive. But this is a shallow analysis. In fact, Obama’s stance was bold and decisive. He had decided that it was in America’s interest to have friendly relations with Iran and he would go to any lengths to ensure success. If he antagonized the Republican Party in the process, that would matter little since they had already shown a tendency to put a minus wherever he put a plus.

This pretty much covers what Obama had to say about Syria but I do want to conclude with some brief words about Libya, which factored heavily in his decision to stay out of Syria. As we have heard thousands of times from the Baathist amen corner, this “failed state” was reason enough to defend Assad, who like Gaddafi knew how to keep the jihadi rabble in line. Never forget that the two were entirely open to torturing them on behalf of the CIA. Waterboarding would learn ’em out of sharia law, you betcha.

Speaking now of the Libyan intervention, Obama says “It didn’t work.” An interesting observation but what does it mean? Keep in mind that the “anti-imperialist” left always thought that after Gaddafi was toppled, Libya would become something more or less like Panama after Noriega was overthrown—a vassal state that could reliably carry out American designs in the region like building up AFRICOM. (Of course, they never bothered to go to the AFRICOM website where Gaddafi’s high military command was held in high regard by their American counterparts for their willingness to collaborate.)

Yes, I suppose things turned out to be a disaster in Libya since it is anything but a tool of American interests. Widely regarded as an expert on what “went wrong” in Libya, Horace Campbell put it this way:

There is not a week since October 2011 when oil executives from Europe have not complained about insecurity in Libya. Although the Libyan ‘government’ has established a Petroleum Facilities Guard with 18,000 men to protect oil production, there are constant statements about ‘insecurity’ in Libya among European oil companies. According to the Financial Times, “Heavily armed militias are invading oilfields, locals demanding jobs are blockading facilities, and protests are closing down export terminals. And then there are the regional concerns in the wake of the attack on an oil facility in neighbouring Algeria earlier this year.”

Unruly natives demanding jobs are blockading facilities? Time to civilize ‘em with a Krag, I’d say.

Obama worried that if Assad was overthrown, Syria would become a mess like Libya with Islamic militias running around threatening law and order and creating a hostile environment for foreign investors. Who can blame him since Libya is a mess by any standard? And most of all, a place where it is dangerous to walk down the streets with out of control trigger-happy militias on the loose.

Just look at the murder rate. Since the militias declared open season on each other in 2014, 4,275 people have been killed. That’s nearly 32 out of every 100,000 people annually. There is of course an issue over whether this litmus test might be applied to Venezuela that has nearly 3 times as high a murder rate but this does not matter so much since the deaths are not accompanied by cries of God is Great, a sure sign of a failed state. This is not to speak of Syria that supposedly is fighting the Good Fight so that it does not end up like Libya, a rather puzzling proposition in the light of the proportional losses it would have suffered in the last two years if it was the size of Syria: 134,000.

At any rate, I will be taking up these questions at a future date when I have had a chance to do some necessary research. I will say at this point, however, that Libya like every other state in MENA is sharply divided by ethnic and religious differences, often masking a more fundamental class divide. In my view, the best way out of this impasse is building a revolutionary left like the kind that emerged in the wake of the Russian revolution of 1917 or the Cuban revolution of 1960. That task is not furthered by writing apologetics for Baathist barbarism, even if there were Cold War-encouraged delusions that Gaddafi or the Baathists were our kinds of peeps. These sorts of beliefs have been endemic on the left for much too long and it is about time we started with a clean slate.

Obama’s hackers

No matter how many years I have been monitoring crimes high and low in what co-authors Alexander Cockburn and Ken Silverstein called “Washington Babylon”, there are those times that I can only do a double-take over something I read in the NY Times. Today was one of those days as I read an article titled innocently enough “Panel to Advise Against Penalty for C.I.A.’s Computer Search”. If you tried to guess what the article was about from the heading, you’d wonder why anybody would be penalized for a “computer search”. After all, I use Google 25 times a day and nobody ever had the need to penalize me, even IT management at Columbia University that probably figured out that if I was on Google, it was to find out who starred in Godard’s “Contempt” rather than how to do a recursive grep in Unix.

But the heading should have been “Panel to Advise Against Penalty for C.I.A.’s Computer Hack” since that is what actually happened:

A panel investigating the Central Intelligence Agency’s search of a computer network used by staff members of the Senate Intelligence Committee who were looking into the C.I.A.’s use of torture will recommend against punishing anyone involved in the episode, according to current and former government officials.

The panel will make that recommendation after the five C.I.A. officials who were singled out by the agency’s inspector general this year for improperly ordering and carrying out the computer searches staunchly defended their actions, saying that they were lawful and in some cases done at the behest of John O. Brennan, the C.I.A. director.

If it was done at “the behest” of the CIA director and behind the backs of the Senate investigators, but seen as not worthy of punishment, there must have been mitigating circumstances that would have allowed that panel to act as it did. Like the possibility that Diane Feinstein was a secret al-Qaeda operative and it was necessary to check up on her. I mean, after all Obama is a Marxist, right? That’s what Glenn Beck says and who would gainsay him?

As it turns out, the panel is like one of those police department internal investigations that are conducted after some Black youth gets shot 37 times. Who would expect the cops to find themselves guilty? That’s basically what happened here. As the NY Times reports, the members were “appointed by Mr. Brennan and composed of three C.I.A. officers and two members from outside the agency.”

The CIA broke the law just as cops do when they shoot an unarmed Black youth. The Times article referred to “improperly” hacking the Senate computers. That is not quite the term that describes what took place. “Illegally” is more like it. When Oregon Democratic Sen. Ron Wyden, a member of the Senate Intelligence committee, asked Brennan whether the CIA was subject to the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act – an anti-hacking law, Brennan said that he’d have to get back to him.

Those two members from outside the agency might as well have been career CIA officers for what it’s worth. One of them was panel chairman Evan Bayh and the other was Robert F. Bauer, Obama’s legal counsel during his first term.

Evan Bayh was the Senator from Indiana between 1999 and 2011 and served as the Chairman of the Democratic Leadership Council from 2001 to 2005. The DLC embodies the sort of politics that the Clintons made infamous. Some people voted for Obama in 2008 under the assumption that being opposed by Hillary Clinton meant that he was not cut from the same DLC cloth. As it turned out, Obama was exactly like Bill Clinton, a loyal servant of Wall Street and a firm believer in the right of the US to rule the world. In 2002, Bayh stood at George W. Bush’s side in a ceremony announcing their joint support for an invasion of Iraq.

Since Barack Obama is strictly opposed to punishing John Brennan or any of his flunkies, you can expect his former lawyer to understand what his job is. After Robert F. Bauer stopped functioning as the White House shyster, Obama sent him off with the following encomium: “Bob was a critical member of the White House team, He has exceptional judgment, wisdom and intellect, and he will continue to be one of my close advisers.” With a White House that has clamped down on the press more than any administration in modern history and that has made secrecy its standard operating procedure, who would expect Bauer to do anything else except get the CIA off the hook?

Bauer wrote for the Huffington Post briefly. You can get a flavor of his worldview from a couple of articles. In one he makes “the progressive case” for pardoning Scooter Libby, the Bush aide who went to prison for perjured testimony in the Valerie Plame investigation. And here I am, stupid me, always thinking that progressive meant something like public works programs or single-payer health insurance. Golly, you really learn so much from the Huffington Post.

Bauer’s other article worth noting was a tribute to Richard Rorty on his passing. It demonstrates an understanding of the culture wars that I wouldn’t have expected from a shady lawyer in the corridors of power. He urged that the heirs of the New Left, the professors at places like Columbia University teaching cultural studies and standing up for diversity, would find common cause with the New Deal left that preceded it.

In making his case, Bauer referred to Rorty’s essay “The Last Intellectual In Europe — Orwell on Cruelty”. On the very first page of the essay, Rorty quotes Orwell’s opposition to practices that had become widespread in the 20^th century. He referred to them in “1984”, those that “had long been abandoned, in some cases for hundreds of years – imprisonment without trial, the use of war prisoners as slaves, public executions, torture to extract confessions, the use of hostages, and the deportation of whole populations – not only became common again, but were tolerated and even defended by people who considered themselves enlightened and progressive.”

Such is the Orwellian state that we have finally arrived at that Robert F. Bauer can write such an article for Huffington Post honoring a man who opposed “torture to extract confessions” while at the same time covering up for a CIA that was guilty of such crimes.

 

Another murder of a Black man in St. Louis–how Abraham Lincoln responded

In St. Louis, Missouri on April 28^th, 1836, a lynch mob burned Francis McIntosh alive. He was a mixed-race freeman who worked on a riverboat. His crime was refusing to assist two cops who were chasing after another sailor who had been in a fight. When under police custody, he learned that he would have to spend five years in prison. In an attempt to flee from an obviously unjust punishment, he stabbed one of the cops to death and wounded the other.

Wikipedia reports on what happened next:

After a brief chase, McIntosh was captured and placed in jail; however, a white mob soon broke into the jail and removed McIntosh. The mob then took him to the outskirts of town (near the present-day intersection of Seventh and Chestnut streets in Downtown St. Louis), chained him to a locust tree, and piled wood around and up to his knees. When the mob lit the wood with a hot brand, McIntosh asked the crowd to shoot him, then began to sing hymns. When one in the crowd said that he had died, McIntosh reportedly replied, “No, no — I feel as much as any of you. Shoot me! Shoot me!” After at most twenty minutes, McIntosh died. Estimates for the number present at the lynching range in the hundreds, and include an alderman who threatened to shoot anyone who attempted to stop the lynching.

During the night, an elderly African-American man was paid to keep the fire lit, and the mob dispersed. The next day, on April 29, a group of boys threw rocks at the corpse in an attempt to break the skull. When a grand jury was convened to investigate the lynching on May 16, most local newspapers and the presiding judge encouraged no indictment for the crime, and no one was ever charged or convicted. During the grand jury trial, Judge Luke E. Lawless remarked in court that McIntosh’s actions were an example of the “atrocities committed in this and other states by individuals of negro blood against their white brethren,” and that with the rise of abolitionism, “the free negro has been converted into a deadly enemy.”

On January 27, 1838 Abraham Lincoln gave the first important speech in his life to the Young Men’s Lyceum of Springfield, Illinois. A Lyceum was a place where politicians or other celebrities could give talks to the up and coming professional, sort of like the 92^nd Street YMHA. Titled “The Perpetuation of Our Political Institutions”, it was a plea to resist mob rule and adhere to the rule of law. He referred to the lynching of Francis McIntosh as a threat the American republic:

Turn, then, to that horror-striking scene at St. Louis. A single victim was only sacrificed there. His story is very short; and is, perhaps, the most highly tragic, if anything of its length, that has ever been witnessed in real life. A mulatto man, by the name of McIntosh, was seized in the street, dragged to the suburbs of the city, chained to a tree, and actually burned to death; and all within a single hour from the time he had been a freeman, attending to his own business, and at peace with the world.

Such are the effects of mob law; and such as the scenes, becoming more and more frequent in this land so lately famed for love of law and order; and the stories of which, have even now grown too familiar, to attract any thing more, than an idle remark.

At first blush, this sounds like the Lincoln we know from Stephen Spielberg’s biopic—a man committed to emancipation. But not so fast. Lincoln goes on to say:

He had forfeited his life, by the perpetuation of an outrageous murder, upon one of the most worthy and respectable citizens of the city; and had not he died as he did, he must have died by the sentence of the law, in a very short time afterwards. As to him alone, it was as well the way it was, as it could otherwise have been.–But the example in either case, was fearful.–When men take it in their heads to day, to hang gamblers, or burn murderers, they should recollect, that, in the confusion usually attending such transactions, they will be as likely to hang or burn some one who is neither a gambler nor a murderer as one who is; and that, acting upon the example they set, the mob of to-morrow, may, and probably will, hang or burn some of them by the very same mistake.

As someone who is not that fond of Lincoln’s ornate circumlocutions, let me paraphrase it in Proyectesque terms. Lincoln said that McIntosh deserved to die but only after being found guilty in a court of law. One can only imagine what a jury made up of his “peers” would have decided in a state that passed a law in 1825 stating that Blacks were not competent to testify in cases that involved Whites.

Even more worrisome was Lincoln’s remarks on abolitionism. In the South, there were laws that banned the promotion of abolitionist ideas. Lincoln warned against “mob rule” that would attempt to circumvent the rule of law. Once again, you have to put up with the circumlocutions: “There is no grievance that is a fit object of redress by mob law. In any case that arises, as for instance, the promulgation of abolitionism, one of two positions is necessarily true; that is, the thing is right within itself, and therefore deserves the protection of all law and all good citizens; or, it is wrong, and therefore proper to be prohibited by legal enactments; and in neither case, is the interposition of mob law, either necessary, justifiable, or excusable.”

When I first got wind of Barack Obama in 2007, I noticed that he was a big fan of Doris Kearns Goodwin’s “Team of Rivals”, a study of Lincoln’s presidency that found great merit in his appointment of men who were hostile to abolitionism. Obama, of course, was inspired to appoint a bunch of shithooks every chance he got, to show how determined he was to be like Lincoln.

Upon taking office, Obama told a reporter: “”I will tell you, though, that my goal is to have the best possible government, and that means me winning. And so, I am very practical minded. I’m a practical-minded guy. And, you know, one of my heroes is Abraham Lincoln.” He referred the reporter to “a wonderful book written by Doris Kearns Goodwin called ‘Team of Rivals,’ in which [she] talked about [how] Lincoln basically pulled in all the people who had been running against him into his Cabinet because whatever, you know, personal feelings there were, the issue was, ‘How can we get this country through this time of crisis?’”

Well, we know how that turned out. Badly.

We have had six years now of an administration that is to the right of Richard Nixon’s. It harasses reporters, favors the rich, sends drones to blow up wedding parties, creates health care “reform” more beneficial to the insurer than the insured, and caves in to the Republicans every chance it gets.

And, now returning to the crime against a Black man in St. Louis once again, we have Obama following in Lincoln’s footsteps. Which means trying to straddle the fence and be acceptable to Black voters and to the white racists who would as soon see them get the short end of the stick just like the Palestinians. No wonder the people of Ferguson carry signs in solidarity with Gaza.

 

The lesser evil?

N.Y. Times December 27, 2013
Judge Upholds N.S.A.’s Bulk Collection of Data on Calls
By ADAM LIPTAK and MICHAEL S. SCHMIDT

WASHINGTON — A federal judge on Friday ruled that a National Security Agency program that collects enormous troves of phone records is legal, making the latest contribution to an extraordinary debate among courts and a presidential review group about how to balance security and privacy in the era of big data.

In just 11 days, the two judges and the presidential panel reached the opposite of consensus on every significant question before them, including the intelligence value of the program, the privacy interests at stake and how the Constitution figures in the analysis.

The latest decision, from Judge William H. Pauley III in New York, could not have been more different from one issued on Dec. 16 by Judge Richard J. Leon in Washington, who ruled that the program was “almost Orwellian” and probably unconstitutional.

The decision on Friday “is the exact opposite of Judge Leon’s in every way, substantively and rhetorically,” said Orin S. Kerr, a law professor at George Washington University. “It’s matter and antimatter.”

The case in New York was brought by the American Civil Liberties Union, which said it would appeal.

(clip)

From Wikipedia:

Pauley is a federal judge on the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York. Pauley was nominated by President Bill Clinton on May 21, 1998, to a seat vacated by Peter K. Leisure.

Leon was nominated to the United States District Court for the District of Columbia by George W. Bush on September 10, 2001, to the seat vacated by Norma Holloway Johnson.

* * * *

Richard Nixon
Statement on Signing the Endangered Species Act of 1973.
December 28, 1973

I HAVE today signed S. 1983, the Endangered Species Act of 1973. At a time when Americans are more concerned than ever with conserving our natural resources, this legislation provides the Federal Government with needed authority to protect an irreplaceable part of our national heritage–threatened wildlife.

This important measure grants the Government both the authority to make early identification of endangered species and the means to act quickly and thoroughly to save them from extinction. It also puts into effect the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora signed in Washington on March 3, 1973.

Nothing is more priceless and more worthy of preservation than the rich array of animal life with which our country has been blessed. It is a many-faceted treasure, of value to scholars, scientists, and nature lovers alike, and it forms a vital part of the heritage we all share as Americans. I congratulate the 93d Congress for taking this important step toward protecting a heritage which we hold in trust to countless future generations of our fellow citizens. Their lives will be richer, and America will be more beautiful in the years ahead, thanks to the measure that I have the pleasure of signing into law today.

Center for Biological Diversity
August 30, 2013
PRESS RELEASE

Obama Administration Proposal Weakens Endangered Species Protections

Rule Would Relax Requirements on Federal Agencies to Carefully Account for and Track Impacts on Nation’s Most Imperiled Species

WASHINGTON – August 30 – The Obama administration has proposed a new rule that would scale back the requirement that federal agencies fully track the harms inflicted on endangered species when large-scale plans are developed and carried out on federal public lands. As a result, the cumulative impacts on rare species from actions like oil and gas drilling will be discounted in the decision-making process — putting hundreds of plants and animals at greater risk of extinction. The change is being proposed by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and National Marine Fisheries Service, which have repeatedly failed to track how the projects they approve are affecting rare and vanishing species.

“America’s endangered species are already dying deaths by a thousand cuts, because too often no one’s keeping an eye on the big picture,” said Brett Hartl, endangered species policy director with the Center for Biological Diversity. “This proposal will make that problem even worse.”

 

Obama doublespeak on the economy

Last week Obama gave a speech at Knox College in Illinois on the economic situation that like his remarks on Trayvon Martin a few days earlier was filled with the number of bromides calculated to give his MSNBC posse just enough to rally around. To give you a sense of the shallowness of it all, he uses the term “folks” 26 times. One supposes that with people like Al Sharpton and Ed Schultz, the only thing that would cause a breach with the President is a Swiftian modest proposal that hungry folks eat their children.

Early on in the speech he says:

See, I had just spent a year traveling the state and listening to your stories — of proud Maytag workers losing their jobs when the plant moved down to Mexico. (Applause.) A lot of folks here remember that. Of teachers whose salaries weren’t keeping up with the rising cost of groceries. (Applause.) Of young people who had the drive and the energy, but not the money to afford a college education. (Applause.)

The hypocrisy in this paragraph reaches achieves Olympian proportions. In 2008, when Obama was first making these demagogic appeals about the fate of Maytag workers, the Chicago Tribune reported that the main union at the plant urged a vote for Hillary Clinton. Leaving aside the logic of that advice, the union was correct to point out that Lester Crown, one of Maytag’s directors, raised tens of thousands of dollars for Obama’s campaigns since 2003. Crown’s son James was Obama’s 2008 campaign’s financial director for that matter. After Lester Crown revealed that Obama never brought up the plant closing with him, Obama’s alibi was that he was unaware that the Crowns had anything to do with Maytag. Oh, sure. To give you an idea of the incestuous relationship between big capital and the Democratic Party, as if you needed any reminder, here’s what warisacrime.org had to say:

Lester Crown first met Obama when he was a 27-year-old intern at the Sidley Austin law firm in Chicago in the summer of 1989. One of Obama’s law professors at Harvard, Martha Minow, had recommended Obama to her father, Newton Minow, who was a partner at the firm. Minow took Obama under his wing and introduced him to his friend Lester Crown. Crown recalls that Minow called him and “said we have in our office a young man who I think is really going places and I’d like you to meet him.” Crown says he has been a supporter ever since.

For people who applauded Obama’s plaint over the Maytag runaway plant, my advice is that outfits like SeaWorld get rid of their trained seals and replace them with these clapping fools.

Obama claims that he is also troubled by the fact that there were “teachers whose salaries weren’t keeping up with the rising cost of groceries.” Really? If Obama really cared about teachers, he would take a stand against the union-busting initiatives of his ex-Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel or the charter school agenda of his Secretary of Education Arne Duncan. Using the excuse that teacher productivity must be raised, administrations across the country are firing teachers left and right. In 2010 the school board of Central Falls fired all 93 teachers, a move that Obama described: “If a school continues to fail year after year after year and doesn’t show sign of improvements then there has got to be a sense of accountability. That happened in Rhode Island last week.” This led Zeph Capo, a teachers union official in Houston, to state:

I ripped the Obama sticker off of my truck. We worked hard for this man, we talked to our neighbors and our fellow teachers about why we should support him, and we’re having to dig the knife out of our back.

One imagines that Capo fell into line when the 2012 election season started. After all, Obama was better than Romney. Romney would have not only fired the teachers but tied them to the roof of his car on a vacation trip to Canada. We can’t have that, can we?

Continuing along in the education vein, Obama added that the number of “young people who had the drive and the energy, but not the money to afford a college education” distressed him. This statement above all brought to mind the character that Jon Lovitz played on Saturday Night Live, the Pathological Liar.

I didn’t always lie. No, when I was a kid, I told the truth. But then one day, I got caught stealing money out of my mother’s purse. I lied. I told her it was homework – that my teacher told me to do it. And she got fired! Yeah, that’s what happened!

Just days after Obama’s speech, Congress passed a bill that tied student loan interest rates to financial markets. This proposal was not the typical Republican plan “forced” on Obama but was his own profit-making scheme inspired by a paper written by Jason Delisle at the New American Foundation, whose president Anne-Marie Slaughter (appropriately named) was Hillary Clinton’s Director of Policy Planning at the State Department. As a member of the Peterson-Pew Commission on Budget Reform and the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, Delisle had just the right credentials to draft a policy paper that would stick it to the students. The Huffington Post reported that a record $51 billion profit could be expected from the student loan shark racket cooked up by Obama. That’s greater than the earnings of America’s most profitable companies and roughly equal to the combined net income of the four largest U.S. banks by assets.

Arguably the only Democratic Senator with a shred of integrity, Elizabeth Warren stated: “I can’t support a proposal that squeezes even more profits out of our kids. In fact, I think this whole system stinks.’’

After listing these items that fell in the doom-and-gloom category, Obama raised his hand over his eyebrows like the captain of a leaking vessel and saw the sun breaking through the dark clouds. Good-god-almighty, jobs were on the horizon: “So you add it all up, and over the past 40 months, our businesses have created 7.2 million new jobs. This year, we’re off to our strongest private sector job growth since 1999.”

An honest appraisal of the job market, however, would be based on the payroll-to-population ratio, something that reflects the real health of the economy. If, for example the population of a country was one million and the number of employed doubled from 100 to 200, who would cheer about that?

On June 6^th Zero Hedge reported that the payroll-to-population was worse than a year ago and that “the unemployment rate is also rising with under-employment – at 18.0% – near 15 month highs.”

There is one sector that appears booming, however. The number of minimum wage waiters and bartenders hit an all-time high of 10,339,800 workers, increasing by a 51,700 in just one month. But mixing drinks like Tom Cruise in “Cocktail” must be a lot more fun than working in some boring factory with a health plan, so it is not that troubling to learn from Zero Hedge that manufacturing jobs have dropped four months in a row, now numbering 11.964 million jobs. Pretty soon the number of bartenders, waiters, and busboys will exceed the number of factory workers. I wonder what Marxist value theorists will make of that?

Obama was also pumped up over the fact that Ford is now hiring workers for its Kansas City plant. Glory be, America is coming back! Well, one can certainly understand why Ford would want to increase the number of workers in Kansas City since it cut a deal with the UAW that entry-level workers will be paid $16 per hour, just about the same amount that fast food workers in New York are struggling to win. Not only that, it will take a lot longer to get a raise. That’s about $31,000 per year, good enough for a mobile home and a night out once a week at the local Burger King. No wonder the UAW bureaucrats got out the vote for Obama in 2012. They, Obama, and the Ford bosses see eye to eye.

Obama made sure to get everybody on board the fracking bus. “We produce more natural gas than any country on Earth. We’re about to produce more of our own oil than we buy from abroad for the first time in nearly 20 years.” That’s great. With shale oil produced by fracking, we’ll be able to take advantage of all those new bartenders to get a pint of beer rather than put up with water catching fire as it flows from your faucet at home.

To make sure that Rachel Maddow will continue to coo over him, Obama made sure to throw in some cheap demagogy:

Even though our businesses are creating new jobs and have broken record profits, nearly all the income gains of the past 10 years have continued to flow to the top 1 percent. The average CEO has gotten a raise of nearly 40 percent since 2009. The average American earns less than he or she did in 1999. And companies continue to hold back on hiring those who’ve been out of work for some time.

Oooh, agitating against the top 1 percent. The Kenyan Marxist is at it again.

One understands why Obama would have to throw in a few words like these. Not only do they come cheap, at least those still laboring under the illusion that the capitalist system is redeemable can con themselves into believing that the President really cares.

Those illusions might finally be breaking down. Who cannot be cheered by the sight of fast food workers calling a one-day strike in New York? As the one host on MSNBC with a smidgen of liberalism left, Chris Hayes had on three people involved with the action last night, as well as my own Congressperson Carolyn Maloney who was on the picket line. Theirs is the voice of a new labor movement. It is a sign of its strength that it can draw upon Maloney for support:

HAYES: We`re talking about the fast food strike under way across the country tonight. Still with me at the table, Tsedeye Gebreselassie from the National Employment Law Project, McDonalds worker, Kareem Starks who is striking and Gregory Reynoso from Fast Food Forward, and joining us is Congresswoman Carolyn Maloney, Democrat from New York. Great to have you here, Congresswoman.

REPRESENTATIVE CAROLYN MALONEY (D), NEW YORK: Great to be here.

HAYES: Gentlemen, I want to get your reaction to the bite I played. If people are feeling they`re not being paid adequately, they have to go find a job someplace elsewhere paid higher wages. What`s your response to that? Just go get a higher wage job.

STARKS: You know, I work for McDonald`s for, like, five months. Before that, I worked for the Parks Department, climbing trees. I made $10.25 more than what I`m making now. So I`ve had a better job, and I was never in poverty like I am now. But whoever is, like, against it, obviously isn`t ever made $7.25 and never tried to budget paying for two kids and an apartment and bills and food all for $7.25.

HAYES: My sense, Gregory, if there were jobs available that paid higher wages, you would be happy to take them.

REYNOSO: Yes, I would be happy. The point is, it`s not these types of opportunities for everybody. There are not a lot of people what can really go out and find these types of jobs. That`s why people have to live on $7.25.

HAYES: Congresswoman, it`s fairly unusual to find members of Congress walking the picket line. There were a number. Why were you out there?

MALONEY: Well, I was looking for you, Chris.

HAYES: I was prepping this segment.

MALONEY: We were out there to show solidarity, the fight we have before Congress. We have a bill before Congress, HR-1010. We have 142 co- sponsors, 30 in the Senate and it would raise the minimum wage to $10.10, over 3 years, 95 cents a year. The president even in 2009 was calling for minimum wage increase in his state of the union and, of course, last week in Illinois. It`s a priority of his. It`s a priority of ours. We`re working hard to pass it.

HAYES: In the past, raising the minimum wage, you`ve been able to get some Republicans to vote for it. There was a minimum wage raised under George W. Bush that happened. There were a number of Republican votes. Is the Republican Party, do you think you can find people on the other side of the aisle who would vote for this bill?

MALONEY: I believe it merits bipartisan support and we`ll certainly be working to secure it. You`re not going to secure it if you don`t try.

HAYES: That doesn`t occur to me very much.

MALONEY: We`re going to try. We`re going it try because it`s too important and talking to Greg and Kareem, you see the importance of it. I believe you`re working two jobs.

REYNOSO: Yes.

MALONEY: He doesn`t have time to sleep. He`s working two jobs and it`s hard.

STARKS: I actually work the overnight shift last night and I`m here now.

HAYES: Thank you for coming in.

STARKS: I just, like, want to thank everybody for the support.

HAYES: Tsedeye, when I was talking to Kareem and Gregory about this idea that if you want a better job then go get a job that pays a higher wage what is happening right now in this economy, I don`t think this is underappreciated. The jobs are being created at the bottom of the wage scale. That is a trajectory that many Americans are experiencing.

GEBRESELASSIE: Kareem`s story is the story of our economy and how our labor markets have shifted so we`ve like hemorrhaged these decent paying jobs. What`s taking its place jobs that pay low wages like fast food and retail. Not only are those the jobs that are being created. They`re also jobs where real wages are actually declining, you know, since —

MALONEY: Out of the 3.2 million low-income jobs, 2/3 of them are women. Women are disproportionately in these low-income jobs.

GEBRESELASSIE: They`re also adults. That`s the other thing.

MALONEY: They always say they`re teenagers. They`re not. Most of them are —

HAYES: Were your co-workers, your co-workers, the image is, like, these are teens on summer jobs. Your co-workers were supporting families.

REYNOSO: Yes.

STARKS: There`s a few co-workers I know that has kids and supporting families and paying bills and stuff like that. I mean, it`s probably — McDonald`s and fast food chains usually target younger kids or whatever, but at the end of the day, there are still older people that have these jobs. There`s, like, a 60-year-old lady in my store.

GEBRESELASSIE: The median age for a fast food worker in this country is 29 years old.

HAYES: Wow.

GEBRESELASSIE: That is an adult. The other thing the industry says these are stepping stone jobs.

HAYES: You could rise up in the ranks.

GEBRESELASSIE: That`s just not the case. There`s limited opportunities for advancement.

REYNOSO: People from 50 years old, they`ll be working in these companies. Imagine those people supporting families.

HAYES: Will you quickly show that mobility graphic? It`s 2.2 percent jobs in the fast food industry are managerial, professional and technical occupations.

GEBRESELASSIE: The vast majority, 90 percent are frontline occupations. The median wage is $8.94 an hour.

HAYES: Compared to all industries, 31 percent —

MALONEY: It hasn`t gone up in four years.

HAYES: And it hasn`t gone up in four years. Tsedeye Gebreselassi from the National Employment Law Project, McDonalds worker, Kareem Starks, Gregory Reynoso from Fast Food Forward, and Congresswoman Caroline Maloney from New York, thank you all.

Obama’s doublespeak on race

On July 19^th Barack Obama spoke to reporters about the Trayvon Martin killing. This time he said that he could have been Trayvon Martin 35 years ago, a follow-up to his March 23, 2012 observation that if he had a son, he would look like Trayvon. Although I generally have little use for Melissa Harris-Perry, there was little to disagree with in her remarks during an MSNBC round-table discussion of Obama’s remarks later that day: “But part of what the president did today in that sort of groping authentic conversation where you saw him saying, I don`t have all the answers here, I`m not quite sure — heck, have you noticed racism in America, big problem, you know, multiple generations, I don`t have all the answers.” Yes, big problem, I know.

But things are definitely getting better, according to the Chief Executive:

And let me just leave you with — with a final thought, that as difficult and challenging as this whole episode has been for a lot of people, I don’t want us to lose sight that things are getting better. Each successive generation seems to be making progress in changing attitudes when it comes to race. It doesn’t mean that we’re in a postracial society. It doesn’t mean that racism is eliminated. But you know, when I talk to Malia and Sasha and I listen to their friends and I see them interact, they’re better than we are. They’re better than we were on these issues. And that’s true in every community that I’ve visited all across the country.

Despite denying that we are in a postracial society, others perceive Obama as moving “past race”. In a perceptive August 10, 2008 NY Times article titled “Is Obama the End of Black Politics?”, Matt Bai—a DLC-minded inside-the-beltway pundit—clearly saw what was in store and liked it very much. An Obama aide was very much in the post-racial mode:

‘‘I’m the new black politics,” says Cornell Belcher, a 38-year-old pollster who is working for Obama. ”The people I work with are the new black politics. We don’t carry around that history. We see the world through post-civil-rights eyes. I don’t mean that disrespectfully, but that’s just the way it is.

”I don’t want in any way to seem critical of the generation of leadership who fought so I could be sitting here,” Belcher told me when we met for breakfast at the Four Seasons in Georgetown one morning. He wears his hair in irreverent spikes and often favors tennis shoes with suit jackets. ”Barack Obama is the sum of their struggle. He’s the sum of their tears, their fights, their marching, their pain. This opportunity is the sum of that.

After speaking to Corey Booker, Newark’s mayor who is cut from the same cloth as Obama, Bai learned that such politicians are not renouncing Black identity only the responsibility to defend Black people:

Even so, Booker told me that his goal wasn’t really to ”transcend race.” Rather, he says that for his generation of black politicians it’s all right to show the part of themselves that is culturally black — to play basketball with friends and belong to a black church, the way Obama has. There is a universality now to the middle-class black experience, he told me, that should be instantly recognizable to Jews or Italians or any other white ethnic bloc that has struggled to assimilate. And that means, at least theoretically, that a black politician shouldn’t have to obscure his racial identity.

This pretty much sums up what the Bill Cosby Show meant to most white Americans, a look at a family you would not mind living next door to even if they preferred shooting hoops to playing tennis, or listening to Mary J. Blige rather than Barbra Streisand.

Speaking of belonging to a Black church, Obama took advantage of the controversy surrounding Reverend Jeremiah Wright’s militant comments about racism in America to evoke postracial themes:

Throughout the first year of this campaign, against all predictions to the contrary, we saw how hungry the American people were for this message of unity. Despite the temptation to view my candidacy through a purely racial lens, we won commanding victories in states with some of the whitest populations in the country. In South Carolina, where the Confederate Flag still flies, we built a powerful coalition of African Americans and white Americans.

Of course, this begs the question of how you are going to get that Confederate Flag off the South Carolina state capitol unless you have some of Reverend Wright’s spine and big mouth.

In contrast to the Clintons, who built ties with the old guard civil rights leaders particularly those who became elected officials, Obama sought out fresh faces unburdened by the past. Bai reported:

For some black operatives in the Clinton orbit — people who have functioned, going back to Jesse Jackson’s campaigns in the 1980s, as Democratic Washington’s liaisons to black America — the fallout from an Obama victory would likely be profound. ”Some of them will have to walk the plank,” an Obama adviser told me bluntly. In their place, an Obama administration would empower a cadre of younger black advisers who would instantly become people to see in Washington’s transactional culture. Chief among them is Valerie Jarrett, a Chicago real estate developer who is one of Barack and Michelle Obama’s closest friends. ”She’s poised to be one of the most influential people in politics, and particularly among African-Americans in politics,” Belcher told me. ”She may be the next Vernon Jordan.” In fact, the last time I saw Clyburn, he told me he had just spent two and a half hours at breakfast with Jarrett.

As Obama’s Senior Adviser, Valerie Jarrett amounts to his Karl Rove. She was key to Obama’s early fundraising success, putting him in touch with powerful and wealthy figures on Wall Street and Chicago’s big bourgeoisie.

Robert Fitch, a NYC adjunct professor and long time Marxist author who died much too young at the age of 72 in 2011, gave a speech titled “The Change they Believe In” in November 2008 that was characteristically laser-sharp.

For almost a hundred years in Chicago blacks have lived on the South Side close to Chicago’s factories and slaughter houses. And Cellular Field, home of the White Sox. The area where they lived was called the Black Belt or Bronzeville—and it’s the largest concentration of African American people in the U.S.—nearly 600,000 people—about twice the size of Harlem.

In the 1950s, big swaths of urban renewal were ripped through the black belt, demolishing private housing on the south east side. The argument then was that the old low rise private housing was old and unsuitable. Black people needed to be housed in new, high-rise public housing which the city built just east of the Dan Ryan Expressway. The Administration of the Chicago Housing Authority was widely acclaimed as the most corrupt, racist and incompetent in America. Gradually only the poorest of the poor lived there. And in the 1980s, the argument began to be made that the public housing needed to be demolished and the people moved back into private housing.

But what does this all have to do with Obama? Just this: the area demolished included the communities that Obama represented as a state senator; and the top black administrators, developers and planners were people like Valerie Jarrett—who served as a member of the Chicago Planning Commission. And Martin Nesbitt who became head of the CHA. Nesbitt serves as Obama campaign finance treasurer; Jarrett as co-chair of the Transition Team. The other co-chair is William Daley, the Mayor’s brother and the Midwest chair of JP Morgan Chase—an institution deeply involved in the transformation of inner-city neighborhoods through its support for—what financial institutions call “neighborhood revitalization” and neighborhood activists call gentrification.

This is the real meaning of Blacks and whites coming together around an Obama presidency. On one side you have Obama, Jarrett, and Nesbitt—all African-American—and on the other side William Daley. The only color that matters to them is green, not the ecology green but the dollar bill green.

Given the deepening of racial injustice in the USA during Obama’s administration, he has to walk a tightrope. On one hand, he calls on people to serve under him who are inimical to Black interests such as Lawrence Summers, who is in line to become the head of the Federal Reserve. This is the same character that dressed down Cornel West for making a hip-hop record and argued for exporting toxic waste to African nations using the following logic: “The costs of pollution are likely to be non-linear as the initial increments of pollution probably have very low cost. I’ve always though that under-populated countries in Africa are vastly UNDER-polluted, their air quality is probably vastly inefficiently low compared to Los Angeles or Mexico City.”

Even more troubling is the possibility that Obama will follow through and install Raymond Kelly as Secretary of Homeland Security. In an interview with Univision, a Spanish-language TV station (), Obama praised Kelly to the skies:

Well, Ray Kelly has obviously done an extraordinary job in New York and the federal government partners a lot with New York.  Because obviously our concerns about terrorism oftentimes are focused on big city targets.  And I think Ray Kelly is one of the best there is.  So he’s been an outstanding leader in New York.

Kelly is one of the best there is? Kelly was the architect and dead-end defender of stop-and-frisk. In a study conducted by the NY Civil Liberties Union, it was revealed that in the cops stopped people on the street 532,911 times. 55 percent were Black, 32 percent were Latino, and only 10 percent were white. The NY Daily News, which has evolved recently into a critic of stop-and-frisk and which carried bold attacks on George Zimmerman ostensibly in order to assuage its largely Black working-class readers, nailed the top cop:

At bottom, the NYPD’s stop-and-frisk regime represents a civil rights violation — one that disproportionally targets young black and Latino men. Though they make up only 4.7% of the city’s population, black and Latino males between the ages of 14 and 24 accounted for 41.6% of stops in 2011. The number of stops of young black men exceeded the city’s entire population of young black men.

The commissioner contends that this happens only because officers go where the crime is. But last year, large percentages of blacks and Latinos were also stopped in overwhelmingly white neighborhoods like Greenwich Village, where 77% of people stopped were black or Latino.

So why does Obama speak out of both sides of his mouth? Or perhaps more accurately, why does he say that he is opposed to racial profiling while he is at the same time ready to put a racist like Raymond Kelly in his cabinet?

Clearly the answer is that the Democratic Party needs Black votes to win elections. Unlike any issue in recent memory, the vigilante killing of Trayvon Martin has activated the Black community. Just this week, Willie Louis, the Black youth who testified against the killers of Emmett Till in 1955, died at the age of 76. Despite the obvious differences between the state of lawlessness that existed in the Deep South in 1955 and today, there is still a problem with racists declaring an open season on Black youth–both of whom coincidentally had just returned from an innocent visit to a convenience store. Obama was under some pressure to take a clear stand on this matter, even if his words were in contradiction to his actions past and future.

In 2009 I wrote an article for Swans on “Are We Living in a Postracial America?” that reviewed David Roediger’s recently published “How Race Survived U.S. History: from settlement and slavery to the Obama phenomenon”. I recommend a look at my article but more importantly Roediger’s book that was published by Verso. Let me conclude with a few paragraphs from my review. In deference to the editors of Swans, I will keep my excerpt brief—understandably as they are opposed to the sort of crossposting that is endemic to the Internet.

As part of the euphoria surrounding the election of Barack Obama, members of the punditocracy speculated that the U.S. had entered a “post-racial” epoch. Typical was The Washington Post’s Jim Hoagland who editorialized on Election Day last year:

Barack Obama has succeeded brilliantly in casting his candidacy — indeed, his whole life — as post-racial. Even before the votes have been cast, he has written a glorious coda for the civil rights struggle that provided this nation with many of the finest, and also most horrible, moments of its past 150 years. If the results confirm that race was not a decisive factor in the balloting, generations of campaigners for racial justice and equality will have seen their work vindicated.

After deploying data in his introduction to How Race Survived U.S. History to the effect that racism continues unabated (one in three children of color lives in poverty as opposed to one in ten of white families, etc.), David Roediger poses the question: “How did white supremacy in the U.S. not yield to changes that we generally regard as constant, dramatic, and, in the main, progressive?” The remainder of his brilliantly argued and researched book gives the definitive answer to this question. As such, it belongs on the bookshelf next to Howard Zinn’s People’s History of the United States and other such works that offer a “revisionist” history of this country in accordance with truth and — more importantly — justice.

The theme that Roediger keeps coming back appears initially in Chapter One on colonial Virginia in the 17th century (“Suddenly White Supremacy”); namely, that a white identity was created in order to unite men and women of conflicting classes against the most exploited groups of the day: the slave and the Indian. And when necessary, blacks were also recruited to the master’s cause against the Indians. As has always been the case, the British — including the freedom-loving colonists who would form a new republic in 1776 — have been adept at dividing and conquering. Roediger writes:

The most spectacular example of revolt, Bacon’s Rebellion of 1676, took Virginia to the brink of civil war. Broadly arising from the desire for good land among European and African servants and ex-servants, the rebellion therefore also had anti-Indian dimensions, demanding and implementing aggressive policies to speed settlement onto indigenous lands. Bondservants joined those who had recently served out “their time” under the leadership of the young English lawyer and venture capitalist Nathaniel Bacon, laying siege to the capital in Jamestown, burning it, driving Governor William Berkeley into exile, and sustaining insurrection for months. Authorities offered freedom “from their slavery” to “Negroes and servants” who would come over into opposition to the rebellion. Rebels, meanwhile, feared that they would all be made into “slaves, man, woman & child.” Both the promise of liberation and the language registering fear of retribution suggest how imperfectly class predicaments aligned with any firm sense of racial division.

(I will be following up on this post with something about Obama’s doublespeak on the economy.)

Caption Contest

The winner will receive a free meal from me at a pretty good restaurant in NYC. Some suggestions: “Did you hear? I just privatized Social Security! Aren’t I terrific?” “So, when you grow up do you want to be a tool of Wall Street like me or earn an honest living?”

Take an indefinite vacation

Brian McFadden in today’s NY Times.

Obama’s 2006 Neoliberal Manifesto