The Capitalist Market and Obama’s Stimulus Plan

The capitalist market and Obama’s stimulus plan

27 January 2009

Even before the Obama administration's economic stimulus package comes to a vote, the rapidity and scale of job losses in the US makes it clear that it will be woefully inadequate. On Monday alone, corporations including Caterpillar, Pfizer, Home Depot, SprintNextel and GM, announced 74,000 new job cuts.

Even if the White House were to achieve its aim of creating or saving 3-4 million jobs over the next two years, it would not make up for job losses that could be twice as large by the end of 2010. The pace of job-cutting has sharply accelerated since the end of 2008—a year that saw 2.6 million jobs lost, the highest number since 1945.

The overriding principle of Obama's plan is that nothing will be done that impinges on the wealth and prerogatives of America's financial elite. He made this clear in his inaugural address when he hailed the "free market," saying its "power to generate wealth and expand freedom is unmatched." Meanwhile, the new president has dropped any mention of his campaign pledge to rescind Bush's tax cuts for the wealthy.

Despite the talk of a "21^st century New Deal," the $825 billion package includes no proposals for government public works projects, let alone plans to hire the millions who have lost their jobs. Ninety percent of the newly created jobs will be in the private sector. Major corporations are already lining up and licking their chops in anticipation of profit windfalls as private contractors for government-funded programs.

A third of the package will be used to pay for tax cuts, half of which are for big business. The House bill includes $7.7 billion in grants for investors in renewable energy, while the Senate Finance Committee inserted a provision that would give companies tax relief on forgiven debt, a measure for which the US Chamber of Commerce and casino giant Harrah's Entertainment lobbied hard.

Less than a third of the proposal—including just $30 billion for roads and $10 billion for transit and rail—will be used for infrastructure repair, under conditions in which the American Society of Civil Engineers estimates that it would cost at least $1.6 trillion to bring the country's crumbling bridges, roads and schools back to "good condition." Robert Yaro, the president of the Regional Plan Association, which has guided civic projects in the New York metropolitan area since 1929, told the New York Times, the infrastructure proposal was a "drop in the bucket."

There is no aid for homeowners facing foreclosure—a number which could rise to as many as 10.2 million in the next four years, according to estimates by Credit Suisse—nor the tens of millions more who owe far more on their homes than they are worth due the sharpest decline in housing prices since the Great Depression. Millions more have seen their life savings wiped out due to the falling value of their 401 (K) retirement plans, but they merit no help either.

The stimulus package provides only minimal relief to the unemployed in the form of extended jobless benefits and money to help laid off workers keep their medical coverage. In addition, there is about $87 billion to help states pay increasing Medicaid health insurance for the poor.

None of these measures are a solution to the crisis because they do not address its source: the decades-long decline of American capitalism and the systematic drive by the corporate and financial elite to starve industry and basic infrastructure of investment in order to reap billions in the most parasitic forms of a financial speculation.

It is striking that the stimulus plan includes no measures to rebuild the shrunken industrial base of the country. This is one more indication of the degree to which it is tailored to the needs of the financial aristocracy. The financial elite has no interest in rebuilding basic industry because it can amass far higher profits from financial speculation than it can from investment in basic production—even as it uses mass unemployment and the threat of bankruptcy to drive down the wages and increase the exploitation of the working class.

Moreover, there is no merely national solution to the crisis, which is a catastrophic failure of the world capitalist system.

In the 1930s, the New Deal measures taken by Franklin Roosevelt put nearly 4 million unemployed workers to work building roads, bridges, dams, schools and other public projects. However, even these measures—possible only in a country with unmatched industrial and financial resources—failed to end the Great Depression. A partial recovery collapsed in 1937, and unemployment once again surged. It took a world war and the deaths of nearly 80 million people to revive the world capitalist economy and create the conditions for the post-war boom.

Unlike the 1930s, however, the US is not the rising economic hegemon, but the world's most indebted nation. Moreover, the American ruling class—which has enriched itself over the last three decades through the systematic dismantling of the reforms of the past—has no intention of allowing any encroachment on its power and wealth. A huge amount of the stimulus money will find its way into the bank accounts of major financial houses, corporations and the wealthiest one percent of the population.

What then are the motives behind the stimulus package?

The first is to stave off a complete collapse of consumer spending and avert a deflationary spiral that would lead to a full-scale depression.

The second is to provide at least the semblance of relief for those facing economic distress in order to contain growing social discontent over a disaster precipitated by the recklessness and avarice of the super-rich.

Finally, the measure is aimed at providing political cover as the White House and Congress prepare to launch another, even more massive bailout of Wall Street and the banks.

The stimulus package pales in comparison to $8 trillion already handed out in loans, grants and financial guarantees to the banks, which have used the public assets not to free up credit for consumers and businesses—bank loans have actually decreased—but to finance a wave of mergers that are further consolidating the grip of financial and corporate monopolies over the economy.

The cost of the bailout will be borne by the American public itself, as Obama and his advisors have made clear in public statements calling for cuts in vital social programs such as Social Security and Medicare.

There is increasing speculation in the media that the Obama administration might be forced to "nationalize" the banks. If carried out, this measure would have nothing to do with exerting public control over Wall Street. Instead, taxpayers would assume responsibility for the worthless assets held by the banking giants so they could take these liabilities off their books and once again become profitable. After a temporary period of government direction, the banks would be turned over once again to private investors, who would buy the now lucrative shares for pennies on the dollar.

As the New York Times noted Monday, "Mr. Obama's advisors say they are acutely aware that if the government is perceived as running the banks, the administration would come under enormous political pressure to halt foreclosures or lend money to ailing projects in cities or states with powerful constituencies, which could imperil the effort to steer the banks away from the cliff."

The stimulus package, like the bailout of the banks, is predicated on the profit interests of the most powerful sections of the capitalist class. There cannot be any rational or socially progressive solution to the crisis within the framework of the present economic and political system.

To assert their own interests working people will have to break with the Democrats and Republicans and mobilize their strength against the Obama administration. Only the creation of a workers' government and the establishment of real democratic rule by the majority can break the power of the financial aristocracy and make possible the reorganization of economic life to meet the needs of society as a whole.

A socialist policy will include the nationalization of the banks and basic industries under public ownership and democratic control by the working class, the input of working people into all economic decision-making, and emergency measures to protect the jobs and homes of workers, including a reduction in work hours with no loss of pay and a ban on all home foreclosures and evictions.

Jerry White

Russia-Georgia Conflict Fueled by Rush to Control Caspian Energy

Russia-Georgia Conflict Fueled by Rush to Control Caspian Energy Resources
..

Human Rights Watch has accused both Russian and Georgian forces of killing and injuring civilians through indiscriminate attacks over the past week of fighting. Professor and author Michael Klare joins us to talk about how the Russian-Georgian conflict is largely an energy war over who has access to the vast oil and natural gas reserves in the Caspian region.
[includes rush transcript]

Guest:

Michael Klare, author of thirteen books, including Blood and Oil and Resource Wars. His latest is Rising Powers, Shrinking Planet: The New Geopolitics of Energy. He is the defense analyst for The Nation and the director of the Five College Program in Peace and World Security Studies at Hampshire College in Amherst.


JUAN GONZALEZ: Human Rights Watch has accused both Russian and Georgian forces of killing and injuring civilians through indiscriminate attacks over the past week of fighting.


On Tuesday, a Russian cluster bomb strike in the town of Gori killed at least eight civilians including the Dutch journalist Stan Storimans. An Israeli journalist was seriously wounded in the same attack. Human Rights Watch said this is the first known use of cluster munitions since Israel’s attack on Lebanon in 2006.


Meanwhile, tensions remain high between Moscow and Washington. On Thursday, US Defense Secretary Robert Gates issued a stern warning to Russia.


ROBERT GATES: If Russia does not step back from its aggressive posture and actions in Georgia, the US-Russian relationship could be adversely affected for years to come.



AMY GOODMAN: Russia is now maintaining that the events of the past week have fundamentally redrawn Georgia’s borders. Russia’s Foreign Minister said it will be impossible to persuade the separatist regions of South Ossetia and Abkhazia to agree to be forced back into the Georgian state.


Our next guest has been closely examining how the Russian-Georgian conflict is largely an energy war over who has access to the vast oil and natural gas reserves in the Caspian region.


JUAN GONZALEZ: Three [years] ago the United States helped open a 1,000-mile-long pipeline that connected Azerbaijan to Turkey, running through Georgia. The pipeline was designed specifically to bypass Russia. More oil and natural gas pipelines are scheduled to be built in Georgia.


Michael Klare is the author of thirteen books, including Blood and Oil and Resource Wars. His latest book is Rising Powers, Shrinking Planet: The New Geopolitics of Energy. He is the defense analyst for The Nation and the director of the Five College Program in Peace and World Security Studies at Hampshire College in Amherst. He joins us this morning.


Welcome to Democracy Now!, Michael.


MICHAEL KLARE: Good morning.


JUAN GONZALEZ: Well, talk to us about the pipelines and the energy aspect that has received almost very little attention in all the coverage of the Russian-Georgia conflict.


MICHAEL KLARE: Well, I believe that this is what really underlies the conflict, and it has to do with the fact that the US has eyed the Caspian Sea, which lies just to the east of Georgia, as an energy corridor for exporting Caspian Sea oil and gas to the West, bypassing Russia. And this was the brainchild of Bill Clinton, who saw an opportunity, when the Soviet Union broke apart, to gain access to Caspian oil and gas, but he didn’t want this new energy to flow through Russia or through Iran, which were the only natural ways to export the energy.


So he anointed Georgia as a bridge, to build new pipelines through Georgia to the West. And it was he who masterminded the construction of the BTC pipeline, which is now the outlet for this oil, with new pipelines supposedly following for natural gas. And he chose Georgia for this purpose and also built up the Georgian military to protect the pipeline, and Russia has been furious about this ever since. And I think that’s the reason that they have clung so tightly to Abkhazia and South Ossetia ever since.


AMY GOODMAN: We’re not hearing very much about this conflict, as Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice heads to the area—I mean, the energy oil politics behind this conflict.


MICHAEL KLARE: No, but if you study very closely the history of US ties to Georgia, it’s unmistakable. Even under the Clinton administration, when Eduard Shevardnadze was the president of Georgia, who was hardly a paragon of democracy, President Clinton said that we need Georgia as an energy ally of the United States. And that was the basis on which the US forged a military alliance with Georgia.


And since then, we’ve poured hundreds of millions of dollars into beefing up the Georgian military. And this is unmistakable in the State Department and military Department of Defense justifications for arming the Georgian military, specifically to protect the BTC pipeline against sabotage and attack. So, looking into the Pentagon and State Department documents, there’s no question that this is about energy security, not about democracy or human rights or the other justifications that have been given.


JUAN GONZALEZ: Now, how would the two breakaway provinces affect this battle? Does the pipeline run through one or either of them?

MICHAEL KLARE: No, they run very close to South Ossetia, in particular, and I believe that the Russians have always been resentful of this effort by the United States to bypass Russia. Now, previously to this effort by the Clinton administration, subsequently embraced by the Bush administration, to establish bypass pipelines, previous to that, all of the pipelines from the Caspian Sea ran through Russia, of course formerly the Soviet Union, ran through Russia to Europe.


And it is the ambition of the Russian leadership, especially Vladimir Putin, to dominate the flow of oil and natural gas from the Caspian Sea to Europe, so they could maximize the profit and the political advantage of dominating the flow of Caspian energy to Europe. And by building these alternate pipelines, the US is trying to undercut Russia’s political and economic power in Europe. That’s what this is about. It’s a geopolitical contest between the US and Europe for—between the US and Russia for influence in Europe.


So, by clinging to these enclaves, this is Russia’s insurance policy, I guess you could call it, or veto power, over the American strategy, because they’re saying, “From our positions in these enclaves, we can sever those pipelines whenever we want,” which is exactly what they attempted to do this week. They did in fact bomb or attack the pipelines. And what they’re saying to the Europeans is, “You can build pipelines through Georgia, but we can snap them whenever we want.” And I think that the message that they’ve been sending to the Europeans is, “Don’t think that you could build more pipelines through Georgia and they’ll be safe. They’ll never be safe.
”

JUAN GONZALEZ: And, Michael, as you mentioned in one of your recent articles, the Russian leadership is as tied to its energy infrastructure as the present Bush administration is to the energy infrastructure here.
President Medvedev is a former head of Gazprom, isn’t he?

MICHAEL KLARE: Yes, exactly. And what’s underway in Europe is an effort headed by the EU to try to get under the thumb of Gazprom’s dominant role in the delivery of natural gas. Gazprom now delivers something like one-fourth of Europe’s natural gas. And if Gazprom has its way, it will double the amount of natural gas it supplies to Europe.


This has many Europeans and the United States deeply worried, because it kind of undercuts NATO’s independence. So, under American prodding, Europe has plans to build an alternative energy natural gas system called Nabucco, after the opera by Verdi, and this would go right through Georgia. And I think one of the major objectives of Russia’s incursion into Georgia is to say to the European leadership, “Your ideas about Nabucco are futile, because we can smash the Nabucco system anytime we want.
”

AMY GOODMAN: Michael Klare, I wanted to ask you about John McCain’s adviser, the controversy around Randy Scheunemann, part owner of the lobbying firm Orion Strategies, the Washington Post revealing Scheunemann briefed McCain before an April phone call with Georgian President Saakashvili, the same day Orion signed a $200,000 contract to advise Saakashvili’s government. Scheunemann then helped McCain draft a strong statement of support for Georgia. And Saakashvili has been talking directly to McCain, I mean, speaking through the press to McCain.


MICHAEL KLARE: Yes. It’s my impression that neoconservative circles in Washington have been egging Saakashvili on, have been telling him that he had much stronger support in Washington for this move, for this attack he made last week into South Ossetia, than he really did. I think, like so much else that’s happened in the past few years, there are really two foreign policy voices in Washington: the State Department voice of Condoleezza Rice and the Vice President’s Office and other elements around Dick Cheney that have a completely different foreign policy. And I wouldn’t be surprised if people around John McCain and Vice President Cheney weren’t telling Saakashvili that if he invaded South Ossetia, he would get much more support from the United States than in fact he did, and that this is what motivated him to provoke this clash, thinking that the US would come to his rescue. I have absolutely no evidence for that, but this kind of report that you just cited leads me to think that he went into South Ossetia last week with some sort of promises that never materialized.


JUAN GONZALEZ: And what do you make of Barack Obama, the presumptive Democratic nominee, his response to this crisis? Do you see any difference in his approach at this point from those of Bill Clinton previously or President Bush, in terms of the situation in Georgia?

MICHAEL KLARE: Well, you know, I get the sense that he was caught off guard by all of this. You don’t get the impression that he was following this as closely maybe as he should have. I don’t think he was aware of just how much—how much there has been this history of US support for Saakashvili and how much encouragement he’s probably been receiving from elements in Washington to engage in this adventuristic policy against the Russians.


And again, I don’t know how much he’s even aware of the degree to which Georgia has been a US military protectorate, the hundreds of millions of dollars of military aid, the fact that there are US military instructors in Georgia, and that this fast-track NATO policy that the Bush administration has favored—all of this has been viewed in Moscow as an effort, as part of this larger effort, that the Bush administration has pushed—is seen in Moscow as part of an offensive, you know, an attack on Russia. It’s tied, of course, to plans for putting missile interceptors in Poland and with the radars in Czechoslovakia. They see this as a Cold War assault on Russia coming from Washington, tied also to plans I mentioned a minute ago to bring Ukraine and Georgia into NATO. They feel they’re under attack and very threatened. And so, all of this is viewed by them as something that required a strong countermove.


I don’t get the sense that Senator Obama was quite aware of the degree to which they felt under attack and were poised for some kind of counter-response.


AMY GOODMAN: It’s also interesting to see the presidents of Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia standing with the Georgian president. They all went to Georgia. I just came back from Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia, and I was very struck by, when asking why these countries had joined with the US in invading Iraq, albeit their forces very small in number but both in Iraq and Afghanistan, people repeatedly said, “We have to do this, because we need the US support against Russia.” They’re still very afraid of a Russian occupation. They don’t forget the sixty years.


MICHAEL KLARE: Yes, this is true. But on the other hand, I—again, I come back to this notion that we have two foreign policies. We have the State Department foreign policy, Condoleezza Rice, who often speaks of the need for a cooperative relationship with Russia, with working out these complicated issues, and we have a neoconservative foreign policy emanating from the Vice President’s Office, which isn’t interested in cooperation, which is interested in confrontation and in reviving the Cold War. And I think that they go to the countries on the border of the Soviet Union and encourage them to take a confrontational line and seek out leaders who are willing to speak this way. This is not where the rest of Europe is inclined.


AMY GOODMAN: Michael Klare, we want to thank you for being with us, defense analyst for The Nation, director of the Five College Program for Peace and World Security Studies at Hampshire College in Amherst. His latest book is Rising Powers, Shrinking Planet: The New Geopolitics of Energy.

No Way Out...Endogamy is the Enemy...

This is one of those topics that just gets under my skin and pisses me off to no end..."Honor" killings of women (mostly) to protect a families supposed honor...However, to me the most insidious, pernicious, and yet still so prevalent manifestation is endogamy or "the practice of marrying within a social group." You see this phenomenon throughout many different cultures/societies...



What is of primary importance to me is not that there is any greater benefit to marrying outside of ones social group but in erasing any of the distinctions and alleged differences that exist for some (even against their often vociferous denials)...

The link to the BBC documentary that spurred me to write this is below as well as a few other resources of interest to those seeking to fight endogamy and social injustice more broadly...

Choice
..



Loving Day
Loving Day Myspace
Inter-"racial" Marriage


No Way Out

Programme Two: No Way Out

Shazia Khan, for BBC World Service, meets some young women in the UK for whom attempting escape from abusive marriages means risking murder by the men in their own families.

According to official statistics, one woman a month is killed in the UK by her family in the name of honour, usually because she has rejected or tried to escape from a forced marriage, or has found a partner to love of her own choosing.

Each year over 300 cases of forced marriage are dealt with by the Forced Marriage Unit set up by the British government.

But campaigners suspect that the figures are much higher, with women being driven to kill themselves out of desperation, or murders being disguised to look like suicide.

Honour killing

Though honour killing is sometimes thought to be a Muslim problem, it occurs in many patriarchal communities around the world, including Hindu, Sikh and Christian too.

Presenter Shazia Khan, who is herself a Muslim of Pakistani descent, is troubled that forced marriage and honour killings take place in her own Pakistani community. She is concerned that young men of her own generation, born or brought up in the UK, are prepared to go so far as to kill to preserve their family name.

Shazia talks to three women, one of them in hiding in fear of her life, about why they have become targets of such rage and threatened violence and how the very people who they would have hoped would protect them have turned on them.

For the women who have challenged their family's expectations, it can feel as if there is 'No Way Out', a life-long price to pay.

US Contractors, FARC, u*ibe, Colombian Para's and the Generals

A VERY good and informative article...

As Freed US Contractors Speak Out, a Look at the FARC, Colombian Paramilitary Groups and the Generals Being Feted for the Hostage Rescue

Three American military contractors freed from the Colombian jungle have spoken out against their former captors, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC. Marc Gonsalves, Thomas Howes and Keith Stansell were among the fifteen hostages, including the French Colombian politician Ingrid Betancourt, rescued in an elaborate military operation last week in a major blow to the FARC. We host a roundtable discussion with Mario Murillo, author of Colombia and the United States; Michael Evans of the Colombia Documentation Project; and Manuel Rozental, a Colombian physician and human rights activist living in Canada following several threats on his life. [includes rush transcript]


Guests:

Mario Murillo, Professor of communications at Hofstra University and producer at Pacifica radio station WBAI here in New York. He is author of Colombia and the United States: War, Terrorism and Destabilization and is completing a book on the indigenous movement in Colombia and its use of popular media in community organizing.

Michael Evans, Director of the Colombia Documentation Project at the National Security Archive.

Manuel Rozental, physician, human rights activist, member of the Hemispheric Social Alliance and the Association of Indigenous Councils of Northern Cauca in Colombia. Fled to Canada in 2005 following several threats on his life.

AMY GOODMAN: We turn now to the three American military contractors freed from the Colombian jungle, speaking out against their former captors, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC—Marc Gonsalves, Thomas Howes and Keith Stansell, among the fifteen hostages, including the French Colombian politician Ingrid Betancourt, who was rescued in an elaborate military operation last week. The Colombian government says it managed to infiltrate FARC command and fool the rebels into thinking they were transferring the hostages to another location.

On Monday, the three Americans spoke publicly for the first time since their release. Marc Gonsalves called his former FARC captors “terrorists” and urged them to release hundreds of remaining hostages.

The freed Americans are employees of the military firm Northrop Grumman. They have been captured—they were captured in 2003 after their surveillance plane crashed in the Colombian jungle.

The rescue operation was widely seen as a major blow to the FARC. The fifteen freed prisoners were the most high-profile of hundreds the FARC had held in hopes of securing the release of captured rebels and achieving other political demands. The group has already been depleted by the deaths of three senior leaders this year and a series of defections.

Criticism of FARC has come from all sides. Indigenous, peasant and human rights groups have denounced FARC’s kidnappings and armed operations and said they also deflect attention from government abuses.

I’m joined now by three guests. Here in the firehouse, Mario Murillo, professor of communications at Hofstra University, a producer at Pacifica radio station WBAI here in New York, author of the book Colombia and the United States: War, Terrorism and Destabilization, currently finishing another book on the indigenous movement in Colombia and its popular use of the media in community organizing. Also, in Washington, D.C., I’m joined by Michael Evans, director of the Colombia Documentation Project at the National Security Archive. And on the line from New Brunswick, Canada, Manuel Rozental. He’s a Colombian physician, human rights activist and member of the Association of Indigenous Councils of Northern Cauca in Colombia. He fled to Canada in 2005 following several threats on his life.

Mario, you have been writing about what happened, and now there’s serious questions, Swiss reports of whether in fact this was staged, whether $20 million wasn’t paid in ransom for these prisoners by the Colombian government.

MARIO MURILLO: Right. There’s a lot of questions, actually, because there’s three different versions. Unfortunately, the official version is the one that’s getting the most play, and obviously Alvaro Uribe is getting a lot of political mileage out of it. And that’s, of course, this dramatic rescue operation that you described in the introduction.

There’s two other reports. The one that you just alluded to from the French—Swiss radio—public radio service, that—based on high sources that the reporters had, saying that one of the wives of one of the guards, one of the FARC rebels who was involved in securing and maintaining security around the hostages, was in constant contact and made this arrangement for a $20 million ransom pay. And that’s from one report.

Another report, which probably is a lot more feasible if this—you know, I haven’t gotten deeper in that one, but the other report is that the Colombian government actually took advantage of a diplomatic effort that was already underway for a long time by the former French consul in Bogota, as well as a leading Swiss diplomat who was in Colombia, and they were making arrangements, and they even got the green light from the Colombian government. It was in the Spanish daily, El Pais, when the president, Colombian president, actually announced that, yeah, this interchange, this dialogue, was actually proceeding. And it turns out, apparently, according to this report, that the Colombian government intercepted the helicopters that were on their way, so it wasn’t really a high infiltration operation that was in the highest levels of the FARC commanders. The FARC were actually turning the folks over to specifically this delegation led by these two diplomats, and apparently the Colombian government kind of took, you know, a right turn and got a lot of political mileage as a result.

A lot of questions are still around what happened, but unfortunately, as I said, the official story is the one that’s getting out the most.

AMY GOODMAN: I want to turn now to the freed American military contractors. On Monday, they spoke out for the first time since their rescue. Marc Gonsalves was the most vocal of the three in criticizing FARC. This is some of what he had to say.

MARC GONSALVES: There was a time that when I slept, I would dream that I was free. That time was only a few days ago. It feels so good to be free here now with all of you.

I want to tell you about the FARC, a guerrilla group who claim to be revolutionaries fighting for the poor people of Colombia. They say that they want equality. They say that they just want to make Colombia a better place. But that’s all a lie. It’s a cover story, and they hide behind it, and they use it to justify their criminal activity.

The FARC are not a revolutionary group. They are not a revolutionary group. They are terrorists. Terrorists with a capital T. Bad people. Their interests lie in drug trafficking, extortion, kidnapping. They refuse to acknowledge all human rights. And they reject democracy.

I’ve seen them hold a newborn baby in captivity, a baby that needed medical help, that was sick. They kept him there in the jungle.

I, myself, and my friends, Tom and Keith, we’ve also been victim of their hate, of their abuse and other torture. And I have seen how even their own guerrillas commit suicide in a desperate attempt to escape the slavery that the FARC have condemned them to.

The majority of the FARC’s forces are children and young adults. They come from extreme poverty and have very little or no education. Many of them, they can’t even read. So they’re easily tricked into joining the FARC, and they’re brainwashed into believing that their cause is a just cause. But once they join, they can never leave, because if they try, they will be killed.

There are people who right now in this very moment, they’re still there in the jungle being held hostage. In this exact moment, right now, they’re being punished, because we got rescued successfully. I want you guys to imagine that. Right now, right now, they’re wearing chains around their necks. They’re going to get up early tomorrow morning, and they’re going to put a heavy backpack on their backs, and they’re going to be forced to march with that chain on their neck, while a guerrilla with an automatic weapon is holding the other end of his chain like a dog.

Those are innocent people. Those are people that were fighting or working for the country. And all they want is what we wanted and what God had the grace to give us: our freedom.

I want to send a message to the FARC. FARC, you guys are terrorists. You deny that you are. You say with words that you’re not terrorists, but your words don’t have any value. Don’t tell us that you’re not terrorists; show us that you’re not terrorists. Let those other hostages come home. Agree to President Uribe’s proposal of an encounter zone. Anywhere and any time you want, he proposed an encounter zone. Then make the humanitarian agreement and let the others come home. Then after that, a peace process, because otherwise this downward spiral that the FARC are on now will continue, and the Colombian military is going to dismantle the entire organization.


AMY GOODMAN: That is the quote of the man, the American contractor, who was captured, Gonsalves, speaking yesterday—Marc Gonsalves—in San Antonio. Let’s begin with you, Mario. Your thoughts?

MARIO MURILLO: Well, first of all, he said a lot of things, so we can comment on a lot of things, obviously. One of the things being the fact of the terrible conditions in which these hostages are held is something that obviously nobody could really argue about. It’s unjust, and everybody from Fidel Castro to Hugo Chavez to many other people around the world have been demanding the FARC turn these folks over.

But he also says a lot of things that kind of whitewash the situation. First of all, I think it’s very important, one of the tragedies of this whole thing is that we will never get to the bottom of what Gonsalves and his so-called contractors were doing in Colombia. We have to recall that he was—first of all, the fact that his plane went down—the official record says it was an accident and they went down in the jungles, although the FARC had claimed initially that they shot it down.

We also have to point out that to use the term “hostages” in their case—not to justify that they were held for five years, by no stretch of the imagination—but to use the term “hostages” is very problematic in the context in which they were operating in southern Colombia. They were there in 2003, two years—a year and a half after President Bush already authorized US servicemen and contractors to conduct counterinsurgency, not counter-drug operations. That was in the heart of where the FARC were operating, in Caqueta and in the southern part of the country. So we will never get to the bottom of what exactly these folks were doing down there—again, not to justify, but I think that’s one of the many questions that are left unsaid.

And then, finally, his last comments there about what Uribe’s proposals are really are optimistic, if not completely naive. He doesn’t seem to understand that Uribe’s strategy is not to dialogue with the FARC. His intention is to totally dismantle them. He does not recognize them as a belligerent force. And the argument that they’re terrorists, which Gonsalves here is arguing, is something that Uribe has embraced to the detriment of any possibility of dialogue for long-lasting peace in Colombia.

AMY GOODMAN: Let me turn to Manuel Rozental. Your response right now, as a man who has fled Colombia, a physician, a human rights activist, now living in Canada, hearing the description of the FARC and also talking about the Uribe government? It’s interesting that Ingrid Betancourt, perhaps the most well-known hostage, who has now returned to France—said she may run for president again, in fact ran against Uribe—said Colombian President Alvaro Uribe should soften his tone when dealing with FARC guerrillas. She urged Uribe to break with the language of hatred. Manuel?

MANUEL ROZENTAL: Yes. Hi, Amy. Indeed, it’s very interesting. I, first of all, have to say, like I think almost every Colombian, that we were absolutely elated by the liberation of Ingrid and that her condition is good, and one cannot downplay that. Regardless of how it was achieved, it was fantastic that she was released unharmed and that all the other ones were, as well.

Also, what Mario was saying, they were really fourteen prisoners of war and one hostage released. The fourteen prisoners of war, mistreated, abused, and I’m also glad, as everybody, that they’re free.

And in fact, I would say, knowing Ingrid before she was kidnapped, and precisely two or three days before she was kidnapped by FARC, she actually met with FARC commanders, including Raul Reyes, and said directly that she demanded a gesture of goodwill from FARC in order for peace to be achieved in Colombia. And her almost exact words were “Your gesture of goodwill has to be no more kidnapping in Colombia, and then, otherwise, if you don’t do that gesture, if you don’t carry it out, then Colombia will explode into a spiral of disaster, and you will lose all credibility.” So I think that background is essential, because just a couple of days after she says that, she’s kidnapped by the very people she demands that gesture from.

But I think it’s very important to put the whole thing into context. First, the Uribe government has peaked in popularity but also has reached a bottom in terms of illegitimacy. It was condemned just a few days before this operation of liberation was carried out because of buying out votes from congress to achieve re-election in a fraudulent way. Uribe’s administration is also linked to death squads, and so are the members of a coalition that led him to win the elections twice and high officials in government, including the secret police. So we’re talking about the regime with the worst human rights record in the continent and the army with the worst human rights record in the continent with the greatest US support, including the contractors or mercenaries that Mario was talking about. So the fact that this regime was involved in this liberation does not and should not and cannot cover up the fact that it is a horrendous regime.

So, the main point I’d like to make here beyond the discussion as to whether FARC or the government, which one is worse or which one is legitimate, the main point here is an SOS for the popular movements and organizations and the people of Colombia who right now, with the validation of Uribe’s regime, are at the greatest risk of continuing to be or even worsening the human rights records and abuses.

And to put this into perspective, there is a major plan in progress within Colombia and from Colombia with US support and for corporate interests to take over resources and wealth in territories in Colombia and, from there, to launch a war or a major conflict in the Andean region. That agenda is going to advance even further, after—if Uribe gets away with the legitimization of his regime after the liberation of Ingrid.

So, to go back to where I started, if Ingrid was the same Ingrid that was kidnapped by FARC, the one that denounced corruption of the government and launched a presidential campaign, she would be saying what I’m saying now. You cannot legitimate a corrupt regime for profit because you have liberated somebody. In fact, the person they’ve liberated fought against that corruption, and we hope she’ll do it again.

AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to bring Michael Evans into this discussion, director of the Colombia Documentation Project at the National Security Archive. Inter Press Service wrote an interesting piece called "Colombia: The General Ingrid Hugged,” and they’re talking about General Mario Montoya—General Mario Montoya Uribe and Ingrid Betancourt. For our radio listeners, we’re showing the image. You can go to our website at democracynow.org. Tell us about this general.

MICHAEL EVANS: Sure. Thanks for having me on the show. General Mario Montoya is the commander of the Colombian army, and he has a sort of spotted history with respect to human rights.

And it’s important to—for the listeners of this show to realize that there’s another side to the coin with the FARC. Few people have illusions that the FARC are well-intentioned liberals, but the other side of it are the right-wing paramilitary groups that have operated virtually unhindered in Colombia for decades.

Mario Montoya, the general that Ingrid hugged—and I haven’t seen the Inter Press story, but I can imagine where it goes—just last year was the subject of a CIA report leaked to the Los Angeles Times that implicated him in a joint operation with paramilitary forces in the city of Medellin just a few years ago, when he was a commander of an army brigade there. And Montoya, throughout his career, has been dogged by these kinds of allegations. A unit that he was a member of in the late 1970s, when he was a young intelligence officer, had actually formed a supposedly independent spontaneous paramilitary group known as the Triple A, the American Anticommunist Alliance, that was responsible for bombings and other kinds of threats and intimidation, sort of black ops type operations in Colombia. The unit that he was associated with created it as a completely clandestine project. So General Montoya has a lot to answer for, as does President Uribe. You know, many of his political allies have been implicated in the parapolitical scandal, a scandal touched off by the discovery of a paramilitary laptop a couple of years ago.

So there’s another side to this that I think is lost in this and is in danger of sort of being consumed or buried under this sort of all this wave of adoration for, you know, what is, I think, rightly considered a very successful military operation. Of course, everybody is happy that the hostages have been released, and it’s a huge victory for them and their families, but you have to also see this as a huge victory for Uribe and for—really as something that’s going to help him to get through and sort of avoid addressing some of these larger problems that he faces.

AMY GOODMAN: The Triple A, what is it, Michael Evans?

MICHAEL EVANS: Yeah, the Triple A was a group, again, that in the late 1970s and early 1980s operated as a clandestine unit of a Colombian military intelligence unit. Essentially, they were formed completely covertly, behind the scenes, without any attribution to the Colombian army. They were responsible for bombing the Communist Party headquarters and some other acts of intimidation around that time. It’s really the first documented evidence that I’ve seen, at least in US government documents, declassified documents, where a Colombian army unit is directly tied to a clandestine paramilitary group or right-wing—

AMY GOODMAN: And its relation to the United States?

MICHAEL EVANS: Well, its relation to the United States, as far as I know, ends where—in a cable reported from the US ambassador, Diego Asencio, in 1979, where he knows of this project and says—kind of downplays it and says, well, it’s not a big deal; you know, these are kind of dirty tricks being carried out by a desperate military facing this—excuse me, this guerrilla threat from the—what then was the M-19 guerrillas. But the US certainly knew about that project, and if they had done a little digging, would have known that Mario Montoya was a part of it, the man, of course, who is now the senior Colombian army official that is considered a great ally of the United States.

AMY GOODMAN: Manuel Rozental, can you return to Colombia today?

MANUEL ROZENTAL: Yeah, actually, I have been returning to Colombia, and my situation is not unusual, in that many of the people under threat actually go back to Colombia and have to be very careful and keep looking for mechanisms to work with social movements. In fact, my working with the Association of Indigenous Councils is at a moment when more indigenous peoples, through this regime of Alvaro Uribe, have been threatened, killed, disappeared or attacked than in any other previous regimes, which has a lot to say about what’s going on.

But, Amy, I wanted to point out something. Maybe you saw this, or the people listening to us. There was a 60 Minutes special on the Chiquita Brands scandal. The Chiquita is, of course, a banana company. And the documentary actually interviewed the CEO of Chiquita that had pleaded guilty of funding the paramilitary forces. But the argument he presented was that he was forced to fund the paramilitaries in order to survive, because he was threatened by them.

The main point here is that the person doing the interview managed to get through to Mancuso, the paramilitary commander and a close friend of Uribe’s, and Mancuso stated clearly in the program that many people saw in the US that there was never a threat, and it was out of consideration that there would be any tense relationship or threat between three companies—Dole, Chiquita, and Del Monte—in Colombia, because they were actually allies. He actually said clearly, “They funded us. They armed us. They trained us,” which is very important.

In fact, just a few days after this came out to the US public, Mancuso and another fourteen paramilitaries were taken, extradited into the US, so that they would be charged for drug trade and all the crimes against humanity and all the names he said he was going to name—Mancuso said he was going to denounce the direct links between the multinational US corporations, the US government, the Colombian government and the paramilitaries to the State Department and Department of Justice. And just after he says that, he is thrown into jail into darkness in the US, so that all these criminal activities and the architecture of power in Colombia could not be exposed. All this stuff is covered up.

And then, the links between corporate interest, paramilitary death squads, the Uribe and the Bush administration have been hidden, covered up completely. And then, the real problem in Colombia, which is an experiment from transnational corporations through the Uribe administration with the support of the Bush and the US government, can be hidden, and further hidden with what just happened.

As was being explained before, the whole paramilitary and death squad machinery in Colombia has been in existence for a long time with clear US support, with direct involvement of military and paramilitary forces in Colombia, and the Uribe regime is directly linked to all that.

AMY GOODMAN: It seems that the FARC has served the president of Colombia very well—Uribe. The US has given billions of dollars to Colombia. Mario Murillo, let’s end there.

MARIO MURILLO: Yeah. Well, I would make the argument that the FARC continue to be a kind of crutch for Uribe, and it’s all couched in the war against narcotrafficking and the war against terror. The United States is looking at this as the prime éxito or success story, and they’re pumping tens of millions of—billions of dollars into Colombia. And McCain was down there just last week, touting it—

AMY GOODMAN: Was there the day of the release.

MARIO MURILLO: Was there the day of the rescue, and he’s touting it as a success story, without pointing out what already has been said, as well as the—it’s not only a thing of the past, it’s a thing of the present. Amnesty International and the Fellowship of Reconciliation came out with a scathing report in May—late April, early May this year, documenting how the regiments, the army units that the Colombian army is receiving the most money of Colombian—of US support are directly involved in extrajudicial executions, a story that has been reported in the Los Angeles Times and the Washington Post but that, unfortunately, as you know, doesn’t get the drumbeat that this dramatic rescue would get.

AMY GOODMAN: I want to thank you all for being with us. Mario Murillo is a WBAI producer, professor at Hofstra University, author of the book Colombia and the United States: War, Terrorism and Destabilization. Michael Evans in D.C., director of the Colombia Documentation Project at the National Security Archive. We’ll link to that. And Manuel Rozental, physician, human rights activist, member of the Hemispheric Social Alliance and Association of Indigenous Councils of Northern Cauca in Colombia. I wish we could be speaking to him in Colombia, but he fled to Canada in 2005 following several threats against his life.

Spitzer’s Shame Is Wall Street’s Gain...

Spitzer’s Shame Is Wall Street’s Gain

Tell me again: Why should we get all worked up over the revelation that the New York governor paid for sex? Will it bring back to life the eight U.S. soldiers killed in Iraq that same day in a war that makes no sense and has cost this nation trillions in future debt? Will it save those millions of homes that hardworking folks all over the country are losing because of financial industry shenanigans that Eliot Spitzer, as much as anyone, attempted to halt? Perhaps it provides some insight into why oil has risen to $108 a barrel, benefiting most of all the oil sheiks whom our taxpayer-supported military has kept in power?

...The best rule of thumb these days is that ordinary Americans should be mightily depressed over any news that Wall Street hustlers cheer, for they have been exposed as a dangerous pack of scoundrels quite willing to rob decent, hardworking people of their homes. And of course no one on Wall Street ever paid for sex.

Tell me again: Why should we get all worked up over the revelation that the New York governor paid for sex? Will it bring back to life the eight U.S. soldiers killed in Iraq that same day in a war that makes no sense and has cost this nation trillions in future debt? Will it save those millions of homes that hardworking folks all over the country are losing because of financial industry shenanigans that Eliot Spitzer, as much as anyone, attempted to halt? Perhaps it provides some insight into why oil has risen to $108 a barrel, benefiting most of all the oil sheiks whom our taxpayer-supported military has kept in power?

Sure, the guy, by his own admission, is quite pathetic in all those small, squirrelly ways that have messed up the lives of other grand public figures before him, but why is an all-too-human sin, amply predicted in early Scripture, getting all this incredible media play as some sort of shocking event? The answer is that, while having precious little to do with serious corruption in public life, it does have a great deal to do with stoking flagging newspaper sales and television ratings.

The sad truth is that reporting on major corruption, say, the rationalizations of a president who has authorized torture, doesn't cut it as a marketing bonanza. Just days before this grand exposé, the president vetoed a bill banning torture, and instead of being greeted with horrified disgust, the president's deep denigration of this nation's presumed ideals was met with a vast public yawn. Torture, unlike paid sex, doesn't have legs as a news story.

Sex sells, and frankly it would seem far more exploitative for the news media to pimp this tale to the public than anything that VIP escort service did with the pitiable governor. His behavior was not really any more wretched than messing around with a young and vulnerable White House intern who didn't even get paid for her efforts, yet Bill Clinton survived that one, whereas Spitzer was presumed dead on the arrival of this "news." The New York Times, which editorially has supported the candidacy of Hillary Clinton, whose vast White House experience clearly did not include corralling her husband, now editorializes contemptuously about Spitzer's betrayal of the public trust as well as about his exploitation of his "ashen-faced" wife, who, like Hillary, stood by her man.

The media consensus from the opening salvo was that Spitzer must resign and he will be thrown to the dogs, which is unfortunate because, like Clinton, he has done much valuable work in the public interest, and the outrage over this personal dereliction, tawdry in the extreme, is excessive. I certainly never wanted Clinton to resign, let alone be impeached, but why is Spitzer's paying for sex more disgraceful than ripping it off? Yes, Spitzer allegedly broke a law that shouldn't be on the books, and his resignation in disgrace is inevitable, but it bothers me that George W. Bush and Dick Cheney remain in office despite having violated enormously more serious laws.

Frankly, I don't care what any of these politicians do in their personal lives as long as the practice is consensual, and the thousands of dollars that exchanged hands in this case would provide a presumption that the lady in question was indeed a willing partner in this commercial transaction. True, Spitzer is an outrageous hypocrite for having prosecuted others caught in what should not be considered criminal behavior, but since when is hypocrisy on the part of a politician, particularly as to sex, so shocking?

I wouldn't have written this column had I not read The Wall Street Journal's Page 1 news story headlined "Wall Street Cheers as Its Nemesis Plunges Into Crisis." The article begins with the crowing statement "It's Schadenfreude time on Wall Street" and goes on to quote those whom Spitzer went after over what should be considered the criminal greed that has predominated on Wall Street. It was Spitzer, as much as anyone, who sounded the alarm on the subprime mortgage crisis, the obscene payouts to CEOs who defrauded their shareholders and the other financial scandals that have brought the U.S. economy to its knees.

The best rule of thumb these days is that ordinary Americans should be mightily depressed over any news that Wall Street hustlers cheer, for they have been exposed as a dangerous pack of scoundrels quite willing to rob decent, hardworking people of their homes. And of course no one on Wall Street ever paid for sex.

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Robert Scheer is the co-author of The Five Biggest Lies Bush Told Us About Iraq. See more of Robert Scheer at TruthDig.

Uh-Obama: Racism, White Voters and the Myth of Color-Blindness

Good article as usual...Also check out Michael Eric Dyson and his thoughts on all this and a lot more...



Uh-Obama: Racism, White Voters and the Myth of Color-Blindness

By Tim Wise

March 6, 2008

Here's a sentence I never thought I'd write, at least not as soon as I am now compelled to write it: It may well be the case that the United States is on its way to electing a person of color as President. Make no mistake, I realize the way that any number of factors, racism prominently among them, could derail such a thing from coming to fruition. Indeed, results from the Ohio Democratic primary suggest that an awful lot of white folks, especially rural and working-class whites, are still mightily uncomfortable with voting for such a candidate, at least partly because of race: One-fifth of voters in the state said race was important to their decision, and roughly six in ten of these voted for Hillary Clinton, which totals would then represent roughly her net margin of victory over Barack Obama.

But having said all that--and I think anyone who is being honest would have to acknowledge this as factual--we are far closer to the election of a person of color in a Presidential race than probably any of us expected. Obama's meteoric rise, from community organizer, to law professor, to Illinois state senator, to the U.S. Senate, and now, possibly, the highest office in the land, is something that could have been foreseen by few if any just a few years ago. Obama's undeniable charisma, savvy political instincts, passion for his work, and ability to connect with young voters (and not a few older ones as well) is the kind of thing you just don't see all that often. The fact that as a black man (or, as some may prefer, a man of biracial background) he has been able to catapult to the position in which he now finds himself makes the accomplishment even more significant. It does indeed mean something.

But this is where things become considerably more complicated; the point at which one is forced to determine what, exactly, his success means (and doesn't mean) when it comes to the state of race, race relations, and racism in the United States. And it is at this point that so-called mainstream commentary has, once again, dropped the ball.

On the one hand, many a voice has suggested that Obama's success signifies something akin to the end of racism in the U.S., if not entirely, then surely as a potent political or social force. After all, if a black man actually stands a better-than-decent shot at becoming President, then how much of a barrier could racism really be? But of course, the success of individual persons of color, while it certainly suggests that overt bigotry has diminished substantially, hardly speaks to the larger social reality faced by millions of others: a subject to which we will return. Just as sexism no doubt remained an issue in Pakistan, even after Benazir Bhutto became Prime Minister in the 1980s and again in the 90s (or in India or Israel after both nations had female Premiers, or in Great Britain after the election of Margaret Thatcher), so too can racism exist in abundance, in spite of the electoral success of one person of color, even one who could be elevated to the highest office in the world's most powerful nation.

More importantly, to the extent Obama's success has been largely contingent on his studious avoidance of the issue of race--such that he rarely ever mentions discrimination and certainly not in front of white audiences--one has to wonder just how seriously we should take the notion that racism is a thing of the past, at least as supposedly evidenced by his ability to attract white votes? To the extent those whites are rewarding him in large measure for not talking about race, and to the extent they would abandon him in droves were he to begin talking much about racism--for he would be seen at that point as playing the race card, or appealing to "special interests" and suffer the consequences--we should view Obama's success, given what has been required to make it possible, as confirmation of the ongoing salience of race in American life. Were race really something we had moved beyond, whites would be open to hearing a candidate share factual information about housing discrimination, racial profiling, or race-based inequities in health care. But we don't want to be reminded of those things. We prefer to ignore them, and many are glad that Obama has downplayed them too, whether by choice, or necessity.

Erasing Race and Making White Folks Happy

The extent to which Obama's white support has been directly related to his downplaying of race issues simply cannot be overstated, as evidenced by the kinds of things many of these supporters openly admit, possessing no sense of apparent irony or misgiving. So, consider the chant offered by his supporters at a recent rally--and frankly, a chant in which whites appeared to be joining with far greater enthusiasm than folks of color--to the effect that "Race Doesn't Matter, Race Doesn't Matter," a concept so utterly absurd, given the way in which race most certainly still matters to the opportunity structure in this country, that one has to almost wretch at the repeated offering of it. Or consider the statements of support put forth by Obama supporters in a November 2007 Wall Street Journal article, to the effect that Obama makes whites "feel good" about ourselves (presumably by not bothering us with all that race talk), and that Obama, by virtue of his race-averse approach has "emancipated" whites to finally vote for a black candidate (because goodness knows we were previously chained and enslaved to a position of rejectionism). Worst of all, consider the words of one white Obama supporter, an ardent political blogger in Nashville, to the effect that what he likes about the Illinois Senator is that he "doesn't come with the baggage of the civil rights movement." Let it suffice to say that when the civil rights movement--one of the greatest struggles for human liberation in the history of our collective species--can be unashamedly equated with Samsonite, with luggage, with something one should avoid as though it were radioactive (and this coming from a self-described liberal), we are at a very dangerous place as a nation, all celebrations of Obama's cross-racial appeal notwithstanding.

What does it say about the nation's political culture--and what does it suggest about the extent to which we have moved "beyond race"--that candidate Obama, though he surely knows it, has been unable to mention the fact that 2006 saw the largest number of race-based housing discrimination complaints on record, and according to government and private studies, there are between two and three million cases of housing discrimination each year against people of color?

What does it say that he has failed to note with any regularity that according to over a hundred studies, health disparities between whites and blacks are due not merely to health care costs and economic differences between the two groups (a subject he does address) but also due to the provision of discriminatory care by providers, even to blacks with upper incomes, and black experiences with racism itself, which are directly related to hypertension and other maladies?

What does it say that Obama apparently can't bring himself to mention, for fear of likely white backlash, that whites are over seventy percent of drug users, but only about ten percent of persons incarcerated for a drug possession offense, while blacks and Latinos combined are about twenty-five percent of users, but comprise roughly ninety percent of persons locked up for a possession offense?

Why no mention of the massive national study by legal scholars Alfred and Ruth Blumrosen, which found that at least a third of all businesses in the nation engage in substantial discrimination against people of color--hiring such folks at rates that are well below their availability in the local and qualified labor pool, and well below the rates at which they are to be found in non-discriminating companies in the same locales and industries? Indeed, according to the Blumrosen study, at least 1.3 million qualified people of color will face job discrimination in a given year. Or what of the study of temporary agencies in California, which found that white women who are less qualified than their black counterparts, are still three times more likely to be favored in a job search? And what are the odds that he'll be likely to mention, to any significant degree, the recent EEOC report, which notes that in 2007 there was a twelve percent jump in race-based discrimination complaints in the workplace relative to the previous year (almost all of which were filed by persons of color): bringing the number of such complaints to their highest level since 1994?

As Obama talks about change and making the "American Dream" real for all, why is he unable to mention the fact--let alone propose specific remedies for it--that thanks to a history of unequal access to property and the inability to accumulate assets on par with whites, young black couples with college degrees and good incomes still start out at a significant disadvantage (around $20,000) relative to their white counterparts? In fact, the wealth gap between whites and blacks--with the average white family now having about eleven times the net worth of the average black family--continues to grow, even as income gaps for similarly educated families with similar background characteristics have shrunk.

And why such muted discussion about the way that, in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, government at all levels and across party lines has engaged in ethnic cleansing in New Orleans, failing to provide rental assistance to the mostly black tenant base for over a year, plotting to tear down 5000 perfectly usable units of public housing, failing to restart the city's public health care infrastructure, and even ordering the Red Cross not to provide relief in the first few days after the city flooded in September 2005, so as to force evacuation and empty out the city? While Obama has spoken much about the failures of the Bush Administration during Katrina, openly discussing the deliberate acts of cruelty that go well beyond incompetence, and which amount to the forced depopulation of New Orleans-area blacks, has been something about which he cannot speak for fear of prompting a backlash from whites, most of whom, according to polls, don't think the events of Katrina have any lessons at all to teach us about race in America.

Surely, that Obama is constrained in his ability to focus any real attention on these matters, suggests that whatever his success may say about America and race, one thing it utterly fails to say is that we have conquered the racial demons that have so long bedeviled us. And to the extent he must remain relatively silent about these issues, lest he find his political ascent headed in a decidedly different direction, it is true, however ironic, that his success actually confirms the salience of white power. If, in order to be elected, a man of color has to pander to white folks, in ways that no white politician would ever have to do to people who were black or brown, then white privilege and white power remain operative realities. Obama's ascent to the Presidency, if it happens, will happen only because he managed to convince enough whites that he was different, and not really black, in the way too many whites continue to think of black people, which according to every opinion survey, is not too positively.

Transcending Blackness, Reinforcing White Racism: The Trouble With Exceptions

Obama's rise has owed almost everything to his ability--and this, again, coming from people who support him and are willing to speak candidly--to "transcend" race, which is really a way of saying, his ability to carve out an exception for himself in the minds of whites. But this notion of Obama "transcending race" (by which we really mean transcending his blackness) is a patently offensive and even racist notion in that it serves to reinforce generally negative feelings about blacks as a whole; feelings that the presence of exceptions cannot cancel out, and which they can even serve to reinforce. To the extent Obama has become the Cliff Huxtable of politics--a black man with whom millions of whites can identity and to whom they can relate--he has leapt one hurdle, only to watch his white co-countrymen and women erect a still higher one in the path of the black masses. If whites view Obama as having transcended his blackness, and if this is why we like him so much, we are saying, in effect, that the millions of blacks who haven't transcended theirs will remain a problem. To praise the transcending of blackness, after all, is to imply that blackness is something negative, something from which one who might otherwise qualify for membership ought to seek escape, and quickly.

Note, never has a white politician been confronted with questions about his or her ability to transcend race, or specifically, their whiteness. And this is true, even as many white politicians continue to pull almost all of their support from whites, and have almost no luck at convincing people of color to vote for them. In the Democratic primaries this year, Obama has regularly received about half the white vote, while Hillary Clinton has managed to pull down only about one-quarter of the black vote, yet the question has always been whether he could transcend race. The only rational conclusion to which this points is, again, that it is not race per se that needs to be overcome, but blackness. Whiteness is not seen as negative, as something to be conquered or transcended. Indeed, whereas blacks are being asked to rise above their racial identity, for whites, the burden is exactly the opposite: the worst thing for a white person is to fail to live up to the ostensibly high standards set by whiteness; it is to be considered white trash, which is to say, to be viewed as someone who has let down whiteness and fallen short of its pinnacle. For blacks, the worst thing it seems (at least in the minds of whites) is to be seen as black, which is no doubt why so many whites think it's a compliment to say things to black folks like, "I don't even think of you as black," not realizing that the subtext of such a comment is that it's a damned good thing they don't, for if they did, the person so thought of would be up the proverbial creek for sure.

In what must prove among the greatest ironies of all time, for Barack Obama to become President, which he well may accomplish, he will have to succeed in convincing a lot of racist white people to vote for him. Without the support of racists he simply can't win. While this may seem counterintuitive--that is, after all, what makes it ironic--it is really inarguable. After all, according to many an opinion survey in the past decade, large numbers of whites (often as high as one-half to three-quarters) harbor at least one negative and racist stereotype about African Americans, whether regarding their intelligence, law-abidingness, work ethic, or value systems. Without the votes of at least some of those whites (and keep in mind, that's how many whites are willing to admit to racist beliefs, which is likely far fewer than actually hold them), Obama's candidacy would be sunk. So long as whites can vote for a black man only to the extent that he doesn't remind them of other black people, it is fair to say that white people remain mired in a racism quite profound. To the extent we view the larger black community in terms far more hostile than those reserved for Obama, Oprah, Tiger, Colin, Condoleezza, Denzel and Bill (meaning Cosby, not Clinton, whose blackness is believed to be authentic only by himself nowadays), whites have proven how creative we can be, and how resourceful, when it comes to the maintenance of racial inequality.

By granting exemptions from blackness, even to those black folks who did not ask for such exemptions (and nothing I have said here should be taken as a critique of Obama himself by the way, for whom I did indeed vote last month), we have taken racism to an entirely new and disturbing level, one that bypasses the old and all-encompassing hostilities of the past, and replaces them with a new, seemingly ecumenical acceptance in the present. But make no mistake, it is an ecumenism that depends upon our being made to feel good, and on our ability to glom onto folks of color who won't challenge our denial let alone our privileges, even if they might like to.

In short, the success of Barack Obama has proven, perhaps more so than any other single thing could, just how powerful race remains in America. His success, far from disproving white power and privilege, confirms it with a vengeance.