The Nation Newspaper

Category: Brian Browne

  • Black history month: Why Selma” and not Memphis

    Black history month: Why Selma” and not Memphis

    Measure with care whose history you accept for neither the past nor the dead can loudly contend how they are dressed.

    Before being granted mainstream entry, selected chapters of minority history are given a thorough wash. After being pasteurised, they are given broader exposure. By then, they are no longer Black history. They have been transformed into White history in blackface. Every commercial retelling of Black history dons this mask of a mask. Subtle distortions in presentation produce grave distortions in the lessons derived there from much like an initial deviation in the course of a vessel will take the ship to a vastly different destination unless the course is swiftly corrected.

    Those who control the medium do more than control the message and the messenger. They pick them. As the years transpire, popularised Black history has been steadily turned into a false light. It no longer serves to enlighten; it now often obscures the deeper questions raised by the actual march of history. Events are recast so that history becomes a stranger to itself. Black history has been bent and domesticated. It now indoctrinates both Blacks and Whites to believe the society we now have is the product of a great awakening that broke old chains by the force of new law.

    The Civil Rights Movement (CRM) is portrayed as the second American Revolution, made this time without weapons and battle but with moral suasion and compassion. Although important, the CRM has been overstated. The fruits of the CRM are the fruits of political compromise; political compromise is always preceded by a moral one. The CRM changed America for the better but that change was more incomplete than comprehensive, more fragile than it was full.

    Most Blacks remain estranged from what they seek. For everyone one part of this failure for which they bear responsibility, society bears two parts. Yet, they are being told, by the commercialised salesmen of Black history, that reform has run its course. Your condition is your fault. Go get some bootstraps then pull yourself up by the odd contraptions. Once a progressive, educative too, Black History is now an instrumentality of those who would rather maintain the extant power relationships underlying the political economy. That which was instituted to help us from the hole is now being used to deceive us that we have already escaped. All the while, the hole gets deeper and we sink deeper in it.

    Despite being the work product of a brilliant, highly talented Black filmmake,r the movie Selma falls into this genre of misconception. It is the telling of Black history purposefully made palatable to Whites because its message is the needed reform has been had. This means that the story of the current Black condition is not that reform has been insufficient but that the people have been to insufficient to live up to the reforms.  Most Whites now insist that this blanched interpretation is the only credible one. If Black history is to retain any meaning except as an appendage of mainstream history we must not become gulled by seeing a finely crafted production featuring heroic black figures. While devoid of the flash and glitter of a Hollywood production, our analysis must strive to be more apt and enlightening that the people may better see the limited dimensions of what has been accomplished in their true behalf and the vast expanse yet to be travelled.

    Selma is the latest attempt to homogenise Martin Luther King into an establishment icon. King has been reduced to a slice of himself. He has become a civil rights amulet. In the popular image, King’s work is almost wholly defined by the Montgomery Bus Boycott, the March on Washington and the Selma demonstrations which helped galvanise political support for the 1965 Voting Rights Act, seen by many as the legal culmination of the CRM.

    Mainstream history treats the Selma episode as King’s best hour. This error tosses aside the last three years of King’s life as if they were lost years. Those years contain his most humane efforts. The works performed during this challenging period are more instructive to our present condition than are the civil rights achievements so publicly heralded. The Bus Boycott, the March, and Selma brought King fame. The hard work he did after 1965 confirmed his greatness.

    This more progressive aspect of his contributions is willfully ignored by the mainstream. They do not want many people to know this part of his life, fearing the people too may walk this line. This could change the structure of America in ways the civil rights legal measures could never contemplate and in ways that would discomfit the establishment.

    1965 was a watershed year, but the water did not all shed into the same channel. The CRM had joined different streams of Black political thought in an often tendentious coalition. Traditional Black elites and radical activists agreed to work toward the agreed goal: the end of legal racial discrimination. (The only recorded meeting between Martin Luther King and Malcolm X was at the Capitol when both attended congressional hearings on the Voting Rights Act.)

    The decision to focus on civil and political rights was apt as it represented the largest yet most attainable goal to which all Blacks could agree. It was the common denominator to which all major strands of Black political thought could agree. With Voting Rights Act’s passage, the ad-hoc political coalition began to crumble.

    Upon winning this battle, the conformist Black elite had its full. They attained their key objective.  Destruction of the most obvious racial barriers would allow them entry into the mainstream. The door of Integration well served them because they were positioned close to it. They just needed the legal key to open it. The majority of Blacks remained miles from the door without means to close the distance. Having a key would do them little good except to serve as a cruel joke of which they were the butt, a stinging keepsake of the oceanic expanse between the high promise of civil equality and the lowly reality of their economic weakness.

    The elite would expand and grow in absolute numbers yet remain a small fraction of the overall Black community. Having achieved most of what they wanted, they would exit the politics of protest to enter mainstream electoral politics. They would no longer posture to change the system. Their modest aim was to gain greater security for their class not be fighting the establishment from within, but by becoming loyal to it, come what may.

    With each year, the Black political class would become more glued to the power establishment. Their role changed without outcry from or due notice to the people.  They would no longer represent the Black community to the White establishment. They would serve as establishment envoy to the people, explaining to the broken and poor why more could not be done and to be patient and grateful because their decrepit condition was the best attainable at the given moment.  The phrases, “We are doing all that we can” or “All that can be done is being done,” are almost always dismissive lies used on those whom the speaker does not feel are entitled to any intelligent explanation.

    Today’s unimaginative Black political leaders are the direct heirs of the moderate, CRM elite.  They both enjoy the same easy conformity to Money Power and an establishment devoid of goodwill toward the majority of the people.

    On the other side of the spectrum were the young activists.  Many of them performed the heroic, dangerous grassroots civil rights work mobilising people to protest and vote.  The foci of their grassroots activity moved from the rural communities of the south to major cities across the nation. These activists recognised civil rights legislation by itself would not answer the question of the worsening ghettoes and super-ghettoes into which too many Black communities had turned.

    Many young activists openly shunned CRM nonviolent tactics. This was not as radical a departure as portrayed. The CRM always contained re was always an important armed element in the CRM. During a meeting at the height of the movement, a senior national leader wanted to poll how many of the grassroots organisers attending the meeting carried weapons while doing their work. They all raised their hands; they all were armed.

    The Black Panthers symbolised this aspect of Black political thought. They saw the Civil Rights Movement as a first step toward radical revolution that would likely prove violent. More because of their revolutionary message than because of their access to weapons, the Panthers were hunted down like dogs. Reactionary groups like the Black Muslims carried weapons. Since they did not challenge the status quo, they were not targeted as severely as the Panthers.

    Between the moderate establishment and the radicals, stood Dr. King. By appearance and vocation, he seemed to belong with the elite. To his eternal credit, he did not limit himself to their cause. His vision was much broader. The Voting Act did not end the campaign. It signaled the beginning of the more fundamental battle.

    King charted unexplored territory for someone considered a member of the Black elite. He remained loyal to nonviolence but would pursue goals that beckoned a drastic, near violent restructuring of the American political economy.  In his ways and means, he remained true to the established norm. Yet, his ends borne more affinity to the radicals than to the Black establishment.

    Thus the Black establishment put him at arm’s length. When he publicly denigrated the Vietnam War and when he espoused the rights of the poor by supporting workers and their unions, moderate Blacks joined the White chorus, labeling him a “troublemaker.”

    Meanwhile, radical blacks said he was too much an establishment figure due to his reliance on dialogue and nonviolence.

    King saw himself not solely as civil rights leader. The CRM was part of a larger struggle, the fight for depressed minorities and the poor in the land of plenty. That fight was itself part of a greater struggle: that of human dignity in all lands for all people.

    King was not killed for his CRM role. The Voting Act was penned three years before his death. America had already absorbed the initial shock of the legislation and had co-opted much of the CRM by then. Rarely is a man assassinated for events several years removed. Famous men are more often assassinated in fear of what they may yet do. He was brought down in Memphis because the work he was doing there was consonant with a larger vision to radically reform America’s political economy. Thus, the mainstream will forever downplay King’s journey to Memphis. Instead, it will act as if his march ended with Selma.

    The Voting Act did not challenge the power structure; it confirmed. For Black people, the Act is rightfully viewed as a major achievement. On another level, the legislation was merely a tool in a fight about which Blacks were dimly aware. The measure was a bit of leverage in the tussle between the moderate and conservative wings of the White establishment. In a way, this echoed the end of slavery a century before. When North and South fought over slavery, the quality of life of the bondsmen was not the main consideration. The true issue was which segment of the national elite would stamp its name on the shape of the nation for the remainder of the 19th century. The status of the Negro was essentially a device by which the two sides kept score in this intramural power scrum.

    In a subtle way, Selma exposes the limited nature of the Voting Act. The film inaccurately portrays President Johnson as opposing the Act. While Johnson had no personal love for blacks and amply directed expletives at us in his private discourse, his record of supporting Black voting rights is incontrovertible. As Senate majority leader, he shepherded the first voting rights legislation outmaneuvering vehement filibuster by fellow Southerners in 1957. As president, he signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964.  Johnson supposed the 1965 Voting Act as a logical progression of the 1957 measure.

    However, the film portrays him as a negative force. Portraying him as a hero would lessen the dramatic impact. By sending the message that the Act had to overcome presidential opposition, the film depicts it as more radical a reform than it really was. If the film showed Johnson as a cooperative agent, discerning people would begin to notice the skunk among the minks, the maggot in the honey jar.

    The aims of the CRM and the Voting Act, in particular, were modest ones more favorable to the elite than the Black majority. Most of White establishment was assuaged that the Act would not damage their position. Some knew they would benefit by gaining the elite as pliant junior partners in a national political coalition.

    Black people gain the right to vote without molestation. Due to their lack of economic muscle, they remain restricted to choosing between the two parties created by the establishment. Thus, they remained on the leash owned by Money Power. Occasionally, an individual race may present a progressive alternative. In the main, the parties and their candidates guard the status quo. The differences between the parties are those of nuance and style, rarely of substance. They offer no workable solutions to the conditions of those living in maw of poverty.

    Yes, if you ask a slave, he would select the less serfdom over pure servitude if his choices were thusly limited. My wager is that he would rather a third option: actual freedom. Yet, that option was not on the menu then and is not on the table.  Neither major party offers an economic agenda to relieve the American working class from three decades of stagnant wages, increasing household debt and growing poverty.

    Well-acted and crafted, Selma seems to be an attractive bundle of political sophistry. A joint venture between members the White and Black establishment, it leads you close yet astray. Its implicit message is that the CRM is the zenith of the struggle for racial equality and dignity. Everything that follows is epilogue. King realised the CRM was but a chapter in a larger, more important book.

    To proclaim victory at that point would have been like the America’s Founding Fathers celebrating victory because they signed the Declaration of Independence. The signing of that document did not end the Revolutionary War; it was the true beginning of it in all of its ramifications. Selma and other messages like it caricature King as his one-dimensional, civil rights miniature. They tame him, turning this ever-evolving progressive and humane figure into a symbol of a status quo that would make him bristle. The things he abhorred 50 years ago still hold sway.

    King has become an object of political taxidermy. They have brought him inside the hall of political legitimacy only after having killed him and stuffed his political legacy with their own notions. They mount him on their walls and tell us to be glad because King has won.  They have made him a hero, they say.  In reality, they have turned him into their trophy and have tried to obscure his true legacy in the process. This expropriation will not stand forever. Truth comes if slowly. One day, we shall take him back and display his fuller legacy because that is where the greater good and justice lie.

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  • A Greek tragedy revisited: The slaying of sovereignty and democracy

    A Greek tragedy revisited: The slaying of sovereignty and democracy

    Truth is as a rare wine. More talk about than taste it on their lips.

    Western democracy was born in ancient Greece. There is where it also first died. It seems many among the rich and powerful of that time did not cotton to the democratic notion although that form of society had enabled them to become wealthy. They concluded that their accumulation of money gave them a greater stake in society than that of the common man. They came to use their money and influence to subvert democracy, steadily turning it into a plutocracy, a dictatorship of money where possession of currency would matter more than possession of merit. This was a tragedy indeed. But it was more than a Greek one. It is universal and not banished to olden times. This tendency respects no time barriers. It lives with us today. It is interwoven in human history because it represents the darker strand in the fabric of human nature.

    Within the seeds of freedom democracy plants lay the spores of weeds that seek to choke that very freedom. Those who prosper greatly come to see democracy as a shackle chaining them to lesser humans through false equality. They think their greater riches bequeath to them greater wisdom in all things.  They use the money gained through democracy to buy democracy then eagerly bury what they bought. This is how democracy lost its first life in Greece. Due to similar forces, modern Grecian democracy is in danger of being brought underfoot once again.

    This time the ravaging comes not from within but from external forces. Greece now suffers a brutal yet subtle invasion. It is an invasion of money into a nation made supine by economic depression and looming bankruptcy. The invaders are European Union bankers and technocrats directed by the government in Berlin. German Chancellor Merkel is set to do what Hitler dared but did not accomplish. She may well succeed in bring an entire nation to heel.  By imposing her will on this smaller, weaker nation she will also intimidate other weaker, smaller Eurozone nations to hew her path.  What Hitler could not do with rifle, jackboot and swastika, Merkel may do with pants suit, loafers and an accountant’s ledger.

    Money is the ultimate weapon for it can purchase almost any mortal or material thing, even the soul of man or of a nation. But what can purchase money except more of it?

    This past week, the newly elected Syriza government has engaged in futile negotiations with the EU to restructure the “debt bailout” program for Greece. The talks have been deadlocked. The Greeks want some form of debt reduction added to the program. The program as now structured is not a bailout for Greece. It is a bailout for select German and French banks holding Greek public and private-sector debt. It alleviates the risk to these favored banks of getting wet due to their improvident lending by literally having them stand atop Greece. While the banks remain dry, Greece is swallowed and drowned by the tide of unbearable debt. For the privilege of keeping the foreign banks sound and dry, the Grecian economy will be condemned to economic recession if not depression for as far as the eye can see.

    Despite the dire economy conditions of the Grecian populace, the EU presently will not budge. The stern austerity deal agreed to by the former conservative government in Athens must be honored, says Brussels. Brussels holds to the merciless stance because Berlin instructs it to do so. The bottom line is brutal. All the talk of pan-European integration and harmony that transcends national boundaries has been claptrap.  When asked to select between maximizing the profits of a few large German banks or diminishing the misery of an entire nation and millions of innocent, hard-working Greeks who had no hand in the errant financial dealings, Chancellor Merkel swiftly made her choice: She told mercy and pan-European brotherhood to take a long hike into Hell’s shadows. She picked her banks over the Greek people.

    The deadline for decision is February 28. While Merkel may soften a bit around the edges, she clearly plans to impose the brunt of the extant plan on the new government in Athens. It is Merkel versus the Greek people. Because she controls the money, she will likely win this confrontation.

    During the 2008-2009 financial crisis, Greece waded into double-barreled trouble. Because yields on Greek government bonds were higher than in most of the Eurozone daring investors and abject speculators invested in these bonds. The Greek government at the time borrowed too much. It was the time of cheap and abundant money globally. A similar excessive leveraging occurred in the private sector. When the global financial collapse came, the Greek economy was overly indebted and in no shape to withstand what would come next. Banks and investors called their loans. Greece had not the money to pay.

    If the nation had maintained its own currency, it could have printed more money to repay. This would have had its costs. It would have caused inflation and made imports dearer. However, it would have also made Greek industry more price competitive while insulating domestic employment levels from the freefall they would experience.

    This monetary sovereignty would also have allowed Greece better leverage in negotiating with its creditors. It would have negotiated directly with the private banks themselves and not having to go through the EU or other, more powerful governments with interests adverse to Greece’s. The Greeks made a fateful mistake by joining the Eurozone. It relinquished its monetary sovereignty to Brussels which takes its marching orders from Berlin. The membership also opened its borders without being able to impose capital or import controls to the flood of German manufactured goods and financial instruments. Now Greeks were being asked to pay for the debt accrued if not in blood then by mortgaging the soul and future of the nation.

    With Greece prostrated by heavy debt, the EU and IMF invaded to perform their neo-classical economic handiwork. The tragedy begins in earnest, developing a cascading momentum the discerning observer soon recognizes will lead to one place: utter calamity. The EU forces the debt-ridden Greek government to assume Greek private-sector debt. This was done to obligate the government to make German and French banks whole for the risky loan the banks had made to individuals. When it comes to their financial institutions, the German and French governments decided the vagaries of the free market were inapplicable. They imposed a transfer of limited Greek public funds to satisfy these purely private-sector obligations. This foreign imposition of corporate socialism and favoritism for non-Greek creditors would add another layer of debt to a government suffocating under the weight of the public debt it had contracted.

    The EU and IMF then devised a plan to loan Greek money to pay these banks. The loan would be conditioned on Greece implementing a severe austerity program. These conservative economists claimed that cutting the government budget would generate more economic activity and growth. They never explained the mechanics of how this would work.  They merrily said the market would take care of everything as if by magic.  They called their happy elixir “fiscal consolidation.” They imposed austerity and then waited for the Greek economy to expand as their textbooks said it would whenever government deficit spending is reduced. The opposite happened.

    Austerity turned a serious financial problem into wholesale economic disaster. The past six years plunged Greece into a downturn comparable to the Great Depression of the 1930s in terms of severity and duration. Making a mockery of conservative economics, GDP has been clipped by 25 percent. Unemployment multiplied to roughly 30 percent. By cutting government revenues, austerity was intended to lower the debt/GDP ratio that hovered over 120 percent at austerity’s inception. Today, that ratio is over 173 percent.

    Austerity has aggravated not fixed the debt crisis. By lessening government expenditure, austerity contracted the overall economy because it removed the buttress government spending provided the private sector. A shrinking private sector pays less tax; diminished revenues inhibit government’s ability to service the debt. This is worse than a vicious economic cycle. It is terrible enchainment, a prison from which the only release is to pardon a significant portion of the debt owed. In other words, Greece needs debt relief or it will suffer depression the rest of the decade and perhaps longer. (Its GDP growth rate the last quarter of 2014 was -0.2 percent.)

    Joining the Eurozone was a terrible bungle for Greece. The nation forfeited its monetary sovereignty to a regional institution and the powerful nations controlling that institution. Because of this forfeiture, Greece must beg the EU for money to pay its debts. He who holds the money is known as the master. He who needs money held by other is known as the slave. The Eurozone was intended to spread freedom and economic prosperity among its members. Sadly, it was not constructed in a way so that it would realize this benign intent. It has gone the opposite way. The Eurozone has opened the door to a financial imperialism in Europe that historically has been reserved for Western manhandling of former colonies.

    What Greece has suffered is a compound lesson to all developing nations.  First, never, ever relinquish your currency sovereignty, especially to a financial arrangement vulnerable to manipulation by a stronger economy.  The short-term gains will be quickly erased when crisis comes; in the long term, crisis always comes. When it does, the stronger economy will squeeze the weaker.  Resolution of the crisis will be conducted in a way that increases the influence and power of the rich over the poor. Second, if anyone tries to sell you a bottle of austerity elixir, return it to the mountebank vendor and demand your refund. By all accounts, austerity is as sure a path to poverty as poverty itself. Those who mistake these lessons as false alarms will discover that this economic genre of the Greek tragedy is not limited to Greece alone.

  • A Nation that betrays its own

    A Nation that betrays its own

    Law is the house that justice built but no longer occupies.

    BULLED into deep complacency by the election of Barak Obama, the political conscience of Black America has finally begun to stir to life. Sadly, it took the daytime killings of Black men by White police officers to revive the community back to political life.

    Protests have occurred in major cities throughout the nation. Black people have been jolted by the realization that their lives remain less valuable than they should be, than what they had been told to believe. They hoped racial discrimination had become a residual breach of the national contract on social equality. The painful lesson relearned is that Black Americans are disposable byproducts of a political economy with little need for most of them and one that affords diminishing living space for that beleaguered majority of Black America.

    The killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson was one thing. The strangulation of Eric Garner in New York was quite another. In the Brown case, conflicting interpretations of that day’s events abounded. The shooter said one thing, Brown’s friend said another. Witness accounts varied on important points. Although the aggressor police officer’s testimony remains highly implausible, it cannot be ruled impossible. The possibility that he was being truthful is slight but the possibility nonetheless exists.

    (In a telling postscript in the Brown case, a witness whose testimony was cited by the prosecutor has been discovered to be a mentally unbalanced racist. Moreover, this witness may not even have been at the scene when the shooting occurred. She has previously inserted herself in other cases, giving unreliable testimony. The prosecutor in Brown should have been aware of her flagrant history; yet, he still presented her to the grand jury without informing them of her habit of bearing false witness. For this alone, the prosecutor should be investigated for professional misconduct.)

    The cloud of factual discrepancy and differing versions of the fatal encounter do not haunt the Garner case.  What haunts that case is the episode was videoed for the world to see. Yet, the picture made no difference to the New York prosecutor and the grand jury he selected. Normally, a picture is worth a thousand words. This video encapsulated more than a thousand words. It showed all that is wrong in the racial history of the nation claiming to be the world’s finest democracy. As long as the legal system affirms killings like Garner’s, the claimed greatness of the American political economy is as true as it is false.

    Mr. Garner was a large, burly Black man living in New York City. Estranged from the world of prosperity and steady employment, the man did what millions of city dwellers across the nation do. He street-hustled. Among his money-making ventures, the man would at times buy packs of cigarettes then resell individual cigarettes to people. The area was a poor neighborhood where many people could not afford an entire pack; they would muster coins for one or two cigarettes at a time. Garner was doing no harm; that same day, he even helped resolve an altercation. However, his street hustle was illegal because all cigarette sales are to be taxed.

    The day of the encounter, Garner may not even have been selling the loose cigarettes. Had he been guilty of such sales that day, his transgression was de minimis. A loose cigarette probably sold for no more than a dollar each.  The city tax on the tobacco sales is 10 percent. Had he sold five cigarettes, he owed the city 50 cents (90 kobo) in taxes. For this small indiscretion, a swarm of police officers descended on him like a small army corralling a thief who had pinched the national treasury and the crown jewels.

    Gardner had no chance. While a number of officers pinned him to the ground, one officer administered a choke hold unauthorized by the police department that hired him. Adding indignity to impending death, another officer placed his hands on Garner’s head, using his full weight to press the man’s face into the hard, cruel New York City pavement. The man pleaded roughly a dozen times that he could not breathe. A dozen times, his uniformed assailants ignored the desperate alarm. His last moments on earth were with his face pressed to the ground that he might take in the foulness and grime of the urban sidewalk as his life’s breath was slowly stolen from him by those hired to protect him.

    As he lay dying, no officer sought to revive him. They walked around his body nonchalantly as if walking around an animal struck by a passing car. There was no urgency in their actions, no remorse on their faces. They felt they had done their job. What they had done to Garner was so disproportionate to his alleged wrong; no logical excuse can be assayed for this ending. At most, they should have given Garner a citation as they do any traffic offender or errant merchant. The reason for lethally attacking him for less than a dollar remains cloaked in racism.

    The coroner properly ruled the outrageous death a homicide. Yet, the grand jury and prosecutor thought otherwise. Upon seeing video, they did not see Garner as a human being. All they saw was black and his blackness obscured any sight and sense of justice they might have otherwise known.

    Had Garner lived during slavery, he would still be alive.  The law enforcement officers would have been more careful with him because he would have been the property of a White man. They would have acted with due care in returning the valued property to his owner. He would have been tussled a bit but not executed. Strange how the worth of a Black man’s life is not established by the mere fact of being a human being. It is established by how closely associated he is to White society. To exist outside the social mainstream, makes a Black man a dreaded superfluity, a victim transmuted into the villain in his own execution. Police men who kill him will be excused because they serve a function in society. While you, the Black man, do not.

    Garner and Brown have not been the only casualties of this dynamic.  The average White racist feels the nation is slipping from their control due to Obama’s presidency and to demographic changes that see Blacks and Latinos becoming larger percentages of the overall population. Perceived change prompts a backlash. The average racist joins the Tea Party or sends anonymous cant to rightwing blogs. Those racists in blue police uniforms are more apt to pull the trigger when the face on the wrong end of the barrel is Black or Brown.

    In Ohio, a Black man, walking in a store while holding a non-lethal pellet rifle, was gun downed by police with no reasonable warning. Ohio law allows people to openly carry lethal weapons.  Thus, the man committed no crime. Yet, he was killed and the offending police officers were given no reprimand. It boggles the mind and makes a farce of justice when an innocent man can be executed and those who committed the misdeed are exonerated. He did no wrong yet he is gone. They wronged him yet they suffer not even minor sanction. When such partiality occurs in a foreign nation, America criticizes and writes annual reports condemning it. When it happens in America, the power establishment protects if not celebrates the transgression as a necessary function of law and order. In the process, justice is disinherited.

    Protests against these attacked were organized in major cities throughout the nation.  Had this been the summer and not the advent of winter, more people would have been taken to the streets in a greater number of cities.  The best aspect of this wave of protests is that they were organized by grassroots activists and not the normal servitors who inhabit the Black establishment.  The youthful organizers’ first plank is to halt the street executions by the police.  But they will not stop there. They will see that defending the right to life is insufficient in itself.  That is where the Civil Rights Movement left off.

    Today’s protesters hopefully will assume the mantle of true leadership the current Black Establishment now deploys for their narrow elitist interests. These new leaders will discover the incompleteness in securing the right to life if unaccompanied by demanding the right to live not merely survive on the social periphery. They will demand jobs, education, economic reform and justice. This will attract a backlash much as the Civil Rights Movement did. The most vocal segment of the backlash will be the right-wing conservatives. The most dangerous element of that backlash will be the falsely liberal establishment.

    That establishment has given their Black surrogates marching orders to stop the genuine young leaders from organizing more people’s marches. The Black establishment did not need to be given the directive.  They already felt the heat. They realized their positions were placed in jeopardy. No one was bounded by quandary more than President Obama. If Black people started to display independent action, his job would be on the line.  No, not the White House job. Whether for good or bad, his mark there has mostly been made.

    The position jeopardized by the young Black leaders is the post-White House sinecure the establishment has designed for him – that of the unofficial leader of Black America. For the past six years, he had proven his worth by keeping Black activism in deep freeze despite the  hardtack policies he has initialed resulting in the deterioration of community institutions, particularly Black universities, and a growing disparity between average Black and White per capita wealth and income. During the Obama years, the Black community has been weakened willfully by establishment policy and practice. The establishment hired Obama to smile and pontificate his people all the way to the poor house. He was doing an excellent job of it until the unruly police began to exhibit a deadly overt racism that would cause the somnambulant Black community to awaken. Obama’s slickness was undone by the gratuitous violence of the new praetorians.

    A delicious twist of irony is in the making. Black political consciousness may reawaken under the very watch of a man endorsed by the establishment to keep the Black community politically dormant. Sensing things were going awry, Obama went into gear. He sent fellow Black elitist, Attorney General Eric Holder, to Ferguson to express concern in hope that a tactful display of implied solidarity would keep the natives from turning restless.  Holder announced his feckless Justice Department would investigate the Ferguson Police Department as a way to soothe community anger. The people realized this Justice Department has a nose for privilege and not a resilient sternum when it comes to protecting the weak and under from the rich and powerful above. Holder’s Justice Department refused to prosecute Wall Street for the visible criminality resulting in the 2008 financial crisis and will not take account of those who tortured and terrorized detainees in the alleged war against terror. That same department will not reform the police.

    It is part of the same federal government that militarized the police by providing the surplus military equipment that has transformed local law enforcement into a paramilitary agency unsuitable for democratic society.

    The protests continued. Then the First Couple took to the media to demonstrate their blackness by citing they had been victims of racism because they had been ignored by taxi drivers or mistaken as store clerks by White shoppers. If these trite remarks were supposed to evoke a sense of solidarity with the average Black, they missed the mark. If this is all the Obamas have experienced, no wonder they are out of touch. They should consider themselves fortunate, then open a listening ear that they may learn the realities of the everyday lives of everyday people. (In part, they cited these inanities so as not to offend their White sponsors. If the President testifies that racism is limited to such innocuous inconveniences, it means that racism did not cause dire condition of the Black community.)

    Raising these trivial incidents insults the millions of Black men and women who have felt the heavy intimidation and have been scarred by the instruments of this unjust system. The bones of thousands of Black men lie in the woods, swamps and along the back roads of the south. So many of us have been stopped along isolate stretches of road by policemen with their hands twitching at their holsters or brandishing their billy clubs, waiting and wanting to draw their pistol or swing that club. As rivulets of sweat swim down your back, you tell yourself to be still and don’t move, no matter the provocation or meanness of the man. They await merely one odd movement or angry word and they will pounce. You will be found guilty of causing the assault against you.

    When their trite examples did not work, Obama summoned a white House meeting of the young activists. His advice was to take it slowly as change comes gradually. This advice was not commended by any true interpretation of history. Change may come slowly but those who succeed in bringing reform rarely seek it piecemeal. They ask for the whole thing then take as much as they can get. The young activists should have retorted that, since the bullets did not kill Brown gradually and the stranglehold did not gradually asphyxiate Garner, they see no reason why their pursuit of justice should march gradually.

    Next, Obama deployed mercenary cleric Al Sharpton to confuse and sidetrack the grassroots movement by holding a march on Washington of his own. During the Obama presidency, Sharpton has visited the White House an extraordinary 60 times. He has become Obama’s man Friday just as Obama is Wall Street’s man Friday. Sharpton is the servant of the servant. However, this tack did not work well either. The people are on to Sharpton. They know he has been an FBI informant, ratting on other Black leaders. He may still be. He refused to allow activists from Ferguson a place in his orchestrated rally. He feared they might say something incendiary or anti-Obama. The crowd began to shout him down.  Eventually, some activists managed to seize the microphone and speak their piece.

    Establishment backlash against the protests went into full gear when a mentally unstable Black man killed two police officers in New York, afterward killing himself. The New York Mayor called for protests to be suspended until the burial of the fallen officers. Former Mayor Giuliani criticized Black leaders for inciting hate. Police officials declared that their department had gone on “war footing.” To that declaration, most Black men would respond, “That is nothing new. You have always been on war footing against us.”

    The murder of the two police officers is a tragedy but no greater than the killing of Brown, Gardner and others.  The protests did not lead to the officer’s death. The proximate cause of the officers’ demise was that police nationwide had been too lethal. When a White supremacist executed two police officers earlier this year and draped the corpses in racist flags, the establishment did not rail that White supremacists should disband their racist campaign and organizations. Police officials did not assert they needed to be on war footing against White hate groups. White establishment politicians said little or nothing about this episode. Now that a Black assailant is involved, they shout to the rafters and quake with self-righteous indignation. It is all part of the ploy to keep Blacks in a lowly place.

    The protesters smartly refused to stop demonstrating. To do so would have been a wrongful, coerced admission that their actions prompted the killings of the officers. What they should do is expand the scope of the protests. While protesting police brutality, they should also advocate tighter gun control so that unstable people cannot get easy access to weapons. The spirit of the expanded protests would be that neither the police nor the populace needs to be on war footing. Both should take intelligent steps toward peace.

    Finally, perhaps the Black community is awakening. Theirs must be a dual arising. First, they must come to grips with the fact that the current ways of the political economy work against them. Second, they must realize that the established Black leadership is wedded to the current ways of the political economy. The people must seek reform as well as reject those who claim to be their leaders. Perhaps, just perhaps, the son of the Civil Rights Movement is being born out of the deaths of Brown and Garner.

     

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  • Global economic blues

    Global economic blues

    Economics is the attempt to make a happy marriage of the uncertainty of good fortune to the certainty of greed.

    THE global economy staggers about like a listless man tired of being locked in that amber condition between decent health and dire sickness. Debilitation pervades the global political economy. Apparently, someone forgot to tell the 2008-2009 Great Recession that it is the past. In some ways, it remains with us more than it has departed. Statistically, the world is no longer in recession. But, people can’t eat, wear, drive or reside in statistics. They eat, wear, drive or reside in whatever their wages can afford or what they can shape by the skill of their hands. For them, the recession has lived close by like a rowdy neighbor. The moment you think you have heard the last of him that you might enjoy a quiet night, he brews even greater commotion.

    Statistics are brandished to tell people to ignore their reality. Statistics tell the people to smile and be thankful; things are on the increase. The misery they feel is a horrid self-delusion. Thus, they should not look to government for relief or reprieve. They should forget their shoddy wages and indebted lives in order to rejoice at the accretion of GDP.

    It seems a non sequitur that the majority of the people would become their lesser economic selves as GDP becomes greater. We have been fed the tale that all we need consider to determine our economic well being is the GDP rate. While the relevance of GDP to true wellbeing may be mythic, it is not the Golden Fleece. We tend to err when we come to value the measurement more than the thing being measured. Focusing on GDP is like reading every other word of an important missive. This concentration is a half-truth, akin to taking a half-bite of an apple or receiving a half-kiss. It is rather unavailing and unappealing.

    It brings into question the overall objective of economic policy. Is the intent to increase aggregate numbers or to improve the living conditions of as many people as possible?  This difference is important because the two possible objectives are sometimes interrelated but they are not always synonymous. However, mainstream economics requests that we have faith that the two actually are the same. Because of this inaccurate bias predominating the economic news we receive, I periodically return to this discussion of economic bias in order to pierce the intellectual miasma in which convention wisdom seeks to cloak us. Imagine a street where ten extremely poor families reside. Then one family wins a coveted and enormous lottery. Before the per capita income of the neighborhood was a pittance. Because of the windfall that has graced the one family, the street’s per capita income – the neighborhood GDP – has increased so dramatically to where the entire place is considered the home of the affluent. Yet, something is amiss. The statistics are real but inaccurate. If the lottery winners hold the majority of the funds to themselves as they most certainly will, they have been enriched to the utmost. Without something else happening, the rest of the neighborhood remains immersed in poverty but are told to rejoice because their community has become rich. The neighborhood is rich yet the majority of its people remain bruised by the maw of penury.  As with neighborhoods so it is with nations.

    Most growth of global GDP has gone to affluent elites. And most of this marginal growth has gone to the even numerically smaller financial sector within the overall elite. The financial sector has won the lottery but the rest of the economy is no better off. The more the financial sector gains, the more it influences government so that economic policy will sustain and increase the rewards given the financial sector.

    In economic reality, there is no such thing as the free market. The market is shaped and directed in a manner to profit those who paid for the shape and direction the economy will take. Those who do not invest in how the economy is structured, those who think the economy’s present architecture follows some inexorable principles akin to the laws of natural science, will believe the economy is destined to be as it is.  Mistaking this subjective social construct as something immutable as if design by science and logic, they will see no need to invest in its redesign to better suit them. That which they refuse to invest upfront to safeguard their interests will be multiplied then charged against them when the dividends and taxes of reward and burden of our economic processes are allocated among all the players in the system.

    We must remember that all fields of human endeavor are ultimately connected. In the abstract, we compartmentalize our activities into social, political and economic categories. In reality, there is no barrier between them that is not always and everywhere violated. The elite would rather you believe that some things are purely economic and therefore scientific. They would have you focus solely on the GDP, solely on aggregate wealth created within the system.  For you to fixate on this point is to become “GDP blind” as one would become sunblind by gazing too long at our closest star. Such a condition would blind us to other important things we need to see so that we will not be rendered both blind and ignorant.

    To help avoid this tragedy, I prefer the phrase “political economy” instead of trying to split things into artificial political and economic spheres. By acknowledging the interplay between political and economic forces we are led to ask questions that protect against GDP blindness. We come to ask:

    1. How is the political economy arranged, by whom and for what purpose?

    2. What is the allocation of power, wealth and influence within the system?

    3. What goods and services are to be produced, why are these produced, and how are they allocated and why?

    4. What are the marginal changes and causal links between the economy’s productive processes, the actual inventory of goods and services produced and allocation of power, wealth and influence among the various sectors of the political economy?

    These questions initiate a more curious inquiry and seek a deeper understanding of the political economy than the one dimensional focus on GDP. The more we think in these terms, the more we bring ourselves to the point of realizing the political economy is shaped as is because of the subjective bias of those who have placed themselves in positions to make decisions that determine the fate of all.

    We don’t have the space to overview the entire world but a glance at three important economies will indicate what is to unfolding. We have steadily returned to the type of debt-fueled, speculative world that existed immediately prior to the 2008-9 Recession.  A few policy miscues in strategic nations and recession may be upon us with such swiftness that we shall feel as if we have been cursed by some deity instead of merely being led astray by unfortunate policy.

    Experiencing modest growth, America has been fortunate among the developed economies. But even here, the vast majority — roughly 90 percent of the population — is no better off now than they were the day after the prior recession officially ended. Even with this, America has done better than its peers. This relative good fortune is more the product of good fortune than of good policy. In late 2011, President Obama handed conservative Republicans a stark austerity “Grand Bargain” paring social programs below the bone. He gave it to them on a silver platter.

    Due to their neuralgia toward the gift bearer, they refused to accept his offering although he had gone so far as to offer them greater long-term budget cuts than they requested. Instead of accepting the conservative feast he presented, they trashed the offered smorgasbord then crammed the silver platter down his throat. Had they taken the deal, America would have started feeling economic contraction by mid-2012, giving a blow to the President’s reelection bid. President Obama could have lost the election that year but for Republican blind hatred. During these last two years in office, he still might renew this fiscal austerity offer for two reasons. He is a more midstream Republican than liberal Democrat regarding economic policy. Despite the mountain of empirical evidence against it, he believes austerity leads to growth. Second, he wants to accomplish something big to enhance his flagging chance at a memorable legacy. Thus, he may be more concerned with demonstrating he can hatch a bipartisan economic deal than he is concerned about the actual economic consequences of the deal. This time, the Republicans may accept the offer. Downturn looms at a time the world can least afford it.

    A second reason America has logged growth is because of the monetary policy called quantitative easing (QE).  The media incorrectly calls QE a stimulus program. This willful error is to entice the public to conflate this monetary action with expansionary fiscal policy. They prevaricate because they want the public to believe all “stimuli” are the same. This is a serious intellectual fraud.  Basically, monetary policy focuses on the financial elite with the implicit hope that something will trickle down to the common folks. Monetary policy is almost always geared toward the affluent. Fiscal policy is different because its direct targets can be more diverse. The rich are still usually the major beneficiaries but the poor and working classes are sometimes directly benefitted. In short, both monetary and fiscal policy generally favor the rich but fiscal policy sometimes is used to help the common man.

    QE is not a stimulus program as much as it is an asset swap for the affluent. A fiscal stimulus program would hire the unemployed to engage in public projects or would provide social welfare services for the needy. It would provide money in exchange for labor or because of a person’s impoverished condition. In contrast QE was a mechanism by which the American Federal Reserve purchased bonds and other financial paper from investors. As such, it merely substituted one form of financial asset for a more liquid one, that of money.

    To some extent, this allowed some people to remove assets of questionable value from their balance sheets without suffering the loss they would have incurred if forced to the sell the paper at true market value. In effect, this amounted to a government prepayment of investors, giving them money for the securities they were willing to release from their financial portfolios. It enabled the investor class to take new funds and reinvest them in another round of financial speculation. Consequently, QE helped bid up stock market prices and also devalued the dollar. This damaged the export industries of developing nations; at the same time, it brought another wave of speculative investment to many developing nations. However, with the ending of QE and the slowdown of the global economy, that money is leaving the developing world and heading home as it always does at the sign of hard times. This flight will damage the financial stability of those nations that were careless enough to quickly welcome the fast money, once again forgetting that speculative money is always of the “easy come, more easily gone” variety. The net effect of QE was to artificially enhance financial asset prices. It raised the ceiling on financial assets without doing much to repair the floor of the productive sector of the economy. The investor class benefitted handsomely, the working class not at all.

    Japan introduced a program akin to QE on amphetamines. Going much farther the American edition, the Japanese version included the Central Bank’s purchase of even stock market equities. This has been a boon for the speculative investment class. As in America, it placed downward pressure on the Yen, making imports more costly. Yet, at the same time, the government imposed high consumption taxes on a population that was already too frugal and a nation with weak aggregate consumer demand. Thus, the Japanese government has almost literally torn the economy in two, purposely profiting the financial class while undermining the average person by unduly taxing their consumption. This will further lower aggregate demand, serving to deflate the real sector of the economy.

    The Euro zone has been an experiment in austerity.  The experiment has failed. The zone teeters again on the edge of recession. Even German’s economy is fragile. Its usual trading partners are so cash-strapped that they cannot purchase higher volumes of German exports. Meanwhile, some people possessed by a mortician’s wit have begun celebrating because Greece experience roughly 2 percent growth the past two quarters. They claim this shows austerity’s effectiveness. They are right but not in the way they intend.

    Due to austerity policies, Greece slumped from recession into depression six years ago. Its depression was the worst in modern times; Grecian output and employment fell more steeply than America’s during the Great Depression. The austerity program was intended to reduce the nation’s debt/GDP ratio which stood around 125 percent at the time austerity was first applied. Austerity worsened the ratio to over 175 percent by the beginning of this year. Austerity –cutting the budget – increased government debt! This misstep was taken because decision makers exalted conservative theory over empirical evidence and rational practice. Self-strapped to conservative orthodoxy, they assumed government expenditures had a negative multiplier effect. Thus, any budgetary savings would result in an even greater increase in overall growth. This was worse than conservative myth; it was a lie injurious to those who had to live it. Empirical evidence showed that the multiplier regarding government expenditure was closer to 2.5. For every euro slashed from the budget, the overall economy shrank by 2.5 euros. Implicitly recognizing this, the international troika (IMF, EU and World Bank) allowed Greece to engage in some expansionary budget engineering through an ambitious highway reconstruction program at the beginning of the year. This fiscal expansion is the primary reason for the slight new growth Greece has experienced. Thus, after six years of depression, Greece has tasted a bit of growth only because it was given a small dose of fiscal expansion.

    The global economy walks toward renewed recession because it has been engineered to do so. In too many nations, government policy has been to elevate financial asset prices and encourage speculation among the investor class. The valuations of their assets have hit the roof. For them, happy days abound. Meanwhile, governments choke fiscal policy, claiming discipline is in order. Why it is in order fiscally but not monetarily they dare not divulge. This discrimination has nothing to do with objective economic principle. It has everything to do subjective bias. They believe the best and easiest policy is to cosset the wealthy while allowing the rest to lunge at and fight over whatever crumbs may descend from the table of plenty. Unless this policy course is altered, aggregate global demand will remain suppressed. Most people will live as if in a recession but the global GDP will still be in the black due in part to the overvaluation of financial assets and other speculative activity. The elite and their hired experts will not only have their cake they will still be eating it as well. They will have also taken a good portion of slice intended more fairly intended for the rest of us.

     

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  • American mid term elections: Democrats eat dust

    American mid term elections: Democrats eat dust

    A lone slap from a friend stings more than a dozen from an enemy.

    he election is over and results are in. The Democrats suffered a tremendous thumping. To a large extent, the elections were a referendum on President Obama’s leadership. For him, it was a resounding setback on one hand. In a strange way, it may prove to be liberating. The Republican takeover of Congress frees him to pursue the conservative economic agenda that he shares with the Republicans because he will no longer have to worry about carrying along the Democrats in the Congress.

    The key change brought by the election was the Republican takeover of the Senate. The Republicans gained at least seven seats in the upper chamber, giving them a majority of 52. With three seats still in the air, the majority might increase by like number, giving the Republicans a solid 54-55 member majority against the 45-46 Democratic minority. In the lower House, Republicans gained approximately 20 seats to reach 243 of the 435 seat chamber. Many gubernatorial seats were up for bidding as well. Going into the election, Democrats predicted they would gain in this category. They were wrong. The Republican bonanza engulfed this group as well. Instead of gaining a handful of new governors, the Democrats lost them as well as a couple of incumbent seats.

    The dimensions of the Republican onslaught transcended the number of seats won. The margins of victory in many races were astonishingly wide. Republican victories generally approached landslide margins while several seats maintained by the Democrats were done so only by the thinnest margins.

    To a large extent, the lopsided outcome was more a product of who did not vote. The turnout of conservative voters was expected. Fueled to a large extent by an irrational hatred of President Obama and with that animus reinforced by Obama’s fumbling on health care, foreign policy and Ebola,  conservative Republicans trooped to the polls to register their disdain for the very idea of having to call Obama their president. The Democrats’ failure was not so much that the electorate jettisoned them. Only thirty percent of the registered electorate voted. The Democrats lost chiefly because much of their part of the electorate stayed home. For them, voting was not worth the effort.

    One poignant anecdote expresses the election in a nutshell.  Months before the election, a Democratic Party pollster wrote President Obama warning him that victory was fast retreating because enthusiasm among Blacks was dismally low. Without a high Black voter turnout, defeat was preordained. Democratic strategists also made the same point, albeit to a lesser extent, regarding the Latino vote.

    Prompted by these dire warnings, President Obama launched that special appeal to Black voters only he could do or so he thought. He made a series of appearances and radio announcements aimed specifically at Black voters. He also drafted the First Lady to the campaign hustings to deliver the same message. In his otherwise unremarkable radio announcements, the president chided his predominantly Black audience by telling them they have to convince “cousin Pookie” to vote.  “We all got a cousin Pookie who is a good person but sometimes is not quite as attentive to his civic responsibilities as he needs to be,” explained the chief executive. This statement drips with hypocrisy. For the entirety of his presidency, when asked why he has rebuffed Black American policy concerns, he has retorted that he was the president of the United States, not the president of Black America. However, when support was needed, he made a special appeal to Black people and did it in a way he dare not have ventured with any other constituency. It worked for him in the past.

    This time it did not work.  I am a Black American. And like most Black Americans, I don’t have a cousin Pookie as President Obama described.  Obama thought that he could flippantly say anything to Black people and they would jump through fire for him. In 2008, that was so. In 2012, it was still valid, but less so. Today, it is no longer the case. Enough Blacks have caught a true glimpse of the man. The frustration in a growing segment of the Black community is palpable. Before, Blacks would have gone to war for him. Now many will not venture to the neighborhood polling station. “He has refused to do anything for us so why should we exert ourselves for him” is the growing sentiment.

    The First Lady also tripped over her tongue. Responding to a question from a Black journalist, the health food advocate beamed,  “I give everyone full permission to eat some fried chicken  after they vote … I think that a good victory for Democrats on Tuesday, you know, should be rewarded with some fried chicken.”  Black Americans are fabled as being slave to the taste of fried chicken. Forget the substantive policy issues that face the Black community. Forget that the diminution of economics of the Black community is redolent of the Depression.  The First Lady’s implicit message was that you folks don’t understand the important things. Just trust us and allow Barack to handle these matters because he is smarter than the whole lot of you combined. All you need do is vote, eat a few pieces of fried chicken in reward for your obedience then go home and shut up until we need you for the next election. This time, Blacks were not buying the claptrap. They refused to go to the polls. Even among those who refused to vote, a number may have consumed some fried chicken on Election Day notwithstanding the First Lady’s conditional approval.

    The Obama strategy crashed against the wall of Black disenchantment. The abovementioned juvenile statements show the White House couple embraces the same bundle of prejudices and stereotypes toward the Black community that afflicts most White America and much of the Black elite. The Obamas and the Black political elite look with deep condescension at the very people who constitute their most loyal voting bloc. Shame on President Obama for treating Black people as if we are inherently off cue and lacking in some unidentified quality essential to responsible and productive citizenship. Instead of bringing greater understanding of minorities into mainstream politics, he picked the easier route.  He used Blacks to get him into office. Once there, he fed from the same bushel of racial stereotypes as most White politicians. As has been his wont, in the futile attempt to ingratiate himself to Whites, President Obama adheres to sad biases against Black people. As such, it is not cousin Pookie but President Obama and his ilk who are not “quite as attentive to their leadership responsibilities as they need to be.”

    Fortunately, more Blacks are beginning to pierce his insincerity, seeing him for the conservative elitist he has turned out to be. They now say to him and his party that they will no longer be satisfied with lofty words resulting in empty promises. If the Democrats want the Black voter to act, the Democrats better begin taking action beneficial to the Black voter. In the end, electoral politics is based on reciprocity not of unrequited affection.

    This small but growing number of Blacks returning to the reformist tradition of the community will not chain themselves to the Democratic Party. That Party has left its liberal habitation to drift further rightward as the Republican Party also does so. These people seek a progressive alternative. They now organize at the community and grassroots levels, reaching out to progressive elements in wider society. The challenge is steep but the effort is necessary because it represents a revival of the political agenda and mores that historically made the Black community the most political progressive and egalitarian element in national politics. If these progressive forces gain traction, Obama would have suffered a double defeat this election.  Not only would the White electorate have rejected him (almost two-thirds of White men voted Republican on Tuesday), Black progressives may have begun to thwart his post-election plans of being the unofficial leader of Black America once his White House tenancy expires.

    Even facing this prospect of dual defeat, President Obama will salvage something from this electoral debacle. In the privacy of his neoliberal conservative heart, he may welcome the Congressional change. While a liberal on social issues, the President is more Republican than Democratic on economic issues and foreign policy. Now that his party no longer controls any chamber in Congress, he can detach himself from the more liberal Democratic lawmakers.

    To maintain his liberal patina, he will battle the Republicans on social matters like immigration, gay marriage, and environmental protection. The Republicans will try to deracinate the eponymous health insurance regime, Obamacare.  He will fight to retain this part of his diminishing legacy. Without it, his legacy becomes too small for so vain a politician. To enhance that legacy, he will do as he has always done. He will contort himself until his spine snaps in order to show he is bipartisan and that he can accomplish something great despite the political forces stacked against him. To accomplish the great thing, he will not fight the strong Republican hand poised against him.  He will join to himself to it. He will work with the Republicans to achieve their great thing.

    Notwithstanding the dramatic noise circling the contentious social issues, the core objective of the Republicans is an economic one. They seek to disinter the remains of Democrat President Franklin Roosevelt so that they may bury his memory and the programs of his progressive New Deal even deeper. The Republicans want to privatize Social Security and rollback, if not eliminate, most economic welfare programs. They claim to do this to balance the budget. However, when it comes to increases in military expenditure or in suborning their pet industries, the imperative for budget balancing lapses.  They know there is no real need to balance the federal budget. The federal government cannot go bankrupt. However, they exploit this canard to destroy liberal and progressive programs they detest so that they can restructure the nation into the elitist pleasure garden of their dreams. They seek to drive the nation back to a time when income and wealth inequality were stark and the poor and working classes were supine and supplicant.

    In 2011, President Obama proposed a fiscal “Grand Bargain’ that gave the Republicans these things and more.  They did not join him. At that time, their objective was to thwart everything he proposed, even those things they would have done if they held the White House. If he offers a similar deal this time, they will join him as they have now electorally defeated him to the extent possible. With this, we face the prospect of President Obama being the architect of the diminution of the progressive economic justice and welfare structure that has been the central tenet of his own party and of Black support for that party for eighty years.

    Even with his attempt to appease the Republicans and act like he is of their camp, he is not out of the woods. He still does not fully understand the racial dynamics surrounding his presidency. Roughly 40 percent of White America detests the idea of a Black president even one as milquetoast as he. The majority of Republicans are of this persuasion.  No matter what he does, the Republican majority wants his hide. If he does one major thing they don’t like, particularly on immigration, they will initiate impeachment proceedings against him. They will do their best to make his legacy one of rebuke and failure. Ironically, as he cast stereotypes upon the Black masses, the White conservative elite casts the same stereotype on him and it has stuck. He is there cousin Pookie. Thus, while he should vote, there is no way he should be president.

    The more he estranges himself from Black people because of his elitism, the less support he will have when the time comes that he will need it.

    In the end, I seek not to reduce the setback the Democrats experienced solely to this one racial factor. The lack of funds, the quality of candidates and the lack of party organization all played roles. However, the critical path of this defeat runs through the White House and the disintegrating relationship between Barack Obama, the Democratic Party and Black America. Beside the Republican Party, the biggest winners in this are the Clintons. Bill Clinton shall keep his title as the official leader of the Democratic Party. The defeat will cause Democrats to play it safe for 2016. They will rally more quickly around Hillary Clinton than if they had won more seats in last Tuesday’s midterm.

    Neither party has much to offer the poor or working classes. Both parties have been bought and sold. The right side of Wall Street and the corporate war machine own the Republicans. The left side has purchased the Democrats. Those who seek to help the average person must migrate from the two major parties to form something different. Chances are poor for this happening. However, a few seeds of progressive awakening have been planted. While these efforts are far from what is needed, they may shake the Democratic Party and help it return to its liberal ethos. If so, this would be a good thing. But in the meanwhile, the economic agendas of the Democratic President and the Republican Congress dovetail.

    This spells pain for the majority of people. Despite nominal economic growth in America, 90 percent of the people are worse off now than at the end of the Great Recession of 2008-9. Blacks have suffered doubly worse; their pain is both economic and political. They suffer greater joblessness and loss of wealth. Meanwhile, the man in the White House treats them cavalierly after they placed blind faith in him. They have begun to perform a painful reality check. Many now believe they voted for an impostor. Because of Obama’s social aloofness  and economic conservatism that goes against the traditional progressive lean of the community, many have reached the stark conclusion that they have yet to witness the election of America’s first truly Black president.

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  • Ebola: of pestilence, pretense and poverty

    Ebola: of pestilence, pretense and poverty

    Fear calls forth genius and folly but never in equal measure; the greater the fear, the greater the folly.

    In the presence of Ebola or anything that threatens indiscriminate probable death, fear becomes rational. It certainly is an inevitable, natural response. Fear can be a strong call, piercing the miasma of false comfort and numbed inaction. Many a brave deed and innovative enterprise have been predicated on the cold slap of fear. Hysteria is of a different sort. It paralyzes logic, turning into madmen those who act out its passions. That the madness may be temporary does not require the damage wrought to be equally limited. History is littered with the flotsam that hysteria’s ugly hand has caused.  Hysteria also is rarely a natural phenomenon. It is artificially induced, taking the kernel of fear and sowing it into a harvest of irrational dread. Generally, those who bestir public hysteria have ulterior motives beyond insulating themselves or others from the feared danger. They incite fear until it compounds exponentially, transforming itself into an acrid poultice of mistake, hatred, blame, illogic, prejudice and horrid superstition. With this in mind, we should weight the global response to the Ebola epidemic.

    International reportage of Ebola should finally disabuse those of us who still adhere to the illusion that the major global media houses are committed to objective journalism. These media outlets have stoked hysteria and foreboding like an arsonist does fire.  Their job has not been to objectively report the risks at hand and the progress made. Their mission was to strike fear so the public would say glued to their televisions. They did not set out to properly educate their viewers about Ebola. They sought to portray Ebola as marauding dread that would mesmerize the audience as much as their favorite action drama or reality show. They turned the nightly news into a horror flick or a sports contest where we were daily told the scores of infected and dead Ebola had netted. The casualties were no longer people but numerical symbols of the deadly victory Ebola was said to be winning.

    The more lethal and contagious Ebola was perceived, the more the newsmakers could continue making news and keeping people fixed to their television channels. The media is no longer about journalism. It is a big and global business. Thus, like any business, the objective is profits which are achieved through the paid advertisements high viewer ratings induce. If the truth serves to profit the corporate bottom line, then the truth they will present. But rarely does the truth suffice. Thus, they simplify then inflate it; they distort into something the truth would not recognize but something the corporate sponsors see as befitting their investments. Journalism is no longer the pursuit; it is the vehicle by which profits are pursued with a bill collector’s vigor.

    Yet, hysteria may arrive quickly but it never leaves without exacting a dear cost. The news of four Ebola cases sent the United States into near panic. The unfortunate Liberian who entered America with Ebola became the victim of umbrage and disgust. Xenophobia and racism were perceptible undercurrents. Not spoken in polite circles yet understood by all was the theme that nothing good comes out of Africa except sickness, war and death. On the lips of many Americans was the question: “Why let these people into our nation to destroy it?” The fear of dreaded disease merged with the historic hatred of black skin to produce an uncivil response to what was entirely a human tragedy. The people of Black Africa were all seen as accursed by reason of their origins and not as unfortunate victims by reason of the incidences of history over which they have exercised little control.

    At the same time Ebola came, American was experiencing an outbreak of enterovirus d68. The virus had affected people in almost all fifty states. At least, five deaths were confirmed due to the sickness which seems to spread faster geographically than Ebola but is less fatal. News concerning d68 was minimal compared to Ebola although the number of deaths exceeded the total number of Ebola cases reported in the nation. Part of the reason for the discrepant attention was the steep lethality and dire symptoms of Ebola. This is understandable. It is fear at its most natural. But there is another more sinister factor at work. D68 was not as newsworthy because there was no outsider to blame. D68 was an American phenomenon and thus had to be tolerated with resolve and a stiff upper lip.

    With only four cases in a population over 300 million, Ebola is limited to one person in every seventy-five million people. The likelihood of an American contracting Ebola was a fraction of that of being shot by a crazed gunman. However, Americans are more petrified of stricter gun control than of the maniacal gun-toters who on a weekly basis bring carnage to some school or shopping center. But there is no great outcry, no hysteria. There is only resignation to the fact that indiscriminant commerce in guns is woven into American life. Thus, cold-blooded, insane murder will also be part of the national fabric. However, Africans and their dreaded disease should not be. Thus, much of the fury and anger Americans should aim at correcting their own internal contradictions was hurled at the Liberian Duncan.

    One can argue the morality of Duncan traveling to America given that he was cognizant of his exposure to the disease. Surely, it would it have been nobly self-sacrificing to have remained in Liberia. Yet, I dare not condemn the man for no one truly knows how he would respond if placed in similar circumstance. The best response is not condemnation but human understanding and empathy.  That did not occur.

    Duncan was begrudgingly admitted into the treating hospital. The treatment the uninsured black man received does not seem to have been inspired. At most, the hospital tried to manage his disease and not help him overcome it. To say the treatment received was minimalist would not be off-the-mark. This again exposes the intrusion of racism into every facet of American life even the administration of health care, which in some instances can be a decision of life or death for a fellow human being. It also reveals the moral emptiness of a health care system run as a business for profit instead of one that functions as a public service. In a profit-based system either you pay money or you pay with something dearer – your health or your life.

    There is the gnawing sense that Duncan’s treatment was kept to the lowest minimum because those in charge were unconcerned whether Duncan lived or died. There was an unspoken yet strong disincentive to curing the man. They feared his cure would flash a green light to other Liberians to take the same route to better treatment. His death would constitute a red stop light. The trajectory of human affairs is forever distorted by the twist of irony. Three hundred years ago, Whites were removing the likes of Duncan from his homeland against their will. This time, he wanted to come; this time, they no longer wanted him. Justice eventually comes but it does not arrive quickly enough to come for us all.

    Waiting for Mr. Duncan to get out of the hospital was the Dallas County Prosecutor’s office. They wanted to bring criminal charges against him although his actions fit no known criminal offense. Trying to ingratiate themselves to American authorities, Liberian officials also announced they wanted Duncan deported that he may face criminal charges back home. Faced with a ravaging epidemic laying down hundreds of people daily, Liberia had not the ability to manage the crisis at hand let alone divert inordinate attention to the lone man who got away. Neither the Texan or Liberian prosecutors would have their catch. Duncan never emerged from his hospital bed alive.

    The two nurses who contracted the illness from Duncan have survived the worst. They shall recover. The New York City doctor contracted it while treating patients in Guinea. He is in isolation and will receive the finest care. Yet, his case sustains the hysteria. Across the nation hospitals have been visited by people who had not the slightest chance of possible contact with anyone who might have had contact with anyone exposed to the virus. People were rushing to the hospital because they were sweating after being outside or felt a pain in their stomach after eating too much. All the while, as they irrationally feared Ebola, they also irrationally cursed Africa and Africans.

    Some of the invectives against Africa attached to President Obama. Racists opined he had not acted decisively because Ebola was an African disease and he wanted sick Africans to come and spread it on America. Thus, Obama refused to institute a travel ban on West Africa. The accusation is the height of animus. It is as senseless as it is vulgar. Yet, hatred has informed much of what has happened. Conservative Republican political leaders seized the opportunity to inflict additional political injury on Obama and other Democrats in the days before the important congressional elections in early November. Giving a nod and wink to the racists, they pronounced Obama’s handling of “the crisis” as casual and inattentive.  They too blamed Obama for opposing a travel ban, failing to add President Obama was merely following the advice of the overwhelming majority of medical experts.

    Last week, the president appointed an Ebola Czar, Ron Klain, to counteract the perception that his administration had lost control of this and other challenges. A consummate political insider, Klain has been Chief of Staff to the last two Democratic Vice Presidents (Gore and Biden). Klain’s medical background is that of a layman. He has no greater knowledge of infectious diseases that you or I. Clearly, he can add nothing of medical value. His mission is to halt the political hemorrhaging inflicted on the Obama administration by the withering Republican criticism.

    Even the American military has got into the act. Not only has the President deployed several thousand troops to Liberia to help construct field hospitals and train local workers on basic medical procedures regarding the care of Ebola patients, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Martin Dempsey proclaimed Ebola to be a national security threat. If possible, he would recommend bombing the smithereens out of the virus. He would meet even less fortune in this endeavor as he is currently having in the air war against an advancing ISIS in Syria and Iraq.

    The military has even established an Ebola rapid response force to deploy within America. This is lunacy. Once the soldiers get to the troubled person, what in creation will they do? The military’s incursion in domestic concerns far flung from its core mission, is troubling. Government funds for medical care and even the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) which is the lead agency on Ebola have withered. The military is so flush with money and power that it can freely invade the province of specialized civilian agencies although the military is ill-equipped to make anything good come out of the encroachment. This is another signal of the slow erosion of American democracy. The greater the military’s role in domestic affairs, the lesser becomes a nation’s democracy. Wherever the military enters, democracy leaves.

    Strangely, the tradecraft of the military does have an answer to the mystery of Ebola. This goes not to the cure but the dissemination of the virus. Those nations that have suffered sustained outbreaks have one thing in common. They are nations laid bare by protracted civil war that have destroyed their national institutions included whatever rudimentary health care that might have existed. Before the current outbreak, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Sudan hosted the most severe outbreaks. Both those nations are sites of perennial war. Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea have also been victimized by ruthless war and unrest. The recovery they face will take several generations. Broken and impoverished by war, these nations became susceptible in a special way to Ebola’s contagion. War is often the first link in a chain of calamity. Where there is long war, pestilence shall follow.

    This is not the first instance of disease riding the hind of war. As WWI was coming to a close in 1918, the Spanish Flu descended. It killed roughly 50 million people or over three percent of the global population in a matter of months. The disease was more deadly than the war. That the most deadly modern plague came on the heels of the first modern war is not coincidence. The conditions of war – trenches, chemical weapons, compact quartering of troops and civilians – as well as the social and material depravations inherent in warfare coupled to make this disease as deadly as disease can get. If a disease as fatal as the 1918 flu now laid siege, it would claim roughly 250 million people. This is equivalent to eliminating almost all of West Africa or five of every six Americans.

    The dysfunction and disease that follow war are often more fatal than the fighting itself. That Nigeria has sufficiently intact medical institutions and that health care professionals and leaders on the ground had the will and courage to respond were the reasons the disease did not spread in Nigeria. Had the nation been then the throes of a complete unrest, the story would have different. Ebola would have marched the ravager’s march through the land. The lessons of war and now of Ebola are ample ones to make all of us rededicate ourselves to peace and stability in Nigeria and throughout the region.

    The other aspect of the disease that has gone unreported is that the virus not only attacks poor, scarred nations but the most vulnerable of the people in these countries. Aside from infecting health care workers, few members of the middle or upper classes have been infected. The vast majority are the poor underclass who eat sparingly and whatever they can, including spoiled, diseased meat caught or paid for on the cheap. Water is even a luxury. Had they or their medical system the ability to rehydrate people on an ongoing basis, the mortality rate of the disease would lower significantly.

    In the end, Ebola is a virus, a serious and deadly one. We can do nothing about its existence. The jeopardy of premature death is part of life. Yet, mankind can do much better in how we respond to this and other scourges. For in the quality of our response, we find our humanity or lose it. Whether we treat the afflicted and whether we act to mitigate the socio-economic imbalances that turn a disease into an epidemic have nothing to do with the severity of the illness. They have everything to do with the largeness of heart and love of mankind we care to live by so that others may not perish before their time.

     

    08060340825 (sms only)

  • War upon war: Barack the bomber (Part two)

    War upon war: Barack the bomber (Part two)

    War is a forgetful avenger. He who often turns to it ignores that someday it shall turn on him.

    The nobility of warfare is fiction. War has always been a horrid ordeal. Butchery, theft, pillage, rapine and death are the perennial certainties of war while the identity of which side may win the martial contestation is left to chance in most instances. No war occurs without wholesale crime conjoined to it. The advent of modern warfare and the industries that manufacture war’s sophisticated instrumentalities have not altered this fact. Whether by knife or by drone, brutality is unleashed and asked to render its fullest demonstration.

    Technology does not abnegate brutality; technology abets it by affecting it at a distance through modern weapons and by making it so widespread in this application that the brutality of superior military force becomes impersonal to us.  A beheading appears savage because we all can empathize with the victim. The devastation of a village by bomb cast from afar is more difficult to feel. The bomb does its task so thorough that human remains meld with inanimate rubble. Scores are beheaded and dismembered in the blast. The explosion is so intense that it blinds you to the human destruction. Bone and board, flesh and mortar become one. No visible humanity remains over which to shed a tear. Yet, obliteration of innocents in this instance is more indiscriminate than a beheading can ever be. It is important to remember this point when assessing the moral claims of all the sides to the free-for-all that Syria has become.

    It is also important to train our emotions and biases as much as possible when assessing what is happening. There are two postulates I seek to establish before continuing with the critique of the international war in Syria/Iraq.

    First, ISIL has proven itself to be a vicious political movement, adroitly using Islam as its calling card; in truth, this group’s behavior has little connection to Islam or any spiritual faith. That a violent political movement attaches itself to a noble belief or idea is not unique. Maoist China and the Stalinist USSR travestied Marxism. Nineteenth century United States, with its enslavement of black skin and genocide against the red (Native American), represented neither the Christian nor democratic ideal although its leaders gasconaded these claims.

    That ambitious actors in the Middle East would hitch their lusts for power and blood to the standard of Islam is predictable. To blame Islam for these depredations is to blame Jesus for the massacre of the American Indian and Europe’s colonization of Africa. Clearly, violence ferments in the Middle East; many Muslims embrace it, ignorantly mistaking the xenophobic bloodletting for an element of their faith. This violence is more the child of region’s checkered history and the political culture born of this history than it is of the religion of the people. Again, no surprise. In most instances and places, culture trumps religion to the extent that culture masquerades as the truest religion for most people. Most people don’t study the books of their faith; thus, they don’t live its tenets. However, because one lives his culture he does not have to study to know it. Thus, many White American Christians dirt-washed their conscience into believing kidnapping and turning Africans into bondservants was a Christian act.

    Second, most of us would rather live a society like present-day America than in the one lSIL seems intent to erect. However, that one society may internally be more conducive than another, does not give that society carte blanche to attack the harsher one. Such an attack is an act of war and instigation of war must accord with international precepts lest the fairer society become the more blemished one by reason of its self righteousness.

    A part from the legal requirements, there is a moral hurdle. Ask the majority of Syrians now under ISIL dominion whether they would prefer living under ISIL control in peace or in war their answer would be neither. Some now long for the days when their only contention was with the harsh Assad regime. Yet, if you press them into recognizing the world is oft unfair and that these two are the only alternatives at present, they would say ISIL and peace. Given the already harsh reality conferred by such an existence, does another nation have a moral right to accost this forlorn population with greater pain by raining on them lethal devices of modern science? These people are now butchered from below and bombed from above. Their lone crime is to live in a land at the crossroads of an international struggle for power and wealth.

    We must quash the idea that a nation which might have a more benign domestic system somehow has the moral right to attack another nation or society. This consideration is important when weighing the propriety of America’s aerial war in Syria. This consideration is also important because it just may be as accurate a barometer of sound policy as any other consideration.

    Syria has become a condominium of war. Due to political and military miscalculations by a crowded procession of actors in a brief time, Syria has become as complex a situation as one can find. It is a theater of multiple wars: 1. Assad against the vaporous moderate domestic opposition, 2. Assad against ISIL, 3. ISIL against the moderates, 4. Saudi Arabia, Qatar and others against Assad, 5. Turkey against Assad, 6. Turkey against the Kurds versus ISIL versus Assad, 7. Israel against Assad, 8. Israel against Iran and Hezbollah, 9. America against ISIL, 10. America against Assad, 11. America against Russia, 12. America against Iran, 13. Sunni against Shi’ite, and 14. Established states against the new entity that claims to honor the line of tradition, ISIL’s emergent caliphate.

    The Syrian conflict is a labyrinth of confusion. The opening lines of each player’s strategy are contradicted by the strategy’s latter phases. Every nation is a contortionist. What is said is not what is meant and what is done goes unspoken. For a nation to jump into this maelstrom when none of its vital interests are at stake measures the reach of that nation’s imperial folly. This is the context of the American incursion into Syria.  America has entered a war, the full regional dimensions and intricacies of which it does not comprehend. Injecting oneself into the center of a dispute whose language you don’t even understand testifies to an empire blinded by arrogance. This might not be the dance with death for the American empire but it certainly is a dance of diminution. It is a case of foreign policy malpractice on a felonious scale.

    America warring against ISIL is the latest incident of Washington eventually battling a force it helped spawn. This dynamic finds its origins in the Cold War. Fearing secular, nationalist movements would angle toward the Soviet Union, America funded reactionary Islamist groups as counterweights throughout the Middle East. As part of its efforts culminating in the 1953 coup against democratically-elected Prime Minister Mossadegh, America funded an Islamic group to stir civil unrest because the prime minister had the temerity to challenge international oil companies. In Mossadegh, America paranoia saw a communist where there was none. A member of the clandestinely-funded group was a young cleric whose surname was Khomeini.  Twenty-six years later, he would show America the bitter dividends of its tainted investment against Iranian democracy. The battle between America and Khomeini’s political heirs still wages; it mars the Syrian complexity.

    When the Soviet Union dumbly invaded Afghanistan, America rushed to fund the Taliban and the stream of itinerant mujahedeen pouring into the desolate nation. America’s wanted the Soviets to experience their own Vietnam. After the war, America turned its back on the mujahedeen; it turned against America. Al Qaeda was born in the bosom of American foreign policy. Its most prominent son would be Osama bin Laden. The rest is history.

    The demise of the Cold War gave America freedom to sally forth and establish dominance in the oil-rich Middle East without risking superpower confrontation. American neo-conservatives believed staking claim to the Middle East would cement American economic and military global hegemony. With many of them personally invested in America’s oil sectors, this segment of the American elite would also financially profit. To accomplish this, stubborn nations in the region needed to be subdued and Russia had to be kept low. The Wolfowitz doctrine was incubated. This doctrine proclaims America should war to ensure its status as the lone superpower and to break recalcitrant nations that might assert a nettlesome independence of thought at the regional level. The doctrine has become the bipartisan capstone of American national security policy.

    Pursuant to this doctrine, the defunct Soviet republic would be replaced by Middle Eastern nations as America’s new foundational enemy. Libya, Iran, Iraq and Syria became four of the five charter members of the Axis of Evil, with nuclear misfit North Korea as the group’s lone geographical outlier. In breaking Saddam, America allowed Al Qaeda to flourish in a country where it once had been proscribed. That branch of Al Qaeda splintered. The splinter grew tumescent, expanding into Syria to become ISIL. America teamed with Al Qaeda to topple Libya’s Gaddafi. Again, America would turn its back on the matter, allowing the jihadists free rein in the disheveled nation. That branch of Al Qaeda would export Libyan weapons, fanning the embers of war in regions as far flung as Nigeria and Syria.

    To understand American foreign policy, you must understand that the war against terrorism is conditional and flexible. The war against enemy nations is the absolute, rigid one. The Wolfowitz doctrine supersedes the battle against extremists groups.  America and its Arab allies wittingly funded ISIL in the battle against the Assad regime. America declared it was funding the “moderate Syria opposition.”  This is a falsehood. Like the ersatz moderate Iraqi opposition before it, this Syrian group looms prominent only in international conferences and in the minds of Western policymakers who believe they can call their desired objective in existence simply by willing it so. On the battlefield, the moderate opposition has been a negligible presence. It is an open secret that American intelligence services have been equipping and paying salaries to fighters who can only be described as extremists.

    What ISIL has done in Syria is merely compressed the normal time span between receipt of American assistance and fight against America. A friend- to-foe process that took years with Al Qaeda has taken only months with ISIL. Once ISIL declared intention to hold territory, it became America’s foe because it transformed itself from being a tool to upend a troublesome state into becoming an inchoate member of the group of contumacious nations America disdains.

    Now America bombs ISIL in Syria and Iraq. In doing so, America breached international norms. It is unlawful to attack the territory of another state unless that state or something in it presented a proximate threat. The Assad regime did not threaten. ISIL presented no closing threat although it brutally executed several Americans. To provide legal pretext for the bombing, the Obama administration invented the Khorasan group, claiming this fictitious Al Qaeda offshoot planned an imminent attack on American territory.  The news of this group likely sent Al Qaeda leaders scurrying to check their membership database. They had never heard of this group.

    Moreover, American official policy long ago made mince of the phrase “imminent threat.” They are not bound to the common meaning we give it, signaling something near and close. If something is discussed by suspected terrorists and is within the realm of possibility at some future point, the American government considers it imminent. Today, imminent means almost anything. It is akin to executing a man for murder just because he was heard to remark that “he was so angry he could kill” after having a heated argument with a friend. Showing the contrived nature of this ploy, America has intensified bombing of Syria after claiming to have obliterated Khorasan headquarters and its plans against the American nation. If the bombing achieved its aim, the imminent threat to America is no more. A legal rationale for continued operations is unavailing particularly since there is no claim ISIL or Assad conspired with the starkly ephemeral Khorasan outfit.

    In Washington, the walls close against President Obama.  He is loath to insert ground troops; but, the logic of the circumstance may soon demand he shelve this skittishness. He is on the verge of winning the devil’s lottery. In exchange for ending war in one nation (Iraq), he may return to the region to war against two nations (Iraq and Syria). He has not the political courage to forestall the neo-conservatives who press for war. He will succumb. He hoped Turkey would bail him from the dilemma by furnishing the needed ground muscle. But the Turkish leader is allied to ISIL. Erdogan’s mortal foe is Assad. The Turk envisions himself as a Sunni bulwark against motley Alawite and Shi’ite groups ruling Syria and Iraq, respectively. Moreover, given his troubles with his Kurdish minority, Alawite minority rule in Syria is an abomination to the increasingly chauvinistic Erdogan. After Assad, Kurds are his most irksome national security challenge. ISIL is minor his list of worries.

    For now, it serves as his instrument of destruction for it fights both Assad and the Kurds. In a display of frigid indifference that would cause Machiavelli to shudder with embarrassment, Erdogan idled his strong military, asking it not to lift a finger to help beleaguered Kurdish fighters as ISIL steadily captures the strategic border town of Khobani. For Erdogan, ISIL pummels two birds – Assad and ISIL — with one stone. Thus, Erdogan proclaimed Turkey will not engage ISIL unless President Obama agrees to deploy the American military in toppling Assad. He extorts Obama while ISIL decimates the Kurds. This is how realpolitik is played in a rough neighborhood. Yet, it has caught the American leader unprepared. Erdogan is well aware American conservatives now press Obama in the same way. He likely orchestrates his diplomatic extortion of Obama with them. Theirs is a concert for war.

    Obama prays the bombing campaign will halt ISIL. So far, it has not noticeably handicapped the group. ISIL advances in both Syria and Iraq. This is not a sign of a battered army. The aerial campaign will prove insufficient. During the Vietnam War, American hurled more destructive tonnage than was expended during the entirety of WW II by all nations combined. Still, America lost. The currently level of bombing in the Iraq/Syrian theatre is a pinprick. If only Obama had the courage and foresight of a man willing to listen to instincts for peace instead of the call of the American war machine. He would have collaborated with the Russian president to contain the war in Syria. If so, ISIL would not be as it is and America would not be on the verge of sending troops back into the fire. However, the war party in America now prevails. Expansion of war is in the offing. The slim chance for peace will be a first casualty. President Obama’s foreign policy legacy will be its second.

     

    08060340825 (sms only)

  • War upon war by Barack the bomber (Part one)

    War upon war by Barack the bomber (Part one)

    A cracked vessel still contains hope for the thirsty but the shattered glass holds no water.

    Syria is doomed to be a theatre of war for years to come. In Machiavellian concert with a few Arab monarchies and the usual western suspects, America began bombing Syria and Iraq.  The stated reason for the air raids is to decimate ISIL which has proclaimed a thoroughly draconian caliphate over territory it has seized in both Syria and Iraq.  Superficially, this reason sounds reasonable, even noble. Yet there is a much longer tail to this tale.  To follow it is to discover the aerial exertions have little to do with protecting civilians and only secondarily with ridding the world of ISIL.  The harsh truth is that the authors of the bombing raids are not committed to eliminating ISIL.

    They merely want ISIL to return to what they see as its proper status. It can survive by going about its merry way as a nomadic extremist group. However, it crossed the invisible yet hard line drawn by the Western powers when it declared it would no longer itinerate but would establish its own state.  That placed ISIL at odds with those foreign sources whose policies, arms and funds had helped build and finance it into what it hath become.

    The global gang-op against ISIL reveals something important to those who care to discern it: ISIL’s claim to territory is more the problem than ISIL itself.  ISIL became a menace worthy enough to bomb once it laid claim to real estate. Here, we have pulled away the chaff that we may see the kernel.

    With precious little fanfare and explanation, the world has entered a dangerous phase because longstanding tenets of international relations have been discarded. That these principles are assaulted by terrorists is of no surprise. That they are being junked by the world’s most powerful nation is the greater astonishment. It should bring you to upper loft of concern.

    America has imbibed the elixir of hubris in much too generous proportions. Extrapolating from its self-description as the world’s indispensable nation, America is now free to ignore the views and concerns of other nations. America now reasons its views on all matters concerning the global estate are also indispensable. This implicitly suggests that divergent viewpoints are dispensable. It is a thin, often fleeting distinction between thinking an opposing view is to be cast aside or thinking the government holding that opposing view should be discarded, or at least, reformed until it assumes the correct mode of behavior.

    This explains the Iraqi war that toppled Saddam.  To second President Bush, Saddam was an eyesore who must be removed. That Saddam tasted ignoble defeat after being chased from his Kuwait misadventure like a petty thief with his trousers ablaze was not enough for the younger Bush. Saddam’s continued presence, his very survival, stood as an affront to American uni-power. Bush and his broad array of narrow-minded, war-hungry   advisors felt Saddam’s reprieve in the First Gulf War was undeserved. They would revoke it without debate or discussion about the likely consequences of the action they believed was their right and destiny to take.

    Although he constituted no threat to American interests, they attacked him and his nation. The Iraqi people would gravely suffer due to him. The American government fabricated the lie about Saddam arsenal of WMD’s. The truth is simply he was attacked because his government remained at odds with America. After his defeat in the 1990’s, Saddam refused to supplicate to Washington. He remained a thorn in the side because his very presence reminded Washington of the limits of its power. His stubborn hold on power broadcasted a lesser power might contend militarily against America yet survive.  This was a lesson American war hawks did not want the world to be taught. Thus, the one-time ally and the people he suppressed became meat for the slaughter.

    Given the superficiality of President Bush, much of the world deceived itself the Second Iraqi War was an incidental folly, a terrible thing that happened because someone barely fit to manage a local convenience store, because of the prerogatives attached to his surname, had ascended to the highest office of the most powerful nation in the history of mankind. Bush’s personal foibles disguised that he was simply being faithful to what was becoming the bipartisan consensus within the American political establishment.  His ugly foray into Iraq would be the first unalloyed demonstration of that policy; but this fact in now undermines the bipartisan agreement supporting it. His political demise came not because he adhered to the policy but that he did it so poorly.

    Once it considers another government an enemy, America is willing to take punitive, even military action, against the blacklisted nation even when the nation does not constitute a hot threat against America or its vital strategic interests. It is sufficient the nation may disagree with an American position. This leads to speculation the nation may possibly encroach on a vital interest at some future point. This is enough to burnish a war plan and possibly pull the trigger against the unruly inferior. After all, only an apostle of evil would oppose the world’s indispensable nation.

    America does not merely see its position on a political or economic issue as that of one state among many, with each state’s position having its own potential and peculiar merits and demerits that must be reconciled with those of the other members of the global community. America has convinced itself that its positions and even its self-interests are divinely appointed; coming from a higher source, America’s views thus have a collective application unlike any other nation’s. Meanwhile the self interests of other nations are petty, narrow things that tear at instead of help build a constructive global order. The nation that prides itself as the world’s leading democracy opposes democracy in the international order and functioning of world affairs. It positions itself as an enlightened dictator, benign to those nations wise enough to follow it but capable of unleashing Old Testament destruction against those possessed of the effrontery to challenge it in a material way.

    This all sounds too fantastic, too conspiratorial to be true. No one in their right mind would think such a thing! But smart, otherwise intelligent people, seized by the grinding imperatives of a mammoth military bureaucracy and of the interests of vast corporate networks, can be led down the path of a collective and blind insanity while picturing themselves as the apostles of a positive secular gospel. May I refer you to a policy document drafted in the early 1990s by the American supremacist ideologue, Paul Wolfowitz, for the Department of Defense.

    His ultimate policy objective was to maintain America as the world’s lone superpower. The strategic was to “convince potential competitors that they need not aspire to a greater role or pursue a more aggressive position to protect their legitimate interests.” (It would be left to America to define another nation’s legitimate as opposed to its illegitimate interests.) If that nation’s interests did not accord with America’s, they would be deemed illegitimate. More ominously, the document stated American must “maintain mechanisms for deterring potential competitors from even aspiring to larger regional or global roles.”  In plain English, he advocated America having such a supremacy of economic and military fire power that no nation with a contrary view would dare openly challenge American hegemony, in fear of economic sanctions or more muscular retribution.

    This document would not be relegated to a bureaucrat’s graveyard of bad ideas.  In the administration of Bush the Younger, Wolfowitz would become Deputy Secretary of Defense, serving as the one-man think tank for the caustic triumvirate of President Bush, Vice President Cheney and Defense Secretary Rumsfeld. His ideas would lead America into the Second Iraqi War. These ideas would also permeate the entire American national security establishment. Sadly, the “Wolfowitz Doctrine” would become as influential as it was destructive to world peace and America’s own democratic traditions.

    With this darkness as the guiding light of American foreign policy, there were but two exits for the world to walk away from constant friction. Either America must shrink its global reach or every other major nation and most minor ones, regardless of their unique histories, cultures, economic interests and political systems, would have to bow to the American way. Neither is the case nor is either really possible. We have reached the place of steep dilemma and craggy danger.

    We have traipsed into an era of perpetual war. Pope Francis realized this recently when he declared the world had already fallen into a “piecemeal” third world war, particularly given the grave conflicts afflicting the Middle East and Central Asia.

    Against this backdrop, President Obama made two recent addresses outlining his rationale and policy for war against ISIL.  His UN address was the stuff of myth and legend. He stood before the global audience and spoke of a world and an America that he knew did not exist except in the minds of schoolchildren. For the second time in a decade, the most powerful Black American in political office went before the world body to utter a litany of falsehoods in support of war in Iraq.  In the prelude to the second Iraqi war, Secretary of State Powell spun a tale of lies about WMD. This time, President Obama evoked almost every myth conceivable about  American national superiority save that God Himself had drafted the Declaration of Independence and American Constitution to hand them to the Founding Fathers on holy parchment.

    One line summed up the hypocrisy of the moment. He chastised Russia’s role in Ukraine, lamenting that it was throwback to the times when a strong nation would simply invade the weaker. The throwback did not have to go very far unless Obama was afflicted by selective amnesia. Obama’s admonition statement was more applicable to America’s invasion of Iraq than Russian aid to Ukrainian separatists. Since 1980, America has intervened militarily in nearly thirty nations. No other nation comes close to approximating the global scope of this martial proclivity. Yet, Obama projects that America is a man of peace and not one of war. The pretty words don’t fit the bloodstained picture.

    In many ways, I feel sorry for President Obama.  He came into office hoping to pull America out of war. As a candidate, he stood up to the war machine. As president, he would succumb to it. As he made this speech, one could tell he had never envisioned that he would be caught in that awkward, incommodious position. He looked like he was mouthing another’s words and inside another person’s skin. If you could ask him privately, he would likely admit his better judgment was against war. However, the enormous political pressure at home and the incessant drumming of the military establishment made him yield.  The corporate war machine forced him from his preferred stance. Because there is no position he holds firmly, there is no position he holds for long once the pressure is on him. His critics know and attack him accordingly.

    The military wants him to go full-fledged into war – by introducing ground troops in both Syria and Iraq in addition to the current aerial display. He does not want war at all. He dodged it last year in Syria regarding the chemical weapons. This year, ISIL’s antics forced his hand and there was no Putin, now that Russia is blacklisted, to rescue him diplomatically at the eleventh hour. Consequently, he cut the difference between his preferred position and that of the military hawks by agreeing to air strikes but no ground troops.

    He hopes by going in half-way he might eke a half-victory or only submit himself to half a defeat since defeat is the most likely scenario. As such, he will only be half disgraced.  Far from hedging his losses, this muddled compromise will likely multiply them. He applies the wrong logic to the dynamics of war. War cannot be prosecuted according to an accountant’s ledger. You can’t half fight a war in hope of obtaining half a victory, or if beaten, only be subjected to half a defeat. There are no such things. Either you jump with the understanding that you might have to take the fight all the way to the outer wall or you sit down and yield ground to those who might expend their all in the endeavor.

    The calculations of war are not algebraic. Even for the most powerful nation, war is a blind stab.  How far your opponent is willing to go and the extent of hardship he is willing to endure are uncertain at the onset and remain such up to the time of surrender or cessation. In testing your opponent’s mettle, you also challenge your own.  If your opponent already knows you have limited your involvement and commitment, you have ceded great strategic advantage to him. He will outwit you by outwaiting you, knowing that your commitment and patience will fail. Obama has exposed himself thusly.

    For its part, ISIL is playing a reckless but cunning game. The evil force is following Bin Laden’s theories. Bin laden remarked that 9/11 cost Al Qaeda less than $500,000 but America spent more than $500 billion in response, without decimating Al Qaeda. In much the same way, the Taliban/mujahedeen bogged down the former USSR in Afghanistan.  ISIL believes it can do the same to America in Syrian. It hopes to pull America into a sandy, desolate battlefield where American troops and fine machinery would waste away in the heat, wind and sand. America would ultimately go home because there was nothing to fight except night ghosts. ISIL hopes to turn President Obama into a new President Johnson and that Syria will be the desert version of the Vietnam military quagmire.

    But ISIL is wrong in an important sense.  Its strategy will be to fold the caliphate and return to being a mobile terrorist force. It will avoid defeat but this also is what America wants. ISIL is not the real prize. It is merely a vehicle to get to the second prize.   The second prize is Syria. The first prize is Iran.

     

    More to come this next week.          

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  • Ferguson: When will the past become itself (Part two)

    Ferguson: When will the past become itself (Part two)

    He whose foes abound is his own worst enemy.

    As stated last week, explicit racism has been vetoed by law in America. However, in custom and thought, it thrives among nearly half the White population many of who still tremble in edgy indignation that they must publicly bridle their tongues by not expressly divulging their herrenvolk prejudices and aspirations.

    Due to the partial successes in the 1960s of the domestic Civil Rights Movement and the anti-colonial movement internationally, this   group could no longer openly brandish their racist armory. However, the years since then affirm that prejudice is a stubborn weed which adapts easily but dies hard. It cannot be legislated from those dark minds willing to retain it. The conservative, reactionary elements in American society fought back against the battle for equality.

    Beginning in the 1970s and enduring to this very day, they launched a well-oiled and abundantly-funded strategic propaganda campaign that would turn the American mind and political system significantly to the conservative right.

    In many ways their task was easier than that of the racial egalitarians. This rightist guard only sought to preserve the unfair status quo. They might need to change its outer trimmings to a more subtle hue but the substance of the belief that they were the divinely-appointed masters of the most powerful nation in the world remained intact. In fact, it would be inflated to place the entire planet and even the adjacent outer space under the scope of their chauvinistic domain.

    They distilled the wrong lesson from America’s unrivalled strength after World War II. They did not see America’s inevitable post-war advantage as a historic incident, the fortunate byproduct of their nation’s geographical distance from the Eurasian land mass.  This fact allowed America to enter the war later while avoiding the massive destruction the conflict visited on its other main protagonists. To perceive one’s rise as the result of events and forces over which one has little control is to be aware the wind can suddenly blow in an adverse direction. The demands one places on others are mitigated by the certainty that the future shall come with its own uncertainties that will place unforeseeable demands, benefits and problems on us all.  Although powerful, one’s actions are constrained by the realization that the quickest path to downfall is one’s own arrogant folly.  Understanding that your fortune comes from being a lucky beneficiary of history and not its master provides the circumspection necessary to prevent grandiosity of thought and ambition.

    However, American thinkers grasp the opposite conclusion. They would see themselves as divinely anointed to recast a tumultuous world in their own image. They and others would dub America “God’s own country,” becoming impervious to the process where dumb faith in the happy-sounding moniker would lead to hubris then to active danger. Americans leaders so frequently boast theirs is the “indispensable nation” that it has become a national proverb. It is a dangerous thing when the leaders of a powerful nation stop thinking rationally to enmesh themselves in the comfort of a simplicity that has never existed.  This notion is agitprop hogwash. It makes a brusque cartoon of global affairs. Every nation is indispensable to itself but none is indispensable to the world.

    Other nations rightfully take umbrage at this rashness. It is like the youngest child in a large family, after winning a gambling lottery, proclaiming the family would collapse without him. The statement eclipses the height of defensible arrogance to enter the land of the jeopardy. Numerous cultures and nations have existed well over a millennium; America has not existed a quarter of one. Every earthly empire that has risen has also declined. Human civilization moves on. To proclaim itself indispensable is to expose a nation’s lack of judgment and historic perspective. It to make the grievous error that being the most powerful nation has transformed it into an all-powerful one. It is to get so inebriated from the fruit God has bestowed that one substitute himself for God. Before the fall, comes the proudest of prides.

    Sadly, America’s arch conservatives masterfully propagated this and similar self-exalting notions. These sophomoric axioms are the tenets of both American patriotism and geopolitical thought.

    Moreover, America placed claim on being the moral arbiter, policeman, judge and jury in world affairs. The White establishment that would rule America would also attempt to lord over the world to make it safe for democracy. They would allow no freedom to those who opposed their concept of freedom. They became intolerant of those who rejected their brand of tolerance. Assuming the temperament of the medieval Inquisition, they would gleefully commit any atrocity or tawdry act in pursuit of what they saw as the noble good.

    Domestically, this meant shooting the unarmed Michael Brown because his blackness made him inherently criminal. Internationally, it means criminalizing, then raining corporal punishment on, any nation or group rash enough to attempt to get in the way of the American way. An ounce of resistance is met by a pound of retribution, an inch of protest by a mile of imposition.

    When people in Ferguson protested the Brown shooting, the police strapped on military gear to confront the unarmed civilians. The small-scale looting and vandalism that took place on fringes of legitimate demonstrations did not lend just cause to the police’s martial display. The police had transformed into what resembled more an occupation force than a public institution meant to serve the people. Implicit in this overbearing reaction was the belief that certain types of people must not dare avail themselves to certain types of social or political action. By definition, Black protest is deemed inimical to fundamental order. Just as their ancestors often awoke in cold sweat from fear of slave revolt, today’s White reactionaries still fear a Black rebellion that will bring their entire edifice. Thus, they abhor Black activism for they know that they would have rebelled decades ago if burdened with the unjust treatment meted to Blacks.

    The leaders of Ferguson would have intensified the crackdown if not for the global attention brought by the media spotlight. The episode had become too openly about race for this day and age. The overt racism had to be pushed into the shadows where it would still be nastily effective yet be impossible to see clearly enough to arrest it. To accomplish this, the establishment resorted to the modern edition of an old trick. Enter Highway Patrol Captain Ron Johnson and other “responsible” Black figures to douse and redirect the local activism and agitation toward a dead end. While Johnson was presented as the man in charge, the police often continued their heavy-handed tactics without Johnson’s knowledge. He was presented as the leader on the ground but was essentially a public relations instrument, a servitor figurehead deployed to mollify black anger, thereby dousing intense racial tension so that normal pedestrian racism could resume charge after the media spotlight elsewhere shifted.

    In this regard, Johnson performed at the local level what President Obama does at the national and international ones. The moderate conservative wing of the White establishment backed his presidency because they recognized positioning a Black man in the front seat was a sure way to preclude opposition to the rightward structural adjustments they sought in both domestic and foreign policy. This cynical political engineering has succeeded in squelching tradition Black and progressive opposition to fiscal austerity at home and military expansion abroad.

    A key lesson from the Ferguson tragedy that also pertains to American foreign policy is the quick, almost reflexive resort to muscle. In Ferguson, the minute trouble brewed, the police force converted itself into hyper-armed paramilitary unit. This transformation was enabled by years of massive transfers of military hardware to cities and towns across America. Ostensibly, the transfer of hardware was to fight drug cartels; now it is supposed to make these departments battle ready against terrorism. However, many of these hamlets are as likely to be targets of foreign terror as a cow is likely to hum the Moonlight Sonata. The true rationale for the transfers is to keep the arms budget at full tilt. Thus, we have the incongruous spectacle of a military engaged in two full blown foreign wars still having enough surplus weaponry to pass to local police forces that have no genuine need for the hardware.

    That same military pays many enlisted men such paltry sums that they are forced to supplement their income with welfare benefits just to feed their families. The same military runs a medical system such disgraceful quality that wounded veterans are waitlisted such a long time for treatment that many simply give in to suffering in silence. Some have probably died from medical inattention in the very same towns where surplus arms are being given the police.

    This weapons transfer has another minatory effect. American law prohibits military intervention in domestic law enforcement. However, the transfer of military ware to the police does not happen without a concomitant transfer of tactics and mindset. Prohibited by law from domestic police action, the military is doing through the back door what it cannot accomplish via the front. It is slowly militarizing local police forces. The difference between the army and police is becoming blurred. The more domestic law enforcement is militarized, the more civil liberties become jeopardized. Democracy is abridged everywhere domestic law enforcement comes to resemble the military in mind, appearance and action.

    Militarization also afflicts American foreign policy. The Pentagon holds greater sway over policy formulation than the State Department.  Convinced their position is always right, American policy makers see compromise as an evil engaged in by lesser souls. Diplomacy cedes in such an environment. “There is no need to talk to the other side because they are wrong. What they need is a good wallop. That will knock sense into them.” Thus, prominent figures like former Republican Senator John McCain looks at almost every international dispute, particularly in the Middle East, as an invitation to bomb some nation or group into submission. A harrowing thought is gun slinging McCain is considered a moderate among the Republican horde. Many of them are worse. Some secretly itch to use nuclear weapons to show American military superiority and turn populated territory into desolate places where oil extraction can be done on the cheap and without further human interference.

    Even President Obama’s recent announcement of deploying troops to help fight Ebola in West Africa evinces the military’s encroachment into areas outside its traditional ken. America has the Agency for International Development, an entity formed for these very humanitarian purposes. The Centers for Disease Control also exists. Why then the military for this medical effort? Given the military’s logistical requirements, its deployment will take longer and be much costlier than if either civilian agency led the effort. This observation is to no avail. The military has long sought a permanent presence in West Africa with Liberia the preferred site. The military knows the situation is so dire that no one dare question the integrity of the offered help. The military now has gotten a foot into the place where it seeks to plant a base. Again, what it cannot do by frontal assault, the military is adept at achieving by attacking the flank.

    Perhaps the most unsettling aspect of the emerging conservative view is the penchant to view any opposition as an imminent threat to be checked by massive force. The 9/11 attack destroyed the myth of American geographic impenetrability. The neo-conservatives seek to rebuild that myth by adhering to a policy of massive retaliation against a potential threat. In the collective mindset of today’s American leaders, any threat imaginable must be treated as if it were an actual attack already done. They have adopted the nonsensical notion of “preventive war.” They believe they have the right to attack and start war elsewhere to prevent the other side from starting the war first. America has convinced itself that it must become a real monster in order to corral an array of mostly imaginary ones.

    The major problem with this approach is that America has imperial reach. This means it has disputes with numerous countries and groups for a variety of reasons and at all times. Adherence to such a hair-trigger strategy means American will be perpetually on war footing and will take a large portion of the world done this road. Russia is in America’s gun sights because of Ukraine. Thus, after the contending Ukrainian sides execute their recent truce, American-led NATO engages in troop exercises in that nation. This move has no worth save its provocative value. The West wants the conflict to continue because it seeks to bloody Russia’s nose.

    America is also set to return to war in Iraq. This time to quash ISIL. However barbaric the group may be, ISIL presents no clear and present danger to vital American interests. There is no reason to war again in that battered region except the American neo-conservatives want to realize their dream of establishing a permanent base in Iraq from which they can influence the commerce of massive Iraqi reserves.

    The fight against ISIL will eventually lead into action in Syrian. Already, American clandestine operatives control the non-jihadist Syrian opposition, according to members of that armed group. Americans control the weapons flow and make the strategic military decisions for this fractious troupe. There are likely undisclosed American military units fighting on the ground.

    The American military establishment will exploit ISIL to accomplish what President Obama’s reticence and Putin’s diplomacy last year prevented. America will fight in Syria. The ultimate prize is not ISIL but Bashar Assad’s regime. Several years ago, Pentagon war hawks enumerated a list of regimes to topple and nations to subdue. Syria was on that list. Again, what the military can’t do through the front door, it will do from the back.

    08060340825 (sms only)

  • Ferguson: When will the past become itself? (Part one)

    Ferguson: When will the past become itself? (Part one)

    Bigotry does not live unattended. It is in all instances accompanied by lies and blood.

    Today, I write about the killing of a single black American teenager, Michael Brown. Given the number of wars and near-wars springing upon us, to focus on a single homicide in the small town of Ferguson, Missouri, seems an exercise in misplaced priorities. It is not. The shooting of this man-child was not merely the act of one human cruelly ending the life of another. The killing represents the lethal convergence of several misanthropic themes unique to the American neo-conservative worldview:  (1.) White American supremacist belief, (2.) Intolerance of dissent to that belief, (3) The militarization of that intolerance as belief and (4.) The glorification of quick, extreme violence as the most trustworthy protector of supremacist ideals.

    The Ferguson incident should not be discounted as an isolated, localized event. The historic policy and psychological strands tracing through Ferguson also fuel the militarism of American foreign policy in far-flung places from the Middle East to Ukraine. The police officer’s actions in Ferguson were spawned in the same supremacist mire from which American warmongers spring forth to shower war on anyone opposing the expansion of American power and interests into domains where it traditionally lacked residence.

    As such, the Ferguson incident serves as a heuristic platform from which we can derive insight into American actions in the momentous affairs that may well shape the global political economy and how we live in it for years to come.

    The fatal encounter began last August when police officer Darren Wilson spotted Michael Brown and a friend jaywalking across a Ferguson street.  Upon seeing the teens commit this minor pedestrian infraction, Wilson stopped them pursuant to an alleged law enforcement policy of zero tolerance for any offense. Brown evidently was not as suppliant as Wilson required. The teen did not beg Wilson to overlook his small indiscretion. Instead, the boy appeared too cocky, probably questioning why Wilson would bother himself and them for such a petty and commonplace thing. Edgy remarks were exchanged.

    Here is where things become clouded in the fog of conflicting versions. Wilson says Brown assaulted him, pushing him into the police car. There, Brown further accosted the officer in futile attempt to win the officer’s sidearm. Wilson said a shot was fired in the car. He managed to secure his weapon from Brown’s lunge. Fearing for his life, he started shooting at Brown.

    If true, this version would go far to exonerate the officer in the slaying. But the story makes little sense. First, why would Brown escalate a minor pedestrian stop into a life-and-death encounter? Snatching an officer’s weapon is the equivalent of rape; it is a street taboo that even the most hardened criminal dare not violate. For Brown to have done so would have made him, “armed and dangerous,” in a small town with a police force notorious for being on the rough and ready when it comes to Black suspects. He would have been inviting the full weight of the police force upon himself. He knew setting such a thing in motion could only end badly for him.

    Additionally, no trace of a bullet was found in the car. If the weapon discharged in the vehicle, there would be evidence. No such information has been forthcoming, most likely because no such evidence exists.  Last, Wilson said he began shooting Brown because the teen was ominously rushing toward him. This is inconsistent with the prior allegation that Brown virtually tackled him in the car.  For both to be true means Brown tackled him in the car, backed up many yards then charged at the armed policeman like a crazed bull. This scenario looms too odd to swallow as the milk of truth.

    The fog clears somewhat when account is taken of the shooting’s several eyewitnesses. Their versions are striking similar. None professes to know the specifics of what was done and said around the vehicle before the shooting. All testify shots were fired at a fleeing, unarmed Brown. A dozen shots were fired. Some missed. Most hit the intended target. According to an independent autopsy, the first landed shot caught Brown in the back of his right arm.

    Once hit, witnesses say, he stopped running. Brown thrust his arms in the air in the universal sign of surrender and went to his knees. This did not appease the policeman. He continued firing at the kneeling, unarmed youth until the fatal bullet pierced the teen’s skull. His face fell to the street, black skin met black asphalt as it has done so many times after an encounter with a White policeman who believed the black face had not given him due deference. Michael Brown and whatever future, family, children, aspirations, dreams and hopes he had died there under the summer sun. The police leaf his uncovered corpse in the street for several hours as a crude but poignant reminder to the rest of the predominately black township of the fatal costs of a contumacious encounter with local law enforcement.

    The police miscalculated.  Their mean tactics did not quiet the populace. It aroused them. Protests ensued. Sporadic rioting took place. As news spread of the incident, the protests grew bigger. Media coverage cast a mean light on the town and its police force. Accustomed to handling their Black populace in their own special way and unnerved by the intense media coverage, the police force overreacted. They donned the heavy military kit and camouflage and deployed the armored personal carriers and machine guns purchases at bargain prices from excess military stocks. For a small fraction of the true costs towns like Ferguson had armed their police forces to the teeth with military gear and weapons inappropriate to the legitimate law enforcement.

    For days, America was treated to the disquieting, incongruous spectacle of camouflaged, machine gun toting, clenched-jawed policemen, with Kentucky Fried Chicken and Macdonald’s in the background, marching down Main Street of a small town to disrupt Americans exercising their right to free speech and peaceful assembly and protest. It was a reminder that the more you arm your security forces, the more authoritarian they become. Those who are supposed to protect the public use the acquired arms to suppress the people. The police evolve to safeguard the interests of those who procure their weaponry instead of safeguarding the interests of democracy and justice.

    The Brown shooting was about maintaining social and racial order, to keeping certain people in their certain place. If justice were part of the officer’s calculation, he would likely not have stopped Brown and companion. Had Brown been a middle-aged White man, the stop likely would never have occurred. Brown likely stoked the policeman’s ire by raising this inconsistency of treatment. Had justice motivated the officer, he would not have fired at a fleeing, unarmed teen. Once the boy tossed his hands into the air in visible surrender, the shooting would have ceased, if justice were present.

    Again, this was about the maintenance of order, not about law and certainly not justice. Mercy and leniency had no function here. Fifty years ago, Brown and companion would not have dared talk snappily to the officer. Then the officer could have called them “nigger” and “boy.”  Blacks were by law and custom inferior in all ways. The police or any White man needn’t reason to accost a black man. It was a White’s right to proffer and a Black’s obligation to accept mistreatment as his fate. A Black did not have to transgress. Being Black was transgression enough. Thus, a police officer could easily put a Black man in his lowly place and keep him there with a cold stare and a hand on his holster. Then something happened: the Civil Rights Movement.

    Although blackness was no longer a legal infirmity, Blacks were still despised by the conservative, reactionaries who populate at least half of White American society. However, the White reactionaries could no longer jail and degrade Blacks based solely on skin color. They could no longer publicly spout epithets like “jigaboo,” “monkey” and “coon.” However, this group was far from defeated. They would seek to reconstruct and preserve the pre-civil rights social and racial order to the extent possible.

    There would be a “counter reformist” backlash against civil rights.  Noting that Blacks could no longer be maltreated simply for being themselves,  reactionaries weaved a new inimical social mythology. No longer would Blacks be simply deemed inferior and dumb. We would become evil and criminally minded. No longer would we be ‘niggers, coons and tar babies.” We would become “thugs, hoodlums, and the criminal element.” Blacks were transformed from a dependent, inferior appendage of society into a societal pox to be contained.

    This backlash started immediately after legal racial equality was won via the Civil Rights Acts of the mid-sixties. The conservative backlash would gain full momentum during the Reagan presidency. It would carry through during the Bush terms and Clinton years. A White southerner, Clinton knowingly approved law enforcement measures that would sentence disproportionately large numbers of Black men to prison terms for nonviolent crimes. He did not care. He was disinterested in justice. No matter how many Blacks he seemed to befriend, Clinton had always been a true, reliable custodian of White order. He remained true to both color and form.

    Thus, what happened in Ferguson was inevitable.  The police officer did not see Brown as a fellow human being. He saw the youth as felony incarnate. His black skin made him a crime in the offing; worst, it made him a crime already committed even in the lack of evidence of wrongdoing. Thus, the man felt no remorse or reticence unloading his weapon into the boy. The officer was imbued with such animus and fear that he created a chain of events in his mind vastly different from what others saw.

    In his mind, he was not merely protecting himself from inherent danger; he was protecting the social order from assault from its most egregious threat, Black criminal harm. So taken by this mindset, the officer discarded the reality of the day to create a fiction excusing him for killing the unarmed youth. The boy died because the officer superimposed his perception of social order on the factual dynamics of his encounter with Brown. As such, he not killed shot Brown, the officer shot dead the equality and justice heralded by the Civil Rights Movement. In that moment, the officer symbolically positioned himself as the successor assassin of Dr. King and all the doctor stood for.

    Peek at Western machinations in Ukraine. We can see how this mindset taints global order and justice. Russia is the remnant of the Soviet Union that America had dubbed an evil empire. America became the lone superpower upon the demise of the Soviet condominium at the end of the Cold War. Hawkish Americans seek a global order where America has no peer or rival. They seek an order where America dictates everything of importance.  The same notion that makes them believe they are the sole architects of American society tends them to believe they are the masters of the entire planet. Nations that do not cohere to this belief are deemed repugnant. Putin and his resurgent Russia are blacklisted because they oppose the expansion of NATO to their doorstep. They have fought the Western-backed overthrown of an elected government in Ukraine. Supporting Ukrainian federalist rebels, Russia now thwarts Western expansionist plans. Russia has merely stood to defend its traditional sphere of influence and buffer zone against Western encroachment. Weighed against the precepts of geopolitical strategy, Russia has acted the wiser, adhering to a course of prudent, restrained endeavor to achieve a limited end that maintains the geopolitical balance. The West is the flagrant actor trying to upend the status quo by threatening Russia’s western approach.

    However, the media paints Russia as the craven aggressor bent on retaking all of Eastern Europe when all it has done is protect its own backyard. Putin is now vilified as the world’s most dangerous leader. Yet, few stop to ask a simply question; If Putin harbored such grand megalomaniacal designs, wouldn’t he have unleashed them before now? The opportunity has always been there. No, something sparked the eastern Ukrainians to rebel and sparked Putin to help them. That something was the West’s insistence on the coup toppling the extant government in Kiev so that the West could supplant Russian influence in Ukraine.

    If Putin wanted all of Ukraine and venture farther westward, he would not have engineered the cease-fire between Kiev and the separatists. Strange, the cease-fire has a chance to end the civil war and to create a federal system all parties in Ukraine can tolerate. However, the West fulminates against the accord, hopes it does not work and seeks to undermine it. When the Ukrainian president said Russian troops were out of Ukraine, America countered that he was lying. The Ukrainian president has the most at stake; why would he fabricate away his own security?

    The truth is that America and its allies objectives are not peace and democratic stability in Ukraine. Their objective is to defeat Russia and teach it a lesson. Their objective is to impose their version of the geopolitical order in a place not traditionally within their sphere of interest. As such they are dangerous revisionists. Yet, they finance a media campaign painting Putin and Russia as stark villains in this drama. They seek to make Russia an outcast, a global pariah. As such, Putin and Russia, for simply maintaining their own, have become the “niggers of Europe.” Back to Ferguson.

    Attempting to justify the officer’s initial stop of Brown, the police published footage of someone stealing handful of inexpensive cigars for a local store.  We were told the officer stopped Brown, fingering him as the perpetrator of the cigar caper. The dead victim gets turned into the villain. This tact is standard police procedure. However, there was a flaw in this approach. Further evidence revealed Officer Wilson had no idea of the cigar theft when he halted Brown. The police had blatantly lied.

    This was more than a case of the ends justifying the means. It was a case of the liars believing themselves to be righteousness personified.  These people believe themselves more virtuous and of a higher calling than mere facts. Thus, they are duty bound to alter reality through fabrication to achieve their supremacist objective.

    In Ferguson, they lied about Wilson’s knowledge of the cigar heist just as Wilson prevaricated about the shot fired in his vehicle. On the international stage, Americans leaders of the same conservative ilk as the men of Ferguson would lie to world about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and about the use of sarin gas by Assad’s government in Syria. These lies were made in the naked attempt to provoke American military into areas where no vital American interests were at stake. Now the same type of lies are being cast that Putin and Russia threaten European peace. Also that, with the horrid beheadings of two American captives, ISIL constitutes a grave threat to the American homeland that must be answered with a massive display of American force in Iraq and Syria.

    To bolster the flimsy case, American security estimates about ISIL’s troop strength escalated from 10,000 men to over 30,000 in just a few days after President Obama’s war speech. It was claimed ISIL is wealthy and thus can finance terror worldwide because it robbed banks in Iraq. However, the Iraqi government claims the large banks in Mosul were not touched. The reality is that ISIL’s bulk funding comes not from illegal withdrawals from Iraqi banks but from clandestine donations for regional governments allied to America.

    No matter how repugnant the murders have been, ISIL is no grave and present threat to American soil. The talk of imminent threat is to scare Americans into panting for war when recent experience counsels against bellicosity. However, the march to war serves the designs of conservative American thinkers. They wanted to establish a permanent base in Iraq from which to topple Syria and trouble Iran. They now inflate the ISIL threat to get their wish. To establish a world order in which they order the world, these people are willing to march room to room, city to city and country to country to spread war until all opposition is muted if not broken. To make the world safe for their brand of American democracy, they are willing to become lords over everyone and everything else. This is the plight of the self appointed angel. It is the 21st century version of the White Man’s Burden. More next week.

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