The Nation Newspaper

Category: Brian Browne

  • More trouble along the border

    More trouble along the border

    Whosoever arises by a lie will fall by the truth

    write this piece with all intentions of dealing with the border crisis in the United States. However, I am compelled to return to Ukraine for I hear the loudening drums, and these drums beat nothing save war.

    The covers of most major American magazines feature ominous pictures of Russian President Putin will even more ominous headlines appearing under the masthead declaring him an international pariah, the rogue leader of a rogue nation. I just witnessed a horrid television interview of a former American ambassador to the Ukraine, advocating the incision of an armed international force into eastern Ukraine ostensibly to secure the MH17 crash site. This preposterous notion would surely turn the Ukrainian civil war into an international one and yet was not brazen enough for the envoy. The former diplomat argued that tougher economic sanctions against Russia were inadequate. Blaming every wrong thing and every drop of blood in Ukraine on Russia, the man called for an international military coalition to war against Russia.

    The irony that this mongering for the third pan-European conflagration in a century came from a man currently holding a senior position in an organisation bearing the title, “Institute for Peace” seemed not to dawn on the CNN hirelings interviewing him. Perhaps their blindness was because CNN’s parent company had just published a Time magazine edition branding Russia and its leader as pariahs.  Consequently, these reporters never questioned the conclusion that Putin and the Ukrainian rebels were culpable for the plane’s downing. For people so obsessed with assuring that no nation challenge America’s global expansionism a great and dangerous transformation has come over them. They now find, in war, the solace the normal heart finds in peace. They long for a world where there is no disagreement and no enemies. This world will not materialise because of the high wisdom of their ways or rule. They seek to accomplish this world by blowing up enough countries that they will be left with no more enemies to face.

    The tragedy’s most likely explanation is the rebels downed the plane, mistaking it for a Ukrainian army transport plane. While this is the most plausible and least sinister explanation, it does not make this positive.  Evidence adduced, thus far, is inconclusive as to the identity of the wrongdoer, let alone the motives behind the act. Thus, the chorus of Western officials and corporate media figureheads ascribing the act and the most heinous motives to Russia and the rebels does compound disservice to the pursuit of truth and peace at a time when both are most needed.

    Putative presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, trying to spark life into her sagging public persona after a lackluster book tour and several verbal gaffes about the extent of her family’s wealth, has taken to the interview circuit, launching her own fulsome projectiles at Putin. She paints Putin as a war merchant who bears full responsibility for the aerial calamity. Her reasoning for pinning the devil’s tail on the Russian leader is as superficial as were her reasons for backing the Iraqi war.  Because Putin has not lashed himself to the American juggernaut, he is an evil tumescent that must be excised.

    As a reward for such crudity of thought on such complex things, the Anglo-American corporate media has bestowed to her a secular halo; but that false diadem cannot wash the blood from her hands. Comparing their records over the past decade, Clinton looms as an undisciplined hustler for war and the expansion of American power beyond the limits of global peace and historic propriety. Next to the Clintonian war lust, Putin stands as a model of the restraint that old world Realpolitik commands from its disciples.

    He may be cold and hard; however, his military exertions have been limited to his own territory (Chechnya) or its borders (Georgia and Ukraine). Regarding Georgia and Ukraine, he has adhered to what was Russia’s traditional defensive posture even before the doomed Napoleonic invasion. Russian has always sought a line of neutral, if not servile, states as a buffer protecting it from encroachment from superior Western European military technology and power. That Western leaders feign shock at Putin neither means they are disingenuous or are so grossly ignorant of history that they should forfeit office before plunging the world into a war that the scantest respect for history would have caused them to avoid.

    Meanwhile, Clinton has lent full-throttle, zealous support to every needless misadventure America has entered since she happened upon the public scene. As senator, she endorsed the fraud in Iraq. As Secretary of State, she led the hawks in the Administration into convincing President Obama that bombing Libya into ruination was a humanitarian imperative. The fallacy of that logic has become painful obvious even to America. This weekend, Washington evacuated its embassy staff from the maelstrom its belligerency created. After retiring, she joined league with those pushing for America to war against Syria. However, plaintive cries from Clinton and others about the Sarin gas episode are heard no longer. The shouting has subsided because the truth leaked in bits and pieces proved awkward for Clinton and her ilk. The Sarin gas attack most likely was hatched by American allies seeking to bring America into the conflict. It did not come from Assad, apparently.

    However, there is no word of apology from Clinton and the American establishment and no sign of introspection at the near fallacy of rushing into war. Instead, theirs was a mad dash to the next crisis. This time Ukraine, and, this time, Russia must be taught a lesson for navigating a foreign policy that did not render it a vassal to American interests.

    Thus, the Anglo-American media has launched an unfettered propaganda war against Russia and the eastern Ukrainian dissidents for downing MH17. Rarely has such a weighty conclusion been globally published based on so little evidence. There was more incriminating evidence against Saddam than against Putin at this stage. We all know how that earlier farce turned out.

    The priests of war have gathered at their highest altars, preparing to sacrifice truth so that the clouds of war might once more gather over Eastern Europe. This ground has seen too much war and blood over the centuries.  If possible, it should be allowed to recover and see no more. Before we led to a hasty conclusion that might march us into war, the facts should be carefully examined.

    Thus far, the major evidence of rebel and Russian culpability is based on the faulty logic that since the Russians have the Buk missile system and the plane was likely downed by a Buk, then the Russians or their rebel allies caused it. What the media conveniently forgets to add is that the Soviets not the Russians manufactured the Buk.  The system was stationed in every part of the former USSR. When the USSR fractured, Buk systems were inherited by the new nations. Ukraine was one of them. Thus, forces loyal to Kiev could have downed the plain with one of their launchers. They had the means and the motive.

    Downing the plane and blaming it on the rebels, Kiev could exploit the resultant international firestorm by seeking to place greater pressure on Russia to jettison its support for the rebels. Conversely, there was no advantage the rebels would gain by willfully targeting the aircraft.

    Days after the attack, Western media was flush with pictures of a Buk missile launcher purportedly being swiftly moved to Russia. This was alleged literally to be the “smoking gun,” the exact instrument that shot the deadly projectile. There may be something very wrong with the picture. According to the rebels and Russia, the city in which the picture was taken was under Kiev’s control.  If so, then unless the Ukrainian military is apt to give free passage to enemy heavy armaments, the pictured Buk system belonged to the government, not Russia, not the rebels.  If this were to be the smoking gun, the gun may fit the holster of the Ukrainian government.

    Even President Obama’s verbal formulation that the missile was fired from within territory controlled by the rebels is vague.  Donetsk is the seat of the rebel administration, yet Donetsk currently undergoes such heavy shelling by government artillery that people hurriedly flee, carrying as much as their frightened arms and their vehicles can tote. Donetsk is under rebel control but areas near it, which the Donetsk rebels claim as their own, are effectively in the hands of advancing  troops and their artillery batteries, the modern–day battering ram.  A parcel of land may be “within rebel territory” but actually in the hands of government forces aided by heavy weapons such as artillery and Buk missile ensembles.

    A senior Ukrainian government military figure added greater doubt regarding the identity of the culprit with his unusually frank admission that the rebels’ Buk launcher did not have the requisite radar complement. This means the rebels could not accurately get a radar lock on to a plane flying at high altitude. For the rebels to shoot down a plane flying over 30,000 feet would be an uncommon stroke of ill fate.  Conversely, Ukrainian missile batteries feature the missing radar component.

    Then there is the alleged taped transcript of rebel commanders gloating over the plane’s downing. There is good reason the tape is no longer being touted as evidence.  Several forensic experts have found it to be fabrication, a cut-and-paste job hastily assembled from prior conversations of rebel commanders. This trick is the latest in a line of misinformation operations by Kiev such as the fake decree purportedly issued by the rebels obligating Jews to specially register with the rebel administration.

    Perhaps, the information that advises extreme caution comes from the small minority of American journalists and government whistleblowers courageous enough to refuse joining the throaty, vociferous procession to war. Robert Parry, a respected investigative reporter who helped uncover the Iran-Contra scandal in the 1980’s, reports an American intelligence source stating that official satellite imagery suggests the missile was fired by the Ukrainian army. Perhaps this revelation is one reason the American government has refused to acknowledge, let alone publish, satellite imagery although it was an open secret that American satellites continuously monitor the Ukrainian theater.

    Plying a soft retreat from the harsh rhetoric of war and unsubstantiated conclusions of Russian wrongdoing, a leading American newspaper let slip toward the end of an article that an American intelligence source indicated a “defector” from the Ukrainian army fired the missile. That a single person set the launch is rather a clumsy explanation to digest, like a mouse trying to swallow and elephant’s leg. Moreover, a true defector would not control such a vital piece of hardware. Apparently, some American intelligence sources believe the missile emanated from a Ukrainian army vehicle; they seek to levy the blame at some mysterious, disgruntled soldier to detract the onus from the Kiev government itself. How convenient. Bias still infects them. Thus, they seem willing to lie to again cover the lie soon to be exposed.

    Another mystery is the flight path of the ill-destined plane.  Western media reported the plane took this dangerous route to save fuel. This is a canard. Ukrainian air traffic control diverted the plane from its usually path, sending it northward over the war zone and toward its encounter with catastrophe. The Kiev government says the plane was diverted because of bad weather. Yet, if the choice were between thunderstorms and flying over a war zone, dodging a bit of rain would be preferable to dodging an armed projectile.

    This official explanation does not hold water. An Air India plane was flying minutes behind MH17. The Indian pilots report hearing Ukrainian traffic controllers divert the Malaysian craft to hostile territory.  If due to foul weather, the Indian plane should have received the same command since they were on the same route. The weather could not have been foul for one but not the other.

    Adding to this mystery is the fact that Ukrainian security services rushed to the Kiev airport immediately after the downing, confiscating all traffic control recordings and heretofore has not release any of them.

    Here, I apologize to Malaysian airlines. I initially fell victim to the media’s misinformation about the airline flying this route to shave fuel costs. The media shaved the truth and used the airline as a convenient fall guy to present a false narrative about why the plane was where it reasonably should never have been. Malaysian Airlines was not as callous as I stated last week.

     

    It may have been a tool in a lethal deception.

    The dark badge of callousness instead goes to Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu. While he plays no discernible role in Ukraine, he took advantage of the air tragedy to advance his incarnadine schemes. Upon learning the plane went down, Netanyahu unleashed his ground assault on Gaza. He did so knowing corporate media would focus its ire and outrage on Russia and the Ukrainian rebels. This would divert criticism and attention from his brutal policy. While MH17’s downing seems the product of error, what Israel has done is premeditated cruelty. The Israeli claim of provocation rings empty. The Palestinian’s military efforts have been futile and relatively harmless. The Israeli assault is highly disproportionate to danger faced. This has been willful slaughter, decimating more innocent civilians than purported Hamas members, decimating almost three times more people than the MH17 disaster.

    It seems Israeli policy has disintegrated to the point where the only good Palestinian is a dead or a fleeing one.

    Back to Ukraine.

    Much hangs on which side downed the plane.  This means the truth will likely never be known. Again, that the rebels committed this as a tragic error is most likely explanation. However, there is enough doubt and countervailing information to make one pause. A prudent person would withhold judgment. Moreover, judgment about the propriety of the wider conflict — the civil war between the government and the rebels – should be made independent of culpability for the aerial tragedy.

    In that case, one must weigh whether the rebels have a right to contest the writ of the government in Kiev just as the leaders of that government recently contested against and ousted the elected Yanukovych government.  Given the wider international  context of the war, one has to judge whether the West’s policy of extending EU/NATO to Russia’s westernmost borders is an excellent innovation that will promote security and prosperity or is it a guise to isolate and weaken an increasingly strong and independent Russia.  The West is racing against time and thus must exploit the uncertainty around this incident to compel Russia to brake its support for the rebels. In a few months, the summer and autumn will cede to winter. If the weather turns bitter cold and snowy, the military activity will subside, allowing the rebels to more firmly secure their hold on what they currently possess. Also, Europe will be in dire need of Russian gas and thus will have no stomach for imposing greater sanctions on the supplier of such a valued and timely commodity.

    In other words, one must decide whether Putin behaves like a relic in his adherence to traditional Russian policy and Realpolitik or has he positioned himself on the tip of a needle as a strategist. Is he trying to balance the need to avoid a conflagration that might engulf an entire continent with his desire to establish his nation as a power at the center of an international alignment challenging the global hegemony of American power?  He and the Chinese had hoped to make the challenge via reform of the global economic system. However, his refusal to side with America on geopolitical issues such as Syria, Iran and European missile systems has brought war to his border’s edge.

    He has proven himself to be the best geopolitical strategist among those now operating in the European theater. This includes the Americans. However, his craftiness may not be enough to overcome the more powerful West’s preference for larger battle. If not, we may be on a slide toward a war that would have been incomprehensible merely ten years ago. Peace is in jeopardy. Pray that it endures. Cherish it while it lasts.

    Once again, I failed to address the American border crisis. I surely will cure this omission next week.

    08060340825 sms only

  • Trouble on the border

    Trouble on the border

    The rich hide behind their strong wall and are glad but the poor despise their habitation

     

    This article started out being about the refugee border crisis in America where thousands of Central Americans, many of them unaccompanied children, seeking haven from the violence and poverty of their homelands. Then came the tragic downing of Malaysian flight airlines MH17.

    The tragedy brings the world closer to a war wanted by few save the most powerful nation in the world, the puppet regime in Kiev and the Washington appendage that 10 Downing Street has become. For months, Washington’s strategy has been to keep the temperature high and maintain the pressure on Russia, hoping Putin would be goaded into war as the separatists in the East wilt under the mounting weigh of Kiev’s rejuvenated martial prowess.

    When Russia and the EU sculpted an extension of a cease-fire agreement weeks ago, the Kiev government refused the olive branch although the rebels acceded to the proposal. Kiev rebuffed peace because Washington did not want peace at the moment. Peace and maintenance of the status quo would benefit Putin since the eastern region of Ukraine is currently out of the effective writ of Kiev. This would be a boon to Putin and a defeat to America. Thus war had to continue.

    America and its NATO allies have funneled material and advisors to enhance the Kiev military as well as the irregular, neo-fascist militias in this battle against the eastern separatists. As a result, the Ukrainian military has increased shelling and aerial bombardment of civilian centres, killing dozens of people, including women and children. There are reports of Ukrainian aircraft striking Russian border towns, again in apparent attempt to stoke the Russian bear into a thoughtless reaction. If Russia can be instigated into directly invading Ukraine, then America will be able to marshal the entire weight of NATO and the West to isolate Russia with draconian sanctions, teaching Putin a lesson that might cost him his job, if not his very skin.

    These benighted transgressions by the Kiev regime are not published by the mainstream international press. Information about crimes by the Ukrainian government is suppressed or discounted as the regrettable fallout of war.

    Now, the rebels apparently have made a terrible mistake that plays right into the hands of the West. Putin had been walking a fine line that now has become a high-wire tightrope.

    Ukraine is the place of a civil war doubling as a proxy contest between America and Russia. America wants to advance NATO to Russia’s front door, then exploit that proximity as leverage to undermine or deter Putin from his increasingly independent, anti-American demeanor. Putin does not want war in Ukraine nor to annex the eastern regions. He wants to maintain Ukraine as a buffer zone providing strategic space between Russia and NATO’s eastern boundary.

    He helps the separatists in hopes of achieving this objective. However, he has been a study in patience and restraint by not taking steps that would cause him to transgress beyond this logical national objective.

    It appears the rebels downed the plane believing it was a Ukrainian military transport.  It was terrible and deadly mistake. Yet it is no darker than the work of Ukraine’s military purposefully targeting residential areas and civilians. It is no more wretched than American drones bombing wedding parties and funeral processions in Pakistan, Afghanistan and other nations. An awful thing has happened, but those making the most noise about the tragedy do so to shift our eyes from the blood on their hands.  The media abets this legerdemain.

    Mainstream media quickly concluded this was a missile fired by the rebels. They did not wait for confirmation. This conclusion fits their script thus they ran with it. Nowhere in the media did I hear any journalist ask whether this could have been done by the government-aligned fascist militias that have access to such weaponry as well. Why would the fascist militia do this? Seeing the tremendous Western reaction, the answer is apparent.

    This sounds far-fetched but it is not.  Remember the Sarin gas class levied against Bashar Assad in Syria.  America was ready to hurtle its arsenal at Assad for crossing the line President Obama had articulated against chemical weapons use. The precession to war was doused when parliament denied PM Cameron his request to join the belligerent escapade. Parliament did not take this step because it suddenly had become pacifist. It did however, have a pang of conscience. It seems British intelligence had quickly gained information that the Sarin used in the attack had not the same chemical fingerprint as that in Assad’s stockpiles.

    Despite the mountain of news reports naming Assad as the culprit, the gas came from elsewhere. The Syrian rebels and their clandestine sponsors unleashed the attack hoping to bring America into the war. Stripped of his British sidekick, President Obama grew cold feet about going it alone. He knew the evidence against Assad was inflated and uncertain. Thus, he pushed the decision to Congress and Congress also balked.

    Don’t forget the well-publicised charge several years ago levied against the Iranian intelligence agency for plotting to assassinate the British ambassador to the United States. The frenzied disclosure of this alleged plot precipitated howls of war among the American neo-conservative pining for war against Iran. Since then, nothing has been heard of this case because there was never anything to it.  This alleged plot was a contrivance to stir bellicose feelings against Iran in order to justify harsher sanctions or worse.

    The press has also made reference to the gruesome 1983 downing of a Korean airliner by the Soviet Union, claiming that incident was similar to the present one. How it is similar the press fails to mention for their job is not to inform but to plant the seeds of suspicion in our minds. As such, they also fail to mention how an American naval vessel downed an Iranian passenger flight in 1988. The Soviet mistake decades ago is cited to cast guilt on present-day Russia. The American mistake is not mentioned because they want you to believe America makes no mistakes and is never in the wrong. This is not news reporting it is an exercise in bending the public mind.

    In Ukraine, neither side is the precinct of angels. However, Devils are more than enough to go around. Both sides deserve to be condemned. However, the media would have us see things as a fight between good and bad. It is a charade to get you to believe that which is, in essence, unreasonable. Media coverage has been abhorrent to objectivity. When segments of Ukrainian society bucked against the duly-elected Yanukovych government that was aligned with Moscow, the media did not label those elements as “pro-American coupists.”  The media called them ‘freedom fighters and democrats.” But the rain that falls to the right is the same that falls which falls to the left.

    The rebels now do to the leaders of the current government what those leaders did to Yanukovych.  The media should deem them freedom fighters and democrats. Instead, they are negatively described as “pro-Russian” as if they have no mind or objectives of their own but are merely the witless, brutish pawns of the cruel genius of Moscow. The purpose of the global media is not to bare the truth but to conceal it behind cascades of misleading information and pejorative labels designed to rouse emotions yet add nothing to our understanding. The objective is to make Russia loom as a sinister machine in need of repair and a different main operator with a completely different global orientation.

    With this latest tragedy, the ante has increased in what already was a high-stakes game of wit and nerves. Filled with bile and bellicosity, American war hawks press for more overt military aid to the Ukrainian government and for increased sanctions against Russia, even though sanctions were just expanded the day before the incident. President Obama will mouth diplomacy but this will be an empty feign. He shares the hawk’s objective. NATO must be driven right to Russia’s front door and Putin must be taught a lesson so sharp that it deters future opposition to American foreign policy.

    Putin must now decide whether to stand his ground and weather the storm caused by the lethal mistake of his rebellious allies or retreat, leaving them to their own fate. Leaving them to their own fate would gain him temporary respite and perhaps avoidance of more sanctions harmful to his economy. But this would not guarantee his or Russia’s position in the long term. If he shows weakness now, the West will rush to aid the Kiev government in crushing the eastern rebels. A stinging defeat for Putin, this would be but the prelude to the expansion of NATO right to the edge of his western border.

    The American policy of isolating Russia from Europe would have gained an important salient, the price of which would be the nearly permanent escalation of tensions along that border. The terrible wall Russia once built in Berlin would have been resurrected on Russia’s own border against Russia’s will.  Although this new wall would be invisible its presence would be no less real and no less foreboding than the former.

    Given this likelihood, Putin has little choice but to maintain his level of support for the rebels. Their defeat is his defeat. If the West increases military support for Kiev, Putin must do the same for the rebels. No one will want to back down. Pride of power and bloodlust will reign. The internecine civil war will become more crimson, escalating in death and depravity much the same as the Syrian conflict except this time America suborns the government while Russia abets the insurgents.

    The ingredients have all been placed on the counter. Mix them as predicted, and the world will see the worst of war take hold of Ukraine. Not only will this pit broaden and broaden in the Ukraine, it will draw America and Russia into closer quarters at a time when their intimacy will be nothing if not confrontational. This scenario will drag the sluggish European economy, particularly as summer turns to autumn and autumn becomes the winter when Europe needs Russian gas supplies.

    Instead of the escalation that looms probable, the sides would do so much better if they genuinely honoured the victims of the tragedy by using the incident as a means to peace and political solution.

    First, a moratorium on further military activity needs to be established. The status quo on the ground should be observed. Second, peace talks should be organised to reconcile the Kiev government with the insurgents. While separation from Ukraine is not plausible, talks offer greater autonomy for the eastern region. A political solution is the only way this war can end without first being widened and made more devastating by the injection of martial support from the rival outside powers. This political solution must be underwritten and guaranteed by America and Russia. Third, once a truce is established, the international community must deploy a neutral peacekeeping force as a buffer between the two sides. Fourth, in the context of the political solution, the parties must seek international judicial assistance to investigate and allocate responsibility for the airline downing and for other war crimes that have taken place. Only within the context of an overall political solution can the tragedy of the airline be resolved. If this item is taken out of sequence, it will not bring justice but will ignite greater animosity and violence.

    If these steps are not taken, it will be because someone does not want peace. That party will bear moral responsibility for the deluge to come. (Last, one must wonder about the management of Malaysian Airlines.  After the mysterious disappearance of a previous aircraft, one would think the company would have turned into a paragon of caution. Yet, most likely to shave fuel costs, they flew the ill-fated vessel over a nation wrenched by civil war. It was a callous decision.)

    Next week, I will return to write in full about the American border crisis. Here, I just want to deposit a few thoughts. In other strife-torn areas around the world, America presses nations to accept refugees. This in consonant with international law. When the stream of desperate, brown-skinned people appear at its border, the American government behaves as it has no international obligations. No American politician, not one of them, has the courage to stand before the television camera and explain to the people that the nation has an international treaty obligation to protect bona-fide refugees.

    Instead, the sojourners are all called migrants. The word “refugee” is off-limits. Instead of understanding their legal obligations, the average White and Black American is kept ignorant and in the anger gestated by that ignorance, many protest against the refugees and come to hate them. Both political parties exploit the tragedy to their electoral ends.

    Thousands of people have surged from Central America to the U.S. border. Some are gang members and drug dealers who should be turned aside. Most have been unaccompanied minors, released by their parents for the dangerous trip to the border because life has grown too dangerous where they live and where too many like them have died too young. Three Central American nations are a lethal mix of gangs, drug wars, ruthless militaries/paramilitaries, and harsh governments. American foreign policy is almost as culpable for this cocktail as are the leaders in these nations. Honduras suffers the highest murder rate in the world, with El Salvador number four and Guatemala right behind it.  Danger in these nations is of the same league as in other nations formally at war.

    Many of the desert walkers now on the border are not idlers out for a perverse stroll. They flee for their very lives.  These are refugees in the truest sense.  To turn them away is to violate international and domestic law. It is also inhumane. Yet, this is being done because current American political leaders believe they and their nation live above the law. They have become a law unto themselves, and this arrogance begets a multitude of sins. More next week.

    08060340825 (sms only)

  • Barack the broken

    Barack the broken

    A leader estranged from his people is as a broken clock. His position is rarely correct and then only by accident

    For the past several weeks, I have written about geopolitical hotspots in or near the throes of war. I return to America this week to underscore an important theme: the decline of Black leadership. I labor on this theme because what has transpired in America is but the dismal vanguard of what will occur in almost every Black nation that neglects to stand against the subtle onslaught. The same political economic forces that take Black America low also clip the development of Black Africa. In the past, slavery and colonialism were the twin yokes we wore. Fifty years ago, both populations helped and applauded each other as they gained a fleeting respite. In America, it was called the Civil Rights Movement. In Africa, it was the age of national independence.

    Now, we return to being adrift because Black leadership has lost its morality compass. No longer committed to helping the poor and broken, no longer worried about justice for all because they have tasted the privileges and riches of the few, they have lost all but the vaguest sense of racial unity and purpose. For them, their black skin is no longer a corporeal anthem calling them to a higher level of duty in order to overcome dreadful past. Instead, their blackness is a burden to be figuratively shed as the price of admission into the theatre of wealth and power.

    Nowhere is this diminution in leadership more acute than in Black America.  For several years, President Obama and those politicians like him have been lauded by the mainstream media as the future of Black politics. While we have been told to applaud, the reality is that it is a rather odd dance he has danced. To be Black by not being so is a waltz that has become increasingly popular in high political circles during the past few years. It is one the steps of which I do not know nor am I fan of the irksome tune that accompanies it.

    Over the past several years, I have waded against the tide of popular opinion to present what I hold as objective analyses of the flaws in the Obama leadership model. I have done so not from any personal animus. I know not the man but my lack of any personal connection does not blind my appreciation of the danger inherent in his particular rise to power. His ascendance has been a racial intoxicant, causing many Blacks to take leave of their better senses to ascribe to him many transcendental qualities that, unfortunately, were never there.

    My writings about Obama precipitated much commentary, most of it emotive, most of it negative. Some have even accused me of being a White racist who sees nothing decent in Black People. Notwithstanding these reactions and often because of them, I write on. I know many comments were the unthinking eruptions of people who have invested too much hope in a false hope. I sympathise with them.

    Yet, I lend not my pen to fake comfort by writing what is popular.  In the end, whether a reader accepts or rejects my analyses is immaterial to me. I do my humble best to proffer timely warning and information that you may understand the challenges and dangers that approach. My goal is not to soothe you. It is to awaken you that may arise and seek higher ground before the unforgiving tide arrives. I write to equip you with a perspective that just might help you avert the pratfall of believing in policies or positions which do not believe in you.  Even if you find what I write to be uncomfortable and you do not care for it, I shall continue because I care for you. If we shall fall, let it be because superior power has pushed us down and not because we thrust ourselves into the open ditch.

    This near adoration of President Obama is tinged with a strange hybrid of racial pride and inferiority. There naturally is pride to see a Black man surmount, by attaining the White House, what so recently was considered an insuperable obstacle. This pride I too felt. However, there is also a bit of inferiority in that we have placed someone else’s standard of legitimacy above our self interests. Thus, because a large chunk of America voted for him, we assumed he must be excellent indeed. That is where our collective analysis began and ended.  It was superficial in the extreme, and costly so. We forgot to dig deeper. We forgot to ask if the powerful establishment could back him as their man, perhaps he was not going to be our man. Black people were so elated to see a Black man in the seat of power that we forgot to even question if the man had sold his soul to get there. After all, what good is Black man who lacks soul? He is as salt without its savor.

    He beckoned to us with a change that we can believe in.  After six years, let’s see what this change has wrought. In global affairs, his signature achievement has been the assassination of Osama bin Laden. Toss in the killings of other high-profile terrorists and alleged ones. He promised this would make the world a better place. Except for those who profit from war and the making of wars, his promise has been a false one.

    The world is more dangerous now than when he took office. He led the assault against Gaddafi, the consequence of which has been to spread war materiel far and wide, augmenting the destructive power of Malian separatists and of Boko Haram in northern Nigeria. He has promoted war in Syria, the spillover of which has predictably incited renewed conflict in Iraq. Obama’s government now goads Russia’s Putin toward war in Ukraine. President Obama has made himself a willing utensil of a foreign policy that seeks undisputed American dominance over the Eurasian land mass.  The will and desires of other proud and independent nations are to take a long hike down a dark path. If they balk, it means war.  If this means one war, that is fine. If it means multiple wars, even better yet.  It serves the purposes of a voracious war industry whose unspoken motto is “the more we kill, the more we live.” In Asia, America and China leer at each other, with hardliners itching to engage in a war that will plunge the planet into darkness not suffered since the Middle Ages.

    Without remorse or a second’s hesitation, President Obama broadened America’s killer drone program. President Bush gave the program its start. President Obama has given himself a blank check to make this program the haunting symbol of American national security strategy. Unmanned death planes now dot the skies over a massive area spanning Central Asia, the Arabian Peninsula, the Levant, the Maghreb and the Horn of Africa.

    After one particularly nasty drone airstrike, confirmed reports reveal President Obama quipping to his subordinates that he had become quite expert in the long-distance killing business.  The man had just ordered the deaths of numerous people, some of who likely were guilty of nothing weightier than being in the wrong place at the deadliest of times. Yet, he could be dismissive with their lives as if he had just swatted a fly.  These are the words and this is the flippant attitude of a man who holds the Nobel Peace Prize. If this is the way of a peacemaker, I dare not contemplate the way of war. If there were a touch of humility in the man, he would pack and mail that prize back to Oslo from whence it came.

    On domestic policy, he has fared little better. True his efforts staved the economy from depression during the worst of the 2009 recession. But those efforts were primarily aimed at saving the banking system from suicide. That other parts of the economy were not pulled down was a collateral benefit, a secondary consequence. When subsequently he could have fought to give assistance to the poor and the beleaguered middle classes, he spoke of offering help but never made a concerted effort to do so. It was all sweet-sounding bells and chimes. He used high rhetoric to disguise his policy of retreat on these humane matters.

    Even his signature achievement, health insurance reform, is less than it seems. The provision that insurers can no longer deny coverage to people with preexisting conditions is obviously condign. However, that advance has been counterbalanced by the fact that policy rates have increased for many people.  Additionally, the low-cost policies purchased by the poor are replete with such caveats and conditions written in indecipherable sentences that the policies are good only to the extent they are not put to use. When the poor reach out to use them, the insurers will posit a flood a reasons why the particular treatment in question is not covered.  Millions have been insured but only nominally so.  President Obama should have fought the fight for broader health care reform; but, the big insurers and pharmaceutical companies said “no,” and he sheepishly said “yes” to them.

    President Obama is not the only Black politician who has turned coat on the reformist tradition of black leadership.  Through the years, the Congressional Black Caucus has been one of the most liberal, sometimes even progressive, forces in American politics. It has championed legislation for the poor, working class and for minorities. It has fought for economic and social justice, waging unpopular, sometimes quixotic, battles in the process. They may not always been the most politically adept actors, but the commitment to the people was a solid one.  Not anymore.

    Five CBC members representing urban districts blighted by the financial crisis actually had the gall to sponsor legislation weakening post-crisis regulation imposed on the banking industry. The regulations are already porous and will not do the needed. Now this mercenary quintet seeks to squash the scant regulations almost completely. That these regulations were enacted to deter the predatory lending of banks in poor, mostly minority communities seems not to worry these lawmakers. The regulations were made to protect their constituents from the sub-prime lenders who helped devour Black wealth and neighborhoods in the financial crisis. Instead of championing their people, these congresspersons have tossed their own folks to the wolves in exchange for a small pocket full of campaign donations from Money Power. Other Black congresspersons have joined the assault to whittle publicly-funded education although they know an overly privatised system will deprive even more Black children of a meaningful education. They do this because the privatization movement has money. Some of its coins have been doled to their campaigns. They sell out the children to buy their continuation in office.

    Twenty years ago, such abdications of moral responsibility by Black lawmakers would have been unthinkable. Now, betrayal has become business as usual. These acts undermine the interests of the people and of the reformist tradition of black leadership. These politicians praise Martin Luther King on his holiday and tell the electorate that they seek to govern in the spirit of the man. Yet, they trample his grave and memory with their meretricious conduct the rest of the year. He would not understand their ways. If alive today, he would lead protests against what they have done and what they are set to do.

    I raise these matters because the influence on our lives of President Obama’s and these others will not end when they leave office. The establishment plans to continue to use them. They will handsomely reward the president with a reward that smacks of our collective punishment. After hearing Obama for eight consecutive years rejecting the notion of having a special relationship with Black America, of rejecting the notion of “being the president of Black America,” that is precisely what they plan for him after office.

    They seek to give him the mantle of the unofficial president of Black America and, by extension, the Black race.  He has and will work hard for his paymasters, and they will give him the tools to do their bidding.  He will found organizations and traverse nations like Bill Clinton now does. This is the Clinton Black people so love because he talks so smoothly of great things. Yet, under cover of media blockade against revealing these escapades, he quietly leads the rapine exploitation of Black Haiti by Western business interests who fund a suppressive regime that has turned the island into a sweatshop of underpaid labor. To curry the favour of Money Power, this regime has sequestered the choicest parcels of land and beaches for expatriate wealth to enjoy. Clinton and cronies seek to turn Haiti into Cuba before Castro’s revolution upset the fun and games of the well-heeled.

    As Clinton does, Obama will do for, if Obama has done anything with determination while in office, it has been to adhere to the Clinton model of glittery but ersatz progressive politics. Like Clinton, once out of office he will talk grandly, offering us corporate establishment solutions to problems the corporate establishment caused. His task will be to lead us to where we already are. His mission will be to tire us by having us march fiercely in place.

    They are preparing him for this role and for us to accept him in it. This we must reject for he comes with an agenda that bodes nothing but harm for us.  True, we lack leadership and need it desperately at this stage. But he is not the one. He is constitutionally ill-equipped to help us because he has shown he is too committed to helping himself. His fundamental problem is that he believes he is superior to every Black person on this planet yet is often deferential to White people who deserve no deference. This man’s tenure has revealed that he had glaring blind spots in his knowledge of economics and geopolitics.  His ambition exceeded his knowledge and wisdom. He reached for something he was not qualified to hold.  To fill his knowledge in these areas, he surrounded himself with the very people who created so much of the crises and confusion.

    He has been found out. A recent poll in America shows his popularity has sunk to historic lows. Many people believe he is the worse president since World War II. Some of the opposition is racist. Much of it is objective reality. He has talked big but acted in miniature. He has done what his paymasters want and they have set him up to be the scapegoat of their own designs. After his tenure, they want to reward him by unleashing him on us. Let them keep him in their stable where they now have him. We need and seek Black leadership but we shall not find it one who is led by forces that would led us astray. This episode of which I now write will not unfold for another two years but a word in advance is worth more than ten thousand on the day of trouble.

    08060340825 (sms only)

  • Iraq: The fire cometh

    Iraq: The fire cometh

    The fruits of winning an unnecessary war are indistinguishable from those of losing a vital one

     

    The extremist Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) has become the more powerful terrorist force on earth. This may not have been by design but it was also not purely by accident. This rise has been caused by the opportunism of the group itself but also by the cynical geopolitical strategy followed by America, its NATO satellites, and its Middle Eastern allies.

    By controlling territory in Iraq and Syria and threatening the Iraqi capital, ISIL, once a franchise of Al Qaeda, has ventured beyond the feats of its parent. Because of the personnel it has attracted from the global inventory of jihadist combatants, ISIL has transformed from a hit-and-run group into a formidable conventional military fighting force. It is no longer a guerilla outfit. It is a small, well-disciplined army capable to taking and holding territory. As such, it has quickly hashed the Iraqi army, revealing that institution to be no tougher than a damp paper napkin.

    The ISIL has gobbled a significant portion of the predominately Sunni regions as if by irresistible force. The Kurds are already well ensconced with a substantial degree of autonomy in their traditional homeland. At sixty percent of the population, the Shiite and the embattled Maliki government hold the rest. Given the relative newness of the intense fighting, the informal, war-hewn boundaries between the three regions will undulate. But, unless the rarest type of political reconciliation between the Sunni rebellion and the Shiite-dominated government can be extracted from the belly of war then this division will stand albeit fluid around its edges.

    Effectively, Iraq has been partitioned before our eyes. The post-World War I boundaries drawn by the British and French upon this parcel of the defunct Ottoman Empire are being sundered and redrawn a full century after the start of the cataclysm that would prostrate the Ottomans.

    That Iraq has fallen into a more pitiful condition than under Saddam was a story foretold from the moment second President Bush determined to unleash war.  The stated reason for the assault – to protect the world from weapons of mass destruction – was a malevolent fraud. The documentary evidence used to support the trespass was counterfeit. Rarely has such a sloppy, easily-disprovable fabrication been the impetus for a major power to strike war against a distant nation that posed no material threat. For its authors and architects, the war was part lark, part ideological imperative. For the Iraqis who would suffer it, the war was a compound tragedy. Under Saddam, they knew misery but had order. They would retain misery, only to have disorder heaped upon it. It would be the start of a great unraveling.

    For the United States, the Iraqi war will be recorded as the greatest strategic blunder of the post-Cold war era. I hope it stands as the worst foreign policy decision of the 21st century. For this to be true, America would have to avoid future errors of great consequence. However, should the present course of American policy continue, I fear the world shall see future errors and commissions, so dangerous, immense and costly that the Iraqi misadventure may come to be viewed as a minor failure or even a relative success when measured against the mistakes to come.

    The American war machine plowed into Iraq promising “shock and awe.” In the end, we were shocked that leaders so awed by their own power were also so arrogant that they failed to anticipate the strategic fallout of their dubious mission. In attacking Iraq, America certainly got their man. Saddam Hussein was hung unceremoniously like a vagrant cattle rustler. While excelling in getting Saddam, America miserably lost the country. Due to its superficial understanding of the nation it invaded, America alienated the population, failed to keep order and turned a stable if despotic nation into a laboratory of chaos.

    Saddam clearly landed on the wrong end of the war. With hundreds of thousands of people killed, a greater number maimed and an economy shredded into pockets of depression, the people were the second greatest losers. Ironically, the Americans who subdued Saddam and his cohort would be the next in the line of losers. The next in this queue of war casualties would be Syria.

    While America accomplished the rather odd feat of losing a nation by defeating it in war, Iran amply profited by America’s misguided exertions. Assessing the vacuum created by Saddam’s demise, Iran simply allowed proximity and Shiite religious solidarity to run their course. Inevitably Iranian influence would expand in Iraq once Saddam joined the league of the departed. The other benefactor was Al Qaeda. Saddam loathed the jihadists. They requited his animosity measure for measure, hatred for hatred. He held them off his land for his brand of despotism was a cynically practical one that brooked no place for a band of armed zealots who harkened to a voice that was not his and that no one else could hear.

    During the American occupation, Al Qaeda would grow, shrink split and splinter. One of the fractions would become ISIL. In time, its adherents migrated to Syria to ply their lethal trade. But they never took their eye off Iraq.

    By weakening the structure of central government, America released and gave liberty to ethnic, religious and regional rivalries that Saddam’s strong arm had kept pent. America said it was bringing modern representative democracy to Iraq. That was a sonorous but untruthful line. What it let slip was old-fashioned turmoil. There were elections and other institutions that gave the form of nominal democracy.  But the actual working of governance ventured far from the democratic ideal.  It was a beehive of ancient prejudices competing one against the rest. The lone element lending the government a semblance of order and stability was the American troop presence. In another twist of irony, America’s troops assumed the role Saddam played in keeping the sub-national rivalries in check. Once the bulk of the American contingent was withdrawn, the breakage of the frail stability was a verdict foretold, like the cracking of thin film of ice atop a warm and roiling sea.

    America’s most serious mistake was that in Iraq, it waged war against a known enemy in Saddam but also against an enemy it did not know. America waged war against War itself. The ways of War may not be as mathematically precise as the rules that govern the physical sciences. Still, War is jealous of its laws and principles. These laws must be obeyed for the combatant to obtain the favor of War. In Iraqi, America broke War’s commandments.  A nation should never invade another unless it is willing to occupy that nation indefinitely. If you must keep checking your watch to gauge whether you are spending too much time in an occupation that place is not worth the expenditure of life and material War minimally requires of the undertaking. By placing a time limit on your presence, you signal to your foes to merely slink into the recesses and out wait you. Once you leave, they will undo in a moment what you took years to achieve.

    Second, never invade a nation you don’t adequately understand. One does not ask a goat herder to captain a ship or a farmer to design a skyscraper. To invade a place with little knowledge of its people and governance is to schedule an appointment with disaster. The invader ensures that he will leave more hated than when he came. His stint will not achieve his objective or even palliate the adverse challenge. It will exacerbate it. In the end, the invader will have to return or be forced to accept that victory had come at a price dearer than most defeats.

    Thus, America used a great display of military force to implement a grand strategy that was neither strategic nor grand. The strategy was is actually a petulant one unbefitting a nation that sets claim to be the underwriter of global stability and justice. To the outsider, American policy looks woefully inconsistent. In Iraq, it appears to be against ISIL; yet, in Syria, it allies with ISIL against the Assad government.

    The real problem is not that American policy is devoid of logic. The trouble is that it lacks high principle. Judge no nation by what is says for self-serving words bear light consequence and even lesser costs. But actions speak a language words cannot rival.

    Particularly in the Middle East, America has targeted certain regimes for extinction. It will expend every effort to accomplish this objective. Thus, it fixated on Saddam. America was not deterred by the fact Al Qaeda would grow where it once had no presence. America and its NATO brood furnished the air support that paralyzed Gaddafi in Libya, enabling the rag-tag ground forces of Al Qaeda and related groups to win the contestation. In Syria, the West now funnels substantial war materiel to the opposition knowing full well ISIL is the most potent rebel force. America now wants to send 500 million dollars in aid to the rebels. Inevitably, much of that aid will work its way into ISIL hands. In effect, western aid has so annealed ISIL in Syria that it could expand and re-enter Iraq in a new, more potent form.

    A pattern emerges. Western rhetoric says the war against terror is the highest priority. The reality of Western action mutters a different tale. The top actionable priority is to dismantle enemy regimes. If this requires teaming with the itinerant jihadists, America will make this devil’s choice almost every time. This behavior accords with America’s overarching objective of retaining the title as the world’s lone superpower. For that title to stick, America also must strictly control the world’s key regions. Thus, the unfriendly governments must be swept aside. Even in the current round of the Iraqi breakage, America’s attention has focused more on removing Maliki as prime minister than on halting ISIL.

    In Western eyes, Maliki’s transgression is not so much that he governed poorly. His indecency was to have angled too closely to Iran. Iran infantry has come to his side in this time of crisis. Even Russian, poking its finger in America’s eye, has come to Maliki’s aid by sending lethal air support. With all this, America has determined he must go. America has placed heavy diplomatic pressure on other strategic points of the Iraqi political architecture, the frailty that it is, letting it become known that significant American military help will come only after Maliki departs. Meanwhile, America has sent a token group of 300 advisors to counsel Iraq’s beleaguered army. This symbol was as utile as grabbing a handful of ice cubes from the freezer to toss at the house fire raging all about.

    America cares little about Iraq beyond whether the leadership leans sufficiently westward. America is not even moved that ISIL might establish itself as a government in the areas it has conquered. In fact, America would be gladdened the jihadists transformed themselves from hidden ghosts and gypsies into a stationary government.

    The America military has difficulty against able guerilla fighters. However, it is beyond equal at toppling stationary governments and their conventional forces.  If ISIL tries to establish itself as a government, it would have walked away from its expertise into an arena where the American military machine stands supreme. Thus, America is not too concerned about ISIL except in using it as leverage to boot out Maliki.  As long ISIL remains a roving terrorist band, it poses no threat to core American interests while its presence can be used to stoke fear that will help increase the military budget.

    ISIL has declared for itself a caliphate over the land in Syria and Iraq from which it has ousted the two governments. This declaration is more symbolic than real. By itself, it confirms ISIL’s military prowess and achievements. However, it is far cry from establishing a government. A government requires offices, civilian personnel, currency. It requires static positions and routine activity. Government to be effective must sit in a place known to the public.

    If ISIL proves sufficiently foolhardy to try to sit as a government, America will bide its time and deracinate the fledgling government whenever it wills. Meanwhile, ISIL’s presence serves the corollary benefit of giving Israel an additional rationale to seek protection behind security and military measures, eschewing a diplomatic solution with the weathered Palestinians.

    When done best, national interests and foreign policy shape the contours of a nation’s military. But that is not how things are in reality. Once established, a military apparatus takes on a life of its own, independent of the national interests and of rational foreign policy formulation. The American war machine is the largest, most powerful ever assembled. Because of the dictates of modern technology, building such a machine takes long-term investment and arcane expertise that must constantly be honed and cultivate. The war machine has become a business. To remain afloat, business must profit and expand.

    For the war machine, peace is bankruptcy. Treasure is made amidst conflict. The nation cannot maintain its global leverage without the war machine. Thus, the propagation of war becomes the way of the nation. Policy is driven by what befits the war machine and its business allies not by what fits genuine national interests. This would merely be sad if the damage could be limited to America alone. However, this is not the case. America leads the world for better or worse. Once upon a time, it appeared America wanted to lead the world to a safer, more peaceful place. Now, it appears it may be leading the world down the maw of incessant war.

    08060340825 (sms only)

  • The beautiful game is not in the stadium this world cup

    The beautiful game is not in the stadium this world cup

    The Poor become irrepressible upon discovering they have everything to gain. They become invincible upon discovering they have nothing to lose 

    The World Cup started roughly 10 days ago. Around the world, most people will focus on the games played within the precise white lines painted on the lush greenery of the stadia floors. Viewers will be guaranteed a fine spectacle as the world’s best footballers battle to obtain their sport’s sacred prize. There also will be another game afoot (forgive the pun). For the socially conscious, this latter game is the most beautiful and significant of the matches to be played. It is a unique one such that, by merely playing, those who initiated it have achieved something profound. This game is the collective street demonstrations against the World Cup and its clumsy local architects, an insensitive and spendthrift government, for having spent so much on a sporting lark while devoting so little to the ways and means of the poor and the poorer.

    Many of us will be irked by the protests. We want to view the games unencumbered by Brazil’s stark, harsh economic realities. For the rest of us, the World Cup is the utmost sport’s fantasy. It is a dream-like break from the diurnal grind and gruel. However, nothing is free, not even dreams. This particular one is being paid in real coin by the Brazilian rank and file. Because we are not in Brazil, we lack empathy for the demonstrators. Their hurt is too distant for us to feel. Thus, many see the protesters as interlopers in their own land. People will hope that they are removed so the games continue unimpeded and without the mist of injustice the demonstrations cast on the event. Too many of us feel not the people’s plight and are disinterested in their causes. We are perturbed that they interrupt the glamorous sport we expect to see on our televisions. Their demonstrations turn the atmosphere around the beautiful game into one more closely associated with a society that nurses its people from the bitterest cup.

    Government and business leaders downplay the protests, claiming them the work of an extreme few.  While acknowledging the high costs of hosting the Cup, the country’s elite asserts the exercise is a worthwhile matter of “national pride.” At such dear expense, wisdom says that pride becomes a luxury ill-afforded by a nation with a teeming population of outcast poor. Pride is a fine contemplation by the properly fed, well housed and adequately clad. However, the type of pride of which the wealthy think has little place among the poor and humble. Pride does not clad or protect the bared foot that must tread the hard road of impoverished life. Pride puts neither onion nor chicken in the cooking pot. Pride does not keep the rain from leaking through a hovel’s shattered roof.

    Talk of national pride from those who taste and enjoy things of material excess is the waste water from the hogwash. Four years ago, such propaganda dazzled the average South African and much of Africa. Africans were ecstatic that one of their nations was selected to host the expensive affair. For the elite it was a true honour. For the poor, it would become a surreptitious burden. The nation paid a princely sum to win the purported honour.  It would pay a thousand king’s ransoms to make the world’s most elaborate soccer match occur. Africans beamed proudly that South Africa proved able to build the large stadia and infrastructure essential to the games. Yet, that outburst of pride was disappointingly jejune. A stupefying racial inferiority had crept into the space that historic perspective and racial confidence should have occupied. Looking at the Pyramids, one would be reminded Africans have been constructing large buildings for some time. The South African construction challenge would be met. However, it would be with costs aplenty.

    The most charitable objective measure would show that the World Cup had a negligible positive economic effect, at best.  Most other accurate measures would say it did more economic harm than good when looking at its effect on the urban poor. The funds used would have had greater benefit if used to enhance social services. Instead, money was spent on stadia many of which are rarely used and falling into disrepair. Jobs were created during the construction binge. But the tasks were transient. The employment exited as soon as the footballers came.

    Tourist money came but mostly went to the high-end local and international hoteliers and official vendors that support events like the World Cup. Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands of poor shanty dwellers and squatters were uprooted to make room for the construction or simply because they were eyesores the South African government wanted to hide. They hoped to give the impression South Africa had conquered apartheid. To accomplish this public relations feat, they simply removed the unsightly poor from vision. If you don’t see the poor, they do not exist was the logic. Poor South Africans would remain mum to the ill treatment for they had been promised that they too would profit from the games if they only exercised patience. It was only after the competition had ended, did the South African poor realise the game had been mostly played on their backs. They had been conned into believing they would sip the nectar, only to realise the intention was always to have the chalice pass over them. By the time they realised they had been inveigled, the parade had left. It had left them behind to sweep up the detritus of the great event and its numerous revelers.

    Having seen the Cup’s ill-effects on South Africa, socially-conscious Brazilians would not sit quietly as their government planned a repeat of the sordid economic injustice committed in South Africa. They took to the streets, this time not to carnival but to canvass against the waste of the event. Because of this, the most important game played now in the samba nation will not be found in any stadium.  This game pits the will and mood of the people against the business-as-usual approach of a government that appears not to sense the mood of the people it claims to lead.

    Many people view Brazil as the official home of football. Yet, 61 percent of the nation opposes hosting the World Cup or, at least, the high price tag (11.3 billion dollar) associated with the rollicking affair. This is a nation known for its zest for music, carnival and sand and sport. Its people are thought of as being serious at taking nothing seriously. The protests destroy that stereotype, bringing us closer to the reality of these people. It is good to view another person’s reality. In doing so, at times, you get a better hold of your own.

    Brazil is a charter member of the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa), that exclusive club of large, middle-income nations of growing international economic clout. Despite this fine status, Brazil is home to some of the most wretched neighborhoods imaginable. The social and economic topography of the city of Rio de Janeiro reverses the normal trend. In most cities, the rich occupy the hills and high ground while the poor huddle below. In Rio, poor favelas litter the hills as the rich occupy the choice coastal ground. Life in the favelas is not for the squeamish. It is a hard and violent maelstrom of poverty, despair, illicit activity, sickness and premature death. You don’t flourish in these neighborhoods; you merely survive them. This is the life of tens of millions of Brazilians, and these Brazilians represent billions of people around the world.

    They like football; but, they are considerably fonder of their families. They don’t dream of the chance of seeing another beautifully-played game brought to them at the costs of billions of dollars. They dream of living a beautiful life. This is not to belittle the social utility of sports.

    There is something about sporting events that help the human psyche cope with what confronts it. However, that respite comes attached to trenchant opportunity costs. Paying for the World Cup means government foregoing something else. As in South Africa, while the construction was ongoing, jobs were created. They are now gone.  Some service jobs will increase during the games but they too will vanish at the final whistle. Infrastructural improvements were made that will help even after the games. However, these projects were geared to serve the logistical requirements of the games. Thus, this new infrastructure will not be optimal once things return to normal. It will be of reduced inefficiency over the long-term, a good investment poorly made. Put more bluntly, the long-term utility of the projects does not equal the expense of the things. This especially applies to the high-cost stadia. After the games, these expensive structures will be of little value. They will become inactive and then start to decay.

    The World Cup is a spectacular event. We all love to watch it, except those uninitiated to the game. Even they are coming to embrace it. However, not every nation should host such a thing. For nations with large percentages of poor people to spend money on this escapade is a noisome decision revealing either an ignorance of the economic consequences of the games or a cold indifference to the lives of the poor and broken in society. The people of Brazil have seen a great pile of money tossed into games that will avail them little. They wonder why more funds can’t be targeted to services and activities that would avail their lives much.  Thus, many have taken to the streets.

    What they do will not halt the games; but, what they do should remind us that no game is more important than the people’s welfare. Their protests will mar the glamour of the event. In a way that is sad. But what they do is of greater value than the glamour of the event. This is because their efforts speak to the humanitarian spirit. They are like poor relatives coming to the rich man’s party to remind him the money he stole had paid for the lavish affair. They seek recompense. The confrontation is awkward to see, but necessary to occur. Justice demands such confrontations so that we remember who is the true giver and taker, who is right and who is wrong.

    Making established powers uncomfortable and exposing their injustice is how progress is attained. In real life, this is the beautiful game. As you watch your favorite team pursue the World Cup, remember that all that is at stake in this arena is a shiny cup. The greater game is being outside the stadia because it will determine whether more quality will be injected into the lives of the average Brazilian.  This is the real people’s game, even if many people seem oblivious to it. No matter the immediate outcome of the protests, the people have already won something just by demonstrating against an elite event once politically unassailable because the people held it in rapt awe. The Brazilians now demonstrate that at least in one nation the people are no longer to be distracted from their unjust reality no matter how beautiful the game used to beguile them.

    08060340825 (sms only)

      

     

  • Making a general mess of things

    Making a general mess of things

    Better to douse one’s head in a boiling pot than curry the favor of a wicked king.

    Three years have passed since the Arab Spring wafted transient hopes of democracy across the Maghreb. Through the oft jubilant protests centered in Tahrir Square, Egyptians inspired themselves into believing they could supplant the sclerotic dictatorship that had ruled their nation for decades. They would instill modern democracy in this ancient land. The Nile itself would be watered and renewed by the outpouring of the popular will.

    The Libyan trek quickly turned less irenic. Gaddafi would brook no replication of Tahrir in his land. Yet, his opponents would not be easily suppressed. Aided by an incongruous, informal alliance of Western nations and itinerant jihadists, the Libyan opposition would graduate from demonstrations and protests to armed insurgency. The nation descended into grim civil war in vain hope that the exit from this plunge into darkness would lead to the light of democracy.

    After three years of taking different paths, Egypt and Libya have returned closely to where they started. In an election characterized by languid voter turnout, the Egyptian people resigned themselves to a return to governance civilian in form but military in soul and substance.

    In Libya, the fight against Gaddafi was portrayed as one pitting democracy against authoritarian order. With Gaddafi gone, order has vanished with him. Yet, democracy also has failed to arrive. The place has turned into a house madder than it was when ruled by the alleged madman. Libya is no longer governed by his mercurial spirit. Though a desert nation, it now operates by the law of the jungle. Factions and factions within factions now fight battles within battles and wars within wars. Tripoli is the capital but the writ of government extends no further than the buildings it occupies. Libya is not so much a nation but a patchwork of tiny fiefdoms competing for local supremacy. Benghazi would be an independent city state except that it is now too anomic to be considered a cohesive entity. Amidst the confusion, a renegade former general/present warlord has launched battle against the government he vowed to serve as well as against the contumacious, anti-government jihadists in Benghazi.

    What happened to these nations pains the heart but should not surprise the mind. In both instances, reformers fell prey to the unintended consequences of their incomplete and idealistic exertions. They recognized neither the enormity nor complexity of the task they assumed. For the truly democratic reformers, august motives were betrayed by a superficial political strategy evidencing a startling lack of depth about the nature of their societies and how to reform them.

    At a most fundamental level, they failed to understand that suppressive government does not retreat. It responds to reformist challenge with doubled force. Every stab at reform begets conservative backlash. If the reformer is unprepared for the political fusillade to come, he will melt into a position inferior to that which he sought to change.

    Because of this strategic weakness, reformers gave themselves over domestic and international forces stronger and more cunning than they at the craft of power wrangling. As such, they became pawns in the game they initiated. Tragically, their exertions have blown back in their faces like wildfire captured by an ill wind. That which they sought to change has reestablished itself as if a wall of crumbling plaster reassembled itself into reinforced brick.

    In Egypt, the reformers thought all they needed was to oust Mubarak. They trounced Mubarak but what they now have may have taken them further away from genuine democracy. Mubarak was an increasingly frail octogenarian whose life force had diminished. Approaching the end of his days, he dreamed of dynastic succession; he hoped to place his son in the seat. This would have rankled senior members of the military, splitting the officer class between those supporting and those opposing the dynastic option.

    Instead of being faced with the weakened son of Mubarak, the missteps of Egyptian reformers have made it possible for the reincarnation of Mubarak through the presidential election of former defense Minister Fattah el-Sisi. The new president has the energy, scope and ambition of Mubarak in his prime. The new leader may actually be a tad more ruthless and cunning. While the sun was setting on Mubarak, it is but high noon for el-Sisi. Take it for granted that he believes elections need not be democratic; to him, they are modern-day coronations of a leader already anointed in the most old fashioned of ways: by brute power allied with established money.

    He has it in mind that he will win every election he enters and that he can easily shred constitutional term limits as easily as one can shred the paper upon which these restrictions have been solemnly inscribed. This man envisions himself as leader for decades to come. In effect, the vernal tumult ignited a process of alternating hope and disappointment that would bring the nation full circle. It was as if Egypt had gotten rid of their version of an aging Ivan the Terrible to replace him with a virile Stalin. This is worse than a bad bargain for it was paid for and made possible by collective activity and sacrifices intended to steer the nation in the opposite direction. Intentions are no substitute for wisdom in strategy; once in the field of actual struggle, belief in the rightness of cause is less valuable than political cunning.

    Reformers should have targeted the military as an institution. Their mistake was to view Mubarak as the problem instead of seeing him as the mere personification of a deeper malady. Thus, they concluded that by ejecting Mubarak, they solved their governance problem. This is akin to believing that by lopping off the crest of a wave one has controlled the entire ocean.

    Because they failed to realize the limitations of individual power, they came to underestimate the intransigence of institutional power. It was not so much that they misfired but that they took accurate aim at the wrong target, wasting all their finite ammunition on minor target.

    The real nemesis was the military’s role in government. Pull the military from government and Mubarak would have folded. However, removing Mubarak did not mean the military would fold. In fact, it was the military that finally told Mubarak to walk the plank as he had become a detriment to their continuity.

    To them, removing Mubarak was not surrender. It represented a tactical retreat as the prelude to counterattack at the propitious moment.

    The so-called reformers were outwitted by military officers they considered their intellectual inferiors. What this shows is that the politics learned in the classroom is a different animal from the one that walks the street. Political science is a fiction not to be heavily relied upon. The contest of competing subjective human thoughts, emotions and ambitions can never be reduced to formulaic expression. In actual politics, we discount the academician’s fluffy words and laboratory observations for they reduce complex real-life figures to lab rats which teach us very little. To master the task of reform, we take our cues, not from the lab, but from those who understand and flourish in the badlands that comprise the true topography of actual politics.

    The military cunningly kept itself intact as the fulcrum of Egyptian politics by taking a backseat role momentarily. By doing so, it wedged itself between the secular reformers and the Muslim Brotherhood. This caused the two civilian camps to become estranged. When the Muslim Brotherhood won the election, it garnered the majority of the wider public but it was a minority government in terms of support among the political elite. Thus, it had to bend and rely on the military in order to have two of the three political groupings on its side. Imperceptible to the reformers, the military had become the indispensable powerbroker between the two opposing civilian camps. When an arbiter becomes indispensable, he ceases being a broker. He assumes another name: master.

    The time to strike came when popularity of President Morsi and the Brotherhood hit low ebb. The military pulled its support from the Brotherhood and promised to ally with the secularists. The military deceived the secularists into believing the secularists would be allowed to take the helm from the Brotherhood. The secularists joined the military to harness the Brotherhood. Here was their great error.

    They failed to realize the Brotherhood was the second most powerful group behind the military. Sound long-term strategy called for a rapprochement between the Brotherhood and secularists against the military. Two and three combine to contain number one. This was not to happen. What occurred was three joined one to impale two. The military achieved what it wanted. It would have had a difficult time taking down the Brotherhood without the implicit support of the secularists.

    With the Brotherhood checkmated, the military simply ignored and walked over the secularists; by themselves, the secularists constituted an insufficient threat. The secularists had been maneuvered to where they stood alone for they had betrayed the democratic mandate given the Brotherhood. They military was free to reclaim what their exalted position and they wasted little time transforming el-Sisi into the second coming of Mubarak. In the cycle of earth’s seasons, spring follows winter. In Egyptian politics, it was winter that replaced spring.

    In Libya, things were less convoluted but also less home-grown. If left solely a Libyan undertaking, the uprising would have been extinguished in weeks. Gaddafi would still be in power. Mali would not have come to increased turmoil and Boko Haram would not be so endowed with lethal materiel. However, foreign jihadists came by land, joining in informal but effective alliance with Western power by air and sea. The effort against Gaddafi was hijacked from its domestic authors to largely become a foreign affair. Thus Gaddafi’s fate was sealed as was Libya’s. The entire nation would be reduced to a brawl.

    Libya is now an unalloyed mess. Governance was by the barrel of a gun or not at all. The nation has become a festival for warlords and misery for the rest. Enter former general Khalifa Haftar. Once a Gaddafi aide, Haftar fled to America. He lived there for years until returning to participate in the drive against Gaddafi.

    It would be naïve to think his arrival and quick return to prominence is unconnected with his stay in America. The general likely has amiable connections with American counterparts. Thus, it is unlikely he has embarked on his two-front battle — mutiny against government and fight against the jihadists —  without the backing of those in control of Washington’s geo-political and military strategy. Haftar may ultimately prove to be his own king but for now he will spend significant time as a pawn of others. In effect, Libya went through its dark sufferings just to replace one strongman with another. The only significant difference is that while Gaddafi was the self-styled apostle of African unity and a thorn in the West’s side, Haftar is a client of the West who will likely prove a thorn in the side of his people for years to come.

    Because both el-Sisi and Haftar are conservative militarists with no political ideology beyond the lust for power, the West feels comfortable with them as with Mubarak, Pinochet and those of that ilk. Even Israel applauded the election of el-Sisi. For Tel Aviv, el-Sisi promises a return to business as usual after the rather uncomfortable Muslim Brotherhood interregnum.

    Sadness drapes both nations. Despite the hard work and sacrifice, reform has been vetoed by retrogression. The situation in both nations shows the difficulty of exacting reform. Not only must reformers have a visionary idea, they must have the political acumen to see it through to completion. They must have the wisdom to outwit rival political forces but also the ability to garner support among society’s undecided and ambivalent. This does not come by happenstance nor are all these gifts likely to be deposited in one person.

    Necessary are thorough organization, discipline and correct strategy drawing clear distinction between tactical goals and strategic objectives. So is a bit of luck. Even here, fortune is more apt to shine on those better prepared to take of its advantage. Luck and fortune detest squandering themselves on the unready. As such, those who embark on reform are obligated not to underestimate the task they assume. To do so, is to place the nation they love on a weak and bending limb.  If that limb breaks, the nation may find itself in a condition worse than when the climb to reform began. At the end of the day, the attempt to climb to a better place should never land us in a deeper pit.

    0806340825 (sms only)

  • Ukraine: Befuddling those who would rule the world

    Ukraine: Befuddling those who would rule the world

    The wise man knows the limits of his power but the powerful man rarely knows the limits of his wisdom

    Presidential elections took place in Ukraine last week.  The elections did nothing to quell the growing unrest. If anything, the elections exacerbated the tension between Kiev and the eastern region. The nation has graduated from the stage of violent protests to open fighting between government forces and eastern insurgents that have all the trappings of incipient civil war. The new president, a manufacturer of confections, seems destined to have his administration defined by the sourness of war. Meanwhile, the United States and other Western democracies oppose the quest of the easterners to seek greater autonomy or liberty from a central government that they believe means them no good. On the other hand, Russia, never known to be gentle in its conquests, now bristles at the Kiev government’s strong-arm methods to impose its will on the easterners. All along the battlements, irony abounds.

    I have written extensively about the Ukrainian predicament because it conglobates the major currents in the global political economy into one rotund mess. While the crisis plays out in the Ukraine, it has much to do with how the world order will be defined in the coming years and thus has much to do with all of us. This global dimension makes Ukraine the most important and, potentially, the most dangerous of our day’s conflagrations. While other conflicts stand more violently, this particular dispute is freighted with deep consequences the others can never portend.

    First, this is a battle of large powers for influence and control over a rich, and fertile but weaker nation. Second, it is a contest to reestablish the contours of a balance of power in Eastern Europe. A balance of power is only required where there are two or more rival powers. Implicit in this new reality is that Russia now asserts her traditional role as the Czar of Europe’s eastern reaches. However, this affronts the American/Western European myth of the Cold War permanently resolving the issue of a European balance of power in their occidental favor. For Russia to challenge this is to unfairly challenge the verdict of history, the West believes.

    These nations arrogant assume a fortuitous chain of events is to forever be recognized simply because those events placed advantage in their hands. They want every other nation and their peoples to believe history should now and forever stand still. They fail to understand as long as man exists, history will be made and unmade, not necessarily in their preferred image.

    Third, this is a battle to dominate the flow of oil and gas on the Eurasian land mass. Fourth, it is a battle whether America can continue to exploit the dominance of the dollar not only to control economic matters but to reverse the strategic foreign policy of another sovereign nation via imposition of sanctions. From the Russian viewpoint, it is an attempt to free itself from American “dollarism,” plotting a course where it and other nations begin to conduct their international transactions without absolute reliance on the dollar as the means of global exchange.

    Fifth, and most importantly, this is a battle whether the world will remain a “unipolar” one dominated by the lone superpower or will it revert back to the more historically-common multipolar constellation where several powers hold sway over their geographically limited (regional) spheres of influence. Again, America seeks to overrule the normal dynamics of history by demanding that history stand still and that other nations acquiesce in this static appointment for history. In this, American policy makers regrettably mistake the exceptional but transient factors leading to its global dominance as evidence America shall forever be the sole global power.

    America’s rise to power was an incident of history. Protected by two oceans from the incessant conflict of the old world, America developed economically in relative peace. It then uses its access to those two oceans, in combination with its colossal economic power, to spread its economic tentacles far and wide. While Europe and Asia destroyed themselves in two gruesome World Wars, distant America entered both conflagrations late. It was able to obtain the fruits of victory without experience the devastation of fighting a protracted war on its own soil.  The power and wealth differential between America and the rest of the world was a vast expanse as a result of these global wars. America stubbornly insists the gap should be maintained. In this, it fights the futile fight. In the long-run, the power differential must decrease.

    The factors that led to America’s ascendance are no longer operative to the same extent. Moreover, no country has an overriding concentration of human genius and industry to justify such a gap in perpetuity.  Many these rival powers own an enviable history of achievement, progress, prowess and power. Some of these nations were major contributors to world history for centuries. In the case of China, for several millennia, before America was a glint of an idea in the eyes of its rebellious founding fathers. As irony would have it, America now occupies a place similar to the British Empire against which it rebelled.

    Today, America uses its might to stop other nations from rebelling against its global domination. In the end, America cannot win this battle; it cannot hope to simultaneously contain the ambitions of Russia, China, India, Brazil and others. Implementing such a policy against an amalgam of nations with populations and landmasses several fold larger than America’s will be exorbitant madness born from ignorant arrogance. Yet, at this stage, America attempts this impossible feat. Ultimately, it will resign itself to the futility of the objective. This may take awhile. As the world awaits this prudent enlightenment, America may do much damage to itself and other nations in the process of trying to hold to an exalted yet intrinsically fleeting global position.

    In trying to simultaneously thwart numerous rivals, America ironically accelerates its own diminution by compelling these nations to cooperate with each to a degree that would not have been achieved had America embarked on a more nuanced strategic policy. Due to Ukraine, Russia has angled closer toward China, moving fast to establish a strategic partnership challenging America’s geopolitical, military and financial might.

    As intriguing as all this is, much of it lies in the uncertain future. The building blocks of that future are now being shaped in Ukraine.

    From the limited perspective of holding an election, the West gained a victory of sorts with the election of their acolyte, Petro Poroshenko, as the next president of this self-embattled nation. The election lends greater legitimacy to the government in Kiev. Weeks ago, Presdient Obama referred to the then government I Kiev as elected. His statement was a lie when made. If made today, it would be true. However, this change may be more semantic than substantive, for, on the larger chessboard, where grand strategy is played, the West continues to be outwitted by the Russian leader.

    The Western-backed coup that overthrew the elected Yanukovych government ignited unrest in eastern Ukraine to the extent that the Crimea seceded from Ukraine to cohere to Russia. Obviously, Russia helped instigate this move.  The change served Russian interests all too well for Moscow to have left such a thing to chance. In one quick grab, Russian regained a peninsula that it previously owned. Russia also preserved its Black Sea fleet, instrumental in projecting power into the Balkans and beyond the Dardanelles into the Aegean and the eastern Mediterranean where the Syrian coast lies.

    Often what is not readily seen is the most important thing. By snatching Crimea, Russia more than doubled its shoreline on the Black Sea. Under the murky waters of that sea are great oil and gas deposits. Those deposits that once belonged to Ukraine are now, by virtue of the Crimean secession, Russian assets. The deals Western oil companies where to strike with the Ukrainian government are no longer to be unless the secession is reversed.

    The West thought the coup strengthened its hand against Russia. Instead, the coup strengthened Western influence in Kiev, the Ukrainian capital, but weakened the West’s influence over how Russia would react to events in Ukraine. To regain its leverage, the West has embarked on a dangerous policy that can no longer pretend to be anything but anti-Russian. Western policy is two-fold. First, impose sanctions to weaken the Russian economy with the thin hope this will undermine Putin and begin the process of his demise. Second, cause such havoc and violence in eastern Ukraine that Putin is forced to intervene militarily to protect the Russian-speaking populace of that region. If they can entice Putin into the snare, they will inflict grievous sanctions on Russia and flood military help into Ukraine. The desire is to heap such an inglorious defeat on Putin that the walls of his Kremlin will crack from within and without.

    Understanding the limits of his power and the extent of his nation’s interests, Putin refused the bait. Again, the West miscalculated. They believed Putin craved eastern Ukraine so much that he awaited the slightest pretext to annex the region. They thought his annexation of Crimea had revealed unrepentant land lust. However, the strategic, economic and historic importance of Crimea is vastly greater than eastern Ukraine’s.

    Putin does not want to own eastern Ukraine. He would rather have it as a buffer between him and the West. To seize eastern Ukraine resolves no strategic question for him. All it would do is to draw a stark dividing line between EU/NATO Europe and Russia. This would be a line of friction, compelling Russia to devote tremendous resources to that border. It is more advantageous to have a buffer state between Russia and the West’s sphere of influence. Provided Russia maintains influence, such a buffer insulates Russia from Western provocations. It provides Putin breathing room.

    The West hoped Putin would salivate over Eastern Ukraine and leap at it like a starving man at a buffet table. He did not bite because he realized the meal was not for him. The more the West goads him, the more he backs away. He removed troops deployed at the border so that a border incident could not be manufactured. Then he asked the eastern provinces to suspend their autonomy/secession plebiscites. The regions proceeded with the referenda notwithstanding the lack of formal Russian imprimatur.

    Certainly, Putin did not try to bring the anvil down on the eastern secessionists in a way that they would be forced to terminate their insurgency. Additionally, he has likely looked the other way as Russian irregulars join to aid their kinsmen in eastern Ukraine. All this is allowed because the eastern Ukrainians are allies who serve his purposes. But he does not want them under his roof. He would like them in the outer tent. Putin would rather Ukraine remain whole, but in an unsettled condition, with the eastern region looking to him as its benefactor. In this way, he always has a hand in Ukrainian events while maintaining the buffer between him and EU/NATO. This scenario secures his interests better than expanding his border westward only to abut a rump western-leaning Ukraine completely in the EU/NATO orbit.

    This is not to say that all Western nations are as seized with confrontation as America. While German Chancellor Merkel maintains a public face of solidarity with the American policy, German officials are unhappy with America’s hardnosed policy. They feel it is bellicose. German newspapers have carried stories of German intelligence leaks revealing that hundred of America intelligence, security and military operatives have clandestinely been inserted into Ukraine to help Kiev suppress rebellion in the eastern region.

    This help may have come with unjust and lethal results.  During unrest in Odessa, groups of peaceful anti-Kiev protestors ran into a government building to hide from marauding pro-government skinheads. As police and army stood aside and watched, the skinheads tossed Molotov cocktails into the building until it was alit. Dozens of innocent people were killed in the ensuing fire. While trying to escape the flames, others were shot by the vigilantes.  All of this was captured on videotape. No one was arrested for the gruesome massacre of people simply exercising their right to protest against government. The West did not issue a diplomatic protest or make a peep.

    This incident raises an interesting point. The West fervently accuses Putin of orchestrating eastern events. This could well be. However, justice requires that the West is measured by the same stick by which Putin is judged. If so, then the West must be complicit in fomenting trouble since the presence of American clandestine operatives has been revealed by one of America’s staunchest allies.

    Here, something must be said of mainstream electronic media. Their beating the drums of war has become shameless. They have abandoned all objectivity in the matter. They have carried the storyline of the American government as if they were America’s private-sector Ministry of Information. When the Odessa massacre took place, international television stations had the information about culprits. Yet, they purposely distorted their reporting so the

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

    general public would be confused as to who did the dying and who did the killing.

    Beware of what you see on television regarding the Ukraine. So much is at stake; the controlling powers will not leave world opinion to be shaped by the truth. That would leave too much to chance. Instead, they have rigged their news accounts to direct our minds to an appointed end. There was even a CNN report lambasting Putin for purportedly being friendly with the “Italian Scandal,” former PM Berlusconi. Such a report would seem scurrilous and not even worthy of comment except that this is the same negative rollout deployed against Libya’s Gaddafi before sending him to another realm.

    However, Putin is not Gaddafi and Russia is a much heavier load than Libya.

    We must keep our eye on Ukraine. It is a cautionary tale for nations seeking to ply the path of independence in their foreign policies. If a nation opposes western foreign policy, the West’s reaction may be a muscular, military one although the offending nation never issued a threat of a martial nature.  The present crisis also reveals a dilemma in the concept of democracy. Is it equally important to have democracy and equality between nations as within nations? The West has mastered the ploy of attacking its international foes on the grounds that these nations are undemocratic. In claiming to promote democracy within nations, America and its allies seems to have scotched the notion about democracy and equality among nations. Instead, if a nation does not behave as they wish, they are primed to toss sanctions or worse until that nation repents. Thus far, Putin has danced around their clumsiness to avoid major confrontation. Should he maintain such poise, he will deserve a peace prize that he will never get. Should he misstep, he will have war instead.

    Against this backdrop, Ukraine trembles as potentially the most dangerous spot on earth. While Russia plays the traditional amoral game of power politics, America and its allies claim a moral superiority that affords them the right to do whatever they wish, including the incitement of violence in one nation to set a trap goading another nation into war. Through such machinations are great wars started. Conservative American militarists would like nothing better than fight Russia in order to finish through firepower what the Cold War partially accomplished by attrition – the destruction of Russia as a competitor. However, the disastrous Afghan and Iraqi military campaigns demonstrate that, for all her power, America is not very good at finishing wars that it starts. More importantly, there is nothing great about war except the enormity of the destruction it visit on the unarmed and innocent.

     

    08060340825 (sms only)

  • The geopolitics of Boko Haram

    The geopolitics of Boko Haram

    Beware of the merchant who sells you medical insurance after giving your enemy a loaded weapon

    THOSE of you who regularly suffer themselves to trudge through this column know I generally abstain from commentary on Nigerian politics. There is already a surfeit of commentary; I would rather not increase the torrent of words. Occasionally what happens in Nigeria intersects with an important global issue. When that occurs, my responsibility switches to that of providing you a different strategic perspective through which you might assess the events taking place in your own backyard. Such a confluence has occurred. Sadly it is not a convergence of positive elements. It is an assembly of the unfortunate. Boko Haram is no longer a local wound. The Chibok abductions have elevated it to an international concern. The overriding moral and policy imperative is to secure the freedom and safety of the girls. With each day that passes, hope diminishes that a good ending will be had by all of them. The chances of abuse and trafficking increase with the accretion of time. Already, too much time has passed. The girls have endured more than should be asked of the innocent. China, Israel, France, the United Kingdom and the United States have offered law enforcement and security assistance. At this stage, help from any quarter is welcome. Yet, none of these nations extends a purely altruistic hand. There is a cost to be had. In fact, these nations volunteer this assistance because Nigeria already paid the price without even realizing the costly transaction had occurred. Boko Haram has been a lethal nuisance for several years, but something has changed during the past several months. Boko Haram has increased the pace and breadth of its operations. The terrorists’ combat ability has likely improved both qualitatively and quantitatively. This has been achieved through receipt of significant lethal help from some of their friends and, indirectly, from some of their purported enemies. The terrorists now have armoured personal carriers, rocket propelled grenade launchers and other deadly war material. These are not items one finds at the corner store or in newspaper ads. They are expensive and relatively hard to procure. Moreover, operating this equipment requires training and maintenance that may be even harder to obtain than the materiel itself. There are only a few places Boko Haram can get such a quantum of dangerous merchandise; it is not from private stock. The likely source is from some national inventory. The most probable source is Libya. This may be where the trail of weapons ends but it is where a trail of questions must start. During the war against Qaddafi, Western propaganda successfully convinced most of Africa that ousting Qaddafi was apt policy. Yet, from what should have been the vantage point the objective national interests of African countries, the attack against Libya was a dangerous, unwise lark. Qaddafi was a loquacious sort whose bark could be irksome. However, he had not bitten anything or anyone in quite some time. He had aggressed against no one and had been a champion, albeit a highly idiosyncratic one, of greater African unity. His policies were more operatic than substantive. In short, he was a noisy, sometimes meddlesome, but not a violent or warmongering neighbor. He was also an implacable bulwark against the advance of radical extremism into sub- Saharan Africa via the Maghreb. That the West would attack his government was unsurprising for he had been a nettle in their side much too long for his own safety. His proposals to ditch the dollar as the world’s currency and to unite Africa under one coin touched a raw nerve in Washington and elsewhere. The West was looking for a reason to make Gaddafi mount the scaffold. The surprise and tragedy was that so many African nations joined this death procession for no good reason of their own. It was as if they forfeited the right to define their policies in a manner befitting their national interests. Instead, their national interests were reduced to the lowly game of currying the favour of the West by joining them in tossing stones at the house of Gaddafi. As such, African nations erred by fooling themselves that they would come out ahead by allowing the West to define their interests for them. During that period, this column warned that the consequences of the demise of Gaddafi would be broad, largely unpredictable in their specifics, but mostly negative in their outcome for an expansion of terrorists’ violence was a foreseeable consequence of the reckless permissiveness towards Al Qaeda in Libya. Events have since unfolded to give their indisputable account. Africa needs to readjust how it views the West and stop seeing the West as the paragon of anything except the amoral acquisition of power and money. America and its Western allies claim the war against terror as their utmost priority. Yet, something curious took place in the war against Gaddafi. The West joined forces with Al Qaeda to topple the Libyan. America and its minions knew Al Qaeda fighters had poured into the Libyan civil war to become one of the strongest, most coherent elements of the anti-government armed elements. This replicated the West’s open door to Al Qaeda to infiltrate Iraq when it smashed Saddam. The story is currently being played in Syria. To understand Western policy regarding Boko Haram, one must discern the reason the West would team with Al Qaeda to topple regimes that clearly were neither threats to vital Western strategic interests nor had recently launched attacks on Western soil as Al Qaeda had done. In the Libya, the collusion was startling. Ground attacks by Al Qaeda and other units were complemented by NATO air support. As victory appeared imminent, NATO did nothing to protect the military armouries Gaddafi had stockpiled. There seemed to be an informal agreement regarding the division of war spoils. NATO countries would acquire the oil installations and static infrastructure. Al Qaeda would loot whatever was not tied down. Gone went massive amounts of weapons and probably enormous stashes of money. In helping to rid the West of the Gaddafi headache, Al Qaeda was allowed a handsome dividend, enabling it to prance southward to Mali. They teamed with Malian Tuaregs to a point where they had overridden half the nation before the French intervention repulsed them, forcing them back to their desert lairs. The quickening of Boko Haram is eerily redolent of the strengthening of the Tuareg insurgents after being annealed by Al Qaeda. Given this history, African must recognize that Al Qaeda is not America’s or the West’s most dreaded foe. America’s most hated foe is that nation which seeks to ply a foreign policy independent of America’s, especially when the nation seeks to divorce itself from dependence on the dollar as the universal currency. America and its allies demonize such governments as the prelude to dismantling them. Farther afield in Eurasia, we must view the clash over Ukraine and the West’s sudden intense animus for Russian President Putin in this light. That is a story for next week perhaps. The morale of the current story is that American and the Woestern grand strategists do not see mortal danger in Al Qaeda. Their objective is to rid each geographical region of potential state actors that might contest against American interests. Years ago, Nigeria and other African countries objected to America’s African Command (AFRICOM) establishing a permanent presence on the continent. Now, we are reduced to requesting their assistance to fight a foe their government indirectly equipped. Please, understand this harsh but honest appraisal. Much – perhaps your future – depends on it. American society and government are not the monoliths you suppose. There are opposing schools of thought battling each other to define the national interests and articulate policy based on that emergent definition. There are conservative, racist militarists on one extreme and enlightened progressives on the other end of the spectrum. Over the long course of American history, the militarists have enjoyed the upper hand, but progressives try as they might. Thus, in the 1960s, the same nation that inaugurated the benign Peace Corps helped engineer the demise of Patrice Lumumba and his democratically-elected government in the Congo. A similar fight for primacy in American policy continues, but today the battle is even more unbalances in favour of the war machine. War is hot-blooded struggle but the machine is a cold-hearted business. Left to itself, war would be fought to a conclusion. But that is not the way of business which seeks profit. For war to be profitable, it must neither end nor be so dangerous that those who wage it will be defeated and lose their shirt if not more. Thus, America and its allies profit so much from fighting Al Qaeda and their affiliates that the corporate war machine would be loath to finish them off. Al Qaeda poses no true military threat to Western global dominance but it incites a deep fear that allows this war machine to fuel and expand itself from the coffers of governments led by anxious, fearful civilian politicians. Where it can, the West uses Al Qaeda or some other local devices, to undermine governments that might stand as regional competitors to American and Western hegemony. It happened in Libya and Iraq. It is happening in Syria. Review the situation in Mali. The French only suppressed the insurgents. The goal was never to defeat them. Insurgents still roam the northern tier of the country. French interests are served by the rebel presence. This renders the government in Bamako beholden to Paris. As such, the French military presence has become an informal occupation force with much of the territory it now laden with precious resources like gold and uranium. Those who believe this is mere coincidence have an enduring love of fairy tales. For Africa, the writing is beginning to appear on the wall for those sufficiently courageous to read it. We must pierce through the clichés and the catchy phrases until the truth is had. Remember a cornerstone of Western policy is to arrest the growth of potential regional powers that might give the West some independent backtalk. View the largest nations in Africa. Africa’s big nations all have big problems. Not one is well positioned to enter a golden era. Most of them seem more likely to fall off the rails. After all the exertion of the Arab Spring, Egypt will soon, by election or otherwise, return to the hands of a dynastic autocrat as brutal as Mubarak. The two Sudans seem like charter members of the fight club. Either they are fighting each other or younger one is engulfed in civil war. Kenya suffers the terrorist scourge and the West wants to place some of its elected leaders behind bars. The Democratic Republic of the Congo could light most of the continent and hold great leverage over the global economy, if a competent government could control the areas where the precious minerals lie. However, the West and their allies in Rwanda and Uganda continue to plague DROC that it remains the sickest of Africa’s sick men. South Africa just reelected a government the people know will deliver them to a diminishing future. Social misery and unrest, particularly labour strikes, will be increasingly common. Nigeria now struggles with an incipient insurgency that has no aim, but to tear the nation apart then casts its separate pieces into a modern Dark Ages where old-fashioned hatred and ignorance trump all that is good of modernity and enlightenment. Boko Haram is a terrible and ugly thing. But in one sense, it may prove to have some utility if only we understand the magnitude of what is upon us. Nigeria’s and Africa’s political elite better come to grips that the world is small and the global game of strategic power, control, land and money now knocks at the door. The traditional way of local politics and policy has to be swept swiftly aside. The challenge that is upon Africa is great. The foreign masters of the game are ruthless and brook no excuse. Bring back the girls by all means, but never ever forget that the story just begins and does not end there. Those helping to rescue the girls also indirectly abetted their taking. Do not be fooled by their assistance because it is not you they have come to help. They have come in their own interests. You better understand where your interests coincide with theirs and where they collide. If not, more than these precious girls will be taken from you.

  • South Africa: The rainbow slowly turns to storm

    South Africa: The rainbow slowly turns to storm

    A wise leader knows the poor by name but the wicked leader knows not the image of their face.

    A few weeks ago, South Africa marked the twentieth anniversary of the formal end of apartheid and the beginning of nonracial democracy. Last week, South Africa also voted. This should have been a time of uplifting celebration of the triumph of justice and our common humanity over prejudice and racial oppression.

    But these events transpired with muted resignation as if the nation were embarrassed by what twenty years has made of it. Regarding the election, the bulbous incumbent won handedly although the people were acutely underwhelmed by his threadbare performance.  As such, the two dates were stinging reminders that, although nominally a nonracial democracy, things have began to turn as they were before. The people’s way of live runs low on hope, food and money. What now happens to them is not of their will or doing but dictated to them by forces much like the forces that defined their beleaguered past.

    South Africa is seized more with a sense of forlorn nostalgia than of future hope. The mass of the people are like the person who came to the party five minutes before it ended. All they enjoyed was a brief taste before the moment passed. That they have been asked to clean up after the festivities only compounds insult with injury. The nation once beheld something precious and rare. The very thing they were looking at has vanished but they realized it not. They were so busy looking that they did not notice the valuable thing had gone. So transfixed, they thought they still saw it. Yet, what remained was but the impress of it on their minds.

    Finally, the costly loss of just opportunity has become real to them and the pain of that reality runs deep like a subterranean river. South Africa was to be the rainbow nation. But, a rainbow is a beautiful but fragile thing. For it to persist conditions have to be nurtured.

    This congenial evolution did not happen.

    The rainbow has cracked and shattered. In its place, a storm gathers. The land of potential freedom and race equality is no longer. Apartheid was legally abolished but was given a reprieve so that it would still define the lives of most black South Africans.

    That this mean turn happened was inevitable, given the genesis of the modern South African state. It was a nation built on fateful compromise. We were told South Africa had been freed from apartheid. That it had experienced a quiet and peaceful revolution. This was a half-truth. There is no such thing as a peaceful revolution. If it is peaceful, it is not revolution and if it is revolution, peace will take its holiday. While not necessarily violent, revolution mandates an upheaval of some type. And those benefitting from the status quo will find these tremors anything but peaceful.

    What happened in South Africa was piecemeal reform dressed to look like something more universal than it was simply by the mire fact that race and color seemed to reverse roles in a world still shaped by discrimination. This statement is not meant to slight what was accomplished. What was done is historic and could not have happened without a large dose of heroism and sacrifice. Perhaps, it was even inevitable. The black architects of this compromise were faced with the certainty of gaining partial recompense without violence or seeking the uncertainty of a bigger reward through longer, more violent confrontation. In that confrontation, the weight of white South Africa and of the entirety of the conservative establishment of the West would be arrayed against the rag-tag black rabble. The battle would be tough and the outcome not amenable to guarantee.

    Thus, South Africa was racially changed but only at the top. The compromised was to introduce the black elite into the ruling class. Theretofore, the black elite had been the leaders of the political opposition. In one fell swoop, they would become the political establishment. This must have been a heady, almost giddy elevation with regard to both power and responsibility. In exchange, they agreed to cordon the economy that it would remain in the hands of those who always held it.

    Whites would control the economy and blacks the politics. Interracial integration and the sharing of power at the top took place. The poverty and misery characterizing the bottom of society would remain the sole possession of the majority of one race alone.

    For all that he went through, Madiba was magnanimous to the extreme in forgiving the past but he was actually more tired and resigned to fate than he let on. By the time he obtained the highest office in the land, the years had robbed him of the ability and zeal to transform the nation into what justice demanded. He was wise enough to see into the past and place a brake on the temptation for revenge; but, having been separated from society that had changed dramatically in his quarter century of incarceration, he had not the intricate understanding of the political economy needed to shepherd its reform.

    He accepted the economic mantra presented him and that was the conservative economics that have dominated the globe since Reagan-Thatcher era. Thus, Mandela was circumscribed by the limits of the predominant economic ideology and by the uncertain environment of the new republic from using his position to push the nation onto the path of reform that would reach the people. Instead, he was reduced to counseling the poor masses to exercise patience for those who would come after him would enact the reform he could not. In effect, his tenure was reduced to demonstrating a black man could hold power in a complex nation without the country crumbling to pieces. His was a caretaker role and he took adequate care. He delivered the nation from birth into infancy. One could not realistically have expected more from him. However, he would pass an enormous task to his successors.  They would ignobly drop, then ignore, the baton because they would be seized in mind and heart by more selfish objectives.

    Something insidious happened on the road to reform. Those into whose hands Mandela entrusted the nation would veer farther off the rightful course with the passage of time. The increasing comfort of their lives took the edge off their quest for social change. A subtle but momentous shift occurred. Instead of subsequent black establishment leaders honoring the sacrifices of the dead and their social contract with the living to use newly-gained political power to engineer structural economic reform, they boarded a luxury cruise and signed a pact of convenience while on board. They entered into a conservative deal with the white economic elite to use that new political power to tamp, and, if necessary, suppress black reformist agitation in exchange for a piece of the economic action. For them, the size of the hurting population was dwarfed in importance by the size of the beckoning checkbook. The former leadership of black liberation had been coaxed into a conspiracy to suppress those they once pledged to liberate.

    Beyond the reach of most humans lies the ability to admit and see the injustice that abets their own enrichment. Once personally sated, many an activist becomes a guardian of the status quo. It is as if they believe what they eat also fills the bellies of others.

    This tragedy has befallen black leadership everywhere. Weeks ago, I wrote how the reform movement in black America has been placed in deep freeze because of the emergence of a moderate black president and a black elite more linked to white money than the black community. The same forces now shape the South African landscape and that of many African nations. Our leaders would rather dance among the international elite than feed the people or create jobs for them.

    Our leaders fall prey to this because, in reality, their racial pride and identification is weak and flagging. Because of this, they do not devote themselves to a deep understanding of the historic and present racial discrimination that exists and continues to shape how the global political economy works. Because of this, they are not ideologically equipped to construct a long-term strategy to develop the people and their futures. They have no guiding vision through which they view the world and on which they can focus so they stay true to a decided path. Because they have no lodestar, they can get tossed and misled by the strongest wind.

    Those who now control the world’s economy are a strong wind. In addition to their hold on money, they control the flow of most information and thus shape the thoughts of most people. While this well-funded shaping of mind and thought may not be injurious if only restricted to the common person, it is disastrous when it shackles the leaders of nations whose genuine interests lie in reforming the system. Their leaders become sheep and their people become the sheep of sheep. Sadly, they follow not a benign shepherd. They follow the calls of the wolf.

    In South Africa, the people are slowly devoured. The ANC standard bearer just won the election in a landslide but he would be sorely mistaken to see this as a ringing endorsement. The people voted his way because they saw no other electoral alternative. However, they know they have been sold a false bill of goods. They want a refund and will wait for it because they are used to suffering. But even a suffering people can be taxed beyond their forbearance. At that point, the suffering horde will no longer look to the established leadership.  Their sense of injustice and pent-up frustration will become their guide. Hopefully, established leaders will sense the danger and rediscover the way of reform. If not they will have themselves to blame if the people eventually gather to upset the dainty banquet table in order to claim what is theirs. At some point, the people will claim the right to enact the second half of the national drama by completing the demolition of apartheid’s economic structure. Either this will be done with the black leaders in front, shaping the process, or by the masses dragging the leaders behind them. It may take years but the clock inexorably ticks.

     

    08060340825 (sms only)

  • Many rivers to cross but only one bridge

    Many rivers to cross but only one bridge

    In the citadel of evil, justice is discarded and branded a name unspeakable.

    This past week, America marked the fiftieth anniversary of the Civil Rights Act. Ending legal segregation against those whose skin is black, the Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act were the crowning achievements of the Civil Rights Movement in America. These laws were greeted with jubilation by the thousands who marched to effectuate their coming into being. Black America anticipated the dawning of a more just nation where skin color would no longer be a political and economic invective.

    Had the laws been honored according to the fullness of their letter and spirit, they would have ushered in a quiet, voluntary revolution the likes of which no other nation had ever undertaken except at the point of crisis or of a bayonet. Adherence to these Acts would have severed America’s tether to the 19th century in time for America’s timely entry into the 21st. Sadly, full acceptance and adherence were not had.

    People tend to exalt those noble moments when people seize the courage to engage the brave fight against unjust laws and oppressive government. These high points in history showcase the best of human nature. We mark these moments on calendars and write about them that our children may learn to be heroes by rising to the occasion should the occasion ever rise against them. However, the reality of change generally proves far less succulent than the ideals that spawned the attempted change. We can think perfect thoughts but are capable of only a flawed reality. This discrepancy is partly due to the inherent imperfection of man. Everything we make is broken from the moment of its assembly. Humans do nothing perfectly; even our mistakes have a touch of correctness and logic about them.

    But part of the distance separating reality from ideal has nothing to do with the flaws in our pursuit of the noble destination. Some of the discrepancy is attributable to the adept pursuit of an ignoble outcome on the part of some people. In the social universe as well as in the world of physical objects, every action has an opposite reaction. Matter is counterbalanced by antimatter. Good cannot be identified but for the existence of its opposite. The pursuit of justice has a sinister alter ego: the pursuit of injustice. As good rises to protest evil laws and indign governance, Evil slithers to undermine what is right and condign. We shy from recognizing this because it is unsettling. It means the past is never really the past, and no victory is ever secure without constant vigil. He who quickly sleeps after attaining the prize will lose more in brief slumber than he gained through years of strife and toil.

    There is a common saying, often echoed by the cynical to hoodwink those sufficiently naïve to believe that evil comes by accident or ignorance. We commonly here people sermonize “evil committed against one person is an evil against all of humanity.” This sounds good because it assumes everyone defines good and bad similarly. Thus, once the error is identified and its perpetrators are tutored properly, they will become agents awash in goodly purpose. This is all too comforting to be true; it also runs contrary to the grain of history. Before the lie, there must be a man willing to tell it. Before there was a slave, there was a person who thought owning another human would benefit him. If injustice damaged all, it would not exist. It would devour itself like a wildfire with nowhere to go. Injustice thrives because its architects profit thereby. They love to make of themselves more than they would allow another person to make of himself. They do not want equals. They want inferiors and subalterns. They disdain discourse and relish giving orders. They detest voting and love decrees.

    This is human nature. This is the reason that those who gathered at various events across America commemorated the Civil Rights Act with an air of ambivalence. They did not know where to celebrate it as a partial victory or mourn it as a partial death. For the Act is of that duality best described as one leg in and the other leg out of the coffin.

    Clearly, progress has been made because of the Act. To claim otherwise is to be obdurate. America has a Black President and Attorney General. Members of the Black elite advance in the corridors of business and halls of government. Yet, life for the Black majority has barely budged. If we remove the elite from the measurement, the plight of Black people in the years since the Civil Rights Act was passed as barely nudged forward, save for this rather cynical tradeoff. No longer are Black men in dire fear of the vigilante lynchings. Today, they have more to fear from police aggressiveness and maladministration of the criminal incarceration system. Police homicides of Black men hover at record levels. Meanwhile, young Black men are more likely to be jailed or arrested than attend university.

    The common response to these figures is that those in jail deserve to be there or they would not have been apprehended. That response is fueled more by emotion than common sense or a sense of history. People not accosted by the criminal system tend to support the system even when that system commits wholesale injustice. As long as the injustice it visits is in a different neighborhood or on a different group that injustice tends to resemble a form of justice to them. The truth of the matter is that most people convince themselves about the presence of justice in anything that advances or preserves their status in the political economy.

    Remember the vast majority of the Southern White community adhered to the law and propaganda of slavery. When slavery was abolished by force of arms, servitude’s proponents did not just sink into the ground. They sketched new notions of how society should be ordered to fit their objectives and no law could change that. The more others tried to convince them of abolition’s humanity and enlightenment, the more they convinced themselves they had been victimized by a force far more sinister than the slavery they imposed on the bondsmen.

    Unable to resurrect slavery in its fullest form, they reengineered society to where the former slave became a serf. On a daily basis, his condition was as close to that of a slave without being one. This was the fate of rural and Southern Blacks from the Civil War until passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964.

    In hindsight, the leadership of Black America made an understandable yet devastating strategic mistake during the Civil Rights Movement. They fought for civil/political but not full rights such as economic justice. Partly, this was due to the overarching American political economic culture. There is an intellectual separation of economics from politics that people in other parts of the world find startling and artificial. Just as the 1776 American Revolution would be led by an elite seeking only political independence from their colonial father, the Civil Rights Movement would be led by a Black elite seeking political equality with White society.

    Already relatively comfortable economically, the Black elite knew a wider political aperture would also open economic doors for them. That the dynamic was different for other Blacks did not overly concern them. Economic progress would sink to the lesser folks on the by and by. Because it fit their narrow interests, they suddenly became adherents to conservative trickle-down economics. Getting soft and flabby around the midriff, they betrayed their cause without venturing to tell the people how they had agrees with dominant power to shortchange them. Thus, just as the elite of the new American nation continued trading with England, the new Black elite would enhance its “economic trade” with the mainstream economy by becoming more integrated into that economy than before. This was progress but only of a sort. Not all progress is capable of sustaining itself, let alone expanding to lift others. This had the gross effect of hiving the Black leadership from the Black majority in ways unexpected and unprecedented.

    There should have been a concerted effort to link economic justice with political reform. Belatedly, Martin Luther King, Jr. tried to cure this lacuna. He was shot for acting upon this revelation. The Civil Rights Act ended the era of serfdom but it did not emasculate the power of those who created that malevolent predicament. These people merely retooled the system to steer things to a comparable outcome given new legal realities and given the evolution of the modern economy. Thus, we have the aforementioned rise in Black incarceration and unemployment. This is not historic accident. It is by design. If the Black man can no longer serve in large numbers as slave, serf or peon, better to make a prisoner of him. This will keep him so poor and disunited, hindering him from becoming a political or economic catalyst for reform.

    During slavery and serfdom, Black unemployment was not such a problem. During those years, work found the hiding Black man. In the modern era, the Black man cannot find the work because it now is hidden from him.

    The lack of economic power and stability deflates the value of political equality. It renders political equality a hollow concept not an active reality. Ironically, the group that most understood the linkage between political and economic power was the group supposedly defeated by the Civil Rights Act – racist conservative Whites. Drawing a lesson from Black exertion in the Civil Rights Era, they where the greatest but most unnoticed victors of that period. It was a period where ever group fought for its rights. Minorities and women fought mostly for political rights.

    Conservative Whites did two things. First, they united to form a conservative moment that continues to lend definition to the American political topography to this day. This movement has swung the ideological pendulum so far to the right that people claim President Obama is a liberal Democrat when the positions he espouses are more like those of moderate Republicans in the 1970’s than of liberals of that era.

    After signing the Civil Rights Act, President Johnson remarked the Democratic Party would lose the southern White vote for a generation. His prophesy seemed cataclysmic at the time. Today, it smacks of understatement. The Republican Party snatched the south from the Democrats and has continued to own that section of the nation. Second, conservative Whites have pushed a rapid corporate capitalist agenda transferring massive wealth from the poor and middle class to the elite. This has impoverished Blacks and Whites who were already on the economic margins. It has also injured the mostly White middle class. However, the conservative elite has been ingenuous in political stagecraft. They have convinced much of the White middle class that the reason for their lost ground economically was because Blacks have gained ground politically. Thus, two constituencies that should unite against the elite have been pitted against each other by that very elite.

    The two prongs of the conservative counterattack have merged recently with a vehemence borne of bottled-up racism. Many members of the elite now openly advocate a return to wealth or property ownership requirements for voting. A recent decision by the conservative Supreme Court invalidated a law that provided a ceiling on the amount of money wealthy people can contribute to political campaigns. As the rich get richer, America also moves toward a system where elections can be purchased by the highest bidder. Control of the most powerful nation is being concentrated in fewer hands.

    Against this backdrop, a tableau of high political theatre and hypocrisy went on display as American past and present presidents gathered to commemorate the anniversary of the Civil Rights Act. Former President George Bush (Bush I) was there. A congressman at the time of the law’s passage, he voted against the Act and has never expressed remorse for that tawdry bit of racism. He son (Bush II) was there. Had he been president at the time, the Act would have died on his desk. He would have vetoed it, seeing in its provisions an arsenal of nonexistent weapons of mass destruction of domestic tranquility.

    Both Presidents Clinton and Obama spoke in eloquent terms about the Act. However, their addresses had an elegiac aspect. It was as if they were speaking about a dead man not the living law. In many ways they were addressing a cadaver. With each day and year that pass with the majority of Blacks being broken under the relentless economic winepress, the political finery of Civil Rights Act loses zest. He who has no bread does not vote. And he who is bereft of any aspect of economic mobility cannot persuasively argue that he is being denied his rights any more than a boulder can complain that it is being prohibited from ambling like a river.

    Defenders of the establishment, Clinton and Obama could not venture beyond eulogizing the Act. They raised the alarm that the Act was under attack from conservatives. As such, they focused on what might be lost if the Act were eroded as if it were not already eroded in the effect. They veered away from talking about what was missing from making the Act a modern whole. Asking people to rally around and venerate the Act is like asking people to defend a partial victory from a war fought long ago. This is a losing proposition. Such a defensive stance is tantamount to retreat given the dimensions of the conservative onslaught. The Presidents should have tried to rally the people to fight that part of the war left undone. The only way to revive and defend the Civil Rights Act at this point is not to treat it as a national landmark but to treat is as half the foundation of a great edifice still awaiting its complement.

    To ensure true equality, America needs to focus on economic justice. This is particularly true at a time when wealth disparity in American is more severe than at anytime since the advent of the Great Depression ninety years ago.

    This matter may seem to be a parochial American one. It is not. The same patterns are reflected in the West’s relationship with African nations and their leadership. Generally the leadership, much like that of the Civil Rights era, is willing to compromise too quickly to accommodate western interests. They trade their nations’ long-term interests for a thin slice of transient personal legitimacy in western capitals. In this exchange, they get photo opportunities with western leaders and the people suffer. It is a bitter transaction better left unconsummated. Given the poverty that persistently stalks the continent, African leaders would better refocus on economic advancement for their nations instead of trying to win foreign accolades by forfeiting the gold they have in exchange for someone else’s worthless glitter.

    08060340825 (sms only)