Tag: America

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.

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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.

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