Tariq Ali is author of more than 20 books, including history, politics, and fiction. His most recent books are Protocols of the Elders of Sodom (2009) and The Duel: Pakistan on the Flight Path of American Power (2008). He is a regular contributor to The Guardian, New Left Review, and the London Review of Books.

British-Pakistani writer, journalist, and historian Tariq Ali spoke at Hampshire College on November 17 for the the Twelfth Annual Eqbal Ahmad Lecture. The annual Eqbal Ahmad Lecture honors the teaching, scholarship, and activism of the late Eqbal Ahmad, who was a longtime Hampshire College professor.

I couldn't have said it better.  From "Democracy Now!," 09 October 2009, Juan Gonzalez, Naomi Klein, and Tariq Ali comment on Obama's Peace Prize: 

http://play.rbn.com/?url=demnow/demnow/demand/2009/oct/video/dnB20091009a.rm&proto=rtsp&start=00:09:35

The volume on this video is a bit low, so I've copied a transcript below which you might find easier to comprehend.  Also, immediately below, I've listed a few links to the contributors of this segment...

Very well-sourced essay on how special interests continue to legislate in Washington, despite the promises of President Obama and his Party...

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http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2009/09/17/kroll/index.html?source=rss&aim=/news/feature

Lobbyists still run Washington

It was supposed to change when Obama took office.
But D.C.'s influence machine is going strong.
Just ask Max Baucus

By Andy Kroll
Editor's note: This article has also appeared on TomDispatch.com.

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Sep. 17, 2009 |

At the end of this summer of discontent, of death panels and unplugging poor Grandma, of Birthers and astroturfers and rifle-toting picketers, the halcyon early days of the Obama administration feel increasingly like hazy, gilt-edged memories. The president's sprawling legislative agenda -- a healthcare overhaul, financial regulation reform, slashing wasteful military spending, and climate change legislation legislation -- is slowly grinding its way through the halls of Congress. Barack Obama's sheen, his administration's unflagging confidence, and all the bipartisan, post-racial aspirations have been replaced by the hard realities of Washington politicking. And with the media's lens more tightly focused than ever on Washington's every move and utterance 24/7, anything said a few months back feels like a lifetime ago.

One particular statement from distant April, however, bears revisiting. The president's chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, then grasped not only the magnitude of what was being undertaken, but the raft of entrenched interests lining up in opposition. As he told the New York Times:

We're not taking on a fight; we're taking on a multiple-front fight because we've taken on a series of entrenched interests across the waterfront -- from education to health care, and the defense industry, and the lobbying industry as a whole … There will be a scorecard at the end of which ones we won and which ones we didn't, but every one of those policy challenges have been initiated by us.

Never short on chutzpah, Emanuel made it clear: it was Us vs. Them in a "multiple-front fight." A "scorecard at the end" would determine winners and losers. As a candidate on the campaign trail, Obama himself regularly decried the undue influence of moneyed interests and lobbyists. Announcing his candidacy on Feb. 10, 2007, for instance, he declared it "time to turn the page" on the "cynics, and the lobbyists, and the special interests who've turned our government into a game only they can afford to play." And on Jan. 21, 2009, the very day he came into office, Obama issued one of his first executive orders aiming to limit the influence of lobbyists in the new administration. He planned to "close the revolving door that lets lobbyists come into government freely, and lets them use their time in public service as a way to promote their own interests over the interests of the American people when they leave."

The new White House stood confident in those early months that it could take on "K Street" -- a street in the capital notorious for the density of its lobbying firms as well as Washington shorthand for their growing ranks. Tallied up today, however, the administration's seven-month scorecard tells a different story. Just as sweeping as the administration's packed domestic agenda has been the sheer force with which the lobbying industry and its clients have fought back, blocking, maligning or undermining its progress. In a Washington version of Newton's third law, the president's actions and those of his allies in Congress have elicited an equal and opposite reaction from opponents -- inside the Beltway and beyond it.

Spending eye-popping sums of money, deploying armies of lobbyists, dispatching grass-roots foot soldiers as agents of disruption, the special interests have fought fiercely to derail the White House reform agenda. It's now apparent that Obama and his advisors, including Rahm Emanuel, underestimated their strength. Even if Congress were to move in all four areas targeted for reform, the concessions already made, the softening of prospective regulations and restrictions, would likely signal a series of genuine victories for those special interests.

What does it mean when an intelligent, ambitious and well-liked president, who broke through one of the nation's most glaring racial barriers and enjoys majorities in both houses of Congress, can't overcome the deeply rooted interests that now seem thoroughly embedded in the American political system? A look at the unprecedented opposition to Obama's plans reveals why Rahm Emanuel might want to pocket that scorecard.

An opposition that knows no limit

The sheer presence of lobbyists cannot be underestimated. Case in point: the legislative battle over healthcare reform. As of mid-August, there were six lobbyists trying to influence healthcare legislation for every single member of the House and Senate, Bloomberg News reported.

That's 3,300 lobbyists working on a single issue (three times the number of defense lobbyists) with nearly three new lobbyists joining the fray each day. So far this year, $263 million (or more than $1 million a day) has been shelled out just for lobbying health-related issues, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. Industry players have waged war to sway public opinion, spending $75 million on TV ads. Lawmakers up for election in 2010 have already seen $23 million flow into their nascent campaign coffers.

And the biggest spenders in healthcare lobbying aren't doling out their largesse to just anyone. Take Sen. Max Baucus, D-Mont., the chairman of the influential Senate Finance Committee, leader of the bipartisan "Gang of Six" spearheading the Finance Committee's healthcare negotiations, and architect of that committee's much anticipated healthcare legislation. He's also one of the top five recipients of health industry-related money in Congress, pocketing $2.9 million in his career. For his 2008 reelection campaign, the unassuming Baucus took in $1.2 million from health industries, $690,050 of which came from health-related political action committees, the most for any Washington politician. Not that the six-term senator needed it: He steamrolled his opponent, an 85-year-old serial also-ran who'd lost 14 elections in 44 years and campaigned on a platform to turn the U.S. into a parliamentary system, by 48 percentage points.

Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, the ranking Republican member of the Finance Committee, not surprisingly ranks among the top recipients of health-related money as well. He's received $2.1 million from health industry players. And yet another Senate Finance Committee member and Gang of Sixer, Sen. Kent ConradD-N.D., has likewise enjoyed a steady flow of donations to his political action committee from lobbyists working for the pharmaceutical and health-insurance industries.

Loosening up lawmakers with lobbying and campaign donations is one way in the door; having worked for them doesn't hurt, either. According to the Sunlight Foundation, five former Baucus staffers -- two of whom are former chiefs of staff -- now lobby or work for major players in the healthcare debate, including the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (which outright opposes the House's promising healthcare legislation that includes a public option) and drug makers Wyeth, Merck and AstraZeneca. Similarly, all but one of the Finance Committee's 10 Republican members have ties to former staffers now lobbying for healthcare-related companies and organizations.

Perhaps, then, it's not so surprising to learn that none of the Big 3 -- Baucus, Grassley or Conrad -- backs a true public option in healthcare legislation, arguably the only way to keep insurers honest, ensure competition, and lower costs. Before the August recess, Democrats had hoped Grassley might come on board with healthcare legislation, giving the Obama administration the bipartisan imprimatur it sought. Grassley had other ideas, and spent his recess propagating the myth that the House was trying to "pull the plug on Grandma." He was even more forthright in a fundraising letter, declaring, "I am and always have been opposed to the Obama Administration's plans to nationalize health care. Period."

Baucus and Conrad, meanwhile, back a nonprofit co-op model, a pseudo-public option that, while successful in a handful of settings nationwide, would, most experts believe, likely fail dismally in any competition with heavyweight private health insurers. Indeed, an early outline of Baucus's long-awaited legislation lists Elizabeth Fowler, the senator's chief health aide, as the apparent author; Fowler, it turns out, formerly worked as an executive for Wellpoint, a big-time health insurer that -- you guessed it -- opposes a true public option.

Nor has the White House withstood the pressure of the deep-pocketed health industries. Before the August congressional recess, Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius broke new ground, declaring that a public option was "not the essential element" of a healthcare overhaul. By then, the Obama administration had already made its "secret," backroom deal with top drug company representatives. In exchange for early support for its reform agenda, the White House agreed to limit how much (via drug price negotiations and industry rebates) Big Pharma would have to decrease the cost of its products, now borne by taxpayers, to $80 billion over 10 years. The deal was a coup -- for the drug makers. After all, the total sales of the top five U.S. pharmaceutical companies alone totaled almost $660 billion in the past half decade, more than eight times the agreed-upon cost savings.

Healthcare may be the most striking example of what's been going on in Obama-era Washington, but this sort of lobbying onslaught actually extends to Obama's whole agenda. Almost 2,400 lobbyists are, for instance, working on financial industry-related issues like the White House's proposed financial-regulation and consumer-protection reforms. Influential players, among them the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and Business Roundtable, have already spent a staggering $222 million on lobbying in just the first half of 2009. The Chamber of Commerce, in particular, ranks first this year in finance-related lobbying (total spending: $26.2 million; total number of lobbyists employed: 167). A senior director for the Chamber of Commerce, which vehemently opposes a White House-proposed Consumer Financial Protection Agency that would consolidate authority over credit cards, mortgages, loans and other consumer products into one centralized regulator, pulled no punches in a comment offered to Reuters: "We are working to kill the bill."

In fact, Wall Street's lobbying battle against increased financial regulation has been so powerful and smothering that, one year after the financial crisis began, plenty of experts already foresee future crises like the one in our not-so-distant past. Of the mega banks on Wall Street, MIT professor and former International Monetary Fund chief economist Simon Johnson says, "They will run up big risks, they will fail again, they will hit us for a big check."

On the Waxman-Markey climate bill, the first in U.S. history to tackle global warming, opponents have thrown everything but the classic kitchen sink at lawmakers to persuade them to drop their support. One of the heaviest hitters, the American Coalition for Clean Coal Energy (ACCCE), an umbrella advocacy group representing mining, coal, manufacturers and other energy interests, has spent nearly $12 million since 2008 lobbying against climate change efforts. But the 2,800 lobbyists weighing in on the Waxman-Markey bill in Washington -- more than 75 percent representing industry interests -- are only the tip of a rapidly melting iceberg.

The American Energy Alliance, headed by oil lobbyist Thomas Pyle, has hit the road with its "American Energy Express" bus tour visiting county fairs, horse shows and baseball games in coal-friendly Midwestern and Appalachian states, claiming that Waxman-Markey is actually a national energy tax that would eliminate jobs. The ACCCE has also hired a firm specializing in astroturfing -- that is, in creating or funding phony grass-roots organizations or networks -- to put together "America's Power Army," a 225,000-strong volunteer network to spread misinformation at the town-hall meetings of congressional representatives and other forums.

The anti-Waxman-Markey warfare reached a new low when one sleazy D.C. lobbying firm, showing the lengths to which opponents will go, fabricated letters opposing the bill and sent them to members of Congress. A congressional investigation found that Bonner and Associates, a specialist in grass-roots/astroturf campaigns working for ACCCE, forged more than a dozen separate letters and sent them to Rep. Tom Perriello, D-Va., and several other congressmen. The purported authors of the phony letters ranged from an American veterans' organization and the American Association of University Women to a Hispanic advocacy group, Creciendo Juntos, and the NAACP. But their message was the same: Fight Waxman-Markey, it will cost us jobs.

The F-22's false promise

In April, Defense Secretary Robert Gates signaled the Obama administration's new philosophy on military spending by announcing an array of notable budget cuts intended to curtail or eliminate some of the unsuccessful or unnecessary weapons systems that litter the Pentagon's bloated budget and reflect the previous administration's military excesses. "We must reform how and what we buy," Gates explained, "meaning a fundamental overhaul of our approach to procurement, acquisition and contracting."

In Gates' crosshairs were projects like the F-22 Raptor jet fighter, a Cold War relic that's run wildly over-budget and never flown a mission in Iraq or Afghanistan; the VH-71 presidential helicopter, which Obama specifically insisted he didn't want or need; the C-17, a transport plane Gates said the country already had enough of; and the Army's lackluster Future Combat Systems modernization program, the brainchild of former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. After years of excessive military spending, Gates' plan to trim these wasteful projects (though, sadly, not the defense budget in toto) potentially presented a stark change of fortune to defense contractors and corporations accustomed to the beneficence of Washington's lawmakers.

In response, the defense industry and its lobbyists mobilized. Six months later, as new defense legislation staggers through Congress, just north of 1,000 defense-related lobbyists are hard at work. This year $62 million has been spent on Pentagon lobbying efforts. In particular, Lockheed Martin, the F-22's main manufacturer, has sunk almost $7 million into lobbying in 2009, in part through a campaign targeting lawmakers with F-22 manufacturing sites in their states, while extolling the number of jobs an F-22 program would create. Lockheed even launched a faux-grass roots Web site, PreserveRaptorJobs.com, to drum up public support for the plane. (It has since been taken down.)

Obama, however, stood firm. Even after House lawmakers tried to restore F-22 funding, the president insisted that he'd veto any bill with more of the planes in it. This was made crystal clear in a "Statement of Administration Policy" (SAP) on the House defense appropriations bill. The plane's loyal supporters like Sen. Saxby Chambliss, R-Ga., and Rep. John Murtha, D-Pa., got the message and left the F-22 on the cutting-room floor.

But the question remains: How pyrrhic was the administration's F-22 "victory"? Gates has, as a start, agreed to order four more of the useless F-22s at a cost of $351 million a pop -- they are included in the 2009 supplemental defense bill -- and he plans to more than double the future run of F-35 Joint Strike Fighters, a cumbersome, accident-prone, prohibitively expensive plane like the F-22. It will surprise no one that the F-35 is also made by Lockheed -- and it is easy to imagine that the F-35 commitment could, in fact, have been a corporate trade-off for the lost F-22, which Lockheed still hopes to sell abroad with the Senate's help.

And what about those other projects eyed by Gates: the VH-71 helicopter or the C-17 transport? The Obama administration, by all evidence, seems to be wilting in its defense of their termination. (That the second most powerful Pentagon official, William Lynn, is a former lobbyist for defense contractor Raytheon undoubtedly doesn't help.) The same SAP with the F-22 veto is noticeably softer on the VH-71, saying only that "the President's senior advisors would recommend that he veto the bill," but stopping short of insisting that the helicopter must go. As for the C-17, any kind of administration recommendation is MIA in the SAP.

"Gates and Obama got tough on the F-22, and in Congress the porkers backed off, and Murtha even took the F-22s he had in his bill out," Winslow Wheeler, director of the Straus Military Reform Project at the Center for Defense Information and a former Capitol Hill staffer for three decades, told TomDispatch. "But in the same bill, Murtha also packed in more C-17s, more presidential helicopters, more F-35 engines, challenging Gates and Obama. They need to understand that they need to put up a fight."

If not Obama, then who?

Rahm Emanuel knew back in April that the administration was entering the ring, but how ready have Obama and his team been to duke it out on all fronts? On paper, Obama has appeared ready enough. In his moving address to Congress last week, for instance, he not only emphasized the need for a public option in healthcare reform, but directly debunked the "bogus claims" being used to attack his healthcare reform vision.

His actions, though, have been less reassuring. While committing his administration to the Afghan war, the president has appeared unwilling to fight defense boondoggles down the line, as he did in the case of the F-22, and he's been less than forceful in defending sorely needed financial reforms -- like those for the $592 billion over-the-counter derivatives market -- in the face of Wall Street's lobbying clout.

Once again, this isn't entirely surprising: For all the talk of the flood of small, individual donations to Obama's historic 2008 election campaign, its coffers overflowed with money from financial powerhouses like Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan Chase and corporations like General Electric, Google and Microsoft. According to the Center for Responsive Politics, Obama still ranks near the top among all recipients when it comes to contributions from the health, defense, financial and energy industries.

The same goes for Obama's staff. In an interview with Politico.com, Bill Moyers put it vividly. "I think Rahm Emanuel, who is a clever politician, understands that the money for Obama's reelection would come primarily from the health industry, the drug industry and Wall Street, and so he is a corporate Democrat who is destined, determined that there would be something in this legislation," Moyers asserted, that will appease those powerful interests.

If the president's sprawling agenda has revealed anything, it's the extent to which private industries and their foot soldiers on K Street and Capitol Hill influence -- and in some cases dictate -- American policymaking. Right now, about 12,500 federally registered lobbyists make their trade in Washington, but believe it or not, they're only a small slice of the pie. James Thurber, director of the Center for Congressional and Presidential Studies at American University, tells TomDispatch that the number of people in the political advocacy business who aren't registered -- the astroturfers, public relations firms, and strategy groups, among others -- number anywhere from 90,000 to 120,000. Conservatively speaking, that adds up to 168 influence peddlers for every member of Congress.

Now you know the players. The teams, uneven as they may be, are on the field. So take out that scorecard. Beating the Washington influence machine, flush with cash, amply staffed and relentless in its mission, will be no small feat for Obama's team. And if they fail, then it will be possible to say that no matter who's voted in, it's the influence machine that rules Washington.

-- By Andy Kroll

Copyright ©2009 Salon Media Group, Inc
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This article by Joe Conason in Salon.com this week pretty much sums-up my sentiments:

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http://www.salon.com/opinion/feature/2009/09/04/conason/index.html?source=rss&aim=/opinion/feature

Healthcare didn't have to go this way

Obama gave away the store on this crucial issue. It's time to take it back

By Joe Conason

Sep. 04, 2009 |

Achieving humane and affordable healthcare in America was never going to be easy, even with an audacious new president and large majorities in both houses of Congress. Compromise between the Democratic Party’s diverse representatives -- let alone with the tiny handful of Republicans who actually care about the need for reform -- was always inevitable. And when the moment for compromise arrived, the result was certain to disappoint many of the president’s most ardent voters, who cherished his campaign’s promises of change. But the mundane grind of making legislation need not have been quite as painful as it is today, when progressives feel betrayed, and Democrats feel deflated. 

The essence of President Obama’s problem can be found in an anonymous quote, attributed to a White House official, that appeared on the front page of the New York Times last Wednesday. “It’s so important to get a deal,” confided the unnamed aide, that the president “will do almost anything it takes to get one.” Such desperate confessions of politics as usual, which have appeared in dozens of such remarks in the press over the past several months, not only serve the president poorly but damage the fresh brand that he brought to Washington after his triumphant election last year. They are the residue of an ill-conceived strategy that has left Obama politically vulnerable, attenuated his connection with loyal progressives, and blurred his most important message. 

That message was Obama himself, of course -- meaning what he represented and what he meant to accomplish. From the outset of the 2008 campaign, the rationale for his long-shot candidacy was that he stood firmly for a set of principles in policy and governance and against political business as usual, as well as a style of politics that emphasized citizen activism. He would drive the corporate lobbyists away from Capitol Hill, the White House and the federal agencies. He would insist on transparency and integrity in conducting the people’s business. Above all, he would pursue the public interest forthrightly rather than inch forward triangularly and incrementally. 

Perhaps none of these happy promises was likely to be fulfilled, and perhaps that was something Obama and his campaign aides always understood. But as the new White House came to terms with the realities of Washington, they seem to have thrown off their original images and ideals insouciantly -- as if unburdening themselves of unfashionable baggage that embarrassed them in the big city. 

Nowhere has this fundamental mistake been more visible than in the effort to reform healthcare. From more than six decades of struggle over the question of universal coverage and cost control, the Obama team must have known that they would face enormous opposition. They should also have known, from the ugly mood of the Republican campaign during the final weeks of the election and the partisan history of the past 15 years, that chances for bipartisan agreement were minimal. And they ought to have realized that the energy of the progressive movement, expressed in their own campaign, could become their most formidable weapon in that battle. 

That was the insight attributed to FDR in a famous anecdote. When progressive leaders approached him with a wish list of reform programs and liberal legislation, he nodded. "I agree with you, I want to do it. Now make me do it." Although Roosevelt biographers consider that story apocryphal, it expresses a truth of political history that remained salient from the labor organizing of the Depression through the civil rights, antiwar, feminist and environmental movements. For a president who wants reform and change, citizen agitation is an important instrument of power, not an obstacle to deal making. 

But this president surrendered that powerful weapon when he chose aides who prefer lobbyists to activists and adopted a strategy that ranks bipartisan agreement above policy substance. The telltale remark came from still another anonymous aide who boasted recently that the White House would welcome a "confrontation" with Democratic liberals over healthcare because it would "show he is willing to stare down his own party to get things done." 

No doubt this willingness to further divide Democrats and punish liberals is pleasing to Beltway pundits. It arises from the same instinct that welcomed a parade of lobbyists into the White House and that fawned over Republican senators and Blue Dog representatives, even as they conspired to wreck reform. Meanwhile, the political environment was suffused with right-wing messages about the president and his program, while the White House failed to promote or explain its plan. (No great sophistication is required to determine who, aside from the president himself, bears the greatest blame for these tactical and strategic errors.) 

While this depressing scenario may seem preordained, especially in the conventional idiocy of Washington politics, there were other possibilities, had Obama remained true to his promise and platform. Instead of seeking to silence supporters of a single-payer, Medicare-for-all plan, for example, the Obama team could have encouraged those organizations to create pressure from below. Then the public option might have become part of the ultimate deal, rather than an ideal that gets traded away. All the whispered White House waffling over the public option -- which remains on Obama’s own Web site as a central feature of his reform plan -- has only made him appear weak, indecisive and unreliable. 

Can he regain the initiative and restore his brand when he addresses a joint session of Congress next week? Only if he returns to the principles enunciated in his campaign and his inaugural address. He must tell the people and their representatives again that it is time to put away childish things. He must explain why it is imperative to bring our healthcare system into the 21st century, like every developed nation that accomplished this fundamental task long ago. He must stand fast for universal coverage. 

And he must vow that he will do whatever must be done to achieve that promise -- rather than sell off whatever he can, including the security of millions of families, simply to pass any bill.

-- By Joe Conason

Copyright ©2009 Salon Media Group, Inc
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Here's a piece of criticism posted this week on salon.com by Michael Lind.  Although it presupposes that Obama actually does want to do good, I'm not convinced that he does.  That said, Lind's short essay makes a lot of sense.  As a person who read Machiavelli's "The Prince" while still in high school, it saddens me that apparently our ostensibly intellectual President has not-- or at the very least, never really learned its lessons on leadership.

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http://www.salon.com/opinion/feature/2009/08/18/machiavelli/index.html?source=rss&aim=/opinion/feature

Obama, you're no Machiavelli

The president should have heeded the Florentine's advice before he embarked on healthcare reform

By Michael Lind

Aug. 18, 2009 |

To judge from his faltering campaign for healthcare reform, President Obama, well-read as he is, appears to have neglected to read Machiavelli. If he had done so, the American president would have learned this from the Florentine statesman and philosopher in "The Prince":

"It must be considered that there is nothing more difficult to carry out, nor more doubtful of success, nor more dangerous to handle, than to initiate a new order of things. For the reformer has enemies in all those who profit by the old order, and only lukewarm defenders in all those who would profit by the new order, this lukewarmness arising partly from fear of their adversaries, who have the laws in their favor; and partly from the incredulity of mankind, who do not truly believe in anything new until they have had actual experience of it. Thus it arises that on every opportunity for attacking the reformer, his opponents do so with the zeal of partisans, the others only defend him half-heartedly, so that between them he runs great danger."

"For the reformer has enemies in all those who profit by the old order ..." Machiavelli's observation is particularly apt in the case of healthcare. The American healthcare system costs nearly twice as much as the average among similar industrial democracies, and yet overall it does not provide better care. American doctors make more money than doctors in similar societies; American drug companies gouge American consumers, in order to make up money lost in other countries where governments control drug prices; and private insurance and hospital and doctors' office bureaucracies consume other resources. For this very reason, the groups that contribute to the problem -- the medical profession, the pharmaceutical industry and the private insurance industry -- have every incentive to spend enormous sums to bribe or intimidate politicians and mislead the public in order to continue extracting their even more enormous rents from their fellow Americans.

" ... and only lukewarm defenders in all those who would profit by the new order ..." Here, too, Machiavelli's observations could not be more apposite. The Obama administration and the Democratic majority in Congress claim that most Americans who are now covered by employer-provided health insurance would be better off in the long run as a result of Democratic reforms. Universal coverage must come first, and cost reductions can come later. The political problem arises from the fact that only a minority of people in the U.S. lack employer health insurance. As in the 1990s, the majority of insured Americans are more concerned about rising deductibles than about universal coverage. However, cost reductions as a result of measures like comparing effective treatments are likely to manifest themselves only in the long run, rather than in the near future. The insured majority are thus being asked to support a reform that will chiefly benefit the non-insured minority in the short run, in the hope that maybe in the long run their own costs will go down -- maybe. Small wonder that not only many Democratic voters but their elected Democratic representatives have been "lukewarm" at best in supporting reform.

"... this lukewarmness arising partly from fear of their adversaries, who have the laws in their favor ... " Machiavelli was talking about revolutions from below or above. In the case of the contemporary U.S., his quote should be amended to read "this lukewarmness arising partly from fear of their adversaries, who have the law-makers in their favor ... " The fight over healthcare reform dramatically illustrates the extent to which the American political system has been colonized by producer lobbies, in healthcare and other industries. This phenomenon is neither new nor unique to the U.S. In every society, consumers of goods and services outnumber producers. But the vast constituency of consumers tends to be disorganized and inattentive, while producers, although numerically far fewer, are focused and mobilized. Because politicians respond to intensity and money and not just electoral numbers, the doctors, drug companies and insurance companies may not have the laws in their favor, but thanks to their successful lobbying they have many lawmakers in their favor.

" ... and partly from the incredulity of mankind, who do not truly believe in anything new until they have had actual experience of it." Machiavelli's second kind of "lukewarmness" is also evident in the debate over healthcare. The Republicans defeated the Clinton healthcare reform by making the case that, as bad as American healthcare might be now, the alternative might be even worse. That strategy worked once before; why not again? Particularly in the midst of the greatest economic downturn since the Depression, people are risk-averse when it comes to the trade-off between risking benefits that exist and going for possible gains. In the words of the children's rhyme by Hilaire Belloc, "It's always best to cling to Nurse/ For fear of finding something worse." 

In addition to exploiting one kind of "incredulity" -- disbelief that change will be better -- many conservatives shamelessly have exploited the incredulity and ignorance of poorly informed voters, who are being told that the Democratic plan will lead to euthanasia for the elderly and the disabled. It is no defense of these vile tactics to observe that the Democrats have made themselves vulnerable to wild conspiracy theories by not being completely candid about healthcare.

The president and the congressional Democrats have claimed that we can cover every American, allow people who want to keep their employer-provided insurance to do so, not raise taxes on the vast majority of Americans, not ration healthcare and cut costs. This cannot possibly be true. According to the CBO, the plan in its present form would cost more than a trillion dollars over a decade. An extra hundred billion a year for real healthcare reform could be a bargain, but let's not pretend that any significant reform can be revenue-neutral.

Progressive supporters of a public option are being less than candid when they claim that a public plan will not put private insurance out of business -- when in fact their not-so-secret hope is that over time the public plan will grow into universal single-payer by putting private insurance out of business. If not, why is the left so supportive of the public plan? A supporter of single-payer, I have no problem with the goal, but instead of trying to sneak the seed of single-payer in by stealth, proponents ought to make the case on its merits. Crude pseudo-Machiavellianism based on misdirection is likely to backfire. (In "The Prince," Machiavelli -- a small-r republican who preferred the many to the elites -- says that the best leaders are those whose reputations for virtue and honesty are actually justified.)

In short, by claiming all gain and no pain -- no rationing of any kind, no middle-class tax increases, no limits on doctor choice, no price controls, no seed of single-payer -- the Democrats have created an LBJ-like "credibility gap." Just as the discrepancy between the Johnson administration's pretext for escalation in Vietnam and its actual strategic motives created a gap that was quickly filled by conspiracy theories, so the gap between the promises of the Democrats and the reality of hard trade-offs has opened a door to false and revolting conspiracy theories, like Sarah Palin's claim that under the Democratic plan her Down syndrome child might have been euthanized.

If Machiavelli were around today, he would not give the Obama administration and the Democratic Congress high marks for Machiavellianism. Indeed, the wily Florentine probably would have been stunned by the fact that the Obama administration and the Democratic congressional leadership announced a schedule for passing the Democratic healthcare plan before there was a Democratic healthcare plan. The Renaissance equivalent would have been an agreement by Florentine conspirators to set a date certain for overthrowing the Medici tyrants, and deciding only later how to do it and whom to include. Right now the evolving Democratic healthcare bill consists of different versions that are not understood either by most defenders or most opponents. Democrats insist that we need to hurry up and pass whatever-it-is, while Republicans are against whatever-it-is, sight unseen.

But while he might have been surprised by the willingness of the Obama administration to campaign for a plan that is not even finished, Machiavelli would not have been surprised that healthcare reformers for the second time in a generation have underestimated the difficulty of reform. The Democrats must hope that Machiavelli's words in "The Prince" are not an epitaph for the latest attempt to provide universal healthcare: "Thus it arises that on every opportunity for attacking the reformer, his opponents do so with the zeal of partisans, the others only defend him half-heartedly, so that between them he runs great danger." 

-- By Michael Lind

Copyright ©2009 Salon Media Group, Inc.
>>

With President Obama's decisions this week to reverse himself on secret Military Tribunals…

… He promised to restore "the rule of law" by disbanding these abominable kangaroo courts, and now he says his administration supports secret Military Tribunals and will continue to try so-called enemy-combatants and alleged terrorists through them…

… And his 180º turn-around on the torture photos…

… He promised transparency and release of the photos, now he says letting the public see the abuses these photos document in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Guantanamo would put American lives in jeopardy*…

… Obama becomes part of the coverup. 

 

Meet the new boss. 
Same as the old boss.

So, am I disappointed in Obama yet.

Heck no!  You can't be disappointed if you get exactly what you expected.

*Note that publication of these photos not only would have put the lie to the "just a few bad apples" line we've been inundated with these last five years, but would have also tarnished the appearance of Obama's choice to lead all military operations in Afghanistan, General Stanley McChrystal, under whose command the systemic-policy of abuses in the photos occurred (see http://stan584.vox.com/library/post/this-modern-world-how-do-the-republicans-do-it-by-tom-tomorrow.html).

But first, my commentary...

Why/How is it that all you Obama-voters didn't anticipate his so-called flip-flops, all his (ridiculously rationalized as) "disappointments," his bad nominations for cabinet-level and deputy-level positions, the unnecessary compromises he made to the economic stimulus package, his back-pedaling on torture, and on and on...

... Now, there's all this hand-wringing over Obama's "confusing" refusal to even consider single-payer healthcare.  You ask yourselves what's his strategy here, sandbagging universal healthcare, when he used to support it.  After all, back in 2003, didn't Obama say, "... [I'm] a proponent of a single-payer universal healthcare program?"¹  And then, in that same speech, didn't Obama declare that the only thing standing between Americans and universal healthcare was that "... first we have to take back the White House, we have to take back the Senate, and we have to take back the House."¹  Last time I looked, Obama-- a Democrat -- was sitting in the White House, Harry Reid-- a Democrat -- was presiding over a filibuster-proof Senate majority, and Nancy Pelosi-- a Democrat --was Speaker of the House. 

Hmmm.  I think I might have mentioned something about this BEFORE the election last November.

Oh, yeh, and then there's that notorious chief of assassins and advocate administrator of torture whom President Obama has just placed in Command of all US and NATO Operations in Afghanistan:  General Stanley McChrystal.  In ousting former Commander, Gen. David McKiernan, and replacing him with McChrystal, Obama has--  in the words of Slate columnist, Fred Kaplan --"... [signaled] a dramatic shift in US strategy for the war in Afghanistan.  And it means that the war is now, unequivocally, 'Obama's War.'"  Besides referring back to the article I've linked-to above, do check out James Petras' article in AlterNet, "Cheney's Chief Assassin is Now Obama's Commander in Afghanistan."

And now, the cartoon...

How do the Republicans do it?
by Tom Tomorrow

¹ Here's the full quote: 

"I happen to be a proponent of a single payer universal health care program...I see no reason why the United States of America, the wealthiest country in the history of the world, spending 14 percent of its Gross National Product on health care cannot provide basic health insurance to everybody. And that's what Jim is talking about when he says everybody in, nobody out. A single payer health care plan, a universal health care plan. And that's what I'd like to see. But as all of you know, we may not get there immediately. Because first we have to take back the White House, we have to take back the Senate, and we have to take back the House."

Read David Sirota's hand-wringing piece at:  http://www.alternet.org/healthwellness/139959/obama_for_single-payer_before_he_was_against_it./

I only wish I'd written these two editorials.  The first is by Glen Ford at Black Agenda Report.  The second is from Paul Krugman at The New York Times (thank you, Baaaaaaaaaaaaaabara for the heads-up on this one):

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Black Agenda Report

http://www.blackagendareport.com

Wednesday, 04 February 2009

Obama's Crusade to Save the Banksters

by BAR executive editor Glen Ford

http://www.blackagendareport.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=1013&Itemid=1

Much of Black America has been politically neutered, incapable of even imagining a situation in which they would make demands of Barack Obama - "whom many believe is literally a God-send." In any case, the president's attentions are focused on his primary mission: to save the core institutions of the financial capitalist class at the unlimited expense of the real economy and its dependents - the rest of us." The sacrifice will be for nothing. "In the process of attempting to breathe life into the bankster zombies, Obama and his bipartisan buddies will exhaust the capacity of the federal government to create money out of nothing."

The quickening spiral of economic decline finds Black America utterly without political or psychological defenses - damn near helpless, and pitifully so. Although it is common to hear Blacks half-joke that "white folks" waited until the system was in meltdown to hand over the White House keys to a "brother," it is Barack Obama who has pulled off history's biggest trick on African Americans. Obama caused Black America to drop its primary defense - a deep and abiding suspicion of the intentions of Power - at precisely the historical juncture when suspicion is most needed. As Constitutional power flowed into Obama's person on January 20, African Americans in their forty millions willed themselves to believe they had "overcome" - when, in reality, they had been overcome by the delusion that the new president did not represent the Power that was never to be trusted, always to be resisted. No, he was a walking, talking treasure to be protected by the group as a whole, the repository of ancient Black hopes and the living proof of change.

Most literate Black people are familiar with Frederick Douglass's maxim, "Power concedes nothing without a demand." But Black Obamites cannot conceive of making demands on "their" president, whom many believe is literally a God-send. Who would even think to make demands of an emissary from Jesus? Religion, that vaunted "rock" of Black society, once again knocks us senseless.

Shorn of defenses and politically neutered, Blacks become befuddled spectators to Obama's version of economic "recovery" - a desperate effort to resurrect from near-death the investment bankster class that ultimately made like Richard Pryor and, driven by its accumulated contradictions, set itself on fire. Obama must also fulfill his obligations to American Empire, which sustained through threat and force of arms the artificial, unjust U.S. global advantages that allowed the Wall Street banksters to believe they could forever feast on the world's sweat and resources while producing nothing themselves.

Between the multi-trillion dollar pincers of an addicted military and the limitless cost of detoxifying a universe of derivative, fictional assets, the real economy and those that depend on it will be squeezed beyond endurance.

Obama's mission is truly impossible: to bring back from the dead the mighty investment banks that were until lately the arbiters of economic development in the United States. As Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin proclaimed at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, "[T]oday, the pride of Wall Street - the investment banks - have practically stopped existing." The composition of Obama's economic team, which is suited only to the warped world of investment banking, shows the new president is determined to raise the dead. But even if such a resurrection were desirable, it cannot be done. By the end of 2007, the banksters had created $596 trillion in over-the-counter derivatives - 12 times the value of the gross planetary product of Earth. Bailout is a nonsensical proposition. What is occurring is a desperate effort to save the core institutions of the financial capitalist class at the unlimited expense of the real economy and its dependents - the rest of us.

It is logical, therefore, that the misdirected "recovery" of the real economy is by design rudderless, lacking any guiding federal institutional structure or general plan for economic development, despite unprecedented projected spending. The Obama team's overarching goal, like the Bush team before it, is to recreate the primacy of investment bankers in guiding economic development - not to replace them with governmental mechanisms. Since the investment banksters "have practically stopped existing," the real economy's recovery effort will ultimately degenerate into a free-for-all grab fest amidst dwindling spoils.

In the process of attempting to breathe life into the bankster zombies, Obama and his bipartisan buddies will exhaust the capacity of the federal government to make money out of nothing. At that point, it will be too late to pay for band-aid "reforms" to mend a gravely wounded economy and society. The self-immolation of the banksters, and the futile attempt to save them, will have destroyed the larger system.

Black folks will be powerless to affect the trajectory of disaster, so long as the Obama delusion holds sway. In any case, from its conception the Obama plan contained no transformational elements that might have narrowed the institutional gaps between Blacks and whites, nothing that would alter the two-to-one ratio of Black unemployment to white joblessness, or shrink the Black Prison Gulag, or bring Blacks closer to wealth parity with whites. African American economic standing relative to whites is likely to slip further, given the fragility of the Black middle class.

Obama will preside over a society that is poorer, less fair, and likely to be engulfed in war, as the U.S. military tries to retain America's unjust advantages in the absence of any recovery.

The debacle will be exceedingly painful for Obama, who entered office with the apparent idea of creating a 21^st Century "Era of Good Feeling," much like the harmony that was said to reign over (the white sectors of) the nation from around 1815 to 1824. Back then, with the collapse of the Federalists, American politics was dominated by the Republican-Democrat Party. President James Monroe won the White House in 1820 with only one electoral vote against him - the kind of bi- or non-partisan heaven (except for slaves and Indians) that Obama craves, and attempts to recreate in his own small way by populating his cabinet and advisory ranks with Republicans.

Those wishful souls that convinced themselves Obama would become the vessel in which to pour progressive ideas and programs in time of economic crisis, did not give him credit for having notions of his own - ideas that would sacrifice the people for the benefit of the banksters. Obama pursues his bankster rescue crusade in plain sight, yet white "progressive" supporters insist he's up to something else, and Black Obamites avow he's doing the work of God.

Not quite. More like the work of Goldman Sachs, in hopes it will rise again.

BAR executive editor Glen Ford can be contacted at Glen.Ford@BlackAgendaReport.com  This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it
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February 9, 2009

The Destructive Center

What do you call someone who eliminates hundreds of thousands of American jobs, deprives millions of adequate health care and nutrition, undermines schools, but offers a $15,000 bonus to affluent people who flip their houses?

A proud centrist. For that is what the senators who ended up calling the tune on the stimulus bill just accomplished.

Even if the original Obama plan — around $800 billion in stimulus, with a substantial fraction of that total given over to ineffective tax cuts — had been enacted, it wouldn’t have been enough to fill the looming hole in the U.S. economy, which the Congressional Budget Office estimates will amount to $2.9 trillion over the next three years.

Yet the centrists did their best to make the plan weaker and worse.

One of the best features of the original plan was aid to cash-strapped state governments, which would have provided a quick boost to the economy while preserving essential services. But the centrists insisted on a $40 billion cut in that spending.

The original plan also included badly needed spending on school construction; $16 billion of that spending was cut. It included aid to the unemployed, especially help in maintaining health care — cut. Food stamps — cut. All in all, more than $80 billion was cut from the plan, with the great bulk of those cuts falling on precisely the measures that would do the most to reduce the depth and pain of this slump.

On the other hand, the centrists were apparently just fine with one of the worst provisions in the Senate bill, a tax credit for home buyers. Dean Baker of the Center for Economic Policy Research calls this the “flip your house to your brother” provision: it will cost a lot of money while doing nothing to help the economy.

All in all, the centrists’ insistence on comforting the comfortable while afflicting the afflicted will, if reflected in the final bill, lead to substantially lower employment and substantially more suffering.

But how did this happen? I blame President Obama’s belief that he can transcend the partisan divide — a belief that warped his economic strategy.

After all, many people expected Mr. Obama to come out with a really strong stimulus plan, reflecting both the economy’s dire straits and his own electoral mandate.

Instead, however, he offered a plan that was clearly both too small and too heavily reliant on tax cuts. Why? Because he wanted the plan to have broad bipartisan support, and believed that it would. Not long ago administration strategists were talking about getting 80 or more votes in the Senate.

Mr. Obama’s postpartisan yearnings may also explain why he didn’t do something crucially important: speak forcefully about how government spending can help support the economy. Instead, he let conservatives define the debate, waiting until late last week before finally saying what needed to be said — that increasing spending is the whole point of the plan.

And Mr. Obama got nothing in return for his bipartisan outreach. Not one Republican voted for the House version of the stimulus plan, which was, by the way, better focused than the original administration proposal.

In the Senate, Republicans inveighed against “pork” — although the wasteful spending they claimed to have identified (much of it was fully justified) was a trivial share of the bill’s total. And they decried the bill’s cost — even as 36 out of 41 Republican senators voted to replace the Obama plan with $3 trillion, that’s right, $3 trillion in tax cuts over 10 years.

So Mr. Obama was reduced to bargaining for the votes of those centrists. And the centrists, predictably, extracted a pound of flesh — not, as far as anyone can tell, based on any coherent economic argument, but simply to demonstrate their centrist mojo. They probably would have demanded that $100 billion or so be cut from anything Mr. Obama proposed; by coming in with such a low initial bid, the president guaranteed that the final deal would be much too small.

Such are the perils of negotiating with yourself.

Now, House and Senate negotiators have to reconcile their versions of the stimulus, and it’s possible that the final bill will undo the centrists’ worst. And Mr. Obama may be able to come back for a second round. But this was his best chance to get decisive action, and it fell short.

So has Mr. Obama learned from this experience? Early indications aren’t good.

For rather than acknowledge the failure of his political strategy and the damage to his economic strategy, the president tried to put a postpartisan happy face on the whole thing. “Democrats and Republicans came together in the Senate and responded appropriately to the urgency this moment demands,” he declared on Saturday, and “the scale and scope of this plan is right.”

No, they didn’t, and no, it isn’t.
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Economist Robert Kuttner (co-founder of the Economic Policy Institute and The American Prospect) was speaking on Democracy Now! this past Friday (11-07-08), about the need to pressure Obama towards a more people-centric economic policy than his advisors are advocating.  He spoke about the precedents set by mass social movements during the first 100 days in office of Presidents Lincoln, F. D. Roosevelt, and L. B. Johnson.  He argues that Lincoln would never have abolished slavery, Roosevelt would not have created the New Deal, and Johnson would not have embraced civil rights had it not been for the immense pressure applied by the electorate during their first few months in office…

“If you look at the great presidents—Lincoln, Roosevelt, the Johnson of the civil rights, not the Johnson of Vietnam—you had the abolitionist movement, you had the industrial labor movement, you had, of course, the civil rights movement.

And I think there’s going to be a tug-of-war inside the administration. And the really interesting question is, what is going happen to the youth movement that became an Obama movement that I think needs to become its own movement for social change, not simply Obama groupies… we need a social movement to stand on its own two feet and push Obama when he needs to be pushed, the same way Dr. King in the civil rights movement pushed Johnson, the same way the abolitionists pushed Lincoln, the same way the labor movement pushed Roosevelt. And the great presidents actually pushed the social movements to put pressure on themselves so that they could break logjams in Congress. It’s a very interesting dynamic, the way social movements interact with presidents… I mean, Roosevelt campaigned on a balanced budget. And once he started serious public works spending, his budget director resigned in protest. This is going to move very quickly…

A lot of money was spent by the Obama campaign to help mobilize young people, but you can’t just turn that off with a switch. That’s the great thing about texting and e-organizing. And if young people are in a state of mobilization, which they are, expecting change, it doesn’t work for the Obama administration to say, “OK, thank you very much, kids. You can go home now.” And this could turn into a genuine social movement that’s not just an Obama movement.”

What this means to me is that now is not the time for Progressives to celebrate and bask in victory, but rather, it is a time to organize and mount massive demonstrations calling for Obama to make good on his promises to lift us out of this economic debacle, keep people in their homes, put Americans back to work at good-paying jobs, and ensure that affordable (or—dare I say it –free) healthcare is available to every American.

 

Just look at the economic stimulus package that the Chinese announced this weekend to see what Obama and his strengthened majority in Congress can do: 

 

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The New York Times

November 10, 2008

China Unveils $586 Billion Economic Stimulus Plan

By DAVID BARBOZA

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/10/world/asia/10china.html?hp

SHANGHAI — China on Sunday announced a huge economic stimulus package aimed at bolstering its weakening economy and perhaps helping fight the effects of a global economic slowdown.

In a sweeping move at a time when major projects are being put off around the world, Beijing said it would spend an estimated $586 billion by 2010 on wide array of national infrastructure and social welfare projects, including constructing new railways, subways, airports and rebuilding communities devastated by an earthquake in southwest China in May.

The package, announced by the State Council Sunday evening, is the largest economic stimulus effort ever undertaken by the Chinese government and would amount to about 7 percent of the country’s gross domestic product during each of the next two years.

Beijing also said it was loosening credit and encouraging lending as part of a more “pro-active fiscal policy.”

“Over the past two months, the global financial crisis has been intensifying daily,” the State Council said in its statement. “In expanding investment, we must be fast and heavy-handed.”

The stimulus plan would be enormous for any country, let alone one whose gross domestic product is lower than most other major industrialized countries, at around $3.5 trillion this year. Earlier this year, the United States Congress passed a $700 billion bailout package in a country with an economy whose size is close to $14 trillion.

The announcement came less than a week before President Hu Jintao is scheduled to travel to Washington for a global economic summit meeting that will be attended by world leaders and hosted by President Bush. There, China is expected to be pressed by world leaders to do its part to help strengthen the global economy in the face of what some economists say is the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression.

But Beijing has already indicated that it intends to help stabilize the global economy by looking inward, and helping keep the world¡¯s fastest-growing economy on track.

At a weekend meeting of Group of 20 finance ministers in Sao Paolo, Brazil, the head of China’s Central Bank, Zhou Xiaochuan, said China can help stabilize international markets by encouraging consumption at home.

And on Saturday, Chinese President Hu spoke by telephone with President-elect Barack Obama about a range of issues, including the global financial crisis and how the two countries might cooperate to help resolve economic problems, according to China’s state-run news media.

Beijing is already struggling to cope with a rapidly slowing economy at home.

After five years of growth in excess of 10 percent, China’s economy is beginning to weaken because of slowing export and investment growth, waning consumer confidence and severely depressed stock and property markets.

The downturn in investment and exports has led to factory closures in southern China, triggering mass layoffs and even sporadic protests by workers who have complained that owners disappeared without paying them their wages.

With many economists in China now projecting that growth in the fourth quarter of this year could be as low as 5.8 percent, and worries that China’s economic miracle could be walloped by the global financial crisis, Beijing is moving aggressively.

While it is unclear how much of the stimulus money is additional government spending, on top of what the government normally earmarks for its infrastructure projects, the government made clear it was aimed at propelling growth for the next two and a quarter years.

Analysts were expecting China to announce a big stimulus package but say they were surprised at the size of it.

“That is much more aggressive than I expected,” said Frank Gong, a Hong Kong based economist at J.P. Morgan. “That’s a lot of money to spend.”

Mr. Gong said that after the Asian financial crisis in 1997, Beijing undertook a similar, but much smaller, stimulus package, earmarking huge sums to build the country’s massive highway and toll road system, which helped keep the economy growing.

Arthur Kroeber, managing director at Dragonomics, a Beijing-based economic research firm, said the government is concerned because people in China have suddenly pulled back on spending as a precautionary move because of worries about China suffering with the global economy.

“The government is sending a signal saying: ‘We’re going to spend in a big way,’ ” Mr. Kroeber said late Sunday in a telephone interview. “This is designed to say to the market that people should not panic.”
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Black Agenda Report
The journal of African American political thought and action

 
Issue for August 27 - Sept 2, 2008. Published every Wednesday
http://www.blackagendareport.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=755&Itemid=33

 

Wednesday, 27 August 2008

 

The more delusional Obama supporters behave as if "their candidate's speech on Thursday will herald a crack in time, after which posterity will speak of Before-Obama (BO) and After-Obama (AO) eras, and the transcendental Age of Obama." They draw straight lines from Dr. Martin Luther King's 1963 "I Have a Dream" speech to Obama's nomination acceptance oration. However, the event that far more accurately defines the age is Katrina, the unfolding catastrophe that descended on New Orleans three years ago, this week. Katrina is "the most dramatic manifestation of an implacable racism coiled deeply in the ruling structures of American society, primed to remove concentrations of Blacks from places of value."

 

The Age of Katrina - Not Obama

 

by BAR executive editor Glen Ford

 

"Obamites believe their candidate's speech will herald a crack in time."

 

Barack Obama supporters would have you believe that their candidate's presidential nomination is the glorious, straight-line culmination of the Black Freedom Struggle whose previous high-water mark, they believe, was the 1963 March on Washington, the 45^th anniversary of which coincides with this week's Democratic National Convention. Obama's public relations agents attempt to bracket the history of modern U.S. race relations within a marketable 45-year period that begins with a snippet from Dr. Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" speech and ends - for the time being -  with the grand peroration of Obama's acceptance speech before the cheering multitudes, in Denver. These dates are presented as the bookends of Black struggle - to be amended and extended when President Obama delivers his State of the Union Address, in January.

 

To the most hopelessly besotted Obamites, their candidate's speech on Thursday will herald a crack in time, after which posterity will speak of Before-Obama (BO) and After-Obama (AO) eras, and the transcendental Age of Obama.

 

Having conjured up a nonexistent "mass movement" to describe what is actually a corporate financed and directed electoral campaign that has not championed a single issue worthy of historical note (don't dare cite partial Iraq withdrawal and for-profit health care schemes), the Democrats now patch Dr. King's speech into the prologue to the Book of Obama for the purpose of consigning real mass agitation strategies to the past, for all time.

 

"The Democrats now patch Dr. King's speech into the prologue to the Book of Obama."

 

Yet, the unedited version of history - the real deal - commemorates another imminent anniversary, one that starkly illuminates the true political character of the age: Katrina. The events that followed the hurricane's arrival in New Orleans on August 29, 2005, would reveal the diabolical intentions of U.S. rulers towards African Americans: to methodically remove Blacks from the central cities of the nation. The ongoing, orchestrated catastrophe also demonstrated beyond doubt the moral bankruptcy and political impotence of Black national "leadership." As I wrote in October, 2005:

 

"If Black America fails to configure its human, organizational and material resources to effectively resist the theft and ultimate disfigurement of New Orleans, then we will be forced to confront the existence of fundamental, crippling flaws in the African American polity."

 

The "the man-made disaster in the Gulf" provided what may have been "the last chance to build a real Movement, encompassing the broadest sectors of Black America." Certainly, a critical mass of "the people" were eager to intervene. Hardly a Black church was without some Katrina-aid project, thousands of students journeyed to New Orleans as soon as logistics were made available, and popular awareness of the raw injustice of government policy was universal. But pure rot pervaded national Black political circles - as was clearly evident within six months.

 

"The Congressional Black Caucus, which claims to be the ‘conscience of the congress,' has shown itself to be an appendage of the white House leadership," I wrote in February, 2006. "They slavishly followed Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi's command to make the Democratic Party look good - as opposed to the Republicans - rather than directly address the crisis that was affecting their own people.

 

"Forty-one of the forty-two Black members of congress obeyed Pelosi's edict, that the House Committee on Katrina be boycotted. They accepted the order that Democratic legislators would not attend the meetings of the Katrina committee, because it was stacked against the Democratic Party."

 

Only Cynthia McKinney, who was soon to lose her House seat from suburban Atlanta, bucked Pelosi's edict to boycott the Katrina hearings. Pelosi's unspoken, but transparent, motive was to distance the Democratic Party from issues considered too "Black" in the run-up to congressional elections in November, 2006. The CBC, as a body, weighed compliance with their party leader versus rescue of Black New Orleans, and chose Pelosi - who would continue to smother the Katrina issue after Democrats gained control of the House.

 

Katrina, that horrific assault on Black humanity, dignity and civilizational rights - the Right to Return and participate in the reconstruction of their city - was (and remains) the greatest test of Black leadership since the days of generalized White Terror in the South, following the collapse of Reconstruction. As the world watched, hundreds of thousands of African Americans were effectively evicted from their city and have since been prevented by every foul and evil means possible from returning.

 

"The CBC, as a body, weighed compliance with their party leader versus rescue of Black New Orleans, and chose Pelosi."

 

There was method to this madness. The hurricane had simply provided "disaster capitalism" with an instant route to gentrification, a goal that takes years to accomplish by the usual methods of public and private urban coercion. As I wrote in May, 2007, corporate Power had shown its hand:

 

"Corporate planners and developers believed they had been blessed by nature when Katrina drowned New Orleans, washing away in days the problem-people and neighborhoods that would ordinarily require years to remove in order to clear the way for ‘renaissance.'  Greed led to unseemly speed, revealing in a flash the outlines of the urban vision that would be imposed on the wreckage of New Orleans. As in a film on fast-forward, the ‘plot' (in both meanings of the word) unfolded in a rush before our eyes: Once the Black and poor were removed, an urban environment would be created implacably hostile to their return. The public sector - except that which serves business, directly or indirectly - would under no circumstances be resurrected, so as to leave little ‘space' for the re-implantation of unwanted populations (schools, utility infrastructure, public and affordable private housing, public safety, health care)."

 

Human rights lawyer Bill Quigley, who has documented the river of crimes perpetrated against the people of New Orleans since August 29, 2005, has compiled a "Katrina Pain Index - New Orleans Three Years Later."  It shows a city in which even the size of population is in dispute. The City Council claims 321,000 residents, the U.S. Census Bureau says only 239,000 remain - a loss of 132,000 or 214,000, depending on who you believe, from a pre-Katrina population of 453,000, 67 percent Black. No one can agree on the current racial breakdown.

 

Local, state and national forces, public and private, have conspired relentlessly to keep New Orleans unlivable to the unwanted classes. Public transportation is down 80 percent. A majority of Black residents were renters, yet no renters have gotten anything from the $10 billion Road Home Community Block Grant. Rents are up 46 percent, most public housing demolished or marked for destruction, while 71,657 "vacant, ruined unoccupied houses" anchor metropolitan New Orleans in social death. The city is number one in physical death by murder, while psychiatric hospital beds are down 56 percent. Three hundred Louisiana National Guardsmen patrol the streets, in lieu of cops.

 

"No renters have gotten anything from the $10 billion Road Home Community Block Grant."

 

Is it any wonder that only 11 percent of families have returned to the Lower Ninth Ward? The Katrina crisis continues because Power is determined that the Black and poor will not be permitted re-entry.

 

Barack Obama denies that racism plays any role in this. "There's been much attention in the press about the fact that those who were left behind in New Orleans were disproportionately poor and African American. I've said publicly that I do not subscribe to the notion that the painfully slow response of FEMA and the Department of Homeland Security was racially-based. The ineptitude was colorblind," said Obama on his web site, September 6, 2005. He still says so.

 

For three years, Power has ensured that the New Orleans Black Diaspora remains scattered. For the forces of organized racism, it is a success story; there's nothing inept about it. Barack Obama will do nothing to facilitate the return of Black New Orleans, since no "malice" was intended. "...I see no evidence of active malice, but I see a continuation of passive indifference on the part of our government towards the least of these."  But Obama is worse than "passively indifferent." By denying the reality of racism, he transforms the monumental injustices of Katrina into motiveless mistakes that somehow continue to replicate themselves to the disadvantage of the same group of people.

 

There is no reason for the Black New Orleans Diaspora to expect any relief from an Obama presidency. In fact, there is no reason to expect anything historically unusual or unique from a President Obama other than his physical Blackness.

 

"Barack Obama will do nothing to facilitate the return of Black New Orleans."

 

Katrina, on the other hand, is the most dramatic manifestation of an implacable racism coiled deeply in the ruling structures of American society, primed to remove concentrations of Blacks from places of value. This overarching imperative to "Negro removal" can become aggressively active in an instant - as we learned in the days following August 29, 2005 - or proceed about its work block by block over years, until the offending population is eliminated. Fast or slow, the end results are the same: seven of the top 12 cities in Black population saw a loss in African Americans as a percentage of total residents between 1990 and 2000. (See BAR "No Black Plan for the Cities, Despite Lessons of Katrina," May 9, 2007.)

 

The pattern becomes clear. As we reported:

 

"...the seven cities that became less Black in the Nineties [New York, Chicago, Houston, Los Angeles, Washington, Dallas, Atlanta] are all concentrated corporate headquarters locations or, in the case of Washington, DC, the headquarters of the federal government. These are places that corporate and finance capital are most keen to ‘make over' in order to provide the urban ‘ambience' believed most amenable to their employees, management and clients, and for the general sake of corporate prestige."

 

Slow-acting Katrinas in the form of gentrification are what Black folks can expect - and must find ways to resist and defeat - from the ruling Lords of Capital for the foreseeable future, Obama or no Obama. There will be no "age" named after the handsome, articulate and oh-so-slick, but otherwise ordinary corporate candidate for president who used to call himself Barry. This is the Age of Katrina, and Barry is part of the problem.

 

BAR executive editor Glen Ford can be contacted at Glen.Ford@BlackAgendaReport.com