Talk about your teachable moment.
BP's Deepwater Horizon blowout in the Gulf of Mexico provides a unique opportunity to build and fight in the popular consciousness for a wide critique of the capitalist system and its workings. I say unique because tens of thousands of barrels of crude oil are still pouring into the Gulf of Mexico every day despite all the public relations soft soap and magic bullet solutions--the Top Hat, the Junk Shot and the rest. It's 40 days on and there's no end in sight.
The disaster has people in this country and around the world transfixed. The longer it goes on, the more questions arise, and the more BP's crimes seep not only into the Gulf but into popular culture. So far the media haven't been able to produce a bright, shiny scandal distracting enough to refocus many people. Eventually fatalism will take hold and even concerned people will no longer be able to stand thinking about it, but before it does, let's look at the opening we've been provided with.
1. It exposes the basic nature of capitalism.
The iron law of capital is expand or die. BP became the fourth largest corporation in the world by ruthless mergers with smaller, weaker oil companies like ARCO and Amoco and global power politics like the MI5/CIA operation which in 1953 overthrew of the Mossedagh government in Iran which had nationalized the country's oil. They have twice, in 2000 and 2005, been cited by Multinational Monitor magazine as one of the 10 worst corporations in the world on account of their environmental crimes and unsafe operating practices. (They should be a shoo-in for 2010).
With pressure growing on BP and Big Oil in general to respond to climate change and peak oil, BP executives decided the most cost effective thing to invest in was--a public relations campaign. In 2000, they hired Oglivy & Mather, the Madison Avenue giant, who came up with the "Beyond Petroleum" campaign, including BP's heliocentric green and yellow logo. The $200 million cost of the campaign was worth it. Polls showed this greenwashing had the public seeing BP as the most pro-environment of the energy companies by mid-decade, even after its antiquated Texas City, Texas refinery blew up in 2005, killing 15 workers and injuring scores, and its corroded pipeline in Prudhoe Bay, Alaska ruptured in 2006, leaking a quarter of a million barrels onto vulnerable tundra.
And BP continued to cut corners everywhere, ignoring standard procedures, safety warnings and danger signs on the Deep Horizon platform project, to squeeze out every last dime of profit--with results the planet will be living with for decades.
And that expand or die thing? Ironically, the blowout has hammered their stock down so far that other big oil companies, Shell in particular, are strategizing about making takeover bids for BP once things have settled down a bit, and the extent of BP's liability becomes clearer.
2. It exposes the fact that corporations and the rich get to play by different rules from everyone else.
Let's say I inherit a property in an unincorporated area and want to put up a house on it but learn I may be building on top of an old gas station. To save money I don't tell anybody and hire a couple teenagers to rent a jackhammer and see what they can find under the broken pavement there. The kids breach and blow up the old gasoline storage tank, killing themselves, burning down several neighboring homes and saturating the whole neighborhood with toxic fumes. A week later, would I be in charge of the cleanup? Nope, I'd be in the hoosegow, facing serious time.
3. It exposes who it is that the government actually serves in our "democracy."
The Bush administration and the current one are both BP's accomplices, pure and simple. BP, of course, got a "categorical exclusion" last year from having to file an environmental impact statement for the Deepwater Horizon rig. The Interior Department kept issuing them well after the blowout. Not surprising, given that its Minerals Management Service, is a hotbed of industry-funded corruption. And that Interior Secretary Ken Salazar took on a former BP executive named Sylvia Vaca as deputy administrator for land and minerals management. A new Rolling Stone article reveals that the government was in the loop with BP on the blowout from Day 1.
Laws to regulate dangerous business practices don't go away (or get waived) by themselves. In 2004, BP's political action committee made donations to candidates totalling 678 thousand bucks. In 2006, 601K. In 2008, that was 619 thou. In 2006, the last year I could find, BP spent $3,650,000 on lobbying. These figures include neither individual executive's campaign contributions nor lobbying by industry associations BP belongs to.
To underline this lesson we have the ugly fact that the government has turned the job of ending the blowout and mitigating the disaster to BP itself!
4. It exposes the nonsense of neo-liberal market worship.
Ask those "The less government, the better" types to explain how the invisible hand of the free market would have prevented this from happening had there been no government regulation at all. Oh, yeah, and how it would force BP, a giant multinational in a oligopolist industry, to fix things faster and better, and to more efficiently make the victims of the disaster and the environment good. Or are we just supposed to exercise our Second Amendment rights on Tony Hayward to caution other Big Oil execs that they'd best clean up their acts?
5. It exposes the right wing "populism" of the teabagging and libertarian types. 
They are saddled with their "Drill, Baby, Drill" slogans which were a centerpiece of the Tea Parties.
And they don't learn. Rand Paul, son of Ron Paul and Republican candidate for Senate in Tennessee, actually said last week that Obama (Obama!) "sounds really un-American in his criticism of business," when he took a couple belated shots at BP. Now Bobby Jindal, Republican Governor of Louisiana, is protesting the belated federal moratorium, a six month halt, on new deep water drilling while safety issues are examined.
6. It exposes other weak points for capitalism where they intersect with BP--and more crop up daily.
The Nation in its current issue reports on BP's ties to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan: BP holds more than $2 billion in annual US defense contracts and continues to be the premiere provider of fuel to the world's largest consumer of oil and gas: the Pentagon. (This is of course in addition to the fact that the war in Iraq in particular had everything to do with insuring that there is a US hand on the petroleum spigot there.)
Today the news broke that a local sheriff in Louisiana has called in "La Migra," a/k/a Immigration and Customs Enforcement or ICE, because he suspects that undocumented workers may among those taking on the dirty, unsafe and thankless job of cleaning up after BP and protecting the state's coastline.
7. It exposes the mainstream media as lapdogs of capital.
For weeks they acted like stenographers for BP and US officials downplaying the disaster, and hyped each successive attempt at a "solution" even after it had failed (possibly because BP flacks didn't keep them informed). It was only the combination of the blogosphere and intrepid pilots and boat operators and scientists and oil industry veterans who forced the real facts and prospects into the public eye and finally got the media raising some timid questions (although the appalling kerfluffle about whether Obama was "acting angry enough" sucked up a lot of their attention).
They are hardly even making any noise about the fact that BP turned access to its underwater video of the blowout on and off for weeks. Or that BP made boat owners they contracted with sign charter contracts forbidding them to talk to the media or disclose "Data" they might come across. Or that BP has local law enforcement keeping journalists away from beaches and cleanup areas. Or that anyone wishing to fly over a huge chunk of the Gulf of Mexico has been told by the United States Coast Guard that they have to get permission from BP's command center. Or that BP purchased the top slot at Google.com so searches for "oil spill" and similar queries would be directed to their site.
Tellingly, one thing BP has tried hardest to suppress is the shocking pictures of birds and other wildlife coated in deadly oil. These pictures clearly indicate to people how deadly the spill is (and will continue to be). They trigger intense feelings of compassion and horror, and they help people reflect on how even something as resilient as an ecosystem can be trashed by greed.
8. It exposes the racism, jingoism and great power chauvinism of Big Oil and the media.
News story after news story frets about the "oil spill" getting into Gulf of Mexico currents and winding up in the Florida Keys or even being carried North along the East Coast. That refers, it goes without saying to the East Coast of the United States. You'd never guess that there are other countries bordering on the Gulf of Mexico, or that anything rounding Florida is going to wash up on Cuba and the Bahamas first.
Commendably, one newspaper, the Guardian (from England, not the US) has carried a harrowing report telling how spills in Nigeria, offshore and on land, are at a level that still dwarfs the Deepwater Horizon blowout so far, and describing the horrific effects on the population and the environment there. It should be spread widely. Environmental groups have done similar exposures about Latin America.
9. It exposes the capitalist mode of production and the capitalist as contrary to the interests of the world's people.
Petrocapitalism some have dubbed it, because imperialism has been increasingly based on petroleum as a source of energy for its whole existence. Petroleum is the largest non-living input into commodity production, the basis for enhancing the productivity of human labor to levels unimagined a century ago. It is central to a global society organized around the incessant production and consumption of commodities--goods and services created for sale in the market, whether needed or not.
As such, dependence on petroleum is a major feature of the world we live in. And the human race is using it up. Fast. There is more oil to be extracted, to be sure, but under conditions worse those feeding BP's underwater gusher, with consequent hazards to the environment and humanity.
The logic is inescapable. A new world is not only possible but necessary, and it will have to be a world where society is organized to meet people's needs and in which people collectively and actively produce what they need and do it with an awareness of what their production and consumption is doing to the planet. Expand or die and the drive for profit have no place in this new world. Let's call it socialism for starters.
A final and obvious point. I have written, nine times, "It exposes..." Well, the BP's Deepwater Horizon blowout ain't exactly gonna do that all by itself. It needs our help.
I'm not going to prescribe here. I hope that others reading this will chip in ideas on how we should be helping friends, family, co-workers, strangers draw some of these conclusions. Because even if this is a teachable moment, we all know that lecturing at folks, especially ones who didn't sign up for it, is bad pedagogy. How should we be teaching?
June 9, 2010
BP's Blowout And Capitalism: A Teachable Moment
May 27, 2010
BP's Gulf Blowout And Our Future
[My friend M sent me the following thoughts which I post with permission.]
Our son-in-law, Lee, earns his living as a fisherman in Key West. Has done so for 30 years. Today is his 52nd birthday and he is now, effectively, jobless for the rest of his life. Being a small fisherman has always been an iffy proposition, because you're dependent so much on the weather, and for the last few years, the weather has become totally unpredictable. Also for the past five years NOAA has been imposing increasingly severe restrictions on what fishers can catch -- how much and when and where -- all in the name of preserving fish populations.
The intent of these restrictions would be believable if the same restrictions were placed on sportsfishers, but until this year, that hasn't happened. Instead, commerical fishers are restricted from catching, say, grouper in certain weeks because they're spawning, and they have to sit idle while sportsfishers pack them in, put them on ice, and take them home to their families and friends.
Why does this happen? Because Tourism is king in Florida. The giant cruise ships come into port regularly in Key West, and dump their loads, polluting the area, with disastrous effects on the coral. And the Navy moved their firing operations to the Keys when protests finally closed Vieques. So things have been hard for Lee and his fellow small fishers lately -- extremely hard since the recession, because tourism is down quite a bit and Lee sold most of his fish to local restaurants and the main fish market in Key West. That market closed two weeks before the oil blowout.
Lee has been scrambling for work -- any kind of work. Captaining boats, scraping barnacles off boat bottoms, anything to bring in money. He's a worker, always has been, and this is very hard for him. He's also become a local spokesman for the small fisher community because he's smart and articulate and a no-bullshitter. Since the oil blowout, he and his fellow small fishers and others in the Keys who are out of work because tourism is down have all taken haz/mat training at the local college, at a cost of $550 a head.
BP gave the college a grant to run the training, a few thousand dollars, and also the promise that those who completed the training would be reimbursed for their costs. Of course they're all hoping for work with BP to help clean up the oil when it hits -- which it will do eventually, and get swept into the Gulf Stream and get carried to other Caribbean countries, but also to the coasts of Europe and Africa. The dispersants, highly toxic to humans and all living creatures, will break up the oil into tiny drops making it less visible on beachers but infinitely harder to deal with. Like sending coal ash into the air.
I am put in mind of the lyrebird, which resides in the Indonesian rain forest. This bird is noted for its amazing capacity to imitate the sounds of the forest all around it, incorporating the sounds into its mating song. In recent years ornithologists have recorded the lyrebird's songs, which include the sounds of the bulldozers and chainsaws cutting down the very trees around it. That's how I see Lee and his fellow fishermen, working to save the ass of the industry that has spelled their doom.
I agree with Bill Fletcher's article -- we just watch and do nothing. We feel hopeless. We all know that nobody at BP will be prosecuted. Oh, probably the CEO will step down, but there will be someone new and nothing will change. Just recently, Biden and Kerry were promoting Big Oil, saying how dependent we are as a nation on BP to provide oil for our war in Afghanistan. This is why the antiwar movement has to be linked to the environmental movement.
We can't really tackle the Fossil Three (oil, gas, coal) and their radioactive playmate Big Nuclear until we confront the fact that this nation's only purpose is as a War Machine. And we can't really stop the War Machine until we deal with our abject and unnecessary dependence on fossil fuels.
We need to start a grassroots movement for solar -- as an individual solution for those who can manage it, and in coops, something akin to the Food Coop. A solar community bank that would fund people going off the grid. I would look to California to see what's happening there. I think another big part of this fight has to be to unite the Food First people, the Greenpeace types, and those fighting to preserve water and waterways. These are really core to our survival and can be readily understood by people because they directly affect their lives.
I've copyedited a few books lately about these issues -- one about grassroots organizing against factory farms; a book that I did earlier this year and was just sent a copy of called The Fate of Earth -- looking at the impact of the Exxon Valdez 20 years later -- which human communities (and other species) recovered and which were destroyed forever. There's a movement out there but it hasn't coalesced and it isn't very visible. But it's who we're going to have to rely on to combat the neofascist Tea Baggers.
I have begun to think that electing Obama was, in fact, a huge setback for the movement. He's every bit as bad as Bush, as regressive on education and war and financialization and civil liberties. He's a corporatist, 100%. There's no question of him unleashing his "inner FDR," as Bob Herbert called for -- he doesn't have an inner FDR. He doesn't even have an inner LBJ. But he's articulate and deceptive, and that has lulled us into doing nothing. I have finally begun to understand how nobody in the USSR rebelled. We feel there's no point whatsoever. We have no leaders. We have no voice.
April 21, 2010
Is Central Falls The New PATCO?
Consumer Warning: This article draws a parallel between Ronald Reagan and Barack Obama. Obama fans, please read the caveats and qualifications included herein carefully before braining out.
The article on budget cutbacks to education in NJ and young teachers’ resistance in Newark posted here at FotM just days ago by Rahim on the Docks, and updated just yesterday, has brought to the surface a deep concern I have about a little-noticed statement President Obama made last month, a statement that reminded me of an action taken by Ronald Reagan at the beginning of his first term.
First, the Reagan analogy. In his first year in office, 1981, Ronald Reagan broke a strike by the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization (PATCO)--one of only two national unions to support him in the previous year’s election. These federal employees hit the bricks for demands mainly concerning passenger safety--shorter hours, more modern equipment, etc.
First, Reagan fired all the strikers. Then he brought in scabs and military personnel to keep air traffic running. Finally he had PATCO decertified, breaking it entirely.
This one act was the main direct government intervention in labor relations during his whole administration. (Of course, the usual anti-union corporate types were appointed to run the National Labor Relations Board, OSHA, etc, but that is standard Republican practice.)
What breaking PATCO did was to send a signal to big corporations, flailing in the quicksand of the severe late ‘70s-early’80s economic crisis which was eroding their profits severely, that it was open season on unions. And they fired away--literally--laying off thousands upon thousands of workers, closing plants in the so-called Rust Belt of the Midwest, breaking union contracts, forcing givebacks, shifting production to low-wage, low-regulation areas in the Third World.
This is not a just a whiny complaint by labor unions and lefties. Reactionary economist and Federal Reserve Bank chairman Alan Greenspan declared proudly in 2003, that Reagan’s “action gave weight to the legal right of private employers, previously not fully exercised, to use their own discretion to both hire and discharge workers.”
One act, mere months after Reagan’s inauguration, and the working class in this country is still paying for it almost thirty years later.
So what step could Obama have taken that could conceivably parallel this crime against working people? True, he hasn’t done much to push through card-check legislation that would eliminate some of the many legal obstacles to union organizing, but he has, after all, already muscled through a health insurance reform law that may, arguably, wind up benefiting millions of working people. His appointees to the NRLB, OSHA and other government regulatory bodies certainly draw from the some of the best and brightest folks the labor movement has to offer. He stepped up to denounce Massey Energy after their murder of 29 coal miners.
Okay, let’s turn our attention to the small city of Central Falls in the state of Rhode Island. At the end of February, the superintendent of the school district fired every single person at Central Falls High School, 93 people-4 administrators, 74 union teachers, and a bunch of other staffers. The school board got to do this under federal law because the students were performing poorly on standardized tests and had a low graduation rate. The fact that the town is the poorest in the state, that a majority of the students don’t speak English as a first language, that population turnover in Central Falls itself is extremely high, that the school had improved its reading scores 21% over the last three years--none of this meant a thing.
And President Obama went out of his way to hail the action. He could even been content to let his Education Secretary, Arne Duncan, make the shameful declaration that Central Falls officials were “showing courage and doing the right thing for kids." But no. On March 1, Obama himself praised the wholesale firings--to the US Chamber of Commerce, of all audiences! He justified the firings: “If a school continues to fail its students year after year after year, if it doesn’t show any sign of improvement, then there’s got to be a sense of accountability,”
Now, I personally tend to hold a cranky and unsympathetic position on the social role played by teachers in capitalist society, which is to condition future generations of workers to live lives subordinate to the needs of capital. And I find that teacher unions too often uphold the immediate interests of their members over and against the needs of the children they are teaching. But Obama’s rap is bullshit, pure and simple, collective punishment based on artificial criteria without taking objective circumstances into account.
And this brings me to the kernal of my concern about what he did. The economic meltdown is increasingly concentrated these days, in the US at least, in state and local budget crises. These are very real, extraordinarily severe and seemingly intractable. There has already been plenty of noise about how brutal budget deficits are the fault of greedy, overpaid civil servants and retirees. Why wouldn’t local governments, desperate for any way out of this mess, use Obama’s words and his general stance to justify directing their fire at all civil service workers and their unions, teachers included, for “failure to perform adequately” and “lack of accountability” ?
In the depths of the Great Depression under Roosevelt, the CIO unionized millions, proclaiming “The President wants you to join the union.” Will state and local governments in the coming decade rally to save their hides under the banner “The President wants you to break the union”?
March 28, 2010
The Anti-War Movement Seven Years After Shock & Awe
[This important piece first appeared at the website of the Freedom Road Socialist Organization/Organización Socialista del Camino para la Libertad. It is reposted here because Fire on the Mountain, as a blog, has the capacity to house a discussion of its content, which we are starting here by following the piece with five interesting comments which appeared on a Facebook thread.]
by Dennis O'Neil & Eric See
The war in Iraq is still on. It's already the second most expensive war in US history--only WWII cost more.
The war in Afghanistan is heating up. It's now the second longest war in US history--only Vietnam lasted longer.
So what the hell happened to the anti-war movement? Today, the movement that turned out millions around the world to try and stave off the invasion of Iraq, that created the conditions for Barack Obama's history-making electoral victory, is nearly invisible and in disarray.
How Come?
We can stipulate a few causes everybody will agree on.
* Mainstream media coverage of the wars has been criminal.
Pop quiz: How many US troops are still in Iraq? (Answer: 100,000, and that's not counting an equal number of "contractors," i.e. mercenaries and logistics people our tax dollars are paying for.)
In some cases we're better off when they don't cover it. Take the Battle of Marja in Afghanistan. After breathless news reports quoting Pentagon spokespeople about a week-long offensive against the Taliban for control of this key city of 80,000, the place turned out to be a rural crossroads with more goats than people.
* The military has become very good at holding down casualty figures among US troops. In Iraq, they are hunkered down in bases and avoid combat, while the escalation in Afghanistan is just now starting to produce a new spike in US casualties. But people in this country have an unfortunate tendency to care only about "our" deaths, even as the super-expensive remote-controlled drone aircraft blow up schools and kill non-combatants in Afghanistan. (This, we are told, is okay, because the military wasn't actually trying to kill those kids.)
* Of course there is the ongoing economic meltdown which has become the principal focus for tens of millions of ordinary people looking fruitlessly for those green shoots of growth that the politicians and TV talking heads keep promoting. Activists, too, have been scuffling for their own survival and struggling to organize their coworkers and communities to fight cutbacks.
Behind The Obvious
There is another big-picture reason for the sorry state of the anti-war movement that is not easy to come to grips with. We have to face it: the 2008 election campaign and the Obama presidency are the biggest
things that have taken the wind out of the anti-war movement's sails.
From 2003-2008, a substantial and growing mass of class forces and social movements formed an objective bloc to the left of the Bush/Cheney administration. It was a broad united front consisting of sections and strata of the people including trade union members, environmentalists, educators, civil libertarians, college students, women's groups, African Americans, immigrants, veterans, etc.
The bloc was dominated by large, reform-minded, generally liberal organizations and coalitions whose leaders realized that there was no gain in kowtowing to the Bushies to try and get their programs passed. Still, it was more than a brief alliance of convenience, and was manifested in the deep visceral loathing for Bush/Cheney among the masses.
The lead unifying issue for this united front became the war in Iraq. For one thing, none of the forces in the bloc was strong enough to impose its program on the others: the unions weren't going to mobilize around reproductive rights nor the environmentalists around card check. More important, the war was, objectively, the principal contradiction facing the people of the US (and the world) and by early 2005 or so, popular rejection of the war had made it a very prominent vulnerable spot for the administration.
In fact, it can be said that it was the anti-war movement that elected Barack Obama. His Democratic rivals, Clinton and Edwards, had not spoken out during the buildup to the Iraq invasion, while Obama had. He became, by default, the anti-war candidate. And once the primaries were over and John McCain predicted that the US occupation of Iraq might continue for 50 or even 100 years, he was toast, even before the economy went belly-up.
By mid-2008, the united front was largely incorporated into the Democratic Party campaign. With Obama's election, the main organized groupings from that bloc became part of the establishment, and they did so on terms dictated by the White House. What was once an objective bloc is now an array of interest groups, each pursuing its own agenda, and each tending to regard others as rivals for (increasingly shrinking) resources and positioning to "affect affairs of state."
None of these groups was about to put the war at the center of their agenda, especially when confronted with the catastrophic and ongoing collapse of the economic boom. Even when Obama announced two big troop escalations in Afghanistan in his first year in office and showed no sign that a rapid and complete withdrawal from Iraq was in the making, there wasn't a peep. Quite the opposite, Obama was able to bring anti-war groups into the White House for closed-door meetings before making his announcement.
We ask: Is there any basis for expecting even a weaker version of a broad united front to coalesce to the left of the Obama administration any time soon, in particular one centered on opposing the wars?
A Hard Look Around
Looking around, the organized anti-war movement found that these developments had downsized it to its hard core: essentially peace people (religious and secular) and the anti-imperialist left.
The long uphill slog of trying to end the occupations now seemed like a task that might never end. As Obama put more troops in harm’s way than had ever been deployed under Bush/Cheney, Congresspeople who had spoken and voted against war funding before were, with a few honorable exceptions, suddenly confused and silent.
More important, hundreds of thousands of everyday people who had participated during the Bush years simply weren't there any longer. Their organizations weren't mobilizing them. Individually, some figured the job was done with Obama's election, or that he deserved a chance to get it done. The economy pulled the attention of many. Others were dismayed at how little their efforts had produced and gave up.
That all had its own suppression effect, disheartening a good part of the hard core of the anti-war movement. That core group, mainly aged forty-five to sixty-five when the war started, is not only tired but nearly a decade older.
We ask: When was the last time you turned out for an anti-war mobilization?
This highlights a final problem facing the anti-war movement. The sheer duration of these occupations has tended to normalize war—with "acceptable" casualty levels—as a regrettable but inevitable fact of life in the US. The first-year college students who were demonstrating against education cuts in California and around the country last month were in 3rd grade when Afghanistan was invaded and occupied, and in 4th when the Iraq war started. They've never really known a country not in combat in that region, since during their lifetime “we have always been at war with Eurasia."
Could the anti-war movement become the equivalent of the nuclear disarmament movement, with a handful of stalwarts still lobbying and holding vigils, still fighting the good fight three generations after it started in the early '50s?
So What Do We Do?
If there were some quick and easy way to bring into being a vibrant and growing anti-war movement, it would already be happening. We have our work cut out for us.
But we must keep on. As much as the terrain has shifted under our feet and presented us with an even steeper uphill trek, we still have a duty to oppose the crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan that our rulers are committing, with our tax money, in our name.
The folks who marched with us in 2005 and 2006 and 2007 haven’t disappeared. There’s a whole layer of folks who cut their political teeth in the anti-war movement and are now organizers against budget cutbacks and the collapse of our social safety net. We need to reconnect the dots and bring an anti-war analysis and message into the struggles that have motion on the ground now.
One of the most powerful arguments against the wars right now is the astonishing bill for them. It costs $1 million a year to keep a single soldier in Afghanistan. How much does it cost to keep that person in college? Your city has a $300 million deficit? Simple--just don’t send 300 people to Afghanistan for a year, problem solved.
We need to build activity at the local level that’s easy for people to engage in and doesn’t require signing on to a whole stew of anti-imperialist statements. We also need to bring our bodies and signs to the marches and vigils against budget cutbacks in our communities, instead of just waiting for people to show up at an anti-war rally. We need to make the connections in our messages; “Heath care Not Warfare” at the rallies on the congressional showdown. “Books Not Bombs” when folks march in defense of public education.
This isn’t rocket science. We know how to do it. Let’s get going.
Dennis O'Neil is a member of the Freedom Road Socialist Organization/Organización Socialista del Camino para la Libertad and active in the War Moratorium project.
Eric See became active during the first Gulf War, he was one of the co-founders of the War Moratorium project and currently works at Peace Action.
Initial comments on this piece
FotM has taken the liberty of borrowing these from Facebook. Kindly add your own in the comments section below.
Sigrid: i have not been able to leave town, pretty much, since last summer (think gas & brake repair). seattle is 100 miles to the south of me & is the nearest protest game around...not to mention i can't find anyone who can, who would.
Diana: There was not enough interest to have a bus from the Lehigh Valley to Washington [for the March 20 Demonstration]. Wwe drove down last weekend. There are vigils in several places on different days in the area, but since the Republicans are out of office people don't seem as outraged as they should be about the wars, the drones, the 20% unemployment, climate change...
Bruce: there's nothing wrong with the anti-war movement being a little like the nuclear disarmament [movement]--which was, after all, was incredibly effective and made up of long distance runner-type activists.
Larry: This is a very sound and very valuable article, and I hope it gets wide distribution. I do want to say though that at the beginning, it seems to buy into the emotional roller coaster so typical of the left.The statement that the anti-war movement is now "nearly invisible and in disarray" is simply not true--and in fact the rest of the article demonstrates this. There is a broad and tested base of anti-war activists in every part of the country, including rural Virginia, where I live. Yes, the highly visible actions are not happening and would not be covered if they did.
It is critical, as the article suggests, that anti-war activists move into alliances, esp. around the budget, and otherwise respond effectively to current conditions. But it is also critical that we convey a historical or at least transgenerational awareness of our task. Of course the antiwar movement shrank after Obama's election. Of course it shrank after the national turn against the Iraq war (almost entirely due to the antiwar movement). and of course imperialism didn't go away because either of these events. These are the conditions we work with. They do not contradict the reality that the anti-imperialist movement has grown in numbers, sophistication, and geographical and racial and age diversity over the last 40 years. It will never be easy in the belly of the beast, but let's not confuse predictable short-term changes with deficiencies in the movement building for the long term.
Laurel: If you want to feel better, Dennis, check out http://ny4cg.org/resources/detail.php?rid=2396 [which] spotlights 20 of 150 organized events organized around the 7th anniversary of the war.
January 22, 2009
With POP at the Inauguration
"The honeymoon is over, there is no honeymoon; study this man's history and don't tell me you didn't know. We need to continue to speak truth to power, fight the power and remain grassroots!"
"Yes, we must hold Obama accountable, but let's remember that the new President is about what we're about, Justice."
"We're about one agenda, Justice. We have many different viewpoints among us and I respect that whether I agree or disagree. We're about unity, but we must understand and remember what government he's in charge of, what country he's leading, and we need to be wary."
While a recent CNN poll suggests that more than 66% of African Americans believe that the vision of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. for this country has been fulfilled, this "great unity" was not evident at a recent meeting of the People's Organization for Progress, a grassroots African-American community-based organization that ran seven buses to the inauguration in order to celebrate the election of Barack Hussein Obama.
The view promoted by CNN's poll is significantly different than fewer than 12 months ago. In less than a year, more than two-thirds of Black people in this country have apparently come to this conclusion. Put another way, this is like less than 13 million people uniting around a farfetched belief one day gaining more 15 million additional adherents almost overnight. What accounts for this weird conversion experience? It is hard not to conclude that this is completely based on last November's presidential election.
Last November, as the presidential election drew nearer, the People's Organization for Progress found itself in a bit of a quandary. POP is an African-American led, Black majority grassroots organization with more than a quarter-of-a-century history of struggle in Newark, NJ. POP has organized for community empowerment: for better schools, protecting healthcare, for peace in the streets, against police abuse, for reparations for the descendants of African slaves, etc. While the organization's legacy includes struggles such as major voter-registration campaigns, organizing a fuel oil cooperative, and a municipal campaign for a civilian police review board in its early days, more recently POP made history in anti-police brutality campaigns, particularly obtaining convictions of five Orange, NJ cops in the murder of Earl Faison while in custody, as well as many other instances of police abuse.
While the these campaigns defined the People's Organization for Progress in the news media as an "anti-police" organization, POP's depth is more event in the range of issues it takes up, such as "peace in the streets" (minimizing the negative impact of street gangs), multiple campaign against closing public hospitals, for reparations, and organizing as well as leading the largest anti-Iraq War coalition in the state, with more than 150 grassroots, community, religious, veterans organizations and peace group participating. In fact, building this coalition has played a role in POP expanding beyond it's original base in Newark and Essex County, N.J.
POP was in an odd position. There was massive demand to support Senator Obama's candidacy, at the same time as a significant minority of members were involved in Black activist Cynthia McKinney's militantly populist campaign. To make matters more complicated, the bylaws and constitution of the People's Organization for Progress expressly forbids endorsing candidates to elected office. In the end, POP voted in this single instance to suspend the rule against endorsements. After the election, the demand for celebration took many forms. Who can ignore the dancing in the streets, not just in Brooklyn, Raleigh-Durham and L.A., but world-wide? POP decided to run affordable buses to D.C. on Inauguration Day. Because our $40 bus tickets stood out in sharp contrast to the $80 and more everyone else was charging, we had people signing up from as far away as the Bronx to take buses out of Newark.
But POP's internal debate continues. At a recent weekly General Assembly meeting, a broad range of views continued to be heard:
"This is an African man, with a Black family. He has a wife and a mother-in-law that we know will call him out when he does wrong. Not one, not two, he has four Black women in the White House to keep him on the straight and narrow."
"As a people, we need to be elated. We've come from chattel slavery to Jim Crow, to the White House!"
"Since the beginning I've been an Obama fan!"
"I don't know how people can say these things. This is our moment! You don't here the whites criticizing their own for their shortcomings. We need to be less self-destructive…"
"I'm a teacher, and I was very interested in my students views after the inauguration; a few of them connected to 'Bush is gone,' and I understood. A few of them connected to Rev. Lowery and I found that interesting…"
In the end, from the viewpoint suggesting that any negative statements about President Obama are part of a racist plot, to those members who believe that the most limited support is evidence of having "drank the Kool-Aid", POP reflect the diversity of our movement. But clearly, "orthodox leftists" are out of touch when we believe that the grassroots enthusiasm about Obama is just another case of going for the okey-doke, of being bamboozled by "Black Faces in High Places."
January 20, 2009
The Road Ahead As Obama Takes Office: A Green Light, A Roadblock, And A Bridge That Isn’t There
[UPDATED: Now with key links.]
With Barack Hussein Obama making history today as he takes the oath of office and a wave of optimism engulfing the country, it is a good time to review what faces us on the road ahead. (The “us” I refer to includes Reds, revolutionaries, socialists, activists, progressives, and all the rest of us who (a) believe a better world is possible and (b) know that work and struggle is the only way to get there.)
Let’s just stipulate one thing from the start. President Obama will be heading up what Karl Marx called the “executive committee for administering the affairs of the whole bourgeois class,” the modern state. He would not be where he is today if he weren’t seen as suited to the job by those whose affairs he will be administering.
But it is also undeniable that there are major differences between Obama and the last crew entrusted with that job. Things after today will be different in very important ways from what they have been over the last eight years. I want to flag three features of the road we are heading down over the coming months.
- First, there is a green light for struggle to advance on many fronts.
- Second, the anti-war movement, by contrast, faces a huge roadblock to moving forward.
- Third, as far as the economy goes, the bridge is collapsing and we are on it.
A Green Light for Struggle
Since November 4, there has been a dramatic uptick in popular struggle in this country. The election of Barack Obama, and the massive mobilization of people from all parts of the US and all sectors of society that made it possible, have created a vastly different terrain of battle than that of the last 8 years. Last month, I heard “Si Se Puede” and even “Yes We Can” chants rising from within a crowd of hundreds of SDSers and other serious young militants mobilized to defend college students who were carrying out an occupation (overall successful) of the New School in NYC.
The emotional highlight of the last few months has been the victory won by another occupation. Union workers at the about-to-close Republic Windows & Doors plant in Chicago seized control of their factory and won nationwide sympathy, including a statement by President-elect Obama affirming the righteousness of their cause and ignoring the illegality of their tactics. When they won their demands, the UE members left the plant chanting, yep, “Si Se Puede” and “Yes We Can.”
Now a wave of protest against the police murder of a young Black man, erupting at times into outright rebellion, has shaken Oakland, CA. Police departments across the country are reviewing their “deadly force” policies and training--and updating their riot preparedness plans.
Any one of these can be dismissed by the cynical as an isolated particular. Let me instead suggest a look at the broadest protest movement which has broken out since the election--the battle which followed the passage of California’s anti-gay-marriage Proposition 8. This ballot initiative, a little gem of rancid bigotry, not only denied same-sex couples the right to wed, but even officially “un-married” tens of thousands of lesbian and gay Californians. It was hands-down the biggest bummer of Election Night, 2008.
But look at what has ensued!
First, there were a couple of weeks of near-spontaneous demonstrations, pulled together by email, instant message and Twitter. Often thousands strong, they reached all 50 states. Many protesters quickly--and correctly--identified and focused on the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (LDS) as the main target. Rallies took place in front of Mormon temples not only across California and in other modern-day Sodoms like NYC but even at LDS Central in Salt Lake City.
The effect has been profound. The demonstrations gave rise to an incredible cultural flowering in defense of gay marriage, from the movie-star-laden YouTube micro-musical “Prop 8: The Musical” (starring Jack Black as Jesus) to the tongue-in-cheek petition drive launched in Princeton, NJ for an initiative forbidding Princeton freshmen to walk on town and campus sidewalks.
Major media outlets and think tanks undertook investigations which showed that, just as protesters charged, LDS money and machinations were at the center of the Prop 8 campaign. Boycotts of tourism in Utah and of Mormon firms, as well as other businesses run by Prop 8 backers, are underway. Members have quit the church or spoken out publicly against its embrace of bias.
On the political front, Obama has felt the heat, especially after his inaugural invitation to Prop 8 supporter Rev. Rick Warren triggered a spasm of revulsion even among his loyalists. One response to the pressure has been his unexpected and unequivocal pledge to move rapidly to end the Armed Force’s homophobic “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy.
To grasp the new mood of struggle, try and imagine the scene if Proposition 8 had passed during the grim 2000 or 2004 elections. The anger would have been swamped in the overall angst and depression. The flowering of protest and culture would never have taken place. Most important, we would not have the current mood, the overwhelming optimism that the passage of Prop 8 is just a bump in the road which will soon be behind us.
A Roadblock for the Anti-War Movement
The exception to this generally very favorable climate for struggle is unfortunately a crucial one: the wars of aggression the US government is locked into in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The anti-war movement has been the single most powerful opposition force in this country during the last six and a half years. The fact that 70% plus of the American people want the war over with, and pronto, owes much to the tireless and thankless work of tens of thousands of anti-war activists. In fact, the coalescing of broad popular sentiment against the war was perhaps the single most important factor in the Democratic Party’s 2006 victories and 2008 landslide.
The problem facing the anti-war movement now is a grimly ironic one. Despite its enormous contributions to the changed political atmosphere in this country, the movement’s demands --Stop the War! Bring The Troops Home Now!--seem today most unlikely to be met by the Obama administration.
The brutal underlying contradiction remains what it has been since the invasion of Iraq--the US ruling class cannot afford to stay in Iraq and they cannot afford to leave. To stay is to extend an insanely costly occupation indefinitely, in the face of popular hatred, with chaos always around the corner and the sketchiest prospects for a stable hegemony. To leave is to give up the prospect of a US hand on the world’s second largest oil spigot and to accept a drastic defeat for US military power and geostrategy.
We are left with two unknowns about Obama’s intentions regarding these wars, and one known.
Unknown #1 is how far he will go toward pulling out of Iraq. Obama’s goal, in practice, appears to be to finesse the contradiction, by pulling out a majority of the US troops and reducing the combat role of the tens of thousands who will remain. This risks further undercutting US ability to dictate what happens in Iraq, while leaving US troops, bases and other assets more vulnerable to insurgent attack or the re-eruption of civil war between Iraqi forces.
Unknown #2 is how far he will go in honoring his pledge to win in Afghanistan. The pledge was made, and repeated incessantly, to make Obama look tough and highlight the Bush administration’s failure to hunt down al-Qaeda’s leadership. Still, Afghanistan doesn’t have the same strategic importance to the US as Iraq and there are excuses aplenty to step back--corruption in Kabul, NATO allies pulling out, the need to conserve funds and rebuild the military.
The thing which we do know is a simple fact of political life: whatever his intentions, inside of six months, these wars will be Obama’s wars, not Bush’s wars.
It is remotely possible that he will actively try to end them both, but there has been no sign of this since Election Day. Appointees of his in the State Department,the national security apparatus and the military are all publicly saying that a too-rapid withdrawal from Iraq is risky and impractical. Continuing the occupation of Iraq or even dragging out its end will continue the bleeding, actual and economic, there and here.
Moving to double down in Afghanistan threatens major catastrophe. There are reasons that Afghanistan is called the Graveyard of Empires--25 centuries worth of reasons.
All of this leaves the anti-war movement off balance, with hard choices before it.
Should the anti-war movement attack Obama now, or not? There are some in the liberal wing of the movement who, in a touching combination of wishful thinking and denial, want to give him a long honeymoon as a chance to follow through on his promises. Most activists are far more skeptical.
Very sensibly, though, most are also reluctant to launch an all-out assault on him and risk alienating the great swaths of his ardent supporters who so far still believe that he will bring the occupation of Iraq to a close, who will keep believing it so long as troop levels are falling, and who don’t know much about Afghanistan.
With Iraq less and less visible on the country’s radar--none of the Big Three teevee networks even has a Baghdad correspondent any more--some argue that we should seek to end the war indirectly by directing our main attack on the bloated military budget. I think this is a mistake and plays into the hands of those, including those in the new administration, who want Iraq off the radar. People need reminding that there are still 142,000 US troops in Iraq, not help forgetting it.
In my view, the best option is to keep on keepin’ on--continue to protest, step up outreach to our friends and neighbors and rattle the cages of elected officials, especially when appropriation-for-occupation time rolls around again. As Iraq becomes Obama’s war, Obama will increasingly be the one the people hold responsible for its continuation. Even if he should actually begin substantial troop reductions, as promised, that doesn’t oblige the movement to drop the demand that all the troops be brought home. Now.
Should we raise the profile of Afghanistan in anti-war work? The anti-war movement is playing catch-up, in a sense, after keeping its focus rather strictly on Iraq. But with the situation changing rapidly, the occupation’s outlook “grim” (according to the latest national Security estimate) and the promise of the US force there being doubled, to 60,000+ this year, we have no choice. And any step by Obama to escalate the US occupation of Afghanistan or to maintain the deadly status quo there should be opposed directly, with all the vigor possible, as education around that occupation is stepped up.
No Detour Past the Collapse of the Economy
I’ve had a little trouble with my roadway metaphors for this one. I thought about the collapsed bridge in Minneapolis (with overtones of The Bridge To Nowhere), Given all the rebuild-the-infrastructure talk, it seemed a natural.
But what the new administration is facing today is a collapsed global financial system and a rapidly crumbling global economy.
In other words, the actual fact is that we are, all of us, sitting on that metaphorical bridge right now while it comes apart beneath us. Furthermore, it is unclear where a rebuilt bridge might (or should) wind up anchored.
The first effort at shoring up the bridge was a failure on an epic scale. Trillions have been spent to bail out the banks and get credit flowing again. Instead, Citibank and Bank of America have just followed AIG back to Uncle Sam’s free money window for seconds. Globally, whole countries are insolvent or facing bankruptcy.
The most intriguing thing about the Obama administration during the transition months was his immediate post-election pledge to create 2 million new jobs (by late December bumped up to 3 million) by 2010. How? “We’ll put people back to work rebuilding our crumbling roads and bridges, modernizing schools that are failing our children, and building wind farms and solar panels; fuel-efficient cars and the alternative energy technologies that can free us from our dependence on foreign oil and keep our economy competitive in the years ahead.”
This is interesting indeed. It suggests that some in the new administration have concluded what most economists and commentators are still eager to deny, at least in public: we are in a depression! That’s the only reason to contemplate adopting a massive industrial policy/public works program like this.
But if the US (along with the rest of the world) is already the early stages of a full-fledged depression, this is desperately insufficient. Employers are sloughing off between half a million and a million jobs every month these days. 3,000,000 jobs won’t stop the hemorraging, let alone reverse the trend. It does, however, set the precedent for further government jobs programs.
However, the other major steps the new administration has announced to deal with the economic meltdown will only deepen it, and place the burden on working people, now and for generations to come.
First, Obama’s people pledge to continue the doomed effort to rescue the banks by throwing more money at them, although this time trying to figure out how to make them start lending. This just won’t work. The reason the banks need more money is to avoid having to admit that they have gone broke. (All of the UK’s banks are “technically insolvent,” the Royal Bank of Scotland reported yesterday.) They are holding, and hiding, so much “bad paper”--unsaleable toxic assets like CDOs and other fancy speculative instruments--that they need to hoard cash. They certainly won’t loan it to other banks they suspect or know are in the same boat, or to consumers who are themselves already up to their ears in debt and at risk of layoff, or to businesses which depend on the spending of those consumers.
Second, Obama’s appointees are trying to jack up consumer spending as the only fast way to break the meltdown’s downward spiral. Any cut or rebate for regular taxpayers (even with its impact boosted by crude oil prices now less than a quarter what they were only months ago) is likely to be used to pay down debt or hoarded as a shield against bad times, not pumped into reviving the cycle of compulsive purchases of unneeded stuff that fueled the credit bubble in the first place.
Third, all of this can only be funded by trillion dollar deficits “for years to come”, as Obama put it. This amounts to putting off the day of reckoning into the future, when all the IOUs the Treasury issues now to finance this “rescue” of the economy have to be paid off by our children and our children’s children. And that’s assuming that buyers can even be found for all the debt the new president is talking about issuing. If you are an investor from China or the United Arab Emirates or the US, for that matter, how enticing does this proposition sound: Loan us trillions so we can throw it at banks which will hoard it to keep staggering around a little bit longer before going belly up?
Obviously government policies can make an enormous difference in how deep the depression goes, how long it lasts and who bears the burden. What it cannot do is bypass the depression.
Look at the last two months. Broke consumers, many with credit cards canceled or limits reduced, sat on their wallets during the holiday shopping seasons. Sales dropped to their lowest since figures were first published, in 1969. Naturally a wave of small store and chain outlet closings is underway, and soon more big chains will be following Circuit City into the boneyard. That means more broke unemployed folks, of course. It also means that the highly leveraged commercial real estate market is tanking fast. That’s the folks who brought you all those malls now starved for customers and covering empty shop windows with brown butcher paper.
And guess what? All the commercial loans and mortgages the developers and management firms took on have long since been bundled, split into tranches, overvalued and sold off to eager banks, hedge funds and speculator--just like residential mortgages. Now there’s another pile of steaming toxic waste which has to be kept hidden in the vaults of the banks. And another turn of the downward spiral takes shape.
From the standpoint of the ruling class, whether they grasp it or not, two things have to happen for this depression to end. First, the global financial system has to be rebuilt from the ground up, and that can only happen on the rubble of the huge, flat-broke banks currently acting as parasites on national economies the world over. Isn't dread that this will happen the best explanation of why desperate financial firms, bleeding money and with stock prices tanking, opted to become the biggest donors to Obama’s $50 million Inauguration?
Second, the huge overproduction--of consumer goods and of means of production--has to be destroyed. That’s what’s starting to happen in the auto industry right now. It won’t be pretty and it won’t be over soon.
From the point of view of everybody outside the ruling class, this gives us one task, crystal clear. Resist! Every single bid to dump the crisis on ordinary working people must be resisted with determined struggle, preferably of the pitchfork and torch variety. Plant takeovers and organizing drives in the workplace. The pillorying of cut-minded local officials like Philadelphia’s mayor when he tried to close eleven libraries. Campus protests like the coordinated demonstrations in the California higher education system. Hounding Wall Street bigwigs when they dare to appear in public.
The watchword of the Obama campaign was “Hope.” Well, if all we do now is sit back and hope, we are going to find ourselves hoeing one very hard row.
Hope will not make President Barack Hussein Obama and the Democratic Congress (much less Republican congresscritters) turn their backs on the banks and corporations--on their lobbyists, on their campaign donations, on their bought-and-paid-for media, on the think-tanks and “experts” they fund. Only struggle, and the fear it engenders in their hearts, will do that.
Pitchforks.
Torches.
Struggle.
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February 11, 2008
Obama and the Bronx: The Malcolm/King Fear
From Black working-class parents and staff members, there is one overwhelmingly most frequent comment: “I think they’ll kill him if he gets it.” The “it“ is either the nomination or the presidency itself,
It’s like you’re setting this man up for an early demise if you support him. It seems to have a paralyzing effect, not only on electoral participation but on any kind of activism.
That's mostly from the parents and staff. From the students who think about social issues on a regular basis—a minority at my school—elections aren’t really on their horizon. They’re into 9-11 conspiracy videos on the net. For example, both the history teacher and I (the social worker) have been asked by some of the smart, sorta emo kids to watch a video at “zeitgeistmovie.com.” I plan to do so and hope I can find a way to dialogue with the students about this. They understand it might take a minute because us old fogies have old computers that it’s hard to watch videos on.
I ‘m curious about whether others are running into either or both of these reactions to current politics.
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I May Wind Up Taking This Down
in a few days, after it's made the rounds of teh Intertubes, but it's a pretty damn funny anti-McCain version of the massively viral Obama video I blogged about here a few days ago.
And I may not. It does after all make the point that McCain's soft white underbelly is his rah-rah enthusiasm for the occupation of Iraq, and highlights the fact that neither of the annointed Democratic candidates is willing to take him on or even talk about the fucking issue much at all. Meanwhile, watch and enjoy.
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February 7, 2008
Some Thoughts On The Elections, Part 1: The Obama Campaign
By way of introduction, let me lay out why I am writing this and why I hope others will chip in some thoughts in the comments section. Fire on the Mountain, splendid though it is, may not be the best place to house an extended non-sectarian discussion of issues related to the 2008 election, but I haven’t found any other venue that rings my chimes, so we’ll give it a shot.
To set the context, briefly, here's where I'm coming from:
I do not think work in the electoral arena in the US, especially above the local level, is a particularly worthwhile place for revolutionaries and socialists to be putting their energies in this time period.
Contrariwise, to act as if the 2008 elections aren’t taking place, and aren’t the principal lens through which the vast majority of the people of this country will be viewing all political issues is to engage in a willful denial of reality.
The weakness and fragmentation of the left in the US gives us a certain luxury—it is highly unlikely that anything we might do could significantly affect the outcome. And so we can analyze, do propaganda, debate approaches and test-run projects without risking much.
Okay, time to wade in and see if we can jumpstart some dialog. Herewith, 3 points on the campaign of Barack Obama, which has clearly created a bunch of dynamics we need to be thinking about very carefully.
1. Early on, the polls showed an interesting divide in the Black community, with many older African Americans, women in particular, backing Clinton. Some said they wouldn’t support Obama because a successful run would get him killed, like the Kennedys and King. As the winnowing process whittled the Democratic field down toward the media-friendly duel—white woman vs. Black man--the tide in the Black community to Obama was undeniable. The Clinton campaign’s effort to play the race card, especially Bill’s sniping at Obama and Hillary’s tin-eared claim that LBJ was the real hero of the Civil Rights Movement, intensified support for Obama throughout the Black nation.
What was reinforced here was the big lesson of Katrina—this society is still deeply racist and Black folk still have to stick together for survival. This is particularly noteworthy at a time when there has been a lot of attention paid to the Pew Research survey of last fall which argued that there is a deep and growing divide in "values" in African America between poor and "middle class" Blacks. While support for Obama was initially strongest in higher income, better educated layers of the community, the urban poor and low wage workers justifiably skeptical of his campaign’s obvious attempt to portray him as "above race" turned out in unexpectedly large numbers on Super Duper Tuesday. These days you hear less of the "he’s not Black, he’s a Halfrican" type disses in the community and on talk radio.
The fact that the Black nation has swung behind Barack Obama in a big way doesn’t, of course, oblige any of us to do so as well, but it does means that those of us who aren’t Black, in particular, should be careful and respectful of this development. "I support Cynthia McKinney, the real Black candidate" probably won’t get you all that far in talking to friends and coworkers who are into Obama. I highly recommend that folks start reading The Black Commentator weekly, if you don’t already. The current issue has three interesting articles, one very sharply critical, on his campaign.
2. A key factor in the coming months will be the "Latino vote" and specifically how the various campaigns approach it. The Republican primary has featured a truly offensive mudwrestlng free-for-all over who can take the most ignorant and punitive stance toward immigrants, meaning that the growing claim of the Democratic Party on Latina/os will not be threatened. There is a very real danger here that sections of the Democratic Party machine supporting Clinton will try to play on and exacerbate existing contradiction between the Black community and Chicana/os and other Latina/o populations.
One important counterdevelopment to this took place in LA during the run-up to Super Duper Tuesday. The Clinton campaign had paid special attention to getting early endorsements from Mayor Villaraigosa and mobilizing the Democratic Party infrastructure there, part of a well-planned and well-financed California push which wound up giving her a two to one edge among Latina/o primary voters. A few days before the primary, though, the most listened-to radio deejay in the US, El Piolin (who was hugely influential in mobilizing over a million immigrants in LA during the immigrant levantamiento of two years ago), came out for Obama and featured Ted Kennedy on the show promoting his candidacy.
3. The Obama campaign has triggered a genuine wave of support and activity among young people of all nationalities which will bear close watching. He and his advisers are packaging him as an inspirational mass leader and his campaign as a movement. The battle cry is "Hope" and the rhetoric is inclusive, powerful echoes of the Jesse Jackson Rainbow Coalition campaigns of the 1980s.
One big problem here is that Obama implicitly pits his message against populism, and pro-equality populism was the heart of the Jackson campaigns. But in this campaign the banner of populism and defiance of giant corporations and their control of US politics was held high by John Edwards, and has been even been picked up and waved around by Clinton, however unconvincingly. And the talk of inclusion seems aimed mainly at suggesting that Obama will be able to transcend the political and cultural divisions in the country, and more concretely the stalemate in Congress. This part of his pitch drives many left liberals nuts—they see the central feature of the last two years as a near-incomprehensible collapse by a Democratic Congressional majority elected to end the war and rein in Bush. This sounds to them like more of the same and worse still, like a declaration that, if elected, Obama would be far too focused on "uniting" and creating "change" to pursue investigation and prosecution of the Bush/Cheney crew for their multiple and horrific crimes.
I’ll close here by posting a video which for me captures some of why Obama’s campaign, no matter how history-making, bothers me so much. Put together by will.i.am of the Black Eyed Peas, and directed by Jesse Dylan, Bob's son, it’s a campaign ad in music video drag. And it’s brilliant. Watch it now (if it hasn’t already turned up in your in-box a dozen times over the last week or so).
Powerful, no? But look at what is really going on. There is no real content to the speech excerpt at the video's center, just platitudes. Audio and video references to the struggles of the '60s and '70s aim to evoke nostalgia among Boomers (and fauxstalgia among the video's real target, younger people who've learned about the period mainly in school or on public television). The casually dressed and almost self-effacing women and men who recite or sing Obama’s words as he orates are in fact celebrities and entertainment biz people acting out a charade of inclusivity. And since it’s evidently thought possible that we may be too damn dumb to get the message, we get HOPE and CHANGE flashed at us in big caps. Oh, yeah, and YES, WE CAN.
Yep, the video takes the great slogan of the Chicana/o National Movement, ¡Si, Se Puede!--usually rendered in English as "Yes, We Can!"--and transforms it from a defiant battle cry into a collective feel-good, patriotic mantra.
Yes, We Can. Hope. Change.
Uh-hunh. As a counterpoint, I post—-repost actually—-a much lower budget video commentary on the primaries, which channels David Bowie to make its point, short and sweet.
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