Tom Hayden : Is Obama Really in Control?

This plane carrying Bolivian President Evo Morales was forced to land in Vienna despite Obama's earlier comment that he "wouldn't scramble jets against a 29 year old hacker." Photo by Andres Gutierrez / AP.

Refs being 'worked'?
Does Obama control the State?

The executive branch has aided in the unaccountable growth of a Frankenstein-like Leviathan which now is beyond the control of its own makers, operating outside the levers of democratic oversight and control

By Tom Hayden / The Rag Blog / July 18, 2013

It seemed weird, off-handed, President Obama's comment that he "wouldn't scramble jets against a 29 year old hacker," just two days before the U.S. forced down a Bolivian plane carrying Evo Morales on the suspicion that Edward Snowden was smuggled aboard. Diplomatic hell broke loose, with Brazil, Venezuela, Nicaragua, Ecuador, and others all accusing the U.S. of violating their sovereignty.

With all the talk of Big Data, it's hard to believe that Snowden couldn't be detected enroute from the Moscow transit lounge to the departure gate for a Bolivian airliner. That aside, one wonders what if any was the connection between Obama's remark and the forcedown which subsequently happened.

Obama presumably was trying to squelch rumblings coming from within the national security state. After all, if some of the U.S. hardliners want Julian Assange, Snowden, and their ilk executed, or tried for treason before being executed, the same types might contemplate a Special Operation to render Snowden off a foreign airliner.

As for Evo Morales, I was told by a U.S. ambassador during the Clinton administration that he was a "very bad guy" who had tried to kill American diplomats, a good example of our intelligence demented..

The problem revealed by the incident is not a new one, and not for this president alone. Can we be confident that the president controls the permanent executive branch, especially the "intelligence" apparatus? Or is it not possible that key elements of the apparatus have been fabricating intelligence, pulling strings, "working the refs," boxing in the White House, asking forgiveness rather than permission, whatever one calls it, and running a foreign policy of their own?

If anyone is shocked by this, it's all happened before. Several presidents were threatened with blackmail by FBI director J. Edgar Hoover who ran what one U.S. senator called a "Gestapo-operation." John and Robert Kennedy had to go around their own generals and conspire with the Soviets to cool down the Cuban missile crisis when it was at the brink.

JFK circumvented the generals and CIA by fudging an agreement in Laos. Richard Nixon and the China Lobby foiled Lyndon Johnson's election-year plan for peace talks by getting the Saigon generals to hold out until after the election. Jimmy Carter was forced to keep diplomacy with Cuba secret from his own State Department negotiators in the late Seventies. Bob Woodward's Obama's Wars documents how generals Petraeus and McChrystal tried to trap the president into a "forever war."

And before all of them, President Eisenhower warned that, "In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist." [1961]

And now this: starting with the Bush era, the top-secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court [FISA] has morphed into a de facto parallel Supreme Court writing and implementing a virtual constitution for the War on Terrorism era. This secret court, appointed in its entirety by the right-wing Supreme Court Justice John Roberts, has approved 1,800 surveillance orders during the past year alone, while rejecting none.

There is no adversary proceeding in this new equivalent of a Star Chamber. There are virtually no public findings. The FISA court has ruled, in secret proceedings, that the vacuuming up of "meta data" on many millions of citizens is a "special needs" exception to the Fourth Amendment ban on state searches and seizures without a warrant.

Some of the secret court's opinions are said to be nearly 100 pages in length, issued without adversarial proceedings and virtually beyond appeal. Just because Obama is a constitutional lawyer doesn't mean that he's devoted detailed attention to this runaway construction of a new constitution -- until something like the Snowden revelations force his attention.

"It has quietly become almost a parallel Supreme Court," according to Eric Lichtblau in The New York Times [July 7], providing a veritable new constitutional framework for every agency engaged in activities under the umbrella of "national security." A similar extra-constitutional project has been underway for decades to rewrite the rules of private marketplace governance in the era of corporate globalization.

Both thrusts, toward privatization and intelligence wars, represent a gradual movement towards a new legal framework for Empire which minimizes or circumvents democratic processes. The NSA plus the WTO are the "new world order" that George Bush I mused about.

Obama, who is responsible for this mushroom cloud of secrecy, seems occasionally to cry for help at his recognition that it's spiralling out of control. Since 2012, Obama has officially "welcomed" public conversation, debate, and Congressional drafting of a "new legal architecture" in order to "rein in" his growing imperial presidency and those which are likely to follow.

His inability to implement meaningful change, however, is a remarkable illustration of the limits of the presidency. There is no sign either of Congressional willingness to re-draft the 1973 War Powers Act to cover drones, secret wars like Libya, or the growth of executive-branch cyberwar. The federal courts are complicit in the private rewriting of the Fourth Amendment and the democratic guarantees of the Constitution.

It is not only the shadow of secrecy over democracy, but the apparent grip of secret forces in the executive branch over public policy. Last week the U.S. supported a military coup in Egypt in express violation of Congressional funding restrictions, and without public hearings. Last month, the President reiterated his five-year old pledge to close Guantanamo, get detainees off life-threatening hunger strikes, and repatriate many who already are cleared for release.

As of now, those straightforward orders have not been carried out. Someone is blocking them.

A secret coup hasn't fully happened yet, and may not, given the nature of American pluralism. But the executive branch has aided in the unaccountable growth of a Frankenstein-like Leviathan which now is beyond the control of its own makers, operating outside the levers of democratic oversight and control.

Obama's occasional comments welcoming a "conversation" may be seen as muted alarms. If he cannot "rein in" the new Imperial Presidency, a populist protest could be slowly building toward either an insurgency presidential campaign, an uprising, or both.

[Tom Hayden is a former California state senator and leader of Sixties peace, justice, and environmental movements. He currently teaches at Pitzer College in Los Angeles. His latest book is The Long Sixties. Hayden is director of the Peace and Justice Resource center and editor of The Peace Exchange Bulletin. Read more of Tom Hayden's writing on The Rag Blog.]

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Steve Russell : Citizens United and 'Scandalgate'

Richard Nixon: "I am not a crook!"
Scandalgate

The Citizens United case has put us in a situation where Watergate is such small potatoes that it's almost quaint.

By Steve Russell / The Rag Blog / November 2, 2012

Luke Russert, son of the late and much admired journalist Tim Russert, recently referred to Watergate as "the mother of all political scandals." He’s right, given our predilection to add “-gate” when we describe any serious scandal. That rhetorical flourish is of a piece with “mother of...” -- a superlative lifted from our late and unlamented adversary, Saddam Hussein.

Russert’s Watergate remark reminded me of the night at The Daily Texan, my undergraduate student newspaper, when I led an editorial "We take no pleasure in the resignation of President Nixon..."

My conservative critics attacked that as rank hypocrisy, given my role in longstanding and public criticism of Nixon on grounds related and unrelated to Watergate.

What they did not understand is that no serious person could find joy in a situation where the President of the United States could announce "I am not a crook!" and a majority of the country would be thinking "Oh yes, he is!"

The Citizens United case, where limitations on corporate spending in elections were held to violate the free speech rights of corporate persons, has now put us in a situation where Watergate is such small potatoes that it's almost quaint.

In Watergate, Nixon had to beat the bushes to come up with a million bucks in his slush fund for the burglars, since it contained a mere $700,000. We say "slush fund" because it came from wealthy donors who were buying the kind of access donations always buy in politics without identifying themselves.

In the post-Citizens United world, a million dollars won't get it. We have billions pouring into our politics with no fingerprints on the billions.

George Soros, the boogeyman of big political money from the right's point of view, is so down on President Obama that he actually threatened to fund a primary challenge from the left. This nicely demonstrates the great irony of this election: much of the left is holding its collective nose very hard to vote for Obama and that's "vote for" as distinguished from "support."

I personally had decided to merely "vote for" rather than "support" based on my disgust with Obama's negotiation style, where he seems to throw the best ideas under the bus at the front end. Then I read Obama's book and discovered he really did believe that most Republicans want the best for the country. I presume that illusion has been shattered by these years of autopilot veto.

I sat down and made a list of Obama's first term accomplishments against overwhelming odds. I watched the GOP scream "socialism!" over mainstream Keynesian economics, the normal method of handling fiscal policy since FDR gave us a clinic in the role of aggregate demand in a capitalist economy.

I listened to the GOP critique of the very idea of government responsibility for everyone's access to health care. I remembered that this party that never met a war it didn’t like tried mightily to prevent Sen. Jim Webb’s update of the greatest engine of social mobility in American history, the GI Bill.

That finally brought me to the fact of the matter. As much as I find this flabbergasting, as much as it turns my knees to jelly and my brain to mush... we are refighting the election between FDR and Herbert Hoover! We are in a time warp.

Keynes is no longer conventional wisdom.

The National Labor Relations Act, Social Security, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, Griswold v. Connecticut (access to birth control)... everything we worked for but, more importantly, everything our parents worked for, is now once again controversial.

Dwight Eisenhower, the hero of WWII, chose to run as a Republican and led the nation to essentially ratify the New Deal. The worst pullback of the Eisenhower years, Landrum-Griffin, was a tinkering at the margins that did not challenge the fundamental right to independent unions.

Keynesian economics was taken for granted because it had worked, and you could follow the aggregate demand curve when FDR briefly succumbed to attacks on temporary deficits and the recovery started to falter, only to be revived by the unbridled demand of WWII.

I remember when the John Birch Society got written out of the Republican establishment for calling Eisenhower a Communist.

Now Obama does things Eisenhower would have approved and gets attacked as un-American.

An incumbent President is about to be substantially outspent by a challenger with invisible money. Contrary to the criticism mouthed by Justice Samuel Alito during the State of the Union, the money could damn well come from foreign corporations because Citizens United has given us a world where we don't know where the money comes from.

I'm not so concerned about money from overseas. In our times, national borders have become technicalities unrecognized by corporate power.

I'm concerned about the kind of money that turned public opinion for to against Hillarycare with the Harry and Louise ads. I'm concerned with the kind of money that has rendered the obvious fact of global warming controversial. The kind of money telling us that Obama has increased taxes and government regulation in the face of hard facts to the contrary.

Watergate may have been the mother of all political scandals, but what is happening in our time puts Watergate in the shade. And the most scandalous thing is that it's all perfectly legal.

[Steve Russell lives in Sun City, Texas, near Austin. He is a Texas trial court judge by assignment and associate professor emeritus of criminal justice at Indiana University-Bloomington. Steve was an activist in Austin in the sixties and seventies, and wrote for Austin’s underground paper, The Rag. Steve, who belongs to the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma, is also a columnist for Indian Country Today, where this article first appeared. He can be reached at swrussel@indiana.edu. Read more articles by Steve Russell on The Rag Blog.]

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Jim Simons : Ralph Nader Was Right

Graphic from AboveTopSecret.com
Ralph Nader was right:
No more voting for the 'lesser evil'

When will we stop doing the same thing every four years and marveling that the results are not different?

By Jim Simons / The Rag Blog / September 19, 2012

“Sitting on a sofa on a Sunday afternoon
Going to the candidates debate
Laugh about it, shout about it
When you’ve got to choose
Ev’ry way you look at it, you lose”
-- Simon and Garfunkel (from “Mrs. Robinson”)

[We believe that Jim Simons' opinion piece published below expresses well how a substantial segment of the left feels about the Obama presidency and the current state of electoral politics in the United States. It does not, however, represent a Rag Blog editorial position on the 2012 presidential election and should not be construed as a recommendation on our part to vote for a third party candidate.]

These words were written 40 years ago or more. I remember I wrote a small piece for The Rag about that time to the effect that we were not going to win anything by electoral politics. Yet, every four years -- even today -- we forget this historical truth and embrace the lesser of two evils as though a new age is dawning, never so passionately as we did in 2008.

Remember Hope and Change? What changed -- or should I ask, what changed for the better? I was as guilty as anyone. My brain told me not to buy into it, my heart took a leap of faith. There was a long fall from that leap as we watched Obama continue Bush’s foreign policy and violate almost every promise the golden tongued orator made, from Gitmo to electronic surveillance in our own country.

Whistle blowers are being prosecuted far more than under Bush, transparency in government undermined at every turn, power usurped by the Republican president is eagerly exercised by the Democrats. A wholesale increase in immigrant summary deportation has occurred. The Democrats and Obama have ignored or capitulated to plunder the environment.

The argument is that we should vote for Obama in spite of his betrayals, none worse than giving up on even the public option for health care, because he is better than Romney, even though from the standpoint of progressives he is at best the lesser of two evils.

This is the ploy that has kept us chained to the pale and lame horse of the Democrats in every race since 1964. Why must we choose from evils? Why can’t we have a real choice? Sallow-faced liberals sigh and say this is the reality, we must face reality. Bosh. Here is the reality: the system is broken; it is rigged to permit only the two wings of essentially the same party to constitute the choice.

I grant the Republicans are bad. That is why we are always backed into the same corner; it is self-perpetuating. When, in what Presidential election, will it be any different? There will always be the argument that we must prevent the really bad guys from getting into office by voting for another candidate who does not represent our views.

At this juncture we are ill-served by the supposedly two-party system. And yes, public funding and shortening the length of campaigns are also essential or all our elections, after Citizens United, will be up for the highest bidder, always big corporations and the 1%.

The only solution to this perennial waltz of the lemmings is to have a choice on the ballot. More and more people (see Bill Moyers’ show -- "Challenging Power, Changing Politics" -- on PBS of September 7) are recognizing that we need a divorce from the ineffectual, compromising-without-a fight Democrats. We need other parties on the ballot in all 50 states.

There is an array of laws in the states (election law is primarily state law) on ballot access. Not surprisingly, Texas has one of the most draconian laws designed to insure that no third parties will get on the ballot. It will not change until we demand a change and stop blindly supporting any yellow dog Democrat. This is the position of not thinking, simply knee-jerking into the same way of doing things election after election.

I am through (again) voting for Democrats -- at least in the presidential election -- and being shocked by their retreat and abandonment of progressive principles once elected.

This year I worked briefly to get Rocky Anderson, a true progressive, and his Justice Party on the ballot in Texas. It was too onerous a hurdle with time shortened by redistricting cases. Also, the two parties have all the resources. In other words, there was insufficient money and time to wage a court battle to get Rocky on the ballot. That is what it would have taken, what it has taken in the past in the few instances when a third party succeeded. I have litigated such cases in the past with mixed results.

The first few times out the Justice Party or the Green Party are not going to win and that is not the point. We need to build toward a future when there is a true choice. Strong third party or parties with left politics could also have an effect on the Democrats who would need to appeal to poor (truly the forgotten population) and working class voters, as well as educated liberals in academia and the professions.

I like the two women who are on the Green Party ticket for president and vice-president, Dr. Jill Stein and Cheri Honkala. If I see them on my ballot I will vote for them. I have no idea whether they will be on the ballot in Texas. I hope so but I doubt it. Barring that, I will write in Rocky Anderson.

When foreign countries decree that certain parties or certain candidates may not run for office we say it perverts democracy. Yet that is exactly what is happening here in setting up huge roadblocks to any party that represents liberal or radical views. The faithful, if complacent, remnants of the Democratic Party who still read the Texas Observer and speak in their middle-class dens of the need to change things yet steadfastly go to the polls to vote against the greater evil, are not going to bring about any change unless it is ever moving Democrats rightward.

They don’t seem to realize that they could vote against a McCain or Romney while not rubber-stamping an Obama. The drilled in mind-set is that in order to vote against the bastards, we must vote for the so-in-sos. We must start now, in this election and beyond, to build progressive alternatives and get them on the ballot. And to change ballot access laws. Only a truly independent party based on principle, not one bought off by Wall Street, can create change or even fight for it.

Back in those misty days of the Movement we accepted the mantle of radical because what is wrong in this country will require more -- as we have dramatically seen in the last four years -- than getting another lesser of two evils elected. Organizing on the basis of issues at the grassroots level is still what will bring real and lasting change.

However, I now believe we don’t have to abandon electoral politics to the likes of the Koch brothers. But the prerequisite for having democratic government is changing the stranglehold the Repubcrats and Democans have on the system which nominates and elects the legislative and executive lawmakers. That could make a big difference.

When will we stop doing the same thing every four years and marveling that the results are not different? Isn’t that the definition of insanity? I am sick of yellow dogs and blue dogs -- of government going to the dogs.

[Jim Simons practiced law in Austin for 40 years, representing many movement activists, including anti-war GIs. Jim served as a counsel for members of the American Indian Movement who were arrested at Wounded Knee in 1974. After he retired he published his memoir Molly Chronicles in 2007. Read more articles by Jim Simons on The Rag Blog.]

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Danny Schechter : The Obama Defection

Obama under fire. Image from PressTV.
The Obama defection:
Former supporters lambaste the President

Just this week he reportedly begged his supporters to send more money as donations fall off. He may be panicking.

By Danny Schechter / The Rag Blog / July 3, 2012

There were two American elections this past week that spoke to the power of incumbency. Despite corruption charges, the venerable Black Democrat Charles Rangel, now in his 80’s, was reelected to Congress by his Harlem constituency.

Orin Hatch, a cranky conservative Republican beat back a challenge to his Senate seat from harder right Tea Partiers in Utah.

It takes a lot to unseat an American politician with seniority.

Barack Obama is hoping that he too will be returned to office despite all the money and conservative fervor trying to topple him. Never in history has so much lucre and political animus been targeted at one politician.

The Supreme Court’s ratification of key provisions of his health care "reform” will buttress his appeal, giving him some new bragging rights at a time when the economy remains depressed. Yet, even his former Economic Advisor Larry Summers says the economy will not rally enough to help him.

So, to try to change the media focus, he has increased global war making to burnish his image as a patriotic hardliner. The tougher sanctions he backed against Iran are soon in effect but ironically; they may lead to a backlash if oil prices rise, as they are likely to.

This race is not just a right-left battleground. Obama is under fire from his own supporters for failures and perceived betrayals linked in large part to his foreign policy, not health care or advocacy for it, same sex marriage, or immigration reform.

In some ways, this year’s contest echoes the way the anti-Vietnam war movement rallied against the then pro-war “liberal” Democrat Hubert Humphrey in 1968.

1968 is remembered as a year of surging protests the world over just like today. Activism was at a high point in America too, so when the Democrats chose a candidate stuck in a cold-war pro war stance, there was a rebellion against the party by its own faithful. There were protests in the streets at the Democratic Convention in Chicago and growing support for an electoral challenge by Bobby Kennedy.

Democrats were at war with each other even as the Republican candidate Richard Nixon claimed to have a plan to end the war. As we know, Nixon’s plan was an escalation but he won, only to be driven from office two years later.

While liberal advocacy groups like MoveOn and some environmental coalitions rally to Obama largely because the alternative is considered much worse, criticisms of his hawkishness, caution, and centrism among progressives reaches a fever pitch. In fact, just this week he reportedly begged his supporters to send more money as donations fall off. He may be panicking.

Writes political scientist Michael Brenner,

Barack Obama received a blast last week from one of his former Harvard law professors who made the case that he "must be defeated.”

Roberto Unger’s argument boils down to a damning indictment spelling out charges that the President has betrayed the progressive cause and those who militated for his election. The alleged betrayal is all the more painful, Professor Unger says, because it reveals a man who never was what he claimed to be.

Deep down, he is a conventionally conservative person -- not just a politician who bowed to electoral expediency. Moreover, he claims that Obama has nailed the lid on the coffin of the Democratic Party that has veered sharply away from its historical constituency and principles.

Brenner, himself a hard-nosed pragmatist and analyst, seems personally persuaded, writing,

How can one approve what he has done? How can one express approval of the man himself? Can one do so with a clear conscience? This question cannot be cavalierly cast aside as an exercise in vanity, as a naïve indulgence of misplaced moral purity.

It is true that the morality of individual action and ultimate ends always co-exists uneasily with standards of political ethics. But the two cannot always be reconciled. Is it unreasonable for someone to feel in his heart that he cannot tolerate pulling the Obama lever -- that the act itself sullies and degrades who he is? That it could even hamper his future ability to carry on as a public person with a sense of integrity unimpaired? I personally do not find it unreasonable.

Maybe not unreasonable but is it realistic? Some on the left think so, believing that a conservative Romney Administration will make a clearer target than a waffling Obama one.

Others say, no, we must hold our nose and vote for him and hold on to the White House as a brake against what will certainly be worse.

Blacks and Latinos are rallying behind Obama for cultural reasons a well as political ones. At the same time, some more traditional Democrats are furious with what they see as his elitism, conservatism, and wrong-headedness.

Jimmy Carter has attacked the White House on human rights lapses for violating 10 of the 30 articles of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, as he wrote in a New York Times op-ed. He sees the Obama Administration as abandoning its role as the global champion of human rights. Instead of making the world safer, America’s violation of international human rights abets our enemies and alienates our friends, Carter argues.

Many of his former supporters are disillusioned. He has done little to even try to sustain their loyalty, having downsized and downplayed his “Organizing for America” initiative that was supposed to build grass roots support for his reform agenda.

He abandoned the outreach effort to build an outside force to focus on the compromise-ridden “inside game” of beltway politics.

The reservations by intellectuals are felt across the activist spectrum, among the Wall Street occupiers and anti-war activists. The anti-war groups and their supporters fear that because of setbacks on the economic front at home, he will escalate his role as “warrior in chief” and perhaps provoke a war with Iran to rally Americans to back his Administration because it is defending them against danger.

Do the majority of Americans care about these issues that are treated mostly uncritically in our media? No, says Daniel Drezner in Foreign Policy magazine,

The overwhelming majority of Americans do not give a flying ---- about the rest of the world. Really, they don’t. Take a look at poll numbers about priorities for the 2012 presidential campaign, and try to find anything to do with international relations. There ain't much. It's almost all about the domestic economy.

So far, it’s mostly the hard right that hates Obama, but some on the left now have come to believe the worst as well. Like those who want to deny Obama’s legitimacy by questioning his claims to being an American citizen, left-leaning investigative reporter Wayne Madsen argues that Obama was a long term CIA agent, an Indonesian, not a Kenyan, and deeply immeshed in covert activities and cover-ups starting with his own identity.

He spells out his theory in a book called The Manufacturing of a President. contending,

Obama's birth certificate has never been the issue. The real issue, which affects his eligibility to serve as President of the United States, is his past and likely current Indonesian citizenship. The reader will be taken through the labyrinth of covert CIA operations in Africa, Southeast Asia, South Asia, and other regions. The real history of President Obama, his family, and the CIA quickly emerges as the reader wades into the murky waters of America's covert foreign operation.

I am not sure we need such a complex plot when a much simpler one will do. Washington is run by unelected forces -- in the financial system, the corporate world, and the Military-Industrial-Media Complex.

That’s who Rules America. Politicians know it, and are increasingly dependent on their largesse.

Whoever wins, they will remain in power.

[News Dissector Danny Schechter blogs at Newsdissector.net. His recent books are Occupy: Dissecting Occupy Wall Street and Blogothon (Cosimo Books). He hosts News Dissector Radio on PRN.fm Fridays at 1 p.m.  Email Danny at dissector@mediachannel.org. Read more articles by Danny Schechter on The Rag Blog.]

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Jack A. Smith : 2012 Elections: 'Another Fine Mess...'

Train car outside Cheyenne, Wyoming. Image from Big American Night.
'Another fine mess...'
The 2012 elections won't
bring progressive change

If Obama returns to the White House it will be to the same mess the U.S. finds itself in today. Should Romney get in it will be a mess on steroids.

By Jack A. Smith / The Rag Blog / May 28, 2012

Less than six months before the November presidential elections in an exceptionally distressed United States the narrow, unpleasant parameters of political possibility are emerging. Two alternatives confront the American people, both to the right of center.

1. If President Barack Obama is reelected, with the Democratic Party retaining control of at least one chamber of Congress, there probably will be four more years of economic stagnation, high unemployment, increasing poverty and inequality, more wars, erosions of civil liberties, and global warming.


2. If Mitt Romney is elected, with the right/far right Republican Party dominating either House or Senate, every particular of the travail afflicting the country today will be multiplied, with emphasis on fulfilling the desires of the 1% at the expense of the 99%.

What else could be expected during the present conservative era? Paul Krugman, the liberal Nobel Prize-winning economist and New York Times columnist, recently described Obama, whom he supports, as having ruled like "a moderate Republican circa 1992." Viewing the ultraconservatives, African American professor and left intellectual Cornell West detected "creeping fascism."

In today's society -- based on gross economic inequality facilitated by a two-party political system spanning center right to far right and where big money is the decisive factor in the electoral process -- an ostensibly democratic election can hardly mitigate the worst of abuses afflicting working people and their families, much less bring about substantial reform.

This dreary reality is offset by an important new development. For the first time over the last several presidential elections -- when voters are usually cheering exclusively for their candidate -- masses of people are protesting in the streets against inequality of income and opportunity, and the class war waged by the wealthy, as well as global warming, ending wars, dismantling NATO, and the like. Some unions, too, are not simply backing Obama but protesting on their own against Wall Street's depredations.

Thirty years of wage stagnation, the growing rich-poor chasm, evisceration of the so-called American Dream and the long, painful effects of the Great Recession are the objective conditions behind the developing political consciousness of many Americans. Like the Roman Catholic church after widespread evidence of priests molesting children, sacrosanct capitalism -- the economic holy of holies -- is finally attracting public criticism for its crimes and hypocrisy, not yet on a huge scale, but growing.

The sudden entrance of Occupy Wall Street last September with an open critique of the substantial excesses of capitalism in American society, following the democratic Arab Spring and Wisconsin uprising, has energized much of the left and progressive forces.

Nationwide May Day actions and the 15,000 who demonstrated against NATO in Chicago later in May, among other protests, including civil disobedience, are encouraging harbingers that many more people eventually will take their grievances to the streets and meeting halls, where all social progress begins.

If this momentum manages to continue for the next few years it could become a broad and diverse national movement for social change -- but it's still a big "if."

The political system seems no longer accountable to the public. Several matters of great importance to the American people do not even figure in this year's election because both ruling parties basically agree about them and there's little to squabble about but details. The administration has taken the U.S. up to its elbows in the quagmire of war, so the conservatives cry, "up to the shoulders!" Here are some issues the voters won't be able to influence at the ballot box:

• President Obama is presiding over U.S. wars in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Yemen, killing "terrorist suspects" in Somalia and wherever the CIA's drones wander. May opinion polls show 66% of the American people want the expensive 10-year-old stalemated Afghan conflict to end, and 40% -- many of whom want it terminated now -- are strongly opposed. Only 27% support the war, 8% strongly. For all the chatter about nearing the end of the Afghan war at the NATO summit in Chicago May 20, Obama days earlier announced that he was prolonging the war a decade after his "final" pullout date at the end of 2014. An undetermined number of special forces combat troops, military trainers, and CIA paramilitaries will "defend" the corrupt Kabul government until 2024. American taxpayers will foot the bills -- several billion a year. Progressive Democrats in Congress seek to restrain Washington's penchant for wars, but they are consistently ignored and occasionally berated by the Obama Administration for their efforts.


• Most citizens want cuts in the war budget. But as they go to the polls, the American people will be lugging a military and national security behemoth on their recession-bent backs, costing about $1.2 trillion a year. Rumors of meaningful reductions are illusory. The Pentagon accounts for over half of this amount (about $642 billion for fiscal 2013); the rest goes to Homeland Security, 17 spy agencies, nuclear weapons, interest on past war debts, and so on.


• Global warming is here and getting worse while the White House is opening up new areas to drill for oil and supports massive development of shale-derived natural gas (which requires fracking), "clean" coal (though it does not yet exist), nuclear power, and dirty tar sands fuel. The Obama Administration's support for alternative non-carbon development is a token tossed to the environmental movement. Meanwhile, the U.S. -- which demands to be recognized as world leader -- is using its leadership to undermine international progress in fighting climate change. Big business and Wall St., primarily concerned with expansion and greater profits, heartily approve. Like Rhett Butler, the conservatives, frankly, just don’t give a damn.


• Since he has borrowed populist phrases for the election, some of them from Occupy, President Obama has finally at least mentioned poverty, inequality, and low wages, but he has done nothing about this situation since taking office and will not put forward an anti-poverty program if reelected. The United States is the most economically unequal of the top 20 advanced, industrialized capitalist economies in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). The U.S. also pays the lowest wages to its working class compared with OECD countries. Almost 25% of the American work force receives low wages (about $10 an hour down to minimum wage and below), usually without any benefits or healthcare. One in two Americans is low income or poor. The poor account for one in seven people. About 47 million Americans require food stamps to eat. Food stamps are the only "income" for six million of them. This has not come about by mistake; it's the political system's payoff to the ever-richer plutocracy and its minions.


• The Obama Administration has responded more resourcefully to the Great Recession than the conservative opposition, but it only goes a quarter or half way in remedial action, which adds to the stagnation and prolongs the pain for the working class, lower middle class and a large sector of the middle class as well. When Obama delivers on the economy -- whether in the stimulus, jobs, foreclosures, bank regulations, or infrastructure -- it's always partial and inadequate because the main concessions are made with the power structure up front before the inevitable compromises with the right wing. There's a difference between talking like a fighter when trawling for votes, and avoiding confrontation as president. Krugman says "we have responded to crisis with a mix of paralysis and confusion." This is a major reason why over 22 million Americas need but cannot secure full time work.


• President Obama has retained all former President Bush's many erosions of civil liberties, particularly the onerous Patriot Act, and added many of his own, such as when he approved of indefinite detention for suspects, including American citizens. A unique coalition of liberals and conservatives in the House tried to pass legislation to reject indefinite detention May 18, but the effort was defeated. The U.S., under Obama, is becoming a full fledged surveillance state. Tom Engelhardt writes that "30,000 people [are] hired to listen in on conversations and other communications in this country."


• Any listing of the important issues that are not part of the election campaign and over which the citizenry has no say must include a foreign/military/national security policy based on exercising world hegemony backed by military power. What's the "pivot" to East Asia really all about, other than to weaken China in its own sphere of possible influence and cling to world domination? Why has the U.S. been taking steps to bring about regime change in Syria, other than to dominate yet another country and weaken Iran in the process?Why did Obama facilitate a violent civil war for regime change in Libya, other than to gain another oil-rich client state, but this time with an enormous aquifer under its sands which may become more precious than the oil as water supplies dwindle through North Africa? Why did the president get behind the coup in Honduras, other than to dispatch a potentially progressive regime friendly to Venezuela?

Further, why does Obama still maintain Cold War sanctions and a trade blockade against Cuba, other than to win Florida votes in November? Why is Washington supporting the vicious Sunni monarchy in Bahrain which routinely oppresses and attacks the Shi'ite majority seeking equality, other than satisfying the obnoxious rulers of Saudi Arabia? Why is Obama now fighting a war in Yemen, other than to keep the new president, who ran unopposed with strong U.S. support, in his pocket, and to bestow another favor upon the Saudi lords?

Why is the administration seeking to strangle Iran, other than to prevent an Iran-Iraq alliance that might compromise U.S. hegemony in the Middle East, especially the Persian Gulf, through which 40% of the world's oil must pass? And what is the real purpose of the Oval Office's new "scramble for Africa," other than establishing a military presence throughout the continent while elbowing China out of the way to grab natural resources, trade, and markets.

President Obama blames all his failures in office on the conservatives and the recession, and most Democrats accept this explanation. Even progressive Democrats, well aware of Obama's abundant shortcomings, will cut him slack for fear of the "greater evil."

The corrosive impact of far right ideology in America must not be underestimated. But despite "Don't-Tread-on-Me" Tea Party reactionaries and conservative obstruction in Congress, Democrats in the House and Senate remain responsible for many unmet objectives and a weak legislative record.

Led by Obama, they would not fight for progressive goals and spent much of the time trying to fulfill the naïve presidential fantasy of "governing like Americans, not Republicans or Democrats." Once the conservatives understood Obama would rather compromise than fight they attacked full force and virtually paralyzed the Democratic agenda.

The silence of some Democratic politicians toward the erosion of civil liberties, indifference to climate change, and support for unnecessary wars -- a silence many would have broken had a Republican been in the White House -- should subject them to publicly wearing scarlet letters inscribed with a "C" (for craven) around their necks.

Despite the stagnant economy -- the main issue in the election according to 86% of potential voters -- the Republican Party's lurch to the far right and the bizarre legislative behavior of the Tea Party-influenced GOP House majority led by the ineffable Speaker John Boehner seem to have at least evened the election odds. Stranger things have happened in American politics, but it remains very doubtful that the critically important independent voters will swing toward fringe conservatism. This factor, in our view, gives Obama the edge.

In this connection the April 28 international edition of Britain's conservative magazine, The Economist, wondered "What happens to a two-party political system when one party goes mad?" The article quotes the following from the new book It's Even Worse Than It Looks, a product of one author from the establishment Brookings Institute and the other from the conservative American Enterprise Institute: "The Republican Party has become an insurgent outlier -- ideologically extreme; contemptuous of the inherited social and economic policy regime; scornful of compromise; unpersuaded by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science, and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition."

Many right-wing voters despise Romney, a shape-shifting opportunist whom they distrust, but they will stick with him because Republican leaders and funders insist he has the best chance to defeat the "big government socialist" whom many Tea Partiers scandalously allege conceals his "true" nationality and religion. Those funders, by the way, will see to it that -- as opposed to 2008 -- the Republicans will spend at least enough money to buy the election as the Democrats, so the race should be close.

Once a moderate Republican, Romney adopted far right positions on most issues to secure the nomination, calling for severe cutbacks in social programs for the poor, unemployed, foreclosed, and similarly discarded, among a plethora of counterproductive social and economic nostrums satisfying to the Rush Limbaughs and Michele Bachmanns.

Now he's in a tight bind. It is absolutely necessary to gravitate partially toward the center, where the independent votes are, but he is under considerable restraint from his own unforgiving constituency.

Consistent with mendacious ultra-conservative propaganda, Romney attributes the economic crisis entirely to Obama's presidency, without suggesting that the Great Recession emanated from the millionaire tax cuts, war spending, and huge deficits of his Republican predecessor (following years of Clinton Administration deregulations of banking and Wall Sreet that set the stage for what by now had become a "winner take all" economic system.)

Romney's nonsensical economic speech in Iowa May 15, was an epic self-exposure. While promising to cut social spending, increase the war budget, and not raise taxes, he declared:

President Obama is an old-school liberal whose first instinct is to see free enterprise as the villain and government as the hero... America counted on President Obama to rescue the economy, tame the deficit and help create jobs. Instead, he bailed out the public sector, gave billions of dollars to the companies of his friends and added almost as much debt as all the prior presidents combined.

Virtually every word was a lie, according to an analysis of the entire speech by the Associated Press the next day which pointed out that "the debt has gone up by about half under Obama. Under Ronald Reagan, it tripled." AP didn't mention Romney's political characterization of Obama, but he's hardly a liberal -- as was clear during his first term, and his adhesion to "free enterprise" capitalism is indissoluble.

Romney has been sharply critical of Obama on two of the biggest issues of the campaign -- healthcare and the Afghan war -- despite the fact that his own past positions on both matters were nearly identical to those of his rival. Obama's healthcare plan is based on the program Romney implemented as governor of Massachusetts.

And despite far more hawkish rhetoric to please the far right during the primaries, the Republican's views on Afghanistan did not differ markedly from those of Obama. In recent weeks before and after the NATO summit, Romney has hardly spoken of the Afghan war, obviously recognizing that his primary views are anathema to the American people as a whole.

Obama and Romney have agreed on other issues. An article in Grist April 24 by Lisa Hymas pointed out that "Obama's 'smart growth' initiative -- the Partnership for Sustainable Communities -- was also created in the mold of a Romney program... As governor, Romney actively fought sprawl and promoted density. He ran on a smart-growth platform: 'Sprawl is the most important quality-of-life issue facing Massachusetts,' he said in 2002... Under President Obama, the EPA moved from praising Romney’s smart-growth office to mimicking it."

It went into effect in June 2009. Romney also supported abortion rights, environmentalism and immigration as governor.

These "coincidences" are the outstanding ironies of the campaign so far. "Far right" Romney and "liberal populist" Obama have both resembled "moderate Republicans" when in power. Obama will revert to his center-right configuration if reelected, but if Romney ever gets to the White House his constituency will force him to largely govern as an ultra-conservative.

A principal Republican issue in the past several presidential elections has been that the Democrats were "weak on defense," including in 2008 when Obama opposed the Iraq war, but the right wing has lowered the volume significantly because it can't work this year. The Democratic Party, of course, voted for, supported and funded the Afghan and Iraq wars, but Obama defeated pro-war Hillary Clinton for the Democratic nomination because his critique of the disastrous adventure in Iraq accorded with that of most Democratic primary voters -- then turned around when elected and stole the Republican thunder by transforming into a war president.

He governs foreign/military affairs as a hawk, juggling several bloody conflicts simultaneously, abjectly pandering to the armed forces and fostering the growth of militarism in American society. A year after the Arab Spring in the Middle East and North Africa, the Obama Administration has launched its own Imperialist Spring in the same region.

Many Democrats voted for Obama in the 2008 primaries because he was considered a "peace candidate" of sorts. A recent article by Atlantic Magazine staff writer Conor Friedersdorf compiled a brief partial account of Obama's "peace" record:

• Obama escalated the war in Afghanistan, adding tens of thousands of troops at a cost of many billions of dollars.
• He committed American forces to a war in Libya, though he had neither approval from Congress nor reason to think events there threatened national security.
• He ordered 250 drone strikes that killed at least 1,400 people in Pakistan.
• He ordered the raid into Pakistan that killed Osama bin Laden.
• He ordered the killings of multiple American citizens living abroad.
• He expanded the definition of the War on Terrorism and asserted his worldwide power to indefinitely detain anyone he deems a terrorist.
• He expanded drone attacks into Somalia.
• He ordered a raid on pirates in Somalia
• He deployed military squads to fight the drug war throughout Latin America.
• He expanded the drone war in Yemen, going so far as to give the CIA permission to kill people even when it doesn't know their identities so long as they're suspected of ties to terrorism.
• He's implied that he'd go to war with Iran rather than permitting them to get nuclear weapons.

No matter who wins in November nothing listed above will change, except perhaps for the worse. If Obama returns to the White House it will be to the same mess the U.S. finds itself in today, along with the wars, inequality, and hardship. Should Romney get in it will be a mess on steroids.

Progressive change certainly remains possible in America, although neither ruling party is equipped to bring it about. These parties were not prepared to end the Vietnam war either, or to get rid of Jim Crow, or to implement the eight-hour day, or to allow women the democratic right to vote. But the people organized radical mass movements to fight for these goals and won.

The informal people's struggles of various organizations that began coalescing early last year, propelled several months later by Occupy's left critique of inequality, Wall Street, and the 1% ruling plutocracy, has the potential to become a mass movement.

Many such potentials have come along and faded for various reasons, including some that were co-opted or lost their vision. But such broad and deep movements -- as long as they are massive, activist, radical, and well organized -- also have significantly changed American history.

It may be a long, arduous struggle, but that's the light at the end of this dismal electoral tunnel.

[Jack A. Smith was editor of the Guardian -- for decades the nation's preeminent leftist newsweekly -- that closed shop in 1992. Smith now edits the Hudson Valley Activist Newsletter. Read more articles by Jack A. Smith on The Rag Blog.

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Van Jones : What Went Wrong in the Age of Obama

Van Jones. Photo by Bill Pugliano / Getty Images.
The Age of Obama:
What went wrong (and how to fix it)

By Van Jones / Progressive America Rising / April 3, 2012

[This article is adapted from Van Jones' new book, Rebuild the Dream.]

The 2008 campaign was a campfire around which millions gathered. But after the election, it was nobody’s job or role to tend that campfire. The White House was focused on the minutiae of passing legislation, not on the magic of leading a movement. Obama For America did the best that it could, but the mass gatherings, the idealism, the expanded notions of American identity, the growing sense of a new national community, all of that disappeared.

It goes without saying that clear thinking and imaginative problem solving are easier in hindsight, away from the battlefield. I was in the White House for six months of 2009, and I was outside of it afterward. I had some of the above insights at the time, but many did not come to me in the middle of the drama and action. Most are the product of deeper reflection, which I was able to do only from a distance.

Nonetheless, the exercise of trying to sort out what might have been and trying to understand why nobody was able to make those things happen in real time has informed this book and shaped my arguments going forward.

I say Obama relied on the people too little, and we tried to rely on him too much.

Let me speak personally: looking back, I do not think those of us who believed in the agenda of change had to get beaten as badly as we were, after Obama was sworn in. We did not have to leave millions of once-inspired people feeling lost, deceived, and abandoned. We did not have to let our movement die down to the level that it did.

The simple truth is this: we overestimated our achievement in 2008, and we underestimated our opponents in 2009.

We did not lose because the backlashers got so loud. We lost because the rest of us got so quiet. Too many of us treated Obama’s inauguration as some kind of finish line, when we should have seen it as just the starting line. Too many of us sat down at the very moment when we should have stood up.

Among those who stayed active, too many of us (myself included) were in the suites when we should have been in the streets. Many “repositioned” our grassroots organizations to be “at the table” in order to “work with the administration.” Some of us (like me) took roles in the government. For a while at least, many were so enthralled with the idea of being a part of history that we forgot the courage, sacrifices, and risks that are sometimes required to make history.

That is hard, scary, and thankless work. It requires a willingness to walk with a White House when possible -- and to walk boldly ahead of that same White House, when necessary. A few leaders were willing to play that role from the very beginning, but many more were not. Too many activists reverted to acting like either die-hard or disappointed fans of the president, not fighters for the people.

The conventional wisdom is that Obama went too far to the left to accommodate his liberal base. In my view, the liberal base went too far to the center to accommodate Obama. The conventional wisdom says that Obama relied on Congress too much. I say Obama relied on the people too little, and we tried to rely on him too much.

Once it became obvious that he was committed to bipartisanship at all costs, even if it meant chasing an opposition party that was moving further to the right every day, progressives needed to reassess our strategies, defend our own interests, and go our own way. It took us way too long to internalize this lesson -- and act upon it.

The independent movement for hope and change, which had been growing since 2003, was a goose that was laying golden eggs. But the bird could not be bossed. Caging it killed it. It died around conference tables in Washington, D.C., long before the Tea Party got big enough to kick its carcass down the street.

The administration was naïve and hubristic enough to try to absorb and even direct the popular movement that had helped to elect the president. That was part of the problem. But the main problem was that the movement itself was naïve and enamored enough that it wanted to be absorbed and directed. Instead of marching on Washington, many of us longed to get marching orders from Washington. We so much wanted to be a part of something beautiful that we forgot how ugly and difficult political change can be.

Somewhere along the line, a bottom-up, largely decentralized phenomenon found itself trying to function as a subcomponent of a national party apparatus. Despite the best intentions of practically everyone involved, the whole process wound up sucking the soul out of the movement.

As a result, when the backlash came, the hope-and-changers had no independent ground on which to stand and fight back. Grassroots activists had little independent ability to challenge the White House when it was wrong and, therefore, a dwindling capacity to defend it when it was right.

We need a president who is willing to be pushed into doing the right thing, and we need independent leaders and movements that are willing to do the pushing.

The Obama administration had the wrong theory of the movement, and the movement had the wrong theory of the presidency. In America, change comes when we have two kinds of leaders, not just one. We need a president who is willing to be pushed into doing the right thing, and we need independent leaders and movements that are willing to do the pushing. For a few years, Obama’s supporters expected the president to act like a movement leader, rather than a head of state.

The confusion was understandable: As a candidate, Obama performed many of the functions of a movement leader. He gave inspiring speeches, held massive rallies, and stirred our hearts. But when he became president, he could no longer play that role.

The expectation that he would or could arose from a fundamental misreading of U.S. history. After all, as head of state, President Lyndon Johnson did not lead the civil rights movement. That was the job of independent movement leaders, such as Martin Luther King Jr., Ella Baker, Bayard Rustin, and Fannie Lou Hamer.

There were moments of conflict and cooperation between Johnson and leaders in the freedom struggle, but the alchemy of political power and people power is what resulted in the Civil Rights Acts of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

As head of state, Franklin Delano Roosevelt did not lead the labor movement. That was the job of independent union leaders. Again, the alchemy of political power and people power resulted in the New Deal.

As head of state, Woodrow Wilson did not lead the fight to enfranchise women. That was the role of independent movement leaders, such as suffragettes Susan B. Anthony and Ida B. Wells. The alchemy of political power and people power resulted in women’s right to vote.

As head of state, Abraham Lincoln did not lead the abolitionists. That was the job of independent movement leaders Frederick Douglass, John Brown, and Harriet Tubman. The alchemy of political power and people power resulted in the emancipation of enslaved Africans.

As head of state, Richard Nixon did not lead the environmental movement. That was the job of various environmental organizations, such as the Sierra Club, and other leaders, like those whom writer Rachel Carson inspired. Once again it was the alchemy of political power and people power that resulted in the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, and the Environmental Protection Agency

The biggest reason for our frustrations and failures is that we have not yet understood that both of these are necessary -- and they are distinct. We already have our head of state who arguably is willing to be pushed. We do not yet have a strong enough independent movement to do the pushing. The bulk of this book makes the case for how and why we should build one.

[Van Jones, a former adviser to President Obama and a former contributing editor to YES! Magazine, is the co-founder of Rebuild the Dream, a platform for bottom-up, people-powered innovations to help fix the U.S. economy. He is also the co-founder of the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights, Color of Change, and Green for All. This article was adapted by Jones for YES! Magazine, a national, nonprofit media organization that fuses powerful ideas with practical actions, from his new book, Rebuild the Dream. It was first published at YES! Magazine and was also published at and distributed by Progressive America Rising.]

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Ian Buruma : Is the U.S. in a 'Dangerous State of Funk'?

Graphic from Progressive America Rising.
Is the U.S. in a ‘Dangerous State of Funk’?

Much political rhetoric, and a spate of new books, would have us believe that the U.S. is in a dangerous state of funk.

By Ian Buruma / Progressive America Rising / February 21, 2012

NEW YORK -- The eccentric Bengali intellectual Nirad C. Chaudhuri once explained the end of the British Raj in India as a case of "funk," or loss of nerve. The British had stopped believing in their own empire. They simply lost the will, in Rudyard Kipling’s famous words, to fight "the savage wars of peace."

In fact, Kipling’s poem, "The White Man’s Burden," which exhorted the white race to spread its values to the "new-caught sullen peoples, half devil and half child," was not about the British empire at all, but about the United States. Subtitled "The United States and the Philippine Islands," it was published in 1899, just as the U.S. was waging a "savage war of peace" of its own.

Chaudhuri had a point. It is difficult to sustain an empire without the will to use force when necessary. Much political rhetoric, and a spate of new books, would have us believe that the U.S. is now in a dangerous state of funk.


Fresh debate over U.S. mission in Afghanistan

For example, Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney likes to castigate President Barack Obama for "apologizing for America’s international power," for daring to suggest that the U.S. is not "the greatest country on earth," and for being "pessimistic." By contrast, Romney promises to "restore" the greatness and international power of the United States, which he proposes to do by boosting its military force.

Romney’s Kipling is the neoconservative intellectual, Robert Kagan, whose new book, The World America Made, argues against "the myth of American decline." Yes, he admits, China is growing in strength, but U.S. dominance is still overwhelming; The U.S. military might can still "make right" against any challenger. The only real danger to U.S. power is "declinism": the loss of self-belief, the temptation to "escape from the moral and material burdens that have weighed on [the U.S.] since World War II." In a word, funk.

Like Chaudhuri, Kagan is an engaging writer. His arguments sound reasonable. And his assessment of U.S. firepower is no doubt correct. True, he has little time for domestic problems such as antiquated infrastructure, failing public schools, an appalling healthcare system, and grotesque disparities in income and wealth. But he is surely right to observe that no other power is threatening to usurp the U.S. role as the world’s military policeman.

Less certain, however, is the premise that the world order would collapse without "American leadership." France’s King Louis XV allegedly declared on his deathbed: Après moi, le déluge. ["After me, the flood."] This is the conceit of all great powers.


‘Pax Americana’

Even as the British were dismantling their empire after World War II, the French and Dutch still believed that parting with their Asian possessions would result in chaos. And it is still common to hear autocratic leaders who inherited parts of the Western empire's claim that democracy is all well and good, but the people are not yet ready for it. Those who monopolize power cannot imagine a world released from their grip as anything but a catastrophe.

In Europe after World War II, Pax Americana, guaranteed by U.S. military power, was designed "to keep the Russians out and Germany down." In Asia, it was meant to contain communism, while allowing allies, from Japan to Indonesia, to build up economic strength. Spreading democracy was not the main concern; stopping communism -- in Asia, Europe, Africa, the Middle East, and the Americas -- was. In this respect, it succeeded, though at great human cost.

But, now that the specter of global communist domination has joined other fears -- real and imagined -- in the dustbin of history, it is surely time for countries to start handling their own affairs. Japan, in alliance with other Asian democracies, should be able to counterbalance China’s growing power. Similarly, Europeans are rich enough to manage their own security.

But neither Japan nor the European Union seems ready to pull its own weight, owing in part to decades of dependency on U.S. security. As long as Uncle Sam continues to police the world, his children won’t grow up.

In any case, as we have seen in Iraq and Afghanistan, "savage wars of peace" are not always the most effective way to conduct foreign policy. Old-fashioned military dominance is no longer adequate to promote U.S. interests. The Chinese are steadily gaining influence in Africa, not with bombers, but with money. Meanwhile, propping up secular dictators in the Middle East with U.S. arms has helped to create Islamist extremism, which cannot be defeated by simply sending more drones.

The notion promoted by Romney and his boosters that only U.S. military power can preserve world order is deeply reactionary. It is a form of Cold War nostalgia -- a dream of returning to a time when much of the globe was recovering from a ruinous world war and living in fear of communism.

Obama’s recognition of U.S. limitations is not a sign of cowardly pessimism, but of realistic wisdom. His relative discretion in the Middle East has allowed people there to act for themselves. We do not yet know what the outcome there will be, but "the greatest country on earth" cannot impose a solution. Nor should it.

[Ian Buruma is Professor of Democracy and Human Rights at Bard College, and the author most recently of Taming the Gods: Religion and Democracy on Three Continents. This article was published by Aljazeera and was distributed by Progressive America Rising. A version was first published on Project Syndicate.]

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Bill Fletcher, Jr. : Obama, Progressives, and the White Nationalist Backlash

Image from Reckless Eyeballing.
Task for progressives in 2012:
Monkey-wrenching the white united front

It has been striking that many progressives have said so little about race, racism, and the discourse of right-wing populism in the context of the upcoming elections.

By Bill Fletcher, Jr. / The Rag Blog / May 22, 2011

In the context of the criticisms that many of us have of the Obama administration for what it has not accomplished, for its advance of a corporate agenda, and for the unacceptable compromises it has made with the Republicans, there is something that I have seen few progressives address.

To borrow from a comment offered by television commentator Tavis Smiley, the 2012 elections are likely to be the most racist that most of us have seen in our lifetimes. Given this, what are the implications?

It has been striking that many progressives, particularly those who have not only written off President Obama but also written off all those who offered critical support to the Obama campaign in 2008, have said so little about race, racism, and the discourse of right-wing populism in the context of the upcoming elections.

We have witnessed the first Black president of the United States questioned about his citizenship and birthplace, yet I have seen precious little from many friends on the left side of the aisle (particularly those so critical of Obama) responding to this. If you put your ear to the ground, however, you hear the murmurings of Black Americans furious that Obama was put in a place where he had to file a petition in order to obtain his Hawaii birth certificate.

The murmurings do not stop there. When Donald Trump and other opportunists started asking questions about how it was that Obama got into Columbia University and Harvard Law School (i.e., was he REALLY qualified to have gotten into those schools?), for most of us enough was enough. Because this was no longer about Obama and it had very little to do with criticisms of Obama and his policies.

The white nationalist backlash is using Obama as the target but they are attempting to create a white united front to, in their minds, take back the United States. Part of this agenda means delegitimizing the democratically elected President, but it also goes towards tampering with election laws and voting processes in state after state.

In case you have not noticed, in many states where there is a Republican majority in control, efforts are underway to restrict voting, whether by further limiting ex-felons from voting, to eliminating same-day voter registration, to the demand for picture identifications at the time of voting, to the shortening of periods of early voting.

The objective is to reduce the potential anti-Republican electorate. This is being done by demagogically and inaccurately crowing about alleged voter fraud. But this happens through the Right racializing alleged voter fraud. In other words, as opposed to a discussion about real voter theft, e.g., the Republican theft of the 2000 election, the right wing uses black and brown characters as the way of convincing segments of the white populace that something needs to be done, otherwise these colored peoples will be taking over.

The racist attacks on Obama, then, fuse with the larger right-wing narrative: the United States of America is being lost to white people. This has been the core of the Birther message, but it has also been the core of the attacks that contributed to the collapse of ACORN, as well as the blitzkrieg effort of the Right to overturn voting rights.

In its more extreme version it is the core of the message that comes out of the fascist and semi-fascist movements among white nationalists such as the Sovereign Citizens (the subject of a segment of the May 15th episode of 60 Minutes).

What we are witnessing is disturbingly similar to the period of the overthrow of Reconstruction and the building of the Jim Crow segregationist system in the South. Appealing to fears among whites, and in a frantic effort to destabilize any efforts at unity between the black and white poor in the South at the end of the 19th century, white Southern elites moved an agenda of voter disenfranchisement, hiding behind various coded concerns such as the literacy of the electorate.

African Americans were completely disenfranchised, and quite ironically, so were many poor whites.

Despite our knowledge of history and awareness of the antics of white right-wing populism, few progressives are discussing the implications of any of this for the 2012 elections. The implications, it would seem to me, are quite profound, and range from what this means about HOW to criticize the Obama administration, to how to ensure that the elections are not outright stolen by the white Right.

Just to be clear before some of my critics start yelling that "Fletcher is covering for Obama," this column is about racial politics in the USA. The particular flashpoint happens to be Obama but what is at stake, as I have attempted to elaborate, is far more than the political future of a corporate liberal president.

Silence on the part of progressives in the face of this situation, despite our own legitimate criticisms of Obama, misses the larger picture. Yes, we must criticize Obama; yes, we must push this administration; yes, we must protest any retrograde domestic or foreign policies. But in the end, we need to be discussing how this is done in the context of fighting a white, right-wing populism that is arguing that Obama is an alien and that he (and the changing demographics of the USA) represents the end of the white "American Dream."

We should have no illusions that the Republican candidate for the presidency, irrespective of who gets it, will center their campaign on anything but this one, critical message.

I think it is time to talk about strategy and tactics in the fight for power and against the Right, and not only about matters of policy. Politics is dirty, but it is also very complicated, that is, if one exists in the real world rather than in one's own playpen.

[BlackCommentator.com editorial board member, Bill Fletcher, Jr., is a Senior Scholar with the Institute for Policy Studies, the immediate past president of TransAfricaForum and co-author of Solidarity Divided: The Crisis in Organized Labor and a New Path toward Social Justice (University of California Press), which examines the crisis of organized labor in the USA. This article was first posted at BlackCommentator.com and was distributed by Progressive America Rising.]

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Tom Hayden : Response to Bill Fletcher on Rethinking 'Hope'

Obama landscape: seeing the forest for the trees? Photo by Mark Wilson / Getty Images.
Returning to a grass roots agenda:
A response to Bill Fletcher
on Obama, 2012, and rethinking 'Hope'

By Tom Hayden / The Rag Blog / April 27, 2011

[This is Tom Hayden's response to "Obama, 2012, and Rethinking 'Hope,'" by Bill Fletcher, Jr., posted to The Rag Blog, April 21, 2011.]

I agree with Bill Fletcher’s essay on how to approach Obama in 2012. I only wish to add these thoughts.

First, I knew very well that Obama was a centrist, because he declared himself to be at the midpoint between Senator Henry “Scoop” Jackson and “Tom Hayden Democrats” such as myself. I knew where things stood from the get-go. No matter how reasonably I described my beliefs, Obama would keep moving to the right of them in order to maintain his role as a centrist.

Aside from the frustrations this would mean for progressives like myself, it also meant that Obama was defining “center” in an unfortunate way. He apparently didn’t mean a midpoint between the 75 percent majorities and 25 percent minorities on taxing the rich, saving Medicare and Social Security, and getting out of Afghanistan. He meant staying in the middle between the poles he chose to consider relevant, which meant the far right and the middle, leaving the Democratic Party liberals stranded on many issues.

His call.

But now Obama has stranded himself, with a majority of Americans favoring “another candidate” in 2012, and a fall-off of about 30 percent among all Democrats and Latinos. His strategy obviously is to get Democrats and Independents to hold their noses and vote for him against an obnoxious Republican in 2012.

This, folks might do. I certainly will. On the other hand, Obama will have an impossible time mobilizing the same level of resources, organizers, and energy of his grass-roots campaign of 2008. So he could lose in some of the dozen states where he won by 1-3 points in that historic year.

I attended an Obama rally in Culver City, California, the other night. There were 2,500 people gathered at Sony Studios, in the district of progressive Congresswoman Karen Bass. The crowd was loyal, caring, supportive, but not inflamed as they were in 2008. The speeches, which were supposed to galvanize, were somewhat flat. People had the president’s back, but all were well aware that the road ahead would be hard and uphill.

I certainly don’t think that the President should throw red meat to his base if it harms him among the independents. But I think he should be aware that his careful parsing of words and positions leaves many people lacking their previous level of faith.

To be specific, does he really mean that he will let the tax credits for the rich expire in 2012, no matter the outcome of the election and negotiations with Republicans? Or is he open to an extension? No one knows, because Obama loathes absolutes.

On Iraq, will he really withdraw the remaining 50,000 troops, or is he open to a deal extending the occupation? On Afghanistan, does he plan a significant withdrawal beginning this July, or will American combat troops remain through 2014? Again, no one can be confident that they know.

On immigration rights, does Obama really have a plan to implement a “path to citizenship," or does he mean to make this a wedge issue with Republicans? Did he do all that he could for the Dream Act students? Or is he just trying to bring back the Latino vote in New Mexico, Colorado, and Nevada?

On Wall Street reform, will Obama really protect us against the return of the vulture capitalists? On campaign contributions, does he really intend to reverse the Supreme Court over Citizens United, or will he focus on raising 1 billion dollars for his re-election? On green jobs, does he seriously believe we can accept coal mining, deep water drilling, and more nuclear plants as part of the bargain?

Serious questions all. By keeping his base uncertain, Obama lowers our commitment to a point where we are going through a shared uncertainty about each other. If he seems to hedge his bets, so do many of us.

Back in 2008, we thought there might be a progressive upsurge that would keep Obama accountable to our agenda. It was a provisional experiment.

As things turned out, however, the big constituencies of the Democratic Party [like labor] have failed to come up with effective strategies to turn the economy around and end the wars. Perhaps the most interesting success of progressives, in my mind, was that of the brainy and well-financed LGBT network, which maintained the pressure to repeal “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell." It was a remarkable victory, but even so the legislation contained loopholes actually allowing the military to stall.

In 2012, like most of us, I will campaign and vote for Obama, not because he is the Second Coming, but because the alternative is unimaginable, and his administration is staffed with all sorts of intelligent and creative people who are open to progressive pressure and thought.

In fact, I will take pleasure in trying to engage the American public in a debate about Tom Payne versus Ayn Rand, Keynes versus Milton Friedman. I think we are at a historic turning point in our culture when so many white people are incapable of accepting the election of a black president. For these extremist “birthers," Obama is symbolic of the Illegal Aliens undermining traditional white culture. They pose a serious internal threat; even the Homeland Security Agency warned in 2009 of the rise of right-wing violence due to the election of a black president and an economic recession.

Like Bill Fletcher, I hope we can return to the grass-roots agenda of trying to shift public opinion and building state and local power bases capable of creating blue-state models of social change and competing with the corporations to push Obama towards applying his experience of community organizing to making the presidency a progressive bastion.

Most on the American Left have internalized the idea that only social movements can make a president progressive, citing the examples of abolitionist pressure on Abraham Lincoln and workers’ pressure on Franklin Roosevelt. That’s a huge step towards understanding how history works from the bottom up.

But the plain fact is that the American Left, unlike our counterparts in Latin America and Europe, has been unable to build an infrastructure of parties, unions, media, and artists capable of the daily work of organizing to compete politically while fostering counter-communities of lasting meaning.

The reason that education, health care and social services are more affordable, that green politics is more viable, that labor protections are stronger on other continents is that there are stronger social-democratic, radical, and green parties with popular support in those parts of the world. They resisted the impulse to empire and war, and tried to develop and improve their lives at home.

There is little Obama can do about that. He plays with the cards he is dealt. He is both the commander-in-chief of a global network of power, and a leader elected on promises of deep reform. He cannot be both.

We cannot fight wars over oil and make the deep commitment to energy conservation that is necessary. How do you reform empire when we are four percent of the world’s population consuming 40 percent of the world’s resources? When becoming more “competitive” means keeping the rest of the world at bay and at risk?

Obama is the symbol of the new globalization processes unleashed in the world, still under excessive influence of those banking elites who Lula refers to as “white people with blue-eyes." Perhaps the American Left needs to study the political experience of social movements in countries where, when forced to leave their empires behind, a better quality of life was discovered, waiting all along.

[Tom Hayden is a former California state senator and leader of Sixties peace, justice, and environmental movements. He currently teaches at Pitzer College in Los Angeles. His latest book is The Long Sixties. This article was also published at TomHayden.com. Read more of Tom Hayden's writing on The Rag Blog.]

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Richard Flacks : Beyond Barack Obama

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Barack Obama. Image from Portlandart.
Beyond Barack Obama

Lefty focusing on the president and his shortcomings distracts us from the work we need to do.

By Richard Flacks / In These Times / February 2, 2011

The growing progressive drumbeat about President Barack Obama’s failed presidency, coupled now with fantasies about opposing his renomination, or with anguished hand-wringing about his failure to communicate, to lead, etc. etc., dismays me.

This hysteria is rooted in fear and anger over the intransigence of the corporate plutocracy we are up against. But the answer to corporate dictatorship and kleptocracy has to come from social movements -- not the White House. History strongly suggests that grassroots disruption that threatens to unravel the social fabric is the fundamental impetus to real reform.

Yet the loudest voices on the left keep wishing that Obama would lead such a movement. It’s a natural wish -- since the work of movement-building is hard, risky and costly for those who take it on. But to wish for The Leader and to cry when he seems to abandon us is childish, and it bespeaks impotence.

Let’s start by giving up a lot of BS about “principle.” There is no history of Democratic Party or liberal principle that Obama is betraying. FDR’s compromises to achieve Social Security and labor legislation abandoned African Americans with effects still strongly felt in our social order. No Democratic president was able to pass universal healthcare and all bargained away any chance of achieving it.

It was FDR who gave J. Edgar Hoover the authority to spy on the Left, and JFK who gave him the same to spy on Martin Luther King. Bill Clinton’s abandonment of welfare and his other ‘triangulations’ were larger and more cynical betrayals than Obama’s (so far). Obama’s record of accomplishment, leadership, and betrayal stacks up well against all his predecessors.

And let’s stop using ideological yardsticks to judge politicians. Is Obama “really” a progressive? Whatever he tells us he is, he must be a pragmatist in the real world he works in. And we should appreciate and even welcome that!

Ideology is a very poor predictor of integrity or action. Ideology is not what determines the political assessments that most Americans make. This is a big topic, but one advantage the Left has over the Right these days is that the latter is driven by narrow ideological thinking and therefore inevitably going to fail to connect with the American majority.

A big reason we aren’t yet in the midst of a movement on the Left has to do with the faults of the leadership in the national progressive organizational world. For example, it took months for the national organizations to call for a march on Washington for jobs. The One Nation event turned out to be a good start toward some kind of national agenda -- and yet I don’t see much evidence of a concerted follow-up to it.

Many of the national leaders are now saying that they intend to be more assertive and independent. But even with a will to mobilize, strategies for effective action have to be grasped -- and defining these is not an easy matter. Equally important, there is a loss of “vision” -- an absence of articulate expression of how a better world might look.

Lefty focusing on Obama distracts us from the work we need to do.

What progressives have to try is to implement strategies that directly challenge corporate and financial domination. These have to include direct action that disrupts the institutional order. One essential theme: The costs and burdens of economic contraction and austerity must not be borne by the weakest and poorest.

The disgusting cycle, perpetuated by the Obama tax deal, that gives virtually all economic gain to the very top of the income pyramid has to be disrupted.

The wars, which hugely drain the public budget, have to be resisted.

Demands that might actually help people materially -- and help the economy as well -- need to be voiced and acted on -- a massive mortgage write-down being one obvious example. Movement-based organizing on such issues needs to find targets that can be seen and addressed. For example, make locally accessible banks and their executives responsible for the mortgage crisis.

A final suggestion: Progressive organizations need to reinvest in college campus organizing. Instead of seeing students just as election time fodder, we need to consider that the campus is the primary space for generating deep, extensive discussion and debate about the social future. It’s also the place where human energy for bold and creative action can be generated.

Back in the early 1960's, a few unions and older liberals more or less recognized their own political staleness, and put a little money and encouragement behind the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committeee and Students for a Democratic Society -- even as these upstart groups made them nervous because they weren’t “disciplined.”

Once again, the progressive side needs activist energy that isn’t controlled by big organizational practices and perspectives -- energy and thinking that can break molds and invent new modes. But if we spend a lot of our energy in anguish and attacks on Obama, our own cynicism may ruin the chance to spark new possibilities.

[Richard Flacks, an emeritus professor of sociology at the University of California, Santa Barbara, is the author of Cultural Politics and Social Movements (co-editor, 1995); Beyond the Barricades: The '60s Generation Grows Up (1989); Making History: The American Left and the American Mind (1988), and many articles on social movements, left culture and strategy. This article was originally published at In These Times.]

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