Eric Boehlert : Fox Insider Says 'Stuff Is Just Made Up'

Fox's Roger Ailes. Image from Scene Magazine
Fox News Insider:
'Stuff Is Just Made Up'

By Eric Boehlert / Media Matters / February 15, 2011

Asked what most viewers and observers of Fox News would be surprised to learn about the controversial cable channel, a former insider from the world of Rupert Murdoch was quick with a response: “I don’t think people would believe it’s as concocted as it is; that stuff is just made up.”

Indeed, a former Fox News employee who recently agreed to talk with Media Matters confirmed what critics have been saying for years about Murdoch’s cable channel. Namely, that Fox News is run as a purely partisan operation, virtually every news story is actively spun by the staff, its primary goal is to prop up Republicans and knock down Democrats, and that staffers at Fox News routinely operate without the slightest regard for fairness or fact checking.

“It is their M.O. to undermine the administration and to undermine Democrats,” says the source. “They’re a propaganda outfit but they call themselves news.”

And that’s the word from inside Fox News.

Note that the story here isn’t that Fox News leans right. Everyone knows the channel pushes a conservative-friendly version of the news. Everyone who’s been paying attention has known that since the channel’s inception more than a decade ago.

The real story, and the real danger posed by the cable outlet, is that over time Fox News stopped simply leaning to the right and instead became an open and active political player, sort of one-part character assassin and one-part propagandist, depending on which party was in power. And that the operation thrives on fabrications and falsehoods.

“They say one thing and do another. They insist on maintaining this charade, this façade, that they’re balanced or that they’re not right-wing extreme propagandist,” says the source. But it’s all a well-orchestrated lie, according to this former insider. It’s a lie that permeates the entire Fox News culture and one that staffers and producers have to learn quickly in order to survive professionally.

“You have to work there for a while to understand the nods and the winks,” says the source. “And God help you if you don’t because sooner or later you’re going to get burned.”

The source explains:

Like any news channel there’s lot of room for non-news content. The content that wasn’t "news," they didn’t care what we did with as long as it was amusing or quirky or entertaining; as along as it brought in eyeballs. But anything -- anything -- that was a news story you had to understand what the spin should be on it.

If it was a big enough story it was explained to you in the morning [editorial] meeting. If it wasn’t explained, it was up to you to know the conservative take on it. There’s a conservative take on every story no matter what it is. So you either get told what it is or you better intuitively know what it is.

What if Fox News staffers aren’t instinctively conservative or don’t have an intuitive feeling for what the spin on a story should be? “My internal compass was to think like an intolerant meathead,” the source explains. “You could never error on the side of not being intolerant enough.”

The source recalls how Fox News changed over time:

When I first got there back in the day, and I don’t know how they indoctrinate people now, but back in the day when they were “training” you, as it were, they would say, "Here’s how we’re different." They’d say if there is an execution of a condemned man at midnight and there are all the live trucks outside the prison and all the live shots. CNN would go, "Yes, tonight John Jackson, 25 of Mississippi, is going to die by lethal injection for the murder of two girls." MSNBC would say the same thing.

We would come out and say, "Tonight, John Jackson who kidnapped an innocent two-year-old, raped her, sawed her head off and threw it in the school yard, is going to get the punishment that a jury of his peers thought he should get." And they say that’s the way we do it here. And you’re going, alright, it’s a bit of an extreme example but it’s something to think about. It’s not unreasonable.

When you first get in they tell you we’re a bit of a counterpart to the screaming left-wing lib media. So automatically you have to buy into the idea that the other media is howling left-wing. Don’t even start arguing that or you won’t even last your first day.

For the first few years it was, let’s take the conservative take on things. And then after a few years it evolved into, well it’s not just the conservative take on things, we’re going to take the Republican take on things which is not necessarily in lock step with the conservative point of view.

And then two, three, five years into that it was, we’re taking the Bush line on things, which was different than the GOP. We were a Stalinesque mouthpiece. It was just what Bush says goes on our channel. And by that point it was just totally dangerous. Hopefully most people understand how dangerous it is for a media outfit to be a straight, unfiltered mouthpiece for an unchecked president.

It’s worth noting that Fox News employees, either current or former, rarely speak to the press, even anonymously. And it’s even rarer for Fox News sources to bad-mouth Murdoch’s channel. That’s partly because of strict non-disclosure agreements that most exiting employees sign and which forbid them from discussing their former employer. But it also stems from a pervasive us-vs-them attitude that permeates Fox News. It’s a siege mentality that network boss Roger Ailes encourages, and one that colors the coverage his team produces.

“It was a kick-ass mentality too,” says the former Fox News insider. “It was relentless and it never went away. If one controversy faded, goddamn it they would find another one. They were in search of these points of friction real or imagined. And most of them were imagined or fabricated. You always have to seem to be under siege. You always have to seem like your values are under attack. The brain trust just knew instinctively which stories to do, like the War on Christmas.”

According to the insider, Ailes is obsessed with presenting a unified Fox News front to the outside world; an obsession that may explain Ailes’ refusal to publicly criticize or even critique his own team regardless of how outlandish their on-air behavior.

“There may be internal squabbles. But what [Ailes] continually preaches is never piss outside the tent,” says the source. “When he gets really crazy is when stuff leaks out the door. He goes mental on that. He can’t stand that. He says in a dynamic enterprise like a network newsroom there’s going to be in-fighting and ego, but he says keep it in the house.”

It’s clear that Fox News has become a misleading, partisan outlet. But here’s what the source stresses: Fox News is designed to mislead its viewers and designed to engage in a purely political enterprise.

In 2010, all sorts of evidence tumbled out to confirm that fact, like the recently leaked emails from inside Fox News, in which a top editor instructed his newsroom staffers (not just the opinion show hosts) to slant the news when reporting on key stories such as climate change and health care reform.

Meanwhile, Media Matters revealed that during the 2009-2010 election cycle, dozens of Fox News personalities endorsed, raised money, or campaigned for Republican candidates or organizations in more than 600 instances. And in terms of free TV airtime, Media Matters calculated the channel essentially donated $55 million worth of airtime last year to Republican presidential hopefuls who also collect Fox News paychecks.

And of course, that’s when Murdoch wasn’t writing $1 million checks in the hopes of electing more Republican politicians.

So, Fox News as a legitimate news outlet? The source laughs at the suggestion, and thinks much of the public, along with the Beltway press corps, has been duped by Murdoch’s marketing campaign over the years. “People assume you need a license to call yourself a news channel. You don’t. So because they call themselves Fox News, people probably give them a pass on a lot of things,” says the source.

The source continues:

I don’t think people understand that it’s an organization that’s built and functions by intimidation and bullying, and its goal is to prop up and support Republicans and the GOP and to knock down Democrats. People tend to think that stuff that’s on TV is real, especially under the guise of news. You’d think that people would wise up, but they don’t.

As for the press, the former Fox News employee gives reporters and pundits low grades for refusing, over the years, to call out Fox News for being the propaganda outlet that it so clearly is. The source suggests there are a variety of reasons for the newsroom timidity.

“They don’t have enough staff or enough balls or don’t have enough money or don’t have enough interest to spend the time it takes to expose Fox News. Or it’s not worth the trouble. If you take on Fox, they’ll kick you in the ass,” says the source.

“I’m sure most [journalists] know that. It’s not worth being Swift Boated for your effort,” a reference to how Fox News traditionally attacks journalists who write, or are perceived to have written, anything negative about the channel.

The former insider admits to being perplexed in late 2009 when the Obama White House called out Murdoch’s operation as not being a legitimate news source, only to have major Beltway media players rush to the aid of Fox News and admonish the White House for daring to criticize the cable channel.

“That blew me away,” says the source, who stresses the White House’s critique of Fox News “happens to be true.”

[Eric Boehlert is the author of Lapdogs: How the Press Rolled Over for Bush (Free Press, 2006) and Bloggers on the Bus: How the Internet Changed Politics and the Press (Free Press, 2009). He was a senior writer for Salon.com and a contributing editor at Rolling Stone. Boehlert is a Senior Fellow at Media Matters for America, where this article was first published.]

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Rebellious Pixels : Right Wing Radio Duck (Video)

This is a re-imagined Donald Duck cartoon remix constructed from dozens of classic Walt Disney cartoons from the 1930s to 1960s. Donald's life is turned upside-down by the current economic crisis and he finds himself unemployed and falling behind on his house payments. As his frustration turns into despair Donald discovers a seemingly sympathetic voice coming from his radio named Glenn Beck. -- Will Shetterly / Boing Boing

Thanks to Carlos Lowry / The Rag Blog

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Glenn Beck : Testing the Waters?

Glenn Beck and friend. Photo by Alex Brandon / AP.
Testing the waters?
Glenn Beck could happen here

Beck...ignores the reality that our essential legal structures are Greco-Roman and Hodenosaunee (Iroquois) in origin, NOT Judaeo-Christian. Five of the first six presidents of the United States were Unitarians and/or Deists, NOT Christians...

By Harvey Wasserman / The Rag Blog / September 3, 2010

Now that the dust has settled from Glenn Beck’s weekend revival at the Lincoln Memorial, two messages need to be delivered loud and clear.

First: the United States of America has NEVER been a Christian nation, but there are those who would make it so, past and future.

And second: do not discount Glenn Beck becoming president of the United States.

I say these things after having sat through nearly all of the 17-part video rendering of Beck’s rally this past weekend, and having read as many critiques of it -- left and right -- as I could find.

This rally was not about intellectual content, and it’s a mistake to analyze it that way.

Its organizers kept the verbal content extremely simple: honor the military, “restore America,” have faith in your churches, follow their lead, and donate generously.

Much of the real meaning was in who was missing.

The only major media stars were Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin. Limbaugh, O’Reilly, Hannity, Levin, Dr. Laura, Ann Coulter -- no one else from the firmament of the Right got the mike or -- unless I missed them -- appeared on camera.

While his rhetoric was duly humble, the sum of Beck’s parts was about his personal Divine Inspiration. The rally was a “miracle,” he said. God told him to do it, and its stunning, unlikely, impossible, amazing, fantastic, Godly, lucrative success was all due to Him, operating through His only visible Messenger, Glenn Beck.

As of this rally, there is no other putative favorite for the Republican nomination for president. Beck is the only one with a very large, dedicated grassroots constituency.

His modus this weekend was keeping it simple. But there were some twists. He is a Mormon. He repeatedly referred to the Jewish exodus from slavery in Egypt (he timed it wrongly by about two millennia) and had a rabbi conspicuously center stage. He honored Native Americans, the other “lost tribe.” Until the very end, when he did mention “mosques” as a place of worship, there was virtually no mention of Muslims, and none prominently on display.

The vast bulk of the show had to do with honoring the military, the Christian faith, and with endless sermons by Beck himself. Except for Palin, no one else spoke anywhere near as long, and even her appearance was fleeting by comparison.

There was also a strenuous avoidance of explicit partisan politics. Obama’s name was barely mentioned. The most prominent reference to abortion came from Dr. Martin Luther King’s niece. The natural environment was a total no-show. Ditto partisan bickering over deficits, social security, etc. (Unspoken, too, was Beck’s endorsement of the legalization of marijuana).

One might assume Glenn figured we all know where he stands due to his radio and TV shows. But if that was meant to be the message, it was implied, not stated.

Dr. King’s fierce opposition to the war in Vietnam was never mentioned. But he was repeatedly placed in the pantheon of American greatness alongside Washington, Jefferson and Lincoln. The documentary clips -- which Beck narrated -- gave the impression of uncompromised support for the civil rights movement.

As usual, the proportion of people of color on stage vastly outstripped the diversity of the actual audience. Except for a Beatles t-shirt that somehow appeared on a participant in the crowd, the 1960s seemed to have never happened, except in the agonies of our troops in Vietnam.

No... on a bright, sunny day in front of the Lincoln memorial, surrounded by monuments to our great presidents and wars, this had all the trappings of well-scrubbed audition for a presidential candidacy.

As expected, the show did feature the usual array of patented historical fabrications. Topping the list was a “Black Robed” battalion of armed priests who allegedly terrified the British during the American Revolution. To end the rally Beck dragged up more than 200 preachers to replicate the symbol.

This is pure -- and dangerous -- invention. If you can find solid reference to this alleged priestly horde anywhere in our history, please send the citations.

Like most of the right, Beck avoids our nation’s deeply secular roots. He repeatedly cites the Constitution and Declaration, but NEVER the Bill of Rights.

Beck also ignores the reality that our essential legal structures are Greco-Roman and Hodenosaunee (Iroquois) in origin, NOT Judaeo-Christian.

Five of the first six presidents of the United States were Unitarians and/or Deists, NOT Christians. So were three of the five men charged with writing the Declaration of Independence. Tom Paine, who wrote the book -- Common Sense -- that inspired the Revolution, was deeply critical of the Christian faith, to which he most decidedly did not ascribe.

Nor did Ben Franklin, the new nation’s truest intellectual godfather, who is almost always absent from the neo-con iconography. It was the free-living Franklin who drew the inspiration for the federal union from the Iroquois Confederacy, still history’s longest-lived democracy.

Thanks in large part to Franklin, the word “Christian” (like the word “corporation”) was omitted from the Constitution by intelligent design.

None of which mattered at this excruciatingly sanitized gathering. We will see, in the coming months, what kind of legs it gave Mr. Beck, and where he wants to go with them.

He’s never run for or held public office. To many he seems a marginal fool, a bore and a rube, a Crusader Babbitt for a traumatized Main Street... just like, say, Ronald Reagan or George W. Bush.

Now he’s stepped out of the studio and into the real world of grassroots constituency-building. He has inspired a large and dedicated core and transcended his merely electronic base. His people have a fire in the belly, with a serious flow of cash nobody else on the right or left can currently match.

Maybe, for the true inner Beck, it’s just about the money and the glory. Until he hears those voices again.

For in a broke new world, where anything can happen, Glenn and his God just might smite us all.

[Harvey Wasserman has been involved in the struggle for peace, justice, and a green earth since the late 1960's. Harvey Wasserman's History of the United States is at www.harveywasserman.com, along with "Thomas Paine's" Passions of the Potsmoking Patriots.]

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David McReynolds : Glenn Beck's Faux Dream

The great March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, August 28, 1963. Photo by Warren K. Leffler / U.S. News & World Report / Wikimedia Commons.
Remembering August 28th:
Martin Luther King had a real dream

By David McReynolds / The Rag Blog / August 29, 2010

What a difference money makes. On Saturday, the 28th of August, 2010, Glenn Beck rallied on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial with all the majesty of Fox News behind him.

Day after day Fox News had trumpeted the event, organizing for it, and if Beck hadn't gotten a crowd it would have been no fault of those who own Fox News and fund Glenn Beck. (Fox News is one very good reason for an estate tax that would guarantee that no one could buy and own networks, newspapers, and control the media, the way Rupert Murdoch has done.)

I’ve never met Glenn Beck, I don’t expect to. He is -- pretty much in common with all the commentators, whether their views are left or right -- paid to air his views. I suspect that for the right price Beck would happily change those views.

(I do agree with Beck’s attacks on Woodrow Wilson, who brought segregation back to the White House, got us involved in the bloody First World War, and who jailed the Socialist Party’s leader, Eugene V. Debs, for the crime of speaking out against that war. Irony of ironies, Wilson refused to even consider a pardon for Debs -- that remained for the Republican President, Warren G. Harding, who met with Debs in the White House and pardoned him.)

Let me, as someone who has had the good luck to be a guest at history’s table, turn back more than half a century to Wednesday, August 28th, 1963, and the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. I was then, at 33, a young radical working for the War Resisters League, which had given Bayard Rustin leave so that he could work in the Civil Rights movement as a special aide to Martin Luther King Jr., and as the primary organizer of the August 28th events.

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., gives his "I Have a Dream" speech during the March on Washington, August 28, 1963. Photo from Wikimedia Commons.
The media gave the event good coverage after it happened -- Life Magazine (who can remember the days when Life Magazine, a weekly, was a major cultural force?) put Bayard Rustin and A. Philip Randolph on its cover. But there was no advance coverage, no daily drumbeat on the networks. No commentator who could act as the organizer for it.

Nor did it take place on Saturday -- Bayard knew it had to take place in the middle of the week, when people would need to take time off from their jobs. The event was far more than a weekend outing in the nation’s capitol -- it was the largest demonstration of its kind in our history.

Much of the background feeling can be seen in the film about Bayard, Brother Outsider, which gives one a sense of how the demonstration was organized with the support of trade unions, church groups, and the civil rights movement in the South.

There was profound fear in Washington DC. John F. Kennedy had tried to get the march called off. The police were put on special alert. The shops of the city were largely closed, the streets empty, as “White Washington” braced for the flood of Blacks and the inevitable rioting.

Bayard had enlisted the support of the Guardians, the Black police officers in New York City, who came down in force to provide security.

I don’t remember how I got there -- I assume I was one of the many thousands of New Yorkers who took buses down. But I shall never forget our march toward the Lincoln Memorial, as thousands and thousands of citizens, most of them black, but many of us white, chanted “Freedom, Freedom, Freedom” with a cadence all its own. Blacks from the South who had never been in a mass demonstration with whites before. All pouring into the area around the Lincoln Memorial.

I had been to Washington many times before (and have been many times since). I had been to the “Prayer Pilgrimages" Bayard had organized, which were a kind of prelude to the great march. I was used to the endless list of speakers at these events, a speaker from each of the sponsoring groups.

Usually, after getting to a march, and making sure I’d be one of those counted by the counters, I’d take a break for a hamburger or a drink. This time I was grateful that I stayed and heard King’s "I Have a Dream" speech, breaking out over the vast assemblage. To compare the majesty of that rolling speech, with the cadence of the Black church and the infinite suffering of Black America, with the commercial hysteria of Glenn Beck is, almost, to make one ashamed of being white.

There was a scene that unfolded before King spoke, as the crowd moved into place. George Lincoln Rockwell, the American Nazi leader (who was later assassinated by one of his followers) had set up a small stand from which to speak, and began to spew hatred of “niggers, kikes, queers, and commies."

I admired Rockwell for his courage, but he was clearly intending to spark a riot. I watched with fascination as young Black men moved in, formed a ring around Rockwell and his supporters, and locking arms, faced outward, toward any of the marchers who might be tempted to make a physical assault on Rockwell. Rockwell and his cohorts found themselves isolated -- and protected -- by a ring of young Black men.

Organizer Bayard Rustin at news briefing, August 27, 1963, before March on Washington. Photo by Warren K. Leffler / U.S. News & World Report / Wikimedia Commons.
There was no violence in Washington that day. It was a proud moment for the Civil Rights movement, though terrible things were to come -- on September 16th, racists bombed a black church in Birmingham, murdering four children. And in November of that year JFK was murdered.

August 28th was a moment of affirmation for the best in America, black and white, young and old. It did not end the struggle for civil rights for Black America -- but it was a crucial point in that struggle.

I wonder if those who follow Glenn Beck so avidly will, 10 years from now, look back to this day, this media-organized event on a Saturday when no one had to take off from work, an event funded by the multimillioniares who stand in the shadows behind Beck, and feel they were part of history, in the way those of us who were there in Washington D.C. in 1963 knew we were on the side of the best America had to offer.

[David McReynolds is retired, the former chair of War Resisters International, and the Socialist Party presidential candidate in 1980 and 2000. He lives on the Lower East Side of New York with two cats. He can be reached at dmcreynolds@nyc.rr.com.]

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Gloria Feldt : Gender Disparities and Aniston-O'Reilly Spat

Fox News host Bill O'Reilly attacked Jennifer Aniston for her comments on single parenting. Photos by Sykes, AP; Lovekin / Getty. Image from New York Daily News.
Women's Equality Day:
Aniston comments on single parenting
Get O'Reilly all riled up

By Gloria Feldt / August 27, 2010

Jennifer Aniston sparked a classic Bill O'Reilly firestorm when she said a woman doesn't need a man to have children and a perfectly fine life, thank you very much.

Defending not her personal situation but the character she plays in The Switch, her hit movie about a single woman who chose to be impregnated by a sperm donor, Aniston opined, "Women are realizing... they don't have to settle with a man just to have a child." O'Reilly retorted that Aniston trivialized the role of men, saying she was "throwing out a message to 12 and 13-year-olds that, 'Hey, you don't need a dad,' and that's destructive."

It's no accident that this pregnant pop culture moment occurred near the 90th anniversary of women's suffrage, Women's Equality Day, August 26. The Aniston-O'Reilly tiff highlights both the progress women have made and how far we are from reaching parity from the bedroom to the boardroom. We might be able to make babies on our own, but according to the White House Project, only 18 percent of leadership positions across all sectors are held by women.

That includes women like Mary Cheney, either clueless or co-opted or both, who even as she endorses anti-choice, anti-gay candidates, claims her own same-sex relationship and pregnancy choice are private matters.

It includes women like my Pilates instructor, who spent her life savings on achieving a high-tech pregnancy at age 42 and told me, "If men would step up to the plate, women like me wouldn't be in this situation" of deciding solo whether or not to experience motherhood.

But the focus on these 50,000 or so exceptional conceptions overshadows the concerns and needs of the six million American women who become pregnant the old-fashioned way in any given year.

Besides, separating biology from destiny is just one of many expansions of freedoms women have aspired to as far back as 1776, when Abigail Adams urged her husband John to "remember the ladies," threatening that the women would rebel if excluded from the Constitution (Yes, the same document Sarah Palin and the Tea Partiers want restored to its original state when enslaved African-American men were counted as 2/3 of persons and women were ignored completely).

The Founding Fathers did not heed Abigail's plea, the women did not rebel, and as a consequence it took until 1920 for women to achieve ratification of the 19th amendment to the Constitution guaranteeing them the right to vote.

And just as those against women's suffrage alleged it would trigger the demise of the patriarchal family, what sets off the O'Reilly Factors of the world isn't so much concern that high-tech turkey-basters will replace the penises they hold dear. It's terror that the power over others -- hegemony they've assumed as their gender's birthright -- diminishes in proportion to the rise in women's power to set the course of their own lives.

Nothing could be further from the truth, of course. Power isn't a finite pie where a slice for you makes less for me. It's an abundant resource. The more it is shared, the more the pie grows, and the more everyone thrives.

But if men have not yet figured this out, neither have women decided it's time to use their power to make the rest of the changes needed to reach full equality.

A recent Harris Poll found three out of five Americans say the U.S. has a long way to go to reach gender equality. Not surprisingly, there's a gender difference: half of men feel inequality remains whereas 74 percent of women agree. But the startling finding is that both men and women across the age spectrum downplay the importance of rectifying gender inequality, saying there are more pressing issues to fix.

That kind of self-abnegation to which women are still acculturated is why AOL's electronic greeting card selections celebrated August 26 as National Toilet Paper Day as recently as 2007, yet the company had no card for Women's Equality Day. Popular culture will continue to imitate what we talk about and what we pay attention to in our daily lives.

And while it's relatively easy for a celebrity like Jennifer Aniston to get attention for any subject, it's much harder for the rest of us to shine the public spotlight on other important issues impinging upon equality.

Today's challenges to reaching a fair gender power balance are rooted not so much in legal barriers as in eliminating lingering constrictive cultural narratives, such as assuming mothers are less competent workers, thus paying them less than men or than women without children.

Women can't wait for a Jennifer Aniston to lead the charge for change, and we don't need to.

It took just one woman, unknown to the paparazzi, calling AOL's oversight to the attention of 10 of her friends, asking each to forward the message to 10 more, to start a viral protest to AOL. An avalanche of complaints ensued, and Women's Equality Day cards magically appeared.

Assuring that attention is paid by media, decision makers, and policy makers -- and by women ourselves -- to social and perceptual barriers standing in the way of a fair shake has become the women's equality issue of these early decades of the 21st century. If we can accomplish that, women's possibilities will indeed be unlimited.

O'Reilly will continue to be offended. But isn't that just another sign of progress?

[Gloria Feldt is the author of the forthcoming No Excuses: 9 Ways Women Can Change How We Think About Power. The article was distributed by truthout.]

Source / truthout

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Jay D. Jurie : The 'New Zeal' of Right Wing Propagandist Trevor Loudon

Trevor Loudon. Image from USA Survival News.
New Zealand's Trevor Loudon and the
Right-wing propaganda machine

By Jay D. Jurie / The Rag Blog / August 4, 2010

Until I came across the KeyWiki site I didn't know I had my very own "Wiki" page. When I went to "my" page I discovered it focused exclusively on the political side of my life.

KeyWiki describes itself as

...a bipartisan knowledge base focusing primarily on corruption and the covert side of politics in the United States and globally. While particular interest is taken in the left, KeyWiki serves to expose covert politics on both the left and right of the political spectrum.

Accompanying this description was a photo of the Statue of Liberty.

Wondering who might be responsible for all this, the KeyWiki "team" identified only one individual, named Trevor Loudon, while "members of the KeyWiki team will be added below shortly."

As it turns out, Trevor Loudon is a resident of Christchurch, New Zealand. Since New Zealand has a multiparty parliament it is a little odd that he describes his site as "bipartisan." His description makes it clear he is focusing on the U.S., so perhaps he means "bipartisan" in the U.S. context. If that's the case, then his "knowledge base" is virtually nonexistent when it comes to exposing "covert politics" on the right.

For example, a search on his site for David Horowitz -- one of the few members of the New Left who became an outspoken conservative -- produced information only about his incarnation on the left several decades ago. There were no pages or listings for well-known figures on the right such as Bay Buchanan, Ann Coulter, Nikki Haley, Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh, or Bill O'Reilly, though there are links on the companion KeyWiki.org site to blogs operated by Glenn Beck and Michelle Malkin.

Statue of Liberty photo by David Prior / KeyWiki.
Thinking maybe these were insufficiently "covert," I tried several others, including Bo Gritz, Eric Rudolph, and Randall Terry, turning up nothing. I thought he might have entries for well-known white supremacists David Duke or Tom Metzger, or for well known anti-Semites or Holocaust deniers such as Don Black or Willis Carto, but again, nothing. There wasn't even a listing for the Ku Klux Klan.

There is no information on right-wing elected officials such as Michelle Bachmann, John Cornyn, Ron Paul, or Joe "You lie!" Wilson. Loudon maintains a separate blog called New Zeal ("promoting liberty in New Zealand and beyond") on which he re-posted a Washington Times op-ed piece by former Representative and nativist Tom Tancredo (R-CO), in which Tancredo wrote: "Mr. Obama is a more serious threat to America than al-Qaeda," to which Loudon approvingly appended "well said."

There are a lot of items about individuals and groups on the left, including denunciatory articles about legislators Neil Abercrombie and Dennis Kucinich, and negatively-framed information about Alan Grayson and Bernie Sanders, among others.

There's a list of "key organizations" that includes the Apollo Alliance, the Center for American Progress, Committees of Correspondence, Democratic Socialists of America, Institute for Policy Studies, and the New Party. Several other organizations and publications also rate considerable attention, including the Communist Party USA, In These Times, the Movement for a Democratic Society (MDS), the New American Movement (NAM), and The Rag Blog.

A September 2008 blog article ("therealbarackobama") by Brenda J. Elliott was entitled "Has Trevor Loudon found the Ayers-Dohrn-Obama 'smoking gun'?" According to Elliott, MDS was behind the creation of Progressives for Obama. Carl Davidson of Progressives for Obama responded that MDS "had nothing to do" with it, "nor did any one of the other alphabet soup of left groups you list." Elliott further asserted "MDS is the brains behind the SDS brawn."

America's Survival Inc. president and Accuracy in Media blogger Cliff Kincaid and Loudon co-authored a 32-page article entitled "From Arms to Education to Political Power: Return of the SDS and the Weather Underground" to further smoke out MDS. Loudon and Kincaid found that under the auspices of MDS, the new SDS, the Center for American Progress and pro-Barack Obama elements were ominously coalescing:

Key to this overall effort is the MDS, which unites Rudd, Ayers, Dohrn and other members of the SDS and Weather Underground from many different socialist and communist organizations.

These assertions are certain to generate some laughter among those actually familiar with the organizations in question.

Former Obama administration "green jobs" director Van Jones was among those singled out by Loudon for special attention. Kincaid has used a Loudon link about Jones on his blog. Glenn Beck has given Loudon a shout-out for "exposing" Jones and Joel Rogers of the New Party. Another shout-out comes from Andrew Breitbart, who conjured up the recent brouhaha over Shirley Sherrod.

Loudon has expended considerable energy making a case that Obama boyhood mentor Frank Marshall Davis was a secret Communist. According to Loudon, U.S. Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan "doesn't lean left. She leans socialist-communitistic (sic) first."

In fact, Loudon's preoccupation with individuals with links, no matter how obscure, to (real or perceived) socialist or communist organizations puts him at the center of a revival of the redbaiting tactics of former Senator Joseph McCarthy.

Among the reasons I apparently rate my own KeyWiki page is I once signed a petition in support of academic freedom for, in Loudon's word, "terrorist" Bill Ayers. Loudon's definition of terrorism seems highly selective, or he must look across the Pacific to find it.

Nowhere does he mention the deadly French intelligence services bombing of the Greenpeace ship Rainbow Warrior in the Auckland harbor, or refer to that as a terrorist act. Nor does Loudon have anything to say about an incident in which New Zealand police pointed automatic weapons at the passengers of a Maori-operated school bus.

The Rag Blog's Jay D. Jurie: Sufficiently 'covert'? Image from Jay's KeyWiki page, in a photo lifted from Next Left Notes.
My page shows me as a signer of a statement several decades ago that advocated closer working relations between NAM and the Socialist Party USA. I owe Loudon a debt of gratitude for this, as I had forgotten all about it. After being reminded of this, my regret is that those closer working relations never materialized.

Virtually all "Rag Bloggers," including Marion Delgado, have some listing on KeyWiki. Thorne Dreyer and David Hamilton are among those who have interested Loudon most. In fact, simply writing for The Rag Blog or signing the Progressives for Obama petition appears to be enough to rate your own KeyWiki page. And Loudon seems to consider The Rag Blog a virtual mouthpiece for his theoretical MDS/Progressives for Obama nexus.

[It should be pointed out that The Rag Blog is an independent progressive newsweekly, published by the non-profit New Journalism Project, and has no affiliation with any political group or party.]

Still left unanswered is the question about why Loudon hasn't exposed covert politics on the right?

Since KeyWiki has only been in existence since April, perhaps he's just been preoccupied with filling in the left-wing side.

A larger question is why has a New Zealander like Loudon created a Wiki site primarily concerned with the U.S.? Answers to these two questions seem to overlap. In several of his writings Loudon makes it clear he is a committed "Americanphile." He apparently sees New Zealand as a satellite for what he believes, but the U.S. is the mother ship.

What are those beliefs? Several on-line sources identify Loudon as a member of the "Zenith Applied Philosophy" or ZAP cult, based upon an admixture of Scientology, Eastern mysticism, and John Birch-style laissez-faire capitalism. Loudon's admiration for the U.S. and its traditions is apparently limited to that which conforms to his laissez-faire outlook. He has taken it upon himself to help chart the rightful course for the U.S.

Whereas its site claims "KeyWiki isn't a part of any political party and we don't support candidates," Loudon is a former vice-president of New Zealand's ACT (Association of Consumers and Taxpayers) Party. ACT appears to be more or less the equivalent of the U.S. Libertarian Party. According to its website, ACT espouses "free market classical liberalism" and "...seek[s] to rebuild diplomatic and political relationships with Australia and the United States." ACT also seeks to negotiate a free trade agreement with the United States.

All of the above makes it patently obvious that Loudon is engaged in the "covert politics on the right of the political spectrum." Rather than engage in honest pursuit of knowledge or debate, his modus operandi is duplicity. While KeyWiki masquerades as objective or balanced its real purpose is to conceal the advancement of a right-wing agenda.

In the deceitful pursuit of this purpose Loudon is not alone, as the shameful Breitbart attack on Shirley Sherrod makes evident. Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson recently wrote of "a cynical right-wing propaganda machine."

Trevor Loudon has not only helped fuel this machine with half-truths, distortions, and fabrications, but is one of its drivers.

[Jay D. Jurie is a proud Rag Blogger who teaches public administration and urban planning and lives near Orlando, Florida.]

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Tom Hayden : Sherrod, Obama, and the Strength of Roots

Charles Sherrod and Carl Braden (a civil rights legend, along with his wife Anne), in 1963. Photo from Wisconsin Historical Images.

Collective amnesia

The media have been silent about Shirley Sherrod's husband, Charles Sherrod, a real hero to many of us in the '60s for his key role as a leader in SNCC in building an INTER-RACIAL civil rights movement. Charlie left SNCC when Stokely Carmichael took it over, expelled white folks, and adopted "black power" as its ideology, in order to continue building a black-and-white movement in Georgia. The notion that Charlie's wife could have been guilty of what's being called "reverse racism" against whites is therefore doubly ludicrous. Some of us who knew Charlie back when, however, haven't forgotten his shining example.

-- Doug Ireland / The Rag Blog

Remembering the struggle in rural Georgia:
Sherrod, Obama, and the strength of roots

By Tom Hayden / The Rag Blog / July 23, 2010

See 'Using Race to Smear Obama,' by Eugene Robinson, Below.

How would members of the Obama administration have reacted to racist pressure from the Deep South in the early 60s? Would they have fired Justice Department civil rights monitors who antagonized hard-line segregationists?

For those of us with long memories, this is one of the key questions posed by the firing of Shirley Sherrod in a fit of official overreaction to the shameful right-wing blogger Andrew Breitbart. It is true that the administration reversed course quickly after the true story was revealed, but that the Obama administration can be spooked so easily by Glenn Beck and FOX News raises a serious question: if they are so tough on national defense, drugs, and crime, where is their resolve against the deceitful attack dogs of the right?

My introduction to virulent southern racism came in 1961 when I ventured to Albany, Georgia, first to write an article about the Deep South organizing done by the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and, second, to become a freedom rider on a train to Albany that December.

It was then I met, and came to admire, a brave young civil rights worker named Charles Sherrod, whom everyone in the movement simply called “Sherrod.” Albany was a segregated town near Plains, Georgia, and the home of Hamilton Jordan who went on to become Jimmy Carter’s chief of staff. Sherrod was the kind of front-line young militant who eventually brought about the New South of Carter, Bill Clinton, and Al Gore, among others. Sherrod had to face violence, and the possibility of death, every day in his effort to mobilize young people and their parents against the suffocation of fear.

Shirley Sherrod (Center) with Charles Sherrod (to her left) at the Charles Sherrod Civil Rights Park in Albany, Georgia in 2006. Photo from Rural Development.
Sherrod, and his equally committed wife Shirley, made a conscious decision to stay in rural Georgia long after the voting rights laws were passed and the national media departed. I left Albany after my two brief and harrowing experiences in 1961, and never returned until I spoke at a commemoration of the Albany civil rights movement a few years ago. The Sherrods were still there. She was engaged in programs supporting rural farmers, while he had served on the city council and was a minister in a nearby state prison. There were 500 people at the event, the stalwarts of the past.

So Shirley Sherrod’s life cannot be reduced by a dishonest and amoral right-wing blogger into a few seconds of videotape 25 years old. She is one of many thousands who had the force of character to face racist abuse, and seemingly immovable state power, when they were demonized and disenfranchised. They were the trees standing by the water, and they would not be moved. They tried to bring their morality to politics, not accept the politics of Machiavelli.

Our leaders today could learn from this strength of long ago. In fairness, government officials and leaders of large organizations, who are beneficiaries of the Southern civil rights legacy, have institutional reputations to protect. They should avoid needlessly provoking the right, and have every right to pick their fights intelligently.

But years of battering from the right have bred a defensive anxiety in the ranks of too many Democratic liberals. They flinch before they fight. It’s almost as if they internalize the right-wing refrain that they are weak, tea-sipping elitists. They give far greater consideration to conservatives, militarists, and bankers who rarely vote for them than to the millions of activists in social movements who actually made their power possible.

This is a moment when roots should be remembered, recovered from oblivion and venerated, not airbrushed out of history and polished resumes.

[A political activist for more than four decades, Tom Hayden is director of the Peace and Justice Resource Center. A founder of SDS and a former California State Senator, Hayden is the author of The Long Sixties (Paradigm, 2009).]

Image by Lance Page / truthout; Adapted by Christian Haugen / webtreats.

Using race to smear Obama

By Eugene Robinson / July 22, 2010

WASHINGTON -- After the Shirley Sherrod episode, there's no longer any need to mince words: A cynical right-wing propaganda machine is peddling the poisonous fiction that when African-Americans or other minorities reach positions of power, they seek some kind of revenge against whites.

A few of the purveyors of this bigoted nonsense might actually believe it. Most of them, however, are merely seeking political gain by inviting white voters to question the motives and good faith of the nation's first African-American president. This is really about tearing Barack Obama down.

Sherrod, until Monday an official with the Department of Agriculture, was supposed to be mere collateral damage. Andrew Breitbart, a smarmy provocateur who often speaks at tea party rallies, posted on his website a video snippet of a speech that Sherrod, who is African-American, gave to a NAACP meeting earlier this year. In it, Sherrod seemed to boast of having withheld from a white farmer some measure of aid that she would have given to a black farmer.

It looked like a clear case of black racism in action. Within hours, Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack had forced her to resign. The NAACP, under attack from the right for having denounced racism in the tea party movement, issued a statement blasting Sherrod and condemning her attitude as unacceptable.

But Breitbart had overstepped. The full video of Sherrod's speech showed she wasn't bragging about being a racist, she was telling what amounted to a parable about prejudice and reconciliation. For one thing, the incident happened in 1986 when she was working for a nonprofit, long before she joined the Obama administration. For another, she helped that white man and his family save their farm, and they became friends. Through him, she said, she learned to look past race toward our common humanity.

Shirley Sherrod, then a former board member of the Farmers Legal Action Group (flag), with husband Charles and retiring board member Betty Bailey, were honored at a FLAG dinner in 2009. Photo from Agricultural Law.
In effect, she was telling the story of America's struggle with race, but with the roles reversed. For hundreds of years, black people were enslaved, oppressed and discriminated against by whites -- until the civil rights movement gave us all a path toward redemption.

With the Obama presidency, though, has come a flurry of charges -- from the likes of Breitbart but also from more substantial conservative figures -- about alleged incidences of racial discrimination against whites by blacks and other minorities. Recall, for example, the way Obama's critics had a fit when he offered an opinion about the confrontation between Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. and a white police officer. Remember the over-the-top reaction when it was learned that Justice Sonia Sotomayor had once talked about how being a "wise Latina" might affect her thinking.

Newt Gingrich called Sotomayor a racist. He was lightning-quick to call Sherrod a racist, too. I'd suggest that the former House speaker consider switching to decaf, but I think he knows exactly what he's doing.

These allegations of anti-white racism are being deliberately hyped and exaggerated because they are designed to make whites fearful. It won't work with most people, of course, but it works with some -- enough, perhaps, to help erode Obama's political standing and damage his party's prospects at the polls.

Before Sherrod, the cause célèbre of the "You Must Fear Obama" campaign involved something called the New Black Panther Party. Never heard of it? That's because it's a tiny group that exists mainly in the fevered imaginations of its few members. Also in the alternate reality of Fox News: One of the network's hosts has devoted more than three hours of air time in recent weeks to the grave threat posed by the NBPP. Actually, I suspect that this excess is at least partly an attempt by a relatively obscure anchor to boost her own notoriety.

The Sherrod case has fully exposed the right-wing campaign to use racial fear to destroy Obama's presidency, and I hope the effect is to finally stiffen some spines in the administration. The way to deal with bullies is to confront them, not run away. Yet Sherrod was fired before even being allowed to tell her side of the story.

She said the official who carried out the execution explained that she had to resign immediately because the story was going to be on Glenn Beck's show that evening. Ironically, Beck was the only Fox host who, upon hearing the rest of Sherrod's speech, promptly called for her to be reinstated. On Wednesday, Vilsack offered to rehire her.

Shirley Sherrod stuck to her principles and stood her ground. I hope the White House learns a lesson.

[Eugene Robinson's e-mail address is eugenerobinson@washpost.com.]

(c) 2010, Washington Post Writers Group

Source / Truthout

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Rush Limbaugh : Get Well, Class Clown

Rush Limbaugh. From "Republican Clowns" / Daniel Kurtzman / Ask.com.
Sick, sick, sick...
Rush Limbaugh, Class Clown

By Carl R. Hultberg / The Rag Blog / December 31, 2009

There’s one in every classroom. Competing with the teacher for attention, cracking jokes, disrupting the course of study. It doesn’t matter if few other students laugh along with him, a couple will do.

Later they meet in the recreation yard to idolize their rebel leader. This is the guy who will save them from having to read books and consider other people’s points of view, save them from being educated, indoctrinated into the modern adult order. Later, this is the kid who will hopefully give them a job, even though they never got a diploma, when he inherits his father’s auto dealership.

Who do you want to be like, the cool fat kid who mouths off in class or the poor hysterical obviously underpaid teacher? Disrespect can definitely work to make you respectable in the USA. Anti-intellectualism is still very often the smart way to go. We got this far being wrong, who’s going to stop us now?

That’s why so many people worship the ground Rush Limbaugh tramples on.

Rush to judgment (off the radio).

Rush to the hospital. In Hawaii, one of only two states in the Union to have fully socialized medicine. But that’s alright folks, Rushie’s rich and he has made sure to tell everyone that he is self-insured and paying his own way. Being rich will also protect him from having his insurance cancelled for having a problem with a “pre-existing condition.”

Just a few days ago he was castigating Obama for being in Hawaii, possibly not even really part of the USA. (That’s a fallback position in case it turns out BO was actually born there.) But that’s also okay, because Class Clown thrives on being able to drive inconsistencies home by force of his personality. Being wrong and still always sounding right is the best act he’s (we’ve) got. In America, relentless self confidence in the face of adversity/reality is the mechanism that has so far never failed to unlock the gold rush.

After the Gold Rush?

Word has it that Limbaugh’s words were halting and slurred when he called in to his guest-hosted radio show yesterday. Perhaps the man has had a stroke. Obesity, hard drug use and a generally apoplectic personality will eventually add up, even with the best of them.

Although he would never do the same himself for any of us, we would like to join the other members of the liberal blogosphere to wish Rush Limbaugh a speedy recovery.

Free speech is what we should all respect the most. In the world of words, being wrong is far better than being silent or being suppressed. If we are busy hiding lies we may just as soon be hiding the truth.

Class Clown should always have a place in our education system. Let the teachers stop the class to reason it out with the young person. Create a debate. Perhaps the heckler is right. (I sure thought I was. Still do.)

If we learn to take our time in the field of education we might not have so many “children left behind.” People with obvious intelligence but also an eternal ax to grind.

Why Rush?

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A Few Bad Acorns and the Right Wing Crusade

In defense of ACORN:

The right-wing crusade against ACORN is a far bigger fraud than any misdeeds a few employees might have committed

By Joe Conason / September 21, 2009

For many years the combined forces of the far right and the Republican Party have sought to ruin ACORN, the largest organization of poor and working families in America. Owing to the idiocy of a few ACORN employees, notoriously caught in a videotape "sting" sponsored by a conservative web site and publicized by Fox News, that campaign has scored significant victories on Capitol Hill and in the media.

Both the Senate and the House have voted over the past few days to curtail any federal funding of ACORN's activities. While that congressional action probably won't destroy the group, whose funding does not mainly depend on government largesse, the ban inflicts severe damage on its reputation.

In the atmosphere of frenzy created by the BigGovernment videos -- which feature a young man and an even younger woman who pretend to be a prostitute and a pimp seeking "advice" from ACORN about starting a teenage brothel -- it is hardly shocking that both Democrats and Republicans would put as much distance as possible between themselves and the sleazy outfit depicted on-screen.

Like so many conservative attacks, the crusade against ACORN has been highly exaggerated and even falsified to create a demonic image that bears little resemblance to the real organization.

Working in the nation's poorest places, and hiring the people who live there, ACORN is not immune to the pathologies that can afflict institutions in those communities. As a large nonprofit handling many millions of dollars, it has suffered from mismanagement at the top as well -- although there is nothing unique in that, either.

Yet ACORN's troubles should be considered in the context of a history of honorable service to the dispossessed and impoverished. No doubt it was fun to dupe a few morons into providing tax advice to a "pimp and ho," but what ACORN actually does, every day, is help struggling families with the Earned Income Tax Credit (whose benefits were expanded by both Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton). And while the idea of getting housing assistance for a brothel was clever, what ACORN really does, every day, is help those same working families avoid foreclosure and stay in their homes.

Perhaps the congressional investigation now demanded by some Republican politicians would be a useful exercise, if conducted impartially. A fair investigation might begin to dispel some of the wild mythology promoted by right-wing media outlets.

Among the most popular canards on the right, repeated constantly by conservative pundits and politicians, is that ACORN has been found guilty of engaging in deliberate voter fraud, using federal funds. In reality, ACORN has registered close to 2 million low-income citizens across the country over the past five years -- a laudable record with a very low incidence of fraud of any kind.

Over the past several years, a handful of ACORN employees have admitted falsifying names and signatures on registration cards, in order to boost the pay they received. When ACORN officials discovered those cases, they informed the state authorities and turned in the miscreants. (That was why the Bush Justice Department's blatant attempt to smear ACORN with rushed, election-timed indictments became a national scandal for Republicans rather than Democrats.)

The proportion of fraud is infinitesimal. For example, a half-dozen ACORN workers were charged with registration fraud or other election-related crimes in the 2004 election. They had completed fewer than two dozen false registrations -- out of more than a million new voters registered by ACORN during that cycle. The mythology that suggests that thousands or even millions of illegal registrants voted is itself a fraud.

If only the Republicans who have worked up a frenzy over ACORN's alleged crimes were so indignant about real and damaging voter fraud -- such as the amazing case of Young Political Majors, the firm that ran GOP registration efforts in California, Massachusetts, Florida, Arizona and elsewhere before the authorities in Orange County, Calif., busted its president, Mark Anthony Jacoby, and sent him to jail last year.

He had built a lucrative partisan career by teaching his minions to deceive thousands of voters into registering as Republicans rather than Democrats, among other scams. Of course, the only on-air mention of the Young Political Majors scandal on Fox News was made by blogger Brad Friedman -- and the national media, mainstream and conservative, generally ignored it. They were too busy generating "controversy" over ACORN.

So now the overhyped voting registration tales are metastasizing into wild accusations about ACORN's finances and programs, including claims that the group will receive billions in federal bailout funding and that it is a hotbed of corruption, perhaps even murder.

In fact, ACORN affiliates -- those not involved with voter registration -- have received a few million dollars annually in federal funding. The group is not scheduled to receive any bailout money (although working people would probably benefit more from subsidizing ACORN than greasing AIG and Goldman Sachs).

The fans of Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck regard ACORN as a criminal enterprise that fosters tax fraud, prostitution, child prostitution and even murder (thanks to a satirical "confession" by an employee filmed surreptitiously in the San Bernardino ACORN office). But ACORN chief organizer and CEO Bertha Lewis swiftly dismissed the employees caught on those videotapes and set about reforming the flawed processes that enabled those individuals to speak for the organization.

No overt acts were committed by any of the people caught on those tapes -- and so far nobody has found that any of those theoretical "crimes" ever took place.

To claim that the stupid behavior of a half-dozen employees should discredit a national group with offices in more than 75 cities staffed by many thousands of employees and volunteers is like saying that Mark Sanford or John Ensign have discredited every Republican governor or senator.

Indeed, the indignation of the congressional Republicans screaming about ACORN and the phony streetwalker is diluted by the presence of at least two confirmed prostitution clients -- Rep. Ken Calvert and Sen. David Vitter -- in their midst. Neither of those right-wing johns has been even mildly chastised by their moralistic peers. Nobody is cutting off their federal funding.

ACORN has pledged to institute reforms, with the appointment of a distinguished outside panel to oversee that process. Let us hope they succeed. Even now they seem far more likely to improve their performance -- and to be more sincere in their intentions -- than the Washington hypocrites who are trying to destroy them.

Source / Salon.com

Also see

• As ACORN Grew, so Did Its Clout and Its Problems by Barbara Barrett / McClatchy / truthout / Sept. 18, 2009
• The ACORN witch hunt: Voter-registration success spurs unfair attack by Errol Lewis / New York Daily News / Sept. 20, 2009

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Losing or Giving Up the Fight Against Racism?

US president Barack Obama: has he gone back on pledges made to black America? Photo: Michael Reynolds/EPA.
Obama's big silence: the race question: Has the president turned his back on black America?
By Naomi Klein / September 12, 2009

Americans began the summer still celebrating the dawn of a "post-racial" era. They are ending it under no such illusion. The summer of 2009 was all about race, beginning with Republican claims that Sonia Sotomayor, Barack Obama's nominee to the US Supreme Court, was "racist" against whites. Then, just as that scandal was dying down, up popped "the Gates controversy", the furore over the president's response to the arrest of African American academic Henry Louis Gates Jr in his own home. Obama's remark that the police had acted "stupidly" was evidence, according to massively popular Fox News host Glenn Beck, that the president "has a deep-seated hatred for white people".

Obama's supposed racism gave a jolt of energy to the fringe movement that claims he has been carrying out a lifelong conspiracy to cover up his (fictional) African birth. Then Fox News gleefully discovered Van Jones, White House special adviser on green jobs. After weeks of being denounced as "a black nationalist who is also an avowed communist", Jones resigned last Sunday.

The undercurrent of all these attacks was that Obama, far from being the colour-blind moderate he posed as during the presidential campaign, is actually obsessed with race, in particular with redistributing white wealth into the hands of African Americans and undocumented Mexican workers. At town hall meetings across the US in August, these bizarre claims coalesced into something resembling an uprising to "take our country back". Henry D Rose, chair of Blacks For Social Justice, recently compared the overwhelmingly white, often armed, anti-Obama crowds to the campaign of "massive resistance" launched in the late 50s – a last-ditch attempt by white southerners to block the racial integration of their schools and protect other Jim Crow laws. Today's "new era of 'massive resistance'," writes Rose, "is also a white racial project."

There is at least one significant difference, however. In the late 50s and early 60s, angry white mobs were reacting to life-changing victories won by the civil rights movement. Today's mobs, on the other hand, are reacting to the symbolic victory of an African American winning the presidency. Yet they are rising up at a time when non-elite blacks and Latinos are losing significant ground, with their homes and jobs slipping away from them at a much higher rate than from whites. So far, Obama has been unwilling to adopt policies specifically geared towards closing this ever-widening divide. The result may well leave minorities with the worst of all worlds: the pain of a full-scale racist backlash without the benefits of policies that alleviate daily hardships. Meanwhile, with Obama constantly painted by the radical right as a cross between Malcolm X and Karl Marx, most progressives feel it is their job to defend him – not to point out that, when it comes to tackling the economic crisis ravaging minority communities, the president is not doing nearly enough.

For many antiracist campaigners, the realisation that Obama might not be the leader they had hoped for came when he announced his administration would be boycotting the UN Durban Review Conference on racism, widely known as "Durban II". Almost all of the public debate about the conference focused on its supposed anti-Israel bias. When it actually took place in April in Geneva, virtually all we heard about was Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's inflammatory speech, which was met with rowdy disruptions, from the EU delegates who walked out, to the French Jewish students who put on clown wigs and red noses, and tried to shout him down.

Lost in the circus atmosphere was the enormous importance of the conference to people of African descent, and nowhere more so than among Obama's most loyal base. The US civil rights movement had embraced the first Durban conference, held in summer 2001, with great enthusiasm, viewing it as the start of the final stage of Martin Luther King's dream for full equality. Though most black leaders offered only timid public criticism of the president's Durban II boycott, the decision was discussed privately as his most explicit betrayal of the civil rights struggle since taking office.

The original 2001 gathering was not all about Israelis v Palestinians, or antisemitism, as so many have claimed (though all certainly played a role). The conference was overwhelmingly about Africa, the ongoing legacy of slavery and the huge unpaid debts that the rich owe the poor.

Holding the 2001 World Conference against Racism in what was still being called "the New South Africa" had seemed a terrific idea. World leaders would gather to congratulate themselves on having slain the scourge of apartheid, then pledge to defeat the world's few remaining vestiges of discrimination – things such as police violence, unequal access to certain jobs, lack of adequate healthcare for minorities and intolerance towards immigrants. Appropriate disapproval would be expressed for such failures of equality, and a well-meaning document pledging change would be signed to much fanfare. That, at least, is what western governments expected to happen.

They were mistaken. When the conference arrived in Durban, many delegates were shocked by the angry mood in the streets: tens of thousands of South Africans joined protests outside the conference centre, holding signs that said "Landlessness = racism" and "New apartheid: rich and poor". Many denounced the conference as a sham, and demanded concrete reparations for the crimes of apartheid. South Africa's disillusionment, though particularly striking given its recent democratic victory, was part of a much broader global trend, one that would define the conference, in both the streets and the assembly halls. Around the world, developing countries were increasingly identifying the so-called Washington Consensus economic policies as little more than a clever rebranding effort, a way for former northern colonial powers to continue to drain the southern countries of their wealth without being inconvenienced by the heavy lifting of colonialism. Roughly two years before Durban, a coalition of developing countries had refused further to liberalise their economies, leading to the collapse of World Trade Organisation talks in Seattle. A few months later, a newly militant movement calling for a debt jubilee disrupted the annual meetings of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. Durban was a continuation of this mounting southern rebellion, but it added something else to the mix: an invoice for past thefts.

Although it was true that southern countries owed debts to foreign banks and lending institutions, it was also true that in the colonial period – the first wave of globalisation – the wealth of the north was built, in large part, on stolen indigenous land and free labour provided by the slave trade. Many in Durban argued that when these two debts were included in the calculus, it was actually the poorest regions of the world – especially Africa and the Caribbean – that turned out to be the creditors and the rich world that owed a debt. All big UN conferences tend to coalesce around a theme, and in Durban 2001 the clear theme was the call for reparations. The overriding message was that even though the most visible signs of racism had largely disappeared – colonial rule, apartheid, Jim Crow-style segregation – profound racial divides will persist and even widen until the states and corporations that profited from centuries of state-sanctioned racism pay back some of what they owe.

African and Caribbean governments came to Durban with two key demands. The first was for an acknowledgment that slavery and even colonialism itself constituted "crimes against humanity" under international law; the second was for the countries that perpetrated and profited from these crimes to begin to repair the damage. Most everyone agreed that reparations should include a clear and unequivocal apology for slavery, as well as a commitment to returning stolen artefacts and to educating the public about the scale and impact of the slave trade. Above and beyond these more symbolic acts, there was a great deal of debate. Dudley Thompson, former Jamaican foreign minister and a longtime leader in the Pan-African movement, was opposed to any attempt to assign a number to the debt: "It is impossible to put a figure to killing millions of people, our ancestors," he said. The leading reparations voices instead spoke of a "moral debt" that could be used as leverage to reorder international relations in multiple ways, from cancelling Africa's foreign debts to launching a huge develop­ ment programme for Africa on a par with Europe's Marshall Plan. What was emerging was a demand for a radical New Deal for the global south.

African and Caribbean countries had been holding high-level summits on reparations for a decade, with little effect. What prompted the Durban breakthrough was that a similar debate had taken off inside the US. The facts are familiar, if commonly ignored. Even as individual blacks break the colour barrier in virtually every field, the correlation between race and poverty remains deeply entrenched. Blacks in the US consistently have dramatically higher rates of infant mortality, HIV infection, incarceration and unemployment, as well as lower salaries, life expectancy and rates of home ownership. The biggest gap, however, is in net worth. By the end of the 90s, the average black family had a net worth one eighth the national average. Low net worth means less access to traditional credit (and, as we'd later learn, more sub-prime mortgages). It also means families have little besides debt to pass from one generation to the next, preventing the wealth gap closing on its own.

In 2000, Randall Robinson published The Debt: What America Owes To Blacks, which argued that "white society… must own up to slavery and acknowledge its debt to slavery's contemporary victims". The book became a national bestseller, and within months the call for reparations was starting to look like a new anti-apartheid struggle. Students demanded universities disclose their historical ties to the slave trade, city councils began holding public hearings on reparations, chapters of the National Coalition of Blacks for Reparations in America had sprung up across the country and Charles Ogletree, the celebrated Harvard law professor (and one of Obama's closest mentors), put together a team of all-star lawyers to try to win reparations lawsuits in US courts.

By spring 2001, reparations had become the hot-button topic on US talkshows and op-ed pages. And though opponents consistently portrayed the demand as blacks wanting individual handouts from the government, most reparations advocates were clear they were seeking group solutions: mass scholarship funds, for instance, or major investments in preventive healthcare, inner cities and crumbling schools. By the time Durban rolled around in late August, the conference had taken on the air of a black Woodstock. Angela Davis was coming. So were Jesse Jackson and Danny Glover. Small radical groups such as the National Black United Front spent months raising money to buy hundreds of plane tickets to South Africa. Activists travelled to Durban from 168 countries, but the largest delegation by far came from the US: approximately 3,000 people, roughly 2,000 of them African Americans. Ogletree pumped up the crowds with an energetic address: "This is a movement that cannot be stopped… I promise we will see reparations in our lifetime."

The call for reparations took many forms, but one thing was certain: antiracism was transformed in Durban from something safe and comfortable for elites to embrace into something explosive and potentially very, very costly. North American and European governments, the debtors in this new accounting, tried desperately to steer the negotiations on to safe terrain. "We are better to look forward and not point fingers backward," national security adviser Condoleezza Rice said. It was a losing battle. Durban, according to Amina Mohamed, chief negotiator for the Africa bloc, was Africa's "rendezvous with history".

Not everyone was willing to show up for the encounter, however, and that is where the Israel controversies come in. Durban, it should be remembered, took place in the aftermath of the collapse of the Oslo Accords, and there were those who hoped the conference could somehow fill the political vacuum. Six months before the meeting in Durban, at an Asian preparatory conference in Tehran, a few Islamic countries requested language in their draft of the Durban Declaration that described Israeli policies in the occupied territories as "a new kind of apartheid" and a "form of genocide". Then, a month before the conference, there was a new push for changes: references to the Holocaust were paired with the "ethnic cleansing of the Arab population in historic Palestine", while references to "the increase in antisemitism and hostile acts against Jews" were twinned with phrases about "the increase of racist practices of Zionism", and Zionism was described as a movement "based on racism and discriminatory ideas".

There were cases to be made for all of it, but this was language sure to tear the meeting apart (just as "Zionism equals racism" resolutions had torn apart UN gatherings before). Meanwhile, as soon as the conference began, the parallel forum for non-governmental organisations began to spiral out of control. With more than 8,000 participants and no ground rules to speak of, the NGO forum turned into a free-for-all, with, among other incidents, the Arab Lawyers Union passing out a booklet that contained Der Stürmer–style cartoons of hook-nosed Jews with bloody fangs.

High-profile NGO and civil rights leaders roundly condemned the antisemitic incidents, as did Mary Robinson, then UN high commissioner for human rights. None of the controversial language about Israel and Zionism made it into the final Durban Declaration. But for the newly elected administration of George W Bush, that was besides the point. Already testing the boundaries of what would become a new era of US unilateralism, Bush latched on to the gathering's alleged anti-Israel bias as the perfect excuse to flee the scene, neatly avoiding the debates over Israel and reparations. Early in the conference, the US and Israel walked out.

Despite the disruptions, Africa was not denied its rendezvous with history. The final Durban Declaration became the first document with international legal standing to state that "slavery and the slave trade are a crime against humanity and should always have been so, especially the transatlantic slave trade". This language was more than symbolic. When lawyers had sought to win slavery reparations in US courts, the biggest barrier was always the statute of limitations, which had long since expired. But if slavery was "a crime against humanity", it was not restricted by any statute.

On the final day of the conference, after Canada tried to minimise the significance of the declaration, Amina Mohamed, now a top official in the Kenyan government, took the floor in what many remember as the most dramatic moment of the gathering. "Madame President," Mohamed said, "it is not a crime against humanity just for today, nor just for tomorrow, but for always and for all time. Nuremberg made it clear that crimes against humanity are not time-bound." Any acts that take responsibility for these crimes, therefore, "are expected and are in order". The assembly hall erupted in cheers and a long standing ovation.

Groups of African American activists spent their last day at the conference planning a "Millions for Reparations" march on Washington. Attorney Roger Wareham, co-counsel on a high-profile reparations lawsuit and one of the organisers, recalled that as they left South Africa, "people were on a real rolling high" – ready to take their movement to the next level.

That was 9 September 2001. Two days later, Africa's "rendezvous with history" was all but forgotten. The profound demands that rose up from Durban during that first week of September 2001 – for debt cancellation, for reparations for slavery and apartheid, for land redistribution and indigenous land rights, for compensation, not charity – have never again managed to command international attention. At various World Bank meetings and G8 summits there is talk, of course, of graciously providing aid to Africa and perhaps "forgiving" its debts. But there is no suggestion that it might be the G8 countries that are the debtors and Africa the creditor. Or that it is we, in the west, who should be asking forgiveness.

Because Durban disappeared before it had ever fully appeared, it's sometimes hard to believe it happened at all. As Bill Fletcher, author and long-time advocate for African rights, puts it: "It was as if someone had pressed a giant delete button."

When news came that the Durban follow-up conference would take place three months into Obama's presidency, many veterans of the first gathering were convinced the time had finally come to restart that interrupted conversation. And at first the Obama administration seemed to be readying to attend, even sending a small delegation to one of the preparatory conferences. So when Obama announced that he, like Bush before him, would be boycotting, it came as a blow. Especially because the state department's official excuse was that the declaration for the new conference was biased against Israel. The evidence? That the document – which does not reference Israel once – "reaffirms" the 2001 Durban Declaration. Never mind that that was so watered down that Shimon Peres, then Israel's foreign minister, praised it at the time as "an accomplishment of the first order for Israel" and "a painful comedown for the Arab League".

When disappointed activists reconvened for the Durban Review Conference this April, talk in the corridors often turned to the unprecedented sums governments were putting on the line to save the banks. Roger Wareham, for instance, pointed out that if Washington can find billions to bail out AIG, it can also say, "We're going to bail out people of African descent because this is what's happened historically." It's true that, at least on the surface, the economic crisis has handed the reparations movement some powerful new arguments. The hardest part of selling reparations in the US has always been the perception that something would have to be taken away from whites in order for it to be given to blacks and other minorities. But because of the broad support for large stimulus spending, there is a staggering amount of new money floating around – money that does not yet belong to any one group.

Obama's approach to stimulus spending has been rightly criticised for lacking a big idea – the $787bn package he unveiled shortly after taking office is a messy grab bag, with little ambition actually to fix any one of the problems on which it nibbles. Listening to Wareham in Geneva, it occurred to me that a serious attempt to close the economic gaps left by slavery and Jim Crow is as good a big stimulus idea as any.

What is tantalising (and maddening) about Obama is that he has the skills to persuade a great many Americans of the justice of such an endeavour. The one time he gave a major campaign address on race, prompted by controversy over the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, he told a story about the historical legacies of slavery and legalised discrimination that have structurally prevented African Americans from achieving full equality, a story not so different from the one activists such as Wareham tell in arguing for reparations. Obama's speech was delivered six months before Wall Street collapsed, but the same forces he described go a long way toward explaining why the crash happened in the first place: "Legalised discrimination… meant that black families could not amass any meaningful wealth to bequeath to future generations," Obama said, which is precisely why many turned to risky sub-prime mortgages. In Obama's home city of Chicago, black families were four times more likely than whites to get a sub-prime mortgage.

The crisis in African American wealth has only been deepened by the larger economic crisis. In New York City, for instance, the unemployment rate has increased four times faster among blacks than among whites. According to the New York Times, home "defaults occur three times as often in mostly minority census tracts as in mostly white ones". If Obama traced the Wall Street collapse back to the policies of redlining and Jim Crow, all the way to the betrayed promise of 40 acres and a mule for freed slaves, a broad sector of the American public might well be convinced that finally eliminating the structural barriers to full equality is in the interests not just of minorities but of everyone who wants a more stable economy.

Since the economic crisis hit, John A Powell and his team at the Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity at Ohio State University have been engaged in a project they call "Fair Recovery". It lays out exactly what an economic stimulus programme would look like if eliminating the barriers to equality were its overarching idea. Powell's plan covers everything from access to technology to community redevelopment. A few examples: rather than simply rebuilding the road system by emphasising "shovel ready" projects (as Obama's current plan does), a "fair recovery" approach would include massive investments in public transport to address the fact that African Americans live farther away than any other group from where the jobs are. Similarly, a plan targeting inequality would focus on energy-efficient home improvements in low-income neighbourhoods and, most importantly, require that contractors hire locally. Combine all of these targeted programmes with real health and education reform and, whether or not you call it "reparations", you have something approaching what Randall Robinson called for in The Debt: "A virtual Marshall Plan of federal resources" to close the racial divide.

In his Philadelphia "race speech", Obama was emphatic that race was something "this nation cannot afford to ignore"; that "if we simply retreat into our respective corners, we will never be able to come together and solve challenges like healthcare, or education, or the need to find good jobs for every American". Yet as soon as the speech had served its purpose (saving Obama's campaign from being engulfed by the Wright scandal), he did simply retreat. And his administration has been retreating from race ever since.

Public policy activists report that the White House is interested in hearing only about projects that are "race neutral" – nothing that specifically targets historically disadvantaged constituencies. Its housing and education programmes do not tackle the need for desegregation; indeed Obama's enthusiasm for privately-run "charter" schools may well deepen segregation, since charters are some of the most homogenous schools in the country. When asked specific questions about what his administration is doing to address the financial crisis's wildly disproportionate impact on African Americans and Latinos, Obama has consistently offered a variation on the line that, by fixing the economy and extending benefits, everyone will be helped, "black, brown and white", and the vulnerable most of all.

All this is being met with mounting despair among inequality experts. Extending unemployment benefits and job retraining mainly help people who've just lost their jobs. Reaching those who have never had formal employment – many of whom have criminal records – requires a far more complex strategy that takes down multiple barriers simultaneously. "Treating people who are situated differently as if they were the same can result in much greater inequalities," Powell warns. It will be difficult to measure whether this is the case because the White House's budget office is so far refusing even to keep statistics on how its programmes affect women and minorities.

There were those who saw this coming. The late Latino activist Juan Santos wrote a much-circulated essay during the presidential campaign in which he argued that Obama's unwillingness to talk about race (except when his campaign depended upon it) was a triumph not of post-racialism but of racism, period. Obama's silence, he argued, was the same silence every person of colour in America lives with, understanding that they can be accepted in white society only if they agree not to be angry about racism. "We stay silent, as a rule, on the job. We stay silent, as a rule, in the white world. Barack Obama is the living symbol of our silence. He is our silence writ large. He is our Silence running for president." Santos predicted that "with respect to Black interests, Obama would be a silenced Black ruler: A muzzled Black emperor."

Many of Obama's defenders responded angrily: his silence was a mere electoral strategy, they said. He was doing what it took to make racist white people comfortable voting for a black man. All that would change, of course, when Obama took office. What Obama's decision to boycott Durban demonstrated definitively was that the campaign strategy is also the governing strategy.

Two weeks after the close of the Durban Review Conference, Rush Limbaugh sprang a new theory on his estimated 14 million listeners. Obama, Limbaugh claimed, was deliberately trashing the economy so he could give more handouts to black people. "The objective is more food stamp benefits. The objective is more unemployment benefits. The objective is an expanding welfare state. The objective is to take the nation's wealth and return it to the nation's 'rightful owners'. Think reparations. Think forced reparations here, if you want to understand what actually is going on."

It was nonsense, of course, but the outburst was instructive. No matter how race-neutral Obama tries to be, his actions will be viewed by a large part of the country through the lens of its racial obsessions. So, since even his most modest, Band-Aid measures are going to be greeted as if he is waging a full-on race war, Obama has little to lose by using this brief political window actually to heal a few of the country's racial wounds.

[A longer version of this article appears in the September issue of Harper's Magazine.]

Source / The Guardian

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