On the Death of Dreams

Ta-Nehisi Coates Aug 29 2013, 4:45 AM ET Watching Barack Obama's speech yesterday, I thought of a young W.E.B. Du Bois who in 1897 authored the original Poundcake Speech: We believe that the first and greatest step toward the settlement of the present friction between the races-commonly called the Negro Problem-lies in the correction of the immorality, crime and laziness among the Negroes themselves, which still remains as a heritage from slavery. We believe that only earnest and long continued efforts on our own part can cure these social ills. Du Bois styled himself as a speaker of bold truths, arguing that black people "must be honest" and fearless in "criticizing their own faults." Those faults included a disturbing number of black boys succumbing to "loafing, gambling and crime," and a "vast army of black prostitutes that is today marching to hell." Du Bois was writing at a time in which such views were current in the world of white sociology. The way to defeat them was not to attack them at their root, but to be better, to be twice as good -- "There is no power under God's high heaven," asserted Du Bois. "That can stop the advance of eight thousand thousand honest, earnest, inspired and united people." Much like Du Bois more than a century ago, Obama positioned himself as an airer of laundry, and speaker of bold, necessary truths: And then, if we're honest with ourselves, we'll admit that during the course of 50 years, there were times when some of us claiming to push for change lost our way. The anguish of assassinations set off self-defeating riots. Legitimate grievances against police brutality tipped into excuse-making for criminal behavior. Racial politics could cut both ways, as the transformative message of unity and brotherhood was drowned out by the language of recrimination. And what had once been a call for equality of opportunity, the chance for all Americans to work hard and get ahead was too often framed as a mere desire for government support -- as if we had no agency in our own liberation, as if poverty was an excuse for not raising your child, and the bigotry of others was reason to give up on yourself. It goes without saying that the president is using a tank to bravely plow through an army of strawmen. George Will could not have done better. I have met a lot of trifling human beings who happened to be black, and from them, I have heard a lot of trifling excuses for not parenting. I have never met one who cited racism as an excuse for not parenting or for giving on oneself. I doubt that Barack Obama has either.* The president's comments regarding the riots are particularly illuminating.The black community in 1968 had born the brunt of roughly 100 years of lynchings, beatings, rapes, firebombs and racist policy . The American state which Barack Obama represents regarded Apartheid -- not as an unfortunate side-effect -- but as one of its necessary premises. Nothing was immune -- not postbellum reunion, not Prohibition, not the New Deal, not the G.I. Bill, nothing. In the main, the black community responded to this campaign of white terrorism and racist policy with stoic protests, hypermorality and nonviolence. Bloody Sunday was not original. It just happened to be

televised. There is the rub: In the 1960s, black men and women who carried the pain of living in a white terrorist state, who carried the pain of redlining, of job discrimination, of being cheated out of land, cut on the television and saw black women and children getting the shit kicked out of them. No one was being punished. Sometimes the police were doing the kicking. They saw this, and they stewed. They'd seen it before. And as they had in the face of racial pogroms, and in the face of slavery itself, they closed their mouths, swallowed the daggers, and got dressed for work. Martin Luther King turned this stoic tradition into high art. It was a kind of jujitsu by which our pain could be made redemptive. The price was high. If that imagery cut black folks to the core, one wonders how far it went in normalizing the idea of the black body as the rightful field for violence. If you accept that being twice as good is the price of the ticket, then you accept a double standard, and thus necessarily accept the precepts of racism. The response to this bargain was to bug King's phones, to send lewd tapes of his affairs to his wife, to plant informants in his inner circle. The heads of the American state signed off on this bugging. Jackie Kennedy held him in contempt. John F. Kennedy liked to demean him as "Martin Luther Queen." The response of the white public was considerably more vicious. And so for daring to oppose Vietnam, for challenging Apartheid, for claiming that garbage workers are people, they murdered him. None of us in this generation can truly know how it must have felt to be black, to have come out of the long night of slavery, into the clutches of revanchists, to have survived only to see your great ambassador slaughtered like a dog. Barack Obama doesn't know anything about this. None of us know anything about this. None of us can really know how deep that pain must have cut. Anger is human. It is fantastic to see the head of the same American state that created the ghettoes (which predictably exploded) attack the people imprisoned there for being selfdefeating. Like Du Bois, Barack Obama has taken the stage at a moment when it is popular to assert that black people are the agents of their own doom. The response to Trayvon Martin, indeed the response to Barack Obama himself, has been to attack black morality, to highlight black criminality and thus change the conversation from what the American state has done to black people, to what black people have done to themselves. Like Du Bois, Barack Obama believes that these people have a point. Du Bois's biographer, David Levering Lewis, says that Du Bois came to look back back on that speech with some embarrassment. I don't know that Barack Obama will ever reach such a conclusion. Indeed, if we are -- as the president asks us to be -- honest with ourselves, we will see that we have elected a president who claims to oppose racial profiling one minute, and then flirts with inaugurating the country's greatest racial profiler the next. If we are honest with ourselves we will see that we have a president who can condemn the riots as "self-defeating," but can't see his way clear to enforce the fair housing law that came out of them. If we are honest with ourselves we will see a president who believes in particular black morality, but eschews particular black policy.

It is heartbreaking to see this. But it is also clarifying. __

September 3, 2012

Bad News for Black Families

By Keith Riler When we assess the President's post-election performance and the effects of his redistributive and regulatory policies, we find that, like a falling tide, he is sinking everyone. We also find that although Barack Obama has hurt all American families, he has hurt black families most of all. The metaphor of the economy as a tide is particularly helpful. When the tide rises, our boats rise. When the tide falls, our boats fall. Just as water may not be subdivided to make some boats rise and others fall, our economy cannot be subdivided, either. Similarly helpful is Democrat Daniel Moynihan's longstanding observation: During times when jobs were reasonably plentiful ... the Negro family became stronger and more stable. As jobs became more and more difficult to find, the stability of the family became more and more difficult to maintain. Black families are faring worse than at any time in the last 25 years, and worse than at this point with President Obama than with Presidents G.W. Bush, Clinton, H.W. Bush, Reagan, and even Carter. These presidential comparisons span a period of almost four decades. Black Adults. Black unemployment has been persistently high for a long time. Likewise, median weeks unemployed are higher than under any other president. These facts are testaments to the ineffectiveness of the Obama presidency. We are experiencing a 28-year high in black unemployment; but unlike January 1983, when black unemployment spiked but then soon improved, Barack Obama's black unemployment has hovered in the14%-16% range for over three years (now 14.1%). Not only has the job picture been dismal, but standards of living have deteriorated in other ways. Black poverty has increased, and the prices of gasoline, bread, ground meat, milk, and sugar are up dramatically. Bloomberg recently reported

that "consumer credit climbed more than forecast in May, led by the biggest jump in credit-card debt in almost five years that may signal Americans are struggling to make ends meet." Under President Obama, needy families have grown needier, and his ho-hum response has been to tout food stamps. As the Texas food stamp experience reveals, "Let them eat junk food" is the president's empathic parallel to Marie-Thrse's now-famous "Let them eat cake." That state's food stamp beneficiaries are sustained by Pop-Tarts, cookies, honey buns, candy bars, corn dogs, taffy, and cheesecake. Yet another sad Obama achievement: 46.5 million Americans, more than the populations of Canada, Poland, Spain, or Australia, are now on food stamps. Hope and change hasn't played out well for black adults. Black Children. Like the adults, black children have suffered mightily under President Obama. Teen black unemployment is at a terrible 39.3%. The number of children living under the poverty line is as high as it has ever been. Similarly, the number of children on food stamps has reached its highest level since 1980, black illegitimate births have peaked at 72.5% of all black births, and sexually transmitted diseases are up -- particularly for black kids, for whom chlamydia occurs 3.8 times more than for Hispanics and 7.5 times more than for whites. New York now aborts of 60% of its black babies, and LA high schools come equipped with Planned Parenthood clinics. Like the adults, black children can't afford to move forward with Barack Obama. Presidential Comparison. A three-and-one-half-decade comparison highlights the problem. Consider the following, shown at the end of the first term for each president:

The man is ill-suited for the job. He scores last (in yellow) in unemployment, weeks unemployed, food stamps, and black illegitimate births, and near the bottom or tied for last in black unemployment, months of 12%-plus black unemployment, and children below the poverty line.

Barack Obama has crushed the business and hiring climate. What's left are his racebased initiatives -- the Initiative on Educational Excellence for African Americans, the first African American policy conference, Operation Vote, the hiring of an NAACP operative to lead White House African-American outreach, and African Americans for Obama, which includes a program to engage barbershops as "opinion leaders." These impotent, Obama-centric promotions highlight the small-mindedness and exhaustion of his presidency. Unless we count barbershop outreach and press releases, his is an all-fronts failure. The damage will continue if he is re-elected, and rational self interest dictates that all voters, but particularly black voters, choose anyone but Barack Obama. However, it is important to note that identifying the failure of Barack Obama in no way compromises the achievement of his election. It is a great thing that we elected a black president. Most of us knew that our country had overcome its most serious racial divisions, but the evidence is nice. We are a great country, and our progress established a permanent possibility for black children -- that of becoming president of the United States. Black Americans should not succumb to the temptations of despair or denial by joining themselves to the disappointing Obama presidency. Our weak economy, black joblessness, and the travails of our families are not their failures; they are Barack Obama's. This should come as a relief -- a yoke lifted -- because family plights can improve once Barack Obama is voted out of office, all the while leaving intact the historical achievement of having elected a black president. As well, let's not conflate the man Obama with the historical achievement. Black Americans may not be robbed of the fact that we have elected a black president and at some point will do so again. Our achievement is irreversible, whether Barack Obama leaves the White House after one term or after two. It's just that all of us, and black Americans in particular, will be better off if he leaves after one. Page Printed from: http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/../2012/09/bad_news_for_black_familie s.html at October 06, 2013 - 12:56:26 PM CDT

Noam Chomsky | On Shutdown, Waning US Influence, Syrian Showdown

Tuesday, 08 October 2013 12:41 By Harrison Samphir, Truthout | Interview

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Noam Chomsky. (Photo: jeanbaptisteparis / Flickr)Noam Chomsky gives his perspective on the US government shutdown, the Syrian civil war, capitalist reform in South America and more in a Truthout interview. Noam Chomsky is one of the world's greatest living intellectuals. His work and achievements are well known - he is a foundational American linguist, professor emeritus at MIT for more than 60 years, undeviating political activist and commentator, and an ally of progressive movements around the world. In this interview, Truthout spoke with the 84-year-old by telephone to discuss the current US government shutdown, tumultuous state of American politics, the Syrian Civil War and a wave of capitalist reform in South America. Chomsky's latest works are Nuclear War and Environmental Catastrophe, with writer and multimedia artist Laray Polk, and On Western Terrorism: From Hiroshima to Drone Warfare, with novelist and filmmaker Andr Vltchek. Harrison Samphir: Thank you for speaking with me today, Mr. Chomsky. I would like to begin with the recent federal government shutdown in the United States. Acknowledging

that it has happened once before, how is this instance different, if at all? How does it speak to the unwillingness from above to institute meaningful reform - healthcare or otherwise and respond to the desires of the majority of the population? Noam Chomsky: Well, actually, there was pretty good commentary on it this morning [October 4] in The New York Times by Paul Krugman who basically makes the point, it's a narrow point, that the Republican Party among the public is a minority party. So for example, they do run the House of Representatives, they're a majority there, and it's the House that is essentially sending the government into shutdown and maybe default. But they won the majority of seats there because of various kinds of chicanery. They got a minority of the votes, but a majority of the seats, and they're using them to press forward an agenda which is extremely harmful to the public. The particular thing that they're focusing on is defunding the health-care system. You're from Canada so you probably know, the United States is unique among the rich countries, developed countries, in not having some kind of a national health-care system. The US healthcare system is a complete scandal. It's got twice the costs of comparable countries and some of the worst outcomes. And the reason is that it's largely privatized and unregulated. So ofcourse it's highly inefficient and costly. And what's called Obamacare is an effort to mildly change this, not change it as far as it should go or as much as the population wants it to go, but to make it a little better and a little more affordable. And the Republicans have picked that as the one thing that they want to hang on to to try to gain some political stand, so they have to destroy what they call Obamacare. This is now not all the Republicans, it's a wing of the Republican Party, which is called conservative but in fact is just deeply reactionary. It's correctly described as a "radical insurgency" by one of the leading conservative commentators, Norman Ornstein. So there's a radical insurgency, which is a large part of the Republican base, which is willing to do anything, destroy the country, whatever, in order to get rid of this Affordable Care Act. That's the one thing that they're able to hang onto. If they can't get rid of that, they're going to have to tell their base, we've been lying to you for the last five years. So they're willing to go to almost any extent to do that. That's unusual, in fact I think it's unique in the history of modern parliamentary systems. And it's very dangerous for the country and for the world HS: How do see the shutdown ending? NC: Well the shutdown itself is bad but not devastating. The real danger will come up in a couple of weeks. There's legislation which is in fact routine - it's passed every year - which allows the government to borrow money, otherwise it can't function. If Congress does not approve this budget request, the government may have to default. That's never happened. And a default of the US government would not only be very harmful here, it would probably send the country back into deep recession, but it just might crash the international financial system. Now, maybe they'll find ways around it, but the financial system of the world depends very heavily on the credibility of the US Treasury Department. US Treasury securities are what's called "good as gold"; they're the basis of international finance, and if the government can't uphold them, if they become valueless, the effect on the international financial system could be quite severe. But in order to destroy a limited health-care law, the right-wing Republicans, the reactionary Republicans, are willing to do that.

Now there's a split in the US about how this will be resolved. The main point to look at is the split within the Republican Party. The Republican establishment, and Wall Street, and the bankers, and the corporate executives and so on, they don't want this. They don't want it at all. It's the part of the base that is mobilized that wants it. And they're finding it hard to control that base. There's a reason why they have a collection of near crazies as the base. Over the past 30 or 40 years, both political parties have drifted to the right. Same thing's happened in Canada, incidentally. This is all part of the whole neoliberal shift in the economy. But the parties have shifted to the right. Today's Democrats are pretty much what used to be called moderate Republicans a generation ago. And the Republicans went so far to the right that they just can't get votes. They've become a dedicated party of the very rich and the corporate sector. And you can't get votes that way. So they've been compelled to mobilize a base of voters and gone to elements of the country that have always been there but were kind of marginal to the political system, for example, religious extremists. The United States is off the international spectrum in religious extremism. I mean half of the population, roughly, thinks the world was created a couple thousand years ago. Two thirds of the country is expecting the second coming of Christ. They've also had to turn to nativists. The gun culture in the United States, which is out of control, is party fueled by people who think 'we've got to have our guns to protect ourselves.' Protect ourselves from whom? From the United Nations? From the federal government? From people from outer space? There are big, extremely irrational parts of the society, and they have now been mobilized politically by the Republican establishment, hoping that these people could be an electoral base to keep them in power, but on the assumption that they'd be able to control them. And that's turning out not to be easy. You actually saw it in the last primaries if you were watching. The Republican Primaries were quite interesting. The establishment had its candidate, Romney, a kind of a Wall Street lawyer and investor, and they wanted him in. But the base didn't want him. And every time a candidate came up from the base, that is with popular support, the Republican establishment went into high gear to destroy them with massive propaganda attack ads and so on. It was one after another, each one crazier than the last. And the Republican establishment is afraid of them, they don't want them. So they were able to keep them under control and get their own candidate in. But they're losing control of the base, and that's a deep dilemma for the Republican Party. Actually, I'm sorry to say it has some historical analogs. It's kind of reminiscent of what happened in Germany in the late Weimar years. German industrialists wanted to use the Nazis, who were a relatively small group, as a battering ram against the labour movement and the left. They thought they control them but it turns out they were wrong. They couldn't control them. I'm not saying that will happen here, it's quite a different set of circumstances, but something similar is taking place. The Republican establishment, the mainstream corporate financial wealth, is getting to a point where it can't control the base it's mobilized. HS: Turning now to foreign policy, it seems as though news about Syria has effectively vanished from the mainstream media since the agreement was reached to confiscate Assad's chemical weapons arsenal. Can you comment on this silence? Does it reflect Western apathy vis--vis foreign conflicts, which are mostly viewed through sanitized television news programs?

NC: In the United States, and to a certain extent in Canada, there's very little interest in what happens outside their borders. The United States is a very insular society. Most people know very little about the outside world and don't care that much. They're concerned with their own affairs. People don't have knowledge and understanding about the outside world, or about history. It's limited, and there are a lot of reasons for this, but it's a fact. So when something isn't constantly drummed-up by the media, they just don't know about it. Syria is bad enough, it's a pretty terrible atrocity. But there are much worse ones in the world. So for example, the worst atrocities in the past decade have been in the Congo, the Eastern Congo, where maybe 5 million people have been killed. Horrible atrocities, and we're [the United States] involved, not directly but indirectly. The main mineral in your cellphone, coltan [a black metallic ore], comes from the Eastern Congo. Multinational corporations are there exploiting the very rich mineral resources of the region. A lot of them are backing militias which are fighting one other to gain control of the resources or a piece of the resources. The government of Rwanda, which is a US client, is intervening massively, and Uganda to an extent. It's almost an international war in Africa. Well, how many people know about this? It is the worst atrocity underway. But it's barely in the media, and people just don't know about it. And that's quite generally true. What happened in Syria was, President Obama had made a statement announcing what he called his "red line": You can't use chemical weapons, you can do anything else but [use] chemical weapons. Credible reports came through that Syria had used chemical weapons. Whether it's true actually is still open to question, but it's very probably true. At that point, what was at stake was what is called credibility. So if you read the political actors, political leadership, foreign policy commentary, they constantly point out accurately that US credibility was at stake, and we have to maintain US credibility. So therefore something had to be done to show you can't violate our orders. So a bombing was planned, which would probably make the situation worse, but would at least establish US credibility. And so what is "credibility"? It's a very familiar notion. It's basically the notion that is central to the Mafia. So suppose say the Godfather produces some kind of edict and says you're going to have to pay protection money. Well, he has to back up that statement. It doesn't matter whether he needs the money or not. If some small storekeeper somewhere decides he's not going to pay the money, the Godfather doesn't let him get away with it. The money doesn't mean anything to him, but he sends in his goons to beat him to a pulp. You have to establish credibility, otherwise conformity to your orders will tend to erode. International affairs runs in much the same way. The United States is the Godfather when it establishes edicts. Others had better live up to them, or else. We have to demonstrate that. So that's what the bombing of Syria was to have demonstrated. Obama was reaching a point where he might not have been able to carry it off. There was very little international support, even England wouldn't support it, which is amazing. He was losing support internally, and was compelled to send the vote to Congress, and it looked as if he was going to be defeated, which would have been a very serious blow to his presidency, to his authority. Luckily for Obama, the Russians came along and rescued him with this proposal [to confiscate Assad's chemical weapons] which he quickly accepted - it was a way out of the

embarrassment of facing likely defeat. They still have the option of bombing if they want to. And incidentally, to add one comment about this, you'll notice that this would be a very good moment to institute a call for imposing the Chemical Weapons Convention on the Middle East. The actual Chemical Weapons Convention. Not the version that Obama presented in his address to the nation and that media commentators repeat. What he said is that the convention bars the use of chemical weapons. He knows better. And so do the commentators. The Chemical Weapons Convention calls for banning the production, storage and use of chemical weapons, not just the use. So why omit production and storage? Reason: Israel produces and stores chemical weapons. So therefore the US will prevent the Chemical Weapons Convention from being imposed on the Middle East. But it's necessary to evade this by misrepresenting the convention, and I think maybe 100 percent of the media, or close to it, go along. But that's a critical issue. Actually, Syria's chemical weapons were developed largely as a deterrent to Israeli nuclear weapons. Also, not mentioned. HS: You have recently stated that American power in the world is declining. Will that limit the extent to which the United States might, to borrow your phrase from 1994's World Orders Old and New, "suppress independent development" in foreign nations? Do you think we live now in a bipolar world, or is that changing? Is the Monroe Doctrine finished completely? NC: Well, that's not a prediction. It's already happened. And it's happened in the [Western] hemisphere very dramatically. What the Monroe Doctrine stated, in effect, is that the US should dominate the hemisphere. For the past century or so that's actually been true, but it's declining very significantly. South America has virtually broken away in the last decade. That's an event of historic significance. South America just doesn't follow US orders. In fact there isn't a single US military base left there. South America goes its own way dramatically in international affairs. There was a hemispheric conference I think about two years ago in Colombia. It couldn't reach a consensus, so there was no declaration that came out, [but] on the crucial issues, Canada and the US were totally isolated. The rest of the hemisphere voted one way, and the US and Canada rejected it. So there couldn't be a consensus. The two issues were admitting Cuba into the hemispheric system and moving towards decriminalizing some drugs. The rest of the countries are in favor of it; Canada and the U.S. aren't. The same is true on other issues. You'll remember a few weeks ago several countries in Europe, [including] France and Italy, blocked the presidential plane of the president of Bolivia, Evo Morales, and when it was forced to land in Austria, they inspected the plane, all of which is a grotesque violation of diplomatic protocol. The South American countries bitterly condemned this. The Organization of American States, which used to be run by the United States, issued a sharp condemnation, but with a footnote. The US and Canada refused to go along. They are now increasingly isolated in the hemisphere, and sooner or later, I think we're going to find that the US and Canada are simply excluded from hemispheric affairs. That's a sharp reversal of what was the case not long ago. HS: Latin America is the current center of capitalist reform. Ecuador and Peru, for example, are keeping nature's oil in the ground, while other nations have pursued

nationalization programs in an effort to ward off heavy foreign investment and financial manipulation. Will these types of systems eventually gain traction in the West? NC: Well, you're right. Latin America was the most obedient follower of the neoliberal regime that was instituted by the United States, its allies and the international financial institutions. They followed it most rigorously. Almost everyone who's followed those rules, including the Western countries, have suffered. And in Latin America they suffered severely. They went through several difficult lost decades. Well, part of the uprising of Latin America, particularly in the last 10 to 15 years, has been a reaction to that, and they have thrown out a lot of these measures and moved in a different direction. In earlier years, the US would have overthrown the governments or, one way or another, curtailed them. Now, it can't do that. HS: Very recently, the United States saw its very first climate change refugees [Yup'ik Eskimos] on the southern coastal tip of Alaska. This puts human impact on the ecosphere into morbid perspective. What is your position on a carbon tax, and in your estimation, how popular might such a measure be in the United States and elsewhere? NC: I think it's basically a good idea. Very urgent measures need to be taken, and without much delay, in dealing with the ongoing destruction of the environment. And here, incidentally, I should say that Canada is one of the major criminals, not just the tar sands and so on, but even mining throughout the world, a lot of it is Canadian. It's extremely destructive, so an important thing for Canadians to do is curtail the predatory and destructive behavior of their own government and corporations. A carbon tax is one way of doing it. If it became a serious proposal in the United States, there would be a huge propaganda onslaught by the business community, the energy corporations and many others, to try to frighten the population into opposing it - claiming that if they have it, all sorts of terrible things will happen, like you won't be able to heat your home, or whatever the story is. Whether that would succeed or not depends on how well the popular movements can organize to effectively combat it.