Susan Rice: This contemptible criminal could have happily served on the Reagan foreign policy team. No wonder she was picked by Obama. —Eds

by Black AGenda Report managing editor Bruce A. Dixon
Hold the author blameless: All insults, rants and captions by the editors.

Did Susan Rice step down on her own or did she do so at the insistence of the White House. Did Republican oppostion doom her nomination, or was the Obama administration too afraid to have such a bare knuckled champion of disaster capitalism and African dictators as Secretary of State, lest its real Africa policy be more closely examined?

The conventional wisdom is that UN Ambassador Susan Rice withdrew herself from consideration as US Secretary of State due to some combination of Republican opposition and the president’s unwillingness to go to the mat for her. Like a lot of conventional wisdom, it’s dead wrong on multiple levels.

MELISSA HARRIS-PERRY: THE PERFECT IMPERSONATION OF THE MORAL AND POLITICAL IMBECILITY REPRESENTED BY BOURGEOIS FEMINISM. —Eds

MSNBC host Melissa Harris-Perry devoted the first half hour of her December 16 [2] show to an extended defense of Ambassador Rice, who she deemed the latest casualty in the GOP’s war on women. She wondered why President Obama did not defend Susan Rice more vigorously. But one of Harris-Perry’s guests, Chloe Angel of Feministing.Com [3] called the idea that Rice withdrew on her own “ludicrous”. Rice had after all, been working toward this professional goal — the post of top US diplomat, her whole career. It wasn’t a line of inquiry that interested the host, who turned the rest of the half hour into a “stand by a sisa” moment for Susan Rice. Harris-Perry’s position on that was pretty much the unanimous stand of the elite black political class. To them, Rice was just anotha strong hard-working black woman done wrong maybe by the president, but certainly and most of all by misogynist white Republican senators, an old and familiar story, if not a true or complete one.

The whole story is that Susan Rice was and is a professional diplomat for empire, a high level policymaker whose significance cannot be grasped apart from the policies she built her career conceiving and carrying out. In his 2003 essay, Barefoot, Sick, Hungry and Afraid: The Real US Policy in Africa [4], Glen Ford outlined in broad strokes US policy on the continent as

“…a ferocious, bipartisan determination to arrest African development at every opportunity and by all possible means – including the death of millions…

“To thwart the growth of civil society in newly independent Africa, the imperialists turned to the Strong Men. It is probably more accurate to say that the imperialists invented the African Strong Man… Their function is to smother civil society, to render the people helpless…

“The Strong Man’s job is to create weak civil societies. Weak and demoralized societies, supporting fragile states hitched to the fortunes of the Strong Man and his circle of pecking persons, pose little threat to foreign capital….

“…a chaotic Africa, barely governed at all, in which civil societies are perpetually insecure, incapable of defending themselves much less the nation, is the least troublesome environment for Western purposes.  The extraction corporations in Africa feel most secure when the people of Africa are insecure… “

The best examples of this insecurity-by-design are Congo and Somalia. In the Congo, the entire eastern region of the country has been depopulated, turned into a free-fire zone by the armies of Rwanda, Uganda and minor parts played by several other African nations. Seven million Congolese have died since 1996 and two million women raped in two major invasions and a ceaseless orgy of terrorism by a shifting cast of militia formations that routinely employ child soldiers and mass rape. The militia formations are supplied by the armies of US client states, most notably Uganda and Rwanda who are in turn totally dependent on the Pentagon for their training and supplies. At the same time, the Congo’s gold and timber, its diamonds and its coltan, a vital material present in every cell phone, every computer, every aircraft on earth continue to flow mostly to the West.

In Somalia, the US fears that a united national government will deny Western access to the lake of oil underneath the country. Hence Uncle Sam branded Somalis it fears “Al Qaeda affiliates” and decreeing there will be no national government till times change, bankrolled Ethiopian [5] and Ugandan troops to conduct multiple invasions. Since the late 1990s, more than a million Somalis have perished in the fighting, raping and blockading and starving.

Africa is the poorest and most war-torn region on earth [6], with US military aid going to 52 out of 54 African countries. It’s the only place where US military and civilian diplomatic functions are combined under the auspices of AFRICOM, the US military command on the continent. It’s a monstrous legacy, and Susan Rice has been one of its leading architects and managers.

Rice joined the Clinton administration’s National Security team and was deeply involved, both in supporting the side that came out on top of the Rwandan civil war while she stalled and wondered aloud whether the killing of 800,000 Rwandan civilians amounted to genocide. She served as Undersecretary of African Affairs in the Clinton administration, and when Democrats were not in the White House joined the lobbying firm that represented Ugandan and Ethiopian dictators in Washington DC. A top policy advisor since the beginning of the Obama administration, she now serves as UN Ambassador, in which capacity she repeatedly tried to suppress UN sponsored studies that laid the blame for mass murders and atrocities at the feet of Rwanda and Uganda.

“US policy in the region has been a disastrous record of supporting brutal strongmen like Rwanda’s Paul Kagame and Uganda’s Yoweri Museveni,” Maurice Carney, executive director at Friends of the Congo [7] explained to Black Agenda Report. “The conflict in the Congo alone is responsible for millions of deaths, more than any other conflict since World War 2, and two million rapes. It’s particularly disturbing that two women of African American descent, Democrat Susan Rice and Republican Jendayi Frazer, both as Undersecretary for State for African Affairs and in Rice’s case later as UN Ambassador were the point people in constructing and carrying out these awful policies. There needs to be some accountability.”

“Accountability” for US Africa policy though, is not what our black political elite is about. Like Melissa Harris-Perry they chose to ignore the specific international policies Susan Rice designed and implemented. They chose to ignore the continuing genocide in the Congo, the impending interventions in Mali, the ongoing bloodshed in Somalia and Sudan, the whole panoply of US policy and consequences that is Rice’s career legacy, and reduce the entire affair to a domestic “stand by a sista” moment. It was, in the opinion of TransAfrica Forum [8] President Nicole Lee, a colossal missed opportunity.

“We disagreed with the Republican senators… around their reading of the Benghazi incident and Rice’s involvement in it, and we can understand the concern of civil rights organizations over seeing her unfairly targeted and blamed. But there’s a whole separate issue around Susan Rice’s career and the particular policy prescriptions she’s been identified with. Those policies have had a deeply damaging effect on the African world, and we would have preferred to see a lot more discussion and education around that.

We have a new dynamic ‘African American’ constituency growing up in this country. Many of their parents were not born in the US, or their forbears not enslaved in the US. Their experience has been severely effected by policies Susan Rice has been involved in… We are not going to be able to build this dynamic constituency if we sweep under the rug real concerns these communities have around leaders, even if they are African American. I really think it’s important for us to be self-critical when there is a problematic approach to someone like Susan Rice…. and to actually call for real change instead of just backing her… African American communities need to take up policy concerns as it relates to Africa with the same amount of fervor as we take up other policy measures domestically… (The job of Secretary of State) focuses solely on international issues, yet there was very little work done to understand what her policies were around international issues. We brought it completely into our own domestic context with no interest or understanding of where she had been in the past. That’s dangerous, and in the long term that is not going to benefit the African American community.”

The anemic state of US journalism, and the near absence of black journalism about Africa US make it possible for African American political leaders to feign ignorance of the real effects of US empire in Africa, as long as the subject isn’t brought up too often. But making a long time bloody handed bare-knuckles “diplomat” like Susan Rice Secretary of State means that questions about her hands-on role in protecting African strongmen and directing attention away from the genocide still in progress in Congo would be tempting targets for reporters around the world. It might be, that when the Obama administration took Susan Rice behind closed doors to rehearse some of the hostile questions she might be asked, the fig leaf covering genocidal US policies of militarization and resource extraction was so thin, and Rice’s involvement in those policies so impossible to downplay, that she was judged a liability for that reason. Already some reporters are asking about her role in Rwanda [9] and the Congo [10], and beginning to connect obvious dots.

These aren’t just questions that Susan Rice dare not answer. There are many lines of inquiry which easily reveal the real nature of US policy in Africa the last two decades — arming African strongmen to the teeth to keep the continent barefoot, hungry, sick and afraid, the better to plunder the resources, to extract the wealth of a rich continent full of poor people. Rice has an awful [11] reputation as well, among African journalists and civil society activists on the wrong side of the local dictators she supports. The facts of her career are well known and widely acknowledged, everywhere except in the black political class of the United States.

Was she targeted by Republican senators? Sure. But the Benghazi noise is leftover venom from the presidential campaign. Republicans hoped to embarrass the president with Benghazi on the eve of the November 2012 election. That didn’t work out for them, and Rice is on the other team and genuinely disliked by some of them. So they went after her. They’re wrong. But the black political class is wrong on a far bigger scale, in fact is complicit in Rice’s crimes by not examining the policies she built her career on, and how they have affected millions across the African continent. John Kerry is thought to be the next runner up for the position of Secretary of State. If he is confirmed there will be an open senate seat in Massachusetts, and he’ll be the first white man to hold that post since Warren Christopher in the 1990s.

“Her hands are bloody. She’s been no friend of Africa,” Kwame Wilburg of Atlanta Friends of the Congo told us. “But we have to separate the picture of Susan Rice under Republican attack from that of Susan Rice the architect of disaster in Africa. She’s one more proof that black faces in those high places don’t always mean anything good for Africans on either side of the water.”

Keeping those bloody hands and their indefensible record in a less prominent place might have been the Obama administration’s best bet to defending her awful handiwork.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Bruce A. Dixon is managing editor at Black Agenda Report, and a member of the state committee of the Georgia Green Party. He lives and works in Marietta GA and can be reached via this site’s contact page or at bruce.dixon@blackagendareport.com.

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Source URL: http://blackagendareport.com/content/did-bloody-hands-not-black-womanhood-sink-susan-rice-nomination

by Black Agenda report executive editor Glen Ford

“With little resistance on the Left, and virtually none from organized Black America, Obama has worked miracles for the resuscitation of the Lords of Capital and their imperial apparatus – feats that only a Black corporate Democrat could accomplish…”

“Obama, with his drone armadas and multiplying Special Forces troops, represents a far greater threat to global civilization – which must be rooted in law! – than the failed conqueror George Bush (who actually negotiated the U.S. withdrawal from Iraq). Unlike Bush, Obama has promulgated his own, novel doctrine of war, which declares that wars only exist when sufficient numbers of Americans become casualties. Under this construct, Libya was not a war, and the possibilities for U.S. non-war depredations are endless…”

__________________

The More Effective Evil has trounced those Republicans with evil intentions. Folks who never made a single demand of the corporate, war mongering Democrat think they are some kind of victors. “The non-resisters have won a non-victory against an unimpressive enemy,” while Obama plots new atrocities.

“Obama is the more effective austerity president – if the Republicans will just let him work his show.”

“Get Away Sandy – God and Obama Will Save Us” read the graffiti, scrawled man-high on a cinderblock wall in the majority Black town of Plainfield, New Jersey. It is an apt articulation of African American politics as we descend into the First Black President’s second term.
Black folks may or may not have a prayer, but they certainly don’t have any earthly influence on the direction of the nation or on a president for whom they gave near-unanimous support, while asking nothing in return.

Wait a minute! I’m hearing echoes of…a familiar voice:

“We have learned that Black politicians and activist-poseurs have an infinite capacity to celebrate not having engaged in struggle with Power, and that the Black masses can be made drunk by the prospect of vicariously (through Obama) coming to power.” – Black Agenda Report, “The Obama ’08 Phenomenon: What Have We Learned?” November 4, 2008 [2].

As Marx said, history repeats itself, “first as tragedy, then as farce.” Independent Black politics, rooted in the historical African American consensus on social justice, racial equality and peace, definitively collapsed, after a long illness, with the first Obama presidential campaign. The tragedy was compounded, exponentially, by the timing, coinciding with capitalism’s greatest crisis since the Great Depression. The autumn of 2008 was an historical juncture for the nation and the world. Either the people would erect structures to protect themselves from being crushed under the dead weight of a system in terminal decay, or the Lords of Capital would swallow the State whole, and buy themselves some time.

African Americans, the most politically volatile and left-oriented U.S. constituency – a people specifically targeted by Wall Street’s machinations – had an historical role to play. “The man STRUCK,” said Frederick Douglass, “is the man to cry out.” But Black folks had already been struck silly with Obama’Laid.

“Despite his background, Obama knew enough about African Americans to pay us no attention and less respect.”

The rulers had, at long last, found our Achilles Heel, the weakest spot in African Americans’ political armor. Our reflexive racial solidarity (actually, an aspect of Black nationalism), which had served us so well, for so long, short-circuited our progressive political instincts. We became fodder for Obama, the slicker-than-Slick-Willie corporate guy with the brown face.

Despite his background, Obama knew enough about African Americans to pay us no attention and less respect. There would be no penalty. Black folks had convinced themselves that Obama needed our protection; it never occurred to most of us that we needed protection from him – not during the primaries, when he praised Ronald Reagan’s reaction to the “excesses” of the Sixties, or when he refused to endorse even a voluntary halt to home foreclosures (while Hillary Clinton and John Edwards endorsed “voluntary” and mandatory moratoriums, respectively); not in the last weeks before his inauguration, when Obama announced that Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and all “entitlements” would be “on the table” for chopping under his administration.

Instead, a million Black folks gathered on the National Mall for what we at BAR called “The Great Black Hajj of 2009 [3],” a pilgrimage, as if to Mecca, in celebration of Obama’s ascension. There, he proclaimed to the multitudes: “In the words of Scripture, the time has come to set aside childish things.”

Dutifully, Black folks set aside the last vestiges of their vaunted distrust of Power. Henceforth, African Americans would consider themselves as a Palace Guard – the antithesis of independent political actors. Thus was Obama empowered to become the “More Effective Evil.”

With little resistance on the Left, and virtually none from organized Black America, Obama has worked miracles for the resuscitation of the Lords of Capital and their imperial apparatus – feats that only a Black corporate Democrat could accomplish. After saving George Bush’s bank bailout in October of 2008 (it passed only after candidate Obama’s intervention), Obama undertook the historic mission of placing the U.S. State at the total disposal of finance capital. Under Obama’s watch, the Treasury Department and, especially, the Federal Reserve have funneled at least $16 trillion to Wall Street and its foreign annexes – a sum greater than the national GDP. The “free money” window at the Federal Reserve has become a permanent fixture of the global financial order, permanently blurring the lines between the U.S. state and international finance capital. Obama has embedded the state into the banks, and vice versa, in ways that cannot be undone without causing the system to collapse. In a very real sense, the “good faith and credit” of the United States has become a collective corporate asset of the Lords of Capital – an outcome that fits the classic structural description of fascism. No Republican could have delivered the state apparatus so effectively to the banks – there would have been fierce resistance from within the Democratic base, as well as libertarian Right. But Obama has proven to be the more effective facilitator of the bankers’ state.

“Obama has embedded the state into the banks, and vice versa, in ways that cannot be undone without causing the system to collapse.”

Social Security was untouchable – until Obama laid his hands on it. Beginning with his pre-inauguration pronouncements on entitlements, Obama has been the guiding hand of an austerity offensive that did not exist on Election Day, 2008. Instead, Obama made deficit reduction his own priority, at a time when pundits were saying obituaries over the GOP. (Much as they are, today.) The Black Democrat appointed the Right-weighted Deficit Reduction Commission to promulgate a $4 trillion blueprint for austerity, a formula that matched Republic proposals in 2011. The blueprint would have been the basis for Obama’s cherished Grand Bargain had the GOP not balked at “modest” taxes on the rich – levies that are irrelevant to those who will lose their programs under the axe. Obama is the more effective austerity president – if the Republicans will just let him work his show.

Imperial aggression has never fared better than under the opposition-less Obama. At one point, he was bombing five countries simultaneously, pretty good work for a Nobel Peace Prize winner – or did the prize help empower him to such heights of bellicosity? His ever-evolving “Kill List” includes not only individuals of all nationalities (including our own) but also any country whose government is inconvenient to the United States. With “humanitarian” jargon as his only justification, President Obama has attempted to render international law a dead letter. No nation has any rights that he feels bound to respect. Obama, with his drone armadas and multiplying Special Forces troops, represents a far greater threat to global civilization – which must be rooted in law! – than the failed conqueror George Bush (who actually negotiated the U.S. withdrawal from Iraq). Unlike Bush, Obama has promulgated his own, novel doctrine of war, which declares that wars only exist when sufficient numbers of Americans become casualties. Under this construct, Libya was not a war, and the possibilities for U.S. non-war depredations are endless.

Preventive detention is the crown jewel of Obama’s presidential exceptionalism. Statutory authority to imprison Americans without charge or trial was beyond Bush’s reach, and he knew it. But Obama guided a bill through the Congress with very little Democratic opposition. He is the more effective secret police warden.

Now Obama has won another “mandate,” which he will use to finish the projects he started: wider wars, a more profound government subservience to finance capital, and that “new legal architecture” on national security that he warned about on the Daily Show, a few weeks ago. He looks forward to fulfilling his austerity dreams early in his new term [4]: “I am absolutely confident that we can get what is the equivalent of the grand bargain that essentially I’ve been offering to the Republicans for a very long time.”

The non-resisters have won a non-victory against an unimpressive enemy, while the more effective evil plots new atrocities.

You will note that I have not specifically mentioned Black folks since the beginning of this article; that’s because African Americans have made themselves irrelevant – not just for the second Obama presidency, but possibly deep into the future. “Power concedes nothing without a demand,” and Black folks have failed to demand even elementary respect from this president, much less concrete programs, or peace. Obama isn’t the only one who has noted Black ineffectuality. Until an independent African American politics and political movement can be rebuilt, there is no reason for a president or Congress to pay “the Blacks” any more attention than Obama did.

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

Source URL: http://blackagendareport.com/content/victory-%E2%80%93-non-resistance

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by Black Agenda Report editor and senior columnist Margaret Kimberley

Hurricanes and other “acts of God” provide a dramatic stage for some of the ugliest – or most endearing – acts of man. “If there is any silver lining to this awful event it is showing the limits of politics and the need for grass roots organizing to meet public needs.”

“Occupy Sandy had no money yet managed to provide food, clothing and medical care to the hardest hit neighborhoods.”

So-called advanced nations are never so advanced that they can stand up to the forces of nature. New York and New Jersey are just the latest examples of seemingly safe and “developed” places which were laid low by a change in the weather. Then again, things outside of human control can expose what was already present but kept hidden. Hurricane Sandy showed us that our society is in reality, not advanced at all.

After the hurricane struck the east coast, it was clear that the United States is nothing more than a failed state with a big military and a strong currency. There is nothing in place to help the masses of citizens in times of crisis. That is because the system isn’t meant to help them. It is meant to help certain individuals and corporations, and everyone else is on their own.

It is ironic that the storm struck just one week before election day. Presidential elections are occasions for Americans to take pride in their so-called democracy and their perceived superiority to the rest of the world. It should have been difficult to gloat this year, when the city of New York literally pulled the plug [7] on housing authority residents, turning off electricity before the storm to force residents to evacuate.

“Hurricane Sandy showed us that our society is in reality, not advanced at all.”

Now one week later, many of them are still waiting for their power to be restored. The mayor said glibly that it will “take time” as another storm bears down and temperatures drop. Thousands of people are waiting on line to buy gasoline and evacuees have nowhere to go. While public officials struggled to restore infrastructure and take care of human beings, the parasites of the private sector had their hands out yet again.

The charitable organization most people were directed to was the Red Cross. That same Red Cross did nothing after receiving millions of dollars in donations during hurricane Katrina, yet is still forced down Americans’ throats as the only solution in every catastrophe.

The borough president of Staten Island, righteously angry about Red Cross inaction, used the occasion of a press conference to tell the public to stop giving them money.

While the Red Cross collected more than $23 million dollars during a celebrity telethon but did nothing with the money, Occupy Sandy [8] had no money yet managed to provide food, clothing and medical care to the hardest hit neighborhoods. The Occupy teams pumped water from damaged homes and even gave direction to the National Guard and FEMA teams. The least effective group got all the cash, but Occupy did the real work without help from the public or private sector.

The mayor and the governor held press conferences to thank each other and the now sainted “first responders,” while residents struggled to return to normalcy without gasoline for cars or access to public transportation. Mayor Bloomberg initially insisted on holding the annual marathon until he was forced to cancel because of public and political pressure. The corporate sponsored event, officially named the ING New York City Marathon, is his baby and he was dragged kicking and screaming to concede that it would have been at the very least impolitic to continue this frivolous tradition after more than 40 New Yorkers were killed.

“Thousands of people are waiting on line to buy gasoline and evacuees have nowhere to go.”

New York was once a city that made room for everyone. Working people, migrants from the southern states and immigrants from all over the world used New York as their stepping stone to a better life. Now it is a city of, by and for the haves. It is the epicenter of inequality and displacement of the poor. Gentrification is taking place at a speedy pace, with an outflow of black residents being replaced on a one for one basis by white newcomers. While nearly all of the bragged about job growth in recent years has been in part-time, hourly work, those workers obviously didn’t get paid if they were unable to get to their jobs or if their employers weren’t operational.

The hurricane didn’t just reveal the under belly of inequality in New York, but also the corruption and dishonesty of American politics. New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg bestowed a last minute endorsement on Barack Obama’s re-election effort. In part, he said, because Obama acknowledges the existence of the global warming which has caused an increase in extreme weather events. He certainly knows how to give lip service, but he has approved offshore oil drilling, and fracking, and drilling in fragile regions of Alaska. During the debates with Mitt Romney he bragged about how much gas drilling he ordered in federal lands. Any fuel that comes from the earth is a fossil fuel and therefore contributes to climate change. Obama’s puny and meaningless acknowledgement, in comparison to right wing flat earth theory, is now considered to be something that it isn’t. Just like the rest of his policies.

“Workers obviously didn’t get paid if they were unable to get to their jobs.”

Hurricane Sandy pointed out in very bold relief that our system just doesn’t work for very many people. Politicians are beholden to the haves for their positions, but the have nots are of no importance because they can’t write big checks or get anyone elected to office. But if the Occupy model were to in place, politicians would have to meet everyone’s needs because involvement in electoral politics is not the goal of activism. If there is any silver lining to this awful event it is showing the limits of politics and the need for grass roots organizing to meet public needs.

The few things that were done well since this tragedy began teach us the same lessons about activism. When politicians complained about the Red Cross, they finally showed up. When the public and politicians demanded a cancellation of the marathon, they succeeded. When Occupy didn’t listen to the city or to FEMA and decided on its own to help people in need, they did it successfully with hardly any money.

The new lessons are the same as the old. Activism without acquiescence to political power can succeed in bringing about tremendous change. There will always be catastrophes but we should not expect a failed system to save us from them.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Margaret Kimberley’s Freedom Rider column appears weekly in BAR, and is widely reprinted elsewhere. She maintains a frequently updated blog as well as at http://freedomrider.blogspot.com. [9] Ms. Kimberley lives in New York City, and can be reached via e-Mail at Margaret.Kimberley(at)BlackAgendaReport.com.
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Source URL: http://blackagendareport.com/content/freedom-rider-hurricane-and-failed-state

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by Black Agenda Report managing editor Bruce A. Dixon

When a Bush, a McCain, or a Romney condones corporate crimes against the rest of us, lies to us, tortures and imprisons at will and murders civilians at a whim, it’s a moral disaster. When a black Democrat does it, it’s nothing personal, just business. And we are soooo proud. What’s wrong with us?

At our October 12 affair at Harlem’s Riverside Church, Black Agenda Report’s executive editor Glen Ford said that the most damning and lasting result of the Obama presidency might be that black America was losing its moral compass

Those of us, this author included, who reached adulthood in the brief eight or nine year heyday of the modern Freedom Movement got to see our elders shuck the shackles of what was proper and legal and take to the streets in defiance of evil in authority. We learned that going door to door, organizing our friends, our neighbors, our fellow workers on the job, calling meetings and demonstrations, and standing up to unjust authority, at whatever cost was the highest duty of citizenship and the only way things ever changed.

During the eight years Obama will have served in the White House, Ford observed, black youth can expect to see nothing like this. Where we learned to be skeptical of what our government, and often our elders told us, they are learning to believe, or pretend to believe whatever they’re told. Where we learned the highest goal of the struggle was improving the lives of ordinary people, they are learning that the highest goals are the big house, the prestigious career, the large lifestyle of those who serve the power and unlock the mysteries of the Market.

They’ll go through a period as long as the zenith of the Freedom Movement without witnessing one major instance of black defiance of unjust power, of illegitimate authority, or illegal war. And of course it’s not as though injustices of class and race, or illegal and genocidal wars waged with our tax dollars and with our lives have gone away; they have not.

If you reached adulthood around 1970 it was relatively easy to get and keep your moral bearings. In the present era, not so. This, he said, may be the awful legacy of the Obama era —- a generation unmoored from the moral compass that guided their forebears, a generation unaccustomed to organized dissent or defiance or civic action outside the guidelines prescribed by their betters.

We hope Glen is wrong. But the evidence is mounting that he might not be.

The genius of Barack Obama’s career is that it has used modern marketing techniques to package the aroma of an imagined popular grassroots movement in the service of a corporate candidate with a thoroughgoing corporate agenda. Democrats are after all, as Doug Henwood often says, a party of capital that pretends for electoral reasons for a few weeks out of the year to be a party of the people. The Obama campaign fit these pretensions masterfully.

In the last couple weeks before the election, Matt Stoller wrote two excellent articles — The Progressive Case Against Obama [2] and Why Is the Left Defending Obama [3] — which exquisitely detail the many broken promises and deliberately missed opportunities of Obama’s first four years. Stoller points out that many of the awful actions of the Obama regime would be loudly denounced if undertaken by a Bush, a McCain, or a Romney, but are quietly acquiesced to when committed by a black Democrat.

Barack Obama invaded Libya, an African country. His administration orchestrated a massive campaign of disinformation, including lies about Libyan aircraft firing into crowds, Libyan mercenaries primed with viagra and primed for mass rape, and much more. Libya’s leader was one of only two out of 54 African nations NOT taking US military aid, and he had been one of the main funders of South Africa’s ANC and other liberation movements, and a backer and proponent of the African Union as well. He was a target, and with massive US and NATO intervention in the air and on the ground, he was taken out. Afterward, Obama openly sent troops to Congo and several other African nations, all actions which his predecessor or either of his Republican opponents could not have done.

Stoller also explains that President Obama’s protection of the Wall Street criminals who crashed the economy have permanently restructured American property rights in favor of the richest, something else that Republicans could not have brought off without massive upheaval and protest. But being black and proud, our elders in the African American community, if there is such a thing, did not object. They are invested in the president as a success story. They tell us it’s about pride, but really it’s about their own position. He’s a leader because he’s a success and a success because he’s a leader, and so are they. He legitimizes our black political class, and they shield him from critical analysis, along with themselves in the bargain. So just as Barack Obama can implement Republican policies without protest, “progressive” black and Latino mayors like Philly’s Mike Nutter and LA’s Villagrosa can push school privatization down the protesting throats of their constituencies.

Personally I’m an atheist. But the book of Exodus tells the story of the Hebrews who, after throwing off Pharaoh lost what we’ll call their “moral compass.” They were condemned to wander in the desert forty years before they got it back. That’s a bad precedent. Climate change, the economy, the threat of genocides in Congo and elsewhere, the prison state and corporate greed everywhere all indicate that we don’t have forty years to get this together.

Black America has lost its moral compass. We used to know right from wrong, and have the courage to stand. In the era of Obama, we have lost it. We’ll need to fight to get it back.

Bruce A. Dixon is managing editor at Black Agenda Report, and a member of the state committee of the Georgia Green Party. Contact him via this site’s contact page or at bruce.dixon(at)blackagendareport.com.

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Source URL: http://blackagendareport.com/content/doing-us-proud-black-america-has-lost-its-moral-compass

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