Eff The 90′s

Have you been watching President-elect Barack Obama’s appointments to his administration with a sense of confusion? A feeling of anti-nostalgia? Crying out, “Why all the ClintonAdmin re-treads!?”

Steve Fraser is your man. Writing in The Nation, Fraser echoes a familiar complaint by liberals about recent appointments, registers dismay at the nearly uniform “neo-liberal” ideology, and compares the group think to the greater diversity that stocked Franklin Roosevelt’s cabinet during a transition period frought with peril.

Worth reading for historical boning up, I suppose, but I was more interested in Fraser’s call for bolder action:

Under the present dispensation, the bailout state makes the government the handmaiden of the financial sector. Under a new one, the tables might be turned. But who will speak for that option within the limited councils of the Obama team?

A real democratic nationalization of the banks–good value for our money rather than good money to add to their value–should be part of the policy agenda up for discussion in the Obama era. As things now stand, the public supplies the loans and the investment capital, but the key decisions about how they are to be deployed remain in private hands. A democratic version of nationalizing the financial system would transfer these critical decisions to new institutions created by the Congress and designed to pursue public, not private, objectives. How to subject the flow of credit and investment capital to public control ought to be on the drawing boards if we are to look beyond the old New Deal to a new one.

Or, for instance, if we are to bail out the auto industry, which we should–millions of jobs, businesses, communities, and what’s left of once powerful and proud unions are at stake–then why not talk about its nationalization too? Why not create a representative body of workers, consumers, environmentalists, suppliers and other interested parties to supervise the industry’s reorganization and retooling to produce, just as the president-elect says he wants, new green means of transportation–and not just cars?

Why not apply the same model to the rehabilitation of the nation’s infrastructure; indeed, why not to the reindustrialization of the country as a whole? If, as so many commentators are now claiming, what lies ahead is the kind of massive, crippling deflation characteristic of such crises, then why not consider creating democratic mechanisms to impose an incomes policy on wages and prices that works against that deflation?

Why not, in effect, assert greater control by the people over the economic forces that affect them? “Cuz that way lies socialism! Aaagh!” Onoz. Heavens to betsy. And, well, probably not. More like neo-social democracy.

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Yay! Another Non-issue!

Props to my friend Leah for noting what a dodge this is. Head full of cold germs, my first thought when I heard CNN breathlessly report this morning (“this just in!”) John McCain’s proposal to delay his debate with Barack Obama and renounce campaigning until a bailout program is developed was, “Ah. Good strategy. Makes him look ‘presidential’ – whatever that means.”

Such is the obvious gambit. But, hey, what a way to get out of answering questions about an economy McCain fails to understand. Sure, the debate is focused on foreign policy, but a global economy facing a widespread crisis as the world’s largest consumer and debtor drowns in its own stupidity might have some bearing on how the next Prez interacts with his peers on the world stage. McCain has found a handy way to deflect criticism for last week’s gaffes and wild demands for firing the SEC chief, while putting Obama on the spot. The Bloomberg article linked above quotes a perfesser:

“The suspension does bring the ‘ready-to-lead’ issue back into focus for McCain,” said Paul Light, a public service professor at New York University. “Obama is damned if he does, damned if he doesn’t.”

Dana Perino helpfully chimes in:

“Bipartisan support from Senators McCain and Obama would be helpful in driving to a conclusion,” press secretary Dana Perino said.

But, hey, no pressure, “Barry”. So far, the AP reports that Obama is not, as Sarah Palin might put it, read to “blink.” If you’re thinking, “Er, isn’t this a non-issue meant to distract us from the sheer stupidity of the Paulson bailout plan,” I would chastise you for your cynicism. Really, just because neither candidate has anything more to offer than vague “principles” and is more interested in hedging their bets against either a full endorsement or a full rejection than, say, calling the Paulson bailout for the utter bullshit it is – that’s no reason assume they’re more comfortable arguing over porcine applications of lipstick. Are not presidential contests supposed to be about debate formats, the relative heights of podiums and microphones, the selection of bland moderators, and the arrangement of deck chairs on the Titanic?

Golly! I Could Be Among the First to Know!

A very special e-mail from the Barack Obama campaign sent straight to my personal e-mail box!

Dear Kevin –
[See! First name basis!]
Barack Obama is about to make one of the most important decisions of this campaign — choosing a running mate.
[What about FISA? Oh...nevermind.]
You have helped build this movement from the bottom up, and Barack wants you to be the first to know his choice.
[Cuz we're special friends!]
Sign up today to be the first to know:
[Sign up? Couldn't he just, ya know, tell me?]
http://my.barackobama.com/vp
[See! He's MY Barack Obama! Get your own, asshole!]
You will receive an email the moment Barack makes his decision, or you can text VP to 62262 to receive a text message on your mobile phone.
[Awesome! One more thing to interrupt my day!]
Once you’ve signed up, please forward this email to your friends, family, and coworkers to let them know about this special opportunity.
[Oh yes, along with my chain letters and long lists of un-funny jokes. They'll love that!]
No other campaign has done this before. You can be part of this important moment.
[Seriously, haven't you heard of Twitter?]
Be the first to know who Barack selects as his running mate.
[I feel so included! So Web 2.0!]
Thanks,

David
[No, David, thank YOU!]
David Plouffe
Campaign Manager
Obama for America

In Contempt (7/24/2008): Obama in Iraq

Click the image to read it at maximum capacity.

In Contempt (7/15/2008): He Gets It

Click it. Poke it. Prod it. Push it. Push it real good.

Idiot Wind

Bob Dylan doesn’t need a weather man to know which way the wind blows:

“America is in a state of upheaval,” Dylan told The Times. “We’ve got this guy out there now who is redefining the nature of politics from the ground up.”

The 66-year-old went on: “I’m hopeful that things might change. Some things are going to have to.”

Yes, the times they are a-changing. Or is he only a pawn in their game? Something is happening here, but you don’t know what it is. There is no truth outside the gates of Eden.

When Quinn the Eskimo gets here –

Okay, I’ll stop now.

Er… Not So Much

From the Gaurdian’s Hillary Clinton campaign retrospective photogallery. Suzanne Goldenberg also writes not the first and certainly not the last autopsy of Clinton’s candidacy. Also, Goldenberg and Ewen MacAskill join most of the American media to declare Obama the Democratic winner.

But I am not so sure. Clinton still claims a popular vote majority – if you count Michigan and Florida, and discount at least four caucuses (but why you would do that, I don’t know) – and her campaign has spent all day fighting against an Associated Press story reporting that she would concede Obama’s win. Sure, she’ll acknowledge he got the necessary delegates, but she won’t actually concede the contest. Does this strategy put pressure on Barack Obama to accept her as a Veep? To risk an already loaded historical analogy, it worked for Kennedy and Johnson. But that only sends chills down my spine.

Barack Obama and Racial Paranoia

Barack and Michelle Obama went on the Today Show this morning to perform some serious damage control following Monday’s performance by Reverend Jeremiah Wright before the National Press Club. Indeed, to be fair, we should view both television appearances as performances, one by Wright, the other by the Obamas, in a larger drama playing out several conflicts at once: between two generations of African Americans, between two strains of political philosophy on the American Left, and between Black political actors and the American media over how to define the image of political participation by African Americans. As an example of the latter, consider Maureen Dowd’s snarky portrayal of Obama as the Sort of Angry Black Man and Wright as the Really Angry Black Man. (Cripes, is she annoying.)

That is by no means an exhaustive list. For example, I have not mentioned Michele’s role as supportive wife, and the balancing act she has to perform as providing “strength” as his advocate while “softening” her husband’s image via her very presence. Better minds than mine can explore the implications of this role for women in political life, and Black women, especially in the context of this conflict over the image of Black political participation.

What strikes me is the relevance of a theory I recently came across in a new book written by communication and anthropology professor John L. Jackson, Jr., Racial Paranoia: The Unintended Consequences of Political Correctness. Don’t let that subtitle fool you; I think it was an editor’s choice, because Jackson is not ranting about the “excesses” of “P.C. culture” like some Limbaugh boor. Rather, he puts forward a rather thoughtful thesis:

Racism is characterized by hatred and power: the hate people express for other racial groups and the relative power they possess to turn that hatred into palpable discrimination or material advantage. The concept of racial paranoia, however, stresses the fears I’ve been talking about, the fears people harbor about other groups potentially hating or mistreating them, gaining a leg up at their expense. Racial paranoia is racism’s flipside, even if those two analytically discrete sides can sometimes effortlessly meet. (p. 4, Introduction).

Examples Jackson cites in the Preface and Introduction are Dave Chappelle’s perception that one of the crew member’s on his show was laughing inappropriately at his use of black face; and the Reverend Louis Farrakhan’s promotion of a theory that the U.S. Corps of Army Engineers had deliberately dynamited the dams near black neighborhoods in New Orleans to spare white neighborhoods from the onslaught of Hurricane Katrina. I thought especially of the latter when I read that Wright in his press conference had repeated the old theory that the C.I.A. had brewed the HIV virus and tested it on vulnerable populations, including poor working class people of color. Such assertions put Obama and any other Black politician attempting to appeal to “mainstream white voters” on the defensive. Indeed, much of Obama’s reluctance to distance himself from Wright stems not only from his personal relationship, but also from the differences in perception that Jackson identifies among Blacks and Whites regarding events that disproportionately affect the Black community, such as the spread of AIDS and Hurricane Katrina. Regarding the latter, Jackson relates an appearance by Chuck D. on Tucker Carlson’s thankfully now-kaput MSNBC show; typically, Carlson plays the Reasonable White Guy flabbergasted that anyone would believe Farrakhan’s theory and that Chuck D. – “a smart guy” in Carlson’s disingenuous words (p. 7) – would not immediately denounce it.

Carlson is a perfect example of America’s too-quick willingness to dismiss the significance of racial paranoia. Of course, such dismissal allows everyone to sleep better at night, believing that a few racial cranks say nothing meaningful about more general racial suspicions in American society, but we can’t begin to understand race today (or the volatile racial fault lines of contemporary national politics) without taking such beliefs (as wild as they may seem) quite seriously – not as points of fact but as organizing principles for how people make sense of their everyday lives and the forces potentially allied against them.

I have only begun to read this book, obviously from the source of my quotes, but I really appreciate Jackson’s approach. In calling such fears “paranoia” Jackson does not “mean that they’re not after you.” He doesn’t off-hand dismiss these fears, but sees them as rooted in a post-Civil Rights environment in which readily identifiable sources of discrimination such as Jim Crow laws have been largely eliminated, yet more subtle practices continue and social inequities along lines of racial and ethnic identity persist without a larger narrative to explain them. As such, the demand for Obama to completely renounce Wright – sever ties, hit him with a shovel and bury him in ditch, or whatever means would truly satisfy the Sean Hannities of the world – are inherently racist in nature, reflecting the institutionalized blindness Whites enjoy as a social privilege.

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Tags: barackobama, reverend jeremiah wright, racism, racial paranoia, white privilege, john l. jackson

Obama and Wright and Church and State

The editorial board of the Detroit Free Press could not come to a consensus opinion regarding the latest “controversy” (cough, distraction, cough) over the Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s relationship with Barack Obama. So they did a neat thing and published the thoughts of individual editorial board members. They’re pretty amusing, but I like Barb Arrigo’s best:

After enduring what is arguably the most faith-based presidential administration in history, why are we attacking the candidate who is most likely to ensure a strong separation of church and state? Or why are we not at least asking him (and the others) how much faith-based money the federal government should continue to hand out, and whether hearing the voice of God factors into their major decisions? From everything I’ve read about Obama, he takes the Constitution very seriously after teaching constitutional law. I think he’d steer us away from church-state entanglements, rather than into more of them, regardless of who his pastor is/was. In fact, if you’re a constitutionalist ala Ron Paul, I think Obama is your best bet among those left standing in the major party fray.

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Tags: barackobama, jeremiah wright, church, state, presidential politics

Cops Shoot Unarmed Black Man, Get Off Scot-free; repeat ad nauseum

I have nothing original to add to the discussion of the police murder of Sean Bell and the judge’s decision to let the guilty cops go free. Maybe because I’m too pissed off, or nauseated, or both by the loss of life, the criminal murder of an innocent man, the inherent racism of the police state, the loss to the man’s wife and young daughter and the rest of his family – I could go on. But others are writing more eloquently than I can muster today, so I link with approval to them.

Holly writes at Feministe that the police murder of black men is a feminist issue. She makes a strong, eloquent case.

The problem is that this disproportionately affects communities of color. The black men who are most often slaughtered by such violence, and all the women and children in their lives too, their loved ones, friends and relatives. A system that is all too eager to exonerate “the thin blue line” and continue business as usual. All of these are feminist issues. Racism must be a feminist issue, for any kind of feminism that counts. Police brutality must be; the biases of the criminal justice system must be.

The SuperSpade is rightly flabbergasted and bitter:

I know there will be rallies held in New York to protest this miscarriage of justice and if you are in the area, you should go. After the marches though, Bell’s story like Amadou Diallo and others will be filed in the Black consciousness as the continuing saga of injustice that has plagued Black folk since we were kidnapped from Africa. Surely this is worth Black folk being bitter right?

Mikhael B. Reid expresses her outrage and posts links to cartoons she has done on this case and on police brutality.

I’ll post more when I find it.

Oh, And: Barack Obama registered the predictable “we are a nation of laws so don’t go crazy in the streets” admonishment. Not that I expected him (or think he should) advocate rioting, but it would be refreshing to hear a prominent politician say something like, “We are a nation of laws, sure, but I don’t see how the police can be allowed to gun down a person in cold blood and get away with it. Something is wrong with our justice system. Cases like this make the law seem like a sham to protect the power of the state against the rights – the very lives – of the people.”

UPDATE: The Village Voice reports that the Justice Department will begin investigating civil rights violations pertaining to this case. And that Mayor Michael Bloomberg has vowed to take measures that will build up public trust in the police department.

Curiously, Bloomberg announced that one of the ways they hoped to instill public trust in the NYPD was by bolstering the staff at the Civilian Complaint Review Board so that now “complaints are dealt with swiftly and efficiently.” What Bloomberg didn’t mention was that since bolster the CCRB last year the NYPD has “swiftly and efficiently” been dumping a record number of the agency’s substantiated cases.

Roberto Lovato analyzes the political implications of this case for Obama, although I could give a crap less. However, I agree with his conclusion:

Beyond Obama, all of us need to raise our voices and point at the abyss of our country’s institutional racism as was painfully and transparently reflected in today’s verdict. We might want to start by pushing Obama, Clinton and McCain — and the mainstream media — to speak honestly and continually about what the 50 bullets in Sean Bell say about justice in the 50 states of our tattered and bloodied union.