by BAR columnist michael hureaux perez
Obama is silent as the grave - Palestinian graves - about Gaza, but shoots off his mouth in what appears to be a prelude to war against Social Security. The "Herald of Hope and Change" shows a "cowardice" on Palestine that "is beyond appalling," while huffing and puffing about how he'll solve the problems caused by "that seven hundred dollars a month the disabled collect from Social Security and the few hundred many people get from the ‘entitlement' programs of Medicare." As long as the "markets" are "soothed" by his ever-rightward policies, Obama is pleased.
Eshu's blues: Obama's message to the world: Let the U.S. ruling class pound you in the face with a forklift
by BAR columnist michael hureaux perez
"But the seal of the bankruptcy of bourgeois civilization is the bankruptcy of its thought. Its intellectuals run to and fro squealing like hens in a barnyard when a plane passes overhead."
---CLR James, Dialectical Materialism and the Fate of Humanity
It's been sixty years since the Pan African historian CLR James wrote the thoughts cited above, but most of what we find in the mainstream media even now is nothing more then "puk puk pukaw" in Mp3 format where it isn't outright chicken doo doo. As the moment of the Oba's Ascension to the Oval Office draws near, the Poultry Land Committee for Renewed Capitalist Mayhem is running its rooster tails off. As is the usual with true believers in Obamian politics, the objective reality that clings to the Big Man's cabinet picks is just one more political ploy from the President-Elect. The common mantra is that Obama is creating a "team of rivals," or exercising the old Don Corleone political counsel that one should keep one's friends close and one's enemies closer. And they'll get no argument from me on that score, certainly boojwah politics is gangster philosophy put into practice. Just ask the residents of the Gaza Strip if they think the owners of U.S. society and their allies are above drive-by shootings.
Not that any of this makes a difference to many the leaders of what passes for the "left" in this country. The line from the aging Port Huron "radical" types like Davidson, Hayden and Gitlin has been a refurbishing of the same old "democratic" party hoo ha some of them used to take issue with in more forthright days. To be specific, our eminence gris from the Sixties favor a steady repetition of the "democratic" party fix offered by His Oba-ness, and the Oba Fish has taken the line of silence on Gaza since there's only "one president at a time." Well, okay. But I say that state terrorist is as state terrorist does, whether state terrorist wishes to address the matter or not.
"The Oba Fish has taken the line of silence on Gaza."
Now, at the risk of "ranting," to cite Mr. Carl Davidson's dismissal of we here at Black Agenda Report, I will merely point to the fact that the local "organizing committees" of his so-called Obama inspired mass movement are marching in lockstep with the National Leader. It's all about Obama as "the decider" now. Nowhere is this so true as in my own field of education, where local teachers and Obama organizers are bending over backwards to suck up the line of the National Education Association, whose leadership has had nothing critical to say about Obama's appointment of the privatizer Arne Duncan to Secretary of Education. And on it goes. But jeez, it's amazing how educated people can be oblivious to the smell of bacon burning. So you'll excuse me, Mr. Carl Davidson, if I feel like I need to open a window. We wouldn't want the smoke alarms going off and disturbing the doctrinaire fantasies of white upper middle class radicals.
So, now we can't expect the Herald of Hope and Change to speak out against Israeli war crimes in Palestine since "there's only one president at a time." What a load of horse manure. And what a cheap cop-out is being put over on us all. The cowardice of this moment is beyond appalling.
There is only one president at a time, you see, but there are several vice-chairmen of the board, and their first concern is how they're going to keep people like you and I under the lash. We're not under the same lash the Palestinians are under yet, but anyone who thinks it's a direct impossibility has short term memory problems. The victims of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans know what I'm talking about. Be it fire or be it flood, you're just as dead if the nickel counters who run this craphole system decide you're expendable.
The foremost question in the mind of these creeps who've bankrupted and burned the world is how we of the great unwashed can be distracted from administering to the owners of society the beatings they so richly deserve. But, enough pique on my part. I must come to terms with the fact that the financial markets are soothed by the sensible fiscal plans of the incoming administration, as the Wall Street Journal and other robber baron papers informed us all the other day.
"I was sitting up nights worrying about how the financial markets could possibly deal with the possible variants on the free ride they'll receive from Obama and his little gathering of Clintonites."
The financial markets are soothed! "Oh my doodness!" as Elmer Fudd would say. I know I was sitting up nights worrying about how the financial markets could possibly deal with the possible variants on the free ride they'll receive from Obama and his little gathering of Clintonites. God forbid we should have any sort of economy but one which provides soft landings for the self-satisfied jackasses whose imperial wisdom has led the world to the state it is in today.
The Big Man has come forward with his "economic stimulus plan" and shock of shocks, it resembles nothing so much as warmed over Reaganism, or in my own quaint little way of putting it, "let the ruling class pound you in the face with a forklift." Tax cuts, reductions of some government services, and the expansion of the public sector under the direction of the same banking, business and finance outfits that dug this country into a hole to begin with. Oh, but be ye not afraid, as the scriptures say. Hilda Solis, that great "friend of labor," quote and unquote, will be Secretary of Labor
Maybe it's just me, but I've never been one to be much reassured by the sort of administrators classic labor bureaucrats call "friends of labor," particularly when they are appointed by the union busting sons of bitches who own the "Democratic" Party. So I'm leery, and don't blame me, I remember homelessness and other austere lifestyle "choices" that taught me what it's like to try to survive even as an "unskilled" light industrial worker in the sort of economy liberal "democrats" can live with. "Friends of labor" in the classic labor "democratic" party hack construct are notoriously short sighted so far as I'm concerned. They also have this zany conviction that everything that comes out of their mouths is a pearl of great wisdom. And, as Will Rogers once said, it's not the things the "realists" among us don't know that bothers me, it's the things they know for certain that just aren't so.
"Joe Biden has already informed labor that it can expect to make ‘sacrifices' before the economy gets better."
And what else looms on the horizon? Well, here comes the Vice President Elect, one Bomber Joe Biden, who has already informed labor that it can expect to make "sacrifices" before the economy gets better, which he also tells us won't happen until it gets worse. Worse than the debt service economy that, up until last fall, was actually called an "economic recovery?" Man, I hope we can get nutrition just chewing water. Okay, maybe that's an exaggeration. But I have to wonder if he's telling us we need to contact the Haitian embassy and ask for their recipe for dirt cookies.
Just what is "worse before it gets better" in a country that would rather pay to train young people to kill and maim people on the other side of the world before it can afford to give them a free universal education here at home? I mean, after Hurricane Katrina, who can tell what a proportional sense of "sacrifice" really means to these geniuses? And what will the vice president be sacrificing? Will he have one less hair transplant in the near future? Or will he send his fellow Zionist geeks in Tel Aviv one less parcel of shrapnel bombs to chop up little kids on the Gaza Strip with this month? Oh, the suspense.
Well, okay. You go with what you got. The President Elect has made it official that the rapid destruction and cooptation of what little public sector remains will be the next phase of the re-tooling of U.S. capital. Obama's task will be to deepen the misery of the working poor, and teach working class leadership to embrace yet more bootstrap discipline. It's the old "carrot and stick," but in revisiting the CLR James essay cited at the beginning of this piece, we find that the author called this decades-old trend in boojwah politics state capitalism:
"...For the capitalist mode of labor, in its advanced stages, the bureaucratic-administrative plan can become the greatest instrument of torture for the proletariat that capitalism has yet produced. State property and total planning are nothing else but the complete subordination of the proletariat to capital."
Capital at this moment can go nowhere else but to the state and the public sector, but it will never do so on the terms of the working class majority that has to sell its labor in order to live. The bank bailout was the first phase, but now the ideological component is going to be brought into play, big time.
"After Hurricane Katrina, who can tell what a proportional sense of ‘sacrifice' really means to these geniuses?"
The emergence of Obama is nothing more than the attempt of capital to administer the death blow to what's left of public sector leadership. The next attacks will be on the remnants of the social wage, or those areas of the public sector which have long been off limits to the private sector, such as public education and Social Security. The President-Elect has begun to outline the features of his so-called stimulus plan, the prime characteristic of which is (surprise, surprise) cutbacks in what are called "social entitlement" programs such as Medicare and Social Security. Ah, the foibles of those who believe they are "entitled." You understand? The economic problems of this country are caused by that seven hundred dollars a month the disabled collect from Social Security and the few hundred many people get from the "entitlement" programs of Medicare. We may surmise that this would include food stamps. God forbid the working poor have any sort of nutrition that extends beyond Kraft macaroni and cheese, Kool-aid, Jell-o and Jiffy corn bread.
The good news is that, according to MSNBC this morning, Our Troops (note the use of upper case initials for those of you who think I lack sufficient fervor) will have beer to drink while they're watching the Super Bowl. I'm sure they will. But you know, it's a damn shame opium is so expensive. Maybe it will be cheaper next year after President Obama has had a chance to wrest control of the poppy fields in Afghanistan and install a different group of warlords. For now, though, business is business, and our boys will just have to make do with beer. It's not like the good old Vietnam Days, when they could come home with a hundred dollar a day habit like my Cousin Maurice did. Now, that was stylin'. Change we can believe in, dontcha know. But for now, everyone will have to tighten their belts a little, no pun intended.
As Charles Bukowski once said, the miracle is that we're not all outwardly raving. Right now, between the two of us, dear reader, it's only me carrying on like this. But your day is coming, oh yes, oh yes.
michael hureaux is a writer, musician and teacher who lives in southwest Seattle, Washington. He is a longtime contributor to small and alternative presses around the country and performs his work frequently. Email to: [email protected]
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