Obama Speaks: "Oh Great White Masters, You Just
Haven't Been Asked to Help America"
by Paul Street
This article originally appeared in Znet.
"I believe all of you are as open and willing to listen
as anyone else in America. I believe you care about this country and the future
we are leaving to the next generation. I believe your work to be a part of
building a stronger, more vibrant, and more just America. I think the problem
is that no one has asked you to play a part in the project of American
renewal." -
Barack Obama, speaking to the masters of "American" finance capitalism at the
headquarters of NASDAQ, Wall Street, New York City, September 17, 2007
"For
years I labored with the idea of reforming the existing institutions of
society, a little change here, a little change there. Now I feel quite
differently. I think you've got to have a reconstruction of the entire
society...a radical redistribution of political and economic power." - Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., May
1967
"Obama
is deeply conservative." - Larissa MacFarquhar, "The Conciliator," The New Yorker, May
2007.
"Standing Up" and Kneeling Down
Maybe it's
because Barack Obama and his handlers are sensitive to the need to reassure
ruling forces that the "first black United States president" will not challenge
existing hierarchies. Maybe it's because he's bought and paid for by big money
(1). Or maybe it's because he believes in his "deeply conservative" (2) heart
that good Americans show deep respect for their socioeconomic masters.
Whatever the explanation, I've never seen an avowedly "progressive" political
candidate more eager than Obama to display his deep willingness to obsequiously
kiss the ring of dominant political and economic authority. For someone who is
marching across Iowa and New Hampshire calling working- and middle-class
American to "get fired up" and "stand up" for democracy (and for him), Obama
sure likes to spend a lot of time groveling before supposed white and
upper-class superiors.
Black
Experience "Not Fundamentally Different"
"Obama calms white anxieties further by claiming that
black Americans have been ‘pulled into the economic mainstream.'"
We know
that the technically black Obama has political reasons to avoid threatening the
white electoral majority. Still it is too much for him to absurdly claim, in
his power-adoring 2006 campaign book The Audacity of Hope (3), that
"what ails working- and middle-class blacks and Latinos is not fundamentally
different from what ails their white counterparts"(Obama 2006, p.
245). Also rather audacious is Obama's praise of the U.S. for historically
possessing "an economic system that, more than any other, has offered
opportunity to all comers regardless of status, title or rank"(Obama 2006, pp.
231-232) - including apparently the many millions of black chattel
"comers" who came in chains, carrying literally subhuman "status." Just
to make sure that no Caucasians fear he's about reawaken the tragically
unfinished revolutions of Reconstruction and the Civil Rights Movement, Obama
calms white anxieties further by claiming that black Americans (who suffer from
a median household wealth gap of seven cents on the white dollar in the 21st
century United States) have been "pulled into the economic mainstream"
(Obama, 2006, pp. 248-49).
He also
apologizes for whites' indifference to the persistence of profound racial
inequality and discrimination in the U.S (see Street.2007c and Brown 2003) by
explaining that "white guilt has largely exhausted itself in America" as "even
the most fair-minded of whites...tend to push back against suggestions of racial
victimization and race-based claims based on the history of racial
discrimination in this country" (Obama 2006, p. 247). This statement of understanding
toleration for white racism-denial deftly consigns racial oppression to the
supposedly finished past, cleverly deleting its continuing and deeply
cumulative (Brown 2003) relevance in the living historical present
(4).
"The
Voice of the Council on Foreign Relations"
The
self-described "American exceptionalist" Obama has obvious political reasons to
try to bring to his campaign as much of the imperial U.S. foreign policy
establishment as he can. Still, it is a bit much to hear him "ponder" with a
sense of awe "the work" of imperial U.S. Cold War architects George Kennan and
George Marshall (Obama 2006, p. 36). Is it really essential for him to
applaud the wonderful (he thinks) "post-[World] War [Two] leadership of
president Truman, Dean Acheson, George Marshall and George Kennan" for
"craft[ing]... a...new...order that married [Woodrow] Wilsonian idealism to
hardheaded realism, an acceptance of American power with a humility regarding
America's ability to control events around the world" (Obama 2006, p. 284)?
This is a remarkably deferential and whitewashed commentary on such memorable
moments in American "humility" as the arch-criminal atom-bombings of Hiroshima
and Nagasaki (mass-murderous shots across the bow of the emerging Cold
War), the mass-murderous U.S. assaults on Korea and Indochina (3 million
"enemy" dead), the U.S. restoration of fascist power in "liberated" Italy, the
U.S. intervention against popular social revolution in Greece (smeared as a
Soviet export by U.S. policymakers in order to "Scare the Hell out of the
American people" to garner support for massive new imperial "defense"
expenditures) and the U.S. subversion of democracy and national
independence across the planet: Iran (1953), Dominican Republic (1965), Guatemala
(1954), Chile (1970-1973), Indonesia (1965) are just some of the more
spectacular examples in a list that goes on and on.
John Pilger
put the imperial foreign policy essence of the Obama phenomenon in useful
context indeed during a speech in Chicago last June (Pilger 2007):
"As for the
Democrats, look at how Barack Obama has become the voice of the Council on
Foreign Relations, one of the propaganda organs of the old liberal Washington
establishment. Obama writes that while he wants the troops home, ‘We must not
rule out military force against long-standing adversaries such as Iran and
Syria.' Listen to this from the liberal Obama: ‘At moments of great peril in
the past century our leaders ensured that America, by deed and by example, led
and lifted the world, that we stood and fought for the freedom sought by
billions of people beyond their borders.' That is the nub of the propaganda,
the brainwashing if you like, that seeps into the lives of every American, and
many of us who are not Americans. From right to left, secular to God-fearing,
what so few people know is that in the last half century, United States
administrations have overthrown 50 governments - many of them democracies. In
the process, thirty countries have been attacked and bombed, with the loss of
countless lives."
"Danger
in the Idea of Equality"
"Obama praises the
arch-plutocratic Ronald Reagan for embodying ‘American's longing for order.'"
Then there
are Obama's disturbing statements of fawning respect for the predominantly
white capitalist economic elite - the top 1 percent that owns more than a third
of U.S. wealth and a probably higher percentage of its politicians,
policymakers, and opinion-makers. Given his dependence on super-rich
"election investors" to run a viable presidential campaign under the
plutocratic rules of the United States' self-negating "market democracy"
(Herman 2007), it's not surprising that he would wish to avoid offending the
nation's leading corporate power-brokers. But Obama goes beyond the call of
class-deferential duty when he praises the arch-plutocratic Ronald Reagan for
embodying "American's longing for order" (Obama 2006, p. 31) and when he
pens the following nauseating paean to aristocratic rule in The Audacity of
Hope: "The Founders recognized that there were seeds of anarchy in the idea
of individual freedom, an intoxicating danger in the idea of equality, for if
everybody is truly free, without the constraints of birth or rank and an
inherited social order...how can we ever hope to form a society that coheres?"
(Obama 2006, pp. 86-87). How's that for commitment to the democratic and
egalitarian ideals to which the United States so often lays special claim?
"Our
[Great] Free Market System"
Equally
sickening is Obama's eagerness to praise the glories of the capitalist system
that produces grotesque fortunes at the top of America's "inherited social
order" while tens of millions of Americans go without adequate food, clothing,
shelter, and health insurance. One key question addressed in The
Audacity of Hope comes straight out of the neoconservative world view Obama
was so good at accommodating at Harvard Law: what makes the United States so
"exceptionally" wonderful? Obama finds part of the answer to this
nationally narcissistic query in the wise and benevolent leadership of the
nation's great white Founders and subsequent supposedly sensible leaders like
Harry "Hiroshima" Truman and JFK. But Obama roots the excellence and
eminence of America in something deeper than the magnificence of its political
elite. He also grounds the United States' supposed distinctive
impressiveness in its "free market" capitalist system and "business culture."
The United
States overclass should be gratified by Obama's paean to the United States'
"free-market" system of (in reality state- and corporate-) capitalism (Obama
2006, pp. 149-150):
"Calvin
Coolidge once said that ‘the chief business of the American people is
business,' and indeed, it would be hard to find a country on earth that's been
more consistently hospitable to the logic of the marketplace. Our
Constitution places the ownership of private property at the very heart of our
system of liberty. Our religious traditions celebrate the value of hard
work and express the conviction that a virtuous life will result in material
rewards. Rather than vilify the rich, we hold them up as role models...As
Ted Turner famously said, in America money is how we keep score.
"The result
of this business culture has been a prosperity that's unmatched in human
history. It takes a trip overseas to fully appreciate just how good
Americans have it; even our poor take for granted goods and services -
electricity, clean water, indoor plumbing, telephones, televisions, and
household appliances - that are still unattainable for most of the world.
America may have been blessed with some of the planet's best real estate, but
clearly it's not just our natural resources that account for our economic
success. Our greatest asset has been our system of social organization, a
system that for generations has encouraged constant innovation, individual
initiative and efficient allocation of resources...our free market system."
The
Audacity of Hope
leaves it to hopelessly alienated and insufficiently realistic carpers,
"cranks" and "gadflies" (Obama's insulting description of the late
progressive U.S. Senator Paul Wellstone [Sirota 2006]) and other
dangerous "zealots" of the "morally absolutist" and insufficiently "pragmatic"
Left (Obama's insulting description) to observe the terrible outcomes of
America's distinctively anti-social and incidentally heavily state-protected
"free market system" and "business culture." Those unfortunate results
include the marvelously "efficient," climate-warming contributions of a
business-dominated nation that constitutes 5 percent of the world's population
but contributes more than a quarter of the planet's carbon emissions.
Other notable effects include the innovative generation of poverty and deep
poverty for millions of U.S. children while executives atop "defense" firms
like Boeing and Raytheon rake in billions of taxpayer dollars for helping Uncle
Sam kill and maim hundreds of thousands of Iraqi and Afghan civilians.
"Obama grounds the United States' supposed distinctive
impressiveness in its "free market" capitalist system and "business culture."
It is left
to the radical lunatic fringe to note the American System's "efficient"
allocation of a wildly disproportionate share of the nation's wealth and power
to the top 1 percent of the U.S. population and its systematic subordination of
the common good to private profit. "Unreasonable" Marxists,
left-anarchists and "conspiracy theorists" are left to observe that
business-ruled workplaces and labor markets steal "individual initiative" from
millions of American workers subjected to the monotonous repetition of
imbecilic and soul-crushing operations conducted for such increasingly
unbearable stretches of time - at stagnating levels of material reward
and security - that working people are increasingly unable to participate
meaningfully in the great "democracy" Obama trumpets as the Founders' great
legacy (Obama 2006, pp. 87-88).
A
Revealing/Revolting Comparison
It is
perversely symptomatic of Obama's passionate desire to sweet-talk the United
States ruling class that he compares "our poor's" "good" situation to that of
its more truly miserable counterparts in Africa and Latin America. Obama
deletes considerably less favorable (at least from a "progressive" standpoint)
American System contrasts with Western Europe and Japan, the most relevant
comparisons, where dominant norms and social policies create significantly
lower levels of poverty and inequality than what is found in the militantly
hierarchical U.S.
"It takes a
trip overseas to fully appreciate just how good" even "our poor" live? It
depends on where the "overseas" trip goes. If it takes the traveler to
much of the rest of the industrialized world, where state (so-called "free
market") capitalism's inherent tendencies towards wealth inequality and corporate
rule are considerably more tempered by social-democratic programs and popular
movements, the comparison is generally less than flattering to the United
States, reminding the minimally attentive societal observer that the United
States' "unmatched prosperity" is doled out in harshly regressive ways that
create relatively high percentages and numbers of poor and uninsured
households, drastically long working hours, rampant economic insecurity and
generally inadequate and under-funded public services alongside spectacular
opulence for the privileged few (see Mishel, Bernstein and Boushey 2003,
chapter 7: "International Comparisons," pp.395-432 in a volume dedicated
to Obama's "gadfly" Paul Wellstone, described by the authors as "a tireless
fighter for economic justice").
Of course,
one does not have to cross seas to appreciate the distinctions. A trip across
the Rio Grande to the proximate "Third World" nation Mexico will yield many
examples consistent with Obama's praise of U.S. "prosperity." But a trip
to Canada challenges Obama's narrative, revealing considerably lower
poverty rates and broader economic security. The favorable Canadian
comparisons partly reflects the fact that Canada possesses a popular and
social-democratic single-payer health insurance system - something the
"progressive" Obama sees as a dysfunctional and un-American
system of coercive government mandates (Sirota 2006).[5]
But given
Obama's desire to raise money and win approval from the masters of America's
openly plutocratic dollar democracy, it makes sense that he prefers to compare
the U.S. poor with the desperately impoverished masses of Nairobi, Jakarta and
Bogota than with the relatively well-off lower classes of Oslo, Paris and
Toronto.
"No One
Has Asked You to Build a More Just America"
My favorite
obsequiously capitalist-praising Obama comment came on September 17th,
2007. That's when the "progressive" senator made a revealing statement at
the Wall Street headquarters of NASDAQ. At the end of a speech that
purported to lecture Wall Street's great leaders on their "Common Stake in
America's Prosperity," Obama scaled the heights of Orwellian
absurdity to tell the lords of investment capital that "I believe all of you
are as open and willing to listen as anyone else in America. I believe you care
about this country and the future we are leaving to the next generation. I
believe your work to be a part of building a stronger, more vibrant, and more
just America. I think the problem is that no one has asked you to play a part
in the project of American renewal."
"The ‘business community' works with structurally
super-empowered effectiveness to distribute wealth and power ever more upward
over and above any considerations of social and environmental health at
home or abroad."
These were
strange beliefs to (claim to) hold in light of the pattern of elite U.S.
business behavior that naturally results from the purpose and structure of the
deeply authoritarian system of private profit. An army of nonprofit
charities and social service-providers, citizens, environmental and community
activists, trade union negotiators, and policymakers have spent decade after
decade asking and (often enough) begging the "American" corporate and financial
capitalist over-class to contribute to the domestic social good. The
positive results have been marginal and fleeting at best as the "business
community" works with structurally super-empowered effectiveness to distribute
wealth and power ever more upward over and above any considerations of social
and environmental health at home or abroad. With no special loyalty to the
American people in an age of negative (corporate) globalization, corporate
"America" is more than willing to forsake the imperial homeland - the domestic
U.S. society and its workers and communities - to serve the only true and
ultimate business end: investors' bottom line.
As the
founder of the Economic Policy Institute
Jeff Faux notes in his instructive 2006 book, The Global Class War: How
America's Bipartisan Elite Lost Our Future and What It Will Take to Win it Back,
America's largely business-based and bipartisan "governing class" holds no
particular attachment to the people, communities, health, or even
competitiveness of the United States per se. "As early as the 1950s," Faux
notes, "A Ford Motor executive corrected a U.S. senator who referred to the
company as ‘an American firm. We're an American company when we are in
America,' he said, ‘and a British company when we are in Britain, and a
Brazilian company when we are in Brazil."
Forty years
later, Ford Motor Company chief Alex Trotman told Robert Reich that "Ford isn't
even an American company, strictly speaking. We're global. We're
investing all over the world. Forty percent of our employees already live
and work outside the United States, and that's rising. Our managers are
multinational. We teach them to think and act globally" (Faux 2006, pp
87, 168).
Prior to
the 1970s, Faux observes, the "American" business community invested in foreign
countries primarily to produce for their markets. Afterward, however,
global competition and technological changes sparked "the restless American
corporate class to see the potential of outsourcing production to places where
labor costs were cheaper and weak governments could be bribed to keep them
cheap. The ability to produce elsewhere and still sell in America would
allow them to abandon the irksome twentieth century American social
contract. Just to threaten to move would give more bargaining power over
workers and government" (Faux 2006, 87-88).
The results
have included an ongoing epidemic of "outsourcing," job loss, union-busting,
and capital flight - an "abandonment of America" that has led both to
dramatically increased inequality and to the waning competitiveness of the
U.S. economy as a whole. As Faux observes, the ever more globalized "American"
business class makes no serious effort to reverse the nation's declining
performance and investment in the critical areas of education, research,
infrastructure, health, and energy efficiency. "Today," Faux writes, "business
elites that cared about America's future would be demanding new government
investments" in quality education and national research and development and the
like. "Instead, they send their lobbyists to demand more tax cuts, now."
'"American' capital no longer holds any special
allegiance to, or interest in a specifically American community or economy."
At the root
of this terrible reality is the simple and obvious fact that "American" capital
no longer holds any special allegiance to, or interest in a specifically
American community or economy (Faux 2006, pp. 187-190). Writing about why
"American" corporate CEO's seem hopelessly disinterested in the United States'
ongoing domestic decline, even the rabid U.S. corporate-globalization
enthusiast Thomas Friedman admits that "in today's flatter [more tightly
interconnected] world, many key U.S. companies now make most of their profits
abroad and can increasingly recruit the best talent in the world without ever
hiring another American" (Friedman 2005).
In his book
The Transnational Capitalist Class, Leslie Sklair distinguished between
three sorts of economies with which corporations interact. The first is a
"national economy" wherein production and distribution occur within national
boundaries. The second is an "international economy" in which goods and
services are traded across national lines. The third is a "global
economy" where investment, production, and sales are conducted freely and
regularly across permeable borders. In the first two, corporations can
make some credible claim to representing the "national interest" of their home
countries. In the third, however, national interest fades to insignificance
in relation to the corporations' underlying profit considerations (Sklair
2000).
Thanks in
no small part to the corporate-globalizationist thrust of U.S. foreign and
trade policy, the commanding heights of corporate "America" are now strongly
rooted in the third sort of economy. Until the last quarter of the
last century, the American corporate elite's pursuit of profit was at least
partly consistent with the mission of "building a stronger, more vibrant, and
more just America." But the leading segments of the business-based U.S. ruling
class have long since disposed of that "project." Their disinterest
in America is seen in their borderless neoliberal business practices and policy
agenda. It also demonstrated by their willingness to tolerate and even in some
cases encourage hair-brained right-wing campaigns to ban stem-cell research,
purvey creationism in the public schools, privatize Social Security, generally
attack public education and the like.
"Obama claims to absurdly believe that ordinary Americans
and their purported (Democratic) representatives should go cup in hand to the
great white lords of global investment capital."
This great
abandonment makes Obama look ridiculous and/or cynical when he purports to
think that what is required for domestic societal revitalization is for the
U.S. citizenry to supposedly belatedly "ask" its capitalist ruling class to
sign up with the allegedly shared "project of American renewal." Disregarding
harsh historical and structural reality, Obama's "you just haven't been asked"
line to big investment capital is worse then naïve. Given his role - well
understood inside the Beltway's corporate-political cash nexus but not (of
course) among the general populace (systematically targeted with an impressive
propaganda campaign seeking to portray him as a people's progressive) - as a
serious corporate-imperial "player"(Silverstein 2006), it is most likely a
cynical effort to curry business favor by absurdly turning the tables of blame
for American crises (rampant poverty, joblessness, inequality, overwork,
inadequate education and health care, environmental pollution, and so on ) back
on the American people and away from those with most power to shape U.S. policy
and conditions: the privileged business-based governing class.
There's no
other credible explanation for Obama's claiming to absurdly believe that
ordinary Americans and their purported (Democratic) representatives should go
cup in hand to the great white lords of global investment capital to childishly
say: "we believe in your essential goodness and commitment to a just and decent
society. It's our fault that you have been so nasty, pushing for huge tax cuts
you don't need and cutting our wages and eliminating our pensions and pushing
up our prices and exporting our jobs, and so on. You aren't really the mean and
selfish Scrooge before he was visited by the Christmas ghosts. No, you really
want to be the nice and caring Scrooge after the ghosts came. You aren't really
the vicious workhouse masters and street bandits who exploited Oliver Twist;
you actually want to be more like the nice Mr. Brownlow, whose benevolent sense
of noblesse oblige led him to help the abandoned young street urchin. We
the American working class majority just needed to ask you, our benevolent
transnational masters to invest in us, disregarding your world-capitalist
profit calculations. And we just need to be more like Oliver, saying ‘please
sir(s), more sir(s), if you don't mind.' Who knew? Our bad."
Whatever
the precise calculations (or lack thereof) behind his idiotic NASDAQ
comment, Obama's profession of faith in the notion that capitalism's
steep and inherent structural disparities can be meaningfully addressed at the
bourgeois-sentimentalist level of Charles Dickens (Orwell 1939) is terribly
insulting (6).
Capitalism
v. Justice and Democracy
One doesn't
have to be a Marxist or left-anarchist to be revolted by
such class-accommodationist silliness. As the vaguely populist liberal
Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards sees it, "the choice we must
make is as important as it is clear. It is a choice between corporate power and
the power of democracy" (Edwards 2007). While Obama blames ordinary
working people and their purported Democratic Party representatives for not mimicking
young Oliver Twist by courteously requesting that America's economic elite
act more responsibly, Edwards insists that "big" democratic and
progressive change will not be attained by "negotiating" with the privileged
few and their gigantic corporations. Such change cannot be meaningfully
achieved, Edwards has argued again and again in the summer and fall of 2007, by
exchanging "corporate Democrats" for "corporate Republicans." It will only
come, Edwards says, by "relentlessly fighting and beating" the corporations,
who have "rigged the game" of U.S. politics and policy across partisan lines
(Edwards 2007).
Edwards is
likely mistaken if he thinks meaningful progress on the path to social justice
will occur without a fundamental and radical challenge to the system of private
profit (7). Economic globalization enthusiasts repeat a false Cold War
conflation by claiming that capitalism and democracy are two sides of the same
coin. As the liberal economist Lester Thurow noted years ago in his New York
Times bestseller The Future of Capitalism (New York, 1996),
"democracy and capitalism have very different beliefs about the proper
distribution of power. One believes in a completely equal distribution of
political power, 'one man [sic] one vote,' while the other believes that it is
the duty of the economically fit to drive the unfit out of business and into
extinction. 'Survival of the fittest' and inequalities in purchasing power are
what capitalist efficiency is all about. Individual profit comes first and firms
become efficient to be rich. To put it in its starkest form, capitalism is
perfectly compatible with slavery. Democracy is not."
"It
is almost refreshing to hear Edwards speak of the need to battle amoral,
profit-mad corporations rather than following Obama's counsel by
moronically getting on our knees to beg them."
In a
similar vein, Chicago Tribune economics correspondent R.C. Longworth, (also no
radical), once noted that the "struggle of democracy and capitalism"
is "at the heart" of current "debate over the global economy. In
theory," Longworth claims, "they are meant to go together, indeed to
be inseparable. But democracy's priorities are equality before the law, the
right of each citizen to govern the decisions that govern his or her life, the creation
of a civilization based on fairness and equity. Capitalism's priorities are
inequality of return, profit for the suppliers of capital, efficiency of
production and distribution, the bottom line" (Street 2000).
Dr. Martin
Luther King, Jr. was on to something when he repeatedly told civil rights
staffers to "turn off the tape recorder" while he expounded on the necessity of
"democratic socialism" and explained that "capitalism" could not "meet the
needs of poor people" (Garrow 1986, pp. 591-592).
Still, it
is almost refreshing to hear Edwards speak some honest measure of populist
truth about the need to battle amoral, profit-mad corporations rather
than following Obama's counsel by moronically getting on our knees to beg
them to advance something that holds no bottom line interest for them:
"American renewal."
For the
"Radical Reconstruction of Society Itself"
Reading
Obama's NASDAQ oration for a second time the other day, I was struck by the
contrast between Obama's eager willingness to accommodate and embrace dominant
domestic and imperial hierarchies and Martin Luther King's more critical and
radical approach to race, class and global disparity. By 1966 and 1967, King
was openly and repeatedly criticizing what he called "the triple evils that are
interrelated:" racism, economic exploitation/poverty (class inequality) and
militarism/imperialism. "The evils of racism, economic exploitation and
militarism are all tied together," King said, "and you really can't get rid of
one of them without getting rid of the others." Consistent with what we
know to have been his deep and early rejection of Obama's supposedly
"efficient" American capitalist system, the democratic socialist King said that
only "the radical reconstruction of society itself" and "a radical
redistribution of economic and political power" could "save us from social
catastrophe." Consistent with the teachings of Marx (of whom King was something
of a youthful admirer) and contrary to sentimental bourgeois moralists
like Dickens, King argued that "the roots of [economic injustice] are in
the [capitalist] system rather in men or faulty operations" (8).
"The democratic socialist Dr. King said that
only ‘the radical reconstruction of society itself' and ‘a radical
redistribution of economic and political power' could ‘save us from social
catastrophe.'"
"For years
I labored with the idea of reforming the existing institutions of society, a
little change here, a little change there," King told David Halberstam in May
of 1967. "Now I feel quite differently. I think you've got to have
a reconstruction of the entire society," including even the nationalization of
some major industries (Garrow 1986, p. 562). In King's view the
simultaneous existence of mass poverty at home and U.S. imperial violence
abroad attested to the fact that "a nation that will exploit economically will
have to have foreign investments and everything else, and will have to use its
military might to protect them." King told Americans not to beg
their business rulers to behave more responsibly but rather to "question the
whole society," seeing "that the problem of racism, the problem of economic
exploitation, and the problem of war are all tied together. They are the
triple evils that are interrelated"
As King
explained in his haunting posthumous essay "A Testament of Hope," "The black
revolution...is forcing America to face all its interrelated flaws - racism,
poverty, militarism and materialism. It is exposing evils that are rooted
deeply in the whole structure of society. It reveals systemic rather than
superficial flaws and suggests that radical reconstruction of society itself is
the real issue to be faced."
"If we
are going to achieve equality," King told a young Civil
Rights worker (Charles Fager) in a Selma, Alabama jail in the winter
of 1965, "the United States will have to adopt a modified form of
socialism'" (Garrow 1986, p. 382).
Obama
writes about how fortunate poor residents of the United States are compared to
wretched "Third World" masses. In the summer of 1966, by contrast, King was
most struck by the greater poverty that existed in the U.S compared to other
First World states. "Maybe something is wrong with our economic system," King
told an interviewer, observing that (in Garrow's words) "in democratic
socialist societies such as Sweden there was no poverty, no unemployment and no
slums" (Garrow 1986, p. 568).
There's
something more than a small empirical contrast between the international
poverty comparison made by King and the one made by Obama forty years
later. The dissimilarity reflects one aspect of the difference between a
radical progressive who valued truth and justice over personal advancement
(King) and a corporate-imperial faux progressive (Obama) who distorts truth and
justice to achieve the power he simultaneously worships and craves.
Veteran Left historian Paul Street
(paulstreet99@yahoo.com) is a writer, speaker and activist based in Iowa City,
IA and Chicago, IL. He is the author of Empire
and Inequality: America and the World Since 9/11 (Boulder, CO:
Paradigm); Racial Oppression in the Global
Metropolis (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2007);and Segregated Schools: Educational Apartheid in
Post-Civil Rights America (New York: Routledge, 2005).
In this week’s segment we discuss a new book analyzing the need to confront counterinsurgency and fight against repression domestically and internationally. But first we hear from an activist on the…
Afeni is an activist and lead organizer with Herb and Temple in Washington, DC. She joins us from Washington to discuss Donald Trump’s declaration of emergency power to take over the operations of…
Joy James is a scholar and a political philosopher who works with organizers. She is editor of the new book Confronting Counterinsurgency: Cop Cities & Democracy’s Terrors, which is published by…
The treachery of the Black misleadership class knows no bounds. While Trump’s latest racist dog whistle about “born criminals” is condemned, double-talking scoundrels may pretend to be horrified…
The Trump administration’s declaration of war on American cities is a logical escalation of the white supremacist project. This is not a policy shift but a clearer revelation of the settler state's…
