Eric Holder: Like the Rest of the Black Political Class – Powerful But Powerless
by BAR managing editor Bruce A. Dixon
Nobody showed the hollow opportunism of Eric Holder's individual claim, and the collective claim of the black political class to be champions of justice, equity and civil rights more clearly than Rev. Michael Eric Dyson did on a panel discussing the outgoing Attorney General last Friday's DemocracyNow show. Unleashing his customary wall of words, the fast talking black preacher praised Holder as the “the second-most-powerful black person in the history of American politics...” but claimed that because they're black neither Holder nor the president could ever be reasonably expected to hold the banks to account for crashing the economy. Sure, he allowed crooks on Wall Street to get away with stripping trillions in wealth from black families through predatory loans and illegal foreclosures and get trillions more from the Fed itself. But those were issues “of the white left”, Dyson declared in his opening statement less, important to black folks than police brutality, voting rights and just not being locked up.
“So, while—yes, get the criminals who have continued financial malfeasance in this country. But what he’s done for the criminal justice system, what he’s done for sentencing, what he’s done for mandatory sentencing, what he’s done for racial profiling, what he’s done to combat police brutality, what he’s done to say that the American Voting Rights Act should be protected, and his, I think, creative use of different aspects of, you know, different sections, when others were gutted by the Supreme Court, has to be acknowledged. And my colleagues on the left sometimes neglect what is important to the masses and millions of people who were never under the purview even of the white left to be concerned about some of the issues that African-American people and Latino people and many others, religious and ethnic minorities, have been concerned about. I think, in that case, he will stand tall in the history of American jurisprudence, and certainly as one of the great attorneys general of all time.”
It was downhill from there. Dyson swiftly absolved Holder from any taint due to actual misconduct on the part of the FBI, DEA, federal prosecutors and the legions of other cops and lawyers working for him over the last six years.
“...whereas Eric Holder has much more direct control over events, forces and realities within the context of the Department of Justice, when we’re talking about the other issues that my colleagues have alluded to, then you’re talking about the interaction between the president of the United States of America and the Justice Department. Then you’re talking about the bailiwick being extraordinarily expanded. And in that case, Eric Holder alone can’t shoulder the burden of that. Are there conflicts and contradictions? To be sure. But in terms of ascribing, you know, responsibility, I think that’s a much more muddy kind of context.
Dyson went on to excuse Holder for his vicious claim that a US president had the right to target and murder anyone, anywhere in the world without trial or anything much in the way of evidence. When the conversation circled back around to Holder's and Obama's contention that Wall Street banks were too big to fail, and their crooked officers too important to jail, Dyson played his opportunist version of the race card in two directions, claiming that perhaps because they were white they were less concerned with economic justice for black folks than they were with punishing the banksters, and repeating that because Holder and Obama were black they couldn't serve the interests of black people anyhow.
“First of all, you know, the people who took the brunt of the mortgage crisis happened to be African-American people. The greatest bleed-off of black wealth in the history of this nation occurred there. So, if anybody is invested in trying to recoup some of that, it would be those people, and to redound to them significantly. The redistributive mechanism that might restore some of the capital to those folk is, again, of course, never the interest of many of my colleagues who are concerned about it. They just want to put in jail the CEOs and the others who did all this stuff, but they’re not really concerned about the redistributive mechanism that allows these people to regain, because even if you put those guys in jail, the people at the bottom continue to suffer...”
Number two, if we’re going to talk about this in the actual political context... If President Barack Obama can’t be seen as too gruffly treating white Americans... what do you think will happen then if Eric Holder, as the first African-American attorney general, is seen to be going after mostly white CEOs and other corporate titans within the economic infrastructure?...”
Clearly Rev. Dyson's, Eric Holder's and the world of the entire black political class are upside down and backward. We're supposed to elect them to high offices, and we must praise them for the achievement of us having uplifted them. And once in office they are under no particular obligation to use their supposed power and influence for the black masses they allegedly represent. And any white people who question why they don't serve the interests of their constituents can be threatened with the race card. After all, the critic is white, the criticized is black, what else do you need to know?
The panel discussion lasted a good 20 minutes, and toward the end, Rev. Dyson didn't even try to mount a defense of Eric Holder's prosecution of the press and whistleblowers, his refusal to go after torturers, his invocation of the Espionage Act, or his deportation of 2 million undocumented after his boss the president promised them a road to citizenship.
Beyond Dyson's troubling display on DemocracyNow, the fulsome praise heaped on Attorney General Eric Holder for being “a champion of voting rights and civil rights,” a contention none of the panelists questioned, is a Big Lie. It's a major rewrite of history and fact to serve the black political class, and more broadly the system it upholds.
It was nationwide enforcement of the Voting Rights Act of 1967 that gave birth to our current black political class. The numbers of black faces elected to high places multiplied six, almost seven times between 1970 and 2000, at almost the same time and proportion as the number of black people in US prisons and jails. During this entire time, and another decade beyond the black political class held the strategic legal and political high ground, with courts and editorial boards in much of the country ruling routinely in their favor, forcing fifty states and thousands of local jurisdictions closer to counting every vote and allowing every vote to count. But the Voting Rights Act was a temporary victory. Since the right to vote was not guaranteed in the supreme law of the land, the US Constitution, any state legislature, any judge, any city or county official was free to throw up inventive barriers. Only a Supreme Court majority and the coalition of public opinion sympathetic to the civil rights movement of the sixties sustained the Voting Rights Act, and these would not last forever. The only way to make the victory of voting rights permanent was to campaign for a constitutional amendment...
“A constitutional right to vote would provide easy grounds for removing corporate money and the contributions of wealthy individuals from political campaigns, ending felony disenfranchisement, banning gerrymandering, voter caging, discriminatory voter ID laws, and a thousand other ruses and schemes employed to keep minorities and the poor away from the polls and to minimize the effect of their votes when these are cast...”
Amending the US Constitution however, is hard work, not for the lazy or faint of heart. It requires a two-thirds vote in both houses of Congress and ratification by 38 state legislatures, a herculean task unthinkable without the creation of a powerful grassroots movement, the like of which black leaders no longer knew how to build. On the positive side, opponents of such an amendment would be stuck having to explain why the right to vote should NOT be a constitutional right. But the negatives won.”
The black political class instead crossed its fingers, complacently pretended the partial victory of the Voting Rights Act was “settled law,” and concentrated on boosting their own and each others' illustrious careers, and ceaselessly commemorating the victories of the sixties, since beyond those careers there was little indeed to show.”
The truth is, the kind of sustained, 24-7-365 peoples grassroots mobilization required to pass a constitutional right to vote isn't just something totally outside the experience of the black political class, it would be a mortal threat to sitting black politicians everywhere.
Eric Holder, President Obama and the rest of the self-aware black political class might have seen the assault on voting rights coming years off. There was plenty of time to counter it, but they didn't. Now that the Voting Rights Act has been kneecapped, they want to bill their hollow half-measures after the fact as courageous defenses of voting rights. Again, the world of the black political class is upside down, and centered on themselves, not the people they pretend to represent.
Eric Holder's, and by extension President Obama's record on beginning to roll back the prison state is pretty much the opposite of what our black political class wants to pretend. The Federal Bureau of Prisons comes under the US Department of Justice, and its budget has risen every year under Holder and Obama. While citizens in the president's home state mobilized to close a brutal state supermax prison, Holder's and Obama's Bureau of Prisons is opening up a new federal supermax in Illinois, Thomson ADX, a landlocked Guantanamo North. Holder hasn't prevailed upon his boss to free a single long serving political prisoner, not Leonard Peltier or Imam Jamil Al-Amin or Mutulu Shakur, and clemencies of nonpolitical prisoners too are at an all time low.
Eric Holder smoothly adopted this boss's technique of talking one game and walking another, as his Department of Justice went to court prevent their retroactive release for time served, keeping thousands of prisoners behind bars for what it admits are unjustly long and punitive sentences, while opining in public that too many black people are locked up for too little and too long. Holder's DEA, along with hundreds of state and local police departments across the country, thanks to data released by Edward Snowden and Wikileaks, are known to access illegal surveillance data from the NSA, to routinely use it to build cases, and commit perjury to conceal the illegal evidence. Holder's been looking into this for a more than a year, with no word on how many cases it affects or how long this atrocity has continued.
Eric Holder is not a champion of civil rights under law, or voting rights, or an advocate for the poor and minorities victimized by the drug war. His career is not that of a dedicated public servant. He's been a vicious prosecutor, a look-the-other-way strategist on voting rights, a high priced corporate lawyer in private practice, and an even more vicious defender of a lawless police and surveillance state. He's paid his dues at the highest levels of our Evil Empire, and with private practice he will now be free to cash in, perhaps representing some of the same telecoms and banksters he refused to prosecute as Attorney General. Maybe he can get a few of them to kick in a few bucks for My Brothers Keeper. That should cement his reputation a philanthropist as well.
Bruce A. Dixon is managing editor at Black Agenda Report. He lives and works in Marietta GA and is a state committee member of the Georgial Green Party. Contact him via this site's contact page, or at bruce.dixon(at)blackagendareport.com
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