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FOCUS | Obama Is Just as Bad as Zimmerman |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=20938"><span class="small">Briana Madden, Reader Supported News</span></a>
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Friday, 26 July 2013 12:55 |
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Madden writes: "The Obama administration is wrong 98 percent of the time, just like Zimmerman was about Trayvon. Yet Barack Obama and George Zimmerman are both free men today."
President Barack Obama during his remarks on the George Zimmerman case. (photo: Carolyn Kaster/AP)
Obama Is Just as Bad as Zimmerman
By Briana Madden, Reader Supported News
26 July 13
 espite his impassioned and seemingly heartfelt words on the unfortunate verdict in the Zimmerman case last week, President Obama is, in fact, guilty of the same wrongs as Trayvon Martin's killer.
The Obama administration has granted itself the power to divine by osmosis the guilt or innocence of anyone, anywhere in the world, and to decide that person's fate. It's not exactly a secret that we live in a world where most are guilty until proven innocent, only now we see this unconstitutional principle written into both foreign and domestic policy. It's bad enough that these unjust practices have gone unchecked for so long, but it's even more outrageous that our government is now attempting to justify their legal use.
The United States government has killed 475 Trayvons in Pakistan and Yemen since 2002, according to the New America Foundation. With relatively no oversight, Obama has unleashed his drones on "suspected terrorists" (American citizens or not) in the Middle East, retaining the power to do so on U.S. soil as well. Based on an intelligence profile, he decides whether a person lives or dies. These supposed terrorists never get to speak for or defend themselves. No evidence is presented to prove their innocence or guilt. Obama just pulls the trigger and a life is snuffed out.
But wait, isn't that exactly what George Zimmerman did when he saw Trayvon Martin that night? Zimmerman decided to follow him based on a racial profile, resulting in his death. Trayvon never got the chance to prove his innocence. Before he was given the opportunity, Zimmerman pulled the trigger, just like President Obama.
And just how accurate is the Obama administration at targeting actual guilty parties? As it turns out, they are wrong almost all of the time. Estimates show that as many as 50 civilians are killed for every one "terrorist." There is also evidence that the CIA targets civilians who come to rescue or move the victims of the drone attacks and those who attend victim's funerals.
So the Obama administration is wrong 98 percent of the time, just like Zimmerman was about Trayvon. Yet Barack Obama and George Zimmerman are both free men today, while 476 families grieve.
Discussing the reaction of the African-American community to Zimmerman's acquittal, Obama said, "I think it's important to recognize that the African-American community is looking at this issue through a set of experiences and a history that doesn't go away." Is it not equally important for President Obama and all of us as Americans to recognize that the people in Pakistan and Yemen are looking at the unrestricted and largely indiscriminate killing by aircraft of their innocents through a historical lense as well? With this in mind, how can anyone wonder about the cause of the widespread anti-American sentiment in the Middle East?
Obama goes on to talk about the way statistics are manipulated to show that African-American men are more violent than others. He says it's not fair to deny the context of these numbers in order to twist public opinion against a group of people. How then, is it fair for government propagandists to engage in the same manipulation of numbers in order to convince a nation that the "war on terror" is worth this merciless killing?
In the most reported sound bite from his speech, Obama says, "Trayvon Martin could have been me 35 years ago." This comment was, I'm sure, intended to convey the idea that even though we have an African-American president, we don't live in a post-racial world, a sentiment that Obama elaborated on later in his speech. What it brought to mind for me was that Obama could've just as easily been born in Pakistan and been the victim of the very violent injustice he deplored in his speech.
The president also spoke of his own personal experience and that of most every African-American man across the country, lamenting the profiling he faced due to his skin color. What he failed to recognize is that those are the same experiences of every other marginalized group in the United States. Profiling, which is derived from stereotypes and prejudice, doesn't just drop out of thin air. It has to come from somewhere. The racial profiling of African-Americans like Trayvon Martin stems from the American slave trade. The racial profiling of Middle Easterners comes from the American "war on terror," which our President Obama has committed himself to perpetuating through haphazard killing, indefinite detention, and extensive breaches of privacy.
Near the end of his remarks, President Obama asked, "If we're sending a message as a society in our communities that someone who is armed potentially has the right to use those firearms even if there's a way for them to exit from a situation, is that really going to be contributing to the kind of peace and security and order that we'd like to see?"
So I ask now, what moral high ground does Obama have to stand on as he condemns George Zimmerman?
Briana Madden earned her bachelor's degree in journalism from Illinois State University and is an Editor at Reader Supported News. You can reach her by email at
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and follow her on Twitter at @brianarmadden.
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9 Ways to Organize the Next Civil Rights Movement |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=7118"><span class="small">Carl Gibson, Reader Supported News</span></a>
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Thursday, 25 July 2013 13:56 |
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Gibson writes: "Intersectionality is also a key part of having as many available assets as possible to help win your fight. Because so many groups are so deeply invested in the fight in North Carolina, all the bases were covered."
Carl Gibson was arrested for his participation in Moral Monday in Raleigh this week. (photo: NewsObserver.com)
9 Ways to Organize the Next Civil Rights Movement
By Carl Gibson, Reader Supported News
25 July 13
"You get the mountain folk, the city folk, the black folk, the Jewish folk, the working-class folk all together, this ultra-conservative stuff is over with."
– Rev. William Barber
 he Reverend William Barber, president of the North Carolina NAACP, is a charismatic, populist Southern preacher with fire in his voice and love in his heart. Every Monday, Barber and thousands of others gather for "Moral Monday" at the Halifax Mall outside the state legislature in Raleigh, North Carolina, to speak out against what Barber calls "immoral politics." I went to the 12th Moral Monday action, this one focused on the legislature's attacks on voting rights. Other than myself and some friends I met up with who drove down from DC, everyone I met there was from North Carolina.
In 2010, the GOP gained a majority in the legislature, and in 2012 Republican Pat McCrory was elected governor, giving Republicans control of the state for the first time since the 1800s. In the short time McCrory has been governor, the GOP has forced through unprecedented legislative attacks aimed at restricting women's access to abortions, cutting unemployment benefits, slashing education budgets, refusing federal Medicaid funds, raising taxes on the poor to cut taxes for the rich, controversial voting legislation that requires voters paying money to obtain a voter ID (which would disenfranchise 300,000 registered North Carolina voters), repealing child tax credits for parents whose children in college register to vote, and a bill that allows guns to be carried on playgrounds and college campuses. Even though these are largely Republican efforts, Rev. Barber is quick to point out that this isn't a partisan fight.
"It isn't about Republicans or Democrats, it's about extremists attacking Democracy," Rev. Barber said. "Their plan is to pass these immoral laws and then make it difficult for people to vote them out in the next election cycle."
North Carolinians say the Moral Monday protesters are now more popular than the state legislature. North Carolina's Moral Mondays could be a way for the South to become progressive again. Here are nine ways those fighting plutocratic governments can organize a popular grassroots movement to make lasting change.
1. Take the Moral Upper Hand
The movement Barber and others organized in North Carolina is rooted in righteous passages from the New Testament where Jesus talks about how it's easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to get into heaven. In Matthew 25:31, Jesus said those who neglect to care for "the least of these," also neglect Him. Luke 3:11 quotes John, who says someone who has two coats should give one to someone who has none, and those with extra food should do the same for the hungry.
"The South is very religious, and so the 'Moral Monday' inclusion of religious principles is very smart," said Harvey Smith of Lillington, N.C., an atheist who was arrested at the Moral Monday protest on July 15. "But it may not be the best model for the rest of the nation."
Moral Monday participants include Catholics, Jews, Unitarian Universalists and Methodists. But for people like Harvey Smith, the movement also draws its strength from simple secular humanism, and the basic ideal that people have the fundamental rights to food, shelter, education, basic healthcare and the vote. Rev. Barber says taking the moral upper hand is fundamental to winning the struggle.
"A lot of liberals tend to run away from the Bible and the flag," Barber said. "But we need to take those things back, and not let people who hurt others through the politics of greed to claim what was never theirs in the first place."
2. Target State Capitols
"The real power isn't in the federal government, it's in the states. If you want to change the nation, you have to do it at the state capitols."
- Rev. William Barber
In 2010, I was still the state capitol reporter for Mississippi's NPR affiliate network, the same year Tea Party Republicans would sweep the midterm elections and win majorities in statehouses and governor's offices. Haley Barbour, then governor of Mississippi, is still a legendary GOP strategist, perhaps best known for his role in engineering the first Republican takeover of the U.S. House of Representatives after the 1994 midterm elections as chairman of the Republican National Committee. Barbour was also the brainchild of the plutocratic takeover of Congress and state capitols in 2010 as chairman of the Republican Governors' Association.
That Summer, I was on assignment at the Neshoba County Fair, an annual Republican-dominated political picnic in Philadelphia, Mississippi, where Ronald Reagan delivered his infamous "States' Rights" speech to crowds of cheering Mississippi Republicans in August of 1980. I ran into Gov. Barbour at a press gaggle, where a fawning TV reporter asked him when he was going to announce his candidacy in the 2012 presidential race. Barbour simply smiled an aw-shucks grin and said, "As RGA chairman, I need to concentrate on getting Republican governors elected in 2010. Then maybe we'll see."
Barbour never announced a run for president, but he did successfully get ultra-conservative governors elected in traditionally purple states like Pennsylvania, Ohio, Florida, Wisconsin, and Michigan, among other states. Almost like clockwork, these governors, assisted by GOP majorities in their respective states, started enacting the agenda of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) to the letter. Whether it's Scott Walker, Rick Scott, Rick Snyder, John Kasich or Tom Corbett enacting the policy, the agenda is always the same. Taxes for the rich and corporations are cut, creating big budget gaps, providing those governors and legislatures with an excuse to slash budgets for government programs that the poor and underserved depend upon.
"This is the new form of the 'Southern Strategy' that they used back in the sixties," Rev. Barber said. "[Lee] Atwater confessed to it before he died, to get it off his chest. He said the best way to win an election was to say the 'N' word more times than the other guy. Nixon's Southern Strategy was instead to not say the word at all, but to use certain keywords that would set off the right group of voters."
In his speech at the 2012 Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), Wisconsin governor Scott Walker spoke of eliminating "dependence on government," which Huffpost described as "dorm room 'makers vs. takers' arguments." McCrory and the North Carolina GOP are simply taking advantage of their numbers to enact a similar agenda aimed at disenfranchising certain groups of people by not only slashing the programs meant to help them, but by making it more difficult for those groups of people to vote them out of office. The sooner we realize this is a nationally-coordinated agenda that depends on state governments to do the scut work, the sooner we can organize to take back our state governments.
3. Be Intersectional
"Somebody say, 'I cannot change things. Only WE can change things.' We are the WE that we've been waiting for."
- Rev. William Barber
The thousands at the Halifax Mall were some of the most diverse of any group of protesters. Though the event was organized by the NAACP and legal help was provided by the civil rights group The Advancement Project, I saw members of clergy from a vast swath of faiths. I met Presbyterian ministers, Catholic priests, Muslim Imams, Unitarian Universalists, Jewish Rabbis, and Methodist preachers. There was a group of LGBT activists holding up rainbow flags. There were families with children from all nationalities. There were Latinos, Asian-Americans, and Middle Easterners standing alongside their fellow black and white protesters. I met a teenager who was upset her mom wouldn't let her join those who had committed to civil disobedience, and a 78-year-old woman who happily volunteered herself to be handcuffed and hauled off to jail while standing up for her rights.
Even though all the people there were from different class backgrounds, religions, sexual orientations, and ethnicities, they all had one thing in common - their righteous struggle for justice.
"Poor people, working class people, transgender people, are all tied into this oppression from people like the Koch Brothers," Harvey Smith said. "They want to use us as a bellweather to roll out these programs all across the country. And we won't stand for it."
Intersectionality is also a key part of having as many available assets as possible to help win your fight. Because so many groups are so deeply invested in the fight in North Carolina, all the bases were covered. The Christian Faith Baptist Church provided the space for the meetings before and after the action. During the large rally at Halifax Mall, there was a DJ playing music between speakers and a medical tent staffed with doctors providing free care to anyone who needed it. The NAACP provided the buses for people to go to and from the church. Volunteers waited outside the Wake County Jail to support those leaving, and offered the freed jailbirds rides back to the church. The Advancement Project provides plenty of attorneys ready to take on pro bono cases for the approximately 1,000 protesters who have been arrested over 12 Moral Mondays. None of these necessary logistics would be possible without an all-inclusive environment.
4. Use Music and Creativity
When we arrived at the church for the meeting before the action, we were all given music and lyric sheets for the song "Forward Together," which we sang several times. Musicians brought drums and keyboards to the church, where we sang joyous songs of protest and justice as we got ready to join the crowd at Halifax Mall.
Singing and music are common languages that bring all sorts of people together from all ages and backgrounds. And when everyone is joining their voices together as one, it adds an entirely new element of power that would have been absent otherwise. I recently wrote an article about the power of revolutionary music to stir revolutionary movements, which began with a James Connolly quote about how a revolution without musical expression is "the dogma of the few and not the faith of the multitude."
Protesters' creativity also shone at Halifax Mall, where people passed out humorous fans made to look like Gov. Pat McCrory's head. Another group had a table advertising a new Tumblr page, "Our North Carolina," in the vein of the "We Are the 99 Percent" Tumblr that launched Occupy Wall Street's rallying cries into the mainstream conversation. At the table, participants filled out a sheet of paper that says "My North Carolina" at the top, and allows the rest of the blank sheet to be filled in by the participant. Photos of these are then shared on social media to amplify the voice of the movement.
5. Use Bottom-Up Organizing, Not Top-Down
"We don't need celebrities to 'helicopter in' from New York and DC to speak at a rally, or for big groups to pour money into the movement. The best way to help the movement grow is to talk about it face-to-face, to your family and friends. Let them see you go to jail, and they'll start to think differently about what they believe."
- Rev. William Barber
The bottom-up approach was key to Occupy Wall Street's success in spreading its message to every American city. Even though the first OWS encampment was in New York City, it was made very clear that each community was just as empowered to take the Occupy name, apply it to their town, and make the movement their own. All decisions were made democratically, with emphasis on input from traditionally-disenfranchised groups. Even after police evicted encampments with help from the Department of Homeland Security, the Occupy movement lives on through its actions, thanks to its bottom-up approach to organizing.
Rev. Barber insists that to be successful, the movement must remain a grassroots coalition of multiple groups, and not become an organization in and of itself.
"We want to build a movement, not argue over who's going to be president and who's going to be treasurer and all this," Rev. Barber says. "That's the difference between movements and organizations."
Even though Rev. Barber is the charismatic leader of the songs and chants, the decision-making is left up to the all the groups involved in the action. And because so many are involved and so many have invested resources into the movement, the Moral Monday actions pick up steam each week as groups work with one another to increase turnout and constantly improve logistics and coordination of events. Due to the structure of the movement, Moral Mondays are a heavily-local, meticulously-organized, grassroots model of action that will only pick up steam as time goes on.
6. Go to Jail for Justice
"Have you been to jail for justice? I want to shake your hand.
Because sitting in and laying down are ways to take a stand.
Have you sung a song for freedom? Or marched that picket line?
Have you been to jail for justice? Then you're a friend of mine."
- "Have You Been to Jail For Justice," by Peter, Paul and Mary
In just 12 weeks, nearly 1,000 North Carolinians have been arrested at Moral Monday protests, making it the single largest act of civil disobedience since the Occupy Wall Street movement. At Moral Monday, they don't refer to it as getting arrested, but as "bearing witness." I decided that if I was going to make the drive to North Carolina to write about Moral Mondays, the story would be incomplete unless I volunteered to be arrested and wrote about the experience from handcuffs to jail to release.
"In my tradition of faith, when one stands up to issues and injustice, one is willing to submit to anything, including crucifixion," Rev. Barber says. "You do it because you believe it is right and your crucifixion will be vindicated."
On July 22nd, 73 of us were "witnesses" at the state capitol. This process involved going to the Christian Faith Baptist Church around 3 p.m. on Monday, where the crowd was divided between supporters and "witnesses," the latter receiving a green piece of cloth to tie around their forearm to signify their intent to be arrested. Lawyers from the NAACP and the Advancement Project meticulously prepared everyone for the process, describing what kind of handcuffs they bind your hands with, the fact that capitol police allow your hands to be cuffed in front if you wish, the charges that will be filed against you, and the environment at the Wake County Jail.
When protesters were preparing for their arrest, they walked into the rotunda with the rest of the crowd at approximately 6 p.m., led chants, gave speeches, and sang songs at the doors of the House of Representatives and the Senate. Chief Weaver of the General Assembly Police sounded an LRAD siren and announced that the capitol was closed, and that protesters had 5 minutes to leave or face arrest for trespassing. When everyone else left, those with green armbands were bound with plastic cuffs and taken into the capitol cafeteria in the basement for processing, and hauled off to Wake County Jail in Department of Corrections buses with mesh grilles welded over the windows (Rev. Barber called the buses "limousines" when describing the process.)
Once we were hauled inside the Wake County jail, our plastic cuffs were cut off of us (any sort of movement pulls the cuffs tighter, which cut off circulation in my right hand for a few minutes) and we were thoroughly patted down before being led to additional processing rooms. The guards were all mostly supportive of our cause, understood what we were doing, and worked to process us through the system as quickly as possible.
One elderly man who was arrested with us named Bob Plummer (seen in this photo) was the very first Black Naval officer to do an underwater detonation in a war. He was one of the few who asked to be cuffed in front. When 8 of us men were being handcuffed to a chain to be led into the next processing room, the prison guards let Plummer, who walked with a cane, walk on his own without being handcuffed to the chain with the rest of us.
Tanya Glover, Harvey Smith's daughter and blogger for modvive.com, which covers the Moral Monday protests, was arrested with her father at the North Carolina statehouse on July 8th. She said her family all volunteered themselves to "bear witness" the following week.
"A lot of them didn't really get what was going on until they saw us being arrested, then when they understood what was really at stake, they had to get arrested too," Glover said.
Glover's husband, Anthony, was arrested on July 15th. Her sister in law, Lisa Dembow, and her two nephews, Dustin Bailey, age 17, and BJ Bailey, age 16, all committed acts of civil disobedience. Harvey Smith's wife, Jane, was also arrested with Tanya Glover's in-laws on July 15th. Now they're all spreading the word to their community about why they got arrested.
"Harnett County is like a world away from everywhere," Glover said. A lot of people have not really understood what's going on, and they don't hear what's going on because they're uneducated about our state and what the government is doing. It's our job to go back to our county and really spread the word."
7. Lead With Love
Love overshadows everything happening at Moral Monday. They protest out of love for those being affected by the legislature's new laws, they stress not antagonizing police officers doing their job, and they stress nonviolence toward others who may not be sympathetic and toward any legislators they may confront.
Love and support were also key roles to be filled by the crowd, from when the "witnesses" first marched toward the capitol to when we were hauled off to jail to when we got out. At a certain point during the rally, a member of the clergy offered a prayer over the group for their safety, and the crowd divided to make one aisle in the middle where all of the "witnesses" would walk two by two toward the front door of the capitol. People on either side of us were saying thank you, clapping, giving us high fives, hugs, and fist-bumps. Several spontaneously joined us from the sidelines and volunteered to be arrested with the group.
I was blown away by the thousands of people all erupting into cheers and chanting "Thank you! We love you!" while walking from the processing room in the basement of the state capitol to the prison buses with my hands bound behind my back. Instead of the walk to the bus and ride to jail being humiliating or dehumanizing, it was empowering. The mood of my fellow male "witnesses" on my bus instantly improved, and morale stayed high after we saw the crowd. We sang songs, told jokes, and didn't take any of it too seriously.
Because of my long protest-related arrest record in many states, I was one of the last protesters to be released. But even close to midnight, there were still roughly 20 people waiting outside the Wake County jail who applauded when I walked out the front doors with my court papers. State senator Earline Parmon (Democrat of Winston-Salem) was the first to give me a hug after I was released. There were Advancement Project attorneys present, along with a notary public, to sign and notarize my court appearance waiver, (hopefully) making it so my attorney could appear on my behalf when my court date arrived. One of the jail supporters had a live video chat going with the Dream Defenders currently occupying the Florida state capitol, who congratulated me through the screen on my release. The atmosphere of love that constantly surrounds the Forward Together movement makes it easy to sympathize with them, and difficult to dislike them. They'll likely win over North Carolina's apolitical class simply with their love.
8. Register New Voters, Support Independent Candidates, and Get Out the Vote
While there's already a lot of talk as to who will run against the Republican incumbents in the legislature, or who will challenge Pat McCrory in 2016, the new congressional and state legislative redistricting maps drawn by North Carolina Republicans aim to gerrymander the GOP's way into another four years of supermajority rule. Reverend Barber says their redistricting plans are just a way to further disenfranchise poor communities and people of color.
"The new redistricting map undermines the work we've been doing for twenty years bridging racial gaps in North Carolina," Barber said. "That's an attack on Democracy."
While I was preparing for arrest, my Facebook friend Mike Cockrell (who was kind enough to host me at his home for two nights) conducted a survey of 54 people at Halifax Mall regarding their voting habits and political leanings. He made sure to question as diverse a group as possible. The survey participants were from 15 different counties in North Carolina. He asked them five short questions with an option of yes/no/not sure:
- Do you vote?
- Have you voted for a Republican at any point in your life?
- Did you vote for a Republican in the last election?
- Are you likely to vote for a Republican in the next election?
- Would you consider voting for a third party candidate if they were on the ballot?
The answers to Mike's survey surprised both of us. All but one of the 54 people surveyed said they were voters. 43.4% had voted for a Republican at least once in their life. 18.9% of respondents voted for a Republican in the 2012 elections. 9.4% of participants said they would consider voting for a Republican in the next election. And a whopping 81.1% of respondents said they would consider voting for a third party candidate. Only 7.4% of survey takers said they wouldn't vote for independent candidates.
"I am a registered independent. If there was a leftist third party, I would love to have that," Harvey Smith said. "I remember when I was growing up in New York, there were sometimes ten parties on any given ballot. I'm really into breaking out of this two-party mold."
The only way to ensure the current crop of lawmakers doesn't maintain their power is to vote them out at every opportunity. The Moral Monday protests could be a great engine not just for registering new voters, but for cultivating strong community leaders to run for local office.
9. Have an Agenda-Driven Movement
One of the chief criticisms of the Occupy movement was that it had no central, core demands. Occupy activists would often retort with the oft-repeated line, "All our grievances are connected," and even created an infographic that showed how every grievance was tied into the cause. However, it still can't be denied that the diffuse nature of Occupy meant a lot of the original populist energy against the bailouts and a bought-and-paid-for government was siphoned out of the movement once every grievance was looped in. It became about everything instead of focusing on a few key goals.
Even though they're rooted in protesting a multitude of attacks from the legislature, Moral Mondays have a specific focus for each given week. On the July 22nd demonstrations, the theme of the week was voting rights. Other themes for Moral Mondays have focused on a woman's right to have access to contraception and abortions, and others focused on the raising of taxes on the poor to cut taxes for the rich. Rev. Barber cited the Constitution when addressing the legislature's attempts to pare back unemployment benefits.
"North Carolinians have a right to the fruits of their labor in their Constitution," Rev. Barber said. "You can't deny someone unemployment benefits after they've spent years paying into it. That's directly denying someone the fruits of their labor."
In Wisconsin, where I live, the problem is similar: Gov. Scott Walker and the GOP-dominated legislature have attacked everything from voting rights to abortion access to public education. But rather than reacting to each individual attack from politicians, it should be the duty of the movement to focus on each one in a given week, and constantly make the connection that it's tied together as part of the ALEC agenda followed to the letter by multiple states with plutocratic governors and legislatures. You can be diffuse in your focus, but make specific demands with each separate protest. When people feel like there's a winnable goal in their sights, they are more energized to win instead of feel defeated, burned out, and overwhelmed.
As Harvey Smith said, the Moral Mondays of North Carolina can only be done in North Carolina. But a similar model can be very successful in many other states. We can take back our government before we know it if we organize this new civil rights movement the right way.
"This one's for North Carolina, come on and raise up!"
- Petey Pablo
Carl Gibson, 26, is co-founder of US Uncut, a nationwide creative direct-action movement that mobilized tens of thousands of activists against corporate tax avoidance and budget cuts in the months leading up to the Occupy Wall Street movement. Carl and other US Uncut activists are featured in the documentary "We're Not Broke," which premiered at the 2012 Sundance Film Festival. He currently lives in Madison, Wisconsin. You can contact him at
This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it
, and follow him on twitter at @uncutCG.
Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader Supported News.
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Racist Roots of GOP War on Obama |
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Thursday, 25 July 2013 13:54 |
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Parry writes: "It is now clear that Obama's election in 2008 was not the harbinger of a 'post-racial' America, but rather the signal for white right-wingers to rally their forces to 'take back America.'"
President Barack Obama. (photo: file)
Racist Roots of GOP War on Obama
By Robert Parry, Consortium News
25 July 13
Exclusive: Right-wing Republicans in Congress are plotting to cripple the U.S. government if Barack Obama, the first African-American president, doesn’t submit to their demands. The battle pretends to be over the size of government but it echoes the whips, chains and epithets of America’s racist past, writes Robert Parry.
he United States finds itself at a crossroad, with a choice of moving toward a multicultural future behind a more activist federal government or veering down a well-worn path that has marked various tragic moments of American history when white racists have teamed up with "small government" extremists.
Despite losing Election 2012 - both in the presidential vote (by five million) and the overall tally for Congress (by one million) - the Republicans are determined to use their gerrymandered House "majority" and their filibuster-happy Senate minority to slash programs that are viewed as giving "stuff" (in Mitt Romney's word) to poorer Americans and especially minorities.
Republicans are gearing up to force a series of fiscal crises this fall, threatening to shut down the federal government and even default on the national debt, if they don't get their way. Besides sabotaging President Barack Obama's health reform law, the Republicans want to devastate funding for food stamps, environmental advancements, transportation, education assistance and other domestic programs.
"These are tough bills," Rep. Harold Rogers, R-Kentucky, who heads the House Appropriations Committee, told the New York Times. "His priorities are going nowhere."
A key point is to slash help to what the Right sees as "undeserving" Americans, especially people of color. The ugly side of this crypto-racist behavior also surfaced in the gloating by right-wing pundits over the acquittal of George Zimmerman in the murder of unarmed black teenager Trayvon Martin. Fox News pundits, in particular, have mocked the outrage over the verdict from America's black community and Obama's personal expression of sympathy.
It is now clear that Obama's election in 2008 was not the harbinger of a "post-racial" America, but rather the signal for white right-wingers to rally their forces to "take back America." The fact that the modern Republican Party has become almost exclusively white and the nation's minorities have turned more and more to the Democratic Party has untethered the GOP from any sense of racial tolerance.
There is now a white-supremacist nihilism emerging in the Republican strategy, a visceral contempt for even the idea of a multi-racial democracy that favors a more vigorous federal government. Some of these extremists seem to prefer sinking the world's economy via a U.S. debt default than compromising with President Obama on his economic and social agenda.
Though the mainstream media avoids the white supremacist framing for the political story - preferring to discuss the upcoming clash as a philosophical dispute over big versus small government, - the reality is that the United States is lurching into a nasty struggle over the preservation of white political dominance. The size-of-government narrative is just a euphemistic way of avoiding the underlying issue of race, a dodge that is as old as the Republic.
The Jeffersonian Myth
Even many liberals have fallen for the myth of the dashing Thomas Jefferson as the great defender of America's Founding Principles - when he was really a great hypocrite who served mostly as the pleasing political front man for the South's chief industry, human slavery.
The popular history, perpetuated by authors such as Jon Meacham, downplays how Virginia's plantation owners and other investors in slavery served as Jefferson's political "base" helping to fund his propaganda battle - and then his political war - against George Washington's Federalists who were the real designers of the Constitution with its dramatic concentration of power in the federal government. [See Consortiumnews.com's "The Right's Made-Up Constitution."]
Prominent Anti-Federalists, such as Virginia's Patrick Henry and George Mason, were alarmed that the Constitution's overturning of the states' rights-oriented Articles of Confederation would inexorably lead to Northern domination and the eventual eradication of slavery.
After ratification, many of these Southern agrarian interests grew even more alarmed when the Federalists began using the expansive federal powers in the Constitution to begin creating the framework for a modern financial system, such as Alexander Hamilton's national bank, and promoting a potent federal role in the nation's development, such as George Washington's interest in canals and roads.
With every move toward a more assertive national government, the Southern slaveholders saw a growing threat toward their economic interest in human bondage. After all, slavery was not just a cultural institution in the South; it was the region's biggest capital investment.
Though Jefferson was in France when the Constitution was written in 1787 and ratified in 1788, his return in 1789 marked an important political moment in early U.S. history. The Anti-Federalists, stung by their bitter defeat at the hands of Washington's Federalists over the Constitution, finally had a charismatic leader to rally behind.
Jefferson, who was a critic of the Constitution but not an outright opponent, retained an outsized reputation from the American Revolution as the principal author of the Declaration of Independence. He was also a star intellect and a crafty political operative who, perhaps more than anyone else, personified the hypocrisy of the slave-owning Founders.
Though he had famously declared, as "self-evident" truth, that "all men are created equal, endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness," he also was one of Virginia's major slaveholders. And he engaged in the pseudo-science of racial supremacy, measuring the skulls of his African-American slaves to "prove" their inferiority.
Known as a harsh "master" when having runaway slaves punished, Jefferson lived in deathly fear that his slaves would rise up violently against him and his fellow plantation owners, much as the slaves of St. Domingue (today's Haiti) did against their French plantation owners in the 1790s.
So, like Patrick Henry and George Mason, Jefferson wanted a strong state-controlled militia in Virginia to put down slave revolts while opposing a professional federal military which white Southerners saw as a potential threat to the future of slavery.
Rose-Colored Glasses
Despite Jefferson's interest in maintaining slavery and his racist pronouncements, many modern writers have bought into the Jeffersonian version of early American history. In part, that may be because Jefferson was among the most handsome, most complex and most intellectual of the Founders. But that modern fascination with Jefferson frequently involves averting one's gaze from the dark - and racist - underbelly of Jefferson's personal beliefs and his political movement.
For instance, Meacham's best-selling Thomas Jefferson: the Art of Power says almost nothing about Jefferson's real source of power, the South's plantation structure. Instead, Jefferson's advocacy for "farmers" and a "small-government" interpretation of the Constitution is taken at face value. Plus, few questions are asked about the fairness of his vituperative attacks on the Federalists, especially Hamilton and Adams. Those assaults are seen as simply an expression of Jefferson's sincere republican spirit.
Meacham's writing is instructive, too, on the Jefferson-slavery issues. Meacham focuses mostly on Jefferson's taking a teenage slave girl, Sally Hemings, as his concubine, what could be regarded as rape, pedophilia or both. While Jefferson's sexual exploitation of a vulnerable girl is certainly noteworthy in evaluating Jefferson's character, the liaison is less significant historically than Jefferson's role in defending slavery by revising the original (Federalist) interpretation of the Constitution.
The Federalists, who included the document's principal drafters, understood that the Constitution granted very broad powers to the federal government to act in the national interest and on behalf of the general welfare. That was also the interpretation held by Anti-Federalists, explaining the intensity of the battle against ratification. So, by substituting a revisionist interpretation, stressing "states' rights" and a tightly constrained federal government, Jefferson negated much of what the Framers had sought to do with the Constitution. He also set the country on course for the Civil War.
Before becoming President, Jefferson secretly conspired with some political forces in Kentucky on possible secession, and he helped devise the theory of nullification, the supposed right of the states to nullify federal law, which became a driving force in the South's belief that it could secede from the Union.
Jefferson was one of the eight early presidents who owned slaves while in office (another four owned slaves while not in office). But Jefferson was one of the most unapologetic, insisting that blacks could never live as freed citizens in the United States and refusing to liberate his own slaves after his death (except for a few relatives of Sally Hemings).
When I visited Monticello some years ago, the tour guide pointed out the beautifully manicured Jefferson family cemetery, which was for white members of the household. When I asked where the slave cemetery was, I was told that no one knew. By contrast, Washington's Mount Vernon has a respectfully maintained slave cemetery.
More Hypocrisy
Meacham and other Jeffersonian apologists also miss many other layers of hypocrisy surrounding their hero, such as his near-hysterical condemnations of the Federalists as they struggled with the herculean task of building a functioning government under an untested constitutional framework, amid extraordinary international pressures and threats.
It is surely true that Washington, Hamilton and Adams made missteps in their efforts to pioneer this new form of government - and thus left themselves open to political attack from Jefferson's paid propagandists - but historians who buy into Jefferson's narrative ignore the unprecedented challenges that the Federalists faced.
The Federalists also were the ones, particularly Hamilton and Adams, who demonstrated sympathy and support for Haiti's black freedom-fighters, while Jefferson did all he could to undermine their success. But Jefferson is the Founder who is praised for his open-mindedness. [See Consortiumnews.com's "Rethinking Thomas Jefferson."]
Though Jefferson skillfully exploited examples of the Federalists' elitism and overreach to win the presidency in 1800, President Jefferson proved to be hypocritical, too, regarding his insistence on "limited government" narrowly defined by the Constitution's "enumerated powers" as well as his supposed respect for freewheeling dissent and his love for freedom of the press.
After undermining President Adams over his signing of the Alien and Sedition Acts - a wartime measure meant to suppress alleged foreign influence seeking to induce the young Republic to take sides in a European conflict - Jefferson expressed his own sympathy for harsh measures against dissidents.
For instance, in 1803, President Jefferson endorsed the idea of prosecuting critical newspaper editors, writing: "I have ... long thought that a few prosecutions of the most eminent offenders would have a wholesome effect in restoring the integrity of the presses. Not a general prosecution, for that would look like persecution: but a selected one," as cited by Meacham's largely pro-Jeffersonian book.
On a similar note, after leaving the White House, Jefferson advised his successor and ally James Madison on what to do with Federalists who objected to going to war with Great Britain in 1812. As historians Andrew Burstein and Nancy Isenberg write in Madison and Jefferson, "Jefferson called for different measures in different parts of the country: 'A barrel of tar to each state South of the Potomac will keep all in order,' he ventured in August [1812]. 'To the North they will give you more trouble. You may have to apply the rougher drastic of ... hemp and confiscation' - by which he meant the hangman's noose and the confiscation of property."
In other words, Jefferson, who has gone down in school history books as a great defender of freedom of speech, urged the sitting President of the United States to "tar" war dissenters in the South and to hang and dispossess dissenters in the North.
Jefferson was similarly hypocritical when it came to his views on "limited government." He arguably was the first imperial president, dispatching the Navy to battle the Barbary pirates before seeking congressional approval and then negotiating the purchase of the Louisiana Territories despite the absence of any "enumerated" power to that effect in the Constitution.
As even an admirer like Meacham was forced to acknowledge, Jefferson "believed ... in a limited government, except when he thought the nation was best served by a more expansive one." So, Jefferson's opposition to the Federalists' view of the Constitution was less philosophical than political. He, like them, adopted a pragmatic approach, accepting that the Constitution did not anticipate all challenges that might confront the country.
While one might commend Jefferson's flexibility - even though he decried similar actions by the Federalists - the public impression of Jeffersonian "small government" principles became more absolute and dangerous. As the nation's early decades progressed, Southern slaveholders seized on Jefferson's constitutional positions in defending the South's investment in slavery and its expansion to new states.
Jefferson had put a powerful stamp on the young country through his own two-term presidency and those of his Virginia colleagues James Madison and James Monroe. By end of this so-called Virginia Dynasty in 1825, the permanence of slavery had been burnt deeply into the flesh of not only the original Southern states but new ones to the west.
In the ensuing decades, as the national divisions over slavery sharpened, the South escalated its resistance to federal activism, opposing even non-controversial matters like disaster relief. As University of Virginia historian Brian Balogh noted in his book, A Government Out of Sight, Southerners asserted an extreme version of states' rights in the period from 1840 to 1860 that included preventing aid to disaster victims.
Balogh wrote that the South feared that "extending federal power" - even to help fellow Americans in desperate need - "might establish a precedent for national intervention in the slavery question," as Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne noted in a May 22 column.
The intensity of the South's hatred toward a reformist federal government exploded into warfare once an anti-slavery candidate, Republican Abraham Lincoln, won the presidency. The South rekindled Jefferson's old flirtations with nullification and secession, even though Lincoln was willing to continue tolerating slavery to save the Union.
But Southern politicians saw the handwriting on the wall - what Patrick Henry and George Mason had warned about - the inevitability of Northern dominance and the eventual demise of slavery.
The bloody Civil War ended slavery but it also stoked the bitterness of white Southerners who reacted to federal amendments granting citizenship rights to blacks by engaging in the terror of the Ku Klux Klan and broad resistance against Reconstruction. Finally, the North's determination to reshape the South as a place of racial equality dissipated and Union troops were withdrawn in 1877. A near century of Jim Crow laws, lynching of blacks and racial segregation ensued.
When the federal government finally moved to outlaw the South's apartheid system in the 1950s and 1960s, white racists mounted a new political resistance, this time by forsaking the Democratic Party, which had spearheaded the major civil rights laws of the era, and migrating in droves to the new Republican Party, which used racial code words to make white racists feel welcome.
The key subliminal message was opposition to "big guv-mit," an allusion that white racists understood to mean less interference with their suppression of black votes and black rights.
Second Reconstruction
Just as the civil rights victories of the 1960s were viewed as a resumption of America's march toward racial equality that was begun a century earlier with the Civil War, so too the petering out of this so-called Second Reconstruction paralleled the original Reconstruction, which ended also about century earlier.
With the emergence of right-wing Republican Ronald Reagan in the late 1970s, the white racist resistance to civil rights found another charismatic front man, who - like Jefferson - pushed the message of "small government" and "states' rights."
The Reagan era marked a reversal of the strides that America had taken after World War II to open mainstream society to black citizens. But it also signaled a retreat on other federal initiatives, including regulation of Wall Street and other industries.
So, besides worsening the financial standing of many blacks and other minorities, Reaganomics returned to a boom-and-bust economy of an earlier capitalism. The Great American Middle Class, which had emerged with the help of federal laws after World War II, began to shrink, though many whites, especially in the South, stuck with the Republicans because of the party's hostility to helping blacks.
But there was still a national push-and-pull over whether to resume a march toward a more equitable society or to embrace Jim Crow II, a more subtle and sophisticated arrangement for disenfranchising black and brown Americans.
Some political observers believed the election of Barack Obama as the first African-American president was a point of no return toward a multi-cultural America. However, instead of heralding a day of greater racial tolerance, Obama's presidency intensified the determination of right-wing whites to do whatever is necessary to make his presidency fail.
That battle appears likely to get even uglier this fall as the House Republican "majority" plots to shut down the federal government and even default on the nation's debt if the African-American president doesn't surrender to their political demands.
Pundits are sure to frame this donnybrook as an ideological fight over the principles of "small government," but behind that will be a replay of the South's historic insistence on maintaining white supremacy.
Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories in the 1980s for the Associated Press and Newsweek. His latest book, "Neck Deep: The Disastrous Presidency of George W. Bush," was written with two of his sons, Sam and Nat, and can be ordered at neckdeepbook.com. His two previous books, "Secrecy & Privilege: The Rise of the Bush Dynasty from Watergate to Iraq" and "Lost History: Contras, Cocaine, the Press & 'Project Truth'" are also available there.
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FOCUS | Political Dreaming in the Twenty-First Century |
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Thursday, 25 July 2013 12:07 |
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Chernus writes: "I bet you, like me, rarely talk to anyone about your dreams, even if you spend nearly all your time among politically active people working to improve the planet. Perhaps these days it feels somehow just too naive, too unrealistic, too embarrassing."
Martin Luther King at Washington DC's Lincoln Memorial in 1968. (photo: Francis Miller/Getty Images)
Political Dreaming in the Twenty-First Century
By Ira Chernus, TomDispatch
25 July 13
 ll right, I confess: I have a dream. I bet you do, too. I bet yours, like mine, is of a far, far better world not only for yourself and your loved ones, but for everyone on this beleaguered planet of ours.
And I bet you, like me, rarely talk to anyone about your dreams, even if you spend nearly all your time among politically active people working to improve the planet. Perhaps these days it feels somehow just too naïve, too unrealistic, too embarrassing. So instead, you focus your energy on the nuts and bolts of what's wrong with the world, what has to be fixed immediately.
I'm thinking that it's time to try a different approach - to keep feeling and voicing what Martin Luther King, Jr., called "the fierce urgency of now," but balance it with a dose of another political lesson he taught us: the irresistible power of dreaming.
I started reflecting on this when I returned from a long trip and found my email inbox crammed with hundreds of urgent messages from progressive groups and news sources, all sounding the alarm about the latest outrages, horrors, and disgraces, punctuated by an occasional call for a new policy to right at least one of the horrendous wrongs described and denounced.
Suddenly, I found myself thinking: Same old same old. The particular words keep changing, but the basic message and the music of our song of frustrated lament remain the same. We give the people the shocking facts and call them to action. And we wonder: Why don't they listen?
Then I looked at the calendar and noticed that the end of the summer would bring the 50th anniversary of Dr. King's greatest speech - and I realized what was missing from virtually all those email messages: Where was the dream? Where was the debate about what the world we seek would look like?
In most of them I could dimly sense that the writer might indeed have a vision of a better world. But it was always hidden somewhere between the lines, as if in the century when capitalism had "triumphed" and nowhere on Earth did there seem to be an alternative, the writer was ashamed to speak such things aloud.
Occupied Dreams
It wasn't always so. I remember how incensed I used to get in the 1960s when hearing the charge from the right: "Those hippie radicals. They don't know what they're for, only what they're against." "Those hippie radicals" knew what they were for: concrete changes in political policies that would turn their dreams into reality. And they talked constantly about the dreams as well as the policies.
It was Dr. King, above all, who inspired them. If, on that hot summer day in 1963, he had only denounced the evils of racism and proposed policy remedies, we would scarcely recall his speech half a century later. It holds a special place in our public memory only because he concluded by confessing his dream. Daring to be a public dreamer propelled him to greatness.
Now, I fear, we mostly talk only about what we're against. The just-give-'em-the-facts approach, so tilted toward denunciation (however well deserved), scarcely leaves room for any other impression.
There are still a few dreamers. You can find them among environmental activists, who give us science fiction-like descriptions of technology that can create a clean, sustainable environment for the whole biosphere. Except that isn't simply a fantasy: much of the technology already exists.
You can also find dreamers in religious communities, sharing the words of holy scriptures informed by eschatological visions of a better future. Occasionally, even a hard-boiled devotee of the facts like Noam Chomsky gives us a peek into his dream: a world without borders.
Not long ago, you could find dreamers occupying parks and public spaces across the country, short-lived as their moment was mainly because of an onslaught of police violence. For that brief season, they showed us that our dreams had been occupied and needed to be freed. In the past, though, movements have persisted much longer, even in the face of massive state violence.
The Occupy movement, however, emerged in a distinctly twenty-first-century world in which activists have long become accustomed to hiding their dreams. Without such shared dreams, political activism can easily feel like nothing more than an endless struggle against insurmountable odds - like being part of a small band of good guys besieged on every side. Who can blame them for feeling overwhelmed, exhausted, and hopeless?
Once most Occupiers were forced to retreat from public spaces, I suspect they, too, felt tired, cramped, hemmed in. Occupy could flourish only in the open, where people could share their dreams and imagine that all the boundaries that limit us might, in that open-air spirit, dissolve.
Realism and Dreams
Boundaries and limitations dissolving: that's not merely Chomsky's dream, it's the essence of all dreaming - to transcend the barriers that separate one person from another, one group or nation from another, and all humanity from its natural environment.
Dreaming is the realm of pure freedom. In dreams, we can see, do, or be anything. When our dreams are political, they help us sense what it might be like to escape the limits imposed by corporations, the state, the media, the advertisers, powerful forces of every kind. They help us imagine in new ways what is possible. In our dreams, none of the powers that be can touch us.
Freud said that every dream is the fulfillment of a wish, but political dreams aren't about our private desires. They are visions of the public realm being freed from the artificial divisions and constraints of the present. There, as in our nighttime dreaming, we experience whole new worlds, constantly changing, often in remarkable detail. Dreaming is the realm of permanent revolution that the great political visionaries from Thomas Jefferson to Che Guevara spoke of.
Constant change, pure freedom, the sense that anything is possible: combined, they can give us the daytime energy we need to work for change despite the obstacles and failures we inevitably face. When political life is infused with a dream, traveling without a map can feel exhilarating. In politics as in physiology, we must dream on a regular basis to restore our energy.
But a political dream is quite different from the dreaming of sleep because it happens while we are wide-awake. It may even make us feel more awake, allowing us to pierce the pre-packaged version of reality handed to us by the rich and powerful, who demand that we take their distorted version of how this place, this country, this planet works as "realism" itself.
When we see by the light of imagined futures, the present and its real possibilities come into clearer view, offering us a broader framework into which we can fit the chaotic pieces of current reality and the specific changes we are working for.
We don't have to wait for some distant future to see our dreams realized. The essence of the nonviolent action that Dr. King preached is to pierce the lies and distortions in the here and now by acting out, with our bodies, the authentic reality we have seen - to persist in what is really real (which is the best translation I know of Gandhi's term satyagraha).
So we should never let anyone dismiss our political dreams as "unrealistic." The world as we wish it to be is no mere fantasy. It is often our most reliable guide to knowing the truth.
Never Stop Dreaming
Whether they know it or not, everyone has their own dream of the world as it should be, and every dream is open to endless interpretation. Dr. King had his. I've got my interpretation of his. I've got my own, too. And you've got yours. The point is not to argue about who has the one "correct" dream, but to bring all of our dreams out of the closet and voice them openly, share our interpretations of each other's dreams, and start a conversation about the politics of dreaming.
When that kind of dream-sharing becomes part of political life, it begins to create myths. By "myth" I don't mean a lie. I mean a story that a community tells itself to interpret its life, to express the fundamentals of its worldview and values, to give meaning and hope to events great and small.
A myth, it is often said, is a collective dream. In myths, as in dreams, anything can happen. And once new myths start circulating, anything can indeed happen. There is a real chance that one myth (or several with much in common) will - by some mysterious, unpredictable process - grab hold of a big enough part of the body politic to stir it to action. The U.S saw that process at work in the 1770s (the dream of a republic), the 1860s (the dream of abolishing slavery), and the mid-1930s (the dream of basic economic security for all).
In the late 1960s, the dream of radical democracy and equality for all took hold in millions of American minds. It happened surprisingly fast. In 1963, when Dr. King gave the nation permission to share our dreams, few could have imagined how radically the political and cultural landscape would be reshaped by new myths within just a few years.
Of course, we should never confuse our dreams and myths with specific policy proposals. That would endanger the chances of achieving policies that could bring us a few steps closer to realizing those dreams. Policies, after all, are always political artifacts, produced by compromises between our dreams and the hard facts of the present.
The coming commemoration of the "dream" speech should remind us of Dr. King's recipe for meaningful political change: take one part facts to reveal the world's evils, one part policy proposals to remove those evils, one part shrewd political strategy, and one part dreams - shared aloud - and stir artfully into a political movement.
So don't stop shouting from the rooftops about everything that's outrageously wrong. Don't stop the grinding political work of changing specific policies. But take the time to show how your outrage, policies, and politics are propelled by your dreams. Share those dreams: talk or write or draw or sing or dance them. Describe the kind of world you are working for and show how it could be linked to policies and politics. And don't let anyone dismiss you as an "unrealistic dreamer."
Yes, it's true, the world will never look exactly like our mythic dreams. But we can't get to any better future unless we first imagine that future, together. A political dream is a magnet that pulls us toward our goals. It may also be an asymptote - a promised land that we can never reach. Yet even if we never get there, every dream takes us closer to a transformed reality.
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radley Manning released hundreds of thousands of government documents and files to Wikileaks, most famous among them the unclassified video Wikileaks dubbed, "Collateral Murder", a harrowing gun-sight view of an Apache helicopter slaughtering a couple of armed men and a much larger group of civilians on a Baghdad street in July, 2007.
