Saturday, 08 September 2012 10:51By Tolu Olorunda, CounterPunch | Op-Ed
(Photo: The White House / Flickr)Power is self-sufficient, a replete possession, and must be maintained by whatever agency is required.
—Wole Soyinka, Climate of Fear [1]
Wars, especially undeclared ones, invariably boost the powers and status of the president as commander-in-chief. ... A president, however feckless or imposing, is transformed, rendered larger than life. He becomes the supreme commander, the unchallengeable leader and the nation incarnate.—Sheldon Wolin, Democracy Incorporated[2]
[Author’s note: This essay is an excerpt from The Substance of Truth (Rotterdam: Sense Publishers, 2011). It is offered for reflection on the day the president would, should all go right, accept his party’s nomination for re-election. The begging question, then, is four more years of what? Neoliberalism and imperialism unhinged?]
On January 20, 2009, President Barack Obama received the mantle worn for eight years by George W. Bush, and thereupon swore a new course in domestic andforeign policies, calling in the Middle East for "a new way forward, based on mutual interest and mutual respect," and assuring an economic model on the domesticfront that "helps families find jobs at a decent wage, care they can afford, [and] a retirement that is dignified."[3]
It's been more than two years now, and the tight rope upon which many balanced their hopes—for a truly different and transformative model of governance—has lost a good deal of fidelity, as the Obama Administration proves day after day a determined unwillingness to stray far from many of the policies that earned the ire of millions, the world over, while his predecessor held the fort. From the Justice Department, to the Money Department, to the War Department, promises delivered on the campaign trail that elevated the spirits of citizens, Left and Right, and inspired a political uprising—following eight harrowing years of hubristic, neoliberal rituals—haven't met the early manifestation many expected with a new face and new mind manning the White House. So, now, one question widely abounds: Who is the real Obama? But to ask "is to drift towards the illusion of thinking there is one—as opposed to an infinitely mutable organism, endlessly adapting to political circumstance, with an eye eternally cocked to the main chance."[4]
Asked often why he, then a one-term U.S. Senator, chose to run for a post many believed he lacked qualifications for, Obama invoked Reverend Martin Luther KingJr.'s exhortation, "the fierce urgency of now," which King applied in a bold April 4, 1967, speech against the Vietnam War efforts of the LBJ Administration, refusingto surrender to "the apathy of conformist thought within one's own bosom and in the surrounding world." Nothing short of "a radical revolution of values," Kingordered, to force a rapid "shift from a thing-oriented society to a person-oriented society." Societies on the brink of defeat against spiritual death need no pointing out,he said. They celebrate "machines and computers, profit motives and property rights" as "more important [than] people." They make like ants and cower before thetrampling wrath of "the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism."
Not one jot or tittle of King's words needs revision 40 years after, even with a Black president warming the highest seat of the land. And if Barack Obama would be remembered years later as a president with rare rigor to "go out into a sometimes hostile world declaring eternal hostility to poverty, racism, and militarism,"[5] hewould have to substitute strikingly different agendas for those currently underway in the first two years of his Administration. So far, the triple giants haven't faced much opposition.
RACISM
On the travails of communities of color, Barack Obama hasn't put forth much. The Black community especially has been blessed with very little from the man 96% ofits voting bloc threw weight behind—and shoveled through snowy, ice-cold weather to see sworn in on Inauguration Day. Of the disparate conditions afflicting Blackand Brown people, the Obama Administration has found very little desire to address.
On the campaign trail, and even before his February 2007 announcement bid for the presidency, Obama's message to Black America differed little from conservative calls for Personal Responsibility, even with glaring institutional and structural barriers obstructing millions of Blacks and Browns from upward mobility. Obama chided poor Black women for feeding their kids leftover Popeyes chicken meals; in sweeping generalization, he scolded Black men for watching SportsCenter excessively (even though later admitting, on several accounts, SportsCenter was his favorite program); he bashed Black boys who fostered dreams of one day playing basketball professionally or making money as rappers.
On economic inequity, nothing better to be said. His analyses find deeper solidarity in neoconservative circles than liberal enclaves. Speaking March 2007 at thehistorical Brown Chapel A.M.E. Church in Selma, Alabama, Obama offered a narrative no White politician could let slip off without facing indignation more fiery than hell harbors. He proclaimed the Civil Rights Movement had brought Black people "90% of the way" to equality, but "[w]e still got that 10% in order to cross over to the other side."[6] That Black net worth only equals 10 cents for every dollar of White net worth failed to factor into this strange interpretation of history and reality. That Blacks barely earn 62 cents for every dollar of White income found no vindication in his sermon;[7] neither did Blacks, despite only 14% of the U.S. population, facing incarceration rates seven times higher than Whites.[8]
A month later, Obama lectured a group of Black South Carolina state legislators on how a "good economic development plan for our community would be if wemake sure folks weren't throwing their garbage out of their cars."[9] Not racist loan practices, not back-bending poverty, not unanswerable greed in government halls, but littering—pushes Black communities farther from self-sufficiency.
Two years earlier, right after Hurricane Katrina had made landfall, Obama stood up to those—in one poll, 84% of the Black community[10]—who held without a shadow of doubt, based on overwhelming evidence, that Race and Class rendered the victims less concerning to their government. "There's been much attention in the press about the fact that those who were left behind in New Orleans were disproportionately poor and African American," Obama observed in a statement. "I've said publicly that I do not subscribe to the notion that the painfully slow response of FEMA and the Department of Homeland Security was racially-based. The ineptitude was colorblind."[11]
To great delight of many White centrists and conservatives, Obama repeatedly told the Black poor their conditions could be rectified if only they decided at once toput away childish things and pull themselves out of social and financial misery with the bootstraps of Personal Responsibility. Prominent White conservatives likeGeorge F. Will, Charles Krauthammer, and William Bennett respectively commended Obama early on for refusing to "subscribe to a racial narrative of strife and oppression," for choosing not to "run as a candidate of minority grievance," for never bringing "race into it."[12] But White liberal elites also took great pride in the Black-bashing campaign Obama's team tried to woo skeptical middle-class Whites with. Newsweek editor Jonathan Alter doled out a disturbing contribution in March 2008, suggesting Obama's "most exciting potential for moral leadership could be in the African-American community." After all, he had achieved the impossible—telling them, above all else, "they need to stop being homophobic and anti-Semitic."[13]
In governance, many of Obama's racial philosophies have produced pernicious policies. Asked April 29, 2009, his 100th day in office, "what specific policies can you point to that will target ... communities [of color] and what's the timetable for us to see tangible results"? Obama clung to the farcical fantasy that a rising tide lifts all boats—"my general approach is that if the economy is strong, that will lift all boats as long as it is also supported by, for example, strategies around college affordability and job training, tax cuts for working families (as opposed to the wealthiest) that level the playing field and ensure bottom-up economic growth."[14]
Not long after inauguration, Obama unveiled an education budget which cut $85 million for Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs)—of particular pain at a time when HBCUs, responsible for nearly 20% of undergraduate degrees for Black students, face steeper hurdles from the economic tumbledown. American Indian Tribal Colleges as well fell victim to the budget scalpel.[15]
Under Obama's watch, Black men still swell up the prison-industrial complex at rates disproportionate to Whites, and often for crimes nonviolent. Very little address from the President and his Justice Department has attended this ever-expanding tumor. And while appointees like Timothy Geithner and Thomas Daschle faced nolegal scrutiny for their tax troubles, Black men—as the tragic case of Detroit activist Reverend Edward Pinkney reminds—forever face the wrath of the court system for infractions like invoking biblical scripture to slam a judge.[16]
When his attorney general, Eric Holder, condemned the cowardly conscience of many who won't acknowledge racial disparities, Obama admonished him coldly: "We've made enormous progress and we shouldn't lose sight of that."[17]
In defense, Obama has enjoyed the acquiescence of a Black leadership in crisis (and denial), which for several reasons remains reluctant to challenge the presidentpublicly on any matters. On the one hand, they should hate to grant the Glenn Becks and Rush Limbaughs of the Lunatic Right any additional ammo in blasting away at the president for just about anything; and on the other, they've convinced themselves any popular backlash from the Black community against the First Black President could seal the fate of all Black aspirants for at least another century—that White voters would be let off the hook and feel no more guilt-produced pressure to push another Black person in there, to make up for the past. The Black leadership elite and Black mainstream press don't intend to hold the First Black President's feet to the fire, even if his policies only further subjugate communities they claim to serve and represent.
Ralph Ellison saw this storm blowing five decades ago. "I would like to see a qualified Negro President of the United States," he confessed. "But I suspect that even if this were today possible, the necessities of the office would shape his actions far more than his racial identity."[18] These necessities, unfortunately, have stamped on them the trumpeting of neoliberal economic initiatives at the expense of communities of color.
EXTREME MATERIALISM...'
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