new since…

The March 28 cartoon by the brilliant Khalil Bendib.

Commenting on Barack Obama’s remarkable speech on race, Charles Kaiser says,

If Obama is elected president, it will be because he has been the first candidate in many years to try to appeal to what is best in America: “What is called for is nothing more, and nothing less, than what all the world’s great religions demand—that we do unto others as we would have them do unto us. Let us be our brother’s keeper, scripture tells us. Let us be our sister’s keeper. Let us find that common stake we all have in one another, and let our politics reflect that spirit as well.” Unlike the approach of every Republican candidate for president, that is a perfect example of the way religion should be used in American politics.

In Obama’s words today, you could hear the mystic chords of memory—an echo of the words of another man from Illinois with humble origins who understood the proper role of religion in politics. The spirit Obama embodied today was the same one Abraham Lincoln evoked in the peroration of his greatest speech in 1865:

“With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation’s wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.”

Well put, Mr. Kaiser. However, in Lincoln’s second inaugural address, just before he got to the “with malice toward none” bit quoted above, he had something else to say. As the Civil War approached its close, here are the words–almost inconceivable today in their eloquent bluntness–with which the American president dared to combine religion and race:

The Almighty has His own purposes. “Woe unto the world because of offenses; for it must needs be that offenses come, but woe to that man by whom the offense cometh.” If we shall suppose that American slavery is one of those offenses which, in the providence of God, must needs come, but which, having continued through His appointed time, He now wills to remove, and that He gives to both North and South this terrible war as the woe due to those by whom the offense came, shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a living God always ascribe to Him? Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said “the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.”

“God damn America,” indeed. It strikes me that old Abe was in some ways closer to Reverend Wright than to Obama–praiseworthy, thought-provoking, and indeed groundbreaking though Barack’s speech was.

To be fair, Lincoln made clear that he hoped God wouldn’t damn America, and the out-of-context snippets from Wright’s speeches we’re being bombarded with don’t make that clear (not that that proves anything one way or the other about Wright). Nonetheless, Lincoln said explicitly that if God did damn, or more precisely curse, America, in the cruelest possible way, that it would be just. More–that perhaps he was already doing so, in the form of the war that cost more American lives than any other. And that the North’s own centuries-long complicity in slavery and benefit from the wealth it extracted meant that the North, too, was liable to God’s justice. Had the North not had slavery, and then, after slowly abolishing it, kept the Southern slave system alive through its political acquiescence? Had Northern mills not woven Southern cotton? Does our economy not today rest in no small part on the backs of our own black and brown grunt laborers and on the cheap products of overseas sweatshops? Does it not further depend on the colossally murderous gunboat diplomacy to which Wright made such maligned mention, whereby countries around the world are kept open to American trade and business at the point of a knife?

I wonder what outcry must have greeted Lincoln, or would have had he confronted an American populace like the one of today. “He’s taking political correctness to a new extreme! Slavery isn’t my fault–I’m a Northerner and can’t even own slaves. Why should I be punished for it?”

He gives to both North and South this terrible war.

If God wills that it continue until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword…

the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.

These words are carved into the Lincoln Monument. They should be seared into the nation’s soul as a protection against the stupendous denial of collective responsibility into which we have fallen–and the vicious anger that greets any attempt to break through it.

PART 1: LINE IN THE SAND

It’s hard not to cheer the way Ron Paul is raising real issues when he discusses Iraq, Iran, and civil liberties in the Republican presidential race. He does it in a way that most of the Democratic candidates are not even doing, and he speaks clearly, forcefully, and eloquently against the united derision of his opponents. Indeed, there’s no reason NOT to cheer his raising these issues, and even to hope he does well enough in the primaries to raise them some more. It’s quite another matter to cheer Ron Paul.

Those of us whose memories stretch back a few years remember him as one of the most consistently right-wing congressmen in the Clinton and early W eras, before Bush’s fall from popularity transformed the political scene. Among the now-swollen ranks of the anti-war crowd, the young and the amnesiac at heart may not know this. Hence the alarming prospect of a candidate whose base of support continues to be ultra-right gaining traction, and perhaps even votes, from the progressive community.

But it’s not just the easily enthused who are catching the Ron Paul bug. No less sharp a mind than Glenn Greenwald has declared him a “principled conservative.” I’m not quite sure what that would mean–selling out the people to corporate interests the good, old-fashioned, Barry Goldwater way? Never disenfranchising without a constitutional rationalization? Jingoism with a conscience? Anyway, presumably being principled is supposed to exclude outright bigotry.

Unfortunately for those who crave to find something redeeming within the Republican party, Ron Paul has a history of vitriolic racism. Moreover, this history, far from being anomalous, is seamlessly enmeshed within a vicious Social Darwinism that is the basis for Paul’s whole worldview, of which his libertarian “principles” are no more than an eloquent expression.

In 1992, Ron Paul, then an ex-congressman, published a piece on the Rodney King riots in his 8-page monthly newsletter, a zine with roughly 7,000 subscribers. In rhetoric far more resonant with the “values” campaign of the Republican party four years later than with what most people associate with libertarianism, the piece gets going with this shot:

We now know that we are under assault from thugs and revolutionaries who hate Euro-American civilization and everything it stands for: private property, material success for those who earn it, and Christian morality.

As a result of the riots’ disruption of transit, the newsletter continues, “White people found themselves walking alone many blocks to get home, running the minefield of black gangs out for their blood. ” Perhaps, you say, the author is merely pointing to the existence of violently anti-white gangs among L.A. blacks at that time? But no, for the piece goes on to refer to “the anti-white ideology in the thoroughly racist black community.” Lest anyone think he only despises “underclass” blacks, the author later says this:

They wanted the cops jailed and the murderers, arsonists, and thieves set free. This came not from the underclass, but from middle-class blacks and black political activists, who hold opinions not markedly different from the Crips and the Bloods. But the Crips and the Bloods, it turns out, have been “misunderstood,” according to Ted Koppel who interviewed two of these animals. After spending several hours with them, he decided he liked them. Unfortunately, they didn’t pull him out of his stretch limousine. [In this and all subsequent quotations, emphasis is added.]

Throughout, the piece excoriates the media for taking the side of black people, criminals, and the welfare state–bizarrely enough considering where the media actually were in 1992, and today. But the author, with populist faith that the common people share his racism, continues optimistically:

Regardless of what the media tell us, most white Americans are not going to believe that they are at fault for what blacks have done to cities across America. The professional blacks may have cowed the elites, but good sense survives at the grass roots. Many more are going to have difficulty avoiding the belief that our country is being destroyed by a group of actual and potential terrorists — and they can be identified by the color of their skin. This conclusion may not be entirely fair, but it is, for many, entirely unavoidable.

…The [National Center on Institutions and Alternatives] reports that 70% of all black men in Washington are arrested before they reach the age of 35, and 85% are arrested at some point in their lives. Given the inefficiencies of what D.C. laughingly calls the “criminal justice system,” I think we can safely assume that 95% of the black males in that city are semi-criminal or entirely criminal.

…We are constantly told that it is evil to be afraid of black men, but it is hardly irrational.

In conclusion, the author bewails the fact that

The riots, burning, looting, and murders are only a continuation of 30 years of racial politics…. Blacks have “civil rights,” preferences, set-asides for government contracts, gerrymandered voting districts, black bureaucracies, black mayors, black curricula in schools, black beauty contests, black tv shows, black tv anchors, black scholorships and colleges, hate crime laws, and public humiliation for anyone who dares question the black agenda.

Presumably, the fact that African-Americans sometimes get hired as TV anchors and sometimes get elected as mayors, that some TV shows have heavily black casts, and that most of the government officials in some mostly black communities are themselves black, strikes the author of this piece as grossly unfair…whereas the existence of white TV anchors, white mayors, and white-dominated TV shows and bureaucracies is perfectly fine. For the author, whatever whites have is prima facie evidence that they deserve it; whatever blacks have is prima facie evidence that they were given something they didn’t deserve.

Now, who WAS the mysterious author of this piece? On the face of it, it might seem very simple. The material appeared in the Ron Paul Political Report, a source acknowledged when it was preserved for posterity by a known white supremacist named Dan Gannon, who posted it on the web. No author is mentioned. Any reasonable person would conclude that Ron Paul was the author.

In 1996, when Paul was again running for congress, the Houston Chronicle exposed this piece. According to the Chronicle, Paul responded that “he opposes racism and that his written commentaries about blacks came in the context of ‘current events and statistical reports of the time.’” Furthermore, the Chronicle reported, “A campaign spokesman for Paul said statements about the fear of black males mirror pronouncements by black leaders such as the Rev. Jesse Jackson, who has decried the spread of urban crime.”

In other words, he copped to writing the piece, then tried to defend it as non-racist, hoping few people would bother to look at the nitty-gritty of its contents, which aren’t exactly reminiscent of Jesse Jackson.

In 2001, however, Paul told Texas Monthly that he hadn’t written the piece: “I could never say this in the campaign, but those words weren’t really written by me. It wasn’t my language at all. Other people help me with my newsletter as I travel around.” Based on this, Paul’s fans have rushed to exonerate him. “Don’t say he wrote that piece without knowing THE FACTS. The facts PROVE HIM INNOCENT!” Therefore, the whole issue can be dismissed, and the lovefest can resume.

This suggests a Monty Pythonesque courtroom scenario. “How do you plead?” “Not guilty.” “All right,” says the judge, “case dismissed!” According to the reasoning of Ron Paul’s exonerators, if you say you didn’t do something, that’s enough.

In actual fact, Paul’s 2001 denial has little evidentiary value. Read the rest of this entry »

The human race will one day split into two separate species, an attractive, intelligent ruling elite and an underclass of dim-witted, ugly goblin-like creatures, according to a top scientist.

He only got two things wrong.

One, this split has already occurred.

Two, it’s the ugly dimwits who are the ruling elite. The intelligent people have been made into the underclass.

Instead of wasting his time and ours using his scientific credentials to present bogus speculation as “hard” science, this guy might want to check out a “sci-fi” movie from the 80′s that tells it like it is…right now.

Or just take a look at the people who are actually running the New World Order.

To secure to each labourer the whole product of his labour, or as nearly as possible, is a most worthy object of any good government.

–Abraham Lincoln, 1847

Bet you never knew ole Abe was a Commie, didya? The labor theory of value rears its non-grata-since-the-end-of-the-Cold-War head — and on the side of the worker, no less! What a subversive, anti-American punk this guy must have been!

Here are some other good Abe quotes:

It is an old maxim and a very sound one, that he that dances should always pay the fiddler. Now, sir, in the present case, if any gentlemen, whose money is a burden to them, choose to lead off a dance, I am decidedly opposed to the people’s money being used to pay the fiddler. No one can doubt that the examination proposed by this resolution, must cost the State some ten or twelve thousand dollars; and all this to settle a question in which the people have no interest, and about which they care nothing. These capitalists generally act harmoniously, and in concert, to fleece the people, and now, that they have got into a quarrel with themselves, we are called upon to appropriate the people’s money to settle the quarrel.

–from his “Speech in the Illinois Legislature Concerning the State Bank,” January 11, 1837 (emphasis added)

Labor is prior to and independent of capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital and deserves much the higher consideration. Capital has its rights, which are worthy of protection as any other rights.

I guess he wasn’t a Commie after all. He thought capital had rights — why, I don’t know. And yet, why is it that no one says such things any more?

Incontestably, alas, most people are not, in action, worth very much; and yet, every human being is an unprecedented miracle. One tries to treat them as the miracles they are, while trying to protect oneself against the disasters they’ve become. This is not very different from the act of faith demanded by all those marches and petitions while Martin [Luther King] was still alive. One could scarcely be deluded by Americans anymore, one scarcely dared expect anything from the great, vast, blank generality; and yet one was compelled to demand of Americans–and for their sakes, after all–a generosity, a clarity, and a nobility which they did not dream of demanding of themselves. Part of the error was irreducible, in that the marchers and petitioners were forced to suppose the existence of an entity which, when the chips were down, could not be located–i.e., there are no American people yet…. Perhaps, however, the moral of the story (and the hope of the world) lies in what one demands, not of others, but of oneself. However that may be, the failure and the betrayal are in the record book forever, and sum up, and condemn, forever, those descendants of a barbarous Europe who arbitrarily and arrogantly reserve the right to call themselves Americans.

–James Baldwin

Libertarianism was the darling ideology of the nineties — a decade when bread-and-butter progressivism was considered oh-so-passe. Nothing beats it if you want to pose as a rebel without ruffling any feathers within the corporate world order.

The attraction libertarianism has for a good many liberals either indicates their ignorance or is very revealing about their true politics. But it isn’t sufficient to denounce libertarianism on the grounds that, “I’m a liberal/progressive/leftist, so I’m for government.” Left/right isn’t pro/anti-government, and the libertarian promise to get the government out of your life is a lie.

Under libertarianism, when you sign a work contract that does not protect you in any way because you need to put food on the table, get injured on a job with no safety rules, get fired with no recourse, get evicted with no advance notice, and try to sneak your family onto someone’s property to get a night’s sleep, you’ll find out in a hurry how the government “stays out of your life” — just as soon as the cops get there.

What a libertarian government stays out of is protecting people against anything short of outright bodily assault. It is property that libertarianism is really designed to protect, and to that end, a libertarian government is just as mean as it is lean — small in size, but as ruthless and violent as any other government, with fewer restraints.

For most people, libertarian “economic freedom” simply means wage slavery.

Of course — people will point out — this stuff is already true under capitalism. Quite so, with some qualifications. It’s strange that some people think this is an argument in libertarianism’s favor.

Libertarianism takes capitalism in all its inequality and oppressiveness and makes it harsher and more absolute. It attacks every restraint imposed on capitalism by workers, consumers, environmentalists, political parties, and so forth, in the name of an absolutist version of property rights and contractual obligations that, although stated in terms that sound equal and fair, is actually ultra-favorable to the rich — those who already have property and are already in a good contractual bargaining position.

I mean, think about it…suppose you were living in a medieval village with standards of hygiene that were, well, medieval. To avoid the filthy streets, would you prefer to live inside the outhouse? Maybe you would, if you’d lived in filth for so long you thought shit was good for you.

Who knows…people are strange. If you can believe shit is good for you, you might even believe capitalism’s good for you.

The rest of us can hope for indoor plumbing. Or socialism — an almost forgotten concept no government ever tried to implement. (The name socialism, of course, used to be very popular in some parts of the world.) Or, if that’s too much for you, stitch up the social safety net, and keep your needles out — because the capitalists are going to keep ripping it open every chance they get.

Or rather, candiDATE, with no ‘s.’ Tom Tancredo, R-Col., is the sole Republican candidate to address the NAACP convention. He was flanked by lecterns with placards for nine other GOP candidates — all no-shows. Every invited Democrat showed up.

As Jeffrey Feldman remarks, “One has to wonder why this photo was not the lead on every morning show and on the front pages of every morning newspaper in America.”

Two right-on-the-money rebuttals: first off, Moyers’ impassioned fire. Then, Greenwald’s legal, logical ice. Both pieces are brilliant.

All Glenn Greenwald ever does, really, is uphold the sense of political decency, propriety, legality, and respect for the rules and for basic fairness that were, believe it or not, widely accepted by the American establishment as recently as the post-Watergate era (1975-78). Granted, they didn’t consistently practice what they preached, and huge areas — such as all U.S. operations overseas, and certain assassinations that had occured back home — were exempt from any concept of fairness, decency, or lawfulness whatever. But debates within the U.S. were, provided they stayed within certain bourgeois, pro-Cold-War bounds, protected by hard-fought-for rules of fairness — as were the contestations between the two major parties — as was ideological struggle within a rather broadly defined mainstream, from strong liberal to strong conservative. (It wasn’t until the Reagan era that we were indoctrinated through endless repetition with the idea that liberalism isn’t part of the mainstream. Most liberals and progressives, seeming to almost relish their faux unpopularity, did not strongly contest this nonsense at the time, with disastrous consequences ever since.)

And the corporate media, in those same post-Watergate times — at least the respectable, anti-tabloid media — adhered to strict rules of neutrality in news reporting that have since gone by the boards. (Imagine news stories that don’t assert what is likely to win public support or how the ongoing struggles they chronicle are likely to come out, that don’t make use of the passive voice or appeals to anonymous “experts” to attribute authoritative opinions, and that don’t strive for false balance — news stories that, even when they decontextualize or fail to dig enough, more or less report facts and not opinions. Yes, Virginia, many of the basic principles of journalistic integrity progressives now fight a 175-degree uphill battle for were once part of the establishment media’s own rulebook.) These rules did not prevent bias — even massive bias — in sourcing and framing assumptions, for example — but they did put some very real limits on it.

Don’t get me wrong — the rules of fairness under which public discourse operated in this country at that time were perfectly compatible with, and indeed conducive to, the capitalist order. Given the destructiveness which American imperalism had already achieved by 1975 (which Greenwald, significantly, does not criticize), it might not seem like much to aspire to get back to a comparable level of inconsistently principled public discourse. But we’ve fallen so very far that in fact it is a huge undertaking, and a desperately needed one to keep us from outright fascism. (No, North Carolina, we are not already in a state of fascism — or I’d be arrested for writing this — and not merely, as is likely, spied upon.)

Like Greenwald, Bill Moyers also, in his way, upholds the old sense of honor — the one that eventually forced out Agnew and Nixon, and that caused a backlash against their repressive machinations, not just among the great unwashed, but even among the freshly scrubbed of Washington opinion-setters (who already viewed said unwashed with the absolute condescension of an elite whose members know their names will always outweigh their lack of talent). Still less than Greenwald would Moyers ever question American imperalism as such. After all, he was the lackey of the president who lied us into Vietnam. In Moyers’ field of vision, such an act is only an excess, not a monstrosity like those committed by “our” foes.

Yet in opposing these excesses, folks like Moyers and Greenwald sometimes see with brutal clarity the exact place where tyranny is now advancing into yet another former stronghold of those who, however waveringly, resist it. My confirmed impression, from hanging out with my fellow leftists, is that most leftists most of the time don’t see this stuff for what it is, dismissing it as fiddling over crumbs. It is not.

To defend these quite unpurist strongholds, good radicals must fight full-shouldered beside our liberal brothers and sisters — even if in other areas, especially their nationalism, they are themselves part of the problem.

But GOP Representatives on Court vote 4-1 in Bush’s favor

A major U.S. Supreme Court ruling this week concerning the EPA’s regulation of greenhouse gases that affect global warning came down as a split decision. The four Justices on the Court unanimously ruled that Bush’s EPA had violated the Clean Air Act by refusing to control vehicle emissions that contribute to global warming. However, the five officials who represent the Republican Party on the Court voted 4-1, with Party Representative Kennedy dissenting, that the EPA was entitled to ignore such emissions if it wants to.

All across the Beltway, analysts agreed that this ruling sent a mixed signal. Those charged with producing just decisions on the Court and upholding the Constitution took a strong stand against Acting President Bush. These “Justices” include two appointed by Democratic presidents (Ginsburg and Breyer) and two by Republicans (Stevens and Souter). But the Acting President found strong support among those whose role is to make sure that the Court gives a voice to the Republican Party’s official positions.

“On the one hand, Bush will be under strong pressure to act on the Justices’ ruling,” one celebrity pundit said, “especially since their position was actually upheld by a majority of the whole Court. On the other hand, Bush can always point to the GOP reps and say, ‘Well hey, 80% of those people supported me.’ That’s not easy to argue with, especially when so many conservatives commentators have effectively demonstrated that justice has a liberal bias.”

Another pundit, equally widely quoted by those who like to appear impressive, agreed. “It’s not like the media, where you also have a split between those who represent the Right and those who are supposed to be fair. In the media, those who are supposed to be fair pretty much cave in to the Right at every opportunity anyway. But it seems like the four Justices make some effort to actually be fair, at least within the limits of the system. They sometimes rule against even very large corporations, with effectively unlimited pockets. That’s why so many people have questioned whether Justices should continue to occupy nearly half the seats on the Court.”

It was the five GOP Representatives who in December 2000 awarded Bush the presidency, or the right to pretend to it, in the first place, despite the fact that he wasn’t elected, saving American democracy from the dreaded scourge of itself in the celebrated Bush v. Gore decision, despite the opposition of all four Justices. The legal reasoning behind the ruling established the fundamental American principle that the appearance of legitimacy must always be preserved, even at the cost of making actual legitimacy impossible.

After Bush was re-selected as Acting President in 2004 by means of extensive electoral fraud, two of the Bush v. Gore majority left the Court and were replaced by Representatives Alito and Roberts. Some objected that they had no right to serve on the Court, having never been appointed by an actual President. But few heeded this objection since, elected or not, Bush was clearly still the leading figure in the Republican Party, giving him the responsibility of ensuring it continues to get its fair share of five seats out of nine on the Court.

The other three Representatives who made up the Bush v. Gore majority, Kennedy, Scalia, and Thomas, have continued to serve on the Court as Party Representatives to this very day.