Principled Progressive

Ah, this is the winter of our political discontent, caught in the limbo between the ending of an 8 year presidency and the inauguration of another which could last for another 8. There is a terrible disconnect between the continuity of our national problems, both domestic and the foreign, and the possible or probable alteration of the policies by means of which we have dealt (or failed to deal) with those problems. The retiring or lame duck administration is reluctant to undertake any policies (except perhaps for matters like presidential pardons or the alteration of administrative environmental regulations) that may be abandoned as soon as the incoming administration takes over. For their part, the administration-to-be is unlikely to propose policy changes before they have taken the reins of power by means of which they can hopefully secure adoption of those proposals. As Barack Obama said in refusing to comment on the current Israeli assault on Gaza: “there’s only one President at a time.” I would argue, to contrary, that in this as every political transition period in U.S. history there is NO President, no one with the power and the motive to assume definitive leadership in dealing with our problems, both domestic and foreign.

This political limbo is of course most acutely expressed in the area of foreign policy, in which there seems to be a conventional understanding that, in such matters, the United States must stand united in support of a singular version of U.S. foreign policy. If a U.S. leader like Jesse Jackson or (more currently) Cynthia McKinney makes a public foray into a version du jour of the endless conflict in the Middle East, that act will be treated as a violation of that understanding of public unanimity despite differences in viewpoint or intention of different persons and parties. The Gaza situation demonstrates the deadly effect of the transition limbo: an effect of which, I have no doubt, Israeli leaders were quite aware and of which they were quite prepared to take advantage, based on the timing of an invasion that could have come almost anytime since Gaza exercised its sovereign right to choose a government controlled by Hamas three years ago. The Bush administration, engaged in the proverbial “rush for the bus” in which sports teams out of title contention at the end of the season play out their schedule with minimal interest or involvement, is hardly likely to interrupt its bogus victory lap in the Middle East by getting involved in anything beyond moral sputterings about how this stuff has got to stop.

Well, that’s the lame duck part of the limbo; the reluctant transition is a little harder to explain. Obama, his chosen cabinet and staff and most of his supporters seem to be continuing their agenda of muting any criticism or even positive suggestion for the new administration on the apparent assumption that, like “nothing was the same” (supposedly but wrongly believed) after 9/11/01, nothing will be the same after 1/20/09 as morning comes (again) to America and we get a “fresh start” on our problems,. both domestic and foreign.

Where domestic policy is concerned, there is actually little pretense that the economic “crisis” into which we have entered will be much different before and after 1/20, and Obama

has made it abundantly clear that he will not act on a chaste “one President at a time” assumption as his administration has moved forward with bailout and economic stimulus in recognition, perhaps, of the fact that there will be only a cosmetic change as the neo-conservatives of the Bush administration are replaced by the Clinton-era Chicago school economists of the Obama one.

In foreign policy the Obama administration could and urgently should take the same kind of activist role that they have adopted in the area of domestic economic policy. True, Obama cannot and perhaps should not advocate specific U.S. military actions like (what needs to be done) the denial to Israel of the military hardware used in the assault on Gaza. But he definitely could and should articulate a principle of foreign policy with regard to the Middle East that looks like something more than the “lopsided” support of Israel which some Arab leaders are accusing Condoleezza Rice of displaying. The Israeli/Palestinian conflict can never be settled by acknowledging an unquestioning right of Israel to commit whatever acts it chooses against what it deems as existential threats by Palestinians. Yet this is exactly what Bush and Obama, Rice and Hillary Clinton, almost with one voice, have pronounced as the sole basis of U.S. Middle East “policy.”

Please don’t tell me that it will be “soon enough” after Obama takes office for him to articulate and practice a less lop-sided “doctrine.” In its dealing with Jewish settlers and Palestinians in the West Bank, Israel has perfected the fine art of creating “facts on the ground” (i.e, settlers located in Arab land) with which governments will have to deal after the fact. As Obama will “inherit” the consequences of ongoing foreign policy decisions (or non-decisions) of the Bush administration (remember how JFK “inherited” the already-planned Bay of Pigs operation from Eisenhower?), he has every motive and civic responsibility to begin to exercise leadership in articulating a post-imperialist policy that will embrace conflict resolution not only in the Middle East but wherever the tentacles of U.S. imperialism are spread. People throughout the Arab world, many of whom were treated by Al Jazeera with juxtaposed images of the “pecs and abs” displayed by Obama at his Hawaiian vacation idyll with images of Gaza under siege and attack are looking exactly for that leadership. The Americans who elected him to the presidency should expect no less.

Jerry D. Rose - Editor, The Sun State Activist

Originally posted on December 30 at Black Agenda Report

By BAR staff

Former Georgia Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney has called upon President-Elect Barack Obama to “please, say something about the humanitarian crisis that is being experienced by the Palestinian people, by the people of Gaza.” McKinney spoke to CNN news from the Lebanese city of Tyre, where she had debarked from the relief vessel Dignity after it was rammed on the high seas by an Israeli patrol boat, early Tuesday morning. Passengers also report the Israelis fired machine guns into the water near their ship.

McKinney was among the passengers on an attempted voyage from the island of Cyprus to Gaza, where Israeli bombs and missiles have killed hundreds of Palestinians, including many civilians, since Saturday. The Dignity carried three tons of medical supplies and a number of doctors prepared to treat the more than 1,000 Gazans wounded in the Israeli attacks. The 66-foot craft had made two previous humanitarian relief trips to Gaza since the summer. Israel has blocked food, medicines and other essentials from entering Gaza in a campaign of collective punishment against the 1.5 million Palestinians that live there under a Hamas Party administration.

President-Elect Obama has been silent on the Israeli attacks, while President George Bush has supported Israel’s actions.

“I would like to ask my former colleagues in the United States Congress to stop sending weapons of mass destruction around the world,” said McKinney, who was the Green Party’s presidential candidate in November. “As we are about to celebrate Dr. Martin Luther King Jr’s birthday, let us remember what he said. He said that the United States is the greatest purveyor of violence on the planet. And guess what: we experienced a little bit of that violence, because the weapons that are being used by Israel are weapons that were supplied by the United States government.”

A CNN reporter who accompanied the passengers and crew of the Dignity confirmed that the boat “was sailing with full lights” when “one of the Israeli patrol boats, with no lights on, rammed the Dignity, hard.”

Israel blames the collision on the relief vessel.

Said McKinney: “Our boat was rammed three times, twice in the front, once on the side…. What the Israelis are saying is outright disinformation.”

McKinney compared the Israeli action against the Dignity to the attack on a U.S. naval vessel during the 1967 Arab-Israeli War. “I recall that there was another boat that was attacked by Israelis, and it was the U.S.S Liberty.” Thirty-four crewmen died and 170 were wounded by fire from Israeli planes and torpedo boats. The Israelis claim it was a case of mistaken identity. “People would like to forget about the U.S.S. Liberty,” said McKinney, “but I haven’t forgotten about it and the people who were on that ship have not forgotten what happened to them.”

This article is posted with permission of the editors of Black Agenda Report.

By David Bruderly

To the editors of the Ocala (FL) Star Banner and the Gainesville (FL) Sun:

Regarding your news article today that features Congressman Clifford Stearns (R., 6th congressional district, Florida) posturing as the “Tough Cop” on the Wall Street fiasco, Stearns may act like the tough cop but in the real world he has voted repeatedly against enforcement of security laws and accountability. Under his watchful protection financiers and shysters have repeatedly exploited investors since the mid-1990’s. Mr. Stearns is not the benevolent representative of the people and tough advocate of law and order that he now pretends to be; just the opposite.

The facts are well documented; the easiest source is a book called “Take on the Street” by Arthur Levitt; it was published in 2002. Mr. Levitt was appointed Chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission in 1993; he then spent most of his tenure in office fighting off attacks on his agency regulatory powers by Congressman Clifford Stearns and other members of the Republican controlled US House of Representatives. The book documents how our very own Clifford Stearns took extraordinary action to gut the oversight, regulatory and enforcement powers of the Securities and Exchange Commission.

I know your budgets for investigative reporting are non-existent, but in the interest of fair and balanced reporting, the Star Banner and the Sun should not allow “tough Cop” posturing by Congressman Stearns without also disclosing his actual performance on these matters while in office. Ask him to explain his votes to gut the SEC; disclose his comments from the Congressional Record. It is a fact that Mr. Stearns and his allies took extraordinary action in the 1990’s to severely weaken the regulatory oversight and enforcement capabilities of the Securities and Exchange Commission. If Stearns had not taken these deliberate and irresponsible actions American investors would not have been hammered by the prolonged and consistent financial corruption that is only now so obvious.
When he had a chance to be a positive agent of change, Stearns did NOT take on the Street; instead he gave Wall Street shysters cart blanche to separate as many people from their hard earned investments as possible.

Please report all the relevant facts on these matters, not just posturing intended to assure a congressman’s re-election in 2010.

David E. Bruderly is CEO of Wise Gas Inc. and owns renewable energy firm Clean Power Engineering

He has previously been the Democratic nominee for Congress running against Stearns in Florida’s 6th congressional district.

Mark it down for the sake of history: 4:30 P.M. Tuesday December 23, 2008 and at this unusually early time I have done the last bit of my Christmas shopping: seems that everything I’m giving is either something to eat or something with which to cook. As the Checkers ads say, “you gotta eat” and those of us who have the wherewithal to do so will eat, and of course do what we can to facilitate the possibility of eating for everyone in the world.

Which brings me to the theme of this posting: the stereotyped yearning for peace on earth that is the inspiration of this season in whatever weird and convoluted ways that inspiration may be expressed. But if we define peace is simply the absence of warfare, we miss I think the message of Christ and of the exemplars of so many other faiths. This is expressed in the cliché “there can be no peace without justice.” Right now we are assessing the likelihood that a new Administration in Washington can bring us any closer to the cessation of warfare: will the de-surge of military activity in Iraq and the surge of same in Afghanistan bring peace to that part of the world? But how can this question even be asked if we don’t make a matter of the highest priority a concern for the sense of so many, throughout the world and in the United States and our local communities, that they are the unjust victims of the policies, both military and economic, of people at the centers of power? How can we appeal to a common devotion of citizenship in our communities, states, nations and the international community when the fruits of our common actions benefit the wealthy and the privileged at the expense of the poor and the deprived?

To be more specific about it, how can our President-elect address the sense and the reality of injustices visited on a race of people, those of African origins, who are deprived of equality with their peers in practically every conceivable way….when that President-elect was elected on a platform of pretending that we have already moved “beyond race” in this country? And to be specific in another way, how can this new Administration hope to bring justice and peace to all the peoples of the Middle East when the President-elect has announced—and confirmed by his staff and cabinet appointments—that he is going to support the actions of our staunch ally, Israel, be those actions right or wrong, be they productive of peace and justice, or be they productive of conflict and injustice?

In raising these questions, I hope they are not totally rhetorical, with a pre-ordained answer that these things cannot be done. That word hope again: what a resilient human emotion, existing when reality batters at the hoped-for walls of peace and justice; and maybe we need these annual seasons of hope and best wishes to retain our Sisyphus-like human tendency to continue to roll to the top of the hill those stones that we know (and yet hope not) will roll down the hill again. We elected our next President, as we always should do, on the basis of our best realistic hope that world and local peace and justice can be accomplished.

As principled progressives our “new year’s resolution” should be the resolution of every day of our lives: to “so live” (if I can remember the poem), “that when thy summons comes to join that innumerable caravan where each shall take his chamber in the silent halls of death, thou go not like the quarry slave at night, scourged to his dungeon, but soothed and sustained by an unfaltering trust, approach thy grave like one who wraps the drapery of his couch about him and lies down to pleasant sleep.” The earnest search for peace and justice in all the phases of our public and private lives may never bring that stone to rest atop that hill of human recalcitrance, but at least we may earn thereby the nirvana of a pleasant sleep.

Jerry D. Rose - Editor, The Sun State Activist

By Glen Ford

Having failed in deploying Ethiopia as its proxy in the war against Somalia, the United States now attempts to rally Europe and as many African stooges as it can muster to gang rape the Somalis into submission. Two years ago, the Americans encouraged Ethiopia to invade its neighbor, to overthrow a young Islamic government that had, miraculously, restored a semblance of peace and stability to Somalia after 15 years of chaos and rule by warlords. As could have been predicted, Ethiopian ground forces and American bombs and missiles combined to bring about the “worst humanitarian crisis” on the continent, forcing millions of Somalis from their homes and into the jaws of starvation. The Americans bankrolled the aggression, in a futile attempt to prop up a warlord-based puppet government that by early this month was in a state of total disintegration, with 80 percent of its soldiers and police having deserted. The Ethiopians, defeated by the Somali resistance, are eager to exit the hell they and the Americans have created in Somalia. That leaves only a small force from Uganda and Burundi to act as Washington’s proxies on the ground in Somalia, under the guise of the United Nations.

Uganda, especially, is Washington’s willing mercenary outpost in Africa, willing to accept any dirty assignment from the Americans. But Somalia is too big a mouthful to be bitten off by Washington’s African proxies, and the Islamists forces now represent Somali nationalism. Mogadishu, the ruined capital, is expected to be back in Islamic Somali hands, any day now. Desperate, in its last weeks in office, the Bush regime now seeks to turn Somalia into a “free fire zone” in which any country in the world can shoot and bomb and kill at will. George Bush invites the world’s military powers to form a posse to invade Somalia by air, land and sea, on the pretext of wiping out piracy. Yet the piracy that flows from Somalia’s onetime coastal fishing villages is mirrored in the lawlessness of foreign fishing fleets off Somalia’s shores and the industrial piracy of nations that treat Somalia’s waters as international dumping grounds for all manner of toxic wastes. The Americans imposed an imperial catch-22 on the Somali people, robbing them of their right to form their own government, then damning the Somalis for not accepting the rule of foreigners and foreign-backed warlords.

The clock is ticking on George Bush’s government, but Washington’s threat to Somalia will outlast Bush. Susan Rice, Bill Clinton’s former assistant secretary of state for Africa, will soon become Barack Obama’s United Nations Ambassador and de facto point person on Africa. Susan Rice is just as warlike as Condoleezza Rice when it comes to Somalia. While Condoleezza Rice and her bosses justify U.S. aggressions in the name of spreading “democracy,” Susan Rice urges American military interventions in Somalia and Sudan and elsewhere on “humanitarian” grounds.

For Somalia, an Obama presidency represents the “same old same old” - the same bombs, the same bullets, the same catastrophes, the same imperialism, with a slightly different vocabulary.

BAR executive editor Glen Ford can be contacted at Glen.Ford@BlackAgendaReport.com

This article was posted originally on Black Agenda Report on December 17, 2008. For a downloadable MP3 copy of this Black Agenda Report commentary visit BAR’s archive page here.

In the current flurry of concern over whether Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich attempted to swap the appointment of Obama associate Valerie Jarrett to replace him in the Senate for a cabinet appointment for himself, it is easy to lose sight of the larger pay-to-play dynamics that have gone into Obama’s cabinet selections (or probably those of any other President or President-elect). The myriad of ways in which “money talks” in American politics is nowhere more baldly demonstrated than the way in which wealthy people who are willing to use that wealth to support political candidates can get plenty of bang of personal advantage from their supporting bucks in the form of presidential cabinet appointments. In this essay, I want to discuss just one current example: the nomination of Tom Daschle as Secretary of Health and Human Services. I expect to do a similar treatment in a future post for the selection of Steven Chu as Secretary of Energy.

The plutocratic element in Daschle’s appointment is especially transparent. The former Majority Leader of the Senate, defeated in 2004 in his re-election bid in Illinois, has cooled his political heels for 4 years but has meantime been busy with involvement with the very health care industry over whose activities he is now to be the designated “czar.” Shortly after leaving the Senate, still barred from lobbying activities by Senate ethic rules, he entered into an “advisory” relationship with the lobbying firm of Alston and Bird, which included a large number of medical and pharmaceutical firms among its clients. These connections with firms that he would be regulating as a health care “czar” is all-too-reminiscent of the way the Bush administration has staffed regulatory agencies with people from the very industries that were supposedly being regulated.

Two other elements of “pay” that may have gone into the “play” that resulted in Daschle being appointed HHS Secretary might be cited. While out of office and presumably to help to “groom” himself for a return to politics, he wrote a book, Critical: What We Can Do About the Health Care Crisis with prescriptions for health care “reform” which, like Obama’s (or H. Clinton’s) “reform” plans, were heavily oriented toward that Massachusetts model of “universal” health coverage on an employer-provided and publicly subsidized model, the net effect of which leaves major health care decisions in the hands of the medical and pharmaceutical businesses. Single-payer (Medicare for all) solutions were not believed to be “politically feasible” (Never mind that single-payer already has 93 co-sponsors in the House.) These same health care forces were quick to praise, through their media outlets, the decision to appoint Daschle. As well, “health care professionals” contributed over $25 million to the Obama campaign coffers; well short of the $43 million by “securities and investments” firms, but still a nice piece of change.

We might also look at the pay-for-play activity of the Service Employees International Union, headed by Andy Stern, on Daschle’s behalf. There was no more active “payer” on behalf of the Obama campaign than was the SEIU. Obama owes the union “big time” for its efforts on his behalf. These included very public endorsements, at least $16.5 million in campaign contributions and no doubt best of all, they furnished a legion of around 100,000 ground troops to hit the pavements and man the phone banks on behalf of Obama’s election. On the issue of health care reform, SEIU may have entered into an alliance of convenience (like the alliance that Stern formed with Wal-Mart in supporting their meager employer-based health care system) with corporate interests. While SEIU formally endorsed single payer at its 2008 convention, it also opposed mightily the efforts of a “subsidiary” union, the California Nurses Association, in its efforts to force the issue of single payer to the fore of considerations at that convention.

In sum, the “payments” from health industry and union sources would appear to have produced the “play” of a Daschle cabinet appointment. Rod Blagojevich is apparently headed for jail rather than appointment as HHS Secretary because, in his appointment seeking, he violated the well-established rules of that game.

Jerry D. Rose - Editor, The Sun State Activist

This is Part 1 of a two-part series.

by Shannon J. Prince

With the recession imperiling the nation’s well-being, poverty is on everyone’s mind regardless of their political orientation. Yet too often the poor are cast as ignorant and impotent pawns needing either a kick in the pants or a magical cocktail of resources and programs. The dialogue typically stalls around what “we” must do for or to “them” as though the poor lack ingenuity and agency.

In this commentary I identify four ideas that can be used to battle poverty: ending marriage penalties, deregulating selected industries, creating tax-funded social programs run by the poor, and creating community gardens. These four ideas are based around two central beliefs. The first is that people should not be punished by having their fight to escape poverty retarded when they choose to marry or profit from their personal knowledge. The second principle is that creative projects such as tax-funded, poor people-led social programs and community gardens help the poor to martial their efforts to fight the penury in their environments. While these two principles and the policies I propose based upon them may seem disparate, they are united by one central idea - that the poor themselves are resources. The minds and spirits of the poor can be marshaled in the fight against the poverty. If their family structures aren’t undermined, if their personal knowledge isn’t penalized, and if their labor and ideas are supported and nurtured, poor people can use themselves as weapons against poverty. Part 1 of this commentary focuses on marriage penalties and deregulation.

The first policy change we should make is to stop the government from dictating to the poor how to organize their homes. Uncle Sam has no more right to break up families than slave-owners did. Currently, poor women receiving government aid face being further impoverished if they choose to marry because the additional income of their husbands often makes them ineligible for government aid. For example, as former Mayor Steve Goldsmith of Indianapolis pointed out, “In my state, a mother qualifies for welfare only if she does not marry her children’s father, and a teen-age mother qualifies only if she leaves home.” Furthermore, public policy consultant Wendell Cox gives the following example of h

“For example: the typical single mother on Temporary Assistance to Needy Families receives a combined welfare package of various means-tested aid benefits worth about $14,000 per year. Suppose this typical single mother receives welfare benefits worth $14,000 per year while the father of her children has a low wage job paying $18,000 per year. If the mother and father remain unmarried, they will have a combined income of $32,000 ($14,000 from welfare and $18,000 from earnings.) However, if the couple marries, the father’s earnings will be counted against the mother’s welfare eligibility. Overall, welfare benefits will be nearly eliminated and the couple’s combined income will fall substantially.”

According to the Center for Marriage and Families, “marriage penalties” can lower a family’s income by twenty percent. The Center goes on to say that many poor parents either secretly cohabit or live near each other as they are unable to marry without punishment. It is unacceptable for the welfare system to tyrannically regulate women’s lives by penalizing them for certain choices they make such as marrying their children’s fathers. This system undermines impoverished families, which are disproportionately families of color, forcing men to sneak to see their children and treating would-be wives like slaves sold to a different plantation.

Cox also points out anti-marriage discrimination in public housing policy. He notes:

“In the case of subsidized housing, the typical single mother receives a subsidy worth about $5,000 per year; if she marries a male with earnings the value of the rent subsidy will be reduced. The more the male earnings the greater the loss of housing aid, and, if she marries a male with earnings around $18,000 per year (a typical sum for unmarried fathers), the housing subsidy will be completely eliminated. Thus, in general, low income couples can maximize their welfare income by remaining unmarried.”

Cox suggests that this could be remedied by not lowering women’s benefits if when one thousand dollars of her husband’s income is ignored she is still eligible for public housing and by making exceptions for men with criminal records (who are normally excluded from subsidized housing) if they are married to and supporting the children of women who live in subsidized housing. I agree. In the Victorian era Dickens lamented how husbands and wives were separated from each other when they entered poor houses. Victorian aid was frequently contemptuous and based on the belief that the poor had no family bonds one need respect - they were like puppies who could be separated at the will of those more powerful. It’s the twenty-first century now, and it’s time to take a stand and affirm that marriage is a right, not a luxury.

In addition to not undermining the family structures of the poor, anti-poverty policy should not undermine the efforts of the poor to profit from their skills and talents either. The problem often isn’t that the poor aren’t pulling themselves up by their bootstraps, but rather when they do so they are told they don’t have the appropriate credentials. The deregulation of some industries could help poor people to use self employment to become more financially stable. For example, many poor black women braid hair as a way of making money. However, as the National Center for Public Policy Research points out, many states have threatened these women with arrest because they don’t have cosmetology licenses; licenses that often demand taking courses that cost around $10,000, and frequently don’t even cover hair braiding in their curriculum. Several states have exempted hair braiders from needing to have cosmetology licenses after black women asserted that by using a traditional skill they were keeping themselves off welfare.
Furthermore, as noted in this September, 2006 AP article, the law punishes African immigrants who don’t speak the English necessary to get a license and only possess the knowledge of hair braiding as a marketable skill. More and more black women are using individual and class law suits to change the laws of their states. State laws requiring the licensing of hair braiders must be revoked.

One concern about industry deregulation, however, is quality control. I do not feel that all industries should be deregulated; however, I do think that we should, whenever possible, avoid regulating industries that have shown themselves capable of functioning ethically and monitoring their own quality levels independent of regulation. We know that since time immemorial black women have braided hair in open air and in kitchens and on front porches without licensing, to no societal ill effect. Wall Street corporate leaders may need someone looking over their shoulders, but black women don’t need supervision to braid. In their case, I think it would be unjust and unnecessary to require government regulation of their industry. Furthermore, there is nothing to prevent those believing that quality control can only be managed by the regulation of industry from going to a hair braider with a cosmetology license. Deregulation may not make small scale entrepreneurs become the next Sheila Johnson, but it can fight poverty by opening up avenues for people to profit from skills they possess.

Next, Part 2 - Social programs run by the poor and community gardens.

Ms. Prince is a Presidential Scholar, Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellow, and Senior Fellow at Dartmouth College in Hanover NH. She can contacted at Shannon.J.Prince@Dartmouth.EDU

This article was originally posted at Black Agenda Report on December 10, 2008 and is re-posted here with permission of BAR editors and the author.

On December 3 New York Times op-ed columnist Thomas Friedman published an essay titled “Calling All Pakistanis,” in a column widely syndicated throughout the U.S. In this essay, Friedman stays close to his usual Islamophobic form as he raises the question why Pakistani Muslims are not protesting against Pakistanis who are allegedly involved in the Mumbai India terrorist bombs. He calls for a “mass demonstration of ‘ordinary people’ against the Mumbai bombers, not for my sake, not for India’s sake, but for Pakistan’s sake.” He asks, rather plaintively, why the Pakistanis are not protesting with the same “heart felt feelings” as they did nearly 3 years ago when an insulting Muslim cartoon was published by a Danish newspaper.

A reasonable question perhaps, but the raising of it displays Friedman’s own hypocrisy when it comes to supporting protests against atrocities where Muslims are concerned. As far as the Danish cartoon protests, his column on 2/22/06 argued that these protests were “excessive” and, as usual, he blamed Arab governments for promoting ignorance and militancy and inhibiting economic and educational improvement for young Arab men, observing that Muslims in India were notably pacifist and also notable was that government’s incorporation of its Islamic population in the wealth associated with neo-liberal capitalist development (the gold standard of a minority’s “success” for Friedman, a neo-liberal intellectual guru.)

A look at Friedman’s extended record on the matter of denouncing “atrocities” would likewise reveal that he has displayed nowhere near the level of demand for nations to denounce individual acts of terrorism when their targets are the Islamic victims of a state-sponsored agenda of terrorism against Arabs in the West Bank, Gaza and in Somalia. Where is the call for “heartfelt feelings” expressed against Israel and its western allies, including the United States, for their perpetration of atrocities of life-disrupting separation walls in the West Bank, economic sanctions against (starvation of) the people of Gaza, and heavy military assaults on Somalia on a pretense of combating Somalia-based terrorists, but actually designed to maintain foreign influence and suppress Islamist political power in that country? Clearly, Mr. Friedman, there are such fully condemnable actions occurring in these and many other places around the world; why do you have to single out Pakistan once more as a country whose citizens are expected to maintain a higher level of moral outrage than you expect of those in other (non-Muslim) countries?

Jerry D. Rose - Editor, The Sun State Activist

by Glen Ford

If you believe that Barack Obama will pursue a policy in the Horn of Africa that is substantially different than that of George Bush, you are in for a deep disappointment. Only weeks after Ethiopia’s U.S.-instigated invasion of Somalia almost two years ago, Susan Rice, Obama’s choice for Ambassador to the United Nations, endorsed the aggression - an atrocity that has resulted in the displacement of 1.5 million Somalis and impending starvation of 3.5 million more.

Rice is a proponent of so-called “humanitarian military intervention” - but supports a U.S. Somalia policy that created “Africa’s worst humanitarian crisis,” according to the United Nations. There is every reason to believe she will counsel the next president to continue George Bush’s policies in the Horn of Africa. In January, 2007, while Ethiopian troops attempted to crush Islamists who had brought a brief period of relative peace and stability to Somalia, and U.S. air and sea forces pounded the countryside with missiles and bombs, Rice revealed herself to be an apostle of George Bush’s War on Somalia (and the so-called War on Terror in general). Rice told the PBS News Hour that U.S. collaboration with the Ethiopian invaders was justified by what she called America’s “counterterrorism imperatives,” which she said “really are real in the context of Somalia.” In Rice’s words, “We have to go after the terrorist cells where we find them.”

The Bush regime gave no estimate of how many persons with ties to Al Qaida were operating on Somali soil, but the number appears to have been very small. The main goal of the Americans and their Ethiopian allies was to crush the government that had been created by Somali Islamists. The Islamic Courts regime, as Abukar Arman writes in the journal Global Politician, operated “schools, hospitals, and for six months before the occupation removed every checkpoint in Mogadishu and brought a semblance of peace.” Two years after the invasion, the Islamists have retaken much of southern and central Somalia, and the Ethiopians appear poised to withdraw - after killing, starving and displacing millions in partnership with the United States.

The “humanitarian” component of Susan Rice’s militarism is quite selective. She has long been a super-hawk on punishing Sudan for its behavior in Darfur. Back in October, 2006, Rice declared, “It’s time to get tough” with the government in Khartoum.” In a Washington Post column, she advised the Bush regime to give Sudan “an ultimatum: accept unconditional deployment of the U.N. force within one week or face military consequences.” (explain China and oil and Israel)

On Darfur, Rice is more bellicose than Bush. She sees no contradiction in calling for military action against Sudan, supposedly to end a “humanitarian crisis” in Darfur, while simultaneously backing a savage U.S.-Ethiopian assault that causes an even larger humanitarian calamity in Somalia. Rice claims to seek safety for civilians in Darfur, while supporting a total absence of security for Somali civilians. Darfur is a military/political convenience for “real-politic” operatives like Susan Rice. As Bruce Dixon wrote in his November 2007 BAR article, “If stopping genocide in Africa really was on the agenda, why the focus on Sudan with 200,000 to 400,000 dead rather than Congo with five million dead?” (See “Ten Reasons Why ?Save Darfur’ is a PR Scam to Justify the Next US Oil and Resource Wars in Africa.”)

Rice’s behavior in Africa has always been morally inconsistent. She was a member of Bill Clinton’s National Security Council during the 1994 Rwandan genocide against the Tutsi minority. Later, she “swore” she would go “down in flames” if necessary to prevent future genocides. But after her promotion to Assistant Secretary of State for Africa, she failed to publicly advocate action against U.S. allies Uganda and by then Tutsi-ruled Rwanda - the main perpetrators in an ongoing war that his killed millions

Susan Rice’s brand of “humanitarian intervention” is a farce, a pretext to justify military aggression under the guise of preventing human suffering. She has amply demonstrated that her sole concern is projection of U.S. power by any means - or pretext - that is available. Rice embraces a policy that causes mass death and starvation in Somalia and ongoing genocide in Congo. Although she’s no blood relative of Condoleezza Rice, on African issues she seems headed in the same direction as the current Secretary of State.

BAR executive editor Glen Ford can be contacted at Glen.Ford@BlackAgendaReport.com
This article first appeared in Black Agenda Report for December 3, 2008.

During the presidential campaign, any complaints about the lack of a progressive focus in Barack Obama’s stances on public issues were deflected with the observation that those of the Republican ticket were so much worse, so that progressives were morally obligated to vote for the Democratic one as the “lesser of the two evils.”  The response to that argument was repeated by many commentators innumerable times: that if you continue to vote for the lesser evil election cycle after election cycle, you are going to be confronted every time with an “evil” choice, in a Dantean hell kind of perpetual misery.  To little avail did we make these arguments, as the voters trooped to the polls and those who needed to hold their noses as they voted for the Democratic ticket held their noses and participated in the glorious “historic victory” that is still being celebrated.

The other argument, being played in the background of the dominant lesser evil theme, was that Obama’s lack of expressed support for progressive positions was simply a strategic decision to avoid alienating the “center” of American political thinking, without whose support he had no chance of being elected.  In this view, what’s the use of voting for an ideological “purist” (like, say, a Dennis Kucinich or Mike Gravel) whose views were too “far out” to make them “electable?”  So Obama and later his team-mate Biden had to be shrewd enough to seem to be centrist in their views, when their “hearts” were with the left. So “give the guys a chance,” a chance to be elected after which their true progressive colors would be allowed to emerge.

After the election and in the current transition period, that secondary “give the guy a chance” motif has now blossomed into the favorite theme of Obama apologetics.  The main occasion for this change has been the fact that Obama has been busily filling his staff and cabinet appointments, some already made and some others still in the usual “float” stage of names being “prominently mentioned” for appointment to government posts.  There is very clearly a pattern in these announced and anticipated appointments that, as Jerome Grossman for example notes, have not included a single “liberal” amongst them. The announced and floated names are almost entirely “experienced” figures, mostly re-treads from the Clinton administration, with a token Bush holdover in the (still floated) re-appointment of Robert Gates as Secretary of Defense. Ideologically, the appointments focused on domestic policy have been overwhelmingly (maybe exclusively) from the camp of neo-liberal proponents of the Chicago school of economics; while foreign policy-oriented ones have been drawn from the decidedly hawkish figures of presidential administrations from Jimmy Carter to Bush II.  Since folks the likes of “Progressive for Obama” had promised during the campaign to hold Obama’s “feet to the fire” of progressive views, some of them have stoked up a bit of fire to criticize those nominations.

But not yet, apparently, are many Obama apologists ready to participate in the stoking of that fire.  “Give the guy a chance” now becomes their fall-back apologetic position. ”Wait til he’s in office and starts to make some decisions before you start your fire,” they say.  In politics as in marriage, aren’t people entitled to a “honeymoon” before they have to deal with the conflicts likely to pervade any country as any marriage?  We have yet to “celebrate” the historic victory with an historic inauguration on January 20.  Why be a wet blanket on the national euphoria during this transition period? There’ll be time enough for critique after we celebrate yet another “New Deal.”

Like the lesser evil theme, the “give the guy a chance” one has its own minor theme that is vital to supporting the melody.  This is the idea, promoted by Obama himself, who deflects any concern about the ideological character of his appointment choices by saying that these men and women are, after all, only advisers to him and that it is his “vision” as President that will determine his actions in that office: a variation of GW Bush’s definition of himself as the “decider.”  Obama says in effect: “pay no attention to that man behind the curtain,” pay attention only to what I, the Wizard of Oz, am telling you about my marvelous powers to grant the wishes of the heart to every supplicant.  Now I have a really hard time thinking of figures of the stature of Robert Gates, Hillary Clinton and Paul Volcker as simply “techno-crats” whose experience will allow them to carry out the dictates of their President.  If anything, Obama’s “vision” (or lack thereof) is being demonstrated with every one of his personal choices from Biden as running mate to the yet-to-be-announced ones of Gates and Clinton.  Perhaps the kool-aid imagery used to castigate Obama supporters for their lesser-evilism should be replaced, as attention turns to what Obama will actually do in office, to a different imagery of people somehow disposed to  the Wizard’s mandate which can be translated into modern vernacular as “what are you going to believe, what I tell you or your own lying eyes?”

Sure, I’m willing to “give the guy a chance,” a chance that is to respond to progressive expectations for his administration that are actually the expectations of most of the American people.  That expectation is not that he “rule from the center,” but that he rule from the consensus of the American people that Wall Street and the Pentagon should not be the all-determining institutions of our society.  If Obama appoints mostly bankers and military hawks to his administration, this tells me that his “vision” is really the vision of bankers and hawks, not the vision of the rest of us. I’ve been accused “cynicism” on internet comment strings for this sort of view, but I actually see these views as arising from a “hopelessly” idealistic tendency to think and speak as a “principled progressive.”

Jerry D. Rose - Editor, The Sun State Activist