Paul Street writes that Obama is "not all that black." The following is excerpted from "Barack Obama's White Appeal and the Perverse Racial Politics of the Post-Civil Rights Era" by Paul Street / June 16th, 2007:

"The first difficulty is that part of Obama's appeal to white America has to do with the widespread Caucasian sense that Obama "isn't all that black." Many whites who roll their eyes at the mention of the names of Jesse Jackson or Al Sharpton -- former presidential candidates who behave in ways that many whites find too African-American -- are by the cool, underplayed blackness and ponderous, quasi-academic tone of the half-white, Harvard-educated Obama. Obama doesn't shout, chant, holler or drawl. He doesn't rail against injustice, bring the parishioners to their feet and threaten delicate white suburban and middle-class sensibilities. He stays away from catchy slogans (like Jackson's "Keep Hope Alive") and from emotive "truth"-speaking confrontations with power. To use Joe Biden's revealing terminology, Obama strikes many whites as "clean" and "articulate" -- something different from their unfortunately persistent image of blacks as dirty, dangerous, irrational and unintelligible." (Paul Street)

Willing to Accomodate Racism

"A second and related reason not to do racial justice cartwheels over Obama's popularity with whites is the candidate's deep willingness to accommodate white supremacy. In his ponderous, power-worshipping and badly titled campaign book The Audacity of Hope (Henry Crown, 2006), Obama ignores elementary U.S. social reality and strokes the master race by claiming that "what ails working- and middle-class blacks is not fundamentally different from what ails their white counterparts." Equally calming to the white majority is Obama's argument that "white guilt has largely exhausted itself in America" as "even the most fair-minded of whites . . . tend to push back against suggestions of racial victimization and race-based claims based on the history of racial discrimination in this country" (p. 247). Part of the reason for this "push back" -- also known as denial -- is, Obama claims, the bad culture and poor work ethic of the inner city black poor (Obama 2006, pp. 245, 254-56)." (Paul Street)

"White fears that Obama will reawaken the tragically unfinished revolutions of Reconstruction and Civil Rights are further soothed by his claim that most black Americans have been "pulled into the economic mainstream" (Obama 2006, pp. 248-49). During a speech marking the anniversary of the Selma, Alabama Voting Rights march, Obama claimed that 1950s and 1960s civil rights activists -- who he referred to as "the Moses Generation" -- had brought black America "90 percent of the way" to racial equality. It's up to Obama and his fellow "Joshua Generation" members to get past "that 10 percent in order to cross over to the other side" (Barack Obama, 2007)" (Paul Street)

"And then there's Obama's claim that "conservatives and Bill Clinton were right about welfare." The abolished Aid for Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) program, Obama claims, "sapped" inner-city blacks of their "initiative" and detached them from the great material and spiritual gains that flow to those who attach themselves to the noble capitalist labor market, including "independence," "income," "order, structure, dignity and opportunity for growth in peoples' lives". He argues that encouraging black girls to finish high school and stop having babies out of wedlock is "the single biggest that we could do to reduce inner-city poverty" (Obama 2006p. 256)." (from notes by Paul Street's newsletter - see above)

"Never mind that blacks are afflicted with a shocking racial wealth gap that keeps their average net worth at one eleventh that of whites and an income structure starkly and persistently tilted towards poverty (Loewen 2005, p. 130; Shapiro 2005). Never mind that lower-, working-, and middle-class blacks continue to face numerous steep and interrelated white-supremacist barriers to equality. Or that multidimensional racial discrimination is still rife in "post-Civil Rights America," deeply woven into the fabric of the nation's social institutions and drawing heavily on the living and unresolved legacy of centuries of not- so "past" racism (Feagin 2000; Brown et al. 2003, Street 2005; Street 2007)," (from Paul Street's newsletter)

"And never mind the absence of social-scientific evidence for the "conservative" claim that AFDC destroyed inner city work ethics or generated "intergenerational poverty." Forget the existence of numerous studies showing that the absence of decent, minimally well-paid, and dignified work has always been the single leading cause of black inner city poverty and "welfare dependency" (Handler 1995, 32-55; Jencks 1992, 204-235; Stier and Tienda 2001). Disregard research showing that high black teenage pregnancy rates reflect the absence of meaningful long-term life and economic opportunities in the nation's hyper-segregated inner-city and suburban ring ghettos. Forget that the single biggest thing that could be done to reduce inner city poverty would be to make the simple and elementary moral decision to abolish it through the provision of a decent guaranteed income -- something once advocated by Martin Luther King, Jr. and that other dangerous left "moral absolutist" (Obama's description of 1960s New Left peace and justice activists) Richard Nixon." (notes from Paul Street's newsletter - see above))

"Racial hierarchy isn't the only oppression structure that Senator Obama is willing to eagerly accommodate. As I've been arguing for some time now (Street 2004, 2006, 2007a-2007e), he plays the same essential opportunistic and power-worshipping game in relation to related inequality structures of class and empire. Beneath peaceful and populist sounding claims to the contrary, he's largely on the dark and neoliberal side of power when it comes to each of what the democratic socialist and anti-imperialist Martin Luther King, Jr. called "the triple evils that are interrelated": racism, economic exploitation/inequality (capitalism), and militarism (King 1967, 250-251; Garrow 1986 p. 546) It's not for nothing that Obama was recently described as a "conservative" in a flattering New Yorker write-up titled "The Conciliator." (MacFarquar 2007) (Many of the quotes herein were excerpted from Paul Street's newsletter, The Empire and Inequality Report, bi-weekly news and commentary letter)

[Who is Paul Street? He is a veteran radical historian, journalist, public speaker and activist and the author of Empire and Inequality: America and the World Since 9/11 (Boulder, CO: Paradigm, 2004), Segregated Schools: Educational Apartheid in the Post-Civil Rights Era (New York, NY: Routledge, 2005), and Still Separate, Unequal: Race, Place, and Policy in Chicago (Chicago, 2005) Street's next book is Racial Oppression in the Global Metropolis: A Living Black Chicago History (New York, 2007).]

Do we need another right-wing Demcrat running the country? It has got to get better with Democrats OR WE DON'T NEED THE DEMOCRATS. If Obama is the new "hope" for America we need a revolution to throw out all the bums, Democrats and Republicans alike - ANYWAY WE MUST.

Black Agenda Report editor, Glen Ford says "...Dr. King declared in 1967, in the heat of the Vietnam War, that Black America's destiny was to "save the soul of America" from the "triple evils" of "racism, materialism and militarism" - a huge historical fact that Barack "Joshua" Obama conveniently fails to process. ( http://blackagendareport.com)

"..[H]e (Obama) prefaced his critique of "materialism" by saying that "it's a good thing" to "drive the biggest car and have the biggest house and wear a Rolex watch and get your own private jet" and "get some of that Oprah money". Obama, it is worth noting, is a freshly minted millionaire who recently purchased an opulent Georgian Revival Mansion below price at $1.65 million thanks to some help from the felony-indicted political fundraiser Tony Rezko." (excerpted notes from Paul Street's newsletter)

"More importantly, Obama's power-worshipping campaign book The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream (2006) - the book to which Obama refers reporters asking him for policy specifics behind his often vague statements - refers to the United States' rapacious, savagely unequal and fundamentally "materialist" capitalist economy as the nation's "greatest asset." Audacity absurdly praises the "American system of social organization" and "business culture" on the grounds that U.S. capitalism "has encouraged constant innovation, individual initiative and efficient allocation of resources". It commends "the need to raise money from economic elites to finance elections" for "prevent[ing] Democrats...from straying too far from the center" and for marginalizing "those within the Democratic Party who tend toward zealotry" and "radical ideas" (like peace and justice). It praises fellow centrist Senator and presidential rival Hillary Clinton (D-NY) for embracing "the virtues of capitalism" and applauds her "recognizably progressive" husband Bill Clinton for showing that "markets and fiscal discipline" and "personal responsibility [are] needed to combat poverty" - an interesting reflection on the militantly corporate-neoliberal Clinton administration's efforts to increase poverty by eliminating poor families' entitlement to public cash assistance and privileging deficit reduction over social spending." (Paul Street's newsletter)

"Obama's badly mis-titled book audaciously lectures poor people on their "duty" to feel "empathy" for wealthy oppressors - including Bush and Cheney, who are "pretty much like everyone else" - and on their need to understood how well off and "free" they are compared to their more truly miserable counterparts in Africa and Latin America. It deletes less favorable contrasts with Western Europe and Japan, the most relevant comparisons, where dominant norms and institutional arrangements produce significantly slighter levels of poverty and inequality than what is found in the hierarchical U.S." (Paul Street's newsletter)

"It also advances a model of health care reform that mocks his claim to support "universal" insurance. "Like the [corporatist] Democratic Leadership Council [members] he flocks with," BAR's Glen Ford notes, "Obama advocates retaining the for-profit nature of American health care, and mandating that poor people pay for it, somehow. His plan is only `universal' in the sense that mandatory auto insurance is universal"." (Paul Street's newsletter)

"Obama's Audacity is as audaciously bad on race as it is on class. It ignores mountains of research and experience on the persistence of racial discrimination and the powerful living legacy of past racism when it claims that "what ails working- and middle-class blacks and Latinos is not fundamentally different from what ails their white counterparts". It justifies Obama's rejection of race-specific measures to overcome persistent white supremacist policies and the living legacy of centuries of open racism by claiming that "white guilt has largely exhausted itself in America" as "even the most fair-minded of whites, those who would genuinely like to see racial inequality ended and poverty relieved, tend to push back against suggestions of racial victimization - or race-based claims based on the history of racial discrimination in this country"." (Street)

Obama "embraces neoconservatives' incorrect notion that family public cash assistance created intergenerational black inner-city poverty." (Paul Street's newsletter)

Obama advocates for invading Pakistan, which has a population of 165 million and NUCLEAR BOMBS, the only Muslim nation that has nukes. The U.S. has propped up the military regime in Pakistan for years. Does Obama really think he can march to Waziristan in western Pakistan unopposed? Obama also wants to add another 100,000 new troops to the U.S. military. Where would he think he will get them? Blackwater, perhaps?

The Senator from Illinois masquerades as a peace candidate while advocating for MORE WAR. He masquerades as a friend of the poor while calling upon the poor to have "hope" and glorifying FALSE VIRTUE for materialism and the rich.

Glen Ford writes: "Senator Barack Obama believes himself to be the reincarnation of President John F. Kennedy. For those of us who are schooled in history - real history - that's not a good thing. Kennedy tried on many occasions to assassinate Fidel Castro, and set in motion events that led to military dictatorships assuming power throughout Latin America. Kennedy, early in the month of November, 1963, gave the order to murder South Vietnamese President Ngo Dinh Diem. Kennedy met his own fate a few weeks later, in Dallas, but he had already set in motion a war that would claim 58 thousand American and three million Vietnamese lives." (Glen Ford's BlackAgendaReport)

"Barack Obama is as stupid and dangerous as Kennedy. Obama wants to invade Pakistan, the most dangerous place in the world, where Osama bin Ladin is holed up. The Pakistani regime installed the Taliban in Afghanistan, which became the incubator of Al Quaeda. President Pervez Musharaff, a general who has never been freely elected, depends on the backing of rightwing Muslim fundamentalists and the military to stay in power. And, Oh yes, the United States, which provides many billions of dollars in "aid" per year to prop up the regime." (GLEN Ford)

Hillary may not be much better, but she does seem to have more common sense and a whole lot more experience than this hot head from Illinois who is no progressive. Glen Ford, editor of the Black Agenda Report (BAR) correctly informs his readers that "Barack Obama will carry us into a suicidal conflict."

If it is hope you want,
it ought to be hope for better than Obama....

Barach Obama is a CONSERVATIVE DEMOCRAT

Barach Obama may have experienced racism? I would be surprised if he hasn't. BUT it also never surprises me anymore how conservative some Gays can be and how conservative some African-Americans can be - and how right wing some Jews can be in spite of their very liberal heritage. And it also doesn't suprise me how so many poor and middle class Americans can vote against their own interests by supporting the ruling elites over candidates which come from more humble beginnings and speak for PEOPLE OVER PROFITS, instead of the other way around.

There are also Jews who deny there is antisemitism yet I have seen it, lived with it, been hurt by it, both physically and emotionally. AND I have seen anti-Black racism all my life. To deny it exists or it is almost gone is just plain crazy and frankly irrational. BUT there are always those who want to be with the majority or whatever the popular view is in spite of the facts. Obama says there is not much racism left - that we have come 90% of the way. I reject his view.

"The technically biracial Obama's campaign and persona are perfectly calibrated for this era of victim-blaming neoliberal racism. He allows whites to assuage their racial guilt and feel non-racist by liking and perhaps even voting for him while signaling that he won't do anything to tackle and redress the steep racial disparities and systemic racial oppression that continue to deeply scar American life and institutions. "What . . . me and my country racist? You can't be serious: we're thinking seriously about voting for a black man as president. My wife and son just love Oprah and Jamie Fox."" (Paul Street)

AS TO RACISM, itself, Paul Street says this:

"The first variety of racism has a long and sordid history. It includes such actions, policies and practices as the burning of black homes and black churches, the murder of "uppity" blacks and civil rights workers, the public use of derogatory racial slurs and epithets, the open banning of blacks from numerous occupations, the open political disenfranchisement of blacks and the open segregation of public facilities by race. It is largely defeated, outlawed and discredited in the "politically correct" environment created partly by the victories of the Civil Rights Movement." (from Paul Street - Note: Also see Counterpunch)

"The second variety lives on, with terrible consequences. It involves the more impersonal operation of social, economic and institutional forces and processes that both reflect and shape the related processes of capitalism in ways that "just happen" but nonetheless serve to reproduce black disadvantage in numerous interrelated key sectors of American life. It includes racially segregating real estate and home-lending practices, residential "white flight" (from black neighbors), statistical racial discrimination in hiring and promotion, the systematic under-funding and under-equipping of schools predominately attended by blacks relative to schools predominately attended by whites, the disproportionate surveillance, arrest and incarceration of blacks and much more." (Paul Street)

Obama says we're 90 percent there, that racism is in most cases, but a memory. MANY BLACKS, and clear minded others, SEE IT OTHERWISE. AND WHAT ABOUT WAR? That is another subject which gets twisted in the spinning of it - always to make the opportunist, Barach Obama, appear to be more anti-war than he really is.

Paul Street writes: "So what about that earlier speech, presented at a protest organized by elite Chicago "Lakefront liberals" (Mendell, Obama, pp. 172-175)in the fall of 2002? In that address, given when he could afford to be more reckless - before he had been tapped to join the national power elite - Obama said he was "not opposed to all wars; I'm opposed to dumb wars." He criticized "the cynical attempt by Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz and other armchair, weekend warriors in this administration to shove their own ideological agendas down our throats, irrespective of the costs in lives lost and in hardships borne." (Paul Street)

"Obama argued that invading Iraq would be a foreign policy mistake - something that would likely not work for American power - but NOT that it would be a brazenly imperialist transgression." (Street)

That is because Obama is not against imperialism. He is not against wars.

And Street emphasizes that these are not the words of a LEFTIST. "It was not a Left oration. Calling Bush's imminent war "dumb" but not criminal or immoral, it deleted the illegal and petro-imperialist ambitions behind the Iraq invasion being planned in Washington. It said nothing about the racist nature of the administration's determination to conflate Iraq with 9/11 and al Qaeda. It argued that invading Iraq would be a foreign policy mistake - something that would likely not work for American power - but NOT that it would be a brazenly imperialist transgression certain to kill untold masses of innocent Iraqis." (Paul Street)

Paul writes: "Never mind that he has repeatedly voted to fund the illegal, racist, mass-murderous and brazenly petro-imperialist occupation of Iraq since his arrival in the U.S. Senate. Never mind that he voted to confirm the mendacious war criminal Condoleezza Rice as Secretary of State, who played a critical role in advancing the preposterous Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD) claims Bush used to invade Iraq - the same ridiculous claims Obama admitted he might have played along with if only he'd had Hillary Clinton's "intelligence" access. Or that he distanced himself from fellow Illinois U.S. Senator Dick Durbin when Durbin faced vicious right-wing attacks after daring to tell some basic truths about U.S. torture practices in Iraq. Or that Obama used his considerable political and campaign finance muscle to back centrist Democrats against antiwar progressives in numerous Congressional primaries in 2006..." (Street)

OBAMA also SUPPORTED NEO-CONSERVATIVE JOE LIEBERMAN.

This should not surprise anyone. Obama is a conservative democrat. The only question is, which one is more conservative, Clinton or Obama? Who is the only progressive? That one is also easy. Edwards.

"..[H]e even supported the neoconservative Joe Lieberman - his self-chosen Senate mentor - against the antiwar insurgent Ned Lamont in Connecticut). Or that he has repeatedly and absurdly argued that the illegal invasion was launched with the best of democratic intentions and praised U.S. military personnel for their "unquestioning" "service" in Iraq and (despite numerous U.S. atrocities there) for "doing everything we could ever ask of them." (Paul Street's newsletter)

"Never mind that his belated calls for withdrawal are hedged by numerous statements indicating that an Obama White House would maintain a significant military presence in and around Iraq for an indefinite period of time. Or that he refuses to support taking a reckless (possibly even nuclear) U.S. military assault on Iran off the table of acceptable U.S. foreign policy options." (Street)

"A recent high point in Obama's "antiwar" record came when he couldn't bother to be present on the Senate floor to vote against the Bush's administration's provocative, saber-rattling effort to define Iran's Revolutionary Guard as "an international terrorist organization." That chilling step was supported by Hillary Clinton, a former Iraq War Hawk (to the right of even Lieberman on the invasion through at least late 2005) who continues to make the contemptible claim that she would not have voted to authorize Bush for invasion if she'd "known then what we know now." The measure is strongly opposed by John Edwards, who has shown the common decency to own his horrid Iraq War vote and to call it "the biggest mistake of my life." (Paul Street's newsletter)

"How would Obama have decided on Iraq in the fall of 2002 if he'd been in the U.S. Senate? Let's "stop and think for a minute," as my fellow Obama antagonist Mike Gravel likes to say. Looking at Obama's subsequent record, the likely direction of his vote seems clear: he would have gone along with Lieberman, Edwards (who has apologized profusely for his vote), Clinton (no remorse), Kerry (who cares?), and the rest of the pro-war crowd." (Paul Street)

AND, if that is not enough, guess which Senator consistently supports anti-progressive candidates? IF YOU GUESSED SENATOR BARACH OBAMA, YOU GUESSED RIGHT.

"Obama used his considerable political and campaign finance muscle to back centrist Democrats against antiwar progressives in numerous Congressional primaries in 2006." (Paul Street)

Do we need another right-wing Demcrat running the country? It has got to get better with Democrats or we don't need the Democrats. If Obama is the new black-white "hope" for America we need a revolution to throw out all the bums, Democrats and Republicans alike - anyway we must.

Hank Roth

http://pnews.org/

Permalink: http://pnews.org/ArT/WaR/WapP.shtml

Today is Friday July 04, 2008