Shock and Audit: The Hidden Defense Budget
What the Pentagon really spends. Part 1 of a Mother Jones special report.
—By Rachel Morris for Mother Jones www.motherjones.com
Jun 22, 2009
The Hidden Defense Budget
This year Obama asked Congress for $534 billion to fund the Department of Defense. That's a lot of dough. But the real amount that the US spends on defense is actually much higher.
The Office of Management and Budget calculates a total for defense spending throughout different parts of the government (it includes money allocated to the Pentagon, nuclear weapons activities at the Department of Energy and some security spending in the State Department and FBI). In the 2010 budget, that figure was $707 billion, more than half of the government's discretionary spending for the year. (Discretionary spending is the money that's appropriated every year by Congress, rather than entitlement programs like Medicare for which funding is mandatory).
Source: Office of Management and Budget
But the real number is even higher, because, among other things, the OMB doesn't count supplemental spending on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. We've combed through this year's budget documents to add up military-related spending throughout the entire government. Here's what we found:
Pentagon budget 534 billion
Extra appropriations for military personnel 4.1 billion
Iraq and Afghanistan supplemental funding (fiscal year 2010) 130 billion
Iraq and Afghanistan supplemental funding (fiscal year 2009, yet to be signed into law) 82.2 billion
Nuclear weapons and other atomic spending
(Department of Energy) 16.4 billion
Military and economic aid to Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan
(State Department) 4.9 billion
Security, counterterrorism assistance, and military aid to foreign countries, including the Middle East and Israel
(State Department) 8.4 billion
Coast Guard spending in the Department of Homeland Security 583 million
Total defense spending throughout the government 780.4 billion
As you'll see, we leaned on the conservative side here by only counting money that's directly related to military activities. We didn't, for instance, add in money for the Department of Veterans Affairs ($55.9 billion), which would take the total to $836.3 billion; or the rest of the Department of Homeland Security ($54.5 billion), which would take it to $890.8. (The wider national security apparatus isn't included either—budgets for the intelligence services are classified.) If we did include these extras, here’s what the difference between the official budget and the real one would look like:
Wednesday, June 24, 2009
Tuesday, June 16, 2009
Monday, June 15, 2009
Friday, June 12, 2009
Wednesday, May 20, 2009
Friday, May 8, 2009
Wednesday, April 29, 2009
The Obama Administration Report Card at 100 Days
The Obama Administration at 100 Days: The Black Agenda Report Card
by BAR Managing Editor Bruce A. Dixon
Why a Report Card At All?
The hundred day report card is an enduring tradition in American journalism for a very good reason. It's journalism's job to help citizens make sense of the world, to seek the truth and tell it without fear or favor no matter where it leads. Three months and a week into a new administration, everybody knows where the mens and ladies rooms are, most of the key hires are in place, and the bus has definitely cleared the station. There's plenty of evidence by now to assess where it's going, and whether it's anyplace we really ought to be headed.
Should We Grade President Obama on What He Promised, or on What People Need?
The answer to this should be easy. It all depends on whether we imagine government derives its authority from the blessedness of anointed men and women in office, or whether legitimacy comes from the informed consent of the governed. Most of us who were not home schooled learned it the latter way: governments are legit only insofar as they serve the people. Limiting the scope of a report card to what politicians promise confers upon them the power to lock down our collective imagination and deny our hunger and thirst for justice before we can even express it.
Why These Categories?
Because these are the issues that matter to our people. As the journal of African American political thought and action, they are what our authors write about every week.
Health Care Reform (9 points)
Creating New Jobs and Preserving Old Ones (5 points)
Fully Funding and Preserving Public Education (6 points)
War & Peace (9 points)
Transportation (5 points)
Caribbean and Latin America (4 points)
Obama's Africa Policy; Our Brotherman and the Motherland (5 points)
Wall Street Bailout (6 points)
Debt and Foreclosure Crises (6 points)
Investigating Bush-era Crimes (5 points)
Criminalizing Immigration, Militarizing the Border (5 points)
Broadband For Everyone and a Just and Fair Media (5 points)
Environment (5 points)
Agricultural Policy, and Policy Toward Black Farmers (5 points)
Mass imprisonment (5 points)
Employee Free Choice Act (5 points)
Urban Policy (5 points)
Privatization of Government Agencies and Services (5 points)
****************************************
1. Health Care Reform
President Obama himself declared that we should judge his first term on whether we get a national health care plan. While the exact specs of the Obama campaign have not been formally introduced, it's been no secret for a couple years now that Barack Obama and his advisors abhor any form of Medicare-For-All or single payer health care. When the president's people ordered their activists to convene a wave of health care house meetings in December, the demand most often voiced was for single payer, everybody-in and nobody out. Despite this, and despite polling data that shows a majority of physicians and a majority of the American people favor single payer health care, the Obama administration buried the results of those house meetings. Obama's series of regional health care "summits," although billed as the chance to get input from all the relevant have pointedly excluded any voices for single payer health care.
Currently, private insurance companies consume a third of every health care dollar for advertising, lawyering, salaries and bonuses, bad investments and the vast bureaucratic machinery they have created to deny coverage to the sick. We are the only nation where half the bankruptcies are caused by illness. The Obama health care plan, modeled on the failed "individual mandate" health insurance experiments of Massachusetts, Tennessee and other states will make health insurance like car insurance.
Everyone will have to buy a policy from a private company or face tax and other penalties, with no guarantee the policy will be either affordable or comprehensive. The myriad shortcomings of this plan are detailed in a report from Physicians for a National Health Care Plan, and in several previous BAR articles. When asked during the campaign whether he thought health care was a human right, Barack Obama said he thought it was. His health care plan does preserve the prifits of insurance companies.
Five points for admitting health care is a human right, minus one for suppressing discussion of single payer. Four out of nine.
2. Creating New Jobs and Preserving Old Ones
When Franklin D. Roosevelt took office in 1933, the nation had been in the Depression almost four years. The new president created some 800,000 jobs in the space of a few months. To be fair, this Depression hasn't been in effect nearly as long, and there are no insistent mass movements waging extralegal campaigns of strikes and civil disobedience going into the spring of 2009. So it's more complicated than measuring the hundreds of thousands of new jobs Roosevelt created against the hundreds of thousands Obama hasn't.
What we see is a failure of imagination on the part of the Obama administration. Not only does the First Black President declare it's the job of the private sector, never government, to create jobs, a stand closer to Herbert Hoover than to Franklin Roosevelt --- his "stimulus packages" have refused to fully fund the operations of local and state governments. Full funding for local governments would preserve the jobs of teachers, water department workers, librarians, coaches and park district workers, public safety employees and others who are being sent home in the tens of thousands. It's a piece of low hanging job and vital service preserving fruit the Obama administration refuses to harvest.
One point out of five for the Obama rhetoric on green jobs, and the $10 billion directed toward high speed rail..
3. Fully Funding and Preserving Public Education
There is no good news here. While Obama's Secretary of Education has not called teachers unions "terrorists" as his Bush-era counterpart did, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan is as committed to de-funding and privatizing public education as his predecessors. Obama's pick for Secretary of Education is an underqualified stooge whose longest lasting job was as a pro basketball player, and who has not a single hour of classroom teaching experience. Duncan's innovations as Chicago Public Schools CEO, detailed in a December BAR interview with longtime Chicago teachers union activist George Schmidt, include the closing and privatizations of dozens of schools in African American communities and the summary firing of their mostly black teachers and principals, and the handing over of several inner-city Chicago middle and high schools to the Army, Navy and Marine Corps.
No Child Left Behind, the bipartisan corporate Bush era "education reform," which allows schools and entire districts to be threatened with closure and privatization, seems destined to remain intact for the forseeable future under an Obama administration.
Zero points here of a possible six.
4. War and Peace
From 2003 onward, Barack Obama staked his political career on conveying to voters the impression that he opposed the war in Iraq, while vigorously signalling to the bipartisan freign policy establishment that he was really one of them. By early 2008 Obama closed the circle, openly endorsing the Bush "surge" and war aims in Iraq, confirming that thirty or fifty or seventy thousand troops, depending, could remain in Iraq throughout his first term. Unlike John McCain, who said the US should increase troop levels in Afghanistan because "we" are "winning," Obama wanted to boost the number of American boots on the ground there because "we" are losing. Halfway though his first week in office, Obama was launching missiles from drones at Pakistani mountain villages.
While the US spends more on things military than the rest of the world combined, the Obama military budget is higher than Bush's. Though the laughable "war on terror" is gone from our government propaganda, all or most of its machinery remains in motion under the new administration.
Barack Obama has kept Robert Gates, a bloodstained Reagan-era war criminal as chief of the Pentagon, and designated the bloodthirsty Susan Rice as National Security Advisor. Susan Rice is an enthusiastic advocate of genocidal military intervention practically everywhere on the African continent under the monstrously hypocritical cover of "stopping genocide."
The president says he will talk to Iran, which is worth a point, but continues the Bush policy of threatening Russia with NATO expansion right up to its borders, which takes away the single point.
Zero out of nine points.
5. Transportation
After more than a half century of disinvestment, the US passenger rail network is the laughing stock of the developed world. Passenger railcars have not been manufactured in the US for decades, and no high speed rail exists at all outside a single line in the northeast. Investment in high speed intercity rail was one of the first promises broken by the Clinton administration.
The initial investment of $10 billion, apparently pushed at the president's personal initiative is a modest start, with the potential to create tens of thousands of new jobs, though not right away. Obama probably knows that $100 billion over his first term would be a minimally reasonable down payment on a world class passenger rail network, which will be cheaper and more sustainable than America's dependence on highways and air travel. Assuming he does have the vision, the question are whether he has the political will, and whether, after allowing Wall Street to pillage and loot the US Treasury under the guise of a "bailout," whether we have the money, and how much of it can be executed before the price of fuel makes air and highway travel prohibitive.
Also, existing urban mass transit is in tatters, thanks to management that believes transit is a profit center rather than an economic right. Those awaiting an Obama commitment to the future of urban mass transit on the scale of his pledges to intercity rail may have a long wait. After all, urban mass transit is identified, in the minds of many, with African Americans, a political identification the First Black President determined to avoid wherever possible.
Four points out of five.
6. Caribbean and Latin America
Given that one black person in ten in the US has a spouse, sibling or parent born abroad, most often from Africa or the Caribbean, administration policies toward these regions have a special resonance in the African American community. Obama deserves a half point for shaking hands with Venezuela's Hugo Chavez, and another half point for not striking the usual full frontal crudity pose toward Cuba at the inter-American summit earlier this month. But massive taxpayer subsidies of US agribusiness to dump millions of tons of genetically modified corn, soybeans and other products on Jamaica, Haiti, Mexico, Central and South America continue to crush local agriculture, deepening food dependency in and driving immigration from these countries. There is no sign that an Obama administration is reconsidering any of these policies.
The brutal occupation of Haiti by a US financed proxy force of so-called peacekeepers, also continues unmentioned by the US press, and unremarked upon by the Obama administration.
Lots of room for improvement here. One and a half points out of four.
7. Obama's Africa Policy: Our Brotherman and the Motherland
In recent years the US has provided arms transfers, military training and military assistance to more than 50 out of Africa's 54 nations. Hence Africa is the most war-torn region on earth, containing millions of square miles in which hospitals, schools, agriculture, industry and civil society have collapsed into vast law-free zones, such as the eastern Congo, where 5 million souls have perished since the mid 1990s. These law-free zones have proven an ideal business-friendly environment for the extraction of Congo's timber and mineral wealth, including 90% of the world's coltan, an essential strategic mineral found in every cell phone, computer, aircraft and modern electronic device. Resources extracted from law free zones in the Congo and elsewhere in Africa invariably find their way into "legitimate" markets of Western Europe and the US.
While the death toll in neighboring Darfur the death toll is a twentieth or a hundredth that of the Congo, according to Mahmood Mandani and others who are in a position to know, but the Obama Administration, just like the Bush Administration before it, calls Darfur a "genocide," and not the Congo. The difference, say many, is that the Sudanese oil is being pumped out by the Chinese, while the profits from 5 million Congolese dead end up here. The "genocide" label is about as truthful as Saddam's WMD, another excuse for military intervention.
Barack Obama has been to Somalia, but his administration continues the twenty year low-intensity war against that unhappy country. Somalia hasn't had a central government in two decades not because its people don't want one, but because successive US Republican and Democratic administrations brand as "terrorist Al Qeada sympathizers" any Somali government that won't grant the US the exclusive rights to the untapped lake of oil beneath the country.
The Bush administratin established AFRICOM, the US imperial command on the continent, a move so unpopular that only one African government in 54 will dare openly accept it, fearing the wrath of their own constituents. Although it is a military command headed a black US general AFRICOM is seconded by a civilian from the State Department, and liberally sprinkled with representatives of every US civilian governmental, and some ostensible non-governmental entity which does business in Africa. Thus AFRICOM deliberately blurs the line between US civilian and military involvement on the African continent, and even more thoroughly militarizes US policy toward Africa.
Nobody who thinks half a minute about it imagines that the militarization of Africa, and of US policy toward Africa is a good thing. It has been US policy for more than two decades. Among the bipartisan designers of this policy are Obama's top foreign policy advisors including Madeline Albright and Susan Rice. You can look awfully hard for some good news in Obama's policy toward Africa so far, and find no reason for optimism.
We'll give him one point out of five anyway, for no good reason. Call it hope.
8. Bailing Out Wall Street
The extent to which Wall Street and the Obama administration are in bed with each other is deeply disappointing to most Americans, according to a recent NBC News Gallup poll.
Not a single economist, regulator, or financial analyst who predicted the bursting of the bubble economy, and there were many, has been hired by Obama's financial gurus, and every financial policy seems aimed at rescuing speculators rather than the American people. Rather than recognize the systemic crisis of capital for what it is, the end of business as usual, all the Obama 'stimulus" paackages are offered in the folorn hope that that lending can be re-started, another bubble re-inflated, and business can be resumed as usual.
Zero points out of six.
9. Debt and Foreclosure Crises
For ordinary people, the financial crisis has become a debt crisis. Mortgage, consumer and credit card debt have mounted to unpayable levels, as the parasitic masters of capital attempt to extract an interest payment out of every transaction. Acquiring a college education, for example, has become virtually impossible for most Americans without incurring a five figure debt at usurious interest rates. The Obamas, despite their much higher than average income, were unable to pay off their college loans till a couple years ago, when they received royalties from his best-selling book. Until there is a commitment on the part of the Obama administration to lower interest rates on current and new consumer, mortgage, and student loans, to restricting interest rates in future lending, and a restoration of bankruptcy laws that enable individuals to liquidate their debt and start anew, we cannot give Barack Obama any more than a single hopeful point out of six.
10. Investigatng the Bush Era Crimes
Unlike the nation's political elite, a substantial majority of the American people want the Bush crimes against humanity and the Constitution at least investigated, But the Obama administration on every front seems to affirm a bipartisan elite consensus that government officials are above the law. The Obama vision of reconciliation without truth incentivizes further violations of law on the part of government, If there were negative points, we would award them here.
Zero out of five.
11. Criminalizing Immigration and Militarizing the Border
Despite some promising campaign rhetoric in which Obama declined to adopt the racist and scapegoating language of Republican and many Democratic politicians toward immigrants, the Obama administration designated Janet Napalitano, the evil twin sister of Phoenix sheriff Joe Arpaio to head the Department of Homeland Security. In our opinion, this is an executive agency which should never have been formed, and ought to now be dissolved. Under the Obama administration, construction of the border wall continues.
Obama gets one point for rhetoric, and another point for not deploying troops to the border. Two out of five.
12. Broadband For Everyone, Low Power Radio, and a Just and Fair Media
One of the administration's professed goals is the extension of broadband availability to underserved rural and urban areas. The designation of $7 billion for this purpose, and the nomination of former FCC commissioner Jonathan Adelstein to supervise its dispensation is a promising start. But the failure thus far to neutralize corporate forces who want to keep any broadband mapping data concealed from the public is a loathsome concession to cable companies and telcos. Obama's new FCC chief has not yet been confirmed, and so cannot be judged. The administration says it is for network neutrality, and has not opposed low power FM radio as far as we know. Its position on media consolidation and the future of music remain unknown.
Two points awarded here for substance, and one for hope. Three out of five.
13. Environment
The so-called "Cap And Trade" scheme favored by the Obama adminstration enacts the reprehensible suggestion of Obama advisor Larry Summers' that African and other less developed countries are I"underpolluted" by establishing a corporate "right" to pollute, along with a financial market to buy, sell, trade and speculate on the value of these imaginary pollution "rights." It doesn't appear to have reduced carbon emissions in Europe, according to Dartmouth's Dr. Michael Dorsey, but it has made a lot of traders and speculators rich. , and is a product of the same market-as-solution-to-everything exhibited during the Bush years. A tax on carbon emission s would be more straightforward. No points there, and none for "clean coal" either.
The Obama adminstration gets a single point for talking up fuel economy standards and green jobs, with another thrown in for hope. One point out of five.
14. Agricultural Policy, and Policy Toward Black Farmers
The broad Obama policy toward agribusiness is unlikely to be good news. Obama is committed, for instance, to ethanol, which often takes more energy to produce than it does when burned. On the other hand, one of the first acts of Obama's new Secretary of Agriculture was to meet with black farmers of the Southern Federation of Rural Cooperatives. After decades of malign neglect toward African American farmers, a single meeting isn't much, but it's hopeful, worth two points of a possible five.
15. Mass Black Imprisonment
Some things are too hot for a First Black President with no real allegiance to African Americans as a community to touch, but too important to the lives of millions in that community to ignore. Not long ago, Obama declared that despite an incarceration rate seven to nine times that of white America, blacks were "90% of the way to equality." If the First Black President cannot grow a pair on this issue, and come out for restorative justice, elimination of disparate penalties, banning of incarceration of juveniles with adults or an end to indeterminate sentencing, he deserves no points. It's tough, it's a high standard, but a fair one.
Zero out of five.
by BAR Managing Editor Bruce A. Dixon
Why a Report Card At All?
The hundred day report card is an enduring tradition in American journalism for a very good reason. It's journalism's job to help citizens make sense of the world, to seek the truth and tell it without fear or favor no matter where it leads. Three months and a week into a new administration, everybody knows where the mens and ladies rooms are, most of the key hires are in place, and the bus has definitely cleared the station. There's plenty of evidence by now to assess where it's going, and whether it's anyplace we really ought to be headed.
Should We Grade President Obama on What He Promised, or on What People Need?
The answer to this should be easy. It all depends on whether we imagine government derives its authority from the blessedness of anointed men and women in office, or whether legitimacy comes from the informed consent of the governed. Most of us who were not home schooled learned it the latter way: governments are legit only insofar as they serve the people. Limiting the scope of a report card to what politicians promise confers upon them the power to lock down our collective imagination and deny our hunger and thirst for justice before we can even express it.
Why These Categories?
Because these are the issues that matter to our people. As the journal of African American political thought and action, they are what our authors write about every week.
Health Care Reform (9 points)
Creating New Jobs and Preserving Old Ones (5 points)
Fully Funding and Preserving Public Education (6 points)
War & Peace (9 points)
Transportation (5 points)
Caribbean and Latin America (4 points)
Obama's Africa Policy; Our Brotherman and the Motherland (5 points)
Wall Street Bailout (6 points)
Debt and Foreclosure Crises (6 points)
Investigating Bush-era Crimes (5 points)
Criminalizing Immigration, Militarizing the Border (5 points)
Broadband For Everyone and a Just and Fair Media (5 points)
Environment (5 points)
Agricultural Policy, and Policy Toward Black Farmers (5 points)
Mass imprisonment (5 points)
Employee Free Choice Act (5 points)
Urban Policy (5 points)
Privatization of Government Agencies and Services (5 points)
****************************************
1. Health Care Reform
President Obama himself declared that we should judge his first term on whether we get a national health care plan. While the exact specs of the Obama campaign have not been formally introduced, it's been no secret for a couple years now that Barack Obama and his advisors abhor any form of Medicare-For-All or single payer health care. When the president's people ordered their activists to convene a wave of health care house meetings in December, the demand most often voiced was for single payer, everybody-in and nobody out. Despite this, and despite polling data that shows a majority of physicians and a majority of the American people favor single payer health care, the Obama administration buried the results of those house meetings. Obama's series of regional health care "summits," although billed as the chance to get input from all the relevant have pointedly excluded any voices for single payer health care.
Currently, private insurance companies consume a third of every health care dollar for advertising, lawyering, salaries and bonuses, bad investments and the vast bureaucratic machinery they have created to deny coverage to the sick. We are the only nation where half the bankruptcies are caused by illness. The Obama health care plan, modeled on the failed "individual mandate" health insurance experiments of Massachusetts, Tennessee and other states will make health insurance like car insurance.
Everyone will have to buy a policy from a private company or face tax and other penalties, with no guarantee the policy will be either affordable or comprehensive. The myriad shortcomings of this plan are detailed in a report from Physicians for a National Health Care Plan, and in several previous BAR articles. When asked during the campaign whether he thought health care was a human right, Barack Obama said he thought it was. His health care plan does preserve the prifits of insurance companies.
Five points for admitting health care is a human right, minus one for suppressing discussion of single payer. Four out of nine.
2. Creating New Jobs and Preserving Old Ones
When Franklin D. Roosevelt took office in 1933, the nation had been in the Depression almost four years. The new president created some 800,000 jobs in the space of a few months. To be fair, this Depression hasn't been in effect nearly as long, and there are no insistent mass movements waging extralegal campaigns of strikes and civil disobedience going into the spring of 2009. So it's more complicated than measuring the hundreds of thousands of new jobs Roosevelt created against the hundreds of thousands Obama hasn't.
What we see is a failure of imagination on the part of the Obama administration. Not only does the First Black President declare it's the job of the private sector, never government, to create jobs, a stand closer to Herbert Hoover than to Franklin Roosevelt --- his "stimulus packages" have refused to fully fund the operations of local and state governments. Full funding for local governments would preserve the jobs of teachers, water department workers, librarians, coaches and park district workers, public safety employees and others who are being sent home in the tens of thousands. It's a piece of low hanging job and vital service preserving fruit the Obama administration refuses to harvest.
One point out of five for the Obama rhetoric on green jobs, and the $10 billion directed toward high speed rail..
3. Fully Funding and Preserving Public Education
There is no good news here. While Obama's Secretary of Education has not called teachers unions "terrorists" as his Bush-era counterpart did, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan is as committed to de-funding and privatizing public education as his predecessors. Obama's pick for Secretary of Education is an underqualified stooge whose longest lasting job was as a pro basketball player, and who has not a single hour of classroom teaching experience. Duncan's innovations as Chicago Public Schools CEO, detailed in a December BAR interview with longtime Chicago teachers union activist George Schmidt, include the closing and privatizations of dozens of schools in African American communities and the summary firing of their mostly black teachers and principals, and the handing over of several inner-city Chicago middle and high schools to the Army, Navy and Marine Corps.
No Child Left Behind, the bipartisan corporate Bush era "education reform," which allows schools and entire districts to be threatened with closure and privatization, seems destined to remain intact for the forseeable future under an Obama administration.
Zero points here of a possible six.
4. War and Peace
From 2003 onward, Barack Obama staked his political career on conveying to voters the impression that he opposed the war in Iraq, while vigorously signalling to the bipartisan freign policy establishment that he was really one of them. By early 2008 Obama closed the circle, openly endorsing the Bush "surge" and war aims in Iraq, confirming that thirty or fifty or seventy thousand troops, depending, could remain in Iraq throughout his first term. Unlike John McCain, who said the US should increase troop levels in Afghanistan because "we" are "winning," Obama wanted to boost the number of American boots on the ground there because "we" are losing. Halfway though his first week in office, Obama was launching missiles from drones at Pakistani mountain villages.
While the US spends more on things military than the rest of the world combined, the Obama military budget is higher than Bush's. Though the laughable "war on terror" is gone from our government propaganda, all or most of its machinery remains in motion under the new administration.
Barack Obama has kept Robert Gates, a bloodstained Reagan-era war criminal as chief of the Pentagon, and designated the bloodthirsty Susan Rice as National Security Advisor. Susan Rice is an enthusiastic advocate of genocidal military intervention practically everywhere on the African continent under the monstrously hypocritical cover of "stopping genocide."
The president says he will talk to Iran, which is worth a point, but continues the Bush policy of threatening Russia with NATO expansion right up to its borders, which takes away the single point.
Zero out of nine points.
5. Transportation
After more than a half century of disinvestment, the US passenger rail network is the laughing stock of the developed world. Passenger railcars have not been manufactured in the US for decades, and no high speed rail exists at all outside a single line in the northeast. Investment in high speed intercity rail was one of the first promises broken by the Clinton administration.
The initial investment of $10 billion, apparently pushed at the president's personal initiative is a modest start, with the potential to create tens of thousands of new jobs, though not right away. Obama probably knows that $100 billion over his first term would be a minimally reasonable down payment on a world class passenger rail network, which will be cheaper and more sustainable than America's dependence on highways and air travel. Assuming he does have the vision, the question are whether he has the political will, and whether, after allowing Wall Street to pillage and loot the US Treasury under the guise of a "bailout," whether we have the money, and how much of it can be executed before the price of fuel makes air and highway travel prohibitive.
Also, existing urban mass transit is in tatters, thanks to management that believes transit is a profit center rather than an economic right. Those awaiting an Obama commitment to the future of urban mass transit on the scale of his pledges to intercity rail may have a long wait. After all, urban mass transit is identified, in the minds of many, with African Americans, a political identification the First Black President determined to avoid wherever possible.
Four points out of five.
6. Caribbean and Latin America
Given that one black person in ten in the US has a spouse, sibling or parent born abroad, most often from Africa or the Caribbean, administration policies toward these regions have a special resonance in the African American community. Obama deserves a half point for shaking hands with Venezuela's Hugo Chavez, and another half point for not striking the usual full frontal crudity pose toward Cuba at the inter-American summit earlier this month. But massive taxpayer subsidies of US agribusiness to dump millions of tons of genetically modified corn, soybeans and other products on Jamaica, Haiti, Mexico, Central and South America continue to crush local agriculture, deepening food dependency in and driving immigration from these countries. There is no sign that an Obama administration is reconsidering any of these policies.
The brutal occupation of Haiti by a US financed proxy force of so-called peacekeepers, also continues unmentioned by the US press, and unremarked upon by the Obama administration.
Lots of room for improvement here. One and a half points out of four.
7. Obama's Africa Policy: Our Brotherman and the Motherland
In recent years the US has provided arms transfers, military training and military assistance to more than 50 out of Africa's 54 nations. Hence Africa is the most war-torn region on earth, containing millions of square miles in which hospitals, schools, agriculture, industry and civil society have collapsed into vast law-free zones, such as the eastern Congo, where 5 million souls have perished since the mid 1990s. These law-free zones have proven an ideal business-friendly environment for the extraction of Congo's timber and mineral wealth, including 90% of the world's coltan, an essential strategic mineral found in every cell phone, computer, aircraft and modern electronic device. Resources extracted from law free zones in the Congo and elsewhere in Africa invariably find their way into "legitimate" markets of Western Europe and the US.
While the death toll in neighboring Darfur the death toll is a twentieth or a hundredth that of the Congo, according to Mahmood Mandani and others who are in a position to know, but the Obama Administration, just like the Bush Administration before it, calls Darfur a "genocide," and not the Congo. The difference, say many, is that the Sudanese oil is being pumped out by the Chinese, while the profits from 5 million Congolese dead end up here. The "genocide" label is about as truthful as Saddam's WMD, another excuse for military intervention.
Barack Obama has been to Somalia, but his administration continues the twenty year low-intensity war against that unhappy country. Somalia hasn't had a central government in two decades not because its people don't want one, but because successive US Republican and Democratic administrations brand as "terrorist Al Qeada sympathizers" any Somali government that won't grant the US the exclusive rights to the untapped lake of oil beneath the country.
The Bush administratin established AFRICOM, the US imperial command on the continent, a move so unpopular that only one African government in 54 will dare openly accept it, fearing the wrath of their own constituents. Although it is a military command headed a black US general AFRICOM is seconded by a civilian from the State Department, and liberally sprinkled with representatives of every US civilian governmental, and some ostensible non-governmental entity which does business in Africa. Thus AFRICOM deliberately blurs the line between US civilian and military involvement on the African continent, and even more thoroughly militarizes US policy toward Africa.
Nobody who thinks half a minute about it imagines that the militarization of Africa, and of US policy toward Africa is a good thing. It has been US policy for more than two decades. Among the bipartisan designers of this policy are Obama's top foreign policy advisors including Madeline Albright and Susan Rice. You can look awfully hard for some good news in Obama's policy toward Africa so far, and find no reason for optimism.
We'll give him one point out of five anyway, for no good reason. Call it hope.
8. Bailing Out Wall Street
The extent to which Wall Street and the Obama administration are in bed with each other is deeply disappointing to most Americans, according to a recent NBC News Gallup poll.
Not a single economist, regulator, or financial analyst who predicted the bursting of the bubble economy, and there were many, has been hired by Obama's financial gurus, and every financial policy seems aimed at rescuing speculators rather than the American people. Rather than recognize the systemic crisis of capital for what it is, the end of business as usual, all the Obama 'stimulus" paackages are offered in the folorn hope that that lending can be re-started, another bubble re-inflated, and business can be resumed as usual.
Zero points out of six.
9. Debt and Foreclosure Crises
For ordinary people, the financial crisis has become a debt crisis. Mortgage, consumer and credit card debt have mounted to unpayable levels, as the parasitic masters of capital attempt to extract an interest payment out of every transaction. Acquiring a college education, for example, has become virtually impossible for most Americans without incurring a five figure debt at usurious interest rates. The Obamas, despite their much higher than average income, were unable to pay off their college loans till a couple years ago, when they received royalties from his best-selling book. Until there is a commitment on the part of the Obama administration to lower interest rates on current and new consumer, mortgage, and student loans, to restricting interest rates in future lending, and a restoration of bankruptcy laws that enable individuals to liquidate their debt and start anew, we cannot give Barack Obama any more than a single hopeful point out of six.
10. Investigatng the Bush Era Crimes
Unlike the nation's political elite, a substantial majority of the American people want the Bush crimes against humanity and the Constitution at least investigated, But the Obama administration on every front seems to affirm a bipartisan elite consensus that government officials are above the law. The Obama vision of reconciliation without truth incentivizes further violations of law on the part of government, If there were negative points, we would award them here.
Zero out of five.
11. Criminalizing Immigration and Militarizing the Border
Despite some promising campaign rhetoric in which Obama declined to adopt the racist and scapegoating language of Republican and many Democratic politicians toward immigrants, the Obama administration designated Janet Napalitano, the evil twin sister of Phoenix sheriff Joe Arpaio to head the Department of Homeland Security. In our opinion, this is an executive agency which should never have been formed, and ought to now be dissolved. Under the Obama administration, construction of the border wall continues.
Obama gets one point for rhetoric, and another point for not deploying troops to the border. Two out of five.
12. Broadband For Everyone, Low Power Radio, and a Just and Fair Media
One of the administration's professed goals is the extension of broadband availability to underserved rural and urban areas. The designation of $7 billion for this purpose, and the nomination of former FCC commissioner Jonathan Adelstein to supervise its dispensation is a promising start. But the failure thus far to neutralize corporate forces who want to keep any broadband mapping data concealed from the public is a loathsome concession to cable companies and telcos. Obama's new FCC chief has not yet been confirmed, and so cannot be judged. The administration says it is for network neutrality, and has not opposed low power FM radio as far as we know. Its position on media consolidation and the future of music remain unknown.
Two points awarded here for substance, and one for hope. Three out of five.
13. Environment
The so-called "Cap And Trade" scheme favored by the Obama adminstration enacts the reprehensible suggestion of Obama advisor Larry Summers' that African and other less developed countries are I"underpolluted" by establishing a corporate "right" to pollute, along with a financial market to buy, sell, trade and speculate on the value of these imaginary pollution "rights." It doesn't appear to have reduced carbon emissions in Europe, according to Dartmouth's Dr. Michael Dorsey, but it has made a lot of traders and speculators rich. , and is a product of the same market-as-solution-to-everything exhibited during the Bush years. A tax on carbon emission s would be more straightforward. No points there, and none for "clean coal" either.
The Obama adminstration gets a single point for talking up fuel economy standards and green jobs, with another thrown in for hope. One point out of five.
14. Agricultural Policy, and Policy Toward Black Farmers
The broad Obama policy toward agribusiness is unlikely to be good news. Obama is committed, for instance, to ethanol, which often takes more energy to produce than it does when burned. On the other hand, one of the first acts of Obama's new Secretary of Agriculture was to meet with black farmers of the Southern Federation of Rural Cooperatives. After decades of malign neglect toward African American farmers, a single meeting isn't much, but it's hopeful, worth two points of a possible five.
15. Mass Black Imprisonment
Some things are too hot for a First Black President with no real allegiance to African Americans as a community to touch, but too important to the lives of millions in that community to ignore. Not long ago, Obama declared that despite an incarceration rate seven to nine times that of white America, blacks were "90% of the way to equality." If the First Black President cannot grow a pair on this issue, and come out for restorative justice, elimination of disparate penalties, banning of incarceration of juveniles with adults or an end to indeterminate sentencing, he deserves no points. It's tough, it's a high standard, but a fair one.
Zero out of five.
Monday, April 27, 2009
Youth and the Myth of Post-Racial Society Under Barack Obama
With the election of Barack Obama, it has been argued that not only will the social state be renewed in the spirit and legacy of the New Deal, but that the punishing racial state and its vast complex of disciplinary institutions will, if not come to an end, at least be significantly reformed.[1] From this perspective, Obama's presidency not only represents a post-racial victory, but also signals a new space of post-racial harmony. In assessing the Obama victory, Time Magazine columnist Joe Klein wrote, "It is a place where the primacy of racial identity - and this includes the old Jesse Jackson version of black racial identity - has been replaced by the celebration of pluralism, of cross-racial synergy."[2] Obama won the 2008 election because he was able to mobilize 95 percent of African-Americans, two-thirds of all Latinos and a large proportion of young people under the age of 30. At the same time, what is generally forgotten in the exuberance of this assessment is that the majority of white Americans voted for the John McCain-Sarah Palin ticket. While "post-racial" may mean less overt racism, the idea that we have moved into a post-racial period in American history is not merely premature - it is an act of willful denial and ignorance. Paul Ortiz puts it well in his comments on the myth of post-racialism:
The idea that we've moved to a post-racial period in American social history is undermined by an avalanche of recent events. Hurricane Katrina. The US Supreme Court's dismantling of Brown vs. Board of Education and the resegregation of American schools. The Clash of Civilizations thesis that promotes the idea of a War against Islam. The backlash facing immigrant workers. A grotesque prison industrial complex. [Moreover] ... [w]hile Americans were being robbed blind and primed for yet another bailout of the banks and investment sectors, they were treated to new evidence from Fox News and poverty experts that the great moral threats facing the nation were greedy union workers, black single mothers, Latino gang bangers and illegal immigrants.[3]
Missing from the exuberant claims that Americans are now living in a post-racial society is the historical legacy of a neoconservative revolution, officially launched in 1980 with the election of Ronald Reagan, and its ensuing racialist attacks on the welfare "Queens"; Bill Clinton's cheerful compliance in signing bills that expanded the punishing industries; and George W. Bush's "willingness to make punishment his preferred response to social problems."[4] In the last 30 years, we have witnessed the emergence of policies that have amplified the power of the racial state and expanded its mechanisms of punishment and mass incarceration, the consequences of which are deeply racist - even as the state and its legal apparatuses insist on their own race neutrality.
The politics of racism has hardly disappeared from the landscape of American culture and the institutions that support it. Poor minority kids now find themselves on a fast tack extending from school to juvenile courts to prison. And the number of poor and minority kids, now aptly called the "recession generation" by Dr. Irwin Redlener, president of New York City's Children's Health fund, has increased from 13 million before the economic meltdown to an expected 17 million by the end of the year. And who are these kids? These are the kids marginalized by race and class, who are largely seen either as a drain on the economy or stand in the way of market freedoms, free trade, consumerism and the whitewashed fantasies of a cleansed, Disneyfied social order. These are kids who, not only have to fend for themselves in the face of life's tragedies, but are also supposed to do it without being seen by the dominant society. Excommunicated from the sphere of human concern, they have been rendered invisible, utterly disposable, and heir to that army of socially homeless that allegedly no longer existed in colorblind America. Most of them, if not homeless, live in dilapidated housing, attend schools that are underfunded and literally falling apart, receive food stamps and eat mostly junk food when they can get it. They are the major targets of gun violence, lack decent health care and they often find themselves in hospital emergency rooms. These are the kids who experience daily, whether on the street or in school, draconian discipline policies that endlessly criminalize every aspect of their behavior and increasingly banish them from the very institutions such as schools that remain their last chance for getting a fair shake in life. It gets worse. For instance, a full 60 percent of black high school dropouts, by the time they reach their mid-thirties, will be prisoners or ex-cons and the drop out rate is as high as 65 percent in some cities.[5] This apartheid-based system of incarceration bodes especially ill for young black males. According to Paul Street:
It is worth noting that half of the nation's black male high-school dropouts will be incarcerated - moving, often enough, from quasi-carceral lock-down high schools to the real "lock down" thing - at some point in their lives. These dropouts are over represented among the one in three African American males aged sixteen- to twenty-years old who are under one form of supervision by the US criminal justice system: parole, probation, jail, or prison.[6]
As the toll in human suffering increases daily, Obama and his Wall Street advisers bail out the banks and the rich just as crucial social services for children are being cut back, unemployment is soaring into record numbers and more and more youth of color are disappearing into an abysmal pit of poverty, despair and hopelessness. Raised in a blood-drenched culture of violence mediated by an economic Darwinism that harbors a rabid disdain for the common good, poor minority kids appear to be completely off the radar of public concern and government compassion. And Obama, for all of his soaring poetic imagery of unity and justice, falls flat on his face by allowing his Secretary of Education Arnie Duncan to offer up reform policies that amount to nothing more than another version of Bush's No Child Left Behind with its anti-union ideology and obsessive investment in measurement and accountability schemes that strips any talk of educational reform of any viability while turning schools into nothing more than testing factories - policies that disproportionately punish brown and black youth. These racially exclusionary set of policies and institutions have become especially cruel since the beginning of the neoconservative revolution in the 1980s, and are not poised to disappear soon under the presidency of Barack Obama - in fact, given the current economic crisis, they may even get worse.
In short, the discourse of the post-racial state ignores how political and economic institutions, with their circuits of repression and disposability and their technologies of punishment, connect and condemn the fate of many impoverished youth of color in the inner cities to persisting structures of racism that "serve to keep [them] in a state of inferiority and oppression."[7] Not surprisingly, under such circumstances, individual suffering no longer registers a social concern as all notions of injustice are assumed to be the outcome of personal failings or deficits. Signs of the pathologizing of both marginalized youth and the crucial safety nets that have provided them some hope of justice in the past can be found everywhere from the racist screeds coming out of right-wing talk radio to the mainstream media that seems to believe that the culture of black and brown youth is synonymous with the culture of crime. Poverty is now imagined to be a problem of individual character. Racism is now understood as merely an act of individual discrimination (if not discretion), and homelessness is reduced to a choice made by lazy people.
Unfortunately, missing from the discourse of those who are arguing for the kind of progressive change the Obama administration should deliver is any mention of the race-based crises facing youth and the terrible toll it has taken on generations of poor black and brown kids. Bringing this crisis to the forefront of the political and social agenda is crucial, particularly since Obama, in a number of speeches prior to assuming the presidency, refused to adopt the demonizing rhetoric often used by politicians when talking about youth. Instead, he pointedly called upon the American people to reclaim young people as an important symbol of the future and democracy itself:
[C]ome together and say, "Not this time." This time we want to talk about the crumbling schools that are stealing the future of black children and white children and Asian children and Hispanic children and Native American children. This time we want to reject the cynicism that tells us that these kids can't learn; that those kids who don't look like us are somebody else's problem. The children of America are not those kids, they are our kids.[8]
But if Barack Obama's call to address the crucial problems facing young people in this country is to be taken seriously, the political, economic and institutional conditions that both legitimate and sustain a shameful attack on poor minority youth have to be made visible, open to challenge and transformed. This can only happen by refusing the race-based somnambulism and social amnesia that coincide with the pretense of post-racial politics and society, especially when the matter concerns young people of color. To reclaim poor minority youth as part of a democratic vision and a crucial symbol of the future requires more than hope and a civics lesson: It necessitates transforming the workings of racist power arrangements both in and out of the government along with the market-driven institutions and values that have enabled the rise of a predatory corporate state and a punishing state that have produced a polity that governs through the logic of finance capital, consumerism, crime, disposability and a growing imprisonment binge.
The marriage of economic Darwinism and the racialized punishing state is on full display not merely in the rising rate of incarceration for black and brown people in the United States, but also in places like East Carroll Parish in Louisiana where inmates provide cheap or free labor at barbecues, funerals, service stations, and a host of other sites. According to Adam Nossiter, "the men of orange are everywhere" and people living in this Louisiana county "say they could not get by without their inmates, who make up more than 10 percent of its population and most of its labor force. They are dirt-cheap, sometimes free, always compliant, ever-ready and disposable....You just call up the sheriff, and presto, inmates are headed your way. 'They bring me warm bodies, 10 warm bodies in the morning,' said Grady Brown, owner of the Panola Pepper Corporation. 'They do anything you ask them to do....' 'You call them up, they drop them off, and they pick them up in the afternoon,' said Paul Chapple, owner of a service station."[9] Nossiter claims that the system is jokingly referred to by many people who use it as "rent a convict" and is, to say the least, an "odd vestige of the abusive-convict-lease system that began in the South around Reconstruction."[10] This is not merely an eccentric snapshot of small town racism, it is also an image of what kind of future poor minority youth might inhabit.
Treating prisoners as commodities to be bought and sold like expendable goods suggests the degree to which the punishing state has divested itself of any moral responsibility with regard to those human beings who, in the logic of free-market fundamentalism, are considered either as commodities or as waste products, and this is true especially of young people. At the same time, as racism has been relegated to an anachronistic vestige of the past, especially in light of Barack Obama's election to the presidency, the workings of the punishing state are whitewashed and removed from the racialized violence that deeply influences and constrains the lives of so many young people. Consequently, the American public becomes increasingly indifferent to the ways in which the practices of a market-driven society - market deregulation, privatization, the hollowing out of the social state and the disparaging of the public good - wage a devastating assault on African-American and Latino communities, young people and, increasingly, immigrants and other people of color, who are relegated to the borders of American normalcy. Alarmingly, the punishing state, when coupled with the growing disappearance of newspapers and other crucial public spheres, not only produces vast amounts of inequality, suffering and racism, but also propagates collective amnesia, cynicism and moral indifference.
Under this insufferable climate of increased repression and unabated exploitation, young people and communities of color become the new casualties in an ongoing war against justice, freedom, social citizenship and democracy. While Obama speaks eloquently about the need to develop public polices that stress social investment rather than enriching the coffers of the rich, he has not produced adequate policies, especially in education, for whom poor and minority youth will no longer be viewed as either criminals or simply disposable. Instead of testing schemes, young people need structurally sound schools, smaller class sizes, high quality teachers, social programs that address the conditions that disable students from learning and a Marshall Plan committed to providing free education, health care, full employment through public works and a promise that the government is willing to invest as much time, money and resources in their future as it has invested so willingly in the past in the military-industrial complex and its expanding discourse of militarism. How much longer can a nation ignore those youth who lack the resources and opportunities that were available, in a partial and incomplete way, to previous generations? And what does it mean when a nation becomes frozen ethically and imaginatively in providing its youth with a future of hope and opportunity?
* * *
[1] For a brilliant analysis of the racist state, see David Theo Goldberg, "The Racial State" (Malden: Wiley-Blackwell, 2001).
[2] Joe Klein, "Obama's Victory Ushers in a New America," Time.com (November 5, 2008). Online: http://www.time.com/time/politics/article/0,8599,1856649,00.html.
[3] Paul Ortiz, "On the Shoulders of Giants: Senator Obama and the Future of American Politics," Truthout.org (November 25, 2008). Online: http://www.truthout.org/112508R?print.
[4] Jonathan Simon, "Governing Through Crime: How the War on Crime Transformed American Democracy and Created a Culture of Fear" (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), p. 59.
[5] Jason DeParle, "The American Prison Nightmare," New York Review of Books, Vol. LIV, No. 6 (April 12, 2007), p. 33.
[6] Paul Street, "Segregated Schools: Educational Apartheid in Post-Civil Rights America" (New York: Routledge, 2005), p. 82.
[7] Angela Y. Davis, "Abolition Democracy: Beyond Empire, Prisons, and Torture" (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2005), p. 98.
[8] From a transcript entitled "Barack Obama's Speech on Race," New York Times (March 18, 2008). Online: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/18/us/politics/18text-obama.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=%22Barack%20Obama's%20Speech%20on%20Race%22&st=cse.
[9] Adam Nossiter, "With Jobs to Do, Louisiana Parish Turns to Inmates," New York Times (July 5, 2006). Online: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/05/us/05prisoners.html.
[10] Nossiter, "With Jobs to Do, Louisiana Parish Turns to Inmates."
»
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Henry A. Giroux holds the Global TV Network chair in English and Cultural Studies at McMaster University in Canada. Related work: Henry A. Giroux, "The Mouse that Roared: Disney and the End of Innocence" (Lanham: Rowman and Lilttlefield, 2001). His most recent books include "Take Back Higher Education" (co-authored with Susan Searls Giroux, 2006), "The University in Chains: Confronting the Military-Industrial-Academic Complex" (2007) and "Against the Terror of Neoliberalism: Politics Beyond the Age of Greed" (2008). His newest book, "Youth in a Suspect Society: Beyond the Politics of Disposability," will be published by Palgrave Mcmillan in 2009.
The idea that we've moved to a post-racial period in American social history is undermined by an avalanche of recent events. Hurricane Katrina. The US Supreme Court's dismantling of Brown vs. Board of Education and the resegregation of American schools. The Clash of Civilizations thesis that promotes the idea of a War against Islam. The backlash facing immigrant workers. A grotesque prison industrial complex. [Moreover] ... [w]hile Americans were being robbed blind and primed for yet another bailout of the banks and investment sectors, they were treated to new evidence from Fox News and poverty experts that the great moral threats facing the nation were greedy union workers, black single mothers, Latino gang bangers and illegal immigrants.[3]
Missing from the exuberant claims that Americans are now living in a post-racial society is the historical legacy of a neoconservative revolution, officially launched in 1980 with the election of Ronald Reagan, and its ensuing racialist attacks on the welfare "Queens"; Bill Clinton's cheerful compliance in signing bills that expanded the punishing industries; and George W. Bush's "willingness to make punishment his preferred response to social problems."[4] In the last 30 years, we have witnessed the emergence of policies that have amplified the power of the racial state and expanded its mechanisms of punishment and mass incarceration, the consequences of which are deeply racist - even as the state and its legal apparatuses insist on their own race neutrality.
The politics of racism has hardly disappeared from the landscape of American culture and the institutions that support it. Poor minority kids now find themselves on a fast tack extending from school to juvenile courts to prison. And the number of poor and minority kids, now aptly called the "recession generation" by Dr. Irwin Redlener, president of New York City's Children's Health fund, has increased from 13 million before the economic meltdown to an expected 17 million by the end of the year. And who are these kids? These are the kids marginalized by race and class, who are largely seen either as a drain on the economy or stand in the way of market freedoms, free trade, consumerism and the whitewashed fantasies of a cleansed, Disneyfied social order. These are kids who, not only have to fend for themselves in the face of life's tragedies, but are also supposed to do it without being seen by the dominant society. Excommunicated from the sphere of human concern, they have been rendered invisible, utterly disposable, and heir to that army of socially homeless that allegedly no longer existed in colorblind America. Most of them, if not homeless, live in dilapidated housing, attend schools that are underfunded and literally falling apart, receive food stamps and eat mostly junk food when they can get it. They are the major targets of gun violence, lack decent health care and they often find themselves in hospital emergency rooms. These are the kids who experience daily, whether on the street or in school, draconian discipline policies that endlessly criminalize every aspect of their behavior and increasingly banish them from the very institutions such as schools that remain their last chance for getting a fair shake in life. It gets worse. For instance, a full 60 percent of black high school dropouts, by the time they reach their mid-thirties, will be prisoners or ex-cons and the drop out rate is as high as 65 percent in some cities.[5] This apartheid-based system of incarceration bodes especially ill for young black males. According to Paul Street:
It is worth noting that half of the nation's black male high-school dropouts will be incarcerated - moving, often enough, from quasi-carceral lock-down high schools to the real "lock down" thing - at some point in their lives. These dropouts are over represented among the one in three African American males aged sixteen- to twenty-years old who are under one form of supervision by the US criminal justice system: parole, probation, jail, or prison.[6]
As the toll in human suffering increases daily, Obama and his Wall Street advisers bail out the banks and the rich just as crucial social services for children are being cut back, unemployment is soaring into record numbers and more and more youth of color are disappearing into an abysmal pit of poverty, despair and hopelessness. Raised in a blood-drenched culture of violence mediated by an economic Darwinism that harbors a rabid disdain for the common good, poor minority kids appear to be completely off the radar of public concern and government compassion. And Obama, for all of his soaring poetic imagery of unity and justice, falls flat on his face by allowing his Secretary of Education Arnie Duncan to offer up reform policies that amount to nothing more than another version of Bush's No Child Left Behind with its anti-union ideology and obsessive investment in measurement and accountability schemes that strips any talk of educational reform of any viability while turning schools into nothing more than testing factories - policies that disproportionately punish brown and black youth. These racially exclusionary set of policies and institutions have become especially cruel since the beginning of the neoconservative revolution in the 1980s, and are not poised to disappear soon under the presidency of Barack Obama - in fact, given the current economic crisis, they may even get worse.
In short, the discourse of the post-racial state ignores how political and economic institutions, with their circuits of repression and disposability and their technologies of punishment, connect and condemn the fate of many impoverished youth of color in the inner cities to persisting structures of racism that "serve to keep [them] in a state of inferiority and oppression."[7] Not surprisingly, under such circumstances, individual suffering no longer registers a social concern as all notions of injustice are assumed to be the outcome of personal failings or deficits. Signs of the pathologizing of both marginalized youth and the crucial safety nets that have provided them some hope of justice in the past can be found everywhere from the racist screeds coming out of right-wing talk radio to the mainstream media that seems to believe that the culture of black and brown youth is synonymous with the culture of crime. Poverty is now imagined to be a problem of individual character. Racism is now understood as merely an act of individual discrimination (if not discretion), and homelessness is reduced to a choice made by lazy people.
Unfortunately, missing from the discourse of those who are arguing for the kind of progressive change the Obama administration should deliver is any mention of the race-based crises facing youth and the terrible toll it has taken on generations of poor black and brown kids. Bringing this crisis to the forefront of the political and social agenda is crucial, particularly since Obama, in a number of speeches prior to assuming the presidency, refused to adopt the demonizing rhetoric often used by politicians when talking about youth. Instead, he pointedly called upon the American people to reclaim young people as an important symbol of the future and democracy itself:
[C]ome together and say, "Not this time." This time we want to talk about the crumbling schools that are stealing the future of black children and white children and Asian children and Hispanic children and Native American children. This time we want to reject the cynicism that tells us that these kids can't learn; that those kids who don't look like us are somebody else's problem. The children of America are not those kids, they are our kids.[8]
But if Barack Obama's call to address the crucial problems facing young people in this country is to be taken seriously, the political, economic and institutional conditions that both legitimate and sustain a shameful attack on poor minority youth have to be made visible, open to challenge and transformed. This can only happen by refusing the race-based somnambulism and social amnesia that coincide with the pretense of post-racial politics and society, especially when the matter concerns young people of color. To reclaim poor minority youth as part of a democratic vision and a crucial symbol of the future requires more than hope and a civics lesson: It necessitates transforming the workings of racist power arrangements both in and out of the government along with the market-driven institutions and values that have enabled the rise of a predatory corporate state and a punishing state that have produced a polity that governs through the logic of finance capital, consumerism, crime, disposability and a growing imprisonment binge.
The marriage of economic Darwinism and the racialized punishing state is on full display not merely in the rising rate of incarceration for black and brown people in the United States, but also in places like East Carroll Parish in Louisiana where inmates provide cheap or free labor at barbecues, funerals, service stations, and a host of other sites. According to Adam Nossiter, "the men of orange are everywhere" and people living in this Louisiana county "say they could not get by without their inmates, who make up more than 10 percent of its population and most of its labor force. They are dirt-cheap, sometimes free, always compliant, ever-ready and disposable....You just call up the sheriff, and presto, inmates are headed your way. 'They bring me warm bodies, 10 warm bodies in the morning,' said Grady Brown, owner of the Panola Pepper Corporation. 'They do anything you ask them to do....' 'You call them up, they drop them off, and they pick them up in the afternoon,' said Paul Chapple, owner of a service station."[9] Nossiter claims that the system is jokingly referred to by many people who use it as "rent a convict" and is, to say the least, an "odd vestige of the abusive-convict-lease system that began in the South around Reconstruction."[10] This is not merely an eccentric snapshot of small town racism, it is also an image of what kind of future poor minority youth might inhabit.
Treating prisoners as commodities to be bought and sold like expendable goods suggests the degree to which the punishing state has divested itself of any moral responsibility with regard to those human beings who, in the logic of free-market fundamentalism, are considered either as commodities or as waste products, and this is true especially of young people. At the same time, as racism has been relegated to an anachronistic vestige of the past, especially in light of Barack Obama's election to the presidency, the workings of the punishing state are whitewashed and removed from the racialized violence that deeply influences and constrains the lives of so many young people. Consequently, the American public becomes increasingly indifferent to the ways in which the practices of a market-driven society - market deregulation, privatization, the hollowing out of the social state and the disparaging of the public good - wage a devastating assault on African-American and Latino communities, young people and, increasingly, immigrants and other people of color, who are relegated to the borders of American normalcy. Alarmingly, the punishing state, when coupled with the growing disappearance of newspapers and other crucial public spheres, not only produces vast amounts of inequality, suffering and racism, but also propagates collective amnesia, cynicism and moral indifference.
Under this insufferable climate of increased repression and unabated exploitation, young people and communities of color become the new casualties in an ongoing war against justice, freedom, social citizenship and democracy. While Obama speaks eloquently about the need to develop public polices that stress social investment rather than enriching the coffers of the rich, he has not produced adequate policies, especially in education, for whom poor and minority youth will no longer be viewed as either criminals or simply disposable. Instead of testing schemes, young people need structurally sound schools, smaller class sizes, high quality teachers, social programs that address the conditions that disable students from learning and a Marshall Plan committed to providing free education, health care, full employment through public works and a promise that the government is willing to invest as much time, money and resources in their future as it has invested so willingly in the past in the military-industrial complex and its expanding discourse of militarism. How much longer can a nation ignore those youth who lack the resources and opportunities that were available, in a partial and incomplete way, to previous generations? And what does it mean when a nation becomes frozen ethically and imaginatively in providing its youth with a future of hope and opportunity?
* * *
[1] For a brilliant analysis of the racist state, see David Theo Goldberg, "The Racial State" (Malden: Wiley-Blackwell, 2001).
[2] Joe Klein, "Obama's Victory Ushers in a New America," Time.com (November 5, 2008). Online: http://www.time.com/time/politics/article/0,8599,1856649,00.html.
[3] Paul Ortiz, "On the Shoulders of Giants: Senator Obama and the Future of American Politics," Truthout.org (November 25, 2008). Online: http://www.truthout.org/112508R?print.
[4] Jonathan Simon, "Governing Through Crime: How the War on Crime Transformed American Democracy and Created a Culture of Fear" (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), p. 59.
[5] Jason DeParle, "The American Prison Nightmare," New York Review of Books, Vol. LIV, No. 6 (April 12, 2007), p. 33.
[6] Paul Street, "Segregated Schools: Educational Apartheid in Post-Civil Rights America" (New York: Routledge, 2005), p. 82.
[7] Angela Y. Davis, "Abolition Democracy: Beyond Empire, Prisons, and Torture" (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2005), p. 98.
[8] From a transcript entitled "Barack Obama's Speech on Race," New York Times (March 18, 2008). Online: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/18/us/politics/18text-obama.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=%22Barack%20Obama's%20Speech%20on%20Race%22&st=cse.
[9] Adam Nossiter, "With Jobs to Do, Louisiana Parish Turns to Inmates," New York Times (July 5, 2006). Online: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/05/us/05prisoners.html.
[10] Nossiter, "With Jobs to Do, Louisiana Parish Turns to Inmates."
»
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Henry A. Giroux holds the Global TV Network chair in English and Cultural Studies at McMaster University in Canada. Related work: Henry A. Giroux, "The Mouse that Roared: Disney and the End of Innocence" (Lanham: Rowman and Lilttlefield, 2001). His most recent books include "Take Back Higher Education" (co-authored with Susan Searls Giroux, 2006), "The University in Chains: Confronting the Military-Industrial-Academic Complex" (2007) and "Against the Terror of Neoliberalism: Politics Beyond the Age of Greed" (2008). His newest book, "Youth in a Suspect Society: Beyond the Politics of Disposability," will be published by Palgrave Mcmillan in 2009.
Wednesday, April 15, 2009
What do you really know about Somali "Pirates"?
You Are Being Lied to About Pirates
Johann Hari
The Independent, January 5, 2009
Who imagined that in 2009, the world's governments would be declaring a new War on Pirates? As you read this, the British Royal Navy - backed by the ships of more than two dozen nations, from the US to China - is sailing into Somalian waters to take on men we still picture as parrot-on-the- shoulder pantomime villains. They will soon be fighting Somalian ships and even chasing the pirates onto land, into one of the most broken countries on earth.
But behind the arrr-me-hearties oddness of this tale, there is an untold scandal. The people our governments are labeling as "one of the great menace of our times" have an extraordinary story to tell -- and some justice on their side.
Pirates have never been quite who we think they are. In the "golden age of piracy" - from 1650 to 1730 - the idea of the pirate as the senseless, savage thief that lingers today was created by the British government in a great propaganda-heave. Many ordinary people believed it was false: pirates were often rescued from the gallows by supportive crowds.
Why? What did they see that we can't? In his book Villains of All nations, the historian Marcus Rediker pores through the evidence to find out. If you became a merchant or navy sailor then - plucked from the docks of London's East End, young and hungry - you ended up in a floating wooden Hell. You worked all hours on a cramped, half-starved ship, and if you slacked off for a second, the all-powerful captain would whip you with the Cat O' Nine Tails. If you slacked consistently, you could be thrown overboard. And at the end of months or years of this, you were often cheated of your wages.
Pirates were the first people to rebel against this world. They mutinied against their tyrannical captains - and created a different way of working on the seas. Once they had a ship, the pirates elected their captains, and made all their decisions collectively.
They shared their bounty out in what Rediker calls "one of the most egalitarian plans for the disposition of resources to be found anywhere in the eighteenth century." They even took in escaped African slaves and lived with them as equals. The pirates showed "quite clearly - and subversively - that ships did not have to be run in the brutal and oppressive ways of the merchant service and the Royal navy." This is why they were popular, despite being unproductive thieves.
The words of one pirate from that lost age - a young British man called William Scott - should echo into this new age of piracy. Just before he was hanged in Charleston, South Carolina, he said: "What I did was to keep me from perishing.
I was forced to go a-pirating to live." In 1991, the government of Somalia - in the Horn of Africa - collapsed. Its nine million people have been teetering on starvation ever since - and many of the ugliest forces in the Western world have seen this as a great opportunity to steal the country's food supply and dump our nuclear waste in their seas.
Yes: nuclear waste. As soon as the government was gone, mysterious European ships started appearing off the coast of Somalia, dumping vast barrels into the ocean. The coastal population began to sicken. At first they suffered strange rashes, nausea and malformed babies.
Then, after the 2005 tsunami, hundreds of the dumped and leaking barrels washed up on shore. People began to suffer from radiation sickness, and more than 300 died. Ahmedou Ould-Abdallah, the UN envoy to Somalia, tells me: "Somebody is dumping nuclear material here. There is also lead, and heavy metals such as cadmium and mercury - you name it."
Much of it can be traced back to European hospitals and factories, who seem to be passing it on to the Italian mafia to "dispose" of cheaply. When I asked Ould-Abdallah what European governments were doing about it, he said with a sigh: "Nothing. There has been no clean-up, no compensation, and no prevention."
At the same time, other European ships have been looting Somalia's seas of their greatest resource: seafood. We have destroyed our own fish-stocks by over-exploitation - and now we have moved on to theirs. More than $300m worth of tuna, shrimp, lobster and other sea-life is being stolen every year by vast trawlers illegally sailing into Somalia's unprotected seas.
The local fishermen have suddenly lost their livelihoods, and they are starving. Mohammed Hussein, a fisherman in the town of Marka 100km south of Mogadishu, told Reuters: "If nothing is done, there soon won't be much fish left in our coastal waters."
This is the context in which the men we are calling "pirates" have emerged. Everyone agrees they were ordinary Somalian fishermen who at first took speedboats to try to dissuade the dumpers and trawlers, or at least wage a 'tax' on them. They call themselves the Volunteer Coastguard of Somalia - and it's not hard to see why.
In a surreal telephone interview, one of the pirate leaders, Sugule Ali, said their motive was "to stop illegal fishing and dumping in our waters... We don't consider ourselves sea bandits. We consider sea bandits [to be] those who illegally fish and dump in our seas and dump waste in our seas and carry weapons in our seas." William Scott would understand those words.
No, this doesn't make hostage-taking justifiable, and yes, some are clearly just gangsters - especially those who have held up World Food Programme supplies. But the "pirates" have the overwhelming support of the local population for a reason. The independent Somalian news-site WardherNews conducted the best research we have into what ordinary Somalis are thinking - and it found 70 percent "strongly supported the piracy as a form of national defence of the country's territorial waters."
During the revolutionary war in America, George Washington and America's founding fathers paid pirates to protect America's territorial waters, because they had no navy or coastguard of their own. Most Americans supported them. Is this so different?
Did we expect starving Somalians to stand passively on their beaches, paddling in our nuclear waste, and watch us snatch their fish to eat in restaurants in London and Paris and Rome? We didn't act on those crimes - but when some of the fishermen responded by disrupting the transit-corridor for 20 percent of the world's oil supply, we begin to shriek about "evil."
If we really want to deal with piracy, we need to stop its root cause - our crimes - before we send in the gun-boats to root out Somalia's criminals.
The story of the 2009 war on piracy was best summarised by another pirate, who lived and died in the fourth century BC. He was captured and brought to Alexander the Great, who demanded to know "what he meant by keeping possession of the sea." The pirate smiled, and responded: "What you mean by seizing the whole earth; but because I do it with a petty ship, I am called a robber, while you, who do it with a great fleet, are called emperor." Once again, our great imperial fleets sail in today - but who is the robber?
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Johann Hari is a writer for the Independent newspaper.
POSTSCRIPT: Some commenters seem bemused by the fact that both toxic dumping and the theft of fish are happening in the same place - wouldn't this make the fish contaminated? In fact, Somalia's coastline is vast, stretching to 3300km. Imagine how easy it would be - without any coastguard or army - to steal fish from Florida and dump nuclear waste on California, and you get the idea. These events are happening in different places - but with the same horrible effect: death for the locals, and stirred-up piracy. There's no contradiction.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ johann-hari/you-are-being- lied-to-abo_ b_155147. html
Sunday, April 12, 2009
Sunday, April 5, 2009
Structural Racism is Most Dangerous!
Structural Racism Not on ABC's Agenda
04/03/2009 by Julie Hollar
ABC's Good Morning America did a special 3-part series on race this week, "Black and White Now," to "look at race relations in America." All three parts revisited old experiments or news stories.
The first (3/31/09) was a repeat of an experiment with children playing with black and white dolls, showing that now kids don't tend to think that the black doll is mean and the white doll nice, like they did in the '40s--although some black girls still say the black doll is ugly and the white doll pretty. The report cited William Julius Wilson saying "there's still work to be done, especially with girls, even with Barack Obama as president, his family in the White House, to make sure the weight of a prejudice past doesn't secretly make its way into the hopes of a brand-new day."
Number two (4/1/09): another experiment repeated, black men trying to hail cabs in New York City. This time, in their very non-scientific experiment, black men do fine during the day, but have a harder time getting a cab once it's dark out. They also talk to people of color who feel discriminated against at high-end stores.
And number three (4/2/09): GMA anchors Diane Sawyer and Robin Roberts went back to their hometowns in the South and talked to groups of white and black children, respectively, about their perceptions of race. Ten years ago, when they did this in Mobile, the kids talked about a racial divide and expressed negative stereotypes of the other race. This time, "the kids don't wanna talk a lot about skin color" and were "expressing one hope that a rainbow of kids can show grown-ups how to learn, have parties, live together." Roberts asks them why they think (old) people still want to talk about race a lot, and one kid says, "Because they're so happy it's not like that anymore."
These are, overall, encouraging stories. But it's only possible to tell such encouraging stories by limiting your focus to one kind of racism--the overt kind that plays out through individually held prejudices. Notice that none of GMA's episodes looked at the racial wealth gap, or the ways that the foreclosure crisis is impacting people of color more severely than white people, or the disproportionate number of people of color locked up in our criminal justice system versus white people (just to name a few examples). Sure, overt prejudice has diminished over the years, and that's a good thing (though there's still plenty of it out there). But ABC only perpetuates the very serious underlying racism by pretending prejudice is the only kind of racism there is.
04/03/2009 by Julie Hollar
ABC's Good Morning America did a special 3-part series on race this week, "Black and White Now," to "look at race relations in America." All three parts revisited old experiments or news stories.
The first (3/31/09) was a repeat of an experiment with children playing with black and white dolls, showing that now kids don't tend to think that the black doll is mean and the white doll nice, like they did in the '40s--although some black girls still say the black doll is ugly and the white doll pretty. The report cited William Julius Wilson saying "there's still work to be done, especially with girls, even with Barack Obama as president, his family in the White House, to make sure the weight of a prejudice past doesn't secretly make its way into the hopes of a brand-new day."
Number two (4/1/09): another experiment repeated, black men trying to hail cabs in New York City. This time, in their very non-scientific experiment, black men do fine during the day, but have a harder time getting a cab once it's dark out. They also talk to people of color who feel discriminated against at high-end stores.
And number three (4/2/09): GMA anchors Diane Sawyer and Robin Roberts went back to their hometowns in the South and talked to groups of white and black children, respectively, about their perceptions of race. Ten years ago, when they did this in Mobile, the kids talked about a racial divide and expressed negative stereotypes of the other race. This time, "the kids don't wanna talk a lot about skin color" and were "expressing one hope that a rainbow of kids can show grown-ups how to learn, have parties, live together." Roberts asks them why they think (old) people still want to talk about race a lot, and one kid says, "Because they're so happy it's not like that anymore."
These are, overall, encouraging stories. But it's only possible to tell such encouraging stories by limiting your focus to one kind of racism--the overt kind that plays out through individually held prejudices. Notice that none of GMA's episodes looked at the racial wealth gap, or the ways that the foreclosure crisis is impacting people of color more severely than white people, or the disproportionate number of people of color locked up in our criminal justice system versus white people (just to name a few examples). Sure, overt prejudice has diminished over the years, and that's a good thing (though there's still plenty of it out there). But ABC only perpetuates the very serious underlying racism by pretending prejudice is the only kind of racism there is.
Friday, March 27, 2009
Thursday, March 26, 2009
Sunday, December 14, 2008
Do You Know the Real chris columbus?
The Real Christopher Columbus
“Do You Really Know Who You Are Celebrating on Columbus Day?”
The Often Untold Facts:
*He and his men Murdered Millions of Arawaks in the Caribbean
*He & his men raped thousands of Arawak Women
*He and his men mutilated scores of Arawak People
*Thousands of Arawak Children died due to malnourishment and because Columbus and his men overworked their Mothers
*He and his men brutally enslaved the Arawak People of the Caribbean
*His men beheaded several Arawak Youth
*He and his men invaded and stole Arawak land throughout the Caribbean
**Unfortunately the aforementioned is just the tip of the “iceberg” in terms of the physical carnage and destruction Columbus and his men inflicted upon native peoples throughout the Western Hemisphere while on their so-called “Conquest” endorsed by Spain and Portugal. There needs to be a more accurate depiction of Columbus if we are ever to move closer towards a moratorium of the celebration of his life.
Thursday, December 11, 2008
How Some Corporations Destroy Countries & Lives!
This is but one singular example of how Multinational Corporations have played an awful role in destroying, disrespecting, and plundering "Developing Countries" land, natural resources and the lives of the people who reside within those countries. Please watch the following 5 minute video clip, do more research on multinational corporations, the IMF, World Bank, structural adjustment policies and how they have historically worked together for their own self-serving interests, regardless of their deleterious impact on "developing nations". Please share this information with all your networks. Knowledge is Power and it is our Responsibility to share that Power once we have acquired it!
Sunday, December 7, 2008
Martin Luther King Speaks (Please Listen!)
The following speech that is showcased below is one of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King's most important and influential speeches, however at the same time it is one of his least known oratories. This speech (Beyond Vietnam) is rarely ever taught or played to students ,of all ages, in all educational systems. Why you might ask. Why you should ask! The answer is rather simple, but also rather disconcerting. Many of the people who control the media, public education, and even government do not want you to know this side of Martin Luther King. "They" do not want you to know how revolutionary and outspoken he really was, especially when it came to many of the American government's public, domestic, and foreign policies. Since Dr. King's untimely death, the aforementioned have tried incredibly hard to reshape and repackage, and ultimately assassinate his image and character. You see, if "they" are able to control the way we view some of our heroes they can ultimately suppress any progressive ideas possible actions we might borrow from the work of those same heroes.
The so-called powers that be can suppress any kind of revolutionary thought or work by controlling images and information in the media, schools, and yes even the images of some of our greatest heroes. The work of many Progressive and Revolutionary historical figures, such as Dr. Martin Luther King, is a direct threat to the power structure of those who work to keep "power" consolidated and in the hands of a few. The last thing they need is for us to get any ideas that we can strategize, galvanize, and mobilize (together) in an effort to create a true representational government that serves all and not just a few. We need to continue to strive towards these goals so that we may truly help create a more equal and just society that is free of inequality and injustice. Please take the time to listen to this speech by Dr. Martin Luther King and spread the word to all of your networks. We can start making a difference by simply making information like this popular! True change comes when there is a well informed populous within any society. That is, in its essence, Democracy!
The Beyond Vietnam Speech is Below:
The so-called powers that be can suppress any kind of revolutionary thought or work by controlling images and information in the media, schools, and yes even the images of some of our greatest heroes. The work of many Progressive and Revolutionary historical figures, such as Dr. Martin Luther King, is a direct threat to the power structure of those who work to keep "power" consolidated and in the hands of a few. The last thing they need is for us to get any ideas that we can strategize, galvanize, and mobilize (together) in an effort to create a true representational government that serves all and not just a few. We need to continue to strive towards these goals so that we may truly help create a more equal and just society that is free of inequality and injustice. Please take the time to listen to this speech by Dr. Martin Luther King and spread the word to all of your networks. We can start making a difference by simply making information like this popular! True change comes when there is a well informed populous within any society. That is, in its essence, Democracy!
The Beyond Vietnam Speech is Below:
Thursday, December 4, 2008
Saturday, November 29, 2008
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