Bill's Back and Better than Ever

Bill Moyers is back on PBS with his classic Bill Moyers Journal. The first episode aired tonight and he takes on the press and the shameful lack of integrity and "truthiness" that has besmurched (yes, besmurched) journalism during the run-up to the War in Iraq. Now, Moyers is not the first member of the fourth estate to attempt to explain how journalists got it so incredibly wrong, but he is the best. In fact, Moyers is far and away the best journalist working in America, and he isn't even a practicing journalist anymore. The truth is not all journalists got it wrong, the heroes of Moyers' documentary are the Kinght Ridder team of Jonathan Landay and Warren Strobel. Landay and Strobel weren't alone in their reporting, but their tireless and largely ignored reporting demonstrates that even as the majority of "mainstream" (read: corporate) journalists went from being watchdogs to lapdogs there was still real journalism going on.

A couple things struck me as I watched the report. First, if Iraq had worked (I don't think it ever could have, but if it did) would all the lies have been ignored and justified by the success of the mission? Silly question, I know the answer, as do you, but I was momentarily saddened by the obvious truth that facts don't matter.

Second, I was also momentarily hopeful. "This is the kind of thing that needs to happen to change things, maybe the Times will see the error of their ways, maybe the Post will see the structural flaws that led it down this path." But, the report ends by reminding us that it's business as usual across the media spectrum. There are no liberal voices on television. The Cross Fire-esque he-said, she-said nature of modern journalism (read: stenographers for hire) is still dominating journalism, especially television journalism (but not only). And, most of the incredibly wrong journalists and pundits still comprise the starting line-up of opinion making journalism. It's amazing. Get the biggest story of our lifetimes wrong and you keep your job. I guess someone has to make the case for Iran, if it's not them then someone else.

Third, I had to wonder how long news will continue to exist in its present form. Newspapers, magazines, and television news (with the notable exception of certain alternative and public sources) are mostly owned by corporations with, as Dan Rather pointed out on the program, "big needs, legislative needs, repertory needs in Washington. Nobody has to send you a memo to tell you that that's the case." News doesn't make money. That's the line, it just costs money. But is that true? NO!!! But it's repeated so often it sounds true and it justifies massize layoffs, which lead to more profits, and an excuse for the stenography that bills itself as journalism. And stenography is what they want, and that's all they want. Stenographers with the stamp of objectivity. The Bush Administration and the Iraqi National Congress used the press in the most obvious ways, and they went along with it, happily. Journalism and reporting are not the same things. We have lots of professional readers stalking the airwaves of television journalism. They report. They read. The question is, who is writing what they read? We need journalists not just reporters and stenographers, but should we be hopeful? What is the alternative? More public money to support journalism? Non-profit newspapers? Citizen journalism via blogs and the Internet?

Fourth, I was shocked at how much of the lack of true journalism was the result of the uninterest of the public, the incest of Washington elite journalism, and pure, pathetic laziness. Walter Pincus of the Washington Post, told a story about how the Post had a "Truth Squad", "We used to do at the Post something called truth squading. --President would make a speech. We used to do it with Ronald Reagan the first five or six months because he would make so many-- factual errors, particularly in his press conference." The Post stopped the "truth squad" not because of pressure from the White House, but because Americans thought it was in bad taste. As Pincus recalled, "And after-- two or three weeks of it-- the public at large, would say, 'Why don't you leave the man alone? He's trying to be honest. He makes mistakes. So what?' and we stopped doing it." What replaced the "truth squad"?

BILL MOYERS: You stopped being the truth squad.

WALTER PINCUS: We stopped truth squading every sort of press conference, or truth squading. And we left it then-- to the democrats. In other words, it's up to the democrats to catch people, not us.

BILL MOYERS: So if the democrats challenged-- a statement from the president, you could-- quote both sides.

WALTER PINCUS: We then quote-- both sides. Yeah.

BILL MOYERS: Now, that's called objectivity by many standards isn't it?

WALTER PINCUS: Well, that's-- objectivity if you think there are only two sides. and if you're not interested in-- the facts. And the facts are separate from, you know, what one side says about the other.

I can remember when criticizing Bush got you silenced, fired, or ridiculed (think Phil Donahue, the Dixie Chicks. every Democrat save Joe Lieberman). Now, it's hip to hate Bush. It's hip for Keith Olbermann to stick it to the man, or Stephen Colbert to openly mock him. Journalists weren't tougher on the President because no one wanted them to be.

The incestious relationship between government, corporations and the Washington Press corps is stunning. These people live toghether in a bubble. That's one reason that Knight Ridder was successful at seeing through the spin and lies, they were outside of DC. But this meant that they were largely ignored by the "opinion making" journalists, columnists, and pundits that dominate the corporate media. As Walter Pincus stated, "The administration can withstand the Knight Ridder critique because it-- it wasn't reverberating inside Washington. And therefore people weren't picking it up."

Another shocking source of this stenography-as-journalism is just straight up laziness. As Dan Rather said in the report, "Reporting is hard. The substitute for reporting far too often has become let's just ring up an expert. Let's see. These are experts on-- international armaments. And I'll just go down the list here and check Richard Perle... This is journalism on the cheap if it's journalism at all. Just pick up the phone, call an expert, bring an expert into the studio. Easy. Not time consuming. Doesn't take resources. And-- if you-- if you're lucky and good with your list of people, you get an articulate person who will kind of spark up the broadcast." No one in the report exemplified this better than journalist(?) and host of Meet the Press, Tim Russert, "What my concern was, is that there were concerns expressed by other government officials. And to this day, I wish my phone had rung, or I had access to them." "I wish my phone had rung," are you serious? That's journalism? Waiting for someone to call you and tell you a big story? That's the laziest and stupidest thing I have ever heard.

Now, it's more than just journalistic laziness, there is a huge and perverse incentive structure to just report. Being first, "scooping" a big story is the goal for everyone, and in an age of 24 hour media filling the hours of the day means repetition and much more reporting than investigating. It's the structure of the media more than laziness or incestious relationships. The corporate dominated media that care more about bottom lines than "truthiness", the passive public that cares more about American Idol than the American Constitution, a self-reinforcing Beltway groupthink that listens more to the Times' Judith Miller than Knight Ridder's Jonathan Landay, and a culture within journalism that cares more about filling the hours of the day and scooping a story than actually investigating the truthfulness of public pronouncements. All these things are created. Thus is not the world, thus have we made it. But, what is the incentive to change? I got nothing. Perhaps it's the lack of incentive to change that will lead people away from our current form of journalism for something different. Maybe that's the incentive, change or disappear.

Check out the Show at Bill Moyers Journal at PBS.com

Also check out the Knight Ridder (now McClatchy) coverage of the Iraq Pre-War Intel

Iran-Contra Redux

If you haven't read Seymour Hersh's most recent piece in the New Yorker then you must do so immediately (The Redirection). If you don't know what Iran-Contra is, then you should write a letter to your high school social studies teacher and insult them. Iran-Contra was an illegal, blackbag operation that utilized Olie North's lack of ethics to illegally sell weapons to Iran through Israel and then funneled the money garnered from the arms sales to the fascist Contra rebels in Nicaragua. The Contras were also very much part of a large CIA-run drug smuggling ring that brought crack-cocaine to America, gang wars to LA, and may have even included Arkansas Governor Bill Clinton (The Dark Alliance, Mysterious Mena: CIA Discloses, Leach Disposes).

According to Hersch, the veterans of Iran-Contra got together to discuss the lessons learned from Iran-Contra. Their chief lesson, run everything out of the Veep's office and not the CIA or the DoD. Well, they put that lesson to good use and now you have blackbag operations within the Veep's office. Using tens of millions of dollars from undisclosed sources (likely missing Iraqi oil money, Saudi money, and miscellaneous siphoned cash from our $416 billion already spent) the US government funneled cash to aid the adminsitration's choosen group of electors during the January 30 Iraqi election. This slate, led by the now Prime Minister Iyad Allawi, won on 14% of the returns, but it proved enough to prevent the sectarian Shi'ite parties from winning a clear mandate. On top of the financial support, there is also evidence that the election results were simply falsified to swing more support for Allawi et al. Cash was also funneled to the Lebanese Sunni-dominated government of Prime Minister Fouad Siniora, which, in turn, distributed that money to Sunni extremist groups.

So, the US is fighting a "Global War on Terror" against Sunni terrorist organizations tied to Al Qaeda and it's supporting such groups in Lebanon. The US is also fixing Iraqi elections to support Shi'ite parties and accusing "Iran" of supporting different Iraqi Shi'ite political parties and "insurrgents". The US is trying to rollback the Sunni organization in Palestine, Hamas, and Shi'ite organization in Lebanon, Hezbollah. The US is planning an attack on Iran, and actually crossing the border into Syria and Iran. Wow. And this is what we know about. Imagine what we don't know about.

Will the Real Obama Please Stand Up?

"Tonight is a particular honor for me because, let’s face it, my presence on this stage is pretty unlikely..." and with those words the most extraordinary political talent in a generation introduced himself to America.

I remember when I first heard about Barack Obama. It was 2 A.M. and I was watching one of Stu Rothenberg's seminars at American University about handicapping races. At the end he paused and he said that there was a little known candidate in a tight race for the Democratic nomination for an Illinois Senate seat, he was running third, but Rothenberg told his students, that he hadn't seen a politician with this much talent, ever. He told them to remember the name, Barack Obama. So, I got involved in following the race through whatever news I could get, it wasn't a lot. I wrote a research paper on the race for a class while an undergrad at Michigan, and while I was writing it Obama won the primary after the front-runner dropped out due to a sex scandal (Blair Hull). Obama began a campaign against the self-proclaimed pious, daily-church-going-Catholic, millionaire-ex-investment-banker-turned-high-school-teacher-of-black-kids, celebrity-husband-of-actress-Jerri-Ryan, Jack Ryan. Mr. Ryan, although a self-declared pious man, began the campaign, in classic Chicago fashion, from the gutter, hiring a guy to follow Obama around with a camera firing insults at him. Things looked extremely tight until Mr. Ryan was forced to drop out because of a sex scandal. Then the nearly dead Illinois Republican Party asked Alan Keyes to run against Obama, there is no punch line, that's what really happened. Needless to say Obama won, ignited a huge following across the state, and after giving the 2004 Keynote Address at the Democratic National Convention became a household name.

I was personally on the bandwagon. Obama was the biracial son of a Kenyan-born economist and a Kansas-born anthropologist, raised in Indonesia and Hawaii, educated at Occidental then Columbia, and a graduate of Harvard Law School (magna cum laude), where he was elected to the position of editor of the Harvard Law Review, the most prestigious position within any law school on the planet, and to top it off, the first black to hold the position. Between Columbia and Harvard he worked within the business community and as a community organizer in Chicago, part of a Gamaliel organized alliance of churches. During this time he embraced the Christian faith and was baptized. While interning for a summer during his study at Harvard he interned at Sidney & Austin corporate law firm and met Michelle Robinson, his current wife. After Harvard instead of taking any number of prestigious and well-paying corporate jobs or clerking jobs he returned to Chicago and led a massive voter registration drive for the 1992 Presidential and Senate elections that delivered Bill Clinton to the White House and Carol Mosely Braun to the Senate. He then took a job at Miner, Barnhill & Galland in the civil rights division and taught constitutional law at University of Chicago. In 1996 he ran for Illinois' State Senate from the 13th District (Chicago's South Side). While in the State Senate he helped author an Illinois Earned Income Tax Credit, a bill requiring police interrogations be video tapped, a laudable effort to amend the Illinois state constitution to define healthcare as a right and guarantee full coverage within 5 years, and he led efforts to crackdown on predatory lending. He ran against Rep. Bobby Rush in 2000 and was humiliatingly defeated 61% to 30%. Then in 2004 he ran for the US Senate and won.
During the campaign he sounded like a true progressive and when the build-up to the war in Iraq began he spoke out eloquently against what he called a "stupid war".

Once in the Senate he hired some very interesting staffers including, former Dashcle chief-of-staff, Karen Kornbluh, an economist who is directly tied to Robert Rubin to serve as policy advisor, and Samanth Power, a Pulitzer-winning human rights author. Again and again he worked both sides of the left and center-left spectrum. He worked in corporate law and civil rights law. He worked as a investment banker in the business community and as a community organizer in the South Side of Chicago. He hired Samantha Power and a leading proponent of Rubinomics. He was praised by the DLC but asked that his name be removed from their list of "New Democrats" (Obama to Have Name Removed From DLC List). He has been praised as a "Hamiltonian" by Republican NYT columnist David Brooks (Run, Barack, Run). He is a blank slate to so many that he seems to be everyone's savior. He is the consumate pragmatic politician, seeing both sides and never taking a stand.

A recent NYT article about Obama's time at Harvard Law mentions his seeming "fair-mindedness". "He proved deft at navigating an institution scorched with ideological battles, many of which revolved around race. He developed a leadership style based more on furthering consensus than on imposing his own ideas. Surrounded by students who enjoyed the sound of their own voices, Mr. Obama cast himself as an eager listener, sometimes giving warring classmates the impression that he agreed with all of them at once" (In Law School, Obama Found Political Voice). Perhaps this explains his on-the-one-hand/on-the-other-hand approach to political issues that has allowed so many to project so much onto him in such a short period of time. But, campaigns are about definition and it will be soon time for Obama to take some stands. I, for one, hope they are as politically astute and courageous as his stand on the Iraq War, however, I have my doubts.

For starters, Obama supported neoconservative Joe Lieberman's "independent" Senate race against anti-war Democrat Ned Lamont (Obama Endorses Lieberman for Senate). Obama even requested that Lieberman be assigned his "Senate Mentor" (Joe Lieberman: Barack Obama's Mentor in the Senate). Then there is Obama's hiring of a protege of Robert Rubin and his support of the Brookings Insitute's Hamilton Project, a corporate-funded neoliberal think tank founded by Rubin himself (Mr. Obama Goes to Washington). There was the "distancing" Obama attempted after Dick Durbin's courageous likening of Guantanamo Bay to Nazis or Stalin-era camps (Obama's Game), and his pre-emptive critique of an Alito filibuster (Alito Filibuster Won't Work, Obama Says).

He told Joe Klein that he hadn't even thought about Al Gore's well-publicized "carbon tax" even as he wouldn't shut up about Ethanol and energy independence (The Fresh Face). Speaking of Ethanol, Obama's defining cause of his short term in the US Senate has been energy, particularly the manufacture and use of E85 fuels and their corresponding flexfuel cars, trucks, and SUVs. In this Obama looks less like a true fresh face, but the same-old tired political message dressed up in a new suit. Agribusiness and the auto industry loves E85 (named for the 85% Ethanol levels). Agribusiness because it makes them mountains of profits, and the auto industry because it allows them to look green while still manufacturing the low-gas-mileage autos that can run on either E85 or regular gasoline. Besides, every report ever made shows that there is likley little or no net environmental benefit to ethanol after you factor in the manufacturing and transportation costs (Barack Obama, Inc.). Instead of delivering a truly progressive and visionary energy agenda he is dressing up ethanol in military fatigues, talking about how our national security relies on decreasing energy dependence, meaning we need more ethanol. I wonder if it is just a coincidence that one of the companies making the most profit off of E85 is Archer Daniels Midland Corporation, an Illinois based agribusiness behemoth? Obama has since worked with Republicans on a bill to raise fuel economy standards 4% annually, a truly modest proposal, but one made before the Democrats won back the Senate. As with the Democratic Party as a whole, Obama will hopefully be judged by what he does now. As he said, "most of the legislation I’ve proposed will be more modest in its goals than it would be if I were in the majority party" (Barack Obama, Inc.).

I still have my doubts. Although Obama has made ethics reform another priority of his Senate identity, he hasn't blushed, even for a moment, at pork barelling. Obama helped to get Illinois $6.2 billion in pork in the infamous 2005 transportation bill (including the Prairie Parkway--that mess of a brand new road that was supposed to make Hastert a rich man). He also supported the corporate backed class action lawsuit "tort reform" bill that made it harder to get corporate accountability.

Perhaps worst of all for me personally he dismissed my personal hero, Paul Wellstone, as a gad-fly. He seems to be positioning himself as a progressive centrist who is not beholden to anyone and willing to "speak honestly" to liberals. Like his wholly inappropriate blog posting surrounding the Roberts nomination (Tone, Truth, and the Democratic Party). Obama is about positioning himself constantly. Nothing new you might say. Ok, I agree, but let's please remember that and stop annointing Obama as a wunderkind or messiah. Obama is not a movement, hell, he's not even a leader. Sure, he supports some progressive issues, but we cannot stop pushing him, because he is, exclusively a politician. Don't forget that.

Be Brave. Be Kind. Be Loving.

Swift Boating Osama, I mean Obama

As you have probably heard the smearing of Barack Obama is in full swing. There was the Hussein flap. His middle name is Hussein. Clearly he hates America. Yes, that's right, we've taken to pointing out the obvious. Nice.

Then there was the madrassa allegation. When he was a boy he lived in Indonesia and attended an Islamic school for two years and a Catholic school for two years. Clearly he is a Muslim Manchurian Candidate, and we must be vigilent for a Muslim invasion, perhaps a law making Islam the national religion should Osama take office. Never mind it wasn't a Wahhabi school (the ones that Bush's dear friends the Saudi's have been funding and have been responsible for the spread of radical violent Islam throughout Central Asia--The Saudi Connection, U.S. Ties to Saudi Elite May Be Hurting War on Terrorism, Bush Advisers Cashed in on Saudi Gravy Train) or that he WAS SEVEN YEARS OLD. Clearly the radical right is justified to worry that a seven year old was brainwashed trained, in two years to become the first black editor of the Harvard Law Review, a brilliant and progressive politician and orator, and a professor of constitutional law, you know that document that the Bush Administration keeps forgetting about.

Read this
Smearing Barack Obama
and this
Obama Smeared As Former ‘Madrassa’ Student, Possible Covert Muslim Extremist

"What is the cause of the crisis in black education?" Part II: I-Pods and Kicks???

Brangelina, Madonna, Bono, and now Oprah, apparently Africa is the cause de jure of American noblesse oblige.

In case you didn't know, Oprah recently opened a $40 million girls school forty miles outside of Johannesburg, South Africa. It is supposedly set on 22 "lush" acres and includes over 28 buildings. "The complex features oversize rooms done in tasteful beiges and browns with splashes of color, 200-thread-count sheets, a yoga studio, a beauty salon, indoor and outdoor theaters, hundreds of pieces of original tribal art and sidewalks speckled with colorful tiles" (Oprah Goes to School). There has been wide spread criticism of this decision by many who call for Oprah to make those kinds of investments in a US public school, or maybe give out scholarships instead of Pontiacs. In defense of her decision, Oprah oppinned the cultural priorities of inner-city youth:

"I became so frustrated with visiting inner-city schools that I just stopped going. The sense that you need to learn just isn’t there," she says. "If you ask the kids what they want or need, they will say an iPod or some sneakers. In South Africa, they don’t ask for money or toys. They ask for uniforms so they can go to school" (Oprah Goes to School).

I'm not here to criticize Oprah's decision to fund a school in South Africa, I could. I don't know where I would begin though, perhaps with the insinuation that all students value things over knowledge. I don't buy that. I teach high school in the "inner city" (actually it's more like the outer city, Chicago's hella big), but I know that Oprah could have found a couple hundred kids in my school alone that might have been "worthy". Or, maybe I could start with the hypocrisy of criticizing kids for caring about material possessions...has she ever watched her own show? Givin' away cars and shit like that, it's not like Oprah contributes to the embrace of conspicious consumption or mass marketed lies. No, not Oprah, those make-over shows are about self-esteem, not wardrobe enlargement or retail therapy or advertisment based notions of the 'good life'. Or, how 'bout the fact that if you google "Oprah" and "Ipod" you are directed to Oprah.com and a page entitled "Oprah's favorite things"? Who is she to criticize poor kids for fetishizing material goods when it is something every American does. It's just that when a rich white kid fetishizes a pair of kicks, he just buys 'em and takes 'em for granted, part of that great American tradition of entitlement. Her statement insinuates that this is some kind of abnormal "mentality" found among urban youth, and we all know what "urban youth" is code for. Worst of all it reinforces a racist perspective that white people love to use to justify continued inequality, namely that it's a matter of behavior, culture, and upbringing that results in the American "underclass".

I could say all that, but that's not what I'm here to do. First, I think it's great that Oprah is using her money in a way that could help some young women in South Africa (she could build like 15 of those schools and not notice it, but let's leave that alone). Second, while she is demonstrating charity and not solidarity I think that charity shouldn't be criticized, I think it should be the start of a long conversation about how for charity to exist there must be continued and substantial economic, social, and political injustice, and what is more helpful is a deeper analysis of the roots of that injustice, a richer and fuller expansion of one's own consciousness. And finally, Oprah is a victim of the all-to-common fundamental attribution fallacy.

You may be asking yourself, if he's not going to criticize Oprah what is he writing about? Well, the truth is, while I don't agree with Oprah, I think her statement is the beginning of understanding part of the truth behind the "crisis in black education".

I was talking to a friend and he pointed out that he felt that Brown v. Board may have actually damaged black education and black entrepreneurialism. This is not a new argument. Brown "integrated" black students into schools that stripped them of the cultural capital that allowed black people to survive in the face of oppression and violence for hundreds of years. In the face of such hatred the black community turned to itself for sustenance. Sure, poverty and violence ravaged that community, but that community took care of itself and it survived. The fact a black culture even exists in America is a testament to the tenacious will and passion that this community possesses. And, integration began to rob that community of the capital that segregation created. The white dominator culture had institutions that did not transmit that cultural capital, and it was and is an inheritance lost. This is not to say that my friend or I blame Brown for anything at all, it is only to say that a cost of integration may have been the loss of a central pillar of the black community and the black culture, namely the black school. And that cultural pillar was replaced by one that, he believed (as do I), robbed black folks of a certain amount of their cultural capital. A similar argument is made about Latinos in the amazing book, Substractive Schooling by Angela Valenzuela.

However, while I think that narrative is true, it only goes so far. The schools are not truly to blame. I think that the material-obsessed, consumer culture of late American capitalism holds most of the blame. Marx proposed a base/superstructure analysis of culture and ideology. The 'superstructure' that constructs ideology, culture, and consciousness is built upon the 'base' of capitalism. This capitalist superstructure creates a 'false consciousness' of commodity fetishizing, or in other words, it leads to the 'thingification' of everything. Blacks were denied full access to this superstructure, the white dominator culture, so they constructed folk cultures, sub-cultures, and counter-cultures to survive (they also internalized much of the dominator culture, which will be the subject of a later post). So, when the 1960s came these various black cultural traditions came under attack not only by the integration of black folks into schools, but by their integration into the newly created mass marketing bonanza coupled with a period of economic prosperity, the result of technological innovation, militaristic Keyensianism, and an empire-like control of global politics and economics. This prosperity created the a black middle class and some say the civil rights movement, but it was still unavailable to most blacks. The great American boom also created the great American unquenchable thirst for stuff, a thirst that influenced the black community as much as it did the white community, the only difference is that the white community belonged and the black did not, economically, socially, politically, and culturally. The cultural and psychological impact of the American thirst for material possessions on an entire group of people denied access to the means to pursue that thirst is unknowable.

Mass marketing makes all Americans feel like they are missing something, that they are not full without whatever it is that is being sold to them, but blacks cannot even have full access to the commodity market because of their inheritance of oppression. And blacks cannot simply buy their way into the American identity; even after the most conspicious consumption they are still told that they are missing something, the correct pigment. Something that the market has noticed.

In speaking about the reason for the growing despair and nihilism in the black community, Dr. Cornel West, wrote,

What has changed? What went wrong? The bitter irony of integration? The cumulative effects of a genocidal conspiracy? The virtual collapse of rising expectations after the optimistic sixties? None of this fully understands why teh cultural structures that once sustained black life in American are no longer able to fend off the nihilistic threat. I believe that two significant reasons why the threat is more powerful now than ever before are the saturation of market forces and market moralities in black life and the present crisis in black leadership. The recent market-driven sharttering of black civil societies--black families, neighborhoods, schools, churches, mosques--leaves more and more black people vulnerable to daily lives endured with little sense of self and fragile existential moorings.

Black people have always been in America's wilderness in search of a promised land. Yet many black folk now reside in a jungle ruled by a cutthroat market morality devoid of any faith in deliverance or hope for freedom. Contrary to the superficial claims of conservative behaviorists, these jungles are not primarily the result of pathological behavior. Rather, this behavior is the tragic response of a people bereft of resources in confronting the workings of U.S. capitalist society. Saying this is is not the same as asserting that individual black people are not responsible for their actions--black murderers and rapists should go to jail. But it must be recognized that the nihilistic threat contributes to criminal behavior. It is a threat that feeds on poverty and shattered cultural institutions and grows more powerful as the armors to ward against it are weakened.

But why is this shattering of black civil society occuring? What has led to the weakening of black cultural institutions in asphalt jungles? Corporate market insitutions have contributed greatly to their collapse. By corporate market institutions I mean that complex set of interlocking enterprises that have a disproportionate influence on how are society is run and how our culture is shaped. Needless to say, the primary motivation of these institutions is to make profits, and their basic strategy is to convince the public to consume. These institutions have helped create a seductive way of life, a culture of consumption that capitalizes on every opportunity to make money. Market calculations and cost-benefit analyses hold sway in almost every sphere of U.S. society.

The common denominator of these calculations and analyses is usually the provision, expansion, and intensification of pleasure. Pleasure is a multivalent term; it means different things to many people. In the American way of life pleasure involves comfort, convenience, and sexual stimulation. Pleasure, so defined, has little to do with the past and views the future as no more than repetition of a hedonistically driven present. This market morality stigmatizes others as objects for personal pleasure or bodily stimulation. Conservative behaviorists have alleged that traditional morality has been undermined by radical feminists and the cultural radicals of the sixties. But it is clear that corporate market institutions have greatly contributed to undermining traditional morality in order to stay in business and make a profit. The reduction of individuals to objects of pleasure is especially evident in teh culture industries--television, radio, video, music--in which gestures of sexual foreplay and orgiastic pleasure flood the marketplace.

Like all Americans, African-Americans are influenced greatly by the images of comfort, convenience, machismo, femininity, violence, and sexual stimulation that bombard consumers. These seductive images contribute to the predominance of the market-inspired way of life over all others and thereby edge out nonmarket values--love, care, service to others--handed down by preceding generations. The predominance of this way of life among those living in poverty-ridden conditions, with a limited capacity to ward off self-contempt and self-hatred, results in the possible triumph of the nihilistic threat in black America (Race Matters).

West suggests that the psychological damage of American-style material thirst and denial of access to material sustenance is self-contempt and self-hatred. The love of material success and hate of self within the black community is so pervasive. Look toward hip hop, a lifestyle built upon hundreds of years of black culture but obsessed with black-on-black violence and hyper-consumption. The anger endemic to hip hop seems to come from that all-too-obvious truth that "they have been betrayed by those who came before them. That they are at best tolerated in schools, feared on the streets, and almost inevitably destined for the hell holes of prison (Homeland and Hip Hop by Immortal Technique and Mumia Abu Jamal).

So, when Oprah speaks of I-pods and kicks crowding out chemistry and physics, I'm not all that sure she isn't absolutely correct. However, to lay the cause there and stop, to declare frustration at those who have been victimized, is at both times honest and dishonest. But, mostly it's just sad. She too is a victim of the dominator culture of consumption and market morality, I mean she just recently topped Forbes list of the world's richest female entertainers, and we all know that Oprah is more than an entertainer, she's a walking, talking transnational corporation. She's a brand more than a person. Talk about a victim of market morality, she is, in the eyes of the world, less person than thing.

While Oprah may be right and she may also be wrong, she is, at least, understood. And that, that is something.

Be Brave. Be Tenacious. Be Understanding.

Distraction or Destruction???

Yeah so the title is a little annoying, but whatever. As I wrote a few days ago the Bushies seem to be escalating not just in Iraq but toward Iran. Now, Sec. Gates confirms that the aircraft carrier and the PATRIOT missiles are, in fact, aimed at intimidating Iran (Iran Target of US Gulf Military Moves, Gate Says). NSA Hadley is quoted as saying "the US was 'going to need to deal with what Iran is doing inside Iraq'." The Dark-Lord Veep Baldy McBalderson evidently "accused Iran of 'fishing in troubled waters inside Iraq'". Sally Hemmings, I mean Condoleeza Rice said, "I think there is plenty of evidence that there is Iranian involvement with these networks that are making high-explosive IEDs [improvised explosive devices] and that are endangering our troops, and that's going to be dealt with" (Bush's New Iran Policy-No Evidence of IED Charge). She has yet to provide any evidence, but that's not really her style, so nothing too surprising there.

The real question seems to be is this for real or is this a slight-of-hand? "Look at Iran, they are the reason Iraq is a failed state..." Truth is the end of that sentence is the key, they can either say, "...it's not our fault but there is nothing we can do because the American public (losers and francophile cowards that they are) won't let us win so we have no choice but to leave" or it can end with "...that's exactly why we need to bomb them." Is it wait and see? Well, there is a march on Washington the weekend of January 27, maybe a large energetic and mobilized anti-war movement can make the former more likely than the latter.

Be Brave. Be Kind. Be Loving.

What Dr. King Means to Me

Few people know this but Dr. King's holiday was long in coming. Four days after Dr. King's death John Conyers, that esteemed representative of Detroit, took to the floor of the US House of Representatives and demanded America to pay tribute to one of its true heroes. We had days dedicated to colonizers and conquerors, to slave owners and middling political talents, but here was the opportunity to create a day for a true hero. A man with the courage to point out to America its unfinished journey, its unfulfilled promise, not with anger or revenge, but loving kindness. Now anger and revenge would have made sense. But Dr. King was not that kind of person. He believed that to use the tactics of violence and revenge would lessen his own humanity and therefore make any victory hollow. That was not a popular position. At the time of his death, Dr. King was easily the most hated man in America.

Now, Representative Conyers demanded a holiday for Dr. King in 1968, but Dr. King's birthday was not declared an official holiday of the United States for another 15 years. Fifteen years. That's not to say that it went unnoticed during that time. In fact, Dr. King's birthday is the only national holiday to be born out of a grassroots struggle--a grassroots union struggle.

Dr. King was no stranger to the struggles of working people, in fact he understood that the oppression of blacks and the oppression of the working class were two faces of the same monster. After Dr. King and the "Civil Rights Movement" claimed victory through the passage of the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act he moved into a small apartment in a housing development in the Greater Lawndale neighborhood of Chicago to begin his Poor People's Movement. The intersection of race and class was never so obvious in the North, and in July of 1965 Dr. King joined AlRaby and the CCCO's Chicago Project. Dr. King once spoke of racism in Chicago as some of the most overtly violent that he had ever encountered. Dr. King had high hopes for his Poor People's Movement but it did not capture the imagination of the Corporate Media and therefore the American public like the Civil Rights Movement had. Dr. King continued to fight for working people and on the eve of his death visited Memphis to join in a sanitation workers strike. There he delivered his final address just a day before his assassination (I've Been to the Mountain Top).

Dr. King's dedication to working class struggles was very well known if not by bourgeious America, then at least by the working class themselves. And it did not go unrecognized. On the first anniversary of his birth managers in a GM plant in New York threatened to disciplined a small group of workers who refused to work. They backed down when a much larger group walked off the job in protest a few days later. Again in New York, thousands of hospital workers walked off the job demanding better pay, better benefits, and a paid holiday on Dr. King's birthday. 25,000 more hospital workers and 80,000 dressmakers won similar demands in that first year after Dr. King's assassination.

Unions provided the financial and social capital to extend the movement nationwide. That support was coordinated by DWA leader Robinson, a close friend of the King family. King's widow, Coretta Scott King, invited Robinson and Conyers to kick off the campaign for a national holiday at a 1969 birthday rally at the new King center in Atlanta. At the rally, Conyers recounted his bill's defeat in Congress and expressed hope for more support the following year. Robinson called for direct action, declaring, "We don't want anyone to believe we hope Congress will do this. We're just sayin', Us black people in America just ain't gonna work on that day anymore." (Working Class Hero)

And they didn't. While the bill languished in Congress, working people stepped up and refused to work on Dr. King's birthday. Working class people, especially working class blacks, but also allies in the white and Latino communities made Dr. King's birthday a national holiday regardless of what the US Congress had to say.

Fifteen years passed, a President's endorsement came and went, and the King Center had to struggle to assemble the largest petition drive in US history, six million signitures in all, before Dr. King was honored with an official day commemorating his legacy.

Fifteen years. What was it that Dr. King represented that could organize people for fifteen years to jeopardize their jobs to ensure that he was honored? What was it that he represented that forced people like Jesse Helms well into the 1980s to call him unpatriotic, a traitor, a communist on the floor of the Senate? What is it that Dr. King means to us?

The champion of the better angels of our nature. There are few days when right and wrong are so clearly obvious. Dr. King represents courage most fundamentally to state what is right and what is wrong plainly and then to throw our bodies upon the wheels and gears of the machine of the wrong and to bring it to a halt. He reminds me of the Buddha's comment on work, "Your work is to discover your work and then with all your hear to give yourself to it." Dr. King represents the courage of compassion, nonviolence, and loving kindness in the face of violent oppression and the darkest urges toward violent vengance and bitter despair.

Dr. King was a human being, he was flawed, he was unfaithful to his wife, a victim of human weakness. This, I believe, only serves to make his legacy more important, he was a person. As complicated and as basic as that, he was a person. He struggled in the spotlight and in his heart and no figure has ever been more interrogated while he did so than Dr. King. Twenty-four hour surveillance courtesy of that same US government that refused for 15 years to honor him with a day off of work. That same US government that recently colonized his wife's funeral, demanding that Harry Belafonte, a man who had paid for Dr. King's bail from the Birmingham City jail (as he did with many other civil rights activists), who funded the march on Washington in 1963, who financed the freedom rides, who was blacklisted because of it all, and who paid for Dr. King's funeral, be disinvited.

Talking about Dr. King is interesting today. All day I looked for memoriums, the History Channel had one half hour on Dr. King as a holiday. They had four hours of "Consipracy?" and four hours of UFOs, but only one half hour for Dr. King. It was cable access that came through finally with a day of videos of lectures and discussions about black America.

As a white man, explaining what Dr. King means to me must be understood through my efforts at honestly interrogating my privilege and the truth of history, the gifts of black folk and the costs of white supremacy. This is one journey that remains unfinished and if you read this will be one that I continuously return.

Be Brave. Be Kind. Be Loving.