The Black Informant | African American Commentary, News and Community Building

A reader some time ago aptly described the blogosphere as a “marketplace of ideas”. In other words, it is a place where one can “shop” at a number of outlets to get the information they want to help frame their worldview. For some, this site may be like your Super Walmart/Target where a bulk of your in depth analysis of various issues may come from this site. For others, this site may be nothing more than a convenience store where the only thing that’s good here is a snippet here and there. Whatever your reason, you come. My goal is to be the best convenience store, outlet or mega store on your daily online travels.

As I was making a run to the grocery store the other day, I turned on the radio to one of my favorite local independent stations (a Progressive radio station that play a mix of ol’ skool jazz, reggae, some RnB from the local area, talk, etc. ) and heard a gentleman giving his assessment of the Obama administration. Now I wasn’t really in the mood for politics that day, but I was really captivated by what this guy was saying. While I did not agree with everything this man was saying, there were some points he raised that have also been raised by Conservatives.

Once I got back in the house, I found the station online and was able to get his name: John Pilger. This is his homepage and this is the page where I found both a video of his speech and a partial transcript. I am going to highlight just some of the points that stuck out to me.

The clever young man who recently made it to the White House is a very fine hypnotist, partly because it is indeed extraordinary to see an African American at the pinnacle of power in the land of slavery.

However, this is the 21st Century, and race, together with gender and even class, can be very seductive tools of propaganda. For what is so often overlooked and what matters, I believe, above all, is the class one serves.

George Bush’s inner circle from the State Department to the Supreme Court was, perhaps, the most multiracial in presidential history. It was PC par excellence. Think Condoleezza Rice, Colin Powell. It was also the most reactionary.

Obama’s very presence in the White House appears to reaffirm the moral nation. He’s a marketing dream. But like Calvin Klein or Benetton, he is a brand that promises something special, something exciting, almost risqué, as if he might be radical, as if he might enact change. He makes people feel good. He’s a post-modern man with no political baggage. And all that’s fake.

In his book, Dreams from My Father, Obama refers to the job he took after he graduated from Columbia in 1983. He describes his employer as, and I quote, “a consulting house to multinational corporations.” For some reason, he doesn’t say who his employer was or what he did there. The employer was Business International Corporation, which has a long history of providing cover for the CIA with covert action, and infiltrating unions on the Left. I know this because it was especially active in my own country, Australia. Obama doesn’t say what he did at Business International and there may be absolutely nothing sinister, but it seems worthy of inquiry, and debate, as a clue to, perhaps, who the man is.

During his brief period in the Senate, Obama voted to continue the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. He voted for the Patriot Act. He refused to support a bill for single payer healthcare. He supported the death penalty. As a presidential candidate, he received more corporate backing than John McCain. He promised to close Guantanamo as a priority, but instead he’s excused torture, reinstated military commissions, kept the Bush gulag intact, and opposed habeas corpus.

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Chris Hedges, a very fine author of Empire of Illusion, puts it very well:

“President Obama,” he wrote, “does one thing and Brand Obama gets you to believe another. This is the essence of successful advertising. You buy or do what the advertiser wants because of how they make you feel.”

And so you are kept in a perpetual state of childishness. He calls this junk politics.

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Working to elect a Democratic Presidential candidate may seem like activism, but it isn’t. Activism doesn’t give up. Activism doesn’t fall silent. Activism doesn’t rely on the opiate of hope.

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What Obama and the bankers and the generals and the IMF and the CIA and CNN and BBC fear is ordinary people coming together and acting together. It’s a fear as old as democracy, a fear that suddenly people convert their anger to action as they’ve done so often throughout history.

Now as you can tell from both this speech and from his website, Pilger is not a big fan of war for any reason. As for me, other than dragging out war beyond the stated mission for the sole purpose of political posturing, I typically don’t have a problem with it. In other words, focus on the target, do the job and get outta there.

Pilger is confirming something that I have been pounding on this site for a long time now. When you look at the differences between Bush and Obama and who backs them financially, there is very little difference.

All throughout the Presidential campaign, many Obama supporters continued to drive home the point that Bush and the entire Republican party was melded together with corporate greed and special interests. To them, Obama was the sum total of all the hopes and dreams of the people.  So it did not matter when ABC News reported back during the Democratic National Convention in Denver the following:

“Not even the emotionally charged speech by Sen. Ted Kennedy kept corporate lobbyists from carrying out their multi-million dollar campaign to wine and dine and influence Democratic lawmakers at a series of lavish parties last night in Denver.

Nor did the speech by Sen. Barack Obama’s wife, Michelle.

Dozens of private corporate parties continued through the convention hours, ABC News found.

At one large party thrown by large financial institutions, including CitiGroup, Merrill Lynch and UBS, television monitors showed the speeches, but the audio was drowned out by a live jazz band.

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‘This is all under the radar,’ said Ellen Miller of the Sunlight Foundation, a non-profit group that has tried to track the hundreds of convention parties planned by corporations for Democrats in Denver and Republicans in St. Paul.” (more…)

It didn’t matter to some of the same folks who at one time were making the false claim that Black soldiers were dying at a much higher rate than Whites in “Bush’s war machine” that Democrats received more money from defense contractors than Republicans this past year.

Pilger mentioned in his speech that Obama received more corporate backing than Sen. John McCain. If this is true (and I have little reason to doubt it), why was this suddenly not an issue to those who made it an issue under Bush? Well that goes back to the other point Pilger raised by quoting author Chris Hedges, “This is the essence of successful advertising. You buy or do what the advertiser wants because of how they make you feel.”

What many Americans who voted for Obama bought into wasn’t his extensive resume, his experience on economic or global issues. What sold voters was the narrative: A President of a combined Black/White heritage who got his start as a humble community organizer. Just being White was no longer enough.

The Black Voter and Obama

For the Black voter, Obama quickly became an easy sell once Obama won Iowa ( a state made up of mostly Whites). We became willing to ditch all those concerns about the war, the economy, politicians who profited from the same “evil” corporations they blasted on the campaign stump in order to take part in history.  Whites loved him–that is all that mattered. We even took it a step further by suggesting that a vote against Obama was a vote against your own race. So despite all the questions a person may have like “Why did Obama and his party continue to court lobbyists even after he repeatedly dissed them publicly”, your loyalty to your race was now on the line. Shut up and vote. Talk about a vote guarantee!

When the economy continued to go south after Obama’s promise that his efforts with his stimulus bill would hold unemployment @8%, criticism has been very light to say the least. In fact, when you do hear criticism, it is directed towards the all-encompassing “government” (even though the listener really know that they are really talking about Obama). When criticisms do make it out of the fold, they are usually confronted with the huge hand of denial that says “It’s way too early to judge Obama.” In the meantime, when a small committee in Oslo decided to JUDGE Obama and give him a Nobel Peace Prize, it was paraded as another “First” that Blacks everywhere should celebrate. Blacks, just like other ethnic minorities, women, members of the GLBT community, the anti-war crowd, the anti/pro-abortion crowd, the disabled, the poor, the uneducated–you name the group–are nothing more than cards in a deck that are played in the game of politics. It’s never about the card itself. Instead, it is all about how the card can be played to achieve a certain goal. Pilger nails it with this quote:

“Real activism has little time for identity politics, which, like exceptionalism, can be fake. These are distractions that confuse and sucker good people.”

The anti-war crowd is only realizing this now.

This is why I always find it interesting to hear how Republicans feel that by engaging in identity politics based on race like Democrats that somehow they will become more liked. Democrats engage in identity politics based on race all the time, yet they cannot point to one city that has improved as a result of their policies under their authority. They had decades of practice and all they can do is blame the other guy.

Lasty, Pilger makes mention of his belief in a shadow government. This is another point where the both of us agree. This is why I constantly say on this site “Follow the money”. If you do not hear anything else I say, just follow the money. While we pions are out here in cyberspace arguing and debating over the latest comment made by Rush Limbaugh, the name given to fried chicken joints, who compared Michelle Obama to a monkey, money is constantly exchanging hands in Washington. It (money) is probably one of the only things in Washington that does not discriminate. Party affiliation does not matter, neither does the color of one’s skin.

Ask a crack addict how he feels about himself at the height of his high and he will tell you he feels wonderful. Yet most of his time is spent living in a crack house. Living off the high of personalities, historical firsts can only last but for so long. There are questions that need to be answered, issues that need to be addressed and campaign promises that need to be kept. If the sober minded don’t rise up now, America will become something reminiscent to a crack house.