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Lessons of the Obama Debacle
The problem with us progressives at this time of crisis is not that we lack an alternative paradigm to pit against the discredited neoliberal paradigm. No, the elements of the alternative based on the values of democracy, justice, equality, and environmental sustainability are there and have been there for sometime, the product of collective intellectual and activist work over the last few decades.
The key problem is the failure of progressives to translate their vision and values into a program that is convincing and connects with the people trapped in the terrible existential conditions created by the global financial crisis. This fluid process is preeminently political. It requires translating a strategic perspective into a tactical program that takes advantage of the opportunities, ambiguities, and contradictions of the present moment to construct a critical mass for progressive change from diverse class and social forces.
We must look at the political experience of the global progressive movement in order to understand why our side has been derailed and how we can fight back to political relevance. The experience of the Obama presidency is rich in this regard. In the U.S. political context, Obama is a social democrat, and the broad left supported his candidacy. Although he was no anti-capitalist, still we expected that he would initiate a program of recovery and reform similar in ambition to Roosevelt’s New Deal. The electoral base that brought him to power, which cut across class, color, gender, and generational lines -- was full of potential. Obama’s ability to bring this base together on a message of change achieved what was then thought impossible—the election of an Afro-American as president of the United States—and showed how smart political leadership can shape social and political structures.
Two years after his spectacular electoral victory, President Obama and the Democrats face a rout in the U.S. polls in early November. Indeed, Obama and his party are like a rabbit on the railroad track that is hypnotized by the light of an oncoming train. Whereas Obama seemed to do all the right things in his quest for the presidency, he seemed to make all the wrong moves as chief executive.
His prioritizing of health care reform, a massively complex task, has been identified as a key blunder. This decision certainly contributed to the debacle. But other important factors related mainly to his handling of the economic crisis, a primary concern of the electorate, were perhaps more critical.
Six Reasons behind the Debacle
Obama’s first mistake was to take responsibility for the economic crisis. In his quixotic quest for a bipartisan solution, he made George W. Bush’s problem his own. Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan never made this mistake. They took no responsibility for the economic problems of the 1970s, heaping the blame entirely on their liberal predecessors and eschewing any bipartisan alliance with those they considered their ideological enemies. Roosevelt, too, slammed – and slammed hard –his ideological foes, those he termed “economic royalists.”
Insofar as Obama and his lieutenants identified villains, this was Wall Street. Yet saying the financial elite brought on the crisis, while bailing out key Wall Street financial institutions such as Citigroup and AIG on the grounds that they were “too big to fail,” involved Obama in a terrible contradiction. The least that he could have done was to remove the existing boards and top managers of these organizations as a condition for government funds. Instead, unlike the case of General Motors, the top dogs stayed on board and continued to collect sky-high bonuses to boot.
The strong sense of disconnect between word and deed was exacerbated rather than alleviated by the Democrats’ financial reform. The measure did not have the minimum conditions for a reform with real teeth: the banning of derivatives, a Glass-Steagall provision preventing commercial banks from doubling as investment banks; the imposition of a financial transactions tax or Tobin tax; and a strong lid on executive pay, bonuses, and stock options.
Third, Obama had a tremendous opportunity to educate and mobilize people against the neoliberal or market fundamentalist approach that deregulated the financial sector and caused the crisis. Although Obama did allude to unregulated financial markets as the key problem during the campaign, he refrained from demonizing neoliberalism after he took office, thus presenting an ideological vacuum that the resurgent neoliberals did not hesitate to fill. No doubt he failed to launch a full-scale ideological offensive because his key lieutenants for economic policy, National Economic Council head Larry Summers and Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner, had not broken with neoliberal thinking.
Fourth, the stimulus package of $787 billion was simply too small to bring down or hold the line on unemployment. Here, Obama cannot say he lacked good advice. Paul Krugman, the Nobel laureate, and a whole host of Keynesian economists were telling him this from the very start. For comparison, the Chinese stimulus package of $580 billion was much bigger relative to the size of the economy than the Obama package. For the White House now to say that the employment situation would now be worse had it not been for the stimulus is, to say the least, politically naïve. People operate not with wishful counterfactual scenarios but with the facts on the ground, and the facts have been rising unemployment with no relief in sight.
Politics in a time of crisis is not for the fainthearted. The middle-of-the road approach represented by the size of the stimulus was the wrong response to a crisis that called for a political gamble: the deployment of the massive fiscal firepower of the government against the predictable howls of anger from the right.
Fifth, Obama and Federal Reserve Board Chairman Ben Bernanke deployed mainly Keynesian technocratic tools—deficit spending and monetary easing—to deal with the consequences of the massive failure of market fundamentalism. During a normal downturn these countercyclical tools may suffice to reverse the downturn. But standard Keynesianism could address such a serious collapse only in a very limited way. Besides, people were looking not only for relief in the short term but for a new direction that would enable them to master their fears and insecurities and give them reason to hope.
In other words, Obama failed to locate his Keynesian technocratic initiatives within a larger political and economic agenda that could have fired up a fairly large section of American society. Such a larger agenda could have had three pillars: the democratization of economic decision-making, from the enterprise level to the heights of macro-policymaking; an income and asset redistribution strategy that went beyond increasing taxes on the top two percent of the population; and the promotion of a more cooperative rather than competitive approach to production, distribution, and the management of resources. This agenda of social transformation, which was not too left, could have been accommodated within a classical social democratic framework. People were simply looking for an alternative to the Brave New Dog-Eat-Dog World that neo-liberalism had bequeathed them. Instead, Obama offered a bloodless technocratic approach to cure a political and ideological debacle.
Related to this absence of a program of transformation was the sixth reason for the Obama debacle: his failure to mobilize the grassroots base that brought him to power. This base was diverse in terms of class, generation, and ethnicity. But it was united by palpable enthusiasm, which was so evident in Washington, DC, and the rest of the country on Inauguration Day in 2009. With his preference for a technocratic approach and a bipartisan solution to the crisis, Obama allowed this base to wither away instead of exploiting the explosive momentum it possessed in the aftermath of the elections.
At the eleventh hour, Obama and the Democrats are talking about firing up and resurrecting this base. But the dispirited and skeptical troops that have long been disbanded and left by the wayside rightfully ask: around what?
The Right Makes the Right Moves
In contrast to Obama, the right wing understood the demands and dynamics of politics at a time of crisis, as opposed to politics in normal times. While Obama persisted in his quest for bipartisanship, the Republicans adopted a posture of hard-line opposition to practically all of his initiatives.
Unlike Obama and the Democrats, the right posed the conflict in stark political and ideological terms: between left and right, between “socialism” and “freedom,” between the oppressive state and the liberating market. The Republican opposition used all the catchwords and mantras they could dredge up from bourgeois U.S. ideology.
Finally, in contrast to Obama’s neglect of the Democratic base, the right eschewed Republican interest-group politics. Fox News, Sarah Palin, and the tea party movement stirred up the right-wing base to challenge the Republican Party elite and drive a no-compromise, take-no-prisoners politics. To understand what has happened to the Republican Party in the last few weeks with the string of tea party successes in the primaries, historian Arno Mayer’s distinction among conservatives, reactionaries, and counterrevolutionaries is useful. In Mayer’s terms, the counterrevolutionaries, with their populist, anti-insider, and grassroots-driven politics are displacing the conservative elites that have long held sway in the Republican Party.
With their anti-spending platform, the Republicans and tea partiers that might capture the House and the Senate in November will probably bring about a worse situation than today. As such, Obama and the Democrats might repeat Bill Clinton’s political trajectory when he scored a victory at the polls in 1996 because the Republicans led by Newt Gingrich overreached politically after their triumph in the midterm elections of 1994. But this is a desperate illusion. The current counterrevolutionaries and their backers are skilled in the politics of blame, and they will likely be successful in painting the worsening situation as a result of Obama’s “socialist policies,” not of drastic cuts in government spending.
Lessons for the Left
The problem lies not so much in our lack of a strategic alternative as in our failure to translate our strategic vision or paradigm into a credible and viable political program. Politics in a period of crisis is different from politics in a period of normality, being more fluid and marked by the volatility of class, political, and intellectual attachments. We should remember that politics is the art of creating and sustaining a political movement from diverse class and social forces through a flexible but principled political program that can adapt to changing circumstances.
Finally, there is no such thing as an objectively determined situation. The art of politics is using the contradictions, spaces, and ambiguities of the current moment to shape structures and institutions and create a critical mass for change. Class, economic, and political structures may condition political outcomes; they do not determine them. Who will ultimately emerge the victor from this period of prolonged capitalist crisis will depend on smart and skilled political leadership.
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Show AllI am most struck by one sentence in this article:
“The key problem is the failure of progressives to translate their vision and values into a program that is convincing and connects with the people trapped in the terrible existential conditions created by the global financial crisis.”
Boy does that line hit the nail on the head … and boy does the tone and tenor of this too-long and long-winded piece demonstrate why it is so. What average American beset by the “terrible existential conditions created by the global financial crisis” could even understand what this article is trying to say? It’s too dense and too academic (OK I’ll add to that it’s downright pretentious).
The problem is the Left (if you will) no longer counts enough average Americans among their ranks. Now I‘m not making some working class hero argument, nor arguing that our movement shouldn’t have educated people in it, but this diatribe turns off even an sophisticated reader with its stylish (narcissistic) rhetoric.
Obama can’t talk to them, academics talk about them; so is it any wonder that the Average American – besieged by insecurity, underpaid or underemployed, if paid or employed at all, broke and uninsured – listens to the over-simplified solutions of the simpletons of the Right?
The author is right. We have no convincing arguments that connect with the millions who vote. So we have no meaningful stake in the democracy. We either condescendingly by-pass them like Obama, or patronize them like some post-modern Vanguard Party, or we insult them as so many “Progressives” do by calling them stupid or crazy or worse.
Democracy is all about building consensus among these far-flung constituencies through, compelling, direct and above all personal communications about what’s at stake and what we stand for. Today’s politicians – of all stripes - show they’ve no talent for it, unless as the Republicans have done, they choose to lie, instill fear and propagandize their way into office.
Educated people and intellectuals contribute and can play a role - operative word: "role." But we need to be speaking for the working class people, promoting their interests (all of our interests) and ideas, not speaking at people with our solutions and ideas. We need to rejoin the working class, not demand that the rest of the working class join us. Verbal and analytical skills are important, but they are only one set of skills - having those skills does not make people superior, nor does it justify them forming a new aristocracy. Those skills need to be placed in the service of the greater good, to support and promote and defend the needs and aspirations of the entire working class, not used to bludgeon people into supporting our needs and aspirations.
The Republicans successfully move into a vacuum and can portray themselves as speaking for the every day people for the simple reason that no one else is. The intellectuals in progressive and liberal circles are so preoccupied with their own status and position and personal identities in the social hierarchy, and so obsessed with preventing the formation of any political Left, that they are entirely divorced from and irrelevant to most working class people.
When push comes to shove, most intellectuals and educated people will side with the ruling class. But we do need a few to fight for the working class. As it is, most educated people deny the existence of class, and deny the existence of class struggle. That in and of itself is siding with the ruling class and causing estrangement from the working class people. Most non-intellectual working class people already know that the battle is between the haves and the have-nots, but they are up against all of the educated and intellectual people on that point. They then can "find a home" in the fake populism of the tea party right.
Progress!
"Promoting their interests" now includes "(all our interests)" if only parenthetically
"We need to rejoin the working class"
Who is "we"? If you mean what i think you mean (always a shaky proposition in our conversations) "we" have always been members of the "working" class. The problem is not in terms of actually joining such a "class", the problem is the recognition, on "both" sides of this artificial arbitrarily drawn aisle - "skilled" v "unskilled", "educated" v "uneducated" etc, etc that we are, in fact all members of this "class". As far as "bludgeon(ing) people into supporting our needs and aspirations", well ........
"we do need a few to fight for the working class. As it is, most educated people deny the existence of class, and deny the existence of class struggle. That in and of itself is siding with the ruling class ...."
"Most"? have you done a survey? I think "many" would serve the purpose of your point just as well and be subject to a lower standard of verification .....
Now you're slipping back into that divisive non-inclusive concept again.
Actually, I suspect that most of those "educated" folk have a very strong concept of "class", the idea of "class struggle" is, however, different, they want to rise in "class" or at least in the relative position they are in with respect to their perceived class. Their mistake is in not understanding that they too are cannon fodder. The mistake of the traditional "working" class you refer to is rejecting, out of hand, the concept that these folks are potential allies, nay, necessary, allies (as is true the other way around as well) in this "struggle" and instead painting them as "the enemy" - IMO, you epitomize that way of thinking - that's why i started this post with "Progress" with reference to your parenthetical phrase.
The only folk, IMO, who would wish to persist in promoting the concept of this (artificial) labor division are those who need it to promote their political philosophy. Otherwise, if one is truly interested in promoting the interests of ALL the people, then one, it seems to me, would be best advised to point out how artificial the distinctions you have made, indeed are, and working to heal the breach before continuing with the battle ...
I think even Marx himself, were he around today, even though his overall analysis might not change, would be redefining what he means by "class" ....
You cannot promote both the needs and desires of Wall Street and the needs and desire of Main Street, because they are in opposition to one another.
Th calls for not alienating "potential friends and allies" always means compromise.
Capital and Labor are artificial distinctions?
We need to "heal the breach" between those who have lost their homes and jobs and the billionaires who did that to them? Do we need to consider the needs and desires of the wealthy so as to be "inclusive?"
You are promoting the same "post partisan" and "all Americans" doctrine of the Obama administration and its supporters. Would you say that is what the Green party represents, or are you only speaking for yourself?
Once again you distort or misinterpret what i said - which distortion serves your purposes, but mangles my post.
"Th calls for not alienating "potential friends and allies" always means compromise."
Including more folks in your definition of "working class" compromises what, precisely.
"Capital and Labor are artificial distinctions?"
Duh, read it again, TA, i spoke of artificial distinctions among members of the working class. What happened to "all of us"? That was a blip on the screen wasn't it? Or was it a prolonged typo?
"We need to "heal the breach" between those who have lost their homes and jobs and the billionaires who did that to them? Do we need to consider the needs and desires of the wealthy so as to be 'inclusive?' "
Who said anything about "billionaires"? I, quite clearly, was referring to the "educated" classes who work for a living, you know the ones you apparently want to exclude, as folks who should be included.
"You are promoting the same "post partisan" and "all Americans" doctrine of the Obama administration and its supporters. Would you say that is what the Green party represents, or are you only speaking for yourself?"
Baloney! TA, there you go again. Taking someone who is quite clearly neither a supporter of Obama, nor his "doctrine" (which obviously doesn't include "all Americans" in any case), and trying, in a rather farcical fashion, IMO, to paint me, and the Greens with the same brush as him. Tch, tch, more "green - baiting" - shame on you!
TA, the "class" you speak of -"working people" - is far larger than your definition apparently allows, and your failure to accept and incorporate that fact does major damage to your cause. Your divide and conquer strategy is whacking you in the private parts but because you are too busy protecting your posterior, you can't identify the true source of your pain. Read Maude Barlowe's piece if you want to get an idea of a concept of how to help meet the needs of your "working class" in the 21st Century and beyond - get out of the 19th, for Pete's sake!
Your rhetoric is simply outdated, man - it's like defining "working class" as buggy whip makers - in the age of the automobile. By the way, are you an "educated" person? What does that mean, precisely?
duplicate
I have been referring to those from the working class who speak for the ruling class. That is not excluding anyone from the working class, or limiting any definition of the working class. I am saying that some things that working class people say, especially educated working class people, do not support the interests of the working class. How is that difficult to understand or controversial?
I don't have any "cause" that I am worried about "damaging" and I am not in any pain. Maybe you are projecting - assuming that I share your feelings and view of this discussion.
"I have been referring to those from the working class who speak for the ruling class. That is not excluding anyone from the working class, or limiting any definition of the working class. I am saying that some things that working class people say, especially educated working class people, do not support the interests of the working class. How is that difficult to understand or controversial?"
Shucks, TA, that isn't difficult at all to understand, why you didn't say that in the first place, I'll never know, and how one could conceivably intuit this interpretation out of your previous post I'll never know, as well, but I suppose one can "interpret" one's own words, as well as those of others, to say whatever one likes ....
As far as the substance of your paragraph is concerned, most people say things, on occasion, that don't represent their own interests, so what is the point of this, now, rather obvious statement?
"I don't have any "cause" that I am worried about "damaging"
Does that mean you don't have any "cause"? Or that you are not worried about "damaging" one that you have?
"I am not in any pain."
Glad to hear it!
"Maybe you are projecting ...."
I do confess, sometimes this discussion does seem a bit "pained" ....
Glad I was able to make myself clear. Sorry for any previous confusion.
I do have a sense of there being a cause, yes, but I see myself as belonging to it, not it belonging to me. I suspect that cause will triumph after I am gone, and doesn't depend on me. The joy is in the struggle, the process. Hard to know the whens and hows of things happening. Also hard to know where and how you can be of service, and what sacrifice or suffering will be required of you.
I do have a burning personal desire to live in revolutionary times, but that is out of my control. Revolutionary times are fast approaching, no matter what any of us do or say, but I don't know that I will experience that and it is really impossible to make that happen (or to stop it from happening) and no way to know what role each of us may be called on to play.
"Revolutionary times are fast approaching, no matter what any of us do or say,"
Ah, so the forces needed, the movements necessary, are already pretty much in place?
No, the conditions are the key thing. Movements come from that, and then as a last step parties and politicians and then voting follow along.
For example, even as late as 1860 there was no "end slavery" choice on the ballot. But the conditions were right. There was a "no slavery" choice in 1868, after the battle had already been won. Partisan electoral politics are the last thing to change.
1860 Presidential ballot -
- Lincoln (Republican) - "stop the expansion of slavery"
- Bell (Whig) - "try to stop the expansion of slavery, but compromise with the Democrats"
- Douglas (Democrat) - "allow the expansion of slavery, but compromise with the Whigs"
- Breckenridge - "expand slavery"
There was no choice on the ballot in 1860 that "matched our values" - that called for the abolition of slavery. Yet it happened. Therefore, electoral choice was not necessary to, and could not have driven or caused Emancipation. Emancipation happened on its own, before any law changed, regardless of partisan electoral politics - the Underground Railroad, then thousands of slaves fleeing to Union army camps and commanders such as Grant hiring them - slaves were then de facto free in reality and that drove Emancipation, with the assistance of sympathizers in the Abolition movement who relentlessly rallied public opinion and pressured the politicians. The laws and the subsequent partisan elections merely certified, were a reflection of change that had already happened.
The question shifted from "should we free the slaves?" to "should we send the slaves back into bondage?" as a result of the struggle - entirely outside of the partisan electoral process - through the work and sacrifice and courage of the slaves themselves and sympathizers in the army and in the Abolition movement. That turned a 10% minority into a 60-70% majority in the North.
See the chain of cause and effect there?
Had there been an "end slavery" choice on the 1860 ballot, it almost certainly would have lost and that may well have set the cause back rather than advanced it.
Lucretia Mott
Born in Nantucket, Massachusetts on January 3, 1793, Lucretia Coffin Mott became a leading figure in the abolition of slavery and the women’s rights movement during the 1800s, a position attributed primarily to her passionate speeches and sermons. The daughter of Thomas Coffin Jr. and Ann Folger, Mott became strongly influenced by her family’s dedication to the Society of Friends (Quakers), which emphasized the value of equality among all people.
In 1837, Mott helped organize the First Anti-Slavery Convention of American Women in New York City, New York and was one of six women invited as delegates of Pennsylvania to attend the World’s Anti-Slavery Convention in London in 1840. Upon arrival, Mott and other women were denied participation in the conference, fueling Mott as a feminist to further fight for women's equal rights. Following the conference, Mott and abolitionist Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who also attended, planned to bring women's rights to the forefront of American society. After returning from the Anti-Slavery Convention in London in 1840, Mott also appeared in slave-owning regions continuing her efforts in the abolition of slavery. She assisted slaves through the Underground Railroad and housed many slaves in her personal home. As a prominent figure in the anti-slavery movement, Mott was granted the opportunity to speak to Congress and President John Tyler regarding her beliefs of antislavery.
http://pabook.libraries.psu.edu/palitmap/bios/Mott__Lucretia.html
Elijah P. Lovejoy
In 1827 Lovejoy moved to St. Louis, Missouri, where he established a school and entered journalism. Six years later he became editor of the St. Louis Observer, a Presbyterian weekly in which he strongly condemned slavery and supported gradual emancipation. Missouri was a slave state, and in 1835 a letter signed by a number of important men in St. Louis requested him to moderate the tone of his editorials. He replied in an editorial reiterating his views and his right to publish them. Threats of mob violence, however, forced him to move his press across the Mississippi River to Alton, in the free state of Illinois. Despite its new location, his press was destroyed by mobs several times in one year. Finally, on the night of November 7, 1837, a mob attacked the building, and Lovejoy was killed in its defense. The news of his death stirred the people of the North profoundly and led to a great strengthening of abolitionist sentiment.
http://www.biography.com/articles/Elijah-Parish-Lovejoy-9387222
William Lloyd Garrison
Garrison was the son of an itinerant seaman who subsequently deserted his family. The son grew up in an atmosphere of declining New England Federalism and lively Christian benevolence—twin sources of the abolition movement, which he joined at age 25. As editor of the National Philanthropist (Boston) in 1828 and the Journal of the Times (Bennington, Vermont) in 1828–29, he served his apprenticeship in the moral reform cause. In 1829, with a pioneer abolitionist, Benjamin Lundy, he became co-editor of the Genius of Universal Emancipation in Baltimore; he also served a short term in jail for libeling a Newburyport merchant who was engaged in the coastal slave trade. Released in June 1830, Garrison returned to Boston and, a year later, established The Liberator, which became known as the most uncompromising of American antislavery journals. In the first issue of The Liberator he stated his views on slavery vehemently: "I do not wish to think, or speak, or write, with moderation. I am in earnest — I will not equivocate — I will not excuse — I will not retreat a single inch — AND I WILL BE HEARD."
http://www.biography.com/articles/William-Lloyd-Garrison-9307251
David Walker
African American abolitionist David Walker (1785-1830) wrote Walker's Appeal, urging slaves to resort to violence when necessary to win their freedom. Walker was born free, of a free mother and slave father, in Wilmington, N.C., on Sept. 28, 1785. He early learned to read and write, and he read extensively on the subjects of revolution and resistance to oppression. When he was about 30, he left the South, because "If I remain in this bloody land, I will not live long. As true as God reigns, I will be avenged for the sorrows which my people have suffered." In 1826 Walker settled in Boston, Mass., where he became the agent for Freedom's Journal, the black abolitionist newspaper, and a leader in the Colored Association. For a living he ran a secondhand clothing store.
John Brown
Though he was white, in 1849 Brown settled with his family in a black community founded at North Elba, New York, on land donated by the New York antislavery philanthropist Gerrit Smith. Long a foe of slavery, Brown became obsessed with the idea of taking overt action to help win justice for enslaved black people. In 1855 he followed five of his sons to the Kansas Territory to assist antislavery forces struggling for control there. With a wagon laden with guns and ammunition, Brown settled in Osawatomie and soon became the leader of antislavery guerrillas in the area.
Harriet Ann Jacobs
Born into slavery, Jacobs still was taught to read at an early age. After escaping to the North in 1842, Jacobs worked as a nursemaid in New York City and eventually moved to Rochester, New York, to work in the antislavery reading room above abolitionist Frederick Douglass's newspaper, the North Star. During an abolitionist lecture tour with her brother, Jacobs began her lifelong friendship with the Quaker reformer Amy Post. Post, among others, encouraged Jacobs to write the story of her enslavement. Self-published in 1861, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl is arguably the most comprehensive slave narrative written by a woman. Jacobs's narrative does not shrink from discussing the sexual abuse of slaves or the anguish felt by slave mothers who faced the loss of their children.
http://www.biography.com/articles/Harriet-Ann-Jacobs-9351667
If voting did not end slavery, then who or what did, and how did that happen? What lessons and examples for us might there be that are overlooked?
Sojourner Truth
For the duration of her adult life, Sojourner Truth spoke out about the social injustice and inequality experienced by African-Americans and women. With the help of friends, she wrote and published her memoirs, and spoke at abolitionist gatherings. She lobbied for land to be set aside in the West for free blacks after the Civil War, and successfully helped conduct a campaign for integrated streetcars in Washington D.C. From the depths of slavery, Sojourner Truth built a reputation for her powerful oration, and her deeply emotional life story inspired thousands of Americans to rethink their definition of equality.
http://www.biography.com/blackhistory/featured-biography/sojourner-truth.jsp
Nathaniel Turner
Nathaniel Turner (1800-1831) was a black American who organized and led the most successful slave revolt in the United States. This slave rebellion catalyzed the beginning of the abolitionist movement in the United States. Because Turner's motive was a desire for liberty, some regard him as cast in the same mold as the American patriots who fought the Revolutionary War and as other freedom-loving men. No less than Patrick Henry, Turner too believed that "give me liberty or give me death" must be man's guiding philosophy of life.
http://www.africawithin.com/bios/nat_turner.htm
Harriet Ross Tubman
Harriet Ross Tubman (ca. 1820-1913) was a black American who, as an agent for the Underground Railroad, a clandestine escape route used to smuggle slaves to freedom in the North and Canada, helped hundreds flee captivity. Harriet Ross was a slave child who suffered the usual hardships of black children during the period of Southern slavery. During the next 10 years Harriet Tubman returned to the South 20 times to help approximately 300 slaves, including her own parents, to escape. Using a complicated system of way stations on the route from the South to Canada, she is believed never to have lost a charge. In 1850 the Federal Fugitive Slave Law was reinforced with a clause that promised punishment to anyone who aided an escaping slave. In addition, a price of $40,000 was set for Tubman's capture. Thus she began transporting some slaves past the North to refuge in Canada.
http://www.africawithin.com/bios/harriet_tubman.htm
Denmark Vesey
Denmark Vesey (1767-1822), an African American who fought to liberate his people from slavery, planned an abortive slave insurrection. After careful examination of the historical record, the judgment of Sterling Stuckey remains valid: "Vesey's example must be regarded as one of the most courageous ever to threaten the racist foundations of America.... He stands today, as he stood yesterday ... as an awesome projection of the possibilities for militant action on the part of a people who have for centuries been made to bow down in fear."
http://www.africawithin.com/bios/denmark_vesey.htm
Angelina Grimke
American abolitionist and advocate of women's rights, b. Charleston, S.C. Converted to the Quaker faith by her elder sister Sarah Moore Grimké, she became an abolitionist in 1835, wrote An Appeal to the Christian Women of the South (1836) in testimony of her conversion, and with her sister began speaking around New York City. She developed into an orator of considerable power and was invited (1837) to lecture in Massachusetts. Her three appearances before the Massachusetts legislative committee on antislavery petitions early in 1838 constituted a triumph. The same year she married Theodore Dwight Weld, also an active abolitionist. Ill health after her marriage led her to abandon the lecture platform, but she continued to aid Weld in his abolitionist work and maintained a lasting, lively interest in the cause to which they had contributed so much.
http://www.questia.com/library/literature/nonfiction/grimke-sisters.jsp
Harriet Beecher Stowe
Harriet Beecher Stowe was born into a prominent, religious, Calvinist family in Litchfield, Connecticut on 14 June 1811. She married a seminary professor, Calvin Ellis Stowe, and had seven children, several of whom died during childhood. 'Uncle Tom's Cabin', her first novel, was published in 1852 and provoked, to Mrs. Stowe's satisfaction, an intense and undeniable reaction -- at home and abroad -- against American slavery. She wrote many more novels, none of them as famous or important as her first, the best-selling novel of the nineteenth century.
http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0832952/bio
Wendell Phillips
After opening a law office in Boston, Phillips, a wealthy Harvard Law School graduate, sacrificed social status and a prospective political career in order to join the antislavery movement. He became a close associate of the abolitionist leader William Lloyd Garrison and began lecturing for antislavery societies, writing pamphlets and editorials for Garrison's The Liberator, and contributing financially to the abolition movement.
As a reform crusader, Phillips allied himself with Garrison in refusing to link abolition with political action; together they condemned the federal Constitution for its compromises over slavery and advocated national disunion rather than continued association with the slave states. During the Civil War (1861–65) he assailed President Abraham Lincoln's reluctance to uproot slavery at once, and after the Emancipation Proclamation (January 1863) he threw his support to full civil liberties for freedmen. In 1865 he became president of the American Anti-Slavery Society after Garrison resigned.
http://www.biography.com/articles/Wendell-Phillips-9439680
No mention of Obama's record on human rights, which closely resembles that of Darth Vader--and which is hard to blame on Congress.
Progressives are trying to forget it, but they were clearly and repeatedly warned about Obama by their peers, and their response to this information was to attack their fellow progressives, often quite viciously. Our problems may go deeper than one rotten President.
http://www.veoh.com/browse/videos/category/comedy/watch/v20507163Cewg2CNc
No mention of Obama's record on human rights, which closely resembles that of Darth Vader--and which is hard to blame on Congress.
Progressives are trying to forget it, but they were clearly and repeatedly warned about Obama by their peers, and their response to this information was to attack their fellow progressives, often quite viciously. Our problems may go deeper than one rotten President.
http://www.veoh.com/browse/videos/category/comedy/watch/v20507163Cewg2CNc
The real lesson is that the modern Democratic Party is just as much a part of the corporate control structure as the Republican party.
Ralph Nader and Cynthia McKinney were right. Will we continue to ignore them and others like them, just as we ignored the economists who warned of the impending global crash?
Stop pouring your energy into a party that consistently betrays you. Register Green, vote Green, and organize Green.
The Green Party is the only party based on principles of grassroots democracy, social justice, nonviolence, ecology, and getting corporate money out of politics.
I certainly is worth a real try ......
Mr. Bello's arguments -- especially his assertion the Left has failed to connect with victims of capitalist seizures of wealth -- are certainly thought-provoking, but he curiously omits the most important elements of the crisis.
Like Obama and the Democrats, Mr. Bello carefully skirts the fact the sole source of the economic problem is the nature of capitalism -- infinite greed as maximum virtue and limitless selfishness as ultimate good -- an inherent savagery that leads inevitably to fascism.
Indeed it is already obvious the capitalists now control government at every U.S. level.
Thus policy and law increasingly serve only capitalist purposes: absolute power and unlimited profit for the Ruling Class; total subjugation and bottomless poverty for the rest of us.
What this means is that the American Experiment in constitutional democracy is dead beyond any hope of resuscitation.
Mr. Bello also ignores the inherent bigotry and hatefulness of U.S. Caucasians -- the fact the election of Obama has enabled hate-mongers to open the cesspool of racial, ethnic, homophobic and religious malevolence that has always been an underlying but mostly hidden characteristic of a vast majority within the nation's white population.
Never in my lifetime (70 years) have these hatreds been so shamelessly agitated to such a deadly dangerous nationwide frenzy.
Thus the lack of a compelling indictment of capitalism combines with explosive release of the Caucasian population's long pent-up hatreds to virtually guarantee a rightist sweep both in the November election and in 2012.
Thus too Mr. Bello misses how these elements combine into an irreversible juggernaut of horror -- as if we are trapped in a vehicle racing downhill toward a new form of Nazism with absolutely no remaining possibility of changing our national direction.
*****
Apropos the notion of Obama's blunders, my own reluctant but growing belief is that Obama has not blundered at all -- that the man for whom I voted is doing exactly what the Ruling Class intended him to do -- suppressing the Left by serial betrayals and infuriating the implicitly white-supremacist Right by being a Black man in the (implicitly and exclusively) White House.
The result is a singularly U.S. brand of chaos.
But the approach closely parallels how the Ruling Class paralyzed the Weimar Republic and so cleared the way for Hitler.
In this context the real "debacle" is how "change we can believe in" has become absolute proof of the imbecility of hope.
I just heard something deeply disturbing on Democracy Now. I suggest listening to the part of Amy's show today that deals with Obama's endless detention - and disappearing the judge's ruling. Literally - disappearing it!
"Obama debacle"? That is like calling the gang torture of the homosexual men in new york last weekend, "bullying".
A final salvo (and an insightful analysis) of the circular firing squad. If you don't support your friends, you elect your enemies. That's how democracy works. The left succeeded in having Bush appointed by voting for Nader. Let's see how we manage to elect the likes of O'Donnell, Paladino and Angle. That might be our best bet actually; we had to destroy governance in order to save it!
Bello's article is excellent. The central problem can be summed up by pointing out Obama's betrayal of his base - his total lack of principled leadership while trying to make nice with crocodiles. But then, the left has long wasted so much counter-productive energy in making out a battle between capitalism and socialism when REALITY is that there is no such battle. The world economic system is capitalism. The degree to which a society is socialistic is the degree to which the excesses of capitalism are tempered for the common good.
"The problem with us progressives at this time of crisis is not that we lack an alternative paradigm to pit against the discredited neoliberal paradigm. No, the elements of the alternative based on the values of democracy, justice, equality, and environmental sustainability are there and have been there for sometime, the product of collective intellectual and activist work over the last few decades."
i stopped right here.
no need to waste time on this neo-lib rubbish.
what the hell does "fluid" even mean?
if one can't translate an idea into a practice, one can be sure as heck that the idea is bunk.
but one will need a Ph.D. from a prestigeous private institution to muck up that simple truth.
When Obama entered office, he inherited a financial situation that neither he nor any other Democrat would have been in a position to adequately deal with under the political climate then and now in existence. The Republicans knew that and early on developed a policy of defeating Obama and the Democrats simply by denying them the means of solving the country's ills and misleading the American people in every possible way. Initial polls showed that the electorate wanted Obama to be bipartisan in his dealings with the Republicans, and he vainly tried to be so. He gave it his best effort because he thought it was politically wise, not because he thought it would work. He knew what the Republicans were up to, but he thought the American people would appreciate his efforts and, therefore, support his policies. Unfortunately, the Democrats in congress were not united from the beginning. The conservative Democrats came from mostly conservative states, and they had their constituents and their monetary backers to worry about as far as re-election was concerned. They were only willing to bend so far to support Obama. For the most part, the Republicans were united in their approach. As a result, Obama's political approach was to get legislation through congress that votes allowed him to get. It was not as if he chose to be moderate rather than progressive. Rather, it was because he really had no choice. He was a pragmatist. Some say that he could have simply spoken out more strongly for progressive policies and those policies would have somehow become reality. That is politically naive. What is driving down the popularity of the Democrats is the state of the economy over which they have little control. It would have been beneficial had they been able to get the amount of money necessary to have "righted the ship", but the votes were not there. Frankly, I believe Obama has done a pretty good job considering the cards he was dealt. Granted, he is not a strong president, but he has tried very diligently, in my opinion, to make the best decisions available to him, and I think he has done about as well as he could have considering what he has had to deal with. Had he not inherited a mini-depression, and if the complexities of health care and the economy had not been so difficult for the American people to understand and so easy for the Republicans to distort in their favor, I think we would be looking at Obama in a much different light.
With the way Obama and his party in Congress are working so hard to fail themselves, only a complete idiot would believe any of that bs. The man can't even lead. What is a president who says that he'll take anything Congress passes? He's no different from GWB.