Category Archives: politics

a singular failure

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It seems pretty clear now that the Obama presidency has failed.

Don’t get me wrong. I still support Obamacare, and I support the president in his current round of struggles with the Republican rump in the congress, as long as he holds firm. I even think President Obama’s decision to hand off the Syrian affair to the United Nations was correct. It’s what should have happened with the situation in Iraq that was hyped by the Bush administration as cause for war. The only losers are hawks on the left and right for whom the only live issue was whether the United States looked like a superpower.

When I say that I now think the Obama presidency has failed, I mean that the president has failed to govern, even to attempt to govern, as the transformational leader his successful campaigns seemed to promise. This is not entirely the fault of the president or of his advisors. Mr. Obama was able to campaign to be the president of the entire country, to appeal to the broad perception that democracy is being undermined in the land, and to promote a near progressive agenda. That his campaign had broad appeal is borne out by the results of two elections in which he won substantial victories.

But the national electorate is not represented by the United States Congress or the Supreme Court. These institutions, and the bureaucracies that surround them (as well as the bureaucracies that surround the presidency itself), have been skewed so as to give more power to right-wing thinking than it presently deserves, if public opinion is taken into account on countless issues from gay rights to voting rights to firearms regulation. Our country, even in these benighted times, may still be a creation of the liberal establishment brought together by the Roosevelt revolution, but our nation’s capital is now a creature of the Reagan revolution with its neoliberal economics and its bias against social programs and the social role of the state.

Add to this fundamental difficulty the continued power in our nation’s capital of corporate wealth with its interests in social control, high unemployment, income inequality, and the suppression of labor. Add the continued power of rightist religion that shares the interest of corporate wealth in social control, particularly in attempts to halt the progress of second-wave feminism. Add to both of these the complexes of phenomena contingent upon President Obama’s status as our first president of African American descent, and you have a mixture of forces that have made against the success of his presidency as we hopefully imagined it five years ago.

Even so—and I’m aware that this may not be entirely fair, President Obama has attempted to govern from a position somewhat to the right of center, backing away from full blown support of economic stimulus to deal with the consequences of the great recession, refusing to hold banks and bankers accountable for their role in the debacle (as the first President Bush did not fail to do during the savings and loan crisis of the 1980s), abandoning support for a public option in Obamacare legislation, generally continuing to promote neoliberal economic “reforms” of our nation’s educational institutions, caving to the congress with respect to the sequester in 2011, ratifying and enlarging the surveillance state and concomitant suppression of the press. I could make a much longer list.

While these things have been going on, the President has of course provided progressives a few token victories in the areas of gay rights and environmental concerns. But even these have left the major difficulties faced by LGBT advocacy and environmentalist groups intact. The net result is that the forces of societal sadism and institutionalized greed have seen their fortunes advance during the Obama presidency. The prison industrial complex grows richer every day. The militarization of police continues unabated. State officials now refuse requests for information under the Freedom of Information Act. The resegregation of public schools now seems an accepted fact. The country is now rife with anti-immigrant sentiment, ratified and reinforced by the Obama administration’s program of deportations. Voter suppression legislation is now pending in many states. The American middle class is now all but dead.

Have I overstated the case? Perhaps. But Republican rightists constantly tell us that government is our problem, and that is because the governments of today’s nation states represent the only force capable of standing against the greed and decadence of the corporate oligarchy that now more or less runs the world and owns the Republican party. The same oligarchy also owns much of the Democratic party, and it apparently wields a powerful influence over our young president. It’s too bad. He seemed to have such promise.

we should have been better

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There are times when history is more than one can bear, when events take over and one’s best judgment fails. It is best at such times, or so I have always believed, to cultivate what Keats called negative capability, “being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.” I’ve been thinking about the not guilty verdict in the trial of George Zimmerman. At first I thought I could accept the proposition that judge and jury did the best they could do, hedged in as they were by bad law, but after reading the published interview with juror B37, I find I cannot do that. Nor can I accept the corollary proposition that the jury “got it right” because the prosecution failed to prove Zimmerman guilty beyond a reasonable doubt.

An unarmed boy, walking in a neighborhood where he had every right to walk, was stalked and murdered. His murderer, a vigilante who was advised by police to cease his stalking activity, was exonerated on the ground that in his confrontation with the boy he feared for his life. My purpose here isn’t to rehearse the arguments and counterarguments I have encountered over the last seventy two hours’ reading. These are easy enough to find and speak for themselves. Indeed, I’d be content to leave the whole matter to think about another day, except that my term of other days grows short, and I can no longer trust any culture of memory to help me with the time being. Most particularly I cannot trust the political culture I inhabit. Of course the Zimmerman verdict was racist. Of course the police took no interest in investigating the shooting or in identifying the victim. Of course Trayvon Martin was denied justice. Of course the misuse of Florida’s SYG law is an obscenity. Of course Trayvon Martin was virtually lynched in the courtroom, and of course the prosecution permitted this additional obscenity.

But most particularly I cannot accept the argument that I shouldn’t blame ‘the legal system’ for this terrible miscarriage of justice. A system that has allowed itself to be hijacked not only by bad law but by a blithely and casually racist human movement as well, in which George Zimmerman is merely one actor, deserves all the blame it gets from citizens whose interests it betrays, and these will be many if the Zimmerman trial becomes the basis of precedent. But this systemic failure is only one of a broad series of failures of our present system of courts to protect the rights and interests of citizens. Witness the Supreme Court’s recent decisions gutting the voting rights act and protecting drug companies from law suits, just two among a host of recent decisions in which the Supreme Court has abandoned humanity in favor of the human abstract. Witness the Supreme Court’s infamous 2005 decision in the Jessica Gonzales case, in which police were exonerated for failing to protect a woman who had obtained a restraining order against her abusive husband, which failure resulted in the husband’s killing the couple’s three children. Witness the Supreme Court’s evisceration of the fourth amendment protection against unreasonable search and seizure.

The Supreme Court’s abysmal recent record with respect to the rights of individuals, together with its now well-established habit of pandering to the interests of corporations and the military industrial complex, has resulted in a system of legality that leaves a host of wrongs without remedy. One reason there has been no concerted political pushback against this very bad court is that the consequences of its derelictions have fallen primarily upon minorities, the handicapped, convicts and prisoners, and other politically marginalized groups to which the average suburban American prefers not to give much thought.

Except when threatened. My newspaper today presents the spectacle of the good citizens of Clayton, Missouri, a wealthy Saint Louis suburb, who are up in arms over the building of a low-income senior center in their midst. Just days ago we were treated to the outrage of parents from an affluent school district at the prospect of sharing their facilities with disadvantaged students from a failing district nearby. Today’s Washington Post carries an op ed piece by Richard Cohen that could serve as a summary of the fears and convictions of affluent Americans who do not believe themselves to be racists but who nonetheless choose to live in gated communities:

Where is the politician who will own up to the painful complexity of the problem and acknowledge the widespread fear of crime committed by young black males? This does not mean that raw racism has disappeared, and some judgments are not the product of invidious stereotyping. It does mean, though, that the public knows young black males commit a disproportionate amount of crime. In New York City, blacks make up a quarter of the population, yet they represent 78 percent of all shooting suspects — almost all of them young men. We know them from the nightly news.

Those statistics represent the justification for New York City’s controversial stop-and-frisk program, which amounts to racial profiling writ large. After all, if young black males are your shooters, then it ought to be young black males whom the police stop and frisk. Still, common sense and common decency, not to mention the law, insist on other variables such as suspicious behavior. Even still, race is a factor, without a doubt. It would be senseless for the police to be stopping Danish tourists in Times Square just to make the statistics look good.

It’s easy enough to attack Cohen. Here’s a piece that does a pretty good job of that. But a perhaps unintended consequence of Cohen’s tirade is that it clearly places the history of Trayvon Martin’s death and subsequent character assassination in the context of class warfare. Race is an important element in today’s renewed class struggle—for many it will be the primary. But the struggle comprehends factors of gender and sexual orientation and issues affecting teachers, public employees, and other workers as well. We’re in the midst of a bitter class war, made worse by its perpetrators’ denial, driven by capital and privilege.

A final note: I do not think the reactions of the likes of Ann Coulter, Geraldo Rivera, or Thomas Sowell to the Zimmerman verdict are worth consideration. I have no wish to suppress the ideas of such people, but I do not believe that I am morally obligated to engage them. They have their audience, of which I am not a part. I find their ideas so morally repugnant that I cannot take them seriously.

There are times when history is more than one can bear, when events take over and one’s best judgment fails. I’m wondering if my body is up to a trip to the nation’s capital on August 28th. But right now I’m angry and sad. Angry and sad for Trayvon Martin whose short life has again been brutalized. Angry and sad for Trayvon’s family and friends, whose suffering has been enlarged and publicly ridiculed. Angry and sad for my country and what it has become, what we have become. For we could have been better, should have been better.

I stand with Texas women

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I’m posting this now in advance of the vote in Austin which will almost certainly impose new and repressive restrictions on women seeking abortions and upon men and women alike seeking medical services relating to reproductive health, constituting a massive and probably unconstitutional violation of the relationship between patients and doctors. Later, I’ll have a good deal more to say, especially about so called conservative states’ denial of basic medical services to children. But today I’d just like to say unequivocally that I stand with my friends in Austin and Raleigh and Madison and Indianapolis and Columbus and in all the surrounding locales in this country where reactionary legislatures are attempting to strip citizens of long established rights.

more about voting rights

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I stayed up late two nights ago hoping for news of the resolution to Senator Wendy Davis’s courageous filibuster against current Republican attempts to shut down most of Texas’s abortion clinics. But it was morning before I learned that she had actually succeeded, with the help of a gallery full of supporters. Of course Texas Lieutenant Governor, David Dewhurst, was quick to claim that the solemn proceedings of the august body over which he presides had been disrupted by a mob, and to promise to fight another day (in a new special session already called by Texas Governor Rick Perry).

My Facebook news feed remains full of celebration of Senator Davis and of the Supreme Court’s decision striking down the Defense of Marriage Act, of which more later. But Senator Davis, though she has become a new national celebrity as photos of her pink shoes have gone viral on the Internet, may need to seek other public office than the seat in the Texas Senate she now holds. Voter suppression legislation, that Texas enacted just hours after yesterday’s Supreme Court decision striking down part of the historic Voting Rights Act of 1965, redraws the Texas Legislative map in a way that effectively destroys Davis’s district.

The predictable Antonin Scalia has been widely noted, as he seemingly felt obliged to vent about his colleagues’ legitimation of “homosexual sodomy.” Declaring that he feels personally (and unfairly) stigmatized by the DOMA decision, Justice Scalia registered his discomfort at being thought a bigot. The very kindest thing that can be said about the good Justice, though, is that he is on the wrong side of this issue and the wrong side of history. Of course, his church is equally on the wrong side and entirely disingenuous in its official expressions of discomfort. Scalia is not disingenuous, just extreme. As a sidebar, the St. Louis Post Dispatch yesterday carried an op-ed piece by St. Louis Archbishop Robert Carlson again claiming that the Affordable Care Act infringes upon Catholic religious freedom.

I’m not hopeful about the voting rights issues. I do not think Justice Roberts’s claim that race no longer counts in our national politics is naive. I think it is calculated. Justice Roberts is surely aware that his court’s decision to weaken the voting rights act is as blatant an intervention into electoral politics as was Bush v. Gore. He is surely aware as well that present Republican strategy relies heavily upon attempts to disenfranchise minority, female, student, and elderly voters who tend to favor Democratic candidates. Republicans have hardly been secretive about this aim.

The conservative punditry are singing the praises of the voting rights decision, ignoring the fact that voter ID laws, which conservatives favor, aim to destroy the very success they (and Justice Roberts) claim that the Voting Rights act has achieved. Over the past several years voter protection groups, the League of Women Voters, and others have achieved some success in combatting voter suppression through legal means. Now much of this will have to be re-litigated. Reactionary state legislatures, Texas, Mississippi, Florida, North Carolina, and others are already announcing readiness to enact and/or reaffirm repressive new laws designed to disenfranchise voters who tend to vote for democrats. The Texas law, hurriedly announced by state Attorney General, Greg Abbott, has already been challenged legally. In states outside the South, such as my own state of Missouri, voter suppression has been given a new impetus.

The Roberts argument about race is grounded in the color-blind ideology (so-called) of aversive racism. It will be interesting to see how all these things play out in the next few weeks as the radical right seeks to express its belief in its own entitlement through voter suppression and liberals and progressives attempt to counter it. I don’t, myself, think we’re that far removed these days from the politics of Bull Connor. Blacks, Hispanics, and now people who look Muslim or have Muslim sounding names, are routinely targeted, beaten, and harrassed by police. Race and class-based repression are not localized in the South or directed solely at black people these days, but then they never were. Minorities are routinely subjected to selective law enforcement, including the death penalty. Our incarceration rate remains the highest in the world, with minorities overrepresented among our incarcerated populations. Texas has just completed its 500th execution since 1976, its eighth so far this year, executing Kimberly McCarthy, a black woman convicted by a jury that escaped being all white by including one black member. A good case can be made that we are not only resegregating our country, but rebarbarizing it as well.