How to Stop the Killing in the Pan African Hood

How To Stop The Killing in the Pan African Hood
By Marvin X

"The reactionaries will never put down their butcher knives,
they will never turn into Buddha heads."—Mao

We are talking about a condition in the hearts of men, an evil sore festering and stinking like rotten meat, to use that Langston Hughes metaphor. It is a spiritual disease more prevalent than HIV, for it consumes whole countries, not only Pan Africa, but it may be said to originate in Europe because lying and murder is the great theme of this culture, and Africa and Africans throughout the Diaspora are victimized and suffer this malady equally with their colonial Mother. See how Europe butchered the butcher's sons in Iraq, or is this the democratic way of life she is bringing to the sand nigguhs?

The problem is how to throw off the vestiges of colonialism to become the New Man and New Woman. Of course, we must first recognize how sick colonialism has made us throughout Pan Africa. Somehow we must bow down and ask forgiveness of our Higher Power, the ancestors, the living and the yet unborn. There must be a cleansing ritual performed until the mud and slime of Western culture is purged from our minds, bodies and souls.

The Western gods must be destroyed, crushed to the earth and stomped into eternity, for they have blessed us with ignorance, superstition, greed, lust and pure evil, allowing us to become worse than beasts in the field, committing the worse atrocities, yea, even worse than all the teaching of our colonial masters.

No doubt Africa is paying for the great sin of sending her sons and daughters into slavery. Has Africa asked forgiveness of herself, yet she wails for apology from the slave master's children. Has she given reparations to her descendants lost in the wilderness of North America? Has she ever sent a symbolic ship or plane to bring them home? So Pan Africa lives a slow death because she allows corrupt, boastful, arrogant leaders to control her nations, her leaders shelter each other, covering their multiple sins, protecting themselves from people's justice who would rightfully hang them like Mussolini and his wife.

Like jack in the box, Pan Africa must jump out of her iniquities, she must call forth the divine energy within the bowels of her soul and step into the New Day of light, breath and health. She cannot allow her children to devour her from coast to coast, sea to sea, from America to Africa, but children only mock the behavior of adults, so we cannot blame them, children are children, so adults must step to the front of the line, no matter how busy they are doing nothing, for they are surely doing nothing if the village is in chaos, security being the top priority of civilization.

Everyone must become the central command, every man and woman must be about the business of teaching new values, new ways of thinking and acting that are not harmful to the human soul and the human condition. The world is so full of wisdom it escapes us because our quest is for the trivial, the low things of life, not the things in the upper room, but those in the basement, in the gutter of our minds and hearts, that is where we dwell, that is our focus and this is why we suffer. Kobe gives his wife a four million dollar rock, but will it placate her soul, will material things correct a spiritual problem of faith and trust?

The West has a sordid history buying people as Pan Africa can attest, but everyone is not for sale, those of integrity will jump ship, will eat the whip and the gun, for persecution is worse than slaughter, the Qur'an teaches.

No, physical weapons cannot solve the problem. Look at Israel, she has the all the modern weapons but she cannot defeat the spirit of a people determined to be free. So Pan Africa's children can and must be armed with a new consciousness. Even Fidel Castro has said the new weapon is consciousness! Like Johnny Appleseed, we must go about spreading consciousness, teaching unconditional love and forgiveness, sharing knowledge and wealth with the poor and ignorant, the brokenhearted and oppressed. I am not trying to be sentimental, but we can and must flip the script as they say in the hood.

Again, like Jack, we must jump out the box of mental and physical oppression by taking a new look at reality, by stopping a moment to wonder at the pleasure in the sun, the trees, the sea and mountains, the glory of being alive each moment to share human love, being grateful we have a moment on this earth to whisper truth to children that they may rise and be a pleasure to the ancestors watching everywhere. Yes, we must transcend block man and block woman, the block within ourselves even, and reach forth into the realm of new possibilities, not allowing evil and her brothers and sisters to control the air and sun that comes each day blessing us with another moment to walk in the light, escaping the darkness of ignorance, greed and lust and violence.

Black men, go into the hood and take the guns from your sons, yes the sons you abandoned, neglected and rejected, the sons who look like you although you deny this, the sons who walk with sad hearts, hardened because they long for you, for your love and guidance, for your wisdom and strength, after all, Mama did all she could to raise her manchild in the promised land.
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A Response to "Killing in the Pan Africa Hood"
By Rudolph Lewis


Marvin, there is great wisdom that should be heeded in your essay "How To Stop The Killing in the Pan African Hood." I am aware that a new set of values (though possessed by our enslaved ancestors but now abandoned under the "new world order") and a new perspective of our place in the world, of our past and future are earnestly needed in these dire times.

The most important of these new perspectives is couched in your paragraph that reads as follows:
Has Africa asked forgiveness of herself, yet she wails for apology from the slave masters' children. Has she given reparations to her descendants lost in the wilderness of North America? Has she ever sent a symbolic ship or plane to bring them home? So Pan Africa lives a slow death because she allows corrupt, boastful, arrogant leaders to control her nations, her leaders shelter each other, covering their multiple sins, protecting themselves from people's justice who would rightfully hang them like Mussolini and his wife.

In short, you suggest our critical sword should have a double edge—that is, the slave trade involved African nations and European nations collaborating for the purposes of wealth and power. They got rid of their "niggertrash." Many of those descendants of the tribal kings and chiefs who sold millions of slaves still play significant roles in the politics of today's African nations. And they will sell us again and their people again in the 21st century, if the World Bank and other internationalist (globalist), corporatist agencies offer the right price. (Check out Paul Kingsnorth's essay on South Africa and the ANCA Shattered Dream.)

In the contest for wealth and power, "black" and "white," however, are not real distinctions but illusions, a means for escapism or sidetracking those who wish to do the "good." I know "evil" has become a popular theme in the discussion of international politics and the resistance to corporate imperialism, especially from the bully pulpit of the presidency. So-called righteous men love to stand behind such symbolic bulwarks. I hope we do not become agents of such trite rhetoric—it indeed will lead us astray. It is necessary that we keep on the straight and narrow and keep both edges of our sword whetted sharp.

At no time must we sink back into mythologizing the world for the sake of political convenience, to hear merely the rhythm of our own voices. Beneath most Pan-African rhetoric (from the 19th century to the present), there is this underlying notion of Africa as paradise into which Satan (the white man) introduced evil. I recommend strongly that all Pan-Africanists and sympathizers and all other petty-bourgeois, pseudo-revolutionaries read the Malian Yambo Olouloguem's novel Bound to Violence. Or any non-romantic account of Africa before European trade began. Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart will provide some evidence even in the "wholeness" of tribal life, all was not well. Even though there was a sense of justice, and right and wrong. There were some practices or acts that were just horrid, unnecessary, and "evil."
If true be told, there was more evil in Africa than one could shake a stick at. The process of empire building in Africa by Africans themselves and the perennial struggles for power and the retention of power included the wholesale slaughter of tribes (genocide), butchery, debauchery of every sort (religious, political and social), cannibalism, incest, and so on—all these acts of evil existed before modern Europe stepped onto the soil of Africa or worked out its first deal for a cargo of slaves. The emperors, kings and queens, and chiefs—to whom we have become so inured (and want to imitate by dress, manners, and religion)—did not achieve those aristocratic titles by their sweetness and benevolence but by the same means we are familiar with today in those who strive to rule and conquer. That is, they did it the old-fashioned way—by violence, exploitation, and oppression..

The aberrations we see in Africa and at home are not new. This violence for wealth and power is just as old as the first time one brother killed another for his wife or his ass. This contest for dominance has always been bloody and this violence and evil were not invented by Europe or whites. We must do away with this myth—the white man alone as incarnate Devil. Otherwise, in a perverse way, we make Africans less than human—we make them into externally corrupted angels.

There is no sanctity in having a black skin or in Africanity. This type of mythologizing gives our leaders too much credit and too much room for collaboration with corporate power and a means of duping the masses of the poor and the black working classes. It is no longer sustainable that we ask or recommend that the masses of "Pan-Africa" to live vicariously by distant observation and/or proximity to power and wealth. That an elite should live in comfort and security while the great masses attend them hand and foot with all their hearts and souls is no longer acceptable if we truly have egalitarian goals for our society. .
That kind of barbaric nobility is no longer proper in a civilized world in which democracy and human rights have been given revitalized meanings in which every man is a king and queen, or at least be acknowledged with that kind of respect, integrity, and dignity.

Our critical sword should not only land on the heads of the great aberrations of society—the likes of a Idi Amin, a Mobutu, a Bokassa, or a Sgt. Doe or a Charles Taylor, but also those respectable heads of state like Mbeki, Obasanjo, and the other African leaders who smilingly welcomed Bush to Africa and are ever-ready to make their deals with globalization. Such African leaders with such narrow interests sold our ancestors into the Americas.

And not only those African leaders there, but also here at home, we should do some swinging at our black elected and appointed officials (city councilmen, legislators, cabinet secretaries), yes and also corporate and ecclesiastical functionaries, and other notable heads, such as the leaders of civil rights organizations like the NACCP, whose board is ruled by corporate executives or such flunkies and running dogs. They too must be made to pay for their sins of neglect and moral blindness.
If we lapse into the anti-white, anti-American, anti-Western rhetoric, we will sorely miss the point and provide more fuel for these black elites to further misdirect the energies of the masses of Pan-Africa along lines of escapism and support for the status quo.

If we are to make real changes within our communities some of our petty bourgeois aspirations must be abandoned. We can no longer naively defend black middle-class sellout politicians and preachers. We must recognize a real change in the face, rhetorical aspirations, and the present corporate ties that our leaders have established. It is fine to cite Walter Rodney's How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, as some Pan-Africanist Marxists tend to do. That is well indeed. I am far from a white apologist—a corner in which some may want to paint me. But I do not want to be a black apologist, either -- I was not taught that way.

The NAACP is headquartered here in Baltimore and they just had a conference and they had nothing to say about the 40% unemployment rate here among black males (18-35); the high murder rate (about 300 a year, mostly young black males); a 50% drop-out rate from high school; neighborhoods in which only 25% of adults have a high school diploma. Brothers and sisters are paraded to jails like our ancestors to Goree Island!!! Whatever the justification for their apprehension is inadequate and should cause some shame to those who run this city and those who support the powers to be—which here in a majority black city, means a black middle class and those who work government jobs or receive money from corporate elites.

Damn, brother, we have grown ass men on the corner selling single cigarettes for 35 cents a piece. What kind of enterprise is that? And it is not just a few. Is that any way to gain a livelihood? And our shit-head leaders are worrying about whether Bush or democratic presidential candidates come to their meeting. Ain't that a matter to be indignant and upset about? But it seems we are so spiritually sick we take it as a norm the misery and the downtrodden state of the poor (black and white). That the oppressed are overlooked and allowed to continue to sink into the abyss is a grand betrayal by our leaders. Murder and mayhem is not just coming from the bottom dregs of society. We have a general slavery and devastation in which silence and passivity is imposed by poverty, the gun, and prisons? With these reservations, I support heartily the sentiments contained in your plea for earnest black work, black renewal, and black progress.

Marvin X has taught English, African American literature, journalism, creative writing, drama, technical writing at various colleges and universities, including: University of California, Berkeley and San Diego, San Francisco State University, University of Nevada, Reno and elsewhere. Or write to Black Bird Press, 1222 Dwight Way, Berkeley CA 94702.

Marvin X is available for speaking/readings, email: jmarvinx@yahoo.com

The Left Crisis and Chickens Coming Home to Roost

NOTE: A good and necessary analysis- but not sufficient. Leo Panitch does not deal with race/racism either within the Left or within the central core of the capitalist-imperialist system (nor does Panitch deal with patriarchy/gender issues). Unfortunately, this indicates that The Achilles heel of Left Praxis is still alive and well in these most critical of times. To really have a revolutionary impact upon capitalism-in-crisis, racism and sexism must be addressed.

Brother Prof Horace Campbell's analysis (see below: The Chickens are Coming Home to Roost) of the US debt crisis helps us see the urgent need to build a powerful national and international Revolutionary Opposition to Capital's path down the fascist road. The masses of working people everywhere are in some form of uprising- spontaneous, weakly organized or strongly organized- with the US workingclass being the least organized yet sporadically and disconnectedly resisting US-styled austerity policies and union-bashing.

We of the Left inside the Belly of the Beast have a lot of work to do in such a short period of time before new forms of fascism become the rule of the land!

Organize & Unite across race and nationality lines so that Black and Latino workers can take the Revolutionary lead inside the US!

-- Sam Anderson
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The Left's Crisis
by Leo Panitch

Socialist Project - The B u l l e t
E-Bulletin No. 536 August 15, 2011
http://www.socialistproject.ca/bullet/536.php#continue

A common response of the left to the financial crisis that broke out in the USA in 2007-08 was often a kind of Michael Moore-type populist one: Why are you bailing the banks out? Let them go under. This kind of the response was, of course, utterly irresponsible, with no thought given to what would happen to the savings of workers, let alone to the paychecks deposited into their bank accounts, or even to the fact that what was at stake was the roofs over their heads. On the other hand, the even more common response was all about asserting state responsibility: This crisis is the result of the government not having done its duty: governments are supposed to regulate capital, and they didn't do so. But this response was in fact fundamentally misleading. The United States has the most regulated financial system in the world by far if you measure it in terms of the number of statutes on the books, the number of pages of administrative regulation, the amount of time and effort and staff that is engaged in the supervision of the financial system. But that system is organized in such a way as to facilitate the financialization of capitalism, not only in the U.S. itself, but in fact around the world. Without this, the globalization of capitalism in recent decades would not have been possible.

It was indicative of the left's sorry lack of ambition in the crisis that its calls for salary limits on Wall Street executives and transaction taxes on the financial sector were far more common than demands for turning the banks into public utilities. It was, of all people, the mainstream LSE economist Willem Buiter (the former member of the Bank of England's monetary policy committee, appointed in November 2009 by Citibank as its chief economist) who in his Financial Times blog on September 17, 2008 a few days after Lehman Brothers' collapse endorsed the "long-standing argument that there is no real case for private ownership of deposit-taking banking institutions, because these cannot exist safely without a deposit guarantee and/or lender of last resort facilities, that are ultimately underwritten by the taxpayer." And he went further: "The argument that financial intermediation cannot be entrusted to the private sector can now be extended to include the new, transactions-oriented, capital-markets-based forms of financial capitalism... From financialisation of the economy to the socialisation of finance. A small step for the lawyers, a huge step for mankind." Credit in the Hands of the State?

Well, this sounds a little bit, if you've ever read The Communist Manifesto, like the call that Marx made - among his list of ten reforms - for the centralization of credit in the hands of the state - which just goes to show that in a crisis you don't have to be a Marxist to have radical ideas if you have any sort of ambition or self-confidence. Most Marxists don't have that ambition and self-confidence today. But you do have to be a Marxist to understand that this is not going to happen by bringing some lawyers into a room and signing a few documents. What Buiter was putting forward was the technocratic notion of how reform happens. But fundamental change can only really happen through a massive class struggle, which would involve a massive transformation of the state itself.

Even in terms of calls for better regulation, with a working-class that is not mobilized to put pressure on, you can't expect this state to simply follow policy guidelines that come from technocrats, progressive liberals or social democrats. So we at least ought to be using our opportunity to do more than offer left technocratic advice to a policy machine; we ought to be trying to educate people on how capitalist finance really works, why it doesn't for them and why what we need instead is a publicly owned banking system that is part of a system of democratic economic planning, in which what's invested and where it's invested and how it's invested is democratically decided.

The sort of bank nationalizations undertaken in the wake of the fallout from the Lehman's collapse - with the lead of Gordon Brown's New Labour government in the UK being quickly followed by Bush's Republican administration in the U.S. - essentially involved socializing the banks losses while guaranteeing that the nationalized banks would operate on a commercial basis at arm's length from any government direction or control. All they asked was that these nationalized banks seek to maximize the taxpayers returns on their 'investment.' As sagely put in the 2010 Socialist Register essay on "Opportunity lost: mystification, elite politics and financial reform in the UK," this really represented "not the nationalisation of the banks, but the privatisation of the Treasury as a new kind of fund manager."

The most important reason for taking the banks into the public sector and turning them into a public utility is that you would remove thereby the institutional foundation of the most powerful section of the capitalist classes in this phase of capitalism. That's the main reason for nationalizing the banks in terms of changing the balance of class forces in a fundamental way. Build Socially Useful Commodities

A second socialist reason for nationalizing the banks would be to transform the uses to which finance is put. Let's take an example. Where I come from in Canada, the backbone of the southern Ontario economy, apart from banking, is the automobile industry. With the layoffs that occurred and the plants that have been closed (this has been going on for three decades, but it was heightened during this crisis very severely) you are not just losing physical capital you're losing the skills of tool and die makers. A banking system that was turned into a public utility would be centrally involved in transforming the uses to which credit is put, so those skills could be put to building wind turbines, so they could be used to develop the kind of equipment we need to harness solar energy cheaply rather than expensively.

We cannot even begin to think seriously about solving the ecological crisis that coincides with this economic crisis without the left returning to an ambitious notion of economic planning. It's inconceivable. It can't be done. We've run away from this for half a century because of command planning of the Stalinist type, with all of its horrific effects - its inefficiencies, but even more its authoritarianism. But we can't avoid any longer coming back to the need for planning. The allocation of credit is at the core of economic planning for the conversion of industry. When we on the left call for capital controls, we can't just think about that in the sense of capital controls that would limit how quickly capital moves in and out of the country. We need capital controls because without them we can't have the democratic control of investment. It's not just capital controls at the border that matter; what matters all the more for socialists is control over capital to the end of directing, in a democratic fashion, what gets invested, where it gets invested, how it gets invested.

Now, people often say that socialists in the last 20 or 30 years have not laid out a programmatic vision. I don't think that's true. As the Socialist Register 2000 volume on Necessary and Unnecessary Utopias showed, there were more writings on what a future socialism would look like in the last two decades of the 20th century than probably ever before. But the detailed pictures of a socialist order they painted - whether involving some combination of plan and market or participatory economic planning - have been exceedingly sketchy on two crucial things. One is immediate demands and reforms. And the other is how the hell would we get there. What are the vehicles? What are the agencies? How are the vehicles connected to building the agencies?

It is certainly very true that, whatever the vehicle or the agency, you are never going to mobilize people simply on the basis of the need to nationalize the banks for economic planning, when they know that can't come for decades, given the lack of political forces to introduce it. People need to be mobilized by immediate demands, as they were by the demands for trade union rights, a reduced workweek, a public educational system a welfare state, etc.

Some 15 years ago, when the FMLN in El Salvador after the settlement of the civil war turned itself from a guerrilla army into a political party, I was one of the people invited to help them set up a party school. And I had a conversation there with Fecundo Guardado who had been subcommandante on the San Salvador Volcano, and who later ran for president under the FMLN banner. He said to me, everybody thinks that the long term is the next election, (which since this was in 1995 would have been in 1999 there). He said: they're completely wrong - in fact, that's the short term. What we have to hope is that by 1999 we will be strong enough, have a strong enough base, to be able to make a decent showing in the next election. The medium term is 2010, when we have to hope that we will have a broad enough representation and a deep enough development of our members' capacities that we actually could have an influence on the direction of the country. The long-term is 2020, when we will be able to get elected as a government that can actually do something, that can transform the state. Angela Zamora who as the head of party's educational program was hosting me, sat there and listened to this and suddenly said, in that case I'm leaving the party. I can't go back to the people who I've been leading in struggle for 15 years and tell them they have to wait for 2020 for immediate reforms. It's impossible. I can't do it. Immediate Demands and Longer-Term Vision

So one needs to figure out how to combine a clear, ambitious sense of immediate demands with this longer-term vision. But in the current crisis the Left's immediate demand could and should have centered around bringing the banks into public ownership. The case for this could have been made in terms of the need for a massive program for public housing. After the Great Society program in the 1960s left-wing Democrats, rather than calling for more public housing to rebuild America's cities instead called for the banks to lend money to poor black communities - in other words, for the problem to be solved by letting black people, who had been largely excluded from the banking system, into it. It was similar to liberal feminism's demand that women should be able to get credit cards, which they were largely not allowed to do by the banks until the 1970s.

Well, you should be careful what you hope for. One of the effects of winning those demands was a channeling of those communities more deeply into the structures of finance, the most dynamic sector of neoliberal capitalism. Clinton carried those reforms much further in the 1990s, appealing to the Democratic Party constituency (Clinton was known as 'the black President' for this) on the basis of we're going to let you succeed at the capitalist housing game. And then Bush, of course, let every crook that he could find into the mortgage business. Of course, there's no reason why black people or women shouldn't want the same rights as everybody else - why shouldn't they look forward to their homes appreciating in market value? But you need to understand the dynamics and contradictions that are involved in trying to win reforms for people through integrating them more deeply into capitalist credit relations. And the results are now clear.

We should be also demanding universal public pensions, as the private pension plans won by trade unions now are coming unraveled for both public sector and private sector workers. And that would contribute to strengthening the working-class, because it would eliminate the kind of competition amongst workers that employers have played on with their private pensions. Indeed, increasingly we see that even the unions in largest corporations today as well as unions of public employees cannot sustain their member's pension plans.

We should also be calling for free public transit - to be available like public libraries, public education and public health care. All of this involves trying to take a crucial portion of what we need for our livelihood, our basic needs, and decommodify them as far as possible within capitalism.

People respond positively to such demands even in North America. The trouble with them, however, is that there's not that much room for manoeuvre left for reform in today's capitalism, because in order to have a major program of public housing, in order to have free public transit, you very quickly run up against where are the funds going to come from? It's possible to argue, given how cheap public bonds are today, that you can go to the bond market, but that also means that you become subject to the kinds of pressures from bondholders that is requiring the Greek and the Portuguese and the Spanish states to do what they're doing to their public sector in order to guarantee that they won't eventually default on those bonds. So you come back fairly quickly to the need to at least begin a process of socialization through taking the banks into the public sector.

We need to try to see this moment of crisis from the perspective of what openings it could create. The limitations of a purely defensive response to the crisis lie in not taking advantage of the opportunity that the crisis creates. Despite the 'Another World Is Possible' rhetoric, the left has been more oriented to attempting to hold on to things than to taking things in a new direction. Whether the struggle has been to prevent water privatization, or whether it's been to protest at G-7 and G-20 meetings, however militant the action, it's often primarily defensive in the demands that are articulated.

This is, oddly enough, one of the limits of a perspective that says you can change the world without taking power, without engaging on the terrain of the state, without transforming the structures of the state. What is on the agenda is mainly to prevent the state doing certain things and what is off the agenda is to change the state in such a way that ensures that when new progressive reforms are won they lead on to further structural reforms. We need to appreciate the reasons for the anti-statism that is so on the Left today; the suspicion of talking in terms of building new parties or transforming the state is understandable. But we need to go beyond protest, or we will be trapped forever in organizing the next demo.

And as this current crisis is transferred down to the regional and local levels, which every central state will try to do, we will run up against the limits of what can be secured in struggles at those levels. We have to learn how defensive and localized struggles can be linked up, and how they can be transformed so they are directed into a struggle for state power. Otherwise, all the protests will run up even more quickly against the kind of limits of the immediate reforms that don't lead on to more fundamental ones.

This is enormously important because we probably are facing the destruction of public sector trade unionism unless there's a shift in the balance of forces in the context of this crisis. Capitalism can only go on so long with the private sector being as limited in its unionization, its density being so low, in terms of collective bargaining rights and recognition, and the public sector being almost universally unionized. It can't continue. Part of the onslaught on state expenditure that is taking place now is to destroy public sector trade unionism. The ability of public sector unions to resist in this crisis is being very severely tested. That's how serious this is.

Speaking more generally, it is increasingly clear that trade unions, as they evolved through the 20th century, not only in the advanced capitalist countries, also in most of the countries of the South, are no longer capable of being more than defensive. They are not able to win new gains, and they are not able to organize in ways that develop the capacities of their members. The challenge now is to build a trade unionism that is actually a class organization, one that goes beyond organizing people by the workplace alone and organizes people in relation to the many facets of their lives touched by this crisis. *

Leo Panitch is a political economist and theorist based at York University, Toronto, and is co-editor of Socialist Register. His most recent book is In and Out of Crisis: The Global Financial Meltdown and Left Alternatives (with Greg Albo and Sam Gindin). This article is a revised version of a presentation at the Delhi University symposium on "Globalization, Justice and Democracy," November 11, 2010.
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The Chickens Are Coming Home to Roost-- US Credit Downgrade
Horace Campbell
2011-08-11, Issue 544
http://pambazuka.org/en/category/features/75607

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On Friday 5 August 2011, one of the world's leading credit rating agencies, Standard & Poor's (S&P), downgraded the United States' top-notch AAA rating for the first time ever in the United States' history. S&P cut the long-term US rating down to AA+ with a negative outlook, citing concerns about budget deficits and political gridlock. In their statement justifying the downgrade S&P stated that:

'The downgrade reflects our opinion that the fiscal consolidation plan that Congress and the administration recently agreed to falls short of what, in our view, would be necessary to stabilize the government's medium-term debt dynamics.

'More broadly, the downgrade reflects our view that the effectiveness, stability, and predictability of American policymaking and political institutions have weakened at a time of ongoing fiscal and economic challenges.'

Additionally, Standard &Poor's indicated that it might further lower the US long-term credit rating to AA within the next two years if the United States' deficit reduction measures were deemed inadequate. These are strong statements from a private agency bent on disciplining the government of the United States with the threat of a further downgrade. What gives this agency such power? In answering this question, we would seek to understand what is a credit rating agency; the source of a credit rating agency's power; what is S&P's track record and what implications do its decisions have for the international political system, especially for humanity.

In all major capitalist countries, the power of the dominant faction is hidden behind ideology (free market), law (protection of private property), propaganda (corporate-controlled media), the coercive organs of the state (military, police and prison) and the power of finance capital (banks, insurance and financial instruments). Credit rating agencies represent the power of financial capitalists and are usually held in the background to discipline corporations and governments. In moments of crisis these agencies show their hand.

These agencies along with the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the US military have been the weapons against the true self-determination of humanity. United States citizens are now beginning to pay attention to the power that the IMF, credit rating agencies and the military wielded over most countries in the world. US Treasuries (or T-bills) are traditionally considered to be a risk-free investment precisely because in the country's 200+ year history, its rating has never been downgraded and the securities are backed by the government.

The downgrade of the credit rating of the United States by Standard & Poor's is much more than a psychological blow to the prestige of the imperial overlords in the United States. This is a sign of a power shift and another blow to the position of the US as the sole superpower. The most oppressed must organise to break the power of capital and the imperial overlords or humanity will pay a high price.

WHAT IS A CREDIT RATING AGENCY?

Credit rating agencies provide information on issuers of securities whether the issuers are corporations or countries. A credit rating agency informs investors whether issuers of securities (such as debt obligations, fixed income securities) can meet their obligations to those securities. The top three credit rating agencies with international influence are Standard & Poor's, Fitch Ratings, and Moody's Investor Services. The job of these agencies is to provide an analysis of the risk posed to investors by bonds, companies and countries. The risk analysis provided to investors by the credit rating agencies is supposed to be objective. However, the credit rating agencies are private entities owned by profit-making companies performing what is essentially a regulatory role. Thus, the credit rating agencies cannot truly serve the investing public because they have a fiduciary obligation to their shareholders to maximise profit.

The rating agencies achieved their influence over time since the capitalist depression of the 1930s but have become more important to the US economy in the era of financialisation, commencing on 15 August 1971. It was from this date that the US gave unlimited rights to the currency speculators after it reneged on the Articles of Agreement of the IMF that had placed the convertibility of the dollar on par with US$35 for one ounce of gold. This departure from the gold standard, called the 'Nixon Shock' after the president who authorised it now backed the US dollar with the military might of the United States. During the Cold War, international capitalists were willing to shelter under the US military umbrella and one price for this shelter was to accept the political power of US credit rating agencies.

These private corporations were issued permits to be credit rating agencies by the United States Securities and Exchange Commission through the Nationally Recognized Statistical Rating Organization (NRSRO) therefore turning rating agencies from solely private entities into regulating bodies.

In the past 20 years, the business of credit rating followed the path of centralisation and concentration of capital so that the rating business fell in the lap of the three big firms, affording these organisations the power to make life and death decisions about corporations and countries.

The subjective nature of their ratings will be brought out later but in the aftermath of the clear theft and fraud of the capitalist organization called Enron, the rating agencies in public hearings held by the SEC in 2002 insisted that credit ratings were only opinions and should have a limited role which is to assess the creditworthiness of issuers on an ongoing basis, and the 'likelihood' that debt will be repaid in a timely manner. The fact that ratings are 'opinions' is important in the US legal context in that these big three capitalist corporations seek to be protected by the First Amendment and from civil and criminal liability.

FROM WHERE DO CREDIT RATING AGENCIES GET THEIR POWER?

These credit rating agencies earn their power from the fact that they are owned by the top financial institutions on Wall Street. For example, S&P is owned by McGraw Hill Companies, one of the United States' big media and publishing conglomerates. The board of directors is comprised of the top individuals of finance capital with a few academics thrown in. The shareholders of McGraw Hill are from the top financial houses. McGraw Hill owns 'Aviation Week', which is one of the prime advocates for a section of the US military. Though S&P is a wholly owned subsidiary of McGraw Hill, Moody's, on the other hand, is a publicly-traded corporation. Its largest single shareholder, with 12 per cent of the company's shares, is Berkshire Hathaway, Warren Buffett's company. Fitch is more transnational with roots in French finance capital.

Thus, we know that the shareholders of McGraw Hill can ensure that their ratings are sanctified by governmental authorities and most importantly, by the IMF. The power of these credit rating agencies has accumulated over time and has been consolidated within the context of the power of finance capital over the international capitalist economy. By seizing a regulatory role while eschewing clear liability, these agencies gained the political power to be whatever they wanted to be.

Since the Depression of the 1930s, statutes and rules required that mutual fund and money managers of almost every stripe buy only those bonds that have been given high grades by a Nationally Recognized Statistical Rating Organization. The effect was to make the three certified rating agencies an oligopoly. It was this power that these agencies used against Asia by providing cover for US companies to buy up assets cheaply in the aftermath of the Asian financial crisis (1997-98). This power also played a role in the recent intimidation of European countries, including Greece, Portugal, Ireland, and Iceland, to launch austerity measures against workers by downgrading the ratings of these countries.

POWER STRUGGLES WITHIN THE INTERNATIONAL CAPITALIST SYSTEM

There are numerous commentaries on the downgrade of the US but the one commentary that caught my attention was that of Paul Craig Roberts, former assistant secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan administration and associate editor and columnist at the Wall Street Journal. This is a civil libertarian who was arguing that there is a struggle between the military and Wall Street for power in the USA. In an article published on counterpunch.com, after quoting from the statements of Dwight Eisenhower on the rise of the military industrial complex, Roberts opined that from the time of Dwight Eisenhower till today, the United States has been dominated by the military security complex. According to this analysis of the downgrade, the only challenge to the military was Wall Street and Wall Street was using this downgrade as its leverage to fortify its challenge:

'The main power rival was Wall Street, which controls finance and money and is skilled at advancing its interests through economic policy arguments. With the financial deregulation that began during the Clinton presidency, Wall Street became all powerful. Wall Street controls the Treasury and the Federal Reserve, and the levers of money are more powerful than the levers of armaments. Moreover, Wall Street is better at intrigue than the CIA. The behind the scenes fight for power is between these two powerful interest groups. America's hegemony over the world is financial, not military. The military/security complex's attempt to catch up is endangering the dollar and US financial hegemony.'

Roberts explained that the security establishment has been trying to catch up with the power of the lords of finance by launching wars to enrich themselves and to gain more power in the society:

'The country has been at war for a decade, running up enormous bills that have enriched the military/security complex. Wall Street's profits ran even higher. However, by achieving what economist Michael Hudson calls the 'Financialization of the economy,' the financial sector over-reached. The enormous sums represented by financial instruments are many times larger than the real economy on which they are based. When financial claims dwarf the size of the underlying real economy, massive instability is present.

'Aware of its predicament, Wall Street has sent a shot across the bow with the S&P's downgrade of the US credit rating. Spending must be reined in, and the only obvious chunk of spending that can be cut without throwing millions of Americans into the streets is the wars.'

While notable, what this analysis by Paul Craig Roberts fails to recognise is the rapid integration between finance capital and the military, as manifest by the fact that companies that profit greatly from militarisation, such as Boeing has an established financial arm called Boeing Capital Corporation. Most of the big investment and derivatives firms have established links with the private military industry. All the top private military companies and the military hardware manufacturers that are woven into the military-industrial complex are traded on Wall Street. Many of the top private military companies are subsidiaries of Fortune 500 companies that are also traded on Wall Street. In fact, the intricate web of alliance between finance capital, the military and the corporate media/information mind control is now so dominant that we can talk of the finance-military-information complex, instead of the military-industrial complex. McGraw Hill is a poster child of the relationship between the military, finance and information/media. McGraw Hill is the owner of Standard and Poor's, and it is directly owned by some of the biggest bankers of Wall Street. McGraw Hill is also in the TV and media business, with stations across the country. It owns 'Aviation Week' and 'Space Technology'. The latter has been the publication that has been the mouthpiece for the US Air Force, and has been an advocate for high military spending and the acquisition of expensive military aircrafts.

As promoters of the ideology of free market and deregulation (even in the military), the McGraw Hill Companies is also a cheerleader for private military corporations. These private military corporations are involved in protecting international capital in all parts of the world The New York Times reported as far back as 2002 that one such private contracting firm 'boasts of having "more generals per square foot than in the Pentagon."' As a militarist state where all is subordinated to the needs of the financial/military interests, there is no contradiction between the two as Roberts claims.

As international capitalists with no cut-in-stone loyalty to the US state, the financial-military complex is now ready to do to the US what it had been doing to the rest of the world since 1945, intervening to discipline governments to do the bidding of big capital. Temporarily, these financial and military oligarchs need to work through the US government because it is the government that carries the authority to print dollars as long as the dollar remains the reserve currency of the world. This downgrade of the US credit rating is part of the forward planning by the top capitalists to guarantee the political and military hegemony of the richest one per cent of the US population. As the dollar loses its status there will be consequences for the global position of American capitalism. The moguls of Wall Street want to ensure that the political leadership in the United States is sufficiently intimidated so that as the position of the dollar deteriorates and there are deepening crisis for capitalism inside the US, the government will take measures to continue to ensure that wealth is transferred from the working peoples to the capitalist class. Hence this downgrade is part of a long term plan to discipline the working class and the politicians within the United States, just as how the IMF has been used in the past against the rest of the world.

THE TRACK RECORD AND CREDIBILITY OF THE RATING AGENCIES

It is now known that Enron was one of the most corrupt capitalist corporations in the US. Yet, Enron had a triple AAA rating by these credit rating agencies until four days before the company went bankrupt. When the full extent of the fraudulent activities of Enron were revealed, President George W. Bush claimed that this was one 'bad apple', implying that Enron was an aberration. But soon thereafter the duplicitous dealings and accounting practices of WorldCom and Global Crossing were revealed – WorldCom fudged accounts to show inflated profits. Up to the day that Enron sought bankruptcy protection, none of the three rating agencies caught the fraud and corruption of Enron.

Throughout the period of the power of the financial houses, the blatant conflict of interest was too hard to ignore so in the aftermath of Enron and WorldCom, there has been some regulatory response. Congress passed the Credit Rating Agency Reform Act of 2006, ending a century of industry self-regulation. The purpose of this law was to promote competition in the rating industry by establishing a transparent and rational registration system for rating agencies seeking NRSRO status. It was also designed to enhance industry transparency, address conflicts of interest, and prohibit abusive practices.

But the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) was itself impotent as the world saw from the financial crisis of the collapse of the investment banks in 2008. Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers had enjoyed top ratings from these agencies and the sub-prime products called Credit Default Obligations (CDOs) were given triple AAA ratings, even when these products turned out to be garbage. Of course, this garbage was held by the same bankers who own the rating agencies.

In the aftermath of the fall of Lehman Brothers and the fact that the sub-prime mortgage crisis exposed the securities fraud by the financial houses, for a short time Wall Street was on the defensive. There were dozens of lawsuits filed against the credit rating agencies. Citizens were calling for the fraudsters to be incarcerated but the rating agencies went back to their old line that their ratings are merely opinions and are protected by the First Amendment.

It was then left to Congress to Act and after the public outrage, the financial regulatory reform law adopted in 2010, known as Dodd-Frank Law, directed the SEC and other agencies to undo that link between the 'opinions' of the credit rating agencies and the claim that they could regulate themselves.

The Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act enhanced the SEC's enforcement mechanisms, and added a number of requirements on NRSROs that are immediately effective (i.e. do not depend on SEC rulemaking). The Dodd-Frank Act also required the commission to adopt a number of new rules concerning conflict of interests.

According to the US government and their news sheet, 'the Dodd-Frank Act requires every federal agency to review existing regulations that require the use of an assessment of the credit-worthiness of the security or money market instrument and any references to credit ratings in such regulations; to modify such regulations identified in the review to remove any reference to, or requirement of reliance on credit ratings; and substitute with a standard of credit worthiness as the agency shall determine as appropriate for such regulations.'

What this meant was that from June 2010, the SEC unanimously approved a plan to erase references to credit ratings from certain rulebooks. The agency also adopted a substitute to the ratings, the first of several such changes the commission had to enact. Dodd-Frank created a laundry list of new regulations for the industry, including proposals to make it easier for investors to sue the agencies. The SEC must also create its own Office of Credit Ratings to police the raters, though the agency has yet to open its doors as it struggles to scrape together the needed money.

Since the passing of the Dodd-Frank Act, Wall Street has been pushing back, spending millions of dollars to reverse Dodd-Frank and to ensure that the law is whittled away until it is meaningless. However, while the bankers were seeking to protect themselves, the fact that they were holding on to garbage since the financial crisis was becoming clearer. This is because the depth of the financial crisis was so much that the bail-out could barely touch the surface of the problem. In the past year, the vulnerability of the banks has been heightened by the capitalist crisis in Europe. As a means of pressuring the states of Greece, Portugal, Ireland, Iceland and others to implement austerity measures against workers, these rating agencies downgraded these countries' ratings. These downgrades exacerbated the class struggles in Europe where the bankers and the bond-holders wanted to be paid. For the US capitalists, the crisis in Europe threatened the future of the Euro and the collapse of the Euro in the short term would serve the interests of the capitalists on Wall Street. This would ensure that there was no clear challenge to the dollar and the US could continue the military occupation of many countries in Europe, especially Germany.

However, some of these US capitalists were also exposed by the crisis in Europe and US banks wanted to ensure that the European Central Bank imposed austerity measures so that the full exposure of US banks would not be known. However, this crisis is not a simple one; it is structural and systemic and needs fundamental changes in how society is organised. This crisis has intensified in the past three months with the knowledge that states and societies such as Italy and Spain will also need the iron hand of international capital to impose harder burdens on the workers to transfer wealth from the majority to a minority. French banks are loaded up with the debts of Italy and Greece, and American banks are holding positions in these same French banks. Hence, US banks are not immune to the crisis in the Euro zone.

PSYCHOLOGICAL BARRIER

There are some who have stated that the downgrade is cosmetic because the other two rating agencies, Moody's and Fitch, have retained the AAA rating of the USA. This may seem to be the case but those who have been following the troubles of the banks and the fake stress tests know better. The timing of the announcement of the downgrade has some significance in the sense that it followed the false debate and conclusion of the debt deal.

By coming out after hours on Friday night when they knew the state of the markets, the downgrade also provided a false 'public' cover for the well-publicised subsequent fall and rise in global stock markets. Political spinners were able to point to the downgrade as the 'spark' for the drop in stock prices (particularly for the banks). In reality, the true causes are the growing risk and troubles in Europe, the continued lack of growth in the US, and the fact that in spite of all the trillions in bailouts of the banks, accounting rule changes, and the fake stress test exams to show that the banks are doing well, the market participants who understand the true status of the banks revealed that the banks are still in danger of collapsing.

Millions of persons around the world are paying attention and there are already signs that these foreign forces are losing confidence in the safety of US securities by the rise in the price of gold. The other point is that the political alliance that paved the way for this conjuncture is being strengthened by the power brokers in the Treasury/Wall Street/IMF relationship. It is this alliance that will work for the transfer of wealth to the top one per cent and will not countenance increased revenues from this small class.

As we have argued before, ultimately the question is not simply one of revenues and taxing the rich, but a fundamental restructuring of the system. However, in the short run, the call for more taxation and regulation of off shore accounts serve to expose the ways in which the capitalist class is above the law. Yet, these capitalist have to live somewhere and they do not want to live in the offshore sites of money laundering and lawlessness. Hence, they need laws to suppress workers, take away collective bargaining and the safety nets of social democracy.

The downgrade will raise the cost of borrowing; this in turn could trickle down to higher interest rates for local governments and individuals. The iterations of decline and deficits will increase the government debt and the deficit, and S&P has issued the clear threat that another downgrade will be coming after 18 months, if Congress does not follow its advice to impose austerity measures.

THE CHICKENS COMING HOME TO ROOST

US government officials are calling the methodology of the rating agencies flawed and some are calling for nationalisation of the agencies and/or the establishment of an international rating agency under the United Nations. There was no such call when the same agencies were working with the IMF to impose hardships on the rest of the world. Now, we are told that the rating agencies cannot do maths. But the destructive structural adjustment maths that the IMF-rating agencies alliance have used to destroy economies and livelihoods in the global South over the past 30 years were never questioned by those now calling out the S&P for its US$2 trillion error in its computation used to justify the US downgrade. The complaint was that a treasury official had spotted a US$2 trillion mistake in the agency's analysis. Whether it was a mistake or not, a psychological barrier has been breached. The US is no longer beyond the sanction of agencies that it unleashed against other societies.

Since the fall of Lehman Brothers in September 2008, politicians have sought to cushion the blows to capital by making band-aid remedies. For some, the issue was one of regulation and more control over the financial institutions. There were hearings in the US Congress and the Dodd-Frank law came into being. Through the media, the financiers went on the offensive about a recovery, but there has been no recovery because there was no fundamental alteration in the way capitalist ensured that wealth was transferred from the poor to the rich.

More, importantly the limits of US military power has been put on full display in Iraq and Afghanistan. The center of the world economy shifted to Asia while the USA and Europe were fighting in the Middle East. The ten biggest economies in Asia ring-fenced themselves against the USA and the instability of the dollar. This downgrade will reinforce this need for protection against the dollar. From China there was the warning that:

'International supervision over the issue of US dollars should be introduced and a new, stable and secured global reserve currency may also be an option to avert a catastrophe caused by any single country.'

This call for international supervision did not include any statement on the conditions of working peoples who are suffering at present. Inside the USA, the political choices have been sharpened. It is either the articulation of democratic control by the people or oligarchic control by the banks and financial houses. The downgrade was not a challenge to the government but to the working peoples of the USA and the world.

Youths in the streets of Greece, London and Cairo are giving one response. The challenge is to coordinate these responses for a prolonged and sustained struggle to break the power of the financial-military-information complex. Those who have been following the gyrations of the capitalist debacle since 2007 will note that the events associated with the 2011 downgrade are simply precursors to what will continue to happen as the last 20 years of debt-driven growth in advanced capitalist nations unwinds. In the midst of this protracted crisis the rich will seek to transfer wealth from the poor as the only means of sustaining their accumulation of wealth as year 4 unfolds of what is likely to be a 7-10 year recession/depression. The financial-military-information complex will continue to ensure that austerity to manage government debt falls on the backs of working people. Corporations will continue to claim that the only way they will invest some of their trillions in cash to create jobs and lower unemployment is to reduce regulations, lower corporate tax rates and perhaps even lower minimum wages. The American people must realise that the chickens have just come home to roost. The people must organise more and more to link up with working people's struggles around the world to break up the banks, IMF-rating agencies alliance and their military enterprise. Financial institutions should be made to serve the people, not vice-versa.

BROUGHT TO YOU BY PAMBAZUKA NEWS

* Horace Campbell is professor of African-American studies and political science at Syracuse University. He is the author of 'Barack Obama and 21st Century Politics: A Revolutionary Moment in the USA'. See www.horacecampbell.net.

Black Studies Journals

Dr. Dorothy Tsuruta, Ethnic Studies San Francisco State University
International Journal of African Studies

Volume 14 No 1 Spring/Summer 2008
"Sustaining Black Studies in the 21st Century"
Marilyn Thomas-Houston, Special Issue Editor
James Turner
Ester Terry
Molefi Kete Asante
Dorothy Randall Tsuruta
James Stewart
Edmund Gordon
Lee Baker
Kimberle Crenshaw
Josephine Bradley
Carole Boyce Davies
Kevin Gaines
Beverly Guy-Sheftall
Summer Melay
Sylvia Cyrus Albritton
Charles Jones
Abdul Alkalimat
Charles Henry
Warren Whatley
Stanlie James
Nathaniel Norment
Ronald Bailey
Maulana Karnega
Claudia Mitchell-Kernan
Rhett Jones
Daryl Scott
Austin Jackson
Monica Carillo
Irma McClaurin
Terry Kershaw

Socialism and Democracy Journal
"What is African American Studies, Its Focus, and Future?"
John McClendon and Yusuf Nuruddin, special issue editors
John Bracey
Anna Reese
Malik Simba
Stephen Ferguson
Reiland Rabaka
Rose Brewer
Greg Carr
Anthony Monteiro
Carter Wilson
Charles Pinderhughes
Robeson Frazier
Charles Lumpkin
Lenore Daniels
David Gilbert

Journal of Pan African Studies, Poetry Issue, Edited by Marvin X
online journal

Volume 4, Number 2, December, 2010

Shaggy Flores
Ras Griot
Phavia Kujichagulia
Chinwe Enemchukwu
L.F. Scott
Rodney D. Coates
J. Vern Cromartie
Dike Okoro
Neal F. Hall
Marvin X
Mohja Kahf
Ayodel Nzinga
Askia M. Toure
Michael Simanga
Amiri Baraka
Kalamu ya Salaam
Kola Boof
Louis Reyes Rivera
Aries Jordan
Ptah Allah El
Hettie V. Williams
Kamaria Muntu
devorah major
Bruce George
Jeanette Drake
Itibari M. Zulu
Renaldo Ricketts
Nandi Comber
Al Young
Ghasem Batamuntu
Mona Lisa Saloy
Eugene B. Redmond
Fritz Pointer
Gwendolyn Mitchell
Felix Orisewike Sylvanus
Rudolph Lewis
Ed Bullins
Mabel Mnensa
Kwan Booth
Tureeda Mikell
Jerry Ward
Mary Weems
C. Leigh McInnis
Haki R. Madhubuti
Everett Hoagland
Charles Blackwell
Jacqueline Kibacha
John Reyonlds III
Darlene Scott
Jimmy Smith, Jr.
Sam Hamod
Opal Palmer Adisa
Amy Andrieux
Lamont b. Steptoe
Avotcja
Anthony Spires
Benecia Blue
Neil Callendar
Tanure Ojaide
Pious Okoro
Tony Medina
Dr. Ja A. Jahannes
Brother Yao
Zayid Muhammad
Nykimbe Broussard
Kiola Maisha
Niyah X
Adrienne N. Wartts
Greg Carr
Darlene Roy
Ishmael Reed
Felton Eddy
Ramal Lamar
Lee Hubbard
Kamau Amen Ra

Obama Drama

The Daily Beast
U.S. Politics
Newsweek Magazine

The Black War Over Obama

African-American leaders fear academic rebel Cornel West’s fierce attacks on the president could spell trouble in 2012.
Aug 15, 2011 1:00 AM EDT

How did Cornel West become the administration’s No. 1 gadfly? The noted African-American scholar and radio host may have helped Barack Obama into the White House, but he has spent the better part of the president’s term taking shots at him, calling him a “black mascot of Wall Street oligarchs,” among other names. “These last few weeks have only proven my point about Brother Obama,” West says in his signature “one love” voice as he talks about the debt-reduction debacle on Capitol Hill. “He simply caved in again.”

Never mind the slings and arrows of Tea Partiers. The most politically problematic criticism of Obama these days is coming from his base. And there’s no question that there is a deep reservoir of frustration, confusion, and even rage among many in the African-American community for West to tap into. With unemployment hovering near 17 percent for African-Americans (the national average rate is 9 percent) and 11 percent of black homeowners facing imminent foreclosure, African-Americans have ample reason for anxiety about the coming budget cuts that Obama reluctantly signed into law this month. The Congressional Black Caucus chairman called the recent debt deal “a sugar-coated satan sandwich” that will do little to help communities already struggling.

West and his longtime friend, radio host Tavis Smiley, have taken their criticism of Obama to the streets, launching a two-week, 15-city “poverty tour,” aimed at forcing the powers that be to once again focus on the “least among us” and getting the president to “wake up.” Their efforts are increasingly stoking fears among some African-American leaders that West and Smiley could discourage black voters from turning out when the nation’s first African-American president stands for reelection in 2012.

“The negative discussion Dr. West is having can only put more apathy in the hearts of African-Americans and could ultimately cause them to lose more faith in the entire political process,” says the Rev. Otis Moss III, pastor of Obama’s former church in Chicago. “Where will that leave us?”

Lately, Obama’s supporters in the black community are fighting back. As West and Smiley pulled up aboard their “Call to Conscience” bus in Detroit in early August, a crowd of hecklers awaited them outside the Coleman A. Young Municipal Center. “We will not stand silent as Smiley and West criticize the man who brought us health-care reform, one of the greatest accomplishments for the poor in this country’s history,” says a spokesperson for Detroiters for Better Government.
Barack Obama

Photo illustration by Newsweek (source photo: Jemal Countess / Wireimage-Getty Images)

The pushback is not just coming from community organizers. “The poor did horribly under every president before Obama, and yet there wasn’t this level of outcry toward them by these men,” says Michael Eric Dyson, professor of sociology at Georgetown. “That makes folks skeptical about the intent.”

West insists he does not intend to suppress support for Obama’s reelection. “If African-Americans choose to stay home this time and not go to the booth, it would be most regrettable -given the options,” he says. “But that can’t stop my message.”

It’s hard to say how much electoral impact the Princeton professor and the media personality might have. Obama retains overwhelming support among black voters. Still, the numbers have been slipping. He received a staggering 96 percent of the African-American vote in 2008. In a poll done by Black Entertainment Television in March, black approval of Obama had slid to 85 percent. According to a recent Washington Post/CBS poll, the number of African-Americans who believe Obama’s actions have helped the economy has dropped from 77 percent in October to about half that this month.

That’s not the kind of news the president’s reelection team wants to hear heading into a campaign year.

Obama’s team has reached out to West several times and invited him to meet with the president, a White House official says, adding that West has declined. For his part, West says he has received a call from White House senior adviser Valerie Jarrett, but did not get invited to meet with Obama. “A beer summit won’t help our issues,” West adds, recalling the now-famous meeting the president had with a white police officer and Harvard’s Skip Gates following a tense confrontation between the two in 2009.

Gates stands by West, his longtime friend: “He is completely sincere in his concern for the poor. I may disagree, as brothers sometimes do, with the way the message is being handled, but I commend him for his work and his passion.

How did Cornel West become the administration’s No. 1 gadfly? The noted African-American scholar and radio host may have helped Barack Obama into the White House, but he has spent the better part of the president’s term taking shots at him, calling him a “black mascot of Wall Street oligarchs,” among other names. “These last few weeks have only proven my point about Brother Obama,” West says in his signature “one love” voice as he talks about the debt-reduction debacle on Capitol Hill. “He simply caved in again.”

Never mind the slings and arrows of Tea Partiers. The most politically problematic criticism of Obama these days is coming from his base. And there’s no question that there is a deep reservoir of frustration, confusion, and even rage among many in the African-American community for West to tap into. With unemployment hovering near 17 percent for African-Americans (the national average rate is 9 percent) and 11 percent of black homeowners facing imminent foreclosure, African-Americans have ample reason for anxiety about the coming budget cuts that Obama reluctantly signed into law this month. The Congressional Black Caucus chairman called the recent debt deal “a sugar-coated satan sandwich” that will do little to help communities already struggling.

West and his longtime friend, radio host Tavis Smiley, have taken their criticism of Obama to the streets, launching a two-week, 15-city “poverty tour,” aimed at forcing the powers that be to once again focus on the “least among us” and getting the president to “wake up.” Their efforts are increasingly stoking fears among some African-American leaders that West and Smiley could discourage black voters from turning out when the nation’s first African-American president stands for reelection in 2012.

“The negative discussion Dr. West is having can only put more apathy in the hearts of African-Americans and could ultimately cause them to lose more faith in the entire political process,” says the Rev. Otis Moss III, pastor of Obama’s former church in Chicago. “Where will that leave us?”

Lately, Obama’s supporters in the black community are fighting back. As West and Smiley pulled up aboard their “Call to Conscience” bus in Detroit in early August, a crowd of hecklers awaited them outside the Coleman A. Young Municipal Center. “We will not stand silent as Smiley and West criticize the man who brought us health-care reform, one of the greatest accomplishments for the poor in this country’s history,” says a spokesperson for Detroiters for Better Government.
Barack Obama.

The pushback is not just coming from community organizers. “The poor did horribly under every president before Obama, and yet there wasn’t this level of outcry toward them by these men,” says Michael Eric Dyson, professor of sociology at Georgetown. “That makes folks skeptical about the intent.”

West insists he does not intend to suppress support for Obama’s reelection. “If African-Americans choose to stay home this time and not go to the booth, it would be most regrettable -given the options,” he says. “But that can’t stop my message.”

It’s hard to say how much electoral impact the Princeton professor and the media personality might have. Obama retains overwhelming support among black voters. Still, the numbers have been slipping. He received a staggering 96 percent of the African-American vote in 2008. In a poll done by Black Entertainment Television in March, black approval of Obama had slid to 85 percent. According to a recent Washington Post/CBS poll, the number of African-Americans who believe Obama’s actions have helped the economy has dropped from 77 percent in October to about half that this month.

That’s not the kind of news the president’s reelection team wants to hear heading into a campaign year.

Obama’s team has reached out to West several times and invited him to meet with the president, a White House official says, adding that West has declined. For his part, West says he has received a call from White House senior adviser Valerie Jarrett, but did not get invited to meet with Obama. “A beer summit won’t help our issues,” West adds, recalling the now-famous meeting the president had with a white police officer and Harvard’s Skip Gates following a tense confrontation between the two in 2009.

Gates stands by West, his longtime friend: “He is completely sincere in his concern for the poor. I may disagree, as brothers sometimes do, with the way the message is being handled, but I commend him for his work and his passion.”

Popular talk-radio personality Tom Joyner recently joined the fray, writing an open letter to West suggesting that he and Smiley were motivated more by a desire for attention and book sales than a genuine concern for the plight of the poor. (The two co-host a Public Radio International daily radio show, and Smiley owns a book imprint that publishes most of West’s written works. Smiley’s most recent book, Fail Up, was released in May.)

The Rev. Al Sharpton has also voiced concerns that the pair’s efforts may do more harm than good. “African--Americans are struggling with many issues, and serious discussions need to be had by all,” Sharpton says. “But instead, West has resorted to personal attacks … All that does is distract the attention from where it needs to be. I’ve said that to Cornel and explained the damage being done.”

West has openly admitted being angered by perceived slights from Obama after his election. He says he campaigned nonstop for Obama in 2007, hosting more than 60 events, yet he says he didn’t receive inauguration tickets and lost all access to Obama once he was in office. Smiley fell out of favor with many African-Americans prior to the 2008 election, owing to his unrelenting criticism of Obama. Many think his distaste for the president influenced West’s attitude.

Some of Obama’s staunchest allies are confident a truce is near. Harvard law professor Charles Ogletree, who befriended both Barack and Michelle Obama in the 1990s, introduced the couple to West in early 2007. Ogletree sounds determined to resolve what he terms a “disappointing distraction” as soon as possible.

“This is not about two very brilliant men squashing a beef,” says Ogletree of Obama and West. “This is about what’s best for this country … The two men will meet before 2011 is over, and this won’t be allowed to impact the 2012 reelection of Barack Obama. That’s simply not an option.”

Like The Daily Beast on Facebook and follow us on Twitter for updates all day long.

Allison Samuels is a senior writer at Newsweek. Her work has also appeared in Rolling Stone, O, Essence and Vibe magazines. She's also the author of Christmas Soul, published by Disney/Jump At the Sun, and Off The Record, (Harper Collins/Amistad).

For inquiries, please contact The Daily Beast at editorial@thedailybeast.com.

The Mythology of Love

The Mythology of Love


Beyond Myth


Myth is all there is, like air, without myth we cannot breathe, therefore we die. Myth is the essence of religion. There are no rituals without myth--myth is the story, the word, hence the foundation of ritual. We take the myth and create the drama as in the original Osirian drama of resurrection, first the story then the enactment of the story, followed by the absorption of myth into the social-psychology of a people. Myth then becomes the foundation of culture, the purpose of existence and the goal of after-life.

Yes, culture is all that we do but all that we do is based on the myths we live by. When we suggest transcending myth it is an awesome challenge to the psyche and thus to the society. What white person wants to give up the myth of white supremacy. It is the essence of their being. Shall they become black? But black is not simply a color, it is a culture that is bound by myth as well. When we suggest giving up myth, we realize the task is daunting, for what shall a person stand upon, what rock, what reality?

We want the schools to change but again it shall involve dismantling the American mythology, all the lies, stories, dreams, holidays, statues, images, symbols that abound the society--in short, a decolonialization must occur—or call it detoxification. The teachers cannot teach a different way because they are victims of myth as well, trapped in their madness which is the essence of all they have been taught and certified to teach.

The black American psychologists are grappling with the problem of myth as I write. At their last national conference in Oakland they spoke about casting out Eurocentric psychology and returning to the ancient African healing philosophy. They want to transcend European psychotherapy for a more holistic approach that will embrace the entire being of the spiritually ill person, for sure, the mental is related to the physical to the social to the political to the economic. But as with education, how shall the mental health workers get certified to teach African healing when they have been trained in Eurocentric psychology? And what is the mythological foundation of African healing?

Imagine throwing out white education, but the question is can they heal the black mind with white psychology? As much as we applaud the psychotherapeutic peer group approach, prescribed in my manual How to Recover from the Addiction to White Supremacy, even the peer group is not sufficient unless the group bonds together in a holistic manner to overcome the myriad ills due to oppression.

The myth of love is an example of how we are entrapped in mythology. Love becomes an ever changing illusion based on materialism and economic security, thus it is a physical thing that in the end causes us to cry, "What does love have to do with it?" But in reality love is all there is. God is Love! Yet we spend a lifetime seeking that which is our essence. Surely we must be on the wrong path or in the wrong house of love. And after a lifetime with the beloved, we wonder was it in vain, a waste of energy, a pitiful existence with a beloved who hated our guts, was jealous, envious, greedy, yet this was our mate, this was us.

And so detoxification is in order to begin our recovery from sick mythology. We resist and deny anything is amiss but we must summon the strength to make a change, to jump out the box toward a brighter day. We fight leaving the comfort zone for it is all we know, like the slaves upon emancipation: where shall we go, what shall we do without the master? He was our everything, our god, our lover, our enforcer, our rapist even. But deconstructing alien mythology is the only way out, just as the dope fiend must stop using dope upon the pain of death. Now some choose death, the die-hards who claim dope is the best thing that ever happened to them. So they are not satisfied until they fall into the pit. The society addicted to sick mythology is no better than the common dope fiend. It is determined to commit mass suicide. America is not alone in this manner. It is the same with Israel, North Korea, Iran and elsewhere. Mythology (call it ideology if you wish) will be the final determinant of the political actions in the above nations.

Will they transcend their mythology and live or persist in their inordinacy until they die? The sooner we get beyond myth into a progressive, radical and revolutionary state of mind, the better we shall all be. But it would be a step forward if we simply stopped believing in the superiority of myth. This notion of superiority is probably worse than the myth itself. The myth of white supremacy is no better or worse than other myths, but the problem is when whites want to spread their myth and force it upon others who have their own mythology.

As far as I am concerned, let the whites in the American south keep their confederate flag, just don’t subject it upon me and my people. Keep that shit in yo house, your church or wherever you dwell and I don’t. And if I fly the Star and Crescent, leave me the hell alone. But let’s go deeper into the world of myth for a story is composed of words, thus we must consider linguistics or language when attempting to transcend myth, for the devil is in the language. We may therefore find ourselves in need of a new language in order to transcend myth, for we speak a mythical language, and just as we do not understand the mythology, we do not understand the language. To have a common language suggests we have agreed upon definitions, but again, what do you mean by love, and are you prepared to love your enemy? Can you love yourself, and who or what is yourself? Who is the black self, what is it?

We grappled with this problem in the 60s in trying to define a black aesthetic. What is beauty and truth to us? Suddenly the Negro was ugly and black was beautiful, and for a moment there was a consensus and a people moved forward. And then came the breakdown and the consensus was gone. The natural hair style was no longer en vogue. Ugly became beautiful. Ugly was freedom, although we never got a consensus on what freedom meant, nor do we have one today. What is freedom to you is not freedom to me. You say freedom is a job, and that’s the totality of your freedom. Other people fight for land, natural resources, self determination, but you say just give you a job and you are satisfied. So how can we unite?

You say freedom is having sex between persons of the same sex. Nothing else matters to you in life. But we ask what does sex have to do with it? Were you put aboard the slave ships so you could have sex with the same gender loving persons, is this why your ancestors suffered in the cotton and cane fields, was it for sexual freedom, or what is possibly something that went far beyond pussy and dick, getting a nut in the dark or in some alley, bathroom, park? Again, we need to define some terms before we can move forward into the new era. Let’s list some terms and define them—and how can we do this when terms are ever shifting, for language is dynamic and fluid, Negro, Colored, black, African, Bilalian, Moorish, et al. We are forever changing our identity because we cannot come to a consensus as a people. At least the white people know they are white, they may not know anything else, but they know they are white.

You don’t know if you are black or white, man or woman—for the sands are constantly shifting under your feet—the result of your insecurity, personal and communal. It is an identity crisis of the most profound degree imaginable. So myth is composed with language, from myth to ritual, from ritual to reality, but language is the foundation. The child’s world only becomes real when it takes command of its “mother tongue.” Within the mother tongue is myth which is composed of surface and deep structure terminology and meaning, the said and the unsaid, the seen and the unseen.

We are that child that has yet to master language, hence our world is chaos without solid, safe and secure definitions, leading us not to know what is real and unreal, a confusion of self and kind. We are not certain our brother is a friend or foe. We are not sure if our mate is friend or foe, lover or hater. In a moment of passion we may hear words we never thought was in the heart of our lover, or we may use such words ourselves. Now there is more doubt and insecurity in an already fragile relationship, that more than likely originated in lust rather than anything that can be called love. And so we see the task before us, a psycho-linguistic mythological conundrum that will take centuries to resolve since in the global village our mythology is bound with other mythological tribes and nations, some of which seek our life blood.

We may be forced out of our slumber to shed the old raggedy clothes of worn out mythology, whether religious or political, sexual or social. Elijah told us the wisdom of this world is exhausted—one need only look around and listen to the language, the babble blowing in the wind, in spite of all the technology, all the human advancement. Surely, in spite of it all, reverse evolution has set in, a kind of atrophy, a freezing of the mental apparatus, a paralysis of thought while the very hour challenges us with the need for grand vision to make that great leap forward into the new millennium.
--Marvin X, from the Mythology of Love, essays on male/female relations, 2011

Common - The Corner ft. The Last Poets

Meet me at Academy of da Corner, 14th and Broadway, downtown Oakland.

Toward A Pan African Mental Health Peer Group

Toward A Pan African Mental Health Peer Group


A few years ago, I called upon Dr. Nathan Hare, our esteemed sociologist and clinical psychologist, and author of the classic The Black Anglo-Saxons, to establish a mental health group we decided to call Black Reconstruction. Along with Dr. Hare, the group was facilitated by social worker, Suzzette Celeste, MSW, MPA. The group took place at my Recovery Theatre in San Francisco’s Tenderloin district. Before the group sessions were disbanded for several reasons, including logistics and promotion, we discovered a few things. One, the group should have been divided into the severely mentally ill and the functionally mentally ill, although the dual diagnosed (those with mental and drug problems) could attend either session, for many times the drug addict and mentally ill are indivisible personalities.

Two, Dr. Hare concluded such mental health peer group sessions should be established in every community nationwide. And I add worldwide. A mental health worker need not be present, but following the 12-step model of AA, let the peers facilitate the session, since there are simply not enough mental health workers to serve the population of mentally disabled persons. The US Surgeon General estimated 20% of Americans are mentally ill. Three, although the Pan African community suffers the brunt of mental disorders caused by oppression, “situational disorders” as Dr. Franz Fanon called them, when whites attended, we saw they too suffer and could participate since much of oppression does not discriminate --and more importantly, the colonizer is as mentally ill, if not more so, than the colonized.

The victimizer with his boot on the neck of the oppressed is sick with the idea of domination. So, yes, racism has affected more blacks than whites, but middle and lower class whites are an exploited economic class as well. Capitalism and imperialism do not discriminate--all workers are exploited and they are programmed into the virus of consumerism wherein their paltry wages acquire the cheap goods of a materialistic society.

Half the goods they acquire are not needed, but the workers and their children are programmed by persistent advertising, often of a subliminal nature. And there is only a matter of degree between the exploited white worker and the black worker. For sure, blacks and women lack wage parity. Yes, a white worker with a prison record can get a job quicker than a black worker with no police record, but once on the job, the white worker is exploited none the less and suffers mental trauma as well. His white skin does not save him from wage slavery and the resultant psycho-social diseases, including drug abuse, partner violence and child abuse, emotional if not physical.

Nevertheless, our main focus is healing the Pan African community, those descendants of slavery and colonialism throughout Africa, Europe and the Americas. This book should also have relevance to the Muslim world, Arabs in particular, who suffer as well the ravages of colonialism and neo-colonialism. Yes, Muslims and Arabs suffer from the trauma of white supremacy as the West devours their oil fields and other resources, and permits reactionary regimes to flourish in spite of their anti-democratic behavior.

The ravages of slavery, colonialism and neo-colonialism (including domestic colonialism) necessitate the formation of Pan African mental health peer groups throughout Pan Africa, whether on the continent, Europe, Caribbean and the Americas, especially North America. Let us all come together in small groups for peer healing sessions.

Radical Pan African mental health peer groups can be a powerful antidote to help heal the lingering, traumatic effects of slavery, colonialism and neo-colonialism. We can see throughout Pan Africa that even when we advance politically and economically, the scourge of cultural imperialism causes mental retardation of a kind that produces stunted men and women who might otherwise continue the radical freedom agenda, but yet (and often in the name of revolution) continue reactionary behavior and practices no different from their former masters. We label such behavior white supremacy, even if it is now black face white supremacy. In the Caribbean they call it, “Black men with white hearts.” Indeed, such behavior is a disease of the heart, of the spirit, and thus no amount of political/economic liberation will suffice--we cannot live on bread alone, but our wretched mental condition stifles real progress toward that divine state of mind wherein we are free of tribal, ethnic, religious and cultural hatred, strife, desires of domination, exploitation, greed and lust for power, i.e., white supremacy.

The advantages and positives of Western civilization do not outweigh the sordid and vile behavior we have inculcated and practice with each other, and thus the time has come to make radical changes as we advance into the new millennium, personal changes in our spiritual consciousness that will transform our political, economic and social behavior. Yes, we are in the era of high technology, but our behavior is often of a bestial nature, for we have lost the civility and serenity of the natural order, even the animals display personalities more at peace than we so-called evolved human beings. As we became urbanized, we are no longer cognizant of natural love for each other and the planet we share with animals and plants. Many city children have never touched an animal, a cow, horse or chicken, a duck, a bird. We may teach gender equality, but we see in the animal kingdom there is leadership based on gender, sometimes the male but often the female. So as we evolve we might need to refer to the animals for wisdom and knowledge of how configure society that decreases psycho-social destabilization that has brought us to the present need for this discussion of how to remedy the most pressing political, economic, social, and spiritual issue of our time: white supremacy.

NOTE:

Until further notice, persons seeking to attend the Pan African Mental Health Peer Group can meet Dr. M at Academy of da Corner, 14th and Broadway, downtown Oakland.
Email me to find out day and time or make an appointment. jmarvinx@yahoo.com.