Black Agenda Report on Obama

Put in different terms the development of a black middle class within capitalist America has fragmented blacks in such a way that it is quite difficult to build a mass black movement that would be any basic challenge to corporate capitalism. The ruling capitalist class has successfully integrated the black middle class into the system. This analysis is in its own way quite idealist since the so-called corporate media is part of the superstructure. Certainly it can help form consciousness but it is the very success of many blacks being integrated into the system that make an Oprah Obama media event possible. The concentration of the black movement on blackness as against class has the result as the article notes that many black folks yearn to see a Supreme (HNIC) Head Negro in Charge even though that negro represents the ruling class quite well.

2007: The Year of Black `Media Leaders' - Especially Obama

by BAR executive editor Glen Ford

"African Americans' most urgent duty is to methodically rebuild a
Movement that is independent of corporate media."

2008 Obama Turn Right Cartoon

In the late Sixties, Black America seemed on its way to reaching
critical velocity in its arc to self-determination and some degree of
security. But in the intervening 40 years, the trajectory of true
Black progress has become erratic and uneven, for lack of the force
that fueled the initial takeoff: a People's Movement. Energies
dissipated as self-concerned grouplets among African Americans sought
their own orbits - usually circling hungrily in the gravitational pull
of corporate America. These greedy little satellites, imagining
themselves much bigger and more powerful than they really are, bask
vicariously in the glow of real power, which is ever more concentrated
in a dwindling fraction of the overwhelmingly white super-rich
population.

Believing they have broken "free" of the Historical Black Political
Consensus on social justice, societal transformation, and peace,
opportunistic Black sub-classes - never representing mass Black
opinion, but only their own petty aspirations - have in the past
decade been "empowered" by corporate America to exert profoundly
destructive centrifugal forces on the larger Black polity. What is
left of collective African American political cohesion is rapidly
shattering under the combined pressures of Black corporate satellites
and the bottomless Black Hole that the Corporate Order has become.

"What is left of collective African American political cohesion is
rapidly shattering under the centrifugal pressures of Black corporate
satellites."

The great historical irony for Black America is that this deluded
descent into the depths of dependency on corporate mechanisms - marked
most dramatically and horrifically by acquiescence to the racists'
claim that race is little or no factor in American life - occurs at
precisely the epoch when U.S.-led corporate structures are in terminal
crisis at home and around the globe. This is the "burning house" that
both Malcolm X and Dr. Martin Luther King foretold.

The year 2007, like those before it, yielded ever increasing evidence
that Black America must reverse the course that has been charted by
its own misleadership classes, and instead struggle mightily to defend
itself, and any allies that can be found, against the implosions that
are wracking the global and domestic Corporate Order - a wave of
terminal crises that cannot be overcome and will, domestically, impact
most painfully on African Americans, the Permanent Other in
U.S. society.

Obamamania

Barack Obama's corporate-made and -financed presidential campaign is
the product of three distinct factors, all mitigating against Black
self-determination and political cohesion: 1) corporate decisions,
made a decade ago, to provide media and financial support to pliant
Black Democrats that can be trusted to carry Wall Street's water; 2) a
widespread desire among whites to prove through the safe and simple
act of voting that they are not personally racist, and/or to dismiss
Black claims of pervasive racism in society, once and for all; 3) a
huge reservoir of Jim Crow era, atavistic Black thinking that refuses
to evaluate Black candidates' actual political stances, but instead
revels in the prospect of Black faces in high places. A President
Obama would, of course, be the zenith of such narrow, non-substantive,
objectively self-defeating visions.

"Many, if not most, Black folks yearn to see a Supreme HNIC before
they die."

In 2007, the Obama "package" amply satisfied all three
"constituencies." Corporations found him a loyal ally on Capitol Hill
and on the speaking circuit, rewarding him handsomely for his fealty;
millions of whites came to believe Obama could solve the "race
problem" by his mere presence, at no cost to their own notions of skin
privilege; and infinitely manipulable Black dreams of the ultimate
Head-Negro-in-Charge. Many, if not most, Black folks yearn to see a
Supreme HNIC before they die, and will not question how he got there
or whom he really serves.

Paul Street has written often in these pages and elsewhere of Obama's
political charade: his impudent posing as the "Joshua" to succeed
Dr. King's "Moses Generation," while supporting none of the
fundamental social transformations sought by King; his fawning praise
of the same U.S. "free enterprise" system that King thought was
incompatible with racial justice and peace; Obama's ridiculous and
statistically baseless declaration that Blacks have already come "90
percent of the way to equality," inferring that his election would
provide the final ten percent; the senator's initial insistence, later
modified, that the Katrina catastrophe and the Jena outrage had
nothing to do with race; his remarkable pledge to the Foreign
Relations Council to increase U.S. troops strength by 100,000 soldiers
and Marines, all the while maintaining the farce of being a "peace"
candidate. The list goes on, and will doubtless lengthen as the
campaign continues.

However, we at Black Agenda Report are most concerned with the
paralyzing stupor that Obamamania has induced in the Black
polity. Even committed Black progressive activists have jumped on the
candidate's bandwagon-to-nowhere. My saddest, and yet most telling,
experience with Obama-coma came late last year, when I was bracketed
with New York City Councilman Charles Barron on Ron Daniels' weekly
WBAI Radio political discussion show. Barron is one of my favorite
politicians, a former Black Panther who is also a grassroots community
activist and implacable foe of racism and entrenched power. Barron
announced that he and the local activist group with which he is
affiliated were endorsing Barack Obama for president.

"Even committed Black progressive activists have jumped on the
candidate's bandwagon-to-nowhere."

In what turned into a debate between us, I confronted the councilman
with all the facts outlined above, and more. He, like every other
Black Obama supporter, could offer no coherent response, except to
pillory Hillary Clinton, Obama's political twin. Indeed, the
interview/debate experience was audibly painful for Barron, who knows
full well that Obama stands on the opposite side of the political line
- when he decides to stand anywhere, at all. Finally, Barron could
only offer that he "wants to give the brother a shot." That was
it. The phrase, which he later repeated, was like an exhalation of
used up air, an abdication of the imperative to Speak Truth to Power
if the representative of Power is Black and seems to be an unstoppable
phenomenon.

Barron's resigned response proved the truth of Louisville University
Prof. Rick L. Jones's evaluation, that we are witnessing the "failure
of the Black political imagination." Obamamania is accelerating that
debilitating process - even among the best, brightest and most
committed of African American politicians.

Obama is, of course, a media and money phenomenon - both corporate
derivatives. In that sense, his rise is only different in degree from
the proliferation of "media leaders" that have taken the place of real
organizers in Black America - and of former organizers who have held
on to name recognition by becoming media leaders, running from camera
to camera in between their radio shows. Nothing lasting,
organizationally, can possibly emerge from their performances.

Obama's hook-up with Oprah Winfrey was perfectly logical. Both are
famous, unthreatening media celebrities with huge white
followings. They compliment each other, and achieve the same effect of
mesmerizing fame-struck Blacks and soothing the fears of whites -
placebos for both sorely afflicted groups.

Media have displaced previous Black leadership-creation mechanisms:
that is, leadership forged in struggle. Now, "leaders" are presented
with theme music in radio studios and TV sound stages, chosen by
executives on the basis of corporate notions of marketability. It is a
"virtual" - not genuine - Black leadership, that only plays the role
through broadcasting.

>From an historical perspective, it is as if James Brown and Aretha
Franklin were the preeminent Black political leaders of the
Sixties. Both made great cultural contributions, and Mr. Brown dabbled
in politics, to various effect, but no conscious person of that era
would have considered either of these entertainers to be leaders -
because real leaders, heading real, often feuding sections of a mass
movement, existed. Brown and Franklin were background music for an
actual People's Movement, like a score to a movie. But today, there is
no movie - no Movement - just a score that makes no sense.

"Obama's rise is only different in degree from the proliferation of
`media leaders' that have taken the place of real organizers in
Black America."

In 2008 and beyond, African Americans' most urgent duty is to
methodically rebuild a Movement that is independent of corporate media
- one that forces media, especially Black-oriented radio, to respond
to IT, rather than taking its cues from on-air performers. There is no
substitute for people in motion, the only force that can compel the
reinstatement of local news on "Black" radio - which will in turn
nourish the Movement, as in years past, by empowering grassroots
forces through coverage of their activities. (See BAR, January 10,
2007, "Bring Back Black Radio News - The People's Network.")

The same forces that shut down the Black Freedom Movement to pursue
their own private interests, 40 years ago, have metastasized into
corporate servants of the rich. With the gradual extinction of Black
journalism, African Americans have grown to believe that Celebrity =
Power - a fatal equation that strips Black America of independent
agency, of political autonomy, and makes them putty in the hands of
media corporations and their Wall Street masters.

This is the underlying, broader meaning and threat of Obamamania (or
Obama-ism). In the final analysis, it's not about how HE got there,
it's about why there are so few mechanisms to make Obama, the
Congressional Black Caucus, and any corporate-bought Black
personality, an instant "leader" - never to be held accountable to
Black people at-large.

Colliding Crises

We are not being African American-centric in emphasizing
steadily-eroding domestic Black political realities. Blacks remain, in
the mass, the most consistently progressive and geographically
concentrated group in the United States. Any semblance of a
progressive "movement" is inconceivable if Black political coherence
is shattered - or smothered - by corporate forces in blackface. This
would result in a permanently ineffectual domestic response to the
deepening and general crisis of the Capitalist Order, globally and at
home.

2008 Africans Oil Flares

The year 2007 showed that George Bush's attempt to alter the global
relationship of forces and resources by military means, centered in
the Middle East, has failed beyond redemption. U.S. spies and
generals found it necessary to mutiny to prevent an insane attack on
Iran - a crime that would certainly plunge the planet into instant
economic and political anarchy. But the imperialists in both parties
persist in finding softer spots for corporate-military domination. The
Ethiopian invasion of Somalia was a joint exercise with Washington,
and threatens to destabilize all of the Horn of Africa. The
U.S. cynically deploys the humanitarian crisis in Darfur as a tool for
Euro-American military intervention, and demands basing rights in the
Gulf of Guinea to control West Africa's oil spigots. The crisis in
Latin America largely revolves around color lines - many colors, but
always "white" on top, and the region's subterranean "Black Gold" and
other minerals the prize, below.

"Any semblance of a progressive `movement' is inconceivable if
Black political coherence is shattered - or smothered - by corporate
forces in blackface."

Given the prevailing racism in white American society - a racism that
craves revenge for U.S. defeats at the hands of darker peoples even as
it expresses opposition to particular, lost wars - and the ever
southward thrust of U.S. aggression, Black America is the historically
logical center for opposition to U.S. marauding, especially in
Africa. Dr. King declared in 1967, in the heat of the Vietnam War,
that Black America's destiny was to "save the soul of America" from
the "triple evils" of "racism, materialism and militarism" - a huge
historical fact that Barack "Joshua" Obama conveniently fails to
process.

In today's world, that historical legacy is to move to the forefront
of saving the planet - and Black America - from the death throes of a
Corporate Order in a state of desperation. The U.S. sub-prime lending
crisis, which uncovered the shallow roots of the Black middle class,
also pulled back the veil from global capitalism's ulcerated
face. Five-hundred TRILLION dollars in "derivatives" - derived from
what, no one really knows - were counted as "assets" of global
financial institutions. Now, few of these institutions want to trade
in each other's "paper" instruments, whose bogus face value is more
than ten times that of the entire planet's yearly output of goods and
services. Implosion is inevitable, with consequences too vast to
imagine.

African Americans are already disproportionately reeling from the
precursor trembles of the global "liquidity" crisis to come, and
best-suited to comprehend the predatory nature of corporate
institutions and their inevitable resort to war to recoup "their"
losses. But re-consolidation of that deep historical understanding
requires real leadership and means of mass communication. The Black
misleadership class must be purged, but first, folks must recognize
who needs purging. The paralytic effect of Obamamania threatens to
finally strangle Black activism - and organizable Black consciousness,
itself - on the eve of domestic and global catastrophe.

To paraphrase the idiotic Black "media leaders" P-Ditty and 50 Cent:
"Organize to take back the means of communications, or die."


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