In part 1, we learned that there is no scientific basis for “race” and “racism” and, therefore, both are “cultural constructs”—myths invented and used for centuries by European marauders to justify and excuse their cruel economic behaviors of colonization and slavery, and their extensive crimes against humanity. Now, let’s examine how these constructs continue to be employed by today’s neoliberal capitalists to justify and excuse the “economy of the 1%,” the endless “war on terror,” and planetary biocide.
When Barack Obama (who I canvassed for) was running for POTUS in 2008, Jesse Jackson’s son, then a Democratic expressed an idea that many believed was true; Obama was MLK.2:
With the election of Obama, it seemed that the national curse of slavery had finally been lifted.
Voters had not only rejected the “war on terror” and deregulated Wall Street (which had just crashed); we had also endorsed the idea of a multicultural society, where all people enjoy equal rights, opportunities and respect. It seemed that the United States might live up to its own propaganda as an “exceptional nation“: a representative example of a democratic republic with a government of laws enacted by consent and enforced impartially and, because of this, the spreader of freedom, justice and equality throughout the world.
Of course, this didn’t happen. The USA remains at war in Iraq and Afghanistan, and our war-making around the planet has magnified exponentially to include Yemen, Syria, Libya, Pakistan, Iran and the Ukraine. Despite the election of a “black” president, the economic reality of “blacks” has worsened since 2008:
And while the recession impacted all race and age groups’ earnings, blacks fared the worst.
To understand how Obama failed to become MLK.2, we turn to Dr. Boyce Watkins, a Finance Professor at Syracuse University and founder of the Your Black World Coalition:
“Race,” as we know, was invented to justify the economy of slavery—& it is important to point out that, though “race” is a construct, the history of its use by economic actors is not a construct; it is American history.
The persistence of its use is due to the fact that slavery—if not chattel, then in the form of what Lincoln era liberals called “wage slavery“—has remained a consistent feature of American capitalism since our nation’s founding. MLK knew this. Obama might know, but his non-action as president proves doesn’t care enough to do anything about it.
Why?
Well—as Locke imagined in the Second Treatise of Government, capitalism is an economy that converts nature into coin (i.e., capital) and those who convert the most nature into coin deserve to possess more than anybody else; after all, he adds, they are not hurting anybody!:
There is no place on Earth that epitomizes the practice of converting nature into coin (i.e., capital), and hoarding it, more than Wall Street. Thanks to the institutionalization of deregulatory “free market” neoliberal economic theory from the Reagan era to our own, Wall Street has gained (in Locke’s words) “a disproportionate and unequal possession of the earth.” Obama had the opportunity and voter support to re-regulate Wall Street, but he didn’t and the result has been the “economy of the 1%“:
Presently, there is no substantive regulatory governance of Wall Street—which proves neoliberalism has triumphed. Wealth continues to accumulate for those 1% who hoard the coins, which allows them to buy lawmakers and judges, while the 99% languishes, a “surplus population” of wage-slaves who are spied upon. Manufacturing jobs—that would be the source of a healthy middle class—are continually shipped overseas to places like China, where workers are wage slaves without workplace protections, and where there are virtually no environmental laws to worry about.
Today in China, Obama is pushing very hard to pass the largest “free trade” treaty in US history—the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP; the text of which no elected congressperson or senator has been allowed to read in full)—that will protect Wall Street investments in wage slave nations while decreasing middle class jobs here in the USA. One of its key features is that it removes our elected government’s congressional and judicial control of trade, and gives that control to corporations and banks, which are in turned controlled by Wall Street, as Eli Wallach, director of Public Citizen’s Global Trade Watch, explains:
So, the sort of grotesque question is: Why does President Obama like the TPP?“
The reason Obama likes the TPP is given by Locke; he actively supports and protects Wall Street’s “disproportionate and unequal possession of the earth.” This protection is seen most obviously in the “war on terror” which was precipitated by Osama Bin Laden’s attack on Wall Street on Sept. 11, 2001. The “war on terror” might have ended when Obama assassinated Bin Laden but it didn’t, and now has metastasized into what is looking abroad like the beginning of World War 3 and at home like the constant-war police-state Orwell envisioned in 1984. In the Middle East and West Africa, US military might is being used to control the global oil trade, and in the Ukraine, where Obama deposed the elected president, a new Cold War has begun, with the US threatening to strike violently against Russia, which Ukraine’s deposed president wanted closer economic ties with. The US-led “regime change” was designed to draw Ukraine out of the Russian-controlled “Commonwealth of Independent States” and into the US/Wall Street-compliant European Union. So much for “free trade”! Here we see that the neoliberals and the neoconservatives are the same thing; neolibs make great-sounding promises and when the promises are broken, the neocons arrive and start killing/incarcerating/spying-on everybody. The evidence—Obama is the commander in chief of “the world’s sole superpower” whose military is designed to protect its Wall Street economy of the 1%—and that is why his support and protection of “free trade” requires he use violent force against those who resist or refuse it.
The economy of the 1%, which values short-term capital gains over the long-term health of humans and non-human creatures, is the primary dynamism that generates our wars, and our continual economic and ecological collapses. Most people do not want their governments to be taken over by lawless corporations (who have been given the Constitutional rights of humans), or their jobs to be low-paying and meaningless, or their environments destroyed—but that’s what Wall Street wants and gets. There is not enough short-term capital gains to be made off changing the world for Wall Street to invest in it; this world, just the way it is, is exactly what Wall Street pays lawmakers and judges to keep in place. Obama, like other politicians, tries to “grow” our economy—and that means forcing people and all living creatures to submit to its relentless destructive mechanisms.
Obama was marketed as the first “post-racial” president but, as his dismal economic record of squashing the “American dreams” of African-Americans proves, he’s kept the hierarchical social structure of the “whites” intact. By drawing most public attention to the racial -redemption or -persecution narratives of his tenure, he has been able to draw attention away from the “Uncle Tom”-role he plays in assisting the Wall Street in its economic war against middle and lower classes. As Cornel West explains:
Because he, and his handlers (most notably, executives of Goldman Sachs) so ably exploited the symbolism of the Civil Rights Movement, and used the cover provided by it to prevent the reformation of our economic and political system so all Americans would share in its common wealth, Obama deserves to be called the first “post-political” president. By failing so substantially to correct the mistakes of the neoliberals, who crashed the economy and got bailed out, and their accomplices the neocons, who never intend to end America’s economy-protecting wars, Obama has put an end to citizen’s expectations that government can help them. Under his “president who never was” leadership, his Democratic Party has lost Congress and the Senate and there seems little hope that they will regain either in 2016. People don’t believe him or his rhetoric anymore, because he didn’t mean it either. (“What is history going to say about you[, Obama]?” Dr. West asks. “Counterfeit! That’s what they’ll say, counterfeit. Not the real thing.”)
There are many conservative African-American politicians who will do the bidding of Wall Street far more efficiently, and with greater joy, than Obama. The Democrat Party’s use of African-Americans to portend MLK-like economic activism could only work once because Obama’s timing was absolutely perfect (after Bush, and against Hillary). Black skin color won’t work again as a potent symbol of change for Democrats. To put it the crude terms of Fox News, the Republicans will make sure that the Dems can’t use the “race card” again, simply by pointing out the Democrats’ glaring failure to help African-Americans achieve middle class status even as Obama takes credit for growing the economy. Considering the fact that the Democrats were considered the Civil Rights party, the loss of this association is devastating to their “brand,” and bad news for most of us, because the Republicans are even less fit to control what’s left of the US government than the Democrats, as George Lakoff explains:
We are witnessing the corporate takeover of our national government, and part of what we are noticing is the abyss between what our politicians are saying and what they are doing. We saw Bush spread democracy by committing gross crimes against humanity in Iraq, and elsewhere. We saw Obama save the economy by bailing out Wall Street. We hear him saying he wants TPP passed because it will “spur greater jobs growth, [&] set high standards for trade and investment.” The disjunction between the president’s performance of such claims and the actual realities he consciously misrepresents as he’s making them, has made our political culture a simulated reality—another (& less entertaining) version of “West Wing.” We have intense nostalgia for World War Two, when the USA was justified in its massive use of violence, and it was actually spreading democracy. The colonial holdings we inherited or took from European, Asian, African and South American nations made us a superpower, and now in the twilight hours of our short history as an empire these nations drift from, or turn on, us. Our system of knowledge and values is losing currency as capitalism moves its world headquarters elsewhere, poor New York City soon to left behind by a world that has no center of finance, only centers. Expect the claims of our politicians to become even more detached from actual reality, for they do pledge allegiance to the past—none more so than our politically-powerful global-warming-denying southern conservatives who cherish their traditonal slaveocracy heritage.
“Race” and “racism” are constructs, but their use in history and in politics is not. Obama’s presidency is a profound and tragic example of this, a politician who traded on, then betrayed, the moral beliefs of people who believe in freedom and equality—a profound example because his promise to change the world gave so many hope, a tragic example because we needed that change. It will come, but we will have less control over it when it does, because it will happen as a break down, collapse, disaster. This collapsing will increase violence and suffering. whereas reformation would have minimized it. One of the last gestures of our government was to create the Department of Homeland Security, and it has trained and equipped our army, national guard and police forces to protect private property, and control domestic populations. Obama will be gone, and the next even worse president will take his place until we have fully military government, controlled by the coin hoarders. Our government is a machine, and the machine is broken. Our economy is imperial, and the empire is over. We didn’t get to choose our moment in history, but it is ours.
In the last part of this meditation I will re-envision the biocitizen, and how it is being called forth by “the triumph of neoliberalism”: the demise of the Democratic Party, and with that demise the beginning of the post-political era.
