Drinking Hot Kool-Aid Tea

There has been a lot of breast-beating lately about 'taking back the country' and 'honoring the Constitution' but the republic is rotting on its old abused foundations. The U.S. Senate, conceived as the 'saucer' in which to pour and cool an impassioned public's 'hot cup of tea', is now a cabal of co-conspirators committed to the art of delay and shameless obstruction.

Rules once employed to ensure proper deliberation and consideration of important issues are now used to pursue an exclusively partisan agenda. As a result, problems mount, progress is delayed at the public's expense simply for a political gain. Half of the Democrats and the entire Republican Party now apply obstructionist tactics. The Right-Wing with one goal in mind: defeat Barack Obama. America be damned.



This extreme oppose-at-any-cost tactic is about to send American foreign policy into disarray. It does not matter if the security of the country is at stake. For the Senate's hyper-partisan Republicans all that matters is that no good deed gets credited to a Democratic president.

"key Republican senator casts on the Obama administration's chances of passing nuclear treaty with Russia".--Washington Monthly "... a treaty endorsed by six former secretaries of state and five former secretaries of defense from both parties; the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; seven former Strategic Command chiefs; national security advisers from both parties, and nearly all former commanders of U.S. nuclear forces."

Meanwhile the rest of the world looks on in horror, wondering what on earth are these Republicans drinking? Apparently a lot of hot tea and kool-aid.

The Left Didn't just Fail, It Was Slaughtered

In my previous post I alluded to the specter lurking in Chris Hedges' article, 'the "Phantom Left'. In his follow-up, 'A Recipe for Fascism' , he again disdains the 'liberal class' but while America's bourgeoisie surely deserve his scorn, his assertion that 'a disenfranchised and angry underclass is being encouraged to lash out at the bankrupt liberal institutions and the government that once protected them' is both faulty analysis and a distortion of history. The hopes of the underclass have never figured in our political thinking.

Thanks to racism and mass immigration the socialist movement that transfigured Europe and inspired Africa and Asia never took root in America. The influx of poor Eastern Europeans coupled with the Great Northern Migration of the recently freed slaves was considered a threat by the lily-white unions. So while it is true that groups like the Wobblies and the Congress of Industrial Workers managed to diffuse some of the fear by showing that united, women and ethnic minorities could extract concessions America's labor force remained largely segregated and hopelessly divided.

As an English visitor observed in the years before WWI: "menial work is increasingly felt to be beneath the dignity of the free white American. The intelligent, highly paid American is actually in the position of a ruling class. He is served and attended by negroes and alien immigrants very much as the ancient Athenian was served by a Thracian or an Asiatic."

It is this privileged status that the globalization that began after WWII has been steadily turning on its head.

The 'Problem is the Blacks'

On Monday, April 28, 1969, Nixon aide H.R. Haldeman noted in the White House diary: "President emphasized that you have to face the fact that the whole problem is really the Blacks. The key is to devise a system that recognizes this, while not appearing to. Problem with overall welfare plan is that it forces poor Whites into same position as Blacks. Feels we have to get rid of the veil of hypocrisy and guilt and face reality."

The reality that the Nixon Government faced was how to manage white resentment as they saw their privileged status collapse in the face of Asian competition. Nixon had hoped to find a latter day Booker T Washington willing to temper black ambitions and accommodate negro subservience. Unfortunately for the Nixon Republicans and the capitalist power structure the 1960's press for equal rights made finding such a leader all but impossible. As Haldeman wrote:
"[the President] broods frequently over problems of how we communicate with the young and Blacks. It's really not possible except with Uncle Toms and we should work on them and forget militants."

The American system's solution to its middle-class problem developed on the tactics employed in the 1950's to discredit the Socialists and and destroy the Communist party. The War on America's emerging democracy otherwise known as Cointelpro was replaced by 'the War on Drugs'. By flooding black neighborhoods with illegal drugs and then issuing Draconian sentences for minor offenses the petty bourgeoisie was able to protect its endangered status and the politicians indebted to big business had fewer unhappy voters to try and content. That a Democratic president, William Jefferson Clinton, would merge the strands and expand the practice speaks volumes about 'liberal policies and their commitment to the poor.

When Clinton entered office, the entire prison population-local, state and federal-was just over a million. By the time he left it had doubled to over 2 million, the highest rate of incarceration and highest total of prisoners held in a democratic state in the history of the world.

60% of those federal inmates were in prison for nonviolent drug offenses. For the beleaguered white middle class it meant the boon of hundreds of new prisons, police weapons and corrections officers. A system grown so large that like our predatory banks it is now "Too Big to Fail". The largest public construction since the Works Progress Administration of the 1930s, the prison industrial complex helped expand the bubble once revered as the 'Great Clinton Economy'. It was a cynical strategy drawn from a reactionary tactic but brilliantly devised: 'Increase incarceration by nearly a million, add a couple of million workers to create and maintain a sprawling prison infrastructure, and voila! Lower unemployment and a healthier economy.'

Unfortunately for Barack Obama, the cost of the scam has now come due and middle class anger or not, he has no such option.

America's Yet Unbridged Divide

Colorado Tea Party Billboard

The election of President Barack Hussein Obama has cemented the fissure at the heart of American politics. It is a divide that ironically enough exists in the man himself. Part white, part black, like the antipathies made extant by his very name, Obama is the walking manifestation of the contradiction wrapped inside the enigma known as the U.S. of A.

Founded on the radical principle that "all men were created" the Founders promptly granted themselves the right to buy and sell others as chattel. Eighty years later the South would defend the practice by expounding states' rights yet at the outset it was the states themselves that often decided that owning other human beings ran against the Constitution. In fact, even earlier, in 1770, a colonial Massachusetts Superior Court found that slavery was unconstitutional on the basis of common law. In Georgia, the colony's governing trustees strictly prohibited the practice of slavery, declaring it to be not only immoral, but contrary to English law.

These early rulings were extraordinary when one stops to consider that in the mines and plantations across the 'New World' slavery was not only common practice but the backbone of Europe's economy. In fact were it not for the wealth of the plantation system, there might never have been an American Revolution.

"the vast sums pouring into France from Saint Domingue at exactly the same time made foreign aid to the New World a distinctly more attractive option than it would have been otherwise. The 1770s and 1780s were the richest decades Saint Domingue had ever seen. It goes without saying that the entire enterprise rested on the backs of the men and women whose labor powered it." --Ted Widmer

So why, if not the democratic conscience of the Founders, when it came to sanctioning slavery, was there an American exception? Simple: In order to manage the country's inherent contradiction the Right to Life, Liberty and Happiness was tacitly reserved for white skins. Despite the Massachusetts and Georgia court rulings, the Framers made sure that their "great Democracy" implicitly provided for slavery:

Article I, § 9 of the Constitution expressly states that "a tax or duty may be imposed on such importation not exceeding ten dollars for each person." Under Article IV, § 2, clause 3, the Fugitive Slave Clause, recognized the individual property rights of a slave owner in a slave, indicating a constitutional protection of slave property. Article IV therefore implicitly sanctioned the product that flowed from slave property, namely, slave labor.

John Locke himself, though he once eloquently deplored the practice, wrote Carolina's pro-slavery Constitution. And yet, through it all, the American people remained hopelessly divided. Aggrieved by their own frustrations, women understood that just as sexism justified their subordination, the pillar of slavery was America's racism. Conversely, when an angry mob killed the antislavery editor, Elijah Lovejoy, in Alton, Illinois, the North's poor were persuaded to join the abolitionists, not out of love for the African, but fearing the loss of their own liberties.

These historical contradictions persist, woven into our conceptions of the country itself. Which America one chooses to defend depends on whether a Constituted Right to Life, Liberty and Happiness was meant to extend equally from the days of George Washington to the contentious times of Barack Hussein Obama.