An Open Letter to the Left Establishment

This letter is a call for active support of protest to Michael Moore, Norman Solomon, Katrina van den Heuvel, Michael Eric Dyson, Barbara Ehrenreich, Thomas Frank, Tom Hayden, Bill Fletcher Jr., Jesse Jackson Jr., and other high profile progressive supporters of the Obama electoral campaign.

With the Obama administration beginning its third year, it is by now painfully obvious that the predictions of even the most sober Obama supporters were overly optimistic. Rather than an ally, the administration has shown itself to be an implacable enemy of reform.

It has advanced repeated assaults on the New Deal safety net (including the previously sacrosanct Social Security trust fund), jettisoned any hope for substantive health care reform, attacked civil rights and environmental protections, and expanded a massive bailout further enriching an already bloated financial services and insurance industry. It has continued the occupation of Iraq and expanded the war in Afghanistan as well as our government’s covert and overt wars in South Asia and around the globe.

Along the way, the Obama administration, which referred to its left detractors as “f***ing retarded” individuals that required “drug testing,” stepped up the prosecution of federal war crime whistleblowers, and unleashed the FBI on those protesting the escalation of an insane war.

Obama’s recent announcement of a federal worker pay freeze is cynical, mean-spirited “deficit-reduction theater”. Slashing Bush’s plutocratic tax cuts would have made a much more significant contribution to deficit reduction but all signs are that the “progressive” president will cave to Republican demands for the preservation of George W. Bush’s tax breaks for the wealthy Few. Instead Obama’s tax cut plan would raise taxes for the poorest people in our country.

The election of Obama has not galvanized protest movements. To the contrary, it has depressed and undermined them, with the White House playing an active role in the discouragement and suppression of dissent – with disastrous consequences. The almost complete absence of protest from the left has emboldened the most right-wing elements inside and outside of the Obama administration to pursue and act on an ever more extreme agenda.

We are writing to you because you are well-known writers, bloggers and filmmakers with access to a range of old and new media, and you have in your power the capacity to help reignite the movement which brought millions onto the streets in February of 2003 but which has withered ever since. There are many thousands of progressives who follow your work closely and are waiting for a cue from you and others to act. We are asking you to commit yourself to actively supporting the protests of Obama administration policies which are now beginning to materialize.

In this connection we would like to mention a specific protest: the civil disobedience action being planned by Veterans for Peace involving Chris Hedges, Daniel Ellsberg, Joel Kovel, Medea Benjamin, Ray McGovern, several armed service veterans and others to take place in front of the White House on Dec. 16th.

Should you commit yourselves to backing this action and others sure to materialize in weeks and months ahead, what would otherwise be regarded as an emotional outburst of the “fringe left” will have a better chance of being seen as expressing the will of a substantial majority not only of the left, but of the American public at large. We believe that your support will help create the climate for larger and increasingly disruptive expressions of dissent – a development that is sorely needed and long overdue.

We hope that we can count on you to exercise the leadership that is required of all of us in these desperate times.

Best Regards,

Sen. James Abourezk
Michael Albert
Rocky Anderson
Jared Ball
Russel Banks
Thomas Bias
Noam Chomsky
Bruce Dixon
Frank Dorrel
Gidon Eshel
Jamilla El-Shafei
Okla Elliott
Norman Finkelstein
Glen Ford
Joshua Frank
Margaret Flowers M.D.
John Gerassi
Henry Giroux
Matt Gonzalez
Kevin Alexander Gray
Judd Greenstein
DeeDee Halleck
John Halle
Chris Hedges
Doug Henwood
Edward S. Herman
Dahr Jamail
Louis Kampf
Allison Kilkenny
Jamie Kilstein
Joel Kovel
Mark Kurlansky
Peter Linebaugh
Scott McLarty
Cynthia McKinney
Dede Miller
Russell Mokhiber
Bobby Muller
Christian Parenti
Michael Perelman
Peter Phillips
Louis Proyect
Ted Rall
Michael Ratner
Cindy Sheehan
Chris Spannos
Paul Street
Sunil Sharma
Jeffrey St. Clair
Len Weinglass
Cornel West
Sherry Wolf
Michael Yates
Mickey Z
Kevin Zeese

Please sign the Open Letter to the Left Establishment.

Is He Black Enough?

I now want to address this topic that dominated much of public discourse in the early stages of Barack Obama's historic rise to becoming this nation's first Black president. I think this is worth addressing because it speaks as much to the definition(s) of Blackness in the United States as it does to Barack Obama's right and privilege to carry the banner of hope for the Afro-American constituency in this country. Now, Barack Obama is the son of an White American mother(I am not sure of her ethnicity-Polish? Irish?) and an African father, which means that he personally is not affiliated with the five hundred year legacy of enslaved Africans who toiled in order to build these United States, literally, from the ground up. However, he is apart of the larger African diaspora and his legacy is just as valid here in this country as is those of us whose ancestors were slaves. Let us not even leave out the fact that he is married to an Afro-American woman and is the father of two young Black girls who are very much apart of the legacy of American slavery.

To get even further to the root of this matter, I feel that the issue of biracial presence in the United States must be addressed. This issue,I am inclined to believe, even more so than his African father, leaves this question on the lips of Afro-Americans. I want to address this issue, and write this blogpost, because I have had this discussion with a few people in a few different instances outside of and preceding the presence of Barack Obama. I feel that the Afro-American community does not take a complex enough look at biracial presence--and this is one of the reasons why they have so coldly embraced biracial people. This post, hopefully, will work towards correcting that.

When I was at Purdue there was a girl that lived in my complex whose name I cannot remember, but we got along very well and talked quite often, especially while waiting for the bus to take us to campus. She was biracial, and looked very Jewish, but when I asked, she very readily confirmed and said she was surprised that could tell. One cold winter night, after having together made a mad dash to walmart for something that we needed ( which was right up the street and we thought we would fare better walking together rather than walking along in that slush, cold, and ice), I went back up to her apartment for some nice cocoa and we somehow settled into a discussion of race, biraciality, and her own experiences. She told me of how she had been constantly rejected by Afro-Americans and some of the horrible things she had been called, and also confided in me that it hurt her that many did not define her as a Black person.

After listening to her story, I told her not to worry and to really pay no attention to what some Blacks had been saying to her. I followed this by telling her that the Afro-American community--by its very definition--was an absolutely mixed bag and could not make any claims to a true or pure Blackness. I suggested to her-- how is it that she might have a white mother and a black father and not be black, but if you count no more than two or three generations sometimes in most Black communities and you have white ancestors as well--yet they are Black? I pointed to my own paternal grandfather who I was truly the whitest Black man I have ever seen( it would anger my father if you ever called his father a white man) and my maternal great-great grandmother(who was a quadroon and whose own mother was a white woman).

If the presence of nonBlack or White ancestry or parentage left one not really Black--just imagine how many Black people in this country came from people that weren't really Black? Consider all of the Octoroons and Quadroons and Mulattoes who after the Civil War--when the racial lines were brutally and strictly drawn and mulattoes were forced to make a choice--and chose to become Black(because the White people weren't taking them unless they could pass and get away with it), which led them to find dark-skinned mates so that there children would more easily fit into the Afro-American community. Let us not even leave out the Black Indians and Blacks mixed with Chinese....Consider how many so-called real Black people are the products of these unions.... As in Brazil and other Countries with a colonial past--the ancestral lines lighten and darken as you go up and down the totem pole depending on social and economic positioning.

All of this is suffice to say that claims to true or real Blackness and the efforts to exclude people from the Afro-American community on the basis of biracial existence should absolutely be rethought and done away with. The Afro-American community was founded on inclusion. When the first mulatto babies begot from the master--by either rape or concubinage or whatever the situation may have been-were cradled in the Black hands that birthed them...the Afro-American community has always included and counted biracial people in its ranks.

And so to answer the question, Is Barack Obama Black Enough?-- The answer is absolutely!

Barack Obama's Speech in New Hampshire was Very Inspiring

What New Hampshire proves--as far as I can see it, is that this will be a pretty tight race through and through--and all of the pundit-talk that is going on really isnt worth a damn. I still believe that Obama will come out on top of this race--and that the historical trend rests on his side. I encourage all to listen to his speech.

I am now reading Barack Obama's The Audacity of Hope. It is a powerful book. His analysis of the U.S. economy is quite interesting and it has made me to revisit that topic again as well. I am quite concerned about what is happening to the U.S economy. There are terrible things underfoot.

When I heard Obama's victory speech in Iowa this morning on Tom Joyner I cried....and my hope has been restored.

Hooray!