A History of Naked Imperialism Continues as Biden Approves Somalia Redeployment

By TJ Coles

Republished from Internationalist 360

Almost as soon as the administration of President Joseph Biden announced a redeployment of US Special Operations Forces to Somalia on May 16, the Western media began to spin the intervention.

As the BBC framed it, Biden’s deployment would “support the fight against militant group al-Shabab” (sic). The intervention coincides with the re-election of former Somalian President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud, who governed between 2012 and ‘17.

Similarly, the New York Times (NYT) reported that “Biden has approved a Pentagon request for standing authority to target about a dozen suspected leaders of Al Shabab, the Somali terrorist group that is affiliated with Al Qaeda.”

But are these motives true? Does Washington really want merely to defeat al-Shabab? Is al-Shabab actually linked to al-Qaeda and, if so, to what degree? As usual, the mainstream state-corporate media reportage is missing context and reference to international law.

As we shall see, the context behind the US redeployment is naked imperialism using counterterrorism as the latest in a long line of excuses to interfere in the politics of the strategically-significant country on the Horn of Africa. In terms of international law, signatories of the UN Charter have legal responsibilities to gain authorization from the Security Council before launching military operations –– something the Biden administration and its predecessors have never done in Somalia, or anywhere else, for that matter.

It is also worth tackling the Trump-era propaganda, which is double-edged. Trump supporters claimed that their hero ended America’s “forever wars,” as he “bombed the shit out of ISIS,” in his words, which often meant dumping munitions on Iraqi and Syrian women and children, while blowing Somalis to pieces via drone operators in numbers greater than during Obama’s term. It is accurate that Trump withdrew US ground forces from Somalia, though it appears to have been both an America First PR stunt and a device to make things difficult for the incoming Biden administration.

On the other side, the pro-war, neoliberal, anti-Trump establishment sought to portray Trump’s withdrawal of ground troops as a sign of American weakness in the face of globalized “Islamic” terrorists. By demonizing Trump and inaccurately reporting the motives of his withdrawal, the NYT, BBC and company were essentially clamoring for US militarism in Somalia: Trump bad so militarism good. And as usual, their reporting was absent of any critical or skeptical voices.

The real agenda: “acquire and maintain the capability to respond to any military contingency that could threaten U.S. interests”

Billionaire-backed, self-appointed “fact-checkers” like Snopes, PolitiFact often rate what they call “fake news” as having “missing context,” yet mainstream state-corporate media operate almost entirely on an unspoken doctrine of propaganda-by-omission. Researchers are left to piece together the kind of coherent recent-historical narratives that MSM refuse to provide. Somalia’s “missing context” can be summarized as follows:

In 1997, the US Space Command (which is still operational, though its duties are largely second to the Space Force) committed the Pentagon to achieving “full spectrum dominance” of land, sea, air, and space by the year 2020, “to protect US interests and investment,” which means elite corporate interests. Since then, numerous oil-rich and strategically-important nations have been occupied by the US and its allies. Various Pentagon departments, including the Central Command and Africa Command, divide the world into self-appointed Areas of Responsibility, based on the given region and/or nation’s strategic relevance to the Pentagon. This follows Britain’s colonial model.

In the 1950s, the Colonial Office described Aden—the Gulf between Yemen and Somalia—as “an important base,” from which forces could rapidly deploy to the energy-rich Middle East. In those days, the so-called Scramble for Africa (which began in the late-19th century) was justified under the doctrine of the “white’s man burden”: the mission to civilize the backward black races, as their lands and resources were plundered.

But Somalia gained independence in 1960 before being governed by the one-time CIA-backed dictator Siad Barre, who ruled from 1969 to ‘91. At the time, US support for Siad—including his killing of tens of thousands of political rivals—was justified as part of American Cold War policy.

With the Cold War over and Siad deposed, successive US administrations tested new “interventionist” doctrines, the first post-Cold War ideology being humanitarian intervention. Operation Restore Hope was launched in 1992 by the outgoing George H.W. Bush administration, supposedly to provide humanitarian relief during the famine triggered by the civil war. But a Fort Leavenworth paper reveals a hidden agenda: “Throughout our involvement with Somalia, our overriding strategic objective was simply to acquire and maintain the capability to respond to any military contingency that could threaten U.S. interests in the Middle East, Northeast Africa and the Red Sea area.”

Under an umbrella of Islamic political parties, known as the Islamic Courts Union (ICU), most of them non-extremist, Somalia enjoyed a short period of peace, stability, and an increase in living standards. Branches of the UN, Amnesty International, and the British foreign policy think-tank Chatham House have acknowledged that the ICU prevented “piracy,” provided schooling for large numbers of children, and reduced malnutrition.

The US and UK wage proxy war on the ICU, infiltrate the movement with Al Qaeda extremists

The attacks of 9/11 in 2001 provided the George W. Bush administration an excuse to sanction Somali banks, even though the 9/11 Commission cleared the banks of wrongdoing. Since then, Somalia has become a testing ground for the imposition of cashless societies.

Convinced that the more right-wing elements of the ICU were “al-Qaeda” fronts, the Joint Special Operations Command and CIA operated covertly in Somalia. Failing to destroy the ICU from within, the US and Britain backed an opposition government in exile comprised of Ethiopian and other warlords.

In December 2006, Ethiopia invaded Somalia as a US-British proxy war. Hundreds of thousands of Somalis fled to neighboring Kenyan and Ethiopian refugee camps, while others made the perilous journey in rickety boats to Yemen. The so-called Transitional Federal Government was comprised of killers and torturers funded by the British taxpayer and given homes and citizenship in the UK. The war reversed the ICU’s social achievements and thousands starved in successive famines.

The frightening-sounding al-Shabab simply means “the Youth,” and was the young persons’ wing of the ICU. In 2007, with the non-violent ICU destroyed by a campaign of US-British terror, al-Shabab turned to violence to defend its country against Ethiopian aggressors and Somali collaborators. British intelligence agencies saw their chance to infiltrate al-Shabab with terrorists and transform it from a nationalist militia into an extremist group that could then be used as pretext for more Western aggression against Somalia. And indeed, some of the high-profile terrorists operating in Somalia post-9/11 were US-British intelligence assets.

It is well-known that the British and American militaries helped fuel the rise of what was later known as “al-Qaeda” to battle the Soviets in 1980s’ Afghanistan. One Afghanistan-based terror cell at the time was a Somali group called Al-Itihaad al-Islamiya, whose leader Ahmed Abdi Godane went on to lead al-Shabab after the ICU collapsed. In London, an MI5 double agent tasked with spying on mosques tried in vain to alert his handlers to the fact that Osama Bin Laden’s main UK connection, Abu Qatada, was training and sending fighters to half a dozen Muslim-majority countries, including Somalia. TIME had reported that Qatada was an asset of MI5.

A US puppet takes control in Somalia as drone war escalates

In 2010, with war still raging, US President Obama signed Executive Order 13536, describing Somalia — a country nearly 8,000 miles away with a GDP of less than $5 billion — as an “extraordinary threat to the national security and foreign policy of the United States.” As you wipe tears of laughter away, notice the emphasis on “foreign policy”: non-compliant regimes in Somalia might threaten total US operational freedom along the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden.

That year, the radicalized and infiltrated al-Shabab launched its first foreign attacks (in Uganda and later Kenya), prompting regional governments to join the US in “counterterrorism” operations. A year later, drone strikes against “al-Shabab” and other groups began, killing at least 300 people by 2017; tragedies small in comparison to the hundreds of thousands who died in multiple, human-made famines over the last decade.

In 2011, the group allegedly pledged allegiance to “al-Qaeda.” The 2012 election of Hassan Sheikh Mohamud provided the US with a client who was described by Obama’s National Security Council spokesperson, Caitlin Hayden, as committed to “strengthen[ing Somalia’s] democratic institutions and promot[ing] economic development.”

By 2016, Bush and Obama had launched a total of 41 confirmed strikes largely from the US base at Camp Lemonier in neighboring Djibouti. The Shabab leader, Godane, was killed in one such strike. His replacement is supposedly named Ahmad Umar, and is a shadowy bogeyman about whom little is known.  By 2020, Trump alone had launched 40 drone strikes against Somalia, eliminating AFRICOM’s accountability protocols.

Exploiting “playgrounds for a new scramble in the Horn of Africa”

We cannot say that corporate-state media do not do their job. They have successfully kept the public ignorant and deluded on virtually every geopolitical issue of significance. Nor can we say that the “war on terror” has failed (i.e., that after 20 years terror groups still operate), because it is not designed to combat terrorism. It is designed to produce an endless cycle of tit-for-tat killings and to create extremist groups where none previously existed. Permanent counterterrorism is a thin smokescreen to justify “full spectrum dominance” to the voting and taxpaying American public whose purse is plundered to fund these wars.

As we see from recent history, professed justifications for bloody US interference in impoverished Somalia shift according to the political climate: countering the Soviets until the collapse of the USSR in 1991, preventing famine under the guise of 1990s’ humanitarian intervention, stopping “pirates” as European ships plunder the starving country’s fish stocks, and, for the last two decades, fighting endless hordes of post-9/11 terrorists; many of them incubated in London by protected intelligence assets.

Britain’s Ministry of Defence recently announced that 70 personnel are training 1,000 Somalis as part of the African Union’s so-called Transition Mission in Somalia, “protecting civilians from Al Shabaab and other terrorist groups.” A more plausible reason for the ongoing US-British involvement is offered by a policy paper published last year by the European University: “Strategic areas of the western shore and the Horn of Africa are being incorporated in the Red Sea geopolitical map and Sudan, Djibouti, Somalia and Eritrea have become playgrounds for a new scramble in the Horn of Africa.”

As excuses change, the geographies of power remain the same. These strategic interests are the real motivations for war. Ordinary people, as always, pay the price.

T.J. Coles is a postdoctoral researcher at Plymouth University’s Cognition Institute and the author of several books, the latest being We’ll Tell You What to Think: Wikipedia, Propaganda and the Making of Liberal Consensus.

Afghanistan, Western Imperialism, and the Great Game of Smashing Countries

By John Pilger

Republished from Mint Press News.

As a tsunami of crocodile tears engulfs Western politicians, history is suppressed. More than a generation ago, Afghanistan won its freedom, which the United States, Britain and their “allies” destroyed.

In 1978, a liberation movement led by the People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA) overthrew the dictatorship of Mohammad Dawd, the cousin of King Zahir Shar. It was an immensely popular revolution that took the British and Americans by surprise.

Foreign journalists in Kabul, reported the New York Times, were surprised to find that “nearly every Afghan they interviewed said [they were] delighted with the coup”. The Wall Street Journal  reported that “150,000 persons… marched to honour the new flag… the participants appeared genuinely enthusiastic.”

The Washington Post reported that “Afghan loyalty to the government can scarcely be questioned”. Secular, modernist and, to a considerable degree, socialist, the government declared a programme of visionary reforms that included equal rights for women and minorities. Political prisoners were freed and police files publicly burned.

Under the monarchy, life expectancy was thirty-five; one in three children died in infancy. Ninety per cent of the population was illiterate. The new government introduced free medical care. A mass literacy campaign was launched.

For women, the gains had no precedent; by the late 1980s, half the university students were women, and women made up 40 per cent of Afghanistan’s doctors, 70 per cent of its teachers and 30 per cent of its civil servants.

So radical were the changes that they remain vivid in the memories of those who benefited. Saira Noorani, a female surgeon who fled Afghanistan in 2001, recalled:

Every girl could go to high school and university. We could go where we wanted and wear what we liked… We used to go to cafes and the cinema to see the latest Indian films on a Friday… it all started to go wrong when the mujahedin started winning… these were the people the West supported.

For the United States, the problem with the PDPA government was that it was supported by the Soviet Union. Yet it was never the “puppet” derided in the West, neither was the coup against the monarchy “Soviet-backed”, as the American and British press claimed at the time.

President Jimmy Carter’s Secretary of State, Cyrus Vance, later wrote in his memoirs:

We had no evidence of any Soviet complicity in the coup.

In the same administration was Zbigniew Brzezinski, Carter’s National Security Adviser, a Polish émigré  and fanatical anti-communist and moral extremist whose enduring influence on American presidents expired only with his death in 2017.

On 3 July 1979, unknown to the American people and Congress, Carter authorised a $500 million “covert action” programme to overthrow Afghanistan’s first secular, progressive government. This was code-named by the CIA Operation Cyclone.

The $500 million bought, bribed and armed a group of tribal and religious zealots known as the mujahedin. In his semi-official history, Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward wrote that the CIA spent $70 million on bribes alone. He describes a meeting between a CIA agent known as “Gary” and a warlord called Amniat-Melli:

Gary placed a bundle of cash on the table: $500,000 in one-foot stacks of $100 bills. He believed it would be more impressive than the usual $200,000, the best way to say we’re here, we’re serious, here’s money, we know you need it… Gary would soon ask CIA headquarters for and receive $10 million in cash.

Recruited from all over the Muslim world, America’s secret army was trained in camps in Pakistan run by Pakistani intelligence, the CIA and Britain’s MI6. Others were recruited at an Islamic College in Brooklyn, New York–within sight of the doomed Twin Towers. One of the recruits was a Saudi engineer called Osama bin Laden.

The aim was to spread Islamic fundamentalism in Central Asia and destabilise and eventually destroy the Soviet Union.

In August, 1979, the U.S. Embassy in Kabul reported that “the United States’ larger interests… would be served by the demise of the PDPA government, despite whatever setbacks this might mean for future social and economic reforms in Afghanistan.”

Read again the words above I have italicised. It is not often that such cynical intent is spelt out as clearly. The U.S. was saying that a genuinely progressive Afghan government and the rights of Afghan women could go to hell.

Six months later, the Soviets made their fatal move into Afghanistan in response to the American-created jihadist threat on their doorstep. Armed with CIA-supplied Stinger missiles and celebrated as “freedom fighters” by Margaret Thatcher, the mujahedin eventually drove the Red Army out of Afghanistan.

Calling themselves the Northern Alliance, the mujahedin were dominated by warlords who controlled the heroin trade and terrorised rural women. The Taliban were an ultra-puritanical faction, whose mullahs wore black and punished banditry, rape and murder but banished women from public life.

In the 1980s, I made contact with the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan, known as RAWA, which had tried to alert the world to the suffering of Afghan women. During the Taliban time they concealed cameras beneath their burqas to film evidence of atrocities, and did the same to expose the brutality of the Western-backed mujahedin. “Marina” of RAWA told me,

We took the videotape to all the main media groups, but they didn’t want to know….

In 1996, the enlightened PDPA government was overrun. The Prime Minister, Mohammad Najibullah, had gone to the United Nations to appeal to for help. On his return, he was hanged from a street light.

“I confess that [countries] are pieces on a chessboard,” said Lord Curzon in 1898,

upon which is being played out a great game for the domination of the world.

The Viceroy of India was referring in particular to Afghanistan. A century later, Prime Minister Tony Blair used slightly different words.

“This is a moment to seize,” he said following 9/11.

The Kaleidoscope has been shaken. The pieces are in flux. Soon they will settle again. Before they do, let us re-order this world around us.

On Afghanistan, he added this:

We will not walk away [but ensure] some way out of the poverty that is your miserable existence.

Blair echoed his mentor, President George W. Bush, who spoke to the victims of his bombs from the Oval Office:

The oppressed people of Afghanistan will know the generosity of America. As we strike military targets, we will also drop food, medicine and supplies to the starving and suffering…

Almost every word was false. Their declarations of concern were cruel illusions for an imperial savagery “we” in the West rarely recognise as such.

In 2001, Afghanistan was stricken and depended on emergency relief convoys from Pakistan. As the journalist Jonathan Steele reported, the invasion indirectly caused the deaths of some 20,000 people as supplies to drought victims stopped and people fled their homes.

Eighteen months later, I found unexploded American cluster bombs in the rubble of Kabul which were often mistaken for yellow relief packages dropped from the air. They blew the limbs off foraging, hungry children.

In the village of Bibi Maru, I watched a woman called Orifa kneel at the graves of her husband, Gul Ahmed, a carpet weaver, and seven other members of her family, including six children, and two children who were killed next door.

An American F-16 aircraft had come out of a clear blue sky and dropped a Mk82 500-pound bomb on Orifa’s mud, stone and straw house. Orifa was away at the time. When she returned, she gathered the body parts.

Months later, a group of Americans came from Kabul and gave her an envelope with fifteen notes: a total of 15 dollars. “Two dollars for each of my family killed,” she said.

The invasion of Afghanistan was a fraud. In the wake of 9/11, the Taliban sought to distant themselves from Osama bin Laden. They were, in many respects, an American client with which the administration of Bill Clinton had done a series of secret deals to allow the building of a $3 billion natural gas pipeline by a U.S. oil company consortium.

In high secrecy, Taliban leaders had been invited to the U.S. and entertained by the CEO of the Unocal company in his Texas mansion and by the CIA at its headquarters in Virginia. One of the deal-makers was Dick Cheney, later George W. Bush’s Vice-President.

In 2010, I was in Washington and arranged to interview the mastermind of Afghanistan’s modern era of suffering, Zbigniew Brzezinski. I quoted to him his autobiography in which he admitted that his grand scheme for drawing the Soviets into Afghanistan had created “a few stirred up Muslims”.

“Do you have any regrets?” I asked.

Regrets! Regrets! What regrets?

When we watch the current scenes of panic at Kabul airport, and listen to journalists and generals in distant TV studios bewailing the withdrawal of “our protection”, isn’t it time to heed the truth of the past so that all this suffering never happens again?

In Somalia, the US is Bombing the Very ‘Terrorists’ it Created

[Photo credit: ABDIRAZAK HUSSEIN FARAH/AFP/GETTY IMAGES]

By TJ Coles

Republished from Internationalist 360.

This July, the Biden administration picked up where Trump left off and began bombing Somalia, a country with a gross domestic product of less than $6 billion and a poverty rate of 70 percent. But why?

The official reason provided by the Pentagon was that the Somali National Army needed air support in its operations to counter al-Shabaab. But the actual reason was that Somalia is geo-strategically important to US empire.

Successive US administrations have cycled through a myriad of excuses to either bomb the country or to arm its dictators: Cold War politics, “humanitarian intervention,” anti-piracy, and more recently counterterrorism.

As we shall see, in the mid-2000s, a fragile coalition of soft and hard Islamists – explicitly not allied to al-Qaeda at the time – brought some measure of peace to the areas of Somalia it controlled. With help from Britain and neighboring Ethiopia, the US smashed the coalition and pushed more right-wing elements like al-Shabaab over the edge into militancy.

And of course, the global superpower bombing one of the poorest countries on Earth in the name of national security is not terrorism.

Let’s take a look at the broader context and specific chronology.

A US imperial bulwark is born in Africa

The Pentagon has divided the world into self-appointed Areas of Responsibility (AORs). The Southern Command deems itself “responsible” for operations in Central and South America, regardless of what the people of the region think.

The Central Command (CENTCOM) covers much of the Middle East and Central Asia: the key intersections of energy fields and pipelines that enable the US to influence the global economy at the expense of competitors, notably Russia and China.

The Africa Command (AFRICOM) was founded in 2007 by the George W. Bush administration and is based in Stuttgart, Germany. President Barack Obama vastly expanded its operations.

AFRICOM’s current AOR covers 53 of the continent’s 54 states, with Egypt in the northeast already under the AOR of CENTCOM due to its strategic value (more below).

AFRICOM recently bragged about how it helped coordinate with Somali “partners,” meaning elements of the regime imposed on the country by the West, to organize the Biden-led bombing of al-Shabaab.

AFRICOM says: “The command’s initial assessment is that no civilians were injured or killed given the remote nature of where this engagement occurred.” But who knows?

US commanders operating in the African theater have tended to dismiss the notion that civilian deaths should be tallied at all. In 1995, for example, the US wound down its “assistance” to the UN mission in Somalia, but ended up in a shooting war in which several Somalis died.

The US commander, Lt. Gen. Anthony Zinni, said at the time, “I’m not counting bodies… I’m not interested.”

Somalia’s geopolitical importance to US empire

In the Africa-Middle East regions, three seas are of strategic importance to the big powers: the Mediterranean, the Red Sea (connected by Egypt’s Suez Canal), and the Gulf of Aden, which is shared by Somalia in Africa and Yemen in the Middle East.

Through these seas and routes travel the shipping containers of the world, carrying oil, gas, and consumer products. They are essential for the strategic deployment of troops and naval destroyers.

Somalia was occupied by Britain and Italy during the “Scramble for Africa,” the continent-wide resource-grab by Western colonial powers that began in the late-19. Ethiopia continues to occupy Somalia’s Ogaden region.

A 1950s’ British Colonial Office report described the Gulf of Aden as “an important base from which naval, military and air forces can protect British interests in the Persian Gulf and the Arabian Peninsula.” “British” interests, like “US” interests today, means elite interests.

A George W. Bush-era report by the US Army War College notes that, “Even before the Suez Canal came into being, the [Red] Sea had been of importance as an international waterway. It served as a bridge between the richest areas of Europe and the Far East.” The report emphasizes that the “geopolitical position of the Red Sea is of a special importance.”

AFRICOM was founded with a grand imperial ambition: to make the four of the five countries on Africa’s Red Sea coast – Djibouti, Eritrea, Somalia, and Sudan – comply with US elite interests, and to keep the Sea, Gulf of Aden, and Suez Canal open for business and strategic deployment.

As noted before, CENTCOM covers Egypt. During the Arab Spring a decade ago, US strategists feared, like their British predecessors, that losing the Suez Canal to a democratic government in Egypt “would damage U.S. capabilities to mobilize forces to contain Iran and would weaken the overall U.S. defense strategy in the Middle East,” home of much of the world’s accessible oil.

International interference drives Somalia’s civil conflict

Somalia declared independence in 1960. Its British and Italian areas merged into a single nation led by President Aden Abdullah Osman and Prime Minister Abdirashid Ali Shermarke, who later became president. Most political parties merged with the Somali Youth League to create a de facto single-party state.

Backed by the West, Ethiopia blocked Somalia’s diplomatic efforts to reclaim the Ogaden region. As president, Abdirashid took millions of dollars in Soviet military assistance and was subsequently assassinated by one “Said Orfano,” a young police-trained man posing as a cop and erroneously referred to in contemporary sources as a “bodyguard.”

Major General Siad Barre took over in 1969 and ruled until his overthrow in 1991. An early-1970s CIA intelligence memo refers to Russian-Somali relations as “largely a liaison of convenience,” marred by “mutual” “distrust.”

After Barre’s failed war with Ethiopia over Ogaden and his explicit rejection of Soviet money and ideology, the US saw him as a client. In 1977, senior US policymakers highlighted Somalia’s “break with the Soviets.” From then until 1989, the US gave nearly $600 million in military aid to Barre’s regime to nudge it further from the Soviet sphere of influence.

The Barre regime used the newly augmented military – from 3,000 to 120,000 personnel – to crush the rival Somali National Movement, killing tens of thousands of civilians and driving a million people from their homes.

But the coalition that deposed Barre in 1991 fell apart and the rival factions fought a civil war that triggered famine and killed an additional 300,000 people within the first couple of years.

The United Nations intervened to deliver food to civilians. The US saw the move as an opportunity to test the new doctrine of “humanitarian intervention” in the form of Operation Restore Hope. President George H.W. Bush said that the objective was to “save thousands of innocents from death.”

But a master’s thesis by Major Vance J. Nannini of the US Army’s Fort Leavenworth provides a version of events much closer to the truth: “Throughout our involvement with Somalia, our overriding strategic objective was simply to acquire and maintain the capability to respond to any military contingency that could threaten U.S. interests in the Middle East, Northeast Africa and the Red Sea area.”

Restore Hope ended in a fiasco for the US, exemplified by the famous Black Hawk Down incident, and thousands of Somali deaths – “I’m not counting bodies,” as Commander Zinni said of a later mission.

A convenient target in the “war on terror”

In Djibouti in 1999, a Transitional National Government (TNG) was formed in exile and came to power in the Somali capital, Mogadishu, in 2001.

At the same time, a broad umbrella of Sufis and Salafists – the “left” and “right” of Islam – known as the Islamic Courts Union (ICU) was gaining political and territorial ground.

The TNG collapsed in 2004 and was replaced with a Transitional Federal Government founded in Kenya and backed by the Ethiopian proxy Abdullahi Yusuf, a man harbored by Britain and even given a liver transplant in the UK. (The liver allegedly came from an Irish Republican Army member. “Now I am a real killer,” joked Abdullahi.)

Abdullahi was found liable for damages in a UK court over the killing of a British citizen in Somalia in 2002 by his bodyguards.

Under the post-9/11 rubric of fighting a “war on terror,” the CIA added to the chaos throughout the period by covertly funding non-Islamist “warlords,” including those the US previously fought in the 1990s. The aim was to kill and capture ICU members and other Islamists.

In addition, the Pentagon’s secretive Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) engaged in covert operations. Estimates of the number of JSOC personnel on the ground in Somalia range from three to 100.

US Special Forces set up a network of operations and surveillance in the country, supposedly to counter al-Qaeda.

In 2003, for instance, US agents kidnapped an innocent man, Suleiman Abdullah Salim, from a Mogadishu hospital. Claiming that he was an “al-Qaeda” operative, the US had Suleiman tortured at a number of “rendition” sites before releasing him. (The operatives who grabbed him were tipped off by the “warlord” Mohammed Dheere, who was paid by the CIA.)

But one of the Arabic meanings of “al-Qaeda” is “the database,” referring to the computer file with information on the tens of thousands of mujahideen and their acolytes trained, armed, organized, and funded by the US and Britain throughout the 1980s to fight the Soviets (Operation Cyclone).

There are more direct links between the US and al-Shabaab. In his younger days, ICU secretary and later al-Shabaab leader Ahmed Abdi Godane joined the only major terrorist group in Somalia in the 1990s, Al-Itihaad al-Islamiya (AIAI, “Islamic Union”). The AIAI fighters trained with “al-Qaeda” in Afghanistan in the 1980s, when the US and Britain were training “al-Qaeda.” (See citation no. 7.)

Killing Somalia’s hope

By the mid-2000s, with the rise of the ICU, the hope of stability came to Somalia – but it was not to last. In 2003, the US Combined Joint Tasks Force Horn of Africa initiated training of Ethiopia’s military in tactics, logistics, and maintenance. The US backing later came in handy fighting the ICU.

The ICU was rapidly and widely painted as an extremist organization. However, a Congressional Research Service (CRS) report notes that it was “well received by the people in the areas the Courts controlled,” particularly as it provided social services.

Western propaganda spun the ICU’s shutting down of cinemas as proof of its Islamo-fascism. But the CRS report says that such measures were undertaken at the request of parents because children were skipping school, “not because of the Courts’ alleged jihadist and extremist ideology… There is no evidence to support the allegation that women were prohibited from working.”

As Western vessels continue to deplete starving Somalia’s fish stocks to sell to comparatively privileged consumers, propaganda denounces Somali “piracy” against Euro-American ships. However, a report by the Royal Institute for International Affairs (the British think tank also known as Chatham House), says: “The only period during which piracy virtually vanished around Somalia was during the six months of rule by the Islamic Courts Union in the second half of 2006.”

A World Bank report from 2006 notes that the ICU “brought a measure of law and order to the large areas of South-Central Somalia” it controlled. The US State Department, meanwhile, was hosting an international conference in a bid to remove the ICU and bolster the Transitional Federal Government (TFG).

With US and British training, including logistical support, Ethiopia invaded Somalia in late-2006 to install Abdullahi as President of the TFG.

The US and Britain worked hard to set up a new regime in a war so brutal that over 1 million people fled their homes. In addition, tens of thousands crossed the Gulf of Aden to Yemen in hazardous small boats sailed by traffickers. Hundreds of thousands ended up in dire refugee camps in Ethiopia and Kenya, where women and girls were raped.

A US- and UK-backed regime terrorizes Somalia’s people

The Transitional Federal Government terrorized the Somali population. One of the few British journalists to report on this at the time, the Kenya-born Aidan Hartley, wrote: “several Somali leaders who have been linked to allegations of war crimes against countless civilians are living double lives in Britain.”

General Mohamed Darwish, head of the TFG’s National Security Agency, was “given British citizenship, state benefits and a subsidised home.”

The taxpayer-funded privatization unit the Department for International Development (DFID, now part of the Foreign Office) paid TFG politicians’ salaries, as well as buying police radios and vehicles.

Human Rights Watch says that the Commissioner of the Somali Police Force, Brig. Gen. Abdi Hasan Awale Qaybdib, was “a former warlord who has been implicated in serious human rights abuses that predate his tenure as commissioner.”

A House of Commons Library report confirms that the UN Development Program (UNDP) and the World Food Program (WFP) were used as unwitting conduits: “DFID has pledged over £20 million in new commitments for Somalia, including £12 million to the WFP. No money goes directly to the TFG. It is channelled through the UNDP.”

By 2011, this included training 3,000 police in Somaliland and hiring mercenaries formerly of the UK Special Boat Service, who were promised up to £1,500 a day.

The consequences for Somali civilians were devastating. In addition to the refugees noted above, the instability caused by the war triggered another famine by jeopardizing aid and driving people from areas near food distribution centers.

The US has survived shocks like 9/11 because it is a robust nation. Fragile countries like Somalia cannot withstand major political disruptions.

Transforming Somalia into an extremist haven

President George W. Bush bombed “al-Qaeda” targets in Somalia in January 2007. Al-Shabaab, then led by the hard-line Godane, survived the collapse of the ICU in the same year.

The UN Security Council then authorized the African Union (AU) to occupy Somalia with “peacekeepers,” with AMISON being the US support mission.

The British-backed TFG President Abdullahi resigned in 2008 and was replaced by the former ICU leader, the more moderate Sheikh Sharif Sheikh Ahmed. Sharif met with Obama’s Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in 2009, who pledged US support to the TFG in its fight against its former armed wing, al-Shabaab.

A West Point study notes that, using sharia, al-Shabaab had by 2009 “succeeded in bringing about a period of relative stability in much of the territory it controlled,” just like the ICU before it. Shabaab was also comparatively moderate: the “leadership pursued a pragmatic approach toward clan politics and drew its leadership and rank-and-file from a relatively diverse array of clans and sub-clans, unlike many of Somalia’s other armed factions.”

But the group made tactical errors, such as the Ramadan Offensives (2009-1010) against the TFG and AMISON forces in Mogadishu. With Shabaab weakened, Godane merged the group with “al-Qaeda” in 2011.

British-backed terrorists poured into Somalia to join Godane. By the time it allied with al-Qaeda, a quarter of Shabaab’s fighters hailed from the UK. Many had been radicalized by Abu Qatada, a man once described as Bin Laden’s “right-hand man in Europe” and a protected asset of Britain’s internal MI5 Security Service.

Via an entity called al-Muhajiroun (the Emigrants), MI5 informant Omar Bakri Mohammed and an alleged double-agent for Britain’s external security force (MI6), Haroon Rashid Aswat, also radicalized young Muslims to fight in Somalia.

The Nigeria-born Michael Adebolajo, who was charged in the UK with murder, had previously attempted to recruit for Shabaab in Kenya. He maintains that MI5 attempted to recruit him.

A time-tested recipe for destabilization and disaster

Since merging with “al-Qaeda,” al-Shabaab has extended its reach, reportedly sending suicide bombers into neighboring countries, including Kenya.

One could say that the Biden administration has learned no lessons after decades of interference in Somalia. But this would be inaccurate. Successive US administrations understand perfectly that stirring the pot of extremism and relying on propaganda to report the result, not the process, gives them endless excuses to occupy other countries.

The Pentagon is committed to global domination, Somalia is a strategic chokepoint, and the Department of Defense needs reasons to maintain its presence in the country.

The US created al-Shabaab in several ways. First, it escalated Islamist vs. non-Islamist tensions by backing secular “warlords” as a proxy against the ICU in the mid-2000s. This alienated the moderate factions of the ICU and empowered the right-wing Islamists.

Second, and most importantly, Washington backed Ethiopia’s invasion in late 2006, triggering a catastrophe for the civilian population, many of whom welcomed hard-line Muslims because they imposed a degree of law and order.

Third, by painting the nomadic and Sufi Islamist nation of Somalia as a hub of right-wing Salafi extremism, Western policymakers and media propagandists created a self-fulfilling prophesy in which Muslim fundamentalists eventually joined the terror groups they were already accused of being part of.

Fourth, for a country supposedly concerned with international terrorism, the US has done nothing to rein in one its closest allies, the UK, whose successive governments have sheltered a number of Islamic extremists that recruited for Somalia.

Even if we look at Somalia’s crisis through a liberal lens that ignores titanic imperial crimes, such as triggering famines, and focus on the lesser but still serious crimes of suicide bombings, it is hard not to conclude that Somalia’s pot of extremism was stirred by Western interference.

Late-Stage Capitalism and the Pedagogical Resurgence of Anti-Fascism

By Colin Jenkins

This essay originally appeared in Keywords in Radical Philosophy and Education: Common Concepts for Contemporary Movements (2019, BRILL)

Social unrest is a daily part of American life. Between the alarming regularity of mass killings and school shootings and the violent street clashes between right-wing fascists and left-wing anti-fascists, it seems as though America’s chickens are finally coming home to roost. Despite its uniqueness, the United States is heading down the same path as so many hegemonic empires of the past, quickly approaching its demise through a combination of exhaustive military campaigns abroad and chronic neglect of a majority of its citizenry at home. Mainstream American culture is inadvertently responding to its empire’s demise. Dystopian-based “entertainment” is on the rise again, millennials are abandoning the traditional American lifestyle en masse, virtual lives based in gaming culture and social media have seemingly grabbed a hold of many wishing to escape and withdraw from the drudgery of real life, and political poles are becoming more polarized as extremist centrism intensifies to protect the status quo.

While many recognize that something is wrong, most have difficulties pinpointing what it is, let alone what is causing it. The pronounced social unrest and emergence of mainstream nihilism have sparked a cavalcade of typical, cutesy, click-bait articles online, claiming “millennials are killing [insert here]” and pushing for “minimalist lifestyles” while hawking shipping-container homes, and superficial corporate news analysis which resembles more of tabloid “journalism” than anything approaching substance. Even so-called “progressive” movements that have formed within this climate, such as Black Lives Matter, the Poor People’s Campaign, and the Women’s March, have failed to reach a substantive level of resistance by ignoring the roots of the people’s problems while insisting on operating within the narrow confines of the mainstream political arena.

The good news is that these social phenomena are not mysterious forces rising out of thin air. They have roots. They have causes. And with multiple political forces coming to a head, many are starting to not only search for these causes, but are starting to identify them. The sudden resurgence of socialism in the United States – after laying dormant since the counterinsurgency of the US government during the 1960s, which resulted in violent state repression against radical resistance groups, the subsequent “Reagan revolution” and rise of the neoliberal era, and Francis Fukuyama’s infamous suggestion that “history had ended” — signifies a much-needed counter to capitalist culture. The wave of counter-hegemony that has come with it defies capitalism’s insistence that we are nothing but commodities — laborers and consumers born to serve as conduits to the rapid upward flow of profit — and has begun to construct a wall against the spread of fascism that is inevitable with late-stage capitalism, as well as a battering ram that seeks to bring this system to its knees once and for all.

Capitalism’s Destructive Path

Humanity has been on a collision course with the capitalist system since its inception. While Marx’s famous prediction that capitalists would eventually serve as their own gravediggers has been delayed by a multitude of unforeseen forces, most notably the overwhelming power and adaptability of the imperialist and capitalist state, it is nonetheless charging toward fruition. As the term “late-stage capitalism” has become widely used among the American Left, it is important to understand what it is referring to. This understanding may only come through systemic and historical analysis, and especially that of the basic mechanisms of capitalism, the social and economic conditions that birthed capitalism, and the subsequent stages of capitalism over the past few centuries.

Referring to capitalism as being in a “late stage” is based on the understanding that the system – with all of its internal contradictions, its tendency to concentrate wealth and power into the hands of a few, and its increased reliance on imperialism and domestic control – is nearing an inevitable implosion. However, the implication that capitalism naturally develops on a path toward fascism is both accurate and potentially misleading. On one hand, this idea suggests that capitalism, in its most basic state of operating, does not already possess inherent fascistic qualities. This is incorrect, and it’s important to understand this. Capitalism, in its orthodoxy, is a system that relies on authoritative, controlling, and exploitative relationships, most notably between that of capitalists and workers. The latter, in its need to survive, must submit itself to wage labor. The former, in its wanting to accumulate a constant flow of profit, uses wage labor as a way to steal productivity from the worker in a perpetual cycle that moves wealth upwards into a relatively tiny sector of the population, while simultaneously impoverishing the masses below. Scientific socialists have always known this to be true, and now that the trickery of “trickle-down economics” has been exposed, many others are beginning to realize it.

Capitalism’s authoritative tendencies are far-reaching throughout a society’s development. Because of this, the system has relied upon and reproduced social inequities that fortify its economic woes. Friedrich Engels touched on its effects for the family unit in The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, Silvia Federici brilliantly illustrated its reliance on patriarchy in Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body, and Primitive Accumulation, the emergence of social reproduction theory has provided insight on the layers of exploitation that effect women in the home, and many have written about the cozy relationship between capitalism and white supremacy, most importantly noting that the system’s birth in the Americas relied heavily upon the racialized chattel slave system. In fact, it is impossible to accurately discuss the inherent problems of capitalism without discussing its propensity to drive social oppression in a variety of forms. If oppression can be defined as “the absence of choices,” as bell hooks once said, then our default status as members of the proletariat is oppression. And when compounded with other social constructs such as patriarchy, white supremacy, heteronormativity, and able-bodiedness, this oppression becomes even more pronounced and marginalizing.

The inherent fascism built into capitalism is rooted in wage labor, which is maintained through coercive means. This coercion that drives capitalism comes from the dispossession of the masses of people from not only the means of production, but also from the means to sustenance and land. The Enclosure Acts tell us all we need to know about this foundation. The fact that feudal peasants had to be forced to participate in wage labor through a legislative destruction of the commons, which kicked them off the land and immediately transformed human needs from basic rights to commodities, says a lot about the requisite landscape of a capitalist system. As such, feudal peasants in Europe viewed capitalism as a downgrade. They were consequently prodded into factories and mills like cattle. In many other parts of the world, stripping entire populations of sustenance for the sake of private property was unheard of. Yet capitalism required this mass dispossession in order to proceed on its desired path. Thus, “between 1604 and 1914, over 5,200 individual enclosure acts were passed, covering 6.8 million acres of land,” all designed to systematically erase the idea of common land. (Parliament of UK)

Understanding that capitalism is a system built on a foundation of oppression, and that it operates on natural internal mechanisms of coercion and exploitation, allows us to also understand that its development has not created these qualities, but rather intensified them. Therefore, the idea of “late-stage capitalism” makes sense from an analytical point of view, as it simply refers to an evolutionary path that has brought its nature to the forefront and, most importantly, in doing so, has resulted in severe consequences for the majority of the global population. And whether we’re talking about late-stage capitalism, or monopoly capitalism, or corporate capitalism, or “crony capitalism,” it all refers to the same thing: capitalism’s natural conclusion. A natural conclusion that is a breeding ground for fascism.

Realizing Fascism

“When the bourgeoisie sees that power is slipping out of its hands, it brings up fascism to hold onto its privileges.” - Buenaventura Durruti

There are many definitions and aspects of and to fascism, but perhaps the best way to identify it is as an effect. In terms of capitalism, the development and strengthening of fascistic tendencies are tied directly to the sociopolitical structures that form in its defense. Or as Samir Amin puts it, “Fascism is a particular political response to the challenges with which the management of capitalist society may be confronted in specific circumstances.” (Amin, 2014) But this only describes one of the major aspects of fascism – that being the systemic and structural; or more specifically, the capitalist system and the capitalist state that naturally forms to protect and promote it. There is also a cultural aspect to fascism that forms from within the populace. It is shaped by structural operations, being the main force of culture, and it manifests as an emotional and defensive response from individuals within this system that naturally coerces, exploits, and dispossesses them from their ability to sustain. In other words, the mass insecurity that stems from capitalism naturally produces reactionary responses of misdirected angst from the people it serves, or rather disserves.  

During these late stages of capitalism, “fascism has returned to the West, East, and South; and this return is naturally connected with the spread of the systemic crisis of generalized, financialized, and globalized monopoly capitalism.” (Amin,2014) The reactionary, right-wing response to the capitalist degradation of society is to target the most vulnerable of that society, viewing them as “drains” on public resources without realizing that such resources have been depleted by the pursuit for profit from those above, and most intensely during the era of neoliberalism, which opened the door for rampant greed to extract nearly everything of value from society in the name of privatization. In this structural sense, fascism comes to its complete fruition through a blindness that develops under capitalist culture, whether intentional or subconscious; a blindness that seeks every type of remedy imaginable for the problems created by the system without ever questioning the system itself.

The fascist regimes that surface during these times of crisis “are willing to manage the government and society in such a way as not to call the fundamental principles of capitalism into question, specifically private capitalist property, including that of modern monopoly capitalism.” (Amin, 2014) And that is why fascism intensifies under this pretense of “managing capitalism” and not simply in “political forms that challenge the latter’s legitimacy, even if ‘capitalism’ or ‘plutocracies’ [are] subject to long diatribes in the rhetoric of fascist speeches.” (Amin, 2014) This shows how the fascist tide is fundamentally structural; and the cultural developments that parallel it do so as a byproduct of capitalism’s systemic failures. Because of this, analyses “must focus on these crises.” And any focus on these systemic crises must also focus on the fundamental coercion inherent in the system’s productive mechanisms — that which former slave and American abolitionist Frederick Douglass once referred to as “a slavery of wages only a little less galling and crushing in its effects than chattel slavery,” and “a slavery of wages that must go down with the other.”

The notion of wage slavery has been all but lost over the course of the last century. Once understood among the masses as a common-sense recognition of capitalist coercion, it has given way to the insidious nature of capitalist propaganda, which intensified in a very deliberate way after the cultural revolution of the 1960s, culminating in a neoliberal wave that has dominated since. While the originators of anti-capitalist theory and scientific socialism had exposed this form of slavery inherent in the system – with Marx referring to workers as “mere appendages to machines,” and Bakunin illustrating its ever-shifting nomenclature, from “slavery” to “serfdom” to “wage earners” – there was a brief resurgence of this analysis in the 1960s and 70s, from a variety of leftist radicals. One of the most under-appreciated of these analyses was the one provided by the imprisoned Black Panther, George Jackson, who in his extensive works made reference to the condition of “neo-slavery” that plagued the working-class masses. In a rather lengthy excerpt from Soledad Brother: The Prison Letters of George Jackson, Jackson uncovered the forgotten importance of this coercive element that drives capitalism:

“Slavery is an economic condition. Today’s neo-slavery must be defined in terms of economics… [in the days of chattel slavery], the slaveowner, in order to ‘keep it (the slave) and enjoy all of the benefits that property of this kind can render, he must feed it sometimes, he must clothe it against the elements, he must provide a modicum of shelter.’ The ‘new slavery (capitalism), the modern variety of chattel slavery updated to disguise itself, places the victim in a factory or in the case of most blacks in support roles inside and around the factory system (service trades), working for a wage. However (in contrast to chattel slavery), if work cannot be found in or around the factory complex, today’s neo-slavery does not allow even for a modicum of food and shelter. You are free – to starve.

…The sense and meaning of slavery comes through as a result of our ties to the wage. You must have it, without it you would starve or expose yourself to the elements. One’s entire day centers around the acquisition of the wage. The control of your eight or ten hours on the job is determined by others. You are left with fourteen to sixteen hours. But since you don’t live at the factory you have to subtract at least another hour for transportation. Then you are left with thirteen to fifteen hours to yourself. If you can afford three meals you are left with ten to twelve hours. Rest is also a factor in efficiency so we have to take eight hours away for sleeping, leaving two to four hours. But – one must bathe, comb, clean teeth, shave, dress – there is no point in protracting this. I think it should be generally accepted that if a man or woman works for a wage at a job that they don’t enjoy, and I am convinced that no one could enjoy any type of assembly-line work, or plumbing or hod carrying, or any job in the service trades, then they qualify for this definition of neo-slave.

…The man who owns the [business] runs your life; you are dependent on this owner. He organizes your work, the work upon which your whole life source and style depends. He indirectly determines your whole day, in organizing you for work. If you don’t make any more in wages than you need to live (or even enough to live for that matter), you are a neo-slave.” And most of us who find ourselves in this precarious position as a working-class person under capitalism have no mobility, whether in a literal or figurative sense. We are “held in one spot on this earth because of our economic status, it is just the same as being held in one spot because you are the owner’s property.” (Jackson, 1994)

The era of neoliberalism, with its insistence of re-imagining laissez-faire economics, has revved up the authoritarian and oppressive underpinnings of the capitalist system by loosening historical constraints stemming from the age-old social contract — the idea that bourgeois governments had a minimal degree of responsibility for the well-being of their citizenries. In the United States, this has amounted to private entities (individuals, corporations, conglomerates) accumulating unprecedented amounts of wealth and power over the course of a few decades, while the majority of people have been thrown to the wolves. During this process, the structural basis of fascism – the merger of corporate and governmental power – has been fully realized, buoyed by the internal coercion of the capitalist system.

The Pedagogical Resurgence of Anti-Fascism

As capitalism’s internal contradictions continue to drive us deeper into a fascist reality, counter-hegemonic movements have aptly pivoted into anti-fascist forces. The most visible of these forces has been the anarchist-led “antifa,” which cracked into the mainstream-US consciousness during its numerous street clashes with reactionary groups during and after Donald Trump’s electoral rise. By heeding to a strategic tactic known as “no-platforming,” these black-clad resistance fighters deploy offensive attacks against both fascist speakers/leaders and marches to prevent them from gaining a public platform and, thus, legitimacy and momentum.

In a 2017 piece for In These Times, Natasha Lennard explained the philosophy behind no-platforming, how it extends from an all-encompassing radical abolitionist movement, and how it differs from liberalism:

“While I don’t believe we can or should establish an unbendable set of rules, I submit that a best practice is to deny fascist, racist speech a platform. It should not be recognized as a legitimate strand of public discourse, to be heard, spread and gain traction. And we must recognize that when the far Right speaks, the stage becomes an organizing platform, where followers meet and multiply. For this, we should have no tolerance.

No-platforming is only useful if it is contextualized in a broader abolitionist struggle, which recognizes that white supremacy will not do away with itself by virtue of being ‘wrong.’ Surely by now liberals have realized the folly in assuming justice is delivered by ‘speaking truth to power’? Power knows the truth, and determines what gets to be the regime of truth. The ‘truth’ of racial justice will not be discovered, proved or argued into lived actuality, but fought for and established.” (Lennard, 2017)

The physical tactics carried out under “no-platforming” are only a small part of a broader movement. While anti-fascists continue to confront fascists in the streets, a pedagogical resurgence of anti-fascism must continue to guide the movement as a whole by providing an intellectual, philosophical, and strategic battle plan. This plan must include: (1) a deep understanding of systemic forces generating from capitalism, imperialism, and white supremacy; (2) an understanding of power dynamics and the need to form and deploy power effectively; (3) an understanding of the two major fronts of the anti-fascist war, which include the systemic and upward-focused class war and the anti-reactionary, horizontally-focused culture war; (4)an understanding of anti-capitalist ideology, including but not limited to Marxism, socialism, and anarchism; and, most importantly, (5) a mass push for class consciousness.

Class Consciousness

Building class consciousness is the most crucial task of our time, being citizens within the capitalist and imperialist empire that is the United States, facing down the impending fascist tide, and attempting to confront and defeat this tide along with the capitalist and imperialist systems as a whole. Recalibrating a working class that has been deliberately detached from its role is imperative. Regardless of how one prefers carrying out this task, whether through the formation of a vanguard of trained cadre or a direct engagement toward mass consciousness, it must be carried out within the proletariat itself, where much of capitalist and reactionary culture has become blindingly influential. This must be done not by rejecting theory and deeming it “too elite and alien for the masses,” but rather by embracing the organic intellectualism that is inherent within the masses and serving as facilitators to awaken this abundance of untapped potential. This must be done by realizing the working class is more than capable of thinking, understanding, and comprehending our position in society, if only given the chance to do so, free from the capitalist propaganda that drowns and consumes us.

In creating a working-class culture that not only embraces its inherent intellectualism, but does so in a way that explicitly challenges the dominant intellectual orthodoxy that fortifies capitalist relations, we may look to Gramsci, the Italian Marxist who provided a clear and convincing relationship between counter-hegemony and working-class, or organic, intellectualism that is rooted in “spontaneous philosophy”:

“It is essential to destroy the widespread prejudice that philosophy is a strange and difficult thing just because it is the specific intellectual activity of a particular category of specialists or of professional and systematic philosophers. It must first be shown that all [people] are ‘philosophers,’ by defining the limits and characteristics of the ‘spontaneous philosophy’ which is proper to everybody. This philosophy is contained in:  (1) language itself, which is a totality of determined notions and concepts and not just of words grammatically devoid of content; (2) ‘common sense’ and ‘good sense’; and (3) popular religion and, therefore, also in the entire system of beliefs, superstitions, opinions, ways of seeing things and of acting, which are collectively bundled together under the name of ‘folklore.’” (Gramsci, 1971)

The formation of class consciousness, therefore, rests on this notion, sprouts from the lived experience of proletarian life in the capitalist system, and may essentially replace Gramsci’s already-existing third parameter of “popular religion,” by simply substituting “folklore” with a materialist perspective. This process reminds us of Fred Hampton’s insistence that we proceed in “plain, proletarian English,” which is not to say that revolutionaries must “dumb down” their message in order to appeal to the masses, but rather return revolutionary theory to where it belongs: within working-class culture. Prior to Gramsci and Hampton, Marx had already gone through this process of realizing the existence of organic intellectualism. This process, the subsequent views that developed within Marxist circles throughout the 20th century, and the sometimes-regressive ideology that formed from such is effectively illustrated by Raya Dunayevskaya’s critique of Jean-Paul Sartre in her book, Philosophy and Revolution: From Hegel to Sartre, and from Marx to Mao:

“Methodologically, Sartre’s organic petty-bourgeois inability to understand what it is that Marx meant by praxis has nothing whatever to do with the Ego, much less with not being able ‘to read’ Marx. It has everything to do with his isolation from the proletariat.

The very point at which Sartre thinks that Marx, because he had to turn to ‘clarifying’ practice, stopped developing theory is when Marx broke with the bourgeois concept of theory and created his most original concept of theory out of ‘history and its process,’ not only in the class struggles outside the factory but in it, at the very point of production, faced with the ‘automation’ which was dominating the worker transforming him into a mere ‘appendage.’ Marx’s whole point what that the worker was thinking his own thoughts, expressing his total opposition to the mode of labor instinctually and by creating new forms of struggle and new human relations with his fellow workers. Where, in Marx, history comes alive because the masses have been prepared by the daily struggle at the point of production to burst out spontaneously, ‘to storm the heavens’ creatively as they had done in the Paris Commune, in Sartre practice appears as inert practicality bereft of all historic sense and any consciousness of consequences. Where, in Marx, Individuality itself arises through history, in Sartre History means subordination of individual to group-in-fusion who alone know where the action is. Sartre the Existentialist rightly used to laugh at Communists for thinking man was born on his first payday; Sartre ‘the Marxist’ sees even as world-shaking an event as the Russian Revolution, not at its self-emancipatory moment of birth with its creation of totally new forms of workers’ rule – soviets – but rather at the moment when it was transformed into its opposite with Stalin’s victory, the totalitarian initiation of the Five-Year Plans with the Moscow Frame-Up Trials and forced-labor camps.” (Dunayevskaya, 2003)

Organic Intellectualism and Political Consciousness

The process of tapping organic intellectualism is perhaps best described by Paulo Freire in his crucial text, Pedagogy of the Oppressed. To Freire, revolutionary class consciousness can only be realized through an embrace of radicalism, or as Angela Davis once phrased it, “simply grasping things at the root.” Applying our intellectualism and relating it to our lived experiences is only a partial awakening on the revolutionary path. To complete the transition, understanding the roots, or systems, that represent the foundational causes of our problems is crucial, not only for identifying the magnitude of the ultimate solution, and thus avoiding spending time and energy on inconsequential activities, but also for understanding that there is a solution. “The more radical the person is, the more fully he or she enters into reality so that, knowing it better, he or she can transform it,” Freire tells us. “This individual is not afraid to confront, to listen, to see the world unveiled. This person is not afraid to meet the people or to enter into a dialogue with them. This person does not consider himself or herself the proprietor of history or of all people, or the liberator of the oppressed; but he or she does commit himself or herself, within history, to fight at their side.” (Freire, 2014)

With this realization in mind, we can better understand the four levels of consciousness and identify the pedagogical route, or remedies, that can be applied to ourselves and others. From the “magical consciousness,” where political impotence is maintained by inconceivable forces like gods and mythology, through the “naive consciousness,” where the material world becomes realized, and our interactions with others, with nature, within society, begin to take on some semblance of control, to “critical consciousness,” which introduces four distinct qualities that may be applied to this material reality: power awareness, or knowing and recognizing the existence of power and who possesses power in society; critical literacy, which leads to the development of analysis, writing, thinking, reading, discussing, and understanding deeper meaning; de-socialization, which allows one to recognize and challenge forms of power; and self-organization/self-education, which amounts to taking initiative to overcome the anti-intellectualism and indoctrination of capitalist “education.” (Wheeler, 2016; Daily Struggles, 2018) And, finally, the realization of a “political consciousness,” or class consciousness, which brings us to the understanding of a shared reality with most others, as well as the need for collective struggle to break our interlocking chains of oppression.

Ultimately, the path through these levels of consciousness are about power; moving from an impotent position to a powerful position — a powerful position that can only be forged through the realization of collective struggle. Freire describes this transition as a break from the “banking concept of education” that is designed to perpetuate ignorance to a critical pedagogy that is designed to empower the oppressed; a pedagogical process that, again, can only be carried out in a proletarian environment:

“In their political activity, the dominant elites utilize the banking concept to encourage passivity in the oppressed, corresponding with the latter's ‘submerged’ state of consciousness, and take advantage of that passivity to ‘fill’ that consciousness with slogans which create even more fear of freedom. This practice is incompatible with a truly liberating course of action, which, by presenting the oppressors slogans as a problem, helps the oppressed to ‘eject’ those slogans from within themselves. After all, the task of the humanists is surely not that of pitting their slogans against the slogans of the oppressors, with the oppressed as the testing ground, ‘housing’ the slogans of first one group and then the other. On the contrary, the task of the humanists is to see that the oppressed become aware of the fact that as dual beings, ‘housing’ the oppressors within themselves, they cannot be truly human.

This task implies that revolutionary leaders do not go to the people in order to bring them a message of ‘salvation,’ but in order to come to know through dialogue with them both their objective situation and their awareness of that situation—the various levels of perception of themselves and of the world in which and with which they exist. One cannot expect positive results from an educational or political action program which fails to respect the particular view of the world held by the people. Such a program constitutes cultural invasion, good intentions notwithstanding.” (Freire, 2014)

And this task must be done in a collective manner, with the clear intention of not only challenging power, but creating our own collective, working-class power that has the potential to destroy the existing power structure emanating from authoritative systems like capitalism, imperialism, white supremacy, and patriarchy. After all, “freedom is acquired by conquest, not by gift,” and “nobody liberates themselves alone; human beings liberate themselves in communion.” (Freire, 2014)

Understanding Collective Power, Separating Radical from Liberal, and Exposing Centrist Extremism and Horseshoe Theory

“There is a whole apparatus that controls the presidency that is absolutely resistant to change. Which isn’t to excuse Obama from taking bolder steps. I think there are steps that he could have taken had he insisted. But if one looks at the history of struggles against racism in the US, no change has ever happened simply because the president chose to move in a more progressive direction. Every change that has happened has come as a result of mass movements – from the era of slavery, the Civil War, and the involvement of Black people in the Civil War, which really determined the outcome. Many people are under the impression that it was Abraham Lincoln who played the major role, and he did as a matter of fact help to accelerate the move toward abolition, but it was the decision on the part of slaves to emancipate themselves and to join the Union Army – both women and men – that was primarily responsible for the victory over slavery. It was the slaves themselves and of course the abolitionist movement that led to the dismantling of slavery. When one looks at the civil rights era, it was those mass movements – anchored by women, incidentally – that pushed the government to bring about change.” (Davis, 2016)

This excerpt is from an interview with Angela Davis, where she shares some knowledge on how to deal with power. Davis’s point is that people create and force change, collectively and from the bottom. This is an inherently radical perspective that comes from a development of political consciousness and the realization that representative democracy, in all of its supposed glory, is a reactionary system that has rarely if ever carried through on its “democratic” advertisement. It is a radical perspective that comes from a place of understanding why and how the founding fathers, in all of their land-owning, slave-owning elitism, chose this system of governing: “to protect,” as James Madison put it, “the opulent of the minority against the majority.” (Madison, 1787)

Davis’s point is reiterated by Noam Chomsky, in his peculiar declaration that Richard Nixon was “the last liberal President” of the United States — a statement that also comes from a radical perspective which realizes the systemic influence of capitalism and, more specifically, of the intensified capitalist period known as neoliberalism. And it comes from an understanding that Nixon the man, cantankerously racist and temperamentally conservative, did not create the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), set employment quotas on affirmative action programs, propose employer-funded healthcare, sign the Fair Labor Standards Act, and approve a series of regulations on big business because he personally championed these causes, or even believed in them. (Conetta, 2014; Fund, 2013) Rather, he was pressured from below, in the same way that Reagan, the Bushs, Clinton, and Obama have been pressured from above to enact and maintain the corporate stranglehold on politics ever since.

Systemic pressure always supplants personal philosophies, beliefs, ideologies, and preferences; and our systemic default, which is predetermined by the capitalist order, will always prevail over electoral and representative politics. Political consciousness exposes this fact, separating radical from liberal. The cases of Lincoln and Nixon, while signifying how pressure from below can force change, are outliers. They were chinks in the system. And since Nixon, these chinks have seemingly been fortified by the “whole apparatus that controls the presidency that is absolutely resistant to change.” The legislation passed by Nixon, as well as the legislation that came about through the New Deal era, the “Great Society,” and Civil Rights movement of the 1960s, have all been tamed by this apparatus. Our environmental crisis has intensified, white-supremacist terror remains prevalent in American streets, economic inequality has reached unprecedented levels, and our racialized prison industrial complex has grown by a rate of over 600 percent since the Civil Rights movement – all realities suggesting that “progressive” legislation is ultimately toothless. Thus, any reforms that develop through the electoral system, as a result of pressure from the bottom, are ultimately curtailed and circumvented by capitalism’s economic base, which always seeks to undermine a common good in the pursuit of never-ending growth and profit. The so-called “liberal reforms” that occurred during the Nixon years were largely rendered useless during the proceeding neoliberal era, which represents a deliberate plan to unleash the capitalist system.

This fact does not render grassroots power useless; it merely suggests that it needs to be redirected. Returning to Davis’s comments, the case of Abraham Lincoln is perhaps one of the best examples of the impotence built into the political system. Lincoln the individual had vacillated on his stance regarding slavery, expressing personal “dislike” for the institution and even displaying empathy for slaves (Lincoln, 1855) during a time when such empathy was often lost on many Americans. At the same time, Lincoln the president recognized his duty to protect the rights of slaveowners as the executive administrator of the United States and its constitution, and ultimately admitted that his institutional duty, which was to “save the Union” and maintain the power structures as created by the founders, even if it meant that slavery would stay intact, far outweighed any personal misgivings he may have had toward slavery. The same logic, when coming from cogs within the power structure, can be applied to capitalism and imperialism, and has been for centuries.

Both Nixon’s and Lincoln’s yield to external pressure illustrates two important points: (1) the personality, ideological leanings, and personal beliefs of a politician, even if the most powerful politician, have no real consequence within the US political system; and (2) the foundation of US politics and government, as arranged by the founders of the country, will never allow for genuine democratic elements to materialize. The first point often represents the most telling demarcation between radical and liberal, with the former realizing this fact, and the latter unable to realize and thus placing focus on individual identity. Because of the liberal’s inability to understand this systemic reality, damaging electoral strategies such as “lesser-evilism” have established a firm place in the American political arena, inevitably causing a gradual deterioration toward more reactionary political platforms designed to protect the decaying capitalist system, which in modern times translates to a very real fascistic slide. Hence, we now have modern Democratic Party politicians that resemble 1970s/80s conservatives, and Republicans that continue to push the envelope of fascism.

Since Nixon, the flock of modern presidents who have bent the knee to multinational corporate and banking power further illustrate the utter insignificance of identity; ironically, during a political era where “marketing personalities” is usually the only determinate for “success.” This contradiction cannot be understated, and it is an accurate barometer that can be used to measure class/political consciousness in the United States, or the lack thereof. Ironically, the fact that voter turnout throughout the country has maintained such low levels during the tail-end of the neoliberal era and late-stage capitalism is a sign that class and political consciousness are actually rising. For when the working class realizes en masse that there is no change coming through electoral politics, and thus have shed the capitalist elite’s “banking concept,” we know that revolutionary change is on the horizon. And any such period must include mass education and a mass movement toward political consciousness – an understanding once echoed by Lucy Parsons: “[radicals] know that a long period of education must precede any great fundamental change in society, hence they do not believe in vote begging, nor political campaigns, but rather in the development of self-thinking individuals.” (Lewis, 2017) Self-thinking, in this case, simply means realizing our inherent political consciousness that is based in our material position in the socioeconomic system beyond the construction and obstruction of capitalist ideology and culture.

As we collectively separate ourselves from a mainstream political arena that has been established to ensure our continued demise as working-class people, we also must be wary of blowback from the system. The most common response to a delegitimizing of the power structure is an appeal to authority, safety, and stability. This defensive posture forms from within the power structure, with corporate-political unity between both major political parties, in an attempt to construct an extremist center. At this stage, the extremist center has one task at hand — to protect the status quo at all costs. In the US, this means keeping the white-supremacist capitalist/imperialist system intact, as well as the bourgeois class that both maintains these systems and benefits from them. To do so, this extremist center exploits the fear of instability in order to build mass support, labels both fascist and anti-fascist ground movements as enemies of the state (although does not necessarily respond to them in the same ways), indecipherable from one another in their mutual “extremism,” and proceeds with an all-out attack on civil liberties in order to suppress popular movements that may challenge the embedded systems.

We have seen this response materialize over the past decade. In the aftermath of 9/11, civil liberties have been systematically removed from members of both political parties. During the street clashes between white nationalists and anti-fascists, we witnessed politicians from both parties as well as media denounce “both sides” as extremists, creating a convenient false dichotomy that completely ignores the most common-sense discussion – what the two sides actually believe in or are trying to accomplish.  And we have seen “horseshoe theory” enter into the mainstream arena as “philosophical justification” for this false dichotomy.  “In the current state of things, the electoral successes of the extreme right stem from contemporary capitalism itself. These successes allow the media to throw together, with the same opprobrium, the ‘populists of the extreme right and those of the extreme left,’ obscuring the fact that the former are pro-capitalist (as the term ‘extreme right’ demonstrates) and thus possible allies for capital, while the latter are the only potentially dangerous opponents of capital’s system of power.” (Amin, 2014) The result of this has been a strengthening of the system as we know it, a virtual circling of the wagons around our reality of corporate politics, inequality, joblessness, homelessness, racism, misogyny, and all of the oppressive social phobias that accompany them.  Still, the resistance looms, it is radical in nature, and it is growing.

Conclusion

The current state of the world — socially, politically, economically, and environmentally — indicates that we have entered the late stages of the global capitalist system. In the heart of the capitalist empire, the United States, social unrest has become the norm. Capitalism’s systemic contradictions, as well as its coercive and authoritarian core, have become increasingly uncontrollable for the country’s capitalist political parties. Social inequities are becoming more pronounced, the political arena is showing irregularities like never before, and an overtly fascist tide is starting to rear its ugly head.

The American working class has responded in various ways. On one side, reactionary mentalities have intensified among hordes of newly-dispossessed whites, thus leading them into the arms of the state’s fascist slide. On another side, a mass awakening has developed among many who have decided instead to tap into our organic intellectualism, turn to radical analysis, and return to anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist, and anti-racist class politics. In response to the fascist tide, a formidable wave of anti-fascist action has sprung to life. To bolster this, a pedagogical resurgence of anti-fascism has formed both organically and through the forging of this new collective political and class consciousness. Rosa Luxemburg’s 1916 ultimatum has suddenly reached the ears of many within the American working class – will we transition away from capitalism and toward socialism, or will we regress further into barbarism?

Capitalism, imperialism, and white supremacy know where they stand. Politicians from both capitalist parties have regrouped to form and extreme center. Corporate executives, bankers, bosses, business owners, arms manufacturers, hedge-fund operators, landlords, military officials, police, and the prison industry have all placed their bets on barbarism. The ball is now in our court. The time is ripe for the people to seize power, but the process of a political awakening, anchored by a mass shaping of class consciousness, must gear up. And, most importantly, our army must be built from the ground-up, from within the proletariat, with the understanding that we are all leaders in this struggle.

A war for consciousness must continue, and must be won, while we proceed in building mass political power. And this must be done with an all-out rejection of capitalist culture and the conditioned mentality that comes with it, because the people’s struggle is doomed to fail if it does not develop “a consciousness of the insidious promotion of capitalist individualism.” In doing so, “it is essential to resist the depiction of history as the work of heroic individuals in order for people today to recognize our potential agency as a part of an ever-expanding community of struggle.” (Barat, 2014) We are on the precipice. The world and its future literally rest on our collective shoulders.

All power to the people.

Bibliography

Amin, Samir (2014) The Return of Fascism in Contemporary Capitalism, Monthly Review, September 1, 2014. Accessed at https://monthlyreview.org/2014/09/01/the-return-of-fascism-in-contemporary-capitalism/

Barat, Frank (2014) Progressive Struggles against Insidious Capitalist Individualism: An Interview with Angela Davis, Hampton Institute. Accessed at http://www.hamptoninstitution.org/angela-davis-interview.html

Conetta, Christine (2014) Noam Chomsky: Richard Nixon Was Last Liberal President, Huffington Post, 2/21/14. Accessed at https://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/02/21/noam-chomsky-richard-nixon_n_4832847.html

Daily Struggles Blog (2018) Paulo Freire and the Role of Critical Pedagogy. Accessed at http://daily-struggles.tumblr.com/post/18785753110/paulo-freire-and-the-role-of-critical-pedagogy

Davis, Angela (2016) Freedom is a Constant Struggle (Haymarket Books)

Dunayevskaya, Daya (2003) Philosophy and Revolution: From Hegel to Sartre, and from Marx to Mao (Lexington Books)

Freire, Paulo (2014) Pedagogy of the Oppressed: 30th Anniversary edition (Bloomsbury)

Fund, John (2013) Nixon at 100: Was He America’s Last Liberal? (National Review online, January 11, 2013) Accessed at https://www.nationalreview.com/2013/01/nixon-100-was-he-americas-last-liberal-john-fund/

Gramsci, Antonio (1971) Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci (International Publishers)

Hampton, Fred (1968) Speech at Northern Illinois Unversity. Accessed at http://www.lfks.net/en/content/fred-hampton-its-class-struggle-goddammit-november-1969

Jackson, George (1994) Soledad Brothers: The Prison Letters of George Jackson (Chicago Review Press)

Lennard, Natasha (2017) Don’t Give Fascism An Inch, In These Times, August 23, 2017. Accessed at http://inthesetimes.com/article/20449/no-platform-milo-free-speech-charlottesville-white-supremacy

Lewis, Jone Johnson (2017) Lucy Parsons: Labor Radical and Anarchist, IWW Founder (ThoughtCo. Online) Accessed at https://www.thoughtco.com/lucy-parsons-biography-3530417

Lincoln, Abraham (1855) Letter to Joshua Speed (Abraham Lincoln Online) Accessed at http://www.abrahamlincolnonline.org/lincoln/speeches/speed.htm

Luxemburg, Rosa (1915) The Junius Pamphlet. Accessed at https://www.marxists.org/archive/luxemburg/1915/junius/ch01.htm

Madison, James (1787) Federalist Papers, No. 10 (The Avalon Project) Accessed at http://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/fed10.asp

Parliament of UK. Managing and owning the landscape. https://www.parliament.uk/about/living-heritage/transformingsociety/towncountry/landscape/overview/enclosingland/

Wheeler, Lauren (2016) Freire’s Three Levels of Consciousness, Participatory Performance Practices. Accessed at https://laurenppp.wordpress.com/2016/01/25/freires-3-levels-of-consciousness-25-1-16/

Delusions Shattered: How Democrats Lost Claims to a Moral High Ground by Ignoring Obama's Transformation Into Bush

By Jon Reynolds

When President Obama was sworn into office back in January 2009, and just a few months later agreed to " look forward" and disregard gross human rights violations committed by Bush officials (such as waterboarding, insect pits, solitary confinement, and more), they were quiet.

When President Obama oversaw the brutal force-feeding of untried prisoners at a detention facility in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, they said nothing.

When President Obama's mass-deportations of undocumented immigrants in the US outpaced deportations under his predecessor, they stayed silent. As the Nation reported, "To pay for the ballooning enforcement-first approach, the budget for immigration enforcement grew 300 percent from the resources given at the time of its founding under Bush to $18 billion annually, more than all other federal law-enforcement agencies' budget combined."

When President Obama spent his first term in office outspending his predecessor on raids against legal marijuana dispensaries , his supporters had little to say. "There's no question that Obama's the worst president on medical marijuana," Rob Kampia, executive director of the Marijuana Policy Project, told Rolling Stone magazine. "He's gone from first to worst."

When President Obama extended the US military occupation of Afghanistan until 2024, anti-war Democrats under George W. Bush were nowhere to be found.

When President Obama fabricated a reason to bomb oil-rich Libya in 2011, and then just a year later, reauthorized the US invasion of Iraq, they were voiceless, with the exception of a few scattered protests in the US, none of which came anywhere close to the size of those against the 2003 invasion of Iraq carried out by a Republican president.

When it was revealed that President Obama met weekly with his advisers for what was dubbed " Terror Tuesday" to decide who was worthy of being picked off by US predator drones around the world - and when it came to light that President Obama had a "kill list" and US citizens were on it, and were being killed, all without due process - again, barely a peep.

When Obama granted legal immunity to telecom companies that had conducted invasive spying during the George W. Bush years, when he extended the Patriot Act, when he prosecuted more whistleblowers under the Espionage Act than all past presidents combined , when he expanded the NSA's surveillance programs , and when he signed the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) and greenlit indefinite detention of US citizens without trial, Democrats remained complacent.

From January 2009 to the end of 2016, there has been a near-virtual silence from those identifying as Democrats against a variety of violations committed under President Obama, violations which were widely protested during the George W. Bush years, a fact that didn't go unnoticed by researchers at the University of Michigan, who released the results of an analysis of antiwar activity and found that after Obama's election, "Democratic participation in antiwar activities plunged, falling from 37 percent in January 2009 to a low of 19 percent in November 2009." Unsurprisingly, they also discovered that "anti-Republican attitudes had a significant, positive effect on the likelihood that Democrats attended antiwar rallies." Moreover, polling data from early 2012 showed Democrats supporting the same policies they heavily opposed during the Bush years, like keeping Guantanamo Bay open and drone warfare.

Under a Democratic president, the occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan was continued, US boots hit the ground in Syria and Iraq, US bombs fell in Libya, US drones terrorized the skies over Pakistan and Yemen, America's nuclear arsenal was upgraded, and highly provocative military drills were conducted along the borders ofRussia and China. Eight years of warmongering by the Nobel Peace Prize winner has been met with eight years of silence by the very same members of his party who protested such activities under a president whose main difference was the political party he was affiliated with.

But the eight year drought of direct action by Democrats abruptly ended in November of 2016 when someone from the "other" party just barely managed to score a presidential nomination. Facing a loss of power, suddenly, Democrats reappointed themselves as the sole defenders of minorities everywhere and quickly attempted to seize the moral high ground. Faces familiar during the Bush years clawed their way out from under enormous piles of steaming hypocrisy to lecture the world on human rights, faces like Michael Moore , who for the past two elections (2008, 2012) encouraged everyone to go out and vote for the guy blowing the legs off Muslim teenagers in faraway lands with aerial death machines. Protests filled major cities across the US with demonstrators wielding signs about human rights, equality, and social justice, the irony lost on them that the candidate they wanted so badly to win would have been just as dangerous to the very minorities they attempted to champion.

Muslims, both domestic and foreign, would have continued to fall under the threat of persecution, violence, or radicalization under a Hillary Clinton administration. She supported the US occupation of Afghanistan and both the 2003 invasion and 2012 reinvasion of Iraq, she supported the drone campaigns in Pakistan and Yemen, and she supported Obama's meddling in Egypt and Syria, as well as the bombardment of Libya in 2011. Where was the outcry during the Obama years? Where was the outcry when she took these positions as a presidential candidate? As Glenn Greenwald of the Guardian wrote back in 2013, "Does anyone doubt that if Obama's bombs were killing nice white British teenagers or smiling blond Swiss infants - rather than unnamed Yemenis, Pakistanis, Afghans and Somalis - that the reaction to this sustained killing would be drastically different? Does anyone doubt that if his overhead buzzing drones were terrorizing Western European nations rather than predominantly Muslim ones, the horror of them would be much easier to grasp? Does it really take any debate to know that if the 16-year-old American suspiciously killed by the US government two weeks after killing his father had been Jimmy Martin in Sweden rather than Abdulrahman al-Awlaki in Yemen, the media interest and public outcry would be far more substantial?"

And let's not forget that Obama, like Bush before him, and certainly like Hillary Clinton after him had she won, offered support to regimes like Saudi Arabia , which are notorious for oppressing homosexuals and women.

Domestically, the War on Terror has also caused a variety of discriminatory problems for the same minorities Hillary Clinton and other Democrats claim to be interested in protecting. In early 2016, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) sued the Obama administration over government surveillance programs allegedly aimed at curtailing domestic Muslim extremism. According to the ACLU, based on public documents, "the initiatives appear based on theories about so-called radicalization and violence that years of social science research have proven wrong. They also result in ineffective law enforcement and unfairly stigmatize American Muslims." Just a few years prior, it was also reported that the Obama administration was continuing to fund Bush-era programs in New York City that helped police departments spy on predominately Muslim American neighborhoods. As USA Today reported, money from Washington helped pay for "computers that store innocuous information about Muslim college students, mosque sermons and social events." In the event of a Hillary Clinton victory, it seems likely that these types of policies wouldn't disappear given her passionate support for and involvement in the Obama administration.

And then there's the War on Drugs, another minority-crushing gem supported by both Republicans and Democrats alike. In 2010, just a year after Obama was sworn into office, black men and women were nearly four times as likely as whites to be arrested on charges of marijuana possession , even though the two groups used the drug at similar rates. African-Americans are 62 percent of drug offenders sent to state prisons, convicted at a rate 57 times higher than white men, yet they represent only 12 percent of the US population . In New York, Latinos are arrested at nearly 4 times the rate of whites for marijuana even though, as with blacks, the rates of use are nearly the same, and from 2008 to 2014, one-quarter of a million people were deported for nonviolent drug offenses, often due to low-level marijuana possession. Hillary Clinton vowed to continue failed drug prohibition policies and disregard the overwhelming evidence illustrating its blatantly racist overtones.

The idea that the Democratic Party is in any way, shape, or form entitled to the moral high ground over the equally horrific opposing party is a beyond ridiculous assertion without any basis in reality. To see crowds of people motivated to action by the loss of their party, protesting an archaic electoral college system that they would have likely accepted the results from had their candidate won, tests the limits of ones ability to empathize with their plight. Kill lists, defense of torture, mass surveillance, US citizens being picked off by drone missiles, the continued buildup of a vast empire - none of it prompted thousands upon thousands of American Democrats to fill cities across the US in a fit of anger because at the time, their chosen political racehorse was in Washington.

If Hillary had won, the drone strikes would have continued. The wars would have continued. The spying would continue. Prohibition would continue. Whistleblowers would continue being prosecuted and hunted down. And minorities would continue bearing the brunt of these policies, both in the US and across the world. The difference is that in such a scenario, Democrats, if the last eight years are any indication, would remain silent - as they did under Obama - offering bare minimum concern and vilifying anyone attacking their beloved president as some sort of hater. Cities across the US would remain free of protests, and for another 4-8 years, Democrats would continue doing absolutely nothing to end the same horrifying policies now promoted by a Republican.

Trump's victory, if there is anything good to say about it, will at least breathe much needed life into an antiwar sentiment that has been largely dormant since Bush left office. Issues like drone strikes, torture, military occupations, mass surveillance, and other hot button subjects once protested by Democratic partisans during the Bush era will again - hopefully - be criticized and fought against. Yet the shame about it all is that this time, those unaffiliated with either of the two major parties - those who have been focused on these issues while Democrats have offered pathetic excuses and baseless justifications in defense of them - won't make the mistake of thinking Democrats will stick around for the fight if they win office again in the next election.

This article was reprinted from the Screeching Kettle .

The Breakdown of The Rule of Law: America's Descent Into Authoritarianism

By Devon Bowers

From early in one's life, an American is taught the law and American institutions of justice are great equalizers within our society, ensuring that everyone is treated the same, no matter one's class, race, or ethnicity. Yet, what has been happening quite recently, especially within the past decade or so, is that we have been seeing an increasing breakdown in the rule of law and the use of the justice system to enforce injustices.

President Obama rode in on a high horse in the 2008 presidential elections, specifically on his slogan of hope and change. He rightly criticized the Bush administration on a number of issues, from the economy to the wars abroad, as well as the use of drones.[1] Yet, Obama subsequently went and not only increased the use of drones, but used them to kill Anwar Al-Awlaki, a member of Al Qaeda who was still legally an American citizen at the time of his death.[2] However, the story gets even more shocking as not only does such as act create a legal precedent where the President can kill any US citizen that he deems a terrorist[3], but the Obama administration's attorney general argued that such assassinations of American citizens on US soil "would be legal and justified in an extraordinary circumstance.'"[4] Some would argue that Attorney General Eric Holder cleared the entire domestic drone debacle when he sent a letter to Senator Rand Paul which read:

It has come to my attention that you have now asked an additional question: "Does the President have the authority to use a weaponized drone to kill an American not engaged in combat on American soil?" The answer to that question is no.[5]

However, the problem with that answer is the vagueness of the phrase "engaged in combat." While it may seem obvious to someone what that phrase means, it becomes murky when one sees that the Defense Department has labeled protests as a form of low-level terrorism[6] and that environmental activists are being prosecuted as terrorists.[7] Does this means that protesters and environmental activists are "engaged in combat on American soil" and thus it is OK to attack them with armed drones?

This is deeply problematic as it essentially nullifies the due process clause of the Fifth Amendment and paves the way for future Presidents to potentially label their political opponents as terrorists or an enemy combatant (both have vague definitions), assassinate them with a drone, and hide the evidence under the guise of national security.

The breakdown of the rule of law has been furthered in the economic sphere as the wealthy elites are able to crash the economy and receive no jail time whatsoever, even though crimes were committed.[8] These economic elites are so powerful that even "the Department of Justice fears bringing criminal charges against them because of the possible repercussions such proceedings would have on the greater economy."[9] The fact that these corporate fatcats can crash the economy without fear of prosecution is only a testament to their political and economic clout. They have established institutions that are so firmly entrenched within the American economy that even the Department of Justice fears the effects of bringing them to court.

These corporations have cheated the government out of what they owe by using tax havens or shell companies, as was the case with Apple.[10] This corporate tax evasion does not only send money overseas, but these corporations can tap that money at will by "simply by taking out loans and using foreign cash as collateral."[11] Activity such as this reveals our two-tiered justice system where individuals get prison time for tax evasion, while bankers run free.[12]

A final- and perhaps the most disturbing of all of these examples- in the breakdown of the rule of law in America is that those who reveal injustices are harshly punished. Bradley Manning revealed information of US war crimes and was demonized as a traitor even though he had a legal duty to tell of these war crimes as "in the US Army Subject Schedule No. 27-1 is 'the obligation to report all violations of the law of war.'"[13] Manning was treated with such harshness that the UN Torture Chief classified Manning's treatment as being in "violation of his right to physical and psychological integrity as well as of his presumption of innocence."[14] More recently, Edward Snowden released information that the US has been spying on its citizens and he has been deemed a traitor even though

Treason is the only crime specified in the Constitution, and here is what our founding document says about it, from Article Three, Section Three:

Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort.

The Supreme Court has interpreted this to mean that no one can commit treason unless it's with a country against whom our Congress has declared war. This means that neither the Vietnam War nor the Korean War nor the War on Terror can yield treasonous Americans, as none of these wars were declared by Congress. [15] (emphasis added)

The actual law is being ignored in order to demonize and prosecute those who go against the state.

Yet, what does this the breakdown of the rule of law mean for the United States? For one it means that the US is a nation where "There are two sets of laws: one set for the government and the corporations, and another set for you and me,"[16] yet on a deeper level it signals that the US is becoming more and more of an authoritarian state. There are many characteristics of authoritarianism that the US is currently engaged in or has shown since the dawn of the 21st century. They include

• Constraints on political institutions (Think the political constraints on third parties[17])

• Constraints on the mass public

• Ill-defined executive power[18]

The descent of the US to an authoritarian nation signals the destruction of the rule of law. Yet, there is hope. We the people can reverse this situation, but we will have to work outside the system. We are our only hope.

Endnotes

1. Tom Curry, "Obama Continues, Expands Some Bush Terrorism Policies," NBC News, June 6, 2013 (http://nbcpolitics.nbcnews.com/_news/2013/06/06/18804146-obama-continues-extends-some-bush-terrorism-policies?lite)

2. Joshua Keating, "Was Anwar Al-Awlaki Still A US Citizen?" Foreign Policy, September 30, 2011 (http://blog.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2011/09/30/was_anwar_al_awlaki_still_a_us_citizen)f

3. Adam Serwer, "Obama's Dangerous Awlaki Precedent," Mother Jones, September 30, 2011 (http://www.motherjones.com/mojo/2011/09/al-awlakis-innocence-beside-point#13725235717251&action=collapse_widget&id=3279092)

4. Jon Swaine, "Barack Obama 'has authority to use drone strikes to kill Americans on US soil," The Telegraph, March 6, 2013 (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/barackobama/9913615/Barack-Obama-has-authority-to-use-drone-strikes-to-kill-Americans-on-US-soil.html)

5. Amy Davidson, "Rand Paul Gets A Letter From Eric Holder," The New Yorker, March 7, 2013 (http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/closeread/2013/03/rand-paul-gets-a-letter-from-eric-holder.html)

6. American Civil Liberties Union, ACLU Challenges Defense Department Personnel Policy To Regard Lawful Protests as "Low-Level Terrorism," http://www.aclu.org/national-security/aclu-challenges-defense-department-personnel-policy-regard-lawful-protests-%E2%80%9Clow-le, June 10, 2009

7. Kevin Gosztola, Environmental Activist, Prosecuted as If He Was Terrorist, Was Held in Isolation for Political Speech, Firedoglake, http://dissenter.firedoglake.com/2013/04/01/environmental-activist-prosecuted-as-if-he-was-terrorist-was-held-in-isolation-for-political-speech/ (April 1, 2013)

8. All Gov, Why No Prison for Banksters Who Caused Financial Crisis…Yet?, http://www.allgov.com/news/top-stories/why-no-prison-for-banksters-who-caused-financial-crisisyet?news=842515, April 15, 2011

9. Halah Touryalai, "The Real Reason Wall Street Always Escapes Criminal Charges? The Justice Dept Fears The Aftermath," Forbes, June 3, 2013 (http://www.forbes.com/sites/halahtouryalai/2013/03/06/the-real-reason-wall-street-always-escapes-criminal-charges-the-justice-dept-fears-the-aftermath/)

10. Brendan Sasso, "Senate report: Apple using shell companies to dodge taxes," The Hill, May 20, 2013 (http://thehill.com/blogs/hillicon-valley/technology/300791-senate-report-accuses-apple-of-using-shell-companies-to-dodge-taxes)

11. Christopher Matthews, "The Next Big Thing In Corporate-Tax Avoidance," Time, April 3, 2013 (http://business.time.com/2013/04/03/the-next-big-thing-in-corporate-tax-avoidance/)

12. Jamie Satterfield, Ex-lawyer Sentenced to Prison For Tax Evasion," Knoxnews, June 24, 2013 (http://www.knoxnews.com/news/2013/jun/24/ex-lawyer-sentenced-to-prison-for-tax-evasion/)

13. Marjorie Cohn, "Bradley Manning's Legal Duty to Expose War Crimes," Truthout, June 3, 2013 (http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/16731-bradley-mannings-legal-duty-to-expose-war-crimes)

14. Kim Zetter, "UN Torture Chief: Bradley Manning Treatment Was Cruel, Inhuman," Wired, March 12, 2012 (http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/03/manning-treatment-inhuman/)

15. Evan Puschak, "Lawrence O'Donnell: Why Edward Snowden Cannot Be A Traitor,"MSNBC, June 25, 2013 (http://tv.msnbc.com/2013/06/25/why-edward-snowden-cannot-be-a-traitor/)

16. John W. Whitehead, The Age of Neo-Feudalism: A Government of the Rich, by the Rich, and for the Corporations, The Rutherford Institute, https://www.rutherford.org/publications_resources/john_whiteheads_commentary/the_age_of_neo_feudalism_a_government_of_the_rich_by_the_rich_and_for_the_c, January 28, 2013

17. Roy L. Behr, Edward H. Lazarus, Steven J. Rosenstone, Third Parties in America 2nd edition (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984), Chapter Two "Constraints on Third Parties"

18. Gretchen Casper, Fragile Democracies: The Legacies of Authoritarian Rule (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1995), pg 40

Political Crossover: The Troubling Emergence of Black Reaganism

By Colin Jenkins

During the 1976 Republican Presidential Primaries, then-candidate Ronald Reagan coined the term "Welfare Queen" as he detailed the story of an African-American woman from Chicago who was arrested after using multiple identities to collect over $150,000 worth of welfare benefits. Reagan's story had a purpose: to establish a connection between the "evils of taxation" and the consequences of "illegitimate" welfare programs that "rewarded laziness," and to relay this to an American electorate poised to identify a scapegoat for what they viewed as a "dying nation." The engine behind this message was the Republican Party's overtly racist "Southern Strategy," which formulated a conscious effort to "appeal to racist whites" who Republicans believed "could never forgive the Democratic Party for its support of civil rights and voting rights for Blacks." Reagan's implication, while purposely misleading, was ripe for the taking and tapped into America's deep-seated culture of white supremacy, misogyny, and classism - prompting a public discussion over social welfare programs and the need for higher levels of "personal responsibility" from those who relied on such.

Fast forward thirty-two years - a period that witnessed the unveiling of neoliberalism, historic welfare drawbacks at the hands of a Democratic President (Clinton), and a disastrous eight years under the George W. Bush administration - to the election of America's "first Black President." For a nation whose history is littered with the horrors of genocide, slavery, and Jim Crow, Barack Obama's ascendancy to the highest office was an incredibly symbolic victory over a shameful past - a seemingly giant leap over the obstruction of institutionalized racism. While not specifically elaborated on, one could not help but recognize the campaign motto of "hope and change" as having a firm foundation in bridging the country's racial divide. To many Americans, electing a Black man to the white house equaled a proverbial cutting of the ribbon - the official opening to a "post-racial America," ready for the business of not only bridging this divide, but also of finally addressing the collective disenfranchisement of a Black population still feeling the effects of a horrible past.

It is no secret that Reaganism, in its original form, was especially unkind to the Black community. "The Reagan legacy is replete with examples of disrespect and outright hostility towards African-Americans," writes David Love in The Grio. "As governor of California, Ronald Reagan signed the Mulford Act , which prohibited the public carrying of firearms. The law was passed specifically as a direct response to the Black Panther Party." On the campaign trail, Reagan courted openly racist Dixiecrats in the South, championed the States Rights platform which was responsible for Jim Crow, and even referred to the historic Voting Rights Act as "humiliating to the South." While in office, Reagan "stepped up the war on drugs, which was really a war against people of color; waged an assault on labor unions ; cut programs of importance to African Americans; slashed low income housing under HUD and social programs such as Medicaid and food stamps that disproportionately impacted black people; attacked the government's civil rights infrastructure; sought to gut the Voting Rights Act and affirmative action; and waged war on the tiny Caribbean nation of Grenada. Reagan even befriended the white supremacist government in South Africa, and vetoed a bill to impose sanctions against the apartheid regime."

It would seem far-fetched to attempt to establish a connection between the Reaganism of the 1980s and the emerging Black leaders of today. However, in reality, Reaganism never really left - it merely flowed through the pipelines of neoliberalism, gaining a near-omnipresence within America's socio-political structure. Considering its permeation through the 1990s into what was once considered the opposition - the Democratic Party - it only makes sense that this process would eventually reach outlying components of the former center-left. Symbolic victories don't always translate into real change. An Obama presidency, unfortunately, has proven to be no exception. In true Reaganesque fashion, Obama immediately "brought corporate executives into the White House, reached out to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and made compromise his new watchword. He also signed a surprise $858 billion tax cut that would have made Reagan weep with joy, and huddled with Reagan's former White House chief of staff Ken Duberstein for lessons learned when the Gipper governed amid economic troubles." Besides appointments and policies, Obama has never shied away from his admiration for the former President. In a January 2011 op-ed in the USA Today, Obama lauded Reagan for "his leadership in the world," his "gift for communicating his vision for America," and his ability to "recognize the American people's hunger for accountability and change." In a 2010 speech, Obama told a newspaper editorial board in Nevada, "I think Ronald Reagan changed the trajectory of America in a way that, you know, Richard Nixon did not and in a way that Bill Clinton did not (by tapping into) what people were already feeling, which is - We want clarity, we want optimism."

While Obama spent time immortalizing Reagan, Black Americans - fresh off their symbolic and historic "victory" - remained stifled under the mounting economic crisis. Today, in the fifth year of the "first Black presidency," the results are in:

• Black unemployment remains double that for whites.

• The median income gap between white and black households has hit a record high.

• Blacks have half the access to health care as whites.

• The gap in homeownership is wider today than it was in 1990.

• African-Americans are twice as likely as whites to have suffered foreclosure.

• Net wealth for Black families dropped by 27.1 percent during the recession.

• One in 15 African-American men is incarcerated, compared with one in 106 white men.

• Blacks make up 38 percent of inmates in state and federal prisons.

• Although only 13.8 percent of the U.S. population, African-Americans represent 27 percent of those living below the poverty line.

• African-Americans are the only demographic group with higher unemployment today than when Obama took office. White unemployment dropped from 7.1 percent in January 2009 to 6.8 percent in February 2013. Hispanic unemployment dropped from 10.0 percent to 9.6 percent. But African-American unemployment rose from 12.7 percent to 13.8 percent during that time.

• The Black teen jobless rate hit a staggering 39.3 percent in July 2012.

The reasons for these horrid realities are vast. However, if you were to listen to the President, they most surely come from a lack of "personal responsibility." Piggy-backing on Reagan's three-decade-old message, Obama has gone on a tour of the American landscape, carrying this very message. His most recent stop was Morehouse College, where he spoke to the nation's most prominent historically-Black graduating class. "We've got no time for excuses," said Obama, "nobody is going to give you anything you haven't earned." "You're graduating into an improving job market," he claimed. "You're living in a time when advances in technology and communication put the world at your fingertips. Your generation is uniquely poised for success unlike any generation of African Americans that came before it." In other words, Black youth (or anyone for that matter) have no viable excuse for not making it in America. An antiquated and powerfully conservative message indeed - one that, while seemingly positive and motivating on the surface, is delivered on the false premise that individuals truly control their own destiny. An absurd notion to a working class that, despite working more hours at more jobs than any other time in history, is still waiting for that "trickle"; and laughable to Black members of that working class who have long been trapped under the shallowest of glass ceilings.

Obama's latest speech was viewed by many as condescending, elitist, and out of touch. When placed alongside his policy initiatives, or lack thereof, it was flat out insulting. And these allegations are nothing new. In 2008, during the Presidential race, Jesse Jackson made similar remarks regarding Obama's "tone" when speaking to Black audiences. "I said it can come off as speaking down to black people," said Jackson. "The moral message must be a much broader message. What we need really is racial justice and urban policy and jobs and health care. There is a range of issues on the menu." And as Ajamu Nangwaya points out, Obama's words ignore deeply embedded issues of racial inequality, including those faced by college graduates in the job market: "Many of these African men do not have control over events within the labor market. There are entrenched racist, gendered and class-related employment barriers that are resistant to personal effort and responsibility on the part of these prospective racialized, despised and stereotyped job-seekers." A point supported by The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education, which reported that "African men in the United States with a bachelor's degree earned only 82 percent ($41,916) of the median income ($51,138) of their white counterparts."

The President is not alone in channeling Reagan while addressing predominantly Black audiences. On the campaign trail in late 2011, Republican Presidential candidate Herman Cain proclaimed that black voters were "brainwashed" and incapable of "thinking for themselves," concluding that "if you don't have a job, you should blame yourself!" Political commentator Juan Williams has made a career out of preaching "personal responsibility" to Black men, suggesting they could "get ahead" if only they were willing to "work hard" and stop wearing their pants "hanging off their asses." In a recent speech at Bowie State University, the First Lady teetered on the "personal responsibility" mantle by openly criticizing black children for what she perceives as a narrow-minded obsession with becoming "ballers or rappers," and for "sitting on couches playing video games and watching TV," as if that's merely a "Black problem." In a June 10th op-ed in the NY Post, a notoriously conservative newspaper, Bill Cosby gave his two cents on "what's wrong" with African-American communities. In it, Cosby pointed to a lack of "personal responsibility" on the part of Black children for being unnecessarily "loud" and "angry," yet "apathetic." And this is not the first time Cosby has made such remarks. In a 2004 speech to the NAACP, Cosby referred to Black youth as "knuckleheads" for not being able to "speak English," ridiculed hip hop culture and style for its backwards hats and sagging pants, and reduced the entire Black population to "women who have eight children with eight different husbands," millionaire athletes "who cannot read or write two paragraphs," and "someone working at Wal-Mart with seven kids," while ending his speech with the disclaimer of "we cannot blame the white people any longer." Ironically, all of these charges come at a time when African-American voters participated at a higher frequency than white voters for the first time in history; "Occupy the Hood" movements are gaining traction around the country, grassroots alternative organizations like the Black Farmers and Urban Gardeners are surfacing, and Black-centered labor movements like "Detroit 15" have garnered national attention.

Considering barely half of whites believe that racism against Black Americans still exists, and instead actually believe they are subjected to racism at a higher rate, it is no surprise that Cosby's comments (as well as the others) caught on like wildfire through the mainstream media - the product of millions of White Privilege-deniers seeking confirmation: "See! A Black man/woman is saying it, so we must be right!" This ultra-conservative approach to historic problems facing African-American communities, especially when coming from those who are viewed as leaders and representatives of that community, is problematic to say the least. In response to Michelle Obama's speech, Jamelle Bouie succinctly wrote , "That too many black students live in poor neighborhoods, attend segregated schools, and don't have much access to the outside world has nothing to do with their effort or their priorities. Michelle Obama is a native of Chicago. I have no doubt she knows this history. Ignoring it, and focusing on the daydreams of teenagers as the real problem, is a considered choice, and a bad one at that." A bad choice indeed - and one typically reserved for those operating under the banner of the Southern Strategy.

The President has called upon his own biracial identity many times in an attempt to reach across "racial and cultural divides" and to symbolize America's diversity and multiculturalism. However, as Nangwaya suggests, the way in which he has used these identities since being elected is particularly telling. While he seems to feel comfortable utilizing his "Black side" to lecture Black Americans about so-called "personal responsibility" and their perceived "shortcomings," he never once has utilized his "white side" to lecture white folks about their collective role in perpetuating societal problems like classism, racism and xenophobia. In other words, as Nangwaya asks, why does the President not call on his "white identity" to tell a "largely white graduating class that they should stop blaming immigrants for taking away "their" jobs, or stop blaming social assistance and welfare recipients for high taxes?" Ultimately, by embracing Reaganism, the President has assumed a license to operate under a double-standard while in office; a double-standard that went global in 2009 when he told African nations to "stop blaming colonialism for their problems." As Ta-Nehisi Coates writes , "It is hard to avoid the conclusion that this White House has one way of addressing the social ills that afflict Black people - and particularly black youth - and another way of addressing everyone else. I would have a hard time imagining the president telling the women of Barnard that 'there's no longer room for any excuses' - as though they were in the business of making them. Barack Obama is, indeed, the president of 'all America,' but he also is singularly the scold of 'Black America."

The right-wing populism that carried Reagan through two successful presidential campaigns and a mythological place in American history was no surprise. Promises to champion privilege and end "white guilt" attracted the upper classes in droves, and strong condemnations against the "weakness" of liberalism and the "corrupt welfare system" for which it supported stroked the highly-reactionary and racist egos of a conservative American middle class that had been patiently waiting to strike back against the radicalism of the 1960s. Three decades later, the emergence of "Black Reaganism" points to the enduring strength of neoliberal corporatism as much as it exposes the transition of white supremacy from the rural landscapes of the Old South to the executive offices of the modern political elite. And the perpetuation of the "personal responsibility" myth is as telling as the seemingly conscious omission of structural failures that continue to relegate a disproportionate number of Black Americans to poverty and prison. "(W)hen you look at the prison industrial complex and the new Jim Crow: levels of massive unemployment and the decrepit unemployment system, indecent housing; white supremacy is still operating in the US, even with a brilliant black face in a high place called the White House,' explains Cornel West. "He (Obama) hasn't said a mumbling word about these institutions that have destroyed two generations of young black and brown youth... It's not about race. It is about commitment to justice. Maybe he couldn't do that much. But at least tell the truth... He's just too tied to Wall Street."

Ultimately, as Obama and the purveyors of "Black Reaganism" have proven, it is not merely racism that creates this unaccountability, it is the tie that binds racism - as well as misogyny, homophobia, jingoism and other oppressive mentalities - to the alienating effects of capitalism, and vice versa. In this sense, it is not Obama who has chosen to be a "good Reaganite" by remaining indifferent to systemic deficiencies that continue to plague the inner-cities and urban ghettoes of America - it is the duty for which he has been chosen to carry out. As Glen Ford from Black Agenda Report concludes: "The Age of Obama, now in its second and final quadrennial, has largely succeeded in divorcing African American politics from the historical Black consensus on social justice, self-determination and peace. What remains is play-acting and role-modeling, an Ebony magazine caricature of politics that leaves the great bulk of Black people with, literally, no avenues of resistance to the savage depredations of capitalism in decline."

If Black Power is "a range of political goals designed to counteract racial oppression through changing and establishing social institutions," then "Black Reaganism" is its antithesis - a co-opting of Afrocentric direct action and a rebranding of white privilege and corporate culture. Although many would just as soon move on from "racial politics," with all of its potential downfalls, the fact remains that America's social structure still operates from a foundation built on racial inequity. "Blaming the victim" through hollow calls for "personal responsibility" is not the solution - because one cannot "pull themselves up from their bootstraps" if their bootstraps were taken from them long ago.