Actual "Expert" vs. Pundits

The Western political-media establishment is busy ginning up baseless fear again over Iran's nuclear program, so pay absolutely no attention to this little gem of independent thought from Dr. Mohamed ElBaradei, Director General of the International Atomic Energy Agency:

I am dismayed by the allegations of some Member States, which have been fed to the media, that information has been withheld from the Board. These allegations are politically motivated and totally baseless. Such attempts to influence the work of the Secretariat and undermine its independence and objectivity are in violation of Article VII.F. of the IAEA Statute and should cease forthwith.

Doesn't he know Iran is eeeeeeevil?

Thankfully, here's Glenn Greenwald on MSNBC, characteristically cutting through the pundit-generated bullshit like a hot knife through butter. But I was shocked to discover none other than Arianna Huffington stoking fear about Iran. For shame, Huff.

The G20 Travesty

The recent economic summit of the G20 nations in Pittsburgh was everything I expected - that is, a glossy stage show in which the chief political representatives of world banking interests offered vague statements praising the so-called economic recovery (for the bankers, that is) while pressing forward on plans to make working people pay for the crimes of international finance, all while peaceful protesters outside faced now-routine police brutality bolstered by the most technologically-advanced methods of crowd dispersal/oppression. Tear gas, pepper spray, batons, rubber bullets and sonic cannons (also known as Long Range Acoustic Devices) were all deployed as the international elite attempted to neutralize any popular criticism of its reactionary policies.

According to the G20, economic recovery will require governments to reduce spending and squeeze workers by lowering their living standard, a solution which does not exactly square with their professed goals of creating jobs and reducing poverty. Perhaps the weakness of their actual economic plans was what prompted leaders of the Western nations to distract the media's attention by engaging in this heartwarming act of political theatre:

In what has all the hallmarks of an orchestrated political provocation, the United States, Britain and France, with the support of Germany, denounced a supposedly secret Iranian nuclear plant, threatened stepped-up economic sanctions and possible military action unless the facility was immediately open to inspection.

In a joint announcement Friday morning at the G20 summit in Pittsburgh, US President Barack Obama, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown and French President Nicolas Sarkozy appeared together before television cameras to issue the warning. Germany’s Chancellor Angela Merkel, who had left Pittsburgh to return home, issued her own statement of support for the threats against Iran.

Obama declared, “The Iranian government must now demonstrate through deeds its peaceful intentions or be held accountable to international standards and international law.” He gave Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad six days to respond—by the time of an October 1 meeting in Geneva. His approach echoed that of George W. Bush seven years ago in citing an alleged nuclear weapons program as the basis for going to war against Iraq.

Talk about déjà vu all over again. Is the memory of the public really so short that the buildup to war against Iraq in 2003 - supported by the same bogus claims about weapons of mass destruction and the same hypocritical lectures about international law from the world's most powerful rogue state - has already been forgotten as we see the exact same propaganda applied to Iran? That's a rhetorical question, of course; public opinion has almost always been irrelevant when it comes to U.S. foreign policy. But it is depressing to see the foreign policy elite do everything in its power to beat the drums of war, especially at a conference supposedly designed to address the economic crisis. Then again, we shouldn't be surprised; unscrupulous politicians have always used war as a distraction from and "solution" to economic problems.

Canadian Foreign Minister Lawrence Cannon characteristically followed the lead of the United States, condemning Iran for its "continued refusal" to listen to resolutions by the UN Security Council and the International Atomic Energy Agency. Unless, of course, you consider the fact that the existence of Iran's supposedly top-secret nuclear facilities was actually disclosed to the IAEA by...Iran, in a letter written September 21 that acknowledged the construction of a new pilot-fuel enrichment plant. But whatever.

The relentless demonization of Iran by the wealthy Western elite is merely another indication of how little power the people of those nations actually have over their governments' foreign policies. We should revere the heroes who showed up in Pittsburgh to protest the continued dominance of the neoliberal agenda over a world that ideology has clearly failed, especially given the ever-more repressive measures undertaken by the new American police state. Riot squads entered university dormitories to threaten students with arrest and expulsion, many requests for peaceful demonstrations were unceremoniously denied, and the use of pepper spray, rubber bullets, gas and LRAD against the crowd was justified by the supposed threat from anarchists, though it has been shown in the past that plainclothed police provocateurs often infiltrated anarchist groups in order to justify the brutal crackdown on protesters.

Also noteworthy is the coverage of the G20 protests in the largest mainstream news organizations, which is to say there was barely any, certainly nothing approaching the wall-to-wall coverage of factually-challenged teabaggers at town hall meetings. We mainly saw sanitized coverage and carefully-prepared statements from the G20 leaders themselves, though CNN ran a nice little fluff piece on the riot police point of view.

Of course, no discussion of this G20 would be complete without a quote from the first Community Organizer-In-Chief. For any deluded liberal who still believes Obama has anything in common with them at all, the following howler should provide a much-needed slap in the face:

PITTSBURGH (AP) — President Barack Obama says the G-20 summit in Pittsburgh was relatively tranquil and protesters should realize that world leaders are trying to shape a global economy that helps poor people.

Obama told reporters Friday that previous world summits drew far more protesters than the several thousand who clashed with police this week in Pittsburgh.

The president said many of the protesters oppose capitalism and free markets in general. He said they are free to express their views but he disagrees with them.

Obama said the G-20 leaders agreed to economic policies that should create world markets that help workers and poor people have more stable and prosperous lives.

After all, if there's anyone who knows about helping workers and poor people have more stable and prosperous lives, it's Wall Street's most prominent puppet.

Head in the Sand

I caught longtime activist Yves Engler at Queen's yesterday promoting his new publication, The Black Book of Canadian Foreign Policy. You can be sure I immediately snapped up a copy. As should be obvious if you've read any of my previous posts, I've been consistently critical of American foreign policy and imperialist wars in general. However, my knowledge of Canada's own international crimes has been sadly lacking. Aside from the most obvious cases, such as the war in Afghanistan, I have largely fallen into the same mindset as most Canadian establishment journalists - i.e., that we are a benevolent, peaceful nation, standing in stark contrast to the more aggressively capitalist and militarist United States.

Call it patriotism, nationalism, or ethnocentric chauvinism, but that is essentially what results when one uncritically supports whatever their country does. While I have been aware of the Harper government's shameful neglect of Canadian citizens imprisoned abroad, such as Omar Khadr and Abousfian Abdelrazik, and its professed support of Israeli war crimes in Gaza, I have still subconsciously clung to the notion of Canada as peacekeeper. What Engler reminds us is that no country is ever as good as its public statements would suggest. He highlights the important fact that we should always regard government words with skepticism, and that Canadians in particular have paid far too much attention to our government's words rather than its actions. If we examine the historical record, the evidence of Canadian compliance in or advocacy of imperialist crimes is damning indeed.

Engler makes a convincing case that throughout our history, Canada has always supported the actions of the preeminent imperial power of the day, be that Great Britain or the USA. Thus, even when it appears on the surface that we have taken a brave stand against American foreign policy, if one digs deeper we usually find either aquiescence to broader U.S. policy or the aiding and abetting of American aggression. Praise of Lester Pearson's famous 1965 speech at Temple University in which he called for a pause in American bombing of North Vietnam - which has been cited even by leftist journalists like Linda McQuaig as an example of Canada's peaceful nature - ignores the more salient truth that Canada largely supported American anti-communist policy in Southeast Asia and even allowed Agent Orange to be tested in New Brunswick, due to the similarity of the foliage to that of Vietnam.

Similarly, despite our much-ballyhooed opposition to the Iraq War in 2003, Canada provided implict support to U.S. forces by allowing the use of our air space, providing logistical support, sending naval vessels to patrol the Arabian Sea, providing equipment such as aircraft, and even sending a small number of soldiers to participate in the conflict, including General Walter Natynczyk, now Chief of the Defence Staff of the Canadian Forces. Our role in Iraq is best summarized by Janice Gross Stein and Eugene Lang in their book The Unexpected War:

In an almost schizophrenic way, the government bragged publicly about its decision to stand aside from the war in Iraq because it violated core principles of multilateralism and support for the United Nations. At the same time, senior Canadian officials, military officers and politicians were currying favour in Washington, privately telling anyone in the State Department of the Pentagon who would listen that, by some measures, Canada's indirect contribution to the American war effort in Iraq – three ships and 100 exchange officers – exceeded that of all but three other countries that were formally part of the coalition.

In the same vein, Canada's rejection of the American embargo on Cuba was not an act of benevolence and common sense, but was designed to serve American interests. In his book Three Nights in Havana, Robert Wright lays it out for us:

Recently declassified State Department documents have revealed that, far from encouraging Canada to support the embargo, the United States secretly urged Diefenbaker to maintain normal relations because it was thought that Canada would be well-positioned to gather intelligence on the island.

Upon closer reflection, none of this should surprise us. Canada is no better or worse than any other country in that its foreign policy is largely dictated by the concerns of an elite establishment. Imperialism, whether British or American, serves the needs of Canadian business interests, who therefore have no trouble supporting neo-colonial adventures in the Middle East or Africa. Aside from acting as a junior partner to larger imperial powers, we have also engaged in the neoliberal exploitation of developing nations, ensuring that Canadian corporations have free rein to extract resources from those impoverished countries. It's really no surprise that our foreign policy elite acts in this way, since it's the same in any country: you only have to follow the money to know why nations often engage in such behaviour without broad popular support.

Canada's exploitive urges are limited only by the size of our population and our resources, not by any claim to moral superiority. To ignore this fact is to fall into the same trap as chest-thumping nationalists south of the border, who I have so often criticized because, let's face it, it's easier to criticize others than to take an honest look in the mirror. Writers such as Glenn Greenwald have noted American hypocrisy in decrying human rights abuses by official enemies such as Iran while ignoring America's own record of torture, international aggression and flouting of the rule of law. For me to continue to criticize those abuses while downplaying my own country's crimes would be utterly hypocritical. In that sense, Engler's book was more than worth the $15.

A Small Dose of Common Sense

Gosh, this sounds reasonable:

Israel promised Russia it would not launch an attack on Iran, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev said in an interview aired on Sunday in which he described such an assault as "the worst thing that can be imagined."

Israel has hinted it could forcibly deny Iran the means to make an atomic bomb if it refuses to suspend uranium enrichment and has criticized Russia for agreeing to supply to Tehran S-300 anti-aircraft weapons that could complicate an attack.

In an interview with CNN recorded on Tuesday, Medvedev denied Moscow was backing Iran but said it had the right to supply defensive weapons and said sanctions against Tehran should only be used as a last resort.

An attack would lead to "a humanitarian disaster, a vast number of refugees, Iran's wish to take revenge and not only upon Israel, to be honest, but upon other countries as well," Medvedev said, according to a Kremlin transcript.

"But my Israeli colleagues told me that they were not planning to act in this way and I trust them."

Call me crazy, but I'm not sure I can place as much trust as Medvedev does in the word of the Israeli government, especially since Joe Biden appeared to indicate in July that the U.S. government would do nothing to stop an Israeli first strike against Iran. Of course, we're talking about Joe "Ready to Gaffe" Biden here. But although the Obama administration distanced itself from those remarks - with the President personally saying the U.S. had "absolutely not" given Israel permission to attack - you have to wonder, given the Beltway establishment's unrelenting push for war with Iran and Obama's own penchant for saying one thing while doing another.

Throughout all of this, I can't help but appreciate the role Russia continues to play as a bulwark against U.S.-Israeli aggression in the Middle East and elsewhere. Although I'm no great fan of Vladimir Putin and the corrupt, authoritarian-leaning government he heads, I understand his popularity among Russians who might desire a more traditional strongman after the economic chaos of the 1990s, the grotesque failures of free market "reforms" masterminded by Larry Summers, and the international embarrassment embodied in booze-addled political opportunist Boris Yeltsin. Following the Cold War, the boost to American exceptionalism provided by the demise of the Soviet Union and the rise of a "unipolar" global order found its most odious expression in the cowboy diplomacy of the Bush administration. Although the neoconservatives have been largely discredited by foreign policy disasters like Iraq, their noxious worldview continues to thoroughly infect mainstream political discourse in the United States, with the result that Beltway conventional wisdom is often predicated on their warmongering interpretations of daily events - which of course then finds its way into that ultimate vehicle for establishment-approved political thought, the Obama administration.

As a result, whenever the American media-industrial complex attempts to push a factually false, but politically convenient meme - such as the idea that the 2008 South Ossetia conflict was unprovoked and entirely attributable to Russian aggression, rather than a response to Georgian president Mikhail Saakashvili's ill-advised offensive into the breakaway province - it's nice to have Russian opinion providing a counterbalance. Yes, it's just another great power protecting its own geostrategic interests, but with the percentage of blatant lies clogging up American political discourse getting thicker all the time, Russian interests will often lead that country's spokespersons wading into the realm of fact. It's a refreshing alternative, but it also underlines the extent to which, in the propaganda-soaked post-9/11 media wasteland, the United States plutocracy has largely made a mockery of the idea that its public relations channels (or "news networks", as the euphemism would have it) resemble anything like a free press. As in any other authoritarian state, the American media serves the interests of powerful elites. It's just a question of which state's bullshit you choose to believe.

Last To Die

Another day, another Canadian casualty in Afghanistan. My best friend just joined the army a month ago, and it's hard to see one more guy our age get blown to hell on the other side of the world for no discernible purpose. Afghanistan is a war even its staunchest supporters find increasingly difficult to justify, and it seems young Private Couterier thought the same thing:

Family members of the latest Canadian soldier killed in Afghanistan told a Quebec City newspaper that the young soldier considered the mission "a bit useless."

Nicolas Couturier, brother of Pte. Jonathan Couturier, told Le Soleil that the 23-year-old soldier had mixed emotions about being in Afghanistan.

"That war, he thought it was a bit useless, that they were wasting their time there," he was quoted telling Le Soleil.

"He didn't talk about it," Nicolas told the newspaper. "He was positive, but at certain moments, let's just say he was fed up."

Jonathan Couturier died Thursday morning when his vehicle hit a roadside bomb while returning from a mission in the Panjwaii district, southwest of Kandahar city.

The soldier's sister-in-law and his brother's spouse, Valerie Boucher, also told the newspaper Jonathan "didn't want to go" and was very much looking forward to coming home.

Nicolas Couturier was also critical of the Afghanistan mission, saying it "is not serving anything."

Bottom line, the main reason Canada is in Afghanistan is because the United States went there and dragged NATO along. The main reason the United States is there, despite the chest-beating rhetoric about "defeating Al-Qaeda", is to gain control of an energy-rich, strategically important area in central Asia. It's now public record that the United States government planned a war in Afghanistan long before 9/11 provided a convenient justification. But the war is about more than just geopolitical strategy or access to energy reserves. In many ways, Afghanistan is about war for war's sake.

In his book The Political Economy of U.S. Militarism, Ismael Hossein-zadeh analyzed the role of the military-industrial complex in American foreign policy, and one of the more interesting conclusions he drew was that the sheer magnitude of American military might makes war a more attractive policy option. As suggested by John Kerry in 2004, the 9/11 attacks were more of a law-enforcement issue than a military affair, and should have demanded a concerted multinational effort to increase intelligence and security through traditional law-enforcement means. The decision to invade Afghanistan was based on political decisions by trigger-happy Republicans and neoconservatives - who see anything less than the use of force as "appeasement" - combined with the sheer institutional inertia of the permanent war economy. Conservatives always decry government spending - except regarding the armed forces, which they happily shower with taxpayer dollars via an extreme military Kenysianism. It's an ideological contradiction that they never get called out on, and it creates a downward spiral of increasing war, death and destruction. If the Great Depression can be said to have been "solved" by World War II, then aside from their energy resources and geostrategic significance, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq are little more than giant public works projects for the military.

Ever since Lester B. Pearson, Canadians have prided themselves on their role as "peacekeepers". But the war in Afghanistan is just that - a full-out war, one that has now dragged on well past our level of involvement in either World War, yet which does not clearly advance our national security in any way. If the fear is of Afghanistan providing a "safe haven" for terrorists, I fail to see how keeping hundreds of thousands of Western troops there will do anything but increase Afghans' hatred for us. Afghanistan and Iraq prove that Western military intervention in the Middle East has been a public-relations boon to Al-Qaeda. Every NATO airstrike on a wedding party can be presented as further evidence that the West is out to destroy Islam. If we want to prevent future terrorist attacks, the only way to do it is through more subtle but effective methods, like improving border security, intelligence-gathering and law-enforcement (the civil liberties repercussions of which is a whole other issue). Maintaining thousands of troops in a distant land - sacrificing our own nationals as well as countless Afghan civilians in an effort to prop up a corrupt government little better than the Taliban - is not the way to do it.

Our country has expended enough blood and treasure in this quixotic quest to bring "peace, order and good government" to Afghanistan, justifiably referred to as the graveyard of empires, less a nation-state than a loose collection of warlords' domains. When even an establishment water-carrier like George Will suggests it's time to pull out, the writing is pretty much on the wall.

You Don't Know Jack

Jack Layton came to Kingston the other day, and I had the good luck to catch him as he swung by Queen's University. Supporting the Harper government has been a pretty controversial move on the NDP's part, and the crowd made sure Jack registered its disapproval, with a friend of mine even asking why he was helping to continue Stephen Harper's "reign of terror." Honestly, I think it's a pragmatic move. The NDP has fallen pretty low in the polls lately, with a mere 12% approval rating, so an election probably wouldn't help them at this point. I also believe the party is sincerely focused on expanding Employment Insurance. Besides, if you're a party that has never formed a government in the history of Canadian federal politics, there's no need to force an election merely on the desire to see your party back in power (Iggy, I'm looking at you).

As a politician, Jack seems very much a man of the people, even coming out to the Grad Club for a few post-speech beers. Certainly to a greater extent than the more "bourgeois" parties, the NDP represents working-class Canadians and activists motivated by social justice issues. But at the same time, the party has come a long way from its more socialist roots with the CCF. During question period, I asked Jack whether he would consider incorporating a more explicitly anti-capitalist message in the party's platform, given the enormity of the global financial crisis. Since the Conservatives and Liberals will label the NDP "socialists" whenever the party gets on their bad side, I reasoned that they should embrace both the word and the ideology, in the same way that rappers reclaimed the N-word and made it a positive thing.

In his answer, Jack said the party was open to new and radical ideas, and made reference to their past support for the nationalization of Hydro Quebec and the party's efforts to promote a massive green jobs campaign. I was satisfied with the answer, since Jack is obviously constrained by political reality from saying anything too obviously threatening to the status quo, and the programs he mentioned were exactly what comes to my mind when I imagine what a democratic socialist government could do for Canada. At the same time, the NDP's reluctance to advance a straightforward critique of capitalism bear witness to how far the party has come from Tommy Douglas and the CCF. The Regina Manifesto of 1933 bluntly stated that "No CCF Government will rest content until it has eradicated capitalism and put into operation [a] full programme of socialized planning."

Given the obvious failures of a command economy as practiced in the former Soviet Union, these sentiments may seem overly simplistic and ideological to modern ears...but is it any more ideological than the "free market" fundamentalists in the United States urging more deregulation as the solution to every problem, where everything can be solved by the magic of the market? It's like this: if you were to ask me whether I'm a capitalist or a socialist, my answer would be socialist for the simple fact that I consider the progression of society a more important value than the accumulation of my own personal capital. The NDP should embrace the "socialist" moniker because socialism envisions a more just society than that of a callous laissez-faire capitalism. While the party advances sensible policies that embody socialist values, it should not be afraid to make its bold opposition to the status quo known. After all, should the party continue in the opposite direction - forever watering down its policies, becoming the "Democratic Party", moving rightward until it is indistinguishable from the Liberals or even the American Democratic Party - then the purpose of the NDP ceases to exist. The party is a vehicle for the impassioned Canadian Left, and the magnitude of the current crisis should make it more open to radically different ideas.

I understand concerns about "electability", but honestly, there's nothing that would rouse my political passions more than a party that pledged to make radical changes in the fight for a more egalitarian society. The cautious pragmatism of the current NDP stands in sharp contrast with the more radical socialism of workers in the 1930s, and this is a pattern I've seen in many countries. After 30 years of neoliberal indoctrination, we seem to have accepted the omnipresence of the capitalist mode of production as a historical inevitability, and lost our agitation for more radical change. Call such an approach "old-fashioned" if you must, but you have to compare the huge gains made by the more radicalized Left in the 1930s to the incremental progress made today, where those of us concerned with social justice often content ourselves with writing stuff on the internet (guilty as charged). If there's one thing I've learned from the American health care debate, it's that passion and emotion, no matter how misdirected, can still be a powerful force in political discourse. If we could just turn out with the same force as the teabaggers, but with facts and history on our side...we might be unstoppable.

Country Boys

Am I the only one who saw some racist undertones in criticism of the Kanye West/Taylor Swift thing? I'm not trying to defend what Kanye did - it was pretty stupid and ill-considered - but the discussion of it on Hannity veered a little into good ol' boy territory when John Rich suggested Kanye was "lucky there weren't any country boys in the audience." Although Mickey Rourke sounded pretty reasonable, the ensuing discussion of a "19-year-old girl" - who, Rich added as if to further underline her purity, was clad in a WHITE dress - being victimized by a black man, seemed, given the venue, to be a bit of a throwback to Jim Crow-era proclamations of the need to "protect" white women from threatening black men...especially with the ominous reference to "country boys" waiting in the wings to deal with him physically if need be. I don't know, maybe I'm reading too much into this. The American cable news cycle is so dominated these days by back-and-forth accusations of racism, I might just be imagining it. But it does seem a little peculiar that the outbursts of Kanye West and Serena Williams produced such widespread condemnation compared to that of Rep. Joe Wilson, who created a profitable career for himself as a right-wing folk hero after his own outburst towards the president.

Also, it's genuinely sad to see a musician like Rich, who penned perhaps the first great protest song of this Great Recession, align himself with the reactionary likes of Sean Hannity and the teabagging crowd. "Shuttin' Detroit Down" was a powerful anthem with lyrics that spoke directly to the pain of working class people being crushed by large, impersonal economic forces and mocked by the boundless greed of Wall Street tycoons still getting record bonuses. To see him help misdirect their anger at phantom enemies projected by the right-wing noise machine - ACORN, the poor, immigrants, minorities - is a vivid example of either cynical indifference to the real source of economic pain in America, or just the tragic self-deception inherent to right-wing populism.

Health Care, American Racism and the Manchurian Candidate

And now, for a long overdue post. I've neglected this blog somewhat since I got a data management job in June working for the Ontario provincial government. It was a great seven weeks, and only reinforced my respect for the public sector. But don't think for a moment that I was so busy with that job that I neglected to follow the news. On the contrary, if anything, the fact that I was following the news so closely contributed to the absence of a new post for a couple of months.

Specifically, I'm speaking about the Obama administration's purported efforts to reform American health care. This is one of those subjects that, as a Canadian basking in the warm glow of a single-payer system, probably shouldn't concern me. But given the subject's dominance of the cable news cycle and the blogosphere, it's been impossible to avoid. And if I'm interested in American politics partially because it's so much more out there than Canadian politics, then this summer has been a stark lesson in both the ironclad grip of corporate lobbyists over the political process south of the border, and the maddening gullibility and stupidity of a large portion of that country's white working class.

Although I wasn't alive in 1967 to experience the Summer of Love, I've now had the misfortune to bear witness to 2009 devolving into the Summer of Hate. When the teabaggers and right-wing extremists first burst onto the national consciousness at the town hall debates, the sheer madness and idiocy of what they were saying stunned me into silence. Never before in my life had I seen so much misdirected anger as when these sad rubes let loose their redfaced rage at the prospect of receiving HEALTH CARE. Bush's wars of aggression, shredding of the Constitution and civil liberties, disregard for looming ecological catastrophe and undeclared class war against poor and working-class Americans all passed them by, but Fox News and hate radio have given them their marching orders: all the accumulated disasters facing the country as a result of eight years of Republican mismanagement (and, more to the point, 30 years of neoliberal economic dogma) have now been placed solely at the feet of one Barack Hussein Obama. Sadly, the town hall rubes are more than racist enough to fully embrace this logic.

Let's not kid ourselves: a good deal of the fears generated among misinformed white working class Americans by the right wing noise machine are based primarily on race. Tim Wise summed up best the reasons for their ludicrous belief that Obama, as total a Wall Street whore as has ever occupied the Oval Office, whose entire health care "plan" is based around salvaging the existing private insurance system, is secretly attempting to impose communism on America:

It is not, in other words, a simple belief in smaller government or lower taxes that animates the near-hysterical cries from the right about wanting "their country back," from those who have presumably hijacked it: you know, those known lefties like Tim Geithner and Rahm Emanuel. No, what differentiates Obama from any of the other big spenders who have previously occupied the White House is principally one thing--his color. And it is his color that makes the bandying about of the "socialist" label especially effective and dangerous as a linguistic trope. Indeed, I would suggest that at the present moment, socialism is little more than racist code for the longstanding white fear that black folks will steal from them, and covet everything they have. The fact that the fear may now be of a black president, and not just some random black burglar hardly changes the fact that it is fear nonetheless: a deep, abiding suspicion that African American folk can't wait to take whitey's stuff, as payback, as reparations, as a way to balance the historic scales of injustice that have so long tilted in our favor. In short, the current round of red-baiting is based on implicit (and perhaps even explicit) appeals to white racial resentment. It is Mau-Mauing in the truest sense of the term, and especially since Obama's father was from the former colonial Kenya! Unless this is understood, left-progressive responses to the tactic will likely fall flat. After all, pointing out the absurdity of calling Obama a socialist, given his real policy agenda, will mean little if the people issuing the charge were never using the term in the literal sense, but rather, as a symbol for something else entirely.

To begin with, and this is something often under-appreciated by the white left, to the right and its leadership (if not necessarily its foot-soldiers), the battle between capitalism and communism/socialism has long been seen as a racialized conflict. First, of course, is the generally non-white hue of those who have raised the socialist or communist banner from a position of national leadership. Most such places and persons have been of color: China, Vietnam, North Korea, Cuba, assorted places in Latin America from time to time, or the Caribbean, or in Africa. With the exception of the former Soviet Union and its immediate Eastern European satellites--which are understood as having had state socialism foisted upon them, rather than having it freely chosen through their own revolutions from below--Marxism in practice has been a pretty much exclusively non-white venture.

And even the Russians were seen through racialized lenses by some of America's most vociferous cold warriors. To wit, consider what General Edward Rowney, who would become President Reagan's chief arms negotiator with the Soviets, told Manning Marable in the late 1970s, and which Marable then recounted in his book, The Great Wells of Democracy:

"One day I asked Rowney about the prospects for peace, and he replied that meaningful negotiations with the Russian Communists were impossible. 'The Russians,' Rowney explained, never experienced the Renaissance, or took part in Western civilization or culture. I pressed the point, asking whether his real problem with Russia was its adherence to communism. Rowney snapped, 'Communism has nothing to do with it!' He looked thoughtful for a moment and then said simply, 'The real problem with Russians is that they are Asiatics'."

In the present day, the only remaining socialists in governance on the planet are of color: in places like Cuba or Venezuela, perhaps China (though to a more truncated extent, given their embrace of the market in recent decades) and, on the lunatic Stalinist fringe, North Korea. These are the last remaining standard-bearers, in leadership positions, who would actually use the term socialist to describe themselves. Given the color-coding of socialism in the 21st century, at the level of governance, to use the label to describe President Obama and his administration, has the effect of tying him to these "other" socialists in power. Although he has nearly nothing in common with them politically or in terms of his policy prescriptions, he is a man of color, so the connection is made, mentally, even if it carries no intellectual or factual truth.

Of course, Obama has made it much harder for progressives to defend him, given his propensity for spitting in the face of his most loyal supporters. His health care bill is to the health insurance industry what TARP was to Wall Street - a government bailout in which taxpayers subsidize private industry. The great Matt Taibbi explained in his recent Rolling Stone article on health care why the bill that ultimately emerges may actually be worse than no bill at all, since it essentially forces the population to buy a defective product. This is classic Obama - he has always offered pretty words while his actual policies have constituted the grossest kind of corporate welfare.

Nevertheless, the sheer level of venom directed at him by the extreme right is profoundly depressing because it fails to address any substantial, real problems with the bill. Rather, the lies, distortions and exaggerations peddled nonstop by Republican politicians and the right wing hate machine have raised ridiculous fears of "death panels" and pulling the plug on grandma. It's just really, really sad to see people again loudly protesting against their own best interests, because if they should be protesting anything, it's that the Obama plans don't go nearly far enough towards universal health care. But that would require a knowledgable, informed citizenry - impossible in the modern United States given the predominance of corporate disinformation campaigns that pass as "news".

I want to end this somewhat disjointed post by referring to two vastly different books I recently read as part of my ongoing attempt to understand conservative redneck culture, to figure out once and for all why these people consistently vote against their own best interests. The first book is a truly worthwhile read by Winchester, Virginia native Joe Bageant called Deer Hunting With Jesus: Dispatches from America's Class War. Bageant is a product of a culture saturated with God and guns, yet through education and 60s-era hippie liberalism managed to emerge a self-proclaimed "godless socialist", earning him mad props from yours truly. His book is a sad indictment of the South in which a toxic combination of religiosity, poor education and an otherwise commendable commitment to "self-reliance" has resulted in a population snugly in the hands of an ingenious Republican public relations machine. Conservatives' success in framing national issues through Southern cultural tropes is truly impressive in its diabolical success, and the only hope for liberals and progressives is to grab the bull by the horns and create new frames by which progressive policies can find a hold in these reactionary strongholds. This will be extraordinarily difficult given the utter corruption (via corporate campaign contributions) of the current Democratic Party.

The second book has value only in that its pages can be burned as a fuel source if necessary. Michael Savage is perhaps the most repugnant talk radio host in America, no easy feat in a field dominated by the likes of Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity. I recently perused his book The Savage Nation, and was predictably mortified by its scathing hatred towards Savage's imagined shadowy force of secular, gay-loving, America-hating liberal "Commu-Nazis". Reading this latest version, published in 2002, it was clear that the equation of Obama to Hitler by conservatives is by no means a recent phenomenon. But I gained some insight into the uniquely twisted reasoning of deluded white conservatives towards Obama and his apparently sinister aims. It goes something like this:

Throughout his book, Savage, like many conservative commentators, explicitly equates liberals with socialists, communists, Nazis and terrorists. Despite Obama's excruciatingly middle-of-the-road, mealy-mouthed centrism and fellating of Wall Street and the Washington establishment, right-wing media has successfully mined his record for anything that could conceivably be used to fit him into a convenient "angry black man" stereotype. The widespread coverage of Jeremiah Wright, magnification of Obama's relationship to William Ayers, and subsequent demonizing of Van Jones as a radical communist revolutionary all combined to create a Bizarro world version of Obama specifically designed to stoke fear among backwards conservative voters - a dichotomy best captured in this article by The Onion.

So the longstanding conservative equation of liberals with terrorists, combined with the exotic "otherness" of Obama's personal background (white mother, black Kenyan father) and his suspiciously Muslim-sounding middle name, Hussein, all conspire to create a version of Obama onto which any manner of conservative fears can be projected - socialism, wealth redistribution, affirmative action, you name it. The teabaggers, birthers and deathers all seem to truly believe Obama is some Manchurian candidate who will soon reveal his true nature as a communist/socialist/fascist/Muslim racist. That these ideas often contradict each other is no problem for far-right propagandists and true believers.

The fact that conservatives will demonize Obama no matter what he does makes his willingness to reach out to Republican politicians in a futile effort at "bipartisanship" that much more frustrating. In fact, the Democrats' approach to health care has been so undeniably weak that it's fair game to assume that that was their plan from the beginning. The always-excellent David Michael Green said as much in today's must-read column:

Of course, he's also chosen to put healthcare reform on the table as the signature legislative initiative probably of his entire presidency. That's fine, but watching him in action I sometimes wonder if this clown really and actually wants a second term. I mean, if you had asked me in January, "How could Obama bungle this program most thoroughly?", I would have written a prescription that varies little from what we've observed over the last eight months: Don't frame the issue, but instead let the radical right backed by greedy industry monsters do it, on the worst possible terms for you. And to you. Don't fight back when they say the most outrageous things about your plan. In fact, don't even have a plan. Let Congress do it. Better yet, let the by-far-and-away-minority party have an equal voice in the proceedings, even if they ultimately won't vote for the bill under any circumstances, and even while they're running around trashing it and you in the most egregious terms. Have these savages negotiate with a small group of right-wing Democrats, all of them major recipients of industry campaign donations. Blow off your base completely. Cut secret sweetheart deals with the Big Pharma and Big Insurance corporate vampires. Build a communications strategy around a series of hapless press conferences and town hall meetings, waiting until it's too late to give a major speech on the issue. Set a timetable for action and then let it slip. Indicate what you want in the bill but then be completely unclear about whether you necessarily require those things. Travel all over the world doing foreign policy meet-and-greets. Go on vacation in the heat of the battle. Rinse and repeat.

Altogether, it's an astonishingly perfect recipe for getting rolled, so much so that I'm not the first person to have wondered out loud if that was actually the president's intention all along. Look at this freaking fool. Now look at the guy who ran a letter-perfect, disciplined, textbook, insurgent, victorious campaign for the White House. Can they possibly be the same person? And, since they obviously are, is there possibly another explanation for this disaster besides an intentional boot? I dunno. But what I do know is this. Obama's very best-case scenario for healthcare legislation right now represents a ton of lost votes in 2010 and 2012. And the worse that scenario gets, the worse he and his party do. But even a 'success' in the months ahead will produce a tepid bill, a mistrustful public, an inflamed and unanswered radical right, and a mealy-mouthed new government program that doesn't even begin to go online until 2013. A real vote-getter that, eh?

Trust me, if Obama was actually the Islamic Marxist revolutionary racist of Glenn Beck's psychotic delusions, he'd be a lot more effective at actually getting things done.