The Honorable Great Pan Africanist Hero of the 20th century Marcus Mosiah Garvey once said after he toured the US."The problem of the black race in America is a problem of leadership".Marcus Garvey said the so called black leaders don't speak for the masses but for their own selfish wants,desires and needs.He accused them of wanting to be white.The biggest issue with the so called leaders as he saw it was he felt their agendas are not their own but ideas of whites who are only using the blacks are pawns.He saw that joining with trade unionist,communist,and other radicals were dangerous and fruitless activities that would set the black man back in American society.Most of Marcus Garvey's detractors in the black leadership indeed came from white philanthropic organizations and charities.These as Garvey put it want black economic,social,and political activities controlled.Talk of nation building, black men wearing military uniforms walking down the streets of Harlem, made the hair on the average white man's head white and stand up.Even though Garvey's program would have worked America had an image of a buffoon,coon,sambo of the black man and that is the image they wanted to keep.A bumbling docile fool who knows nothing about the world around him just where to get his next meal.Marcus Garvey dreamed of a redemptive African people free and safe in a land of their own.
Marcus Garvey had his vision which was what he saw at the time period.He would have changed his mind if he had lived to see black men being elected mayors,governors,senators,and now the President of the United States of States.
It seems that 85 years after the height of Marcus Garvey and the openly hostile negro leadership who conspired to have him brought up on charges then deported we still have negros who out of pure envy and jealousy want to undermine Barack Obama.Lets examine some similarities.There were rumors spread by enemies of Garvey in the so called black leadership saying the KKK paid Garvey to ship negros to the jungle in Africa.The hidden hand during Garvey's demise was the zionist and white crime syndicates who exploited the newly urbanized African Americans in the North.They paid black leaders to oppose Garvey much like now it is the militant gays,the extreme communist that are pouring money into black blogs to break the solid block Obama has in Black America.Because they think they can use us to leverage power.But they are wrong we are for the first time thinking for ourselves and voting for who we want.This is what happened during the primary.The black so called intellectuals,leaders,thinkers,pundits were all in the pocket of the Clintons,but to show they have no more influence in black America no one listened to them.The hatred for Obama is not rooted in anything he is doing.It rooted in self hatred that old damning sacred cow we as a people cant seem to get rid of.Why do some expect magic in 6 months of office?We said nothing about all the things Clinton did not do in office.I cant find one bad word any of the so called Obama haters said about Bush.Their out right hatred is reserved for a fellow Black man.We want this young man to fix the problems we all created.Can Obama stop ignorance?Self Hate?Violence?The fact that we don't support each others businesses,is that Obama's fault?Our girls have the highest teen pregnancy rate,is that Obama's fault?The Lakers won the NBA championship was there some conspiracy by Obama?Well according to Glen Ford Barack Obama sunk the Titanic and created AIDS.
Kalagenesis vs The Black Agenda Report
The following is an article by communist and anti capitalist professor Glen Ford:
by BAR executive editor Glen Ford
The first Black president has racked up some impressive victories. Barack Obama has quarantined single-payer healthcare advocates, crushed dissent against the war in Congress, and transferred more money to the finance capital class than at any time in planetary history. Not bad for just five months in office. “At some point in the near future Barack Obama will become inextricably associated in the public mind with Big Capital – and deservedly so.”
Obama’s Emerging Legacy: Wars, Bankers and For-Profit Healthcare
by BAR executive editor Glen Ford
“The 'Obama Effect' has led to the near-total collapse of the Left.”
As of this writing, the Progressives for Obama [1] website still exists, a relic of Left delusion that should have died of embarrassment months ago. Barack Obama has, indeed, grown in the presidency – but not into the FDR-like figure of his leftish supporters’ imaginations. Nor has his presence in the Oval Office served to spur Blacks and progressives to dramatic action, creating the “push” that Left Obamites had predicted would allow their champion to act on his more “liberal” instincts. Quite the contrary. The “Obama Effect” has led to the near-total collapse of the Left– both its white and Black wings – and made the nation safe for rule by finance capital and militarists.
The military, finance capital and healthcare corporations (insurers are a branch of finance capital) are winning every important battle because, on fundamental issues, President Obama is on their side. It is he who crushed the anti-war bloc [2] in the US. House; who silenced and marginalized single payer advocates, while fawning over health profiteers; who engineered the greatest transfer of wealth in human history to bankers, leaving them free to once again ruin themselves and the rest of us.
So let us give President Obama his due. He not only smashed the Left opposition, he humiliated them.
“The Congressional Black Caucus can claim only eight members worthy of the label, 'progressive.'”
There is no longer an anti-war bloc in the U.S. Congress. It began to evaporate when Obama took office. The Out of Iraq Caucus has dissolved. The Progressive Congressional Caucus cannot find a mission. And the Congressional Black Caucus can claim only eight members worthy of the label, “progressive.” The list of CBC members among the 32 Democrats that voted “No” to Obama’s $106 billion Iraq and Afghanistan war request [3] is so short, it can be taken in at a glance. Here are the few, the brave:
Barbara Lee (CA), Maxine Waters (CA), Diane Watson (CA), John Lewis (GA), Donna Edwards (MD), John Conyers (MI), Keith Ellison (MN), Donald Payne (NJ),
Less than seven years ago, only four members of the CBC supported George Bush’s Iraq War Powers: Harold Ford, Jr. (TN), William Jefferson (LA), Albert Wynn (MD) and Sanford Bishop (GA). In the pages of The Black Commentator I called them the “Four Eunuchs of War [4]” and felt confident in writing:
“The rest of the 36 voting members of the Congressional Black Caucus defended Black America's political legacy, voting No. Rep. Barbara Lee (CA) led half of her CBC colleagues in support of her ‘alternative to war’ resolution, demonstrating once again that African Americans are the core of the forces of peace and justice in the U.S.”
It’s been all down hill for the CBC since 2002, a steady slide into corporatism and irrelevance. With the Black progressive “core” definitively demobilized since January 20, the Left is largely adrift.
Obama has accomplished what George Bush could not: virtually silence progressive voices in Congress, so that he can stoke the fires of war on two fronts without significant challenge from the legislative branch. It is a great victory, so why not congratulate the president, and give him the elemental respect of recognizing that he is – or is trying his best to be – a Man of War?
A Murdered Dream
Kudos, again, to the president, for such adroitness in killing a dream whose time appeared to have come: single-payer healthcare. Obama made non-persons of healthcare reform’s best friends in the Democratic Party, barring them from White House-sponsored healthcare events. The president erected a big tent that included everyone except single-payer advocates who, from Obama’s perspective, are the enemy. Instead, he wheels and deals and even invents nonexistent agreements [5] with Big Pharma, Big Hospitals, and Big Insurance, all the while vowing to slice huge chunks out of Medicare and Medicaid.
Obama apologists offer their usual excuse: the president must huddle and compromise with the profiteers, if he is to get any kind of health care passed. The single-payers are well-meaning spoilers. Obama had to muzzle them, so he could get down to business on a practical plan.
“Obama made non-persons of healthcare reform’s best friends in the Democratic Party.”
What should be clear as day to any lucid, rational observer of the last 150-plus days, is that Obama has not compromised with anybody. Certainly, he never even thought to compromise with single-payer advocates – he simply shut them out of the discussion. And he was never in a position to effectively compromise with the healthcare profiteers and their political servants, since Obama never submitted a Plan of his own, or endorsed anyone else’s. Instead, he encouraged everybody and their momma except single-payer advocates to fashion their own plans – creating a cacophony of what Rep. Conyers aptly calls “crap.” In the end, he will throw his weight behind one or another pile of healthcare crap.
Is Obama incompetent? Only if you believe he sincerely wants a healthcare plan that is as close to the ideal of health-as-a-right as possible, in which case, yes, he has been amazingly incompetent. But why disrespect our president? Give the man credit for knowing what he is doing. Assess his efforts according to the clear logic of his actions, for he has worked wonders.
Obama has succeeded in shutting out of the debate proponents of an idea supported by an overwhelming majority of Americans and an even larger segment of his own party. According to a June 12-16 New York Times/CBS News poll [6]:
“…72 percent of those questioned supported a government-administered insurance plan — something like Medicare for those under 65 — that would compete for customers with private insurers…. Sixty-four percent said they thought the federal government should guarantee coverage, a figure that has stayed steady all decade.”
“In the end, Obama will throw his weight behind one or another pile of healthcare crap.”
Only 20 percent of respondents oppose a Medicare-for-all-type plan. It would require the awesome power of a still very popular president to hold back a mob that is composed of damn near everybody, but Obama is up to the task. At the end of the process – this crap storm – that he has so skillfully set in motion, Obama will settle on a legislative contraption that will not even cover all of the 45 million-plus currently uninsured. For-profit healthcare will be safe for the remainder of his term, and possibly much, much longer.
Give Obama his props. He has turned the tide against real reform at a time of generalized crisis, when the chances for creating a civilized healthcare system were most propitious. He is a wonderment!
The Bankers’ Man
Even a man of Obama’s vast talents cannot easily hide the fact that the federal government (including the Federal Reserve) has “spent, lent or committed $12.8 trillion…to stem the longest recession since the 1930s,” as reported by the Bloomberg financial news service on March 31 [7]. The vast bulk of the money has gone to finance capitalists, most of it on President Obama’s watch. It is easily the largest transfer of national treasure in planetary history, accomplished in the relative wink of an eye, mostly outside the legislative process. By comparison, the 2008 Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of the United States – that is, the value of every good and service produced by every man, woman, child and enterprise of any kind in the nation – was $14.2 trillion. By the end of March, the feds had “spent, lent or committed” a sum equal to 90 percent of last year’s total economic activity in the United States – and still counting.
The Obama administration’s façade is cracking on the macro economic issue. Despite his hollow protestations, it is now generally perceived that Obama’s team is allowing “the banks” to get away with murder, theft and mayhem. In reality, the finance capitalist class is virtually inseparable from Obama’s economic apparatus; one is an extension of the other. Larry Summers, Tim Geithner, Robert Rubin, Paul Volker and the rest of Obama’s economic Rasputins will no more “rein in” finance capitalists, than they would put shackles on themselves.
“The Obama administration’s façade is cracking on the macro economic issue.”
Once gain, I must ask that you respect President Obama. Allow him to surround himself with people of like mind, men and women with whom he shares a core worldview. Do not belittle our president, by grumbling that he is being “manipulated” by “the bankers.” Accept that he is a strong leader, who knows what he wants to accomplish and is wise enough to choose a team that reflects his vision. The Obama administration serves the bankers’ interests because Obama wishes to do so.
This will be his undoing – not his expanding wars, not the healthcare fiasco – and much sooner than most think. Obama’s sham banking regulations were unveiled to great fanfare – and bombed, colossally, on the front page of the New York Times. In language that an economics columnist for the “gray lady” of corporate media seldom deploys against sitting presidents, Joe Nocera wrote [8]:
“Everywhere you look in the plan, you see the same thing: additional regulation on the margin, but nothing that amounts to a true overhaul…. Firms will have to put up a little more capital, and deal with a little more oversight, but once the financial crisis is over, it will, in all likelihood, be back to business as usual.”
Nocera’s headline read, “Only a Hint of Roosevelt in Financial Overhaul.” William Greider, writing in The Nation, a bastion of “Progressives for Obama,” concluded that [9] “most of Obama’s reforms are insubstantial gestures, not actual remedies.”
Kevin Baker’s devastating piece in the July issue of Harper’s stripped the emperor naked. Obama was not, as his progressive followers imagined, the second coming of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Rather, he is the political soul-mate of FDR’s predecessor, Herbert Hoover:
"Much like Herbert Hoover, Barack Obama is a man attempting to realize a stirring new vision of his society without cutting himself free from the dogmas of the past—without accepting the inevitable conflict….
“The common thread running through all of Obama’s major proposals right now, is that they are labrynthian solutions designed mainly to avoid conflict. The bank bailout, cap-and-trade on carbon emissions, health-care pools - all of these ideas are, like Hillary Clinton’s ill-fated 1993 health plan, simultaneously too complicated to draw a constituency and too threatening tor Congress to shape and pass as Obama would like. They bear the seeds of their own destruction.”
Baker is too kind. He persists in assigning Obama the most progressive of motives, when the content and consistency of his actions point to a profoundly corporate frame of mind and outlook. The president “avoids conflict” with the banks because he has no basic problem with them occupying the commanding heights of power in U.S. society.
“Barack Obama will become inextricably associated in the public mind with Big Capital.”
It is better, and ultimately more respectful, to judge a politician, or any person, by the accumulated body of his work. Based on his record as candidate and president to date, it is plain that Obama sees the world as the bankers see it. He accepts their advice because he agrees with it. He shares their core ethic, and is therefore always forgiving of their “excesses.” The fate of his presidency is entwined with theirs.
At some point in the near future Barack Obama will become inextricably associated in the public mind with Big Capital – and deservedly so. No one can predict when this perceptual critical mass will be reached, but once it has occurred, it sticks.
The aftershocks of the recent meltdown and the before-shocks of the next, onrushing crisis of capitalism will bring a cascade of calamities to the doorstep of the White House. With each crisis, Obama will do what we now know comes natural to him: protect capital at all costs to society as a whole.
With their champion saddled with such baggage, it will be interesting to see when “Progressives for Obama” become extinct.
BAR executive editor Glen Ford can be contacted at Glen.Ford@BlackAgendaReport.com [10]
Kalagenesis
I sometimes think Glen Ford has a secret crush on Obama.He the gay militants,the extreme Marxist sound like a girl who lost her virginity on the first date then gets dumped.Glen Ford does not like big corporation,banks,military,or any government that seems to actually work(Israel)but every time he writes he praises the recent victory of Iran's Achmedinnejhad.People dying in the streets of Terhan is just western media propaganda to Mr Ford.Mr Ford is a tragic mullatto so full of himself he still lives in the sixties with his outdated Queens NY leftist radical white guy hippie bull.Obama said he was going to govern from the center and he wanted to reach out to all Americans.Do you think he was lying?He meant it.You Mr Ford hate banks do you?You say nothing first about George Bush giving away 700 billion with a one page proposal.But Obama had no choice because if the Banks fail the world economy would collapse.I know you are disappointed because you though Obama was a communist like you you wanted the economies to collapse.You want Marxist reform sorry buddy in another life.I suggest you go work for an Arab news outlet you would fit right in.Black America sees you as a TRAITOR.The Black Agenda Report is being financed by big money gay groups.Also Republicans are looking for uncle toms using the guise of being disappointed in President Obama, to decrease black voter turnout for 2012.Mr Ford I accuse you for being part of that plot to undermine President Barack Obama
