Later Emanuel responded to a question on the Employee Free Choice Act,
a measure backed by organized labor but strongly opposed by business,
saying, “Let me take your question and go somewhere else.” Instead, he
spoke about the need to address falling income among middle class
workers.

http://blogs.wsj.com/ceo-council/2008/11/18/determined-not-to-make-news-emanuel-speaks-of-era-of-reform/

Oh well, just the democrat he always promised to be.

The HSV3 currently await trial on Friday, November 21 on charges of “obstructing justice” and “resisting arrest”.

InPDUM is calling on all freedom-loving people to participate in the HSV3 call-in campaign and help to defend the democratic rights of the African community!

On Tuesday, November 18th, from 8am-4pm CST, call and email each of the government officials below and demand that all charges be dropped against the Huntsville Three, Dr. Aisha Fields, Thomas Buchanan and Dr. Michelle Strongfields. Give your city, state and country (if outside of the US). After you have called and/or emailed the officials, please send a follow-up email to inpdum_huntsville@yahoo.com to let us know that you have called in.

Call and email:
1)Mayor Tommy Battle (256) 427-5000
tommy.battle@hsvcity.com
2)Chief of Police, Henry Reyes (256) 427-7001
henry.reyes@hsvcity.com
3)Councilman Richard Showers (256)427-5011
richard.showers@hsvcity.com

Send contributions to the legal defense. Make checks to “Uhuru” and mail to:

Legal Defense c/o InPDUM
P.O. Box 454
Huntsville, Al 35762

For more information, in the U.S., contact (256) 489-8715

To Sign our Online petition Click Here http://www.ipetitions.com/petition/hsv3/

www.inpdum.org

*yawn*

somebody wake me up when identitarian epistemologies have lost their hold on poc feminists, too, kthanxby

Reading up on the debates over prop 8 this weekend, I noticed how the deployment of a wounded identity constantly played itself on all sides. Dan Savage was hurt. A host of posters and commenters I read expressed hurt that blacks in California and FL voted in such overwhelming majorities for prop 8 in CA and prop 2 in FL.

Currently, I happen to be reading Linda Williams’ _Playing the Race Card: Melodramas of Black and White from Uncle Tom to O.J. Simpson_. I’d picked it up at a benefit for the library a few weeks ago and have been flipping through it on and off.

Williams is a prof of film studies, more well-known for her work on porn films in _Hard Core: Power, Pleasure, and the Frenzy of the Visible_. In _Playing the Race Card_, Williams examines the centrality of melodramatic storytelling in novels, plays, films, and television. A contemporary example of melodrama can be found everywhere, but the one she uses to illustrate is _Titanic_ an American melodrama that

“deploys the paradoxical location of strength in weakness — the process by which suffering subjects take what Nietzsche calls ‘ressentiment.’ a moralizing revenge upon the powerful achieved through a tirumph of the weak in their very weakness. In contemporary political terms this is what feminist political theorist Wendy Brown has called the overvaluation of the ‘wound’ in the political rhetoric of liberal identity politics. As we have already seen, Lauren Berlant has further investigated the process by which pain and suffering confers moral power on ‘wounded’ subjects. Ever since the abolitionist and suffrage movement, Berlant argues, individual citizens have been most compellingly identified with the national collectivity not through a universalist rhetoric of citizenship but through a “capacity for suffering and trauma” viewed as the core of citizenship.”

As Berlant writes:

“It would not be exaggerating to say that sentimentality has long been the more popular rhetorical means by which pain is advanced, in the United States, as the true core of personhood and political collectivity. It operates when relatively privileged national subjects are exposed to the suffering of their intimate Others, so that to be virtuous requires feeling the pain of flawed or denied citizenship as their own paint.”

Williams argues that it is through melodrama that the narrative of wounded identity has been forged, that we rely on it to express claims to citizenship. Specifically, Williams argues that melodrama is central to the way whites and blacks have played the race card: a melodramatic wounded identity where virtue is seen in the mistreated slave’s existence or located in the threatened virtuousness of the white female virgin threatened by black masculinity.

Elaborating on Berlant’s work on expressions of citizenship among suffrage and abolitionist movements, she says that

“this model, pioneered by abolitionists and feminists of the nineteenth century, and continued in contemporary identity politics, citizenship is paradoxically established not through reason, nor the acquisition of wealth and power, but through ‘the trumping power fo suffering’. Manifestation of pain — or what Brown calls ’states of injury’ — become evidence of a subjectivity worthy of recognition.”

As Berlant points out, however, the problem with constructing the right to recognition on a wounded identity, on expressions of pain and suffering is that the eradication of pain and suffering does not necessarily mean that justice has been achieved.

Williams goes on to talk about how melodramas are locations where tensions about past and future play out. Where the drama suggests that it is both “too late” and “not too late, that there may still be an original locus of virtue and truth can be achieved in private individuals and individual heroic acts rather than … in revolution and change.”

Describing the racial melodrama in Buffalo Bill Wide West Shows, Williams writes:

The white settlers are not just victims in this scenario; they are racially beset victims who acquire moral legitimacy through the public spectacle their suffering. Racial melodrama takes on enormous importance as the engine for the generation of legitimacy for racially constituted groups whose very claim to citizenship lies in these spectacles of pathos and action. Racial melodrama is the popular form that gives permission to these racially constituted groups to carry out actions that they could not carry out in the name of bald self-interest. In terms of our third feature of melodrama, the pathos of the suffering of white settlers victimized by marauding Indians… ultimately authorizes the action of the conquest of the West…. As Ric Burns’s commentator puts it, it gives the impression of a conquest won without any intentional quest: ‘They attacked us and when we ended up, we had the whole continent.’”

As Williams writes, though, it would be a mistake to carry out the melodramatic spectacle of victimized, powerless virtue winning the day by concluding that whites racialize victimhood in a bad, villainous way and people of color do so in virtuous ways.

I’m thinking of the complaints I heard on television last week, Bill Mahar’s show and Rachel Maddow (I think; I watched so much I can’t remember). Anyway, two women pointed the finger at gays for failing to organize against prop 8. One was on the show to speak specifically about the black vote in CA. The other was just one of three other guests, none of whom I recognized, on Mahar’s show. I don’t remember why she said it, but when she did, on the heels of the other woman excusing the much higher rates of heterosexism among blacks, I got steamed.

If you take intersectionality seriously and don’t privilege one oppression over others, then it’s inapprorpriate to explain that people aren’t going to stop being bigoted until the other groups stops being bigoted first. doesn’t work that way. of course, the woman on Maddow’s show didn’t say that. She acknowledged that there’s a problem that needs to be discussed, but she spent more time pointing the finger at gay activists and, in doing so, made an implicit demand that they fit a model of activism that may not be appropriate given the nature of heterosexist oppression in this country.

Gay people generally aren’t the placard-waving, bomb-throwing, chaps-wearing, communion-wafer-stomping radicals we’re made out to be by the Bills O’Reilly and Donohue. Most gays and lesbians are content to be left to alone; many gays and lesbians go out of their way to ignore political threats and political activism and political activists. Only when gays and lesbians are attacked—only after the fact—do gays and lesbians take to the streets. Remember: the Stonewall Riots were are a response to a particularly brutal and cruelly-timed (we’d just buried Judy!) police raid on a gay bar in New York City; ACT-UP and Queer Nation were a response not to the AIDS virus, but to a murderous indifference on the parts of the political and medical establishment that amounted to an attack.

Most gay people grow up desperately trying to pass, to blend in; most of us flee to cities where we can live our lives in relative peace and security. We don’t go looking for fights. And most gay people walk around without realizing that they’ve internalized the dynamics of high school hells some of us barely survived: it’s better to pass, to stay out of sight, to avoid making waves, lest you attract negative attention, lest you get bashed.

But once you get bashed, once someone else throws the first punch, then you fight back—what other choice do you have?

Gays and lesbians were active in the fight against Prop 8—thousands of us. But the great gay masses marching in the streets over the last week didn’t perceive Prop 8 as an attack until after it was approved. Which was idiotic not just in hindsight but in foresight—lots of gay people were screaming bloody murder about Prop 8, and pouring money into the campaign, before the damn thing passed. So now we’re in the streets—now when some would argue that it’s too late. But as with past attacks that galvanized the gay community—Anita Bryant, Harvey Milk’s murder, the AIDS epidemic, Don’t Ask/Don’t Tell, Matthew Shepard’s murder—the energy will be harnessed, new leaders will emerge, and we will emerge stronger.

Doug asked: from The Note - will someone ask Andy Stern what he hopes to gain by
associating with this gang?

The Note:

Pressure to move, on healthcare: “Four leading advocacy groups
representing business, labor and retirees are starting a campaign
today to press Barack Obama to enact comprehensive healthcare reform,
upping the pressure on the president-elect to tackle the issue quickly
after he takes office,” Noam M. Levey reports in the Los Angeles
Times. “In a letter to Obama, the Business Roundtable, the National
Federation of Independent Businesses, AARP and the Service Employees
International Union urge that a healthcare overhaul be a priority in
the administration’s first 100 days. The groups plan to spend nearly
$1 million to publicize their cause in newspaper and television
advertising in coming weeks.”

………

Dwayne tells it like it is. Huzzah!

Unless I miss my guess, here’s the group’s website:

Note the ‘post partisan’ (and, we can infer, post political) logo
which mates the elephant with the ass to create a new, apolitical,
hybrid creature.

This seems perfectly suited to the Obama era: the message is
attractive — let’s solve our problems together without partisan
bickering! But the goal is to preserve the existing class
architecture.

The fantasy of politics without politics, without conflict, is
fascinating. If the US nurtured a functioning technocratic elite
–instead of a dysfunctional command strata which tends towards wild
swings between unbounded enthusiasm and baggy eyed depression — she
might be able to sustain this fantasy.

For a little awhile.

The idea that our trouble is argument itself, instead of the genuinely
conflicting goals of competing class interests (for example, the
medical industry’s desire to squeeze ever more protection money from
me while providing ever less service vs. my need for decent health
care) will, I predict, achieve its apogee during President Obama’s
time in office.

I’m thrilled to death that the kossack progressives *spit* are going to get one of the first slaps in the face to wake them from their stupor. i told some friend yesterday that they should get a good seat next to me, I’d buy the popcorn and goobers, coz this is going to be a craptastically fun show:

AMNESTY FOR LIEBERMAN, as Politico’s Glenn Thrush calls it in today’s
‘Huddle.’ President-elect Obama is warning Democrats against ‘grudges’
against Sen. Joseph Lieberman, who caucuses with Ds but campaigned for
Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.). Many on Capitol Hill had assumed he would
be kicked out of the caucus Whether or not he’ll keep his chairmanship
of the Homeland Security Committee is another matter.

bwahahahahahahaha

As Adolph Reed, Glen Ford, the Uhurua and others have been teling you people for months: he’s a right-leaning centrist who eschews partisan politics. Why did any of these wankers think otherwise? It was right in front of their nose.

And then there’s this, from the Note. Which is so totally true. My exposure to the campaign taught me that, with regard to who worked to support Obama, their reasons are as diverse as can be. Thus, there is no solidarity around anything other than the candidate and thus, nothing but a mass of isolated individuals waiting for a pony under the tree on 12/25 (figuratively speaking)

Doug Henwood’s comments preface the Note’s quote:

[A question from The Note, reminiscent of the corporate governance
literature - when you have millions of dispersed, unorganized
shareholders, management gets a free hand.]

Can you smell the conflicts coming? “Interest groups are furiously
drawing up wish lists for the incoming Obama administration, many of
them hoping to cash in on the investments they made — in volunteers,
political support, and campaign contributions - in Obama’s commanding
win,” The Boston Globe’s Scott Helman writes. “But given the nature of
Obama’s victory, which was propelled more by a grass-roots army of
millions than by traditional Democratic constituencies, is the
president-elect really indebted to anybody?”

But worse, as Sam Smith says, he’s a radical centrist:

http://prorev.com/2008/11/can-we-talk-about-real-obama-now.html

Over the past few weeks I’ve been a good boy. I’ve placed everything having to do with the real Barack Obama into a futures file and spent my time on the far grimmer matter of the real John McCain and Sarah Palin.

Now the party is over and it’s time for people to put away their Barack and Michelle dolls and start dealing with what has truly happened.

This, I admit, is difficult because the real Obama doesn’t exist yet. He follows in the footsteps of our first postmodern president, Bill Clinton, who observed the principles outlined by scholar Pauline Marie Rosenau:

Post-modernists recognize an infinite number of interpretations . . . of any text are possible because, for the skeptical post-modernists, one can never say what one intends with language, [thus] ultimately all textual meaning, all interpretation is undecipherable.. . . Many diverse meanings are possible for any symbol, gesture, word . . . Language has no direct relationship to the real world; it is, rather, only symbolic.

As James Krichick wrote in the New Republic, “Obama is, in his own words, something of a Rorschach test. In his latest book, The Audacity of Hope, he writes, ‘I am new enough on the national political scene that I serve as a blank screen on which people of vastly different political stripes project their own views.’ ”

This is remarkably similar to Ted Koppel’s description of Vanna White of TV’s Wheel of Fortune: “Vanna leaves an intellectual vacuum, which can be filled by whatever the predisposition of the viewer happens to be.”

Obama has left the same kind of vacuum. His magic, or con, was that voters could imagine whatever they wanted and he would do nothing to spoil their reverie. He was a handsome actor playing the part of the first black president-to-be and, as in films, he was careful not to muck up the role with real facts or issues that might harm the fantasy. Hence the enormous emphasis on meaningless phrases like hope and change.

Of course, in Obama’s postmodern society — one that rises above the purported false teachings of partisanship — we find ourselves with little to steer us save the opinions of whatever non-ideologue happens to be in power. In this case, we may really only have progressed from the ideology of the many to the ideology of the one or, some might say, from democracy to authoritarianism.

The Obama campaign was driven in no small part by a younger generation trained to accept brands as a substitute for policies. If the 1960s had happened like this, the activists would have spent all their time trying to get Martin Luther King or Joan Baez elected president rather than pursing ancillary issues like ending segregation and the war in Vietnam.

Obama himself took his vaunted experience in community organizing and turned its principles on its head. Instead of empowering the many at the bottom, he used the techniques to empower one at the top: himself.

It is historic that a black has been elected president, but we should remember that Obama was not running against Bull Connor, George Wallace or Strom Thurmond. Putting Obama in the same class as earlier black activists discredits the honor of those who died, suffered physical harm or were repeatedly jailed to achieve equality. Obama is not a catalyst of change, but rather its belated beneficiary. The delay, to be sure, is striking; after all, the two white elite sports of tennis and golf were integrated long before presidential politics, but Washington - as Phil Hart said of the Senate - has always been a place that always does things twenty years after it should have.

There is an informative precedent to Obama’s rise. Forty-two years ago Edward Brooke became the first black senator to be elected with a majority of white votes. Brooke was chosen from Massachusetts as a Republican in a state that was 97% white.

Jason Sokol, who teaches history at the University of Pennsylvania, wrote in History News Network:

|||| On Election Day, Brooke triumphed with nearly 60 percent of the vote. Newspapers and magazines hummed with approval. The Boston Globe invoked a legacy that included the Pilgrims, Daniel Webster, and Charles Sumner, offering the Bay State as the nation’s racial and political pioneer.

Journalist Carl Rowan was among the unconvinced. For whites, voting for Brooke became “a much easier way to wipe out guilt feelings about race than letting a Negro family into the neighborhood or shaking up a Jim Crow school setup.” Polling numbers lent credence to Rowan’s unease. They showed that only 23 percent of Massachusetts residents approved of a statewide school integration law; just 17 percent supported open housing. ||||

That’s the problem with change coming from the top, as Obama might have heard when he was involved in real community organizing. It also helps to explain why there have been no more Catholic presidents since John Kennedy. Symbolism is not the change we need.

Getting at the reality of Obama is difficult. He performs as the great black liberal, but since he is one half white and one half conservative, that doesn’t leave him a lot of wiggle room.

To be sure, in the Senate he got good ratings from various liberal groups, but two things need to be remembered:

First, liberals aren’t that liberal any more. Thus getting a 90% score merely means that you went along with the best that an extremely conservative Democratic Party was willing to risk. This is not a party that would, in these times, have passed Social Security, Medicare or minimum wage. In fact, many liberals aren’t much interested in economic issues at all - especially that portion of the constituency that controls the money, the media and the message.

Second, politicians reflect their constituency. Obama’s constituency is no longer Illinois. He has a whole new set of folks to pander to.

There is one story from Chicago, however, that remains relevant. A citizen walks into his alderman’s office looking for a job. “Who sent you?” he asks. “Nobody,” he replies. Says the staffer: “We don’t want nobody nobody sent.”

Who sent Barack Obama remains a mystery. He has risen from an unknown state senator to president in exactly four years and that only happens when somebody sends for you.

The black liberal image falters on a number of other scores including Obama’s affection for extreme right wingers like Chuck Hagel and an obvious indifference to anybody who votes like, say, a state senator from Hyde Park. Think back over the campaign and try to recall a single instance when Obama reached out to the progressive wing of the Democratic Party or to the better angels of the Congressional Black Caucus. Instead his ads attacked as ‘extreme’ the single payer health insurance backed by many of his own supporters, he dissed ACORN and Colin Powell was as radical a black as he wanted to be seen palling around with.

The key issue that has driven Obama throughout his career has been Obama. He has achieved virtually nothing for any other cause. His politics reflects whatever elite consensus he gathers around himself. This is why his “post partisanship” needs to be watched so carefully. If Bernie Sanders and John Conyers don’t get to White House meetings as often as Chuck Hagel, Obama will glide easily to the right, as every president has done over the past thirty years. If liberals, as they did with Clinton, watch without a murmur as their president redesigns their party to fit his personal ambitions, then the whole country will continue to move to the right as well.

Since the real Obama doesn’t exist yet, it is impossible to predict with any precision what he will do. But here is some of the evidence gathered over the past months that should serve both as a warning and as a prod to progressives not to take today’s dreams as a reasonable facsimile of reality:

<...>
[Smith outlines the many policies that we’ve discussed here, but many more. So there’s a list of Obama’s rightwinginess for B, already started. :)]

As things now stand, the election primarily represents the extremist center seizing power back from the extremist right. We have moved from the prospect of disasters to the relative comfort of mere crises.

Using the word ‘extreme’ alongside the term ‘center’ is no exaggeration. Nearly all major damage to the United States in recent years - a rare exception being 9/11 - has been the result of decisions made not by right or left but by the post partisan middle: Vietnam, Iraq, the assault on constitutional liberties, the huge damage to the environment, and the collapse of the economy - to name a few. Go back further in history and you’ll find, for example, the KKK riddled with members of the establishment including - in Colorado - a future governor, senator and mayor after whom Denver’s airport is named. The center, to which Obama pays such homage, has always been where most of the trouble lies.

The only thing that will make Obama the president pictured in the campaign fantasy is unapologetic, unswerving and unendingly pressure on him in a progressive and moral direction, for he will not go there on his own. But what, say, gave the New Deal its progressive nature was pressure from the left of a sort that simply doesn’t exist today.

Above are listed nearly three dozen things that Obama supports or opposes with which no good liberal or progressive would agree. Unfortunately, what’s out there now, however, looks more like a rock concert crowd or evangelical tent meeting than a determined and directed political constituency. Which isn’t so surprising given how successful our system have been at getting people to accept sights, sounds, symbols and semiotics as substitutes for reality. Once again, it looks like we’ll have to learn the hard way.

Maybe I should make a new tag: liars and the lying lies they tell you?

Two days after Barack Obama became the first African-American to be voted into the White House, the percentage of black voters who view American society as fair and decent jumped 18 points to 42% (see crosstabs).

Just a month earlier, only 24% of black voters viewed American society as fair and decent.

The latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey found that nearly half of black voters (46%) still believe society is unfair and discriminatory, but that’s down from 64% in early October. The latest results represent the most positive outlook found among black voters since August, when 53% said they view American society as fair and decent. That month Obama became the first African-American presidential candidate of a major U.S. politial party.

While the opinion of black voters has changed considerably over the past month, the overall population’s has changed little. Sixty-five percent (65%) of voters view society as fair and decent compared to 64% in October.

Democratic voters’ optimism also has grown over the past month, from 47% who viewed society as fair and decent in October to 53% who say the same now.

(Want a free daily e-mail update? If it’s in the news, it’s in our polls).

Another recent Rasmussen survey found that 70% of African-American voters think relations between blacks and whites are getting better (see crosstabs), up from 67% a month ago. While that outlook hasn’t changed much over the past month, it is interesting to note that just 37% of black voters shared that opinion in September. By comparison, 73% of whites say race relations are better now, while 68% thought that a month ago.

U.S. voters are divided as to which group is more discriminated against – African-Americans or women. While 32% of voters say blacks still suffer more discrimination, an identical number (32%) say women are more discriminated against.

Again, there’s been a shift in the numbers since Election Day. In October, 68% of African-Americans believed blacks were more discriminated against than women. Not just 60% feel that way.

A negative finding during the week of the election was that 40% of black voters say they witnessed racial discrimination within that week, while 53% say they did not. In October, just 30% said they personally witnessed discrimination in the past week.

Overall, American voters say American’s best days are in the future by a 47% to 39% margin. That number has changed little from October. However, the percentage of black voters who say America’s best days lie ahead jumped from 59% in October to 68% after the election. Just 23% of black voters now say America’s best days are in the past.

or

good stuff: http://aud1.kpfa.org/data/20081011-Sat1000.mp3