In Philly, They’ll Cut Off Your Gas For A Laugh

Color of Law
By David A. Love
BlackCommentator.com Editorial Board
June 26, 2008

Recently, in Philadelphia I heard the most insulting radio commercial of all time.

It was an ad for Philadelphia Gas Works, or PGW, a local city-owned utility. The narrator, a woman, lectures to the audience that if they do not pay their gas bill, PGW will cut off their service. In the background, throughout the commercial, is the sound of a man singing in the shower. Suddenly, towards the end of the commercial, he starts screaming in agony, presumably because PGW shut off his hot water.

Now, PGW tried to make light of a matter which is anything but amusing. It would seem to represent the worst, most inappropriate and most poorly timed public relations strategy in recent memory, but no one seems to talk about it. The PGW people are inferring that people are trying to beat the system, to have gas heat without paying for it.

Here’s a novel idea: perhaps poor and working people cannot afford fuel costs. Philadelphia, like other cities, is hurting from the recession, but for many people, every day is a recession. One-third of the city is mired in poverty, and the city has the highest per capita incarcerated population in the nation. There are no summer jobs for the kids, and for many of them there may not be any free bus passes when they return to school.

But the problem is bigger than Philly. The city’s current administration is as able as any, and seemingly abler than those who preceded it, but they inherited problems that are shouldered by states and localities throughout this nation. It will take a national strategy to solve them.

To make it simple, people cannot afford to live in America.

There is the energy crisis, where profiteers and speculators are making out like bandits from the high price of oil, and companies such as Exxon Mobil are posting record profits, while common people cannot afford their energy needs. Alternative fuels will save the environment and unleash new industries and spur job creation, but the corporate giants that killed the street cars throughout the nation, and the electric cars in California, stand in our way.

The energy crisis relates to the food crisis, because the high cost of energy increases the cost of food.

Then, of course, there is the subprime mortgage crisis, where the financial giants and Wall Street banks defrauded millions of people with home loans with unconscionable terms they could not possibly afford. These people are continuing to lose their homes in cities throughout the country, in what has become a loss of wealth of historic proportions.

Related to the mortgage crisis is the emerging school loan crisis, where colleges and universities make unholy alliances with lenders. The result is tuition that rises well in excess of the rate of inflation, and students that graduate with a mortgage-sized, high-interest loan. The massive amounts of debt with which these young people are saddled - before they even start their career in a job market of fewer opportunities and outsourcing abroad - will gravely affect their life choices and career choices.

Finally, there is the crumbling infrastructure crisis. The levies broke in New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina, but now the levies are breaking everywhere. And our children and families are levies, too, and they cannot stand the pressure. There are inadequate public investments in physical infrastructure such as roads and bridges, and spending for social welfare and education takes a back seat to prison and war profiteering.

What caused this problem? To make a long story short, much of it has to do with the conservative revolution, perverse public policy choices that shift wealth upward, deregulation, hatred of government as a force for social change, and unscrupulous politicians who run the track each and every day to make that money for their corporate pimps.

The PGW commercial represents the common Dickensian strategy, American-style, of callously blaming the poor for their own problems, calling for personal responsibility, and criminalizing them as a means of shutting them up, shutting them down and keeping them in line. But what do you do when most people are poor or are becoming poor, as is the case with the U.S.?

But there is a better way. In this election season, as we are about to witness a potentially dramatic pendulum shift in the United States, there are clear choices as to what direction Americans want for the country. Whatever happens, people of good will must be part of a movement that brings sustained economic and social equity and justice, seeks quality jobs, healthcare and education as a human right, and ensures that government serves the people and is no longer used as a casino for multinational conglomerates. Although the next occupant of the White House can go a long way in setting the tone, an election result is not a magic wand, and there are no shortcuts for the hard work which must be done on the ground.

Breaking Down the Far Right’s Attacks on Michelle Obama

Color of Law
By David A. Love
BlackCommentator.com Editorial Board
June 19, 2008

Are the spouses of the presidential candidates fair game? Republican presidential candidate John McCain - as well as McCain surrogates at Fox News and elsewhere - seems to think they are open for attack, particularly when they are Black.

The Far Right decided to wage warfare against Michelle Obama after she stated in a Feb. 18, 2008 speech in Wisconsin that “for the first time in my adult lifetime I am really proud of my country. And not just because Barack has done well, but because I think people are hungry for change.”

The next day, Cindy McCain, wife of John McCain, took time from her busy schedule of plagiarizing recipes to attack Michelle Obama’s statement. This, despite the rule that people who live in glass houses should not throw stones. “I am proud of my country. I don’t know about you? If you heard those words earlier, I am very proud of my country,” Mrs. McCain said while introducing her husband to a crowd in Wisconsin. Sen. McCain reiterated, “I just wanted to make the statement that I have and always will be proud of my country.”

Taking cues from their candidate, McCain’s shadow campaign staff at Fox News fell in line and proceeded with racist and sexist attacks against Michelle Obama.

The attacks have relied on three stereotypes about African Americans. The first is the image of the angry, uppity Black woman. Fox host Bill O’Reilly, in a discussion with a listener about Mrs. Obama as an angry and militant woman, suggested that Mrs. Obama should be lynched:
O’REILLY: I don't want to go on a lynching party against Michelle Obama unless there's evidence, hard facts, that say this is how the woman really feels. If that's how she really feels - that America is a bad country or a flawed nation, whatever - then that's legit. We'll track it down.

During a June 14, 2008 discussion about Michelle Obama, Fox News commentator Cal Thomas said:

THOMAS: Look at the image of angry black women on television. Politically you have Maxine Waters of California, liberal Democrat. She's always angry every time she gets on television. Cynthia McKinney, another angry black woman. And who are the black women you see on the local news at night in cities all over the country. They're usually angry about something. They've had a son who has been shot in a drive-by shooting. They are angry at Bush. So you don't really have a profile of non-angry black women.

The second component of the McCain-GOP-Fox race card strategy against Michelle Obama is the offensive image of the “baby mama.” On June 11, Fox News displayed the words “OUTRAGED LIBERALS: STOP PICKING ON OBAMA’S BABY MAMA” several times while on-air. I decided to consult Urban Dictionary for a definition of baby mama. The primary definition of the term is:

The mother of your child(ren), whom you did not marry and with whom you are not currently involved.

The secondary definition is more telling:

A term used to define an unmarried young woman (but can be a woman of any age) who has had a child. As mentioned before in another definition, most of the time it is used for when it was simply a sexual relationship, compared to ex-wife or girlfriend. Usually this has a negative connotation, a lot of baby mamas are seen as desperate, gold digging, emotionally starved, shady women who had a baby out of spite or to keep a man. Sometimes they may act like this because of missed child support payments, unfulfilled promises by the father, or convenient sex by the father. Either or both may exist in any situation.

So, to use this term against anyone, in this case a dignified woman from the south side of Chicago with a Princeton and Harvard Law pedigree, the people at Fox know what they are doing.

Finally, the third racist stereotype that McCain’s people are utilizing is that of the unpatriotic and un-American Black person. Unveiled characterizations of Barack Obama in the Neanderthal conservative media as a Muslim terrorist who refuses to wear a flag lapel pin or place his hand over his heart during the pledge of allegiance have been plentiful. And when Michelle and Barack Obama pounded each other’s fists during a campaign event in St. Paul, Minnesota, one Fox commentator described the harmless and popular hand gesture as a “terrorist fist jab.”

It is common to characterize African Americans as un-American and unpatriotic (translation: ungrateful). And what exactly is patriotism? Samuel Johnson (1709-1784) said that “Patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel.” In the case of John McCain, perhaps patriotism is endorsing the use of torture, although he was a torture victim, or voting against the G.I. bill, or voting against women’s reproductive rights, or hoping to continue an immoral war in Iraq that has claimed thousands of lives and will certainly claim many more.

And McCain and the GOP have surrounded themselves with “patriotic” Americans such as Rev. Rod Parsley of the World Harvest Church in Columbus, Ohio, who said that America was founded to destroy Islam, which he calls a false religion; Pastor John Hagee of Cornerstone Church in San Antonio, Texas, who said in a late 1990s sermon that Adolph Hitler was sent by God to hunt the Jews and carry out the Holocaust; fundraiser Clayton Williams, who made a comparison between rape and weather, saying that “As long as it’s inevitable, you might as well lie back and enjoy it”; and ex-Hillary Clinton supporter turned McCain democrat Paula Abeles. Abeles, who facilitated a conference call between McCain and disgruntled Clinton supporters, led an effort by White descendants of Thomas Jefferson to exclude the Black descendants of Jefferson and his slave Sally Hemings from family gatherings. We won’t even get into Sen. Joe Lieberman.

And while McCain may not be able to control all of the statements and actions made by his surrogates or by independent organizations, this belies the point. McCain is the beneficiary of the attacks on Michelle Obama, and he can play good cop while the right-wing slime machine does the only thing it knows - sow the seeds of racial division. The conservative movement has employed this tactic, known as the Southern Strategy, for years, in order to win elections. (McCain knows what they are capable of doing. In the 2000 South Carolina primary, the Bush campaign spread rumors that rival McCain had fathered a Black child.) This time around, unencumbered by morality, ethics, scruples or good taste, it is literally all that they have left. They had the opportunity to rule, and they have turned the nation into a shambles. All out of ideas, and faced with major losses in the Senate, the House of Representatives, and possibly the presidency, they cannot run on the issues, the economy, or their energy policy, or domestic policy, or Iraq, or the environment.

Meanwhile, those who are members of political, cultural and ethnic minorities have every right to be angry at a nation which has for years locked them out of the mainstream, humiliated them, promulgated unjust laws against them, and treated them like anything but a child of God. Yet, these folks, shut out, have emerged as the greatest patriots of all - those who are angry because they see a nation that does not live up to its promise, and who decide to fight to make that promise a reality for all people.

Fannie Lou Hamer was one of those angry Black women that Fox News hates so much, as were Harriet Tubman, Sojourner Truth, Ida B. Wells-Barnett, Barbara Jordan, Shirley Chisolm, Ella Baker, Rosa Parks, Audre Lorde, and many others. In their day, they would have received a far better reception from the conservative White men, had they known their place, stayed at home, baked some biscuits and shut the hell up. I do not know if they wore flag lapel pins, although I am inclined to believe many did not.

I do know, however, that these women could have taught John and Cindy McCain, Bill O’Reilly and Cal Thomas a great deal about patriotism.

Republicans Would Chisel the Anger Out of Dr. King’s Face

By David A. Love
BlackCommentator.com
June 12, 2008

It is true that the dead are unable to defend their reputation. Such is the case with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. With four decades since his assassination, it is very easy for society to lose sight of the man’s philosophy and his great works. Just to take this a step further, there is a not-so-subtle attempt by conservatives to recast Dr. King either as a mild-mannered and milquetoast individual, obsequious and not easily roused, or as a conservative who, if alive today, would side with the interests he railed against in the 1950s and 1960s.

One example of these efforts is the controversy surrounding the King memorial. Chinese sculptor Lei Yixing has been commissioned to render a 28-foot sculpture of King, carved from Chinese granite, the cornerstone of the $100 million King memorial in Washington, DC.

Frankly, Lei’s proposed likeness of King is a bad piece of work, bad meaning good. King stands erect, back not bent, with a stern face and his arms crossed.

But the United States Commission of Fine Arts, which must give final approval of every facet of the memorial, said in a letter that the statue made Dr. King look “confrontational,” that “the colossal scale and Social Realist style of the proposed sculpture recalls a genre of political sculpture that has recently been pulled down in other countries.” The Commission, a federal body that supposedly provides “expert advice” on issues of design and aesthetics in the nation’s capital, “consists of seven ‘well qualified judges of the fine arts’ who are appointed by the President [in this case, that would be Bush] and serve for a term of four years.”

How deviously ironic that the Commission would show concern that a sculpture of King is too confrontational, too political, too angry. King was a man who confronted the three-headed beast of racism, economic exploitation, and militarism, from the unjust laws of Jim Crow segregation, to the White clergy in Birmingham who told him to wait, to the injustice faced by Memphis sanitation workers, to the atrocities of the Vietnam War, and was hunted by the government and gunned down in the process. Let us remember that J. Edgar Hoover called King “the most dangerous man in America, and a moral degenerate.”

Understandably, the artist is aggravated the Commission has asked him to alter King‘s appearance (a depiction they initially voted for unanimously) so that he doesn’t seem to have so much on his mind.

Meanwhile, the National Black Republican Association (NBRA) has kicked off a campaign to place billboards across the country that read “Martin Luther King Jr. was a REPUBLICAN.” One such billboard was placed off exit 145 of I-26 in Orangeburg, South Carolina. According to Frances Rice, who founded the NBRA in 2005, the association “is dedicated to promoting the traditional values of the black community which are in concert with the core Republican Party philosophy of strong families, personal responsibility, quality education and equal opportunities for all.” Further, according to Rice, “Our vision is to help black Americans become power players in the political arena and move into our ownership society, emphasizing small business and home ownership.”

The problem with the NBRA’s argument regarding King is that it is intellectually disingenuous and lacking in historical context. You get the sense that there are people operating the controls, the Republican National Committee perhaps, who hope you don’t see them behind the curtain. On its website, the NBRA states that “It should come as no surprise that Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was a Republican. In that era, almost all black Americans were Republicans. Why? From its founding in 1854 as the anti-slavery party until today, the Republican Party has championed freedom and civil rights for blacks.”

Proclaiming that King was a Republican is not so outlandish. Frederick Douglass was a Republican, as were the 22 Black members of Congress (two senators, including Blanch Kelso Bruce of Mississippi, a former slave, and 20 representatives, including John R. Lynch, who was speaker of the Mississippi House before coming to Washington) and one Black governor (Pinckney Benton Stewart Pinchback of Louisiana) who served during Reconstruction. The Republican Party also claimed Black lieutenant governors, a secretary of state, judges, state treasurers, superintendents of education, mayors and generals of state militias.

The Radical Republicans who were responsible for the Thirteenth, Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to the U.S. Constitution, the Freedmen’s Bureau, and other post-Civil War legislation, represented a brief glorious period for the Republican Party, but that was a long time ago. The party of Lincoln is not the party of the Bush-Cheney-Rove criminal enterprise. And in the twentieth century, the Republican Party that had a vibrant and viable liberal wing in the form of Sen. Jacob Javits and Mayor John Lindsay of New York, of Sen. Edward Brooke of Massachusetts and Arthur Fletcher, the “father of affirmative action,” is no more, and has not existed for some time. With no diversity on the national scene, the GOP can offer up only a paltry few prominent faces of color these days, token faces such as Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal, an Indian American.

To be sure, the Democrats must answer for their long history of racism, and even today, the 2008 presidential primaries revealed the problem of racial division that won’t go away. The NBRA likes to argue that “the Democrat Party is as it always has been, the party of the four S's: Slavery, Secession, Segregation and now Socialism.” But this analysis suffers from historical amnesia.

In its narrative, the NBRA conveniently omits the role of the GOP’s Southern Strategy in steering White segregationists from the Democratic Party to the Republicans, and winning elections by appealing to White fears of African Americans. It started with Nixon, following Johnson’s passage of the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Act, which ensured a massive loss of White Southern support for the Democrats. And the Southern Strategy was perfected by Reagan, who kicked off his presidential campaign by invoking states’ rights in Philadelphia, Mississippi, where three civil rights workers, Andrew Goodman, Michael Schwerner and James Chaney - two Jews and a Black - were murdered by domestic terrorists in 1964.

As the now-deceased Republican strategist Lee Atwater said in 1981, “You start out in 1954 by saying, ‘Nigger, nigger, nigger. By 1968, you can’t say ‘nigger’ - that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff. You’re getting so abstract now [that] you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things, and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites.”

The Southern Strategy has had a long run in American politics, and it may very well fail miserably in the midst of an Obama candidacy. And yet, this is the last idea the Republicans have left, aside from permanent war, tax cuts, and ending abortion and gay marriage.

The Republican brand, badly damaged, would be taken off the shelves if it were pet food. In this season of discontent, Americans are in dire straits and the economy is ready to jump off the deep end. Foreclosures and food stamps abound. It would seem that eight years of Republican rule have ruined the nation so badly that more parlor tricks, more bait and switch, more smoke and mirrors will not work this time.

McCain, the GOP standard bearer, has the unenviable task of attempting to distance himself from the most unpopular president in American history, a president whose policies are in line with his own. His party, like America’s two-party system as a whole, is a dinosaur. And it faces well-deserved extinction by clinging to anti-immigrant fervor at a time of changing demographics; anti-Muslim sentiment when the U.S. needs to reach out to the rest of the world; robber baron economics which is exacerbating the gap between rich and poor; the elimination of civil liberties ostensibly to make us free, and an unjust and immoral war in Iraq which is bankrupting the nation and sucking the life out of essential social programs.

Uninspiring, stiff and crotchety, McCain is, according to David Letterman, “the guy at the hardware store who makes the keys.” Unable to energize even his own base, McCain faces predictions that as many as 40 percent of evangelicals will support Obama in the general election. With a 50-state strategy and a massive voter registration drive, the Obama train hopes to change the electoral map and make it rain blue in the red states.

So, in light of this, the NBRA hopes for a McCain victory by siphoning off 25 percent of the Black vote in the 2008 election. A quixotic endeavor at best, such a feat would not have been possible even when the Democrats ran boring wooden candidates for president every four years. Their plan for achieving this - not unlike the conservatives who would eliminate affirmative action on the grounds that King wanted a “colorblind” society - is cynically to portray Dr. King as someone who had much in common with today’s atrociously regressive and bigoted Republican Party. Moreover, McCain voted against the King national holiday.

Like Bush’s art critics, expert lackeys who would use a chisel to remove all the anger from Dr. King’s face, it simply won’t work.

McCain’s Christian Zionist, Subprime Mortgage Pimping Problem

David A. Love
BlackCommentator.com
June 5, 2008

On the eve of the general election season, as much of the media focuses on the trivialities of Senator Barack Obama’s associations - and whether he should repudiate everyone he knows or doesn’t know - GOP candidate John McCain has been given a free ride. This, despite evidence that McCain, like George Bush, would open the White House to profiteers, influence peddlers, racists and religious extremists.

There was, at best, token coverage of statements made by two of McCain’s supporters, Rev. Rod Parsley of the World Harvest Church in Columbus, Ohio, and Pastor John Hagee of Cornerstone Church in San Antonio, Texas. Parsley said that America was founded to destroy Islam, which he calls a false religion. Meanwhile, Hagee - who is known for his homophobic, anti-Muslim, and anti-Jewish sentiments - said in a late 1990s sermon that Adolph Hitler was sent by God to hunt the Jews and carry out the Holocaust, leading to the establishment of the state of Israel. In his 1996 book, The Beginning of the End, he expressed praise for Yigal Amir, the assassin of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, and characterized the murder as a fulfillment of prophecy. And on March 16, 2003, Hagee proclaimed that the Antichrist will be gay, will “make Adolph Hitler look like a choirboy,” and “is at least going to be partially Jewish, as was Adolph Hitler, as was Karl Marx.”

Hagee, oddly enough, has spoken before the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), the largest pro-Israel lobbying organization, a fact which may speak more about AIPAC than anything else. He even received a standing ovation at the 2007 AIPAC convention. And McCain supporter, Sen. Joe Lieberman, who called Hagee “a man of God,” has decided to speak at Hagee’s July 2008 Christians United For Israel (CUFI) conference. Advocating confrontation with Iran and a denial of aid to the Palestinians, CUFI believes that Israel’s expansion into Palestinian territory is “a biblical imperative.”

J Street, a pro-peace, Jewish political group that hopes to reverse the rightward shift in U.S. Mideast policy and the influence of AIPAC, has called upon Lieberman to withdraw his participation in CUFI’s conference. Perhaps for Lieberman and others, Hagee’s unflinching support of the Israeli government’s hard line policies trumps his intolerance and anti-Semitism. While the media have seemed fixated on one pastor who rightly condemned U.S. foreign policy and racism (Dr. Jeremiah Wright) and another who condemned white-skin privilege (Father Michael Pfleger), very little is said of Hagee. The double standard is clear.

McCain repudiated Hagee and Parsley, but that is beside the point. Rather than focus on individuals, it is necessary to examine the interests they represent. Why would McCain and the Republicans seek the support of such loathsome people and embrace their twisted interests, inviting them to sit at the table? And why do they have such influence in mainstream U.S. politics, and the Mideast policy debate?

Hagee, Parsley, and people of that ilk are members of what is known as Christian Zionism. Christian Zionists support Israeli government acts of military aggression, do not want peace in the Mideast region, and reject self-determination and statehood for the Palestinian people. Most of all, and this is key, they believe that Muslims, Jews, and those who do not accept Jesus Christ as their savior will perish when Armageddon comes, and Jesus returns. These far Right Christians are part of the GOP base, the GOP faithful whose support McCain has coveted, and from whom McCain will be unable to distance himself, even if he repudiates a few of their leaders.

Although he has positioned himself as a reformer and an independent, straight-talking maverick, John McCain is little more than a Bush shill. A Johnny One Note of American politics, McCain might as well be the nominee for President of Iraq, offering few policies other than perpetual war in Iraq, no talking to enemies and more atrocious Supreme Court nominees.

McCain talks little about domestic policy, and admits he knows little about economics. But his campaign co-chair, former Senator Phil Gramm, knows a great deal about economics and has that covered. While advising McCain on economic policy, Gramm lobbied Congress on behalf of UBS, a Swiss Bank, in its effort to block legislation to help the victims of the subprime mortgage crisis. Gramm, who has a doctorate in economics and is a vice-chair at the UBS banking division, was the architect of the very deregulation in the banking industry which allowed the subprime disaster to take place. Further, UBS has advised its bankers to avoid traveling to the U.S., where they face questioning and possible arrest for helping clients evade taxes.

Another close McCain advisor, influence peddler Charlie Black, is a longtime associate of George Bush and Karl Rove. Black’s lobbying firm, BKHS, is owned by Burson-Marsteller, which in turn is chaired by Hillary Clinton campaign advisor Mark Penn. Black’s clients are a who’s who of barrel-scrapers, including dictators such as Mobutu Sese Seko of Zaire, Angolan rebel leader Jonas Savimbi, the late Filipino President Ferdinand Marcos, hustler Ahmed Chalabi of the Iraqi National Congress and fake-WMD fame, and Blackwater founder Erik Prince.

Coddling racists, homophobes and Holocaust revisionists on the one hand, and embracing corporate pimps, subprime profiteers and influence peddlers on the other - important Republican constituencies - McCain has a lot of repudiating to do.