The hand that once had the right to pick a president can now get back to picking cotton!

By Malik Sekou OSEI and William PLEASANT


“The people who cast the votes don't decide an election, the people who count the votes do.”--Joseph Stalin


July 15, 2012


Perhaps Pres. Barack Obama's most freakish stage routine today is his leading role in de jure disenfranchisement of Blacks and the poor in general. Ironic? Actually, it is quite lawful at this historical juncture characterized by growing convulsive class antagonisms that are sweeping the world. How can it be that the Obama regime at once crows that it is passionately commited to expanding the voter pool of the US and ready-willing-able to mobilize the traditional Democratic Party base--Blacks, Latinos, labor unionists, the elderly and progressive whites--and at the same collaborate in the Republican Party's quite transparent nationwide campaign to drive the poor and the left from the ballot box?


The answer is political. Obama has side-stepped the fundamental issue of democratic rights and equality by engaging the pinata of Voter ID laws under the now moribund 1965 Voting Rights Act.


In the state of Texas there a was week-long trial on a new voter ID law that concluded with members of a three-judge federal court panel indicating they would uphold the federal Department of Justice and block the implementation of the law on the grounds that it has a discriminatory effect on minorities.


Obama's Justice Department presented a compelling 1965 Voting Rights Act case proving that Black people (the poor in general) are far more likely to lack the government-issued photo identification required to vote under the Texas law. One expert witness testified that 11-percent of white registered voters lacked the required ID, compared to 18-percent of Hispanic registered voters and 21-percent of black registered voters. A total of 1.5 million people of all races could have been denied the right to vote under the new Texas law.


Attorneys representing the Texas state government argued that the law would not have a “disproportionate” impact on Latino and African American voters and claimed that “only” 167,000 current voters would be disenfranchised by the new ID requirements. Predictably, the Texas legal team never bothered to bring a single state legislator nor executive official (overwhelmingly right wing Republicans) to the witness stand The reason was simple: They would be subjected to cross-examination by the federal lawyers. That would have of course put the Texans on the record stating that their reasons for snatching the ballot from minorities and the poor was purely a political ploy to keep non-whites from voting AGAINST REPUBLICANS, not preventing voter fraud, as the Lone Star ballot bandits pleaded.


The Texans did not challenge evidence that 80 of the state’s 200 counties have no location where photo IDs can be obtained, and that many residents would have to drive more than 120 miles (one way) to get such an identification card. They also went mum when it was pointed out that the IDs runs at least $22, a hardship,  particularly onerous to the elderly and the poor. 


At one point, Mr. Robert Hughes, one of the Texas state attorneys, stated that he also regarded literacy tests as permissible, although they were one of the primary KKK-driven tactics for excluding Black people from the ballot box for 90 years!. Literacy tests and poll taxes were supposedly permanently barred by the 1965 Voting Rights Act. In other words, for the Texas Attorney General--circa 2012, "The hand that once had the right to pick a president can now get back to picking cotton!"


The Texan's case was so tranparently threadbare that it immdiately exposed the underlying national strategy of the Republican Party, namely to force an appeal in the US Supreme Court aimed at obliterating the 1965 Voting Rights Act altogether. Texas is one of 16 states required under the Voting Rights Act to obtain “clearance” by the federal Justice Department before any significant changes can be made to statewide or even county-level voting protocols.

The heart of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 was to address particular counties where there had existed a historical pattern of de jure measures employed to virtually outlaw Black and Latino participation in the electoral process. These, of course, were augmented by sheer terrorism led by a coalition of local law enforcement officials and KKK death squads.


Texas is not the only Republican-run state to have recently enacted voter ID requirements and other measures aimed at curbing voter registration and reducing the number of people able to vote, in the name of a fight against “vote fraud.” Voter fraud is merely a euphemism for the strong tendency for non-whites and their allies to reject Republican Party candidates. It is a very WHITE ELEPHANT, since there have been no significant nor documented patterns of voter impersonation, the type of fraud that could be forestalled by a photo ID requirement. For example: not a single person has been convicted in Texas for such an offense. The song remains the same in the other states that have pushed for voter supression.


In Michigan, according to a report by the Republican Secretary of State, out of nearly 1.2 million ballots cast in the February 28, 2012 presidential primary, there were half a dozen believed to have been ineligible to vote.


In Florida, where the state attempted to purge 182,000 people from the voter rolls by employing a dubious list of supposed “illegal aliens,” the number was first whittled down to 2,600, then to only 47, after press revelations that the “illegals” on the list included such individuals as the state’s former Republican governor, Rick Scott, a principal sponsor of the law, and a 91-year-old decorated veteran of World War II's Battle of the Bulge.


Since a reactionary 2008 US Supreme Court decree upholding a photo ID requirement for voting in Indiana, such measures have been adopted in a total of 17 states. The Justice Department has blocked implementation of these laws in Texas, Florida and South Carolina, relying on its powers under the Voting Rights Act. But in states that lie out side the jurisdiction of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, legal disenfranchisement of non-white voters is in full swing. By one estimate, as many as five million voters could be summarily driven from the polls by such laws on Election Day 2012..


For example: Pennsylvania's voter ID law takes effect for the first time in November. According to state officials, some 750,000 people, or nine percent of the state’s 8.2 million voters, do not have an acceptable ID card. In Philadelphia, the state’s largest city, which has a Black majority, that figure rises to 18-percent!    


Pennsylvania's Republican House Majority Leader Mike Turzai openly confessed to the political purpose of the bill, declaring that voter ID “[I]s gonna allow Governor Romney to win the state of Pennsylvania.”


The clear intent of these laws is to speed up the “vote suppression” tactics applied by the Republican Party in the 2000 and 2004 presidential elections, which included massive purges of Black and Latino voters from the registration lists in the name of eliminating felons and undocumented workers. The vast majority of those removed were, in fact, US citizens eligible to vote, whose democratic rights were denied in order to obtain an electoral advantage for the Republican Party's candidates..


Of course, the most egregious case of “vote fraud” in recent years was the stolen election of 2000, when Republican state officials in Florida intentionally suppressed turnout in African American precincts and then declared George W. Bush the victor by a 537-vote margin. When the Florida state Supreme Court ordered a full recount that threatened Bush’s supposed victory, the US Supreme Court intervened with its notorious Bush v. Gore decision.This crippled the vote re-count and the installed Bush in the White House. The Democratic Party surrendered to this attack on democratic rights, setting the stage for the anti-working class onslaught that has followed.


We have noted in earlier articles that the 2000 Supreme Court action and the decision by Democratic candidate Al Gore and the Democratic Party to accept the virtual coronation of Bush--who had actually lost the popular vote by a margin of nearly one million--demonstrated that there was no longer any significant constituency within the US ruling stratum for the defense of democratic rights.


Likewise, there is really no substance to the Obama regime's opposition to the voter supression campaign. Why did not the Justice Department subpoena the
Republican masterminds behind Texas disenfranchisement last week? Why did Obama's legal eagles merely argue against the Texas voter ID law on the basis of the 1965
Voting Rights Act--which applies almost exclusively to the former Confederacy--when voter supression is a nationwide phenomenon in 2012? It should be plainly clear that the 1965 Voting Rights Act is pathetically obsolete today. Doesn't the 19th Amendment of the US Constitution (1920), which granted euqal voting righs to males and females by extension grant the federal executive and legislative branches the absolute power to protect access to the ballot? It reads: "The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex. Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation." 


Substitute "race" or "income level" or "geographic location" or "party affiliation" for "sex" and you can see our point. Does Obama support equal democratic rights for minorities and the poor. His Justice Department's performance in Texas leaves strong evidence that he is at most indifferent.



While the Democrats, for short-term electoral purposes, oppose the Republican attacks on voter turnout in minority areas, the Obama administration has in every other respect continued and accelerated the attacks on democratic rights carried out by the Bush administration, including stepped-up political surveillence on the American. Obama has effectively politically disarmed Blacks and other people of color through a highly sophisticate campaign by which the demands of minorities and poor are submerged in the politically neutral jargon of "Middle Class" shared self-interests. This bourgeois populism, propelled by the cultural nationalistic placebo of "Black faces in high places"   has rendered Black political resistance to a mush of apologies for Obama's very open disdain for anything approaching a pro-Black or pro-working class political agenda, even of the mildest reformist specie.


Now is the time for a profound reality check:
 “What” are the material and political interests of the Black community and the larger working class community?


Can Pres. Buckwheat, a representative of the American capitalist/imperialist system really have the same interests as the Black community and the working poor? There is, of course, the argument that we need to support the lesser (Obama) of the two evils. But where in Buckwheat's historical practice of the last four years have we seen him as anything other than evil? Buckwheat was simply the more efficient of the two evils.Let that sink in.
        
For Black people and the 99-percent in the US, history is on their side, but not time.


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A PIMPER'S PARADISE: Obama and the unions...

By William PLEASANT

When Barack Obama promised CHANGE during his 2008 presidential campaign he was definitely not talking about changing the traditional post-war relationship between organized labor and the Democratic Party.

The June 5th Wisconsin gubenatorial recall election should have made this point emphatic to all. Pres. Buckwheat and his DP minions allowed the Republican Party to stomp organized labor's passionate attempt to unseat the reactionary incumbent Gov. Scott Walker and install the liberal Democratic Mayor of Milwaukee Tom Barrett. Despite millions of man-hours spent collecting recall petition signatures and millions more spent on canvassing and get-out-the-vote campaigns, organized labor was undone at the hands of the Republicans, with the tacit assistance of the Obama regime and the Democratic National Committee (DNC).

(Walker raised more than $30 million--mostly from out-of-state corporate donors and the Republican National Committee. Barrett's campaign ran on less than $4 million--mostly from unions and small private donors.)

Obama and the DNC offered next to no concrete support to the recall drive (less than $500K), which began over a year ago when Gov. Walker rammed a bill through the Wisconsin legislature that effectively outlawed collective bargaining rights for state employees.

Walker, a wannabe Republican Party bigwig, is actually the cat's paw of the infamous KOCH BROTHER. These are the folks who brought us the maniacally racist TEA PARTY movement. The pedigree of their politics and enormous wealth goes back to the birth of Germany's Third Reich. To call the KOCH BROTHERS fascists would be an understatement. Their ideological vision encompasses no less than the total political annihilation of any social sector--especially organized labor--that can possibly raise opposition to the dictatorship of the rich.

Scott Walker's anti-union antics in Wisconsin were a KOCH-financed experiment to see how much union-busting would be tolerated under the Obama regime. The KOCH BROTHER'S hypothesis was proven: Obama and the Democratic Party establishment did not support organized labor. In short, organized labor and its supporters in the liberal/progressive camps were actually politically disarmed by their material relationship to the Democratic Party.

The same can be said for the Black, Latino, Asian, Native social sectors. They are all political sitting ducks. The KOCH BROTHERS and fellow supporters of a fascistic AMERIKKAN SPRING are licking their chops now, as they prepare for a multi-state coupe de grace to public
sector collective bargaining rights.

Liberal post-recall pundits now scratch their heads and ask: "What if President Obama had campaigned for Tom Barrett? (Though Obama made fund-raising trips to nearby Minneapolis and Chicago last week, the president declined to make even a brief detour to campaign for his fellow Democrat.) The most Obama & Co. had to offer Barrett (i.e., organized labor) was a single TWEET of support on election eve!!!! Vice President Joe Biden didn't even TWEET.

The truth of the matter is that an Obama appearance in Wisconsin would still have been too late and too little. The political substance of Pres. Buckwheat and his party's support for labor had already been exposed over a year ago. When Wisconsin labor unionists occupied the state capitol in protest to Scott Walker's anti-union legislation, the Obama crew went AWOL. Obama and Biden were conspicuous no-shows.

Marxists are not scratching their heads in the wake of the Wisconsin debacle. Organized labor, like other resisting social sectors, has been double teamed by Democrats and Republicans since the 1980s. When then-president Ronald Reagan crushed the Air Traffic Controllers Union, without even a whimper from the Democratic Party, the ideological Right was given the historical high sign that the organized labor sector was political fair game. With military precision, the Right pushed through right-to-work laws and a string of roll-backs of 30 years of worker shop-floor gains.

Purged of its socialist and communist leadership during the 1950s and 60s, and ideologically misled by social democratic opportunists, organized labor ( especially its militants) were grazed silly on the notion that the Democratic Party was the party of labor. Labor's advance was equated with the fortunes of the Democratic Party, which was at least the "lesser-of-two-evils." The organized labor movement's social policy agenda became structurally chained to the Democratic Party. In the name of unity with the only mainstream political institution that would tolerate its social presence, organized labor again and again kow-towed to the whims of the Democratic Party leadership.

In this arrangement, the establishment of an independent, pro-labor party was impossible. That would mean that labor would need go into strategic opposition to the Democratic Party. This is the historical essence of Barack Obama's pimp game against US labor. In short, Obama correctly surmises that it would be absurd to pay for what he and only he can get for free--i.e., the money and slavish support of organized labor's leadership, and the disciplined activism of the rank-n-file.

Obama flashed his rear-end to labor and progressive voters in Wisconsin this week because he knows that come November 2012 they will stampede to the polls on his behalf, come hell or high water. His strategy is highly similar in respect Black and Latino voters.

As far as Obama is concerned, his streetwalkers have already officially lined up to pleasure him. Despite three years of deliberate neglect and disrespect at the hands of the Obama regime, labor unions have rushed to endorse the incumbent, starting a year before his party offers even a crumb of political concession and before the national convention!

National Education Association (NEA) – July 4, 2011

United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) – October 20, 2011

National Air Traffic Controllers Association (NATCA) – November 16, 2011

Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union (RWDSU) – November 17, 2011

Service Employees International Union (SEIU) – November 19, 2011

American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) – December 6, 2011

Communications Workers of America (CWA) – February 2, 2012

American Federation of Teachers (AFT) – February 7, 2012

International Association of Machinists (IAM) – February 24, 2012

United Association of Journeymen and Apprentices of the Plumbing and Pipefitting Industry (UA) – March 1, 2012

United Steel Workers (USW) – March 4, 2012

Laborers International Union of North America (LIUNA) – March 8, 2012

AFL-CIO – March 13, 2012...

This list continues to grow week by week. Meanwhile, rank-n-file labor unionists groan under the political boot of a presidential candidate who promised in 2008 that if “American workers are being denied their right to organize and collectively bargain when I’m in the White House, I’ll put on a comfortable pair of shoes myself. I’ll walk on that picket line with you as president of the United States of America.”

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A MEMORIAL DAY for murderers--past and present?

By William PLEASANT

Today, the US secular religious cult celebrated Memorial Day.
We were urged to give thanks--apolitically--to the US military personnel
who "died for our freedoms". The day was marked with military parades and
mountainous steaming piles of sentimental oratory. President Buckwheat Obama stood on the altar of US imperialism and called forth a deluge of crocodile tears.
Meanwhile, retail outlets badgered the appropriately mournful patriotic masses to soothe their bereavement with the purchase of a new car or sofa. That was the holiday. That was Memorial Day 2012, America's secular Easter--death and resurrection symbolized by the custom of lowering the flag to half-mast at dawn and then raising it at noon.

As marxists, we understand the political and cultural function of holidays. Aside from their transparent commercial utility, holidays serve a specific political use for the ruling stratum.

Karl Marx wrote:"Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of the
heartless world, just as it is the spirit of a spiritless situation. It is the opium of the people."

The US secular religion is no less a narcotic. The CHURCH USA, as I style it, holds that every military escapade, past and present, is the work of an omniscient and benevolent god tasked with spreading his bounty--mainly consumer good, armaments and crass materialism--around the globe. The daily slaughter of civilians and military personnel is a necessary good for the glory of god who resides everywhere except in the political, social and financial agenda of the ruling class. One knows not where wars come from, but they are the will of the invisible god of America. Memorial Day serves to keep that god under wraps.

HIROSHIMA

　
Today, President Obama, the Pope of the CHURCH USA, in his Washington DC Memorial Day sermon, used the occasion to do a little historical revision on the 50th anniversary of the start of the Vietnam War. At the Vietnam war monument, he chastised past sinners for their apparent maltreatment of Vietnam War-era military personnel upon their return to the US. (Click here for complete text.)

"It was a national shame, a disgrace that should have never happened.
"That's why here today we resolve that it will not happen again," Obama told veterans and their families gathered on the national mall.

"You were often blamed for a war you didn't start when you should have been commended for serving your country with valor."

VIET NAM

 Indeed, returning members of the military were the target of national outrage over the illegal war in Vietnam. As operatives of a policy that was rejected by huge sectors of the population, they suffered the same repudiation as their civilian and military superiors. They were reviled for clear cut political reasons. Why did people throw garbage at returning soldiers? Namely, because military personnel committed atrocities against the Vietnamese people in the name of propping up the appallingly corrupt, neo-colonial clique known as the Republic of Vietnam. Most American people, particularly youths and non-whites, detested the war policy. They acted out on their political opposition. As Obama pointed out, that was a sin and the American people should sin no more.

GRENADA

But why shouldn't the gunslingers of US imperialism in Vietnam have been subjected to criticism and rebuke? Why, in a like manner, the marauding assassins who today operate in Afghanistan and Iraq not be called to task for their role in barbarizing the people in those countries?

PANAMA

Isn't a hitman as guilty of murder as is his employer?
　
The CHURCH USA requires a yearly mass supplication called Memorial Day to ward off the rather transparent fact that US military policy makers and their minions in the trenches are equally guilty of ongoing crimes against humanity. Memorial Day is merely a ploy to deflect political criticism of imperialistic military aggression by but again exploiting the cannonfodder class--dead and alive--as poster children. They bravely served the country, so they are worthy of our mourning and sympathy, correct? "The country" is really a myth. The military serves its paymaster, the ruling stratum. They kill for the ruling stratum. They occupy countries for the ruling stratum. And they make money, in the productive process of war manufacture, for the ruling stratum. Memorial Day is supposed to blind us with tears to the extent that we cannot discern the obvious.

IRAQ

　
The truth of the matter is that the holiday that we now call Memorial Day was invented by Black people in Charleston, SC. It was a political celebration based upon honoring dead Union Soldiers in the aftermath of the Civil War.

According to historian David Blight:

"During the final year of the war, the Confederates had converted the planters' horse track, the Washington Race Course and Jockey Club, into an outdoor prison. Union soldiers were kept in horrible conditions in the interior of the track; at least 257 died of exposure and disease and were hastily buried in a mass grave behind the grandstand. Some 28 black workmen went to the site, re-buried the Union dead properly, and built a high fence around the cemetery. They whitewashed the fence and built an archway over an entrance on which they inscribed the words, "Martyrs of the Race Course."

"Then, [B]lack Charlestonians, in cooperation with white missionaries and teachers, staged an unforgettable parade of 10,000 people on the slaveholders' race course. [May 1, 1865--Ed.]. The symbolic power of the low-country planter aristocracy's horse track (where they had displayed their wealth, leisure, and influence) was not lost on the freed people. A New York Tribune correspondent witnessed the event and described, "a procession of friends and mourners as South Carolina and the United States never saw before."

This holiday--originally called DECORATION DAY-- caught on throughout the Unionist states. But its political meaning was quickly transformed by the bourgeoisie in the 1870s. Disdainful of freed Blacks and in opposition to radical Reconstructionists/progressives who saw Decoration Day as a celebration of Black emancipation and the victory of social progress, Decoration Day was quickly transformed into a spectacle of national mourning for ALL deceased US military personnel from ALL wars--including dead Confederate soldiers from the Civil War!!!! This was quite convenient, since the northern ruling stratum had grown weary of Reconstruction and was eager to get on with making money with the assistance of the previously defeated Southern aristocracy. Reconstruction was abandoned in 1876, with the withdrawal of federal troops from the South. The former rebel slave-owners were freed to initiate a reign of terror against the emancipated slaves and their white supporters. Blood flowed in the streets of the South. Meanwhile, a myth of national unity was anchored in all-embracing holiday of reconciliation between white men of the North and South. Modern Memorial Day was born.

PALESTINE BY PROXY

Through the years and until the end of World War II, Decoration Day--renamed Memorial Day--served the task of inculcating the myth of US national unity--actually a unity of cadavers who had previously engaged in corporatized ultra-violence. But as US imperialism went into over-drive following WWII, leading to dozens of military adventures of at best dubious justifications, the theme of national unity was supplanted with a theme of worshiping the act of war making and its executioner. That was, in fact, the substance of Obama's sermon today. According to Pres. Buckwheat, we were supposed to reward mass murderers with praise as a reflex of patriotism .

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