From Montana to ‘Bama– It’s Bloomberg Obama!

by on May 4, 2008 11
0sharesFacebook
0tweetsTwitter
0stumbledStumbleUpon
0sharesReddit
0recommendGoogle

Obama just said on Meet the Press that he's for the Democratic nominee come November. Hillary also said she'll fight for Obama if he wins. I think this is pillow talk. When one of them loses, they're gonna be sore. The party's divided for a reason. It's the old guard vs. the new guard (and let's leave the class issues out for a second). If Hillary wins, why shouldn't Obama grasp the nettle and break with the old politics--if he's for real about all that--and run for the great smart middle that is tired of Iraq, tired of the Israeli occupation, tired of special interests, tired of being patronized and pandered to. I believe Bloomberg's endorsement is still up for grabs; a spectacular triangulation would be to sign on Mike Bloomberg as VP. Blacks and Jews, Democrats and Republicans, conservatives and liberals, a third way. Yes, two members of the elite, from Illinois and New York. But remember that blue states are elite and neither of these guys has shown real contempt for ordinary people (when not pandering to SF audiences that is); and the main thing these guys would be selling is creativity, intelligence, competence, new politics, a new generation, optimism and Yes we can--fix the country. Don't you want to fix the country?

About Philip Weiss

Philip Weiss is Founder and Co-Editor of Mondoweiss.net.
Posted in US Politics

{ 11 comments... read them below or add one }

  1. otto says:
    May 4, 2008 at 1:13 pm

    From wiki:

    Initially, Bloomberg strongly supported the war in Iraq and the rationale for going in. He stated, "Don't forget that the war started not very many blocks from here" alluding to Ground Zero.

  2. Charles Keating says:
    May 4, 2008 at 1:25 pm

    Exactly Otto. Bloomberg is a real deep thinker, the kind who is cunning, but not wise, unless one thinks wisdom is satisfaction
    of one's own material needs and ego at whatever cost to anyone else. An Enron type of fellow, after all. He's pretty common-sensical, given American culture.

  3. Ed says:
    May 4, 2008 at 1:25 pm

    "a spectacular triangulation would be to sign on Mike Bloomberg as VP. Blacks and Jews, Democrats and Republicans, conservatives and liberals, a third way."

    Phil, you're grasping at straws again. First of all, blacks and Jews are today irreconcilably divided. That's what happens when Jews embrace racialist ideologies like Zionism, which in actuality is only a return to the Jewish mean. In retrospect, it is clear that those directing the Jewish “liberals” were merely employing a Marxist tactic and using black numbers during the civil rights movement in order to break the WASP establishment in America and replace it with an even more racist Jewish Zionist establishment, which doesn’t even feel Christian charity towards blacks. Just look at how poorly blacks have fared since Jews rose to the status of elite since the civil rights era. Secondly, no blacks are going to trust Jewish Zionist billionaire Bloomberg, who is the moral equivalent of Joe Lieberman, and jumps back and fourth between political alignments as his needs of the moment dictate. Thirdly, Glenn Greenwald already decimated the harebrained delusion of the cynical, opportunist Bloomberg as somehow transcending partisan divides. Read it here: link to salon.com

    Authentic Jewish liberals in this country face a massive problem: the Jewish faith is inherently racialist and deeply conservative in a tribal sense. Its duel-identity in the diaspora can only be maintained for so long before the rabbinical keepers of the faith, over time, return it to mean. This means liberal diaspora Jews have to either reinvent their faith, or leave it all together. And Judaism will never be successfully reinvented. It’s way too hardwired.

    So there you have it: time to decide: America or Israel; Western civilization or Zionism. Jews can’t have it both ways any longer, and when they try, it results in dangerous ideologies like Neoconservatism/Neoliberalism that, at their core, are a manifestation of Jewish contempt for non-Jewish humanity. Gentile-hating misanthropes should not be put in charge of non-Jews…ever. It’s unnatural. We are experiencing the side-effects of such an upside down arrangement in America today. And they’re only going to get worse.

    Does pointing this out make me a “bigot”? A really don’t care what Marxist label the Zionists throw around. They’re the worst bigots of all: they hate 99 percent of humanity.

  4. Charles Keating says:
    May 4, 2008 at 1:52 pm

    Ask any average black if they know any Jew in their life. The class thing is obvious, and guess who is always on the bottom?
    Ask the same of any working or lower middle class white. What do you find? What is the system de facto, as implemented and used?

    It's hard to see any reconciliation between the white working class or lower middle class and ghetto or working to middle-class blacks–and Jews who imagine they are the poor milkman of Fiddler On The Roof while in fact they oppress the masses, thinking this is just revenge for the stupid WASP Bush folks for looking down on them.

    I think history is going to repeat itself.

    The Middle East will replay what happened in Europe, and for the same reasons. And average Americans will never have a clue–like pawns who never knew who fondled, and moved them.

  5. Richard Witty says:
    May 4, 2008 at 2:19 pm

    I also think your off on this one Phil.

    First, the Israeli occupation is of little importance to the average US voter. They are not aware of Palestinians' experience. And partially because they distrust polemic and discount it when they here it.

    Partially brainwashed that Arabs are violent. Partially more preoccupied with American issues and day to day life.

    The Iraq war is important.

    And, Bloomberg is not a player.

  6. Todd says:
    May 4, 2008 at 3:15 pm

    I seriously doubt that Bloomberg could, or should, make a serious run at power. Who says that the average American wants to be triangulated, anyway?

    My personal belief is that the nation should peacefully break apart along more natural lines while it is still possible. When will the time come to quit calling one another bigots, racists, fascists, commies, elites, masses, and all other names, and just allow the different parts of the nation to live as they wish?

    This nation will never be united at this point, and I see no reason to keep trying. I don't claim that utopia would be the result, because the risk would still be there for political abuse. But smaller states could serve local interests better, and there would be less possibility for global abuse of power.

  7. Crimson Ghost says:
    May 4, 2008 at 5:30 pm

    Anyone think it is a coincidence that the most pro-Israel President in US history also is generally thought to be the worst President in US history.

  8. syvanen says:
    May 4, 2008 at 5:31 pm

    I thought this was a good idea a few months back but must conclude it is a terrible idea today. The ethnic breakdown is just too minority not to mention that one is a billionair NY captitalist. Obama needs to be balanced with something more middle American, apple pie and that kind of thing.

  9. Charles Keating says:
    May 4, 2008 at 7:53 pm

    Apple pie? What would the United States be like without black people? Consider Canada, which resembles the U.S. in many ways – a vast area of great natural resources, sparsely settled by native peoples before European colonization. Canada differs from the U.S. in only one significant particular – it was never given over to African slavery, nor was it ever implicated in the slave trade.

    The first African laborers to arrive in the English colonies did not come as slaves, and the first European laborers did not come as free men and women. The labor force in the 17th century was composed of indentured servants imported from both Africa and the British Isles. They were bonded for a specified period, usually seven years, after which they became legally free. The rulers of colonial Virginia were faced with two problems: in addition to the labor shortage, there was the question – who would police the laborers, who were not easily reconciled to conditions of servitude in a continent where land was available for the taking?

    English and African bonded laborers lived under much the same conditions of hardship, so severe that a large portion of them failed even to survive their period of indenture, and they reacted to their oppression as do laborers everywhere, by drawing closer together, intermarrying, plotting escape – and by revolt.

    The growing solidarity among the laborers broke out in several bloody revolts, which threatened the security of the government of the Virginia colony (which had two-thirds of the total population of the English colonies as a whole).

    In a response which is remarkably well documented, the colonial rulers turned, around the middle of the 17th century, to a policy of drawing a line between the English and African bond laborers. Certain privileges – the first being the exemption of female European bond laborers from field work – were conferred on the former, while special laws were passed to fix the status of the Africans: extending the term of servitude until it became permanent and then hereditary, imposing a pass system, denying them the right to carry arms, etc.

    The process of encoding the new status took about a half-century, and marks the birth of the "white race" as a social category – the emergence of a class of laborers whose community of interests with their exploiters was legally and publicly affirmed, and who functioned to maintain social control over the entire labor force, themselves included.

    By 1705, the rulers of the Virginia colony felt sufficiently confident of the support of their European proletarians to specify that white bond laborers finishing their period of indenture be given a musket. What a change from barely a generation earlier, when rebel forces -European and African – beseiged, captured and burned the colonial capitol of Jamestown and sent the governor fleeing across the Chesapeake Bay, the same bond laborers who, between the years 1663 and 1682 hatched no less than ten servile revolts and revolt plots!

    Left historians who are critical of the characterization of the U.S. as the "Land of Liberty" commonly assert that the much vaunted democracy depends on the denial of rights to the African, Native American and other people of color. This is a good example of the "appearance" being the reverse of the "essence" – the development of a system of racial slavery and national oppression depended on the extension of democratic rights to the "white" population as a whole. As early as the 18th century there had emerged the pattern which was to define the distinctive course of U.S. history: U.S. society is not merely bourgeois but bourgeois white supremacist; tilt U.S. working class movement has been, in the main, not merely opportunist but white racist opportunist; the main form of opportunism in the working class movement is not merely white racism – an idea – but the acquiescence of the white workers in the system of white skin privileges imposed by the bourgeoisie.

    The USA never passed through a feudal stage of development.

    The American War for Independence, while it had progressive features, was not a war of a rising bourgeoisie against the forces of feudal absolutism, but instead a conflict between the merchant class of New England (allied with indebted southern planters) and the colonising power over who would reap the vast profits of the slave trade; over which would be the third corner of the famous "triangle trade" described by slaves captured in Africa, rum and tobacco produced in the West Indies, and manufactured goods from either Liverpool of Massachusetts.
    The decades following the establishment of the American Republic saw the emergence of two systems of exploitation: direct slavery in the South, supporting the cultivation first of tobacco and later of cotton; and manufacture based on wage labor in New England and the Middle Atlantic states.

    The Civil War began with both sides fighting for slavery – the South to take it out of the Union, the North to keep it in. The real aim of the South, however, was not to secede from the Union but, by secession and war, to reorganize it on a new basis, with the "peculiar institution," slavery, as the foundation of an empire stretching from the Great Lakes to Central America.

    The aims of the northern manufacturing bourgeoisie were modest: simply to restrict slavery to those areas where it already existed.

    Two things brought about a change. First was the attitude of the whites enlisted in the Union cause. They opposed the spread of slavery and the breakup of the Union but were hardly enthusiastic supporters of a war that was bringing them extreme hardship while enriching their employers through government contracts. They showed their feelings early by a series of draft riots in New York, Cincinnati and elsewhere that commonly took the form of mob attacks on free blacks.

    The second factor making for a change in government policy was the role of the blacks themselves. For decades, free blacks had been the mainstay of the small organizations advocating the abolition of slavery, and the escaped slaves had been both a severe drain on the slave economy and a call to the conscience of the country. Besides running away, the slaves also had developed various means of striking and resisting their exploitation, including launching numerous revolts, the most well known led by Gabriel Prosser, Denmark Vesey and Nat Turner. Now, as the War began, the black people began to see it as part of their struggle for freedom. Free blacks in the North understood that the cause of abolition was linked to a Union victory, in spite of Lincoln's protestations that he had no anti-slavery aims. While pressuring the government at all levels to broaden the War to one against slavery, they began to enlist in the Union armies, often against giant obstacles placed in their way by the government which did not want them as soldiers.

    The famous song, John Brown's Body, commemorating the great revolutionary abolitionist who gave his life struggling against slavery, was written and sung by the Massachusetts 54th Regiment, one of the all black units (commanded by white officers).

    At first the slaves watched and waited; it was not yet clear where their interests lay. So long as they worked the cotton, the South could place in the field of battle a disproportionate number of its white manhood. The first attempts made by the slaves to join the Union cause were repulsed; fugitive slaves, making their way to Union army camps in the South, were sent back to their owners. Gradually, under the pressure of necessity, the Union's policy began to change: fugitive slaves were reclassified as "contraband of war" and put to work building fortifications, etc. Soon they were enlisted as scouts and spies for the Union armies.

    By 1863, the attempt to wage a war against a force whose strength and weakness both lay in the institution of slavery brought about a change in Lincoln's policy. This was manifest in three things: first, the adoption of a more active military policy; second, the decision to encourage the enlistment and arming of Blacks; and third, the declaration of the aim of the war to be the abolition of slavery.

    It should be noted that Lincoln's famed Emancipation Proclamation freed no one: it merely declared slavery abolished in those areas then in revolt, that is, those areas where it could not be enforced. But as a statement of intent, it was enough to "loose the fateful lightning" – the six hundred thousand black laborers who embarked on a great working class upsurge, beginning in 1863, a mass withdrawal of labor power – a general strike – which quickly brought the South to its knees.

    Reconstruction was carried to its furthest extent in South Carolina and Mississippi, the two former pillars of the Confederacy and the only states with a black majority. Of the delegates to a convention called in South Carolina for the purpose of writing a new state convention, almost half were former slaves and another fourth were so poor that they paid no taxes. Has the world ever seen a parliament of purer proletarian composition?

    What tramspired was a specifica avoiding of a challenge to the white supremacist contract on which bourgeois hegemony rests.

    Thus the unions, both in their economic functions and in their political activity, have at best striven to redress some of the most glaring "excesses" of white racism, while leaving intact the fundamental compact on which white racism rests, namely the black, brown, yellow and red interests shall be served only after the needs of the white workingmen have been fulfilled. An additional point: in no other developed country is there such widespread cynicism toward the electoral process as in the U.S. It is taken for granted among all sectors of the working class and the entire population that all politicians steal and take bribes, that political parties are motivated purely by vulgar self interest

    STRATEGY
    The position of the working class under capitalism gives rise to two patterns of behavior, each with its characteristic consciousness. On one side are the efforts of the workers to improve their conditions of life while accepting the framework of the wage labor relation. This pattern, which manifest in ordinary trade union struggles, constitutes the basis for reformism. White supremacy, representing as it does the effort of a portion of the working class to strike a separate bargain with capital, forms part of this pattern. Alongside of the above sort of activity, workers are also compelled to resist their condition as wage labor and assert themselves as producers. Such resistance takes the form of direct action, tends in the direction of proletarian solidarity and challenges the institutional framework that ties the workers to capital.
    These two patterns of behavior are not imported into the working class by reformists or revolutionaries, as the case may be, but arise spontaneously out of the conditions of working class life.
    The revolutionary potential of the working class lies in its location in the production process, which compels it to act in ways that undermine the capital relation. Ordinarily, this aspect of working class behavior is subordinated to the dominant reformist aspect; even when it arises spontaneously it is accompanied by reformist consciousness.
    The task of proletarian revolutionaries is to seek out and discover those aspects of proletarian activity which foreshadow the future society, which manifest the tendency of the proletarians to constitute themselves as a ruling class, to link these sporadic activities into a coherent social bloc that exists and struggles under capitalism without accepting the permanency of capitalism, and to transform the consciousness of the participants through the criticism of bourgeois ideas as they exist within the working class.

    A revolutionary strategy is, in short, a strategy of dual power. It is the treating of revolution as an act for today, as a part of the continuous struggle, instead of a dream to be indefinitely postponed in the interest of "realism".
    From what we have said so far it should be evident that we regard the struggle against white supremacy as the most advanced outpost of the new society and the key ingredient in a revolutionary strategy. The waging of that struggle among whites is the main distinctive task of STO, as befits its character as an organization made up of white people.

    And now, Obama, Hillary are facing the working class Irish (c
    Catholic and equally secular ) Americans. In PA, In N Carolina & in the main campaign, elsewhere.

    Interesting.

    1600 AD has come a long way.

  10. Todd says:
    May 4, 2008 at 10:36 pm

    Did you type that yourself, Charles? How long did that take? Yes, there were more than a few early attempts at rebellion. Bacon's Rebellion and the Whiskey Rebellion are two of the major
    examples.

    I agree that race has been a major issue all along, but not in the way that many wish to portray it. Anyone who is at all familiar with Booker T. Washington's dealings with Theodore Roosevelt should suspect that the Civil War wasn't fought for egalitarian reasons. European immigration was seen as a necessity as the nation industrialized, because blacks were viewed as being incapable of providing a skilled workforce-without having given them the chance to participate on a large scale.

    I'm not sure how Hillary, Obama or McCain will change the view of the past or make the present or future better. The nation is too divided, and there is no way to make everyone happy. That boat passed long ago with the introduction of ideas such as multiculturalism and massive non-Western immigration from all corners of the globe, with each new immigrant encouraged to ride the guilt train. Our problems aren't going away. I suspect that they are going to get worse.

    I just don't understand why anyone believes that Obama offers anything new. We've already tried programs, partiality and guilt.

  11. Todd says:
    May 4, 2008 at 10:40 pm

    "The USA never passed through a feudal stage of development."

    Alger Hiss seemed to think that feudalism was alive and well in rural Georgia during the 30s. He even tried to institute a forced land redistribution scheme. That alone should have been enough to brand him a communist sympathizer. :)

Leave a Reply