I’m in support of fair elections in Iran. That’s pretty easy to say, I know.

But I’m not particularly for Mousavi or Ahmadinejad.  And I’m slow to believe anonymous articles coming out of Iran claiming the election to be fraudulent. My reasoning here i s that there are lots of international interests in Ahmadinejad being removed from power and anonymous internet traffic denouncing the election results fits right in with what one would expect from US intelligence.

All that said, Ahmadinejad is an authoritarian who isn’t in support of things the majority of Iranians want. Such as the right to vote for the Supreme Leader instead of the holder of that post being dictated to the population. Mousavi doesn’t support this either however.

Another thing that bothers me is the lack of recognition in the Western press of the internal dynamics of Iran. This election is being written about as the people vs the government. This is how US politics is often written about as well and that version of events is often a smokescreen for ruling class fights.

• What are the dynamics of the Iranian ruling class?
• What are their interests in this election?

The NYTimes hasn’t made those questions a central point in their analysis and that is worrisome. Instead they have written more about the use of Twitter by wealthy Iranian college students. This kind of perspective skewing yellow journalism raises flags for me.

And finally, I have read that polls indicate only a third of Iranians have internet access. I would assume that this is the upper class layers of the population. It is known that Ahmadinejad has done significant wealth redistribution. This is never popular in countries with significant class divides. Therefore, to see lots of anti-Ahmadinejad information coming out of Iran on the net is predictable and because of the digital divide that exists there, not a good litmus for judging what is actually happening on the ground. Unfortunately, most folks outside Iran depend on the net for information on the situation. And in this case, as in many cases, the net opinions will have a very high class bias and the class realities of this political situation must be honestly taken into account and not simply dismissed as most seem to be doing. Here in the US, liberal political discussion is dominated by the middle and upper-middle class that has easy and frequent internet access. Those liberals are far more conservative than those with less wealth and less access to the discussion. If you were to only watch the US political discussion by way of the internet you would have a very biased and inaccurate view of the political situation here. You would likely not understand the political views of Black, Latin or poor Americans generally because of the way the digital divide acts as an economic censor to so many millions of political voices. As a Black person in the US I understand this dynamic quite intimately and am very wary of the political narrative we are being fed in regards to Iran. I don’t feel that the net saavy student movement in Iran represents the masses of poor people at all. Because it is reported that they are young and using Twitter, the story appeals to naive whites here who like to fetishize nonwhite people who accept the use of technology similar to white populations in the US but it really doesn’t make sense that these Iranians would be the group representative of the popular base in Iran. They are largely college students and business elements with far more resources than it appears most of the population. My point in all of this is that we need to be far more discriminating and discerning about information coming out of Iran and use our common sense (which apparently is all too uncommon in the West).

Rob Kall over at opednews.com has a theory that it’s not only Hannity, Savage, Beck and Limbaugh-the right wing-but the left as well, that is fueling the right wing killing spree. He theorizes that it is the sharp media characterizations of the ‘other side’ that are inflaming millions of Americans, many of them mentally ill, who have the potential to kill. Any serious political formation first and foremost should be willing to criticize itself. So hat tip to Rob Kall for engaging in any kind of self criticism. Unfortunately his audience is correct but he aims at the wrong thing.

Any one paying attention has long understood the right wing’s role in fear/hatemongering. Limbaugh, Hannity, Beck, O’Reilly, Boortz and many others have had listenerships in the collective tens of millions for many years now. So when white, right wingers get their guns and kill perhaps you can place blame at the doorstep of the right wing media that foments fear and hate every night. The interesting aspect Kall brings is the blaming of the left wing of US politics in this dynamic.

Every day the right wing bends the ear of millions of mainstream US citizens to its message. If there is one mainstream left (NOT LIBERAL) commentary outlet that reaches even a 100,000 listeners I haven’t heard of it. So to compare the actions of the left to those of right wing commentary doesn’t add up.

Rob Kall starts off his piece saying that it may piss off some of his white liberal/left readership. And I’m sure he’s right. Some will be upset to hear that their daily pasttime of heading over to DailyKos, Democratic Underground or his site, OpedNews to rip Sean Hannity a new one isn’t necessarily the most helpful thing for them to be doing. But there is another more important critique that I thought Kall was going to make that he didn’t touch that would is more appropriate and would surely upset the opednews.com faithful. When I read the link to Kall’s piece, ‘Wingnut Murder Spree or Are WE The Problem’, the ‘WE’ in his title fooled me into thinking he was going to address the much more salient issue of left and liberal whites complicity in the racial hatred expressed more overtly by the right wing. The left preaches tolerance and diversity but more often than not lives racial segregation and division. Unlike their right wing counterparts, left and liberal whites are more willing to live in relative proximity to non-whites. Sociologists call this gentrification. But this tolerance doesn’t translate into significant interracial living. Black cashiers at Publix, Target and Trader Joes doesn’t count. Left and left-leaning whites disagree SHARPLY with the rhetoric of the right wing. To be clear on this, liberal, progressive and left whites disagree very strongly with the right wing when it comes to hate speech, theories and violent rhetoric aimed at nonwhites. However, the theoretical and rhetorical disagreements are lost in the translation into real life. Consequently, as a good example, the bright line of right wing hate, interracial co-mingling, marriage, sex and children seems to be shared by many white liberals and leftists. It is in this way that I think the white left, the WE Rob Kall refers to, actually does bear some responsibility. Attorney General Eric Holder kicked this message in his Black History to the Department of Justice where he called [white] America a ‘nation of cowards’ when it comes to dealing with white racism. He wasn’t just talking to the right wing. In fact, he logically had to be talking more to the white liberals and leftists than white conservatives.

Conservatives in 2009 are still a long ways away from being able to deal with the historical reality of the United States of America, no less actually engage in productive white anti-racism work and living. The liberal and left white population therefore is who he and others with Holder’s critique refer to. And therefore when the racial cauldron boils over some and racial murder is the result it is white liberals and leftists that must bear a portion of the blame for the antiracism work and living they agree needs to happen but that they continue to decline to actually do. I wish Rob Kall would talk about this. But he never does.

None of the white left talks seriously about this issue. They feed themselves, and us nonwhite folk on the left, the same regurged tracts about diversity and tolerance and multiculturalism and good intentions etc. But those same liberal and left intellectuals lead lives that are almost as segregated and racially isolated as many of their right wing counterparts they excoriate on paper, in books, and  on blogs and websites. Rob Kall and others essentially talk to themselves about the racial situation and to each other, the logic of morally upright racial rhetoric, divorced from the actions of their daily liberal lives, adds up.

To the rest of us, its just blather. Dangerous blather.

Left-wing Paraguayan president Fernando Lugo has fathered a child outside of marriage. OPn May 10th, Mother’s Day in the United States, this is a front page story according the newspaper of record. Some folk will say this is stupid of them to even report on it. Some will say Lugo is turd or is corrupt for having done this. But we all know the New York Times and the ruling class it represents doesn’t really care about this kind of thing. They do it all the time. It’s political. Just like the Spitzer story that happened right before the biggest political-financial scandal exploded in the state they removed him from, this Lugo story is political. So what is being planned? Chavez style political coup de etat? Hopefully Paraguay will be supported by Brazil, Venezuela and its other allies through what may be coming.

Here’s the pic from the front page story of the Times

It is most important to note that during this news interview the Bloomberg news anchor doesn’t challenge any of the facts presented. Only the analysts perspective. Sorta like what the Obamamaniacs respond with when he is criticized.

“Don’t be so cynical!”

Analysts Kirby Daley makes Bloomberg News unhappy by explaining why they and every analyst they have brought on has been lying through their teeth. A careful watching of the video reveals just how fundamentally corrupt the financial system and its paid guns, the corporate news anchors and analysts are. Daley is no leftist. He is advising his clients to get in and make a little quick money during what he calls this ‘manufactured’ market rise but then to GET OUT because it is not at all real.

The Bloomberg analysts, Bernard “Bernie” Lo tries to remain composed but is visibly uncomfortable with Daley’s presentation.

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

For such an explosive video, it is is not widely posted.

With the pending retirement of US Supreme Court Associate Justice David Souter, a predictable media mini-circus (swine flu is the current circus) is opening up over it. Names are floated alongsides particular interests or so-called identity groups that would benefit or ‘like to see’ a certain candidate nominated. Care seems to be being taken to ensure it reads like every other very typical political script. A Latina is by definition progressive and will ’satisfy’ Latin people, feminists and racial progressives generally. Specifically, Sonia Sotomayor is the Latina being suggested  as a likely Obama nominee. I will assume that since her name is appearing in major media that the Obama administration has suggested she is a frontrunner (it might be true or they might be trying to appear progressive according to the script).

Ethnic media outlet New America Media (NAM) is pushing the idea positively apparently for the simple reason that Sotomayor is of Puerto Rican descent, something we all should find highly dubious ever since that poor Black kid from Pin Point, Georgia arrived on the court almost 20 years ago and has voted with the right wing ever since. NAM supports the nomination writing that

Naming a Hispanic would soothe frayed nerves among Latino leaders

and approvingly of Sotomayor,

She is not an ideologue but has a pragmatic streak

I don’t think the NAM perspective is an isolated one. That pragmatism can be divorced from ideology is a curious notion. A pragmatic or practical way of looking at things within a highly ideological and extreme political context means that you aren’t interested in rocking the boat but going along to get along. I try to imagine a pragmatist in Stalin’s Russia, Hitler’s Germany or Benito Mussolini’s Italy. What does pragmatism mean in a country that leads the largest global wealth divide in human history? What does pragmatism look like in a country waging two imperialist hot wars and dozens of cold and covert wars? What is pragmatism in a country where children hide in the woods while their mothers and fathers are kidnapped off their jobs and ‘detained’? How to be pragmatic in a judicial system that imprisons five times as many Black men proportionally than did South Africa under apartheid? What does pragmatism look like on a court that last year ruled that it was okay for evidence obtained from an illegal arrest to be used against me? What is this non-ideological pragmatism? And is it what people of color need today? No less, should we consider it a victory if that is what we end up with on the Supreme Court? I can hardly think so. If Sotomayor or any pragmatic person of color ends up on the US Supreme Court, should Brown, Black, Red, and Yellow people celebrate?

Obama and the forces he represents (and those that still find themselves supporting him and those forces) would like to frame ideology as something to be avoided, as an obstacle to getting things done in Washington. In reality, extreme neoliberal ideology is behind everything that happens in DC and throughout most of this country. All the while claiming to be everything but ideological.

A Brown/Black/Red/Yellow, non-ideologue is the perfect tool of confusion for Obama and the billionaires whose interests he represents. Obama, of course is a perfect example of this kind of tool. As he gives millionaires and billionaires billions and trillions of dollars he is simultaneously juxtaposed next to Martin Luther King and Malcolm X on t-shirts. If that’s not confusion, nothing is.

To be clear, Sonia Sotomayor isn’t personally the problem. It’s just that under imperialism, to rise as high as she or Obama or anyone like them, you have to be pragmatic. You have to go along with the empire to get along with the empire. You have to be pragmatic.

We don’t need an appointee from Obama. We need a movement opposing the policies of Obama who watches while autoworkers get kicked out of their jobs and unto the streets of Detroit but trips over himself rushing to back trillions of dollars in loans to white guys that are already rich. We need a movement of revolutionary reality supplanting the hypnotic support of Barack Obama. We need it yesterday.

So no to Sotomayor, no to all appointees from the rich who make our lives miserable to begin with. They are the ones killing us, don’t count on them saving us.

ATAC, Atlantans Together Against Crime is as founder Kyle Keyser says, ‘becoming a force to be reckoned with’. The group is holding rallys according to WSBtv, in neighborhoods around Atlanta to protest violent crime in the city. The group is receiving fabulous press. I have not yet read or heard a negative word (or negative framing) about them from big tv or print media. This is odd considering the press tends to disparage or at least present in a disparaging frame grassroots, people-oriented action unless it is conservative (the tea parties). I will be going to the next ATAC rally to see for myself what is going on and by whom.

On Yahoo.com’s front page. No-the main story on Yahoo’s front page at the moment of this posting (8:22 am est April 16, 09) is about Barack Obama’s tax return and how much the rage it is on the web. White supremacy is, by the second now, going more and more mainstream.

I hadn’t posted on this blog for a while because there were other things going on, like getting laid off from the job and the supposedly eminent halt of public transit service here in Atlanta. There’s always lots going on politically if you care to get involved with something in Atlanta. With so much dirt being done and such a proportionally tiny response, there is always something for a troublemaker to get her/his hands into if so inclined. Recently the opposite has been happening.

Yesterday a crowd larger than any antiwar protest that has ever assembled on the streets of Atlanta, parked on the steps of the state capitol and surrounding streets to express its collective fury at the Obama administration’s class warfare on them and its rage at the theft of their tax dollars. It was a white power rally in drag. It was calling itself a tea party.

About ten thousand white folks came downtown to protest the federal deficit, their tax rate, ‘illegal’ humans, an immigrant (and thus illegal) president and out of control government spending. You’d have been hard-pressed to find anyone in this crowd interested in halting Barack Obama’s military budget, bigger than any ever put forward by either President Bush. This, so-called movement, like all white political activity related to the budget, is protest of monies going to non-whites, however those monies might reach non-white destinations. Isn’t odd how there was no tea party ‘movement’ under Bush with his ballooning budgets and deficits. There was the usual white noise whining on the AM dial but nothing materialized. With a Black man in the White House, all bets are off. But back to the tax return.

For years, there was the scandal of then Vice President, Dick Cheney, having been the CEO of one of Halliburton, a company that received billions in contracts after his election. The question arose as to how much was he making from Halliburton stock and other corporations he had ties to before assuming the office of VP.Was there ever a media-fueled effort to stoke public interest in his earnings?

Did mainstream media, the likes of Yahoo! ever link directly to his tax return as they have today with Obama? Of course not.

What will these hordes of whites the media ignores the racial aspect of in calling it a popular movement, do next? More importantly, what are progressive forces going to do?

The age of Obama becomes more interesting (and scary) everyday.

Not that anyone should be surprised by this.  The change we see will be the change we create.   The creation of Obama exists as an attempt to extend the life of American empire.  That said, how the Obama administration, and power generally, operates is worth noting and understanding.

The World Socialist Website reports.

I am ready to die 100 times to bring back my daughters.

I am amazed that Anwar Balousha can even muster the courage to speak those words.  In just a couple of minutes yesterday, Israel killed his five daughters.  The three day death toll of Israel’s seige of Gaza neighborhoods stands officially at 364 this morning according to the WaPo.  I have nothing significant to say and this post is really only to feel like I’m not just standing around doing nothing, which is what I am doing and what I will continue to do.  War is being waged on my brothers and sisters and I sit here behind enemy lines, at a keyboard, in pain.  Impotent.  All I will do is say that it is wrong.  I won’t walk into the Israeli consulate and open fire on those who respresent and protect the killers.  I won’t even throw a rock through the window of their tony offices.  I surely have more power than I pretend to not have.  I could get press when they hauled me away to jail.  The peace movement, surely the only thing more impotent than myself, would denounce me.  I would probably lose a job I’m going to be laid off from anyhow.  But I won’t do anything.

I am afraid.

So I sit here in digital solidarity with so many others around the world protesting rhetorically.  Saying what everyone knows.  Israel is fascist.   Israel is killing our children.  Our voices pale so in comparison to the one who could lend so much assistance to the dying in Gaza.  But on this question, like many others to come for sure, Barack Hussein Obama has failed and continues to fail.  When asked for his take on the situation, his response is swift and ready.  ”There is only one president at a time” comes spinning out of his mouth with the same calculated deliberation as the missile that spun to rest on the home of Anwar Balousha.  In macabre silence, president-elect Barack Obama stands with the killers of Zion as they target and kill police officers, eight university students yesterday.

Because it is so little, because people are dying while I sit here, half dressed, typing I am embarrassed.  If nothing else I can say, I must say, as a citizen of the US south, as a man of African descent, that Barack Obama is a fraud.  Like those before him, he’s a killer.  He is soon to be President of the United States which a  longer than necessary synonmy for fraud and murder, for genocide, for capitalism, for callousness.   Barack Obama is not Black.  He’s an embarrassment to humanity.  Not unlike or more so than those preceding him, but along with them.  Obama is not Black.  He’s disgusting.  Obama isn’t Black.  He’s the President.  The distinction apparently needs to be made.

Of course there are those out there that, while US bombs explode in the faces of  Palestinian college students and grandmothers, we must give him a chance.  It is time for you silly people to grow up.  Obama could save lives without speaking a word.  With an email, with a press release, the killing would end immediately.  But he won’t do this and besides repeating the line of the media, Hamas this or that, he won’t even say why.  If you understand how the world works in this regard, then you know why he won’t say.  If you don’t understand, you’ll say give him a chance or something else to prove your ignorance.  I am not a fool.  I’m a coward.  Or maybe, as my country marches deeper and deeper into fascism, my refusal to put my body and life on the line for Palestinian children may prove foolishness in the end when I, too, end up in a prison like Gaza.  Or maybe worse.  It’ll be too late then, of course.  And I won’t even have wordpress to make me feel better about how little I did to stop the killing of the US and by extension, Israel.

What would I do if I were Anwar Balousha?  I have no real illusions about what a rock through a window of the Atlanta Israeli consulate will accomplish.  I still can’t help but wonder if fear isn’t the foundation of the logic of my inaction.

The public relations nature of everything in the US makes it difficult to discuss much anything with any intelligence.  For everything there is the official line, the perspective of the ruling class,  and then there are the varied perspectives of regular folks.  The same goes for the election that occured on November 4th.  The official line is that change came to the US with the election of the first Black president of the United States.  The official line is, like everything else, bullshit.  Hillary Clinton won the election.

There are several ways in which to understand that last sentence.  I’ll look at a few of them.  Some, are more relevant than others.  I’ll start with the least relevant and work up.

The LA Times performs a cursory examiniation of the president-elect’s administrative selections and with a single page of observations, reflections and quotes reaches a breathtaking conclusion-Obama’s picks, many of them, already worked in the White House for the Clintons.   Is this change, the LA Times asks.  How do you make the wordpress eyeroll emoticon?  Obama’s picks are center and center-right.  Just like the Clintons.  No, not just like the Clintons.  They are the Clintons.  Who won the election?

At the beginning of the 2 year campaign for the presidency, Obama was branded (yes, he’s a brand) as the antiwar candidate.  After he garnered the Democratic nomination he became the war candidate, promising to increase troop levels in Afghanistan and becoming predictably vague about Iraq withdrawal.  In this way, he moved even to the right of Hillary Clinton’s preconvention candidacy but surely right in line with his pimp, Wall Street.  Who won the election?

Finally, the notion that there was any real diffference between any of the candidates deemed serious by the corporations (that means all of the major tv, radio and newspapers of this country) was bullshit that in any other country would have been obvious.  But in the Public Relations States of America, nothing is obvious until a white model holding a microphone blesses it and proclaims it truth.    Barack Obama is a plant.  His candidacy and fake win were engineered by the same people that make the news every night for this country.  Quick thought experiements can help make this more plain.

People are convinced Obama stands in opposition to the interests that have dominated this country since it began.  This is silly.  If he stands in opposition to him then they stand in opposition to him.  If they oppose him, why didn’t they trot out the Jeremiah Wright story/scandal before Obama had any momentum.  Would a no name Black man with the middle name of Hussein have ever gotten traction in a presidential race if the Jeremiah Wright story had hit the headlines a month after he announced his candidacy?  To ask the question is to answer it.   They allowed him to be strong enough to withstand the attacks they had to bring to make the whole thing believable to audiences on the right and the left.  Obama was going to be president but conservative and liberal audiences had to frst be treated with the racial freak show this society is famous for and that its citizens (and non-citizens) have come to expect.  Obama was a made man from the start.

The official line?  Hope.  Change.  Whatever.  It’s all bullshit.  The only serious questio is how long it will be before the offiicial line disintegrates.  It will.  It must.  Malcolm said, America is a prison.   This remains true.  But it is a prison with a public relations budget just as large as the prison budget.  So a situation is created in which very few outside of those actually experiencing the reality of the society understand what the society is.  A country full of Dorothys who can’t see the man  behind the curtain.  Who don’t believe that man or the curtain, are real.  The notion that a curtain even exists or that anyone might be behind it orchestrating anything, is a conspiracy theory.  The domain of fools.

Who won the election?

Believe them?  Or your own eyes?