Month: April 2008

THE U.S. TORTURE PROGRAM

April 24, 2008: J. Rosencrantz

As if we didn’t know already, but now it is official: The President of the United States condoned the use of torture, and his top advisors discussed in detail and approved what they call “enhanced interrogation techniques”.


Remember when they tried to blame it on “a few bad apples”?

Jan Crawford Greenburg broke this story on ABC. You can see it here.

Kieth Olberman discusses the story and its legal implications with Jonathan Turley here.

People’s reporter Helen Thomas confronts White House Spokesliar about torture here.

Brave New Films put out a nice little piece mixing ABC story with the various false testimonies of Dr. Rice:

And here is F.B.I Director Robert Mueller testifying about his lackluster response to the Administration’s use of torture. Rep. Robert Wexler does a nice job pushing the question — why didn’t the F.B.I. do more to stop the C.I.A. or the D.O.D from using torture?

Republican Nominee and U.S. Senator John McCain was tortured when he was a prisoner of the North Vietnamese, and has long spoken out against torture. But now that he is running for president McCain voted AGAINST an anti-torture bill.

The Colombian artist Fernando Botero has produced a series of paintings inspired by spoken testimonies of the torture at Abu Ghraib. Here are a couple of samples of his work:

Botero_Abu_Ghraib

Standard Operating Procedure a film about the U.S. Torture Program by the great documentarian Errol Morris, opens in L.A. on May 2.

And the ACLU is pushing for accountability for the U.S. Torture Program. You can send a letter to your representatives here.

CLINTON, EMPIRE AND CORPORATE HEGEMONY

April 14, 2008: J. Rosencrantz

The last couple of posts included critical notes of McCain and Obama, so as the Pennsylvania Democratic Primary approaches it is only fair that this third post should focus on Hillary Clinton’s record.

Two features of her record should not be forgotten:

1. Hillary Clinton Voted for the War

On October 2, 2002, Hillary Clinton voted to give George W. Bush authorization to use military force against Iraq. She voted to give authority for a war of aggression, which according to the post-World War II Nuremberg Tribunal is “the supreme international crime”:

“[it is] essentially an evil thing… to initiate a war of aggression… is not only an international crime; it is the supreme international crime,differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.”

This means that insofar as Clinton is complicit in the war of aggression against Iraq,she is also complicit in the theft, rape, torture and mass murder that followed as a consequence of the invasion.

The number of war dead are is now in the neighborhood of a million people:

Iraq Body Count web counterJust Foreign Policy Iraqi Death Estimator

She claims to have been duped into voting for the war by the Bush Administration lies about the threat of Iraq, although 23 other senators voted against it. Here is her parroting Bush Administration talking points in her speech on the day of the Iraq Resolution Vote:

Here is one video maker‘s aesthetic response:

2. Clinton was on the Board of Directors of Wal-Mart for Six Years.

Clinton was on Wal-Mart’s Board of Directors from 1986-1992. She joined the Board as a lawyer for Rose Law Firm, which had represented Wal-Mart in several cases.

To be fair, it must be kept in mind that Clinton was breaking gender barriers, as the above photo makes clear.And according to a New York Times article from last year, she did try to change some of Wal-Mart’s environmental and gender policies for the better, but remained silent about the company’s rabid anti-unionism.

Anyway, here is a story about it from ABC news:

And here she is being praised by Sam Walton at a Wal-Mart event in 1991.

RACE AND EMPIRE

April 8, 2008: J. Rosencrantz

A. Obama, Race and Empire


Racism of course is a world wide problem, and in the United States it takes its particular forms. The black / white dichotomy as it exists now in the U.S. is a result of a history which includes centuries of chattel slavery, which by the 1700s was legally racialized to apply primarily of people of African descent.

A “white” person’s ownership of a “black” person was made illegal only 143 years ago, and since then “black” people in the U.S. have had to struggle, in W.E.B. Du Bois’ phrase, “up from slavery”. As a result, in part, of this struggle for civil rights, which began to blossom only in the last half century, there is now a “black” man who is in a position to be elected to the highest office of this historically racist country.

The corporate media at first had to struggle with a way to categorize Obama, whose mother is “white” and father is “black” — Is he black enough? Is he too black?

And then videotape surfaced of Obama’s Pastor Jerimiah Wright saying “God Damn America” during a sermon.

The quote was taken out of context and sensationalized, thus scaring and confusing certain groups of “white” people. But in context it is difficult to understand what is upsetting about what he said. You can see Wright’s outburst in context here.

In context, there is very little Pastor Wright says that is objectionable – other than his superstitions about “God”, perhaps. If one believed in a benevolent God, then it would be reasonable to expect God to disapprove of America’s history of racism and imperial violence — a history that continues to this day despite Obama’s successes.

Nevertheless, Obama felt forced to defend his relationship with Wright. If you haven’t listened to the entirety of this historical speech, here it is:

There are some impressive rhetorical moves here. Obama presents racial division as a remaining challenge toward “a more perfect union”. He clearly distinguishes between evaluating Wright’s offending sermon on the one hand and evaluating Wright the man on the other. He casts himself as a member of a younger generation that does not suffer from the distorting bitterness of Wright’s generation. In addition, he recognizes “white” resentment against flawed racial policies.

The speech is historic because a politician so close to the white house speaks intelligently about race in America.

However, in “condemning in unequivocal terms” the “incendiary language” of his former Pastor, Obama bows to the Israel lobby and glosses over the brutality of Israel’s occupation of Palestine. Thus Obama condones imperial violence and promotes his own kind of racism — one in which “radical islamists” are the new “black”. Consider this:

“… the remarks that have caused this recent firestorm weren’t simply controversial… they expressed a profoundly distorted view of this country – a view that sees white racism as endemic, and that elevates what is wrong with America above all that we know is right with America; a view that sees the conflicts in the Middle East as rooted primarily in the actions of stalwart allies like Israel, instead of emanating from the perverse and hateful ideologies of radical Islam.”

Which is a more distorted view? That white racism is endemic or that it is not?

In a time of two ongoing military occupations, isn’t it irresponsible to elevate what is right with America over what is wrong with America?

And is it true or false “that the conflicts in the Middle East” are rooted primarily in the actions of stalwart allies in the imperial project?

In any case, despite Obama’s questionable position on war and empire, and despite the continuity of racism in the U.S., one should be celebrating Obama’s historical candidacy, right?

Or is it just a ruse?

B. OBAMA and DMX

Rapper and actor DMX offers some much needed perspective on Obama’s candidacy in an interview he did with XXL magazine in March:

XXL: Are you following the presidential race?

DMX: Not at all.

XXL: You’re not? You know there’s a Black guy running, Barack Obama and then there’s Hillary Clinton.

DMX: His name is Barack?!

XXL: Barack Obama, yeah.

DMX: Barack?!

XXL: Barack.

DMX: What the fuck is a Barack?! Barack Obama. Where he from, Africa?

XXL: Yeah, his dad is from Kenya.

DMX: Barack Obama?

XXL: Yeah.

DMX: What the fuck?! That ain’t no fuckin’ name, yo. That ain’t that nigga’s name. You can’t be serious. Barack Obama. Get the fuck outta here.

XXL: You’re telling me you haven’t heard about him before.

DMX: I ain’t really paying much attention.

XXL: I mean, it’s pretty big if a Black…

DMX: Wow, Barack! The nigga’s name is Barack. Barack? Nigga named Barack Obama. What the fuck, man?! Is he serious? That ain’t his fuckin’ name. Ima tell this nigga when I see him, Stop that bullshit. Stop that bullshit… [laughs] That ain’t your fuckin’ name… Your momma ain’t name you no damn Barack.

XXL: So you’re not following the race. You can’t vote right?

DMX: Nope.

XXL: Is that why you’re not following it?

DMX: No, because it’s just… it doesn’t matter. They’re gonna do what they’re gonna do. It doesn’t really make a difference. These are the last years.

XXL: But it would be pretty big if we had a first Black president. That would be huge.

DMX: I mean, I guess… What, they gon’ give a dog a bone? There you go. Ooh, we have a Black president now. They should’ve done that shit a long time ago, we wouldn’t be in the fuckin’ position we in now. With world war coming up right now. They done fucked this shit up then give it to the Black people, “Here you take it. Take my mess…”

XXL: Right, exactly.

DMX: It’s all a fuckin’ setup. It’s all a setup. All fuckin’ bullshit. All bullshit. I don’t give a fuck about none of that.

XXL: We could have a female president also, Hillary Clinton.

DMX: I mean, either way it doesn’t matter. I don’t care. No one person is directly affected by which president, you know, so what does it matter.

XXL: Yeah, but the country is…

DMX: I guess. The president is a puppet anyway. The president don’t make no damn decisions.

XXL: The president… they don’t have that much authority basically?

DMX: Nah, never.

XXL: But Bush pretty much…

DMX: You think Bush is making fuckin’ decisions?

XXL: He did, yeah, he fucked up the country.

DMX: He act like he making decisions. He could barely speak! He could barely fuckin’ speak! Can’t be serious. He ain’t making no damn decisions.

XXL: Well Barack has a good chance of winning so that might be something.

DMX: Good for him, good for him.

C. As for contemporary visual artists, few are fucking with categories of “white” and “black” as much as Kara Walker, whose work is now on display at the Hammer Museum in Westwood until June 8, 2008:

DARK ANNIVERSARIES

April 4, 2008: J. Rosencrantz

Welcome to The World’s Got Problems. This space will serve as a catalog of the world’s problems, and also to creative aesthetic responses to those problems.

For now, each post will cover a world problem, categorized under a general name. Since today is the40th anniversary of MLK’s assassination, we’ll start with the main targets of his career: imperialism and racism. Future posts might be about elections mechanics, environmental degradation, sexism,consumerism, and so on. Let’s begin.

Race, Class and Empire

MLK giving the Beyond Vietnam speech 41 years ago today, and his assassination 40 years ago today.

41years ago today at Riverside Church in New York City, Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his ‘Beyond Vietnam’ speech. This speech turned the establishment media against him and exactly one year later – 40 years ago today – he was assassinated.

Today’s republican candidate for president voted against making Martin Luther King Day a national holiday when he was a 47 year old senator in 1987.

McCain went to the site of MLK’s assassination today to apologize for his opposition to the MLK Day Holiday Act. You can see the crowd mildly heckle him here.

Representative John Conyers, who originally authored Act, responds to the news of McCain’s campaign apology here. Perhaps McCain has learned not to oppose the MLK holiday. But the imperialist McCain, who finds the idea of a century long military occupation of Iraq unobjectionable, has clearly not digested King’s anti-imperialist message. (Nor, it seems, has either of the Democratic candidates.Clinton voted to authorize the invasion of Iraq, and both Clinton and Obama have consistently voted to fund the occupation. Consider this essay on Obama’s record.)

In honor of Martin Luther King Jr. on the anniversary of both his anti-imperialist speech and his assassination, here is a brief review of the 6 main reasons King gave for opposing the Vietnam war, followedby quotes from the speech. Judge for yourself how many of these reasons can apply to the occupations of Iraq or Afghanistan.

1. The war dismantles poverty programs.

“[Before the war, it] seemed as if there was a real promise of hope for the poor– both black and white — through the poverty program. There were experiments, hopes, new beginnings. Then came the buildup in Vietnam and I watched the program broken and eviscerated as if it were someidle political plaything of a society gone mad on war, and I knew that America would never invest the necessary funds or energies in rehabilitation of its poor so long as adventures like Vietnam continued to draw men and skills and money like some demonic destructive suction tube. So I was increasingly compelled to see the war as an enemy of the poor and to attack it as such.”

2. Disproportionately high numbers of the dispossessed were used to fight a war that was not in their own interest:

“We were taking the black young men who had been crippled by our society and sending them eight thousand miles away to guarantee liberties in Southeast Asia which they had not found in southwest Georgia and East Harlem. So we have been repeatedly faced with the cruel irony of watching Negro and white boys on TV screens as they kill and die together for a nation that has been unable to seat them together in the same schools. So we watch them in brutal solidarity burning the huts of a poor village, but we realize that they would never live on the same block in Detroit.”

3. As an advocate of nonviolence, King could not be silent about the violence perpetrated by his own country.

“I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today — my own government.For the sake of those boys, for the sake of this government, for the sake of hundreds of thousands trembling under our violence, I cannot be silent.”

4. Civil Rights = Anti-imperialism.

When people criticized him for jeopardizing the Civil Rights movement by speaking on Vietnam, he responded that Civil Rights should not only apply to black people in the United States, but to everyone in the world. So opposing the violence in Vietnam is part of the larger civil rights movement.

5. His own responsibility as a Nobel Prize winner:

King won the Nobel Prize in 1964: “And I cannot forget that the Nobel Prize for Peace was also a commission — a commission to work harder than I had ever worked before for “the brotherhood of man.”

6. He felt bound by his own a commitment to “the ministry of Jesus Christ”:

“Tome the relationship of this ministry to the making of peace is so obvious that I sometimes marvel at those who ask me why I am speaking against the war. Could it be that they do not know that the good news was meant for all men — for Communist and capitalist, for their children and ours, for black and for white, for revolutionary and conservative? Have they forgotten that my ministry is in obedience to the one who loved his enemies so fully that he died for them? What then can I say to the “Vietcong” or to Castro or to Mao as a faithful minister of this one? Can I threaten them with death or must I not share with them my life?”

Hear the whole “Beyond Vietnam” speech here.