There will be no daily blogs for about nine days. I shall resume my normal postings by the middle of November.
To our readers and writers
November 5, 2008A new Middle East under Obama?
November 5, 2008| Al Jazeera, Nov 5, 2008 |
||||||||||||
| By Firas Al-Atraqchi | ||||||||||||
Even though Barack Obama has been elected the 44th president of the United States, there are some in the Middle East who believe his policies towards the region will differ little from those of his defeated Republican rival, John McCain. Al Jazeera asked a number of people in Egypt, the Arab world’s most populous country, whether Obama would bring change to the US presidency.
“In terms of actual policy, I do not think there is much difference at all when it comes to Obama or McCain’s Middle Eastern viewpoints.They have both committed themselves publicly and explicitly to the Zionist cause, with Obama promising Aipac an ‘undivided Israeli Jerusalem’ as a goal. More so, they have both said that ‘nothing is off the table’ when dealing with Iran, which implicitly means they both consider a military attack on Iran a strategic option. That Obama has implied he would not want to use nuclear weapons is a small consolation when we consider the devastation wrought on Iraq by ‘conventional’ warfare. Obama has also made it quite clear that he is a subscriber to the whole ‘war on terror’ notion – which to the rest of the world simply means he will continue the march of Empire Amerika. Unfortunately, there is a geist of optimistic negative-racism that chooses to see Obama as an actual opportunity for change – when in fact he offers absolutely nothing new save for his skin colour and relative eloquence. Obama reminds me far too much of Clinton. Clinton, quite literally, got away with murder simply because the world found him charismatic and charming. Clinton helped destroy Iraq with sanctions and was an accomplice to the murder of over 500,000 Iraqi children and yet most people in the Middle East still like the murderer, still believe that, somehow, he was a good man. That is my fear with Obama, that he will pacify the world as he rapes it. At least with McCain, like Bush, the world would have been acutely aware of its rape.”
“There is an apathy among Egyptians regarding the US election because many say it makes no difference who wins. The US will always pursue the same policies in the region. Even with a Democratic win in the White house, it is American – and almost by default Israeli – interests which will always come first. The fulcrum of American policy in the region is support for Israel above all else, and both parties unequivocally adhere to that. Additionally, as opposed to Great Britain where the divide between left and right has become less pronounced in recent years, the American political spectrum has always been more centrist. One position both candidates straddled quite comfortably is their staunch support for Israel. Obama’s promise to the American Israeli Public Affairs Committee (Aipac) that Jerusalem will remain the “undivided” capital of Israel does not bode well for the future of the peace process which is currently proposing East Jerusalem as the capital of a future Palestinian state. Nevertheless, Jewish and pro-Israel groups remain sceptical about Obama and feel he is merely paying lip service to secure the election, so again it is difficult to surmise exactly how it will pan out.”
“Unfortunately, I do not believe that Obama will have significantly different foreign and financial policies. I considered the one person who could have brought about real change in the Middle East, to be Ralph Nader. Nader dissected the real problem with America’s financial policies – that being the unfettered control of the transnational corporations and their lack of respect for human rights and environmental rights at home and globally. Unfortunately, every time Nader tries to enter the presidential race he is called a spoiler for the Democrats. This just goes to shows me, and I believe others around the world and in the Middle East, that the Democrats and Republicans are one and the same. Perhaps Hillary Clinton was the lesser of the two evils than Obama who has changed his mind multiple times on issues such as Iraqi troop withdrawal. Both parties will always be loyal first and foremost to Israel as a necessary ingredient to US foreign policy and according to most Middle Easterners it has always meant one thing: there will be no progress on Israeli-Palestinian peace. There has yet to be a Democratic or Republican party in the US which has demonstrated a real significant move on a two-state solution. I do not think things will change now.”
“There is also … a belief that the foreign policies of both candidates do not really vary much.The debates did not highlight key differences that will help regional problems in the Arab World, Afghanistan, Sudan, Lebanon, Iraq and Palestine. My impression from talking to Egyptians who are well-read in international affairs and business is that they perceive McCain to be hawkish (more so than Obama) and that his policies would have been less-suitable for Arab interests. Obama appears to be better for our region, but the key word here is appears. The Middle East would look different under Obama but it will be difficult to judge because the rhetoric during the campaign does not necessarily translate into decisions or policies once the candidate reaches the White House. Once candidates are confronted with certain realities in the White House or realities that emerge later on, they may have to adapt their policies. The international arena is very dynamic, things change very quickly. It is difficult to accurately predict US foreign policy.”
“Israel won’t be that happy that Obama won because they might not trust that he would fully back them, even though he has said before that he would fully support them. As for the Middle East, not much would change with Obama in office. The situation in the region might stay the same or get a bit better or put on hold till the following elections. The American people are the only ones to benefit if Obama wins. Now Obama being the first black president in America is a history-making event; if he stays in office the full term, that is good. But if he gets assassinated or something like that, then it will be a tragedy.”
“An Obama win doesn’t mean so much to me because whoever comes to power will never dare to change certain basics in the US foreign policy and assuming there will be any, those will be slight changes that would never reverse the situation in the Middle East. I do not think Egypt and the Middle East will look any different; there is a fear that things will move from bad to worse. The financial crisis has peaked and the wealth of the Middle East is the only way out for the US. Egyptians see the US as working for its own interests and is a big supporter of Israel. For them the US is a big power that will never ever work for their interest, so it doesn’t matter if Obama or McCain is in power.” |
Silence on War Crimes
November 5, 2008Andy Worthington |’fff.org’ November 3, 2008
Last week, Bill Kovach, former Washington Bureau Chief of the New York Times and the founding chairman of the Committee of Concerned Journalists, blasted the U.S. media for its failure to ask tough questions of both presidential candidates regarding their opinions of the Bush administration’s unprecedented adherence to the controversial “unitary executive theory” of government.
The theory, which became prominent in the Reagan administration, but has peppered U.S. history, contends that, when he wishes, the president is entitled to act unilaterally, without interference from Congress or the judiciary. This is in direct contravention of the separation of powers on which the United States was founded, and critics have long contended that it is nothing less than an attempt by the executive to seize the dictatorial powers that the Constitution was designed to prevent.
Under the cover of the wartime powers granted in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, and with encouragement from lawyers including, in particular, Vice President Dick Cheney’s chief of staff (and former legal counsel) David Addington, President Bush has pursued the theory relentlessly, issuing a record number of “signing statements” to laws passed by Congress, designed to prevent the nation’s politicians from interfering in the executive’s quest for unchecked power.
He has also approved a number of secret memos, which, in conjunction with various “signing statements,” have authorized what numerous critics of the administration regard as war crimes. These include detaining prisoners seized in the “war on terror” as “illegal enemy combatants” and holding them without charge or trial, dismissing the protections of the Geneva Conventions, redefining torture and approving its use by the U.S. military and the CIA, and authorizing “extraordinary rendition” and the use of secret prisons.
As if to prove what he was saying, Bill Kovach’s speech to a meeting of international journalists in Washington, D.C., went unreported in the U.S. media (and I located it only on the website of a Jamaican newspaper). And yet in many ways Kovach could have gone further, and could also have asked why the presidential candidates themselves have been silent about the current administration’s crimes.
The answer, sadly, is that the executive’s thirst for unfettered executive power is not a priority for voters, even when it spills out of foreign wars and offshore prisons and onto the U.S. mainland. Too many Americans, it seems, are unconcerned or unaware that the president can even hold U.S. citizens and legal residents as “enemy combatants” and can imprison them indefinitely on the U.S. mainland without charge or trial, as the cases of Jose Padilla and Ali al-Marri reveal in horrific detail.
MEDIA-US: Massive Iraqi Death Toll Ignored by Tabloid Culture
November 5, 2008By Marie-Helene Rousseau | Inter Press Service
NEW YORK, Nov 4 (IPS) – The year is 1994. Pictures of Michael Jackson and Lisa Marie Presley cover the pages of prominent U.S. newspapers and magazines. Yet hidden from national view is the attempted elimination of the Tutsi ethnic group in Rwanda.
When news of pop stars and their marriages and divorces takes precedence over stories about the Iraq War or privacy concerns in an age of increasing security measures, U.S. citizens are faced, as described by the director of Project Censored, “with a truth emergency”.
To address this emergency, Project Censored, a non-profit media project within the Sonoma State University Foundation, each year compiles 25 stories which they say have been neglected by the mainstream media. Since 1976, when Carl Jensen founded the research facility, these stories have comprised a yearbook of controversial stories that have gone largely unread and underreported.
The organisation, now headed by Peter Phillips, a professor of sociology at Sonoma State University, works with students and faculty of SSU to review and select which of the 700-1,000 annually submitted stories make the final cut. A panel of judges that includes noted writers Noam Chomsky and Susan Faludi then ranks the 25 stories in order of importance.
How do they determine what constitutes “censorship”? An explanation on ProjectCensored.org states, “We define Modern Censorship as the subtle yet constant and sophisticated manipulation of reality in our mass media outlets.”
The organisation outlines a set of criteria by which individuals can determine if a story is suitable for the “censored” list. The first of these criteria reads, “A Censored news story is one which contains information that the general United States population has a right and need to know, but to which it has had limited access.”
Indeed, none of the selected stories have appeared in the mainstream press, a category encompassing widely read publications such as The New York Times and the network news channels. Rather, the stories have been covered by a select number of independent media that are free from the constraints of corporate ownership.
The number one story this year gave a staggering answer to a question that has been glossed over in the mainstream press — just how many Iraqi lives have been lost because of the U.S. occupation? The answer is one million, and it exceeds the death toll of the 1994 Rwandan genocide, points out the Censored entry.
But that figure, calculated by British the polling group Opinion Research Business (ORB), was reported in just three independent media outlets — AlterNet, Inter Press Service (IPS), and After Downing Street.
Michael Schwartz, of the nonpartisan coalition After Downing Street, also refuted in Censored the idea that most violence occurs only between Iraqis, placing the percentage of U.S.-inflicted Iraqi deaths at about 80 percent.
Censored also points to what may be the most ominous consequence of media censorship — a public lack of awareness.
Schwartz, in Censored, refers to a February 2007 Associated Press poll in which U.S. citizens were asked how many Iraqis died because of the U.S. occupation. The most common answers placed casualties at below 10,000.
“This remarkable mass ignorance, like so many other elements of the Iraq War story, received no coverage in the mass media, not even by the Associated Press, which commissioned the study,” he writes.
Many of the stories included in this year’s compilation dealt with the aftermath of the Iraq War as well as privacy concerns in an age of increasing security measures.
At number three on the list, “InfraGard: The FBI Deputizes Business” reveals that members of the business community may be part of an anti-terrorism line of defence, but are also the first ones reaping the benefits of it. This programme is called InfraGard, and goes as far back as 1996, when it started in Cleveland with 350 members from the Fortune 500.
By transmitting information about private individuals to the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security, 23,000 members of private industry guarantee that they will receive warnings of a terrorist attack before private individuals — even before certain elected officials, reported The Progressive in an article by Matt Rothschild.
Rothschild’s article also asserts that an InfraGard member can even shoot to kill in the case of martial law “without fear of prosecution”.
Although in February, the FBI released a statement denouncing the piece, Rothschild is sticking by his story.
The Winter Soldier hearings, which took place in Silver Springs, Maryland in March of 2008 organised by Veterans against War, also found a place on the list at number nine. The testimonies of more than 300 Iraq and Afghanistan veterans revealed atrocities they not only saw, but also participated in, such as desecrating corpses and targeting civilians.
These revelatory hearings were covered in just three print media outlets — The Nation, One World, and Inter Press Service — as well as one radio station, Pacifica Radio.
If the U.S. government deems that a person, directly or indirectly, poses the risk of threatening U.S. operations in the Middle East, the U.S. treasury department can seize their property and freeze their assets — a story on this is number five on the list.
Two executive orders were established giving the treasury department this power, one in July of 2007 and more recently in August of 2007. The first executive order is limited to Iraq, and threatens seizure of property in the event someone committing, or posing a risk of committing violent acts in opposition to U.S. operations there.
The second order, targeted to operations in Lebanon, goes a little further, broadening the scope to actions, non-violent or otherwise, that undermine U.S. involvement in Lebanon. Under this order, dependents of the individuals (spouse, children) would also have their assets frozen, and would not be allowed to receive humanitarian aid, Censored states.
The two executive orders were covered in The Progressive, and Global Research.
While mass media closely followed such stories as Angelina Jolie’s pregnancy and Alec Baldwin’s marital problems, reports regarding the aftermath of the Iraq War and privacy concerns were hidden.
News of abuse and death in juvenile detention centres, unprecedented rates of arrests for marijuana possession in the U.S., corporate profiteering from No Child Left Behind, and the American Psychiatric Association’s sanctioning and aiding in torture methods lay buried underneath images of Paris Hilton’s new escapades. And those are just the top 25.
Fidel Castro: The November 4 elections
November 4, 2008Reflections of Fidel | Granma, Nov 4, 2008
TOMORROW will be a very important day. World opinion will be following what happens with the elections in the United States. It is the most powerful nation on the planet. With less than five percent of the world’s population, it annually sucks up enormous quantities of oil and gas, minerals, raw materials, consumer goods and sophisticated products from other countries; many of these, especially fuel and products that are mined, are not renewable.
It is the largest producer and exporter of weapons. The military industrial complex also has an insatiable market within the same country. Its air and naval forces are concentrated on dozens of military bases in other countries. The strategic missiles of the United States, which carry nuclear warheads, can reach any point in the world with total precision.
Many of the most intelligent minds in the world are plucked out of their native countries and placed at the service of this system. It is a parasitical and rapacious empire.
As everybody knows, the black population that was brought into the United States through slavery for centuries is victim of intense racial discrimination.
Obama, the Democratic candidate, is part African, and the color black and other physical traits of that race predominate in him. He was able to study at an institution of higher learning from which he graduated with brilliant grades. He is no doubt more intelligent, educated and level-headed than his Republican rival.
I am analyzing tomorrow’s elections as the world is experiencing a serious financial crisis, the worst since the 1930s, among many others that have seriously affected the economies of many countries for more than three-quarters of a century.
The international media, analysts and political commentators are spending some of their time on the issue. Obama is considered as the best political orator in the United States in recent decades. His compatriot Toni Morrison, winner of the Nobel Literature Prize in 1993 —the first of her ethnicity born in the United States to win that award and an excellent writer — describes him as the future president and poet of that nation.
I have observed the struggle between the two rivals. The black candidate, who surprised everyone so much when he won the nomination against strong adversaries, has articulated his ideas well, and strikes with them over and over in the minds of voters. He does not hesitate to affirm that above all, more than Republicans and Democrats, they are the people of the United States, citizens that he describes as the most productive in the world; that he will cut taxes for the middle class, in which he includes almost everybody; he will eliminate them for the poorest and raise them for the richest. Income will not be allocated to saving banks.
He reiterates over and over that the ruinous spending on Bush’s war in Iraq should not be paid for by U.S. taxpayers. He would put an end to that and bring back the U.S. soldiers. Perhaps he took into account the fact that that country had nothing to do with the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. It has cost the blood of thousands of U.S. soldiers, dead or injured in combat, and more than one million lives in that Muslim nation. It was a war of conquest imposed by the empire in its search for oil.
Given the financial crisis that has broken out and its consequences, U.S. citizens are more concerned at this time about the economy than the war in Iraq. They are tormented by their worries over jobs; the security of their savings deposited in banks; their retirements funds; the fear of losing the purchasing power of their money and the homes in which they live with their families. They wish for the security of receiving, in any circumstances, adequate medical services, and the guarantee of their children’s right to higher education.
Obama is defiant; I think that he has run and will run increasing risks in the country in which an extremist can legally acquire a sophisticated modern weapon on any street corner, just like in the early 18th century in the West of the United States. He supports his system and will base himself on it. Concerns over the world’s pressing problems really do not occupy an important place in Obama’s mind, and even less so in the mind of the candidate who, as a war pilot, dropped dozens of tons of bombs on the city of Hanoi, more than 15,000 kilometers from Washington, without any remorse in his conscience.
Last Thursday the 30th, when I wrote to Lula, along with what I described in my reflections of October 31, I literally said to him in my letter, “Racism and discrimination have existed in U.S. society since it was born more than two centuries ago. Blacks and Latin Americans have always been discriminated against there. Its citizens were educated in consumerism. Humanity is objectively threatened by its weapons of mass destruction.
“The people of the United States are more concerned about the economy than the war in Iraq. McCain is old, bellicose, uncultured, not very intelligent and not in good health.”
Finally, I added, “If my estimates should be erroneous, all kinds of racism prevail and the Republican candidate obtains the presidency, the danger of war would grow and the opportunities of the peoples to advance would be reduced. Despite everything, we must fight and raise awareness about this, no matter who wins these elections.”
When this opinion of mine is published tomorrow, nobody will have any time to say that I wrote something that could be utilized by one of the candidates for their campaign. I had to be, and have been, neutral in the electoral battle. It is not “interference in the internal affairs of the United States,” as the State Department would say, with all that respect it has for the sovereignty of other countries.
Fidel Castro Ruz
November 3, 2008
Notions of the Nation
November 4, 2008Legitimising or Delegitimising Violence
By Badri Raina | ZNet, Nov 4, 2008
I
Within hours, literally, the world will know whether the nation-state in America as decreed by the American Constitution has or has not triumphed finally over the competing, even if subterranean, notion of the nation as race.
If indeed Obama wins the Presidency, the American voter would have set an example to other regions, India included, where Constitutional stipulations with regard to nation and citizenship continue to be bedeviled by racial and religious supremacists who contest the ideal of secular equality under a commonly accepted regime of laws as stipulated by the Constitution at any given time.
These impulses of course work severally: they can be pressed into service to seek from the state a redistribution of largesse by privileging one identity or the other, internally.
Often an identity that has been reviled previously finds itself elevated to favour subsequently (today’s Maharashtra offers a fine instance; for now, neither South Indian lungivalas nor Marathi-speaking Muslims are the targets of Maratha chauvinism); More ominously, a reformulation of the notion of the nation-state in toto becomes the object.
Which of course is not to say that the nation-state is already too evolved to be meddled with on behalf of those that derive rather little participation in or benefit from its decisions and operations.
Occasionaly, intermediate forms of racial privileging detrimental to the idea of the nation-state also surface with strident insistence on behalf of some sections of the citizenry, without overtly challenging the nation-state per se.
A fine current example of this in India is the pressure built within Tamil Nadu on behalf of fellow-Tamilians in another country.
Members of the Indian parliament from this state have thought nothing of making a gesture of resigning their parliamentary memberships if the Indian state fights shy of intervening in Sri Lanka to protect the interests of Tamilians. Never mind that in that beleaguered country, the government of the day is battling the world’s first and worst terrorist outfit, banned in most countries including India, namely the LTTE.
Not only did this outfit invent the suicide bomber, it also murdered an Indian Prime Minister, Rajiv Gandhi, using such a bomber.
Tamil parties in India, with the honorable exception of the AIADMK, supported also by bevies of film stars, have thus expressed their primary allegiance to their racial tribe in another country rather than to the Indians who elected them to the Indian parliament.
Not to speak of sections of more vociferous racists among them who have clandestinely supplied munitions to the LTTE for many years, and who make no bones about going to war on its behalf.
Given all that, the Indian government which depends on the support of the Tamilian parliamentarians has felt obliged to send its foreign minister to Colombo to do some talking, and to make repeated statements on behalf of Tamilian refugees in Sri Lanka.
Speaking of which, imagine how the government of India would react were Sri Lankan Muslims to issue statements with respect to real or imagined excesses perpetrated on Kashmiri Muslims, or Muslims in Tamil Nadu itself. Unbearable thought that. Not to speak of Indian Muslims expressing the least anxiety about Muslims anywhere else. That would be pure treason.
Thus, in short, much like many Muslims the world over who privilege the Muslim nation, or the Ummah, over the nation-state, India’s Tamilians feel that the “Tamil nation” takes precedence over the Indian state when push comes to shove.
As to the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (Global Hindu Community), it is on record as believing that “in pre-Christian times, all people, everywhere in the world, were Hindus” (see H.K.Vyas, The VHP, Communist Party of India Publications, New Delhi, 1983). And yet, it only sees enemies everywhere, including in India. You might well wonder why.
II
Dating from colonial times, of course, the most concerted challenge to the notion of a secular-democratic Republic wherein the ideals of equality and non-discriminatory justice, with due consideration for the preservation of the specific needs of non-Hindu Indians—some twenty or so percent of the population, all taken together– against hegemonising oppression, either by the state or the majority community, would define and inform citizenship has always come from the Hindu-Fascist right-wing.
That at least a third of the so-called “Hindu majority” feel as oppressed by the hegemonising brahminical upper-caste minority of Hindus is of course another little- discussed matter. Indeed, one thoughtful Dalit intellectual was to feel impelled to write a whole book, explaining why he does not regard himself a “Hindu” (see Kancha Ilaiah, Why I Am Not A Hindu: A Sudra Critique of Hindutva Philosophy, Culture, and Political Economy, Samya, Calcutta, 1996.)
But, to return to the “Hindu/Muslim” question:
Before you bring up the question about the Muslim League, let it be reiterated that the earliest formulation of a two-nation theory was not to come from the League but from Savarkar.
Explicitly in his pamphlet, Hindutva: Who is a Hindu? (1923), Savarkar was to say that India comprised two distinct nations, “Hindus and Muslims”.
As has been often noted,,Hindutva for him had little or nothing to do with the Hindu religion (not that the Hindu religion is any one identifiable monolith either, although those that have hegemonised it over ruthless millennia is). The man claimed to be an atheist and did not approve of the Hindu caste system.
Hindutva for Savarkar constituted purely a racial thesis; only those could be regarded genuine Indians who were both born in India and whose places of worship lay within the territorial confines of India. That most of these places of worship do lie within India is of no account, since Mecca remains outside, a fact sufficient to negate millennia of Hindu-Muslim syncretism.
This formulation has since become the source of the call on Indian Muslims either to fall in line or accept without question the primacy of the “Hindu Nation.”
In modern parlance, the RSS/BJP call this “cultural nationalism”—a racial concept which is deployed to question and dislodge the ideal of secular citizenship, bedrock of the Constitutional Republic.
In 1939, Golwalker was to write about the “minority problem” thus:
they must “merge. . .in the national race and adopt its culture, or to live at its mercy as long as the national race may allow them to do so and quit the country at the sweet will of the national race.”
This he called the only “sound view on the minorities problem…that alone keeps the nation safe from the danger of a cancer developing into its body politic of the creation of a ‘state within a state.'”
(see We, Our Nationhood Defined, Bharat Publications, Nagpur, p.47)
Remarkably, as has often been pointed out, the entire ideological equipment of the Hindu Right which prides itself for representing the essence of Indianness, was imported from Fascist Italy where Munje, who was to become head of the Hindu Mahasabha, met and imbibed Mussolini, and from Nazi Germany. (Interestingly, it was also in 1923 that Mussolini’s Doctrine of Fascism appeared.)
Munje, whose great friend Hedgewar was, passed these thoughts to the RSS which has ever since not just lauded Hitler and Nazi Germany for the height of their “race pride” but sought to impose this notion of nation on independent India.
Studs Terkel and Me
November 4, 2008Conversing with Friends
By DAVE LINDORFF| Counterpunch, Nov 3, 2008
I only met the master interviewer Studs Terkel, who died Friday at 96, once but that occasion remains a high point of my 35 years as a journalist.
And the funny part is, although I was a reporter, I didn’t meet him in that role, but rather as interviewee.
It was 1992, and I was in the middle of a two-week author’s tour Bantam Books had set up for my first book, “Marketplace Medicine,” an investigative book about the for-profit hospital corporations that were buying up community hospitals all over the country and turning them from care-giving institutions into “profit centers.”
Over the course of the prior week, I had been interviewed by hosts of TV programs and radio programs in the New York and Washington media markets. Most of the program hosts had obviously not read more than the liner notes on the dust jacket before having me on. In Chicago, I’d even gone to one radio station where the host met me outside the studio and said, without a hint of embarrassment, “Can you give me a couple of questions to ask you? I don’t like to read the books of the authors I have on because I like to ask the kinds of questions my listeners would ask.”
Studs was something else entirely. When the car service driver dropped me off at the building where WFMT, the station that broadcast the long-running interview program that had made Terkel into a Chicago landmark, was located, I found him waiting for me in the lobby, inside the building’s revolving door. A short, energetic man of 80, with a shock of white, slightly disheveled hair, Studs stepped forward to greet me, shaking my hand vigorously and steering me towards the elevator. “Dave, great to see you, great to see you!” he growled in his raspy voice. I noticed he was carrying my book in his other hand.
“This is a terrific book!” he said enthusiastically as we walked into the elevator. “A great book!” He began flipping intently through the pages, which I noticed were black with markings done in a thick marker pen. Passages were circled, there were exclamation marks and asterisks in the margins, and comments scrawled in a big sloppy hand. “There’s just one thing I want to ask you.”
He flipped through more pages, all black with his marker handiwork, and came to the page he wanted. I can’t remember the question he asked, but I remember he wanted a clarification of a comment I had made about some incident involving the actions of one of the hospital chains I had been writing about.
I confess, I was just in awe at the prospect of being interviewed by this guy.
He led me into a studio room, offered me something to drink—coffee I think—and motioned me to a chair at a large table. He sat down too, and continued the conversation. I gradually relaxed and was looking forward to the interview, when Studs suddenly said, “Well, that was great. Now all we need is a wrap. Could you just read this paragraph from the book?”
I was dumbstruck. “You mean we already did the interview?” I asked him, incredulous.
“Yeah,” he said, laughing. He pointed up at the microphones hanging from the ceiling, unnoticed by me. “Didn’t you see the engineer over there?” he asked, pointing to a glass window, behind which an engineer sat, laughing silently.
No, I hadn’t. I had thought we were just shooting the breeze, waiting for the interview to begin. At most of the studios I had been at, engineers had attached mikes to my shirt, done sound checks and generally fussed around for a while before starting to record or broadcast a live program.
How long had we talked, I wondered? It had seemed like only a few minutes to me, but it turns out we’d done the whole program.
I read the passage from the book that Studs had requested, and then he leaned back in his chair and sighed. “Ah, that’s what I call a back porch interview,” he said.
I was still in shock. His interview had been so smooth, so casual, his interest in and knowledge of the material in the book so thorough, and his questions so easy and on target, that I had never realized that it was happening. I had thought we were just chatting.
The amazing thing is that we were just chatting. But when I took the tape of the program home and played it, I was astonished at how incisive and articulate I sounded. The truth is, I had never sounded so good, before and probably ever since!
What was it that Studs had done in that interview? I’ve listened to that tape many times trying to figure it out. He was completely conversational. He never cut me off, allowing me to answer questions fully, and if he wanted more, he knew exactly what he wanted and was able to gently ask a leading question that sent me in the right direction without my ever feeling steered, pressured or manipulated into answering. Most important, he was genuinely interested in what I had to say. It really was like he said, that we were two guys relaxing on the back porch conversing.
And that, I believe, not just his incalculable contribution to the understanding of America, is what was Studs Terkel’s greatness as a journalist. He was not interviewing a subject. He was conversing with a friend.
Obama’s Victory – Fear and Hope
November 15, 2008Immanuel Wallesrstein, Commentary No. 245, Nov. 15, 2008
The whole of the United States and indeed the whole world was watching, and almost all of it was cheering, the election of Barack Obama as the next president of the United States. Although, during the electoral campaign, everyone tried to play down the centrality of the racial issue, on Nov. 4 it seemed that no one could talk of anything else. There are three central questions about what most commentators are calling this “historic event”: How important is it? What explains the victory? What is likely to happen now?
On the evening of November 4, an immense crowd assembled in Grant Park, Chicago, to hear Obama’s acceptance speech. All those who were watching U.S. television saw the camera zoom in on Jesse Jackson, who was in tears. Those tears reflect the virtually unanimous view of all African-Americans, who regard Obama’s election as the moment of their definitive integration into the U.S. electoral process. They do not believe that racism has disappeared. But a symbolic barrier has been crossed, first of all for them, and then for all the rest of us.
Their sentiment is quite parallel to the feelings of Africans in South Africa on April 27, 1994 when they voted to elect Nelson Mandela president of their country. It has not mattered that Mandela, as president, did not fulfill the whole promise of his party. It will not matter if Obama does not fulfill the whole promise of his campaign. In the United States, as in South Africa, a new day has dawned. Even if it is an imperfect day, it is a better day than before. The African-Americans, but also the Hispanics and the young people in general, voted for Obama out of hope – a diffuse hope, but a real one.
How did Obama win? He won the way anyone wins in a large, complex political situation. He put together a large coalition of many different political forces. In this case, the gamut ran from fairly far left to right of center. He would not have won without that enormous range of support. And, of course, now that he has won, all the different groups want him to govern as each prefers, which is of course not possible.
Who are these different elements, and why did they support him? On the left, even the far left, they voted for Obama because of deep anger about the damage the Bush regime inflicted on the United States and the world, and the genuine fear that McCain would have been no better, perhaps worse. On the center-right, independents and many Republicans voted for him most of all because they had become aghast at the ever-increasing dominance of the Christian right in Republican party politics, a sentiment that was underlined by the choice of Sarah Palin as the vice-presidential candidate. These people voted for Obama because they were afraid of McCain/Palin and because Obama convinced them that he was a solid and sensible pragmatist.
And in-between these two groups were the so-called Reagan Democrats, largely industrial workers, often Catholics, often racist, who had tended to desert their Democratic party roots in recent elections because they viewed the party as having moved too far left and disapproved of its positions on social questions. These voters moved back to the Democratic party not because their outlook had changed, but because of fear. They were deeply afraid of the economic depression into which the United States has moved, and thought that their only hope was in a new New Deal. They voted for the Democrats despite the fact that Obama was an African-American. Fear conquered racism.
And what will Obama do now? What can Obama do now? It is still too early to be sure. It seems clear that he will move quickly to take advantage of a crisis situation, as his new Chief of Staff, Rahm Emanuel, put it. I suspect we shall see a dramatic set of initiatives in the traditional first 100 days. And some of what Obama does may be surprising.
Still, there are two situations, the two biggest, that are largely beyond his control – the transformed geopolitics of the world-system, and the catastrophic world economic situation. Yes, the world received Obama’s victory with joy, but also with prudence. It is notable that two major centers of power issued statements on the geopolitical scene that were quite forthright. Both the European Union in a unanimous statement and President Lula of Brazil said they looked forward to renewing collaboration with the United States, but this time as equals, not as junior partners.
Obama will pull out of Iraq more or less as promised, if for no other reason than the fact that the Iraqi government will insist upon it. He will try to find a graceful exit from Afghanistan, which will not be too easy. But whether he will do something significant in relation to the Israel/Palestine deadlock and whether he can look forward to a more stable Pakistan is very unsure. And he will have less to say about it than he may think. Can Obama accept the fact that the United States is no longer the world’s leader, merely a partner with other power centers? And, even if he can, can he somehow get the American people to accept this new reality?
As for the depression, it will no doubt have to play out its course. Obama, like all the other major leaders in the world, is a captain on a very stormy sea, and can do relatively little more than try to keep his ship from sinking altogether.
Where Obama has some leeway is in the internal U.S. situation. There are three things where he is expected to act and can act, if he is ready to be bold. One is job creation. This can only be done effectively in the short run through government action. And it would be best done by investing in reconstructing the degraded infrastructure of the United States, and in measures to reverse environmental decline.
The second is the establishment, at last, of a decent health care structure in the United States, in which everyone, without exception, will be covered, and in which there will be considerable emphasis on preventive medicine.
And the third area is in undoing all the damage that has been done to basic civil liberties in the United States by the Bush administration, but also by prior administrations. This requires an overhauling both of the Department of Justice and the legal and paralegal apparatus that has been constructed in the last eight, but also the last thirty, years.
If Obama acts decisively in these three arenas, then we might say that this was a truly historic election, one in which the change that occurred was more than symbolic. But if he fails here, the letdown will be momentous.
Many are trying to divert his attention into the arenas in which he cannot do much, and in which his best position would be that of a lower profile, the acceptance of new world reality. There is much about Obama’s future actions to fear, and much that offers hope.
Share this:
Tags: Afghanistan, Barack Obama, election victory, Iraq, McCain/Palin, United States
Posted in Commentary, USA | Leave a Comment »