Barack Obama is not helping
Protesters protest. They are not politicians. It is not incumbent upon them to be “politic.” They make demands. They agitate. They hold the feet of politicians to the fire. Furthermore, these Black Lives Matters activists, it should be stated, are not liberals. They are, by and large, radicals. Liberals such as Barack Obama have failed them. Obama’s vice president, Joe Biden, the new party standard-bearer, even now is promising more money to be thrown at police-- the exact opposite action of the defunding that’s being demanded. These Black Lives Matters activists are also not capitalists. Capitalists like Barack Obama have failed them. They’ve been suppressed-- attacked, beaten, and killed-- on the streets and in their neighborhoods by the soldiers and guardians of capital.
On virtually every level, the Obama administration held firm to the principles of neo-liberalism. There was no emphasis on unemployment. Certainly no effort towards anything that could be said to resemble FDR’s “public works.” While Roosevelt owned what he once called a “broad executive power to wage a war against the emergency” of the Great Depression, Obama met the economic crisis of 2008 with the stated belief that the market’s “power to generate wealth and expand freedom is unmatched.” That market, as it always has, treated Black and Hispanic Americans like a punching bag.
A very big reason that protesters are in the streets today-- in numbers that dwarf even the protests of the 1960s-- and fighting to end America’s institutional violence against people of color is because of the failure of Obama's "Hope." It makes sense that people would be angrier, more frustrated, more impatient. A Black chief executive, a Black attorney general, and a Black head of Homeland Security did little if anything to reform the nation’s police departments during eight years in office. It’s even clearer today than it was four years ago what they
didn't do.
When Michael Brown was killed in St. Louis in 2014, Obama flew to Hollywood for a fundraiser with millionaires rather than go to St. Louis. The president took the much-heralded act of publicly proclaiming that Brown looked like he could be his own child, but if it truly were his child, he would have certainly gone to St. Louis. William Holder’s Justice Department investigated and eventually sued the individual city of Ferguson, Missouri, but the small community was treated like an outlier. Little else was done to address national systemic police terrorism against Black people.
Now, out of office, Obama has the audacity to lecture these courageous protesters-- the ones that inspire the world by standing up every day to military-grade police firepower and armed with only their hearts and minds and voices-- to move
past protesting and commit the refrain mistake of placing their futures on the ballot, and upon the shoulders of elected Democrats. Obama, a go-along personality and the author of a presidency of only negligible reforms in pretty much all areas of governance, believes that protesters do what they do to “raise awareness.” He said so himself in a video last week. When, in fact, the purpose of effective protests is to disrupt and force policy changes. We can see it playing out on stage. As the protests continue-- but the damaging of property lessens over days and weeks, so lessens the media coverage of the protests.
Disruptive protests have forced dozens, if not hundreds, of concessions already, of varying size and shape, whether we’re talking about individual cities, like Minneapolis and Seattle, plotting the dismantling of their police departments, or the firing of abusive cops, or giant corporations asking their employees to talk to each other about the difficult matter of race, rather than shying away from it, or the NFL at last publicly conceding that Colin Kaepernick was justified in his high-profile, 2015 on-field protests, or the publicly-forced arrests of the killers of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor. Perhaps Obama has not noticed this already-monumental progress from inside the soft bubble of his post-presidency, which came with a $65 million package book deal for him and his wife. Mitt Romney has participated in a protest march for Black Lives Matter. The Obamas haven’t.
Let’s never forget that these nationwide protests against injustice enjoyed the benefit of a dress rehearsal during the Obama years. His record number of immigrant deportations and the failure of other elected local Black officials in places like Baltimore helped lead us to this specific point of public fury and the calls to account. As Dr. Cornel West has pointed out, it turns out that Black
faces aren’t enough. It requires a commitment.
Obama is not wrong that electing better office-holders can work to apply more pressure for change, but we can see during this historic month of June 2020, that, if anything, voters need to get out of the voting booth and into the
streets, rather than graduating the other direction. Democracy is 24/7, not just exercised once every two or even four years in private. Plus, we’ve already seen what happens to other progressive, non-partisan movements, such as the anti-Iraq War movement, when they throw over their Cindy Sheehans for machine hacks like Nancy Pelosi or Chuck Schumer. If we could trust this leadership, they wouldn’t be seen throwing multi-million dollar primary opponents at Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, accepting money from racist, reactionary, “warrior” police unions, or continuing to protect the financial top 1% of the white supremacist power structure.
Johnson didn’t sign the Civil Rights Act of 1964 because a whole host of liberals had been swept into office in 1962. That had not happened. He signed it because some brilliant and resilient people were in the streets of Birmingham and Montgomery and Greenwood, blocking streets and disrupting business. The merchants in those Southern cities were not just losing Black business, they were now losing white business, because of the protests. We’re seeing that today in city after city. Their peaceful civic images are in jeopardy with every dirty cop caught on video, with every department that lies and conceals, and with every rally and group protest getting met with tear gas and rubber bullets. It’s going to have to end for them, and it will have been the protests that forced it to end.
Obama is drowning in hypocrisy here. He sermonizes, “If we want our criminal justice system, and American society at large, to operate on a higher ethical code, then we have to model that code ourselves.” Any sort of violence or damage to inanimate objects-- to those that share his mindset-- is a mark against the entire movement. Fortunately for him, tens of millions of Americans don’t judge
him similarly-- by his record on immigration, his oil pipelines, or his robot bombing campaigns against Muslim weddings. If they did, he would be wholly discredited.
It is not the role of street protesters to consider the electoral impact of their actions. It misses the point to concern oneself with the possible backlash of popular opinion by demanding too much or alienating. What matters is that the voices and demands be heard, with actions speaking even more loudly at times, with the goal of maximum disruption. Power-- as we’ve been told but often willfully forget-- concedes nothing without demand. Obama didn’t catch this lesson during his presidency or since, likely because so little was demanded of him by most liberals.
Obama’s White House failures led to an outrageous and cathartic successor, a two-bit gangster and con man. Obama laid a bipartisan cover for an immigration assault and a culture of “money worship” that would be injected with a steroid needle into the country through the person of Donald Trump. It’s difficult to fully measure the profound disappointment of the first African-American presidency. The top 1% took home two-thirds of the national economic growth. He took the side of the bankers and the police unions and the occupiers and the torturers. None in any of these groups went to jail-- but protesters did by the dozens. And the truth-tellers surely did. On his way out, he crushed the 2016 Bernie Sanders political uprising just as he crushed the ones on the street in 2014 and '15. The liberal reckoning with Obama’s legacy is coming.
Truly the greatest thing about these protests is the overwhelming display of anger and concern and passion. In the “perfect storm” face of so many national failures, an absence of any of these characteristics would be horrifying. The best advice I have for this group, the one filled with so many of those I call my heroes, is not to take any advice at all and just keep on keeping on. The world is watching. And changing.
How white people *still* steal from Black people
You’ll be forced to duck furrowed brows coming back at you if you call it looting, but the wholesale transfer of Black investment and savings to white wealth is
exactly looting and it continues today virtually unabated despite claims of social progress. I’ll relate a pair of examples of this phenomenon culled from the new book “The Broken Heart of America,” by Walter Johnson.
We start in North County St. Louis and a sight that holds the eye when you’re driving eastbound on Interstate 70 near Lambert Airport. It’s a large business campus straddling the freeway belonging to Express Scripts, a large company now part of Cigna after a $69 billion(!) purchase in 2018. They’re a prescription drug provider and the largest company by annual income whose headquarters is located inside the state of Missouri.
It’s already underappreciated how much government money gets spent in the United States that directly or indirectly serves to elevate its white citizens economically at the expense of their Black neighbors. The interstate highway program is itself a very visible but ignored example of it. In St. Louis, the impressive and efficient freeway circuits that snake in and around the city were sliced deepest through the heart of Black St. Louis during the 1950’s and ‘60’s and their impact and ongoing purpose is to permit white residents to isolate themselves, living further and further away from the city center, to bypass Black St. Louis altogether if they venture downtown for a ballgame or to visit the Arch.
But this Express Scripts campus-- 496,000 square feet in all-- is a special case of reverse-Robin Hood. It sits within the boundary of the Normandy School District, which graduated as one of its students in 2014 police-shooting victim and Black Lives Matter martyr Michael Brown. Thanks to tax abatements that don’t extend to any of the residents in the overwhelmingly-black district, the company took to its breast pocket more than $63 million in tax incentives for its new headquarters.
The deal to draw Express Scripts to this location was a tremendous one financially for the state of Missouri and for the Republican-controlled (and mostly rural-white) legislature in Jefferson City that approved it. The payroll tax revenue from the company far outsizes the tax subsidy. But it didn’t do anything for Express Scripts’ closest neighbors. The Normandy school district lost its academic accreditation in 2014, the same year of Brown’s graduation, and state law allows for Brown’s former schoolmates to transfer to nearby suburban districts, providing that Normandy also pay those districts $20,000 for each student they take. That’s a number that far exceeds what Normandy receives per student in revenue while Express Scripts is busy
not paying its share of taxes. Giant parking lots ring the corporate campus and allow Cigna/Express Scripts employees to easily navigate the I-70 exit and entrance ramps mere yards away and live anywhere else in the metro area other than Normandy. And it’s cash-strapped Normandy that gets to subsidize the schools in wealthy suburbs like Ladue and Clayton as their young people leave.
So many of our cities, including St. Louis, issue bonds on behalf of wealthy developers, and then those bonds are bundled and swapped out on the secondary market where their purchasers become, basically, the creditors of the cities. By law, bondholders have the legal status of what’s called “first-paid creditors.” That means they have to get paid by the city before the city can pay for anything else that needs to be paid for. It makes land that is populated by Black St. Louisans here very valuable to the rich, but the rich don’t want to pay for it. No, that would be foolhardy. In the city of St. Louis, the city takes on many properties because the poor owe on their taxes. Property taxes have skyrocketed because the city, in a clear declaration of priority, has agreed to forego tax collection on property developers. Meanwhile, an individual’s reward for repairing a home is a larger tax bill.
The city doesn’t rehabilitate the vacant properties in their possession. It doesn’t fit their model for them to rebuild house-able units. They simply categorize the property, or the area, as “blight.” Under city codes, even being located
near “blight” makes you “blight” as well. As of last year, St. Louis holds over 12,000 properties, most of them on the majority-Black Northside, and most having been seized because of unpaid taxes. An irony is that it’s happening when so much commercial development in the city is tax-exempt. Another irony, more bitter, is that the repossessed homes stay vacant, deteriorating, and awaiting the developer’s pitch while the ranks of the city’s homeless population continues to grow.
We first ghettoized the Black population in the city, locking them in for generations with redlining and racist housing covenants (as well as those pesky and enduring threats of violence), and placing the freeways where they are to drive a stake through their neighborhoods and to also establish a fresh boundary between Black and white. This has happened in city after city. Now we finagle, often through the use of eminent domain as well, to take back the land, which lies economically-convenient to the city’s center.
Episode two of season one in our story of theft involves the hustle called “Black capitalism,” which has been sold as a consumerist salve to African-Americans by everyone from Jay-Z to Richard Nixon to Barack Obama to Donald Trump. Instead of a focus on the large federal government response that’s necessary to help undo racial economic inequality-- whether that be anti-poverty programs or financial reparations for slavery, Jim Crow and white violence, “Black capitalism” doubles down on the neglect of those necessary elements and shrinks Black spending power into a segregationist economy. It’s subjecting start-up small Black-owned business to the same disadvantages endured by all small businesses in the modern-day U.S. economy--higher insurance prices, unshared supply chains, damage from recessions (and pandemics!), regulators, predatory loans, and the unrelenting assault from above by American monopolies and corporate pirates. It also fails to acknowledge the inter-generational wealth gap between white and Black families. In summary, it’s downright goofy to attempt to promote social and racial equality through a lens of “economic development.” And the fact that Trump is for it should be enough to tell you what a crock it is.
We land then in Kirkwood, Missouri, and its adjoining, once-unincorporated Meacham Park neighborhood in the southwest suburban ring of St. Louis, about 17 miles from Normandy. Kirkwood is majority-white and affluent. Meacham Park is majority-Black and poor. Kirkwood annexed the neighborhood in 1992, when the average income in Kirkwood was four times that of the neighborhood and its average home worth three times as much. This marriage of municipalities was presented as economic opportunity to the residents of Meacham Park-- improved public services and the like. The mostly white voters in Kirkwood certainly saw the partnership in altruistic terms, to some degree, but the possibility also undeniably existed there for economic development for the city.
Within two years of the annexation, by ’94, the government of Kirkwood was interviewing developers and making moves to clear out half of Meacham Park to build a Walmart. It later became publicly-known that Kirkwood had offered up the entirety of Meacham Park but the builders told them that half would be enough. There were promises made to the residents of the neighborhood along the lines of-- $150 million in taxable business coming to the area, 700 short-term construction jobs, along with 600 permanent ones, construction upgrades for those that would stay in their homes, and fair-market payouts for those that were slated for the bulldozer.
What came instead was a Walmart-centered property development ultimately ten square blocks larger than the proposal. Six new houses sprouted up but 85 had been promised. An historic school that had been ticketed to become a community center never became one and now houses instead a private business that offers injury-rehabilitation services to wealthy professional athletes. On the day the city signed with the developers, many residents found notices of seizure and condemnation stuck to their front doors. Those same residents believed that the process was still at the stage of price negotiation.
In the middle of it all was an African-American man named Charles “Cookie” Thornton. Cookie was a small business owner that accepted the wager of “Black capitalism.” A Meacham Park native, he owned a small demolition and construction operation, and did so out of his home. Thornton had been one that had hoped for a contract for his professional services that never came about behind the development. He contended that promises had been made, but a council member says that only the possibility of work had been extended. He had bought a new dump truck that would make him qualified for the work. As he routinely parked his truck on his lawn, the city-- in or around the year 2000-- started issuing him citations for it, and also for not properly posting work permits in places where he worked around the neighborhood. By the end of 2001, he owed the now-larger city of Kirkwood $12,000 in fines, and by 2008, that figure was up to $20,000. Certainly this growth in the tally was the result of some bullheadedness on Thornton’s part, but it was also a very punishing amount of money for doing business the way he had always done it.
Thornton started attending council meetings and speaking at length there in front of the members until an ordinance was passed that limited citizen comments to three minutes each. So he began approaching the microphone out of order and addressing the council directly. That led to a crisp velvet rope being placed at the front of the seating area. Losing that avenue, he would then lie down in the aisle and make disruptive animal noises. When police attempted to remove him, he would go limp in the age-old tactic of civil disobedience. He had lost his wife, his business, his house, and then a federal lawsuit he had filed against the city of Kirkwood, the cost of which had been paid for on his end by mortgaging his parents’ home. Thornton was one of those Meacham Park residents long ignored by the people of neighboring Kirkwood until they found a way to make money off of him. His land had value anyway. And his vote mattered until it didn't. That was the extent of his value.
It was significant that he was Black because a percentage of Black-owned demolition and construction work was written into the verbiage of the agreement. That’s the type of promise made by capitalists that often gets attached in order to project a morality that's actually non-existent. What wasn't significant to the people of Kirkwood was that he was their neighbor. After the deal was in place, the city and developers could look anywhere they wanted for other Black capitalists that could undercut Cookie’s bid and satisfy their minority requirement. He had supported the development, had even gone door-to-door to help convince his reluctant neighbors that the project was worthy of their support.
He was humiliated and broken, with nothing left to lose when he walked into Kirkwood’s city hall in 2008, having already shot to death a police sergeant across the street, and there he would also murder a court officer, two council members, and the city’s public works director. He shot the mayor twice in the head and the mayor would die too, a year and a half later, from complications of the shooting combined with ongoing cancer treatment. Police responding to the council chambers shot Cookie Thornton dead inside the government room moments after the rampage. He was lying next to a placard he had brought with him that referred to the city as a “plantation.”
Ninety-seven-percent-Black Meacham Park was the plantation. Thornton had been a leader there-- a member of civic boards, the head of charitable organizations, and a mentor to children. He had once run a campaign for a seat on the council. His community was now a part of Kirkwood, Missouri, but Kirkwood, Missouri had a very narrow interest in the neighborhood or in the people of Meacham Park. Said one Meacham Park resident after the annexation and the development, “Ain’t nothing changed but the year.” The undeveloped, remaining part of Meacham Park still has dirt roads.
Large swaths of Black St. Louis
appear to be abandoned-- as the larger metropolis of St. Louis possesses one of America’s most famous among the growing number of “urban prairies,” but the areas are not abandoned in the slightest. The land is held by investors and banks. There is what Walter Johnson calls “speculative capital” located in every vacant strip mall and in so many of the houses. It’s a long game for the deed holders-- and the deed takers-- to clear the land. They’ve stripped down the schools and the general public services the way investors strip down companies for a sell-off. It’s the same thing. They’re just waiting for the highest bids.
There are also storefronts and billboards-- un-abandoned-- for white-owned businesses and their shadowy, Wall Street investors that advertise fast loans, easy loans, quick cash, title change, you know them. They’re all making money off Black people behind high-interest usury here in the heart of the “wild west” of American deregulation. An activist named Jamala Rogers, “Mama Jamala,” says there are twice as many payday stores in the state of Missouri as there are McDonalds and Starbucks branches combined, as of 2015.
Along with the incarceration-for-profit industry and the racist policing that not only includes trigger-happy cops but selective, targeted enforcement of the laws, wide variances in criminal sentencing, and oppressive fines for committing misdemeanors and for breaking simple ordinances, we’re bleeding dry financially a population that already lives on the perimeter of survival. This is looting and this is white violence. Plain. Simple. It’s a knee on their necks that is the degradation of their humanity-- and of ours-- and the barbaric, true nature of capitalism.
