The Chris Moeller Archives

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.

posted by CM @ 5:18 PM