Barak Obama must carefully show himself from now on as whiter than white...

VHeadline's Washington DC-based commentarist Chris Herz writes: I have thought there little point to writing for the blogosphere if one was just to repeat the silly stuff found in the corporate press. After all why take the trouble to work without renumeration, even make direct financial sacrifice in terms of lost time from paying work or even subscription costs or donations if one cannot make some original contribution lacking from the conventional corporate media?

Ron Jacobs, an important commentator writing at Zmag.org seems the latest to find himself surprised by "opposition" presidential candidate Barak Obama's warm and fuzzy friendliness to the warfare policies of our US corporate state.

Mr Jacobs professes to find himself bemused by Mr Obama's cozying up to the Israel-American Political Action Committee -- the candidate expressing before that group his support for the expansion of war for oil in the Middle East. Mr Obama has in recent days also supported the extension of the death penalty, and criticised the members of his own racial minority for their propensity to anti-social behavior.

At least on the matter of war, such support seems utterly unnecessary in attracting votes, given that a substantial majority of the voters here want us out of Iraq now.

Anti-black racism is another matter -- it being of near-constitutional importance here in the supposedly United States.

You see, dear foreign reader, how successful we have been in the assimilation of all the mutually hostile tribes of Europe into a cohesive, even often a fanatical nationality. We Euro-Americans are all whites together. And we can only define ourselves in this way because we are not-blacks.

Here Serbs marry Croats. Irish girls make babies with English guys. Germans and French live in the utmost harmony. Magyars and Poles go to the same churches. All see themselves as 100% Americans.

This is a real problem for Obama. He is actually of course, half white himself. But here that does not signify. He looks like one of "them", not us. Here is the existential difference between the US and European styles of Toryism. (Although the European leadership are learning from us now how to introduce into their own poisonous corporatism their own coded racisms) All the US political class is aware of how to appeal to this fundamental factor by carefully coded appeals to prejudice. And they are usually successful when they do so.

Hence his ability to move away from the conservative paradigm is very limited. Since the days of President Nixon's election, by a landslide, it has been clear that most of our citizens had then and have now no use for Black equality. There is only one place, because of their historic social disabilities, that we are ready to make some extra places for blacks -- the penitentiaries.

Barak Obama must, to have any chance at all at election, carefully show himself from now on as whiter than white. He must disparage the interests and the aspirations of his own minority. He must govern from the right like all other US politicians.

He will, as was Clinton before him, if elected by the influx of younger voters, less impressed with racism than their parents, STILL be unable to enact any sort of liberal or progressive programme and will face unremitting attack for the slightest misteps from an hostile corporate press and TV. And however much foreign leaders would like to deal with Mr Obama this inability to deliver on any deals outside the corporate and militaristic box will make their diplomatic tasks just as frustrating as has been this work vis-a-vis the present regime.

Too many liberals like Mr Jacobs have little appetite for facing the reality of just how little the civil rights struggles of the sixties and seventies impress most of white America. In fact, this historical memory still induces most to vote conservative.

And as with any other psychopathology the failure to come to grips with root causes makes the insanity of US policy and negotiating positions appear to many incomprehensible.

This is why this writer thinks foreign leaders interested in the protection of their own, have little choice but to find ways of breaking with the empire. For it can no more reform itself from within than could the equally ossified Soviet state. No one is more aware of these facts of life than Barak Hussein Obama.

From the imperial capital

Chris Herz
cdherz44@yahoo.com

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Venezuela is facing the most difficult period of its history with honest reporters crippled by sectarianism on top of rampant corruption within the administration and beyond, aided and abetted by criminal forces in the US and Spanish governments which cannot accept the sovereignty of the Venezuelan people to decide over their own future.

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