alias Bruce.

I've just read the entire Playboy interview with Cornel West

that ran in the August 2010 issue (excerpts here), and if you missed it (as I originally did) I think it's worth a read now -- maybe even more so today than during the summer, since we know that much more about Barack Obama than we did six months ago. West does, after all, have a few words to say about the president in the interview, having supported his campaign, and his assessment is no surprise: he is disappointed by Obama's weakness -- he is almost bitter, actually -- but he says he supports his re-election. I'm guessing that West feels, as do a lot of people, trapped into voting for even a gelatinous Obama in 2012 given the monstrous nature of the opposition and the potentially apocalyptic consequences for the country.

More interesting, though, is West's analysis of the subtext of all this, that being the structural and ethical dissolution of contemporary monopoly capitalism, which he describes, rightly, as gangsterism writ large. In the larger sense, West seems to dismiss Obama as not being terribly important any more, having missed his opportunity as president to champion the changes for which voters originally elected him: a meaningful reining in of the barbaric practices and expense of corporate-ruled health care; a balls-out public investment in creating jobs (versus bailing out CEOs); a decisive pulling back of American resources from tragic boondoggles in Iraq and Afghanistan; actions to put Main Street ahead of Wall Street instead of just proclamations. Now that Obama has been bowing and offering tea to dragons for two years, West's concern is with the monsters who are throwing the party. He delivers a dense, succinct summary of the erosion of regulation and the growth of a corrupt corporate-government compact, culminating in the private recklessness and public wreckage we have now seen.

But here is the part I like best: West goes further, daring mainstream ridicule by bringing in the question of the soul -- he actually uses the word -- and the cost to a nation whose voters and rulers lose all inner grounding. We're not talking about religion here. We're talking about a nurtured sense of coherent and committed connection to all that is. If that sounds really big, it's because it is. And without it, a society gets really small really fast. This language -- in the preceding four or five sentences -- is mine, not West's. That's because, as it happens, in the time prior to seeing West's Playboy piece I've been thinking about the soul -- using that very same word for lack of a better one -- as a living entity, and what happens to it when it is starved for its essentials. I've been thinking about it a lot, actually. More about that when I'm ready to post it.

Anyway, West's interview is a kick as well as a thought piece. He is as glib as always, working that hipster-sass-intellect thing that has always struck me as part inspired conceptual improviser and part full-of-shit egoist. He covers a huge amount of ground, from Michelle Obama's garden to the Catholic Church to the Tea Party to Prince to Samuel Beckett. And how can you not love the afro and the trademark three-piece suit? My favorite reader comment about West, posted by a visitor to PublicEnemy.com, is, "I always get a kick when Dr. West speaks, but why does he dress like Colonel Sanders?"

Thanks to Laurie and Mushim.

Keep It Up, Cos.

I know I've hit Bill Cosby pretty hard in this space from time to time. He deserves it. Slamming yo's from the podium for their dysfunction while displaying no such public fury about the nation's misguided policies and its misdirected billions of dollars is an inexcusably fickle stance for a so-called "grandfather" figure of black America. Cosby's fiscal generosity toward Historically Black Colleges and Universities is terrific, but it is no justification for his (professionally convenient?) silence on the immoral behavior of American political leadership when it comes to key matters affecting poor black communities. If you're going to hammer the yo's, Bill, let's hear you also slam the militarized policing of the War on Drugs and the moral and fiscal criminality of the War in Iraq while communities here are starved of vital resources.

But I'm writing today, actually, to heartily praise William H. Cosby, Jr., Ed. D., for remarks he made during a July 31 visit to Baltimore. According to the Baltimore Sun, here are a few excerpts of what Cosby told a large outdoor audience in the (highly black, highly poor) Park Heights neighborhood of the city:

"You may have dropped out of school for whatever reason, but you now realize that's not going to do it. We got something for you. We got community college for you. You may feel so broke, so poor and think, 'I can't become a doctor, I can't become...' But we got something for you: community college."

"It's people in your house just sitting around, and you want them to get up. We're going to suggest community college to them, and they're going to say, 'Well, where it is?' They're going to run through a whole bunch of excuses. Don't get mad. Because the person you're talking to is depressed. And depressed people tend to find excuses to just lay there, wearing out your furniture and burning out your TV. I know you're tired of them, but we're going to get you ready to take them down to community college."

"Your children have no business going to the street for love. There is no love there. The only thing out there is how to write your entrance exam to jail. That's all that's there, lost young men looking for love."

Now, that is the way a grandfather is supposed to talk. Discipline underpinned by truth and understanding.

Way to go, Cos.

Now all we need you to do, Bill, is to get on CNN and be as pissed off about potential education funding being squandered on the Iraq War as you are about yo's laying around in their grandmothers' living rooms.

Laughing Gas.

Thanks to Darryl Moment for passing along this cache of cartoons:










 

Dick Cheney Comes Clean on Iraq.

For a truly flabbergasting peek into Dick Cheney's clarity about invading Iraq, watch a video clip from a 1994 Cheney interview now being circulated by MoveOn.org as part of their fundraising campaign. It really must be seen to be believed.

Too Awful to Watch.

It has gotten to the point where it actually makes my skin crawl to see W make a public appearance at the scene of a horrible disaster: his creepy, bumbling lack of sincerity, his mangling of even the most trite of truisms, his blazing hypocrisy.

Here is part of what the President of the United States had to say on the occasion of his August 4 visit to the Minneapolis bridge collapse site, according the August 5, 2007 New York Times:

Expressing condolences to the families of the victims and "prayers to those who wonder about whether they'll ever see a loved one again," the president promised to make it a priority to rebuild the bridge "in a way that not only expedites the flow of traffic but in a way that can stand the test of time." Mr. Bush took a 10-minute helicopter tour of the wreckage, where he could see the remains of a school bus, a truck and other vehicles. "Our message to the Twin Cities is we want to get this bridge rebuilt as quick as possible," the president said. "We understand this is a main artery of life here, that people count on this bridge, this highway system, to get to work."

So the nation's chief executive, with ample coaching, is able to offer boilerplate "prayers," to say aloud that the bridge should be "rebuilt quick," to express his understanding that "people count on it to get to work," and to stumble his way through a wreckage of parallelisms to the effect that a new bridge ought to "expedite traffic" as well as "stand the test of time."

I hate to go here -- it seems so unfair, like putting an eloquent champion up against a brine shrimp -- but just imagine, if you can stand the pain of the comparison, what a Bill Clinton would likely have been able to spontaneously offer the people of Minneapolis in this setting, with his eyes clear, jacket unbuttoned, tie loosened, no notes or prompts, and yes, maybe an unfortunate but at least competently-derived stain on his tailored pants.

But that was then. Now we're talking about a truly presidential scandal: The crushing irony (chastely ignored by much of the press corps) of a president slashing funds to cities and states, easing regulations on industry, weakening government safety standards, and then sidling up next to a rotted bridge to offer "prayers" for the dead and to chirp about construction that "can stand the test of time."

I guess this is what a collapsed presidency looks like.

Barry Bonds: Beyond the Asterisk.

(I'm back from another blog-free zone. As always, thanks for your patience if you've been watching for a new entry, and thanks for reading.)

Any time now, Barry Bonds will break Hank Aaron's revered record of 755 career home runs.

When he does, Bonds' name in the record books will immediately, and maybe permanently, be dwarfed by a giant neon asterisk, with a disclaimer reading something like, "Forget this punk. He cheated to get here."

Me, I think the asterisk belongs there, big and blinking as the Times Square sign, and it couldn't have been earned by a nicer guy. As a baseball fan, I stopped caring about the Barry Bonds and the Mark McGwires and the Sammy Sosas and the other hulked-up megasluggers when baseball went giddily corporate and "performance-enhancing" substances became the clubhouse version of Wall Street hardball. I still love listening to a game on the radio, but honestly, I couldn't care less about most of the players or their multi-hundred-million-dollar teams, including my hometown Baltimore Orioles.

But here's the thing.

There is another kind of rigging of the record books that has been going on, officially, in major league baseball for more than 50 years now. I hadn't stopped to think about its significance until I ran across a little snippet of a piece by Jonathan Cohen in the June 18, 2007 issue of The Nation, entitled "SI Cooks the Books."

As Cohen points out, the cockroach in the ointment of today's high-minded moralizing about Barry Bonds is that a good number of baseball's official historic demigods -- Babe Ruth and Ted Williams, to name just two -- earned their stature unfairly and unethically. That is, whether they approved of it or not, they played in a sport that legally excluded arguably the finest athletes in the game: the Satchel Paiges and the Josh Gibsons and the other greats of the Negro Leagues. This isn't to deny Ruth's or Williams' greatness. But the fact is that they and all other white players of the segregation era enjoyed the protection of being shielded from competing against black players whose abilities would have, literally, changed the complexion of major league baseball.

Cohen puts it downright bluntly:

"When 30 to 35 percent of qualified athletes are not allowed to play because of the color of their skin and are replaced by others who most likely would have been in the minors if segregation had not been in effect, the statistics are sharply skewed."

So all of a sudden Sports Illustrated's recently-named "all-time" team (which deliberately excludes Bonds), as well as baseball's official pantheon of all-time record-holders, don't look quite so legit.

This isn't to defend steroid use. I have already told you what I think about Barry Bonds.

But which is the greater injustice: One player immorally breaking a home-run record thanks to the advantage of self-medication, or generations of players immorally setting "all-time" records thanks to the advantage of racial exclusion?

You decide.

Want a Mortgage? What's Your Race?

A study in six cities has found that black and Latino borrowers are nearly four times likelier than whites to get a higher-cost mortgage -- that is, a subprime loan -- when buying a home.

The report, Paying More for the American Dream, a joint research project by six nonprofits, found that the racial disparities in lending outstripped differences in income and credit risk, leaving little room for any conclusion other than that race played into lenders' decisions. According to the report, which studied mortgages in 2005 in New York City, Los Angeles, Chicago, Boston, Charlotte, NC and Rochester, NY:

"Despite controlling for publicly available borrower and lender related factors that may affect pricing, a substantial, unexplained gap remained between levels of higher cost lending to African American and Latino borrowers and white borrowers. This gulf has often been attributed to differences in credit history, loan documentation, and overall wealth between race and ethnic  groups. Yet evidence suggests that weak borrower credit profiles do not fully explain why some borrowers get stuck with higher-cost home loans. The Government Sponsored Enterprises, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, have estimated that many subprime borrowers could have qualified for lower-cost prime loans. ...Such patterns indicate a dual lending market in which lenders heavily push their higher-cost subprime products to minority markets while excluding those markets from access to lower cost prime mortgage products."

The disparities in loan rates were true in all six cities and for all seven lenders studied: Citigroup, Countrywide, GMAC, HSBC, JP Morgan Chase, Washington Mutual, and Wells Fargo. The starkest example was Washington Mutual, which the report scrutinized in particular detail because the company "operates distinct prime and subprime lending channels, yet sees the vast majority of its loans to African American and Latino borrowers come through its subprime unit."

What's happening, the report concludes, is not simply that lenders show patterns of bias in granting loans, but also that many lenders flat-out avoid black and Latino communities, creating a captive market for the lenders who "serve" these populations. As a result, many black and Latino borrowers with solid credit histories sign on for unnecessarily costly mortgages because that is what is offered where they live.

So the problem is not just old-fashioned "charge-the-colored-person-more" bigotry, but also the abandoning of entire communities of color -- stereotyped as "bad credit risks" -- to the abusive practices of lenders who thrive amid the lack of competition.

All of this begs for oversight and reform. Among the report's recommendations are that lenders who carry out such practices be screened out of major Wall Street investment portfolios; that the feds and the states legislatively prohibit lenders from hitting borrowers with higher-cost loans when they qualify for lower-cost ones; and that federal and state government aggressively prosecute violators. (According to the report, "To date, New York  Attorney General Eliot Spitzer has taken the only public enforcement action against a mortgage lender based on HMDA disparities, despite the Federal Reserve Board having identified hundreds of lenders whose data show large differences between the prices paid by racial and ethnic groups and whites.")

So the next time you hear someone adamantly dismiss widespread racial discrimination as "a thing of the past," dare him or her to chew on 21 pages of empirically-established facts. The report, downloadable as a PDF, is written in plain English and can easily be read over lunch.

Hell Hath No Wrath.

We have all heard about Cindy Sheehan's "resignation" on May 28 from her position as the "face" of the American antiwar movement. There has been much rumination and gnashing of teeth about her departure, some of it thoughtful (as with John Nichols' mournful but pensive June 18, 2007 editorial in The Nation and Rabbi Michael Lerner's studied May 30 response to Sheehan) and some of it less so.

But if you have not read Sheehan's resignation letter itself, sarcastically titled "'Good Riddance, Attention Whore,'" I suggest that you do so. It has been posted on websites everywhere, including Daily Kos, AfterDowningStreet.org, and Michael Moore.com. It is more a rant than a manifesto, in which Sheehan, with plenty of apparent justification, rips into the flanks of the American left for the ways in which she was mischaracterized, pilloried and otherwise jerked around.

A few excerpts from Sheehan's missive:

"I was the darling of the so-called left as long as I limited my protests to George Bush and the Republican Party. ...However, when I started to hold the Democratic Party to the same standards that I held the Republican Party, support for my cause started to erode and the "left" started labeling me with the same slurs that the right used. I guess no one paid attention to me when I said that the issue of peace and people dying for no reason is not a matter of 'right or left,' but 'right and wrong.'"

"If I am doing what I am doing because I am an 'attention whore' then I really need to be committed. ...I have spent every available cent I got from the money a "grateful" country gave me when they killed my son and every penny that I have received in speaking or book fees since then. I have sacrificed a 29 year marriage and have traveled for extended periods of time away from Casey's brother and sisters and my health has suffered and my hospital bills from last summer (when I almost died) are in collection because I have used all my energy trying to stop this country from slaughtering innocent human beings. I have been called every despicable name that small minds can think of and have had my life threatened many times."

"Casey did indeed die for nothing. His precious lifeblood drained out in a country far away from his family who loves him, killed by his own country which is beholden to and run by a war machine that even controls what we think. ...Casey died for a country which cares more about who will be the next American Idol than how many people will be killed in the next few months while Democrats and Republicans play politics with human lives."

"Good-bye America ...you are not the country that I love and I finally realized no matter how much I sacrifice, I can't make you be that country unless you want it."

I have stood within a few feet of Cindy Sheehan while she spoke. To my eyes, she was no attention-hound; she was a woman possessed by a mission of grief and outrage. I did and do honor her raw guts, her ruthless candor and her steadfast resourcefulness in a political landscape that generally lacks all three.

But I have to say: what strikes me most about Sheehan's resignation letter is her sheer bitterness and her remarkable naiveté, both of which leave me thinking she had no idea what she was getting into.

Cindy, what did you expect? To morally convert one of the most selfish, self-indulgent populations on earth within the space of three years? To overturn the military-industrial complex and the massive idea machinery that supports it on the strength of one courageous mother's dramatic example? To promptly fill the streets with America's overfed, underinformed middle-of-the-road voting bloc in response to a war to which most voters (and politicians) are not required to send their children?

Look over your shoulder, Cindy. Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat to a white man in 1955 (and the Supreme Court upheld her cause the following year), but Jim Crow laws continued to be enforced in many regions for another 10 years, and bus boycott leader Martin Luther King Jr. was still at war against virulent racism when he was slain in 1968. Activists began fighting for women's suffrage in the 1820s, but women did not gain the right to vote in federal elections until 100 years later. The Stonewall Riots, viewed as the beginning of the open and organized struggle for gay rights in America, happened nearly 40 years ago in 1969; today many states still legally allow discrimination against gays, and the fight for the simple right of gays to marry remains a raging "controversy" nationwide. Public protests against the Vietnam War began in 1964; the final U.S. troops were withdrawn more than a decade later in 1975.

I'll wager that King, Parks, and many a suffragette and Vietnam War opponent and Black Panther Party member were tempted to "resign" from political movements fraught with rivalries, backbiting, confusion, and life-threatening danger. I'll bet the same temptation exists today among legions of the beleaguered souls who fight on for gay rights, for fair global trade, for media reform, and for protection of a life-supporting planet while we still have one.

Not to over-hype Cindy Sheehan. No disrespect, Cindy, but you're no Sojourner Truth or Martin Luther King. You are, however, an extraordinarily courageous person who stood and spoke while others sat and slumped in the face of atrocity. As a combat mother who paid a tragic price that most American families ducked, you wielded a moral authority few could challenge. But what makes you think you can declare the antiwar struggle lost after three years of (surprise!) public fickleness and continued carnage and political cowardice? What gives you the authority to write off the cause because you couldn't handle its pathologies any longer?

I make no pretense, Cindy, to knowing your ordeal as a grieving mother trying to wrestle with the beast of national political prominence at the cost of your personal life. I believe you when you say that you are flat broke and that your spirit of hope for the antiwar movement is broken. I can understand your needing to withdraw, to rebuild your life, to nourish what sustains you. I just don't get why you think your own exhaustion and bitterness sounds the death knell for the antiwar movement.

Your tragedy and hardship notwithstanding, Cindy, as a white American you have the relative privilege of picking up your marbles and going home in a huff. Plenty of people of color in Watts and Harlem and North Philly and Cincinnati -- and in what used to be New Orleans -- have no such luxury of "resigning" from suffering. Nor do poor whites who scrabble for lousy jobs in rural West Virginia and Montana and Mississippi. And it is these folks who are sent, disproportionately and not entirely by choice, to stand in harm's way in the insane war that killed your son Casey.

So it is not your disgust with spine-free Democrats and with backbiting politicos that I challenge, Cindy. It is your biliousness and petulance, your seemingly naive expectations about what will in fact be a long and protracted struggle, and your presumptive defeatism that disappoint me.

The antiwar movement will miss you, Cindy. But it will go on without you.

Illegal Aliens.

Amnesia is a terrible thing. Hypocrisy is even worse.

And both are worse yet when they involve massive deceit and wholesale murder.

These come to mind because of a June 10, 2007 New York Times Page One story headlined, "Grass Roots Roared and Immigration Plan Collapsed." The story details the wrath of a swath of ordinary Americans (mostly white Americans, I would confidently surmise), who are up in arms at the prospect of a would-be bipartisan Senate plan to accommodate the laws of physics and the desires of industry by granting some form of legal status to America's gargantuan and unstoppable underground illegal alien economy. As the Times reported, the grass roots roared (kind of a klutzy mixed metaphor for the Paper of Record, I'd say), and the plan sank.

Among the roarers quoted in the Times story was Monique Thibodeaux, 50, an office manager for a Detroit  towing company, who heatedly told the paper, "These people came in the wrong way, so they don’t belong here, period. ...In my heart I knew [the immigration bill] was wrong for our country."

Okay, Monique. Can we talk?

From your surname and your photograph, Ms. Thibodeaux, I'm going to hazard a guess that your ancestors did not number among the numerous original inhabitants (that is, the first legal residents) of the territory we now call the United States. I'm going to suppose, reasonably, I think, that your kin owe their presence on these shores to a process whereby an influx of armed newcomers (that is, illegal aliens) took this land by force and by fraud, using lies, broken treaties and disease-infested blankets alongside a campaign of rape, slaughter and pillage. We are talking about genocide, Monique. We are talking about ousting sovereign nations from lands they had occupied for centuries. We are talking about signing explicit agreements and then reneging on them, about laying waste to entire societies, about sexually assaulting women and cutting off their breasts, and about generally massacring a civilian population.

This, Monique, is how you came to be a "legal citizen" of the United States of America. Even if your ancestors were not involved with this historic campaign of dishonesty and atrocity, you are here because of it.

So it is just a little bit repulsive, Ms. Thibodeaux, just a wee bit historically obscene, for you to carp to a reporter about your right to deny entry to those who "came in the wrong way."

This kind of know-nothing exclusionism, with its belligerent assertion of "homeland" rights that modern America's precursors ruthlessly violated in order to be here in the first place, needs to be confronted for what it is: the bigoted presumption that the right to illegally enter (or, worse, forcibly take over) a nation is limited to European "settlers" and their political inheritors. Or to put it another way, we need to tell Monique Thibodeaux and others who are here by virtue of a brutally ill-gotten republic to quit their loathsome scapegoating of "illegal aliens" and to instead work on fair ways of dealing with the economic fallout of our maintaining a near-colonial relationship with our neighbor directly to the south.

"Illegal immigration," and its cousin "Free Trade," are the reasons why Wal-Mart Sells for Less, why brown-skinned nannies and gardeners are so available to busy high-income families, and why our slaughterhouses and our strawberry fields don't lack for labor despite the reluctance of most Americans to do such work. President Bush is in trouble on immigration right now, in fact, because he is caught between two camps of his base: the angry Monique Thibodeauxs who think the door should slam shut behind them, and the greedy industries who have grown accustomed to cheap foreign labor.

The right thing to do, of course, is to establish true living-wage laws here so that honest work is rewarded with decent pay, and to stop coddling American-based companies who use nations such as Mexico -- and their compliant and corrupt governments -- as pools for low-wage servitude. A just rewriting of the rules of global "Free Trade" -- conventions drafted behind closed doors that now tie the hands of many of the world's governments when it comes to the behavior of international capital -- would help as well.

And in the meantime, we need to remind  the Monique Thibodeauxs of America that in addition to enjoying clean sheets in cheap hotels and bundles of fresh-picked produce, they owe far more to the long legacy of illegal immigration than they think.