Newsflash: We don't have a Black President, and jibes about the Sherrod debacle at the USDA.

WWW--Could the Obama administration have handled the whole affair worse by immediately capitulating to the GOP once again? Give them time, they'll find a way. It's obvious that the White House did call the Secretary of Agriculture (the decidedly Caucasian Tom Vilsack, since that's who gets hired at the USDA and stays on...) telling him to fire Shirley Sherrod from her USDA post over very carefully edited comments she made at an NAACP event that were posted on a conservative blog.

The whole media event is political theater predicated on misinforming the public and pushing a racist and classist agenda: the GOP gets to show that President Obama and his advisers will give into just about any of their demands, curious behavior for a president whose party currently holds a firm majority in both houses of Congress (for now), as well as making the first Black President look weak. He's doing a great job on his own, granted, but their agenda is a primarily racist one.

One of the worst things about all of this is that conservative propagandist Breitbart wasn't the first to discriminate against Sherrod, it was the USDA in 1985 when they refused to grant her and her husband a routine loan that white farmers almost always receive, possibly because they were Black farmers. Like many at the time, they lost their farm, but presumably not for the same reasons as white farmers. Discrimination at the USDA is well known. It wouldn't have been the first time racism hurt a Black American farmer at the USDA. The Department of Agriculture has engaged in institutionalized racism all the way back to its inception, but this mandate came from Congress, from the executive branch. I believe her story as a Black farmer is true. So, this isn't the first time that the USDA has failed Mrs. Sherrod and Black Americans, not by a long-shot.

A prediction: If the Obama administration continues down the same road, they can expect two years of a lame-duck presidency or collapse and a subsequent resignation. They will have earned it.

Will the GOP benefit from this? It doesn't appear so, but you never know, even with the phony "apologies." They could very well inch their numbers higher in Congress again. But be careful what you wish for, GOP: your last unfortunate president (George W. Bush for those with no memory), the man (with help from a GOP dominated Congress) who left us with a $10+ trillion national debt was still in office when the shit began hit with the economy and he went begging to Congress and even the president-elect for help. The first Wall Street bailout came under his last days of unprecedented Republican misrule, a well known fact. The Democrats generally let him do all of this and were his shadow enablers. Bush II left us with a wrecked economy, but without the assistance of the entire congressional GOP and many Democratic incumbents it wouldn't have been possible. Again: they let him do it. In sum, both major national parties own the current economic crisis and certainly aren't ever going to be a solution to it.

Like the manufactured ACORN scandal, conservative blogging played a major hand in all of this, and it was done with heavily and selectively edited video. Yet, there has been no accountability for any of these activities by right-wing operatives. It helps to have activist conservative judges on your side, already paid for. The corporate mainstream media has been extremely complicit in the dissemination of these memes and stories to the point that it cannot be a coincidence. Congress and the Obama administration not only "played" into their hands, they were complicit in the dismantling of a grass roots organization that registers Black and poor Americans (many of who are women and veterans, no less), people who don't tend to vote Republican. A Black President signed a bill that defunded them. This is really a story of the damage that GOP operatives are doing to our democracy and the right to vote, a desire to roll things back for Black Americans to a pre-1964 state, when a white supremacist culture could still prevent them from voting. It's also about a Democratic Party that doesn't care if they do. We seem to be going backwards in time as a nation and a culture. Not so long ago, it was a frightening proposition for Black Americans to vote, and in many parts of the continental United States, not just the South.

This began to change with the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (which the late Sen. Robert Byrd filibustered for 14 hours, losing) and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, two laws that have being routinely violated in several national elections, and without any real official reaction, never mind enforcement. Under the GOP, that's predictable, but the Democrats haven't shown any substantial enthusiasm to curb it. These pre-1964 practices have returned and the need for a new Civil Rights movement is clear, besides the need for serious investigations into actions committed by various GOP operatives to disenfranchise American citizens.

But the DNC doesn't appear too concerned about poor Blacks having the right to vote any more than the franchise for poor whites and prison inmates. We might ask them why some time. The events at the USDA just underscores that institutional racism is alive-and-well in our era, even being implemented by Black Americans who have benefited from the aforementioned legislation and the sacrifices of the Civil Rights movement of the 1950s-70s. It's not just the GOP that wants to roll back the clock on civil rights. Both parties are taking orders from the same super rich interests that dominate this nation through the power of money, influence, and yes, criminal activity. Meanwhile, the political class looks the other way...unless the public won't have it anymore. Why do you keep having it? Really?

Personally, were I Mrs. Sherrod, I'd mount multi-million dollar civil suits against not only Andrew Breitbart and his site and organization, I'd sue him personally and much of the mainstream media, as well as USDA chief Tom Vilsack and even Rahm Emanuel and the standing president. That would be just the beginning. It should be noted here that Mrs. Sherrod was an activist for SNCC during the Civil Rights era, meaning it's very likely that at one time she helped register frightened, poor Blacks in the South to vote. This is all about white hate and institutionalized racism, make no mistake about it. She was targeted. CNN's Wolf Blitzer--after profuse "apologies"--just referred to the Sherrod story (Breitbart's take) as "too good to be true." He should be on the list of defendants too.

Shirley Sherrod, community activist and ally of small farmers, including white ones: http://www.cltnetwork.org/index.php?fuseaction=Blog.dspBlogPost&postID=1389

Why we should be happy that the racists are out of the closet

WWW--There's a theme I keep coming across with some of my compatriots on the progressive left, and I think that it's unnecessary: the fear of traditional American racism coming out of the closet. These people are literally the lunatic fringe now, but they're white and they're loud, if not proud (OK, they're that too, just without any basis). The problem--mainly--is our reaction to them, and reaction in itself is the problem, there's too much of it. We need to be more proactive about these people rather than reactive, and that's not an endorsement of Scientology. That's why I support the legal actions of the SPLC and its director, Morris Dees. His targets seem to understand intuitively, as some of the mentally ill do, that he's got their number and that he's using the proper cure. This provokes very dramatic responses.

Just looking at the words behind the anagram tells you where they're coming from at the SPLC: The Southern Poverty Legal Center. I have had great admiration for Mr. Dees and his work for ages, and the key to his work and that of his great staff has been in tracking these groups and bringing them to the attention of the public while going after the very worst, the most dangerous of them, in the courts rather than in the streets where they're only going to be emboldened by physical attacks. Hate movements thrive on the victim mentality, but we should also remember that these folks are victims in their own right, frequently victims of poverty that breeds this form of mental dysfunction. Dees knows that this isn't simply a Southern problem, but an American one, and while it is a bit alarming that these groups have grown in numbers since the election of a black president, it's also a reason to be thankful for the fact that we have one. They're out of hiding and easy targets again, just as they became so in the 1960s. They were always out there, their number haven't really grown.

The Civil Rights movement of that decade (really beginning in the mid-1950s and cresting roughly ten years later) brought the flat-heads out of the woodwork. The ranks of the KKK swelled as they had with the great influx of European immigration during the 1920s and "White Citizens Council" offices sprang-up everywhere...and they lost, badly, to the civil rights workers and activists because history and moral authority weren't on their side. Crucially, the federal government was pressured into action and the FBI unwillingly had to conduct a barely submerged war on the Klan and other hate groups. Indeed, non-violence proved to be a vital tactic, but so too did African-American groups like the Deacons for Justice and the original Black Panthers in the South with their militancy and their rifle clubs, meant to protect black communities from terror tactics. But the real fight was won in the legislative arena and the courts and the laws are still on the books to this day and aren't likely to be rolled-back anytime soon. That's not to say we shouldn't be vigilant, however.

In the 1990s, the late Stokely Carmichael, one of the founders of SNCC and one of the central players in the rise of black nationalism said that the problem had become deeper, that racism had "gone into hiding" and was therefore harder to combat, and he was right. Racism became institutionalized and very much a phantasm, a free-floating force that was almost impossible to pinpoint, let alone to fight with traditional methods. That has changed now that the loons have come out of the woodwork and are now shooting their mouths off, not to mention committing some very heinous acts of violence again. But that's what people do when they're desperate and feel they have no other options. They'd better enjoy the fun while it lasts, because it's not going to for very long.

In other words, they feel very threatened in their racist beliefs and identities, and that's a good thing since those culturally pathogenic personalities can ultimately be isolated and marginalized out of existence. These small, reactive faux-personalities--once again--intuit this and that's when the fear comes, when the ego externalizes its innermost and darkest tendencies. The shadow side externalizing itself can be dealt with by civil society more easily. Now they're visible targets, even their goons they've embedded within the military. But we tend to take these revelations the wrong way, we react, and we become part of the fear. This is a mistake. We know who they are now, we have their number, and it's time to go round-'em-up when they misbehave. We can also make sure that they never come into being by fighting for social and economic justice. Poverty is a breeding ground for this kind of faux-personality.

A recent cross-burning in my community has had some alarmed, but I'm not especially worried. As much as I have a problem with the FBI on other issues, they're good at criminal investigations like this and they're likely to find out who was behind it. When-and-if they do, the perpetrators are going to be dragged into court and could face real jail time if not civil penalties, meaning heavy fines that have shut them down in the past. We should also keep in mind that not all rabid racists are poor and that this is a pathogenic cultural stream predicated on keeping things as they've been in America since the beginning: oligarchical and unequal. The name Tony Zirkle should come as a good example of the privileged racist flake.

Economic elites must become racists by-definition in order to hold onto that power, something that they're more-than-willing to do. The reality is that they're more frightened of the rest of us, these groups, and while it makes them dangerous, they're still marginal. Nonetheless, vigilance and awareness is the key, and now we have the added advantage of visible targets.