Malcolm X
On Tuesday, January 25, President Obama will deliver his third State of the
Union address. He is trying to rally his 2008 election supporters after seeing
millions of them stay home on Election Day 2010, thus handing the House of
Representatives back to the right-wing Republicans and barely holding an
edge in the Senate.
Unfortunately, he seems to continue to do everything that the opposing Party
wants him to do rather than completely reversing course to go in the
direction he again and again promised those millions of Progressives who
ultimately put him in office in January 2009.
As I thought about this during the past week, I realized that there was an
important indicator that this would happen during Obama's campaign days
in 2008. For two decades Obama had attended an activist church in
Chicago, dedicated to social and economic justice, the Trinity United
Church of Christ. His pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, was not afraid to
preach against American injustices and American hypocrisy. The right-
wing, so called "mainstream" media, were quick to jump on a couple of
Wright's "one-liners" and Obama in turn was quick to repudiate his
pastor of two decades.
It seems that, for Obama, with that repudiation also came a repudiation of
dealing directly, head-on, with some of the injustices, disparities, and
hypocrisies perpetuated by the American Government that the pastor had
been preaching about for all those years. Thus, the bailouts were not for
the working class, but for the billionaries and their corporations. The
immoral "detention" tortures of the Bush Administration are still taking
place and the world's most notorious prison at Guantanamo Bay is still
being used. The bedrock rights of free speech, press, and assembly are
continuing to be eroded and more illegal search and seizures are taking
place. And the U.S. continues to support in practice every brutal action
of the right-wing Israeli government against the virtually enslaved
Palestinians, including their latest threat to veto a UN Security Council
resolution condemning the ever expanding Israeli settlements, even
though the resolution is in harmony with U.S. rhetoric for the past 40
years. The U.S. also had been stepping up aid to the Tunisian dictator
before he was ousted during the past couple weeks, and continues to
mightily aid the Colombian government, with its death squad history
and misuse of "drug war" funds, while railing about the rise of "leftist"
governments in Latin America, whose leaders were democratically
elected (as in Gaza too), which process the U.S. claims to believe in.
What is most sad about all of this to millions of poor Americans is
that it was they who handed President Obama, in 2008, the most
golden opportunity since John F. Kennedy: to turn the United States
in a positive direction by focusing on closing the world's largest
income disparity gap; by ending reckless wars abroad and
transferring the billions spent on them into public services and
works; and by seeking to work with other countries as equals
instead as the world's cop with a billy club. Obama had "the
wind at his back," with the Republican Party discredited and
in a shambles, and millions of enthusiastic supporters who
thought this government would finally help them "get on their
feet," after being beaten down at the whim of the wealthy elite
during the previous eight years.
...But the President has let the oppression of the poorest and
most powerless get greater ... so what can he say ... and
more importantly ... do ... now?
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