An exclusive interview with Glen Ford Part 2

Obama’s is a corporate war mongering administration - exclusive interview with Glen Ford Part 2
Mar 7, 2013 13:29 Moscow Time

  The placing of a black man in the ultimate seat of power by the true corporate rulers of America was a pacifying face-lift and now black America is living with the worst, most profound, political crisis in history, a much deeper crisis than during the civil rights era and the time when Booker T. Washington and his advocates of accommodation with white supremacy clashed with W.E.B. Du Bois and the NAACP and the advocates of full equality for black people. This comes in an interview with Glen Ford by the VOR’s John Robles.

Robles: Obama has continued Bush’s policies although everybody thought there would be some return to sanity, if I may express it that way.

Ford: Not everybody, certainly we at Black Agenda Report didn’t think that. Obama has built on the Bush administration policies and added new dimensions of his own.

Although the doctrine of R2P, responsibility to protect, or humanitarian military intervention, existed prior to president Obama’s assumption of office, he has made that doctrine his own.

Humanitarian military intervention is designed to fundamentally undermine international law as it has evolved over 100s of years and especially as it was left to us in the wake of World War II.

At the heart of international law is the sovereignty of nations. If there is no sovereignty of nations, there really can be no sovereignty of peoples and individuals either. But humanitarian military intervention throws national sovereignty out of the window. It says that the world community and de facto that means the United States and its allies, can declare any regime to be unworthy of its people and therefore subject to regime change, and frame that as not a violation of the fundamental principles of international law, which it is, but as a good deed, as another step up in the ladder of civilization.

It has turned world international order, international law on its head and that is the advance in imperial ideology that Obama has wrought; building on George Bush’s depredations in the world.

Robles: Now more people are realizing this, do you think this is just going to continue until… What end? In your opinion, or do you think there is any chance that we can bring order back to the world somehow?

Ford: In terms of what people in the United States can do, the landscape looks rather bleak, polls show something like 83% of Americans are in favor of Obama’s drone assassination policy, which violates international law and US law in multiple ways.

So, to whatever extent people are depending upon US resistance to the United States government’s policies, they will be, I believe, quite disappointed.

This is made even more complicated because historically the most progressive constituency in the United States, by far, has been black America. This is shown by every study and just by the polls over the last several generations as long as black people have been polled. But with the elevation of a black man to the White House, that had the effect of short circuiting African American political sensibilities, instincts and behavior, so that just by installing, and of course Obama was Wall Street’s candidate, they have neutered the most anti-war constituency in the country.

White progressives in the United States historically have tended to follow black people’s cues and so when black folks are neutralized, that tends to neutralize white progressives as well, and that is why the political picture is so bleak in the United States.

That doesn’t mean that, what works in the United States doesn’t not necessarily determine, where history marches off to, but this is a bleak political situation here.

Robles: I had this impression, towards the end of the Bush regime there, that a lot of black Americans and minorities in general were almost ready to revolt, if you would. I mean things were getting pretty bad.

And I saw Obama comes in, he had no political base of his own, he was pretty much an unknown, he was pretty much placed in the White House. Do you think that was done to appease and, like you said, neutralize black elements?

Ford: It certainly had that effect domestically. I believe however that the folks who rule this country, and we are talking about multinational capital and we’re talking mainly about finance capital, Wall Street, they wanted to do a makeover, a cosmetic face-change, in the wake of the foreign policy debacles of the Bush administration, for international global purposes, to literally put a radically different face on US imperialism, and how better to do that than to put an African American in the White House. I think that audience was a global one.

Robles: It was. It was.

Ford: It had the added advantage, in terms of domestic politics, of neutralizing that domestic constituency. But, you know, it had similar effects in Africa and, I note, elsewhere in the non-white world: that somehow this black guy could not possibly be as bad as that Texas cowboy white man George Bush, and in fact he is far more effective.

We at Black Agenda Report describe Barack Obama as not the lesser of evils, but the more effective evil, because he gets away, with so much more.

Robles: And it is hard to criticize him, I mean if you are not black, people are afraid to say anything bad about him. Do you think that he plays on that?

Ford: Well, of course, he takes that for granted. In fact, early in 2009 a number of organizations, and I was involved with this, put together a coalition called The Black is Back Coalition.

We did so not just because there needed to be a black left coalition of forces, at this point in history, but also secondarily, but importantly, to give political cover to those white progressives who wanted to do a critique of this Obama-corporate-war-mongering-administration, so that they could point to the Black is Back Coalition and say, “Hey, don’t call me racist”, the Black is Back Coalition shares the same general world view. So, yes, it is important on that racial end as well.

Robles: How do African Americans feel about… and how do black people feel about, Obama? I mean: what is the general consensus?

Ford: We’ve been wrestling with that for more than 4 years now, more like 6 years since Obama became a viable topic for presidential talk.

What has occurred is black America at large has made an emotional commitment to the idea of a black president and to the success, whatever that means, of this black president.

So that any attack on him, any critique of him is perceived as an attack on black folks. Any attempt to rein him in, in his corporatist and belligerent war mongering policies is perceived by a large segment of black America as an attack on black America.

So we see that all of the political instincts that made black America unique and guided us in a progressive direction over all these generations, at the heart of which was our deep skepticism of power, because we knew what power had done to us. These instincts have been short-circuited by the implanting of a black person in the ultimate seat in power.

So, we are not having a discussion in black America of what Obama is doing, we have a discussion of “how he is doing” and that is profoundly different, it is a discussion of: who is attacking Obama, how Obama can be supported, what black America needs to do to beat back the racists who are attacking Obama. There is very, very, very negligible amount of discussion of what Obama’s policies, domestically and internationally do to us. How they harm interests that we saw as our own only 4-5 years ago.

This has created the worst, most profound, political crisis in black America, I believe, ever. I believe it is a much deeper crisis than, that which occurred at the turn of 20th century, between Booker T. Washington and his advocates of accommodation with white supremacy and W.E.B. Du Bois and the NAACP and the advocates of full equality for black folks at the time. That was one hell of a fight.

This is of a different nature. This is a crisis manifested in the breakdown of the black policy. So, it can not even do an analysis of the behavior of power, because the black man is sitting in that seat.

This is John Robles. I was speaking with Mr. Glen Ford, he is the Executive Editor at Black Agenda Report.

End of Part 2