Bruce Dixon's Open Salon Blog

Obama, Corey Booker Both Love Bain Capital

Thu, 24 May 2012 13:05:36 -0400

Did Newark mayor Corey Booker really cross the Obama campaign when he defended vampire capital companies like Romney's Bain? Or was he just being truer to his own, and Obama's roots than presidents and their surrogates ought to be in an election year?

Don't Be Fooled. Corey Booker, Barack Obama & the Whole Black Political Class Love Bain Capital

by BAR managing editor Bruce A. Dixon

Barack Obama, Corey Booker and the entire black political class have a problem. They must deliver the votes of their people to the campaign contributors who make their careers possible. Their voters oppose unjust wars, privatizations of public assets and services, and corporate bailouts. Once safely in office, these are exactly the measures Obama, Booker and their colleagues enact. But right now Barack Obama and other Democrats need to be re-elected, and to be re-elected they must pose at least as half-hearted opponents of the bloodsucking model of parasitic venture capital practiced by Bain Capital, J.P. Morgan and other players..

It's not an easy act to sell, and sometimes Obama and his surrogates are caught in their own tangled webs. Romney's Bain Capital, like other vampire capital firms like it don't just have relations with Democrats as well as Republicans. They have deep institutional and personal ties with leading members of the nation's black political class. Bain's business models, along with reams of their business advice in the forms of pro bono “transition” and “turnaround” reports recommending the mass firings of public workers, especially teachers, and the wholesale privatization of local water, government payrolls, parking meters, garbage pickup, parks and recreation departments, and everything that can or cannot be nailed down have been common staples on the desks of incoming black mayors in Newark, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Columbia SC, Atlanta and other cities.

When former Atlanta mayor Shirley Franklin swept into office in 2005 her pro-bono transition report was “the Bain Report” put together by Mitt Romney's colleagues intent on turning government services into lucrative business opportunities and pocketing the money saved by firing workers, reducing their benefits and eliminating their pensions while jacking user fees for the public to the maximum sustainable levels. Fortunately for Atlanta, the water privatization deal already done by her predecessor unraveled in spectacular fashion just as Franklin was entering office, creating a less favorable atmosphere for other immediate privatizations. Out of office, Franklin is a lobbyist and consultant to firms specializing in the privatization of education and government services of all kinds.

On last week's Meet The Press, Newark mayor Corey Booker rose to the defense of parasitic venture capital, declaring himself disgusted at what he called the useless rhetoric about how the nation's bloodsucking financial sector extracted its profits. Booker has his own relations with Bain and similar outfits, and looting the public sector at their behest is at the very center of his mayoral administration. You wouldn't know it from the national media coverage, but Corey Booker has been a relentless advocate of privatizing the city's water, parks, garbage collection and a whole range of public assets and services --- implementing the vampire capitalist model in Newark.

It's not easy either, for Barack Obama to pretend to be against what Bain Capital does, when his former chief of staff William Daley, brother and son to longtime Chicago mayors and one of the guys who wrote NAFTA, was a vice president at J.P. Morgan, a much bigger shark swimming in the same pool as Bain Capital. The Obama administration and its advisory bodies are riddled on every level with hundreds of vice presidents, lobbyists and functionaries of vampire capital. Barack Obama knows where his real allegiances lie, and what time of year this is. He'll score a few rhetorical points at the expense of Bain Capital. But his heart belongs to J.P. Morgan. He knows, and we should know, that talk is cheap.

For Black Agenda Radio, I'm Bruce Dixon. Find us on the web at www.blackagendareport.com.

Find the audio of this commentary here. And much more on Black Agenda Report, at www.blackagendareport.com.

GA Prisoners Stage Peaceful 1-Day Strike, Authorities React

Thu, 9 Dec 2010 15:12:09 -0500

In an action which is unprecedented on several levels, black, brown and white inmates of Georgia's notorious state prison system are standing together for a historic one day peaceful strike today, during which they are remaining in their cells, refusing work and other assignments and activities. This is a groundbreaking event not only because inmates are standing up for themselves and their own human rughts, but because prisoners are setting an example by reaching across racial boundaries which, in prisons, have historically been used to pit oppressed communities against each other. PRESS RELEASE BELOW THE FOLD

The action is taking place today in at least half a dozen of Georgia's more than one hundred state prisons, correctional facilities, work camps, county prisons and other correctional facilities. We have unconfirmed reports that authorities at Macon State prison have aggressively responded to the strike by sending tactical squads in to rough up and menace inmates.

Outside calls from concerned citizens and news media will tend to stay the hand of prison authorities who may tend to react with reckless and brutal aggression. So calls to the warden's office of the following Georgia State Prisons expressing concern for the welfare of the prisoners during this and the next few days are welcome.

Macon State Prison is 978-472-3900.

Hays State Prison is at (706) 857-0400

Telfair State prison is 229-868-7721

Baldwin State Prison is at (478) 445- 5218

Valdosta State Prison is 229-333-7900

Smith State Prison is at (912) 654-5000

The Georgia Department of Corrections is at http://www.dcor.state.ga.us and their phone number is 478-992-5246

This is all the news we have for now, more coming.

One in every thirteen adults in the state of Georgia is in prison, on parole or probation or some form of court or correctional supervision. For press release including prisoner demands and contacts, click here.

Obama's Georgia Nukes Selectively Penalize Black Communities

Wed, 3 Mar 2010 18:03:02 -0500

By BAR managing editor Bruce A. Dixon

Can a black president be guilty of environmental racism? President Obama's new proposed nukes are in one of the poorest areas east of the Mississippi. Burke County Georgia is majority black, the home of existing commercial nuclear reactors and directly across the river from the Savannah River nuclear weapons facility. Its river is the 4^th most polluted in the nation, and its residents are suffering a veritable epidemic of unexplained cancers, with no local, federal, public or private funds available to test their air, soil, water or environment for its causes. But Burke County's residents are neither silent nor powerless.

Obama's Georgia Nukes Selectively Penalize Black Communities. Is That Environmental Racism?

By BAR managing editor Bruce A. Dixon

President Obama's proposal to place a pair of new reactors in a majority black Georgia town a mere 4 miles from the existing nuclear weapons site at Savannah River and next door to Georgia Power's existing nukes at Vogtle selectively penalizes and endangers poor black communities and will cost black lives. When the president and his nuclear industry donors try to pass off these new Georgia nukes as a job creation measure for one of the poorest counties east of the Mississippi, their hypocrisy and cynicism are transparent and inescapable.

The Savannah River, which flows between the nuclear weapons site on the South Carolina side, and the existing and proposed electric utility reactors on the Georgia side is already a SuperFund site and the 4 ^th most toxic river in the nation, according to the EPA. Until 2003 the federal government funded limited testing of the air, water and wildlife on the South Carolina side adjacent to the weapons plant, but this funding was discontinued during the Bush administration. As far as we know, nobody tests the air, ground water, wildlife or humans living on the Georgia side of the river, or near Georgia Power's existing reactors. But local residents do say there is a cancer epidemic in Waynesboro.

“I lost a brother, a cousin, a sister to cancer, and my daddy... My mother had cancer when she died in her old age.” said Claude Howard, assistant pastor at Fairfield Missionary Baptist Church to the Georgia Green Party's Hugh Esco at a public meeting called by Georgia WAND in Waynesboro Monday. Rev. Howard's deceased brother worked at nuclear Plant Vogtle. “I'm here now, concerned about the environment, about nuclear waste from Plant Vogtle by the riverside, about the amount of tritium and whatever other chemical agents are getting in our water supply.” Rev. Howard's family, like many others in Burke County, depend on wells fed by ground water which may have been contaminated by leaks of radioactive tritium from the area's multiple nukes.

But Waynesboro, with a population of about 6,000, cannot afford to test the air and water. So far, no help is coming from Burke County or the state of Georgia either. The utility companies who make millions off their existing reactors at Vogtle, and to whom the Obama Administration wants to give $8 billion in free money for more nukes are under little or no obligation to test the air, the ground water, the local environment or the local population. Their only obligations are to their stockholders and the gods of profit.

“We're just caught in the middle of it,” declared Annie Laura Stephens, another Waynesboro resident. “We don't have a lot of money for legal (expenses) but we have put out a lot... But they have more money and expertise than we have. All we have is just Jesus.”

In truth, Burke County residents do have a little more. They have each other, and neighbors outside the county. Georgia WAND is assisting Burke County residents in mounting legal challenges to the construction permits for the new nukes. If these fail, WAND's Bobbie Paul assured us, they will fight the operating permits in court. Stephens is active in WAND.

President Obama notes that these will be the first new U.S. nuclear reactors in decades, but he never says why. In the 70s and 80s the dangers of nuclear reactors and the fraudulent claims the nuclear industry became obvious to the insurance industry, to Wall Street and to the American public. Private sector insurers looked at Three Mile Island and Chernobyl, and saw infinitely large potential liabilities. Wall Street, even without catastrophic accidents and without environmental testing that might hint at the existence and causes of cancer clusters in local populations, balked at construction costs which often doubled or tripled in the few cases that public outcries allowed construction to proceed at all. The bottom line is that nukes are inherently dangerous and ridiculously expensive. Even when there are are no accidents and no studies to detect local contamination, nuclear plants produce radioactive wastes that remain lethal for tens of thousands of years. With the pyramids less than 5,000 years old, it's hard to take seriously the notion that government and the nuclear industry can safely contain them.

There is a general principle of capitalist economics called “externalizing” your costs. When you're Nike and you pay your Vietnamese workforce twenty-five cents an hour, you've profitably “externalized” or shifted your costs onto the families of those workers. When you're a factory owner spewing your waste into the environment for someone else to clean up or suffer from you've “externalized” or transferred a piece of your cost onto the local public in the case, for example, of downstream water pollution, or onto the people in another country entirely as in the case of global climate change.

Environmental racism occurs when the powers that be single out poor nonwhite communities to bear the human and environmental costs that make their super profits possible. It's not as though the president and the nuclear industry don't know they've targeted a majority black and very poor community. The presidential announcement last month and his appearances at places like Savannah State University this week are replete with references to jobs, jobs and more jobs, as if the nuclear industry were in the business of creating employment opportunities in places like Burke County GA.

The truth is that most of the local jobs at nuke plants occur during construction, and bitter experience tells us that building something in a black community is no guarantee that the construction workers will be black. The only guarantee, if Obama's new nukes are built in Burke County Georgia, is that local black residents will pay a high price in sickness and early deaths from cancer, in their inability to drink from their own wells, fish from their own streams or eat the food from their own gardens. Black Agenda Report asked Hugh Esco, a state committee member of the Georgia Green Party whether this was environmental racism.

"It is hard to avoid concluding that racism is at the center when you're confronted with the economic and health statistics endured by those living in sacrifice zones like Shell Bluff. Obama would not be the first black face who has fronted for white supremacy and white privilege, nor would this be the first time he has done so. The president has proven whose side he is on."

"We're grateful to Georgia WAND, for calling us together today," said Esco. "The Shell Bluff community has already formed a concerned citizens group, and I hope the Green Party of Georgia can find ways to support this local organizing by Burke County residents to get their air and water tested, to trace this apparent cancer cluster in the midst of all these nuclear weapons and power installations back to its source, and to stop the president's new nukes. The residents of Burke County have been penalized enough. It's high time the nuclear industry met the fate the markets long ago determined was appropriate, to cut off their corporate welfare and not prop them up for another generation."

Bruce A. Dixon is managing editor of Black Agenda Report, and a member of the GA Green Party state committee. Thanks to Hugh Esco for interviewing Rev. Howard and Ms. Stephens.

Why I Won't Give A Nickel To Haiti Thru The Red Cross

Thu, 21 Jan 2010 13:01:12 -0500

This will be quick and dirty. I wrote another, also hurried version of this for my weekly column at Black Agenda Report, but will take another lick at it here on OS.

I will not ever give a nickel to the Red Cross for anything, because I remember what they did with some of the millions they received immediately after Katrina. The Red Cross used donated money to prevent the re-establishment of the centuries-old African American communties of New Orleans by deliberately dispersing tens, perhaps hundreds of thousands of nearly all black New Orleans evacuees to the four corners of the continental U.S.

I took a couple days off to drive down to Baton Rouge the week after Katrina to interview evacuees in the city's two biggest shelters, at Southern University and at the city's convention center.

The shelters were easy to find because of the mile long line of buses pointing to each one, buses which were filled by the "transportation coordinator," whose office was the busiest point at the shelters. For folks with high status jobs and checkable references (in New Orleans context that meant a master chef, at a well known restaurant) I saw them line up employment offers in NY, LA and Detroit, put plane tickets for the whole family in hand and call a cab to the airport.

For everybody else, the only answer was "Get on the bus." Evacuees were understandably dazed and disoriented, having been scooped out of floodwaters, off rooftops and overpasses and the like, abruptly cut off from families, lives and communities. Finding out what happened to the rest of their families and friends seemed to be uppermost on their minds. When they could focus at all on the future, they wondered how and whether they'd ever be able to go back, or whether there would be anything to go back to.

I talked to a couple evacuees, and several of the administrators of both shelters. Evacuees felt themselves pressured to get on the buses, though they had contradictory info on where they were headed, and some where already wondering if they would ever be allowed back. There were reports too, that the buses were not being allowed to stop anyplace short of Houston, and many were going much further.

Shelter admins, all the ones I talked to were white of course, looked at the crowd and told me the best thing was to send them anywhere away from here. Look at them, said one. What have they got to go back to? This (dispersal, though she didn't use that word) is the best option for them. While these people told themselves they had good intentions, they obviously did not value the evacuees the way they valued themselves, and certainly placed no special value on the communities they came from.

Obviously the decision was made higher up than these people. The Red Cross is notoriously chummy with business elites local and national, so it would surprise nobody that the same business interests who thought clearing the projects and much of black New Orleans out was a great chance to re-imagine the city were able to enlist the Red Cross in making it all possible.

If the American Red Cross didn't value the lives and communities of black US citizens, what makes anybody think they will value the lives and communties of black Haitians? If the Red Cross was willing to put implementation of elite business plans before protecting communities in New Orleans, what do you imagine they'll do in Haiti?

The Heritage Foundation, within hours of the earthquake was crowing that this was another shock-doctrine disaster-capitalism opportunity to further remake Haiti's society and economy in the interest of US business. They'll already be using my tax money to do that with the US military. They're not getting my donations to do it with the Red Cross too.

I will find responsible people to donate to who respect Haitians and their communities, and give to those. But not to the Red Cross.

Is the Nigerian "Terrorist" Apprehended in Detroit A Patsy?

Thu, 31 Dec 2009 15:12:08 -0500

This video at RTV, Russian TV asks the question media in the US will not. Is the guy a patsy?

He is supposed to be an engineering student AND a "trained" terrorist. What kind of engineer doesn't know the difference between a device that might take down a plane and one that would just set his lap on fire?

He paid cash for his ticket in Ghana and had no checked baggage. All over the world they pull people into rooms to question and search them all the time for stuff like this. But not this guy.

He had a multiple entry US visa but showed neither it or his passport to get on the last leg to the US. Anybody who's been to Europe knows they have multiple layers of screening, much tougher than in the US. How did he get on there with no passport, no visa and no checked bags?

Is he another incompetent mope manipulated to cause a "terror" incident so the authorities can

(1) whip up fear, the same way they used to with color-coded alerts

(2) claim "the system worked" and lobby for more restrictions on civil liberties, more surveillance of civilians, more militarization of life in the US

(3) justify US intervention in West Africa, from where almost 20% of US oil imports flow

(4) justify US intervention in Yemen, where the drones and cruise missiles are already bombing and our mercs and special forces are already kidnapping and murdering...

Maybe his job was not to bring the plane down, but to cause a useful incident so that the prez and his people can continue pretending there is a vast shadowy network out there that hates us becuz of our freedom, or something like that...