the Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez victory in NYC proves once again that we CAN elect progressives to public office from time to time. But what then? The left has no institutions with whi9ch to hold them accountable.

Sure We Can Elect The Occasional Democrat Progressive. Then What?

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 In 1916 a socialist ran for president of the United States. The US Post Office, stretching bck to the American Revolution, had always granted free or nearly free postage for newspapers and magazines, so socialist tracts and magazines had subscription lists in the millions. The 1916 socialist candidate got 600,000 votes, about 3% of the total. The first World War was on the horizon, and socialists opposed that war, viewing it as a conflict between empires in which ordinary people had no stake. So the US government ended postal subsidies for newspapers and magazines.  In 1920, another socialist, Eugene Victor Debs ran for president. By then a widespread crackdown on socialists in public life was underway, and Debs was imprisoned for his opposition to World War 1. Debs got 900,000 votes, 4% of the total cast from his cell in a federal prison in Indiana.  In 1924 another socialist, Robert LaFollette ran for president on the ticket of the Progressive Party and got 5 million votes, one sixth of the total votes cast for president that year.  The establishment was in a sort of panic. The lords of capital, the bankers, the industrialists, represented today as they were a hundred years ago by the Democrats and the Republicans were not about to allow themselves to be simply voted out of power. So they passed a briar patch of restrictive laws on the state level to make it increasingly difficult or impossible for socialist candidates to get on the ballot in the first place.  The most effective of these laws, which are still with us today, are the petitioning laws, rules which do not apply to Republican or to Democratic parties or their candidates, but only to other parties whom voters might go for if only they were allowed access to the ballot. Having been law for a hundred years now, most people have forgotten the purpose of these laws or are simply not aware of them at all. But they are still on the books and with some variations, still enforced in about half the 50 states.  For all its faults and lapses, right now, in the years 2019 and 2020, the only national party that calls itself socialist – more precisely ecosocialist – outside the Democrats and Republicans and intent upon competing with them is the Green Party. And the Green Party is intent on organizing to break the two party monopoly on the ballot. It won’t be cheap and it won’t be easy, and it hasn’t been done nationally in the hundred years that the restrictive anti-socialist ballot access laws have been in place.  In Texas for instance, a party other than the Democrats or Republicans, whose ballot access is grandfathered in, must gather 83,000 signatures in 75 days, and they must be voters who have not recently voted in either a Republican or a Democratic party primary election. As a practical matter, this would require the full time mobilization of about 200 signature collectors dispersed around the state for ten and a half weeks. It’s not impossible, but it is expensive and difficult.  In Georgia, a state with less than half the population of Texas, new parties are required to gather a little over 65,000 signatures over a 14 month period. This is what’s called a party petition, since it allows a qualifying party to place candidates via nomination at a state convention. Georgia also separates congressional elections from all others, so a more restrictive rule applies to congressional candidates, who must produce 18 to 24 thousand petition signatures of qualified registered voters. Like many other states, Georgia law also provides a presidential-only petition, with a much lower requirement of only 7,500 signatures, but presidential-only petitions actually prevent the building of local party organizations, since they do not allow for the running of candidates for local office.  Alabama requires 51,500 signatures to put a new party on the ballot with the ability to name candidates for all partisan elected offices, but a much lower threshold for presidential only campaigns. Generally Greens prefer not to run presidential only campaigns for the quite sensible reason that building local electoral power requires local candidates and local campaigns, in addition to somebody at the top of the ticket.  Tennessee law demands the Greens come up with 56,000 signatures for party access to the ballot; Ohio, 43,200; Indiana 42,900; Oklahoma 35,600; and Illinois 25,000 signatures in 90 says, and this is far from a complete list of even the worse offenders. Again, most of states allow lower petitioning thresholds for presidential-only campaigns. The most extreme example is Minnesota, which requires only 2,000 signatures for a presidential-candidate-only ballot access, but demands more than a hundred thousand signatures to allow a party to nominate local candidates throughout the state.  Greens will not formally choose their presidential candidate until the summer of 2020, but the presumptive nominee is New York’s Howie Hawkins, a retired teamster out of Syracuse who was one of the party’s founders and the first candidate of any party to campaign on the Green New Deal. Hawkins is the only one of the Green candidates to have put together a team and begun to raise the $3 to $5 million it will take to run a credible campaign in 2019 and 2020. Ballot access is the key. Without breaking the century old ballot access barriers which the capitalist parties have erected against challenges from the left the Greens or any other socialists are going nowhere fast.  The battle for national ballot access for the Green Party will require about 1.2 million petition signatures nationwide, a load of organizing talent and a good $2 million dollars. The talent is mostly there, the money has to be raised, beginning now. By the summer of 2020 when Democrats kick Bernie Sanders to the curb again it will be too late. Petitioning deadlines in places like Arizona and Kansas fall in the early spring of 2020, so efforts in these and a dozen other states need to be off the ground in late fall and winter. There’s a reason these barriers have blocked socialist challengers from the ballot for a century now. It’s what they were designed to do.  HERE’S WHAT YOU CAN DO… Go to http://howiehawkins.us and take a look at what the Real Green New Deal, not the pale Democratic appropriation of the name is all about. Then drop some coin, make a donation to the only campaign dedicated to organizing a national attempt to break the restrictive ballot access regime wide open – that’s Howie Hawkins’ campaign. Know that once the Hawkins campaign gathers $5,000 in each of 20 states in donations of $250 and less it qualifies for matching funds from the Federal Elections Commission, a law that fearful Democrats are trying to scuttle in HR 1.  Your donation NOW helps us break the ballot access barrier in 2020. Even if you’re a one of those who calls yourself a Democrat and a socialist, your position inside the capitalist party can only be strengthened by the existence of a viable left OUTSIDE that party as well. And if Bernie or Bust busts again, you’ll be needing a new home. We’re building it now. Bernie has a plan B. It’s Joe Biden or Kamala Harris or Pete WhatsHisHame. What’s your plan B?  For Black Agenda Radio Commentaries I’m Bruce Dixon. In full disclosure, I’m a Green and a member of Howie Hawkins’ campaign committee too.  Black Agenda Report has been named by anonymous cowards as a tool of the Russians, so we are censored by Google and other corporate social media. That’s the way it works nowadays. The only way you can be sure you’re getting the latest news, commentary and analysis from the black left is to subscribe to our free weekly email newsletter, with links to all our newly published audio, video and print material neatly packaged for your reading listening and viewing convenience. To do this, visit us at www.blackagendareport.com, that’s www.blackagendareport.com and hit the subscrible button.  Thank you.

The Battle For Ballot Access is a Century Old. It's Time to Break it Open

 Joe Biden announced his candidacy for president last week. You might imagine that in the age of Bernie Sanders and Liz Warren, with some of the leading Democrats talking up free college tuition, the abolition of student debt, Medicare For All raising the minimum wage and taxing wealthy individuals and moonwalking even a little away from support of apartheid Israel that another frankly pro-corporate candidate would enter the race somewhere near the bottom of the polls. That would be right. You’d be imagining that.  In the real world, Joe Biden announced last week and the first three polls list him at the top of the field, leading Bernie Sanders by double digits, with everybody else in single digits. Ominously, in all three polls about half the voters favoring Biden are black voters. The obvious conclusion, supported by the fact that Biden’s first two campaign videos, are race themed, and the second one prominently includes Barack Obama, is that Biden’s popularity among black voters is a hangover from the blind and unconditional support those same voters gave to the Obama administration. In the case of Barack Obama the fumes were so strong that his actual record didn’t matter. Barack could bail out and immunize the banksters and the companies that manufactured fake paperwork to take hundreds of thousands of homes away from people, and support from his base did not waver. Barack could propose commissions to privatize social security, and rescue the insurance companies instead of delivering Medicare For All and his based still lined up behind him. Barack Obama’s “Race to the Top” program put more than 150,000 experienced black teachers out of work and closed thousands of public schools to make way for the privatization of education across the country, and black voters, including most of those former teachers, would have voted for him again.  Biden was Obama’s vice president. But Biden is not Obama. Even if Obama openly endorses him at some point, Biden has his own record, and it’s that of a consistent corporate stooge. particularly of the real estate and banking industries, and as one of the architects of the mass incarceration state.  Joe Biden didn’t just cast a vote for the 1994 Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act, also known as the Clinton Crime bill. Joe Biden wrote the bill, including but not limited to provisions that created no less than 60 new federal death penalty offenses a ban on Pell grants for prisoners, from which states took their cues and enacted similar bans on higher education for prisoners. $9 billion in new funding for prisons sex offender registries to ensure lifelong stigmatization of the convicted 3 strikes provisions new funding for “boot camps” and juvenile prisons funding for 100,000 new police officers  Biden’s bill resulted in a spike in mass incarceration which of course affected African American and Latinx communities more profoundly than any others. The damage to families and lives of course continues today.  For many years, Joe Biden was known as the Senator from MBNA, the giant credit card entity that was bought by Bank of American in 2006 and re-sold to Lloyd’s Bank UK in 2016. Biden was responsible for the provisions that made it impossible to discharge student debt via bankruptcy, thus shackling millions of people with ballooning student debt that lasts till their forties and fifties. Student debt of course weighs heaviest upon black women.  Joe Biden is an unwavering supporter of apartheid Israel, just like his buddy Barack, and an unrepentant warmonger like just about all of his Democrat colleagues in the House, the Senate, and among presidential candidates. Until Biden’s entrance, Bernie Sanders was the clear Democratic front runner. That’s over. The polls haven’t broken Biden’s black support by age, but it’s safe to assume that Bernie still leads among younger black voters, while Biden’s voters tend to be older.  After promising for two years and failing to deliver Trump and his crew in handcuffs over imaginary collusion with the Russians, it’s hard to see how any Democrat wins in 2020. Even Bernie Sanders did his best to spread the RussiaGate nonsense. And while Bernie is likely the best candidate against Trump (my opinion – not the pollsters) the big lmoney guys from the telecoms, the military contractors, the real estate and banking and Big Pharma will surely line up behind their dependable Uncle Joe. They would rather lose with Biden than win with Bernie.  The key to popping the Biden Balloon is getting past the warm and fuzzy Obama hangover, and drilling down into Biden’s actual record as a corporate stooge, a warmonger, an architect of the prison state, a foe of Medicare For All and a servant of the predatory banking industry which has saddled a generation with unpayable student debt. Most of the Democratic hopefuls though cannot do this, because they too are on the same corporate tit as Joe Biden, which is a telling indictment of the Democratic party, and why I and others are trying to build another party outside of and independent of the corporate-run Republicans and Democrats.  For Black Agenda Radio Commentaries I’m Bruce Dixon. Find our audio podcasts – there are two of them, Black Agenda Radio and Black Agenda Radio Commentaries on iTunes, Stitcher, SoundCloud, Libsyn or wherever you get your podcasts.  Please do know that Black Agenda Report is being censored by Google and other commercial social media, and has been singled out by anonymous cowards who, accuse us of making propaganda for the Russians. So please do like us on Facebook, follow us on Twitter and all, but old fashioned email direct from us to you is the only way to guarantee you’re receiving the fresh news, commentary and analysis from the black left that Black Agenda Report has delivered each and every week since 2006. So please visit our web site at www.blackagendareport.com and hit the subscribe button to receive our free weekly email newsletter containing weekly summaries of and links to all our weekly posted print, audio and video content neatly packaged for your listening and sharing convenience.  To comment on our material, join the conversation on our Facebook page, or send us email to comments(at)blackagendareport.com, or you can message us on Twitter @blkagendareport.  Bruce A. Dixon is managing editor at Black Agenda Report, and a state committee member of the Georgia Green Party. He lives and works near Marietta GA and can be reached via email at bruce.dixon(at)blackagendareport. He answers email, and has also been known to answer tweets to @brucedixon.

Biden's Poll Balloon is Black Voters

 ADOS stands for American Descendants of Slaves, a group founded by Yvette Carnell and Antonio Moore, supposedly advocates of reparations for the descendants of Africans enslaved in the US. Moore is a former LA County prosecutor, Carnell a former US Senate staffer, and both have been blogging, Tweeting, YouTubing and fishing in the waters of corporate social media a good while now.  ADOS has strong ties to Republicans and racist white supremacists. Its co-founder Yvette Carnell sits on the board of the cynically misnamed Progressives For Immigration Reform, an outfit founded by noted white supremacist John Tanton, who’s been trying to manufacture black and so-called environmentalist organizations to parrot his racist views on immigration, eugenics and more since the 1970s. It’s a match made in heaven for PFIR, which has struggled to invent or find a black group to fly their crooked flag for four decades, and if things work out it’ll be a good career move for Carnell too. CNN, Fox News or ABC would be delighted to bring on a charismatic black commentator willing to spout Trumpist talking points interspersed with faux reparationist rhetoric. If Yvette does get a broadcast talking head job out of this, that might be the only piece of #tangibles2020 that comes out of the current presidential campaign.  We live in a nation where most people cannot find the countries their tax dollars pay to bomb every day on a map, a country where sixty million (mostly) white people voted for Trump. There’s no reason to imagine this proud North American ignorance of history, the planet and its people is confined to white Americans. When Barack Obama threatened to bomb Syria, polling showed that black people, always the least hawkish of US constituencies, were more inclined to war than their white neighbors. So the appearance of a social media savvy right wing black reparationist group, with hashtags like #lineagematters followed by 3 or 4 American flags, a group which claims the exclusion of Mexican, Central American, African and Caribbean immigrants is necessary to protect the livelihoods and social capital of black Americans should be no surprise.  Popular support for empire, such as can be obtained, depends, as we have observed before, on lots of fake news and fake history. ADOS embraces capitalism, empire and the American Exceptionalist ideology that goes with with it. Until now, black reparationists have aligned themselves with colonized people around the world. But true to its roots in social media and right wing politics, ADOS takes the short cut, to embrace the racist narrative of Zionism. ADOS leaders and followers routinely assert that US military, diplomatic, financial support of Israel’s apartheid regime are examples of “reparations for the Jews,” in support of its own reparations claim in the US. The Jews got theirs, ADOS followers say, pointing to Israel. It’s time we got ours. This is both telling and pernicious for all kinds of reasons.  The fact is that since the fall of the old regime in South Africa 25 years ago, Israel is the world’s premiere apartheid state, viciously persecuting Africans, Arabs and anybody else it deems not “Jewish,” however they define that. The fact is that Zionists, and the Zionist project was never about representing all Jews, or making a home for all Jews, or reparations for the persecuted. It has always been about using Jewish nationalism to establish a settler state. To depict a racist settler state as an example of restorative justice requires bottomless cynicism on the part of leaders who know better, and deep historical ignorance on the part of followers who don’t.  In the absence of real journalism, for which Julian Assange may be on his way to a Guantanamo torture cell for practicing, such narratives are easily disseminated on Twitter and YouTube, where the flat earthers, the moon landing skeptics, the birthers and the folks warning us about us about the lizard people all have big followings too. But none of them enjoy shoutouts from Cornel West, none of them try to wrap themselves in the just cause of reparations and none of them aim to affect the 2020 elections. ADOS does.  We’ll talk more about that some other time. As my colleague Glen Ford says, we need to pass HR 40. I agree. Ford says we need an extended debate among black people on just what reparations and restorative justice look like. That sounds sensible. But it’s hard to imagine how such an exchange 3can take place in an atmosphere of willful ignorance and disinformation. And somebody really should talk to brother Cornel.  For Black Agenda Radio Commentaries, I’m Bruce Dixon. Please find our audio products – two of them – Black Agenda Radio, a one hour weekly show hosted by Glen Ford and Nellie Bailey, and Black Agenda Radio Commentaries which are usually just me on iTunes, Stitcher, or wherever you get your audio podcasts. It helps if you leave a comment or review, even an emoji because that encourages other people to discover us.  Black Agenda Report publishes five to ten original print articles each and every week, as we have each week since October 2006, which you can find at www.blackagendareport.com, that’s www.blackagendareport.com. Our content is frequently suppressed by Google and other social media, so the only way you can guarantee you’re getting fresh news, commentary and analysis from the black left is to visit www.blackagendareport.com and hit the subscribe button to receive our free weekly email newsletter, with summaries of and links to all our weekly published print, audio and sometimes video content. You can also make a contribution there to support our ongoing work.  To comment on anything you hear or read at Black Agenda Report visit our Facebook page, or email us at comments@blackagendareport.com, that’s comments@blackagendareport.com.

Is the Apartheid Colonial Settler State of Israel “Reparations” For Jews? ADOS Thinks So.

 The Real Peace Candidate for 2020 Isn’t Tulsi Gabbard, It’s Howie Hawkins  by Bruce A. Dixon  Respectfully, my comrade and friend Danny Haiphong is wrong. Hawaii congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard is not a peace candidate. To extent that she diverges from the warlike bipartisan consensus that’s a good thing. But it’s not the job of the left to, in Danny’s’s words “nurture” or support Gabbard with campaign donations so she can get into the televised Democratic primary debates.  Danny Haiphong says he is neither a Democrat nor a Gabbard supporter and I believe him. That’s what makes his “sophisticated” – his word not mine – notion that the left needs to line up behind Gabbard utterly baffling. The plain truth is that whatever else the Democratic party may be, it is also one of the two permanent government parties of the US, a party of empire and war, despite the fact that a great number of Democratic voters are, for a multitude of reasons, opposed to imperial war.  But if Gabbard’s campaign can’t get votes and campaign contributions from those folks who envision themselves as being still inside the Democratic party, then hers is just another sheepdog candidacy. As I explained back in 2015…  “...the sheepdog candidate is charged with herding activists and voters back into the Democratic fold who might otherwise drift leftward and outside of the Democratic party, either staying home or trying to build something outside the two party box...  Gabbard fits this description to a T. Her antiwar rhetoric serves to herd left leaning voters and activists back under the big stinky Democratic tent with the likes of Kamala Harris, Cory Booker, Joe Biden, Rahm Emanuel and the rest, and keep them as always safely inside until the Democrats’ 2020 summer convention. By then, it will be way too late for the strenuous yearlong national organizing effort which the laws passed by Democrat and Republican politicians require to place a third party alternative on the ballot.  I do love and respect Danny. But we differ on this one. I won’t give a nickel to a sheepdogging Democrat, even one who some imagine to be a peace candidate.  A real peace candidate would be about the business of building a real peace party, not pulling us back into the party of war. The only 2020 presidential candidate who fits that description is Howie Hawkins, who announced the exploratory phase of his presidential campaign today in Washington DC.  Howie Hawkins has a practical and a workable vision of how the Green Party can be built into a sustainable and nationally competitive opposition party, not based upon the contributions of greedy corporations and billionaires like the Democrats and the Republicans, but on the modest and regular contributions, the dues of its members. If you’re reading the print version of this piece, there’s a link to the YouTube video of a workshop Howie and I did outlining how the process of how the Green Party can be transformed into a mass based sustainable party capable of contending for power across the country.  The Hawkins vision includes a yearlong grassroots organizing campaign to overcome the profoundly unjust legal barriers which Republican and Democratic politicians together have erected in almost half the states to prevent the Greens from competing against them in national and local elections. Unlike the regulations pertaining to Republicans and Democrats, these arbitrary, anti-democratic and unjust laws require Green Party candidates to present more than 800,000 voter signatures on paper petitions just to allow Green candidates for local, state and national office to appear on the ballot in about a third of the states. Texas requires 85,000 petition signatures, Georgia 65,000 signatures, Tennessee, 56,000 signatures, Alabama demands 51,000 signatures Ohio, 43,000 Indiana, 44,000 Illinois, 25,000 Oklahoma, 34,000 Minnesota requires an outrageous 147,000 signatures  just to name a few.  Many of these legal barriers to third parties appearing on the ballot have been in place for a century, and raised even higher whenever insurgent parties threatened to overcome them. What we were all taught in school to call “the two party system” is nothing more than the product of the two capitalist parties colluding with each other to continuously tweak the laws in such a manner as to protect themselves against competition. Competition from parties funded by people instead of billionaires, Competition from socialist and eco-socialist parties, competition from parties who stand for economic and racial justice at home and for peace abroad.  The latest legislative tweak aimed at kneecapping the Green Party was buried in the Democrats HR1, a provision that raised the amount Green presidential candidates needed to raise per state to qualify for matching funds from $5000 in small donations from each of 20 states to $25,000 in 20 states was endorsed and voted for by supposed socialist Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez and every other Democrat in the House of Representatives. Curiously none of the so-called progressive Democrats, nobody in the media, in civil rights industrial complex, none of our friends in DSA and certainly not Tulsi Gabbard or even Bernie Sanders have ever bothered to mention this cynical and longstanding piece of voter suppression. These unjust legal barriers to third parties on the ballot are the main reason most US voters don’t get to see Green candidates on the ballot for state legislature, for governor or local offices, or for president.  Howie Hawkins is 2020’s only real peace candidate because Howie is committed to the hard work of building a permanent peace and justice party from the bottom up, and putting it on the ballot nationwide, not just to running a one-shot sheepdog campaign and lining up behind whoever the capitalist war party eventually nominates. Howie has been in the movement longer than Gabbard has been alive, working against the Vietnam war as a teenager before joining the Marines in 1972 and taking part in the widespread antiwar movement inside the US military of that time. Hawkins worked with the Peace and Freedom Party in the 1970s, and as a construction worker building sustainable housing through the 1970s and as a community organizer in the 1980s while picking up a degree at Dartmouth, and worked as a Teamster at UPS until retiring last year. Along the way, Howie Hawkins was one of the founders of the Green Party, which was soon taken over by mostly white professionals who chose to follow the organizing models of Democrats and Republicans rather than that of socialist and working class parties around the world, resulting in the weak and largely ineffective Green Party we have all seen the last two decades. With the presidential candidacy of Howie Hawkins, the Green Party is transforming itself in to the fighting ecosocialist party that the current crisis demands.  Howie Hawkins was the first US candidate to run on a Green New Deal, in a 2010 campaign for NY governor, declaring that it was entirely possible and absolutely to zero out New York’s carbon emissions by 2030 while creating millions of new jobs and rehabbing millions of units of affordable housing along the way. He ran on the Green New Deal again in 2014 and 2018, and since then the phrase and concept have gone viral.  The Democrats always declare the current election is the most important of our lifetimes, and this time they’ll claim this one is too important to “waste your vote” on any candidate that won’t defeat Trump. But they’re the same party that wants us to believe the Russians fooled black folks into not voting for Hillary Clinton with a handful of Facebook ads, most of them published after the election. They’re the same folks who called Trump a traitor for meeting with North Korean leaders, and applaud him for being “presidential” when he bombs Syria. These are the same Democrats who raised Trumps already outrageous military budget another ten percent to show Boeing, Lockheed and the other military contractors that they were good friends too, and the same Democrats who join Republicans in backing the apartheid state of Israel. Democrats don’t have the solution to climate change, they can’t get behind Medicare For All, rent control, and couldn’t be bothered with enforcing the Voting Rights Act and the galaxy of existing anti-discrimination laws in housing, employment or anywhere else when they had power.  Our future, the future of our children and grandchildren, of our planet is too important to trust either of the two capitalist parties. It’s time to make a longer term plan than the next election, time to organize and build for the long fight ahead. It’s not a time to let sheepdogs herd us into doing what we’ve done so many times before. Instead of giving to sheepdog Tulsi Gabbard, we should be lining up with Howie Hawkins to build the kind of fighting ecosocialist party the times require.  Howie needs $5,000 in donations $250 and under in each of 20 states for his campaign to receive federal matching funds that will enable us to launch the yearlong ballot access campaign that will put the Green Party on the ballot in every state, and put us on the road to building a fighting party sustained and run by its members. Go to HowieHawkins.US to volunteer, and to give what you can now. The clock is ticking. For Black Agenda Radio Commentaries I’m Bruce Dixon. Find our audio podcasts – there are two of them, Black Agenda Radio and Black Agenda Radio Commentaries on iTunes, Stitcher, SoundCloud, Libsyn or wherever you get your podcasts. Please do know that Black Agenda Report is being censored by Google and other commercial social media, and has been singled out by anonymous cowards who accuse us of making propaganda for the Russians. So please do like us on Facebook, follow us on Twitter and all, but old fashioned email direct from us to you is the only way to guarantee you’re receiving the fresh news, commentary and analysis from the black left that Black Agenda Report has delivered each and every week since 2006. So please visit our web site at www.blackagendareport.com and hit the subscribe button to receive our free weekly email newsletter containing weekly summaries of and links to all our weekly posted print, audio and video content neatly packaged for your listening and sharing convenience. To comment on our material, join the conversation on our Facebook page, or send us email to comments(at)blackagendareport.com, or you can message us on Twitter @blkagendareport. Bruce A. Dixon is managing editor at Black Agenda Report, a state committee member of the Georgia Green Party, and a member of the Howie Hawkins Exploratory Campaign Committee. He lives and works near Marietta GA and can be reached via email at bruce.dixon(at)blackagendareport. He answers email, and has also been known to answer tweets to @brucedixon.  

Tulsi Gabbard is a Sheepdog; Greens' Howie Hawkins is 2020's ONly Real Peace Candidate

“ADOS followers throw away the internationalism of their forbears, embracing instead a sometimes polite, but always frank hostility toward immigrants of all nations on the grounds that they’re either economic competition for native-born blacks...” Why can’t y’all just decide to be what you already are – more like us – a white co-worker named Travis asked me in the early 1980s. He was a diehard Southern Baptist, Reagan was the president, and we were working at the Hammond Pullman plant, laying on our sides routing ducts and cabling in the tiny equipment rooms beneath Amtrak cars, talking politics and history. I’d just brought up the war in Vietnam, in which the US killed 3 million Vietnamese alone, and the murderous wars in Central America which were happening as we spoke. I probably threw in some references to the ongoing wars for liberation in southern Africa as well. But you were born here, Travis insisted. Your parents and grandparents were born here, not over there. You’re an American, just like me. What are those people to you? I never did get through to Travis. War crimes against black and brown people and a mountain of dead possibly communist foreigners meant nothing to him. His identity was not with humankind, certainly not with the working class, his White God and but with his white or mostly white tribe whose flag was the stars and stripes and which had been chosen to rule the world. In the decades since I have heard the same question posed a few more times. Why can’t black folks just be good Americans?Why shouldn’t we embrace empire and line up for our cut like everybody else? Well, now It looks now like Travis got his wish. There’s an internet current of US-born black people calling themselves ADOS, the American Descendants of Slaves who seem to be trying their level best to be the kind of Good Black Americans Travis talked about. The ADOS people claim to be relentless advocates of reparations for the crimes of slavery, Jim Crow, the prison state and more, but with an important right wing twist which sharply differentiates them from the previous generation of reparistas. ADOS followers throw away the internationalism of their forbears, embracing instead a sometimes polite, but always frank hostility toward immigrants of all nations on the grounds that they’re either economic competition for native-born blacks, that they’re stealing the affirmative action and similar spots which ought to go to native-born black Americans, or that they are somehow cashing in the accumulated moral and social capital which belongs to the US born descendants of slaves alone. It’s a tribal thing, #LineageMatters, ADOSers tell anybody listening, and anyone not a US born descendant of US slaves on both sides of the family is in some other tribe. Until last summer’s wave of revulsion at the deliberately cruel separation of refugee children from their parents at the border, the kindest sentiment you could find on ADOS Twitter feeds was the equivalent of “Latinos don’t stand up for us, why we gotta stand up for them?” Yvette Carnell and Antonio Moore, originators of the #ADOS name and hashtag would like us to believe ADOS is a movement. But that claim is made so often by so many canny self-promoters that it’s hard to take seriously without some kind of proof. Carnell has been doing podcasts, internet writing and commentary, and most reccently YouTube blogging the past several years, while Antonio Moore teaches economics at Duke University. They’ve got a web site at ados101.com and plan to hold a conference this fall in Louisville. “Yvette Carnell and Antonio Moore, originators of the #ADOS name and hashtag would like us to believe ADOS is a movement. But that claim is made so often by so many canny self-promoters that it’s hard to take seriously without some kind of proof….” Politically bankrupt black Democrats of the black political class don’t know what to make of #ADOS. CNN commentator and corporate lAngela Rye, following the lead of similarly enightened Democratic pundits, would like her audience to believe the ADOS message originates with the Russians. Rye is worse than clueless, she’s lazily chiming in behind the corrupt cops and the so-called intelligence community, a great deal of whom are also Democrats, who guarantee their own budgets and jobs by portraying Americans who disagree with the establishment as foreign-inspired traitors. It’s the RussiaGate scam. Democrats avoid responsibility for the failure of their party to reliably represent anybody but the lords of capital by accusing anybody with unanswerable arguments or inconvenient facts of being mouthpieces for foreign subversion. It’s cynical BS when they level it at the Green Party, or at Wikileaks and Julian Assange. It’s baseless garbage when they throw it at Black Agenda Report – and they have – and its errant nonsense when corporate lazy corporate hacks like Angela Rye throw it at ADOS. ADOSers don’t take money or direction and haven’t borrowed ideas from the Russians Their insular tribalism – and Yvette Carnell frequently refers to ADOS in terms of “our tribe” is entirely home grown and very very tribal. If you look, you can find its like just about anywhere on the planet. Like monarchy, it’s one of those ancient backward looking but widespread human social contraptions which belong in a museum. The reparations advocacy of ADOS departs from the previous generation of pro-reparations activists, who for convenience I’ll call the Pan Africanists, even though some of them are not. The historic vision and practice of the Pan Africanist movement flowed through the careers of Guinea’s , Ghana’s Kwame Nkrumah and the final years of W.E.B. DuBois’s life in Africa. Pan-Africanists had their own reparationist ideas, and by the late 70s and 80s significant numbers of Pan Africanists had entered the academy. They were influenced by the current traceable to SNCC’s James Forman who called on white US synagogues and churches to hand over $500 million as reparations to philanthropic organizations, printing and publishing enterprises and organizations that included the National Welfare Rights Organization. These reparistas, reparationists, whichever you prefer, kept the internationalist view of the Pan Africanists, even when they don’t identify as such. They embrace the entire human family, while holding that the political and economic unification of the African continent and the coordinated democratic uplift of the African Diaspora is a giant and indispensable step towards human liberation worldwide. Their fundamental moral and political calculus dictates solidarity, with Africans and their descendants worldwide, and with oppressed people struggling against imperialism everywhere. “So where, if anyplace will ADOS go from here? Right now it’s just internet noise. A lot of noise. If ADOSers have ever managed to put fifty or a hundred people in a room or anywhere in meatspace, not cyberspace it’s news to most of us….” ADOSers have taken a different road. Being tribalists rather than internationalists, ADOSers rarely mention the existence of class differences among American blacks. They usually manage to ignore the very existence the US empire in whose heartland they and their tribe were born and raised, let alone explain how that global capitalist generates the influx of refugees to which they object so vehemently, Obviously, the refusal to talk about class is a kind of class politics itself, while their inability or unwillingness to examine and acknowledge the role of empire is a de facto endorsement of the same. Opposing racist and capitalist empire is what a left would do, and ADOSers are NOT leftists. ADOSers are one of the home grown intellectual outcomes of what Adolph Reed calls the substitution of the neoliberal politics of antiracism in place of building an actual left. (IF YOU’RE LISTENING TO THIS YOU SHOULD FIND THE PRINT VERSION AT BLACKAGENDAREPORT.COM AND READ THE PIECE THE PHRASE LINKS TO.) ADOSers are in a permanent rage against Democrats, who they see as going out of their way to pander to every other constituency but black Americans who are owed reparations. What ADOSers miss of course is that while Democrats rhetorically pander to gays and Latinos every election cycle, they only deliver results to the lords of capital who fund their careers, to Big Insurance, Big Real Estate, Big Media, Big Energy, to Silcon Valley, military contractors, to charter school sugar daddies and hedge fund boyz and similar malefactors of great wealth. Candidate Barack Obama won the whopping majority of the Latino vote in 2008 and 2012 by promising a road to citizenship. But President Obama was the deporter-in-chief, delivering an all time record 2 million deportations during his eight years, so many that even a two-term Trump is unlikely to match is total cause there just aren’t enough undocumented people and green card holders accused of misdemeanors remaining who they can manufacture excuses to deport. President Obama separated immigrant families at the border and built hundreds of miles of border wall, leaving only the last six or seven hundred miles for his successor to complete. Obama opposed gay marriage in 2008, only coming around when election to a second term seemed certain. The pandering to other ethnic voting blocs that so enrages ADOSers is pretty much fakery, but as tribal folks will do, ADOSers seem to see only perceive the slights, the lies, the insults which are directed at them. ADOS leaders Carnell and Moore have probably never participated in, probably never seen a mass movement against unjust authority. As far as most of us know, they’ve never organized a new union or tried to take over a corrupt old one, never led a rent strike, never founded a cooperative, or gotten themselves arrested for defying unjust authority. There was a time when those sorts of credentials were required for aspiring black leaders. “ADOS is not a movement. It’s another hashtag, a brand. It’s shrunken, shriveled and tribal brand of reparations politics, tacitly endorsing US global empire and throwing shade on solidarity...” So where, if anyplace will ADOS go from here? Right now it’s just internet noise. A lot of noise. If ADOSers have ever managed to put fifty or a hundred people in a room or anywhere in meatspace, not cyberspace it’s news to most of us. What put #BLM on the map back in 2015 was their Cleveland conference, into which corporate philanthropists allied with the Democratic party sunk a cool million or two for hotel and conference rooms, travel expenses, food, entertainment, per diems, media production and the organizing person-hours to bring several thousand people into town for the affair. ADOS doesn’t have anywhere near that kind of money, and it’s hard to imagine who might fund them. Carnell and Moore are not about to turn ADOS into a membership supported organization. The only institution I know of with which they’ve cultivated actual ties are some sectors of the black church. But the black church’s pockets aren’t that deep and they don’t have a tradition of funding what would look to them like a political initiative, unlike the mainline Protestant churches who are shoveling money at the New Poor Peoples Campaign. ADOS is not a movement. It’s another hashtag, a brand. It’s shrunken, shriveled and tribal brand of reparations politics, tacitly endorsing US global empire and throwing shade on solidarity. Its backward looking tribalism, and hopefully its inability to find a way to finance growth into any kind of effective political force will doom it to haunt the margins of black twitter, YouTube celebrity, and some corners of the academy. If we’re lucky. For Black Agenda Radio Commentaries I’m Bruce Dixon. Find our audio podcasts – there are two of them, Black Agenda Radio and Black Agenda Radio Commentaries on iTunes, Stitcher, SoundCloud, Libsyn or wherever you get your podcasts. Please do know that Black Agenda Report is being censored by Google and other commercial social media, and has been singled out by anonymous cowards who, like Angela Rye does with ADOS, accuse us of making propaganda for the Russians. So please do like us on Facebook, follow us on Twitter and all, but old fashioned email direct frofm us to you is the only way to guarantee you’re receiving the fresh news, commentary and analysis from the black left that Black Agenda Report has delivered each and every week since 2006. So please visit our web site at www.blackagendareport.com and hit the subscribe button to receive our free weekly email newsletter containing weekly summaries of and links to all our weekly posted print, audio and video content neatly packaged for your listening and sharing convenience. To comment on our material, join the conversation on our Facebook page, or send us email to comments(at)blackagendareport.com, or you can message us on Twitter @blkagendareport. Bruce A. Dixon is managing editor at Black Agenda Report, and a state committee member of the Georgia Green Party. He lives and works near Marietta GA and can be reached via email at bruce.dixon(at)blackagendareport. He answers email, and has also been known to answer tweets to @brucedixon.  

Sure We Can Elect The Occasional Democrat Progressive. Then What?

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