Foreshadowed
by his roots and bottle-rocket-like rise, Barack Obama’s legacy is
one of betrayal and what might have been,… From the outset, he
courted and was courted by the pillars of counter-revolution, his
very blackness a cloak for his Manchurian mission.
by
Jon Jeter
Part
4 - The Empire fights back
The
assassination of Martin Luther King, coupled with the twilight of
American industry’s global dominance, ratcheted up both working
class militancy, and the elites’ crackdown on it. Mineworkers in
Appalachia and autoworkers in Detroit were fighting to reclaim their
trade unions from a reactionary leadership that was in bed with
management; communists were on the march in North Carolina, Black
Panthers in Oakland; militant white college students protested the
war in Berkeley, and black parents and teachers fought for community
control of their school curriculums in Brooklyn. Fred Hampton was
organizing black street gangs and black professionals, Latinos, poor
alienated white youths, and college students and blue-collar workers
of all races into a Rainbow Coalition intent on socialist revolution.
Black voters capitalized on white flight following the season of
unrest that began with the Watts riots to elect black mayors in
Detroit, Newark, Cleveland, Gary, and Atlanta, and Puerto Ricans
joined with Blacks and Italians to force the City University of New
York to guarantee admission and free tuition for every New York city
public high school graduate.
It took
all of three months.
With
Blacks accounting for a third of the country’s unionized workforce
and taking on leadership responsibilities to boot, organized labor’s
demand for a bigger share of the pie was causing wage inflation to
spike and, combined with the Arab world’s demands that the West pay
more for its oil, slicing into the oligarchs’ profit margins.
Something
had to be done.
The
Empire began fighting back. Nixon’s southern strategy, the FBI’s
counterintelligence program, and an infamous memo to the U.S. Chamber
of Commerce by Lewis Powell, whom Nixon would later appoint to the
Supreme Court, got the ball rolling, isolating the radical black
polity from polite society. New York City’s bankers and
corporate executives doubled down on polarizing racial narratives in
executing a takeover of New York City’s finances in 1975 —
scapegoating the pensions, wages and subsidies won by public sector
unions for a financial crisis triggered by an overheated real estate
market. That same year, the publisher of The Washington Post,
Katherine Graham, broke the pressman’s union to fatten profits for
Warren Buffett and other shareholders.
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