Thursday, September 9, 2010

The View From India

Vijay Prashad tamps our politics into a nice neat brick in a piece entitled "White Fright".

The far Right is making a bid to use the average American's economic frustrations in its campaign against the minorities and immigrants.

This may be the most succinct single paragraph I've seen:

Barack Obama's election was a blow to white supremacy. No longer could it be said that the highest reaches of American society were out of bounds to non-whites. It rattled the cages of hardened racists. Protests came fast on the heels of the election. Those who refused to believe that a black man could be President of the U.S. sought fantastic reasons to deny reality: that Obama was not born in the U.S. (a criterion for the office) and that Obama was secretly a Muslim (until now not a disqualification for the office). Having inherited an economic and foreign policy mess, Obama did not articulate a plan that generated confidence among the large section of the American middle class that saw its jobs and its wealth disappear (one indication of the lack of trust in the future is the decline in the birth rate since 2007). The unemployment rate continued to rise, and home foreclosures seemed unstoppable. The general drift in the country was fodder for the growth of small protests, whose presence attracted the attention of Washington's far-Right organisations and the money of the sturdy pillars of the far Right. Former Congressman Dick Armey's FreedomWorks gave its activists to the nascent Tea Party, and rising figures in the Republican Party, such as Sarah Palin, offered themselves as its leaders. They were funded by such figures as David and Charles Koch, owners of Koch Industries, the second largest private firm in the U.S. (after the agro-business behemoth Cargill). The grass-roots protests soon became astroturf events.

Why can't our "press" do that? We always seem to get the clearest view from afar.

Much more.

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