Today's Stories

April 3-5, 2009

Kathy Kelly /
Brian Terrall
Getting a Closer Look at the Killer Drones

April 2, 2009

Robert Weissman
What If Obama Had Treated Detroit Like Wall Street?

Eric Toussaint /
Damien Millet
A G20 Meeting for Naught

George Bisharat
Israel's Impunity Must End

Russell Mokhiber
Something is Rotten at PBS

Franklin Lamb
Has Washington Lost Lebanon?

Gareth Porter
Settling Scores in Iraq: Maliki Draws US Troops into Crackdown on Sunni Rivals

David Macaray
Obama and the Ruling Class: "Only the Little People Pay Taxes"

Chris Genovali
B.C.'s Bloody Grizzly Hunt

Sam Smith
The Politics of Adulation

Suzan Mazur
Is Neo-Darwinism Dead?

Website of the Day
Fighting for Change in St. Louis

April 1, 2009

Chris Floyd
Surging Further Into the Afghan Abyss

Stanley Heller
Israeli War Crimes: Thank God, It Was Only Rumors

Mark Brenner, Mischa Gaus and Jane Slaughter Obama's Perilous Plan for Detroit: Restructure the Big 3, But Not With Bankruptcy

Jonathan Cook
The Slow Demise of Ehud Olmert

Eric Walberg
EU in Tatters: Only the Protesters Have Any Vision

Richard Morse
Why Haiti Can't Forget Its Past

Don Fitz
Guess Who Came to Dinner with a Match? Green Mayoral Candidate's Van Firebombed in St. Louis

Laray Polk
Texas and Evolution

Belén Fernández
12 Años de Soledad?

Harvey Wasserman
Cracking the Media Silence on Three Mile Island

Website of the Day
Pentagon Fraud Investigations Fell, While Contracts Soared

March 31, 2009

Uri Avnery
The Deception Tango

Peter Lee
Ghosts in the Machine: the World's Hottest Cyberwar Battlefield

Nicholas Dearden
A New Global Debt Crisis

Dave Lindorff
The Obama Betrayal

Joanne Mariner
"We'll Make You See Death"

Ron Jacobs
Obama's Pakistan Gambit

Wiliam S. Lind
Another Lost War

David Michael Green
Who Says the GOP Doesn't Have a Plan?

Benjamin Dangl
Beyond Elections in the Americas

Johnny Barber
Meditation in Orange

Dedrick Muhammad
Economic Inequality: the Foundation of the Racial Divide

Website of the Day
How the Obama Dems Took Over the Peace Movement

March 30, 2009

Michael Hudson
Financing the Empire: Do US Face G20 Mutiny?

Patrick Cockburn
What Next in Afghanistan?

Henry A. Giroux
Hard Lessons

Mike Whitney
Where's Eliot Spitzer Now That We Need Him?

Ralph Nader
Where's All the Money Coming From?

Paul Craig Roberts
Obama's War on the (Upper) Middle Class

Jeremy Scahill
The Logistical Nightmare in Iraq

Robert Bryce
The Cellulosic Ethanol Delusion

Jonathan Cook
Remembering Land Day in Palestine

Ray McGovern
Obama Bombs

Website of the Day
Hersh: Syria Calling

March 27-29, 2009

Alexander Cockburn
Obama's Fall Guy

Arno J. Mayer
Too Big to Fail?

Michael Hudson
How the Scam Works

José Pertierra
Gesture for Gesture: How to Free the Cuban Five

Andy Worthington
A Letter to Obama From a Guantánamo Uighur

Mike Whitney
Geithner's Hog Wallow

Winslow T. Wheeler
What Does an F-22 Cost?

Souad N. Al-Azzawi
Iraq: Let the Numbers Speak for Themselves

Dave Lindorff
A Financial History Lesson

Ian Masters
The Zombie Presidency

Barbara Rose Johnston
Water Culture Wars

Jami Tarn
Smearing Tristan Anderson

Diane Farsetta
The Nuclear Industry Targets Wisconsin

David Ker Thomson Against Democracy

Ramzy Baroud
Netanyahu and the Future of the Peace Process

Rannie Amiri
Saudi Shiites' One-Word Demand

Wajahat Ali
Writer as Fighter: the Genius of Ishmael Reed

Nick Egnatz
Whatever Happened to the Fierce Urgency of Now?

Gregory A. Burris
The Insolents Abroad: a Defense of Iceland

Missy Beattie
This Land

Stephen Martin
The Broken Stone of Corporatism

Charles R. Larson
Obama, Smoking and Me

David Yearsley
How They Built Bach's Face (Is the Bard Next?)

Ben Sonnenberg
Won't You Please Get Thee Behind Me? Buñuel's Simon of the Desert

Kim Nicolini
The Mafia Without Moralizing: Garrone's Gomorrah

Lorenzo Wolff
Pat Boone Syndrome

Poets' Basement
Four Poems by Paulann Petersen

Website of the Weekend
Ann Coulter: a Portrait by Ben Tripp

March 26, 2009

Paul Craig Roberts
Is the Bail Out Breeding a Bigger Crisis?

Sharon Smith
Another Blow to Labor ... from the Democrats

Neve Gordon
Avigdor Lieberman, Israel's Shame

Patrick Madden
Why the Geithner Plan Will Fail

Gareth Porter
The Big Con on Iraq

Dave Lindorff
Why Do We Need a Health Insurance Industry?

Hannah Safran
The Israeli Resistance: "Ready to be Traitors"

Keith Newell
Will the Cellphone Please Take the Stand?

Todd Chretien
Behind the Green Collar

Nelson P. Valdés
When It Comes to Cuba and the Media Anything Goes

Website of the Day
G20 Meltdown

March 25, 2009

Robin Blackburn
Media Revolution or Mirage?

Conn Hallinan
Europe in Crisis

David Rosen
Sexting: a First Amendment Challenge for Obama

Jonathan Cook
Turkey's Fallout with Israel Deals Blow to Settlers

Dean Baker
Billions More for Failed Banks

Ron Jacobs
Karzai on a String

Russell Mokhiber
Corporate Liberals vs. Single-Payer

David Macaray
Slice and Dice on Card Check

Dave Lindorff
Geithner's Power Grab

Sarah Knopp
LA Teacher's Sit-In Over Layoffs

Website of the Day
How to Create an Animal Rights "Terrorist"

March 24, 2009

Robert Sandels
Obama and Cuba: Real Change or Minor Tweaks?

Harvey Wasserman
People Died at Three Mile Island

Franklin Lamb
Who Tried to Kill Palestinian Ambassador Abass Zaki and Why?

Michael Donnelly
Obama's Team of Losers

Norman Solomon
Denial and Evasion on Afghanistan

Elizabeth Schulte
The Stark Facts About Violence Against Women

John Goekler
The Most Dangerous Person in the World?

Nicole Colson
Is Justice Finally in Sight for Sami Al-Arian?

Global Balkans
NATO's 78-Day Bombing of Yugoslavia: Ten Years On

William S. Lind
Cat-and-Mouse Off Hainan Island

Website of the Day
Video: IDF Fired on Medics in Gaza

March 23, 2009

M. Shahid Alam
Capitalism From the Standpoint of Its Victims

Uri Avnery
Israel's Most Revolting Law?

Mike Whitney
Zombie Economics: Judgment Day for Geithner

Ralph Nader
Bush the Teacher

Brian Cloughley
Tilting at Afghan Windmills

Dave Lindorff
Toxic Bailouts

Amira Hass
The Rules of Engagement in Gaza: Open Fire on Rescuers

Chris Irwin
When Nonprofit Groups Go Bad

Binoy Kampmark
The Celebrity of Celebrity

Michael Dickinson
Tollbridge Over Troubled Waters

Website of the Day
State of the Birds

March 20-22, 2009

Alexander Cockburn
On the Edge of the Volcano

Paul Craig Roberts
When Things Fall Apart

P. Sainath
Slumdogs vs. Billionaires

Robert Weissman
Lessons From AIG

Saul Landau
Sliding Down in Anger: If We Bail Out the Banks, Why Shouldn't We Own Them?

David Michael Green
Obama and the Altar of Greed

Greg Moses
Winter Soldiers Come to Texas

Ron Jacobs
Pakistan in Turmoil: an Interview with Farooq Tariq

Michael D. Yates
A Nation of Immigrants

John V. Whitbeck
Happy New Year, Iran!

Andy Worthington
The Case of Ahmed Zuhair

Linn Washington Jr.
Supreme Test: the Latest Twist in the Mumia Case

David Ker Thomson
Actions: Things to Do Instead of Hailing the Chief

Laurent Jacque
Is the Euro Doomed?

Rannie Amiri
The Middle East's Jittery Monarchies

Reiko Redmonde /
Larry Everest
The Cold-Blooded Murder of Oscar Grant

David Macaray
The Myth of the Powerful Teachers' Union

Kenneth Couesbouc
Where has the Consumption Gone?

Martha Rosenberg
Meltdown in the Drug Industry

Alan Farago
The Recession, the Developers and Baseball

Missy Beattie
Still Waiting for Change

Richard Rhames
Invisible But Not Completely Insolvent

Stephen Martin
Barack and the Jets

Charles R. Larson
Impeach Obama!

David Yearsley
On Bach's Birthday

Lorenzo Wolff
Manic Levity

Poets' Basement
Three Poems by Gary Corseri

Website of the Weekend
Teachers for CEO Merit Pay!

March 19, 2009

Dave Marsh
Sir Bono: the Knight Who Fled From His Own Debate

Paul Craig Roberts
Was the Bailout Itself a Scam?

Mike Whitney
Why Business is Hysterical About Card Check (And Why America Needs It)

Sam Smith
The Economy in Two Eras of Democrats

Harvey Wasserman
The Crash of France's Nuclear Poster Child

Binoy Kampmark
Back Into NATO: the End of French Exceptionalism

Kathy Sanborn
Broken Culture: the Desecration of Iraq's Art Treasures

Christopher Brauchli
Taxing Problems

George Wuerthner
Permanent Damage From Temporary Logging Roads

Diann Rust-Tierney
New Mexico Abolishes the Death Penalty

Website of the Day
Bailout Plan: "Cross Your Fingers and Hope"

March 18, 2009

Michael Hudson
The Real AIG Conspiracy

Paul Craig Roberts
Israel's American Chattel

Nelson P. Valdés
Why Obama's New Cuba Rules Violate the Constitution

Jonathan Cook
Bedouin Villages Left in the Dark Ages

John Ross
The Death of the American Newspaper

Yifat Susskind
Where Are We Leaving Iraqi Women?

Dave Lindorff
Who's Calling the Shots Now?

Frances Moore Lappé
The City That Ended Hunger

Richard Grossman
Beware the Madoff Diversion!

Rev. William E. Alberts
On Being Whole Not Holy

Website of the Day
Three Weeks in Cuba: a Painter's Perspective

March 17, 2009

Michael Hudson
Mr. Bernanke Spreads the Fire

James G. Abourezk
Show Business: AIG and the Posturing Democrats

Harry Browne
Ireland's Blast From the Past

Joanne Mariner
U.S. Human Rights Abuses in the War on Terror

Alan Farago
The National Ponzi Scheme

Dean Baker
Getting Lehman Bros. Wrong ... Again

Peter Morici
Cuts for Autoworkers, Bonuses for Derivatives Traders

Bill and Kathleen Christison
Obama and the Empire

Richard Gott
Victory for the Left in El Salvador

Walter Brasch
Dog Mutilations vs. Cosmetics

Website of the Day
Single-Payer Action

March 16, 2009

Pam Martens
Has a Comedian Just Saved America?

Uri Avnery
The Rape of Washington

Mike Whitney
Bernanke's Witness Protection Program

Ralph Nader
Americans Want Justice for Wall Street Crooks

Nikolas Kozloff
Down But Not Out: the Latin American Right

John Walsh
Redbaiting on the Left

Ron Jacobs
A Call for Common Sense

Binoy Kampmark
The Case of Tim K

Stephen Fleischman
Coxey's Army Will March Again!

Christian Christensen
A 25-Year Misunderstanding: Springsteen's "Born in the USA"

Scott Handleman
Shooting Tristan Anderson

Website of the Day
Clean, Green, Sustainable

March 13 / 15, 2009

Alexander Cockburn
The Parable of the Shopping Mall

Peter Lee
What the Chas Freeman Fight Was Really About

Diana Johnstone
NATO's Global Mission Creep

David Harvey
Is This Really the End of Neoliberalism?

Petrino DiLeo
Inside Obama's Housing Plan: Will Millions be Left Out in the Cold

David Ker Thomson
Tender to the Earth

Eric Ruder
Massacre in Slow Motion: an Interview with Haider Eid on Gaza

Fred Gardner
Cannabidiol Now!

David Yearsley
Music Torture

Saul Landau
How Israel Gives Jews a Bad Name

Laura Carlsen
Drug War Doublespeak

Robert Weissman
We Told You So

John Goekler /
Merle Lefkoff
The Struggle in Saffron

Tom Barry
Imprisoning Immigrants for Profit

Kathy Sanborn
Money Out of Thin Air

Chris Mobley / Leela Yellesetty
Criminalizing Poverty: the Jail Seattle Doesn't Need

David Michael Green
The Perils of Being Right and Wrong

Alan Maass /
Lee Sustar
A Socialist Moment?

Christopher Brauchli
Pity, the Poor Tax Collectors

Richard Morse
Clinton in Haiti

Lorenzo Wolff
Taking It From the Streets: From Springsteen to the Wu-Tang Clan

Poets' Basement
Springate and Johnston

Website of the Weekend
Hear the Buffalo

March 12 , 2009

Sharon Smith
Bottom Feeders at the Trough

Christopher Ketcham
Full Spectrum Penetration: Israeli Spying in the United States

Mike Whitney
Haircut Time for Bondholders

Ray McGovern
Obama Caves to the Lobby

Eric Toussaint /
Damien Millet
The Doublespeak of a Discredited IMF

John Ross
The War is Not Over

M. Reza Pirbhai
Men in Black: Another View of Pakistan

Chris Floyd
Lost Liberty Blues: Prisons, Profits and the Banality of Evil

Steve Early
Why Labor Doesn't Need a "House of Lords"

Quentin Gee
Hiding the Costs of Coal

Website of the Day
Amadee Coral Reef: a Spherical Panorama

March 11 , 2009

Mike Roselle
From Birmingham to Coal River: Why is the Environmental Movement So Timid?

Paul Craig Roberts
The Criminal Injustice System

Henry A. Giroux
Academic Labor in Dark Times

Nikolas Kozloff
The Death Cries of the Salvadoran Right

Norm Kent
I am Patient Number 380206011

Mitu Sengupta
Reforming the World Bank: Different Image, Same Tune?

Ludwig Watzal
The Structure of Israel's Occupation

David Macaray
The Battle Over EFCA Has Begun

William S. Lind
Rounding Up the Usual Suspects

Martha Rosenberg
A Merger From the Folks Who Brought You Vytorin

Website of the Day
American Indicator: One in Fifty Kids are Homeless

March 10 , 2009

Franklin Spinney
What Israeli Peace Process?

Vijay Prashad
What Did Hillary Clinton Do?

Stan Cox
There's No Free Lunch on Your Browser: the Internet's Energy Drain

Zoltan Grossman
Coffee Strong: Listening to the G.I. Voice at Fort Lewis

Reuven Kaminer
Pure and Unadulterated Racism

Jonathan Cook
Memoricide in the West Bank

Dave Lindorff
Business Rules

Brian McKenna
How Anthropology Disparages Journalism

Harvey Wasserman
Is This the End of the Age of the Automobile?

Corey Pein
He Told You So

Website of the Day
AIG and Systemic Failure: $1.6 Trillion in Insured Deriviatives

March 9 , 2009

Pam Martens
Madoff and the Sorkin Affair

Ralph Nader
Too Big...Period

Peter Lee
Meet Gulbuddin Hekmatyar: the US's Worst/Best Hope for Afghanistan?

Mike Whitney
Geithner's Charade

Peter Morici
Fixing the Banks: Treasury's Doomed Strategy

Dean Baker
Why Do We Need a Private Health Insurance Industry, Anyway?

Steve Ault
Kiss Thailand's Tolerance for Gays Goodbye

Stephen Lendman
Guantánamo Under Obama

Farooq Sulehria
Tennis Without Spectators

Belén Fernández
Chávez, a Cockfight and the Caracazo

Website of the Day
How Lincoln Learned to Read

March 6-8 , 2009

Alexander Cockburn
Harlots High and Low

Chris Floyd
Tangled Up in Karl

Uri Avnery
Remember Ophira?

Dave Lindorff
Kiss the Banks Goodbye

Mark Weisbrot
The Crisis vs. the Dogma

David Ker Thomson
Against Work

Phil Aliff
Soldier Suicides

Rebekah Ward
Georgia Injustice: Another Young Life Wrecked

Tracey Briggs
How Capitalism Feels in the Head

Dean Baker
Depression Nostalgia?

Daniel P. Wirt, M.D.
Remove the Handle From the Health Insurance Misery and Death Pump

Carl Finamore
The Recovery Plan: Save Us From Those Who Would Save Us

Wajahat Ali
The Pakistani Monster

David Michael Green
Smart is the New Stupid

David Macaray
The Minimum Wage Revisited

Michael Dickinson
On Financial Fools Day

Susie Day
Line in the Sand

Bob Sommer
Echoes of the Townhouse Explosion

Ben Sonnenberg
No Forgiveness for the Bourgeoisie: Buñuel's "The Exterminating Angel"

David Yearsley
Sonic Fakery in "Slumdog" From the Mozart of Chennai

DC Larson
They're Writing Those Depression Songs, Again

Lorenzo Wolff
Live Truth: Music Sans Headphones

Poets' Basement
Dominquez, MacNeil and Buknatski

Website of the Weekend
The Environment & Obama: a Conversation with Jeffrey St. Clair

March 5 , 2009

James G. Abourezk
This Time It's Mrs. Clinton's Turn

Kathleen and Bill Christison
U.S. Military Aid to Israel

Robert Weissman
Wall Street's Best Investment: Paying for Public Policy

Patrick Cockburn
My Day at the Terror "Charity"

William Blum
Being Serious About Torture...Or Not

Robert Fantina
From Iraq to Afghanistan: Augmentation All Over Again

Saul Landau
The Unseen Crisis

Benjamin Dangl
Striking a Blow Against the Beer Cartel: a Grassroots Victory in Utah

Christopher Brauchli
The New Leaders of the GOP

Website of the Day
The Angola 3: 36 Years of Solitude

March 4, 2009

Marjorie Cohn
Blueprints for a Police State

Mike Whitney
Blowing Up the Economy: How Securitization Lit the Fuse

Ron Jacobs
The Banality of Occupation: the Rand Papers

Ashley Smith
War by Another Name

Joanne Mariner
Obama's War on Terror

Dan Bacher
The California Water Wars: Why It's Not a Conflict Between Fish and People

Mark Engler
Will the Winds of Change Reach El Salvador?

Franklin Lamb
"What's Hezbollah Done for Us Lately?"

Cal Winslow
Slugging It Out in California

David Mandelzys
Apartheid Week

Website of the Day
Guantánamo: the Definitive Prisoner List

March 3, 2009

Conn Hallinan
Ethnic Cleansing and Israel

Fawzia Afzal-Khan
The Long, Dark Night of Pakistan

Brian M. Downing
The Changing Game in Afghanistan

Robert Larson
External Damnation: Companies are Designed for Destruction

Daniel P. Wirt, MD
Single-Payer Health Reform

Russell Mokhiber
Burn Your Health Insurance Bill!

William Loren Katz
Obama, One Ape and Two Newspapers

Kathy Sanborn
The Lazy Man's Guide to the Economic Crisis

Pauline Imbach
A New Start for the World Social Forum?

Christopher Ketcham
The Best Journalism You'll Write is Priceless

Website of the Day
The Surveillance Self-Defense Project

March 2, 2009

Andrea Peacock
A Poisoned Town's Shot at Justice

Paul Craig Roberts
Obama's Budget

Peter Lee
Pakistan Lurches Toward the Abyss

John Blair
Locking Down Big Coal

Peter Morici
Treasury's Flawed Plan for Citigroup

Uri Avnery
10 Ways to Kill Fatah

Michael Donnelly
Resistance to the War on the Wild

Fred Gardner
The Judge Who Ruled Marijuana is Medicine

Sonia Nettnin
Middle East Medical Mission Heroes

Andrew Lehman
A New Deal for the Web

Website of the Day
Pentagon Papers II?

Eric Holder and the Whitewashing of Racism

Tom Barry
Napolitano's Hard Line

Harvey Wasserman
Obama's Excellent Atomic Omission

Adam Turl
The Enemies of Unions and the Lies They Tell

David Macaray
When People are Fired Illegally

James McEnteer
Rush to the Rescue: Limbaugh's Secret Plan to Save the Economy

Website of the Day
The Carbon Casino

Weekend Edition
April 3-5, 2009

A Black Depression?

Race in the Obama Era

By KEEANGA-YAMAHTTA TAYLOR

THE HISTORIC election of Barack Obama represented an undeniable blow against the legacy of racism in the U.S. For the first time ever, a Black man was elected president of a white majority country. Slavery persisted in the U.S. for more than 300 years, and when slavery was abolished, Blacks were legally designated second-class citizens until the civil rights rebellion of the 1960s finally produced full legal equality.

This backdrop made Obama's victory last November all the more astonishing. Even in the desperate dog days of the McCain-Palin campaign, when Republicans tried to make race an issue by reviving the dead issue of Obama's former pastor Jeremiah Wright, calling Obama "dangerous," letting conservative followers believe Obama was Muslim and Arab, and calling Obama "uppity"--they failed miserably.

In fact, the Republicans' strategy backfired. The closer we got to the election and the more desperate they became, the more they began to slip in the polls. For the first time in 40 years, the staples of American politics--race-baiting and racial scapegoating--failed as a political strategy, and the result was the election of the nation's first African American president.

Since the election, the media has manufactured a discussion about whether the U.S. has entered some netherworld of post-racialism. The mantra was quickly picked up by conservative pundits who have always denied the saliency of racism. They concluded that the political ascendancy of Obama was the final "proof" that the U.S. was a color-blind society. Dinesh D'Souza, who wrote the 1995 book The End of Racism, recently gloated:

As I watched Obama take the oath of office, I was moved, along with many others, but I also felt a sense of vindication. In 1995, I published a controversial book The End of Racism. The meaning of the title was not that there was no more racism in America. Certainly in a big country, one can find many examples of racism. My argument was that racism, which once used to be systematic, had now become episodic. In other words, racism existed, but it no longer controlled the lives of blacks and other minorities. Indeed, racial discrimination could not explain why some groups succeeded in America and why other groups did not...for African Americans, their position near the bottom rung of the ladder could be better explained by cultural factors than by racial victimization.

D'Souza's outburst aside, the idea that Black poverty and unemployment is the result of individual failure and personal dysfunction is a regular staple of political parlance in the U.S. Even Obama made news when he spoke at a Black church last Father's Day and chastised Black men for not being more involved in their children's lives. "We need fathers to realize that responsibility does not end at conception," he said.

Without a condemnation of the racism that shapes the communities, choices and interactions of poor and working-class African Americans, this kind of moralistic finger-pointing essentially blames the victim.

Moreover, D'Souza's outburst underlines the problem with measuring racism in American society simply by changing ideas or attitudes, as opposed to barometers that actually measure the quality of life of African Americans. The current meltdown of the American economy, which faces its gravest crisis since the Great Depression of the 1930s, demonstrates the institutionalization of racism in the U.S.

A Black depression

While most Americans are struggling to find ways to cope with the economic recession, African American communities have been experiencing a protracted financial collapse since 2000. The impact of the unraveling U.S. economy on African Americans is nothing short of startling and should give lie once and for all to worn axioms that describe Black poverty and inequality as products of the Black community itself or the result of cultural deviance.

While the media have marveled at how quickly the national unemployment level ballooned to 8 percent over the last two months, Black unemployment currently stands at more than 13 percent, while Latino unemployment creeps toward 12 percent.

Since 2000, Blacks and Latinos have been 40 percent more likely to experience unemployment than whites. But the national unemployment rates don't really speak to the catastrophic levels of job displacement in Black communities, particularly among African American men.

In a study conducted by the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, social scientist Marc Levine looked at the total unemployment of Black men aged 16 to 65 in urban America. He included men who were out of the labor market for a range of reasons, including those who were incarcerated and those who were jobless because they had given up looking for work.

He found that Black men in Milwaukee had the highest rate of unemployment at 51 percent, followed by Buffalo, Detroit and Chicago, where Black male unemployment is 45 percent. In other large metropolitan areas like New York City and Washington, D.C., unemployment rates for African American men of working age were more than 30 percent. In Detroit, the 11th largest city in the U.S., Black workers have been devastated by the plunging fortunes of the auto industry, where, by last December, more than 20,000 Black autoworkers had lost their jobs.

This rise in unemployment will undoubtedly increase the numbers of African Americans without health insurance--already at a high of 19 percent.

The job losses that began before the current economic crisis have led to an increase in Black poverty, from a historic low of 19 percent in 1999, back up to 24 percent in 2007. Poverty rates for Latinos are also at more than 20 percent. This number will surely rise if predictions are that official Black unemployment will exceed 20 percent by the end of 2009.

In addition to the job losses shaking African American communities, the collapsing housing market is having a disproportionate impact on Black homeowners. Because of a racist legacy of redlining, housing discrimination and the patterns of predatory lending as their result, Blacks were three times more likely to be steered toward subprime loans for home mortgages than whites.

This has meant that as rates for these loans readjusted upward and beyond the means of Black homeowners, tens of thousands have been forced into foreclosure, destroying what little net worth exists among African Americans. Home foreclosures are not measured by race, but a recent study found that since 2004, Black homeownership has dropped from 49 percent to 46 percent.

By 2007, 30 percent of Black households had zero net worth, compared to 18 percent of white households. According to the nonprofit think tank United for a Fair Economy, households of color lost between $164 billion and $213 billion over the past eight years because of foreclosures and ballooning subprime loan rates. According to economic analyst Dedrick Muhammad, the cumulative impact of these losses will result in a 33 percent reduction of the Black middle class.

The election of Obama, while significant, doesn't change the daily struggle against deprivation that shapes the Black experience in the U.S.

What's race got to do with it?

The crisis is having a disproportionately brutal impact on Black workers because of the racism inherent in American capitalism. U.S. capitalism was built on the labor of Black slaves, and when slavery ended, capitalists in the North and South stoked racism to divide their workforces, drive down wages and increase their profit margins.

Throughout the first 70 years of the 20th century, millions of African Americans moved from the rural South to the urban North and South in search of jobs and freedom from the codified racism of Jim Crow. Black workers found that racism in the North was only different by degrees from the racism they encountered in the South.

Violent white mobs and racially restricted covenants in housing deeds--which allowed private homeowners to forbid the selling or renting of homes to African Americans for up to 20 years--hemmed African Americans into ghettos. Federal housing policy stipulated that Black inner cities be restricted from mortgage insurance, guaranteeing that businesses and developers wouldn't invest or build in the cities.

Instead, government monies subsidized building and investment in white suburbs. The disinvestment in the central cities fueled residential and school segregation, creating a political economy of racism where Blacks paid more for inferior housing and services, while the managers of inner cities reaped the profits of minimal investment.

Existing employment in the inner cities became increasingly elusive as businesses either moved to the suburbs, to the South or out of the country altogether in search of cheaper labor. The conditions of diminishing employment, low-wage service jobs, underfunded schools and segregated housing created by racist federal policies are maintained and policed by a racist criminal justice system, and have been since Blacks arrived en masse in the North.

These public and private practices have led to historic disparities between African Americans and whites. The social movements of the 1960s eliminated the last vestiges of legal racism and opened up greater opportunities for the economic and political advancement of a small layer of African Americans, but for the majority of ordinary Blacks, racism continues to restrict opportunity. This means that Blacks have borne the greatest brunt of this economic catastrophe.

The managers of capitalism profit handsomely from inequality and racism in the U.S. because they guarantee a combination of low or lower wages paid to Black workers and the absence of a welfare state. Moreover, these same managers have historically used racism to divide political struggles for public or state entitlements--welfare--to poor or unemployed workers regardless of race.

The material impact on the lives of Black workers should be clear enough, but ideologically, the systematic and institutional impoverishment of African American communities perpetuates the impression that Blacks are inferior and defective. These perceptions are perpetuated and magnified by the mass media, Hollywood and the general means of ideological and cultural production in bourgeois society.

The recurrence and persistence of racism in this economic system is not accidental or arbitrary. American capitalism is intrinsically racist.

A new era

The racist nature of American capitalism doesn't mean that workers of color and white workers do not challenge it. The political struggles of the 1960s are but one example of this potential, but so are the heroic struggles to build unions and anti-poverty movements during the Depression era in the 1930s.

The era of Obama is a welcome change from the era of Bush and opens the potential for a new period of struggle that can both fight for economic reforms and against racism. During the Bush administration, not only did the economic gains of Black America during the 1990s go into reverse, but the racial symbolism of the Bush administration was downright regressive.

From his theft of the 2000 election at the expense of Black voters in Florida, to the malfeasance of his administration during the Katrina disaster in New Orleans, to the unleashing of raids in Latino communities, to the imprisonment and internment of Arab and Muslim men across the U.S., the Bush administration was a disaster for communities of color.

The election of Obama represented a popular rejection of this state-sanctioned racist hostility. But what concretely replaces the racist Bush agenda will depend upon struggle from below. While Obama's candidacy and election represented a dramatic shift in racial attitudes in the U.S., Obama, has eschewed almost any racial discourse--and continues to.

Obama's attorney general, Eric Holder, made the strange comment that when it comes to race, "Americans are cowards," when it is the Obama administration that has gone out of its way to avoid putting forward coherent policies aimed at curbing the racism evidenced by the overwhelming impact of the economic crisis on Black families.

To be sure, the almost $300 billion in economic stimulus aimed at working-class communities is a welcome change to the tired mantra of tax cuts--but it's woefully inadequate when compared to the more than $1 trillion filling the troughs of corporate America and Wall Street. Moreover, given the disproportionate way in which the crisis is impacting African Americans, there needs to be specific programs and solutions aimed at Black urban communities.

This must include more than infusions of cash to increase food stamps and unemployment cash benefits. Economists predict that the jobs that have been lost are not likely to come back, as American capitalism restructures and retools itself. This means there could be a long period of unemployment until new, sustainable jobs are created, rather than short-term "project"-oriented jobs.

This in turn means that the U.S. needs a new public welfare system that can house, feed, clothe, pay and take care of its population while the job market fluctuates. The public entitlement to welfare was gutted in 1996 during the boom, as recipients were made to "work" for their meager cash benefits.

The assumption was that the economy was supposedly awash in jobs--which were largely low wage and in the service sector--and, if people weren't working, it was because they didn't want to. These anti-poor policies, shrouded in anti-Black rhetoric, were underpinned by the politics of "personal responsibility," which looked to shift the blame for poverty and unemployment away from inherent problems in the system--as they were identified in the 1960s by everyone from the Black Panther Party to Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.--to the individual failings of Blacks themselves.

But the rapid disintegration of the job market has opened up the ideological space to expose the racist assumptions that Black workers are more interested in welfare than work. When 650,000 jobs have been lost every month since December, it's difficult to mount an argument that the problem of unemployment is a moral one.

Moreover, when banks and corporations fail as a result of the personal irresponsibility and greed of executives, but are still bailed out to the tune of trillions of tax dollars, it rightfully raises the question of where is the bailout for ordinary workers--Black, white and Latino.

The ruling class proposal for resolving the economic crisis--blank checks and no questions asked for Wall Street--diminishes the extent to which they can argue that workers shouldn't also demand our piece, in the form of direct cash stimulus, universal health care, a new welfare system, real affordable housing, an end to home foreclosures and more.

The key to winning any of those demands depends on building a movement of workers, the unemployed and the poor to take on the obvious economic inequities that have been exposed as a result of the crisis, but it also demands the building of an explicitly antiracist movement that can highlight and organize against the specific ways this crisis is affecting Black workers.

While Obama has been reluctant to discuss the issue of race or racism, the vast majority of African Americans viewed his election as their own victory--as demonstrated by the dancing in the streets in Black communities across the country last November when he beat McCain. A CNN poll conducted in the days leading up to Obama's inauguration found that 69 percent of Blacks felt that King's dream was now fulfilled because of Obama's victory.

In March, a poll found that African Americans were more optimistic than the general public that the financial crisis would be resolved by the end of the year. Fifty-eight percent of Blacks said they expected their household financial situation to improve by next year, and 85 percent said they were generally optimistic about the future.

But the confidence and optimism that resulted from successfully sending a Black president to the White House has come into conflict with the reality that African Americans are bearing the brunt of the economic downturn in the U.S. At the same time, the election of Obama has raised the expectations of African Americans--and most workers--for more, not less.

While the Obama honeymoon within Black communities may not end for while, the worsening economy will demand politics, organization and activism from Black workers. This new reality, in a new political era, represents an opportunity to build a movement to demand new social programs for the working class, with Black workers and antiracist demands at its center.

There is also the possibility that as conditions grow worse, there could be a rise in racism against Obama and other minorities in the guise of right-wing populism--as racists and the right intensify their efforts to scapegoat and blame sections of the population for the crisis.

This is why the revival and rebuilding of progressive forces and the radical left must put the fight against racism at the center of its politics--as opposed to focusing only on the economic dimensions of the crisis. Racism and class oppression have always been the nexus of American politics, and today is no different.

Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor is on the editorial board of the International Socialist Review and a doctoral student in African American Studies at Northwestern University. She can be reached at keeanga@u.northwestern.edu.

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