The current issue is always free to everyone

If you need the access available to a
and cannot afford the $50 subscription price, request a complimentary subscrpition here.

“This is no time to back down…This fight to end the war isn’t something that we can just put off or kick down the road…Now is the time to be pulling out all the stops to end the war.”  This was the Senator from Wisconsin, Russ Feingold in May 2007 writing on the Daily Kos blog.  This was Feingold, sounding like a progressive, most would say.  Now, this is Feingold echoing House Speaker Nancy Pelosi: No impeachment!

“I believe that the President and Vice President may well have committed impeachable offenses.” May well have committed impeachable offenses? And there’s more: There are “so many important issues facing the country and so much work to be done…” What? The problems facing the country are called King George and Darth Vader and the work to be done is beginning the impeachment process to remove these two criminals!

I was born in Chicago in the early fifties, and my generation experienced the Democratic liberalism of Richard J. Daley, mayor and, during our formative years, learned to resist white and black Machine politicians.  Recruited along with other youths to form the Youth Division of Operation Breadbasket during its first Black Expo, we were introduced to community organization.  Most important, we came to understand that the work of politicians was to fight against unfair and unequal social or legal restrictions that would prohibit people from living out their full potential as citizens in a community.

The U.S. military budget for the “war on terror” in Iraq and Afghanistan takes precedent over domestic spending on health care, education, global warming, and job training. The other day, the Senate proposed to boost the Children’s Health Insurance Program by $35 billion dollars, according to a Washington Post report.  But such a proposal, said Bush, would “open up avenues for people to switch from private insurance to the government.” Here is a president whose concern is for the private insurers and not the children of this nation who would benefit from this proposal. He has a philosophy, he told reporters, and a $35 billion boost to children’s health would violate his philosophy! 

We are dealing here with characters fostering a regime stuck on pre-emptive wars, detention camps, torture, and illegal wiretapping.  It is a regime with a cruel and brutal collective consciousness fixed on its own desires and needs to the exclusion of other human beings it deems the enemy. 

And the “enemy” is ever expanding, according to this regime.

Such a regime can’t sustain life, let alone consider peace in the world.  Such a regime lives within the fantasy of its world domination, motivated by a collective paranoia of the other—the unfamiliar.  Such a regime sweeps up people who want to profit and profit big or who want to assure that resistance from the excluded is denied and ultimately diminished. Profiteers abroad and court judges domestically help sustain this regime. 

It does not seem like the regime “may have committed impeachable offenses.” They have and they plan to continue do to so. 

What is Feingold thinking? More to the point, is he able to truly be progressive when there’s a regime in place determined to maintain white supremacy throughout the world?    

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, I participated in the movement to push the borders of where we could live and work. We were exposed to white progressives, people who identified with the needs of the black and Latino/a communities because to do so was considered good for the country as a whole. Thus, young black people my age understood what it meant to resist without violence because, in the act of resisting limitations on social mobility and justice, resisting racial and class hierarchy, we were committing a violation to the “philosophy” that would condemn us to spaces of political, social, and cultural invisibility.  

I have lived in Wisconsin, off and on, for some six years, and it is a place where I feel, after all these years, invisible. Particularly in Madison, Wisconsin, with a reputation for liberal and progressive, I have witnessed how the word “progressive” has been co-opted with a vengeance by some who have taken ownership of the word. In control of words, they are in control, too, of the “philosophy” in which the history of the conquerors is subordinated, almost invisible.  In its place is a humanitarian and social justice narrative that looks similar to what I learned in my youth.  But I have been horrified to discover it’s a new day, a new world order where blacks, in particular are not needed in the decision-making process of these humanitarian or social justice programs.  Nationally, there’s been a take over of the discourse surrounding the historically oppressed and the baggage of issues that once united progressives in the 1960s and early 1970s.

In this new world order, the history of conquest, of struggles and of resistance by the historically oppressed, of the visibility of people of a darker hue is almost absent.  What took me a couple of months to understand last year is that Madison resembles the liberalism of a Richard J. Daley (who assured John F. Kennedy the Presidency in 1961) than the progressivism of a Martin L. King, particularly in the later years when King advocated for ending the Viet Nam War and joined forces with Stokely Carmichael and Malcolm X, Cesar Chavez, and other coalition activists.  And although King’s name is uttered at convenient moments in Madison, the city functions in the manner of Richard J. Daley’s Chicago of old: its officials are determined to keep Madison “safe,” i.e. white and devoid of the progressives, particularly those of darker hue who would want to see an alternative Madison—fair and truly open to embracing the humanity of all races of people. 

Consequently, some of Madison’s liberals and progressives see and don’t see this new order, for it is beneficial to them.  It maintains the “peace”—as Bush says is the goal of his Agenda.  I’ll attend rallies and meetings or other events that often focus on the war or some issue that should surely demand the presence of people of darker hue, but alas, I am more often, the only black or only person of darker hue.  Worse, those who sponsor these events are not disturbed by the absence of people of darker hue.  Far from this crowd, black parents worry about the education their children are receiving in a town that would rather call the police on a five-year-old black child than take the time to acknowledge the political and cultural heritage of that child and relationship of this heritage to the regime’s No Child Left Behind program.  Others contend with homelessness or fear homelessness because there’s an unspoken understanding unskilled, skilled, or professional employment is limited to whites or people of darker hue who will get with the program of “safety” first and foremost for Madison. Exclusion, then, becomes a practice of “pre-emptive” strike against violence.  As a staffer at the University of Wisconsin Madison told me, you either adjust or you leave. We are the criminals until proven “innocent,” here.

Wisconsin, according to the Milwaukee Sentinel, leads the nation in locking up black Americans (January 28, 2007).  “Animalizing the human” has been well underway since the domestic “war on drugs” and works hand-in-hand with the foreign (or not so foreign now) “war on terror.” I have yet to hear Feingold address the astonishingly high incarceration rate of black people in a state that barely has a black population! Dr. Pamela Oliver, Professor of Sociology at the University of Wisconsin Madison, writes that this high incarceration rate of blacks is a “result of policies implemented since the mid-1970s.” “The growth,” Dr. Oliver writes, is “not due to growing crime rates, but to greater use of incarceration for lesser offenses and drug offenses.” In the 1990s, whites saw an increase in imprisonment for violent crimes while blacks were imprisoned for drug offenses. Yet, in Madison, the issue of “safety” (security) generates fear of blacks and black violence. We see the Bush and Cheney regime’s practice of isolating the designated “enemy” rather than negotiating for inclusion played out in Feingold’s home state.  Where is Feingold when it comes to standing in resistance to such in justice?

The smiles of some of his constituents barely conceal the message that I, not you. But what security is to be had within a regime of oppression?  What peace can be achieved with this way of being in the world? 

A progressive resists oppression of all kinds.  A progressive does not wake up one day and say to himself or herself, I am cured of thinking about the exclusion or the negation of all life.  Increasingly, the U.S. agenda of imperialism and world domination generates a narrow vision of the collective paranoia surrounding race and its ever-expanding image of terror.  In turn, certain attitudes and behavior toward fellow citizens (Native Americans, blacks, Latino/as, Asian, working class, and poor) directly contributes and sustains the regime of Bush and Cheney.  The very regime most Americans love to hate now! Good deeds are not enough.  Progressivism demands identification with those left out of the “philosophy” of the national regime.  

Yes, the liberals/progressives of Madison love Russ Feingold.  He’s progressive! I have yet to hear from Feingold that he has noticed the “invisible” or that he identifies with the plight of a people he barely sees in Madison or in neighboring Middleton where he lives. A couple of weeks ago, I saw a political ad on the television in which Feingold was speaking about his new effort to curb crime! Oh, my.  What is going on here? Well, maybe we are seeing the real Russ Feingold now.

His white liberal/progressive constituents want an impeachment of Bush and Cheney because most, whether they see the death of Iraqi citizens as criminal, they certain ly apprehend Bush’s and Cheney’s reckless and ruthless aggressive behavior as offensive to their sense of what it means to be white in America.  Bush and Cheney have gone too far: the “foreigners” in other countries, those other people of darker hue, hate us, most important, the Europeans are beginning to hate us! We don’t do as well confronting the hate of others.  Enduring hate, backed by power, is a daily task for those others. 

A progressive would not back down from a fight—particularly when the stakes are so high for so many people not just in this country but also around the world. 

“I fully respect the anger and frustration many Americans feel with this Administration.  I share much of it.” Does he really? Can he even comprehend life in opposition to the regime of terror for some of us?

Most of us have long known that we can’t depend on the Feingold’s no more than we can depend on those in the White House.  If we awake everyday and survive the day with mind and body in tack, we have contributed to our resistance.  Feingold does not understand what that means because he has never been one who lived in the space of opposition. We are surviving in opposition to being dead, unless we acquiesce to the regime’s agenda, in which case we are already dead.  Despite one more “progressive” like Feingold we must work for the impeachment of Bush and Cheney.  Murdering the body and soul of people—destroying the spirit of resistance is a criminal, indeed, impeachable offense, Senator Feingold!

BlackCommentator.com Columnist Dr. Jean Daniels writes a column for The City Capital Hues in Madison Wisconsin and is a Lecturer at Madison Area Technical College, MATC. Click here to contact Dr. Daniels.