(Read Part 2, Part 3)

Introduction

There was happiness all over the world on Wednesday morning November 5 as the world woke up to the victory of Barack Hussein Obama in the campaign to become the President of the United States. US citizens, in the main, rejected neo- conservatisms and neo-liberalism. The team around Obama had organized the most sophisticated election campaign in the history of the United States, breaking the old conventional wisdom about red and blue states and the divisions between black, brown, first nation and white workers. The political organization of this ‘machinery of hope’ had tapped into the deep spiritual energies of people who wanted change. Rituals of hope were translated into effective tools for inspiring a new generation that had been alienated by the old politics of manipulation and exclusion.  Songs of hope echoed from across the USA to different parts of the world using the new media to make this election a referendum on the future of global humanity. Barack Obama has been called a transformative figure and a transcendental figure by many commentators but it is important to grasp the moment that made Obama the person best able to tap into the turning point away from the old politics of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Barack Obama and his team had grasped the need to catch up with the technological change and the revolutionary potentialities of the moment. Obama’s election took place in the middle of the push forward to the era of singularity. This is the era were the convergence of information technological tools and the human brain will reach a new level. Unfortunately, many of the scientists working on these new possibilities have been trained in the era of ‘white nationalism’ and concepts of the hierarchy of human beings.  The convergence of biotechnology, nanotechnology, information technology and cognitive technology had opened the possibilities for profound transformations of the relations between humans and the relations between humans and nature. Intentional actions by humans to live in harmony in nature and with each other opened revolutionary possibilities for wealth creation and for global eradication of exploitation, racism and gender discrimination. Yet, trapped by the ideas and conventions of liberalism and neo-liberalism, the Obama transition to the top office in the USA was torn between the past forms of economic organization and the multiple challenges of breaking from the old forms of destruction, war and greed.

Messages of change, hope and peace during the election campaign had resonated with a population that wanted an end to war, militarism, fear and economic terrorism. Environmental destruction, waste, toxic dumps and toxic assets reinforced the cancers of sexism, racism, homophobia and economic exploitation. These are the elements of counter-revolution that had been set in motion after the Civil Rights Revolution in the United States. The election results of 2008 with the landslide victory of Barack Obama flowed from decades long struggles to democratize US society. The old was in the process of dying but the new was seeking desperately to be born. What was missing was the ideological and political clarity to embrace the moment in a way that would transform the politics of the United States.

The urgency of the moment could not await the intellectual and ideological maturation of the citizens of the United States. Forced by the weight of fallout from the conservative and neoliberal ideas about market fundamentalism, the US government nationalized financial institutions (banks and insurance companies) with a massive intervention to save the automobile industry. Because of the ideological lag from the Reagan counter-revolution, the mainstream media and the intelligentsia could not easily use the word ‘nationalization.’ Henry Paulson termed the moves, ‘conservatorship.’ This word was more palatable to a class that had created a fictional financial system that rested on the confidence in the US military might. From across the Atlantic, the former Mayor of London, Ken Livingstone commented that the pace of nationalization in the USA and Britain was the fastest in history outside of a revolution. Whether it was called conservatorship or nationalization the real change that was urgent was for citizens to become engaged with these new state institutions so that democracy was not confined to elections. Democratic control and accountability by workers at the nationalized entities would strengthen democracy and democratic participation.

As the consequences of the military defeat of the USA in Iraq became clearer, the quicksand of get-rich schemes on Wall St (termed the financial services industry) evaporated with the schemes called ‘credit default swaps’ and ‘collateral debt obligations’ exposed to be fraudulent gambling schemes of humans who were inspired by greed.  As the cascading impact of the financial exposure accelerated. there were new stories every day of conmen who had masqueraded as financiers. The recursive process of scandal begetting scandal and scams exposing other scams behind the so called ‘financialization’ and ‘securitization’ took place at such a breathtaking speed that the media had no time to hide the depth of the crisis form the working peoples.

Not just in the USA, but internationally, the corrosive repercussions of Bernard Madoff’s ponzi scheme with the loss of $50 billion dollars for ‘investors’  further eroded confidence in US capitalism. In so far as the confidence in the US financial system and belief in the  US dollar as the reserve currency of the world was based on trust, the in fighting between different sections of the falling financiers’ revealed to Central bankers and peoples all over the world the fictitious nature of the Wall Street edifice. 

In this cascading quagmire, sections of the US establishment began to understand that it was the politics of Barack Obama that could save the social system. Hence, during the transition, even though Obama said that there was only one President, the media managers understood the need for his face to give confidence, so he was paraded on television every day. This portrayal of Obama as the steady leader could not hide the news about bail out, bank failures and the rise in unemployment. When 250 union workers occupied the Republic Windows and Doors plant in Chicago, the move to occupy a factory meant that a definite new stage was reached in US politics in the 21st century. Citizens began to hear of the long -term organizing goals of Unions such as the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America.

Citizens from all corners of the world joined with those in the United States who were nurturing the birth of the new twenty first century politics. The expectations from this Obama victory triggered new possibilities as workers looked to the Obama administration to reinvigorate interest in the rights of workers in all parts of the world. As with workers in Chicago, the youth began to be released from the fears, insecurities and phobias that had been rained on them by the media and the image makers of the military/industrial/cultural/petroleum complex. Here was one crack in the edifice of mind control. Would the crack in the edifice of mind control unleash a new cultural apparatus in the USA?  This break was not only possible but slowly developing even before the inauguration as those media outlets that had enthusiastically supported the militarism of the War on Terror now open the airwaves to new voices and now social groups. All of the contradictions before the society were now being discussed as those who had surrounded Obama now jockeyed for positions in the new administration.

This commentary is to stiffen the resolve of those who supported the Obama campaign not simply to elect an African American as the President of the United States, but to unleash a new democracy where the central aspect of change is based on a new mobilization of the citizen not just to vote but also to govern.

Alice Walker called on the President to govern with happiness. Reflecting on the positive mood inspired by Obama on the night of the election an d the mood of happiness of the multi racial and multinational gathering, Walker wrote,

A primary responsibility that you do have, is to cultivate happiness in your own life. To make a schedule that permits sufficient time of rest and play with your gorgeous wife and lovely daughters. And so on. One gathers that your family is large. We are used to seeing men in the White House soon become juiceless and as white-haired as the building; we notice their wives and children looking strained and stressed. They soon have smiles so lacking in joy that they remind us of scissors. This is no way to lead. Nor does your family deserve this fate.

One way of thinking about all this is: It is so bad now that there is no excuse not to relax. From your happy, relaxed state, you can model real success, which is all that so many people in the world really want. They may buy endless cars and houses and furs and gobble up all the attention and space they can manage, or barely manage, but this is because it is not yet clear to them that success is truly an inside job. That it is within the reach of almost everyone.

How can the progressive movement build on the spirit of happiness and revolution in the midst of an economic depression? This was the challenge of the progressive forces who carried forth the spirit of optimism of those who had fought against historic oppression.

We will begin outlining the elements of the counter- revolutionary period in the USA that had instilled unhappiness, fear, insecurity and state repression in the period after the Civil Rights Revolution. Our effort will be to grasp how the counter-revolution was opposed by the peace and justice movements throughout the world and the extent to which the campaign of change to win rode on the crest of the waves created by the peace and justice movement. While highlighting the elements of counter-revolution, it will be the basic thrust of the paper to delineate the delicate political moment that is emerging out of the crisis of capitalism. Past experiences of crisis reveal the moments when those in power seek to mobilize, jingoism, chauvinism, imperialism, racism and sexism to divide working peoples. Adolf Hitler and the Nazis were the most successful in pursuing this division inside Europe to the detriment of the lives of millions of citizens of the planet.

Fascist tendencies that grow on the basis of exploitation and racial genocide have never been far from the surface of US society. While the media shower Obama with praise as the post-racial President, it is the cocoon of privilege that would blind these commentators to the devastating consequences of institutionalized racism in every aspect of social and economic life in the USA.  The protracted struggles against racism will continue under President Obama because the election of Obama as the First President of African descent cannot break the mindset of eugenics and the entrenched ideas of white supremacy in the body politic. It is the long term struggle against institutionalized racism and dehumanization that places the struggles against the prison industrial complex as part of opposition to global lockdown.  The violations of the Geneva Conventions by the Bush administration abroad followed directly from the torture and violation that continues on a daily basis in the vast and growing prison complex at home. 

The peace and justice forces have been able to withstand the neo-conservative onslaught embedded in the imperial war on terror.  In the concluding section, this author will seek to grasp how is it that citizens in the USA were caught in a revolutionary moment without revolutionaries. It will be the argument that in so far as the counter- revolutionary ideas of fundamentalism, (religious, military and economic) sought to blunt alternative ideas about social and economic life, the realities and tragedies of hurricane Katrina, the health crisis and cancer epidemic were bringing forth new ideas.

What is necessary is for the old left to develop some self- criticisms, especially with respect to the ideas of racism and hierarchy of human beings. Some sections of this historic left expended an unusual amount of energy critiquing the transition process while they were slowly learning that the resolution of the crisis will not be dependent solely on the actions of what is done by US citizens. The capitalist crisis is a global crisis and the management of the end of the dollar hegemony is necessary to ensure that the decline of the super power status of the USA is not exploited by racists and neo-conservative forces. A new morality in politics requires repair. This is where reparations become the cornerstone of the next phase of the US revolutionary process.

Obama’s victory in the context of counter-revolution.

Samir Amin, in his book, The Liberal Virus: Permanent War and the Americanization of the World, sounded a warning about the possibilities of genocide of epic proportions if humanity followed the logic of neo-liberalism that sought to change agriculture around the world to follow the forms of agricultural production of Western Europe and North America.

“Peasant agriculture, accounting for 3 billion humans, faces economic extermination by 20 million modern farms”, he warned in this book.

Here Amin made the connection between the imposition and promotion of genocidal economic relations embedded in neo-liberalism. At the same time, while sounding this warning, Amin traced the history of the ideas of liberalism in Western Europe and North America pointing to the dangerous forms of this ideology as it had matured with the context of enslaving Africans and the genocide of First Nation Peoples. Amin, in dissecting the ideology of liberalism in Europe after the French Revolution, drew solace from the survival of the ideas of equality within Europe. Even while acknowledging the rise of fascism and imperialism in this tradition of equality, Amin was more optimistic about the future of political change in Western Europe than in the United States. In the Liberal Virus, he argued that US militarism will be far more barbaric than earlier forms, pillaging natural resources and destroying the lives of the poor.  This sobering assessment of the liberal traditions of the USA brought out clearly the history of the ideology of liberalism and the rise of neo-liberalism that preached the linkages between liberty and the market. The virus is based on the view that the market brings US citizens the opportunity for liberty. But to defend this liberty, US citizens had to support permanent war.

Neo-liberalism and market fundamentalism were the most visible sign posts of the conservative ideas in the USA that stood at the foundation of counter-revolution. Within the USA, it was the presence of the revolutionary traditions of the black working peoples along with their allies from the white, brown and First Nation Peoples that had held back counter-revolution into developing full blown fascism. Samir Amin downplays the long traditions of anti-racist struggles in the USA, where black people instinctively understood that, "extreme inequality is not only tolerated, it is taken as a symbol of "success" that liberty promises.”  Samir Amin’s adage that ‘liberty without equality is equal to barbarism’ is not a theoretical point but reflected the lived experiences of the long struggles of institutionalized racism, Klan violence and police brutality. It was the organized and unorganized actions of the black liberation traditions that prevented full blown fascism in the USA in the last depression. and war from1929 to 1945.

German society is widely known as the high point of the degeneration from counter–revolution to full blown fascism in the 20th century, but many of the economic, social and intellectual underpinnings of German fascism had their origins in the eugenics movement in the United States. No less a person than the President of the United States, Theodore Roosevelt had expressed the most fascist ideas when he argued that,

Society has no business to permit degenerates to reproduce their kind.... Any group of farmers, who permitted their best stock not to breed, and let all the increase come from the worst stock, would be treated as fit inmates for an asylum.... Some day we will realize that the prime duty, the inescapable duty of the good citizens of the right type is to leave his or her blood behind him in the world; and that we have no business to permit the perpetuation of citizens of the wrong type. The great problem of civilization is to secure a relative increase of the valuable as compared with the less valuable or noxious elements in the population... The problem cannot be met.

I wish very much that the wrong people could be prevented entirely from breeding; and when the evil nature of these people is sufficiently flagrant, this should be done. Criminals should be sterilized and feebleminded persons forbidden to leave offspring behind them... The emphasis should be laid on getting desirable people to breed..." Quoted from The Biotech Century, page 117

Averell Harriman (former Governor of NY and one of the most important leaders in the Democratic Party for over 50 years) grew up in a household where his mother was the main financial supporter for the Eugenics Records Office at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. This was the center for research on eugenics and human heredity.  So potent were the ideas of eugenics in the USA that even leaders of the Women’s movement who were struggling for the right to vote subscribed to the fascist ideas of eugenics. Margaret Sanger said, "Eugenics is … the most adequate and thorough avenue to the solution of racial, political and social problems.”

These statements reveal the reality that genocidal thinking was never absent form US society. Genocidal thinking as manifest in the US eugenics movement is the kind of thinking that devalues the lives of other human beings on the basis of their race or ethnicity. Just when concerned citizens were inquiring as to whether there were linkages between the Eugenics research at the start of the century and the new directions from the Human Genome Project at Cold Spring Harbor, James D. Watson made the clear statement in 2007 that the Africans were less intelligent than Europeans.  As a Nobel Prize winner in medicine and one time head of the Cold Springs Harbor Laboratory, Watson was bringing his considerable scientific reputation to consolidate scientific racism in the community of those involved in genetic engineering.

Eugenics had graduated from the death camps of the Germans to the white lab coats of research parks across Universities in the United States. Universities were competing for start- up funds to establish Life Science centers where the ideas and principles of James Watson would be supported under the guise of academic and scientific research   (Would resources from the Obama stimulus package go to these researchers without a fuller ethical inquiry into the current forms of eugenics in the USA?)

The US society had been able to escape the worse aspects of the capitalist depression of the thirties because a progressive coalition had supported the Democratic Party and the administration of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. This was the anti-racist coalition that turned its back on the segregationists that had dominated the Democratic Party between1865 and 1933.  It is not by accident that in preparation for his role as the President of the United States, Obama is preparing his administration for massive state intervention and infrastructure projects similar to the New Deal.

The New Deal was not simply a massive government project to jump start the economy, it was a political alliance between labor, anti-racist forces, socialists and the anti–fascist faction of the capitalist class. Ultimately, it was military Keynesianism that broke the depression but blacks had to fight a prolonged and protracted struggle against the chauvinistic and racist ideas that formed the basis of the liberal ideology of US capitalism.

Space does not allow for an elaboration of the protracted struggles from the fight against fascism globally, but it is important to restate the fact that imperialism, militarism and expansionism thrived inside the United States after World War II. As early as the fifties, when President Dwight Eisenhower had warned of the rise of the Military Industrial Complex, the sociologist C. Wright Mills had written in his book of the development of the Permanent War economy and the interlocking directorates between the military, the economic and the political elite.  Mills also very early outlined how the military industrial complex was corrupting the mission of the University so that the eugenics thinking within the society reinforced the devaluation of other humans while celebrating free markets.

Militarism, the Breton Woods Institution and US Imperialism

Both imperial wars of the twentieth century had been precipitated by the challenges of German capitalists to the dominance of the British imperialists. One by-product of British imperialism and militarism was the centrality of the British Currency (the Pound sterling) as the currency of world trade. In the midst of fighting fascism in Germany there were concerns in the United States for the reconstitution and the recomposition of global capitalism after the war.  Thus, in 1944, the Breton Woods system was instituted so that the USA could become the international headquarters of capitalism. The establishment of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IBRD) or the World Bank – entrusted the defence of international capitalism in the hands of the US ruling class. The dollar was enshrined as the currency of world trade (replacing sterling) and the USA used the strength of the dollar to support the reconstruction of capitalism in Western Europe.

Despite the competition between US and European capitalists, the USA supported European Reconstruction under the Marshall Plan to wean the European working classes away from ideas of socialism and new modes of organizing economic life. The dollar as the reserve currency of the international trading system was aligned to the British pound and this cemented the special relationship between the USA and Britain. Under the articles of agreement of the IMF, the USA was supposed to maintain the value of the dollar at US $35 to an ounce of gold. This arrangement held until the USA exhausted itself in its attempt to roll back the decolonization process, manifest in the struggles against the peoples of Vietnam.

The Civil Rights movement and the rise of counter- revolution.

The war against the peoples of Asia and Vietnam strengthened the capitalist classes with a vested interest in the military industrial complex. A core set of ideas relating to social Darwinism, survival of the fittest, control of labor, the build-up of the military to confront communism, and the rolling back of liberation movements were reproduced in the educational system that taught and celebrated racial genocide. African Americans had to wage a concerted struggle in the streets, in the factory, at the voting booth and in schools for the rights that had been enshrined in the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights.  These struggles for social and economic rights were designated as a component of the Civil Rights revolution and the Obama electoral campaign was a direct beneficiary of many of the ideas, strategies and tactics that had been developed in the struggles for the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

Cultural artists captured the continuities between the Civil Rights Revolution as they wailed, “Rosa Parks sat so Martin Luther King could walk" "Martin Luther King walked so Obama could run." Kwame Ture had forewarned of the linkages between the Civil Rights Revolution and the future revolutionary trajectory of the United States in the book, Ready for Revolution.

The counter-revolution of global militarism, anti-communism sexism, and super-exploitation of immigrants was most manifest in the campaign of assassinations against the Black Liberation Movement. The assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.  Malcolm X, school children, church goers, Robert Kennedy, John F. Kennedy and the Cointelpro frame up and street killings were meant to halt the coalescence of the Black Liberation movement with the revolutionary traditions of the USA. This counter-revolutionary period had a base in the intellectual culture of the society and found a political base in Reaganism. It was appropriately called the Reagan Revolution. As this counter revolution deepened, Newt Gingrich proudly called himself a revolutionary. In his book on the Bush administration, What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and Washington’s Culture of Deception, Scott McClellan outlined the plans of Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney and the neo-cons for a permanent campaign or permanent revolution

It was the peace movement nationally and globally that intervened in the permanent campaign. Historically, the Black Liberation movement had served as an inspiration for the anti-war movement, the peace movement, the Free speech movement, the gay and liberation movement, the women’s movement, the environmental justice movement, the anti- colonial movements (eg Puerto Rico and anti-apartheid) and sections of the workers movement. These movements did not agree on a strategy for liberation but it was understood that the capitalist mode of production stood as an obstacle to human freedom, self-emancipation and limited independence. Through the culture of the Civil Rights movement, the US media was beamed all across the world so that cultural heroes such as Mohammed Ali was not simply an American hero but a hero to all anti- imperialist forces.

Subsequent to the defeat of the USA in Vietnam, the counter-revolutionary forces set out to roll back the gains of the Civil rights period. Professor Ronald W. Walters has chronicled the various policies of the conservative forces in his book, White Nationalism-Black Interests: Conservative Public Policy and the Black Community. Professor Walters correctly documented how the radical section of the conservative movement captured power in the United States and drew attention to how the Clinton administration strengthened these conservative forces. The conservative sections of the capitalist class invested in think tanks and foundations to recast the free market ideas of neo-liberalism. The Heritage Foundation and the American Enterprise Institute emerged slowly during the period of Ronald Reagan to settle at the apex of a network of foundations, publications, columnists, radio talk show hosts, religious organizations, professional fund-raisers, and endowed professors to promote the ideas of white supremacy and obscene militarism. The basic dogma of both conservatism and neo-liberalism was based on the strength of the military and the fight against communism. After the fall of the planned economies in Eastern Europe in 1989, the intellectuals of the conservative movement in the USA were emboldened to believe in the supremacy of the US form of organizing economic life. By the end of the twentieth century, capitalism was presented as a religion with the market as the ‘deity of choice.’ It was in this euphoria over the triumph of capitalism when Harvey Cox penned, ‘the Market as God.’

Throughout this period of the massive buildup of US military, the European capitalists who had been crushed during Second World War set about the establishment of the European Union in order to establish a common currency to compete with the dollar as the currency of world trade. After the massive deficits of the US government, the Europeans refused to continue to finance the US deficits.  As long as the dollar was the currency of world trade, the USA could finance its deficits by printing money and by militarily occupying other countries to reinforce US cultural domination.  The conflict and cooperation between the European Union and the USA was camouflaged but after the convergence of the European economies with a common currency, the Euro (in 2002), the competition between the USA and Europe was out in the open as the EU sought to develop another imperial front in the international system.

Cultural imperialism reinforced the US corporations as the film and media complex was placed at the service of those who promoted genocidal thinking and militarism. Ronald Reagan, as an actor, cemented the linkages between militarism and the media during his rise to power and his actual service as President 1981-1988. Republican-style attacks and negative campaign tactics were introduced into corporate public relations as an essential ingredient of eugenics and mind control. One central component of mind control was to induce fear and pessimism in the ranks of the most oppressed. The genius of the election Obama campaign was to make a leap beyond the cynicism and callousness of the rulers who believed that the oppressed could be divided forever.

The Audacity of Hope was translated from a book project into a ground operation that intervened to halt the permanent campaign of Karl Rove and the Republican Party. Rove was the activist on the political front while Cheney and Rumsfeld were the militarists to consolidate the counter evolution that had been given a fillip in the Reagan period. There were very few differences between the two main political parties over the neo-liberal project, and, in fact, the Clinton administration was most aggressive in advancing the neo-liberal trade deals along with the promotion of the World Trade Organization. While the Clintons actively promoted the neo-liberalism of trade and deregulation internationally, it was left to the second Bush administration to fully promote deregulation and aggressive militarism. 

Within this period there were conservative elements that were proud to be called imperialists. Of these formations, the Project for a New American Century (PNAC) led by Donald Rumsfeld and Richard Cheney called on conservatives to be proud of being imperialist and were not afraid to declare that the United States was above international law. The varying writers who proclaim the need for US imperialism are documented in the book, The New Imperialism by David Harvey.  This author wants to go beyond David Harvey and note that the one section of the academic left has been unwilling to grasp the full dangers that have been outlined in the Liberal Virus. Academic treatises on imperialism treated the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq as bad decisions of a neo- conservative cabal instead of understanding this militarism and war as emanating directly from the permanent war culture.

Chris Hedges linked this permanent war culture to the Christian right and the culture of despair in order to promote the American fascists. In his brilliant clarification off the signposts of American fascism, Hedges highlighted the ‘cult of masculinity,’ the religious crusades, the war on truth and the commercialization of God as the key sign posts of American fascism. This author would agree with these signposts with the qualification that the vibrant peace movement, the abolish prison movements, the black liberation movement, the reparations movement, the women’s movement and the environmental justice movement developed as a counterweight to fascism. Hence this author termed the period not as fascist but one of counter-revolution.

There were key elements to this counter-revolutionary period.

1.    Re-segregation and the entangled hierarchies in the USA and at the global level (called Global Apartheid - hierarchies most evident in the organization of urban communities, the system of schooling and absence of schools).

2.    Economic polarization and disparities globally. Concentration and centralization of capital taken to new heights (dominance of Wall Street and dollar hegemony).

3.    Twenty-first century eugenics, such as AIDS, Sterilization, Designer babies, Biometrics and the cancer epidemics.

4.    International Drug and Military interconnections: Ritalin culture, wars on drugs and crack cocaine epidemics (global drugs, finance infrastructure) feeding the prison industrial complex.

5.    Religious Fundamentalism (especially Christian, Islamic, Jewish and Hindu fundamentalism).

6.    Armaments Culture, (Militarism and military humanitarianism - war and influence of intelligence, security apparatus, information warfare (multi-billion expenditure on war and the development of nuclear weapons).

7.    Media disinformation, psychological warfare and mind control.

8.    Environmental decay: pollution and global warming (most manifest in Hurricane Katrina and the aftermath).

9.    Big Pharmaceutical conglomerates, genetically modified food and seeds.

10.  Racism at a new level.

11.  Sexism, deformed patriarchy, and homophobia.

It should be noted that the identified elements of counter-revolution–militarism, war, eugenics, institutionalized racism, Ritalin culture, environmental decay and toxic racism, propaganda and psychological warfare, economic disparities, bell curve ideas of schooling, re-segregation, sexism and homophobia–cannot be understood in isolation. Within this counter-revolutionary period militarists and anti-democratic forces thrived in all parts of the world. Because of the degree of concentration of capital that had been reached, the counter- revolutionary politics of the one per cent of billionaires on Earth imposed the politics of retrogression and negative human relations not only for citizens of the USA but for most of humanity. In the process there was a vast array of institutions that were organized to demobilize and disorganize the citizens of the world.

(Read Part 2, Part 3)

BlackCommentator.com Guest Commentator, Dr. Horace Campbell, PhD, is Professor of African American Studies and Political Science at Syracuse University in Syracuse New York. His book, Rasta and Resistance: From Marcus Garvey to Walter Rodney is going through its fifth edition. He is also the author of Reclaiming Zimbabwe: The Exhaustion of the Patriarchal Model of Liberation and is currently working on a book on Obama and 21st Century Politics. He has contributed to many other edited books, most recently, “From Regional Military de-stabilization to Military Cooperation and Peace in South Africa” in Peace and Security in Southern Africa (State and Democracy Series) , edited by Ibbo Mandaza. He has published numerous articles in scholarly journals and is currently writing a book on the Wars against the Angolan peoples. Click here to contact Dr. Campbell.

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