Wednesday, May 16, 2018

Truest statement of the week

Policy-wise there are places where Barber, the PPC and the Institutional Church are unwilling to tread. Barber and company seem barely able to recognize domestic or international crimes when these are perpetrated by Democrats. It was Obama not Bush or Trump that started giving training, material support, ammo and logistics to every single army on the African continent except Libya, Somalia and Zimbabwe. Barber’s call for “a just two state solution” is utterly oblivious of the impossibility of anybody peacefully co-existing with or creating such a thing out of the nuclear armed apartheid ethnocracy that is today’s Israel. Barber’s sermon condemns drone warfare’s murder of innocents without noting that Barack Obama originated the policy. Rev. Barber denounces the hateful and immoral border wall, without noting that 70% of it was built under Obama, who voted for it as a US senator, leaving less than 30% to be completed by Trump. All these are places where rank and file activists inside and outside the precincts of the Church-led movement must continue to press Barber, the PPC and the Institutional Church.
The PPC has other built in political limitations as well. While legally and nominally a non-partisan endeavor, its operatives, its organizational history and political ties are firmly to the Democratic Party. Rev. Barber comes out of a tradtion of political preachers, through the NAACP, which is firmly tied by blood, business, social, funding and legal networks to the Democratic party. Rev. Barber was a featured speaker at the 2016 Democratic convention. For all of Barber’s career, and in his previous outfit, Moral Monday Barber was known for deploying his guns of moral outrage exclusively against Republicans. That’s a big problem when austerity, empire and militarism are bipartisan projects of both ruling class parties. And of course Rev. Barber doesn’t touch his party's craven obsession to blame Russian meddling, Russian influence and Russian perfidy of all kinds for the Democrats’ loss in 2016, and maybe for their next losses too.

-- Bruce A. Dixon, "Barber Sermon on Militarism Reveals Philosophical & Political Limitations of the Poor Peoples Campaign" (BLACK AGENDA REPORT).









Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.
 
Poll1 { display:none; }