Obama and Johnson, "Progressive" Black Leaders

President Barack Obama swept into office on the delusions, eagerly sold to the American people by “progressive Democrats,” that he opposed the war in Iraq, would stand up for unions and the poor, address black unemployment, rein in polluters and banksters, and deliver universal health care and a path to citizenship for millions of immigrants. Instead, the first black president increased the military budget, tried and failed to keep the troops in Iraq, doubled down on Afghanistan, and unleashed drone wars in Africa and Asia. The first black president froze wages of federal employees and scapegoated unionized federal workers and public school teachers. The first black president quadrupled down on the Bush bankster bailout, and passed new legislation shielding mortgage fraudsters, telecom snoopers, war criminals, torturers and more. The first black president promotes gentrification, ignores black unemployment. He threw away his mandate for single payer health care and immigration reform to give us a blanket full of holes cynically misnamed the “Affordable Care Act” and deport 1.1 million people, more than any three or four previous presidents combined.

And now a black man, a Morehouse man, a certifiable member of the black misleadership class who invokes Dr. Martin Luther King as the patron saint of the US Army in Afghanistan [ed: proclaimed “progressive” Jeh Johnson] is in charge of the Department of Homeland Security, with its private prisons, its border walls, its “fusion centers” distributing unfounded rumors, illegal surveillance data and more on citizens to local cops and private security contractors. The paradigm has indeed shifted. A black man will take charge of hounding and profiling Latino immigrants, locking them up in privatized prisons.

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If this is where being a “progressive Democrat” leads, maybe it's time we looked in some other direction. If this is where black leadership has led us, it's time to hang our heads in shame for a minute or two, and resolve to lead ourselves in some other directions. It's time for black America to shed its black misleadership class of “progressives” and throw up some new leaders, and some new models of leadership.

  Black Agenda Report