Maher Owes Obama an Apology for Racist and Demeaning BP Dig

Earl Ofari Hutchinson

On his Friday May 28 show, Real Time HBO host Bill Maher demanded that President Obama act like a black president and pack a gun when he meets with the BP CEOs. Now Maher should take his own advice and act like a responsible commentator and apologize for his own politically demeaning and racially offensive dig at Obama. Politically demeaning and racially offensive are probably not strong enough characterizations of Maher’s silly, inane, effort to get a laugh. In one fell line, Maher demoted Obama from American president Obama, to black president Obama, complete with gun tucked in waistband. This played to the vile stereotype that blacks are inherent gun toting gang bangers, drive shooters and thugs, and that violence is a natural way of life in black communities. In another fell line, he played hard on the media and GOP line that Obama fell badly asleep at the wheel on the BP spill, has done little to contain it, and has botched every chance to be the strong, commanding president and rein in the oil giant and the oil industry.

Non-funnyman Maher dredged up a textbook perfect bad guy image storm for Obama; a storm chock full of racial stereotypes, and the terrible, finger pointing by much the public and the GOP at Obama for the BP catastrophe. Maher could have hit Obama from any of a dozen angles to get a chuckle about the political straight the BP ooze has put Obama in. He could have cracked that Obama should clamp a wetsuit or a diving bell on the BP CEO, or spray him with an oil can, or even took it the street, and said Obama should kick his butt if he didn’t fix the spill. None of which carried any hint, overt at least, of a racial slam or disrespect for Obama and the office.

But Maher didn’t go there with that. Race stuff is simply too juicy and eye catching. And now in the wake of the BP spill, Maher, like the ever swelling pack of sharks circling their victim in the water, sniff Obama’s sudden vulnerability, and political blood. The hard fact is at this point BP can’t cap the well, and even if Obama did what the new crop of his bashers shout he do and order the oil giant to cap it immediately, it still wouldn’t get done that minute. Obama, then, can expect more blame, finger pointing, and cheap shots, will be heaped on and taken at him. Maher certainly heaped that on him for the wrong reason, and above all in the wrong way. Bill, you owe Obama an apology.

Earl Ofari Hutchinson is an author and political analyst. His new book is How Obama Governed: The Year of Crisis and Challenge (Middle Passage Press).
Follow Earl Ofari Hutchinson on Twitter: http://twitter.com/earlhutchinson

GOP’s Calling Gulf Spill Obama’s Katrina Bogus

Earl Ofari Hutchinson

This one could have been mailed in. Sarah Palin predictably knocked President Obama for as she put it in garbled colloquialism failing to “dive in there” and solve the Gulf spill disaster. Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal and a rash of GOP senators were slightly more grammatically intelligible but still pounced on Obama for being too cozy with BP and not pulling out all stops to staunch the spill. The GOP’s political attack plan is crude and transparent. Compare the Gulf spill to Bush’s Katrina bumble, liken Obama to Bush and heap the same blame on him.

It won’t fly. Before Katrina hit, government tracking systems, weather satellites, and countless news reports warned that the hurricane potentially posed a grave threat to New Orleans and the Gulf. Bush administration officials well knew this. They also knew that the sea walls there were in terrible shape and could give way. When the storm hit, Bush hesitated, dithered, and minimized the immediate impact of the storm, and made no effort to counter the wild, sensational and thoroughly false reports of looting, rape and vandalism. The colossal loss of property, the thousands dead and injured, the horrendous displacement of residents were the direct result of government ineptitude. Five years later thousands remain uprooted, and whole neighborhoods remain gutted. New Orleans and the Gulf are still paying the high price for Bush’s abysmal delay. After an international army of volunteers and donors sped aid and relief to the area, Bush eventually recovered and kicked relief efforts into high gear.

Obama’s response to the Gulf spill stands in stark contrast. He sent cabinet secretaries, and an armada of homeland security, Environmental Protection Agency, FEMA and Coast Guard personnel, engineers, scientists, technicians and clean-up workers to the Gulf; more than 20,000 responders in all. There are multiple staging areas, and ships in the area involved in the clean-up. Nearly 2 million feet of containment boom, and a million gallons of chemical dispersant have been used to fight the spill. Obama has asked Congress for $130 million for clean-up operations. The White House has churned out reams of releases, statements, and reports to keep the public updated on the progress and problems in containing the spill.

Obama correctly points the blame finger at BP and oil executives for their duck and dodge of full responsibility for the spill, and their inability to successfully contain it. They deserve the blame. But as environmental disasters go, off shore drilling spills are rare. The industry’s forty year safety record on drilling has been fairly good. But the BP mess shows that all it takes is one drill disaster to cancel out the industry’s record and paint the industry as a greedy, safety plagued, environmentally irresponsible menace.

The spill should be a wake-up call on the potential and real hazards of ultra deep water oil drilling, and the urgent need to devise new and better safety and equipment standards and controls. The Obama administration has been hands on in supervising BP’s efforts to stop the spill. This provides it with terrible but needed teaching moment on the need for the government to ramp up oversight and monitoring of the industry. And beyond that for the Obama administration to rethink and reexamine the potentially devastating environmental hazards and drawbacks of expanded off shore drilling as well as its potential to dent America’s energy dependent shackle.

Public opinion polls now show that more than half of Americans say they disapprove of Obama’s handling of the disaster. An even bigger percentage says they have no confidence in the government’s ability to prevent another spill. The public’s heightened jitters over the spill are understandable given the nightmare environmental messes that the oil industry has at times made in the past. The public is also right to be deeply suspicious and outraged over the far too lax and cozy relationship between government regulatory agencies and the oil industry.

The Gulf spill, though, is not solely an environmental catastrophe to Palin and the GOP or even a matter to them of government officials in bed with an industry. If that was there real concern they’d point the same blame finger at themselves as they do at Obama for their sweetheart relation with the oil industry. According to the Sunlight Foundation, BP has dumped six million in campaign contributions to congresspersons in past years. Seven of the top ten recipients of BP contributions have been GOP senators and congress persons, and one of the principal recipients has been GOP Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell.

But the facts are irrelevant. The Gulf spill is simply too juicy a political opportunity for the GOP to pass up to ream President Obama for a disaster that he could not foresee, did not make, and has made a best effort to solve. What better way to drive the political nail in the box than to call the Gulf spill the politically loaded Obama’s Katrina. It’s a bogus call.

Earl Ofari Hutchinson is an author and political analyst. His new book is How Obama Governed: The Year of Crisis and Challenge (Middle Passage Press).

Follow Earl Ofari Hutchinson on Twitter: http://twitter.com/earlhutchinson

Obama’s Tin Ear on Bernanke---And Company

Earl Ofari Hutchinson

President Obama ear can’t be that tin on Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke. His wink and nod at the Big Banks and Wall Street’s roulette play with public monies is a big reason for record breaking home foreclosures, record breaking bank executive compensation payouts, soaring bank profits, unemployment climbing again in December, a decade high number of Americans in poverty, and Scott Brown. Yet Obama’s still busily jawboning senators to ram Bernanke through the Senate.

The checklist of Bernanke flubs is well documented. There’s fraudulent AIG, JPM, and Bear Stearns bailout, the banks and financial houses went on a free wheel orgy in trading risky and ultimately hollow derivatives, the massive bait and switch sub-prime lending scams, the stonewall of details on how and to whom the Fed shelled out trillions through the Fed's special lending programs, the near total absence of tough regulatory oversight over the failed and flawed Wall Street banks and financial houses. All of this happened on Bernanke’s watch.

Wall Street and Obama administration mythmaking about Bernanke aside, he didn't save a system from collapse. He saved a handful of flopped banks and financial houses that engaged in dubious stock spins, swaps and game playing with investor and public monies from a crisis that he and they helped create.
Bernanke, of course, didn’t make the mess alone. The not embattled enough Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner and Obama top economic advisor Larry Summers with their free market, minimal regulations philosophy, and too cozy ties with Wall Street also fueled the crisis.
Volumes have been written about how Bush and the Republicans eagerly cut sweetheart deals with financial industry lobbyists to gut lending and stock trading regulations, winked and nodded at the banks and brokerage houses as they engaged in an orgy of dubious stock swapping, buys, and trading, conned millions of homeowners into taking out catastrophic sub-prime loans and watered down the oversight powers of government regulatory agencies.

But their financial free boot couldn't have happened without a huge policy change that Summers and another Obama advisor Robert Rubin engineered during the Clinton years to scrap most of the provisions of the decades old Glass-Steagall Act. The Act was the 1930s Great Depression era measure that kept federally insured banks out of the go-go world of stock trading, exotic lending and financial speculation. It also set rigid standards for mortgage lending and strict oversight over banking practices.
The predictable quickly happened with the regulatory gloves off commercial banks, brokerage firms, hedge funds, institutional investors, pension funds and insurance companies could do whatever they wanted when it came to investing in each other’s businesses and marching in lock step with each other's financial operations. Now Obama belatedly wants Glass-Steagall, or some reasonable facsimile of it, back. But can he convince his economic troika of that?
The Wall Street three give no sign of backing away from their belief that failing financial institutions must be propped up with massive amounts of taxpayer dollars, that the industry can police itself, and that Wall Street still holds the key to economic recovery.
The three have a lock on Obama. And since one of them has to face confirmation only once and pass muster and he has done that and the others are advisors, they can’t be dumped by the Senate, but Bernanke can. That is if Obama would cut bait on him. Obama’s made that clear that won’t happen. His ear is too tin.

Earl Ofari Hutchinson is an author and political analyst. His new book is, How Obama Governed: The Year of Crisis and Challenge (Middle Passage Press).

What’s Next--Muslim Only Lines at Airports?

Earl Ofari Hutchinson



Are Muslim only lines at airports next? The thought is offensive, disgusting, and blatantly unconstitutional. But it’s hardly far-fetched. Three years before suspected Nigerian airline terrorist Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab was hauled off a Northwest airlines flight from Amsterdam to Detroit with a powder and liquid explosive device stuffed in his underwear, British Department of Transportation officials openly discussed corralling men of Asian or Middle Eastern appearance at airports for intense questioning, checks and searches. The plan outraged Muslim leaders and British officials backed off the systematic profiling of Muslims. However, single men of Asian and Middle Eastern appearance were still subject to intense checks and searches. Britain was not alone. France and the Netherlands had already imposed de facto profiling of Muslim appearing young men and families at airports since the September, 2001 terror attacks. Polls showed that a substantial majority of Europeans agreed that racial profiling was not repugnant if it made airline travel safer and thwarted a possible terror attack. The clamor for a racial crackdown was first heard in the U.S. following the bombing of the Federal Building in Oklahoma City in 1996,

Then President Clinton and Attorney General Janet Reno had the good sense not rush to judgment and scapegoat Muslims. The swift arrest of Timothy McVeigh squelched the building mob hysteria against them. But it didn't squelch public suspicions that all Muslims were potential terrorists. The federal building bombing propelled Clinton's 1996 Antiterrorism Act through Congress. Civil rights and civil liberties groups had waged a protracted battle against the bill. The law gave the FBI broad power to infiltrate groups, quash fundraising by foreigners, monitor airline travel, and seize motel and hotel records and trash due process by permitting the admission of secret evidence to expel immigrants. The implication was that present and future attacks would likely be launched by those with an Arab name and face rather than by men like McVeigh.

President Bush, as Clinton, took the high ground after the 911 attack. He did not reflexively finger-point Muslims. The Bush administration publicly assured that profiling was reprehensible and violated legal and constitutional principles, and that it would not be done. But the attack stirred tremors among Muslims that they would routinely be targeted, subject to search and surveillance, and profiled at airports.

The profiling alarm bells went off again after a soldier with a Muslim name shot up the military base at Ft. Hood back in November. The Council on American-Islamic Relations wasted no time and issued a loud and vigorous denunciation of the mass killing. The Council didn't know at that moment whether Major Nidal Malik Hasan, the alleged shooter, was a Muslim by birth, a converted Muslim, or even a Muslim at all. The name and the horrific murder spree was enough to drive the group to quickly distance itself from the rampage. Other Muslim organizations instantly followed suit and issued their own equally strong disavowal of Hasan.

This didn’t stop the pack of Fox Network commentators, conservative radio talk show hosts, writers, and some officials from again openly shouting for even tighter scrutiny of Muslim groups. Terror suspect Abdulmutallab has simply raised the decibel level on their call for transportation officials to openly profile Muslims at airports, train stations, and even on the open highways.

Some elected officials have even jumped on the profiling bandwagon. Congressman Peter King, ranking Republican on the Homeland Security Committee, predictably loudly called for the profiling of Muslims. Brooklyn Assemblyman Dov Hikind went further and announced he’d reintroduce the bill he first introduced in 2005 to let police stop and search anyone they deem to be suspicious. Hikind didn’t specifically finger Muslims, but the intent of the bill was unmistakable, namely to target Muslims.

The New York Assembly will reject Hikind’s bill again. But the rejection isn’t likely to be unanimous. Legislators read the papers and the polls. Informal on line polls taken immediately after Abdulmutallab’s failed terror attempt found that a majority of Americans are ready to turn a blind eye to law, the constitution and just plain human decency to target Muslims, any Muslim, for special scrutiny. No matter that a potential terrorist can come in any shape, size, color, gender, and disguise. The Leadership Conference on Civil Rights noted that convicted terrorists John Walker Lindh were white, and Richard Reid was Jamaican and British. Abdulmutallab is Nigerian, but from all appearances he could just as easily be mistaken for a young African-American hip hop artist.

Broad-based ethnic profiling creates in turn panic and the false sense of security that airlines are actually preventing terrorist attacks. It also causes law enforcement resources to be squandered chasing the wrong targets. Worse, it’s a witch-hunt against a group based solely on their religion and ethnicity. This fuels even greater racial division, fear and hysteria. The public whispers and the right wing’s open talk of Muslim only airport lines do the same.

Earl Ofari Hutchinson is an author and political analyst. His forthcoming book, How Obama Governed: The Year of Crisis and Challenge (Middle Passage Press) will be released in January 2010.

Blacks and Hispanics Biggest Losers if Real Health Care Reform Flops

Earl Ofari Hutchinson

If President Obama’s drive for some form of universal health care falters the biggest losers by far will be African-Americans and Hispanics. According to a report by the Commonwealth Fund, blacks and Hispanics make up nearly half of the estimated 50 million Americans who have no health care insurance. But the danger signs for reform are real. A Washington Post/ABC News poll found that public support for Obama’s plan is badly fraying. This is no surprise.
The instant that Obama announced he would make health care reform his defining issue the health care reform opponents kicked their attack into high gear. The two hit points are that it’s too costly and too intrusive; meaning that it will snatch from Americans their right to choose their own doctors and health plans and dump health care into the alleged slipshod, inefficient hands of government bureaucrats. The real fear of private insurers, pharmaceuticals, and major medical practitioners is that they’ll have to treat millions of uninsured, profit losing, health challenged blacks and Hispanics.
The huge racial disparity in the number of uninsured has been a sticking point for every Democratic president since Harry Truman proposed the first national health care plan in the late 1940s. The numbers of blacks and Hispanics without a prayer of obtaining health care at any price has always been wildly disproportionate to that of whites, even poor whites. It has steadily gotten worse over the years.

The legions of black and Hispanic uninsured are far more likely than the one in four whites who are uninsured to experience problems getting treatment at a hospital or clinic. This has devastating health and public policy consequences. A study by the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies found that they are far more likely than whites to suffer higher rates of catastrophic illness and disease, and are much less likely to obtain basic drugs, tests, preventive screenings and surgeries. They are more likely to recover slower from illness, and they die much younger.
Studies have found that when blacks and Hispanics do receive treatment, the care they receive is more likely to be substandard than that of whites. Reports indicate that even when blacks and Hispanics are enrolled in high quality health plans, the racial gap in the care and quality of medical treatment still remains.

Private insurers routinely cherry pick the healthiest and most financially secure patients in order to bloat profits and hold down costs. American medical providers spend twice as much per patient than providers in countries with universal health care, and they provide lower quality for the grossly inflated dollars. Patients pay more in higher insurance premiums, co-payments, fees and other hidden health costs. At the same time, government medical insurance programs shell out more than public insurers in other countries with universal health care.


With much fanfare, three major hospital groups and the pharmaceuticals in June and July announced that they would plough more than $200 billion into health care reform. This appeared to be a major step toward breaking the age old logjam on getting real health care reform. That’s hardly the case. Neither the pharmaceuticals, the hospitals nor private industry groups publicly pledged to fully drop their opposition to providing coverage and at cost medicines to those considered “high risk” or, less charitably, “undesirables.” Those are the millions who suffer chronic and major diseases—cancer, diabetes, asthma and heart disease.
Blacks and Hispanics have far greater incidences of these ailments than whites. Even when they can pay for medical coverage, they can be excluded from coverage if afflicted with these medical maladies. The health care industry’s reform plan is vague, tentative and subject to change at every step of the negotiating process. They still have a free hand to exclude high-risk cases from coverage.
The much debated “public option” is the only government check and balance to guarantee coverage and treatment for the uninsured and those labeled as high risk.

Yet, industry groups have mounted a major effort to kill outright or water the public plan down to where it is meaningless. In a press conference in June, Obama sent a mild signal that the public option is open to negotiation. Chief of Staff Rahm Emmanuel went further and privately told opposing Republican Senators and doubting conservative Democrats that Obama will consider “alternatives” to the tepid government option. Emmanuel didn’t say what the alternative is other than a nod toward an even vaguer and unproven system of loosely regulated, non profit health care co-operatives.

For decades, the health care industry has gutted every proposal for expanded health care. It has couched its attack by posing as the noble public spirited guardian of the nation’s health and pocketbook; arguing that a public plan is too costly, inefficient and entails too much heavy-handed government control and interference. The Post/ABC Poll shows more Americans are buying their spin. This is catastrophic news for the millions of black and Hispanic uninsured who desperately need real health care reform.

Earl Ofari Hutchinson is an author and political analyst. His weekly radio show, “The Hutchinson Report” can be heard on weekly in Los Angeles at 9:30 AM Fridays on KTYM Radio 1460 AM and live streamed nationally on ktym.com