In Afghanistan, the top killer of U.S. troops is suicide. Continuing a war so that our troops will not have been killing themselves in vain brings a new level of blindness to the question of what types of destructive madness are simply and unavoidably in vain. Of course, U.S. troops are in Afghanistan to spread democracy, while the vast majority of U.S. residents oppose keeping U.S. troops in Afghanistan, and the casus belli has been assassinated and given a proper Muslim sea burial, according to our president, who occasionally brags about such killings while refusing to officially say whether they exist. He has said, however, that we're leaving Afghanistan, and the primary way in which we're leaving is, oddly enough, by staying, at least for the next two and a half years, after which we're staying in an unspecified smaller way for another 10 years. Then we'll see.

Will the third poorest nation in the world be able to keep fighting off our loving embrace, night raids, and drone strikes for 12.5 more years? It will if we keep paying for it. Imagine how many of that last 25 percent of Americans would turn against this war if they knew they were paying for both sides of it while their schools and fire stations and ecosystems collapse. A report by the congressional Subcommittee on National Security and Foreign Affairs, chaired by Rep. John Tierney, found that $360 million per year was being handed over by the Pentagon to insurgent groups or their warlord front men for the safe passage of truck convoys carrying US military supplies, from one trucking contract alone. We're paying for permission to drive down roads without being shot at. What a war! Imagine if the British had thought of that in 1776. Maybe we could still be colonies.

We don't need to abandon Afghans, or Libyans, or Syrians, or for that matter Bahrainis or Saudis. But effective financial aid and reparations would support nonviolence and independence. As Ralph Lopez has been pointing out, there are good examples of humanitarian programs in Afghanistan that could be built on. Most foreign aid, however, is a scam, with 40 to 50 percent never reaching Afghanistan. Aid profiteers rival war profiteers in their greed, while 60 percent of Afghan children are in various stages of starvation and 23 froze to death last winter outside Kabul. And half the so-called aid money has gone to training soldiers and police. I remember the late Richard Holbrooke telling Congress that civilian operations in Afghanistan were subordinate to the military. That dooms them to failure, and Afghans to suffering.

I went to Afghanistan last year with Kathy Kelly and Voices for Creative Nonviolence. I met there a man named Hakim who has organized a group called Afghan Youth Peace Volunteers. Last week I heard from Kathy that he wanted to visit the United States but had been denied a visa. So, Voices and Global Exchange and Fellowship of Reconciliation and the group I work for RootsAction.org flooded the State Department with emails and calls. And they reversed their decision and gave Hakim a visa. He'll be here soon. Sometimes our voice is loud enough. Other times it's just one tiny little whisper short and we imagine it's nowhere close.

Our voice was loud in 2005 and 2006. It was loud enough to prevent an attack on Iran in 2007. We've been helping to hold off an attack on Iran for years, since our 1953 overthrow of its government and our aid to Iraq in killing Iranians in the 1980s. Now we hear that Iran may have nuclear weapons, or nuclear weapons facilities, or nuclear weapons program capabilities, and Iran was behind 9-11, and Iran is criminally threatening to put up a fight if attacked again, plus Iran hired a Mexican drug gang to assassinate a Saudi ambassador in D.C. and then called it off just to make us look bad for catching them. There's no limit to the Iranians' evil, which is why we should take an action that the war proponents themselves say would fail on its own terms. Bombing Iran would do no more than the murderous sanctions already in place or the assassinations of scientists already committed to overthrow the government. And for the U.S. to allow Israel to attack Iran would only fool people in a single nation: ours. Iran would strike back at U.S. troops, and it would be a U.S. war by day two.

War is not just reserved for poor nations now, but it has -- in other ways -- changed almost beyond recognition. Mostly the elderly and children die in wars now, mostly civilians. The wars happen where they live. Almost entirely non-Americans die in U.S. wars. Sometimes the U.S. warriors are seated in air-conditioned offices in the United States. Drones are better than armies, someone told me recently, because with drones nobody gets killed. Imagine the terror produced by the buzzing of a drone over your house night and day, able to take your life and the lives of your loved ones at any moment. But don't bother to protest. You're nobody. You're not listed in the war casualty reports in U.S. newspapers. When drones kill, nobody dies, and you -- you 95 percent of humanity -- you are nobody. Harold Koh says that bombing houses is neither a war nor hostilities, under the War Powers Act. Unless Americans are under the bombs, they are not hostile bombs. Perhaps they are friendly bombs, or bombs that are good for people whether they know it or not.

The military now wants to give medals to drone pilots. I picture them as bronzed joy sticks. I actually think there's something unfair about this idea. I think our brave drones themselves should be getting the medals. They show the absolute least hesitation to kill. Or what about the ants fighting in my back yard? They sacrifice their lives and abandon their comrades with complete efficiency. If we're handing out medals for desk jobs, what about the guys who pay the protection fees on Afghan roads? Or the guy who catches Petraeus when he faints in Congressional hearings? Why should some people get medals and others not? "War will exist," wrote John F. Kennedy, "until that distant day when the conscientious objector enjoys the same reputation and prestige that the warrior does today." Therefore, I say, scrap all the medals except for those who refuse to fight.

The key, I think, to getting to that distant day when resisters are honored and warriors are not, is that we stop justifying or ignoring mass-murder. The deaths of 95 percent of the victims of our wars are the most closely guarded secret. The deaths of so-called civilians, of those not understood to be fighting back in defense of their homes, of those not male or fighting age. (Fighting-age males are posthumously declared combatants whenever our government kills them). This is the most forbidden information, because it brings down the war machine. The war machine depends for its existence on being something other than murder on a larger scale, even as it strives to reduce itself to exactly murder on a recognizable scale. Our sacred troops are the war machine's best defense, since whatever they do must be brave and therefore good. And yet some of those troops are the gravest threat, not only because they can refuse to fight, or can speak out in opposition, but because some of them persist in producing videos and photos of themselves posing with, mutilating, and urinating on the bodies of people they kill.

And then we're told to be outraged by the urination. But when you get outraged that someone has peed on the body of a man they just murdered, what does that convey about your attitude toward the murder itself? Surely most of us would object more to being killed than to being peed on after we're dead.

The forbidden thought is that all killing is regrettable, immoral, and criminal. This is the thought of which Lockheed Martin, David Petraeus, General Electric, Buck McKeon, and your neighbors are frightened.

It's all right to call a war a failure and the failure a SNAFU and incompetence the order of the day. The military money machine can generate even more money out of that. It could have done better with another trillion or two to spend.

It's all right to point out the injustice, hypocrisy, and shame in our society's treatment of veterans after they've served their war-making purpose. People can devote their time and energy to bake sales for veterans' needs. That only furthers the acceptance of war in many minds, while a few are awakened. And the Pentagon can shift to fighting its wars with robots.

It's all right to point out the economic trade-offs at stake, the standard of living we could have if we gave up some bombers and some billionaires. I make this point all the time. A few will understand, but the military industrial complex will counter by calling itself a jobs program and threatening congress members with unemployment in their districts.

What is not all right is finding out that our wars are one-sided slaughters of helpless families, and that over a million Iraqis lie dead in a devastated society where the first question any mother asks in areas poisoned by our weapons is "Is it normal?"

Veterans For Peace put out a statement last week in response to a United Nations communication to the U.S. government expressing concerns about our country's treatment of children in war. Included were concerns about the recruitment of children into the U.S. military, the U.S. killing of children in Afghanistan, the U.S. detention and torture of children labeled "combatants," and the provision of weapons by the United States to other nations employing child soldiers. I suspect it is the senseless killing of children abroad that will ultimately sway the most minds, but recruitment -- or at least the cost of it -- if an issue that is gaining traction.

Congresswoman Betty McCollum of Minnesota has won bipartisan support and passed through the Armed Services Committee a measure blocking the military from spending $80 million on sponsoring NASCAR drivers. We have a campaign at RootsAction.org to keep that measure in the bill. The U.S. Army says a third of its recruits come from motorsports sponsorships. Recruitment stations at racetracks help. But how does the Army measure the impact on our culture of sponsoring race cars? Dale Earnhardt, Jr., whom the National Guard has paid $136 million over the past five years to put a National Guard sticker on his race car and wear the logo on his uniform, predictably opposes cutting the funding, as do the biggest recipients of weapons money in Congress, none of whom have agreed to plaster their bodies with the logos of their sponsors. Military race cars have been featured in music videos, movies, and the shelves of toy stores. How can something so pervasive be measured? Well, we do know this: the total cost of advertising and recruitment per recruit is so much that we could have taken that money and simply given that young person and a bunch of his friends jobs doing something productive.

Those of us over on the left tend to think of cuts as bad and spending as good. For libertarians, cuts are good and spending is bad. This conveniently erases from the discussion the question of WHAT cuts and WHICH spending. We need to stop shouting "Jobs Not Cuts" and start shouting "Jobs Not Wars." The U.S. military is so well funded, that it could be cut by half, remain far and away the best funded military in the world, and fund with those cuts every program any progressive group has ever dared to dream of for clean energy, education, housing, etc., and quite a few programs nobody has yet dared to dream. Or we on the left could make a deal with libertarians: we work together. We cut a half trillion out of the Pentagon -- and I mean each year, not "over 10 years" as they like to say -- and we put a quarter trillion into tax cuts and a quarter trillion into useful spending.

A massive urgent program, or what people unthinkingly like to call "a war," is needed right now to prevent catastrophic climate change. Another is needed to rid the world of nuclear weapons and power. Another is needed to pull government out of the hands of plutocracy. And these aren't movements aimed at making life a little bit better. Jeremy Brecher wrote recently of the need for a human preservation movement. This is what we need, a survival movement, part of which will be the full abolition of war.

The Occupy movement is a good start at bringing important issues together. But of course we need to carry with us into the occupy movement the distinctly minority understanding that war can and must be completely eliminated. We can learn from the Outlawry movement. It was moral, educational, non-electoral, and long-term with no expectation of succeeding even in a generation, and no trigger to collapse into despair if it didn't.

We need to recognize that war is not in our genes. It's a relatively new creation, sporadically present and absent in various societies, avoided when we choose and not otherwise. It's not created by mystical forces of history or population or resource shortages or testosterone. It's created by a culture's tolerance for it, or tolerance for an unrepresentative government that engages in it. That's our situation. War is a creation of the 1 percent that recruits members of the 99 percent to support it, as well as to do the dirty parts. War and the weapons barons and the oil oligarchs and the Wall Street banksters and the corporate media and the big business lobbies and the crowd of court jesters and sycophants in Washington who claim to be our government: they look more powerful than they are. They're afraid of their own shadows. Six years ago they were secretly telling each other to end the wars before we gained more strength. Instead we switched parties and went home, while they breathed a sigh of relief. Yet, now, again they are scared of everything we do. They're spying on every word, comprehending little. What they understand is resistance. Frank Kellogg never understood the Outlawry of War, but he didn't have to. He just had to do what the people demanded. There are more of us in any small town than there are of them in the whole country. We need to realize our strength.

"And these words shall then become," wrote Percy Bysshe Shelley,
"Like Oppression's thundered doom
"Ringing through each heart and brain,
"Heard again - again - again -
"Rise like Lions after slumber
"In unvanquishable number -
"Shake your chains to earth like dew
"Which in sleep had fallen on you -
"Ye are many - they are few."

Much of my recent book "Back to Our Future" is focused on how 1980s popular culture created many of the perverse stories we still tell ourselves today. Through movies, video games, toys and television shows of that decade, children were specifically taught whom to love and whom to hate. We were inculcated to fear government scientists ("E.T."), EPA officials ("Ghostbusters") and municipal governments (the various police officials that cop heroes had to "go rogue" against). We were also taught to love the military ("Top Gun") and the super-rich ("Silver Spoons," "The Toy," "The Secret to My Success").

That decade, of course, initiated a modern era that now sees multimedia pop culture products serve as a full-on shadow education system - one that still aims to tell young adults how to divide the world between good and evil. That"s why two of this year's most anticipated pop culture products are so important - they may signal a larger effort to go beyond even the most audacious anti-populism of the 1980s and somehow turn the mass public itself into Public Enemy No. 1.

Reporting on the upcoming new edition of the game "Call of Duty" and the imminent release of the film "The Dark Knight Rises," Gameranx.com reports:

The game's main villain is Raul Menendez, described as the "idolized Messiah of the 99%" - a Julian Assange-like character who's old, experienced, and hell bent on starting a global insurrection against the status quo....

The character, as with the rest of the story, is the creation of David S. Goyer. Goyer is the co-writer of "The Dark Knight Rises," which also shares a similar story featuring Bane as Batman's primary antagonist, who starts a class war aimed against the rich and privileged of Gotham City with the backing of the common man.

In 1988, a Konami executive said pop culture industries were looking to "take anything remotely in the news and make it a game." Obviously, this move to put the headline-grabbing "99 percent" concept into video games and movies shows what that enduring strategy looks like in practice - and it doesn't look very good. In fact, it looks like the 1980s on steroids. Whereas that decade saw an anti-populism telling kids that do-gooders like government scientists, EPA officials and police chiefs were society's enemies, we are now seeing an even more audacious anti-populism - one suggesting to kids that our heroic military and superheroes must defeat leaders of "the common man" in order to protect the common man.

There's a cyclical quality to this, of course. Just as so many 1980s pop culture products reflected the spirit of the Reagan Revolution's conservative backlash, we are now seeing two blockbuster, genre-shaping products not-so-subtly reflect the Tea Party's rhetorical backlash to the powerful Occupy Wall Street zeitgeist. In the same way Republican leaders have caricatured the "99 percent" idea as a menacing "attack upon freedom" or a "mob," "Call of Duty" is essentially equating the "99 percent" idea with terrorism, chaos and violence.

Likewise, in "Dark Knight Rises," though there has been some effort to use the villain's name to portray him as a stand-in for Mitt Romney, the Los Angeles Times is right to flag the true "Occupy Wall Street vibe" of the bad guys. And though it's possible that the film will ultimately provide a more nuanced portrayal of such populist outrage than "Call of Duty" seems intent on presenting, the problem remains the same: when villainous motives and psychopathy is televisually ascribed to mass popular outrage against the economic status quo, it suggests to the audience that only crazy people would sympathize with such outrage.

The Chaplain Corps of the respective branches of the United States Armed Forces have long played a crucial role in the U.S. military. From its inception, the chaplaincy largely served a nonsectarian "civil gospel" catering to the needs of America's war fighters to worship, attend holiday services, and otherwise receive the spiritual counsel and guidance needed to carry out their duty with optimal morale, good order and discipline. However, the Cold War sharply accelerated the politicization of the Chaplain Corps. Department of Defense (DoD) top brass found it expedient to ally themselves with militant Christian extremists such as the Church of the Christian Crusade and the Christian Anti-Communism Crusade. Under the approving gaze of successive generations of complicit military leaders, ever more powerful sections of the chaplaincy became strongholds for those who sought to turn the Armed Forces into a bitter battleground to win the hearts, minds, and souls of service members perceived to be religiously derelict and, accordingly, branded as "unchurched." Were blind eyes turned to the clear Constitutional provisions outlawing such DoD blasphemies? No. Not merely "blind eyes." Let's call a spade a spade here. Unconstitutional rape of armed forces member's civil rights is quite more to the point.

Throughout the course of the Cold War, an extremist alliance comprised of military personnel, private and public sector civilians, and clergy used the black brush of McCarthyism to relentlessly and unconstitutionally target anyone not already to the right of Attila the Hun. Indeed, this vicious tool of dehumanization proved to have a shelf life extending far beyond that of the "Red Menace" itself. Civil rights organizations representing ethnic, national, cultural, and religious minorities, organized labor, opponents of fundamentalist (also known as Dominionist) Christian supremacy, and advocates for the continued separation of church and state were each subject to vicious attacks by this modern day inquisition. The courageous advocates of equality who fought for the basic human rights of the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) community were subject to some of the most egregious of these vituperative, unyielding attacks.

The repeal of Don't Ask, Don't Tell (DADT) and the recent judicial challenges to the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) have provided additional impetus to these bigots' continued crusade against these most basic rubrics of human equality. Shamefully, the significant lesbian, gay, and bisexual demographic within the armed forces is once again being subjected to a withering torrent of cowardly assaults launched by the fundamentalist Christian gutter-press. The weapons? Wildly off-base predictions of mass defections within the chaplaincy, foretellings of a shattered esprit de corps across the whole of the U.S. Military, and the usual uber-fundamentalist gay-bashing tropes.

For example, last November the ultra-Evangelical fundamentalist Family Research Council issued the ominous warning that "[C]haplains who uphold the Bible's teaching on homosexuality will open themselves up to disciplinary action, bad fitness reports and the denial of promotions." The same letter demagogically goes on to ask, "how long will it be before your church can no longer preach the portions of God's word that are politically incorrect?" Meanwhile, the Huxleyesque-named Chaplain Alliance for "Religious Liberty" (CARL) endlessly fulminated about the fictitious damage to troop retention, morale, and discipline that was to be caused by the repeal of DADT. CARL is an activist organization of extremist former armed forces chaplains who claim to "speak on behalf [of] more than 2,000 chaplains." CARL tries mightily to pose as the polar opposite of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation (MRFF), the constitutionalist civil rights organization of which I am founder and President.

Craven posers, indeed. According to CARL Executive Director Col. Ron Crews (USAR-Ret.) "DoD is bowing to a political agenda to turn our nation's military into a social experiment, [...] It is time for the American public to say, 'Enough!'"

Col. Crews' preference for fantastic melodrama over reality was starkly revealed in a recent press release from CARL. In Crews' imagination, "It just seems that every time Mikey Weinstein sends an e-mail over to the Pentagon that they just cater to his every whim." The rabid fundamentalist dogs at CARL have even called for an official Congressional investigation of what they perceive to be my supposedly "unfettered access" to senior Pentagon officials.

CARL will utter just about any falsehood in line with its prerogative, which is to maintain the fundamentalist Christian supremacist grip on our nation's armed forces. Thus, they can disingenuously twist, torture, and contort a phrase such as "religious liberty" into its total antithesis without batting an eyelash. Such is also the case with their horrendously alarmist forecasts of the "dire" repercussions of DADT's repeal.

Crews said in a recent statement that "Evangelical soldiers, airmen, marines, they're going to have to make some courageous stands right now to say to their commanders, 'Sir, I cannot participate in this type of ceremony because we believe this is a celebration of something that God's Word is clear about defining as wrong."

Fortunately for our national security and our armed forces, Crews and his spiteful "klan" of old school, putrid bigots appear to be isolated in their pursuit of a fearful and ignorant witch-hunt of those whose oppressive burdens have been lightened by DADT's repeal. According to a recent story from Associated Press, chaplains representing a broad range of Christian denominations have reported virtually no problems following the lifting of DADT:

Bishop James Magness, the coordinator for about 75 active-duty and reserve Episcopal chaplains, said he'd heard a common, positive verdict about repeal from his more conservative Catholic, Mormon and Southern Baptist colleagues.

"The whole argument about religious liberty is so incredibly uninformed, and inflamed by some of the very conservative legal groups," Magness said. "In reality, there's been very little if any of the services forcing any ministerial activity on a chaplain against his or her will.

A lot of people inside the Beltway are tut-tutting about the recent campaign focus on Mitt Romney's personal history - his record of profiting even as workers suffered, his mysterious was-he-or-wasn't-he role at Bain Capital after 1999, his equally mysterious refusal to release any tax returns from before 2010. Some of the tut-tutters are upset at any suggestion that this election is about the rich versus the rest. Others decry the personalization: why can't we just discuss policy?

And neither group is living in the real world.

First of all, this election really is - in substantive, policy terms - about the rich versus the rest.

The story so far: Former President George W. Bush pushed through big tax cuts heavily tilted toward the highest incomes. As a result, taxes on the very rich are currently the lowest they've been in 80 years. President Obama proposes letting those high-end Bush tax cuts expire; Mr. Romney, on the other hand, proposes big further tax cuts for the wealthy.

The impact at the top would be large. According to estimates by the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center, the Romney plan would reduce the annual taxes paid by the average member of the top 1 percent by $237,000 compared with the Obama plan; for the top 0.1 percent that number rises to $1.2 million. No wonder Mr. Romney's fund-raisers in the Hamptons attracted so many eager donors that there were luxury-car traffic jams.

What about everyone else? Again according to the policy center, Mr. Romney's tax cuts would increase the annual deficit by almost $500 billion. He claims that he would make this up by closing loopholes, in a way that wouldn't shift the tax burden toward the middle class - but he has refused to give any specifics, and there's no reason to believe him. Realistically, those big tax cuts for the rich would be offset, sooner or later, with higher taxes and/or lower benefits for the middle class and the poor.

So as I said, this election is, in substantive terms, about the rich versus the rest, and it would be doing voters a disservice to pretend otherwise.

In that case, however, why not run a campaign based on that substance, and leave Mr. Romney's personal history alone? The short answer is, get real.

Look, voters aren't policy wonks who pore over Tax Policy Center analyses. And when a politician - say, Mr. Obama - cites actual numbers in a speech, well, there's always a politician on the other side to contradict him. How are voters supposed to know who's telling the truth? In fact, earlier this year focus groups given an accurate description of Mr. Romney's policy proposals refused to believe that any politician would take such a position.

Perhaps in a better world we could count on the news media to sort through the conflicting claims. In this world, however, most voters get their news from short snippets on TV, which almost never contain substantive policy analysis. The print media do offer analysis pieces - but these pieces, out of a desire to seem "balanced," all too often simply repeat the he-said-she-said of political speeches. Trust me: you will see very few news analyses saying that Mr. Romney proposes huge tax cuts for the rich, with no plausible offset other than big benefit cuts for everyone else - even though this is the simple truth. Instead, you will see pieces reporting that "Democrats say" that this is what Mr. Romney proposes, matched with dueling quotes from Republican sources.

So how can the Obama campaign cut through this political and media fog? By talking about Mr. Romney's personal history, and the way that history resonates with the realities of his pro-rich, anti-middle-class policy proposals.

Thus the entirely true charge that Mr. Romney wants to slash historically low tax rates on the rich even further dovetails perfectly with his own record of extraordinary tax avoidance - so extraordinary that he's evidently afraid to let voters see his tax returns from before 2010. The equally true charge that he's pushing policies that would benefit the rich at the expense of ordinary working Americans meshes with Bain's record of earning big profits even when workers suffered - a record so stark that Mr. Romney is attempting to distance himself from part of it by insisting that he had nothing to do with Bain's operations after 1999, even though the company continued to list him as C.E.O. and sole owner until 2002. And so on.

A few months ago I gave a presentation at a conference on drone warfare, in a Brooklyn church. Afterwards, a Black woman in attendance engaged me in a spirited conversation. She agreed with me on all the essential points: that President Obama is savaging international law while simultaneously nullifying the U.S. Bill of Rights - and that he doesn't give a damn about Black folks. Then she asked who I was going to vote for at the presidential level, in November. Certainly not Obama or Romney, maybe nobody, I replied. "But, you've got to vote," she insisted - and not one of those wasted votes for an obscure party candidate who had no chance to win. It was a racial obligation. Too many "had died for our right to vote" - it was unthinkable not to.

It became instantly clear that, despite all his crimes, she'd be voting for Obama. The Black vote fetish gave her no alternative.

The fetishization of voting is part of the larger African American imperative to "get in the game" even when you know its rigged. It is as if history has bequeathed Blacks a racial and personal responsibility to redress centuries of social, political and economic exclusion. We must participate, because the ancestors could not. In some silly Black social circles, this means the obligation to ski.

On August 18, the Black Is Back Coalition for Social Justice, Peace and Reparations holds a national conference in Newark, New Jersey, to explore the efficacy of engaging in electoral politics in the United States and throughout the global African Diaspora. The coalition's stance on Obama is well known. Black Is Back was formed, in large measure, as a public statement that not all African Americans were drunk on Obama aid. Its first act was to march on the White House, in November, 2009, denouncing the Black president and his service to Wall Street. The coalition marched on Obama's residence again, the next year.

The imperative to participate in the vote game, no matter how putrid the personalities listed on the electoral menu, will surely be part of the Black Is Back discussion, in Newark.

Although there will be no repeat of what I called the "Great Black Hajj of 2009," when a million African Americans went on pilgrimage to Washington to bear witness to the First Black President's inauguration, there is no doubt that the warmongering corporate Democratic will garner the vast bulk of the Black vote this November. An important segment of those voters will politically resemble the lady that engaged me outside the church: folks on the Left side of a Black spectrum which, as a polity, has always been significantly to the Left of the white American spectrum on issues of social and economic justice and U.S. military adventures abroad.

The imperative to participate in the vote game, no matter how putrid the personalities listed on the electoral menu, will surely be part of the Black Is Back discussion, in Newark. Possibly the greatest obstacle, however, to organizing African Americans for their own empowerment is the belief that electoral activity is the only kind of politics.

This notion of elections=politics is pervasive across the American racial landscape, and is one of the most frightening aspects of the hegemony of capitalist market ideology, whose message is: if you're not playing our (rigged) game, you don't exist. For African Americans, the marginalization of non-electoral political activity - the rejection of mass, grassroots action - is a negation of, literally, the vast bulk of the Black historical political experience.

The distortion of Black political memory is seen most ominously in the concerted effort to frame Obama's election as the ultimate expression of all the Black struggles that came before. The entirety of the Black self-determinationist and radical traditions is nullified under an all-things-led-to-Obama construct that is buttressed by every corporate media and educational/propaganda institution, with the indispensable assistance of Black intellectuals like the late Manning Marable and the upstart lightweight, Peniel Joseph. Marcus Garvey and Malcolm X and the Black Panther Party and even Dr. Martin Luther King's definitive break with President Johnson's war policies - all are transformed into historical stair steps to Obama's inauguration, a stairway that can lead only to the death of Black politics, of Black history, and of Black self-determination.

In this context, the Black Is Back conference will examine those electoral races in which candidates championing Black self-determination on the local level and beyond should be supported - for example, Jackson, Mississippi, city councilman and human rights activist Chokwe Lumumba's campaign for mayor - and other such candidacies should be encouraged.

However, we must have an even more fundamental discussion about the way that elections should be approached. If the goal is Black self-determination, then elections should be viewed as potential opportunities to express Black people's political will - which leads to a very different conception of what constitutes victory or defeat.

It is no victory when Black people's votes are used against them to empower our enemies among the noxious choices on the take-it-or-leave-it menu served up by the corporate financiers of electoral politics. And it is an even more abject defeat when Black people's political leanings and aspirations are distorted and mischaracterized due to their participation in an ever more Rightward-trending electoral game. For example, does massive electoral Black support for Obama indicate that African Americans favor drone wars and preventive detention without trial? We know that's not true, and can prove it beyond doubt through opinion polls and other means. (Indeed, there is ample reason to believe that many, if not most, African Americans don't know or much care what Obama's actual policies are, or invent policies and intentions on his behalf, in order to make the Black President more palatable to the Black psyche.) Nevertheless, corporate and white political actors feel free to interpret Obama's "popularity" among Blacks - as measured by votes - as an indicator of a Rightward drift among African Americans.

The corporate media has been trying to confirm such a drift for a very long time, on the assumption that Blacks would become more conservative as they became more middle class. This, they predicted, would lead to the emergence of a "new" Black politician: more business-friendly, less race-conscious, who rejects the "Sixties-type" politics of "confrontation."

Newark Mayor Cory Booker and former Tennessee Congressman Harold Ford Jr. were the archetypes of this New Black Politico, preceding Obama. Cynthia McKinney's losing battle to retain her congressional seat from a relatively upscale suburban Atlanta district, in 2002, became a national test of the theory of growing conservatism among Blacks. Her defeat by corporate-supported Denise Majette was heralded as proof that Black opinion had turned decisively to the Right.

But the actual election returns said different. Bruce Dixon and I concluded, during our tenure at BlackCommentator.com, that McKinney had garnered more than 80 percent of the Black vote. Majette had won the "white election," with 90 percent of the white vote, while McKinney and her leftist and Black self-determinationist politics had handily won the "Black" election. A white political scientist at the University of Georgia found, in his own study of the election results, that McKinney had won a whopping 86 percent of her Black constituents: a landslide, from a Black perspective. Although defeated in a district that had only a slight Black majority, the election was actually an affirmation of the appeal of McKinney's brand of politics to Black voters in the second most affluent Black-majority county in the country. Majette was revealed as the representative of the district's whites and, therefore, not a legitimate Black spokesperson.

"Majette had won the 'white election,' with 90 percent of the white vote, while McKinney and her leftist and Black self-determinationist politics had handily won the 'Black' election."

With Black super-majority congressional districts going extinct (largely because the Democrats want to spread Black voters around) and African Americans rapidly losing their majorities in the nation's cities to gentrification, it becomes senseless to speak of the election of Black individuals as proof of Black political power. The Black face in the winner's seat may represent exactly the opposite: Black defeat.

Those of us who seek Black self-determination should think in terms of "Black" elections: who won the Black vote, regardless of the district-wide outcome? Who is the "legitimate" spokesperson for Blacks - the final tally winner, or the official loser?

On this basis, New York City Councilman Charles Barron's 28 percent share in the recent primary contest in Brooklyn's new 8th congressional district represents about half the Black vote. The district is 56 percent Black, and former Black Panther Barron, who was demonized by the totality of the corporate media (and even the Democrats-in-left-clothing of Moveon.org), could not have picked up more than a negligible number of white votes. Hakeem Jeffries, the charter school champion whom the corporate media praised as a "new" Black politician in the Booker, Ford, Obama mold, faced a serious challenge in the "Black" election, and may have lost it, despite an overwhelming advantage in money and media.

Barron's strong showing, and possible victory, in the "Black" congressional election means the race was worthwhile; that half the Black voters agree with Barron's militancy and radical politics, and it might well be in Black people's interests that Barron run, again, next time around.

Who's buying our democracy? Wall Street financiers, the Koch brothers, and casino magnates Sheldon Adelson and Steve Wynn.

And they're doing much of it in secret.

It's a perfect storm:

The greatest concentration of wealth in more than a century - courtesy "trickle-down" economics, Reagan and Bush tax cuts, and the demise of organized labor.

Combined with...

Unlimited political contributions - courtesy of Republican-appointed Justices Roberts, Scalia, Alito, Thomas, and Kennedy, in one of the dumbest decisions in Supreme Court history, "Citizens United vs. Federal Election Commission," along with lower-court rulings that have expanded it.

Combined with...

Complete secrecy about who's contributing how much to whom - courtesy of a loophole in the tax laws that allows so-called non-profit "social welfare" organizations to accept the unlimited contributions for hard-hitting political ads.

Put them all together and our democracy is being sold down the drain.

With a more equitable and traditional distribution of wealth, far more Americans would have a fair chance of influencing politics. As the great jurist Louis Brandeis once said, "we can have a democracy or we can have great wealth in the hands of a comparative few, but we cannot have both."

Alternatively, inequality wouldn't be as much of a problem if we had strict laws limiting political spending or, at the very least, disclosing who was contributing what.

But we have an almost unprecedented concentration of wealth and unlimited political spending and secrecy.

I'm not letting Democrats off the hook. Democratic candidates are still too dependent on Wall Street casino moguls and real casino magnates (Steve Wynn has been a major contributor to Harry Reid, for example). George Soros and a few others have poured big bucks into Democratic coffers. So have a handful of trade unions.

But make no mistake. Compared to what the GOP is doing this year, Democrats are conducting a high-school bake sale. The mega-selling of American democracy is a Republican invention, and Romney and the GOP are its major beneficiaries.

And the losers aren't just Democrats. They're the American people.

You need to make a ruckus. Don't fall into the seductive trap of cynicism. That's what the sellers of American democracy are counting on. If you give up on our system of government, they win everything.