View From Here: Occupy Wall Street

If we take President Obama at his word when he challenged the Congressional Black Caucus to press on for fairness, then the Occupy Wall Street protests taking place across the country are exactly what the president is asking for and needs, a mass movement against financial and political institutions that behave as self-imagined kings and emperors have always behaved- as rulers of the populace.  The tens of thousands of people we saw marching tonight, all colors and all ages, truly represented the 99% who refuse to live only in service and indebted to the richest 1% and the systems they control.

What we saw marching and chanting down Broadway in lower Manhattan, represented yet another  progressive movement standing against an exploitive economic system.
The abolitionist movement against slavery was a threat to the financial interests of everyone involved in that major economic engine and wealth creator of the time, a system that produced 60% of the entire nation’s exports, the capturing and enslaving of African people to work the land stolen from the Indigenous people.
To stand in opposition to that many-tentacled economic system which controlled laws and punishments, required a movement of heroism by whites and African-Americans, the  story of which has not been told widely enough.
But today, the enslaving is much more subtle and certainly more diverse, causing a full spectrum of people to see their future being taken from them and  controlled by others who mean them no good.   People are seeing the sudden explosion of debt and interest as new kinds of shackles created by the banking system and requiring a new wave of abolitionists, transitioning from freeing Africans from the economic system of chattel slavery to freeing the 99% (themselves, us) from the financial slavery of a system that has destroyed the economy, left millions of families devastated and has not been held responsible for their actions.
But now the rulers have overreached with their successful faux populist Tea Party strategy, but that creation of the Koch brothers and Fox News could never mount the kind of mass demonstrations we’re seeing across the country, or anything like the solid blocks of people we saw chanting down Broadway.  And now these tech-empowered citizen activists are intent on reworking and bringing into account a system that is recognized as enslaving everyone in support of a ruling elite.
The story of the abolitionists of old was not just of John Brown at Harper’s Ferry and Harriet Tubman camped in the woods.  It was of hundreds of thousands of sympathizers and community activists, working and helping locally, defying laws and risking jail and fines that saved thousands of enslaved Africans and helped spur Abraham Lincoln to issue the Emancipation Proclamation.
And now we have demands and pleas to an African-American president to save the general population from the economic slavers represented by Wall Street.  To claw back the money they’ve taken from the system with a new tax code, and to save the nation from those addicted to an insatiable need for more, and redirect the nation from a warring, polluting, financially-driven path, one that is humanity-centered and sustainable direction.
The people are more powerful than money but they have to come out and be counted.  That means the jobless, homeless, the poor and the middle class.  Students, construction workers and those in office cubicles, have to heed President Obama’s call to the Congressional Black Caucus to remember the Civil Rights Movement where,  “in the face of troopers and tear gas, folks stood unafraid…  ..I expect all of you to march with me and press on. Take off your bedroom slippers, put on your marching shoes. Shake it off.  Stop complaining, stop grumbling, stop crying. We are going to press on.”
Frederick Douglass, an escaped African-American and abolitionist leader, famously said, “Power concedes nothing without a demand.  It never has and it never will.”   President Obama is saying the time has come to make the demands.   They people agree and they are making their voices heard.
The question remains what does this movement mean for African-Americans beyond the “rising tide lifts all boats” refrain.  African-Americans have two and more times the unemployment of whites, a fraction of the wealth and none of the privileges from centuries of injustice.
It would not be uplifting for this battle to be won leaving whites even more empowered to come into African-American communities able to “gentrify”, because they still benefit from the economic legacy of chattel slavery, the history of racism in financial and criminal justice systems, and the current financial onslaught that has created home-buying opportunities.
African-Americans need to be a part of this economic abolitionist movement to ensure that it isn’t just some chains that are thrown off and that everybody gets free, by including debt abolishment and an economic justice strategy of jobs, business-building and the economic and social empowerment of communities of color.
If the Occupy Wall Street Movement continues to gain momentum and is targeted in its demands and voting, then in his second term,  President Obama may find that he will be forced by popular sentiment to become known as the second Great Emancipator, freeing the population from the slavery of the banking system and the financial tyranny of the 1%.

 

Troy Davis Executed. Supreme Court Denies Last Appeal, Death came at 11:08pm

On the streets, in churches and in homes, vigils were held waiting on the slow-motion lynching that was the killing of Troy Anthony Davis by the state of Georgia. After the execution hour had passed we learned of a last appeal to the Supreme Court. Three hours later we were told that the Justices had denied Davis’ appeal, the death warrant was enforced and Troy Davis was executed September 21, 2011 at 11:08pm.

Witnesses said Mr. Davis did not take a sedative and made a final statement while strapped to the gurney. Looking directly at the family of officer MacPhail, the policeman he is accused of killing in 1989, the witness reported that Davis said, “Despite the situation that we’re in, I was not the one who did it.” “He said that he was not personally responsible for what happened that night. That he did not have a gun. He said to the family that he was sorry for their loss. But he also said he ‘did not take their son, father, brother’. He said to them to dig deeper into this case to find out the truth.

He asked his family and friends to keep praying, keep working and keep the faith.” And then speaking to the jailers, the witnesses reported Davis saying, “To the people who are about to take my life, may God have mercy on your souls. And God bless your souls.” “Then he put his head back down, the procedure began, and fifteen minutes later it was over.”

This is more than class-warfare we’re seeing in America. It is the conflict between civilization and barbarism. At the recent CNN/Tea Party debate of Republican presidential candidates, the Tea Party true-believers gave a standing ovation to Texas Governor Rick Perry’s record of 254 executions, and shouted a resounding “Yes!” to the question of whether a 30-year-old, having refused to buy health coverage, should be left to die if he became ill. Do not be shocked by these responses.

After all, these are the descendents of those “good Christians” who used to gather around lynchings as a spectator sport, full of laughter at the torture and suffering they were part of. This mentality did not pass away with those generations. It was passed down and we see it in both the Troy Davis case of coerced testimony, as well as in the Tea Party mantra to cut every social program they can.

What to do now? Robert Rooks, director of the NAACP Criminal Justice Department reported on Democracy Now! That he and his team visited Troy Davis the day before the execution. He said Davis told them that whatever happens, “You have a choice. Either fold up your bags and go home or continue the fight.”

The Tea Partiers, the executioners, the bankers and corporate avarice will not stop, they must face constant opposition or they will win. We have to take Troy’s words to heart and do as we have always done, continue the fight.

The View From Here: Diallo & DSK – Libya & Africa

The encounter that initiated the charge of rape by Guinea-born hotel maid Naffisatau Diallo against former International Monetary Fund chief Dominique Strauss Kahn, the subsequent dropping of the charges by District Attorney Cy Vance and the opportunism of NATO in its attack on oil-rich Libya, are all part of the European lustful and proprietary attitude regarding Africa and all of its human and mineral resources.
We don’t know what exactly happened in the Sofitel Hotel that day, although DNA shows DSK wanted something from Ms. Diallo.  The question of why he had to suddenly leave his belongings and hurry on to a flight to a non-extraditable country remains unanswered for the moment because DA Vance considers Ms. Diallo, by her very nature, not to be believable and therefore no questions need be asked.  DSK?  You’re free to go.  Sorry for the inconvenience.
In Libya, NATO believed they saw an opportunity to ravish and plunder and they took it.   If Europeans could continue their centuries of disruption of the development of the African continent, so much the better.  Whether or not those hopes of theirs are well-founded remains to be seen.
They may have miscalculated Qaddafi’s accomplishment, as Qaddafi himself may have, of achieving the highest literacy rate in northern Africa of about 82.6%.   With education compulsory for the early grades and free for all up to the postgraduate level, studying either in Libya or abroad, he has empowered his people and given them the tools for his eventual leaving of the scene and controlling their own destiny.
But what is happening now is a preemptive strike by Europeans to shape the flow of events to allow them to continue their theft of African resources and influence an emerging National Transitional Council (NTC) to be mindful of Europe’s needs..
Once control of the international Libyan assets have been turned over to the NTC, then the NTC, NATO and the Libyan people will continue an awkward dance until the still-fluid situation with Qaddafi is resolved, NATO is pushed away and the Council and the people can get on with the Libyan evolution.

If Libyans continue the pursuit of Qaddafi’s dream of a United States of Africa but now as a people-led movement, then the plentiful and unique natural resources of the African continent could be used to make a United States of Africa an ever-increasing economic power as finite resources are needed to support the insatiable demand of a growing world population.  It would be an unintended consequence of the intervention by Western powers and just what they have always feared, and that it would make the coming together even sweeter.

View From Here: Obama talks like a Democrat, walks like a Republican

When we look at President Barack Obama, it is easy to forget that he does not share the psycho-social heritage of the descendents of chattel slavery and that he was raised by white folks.  And while there is nothing wrong with that, his mother was an extraordinary woman herself, it does mean that his psychological core and sensitivities, were not passed down from the Middle Passage or the centuries of enslavement, but rather from Kansas, his mother’s home state, dead center of the country and a Red state politically.
In a very deep way, the Republicans are more the president’s people than are the descendents of chattel slavery.  This is why he was agreeable to give so much before the debt-ceiling negotiations even began, he starts from middle America and will get pushed right or left from there.  And until now, it’s been the corporations and the Tea Party doing all the pushing.
Now with three wars being waged simultaneously and with Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid being put at risk, the president needs a primary challenge with new ideas put forward by someone who wants to push back.
My recommendation would be to draft Congresswoman Donna Edwards from Maryland.  Congresswoman Edwards is a member of both the Black Caucus and the Progressive Caucus where she is vice chair, and is a forceful advocate for playing “hardball” with the Republicans.
Visit her Web site and view the video archives of her presentations in congress and determine for yourself if this person has the sensibilities you’d like to see in the Oval office.  The Progressive Caucus should call on Congresswoman Edwards to present a Primary challenge for the president.   And maybe after she wins the first debate and  threatens him in the primaries, Obama will be thanking Joe Biden for his years of service and under the bus he goes.
Regarding the flash mobs, first the disclaimer:  Looting, burning and destroying life and property are wrong.  Perpetrators should be punished.  Now, having said that, I cannot believe that anyone is surprised by this phenomenon.  We warned about it back in June.  These communities in England, Maryland, Philadelphia, Chicago are, like Brooklyn, communities where unemployment rates among the youth can be over 50% and relationships with the police fluctuate between tense and explosive.  These young people are living in a consumer society with stuff all around them and billions of dollars being spent telling them to buy and to have, and here they stand with some loose change and lint in their pockets and no prospects for sudden upturns in that condition.
Because they’re mis-educated and yet self-motivated, too many young people, and those old enough to know better, see thug life glamorized as an option and going to prison as a normal way of being.  All around them there is a different normal, an alternative reality where people are enjoyably comfortable and raising lovely families.  They are, by and large,  a very amiable group, as they crowd into restaurants and text, brunch and relax in the cafés.  My suggestion to these folks is to become viscerally concerned about jobs programs and youth employment.  Infrastructure building and repairs that involve long-term jobs and business opportunities, would go further to  preventing the collision of the two “normals” than all the beefed up precinct patrols or gang task forces the city can muster.

View From Here

 President Franklin D. Roosevelt famously told  A. Philip Randolph, president of the Sleeping Car Porters union, that he agreed with Randolph on many thoughts he had about what steps the president should take, but he told him, “You have to make me do it.” 

President Barack Obama is in the same office and if there is something the people want done, we’ll have to make him do it.  I’d love to keep the faith in this presidency, because losing it is so painful, given the image of the president and his family and the history and hopes that put him there.  But with the President’s ongoing attacks on the African nation of Libya and the attempts to assassinate that nation’s leader, Muammar Qaddafi, and now his apparent  inability to protect the poorest, the oldest, the youngest, and the middle class here at home while agreeing to ensure that the wealthiest 2% pay not one cent more, he appears to be a politician whose words can diverge from his actions and must be prodded in the right direction.

 I think that’s why so many are railing at the White House, they thought with this election they could get out of  the political arena and go home, but the Tea Partiers were just climbing in with brass knuckles and hard heads.  Donna Edwards (D- Maryland), a member of the Black and the Progressive Caucus, said “these folks don’t understand negotiation.  They don’t understand compromise.”  Congresswoman Edwards has no faith in the proposed joint committee to decide the future cuts and revenue, of six Republicans already pledged not to raise taxes, and six conservative Democrats.  “We need to rev it up even more,” said the Congresswoman, noting she told the President, “We need to play some hardball with these folks.”

It’s being done elsewhere, with mass protests from Egypt and Tunisia to Israel and Syria, and there are American examples to follow such as the Abolitionist and Populist farmer’s movements that were able to push ideas and policies without the advantages of Facebook and Twitter. 

One idea would be to come together around the Progressive Caucus’ People’s Budget, a document that balances the national budget mainly by cutting defense and having the wealthy pay their fair share.  If the citizenry could become passionate about the provisions in this budget, contribute only to its supporters and aggressively campaign against those who don’t support , they would be climbing into the arena with “brass knuckles” of their own.

There was a time when sit-ins and civil disobedience were in the toolkits of Civil Rights organizations.  Today, the fight for economic rights may have available the modern  tools of social networking but it still requires the same passion and commitment of the Civil Rights movement.

Thankfully, it does not call for the courage of the Freedom Riders or of SCLC’s Hosea Williams, SNCC’s John Lewis and others who were attacked by state troopers  on the Edmund Pettis Bridge in Selma, Alabama, March 7, 1965.  It hasn’t come to that again.  Not yet.

Transformational Seminar Comes to Bedford-Stuyvesant

Expressions such as, “He’s his own worst enemy,” have their basis in the wonders of the human mind and its ability to hide reality and self-awareness.  The Transformational Leadership Summit at Bedford-Stuyvesant Restoration is an ambitious and creative plan to jump-start positive change in the community by first jump-starting positive change in individuals by making them aware of the subtleties of their lives, how they think about themselves and how the conversations they have when alone can act as barriers to the expression of their better selves.  

Both the  Bedford-Stuyvesant Restoration Corporation and Super Foodtown have had their employees, from presidents to porters, take the course , facilitated by the Executive Coaching Group, and found it so beneficial to their organizations that they felt it had to be brought to the surrounding community.  We spoke with Restoration President and CEO Colvin Grannum about the summit and asked what was it about the experience that made he and Noah Katz, president of Super Foodtown, conclude that they had to bring this to the community.

“There are things about the way people behave, how they see themselves and interact with others that has a lot to do with concepts of self-mastery,” said Mr. Grannum.    “About the kinds of conversations you have with yourself and others, and in the broader context, how do you interact with other people and create projects, and drive them to completion.”  Being shown how to step outside and see themselves led to many ‘Aha’ moments and feelings of big advances in my own life,” said Grannum.

Asked about what transformations he looked for in the community he said, “Ultimately, what we want to build is a better neighborhood.  We are primarily interested in getting in the room with those who are committed to making a difference.  For too many years, we have not been using our collective energy to have a breakthrough. Resources are getting tighter and we have to use the resources we have more creatively and collectively.”

It was Noah Katz who first had his people go through the course and then wend and did another three days with Restoration’s group.  “He was very enthusiastic about doing it in Bedford-Stuyvesant,” said Grannum, so much so that Super Foodtown is underwriting the $995 3-day course (August 17-19, 9am-6pm) bringing the cost to $475.  This is still a lot of money, however, scholarships are available and those who are very interested should call.  The primary concern of Restoration are the outcomes that are possible.  In literature about the seminar they say, “Transformational change is needed in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn and New York City —the type of change that is generated by ‘citizen-leaders.’ Transformation can be achieved onlythrough committed mass concerted action. The type of action Martin Luther King, Jr. led and we see exemplified by peaceful but resolute protests in Egypt and Syria. Every ‘citizen-leader’ of Bedford-Stuyvesant is being called to commit to and be accountable for achieving a few simple transformational goals.”  Grannum adds that “Most important for us is  to make a breakthrough on the education piece, so that we can get these household incomes up. These communities are great places to live and will be increasingly more so. The  question is who is going to live here.  It’s about money, education and skills.  There will always be low-income and affordable housing, but the future of Bedford-Stuyvesant is in the well-educated and well-informed.”

We suggested that people of African descent may find these seminars particularly useful given the history of negative self-imagery., Grannum agreed, saying, “If you feel you’re a victim, how much power do you have to collaborate?  That’s why some partnerships and plans fall apart.  If you have two  people who think of themselves as victims working on a project, that project is doomed to failure.” 

The outcomes that Noah Katz foresees is “Every family will have a home, every child will go to college, every person will have  a job and every street will be crime- free.”  These are goals we can all agree on.   For further information, you can call Doris or Rachel at 718-636-6930. The course takes place

There will be a conference call on Friday, Aug 5 – 2:30 PM for those wanting more information. Dial in 308-344 6400 code 300794#

View From Here: Debt Ceiling Crisis to Shackle all of America

Reverend Clemson Brown stopped by the other day and asked us out to the car with something to show.  The items were rusted relics of the slave era, that 340 years that Africans in the Americas were held as property with implements like what Rev. Brown had for us.  He gave me the shackles on a ball and chain and said “Pick it up.”  The weight of the ball stunned me.  But it was more than the physical weight that I felt.  There was a visceral horrifying surge, a shudder of images of being held in place and made to move down a field of crops, periodically stopping to pick up the sixty pound ball of iron with metal shackles rubbing at bare ankles.

Imagining being in the field, knowing of the shackled father and grandfather and the shackled sons and daughters, the thoughts were so powerful, I put the ball down even as I was picking it up.  It was an experience that all African-Americans should have.  It was a window on the pain that has shaped our emotional character.  The psychological gymnastics of denial necessary to survive those centuries of terror lives on in boys and men, wearing pants below their behinds, with no job or business, and who answer, “It’s all good,” when asked “How’s it going?”

And on the other side of that coin of pain  are those many Christian white people who thought that this state-of-affairs was perfectly acceptable and the norm of the day.

And for the Planters, it was Capitalism’s Golden Age: a time when land could be stolen and labor could be held in place with a ball and chain and not paid anything at all.  American manufacturers have been outsourcing around the world, looking to find conditions as close to those halcyon days as possible.  Humanity means nothing to these folks.  These,”good” Christians would organize picnics and outings around an upcoming lynching of an African-in-America.  That history is a part of the United States and is a view of humanity that lives in  the emotional core of the Tea Partiers who are so adamant that cuts be made to any services for people they perceive as not like them.

It forms the core of the thinking of  Anders Breivik, the 32-year-old right-wing terrorist who killed more than 70 people in Norway this past weekend and who got his ideological justifications from white American racial activists, who now voice dismay at his actions, but offer understanding of his warning that Christianity faces an Islamic threat. These people we will always have with us.  They are the reason good folks have to stay busy.  They must be continuously countered by progressive movements and by the Clara Lemlich’s and A. Philip Randolph’s of the world.

Whatever comes of these budget negotiations, it would seem that the Republican Party is intent on balancing the debt on the backs of the poor.  The Republicans, who have been cutting taxes for the rich for three decades of legislation, are now demanding cuts Social Security and Medicare and refuse to have any tax increases on the wealthy and are using the threat of national default as the outcome if the country does not comply.

Well, “Fool me once, shame on you.  Fool me twice, shame on me.”  After the bailouts of Wall Street, financial interests are trying to fool us again and panic the nation into cutting help to seniors, those in poor health and the children.  Shame on the Democrats if they give in to them.   You can’t negotiate with racial terrorists, whatever their disguise.

View From Here: In the Debt Ceiling Showdown; Obama May Need to Invoke the U.S. Constitiution

At a Tea Party rally there is a vendor selling t-shirts saying,  “Yup, I’m a racist”  in patriotic colors.  There is a Republican presidential candidate, Congresswoman Michele Bachmann, now leading the polls in Iowa, who signed onto a pledge from an Iowa Christian group that originally said, “Slavery had a disastrous impact on African-American families, yet, sadly, a child born into slavery in 1860 was more likely to be raised by his mother and father in a two-parent household than was an African-American baby born after the election of the USA’s first African-American President.” This is the gut mentality of the Republican supporters on the other side of the debt-ceiling negotiating table where the president is trying to bring together all the players in the efforts to approve a debt-ceiling increase of $1.4 trillion. The Republicans say to do it with cuts alone and no new taxes.  The president does the unthinkable and offers up programs that keep people alive, whole and able to survive. Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security are the sacrifices he offered in exchange for some contributions from the rich but the Republicans remain adamant that all budget targets be met by cutting into the health and welfare of people, but under no circumstances should taxes on the rich be raised to cover any shortfalls. These non-colored people are intransigent because they’re afraid that the colored people of the hemisphere will unite for a payback time. It’s sad to say but the problem with America is that every place ain’t Brooklyn.  I don’t want to be mean, but it’s true.  Milling people of different colors and a multitude of ethnicities are an oddity to most Americans.  They sit up high on double-decker tourist buses to see as many of us as they can before the flight back to Sioux City, Iowa. The truth is that the Republican base has no interest in anything other than getting this African-American out of the president’s office. And if they have to destroy the country to do it then so be it.  Their forebears did it once with the Civil War and make no mistake, they will do it again.  I think that realization is why the president was looking a little tired the other day.  He knows there will be no deal with these people by the August 2nd deadline. And if the politicians remain deadlocked when the deadline passes and all hell breaks loose, the president will then be “compelled” to step in and invoke Article 14 Section 4 of the U. S. Constitution which states, “The validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized by law, including debts incurred for payment of pensions and bounties for services in suppressing insurrection or rebellion, shall not be questioned.” The Republicans will scream foul, lawyers and commentators will make nothing but money, and the “American people”, so often and tiresomely invoked at every press conference, will make the ultimate decision at the ballot box on whether to tax the rich or take from the poor, providing they have their papers in order, the machines are working, are digitally secure and have a paper trail backup.

View From Here

When I was a child watching movies, it was the Mau Mau who were the villains and the white colonialists who were portrayed as the good guys.  It wasn’t until much later that I realized that the Mau Mau were freedom fighters and it was the opposite that was true.

Now we have President Barack Obama, enamored with the national security and military options available to him, starting a third war, this one on the African continent.  He has his justifications, but perhaps it is the opposite that is true.

Putting aside the agendas of the U.S. regarding the war in Libya and the effort to kill Muammar Gaddafi, the question is what is best for the African Diaspora?

NATO is a European animal that won’t stop feasting on Africa.  Here, they saw a coming  regime challenge as an opportunity to attack and they attempted to get ahead of the ball and shape the game in their direction.

That Western powers are so concerned about controlling the regime change in Libya is an indication of the importance they place on its resources.  If those resources were directed toward first the citizens, in a  healing  and constructive way, and then as a contributor to the healing and rebuilding of Africa through the African Union and perhaps on to a United States of Africa, with the Diaspora having a voice, then it is apparent that this war against Libya is against the reemergence of the continent of Africa as a leader on the world stage.

Whatever the political motives and corporate interests that are driving the United States’ actions, the creation of a strong and united Africa is not among them.
By not following the procedures in the War Powers Act, Obama has declared that the president acting alone can take the nation to war.  He’s going to find a lot of folks do not agree with him.   If American participation in this invasion does not end soon, there will come a time when the president will have to make somebody unhappy: either his NATO allies or the American people.  He can’t serve two masters.

In an interview in The Voice of Russia, Evgenia Voiko, a leading expert at the Russian Center of Political Processes, was asked how long he thought the NATO military operation may last in Libya. He answered, “I cannot predict the exact date, but I think that the whole summer will be devoted to this operation, because Gaddafi has to fight to show his power, to show his moral qualities, so I think that the summer will be not enough to fight him.”
If this is true, and the US doesn’t get a lucky strike, then a “slow news summer” will only have one thing on its mind, barring natural disasters and flash mobs in the cities, war.

The president may want to consider allowing himself to be “forced” to ask for congressional approval and make as graceful an exit as possible from this NATO operation.  Because if he’s fighting Gaddafi  in September, then the tar baby will have him but good.   He will have killed the visceral progressive and proud spirits that carried him into office.  The slogan, “Their bad qualities are worse than mine” is not the fuel for a grassroots effort.  But, of course, the president knows this.  That is why the Obama campaign goal is to raise a billion dollars for the media effort he’s going to need to sell his presidency.

His major chance for reelection will be if the Republicans have a Palinesque figure for president or vice president.  And even then, it will be close.   And if the U.S. is on its fifteenth drone strike at “suspected Gaddafi headquarters” and the administration has lawyers arguing why they should continue, it won’t be close at all.

Civil Rights Profiteers
Marc Morial at the National Urban League and Reverend Al  Sharpton with the National Action Network are an embarrassment to the Civil Rights Movement.  These two organizations have written letters of support for the merger of ATT and T-Mobile, ostensibly because of “diversity” , “minority hiring” and other such stuff as though any other corporation would not follow the equal employment laws.   They say everything but what truly matters to them, that is continued “Platinum Level” support for the next gala and corporate tables at some chromed palace.    The hundreds of millions of dollars this will cost their constituents in higher rates means nothing next to the creature comforts of the NUL and NAN corporate alliance.  One would have thought the founding mission of these organizations was to free Black people, not help corporate America pick our pockets.  There is nothing wrong with having corporate friends, (we all do), but as one of Sharpton’s mentors, the Rev. William Augustus Jones of Bethany Baptist Church used  to say regularly, “You eat the king’s meat, you do the king’s bidding.”  Here, that bidding involves using the legacy of the Civil Rights Movement as a protector of profits and corporate giants, using the rationale that what is good for NUL and NAN is good for African-Americans.  That may be true some of the time, but not here.

We will not be beaten
Technology has empowered the rulers, but it has also empowered the masses of people in a profound new way.  The only concern, as it is with rulers around the world, is how much pain they are willing to cause to maintain control.

As the recent reports and images coming out of places like Yemen, Syria and Libya of the extreme measures rulers are willing to take to ensure that the status quo is maintained, were intermingled with  images of the 60’s  around the death of Gil Scott-Heron, African-American men and women wearing Afrocentric clothes with “Buy Black” and community control of education as mantras, it was apparent why the security apparatus of the United States, used the Counter-Intelligence Program (COINTELPRO) domestically to gather intelligence, entrap and assassinate, and the Central Intelligence Agency internationally to enable hundreds of tons of cocaine to be brought into African-American communities across the country.  By using this chemical warfare, they were able to short-circuit the arc of African-American self-empowerment and cripple it for generations to come.

But here is the thing the oligarch should learn, we will not be beaten.  There are too many community-based ogranizations and individuals, unions and bookstores, Churches and Mosques, study groups and others who are working through the neighborhoods, helping, mentoring and reaching back.  Transferring knowledge and encouragement spirit to spirit.   We do not know the names of the vast majority of these workers, but we know they will not be beaten.

View From Here

The world we are leaving for our children and grandchildren is competitive in ways not seen before.   President Barack Obama reiterated the national effort to ease the path to citizenship for “the best and the brightest” from around the world.  And with the globalization of information transfer, they don’t even have to come stateside to compete for jobs that used to be here.   New York is becoming a city of front-end companies, with the office “back end” being handled out of India and on server farms around the world.
For those who do come, they become the local competition in New York.   And it isn’t only “the best and the brightest” we are in competition with, it is also the “highly motivated” from impoverished and war-torn countries who have the determination and work ethic to achieve and who also enjoy the cultural cohesiveness and mutual support from having a native language.
African-American communities are magnets for these newcomers.  These folks are able to profit from both the result of centuries of intergenerational trauma from the terrorism of enslavement, as well as the ongoing economic disenfranchisement of African-Americans.   A quick example is banking.  Whereas banks in the U.S. need laws to compel them to service the Black community, the New York State Banking Department says there are 84 foreign branches of banks in New York servicing some part of their national and expatriates’ interests.  And the Flushing location of the Chinese United Commercial Bank suggests that the clientele are not just corporate titans, but also small business owners looking for someone who speaks their language and through whom they can send and receive dollars back home.
The Hasidic community has just opened a large and festive ice cream store on Bedford Avenue between Willoughby and Myrtle.  One morning there were Hasidic-owned school buses of Hasidic school children lined up outside to tour the facility.  They sell Klein’s ice cream, dairy and nondairy, with whatever toppings you’d like.   Walk into a corner store in their community to pick up a breath mint and they sell you a Glick’s.    This is how you fight unemployment, crime and despair.  This is how you build a strong community and a strong people.
Walk down any street in Fort Greene or Bedford-Stuyvesant and you know that the generalized dread you’ve been feeling in your bones is real and African-Americans had better work on plans of action to reverse the ongoing dissolution or we’ll be on the same track as the indigenous people, but we won’t have the benefit of any casinos or treaties.  And instead of reservations, we’ll have public housing that is vertically-patrolled and horizontally-ringed by police towers and cars with flashing lights.

RATS!
Shouldn’t something be done about the rats?  They’ve really gotten out of hand.  Every night we see them, and it doesn’t matter which route we take.  There are rats everywhere.   This cannot be a good thing.   We have tourists to consider and it’s embarrassing to have them think this is how we live in New York.  We just hope the problem is cleaned up before we are called to show the world how well New Yorkers handle the threat of bubonic plague.

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