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CIA, Drugs, Social Control & Black Folks

Editor, Our Time Press
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Over twenty-five years ago, Marvin Gaye, commenting on the direction of the country said, “It makes you want to hollar and throw up both your hands.”   Marvin was right, and it’s  the natural response to what passes for democracy in the United States.   The newly published  “Whiteout – The CIA, Drugs and the Press” Written by Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair,  lays out the connection between drugs, the CIA and social control and how this complex of interests is aided and abetted by the major media.

In the December 1996 issue of Our Time Press, we called the CIA Headquarters in Langley Virginia, the “Mother crack house of them all.”   We realize now that we were being naive with this understatement.  The involvement of the CIA and the drug trade goes far beyond comparison to a crack house or drug dealer.  As revealed in the exhaustively researched “Whiteout”, the CIA is the Mother of all Drug Lords.  The work of the Agency–the Company– the Boys– can more accurately be compared to the gangland muscle for a covert government funded partially by taxes, and partially by drug sales.   Illegal drugs are useful in that they enable control of populations both where they are grown and where they are sold.  And the business of social control is the prime mission of the CIA, and they use any means to attain that end.  After reading “Whiteout”, it is possible to see that recent terrorism has only a couple of degrees of separation between the acts and the CIA. For example, people from the Afghan areas where the CIA used to arm, support and train the Mujahadin, were reportedly connected with the bombings in Kenya and and the Sudan.

Another terrorist attack with a possible CIA pedigree, would be the recent arrest of seven exiled Cubans with a plan to assassinate Fidel Castro.  “Whiteout” gives background to the history of the CIA plotting against President Castro; a history that is long, comic and perverse.   The CIA relationship with aggressive elements within the Cuban expatriate community is well known to be as close as kittens at a nipple.   And while they may not be directly involved in this latest fiasco, they certainly created an environment friendly to the plotters.
When the bombs first went off in Africa, my first thoughts idled on the CIA,   but then I thought  not even the CIA would bomb that many people for no apparent reason,  So I said let’s see what happens.   Well, what’s happened is “heightened security”.   This appears to be perfectly proper.  The barricading of government facilities and the long lines where people are asked to show their papers before they can “move along”.   These are reported as unavoidable but cautious responses to a world wide terrorist threat.   So it seems that the only thing that has actually happened is the increasing deployment of security forces and their apparatus home, and a one day airstrike by the U.S. at what are reported to be former CIA training camps in Aghanistan and a pharmeceutical company in the Sudan.   Then there is the labeling of Khalid Muhammad, an African American leader well outside the mainstream, as a “terrorist”, and a convocation of Black youth as a “hate march.”   The history of United States government in general and the CIA in particular as outlined in “Whiteout” suggests that these are not necessarily unrelated topics.   To the kind of people you read about in “Whiteout”, people receiving US government checks, the 12 Americans who died in the bombing in Kenya could easily be considered “unavoidable collateral damage,” and the thought of a million black youth united behind an agenda for changing their lives would be considered totally unacceptable.

After recapping Gary Webbs’ “Dark Alliance” series and the CIA orchestrated media firestorm of denial of the evidence and destruction of Mr. Webb’s journalism career,  “Whiteout” takes a look at some of the basis, of what the major media calls “Black paranoia.”   That is, African Americans, after looking at the evidence revealed by Webb and the empirical evidence on the corner and in their lives, are left with a feeling that yes, “they” are out to get us.  Well if you’re Black and  weren’t paranoid before reading “Whiteout”, it’s only because you didn’t know enough.    Check out the following excerpts from chapter three, “The History of Black ‘Paranoia’.”

“In the early years of the century, Lieut. Col. Ralph Van Deman created an Army Intelligence network targeting four prime foes: the Industrial Workers of the World, opponents of the draft, Socialists, and ‘Negro unrest.”  Fear that the Germans would take advantage of black grievances was great, and Van Deman was much preoccupied with the role of black churches as possible centers of sedition.

“By the end of 1917 the War Department’s Military Intelligence Division had opened a file on Martin Luther King Jr.’s maternal grandfather, the Rev. A. D. Williams, pastor of Ebenezer Baptist Church and first president of the Atlanta NAACP.  King’s father, Martin Sr., William’s successor at Ebenezer Baptist also entered the army files….By 1963, so Tennessee journalist Stephen Tompkins reported in the Memphis Commercial Appeal, U-2 planes were photographing disturbances in Birmingham, Alabama, capping a multilayered spy system that by 1968 included 304 intelligence offices across the country, “subversive national security dossiers” on 80,731 Americans, plus 19 million personnel dossiers lodged at the Defense Department’s Central Index of Investigations.

A more sinister thread derives from the anger and fear with which the army high command greeted King’s denunciation of the Vietnam War at Riverside Church in 1967.  Army spies recorded Stokely Carmichael telling King, ‘The Man don’t care you call ghettos concentration camps, but when you tell him his war machine is nothing but hired killers you got trouble.’
“After the 1967 Detroit riots, 496 black men under arrest were interviewed by agents of the army’s Psychological Operations group, dressed as civilians.  It turned out King was by far the most popular black leader.  That same year Maj. General William Yarborough, assistant chief of staff for intelligence, observing the great antiwar march on Washington from the roof of the Pentagon, concluded that the empire was coming apart at the seams.  There were, Yarborough reckoned, too few reliable troops to fight in Vietnam  and hold the line at home.
“In response, the army increased its surveillance of  King.  Green Berets and other Special Forces veterans from Vietnam began making street maps and identifying landing zones and potential sniper sites in major US cities.   The Klu Klux Klan was recruited by the 20th Special Forces Group, headquartered in Alabama as a subsidiary intelligence network.   The army began offering 30.06 sniper rifles to police departments, including that of Memphis.

“In his fine investigation, Tompkins detailed the increasing hysteria of Army intelligence chief’s over the threat they considered King to pose to national stability.  The FBI’s J. Edgar Hoover was similarly obsessed, and King was dogged by spy units through early 1967.  A Green Beret special unit was operating in Memphis on the day he was shot.  He died from a bullet from a 30.06 rifled purchased in a Memphis store, a murder for which James Earl Ray was given a 99-year sentence in a Tennessee prison.  A court-ordered test of James Earl Ray’s rifle raised questions as to whether it in fact had fired the bullet that killed King.”

COINTELPRO & Political Prisoners
One of the items on the agenda for the Million Youth March is that of political prisoners.   Some people, even black people, may think this involves some drug dealer or violent criminal who got “caught up in the system by the man”, yada, yada yada.  Actually, in recent history, the term “political prisoners”  grew out of the FBI’s  Counter Intelligence Program.   COINTELPRO as it was known began in 1956.  Cockburn and St. Clair write, “A memo from FBI director J. Edgar Hoover described the program as it stood in August 1967; the purpose of COINTELPRO was to ‘expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit or otherwise neutralize’ black organizations the FBI didn’t care for.  And if any black leader emerged, Hoover’s order was that the Bureau should “pinpoint potential troublemakers and neutralize them before they exercised their potential for violence.’
“‘Neutralize’ has long been government-speak for assassination.  At least six or seven Black Panther leaders were killed at the instigation of the FBI, the most infamous episode being the assassination of Fred Hampton and Mark  Clark in Chicago.  These two Panther leaders were shot in their beds while asleep, by Chicago police who had been given a detailed floor plan of the house by an FBI informant who had also drugged Hampton and Clark.”

In jail right now there are men and women for whom this is not history.  It is a life held in a prison cell because that person stood up when others did not, and said “No”.    They will not be forgotten at the  million youth march, and they must not be forgotten at the ballot box either.
When you think of cocaine you may think of the CIA.  But the use of cocaine as an excuse to attack black people is not new.   “In 1900 the Journal of the American Medical Association printed an editorial alerting its leaders to a new peril: ‘Negroes in the South are reported as being addicted to a new form of vice – that of ‘cocaine sniffing or the ‘coke habit.”   One of the authorities of the time, Dr. Christopher Koch of the State Pharmacy Board of Pennsylvania, in testimony before Congress in 1914, said, “Most of the attacks upon the white women of the south are the direct result of a cocaine-crazed Negro brain.'”
This is the kind of thinking that guided the war on drugs in the early years, and the linking of cocaine and blacks continued unabated through the decades.   “Whiteout” reports that, “After a Nixon briefing in 1969, his top aide, H.R. Haldeman noted in his diary:  ‘Nixon emphasized that you have to face the fact that the whole problem is really the blacks.  The key is to devise a system that recognizes this while not appearing to.'”    Nixon was at least respecting black sensibilities.  “Whiteout” shows that appearances were tossed aside during the Reagan-Bush-Clinton years when black people were seriously dissed in the War on Drugs.   This war has many components.  One that is explored by Cockburn and St. Clair, is the forfeiture program.  “Even if only a small amount of drugs is found inside,” and Orange County narcotics detective explained, “the law permits seized vehicles to be sold by law enforcement agencies to finance anti-drug law enforcement programs.’

“In fact, the forfeiture program became a tremendous revenue stream for the police.  From 1982 to 1991 the US Department of Justice seized more than $2.5 billion in assets.  The Justice Department confiscated $500 million in property in 1991 alone, and 80 percent of these seizures were from people who were never charged with a crime.”
In 1986 the Ant-Drug Abuse Act was passed.  “It contained twenty-nine new minimum mandatory sentences….In 1995 the US Sentencing Commission reviewed eight years of application of this provision and found it to be undeniably racist in practice:  84 percent of those arrested for crack possession were black, while only 10 percent were white and 5 percent Hispanic.  The disparity for crack-trafficking prosecutions were even wider: 88 percent blacks, 7 percent Hispanics, 4 percent whites.   By comparison, defendants arrested for powder cocaine possession were 58 percent white, 26 percent black and 15 percent Hispanic…..Between 1986 and 1991 the incarceration rate for white males convicted on drug crimes increased by 106 percent.  But the number of black males in prison for kindred offenses soared by a factor of 429 percent, and the rate for black women went up by an incredible 828 percent.”

Using drugs as a weapon to attack blacks extends well beyond “illegal substances”.   In “Whiteout”, we are introduced to “Jolly” West, a UCLA psychiatrist and Government researcher.   Mr. West put it this way, “‘The role of drugs in the exercise of political control is also coming under increasing discussion,’ he wrote in Hallucinations: Behavior, Experience and theory, a book he edited in 1975.  ‘Control can be impose either through prohibition or supply.  The total or even partial prohibition of drugs gives government considerable leverage for other types of control.  An example would be the selective application of drug laws…against selected components of the population such as members of certain minority groups or political organizations.’  As we have seen, sentencing patterns vindicate West’s analysis.”
Sterilization and the history of bio-chemical warfare here in the US is also instructive.  One of the most frightening possibilities should be of interest to anyone who has heard of the Human Genome Project, the world-wide search to map every human gene.  “In a 1970 article in Military Review, a journal published by the US Army Command and General Staff College, a    Swedish geneticist at the university of Lund  named Carl Larson discussed genetically selective weapons.  Larson stated that though the study of drug metabolizing enzymes was in its infancy, ‘observed variations in drug responses have pointed to the possibility of great innate differences in vulnerability to chemical agents between different populations.’ Larson went on to speculate that in a process similar to mapping the world’s blood groups, ‘we may soon have a grid where new observations on this can be pinpointed.’  In the same vein, a January 1975 US Army report noted in its conclusion that “it is theoretically possible to develop so-called ‘ethnic weapons’ which would be designed to exploit naturally occurring differences in vulnerability among specific population groups.'”

With all of that and more as prelude, Cockburn and St. Clair then begin to tell the murderous, torturous, system controlling, drug running saga of the CIA.   In spite of recent reports that they no longer assassinate people, assassination has always been one of their options.   Well known is the case of Patrice Lumumba, leader of the Congo.  CIA director Allen Dulles had decided that his removal was “an urgent and prime objective.”    First they tried a bio-poison created by the CIA’s Technical Services Division.   The poison was to be applied to Lummaba’s toothbrush and food.   “However, the CIA’s bio-assassins couldn’t get close enough to Lumumba, so the ‘executive action’ proceeded by a more traditional route.  Lumumba was seized, tortured and murdered by soldiers of the CIA’s selected replacement, Mobutu Sese Seko, and Lumumba’s body ended up in the trunk of a CIA officer who drove around Lumumbashi trying to decide how to dispose of it.”

Looking at the Congo today, with all her minerals and boardering countries, we see the results of the CIA’s work then, and probably the work they’re doing right now.  The chapter dealing with the connections between the CIA and its predecessor, the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), with Nazis after WW2 is instructive in the kinds of people the CIA is willing and even eager to work with.

Their exploits in the realms of torture and human experimentation are detailed at length and the relationship of the CIA with people such as the Nazi war criminal Klaus Barbi extended into the 1970’s.    But we don’t have to tar the CIA with the Nazi brush.  It is revealed that the CIA is quite capable of creating its own horrors.  Take the effort to interrogate Vietnamese prisoners in July of 1968.  “In one such experiment, three prisoners were anaesthetized, their skulls were then opened and electrodes were implanted by CIA doctors into different parts of their brains.  The prisoners were revived, placed in a room with knives and the electrodes in the brains activated by the CIA psychiatrist who were covertly observing them.  The hope was that they could be prompted in this manner to attack each other.  The experiment failed.  The electrodes were removed, the patients were shot and their bodies burned.  This rivaled anything in Dachau.”

“By the early 1950’s the CIA’s relationship with drugs stretched from alliances with criminal smugglers of heroin to research in, and application of, lethal or mind-altering chemical agents.”

After reading about the blatant drug running, the plane buying, the court fixing, the coups, the third-party slaughtering, the creation of deniable hight ground, once again we see that the people in the barbershops, beauty parlors, and on the street corner are right: The volume of guns and drugs that are in the Black communities would not arrive without the active aid and assistance of a government authority. The evidence has been compiled again; it’s the Central Intelligence Agency.  Once again there are hundreds of pages of documentation, interviews, sworn testimony, eyewitnesses, etc., all compiled from a wealth or sources.  And once again there is a collective shrug.    There was a brief flurry of activity last December, when “news” of the results of the CIA internal investigation of drugs charges was leaked.  The actual report was due out the following January but has not been issued yet.  The Amsterdam News reports Maxine Waters charging that “the leaked CIA report remains classified, sitting at the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence.”   The December 16th issue of CounterPunch anticipated the non-release.  “As for the January release, don’t hold your breath.  This is not the first CIA Inspector General’s report that’s been laggard in appearing.  In 1988 the Agency conducted an IG’s report on Contra-CIA drug running.  We’re still waiting.  In 1973 the Agency promised an IG report on CIA relations with opium smuggling in Southeast Asia (this was after McCoy’s book raised a storm and was duly denounced in the mainstream press.)  We’re still waiting for full publication of that one.  In 1953 and in 1963 the Agency undertook self-examinations of its role in drug experimentation, with reference to LSD.  We’re still waiting for complete disclosure of those reports as well.”
People had better start caring about this, and not leave it up to Congresswoman Maxine Waters to fight this battle with thin troops.   Africa risks being depopulated, and black people here in the states are employed as company labor or as product for the criminal justice system and social service agencies.
The solution that worries the ruling elite,and their operatives the most, is the prospect of a black voter turnout in the 80% range.  At that level, we would leverage a movement that would fundamentally reform the political system and the exercise of power around the world.   That is why so much time and energy is spent trying to keep black folks down, and why the fate of the nation depends on our rising up.

-DG
(“Whiteout – The CIA, Drugs and the Press” is published by Verso 212-807-9680)
CounterPunch is published by Ken Silverstein and Alexander Cockkburn.  For subscription info: CounterPunch, P.O. Box 18675, Washington, D.C.

Charles Barron – What it Takes to Win the Political Game

Editor, Our Time Press
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OTP:  The recent primary election only had about 15% of the electorate coming out.  What’s going on and how can we change it?

Charles Barron:  Number one, I think that a lot of voters feel they don’t have a reason to vote. They’ve been lied to so much by elected officials that there is a fair amount of despair and hopelessness vis a vis the electoral process, and we can’t blame it all on voter apathy.   The other part is the candidate.  There is a lack of sincere, down-to-earth, grassroots, for the people, candidates.  So when you have candidates that are not committed to the people, and you have incumbents who have sold out the people, it’s very, very difficult to convince people to come out and vote because Rosa Parks, and Fannie Lou Hamer, and Martin Luther King, Jr. struggled for you to have that right.   We ran that one down for a little while and it’s worked to an extent.  Now people want to see some concrete changes in their daily living.  They want to see things delivered and promises kept.

OTP:  How do we convince people that there is a reason?   I see folks out here who simply have no inclination whatsoever to go and vote.

CB:  I think you have to do several things.  Number one, as we’re doing with the Unity Party and the Mary France campaign, is to give people a reason to vote,   to develop a new electoral movement.  To revolutionize the electoral movement with people who are connected with grassroots people.  I think once they see candidates from the community who have worked in the community, candidates they believe in, then I think we’ll have a better chance. Even though this last turnout was dismally low, I look at things like Barry Ford running against Ed Towns in the 10th Congressional District.  Ed Towns got 17,000 votes and Barry Ford got 12,000 votes.  That’s a lot for a person who was not known before this race.  And when you add in the other guy, Ken Diamondstone, he got 4,000 votes.   So there were 16,000 votes against Ed Towns.   48% of the district went against Ed Towns, a longtime incumbent.   Well that’s a signal that people are dissatisfied with the kind of leadership Towns is offering and want a change.

OTP:  What are the nuts and bolts of grabbing people and getting them down to the ballot boxes.  How is that done?

CB:  First it has to take place long before the election.  I think that’s a mistake that a lot of grassroot candidates, insurgent candidates make.  They take too long to run.  They wait until the last minute to make that decision.  To run, you need an expert team to get the signatures to get on the ballot.  You need to raise enough money, and you have to be connected to the people.  People are tired of folks coming around just on election day.
We have an election coming up in 2001 and we’re out here now, three and four years before the election, getting connected with our people.   We have to see our folks where they are.  We have to go into the barbershops when there are no elections and find out what is on folk’s minds.   We have to go to tenant association meetings, block association meetings, churches, when there are no elections.  Just to get involved in the everyday life of our folks and work on issues they care about.  Rent control issues, issues in the housing developments, income caps.  People are looking at subsistence education of their children and we have to address those basic issues.  When people know that you are going to address the issues that impact their daily lives, and do it on a consistent basis, even before the election, then I think we have a better chance of getting them out to vote.
Just last night I was talking to five or six brothers on the corner, and one of them said, “I’m glad you stopped to talk.  We saw your picture on the poster, but I’ve never met you.    Now that we’ve met, you can rest assured you’ve got my vote.”  I invited them to an organizing committee, Operation POWER.  It’s an organization that came out of our campaign.  So that’ll be four or five more people.  I’ve got to do more of that.  So do other people who are serious about transforming our communities and our people.

OTP:  It’s not just the picture on the poster that gets the job done?

CB:   No, you can’t just put the picture on the poster up a few months before election day, get the New York Times and the Amsterdam News to endorse you, some big name people to endorse you.  You have to work hard everyday.   You have to walk through the housing developments.  See the folks sitting on the benches, introduce yourself and see what is on their minds.  What do the people want?  Of course they’re going to tell you “I need a job.”  Of course they’re going to tell you they want the drugs out of the community.   Then you have to see what level of commitment they’re willing to make, to cause that kind of stuff to happen.   It takes leadership. There are two kinds of leadership, A transformative leader who is a change individual, trying to change the system so that a greater amount of goods and services are delivered to the greatest number.  Then there are the other types of leaders who are into transactions.   They cut deals.  They make transactions.  They get a small group of loyalists some jobs to keep them in office.  I believe we need to move toward a transformative leadership for change, and away from transactional so that we can create a political movement.

OTP:  There is always talk about how the incumbents have a built-in advantage.  What are the mechanisms they use to enhance their reelections?

CB:  There are three main things they do to get reelected.  The first is mass mailing.   Take my 42nd Council District.   We have 54,000 registered voters.  The incumbent, with the money in her city council budget, can mail to those 54,000 voters two or three times right before the election.   So she’s already started off with three mailings to 54,000 people.

OTP:  These are mailing paid for by the city?

CB:  Out of the city council budget.  It’s illegal to use the city council budget for a campaign and there is a law that you’re not supposed to do a mailing within ninety days of an election, but not many people adhere to that law.   So what they’ll do is say they are just sending out a council report to the district thirty days before the election.   So they get to do that three times.  Then when it comes to the campaign, the incumbents are connected to powerful people, like the mayor in the case of Priscella Wooten in my district or the mayor and Ed Towns, so they get support from these power associations and developers, and corporations, so they have a lot of funds.   So they take those funds and do two or three more mailings and add to the three they’ve already done.   So now you have five different mailings to 54,000 people.   Secondly, they do phone banking.  The day of the election or a week before the election, they get the unions to give them access to very sophisticated phone banks.  They are able have people work the phones.    So now the voters are getting phone calls.   Thirdly, most voters make up their minds the day of the election and the incumbents have the money to pay people to go out there with palm cards.  They have the financing to put teams of people at each polling site.  Priscella Wooten had five hundred people out to my one hundred.   So it’s mailing, phone banking and election day operations with palm cards.  That’s how the incumbent stays in office.  And they already have the name recognition.

OTP:  Now what does an insurgent have to do to overcome that?

CB:  That’s why we have to start very, very early.   For example, I ran once, we got four thousand votes.  So even though Wooten is the incumbent and did all that I just said, and then some, she only got six thousand votes.   So four thousand to six thousand.  Now I have to work these next three years, to build an army for election day.  To raise more money so that I can do more mailing and to get a phone bank going.   I’ve got to spend the time expanding my base.  You have to build a base.  After the election, I didn’t go away.  We’re going to work out there to expand our base.  We’re going to go into the churches.  We had several ministers working with us this time, and we’re going to increase that number.   We are getting more into our youth.  There are a lot of young people who are politically conscious, the Hip Hop Nation.  Hip Hop culture is looking more toward politics.  I’ve spoken with young people in the district who are looking to get involved as well.  And then we are going to look more to expand toward some community-based organizations that were more fearful to get involved last time because there were purse strings attached.  But with no incumbent in the next election, even though they will still have a machine coming at me, these organizations will have more courage to get involved.  And then looking at the Tenant Associations and Block Associations Presidents.  These are real local leaders.  In our district we have about eleven housing developments.   We had three or four tenant association leaders from those housing developments involved.   We’re going to shoot for more and expand that.   Then we are working with the Black Political Free Agents organization, the Unity Party, and Operation POWER which is a group we put together.  And then we’ve been assisting other campaigns.   In this past election we worked with three or four different campaigns and that gave us relationships with other political forces.   That’s what we mean by expanding our base.

OTP:  In this upcoming election for governor, what’s the lay of the land and what’s the role of the Unity Party and Mary France?

CB:  We’ve really got to build an independent political movement, a progressive political movement.   That is a major objective.  We want to get 50,000 votes under the Unity Party banner, so we can build an independent political movement.   Right now the two major parties either take us for granted like the Democrats, ignore us like the Republicans or use us like progressive white efforts.   So we’re either ignored, taken for granted or used.  The Unity Party brings us power, leverage and respect.   Instead of an individual voting for Twiddle Dee Dee or Twiddle Dee Dum, that is Peter Vallone or George Pataki, they’ll have a real choice.  Because those two are both so conservative their politics are very similar, it’s not going to make a huge difference who wins.  The difference will be so marginal, you’ll be better off voting for Mary Alice France, with the Unity Party, so that you’ll have 50,000 people representing you.   Because you need 50,000 votes to get an independent party line, when people seek elections with these major parties, they will look at you differently now because they are looking at 50,000 people instead of one person.   Or instead of black people who are controlled by certain black leaders who the power structure is comfortable with, we’ll have an independent party that will give us more leverage.   Having a Unity Party means that we can run our own candidates locally.  So if I run in 2001 as a registered Democrat, I’m also going to be on the Unity Party line. So it really increases our opportunities on a local level, as well as gives us more leverage and power and negotiating power on the broader level.

OTP:  Running on two party lines, how does that work?

CB:  you can be endorsed by many parties.   Peter Vallone is on the Working Families Party line in November, and the Democratic.   In New York City, the Liberal Party, the so-called Liberal Party that’s actually very conservative under the leadership of Ray Harding, they wield a lot of power now because they support Giuliani.  If that white vote is split, then the Liberal Party endorsement really means something.    We can play that same kind of power politics if we had a Unity Party and continued to build it.   There may come a time where we’ll run our own candidates for statewide office and keep building.  But in the meantime, as we win local elections and become powerful, we can still make a difference in the gubernatorial election if the two main candidates are neck and neck, if we can come in with a hundred thousand, hundred and fifty thousand votes, it can make a difference.  If you look at this last race for the Democratic Primary, Peter Vallone got 296,000 votes.   Chuck Schumer won the nomination for Senate with 252,000 votes.   That may seem like a lot, but you’re talking about millions of voters in the state.   Remember that Al Sharpton got 187,000 votes when he ran statewide with little or no money.   These other guys have millions of dollars.  Sharpton got more votes than everybody else in those races but the two winners.   Now that’s something to think about.  He got more votes than Mark Green, more votes than Geraldine Ferraro, more votes than Betsy McCaughey Ross.  When you look at the governor’s race, Peter Vallone got 296,000 votes.  Betsy McCaughey Ross 112,000, James LaRocca, 41,000, and Charles Hynes, 84,000.  Sharpton, with 187,00 votes in his senate race in 1994 got more votes than Hynes and LaRocca put together.

OTP: How much did Sharpton spend on that race?

CB:  About $70,000.

OTP:  How much money do these other guys spend?

CB:  Millions.  I know Betsy McCaughey Ross spent about $2.5 million and she only got 112,000 votes.

OTP:  Unbelievable.

CB;  So Sharpton spent $60-70,000 in that Senate race and he got 187,000 votes.   Look at it this way.  In his citywide run for mayor, he got 132,000 votes.   That was more than Betsy McCaughey Ross got statewide.

OTP:  Gotcha.

CB:  Her 112,000 with her millions.  Look at the Senate race.  Charles Schumer got 252,000 votes with over ten million dollars.  That’s not cost-effective with Sharpton getting 187,000 votes for $70,000.  [ed. Note: These figures work out to approx. .37 cents a vote for Sharpton, $22.32 a vote for Ross, and $39.68 a vote for Schumer].   Mark Green had 93,000 votes.  Sharpton had 187,000.  Geraldine Ferraro, the woman icon, vice-presidential candidate, she had a few million, 132,000 votes.  The Geraldine Ferraro vote statewide was only as much as Sharpton got citywide, 132,000.  So we have the potential to really build a party, an alternative to the two party system, and really have a major impact.  And then look at some of the local stuff.   The local races.  When I ran against Priscella Wooten, I got 3,990 plus votes.  Four thousand.   Clarence Norman, Jr., the most powerful black Democrat in the State.  He received 3,313 votes.   Do you hear me?  We got four thousand.

OTP:  And the populations are the same?

CB:  We have a larger district.  There are several assembly district in the council district.  But look at it this way, I got three thousand votes from just the 40th Assembly District.  That covers East New York, the other thousand came outside of East New York.

OTP:  Alright.

CB:  He got three thousand three hundred.  I got three thousand in the 40th , one Assembly District.   I probably could have beaten Assemblyman Griffith if I would have wanted that seat, because he’s vulnerable and we’re building a machine out here.  Take the case of James E. Davis, Officer Davis.

OTP:  Oh yes.

CB:  He doesn’t have any real solid base.  Two thousand seven hundred and thirty-three votes against Clarence.  He got 45% of the vote against Clarence.   Look at Ed Towns with millions of dollars and out here for sixteen years, he got a total of 17,990 votes.   Barry Ford, a virtual unknown, 12,610 votes, 36% of the vote.  Kenneth Diamondstone, 4,000 votes.  If you total Kenneth’s and Barry’s votes, which is an anti-Towns vote, it’s 16,610 to Towns’ 17,990.  48% to Towns’ 52%.  What message is the electorate giving to us?   They want these guys out.   They will go with anybody to get them out.   But we have to build our bases more, and build our relationships more.
OTP:  What can the individual person do who says, “Hey, I want to make something happen.”  What can they do?

CB:  I don’t think there should be an individual black person in this city that is not a part of some organization.   The first thing all of us have to do with our families is join an organization.   We cannot do this thing alone.   Then once you get involved with an organization, you have to push that organization to be progressive.   To link with other organizations that have similar goals, so that we can build progressive and independent coalitions to launch an electoral movement.  Movements change things.   Campaigns put individuals in office.  Movements change things systemically.  Movements build platforms.   Campaigns build a person.  We have to get beyond the idea of running campaigns as individuals and look at building movements and coalitions for independent progressive policy that will be more issue-based and platform-based, organizational-based, and system fighters.  We can’t just look at somebody with a name, and put them in office.  They have to be committed to an agenda, an organization, and be system fighters.  Not afraid to fight against white supremacy.   That’s one of our major problems.  White male supremacy.  Most of the parties in this state, if not all, are lead by white males.   Whether they’re progressive parties or liberal parties, or conservative parties, they’re lead by white males.

OTP:  Conrad Muhammad has an interesting group called A Movement for CHHANGE that he is developing.

CB:   Yes.  I think that’s an excellent group that has a world of potential.  Conrad Muhammad has a real challenge before him.  He’s going to have to sustain a movement, and develop the resources.  But we need training.  Groups like that need training.  Not only young people, but all of us need training.  I’ve put out a call to Conrad already.  We at Dynamics of Leadership, are certainly willing to provide that kind of training.  People will gather with you early, but to sustain a movement like that, you’re going to have to obtain some power real soon, and obtain resources in order to do fundamental things.  You have to find a building, a base, that you can organize in and have people come to.  In addition to the money, you have to have the training to go along with that so that you’ll know what the political landscape is in New York.

OTP:  When we were speaking at the meeting, I was lamenting on the poor turnout and you said words to the effect, “Do not despair.”   Do you remember that?

CB:   Yes.  You know, I’m an eternal optimist and a realist.  I’m not one who is an idealistic optimistic in an unreal way.  But I’m certain that during slavery days somebody told Harriet Tubman that she was out of her mind.  That slavery was here forever, so why would she try and do something about it.  But Harriet did it, despite of all that was around her.  And slavery doesn’t exist anymore in that form.  I’m sure somebody told Marcus Garvey that he couldn’t build the things he wanted to build.  A steamship company in 1920.  Black people would never give him enough money to build the Phyliss Wheatley Hotel, and the Universal Grocery Store, and the Universal Restaurant.   But Marcus Garvey said, “Up you mighty race, you can accomplish what you will.”  And he did it.  I’m sure people thought that Jim Crow would be around forever.  George Wallace said, “Segregation now, segregation forever.”   He just died himself, as did segregation.   I’m sure someone told Nelson Mandela, “well you might as well just give it up.  You’re going to be in jail forever.   He sat in there for twenty-seven years.  Never giving up hope, always having a vision for a new South Africa.  Apartheid is dead and Mandela went from the prison to the presidency.   If that could happen in South Africa, if that could happen on the plantations, then we who have so much more, should do equally as well, if not better.  And any leader who comes before us and tells us that any form of our oppression is permanent, that’s a leader not fit to lead.

Brother Kazembe Speaks on Working for Unity

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OTP:  What is the Universal Nubian Association.

Brother Kazembe: The Universal Nubian Association is a loose network of Pan-Africanists and African Nationalists.  Young adults based mostly in New York City.
OTP:  What groups are involved and what is it that you do?

BK: Our primary focus is promoting nationalism and Garveyism in particular.  We work in the trenches.   We try to be involved with everything that’s going on in the movement and in providing troops and assisting other groups. We’re also on the campuses of BMCC and Lehman College.  We work to organize students around fighting against tuition increases and understanding the role that access to tutorial services has traditionally played at CUNY. We’ve been around for ten years in different forms.

We have a small membership, but we use our resources and our time to assist all of the larger existing organizations that are out there such as the United African Movement, the National Action Network, the Unity Party and so forth.

We use our influence in our circles to work with groups that are doing work.  We have a chapter in the Bronx and in Brooklyn.  Sometimes our activity is just to encourage people to come out to the House of Justice or the Harriet Tubman School, to get information and to contribute funds if they can or just become involved in the overall movement. We used to have a base at the Muse on Bedford Avenue.  We’ve worked with people like Una Mozak, Sonny Carson, Alton Maddox and some younger people like Kevin Muhammad, Brother Eric Muhammad, Sista Soljah, Erica Ford, people like that.

OTP:  When I hear Garveyism or Nubian or Nationalism, I don’t usually associate that with the kind of work the Unity Party is doing.  How do you make that connection?

BK:  Within the Universal Nubian Association, we believe that we have to use the totality of struggle to achieve our ends.   That means whatever has the potential to work and advance the condition of our people, we will use.  It could be the ballot or protesting in the street.   Historically, over the years, our organization has kept good relations with different forces in the movement that didn’t relate to each other.  For example, for a while there was a big thing between Sharpton and Sonny Carson.   During those years we related to and did programs with both of those brothers.    We were able to do this because within our organization we felt that both of those forces were doing good and we were able to relate to both of them.  Now as far as the Unity Party is concerned, we definitely believe that there is a need for a Black led progressive political party in the state of New York and in this country.    When Sharpton ran for mayor and Barron ran for city council, I counseled both of them to consider running not as Democrats but as independents.   I thought that would have given them a better chance of impacting on the people in a permanent way and also potentially winning.   Especially since they would have been insured of having a rematch in the general election.   That didn’t happen in those two elections, but they are both in the vanguard of supporting and building the Unity Party which would serve this purpose in future elections.   The reason we are supporting the Unity Party is because we see the potential for it to be a Black organization.  That’s important to us, not because we think black people are superior just because they’re black, because we don’t.   We do see ourselves as black people, and we believe that because of the history of this country, and the way this country has developed, race is a key element, a key organizing element for us as a people because that’s how we’ve been oppressed.  We haven’t been oppressed because of our religion, our class or ethnicity or the language we speak.   Elements such as class may be present, but overall, race is the main factor and those other things come into it.   Therefore we believe there should be a black-led party as this country diversifies.   As black people, seeing the world through our own eyes, we demand, insist, and will fight for the need for acknowledgment of the contributions of black people in building this country and creating a progressive agenda.  The civil rights movement of the sixties led to benefits for women and other ethnic groups.   That was led by the black community.  Now as the country continues to diversify, we want the recent immigrants to this country to acknowledge and respect the contribution that black people have made.   Since the Democratic, Republican and Liberal parties are controlled by white people and corporations, we believe that the Unity party must be multiracial and black led.

OTP:  What kind of work do you do to increase participation in the electoral process?

BK:  The main thing is to be out in the streets spreading the word.   Last year the Universal Nubian Association sponsored a cable show on BCAT called “Nubian Voices”.   We did a couple of shows around the political process and young adults and their opinions about the mayoral race when Sharpton was running.   Basically it’s voter education.  Getting the word out about the issues and the importance about how an individual can impact the system.  Not just by voting on election day, but also keeping a constant relationship with the local elected officials and other elected officials that represent them.  So we go out in the streets and encourage young people to get involved in the political process.   Right around now it’s been difficult because of the situation with the President.  People are pessimistic about the whole political process.  This is what I’ve seen over the past few weeks while carrying around the literature about Mary France and the Unity Party.  But I think that will pass.   Long term, I see young adults getting involved in the political process because Hip Hop culture has an impact on young adults worldwide.  Many of the leaders, be they artists or just people involved with the industry are starting to focus more on organizing that culture to get them to be more political and active as far as social issues.   I see that in the near future, possibly in time for this election to get Mary France those 50,000 votes, but definitely going into the new millennium, a new upsurge in activism coming from young adults because the Hip Hop Culture is beginning to focus in on that.   Steps are being taken to organize that energy and get the young adults to see that historically culture has played a key role in empowerment.  People like Harry Belafonte and Sidney Poitier they assisted the civil rights movement.   Prior to that you had the great Paul Robeson.  In the 80’s you had Public Enemy and KRS One and X-Clan as part of the Hip Hop generation.  That sort of got knocked out of the box by so-called Gangsta Rap.   Gangsta Rap took over.  But nowadays I see an upsurge in nation-conscious rap and that bodes well for young adults being involved in the political process.  The Nubian Nation, which is what we call the UNA as a street name, all along has been encouraging rappers.   Now we are working with Conrad Muhammad and other people putting the focus on organizing the Hip Hop community.   This is something that is going to takeoff and work.  Young adults are looking for established activists and or politicians who talk their language and understand where they’re coming from.   That’s why we’ve been advocating within the Universal Nubian Association that the Unity Party should add a plank to their platform that specifically deals with Hip Hop Culture.   The fact that it started in New York and is a cultural and economic force on a global level that needs to be supported by government so that they can create more jobs and continue to grow.   Such a plank by the Unity Party would be like an “invite”.  It would be opening the doors to encourage all these young adults who are in that culture to come aboard and get down with the Unity Party.

OTP:  When you say Hip Hop Culture what do you mean?  Could you explain to me what you mean by Hip Hop Culture?

BK:  Hip Hop Culture started in the mid-seventies in the South Bronx.  Dealing with Graffiti as an artistic expression.  Also break dancing, deejaying and rhyming and rapping.  Rhyming and rapping sort of took off more than the other three aspects of Hip Hop culture.   To some it seems that the Hip Hop Culture itself is just Rap music.   But the other things the graffiti, the deejaying and the break dancing were all a part of it in the beginning.    It’s also mannerisms, the way you carry yourself.  It’s a language, it’s lingo that is used within the generation.  It also has expanded into film, comedy and clothing.  A lot of Hip Hop culture is very creative.  That’s how we talk about it in the UNA.  The creativity of Hip Hop Culture.   The ability to say, “Well we’re not being taught in schools how to play instruments because all of that has been cut out of the Board of Ed.  Fine.  We’re just going to hook up our turntables to street corner poles and take little bits of previously recorded music and make a whole new sound.”   The creativity of that, the ability to market out of the back seat of your car or to have the ability like the Wu Tang Clan, to go into various major labels and strike deals.  Deals that have the artist keeping creative control and getting a fair share of the profits.  This is different than how some of our artists were treated in the ’60’s, when they didn’t reap the financial benefits that they were entitled to.   Of course there are still artists that are getting ripped off and not getting their just do.  But there seems to be more creative control and business control with people like Master P or Sean “Puff Daddy” Coomb, in this generation than there was in the past.  Hip Hop Culture is global.  It’s beyond the Black and Latino neighborhoods of New York.  It’s in Germany, it’s in Japan, it’s in Cuba, it’s in Brazil.  It’s a global culture that’s youth oriented and deals with expressing your self.  And that expression usually comes through fashion, through music or through art.

OTP:  Last week I looked at a website that had on it some lyrics for Little Kim.  I was stunned.    Reading those lyrics and hearing you talk about Nation Consciousness, how are these two sides of the culture being reconciled?   What about lyrics that portray one kind of image, and the kind of image that you’re talking about now?
BK:  Nation Conscious Rap was a book that came out about 1990.  That was when Nation Conscious Rap was at it’s peak, with people like Public Enemy, X-Clan, KRS One and others.  That sort of got knocked out of the box by Gangsta Rap.  When NWA came out with, “”Fuck the Police”, and some of these other West Coast Rappers rose up.   Now with Little Kim, what she raps about is sexuality using vulgar and explicit lyrics. Now for every Little Kim there’s a Lauren Hill.  The number one selling album in the country– not only amongst rapper, is Lauren Hill.

OTP:  Oh yes, I’ve heard of her.

BK:  The other two members of that group are of Haitian descent.  They’ve done a lot of good work.  Fund-raisers for the people in Haiti and so on.   For every Little Kim, there’s an Erica Badou.  Erica puts out positive conscious lyrics and she talks about empowerment and self development and spirituality.  We say that in Hip Hop there’s good and bad, just like in all things.   Look, you can go and buy violent movies or sexually explicit movies and magazines or you can choose not to.  I think artists have to be able to express themselves even though it is sexually explicit or is drug related or crime related.  I would not promote it and I don’t think young adults should listen to that twenty-four seven.   But I don’t think artists should be prevented from expressing themselves either.   People have the right to choose to purchase what they like.  Then it’s up to the community to step to these artists if they go too far over the line and to put them in check.

OTP:  Give me a listening list of some positive, nation-oriented rap artists.

BK:  I would say Erika Badu, Lauren Hill, Wycleff Jean, The Fugees, Digital Underground, Brand Nubian and Dead Presidents.   Of course, there’s Sista Soljah and Ras Baraka has some poetry out. There’s also A Tribe Called Quest, those would be good place to start.
What we like about Hip Hop artists is that they put their friends and their family members on the payroll as they grow businesses.  Like Fat Joe up in the Bronx opened up a clothing store and he has a clothing line.  The Wu Tang Clan has a clothing line.  What we admire about the Hip Hop Culture is how people are able to get into it and keep spinning and revolving into different things.   First there’s the artist, then the label the clothing line and so on.  We think that bodes well as far as creativity and entrepreneurship are concerned.  And that is something this generation is into more than the prior generation.   We think that this generation can learn from our parents, the Civil Rights generation, about the need to struggle and to be out there and force the government to respect us as human beings.  But we also think that our parents can learn from this generation about ownership.  Not just looking for a job, but creating a job out of nothing and having ownership.

OTP:  What’s your background?  Did you grow up in New York?

BK:  I grew up in Bedford Stuyvesant on Jefferson and Tompkins.  I live in the Albany Houses now.

OTP:  What school did you go to?

BK:  I graduated from Boys and Girls and I went to Borough of Manhattan Community College.

OTP:  Is there anything else you’d like to speak on?

BK:  The gang situation.   We believe as a consensus that our leaders have to spend as much time dealing with young adults that are NOT in the gangs, as they do with people who are in the gangs.

OTP:  If you were in charge, what kinds of programs would you see for young folks?

BK:  I see a program that is similar to what Richard Green does, even though I don’t like his politics.   There has to be a building.  A Plant where sisters and brothers can come in and get skills training and that has support services like access to computers.    Take the Jackie Robinson Center operation for example.  They’re getting a new building and it’s going to have studios, a library and more.    I think what the young people need is similar to school but more of an after-school program that they can tap into to build themselves up.  Most of the young adults, if you give them a chance, they want to do better.  They do negative things because they don’t see any other way out.   What we need is a building that provides support services for whatever it is that’s productive that the young people want to do.   It would be sort of and after-school, camp, skills/development center and it would be open twenty four seven.  That’s what I’d like to see.

Breaking New Ground

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We appear to be in a golden age of African-American small business development.  The number of black businesses is rising sharply-more than 46% in the late 1980’s and early 1990’s-and the sophistication of the efforts is accelerating as well.  In the past, it was common to see firms launched with little more than a good idea, a tiny amount of capital, and a double helping of prayer.

Today, we are much more likely to see African-American companies started by experienced managers who have already learned many of the toughest lessons of business, like managing staff, creating a realistic business plan, and staying on top of expenses.

Two newly formed home-based African-American businesses show the kinds of thoughtfulness, creativity and courage going into some of the new businesses.
Allen-Barcelona Development Corporation (212-234-2429) is a construction and property development company based in East Harlem that renovates residential and commercial properties.  In its first year, the company has racked up more than $100,000 in billings, including a contract with Harlem’s Hale House agency to start converting an abandoned building into usable space for the care of orphaned children.

Allen-Barcelona is owned and run by Lizzette Hill Barcelona, who formerly directed the East Harlem Neighborhood-Based Alliance, a nonprofit social services agency that she founded.  Why start a construction company?  “I decided to go into something that was not traditionally open to women, and then do it from a different perspective,” says Barcelona.  “All my clients say it’s different dealing with a woman contractor.”

That’s putting it mildly.  Anyone who’s ever hired a company to renovate their home knows that contractors have a maddening habit of showing up late for meetings and underestimating the time it takes to finish projects.  Not Barcelona.  “I take deadlines seriously,” says the 36-year-old single mother.  “When you have a two-year-old waiting for you at the baby sitter, every minute counts.”
Although she has a master’s degree in planning from Pratt Institute, Barcelona attributes her early success to what she learned by running a nonprofit agency with 14 employees and a $1 million budget. “In a nonprofit, you’re constantly tracking the cost of everything to make sure you don’t overspend your grants,” she says. “That’s the same theory behind a home business-you have to control the expenses or they will control you.”

With a staff of two and about 15 construction workers on call, Barcelona’s next step is to acquire properties and construct new facilities. “Right now I’m a home improvement contractor,” she says.  “I want to acquire property and build on it.  That’s why we’re called a development company.”

Bold Footwear (718-623-0333) is a Georgia-based athletic footwear and apparel company with a northeast distribution arm based in Brooklyn.  In September, the firm’s shoes will be sold through nine New York area Footlocker/Sports Authority stores-part of a national rollout that includes Chicago, Baltimore, Atlanta and the Carolinas.
The notion behind Bold is simple, says Bilal Muhammad, the northeast distribution manager.  “I pay easily between $80 and $110 a shot for my children’s footwear,” says the father of five.  “It’s $100 plus for the Michael Jordans.  Do the math.”

According to Muhammad, the math adds up to a $12 billion global market for athletic footwear, and huge profits for the large sneaker companies.  Keds sells $180 million worth of shoes without any marketing, says Muhammad, while a marketing machine like Nike earns billions every year.  “Our footwear is designed, created and marketed by African-Americans; that’s totally unique in the market,” says Muhammad.  “We understand and know the needs and wants of the inner-city consumer, which really drives the market.  We know them because we are them.”
Bold’s founder and CEO, Tariq Khan, learned the ropes the hard way-a 1986 attempt to launch Bold resulted in more orders than the young company could handle, and the effort collapsed.  Undeterred, Khan staged a 10-year comeback, handling marketing for a Korean sneaker company and honing his skills by marketing well-known brands like Puma and Converse.

By the time he was ready to re-launch Bold this year, Khan had a stronger business plan, a national distribution network of savvy local entrepreneurs like Muhammad, and a celebrity endorsement from a well-known hip hop artist, Da Brat.

“We want our folks to come out and support Bold,” says Muhammad.  “We have a quality product that they will be proud to wear, with unique designs and color combinations.  If it wasn’t a quality product, it wouldn’t be in Footlocker right now.”

Where the Jobs Are
A small nonprofit community group in Bedford-Stuyvesant has quietly stepped up to the challenge of helping people get jobs. The Central Brooklyn Neighborhood Employment Center (718-573-9197) is a one-stop source of training and job placement for community residents.  In just over three years, CBNEC has placed more than 200 people in jobs, including public assistance recipients.

CBNEC’s approach is different from most job agencies, according to the agency’s Executive Director, Jeffrey E, Dunston.  For one thing, all job seekers are tested and helped in creating a resume.  Next, CBNEC staff look through want ads, and send resumes out for job seekers.

The agency also attempt helps people solve any problems that might stand in the way of employment.  Job seekers with misdemeanor jail records, for example, may be referred to lawyers who can help them seal their records.  Clients with drug or alcohol problems are referred to detox programs.

All of this is free for clients, and walk-ins are accepted.  The storefront office is at 796A Putnam Avenue, between Malcolm X Blvd. and Stuyvesant Ave.
By Errol T. Louis

Barron

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OTP:  The recent primary election only had about 15% of the electorate coming out.  What’s going on and how can we change it?

Charles Barron:  Number one, I think that a lot of voters feel they don’t have a reason to vote. They’ve been lied to so much by elected officials that there is a fair amount of despair and hopelessness vis a vis the electoral process, and we can’t blame it all on voter apathy.   The other part is the candidate.  There is a lack of sincere, down-to-earth, grassroots, for the people, candidates.  So when you have candidates that are not committed to the people, and you have incumbents who have sold out the people, it’s very, very difficult to convince people to come out and vote because Rosa Parks, and Fannie Lou Hamer, and Martin Luther King, Jr. struggled for you to have that right.   We ran that one down for a little while and it’s worked to an extent.  Now people want to see some concrete changes in their daily living.  They want to see things delivered and promises kept.

OTP:  How do we convince people that there is a reason?   I see folks out here who simply have no inclination whatsoever to go and vote.

CB:  I think you have to do several things.  Number one, as we’re doing with the Unity Party and the Mary France campaign, is to give people a reason to vote,   to develop a new electoral movement.  To revolutionize the electoral movement with people who are connected with grassroots people.  I think once they see candidates from the community who have worked in the community, candidates they believe in, then I think we’ll have a better chance. Even though this last turnout was dismally low, I look at things like Barry Ford running against Ed Towns in the 10th Congressional District.  Ed Towns got 17,000 votes and Barry Ford got 12,000 votes.  That’s a lot for a person who was not known before this race.  And when you add in the other guy, Ken Diamondstone, he got 4,000 votes.   So there were 16,000 votes against Ed Towns.   48% of the district went against Ed Towns, a longtime incumbent.   Well that’s a signal that people are dissatisfied with the kind of leadership Towns is offering and want a change.

OTP:  What are the nuts and bolts of grabbing people and getting them down to the ballot boxes.  How is that done?

CB:  First it has to take place long before the election.  I think that’s a mistake that a lot of grassroot candidates, insurgent candidates make.  They take too long to run.  They wait until the last minute to make that decision.  To run, you need an expert team to get the signatures to get on the ballot.  You need to raise enough money, and you have to be connected to the people.  People are tired of folks coming around just on election day.

We have an election coming up in 2001 and we’re out here now, three and four years before the election, getting connected with our people.   We have to see our folks where they are.  We have to go into the barbershops when there are no elections and find out what is on folk’s minds.   We have to go to tenant association meetings, block association meetings, churches, when there are no elections.  Just to get involved in the everyday life of our folks and work on issues they care about.  Rent control issues, issues in the housing developments, income caps.  People are looking at subsistence education of their children and we have to address those basic issues.  When people know that you are going to address the issues that impact their daily lives, and do it on a consistent basis, even before the election, then I think we have a better chance of getting them out to vote.
Just last night I was talking to five or six brothers on the corner, and one of them said, “I’m glad you stopped to talk.  We saw your picture on the poster, but I’ve never met you.    Now that we’ve met, you can rest assured you’ve got my vote.”  I invited them to an organizing committee, Operation POWER.  It’s an organization that came out of our campaign.  So that’ll be four or five more people.  I’ve got to do more of that.  So do other people who are serious about transforming our communities and our people.

OTP:  It’s not just the picture on the poster that gets the job done?

CB:   No, you can’t just put the picture on the poster up a few months before election day, get the New York Times and the Amsterdam News to endorse you, some big name people to endorse you.  You have to work hard everyday.   You have to walk through the housing developments.  See the folks sitting on the benches, introduce yourself and see what is on their minds.  What do the people want?  Of course they’re going to tell you “I need a job.”  Of course they’re going to tell you they want the drugs out of the community.   Then you have to see what level of commitment they’re willing to make, to cause that kind of stuff to happen.   It takes leadership. There are two kinds of leadership, A transformative leader who is a change individual, trying to change the system so that a greater amount of goods and services are delivered to the greatest number.  Then there are the other types of leaders who are into transactions.   They cut deals.  They make transactions.  They get a small group of loyalists some jobs to keep them in office.  I believe we need to move toward a transformative leadership for change, and away from transactional so that we can create a political movement.

OTP:  There is always talk about how the incumbents have a built-in advantage.  What are the mechanisms they use to enhance their reelections?

CB:  There are three main things they do to get reelected.  The first is mass mailing.   Take my 42nd Council District.   We have 54,000 registered voters.  The incumbent, with the money in her city council budget, can mail to those 54,000 voters two or three times right before the election.   So she’s already started off with three mailings to 54,000 people.

OTP:  These are mailing paid for by the city?

CB:  Out of the city council budget.  It’s illegal to use the city council budget for a campaign and there is a law that you’re not supposed to do a mailing within ninety days of an election, but not many people adhere to that law.   So what they’ll do is say they are just sending out a council report to the district thirty days before the election.   So they get to do that three times.  Then when it comes to the campaign, the incumbents are connected to powerful people, like the mayor in the case of Priscella Wooten in my district or the mayor and Ed Towns, so they get support from these power associations and developers, and corporations, so they have a lot of funds.   So they take those funds and do two or three more mailings and add to the three they’ve already done.   So now you have five different mailings to 54,000 people.   Secondly, they do phone banking.  The day of the election or a week before the election, they get the unions to give them access to very sophisticated phone banks.  They are able have people work the phones.    So now the voters are getting phone calls.   Thirdly, most voters make up their minds the day of the election and the incumbents have the money to pay people to go out there with palm cards.  They have the financing to put teams of people at each polling site.  Priscella Wooten had five hundred people out to my one hundred.   So it’s mailing, phone banking and election day operations with palm cards.  That’s how the incumbent stays in office.  And they already have the name recognition.

OTP:  Now what does an insurgent have to do to overcome that?

CB:  That’s why we have to start very, very early.   For example, I ran once, we got four thousand votes.  So even though Wooten is the incumbent and did all that I just said, and then some, she only got six thousand votes.   So four thousand to six thousand.  Now I have to work these next three years, to build an army for election day.  To raise more money so that I can do more mailing and to get a phone bank going.   I’ve got to spend the time expanding my base.  You have to build a base.  After the election, I didn’t go away.  We’re going to work out there to expand our base.  We’re going to go into the churches.  We had several ministers working with us this time, and we’re going to increase that number.   We are getting more into our youth.  There are a lot of young people who are politically conscious, the Hip Hop Nation.  Hip Hop culture is looking more toward politics.  I’ve spoken with young people in the district who are looking to get involved as well.  And then we are going to look more to expand toward some community-based organizations that were more fearful to get involved last time because there were purse strings attached.  But with no incumbent in the next election, even though they will still have a machine coming at me, these organizations will have more courage to get involved.  And then looking at the Tenant Associations and Block Associations Presidents.  These are real local leaders.  In our district we have about eleven housing developments.   We had three or four tenant association leaders from those housing developments involved.   We’re going to shoot for more and expand that.   Then we are working with the Black Political Free Agents organization, the Unity Party, and Operation POWER which is a group we put together.  And then we’ve been assisting other campaigns.   In this past election we worked with three or four different campaigns and that gave us relationships with other political forces.   That’s what we mean by expanding our base.

OTP:  In this upcoming election for governor, what’s the lay of the land and what’s the role of the Unity Party and Mary France?

CB:  We’ve really got to build an independent political movement, a progressive political movement.   That is a major objective.  We want to get 50,000 votes under the Unity Party banner, so we can build an independent political movement.   Right now the two major parties either take us for granted like the Democrats, ignore us like the Republicans or use us like progressive white efforts.   So we’re either ignored, taken for granted or used.  The Unity Party brings us power, leverage and respect.   Instead of an individual voting for Twiddle Dee Dee or Twiddle Dee Dum, that is Peter Vallone or George Pataki, they’ll have a real choice.  Because those two are both so conservative their politics are very similar, it’s not going to make a huge difference who wins.  The difference will be so marginal, you’ll be better off voting for Mary Alice France, with the Unity Party, so that you’ll have 50,000 people representing you.   Because you need 50,000 votes to get an independent party line, when people seek elections with these major parties, they will look at you differently now because they are looking at 50,000 people instead of one person.   Or instead of black people who are controlled by certain black leaders who the power structure is comfortable with, we’ll have an independent party that will give us more leverage.   Having a Unity Party means that we can run our own candidates locally.  So if I run in 2001 as a registered Democrat, I’m also going to be on the Unity Party line. So it really increases our opportunities on a local level, as well as gives us more leverage and power and negotiating power on the broader level.
OTP:  Running on two party lines, how does that work?
CB:  you can be endorsed by many parties.   Peter Vallone is on the Working Families Party line in November, and the Democratic.   In New York City, the Liberal Party, the so-called Liberal Party that’s actually very conservative under the leadership of Ray Harding, they wield a lot of power now because they support Giuliani.  If that white vote is split, then the Liberal Party endorsement really means something.    We can play that same kind of power politics if we had a Unity Party and continued to build it.   There may come a time where we’ll run our own candidates for statewide office and keep building.  But in the meantime, as we win local elections and become powerful, we can still make a difference in the gubernatorial election if the two main candidates are neck and neck, if we can come in with a hundred thousand, hundred and fifty thousand votes, it can make a difference.  If you look at this last race for the Democratic Primary, Peter Vallone got 296,000 votes.   Chuck Schumer won the nomination for Senate with 252,000 votes.   That may seem like a lot, but you’re talking about millions of voters in the state.   Remember that Al Sharpton got 187,000 votes when he ran statewide with little or no money.   These other guys have millions of dollars.  Sharpton got more votes than everybody else in those races but the two winners.   Now that’s something to think about.  He got more votes than Mark Green, more votes than Geraldine Ferraro, more votes than Betsy McCaughey Ross.  When you look at the governor’s race, Peter Vallone got 296,000 votes.  Betsy McCaughey Ross 112,000, James LaRocca, 41,000, and Charles Hynes, 84,000.  Sharpton, with 187,00 votes in his senate race in 1994 got more votes than Hynes and LaRocca put together.

OTP: How much did Sharpton spend on that race?

CB:  About $70,000.
OTP:  How much money do these other guys spend?
CB:  Millions.  I know Betsy McCaughey Ross spent about $2.5 million and she only got 112,000 votes.
OTP:  Unbelievable.
CB;  So Sharpton spent $60-70,000 in that Senate race and he got 187,000 votes.   Look at it this way.  In his citywide run for mayor, he got 132,000 votes.   That was more than Betsy McCaughey Ross got statewide.
OTP:  Gotcha.
CB:  Her 112,000 with her millions.  Look at the Senate race.  Charles Schumer got 252,000 votes with over ten million dollars.  That’s not cost-effective with Sharpton getting 187,000 votes for $70,000.  [ed. Note: These figures work out to approx. .37 cents a vote for Sharpton, $22.32 a vote for Ross, and $39.68 a vote for Schumer].   Mark Green had 93,000 votes.  Sharpton had 187,000.  Geraldine Ferraro, the woman icon, vice-presidential candidate, she had a few million, 132,000 votes.  The Geraldine Ferraro vote statewide was only as much as Sharpton got citywide, 132,000.  So we have the potential to really build a party, an alternative to the two party system, and really have a major impact.  And then look at some of the local stuff.   The local races.  When I ran against Priscella Wooten, I got 3,990 plus votes.  Four thousand.   Clarence Norman, Jr., the most powerful black Democrat in the State.  He received 3,313 votes.   Do you hear me?  We got four thousand.
OTP:  And the populations are the same?
CB:  We have a larger district.  There are several assembly district in the council district.  But look at it this way, I got three thousand votes from just the 40th Assembly District.  That covers East New York, the other thousand came outside of East New York.
OTP:  Alright.
CB:  He got three thousand three hundred.  I got three thousand in the 40th , one Assembly District.   I probably could have beaten Assemblyman Griffith if I would have wanted that seat, because he’s vulnerable and we’re building a machine out here.  Take the case of James E. Davis, Officer Davis.
OTP:  Oh yes.
CB:  He doesn’t have any real solid base.  Two thousand seven hundred and thirty-three votes against Clarence.  He got 45% of the vote against Clarence.   Look at Ed Towns with millions of dollars and out here for sixteen years, he got a total of 17,990 votes.   Barry Ford, a virtual unknown, 12,610 votes, 36% of the vote.  Kenneth Diamondstone, 4,000 votes.  If you total Kenneth’s and Barry’s votes, which is an anti-Towns vote, it’s 16,610 to Towns’ 17,990.  48% to Towns’ 52%.  What message is the electorate giving to us?   They want these guys out.   They will go with anybody to get them out.   But we have to build our bases more, and build our relationships more.
OTP:  What can the individual person do who says, “Hey, I want to make something happen.”  What can they do?

CB:  I don’t think there should be an individual black person in this city that is not a part of some organization.   The first thing all of us have to do with our families is join an organization.   We cannot do this thing alone.   Then once you get involved with an organization, you have to push that organization to be progressive.   To link with other organizations that have similar goals, so that we can build progressive and independent coalitions to launch an electoral movement.  Movements change things.   Campaigns put individuals in office.  Movements change things systemically.  Movements build platforms.   Campaigns build a person.  We have to get beyond the idea of running campaigns as individuals and look at building movements and coalitions for independent progressive policy that will be more issue-based and platform-based, organizational-based, and system fighters.  We can’t just look at somebody with a name, and put them in office.  They have to be committed to an agenda, an organization, and be system fighters.  Not afraid to fight against white supremacy.   That’s one of our major problems.  White male supremacy.  Most of the parties in this state, if not all, are lead by white males.   Whether they’re progressive parties or liberal parties, or conservative parties, they’re lead by white males.
OTP:  Conrad Muhammad has an interesting group called A Movement for CHHANGE that he is developing.
CB:   Yes.  I think that’s an excellent group that has a world of potential.  Conrad Muhammad has a real challenge before him.  He’s going to have to sustain a movement, and develop the resources.  But we need training.  Groups like that need training.  Not only young people, but all of us need training.  I’ve put out a call to Conrad already.  We at Dynamics of Leadership, are certainly willing to provide that kind of training.  People will gather with you early, but to sustain a movement like that, you’re going to have to obtain some power real soon, and obtain resources in order to do fundamental things.  You have to find a building, a base, that you can organize in and have people come to.  In addition to the money, you have to have the training to go along with that so that you’ll know what the political landscape is in New York.
OTP:  When we were speaking at the meeting, I was lamenting on the poor turnout and you said words to the effect, “Do not despair.”   Do you remember that?
CB:   Yes.  You know, I’m an eternal optimist and a realist.  I’m not one who is an idealistic optimistic in an unreal way.  But I’m certain that during slavery days somebody told Harriet Tubman that she was out of her mind.  That slavery was here forever, so why would she try and do something about it.  But Harriet did it, despite of all that was around her.  And slavery doesn’t exist anymore in that form.  I’m sure somebody told Marcus Garvey that he couldn’t build the things he wanted to build.  A steamship company in 1920.  Black people would never give him enough money to build the Phyliss Wheatley Hotel, and the Universal Grocery Store, and the Universal Restaurant.   But Marcus Garvey said, “Up you mighty race, you can accomplish what you will.”  And he did it.  I’m sure people thought that Jim Crow would be around forever.  George Wallace said, “Segregation now, segregation forever.”   He just died himself, as did segregation.   I’m sure someone told Nelson Mandela, “well you might as well just give it up.  You’re going to be in jail forever.   He sat in there for twenty-seven years.  Never giving up hope, always having a vision for a new South Africa.  Apartheid is dead and Mandela went from the prison to the presidency.   If that could happen in South Africa, if that could happen on the plantations, then we who have so much more, should do equally as well, if not better.  And any leader who comes before us and tells us that any form of our oppression is permanent, that’s a leader not fit to lead.

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