April 13, 2006 - Issue 179

Bruce's Beat
Black news on the road to extinction
Black politicians who should go extinct
But Black newspaper celebrates good times
Email from readers
by BC Editor Bruce Dixon

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Last week's BC cover story unmasked Atlanta's Kasim Reed, a part-time Democrat and black state senator and a full time corporate attorney with an anti-civil rights and pro-employment discrimination practice, and generated quite a bit of reader email.

There was this comment from Mr. Albert Murphy:

Thanks for your superb article on Kasim Reed, and your trenchant verdicts on the “black” magazines. It is indeed gratifying to know that people like yourself still exist in this country, in these times. Keep 'em coming!

We received this note from Richard Clement:

Haul them out and call them out! These types need to be exposed for what they are doing to the black community's general well being. Thanks to the legal hijinks of this clown more black professionals are out of work and struggling.  Senator Reed is a prime example of "The Black to hold others back."

I would hope that you would add a "Negro/Sambo Hall of Shame" web page placed on your website for easy reference.

Monte Watson of Atlanta had this to say about Reed’s anti-immigrant activities:

I would just like to thank you for the article regarding Kasim Reed. I found it most enlightening and true to the power.  I fear and know that the lack of education on this subject by our people and continued perpetrations by people like Mr. Reed and his owners will only achieve massa's goal of dividing the brown and black when we have a huge opportunity to join forces!

And Clemmie Freize wrote:

I am proud of you for how you presented the context behind Kasim Reed, his actions, and how they affect the real progress that is so desperately needed by Black People.  Thanks for helping to reduce the media manipulation we are subjected to on a daily basis.  Keep this up and you may give journalism a good name.

African Americans are not the least bit in doubt about where they stand on most important issues.  Every time our people have been polled on the subject our communities have overwhelmingly favored not just raising the minimum wage, but instituting a living wage.  The vast majority of black voters favor repealing right-to-work laws wherever these exist and guaranteeing everybody the right to join unions and strike.  And of course we lopsidedly favor tightening the enforcement of civil rights laws against employers who discriminate on the basis of age, sex and race.

How then, do we explain the political career of Atlanta's Kasim Reed, an anti-civil rights civil rights lawyer, an attorney who actually fights for the right of employers to hire, fire, promote and discriminate on the basis of sex, age and race?  Why?  Black voters in his Atlanta district are no different on the issues from black voters anyplace else, and they certainly aren't stupid either.

Kasim Reed owes his political career to the absence of anything like news coverage of and for black communities.  The mainstream broadcast and print media simply do not provide the steady stream of relevant facts, local and global, that citizens need.

The surviving vestiges of the black press don't do it either.  A quick survey of the day's top news stories on the web site of the Atlanta Daily World, the city's black newspaper, graphically tells the tale.

"Spelman College Celebrates Anniversary – This 125-year legacy will be celebrated from April 1-11 with a series of programs, including "An Evening with Donnie McClurkin,"

"'ATL' Stars Walk Red Carpet At Premiere...Celebrities arrive for the Atlanta premiere of the movie ‘ATL’..."

"Gee's Bend Quilts Arrive – ‘The Quilts of Gee's Bend’ celebrates the artistic legacy of several generations of women..."

”70th Annual Atlanta Dogwood Festival Marks Arrival Of Spring In The City.”

”Lt. Governor Mark Taylor Warmly Embraced by Who's Who Group of Men.” – The dinner guests amounted to a consortium of the Black community's heavy-hitters

”60 In The World With...Ludacris.”

”McKinney Case Goes to Federal Prosecutor” – An Associated Press story, not from local reporters although McKinney represents Atlanta.

”Gen. Russel Honore and John Hope Franklin Honored by Black Press” – This is from the news wire of the NNPA.

”Southeast Region NAACP Honors Sutton, Bryant & Alpha Phi Alpha.”

Two entertainment stories, a local festival, five celebrations including one of a quilt, and another of a white guy running for governor, and the McKinney wire service story.  This is the black press in a metro area with one million African Americans, vigilantly monitoring the centers of power to let us know what's going on.  Right.

On the other hand, it took BC a single glance at Reed's email address and less than ten minutes of Googling to discover the outlines of Reed's anti-civil rights law practice, and to understand how it fit into the broader patterns of union busting and corporate influence peddling on the part of his transnational law firm of Holland & Knight.  In another five minutes we found evidence that the very law firm in which Reed, an elected Georgia Democrat, is a full partner advises Republicans in Georgia, Florida and other states on the redrawing of district lines to neutralize the black vote.  If a single BC columnist can find this out in fifteen minutes on google.com, what could a journalist backed up by the resources of a professional news gathering operation discover in a day?  Or three days?

From Charlotte to Chicago, Black corporate stooges like Senator Reed owe their political careers to the fact that there simply are no professional news gathering operations covering our black communities. Phil Donahue likes to tell the tale of how, as the 22 year old news director of a local radio station his mere appearance at a public event stopped the local mayor, an accomplished gentleman more than twice his age, in his tracks. That's what journalists are supposed to do.

Reader and reporter Saleemah Rasheed gets it exactly.

I would like to commend you on presenting your readers with factual information about a controversial political topic. Far too often in our country's media outlets, journalists give their readers a glossed over, neutral piece so as to not offend.  However, as a fellow journalist, I believe we have a duty to present the truth, despite opposition.  It is so crucial that journalists do what you have done in Black Commentator; fully exercise their first amendment rights. Job well done.

The profession of journalism is shrinking across the board in print and broadcast media alike, according to Columbia University's State of the Media 2006 report, and black communities are especially hard hit.  In the absence of news coverage black as well as white corporate crooks masquerading as public servants will continue to hide in plain sight.  When Reed and people like him are covered at all, especially in the black media, it's all about roasting, boasting and toasting the few who have "made it," until the day we begin to demand accountability from those media.

Editor and Senior Commentator Margaret Kimberley's Freedom Rider column is consistently the most widely read feature of BC, and never fails to draw the informed feedback of BC readers.  One of her recent offerings was the latest installment on the looming tragedy of Newark, New Jersey, where Cory Booker, the hand picked product of the Manhattan Institute and the Walton Family Foundation, is trying to become that city's mayor, to use city hall as a stepping stone for higher office, and to cannibalize and privatize what remains of Newark's schools and public sector.  Booker's wealthy patrons even produced a film on the previous Newark mayoral election that insults the people of that city by saying that they rejected Booker's previous candidacy because he was light-skinned and educated, and likened their free and fair election which Booker lost to a kind of mugging.  A “Street Fight.”

Ms. Kimberley's column generated this response from the producer and director of the film, Marshall Curry.

I saw your most recent post about my film “Street Fight.”  I don't mind you criticizing it – in fact the reason I made it was to encourage debate and discussion – but rather than taking my quote on my website out of context, why don't you show a little integrity and link to the quote in its entirety (even Mickey Kaus did that when he criticized the film). You have links all over the article, and it wouldn't use up any ink to do so.  In fact, the only reason I can imagine for you NOT linking to me is that you don't trust your readers (or your own ideas) enough to expose them to a different point of view.

In case you need it, the quote in question is on: www.marshallcurry.com/kaus.html

In addition, if you are ever interested in a true exchange of ideas, I'd be happy to have an unedited dialogue with you where we each post our ideas on our websites and link back and forth – you criticize “Street Fight,” and I criticize your reporting on the election.

best,

Marshall

Curry received this reply from BC co-publisher Glen Ford:

Mr. Curry:

We did read your remarks in their totality. The quote we featured was not taken out of context. Indeed, you descend ever deeper into dishonesty with every line that follows the quoted text. Had we decided to devote an entire article to your propaganda film, a thorough deconstruction of your justifications might have been in order - so you actually got off easy.

You claim that vouchers was not a "significant issue" in the 2002 campaign. Cory Booker tried to make it no issue at all, hiding his pro-voucher views and activities from the electorate until he was outed by The Black Commentator and, later, the Sharpe James campaign. The corporate media, which universally supported Booker, collaborated in largely ignoring the voucher question.

However, you know full well that the voucher issue was raised by BC and the James campaign to demonstrate Booker's intimate connections with the Hard Right: the Bradley Foundation, the Walton Family Fund, and the Manhattan Institute. You could not have been as close as you were to Booker's campaign - an appendage of it, in fact - without being familiar with BC's investigative work on this subject. During the last weeks of the campaign, every James handout contained copies of BC articles. The first page of Sharpe James' website urged visitors to click to the relevant BC articles. James repeatedly charged Booker with being in league with Black folks' worst enemies, as BC maintained.

Booker's association with vouchers and the rightwingers who invented the Black voucher "movement" out of whole clothe were central to Sharpe James' campaign, an issue constantly dodged by Booker. And Sharpe James won. That your film pretended this issue didn't exist mutilates reality, and proves that you are nothing but a shill for Booker, acting in total concert with his 2006 campaign, as you did in 2002.

Just in case you are tempted to claim that we at BC shilled for Sharpe James, here's our retort in advance: We never praised Sharpe James or his policies. Our interest in the Newark race was solely based on the candidacy of Cory Booker, who we recognized as a Trojan Horse for the Right's attempt to gain a foothold in a major Black city, with the goal of turning Newark into a showcase for privatization of education and other reactionary policies. The larger aim of this rightwing offensive is direct subversion of Black Democratic politics in the inner cities - a new and awesomely dangerous development.

Sharpe James didn't understand the nature of Booker's candidacy and support, until BC explained it. The white liberals who support Booker remain unaware of his affiliations. But you aren't. Instead, you conspire to hide the easily documentable truth from the public. Effectively and objectively, you are an operative of the Right. Why would we want to have a dialogue with an enemy operative and non-journalist? Certainly, your film was no work of journalism, investigative or otherwise.

We don't dialogue with the enemy, we fight him.

Glen Ford, Executive Editor and Co-Publisher
BlackCommentator.com

By now we all know the right is targeting Georgia's Rep. Cynthia McKinney once again. BC readers are wondering at the lack of visible support she has received from fellow Democrats in Congress, especially members of the Black Caucus.

Reader TC, in response to a two-part CBC Monitor Report, by Leutisha Stills, wrote:

Read your very, very on point article in BC. You have articulated every emotion I am feeling about the Cynthia McKinney situation.  I am a male, and I have to say the lack of response from any high profile Black male is an embarrassment to African American Manhood.

Patricia Hosch wrote:

Thanks for writing something that looks critically at the situation of Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney. I was saddened that the members of the Black Caucus did not support her and the white supremacists were able to dehumanize her in the so-called mainstream media without any rebuttal from anyone of color or even any of the so called non-black progressives. This appears to be the 21st Century version of dehumanizing people of African descent regardless of their station in life. I thought that members of Congress were exempt from arrest except for felonious or treason cases, but this apparently applies only to its non-black members.

I am thinking seriously about dumping the Democratic party. There does not seem to be that much difference between Dems and Reps when it comes to black people. I may become an Independent. I seriously believe it is time to start a party that addresses the needs of people of African descent.

BC has little to say in defense of a Democratic party or a black caucus which won't even defend the duly elected representative of Georgia's 4th district.  We hope to announce the location and date of CBC Monitor's First Annual Lawn Jockey Awards later this month.

The profession of journalism, as we have said before, is shrinking, and with this shrinkage, the ability of black people to work out our own thoughts and opinions in public is critically endangered.  By now you know that BC is in desperate financial condition.  The model for self-funding Internet journalism is not well established, but we know one thing for sure.  BC depends on donations from our readers to keep coming to you every week.  If you've given before and can afford to give again, this is the time.  And if you've never given before, this is the time to do it.  So reach for that Visa or MasterCard and do the right thing to help us stay out here.

Thank you.

Bruce A. Dixon
[email protected]

 

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