Naming names and the red carpet

is always on Black Trojan Horse alert. We are also proud that our activist readership doesn't miss a beat. Here’s a message from a reader called Doches.

Don't you think that it is time to call names, before these people are in power?

I read your article, looking for names, it seems that you are as wimpy as the democrats in playing hard ball. I think that I know some of the people by my own observations.

One is probably the black minister that refused to let any politician use his pulpit, until GW. Now he is a minority owner in the Texans Football Team. C'mon , speak out!

I know that the voucher system is a way to take away from public schools, and reward upper crust conservatives that can afford the other portion of funds that supplement the voucher funds. Let's talk about these issues and their proponents.

We thank Doches and ask the question: “Does the name Cory Booker ring a bell?” We also remind Doches and all readers that we have written extensively about vouchers. If you ever want to know if has written about an issue, individual or organization, please visit our Google powered Search page.

Please never hesitate to sound the alarm by sending e-Mail to [email protected].

We will continue to name names as we are doing in this issue’s cover story “Why We Can’t Trust Harold Ford Jr.” Our cartoon this week creates the opportunity to put others on King Dubya’s red carpet. Stay tuned!

Additionally we will soon begin the publication of the Good Works File. This Webpage will contain the names of individuals and organizations doing good work in the fight for social and economic justice.

Doches calls wimpy, but reader Elizabeth Evans at Hampton University thinks our rhetoric is too strong.

I read . I like it a lot. Basically, I agree with most of your politics. My concern is that the language in which you couch your arguments tends toward hyperbole. This causes people like me who are academics to think that your points are less considered and researched.

I am an “Old Democrat” who is awaiting the return of a sense of power to our party, but I think you could reach more people with a little less transparent rhetoric. Thanks.

Editor-in-Chief and Co-Publisher, Glen Ford replied:

Merriam-Webster defines hyperbole as "extravagant exaggeration" - which in journalism amounts to bad reporting. Perhaps you meant that our "tone" puts you off. If so, we are sorry. But we do not exaggerate.

We are practitioners of the "old" journalism - unabashed advocacy rooted in facts - and not likely to change. (I'm 55 and Co-Publisher, Peter Gamble is...older than that.)

We have the data to show that we are reaching precisely the people we seek - including you. Most importantly, we also have lots of evidence to show that when we target bad actors like Harold Ford Jr., they feel it.

Our tone of indignation is purposeful. We believe that righteous indignation is appropriate in the presence of crime. We urge all righteous people to become indignantly active.

Ms. Evans responded to Ford:

Actually, your tone doesn’t “put me off”. It makes me want to investigate more in what might be considered by some to be more “referenced sources”.

I like your newsletter very much. It presents an alternative view that as Americans we miss in the mainstream press. I’ve also started reading newspapers from other countries for a more balanced view.

For the record, Brother Gamble is 62.

I have given credit and placed links back to . I have done this in order to have several articles on the same subject on the same page with the hope these stories will find a wider readership.

I make absolutely no money from running injusticebusters. The focuses are twofold: bringing ongoing injustices to public attention and defending free speech.

People who are facing the injustices of the system are often (understandably) absorbed with their own situations and I hope to gently direct them outside themselves by placing the injustices in a larger context.

I hope this all meets with your approval, or that you can direct me to do what I have to do so it will.

Your site is full of wonderful stories.

My daughter attends college in Illinois, she brought this letter home to me and I am very concerned about it's validity. I know that the right for African-Americans to vote is an amendment. However, my daughter was quite concerned about this letter and wanted to take some action by writing Congress. I assured her that I would check on its validity and we would respond appropriately. I trust that your organization would give me some insight on the validity of the statements contained in this letter.

Did you know that our right to VOTE will expire in the year 2007? The Voters Rights Act signed in 1965 by Lyndon B. Johnson was just an ACT. It was not made a law. In 1982, Ronald Regan amended the Voters Rights Act for another 25 years.

Which means that in the year 2007 we could lose the Right to VOTE!...

When I received this one I had no choice but to pass it on. Please do the same. Anonymous Author

Beware the stranger bearing gifts. Or as the law teaches, caveat emptor, buyer beware. Look before you leap. All these warnings apply to the emerging Republican positioning on the Voting Rights Act.

Forty years ago, after the bloody march in Selma, Ala., Congress passed the Voting Rights Act, which requires that states with a history of discrimination get pre-approval from the Justice Department for any changes in their voting procedures.

This was a great victory for the movement that Dr. Martin Luther King led. Give us the vote, King taught, and we can begin to change America. As African Americans were able to register and vote and segregation slowly came to an end, a new South was created. The New South became a center of investment.

Politics changed, too. As Lyndon Johnson predicted when he signed the Voting Rights Act, Democrats paid a great price for being the party of progress. In the South, Republicans made themselves the party of white sanctuary. The current Republican majorities in the House and Senate are founded on the racial politics of the South.

In 2007, the Voting Rights Act must be reauthorized. This requires congressional hearings on the evolving history of racial discrimination in the South. By demonstrating the reality that minorities still face discrimination -- from voter intimidation, racially motivated redistricting, racially biased disqualification standards, racially biased distribution of voting machines and much more -- Congress can re-establish the precedent for maintaining strict scrutiny over those states with a history of legalized discrimination.

Will the Republican Congress reauthorize the Voting Rights Act? When asked in a meeting with the Black Caucus of the Congress, President Bush said he didn't know anything about the question. But as governor of Texas, he led one of the states covered by the Voting Rights Act, and so he must have known what it entailed.

Now some GOP leaders are suggesting that the law be made "national and permanent." That sounds good. By making it national, strict scrutiny will apply to all states. By making it permanent, the periodic battles over reauthorization will not be necessary.

But beware. This plan, hatched in right-wing think tanks, sounds good, but is designed to gut the Voting Rights Act. By making it national and permanent, the Congress would set the act up for being ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme Court. Since the act focuses on race, it requires strict scrutiny to make certain there is a rational basis for its provisions. If it is made national and permanent, divorced from the record of discrimination that requires special review, the act could well be deemed unconstitutional. Republicans will have used the court to murder the Voting Rights Act while pretending to have clean hands.

If Republicans were serious about electoral reform, there is a simple alternative. Reauthorize the Voting Rights Act and maintain strict scrutiny on the states with a long history of race-based discrimination. Then pass a constitutional right-to-vote law for every American, making our Constitution as sensible as the election laws we helped write for Iraq. The states with a history of segregation would stay under scrutiny, and voting rights across the country would also gain greater protection.

But Senate Majority leader Bill Frist of Tennessee and House Majority Tom DeLay of Texas are maneuvering to use the courts to gut the Voting Rights Act. (And to insure the courts go their way, they are ready to trample the rule of the Senate to pack the courts with right-wing zealots.)

Bush is using his faith-based initiative to help purchase allies in the churches. He'd like to focus our attention on gay marriage and abortion, even as he attacks, first, affirmative action, and now voting rights.. For African Americans, this is the proverbial wolf in sheep's clothing. And we'd better watch out or we'll wake to find the wolf has made off with all of the rights that we fought so hard to achieve.

I read your commentary (March 19, 2005) on how Bush and the Republicans are selecting black leadership by dangling the faith-base carrot in front of greedy and immoral black ministers. More and more people in the black community are speaking out against the greed of these fat cats. Obviously these so-called Christians need to be called out and shamed at every turn.

Keep up the good work.

1. Pillars of the Community are not Necessarily Moral Role Models.

2. Greed is not a Christian Value.

3. People Shouldn't Be Considered "Collateral Damage."

4. The Justice System Isn't Necessarily Just.

5. Just Because a Person Claims to Be Christian Doesn't Mean He Is Christian.

6. Fascism is conducted by the extreme right, typically through the merging of state and business leaderhip, together with a belligerent nationalism.

7. If there is no ideal or principle that you will sacrifice everything for, you're not worth much to society.

8. For every Harriet Tubman, Frederick Douglass, Martin Luther King, and Malcolm X, there were at least 10 more Blacks who fought against freedom and civil rights or cowardly sat on the sidelines.

Keep up the great work, I 'm either reading from or talking about it every Monday evening on our show and directing people to the website. Thanks so much for helping us stay on  point. 

I haven't read anything on that I disagree with so y'all must be crazy too!!! Peace and free speech.

I wrote a few month's back to ask why you--the leading voice of political dissent in the Black community--haven't urged Blacks to switch from blind obeisance to the Democratic party to real representation as members of the Green party. I'm still waiting.

The past weeks have seen the passage of a "tort reform" bill and a bankruptcy bill, both of which stick it to the Little Guy in favor of corporations. Obviously, the Black community will be on the losing end of the stick, yet again.

And Democratic senators are complicit. One of my own, turncoat Debbie Stabenow, voted for cloture on S.256. The Dems take your vote for granted. As I've asked before, who went to the mat to protest Black voter disenfranchisement in Ohio? The Greens did, not the Dems.

I'm just some white guy; but I read loyally and feel it's the only political publication that gets it straight.

Please, call on the Black voting bloc to turn Green, not -coat. And let's march on that hotbed of impunity, Capitol Hill.

I love what you guys do.

Black people are overwhelmingly Democrats. All but a sliver of the 9,000-plus Black elected officials are Democrats. In many cities and regions of the nation, Blacks are the Democratic Party. Are Black voters in Newark paying allegiance to white Democrats when they vote for Mayor and City Council? Are Blacks in Louisiana blindly following white Democrats, or their own interests as they see them, and as the Black officials they elected advise?

The problem with Blacks in the Democratic Party is that they do not organize effectively as Blacks, and proceed from there to support white progressives inside or outside the Party. For example, only 18 of the 43 Congressional Black Caucus members are also members of the Progressive Congressional Caucus, although at least a dozen more should be in the PCC based on their voting records. At the state and local level, there are very few Black progressive caucuses, although there are plenty of Black progressives.

Jumping to the Green Party does not solve our problem. If we can't organize in a party in which we are often the majority, then the problem is an internal one, without an outside solution.

My second husband was a theatrical maven in Los Angeles and he wrote and directed a show about Robeson. He told me more than once the same thing you said this morning -- that Robeson had made a mistake when he said that blacks in the U.S. would not go to war against Russia.

As has been said before, when they brought down Robeson, the felled "the tallest tree in the forest." Good to hear from you.

Ever since the U.S. got rid of the draft in favor of an all-volunteer force in 1973, the Army has depended on African Americans for about 25 percent of its recruits. That, in itself is a huge irony: the United States dependent on institutional racism in civilian life to keep its armed forces up to strength. Well, racism has not abated, and the last five years have been hell for young Blacks seeking work. But, since the year 2000, Black enlistment in the Army has gone down a whopping 41 percent. In 2000, African Americans made up 23.5 percent of recruits. Today, they are less than 14 percent. Female enlistment is way down, too – from 22 percent of recruits five years ago, to just 17 percent, now. This decline can be explained almost entirely by the fact that Black women are an absolute majority of female Army soldiers. At least, they were, only a few years ago.

Even the U.S. military concedes that general Black opposition to the Iraq war plays a big role in the dramatic decline in Black enlistment. The Army is getting whiter, more Latino, and a lot more Asian and Pacific Islander. Blacks are much more likely to tell recruiters in plain language that they want no part of Bush’s war – which is a political statement – while other groups say “No” because they don’t want to get hurt. However, even the war does not fully explain the 41 percent decline in Black enlistment. The statistics show that Blacks have been avoiding the Army since at least two years before the invasion of Iraq. And it appears that Black recruits in the Marines have also declined during this period.

During most of the years of declining Black recruitment, Black America was in an economic depression. Black youth unemployment hit new records – yet still, they have resisted the recruiters for the last five years. The common denominator during most of this period, is not war, but Bush. African Americans are politically the smartest people in the country. It was clear to Black people, even teenagers, that Bush was itching to get into war, big-time, and that it would be an unjust war – maybe a whole series of unjust wars. It’s one thing to be a civilian with George Bush as your president. It’s quite another to be in uniform, at Bush’s beck and call, as your Commander in Chief. So, even before the invasion, young Black men and women thought two or three times, and then said “No” to George Bush’s U.S. Army.

This reminds me of a different time, more than half a century ago, when the great singer and activist Paul Robeson said that Negroes would not fight a war against the Soviet Union. Robeson paid dearly for that statement. He was banned from traveling abroad, and could find no work in the U.S. The NAACP and even Jackie Robinson denounced Robeson, whose career was destroyed.

Now, in 2005, we find that African American youth, who desperately need jobs and money for college, are refusing to enlist while George Bush is commander in chief. The Congress has told the Army to find 30,000 more soldiers by October of 2007. But the recruiters can’t count on Black youth to fill their quotas, anymore. For Radio , I’m Glen Ford.

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