Issue 168 - January 26, 2006 |
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Bruce's Beat |
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By some time in the late 1950s, before I was ten years old and without knowing what most of the words meant, I had memorized my child's version of Harry Belafonte's "Banana Boat" song along with a couple others on his Calypso album. As many times as I heard those songs, I am certain my parents wore out the vinyl. But mid-century electronics geek that my dad was, he pumped a lot of his favorite music through a suitcase-sized reel to reel tape recorder. Harry was in a lot of those mixes too. Belafonte is a creative artist, an entrepreneur and public intellectual in the finest sense of those words, and a human rights activist of long standing. Like Ruby Dee and the late Ossie Davis, Harry was a confidante of both Martin Luther King and of Malcolm X. That makes him one of the last surviving flesh and blood links to that piece of our histories, but Mr. Belafonte has always been about way more than showing up at the right place and time. This year Belafonte led a fact finding delegation to Venezuela of more than a dozen U.S. activists and notables including Cornel West, Danny Glover of TransAfrica and Tavis Smiley during which he raised the ire of the corporate press back home. For our money, Harry speaks for more African Americans on more issues than any of the black mayors we can think of. But in a time when the Wall Street Journal can blithely declare black public opinion illegitimate because most whites may not agree with it, nobody should be surprised by the corporate press's attempts to denigrate and dismiss Belafonte. Our reader email on the subject indicates that savvy BC readers are not surprised either.
Harry Belafonte is an esteemed elder, one of the tallest trees in the forest. Beside him, this president is a shrub. A bush.
We do too. And we hope Belafonte is around for many more years to come. Keep on giving them hell, Harry. In last week's BC, guest commentator Meizhu Liu, executive director of United for a Fair Economy treated BC readers to a small slice of UFE's newly released report, Stalling the Dream: Cars, Race and the Hurricane Evacuation, which she co-authored with Emma Dixona nd Betsy Leondar-Wright.
Connecting all the dots in many directions in a single short article is a tall order, even for our able guest commentators, but this reader raises a valid set of points. For one, the connection between America's oil-centered domestic economy and its need to conquer and hold the Middle East by military force is beyond dispute. We cannot oppose war and not strive to re-invent the economy. For another, there is a crisis coming. Most responsible estimates - and the US Geological Survey is not a responsible body in this regard - indicate that around 95% of the world's oil has already been discovered and half of it is already pumped out of the ground. Much of the remaining oil will also be more expensive to bring to market. With the amount of energy the world - and especially the U.S. - uses continually rising while the supply of oil becomes scarcer and more expensive, and the public face of the U.S. oil industry, sometimes known as the federal government in public denial, bad things are bound to happen. Things for which the U.S. economy is not prepared. This is what they call Peak Oil. We wish that more local officials, those allegedly responsible for economic development planning in our cities would take account of this crisis. What will happen to passenger air, to air cargo operations, to the hospitality industry, to truck transport, to the price of things in local supermarket where the grapes are from Chile and the apples from New Zealand, and the lettuce from the opposite side of North America? We commend you, and all of our readers who are willing to get busy on this. Time is running out. A lot of corporate air and ink have been wasted on New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin and his foolish "chocolate city" remark, and some other things that have come from the mouth of the junior senator from New York. One reader asked:
BC Co-Publisher Glen Ford offered this response:
Brother Mumia Abu-Jamal, is a man who sees many things more clearly from his cell on Pennsylvania's death row than lots of us in the nominally free world. His latest commentary notes that the white media flap over the mayor's words tell more about corporate media and its facility for seizing any convenient opportunity to whip up anti-black sentiments in white America than they do about Nagin. Mumia Abu Jamal's recorded comments are posted regularly at the link above, and we encourage BC readers to check them out. Unlike some who believe black elected officials are to be uncritically celebrated, we at BC are inclined to demand accountability from them. Sometimes it happens, but too often it does not. A habitual offender and one of our favorite targets is the execrable congressman from Memphis, Harold Ford. One reader made the following request of us:
For a ranking of the performance of current members of the Congressional Black Caucus, based upon their votes on several key issues, except for the member from Milwaukee, Wisconsin who for some reason was omitted from the list, consult BC's issue for September 22, 2005. Ford isn't dangerous because of any inherent quality of his own. He is dangerous because he is for rent. He is dangerous because of the uses his employers have already put him to. When the bankruptcy bill was in play, so was Harold Ford. You can guess who outbid who for his services. When Social Security privatization was in play, Ford let it be known that he was in play again. Those who would rent the wannabe senator from Tennessee aim to use him to back up the Wall Street Journal's contention that the political views of most African Americans, including most of those in Memphis Tennessee, are passé. We are all about to be replaced by some new cohort of conservative blacks, the story goes, of whom Mr. Ford is a harbinger. Harold Ford already votes with Republicans more often than many Democrats, more often than most of the Congressional Black Caucus. In the senate he will not be just one more occasionally AWOL soldier. He will be a dagger pointed at the heart of the Black Consensus. BC welcomes reader comments. We respond personally to many, not all, and print a selection of those nearly every week. Send them to bruce.Dixon@blackcommentator.com. |
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