In last week's Freedom Rider, BC's own Margaret Kimberly drew attention to the little-noticed news item that Halliburton had landed the no-bid contract to construct detention centers to be utilized in the event of what officials deem an “immigration emergency.”

Reader Linda O'Brien writes 

Yeah.  We heard that about New Orleans too. And “immigration emergency” does sound like an X-Files episode.  Former Halliburton CEO and co-president Dick Cheney and his gang, as Ms. Kimberly points out, have given us plenty to be paranoid about.  These are sad and dangerous times indeed when the most optimistic scenario, as she puts it, is that this is a case of vast but straightforward no-bid corruption.  And we cannot all be optimists.

Real journalists arm citizens with the real truths they need to stand up for their own rights.  Margaret Kimberley is a real journalist and a great commentator, and we are blessed to have her on board.

If there were more Margaret Kimberleys and more editors in the corporate media who allowed their stories to reach the public, it would have been big news at the end of January that a Zogby poll of 897 likely Pennsylvania voters revealed that 84.9% of them would support a congressional candidate who favored impeachment.  This is one of the latest pieces of potentially valuable and empowering news affirming that the vast majority of Democrats, and a much narrower majority of all Americans may favor impeaching the president and his gang.  Such news, if it became more widely known, would inevitably lead more rank and file Democratic voters to ask why the Democratic Party's House and Senate campaign committees, whose function is to recruit and provide assistance to Democrats running for the House and Senate, are not beating the bushes for the strongest pro-impeachment candidates they can find as the surest strategy to tip the Congressional balance in the upcoming mid-term elections. 

It is an open secret that instead of riding the impeachment donkey to a Congressional majority in the midterm elections, Democratic Party shot callers are threatening and discouraging pro-impeachment candidates.  For those seeking a clue to this mysterious behavior, Jeff Blankfort's article in last week's BC, “Why Cynthia McKinney Lost Her Seniority and Didn't Get It Back” went to the heart of the riddle by examining Democratic House Leader Nancy Pelosi's shameful and inexplicable revocation of Rep. Cynthia McKinney's seniority.   

Maceo Kemp was one of several readers to comment on that article: 

George Wilson, another BC reader, sent us a very brief media message detailing what he thinks is the very simple reason behind the revocation of McKinney's seniority.  The way he tells it, 

We respectfully disagree with Brother George.  We at BC are certain that a better world is possible.  People who believe this don't mistake the way things are at the moment for the way things ought to and can be.  Rep. Pelosi is no “alpha female” and this is not “Life.”  Legislative majority and minority leaders in both parties and houses of congress,  and in state legislatures across the land act as funnels for literal rivers of campaign cash from corporations and wealthy donors which they direct to legislators and candidates that tow the corporate line and away from those that stray from the plantation. 

Hence Rep. Pelosi as Democratic Minority Leader is no “alpha” anything.  She is the middleperson in what her colleague Senator McCain has deemed an ongoing “sophisticated influence peddling scheme.  She is a cut-out, a bag man, or a bag lady.  And when the legislative process and the Democratic Party itself is for rent to its big donors in big oil, big pharma, to insurance companies, media monopolies, agribusiness, military contractors and the rest we don't call it “Life.”  We call it corruption. 

This endemic corruption among the Democratic party's leadership is what makes it punish Georgia's 4th congressional district for having returned Cynthia McKinney to the House.  It is the same corruption that drives it to threaten or discourage anti-war and pro-impeachment Democrats who want to run for the House or Senate, and it now threatens to prevent Democrats from taking control of the congress in this year's midterm elections. 

Projecting today's savagely limited economic choices as “all there is” or all there ever can or should be is often mistaken for wisdom.  Another of our readers, possibly infected with this malady, writes us: 

BC's co-publisher Glen Ford, who spent a good deal of his childhood in rural Georgia, replies:

Most young people are taught that history is driven by great people called “leaders” that do great things, the effects of which trickle down to current and future generations of ordinary folks.  We suppose this is the historical view that prompted the following comment from reader Wadiya Ali upon reading BC's February 9, 2006 cover story, “Failures of the Black Misleadership Class.”

We humbly suggest that looking for leaders to “galvanize the black communities of America into a unified group” is a dead-end.  Leaders don't make history. Mass movements make history.  Mass movements throw up leaders, they throw down governments and established orders.  Mass movements drag judges, politicians and the law itself in their wake.  The Freedom movement of more than a generation ago was such a mass movement.  We have plenty of leaders and wannabes unwilling and unable to galvanize a blessed thing.  That will not change until we find the wherewithal to build another broad mass movement.

Finally, the February 9 “Misleadership” article sparked the following email from the honorable Keith Ellison, a state representative in Minneapolis MN.

BC hopes that a young person reading our Misleadership article will be reintroduced to the idea  that black elected officials ought to serve the interests of their human constituents rather than those of greedy real estate speculators and big campaign contributors.   

Rather than branding anyone a “misleader from the start,” the article gave specific examples of misleadership behavior citing examples from Atlanta's thirty-year string of African American mayors.  Breaking promises to city workers and responding to strike threats with mass firings under the reign of Maynard Jackson.  Spatial deconcentration and gentrification for the Olympics under Andy Young and a third Jackson term.  More of the same and water privatization under Bill Campbell, and the BeltLine under Shirley Franklin.  There are those whose duty seems to consist of heaping uncritical praise on black politicians, black business people, black celebrities, anyone black who has “made it.” That's not what BC does.  We are about evaluating black elected officials on their performance, and whether that performance makes life better for their constituents.  By this yardstick, there are indeed a lot of misleaders. 

BC is careful not to be all things to all people.  But we have and we do offer advice to black policy makers.   

Anyone seeking some of our policy advice on mass incarceration, for instance might look to two articles from the summer of 2005, “It's Time To Build a Mass Movement” and "Mass Incarceration: A Political Abomination.”  The first article points out many of the defining characteristics of mass movements.  The second states our belief that the issue of mass incarceration is, in the African American community, the organizing opportunity of this generation, and suggests a strategy for placing the issue of America's unjust and illegitimate policy of mass incarceration on the center stage as a political issue.  A third article from last summer, titled Ten Worst Places to be Black is an example of the messaging around the issue of mass incarceration which Mr. Ellison opines that “politicians”  are really good at, which encourages people to think the issue of mass imprisonment in new ways.

BC has also offered solid and sound advice on what urban economic development might look like if it was to benefit the people actually living in the cities now, as opposed to the economic development model currently in favor, which consists of moving poorer people off the land and richer ones in, and giving well-connected developers giant subsidies and tax breaks to make it happen.  The five part series, “Wanted: A Plan For the Cities to Save Themselves” ran in BC issues throughout 2003 and 2004.

Far from being all problem statement and no solution, the series highlighted the efforts of community groups and others engaged in exemplary and pioneering work in the field of community economic development.   

BC also showcased the very useful work of Greg Leroy of Good Jobs First, reprinting the abridged introduction to his book The Great American Jobs Scam in our September 15, 2005 edition.  In this seminal work, Mr. Leroy outlines a decades-long campaign on the part of corporate America that has all but abolished the corporate income tax, which allows companies that operate in multiple states to not report income in any of them, and much more.  His book reveals an entire industry devoted to producing fraudulent and misleading job creation and economic growth forecasts in order to wring unjustified subsidies out of local and state governments.  We recommend it most highly to politicians and to ordinary citizens trying to get a grip on what “economic development” is. 

Far from meekly acquiescing to life in “the age of Wal-Mart-Mart,” as Rep. Ellison puts it, Greg Leroy  was the first to put an accurate figure on how much government subsides Wal-Mart gets. 

An astute and careful BC reader will have no trouble picking out lots of specific advice on public policy.  Living wage legislation to boost family income?  Anti-usury laws to keep more families out of bankruptcy?  Single payer health care?  Shrinking the crime control and prison industry that has disproportionately victimized our communities?  We can only conclude that Rep. Ellison is new to BC, and has not yet familiarized himself with some of our useful offerings.  We welcome the opportunity to engage him and other progressive black elected officials in discussions about how to address the urgent matters that affect our people. 

BC welcomes dialogue with all its esteemed readers.  We try to answer most of our email, and we print some of it in this space each week.  Send us your best, and we promise to keep sending you ours.

Contact Bruce Dixon at [email protected]