Life, the song tells us, is hard out here for a pimp.  And why shouldn't it be?  The pimp sells something of great value that's not even his.  By that definition, Newark mayoral candidate Cory Booker, poised to hand over the city's schools and the remnants of its public sector over to privatizers and the right wing social engineers of the Manhattan Institute, is one pimp to watch. 

Last week BC Senior Commentator Margaret Kimberley incisively skewered Booker along with incumbent Mayor Sharpe James, whose late withdrawal from the race may have paved the way to a Booker victory.  This week, BC readers weigh in:

Carl Fletcher heard Booker on the radio and writes us: 

The Howard Dean who ran for president in 2004, and who was independent of most of the Democratic party's corporate funders was a very different man from the Howard Dean of today.  Party leaders are not chosen for their big or original ideas or for their grand and inspiring visions of how society ought to work.  They are fundraisers. Appointing Dean the chief fundraiser of the Democratic party seems in retrospect to have been a brilliantly effective means of silencing his voice, and those of his original supporters, the Democratic party's base voters, who resolutely oppose the war and favor universal health care, impeachment of the president, and other stands which are anathema to corporate media and corporate contributors.

Nowadays Job One for Dr. Dean is to keep the contributions, overwhelmingly from wealthy individuals and corporations, flowing.  As public financing for campaigns is off the table, and as long as Americans are legally restricted to a two-party system with no alternatives to the left of Democrats, the Democratic base voters - and that means black voters - will be mere passengers on the bus driven by the party's contributors and their lobbyists.

We once had high hopes for Senator Obama too.  But that was a while ago.  The Obama of today seems to value his friendship with party financiers like Warren Buffet more than he does the principles and aspirations of the Democratic party's base voters who launched his political career.   

As for softball questions, everybody who's "media" is not a journalist.  The job of journalism is to monitor the centers of power and inform the public.  On the individual level, too many media personalities and self-described journalists would rather be friends of power than speak truth to it.  And on the institutional level the media and human resources directed to original news gathering are shrinking, according to the annual State of the Media report from Columbia University's center for Excellence in Journalism.  It's no surprise therefore, that the few big "media personalities" with microphones are asking the same few official spokespeople the same lame questions.

An optimistic BC reader and frequent correspondent J. Hutton writes:

It's indeed late in Newark, but we think Mr. Hutton is on to something.  We hope Ron Rice and the forces allied with him can define the issues and define Booker in a way that will keep George F. Will and the Manhattan Institute from naming black Newark's next mayor, or providing Booker with a stepping stone to higher office.  Time will tell. There just isn't that much time left. 

While Corey Booker attempts to pimp a city's public sector, another ambitious member of the black political class chose to pimp the reputation of his own family - his own grandmother.  It's not as though BC didn't get reader email defending the execrable congressman from Memphis, Harold Ford, Jr.  It's just that so little of it was coherent or printable.  Without radically changing the character of what was written, the following misguided comment by reader Rob Harris Jr. was the only email of its kind we could print.

The notion that honest criticism of black political figures somehow helps Republicans betrays a deep bankruptcy of principle.  If we can't criticize leaders and pretenders to leadership we are all passengers on a bus to nowhere. 

When a movie wins the academy award for "best picture" that's big stuff, big business and big culture.  In BC's case, it was big enough to follow Derik Smith's March 16 Guest Commentary, "Investigating the Crash Scene" with a March 23 ThinkPiece, by Robert Jensen and Robert Wosnitzer, "Crash and the Self-Indulgence of White America."  The movie's publicists and many critics have advanced the claim that "Crash" tells us something about race "as it's lived in America" that we knew all the time, but have not dared acknowledge.  The trouble is, what "Crash" tells us isn't true, and excuses white privilege and white supremacy.

Joseph Anderson of Berkeley CA wrote us this note, to pass on to the authors:

Culture is the lens through which humans view each other and the world.  Expecting corporate culture to challenge, or even to illuminate corporate rule is really asking quite a lot.  Sometimes rogue elements of authentically empowering culture do slip through the corporate filters.  That, Chuck D explained in a recent interview with Free Mix Radio's Dr. Jared Ball, is how Public Enemy initially slipped past the gatekeepers and into the spotlight.  But it doesn't happen often.

"Crash" reached the mass market, and received the "best picture" award not because it disagreed in any fundamental way with the white establishment take on "how race is lived in America" but because it reassured white America that racism was about individuals, not institutions, and that blacks and Asians and everybody else was probably just as "racist" as they were. 

Restricting the definition of racism to the actions and attitudes of individuals, and denying the existence of institutional racism is a major project of conservative "thought" in America.  If racism is either bad manners or just an individual thing that happens inside people's heads, government can do nothing about it because of course government has no business regulating manners or poking around inside anyone's head.

Reader Bennie Barton wrote BC to offer suggestions on African Americans and the immigration issue:

As we point out elsewhere in this issue, the immigration issue, for African Americans is about labor market competition, and the labor market is a global one.  What happens here profoundly affects people over the horizon, and soon afterward, what they do over the horizon will have repercussions in your neighborhood.  Those who imagine we can understand the labor market crises affecting black America without comprehending the US role in depressing the labor markets of countries whose citizens are now forced to come here to find work to keep their families alive are being fooled or are fooling themselves. 

Undocumented immigrants in the US, at least 60% of whom are Mexican, are children of NAFTA.  The US business class, spearheaded by the Republican party but massively aided by Democratic President and former DLC head Bill Clinton passed NAFTA into law over the objections of most congressional Democrats in 1993.  NAFTA spent US  taxpayers' money to aid and encourage businesses to relocate their investments first to Mexico, then to wherever on the planet wages were driven lowest that year. NAFTA allowed taxpayer-subsidized US agribusiness companies to devour what used to be the market for locally produced agricultural products in Mexico.  It drove farmers in Mexico and elsewhere off the land into the cities, and subverted the food sovereignty of those nations.  The latest economic and political repercussions of NAFTA are immigrant workers here in the US.  The chain of causality isn't hard to follow, but we won't get any help from the mainstream media or from many of our so-called leaders.

Finally, by now BC readers will have heard that last week Georgia's Cynthia McKinney was manhandled by a Capitol Hill police officer at a security checkpoint when hurrying to a floor vote.  Amazingly, with only 14 black women in Congress, it seems that the Capitol Police were unable to remember McKinney's face.  The whole incident reeks of racial profiling.  Farfectched?  The following Monday on the Wolf Blitzer show, McKinney related the story of a lesser known, but related incident. 

During the Atlanta funeral of Coretta Scott King, when she lay in state under the golden dome of the Georgia state capitol, in McKinney's words "...the Georgia legislative black caucus was not allowed into the building to form a part of the procession.  Why?  .... the security at the Georgia capitol did not recognize them as duly elected members..." 

On April 4th Democracy Now Atlanta Democratic state representative "Able Mabel" Thomas confirms McKinney's story. 

It seems that racial profiling impacts our communities every day, whether we are teenagers walking down a street, or properly suited and booted members of Congress or state legislatures.

We welcome the comments of BC readers.  We try to answer all our email, and sometimes succeed.  We print some of it in this column weekly.  Send us your best, or the rest at [email protected].