In the early 1970s, President Richard Nixon, who many of us at the time routinely called a fascist, seriously entertained the idea of establishing a national minimum income. He never actually moved on the concept, but he did verbally entertain it. Today, none of the stars of the Democratic Party – the one that claims to speak for progressive values – is willing to even entertain the national minimum income idea. Which means, they are not very entertaining, at all, and look quite bad in comparison to Richard Nixon.

In the early Seventies, Black news organizations were proliferating throughout urban radio. Now, local Black news – or anybody’s news, for that matter – is all but extinct. And yet, it is claimed that we are in the midst of a glorious information age. What kind of information? Not very useful, certainly not to the empowerment of communities. But there are plenty of very rich Black people in broadcasting, so the usefulness of what they provide is not deemed to be important. The previous age of energetic local news looks far better, in retrospect, than the current era of Black booty-shaking on a massive and often profane scale.

In the mid-Sixties, a U.S. President, Lyndon Johnson, proclaimed that the purpose of affirmative action was to redress the grievances and disadvantages of the descendants of slaves. Today, that concept has been erased in the official conversation, replaced by a vague “diversity” paradigm that does not address the needs of the masses of Black people in either letter or spirit.

In 1964, whites made up two-thirds of all prison inmates; non-whites, one-third. Today, that ratio has been more than reversed. Yet we are told that the society is less harsh, oppressive and racist regarding non-whites than it was 42 years ago. The numbers say something entirely different.

We could go on and on. Unemployment statistics have become meaningless, not just because they are manipulated to reflect gross unreality, but because the national conversation is now dominated by the ups and downs of stock manipulators – the same people who own the media. A small but politically significant slice of African Americans now speak that same language, which is profoundly hostile to the most basic interests of the rest of Black America. It is their venality, opportunism and just plain selfishness that has allowed the progressive dialogue to devolve into meaninglessness. Harvard’s Henry Louis Gates, for example, spends his time finding Black upwardly mobile success models, when the numbers show that much of the quality of Black life is going down the toilet. We desperately need a movement, to reverse this retrograde process. And the first thing that movement must do, is flush these pimps, hustlers and self-promoters down into the dirty swirls from which they so dishonestly emerged. For Radio BC, I’m Glen Ford.