Capitalists have the power to make everyone else worry about them.

- Vivek Chibber, Professor of Sociology, NYU

Happy days are here again! It�s not just an old song.� Happy days are here again for some Black Americans! The last time these happy days came around, Old Abe freed them. Dismiss what you hear about the ever increasing rate of unemployment and foreclosure among Black Americans. Old Abe has done it, again�or at least a facsimile of Old Abe has turned the ship around!

There is light at the end of the tunnel.� Free at last!

Two thousand, eight hundred and four Black Americans responding to the Pew Research Center survey on race were downright �upbeat�! According to the survey, Black Americans report that �the state of black progress in America have improved more dramatically during the past two years than at any time in the past quarter century.��

Two thousand, eight hundred and four Black Americans responding to the Pew telephone survey reported that everything is better than ever! The future looks bright!� �Life for blacks in the future will be better than it is now,� according to 53% percent.� In 2007, only 44% percent thought things would be better in the future.� Bush II blocked the path to freedom then!

Race relations are better, too, thanks to the 2008 election of Barack Obama! Less than 2 years later, �a majority of blacks (54%)� report that �Obama's barrier-breaking election has improved race relations in America.��

In addition, 60% (six-in-ten blacks) report that �values held by Blacks and whites have become more similar in the past 10 years.�

This really means that more Blacks think like white Americans! If this sharing of similar �values� more Blacks believe in �American exceptionalism� and the pursuit at all cost of �evil-doers� in the world, if this sharing of similar �values� means believing the consumption of consumer goods is freedom and being awed to debt by corporate-capitalists.� If this sharing of similar �values� means the individuals trump the community and empathy is a weakness�then the gap has narrowed indeed!

Check out the enlightening news from the Pew Center:

Now, back to reality.� The national unemployment rate is at 10 %.� For the masses of unhappy Black Americans, unemployment is twice that of whites and the gap here is only widening.� �The unemployment rate is 9 percent for whites while the rate for black workers is 16.2 percent,� writes reporter Adriana Pratt, South Bend Tribune. �

But don�t tell this to the �happy� Blacks who see a bright future ahead! Maybe these happy Blacks believe now in the value of denial, a much cherished American value!

Old Abe has arisen!

�Barack Obama's election as the nation's first black president appears to be the spur for this sharp rise in optimism among African Americans,� reports the Pew Research survey.�

Obama! Savior!

The Commander-in-Chief is busy managing security measures in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Yemen.� The Executive is busy retaining old Bush II era executive orders on global torture and global surveillance.� The socialist in him is busy saving the free market, Wall Street bankers, and too-big-to-fail corporations.� Peace Man is way too busy garnering bipartisan support: retreating and dining with �opponents� at events sponsored by the �Congressional Institute�funded by corporate contributions and run by top Republican lobbyists� (Bill Moyers, Bill Moyers Journal, February 5, 2010). (The Democrats have their The Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee retreats that feature ��sumptuous marble baths,� a spa, and a two million dollar art collection�).����

In the meantime, tip-toeing to the White House, Black leaders (also deeply indebted to corporations) hoped to remind the Black president (Goldman Sachs among other corporate backers) that Black Americans were busy, too,--looking for employment! The NAACP President Benjamin Todd Jealous, the National Urban League President Marc Morial, and the Rev. Al Sharpton, the founder of the National Action Network, all came out of the White House standing tall! �The White House meeting yielded no new ideas or initiatives,� �Jobs Talks between Obama, Black Leaders Focus on Region, Not Race,� McClatchy Newspaper.� But this �talk� wasn�t about race! Employment is about regions!

Hear the post-racial president�s influence?

Help the regions! Help everyone else, first! We�ll wait until help trickles down!

We talked about things that benefit all people� In these times, when everyone is hurting, the focus needs to be and has every right to be on the lifting of all boats. There may come a time when it's clear that something special needs to be done for one group or another. This isn't the time.

That was Jealous. �This isn't the time.�� Lobbyists for Black American interests comes back from the White House where a Black president sits and�still��This isn�t the time� for Black American concerns to be heard and honored? Over 16% percent of Blacks are unemployed and this isn�t the time to bring up Black interests!

�The US public doesn't have any understanding of how much wealth has been generated and concentrated into the hands of the Economic Elite over the past 40 years�There is no historical frame of reference,� writes David McGraw in �the Richest 1% Have Captured America�s Wealth�What�s It Going to Take to Get It Back, Part II..� In the last 40 years, mesmerized by the �Economic Elite,� Black leaders tossed aside the values of struggle and the Black community.� All too eager to accommodate the State, the Black leaders and the rising Black middle class held hands and sang at brunches and lunches and dinners with corporate partners �We have overcome.� Partnership with the Black community be damned!

�People at the top remain winners no matter how bad the whole economy,� Joel S. Hirchhorn writes in �Real, Uglier American Unemployment,� GlobalResearch.ca. �The wealthy Upper Class controls so much of the political system and benefit from countless government policies.� 

Those at the bottom, he continues, �with no political power,� experience �something as bad as the Great Depression, with no end in sight.� Government policies that �do not target lower income groups,� Hirchhorn adds, �are a failure and disgrace.�

But tell that to Black leaders who wouldn�t dare speak so bluntly, and who are now fretting over upsetting the Black president in the White House, least he speak benevolently of irresponsible Black Americans and un-lifted bootstraps!

These are the accomplished Black elites, business-mind Black elites. Urban renewal/urban Black removal projects (partnerships with corporate rulers) and elections (funded by corporate rulers) sponsored a poverty campaign of sorts that lifted them and their own clear above the rank and file of the Black worker and the Black poor. We can point to external factors in the continued repression and degradation of the Black American, but the integration of Black leaders and corporate partners has assisted in the outsourcing of Black interests to a police state.

It�s been a long time since the world has witnessed Black American leadership!

Long dead!

This isn�t the time. We�ll wait some more, Massa. It�s only been 400 years of waiting, but we�ll wait some more.

And these so-called leaders can no longer remember Dr. Martin Luther King�s response to the �This isn�t the time. Wait.�

The new normal is�Better dead than Black!

They have a new gimmick every year. They're going to take one of their boys, black boys, and put him in the cabinet so he can walk around Washington with a cigar. Fire on one end and fool on the other end.

El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz �The Prospects for Freedom in 1965� (NY January 7, 1965)

What�s Black about the Black president?�

As a successful organizer of corporate funding, the youthful Obama bested his fellow Black cohorts in the exclusive club of African descendents in the U.S. who understand one another�s hopes and desires to belong to the external power of the State. Corporate fathers adopted them, groomed them, and approved them for State servant. But young Obama has outdone them all!

Barack Obama sought to be a State servant of the first order! He brushed aside Rep. Bobby Rush and other Black Chicago leaders and shook hands with spin masters, land developers, and the Daleys. In the spring of 2001, the would-be-president of the U.S. displayed for the State and corporate powers his willingness to do what it takes to be noticed as an ideal citizens Black in America: �John Corrigan sat in front of a terminal to draw Obama a new district,� writes journalist Ryan Lizza in �Making It,� New Yorker.� �[I]t retained Obama�s Hyde Park base�then surged upward along the lakefront and toward downtown.�

Rather than jutting far to the west�to a swath of poor black neighborhoods of bungalow homes, Obama�s map now shot north encompassing about half of the Loop, whose southern portion was beginning to be transformed by developers like Tony Rezko, and sketched far up Michigan Avenue and into the Gold Coast covering much of the city�s economic heart, its main retail thoroughfares, and its finest museums, ports, skyscrapers, and Lakefront apartment buildings� Obama�s new district was wealthier, whiter, more Jewish, less blue-collar, and better educated.� It also included one of the highest concentrations of Republicans in Chicago.

Empathy with Black Americans, enslaved African descendents? No! The would-be-Black-president�s future would depend on repressing blackness.�

That �swath of poor black neighborhoods,� those poor Black residents�tossed aside! In contrast, he envisioned his bright future would rest on supporting the interests of AIPAC, Israel, Wall Street Bankers, Excelon, Goldman Sachs, and Republicans!

�And Black leaders believed the now post-Black president wanted to be reminded about the existence of Black Americans and their interests? Which one of these characters has the interests of the people at heart when each are still jostling for positions in the Empire around President Obama?

Isn�t a U.S. fascist State when the messiah of the oppressed isn�t a Fannie Lou Hammer, Malcolm X, or Martin Luther King, but one who abhors the oppressed and admires the State�s corporate slaveholders and war profiteers�and he is awarded the presidency of the United States?

Anytime a State can manipulate the leadership of its core Left resistance, it�s a powerful State indeed. Isn�t a fascist State�yet?�

Corporate rulers yank the chains of their step-sons and step-daughters to a standing position and motion to them to encircling the useful messiah, and then the leaders and the messiah are ordered to echo the corporate-brand phrase �Change you can believe in!�

It�s not surprising then that a spiritual people so desperate for hope in the long absence of Black leadership and after the betrayal of the Black middle class would look at a Barack Obama and mistakenly feel democracy was here at last and that this democracy at last would acknowledge, in its reflection on U.S. history, (which never happened), the inclusion of the Black enslavement, disenfranchisement, and discrimination experienced for over 400 years. Change is coming over the horizon! So the desperate, looking to the Black leaders and middle class, vote, again.�

Surveys proclaiming happiness for those at the top while the bottom are told �this isn�t the time�!��

The Black leadership, the Black middle class, and Barack Obama misuse the imagination of the most desperate.� Such an abuse represents a cruel hoax that serves to cover up the criminal coup of Black history and culture. The resulting fatal detachment of the Black community from its culture and liberation narrative is evidence of the crime of mass murder. This hoax may well account for any identification the unhappy Black masses may have with �American values� now called Barack Obama.�

To the Black leadership and the Black middle class, who�ve adopted external �values� and who, in turn, still prophesizing for that entity sitting in the Oval Office�we do see you! Its not happiness you feel� you only think you are alive and happy! You know who are really alive and happy? Capitalists!

There may be bigger fools, but none more dangerous than those of African descent in the U.S. who believe the Empire�s motto better dead than Black!

BlackCommentator.com Editorial Board member, Lenore Jean Daniels, PhD, has been a writer for over thirty years of commentary, resistance criticism and cultural theory, and short stories with a Marxist sensibility to the impact of cultural narrative violence and its antithesis, resistance narratives. With entrenched dedication to justice and equality, she has served as a coordinator of student and community resistance projects that encourage the Black Feminist idea of an equalitarian community and facilitator of student-teacher communities behind the walls of academia for the last twenty years. Dr. Daniels holds a PhD in Modern American Literatures, with a specialty in Cultural Theory (race, gender, class narratives) from Loyola University, Chicago. Click here to contact Dr. Daniels.