As corporations “rediscover” the cities, unions must leap with all four feet into the realm of city planning, and allocate substantial resources to those urban movements and community institutions that can ensure the viability of union-backed projects. Labor must commit itself to safeguarding the assets and internal economies of the cities by aligning itself with those who will fight Big Capital’s most destructive, people-dispersing schemes.

Labor must take the lead in nurturing Plans, tailored to every targeted locality. In the process of formulating plans for the cities, people’s dreams become tangible – and as Dr. Martin Luther King understood, dreams are the real stuff of movements. It is the stuff that is lacking in far too many Black-led urban political groupings, circles that care more about a piece of the next corporate contract that floats their way than the stability, prosperity and dignity of African Americans as a whole.

Thank you for the enlightened commentary on African labor in America. As a social policy professor, this information will be helpful in teaching the history of social progress coupled with economic stability.

Since then, it has been a fight for Democrats to win the hearts and minds of Southern white males, who now felt at home with the GOP’s subtle racist agenda. Under the guise of conservative family values, the Republicans have de-valued the need for hard-fought gains, such as affirmative action, and have escalated the level of fear by highlighting wedge issues like crime and religion. The current GOP has used the same manipulation tactics engaged in by slave owners in the 1700’s and 1800’s to convince poor whites under their employ to enact acts of atrocity toward Negro slaves and to later fight a war for “the noble Southern way of life.”

I'm sending your article on the disappearance of White Male Dems to Reverend Jim Lawson, who has been trying to teach us white religious leaders why it is that the current economic environment has ideological ties to plantation slavery. This article brings it home!

I am the whitest white girl God ever made, but Oh My am I glad to find your website. Thank you for providing some of the most sensible political articles I've read in a long, long time.

In 1856 Sen. Charles Sumner was beaten to within an inch of his life by a slaveholding congressman with a cane. We respect Sumner, because he consistently opposed injustice and thereby earned the hatred of evil men. Sumner did not consort with the Devil. The same cannot be said for Kennedy.

Thanks for the link to the speech Senator Sumner gave back in 1856; it appears Massachusetts used to include more focus on the "classics" during the formative educational years.  However, as kind as the senator’s words were with regards to the evils of slavery; ultimately, those kind words were misdirected.  The problem was not southern senators betraying the Constitution; sadly, the problem began years earlier with the editing done to the Declaration of Independence to remove the African Slave Trade as one of the crimes committed in the name of the king.

First, my apology for not being as eloquent as the senator was.  I have spent far too much of my education learning how to be a good employee and far too little learning how to be a free man.  The allegiance this country made with the slave trade decades before our birth as an independent nation enabled the powers that commissioned the drafting of that document with the ability to pervert a declaration of independence into a referendum for wealthy landowners.  So if the initial document of our "great" nation is irrevocably corrupted, how could the constitution be anything but fruit from the poisoned tree?  Of course, it is a rotten document to the core. 

Reverend Sharpton is going in the right direction with recommending more amendments, but seriously, how many more changes before we just rewrite the document in a proper fashion in the first place?  An appropriate Declaration of Independence needs to be written now and there are at least two authors I would nominate for the work.

The U.S. Constitution protected slavery from interference for a period of 20 years, thus weaving the institution into the fabric of the new Republic. Abolitionists argued for decades - right up 'til the South seceded, in fact - over whether the Constitution was a salvageable document. A minority of abolitionists felt so strongly about the matter, they favored secession from the Union by the North. Virtually all Blacks in the movement opposed Northern secession, although African American opinion remained divided on the value of a Constitution that had specifically enshrined slavery.

I’m usually up on the scams of this cloned congress, innately, so thanks for pointing this one out because, I almost fell for it. Thinking that this woman was being scandalized by the Dem's. Thanks for your article. I don't think Brown will make it though because the Republicans hate the fact that they don't know what mood she will swing to – if her "nigga" is "trigga-ed," since her speeches differ from her legal rulings.

All four of them – Colin, Clarence, Condoleezza and Janice – still have that original DNA in them and so I say let them stay where they are because when that gene gets triggered, as it will, they are going to be the first ones to find their way back home, with a whole lot of stories to tell. Thanks for your articles. I thought the cartoon looked familiar when they put it up at the beginning of the hearings. Keep defining the energy.

As for the “some” Black folks who pretend we don't talk like that among ourselves, all I can say is maybe they are still shedding the Ne-gro (need to grow) image, they will be all right in the end as well.

We cannot by ourselves defeat their nominations on Capitol Hill; we don’t have the numbers. We can’t stop the rich from funding bogus Black front groups; it’s not our money. But we can heap scorn on the rascals, and thus deny them legitimacy as “spokespersons,” “leaders” and “role models” for our communities.

You are a breath of fresh air.  Judge Brown made the remarks she made because she never expected to be scrutinized the way you are doing her.  She was hamming it up for her white counterparts.  No doubt at the expense of some other Black or poor person.  It is sad to see that this type of Tomming still continues in the 21st century.  You exposed her.  Good! George Bush only goes for Black people who will serve his interest and not reflect the interest of the vast majority of Black Americans in this country.  Keep up the good work.

The effort to restore the draft would be an uphill battle for public support and have questionable value. The better way to fight militarism is just to fight it. Democrats must tell the truth about the Iraq war. The war was supported by those who want to establish a permanent military presence in that region and in so doing control the supply of oil. They are also not opposed to making money for their friends at Bechtel and Halliburton.

Politicians can’t allow themselves to be taken in by phony appeals to “support the troops” and “stay the course.” Fortunately the folly of Iraq is becoming more evident every day. We will not need to support the draft to make the case to disengage from this situation. We will only need to speak up and tell the truth.

Thank for your insightful article on the draft.  A draft, at best is unclad coercion and at worse a form of slavery. It is utterly naive to think that the onus of a draft would be shared by the privileged classes. Further, a draft promulgated in the shadow of the current political horror would likely will be far more burdensome to the poor and working class than was the one in effect during the Vietnam unpleasantness. In my estimation the draft gave life to the atrocities of that conflict far longer than would have been the case if the war criminals in power would have had to depend on a volunteer army.

I understand your ambivalence concerning whether a draft should be reinstated. I was a young African American man in Vietnam in two branches of the service in the sixties, the US Marine Corps and the US Air Force.

The problem with the present situation is really dreadfully and painfully simple. These Right Wing fascists who are presently running the country have boxed themselves into a perilous corner by putting our troops into a "no win" situation in Iraq. Much like that in Vietnam!

I was a volunteer when I went to Vietnam in 1965, I had already been in the military since 1962 so one could say that I was an experienced soldier.

Many of my male friends, most of them in their forties and fifties, like me, say that the draft if it comes would actually benefit the young males in our communities as it would inculcate some degree of discipline into their young lives. I tend to strongly agree with that hypothesis as well.

My time that I spent in the military was pretty productive because I did manage to finish high school and three years of college there.

I wish that I could end this e-mail on a more positive note but I cannot. The "powers that be" in Washington, DC have moved this country into what I consider to be deep doo doo and I'm not quite sure how we are going to disengage ourselves from that fact without a great deal of pain. I just returned from Europe on business and I can tell you that just to mention the name of the United States there is to invoke anathema.

Hoping for better times ahead and putting things in God's hands I bid you peace my sister.

Thank you for your words in Black Commentator!  I have to say when I hear Charles Rangel speak a part of me nods and thinks, "Wouldn't it be great to see the Bush twins in Iraq?"  But then I too realize that this part of me is illogical and is "acting" on a purely distressed level, disgusted with the disproportionate numbers of blacks and Hispanics, and more generally, the lack of middle-class and upper-middle class soldiers of all backgrounds.  Indeed, America's military taste buds would only be superficially controlled by a draft and cause more problems than it would serve – mainly buttressing the abhorrent practice of forced military participation which no human should ever have to endure.

As you eloquently indicate in your piece, the military is "divorced" from the public sector – but not because of the lack of draft.  I would say this is greatly due to the media's elision of the military from our view and the nauseating glorification of murder that has taken place in our media.  Just yesterday the LA Times instructed its writers to refrain from using the term "resistance fighters" since that alludes to the resistance of Jews in the Ghettos or of the counter-Vichy fighters in France.  Imagine this?  Reporters must now use the word "insurgents" to refer to these people so desperately trying to be heard.  I find the language of the military problematic (as you point out the glorification, the cheap tactics to recruit colleges students, etc) and the answer to this even more so since there is one huge mechanism at work vis a vis the media, corporate America and the current regime.

After the recent House of Representative Bill which essentially makes university funding conditional upon Middle Eastern Studies departments agreeing with US foreign policy, I find the current state of affairs terrifying.  I certainly do hope the truth can be heard, or rather, that people are made ready to hear it.

How many African Americans perceive themselves as the genetic cousins of the Dalits of India, the Chang Dynasty of China, the Moros (MNLF) of the Philippines, the Dravidians (Tamil Tigers) of Sri Lanka or the even Black Madonnas of Medieval Italy.  For that matter, do African Americans identify with the Blacks of Fiji or the long ago victims of mass genocide, the Tasmanians of the down under Pacific.

Having an enlarged sense of the dramatic, the President declared the "Axis of Evil" as the greatest threat to America.  Lost on some African Americans was the fact that all of these so-called "evil" nations are people of Color.  How does a thinking mind work, when it finds itself unable to perceive an assault upon its own consciousness?

With rare exception, all American wars, after World War II in Europe, have been wars against people of color whom America has always attacked, after developing some flimsy pretext which could be easily employed to exploit the ignorance and prejudice of American citizens.  With an industrialized world record number of prisoners under supervision of the Corrections industrial complex and the constant savaging of the system of public education, there should be no surprise, that the policies which capitalize on geopolitical antipathy would be effective.

Because our educators have seen little value in the works Dubois, Van Sertima, John Henrique Clarke, Chancellor Williams or Runoko Rashidi, the natural consciousness aroused by contact with the world-at-large finds no place to germinate.

Somewhere, someplace in Iraq or Kuwait or Somalia or Djibouti, an African American soldier is going to suddenly recognize his or her long lost cousin and have a consciousness-raising experience that (if it survives the initial trauma and flourishes long enough to sever the links that have separated people of color for centuries) will seem a great blessing.

For America, because of its heavy reliance on African Americans in the uniform services, this awakening would be seen as a significant threat to National Security.

In fact, the mere knowledge that negative views about one’s group are prevalent has been shown to adversely impact the academic performance of blacks, by creating the added stress of trying not to confirm the stereotype when one takes a standardized test, for example. The added burden of having to disprove a negative stereotype is enough in many cases to fully explain the scoring gaps between blacks and whites on tests like the SAT, according to groundbreaking research by Claude Steele, chair of the Psychology Department at Stanford who has studied the phenomenon of “stereotype threat” for years and whose research remains unrefuted.

A few years ago, sociologist William Julius Wilson, who had long peddled the line that race and racism were of declining significance in the U.S., partially reversed course when he discovered that employers in and around Chicago were openly reluctant to hire people of color because of a collection of negative stereotypes about their work effort, home environment and character: the same kinds of stereotypes that form the backbone of GHETTOPOLY.

It took a horrible revision of the much-heralded game Monopoly to get the attention of African Americans to be in a fervor to change things. That same fervor needed to have been in placed and voiced when BET for the past twenty years has presented degrading and debased images and characterizations of Africans Americans and nothing was basically said, but the minute BET was sold, there was flood of calls to pressure Viacom to change the programming. Yes Mr. Chang's game is degrading and debasing, but we African Americans must stop accepting less than positive marketing of us by our own. Instead of just decrying the Ghettopoly game, we need to protest and be active to end the exploitation of Blacks by Blacks, and put pressure on BET or any other media outlet that glamorizes the "ghetto" or "thug" lifestyle by a boycott and a refusal to buy their products. If Blacks would put energy to that then all of the negative profanity-laden "gangsta rap" would change or be no more. We need to be an active group of people instead of reactionary only. Mr. Chang tested the waters of apathy that seem to be prevalent in America today, and oftentimes in the Black community. In order for us to change the images and views, we must rewrite those images and views and not allow negative depictions to flourish by our patronage and financial resources. We have already lost a big portion of two generations of African American youth due to the want-to-be-a-ghetto-gang banger thug mentality. It seems that we have totally tarnished and forgotten the struggles that our ancestors went through to open doors and safeguard the "freedoms" that we enjoy.

In scores of large, medium and even small cities across the nation, the early to mid-Seventies saw a flowering of Black radio news, a response to the voices of an awakened people. Black ownership had relatively little to do with the phenomenon. According to the National Association of Black-owned Broadcasters (NABOB), there were only 30 African-American owned broadcast facilities in the United States in 1976. Today, NABOB boasts 220 member stations - and local Black radio news is near extinction.

I’ve just received, for the first time, your commentary. How wonderful, keep up the good work! In response to your lead story, "The Death of Black Radio News," I can safely say this is the state of radio news – black, white, blue or brown.

As a sista whose career has been in radio – and over the past 13 years in radio news, I can say radio news is on a resuscitator, because programmers come in and look at radio news as "fat." You have to remember that most of the people who now either run or own these billion-dollar conglomerates – such as Mel Karmazin of Viacom, (which now owns BET) and L. Lowry Mays of Clear Channel (whose son, Mark, now runs the company) – are people who come from business or accounting backgrounds, and feel news doesn't make money, so why have it? Its a liability.

And when it comes to African-Americans being informed, while the community may fight for news to remain on the air, it is still a matter of money! As news director of an urban FM, because we are non-profit, we can't pay anyone – my staff is volunteer. And while folks say they are committed to doing news, at least 15 per cent of the people who come through my doors willing to volunteer, leave after a few weeks because of the time it takes to put out a good product – and they aren't getting paid to do it. And where are the radio stations anyway – the small "mom and pop" stations where people got a start don't exist.

While there is a glimmer of hope – Clear Channel was recently lambasted in the Midwest for not having a person in the station where a disaster took place, and they said they would look into having a person there round the clock, after the community took them to task – most people are beginning to ask where is their local news, and why aren't they getting relevant information. And even Trent Lott (!) joined in the fight this year over companies owning too many stations. Although the big playas will tell you that you have more options, such as cable, Internet and satellite for news, local news is being squeezed! If the public doesn't recognize this and fight for their news and information, we will go on being under-informed (understanding what's happening in Iraq, but not knowing a three alarm fire has just destroyed a whole block downtown! You'll see it on TV but do not have the immediacy of radio) and won't realize it.

The entire world looks to Europe and North America as the model of human social development not because everyone wishes to be European or American, but because all humanity values personal freedom, social responsibility, state accountability and political participation.  The development of liberal democracy and free market capitalism in the West presents, to date, the most successful socio-political and economic model for delivering these values to the greatest number of people.  With all of its admitted faults, peoples throughout the world look to this model of human organization and development to learn from and enrich their own progress.  This is why the response of the leadership of the world’s greatest and oldest democracies (USA & UK) to the evil of September 11th, 2001 is so wanting.  Instead of wisdom, reasoned judgment and vision they have chosen vengeance, xenophobia and imperial might.

Mr. Egal is in error when he argues that the combination of liberal democracy and free market capitalism is the most successful model to date for  delivering freedom, social responsibility, state accountability and political participation to the greatest number of people in the world. The European populations of America and Europe constitute only 20% of the world's population that comes under the sway of liberal democracy and market capitalism (I exclude places like China, North Korea and Cuba).  The remaining 80% of the world's population that live in Africa, Latin America and Asia (India) are all victims and free market capitalism which makes it extremely difficult for them to embrace democracy. The reason is that democracy in those regions is diametrically at odds with the predations and dictates of market capitalism as dictated by the so-called liberal democracies of America and Europe.

Recently there was a small triumph for democracy as the "voice of the people" in Bolivia with the chasing from office of President Sanchez, one of  market  capitalism's favorites in Latin America. Left to its own designs market capitalism produces ruination, poverty, prostitution,  rural exodus, family disruption through  desperate migration, crime, drug smuggling, and other desperate survival  measures on the part of those who don't enjoy the exploitatative benefits of that nefarious system made to look respectable by collared and perfumed undertakers at the IMF, the World Bank, the mega-banks of Euro-America, and wealth-sucking corporations that fan out over the globe like mosquitos sniffing for blood.

In response to Alassan Kamara’s letter, the first point I wish to make is that Kamara implicitly accepts that the liberal democratic/free market model does deliver to the great majority of American and European peoples the very values listed in the article, which is was my point.  Delivery of these same values to the great majority of the peoples of the Third World (including China, North Korea and Cuba) is the responsibility of those peoples themselves through their own actions.  Further, the democracies of Asia, i.e. Korea, Taiwan, Malaysia, Indonesia, Singapore, Thailand and India, with their rapidly growing tiger economies would not consider themselves downtrodden, poverty-stricken, neo-colonial puppets, and neither would the newly industrializing countries of Latin & South America.  Indeed, they have delivered these values to more of their peoples than ever before achieved by adopting democratic political systems and free market economies.

Despite the romantic allure of the notion of capitalism as a vampiric hydra sucking the lifeblood of Third World peasants, the reality is much more complex.  This theory of imperialism was first popularized in Lenin’s 1920s pamphlet “Imperialism: The Last Stage of Capitalism”.  This formulation has been adopted and updated by the modern anti-WTO, anti-IMF/World Bank activists and this is Kamara’s thesis in short.  This analysis was based upon the mercantile model of capitalism prevalent in the 19th and early 20th century wherein the colonial powers procured raw materials and agricultural goods from their colonies for processing into finished goods for the metropolitan ‘home’ market.  This thesis is outdated and has been overtaken by history. 

We are now witnessing a process whereby manufacturing is relocating from the high wage economies of North America and Europe to the low wage economies of the South.  Concomitant with this, the advent of the Information Revolution is also transferring white collar IT jobs increasingly to Third World countries for the same reason, lower wages - witness India’s growing power as an IT hub whereby many experts predict that Bangalore & Hyderabad will overtake Silicon Valley as the pre-eminent center of software development & innovation within a decade.  To be sure, there are yawning inequities in the global economic system, e.g. the insistence under WTO rules that the movement of capital and goods (which the rich world predominantly owns) not be subject to territorial constraints, while labor (which the poor world has in abundance) is denied the same freedom.  The denial of tariff protection for fledgling import-substitution industries in Third World countries while the rich countries bestow massive subsidies upon their agricultural and manufacturing sectors not only flies in the face of economic sense, but is unjust and iniquitous.

Finally, I wish to address the point that democracy in the Third world is diametrically opposed to market capitalism.  Nothing could be further from the truth.  It is precisely in those Third World countries with authoritarian or dictatorial regimes that exploitation of the poor, the landless and the backward (those that Fanon called “The Wretched of the Earth”) is the greatest.  Again, the resurgent democracies of Asia are an excellent example of this fact when compared with the brutal dictatorships prevalent throughout much of Latin & South America and Africa.  It is also a fact that those countries that have invested the most in social capital, i.e. education, health care & infrastructure, have been able to deliver to their peoples the highest standard of living.  Again, these tend to be countries with democratic political systems where people choose their leaders.  In short, the simplistic notion that liberal democracy and free markets are inherently oppressive systems that enslave the Third World provides neither a meaningful analysis of the current global situation, nor a blueprint for empowering the wretched to realize their share of the earth’s bounty.

November 13, 2003
Issue 64

is published every Thursday.