The Best of BC Cover Stories

The authors are Glen Ford and Peter Gamble, Co-Publishers of The Black Commentator.

The Black Commentator has gone on hiatus for August, as we did last year, so that we can accomplish some tasks that the usual weekly toil prevents. It has been a good year for the publication, our third. It has been a bad year, politically, for Black people and, therefore, for progressive prospects in the United States. Most dramatically, the mid-Nineties corporate decision to throw dollars at rightwing Black Democrats, in an effort to create an alternative “New Black Leadership,” has been bearing fruit. Confusion abounds – as would be expected when a community that has been shunned and ignored for centuries is suddenly wooed and regaled by the corporate Right.

Inexorably, the rich solidify their rule. In the Democratic Party, they ejected traditional Black organizations from meaningful participation in the 2004 presidential and congressional elections, in favor of “527” organizations run by white people and funded by super-rich Democrats. The Black Commentator documented this “expression of…utter contempt for mainstream African American organizations” in our October 14, 2004 Cover Story.

Unions also defunded their minority constituency organizations, in the 2004 campaign. Is there any mystery as to why the Republicans won/stole the election? Racism has always crippled progressive movements in the U.S., but 2004 was a watershed. It seemed that rich white folks had convinced themselves that Blacks could be dismissed out of hand. If this policy is allowed to continue, there will be a total collapse of resistance to the crazed, race-based Republican onslaught. Corporatism is rampant in the Democratic Party – and even in the unions, which jettisoned their most loyal and active sectors in 2004, in favor of rich whites who thought they knew best. And lost.

Eleven percent of the Black electorate voted for George Bush – less than the Black vote for Ronald Reagan in 1980, but two percent more than Bush got in 2000. The Black Commentator did the math, and found that the real shift in Black votes was about one quarter million, nationwide – a very expensive fraction, given the tens of millions of dollars in bribes doled out to Black preachers through Faith-Based Initiative programs. Our conclusion, on November 4, was that Blacks and progressives should “Concede Nothing to Bush: Black Consensus Remains Intact.”

Clearly, the Black masses know what’s up, and vote accordingly. Many do not vote, because of terminal disillusion with the increasingly corporate Democratic Party. But Black Republicanism hardly exists. We ain’t stupid. However, Black “leadership” has been seriously infected with corporate cash, or the expectation of access to the vaults. The Black Commentator shouted a warning , forecasting that treachery was in the wind. The Congressional Black Caucus, which had for more than three decades acted in unison on behalf of their constituents’ progressive yearnings, had been undermined by the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC).

The DLC was created by white southern Democrats (most notably, Bill Clinton and Al Gore) to prevent the “blackening” of the Democratic Party in the South, and to preserve white leadership. These white Democrats were particularly disturbed by Rev. Jesse Jackson’s successes in the 1984 and 1988 primaries in the South. They were determined to stem the flow of Black power in the party organization, and called on corporate America to come to their aid. The response from the boardrooms was enthusiastic – and lucrative. However, the DLC organizers knew that they had to corrupt key Black politicians if they were to have any credibility among the base of Democratic voters in the South and urban centers: Blacks. Money would do the trick.

By 2004, the Congressional Black Caucus was infested with DLC members, as we reported on December 2.

Our colleague Maya Rockeymoore, who at the time was Vice-President of the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation, led the way in the resistance to George Bush’s attack against Social Security, which included a highly organized theater of operations to subvert Black America. Dr. Rockeymoore flipped the script on the fool, with devastating effect, in her February 10, 2005 expose of the administration’s lies and false assumptions.

Bush, however, had a Black ally in the form of Harold Ford, Jr., the Black congressman from Memphis, Tennessee. Ford, a DLC member, had spent two years meeting with rightwing white organizations to give lip-service to privatization of Social Security. He was their Great Black Hope.

The Black Commentator is most concerned with the internal politics of Black America. Unfortunately, much of our politics are not internal, but dictated by external, corporate forces. Harold Ford is one of the worst examples. Representing one of the poorest districts in the nation, he votes with the rich at an appalling rate. Ford is the point man in the rightwing intervention in Black national politics, as we explain in our March 17, 2005, article, “Why We Can’t Trust Harold Ford Jr.” Ford showed his true colors – a Republican in everything but name – when he said:

”…there are some things some Democrats believe that I don’t. I don’t think government is an insurance program”

”Scott leads the pack, having managed to vote with Republicans more than any other member of the Congressional Black Caucus….”

It was becoming apparent that the avalanche of corporate money was rapidly eroding Black leadership. The people were not at fault, but their elected leadership were being corrupted. In April of this year, the Congressional Black Caucus saw its most shameful period in history – unthinkable only a decade before – when 15 members voted with Republicans on one or more of three “bright line” issues: bankruptcy, the estate tax, and energy subsidies to multinational corporations. The Black Commentator listed their names, in our April 28, 2005 Cover Story, “How to Fix the Fractured Black Caucus.” which displays a chart of the CBC members that voted with Republicans on bankruptcy, the estate tax, and energy.

Note that a number of these Black congresspersons are also members of the Progressive Congressional Caucus – and voting with Republicans! There is no question that we have been betrayed, and that the Black conversation must be started all over again, so that leadership can be made to get in synch with the people. Or get the hell out, and go to work for a multinational corporation.

We at The Black Commentator believe that Black labor leadership is the most fit to stand against racist, corporate rule – the scourge that threatens all of humanity. The “aspiring” Black classes that seized control of our movement in the late Sixties have served no one but themselves. Working people – and people who want to work, but are prevented from doing so – are the folks who will uplift our people. We have been bequeathed a leadership that cannot even speak to the youth, guaranteeing that there will be no “movement” – since all mass movements are based on youthful action.

We are frozen by a corrupted class.

We need a full reevaluation of our political conduct since 1972, when the Gary, Indiana National Black Political Convention occurred. We have been misled, and now we are under massive attack, with skillfully effective infiltration by corporate forces that engage corporate media to pick and choose our leaders.

We are in trouble. More than a third of the Congressional Black Caucus cannot be counted on to vote like civilized men and women. They have been subverted by corporate dollars. We must create a countervailing force: a Black Progressive PAC that will finance campaigns by people who speak our people’s language, and vote accordingly.

But first, we must be clear on what we are talking about. For three decades and more, we have allowed the hustler, “aspiring” classes to speak for us. That must end. Bill Lucy, President since 1972 of the Coalition of Black Trade Unionists (CBTU), has called for a national conference – “Going Back to Gary,” as it was announced at the CBTU’s national convention in Phoenix. This gathering will occur in March.

The conference must take fan open-eyed, objective look at the general status of Black people since the last gathering, in 1972. Thirty-three years ago, the mood was celebratory. Black mayors were getting elected all over the place. We were “moving on up.” But Black people got hijacked by a political class that was focused on only their own mobility – and called each and every million they put in their pockets “Black progress.” Meanwhile, the masses of us were subjected to vicious police and prosecutorial assault, that demolished our opportunities to build families and community. The white backlash.

There has been no effective response from the “aspiring classes” to the massive police/prosecutorial offensive that has multiplied the prison population six- or seven-fold in the past 30 years; that has made it impossible to build Black families, or general Black wealth, or cohesive Black communities. Instead, they applaud Bill Cosby and other slanderers of Black life, blaming the victims for the ghastly crime against a people.

Only a mass movement will solve this problem. Mass movements create leadership, and we need new leadership in the worst way. It will come, and it will be young. The “business class” of Black politician must be put out of business. We must set the engine running, again, as BC Associate Editor Bruce Dixon wrote on June 30, 2005:

”A mass movement aims to persuade courts, politicians and other actors to tail behind it, not the other way around. Mass movements accomplish this through appeals to shared sets of deep and widely held convictions among the people they aim to mobilize, along with acts or credible threats of sustained and popular civil disobedience.”