The Kim Kardashian syndrome: Why Black Pay More Attention to Things That Don't Impact Them

If you go on twitter, it is not hard to see what the average African American considers as being important and worthy of incessant attention. For that matter, you can also conclude why our community is in the state of disarray it is. Our main problem is not being able to prioritize in concert with not engaging our attention to matters and issues that proffer a tangible importance to our collective well-being.

Ask the average black person about Greece, they may something about the debt crisis, but for certain than can speak astutely on its salads and yogurt more than the former. Comparatively speaking, ask them about anything related to Ms. Kim and some self-absorbed rapper, they can speak with the prowess of a Neil Bohr on particle physics. This is what I find problematic: occupation with mundane idiocy that has nothing to do with our lives than those issues that do.We question why African American youth perform poorly academically in schools, or why we don’t attend or graduate from college, yet we never examine our own practices and behaviors that contribute to this. For the way I see it, it would be more reasonable to attend to the high unemployment and dropout rates in our community than what one Kardashian does.

This is not funny. Now I know folks say I am piling up on my folk, but really I am not. It reminds me of the student I may have in my class who is failing who ask for extra credit at the last moment just to pass, when they did not attend class regularly, did not do their homework and didn’t take notes when they did attend.This is equally comparable to our inattention to the Greek and European sovereign debt crisis.

For the record, the European sovereign debt crisis has more of an impact on our daily lives and is way more import than any Kardashian or Jay-Z and Kanye West Concert will ever have. Sadly I want to believe people know this, but more sadly is the possibility that they do and still don’t care to inform themselves on the topic as much as they do the Kardashian or the concert.

To put is plainly. Countries like Greek and Ireland and Spain and Italy have borrowed lots of money from other European nations and now they cannot pay it back. America in turn does business, a lot of business with Europe so it will hit us making us suffer just as bad also. Why because the global market is based on the massive buying, selling and trading of bonds and complex papers that bundle risk that folks buy in hopes of making a profit.

As it stands, short term Greek Bonds are still trading at 50% or less of face value. With the new Plan announced last Thursday the Bonds should be trading close to, or at par but they won’t since the Greek Prime Minister just announced that he will place acceptance of the Eurozone bailout up for a popular vote. A vote many Greek citizens equal to blackmail.

If they refuse, it means Greece and Germany will not agree to the conditions of the new Plan and that Greece won’t get an 8 billion-euro payment in mid-November that would most likely run out during January that would leave the government with no funds to function. This is not a good look for American citizens. And seeing that more than 60 percent of Greek citizens do not desire a bailout, and that G20 leaders are trying to get China to drop some loot to help folk out if all goes to ####.

Greek Prime Minister Papandreou, whose PASOK party has pushed sweeping austerity measures through parliament while protesters rally in the streets, has asked for major budget cuts. Now Italy Bonds are trading at the largest spread between Germany bonds in history because of the exposure contained by the major banks of Europe. Shares in France's Society General tumbled 17 percent and Credit Agricole was down almost 12.5 percent.

We can see the impact right here just by looking at MF Global Holdings Ltd. Like other major US banks, the folks who run these massive pension and hedge funds have provided most of the wealth of banks via negative rates of interest that guarantee their liabilities, and that in effect bailed them out unconditionally with our invested money. This means as Greece goes so do all of the other debtor nations, like the US. The more we ignore the importance of these events in Europe, our large indebted and over leveraged economy accomplished by our propensity for investing in financial instrument widely used by speculators to discredit government bonds, and undermine the country's weakening creditworthiness like credit default swap (CDS)., the more danger we are in.

The end result may be a freeze in the credit markets, similar to what we saw after the collapse of Lehman Brothers. Consequently, it will also result in a net-negative impact on the job creation reducing the ability of U.S. manufacturers to sell their goods in Europe. This will give European manufacturers a significant pricing advantage over US manufactures because of the decline in the exchange rate. Thus a weaker European economy means reduce demand for U.S. exports, because with no disposable income, European consumers will not be able to buy autos, appliances and other goods.

So the significance of the Greek sovereign debt crisis has a large impact on the average American citizen.Yet still, it seems that what happens to Kim Kardashian is more important to most African Americans than the aforementioned. I do not know why but I would like to call this the Kim Kardashian syndrome – the reason why black folk attend and care more about things that do not impact them than things that do.