The Problem is Darkness

As a people, in particular a nation – we some dumb folk. I really wanted to use another word that conjoins a female parent with the act of copulation, but that is beside the point. I know I have been harping on the inadequacy of the general populous in concert with what is supposed to be leadership, especially as it pertains to legislation implemented for show in the perverse attempt to protect folk from themselves via the impossible act of legislating morality, just so happen this time it deals with gun control, assault weapons ban and across the board registration requirements.

Now, all this reminds me of something I heard Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. say on a talk show once when I was a kid. I think I was in Kindergarten at the time. Back then TV and television watching was a social event and when Dr. King was on, everybody in the household watched. Otherwise, if I was inside and not playing outside and had to watch TV, all who knocked on my door asking for me to come outside, and I said I couldn’t, that I was watching TV, knew I was on punishment. Back then you only stayed in to watch TV when you were on punishment.

On the show, the two tortoise-shelled rim glasses wearing white cats asked Dr. King if those who rioted in America who were black took away from his cause and his message of non-violence. He quoted Victor Hugo and stated: “Where there is darkness crimes will be committed. The guilty one is not merely he who commits the crime but he who caused the darkness.”

Now it seems to me the weight in which I look at Dr. King’s mental prowess is like a ton to an ounce when I compare it to the likes of a Barack Obama or a Rahm Emanuel. It seems that the latter two gentlemen are so caught up on the propaganda (and banning guns), more than the root causes of the ailments of our social predicament, or saving lives. Fact is when the gun laws are put in place (and I doubt if they will be) the social ills that precipitate our violent oriented society will still remain. First it is not the tool, for we see around the world car and suicide bombs can and do as much damage as assault rifles. Second, the darkness which the metaphorically inclined Hugo made and Dr. King referenced is still going undealt with. The darkness that produces crime is a historic occurrence based in the economic deprived citizenry of our nation who just so happen mainly to be folk the same color as I. It is this loss of opportunity, or really, the lack of opportunity that facilitates the “I will get mine even at the expense of yours mentality. It is not guns but the reality of the environmental circumstances in which we see 25% of blacks in poverty – a rate which is at its highest in the past 60 years and snow-balled downhill just by chance when America has its first African American President.

Yes, TV watchers watch the subscribed and pre-prepared news broadcast and say the economy is getting better but outside of make-believe facts do not support this. Truth be told, thanks to our declining economy, poverty is ravaging out city like some exotic parasitic infection. Add to that the millions of young folk, who only watch TV, play video games and self-medicate in our materialistic culture, and whom are unemployed, do not even have the prospects of long-term or temporary employment for that fact. In Detroit for example, more than 60% of folk fewer than 18 years of age live in poverty – an increase of 40 percent since 2009. And this is one reason why 80% of the murders in Detroit or a Chicago are gang-related. These numbers are staggering, especially in urban areas from New York, to Oakland, to Memphis to New Orleans. Across America, more than 150 million folks live in poverty. Not to mention more than 1 million US school children are homeless. This is the darkness the aforementioned spoke of. Where there is darkness there will be crime. But no, to accept such requires logic and reason, two things that are severely lacking in modern American culture. Our status quo instead is to accept what is being told without query and let the government deal with it, since the government is the only solution and only folk with the answers (albeit their track record suggest otherwise).

Even if you go to college it doesn’t translate in to success or economic stability. One recent study published by the Center for College Affordability and Productivity revealed that Almost half of college educated workers are over qualified for the jobs that they do have.

And we black folk go along with everything being feed us as if we were still expecting master to drop some chittlings on our plates. Because if gun control do pass, we gone be stuck with the same thing we got with mandatory minimums and three strike laws – more black men in prison. Yep, I said it; I can add that the man who Obama asked to work out something on guns, Joseph Biden, is the same cat who came up with the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act. If I must remind you, the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act, H.R. 3355, Pub.L. 103–322, (commonly referred to as the Assault Weapons Ban) was originally written by Senator Joe Biden of Delaware, passed by Congress and signed into law by President Bill Clinton. In the Bill, Biden as a lawyer mandated that people in prison were not to be allowed to get an education in the form of a high school diploma or a college degree and also created the 3 strike law, which sent a lot of black people to prison for life. Democrat Bill Clinton sign this into law in 1994. Biden’s law also made many new provisions to be considered as capital offenses including but not limited to gang membership, and created several new federal death penalty offenses, including murders related to drug dealing, and drive-by shooting murders. And this new bill, well it will be the same, just a disproportionate number of black men being incarcerated.

I write this to suggest that most politicians and Americans (especially African Americans are lost, misguided and lack the critical thinking required to both problem solve and address what is wrong within our communities. It is we who are the problem and as such only we can proffer answers and solutions to deal with such. It is darkness that creates the crime and the folk who create the problem are just as much as fault as the tools of criminals. I can honestly say that before Obama 32 million Americans were on food stamps. Today, more than 47 million Americans are on food stamps. That the Median household income in America has fallen for four consecutive years, which means it has fallen even more for the average African American. And it will only get worse with America losing half a million jobs to China every single year and with a future that will have robots working in fast food restaurants and the service industry. Again, our problem is not guns it is darkness and no one can see the light.

Aint No More Charles Hamilton Houston’s

Once upon a time there were activist warrior scholars who served the needs and protected African Americans against the onslaught of laws designed to subjugate, marginalize and mass incarcerate this population disproportionately to their representation and the occurrence of such crimes. Most of these involved rights proclaimed under the constitution and dealt with receiving an equal education.

As many know, during slavery, a slave was not allowed to learn to read; it was illegal. Whites didn't want black slaves to read and write because they might be encouraged to run away. In addition, People feared that slaves who could read would be more rebellious. At the time of the Civil War, only 1 or 2 percent of slaves were able to read and write meaning that Illiteracy was one of the worst handicaps of being a slave. In most cases, outside of having hands or tongues cut out or being blinded, death was the punishment for a slave learning to read.

To the slave, the ability to read and write meant freedom—if not actual, physical freedom, then intellectual freedom—to maintain relationships amongst family members separated by the slave trade. These men and women took great risks to empower themselves, and in some cases, achieved freedom. However after slavery a dark period emerged and well up into the 20th century, African Americans were still disenfranchised by the legal burden of obtaining an equal education. Charles Hamilton Houston was one of the bright lights of activism that addressed these social ills.

WEB Dubois wrote that “The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line.” I would suspect that he would say that in the 21st century this would continue to be true but add something implicating the impact of the criminal justice system on the worsening of this problem. To put it plainly, it is like comedian Tony Rock stated, “People always say I act like I am afraid of the police, I am afraid of the police."

If there was a time in which our community need the aspiring efforts of a Charles Hamilton Houston it is now. Who was Charles Houston; well he was a lawyer, educator and a warrior. He was the man who devised and led the legal strategy leading to the end of legalized racial segregation in the United States. He also taught and mentored a generation of lawyers, including Thurgood Marshall, James Nabrit, Spottswood Robinson, and A. Leon Higginbotham. It was his work and effort that laid the legal groundwork that led to 1954 U.S. Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education that made racial segregation in public primary and secondary schools unconstitutional.

He completed high school at the age of 15 and graduated from as one of six valedictorians from Amherst College in Massachusetts in 1915. After serving in World War I as a second lieutenant in field artillery and receiving an honorable discharge from the army, he enrolled at Harvard Law School in 1919 where he earned his Bachelor of Laws in 1922 and a doctorate in 1923. Truth be told, Houston, and not Barack Obama was the first black editor of the Harvard Law Review.

He fought to end legalized discrimination and, in particular, the "separate but equal" doctrine accepted by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1896 in Plessy v. Ferguson. He proceeded step by step and from 1935 to 1940, he successfully argued several cases using this strategy, including Murray v. Maryland, (1936) which resulted in the desegregation of the University of Maryland's Law School and Missouri ex rel Gaines v. Canada, another case that Houston argued before the Supreme Court, declared that the scholarships Missouri offered to African Americans to attend out-of-state graduate schools did not constitute equal admission. In the end, the U.S. Supreme Court ordered the admission of a black student to the Law School at the University of Missouri (1938).

Thurgood Marshall took over where Houston left of as NAACP's Special Counsel. In Smith v. Allwright, Marshall successfully challenged "white primaries," which prevented African Americans from voting in several southern states. In Morgan v. Virginia (1946), Marshall won a case in which the Supreme Court struck down a state law that enforced segregation on buses and trains that were interstate carriers. In 1948 he won Shelley v Kraemer, which ended the enforcement of racially restrictive covenants, a practice that barred blacks from purchasing homes in white neighborhoods. In 1950, he won cases that struck down Texas and Oklahoma laws requiring segregated graduate schools in Sweatt v. Painter and McLaurin v. Oklahoma. “In those cases, a unanimous U.S. Supreme Court held that the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment required those states to admit black students to their graduate and professional schools.”

Houston's said “A lawyer's either a social engineer or he's a parasite on society," the formers whose goal was to focus on "bettering conditions of the underprivileged citizens." Like I said in the intro we do not have any more of these types in Law. They say we have Obama, but he went for the presidency making one wonder which he would be according to the reasoning of Mr. Houston. We have growing evidence that the current administration will not address these issues. Travon Martin aside, there is a history of injustice deserving our attention. The store clerk, who shot Michael Haynes II in the back and murdered him apparently during a dispute over the price of condoms, The Georgia business owner onto John McNeil, in jail for shooting Brian Epp, who trespassed onto his Cobb County, Georgia property in December 2005 while waving a box cutter and threatened McNeil's son, after being asked to leave his property multiple times before firing in self-defense. Not to mention the countless unknown cases that railroad black men under the guise of justice.

What is required is what Houston and Marshall did: a structured plan to address the legal burden of what leads to the disproportionate mass incarceration of African Americans. Today such an approach would have to tackle several current legal opinions:

Swain v. Alabama, 380 U.S. 202 (1965): Robert Swain, nineteen, year old black male, was indicted, tried and convicted of raping a white woman in Talladega County, Alabama, and received the death sentence. There had been five African Americans on the grand jury panel of thirty-three, two of whom served on the grand jury which indicted Swain. Of those in the county eligible for jury selection for grand and petit juries, 26% are Negroes, while the jury panels since 1953 have averaged 10% to 15% African Americans. Of the eight on the venire, two were exempt, and six were peremptorily struck by the prosecutor. The court held that: A defendant in a criminal case is not constitutionally entitled to a proportionate number of his race on the trial jury or the jury panel and that purposeful racial discrimination is not satisfactorily established by showing only that an identifiable group has been underrepresented by as much as 10%. The courts conclusion was that there is no evidence in this case that the jury commissioners applied different jury selection standards as between people based on race.

Purkett v. Elem (94-802), 514 U.S. 765 (1995): During jury selection, he objected to the prosecutor's use of peremptory challenges to strike two black men from the jury panel, an objection arguably based on Batson v. Kentucky, 476 U.S. 79 (1986). The prosecutor explained his strikes: "I struck [juror] number twenty two because of his long hair. He had long curly hair. He had the longest hair of anybody on the panel by far. He appeared to not be a good juror for that fact…I don't like the way they looked, with the way the hair is cut, both of them. And the mustaches and the beards look suspicious to me." The Supreme Court upheld this was valid.

Then there are Batson v. Kentucky, 476 U.S. 79 (1986) and United States v. Armstrong (95-157), 517 U.S. 456 (1996) among others. Like I said, we cannot depend on the current administration to do anything albeit in his book “The Audacity of Hope,” Obama admitted his drug use and how it could have derailed his future. The president is quick to say he is against the disparity in the criminal justice system yet his actions prove otherwise. His first Chief of Staff, Rahm Emanuel increase funding for Clintons "COPS ON THE BEAT" program in 2007 when he co-sponsored the COPS Improvements Act of 2007 - Amends the Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act of 1968 to make grants for public safety and community policing programs (COPS ON THE BEAT or COPS program). Although Clinton claimed that this program was impactful in decreasing crime, a GAO report indicated if any reduction occurred in violent crimes it was barely 1 percent at a cost of $8 billion. Moreover, Worrall & Kovandzic (2007) showed that COPS spending had little to no effect on crime.

Two more suspect members of the team include Vice President Joe Biden and Attorney General Eric Holder. Biden has always been in the led of the war on drugs, on everything from marijuana to steroids. He even wrote the legislation that created the position of a national "Drug Czar", and his Anti-Drug Proliferation Act provides 20-year prison sentences for folk who throw parties in their home if drug use occurs. In addition, he was a proponent of the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act in 1994, which allocated substantial funds for construction of new prisons, established boot camps for delinquent minors, and brought the death penalty for crimes related to drug dealing. Biden’s 1994 Omnibus Crime Bill included a provision allowing for the federal execution of drug kingpins, asserting that drug-related offenses were equivalent to, or worse than murder.

Eric Holder is no better than Biden or Emanuel. Holder, a former D.C. prosecutor, and the chief law enforcement officer in the U.S., complained that prosecuting the banking executives who caused the 2008 global financial crisis and subsequent deep recession was too difficult. But he is all game for marijuana. As U.S. Attorney in Washington, D.C., Eric Holder sought to raise marijuana penalties and restore mandatory minimum penalties for drug crimes. His plan was to set minimum sentences of 18 months for first-time convicted drug dealers, 36 months for the second time and 72 months for every conviction thereafter.

All I am saying is that we cannot wait for Obama, even if he is a black president with a past of self-admitted weed and drug use to protect the average black man on the street who are disproportionately targeted by the drug war and court system, to help us. We need another brave group of legal minds like Houston and Marshall to adeptly and shrewdly dismantle the new laws of modern Jim Crow. If either were living today, they would probable say the same about mass incarceration as Houston did education. “This fight for equality of educational opportunity (was) not an isolated struggle. All our struggles must tie in together and support one another. . . We must remain on the alert and push the struggle farther with all our might.”

Could Obama be impeached over Libya?

U.S. Proposes New Laws to Control IRAs

The United States government is preparing new laws to take control and even seize private retirement accounts. The proposed law, which is in Congress now, is called the Automatic IRA bill.

S. 1141, the Automatic IRA Act was first introduced in 2007. It is a bill designed to amend the Internal Revenue code of 1986 to allow employees not covered by qualified retirement plans to save for retirement through automatic payroll deposit IRAs, to facilitate similar savings by the self-employed, and for other purposes.

To put it simply, it is designed to control, confiscate and destroy the private retirement system. Similar in concept to the legislation that recently passed that nationalizes health care, this government program has an identical goal with regards to individual retirement plans.

Congressman Richard Neal, D-Mass., has introduced legislation that would allow companies to set up automatic payroll deposit individual retirement accounts, or auto IRAs, for workers who do not have access to employer-provided qualified pension plans.

Jeff Bingaman, D-N.M., introduced similar legislation in the Senate last Friday. In Bingaman's bill, employers would receive a $250 tax credit for each of the first two years that the plan was in operation, even if they contributed nothing to the accounts. However, companies that failed to offer an automatic IRA option to employees would be subject to an excise tax of $100 for each employee who was supposed to be covered. Employers who made an error would have the opportunity to self-correct.

The problem, according to David Salisbury, president of the Employee Benefit Research Institute is that "a very substantial portion of those workers without a retirement plan at work are low-income people.” This means that African Americans, who generally do not invest, will be subjected to the will of people who will not have their best interest at hand. In addition, given that many blacks do not know or understand investing, they will likely accept advice from the government on what to invest in without question.

The concept was proposed in President Obama’s budget and supported by the Middle Class Task Force chaired by Vice President Joe Biden.

However, as it reads, it is not hard to discern why many feel that the Auto IRA is the first step towards controlling a person’s retirement assets and replacing our private system with a forced, government controlled Social Security type of program. Moreover, seeing that it would be government run, the feds would decide where or how to invest your money, rather than the individual making that decision. This means that the government could decide to purchase junk Treasury bonds to bolster a weak dollar or pay down the national debt. Thus subjecting an individual to confiscatory levels of taxes and penalties that will even target previously taxed Roth IRA accounts.