Federal Government Forgets I am a man

This week reminds me of why Martin Luther King, Jr. was in my home town when he met his untimely murder. It was because of the garbage strike, I suspect many folk don’t know about it to even care, or even understand its corollary with today’s US economic crisis.

Ask any Black person, and they will say the economy is growing. They will also say that it is all because of the policies of President Barack Obama. Ask the same folk how the dollar is doing in the world and the present US economic picture for employment prospects, and they will say he is doing his best and that it will take time, or that he is not just the President for Black Americans. But you never hear such pronouncements with respect to Jewish people, Gay or Lesbians or even Hollywood. They get mentioned and African Americans are conveniently left out of the conversation.

Now I am writing about the economic situation America finds itself in but I want to make this lucidly terse - I was objectively as critical about former commanders in chief starting with Regan and I will continue to be until my dying years as long as I can both read and write. But never have I been attacked prior (and I expected to be attacked) by my own folks for pointing out mathematical facts. For I know some uppity progressive, quasi-liberal, libertarian hating black political pundit will take aim and me and ridicule my suppositions, even if they don’t have facts on their side, all to protect the current Teflon President.

Again, proponents blinded by party affiliation will say the economy is growing and will give the President Props and if it is doing bad will blame it on the GOP. I think both are equally responsible but if it is so good, then tell that to the average African American or college student who is under employed or unemployed.

Fact is many recent college graduates are working at coffee shops and tend to be very skilled workers with higher degrees. In addition, each day they are increasingly ending up in lower-skilled jobs that don't really require a degree. This means they are making it even harder for unskilled workers who usually get such jobs out of the work force and yet, the present administration has offered no policy response to deal with this phenomenon. And by the way, the unskilled can be a synonym for the African American worker.

The US Labor Department reports that approximately 280,000 Americans with bachelor’s degrees and 37,000 with advanced degrees were working minimum-wage jobs in 2012 and that the number of college-educated Americans working such jobs has risen 70 percent in the past 10 years ( a figure double the number who worked minimum-wage jobs before the Great Recession).

The reality is that the high-wage, middle-skilled job — the thing that sustained the middle class in the past no longer exist. Although the mantra of the economy is getting better is batted around like a whiffle ball, the math shows us that the U.S. economy is in a bubble inflated by money created out of thin air by the federal reserve, and all of this money, instead of creating jobs, is going into the stock market by already well-off and wealthy folks. And this cannot and will not last. Obama’s approach is just as Regan’s economic approach - “trickle down.” When the Federal Reserve prints new money, it is basically reducing or stealing the value of the dollar (all the money you have in your bank accounts and wallet).

The math shows us that the Federal Reserve Bank is buying approximately $85 billion in assets every month, while at the same time keeping its key interest rate near zero. This does nothing to reduce unemployment or create jobs but rather only serves investors and big wig traders in the various stock and bond markets. This is why corporate profits and Stock prices are up. The question remains, why isn’t anyone hiring?

Fifteen percent of Americans are on food stamps according to the latest USDA report for November 2012. To put it plainly, in America, there are two economies - one for the rich, and the other for everyone else. The number of Americans on food stamps now exceeds the combined populations of "Alaska, Arkansas, Connecticut, Delaware, District of Columbia, Hawaii, Idaho, Iowa, Kansas, Maine, Mississippi, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Mexico, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Oregon, Rhode Island, South Dakota, Utah, Vermont, West Virginia, and Wyoming." If one is lucky to have a job, it goes on deaf ears that the average worker’s hourly wages, after accounting for inflation, were nearly 2 percent lower this year than last year, and in total is taking home less than $800 a week.

As it stands one in four of every US citizens that is employed has a job that pays $10 an hour or less and for the first time ever, more than a million public school students in the United States are homeless. To top it all off, the U.S Dollar is losing its status as the world reserve currency. Just last week, five of the top ten economies in the world, decided to no longer use the dollar as an intermediary currency for trade. Last week the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) agreed to set up a development bank to compete with the IMF, indicating it's gearing up to compete in a post-dollar world. In addition, Australia (the world's 12th-ranked economy), China (2nd behind the U.S.), Japan (3rd), Brazil (6th), India (9th), and Russia (10th), have agreed to bypass the dollar in bilateral trade with China.

President Obama and Geithner’s toxic asset plan has enabled one of the biggest transfer of wealth in history allowing for big banks to transfer their toxic debts from fraudulent activities to the American People. All the banks are doing is redistributing the nation’s wealth to shareholders and their top executives. This what President Obama has done, even with all his flossy rhetoric is assist the wealthy in get richer at everyone else’s expense. All of the monetary and economic policy of the last 3 years has helped the wealthiest and penalized everyone else. Wall Street is good but Main Street isn’t. How can it be when the richest 10% own 98.5% of all financial securities like stocks and bonds?

But for some reason or another, our economic prowess is always, or in most cases obviated by the inability to be critical of the current administration. For it seems as for most black folk, politics involved talking about President Obama and even his policies in the affirmative only, Trayvon Martin or the GOP. I don’t hear any of the TV propagandists of the African American community dare mention the president’s name in the same sentence with growing equity disparities, employment and poverty as a function of race. And you shole wont here nothing asserting that under the Obama administration, crony capitalism has gotten worse. As President, Obama is prosecuting fewer financial crimes than Bush, or his father, Clinton or even Ronald Reagan.

I recall of this as I said, on the week in which one of the greatest men to ever live was killed. King was in Memphis, marching with sanitation workers on strike for a living wage when he was killed. No one remembers the words he stated while delivering a speech a Stanford University a year before his death: “In this America people are poor by the millions. They find themselves perishing on a lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity.” And no one remembers how he frequently spoke about poverty and how that during his time, America had about 40 million people living in poverty. Obama seems to ignore that in America, the richest nation in the world today, there are almost 100 million people who are in poverty.

The sanitation strike in Memphis started because two sanitation workers, Echol Cole and Robert Walker died when they were crushed to death with the garbage and nobody noticed – crushed in the back of a garbage truck because during a sever rain storm, they were not allowed by the city to seek shelter from storms. Why because white folks in Memphis at the time didn’t like or want any of the all black sanitation workers to stop in their neighborhoods. Cole and Walker couldn’t fit inside of the truck, so they crawled in the back where the garbage was placed and a broom fell on the lever which resulted in them being crushed to death with the garbage.

I would wish that folks knew this and would never forget this, for this is where the slogan “I am a man. I am a man, not a piece of garbage" originated. It seems that the Federal Government in all of its aspects seems to forget that African Americans are people and that we are men, not the refuse and waste or cheap labor for the rich.

Remembering the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church bombing and Virgil Ware

This year, 38 years ago, two events shaped history in the goal of equal rights and liberty for all in America. They were events that showed the ugly that festered inside of America, an ugliness based on a terroristic hate and race supremacy. These events were the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church bombing in Birmingham and the murder and lynching of Virgil Lamar Ware. The common element was that the both occurred on killed Sept. 15, 1963 and both involved children.

On that Sunday, a white man was seen placing a box under the stairs outside of the church, which had become a meeting-place for civil efforts to register African Americans to vote in Birmingham.

A few minutes before 10:30 am., the bomb exploded killing four girls who were in the church attending Sunday School: Denise McNair (11), Addie Mae Collins (14), Carole Robertson (14) and Cynthia Wesley (14). In addition, twenty-three other people were also hurt by the blast.

A witness identified a known member of the Ku Klux Klan, Robert Chambliss, as the man who placed the bomb at the but found not guilty of murder and received a hundred-dollar fine and a six-month jail sentence for having the dynamite.

On the same day the 13 year-old Ware was found lynched and mutilated in Birmingham. Virgil Ware had just entered the eighth grade at the all-black Sandusky Elementary School near his home in suburban Pratt City. While working on a paper route with his two brothers. Larry Joe Sims and Michael Lee Farley, both 16, had attended a segregationist rally that day drove by the brother firing two bullets hit Virgil in the chest and cheek, making Virgil Ware the sixth and final black person to be killed in Birmingham that Sunday.

Although African Americans can applauded some overt change with the election of Barack Obama and the erection of a tribute to Martin Luther King, Jr. in Washington, D.C., we must recognize the disservice we actually do ourselves by forgetting about those who gave blood for what we supposedly have currently. To forget in memory yet celebrate in symbols is a defeatist mantra that serves no proactive or productive utility. For it will always be as Dwight David Eisenhower stated, “A people that values its privileges above its principles soon loses both.”

Our privileges have us more knowledgeable of celebrity and avarice than education and self-determination. Thus if such is the case, the principals symbolized in the actions of those before us and the words of Dr. King are long gone and may be never to return.

negro comfortable up in here

One book that left a lasting impression on me as a child was written by Samuel Yette. It was called the choice. In summary he suggested that people of African descent in America had a choice to be proactive or inactive in sustaining their survival in America in light that many in the majority would not lift a finger, if the government proffered such, to enact measure to repress African Americans.

I say this for as some of you all know, I am proud to have been raised in a strong family. My aunt was arrested for sitting in a library to study in the late 1950s. My mother and her siblings marched and were confronted with dogs being unleashed on them as well as the forceful pressure of water from fire hoses sprayed on them. I have learned that the weapon of choice in the war with injustice and hate is the mind as facilitated with words seasoned with serious rumination and historical precedence. So it is not surprising II feel it is my duty to protect and enunciate my beliefs as eloquently as possible in forums with those who preach hate and intolerance. This is why I frequent and post to the Nazi, and racist and skinhead websites/blogs and read them just as much and if not more than blogs run by African Americans.

And you may also be aware that it frustrates me when I share these blogs with others, in particular African American men, and they on the surface appear afraid to post for whatever reason. I had one fellow inform me in query, why post and address such ignorance? My response was that Martin Luther King Jr, and out parents confronted such ignorance in the face of death but it did not stop them for freedom most be aggressively pursued as Frantz Fanon wrote and cannot be given, for if it is it can also be taken back.

As men we must protect and serve our community as a collective. Meaning when we see any form of injustice we must assert our thoughts objectively in the stance for self determination. To do no such thing is unacceptable. Many of these folks, like the skinheads who were just recently exposed to have plotted to kill 88 African American college students, behead non-whites and murder Barack Obama; do so for they know that African American men will not stand to confront them as our ancestors did, men such as David Walker, Martin King Jr and Malcolm X.

They know and smell our aura of weakness and insecurity. And this makes no sense to me, for we will fight our own for calling us out of our name, or will tell a person who is washing our car that they missed a spot, before we would tell a skinhead that we don’t get down like that.

But they do what they do, for they know we Negro comfortable up in here. Yep, we got our Iphones, our 25 pair of air force ones, our big cars, but we don’t have the appreciation of knowledge when we know that there was once a time when folks did learn to read, if found out, their eyes would be removed from their heads and their tongues cut out. That alone should show one the importance of such. Instead we wait for other to tell us instead of have the patience to inform ourselves.

Maybe Frank Tannenbaum was correct when he wrote in Slave and Citizen about the history of America when he asserted “We have denied ourselves the acceptance of the Negro as a man because we have denied him the moral competence to become one, and in that have challenged the religious, political, and scientific bases upon which our civilization rest…and this separation has a historical basis, and in turn it has molded the varied historical outcome.” Yep we still thank we free, and even worse, are Negro comfortable up in here.

and this poem is for we:

Is my mind clear can I see?

I hold my TV and radio dear

Im Negro comfortable up in here

So what I care about the other

About stars and actors over there

Im Negro comfortable up in here

Yea, I don’t read, I listen to what they say

The drop date for lil Wayne’s new cd is near

Im Negro comfortable up in here

Yea im voting for Barack

Don’t know how he differs from McCain real clear

Im Negro comfortable up in here

Stocks and bonds and economics, say what

To busy waiting for VIP in club and BET with cold beer

Im Negro comfortable up in here

thank we free

Yo folk, this is self-evaluative…. we some fked up folks. We seem and appear to care about the mundane, music, sports (of which I am guilty also) entertainers, what folks think of us and anything that really has no direct bearing on our immediate lives. I spent tonight looking at "Boycott": The Montgomery Bus Boycott while I figure many folks were or are out having fun, at a bar, or a club or just out in the streets. And for the record, Jeffrey Wright and Terrence Howard put it down. We didn’t have such worries or cares when we were in the bowels of slave ships being transported to foreign lands.

It is just that now; our slave ships are landed in front of us, on walls and in our bedrooms and come with remote controls. The folk in Montgomery went 381 days without riding the bus. Taking cabs, car pooling, walking and what have you to express their passion for right and showing that thing were not, as the say ALL GOOD. We can’t go without a telephone, a car, a television, the club, or any other material contamination with out bitching and complaining or fusing. Then there is the conundrum of being too lazy to read and the tendency to take what ever we see on the cathode ray tube as being gospel without query.

I aint trying to be deep, albeit folks say I am and chastise me for such, but if the perception is that I am, then so be it. I’m certain Martin King Jr. said the same. But necessity and reality dictated that he had to be deep for others were too shallow(2 quote Gnarles Barkley "its deep how u can be so shallow"), to soft, to scared, to un-informed, poorly read and too preoccupied with the surface contingent to observe that things were not as good as they appeared.

See I still remember when I was six, and Dr. King was murdered in my fair city of Memphis. I can still recant of that day. Of my uncle marching from Hamilton High School, the same school I attended, with the same teachers that taught him and my mother and her sisters, heading toward downtown to burn it down – and that they did. That night all over the city, I can still see to this day the National Guards in their jeeps and on every corner, telling me directly, couldn’t play outside after 8pm in my own yard. I could see the flames lighting up the sky all the way from downtown.

Yea folk, we got a problem, we thank we free, not think, for if we thought, then we would discern the opposite, that we are still, if not more slave than ever. Our passion is not justice, or liberty or self-determination but instead, money, fame, status, and the penchant to not to wan to be bothered about any thing that requires rigorous thought, planning or rumination.

So I write this, take the time to pen these ruminations of mine in honor of the aforementioned man on the weekend leading up to his commemoration. For I learned from him and others that there is a great urgency to attempt to present the invisible to the blind, in times that are perilous when the masses cannot. You see, I take pride for being able to recant his speeches, as well as those of others, and knowing that I have read nearly all of all he and such individuals took the time to write from within the corpus of their being and spirit via their intellect. See I am a fighter for what is just and even worse what I believe in as long as it is not petty. I don’t like to box, albeit I can, for I’d rather beat a person down with brain cells. My momma always told me that if you wanna hide something from a nigga put it a book. I took that lesson to heart and came to realize aint no body deep, others are just lazy and desire for others to do the work for the, So with that said. Dr. King, toast to you. Good Lookin'.

And my folk Eb .... thanks for making me reflect, i guess i cant help it...u good people