Stepin Fetchit Negroes: A Profile of Roland Martin and the NAACP

A few weeks ago I wrote an opinion piece in which I listed CNN correspondent Roland S. Martin, among others, as a pseudo intellectual. I still stand by those remarks and this week Martin supported my hypothesis even more.

Yesterday, Shirley Sherrod, a loyal and dedicated public servant of the USDA, was asked to tender her resignation, via text message on the side of a Georgia highway, for allegedly making statements that revealed racist views.

Without due diligence, substantiation or proof, the NAACP and its headless horseman of a leader, Benjamin Jealous, and the self-made pundit Roland Martin, vilified Shirley Sherrod and called for her to be removed from office.

The impetus for their reaction was based on information obtained from a conservative Web site of an event that the NAACP conducted and had stored in their archives.

Martin rushed to condemn Sherrod before he had all the facts like a kid running to get the first seat in the back of the bus. Likewise the NAACP, in using its "I can do anything better than you" modus operandi, tried to refute the Tea Party’s recent allegation that it, too, is racist.

The intellectual deficiencies of both the NAACP leadership and Martin are examples of what is wrong with the black community. First, to pretend that they are the most wise and sagacious among us and should speak on behalf of the masses is feculent, given that they respond to emotion more so than reason. Scholars, scientists, and intellectuals do not make decisions as a function of emotion.

As a scientist, I do not make statements or judgments from one survey or one clinical trial, but rather hundreds and even thousands. I will not publish a scientific paper based on one article but many.

This is not an issue about Fox News or Andrew Breitbart as the aforementioned would claim, but more about how inept and incredible the positions evinced by so-called journalists like Martin and leaders like Jealous really are. The truth is neither is the intellectual equal of a James Weldon Johnson, W.E.B. Du Bois or Ida B. Wells.

They are Stepin Fetchit Negroes that respond to any bait that Master places in front of them. They are pawns who present ignorance under the guise of intellect and are of no value to today's African American community.

They should be the ones we ask to resign, for as Plato stated, "Wise men speak because they have something to say; Fools because they have to say something.”

First Published - 21 July 2010 - Rollingout.com

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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.

Obama dont like black folk: Mortgage Relief Program Just a Ploy to Pump Money Into Wall Street

When the Obama administration took office, they also inherited the economic troubles worsened by the Bush years and the prior presidents from Bill Clinton to Ronald Regan. Obama's approach was twofold. First was to continue the TARP program that Bush started at the end of his tenure and to try to curtail the massive number of foreclosures across the country. However, it has now been revealed that his only goal was to prop up banks through the use of both.

New reports have documented that the Obama administration's mortgage relief program isn't working. This is to say it is not helping assist homeowners facing foreclosure. Instead it is taking money from struggling homeowners and channeling it to banks. The program, which many purport is poorly designed and executed, has only aided a small proportion of individuals actually seeking and needing assistance.

In theory, the program was supposed to lower monthly payments for borrowers. However, it doesn't even reduce the overall debt burden that many homeowners facing foreclosure experience. Now it has been discovered that top treasury officials admit that the mortgage plan was actually designed to pump money into banks in an effort to protect them from future losses and bad debt — in essence another program implemented in the interest of Wall Street over Main Street.

Timothy Geithner, who wanted banks to make money in an effort to stabilize the economy, has used the mortgage relief program to enrich bankers riding on the backs of troubled homeowners when the focus should be to assist struggling individuals who are trying to keep their homes.

The Home Affordability Modification Program (HAMP) allows homeowners to ask their loan holders for relief on monthly mortgage payments via reduced monthly payments or lowered interest rates, for example. This is a win-win for banks because it keeps monthly payments coming. However, it actually gives homeowners the shaft because the banks do not lower how much individuals pay, thus individuals end up paying more for their homes than they are actually worth on the market.

Although Obama's economic team continues to repeat the mantra "the economy is continuing to recover," the fact remains that in terms of the aforementioned and economic indicators I read, that is not the case. If Obama is genuine about helping troubled homeowners, then his efforts should target having an individuals debt burden from their mortgages reduced. Banks will take a loss, but massive foreclosures will be averted. This is not a recovery and if the advice of folks like Geithner and Larry Summers is what Obama is using, then we will be up the creek for a long time to come. In all simplicity, we need around 2.5 percent growth just to keep unemployment from rising and until we are honest and admit this is not a recovery, things will only get worse before they improve.

Black folks need to wise up and increase their understanding of economics and look at policy as policy, regardless of who it comes from, even if it is a black president. If we don't, then Kanye West may be saying, "Barack Obama don't like black people."

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The ONLY Card All People Play

In his book, Africa Must Unite, the great African scholar and politician Kwame Nkrumah explored racism and determined that in order to be a racist, you have to be in a position of power to subjugate other races to adopt your standards. That as opposed to prejudice, which can be equal across all individuals.

In politics though, it seems nothing that involves African Americans can get around the issue of race. It's obvious that people do not know what racism is, judging by the way they throw the word around as if it just means hating someone because of their skin color, which is not the case. However, the fact remains that no matter what is accomplished politically, whenever it involves race, the race card gets played.


A new poll released by the Gallup Corporation illustrates my point: Gallup Daily Tracking shows that President Obama's job approval rating averaged 88 percent among blacks and 38 percent among whites in July of this year. This is the first time that African Americans' approval of the job Obama is doing fell below 90 percent. In comparison, whites' approval of Obama is down 24 percent from the high of 62 percent in January 2009. These findings are based on data collected via telephone interviews with a random sample of 15,467 adults, age 18 and older, living in all 50 U.S. states and the District of Columbia.

The query should be what does this data tell us? First, it is emblematic of the political ambience that we exist in as Americans. Today's landscape of unconscious bias demonstrates the influence of its real-world application. And although some Obama detractors are African Americans, the vast majority are white people who develop nugatory beliefs based on simple and extreme claims like if he wears an American flag on his lapel or the belief that he was not born in America. Even his slight bit of color has the capacity to prompt negative associations among white Americans.

But the only reality is that Obama is the president of America, even though for many whites he is just another black man, and is accorded the historical and negligible respect that African American men have received since this great and hypocritical nation was founded.

'Stop, Question, Frisk' Tactics in NYC Reminiscent of Slave Patrols

In order for slavery to be effective as practiced in the United States, the peculiar institution had to maintain strict control over slaves both on and off the plantation. Runaways represented a loss of labor and productivity, so to reduce the chance of that occurring, plantation owners established slave patrols.

Slave patrols had the authority to question, and sometimes punish, any slave they encountered traveling between plantations. Their general objective was control of the slave population through physical intimidation. Kenneth Stampp described slave patrols as a pseudo-police force that were even sanctioned by local political bodies. In her book Slave Catchers, Slave Resisters, Sally E. Hadden pointed out that the system of slave patrols that existed from the 1700s through the Civil War, helped give rise to the Ku Klux Klan during Reconstruction.

That was history, but today in Brooklyn, N.Y., this practice continues. Nightly on the streets and around the public housing complexes in the Brownsville neighborhood, large contingents of police officers, most fresh to the beat patrol, question, frisk and detain people via the controversial tactic known as “Stop, Question, Frisk.”

Just entering a public housing project for these officers is reason enough to ask for identification, and run warrant checks. They even stop youth for riding bicycles on the sidewalk.

The Center for Constitutional Rights and the New York Civil Liberties Union reported that between January 2006 and March 2010, police made nearly 52,000 stops in an eight-block area. Police recorded the names of those stopped regardless of whether they were arrested or not. This is roughly equal to one stop a year for each of the estimated 14,000 neighborhood residents.

These activities result in very few arrests (less than 1 percent), in contrast to the 6 percent of stops that result in arrests across the entire city.

The United States Supreme Court has held that in order for the police to frisk someone they must have a reasonable belief that the person is armed and dangerous. Reasonable suspicion of a crime is not a legal justification for a policeman to frisk an individual.

People need to recognize that these activities are similar to those of the night riders. The only difference is that these individuals drive cars instead of horses and wear blue uniforms instead of white robes. This is not an indictment of individual police officers, but rather a system that continues to practice intimidation tactics that were used during slavery to control and keep the population enslaved.

You a Tea Bagger if....

I Before E except after C: This is their mantra. They hate Islam and immigration, except that is after colored Folks.

They believe that if their children , in particular daughters, swim in a pool with men they will certainly get pregnant.

They actually only watch one television station - Fox, but they both think every thing on it from Football on Sunday to Glee is actually NEWS and fact taken from Revelations - Fox News Most Trusted Channel In News.

You applaud the assertion that Obama is a Muslim, non-christian, off the main Land born Kenyan, yet find it inaccurate and offensive when you call Christine O'donnell an tax cheating, masturbation crazed warlock apprentice.

The father, the son and the holy ghost are code words for David Duke, Ann Coulter and Rush Limbaugh

You believe the Sermon on the Mount was preached by Rev. Jerry Falwell and not Jesus.

You believe only racists, homophobes, Nazis, polygamists, rednecks and Republicans are the only real Americans

You believed that Sarah Palin actually can see Russia from her front porch or that she has even read anything written by Shakespeare or anything other than what someone writes on the palm of her hand for her.

You have someone in your family that fly's the rebel flag and/or lives in a trailer park.

You believe the sun revolves around the Earth.