The Corporate Black Caucus and Other Black Leaders Selling Us Out

OCTOBER 2008 SCORES AND STATUS FOR MEMBERS OF THE CONGRESSIONAL BLACK CAUCUS Bishop, Sanford GA, 2nd Score: 50% Status: Derelict F Butterfield, G. K. NC, 1st Score: 75% Status: Underachiever C+ Brown, Corrine FL, 3rd Score: 50% Status: Derelict F Clarke, Yvette NY, 12th Score: 75% Status: Underachiever C+ Clay, William. “Lacy” MO, 1st Score: 87.5% Status: Consensus B+ Cleaver, Emmanuel MO, 5th Score: 62.5% Status: Underachiever D Clyburn, James SC, 6th Score: 50% Status: Derelict F Conyers, John MI, 14th Score: 87.5% Status: Consensus B+ Cummings, Elijah MD, 7th Score: 68.75% Status: Underachiever D+ Davis, Artur AL, 7th Score: 50% Status: Derelict F Davis, Danny IL, 7th Score: 75% Status: Underachiever C+ Ellison, Keith MN, 5th Score: 75% Status: Underachiever C Fattah, Chaka A, 2nd Score: 62.5% Status: Underachiever D Green, Al TX, 9th Score: 62.5% Status: Underachiever D+ Hastings, Alcee FL, 23rd Score: 50% Status: Derelict F Jackson, Jesse Jr. IL, 2nd Score: 87.5% Status: Consensus B+ Jackson-Lee, Sheila TX, 18th Score: 87.5% Status: Consensus B+ Jefferson, William LA, 2nd Score: 87.5% Status: Consensus B+ Johnson, Eddie Bernice TX, 30th Score: 62.5% Status: Underachiever D Johnson, Hank GA, 4th Score: 87.5% Status: Consensus B+ Kilpatrick, Carolyn MI, 13th Score: 62.5% Status: Underachiever D Lee, Barbara CA, 9th Score: 87.5% Status: Consensus B+ Lewis, John GA, 5th Score: 87.5% Status: Consensus B+ Meek, Kendrick FL, 17th Score: 62.5% Status: Underachiever D Meeks, Gregory NY, 6th Score: 56.25% Status: Derelict F Moore, Gwen WI, 4th Score: 75% Status: Underachiever C+ Rangel, Charles NY, 15th Score: 75% Status: Underachiever C+ Richardson, Laura CA, 37th Score: 50% Status: Derelict F Rush, Bobby IL, 1st Score: 68.5% Status: Underachiever D Scott, David GA, 13th Score: 62% Status: Underachiever D Scott, Robert “Bobby” VA, 3rd Score: 87% Status: Consensus B+ Thompson, Bennie MS, 2nd Score: 75% Status: Underachiever C+ Towns, Edolphus NY, 10th 62.5% Underachiever D Waters, Maxine CA, 35th Score: 75% Status: Underachiever C+ Watson, Diane CA, 33rd Score: 68.75% Status: Underachiever D Watt, Melvin NC, 12th Score: 62.5% Status: Underachiever D The Congressional Corporate Black Caucus and Civil Rights leaders are selling their blackness off to corporate American and Black America is suffering. We need real advocates, real voices for our liberation from years of neglect and not so subtle racism. Corporate America wants to seem sympathetic to communities of color while they are fucking us. The Corporate Black Caucus, Rainbow Push, Al Sharpton and the like will give them that cover for the right price. They let Corporatocracy pretend to care about our community give a minuscule amount to us, pay off our leaders and then screw us over. The Black Agenda Report has put together a series of critical votes to Black citizens and you can see the result. They are a mess and need to go. It is not just congressional black Leaders. Civil Rights leaders are doing the same. The worst of the worst because the Southern Christian Leadership Conference is an organization where Dr. Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. came from. And they are using that cache to support THE WORST OFFENDER AGAINST BLACK AMERICA. Subprime loans are very simple, they offer credit to the Black community but make their victims pay huge interest rates and lie to their victims about it. They lie and bankrupt the community. Why would anyone support companies that even this administration find offensive? We should be providing our community access to credit but at below market interest rates so they can pay it back. Microfinance should be what the SCLC and other Civil Rights groups focus on. Of course that wouldn’t make them personally rich. Disgusting: Civil Rights Groups Defending Predatory Lenders: Priceless What does Martin Luther King Jr. have to do with payday lenders? Nada, but that hasn't stopped African American leaders from invoking his name as they shill for the credit industry." At the end of June, as the subprime mortgage crisis was driving the economy into a tailspin, Charles Steele Jr., the president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), took to the op-ed page of the Washington Post to decry the devastating effect the meltdown was having on minority homeowners. But rather than support currently pending measures to better regulate the credit markets, the leader of one of the nation's oldest civil rights groups instead attacked them. Steele was particularly upset about a Federal Reserve proposal that would crack down on subprime credit cards—high-interest cards marketed to people with bad credit. Steele rose to the card issuers' defense, invoking his group's founder, Martin Luther King Jr., and claiming that any move to regulate the cards would deny minorities access to much-needed credit. The argument was an odd one coming from a civil rights group. Most consumer groups believe that the subprime industry is largely predatory, and rife with abuses that disproportionately affect minorities. But Steele's op-ed makes a lot more sense when you consider a detail the Post at first left out: In August 2007, the SCLC formed a partnership with CompuCredit, a subprime credit card issuer and payday lending company. …While the civil rights group has been lauding its corporate partner, the federal government has taken a slightly different view of CompuCredit's contributions to economic empowerment. Last month, the Federal Trade Commission sued the company for unfair and deceptive trade practices, as well as violating the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act. The FTC alleged that CompuCredit bilked consumers out of at least $217 million through a scheme in which consumers paid so much in fees that they rarely had any credit available on the company's Visa cards. …The fraud allegations against the company don't seem to have soured the storied civil rights group's enthusiasm for it. After the FTC filed its suit in June, Steele defended the company, saying that CompuCredit "has been a true friend to the SCLC and to the communities and individuals it serves, and in our opinion is one of the few financial services companies that is working diligently to increase access to credit in underserved communities." William Jelani Cobb, a history professor at Atlanta's Spelman College who has followed the fortunes of the civil rights infrastructure, says that he was unaware of the SCLC's relationship with CompuCredit, but is not surprised by it. "It's an indictment of how far SCLC has gone from its historic roots. These folks owe their existence to a moral claim to helping other black folks. This is an outright betrayal of that." …Three years ago, Al Sharpton went so far as to appear in TV commercials for LoanMax, a company that specializes in auto-title loans, whose 300 percent interest rates consumer advocates consider deeply predatory. CompuCredit has participated in Jesse Jackson's Rainbow/PUSH Coalition's career fairs and economic summits. Local affiliates of the National Urban League, one of the nation's oldest civil rights groups, have worked with the payday lending industry trade group, the Consumer Financial Services Association (CFSA), to conduct financial literacy seminars. Denise Harrod, CompuCredit's vice president, has served on business committees of the National Conference of Black Mayors and the National Black Caucus of State Legislators, both of which have received money from the payday lending industry. And this is one of the main reason our community is suffering. OUR LEADERS ARE SELLING US OUT. Or as one of my favorite bloggers likes to say, “that is House Negro behavior.” RSS Feed

We Need A Real Economic Recovery Act

One of the more promising developments coming out of the sweeping Democratic victory is talk of a real economic/stimulus bill to move the country in the right direction. Not the silly $300 we got, but a real plan to move the economy in the right direction and rebuild from the bottom up. Banks need to lend, but it won't matter if people aren't spending, we are being kicked out of our homes and no real job to support future earnings. Rebuilding a functioning middle class will take the sort of investment that the New Deal was good at. And it can move us in the right direction for our foreign policy. Per Political Affairs.net (great site) a bill taking shape would include: * Investment in alternative energy development and new green collar jobs; * An extension of unemployment benefits; * Expansion of the Food Stamp program; * Re-negotiation of mortgage terms for those about to lose their homes; * An increase in the Community Economic Development discretionary budget to $250 million a year so that community economic development corporations (CDCs) can create more business and employment opportunities in economically distressed neighborhoods and communities that have been hit hardest by the sub-prime loan crisis; and most important * A major economic stimulus package that would provide $250 billion in direct assistance to states and local governments for infrastructure development. This kind of direct federal spending for community and economic development would be far more productive than rebate checks. It will create jobs and crucial investments where it counts and is needed. This is simple and just makes sense. Green Jobs are the future, and the one place America still has capacity to have a competitive advantage. What I mean is that we already have the infrastructure, ability to quickly educate, and the skilled work force to quickly move into being a leader in developing the Green technology of the future. Other countries are moving to take the mantle, but if we move quickly we can be the center for the coming Green Revolution. This will of course also take away are reasons for continual war in the Middle East (we will find made up reasons for war in other regions, but that is another post). An extension of unemployment, food support and mortgage refinancing gives American the bridge to just make it and allows our economy to keep functioning. State and local governments are struggling, giving direct support can help all the loss in revenue and foster job growth. As will the very direct Community Economic Development. There is no reason this recession become a depression if the Dems act out of their nature and go bold. We need this bill if not more to use this downturn to push America in the right direction for the future. RSS

Rest In Peace Odetta Holmes

I am really sad we have lost such a powerful and beautiful voice for the civil rights movement. She will be oh so sorely missed. I understand why she was rushed back, clearly Hashem wants to hear that voice up close. Via Jack and Jill Politics: Odetta, 77, the folk and blues singer whose renditions of civil rights anthems accompanied historic events and made history themselves, died last night in New York. Afflicted for years with heart and lung ailments, she died at Lenox Hill Hospital, which she had entered at the end of October for treatment of kidney failure, according to her manager, Douglas Yeager. Rest in Peace Technorati Tags: Odetta, Civil Rights Leaders, Rest in Peace RSS

Mumbai Tragedy Via Greatness of Daily Show Writers

The Daily Show With Jon StewartM - Th 11p / 10c Mumbai Tragedy Barack Obama Interview John McCain Interview Sarah Palin Video Funny Election Video I have to admit I held my breath when the Daily Show went to tackle the Mumbai attacks. I shouldn't have. Truth be told I didn't have the guts to cover it myself, what do you say? I will let the Daily Show do it for me. RSS

When News does Investigative Journalism, People Watch

For too long this myth that the American Public just wants celebrity gossip and trite fluff news has been used by the media to excuse its horrible news reporting. Well the Columbia Journalism Review has put that to rest: The decade-long collaboration between the Project for Excellence in Journalism and several academics led by Wellesley College political scientist Marion Just concludes that the more local TV invests in quality reporting, the bigger its audience tends to be. Crime news and celebrity news, contrary to all popular and professional wisdom, they say, aren’t as appealing to TV viewers. ….Rosenstiel and Just, on the other hand, insist that it is newsroom misperceptions about public taste that defeat quality, that newsrooms erroneously believe that the public wants sensation and gossip rather than substance. Rosenstiel and Just’s extensive national data indicate that newscasts with quality news have bigger and demographically more desirable audiences. The truth is that we are not watching this crap. More and more Americans are turning off their TV’s during the news or turning the channel. More Americans are putting down their Newspapers and going online. Not because they don’t want the news, but because we know the news we are getting is shit. The Daily Show and Colbert have an ever increasing audience because they do a better job of covering the news than anyone on TV. And they have real experts on to talk about the days issues. The reason the news sucks is not because they don’t know this. They know that playing their constitution role of challenging power and digging for the truth sells papers. What it doesn’t sell is advertising dollars. Even more importantly, why would a company that is getting rich making Apache Helicopters for the war in Iraq do an investigative peace on the coast of the war in Iraq? It just isn’t good business sense. News creation is owned by a dwindling few, with only 6 companies controlling nearly everything we read, see, and hear throughout the day. They have no interest in investing in the sort of investigative journalism that would actually sell papers or get people to watch. But NEVER LET THEM TELL YOU JUNK NEWS IS WHAT THE PEOPLE WANT, it is what the corporate owners want. RSS

The Future Could be Upon Us or Pass Us By

Wireless Internet is the future. It will give Americans the ability to access information, push the wheels of business, and bring entertainment wherever we desire it. Led by Japan, Asia and the European Union not far behind is investing in its future by funding the building of this infrastructure. The same way we built roads because it was important to our future, and provided universal electricity, so to Will we finally get on board before the future leaves us or continue to allow our leaders to let us fall behind? Megan Tady explains the US finally eking in the right direction and who is standing against us. READ THE WHOLE ARTICLE IT IS IMPORTANT: Wireless to the People ….The Federal Communications Commission used the stadium to test mobile wireless devices that harness vacant portions of the public airwaves. To me, the results of these tests — which could lead to high-speed Internet access for all Americans — is more thrilling than any quarterback sack. In the early days of television, the government established empty spectrum areas (dubbed “white spaces”) between TV channels to guard against broadcast interference. These white spaces are beachfront property for broadband spectrum, with signal strength so powerful it can penetrate buildings and trav