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.”

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