Viewpoints
- Created on 25 April 2013
Black Leaders Have Sold Out
Once again the Black community has been shown how irrelevant they have become in the U.S. Most of the blame can be laid at the feet of the media appointed Black leadership for selling out their people. And we’ve gotten nothing in return. At least Judas Iscariot had sense enough to get 30 pieces of silver when he sold out Jesus Christ.
Isn’t it amazing that with all the debate swirling around the issue of amnesty for the illegals in the U.S., no one on either side of the debate has engaged with the Black community? Blacks will be hurt the most by giving amnesty to these 11 million illegals and yet there has not been one town hall meeting with the Black community to discuss how this issue will negatively impact the Black community’s high unemployment rate.
The official Black unemployment rate was 13.3 percent in March, approximately double the White rate of 6.7 percent. If the White community had the same unemployment number as Blacks, it would be declared a national emergency and Congress would be having hearings all over the country to solve this problem.
So, why do liberal Black groups – the NAACP, the National Urban League, and the Congressional Black Caucus – put so much energy in support of homosexual marriage and amnesty for illegals? These groups acknowledge the unemployment rate in the Black community is at an epidemic level, but their solution is to increase competition for the few low and unskilled jobs, in which Blacks are disproportionately represented.
So the media trots out Ben Jealous, Marc Morial, Marcia Fudge, and Al Sharpton to provide political cover for a policy that will further devastate the Black community. These folks do not represent the Black community, they represent the Democratic Party. In most cases, the Black community’s interest is not the same as the Democratic Party’s interests. Jealous, Morial, Fudge, and Sharpton are more concerned with getting invited to a party so they can take a picture with Obama or Valerie Jarrett.
Why is it that these media appointed Blacks always take up other groups’ causes to the detriment of the people they claim to represent?
Where was the illegal Hispanic community on Trayvon Martin? Where was the homosexual community on apartheid in South Africa or the genocide in Rwanda? Where are the White women on repealing the “wet foot, dry foot policy” in Miami?
None of these groups have stood with Blacks on any of these issues, yet Blacks lose their minds to support them on the issues they care about—homosexual marriage, amnesty for illegals, and including women in affirmative action.
The rank-and-file in the Black community is totally against amnesty for illegals, marriage for homosexuals, etc. In fact, in a poll commissioned for BET Founder Robert L. Johnson, respondents were asked: “Do you believe Hispanic Americans will achieve greater economic growth than African Americans over the next 5 years?” More than half – 51 percent – replied yes, with only 19 percent saying no and 30 percent not sure.
Can somebody please explain to me how the media touts polls that say 65 percent of Americans support homosexual marriage, yet 30 states have laws on the books that define marriage as between a man and a woman? The math doesn’t add up. Even in the Bob Johnson poll, the Black community was split, with 42 percent saying marriage should be restricted to a man and a woman. When asked if equal rights for gays are the same as equal rights for Blacks, 55 percent said no, 28 percent said yes and 17 percent were unsure.
So, to my many readers, don’t believe all the bogus polls about how America supports amnesty for these illegals—because they don’t. Remember, these are the same polls that said the criminal background check bill would past the Senate last week.
So, as it was with the defeat of the criminal background check bill before the Senate last week, the amnesty bill submitted in the Senate will similarly be defeated. The liberal media and their appointed Black mouthpieces will be totally discredited upon the defeat of this amnesty bill.
These are some of the issues that the Republican Party can engage with the Black community on and win new allies in the fight to bring them into the party. I challenge GOP leaders to do a series of town hall meetings within the Black community on these issues of illegal immigration, homosexual marriage, and values in general.
Even within the Republican Party, there are varying positions on these issues, but the point of the town halls is to show that there are many opinions within the Black community on these issues. As I have often said, Republicans never engage the Black community even when they agree with the party on certain issues. As Reagan once told me, “my 80 percent friend is not my 20 percent enemy.”
If the Republican Party deals with some of these issues, then we might be able to say, “My 93 percent enemy can become my 20 percent friend.”
Raynard Jackson is president & CEO of Raynard Jackson & Associates, LLC., a Washington, D.C.-based public relations/government affairs firm. He can be reached through his Web site, www.raynardjackson.com. You can also follow him on Twitter at raynard1223.
- Created on 25 April 2013
The Abortion Holocaust
Let me first say that I believe a woman should have the right to an abortion. It is the law and each person has their own decision to make. However, since the court decision, Roe V. Wade, the amount of abortions in this nation have been on a steady rise.
Black abortions are now at an epidemic rate and a lot of God’s children are being snuffed out without a chance of life. The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) states that in 2010 Blacks comprised of 12.6 percent of our national population. However, we account for 35.4 percent of all abortions during that year. In sum, since the court decision Black women have removed from their bodies 15 million babies. This year alone they will account for over 400,000 Black abortions. Minorities kill babies at more than three times the rate of White children.
The historical trend is amazing. The CDC reports that during the 1970s, roughly 24 percent of all U.S. abortions were performed on Black women. That percentage rose to 30 percent in the 1980s, 34 percent in the 1990s and 36 percent in the 2000s. Our population has been growing at a slower rate than some groups. This can be attributed to the mass elimination of our precious children who lie within their mothers’ womb. Hispanics have surpassed us as the second largest population group in the nation. Why? I think we have an answer – abortion frenzy. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. once said, “The Negro cannot win as long as he is willing to sacrifice the lives of his children for comfort and safety.”
What is fanning this awful flame? I truly conclude that it is a very active organization known as Planned Parenthood. Their offices are located in communities with noticeable minority populations. It becomes clear they are targeting minorities, particularly Blacks. Let’s look at the roots of Planned Parenthood. Its founder, Margaret Sanger, had fascist and racist views and supported eugenics. Eugenics is the applied science of strengthening the population by increasing the breeding of those who are desired and weeding out the strains of humanity that is considered weak and feeble.
Sanger and her board of directors were of the same ilk. They admired Adolph Hitler and his “final solution” for Jews. They were candid in their beginning stages and the evolution of Planned Parenthood (merging with like groups). The eugenic theme was strong in Sanger’s magazine, the Birth Control Review, which she started in 1917. Some of her articles were titled, “Some Moral Aspects of Eugenics” (June 1920), “The Eugenic Conscience” (February 1921), “The Purpose of Eugenics” (December 1924), “Birth Control and Positive Eugenics” (July 1925), and “Birth Control: The True Eugenics” (August 1928). I could go on and on. Some of her quotes: “Colored people are like human weeds and are to be exterminated.” Also: “We prefer the policy of immediate sterilization, of making sure that parenthood is ‘absolutely prohibited’ to the feeble-minded.” Finally: “We do not want word to get out that we want to exterminate the Negro Population”.
Before World War II, Sanger and her compatriots flirted intensely with the Nazi view of eugenics. According to www.acts1711.com/sanger.htm, “Lothrop Stoddard was on the board of directors (of Margaret Sanger’s Population Association of America) for years…He had an interview with Adolf Hitler and was very impressed. His book, The Rising Tide of Color against White World Supremacy, was written while he served on Sanger’s board.
Havelock Ellis, one of Sanger’s extra-marital lovers, reviewed the book favorably in The Birth Control Review. As the horrors of the Nazi’s started to be unveiled, Planned Parenthood founders decided to take a more public relations approach. They reached out to Black groups for cover and also to improve their “fishing” of Black women. The Urban League, NAACP, AKA Sorority, AME Church all took the bait. Even today, most in the Black community has a positive image of Planned Parenthood, the provider (through referral) of abortions. Our morality, faith and leadership have gone down the wrong road.
Who owns these abortion clinics? All types do – good and bad; responsible or reckless. Even our Attorney General, Eric Holder, has a connection with a clinic via his wife and in-laws. It is the Old National GYN in College Park, Ga. We all know about the mass murder shop in Philadelphia. Doctor Kermit Gosnell was birthing babies and then killing them by snipping the back of their necks with scissors. They have indicted him on eight counts of murder. Certainly, there are more as he has performed more than 16,000 abortions but he would destroy the evidence to cover his tracks. Did you know that abortion clinics are not regulated? All of this termination of life when we have all types of vehicles for birth control (prevention of pregnancy). Shouldn’t we be wiser and more worthy of heaven above?
Harry C. Alford is the co-founder, President/CEO of the National Black Chamber of Commerce®. Website: www.nationalbcc.org. Email: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. .
- Created on 24 April 2013
Crime Pays – Literally
A recent report by Jason Jenkins, Investment U Research, shows that private prisons are earning even more money via warehousing prisoners and by establishing Real Estate Investment Trusts (REIT) with the land upon which their prisons are built.
Corrections Corporation of America and The GEO Group, the two largest private prison firms, own 75 percent of the for-profit prisons in the U.S. Both companies are registered on the New Your Stock Exchange as CXW and GEO, respectively. According Jenkins’ report, GEO “gets 60 percent of its revenue from company-owned or leased real estate.”
What an idea, huh? I often wonder why we are so slow on the uptake when it comes to dealing appropriately with issues we often rail against. Folks like Tony Brown, whom we seldom hear from these days, and Claud Anderson, are two examples of elders who have for 40 years or more been giving us solution-oriented information on this subject and many others. Yet, we have failed to heed their advice and participate in their initiatives.
Others – including Reginald Lewis, Tom Burrell, Bob Johnson, George Fraser, Michael Roberts, Julianne Malveaux, Brooke Stephens, among others – have shared practical ways for us to empower ourselves economically but their words, for the most part, have fallen on deaf ears.
What does this have to do with prison profits? Back in the latter part of Ronald Reagan’s administration and the early Daddy Bush term, the political mantra was “lock ‘em up and throw away the key” as was pointed out in a Time magazine article written by Jill Smolowe. Then, along comes Bill Clinton who tags right along by proposing that $20 billion be spent on new prisons in this country. So this is an issue that took legs more than 25 years ago.
Even further back, as Amos Wilson shared in his book, Black on Black Violence, “Within five years after the Civil War, the Black percentage of the prison population went from close to zero to 33%. Then, as now, the Black prison population performed an economic and political function for the benefit of Whites.” (Featured in the City Sun, July 18-24, 1990, and written by Clinton Cox, Racism: The Hole in America’s Heart.)
Fast forward to Michelle Alexander’s book, The New Jim Crow, in which her research shows that not much has changed. Once again, the alarm has sounded for many Black people, and we are fired up again about the so-called “Prison Industrial Complex” and all the money it is generating for its owners. I wonder how long it will be before we push the snooze button and go back to sleep on this issue.
We seem to get aroused and engaged in an issue only when it’s fashionable (I call it our crisis du jour), which is a very short period of time. Thus, our recent response to the prison issue is a microcosm of our laxity and, I might add, complacency when it comes to larger issues pointed out by those who have gone on before us, and those who are yet on the battlefield fighting for our economic freedom. We are riled up yet again by the prison money machine, but unless we resolve to do something about it, what does it matter?
In 1994 I wrote an article about this subject that pointed out the move by private corporations to take advantage of the several presidents’ attempts to jail our way out of crime. Remember the Three Strikes Rule? The War on Drugs? Individual states found themselves in a “cell crunch,” operating prisons beyond their capacity. The answer: Build more prisons and provide the developers with “guaranteed occupancy.” The result: prisons for profit – a billion dollar industry.
So what should we do? First, we should institute local and national boycott prisons campaigns, an initiative I called for in 2001 after having a discussion with Nathan Hare in Buffalo, N.Y. It was his idea, not mine, but I thought it was a fantastic idea and ran with it. T-shirts were printed, bumper stickers were made, placards and posters were developed to spread the word and to educate our people about the 13th Amendment, the criminal justice system, and alternative behaviors such as entrepreneurship. The theme was, “Stay out of the cells and get into sales.” There is a chapter on the subject in my last book. What it simply calls for is an end to doing stupid illegal things for which we can and will be sent to jail.
Second, since Black prisoners disproportionately occupy the cells, Black businesses should avail themselves of the tremendous opportunities for “sales” inside the prisons. Instead of always being the profit, we should start earning some of the profit from the prison industry. Can you imagine how much stuff prisons purchase each year?
I’ll end here because I know you get the point. In that Time article, Robert Gangi, executive director of the Correctional Association of New York, warned, “Building more prisons to address crime is like building more graveyards to address a fatal disease.” You know it’s all a game; on what side are you going to play?
Jim Clingman, founder of the Greater Cincinnati African American Chamber of Commerce, is the nation’s most prolific writer on economic empowerment for Black people. He is an adjunct professor at the University of Cincinnati and can be reached through his Web site, blackonomics.com.
- Created on 25 April 2013
The Truth About Chechnya and the Tsarnaev Brothers: An Unfair Connection
After a week of reporting on Dzhokhar and TamerlanTsarnaev – and subsequently, Chechnya – we know no more about this complex part of the world or its people than we did before the Boston Marathon bombings of April 15th.
As soon as Chechnya was identified as the suspects’ homeland of origin, the entire region became a symbol of age-old conflicts, mass stereotyping, and incomplete, Wikipedia-style reporting. Before the Tsarnaev brothers carried out the Boston Marathon bombings, very little attention was concentrated on the region.
- Created on 24 April 2013
President Obama Ends Reagan’s War on Drugs
Being a college student at the time, I clearly remember when Nancy Reagan and the conservative wave in national government helped usher in the nation’s War on Drugs in the 1980s.
Television news images of drug busts, large and small, along with the wholesale arrests and stiffer sentencing for anyone even suspected of drug involvement sent a clear
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