Cynthia’s Interests

This experiment in Republican leadership has utterly failed. I wonder how many of the shafted Enron employees voted these people in office. I wonder how far this country has to sink into the abyss before people realize they are drowning.

Wall Street’s investment banks just got another one step closer to making defrauding investors an accepted line of business. And Enron’s employees who lost their pensions and the small investors who got fleeced in the Enron frauds just got shafted again—this time at the urging of President George W. Bush.

Wall Street’s most powerful investment banks and their friends in high places lobbied the U.S. Solicitor General Paul Clement to reject the recommendation of the Securities and Exchange Commission that the Justice Department support defrauded investors in their appeal to the Supreme Court.

Definition of an Empire:

A nation-state that dominates other nation-states and exhibits one or more of the following characteristics:

1) Exploits resources from the lands it dominates

2) Consumes large quantities of resources in amounts that are disproportionate to the size of its population relative to those of other nations

3) Maintain a large military that enforces its policies when more subtle measures fail

4) Spreads its language, literature, art, and various aspects of its culture throughout its sphere of influence

5) Taxes not just its own citizens, but also people in other countries

6) Imposes its own currency on the lands under its control

The answer is the U.S.

Of the 24 directors on the board of the World Bank, 1/3 of them (8) represent individual countries: the US, Japan, Germany, France, the UK, Saudi Arabia, China, and Russia. The rest of the 184 member-countries share the other 16 directors. The US controls nearly 17% of the votes in the IMF and 16% of the votes in the World Bank; Japan is second with ~6% in the IMF and 8% in the World Bank, followed closely by Germany, the UK, and France each with ~5%.

The US holds veto power over major decisions and the president of the US appoints the World Bank president.

It is really absurd for Black people to say that we are not owed anything from this society and it is equally insulting for a White person to tell us we need to pull ourselves up by our bootstraps as if that is what they are doing and have done in the past. 

 The below excerpt was taken from the blog "The Assault on Black Sanity".

As Dr. Marimba Ani has said:“the trade in Afrikan lives and the enslavement of Afrikan beings by Europeans constituted the most thoroughly destructive act ever to be perpetuated by one group of people upon another.”

Since this Holocaust was both a destruction of humanity and a crime against humanity, there are unresolved issues from this historical period which still impact us today that we must resolve. There are legal and economic issues which need to be resolved. There are cultural and psychological issues which need to be resolved. If we continue to ignore these issues we will be coming here, celebrating Juneteenth for the next ten years, while our basic condition—powerlessness—remains unchanged.

If one group of people stops committing a crime against another, that does not mean that the legal issues are over. In this particular case the criminals were never charged or punished for their crimes against Afrikan humanity which included the theft of Afrikan labor. Sometimes, I don’t think we grasp the enormity of the theft of Afrikan labor. For example the US Gross Domestic Product per capita for 1865 was $2606.00. The per capita GDP is an index of the economy’s average output per person and is closely related to the per capita income. Thus 4 million enslaved Afrikans times $2606 would equal $10.424 billion of economic output. So our ancestors were robbed of over 10 billion dollars in 1865 alone, and this robbery went on for 246 years.

Not only were our ancestors robbed, the wealth generated from their economic output, instead of being passed from one generation of Afrikan Americans to another, was passed from one generation of European Americans to another. So we were robbed of our potential inheritances. Money from our ancestors which should have gone into our pockets went into the pockets of others and we are simply supposed to forget about this. No way! Reparations are due for these crimes. This issue of reparations must be planted in our frontal lobes. We cannot truly celebrate until we resolve this issue.

All Things Cynthia McKinney and The Assault on Black Sanity (I have to warn you, besides me, some of the contributors of this blog are the most progressive Black bloggers I have ever run across in the Black Blogosphere). You have been warned.

Last night I went to hear John Perkins promote his new book, “The Secret History of the American Empire: Economic Hit Men, Jackals, and the Truth About Global Corruption”. It is a must read.

While there, I bought another book called “The Trouble With Diversity” by Walter Benn Michaels.

The trouble with diversity is perhaps the most incisive look yet at how liberalism – in its polite, well-meaning way – missed the boat on the greatest liberal issues of our time: inequality. Worse: as Michaels shows, liberalism, with its almost obsessive concern for diversity, has actually managed to make the problem invisible. Thomas Frank...

To see this in action, you only have to look at the Black Blogosphere.

I have to link to this – this is too cute. Obama Girl can sing and dance. If you haven’t seen this, make sure you look at the YouTube video of I got a crush on Obama.

On Conservatives and Black Voter Disenfranchisement

“I don’t want everybody to vote. Elections are not won by a majority of the people. They never have been from the beginning of our country and they are not now. As a matter of fact, our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down.

– Conservative activist Paul Weyrich, at a 1980 training session for Christian conservatives

I saw this post over at Premptive Karama: One Black Man is OK, Two is Too Much?

An Obama-Powell ticket would be "too black" and American voters would never go for it. It blew my mind for several reasons. The first shock came in realizing that both men were black. Until the comment was made, that fact actually had not occurred to me. The second shock came in realizing that my friend not only noticed it, but also thought it was too great an obstacle for the men to overcome. The third shock came in thinking that perhaps racism was more intransigent than I realized.

This is a good example of the State of America in terms of what it thinks of Black people.

It is these types of antics that make me wonder about Obama. All of us are aware of the lies told by Powell leading up to the Iraqi war. I guess this is what happens when you are running for the President, if you are a Democrat, you must be in the middle, if you are a Republican, it is ok to be right of the center. One has to wonder about the logic of the Democrats.

Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama has sought and received foreign policy advice from former Secretary of State Colin Powell.