The DISH
Unbossed and unbought news and information you can use
Vol. 11 Issue 41…Dedicated to the Dialogue on Race…October 12, 2008
By Doug Holloway
Occasionally I am invited to
address a gathering of un-like-minded individuals to present my point of view
on the state of Black progress, as I know it. Some seek to learn. Some seek to
teach. Some seek to ridicule. I am open to them all and relish each and every
comment as a stepping stone to a preconceived destination of my choosing. The
following is an excerpt from one such recent exchange.
Once upon a time I selfishly and
naively thought every slave wanted to be free. That was history as it was
taught to me in the educational environment of various levels of schools. As I
progressed through the journey that was to become my life, I learned that this,
tragically, was not the case at all. I thought of KUNTA KINTE in ROOTS who
innocently said "FIDDLER, that freedom must be a wonderful thing!"
For some I suppose it is, but for just as many others the relevant question was
"Now that we's free, what we gwine do?" Sadly, that question has just
as much relevance today as it did then! That is the shame of the whole thing.
The sacrifices of Black people,
who dared to dream generations ahead of this one, have been bought, sold and
otherwise squandered by the generation that was supposed to be so bright, so
smart, so intelligent - the generation that carried the hopes and dreams of a
people long gone. It is the same generation that wasted the opportunities given
to them in order for them to have a boost up in the world. Perhaps that is
where the problem lies. The importance of just what has/is taking place would
be more evident to those who reap the benefits, had they been compelled to do
more than hold out an empty hand with expectations that it would be filled by
someone else.
To try to answer the question
"FREE TO DO WHAT?" with any semblance of common sense is as futile as
trying to answer the question "WHY VOTE?" Those who don't know the
answer deserve both and neither! WHY DON'T YOU?!
By John Burl Smith
Always one to jump in where
angels fear to tread, I will give what I think is a reasonable answer to the
afore asked questions. The above email from a DISH reader seemed to suggest
slave descendants are engaged in a futile struggle. However, there was another
group of slaves that were freed unexpectedly and vacillated between bondage and
freedom -- the children of
The Bible presents the situation
from the perspective of Moses, who talked directly to God, not from the
perspective of individual slaves. Moses, if anyone, had every reason to believe
and be confident in the success of God's plan; but even he needed constant
reassurance and guidance from God. Even with God on their side and witnessing
His awesome power and spectacular miracles, the children of Jacob did not
follow God in lockstep, faithfully obeying His commands.
Given that reality, one must consider the difficult state of
Archaeological evidence, as well
as Biblical statements regarding Israelite slaves' existence, describes a
wantonly barbaric period (paganism), steeped in animal and human sacrificial
rituals (idolatry). War was the world's economic engine. Individuals had no
value beyond their ability to serve their masters. God took the children of
Jacob, who became Israelites, and used them to change the world. Through them,
a barbaric and heathen world was transformed into a place where humanistic
values, such as love, could be nurtured. It took thousands of years to turn a
bunch of slaves living in a warring world to lay the foundation for the coming
Messiah -- the Prince of Peace.
Present day slave descendants in the
Slaves did not find Jesus Christ, Christ found slaves, and to the amazement of
the world the love they developed as bondsmen and women, serves as a shining
example to the world. Although never having fully experienced freedom's
promise, slave descendants have given the world a sense of freedom that other
far more homogeneous and richer cultures envy and try to emulate. How was it
possible for slaves to find such a "promise land," without a cloud or
flame to follow? Instead of those miracles, a gracious God gave them HOPE!
Hope and love are two of the most powerful forces in the universe. Hope can
sustain one when survival seems impossible. It can enable one to achieve the
unbelievable. A belief by our ancestors that prayers are answered helped them
hold fast to the impossible dream that something better was in store for those
that survived. Hope became slave descendants' creed, which gave them the will
to survive. This meant putting their faith in the next generation. The struggle
for each successive generation was making sure they pushed the load up the hill
a little farther than where it was when their generation took the point.
A case in point: To understand the
level of poverty that persists among slave descendants one must go back to
Emancipation. Released from bondage penniless, successive generations of slave
descendants have had to start from zero trying to accumulate and build wealth.
Specifically, high unemployment and recessions (last hired and first fired)
coupled with situations like the subprime mortgage debacle, have served to rob
slave descendants of the wealth amassed within a generation. So, the following
generation went back to square one - depending on finding a job. Contrast that
to the sons and daughters of slave masters, who inherited wealth accrued from
the free or 3/5 Compromise labor supplied by the ancestors of those with
outstretched "empty hands."
Today, when one complains about the current generation of slave descendants and
their shortcomings, the complainer must ask, "Who dropped the ball? Did I
keep my shoulder to the wheel or stopped to see who wasn't pushing? Had our
ancestors had such an attitude and did like others, we would still be riding in
the back of the bus, entering buildings through the back door, and getting off
sidewalks to allow whites to pass.
Hope, like prayer, creates an
expectation and with it comes desire. With desire comes the will to act. With
action comes an attitude of confidence and with confidence comes the reality of
habit. Consequently, the question "Why vote!" creates an expectation
that justifies not voting. For slave descendants, voting does not depend on an
expectation of winning. Slave descendants vote as an exercise in building an
expectation of winning. When our ancestors went to the polls, they knew they
were not going to win; their action was a show of courage calculated to
encourage more to come out the next election. Each generation taught the next
to believe in the hope that if we continued to practice voting one day we would
triumph.
No matter what the outcome may
be, so whites steal that election, if slave descendants kept going to the polls
in ever increasing numbers, one day whites won't be able to steal it. In the
words of our ancestor, "We've come this far by faith leaning on the
Lord." Why would we arrive at this point and start to worry about what
white people are going to do? Our ancestors believed, "If the Lord is with
you, who can stand against you!" So the question isn't "Why
vote?" The question is "Why not vote?" Don't look around at others
to see what they are doing, look in the mirror and ask "What am I
doing?" You know the answer!
The Haunted Oak
By Paul Laurence
Dunbar (1872-1906)
Pray why are you so bare, so bare,
Oh, bough of the old oak-tree;
And why, when I go through the shade you throw,
Runs a shudder over
me?
My leaves were green as the best, I trow,
And sap ran free in my veins,
But I say in the moonlight dim and weird
A guiltless victim's
pains.
They'd charged him with the old, old crime,
And set him fast in jail:
Oh, why does the dog howl all night long,
And why does the
night wind wail?
He prayed his prayer and he swore his oath,
And he raised his hand to the sky;
But the beat of hoofs smote on his ear,
And the steady tread
drew nigh.
Who is it rides by night, by night,
Over the moonlit road?
And what is the spur that keeps the pace,
What is the galling
goad?
And now they beat at the prison door,
"Ho, keeper, do not stay!
We are friends of him whom you hold within,
And we fain would
take him away
"From those who ride fast on our heels
With mind to do him wrong;
They have no care for his innocence,
And the rope they
bear is long."
They have fooled the jailer with lying words,
They have fooled the man with lies;
The bolts unbar, the locks are drawn,
And the great door
open flies.
Now they have taken him from the jail,
And hard and fast they ride,
And the leader laughs low down in his throat,
As they halt my trunk
beside.
Oh, the judge, he wore a mask of black,
And the doctor one of white,
And the minister, with his oldest son,
Was curiously
bedight.
Oh, foolish man, why weep you now?
'Tis but a little space,
And the time will come when these shall dread
The mem'ry of your
face.
I feel the rope against my bark,
And the weight of him in my grain,
I feel in the throe of his final woe
The touch of my own
last pain.
And never more shall leaves come forth
On the bough that bears the ban;
I am burned with dread, I am dried and dead,
From the curse of a
guiltless man.
And ever the judge rides by, rides by,
And goes to hunt the deer,
And ever another rides his soul
In the guise of a
mortal fear.
And ever the man he rides me hard,
And never a night stays he;
For I feel his curse as a haunted bough,
On the trunk of a
haunted tree.
The Lynching of
Claude Neal (1934)
In the months preceding Franklin
Delano Roosevelt's inauguration as the 32nd and longest serving
On October 19, 1934, Claude Neal, 23, of Greenwood, Florida was arrested by
Jackson County Deputy Sheriff J.P. Couliette for the murder of Lola Cannidy,
20, also of Greenwood, Florida. At the time of his arrest, Neal worked on John
Green's peanut farm. Taken into custody with another man whom officials
believed was also involved in the murder, the pair was taken to nearby woods
for questioning.
Allegedly, Neal confessed and assumed full responsibility for the crime. Aware
of the social unrest and lynching mood across the small farming community,
Jackson County Sheriff W. F. Chambliss decide to transport Neal to
Following Neal's arrest, word was passed all over Northeastern Florida and
southeastern
At the time of Neal's arrest, Marianna had a population of about 3,300. The
black population comprised between 35% and 40%. The town was on the main highway
between
Thus, despite the precautions against mob violence, a small lynching party
composed of approximately 100 men took Neal from the jail early Friday morning,
October 26, 1934. This mob directed that "all of the niceties of a
twentieth century lynching . . . be inflicted upon Neal," who was tortured
for ten or twelve hours before being dragged to the Cannidy house in Greenwood.
A member of the lynching party described what transpired in great detail:
"After taking the nigger to the woods about four miles from
It is reported from reliable sources that the little children, some of them
mere tots, who lived in the
Pictures were taken of the mutilated form and hundreds of photographs were sold
for fifty cents each. Scores of citizens viewed the body as it hung in the
square. The body was perfectly nude until the early morning when someone had
the decency to hang a burlap sack over the middle of the body. The body was cut
down about eight-thirty Saturday morning, October 27, 1934.
Fingers and toes from Neal's body have been exhibited as souvenirs in Marianna,
where one man offered to divide the finger which he had with a friend as
"a special favor." Another man has one of the fingers preserved in
alcohol. (Sources: Daily Times-Courier,
October 26 and 27, www.nathanielturner.com
and www.yale.edu)
Predatory Lenders' Partner in Crime
By Eliot Laurence
Spitzer
Several years ago, state
attorneys general and others involved in consumer protection began to notice a
marked increase in a range of predatory lending practices by mortgage lenders.
Some were misrepresenting the terms of loans, making loans without regard to
consumers' ability to repay, making loans with deceptive "teaser"
rates that later ballooned astronomically, packing loans with undisclosed
charges and fees, or even paying illegal kickbacks. These and other practices,
we noticed, were having a devastating effect on home buyers. In addition, the
widespread nature of these practices, if left unchecked, threatened our
financial markets.
Even though predatory lending was becoming a national problem, the Bush
administration looked the other way and did nothing to protect American
homeowners. In fact, the government chose instead to align itself with the
banks that were victimizing consumers.
Predatory lending was widely
understood to present a looming national crisis. This threat was so clear that
as
What did the Bush administration
do in response? Did it reverse course and decide to take action to halt this
burgeoning scourge? As Americans are now painfully aware, with hundreds of
thousands of homeowners facing foreclosure and our markets reeling, the answer
is a resounding no.
Not only did the Bush administration do nothing to protect consumers, it
embarked on an aggressive and unprecedented campaign to prevent states from
protecting their residents from the very problems to which the federal
government was turning a blind eye.
Let me explain: The
administration accomplished this feat through an obscure federal agency called
the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC). The OCC has been in
existence since the Civil War. Its mission is to ensure the fiscal soundness of
national banks. For 140 years, the OCC examined the books of national banks to
make sure they were balanced, an important but uncontroversial function. But a
few years ago, for the first time in its history, the OCC was used as a tool
against consumers.
In 2003, during the height of the
predatory lending crisis, the OCC invoked a clause from the 1863 National Bank
Act to issue formal opinions preempting all state predatory lending laws,
thereby rendering them inoperative. The OCC also promulgated new rules that
prevented states from enforcing any of their own consumer protection laws
against national banks. The federal government's actions were so egregious and
so unprecedented that all 50 state attorneys general, and all 50 state banking
superintendents, actively fought the new rules.
But the unanimous opposition of
the 50 states did not deter, or even slow, the Bush administration in its goal
of protecting the banks. In fact, when my office opened an investigation of
possible discrimination in mortgage lending by a number of banks, the OCC filed
a federal lawsuit to stop the investigation.
Throughout our battles with the OCC and the banks, the mantra of the banks and
their defenders was that efforts to curb predatory lending would deny access to
credit to the very consumers the states were trying to protect. But the curbs
we sought on predatory and unfair lending would have in no way jeopardized
access to the legitimate credit market for appropriately priced loans. Instead,
they would have stopped the scourge of predatory lending practices that have
resulted in countless thousands of consumers losing their homes and put our
economy in a precarious position.
When history tells the story of the subprime lending crisis and recounts its
devastating effects on the lives of so many innocent homeowners, the Bush
administration will not be judged favorably. The tale is still unfolding, but
when the dust settles, it will be judged as a willing accomplice to the lenders
who went to any lengths in their quest for profits. So willing, in fact, that
it used the power of the federal government in an unprecedented assault on
state legislatures, as well as on state attorneys general and anyone else on
the side of consumers.
About Me: Born June 10, 1959, Eliot L.
Spitzer is the son of real estate tycoon Bernard Spitzer and Anne Spitzer, an
English literature professor. An attorney, Spitzer served as Governor of New
York from January 2007 until his resignation on March 17, 2008 in the wake of
his involvement in a high-priced prostitution ring. Prior to being elected
governor, Spitzer served as New York State Attorney General. This article was
published online February 14, 2008 at www.washingtonpost.com.
McCain: Nasty as Bush in 2000
By Dot
A conservative is a man with two perfectly good legs who, however, has
never learned how to walk forward. Franklin D. Roosevelt
In 2000, the South Carolina GOP presidential primary campaign got extremely
nasty. Senator John McCain, who initially appealed to some Democrats and
independents, looked as if he would take conservative
Eventually, the barrage of dirty tactics proved too much for the maverick.
McCain dropped out of the presidential race following his defeat in 
foreign
sources of credit, tax cuts for the wealthy and deregulation.
Fast forward 2008. Desperate to close the gap and stir up their conservative base,
McCain and his vice-presidential running mate, Alaska Governor Sarah Palin, are
employing tactics similar to those used by Bush in 2000 against Senator Barack
Obama, who is apparently leading in all national polls. With the election a
mere three (3) weeks away, desperation has set in, and McCain and Palin appear
willing to employ even dirty tactics to win.
Congressman John Lewis (D-GA)
posted the following on http://www.politico.com:
"As one who was a victim of violence and hate during the height of the
Civil Rights Movement, I am deeply disturbed by the negative tone of the
McCain-Palin campaign. What I am seeing reminds me too much of another
destructive period in American history. Sen. McCain and Gov. Palin are sowing
the seeds of hatred and division, and there is no need for this hostility in
our political discourse.
During another period, in the not
too distant past, there was a governor of the state of
As public figures with the power to influence and persuade, Sen. McCain and
Gov. Palin are playing with fire, and if they are not careful, that fire will
consume us all. They are playing a very dangerous game that disregards the
value of the political process and cheapens our entire democracy. We can do
better. The American people deserve better."
In response to Rep. Lewis'
statement, which the McCain campaign called "brazen and baseless,"
Senator Obama was asked to "personally repudiate these outrageous and
divisive comments." Yet, we have all heard and seen replays on television
of Gov. Palin's stump speeches stirring up crowds of supporters by suggesting
Senator Obama "pals around with terrorists." Palin has yet to
discourage supporters shouting "terrorist," yelling "off with
his head," and other racist slurs.
While Senator McCain may have toned down the divisive rhetoric over the past
few days, he has apparently not called off the nasty attacks. And, like Bush in
2000, he pretends to be above the fray, running on his experience and record.
Meanwhile his attack dogs, no doubt led behind the scenes by someone like Karl
Rove, savage his opponent.
Mailbox:
E-Mails, Faxes and Telephone Calls
Email www.msnbc.com
...IMF warns of global financial meltdown ...Bush urges patience in crisis fix;
rich nations vow to fight credit crunch...The International Monetary Fund
warned Saturday that debt-ridden banks were pushing the global financial system
to the brink of meltdown and wealthy nations had so far failed to restore
confidence. The IMF's policy setting panel said the economic crisis is so deep
and widespread that it requires excellent coordination among nations and a
willingness to take bold action. It endorsed a plan of action to do everything
possible to protect the financial system and get credit flowing again. Bush
appealed for patience as world leaders raced to stabilize financial markets and
avert the deepest global recession in decades, but the 185-nation IMF said even
more steps would be needed in the coming months. "Intensifying solvency
concerns about a number of the largest U.S.-based and European financial
institutions have pushed the global financial system to the brink of systemic
meltdown," IMF chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn said.
Email http://online.wsj.com ...Nearly 1 in 6 homeowners
'under water'...After a housing slump that has pushed values down 30% in some
areas, roughly 12 million households owe more than their homes are worth. The
relentless slide in home prices has left nearly one in six U.S. homeowners
owing more on a mortgage than the home is worth, raising the possibility of a
rise in defaults -- the very misfortune that touched off the credit crisis last
year. The result of homeowners being "under water" is more pressure
on an economy that is already in a downturn. No longer having equity in their
homes makes people feel less rich and thus less inclined to shop at the mall.
And having more homeowners under water is likely to mean more eventual
foreclosures, because it is hard for a borrower in financial trouble to refinance
or sell a home and pay off the mortgage if the debt exceeds the home's value. A
foreclosed home, in turn, tends to lower the value of other homes in its
neighborhood.
Email www.gregpalast.com...The
$200 billion bail-out for predator banks and Spitzer charges are intimately
linked...By Greg Palast...March 14th, 2008...While New York Governor Eliot
Spitzer was paying an 'escort' $4,300 in a hotel room in Washington, just down
the road, George Bush's new Federal Reserve Board Chairman, Ben Bernanke, was
secretly handing over $200 billion in a tryst with mortgage bank industry
speculators. Both acts were wanton, wicked and lewd. But there's a BIG
difference. The Governor was using his own checkbook. Bush's man Bernanke was
using ours. This week, Bernanke's Fed, for the first time in its history,
loaned a selected coterie of banks one-fifth of a trillion dollars to guarantee these banks' mortgage-backed
junk bonds. The deluge of public loot was an eye-popping windfall to the very
banking predators who have brought two million families to the brink of
foreclosure. Up until Wednesday, there was one single, lonely politician who
stood in the way of this creepy little assignation at the bankers' bordello:
Eliot Spitzer
Email http://bulletin.aarp.org/...No Place to
Call Home...Why Are More Older Americans Sleeping in Their Cars?...By Carole
Fleck ..Behind a security gate in the desolate parking lot of a historic church
in