The DISH

Unbossed and unbought news and information you can use

Vol. 14 No. 30…Dedicated to the Dialogue on Race…July 25, 2011

Venue for an Artist

Greatest Love of All

By Michael Masser and Linda Creed

I believe the children are our are future

Teach them well and let them lead the way

Show them all the beauty they possess inside

Give them a sense of pride to make it easier

Let the children's laughter remind us how we used to be

Everybody searching for a hero

People need someone to look up to

I never found anyone to fulfill my needs

A lonely place to be

So I learned to depend on me

I decided long ago, never to walk in anyone's shadows

If I fail, if I succeed

At least I live as I believe

No matter what they take from me

They can't take away my dignity

Because the greatest love of all

Is happening to me

I found the greatest love of all

Inside of me

The greatest love of all

Is easy to achieve

Learning to love yourself

It is the greatest love of all

I believe the children are our future

Teach them well and let them lead the way

Show them all the beauty they possess inside

Give them a sense of pride to make it easier

Let the children's laughter remind us how we used to be

And if by chance, that special place

That you've been dreaming of

Leads you to a lonely place

Find your strength in love

About Me: Originally recorded by George Benson for the 1977 Muhammad Ali biopic The Greatest and later popularized by Whitney Houston, Greatest Love of All was written while Creed struggled with breast cancer. The lyrics "describe her feelings about coping with great challenges that one must face in life, being strong during those challenges whether you succeed or fail, and passing that strength on to children. Creed eventually succumbed to the disease in April 1986 at the age of 36." (Source: http://en.wikipedia.org)

DISHing It Up Hot!

On the Naked Truth!

By Dot

Rarely is the truth pretty. All too often, it is brutal and ugly! Here is a truth: Black children in the United States of America are born into a society in which they are valued as less than human. They, like their parents before them, are victims of the Three-Fifths Compromise. Born into socioeconomic and political slavery, rather than outright bondage, their enslavement is disguised as "freedom and democracy" to hide its treachery. To get half as far in their circumscribed environment as their white counterparts, black children must work twice as hard. And, that is the naked truth.

Unfortunately, black children, like their parents, are largely unaware and frequently inured of the very system that so callously constricts them. Ironically, they and their parents are some of the system's most willing victims and staunchest advocates.

For nearly thirty (30) years, I have sought to impart this truth. But, most black people have refused to listen. They refuse to accept the notion that they are still slaves that none of the things they were told ended slavery, from Abraham Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation, through the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments to the Voting Rights and Civil Rights Acts of the 1960s, changed their socioeconomic status. And, even though their daily lives are inundated with examples of the lies they are fed about freedom and democracy, still they refuse to accept the naked truth that the Three-Fifths Compromise is alive and thriving from Bangor, Maine to the Baja Peninsula.

Given the black human condition, is it any wonder we suffer from low self-esteem and depression? Generations of black people have been taught to believe we reside in a free society. When one considers the dichotomy posed by such a belief when the truth is the opposite, one begins to understand the daily psychological callisthenics performed by blacks in America. After generations, we willingly accept the "free" society lie and teach our children the same. Under such circumstances, how do we give our children a sense of pride?

When our children acknowledge the truth, as I did so long ago, they will stop reciting the pledge of allegiance. No one seemed to have noticed or called attention to my little rebellion or asked the question -why don't you stand for the pledge of allegiance? I suppose, my teachers did not ask because they feared the nature of my response; they knew the truth, too.

Yet, like most of us today, my teachers were inured of the system. After all, they taught Christopher Columbus discovered America. Sadly today, those who know the truth will point to the accomplishments of individuals, such as Kwatsi Alibaruho or Barack Obama, and lay the blame for the relative impoverishment of black America at the altar of a lack of individual effort and personal responsibility, rather than place any blame on the system that is rigged against them.

Sure, it is possible to identify a few black people whose lives do not reflect our negative group statistics. However, these are the outliers! Their success should not give us succor, nor cause us to believe the system possesses any semblance of equity and justice when the vast majority languishes in relative poverty.

Having said this, never would I suggest we cease to struggle to achieve individual success. To the contrary, I believe struggle is necessary and good for the body and soul. But, I also believe we must accept the naked truth of the black human condition in the "land of the free and the home of the brave." We must teach our children the naked truth and instill in them a sense of pride in the struggle to free ourselves from the Three-Fifths Compromise.

Bit of History

Kwatsi Alibaruho

"I chose the name "Defiant" as the team designation for my team and my flight director name. For me, what it represents is a resistance to things that would hinder us as we chose to explore space. At the time I was certified we had just returned to flight following STS-114 and there still was a great deal of fear, a great deal of trepidation concerning the safety of the shuttle some uncertainty going forward. I wanted my team call sign and my behavior as a flight director to represent a bold resistance of fear, a bold resistance against complacency, a bold resistance against even exhaustion, as we pressed forward to explore space which of course is what we are here to do.."

Born in Maywood, Illinois on May 6, 1972, a year after his parents fled the brutal dictatorship of General Idi Amin Dada of Uganda, Kwatsi Alibaruho exhibited an early interest in science, space and mathematics. His parents, Ugandan economist Dr. George and Dr. Gloria Alibaruho of Macon, Georgia, encouraged and nurtured those interests.

At age two, Alibaruho's parents divorced, and Kwatsi was raised by his mother, a social science professor, who helped guide and direct his career. In 1990, with a Grade Point Average (GPA) of 3.96 and a Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) score of 1420, Alibaruho entered the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He worked very hard to perform at this level in order to obtain the grades and also attend summer school to further his knowledge of science. There were 1,200 students in his freshman class.

While he began his studies in computer science, Alibaruho switched his major in his junior year and entered MIT's School of Avionics and Aerospace engineering. In 1993, he was one of two students selected to join NASA's internship program at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas. Alibaruho earned his Bachelor of Science in avionics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (1994). In May of 2011, he earned a Master of Business Administration from Rice University through Rice's Executive MBA Program, which he attended full-time while concurrently performing his duties as Flight Director.

Following his internship, Alibaruho remained with the Johnson Space Center, working his way up from a flight controller to a flight director. After completing more than 700 hours in 2005, Alibaruho was certified to become NASA's first African American mission control director. Leading a team of flight controllers, support personnel and engineering experts, a flight director has the overall responsibility to manage and carry out space shuttle flights and International space station expeditions. A flight director also leads and orchestrates planning and integration activities with flight controllers, payload customers, space station partners and others.

Despite a relative absence of people of color in the space industry, Alibaruho says NASA respected the proficiency and skills he brought to the job. According to Alibaruho, "I was good at my job and I demonstrated the proficiencies that allowed me to excel purely on merit." Alibaruho is a recipient of numerous awards, including the NASA Outstanding Leadership Medal, 2009, and the Rotary National Award for Space Achievement Stellar Award.

Alibaruho has been married for 15 years to Macresia Alibaruho, a NASA Flight operations communications and data systems supervisor. The couple has a five- year-old son.

When not working at NASA, Alibaruho, an ordained minister, heads a volunteer staff at his church, where he is involved in the Children's ministry. (Sources: www.monitor.co.ug, and http://en.wikipedia.org)

The Question No One Wants Answered

By John Burl Smith

Theories have strange lives depending on the prognosticators more so than what is postulated. Other times, it depends entirely on what is claimed by the theory more so than the evidence presented to support what is predicted. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's fictional detective Sherlock Holmes famously stated, "When you have eliminated all possible explanations, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth?" A case in point is the research of economist Dot M. Smith, which answers the question no one wants answered, "Why the black unemployment rate has historically remained twice that of whites?"

Smith's hypothesis is that the answer goes back to the Founding Fathers' deal to ratify the United States Constitution. Known as the "Great Compromise," it gave small states equal representation with large states in the US Senate, established the Electoral College to elect the president of the United States and established black (slave) human capital as 3/5 that of a white man. She postulates that even though slavery was outlawed in 1865, the 3/5 Compromise of Article I Section II of the US Constitution was never repealed, consequently slavery never ended. Hence, the 3/5 Compromise remains the foundation of the economic gap between blacks and whites in America.

Smith's research was published in the Mid-South Journal of Economics (Vol. 6 No. 3) in 1982. Without addressing her research directly, academicians and others ridiculed such a contention as unscientific speculation driven by an agenda to support reparations for former slaves, because "passage of the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments nullified the 3/5 Compromise." These critics declared that linking the present situation of African Americans to the 3/5 Compromise was an attempt to blame whites today for something that had nothing to do with them. Sherlock Holmes would say, "In solving a problem of this sort, the grand thing is to be able to reason backwards. There are fifty who can reason synthetically for one who can reason analytically."

The 3/5 Compromise nullification argument is specious on its face because no language referring to such a repeal exists any place in the record. This assumption is easily discredited by the fact that all the language, "the election of all US Senators and the Electoral College election of the president is part in parcel of the 3/5 Compromise which remains in the Constitution. Ergo, it could not have been repealed, since these aspects of the Constitution are still operational.

However, the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments debunk the repeal argument on their face. Notwithstanding that the 13th Amendment does not mention repealing the 3/5 Compromise, it does establish the condition under which a person can be held in bondage (imprisoned). The 14th Amendment, among other things, bestowed citizenship upon slaves, while establishing due process and equal protection, but makes no mention of repealing the 3/5 Compromise. Finally, the 15th Amendment gave former male slaves the right to vote, but it contains no reference to the 3/5 Compromise. Consequently, the claim that the 3/5 Compromise formula somehow ceased to have any impact on the federal government's evaluation of black human capital, even as the language remained a part of the US Constitution, is ridiculous. Sherlock Holmes would advise, "Always look for a possible alternative, and provide against it. It is the first rule of criminal investigation."

Such is the case with Smith's research and her hypothesis regarding the role of the 3/5 Compromise. Motivated by the intractable problem of the disparities between blacks and whites, in 1981 Smith undertook the challenge of understanding why black unemployment seemed to always be twice that of whites. She looked at historic unemployment rates and median family incomes as the broadest measures of economic welfare because the majority of Americans depend on jobs to earn income or economic welfare.

Smith reviewed data provided by the US Labor Department going back to the 1940s when such data was first collected. Controlling for such factors as education, job history, marital status, age, etc.., Smith found a consistent and stable residual of .4 between the median family incomes of whites and blacks--the 2/5 blacks never receive as a result of the 3/5 Compromise. When Smith graphed the median family income data, it mimicked the 3/5 Compromise, which goes back to the institution of slavery.

This .4 residual may seem small, but it figures prominently in the current relationship of black to white median family income as it relates to economic funding formulas. This gap remained remarkably stable across upswings and downturns in the US economy and proves that the US government has engaged in a huge deception regarding its role in maintaining racism, discrimination, disparate treatment and the hostile racial environment slave descendants have endured.

Median family income is the best indicator of overall economic welfare of a society or groups within a society. The black to white median family income ratio fluctuates along the narrow interval of .5 to .65. Its stability has defied explanation by other researchers because they cannot conceive of a mechanism capable of holding so consistently over the boom and bust cycles of the American economy. This is why the black to white median family income ratio raises red flags and begs the question no one wants answered. In Sherlock Holmes' parlance, "Perhaps, when a man has special knowledge and special powers like my own, it rather encourages him to seek a complex explanation when a simpler one is at hand."

In a recent article -- How Racism, Global Economics, and the New Jim Crow Fuel Black America's Crippling Jobs Crisis -- Andy Kroll mulled over the same question as Smith. Looking at the same unemployment data, he plowed over the same ground as other investigators, identified the same chasm, entertained the same factors that could be responsible for the gap, and discovered as other researchers, after eliminating them, there still remained that persistent residual that Smith found in 1981. With no place to go and no way of explaining the black to white unemployment disparity, Kroll seemed to throw up his hands in frustration, rather than accept Smith's simple, yet obvious, conclusion.

As Sherlock Holmes would say, "Its elementary Watson." Smith's research provides the only plausible explanation, however improbable, to the question no one wants answered because to accept the truth of it would mean acknowledging that the racist foundation upon which this nation was founded remains alive and well and dictating outcomes in the American marketplace.

News You Use

How Racism, Global Economics, and the New Jim Crow Fuel Black America's Crippling Jobs Crisis

By Andy Kroll

Like the country it governs, Washington is a city of extremes. In a car, you can zip in bare moments from northwest District of Columbia, its streets lined with million-dollar homes and palatial embassies, its inhabitants sporting one of the nation's lowest jobless rates, to Anacostia, a mostly forgotten neighborhood in southeastern DC with one of the highest unemployment rates anywhere in America. Or, if you happen to be jobless, upset about it, and living in that neighborhood, on a crisp morning in March you could have joined an angry band of protesters marching on the nearby 11th Street Bridge.

They weren't looking for trouble. They were looking for work.

Those protesters, most of them black, chanted and hoisted signs that read "DC JOBS FOR DC RESIDENTS" and "JOBS OR ELSE." The target of their outrage: contractors hired to replace the very bridge under their feet, a $300 million project that will be one of the largest in District history. The problem: Few DC citizens, which mean few African Americans, had so far been hired. "It's deplorable," insisted civil rights attorney Donald Temple, "that... you can find men from West Virginia to work in DC You can find men from Maryland to work in DC And you can find men from Virginia to work in DC But you can't find men and women in DC to work in DC"

The 11th Street Bridge arches over the slow-flowing Anacostia River, connecting the poverty-stricken, largely black Anacostia neighborhood with the rest of the District. By foot the distance is small; in opportunity and wealth, it couldn't be larger. At one end of the bridge the economy is booming even amid a halting recovery and jobs crisis. At the other end, hard times, always present, are worse than ever.

Live in Washington long enough and you'll hear someone mention "east of the river." That's DC's version of "the other side of the tracks," the place friends warn against visiting late at night or on your own. It is home to District Wards 7 and 8, neighborhoods with a long, rich history. Once known as Uniontown, Anacostia was one of the District's first suburbs; Frederick Douglass, nicknamed the "Sage of Anacostia," once lived there, as did the poet Ezra Pound and singer Marvin Gaye. Today the area's unemployment rate is officially nearly 20%. District-wide, it's 9.8%, a figure that drops as low as 3.6% in the whiter, more affluent northwestern suburbs.

DC's divide is America's writ large. Nationwide, the unemployment rate for black workers at 16.2% is almost double the 9.1% rate for the rest of the population. And it's twice the 8% white jobless rate.

The size of those numbers can, in part, be chalked up to the current jobs crisis in which blacks are being decimated. According to Duke University public policy expert William Darity, that means blacks are "the last to be hired in a good economy, and when there's a downturn, they're the first to be released."

That may account for the soaring numbers of unemployed African Americans, but not the yawning chasm between the black and white employment rates, which is no artifact of the present moment. It's a problem that spans generations, goes remarkably unnoticed, and condemns millions of blacks to a life of scraping by. That unerring, unchanging gap between white and black employment figures goes back at least 60 years. It should be a scandal, but whether on Capitol Hill or in the media it gets remarkably little attention. Ever.

The unemployment lines run through history like a pair of train tracks. Since the 1940s, the jobless rate for blacks in America has held remarkably, if grimly, steady at twice the rate for whites. The question of why has vexed and divided economists, historians, and sociologists for nearly as long.

For years the sharpest minds in academia pointed to upheaval in the American economy as the culprit. In his 1996 book When Work Disappears, the sociologist William Julius Wilson depicted the forces of globalization, a slumping manufacturing sector, and suburban flight at work in Chicago as the drivers of growing joblessness and poverty in America's inner cities and among its black residents.

He pictured the process this way: as corporations outsourced jobs to China and India, American manufacturing began its slow fade, shedding jobs often held by black workers. What jobs remained were moved to sprawling offices and factories in outlying suburbs reachable only by freeway. Those jobs proved inaccessible to the mass of black workers who remained in the inner cities and relied on public transportation to get to work.

Time and research have, however, eaten away at the significance of Wilson's work. The hollowing-out of America's cities and the decline of domestic manufacturing no doubt played a part in black unemployment, but then chronic black joblessness existed long before the upheaval Wilson described. Even when employment in the manufacturing sector was at its height, black workers were still twice as likely to be out of work as their white counterparts.

Another commonly cited culprit for the tenaciousness of African-American unemployment has been education. Whites, so the argument goes, are generally better educated than blacks, and so more likely to land a job at a time when a college degree is ever more significant when it comes to jobs and higher earnings. In 2009, President Obama told reporters that education was the key to narrowing racial gaps in the US. "If we close the achievement gap, then a big chunk of economic inequality in this society is diminished," he said.

Educational levels have steadily climbed over the past 60 years for African Americans. In 1940, less than 1% of black men and less than 2% of black women earned college degrees; jump to 2000, and the figures are 10% for black men and 15% for black women. Moreover, increased education has helped to narrow wage inequality between employed whites and blacks. What it hasn't done is close the unemployment gap.

Algernon Austin, an economist for the Economic Policy Institute in Washington, DC, crunched data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics and found that blacks with the same level of education as whites have consistently lower employment levels. It doesn't matter whether you compare high-school dropouts or workers with graduate degrees, whites are still more likely to have a job than blacks. Degrees be damned.

Academics have thrown plenty of other explanations at the problem: declining wages, the embrace of crime as a way of life, increased competition with immigrants. None of them have stuck. How could they? In recent decades, the wage gap has narrowed, crime rates have plummeted, and there's scant evidence to suggest immigrants are stealing jobs that would otherwise be filled by African Americans.

Indeed, many top researchers in this field, including several I interviewed, are left scratching their heads when trying to explain why that staggering jobless gap between blacks and white won't budge. "I don't know if there's anybody out there who can tell you why that ratio stays at two to one," Darity says. "It's a statistical regularity that we don't have an explanation for."

Andy Kroll, an associate editor at TomDispatch and reporter for Mother Jones magazine, lives in Washington, DC Read the entire article at www.alternet.org/story/151521/how_racism%2C_global_economics%2C_and_the_new_jim_crow_fuel_black_america%27s_crippling_jobs_crisis.

Intuit's Vibe

How to Succeed at a Summer Job: Look White and Christian (Excerpts)

By Jamilah King

After a couple of internships in high schools, I thought I'd hit the big time when I landed a part-time gig at one of my favorite sportswear retailers during the summer after my freshman year in college. The store was situated nicely in downtown San Francisco, and for most of the summer I smiled and waved to greet customers, kept the displays tidy and ran shoe orders for the waves of customers and tourists who came in. I did it all as one part of a mostly young, seemingly hip multicultural staff who looked to be the perfect ambassadors for the company's image. And then one day I made what ended up to be a game changing decision: I stopped straightening my hair and went natural.

My supervisor, a white male, never said anything directly to make me think that I had informally gone against company policy. But within a day I found myself tucked away on an upstairs floor, folding t-shirts and greeting the trickle of customers who could brave two flights of stairs to see over-priced backpacks.

I can't be certain if it was my hair that shifted things. But after talking with several friends, I realized that my circumstances weren't unique. And recent news shows that it can get much worse for young workers of color, who are discriminated against and sometimes fired because of their appearance or religion.

Whether it's at McDonald's, a local summer camp, or any number of retail stores, working through your teenage and college years has become a rite of passage in many communities. And for many it has long been an urgent necessity, either to pay for school or help make familial ends meet. But the recession and ensuing slow crawl toward recovery has changed all that. While young prospective workers in general are saddled with record levels of unemployment, young workers of color face an even bleaker economic outlook. And in an economy that is driven by the service and retail industries--industries that are notoriously image conscious--young workers of color may be more vulnerable than ever to the biases of their employers.

Last month, 20-year-old college student Hani Khan made headlines when she filed suit against Hollister, a subsidiary of Abercrombie & Fitch, for religious discrimination. Khan is a practicing Muslim who wears a headscarf in accordance with religious tradition. Before she was hired in October of 2009 at a Northern California shopping mall, she was asked if she could wear a hijab that fell in line with the company's official "Look Policy", and she agreed. Khan had been working at the store for four months when, after restocking items, she was spotted by a district manager. Less than a week later, she was fired.

Abercrombie has a particularly long and troubled history with discrimination claims. While it has certainly been one of the most visible retailers to have trouble with its workers of color, it's not the only one. Just this week American Apparel settled a lawsuit with Christopher Renfro, a black former employee, for more than $300,000. Renfro said that a coworker repeatedly called him "nigger." The company had previously dismissed his claims and instead insisted that it was as case of a coworker singing along with rap lyrics.

These sorts of cases take on added significance given today's economy. The overall unemployment rate hovers just above 9 percent, but jobless numbers for prospective black and Latino workers is much worse, at 16 percent and nearly 12 percent, respectively.

But numbers for jobless youth are even higher. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that for young people between the ages of 16 and 19, the unemployment rate is just over 24 percent, which is only slightly better than a year ago. The unemployment rate for black youth in the same age bracket is nearly double that, at 40.7 percent. When the overall youth unemployment rate for last July edged up over 19 percent, it was the highest since the country began keeping records in 1948. (Source: www.alternet.org/story/151589/how_to_succeed_at_a_summer_job%3A_look_white_and_christian)

Politics Y2K11

It's the Gen-Xers Fault They're Out of Work

By Elizabeth MacDonald

Former Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan said in a recent interview that the U.S. is suffering from an unproductive youth movement in the labor force, and that companies don't want to hire these young folk. Greenspan also said that U.S. companies would be better off hiring immigrants.

Apparently the problem with the American jobs picture is the American worker. At least that's what Alan Greenspan thinks.

We are, he says, too young, dumb and unproductive as a workforce. The Baby Boomers were better, finding ways to do more with less, but they are retiring in droves. As they hit the links, their ranks of replacements don't measure up.

Here are his [Greenspan's] words, in an interview with The Globalist: "Baby boomers are being replaced by groups of young workers who have regrettably scored rather poorly in international educational match-ups over the last two decades. The average income of U.S. households headed by 25-year-olds and younger has been declining relative to the average income of the baby boomer population. This is a reasonably good indication that the productivity of the younger part of our workforce is declining relative to the level of productivity achieved by the retiring baby boomers. This raises some major concerns about the productive skills of our future U.S. labor force."

There is, sadly, much truth in what he says. The degradation of our educational system, thanks to a lack of accountability and a general resistance to innovation, is well-documented.

It has been difficult for American students to keep pace with those from overseas when viewed through the lens of quantitative, objective metrics like standardized tests.

But the lack of productivity Greenspan frets over can arguably also be set at the feet of our growing entitlement culture, which we explored in some detail several weeks ago for Entitlement Nation Week. Being a productive worker means having a commitment to honest labor.

That has eroded as more people have relied upon the federal government for the growth of their household wealth. That, in turn, has led to a troubling change in attitude in this country.

As [Pulitzer Prize winning syndicated columnist] George Will put it, "Americans, endowed by their solicitous government with an ever-expanding array of entitlements, now have the whiny mentality that an entitlement culture breeds."

The question then becomes, "How do we fix this?" To Greenspan, it is to "Go West, young man." Or East, North and South for that matter. Just go anywhere else but here and find someone who is willing and able to work:

"Most high-income people in our country do not realize that their incomes are being subsidized by their protection from competition from highly skilled people who are prevented from immigrating to the United States," Greenspan said. "But we need such skills in order to staff our productive economy, so that the standard of living for Americans as a whole can grow."

Think of that last line for a moment. We need to import labor - intelligent, skilled labor - to guarantee that Americans' standard of living is maintained.

Have we indeed fallen so far?

Hood Notes

Jobless Claims in U.S. Rose 10,000 Last Week

By Bob Willis

More Americans than forecast filed claims for unemployment benefits last week, reflecting the volatility of applications during the annual auto-plant retooling period.

Applications for jobless benefits increased 10,,000 in the week ended July 16 to 418,000, Labor Department figures showed today. Economists forecast 410,000 claims, according to the median estimate in a Bloomberg News survey. The data included about 1,750 additional job cuts due to the Minnesota government shutdown, the agency said.

Employers have been reluctant to hire more workers over the past two months on concern the recovery was slowing and growing unease over stalled negotiations to extend the federal debt ceiling and reduce the budget deficit. Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke last week said recent data showed "continuing weakness" in the labor market.

"The labor market is still quite fragile," said Tom Porcelli, chief U.S. economist at RBC Capital Markets Corp. in New York, who correctly forecast the rise in claims. "The pace of firings continues to move sideways and it's obvious there is not a lot of hiring going on. There is not a lot of demand right now."

The four-week moving average of claims, a less-volatile measure, fell to 421,250, a three-month low, from 424,000.