Volume 3 Issue 51…Dedicated to the Dialogue on Race… December 29, 2000

Note: The DISH is based on themes from T.H.I.N.C. (Teaching Humanity In New Consciousness): The Chrysalis of Evolution. According to the President's Initiative on Race, "The issues that this book brings to the forefront are important in our efforts to achieve the goals set forth by the President for the Initiative. This work will serve as a solid resource for us as we begin to examine these critical issues." For your copy of T.H.I.N.C., The DISH or to submit comments, contact ICIM, Inc. at (404) 244-6023. The DISH © 2000

King George III: America's Last Monarch

In Historical Viewpoints - a compilation of essays by noted historians - editor John A. Garraty notes, "One of the most difficult tasks of the historian is to deal fairly with failure and incompetence - even with evil. He must try to honor Othello's plea and speak of men (and institutions) as they actually were - "nothing extenuate, nor set down aught in malice." Garraty opines, George III, Our Last King, an essay written by Professor J. H. Plumb of Cambridge University, succeeds brilliantly.

Professor Plumb begins his essay, "Poor George III still gets bad press," and ends, "If he is blamed, it must be not for what he did but for what he was - an unbalanced man of low intelligence. And, if he is to be praised, it is because he attempted to discharge honorably tasks that were beyond his powers." In between, Plumb explains how the King's friends - a collection of corrupt politicians - Tory incompetents - bent on personal government for their master, pursued a ruinous policy that ended with the breakup of the first British Empire." In addition to disaster in America, historians credit George III with a "failure of parliamentary reform, oppressions of the Irish, Catholics and Dissenters, mistreatment of radicals during the French Revolution, merciless oppression of trade unions and violent opposition to the abolition of slavery."

American historians Leon Canfield and Howard Wilder wrote: "In 1760, George III mounted the throne. A young man of twenty-two, he was unwilling to accept the idea that the King's power should be limited. His mother had always said to him: "George be King!" When he became ruler this obstinate young man put his mother's advice into swift action. He set out to get his way not by ignoring Parliament, but by building up a personal following. He made free use of bribes and appointments, and presently the King's friends were strong in Parliament. The increase in royal power drove the wedge of misunderstanding deeper between England and the colonies."

Plumb writes that George III was unluckily born into an environment singed with the politics of hatred and betrayal. In addition, he was unlucky in his heritage, because as Plumb puts it, "George was very stupid, really stupid." Yet, as stupid as he was, George was the best of the bunch, an assessment that says nothing positive about the class into which George was dumped. According to Plumb, "his parents' hatred of their son was tinged with genuine disappointment."

"George II married his son to Princess Augusta of Saxe-Gotha simply because there was no one else. The other Protestant princesses of sufficiently high birth had madness in their families, and George II rejected them, for as he said, "I did not think ingrafting my half-witted coxcomb son upon a madwoman would mend the breed." Poor George III indeed, his predatory policies sowed the seed that spawned the American Revolution, making him America's last monarch. (Source: Historical Viewpoints, ed. John A. Garraty, Vol.1, 1975)

The Dark Knight-Batman/White Ninja/Zorro gave up his role as super hero, defender of justice and truth for a week. According to the Dark One/Ninja/Zorro, "I believe in Santa Claus this week for momma and daddy! You know, it is like trick and treat!"

by Yohannes Sharriff

Squeeze ripe fruit until beauty bathes my soul in truth.

I live the past, present and future now, cause every station

2000 presidential politics demonstrating how emancipation gets nullified by taxation.

Without representation my case was thrown out of court.

Like no insurance, no life support.

The plight of the Black farmer is continually ignored.

But of course with no welfare to sponsor shelter

to weather the financial flood watering down freedom,

how do we avoid our voting power being revoked by the Electoral College,

like silent war secret redistricting

after Brown v. Board of Education

or the Sanitation Strike followed by King's assassination?

REPARATION!

Yesterday's plantation training left...left...left...right...left us sore.

Sour and soaking for hours,

we stand at the arctic polls,

beating on locked doors, screaming,

"Revoke or Revolt!"

against the demon preoccupying our worried minds.

In debt up to our necks for the next year,

caught in the undertow of Yuletide.

Damn, just last night Hosea died.

But today leadership positions won't stay vacant like unexamined lives.

My need to change will never die.

Waving a sign of the times on an I-20 west off ramp -panhandling a cup of love,

somewhere between Atlantis & Decatur, scribes gather in healing circles.

Vertically risen hands interwoven like strands of bamboo rope

supporting the hope for flowers to grow within the wounded remains of the raped.

Wake up and smell the bouquet!

Gift wrapped in chaos there is fire beneath the waves.

Purified by flame, my thoughts refreshed like baby's first breath

Dorothy May's second glimpse at infinite possibility

Her round belly, pregnant with the son light of me.

"I'll stand up next to a mountain..."

The divine is within... Heaven is at hand.

It is the land beneath your feet, in the air we breathe, your seed,

that place you go when you dream, within the deoxyribonucleic acid,

and it's closer than you think... you know.

But, through rose-tinted vision, what can you really see?

Colorful contact cataracts choke our community with undigested bites of American pie,

while my all-natural soul food serves imagery

like a waiter performing the Heimlich maneuver on the future.

Baby you got to breathe...

cause I'm racing against time to save my babies dying in vain.

I'm racing to change these tracks in my veins to rail

that maintains this underground train of thought

buried in unmarked graves under garbage dumps.

Slumlord landfilled lives light candles for the lost.

Crackerjack Frost megabit the chip on my shoulder.

So, I build sanctuary for those who can't afford the cost of a soft bed.

Yesterday, I used to be homeless, now I'm hopeful.

Roses do grow from concrete gardens,

sparking my passion for love to turn the tragic into lilies and lilacs.

Imagine, love, you are all the magic we need to heal the madness.

"I'll stand up next to a mountain and chop it down with the edge of my hand."

Disgruntled feels: Given Dubya's pedigree, it is no wonder the Supreme Court and the Florida state legislature wanted to assure an outcome in his favor. To do otherwise would have been against the founding fathers' intention of maintaining executive power in the hands of their descendants.

Disgruntled says: Played in the press as something to make blacks happy, President-select Bush appointed two colored people to decorate his Cabinet. Then, the idiot tried to conjure up a recession to justify his campaign pledge of 1.3 trillion dollars in tax cuts for the wealthy.

Disgruntled wants to know: Will Georgia Governor Roy Barnes accept the Republican Party's challenge and identify where he, as the leader of the Democratic Party, stands on changing Georgia's flag?

by John Burl Smith

Turnout 75 %: Though it pains us to face the truth, America suffered a bloodless coup d'etat. Not the banana republic variety, where military officers capture the power of institutions to claim legitimacy, but a more insidious plot akin to those hatched in the minds of Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini and Slobodan Milosevic. These vipers perverted the power of institutions from within, permanently altering their legitimacy.

Striking the assassin's blow, the Supreme Court personified Brutus' treachery by selecting George W. Bush, Jr. president. Those horrified at this reality need only look at the five judges - Rehnquist, Scalia, Thomas, O'Connor and Kennedy- making up the majority. As the hands welding the knife, they used the Court's legitimacy to select whom they wanted to be president. These five judges believe as other dyed-in-the-wool states' rights strict constructionists. Their "stock-in-trade" is emancipation was unconstitutional. They posit, the 13^th, 14^th and 15^th Amendments did not repeal Article I Section 2 of the Constitution (3/5ths Compromise). Hence, slave descendants do not have claims of "equal protection" because those Amendments are unconstitutional. Their rulings reflect these beliefs.

Justifying Bush v. Gore on the basis of "equal protection," these five judges talked out of both sides of their mouths. In Bakke v. University of California, the Court supported Plessy v. Ferguson's states rights to determine standards defining "separate but equal" and struck down claims of "equal protection" for blacks under the 14^th Amendment. This ruling stood "equal protection" on its head, in that, blacks trying to remedy the impact of slavery and segregation were denied claims established under Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka's edit "all deliberate speed." Brown established that "separate but equal" was based solely on race and "inherently unequal." Therefore, any remedy must be based on the same standards of race for "equal protection" to exist.

While race was the only standard used during slavery and segregation to deny "equal protection" to blacks, Bakke ignores 14^th Amendment claims brought by blacks. Deciding Bush v. Gore based on a concept they insist is unconstitutional (equal protection), these five judges used "equal protection" to block counting votes and overthrow an election result. Like Brutus, they are transparent. The knife in America's Constitution's back left blood on these five judges' hands.

Legal scholars should hide their faces in utter shame. They should publicly challenge the Court's judicial integrity and philosophical coherence. In order to undermine Brown v. Board of Education, the Rehnquist Court created a Constitutional claim (reverse discrimination) to protect whites from remedies ordered by the Supreme Court for past racial discrimination in 1954. How can they now use the same "rule of law" to rule in Bush's favor? The Court cannot be allowed to flip-flop back-and-forth on "equal protection" depending on whether the issue will help or hurt those they support. Bush v. Gore flies in the face of "equal protection" as decided in Bakke and does not cover the stench of a coup d'etat. Et Tu Brute? John 2000

Bush's Pedigree

As presidential candidate George W. Bush, Jr., the media did little to identify the man who would be president. Since his Supreme Court selection, Americans are learning more about the aristocracy that spawned Dubya. Within hours of his infamous selection, the media revealed Bush's pedigree. They still will not discuss his divisive political philosophy.

On December 14, 2000, the Atlanta Journal reprinted Salon.com reporter Suzi Parker's skeletal look at Bush's dynastic heritage. Based on research by Gary Boyd Roberts, a prominent genealogist with the New England Genealogical Society, Bush is related to 16 U. S. Presidents. They are: George Washington, Millard Fillmore, Franklin Pierce, Abraham Lincoln, Ulysses S. Grant, Rutherford B. Hayes, James Garfield, Grover Cleveland, Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, Calvin Coolidge, Herbert Hoover, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford and George H.W. Bush. With family roots that extend back to ancestors that arrived in America on the Mayflower, Bush is a member of the social registry. Famous family members include five kings - Henry I and II, Robert II of Scotland, William I of Scotland and Edward I of England- and Indian Princess Pocahontas, who married John Rolfe, the first colonial tobacco grower. Ironically, he is also related to Samuel Prescott, who completed the 1775 Midnight Ride of Paul Revere, which sounded the alarm that began the American Revolution.

Annually, millions become ill and/or die from food borne diseases. Those who eat chitterlings should take care; a batch of pig intestines can be deadly. A massive poultry recall by Tyson Foods is enough to make many people choose to go meatless.

Recently acknowledged outbreaks of bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) or mad cow disease in Germany make articles written in 1998 by Alan Watkins of the London Observer Service and others an urgent warning for the meat-consuming public. At http://www.meat.org.uk/madcows.html, research suggests future generations of British cattle could carry the agent that causes BSE without showing symptoms.

Dairy herds could act as reservoirs of BSE and its human counterpart, Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease (CJD), which is a rare, fatal brain disorder that causes a rapid, progressive dementia; it usually produces microscopic vacuoles in neurons that appear "sponge-like". Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease can afflict men and women of diverse ethnic backgrounds usually between the ages of 50 to 75 years. Reports indicate that the disease occurs worldwide. See Http://cjdfoundation.org/CJDInfo.html

According to the American government, the US stopped importing beef products from Europe, so American meat eaters need not be concerned, beyond consuming domestically grown Frankencows. However, Americans traveling abroad should avoid beef, including that treat- German sausage. Mad cow is a monster that hangs around for years before striking. Children as young as fourteen are dying from CJD in Britain. Anyone who has eaten beef in the last ten years could be stricken with the brain-wasting disease, a serious wake-up call for meat eaters.

After restoring our natural gas service, we called the Public Service Commission (PSC) to file a formal complaint. We wanted to prevent this from happening to anyone else. Persistence finally paid off after numerous attempts to speak with a PSC customer service representative. Jamaal Eddings took our complaint and forwarded it to SCANA. Problems persist; the complaint was written up incorrectly.

Worse, SCANA is still our gas provider. According to them, the PSC gave them the go ahead to reconnect our service and bill us for the reconnect fee. More important, they will not release our account to another provider until all charges on the SCANA account are paid, including reconnect fee and deposit.

The PSC's actions raise serious concerns about the consumers' right to choose in a competitive market. Their complaint process does not help consumers; it aids AGL and SCANA. There seems to be collusion between Atlanta Gas Light (AGL), PSC and SCANA. By operating in tandem, they make deregulation a fancy term for their monopolistic practices.

These are bitter fruits of deregulation; they raise as yet unanswered questions. For example: How much does AGL charge gas providers to reconnect customers? According to SCANA, they charge what AGL requires, but other providers charge less. SCANA and AGL squeeze the consuming public. No one knows how long customers' deposits are kept, or what is done with the interest that accrues to these deposit accounts?

The current system is abusive. Deregulation was supposed to introduce competition into the market. Yet, all it has done is make the monopoly more effective in maximizing profits at the expense of consumers.

by Dot

For the past three years, The DISH has tried to explain why America is not a real democracy. As a matter of historical record and law, the U.S. Constitution is based on inequality, which negates one-person, one-vote democracy. The republic was founded on legal racial discrimination - slavery. Election 2000 was an object lesson on America's blatant hypocrisy.

Ironically, after elections in Haiti, where all votes were not counted, the U.S. sought to have Haiti dismissed from the Organization of American States (OAS). U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan called for a full and accurate count. No one in the international community commented on the U.S. election, nor sought the UN's help in overseeing the count. Former President Jimmy Carter and his international election monitors are silent. There is a double standard. Thousands have pledged to rail against the hypocrisy. Many will gather for the Shadow/Anti-Inauguration January 20, 2001 in Washington, D.C. Others plan a letter writing campaign beginning with "a plea" to U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan to help end this outrage against democracy.

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