Buy Black
Tre “OBEYERAFOO” Millyanz
I just heard a great idea for supporting Black businesses I thought I’d share with everyone. Get a few people from your organization, group of friends, church group, fraternity brothers, sorority sisters, etc. together once a month to visit a new Black business. People are always telling us to buy Black, but it’s hard to find Black businesses when you’re just looking for something you need immediately. You don’t say to yourself, “I need some milk, let me go find a Black owned grocery store right quick.” No, gas ain’t cheap and you don’t feel like driving all over the place looking for a Black-owned store. Instead, a group of people can share the work load finding Black businesses on the internet or just by asking around. Then when one of you find one you can all make plans to visit there together. Simple genius I tell you.
Let me go ahead and explain the concept of buying Black while I’m at it. A lot of people just throw that term around, but most people don’t really understand why it’s important. There are a few major things that drive economies, and they all have to do with movements of money. These things are government spending, investment, savings, and consumption. We (Black folk) are good at that last one….consumption. But consumption is only important when it’s used to drive investment, savings, and taxes for the government (unfortunately our government is run by idiots so they don’t do live up to their economic responsibility most of the time). Consumption is not so good for your community when it is used to fund other people’s investment and savings. This is why buying American strengthens the American economy, and buying Japanese, for example, increases the American trade deficit. This is why America has so much debt. We consume too much ish from other places. Meanwhile, Black people have made everyone else rich through our labor or our consumption, but we can’t fund our own damn schools to teach our kids about our people or provide jobs for our people, so they can get better jobs and live better lives than us.
If this is sounding too much like that econ class that you always hated, let me put it this way…money comes in the community and money goes out of the community. The more money that comes in the more jobs there are, the more we can save, and the more we can invest in more businesses to create more jobs, more savings, and so on. If we give our money to other people, there will be no money left for us and we’ll have to borrow money to keep up our lifestyles. This is why many Black people are in more debt than the average American. If we started saving and investing in our own community, we could build good schools, businesses, and institutions. It is absolutely ridiculous for us to trust other people to teach us and govern us properly when they don’t really want to and we are perfectly capable of doing it ourselves.
So buy Black not because people say you should do it, or even because you want to help a sister or brother out. Do it because it’s good for YOU and your family.
Thank you and goodnight.
DON’T VOTE!
by Tre Millyanz
Just kidding….maybe. I’ve been reading Malcolm X Speaks edited by George Breitman and I ran across an interesting quote I thought I’d share (actually I found a ton, but I’ll post this one first). My commentary follows the quote
We’re neutral. We’re for ourselves. Whatever is good for us, that’s what we’re interested in. That doesn’t mean we’re against you. But it does mean we’re for ourselves.
This is what you and I need to learn. You and I need to learn how to be positively neutral. You and I need to learn how to be non-aligned. And if you and I ever study the science of non-alignment, then you’ll find out that there’s more power in nonalignment than there is alignment. In this country, it’s impossible for you to be aligned – with either party. Either party that you align yourself with is suicide. Because both parties are criminal. Both parties are responsible for the criminal condition that exists. So you can’t align yourself with a party.
What you can do is get registered so that you have power – political potential. When you register your political potential, that means your gun is loaded. But just because it’s loaded, you don’t have to shoot until you see a target that will be beneficial to you. If you want a duck, don’t shoot when you see a bear; wait till you see a duck. And if you want a bear, don’t shoot when [you] see a duck; wait till you see a bear. Wait till you see what you want – then take aim and shoot!
What they do with you and me is tell us, “Register and vote.” Don’t register and vote – register! That’s intelligent. Don’t register and vote – you can vote for a dummy, you can vote for a crook, you can vote for another who’d want to exploit you. “Register” means being in a position to take political action any time, any place and in any manner that would be beneficial to you and me; being in a position to take advantage of our position. Then we’ll be in a position to be respected and recognized. But as soon as you get registered, and you want to be a Democrat or a Republican, you are aligning. And once you are aligning, you have no bargaining power – none whatsoever.
You hear people talking about politicians (specifically Democrats) taking the Black vote for granted, and Black people not demanding anything in return for their votes. Then we want to get upset and start protesting when stuff doesn’t go our way. All those people didn’t give their lives during the Civil Rights Movement to secure our right to vote only for us to throw it away. Not registering to vote is disrespectful to them and, frankly, downright stupid. But registering and voting blindly for a party is even worse.
There are approximately 40 million Black people in this country, or about 13% of the population, and we always vote as a block (with 85+% voting the same way). When you consider that the average point spread of the 11 presidential elections from 1952 to 1992 was 7%, you’ll see that we can easily swing an election. Everyone knows that independents win elections.
But this information is only helpful for you poor, lost causes that actually think we can fix the institutional racism inherent in the system before your great grandchildren die. You Negroes that will be left behind to suffer, sit-in, march, and protest every time a cop kills a Black man, predatory lenders prey on the poor & Black, and the government abandons you after a natural disaster destroys countless lives. Me, I’d rather us have our own government, but that’s another article for another day.
Paying College Athletes
Dr Boyce Watkins
www.BoyceWatkins.net
Quick FYI: I will be on the Jesse Jackson Show tomorrow morning from 8 – 10 am. A list of cities is here. Some of you know that I have been in an on-going campaign to challenge the NCAA on the fact that they do not compensate the families of college athletes for what they bring to campus. Below is an article I contributed to in the Atlanta Journal Constitution and Sunday, there should be a syndicated column I wrote opposite NCAA President Myles Brand on the topic. You know that I am pretty candid in my thoughts (love it or hate it), so here are some reasons I feel that we should be outraged over this issue. I speak on this issue based on my 15 years teaching on college campuses with big time athletics programs, as a Finance Professor who understands how money works, and also as a black male who has seen the devastation of this system up close. Also, as a faculty affiliate with the College Sports Research Institute at The University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, I made it clear to the director that I intend to pursue the racial element of NCAA compensation inequity. I am not a fan of preferential treatment for athletes. I only want fairness for the athletes and their mothers. I am sick of seeing an athlete generate millions for his coach, while simultaneously watching his family struggle to pay the rent every month:
1) The NCAA extracts somewhere near $1 Billion dollars per year from the black community. The revenues earned by collegiate athletics are on the magnitude of the NBA, NFL and NHL. However, unlike these other leagues, the players are only compensated with a scholarship. Scholarships are valuable, but only a drop in the bucket relative to the money players bring to campus.
2) The NCAA contract with CBS sports for the TV rights to March Madness was worth over $6 billion dollars. This does not include hundreds of millions earned each year in concessions, endorsement deals and other extraneous benefits. This money goes into someone’s pockets, so the question is “Who takes this cash home? Those who earn it, or those on the sidelines?”
3) NCAA coaches in revenue generating sports earn as much as $4 million dollars per year, with a large percentage of that revenue coming from endorsement deals based on the clothing that players wear and appearances that players make on national television.
4) In contrast to the luxury experienced by NCAA coaches and their families, nearly half of all black college basketball and football players come from dire poverty.
5) The NCAA spends millions every year in a massive propaganda campaign. Their goal is to convince the world that paying college athletes or their families would be unethical and impractical. At the same time, many of the arguments they make about player families do not apply to their own families. For example, in the CBS Sports special I was on last year, nearly every single person on the special (Coach K from Duke, Billy Packer, Clark Kellogg, NCAA President Myles Brand, etc.) was earning hundreds of thousands, even millions from athletes, while simultaneously explaining why athlete families should not be paid. That’s worse than Dick Cheney and George Bush sending young people to die in a war that they or their f amilies refuse to fight.
6) The mission of collegiate athletics, unfortunately, is more commercial than educational. Players are admitted to college every year with full knowledge that the player is only going to be there for a little while. Also, athletes are not allowed to miss big games or practice sessions to prepare for exams. Finally, coaches with high graduation rates who do not win games are fired, while winning coaches with low graduation rates are promoted and given raises. This creates poor institutional incentives and leads to a mountain of academic hypocrisy.
7) As an African American, I find it ironic that many HBCUs can’t pay the light bill, yet the NCAA is earning over a billion dollars every year from black athletes and their families. This amounts to a massive wealth extraction from the black community, where some of our most valuable financial assets are being depleted, no different from mining being done in Africa.
8) While one might wonder why the players don’t simply take another option, the problem is that the NCAA is allowed to operate as a business cartel, effectively allowing them to implement nearly any and every rule they wish in order to keep athletes from having other options. This form of operation is due to a political blank check being written by Congress that allows the NCAA to do things that would be illegal in nearly any other industry. The very idea that they’ve warped our minds to the point that we think it should be illegal or immoral to fairly compensate a young man or his family for their labor is simply unbelievable. Players don’t even have the same rights to negotiation that are given to coaches, administrators, or sports commentators, all of whom earn millions from the activities of players on the court.
Personally, I think this is wrong.
Green is the New Black
The Black Empowerment Movement is going to require and economic revolution in the Black community. We missed the Industrial Revolution because we were in chains or getting lynched. What was the “Golden Age” for white folks in America (the period after WWII until about 1960) was almost non-existent for a people at the height of a decades-long civil rights battle. We missed the Internet Bubble because we were just sleeping. The Green Revolution is here and it’s real. Massive wealth is going to be created over the next two decades for innovators and out-of-the box thinkers that work to solve the climate and energy crisis. We can’t miss this one folks. Van Jones from greenforall.org is working on this, but it’s going to take a massive effort to mobilize the community around this issue.
In an effort to do our part, here are some things you can do to get involved:
- Buy a shirt with our new design “Green is the New Black” to help promote the movement. A portion of the profit from each shirt goes to Green For All
- Educate yourself with info from these websites:
- Watch this video about billionaire Boone Pickens’ plan to reduce our dependence on foreign oil.
- Join the We Can Solve It campaign
Hidden Oil Subsidies: We Need to END Them
by Michael Graham Richard, Gatineau, Canada on 07. 2.08
Econ 101: Subsidies
One of the many problems with subsidies is that they are almost impossible to repeal. That’s because they usually give big benefits to a small group of people at a relatively small cost to a huge number of people. For example, corn-ethanol subsidies are going to be very hard to phase out because they might mean hundreds of thousands of dollars to farmers, while their cost is spread over the rest of the population and almost invisible. Farmers are a lot more motivated to lobby politicians than the average taxpayer, even if they only represent 1% of the population. The green impact of this is that corn-ethanol, a biofuel that would not necessarily be used much otherwise, is now made competitive with taxpayer dollars (and by putting tariffs on the greener Brazilian sugarcane ethanol), and that makes it harder for other alternative fuels to supersede it (and it also drive food prices up, something that affects most the poor).
Hidden Oil Subsidies
The real price of gasoline is what people actually pay for it, not just what they pay for it at the pump. That might seem subtle, but there’s a big difference. (read more)
The Big Payback
by William A. Darity, Jr. and Kirsten Mullen | TheRoot.com
Thanks for all the slavery apologies, but where the hell is my mule?
July 1, 2008–Legislatures in two more states—Missouri and Nebraska—are contemplating apologies for slavery. Slavery was introduced in what would become Missouri at least as early as 1720 when Philippe Francois Renault brought 500 enslaved Africans to excavate the mines in present-day St. Louis and Jefferson counties. Missouri outlawed the practice with the ratification of its state constitution in 1865. Nebraska’s legislators have expressed “profound regret” for their state’s role in slavery and “condemn racial discrimination in any form toward African Americans.” We believe that these actions are a critical first step toward reparations.
Why institute a program of reparations for events like slavery and legal segregation that happened so long in the past? The reality is: Neither set of events is distant in time.
There are literally scores of living victims of legal segregation in the United States. Our own parents endured Jim Crow into mid-life; a quarter of our own lives were spent in a world of racially segregated and unequal schooling. While the Brown v. Board decision technically ended school segregation in 1954, massive resistance by white Southerners stalled the process for another 20 years. (read more)
Against all odds: School offers hope, opportunity for young men
CNN
CHICAGO, Illinois (CNN) — The odds were never good for 16-year-old D’Angelo Gardner. His father died of a heroin overdose when he was 9 years old, and by the eighth grade, he was caught up in a gang.
“I had a real bad attitude towards … everybody. I didn’t wanna talk, I didn’t wanna do work,” D’Angelo recalls. “It was just hard, and I didn’t wanna be there.”
Growing up in Englewood, one of the city’s toughest neighborhoods, the statistics for young black men are grim. Only one in 40 African-American males in Chicago will finish college, and 50 percent will drop out of high school. If that weren’t bad enough, guns and gang violence are almost a part of daily life. This year, nearly 30 Chicago Public School students have been shot to death.
But in the center of this impoverished neighborhood, there is hope.
The Urban Prep Charter Academy for Young Men, founded in 2002, has become a haven. The charter school, which is not part of the Chicago Public Schools system, has a mission to prepare young black men for college and promote self-esteem and success. (read more)
Managing Expectations for the Obama Presidency
Here’s an interesting article (see below) from our fam over at Black Agenda Report regarding some of Obama’s policies/views and the impact (or lack thereof) they might have on the Black community. I think the main takeaway from the article should be that Obama may not be all he’s cracked up to be, and folks may be setting themselves up for disappointment when they find out that the President doesn’t operate in a vacuum and can’t single-handedly make good on all these promises that Obama is making. Having a Black President is great, but our goal as American Negroes should continue to be becoming self-sufficient and having enough control over our own destinies to not need a Black President to “save” us or validate our place in this country. Even when Obama is elected, the struggle will be far from over. But in the meantime, who else is there to vote for? McCain?….be serious!
Anyway, here’s the article…
Barack Obama vs. Black Self-determination
by BAR executive editor Glen Ford
One of the great ironies of the current campaign season, is the assumption by so many Black voters that by supporting Barack Obama for president, they are making a real contribution to African American self-determination. Nothing could be further from the truth. The candidate, himself, is mightily opposed to the principle of African American self-determination, as he revealed in great detail and beyond doubt in rejecting Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s narrative on America’s origins. Obama also has no more respect than other corporate politicians for principles of international law and the sovereignty of nations. Should he win the presidency, U.S. militarization of African will continue, as will American bullying of its Latin American neighbors.
Obama-ism – a thoroughly corporate political concoction soaked with banalities and wrapped in fraudulent brown packaging – presents a clear and present danger to perhaps the greatest legacy of the Black Freedom Movement: African Americans’ embrace of their right to self-determination. Although African American yearnings for self-determination are evident in all previous eras, the general and dramatic emergence of this fundamental understanding among Blacks of their distinct “peoplehood” and inherent right to shape their own collective destiny, free of veto by or need for validation from dominant whites, marks the Sixties as a transformational period in African American history. (read the full article here)
dangerousNEGRO Goes to the Motherland
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tdv85ROafcU&hl=en]
Keith Olbermann’s “Special Comment” about Clinton RFK Remarks
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a7FXEMVPKbU&hl=en]
Improve our educational system or get people like this…
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c-q4MDQ0cDI&hl=en]
New Designs: May 2008
- Check out our new designs for this month: GOAL Digger & Bamboozled (available with a front and back design)
- For the trend setters up on their t-shirt game, you know that neon print is what’s hot in the streets (shout out to ATL). We now have neon colors available in the “Create Your Own” store where you can get custom made shirts in any color combos you want using dN|Be designs.
Your Black World vs. Bill O’Reilly
Why The O’Reilly Factor is Becoming a Non-Factor and why Bill O’Reilly is Feeling Threatened (Juan Williams lost his credibility a long time ago
Email Your Black World with your opinion
To sign our petition, click here
To see a list of Fox News Corporate Sponsors you can write or call, click here
African-Americans are getting tired of Bill O’Reilly. He has joked about lynching Michelle Obama, insulted the victims of Hurricane Katrina, described African-Americans as uncivilized people, and consistently attacked and undermined everything about black culture. Additionally, he and the rest of the right wing have engaged in unfair, racialized attacks on Senator Barrack Obama.
It is time to fight the hate and oppression. Bill O’Reilly, Sean Hannity and others represent the ugliest of American traditions. As our country tries to move forward with peace and equality, these men use their platforms to engage in the facism and white supremacist mindsets our country fought during World War II.
Slavery and the American Economy
by Waldron H. Giles, Ph.D.
Slavery raises a host of negative images for Black people; so much so, they fail to realize the tremendous economic contributions they made, albeit forced, to the development of the United States into a world power. This lack of realization stems from the national shame of slavery and the concomitant national denial, which in reality has become a weak defense mechanism. To a large degree Blacks and whites have bought into this denial, albeit for different reasons. In spite of this contribution Blacks continue to vie for respect and acceptance by the very country that they practically own via a down payment with their own blood, sweat, and tears. Through the shame of slavery African Americans continue to increase the “Debt” they are owed instead of steadfastly demanding payment.
The resulting hypothesis of this economic analysis of slavery is that the current “Debt” is too large to foster healthy discussions with whites and continued avoidance of such discussions has been and will continue to be disguised under a variety of racist manipulations. The purpose of this economic analysis is to enlighten African Americans and end the impotence produced by this shame and to undo those stereotypical images of laziness, ignorance, criminal behavior, and incompetence.
Smart is the New Gangsta Short Film
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IXCxMbR8MjA&hl=en]
Higher Learning Sighting in Prague
Royce The 5′9, Phonte & Pooh of Little Brother, J-Ro of the Liks, Rasco & Planet Asia of Cali Agents, Kid Vicious (Royce’s brother), Nironic and more freestyle onstage in Prague.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LhrI9aIbcZ8&hl=en]
