Vision Circle

FrontlineNews - NBUF Youth BTM

My man Marcus Brown spits fire in his own right. Outside his own spoken word exposition, he puts in Work with creative and conscious folks nationwide. In Kansas City, he's known for exemplifying and making a way for young people to express themselves. It's in that context under the umbrella of the Dubois Learning Center that I've had the pleasure of making his acquaintence. Marcus put together a tight 12 minute podcast that beautifully demonstrates the power we can tap when we help our children BE THE MEDIA (BTM). This is the type of audio that will become a staple of the Frontline Media Network, a podcast Internet Radio show that will soon begin regular production at the Dubois Learning Center. I think this is one you'll really enjoy! Here's the audio file.

NOLA TAZ

It is at times like this, when the focus is on disaster, that people show their true nature. At least that's what MLK said about the test of a man. Coming to grips with my partisan side, I recognize how best to antagonize the liberal nemesis: test his theories during times of duress.

I happened across a friend's blog and he mentioned, on his way to Burning Man, that doyenne of the diverse Hakim Bey. Bey's theory turns up at the oddest moments and from my perspective evoke little more than a romance for chaos. And so I quote from Bey wondering if Progressives here might be swayed by the highfalutin' theory as we observe what goes down in the town that drowned. To wit:

Uprising, or the Latin form insurrection, are words used by historians to label failed revolutions--movements which do not match the expected curve, the consensus-approved trajectory: revolution, reaction, betrayal, the founding of a stronger and even more oppressive State--the turning of the wheel, the return of history again and again to its highest form: jackboot on the face of humanity forever.

By failing to follow this curve, the up-rising suggests the possibility of a movement outside and beyond the Hegelian spiral of that "progress" which is secretly nothing more than a vicious circle. Surgo--rise up, surge. Insurgo--rise up, raise oneself up. A bootstrap operation. A goodbye to that wretched parody of the karmic round, historical revolutionary futility. The slogan "Revolution!" has mutated from tocsin to toxin, a malign pseudo-Gnostic fate-trap, a nightmare where no matter how we struggle we never escape that evil Aeon, that incubus the State, one State after another, every "heaven" ruled by yet one more evil angel.

If History IS "Time," as it claims to be, then the uprising is a moment that springs up and out of Time, violates the "law" of History. If the State IS History, as it claims to be, then the insurrection is the forbidden moment, an unforgivable denial of the dialectic--shimmying up the pole and out of the smokehole, a shaman's maneuver carried out at an "impossible angle" to the universe. History says the Revolution attains "permanence," or at least duration, while the uprising is "temporary." In this sense an uprising is like a "peak experience" as opposed to the standard of "ordinary" consciousness and experience. Like festivals, uprisings cannot happen every day--otherwise they would not be "nonordinary." But such moments of intensity give shape and meaning to the entirety of a life. The shaman returns--you can't stay up on the roof forever-- but things have changed, shifts and integrations have occurred--a difference is made.

Is there or is there not insurrection in New Orleans? Are people taking this opportunity to liberate themselves as the jackboot of the state is otherwise occupied? Will the prisoners released from jail to higher ground find an opportune moment to become what they have been denied from becoming? Is New Orleans a Temporary Autonomous Zone?

Or, are we just witnessing what happens to poor people who have but simple ambitions? Is everybody simply reduced to a lower form of survival and those not fit to achieve during normal days only depressed a bit further?

I think it is what it is. A city reduced to rubble and refugee status. There is no transcendence here, only human instinct and the spinning and framing of government assistance and media commentary. There is nothing special except that we Americans don't often look so closely at our neighbors. Everybody who wants to help, would help anyway. Everybody who wants to rob would be robbing sooner or later. Today, we're just getting a peak at ourselves naked. 24/7

It's not biblical. It's just a flood.

$0.20 Price Rise Over Night?!?!?!?!?

In the Baltimore-Washington region, some local news stations are reporting overnight gasoline price increases of $0.20.

Gouging.

Plain and simple.

Unless they are saying that the refinery to gas station reserve is no more than 3 or 4 days.

Of course, that reserve seems to become months worth when the price per barrel price drops.

"This Hurts More More Than...."

I never believed the saying, "This hurts me more than it hurts you".

Until now.

Sometimes you have to let your children fail in order to teach a life lesson.

Stand back, say, "You do what you want to do, but it is wrong for the following reasons...". Then, let them go along their way. Just pray that they find their way back onto the right path.

The "kid" messed up the first year of college. No more funding from me until it's determined that the "kid" has proper priorities. Meanwhile, swim on your own. If you sink, you sink.

With love...

Chavez challenges the oil kings

More plot thickening from the Sunday Binnis Post online...,

On July 14 in the western city of Maracaibo, Venezuelan government tax auditors and a prosecutor went to the offices of Chevron, the second-largest US oil company.

They seized boxes of records to build a case that San Ramon, California-based Chevron and 21 other energy companies owe Venezuela €2.4 billion in back taxes.

Chavez, who refers to US president George Bush as ‘Mr Danger', said on June 5 that the US was trying to install a global dictatorship. US secretary of state Condoleezza Rice described Chavez as a “negative force'‘ in the region.

just goes to show, you gotta let a ho be a ho...,

On July 14 in the western city of Maracaibo, Venezuelan government tax auditors and a prosecutor went to the offices of Chevron, the second-largest US oil company.

They seized boxes of records to build a case that San Ramon, California-based Chevron and 21 other energy companies owe Venezuela €2.4 billion in back taxes.

The raid is part of Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez's push to squeeze more money out of foreign companies that want to pump oil from the world's fifth-largest petroleum exporter.

Since last October, he has raised heavy-oil royalty fees to as much as 30 per cent from 1 per cent, begun paying for some services in nonconvertible bolivares instead of US dollars, and ordered oil well contracts converted into government-controlled joint ventures.

Chavez wants to use the revenue to pay for homes, clinics and schools for the 58 per cent of Venezuelan families who live on less than $200 a month.

Since taking office in February 1999, Chavez has embarked on a socialist revolution, seizing ranches to hand over to the poor and starting a TV news network with promotional ads featuring a swastika painted on a US flag.

Chavez says he's using oil money to bankroll a quest to become Latin America's leader against US-style capitalism.

In a May 4 speech, he said: “Being rich is bad'‘ and “Jesus Christ was a socialist'‘.

Chavez, a close friend of Cuban president Fidel Castro, sends crude oil to Cuba in exchange for doctors to staff 3,000 neighbourhood clinics.

In June, he pledged subsidised oil for poor Caribbean nations, such as Grenada.

But Chevron and its competitors haven't been scared off, because Venezuela has the largest reserves in the western hemisphere. The oil companies want to invest $30 billion in Venezuela, which is the fourth-largest supplier of crude to the US, according to the Venezuelan Hydrocarbons Association.

Chavez says all companies are welcome in his country.

“Foreign companies have been here for the last century exploiting oil and gas, and they'll have all the space they've been able to have so far,” he says.

“It's just that they will have to pay the royalties, they will have to pay the income tax. If they don't, we will go after them.”

Venezuela's tax agency stated on August 11 that it was seeking to attach more than 280 billion bolivares (€106million) in assets from Royal Dutch Shell in a dispute over what the country says is unpaid back taxes.

The prize in Venezuela is the tropical flatlands north of the Orinoco river, beneath which, according to Chavez, lie 230 billion barrels of heavy crude, one of the largest oil deposits in the world.

Chavez, who has used his clout as leader of the third-largest member of the Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries (Opec) to curb Venezuela's output by 20 per cent since taking office, now says he wants to boost production.

Most of the decline came from the state-owned producer, Petroleos de Venezuela, where Chavez fired half the workforce to break a 2002-2003 strike aimed at ousting him. Daily output at PDVSA has tumbled to about 2million barrels from 2.92 million barrels in 1998.

Foreign oil companies took up the slack, doubling their production to about 1.12 million barrels a day last year.

Now, Chavez says he wants to attract €8 billion more from foreign oil companies to help boost Venezuela's total oil production to 5 million barrels a day by 2009.

“This government is your ally,” Chavez told foreign oil executives in March. “We are not chasing anyone away from Venezuela.”

At the same time, Chavez claimed that the Bush administration was trying to force him to commit suicide and he threatened that exports to the US would be cut off if he were to meet an untimely death.

Chavez, who refers to US president George Bush as ‘Mr Danger', said on June 5 that the US was trying to install a global dictatorship. US secretary of state Condoleezza Rice described Chavez as a “negative force'‘ in the region.

Last Monday, television evangelist Pat Robertson told viewers of his 700 Club TV programme that the US should assassinate Chavez to stop him from becoming a “launching pad for communists'‘.

Venezuelan vice president Jose Vicente Rangel responded by saying Robertson's remarks were “criminal'‘. US state department spokesman Sean McCormack said at a press briefing that Robertson's views did not “represent the policy of the United States'‘.

Unless new reserves are tapped in countries like Venezuela in the next 15 years, global oil output won't keep pace with demand, according to a report by New York securities firm Sanford C Bernstein.

The report forecasts that demand for oil will grow by 1.8 per cent a year until 2020 to 102.7 million barrels a day.

Global oil production capacity will be 102.1 million barrels a day, the report says.

Concern about future supply has helped to push crude oil prices up more than fivefold to a record $67.10 a barrel on August 12 from $12.28 on February 2, 1999, when Chavez was sworn in as president.

Venezuela is one of the few major oil producers that allow foreign investment. Saudi Arabia allows only its state oil company to pump crude.

And Venezuela has been more open than other countries in Latin America such as Mexico, which bars foreign companies from exploiting the second-biggest oil reserves in Latin America.

Oil companies such as Shell have acquiesced to Chavez's demands. On July 14, the government ordered Shell, whose 90 years of working in Venezuela includes having its wells nationalised in 1975, to pay $131 million of back taxes.

Shell says it has paid all of its taxes.

Norway's state-run Statoil, Paris-based Total and Chevron have been hardest hit by Chavez's new rules, because they manage wells for PDVSA and are shareholders in the four heavy-crude production ventures in the Orinoco belt.

Statoil, Total and Conoco-Phillips may have to pay €260 million in back taxes for their heavy-oil ventures in the Orinoco belt, according to oil minister Ramirez.

Chavez is also considering a reduction in Venezuela's dependence on oil sales to the US, which accounts for about 60 per cent of the nation's crude exports. He signed agreements to boost oil sales to Argentina, Brazil, China, India, Paraguay and Uruguay.

He also proposed building a pipeline to Pacific Oceanports in Colombia to ship more crude to China.

The US imports 15 per cent of its crude oil from Venezuela, which is just a four to five-day tanker trip from Texas refineries.

Oil is a pervasive part of life in Venezuela, where petrol stations don't even post the price, because it is fixed at 18 cents per gallon. Revenue from crude exports funds half the government's budget, and oil prices have driven Venezuela's economy since the 1920s.

Last year, as crude prices soared again, Venezuela's economy grew a record 17 per cent.

In 1998 Chavez won a landslide election victory by pledging a revolution that would use oil revenue to spread equality. Since taking office, he has taken advantage of surging oil prices by boosting spending on programmes for the poor to a projected €10.6 billion this year - almost half the national budget. This has helped him to survive an attempted coup and recall referendum.

PDVSA dispenses €3.2 billion a year for everything from cooperatives that make the red T-shirts Chavez supporters wear to monthly stipends for 700,000 people enrolled on adult education courses.

On some days, PDVSA's 13-floor concrete headquarters in Caracas draws scores of people seeking funds for social programmes, known as missions.

“For a long time, our oil went to the rich, but as you can see, here that's changed,” says Wuikelman Angel, 35, who manages workshops, a youth centre and a clinic that PDVSA built last year on a three-hectare shuttered gasoline depot in Caracas's Catia slum.

On one morning in late June, about 50 people wait at the €5.7 million complex, flanked by a verdant hill covered with tin-roofed shacks and piles of garbage, for free treatment at a two-storey clinic with a new X-ray machine and a pediatric ward.

In a warehouse across a rose-lined square, a dozen people make final adjustments to machinery at a shoemaking cooperative, one of thousands of government-financed companies that are part of Chavez's plan to give jobs to the poor.

It's all financed by PDVSA, starting with the cooperative's first order for 250 pairs of black leather shoes, which were donated to victims of a mudslide.

Across the road is a government supermarket that sells food at a 33 per cent discount - one of 12,000 built with PDVSA funds since Chavez took power.

In addition to the PDVSA money, Chavez is using €4.8 billion of the country's €23.5 billion of central bank reserves for government spending.

Chavez is stepping up social spending to build support for a re-election bid in December 2006. His approval rating was 61 per cent in the second quarter - that's down eight percentage points from the start of the year.

Despite demands for more taxes, Chevron and Repsol plan to expand in the Orinoco area, which would involve drilling as many as 2,000 wells that use steam to force tar-like crude oil out of the ground.

The Orinoco Belt, with as many as 300 billion barrels of oil, may be a critical area for Chevron to add reserves.

Chevron and Repsol hope to negotiate an agreement that will allow them to use their expertise to run the wells, pipelines and refineries planned for the Orinoco.

If Venezuela is seeking to expand production, there is no doubt that the Orinoco is the area to develop.

28 August 2005 By Michael Smith and Peter Wilson

Parker Exceeds Coonshow Ideals

Writing in the Philadelphia Inquirer Star Parker meets and exceeds her typical standard of high coonshowmanship - managing in one loopy screed to take a whack at Jesse, {who's prolly just there trying to arrange for a Citgo discount gas franchise for himself or a member of his extended entourage in a hood near you} deny MLK's suppressed vision for social justice and structural change, and most astonishingly, defend Pat Robertson's call for the assassination of the democratically elected leader of Venezuela who just happens to be black!!!

Jackson addressed the Venezuelan parliament, met personally with President Chavez and used the occasion to condemn Pat Robertson's unfortunate remarks calling for Chavez's assassination. However, Robertson's remarks, for which he had already apologized, were provoked by genuine and well-founded concern about the ongoing erosion of human liberty in Venezuela and Chavez's activities in spreading his influence throughout Latin America.

Jackson, however, was more interested in attacking Robertson than in whether Robertson's concerns are legitimate.

oh Lawd...,

Jackson falls short of King's ideals

By Star Parker

Jesse Jackson chose to celebrate the 42d anniversary of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" speech by going to Venezuela and paying homage to its left-wing strongman president Hugo Chavez. Choosing this venue for recalling King's ideals tells us a lot about how Jackson understands those ideals and what he is about.

Jackson's politics have largely defined black politics since King's death. It has been my view that these politics have played a central role in creating the serious social problems in our community today. Checking out whom Jackson chooses to embrace provides insight into those politics and, hopefully, into our problems.

Jackson addressed the Venezuelan parliament, met personally with President Chavez and used the occasion to condemn Pat Robertson's unfortunate remarks calling for Chavez's assassination. However, Robertson's remarks, for which he had already apologized, were provoked by genuine and well-founded concern about the ongoing erosion of human liberty in Venezuela and Chavez's activities in spreading his influence throughout Latin America.

Jackson, however, was more interested in attacking Robertson than in whether Robertson's concerns are legitimate.

In response to concerns from the Bush administration that Chavez is a force for instability in Latin America, headlines in Venezuela and the United States reported Jackson as saying that Venezuela was "no threat."

However, here is what Michael Shifter, vice president of the Inter-American Dialogue, who also teaches Latin American politics at Georgetown University, had to say in a Washington Post op-ed piece on Sunday:

"The Venezuelan leader is waging battles on several fronts. A great deal is at stake, including the prospects for liberal democracy in Latin America. Chavez is constructing a model of domestic governance that is inimical to democratic values and individual rights. He appears to be embarked on a mission that is not only virulently anti-U.S. but that seeks to push the region back toward authoritarian politics."

When Pat Robertson broadcast his suggestion that we "take out" Chavez, Chavez himself was in Cuba visiting his good friend Fidel Castro. Also among his friends is African dictator Robert Mugabe, whom Chavez honored in Venezuela last year.

However, Jesse Jackson had nothing but words of praise for Chavez.

"Your focus on foreign debt, debt relief, and free and fair trade to overcome years of structural disorder, unnecessary military spending, land reform... these are some of the great themes of our time."

Regarding the "unnecessary military spending," Peter Brookes, a senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation reports on Chavez's buying spree of MiG 29 fighters, helicopter gunships and AK-47 assault rifles from Russia and additional arms purchases from Spain and Brazil. Chavez has indicated intent to increase Venezuela's army reserve as "an honorable answer to President Bush's intention of being master of the world."

Meanwhile, Chavez has been busy using oil as a diplomatic tool, making sweetheart deals throughout Latin America, according to the Inter-American Dialogue's Shifter, to advance his anti-U.S. agenda.

King fought oppression with nonviolence and carried a message of freedom driven by Christian ideals. His message was transformed, under leaders such as Jesse Jackson, to the politics of power and political patronage, of entitlement and welfare. Since King's death, single-parent black households and out-of- wedlock black births have tripled. Life in our inner cities has become defined by drugs, aids, promiscuity, disdain for education, and unemployment.

I believe if King were with us today, he would be in our cities working to restore faith, family, and personal responsibility. He wouldn't be in Venezuela giving credibility to a garden variety Latin American despot.

Star Parker is president of Coalition on Urban Renewal and Education and author of "Uncle Sam's Plantation." The Web site address for her organization is www.urbancure.org.

Superdome of Shame

Jack Duggan brings it hard and correct at LewRockwell.com on the apartheid degeneracy perpetrated under cover of Katrina. Predictably, there hasn't been a peep raised about this in the MSM or by the traditional coonshowmen/wimmin.

Let's face it. If you're poor in America, you're a "suspect," maybe. If you're poor and black in America, you're a "criminal," definitely. Even if your life is in peril, no excuses. Your rights don't count as long as any badge or weekend warrior in BDU's says they don't.

This is the real story of the Louisiana Superdome. Hurricane Katrina can certainly destroy the environs of the Louisiana and her neighboring states, but that can all be rebuilt. What will never be rebuilt is the dignity of the poorest citizens of that region, since the government acted with a greater destructive force than a hurricane. The lamp of freedom has been blown out by force-five bureaucrats, their sycophants and their head-embedded media enablers who will insure that it will never get re-ignited. For our own good, of course.

Heads should roll in Louisiana, for all those whose civil rights were violated on Sunday, August 28, 2005, outside the Louisiana Superdome of Shame.

Watching news coverage of the refugees trying to enter the Louisiana Superdome in New Orleans for safety from the approaching force-five Hurricane Katrina, I was incredulous how the people attempting to enter the stadium were being treated by the National Guard troops and local police. The people were made to stand for hours outside in the awful Louisiana climate while they were admitted one or two adults at a time so they could be searched "for firearms and alcohol."

The frail elderly, many grasping walkers and others in wheelchairs seemed to be near collapse. They, along with hundreds of small children needing water and rest-room relief, were forced to wait as long as four hours to get to safety. It was often repeated during the video reports that the last time the Superdome was used as a hurricane shelter, a few of the temporary occupants removed some furniture. But this time, they had a large security force on hand, so that was NOT going to happen again, no-siree-bob.

During coverage by Geraldo Rivera Sunday night, FOX NEWS' video cameras zoomed inside the foyer deck of the Superdome and viewers could see a national guard person going through a powder compact from of a woman's purse that was way too small to hold a liquor bottle or a gun. It was obvious that they were looking for drugs in warrantless searches. They instructed all the refugees far back in the seemingly endless lines to have their prescription-pill bottles out when approaching the security checkpoint and also a photo ID to prove that they belonged with the prescription.

There were THOUSANDS of poor, mostly black citizens of the lower Louisiana area, many of them little children and sickly elderly, being forced to stand for hours while the government violated their civil rights with forced searches that were patently unconstitutional, unjust and unreasonable under the dire circumstances. "Don't want to be searched? That's okay...now turn around, go outside and die!" Big choice.

Can you imagine New Orleans' wealthy elite meekly submitting to such microscopic searches of their persons and property for drugs? Heads would roll. But poor people who had no money to escape the deadly storm's onslaught had no choice. They had nowhere else to go to save their children's and parents' lives. They were humiliated just for trying to survive. Their grandfathers and grandmothers suffered as slaves on Southern plantations decades ago, while today, they suffer as slaves to the state, the state that cancels their human rights and dignity in the name of "protecting" them.

Did you see that, America? Nothing has changed in the South. Poor people of are still being herded and treated as criminals because of the color of their skin. The Sheriff and Louisiana National Guard knows the profile of likely drug users: black people and anyone associating with them; they were searched just as if they were entering a state penitentiary visiting a death-row prisoner. Maybe the refugees would have fared better if they had had season tickets in their hands.

Think about it. They can allow in 30,000 screaming fans with fifty-dollar bills and costly NFL tickets in their hands in a few minutes, but poor black people fleeing for their lives, four hours. Four HOURS!

None of the news people I saw on the major cable and broadcast networks noticed this outrage. Apparently, they are still "embedded" with the government and couldn't possibly risk dislodging their heads long enough to report the truth right before their eyes.

We let morons take away our rights to person and property at the airports, all for the false "protection" they promised us and can't possibly deliver, so now we see them doing it to helpless citizens even when the citizens' lives are in danger. "First, we gotta check you for weapons and drugs...pull your dress up, lift up your arms...." – let those old people collapse and those kids soil themselves – "This is FOR YOUR OWN SAFETY."

God forbid that anyone have a hip flask to calm their nerves during a traumatic life-and-death experience. Someone else might actually toke up or take a non-prescription pill! And a few might take their right to keep and bear arms seriously, when everyone knows that only government employees deserve self-protection, not their citizen "bosses." The constitution doesn't apply when the government thinks it can make you safer by judging you, disarming you, and denuding you of your rights.

Who gave the order to make all these exhausted, miserable poor people wait for hours while they were searched so illicitly? Under what actual law did they search these refugees for anything whatsoever on their person? Do they search football game fans this thoroughly and for this long? Suuuuuure they do....

Could all this form a mass tort against the State of Louisiana? Maybe. Some of the Superdome refugees must be hopping mad.

Let's face it. If you're poor in America, you're a "suspect," maybe. If you're poor and black in America, you're a "criminal," definitely. Even if your life is in peril, no excuses. Your rights don't count as long as any badge or weekend warrior in BDU's says they don't.

This is the real story of the Louisiana Superdome. Hurricane Katrina can certainly destroy the environs of the Louisiana and her neighboring states, but that can all be rebuilt. What will never be rebuilt is the dignity of the poorest citizens of that region, since the government acted with a greater destructive force than a hurricane. The lamp of freedom has been blown out by force-five bureaucrats, their sycophants and their head-embedded media enablers who will insure that it will never get re-ignited. For our own good, of course.

Heads should roll in Louisiana, for all those whose civil rights were violated on Sunday, August 28, 2005, outside the Louisiana Superdome of Shame.

August 30, 2005

Jack Duggan [send him mail] lives in Fort Apache (Hamilton, New Jersey, site of the anthrax mailings) with his family.

Bled, Misled, and Spiritually Dead

AJC reports black conservative coonshow du jour;

"We're not just a church, we're an international corporation," Long said. "We're not just a bumbling bunch of preachers who can't talk and all we're doing is baptizing babies. I deal with the White House. I deal with Tony Blair. I deal with presidents around this world. I pastor a multimillion-dollar congregation."

"You've got to put me on a different scale than the little black preacher sitting over there that's supposed to be just getting by because the people are suffering."

"Any problem people may have with his charity, Long said, was rooted in some people's expectations that pastors should be poor.

"I would love to sit with you and walk with you through the Bible to show that Jesus wasn't poor," he said.

His congregation is inspired by seeing its pastor do well, Long said.

"I'm not going to apologize for anything. ... "

In 1995, Bishop Eddie Long established a nonprofit, tax-exempt charity to help the needy and spread the gospel.

But it was Long, leader of the largest church congregation in Georgia, who became the charity's biggest beneficiary.

The charity, Bishop Eddie Long Ministries Inc., provided him with at least $3.07 million in salary, benefits and the use of property between 1997 and 2000 — nearly as much as it gave to all other recipients combined during those years, tax records show.

It is one of at least 20 nonprofit and for-profit corporations that Long founded after becoming pastor of New Birth Missionary Baptist Church in 1987. Long's businesses include a music publishing company and a transportation service.

The charity's compensation to Long over that four-year period included:

•A $1.4 million six-bedroom, nine-bath home on 20 acres in Lithonia.

•Use of a $350,000 luxury Bentley automobile.

•More than $1 million in salary, including $494,000 in 2000.

Long said the charity, which reported that it stopped doing business after 2000, did not solicit donations from New Birth members. It reported that its income included royalties, speaking fees and several large donations.

The charity made $3.1 million in donations to others between 1997 and 2000, the records show, but they did not contain any itemized breakdown of the donations, as required by the Internal Revenue Service.

Nonprofit groups are exempt from paying state and federal income taxes if they meet certain criteria. In return, the federal tax code says their executives' benefits may not be excessive.

Long and his wife, Vanessa, were two of the charity's four board members. The charity gave a third board member, Terrance Thornton, a $160,000 loan in 1999 to buy a home site across the street from Long's house, tax records show.

Long's tax attorney, J. David Epstein, said an independent compensation committee, along with a second committee within New Birth and a national accounting firm, oversaw those decisions. He declined to identify the firm or members of the committees.

Long, 52, defended his compensation during an interview about his charity. He's transformed New Birth, based in Lithonia, from a 300-member church to a 25,000-member megachurch with a global presence, according to the church's Web site.

"We're not just a church, we're an international corporation," Long said. "We're not just a bumbling bunch of preachers who can't talk and all we're doing is baptizing babies. I deal with the White House. I deal with Tony Blair. I deal with presidents around this world. I pastor a multimillion-dollar congregation.

"You've got to put me on a different scale than the little black preacher sitting over there that's supposed to be just getting by because the people are suffering."

Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), chairman of a Senate committee investigating lavish salaries of nonprofit executives, said leaders of tax-exempt organizations must be responsible for the public trust they've been given.

"I'm worried that a few people are confusing the ringing of a church bell with the ringing of a cash register," Grassley said in a statement in response to The Atlanta Journal-Constitution's inquiries about the charity. "When I hear about leaders of charities being provided a $300,000 Bentley to drive around in, my fear is that it's the taxpayers who subsidize this charity who are really being taken for a ride."

As the popularity of televangelism, traveling religious shows and megachurches has skyrocketed, so has the money their leaders can earn. IRS enforcement of compensation rules has been light, and the agency rarely audits nonprofit groups.

In 2002 and 2003, TV evangelist and author Joyce Meyer had compensation packages of up to $900,000 approved by her ministry's board, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported. Bishop T.D. Jakes, who staged MegaFest in Atlanta this summer, has a $1.7 million mansion in Dallas, according to Time magazine.

With few exceptions, the public rarely gets a glimpse at religious leaders' compensation because churches are not required to file tax returns. Information on Long's salary and benefits was derived from the charity's tax returns, which are public records.

Churches must report to the IRS how much they pay employees, but those records are not public.

Long's charity and his church were separate organizations. The charity was incorporated under federal law as a nonprofit religious corporation — not a church — subject to rules to ensure accountability and prevent enrichment of executives at the public expense.

Churches and nonprofits are required to follow the same IRS rules regarding compensation. The IRS tax guide for churches and religious organizations says that neither group may "provide a substantial benefit to private interests," and their net earnings "may not [benefit] any individual." They are allowed to pay their executives "reasonable compensation."

"In general, an individual(s) salary and benefits should not be excessive and must be approved by the majority of board of directors who are unpaid and not related to the individual(s)," said IRS spokesman Mark Green in a statement.

Long's benefits went beyond reasonable compensation, said Jeff Krehely, deputy director of the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy, a Washington-based group that promotes accountability in the philanthropic community.

"After reviewing the compensation packages of foundation executives — including those who have been written up in the press as being excessive — I've never seen anything quite like what Long [was] getting, when you include his salary, the house and the car," Krehely said.

Marcus Owens, a Washington attorney and former director of the IRS' Exempt Organizations Division, was retained by Long to look over Bishop Eddie Long Ministries as a result of inquiries about the charity.

Owens released a statement saying, "The Ministry has a comprehensive system of internal controls and policies in place that ensure that all funds are accounted for and spent for appropriate purposes under the tax code." He declined to elaborate or answer questions about the operation of the charity from 1997 to 2000.

'Touch a lot of people'

Long, accompanied by two attorneys and two publicists, talked about his charity in a conference room at New Birth's sprawling campus in south DeKalb County. He declined to answer most questions about his charity's financial transactions, leaving those responses to his attorney. He and Epstein later declined to answer follow-up questions, including whether Long had reported the house on his personal income tax return.

The church, dubbed "Club New Birth" because of the abundance of young black single professionals who attend its services, includes a school that goes through ninth grade, a fitness center and a 10,000-seat sanctuary, opened in 2001.

The church also ministers to drug addicts and prisoners, helped start a credit union near South DeKalb Mall, and has been involved in religious revivals as far away as New Zealand and Kenya.

"We touch a lot of people," Long said. "This is a world-impacting ministry, and I personally get a little offended when my integrity is questioned."

Long has drawn criticism before. In December, he and Bernice King, younger daughter of the late Martin Luther King Jr., led a march from the King Center promoting several causes. Critics said the civil rights leader would never have agreed to the march's call for a constitutional ban on same-sex marriage.

A black conservative, Long calls himself one of God's "scarred leaders," someone God uses despite moral lapses that included being fired from a job for lying on an expense report.

Long established the charity as a nonprofit religious corporation in 1995. Incorporation papers filed in New York said its purpose was spreading the gospel and that no part "of its assets, income or profit" would be distributed to any directors of the charity except for "reasonable payment."

Epstein said it was created for Long to coordinate his charitable activities, including mission trips overseas and donations to churches and orphans.

But later, the charity's compensation committee decided to use some of the charity's assets to pay Long for his work at New Birth to make up for many years when he had been underpaid, Epstein said. Long had told his charity's compensation committee previously that he didn't want to be paid the maximum amount available to him, Epstein said.

"It was appropriate to do something to make a dent in the compensation that the bishop hadn't received," Epstein said.

"Bishop Long has never received the legal amount of compensation he is due by law," said Epstein. A Philadelphia lawyer specializing in church tax law, Epstein is the producer of a video for pastors called "How To Maximize Your Clergy Salary and Benefits Package."

At one time Long also received a salary from New Birth. A church spokesman said Long no longer takes a salary, but instead accepts "love offerings" made by church members. Long would not discuss his current compensation.

Land donation

The charity took out a $1,160,000 mortgage to purchase the home in March 1998, according to DeKalb County property records. The mortgage was paid off by 2003, records show.

In October 2002, Bishop Eddie Long Ministries notified the IRS that the charity was dissolving and pledged to transfer all of its assets to New Birth Missionary Baptist Church.

The house was never transferred.

Instead, a year later, Long signed papers relinquishing the charity's interest in the home, making himself the sole owner. The same day, Christmas Eve 2003, Long took out a $300,000 loan using the house as collateral.

State law in New York requires that a nonprofit religious corporation must get court approval and notify the New York attorney general's office of its intent to transfer real estate to one of its officers. The attorney general's office said it could not find any record of the transaction or of Long's charity getting court approval.

Epstein said Long earned much of the charity's revenue through royalties, honorariums and gifts from other pastors and churches. He and Long emphasized that none of the charity's money came through soliciting New Birth members.

"I have great integrity with my congregation," Long said. "I would never take their money and use them to build my own personal happiness."

Tax and property records show, however, that New Birth accounted for more than half the charity's income in 1997. Fulton County property records show the church gave Long's charity 13.7 acres of land that year. The charity later reported selling the property for $1.4 million.

Also, a single donor accounted for 90 percent of the charity's income in 1999 and 2000, tax records show. One donor gave $1.9 million in 1999 and one donor gave $1.6 million the following year. As allowed by law, the records do not identify the donors.

Long would not say whether New Birth was the donor nor talk about the church's decision to donate land to his charity.

'Last say-so'

Long said a church board oversaw his charity's decisions to compensate him.

"It's not like I wake up and say, 'I think I want a Bentley,' " he said.

In the past, however, Long has claimed he was the final decision-maker at New Birth. In a 1999 interview, he told the Journal-Constitution how he became the unquestioned leader at his church. After presiding over New Birth's explosive growth, he said he told his congregation that a biblical leader shouldn't have to answer to a board. Long said the board relinquished its authority over him with his congregation's approval.

In his book "Taking Over," Long described the event in more detail. He wrote that after seven years at New Birth, he was frustrated by its deacon board because it was "gripping the purse strings" of the church and "telling the man of God when to jump and how high." He said he received a revelation from God, who encouraged him to get rid of the "ungodly governmental structure" at New Birth.

"That was the day I became pastor," Long wrote. "Up until that time, I was the hired preacher . ... "

Some pastors take advantage of a lack of denominational accountability to enrich themselves, said J. Lee Grady, editor of Charisma, a national magazine that covers charismatic churches. Grady said, however, that he didn't know enough about Long's ministry to comment on it specifically.

"There are many independent churches out there today that are accountable to no one," he said. "Their board structures are controlled by a few insiders and no one can bring correction. That is not healthy. But it will not change as long as the congregations don't demand change."

Several New Birth members said they approved of Long's compensation, home and leadership style. They said church boards often limit the vision of pastors.

"I know he's going to do the right thing," said Melvin Johnson, a member of the church's elder council. "He's going to sow the seed where it's supposed to be sowed."

Johnson said there was no New Birth board or committee that can overrule Long's decisions. "He would have the last say-so in terms of what ultimate decisions are made," said Johnson, a member for 17 years.

Everett Blakes, another member, said Long recently pledged to pay off the debts of 10 families and to buy a car for every unmarried mother at the church.

Blakes said it was New Birth's duty to support Long financially.

"We have to come bearing gifts," Blakes said. "When you come before the priest and he gives a word to you, then it's your duty to meet the needs of the priest."

'Jesus wasn't poor'

Several nonprofit experts and watchdog group leaders questioned how the $1.4 million home and the Bentley contributed to the charity's stated purpose.

They cited IRS rules warning that a nonprofit religious group could lose its tax-exempt status if it provides excess economic benefits to an insider.

"An organization can be a tax-exempt entity or a for-profit entity, but not both," said Rod Pitzer, a tax expert with Wall Watchers, a North Carolina-based watchdog group that monitors the finances of large Christian organizations.

Nonprofit experts and others who viewed the charity's records at the Journal-Constitution's request said that it did not appear to have an independent board.

"With a wife approving her husband's salary, it appears that this board's stamp is really just a rubber stamp," said Grassley, the Iowa senator.

Board members other than Long did not comment for this article. Long's wife, Vanessa, declined to comment and Thornton did not return telephone calls. A fourth board member who served for several years could not be located.

Daniel Borochoff, president of the American Institute of Philanthropy, said Long shouldn't build his prosperity on the back of a nonprofit religious corporation.

"It's wrong to use tax-subsidized dollars to support luxury goods for nonprofit executives," said Borochoff. "If he wants these things, then he should get people to give him money outside of a nonprofit organization."

Long said he represented a "paradigm shift" in the black church. He said he won't be like other pastors who died broke while giving everything to congregations that "wanted them to live in poverty and preach to them about prosperity."

Any problem people may have with his charity, Long said, was rooted in some people's expectations that pastors should be poor.

"I would love to sit with you and walk with you through the Bible to show that Jesus wasn't poor," he said.

His congregation is inspired by seeing its pastor do well, Long said.

"I'm not going to apologize for anything. ... "

Why We Fail

In a nutshell;

While stating that she “didn't have a personal relationship” with Johnson, Oprah told Martin of several stories the highlight her regard for the visionary publisher.

Complete gossipy coverage of the snub but the bolded words above tell the entire story as far as I'm concerned about a catastrophic failure of leadership and commonality of interests.., how could the two most powerful black folks in MSM - both operating out of Chicago -NOT have a close professional relationship at the very least?

thinking about the pink slip issued to Julian Bond by Ted Hayes on an episode of America's Black Forum in May..,

KatrinaVision

Neocon wagerers please step to the betting window.

Katrina is a category 5 storm. It's gonna shutdown 1 Million barrels of daily oil production and 10 million cubic feet of natural gas production {which as we all know by now, peaked a long time ago in these here united states...,} and which will have an even greater impact than the approximately 2.5% disruption of our daily oil jones.

If G-Dub opens the strategic petroleum reserve today {800 Million barrels of black gold} it'll put the speculative wolves into check at market opening tomorrow morning, and, indicate that the administration is focused on the well-being of the American people. If, on the other hand, he salutes us with his middle finger, as I fully expect him to do, I will interpret this as a clear and present signal that we are strategically committed to putting in work in and around the Tehran metropolitan area within the next x months weather and other logistical factors permitting.

So neocons, is your boy about the well-being of the American people, the well-being of energy speculators, or, is he fittin to put in work in Iran which necessitates he hold that oil dear for the use of Rumsfeld and company?

Grieving Mothers

I haven't written anything about Cindy Sheehan, because, frankly, I don't see the point in it.

The woman was anti-war before her son was killed. After her son was killed, she was still anti-war, and is doing what she thinks needs to be done so that no other mothers face what she is facing.

Other mothers take a view opposite of Cindy Sheehan. That's their view.

To date, I think many on the anti-Sheehan side have been pathetic and over the top in their opposition to her. Frankly, it's made me sick to my stomach. However, on the Fox News Sunday, I saw some sanity.

Chris Wallace had two mothers who each had a son killed in the war. One wanted the troops to come home IFF the reason for being there could not be explained well enough, while the other supported the mission as is.

Wallace and the segment producer did an outstanding job presenting rational women who presented rational views. And at the end, Wallace did something that too many pundits and news articles are not doing: he asked about their commonality.

Pat Robertson's Fatwah and the Emergence of Medieval America

One of the best said Malthusian libertarian summaries of the current state of affairs that I've come upon to date. It begs the question of whether we can stop distracting ourselves long enough to concentrate and generate a feedback loop of sufficient intensity to alter our trajectory into the economic phase transition. Note this is only about altering our trajectory because there's no question that we're coming to ground shortly. All that remains in question is whether we execute a landing or whether we crash.

It is a bitter truth to swallow that the American peace movement, by itself, did not end the Vietnam War. It ended, primarily, because the Vietnamese people fought tenaciously, purchased freedom with their own lives and bloodied America's nose. It ended because America's soldiers, mostly Black, began to mutiny, and because college-aged boys, mostly White, declined to fight or die for a war that meant nothing to them. It ended because of the massive stresses in the American economy, the inflation, the devaluation of the dollar, the crisis caused byskyrocketing oil prices due to the 1973 oil embargo. It ended because the feedback loop of the Vietnam War threatened to rip apart the carefully engineered society of America.

Pat Robertson was right when he suggested that the United States would assassinate Venezuela's Hugo Chavez.

Robertson, of course, is a hypocrite and one of this country's most effective ad men for atheism. In the main, Pat Robertson is a medieval, witch-burning, fool. However, he moves among people who are either within or near to the circles of power. They are not nice people, but they are not fools. Robertson has either heard directly from this country's rulers' own lips, or heard from reliable sources close to them, that the US does, indeed, have President Chavez in its cross-hairs.

Robertson sees himself as a prophet with a direct line to God. All medieval witch-burners do. He is a fool because he could not resist opening his mouth and blabbing to the whole world that he had foreknowledge about America's black bag operations to assassinate yet another democratically elected foreign leader. By speaking so brazenly -- and prematurely -- Robertson caused two immediate effects: First, he provoked sanctimonious denials from other political witch-burners like Minnesota's Republican Senator Norm Coleman and Secretary of War Donald Rumsfeld. Second, Mr. Robertson's intemperate prattling has, in essence, spilled the beans about the all-too-real US plan to kill President Chavez. Thus has Pat Robertson unwittingly spared Hugo Chavez from the death that was, indeed, prepared for him -- at least for the time being -- and earned Mr. Robertson a public scolding from those liars whose dark secret he has disclosed.

There are numerous wonders associated with what Mr. Robertson said. Why, for example, are so many Americans shocked by the notion that, covertly or overtly, their leaders would assassinate another country's head of government?

It is one thing to have forgotten our history from the last century, when the US helped to violently overthrow the popularly elected governments of Chile (Allende) and Iran (Mossadegh) and nearly every country in Central America from Panama (Omar Torrijos) to Guatemala (Jacob Arbenz). Can the majority of Americans have already forgotten that even in this century we have forcibly removed Jean-Bertrand Aristide, the duly elected president of Haiti, and unhesitatingly supported undemocratic governments in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, the Philippines and Kazakhstan? Political assassination, of course, is not an exclusive tool of American foreign policy. This country's readiness to covertly kill political leaders who offend us puts the US in league with Ariel Sharon, Stalin, Rome's Caligula, feudal Europe and the medieval despots of the declining Byzantine Empire.

It is no surprise that Mr. Robertson and his fellow medievalists have most in common with the theocrats of Iran, Iraq, Saudi Arabia and the Taliban in Afghanistan. The word “assassin”, after all, is derived from the medieval French word, “hassassis” (hashish takers) given to Muslim fanatics who committed to “assassinate” Christian crusaders who had occupied the Middle East. Thus has Mr. Robertson eschewed the peace-extremist teachings of Jesus of Nazareth and endorsed the tactics of medieval, anti-occupation, Crusader-killing, dope-smoking, Islamic insurgents.

The Administration's more-or-less official response to Mr. Robertson's statements was that such an assassination would be “illegal” under US law. But why would the public accept that explanation when it is obvious that the 'rule of law' in America applies only to the lesser classes, and not to them at the highest level of policy making? Political and social leaders have been assassinated within and without the United States for decades, usually without the sanction of law; and if the US government had not its own finger on the trigger, then it found the usual collaborators who, for the purchase of power or money, would pull the trigger as America's proxy.

Meanwhile, America's perpetually vacationing medieval king says nothing while he shakes spears at the world and mutters disingenuously, like Henry II, “Will no one rid me of this meddlesome chaviste?”

The election of Mr. Bush and the influence of Pat Robertson and his dominionist ilk are markers of a degenerate medievalization of America. So, too, are the efforts in some quarters to push Science back into the Middle Ages and to undermine evolution with oxymoronic notions of “intelligent design”. Notwithstanding advances in technology, America is regressing backwards from its Enlightenment origins into medievalism. The people who scream their patriotism the loudest seem to be the most determined to destroy the Founders' dreams by creating a medieval theocracy like only Torquemada could love.

History often shows that blind religious fervor, superstition, sectarian violence, witch hunts and intolerance increase in society commensurate with increasing economic stress. Thus, “technology”, in and of itself, does not protect a society when economic surpluses start to disappear and the competition for depleting resources becomes sharp. Technology will not brake the superstitious, frightened flight into medieval religious irrationality when the people find their jobs disappearing, their purchasing power devalued, their houses becoming too expensive to heat, their cars too expensive to fuel, everything costing more for less value -- in short, as the brief historical blip of American middle class prosperity between the age of coal and the age of the Internet evaporates. It is in times like these, historically, that the people turn to charismatic religious leaders.

Why do we seem so unable to arrest America's backsliding from modernity? Other than the occasional demonstration, protest march or election between greater or lesser evils, concerned American citizens cannot seem to gain any traction. Except for the spontaneous actions of people like Cindy Sheehan, organized resistance to the witch-burning medievalists has, at least in these United States, resulted in more disappointment than quantifiable success. Why is this?

Partly, it is because beginning around the time of the First World War, America has been a laboratory for very successful social engineering on a grand scale. By a deliberate, decades long, coordinated training of the American people -- through print, film, radio and television and their infusion into the institutions of education -- the most powerful business/political interests have thoroughly inculcated the citizenry with a medieval serf's docility and acceptance of authority. Our colleges and universities have been re-made into incubators for obedient corporate employees and consumers. Whereas once we were a wilder, more independent pack of dogs, now we tend to bark when told to bark, shut up when told to shut up, and lick the hand that merely refrains from striking us. We have been trained to be collared, to walk on a leash, and to think of it as though we were walking the master and not the other way around. We eat the kibbles that trickle down to us and we have been trained not to bite.

In part, enlightened Americans have become politically impotent because we have been purchased with the excesses afforded by abundant, cheap energy. Like peasants in Pieter Bruegel's Land of Cockaign, we luxuriated in a relative life of ease and forgot that we were once a revolutionary people who had to wrest our Enlightenment from an empire by blood, force and strength of will. Now, when the hard labor of political effort beckons to us, we can, instead, do the institutionally approved, time-consuming things like go shopping, go to the movies, watch a baseball game, play the slot machines, drink a beer, play a video game, anything that entertains and distracts us from the task of democracy. There is Michael Jackson to titillate, Pat to pontificate, American Idols and more American idles.

In part, even the Enlightened portions of the citizenry have been enervated by the soma of this Brave New World. Some think that occasional charitable deeds, or a few dollars contributed to this NGO or another, or a weekend demonstration (time permitting), or effusions of love and understanding will change the world. While they cannot hurt, by themselves, none of these actions will accomplish anything. In fact, the control tendrils of surveillance, monitoring, and foundation grants, we should have no doubt, have already so vascularized, so infiltrated into even the highest levels of the most noble appearing organizations such that only the spontaneous, non-hierarchical actions of the Cindy Sheehans of this world can hope to effect real change. It is as though the Powers tolerate, even indirectly fund, the ineffectual organized protest that they do permit to take place because these are a social pressure release mechanism that dissipates resistive energy, a controlled burn intended to prevent a larger conflagration.

It is a bitter truth to swallow that the American peace movement, by itself, did not end the Vietnam War. It ended, primarily, because the Vietnamese people fought tenaciously, purchased freedom with their own lives and bloodied America's nose. It ended because America's soldiers, mostly Black, began to mutiny, and because college-aged boys, mostly White, declined to fight or die for a war that meant nothing to them. It ended because of the massive stresses in the American economy, the inflation, the devaluation of the dollar, the crisis caused byskyrocketing oil prices due to the 1973 oil embargo. It ended because the feedback loop of the Vietnam War threatened to rip apart the carefully engineered society of America.

As painful as the end of the age of cheap, abundant energy will be, it may allow Americans to bust out of their gilded cages. It is, after all, in the less affluent countries of today's world -- where there is less time for social foppery and fewer resources for idle consumerism -- where we find the lessons Americans must learn if it is to avoid descending into a new medievalism.

In Mexico this year, more than a million citizens turned out, effectively shutting down the capital city. They prevented the ruling mainstream parties from contriving, through judicial machination, to extinguish the presidential ambitions of its popular, left-leaning politician, Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador. In Ecuador, the people rose, first to oust their unrepresentative president and, second, to shut down the oil industry until it renegotiates its national contracts. In Bolivia, in June 2005, a coalition of indigenous and working class people threw out a leadership that had sold off the nation's mineral and energy patrimony to western corporate interests. In the years while Americans disputed the limped electoral contests of Bush versus Gore or Bush versus Kerry, the citizens of Brazil, Venezuela, Argentina and Uruguay also practiced enlightenment and swept their political houses clean.

In Europe this spring, the EU proposed a constitution that was, in essence, a carte blanche for multinational corporate rule. Overriding the cajolery of their leadership, the citizens of France and Holland overwhelmingly voted NO, thereby extinguishing (for the moment) big business's attempt to undo Europe's social safety nets and remake the continent in America's neo-liberal/neo-conservative image.

We can relearn lessons in enlightenment by looking abroad. The lessons will not mean anything, however, until the economic stress in this country equals that of the nations we would learn from; until the seductions of a surplus society yield to the reality of scarcity. That time could be coming sooner than you think: as soon as your next trip to the gas pump, as soon as your next winter heating bill, as soon as your next electrical power outage.

It is then that America's descent into medievalism could begin to be seriously checked. May the Enlightenment prevail.

Zbignew Zingh can be reached at Zbig@ersarts.com. This Article is CopyLeft, and free to distribute, reprint, repost, sing at a recital, spray paint, scribble in a toilet stall, etc. to your heart’s content, with proper author citation. Find out more about Copyleft and read other great articles at www.ersarts.com.

Article source at dissidentvoice.org

Greenspan Gives a Very Clear Warning

Now, let's turn our attention to Jackson Hole, Wyoming, to the annual Kansas City Federal Reserve Bank meeting. (My invitation got lost in the mail again this year.) For the last four years, Greenspan has given his clearest, easiest to understand speech for that year at Jackson Hole. This year was no exception. His speech was on the evolution of central bank policy decision making.

The man has spoken. The end is near for this absurd housing market bubble. Many of us, by the way we act, appear to have lost our minds in the dopamine fog of blissful diregard for the hard lessons of the dotcom bubble. You've been warned, now ack like you know!!!! hmm.., I wonder what TD Jakes has told his flock to do?

T. D. Jakes

Does T. D. Jakes deserve to be put into the same category as Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, or Lewis Farrakhan?

Is T.D. Jakes leading Christians astray?

August Wilson Has Liver Cancer

Diagnosed with liver cancer, August Wilson continues to write

By MICHAEL KUCHWARA
AP DRAMA WRITER

NEW YORK -- Even after a diagnosis in June of inoperable liver cancer, August Wilson has continued to work on "Radio Golf," the final play in his epic 10-work cycle about the black experience in 20th-century America.

"He completed another draft of the play in early July," his assistant, Dena Levitin, said Friday in an interview from Seattle where the 60-year-old Wilson lives with his wife, costume designer Constanza Romero, and their daughter, Azula.

News of Wilson's illness was first disclosed Friday in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. "It's not like poker, you can't throw your hand in," the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright told the paper. "I've lived a blessed life. I'm ready." He said he has a life expectancy of three to five months.

Introducing the VisionCircleWiki

You asked for it, you got it. Let's get this party started HERE.

Chavez offers Americans cheap fuel

Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, popular with the poor at home, has offered to help needy Americans with cheap supplies of petrol.

Full Monty; is either one of the cruelest disinformation bomblets of all time, or, the genuine article showing us how this brother Works. Is it any wonder he's got old devils talking out the side of their necks on teevee? Next thing you know, they'll be calling him the anti-Christ.

"We want to sell gasoline and heating fuel directly to poor communities in the United States," the populist leader said at the end of a visit to Communist-run Cuba on Tuesday.

Chavez did not say how Venezuela would go about providing petrol to poor communities.

Venezuelan state oil company PDVSA owns Citgo, which has 14,000 petrol stations in the United States.

The offer may sound attractive to Americans feeling pinched by soaring prices at the pump but not to the US government, which sees Chavez as a left-wing troublemaker in Latin America.

Petrol is cheaper than mineral water in oil-producing Venezuela, where consumers can fill their tanks for less than $2.

Average petrol prices have risen to $2.61 a gallon in the US, according to the US Energy Information Administration.

Free health care

Chavez and Castro (R) offered to train US doctors free of charge

Chavez said Venezuela could supply petrol to Americans at half the price they now pay if intermediaries who "speculated ... and exploited consumers" were cut out.

Venezuela supplies Cuba with generously financed oil, and plans to help Caribbean nations foot their oil bills.

Chavez, in Cuba to attend the graduation of Cuban-trained doctors from 28 countries, was seen off at the airport by Cuban President Fidel Castro.

Washington has accused the two leaders of being a destabilising influence in South America.

Chavez and Castro offered to give poor Americans free health care and train doctors free of charge.

Hugo Chavez

Though it's written all over his face, seeing it in writing was very gratifying indeed;

Chávez comes from the provinces of Venezuela, from the vast southern cattle lands of the Llanos that stretch down to the Apure and Orinoco river system. Of black and Indian ancestry, his parents were local schoolteachers, and he has inherited their didactic skills. His talents first came to the fore when he joined the army and became a popular lecturer at the war college in Caracas. He is a brilliant communicator, speaking for hours on television in a folksy manner that captivates his admirers and irritates his opponents.

Hugo Chávez, the president of Venezuela, is a genial fellow with a good sense of humour and a steely political purpose. As a former military officer, he is accustomed to the language of battle and he thrives under attack. He will laugh off this week's suggestion by Pat Robertson, the US televangelist, that he should be assassinated, but he will also seize on it to ratchet up the verbal conflict with the United States that has lasted throughout his presidency.

Chávez, now 51, is the same age as Tony Blair, and after nearly seven years as president he has been in power for almost as long. But there the similarities end. Chávez is a man of the left and, like most Latin Americans with a sense of history, he is distrustful of the United States. Free elections in Latin America have often thrown up radical governments that Washington would like to see overthrown, and the Chávez government is no exception to this rule.

Chávez is a genuinely revolutionary figure, one of those larger-than-life characters who surface regularly in the history of Latin America - and achieve power perhaps twice in a hundred years. He wants to change the history of the continent. His close friend and role model is Fidel Castro, Cuba's long-serving leader. The two men meet regularly, talk constantly on the telephone, and have formed a close political and military alliance. Venezuela has deployed more than 20,000 Cuban doctors in its shanty-towns, and Cuba is the grateful recipient of cheap Venezuelan oil, replacing the subsidised oil it once used to receive from the Soviet Union. This, in the eyes of the US government, would itself be a heinous crime that would put Chávez at the top of its list for removal. The US has been at war with Cuba for nearly half a century, mostly conducted by economic means, and it only abandoned plans for Castro's direct overthrow after subscribing to a tacit agreement not to do so with the Soviet Union after the missile crisis of 1962.

The Americans would have dealt with Chávez long ago had they not been faced by two crucial obstacles. First, they have been notably preoccupied in recent years in other parts of the world, and have hardly had the time, the personnel, or the attention span to deal with the charismatic colonel. Second, Venezuela is one of the principal suppliers of oil to the US market (literally so in that 13,000 US petrol stations are owned by Citgo, an extension of Venezuela's state oil company). Any hasty attempt to overthrow the Venezuelan government would undoubtedly threaten this oil lifeline, and Chávez himself has long warned that his assassination would close down the pumps. With his popularity topping 70% in the polls, he would be a difficult figure to dislodge.

Chávez comes from the provinces of Venezuela, from the vast southern cattle lands of the Llanos that stretch down to the Apure and Orinoco river system. Of black and Indian ancestry, his parents were local schoolteachers, and he has inherited their didactic skills. His talents first came to the fore when he joined the army and became a popular lecturer at the war college in Caracas. He is a brilliant communicator, speaking for hours on television in a folksy manner that captivates his admirers and irritates his opponents.

He never stops talking and he never stops working. He has time for everyone and never forgets a face. For several years he travelled incessantly around the country, to keep an eye on what was going on. This was not mere electioneering, for he would talk for hours to those who had hardly a vote among them. He exhausts his cadres, his secretaries and his ministers. I have travelled with him and them into the deepest corners of the country, and then, after a 16-hour day, he would call the grey-faced cabinet together for an impromptu meeting to analyse what they had discovered and what measures they should take.

There was always a touch of the 19th century about this frenetic activity, as though the president were still on horseback, and Castro is known to have warned Chávez not to absorb himself unduly in the minutiae of administration. "You are the president of Venezuela," he is reported to have said, "not the mayor of Caracas." Chávez has taken the advice to heart, and has become less the populist folk hero and more the impressive statesman. Concern about possible assassination has long predated Robertson's outburst, and for the past two years Chávez has cut down his travels inside the country and been accompanied everywhere by fearsome-looking guards.

Abroad, however, he is a frequent visitor to the capitals of Latin America, and he is widely perceived as the leader of the group of left-leaning presidents recently elected in Brazil, Argentina, and Uruguay, as well as the inspiration of the radicalised indigenous movements now clamouring at the gates of power in Bolivia and Ecuador. There is another touch of the 19th century here, for Chávez is a follower and promoter of the ideas and career of Simón Bolívar, the Venezuelan leader who brought the philosophy of the European Enlightenment and the French Revolution to Latin America, and liberated much of the continent from Spanish rule. Chávez has labelled his movement the "Bolivarian Revolution", and he hopes that his political ideas will spread throughout the continent.

This in itself would be alarming enough to the United States, had it the time to pay proper attention. Equally worrying for the Americans is the time Chávez has devoted to the Middle East, successfully courting the governments that belong to Opec, the oil producers' organisation, some of whom have been labelled by the Americans as "the axis of evil". Today's high oil price has much to do with increased demand from China and India, and from the Iraq war, but the spadework that has given Opec fresh credibility was put in by Chávez. Soon he will be helping to show the new Iranian president, using the Venezuelan example, how to increase the revenues of a state-owned oil company and channel them into programmes to help the poor.

Chávez is widely popular today, but for much of his presidency he has been a contested, even a hated figure, arousing widespread discontent within Venezuela's traditional white elite. Yet although his rhetoric is revolutionary, his reforms have been moderate and social democratic. He criticises the policies of "savage neo-liberalism" that have done so much harm to the poorer peoples of Venezuela and Latin America in the past 20 years, yet the private sector is still alive and well. His land reform is aimed chiefly at unproductive land and provides for compensation. His most obvious achievement, which should not have been controversial, has been to channel increased oil revenues into a fresh range of social projects that bring health and education into neglected shanty-towns.

The hatred that he arouses in the old opposition parties, which have seen their membership and influence dwindle, lies more in ideology and racial antipathy than in material loss. Some opponents dislike his friendship with Castro, his verbal hostility to the United States, and his criticisms of the Catholic church, and some people still have a residual hostility to the fact that he staged an unsuccessful military coup in 1992 when a young colonel in the parachute regiment. Many Latin Americans still find it difficult to come to terms with the idea of a progressive military man. But mostly they are alarmed by the way in which he has enfranchised the country's vast underclass, interrupting the cosy, US-influenced lifestyle of the white middle class with visions of a frightening world that lives beyond their apartheid-gated communities.

Over the past few years this anxious opposition has made several attempts to get rid of Chávez, with the tacit encouragement of Washington. They organised a coup in April 2002 that rebounded against them two days later when the kidnapped Chávez was returned to power by an alliance of the army and the people. They tried an economic coup by closing down the oil refineries, and this too was a failure. Last year's recall-referendum, designed to lead to a defeat for Chávez, was an overwhelming victory for him. The local opposition, and by extension the United States, have shot their final bolt. There is nothing left in the locker, except of course assassination.

The fingers of mad preachers are usually far from the button, but the untimely words of Pat Robertson, easily discounted in Washington and airily dismissed by the state department as "inappropriate", might yet wake an echo among zealots in Venezuela. A similar call was made last year by a former Venezuelan president. Assassinations may be easy to plan, and not difficult to accomplish. But their legacy is incalculable. The radical leader of neighbouring Colombia, Jorge Gaitán, was assassinated more than 50 years ago, in 1948. In terms of civil war and violence, the Colombians have been paying the price ever since. No one would wish that fate on Venezuela.

Crossroads

To be conscious at this moment means to accept that everything you have ever been taught in church and school is a farce, and that maintaining the American way of life will prove anti-thetical to every moral value you pretend to hold dear.

Never during our media saturated recollection has America's history so openly centered on subjugation to greed, fear, and monstrousness. In direct and overt contradiction of all the many just-so-stories which exist to reinforce our allegedly Christian identity, we are faced with the increasingly open expression of anti-Christian soullessness.

but do we dare call it what it is?

History has shown us everything we need to know about its scope, approach, and methods;

"In the big lie there is always a certain force of credibility; because the broad masses of a nation are always more easily corrupted in the deeper strata of their emotional nature than consciously or voluntarily; and thus in the primitive simplicity of their minds they more readily fall victims to the big lie than the small lie, since they themselves often tell small lies in little matters but would be ashamed to resort to large-scale falsehoods. It would never come into their heads to fabricate colossal untruths, and they would not believe that others could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously. Even though the facts which prove this to be so may be brought clearly to their minds, they will still doubt and waver and will continue to think that there may be some other explanation. For the grossly impudent lie always leaves traces behind it, even after it has been nailed down, a fact which is known to all expert liars in this world and to all who conspire together in the art of lying. These people know only too well how to use falsehood for the basest purposes."

Not only should we all recognize its approach, we should all of us have taken the lesson concerning precisely where it's headed. Come on people! It's not rocket science. Pay attention to what it says, and from time to time it'll even slip up and tell you point blank, and in no uncertain terms, exactly what it is....,

Cobb - Ya Coulda Jumped In Here

Black Economics

Moreover, in glancing at your 2003 post re: Ujamaa, I would reject the notion that cooperative economics is lacking as a strategy for liberation. The opposing positions are ahistorical and untenable.

In point of fact, a good friend has done just that - with a Papa John's in Harlem - this after a successful stint at the Federal Reserve Bank...so, there's more to this than is meeting the eye.

But - here we go again...I don't think cobb's well thought out arguments actually hold up because in too many cases, it's a question of apples and oranges or flawed assumptions. still, the contours of the discussion merit discussion and flushing out.

The Economic Lessons of Blackness

The absolute favorite discussion of mine, more than Conservatism, more than just about anything else that touches on black identity and who we are supposed to be is right here. It is a discussion I have tried to sustain anywhere and everywhere on the net, in person, via email, in forums, in dorm rooms. I have yet to be able to sustain this conversation and so have consigned it to the pile of black intellectual curiosities that I am heir to. It is the question of black economics.

Like with my 3x4x5 demographic, I also have a notion of the various strategies of black economic destiny.

I have wrote most recently about Ujamaa, The Problem Child and came to the conclusion, somewhat disdainfully, that the winner in the sweepstakes is 'Blackface Capitalism'. But perhaps we are just a generation too soon. I think the critical question lies with understanding whether or not we will lose our willingness to aggregate and our ability to network before we become as indistinctly mainstream as everyone else who is 'not a minority'. I should also note that America is swinging our direction, big time. It won't be long before King Day means beer. (Just today I saw a TV commercial for Red Stripe whose tagline was 'Teaching our white friends how to dance for 70 years'. I swear to god.)

So let's break it down:

Mastery Culture vs Corporate Civilization Redux

Temple jogged my memory with the following comment;

The question of obtaining an effective foothold or control of an industry - from production through distribution must be resolved in the affirmative...and it won't be settled by anything other than black folk being excellent at activity x. And, in most cases, it will certainly require excellence.

Summoning to mind Dr. Oba T'Shaka's commentary on mastery culture vs corporate civilization. On the spectrum of knowledge-power-freedom - it is necessary to realize that the way things are is not the only way for them to be - and sure as hell not the best way for them to be. For example, the industrial development of Japan, up until comparatively recently, was not in fact due to emulation of Western capitalist methods, but to a much less hierarchically organised structure based on a different kind of relationship between local industry and the capitalist sector. In the light of the economic destruction being wreaked at present by the proponents of crude corporate globalisation, this is interesting to say the least....

Here are a few excerpts to whet your appetites:

"The predominant viewpoint in Japanese studies is that the emerging industrial economy of the Edo Era was “premodern” or merely the commercial extension of feudalism. Economic historian Heita Kawakatsu disputes this notion of a premodern transition existing phantom-like between feudalism and capitalism. The late Edo era, he argues, gave rise to a productive revolution on par with the industrial revolution in Western Europe and the United States. The modernization of Japan came about as the result of an evolutionary process within Asian civilization rather than by emulation of the capitalist West."

"...The evolution of silk- reeling technology reveals one of the notable features of Japanese industrialism: the incremental improvement of production technology by “skilful” workers. The role of the “skilful” worker represents a major difference between the Asian and Western models of industrialization in their respective management philosophies and in the relationships between labor and capital...In the West, as Max Weber pointed out, the entrepreneur has been exalted as a member of a predestined elect whose faith was affirmed with hard work and accumulation of capital. The result was a bias in favor of the capital congealed in the machine, while the worker faced the steady loss of his social status from craftsman to unskilled laborer. The Western factory is the meeting point of the smart machine and dull worker. The Japanese model, on the other hand, has stressed the role of the “skilful” laborer who exercises a significant degree of authority and responsibility over his tools and, collectively, over the workspace and production process. ."

"...Studies of the traditional economic dynamics of mountain communities could lead to a better understanding of their potential for industrial self- development, as well as more sustainable trade links with the developed countries. In its early development drive, Japan’s homegrown industry proved to be the basis for economic growth rather than a disadvantage. ....The retreat of NGOs and tourism before the ongoing Nepalese hill people’s insurgency, reminiscent of the Chichibu Rebellion, shows that external dependency relations, no matter how well intended or ideally conceived, cannot substitute for indigenous industry rooted in the environment and culture of mountain communities."

Full Monty here;

Watts, Another VIew

The Watts Riots, Burned Into Memory

By Roger Wilkins
Tuesday, August 23, 2005; A15

John McWhorter is right to say that we ought to pause and remember the Watts riots of 40 years ago and ponder their implication for America's present and future ["Burned, Baby, Burned: Watts and the Tragedy of Black America," Outlook, Aug. 14]. I take strong issue, however, with the conclusions he draws from his review of the events in Watts and South Central Los Angeles in 1965.

I think the difference between McWhorter and me arises in large measure from our profoundly different perspectives on the event. He writes that he was born two months after the riots occurred and that his conclusions are based on his research on the subject. Mine are based largely on what I learned when President Lyndon B. Johnson sent me to Watts 40 years ago this month as a part of two federal teams -- one headed by former Florida governor LeRoy Collins and the next by then-deputy attorney general Ramsey Clark -- both charged with helping to end the violence and figuring out what had caused it.

McWhorter dismisses the conventional wisdom that the riots occurred because of the miserable conditions in the bleakest ghettos of what was then America's most glamorous city, and he notes that "the National Urban League had rated Los Angeles the best city in the nation for blacks to live in." That might have been true of Crenshaw or other upscale black neighborhoods, but not of South Central and Watts. In one community meeting I arranged for Collins and two others I set up for Clark, the bitterness and anguish laced through the testimony of poor neighborhood residents were heart-rending and, when they spoke of the city's neglect, just cause for indignation.

----

More at the link provided.

Black Political Ideologies

Ideologies work to do a few different things. They identify friends and enemies. They identify opinion leaders and anti-opinion leaders. They identify goals, and to a much lesser extent, strategies and tactics. They link individual experiences to group experiences. They reduce complexity and interpret truth (Harris-Lacewell, 2004).

Harris-Lacewell, taking from Dawson, identifies four major streams of black political thought: Black Nationalism, Black Integrationism, Black Feminism, Black Conservatism. A fifth exists--Black Radicalism, but she (again taking from Dawson), argues that it doesn't really appear in popular black public opinion. Myself? I don't think this strain would appear in black public opinion largely because the survey questions used to measure radicalism are weak.

These ideologies are to an extent orthogonal to conservatism and liberalism. Louis Farrakhan for example, with his strong critiques of black cultural life, and his anti-democratic tendencies, can be thought of as a black CONSERVATIVE nationalist. And within black nationalism there are even more dimensions (I published a paper recently arguing that Pan-Africanism should be thought of as a dimension of black nationalism distinct from separatist nationalism).

One thing that bears witnessing. Just as the schools our children attend are set up to deal with mid twentieth century realities, and our media is set up to cover those same realities with a slight techno spin....it is very likely that our ideologies too are fifty years old. Separatist black nationalists for example no longer have to theoretically use the law or revolutionary means to take over land, or a set of southern states (like the Republic of New Africa suggests).

Simply convince around 100,000 or so black people to move to Rhode Island.

"Conservative" vs. "Liberal": We Can't Afford It

So, Lester is attempting to give me a cyber-spanking on ideology.

That's all well and good. I put words out there so if someone goes for them, that's cool. But let me clarify me thiknking a bit if I may.

There are serious issues within the Black community that need to be addressed. I'm not saying people aren't already trying to address them, but the more the merrier.

So this is where I'm coming from.

If students need to be tutored, does it matter if the tutors are from "the left" or "the right"? No. In fact, when I tutored, there were people politically aligned "left" and "right."

How about the creation of Black businesses? That something Earl Graves, Sr.has been preaching about with Black Enterprise magazine.

Michael Steele has been an advocate of Black business as well. Why should their "left" and "right" leangings prevent them from working together to benefit Blacks who want to start a business or who are already owning a business?

So this is where I'm coming from. If there are things to do, and the "sides" agree, drop the labels, put the shoulders together, and do it. If the "sides" disagree, salute each other, and go along the respective paths.

Check out this opinion article by Robert Woodson, Sr that appeared in The Washington Post's Outlook section.

Then, a community activist named Falaka Fattah and her husband, David, discovered that the oldest of their six boys had become an active gang member. Fattah responded by inviting 13 of her son's friends and fellow gang members to come and live in their small row house, replacing the family furniture with mattresses on the floors. They established rules together that governed conduct, such as requiring that everyone go to school or to work during the day, and that everyone practice good hygiene. Because fighting threatened the whole family, they agreed to bring all disputes to an "Adella" -- a peace session where all the members would participate in finding a resolution and meting out punishment if necessary.

When word circulated that there was a sanctuary from the street, more and more young people sought refuge at the Fattahs'. The family purchased the house opposite and then another one next door with the wages the young men earned doing odd jobs, washing cars and making deliveries. They named their community the House of Umoja, which means "unity" in Swahili. The number of houses grew to five, then seven.

...

If these programs have been successful, why haven't they been embraced more widely by school systems and communities? The fundamental resistance is from people on both the left and the right who argue that these remedies come from "untutored" people -- individuals who do not hold advanced degrees. More responsive, however, are police officers, judges and parents who have seen violence firsthand and know how young people can be influenced by real neighborhood experts.

I know I'm spitting into the wind, but I guess I can be an idealist, while being pragmatic and realist.

Lost Humanity

Low Down and Foul is what I wrote about Michael King's short piece on Corretta Scott King.

Now I read that she had a stroke and heart attack and is paralyzed on one side.

In my opinion, if someone who you don't like has something bad happen to them, the best thing to do is shut your trap and show some class and humanity.

IMO, this is an example of what happens when the partisan crap gets out of control.

What happened to praying for the well-being of the family?

"Just damn".

[Update] An apology.

But first, let me take a moment to apologize to anyone who I offended with my comments regarding Mrs. King the other day. They were harsh, and stepped a bit over the line.

Well done.

Walking the Creek

My 6 year old son starts first grade this week. He lost his first baby tooth this summer, swam like a fish just about every day, {the only little kid by a two-year margin with a green wristband and free run of the pool including the deep end and the diving boards} and for the first time in his life, he finally got free run of the neighborhood in the company of a pair of little wild boys, one 7, one only 5, and both seriously latchkey independant. In retrospect, my son achieved the milestone of emancipation from full-time parental vigilance. For my part, I found the resolve to trust the modulus of boy-in-world so that he could begin the process of becoming strong as he must on his own. It is with a mixture of pride and regret that I watch this summer draw to a close, regret at seeing my little boy morph into a mayne-mannish boy, and pride in his often surprising displays of autonomous control over aspects of his world.

One of my neighbors invited my son and I to join he and his two sons on a little camping and fishing excursion this weekend that turned into a much bigger than expected adventure - of the very best possible sort - the kind that teaches life lessons. Friday, we packed up our gear and made a little junket out into the southeastern quarter of kansas and into Leavenworth county. {yeah, home to Ft. Leavenworth, and the U.S. Penitentiary} Turning off 7{73} and onto a country road, we go several miles and into a completely different world, a black farming community with roots stretching back nearly to exodusters and going forward as far as we personally are able to do something to help make it so.

Understand, much of this world is lost, and was lost a long time ago. However, there remain sizeable pockets of black agricultural community which must not fade out of existence - and which I believe - will determine our future collective strength and viability as a people. Holding onto what little remains of our control of the land - and growing that into something new and completely different - is the only sure way for black folks to ensure control over our cultural and political future. Unlike this summer's right of passage for my son - which I regretfully know will never pass this way again - the political right of passage that black folks went through a long time ago, is a right of passage to which we must return with a Work-man-like seriousness.

Singleton's Colony The first of several colonies to be established under the leadership of "Pap" Singleton. Settled in 1874, this successful colony had an initial population of 300 people and was located on 1000 acres near Baxter Springs in Cherokee County. By 1878, the settlement included adequate housing [cabins], livestock and fruit trees to sustain the community. In 1881, the Agricultural and Industrial Institute for the Refugees was founded on 400 acres of land near Columbus and continued to operate until 1885, when it closed due to a lack of funds. Singleton challenged the need for highly educated "political Negroes" stating, "it was the muscle of the arm, the men that Worked, that we wanted."

So friday night, we went fishing, set up camp, and then got rained out of our tents and back into the farmhouse. No, we didn't go soft on the great outdoors, there was actual flash flooding and the boys decided by unanimous decree that they didn't want to be THAT intimate with any more prairie big sky weather. Yesterday morning, my neighbor's mother - came over and prepared a serious farm breakfast - which should've been my clue that we were about to put in some serious work. You see, we'd planned on going to collect some eggs, feed some hogs, and then go do a little more fishing that morning. Well, it didn't quite turn out like that.

Instead, we got to experience a walking the creek adventure.

So we drive out to a dilapidated farmhouse with a sizeable hog pen and wallow - and then we boot and bugspray up and head off across the cow pasture. About a half-mile out from the farmhouse, we hit on the creek that runs through and part-way round a very large collection of family-owned farmsteads. Now the brother who's taken us out on this adventure, is an attorney in Kansas City. He hadn't planned on this either, but the flash-flooding necessitated it. Instead of the light county-fair duty we'd planned on for the boys that morning, we were going to have to walk the creek to check on the condition of several patches of barbed-wire fencing that serves to keep their cows on their property.

"fine rolling prairie, plenty of stone and water and coal within twenty-five miles."

You absolutely have to see it, to believe it. On his grandfather's property alone, homeboy's grandfather and his grandfathers 6 brothers were all homesteaders, we passed through two former rock quarries. The limestone, shale, and other sedimentary rock formations in some points jut up to a height of nearly 30 feet from the creek bed, studded with fossils and green with moss in areas - most of the creek walk consisted in negotiating muddy water interspersed with broken rock and quickmud {think quicksand but with mud} and trees and tall foliage that looks a lot like temperate jungle. You pretty much have to keep a switch swinging in front of you in the forested and flora'd areas, or just try your luck with the big orb webs you go through every 30 seconds or so, and while most of the spiders are small even though their webs are quite large, occassionally you run into some nightmarishly successful {big fat hairy frikkin} individuals - with whom you really don't want to tangle.

Now remember, you're not just out there for the sheer adventure of the thing, you've actually gotta take note of all the broken spots on the fencing and fix all of those you can fix. There are cow patties and cowbones and other relics indicative of the extent to which the cows will get down in that creek bed and do their cow thing, including getting under broken barbed-wire fencing. In the course of our walk, we came across one forelorn gray calf knocking on deaths door, it had been flyblinded {fly's can do a lot of damage to young cattle} and not eating and was effectively lost from the rest of the herd.

We had walkie talkies {which were all but useless unfortunately} Since there were three 650 acre farms (640 acres is a square mile) through which the creek traversed, and it took us ~ five hours to traverse the creek and then make a diagonal overhill and cowpasture back - I believe we wound up walking about 6-7 miles. If it takes you 3+ hours to walk about 3 miles, go figure, those are some hard, hard miles.

it was the muscle of the arm, the men that Worked, that we wanted.

I'm not going to bore you with a more detailed walk travelogue other than to say that neither my son or I have ever been as dirty and as tired as we were when we finally finished that walk. It is to his great credit that he made it. As the smallest, with the shortest legs and no prior experience with a challenging haul, he made it through in great good spirits and with a determination to do it again, as soon as possible, only next time with different footwear. {forget about the boots, just wear sneakers and pants that you don't give a damn about} As for myself, I managed to hang onto my keys, wallet, and other necessities and only experienced one drenching mudbutt fall. [those are the breaks when you're making sure your child is able to get across spots you yourself are uncertain of being able to traverse]

We're committed to going out again sometime in the next couple weeks. I suspect we passed the test of earnestness - and maybe next time we'll actually get to do a little more restful sport fishing and county fair type chores. That all depends on the weather and necessity of course. The good thing is that my 6 year old has decided that he loves the country, fears nothing in it, and wants to master every aspect of it. For my own purposes, our host was in complete agreement with me about the urgency of making every effort to keep control of the land, transfer knowledge across generations - so that those remaining black master farmers - who've managed to keep the farms and to maintain black farming communities can pass on their skills and expertise.

It was even apparent how black digerati might be useful >{unlike black politicos?} to black farming communities. As things presently stand, there is little to no cross-pollination from city to rural county. There is little to know communally organized and cooperative project management and execution by multiple black farmers. i.e., individuals are mostly autonomous operators in the market. With the cost of energy going on a perpetual incline from this point forward, the long-standing need for black farmers to work together more efficiently - will only become increasingly acute.

I feel very blessed to be situated in the right place to identify and have a relationship with all the players - even more blessed to have been moved by the spirit to even attempt to do so. It was purely by grace that this came to pass. I had no idea of my neighbor and friend's connection to the black farming community, we had never talked about anything like that, instead talking about the kids, and 9-5 type stuff.

Now, based on this little adventure, and some our discussion over the weekend, Work is going to proceed on a whole different level. I can see clear and tangible ways in which we can DO some things across an expanse of interpersonal blackness that have never previously been attempted. I see a rural-urban interpolation in which worlds practically separate for the time being, but spatially and culturally proximate - can be brought together for mutual benefit and flourishment.

I'm really looking forward to more boys in the hood having a regular creek walking experience of their own....,

Muslim Converts, Meet the FBI

Colbert King in the Washington Post gets around to talking about what conservative talk show hosts were pushing for as long as three years ago..., designation of a black enemy within

Once upon a time the nation felt threatened. Fear of civil disturbances and unlawfulness by domestic groups reached the White House and Justice Department. In the name of protecting the nation, the FBI was mandated to "expose, disrupt, and otherwise neutralize" groups that posed a danger to national security. They called it COINTELPRO.

To make the program work within the African American community, the FBI created a "ghetto informant program" and recruited thousands of people to watch suspected militants in the black community. The FBI monitored bank accounts and trips, examined income tax returns and launched dirty operations to besmirch and "neutralize" so-called "Key Black Extremists." And it didn't take much to get labeled and investigated by the government.

Shortly after the London bombings, it became fashionable for some American commentators to cite the alienation of British Muslims as an example of a massive failure of assimilation -- a state of affairs, they asserted, that is inconceivable in the United States.

Americanization, went their argument, has virtually eliminated teeming groups of disaffected Islamic immigrants within our shores.

Well, that may be true but it's not the whole truth concerning American Muslims.

Islam in the United States is not solely the province of immigrants from North Africa, the Middle East and South Asia. The largest and fastest-growing ethnic group of American Muslims is African Americans, whose estimated numbers range between 1.3 million and 2 million. Most, by the way, are Sunni Muslims and not followers of Minister Louis Farrakhan's racially exclusive Nation of Islam.

What's more, the group within the African American Muslim community that is experiencing the most explosive growth is probably the least assimilated: black inmates. Good statistics are hard to come by, but one estimate places the number of Muslim converts in prison above 250,000. What brings them to Islam? Survival? Acceptance? Rejection of Christianity? Spiritual transformation?

One thing for sure: It's not Americanization.

Which gets us to the FBI, converts to Islam and a possible terrorist plot in California.

When FBI director Robert S. Mueller III joined us at The Post for lunch in June 2002, Muslim converts in prison seemed to be the last folks on his mind. At the time, Mueller was preoccupied with discussing the bureau's new post-9/11 mandate to detect and foil terrorist actions against American targets before they happened.

Not so today.

Mueller recently told Congress that one area of the war on terrorism that causes him great concern is the potential for extremist groups such as al Qaeda to recruit radicalized American Muslim converts. Mueller drew a bead on the American prison system, which he described in written testimony as "fertile ground for extremists who exploit both a prisoner's conversion to Islam while still in prison, as well as their socioeconomic status and placement in the community upon their release."

That concern is no longer theoretical.

This week brought news that three California men are currently being investigated as part of a possible plot to launch assaults against National Guard facilities this Sept. 11 and against Jewish targets on Yom Kippur.

One of them, 25-year-old Levar Haney Washington, had served time at the California State Prison in Folsom and, during his incarceration, converted to a radical Islamic group known as Jamiyyat Ul Islam Is Saheeh. Gregory Vernon Patterson, 21, arrested with Washington on unrelated robbery charges, recently converted to Islam. The third man in custody, Hammad Riaz Samana, 21, is a Los Angeles resident. Washington and Patterson are African American; Samana is a Pakistani national.

Authorities, according to news reports out of California, are trying to link the three men to Peter Martinez, 36, and Kevin Lamar James, 29, two state prison inmates and members of the same radical Islamic group. Martinez and James reportedly had recruited other inmates to join in a "jihad against the United States."

There's talk that this case could represent a new U.S. front in the war against terrorism: homegrown terrorists among prisoners and former inmates with ties to Islamic extremists. They cite the case of Jose Padilla, the ex-gang member from Chicago now held without charges as a suspected terrorist. He converted to Islam while in jail. Could those in California be the latest incarnation?

In the fullness of time, maybe we'll know more.

Yesterday the Council on American-Islamic Relations of Southern California issued a statement urging the public "not to use this case to generalize and incriminate all Muslim inmates." It's a thought worth holding.

First, let's lay down a marker: Protecting the nation from terrorism must remain one of the government's highest priorities. Finding those who would aid or carry out attacks should top the list. And the effort must necessarily be intelligence-driven and proactive. Waiting until the bomb explodes is stupid. It's the government's duty to secure Americans at home and bring enemies to justice.

But we can't mangle the Constitution in the process.

Mueller, to his credit, assured us at lunch that his use of new investigative powers would remain behind, and not get ahead of, the law. That's also worth keeping in mind even as his agents work with law enforcement and corrections officials to defeat what he has termed "the recruitment and radicalization of prison inmates."

Thousands of inmates have converted to Islam; thousands more convert each year. Questions worth asking: How will authorities go about monitoring prison proselytizing? Who gets to decide when an American Muslim inmate is "radicalized"? How will the FBI staunch "recruitment"?

Recent American history justifies those questions and more.

Once upon a time the nation felt threatened. Fear of civil disturbances and unlawfulness by domestic groups reached the White House and Justice Department. In the name of protecting the nation, the FBI was mandated to "expose, disrupt, and otherwise neutralize" groups that posed a danger to national security. They called it COINTELPRO.

To make the program work within the African American community, the FBI created a "ghetto informant program" and recruited thousands of people to watch suspected militants in the black community. The FBI monitored bank accounts and trips, examined income tax returns and launched dirty operations to besmirch and "neutralize" so-called "Key Black Extremists." And it didn't take much to get labeled and investigated by the government.

Such tactics were unworthy of America then. They still are today. Even in a war against radical extremists -- in and out of jail -- to whom our Constitution means nothing.

"We Don't Need No, Ed-u-cation"

That line is from Pink Floyd, "The Wall". I think about the song when the talk show pundits, spinmasters, and liars "discuss" the Able Danger situation.

We are going to discuss the 3 letter goverment agencies: NSA, CIA, and FBI.

The NSA is the evesdropping agency of the the United States. Because of prior abuses by this agency, the NSA is bound by law to only do its spying on entities outside of the geographic boundaries of the U.S. Entities are people and American owned businesses. Additionally, anyone legally in the U.S. is considered to be, for the sake of spying, a U.S. citizen.

The CIA is a "spying" organization of the U.S. It is allowed to conduct espionage activities in the defense of the United States.

The FBI is a law enforcement organization of the U.S. It is allowed to "spy" on U.S. citizens for the purposes of gathering information to be used in the prosecution of individuals believed to have committed crimes.

What does this have to do with "The Wall"?

Everything!

Let's use this story that appeared in the UK Times Online as the discussion point.

According to Colonel Shaffer, a small, highly secret intelligence unit known as Able Danger had used data-sorting techniques to identify Atta and his accomplices as possible US-based terrorists by mid-2000, but military lawyers prevented the team from sharing their information.

Colonel Shaffer said that lawyers working for the Special Operations Command of the Defence Department, cancelled the meetings because they believed that the surveillance techniques used by Able Danger could be understood as a violation of the rights of people who were living legally in the US.

That's all you really need to read. The information about the terrorist group was collected on people who legally reside in the U.S. If there was concern about breaking The LAW, how can this be blamed on the Clinton administration and the so-called "Wall" that the "Clinton administration put in place"?

The fact is, the "Wall" is a set of laws enacted before Clinton was in office. It is NOT a set of regulations or guidelines put in place by each administration.

Background information of the 3 agencies listed and more.

Splitting The White Vote

There is a new person getting into the primary Democratic race for the chance to run for in teh general election for the U.S. Senate.

The person is white. I heard him on a radio talk show today. When explaining why he should be the person to get the Democratic nomination, he mentioned the other white candidate, Ben Cardin, by name. But he NEVER mentioned Mfume, as if Mfume is a non-factor.

This is what some white Democratic pundits in Maryland feared. The reason being is that whites will split their vote and Mfume will get to run in the general election. But this is the situation that Republicans like because they believe that the Republican candidate, Michael Steele, will wipe up the floor with Mfume.

Stay tuned...

Talking about Ideology

Ed's turn.

Ed's been on this kick for a while now. "Blacks shouldn't get caught up in this foolishness." What foolishness? This "left-right" foolishness. How do we know we're caught up in this foolishness? Ed's been talking to people. How do we know it's foolishness? Ed says it's foolishness. That we don't know what terms like "liberal" and "conservative" mean.

Here's a continuation of Black Politics 101. I'll call it "ideology matters."

What is ideology? I'm going to do this real simple like. Ideology refers to a worldview that gives people the opportunity to make decisions about political positions, about social reality, efficiently. Now as far as black people are concerned, there isn't just left-right, but nationalist, feminist, conservatism, and radicalism to content with.

But for ed, it's this left-right thing. This left-right "foolishness." Kind of like a mantra with him.

Here's the thing though. You take a group of say 1206 black people taken from across the country.

Ask them what they think of various political issues. And then ask them to identify themselves as either "liberal" or "conservative."

If Ed's right....then this should have absolutely NO predictive capability whatsoever. You ask someone whether they are liberal or conservative and you won't know JACK about how they feel towards Clarence Thomas, or how they feel towards Bill Clinton, or how they feel about gay men, or issues like abortion.

Guess what?

For every point "more liberal" on a seven point scale, sentiment towards gay men goes up 12 points. For every point more liberal, sentiment towards abortion does similarly. For every point more liberal, sentiment towards Clarence Thomas DECREASES.

Just like we'd expect if black people knew what these terms meant...if these ideological predispositions were part of a larger worldview.

I am a professor of black politics.

Slapping around knuckleheaded positions shouldn't be part of my job desciption.

Black Conservatives and Authentic Advocacy

What philosophical and practical positions would black conservatives embrace/espouse if their prescriptions were the same as those used by white conservatives?

In other words, are black conservatives asking black folk to do something that white conservatives do not do, would not do, have never done?

Economics, politics, social, military. What are black conservatives saying preaching that is/is not practiced by their sponsors? Does the rhetoric match the reality??

Al Sharpton Slams Clinton

I've said it before and I'll say it again, I think that Al Sharpton has done more to break the binds of Blacks to the Democrats than any Black Republican today.

Here is Al Sharpton on Thursday's Tom Joyner Morning Show, in for Tavis Smiley.

Bill Clinton "The First Black President".

Black IntraPolitics

I bit the title of this entry from P6 because the phrase fits.

• Black Intrapolitics: So What Do We Call It?
• I Changed My Mind
• Black IntraPolitics: That most dangerous of activities

The more "conversations" I have online, the more hardened my idea becomes that Blacks shouldn't be involved in the "left" vs. "right" garbage.

From the online conversations, and a few "real world" conversations, I get more data points to support my thesis that most people don't understand what "conservative" means or what "liberal" means.

For example, I've been called conservative because:

• I know that the government wastes money and I don't think that the government deserves more of my paycheck than God.
• I don't think there is enough evidence to "prove" global warming.
• I support vouchers.
• I support charter schools.
• I don't trust the government to solve problems.
• I don't think that President Clinton was good for Blacks.
• I've criticized Jesse Jackson.
• I believe in a strong U.S. military because the best offense is a great defense.
• I think that the economic system of the U.S. is the best system in the world.
• I have criticized Democrats.
• I have criticized Black Democrat politicians.

But at the same time...

I've been called a liberal because:

• I've criticized Republicans.
• I've supported Jesse Jackson or Al Sharpton when they have been right.
• I've criticized Black conservatives when I think they are wrong.
• I question the continuing negative representation of Blacks by self proclaimed conservatives.

Let's just state the obvious. The sad state of politics in the U.S. has lead to an even sadder state of politics within the Black community.

For liberals, if you support Republicans or too harshly criticize "Black leaders" -- although most Black criticize "Black leaders" -- or don't buy into the insane mau-mauing by the "Blacker than thou" cabal, then you are a conservative.

For conservatives, if you don't continuously attack "Black leaders", or you don't support Republicans, or you don't like Clarence Thomas, then you are a liberal.

It's insane.

What happened to the "right" to "think for yourself"?

But what do I know? This is just mental masturbation.

Vision Circle Podcast with Lynne d Johnson

Lynne d Johnson is the subject of our latest podcast.

Born This Day, Marcus Mosiah Garvey

How interesting that another August 17 should pass on our collective calendars with nary a mention of the Honorable Marcus Mosiah Garvey, born on this day in the province of St. Ann, Jamaica in the year 1887.

I would like to invite you all to share thoughts, feelings, etc. regarding Garvey and his legacy - especially as it relates to the legacy of Booker T. Washington and Cruse's reflections in Crisis.

I look forward to hearing from you all and I hope to provide some interesting links in the coming weeks.

Just What We Need, Another Jackleg Preacher

I've had a chance to wade through some of the comments so far.

Maybe it's the time of year? It's hot as hell out these parts...perhaps the heat has addled my partner?

To wit:

They were subversive but what was the aim? The aim was integration, it wasn't to defeat the enemy. The aim was bourgeois brotherhood, not control of the resources of the enemy.

The aim was to defeat white supremacy. Find me a citation, a quote, where someone actually STATES "the aim was brotherhood." The bourgie part is just goofy so I'll let that slide. And in as much as cities like Detroit, Cleveland, Gary, and Atlanta, were resources controlled by the enemy, the aggressive actions of folks like the Black Slate out of Detroit certainly seem to rise to the standard set here.

Let me put it this way, you cannot be militant and also for 'non-violent social change'.

So exactly why was King and his ilk referred to as militants? Why exactly did Hoover spend so much capital surveilling him?

You are taking 21st Century realities and porting them backwards. Damn Coretta was fucked up for not emailing Betty when Malcolm got put down. She should have at LEAST called her on her cell.

Sheesh.

What I'm saying is that the Old School ought to be about rescuing black consciousness and black nationalism from the knuckleheads who have been coddled by the Left. The kind of knuckleheads who would say that people like Assata Shakur are the heirs of the black progressive agenda.

Could you even name a single knucklehead here? Who are you talking about?

What the Old School should be about is preserving the best of our history, and our knowledge. What you're doing here, ain't old school kid. By consistently playing loose with the facts, you're on some new jack shit here.

Wait, wait. See you can't just compare pre- and post-Reconstruction and post-Brown.

Oh. But you CAN put Steve Cokely--a CONTEMPORARY knuckleheaded conspiracy theorist in search of a theory--and the Black Panthers in the same sentence? Even though they lived in two totally differrent time periods?

The crack must've worn off for a second.

When I'm talking black militants there are basically three: The Panthers, MOVE and the Symbionese Liberation Army. If there was a black equivalent of the Weather Underground, and whomever Chesimard thought she was. Maybe you could count the Fruit of Islam, but that's basically it. Break out the FBI's Cointelpro targets and that's the comprehensive list, most of whom were harmless radical loudmouths which everyone admits, now.

When the hell did MOVE start? There are TWO fundamental events in MOVE history. The battle with Rizzo occurs in about 78, and getting bombed out occurs in the nineties. A full generation plus AFTER Watts. Why would you even include them here?

Further, are you saying that the FBI Cointelpro list is the definitive list? You DO remember that FBI agents put Karenga on the same militant list as the Panthers right? That the shootout between US and the Black Panthers was partially spurred by FBI infiltration right? That King was on that list as well.

We all can flunk black militancy and move forward. Beyond the politics of human rights, beyond the politics of civil rights, towards the politics of social power.

No. YOU can flunk black militancy. But as soon as you do, whether it's because you don't think education is as important as capital accumulation, or because of whatever...you place yourself firmly outside of the old school. Albert Murray might flunk and still be down--but even here you won't see him sleeping on jazz and the blues. The rest of us don't get that pass.

What there *is* is a lingering sentiment that black rage can be converted into black militancy and that this is an effective political strategy. That's a myth, and McWhorter just exploded it.

um...right on brother!

i'm not teachin', just preachin.

Just what we need. Another jackleg preacher.

Low Down and Foul

Coretta Scott King has been hospitalized.

Michael King, (any relation?), wrote this: "Professional widow Coretta Scott King was admitted to Piedmont Hospital in Atlanta this morning, for an undisclosed ailment."

Foul.

I'm not much on how the family tried to get money from Dr. King's works by attacking the fair use of his speeches.

I'm not much on how the family has controlled the King Center to the point of it being a disgrace because it's falling apart.

But show some class.

That was just foul.

"Just damn".

What Is A Black Militant?

So, I guess I should ask, "What is a Black militant"?

Webster's definition of militant is

Main Entry: mil·i·tant
Pronunciation: -t&nt
Function: adjective
1 : engaged in warfare or combat : FIGHTING
2 : aggressively active (as in a cause) : COMBATIVE <militant conservationists> <a militant attitude>
synonym see AGGRESSIVE
- militant noun
- mil·i·tant·ly adverb
- mil·i·tant·ness noun

So, what is a Black militant?

When I see the phrase, at first thought I think of the Black Panthers.

When I think about this part of the definition, aggressively active, and think more in context of that, I think of Ezra Jack Keats.

You see, my mother and father were VERY excited when my mother brought home The Snowy Day and Whistle for Willie. I vaugely remember my mother saying it had a young Negro boy as the main character and how this was different from the rest of the books. It made sense to me in the mid-70s, but when I first saw the books in the late 60s, I didn't care much. It was just another book that was good to read.

I think Ezra Jack Keats was a militant. Or maybe he was a radical. Hmmm....

Was Malcolm X a militant?

"I believe in the brotherhood of man, all men, but I don’t believe in brotherhood with anybody who doesn’t want brotherhood with me. I believe in treating people right, but I’m not going to waste my time trying to treat somebody right who doesn’t know how to return the treatment."
-- Speech, Dec. 12 1964, New York City

How about Shirley Chisholm?

I was the first American citizen to be elected to Congress in spite of the double drawbacks of being female and having skin darkened by melanin. When you put it that way, it sounds like a foolish reason for fame. In a just and free society it would be foolish. That I am a national figure because I was the first person in 192 years to be at once a congressman, black and a woman proves, I think, that our society is not yet either just or free.

So, what exactly IS a Black militant?

Flunking Black Militancy 101

In two different pieces, black bloggers have evinced a startling disdain for the rudiments of black political history. To the point that I feel it necessary to slap some sense into some folks. I'll start with my boy. Kwanzaa? The holiday he defends to the death? Black militancy. NSBE? The organization he was elected National Finance Officer of? Black militancy.

Oh.

Cobb's hanging out in Detroit this weekend if I remember correctly. His wife's high school anniversary is coming up. She went to Cass Technical High School--one of the most prominent high schools in the country. All black now, but black kids were getting rejected from Cass like they had the plague. What stemmed the tide?

You know the answer.

If I knew Ed's backstory (and that of Baltimore) better I think I could run the same game. And of course we all know about McWhorter's dalliance with Affirmative Action.

Slapping around knuckleheads like Steve Cokely is no substitute for thinking long and hard about the triumph and tragedy of black militancy.

Be better.

"Black Militancy"

Bear with me for a few minutes please.

Can someone tell me exactly what came out of "Black militancy" other than a lot of hot air?

This is asked in response to Booker Rising commentary and P6.

[ Update ]

lks said the question should be phrased a different way, so here is the question phrased a different way: What would we as individuals have today WITHOUT black militancy?

And now I guess I should ask, what do you define as "Black militancy"?

Again, bear with me. I'm going somewhere. Just hang on for the ride.

I'm Better than the Average Fucking Movie

Teri Woods is making LOOT writing hard core urban fiction. While some wonder whether this is good for "African American Literature" (and peep Raymond Williams on the creation of "literature") I think they're missing the mark. Woods isn't looking to knock out Ellison.

She's looking to knockout Bay.

Know Your Health

Black leaders urge shared health knowledge

By DANIEL YEE
Associated Press Writer

ATLANTA (AP) -- Although an avid tennis player and very trim at age 58, Terrell Slayton Jr. has a host of chronic conditions - including diabetes, high blood pressure and high cholesterol. But he knows that many other black men in his community don't even know the status of their health.

"Even the most learned among us sometimes, for whatever reason, don't get that checkup as often as we should," said Slayton, who has learned to balance regular exercise and a medication schedule with his busy role as Georgia's assistant secretary of state.

A program created by former U.S. Surgeon General Dr. David Satcher and a group of the city's top leaders - the 100 Black Men of Atlanta Inc. - is aimed at raising health awareness among black men. They are working to first educate themselves about their own health so they can teach others and serve as role models.

"I started the program ... to take advantage of the fact these men are leaders in the community - they were in a position not only to improve their own health but to influence the health of other people," said Satcher, now interim president of the Morehouse School of Medicine and member of the 100 Black Men group.

--------

More at that link.

Contrasting Stories Of Iraq

The following two stories appeared in The Washington Post. Both were above the fold.

U.S. Lowers Sights On What Can Be Achieved in Iraq Administration Is Shedding 'Unreality' That Dominated Invasion, Official Says

By Robin Wright and Ellen Knickmeyer
Washington Post Staff Writers
Sunday, August 14, 2005; Page A01

The Bush administration is significantly lowering expectations of what can be achieved in Iraq, recognizing that the United States will have to settle for far less progress than originally envisioned during the transition due to end in four months, according to U.S. officials in Washington and Baghdad.

The United States no longer expects to see a model new democracy, a self-supporting oil industry or a society in which the majority of people are free from serious security or economic challenges, U.S. officials say.

Then, there was this one:

Iraqi Sunnis Battle To Defend Shiites Tribes Defy an Attempt by Zarqawi To Drive Residents From Western City

By Ellen Knickmeyer and Jonathan Finer
Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, August 14, 2005; Page A01

BAGHDAD, Aug. 14 -- Rising up against insurgent leader Abu Musab Zarqawi, Iraqi Sunni Muslims in Ramadi fought with grenade launchers and automatic weapons Saturday to defend their Shiite neighbors against a bid to drive them from the western city, Sunni leaders and Shiite residents said. The fighting came as the U.S. military announced the deaths of six American soldiers.

Dozens of Sunni members of the Dulaimi tribe established cordons around Shiite homes, and Sunni men battled followers of Zarqawi, a Jordanian, for an hour Saturday morning. The clashes killed five of Zarqawi's guerrillas and two tribal fighters, residents and hospital workers said. Zarqawi loyalists pulled out of two contested neighborhoods in pickup trucks stripped of license plates, witnesses said.

The contrast is left up to the reader to think about. This one makes me laugh, sigh, and wonder what's going on in the administration.

Some People Are Sick

Some people are sick.

SYDNEY: A man faced an Australian court yesterday charged with having sexual relations with a rabbit and the sadistic killing of 17 other rabbits whose carcasses were found dumped in a lane.

Brendan Francis McMahon, 36, North Sydney, appeared briefly before Central Local Court Magistrate Allan Moore yesterday charged with having allegedly committed the offences over the past three weeks.

McMahon, a New Zealand born finance company director, sat quietly in the dock during the hearing at which he was represented by barrister Doug Marr.

What else can be said?

Giving The People What They Want

On the most segregated day in the country, a thought just occurred to me.

Some accuse "Hollywood liberals" of being racist because Blacks and other "people of color" have a very hard time getting roles. But Hollywood is a very capitalist system, meaning those who generate money, get money to generate more money.

If "Hollywood liberals" give Blacks and other "people of color" fewer roles, maybe it's because they think that Blacks and "people of color" won't generate the type of revenue that they are seeking. And if that's the case, is it Hollywood, or the audience, who is to blame?

AMT: Government In A Nutshell

This is the reason why the congress-criters, who all know that the alternative minimum tax is a problem, aren't doing a thing about it.

"When the stock market took a nosedive, we were stuck with huge amount of AMT which we could not pay even if we sold all the stocks that we exercised," said one recent letter. "My brother was hit by the AMT and is now facing financial ruin," said another.

For a host of worthy reasons, Connie Mack, a former U.S. senator who chairs the panel, reported it will recommend repealing the AMT.

He had no sooner uttered these words when a chorus of voices said the government's accounts couldn't stand the revenue loss, which would have to be made up some other way.

As always, follow the money.

$2.54

That's how much I paid, per gallon, of gas today.
It took $32 to fill up a near empty tank.

The Rebecca Project

The Rebecca Project

History:

Malika Saada Saar (our Executive Director), founded the Rebecca Project for Human Rights in 2001 while she was a student at Georgetown University Law Center in Washington, DC. The Rebecca Project for Human Rights is a national legal and advocacy organization for families struggling with the intersecting issues of economic marginality, substance abuse, access to family-based treatment, and the criminal justice system.

Our Method:

The Rebecca Project roots itself in the lived experiences of parents, who are mostly single mothers in recovery, and works to create openings and forums for their agency, voice, and leadership on the national level regarding policies that affect the lives of families battling with substance abuse. Through Rebecca Project's two civic action and leadership development programs, "Crossing the River" and "Sacred Authority," we frame the condition of parents denied access to treatment and the plight of substance abusing parents incarcerated for their addiction as human rights violations. The Rebecca Project unearths, documents and challenges those human rights violations that deny mothers the opportunity to raise their children, and indeed to raise their children with dignity.

Our Vision

Our vision is to create a community of civic-minded national leaders by educating, organizing and training low-income parents recovering from substance abuse. In turn, those parents advocate on behalf of their families and communities for sensible substance abuse treatment and social-welfare policies.

Though We Are Told To Mourn It

this is a post that, for many of you, has already awakened your senses to Wynton Marsalis and Rev. Jeremiah Wright laying it down about "Premature Autopsies." this piece, written by Stanley Crouch, became an integral part of my disciplined academic growth while at the university of michigan...and i have been thinking a great deal about one of the lines that always stuck with me.

"These are the ones who follow in the footsteps of the gifted and the disciplined who have been deeply hurt but not discouraged, who have been frightened but have not forgotten how to be brave, who revel in the company of their friends and sweethearts but are willing to face the loneliness that is demanded of mastery."

mastery demands a serious willingness to walk alone...and for me, this is an ongoing process/challenge of engaging and disengaging for a purpose - because one cannot apply mastery if the cost is forgetting the rest of this brilliant description.

Watching the Wiz

My wife and kids are watching The Wiz while i'm working or at least trying to work. I've been thinking about world-building for some random reason or another. Reading The Lord of the Rings for example, can give you a very clear sense of how the different languages develop across time....but there is absolutely no discussion about either economy or state formation.

(What the hell does this have to do with The Wiz?)

The only part I caught was the introduction of the Wicked Witch. Don't go bringing me NO BAD NEWS.

We have a very clear idea of WHY homegirl is the Wicked Witch. Remember, the world of Oz (in the Wiz) is decidedly urban. Homegirl is feared because she's got them damn munchkins WORKING. Ain't had no lunchbreak in MONTHS.

I am not sure I recall why the Wicked Witch (in the traditional movie) had juice.

On the other hand, the Wiz? He's got them mugs so caught up, they're engaging in widespread fashion changes every two minutes!

An overlooked classic.

Sucking Off Of The Government Teat

• S.B.A. loans.
  
• F.H.A. loans.
  
• Government backed student loans.
  
• Pell Grants.
  
• Fannie Mae.
  
• Sallie Mae.
  
• Research Grants.
  
• "Pork" from congress as a part of the transportation appropriations.
  
• "Pork" from congress as a part of the military appropriations.
  

Someone tell me my it is only Blacks are singled out as "sucking off of the government teat"?

Craig Nulan: Urban Spelunker

This week's Vision Circle Podcast features an interview with our own Craig Nulan. Check it.

I Keep Saying

So, I'm home a little early from work, stretched out on the bed, with my headphones on, listening to sometimes talk radio. (The kid is asleep at the head of the bed, I'm at the foot of the bed).

I wake up from a catnap to hear Black people talking about the Republican vs. Democratic party thing.

One person gets his facts twisted and states "Republicans" when it should be "Democrats". The Republicans in the discussion jump on him.

Should I mention this was an all Black panel?

Anyway...

What got me is one person said that parties don't matter, it's the policies that matter.

That's where I'm at in this stage of my life.

To hell with the party labels, I'm going to support the PERSON who is saying things that most align with my views.

Alan Keyes and Michael Steele and Olympia Snowe are all in the same party. (Shouldn't Keyes be pissed about the GOP pushing Steele as a star?)

Mfume, Ford, Teddy Kennedy and Zell Miller are all in the same party.

Screw the labels, I'm staying independent and will support the person not the party.

Footnote: I find it a damn shame that some people can't handle a person being critical of a party but that not meaning that a person supports the opposition party. How many people realize that the U.S. political system is not a 2 party system, but a multi-party system with the 2 primary parties rigging the game against all other parties?

Steroids

Rafael Palmerio is back from his suspension for taking steroids.

I think that the powers that be of baseball knew that McGuire, Sosa, Barry Bonds, and others were "doing something" and they didn't care because of the balls that were leaving the park, which made the game more exciting.

If grown men want to take drugs that may shorten their lives, shrink their testicles, and possibly cause depression, so be it. Let them do it. I don't care. Just make it legal for people 21 and above and let the pro sports of baseball, football, and basketball deal with it.

Congress shouldn't be involved in this and they wouldn't be involved except that it gives those pompus media hounds a chance to have their mugs on television.

Commission on Black Male funded by Kellogg

I must have missed this article because I was on vacation. I always thought those "crisis of the black male" joints were patriarchal and sexist. I still do. But the numbers don't lie. he question is what will commission hearings--which are largely symbolic events--actually do? Thanks to Terecico for the article. (As an aside I must be getting old as dirt...homeboy was on the yard the same time I was, but I have no recollection. Granted I was in grad school with a family but damn...)

Oh. Podcast interview with Craig Nulan coming up later.

MSM Bias Against McKinney Reopening 9/11 Issues

I'll include the text of the Atlanta Journal Constitution Article detailing this hearing, but my real aim here is to do my little piece to lend exposure to skewed MSM coverage of Rep. McKinney's efforts. To that end, McKinney's 8/2 letter to the AJC as reported by Playahata first.

It's a shame that the Atlanta Journal and Constitution seems incapable of running factual coverage of important events for the people in the Atlanta area. Their coverage of our historic Capitol Hill 9-11 briefing, laden with commentary and innuendo, bore no resemblance to the content of the actual event. They refuse to retract that story--as I have requested them to do--or to even print this op ed signed by many of the panelists and me. Please share this op ed with your friends; post it widely as an example of the way serious issues are treated by the corporate media in Atlanta.

August 2, 2005

Editor
Atlanta Journal Constitution
55 Marietta Street, Ste. 1500
Atlanta, GA 30303

OP-ED TO THE EDITOR:

Your recent article ("McKinney reopens 9/11" July 23, 2005,by Bob Kemper) covering a day-long Congressional briefing on July 22 was totally misleading in claiming that it consisted of "conspiracy theories implicating president [Bush]." The actual title was ""The
9/11 Commission Report One Year Later: A Citizens' Response – Did They Get it Right?" and not a single panelist at the event, which included 9/11 family members, former intelligence and government workers, whistleblowers and academic experts, raised any allegations that the Bush administration arranged the
9/11 attacks.

The eight hours of testimony included a powerful statement from New Jersey 9/11 widow Lorie van Auken speaking for other family members about their questions that remain unanswered to date, and their frustration that no one has been held accountable at any level for what was not an "institutional failure" nor a "failure of imagination"in relation to the 9/11 attacks, but personal failures to heed multiple and explicit advance warnings of just such an event in the United States.

Your reporter has done the concerned family members and scholars present a disservice by his defamatory remarks which continue to hide from the American public the many unexplored facts and unanswered questions that mark our understanding of and response to 9/11. I hope the public and the citizens in my district in Georgia will take the opportunity to hear this new evidence through C-SPAN, Pacifica Radio,and my own website.

Certainly the dozens of panelists who spoke about
post-9/11 violations of civil rights and liberties, the rise of secrecy and the hidden costs of covert operations and consolidation of intelligence, and the rise of the neoconservative view in foreign policy and a new "Pax Americana" and permanent warfare that ignore international law or the alternatives of restoring justice and peace cannot be called "conspiracy theorists" because they question the immediate response and flawed recommendations that now guide legislation and a new security paradigm.

Historians and researchers who discover glaring errors or omissions in the Commission's report, or the lack of historical framework to their comprehension of the sources of terrorism can't be called "contrarians" for unearthing facts that contradict faulty conclusions or assumptions in the official version of events.

This calls for another look at the government's account of 9/11, which guides so much of what has happened since. Mistakes of fact, intentional or not, have changed and guided America into costly wars and increased insecurity at home. They need to be addressed and scrutinized, not dismissed and used to attack those who discover or raise them.

Your writer further implies that the issues I raised in 2002 regarding 9/11 and its aftermath "helped to spur my ouster from Congress" and that this event merely revisited the questions I raised then. To the contrary, my legitimate questions of 2002 have been taken up since by many others in Congress and the public. Many 9/11 victims' families share these concerns as well. My re-election calls the question to such claims, since my credibility with the electorate in my district is intact.

In the end, public consideration of important new facts regarding all aspects of the 9/11 tragedy is my responsibility to my constituents, the victims of 9/11, and the oath I took to defend our Constitution.

The presenters listed below, who were at the July 22 briefing, join me in this response.

Rep. Cynthia McKinney
4th District, Georgia

Peter Dale Scott, Ph.D.
Ray McGovern
David MacMichael
Paul Thompson
Nafeez Ahmed
Elaine Cassell
C. William Michaels, Esq.
Dr. John Nutter
Anne Norton
Dr. William F. Pepper

The article which provoked Rep. McKinney's letter;

Original Article in the AJC
Conspiracy theories implicating president aired at 8-hour hearing
Bob Kemper - Staff
Saturday, July 23, 2005

Washington --- Revisiting the issue that helped spur her ouster from Congress three years ago, Rep. Cynthia McKinney led a Capitol Hill hearing Friday on whether the Bush administration was involved in the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

The eight-hour hearing, timed to mark the first anniversary of the release of the Sept. 11 commission's report on the attacks, drew dozens of contrarians and conspiracy theorists who suggest President Bush purposely ignored warnings or may even have had a hand in the attack --- claims participants said the commission ignored.

"The commission's report was not a rush to judgment, it was a rush to exoneration," said John Judge, a member of McKinney's staff and a representative of a Web site dedicated to raising questions about the Sept. 11 commission's report.

The White House and the commission have dismissed such questions as unfounded conspiracy theories.

McKinney first raised questions about Bush's involvement shortly after the attacks in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania, generating a furious response from fellow Democrats in Washington and voters in Georgia, who ousted her in 2002.

"What we are doing is asking the unanswered questions of the 9/11 families," McKinney, a DeKalb County Democrat who won back her seat in 2004, said during the proceedings.

She rebuffed a reporter's repeated attempts to ask her why she would so boldly embrace the same claims that led to her downfall.

"Congresswoman McKinney is viewed as a contrarian," panelist Melvin Goodman, a former CIA official, said. "And I hope someday her views will be considered conventional wisdom."

Though she left the testimony and questioning of panelists to others, McKinney was the main attraction, presiding over more than two dozen participants, including the author of a book that claims the U.S. government had advance knowledge of the Pearl Harbor attack and allowed it to happen, and Peter Dale Scott, who wrote three books on President John F. Kennedy's assassination.

Georgia peanuts, Cokes and coffee were available to more than 50 attendees, whose casual dress was a decided change from the gangs of blue-suited lobbyists who usually crowd Capitol Hill hearings.

McKinney herself offered witnesses bottled water and found additional trash cans to place around the room.

Nearly a dozen 9/11 enthusiasts lined one side of the room, camcorders at the ready, broadcasting the hearing live over the Internet or recording it for later release. C-SPAN cameras documented the hearing, and a DVD recording of the proceedings will soon be available.

Ten people sat in a section reserved for family members of 9/11 victims.

"Nine-eleven could have been prevented," said Marilyn Rosenthal, a University of Michigan professor who lost a son in the attacks, echoing the premise of the hearing.

Panelists maintained that Bush ignored numerous warnings from the CIA, the Federal Aviation Administration, foreign governments and others who told him before 9/11 that Osama bin Laden was planning to attack the United States and that terrorists were likely to use hijacked airliners as weapons.

But why would the president or his administration want the 9/11 attacks to occur? Power, the panelists agreed.

In the wake of the attacks, the administration was able to greatly expand the president's power and the reach of the federal government, they said, but whistle-blowers and other potential witnesses who could have testified to the Sept. 11 commission about such things were either prevented from speaking or ignored in the commission's final report. Panelists called the commission's report "a cover-up."

"The American people have been seriously misled," said Scott.

Ohio Citizens Rail Against Election Rules--Seek Change

Game on.

I've argued that the battle for the political future of the country won't be waged at the ballot box in 2008--no matter whether we're talking about Clinton vs. Dole 2.0 or Clinton vs. Bush the Younger. It'll be fought at the state level, over electoral rules. Somebody's waking up. If this works, this will go some way to a more competitive electoral system. And the more competitive elections are, the more responsive government should be to our needs.

Media Quickies

Two articles of note:

Rumsfeld Says Weapons From Iran Found in Iraq

By Daniela Deane
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, August 9, 2005; 3:09 PM

Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said Tuesday that weapons have been found in Iraq that were "clearly, unambiguously" from Iran and that the weapons would ultimately become a problem for Tehran.

Speaking at a Pentagon briefing with Air Force Gen. Richard B. Myers, chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, Rumsfeld said it was unclear whether the weapons were coming from elements of the Iranian government or from other parties in that country.

"What you do know is that the Iranians did not stop them from coming in," he told reporters. "It's notably unhelpful for the Iranians to be allowing weapons of those types to cross the border," said Rumsfeld. He offered no further specifics on the weapons.

----------

Judge Sides With Disney Board

By Ben White
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, August 9, 2005; 5:48 PM

In a sharp blow to advocates for stronger corporate oversight, a Delaware judge on Tuesday ruled that Walt Disney Co. board members did not violate their duty to shareholders when they awarded Hollywood super agent Michael Ovitz a $140 million severance package in 1997 to push him out the door.

The $140 million award came after Ovitz spent an unhappy 14 months as Disney president and deputy to his one-time close friend, chief executive Michael D. Eisner, who concluded that his chosen successor was a flop.

The decision in the case came six months after the end of a gossipy and celebrity-soaked trial that laid bare intimate details of one the strangest and most disastrous executive partnerships in recent business history.

The ruling, from Delaware Court of Chancery Chief Judge William B. Chandler III, is expected to have enormous implications for other cases involving corporate directors' legal responsibility to protect shareholders and serve as a check on management. Many public companies are nominally headquartered in Delaware, so rulings from the state often set critical precedents in corporate law.

--------

I don't have anything to say.

A Rant

• Maybe I should do podcasting. I get a lot of quick streams of thought that I say I need to remember so that I can blog about it, but then I forget what I first thought.

• The Black community is suffering from a major case of scrambled brains, first scrambled because of the social situation in the United States. Our collective minds are still scrambled, but not it's scrambled as a residual affect of the prior scrambling.

  Think about it. How can the collective group with one of the lowest average net worth be such consumers instead of savers?

• The true independent thinkers are always outside of the society's mainstream. They are admired and disparaged by the same people at the same time.

• "Victimology" is a red-meat phrase that seems to be applied to people who have a complaint about something in society. The people throwing around the phrase seem to be the people who are more likely to adopt that "mindset" and complain about what they believe are forces against their way of thinking. They need to either stop whining or drop the b.s. phrase.
  

• In writing that last bullet, I had a thought and lost it while I completed that thought. Damn.

• When Democrats where in office, the Republicans, rightly, said that the Democrats were drunk with power and were abusing the perks of office and using the government treasury as their personal bank accounts. Now that the Republicans control the both halves of congress and the presidency, they are doing the same thing that they accused Democrats of doing.

• Negative news sells. Even when it distorts the picture of society or a part of society, negative news sells.

  One day, Gregory Kane was the guest of a conservative radio talk show host. Kane was going on about some "problem" in the Black community. Actually, the "problem" was that "Black leaders" weren't saying something about a situation that Kane believed they should be saying something about.

  I called in and launched on him and the host. I asked why it is that "Black leaders" are blasted for thing they are "not doing" when Blacks who are doing things are not pointed out. Specifically, I pointed out Black Professional Men, Inc., and asked why they are not given more press when they are doing things that "Black leaders" are not doing.

  The host jumped in and said, essentially, because negative news sells. No one wants to talk about positive news.

  That's the mindset that is part of the scrambled brain syndrome that Blacks suffer from that I wrote about above.

• Read this.

• Whe the Democrats controlled the House of Representatives, many on the right said that term limits need to be put into place to stop the abuses by the congresscriters. One of the voices AGAINST term limits was Rush Limbaugh. After the election which occurred prior to the Republican take over of the House, Rush Limbaugh was spitting fire about the Democrats retaining control of the House. He then became a term limits supporter.

  The next election cycle, the Republicans gained control of the House. For most people, term limits stopped being an issue.

  Does anyone else notice that the same people who were backing term limits of congress criters are now backing term limits for the Supreme Court?

• When someone says that capitalism is evil, do the following:
  1. Smack them.
  2. Tell the person that capitalism is an economic system. As such, it can't be evil. People are evil. It doesn't matter what system that person is in, if he is evil, he is evil and will find a way to exploit the economic system in a way that favors him.
  3. Smack them.
  4. Ask them if they realize that socialism and communism has similar abuses occuring those economic systems.
  5. Smack them.
  6. Tell them that you were mistaken. Capitalism is more economic based, while socialism and communism, while economic in theory, needs a repressive political system behind it to get it to work.
  7. Smack me for messing this up.
• The thrust is, people corrupt the system, the system doesn't corrupt the people.

• Many public Black conservatives, IMO, are just as much race hustlers as are "Black leaders".

• Women control relationships.

  Attractive women -- women who are physically beautiful, have bodies that are "ideal", or have personalities that shine -- know that they are desireable. They know that they are wanted. They know that they have a larger pool to pick from. As such, they act accordingly.

  Meanwhile, the men that go after them do some stupid and/or degrading, to themselves, things.

  Until...

  The women meet that man that they find attractive -- physically, financially, or socially -- then they lose control of the relationship. They tend to want that man so much that they "over look" things like behavior, attitude, the other women, etc.

  Then the men gain control. If the men want to take advantage of the situation, they will. Then the woman gets hurt and blames men.

  But in all of the bad relationships she has been in, she's the constant factor. So why doesn't she blame herself and get herself together?

• Men can only take advantage of women while the women allow men to take advantage of them. If women want better men, become better women who demand that their men are better men.

• Blogging, for me, is mostly brain spew, mental masturbation, throwing out of stuff. Spelling isn't a high concern for me. Make that of it what you will.

• It's easy to stand above the crowd because the average size of people in the crowd is small.

• Even though I wrote that Blacks as a group have scrambled brains, we still have a strength that cannot be denied. Well, actually, it is often denied. John H. Johnson is an example of the strength. The Perry family is an example of the strength.

  You never heard of the Perry family? Well, you're right. But I can tell you stories of my clan that are nothing short of inspiring and life affirming.

  I stand on their shoulders. I will not let them down.

• Being positive is hard work. Being negative is easy.

• Blacks can't afford to get caught up in the liberal vs. conservative garbage. The "conversations" based on "liberal" vs. "conservatve" proves it.

Spence on News and Notes with Ed Gordon

During my month and a half long sojourn back to Detroit, I attended an event in Chicago on behalf of the Charles H. Wright African American History Museum in Detroit. I talked about the museum's innovative fundraising technique in today's News and Notes with Ed Gordon.

I Bet Their Ratings Rose

The Smack Down is Smacked.

Okay ladies, you can stop slapping each other now

THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

ALBANY — A New York City radio station has agreed to stop its “Smackfest” promotion, in which women slap each other for prizes, under a $240,000 settlement announced Monday, said state Attorney General Eliot Spitzer.

WQHT Hot 97’s parent company, Emmis Communications, agreed to pay a settlement equal to the maximum fine it faced, Spitzer said.

Spitzer and the state Athletic Commission stated that the hip-hop and rhythm and blues station held 24 “Smackfest” contests from April 2004 to January 2005. Young women took turns “violently slapping” each other for concert tickets and as much as $5,000 in cash, Spitzer said. Images of the slapping then ran on the station’s Web site.

“This agreement should be a wake up call to all those in the entertainment industry who think outrageousness is a clever marketing strategy,” Spitzer said.

I bet their ratings rose.

Fishing Fill-os-o-fee

So, my friends and I chartered a head boat from Chrisfield and went off to do battle with the Croakers, Spot, and Sea Trout of the Chesapeake Bay.

While waiting for the fish to realize that we had placed squid, blood worms, night crawlers, and peelers in their domain for their feasting, we touched on a lot of topics.

Music and lack there of in rap, getting our children to be more responsible, a knucklehead who was running from the police and was captured because "his damn pants were falling off of his ass!"

We hit upon immigration. The two people most impacted by illegal immigrants didn't blame the illegal immigrants. "After all, they are just trying to earn some cash". But they mentioned that their bosses are now hiring nothing but illegals, some having multiple pieces of the same identification, each with a different name. They also mentioned that it appears many can't understand English until they are put into a rough situation, like someone mentioning that if no one understands, they will call a policeman so the police can get someone who speaks Spanish.

Of course, there was the conversation about women, cars, the housing market and the like.

So what is the point?

None really. Just a part of life that keeps going.

John Johnson, Media Great, Has Passed

John Johnson, publisher of Ebony and Jet magazines, has passed.

CHICAGO (Reuters) - Magazine publisher John Johnson, who jolted the mostly black readers of Ebony and Jet with violent images that lent visibility and momentum to the civil rights movement, died on Monday, his office said.

A publicist at Johnson's Chicago-based publishing company would not immediately give a cause of death. He was 87.

A multimillionaire who in 1982 became the first black American to make Forbes' list of the richest Americans, Johnson said his magazine philosophy was to reflect the "happier side" of black American life, and that "deep down, at the end of the day, we're trying to give people hope."

My family members received both magazines; Jet and Ebony.

I remember reading about my first celebrety crush, Diahann Carroll, in Ebony.

I remember passing the time on Saturday in the barbor shop, reading Jet.

I liked Jet so much, I kept the subscription I was given as a gift, even in college. Someone in the first year dorm mailroom liked it as well. It was often late.

Ebony was said to be the "Black version of Life magazine". I think the mission was accomplished.

The man created a successful enterprise that will last beyond his passing. The man created a publication that gave Negroes the chance to see some of the positive and lighter side of the Negro life.

On the business side and the media side, job well done, sir.
Salute!

On Our Shoulders

The On Our Shoulders program was created out of the empathy felt by its founder, Ray Cook, as he watched countless youths die and become victims of violence on the streets of Baltimore.

The counseling, education and skills training offered by On Our Shoulders helps young people develop career potential and connections to advanced education.

The program components include:

Group Sessions

* Assessment
* Review Street Violence Statistics
* Health and Hygiene Classes Conducted by Registered Nurses
* Individual Drug Counseling and Referral
* Young Mothers/Fathers Group
* Support Groups for Young Victims of Violence

On The Job Training

* Pre-apprenticeship Training
* Catering, Food Handling and Baking Classes
* Clerical Training
* Construction/Electrical/Plumbing
* Barbering/Braiding (Hygiene Enhancement Classes)
* Modeling Training/Fashion Shows

Skill Enhancements

* Academic Skills
* G.E.D. Preparation and Testing
* Computer Skills
* Job Readiness Skills
* Life Skills/Coping Skills/Decision Making Skills
* Paid Internships
* College Preparation/Scholarships/Advanced Education

Crimminal Assessment

* Help young people understand charge papers and court procedures
* Provide an assessment on program participants to the courts
* Appropriately recommend "On Our Shoulders" as an alternative to incarceration

Advanced education will be based on academic performance, attendance, punctuality, and commitment to the program. Our youth will need to demonstrate a high degree of motivation within the program to receive a court representation and assessment verification.

On Our Shoulders
2846 West Lafayette Street - Baltimore, Maryland 21216
Phone: 410.947.3700 - Fax: 410.947.3200
onourshoulders@verizon.net

Ask DarkStar

Are you "tired" of my comments in blogs where you assume I never tell what I think or advocate?

Here's your chance to ask me a question. The ground rules are this:

• I won't answer vague, open ended questions. In my view, they can never be answered. For example, when I am interviewed, and the interviewer says, "Tell me about yourself", I always respond with, "What do you want to know?" By nature I am short and to the point. An open ended question leaves me wondering what is being asked so I am stuck in giving the answer.
• State if you think I'm a liberal, conservative, moderate, contrarian, or whatever and why.

Are HBCUs Failing?

From today's NYT:

IN a classroom of white walls and black students, an air-conditioned sanctuary from a sweltering July morning, Devon Moore walked toward the front table with his homework. He had clipped out a newspaper article and now gave a one-sentence synopsis of its subject, safety problems in pickup trucks. He identified a word new to him, "adjacent," and a word that used a prefix or suffix, "faulty." He was less than four weeks from starting his freshman year of college.

Devon had passed up a senior-class trip to Atlanta to enroll in the Summer Academy at Texas Southern University here, and at the outset of the eight-week session, he had wondered why. Having graduated from high school, he figured, "I already knew everything there was to learn." That illusion crashed and burned on Day 1, when the math instructor taught a lesson on slope and even gave an overnight assignment.

For some 185 incoming freshmen like him, and indeed for Texas Southern as an institution, the summer courses in reading, writing, and math form one front in a battle to reverse a disturbingly low graduation rate. Of the students who received diplomas last May, only 6 percent had earned their degree in the normal four years, and only 21 percent in six years. Those numbers, incredibly, reflected improvement from prior rates.

Mass Incarceration and the Black Elite

The quantum aether was listening and responded in its own sublimely subliminal way. Just now kicking the dopamine can with Cobb about Roberts and the issue I believe his nomination underscores - when what should waft into my inbox but this sweet little tidbit from the Black Commentator.

Mass Incarceration and the Black Elite

Text of the audio inside;

When Black Commentator Associate Editor Bruce Dixon wrote his recent Cover Story, “The Ten Worst Places to be Black,” some people in Wisconsin and Iowa got very upset. In terms of the disparity in the rates of incarceration between Blacks and whites, Wisconsin and Iowa were number one and number two. Number three was the prison hell called Texas, but Wisconsin and Iowa’s racial imprisonment disparity was more than twice as large as even Texas. Therefore, Wisconsin and Iowa were placed at the top of our Ten Worst Places to be Black. Milwaukee seems to tattoo prison numbers on Black baby boys, at birth.

Dixon also pointed out that Milwaukee has the highest child poverty rate of any big city in the country. There is, of course, a connection. It’s very difficult to build two-parent families when such huge numbers of would-be marriage partners are in prison. The effects cascade throughout Black society, destroying the very fabric of African American life.

However, there is an historical current in Black politics that is more embarrassed than outraged at mass Black incarceration. Thus, we witnessed a long NAACP boycott of the state of South Carolina, because it refused to remove the confederate flag from the Capital Building – but then the NAACP stages its national convention in Milwaukee. The NAACP rewarded – with millions of convention dollars – the city with the highest Black incarceration and child poverty rates. Somebody’s got their priorities very, very wrong. These are the same people who care more about getting relatively small numbers of Blacks in prestigious universities, than punishing the localities that place far higher numbers of young Blacks in prison. They care more about getting contracts for a few more Black business people, than in destroying the savage, thirty-year old public policy of criminalizing whole Black neighborhoods.

I’m reminded of a petition sent to the white administration of New Orleans by an elite organization of Blacks, back in the 1880s. These community leaders were upset that Black women city jail inmates were set to work cleaning up the streets. Their concern was not for the well-being of the female inmates, many of whom had been sentenced for prostitution, and some of whom were probably glad to get out of the dungeons and into the open air.

No, the Black elite were upset that the sight of these unfortunate women on New Orleans boulevards made the “colored race” look bad. They were embarrassed. A century and a quarter later, much of the African American elite is exhibiting the same political behavior. Why else would they reward a city that treats its Black citizens as badly as Milwaukee. For Radio BC, I’m Glen Ford.

Roberts and Racial Justice

I told you so! OK, two weeks ago doesn't exactly establish my prophetic credentials, but it does suggest a useful degree vigilence outside the carefully scripted narratives of the dopamine distraction theatre of U.S. politics. Nowhere in the mainstream media do we hear anything about Supreme Court nominee Roberts record on racial justice. Trust me on this one, conservatives will continue to warm to Roberts the more they learn about his Reagan-era writings on civil rights. So-called black conservatives will predictably bite their tongues and fall in with the party line. Perhaps the conservative black afrostocracy will step up to the plate and say a little something about this nominee, but I'm not holding my breath for that deus ex machina moment.

Noam Scheiber at The New Republic has a fair amount to say about it, viewed from the perspective of a Rovian dopamine distraction programmer and gamesman....,

Conservatives had lots of reasons to like John Roberts's nomination to the Supreme Court. But the one they cited most eagerly was that the nominee, barring some unforeseen revelation, was neither a woman nor a minority. David Brooks praised President Bush for "mov[ing] beyond the tokenism of identity politics." National Review's Jonah Goldberg was relieved that Bush had "tagged a plain old really smart white guy." "[B]y not worrying about walking out to the podium last night accompanied by a white male," William Kristol concluded, "Bush did something important and courageous."

At the time, the glee with which conservatives greeted Roberts's white male-ness fell into the category of slightly weird but hardly worth a second thought. In retrospect, it was rather telling. To the extent that Roberts's nomination has been defined in the early going, it is civil rights issues that have defined it. That has, in turn, produced two reactions on the right. On the one hand, conservatives have continued to warm to Roberts the more they learn about his Reagan-era writings on civil rights. But these discoveries have also created a gnawing, if not quite urgent, sense of anxiety among Republicans--and rightly so.

Roberts comes across as nothing if not conservative in the thousands of pages of documents he wrote as a Reagan-era legal adviser. Roberts favored a highly restrictive interpretation of the Voting Rights Act. He concluded that Congress had the authority to pass so-called court-stripping legislation in order to prevent courts from imposing busing as a remedy for segregation. He took a dim view of a Justice Department decision granting restitution to people discouraged from applying to jobs for reasons related to race. He argued against an affirmative action program on the grounds that it led to the hiring of unqualified candidates.

In the early '80s, Roberts's positions on these issues were not only popular among conservatives, they were central to what it meant to be a Reaganite, both politically and ideologically. The conservatism of the era was very much a reaction to the perceived liberal excesses of the 1960s and 1970s, particularly on matters of civil rights. Ronald Reagan won states like New York, New Jersey, Michigan, and Pennsylvania thanks largely to the resentment that blue-collar, white Democrats harbored toward welfare, busing, and affirmative action. Meanwhile, the '80s saw elite universities churn out hoards of conservative ideologues radicalized by the political correctness they felt pervaded their campuses. Northwestern University Law Professor Steven Calabresi has said he founded the Federalist Society, the conservative legal organization, to counter liberals' dominance at Yale Law School, where he was a student in the early '80s.

But, while conservative elites still harbor these resentments, things have changed among voters. Bill Clinton helped defuse race as a political issue across the Northeast and Midwest when he signed welfare reform in 1996. Around the same time, race was creating political problems for the GOP. A Wall Street Journal poll found that 66 percent of Americans thought the GOP was intolerant. Republicans began suffering defections among Sunbelt Latinos and moderates nationally thanks to the punitive cast of their immigration and welfare policies.

The coup de grâce came when then-Governor Bush, partly as a concession to political reality and partly as a result of his own personal decency, self-consciously fashioned himself as a new, tolerant brand of Republican. Bush has largely repudiated appeals to racial resentments. He has proposed instead to liberalize immigration and has scrupulously practiced affirmative action within his own administration. While the Reagan/Bush I/Newt Gingrich coalition largely repelled minorities with its preoccupation with race, the Bush II coalition directly enlists socially conservative blacks, Latinos, and women (albeit in a new crusade against gays).

In this context, it's hard not to see Roberts's memos as a political liability. Conservative bloggers have spent much of the last two weeks defending the nominee's individual positions--often with justification. A careful reading of the memos doesn't evoke the mind of a racist. It evokes a principled, if rock-ribbed, conservatism--someone devoted to the belief that government does more harm than good when it relies on ambitious means to defend civil rights.

But, collectively, the weight of his civil rights positions have the effect of casting Roberts as someone out of step with the current political consensus on race, or at least with the tentative peace Bush's GOP has forged. And the GOP establishment knows it. In the days since Roberts's memos began trickling out, administration surrogates have mostly sought to distance Roberts from his own paper trail. Asked about the memos, administration spokesman Scott McClellan would say only that "the files that you're referring to mostly are from about 20 years ago." South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham argued that Roberts was merely advising a "client": "I've represented rapists, murder[er]s. ... You shouldn't hold it against me the thoughts of my client." The few times the GOP has engaged on substance have been to repudiate a position attributed to Roberts. Last week, Kentucky Senator Mitch McConnell announced that, contrary to popular opinion, Roberts had actually opposed court-stripping. (Roberts opposed it in practice but believed Congress had the power to do it.)

For Republicans, the risks posed by Roberts are the mirror image of the risks posed by Robert Bork. Bork, with his shaggy hair and condescending manner, was a tough sell in the Senate. But he posed no long-term risk to a party that largely shared his views on civil rights. Roberts isn't likely to encounter problems in the Senate. But, in closing ranks behind him, Republicans risk handing Democrats a political wedge. In 2004, Bush increased his share of the black and Latino vote by roughly 2 and 6 percentage points, respectively. Karl Rove believes this trend is the key to a future GOP majority. Yet these inroads are fragile. As Deval Patrick, a former Clinton civil rights official, said after Republican Party Chairman Ken Mehlman apologized to the naacp for his party's checkered racial past, "The Republicans have a lot to answer for." If Rove's majority fails to materialize, we may one day look back on Roberts as the reason why.

This Is Foul

OK, this is just foul.

From the Drudge Report:

XXXXX DRUDGE REPORT XXXXX THU AUG 04, 2005 11:35:09 ET XXXXX

A TIMES insider claims the look into the adoption papers are part of the paper's "standard background check."

That. Is. Just. Wrong.

Dead Prez on the State of HipHop

This is the last of the recordings from the 26th annual National Black United Front convention held in Kansas City July 14th-16th. Marcus Brown led a panel discussion which included Dead Prez speaking very candidly about the current state of black cultural production and black youth culture in its media and $$$ dominating embodiment as commercialized RaP {Rhyming and Posing}. About 45 minutes of that panel discussion can be heard on this 16 bit (slightly tinny) 5 megabyte file.

Left click here to listen, right click to download.

Globalisation is an anomaly and its time is running out

The HUGE LIE of this false doctrine infects every aspect of the dopamine distraction theatre {politics} by which we alleviate the excruciating boredom of lives essentially devoid of interior psychological value or meaning. Boredom is merely the seeing of how empty I am...dependent on exterior stimuli to validate my existence. What do I look forward to upon awakening in the morning? Newspaper, FOXNEWS on TV, email, input from co-workers, an exchange with my current companion...all of which cover-up an incipient state of anxiety...a desire to avoid being-here-now with how I am - with my avidity, fears, aversions and dreams of how my life should be.

J.H. Kunstler writes with typical flair in the Guardian about how cheap energy and relative peace have helped create a false doctrine, to which I only add that sooner than we expect or can even imagine, the unsustainable bubble of our dopaminergic consensus hallucination will be most rudely popped by a sharp prick from the thermodynamic real world.

The big yammer these days in the United States is to the effect that globalisation is here to stay: it's wonderful, get used to it. The chief cheerleader for this point of view is Thomas Friedman, columnist for the New York Times and author of The World Is Flat. The seemingly unanimous embrace of this idea in the power circles of America is a marvellous illustration of the madness of crowds, for nothing could be further from the truth than the idea that globalisation is now a permanent fixture of the human condition.

Today's transient global economic relations are a product of very special transient circumstances, namely relative world peace and absolutely reliable supplies of cheap energy. Subtract either of these elements from the equation and you will see globalisation evaporate so quickly it will suck the air out of your lungs. It is significant that none of the cheerleaders for globalisation takes this equation into account. In fact, the American power elite is sleepwalking into a crisis so severe that the blowback may put both major political parties out of business.

The world saw an earlier phase of robust global trade run from the 1870s to a dead stop in 1914. This was the boom period of railroad construction and the advent of the ocean-going steamship. The great powers had existed in relative peace since Napoleon's last stand. The Crimean war was a minor episode that took place in backwaters of Eurasia, and the Franco-Prussian war was a comic opera that lasted less than a year - most of it the static siege of Paris. The American civil war hardly affected the rest of the world.

This first phase of globalisation then took off under coal-and-steam power. There was no shortage of fuel, the colonial boundaries were stable, and the pipeline of raw materials from them to the factories of western Europe ran smoothly. The rise of a middle class running the many stages of the production process provided markets for all the new production. Innovations in finance gave legitimacy to all kinds of tradable paper. Life was very good for Europe and America, notwithstanding a few sharp cyclical depressions and recoveries. Trade boomed between the great powers. The belle époque represented the high tide of hopeful expectations. In America, it was called the progressive era. The 20th century looked golden.

It all fell apart in 1914. Historians are still baffled about what really brought on the first world war. What did France or Britain really care about Austrian archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the throne of a country already in deep eclipse? There were no active contests over territory at the time, not even in the Asian or African colonies. And yet the diplomatic failures of that fateful summer led to the great slaughter of the trenches, the death of a substantial portion of the younger generation, and a virtual nervous breakdown of authority in politics and culture. It would take a depression, fascism, and a second world war to resolve these issues and a new round of globalisation did not ramp up again until the mid-1960s.

It may be significant that the first collapse of globalisation occurred as the coal economy was transitioning into an oil economy, with deep geo-political implications for who had oil (America) and those who might seek to control the other major region closest to Europe that possessed it (then the Caspian, since Arabian oil was as yet undiscovered). The first world war was settled by those nations (Britain and France) that were friendly with the greatest producer of oil most readily accessed. Germany was the loser and again in the reprise for its poor access to oil. Japan suffered similarly.

We are now due for another folding up of the periodic global trade fair as the industrial nations enter the tumultuous era beyond the global oil production peak, which I have named the long emergency. The economic distortions and perversities that have built up in the current era are not hard to see, though our leaders dread to acknowledge them. The dirty secret of the US economy for at least a decade now is that it has come to be based on the ceaseless elaboration of a car-dependent suburban infrastructure - McHousing estates, eight-lane highways, big-box chain stores, hamburger stands - that has no future as a living arrangement in an oil-short future.

The American suburban juggernaut can be described succinctly as the greatest misallocation of resources in the history of the world. The mortgages, bonds, real estate investment trusts and derivative financial instruments associated with this tragic enterprise must make the judicious goggle with wonder and nausea.

Add to this grim economic picture a far-flung military contest, already under way, really, for control of the world's remaining oil, and the scene grows darker. Two-thirds of that oil is in the possession of people who resent the west (America in particular), many of whom have vowed to destroy it. Both America and Britain have felt the sting of freelance asymmetrical war-makers not associated with a particular state but with a transnational religious cause that uses potent small arms and explosives to unravel western societies and confound their defences.

China, a supposed beneficiary of globalisation, will be as desperate for oil as all the other players, and perhaps more ruthless in seeking control of the supplies, some of which they can walk to. Of course, it is hard to imagine the continuation of American chain stores' manufacturing supply lines with China, given the potential for friction. Even on its own terms, China faces issues of environmental havoc, population overshoot, and political turmoil - orders of magnitude greater than anything known in Europe or America.

Viewed through this lens, the sunset of the current phase of globalisation seems dreadfully close to the horizon. The American public has enjoyed the fiesta, but the blue-light special orgy of easy motoring, limitless air-conditioning, and super-cheap products made by factory slaves far far away is about to close down. Globalisation is finished. The world is about to become a larger place again.

· James Howard Kunstler is the author of The Long Emergency: Surviving the Converging Catastrophes of the Twenty-First Century

kunstler@aol.com

Black American-ness

Why is it that only Blacks have their sense of American-ness questioned?

I have no patience from this questioning, no matter who is doing it.

I have no patience for those who claim that, because of the history of this country, Blacks should not consider themselves American.

Black, African-American, Colored, Negro, it doesn't matter. We're still Americans and saying the use of such labels demonstrates a lack of American-ness, is a farce, illogical, and an insult to the Blacks who have been a part of this country from day one, under any circumstance.

In short, the following statements or questions, in any form, is B.S.:

• Do we see ourselves as Americans first or black Americans first?
• The use of "African-American" means that the person does not consider himself to be American.

[Update] Let me add one thing to this.

White Americans have created most of the groups that are subversive to the American ideal, yet white Americans, as a whole, don't have their American-ness questioned.

And Here Lies Jerry Buss...

owner of the los angeles lakers who pulled the single silliest move in the history of a franchise built on the backs of mikan, chamberlain, jabbar and o'neal. there are other numbers in the rafters, including #32 (my personal favorite), but none are bigger than those of the big men who dominated the low post in LA. buss traded shaq and here comes the hammer...it seems some of his old peeps had a meeting and put together the LARGEST TRADE in NBA HISTORY...and guess who's involved...

Jerry West, Pat Riley, Bryon Scott. Can you imagine the conversation. I wonder who called whom first...maybe it was Riley since he was the most desperate - or maybe West since he's still a bit miffed at the Lakers...West: "Pat, let's talk, I've got Bryon on the line and, uh, as we much as we all hate Danny Ainge, it seems the Celtics could be in our corner on this one. Besides, I know you need to move Eddie Jones, and he's still part of our family...we'll take care of him too."

If ever there was a group out to win a championship and build bridges to lock the lakers out, here it is...Miami, assuming that shaq and wade don't get injured will have White Chocolate (back home in Florida) dropping dimes to d-wade, 'toine and shaq...ya gotta be kidding...if they're healthy, it's a wrap.

if i was in a room and wanted to win again and i had phil and kobe and mitch kupchak in the room, i'd be a little nervous...jerry can work on his golf game in june for the foreseeable future...he won't be putting up any more hardware in the staples center.

i guess this is what is meant when they say, "the stars are aligned."

Congress Mulls Cutting Food Stamps

WASHINGTON, July 28 (Reuters) - Leaders of a U.S. House of Representatives panel were to meet privately Thursday in the second of a series of sessions to reduce farm spending by $3 billion, with some lawmakers fearing cuts could target the food stamp program that helps poor families buy groceries.

tsk, tsk, tsk, full monty here; and some folks ack like they don't understand my emphasis on food security...,

Peaking of World Oil Production: Impacts, Mitigation and Risk Management

Waiting until world conventional oil production peaks before implementing crash program mitigation leaves the world with a significant liquid fuel deficit for two decades or longer," according to a report prepared for the Department of Energy's National Energy Technology Laboratory (NETL) by Science Applications International Coporation (SAIC).

Here is a link to the full 91 page report and the executive summary from the report. Inquiring minds want to know, where is MSM on this subject? Who's looking out for me?

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

The peaking of world oil production presents the U.S. and the world with an unprecedented risk management problem. As peaking is approached, liquid fuel prices and price volatility will increase dramatically, and, without timely mitigation, the economic, social, and political costs will be unprecedented. Viable mitigation options exist on both the supply and demand sides, but to have substantial impact, they must be initiated more than a decade in advance of peaking.

In 2003, the world consumed just under 80 million barrels per day (MM bpd) of oil. U.S. consumption was almost 20 MM bpd, two-thirds of which was in the transportation sector. The U.S. has a fleet of about 210 million automobiles and light trucks (vans, pick-ups, and SUVs). The average age of U.S. automobiles is nine years. Under normal conditions, replacement of only half the automobile fleet will require 10-15 years. The average age of light trucks is seven years. Under normal conditions, replacement of one-half of the stock of light trucks will require 9-14 years. While significant improvements in fuel efficiency are possible in automobiles and light trucks, any affordable approach to upgrading will be inherently time-consuming, requiring more than a decade to achieve significant overall fuel efficiency improvement.

Besides further oil exploration, there are commercial options for increasing world oil supply and for the production of substitute liquid fuels: 1) Improved Oil Recovery (IOR) can marginally increase production from existing reservoirs; one of the largest of the IOR opportunities is Enhanced Oil Recovery (EOR), which can help moderate oil production declines from reservoirs that are past their peak production: 2) Heavy oil / oil sands represents a large resource of lower grade oils, now primarily produced in Canada and Venezuela; those resources are capable of significant production increases;. 3) Coal liquefaction is a well-established technique for producing clean substitute fuels from the world’s abundant coal reserves; and finally, 4) Clean substitute fuels can be produced from remotely located natural gas, but exploitation must compete with the world’s growing demand for liquefied natural gas. However, world-scale contributions from these options will require 10-20 years of accelerated effort.

Dealing with world oil production peaking will be extremely complex, involve literally trillions of dollars and require many years of intense effort. To explore these complexities, three alternative mitigation scenarios were analyzed:

• Scenario I assumed that action is not initiated until peaking occurs.
• Scenario II assumed that action is initiated 10 years before peaking.
• Scenario III assumed action is initiated 20 years before peaking.

For this analysis estimates of the possible contributions of each mitigation option were developed, based on an assumed crash program rate of implementation. Our approach was simplified in order to provide transparency and promote understanding. Our estimates are approximate, but the mitigation envelope that results is believed to be directionally indicative of the realities of such an enormous undertaking. The inescapable conclusion is that more than a decade will be required for the collective contributions to produce results that significantly impact world supply and demand for liquid fuels.

Important observations and conclusions from this study are as follows:

1. When world oil peaking will occur is not known with certainty. A fundamental problem in predicting oil peaking is the poor quality of and possible political biases in world oil reserves data. Some experts believe peaking may occur soon. This study indicates that “soon” is within 20 years.

2. The problems associated with world oil production peaking will not be temporary, and past “energy crisis” experience will provide relatively little guidance. The challenge of oil peaking deserves immediate, serious attention, if risks are to be fully understood and mitigation begun on a timely basis.

3. Oil peaking will create a severe liquid fuels problem for the transportation sector, not an “energy crisis” in the usual sense that term has been used.

4. Peaking will result in dramatically higher oil prices, which will cause protracted economic hardship in the United States and the world. However, the problems are not insoluble. Timely, aggressive mitigation initiatives addressing both the supply and the demand sides of the issue will be required.

5. In the developed nations, the problems will be especially serious. In the developing nations peaking problems have the potential to be much worse.

6. Mitigation will require a minimum of a decade of intense, expensive effort, because the scale of liquid fuels mitigation is inherently extremely large.

7. While greater end-use efficiency is essential, increased efficiency alone will be neither sufficient nor timely enough to solve the problem. Production of large amounts of substitute liquid fuels will be required. A number of commercial or near-commercial substitute fuel production technologies are currently available for deployment, so the production of vast amounts of substitute liquid fuels is feasible with existing technology.

8. Intervention by governments will be required, because the economic and social implications of oil peaking would otherwise be chaotic. The experiences of the 1970s and 1980s offer important guides as to government actions that are desirable and those that are undesirable, but the process will not be easy.

Mitigating the peaking of world conventional oil production presents a classic risk management problem:

• Mitigation initiated earlier than required may turn out to be premature, if peaking is long delayed.

• If peaking is imminent, failure to initiate timely mitigation could be extremely damaging.

Prudent risk management requires the planning and implementation of mitigation well before peaking. Early mitigation will almost certainly be less expensive than delayed mitigation. A unique aspect of the world oil peaking problem is that its timing is uncertain, because of inadequate and potentially biased reserves data from elsewhere around the world. In addition, the onset of peaking may be obscured by the volatile nature of oil prices. Since the potential economic impact of peaking is immense and the uncertainties relating to all facets of the problem are large, detailed quantitative studies to address the uncertainties and to explore mitigation strategies are a critical need.

The purpose of this analysis was to identify the critical issues surrounding the occurrence and mitigation of world oil production peaking. We simplified many of the complexities in an effort to provide a transparent analysis. Nevertheless, our study is neither simple nor brief. We recognize that when oil prices escalate dramatically, there will be demand and economic impacts that will alter our simplified assumptions. Consideration of those feedbacks will be a daunting task but one that should be undertaken.

Our study required that we make a number of assumptions and estimates. We well recognize that in-depth analyses may yield different numbers. Nevertheless, this analysis clearly demonstrates that the key to mitigation of world oil production peaking will be the construction a large number of substitute fuel production facilities, coupled to significant increases in transportation fuel efficiency. The time required to mitigate world oil production peaking is measured on a decade time-scale. Related production facility size is large and capital intensive. How and when governments decide to address these challenges is yet to be determined.

Our focus on existing commercial and near-commercial mitigation technologies illustrates that a number of technologies are currently ready for immediate and extensive implementation. Our analysis was not meant to be limiting. We believe that future research will provide additional mitigation options, some possibly superior to those we considered. Indeed, it would be appropriate to greatly accelerate public and private oil peaking mitigation research. However, the reader must recognize that doing the research required to bring new technologies to commercial readiness takes time under the best of circumstances. Thereafter, more than a decade of intense implementation will be required for world scale impact, because of the inherently large scale of world oil consumption.

In summary, the problem of the peaking of world conventional oil production is unlike any yet faced by modern industrial society. The challenges and uncertainties need to be much better understood. Technologies exist to mitigate the problem. Timely, aggressive risk management will be essential.