elementary my dear Watson, elementary

Updated repost of one of my favorites. Thanks to Sister Anna for bringing it to my attention again after 3 years. 

I remember watching a couple of the Sherlock Holmes movies when I was a kid. I never thought much of them as the story lines didn’t really hold my interest, plus they were shown in “black and white”…lol! I do remember though the line Sherlock Holmes gave his sidekick, Dr. Watson when he was ready to solve the case and explain how he came to his conclusions. He made it all seem so obvious after he proclaimed: “elementary my dear Watson, elementary,” and then broke it all down. I would wonder why Watson, being a learn-ed “Doctor”, hadn’t figured it out also and would ask the detective dumb questions. hmmmmm

This week another Dr. Watson garnered media attention, not for asking dumb questions, but for making “dumb” comments. Dr. James Watson, biologist, geneticist, Chancellor of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory and 1962 Nobel laureate in science, made some controversial statements regarding “Race” in an interview he gave to The Sunday Times. The interviewer shared these beliefs of Dr. Watson’s in the article:

“He says that he is “inherently gloomy about the prospect of Africa” because “all our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours – whereas all the testing says not really”, and I know that this “hot potato” is going to be difficult to address. His hope is that everyone is equal, but he counters that “people who have to deal with black employees find this not true”. He says that you should not discriminate on the basis of colour, because “there are many people of colour who are very talented, but don’t promote them when they haven’t succeeded at the lower level”. He writes that “there is no firm reason to anticipate that the intellectual capacities of peoples geographically separated in their evolution should prove to have evolved identically. Our wanting to reserve equal powers of reason as some universal heritage of humanity will not be enough to make it so”.   

This is not the first or only time the “good doctor” has made controversial statements, especially regarding race. During a lecture tour in 2000 he hypothesized that there were scientific links between skin colour and sexual prowess, specifically that “dark-skinned people have stronger libidos”. He has also hypothesized that if you could detect babies with “gay genes” pre-natally, women should then have the right to abort the baby “because women want to have grandchildren, period.” He also agreed with what he refers to as the “unpopular but by no means unfounded” theory of ex-Harvard president Larry Summers (recently President Obama’s director of the National Economic Council and chief economic policy co-ordinator), who lectured that the low representation of tenured female scientists at universities might be due to, among other things, “the innate differences between the sexes”. Due to the furor caused by his latest comments, he has had to cancel a book tour, scheduled lectures and he has also been suspended from his administrative duties at the Laboratory.

So here’s the deal. I believe the issue isn’t so much with the statements he made…. but that he made them publicly! He simply stated what is the widely held belief among those in the dominant “white” society. It is not the first time (nor the last) that science has been utilized to assert the inferiority of the so-called “Black Race”. Scientists are forever coming up with hypotheses and theories either contending that “whites” and/or “Europeans” and their culture is superior to everyone elses, or that “Blacks” and/or “Africans” and their culture are inferior to all others. However, because it is no longer “socially acceptable” nor “politically correct” to make such assertions publicly, “the rule” now is to do it within private (i.e. where Black people aren’t allowed) confines of the backrooms, the social clubs, the boardrooms, the executive offices… hell even in the bathroom…. but never, never out in the open and certainly not to the media! If you break this rule…. you are on your own!

Dr. Watson has made the usual apologies, claimed the statements don’t reflect what he meant, “and there is no scientific basis for such a belief.” Interestingly he also stated: “I cannot understand how I could have said what I am quoted as having said.”

“Elementary my dear Watson, elementary…. you’re a racist.”

Working Man’s Death

Some days I hate my job. However I am thankful for it and for the lifestyle and security it provides for me and my family. I appreciate it even more when I watch documentaries like this 4-part series on Aljazeera called “Working Man’s Death”. It provides a glimpse of the harsh realities of the physical work in the 21st century.

As you watch on your laptop or desktop computer, in a warm room with a full stomach, probably drinking a cold beer, or a popular branded coffee or tea, or a glass or bottle of clean water, my hope is that it brings your life into perspective, particularly when you sit to write how oppressed and shitty your life is.

Click on image below:

Convicts as a Protected Class

Federal Agency Thinks Background Checks Can Discriminate Against Blacks, Hispanics

Op-ed submission by Project 21

Washington, D.C. – Attorneys at the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission believe new technology that makes it easier for employers to check the criminal and credit histories of applicants is also makes it harder for blacks and Hispanics to find jobs. Members of the Project 21 black leadership network fault this position, noting that it unjustly interferes with the ability of employers to build a trusted and coherent workforce.

“Background and credit checks are legitimate hiring and recruitment tools,” said Project 21 member Horace Cooper, a former visiting assistant professor of law at the George Mason University School of Law. “There is no federal law making a refusal to hire convicted felons a crime, and felon status is not a protected class under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act. Especially in the midst of a recession, suits like these — which charge racial discrimination — falsely serve to only make hiring decisions unnecessarily harder and lessen the impact of real allegations of racism.”

Adrienne Hudson filed a lawsuit against First Transit after she was fired from a bus driver position with the company. She alleges her firing was due to her prior conviction for welfare fraud, and that First Transit discriminates against blacks and Hispanics when it does background checks because these minority groups have higher rates of arrest and convictions than whites. First Transit representatives would not comment.

The AP reports the EEOC believes background checks can have a disparate impact on blacks and Hispanics, and quotes EEOC assistant legal counsel Carol Miaskoff saying “the problem is snowballing because of the technology” that is making it easier to do such checks.

Last fall, the EEOC filed a class-action lawsuit against the Freeman Companies event-planning company that claimed the company’s background checks discriminated against blacks, Hispanics and men.

“Once again, the liberal legal theory of ‘disparate impact’ is trotted out. This time, it is by the bean-counters at EEOC. They are now arguing that if an employer conducts background checks on employees they are, in effect, discriminating against black and Latino applicants. But shouldn’t employers have the right to set standards for those they seek to employ and reject those who have criminal records?” said Project 21 member Joe Hicks, host of “The Hicks File” at PJTV.com “Americans strongly believe in the concept of redemption, but there must be consequences for illegal behavior. To claim otherwise suggests that employers should ignore employment standards and simply hire people based on some ideological concept of ‘social justice.’ The notion that criminal background checks disadvantage blacks and Latinos is based in the reality that blacks are 38 percent of the prison population but only 12 percent of the general population. This shouldn’t be used as an argument for eliminating employment standards, but a reason to understand and combat the dysfunction and violent criminality that’s an all-too-real part of poor black urban life.”

Project 21, a nonprofit and nonpartisan organization sponsored by the National Center for Public Policy Research, has been a leading voice of the African-American community since 1992.

The Great African Scandal

This very informative documentary is by Robert Beckford on his fact finding visit to Ghana and the “new” colonization of Africa.

“What has been shall be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun.”

Bottom Line about the Economy

Now the latest hype about the global economic situation involves the debate about what has caused it rather than what is actually taking place. Working class people must exercise some critical thinking, because this ruse intends to keep them in the dark. Since black folks are linked into the global economy just like anybody else, we need to get our heads out of the soaps and churches and anywhere else that does not help us gain clarity and substance on this issue.

The economists are inventing red herrings like the “global savings glut”. This is nonsense. Who believes that money can be earned thru saving? In terms of working class folks, it makes little sense to save, since inflation eats up savings. The annual 3% inflation rate results in only a 1% yearly savings on your money, if banked. Outside of the industrialized countries, there is no return because inflation is much steeper. If you are a middle class person trying to save, your higher education is not paying off.

Not only that, but the Savings & Loans crisis of the Eighties and Nineties definitely scared the US public away from savings and stampeded them towards more sophisticated types of swindles, such as retirement plans based upon 401k and KEOGHs. Just because an activity is approved by Congress, and filled with volumes of small type that only a lawyer can understand, does not make it honest. No black worker has any business playing the stock market without knowing the dollar value of one point on the DJIA or having $250k to throw away in a money-manager fund. ‘Investment’ means only fools leverage all their assets on a gamble.

So if the economists were discussing stock-based retirement funds as a form of savings, consider that misinformation. The New York Review of Books and PEN World Voices presented a symposium on the world economic crisis at the Metropolitan Museum of Art on April 30. At that time, the idea was proposed that savings had driven down interests rates when, in fact, the Fed and the European Common Bank (ECB) themselves dictate interest rates. Not only that, North America and Europe in no way represent the globe.

It is important to repudiate any notion which dismisses the theory that the ruling class manipulated the financial system for their own benefit. The theory proposed by the symposium flies in the face of every scandal from Enron to Bernie Madoff. It contradicts the events which demanded welfare (bail outs?) for the banks.

Folks must not be duped by the highly esteemed panelists at that event, former senator Bill Bradley, Niall Ferguson, Paul Krugman, Nouriel Roubini, George Soros, and Robin Wells, and Jeff Madrick as moderator. Not one of them has an analysis which serves the interests of the millions of people who form the basis of the US domestic economy; not one of them even speaks the language of every day people.

When the banks pressed the Fed to raise interest rates, this became the primary trigger for the financial meltdown. While most folks think of the banks as finance institutions, the bank is a tool for making money. It is an instrument for concentrating money. Concentrated money becomes capital. Working class people lack capital. They sell their labor for a wage. Capitalists do not earn wages. They make money not thru labor or savings but by skimming value from what labor produces.

If ten laborers in a gold mine work together to extract one ton of gold daily which has a value of $900 per ounce, not one of them makes $900 per day, or even half of that. Even if their combined labor only extracts ten pounds of gold a day, who gets the money? The workers do not earn enuf to save. The value of the gold gets concentrated at the top of the chain, by people who trade paper with a value printed upon it, in exchange for the real value that has been extracted from the mine. This practice prevails thru out the bloodsucking capitalist system, where a few people live exorbitantly upon the backs of five billion working people worldwide.

This paper money has a value assigned to it. This value can be manipulated easier than anything else. After all, the paper has no real value! Today, one dollar may be as strong as yesterday’s ten dollar bill; tomorrow, that same one dollar note may be devalued so that it is only worth five cents. Entire societies remain at risk as a worker in this type of system.

So the monies the panelists claimed were tied up in savings actually were being poured into a volatile market, the stock market, another place ruled by paper tigers. Over the last thirty years, real wages failed to keep pace with inflation and the cost of living. Working people lacked the ability to save. However, amid the fears that Social Security would dry up before they could retire, they put a few hard earned extra dollars into stock-based retirement funds. Human relations managers and other company officials pulled their workers off assembly lines to sell them pyramid and ponzi schemes called a KEOGH or IRA or 401k Plan. These talks sounded something like the average MLM hustle, where the guy at the top of the chain makes all the money and the suckers who bought into it are left holding the bag. That is precisely what happened in instances such as MCI-Worldcom, Tyco, Enron, and others all the way thru the  Madoff scandal. These were all multi-billion dollar scams.

Now, this symposium happened in April. Do not forget, several weeks earlier, pretty much the same crew had called for the goverrnment to nationalize the banks. Their analysis continues shifting, while the causes for this period of voodoo economics involve financial manipulation, pure and simple. Prior to the curveball idea about interest rates being dictated by savings, the pundits said that the financial crunch happened because people were living on debt, another shattered theory.

People were indeed living on debt, yet that is not the reason for the crisis. People were forced to live on debt because wages did not keep pace with rising costs. Remember the old adage: “When creditors enforce collections, that results in market corrections.” So for folks living in debt, their very existence has become manipulated by those who control wages and prices. Stay tuned to the media, because within the next few weeks they will cook up a new rationale for the problems they continue heaping on the backs of poor and working people.

Immigration 111: Racists, Xenophobes and Bigots

A commenter on a previous post submitted this video which discusses the impact of illegal immigration on African Americans, as well as other issues relating to the subject of illegal immigration.

I found it thought-provoking and rather enlightening on certain aspects of the issue at large. It also challenges the racialization of illegal immigration and the misuse of the civil rights model by the pro-amnesty movement, the academic and political elitism that underscores the issue, and the control of discussion and debate by the labeling and name-calling of opponents.  

The video is approximately 1 1/2 hours long, but it is well worth the viewing. Overall I thought it provided excellent commentary on the issue, however there were some arguments I didn’t agree with and some viewpoints that made me… well in a word… “uncomfortable”.

White Supremacy, Imperialism and Fascism in America

Breaking down the concentrated class struggle

Right now US society needs a clear understanding of the difference between socialism and fascism because a war is being waged against working class people. Americans fail to understand the class basis of the State. They also have a difficulty in making comparative analyses between the US brand of bourgeois democracy and other types. Imperialism and fascism are not such very different systems. US society presently faces a neo-fascist “dictatorship”.

First of all, socialism is a revolutionary social system. It is born out of revolt, uprisings and insurrection. It is a bottom up society and a system created to wither away; that is, socialism is not a society which has a long-term future. It will be transformed into a society where revolutions, uprisings and insurrections are unnecessary.

Socialism, like the society which must succeed it, will transform the means of distribution so that all the resources of society will be available to its members. The State must operate as the primary instrument for socialized distribution of resources — to contrast with capitalist privatization of collectively produced wealth — but not as the sole force for this activity.

Socialist democracy means working class democracy. This is the logic of democratic struggle. Once the laboring masses eradicate the degenerate notion of racist supremacy, the democratic political process must take on a more principled character. America thrives on the practice of racist supremacy, pure and simple.

Never has this been more apparent than the racist resurgence rising to challenge President Obama’s tenure in office. From Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio voicing his admiration for the Ku Klux Klan to the police summarily executing Oscar Grant on a BART station platform, these examples of racist reaction raising its hydra head have to meet forceful, unbreaking resistance from our community.

Racism shapes the culture of the colonizer society, and deforms the culture of the oppressed. It is, in reality, an expression of class warfare. As such, racism designates one nationality as a master race and the others as servants or slave races, a so-called underclass. These ideas, inculcated thru out colonialism, set the standards for interactions between workers of different nationalities. Workers from the white society think of themselves as superior to blacks, Latinos, American Indians, and Asians. Even government census forms convey a false sense of race purity.

The government bail out of the bloodsucking banks, tho, will deepen the merger of international finance capitalism with the State, which is the very definition of fascism. Capitalism is comprised of concentration of wealth into as few hands as possible. Imperialism constitutes capitalism’s merger of finance with the corporations to create an international finance system. So because of what is taking place today, with the State giving massive amounts of money to the Wall Street bankers, this is the end-game in the Milton Friedman economic model first advocated by Ronald Reagan, also known as voodoo economics.

Barack Obama seems to deepen this trend of reducing US white workers to colonized status, while the neo-cons continue to inflame racist sentiments. This struggle reflects the historical lag between bourgeois ideology and working class self-realization or, on the opposite hand, white workers reaction. Until that gap gets closed, the colonized masses must remain in a defensive posture against their white working class comrades on the other side of the skirmish line.

A Soldier’s Story

Back in the day, in my former life I was a working actor. Looking back at my life to that time so long ago, it does seem like it was a former life. I am certainly a much different person than back then.

Anywayzzz… when I was making my living as an actor in Toronto Canada, the experience was fulfilling in many ways, but it was mainly very frustrating. When it came to film and television roles, they were primarily U.S. based productions, so all the main characters were already cast with American actors. My first few years were working as an “extra” … basically in non-descript roles making up the background scenery. It was grueling work and somewhat demeaning. I remember many times when as an “extra”, I had to wait off to the side during meal breaks until the lead characters and the crew had eaten, before we were allowed to get our lunch and/or dinner (i.e. leftovers) from the meal table. After some time I was able to get an agent and I got cast in “better” roles in these productions. As a Black actor, I was primarily offered the role of “Black thug on the right”, or “Black thug on the left” … or if I was really fortunate, I got cast as “Black thug in the middle” , who got arrested by the lead “white” cop character and got to say a variation of the line: “hey man… I didn’t do nuttin!” After a number of these roles, my sense of self-respect couldn’t handle it, so I told my agent I wasn’t going to do them anymore and to try to get me auditions for roles that were not “race” specific. I think I went on 2 auditions after that before the agent dropped me.

When it came to theatre productions, things were a little better. There was certainly more “artistic-license” taken by producers and directors when it came to “non-traditional” casting. I played a variety of roles in numerous productions. I was given the opportunity to play “Benvolio” in a summer stock production of Romeo and Juliet. It was a fantastic experience and it led to an audition for the artistic director of the Stratford Festival. This festival is the premiere Shakespearean festival in Canada and it is world renown. I had known a couple of my peers… and I literally mean two Black actors, who had been cast in minor roles at the festival. However they were cast as background figures, non-speaking roles… “spear carrier on the right” or “servant on the left”. As a part of the festival’s training program, both were given the opportunity to “understudy” minor roles. From conversations with these friends about their experiences, it was obvious (to me at least) that the festival only hired Black actors (and other “actors of colour”) in an effort to appear to be inclusive, so as to ward off any criticism that they were racist or discriminatory in their casting.

So I decided that instead of doing a “standard” audition where I would recite a monologue and then stroke the artistic director’s ego and claim how it had always been my lifelong dream to work with him and be a part of the festival, no matter how small the role, and that I would be forever grateful and in his debt for the opportunity… I decided to put him on the spot and ask him why I should want to work at the festival? What was the advantage for me? What role(s) did he have in mind for me? I informed him it wouldn’t be worth it to me, to go there and play insignificant background roles. Needless to say, he wasn’t impressed. He gave me an exasperated lecture on the importance of respecting the auditioning process and “paying my dues” . He then ended the audition. Not surprisingly, I didn’t get an invite to work at Stratford… but strangely I felt a certain amount of pride for my stance.

I then made the decision to do low budget independent films and theatrical production dealing with social issues, primarily those relating to the Black and African community. I also worked with a collective of Black artists doing our own productions. However it became increasingly difficult to work on a continuous basis as there wasn’t much community support and the government funding for what was termed “non-traditional productions”, went primarily to “white” film production and theatre companies that had submitted proposals to do “ethnic-based” productions. I worked for a couple of these companies and found that they were very eurocentric in their perspectives on social issues, as well as blatantly condescending and patronizing in their ethnic-based” productions. Although I worked for approximately another year or so in the arts before I decided to do something else, my most rewarding efforts during this period were the productions I did with other “artists of colour”. I didn’t feel like I was a slave to the whims and self-promoting generosity of “white” producers and directors.