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Your Black Life: How To Eliminate Poverty (Part 2) — Shannon Joyce Prince
Poverty: Policies and Possibilities (Part 2 — Read: Part 1)
By: Shannon Joyce Prince
Contributing Writer – YourBlackWorld.com
Imagine a program that built a childcare center which gave teens construction work experience, used Department of Agriculture funds to pay poor women to cook for poor children, taught poor women to become day care teachers and run day cares, and helped poor women get their GED’s. Imagine this program also provided mortgage counseling and founded a health center that provided forty local women with jobs. Now imagine the program was run almost entirely by black welfare mothers. Such a program did once exist. It was called Operation Life. It was at its peak during the 70′s and 80′s and is detailed in the book Storming Caesar’s Palace by Annelise Orleck.
Operation Life was based on the principle that the poor themselves are the experts on poverty and many current successful programs make that adage their foundation. [...]
Another factor in reducing poverty is looking for creative solutions that solve multiple problems. [...]
For example, many poor neighborhoods have constructed community gardens in vacant lots. In Philadelphia, crime on some blocks dropped 90% after the creation of community gardens [...]
More At Your Black Life
Your Black Politics: How To Eliminate Poverty — Shannon Joyce Prince
Poverty: Policies and Possibilities
By: Shannon Joyce Prince
Reprinted From Black Agenda Report
“Poor people can use themselves as weapons against poverty.”
With the recession imperiling the nation’s well-being, poverty is on everyone’s mind regardless of their political orientation. Yet too often the poor are cast as ignorant and impotent pawns needing either a kick in the pants or a magical cocktail of resources and programs. The dialogue typically stalls around what “we” must do for or to “them” as though the poor lack ingenuity and agency.
In this commentary I identify four ideas that can be used to battle poverty: ending marriage penalties, deregulating selected industries, creating tax-funded social programs run by the poor, and creating community gardens. [...]
The problem often isn’t that the poor aren’t pulling themselves up by their bootstraps, but rather when they do so they are told they don’t have the appropriate credentials. [...] For example, many poor black women braid hair as a way of making money. However, as the National Center for Public Policy Research points out, many states have threatened these women with arrest because they don’t have cosmetology licenses; licenses that often demand taking courses that cost around $10,000, and frequently don’t even cover hair braiding in their curriculum [...]
More At Your Black Politics
Your Black Life: HBCUs Face Extinction
Black Colleges Face Whiteout
A Black Agenda Radio commentary by Glen Ford
As the great unraveling of finance capitalism unfolds, lots of issues that were prime concerns in Black politics not long ago, are getting buried in the economic debris. [...] It is in times of general crisis that the enemies of identifiably African American institutions find new opportunities for mischief. Such is the case in Georgia, where efforts are afoot to dismantle at least two Black colleges: Savannah and Albany state universities.
Members of the Republican-controlled state legislature are using the economic crisis as a rationale to merge majority Black Savannah State with mostly white Armstrong Atlantic State University. Historically Black Albany State University would be forced to combine with majority white Darton College. Adding insult to injury, Darton College is only a two-year institution, a community college, while Albany State is a full university.
Modern-day racists have learned to cloak their anti-Black ideas in progressive-sounding language [...]
Listen To Commentary At Your Black Life
Your Black Politics: Will Obama Hold Henry Paulson Accountable?
Lawless Capital, Rushing to Armageddon
A Black Agenda Radio commentary
By: Glen Ford
The fundamental law of capital – the system’s need to extract by any means possible ever increasing returns on investment, or die – brought the world to the current catastrophe. Inevitably, despite all the noise about the need for transparency and tightening of regulations on the behavior of capital, the system’s response to its crisis is to descend into even greater depths of lawlessness.
The frenzy of unchecked illegality pulsates outward from the chaotic center of crisis and criminality: Wall Street, which has succeeded in establishing a kind of privatized martial law economic regime in the waning months of the Bush kleptocracy. The $700 billion “bailout” is revealed as a brazen bait-and-switch bamboozlement, in which Goldman Sachs Family Don Hank Paulson, under color-of-law as Treasury Secretary, ignores the terms of congressional legislation to dispense mountains of public wealth to his bankster friends as he sees fit. In return for their cut of the loot, the banking mafia give the public – nothing! No recycling of the billions into loans to small business or college-bound students or any of the intended beneficiaries. [...]
If there is one person who possesses the moral capital to demand an accounting from the conspirators, it is Barack Obama [...]
Listen & Read More At: Your Black Politics
Your Black Politics: The Obama ’08 Phenomenon — Lessons Learned
The Obama ’08 Phenomenon: What Have We Learned?
By: BAR executive editor Glen Ford
“This generation will have to learn from damn near scratch what a real social movement looks like.”
Without question, the nation has experienced an election of historical significance, for reasons that go beyond the obvious “first Black” aspect of race. This has also been the most-hyped presidential campaign in U.S. history, if for no other reason than the simple fact that every presidential campaign is more hyped than the last, since hype is what corporate media sells. But what has the experience taught us?
We have learned that a large and decisive national minority of whites can be persuaded to vote for a certain kind of Black man for president if that Black man possesses the following characteristics:
Find Out At Your Black Politics
Your Black News: White Liberal Racists Enticed By Obama — Glen Ford
Pandering to Racists
A Black Agenda Radio commentary by Glen Ford
With unseemly haste, the corporate media consensus seems to have rushed to the conclusion that the so-called “Bradley Effect” is a myth; that white covert racism will not be a significant factor on November 4, and that the polls are accurately reflecting a looming landslide for Barack Obama.
[...]
Those who attempt to discredit the Bradley Effect are, in reality, seeking to declare racism in America a non-issue, unworthy of further attention. They have seized on Barack Obama’s campaign as proof that Black agitation is outdated and even harmful to the national interest.
Obama has encouraged whites to believe that, once he is in the White House, Black complaints about racism in public life can be deemed irrelevant; that the long debate over white skin privilege and entrenched institutional racism will be over. The most shameless proponent of this baseless notion is Frank Rich, a supposedly liberal columnist for the New York Times [...]
Read & Listen To The Full Commentary: Your Black News
Your Black Life: Black Female Critic Of Tim Wise Speaks Out
Word to the Wise (Tim Wise, that is)
By: Shannon Joyce Prince
In writing to condemn an attitude held by a white anti-racist activist I respect, I must begin with the words of William Lloyd Garrison, another white activist who is his intellectual antecedent. Garrison said, “Little boldness is needed to assail the opinions and practices of notoriously wicked men; but to rebuke great and good men for their conduct, and to impeach their discernment, is the highest effort of moral courage.” Tim Wise is clearly a great and good man and one of the nation’s foremost anti-racist activists, yet his recent blog post “This is how fascism comes: reflections on the cost of silence” reveals not only a powerful lack of discernment but also an intolerably ugly hatefulness.
[...]
To cruelly mock those whose way of life is different from your own and to ascribe to such people all the failings of American society is hateful and unacceptable – particularly from someone who considers himself liberal and progressive [...]
Full Article At Your Black Life
To Read Tim Wise’s (Quite Crass) Response: Click Here
Your Black Politics: White Liberals Mad At Obama For Being Obama
By: Tolu Olorunda
Reprinted From Dissident Voice
In the wake of President-Elect Obama’s recent cabinet-appointments, many white liberals have taken it upon themselves to release pent-up aggression at a man they thought was the “progressive” candidate he had earlier claimed to be.. As they saw it, Obama had “betrayed” the loyalty that earned him victory. As a sort of catharsis, railing Obama’s reputation over the coals of indignation could make them feel better about their decision to elect a man who promised virtually nothing (of substance) in his bid for the presidency. White liberals, especially, have had to learn so much, in the last 1 month, about the man whose political dirty-laundry was never hidden from the public to begin with.
In a highly predictable move, they have sought to bash everything Obama, or Obama-like, and couch their frustration in the ‘eloquence,’ and ‘con-artistry’ of Obama. Spare me the misplaced aggravation. [...]
Whilst Black progressives sought to rip the mask off of Barack Obama, in an attempt to unveil his true identity, we were deemed ‘Obama-haters,’ whose egos sought to stifle the chances of a Black man making history. [...]
Full Article At Your Black Politics