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Books by Wilson
Jeremiah Moses
Golden Age of Black Nationalism,
1850-1925 (1988) /
The Wings of Ethiopia
(1990)
Alexander
Crummell: A Study of Civilization and Discontent
(1992) /
Destiny & Race: Selected Writings, 1840-1898
(1992)
Black
Messiahs and Uncle Toms: Social and Literary
Manipulations of a Religious Myth (1993)
Liberian Dreams: Back-to-Africa
Narratives from the 1850s
/
Afrotopia: The Roots of African American
Popular History
(2002)
Creative Conflict in African American Thought (2004)
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*
Joe the Plumber and Adam Smith
By Wilson J. Moses
18 October 2008
This election
is a continuation of the culture wars, and it is
likely that cultural symbols may trump economic
interests. On the cultural level, this plays out
the Vietnam war all over again. That is one reason
that Ayers has emerged as an icon. Previously the
election of 2004 was about Vietnam, with John Kerry
serving as an icon. McCain, also an icon, sees the
Presidency as his opportunity to vindicate not only
the Iraq war, but Vietnam, as well.
On the economic level, Republicans, see the election
as a way of further destroying the
Keynesian
economic policies that predominated from Roosevelt
through Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson.
People like
Joe the Plumber
foolishly believe that
if they were not taxed, they could take their money
and use it to invest on their own. It is obvious to
everyone but themselves that they lack the capacity
to do so. Indeed, most of us lack the capacity to
do so, and it is this knowledge that distinguishes a
working-class liberal from a working class
conservative. The Sarah Palins lack all humility,
and really do believe that they are as smart as
Warren Buffett. They forget that a guy like McCain
begins life with tremendous advantages, and proceeds
thereafter, with access to information and
institutions that they are unavailable to most of
the working class. Far too many workers foolishly
believe that they can succeed outside institutional
structures supported by government and taxation.
Adam
Smith, who is so frequently mischaracterized by
Marxist historians, said in 1776:
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It sometimes happens,
indeed, that a single independent
workman has stock sufficient both to
purchase the materials of his work, and
to maintain himself till it be
completed. He is both master and
workman, and enjoys the whole produce of
his own labour, or the whole value which
it adds to the materials upon which it
is bestowed. It includes what are
usually two distinct revenues, belonging
to two distinct persons, the profits of
stock, and the wages of labour. Such cases, however, are not very
frequent; and in every part of Europe
twenty workmen serve under a master for
one that is independent, and the wages
of labour are everywhere understood to
be, what they usually are, when the
labourer is one person, and the owner of
the stock which employs him another. What are the common wages of labour,
depends everywhere upon the contract
usually made between those two parties,
whose interests are by no means the
same. The workmen desire to get as much,
the masters to give as little, as
possible. The former are disposed to
combine in order to raise, the latter in
order to lower, the wages of labour. |
Joe the Plumber
does not see the need to have a plumber's license,
or a union card, or to pay his taxes. He earns
$40,000 annually, and yet he identifies with people
earning $250,000. This ordinary wage earner does
not, and cannot understand what Adam Smith is
talking about. His vision is too occluded by his
abstract fears, his unrealizable American Dream, and
his subliminal recognition of his inferiority to
hereditary aristocrats like John McCain, who are
stronger and smarter than himself. He is unaware of
his interests and incapable of acting in accord with
them.
Adam
Smith
is often misrepresented as
standing in opposition to
Karl Marx. In fact Marx
stood on the sturdy shoulders of Smith.
* * * *
*
Joe The Plumber's Ideal
Mortgage
The goal of
Secretary Paulson's program, regardless of how he
gives away the money, is to maintain an unnatural
price level in American housing. This leads to
continuation of inflation in the housing market, and
leaves Americans worse off than before. Paulson's
plan if carried out successfully can only mean
increased inflation, and Inflation is a tax.
Joe the Plumber, who earns $40,000 a year, cannot afford to
own a $350,000 house with three baths and a three
car garage, nor can he afford to purchase his
employer's business. But the government persists in
telling him that he can do so. In order for Joe to
"own," such a house, it is necessary to manufacture
a dream world. This involves a no-money-down,
interest only, adjustable-rate mortgage at a teaser
rate of 4%, which is ridiculous. Such mortgage
rates inflate the price of real estate. Nobody
should be able to get a mortgage unless they have
20% down payment. Interest on a 30 year mortgage
should be 8%. Joe the plumber can perhaps afford
such a mortgage on a home priced at $150,000 if his
wife works and earns enough to bring their household
income to $85,000. Anything else is folly.
* * * *
*
Responses
Guided by An
Invisible Hand—Make no mistake: we are
witnessing the biggest crisis since the Great
Depression. . . . There are several reasons for my
pessimism. The extreme credit crunch is a result of
the banks having lost a lot of capital. And there is
still uncertainty about the value of the toxic
mortgages and other complex products on their
balance sheets. The US economy has been fuelled by a
consumption binge. With average savings at zero,
many people borrowed to live beyond their means.
When you cut off that credit you reduce consumption.
This, in turn, will dampen the US economy, which
helps keep the global economy growing. The American
consumer has not only sustained the US economy, he
has sustained the global economy. The richest
country in the world has been living beyond its
means and telling the rest of the world it should be
thankful because America fuelled global economic
growth. . . .
This crisis is
a turning point, not only in the economy, but in our
thinking about economics.
Adam Smith, the father of
modern economists, argued that the pursuit of
self-interest (profit-making by competitive firms)
would lead, as if by an invisible hand, to general
well-being. But for over a quarter of a century, we
have known that Smith's conclusions do not hold when
there is imperfect information— and all markets,
especially financial markets, are characterised by
information imperfections. The reason the invisible
hand often seems invisible is that it is not there.
The pursuit of self-interest by Enron and WorldCom
did not lead to societal well-being; and the pursuit
of self-interest by those in the financial industry
has brought our economy to the brink of the abyss.
New Statesman
* * * *
*
Will an Obama Change Speed Up a
New and Better Economic Model?
Joe the Plumber
is indeed an American type—white working class male
Republicans. They are morphed descendants of those
Jim Crow racists of 1968. It wouldn't matter what
Obama was able to do for them, even if Obama offered
them zero taxes on his wages these Republican
loyalists (guys and dolls) would still be against
Obama and the likes of Obama—that “foreign” element
in “White American” politics.
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He and his
compatriots are ideologues and hypocrites—e.g.,
against Social Security; though they will happily
draw their SS when 65 and complain that it is not
sufficient. Race plays no small part in their
political psychology. Because they are not able to
afford that $350,000 house or afford that plumbing
business, Joe and his type fault minorities,
immigrants, and foreigners in general for not being
fully part of the white elite, just as the patty
rollers and the mountain folk blamed black slaves
rather than slave owners for their class conditions.
They are a sad
and unhappy lot—anti-liberal, anti-democratic,
anti-black, anti-rational, and anti-their-own-good.
At bottom this type wants to retain and enhance
white skin privileges. They are the base of these
white-appealing-American ideologues, including MSNBC
commentator Pat Buchanan. They are seen as more
American than say a Jeremiah Wright.
|
 |
The Republican
Party has become today's Dixiecrats (North, South,
Midwest, and Southwest) and they are using this
election as a testing ground to put forth more
vigorous ideological statements and actions. A
reorganization of the RP after November is a
national necessity. Will they decide however to
fixate on a far right religious (cultural) agenda?
In that they, including the more moderate
Republicans, have made Sarah Palin their heroine,
the prospects seems unlikely. The RP has become
unmanageable. They lack the necessary leadership.
Much of the
necessary changes in the RP, may they rest in peace,
depends on the more intellectual and as David Brooks says
the “coastal” Republicans. That too will
depend on how crushing the DP win will be in
November. The Republicans fear the outcome of the
2008 election will be a landslide. They fear it like
the plague and so rather than creating a better product they
are now bringing out every kind of racial fear
tactic used since 1980.
 |
The other
problem connected with their right wing cultural
offensive is that the Wall Street culture has not
changed. McCain and the Wall Street Republicans are
indeed “elitists.” Their trickle down economy
theory—decreasing corporate taxes and taxes on the
very wealthy—is an elitist one, that is, top down
from
the few to the pyramidal base.
The great problem
with this pyramid scheme, as all pyramid schemes, is
that the trickling does not get down far enough on
the pyramid, say, to a Joe the Plumber, which has
partially been caused by the global trade agreements
and overproduction. That has decreased income
nationally and shifted wealth more and more upward.
Doubtless the
Republicans have had a persuasive opaque populous
racist response to convince their very white
religious base that all is well with fundamentalist
capitalism . . . . Too
many living beyond their means resist the
spread of wealth farther downward to the
base. They foolish think they each have a
chance of becoming a millionaire. We can see
that the present economic crisis has cracked
that opaqueness and allowed some light and
fresh air to come in. |
Class
suppression and penal methods to resolve the
criminality of poverty are not working for the overall
economy. Will the present window of opportunity and
vision be cemented and the American people return to
the old cave they have been in for more than two
decades?
The verdict is
still out. We have no idea what will be the full
material impact of this economic crisis and we have
no idea how long it will last. Moreover, we are
still in the dark about what can be achieved by an
Obama presidency. We all remain on the edges of our
seats and we want the change promised to be speeded
up—Rudy
* * * *
*
What went wrong in the capitalist casino?—Trade
union rights are now more restricted than they were in
1906, wages have been held down and people have been
advised to borrow and spend as an alternative—which
explains why the stock market has fallen and locked more
and more people into debt, which is a subtle form of
slavery itself.
This is why so many
people are frightened and frightened people can
sometimes be persuaded to seek an answer by identifying
an enemy who can be made a scapegoat for failure - as
Hitler did when he blamed the Jews, the Communists and
the trade unions for the mass unemployment in Germany
and set up a fascist dictatorship which led to the
Holocaust and war.
Hitler dealt with
the unemployed by giving them jobs in the arms factories
and the armed forces which led to the Second World War
and the massive human cost it caused.
ZMAG
* * * *
*
The Real Plumbers of Ohio—But
what’s really happening to the plumbers of Ohio, and to
working Americans in general?
First of all, they aren’t making a
lot of money. You may recall that in one of the early
Democratic debates Charles Gibson of ABC suggested that
$200,000 a year was a middle-class income. Tell that to
Ohio plumbers: according to the May 2007 occupational
earnings report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the
average annual income of “plumbers, pipefitters and
steamfitters” in Ohio was $47,930.
Second, their real incomes have
stagnated or fallen, even in supposedly good years. The
Bush administration assured us that the economy was
booming in 2007 — but the average Ohio plumber’s income
in that 2007 report was only 15.5 percent higher than in
the 2000 report, not enough to keep up with the 17.7
percent rise in consumer prices in the Midwest. As Ohio
plumbers went, so went the nation: median household
income, adjusted for inflation, was lower in 2007 than
it had been in 2000.
Third, Ohio plumbers have been
having growing trouble getting health insurance,
especially if, like many craftsmen, they work for small
firms. According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, in
2007 only 45 percent of companies with fewer than 10
employees offered health benefits, down from 57 percent
in 2000. . . . I don’t want to suggest that everyone
would be better off under the Obama tax plan. Joe the
plumber would almost certainly be better off, but Richie
the hedge fund manager would take a serious hit.
But that’s the point. Whatever
today’s G.O.P. is, it isn’t the party of working
Americans.
NYTimes
* *
* * *
Speak My Name
Black Men on Masculinity and the
American Dream
Edited by Don
Belton
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It is rare in
America for African-American men to have the
opportunity to express who they are, what they
think, or how they feel. As the nemesis in the
American psyche, they have been silenced by an image
that is at once celebrated and maligned. In this
first anthology of contemporary African-American
men's writing, black men share their experiences as
the revered and reviled of America. Through the
voices of some of today's most prominent
African-American writers, including August Wilson,
John Edgar Wideman,
Derrick Bell, and
Walter Mosley,
Speak My Name explores the intimate
territory behind the myths about black masculinity.
These intensely personal essays and stories reveal
contemporary black men from the vantage point of
their own lives - as men with proper names,
distinctive faces, and strong family ties.
Writing about everything from "How it Feels to Be a
Problem" to relationships between fathers and sons,
these men reveal to us both great courage and in an
amazing love for each other and themselves. In a
stunning tribute to a centuries-old brotherhood of
heroes, black men come together to challenge America
finally to see them as individuals, to hear their
long-silenced voices—to speak their names. This
diverse anthology, mainly of original essays, serves
as an excellent counterpoint to media stereotypes of
black men. Topics include black male images,
relations with women, family life and heroism.
|
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Some favorites: soft-voiced scholar
Robin D.G. Kelley recounts how his newly shaved head scared
people; novelist
Randall Kenan recalls a mysterious, kind and loving mentor;
Quinn Eli faces the tendency of black men to accuse black women
of not being supportive; filmmaker
Isaac Julien and poet
Essex Hemphill debate whether black unity can include gay
men; novelist
Walter Mosley muses about why his PI protagonist, Easy
Rawlins, needs the backup of the remorseless killer Mouse to
survive in an oppressive world. Belton, a former reporter for
Newsweek who teaches at Macalester College, contributes his own
touching effort, which treats the gap between himself and the
ghetto-trapped nephew he loves.—Publishers
Weekly
* *
* * *
Black masculinity has built
and shaped America. It is an old story which our fathers taught
us; it is measured by their quiet dignity as well as their
fears. What is heroic about
Speak My Name
is the fact that the contributors are men who decided to become
writers. They all made the decision to use words instead of
fists. They are writers shaped by the 1960s, like Arthur
Flowers, who writes:
|
And, understand, the 60s were more than street
battles or sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll, the 60s
were about commitment. We cared. We tried. It was
important (and do-able) for us to make a better
world. It was important to save the race. And it
still is. |
While our society still
attempts to come to grips with the lyrics of tappers, Don
Belton's book is a gift which offers insight into how a few
Black men think and feel. For sisters who are still waiting to
exhale, it serves as testimony that there are good men in the
world and we only have to speak their names.
Belton's purpose for
editing the volume was to "experience a richer sense of
community and communion among other Black male writers." This is
evident in the interview conducted by Lewis Edwards of
Albert Murray. Here, a young writer sits at the feet of an
elder with an acknowledgment of inheritance and a respect for
tradition. When Murray (author of
The Omni-Americans and
Train Whistle Guitar) talks about his friendship with
Ralph Ellison during their days at Tuskegee, he conveys to
Edwards how two Black men enjoyed reading and developing their
intellect.
Speak My Name
, according to Belton, is structured in "jazz music's
compositional model of theme and variation, giving my
contributors a series of extended solos that develop toward
visions of masculinity as a struggle for hope." Belton divides
his book into five sections, although these categories are
unnecessary. One can enjoy the entire volume the way one
appreciates the old Ornette Coleman "Free Jazz" album; just open
the door to the studio and let the brothers play. The music will
find its own center.— Black
Issues in Higher Education, March 7, 1996 by E. Ethelbert
Miller—FindArticles
* *
* * *
 |
Race Men
By Hazel V.
Carby
Race men is a
term of endearment used by blacks to signify those
high-achieving African American men who "represent
the race," disproving bigoted notions of black
inferiority. In this engaging study, Yale African
American Studies Professor Hazel V. Carby seeks to
ask "questions about various black masculinities at
different historical moments and in different media:
literature, photography, film, music, and song." She
does so by discussing the lives and works of myriad
types of race men. Frederick Douglass's
uncompromising fight against slavery, W. E. B. Du
Bois's masterful
The Souls of Black Folk,
Martin Luther King's nonviolent struggles, and
Malcolm X's fiery rhetoric articulate the
intellectual-political prisms of black activism, for
example, while actor
Danny Glover represents the dilemma of the
black/white sidekick and the fight for a more
multidimensional Afro-American image. |
* *
* * *
Carby compares
Toussaint L'Ouverture, the ex-slave who liberated Haiti from
the French in the 19th century, to Trinidadian writer
C.L.R. James, whose Marxist interpretation of the Haitian
Revolution, the
Black Jacobins, unveiled the complexities of
colonialism, class, and the sexist aspects of radical black
leadership. She discusses jazz icon
Miles Davis's quest for freedom and his misogynistic persona
articulated in his autobiography, then praises science fiction
writer Samuel R. Delany's
Motion of Light in Water as "an effective counterpoint
to Miles ... a magnificent attempt to reject the socially
created obstacles separating desire from its material
achievement, and in the process demolishing and transcending the
limitations of heterosexual norms."
Indeed, for Carby the major flaw of race
men is that their upholding of "the race" does not prominently
address the concerns of African American women as well.—Eugene
Holley Jr.
* *
* * *
In a discussion of "The
Body and Soul of Modernism" Carby reads Nicolas Murray's nude
photographs of Paul Robeson, as well as black male nudes by
other European and American artists, and argues that for these
modernists the black male body represented "essentialized
masculinity." However, because the black subject was unable to
"gaze back at the viewer," these photographic texts reproduced
"the unequal relation of power and subjection of their
historical moment" in the early twentieth century. Carby also
discusses Robeson's roles in Eugene O'Neill's
Emperor Jones and
All God's Chillun Got Wings, concluding that, in
contrast to the character Robeson portrays in
Oscar Micheaux's film
Body and
Soul, O'Neill utilized a "strategy of inwardness" to
present racialized emotional conflicts for Robeson's character,
rather than outward resistance and rebellion. Carby's notes
that, with his expanding political consciousness and increased
commitment to the advancement of the working classes worldwide
in the 1930s, Robeson rejected these types of roles.
Unfortunately, how these ideological changes were reflected in
Robeson's racial consciousness (was Robeson a "race man"?) are
left unexplored.
Carby describes the
authentic and inauthentic nature of the relationship between
ex-convict and folk singer
Huddie (Leadbelly) Ledbetter and folklorist
John Lomax and his son
Alan. She believes that this unusual partnership
demonstrated an attempt to use "the aesthetics of the folk" to
create a "fictive ethnicity of blackness" that allowed the
incorporation of potentially threatening black males into the
national community. For
C. L. R. James the
cricket field
in England's colonial territories not only was the space where
"ideologies of masculinity" were put to the test, but also was
"the battleground out of which nationhood . . . [had to] be
forged." Carby argues that in James's
Beyond the Boundary (1963) and the novel Minty Alley
(1936), "intellectual practice, racial politics, and cricket
were . . . unquestioningly imagined within a discourse of
autonomous, patriarchal masculinity." In
Black Jacobins(1938)
James posits the existence of a "revolutionary black manhood
that, both individually and collectively, gives birth to an
independent black nation state."— African
American Review, Fall, 2000 by V.P. Franklin,
FindArticles
* * *
* *
* *
* * *
 |
The Shadows of Youth
The Remarkable Journey of the Civil Rights Generation
By Andrew B. Lewis
With deep admiration and rigorous scholarship, historian Lewis (Gonna Sit at the Welcome Table) revisits the ragtag band of young men and women who formed the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. Impatient with what they considered the overly cautious and accommodating pace of the NAACP and Martin Luther King Jr., the black college students and their white allies, inspired by Gandhi's principles of nonviolence and moral integrity, risked their lives to challenge a deeply entrenched system. Fanning out over the Jim Crow South, SNCC organized sit-ins, voter registration drives, Freedom Schools and protest marches. Despite early successes, the movement disintegrated in the late 1960s, succeeded by the militant Black Power movement. The highly readable history follows the later careers of the principal leaders. Some, like Stokely Carmichael and H. Rap Brown, became bitter and disillusioned. Others, including Marion Barry, Julian Bond and John Lewis, tempered their idealism and moved from protest to politics, assuming positions of leadership within the very institutions they had challenged. According to the author, No organization contributed more to the civil rights movement than SNCC, and with his eloquent book, he offers a deserved tribute.— Publishers Weekly |
* *
* * *
|
Hopes and Prospects
By Noam Chomsky
In this urgent new book, Noam Chomsky
surveys the dangers and prospects of our
early twenty-first century. Exploring
challenges such as the growing gap
between North and South, American
exceptionalism (including under
President Barack Obama), the fiascos of
Iraq and Afghanistan, the U.S.-Israeli
assault on Gaza, and the recent
financial bailouts, he also sees hope
for the future and a way to move
forward—in the democratic wave in Latin
America and in the global solidarity
movements that suggest "real progress
toward freedom and justice." Hopes and
Prospects is essential reading for
anyone who is concerned about the
primary challenges still facing the
human race. "This is a classic Chomsky
work: a bonfire of myths and lies,
sophistries and delusions. Noam Chomsky
is an enduring inspiration all over the
world—to millions, I suspect—for the
simple reason that he is a truth-teller
on an epic scale. I salute him." —John
Pilger
In dissecting the rhetoric and logic of
American empire and class domination, at
home and abroad, Chomsky continues a
longstanding and crucial work of
elucidation and activism . . .the
writing remains unswervingly rational
and principled throughout, and lends
bracing impetus to the real alternatives
before us.—Publisher's
Weekly
|
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* * * * *
The White Masters
of the World
From
The World and Africa, 1965
By W. E. B. Du Bois
W. E. B. Du Bois’
Arraignment and Indictment of White Civilization
(Fletcher)
* * *
* *
Ancient African Nations
*
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Negro Digest / Black World
Browse all issues
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Enjoy!
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* *
The
Death of Emmett Till by Bob Dylan
/
The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll
/
Only a Pawn in Their Game
Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson Thanks America for Slavery /
George Jackson /
Hurricane Carter
* * * *
*
The Journal of Negro History issues at Project Gutenberg
The
Haitian Declaration of Independence 1804
/
January 1, 1804 -- The Founding
of Haiti
* * * * *
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posted 18 October 2008
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