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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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If this be Lynching . . . (As in Merrill-Lynch)
Mad Dog Moses Froths Again
The
United States is funding the war in Iraq with borrowed
money. And where is the United States borrowing the
money to finance its war in Iraq? From China, of
course. The dirty little secret about the war in Iraq
is that "Communist" China is footing the bill. The war
is funded by selling American debt and China is buying
that debt. Fed Chairman Bernanke maintains a
what-me-worry attitude and consoles us with the
assurance that China holds only 4% of American debt.
True, I suppose, but it is convenient for George Bush to
have China as his banker, while he seeks to build an
Alexandrine empire from the Bosporus to the Hindu Kush.
Did you know that a black man, Stan O'Neal was the CEO
of Merrill Lynch, and that he lost his job for
contributing to the subprime mortgage debacle, and
bringing about the biggest loss that Merrill has ever
experienced? I can already anticipate the cries of
African American outrage at this "Lynching," but is he
being lynched? Read on. First of all, nobody was
duped by Brother Stan, while he was pumping his Ponzi
scheme. Stan was really behaving no differently than
Alan Greenspan, or Ben Bernanke, or the House and Senate
banking committees. Everybody was pumping the same
bubble, including Bear Stearns, Merrill-Lynch, the
Federal Reserve Banks, the Treasury Department, and the
MIT and Harvard departments of economics. The Wall
Street Journal didn't see this coming; neither did
Alan Greenspan, Larry Kudlow, Jim Cramer or public
Television's Nightly Business Report. They all claim
they didn't realize the exposure of the various economic
sectors to mortgage debt, and they claim they didn't
know how risky these investments were.
Sure, tell me about the tooth fairy!
In 1976 I bought a house in Dallas, with a 9% mortgage
and I sold it in 1980 for almost twice as much. In
those days banks almost never issued mortgage loans at
or below the prime interest rate. They derived their
profits from the interest that borrowers paid. Alas
those times have become a fairytale that survives only
in high school economics text books. Today, banks
"bundle" and "securitize" these mortgages and sell them
to speculators, who expect to trade them on the
secondary market. Profits come from trading in (or
speculating on) mortgage futures. Mortgages are bought
and sold on the assumption that their monetary values
will rise for two reasons: 1. Increase in the amounts
that borrowers will pay as their interest rates rise. (a
very tenuous assumption) 2. Confidence that the future
value of the securitized mortgages will perpetually
increase as they are traded in the secondary market.
The brutal hypocrisy is that while everyone talks about
how wonderful it is for the economy to enjoy low
interest rates, lower-middle-class whites are the
principal victims of adjustable rate mortgages.
Lower-middle-class whites, with median household incomes
of $45,000 cannot afford to keep up with the rising
interest rates, any more than they can afford their
gas-guzzling SUVs. Oil prices are mounting towards $100
per barrel as a result of dollar devaluation, but
whether or not these costs will be passed on to
consumers is a political matter. I am tempted to
suggest that the oil companies are involved in
conspiracies, but that is a theory so unthinkable that,
I blush to admit that it even crosses my mind.
Things are bad enough for the lower-middle class, but
the poor people in the trailer parks and housing
projects haven't a clue. They are not aware of the
workings of the Federal Reserve System; indeed, they
don't even know it exists. The Fed is a private sector
entity, that controls the lives and economic welfare of
everyone, but like the Supreme Court, it is a
non-elected body, hence undemocratic. But unlike the
Supreme Court, the Fed is a conclave of private sector
banking institutions; its board members are functionally
judges in their own cases, regulating the values of
stocks and bonds, Treasury Bills, hedge funds, and
derivatives. And what does the median-income American
know about hedge funds and derivatives?
When your pension fund invests in the real estate
market, you are not speculating in land, but in
derivatives, which have no value other than the
confidence of speculators that their price will
inexorably continue to inflate. Bernanke is doing his
best to meet this expectation, but his lowering of
interest rates will not help those who are already
losing their homes to foreclosure. Be certain that
these areas of the economy are neither regulated nor
closely scrutinized by either Democrats or Republicans.
In the past the Republicans with their constant drum
beat against regulation bore a greater share of the
guilt. But the Clinton Democrats, with their rhetoric
of abolishing "big government," are equally culpable.
Mia Farrow is currently protesting against the evils of
China's economic culpability for the humanitarian crisis
in Darfur. What about China's economic culpability for
the American war in Iraq? Which war has cost the
greater number of lives or displaced the greater number
of people?
My poor benighted and enfeebled Negro brothers and
sisters continue to rock in their churches, to
recirculate Garveyite rhetoric, and plan conventions and
demonstrations. Meanwhile Stan O'Neal, one of the smart
Negroes negotiates a $100 million severance package from
Merrill Lynch, beyond the wildest dreams of Shelby
Steele or Cornell West.
If this be Lynching, Stan the Man is certainly making
the most of it.
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Please do not remove my name
from your list of ignorant, backward, confused, and
benighted Negroes. Yesterday, I naively stated that
Stan, "the Mack Man" O'Neal would receive "severance
pay" of $100,000,000. This was ignorant. In fact,
one of the elements of his negotiated departure was that
he be allowed to "retire." He has not been fired, and
furthermore it is difficult to calculate exactly how
much he will be receiving, but aReuters article printed
on Monday, estimated $200,000,000.
Remember Dick Grasso, who
"retired" from the New York Stock Exchange? All Grasso
got was a mere $139.5 million "retirement and severance"
package. Why would
any smart Negro want to waste his time with so-called
"black business?" Mack
on, Mister Stan!
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UPDATE: Merrill's CEO Exit: When A Severance Package
Isn't Severance
Dow Jones
October 30, 2007: 06:35 PM EST
http://money.cnn.com/news/newsfeeds/articles/djhighlights/200710301835DOWJONESDJONLINE000812.htm
SAN FRANCISCO (Dow
Jones) --When is a severance package not a severance
package? When Merrill Lynch & Co. says so, some
executive compensation experts said on Tuesday.
Merrill (MER) announced the retirement of Chief
Executive Stanley O'Neal earlier on Tuesday, just days
after the investment bank reported an unexpected
third-quarter loss on the back of an $8 billion subprime
mortgage-inspired write-down.
O'Neal is getting roughly $160 million in stock options
and retirement benefits as he steps down. The company is
not paying him any severance, a spokeswomen for the bank
said. She declined to comment further.
Mack
on, Mister Stan!
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Merrill's CEO Exit
When A Severance Package Isn't Severance
Dow Jones
30
October 2007
SAN FRANCISCO (Dow
Jones) --When is a severance package not a severance
package? When Merrill Lynch & Co. says so, some
executive compensation experts said on Tuesday.
Merrill (MER) announced the retirement of Chief
Executive Stanley O'Neal earlier on Tuesday, just days
after the investment bank reported an unexpected
third-quarter loss on the back of an $8 billion subprime
mortgage-inspired write-down.
O'Neal is getting roughly $160 million in stock options
and retirement benefits as he steps down. The company is
not paying him any severance, a spokeswomen for the bank
said. She declined to comment further.—Money.cnn
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Speak My Name
Black Men on Masculinity and the
American Dream
Edited by Don
Belton
Race Men
By Hazel V.
Carby
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.
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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
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Sister Citizen: Shame, Stereotypes, and Black Women in
America
By Melissa V.
Harris-Perry
According to the
author, this society has historically exerted
considerable pressure on black females to fit into one
of a handful of stereotypes, primarily, the Mammy, the
Matriarch or the Jezebel. The selfless
Mammy’s behavior is marked by a slavish devotion to
white folks’ domestic concerns, often at the expense of
those of her own family’s needs. By contrast, the
relatively-hedonistic Jezebel is a sexually-insatiable
temptress. And the Matriarch is generally thought of as
an emasculating figure who denigrates black men, ala the
characters Sapphire and Aunt Esther on the television
shows Amos and Andy and Sanford and Son, respectively.
Professor Perry
points out how the propagation of these harmful myths
have served the mainstream culture well. For instance,
the Mammy suggests that it is almost second nature for
black females to feel a maternal instinct towards
Caucasian babies.
As for the source
of the Jezebel, black women had no control over their
own bodies during slavery given that they were being
auctioned off and bred to maximize profits. Nonetheless,
it was in the interest of plantation owners to propagate
the lie that sisters were sluts inclined to mate
indiscriminately.
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Salvage the Bones
A Novel by Jesmyn Ward
On one level, Salvage the Bones is a simple story about a poor black family that’s about to be trashed by one of the most deadly hurricanes in U.S. history. What makes the novel so powerful, though, is the way Ward winds private passions with that menace gathering force out in the Gulf of Mexico. Without a hint of pretension, in the simple lives of these poor people living among chickens and abandoned cars, she evokes the tenacious love and desperation of classical tragedy. The force that pushes back against Katrina’s inexorable winds is the voice of Ward’s narrator, a 14-year-old girl named Esch, the only daughter among four siblings. Precocious, passionate and sensitive, she speaks almost entirely in phrases soaked in her family’s raw land. Everything here is gritty, loamy and alive, as though the very soil were animated. Her brother’s “blood smells like wet hot earth after summer rain. . . . His scalp looks like fresh turned dirt.” Her father’s hands “are like gravel,” while her own hand “slides through his grip like a wet fish,” and a handsome boy’s “muscles jabbered like chickens.” Admittedly, Ward can push so hard on this simile-obsessed style that her paragraphs risk sounding like a compost heap, but this isn’t usually just metaphor for metaphor’s sake. She conveys something fundamental about Esch’s fluid state of mind: her figurative sense of the world in which all things correspond and connect. She and her brothers live in a ramshackle house steeped in grief since their mother died giving birth to her last child. . . . What remains, what’s salvaged, is something indomitable in these tough siblings, the strength of their love, the permanence of their devotion.— WashingtonPost
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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)
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Ancient African Nations
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If you like this page consider making a donation
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Negro Digest / Black World
Browse all issues
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____ 2005
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
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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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ChickenBones Store
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posted 31 October 2007
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