|
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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* * *
Regulators Obfuscators, and Inflators
By Wilson J. Moses
December 15, 2008
The news dominating headlines yesterday and today
concerning the investment fraud of
Bernard L. Madoff is literally sickening. This
afternoon, I watched CNBC, to discover that Larry
Kudlow's solution, not surprisingly is more
deregulation. He calls, not surprisingly, for
abolition of the
Security and Exchange Commission. John McCain's
solution last fall was to fire SEC head,
Christopher Cox. That is the best the fat cats can
come up with: either abolish the regulatory commission,
or treacherously scapegoat one of their own, a man who
has constantly played by the rules of their game. The
fact is that the SEC should have been regulating the
investment business, and the Fed should have been
regulating the money supply. The fact that neither has
been doing its job is due to the fact that the
respective officials were selected primarily because of
their fundamental hostility to regulation.
As far as Wall Street is concerned, the fundamental
cause of what they simplistically refer to as "the
credit crisis," is the
Community Reinvestment Act, which encouraged unsafe
loans to poor people in inner cities (translate black
folk). The cause of the crisis of the auto industry is
that labor
unions forced the auto companies to pay their
employees decent salaries and benefits.
Sarah Palin, to her credit, is the only prominent
Republican who has audibly placed any blame on
"predatory lenders," thereby demonstrating that she is
indeed a maverick. Palin also made the indiscrete
statement that public school teachers are underpaid,
which shows she is completely off the reservation. It
would truly blow my mind if she were next to admit that
auto workers are entitled to
health insurance and pension funds.
In general, however, there is little if any recognition
by Republicans or Democrats of the fact that the deficit
spending of the Reagan, Clinton, and Bush II
administrations, combined with the easy-money policies
of the Federal Reserve Board under
Alan Greenspan, inflated the price of real estate.
There have been one or two notable exceptions, including
Paul
Krugman and
Joseph Stiglitz, but Wall Street and its
spokespersons are in stubborn denial. That the
uncontrolled flood of exotic securities, and the
invention of
credit swaps based on the real estate bubble might
have had anything to do with our problems is seldom
discussed. And even those who recognize the
malpractice of Greenspan seem to think that the cure for
our current difficulties is to resume the
super-inflation of real estate.
Michael Kinsley writing in The Daily Beast is one
of the few who recognize the irony of current
Republicrat policies of re-inflation, He writes with
irony, "The crisis won't be resolved until house prices
start rising again, thus making the American Dream
unaffordable to more people." Kinsley might have added
that the process of re-inflation will also make housing
unaffordable to retirees, whose life savings have been
eroded by inflation, and many of whose pensions are
destined to be destroyed when the American automakers go
into bankruptcy, a prospect that Stiglitz hails as
benign.
The science section
of the French journal Liberation, December 10,
carried an editorial by Denis Guedj, mathematician, and
historian of science, decrying the selling of
mathematiques twenty-three year old prostitutes, who
sell their services to war profiteers without any
concern for the misery of humanity. Their formulae are
as clever as those of the medieval astronomers, and just
about as relevant. Elsewhere, I have compared these
sorcerer's apprentices to the Fantasia Mickey Mouse, who
have flooded the market with instruments they do not
understand. Mathematical devices are created to support
ideological principles that are empirically
insupportable. The theoretical hocus pocus can serve
only to raise the wonder of the ignorant and sustain the
superstitions of the rich and powerful.
I am not a conspiracy theorist, for, as did Adam Smith,
I recognize that the rich and powerful have no need to
conspire. They understand immediately, without need for
communication, the concatenation of their interests,
which are usually opposed to the interests of working
people. It is working people who must rely on
organization and communication-conspiracy, if you will.
But like the factory workers in the Japanese auto plants
that have sprung up on American soil in recent decades,
workers are universally suspicious of labor unions, and
choose neither to unite not to conspire. As Adam Smith
points out, labor does not organize easily, and in those
cases where workers understand their interests, they
must work within the framework of laws created by the
master class.
It is interesting that anyone who wishes may hear the
opinions of the master class and their Congressional
minions daily on CNBC. There is no equivalent outlet
for the opinions and sentiments of working people.
Copyright©2008 by
Wilson J. Moses
Source:
http://wilsonmoses.wordpress.com/
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* * *
The Madoff Economy—The
revelation that Bernard Madoff — brilliant investor (or so almost
everyone thought), philanthropist, pillar of the community — was a phony
has shocked the world, and understandably so. The scale of his alleged
$50 billion Ponzi scheme is hard to comprehend. . . .
The financial services industry has
claimed an ever-growing share of the nation’s income over the past
generation, making the people who run the industry incredibly rich. Yet,
at this point, it looks as if much of the industry has been destroying
value, not creating it. And it’s not just a matter of money: the vast
riches achieved by those who managed other people’s money have had a
corrupting effect on our society as a whole.
Let’s start with those paychecks.
Last year, the average salary of employees in “securities, commodity
contracts, and investments” was more than four times the average salary
in the rest of the economy. Earning a million dollars was nothing
special, and even incomes of $20 million or more were fairly common. The
incomes of the richest Americans have exploded over the past generation,
even as wages of ordinary workers have stagnated; high pay on Wall
Street was a major cause of that divergence.
But surely those financial
superstars must have been earning their millions, right? No, not
necessarily. The pay system on Wall Street lavishly rewards the
appearance of profit, even if that appearance later turns out to have
been an illusion.
Consider the hypothetical example
of a money manager who leverages up his clients’ money with lots of
debt, then invests the bulked-up total in high-yielding but risky
assets, such as dubious mortgage-backed securities. For a while — say,
as long as a housing bubble continues to inflate — he (it’s almost
always a he) will make big profits and receive big bonuses. Then, when
the bubble bursts and his investments turn into toxic waste, his
investors will lose big — but he’ll keep those bonuses.
NYTimes
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* * *
| On Wall Street, Bonuses, Not
Profits, Were Real— .—A Bonus Bonanza—For Wall Street, much of this decade
represented a new Gilded Age. Salaries were merely play money — a
pittance compared to bonuses. Bonus season became an annual celebration
of the riches to be had in the markets. That was especially so in the
New York area, where nearly $1 out of every $4 that companies paid
employees last year went to someone in the financial industry. Bankers
celebrated with five-figure dinners, vied to outspend each other at
charity auctions and spent their newfound fortunes on new homes, cars
and art.
E. Stanley O’Neal, the
former chief executive of Merrill Lynch, was paid $46
million in 2006, $18.5 million of it in cash |
 |
The bonanza redefined success for
an entire generation. Graduates of top universities sought their
fortunes in banking, rather than in careers like medicine, engineering
or teaching. Wall Street worked its rookies hard, but it held out the
promise of rich rewards. In college dorms, tales of 30-year-olds pulling
down $5 million a year were legion.
While top executives received the
biggest bonuses, what is striking is how many employees throughout the
ranks took home large paychecks. On Wall Street, the first goal was to
make “a buck” — a million dollars. More than 100 people in Merrill’s
bond unit alone broke the million-dollar mark in 2006.
Goldman Sachs paid more than $20 million apiece to more than 50
people that year, according to a person familiar with the matter.
Goldman declined to comment. Pay was tied to profit, and profit to the
easy, borrowed money that could be invested in markets like mortgage
securities. As the financial industry’s role in the economy grew,
workers’ pay ballooned, leaping sixfold since 1975, nearly twice as much
as the increase in pay for the average American worker. . . . Mr.
O’Neal, however, got even richer by leaving Merrill Lynch. He was
awarded an exit package worth $161 million. NYTimes
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* * *
 |
Ponzi Schemes—In
a Ponzi scheme, potential investors are wooed with promises
of unusually large returns, usually attributed to the
investment manager’s savvy, skill or some other secret
sauce. The returns are repaid, at least for a time, out of
new investors’ principal, not from profits. This can
continue as long as new investors line up with cash, and old
investors don’t try to withdraw too much of their money at
once.
Ponzi schemes are also
known as pyramid schemes, from the shape of any chart that
reflects their basic premise -- that ever-growing layers of
new recruits are needed to provide gains to the smaller,
earlier cohorts. A gigantic pyramid scheme virtually
bankrupted Albania after the fall of Communism. Ponzi
schemes are named after Charles Ponzi, the flamboyant con
man whose scam followed a particularly spectacular course.
|
Mr. Ponzi began telling New York
investors in December 1919 that investments in foreign postage coupons
could yield 50 percent returns in 45 days. By redeeming coupons bought
cheaply overseas for much higher amounts in the United States, he could
double their money in three months, he claimed.
NYTimes
* *
* * *
Even Winners May Lose Out With
Madoff—Mr. Madoff regularly delivered returns of 10 to 17 percent to
investors, a very good year-in, year-out return but on the low end of
the 10 to 100 percent a year typically dangled by promoters of Ponzi
schemes.But assets that can guarantee those returns year after year
without risk simply do not exist. Instead of profitable investments,
Ponzi schemes repay initial investors by raising more money from new
investors. The schemes typically collapse when the promoter cannot bring
in enough money to pay existing investors seeking redemptions.
Joel M. Cohen, the deputy head of
litigation for the Clifford Chance law firm and a former federal
prosecutor who specialized in business and securities fraud, said that
payments to early investors were an integral part of any Ponzi scheme.
“You need to deliver returns in the
range that you promised to attract investors,” Mr. Cohen said.
Yet even Mr. Madoff’s most
fortunate clients may wind up having to give back some of their gains,
as investors might have to do in another recent financial fraud, the
collapse of the hedge fund Bayou Group in 2005.
NYTimes
* *
* * *
What CEOs Got on the Way Out—Bailed-Out
Banks' Execs Got $1.6 Billion
Banks that are getting taxpayer bailouts awarded
their top executives nearly $1.6 billion in salaries, bonuses, and other
benefits last year, an Associated Press analysis reveals.
The rewards came even at banks where poor results
last year foretold the economic crisis that sent them to Washington for
a government rescue. Some trimmed their executive compensation due to
lagging bank performance, but still forked over multimillion-dollar
executive pay packages.
Benefits included cash bonuses, stock options,
personal use of company jets and chauffeurs, home security, country club
memberships and professional money management, the AP review of federal
securities documents found.
The total amount given to nearly 600 executives
would cover bailout costs for many of the 116 banks that have so far
accepted tax dollars to boost their bottom lines.
Rep. Barney Frank, chairman of the House Financial
Services committee and a long-standing critic of executive largesse,
said the bonuses tallied by the AP review amount to a bribe "to get them
to do the jobs for which they are well paid in the first place.
"Most of
us sign on to do jobs and we do them best we can," said Frank, a
Massachusetts Democrat. "We're told that some of the most highly paid
people in executive positions are different. They need extra money to be
motivated!" . . .* *
* * *
Short-lived AIG CEO Robert Willumstad, left,
inherited a sinking ship from Sullivan, who left in his wake $20 billion
in subprime writedowns. Sullivan left AIG with $47 million, while
Willumstad declined $22 million in severance pay. Click through the
gallery to see what other departing CEOs have received.
CEO: Stanley O'Neal |
Company: Merrill Lynch
Payout: $161.5 million
O'Neal stepped down last October, shortly after
Merrill wrote down $8 billion in losses during the height of the
subprime mortgage fallout.
CEO: Charles Prince |
Company: Citigroup
Payout: $68 million
Prince left Citigroup last November following steep
losses that shaved nearly a quarter off the bank's market value.
CEO: Jimmy Cayne |
Company: Bear Stearns
Payout: $61.3 million
CEO: Angelo Mozilo |
Company: Countrywide Financial
Payout: $121.5 million
Mozilo gave up $36 million in severance pay, but
cashed in his stock options as the massive mortgage company entered the
subprime fallout. Mozilo is currently under investigation by the SEC.
CEO: Michael Perry |
Company: IndyMac
Payout: Unknown.
Perry was removed in July when the FDIC took over
IndyMac in the second-largest action by the bank depositors' insurer.
CEO: Ken Thompson |
Company: Wachovia
Payout: $8.7 million
After 32 years with Wachovia, Thompson resigned in
June after a deep first-quarter loss and a 41 percent dividend cut
spurred a shareholder uprising
CEOs: Richard Syron /
Daniel Mudd | Company: Freddie Mac / Fannie Mae
Payout: Zero.
Regulators voided the chiefs' severance packages
when the government took over the giant mortgage agencies. Mudd was due
to receive $9.3 million, while Syron could have earned $14.1 million.
CEO: Kerry Killinger |
Company: Washington Mutual
Payout: As much as $22
million
Killinger was ousted in September as the nation's
largest thrift joined the list of other troubled banks likely to be
sold.
MoneyAOL
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|
Speak My Name
Black Men on Masculinity and the
American Dream
Edited by Don
Belton
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. 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
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*
 |
Malcolm X
A Life of Reinvention
By
Manning Marable
Years
in the making-the definitive biography of
the legendary black activist.
Of the great figure in twentieth-century
American history perhaps none is more
complex and controversial than Malcolm X.
Constantly rewriting his own story, he
became a criminal, a minister, a leader, and
an icon, all before being felled by
assassins' bullets at age thirty-nine.
Through his tireless work and countless
speeches he empowered hundreds of thousands
of black Americans to create better lives
and stronger communities while establishing
the template for the self-actualized,
independent African American man. In death
he became a broad symbol of both resistance
and reconciliation for millions around the
world. |
Manning Marable's
new biography of Malcolm is a stunning achievement.
Filled with new information and shocking revelations
that go beyond the Autobiography, Malcolm X unfolds a
sweeping story of race and class in America, from the
rise of Marcus Garvey and the Ku Klux Klan to the
struggles of the civil rights movement in the fifties
and sixties.
Reaching into
Malcolm's troubled youth, it traces a path from his
parents' activism through his own engagement with the
Nation of Islam, charting his astronomical rise in the
world of Black Nationalism and culminating in the
never-before-told true story of his assassination.
Malcolm X will stand as the definitive work on one of
the most singular forces for social change, capturing
with revelatory clarity a man who constantly strove, in
the great American tradition, to remake himself anew.
* *
* * *
|
Ratification
The People Debate the Constitution,
1787-1788
By Pauline Maier
A notable historian
of the early republic, Maier devoted a
decade to studying the immense
documentation of the ratification of the
Constitution. Scholars might approach
her book’s footnotes first, but history
fans who delve into her narrative will
meet delegates to the state conventions
whom most history books, absorbed with
the Founders, have relegated to
obscurity. Yet, prominent in their local
counties and towns, they influenced a
convention’s decision to accept or
reject the Constitution. Their
biographies and democratic credentials
emerge in Maier’s accounts of their
elections to a convention, the political
attitudes they carried to the conclave,
and their declamations from the floor.
The latter expressed opponents’
objections to provisions of the
Constitution, some of which seem
anachronistic (election regulation
raised hackles) and some of which are
thoroughly contemporary (the power to
tax individuals directly). Ripostes from
proponents, the Federalists, animate the
great detail Maier provides, as does her
recounting how one state convention’s
verdict affected another’s. Displaying
the grudging grassroots blessing the
Constitution originally received, Maier
eruditely yet accessibly revives a
neglected but critical passage in
American history.—Booklist |
 |
* * * * *
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
* * * * *
If you like this page consider making a donation
* * * * *
Negro Digest /
Black World
Browse all issues
1950
1960
1965
1970
1975
1980
1985
1990
1995
2000
____ 2005
Enjoy!
* * * * *
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 15 December 2008
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