Americans May Soon Walk Like Egyptians

(Written February 19, 2011)

Have you had about enough news about Egypt? Is your head starting to spin as you try to figure out whether the next, biggest “unrest” story is coming from Egypt itself, or from the “protest of the day” In Tunisia, Bahrain, Yemen, Jordan, Libya or Sudan?

Even now, after three consecutive weeks of 24/7 media focus on "Middle East unrest", can you find any of those places, other than Egypt, of course, on a map without a great deal of assistance?

Was it as strange for you as it was for me to see the president of the United States flip-flopping back and forth in his support for Hosni Mubarak, the 30-year U.S. ally? Was it stranger still to see Mubarak quit abruptly and leave Cairo by helicopter, just one day after saying emphatically that he wasn’t going anywhere,, and after he had vowed to “punish” the demonstrators?

Even before events in Egypt came to a head, there had been unrest in Tunisia, and in Jordan, a major recipient of U.S. foreign aid. Also hit with demonstrations has been Sudan, which receives about $300 million annually in U.S. aid. Bahrain, home to a huge U.S. naval base, has also been the target of protestors.

Curiously, even though the U.S. provides $1.75 billion per year in foreign aid to Egypt (second in the region, only behind the $2.75 billion given annually to Israel), a recent poll by Zogby International has made it clear that the unrest in Egypt was probably just as much an anti-U.S. phenomenon, as it was an anti-Mubarak event.

According to the poll, 85 percent of Egyptians had an unfavorable attitude toward the U.S., 87 percent had "no confidence" in the U.S. and 92 percent named the U.S. as one of two nations that are the greatest threat to their country.

Those poll results and these recent events have been clear indicators that the U.S. is going to have to conduct itself much differently in the next few months, and over the coming years, if it ever hopes to regain the respect of people in the Middle East and elsewhere.

Notwithstanding the importance and value of oil, for example, the U.S. is going to have to learn to pursue it without having a total disregard for the lives of those in the countries where it is produced.

I hope it’s become increasingly clear to the president of the United States, and to Congress, that people around the world no longer seem to be impressed by how powerful, rich and influential the United States used to be in the ’40s, ’50s and ’60s.

It’s apparent that when they look this way, both friends and foes of the U.S. see a country that hasn’t won a major war since 1945, and a nation with a chronic and growing unemployment problem that has seriously diminished its ability to function as a leading global economic power.

They’re also seeing, more and more, a country that has to be increasingly concerned about the potential for addressing its own domestic challenges and protests.

In that regard, it was especially interesting to hear, early during the Egyptian protests, that the people in that country were demonstrating because they had an unemployment rate of 9.75 percent, that the cost of food had grown unacceptably high and because there was a far-too-great economic disparity between rich and poor in the country.

When I heard that, I was struck by the similarities between what was happening in Egypt and what we’re beginning to see here in the “good ole U.S.A.”

If you thought the people in Egypt, Bahrain and Tunisia were angry and frustrated, maybe you should take a closer look at the faces of the 30,0000 people who marched on the Wisconsin legislature last week, protesting a bill that would diminish the power of labor unions over all, and substantially reduce pensions and benefits for members of teachers’ unions.

That protest grew so ugly so quickly that 14 Democratic legislators actually left the State capitol to avoid participating in the vote and to prevent the government from having the quorum needed to pass the legislation.

State troopers were called in and the governor threatened to call in the National Guard.

But it’s not just Wisconsin.

It’s been reported that 40 states across the country are trying to address budget shortfalls that may climb to $140 billion. The resultant budget cuts will have disastrous impacts, among other things, on the country’s 14,000 school districts for at least the next five years. Most states are targeting areas such as health care, public school education, university funding and services to senior citizens and to low- income youths to close their budget gaps.

In November of last year, 500 students converged on Baton Rouge, La. to protest cuts in state education. One student, from the University of New Orleans, was quoted as saying, “The cleaning staff in the Liberal Arts building has been laid off. The classrooms are filthy. It’s not uncommon to see trash all over the room.”

In addition, in March of last year, thousands protested education budget reductions in California, and in May, an estimated 35,000 people, the largest group of protestors ever assembled in the state of New Jersey, gathered in Trenton, the state capital, to protest Governor Christie’s education budget cuts.

Two things bother me about all of this: One, our mainstream media outlets are diligently covering stories about government unrest in the Middle East, and occasionally, in Europe, but seem not to be interested in similar stories right here.

Secondly, our elected officials, especially those who claim to be fiscal conservatives, or who profess affiliation with the so-called Tea Party, seem to be taking an all-too-theoretical and dogmatic approach to the pain their trendy new “deficit reduction-or-bust” ideology is inflicting on the American people. They seem to be really impressed with hearing themselves repeat for Fox Cable Channel and the Wall Street Journal that the only way to improve the economy is to reduce taxes for the extremely rich and to cut services — across the board — for the American people as a whole, especially for those who are most economically vulnerable, including most African Americans.

The idea that they might be able to improve city, state or federal economies solely by reducing the size of governmental budgets is absolutely ludicrous. It’s like trying to convince an already-destitute family that the best way for them to improve their wealth is to stop spending.

Global economic supremacy has shifted over the past decade, from the West to the East. Consequently, the U.S. is suffering through a significant economic crisis. It doesn’t help that our politicians seem not to understand how to stop spewing empty rhetoric about budget cuts and deficit reductions, or how to start changing our national business and economic models so the country and its businesses can go back to generating revenues and creating jobs.

If they can’t learn to do these things, it seems to me, our elected officials, much like those who are being toppled across the Middle East, will simply have to be removed from office as soon as humanly possible.

Too many Americans are already seriously at risk, largely due to conditions they had absolutely no role in creating. We can’t afford to endure indecision, incompetence or empty ideologies very much longer, or to continue to have our elected officials cater irresponsibly to those in our society who absolutely did create these circumstances and who, even at this late date, are still committed to maintaining the status quo.

Pretty soon, the people in Egypt may very well be watching us on their flat-screen TV sets as we’re having our own anti-government demonstrations, here in the U.S.

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Newsweek's "Best Countries" Ranking: A Poor Joke.

I’ve seen dumb lists before, but the one recently published in Newsweek, ranking the “World's Best Countries,” certainly “takes the cake.”


In a way, you almost feel sorry for Newsweek. We all know that the magazine has been “up against it” lately. In fact, the owners of the venerable periodical announced, just three weeks ago, that it had reached an agreement to sell the magazine, effective next month, to Sidney Harman, who made his millions in the audio equipment business. (You remember Harmon-Kardon stereo sets? Same guy.)


This came about after the magazine dropped from 3.2 million to 1.5 million subscribers, and after it reported a $47.5 million operating loss in 2009.


It appears that, in one more effort at reviving its fading fortunes, Newsweek decided to “swing for the roof,” and create its first-time-ever “World’s Best Countries” ranking.


After all, the editors must have thought, “U.S. News and World Report” seems to be doing well with its strategy of publishing U.S. college, university and healthcare rankings. How can we lose if we develop our own ranking of the entire world?"


If Newsweek had taken its “World’s Best Countries” project a bit more seriously, if their editors had made just a modest effort to develop the new ranking without the highly political, substantially subjective, European-skewed criteria they obviously used, maybe the “world” would have taken their product seriously.


But, in my opinion, they didn’t do any of that and they clearly blew it.


I found Newsweek’s “Best Countries” ranking no more credible than the steady stream of other nonsensical, gimmicky lists that seem to be published at least once a week, by other desperate media outlets, in a vain attempt to attract “eyeballs.”


In recent years, for example, there have been published rankings of: “The Top 10 Dumbest Pet Products” list, the “Top 10 College Drop Outs,” (almost interesting because Microsoft’s Bill Gates, Apple’s Steve Jobs, Avatar director James Cameron, Harrison Ford and Tiger Woods all made the list), the “Top 10 Screen Vampires” and the “Top 10 Angry Comedians.”


Like David Letterman’s far-funnier trademark “Top 10 List” routine, these rankings hold our interest for only a minute or so. That happens because, very much like the Letterman “bit,” we see them as comic relief, a “mental health break” before we move back to the things we have to do every day to earn a living.


I felt that way about the Top 100 “Best Countries ranking,” by Newsweek.


Intentionally or unintentionally, it was clearly a joke.


The project’s advisory board included A Nobel laureate economist, the director of McGill University’s Institute of Health and Social Policy, the director of Columbia University’s Global Center for East Asia and, most importantly and revealingly, two high-ranking representatives of McKinsey and Co., the world’s largest management consulting firm.


On the surface, such a group would appear to be credible, until you realize that McKinsey, a $6 billion company, has a client list that includes 90 of the world’s leading, global corporations and more than 35 (nearly one in every six) of the world’s countries. Do you think the interests of their clients might have been factored into the final rankings and the discussions about who made the list in the first place? You think?


Why else would a ranking of the “World’s 100 Best Countries” include every single European Union nation, but exclude 67 percent of the countries in Africa, altogether?


How would 15 of the Top 25 Best Countries be drawn from the ranks of the European Union, including Greece, (#26), Spain (#21), Ireland (#17) and the United Kingdom (#14), each of which is in imminent danger of being declared financially insolvent? How did any of these countries make the list, in the first place?


Without a strong political “tweak” of the data, how would Israel wind up at #22, overall, and be listed as the “Best Country” among all of the 14 countries classified as “Middle East / North Africa”? Aside from purely political considerations, why else did Newsweek rate Israel as “better” than Kuwait (#40), oil-rich Saudi Arabia (#64), and Iran (#79), among others?


Why, other than lingering colonialist attitudes, does the report include Tunisia, Morocco, Algeria and Egypt, four countries located squarely on the African continent, together with “Middle East” countries? Is it geographic proximity to Saudi Arabia, Iran and Syria that has led political consultants such as McKinsey to continue to “lump” Northern Africa into the Middle East?


Can’t be.


If that were the case, Sudan, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Djibouti and Somalia, all located within 200 miles or less across the Red Sea from Saudi Arabia and Yemen, would, logically, be considered Middle Eastern Countries, also. For the world’s sake, and all of our collective sanity, let’s hope that those countries being “relegated” to “African” rather than “Middle East” status had nothing to do with the darker complexion of their inhabitants.


By the way, Spain is less than 50 miles from African Morocco. At a certain point, should Spain, also, be considered a Middle Eastern country, or a part of Northern Africa?? Who decides these things, anyway?


Subjective….totally subjective…so much so, as to be humorous.


If Newsweek and its consultants at McKinsey weren’t trying to be funny, or to simply reinforce well-worn, negative global stereotypes, why were the 14 “sub-Saharan” African Nations all placed within the last 21 places in the rankings – from 80 to 100?


Wait, it gets better…in developing its rationale for the U.S. to be ranked as high as #11, even in the midst of one of its very deepest economic crises, Newsweek clearly used inflated, misleading data to improve the case for that ranking.


Even though a 2006 report commissioned by the U.S. Department of Education disclosed that 46 – 51 percent of U.S. adults read so poorly that they earn significantly below the poverty level, the U.S. literacy rate used in the “Best Countries” calculation was the highly inaccurate 99 percent, the one drawn from the CIA World Fact book.


There's more...even though the U.S. Census Bureau lists the average per-capita income in the U.S. at $33,070, Newsweek’s #11 ranking for the U.S. was arrived at by using a per-capita income level of $47,200. Why?


Finally, it was very interesting to see which of the world’s total of 194 countries were left off the Newsweek list entirely, in order to get down to the “100 Best.” That unranked group of 94 countries included, of course, a significant number of Central and South East Asian, Middle Eastern and Caribbean countries, and 36 African nations, such as Angola, Cote d’Ivoire, Libya, Rwanda, Sierra Leone and Zimbabwe.


Even more glaring, why was China, the world’s second-largest economy, ranked #59, Brazil ranked #58, India #78 and Russia #51? Aren’t those "BRIC Nations" the emerging global economic players? By whose strange logic at Newsweek do these clearly powerful G-20 players rank below Latvia, Costa Rica, Poland, Slovenia and Newsweek’s #1, Finland?


Was Newsweek’s entire “Best Countries” announcement all just one more dumb “David Letterman Top 10 List” joke, or were the magazine’s editors simply trying to re-affirm the outdated, Western, global management policy that “if we say so, it must be true?”


When are we in the U.S., and in the entire West, going to finally take our heads out of the sand?


When are we going to start to use accurate, comparable data sets to arrive at more honest analyses of our true, economic and military condition? When are we going to understand that if we don’t recognize the underlying reasons for the loss of our economic, quality-of-life and military advantages, then we won’t really be able to address them, or to retain the U.S.’s world leadership?


When I finally stopped laughing at Newsweek's "Best Countries" list, I began to worry that our country and its formerly all-powerful opinion - making apparatus has gotten so far off track that we may not recover in time to prevent the inevitable crash.


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BP's Pledges to the Gulf Coast: Can a Leopard Change its Spots?

On Wednesday, President Obama sat down with the chairman and the CEO of BP and emerged from that meeting with a pledge that the company would establish a $20 billion fund to help pay for losses experienced by residents during the recent Gulf Coast oil spill.

The president also announced that he had obtained a further commitment that BP would make an additional $100 million available to compensate unemployed oil-rig workers affected by the stoppage in deepwater drilling.

Here’s where all of this starts to get interesting: Under U.S. Federal law, total corporate liability related to oil-spill losses is limited to $75 million.

It seems to me that what the U.S. expects in the way of corporate responsibility from BP, a notorious, bottom-line-oriented, public-be-damned industrial bully, is very much akin to expecting a leopard to “change its spots.”

In the year 2000, for example, British Petroleum, as part of an embarrassingly transparent, “lipstick-on-a-pig” image campaign, changed its official name to BP (Beyond Petroleum) to imply that it was going to be, in the future, no longer wedded to fossil fuel development and would work to become a leading participant in the development of clean, more ecologically friendly energy sources, including “solar.” The image campaign came complete with a spanking new green-and-yellow sunburst logo color scheme and an investment, from 2000 to 2002, of $600 million in new signage, stationery and a global multi-media advertising campaign.

One of my old communications professors was fond of saying that “good PR is not what you say, it’s what you do."

Someone should have mentioned that to BP. They probably could have saved themselves several hundreds of millions of dollars.

It turns out, of course, that the company’s problem was not limited, at all, to the color of its signs or the appeal of its TV commercials. The real issue was that BP had amassed a long, uninterrupted history of being grossly insensitive to people, wherever it happened to do its business – all over the globe – and that it simply never has seemed to care very much about what the public thought about any of that.

In fact, BP’s corporate style has been to say anything that might be expedient to move past an uncomfortable situation, or to temporarily divert responsibility. We’ve seen evidence of that dozens of times already, just since April. That’s probably why the company’s CEO, Tony Hayward, seems to contradict himself so much, to otherwise misspeak, and to have a problem looking straight into a camera.

It’s clear, now, given what we’ve seen of its “half-stepping" reaction to the damage being done every second of every minute, every hour of every day, for the past two months, in the Gulf Coast, that the “new BP" is still very much the same organization that has acted so irresponsibly toward its neighbors and to the global ecology since the London-based company discovered its first oil reserves in Iran, in 1908, and began to operate, in 1909, as the Anglo-Persian Oil Company.

Though most Americans had been only vaguely familiar with BP, other than through seeing its brightly lit gas stations along the highway, the company has $130 billion in assets, and happens to be the world’s third-largest energy company, behind only Exxon-Mobil and Royal Dutch Shell.

Establishing its rapacious business model early on, the company, which drew absolutely all of its revenue from those early Iranian wells, returned only 16 percent of that money to the people of Iran. In 1935, after Persia changed its name to Iran, the company renamed itself, becoming the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, but still maintained total and absolute control over every drop of oil that flowed from Iran.

In 1951, Iranian Prime Minister Mossadeq nationalized the country’s oil industry and forced BP out of his country’s oil-producing operations. Shortly thereafter, in 1953, perhaps not coincidentally, Mossadeq was overthrown in a coup and replaced by a man who happened to be exceptionally supportive of the U.S. and British, Shah Pahlavi, known to most Americans, simply, as the Shah of Iran.

The next year, the company changed its name again, this time to "British Petroleum."

Shortly after the Shah assumed power, the British began to share their oil revenues with the Americans, and BP began to expand its oil drilling operations beyond Iran and into Alaska and to the North Sea. It also assumed control of the old, U.S.-based, Atlantic Richfield (ARCO) Energy Company.

The company eventually expanded its drilling operations into Colombia, where it has long been accused of human rights violations.

In case you didn’t know, BP also maintained extensive business relationships with the apartheid South African government, prior to that country’s “democratization,” in 1994, which saw Nelson Mandela elected president. Because the company had continued to refine crude oil in pre-1994 South Africa, despite an international oil embargo, it was high on the global “anti-apartheid” movement’s list of “corporate enemies.”

BP also ignored a U.N. oil embargo against pre-Mugabe Zimbabwe, then known as Rhodesia. In that capacity, the company supplied the oppressive, white-minority-controlled government with oil that was illegally shipped in through South Africa.

Not surprisingly, the company's record of insensitivity has extended far beyond geo-political and human rights issues.

As far back as 1991, nearly 20 years ago, the Washington DC-based Citizens Action organization named BP among the top ten environmental polluters in the United States. In Ohio, the Public Interest Campaign, in 1988, said the company’s two plants in Lima, Ohio, were far and away the “biggest polluters" in the state. The company’s chemical plant and refinery, the group found, “produced 60 million pounds of toxic pollution” in the year before the report was written, including 8.2 million pounds released into the air, 58.2 million pounds injected under ground, 380,000 pounds dumped into the Ottawa River and one million pounds disposed on the land.

When you look at the company’s shameful record, it’s hard to imagine that it could have any, real, corporate-level concern for the residents of the Gulf Coast--what may become of the them, their families, their homes or their very way of life.

In that regard, I'm especially concerned about the well-being of the region’s black fishermen. Up until two months ago, they had been able to earn a self-sufficient living in the Gulf, dating back, at least, to the early part of the 20th Century. Now that the spill has decimated their industry, will they and others really receive the support they need from BP to make themselves whole?

It is clear, however, that such a principled response is entirely inconsistent with the company’s 101-year track record.

While we wonder about that, we should also remember that the Gulf oil spill, as horrible as it continues to be, is not the largest such spill on record – not yet anyway. At an estimated 2.7 million barrels spilled to date, it still ranks behind the 3.3 million-barrel Ixtoc I spill in Mexico in 1979, the 5.5 million-barrel Gulf War oil spill in Iraq, in 1991, and the 9 million-barrel Lake View Gusher spill, in Kern County, California, in 1910. Give it time, though. With 40,000 gallons a day being pumped into the Gulf of Mexico, this one still may very well top them all.

But while you’re waiting for BP and the U.S. Government to “plug the hole,” don’t hold your breath about the company actually stepping up to the plate and doing anything substantially more for Gulf residents and wildlife than the law absolutely requires it to do.

As welcome as that kind of corporate cooperation would be, such behavior would be entirely out of character for the company which now calls itself BP.


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Arizona Immigration: Just the Tip of the Iceberg

About a year-and-a-half ago, the first time I heard about Igor Panarin, I was absolutely convinced that the guy was crazy.

Now, as I watch what’s been going on in Arizona, I’m not so sure.

Panarin, a former KGB official and dean of the Russian Foreign Ministry academy for future diplomats, according to a December 2008 Wall Street Journal article, has predicted that the U.S. will splinter into six, separate “Republics” and territories, during the year 2010.

Panarin’s premise is that mass immigration, economic decline and moral degradation will be the cause of a civil war in this country, and lead to a collapse of the U.S. dollar in late June/early July, 2010. The Russian also predicted that “wealthier states will begin to withhold funds from the federal government and effectively secede from the Union," according to the Journal.

Until very recently I had thought that Panarin was just “blowing smoke,” but the more I watch the right-wing political posturing and the increasing legislative "hard line" against all non-European Arizonans, I’m starting to wonder if Professor Panarin just might be right.

Less than a month after the passage of the country’s most stringent anti-immigration law in her state, Jan Brewer, Arizona’s governor, signed, despite a strong opposing statement by six United Nations human rights experts, another anti-immigrant-focused piece of legislation. This one was designed to prohibit Arizona public schools from offering classes primarily for students of a “particular ethnic group.” In case you weren’t paying full attention, that not only would prohibit heritage-focused classes for Mexican Americans, it also would ban Native-American and African-American studies courses throughout the state, effective January 2011. In teaching ethnic solidarity, says Arizona Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Horne, the courses are also "teaching Latino students that they are oppressed by white people."

By the way, there are more than 275,000 black residents of Arizona, and their families will also be affected by all of this, though you wouldn’t know that from mainstream news coverage.

As if all of this hasn’t been enough, the state of Arizona and its public school system has also been working under a directive that requires that teachers whose spoken English is considered “heavily accented,” or ungrammatical, must be removed from classes for students who are still learning English. "Evaluators," believe it or not, have been dispatched across the state and have audited 1500 teachers, in 2008 and 2009, on things such as “comprehensible pronunciation.”

I’m just wondering...what part of England are these Arizona evaluators from that they can discern when a person is speaking English without an “accent?” Would Jimmy Carter, Lyndon Baines Johnson, Strom Thurmond, Haley Barbour, Bill Clinton or John F. Kennedy have been evaluated by them as speaking “without an accent?"

Are there really people in any part of this country who don't have some kind of regional accent? That, in my opinion, is just thinly disguised xenophobia and racism.

Needless to say, none of this is going down without incident. The city of Los Angeles, for example, with an elected Hispanic mayor and a 46.5 percent Hispanic population, has called for a boycott of the entire state of Arizona. And at the recent summit of the Union of South American Nations, the participants issued a strong statement condemning the law. Signers of the statement, which said the law would lead to “legitimization of racist attitudes,” included the presidents of Brazil, Uruguay, Ecuador, Paraguay, chile, Bolivia, Venezuela and Argentina.

The truth is that what’s apparently taking place in Arizona is a great deal more complex than our mainstream media and elected leaders have led us to believe.

It reminds me of a trip I took to China in the mid-'80’s. On a tour bus through Macau, which, at the time, was still a neighboring Portuguese colony, the tour guide explained that, each day, tens of thousands of vendors from the Peoples' Republic of China would cross the border into Macau, sell their wares and return home to China each night. She was careful to point out, however, that on any given day, if the Chinese government wanted to do so, it could simply dispatch millions of Chinese citizens into Macau and encourage them to stay, and that Macau would be unable to do anything at all to make them leave. Macau, in 1999, by the way, was “handed over” by the Portuguese to the Peoples’ Republic.

Until 1836, what the U.S. now calls the state of Texas was actually a part of Mexico and, in 1848, the major portions of seven other current U.S. states – California, Nevada, Utah, Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico and Wyoming – were also annexed, from Mexico, by the United States.
There was, of course, great resistance by the Mexicans, there was war and many bloody battles related to all of this but, in the end, those territories became a part of the U.S. and the size of Mexico was reduced by 45 percent.

Why else would all of those great U.S. cities in the southwest have Spanish, Mexican-derived names, such as San Francisco, Los Angeles, San Antonio, Mesa, Casa Grande, Santa Fe, Las Vegas, and El Paso?

Right up to the present day, there are many in Mexico, who still believe that the greater part of what is now called the southwestern United States is, actually, their own ancestral homeland.
To further complicate all of this, the Arizona legislature also has voted to advance a bill that would require all future U.S. presidential candidates to present their birth certificates, prior to being placed on the ballot for national election in the state of Arizona. Not adhering to the law, experts say, would be sufficient grounds to have a presidential candidate, such as Barack Obama, removed from the ballot.

All this brings us right back to our friend, Igor Panarin. According to his prediction, these kinds of controversies will lead, among other things, to Hawaii reverting to its former Asian control, Alaska reverting to its former Russian control and the rest of the continental United States being divided into four separate republics.

The “California Republic” would include seven states, including California, Arizona, Nevada and Utah. The “Texas Republic” would include nine states under the influence of Mexico, whose people, as in the Chinese example, already seem to be simply moving across the U.S. border, unrestrained, every day, and not returning home.

“Atlantic America,” according to Panarin, would include eighteen largely mid-Atlantic states, ranging from South Carolina to Maine, and the “Central North American Republic,” would include fourteen states in the North Central part of the country under the influence of Canada.

If this sounds a little far-fetched to you, please note that more than ten other states are also considering Arizona-type pieces of legislation, including Colorado, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Idaho, Utah, Missouri, Texas, North Carolina, Maryland and Minnesota. And, right here in Pennsylvania, former Lt. Governor candidate and state representative Daryl Metcalfe is a leading supporter of H.B. 2479, which would, among other things, direct the state's police officers to "attempt to verify the immigration status of suspected illegal aliens."

While I hope Panarin, the former KGB agent, was dead wrong in his predictions, I am starting to suspect that this is all so much bigger than "immigration" and it's just the "tip of the iceberg" of the deep political, scape-goating emotions that are spawned, routinely, by a depressed national economy.

While we, in the black community, watch, distractedly, what is happening to people who speak with "heavy Spanish accents" in Arizona, we would be well-advised to remember the old quote: "If they come for me in the night, they'll be coming for you in the morning."

I'm sure we'll be hearing more about all of this, in the not-too-distant future.



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It’s Time to Stop U.S. Hypocrisy In Haiti.

Did you see the despicable "Haiti story" in the New York Times the other day?

I’m referring to the one about the 30 Haitian earthquake survivors, who had been ushered onto planes bound for the U.S., while the cameras were rolling and the world was still paying attention to the tragedy in their country. That's the same story that said that, since their arrival, here, the Haitians have all been held as prisoners of the U.S. Immigration System, in detention centers, in Florida.

Doesn’t it make your head spin to think back to two weeks ago, when former Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush traveled to Haiti “to remind Americans that Haiti is still suffering and in need of long-term, quake-related relief?"

Those poor detained souls – none of whom happened to have any sort of criminal record – had been “waved” onto military flights by U.S. Marines, with no time for normal immigration processing. You were probably watching as it happened, on the evening news. Now, apparently, the evacuees are learning that they must have done something terribly wrong.

According to news reports, when they showed up in the U.S. without visas, they were immediately taken into custody by immigration officials and held for deportation – and you won’t believe this – back to Haiti.

Sounds like a “B” movie plot, doesn’t it? Maybe they can get that brother, Tracey Morgan, to play the lead role.

If I were Haitian, my jaws would be “locked.”

The United States, it seems, has always treated the Haitians like "step children," contributing significantly, through its policies, to the country’s status as the "poorest nation in the Western Hemisphere." This latest debacle is entirely consistent with that long-standing pattern.

Maybe our founding fathers and their political descendants have never quite gotten over the fact that, in 1791, the Haitians pulled off the only successful slave-led revolution in history, overthrowing French rule and becoming the world’s first, independent, post-colonial, black nation.

Maybe that’s why the United States stood by and didn't intervene, in 1825, despite the adoption of the Monroe Doctrine in 1823, while the French staked an initial claim of 150 million francs in reparations to be paid to the former French slaveholders. As a result, the new Haitian government was quickly bankrupted and forced to borrow the money from French banks to make payments to the slaveholders. Those same banks wound up controlling the country’s economy, despite Haiti's newly won “independent” status, and plunging the Haitian people into the poverty from which they have never, really, emerged.

As onerous as all of that may have seemed back in 1825, France’s claim for 150 million francs in reparations to its slaveholders was just a pittance compared to the $1.8 billion in peak debt the tiny island nation wound up owing to the World Bank, International Monetary Fund and the Inter-American Bank.

So, what were “Bill” and “W” really doing down there in Haiti, anyway? In an interview with the Miami Herald, Clinton said that his mission in Haiti, along with George W. Bush, was to “...help fill the gaps of human needs and help create jobs…by stimulating entrepreneurship…”

By "stimulating entrepreneurship," was he referring to quickly restoring the earthquake-ravished Haitian apparel and textile production industry? That’s the one, by the way, that, over a ten-month period ending in October, 2009, exported $424 million in clothing items for brands such as Hanes and Jos. A. Bank men’s clothing to the U.S., all while paying the Haitians who worked to produce those items a minimum wage of $3.09 for an 8-hour day. (That, by the way, represented an increase, amazingly, from $1.72 a day, just a year ago). One news account pointed out that a pin-striped men’s suit produced by a young Haitian woman at the $3.09 wage scale would be shipped stateside to Jos. A. Bank, where it would be sold for $550.

With those kinds of numbers, it’s easy to understand the U.S. concern about the earthquake’s impact in Haiti--not so much for the safety and well-being of the Haitian people, but because the island's highly profitable apparel production has been down by 50-70 percent, since the January 12 earthquake.

I often wonder whether the U.S. really is still holding some sort of strange “grudge” against the Haitian people for having staged their successful slave revolt. Strangely, the U.S. government doesn’t seem to be anywhere near as adamant about deporting its 7-20 million predominantly Latin American illegal immigrants as it seems to be with the Haitians.

In fact, just a week ago, the President, himself, offered high praise for a bi-partisan immigration reform proposal from Democratic Senator Chuck Schumer of New York and Republican Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina. Under the proposal, the U.S. would address its "immigration issue" by “improving border security,” “introducing a new system for admitting temporary workers,” by “issuing biometric ID cards" and (here’s the “kicker”) by “establishing a process for legalizing illegal immigrants currently residing here in the U.S."

According to Schumer and Graham, current "illegals" would be given “legal” status, if they paid any back taxes and fees they owed, if they submitted to background checks, if they completed an English proficiency test and performed “community service.”

Bam! Just like that…they’d become legal U.S. citizens.

While all of this was being worked on, the same Obama administration, right up to the day the earthquake actually struck Haiti, had been engaged in a high-profile initiative to deport 30,299 Haitians out of the United States, even in the wake of last year’s horrendous tropical storm on the island that destroyed 15 percent of the nation’s economy, left 800 dead and tens of thousands homeless.

I wouldn’t want you to get the impression that the Obama administration has been acting in any way inconsistently with U.S. policy toward Haiti. Just the opposite appears to be true. The Bush administration, you may recall, maintained a standing practice of denying entry to this country by Haitian immigrants and turning back Haitian refugees who tried to reach these shores by boat. The new administration has, apparently, simply picked up where George W. Bush left off.

Here’s the question: Does the United States still maintain separate "admission standards" for potential African and black immigrants than it does for other people who are “yearning to be free?”

If so, we really do need to address that, as soon as humanly possible.

Africans continue to be the very highest educated of all immigrant groups admitted to this country, and Haitians, as far as I can tell, have become good and productive citizens, in the main, once they arrive here. Indeed, Mr. Obama and other residents of our third-largest city – Chicago, Illinois – should be especially sensitive to that issue, given that the City, itself, was founded in the late 1700’s by a Haitian of African descent named John Baptist Pointe du Sable.

This whole issue about the egregious treatment of the Haitian people really came to a head for me after I read about the 30 Haitian detainees, including one 25-year old, whose surname is Ulysse, but whose family, ironically, gave him the very pro-American first name, "Reagan."

So, there he is, Reagan Ulysse, sitting in a detention center, waiting to be deported back to Haiti, after having been flown out by military transport “for his own good,” while CNN, Fox, Reuters, and the Washington Post were all watching, 10 weeks ago.

Can you spell "hypocrisy?"

If so, the next time you communicate with Bill Clinton, George Bush or Barack Obama, let them know that you believe U.S. treatment of Haiti has been hypocritical, at best, and, certainly, inhumane.



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For Europe and Africa, It's a Small World, After All.

When I read and listen to the news, now, about the growing prospects for financial collapse by the major European nations, I think back to something my grandmother used to say: “Boy, it’s a small world.”

If we happened to be “downtown” and “ran into" some friends she knew back when the family lived on Union Street in "the Bottom,” and they unexpectedly offered some information on a long-lost relative, she would shake her head, on our way home, and say: “It’s a small world, boy, and don’t you forget it.”

She’d say that all the time.

In my grandmother’s mind, almost everything that happened to any of us was somehow connected to other people in unexpected ways, and those connections were greater and more direct than we realized. She hadn’t read that anywhere. Like so many other things, she just knew it.

In a very related way, over the past 20 years or so, the concept of “Six Degrees of Separation” has been postulated, i.e., that everyone on earth is no more than six steps away from any other person on earth, even though we don't realize it. In fact, the “Six Degrees" concept is now being tested scientifically with some noted success, and has been included as a premise on Internet sites, such as LinkedIn, Facebook, and others. Curiously, it’s also been converted into a parlor game that incorporates the relationships and experiences of Philadelphia-born actor Kevin Bacon. Bacon, by the way, has turned his own connection to the phenomenon into a charitably based social network (http://www.sixdegrees.org/).

But, now, we’re finding that "Six Degrees" is much more than a parlor game. Indeed, the Europeans are being faced with dealing with, both, the concept of a “small world” and another, Biblical concept, “reaping what you sow,” even as you read this.

There is, in fact, strong evidence that one of the largest single factors in the prospective economic collapse of Europe is not simply the financial shenanigans by Goldman Sachs, or each respective country's real estate "bubble," or, even, the greed of their corporate leaders. Instead, in a "Six Degrees" kind of way, the answer lies in an event that was celebrated late last month – the 125th anniversary of the Berlin Conference. That was the event that launched the infamous “Scramble for Africa,” in which a handful of European nations, together with the United States, met in Germany and came away having allocated all of Africa’s land – except Ethiopia and U.S.-controlled Liberia – into 50 nation-states, whose boundaries still exist today.

Up to that point, Europe had grown rich and prosperous from 400 years of capturing, selling and exploiting primarily Western African people through the Trans- Atlantic slave trade. But in the late 1800’s, that despicable industry had become outmoded, no longer cost-effective and, in many places, illegal.

In addition to creating the African colonies, the Berlin Conference also served the purpose of reducing the constant small wars among competing Europeans for African wealth. Over more than a 70-year period, dating back to 1884, Europe was able to continue its growth and global influence in the post- slave-trade world economy. As a result, Europe grew richer and richer and the colonized African nations grew poorer and poorer.

Gold? Africa provided it. Diamonds and platinum? Africa provided them, too. Rubber, petroleum, copper, agricultural products, iron ore, and titanium? Africa, Africa, Africa, and, again, Africa.

In fact, Germany’s loss of its valuable African colonies, including German Southwest Africa, Cameroon and Togo, to the Allies, during World War I, contributed significantly to the tremendous economic hardship experienced by the German people in the 1920’s and 1930’s, leading to social unrest in that country and the rise of the Nazi party, there. The economic desperation in the country and the resulting German nationalistic aggression led to the instigation of World War II.

Fast-forwarding to today, we’re not only recognizing the 125th anniversary of the heinous Berlin Conference, but also the 50th anniversary of the independence of 17 of the previously colonized nations, created, drawn and named, arbitrarily, by the European colonizers, who met in Berlin.

The process of African reclamation that began with the independence movements across the continent in 1960 has led to the outright elimination of free natural resources for former European colonizers or the need for Europe, finally, to pay at least something for those assets. That began the gradual decline of Europe’s comparative global advantage.

I remember being amazed, during my first career in the commercial backing industry, to learn that our bank’s clients that wanted to do business in places such as Nigeria, Uganda and Ghana, were forced to conduct that business through financial intermediaries in London, England, rather than directly through the African countries, themselves.

As a naïve young man, back then, I thought that was peculiar and not very efficient. Now I understand why that situation existed.
Every year since that time, as more and more African nations have won their independence from Europe, the inherent strength of the European economies has continued to weaken.

How do you – if you’re England, France, Belgium or Portugal – replace the diamonds, gold, bauxite, lumber, etc., that had been so easily available through your African colonies?

The fact is that you simply don’t.

And, unless Europe can quickly devise a strategy that will help restore the unfettered access to natural resources it once enjoyed, at Africa’s expense, the short-term outlook for its economic recovery looks bleak, no matter what they report in the Times of London.

How much longer can Europe’s leaders afford to stand by and watch as their economies shrivel and their citizens call for their resignations? How much longer will they be content to see their people marching in the streets, carrying picket signs, demanding jobs, lower taxes and a return to their “old way of life?”

At the same time, while we’re on the subject of "small worlds," there’s a growing issue on the African continent about "integration." No, it’s not the kind of integration you’re thinking about – not the Civil Rights-era “white-only” drinking fountains, dogs and hoses, school busing and whites and blacks in the same classroom thing.

For growing numbers of Africans, "integration" means giving more and more serious consideration to eliminating the old boundaries between what are now 53 African nations that were drawn arbitrarily in the 1800’s by their former European colonizers.

Because not a single indigenous African was invited to participate in the Berlin Conference, those boundaries wound up “lumping together” ethnic groups that had never previously been forced to co-exist, and splitting groups, that did have strong cultural relationships, into two or three separate European-designed countries.

That being the case, New African Magazine informs us that African and African-born leaders, such as Sudanese-born telecommunications mogul Mo Ibrahim, have suggested that African countries, as defined and created for business purposes, by the Europeans 125 years ago, are too small to survive and prosper in today’s world. Like many others, Ibrahim feels that many of those countries' boundaries need to be eliminated and their people "integrated" into fewer, larger, more powerful African nations.

There are two things to watch for in all of this. First, how long can the 450 million Western Europeans, who have already slipped demographically to represent barely 8 percent of the global population, continue to suffer economically without resorting to tactics that can restore their economic stability?

And directly related to that, how long will it take the African people, 125 years after the Berlin Conference and 50 years after their first successful independence efforts, to reorganize themselves into a solid, militarily and economically viable geo-political entity?

As difficult to believe as it may seem at first glance, both issues are directly connected to each other.

It really is a "small world," isn’t it?
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Cultural Property Demands: A Sign of Shifting Global Power

The other day I saw something in the news that reminded me of just how quickly the balance of power is shifting around the world.

The story was about the whole issue of “cultural property,” i.e., stolen or illegally exported cultural objects. The focus of the piece was that the French government was being forced by the Egyptian government to return five, 3200-year-old frescos (or paintings made on fresh plaster) that had been taken from a tomb from the Valley of the Kings in Luxor, Egypt. The frescos had been kept since early in the decade in the Louvre, in Paris, which is arguably, the Western world's most famous and important museum.

The Egyptians had threatened in October to discontinue all relations with the Louvre, if the pieces weren’t promptly returned, and to prohibit future archeological work in Egypt, by the museum.

France understood and, as an indication of its new-found good faith, one of the frescos was returned, personally, to Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak by French President Nicolas Sarkozy.

Up until very recently, and over the better part of the past 500 years or so – a period of history that was absolutely dominated by western Europe and the United States – such a scene would have never taken place. Egypt would never have had the temerity to stand up to one of the Western powers and demand the return of its “cultural property.” And even if it had done so, France, most probably, would have totally ignored the country’s request.

With the growing military and economic power in places such as China, Brazil, India, Venezuela, the Middle East and parts of Africa, there’s evidence of a growing willingness on the part of emerging nations to demand the return of cultural artifacts that had been taken from them over the years as spoils of hundreds of one-sided wars.

Egypt also recently “stepped to” Germany to raise the question of whether a 3500-year-old bust of Queen Nefertiti, taken from their country by a German archeologist in 1912, and now on exhibit at Berlin’s Neues Museum, should also be returned to their northern African country.

It's not just Egypt. Iraq has demanded the return of some of its own cultural property, including the Samarra Islamic antiquities, whose exportation from Iraq and into England had been condoned by none other than Winston Churchill early in the 20th Century, and thousands of other cultural items that were looted during the U.S. invasion of the country in 2003. Now emboldened by having some of the world’s largest oil reserves, the Iraqis have been raising these issues since 1980.

On another front in the same cultural war, a senior Chinese diplomat, Liu Zhenmin, recently said at the United Nations that China is now committed to having its illegally taken cultural relics returned to its possession. Citing looting and plundering during the 1800’s by Western powers, Liu called the continued possession of such Chinese artifacts by the West “a sacrilege to history and civilization.”

The thinking here is that if China, the world’s largest military and economic power (no matter how much the West tries to explain it otherwise) wants its “stuff” back, it will probably be returned.

As an African American, I began to be aware, in my early 20’s, of the importance of having exposure to symbols of my African heritage, including African and African-American artwork, where I lived and where I worked.

It’s why the French, when they’re not busy importing other countries' cultural artifacts, surround themselves with artwork by Delacroix, Rodin, Monet and Matisse. It’s why the Italians make a point of keeping the works of DaVinci, Michelangelo and Raphael prominent in their own environments.

Early on, I found myself drawn to the royal art of Benin, especially the unique bronze sculptures produced by artisans of that southern Nigerian kingdom. Although I don’t consider myself an art collector, I have, over the years, owned several pieces of Benin sculpture, including multi-figured plaques, Oba (king) heads, and statues of leopards, warriors and court musicians, all crafted in bronze.

I’d pick them up at Odunde, at other African festivals, or wherever they were available.
While I loved Benin bronzes, I had also been very much aware of the ugly series of events that introduced these beautiful works of art to the West. In 1897, the British sent a 1500-man army to the country, on what was called the Benin Punitive Expedition, to punish the Oba and his people for their refusal to be subservient to the British, who had claimed control of all of Nigeria in 1884, as part of the infamous Berlin Conference, wherein the European nations “whacked up” all of Africa and allocated pieces to themselves, as colonies.

Equipped with Maxim machine guns, the British decimated the Oba’s 130,000-man army, packed up virtually everything of value in the country, including the “bronzes,” and auctioned them to Western European and U.S. museums. The Oba, himself, was sent into exile.

It’s impossible today to separate the beauty and dignity of the” bronzes” from the brutality and vindictiveness of the British, who literally attempted to eliminate the culture of the Kingdom of Benin during the Expedition.

Clearly, the Benin "bronzes" that most of us common black folks purchase at street festivals are, merely, well-produced replicas made to appear antique, and are not a part of the original spoils of the Punitive Expedition. Not actually having the 100- and 200-year-old originals makes the beauty and significance of the art no less impactful for me. Maybe the Western museums should learn to get more comfortable with the same concept.

As I've watched the Iraqis, Egyptians, Chinese and others begin the process of reclaiming their cultures, I have been equally impressed to see that the Nigerian Minister of Tourism, Culture and National Orientation, Prince Kumbo Kayode, has demanded, in a letter sent originally in September, 2008, that the West’s ill-gotten original bronzes and other original artwork be returned to Nigeria

Those who are familiar with how the original bronzes were dispersed say that about 580 of the pieces are being held at the Ethnologische Museum in Berlin; that another 400 or so are being kept at the Field Museum in Chicago and that, as recently as October 2008, the University of Pennsylvania’s Museum of Archeology presented an exhibition called: “Iyare! Splendor and Tension in Benin’s Palace Theatre,” which featured “nearly 100 objects from the Penn Museum’s world-renowned collection of cast bronzes, carved ivories and wooden artifacts."

Not unexpectedly, the initial response to the Nigerian minister’s request to have his country’s “cultural property” returned was blunt, “ …. directors of four museums (declared) that they have no intention of returning these objects and advising the Nigerians to forget the past and look to the future.”

You’ve got to wonder what would happen if the shoe were on the other foot. If the Nigerians were holding in a museum in their capital city, Abuja, valuable artifacts taken by force by Africans from the court of Henry VIII or the first Queen Elizabeth, would the British be satisfied to be told that they should “forget the past and look to the future?”

Somehow, I don’t think so.

Here, again, though, the very fact that Nigeria is staking its claim to its own culture and demanding the return of its artifacts from the formerly omnipotent Western powers is a sign that something very different really is happening among the world’s nations, that the balance of power really is shifting.

In the midst of everything else that’s going on, please pay special attention to this whole “cultural property” thing. I guarantee there's more to come.

Hey, can you ever look at an archeological museum again without considering its politics?


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Don't Rush to Believe "World Opinion."

Just when you think you’re beginning to understand what’s really going on in the world, you stumble across a new piece of information that allows you to further “connect the dots” and that reminds you, once again, just how misinformed and naïve you actually are.

Happened to me just the other day.

I’ve been going around and around, in my own mind, on the whole issue of Iran and the way in which Western media have tried to paint that country as an outlaw, as non-cooperative, as belligerent and as one that condones “human rights violations.” As part of all of that, every now and then, we’re reminded that Iran and other nations, which with we happen to disagree, suffer from “unfavorable” world opinion.

It’s been clear that the whole point has been to communicate to all of us that Iran’s leaders were not only too irresponsible to have access to nuclear power, they were also probably not suited to run their own country, and that the members of "the world" are in general agreement in that regard.

For awhile, they almost had me – especially when I began to see the news reports about the “secret” nuclear facilities that the Iranians have been operating away from the watchful eyes of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), and the rest of the so-called “world leaders." That brought to mind, again, my nagging curiosity about the Nuclear Proliferation Treaty, which seems to be dragged out only when nations ruled by people of color begin to explore the advantages of creating their own nuclear energy.

If you’re anything like me, you’ve asked yourself, from time to time, why the same “stink” isn’t raised when European nations, or nations controlled by people of European descent, begin to explore their nuclear options. Recently, you’ll recall, it was North Korea that was sharply criticized for having nuclear ambitions, followed, in quick order, by Iran.

A lot of this began to become very clear for me a few weeks ago, when I revisited the United Nations Charter.

You remember the United Nations, don’t you?

That’s the organization that was established, by the Western Powers, in the mid-1940's, to control the political and economic affairs of the world, and to launch joint military initiatives, if necessary, all in the name of world peace.

There are 6.7 billion people on earth and 238 separate nations, and 192 of those nations, or 80.6 percent of them, are members of the U.N. Being a member essentially permits them to sit as delegates to the U.N. General Assembly and to cast votes on resolutions, whenever they’re presented.

There’s another separate, more powerful, body within the U.N., itself, called the Security Council. You remember the scene in George Orwell’s "Animal Farm" when the pig (either Snowball or Napoleon, I can't remember which one) said to the other farm animals that although all animals were created equal “some are more equal than others?” Well, that’s the Security Council.

The Council is comprised of 15 members, 10 of whom are rotating participants with two-year terms. The other five members – and this is where the “more equal than others” part comes in ─ are what are known as “permanent” members." They include the U.S., Britain, France, Russia and China, and each has unilateral veto power. Any single one of the Security Council members can, with their one “no vote,” shut down any proposal that comes across the table from the other 191 members.

At the same time, there happens also to be a small number of nations, under the Nuclear Proliferation Treaty, that are defined as being full-fledged “nuclear weapons states.” Guess who they are….the U.S., Britain, France, Russia, and China, the same countries, coincidentally, that make up the U.N. Security Council.

There are four other nations – India, Pakistan, North Korea and Israel – that have conducted tests and that are believed to have some nuclear capability, but only the Security Council “permanent members” have been identified as full “nuclear weapons states."

So, is this what the game has been all the time? Is becoming a "nuclear weapons state" the price of admission to permanent Security Council status? Is that what you have to do to get your hands on that veto power? Is that what constitutes true world leadership? It seems that you don't necessarily have to be a huge supporter of "world peace" or even agree philosophically with the other Security Council members. All you have to do is have "the bomb" and the means to deliver it, and you are, apparently, in.

No wonder China and Russia are so routinely at odds with their fellow-Security Council member nations--the U.S., France and Britain. No wonder U.N. sanctions against Iran have been so difficult to come by.

I must admit that, in the middle of these high-profile nuclear discussions and reports about how “world leaders” feel about those things, I’ve been just a little confused about who the “world” actually is, and who its leaders are supposed to be, anymore.

You hear in the news that “world opinion” is solidly against Iran or solidly opposed to the Somalians, or is showing signs of impatience with the Nigerians, or now reflects clear frustration with the whole litany of Middle Eastern nations. It makes you scratch your head and wonder who these guys in “the world” actually are.

When the Associated Press, CNN, Fox or the New York Times give us their periodic updates on how the “world” feels, you have to wonder if they’ve remembered that there are increasingly populous and economically powerful African, Asian and Latin American nations in that world? We also have to wonder whether any of those people, from any of those places, have been asked to offer their opinions on the topic of the day?

Apparently, it seems, our media outlets still believe that it’s possible to offer a fair and accurate report of global attitudes while ignoring the input from 85 percent of the world’s population.

Has it ever occurred to them that it may be finally time to include responses from the three billion Asians other than the Chinese, from the one billion Africans, from the 349 million residents of the Middle East, and the 382 million South Americans? Don’t their opinions count?

After all, when you only consider the input of those who represent the interests of the five Security Council members you leave about five billion people on earth without a voice in global affairs, and there are growing signs that the non-Security Council members, those who constitute the rest of the world, are getting a little tired of that arrangement.

Maybe U.S. leaders and the Security Council haven’t been paying enough attention to the fact that political alliances outside of the Council are also being formed among the six Middle Eastern nations, the two South American nations, and four African nations that comprise the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), and that those alliances are finding their way into discussions and relationships on the floor of the U.N. Maybe some of those relationships are behind the talk you hear about restructuring the Security Council, or even the “buzz” about moving U.N. headquarters to a country outside the U.S.

According to one definition, “world opinion” can be identified when there is general consensus among informed and interested individuals around the world, involving major global issues.”

The problem, however, is that many experts doubt that the concept has any true validity. They hold that true “world opinion cannot be measured because there is no single, general framework capable of drawing credible responses" from people in rural areas of emerging and developing nations. What, for example, does the villager in China, or in Zimbabwe or in Colombia really think about Nuclear Proliferation?

Hence, it seems, the “world opinion” we’ve been routinely given on nations, including Iran, Somalia, Nigeria and China, is almost certainly bogus, manufactured to hold onto a rapidly deteriorating status quo and to create political and media advantage.

At some point in the not-too-distant future, we’re going to have to come to grips with the fact that there really is a world beyond Europe, the U. S. and Canada, and that pretending that it doesn’t exist is just not going to “get it” anymore.

I hope it’s not already too late.


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The West Benefits from Negative African News Coverage

If all you knew about Africa grew out of the typical Western news reports, the coverage of President Obama's speech to the Ghanaian Parliament, last month, or his earlier trip to Kenya, you'd hardly suspect that most of Africa's 53 nations actually have thriving, modern cities, with gleaming skyscrapers, contemporary and crowded highway systems, world-class hotels, exceptionally high-level cell phone usage, and attractive residential areas. Neither would you know that they also have sprawling retail complexes with local and globally branded shops and restaurants, and highly educated citizens, who commute back and forth from their workplaces every day, in business attire, much in the same way that some Americans do.

For the Ghana trip, for example, we were shown tight shots of Ghanaians dancing at the airport in traditional garb, as a mildly amused President, and his family, strode unempathetically toward their waiting car. There were the obligatory "stand-ups" being done by CNN's Anderson Cooper, with images of "the bush" in the background.

Even if you watched and listened very closely, and read every word about the speech, and the news event at Cape Coast Castle and Dungeon, you'd be hard-pressed to know that Ghana's capital city, Accra, where the so-called "tough love speech" was actually delivered, is a wealthy, modern city of 1.6 million people. By comparison, Philadelphia is a city of just 1.4 million persons.

Who knew?

During the President's 2006 trip to Kenya, purportedly to visit his father's family (the side of the family that was not featured in the campaign commercials), the BBC coverage included his visit to Wajir, in northeastern Kenya, which the BBC described as Obama's "slum tour," pointing out that the President-to-be was actually walking through "rubbish and sewage as he toured Kibera, the slum home to at least 600,000 people, many without jobs...."

You got no impression that Kenya's capital city, Nairobi, with 2.8 million people, would be tied with Chicago as the third-largest city in the U.S., if it were moved, somehow, to North America. In fact, when Obama visited Nairobi during that same Kenya visit, according to MSNBC, he also made a point of visiting that city's "slum."

I don't seem to recall similar "slum visits" during the President's visits to Russia, Turkey, The U.K. or Italy. Why, in Africa?

Who would be able to tell from the slanted news coverage that Kenya has an 85.1 percent literacy rate (90.6% for males), or that a report early this year disclosed that about 14 percent of U.S. adults -- strikingly similar to the Kenyan average-- also cannot read? Instead, we get never-ending photos of Maasai tribesmen (who, by the way, constitute just 1.7% of the country's population), more images from "the bush."

Who knew, from the way Western media still cover Africa -- during Presidential visits and every other day -- that Lagos, in Nigeria, is a city of more than 8 million people, about the same size as America's largest city, New York, or that another Nigerian city, Kano, has 3.2 million residents?

Who would suspect that Kinshasa, the capital of the Congo, has 6.3 million people, that Tanzania's capital, Dar Es Salaam, is the home to 2.7 million persons, that the city of Luanda, in Angola, also has 2.8 million residents, or that Khartoum, the capital of Sudan, a country from which only negative news stories seem to flow, now, is actually a city of 2 million people?

Did Western media inform us, during Obama’s visit, that the U.S. is trying to keep pace with Russia, China and India in taking a heightened interest in Ghana, since the recent discovery of more than one billion barrels of new oil reserves in that country, or that we're also especially interested in Ghana's two largest, current exports, cocoa and gold, or that, in 2007, gold contributed 31 percent of Ghana's foreign exchange earnings? Especially given the declining, underlying values of Western currencies, gold is experiencing an exponential increase in valuations. It's also becoming clear that China may be attempting to "corner" the global market for gold, having recently increased its gold reserves to 1,054 metric tons.

No, this wasn't a courtesy trip to Ghana, by Mr. Obama, and, given their growing, potential economic importance to the U.S., the Ghanaians should not have been spoken to, by your President, as if they were disobedient third-graders, or with the tone that the President usually reserves for African-American males on Father's Day.

Interestingly, this entire approach to Africa actually dates back to the West's 500-year-long need to morally "justify" African slavery. Fundamental to the slavers’ ability to sleep at night and to explain their very un-Christian, and certainly inhumane, treatment of black people during that era, was the carefully orchestrated theme that, even though the Africans were being taken into bondage, they were also, in a perverse way, being "civilized." They were being given a more "civilized" religion, a more "civilized" language and being introduced to a more "civilized" standard for clothing and housing. In the long run, as the story went, slavery was, in many ways, the best thing that ever happened to the indigenous Africans. They just didn't fully recognize it at the time. After all, who would actually choose to remain in a place as "savage," "primitive," and "miserable" as Africa?

That was the "party line," anyway, notwithstanding the fact that, since the late 15th century, thousands of Europeans actually left their own homes, traveled to Africa and, forcibly, took possession of the land, and control of the people. Curiously, the colonizers apparently liked it so much that most never left, seriously contradicting the "official" story that Africa was such a horrible place that no one in their right mind would ever want to stay there.

That story, apparently, served as an effective cover for slavery, and for the exploitation of agricultural and natural resources, such as diamonds, bauxite, and, recently, coltan-- that indispensable component for the manufacture of cell phones, video games and laptop computers, 80 percent of whose world-wide supply just happens to be found in the Congo. Accordingly, there is substantial evidence that the "tribal conflicts" in Africa, that are so widely reported in Western media are actually instigated, funded and sustained by the very Western powers that happen to have vested interests in Africa's abundant wealth.

In fact, a review of stories from news agencies about Africa, published in the Daily Graphic and Ghanaian Times (Ghana's two largest daily newspapers), disclosed that out of 543 stories published from May to July 2006, 13 percent came from Ghanaian news agencies, 64 percent from the BBC, with the remaining 23 percent from other agencies.

A December 2000 report about African-focused news coverage, by the New York Times and the Washington Post, found that the vast majority of news stories about Africa in those publications were confined to just three categories -- Aids, development and conflict. There were "no reports on regional economic or political cooperation in Africa, not one article on the private sector." Not surprisingly, in May 2005, former African heads of state met at Boston University to discuss the ongoing negative reporting on Africa. They concluded that it was imperative that African nations develop a set of strategies to counter the negative media portrayal of Africa, including the development of alternative media, and a multimedia campaign to counter Africa's negative image in the Western press.

We need to be cognizant of how this has always worked, and still works, to our detriment. We also need to challenge our President to stop taking the obligatory Colonial-themed tours when he visits Africa and, perhaps, most importantly, where Africa is concerned, we need to stop "believing the hype."



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English Language Signs At Iranian Demonstrations A Dead Give-Away

If I had been smart enough to become a neurosurgeon, you would have to believe me, if I told you that the organ inside your skull cavity was your brain. If I had been talented enough to become a soul food chef, you’d have to believe me, if I told you that the piece of meat in your “greens” was a ham hock. But no, I went to school for marketing and journalism and chose to do strategic communications. That being the case, I can recognize “good PR” and “bad PR” a mile away.

In my opinion, what’s going on right now in Iran, related to the election results, between Mr. Ahmadinejad and Mr. Mousavi, is a bad PR campaign, and whoever is responsible for it should be replaced, immediately.

Clearly, somebody, somewhere, is doing more than simply reporting the news, they're managing a huge public relations campaign to convince people in the U.S. and in Europe that the Iranian presidential election was "rigged." While I have traveled to the Middle East, to Israel and to the West Bank, I have never actually set foot in Iran, itself. So, like virtually all of us, I have to take someone else’s word, if I want to understand what’s happening there, on the ground.

Perhaps the most blatant example of "bad PR," to me, is the fact that, in virtually every demonstration scene, we see protesters holding up signs expressing their outrage about the Iranian election. I can clearly understand that. I’ve been involved in a few protests, myself, over the years, and I know that that’s what protesters do – they carry signs.

The thing that throws me off about the photos and video images we’ve seen from Iran, however, is that many of the protesters are holding up signs that are printed – in English.

Some of the signs say: “God bless humanity.” Others have said: “We want democracy.” I saw one, held by a young man in a brown tee shirt, that read: “We lost our work. We need protection. We want to return.” There was even an Iranian, English sign-carrying protester on the front page of the Philadelphia Inquirer last week.

The curious thing about those signs is that, according to every source that I’ve checked, virtually no one in Iran is an English speaker. In fact, 58 percent of Iranians speak Persian or a Persian dialect, 26 percent speak Turkic or a related dialect, 9 percent speak Kurdish, 2 percent Luri, another 3 percent either Balochi, Arabic or Turkish. And the remaining 2 percent speak some “other language.”

That certainly raises the question: if English is so rarely spoken or read in the country, who are the "protesters" trying to influence with the English - language signs?

When we see old news accounts of 1963's March on Washington, each Black History Month and each Martin Luther King's Day, you see a great number of white, neatly printed, mass-produced signs carried by the demonstrators. Not one, however, that I recall, was ever written or printed in a foreign language – no French, no Portuguese, no Amharic(Ethiopian), no Chinese and, certainly, no Farsi/Persian, the language of most Iranians.

For perfectly good reasons, foreign-language signs were not used when we were trying to address the negative treatment of black folks, here in this country.

So, what’s the real reason why CNN, MSNBC, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and other mainstream media outlets are all so rabid about the election results in someone else’s country, and why are the signs being printed so that their reporters and their audiences can understand them?

Haven't we had our share of disputed presidential elections, right here? As I recall, after a hard-fought campaign, in the Year 2000, Al Gore initially wound up with the most "popular votes" for president, i.e., more Americans voted for Gore than for George W. Bush. Somehow, despite how Americans actually voted, George Bush eventually won the mysteriously calculated “electoral vote” and was named President of the United States, more than a month after the polls closed that November.

There was evidence of black voter disenfranchisement in several states, even the threat, by Jesse Jackson, of a “civil rights explosion," but, as I recall, not a single protestor was seen carrying a sign printed in a foreign language.

Back in Iran, the mobs of people who are opposed to the country’s official election results have been readily recognizable because they’ve been encouraged, or paid, to wear bright green shirts, hats, scarves, and banners, when they go to the streets.

Somehow, someone working for Mr. Mousavi, the candidate supported by the West, even arranged to have the Iranian World Cup Soccer team, during a qualifying match in South Korea, last week, wear special wrist bands printed in Mousavi’s green logo colors. At the same soccer match, Iranian “fans” staged small protests outside the stadium, held up a banner that said, again in English, the language that most Iranians don’t speak, “Go to hell, Dictator,” and carried the most popular of all the omnipresent English-language signs, “Where is my vote?” Some even carried Iranian flags, on which the words “Free Iran” were printed, also in English.

It's obvious that the people who are “packaging” Mr. Mousavi, creating his green-branded campaign and making sure his English-language signs are shipped out to demonstrators, in Tehran and around the world, aren’t really trying to have a dialogue with the Iranian people, at all. It seems, instead, that they are trying to convince us, right here in Philadelphia, in New York City, in Dallas, Texas, and in Los Angeles, that Mr. Ahmadinejad is the “bad guy” and that Mr. Mousavi, the “pro-Western,” "reform candidate," is the “good guy” and the best man to be president of Iran.

What business is any of this of ours?

Maybe it’s all as simple as was explained by U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, in 2000, when she said: “In 1953, the United States played a significant role in orchestrating the overthrow of Iran’s popular Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh. The Eisenhower administration believed its actions were justified for strategic reasons, but the coup was clearly a setback for Iran’s political development. And, it is easy to see now why many Iranians continue to resent this intervention by America into their internal affairs.”

Maybe it’s as simple as John Perkins explained in his 2004 New York Times best seller: “Confessions of An Economic Hit Man.”

In trying to regain control of Iran’s nationalized oil reserves, Perkins wrote, the U.S. sent CIA agent Kermit Roosevelt to the country. He won some Iranian “people over through payoffs and threats. He then enlisted them to organize a series of street riots and violent demonstrations, which created the impression that Mossadegh (the Iranian Prime Minister, at the time) was both unpopular and inept.”

Sounds strangely familiar, huh?

From where I sit, if this is all just a continuation of the U.S.’s on-going strategic pursuit of oil reserves, and the political control to ensure that, then, in the interest of “transparency,” somebody in our government should simply say so.

With the price of gas at the pump returning to $3 a gallon, recently, the American people will understand. They may not necessarily like it, but they will certainly understand.

Maybe, then, we can get away from the 24/7 daily onslaught of contrived demonstrations, green logos, hats and tee-shirts, and signs, curiously and clumsily, printed in English, carried by people 6,500 miles away.

Like I said, I know good PR when I see it, and this ain't it.



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The Global Collapse of the “Artificial Hierarchy of Race”

If you listened carefully, over the past few months, you could plainly hear loud, crashing sounds coming from the meetings of world leaders, at organizations such as the G-20 , the economic gathering of the largest developed and developing nations, together with the 27 members of the European Union; NATO ,The North Atlantic Treaty Organization, comprised of European nations, Turkey and the United States, and the OAS, the Organization of American States ,comprised of 35 Western Hemisphere countries with “democratically elected leaders."


Those crashing sounds could be traced to the collapse of the "artificial hierarchy of race" that has existed around the world for more than 500 years.

Those rankings, by racial and ethnic categories, and developed by politically influenced "social scientists," were created to justify colonialism and the subjugation of people of color, wherever on earth they were found. Indeed, the ranking with which we are all familiar, by now, always placed whites at the top of the global, racial pecking order, followed by Asians, who were followed by Middle Easterners, who were followed by northern and southern Native Americans. Blacks, without fail, were placed at the very bottom of the totem pole.


There has always been a need to create a "valid" scientific basis for the concept of global European supremacy upon which the world economy has been based for the past 500 years. How else could good, God-fearing explorers and colonials, who paid lip service to concepts such as "all men being created equal," turn immediately around and approve a 20-year continuance of slave importation as part of the final, signed, draft of the U.S. Constitution? How else did they justify attributing "3/5 of a person" status to enslaved blacks for purposes of electoral representation?

Most of this thinking traces back to the 15th and 16th centuries, when the "Great European Explorers," whose nations, at the time, were the undisputed "lords of the sea," and the unquestioned economic and military leaders of the known world, set out to subdue, "civilize" and generate wealth from people who were already living, and doing quite well, in places such as North and South America, Asia and Africa.


Because Europe and, subsequently, the U.S., had access to the wealth drawn from these nations, and the military strength to retain it, this system continued in effect for the better part of 500 years.

To fully understand this scenario, special notice must be given to the Berlin Conference in 1884, wherein the major, European nations, led especially by then-dominant powers, Britain, France and Germany, met to devise an outrageous plan by which they would attack, subdue and colonize the entirety of the African Continent. Of course, the same "artificial racial hierarchy" was at the basis of all that occurred over the ensuing 25-year-period when this all took place.
Similar actions had previously taken place in Asia, North and South America.

At the conclusion of World War II, the so-called "Allied Nations," led overwhelmingly by Great Britain and the United States, met at the Bretton Woods Conference, in New Hampshire, where they not only established the U.S. dollar as the standard currency for world trade, but also put into place the economic framework which grew to produce the World Bank, the IMF and much of the underpinnings of the United Nations.

Throughout all of this, of course, the absolute belief in the "artificial hierarchy of race" was virtually never questioned.

During the “hey day” of the Roman Empire, few had the temerity to question the Caesars about very much of anything, and certainly not about why the people in most subject nations were strongly encouraged to speak Latin.

Similarly, during the period when the "Sun Never Set on the British Empire," most nations were absolutely terrified of Britain and few ever questioned its leadership. That role, as undisputed world leader, was, of course, assumed by the U.S after World War II

It's clear that a globally powerful military and a strong and stable economy, produce a wide range of subtle, and not-so-subtle, benefits for the citizens of a powerful nation.

"Whether we like it or not, in every corner of the planet, (whites) enjoy an extraordinary personal power bestowed by color. It is something (they) are largely oblivious of, and consequently take for granted, whether (they) are liberal or reactionary, backpackers, tourists or expatriate businessmen," said Martin Jacques, of the London School of Economics, in 2003.

"Being white," continued Jacques, "confers a privilege, a special kind of deference, throughout the world....whites are the only race that never suffers any kind of systemic racism anywhere in the world."

But, if you've been paying careful attention, you know that all of this is starting to change significantly, which will produce what appears to be an entirely "new world order," one that is likely to remain in effect over the next five hundred years.

The absolute unwillingness of the European nations to join the U.S. in expanding its military presence in Afghanistan; Hugo Chavez' "gift book" to President Obama; China's continuing efforts to replace the U.S. dollar as the standard currency for international trade; the growing weakness of the U.S. economy and military; the ever-more-critical comments about the U.S. and European leadership by Iran's Ahmadinejad and Brazilean president, Lula ─ all of these things point to a declining ability by Europe and the U.S. to define the parameters for future, global economic and cultural activities or, even, to continue to unilaterally draft their own versions of world history.

Curiously, even while the president of the United States still insists that there has been an emergence, in our country, of a "post-racial society," there have been pointed comments, flowing out of China, Iran, Brazil and Venezuela, about the global, racial oppression that has long been associated, by developing nations, with the U.S. and Europe. Interestingly, the U.S. decision to "boycott" the U.N. Conference on Racism sent a message that the country is not yet willing to face the changing, global, racial landscape, head-on.

And, now, the relationships between and among Western nations and "nations of color" are starting to shift.

If you think I'm kidding, take a look at what Courtney Rattray, Jamaica's ambassador to China said, for the record, when China signed a $138 million loan package with the economically desperate island nation. "The loan couldn't have come more on time and on more preferred terms," he said. Rattray went on to say that the economically challenged, and militarily less-imposing, Western powers, including the U.S., "don't have such an indepth understanding of the development aspirations of Jamaica, as does China."

Can you imagine such a loan being made or such a statement being issued 10 years ago?

As China continues to assert itself economically, especially in providing financial assistance to other nations, it's going to be interesting to watch how the 500-year-old concept of European/Western global supremacy, holds up.

It's also going to be interesting to see if people will continue, now that the economic and military paradigm has begun to shift, to aspire to European cultural standards.

Will African Americans continue, for example, to be so anxious to claim their "partial European heritage,” or will they begin to look for Chinese, Japanese and Mayan links in their genetic profiles?

From a pure, political perspective, I have absolutely no rooting interest in any of this, one way or the other.

It's just going to be extraordinarily interesting to see if our primary and secondary schools and universities, for example, will begin to offer fewer readings from Shakespeare and more from, and about, Miyamoto Musashi, Simon Bolivar and Chinua Achebe.

Will it be less important to know how to speak the "Kings English," or to be proficient in Arabic,
Swahili and Mandarin?

We'll just have to see.

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If Africans Are So Much Smarter Than Everybody Else, Why Are We Deporting Them?

Dating back to Thomas Jefferson, there has always been a segment of American political and government leadership that has been strongly involved in wanting to deport free Africans in this country back to Africa.

In 1816, the American Colonization Society was formed, including “founding fathers” such as Henry Clay, Daniel Webster, James Madison and Francis Scott Key. Their mission: To move blacks outside the U.S. and back to Africa, if need be, to insure the continuing quality of life for white Americans, among other things.

You know the old saying: “You don’t have to go home, but you have to leave here?” That could have been first said by the members of the American Colonization Society, an organization that was instrumental in establishing the nation of Liberia on Africa’s West Coast, in 1821, as a place to which to send former U.S. slaves. They wound up sending about 15,000 blacks from the U.S. to that location, according to most estimates.

From a close scan of recent news accounts, things haven’t changed all that much, in 2009, and there are still people high up in the U.S. government who maintain an irrational commitment to sending black people out of this country and back to Africa – even though there is substantial evidence that the Africans happen to be some of the most well-educated, socially well-adjusted people in America.

Why did I use the word “irrational?”

Let’s start with the fact that while the Obama administration still seems committed to the President’s campaign pledges to create a convenient path to citizenship for the 12-20 million Latin American and Mexican illegal immigrants in this country, the same government seems absolutely intent on implementing policies that call for the outright deportation of Africans and black Caribbeans, who have immigrated into the country in far fewer numbers.

In fact, the U.S. government, following the signing of an order of “delayed enforced departures” by George W. Bush in 2007, has recently informed about 14,000 Liberians, who fled the 14-year-long civil war in their country, that, as of March 31, 2009, they should be prepared to be deported back to Africa. It doesn’t matter if they’re gainfully employed, it doesn’t matter if they’ve been absolute model citizens, it doesn’t matter if their children have been born in this country and are now citizens, the parents have to go.

If we dig a little deeper, we find that the French news service, Agence France Presse(AFP), reported last week that the U.S. is also moving closer to carrying out deportation orders for more than 30,000 black Haitians. Of that number, according to AFP, nearly six hundred have already been placed in detention centers or on electronic monitoring devices, in preparation for their shipment back to their island nation.

According to the same news source, when non-black Cubans arrive in Miami, by comparison, they are immediately “given the right to stay and work and a blanket, red-carpet treatment.”
There was also a report last week that 65 Nigerians – 59 males and six females - had been recently deported from the U.S. Some had been accused of having committed crimes such as robbery, fraud, and overstaying their visas. Others, however, were shipped out of the “good old U.S.A.” for allegedly “blaring their car horns,” “playing of music loud” and for “overspeeding.”

Even closer to home, on this whole topic, is the current situation involving the President’s father’s half-sister, a Kenyan national named Zeituni Onyango, who escorted her son from her homeland to a Boston-based university, where he had been admitted as a student and, subsequently, sought political asylum in the city, in 2004, in an attempt to escape violence, back in Kenya. A federal immigration judge rejected Ms. Onyango’s petition and ordered her to leave the country, at once.

Commenting, during the recent presidential campaign, on the situation impacting the woman he referred to as “Auntie Zeituni” in his memoir “Dreams from My Father,” then-Senator Obama had his spokespeople say that he had no knowledge of his aunt’s status, but that he “obviously believes that any and all appropriate laws should be followed.”

By “appropriate laws,” did he mean his aunt should be kicked out of the country along with the other Africans? Sounds like it. Couldn’t the presidential candidate have checked
on his aunt’s “status” with a simple phone call? Seems as though he could have.

How can 12-20 million illegal Mexican immigrants live here with virtually the full support of the U.S. government, while at the same time, a single Kenyan woman, who is a part-time health advocate, and a computer programmer, be given a dismissive deportation sentence by a federal judge?

What had she done that 20 million Mexican “illegals” have not already done? The most disturbing and contradictory point of this whole comparison can be found in the words of Ms. Onyango’s own nephew, Mr. Obama, who said, in a March 2007 interview with Larry King on CNN: “We have to recognize that we’ve got 12 million undocumented workers who are already here, many of them living their lives alongside other Americans. Their kids are going to school, many of the kids, in fact, were born in this country and are citizens… it is absolutely vital that we give them the opportunity to travel a pathway to citizenship.”

Sounds like a very reasonable explanation for why the U.S. has made no significant move to deport millions of Mexican illegal aliens, to date. But why doesn’t that same logic apply to Liberians, to Nigerians, to Haitians and to other black immigrants?

It can’t be because the “powers that be” don’t believe that Africans fit the profile of “hard working, loyal, intelligent and desirable” that is generally used to describe Western European and Asian immigrants. That can’t be it.

Know why it can’t be? Because, according to the 2000 U.S. Census, and the Journal of Blacks in Higher Education, African immigrants to the U.S. were found more likely to be college-educated than any other immigrant group, including those from Europe, and other parts of North American and Asia.

The same data revealed that African immigrants to the U.S. are also more highly educated than any native-born ethnic group, including whites and African Americans. The fact is that 48.9 percent of all African immigrants in the U.S. hold a college degree, slightly more than Asian Americans(44.3%), and nearly double the rate of native-born whites.

In addition, 19.4 percent of adult Africans in the U.S. hold a graduate degree, compared to 8.1 percent of adult whites.

So, it doesn’t make sense at all.

While we’re on the subject, the incredible educational attainment of African immigrants also sends a stark message that there is absolutely nothing in the genetic make-up of blacks that should cause us to be experiencing 49 percent drop-out rates in largely black-populated public schools across the country.

It’s clear that black people have no less inherent potential to be educated than any other race or ethnic group.

At the same time, there does seem to be something wrong with the way in which we have been educating our young people – especially in urban centers. The academic achievement of indigenous Africans makes that point, emphatically.

Since the establishment of Liberia in 1821, the U.S. has been engaged in the practice of deporting free Africans.

It seems that it’s a habit that’s difficult to break or to rationally explain.


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