Next Week, Will Black Voters In South Carolina Pay Attention To Michelle Alexander-- Or Gregory Meeks?

Corey Robin, a political science professor at Brooklyn College, wrote a phenomenal book I read some years ago-- and talked a lot about here at DWT-- The Reactionary Mind. Musing aloud last month for Salon, Robin let his readers know what Bill and Hillary Clinton mean to him: "Sister Souljah, welfare reform, Ricky Ray Rector and the crime bill." Yeah, not a fan. If that video up top moved you at all, The Clintons’ sordid race game: No one will say it, but the Clintons’ rise was premised on repudiating black voters is a must-read. Especially if you're considering voting for Hillary, who brings with her lessons she learned while First Lady of Arkansas, "namely, that in the face of white reactionary intransigence, the best thing to do is nip and tuck, compromise, conciliate, mollify, appease. In other words, be a Clinton. And not a Sanders... Or a Lincoln."

Many of the liberal journalists who are supporting Hillary Clinton’s candidacy are too young to remember what the Clintons did to American politics and the Democratic Party in the 1990s. But even journalists who are old enough seem to have forgotten just how much the Clintons’ national ascendancy was premised on the repudiation of black voters and black interests. This was a move that was both inspired and applauded by a small but influential group of Beltway journalists and party strategists, who believed making the Democrats a white middle-class party was the only path back to the White House after wandering for 12 years in the Republican wilderness.

...Hillary Clinton in 1996 resorted to the worst sort of animal imagery to describe teenage criminals:


Some might prefer to call her pals like Kissinger or the Goldman crew "super-predators"

They are not just gangs of kids anymore. They are often the kinds of kids that are called ‘super-predators.’ No conscience, no empathy. We can talk about why they ended up that way but first we have to bring them to heel.

As one wag said on Facebook the other night—in response to the question “Bring them to heel? Who says that shit out loud?”-- “Dog trainers.”

What’s more, white people got the message: According to polls, white voters were more familiar with Clinton’s attack on Sister Souljah than they were with his economic plan. So did black people: Though they voted for Clinton, their share of the total voter turnout fell by 20 percent from 1988, when they cast their ballots for Michael Dukakis (and accounted for 20 percent of the vote for him and 10 percent of total turnout), and 1992, when they cast their ballots for Clinton (and accounted for 15 percent of the vote for him and 8 percent of total turnout).

[Clinton pollster Stanley] Greenberg, for his part, celebrated all these changes in an influential book, arguing that this recalibrated focus “allowed for a Democratic Party that could once again represent people in the broadest sense.” It doesn’t take a close reader to know what that “people in the broadest sense” looked like.

This is what the Clintons were to millions of voters. This is what they will always be to me.

And not just me. As Michelle Alexander, author of The New Jim Crow, which helped galvanize the movement against mass incarceration in this country, posted on Facebook on Thursday night:

If anyone doubts that the mainstream media fails to tell the truth about our political system (and its true winners and losers), the spectacle of large majorities of black folks supporting Hillary Clinton in the primary races ought to be proof enough. I can’t believe Hillary would be coasting into the primaries with her current margin of black support if most people knew how much damage the Clintons have done-- the millions of families that were destroyed the last time they were in the White House thanks to their boastful embrace of the mass incarceration machine and their total capitulation to the right-wing narrative on race, crime, welfare and taxes. There’s so much more to say on this topic and it’s a shame that more people aren’t saying it. I think it’s time we have that conversation.

Black Agenda Radio editor Brace Dixon: "Bill Clinton offered a half-hearted 'apology' for his 1990s crime bills, which he admitted 'set the stage' for state and federal governments to nearly double the US prison population.

[H]ow come Bill Clinton, fifteen years out of office chose this week to publicly admit that black mass incarceration was maybe not the best public policy?

The short answer is that Hillary Clinton is running for president, and she needs that big black vote. Barack and Bill are working hard to position Hillary as the lesser evil, so that a large black vote, an essential component of what Democratic party consultants call their “base vote” can be mobilized for her.

We shouldn't forget however that despite the posturing of former presidents, that mass black incarceration has been the joint and bipartisan policy of both Republicans and Democrats.

The federal prison budget rose every year but one in the Clinton years, the Bush years, and so far the Obama years look about the same. The First Black President approved new federal supermax solitary prisons in places like Illinois, where citizen action closed the infamous Tamms penitentiary, and his Justice Department went to court to keep thousands who should have been freed when Congress relaxed the crack to powder sentence disparity from 100 to on to 17 to 1 behind the walls to this day.

Why? Why is black mass incarceration the bipartisan policy of America's rulers?

...The America prison state came into fullest flower at the same time as and as the flip side of Bill and Hillary Clinton's so-called “welfare reform.” Whether Republicans or Democrats are in office black mass incarceration serves the vital purpose of morally justifying America's viciously unequal and racist economic and social order. The prison state does this by creating mostly black and brown class of permanently stigmatized and “unworthy” poor who can be portrayed as not deserving decent housing, real educations, affordable health care, dignity or jobs at living wages and whose precarious lives and devastated communities can be blamed on anything except the failure of neoliberal capitalism to provide bread, education, housing dignity or justice.

The more unjust and unequal capitalist America becomes, the more it needs prisons, and that stigmatized class defined by them. Their precarious lives are also a standing lesson to millions more with falling wages and rising debts to shut up and suck it up or this could be you.

Lesser of two evil... it's all she's got to offer besides the fact that America still hasn't had a woman president. But the lesser of two evils is still evil and-- in any case-- is something to be thought about when she faces Trumpf, Cruz, Rubio or Ryan, not now when there's is a non-evil choice. She's running a misleading ad in South Carolina mocking Bernie. I wish DWT had enough money to send the graphic below to every voter in the state. By the way, if you click on this link you can contribute to Bernie's campaign through ActBlue.

The School-To-Prison Pipeline

All my school teacher friends are back at work now. Many sound as excited and optimistic as their charges do. M pal Roland spent a whole day over the weekend at a teacher supply store buying stuff for his kids. He said they're an especially wonderful group this year… but he says that every year. And he means it every year. He already broke my heart with one story though. One of his kids, a little boy living with a foster family, seems tightly wound and ready to fight. I think he's 7 or 8. His dad's in prison, which has got to be hard on a kid that age. And his mother shot him in the back with a shot gun. Yeah-- she tried to kill him. Ever experience rejection? The skin on his back is all torn up-- and so is his young mind. She's in prison too. So how's Roland going to teach him?

Writing yesterday for Bruce Dixon's Black Agenda Report, Solomon Comissiong asked, provocatively, if Black children can survive an educational system whose chief purpose is to destroy minds.

The United States’ system of public education is one of the most unequal institutions in a profoundly unequal society. Students from socially and economically neglected communities routinely face educational challenges associated with inflated classroom sizes, severely underfunded schools, dilapidated school infrastructure and a disproportionate array of under-qualified teachers-- often supplied by gimmicky organizations like Teach for America. Conversely, many of the ardent and qualified teachers within these communities are under-supported and often find themselves under constant attack by a relentless charter school scam.

A disproportionate number of students from economically impoverished areas are of color. Many students are fed directly into the voracious mouth of the United States’ prison system. The school-to-prison pipeline has a penchant for youth of color. US society has a long, tainted reputation of profiting from the exploitation of people of color. Whether it was the theft of indigenous land or the evil institution of chattel slavery, Euro-American society has a wretched history of terrorizing people of color.

Unity against the scourge of poverty and capitalism is important; however all poverty is simply not equal. Impoverished white communities ultimately have their white skin to shield them from the societal plagues of institutional racism and white supremacy. For example, white parents do not have to deal with incessant police terror and brutality. Despite the fact that Africans/blacks, Euro-Americans/whites and Latinos use drugs at roughly the same levels, it is the communities of color that are subjected to a draconian police state and vastly disproportionate rates of incarceration.

It is true that capitalism is a disease that negatively impacts impoverished people from all backgrounds. However, capitalism, coupled with white supremacy, has committed genocide on people of color throughout the globe. Like two evil comic book villains, chattel slavery went hand and glove with capitalism. Capitalism helped sustain the African slave trade and it was chattel slavery that helped give birth to the US industrial revolution. Plain and simple, capitalism is riddled with racism. Poor whites have not had to deal with this consistent persecution people of color face-- regardless of the socioeconomic status. If you are an African/black person in this country you are profiled on the basis of your skin color, not your bank account.



These harsh realities are lessons African/black parents must teach their children. Simply put, they are rules for survival. In the United States you can lose your life merely for being African/black. Michael Brown, Eric Garner, and Renisha McBride are three of myriad recent examples. They lost their lives due to the fact that they were African/black within a vicious white settler colony.

As if worrying about your children being profiled and brutalized by the police were not enough, parents of color often worry about the impact the United States’ educational system will bear on their impressionable children. The United States’ system of policing has a vicious habit of destroying African/black lives; the US educational system habitually destroys minds.

The United States is a society awash in false propaganda, indoctrination and revisionist “history.” Most Americans have been unwittingly victimized by a system that instructs them to hate the oppressed and love those carrying out the evil act of oppressing. They have been taught to extol that which is loathsome. From Christopher Columbus to Ronald Reagan, Americans mindlessly celebrate these kinds of nefarious characters by naming holidays, monuments and airports in their honor. If the legendary football coach of Penn State, Joe Paterno, can have his statue torn down (rightfully so) by that school’s officials for not coming forward to report the crimes of a pedophile on his coaching staff, then how can there exist a US holiday celebrating the life of Columbus-- a man who murdered and mutilated countless indigenous children? That was a bit of a rhetorical query, however the answer rests on the foundation that the US is a quagmire of hypocrisy. Despite the fact that Christopher Columbus began the genocide against the native men, women and children of the Americas, he is force-fed to children throughout the US.

No child should be taught to think of Columbus as anything but a monster, however it is even more insidious that youth of color are indoctrinated with lies that paint his ilk as noble human beings. It should be considered mental cruelty to brainwash African/black students to revere slave masters like George Washington and Thomas Jefferson as “Founding Fathers.” These reprehensible hypocrites, who spoke of “liberty” for all men, clearly did not intend for that message to carry over to anyone who was non-white. The shiftless slaveholding class framed the US Constitution explicitly for white people. There should be little doubt that the African/black youth of today would have been held captive as slaves if they were anywhere within the vicinity of those “Founding Fathers’” plantations.

Despite the sick and twisted nature of this kind of education (mental programming), many Americans see nothing wrong with it because they, too, were indoctrinated in the same manner. They are completely oblivious to the crimes against humanity perpetrated by numerous Euro-American historical icons. Allowing the truth to be told within America’s public school system would unmask the true nature of what the United States was founded upon, and in the process, explain why myriad injustices continue to fester throughout its manufactured borders.

Any parent (regardless of cultural background) knowledgeable of the above-mentioned facts, who has their humanity intact, would understandably be concerned about the prospects of these white supremacist narratives invading their children’s mental space.  However, that level of concern is elevated several notches in regard to African/black parents. This is one of the reasons more and more African/black parents are turning to homeschooling as an alternative to what passes for education in the United States. However, not all parents can afford to homeschool their children.

This is where community homeschooling can be rather useful. This would enable parents to collectively homeschool neighborhood children on a rotating basis, without everyone taking the entire week off from work. Another alternative is for communities to create afterschool/weekend neighborhood children’s history collectives where a much more balanced, culturally relevant and honest approach to history is taken. There is a children’s history and theater company in Washington DC called, “Mass Emphasis,” that, in my estimation, is one of the best. Mass Emphasis is a paragon within this realm. Parents are engaged and involved. Historian, veteran organizer and playwright, Obi Egbuna, Jr., teaches the children comprehensive African history and politics.

In order to better educate our children, we must re-educate ourselves. Books like Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States, James Loewen’s, Lies My Teacher Told Me, and John Henrik Clarke’s, Christopher Columbus and the African Holocaust: Slavery and the Rise of European Capitalism, are good points of departure along that lifetime quest for knowledge and truth. The more we know, the more we can teach others, as we build a movement towards a more humane and equitable society.

Until we are able to collectively change the dynamics of public education within our own communities, we must create viable alternatives to counter the mentally deleterious themes that pollute institutional education, and to make up the growing deficit in subjects like history, politics, social studies and geography. We must create the spaces in which children are taught to admire, not the warmongers, slavemasters and profiteers, but people who fought for peace, human rights, justice and equity.

We Still Have Police Brutality? In America?

Over the weekend, Jonathan Martin, writing for the NY Times postulated that because control of the Senate will be largely determined by the ability of Democrats to hold or win 4 southern states that were won by Romney with substantial margins-- Arkansas, North Carolina, Louisiana and Georgia-- there is a major effort to mobilize African-American votersbased, in part, on the police brutality and racism in Ferguson, Missouri.

In black churches and on black talk radio, African-American civic leaders have begun invoking the death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, along with conservative calls to impeach Mr. Obama, as they urge black voters to channel their anger by voting Democratic in the midterm elections, in which minority turnout is typically lower.

“Ferguson has made it crystal clear to the African-American community and others that we’ve got to go to the polls,” said Representative John Lewis, Democrat of Georgia and a civil-rights leader. “You participate and vote, and you can have some control over what happens to your child and your country.”

The push is an attempt to counter Republicans’ many advantages in this year’s races, including polls that show Republican voters are much more engaged in the elections at this point-- an important predictor of turnout.

…And the terrain is tricky: Many of the states where the black vote could be most crucial are also those where Mr. Obama is deeply unpopular among many white voters. So Democratic senators in places like Arkansas, Louisiana and North Carolina must distance themselves from the nation’s first African-American president while trying to motivate the black voters who are his most loyal constituents.

Last week was the 20th anniversary of passage of the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act by the House (HR 3355). It passed 235-194, 46 mainstream Republicans joining 188 Democrats to pass it. 64 mostly conservative Democrats crossed the aisle in the other direction to vote with 131 reactionary, racist Republicans. And last week, Bruce Dixon's Black Agenda Report delved into the unpleasant realty of how the Department of Justice Department instill ignores the law requiring it to gather national police brutality statistics.

20 years down the road no such stats exist, because the Justice Departments of the Clinton, the Bush and the Obama administrations have all simply ignored the law and refuse even to try to gather the information. Let me say this again: the Clinton Justice Department defied the law and refused to gather national stats on police misconduct. The Bush Justice Department thumbed its nose at the law and also refused to gather national stats on police misconduct, and now the first black attorney general, who sometimes even utters the phrase “mass incarceration,” which he recently discovered, selected by the first black president who says if he had a son, his son could be Trayvon Martin-- Eric Holder and Barack Obama have likewise shown no interest whatsoever in fulfilling their legal duty when it comes to assembling a national database of police misconduct.

This should not surprise the president's apologists, who will surely counsel us that he has to be president of all the people, including the police. Everybody knows black and brown people are the disproportionate targets of police violence, so enforcing laws which particularly benefit black and brown communities are something we must not expect. Perhaps after the president leaves office, they'll tell us, he'll speak out more forcefully on this. Maybe the “My Brothers Keeper” initiative can get some charitable dollars to organizations like , or PUSH or the Urban League to help more of our young boys to pull their pants up so they won't get beat down.

Let's get real. The Republicans haven't stopped Obama and Holder from doing this, they stopped themselves. Like every cop on the beat, the Obama administration chooses which laws to enforce, which ones to bend and in what direction, and which ones to ignore. Obama's DOJ has resurrected the century old Espionage Act, not to prosecute spies, but to threaten and to imprison whistleblowers who tell the truth to reporters, and to journalists themselves if they do not reveal their sources with decades in prison, like Chelsea Manning, and on so-called “secret evidence.” So when you think about it, it's entirely logical that a president and attorney general who place such a high priority on protecting their torturers, their bankster friends, and the official wrongdoers of past and future administrations should want to protect the police from scrutiny as well.

It's time to shed some illusions, not just about this president but about the whole political class that claims he or any president can be “held accountable.” Barack Obama and his Justice Department are no more interested in justice than the administrations of ten presidents before him, and uncritical black and brown support has made this president less accountable to black and brown people than any in living memory.

This morning Alan Grayson sent his supporters an e-mail, "Acknowledging the Reality of Police Brutality." He began by reminding his readers that "a police officer in Ferguson, Missouri killed an unarmed African-American teenager. The police officer shot him somewhere between six and eleven times. According to some eyewitnesses, the victim, Michael Brown, was shot in the back. Then Brown turned around, with his hands up, and shouted 'I don’t have a gun-- stop shooting!' At which point the officer shot him shot several more times, and killed him." Grayson sees it as part of a pattern of behavior he's observed his whole life. You'd have to be either completely clueless or delusional not to have.

Since I grew up in the Bronx, I have some general familiarity with that scenario. In 1978, a Bronx police officer was convicted of beating a Puerto Rican to death-- while he was in custody.



In 1994, a young man in the Bronx was arrested for accidentally hitting a police car with his football. His brother expressed dismay to the officer about that arrest, crossing his arms across his chest. The officer then arrested the brother, for “disorderly conduct,” and literally choked the life out of him; the coroner listed the cause of death as “compression of his neck and chest.”



In 1996, a Bronx police officer frisked an African-American male, Nathaniel Gaines, on the “D” Train, and found that he was unarmed. One stop later, at 167th Street, overlooking the Grand Concourse on the southbound platform, one stop before Yankee Stadium, the officer ordered Gaines to disembark. The officer then shot at Gaines five times, including four times in the back, and killed him. Gaines was a veteran of the Persian Gulf War, he had no criminal record, and he had never been arrested.



In 1999, four Bronx police officers approached an unarmed Guinean immigrant named Amadou Diallo and ordered him to “show his hands.” Misunderstanding them, presumably because his native language was Fulfulde and not English, Diallo reached into his pocket and took out his wallet. The officers shot him 41 times, and killed him.



And in the meantime, in 1997, New York City police arrested Abner Louima, a Haitian-American, and then sodomized him with a broomstick. But that was in Brooklyn. My parents used to warn me about Brooklyn.



I could go on. Sadly, I could go on and on and on. But what is the point? Police brutality is a reality. And you can’t miss it, unless you literally close your eyes to it-- which all-too-many people seem willing to do.



Let’s start with Fox News. When I listen to Fox News, I feel torn. I just can’t decide: Are they idiots, or are they fools? Are they nitwits, or are they imbeciles? Are they morons, or are they jerks? Are they blockheads, or are they boneheads? They report, and we decide.



Remember how you used to hear the phrase “clever like a fox”? Since Fox News, you don’t hear that anymore.



The primary Fox “talking point” regarding the killing of Michael Brown is that Brown may or may not have been in a convenience store earlier in the day, and that he may or may not have stolen some cigars from that store. Fox has been playing the convenience store video footage in an infinite loop. But there is little or no evidence that the officer knew of the store incident, or that he connected it to Brown.

And if he did, then so what? Even under sharia law, if you steal a few cigars, the worst that can happen is that you get your hand cut off. Not eleven shots from a high-caliber weapon.



The U.S. Supreme Court has held that our Constitution permits the death penalty only in cases of first-degree murder, and treason. Not cigar theft. If 11 bullet holes for stealing some cigars is not “cruel and unusual punishment,” then I don’t know what is. It’s definitely cruel, and I certainly hope that it remains unusual.



The other major Fox talking point is “why aren’t we talking about all of the black-on-black violence, and the black-on-white violence?” OK, let’s talk about that. I can give you dozens, if not hundreds, of examples of white police officers killing unarmed black men. I just gave you several from my younger days in the Bronx, alone. The Bronx represents well under one percent of the population of the United States, and my “younger days” were, sadly, quite a while ago.



Now, Fox News, give me an equal number of examples of black police officers killing unarmed black men. Also, give me a list of black police officers killing unarmed white men.



I’m waiting . . .



Anyone who thought that electing our first American-American President would end racism in America must be sorely disappointed this week.



If you ask a sociologist for a definition of “the government,” he or she will not mention Social Security, or the fire department, or the public school system, or our national parks. The sociological definition of the “government” is the entity that has a monopoly on the legal use of force. In every nation on Planet Earth, only the military and the police have the legal right to exercise force, up to and including deadly force. And that makes it tragic when that force is used indiscriminately or-- even worse-- discriminately.



In 1969, the American psychologist Elisabeth Kubler-Ross published a book about how people facing death deal with death. She said that there are five stages: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance.



When it comes to the reality of brutality by our peace officers, too many of us are still in that first stage: denial.

Anyone think Ted Cruz, Chris Christie, Jeb Bush or Mike Huckabee is going to deal with this and make it better? How about Hillary Clinton? By the way, do you remember which people in your high school class became policemen? Fox News fans?

Paul Krugman And Bruce Dixon Address The Scourge Of Beltway Politics: Careerism

Steny Hoyer and Al Wynn, a couple of good ole boy Maryland crooks

Actually, Krugman was only addressing right-wing careerism-- and it's role in the real-time unraveling of movement conservatism-- but much of what he says can be applied to the political hacks on both sides of the aisle. Patently dishonest Republican Party strategy has led to the recruitment, increasingly, of "apparatchiks, motivated more by careerism than by conviction," he wrote. And that m.o. certainly fits the corporate Democrats-- led by Steny Hoyer, Joe Crowley, Steve Israel, Ron Kind, Debbie Wasserman Schultz (practically the entire post-Pelosi House leadership)-- who lure voters with progressive stands on social issues-- the polar opposite of what Krugman says the Republicans do-- only to sell out their economic interests to their corporate donors… exactly the way Krugman says the Republicans do.

That’s certainly the impression Mr. Cantor conveyed. I’ve never heard him described as inspiring. His political rhetoric was nasty but low-energy, and often amazingly tone-deaf. You may recall, for example, that in 2012 he chose to celebrate Labor Day with a Twitter post honoring business owners. But he was evidently very good at playing the inside game.

It turns out, however, that this is no longer enough. We don’t know exactly why he lost his primary, but it seems clear that Republican base voters didn’t trust him to serve their priorities as opposed to those of corporate interests (and they were probably right). And the specific issue that loomed largest, immigration, also happens to be one on which the divergence between the base and the party elite is wide. It’s not just that the elite believes that it must find a way to reach Hispanics, whom the base loathes. There’s also an inherent conflict between the base’s nativism and the corporate desire for abundant, cheap labor.

And while Mr. Cantor won’t go hungry-- he’ll surely find a comfortable niche on K Street-- the humiliation of his fall is a warning that becoming a conservative apparatchik isn’t the safe career choice it once seemed.

Raul Labrador (Tea Party-ID)

So whither movement conservatism? Before the Virginia upset, there was a widespread media narrative to the effect that the Republican establishment was regaining control from the Tea Party, which was really a claim that good old-fashioned movement conservatism was on its way back. In reality, however, establishment figures who won primaries did so only by reinventing themselves as extremists. And Mr. Cantor’s defeat shows that lip service to extremism isn’t enough; the base needs to believe that you really mean it.

In the long run-- which probably begins in 2016-- this will be bad news for the G.O.P., because the party is moving right on social issues at a time when the country at large is moving left. (Think about how quickly the ground has shifted on gay marriage.) Meanwhile, however, what we’re looking at is a party that will be even more extreme, even less interested in participating in normal governance, than it has been since 2008. An ugly political scene is about to get even uglier.

Meanwhile, the transactional Beltway Democratic leaders have learned how to play a nasty little game of identity politics, while not heeding the essential interests of the Democratic grassroots as fully as they can get away with. We just heard from Paul Krugman in the NY Times railing against the Republicans. Now let's hear from Bruce Dixon at the Black Agenda Report-- a post he published last week: Black Lobbyists, Black Legislators Leverage Their "Brands" For Banksters, Military Contractors, Corporate Interests. "When black politics emanated from the streets, not the suites," he wrote, "it was a force against imperial war, for full employment, better housing and public education. But now, black politics is a hollowed out brand, an empty signifier deployed by black lobbyists and congresscreatures to cover whatever their corporate donors want, while the black political class ceaselessly celebrates the civil rights era to renew its own legitimacy.

Ever wondered what the staffers of Congressional Black Caucus members do after their stints on Capitol Hill? The answer, according to a Huffington Post article by Ryan Grim and Zach Carter, is they do the same thing most of their white colleagues do. They go to work for the big corporations which fund the careers of their former bosses. They become lobbyists for giant telecoms, for greedy banksters, for military contractors, for agribusiness, Big Oil, Big Pharma, big gentrifiers and the rest, all of which are finding their black faces and their ties to the Congressional Black Caucus, and the CBC itself especially useful these days.

With Republicans controlling the House and Democrats the Senate these days, Grim and Carter explain, the appearance of bipartisanship is everything. Any measure that passes the House with exclusively Republican support will go nowhere in the Senate, and whatever sails through the Senate on the votes of Democrats alone is guaranteed dead on arrival in the House. But when particularly nasty pro-corporate measures-- the HuffPo article cites as examples bills to allow certain kinds of banned derivatives trading, and laws to aid for-profit schools and colleges-- when legislative turds like this are passed with lots of Republican votes and a smattering of Democrats, especially black Democrats, the moral authority of the Congressional Black Caucus protects those measures from attacks by white liberals in the House, the Senate and among pundits, reporters and policy advocates as well.

Nobody nailed the sense of it better than Breaking Brown's Yvette Carnell, a black former Capitol Hill staffer herself, with the title of her piece riffing on the HuffPo revelations, Revealed: How the CBC Leverages Blackness to Work as a Tool for Wall Street.

…Politicians who consistently stand up for the poor and oppressed in the halls of power do not attract big campaign contributions, because everyone knows how they'll vote. Without big campaign contributions they cannot rise to legislative leadership, and their ambitious staffers will not rise either. To be a player, you gotta play, and to get the big money you've got to command a respectable price when you sell out. Many CBC members and their employees want desperately to be fixers and players, like those on the TV series House of Cards, and they've learned exactly how. CBC members, goaded by black lobbyists, have been so eager to cross the aisle and make deals that they have often been leading co-sponsors and supporters of odious measures attracting few other Democrats. Carter and Grim show that when CBC members jumped on board with Republicans, these measures become law, or influence regulators. When CBC members hang back, most other Democrats do the same.

As the Huffington Post article says, the moral legitimacy of the Congressional Black Caucus, and by extension that of the entire black misleadership class is nothing but a hollowed out brand. The article is full of quotes from staffers and lobbyists about this or that CBC member's “brand.” In plain English, brands are purposeful, deliberate, manipulative lies. Branding is a marketing strategy intended to evoke a given response in a target audience, summoning real or imagined memories, tastes, feelings or desires in order to get a response from the target audience which could not be obtained by appeals to fact or logic. When political players proudly admit among themselves that they are mere “brands,” black politics as a progressive force in these United States is over.

There was a time not so very long ago when black America was where the left lived. Black politics emanated from the streets, not the suites. This kind of politics from the bottom up projected demands to end unjust wars, for better housing, more aid to public education, public transit and the public sector in general, and for voting rights, so that a class of black elected officials might look to the interest of the black masses. Now that a prosperous, empowered and ambitious class of African American officials and lobbyists has been called into existence, it has flipped the script and turned black politics into a top-down affair. Black elected officials, from state and local level to the CBC and its staffers-turned lobbyists has become the hinge swinging the politics of the Democratic party and the nation ever rightward.

We said it a while back-- black politics as we have known it is over, because black politicians and the black political class no longer believe justice or peace or full employment are possible. They haven't been working for us for a long time now.