THE BLACK POLITICAL CRISIS

This morning's Newsday has a salutary wake-up call to the black community by Norman Kelley, who is currently producing a documentary film based on his book, "The Head Negro in Charge Syndrome: The Dead End of Black Politics" (NationBooks).

Denouncing the black community's "bankrupt" political leadership, Kelley writes:

"The last four decades of American politics have witnessed the rise of conservative politics and the decline of the alliance that staged the March on Washington: 'Negroes, trade unionists, liberals, and religious groups.' Except for Brown v. the Board of Education and the two landmark pieces of civil rights legislation of 1964 and 1965, almost every policy - affirmative action, welfare, minority set-asides, etc. - that has come into existence via the federal government to assist blacks has been attacked, chipped away and de-legitimized by the conservative movement.

"African-American leadership, ignoring the possibility of a return to a post-civil rights era of hostility to black advancement, never sat down and tried to strategize ideas and policies that would deal with the poor and economics. Today, a swath of the black population is still enmeshed in a web of social dysfunction, which W.E.B. DuBois outlined roughly a hundred years ago. The numbers have gone down since the civil rights era, but as Bill Cosby put it: 'The lower economic people are not holding up their end in this deal.' But the leadership class hasn't held up 'their end in this deal,' either.

"Jesse Jackson's two campaigns have to be viewed as pseudo political mobilization, insofar that they aroused voters but led to no discernible policy changes and no significant grassroots infrastructure building. The Million Man March has shown nothing in 10 years. Today, no better example of a black political collapse is the rise of the Rev. Al Sharpton as a spokesman for blacks and/or the Democratic Party, despite his years of corruption and cronyism - as well as dalliances with the Republican Party. Despite the Village Voice and the New York Times reporting that Sharpton was playing footsie with the GOP, the black political elite said nothing. Despite his meager showing, lack of ideas and vote-getting in the primaries, he was rewarded by the party for one thing and one thing only at the Democratic National Convention: being an entertaining, boisterous court jester...."

I may not agree with every single formulation of Kelley's important book, but he has accurately diagnosed the stasis at the heart of black political leadership. Like the Jewish, Irish, and Italian left-outs and shut-outs before them--who saw their leaders, once in power, sink into self-satisfied contentment with a place at the table and large helpings on their personal plates--the African-American community is no longer adequately represented, nor do its elected political and institutional organizational classes really try to mobilize its disadvantaged majority in ways that count. Take the Congressional Black Caucus, most of whose members are on the take from Big Tobacco and other special interests inimical to the well-being of blacks. Even a supposedly feisty progressive like Rep. Maxine Waters was caught by the L.A. Times last month in a smelly scandal in which her "family members have made more than $1 million in the last eight years by doing business with companies, candidates and causes that the influential congresswoman has helped."

Without a more progressive, militant, mobilized black community, with a social and political agenda that challenges the power arrangements of today's society, fights the demonization of that agenda by the conservative national consensus, and asserts a more independent role in the political process, it will be even more difficult to re-build an American left worthy of the name. Kelly was even more specific in an L.A. Weekly piece last summer during the presidential campaign. Read both these articles of his as appetizers--and then get yourself his book.

THE CELL PHONE DANGER WATCH: If you want to keep up with the latest on the dangers of cellphones--which have been shown in a number of studies to cause cancer and DNA changes harmful to one's health--the indefatigable journalist-scientist Louis Slesin has just started a blog, "From the Field," for his Microwave News, the leading organ on health hazards from electromagnetic fields (EMFs).

In his latest blog post yesterday, Slesin--who's been researching and writing about these matters for a quarter of a century-- highlites an interview with Sir William Stewart, the chairman of the British Health Protection Agency and the National Radiological Protection Board, warning against letting kids use cell phones. Check out Slesin's eye-opening blog by clicking here.....

AND ELSEWHERE...: Reuters is reporting this morning that there may be an FCC investigation into whether Armstrong Williams broke the law by promoting Bush's education plan on television and radio--including on the show he owned and hosted--without disclosing that he'd received $240,000 in taxpayer dollars as a payoff from the Bushies to do so...And P.R. Watch has just posted "The Other Armstrong Williams Scandal," a lengthy documented account, by Bob Burton, of how Williams used his syndicated radio show as a propaganda megaphone for the tobacco industry....

Daily Kos and MyDD, two very popular bloggers, both took $3000 a month from the Howard Dean presidential campaign for four months to promote Dean, the Wall Street Journal reports this morning--citing as one source this post from Zonkette (a.k.a. Zephyr Teachout, former Internet outreach director for the Dean campaign). The WSJ compares this to the Armstrong Williams pay-for-propaganda scandal. I don't believe in bloggers taking payoffs of this kind--so I've removed Daily Kos from my recommended blogs list.