DISQUS

Both the existence of the digital divide and the fact that the business model of cable and telecom companies has always been based on cherry-picking (providing service to so-called "high value customers) and redlining (denying service to poor and minority areas) are well established as historical facts and as accurate statements of current corporate telecom and Big Cable policy, Pam --- established well enough to have been the subject of many, many legislative and regulatory hearings, and to have been remarked upon in many, many authoritative books and studies on the media regime. Paul Starr's Creation of the Media, for example contends that these have been the business model of the big phone companies since the very start of telephony more than a hundred twenty years ago. The evidence of these practices is so widespread and readily available as to be just undeniable, except by people who "...work with these big companies, ATT, Verizon, Comcast..."


If you do, as you say, work with and have access to top execs at AT&T;, Verizon and Comcast, Pam and you are telling us there is no redlining or cherry picking then you are simply acting as mouthpiece of these corporate actors in this space. I hope these are billable hours for you. If not, they oughta be.

The study itself, much more useful than the USA Today fluff piece, can be found here. Bear in mind of course that Yankelovich conducts its surveys for the sole and express purpose of marketing to us, They are not friends of black or any other kind of humanity. They are marketeers whose job it is to get under our skins, inside our motivations and ensure that everything we do makes money for their clients.


That said, read it. I know I will.

The conclusions of the USA Today story which this post uncritically echoes are deeply, deeply suspect for many reasons.


First of all there really IS a deep digital divide. Corporate America, most notably the telecom companies and Big Media have every reasons to deny this, but it is a fact. Here in GA where I live I can take you to small and medium sized towns --- even to spots in the burbs of Atlanta where once you cross the line into the areas inhabited by African Americans, the price of broadband doubles or triples because the cable companies are permitted to redline our communities. In Chicago where I lived for 50 years, the price of cable internet is almost double in Lawndale or Ford Heights what it is in Skokie or Barrington or Rolling Meadows, and people make a lot less in the hood, so there are really quite few more blacks connected, per hundred thousand, than whites, no matter what this study says. The rash of state cable franchise deals pushed through with a flood of telecom campaign contributions in the last couple years (and with the connivance of many black state legislators) have a lot to do with this, and are actually KEEPING the digital divide very wide and very alive.



I have been in legislative hearings and on the front lines of this stuff nationally and in GA, and I distinctly recall correcting dNa about parroting this very same sort of "the digital divide is no more" story in his blog a while back. It was nonsense, corporate propaganda, and just plain untrue, a year or two ago, and it remains so today. Cable companies and telecoms want out from under any public scrutiny of their practices, they want to be free to continue to redline our communities, so they continue to plant stories like this in the media, telling us that everything is OK, that they don't need to be legally forced to give equal service for a fair price to minority communities.



I will never know why some black bloggers are willing to echo this corporate propaganda uncritically. Shame. I strongly recommend that dNa undertake some real study on the question before broadcasting a piece of self-serving corporate PR. That Radio One, which is a nationwide chain, not a single radio station, as dNa imagines, is supposed to have commissioned the study means nothing. Cathy Hughes and Radio One are to radio what Bob Johnson and "Black Evil Television" are to TV--- neither responsive nor responsible to black people.



Finally, white folks love to imagine that we are just like them, only --- well --- darker --- that we view US foreign and domestic policy the same way, law enforcement and many other questions the same way, and that there is no such thing as even the ghost of black solidarity, or a black world view. These things are all, in the mainstream discourse, illegitimate. They are what we at BAR have called "the black consensus". A major point of the USA Today study simply says that the black consensus does not exist.



That ain't true either. But it's what white folks like to believe, and therefore in line with what USA Today might print. I'll leave it there.

Yo. CPL.


You know I luv you, but I just gotta ask...



"I will probably vote for Obama, but it will qualified with a "But", because..."



How do you manage that? Down here in GA, and up in Chicago where I lived the first 50 years of my life they don't let us cast any 'but' votes, nor do they count whether we are holding our noses. You either vote for the bad Repubs, enabling them, or you vote for the nearly as bad Dems, enabling them, or you vote for somebody else, or you stay home.



You need to tell me where you live, so I can cast that kind of 'but' vote that is not really the full and unqualified endorsement that a normal vote seems to be.



*****************



And this is for the lady who just got out of the navy in 2006. I would humbly recommend that you stay out here and breathe in the free air for a while. You seem to be laboring under a lot of very strange notions, like that the so-called "war on terror" is really what your former bosses told you it was, and that torture and lawless behavior on the part of the government are somehow "protecting" you. or us.



There should be no doubt that in the military you were lied to. A lot. I mean a whole lot, night and day, for years by folks who outranked you, and some of whom may have even been smarter than you. No offense, but that's got to have an impact.



Remember, that as late as 2005 most of the troops in Iraq still believed they were over there to avenge 9-11, even though the whole rest of the world (outside the military) knew that Saddam had nothing whatsoever to do with the towers going down. Given the military's current role in generating deceptive propaganda and fake news for the civilian population, a recent military background is the least persuasive evidence one can present in favor of either (A) an accurate perception of what's going on; or (B) a willingness to tell the truth about it, assuming that one DOES know what's going on.

What will I do? I called up Regina Thomas, the credible black and progressive candidate for congress in the 12th district of GA, and offered to shoot a couple of YouTube videos for her next week so she can help raise a fw bucks to defeat her torture-loving, Bush-enabling, opponent John Barrow, whom Obama is supporting. Barrow publicly led the Blue Dogs in begging Nancy to allow him to vote for telecom immunity when the issue first surfaced about February, and played a major role in rounding up his fellow Bush Democrats to join a unanimous Republican black (and Obama) in supporting this thing.


So I'm gonna help her. That's what I'll do.

"I've always been of the opinion that if you're a law-abiding citizen, you don't have anything to be concerned about with FISA."


That really is beyond the pale, d. If the 4th amendment means anything at all, the government has no business data-mining the lawful communications of citizens OR non-citizens, period, exclamation point. It's lawless behavior that allows the government to target not terroritsts, but anyone it conceivably disagrees with. It allows them to criminalize dissent, to research all the contacts of people who have committed or plotted no crime, but who merely disagree with the policies of the government. And it's been done already.



FISA itself was an abomination, a blank check, since in only a handful of instances did the secret judges in the secret court tell the government they could not have what they wanted. the new FISA "compromise" removes even that nominal check on police power.



You DO live in a police state. Right now. Thanks Stenny. Thanks Nancy. And thank you, candidate Obama.

rikyrah, I do not have your email address, so you will have to hit me. Try bruce.dixon(at)blackagendareport.com.


As I recall I made a bet with you and skeptical brotha that the Dem ticket would be Hillary and Barack, in that order, several months ago. Am I mistaken?



bd

Let's take your comparison of the Memphis TN race with that in Savannah GA. White incumbent Cohen opposed the war, black challenger Nikki Tinker refuses to say. I'll take Cohen any time.


Barrow supports the war, and Barack supports him over the black progressive state senator who opposes it. What's hard to understand about this? I am pushing it because it is illustrative of our moral compass at this time. Not Barack's. Ours. Yours, maybe too.



The fact that Barrow supports Obama somehow makes it OK to empower a congressman who has long ago sold out to the very worst forces in this country's politics? When did boosting the career of one man begin to take precedence over whether innocent should be killed, whether prisoners should be tortured, whether citizens should be spied on? If boosting one man's career is more important than war, peace or justice, where are we? And what have we become?



I'm through asking what HE is. What are WE?

Rikyrah, I'll disagree with your assessment of Barrow VS Thomas. I live down here in GA. I have met Barrow, whom Obama endorses in the Democratic primary, and I will meet his opponent Regina Thomas on July 1.


Regardless of whether or when Barrow endorsed Obama, Barrow also endorsed Bush's war early on, and has never wavered from this position. His opponent Regina Thomas has opposed it.



Barrow crusaded against Nancy Pelosi for the earliest possible surrender date to the demands of the telecom companies for immunity from prosecution as they violated two or three of the first ten amendments.



Barrow, like Republicans, calls the estate tax "the death tax" and voted against it. He voted for every one of Bush's tax cuts too. Every one. Regina Thomas denounced all this --- she could not vote against it cause she is not in Congress.



Barrow voted against even the feeble health care measure that other Dems supported, SCHIP. Thomas would have supported it.



Barrow voted for the Patriot Act. He voted to renew the Patriot Act (so did Obama, after campaigning against it in Illinois --- I was there) and voted for Patriot Act 2 (so did Obama). Regina Thomas opposed and denounced Patriot Act 1 and 2.



Barrow voted for the Military Commissions Act, parts of which have now been overturned by the Supreme Court, but which authorized torture and indefinite imprisonment, and trials with so-called "secret evidence". Thomas opposed and denounced this too.



Barrow voted for the credit card bills which removed all ceilings on interest and fees, and he voted for "tort reform" to keep ordinary people from suing corporations. Obama voted for tort reform too, but voted against the credit card bill, after casting a vote in committee against removal of interest ceilings. Thomas opposed both.



One could go on and on. Barrow's voting record is barely distinguishable from GA Republicans in neighboring districts like Gingrey. Thomas has had a steady and largely progressive record in the GA state senate. And the district is 40% black. Barrow has $1.3 million on hand, and Obama has more money than God right now. Thomas is fighting the good fight, but has only modest means.



Obama endorsed a warmongering, racist, torture-loving, Bush-enabling white Blue Dog and Bush enabler over a legitimate and credible black challenger. On the merits of the two candidates, it does not look good. Put all the makeup on that pig you want. It still oinks.



Email me and tell me where to send that peach cobbler I owe you.



bd

Anybody here got a clue why Barack Obama has endorsed and cut a radio commercial for 12th district congressman John Barrow, in the GA Democratic primary election next month? Barrow is a retrograde and racist Blue Dog Dem who has supported the war and Bush and his tax cuts at every turn, voted against SCHIP, and much more? Barrow's opponent is a black woman, Savannah GA state senator Regina Thomas. The 12th distirct, comprisong Augusta, Savannah and much in between, is about 40% black.


Apparently it's payback for Barrow, a superdelegate, endorsing Obama at the last minute, and to show the Blue Dogs and such that he likes them too. But what does that show the rest of us down here?



Just wondering how Obama's fans explain his dissing the progressive black woman for the right wing incumbent and stooge of the telecoms... more of the 50 state stretegy, or what?

First off, I owe you something, do you remember? Guess, over the next few weeks I need to make arrangements to fulfill my wager. I owe Skeptical Brotha too.


I too was a community organizer through much of the 70s and 80s in the projects (north side -- Cabrini Green) in Chicago. I have run up on a very interesting comparative analysis of the methods the Obama campaign uses at Camp Obama, and the most typical kind of methodologies employed by community organizers. I intend to reprint it in this Wednesday's Black Agenda Report, possibly with my own comments added.



You did Camp Obama? Is Jacqueline Woodard still in charge there? She is another old friend of mine from Chicago. If you see her, tell her I still love her. Heck, I've got her email. I should hit her myself, shouldn't I?

Powell's career is full of wanton acts of criminality. It's the only way one rises to the top of the military, the business of which is after all, to break things and kill people, and at the higher ranks, occasionally to lie about it. For example, Powell was chairman of the Joint Chiefs when the US invaded Panama, supposedly to arrest their former henchman Noriega.


Panama has deep racial divisions, and Noriega had serious popular support in some of Panama city's poorest neighborhoods. So the US military, on Gen. Powell's watch, to prevent thousands of black poor people from coming out into the streets to support their guy Noriega during the US invasion, sent aircraft to bomb and burn those poor black shantytowns to prevent unfortunate political disturbances.



Those poor black people, hundreds of them, whose murders were ordered by Gen. Powell had no copters or planes of their own to fight against the US military, no anti-aircraft defenses. It was a civilian neighborhood and they lived there. With wives and aunties and children. They were wives, and aunties and granfathers and children.



I have a couple friends who were there, and it's documented in a number of places. The neighborhood was called El Chorillo.

Whenever you feel that soft spot for old Colin Powell, here's a lil sumpm' to remember. When Powell was 31 years old he was Maj. Powell, in the army serving in Vietnam. He was assigned to investigate whether a massacre of Vietnamese civilians by US troops took place at an obscure village named My Lai.


By many accounts there were hundreds of massacres during the US war in Indochina, but for a single incident My Lai was one of the bigger ones, and the only ones where Americans were actually prosecuted and convicted.



Colin Powell weighed the evidence, read the reports and did whatever it is investigators do. Then he told the higher ups that nothing happened. Nothing. No harm, no foul, no three to seven hundred dead women and children. Powell did not just participate in the cover-up. He played a lead role in it. Of course if he hadn't that would have been the end of his career. The US military is nothing if not an utterly unforgiving bureaucracy, and ratting out other officers is seriously frowned upon. So his going along with Bush to lie to us and get a much larger number of folks killed was no aberration, no one-time thing. It was his career pattern, and that of almost every military officer.

No discussion of what the US does overseas is even intelligible absent the mention of empire. The English language contains no other word for a country that "reserves the right" to maintain hundreds of military bases outside its own borders, aupposedly to "protect its interests".


What interests of mine are being protected in Somalia right now, where we are bombing from carrier based aircraft on the regular? Nobody knows exactly HOW regularly, because the Pentagon does not allow reporters to cover fleet operations and does not give out the info willingly. The only mention of it you can get is from African news agencies on http://alafrica.com.



What interests of mine are served by maintaining the huge air and naval base, arms dump and secret prison complex at Diego Garcia, for example, about as far away from Atlanta GA as you can get and still be on planet Earth?



What interests of mine are served by building the latest next-generation fighter jet (which they're doing less than 10 miles from where I live in Marietta GA), each of which costs in excess of $100 million, when no country on earth is willing to take to the skies against the current generation of tactical aircraft, and the only conceivable opposition is from other countries we have sold F-16s to??



You cannot even ask, let alone answer these questions if "empire" and "imperialism" are off the table.



We have given military aid, military training, and arms transfers to at least 50 of Africa's 54 counties in the last few years, to turn the place into a war-torn genocidal hellhole that makes it easy for us (as in the Congo) to extract the natural resources.



As for Afghanistan, the only visible fruit of our invasion has been a drop in the price of heroin. The Afghan president's own family are opium smugglers, and so are lots of his cronies. But they are the only Afghans who will throw in their lot with the empire, so we're stuck with subsidizing them.



Going after Al-Qeada should have been a police operation, not a war. The Afghan government offered to give them up, to deliver Osama to the US, remember? Bush refused because he wanted a war instead, to whip us up for the main event, Iraq. Don't you remember any of this? Go back and read the newspapers from 5 years ago.

In answer to the question when does "being proactive against our enemies" become acceptable, the answer is that "preventive war" is criminal action. It's what we hanged people after WW2 for. When did it become otherwise?


The US has about 800 military bases around the world. No way you can call that "defense", my friend. The word is "empire". Empires are inherently unjust. The idea that some god or gods chose the rulers of the US to run the affairs of other peoples in other lands is shameful and odious. It is financially bankrupting us, and it long ago morally bankrupted us.

Another problem is that the leading Democratic candidate, Senator Obama, is widely quoted as believing that the war in Afghanistan is one we SHOULD be fighting, and he promises to devote more resources to it.


On the real, it's just another invasion of somebody else's home, indefensible on any level and for any reason, and another "destructive demonic suction tube" to use Dr. King's phrase, through which resources are sucked that could be devoted to improving education, infrastructure, to job creation and the environment and other human needs.

I do share your fear on that score, that's why I mentioned it. But we're the grownups in the room. It's our job not to be blinded by hero worship , not to wait for our anointed leader to get elected before obliging him to take an open stand. After election Obama will have less reason to heed us, not more. His DLC pedigree suggests he is privatization-friendly right out of the box too.


We need to make that an uncomfortable position for him, and oblige him to change it.

Massive respect to you, Baratunde, for following up and following through on all this, and thanks for all the compliments.


All this stuff happened when Barack was campaigning for the US Senate in 2002-2004 (that's how long these campaigns last, y'know). After Barack answered two of our three questions more or less correctly, dodging one about single payer health care, and explicitly renounced the formal DLC connection, we printed an endorsement. A week or two letter I took a few vacation days to drive from the ATL back home to shake Barack's hand and work Sunday, Monday and election day in the campaign. Don't think it will end that way this time around. We at BAR won't be endorsing Obama or Hillary (and certainly not a Repub).



We think our job is to give Obama or whoever the Democratic nominee is something to respond to. As Amiri Baraka will say in a speech we will print next week, the less we demand, the less he will have to do, the less we do, the less we can expect from him. I think there are vast areas in which Obama could do better. But he won't unless there is sustained, even impolite pressure on him to do so. So our job is not to follow him, or to excuse his inaction or inattention or downright lapses. That is the job of people he is paying on his campaign, the job of those who expect to get jobs and contracts from an Obama administration, and others who just volunteer to look the other way.



We at BAR are journalists, and we were active in the movement long before we became journalists. Our job is to bring the heat to him and keep the heat on him, not to trust him to do better, but to make him do it. It ain't personal. I know the brother personally, and he's a good fellow, but this ain't about that. But this is business, the people's business. We concentrate our scrutiny more on Obama than on Hillary because we are black journalists writing for a black audience about black affairs, and we treat the opinions of our people as if they really matter.



The illogic that says Obama should not be expected to address the demands of Black people just so he can get elected is self-effacing, self-defeating, self-contradicting nonsense. Someone who ignores your demands in order to get into office is not going to turn around and go your way once they're in. That is purest delusion, but it's an excuse many of our people are offering for the candidate of their choice. If you want to get something in politics, you demand it. If you shut up or back down, it's off the table. We have come too far to back down just for the sake of one guy's career.



To name just two serious demands we ought to be confronting Obama with, the US policy toward Africa ought to be about demilitarizing the continent, not establishing military HQ (AFRICOM) not providing military aid, assistance or training to anybody in Africa. Listen to the Ravaging of Africa, a four part documentary posted on our site (can't link to it, that's not permitted here but you can google it). It says that the US is giving arms and military aid to 52 out of 54 African countries, arming both sides in 7 wars over the last 20 years, and one side in three wars, and four or five or more sides in the Congo. We have turned Africa into a war-torn hell on earth for the profits of US and Western corporations, the easier to extract the diamonds, the coltan, the cocoa, the gold and uranium, etc. It's time to close AFRICOM, to stop our military incursions and air sorties over Somalia which we fly every day, (wonder why you don't hear that on the media?) and withdraw all US troops and military aid from Africa. See where Obama is on that, and demand that he get right.



Another thing is that on Obama's “Plan to Change Washington” he does not mention the massive privatization of government functions across the board which actually began during the Clinton administration but ramped up to a fever pitch during the Bush regime. Homeland Security is nothing but a contracting agency. The Pentagon depends on private firms to do intelligence, to torture, to spy on civilians, and we have somewhere between 100,000 and 200,000 armed mercenaries in Iraq. I do not see Obama educating the public about this pernicious trend or even acknowledging it, let alone proposing to reverse it. I could go on and on, of course, but I gotta go pay the mortgage, it's 8AM.



Massive respect again, Baratunde. Let's talk sometime soon.

Baratunde, I have to tell you and your audience this, but Barack very definitely DID take the antiwar speech of his web site. Clinton got the year wrong though, it was May and June of 2003. I know because I was the one who caught it, and with Glen Ford, forced Obama to put it back on.


It happened during his Democratic primary run for the US Senate. We ain't makin' this stuff up. Obama himself answered the charge in our pages.



Here you can find the original link to the original pages from June 2003 in which (1) we spotted it and pointed it out and (2) Obama began to engage in a dialog with us about it, and gave a lame excuse for why it was dropped. The dialog continued into a third week and a second response from Obama. That part is here



We also forced Barack to remove his DLC tatoos, figuratively speaking read it. We will be reprinting the whole exchange again in this week's Black Agenda Report. It DID happen. Slick Willie has told lots of lies, but that wasn't one of them.



We are no fan of the Clintons, we are not about drinking anybody's campaign kool aid. We are all about holding folks accountable. That's it and that's all.

Um, I don't believe I said anything that needs correction.

That's utter nonsense. I owe nothing whatsoever to the US military. Plenty of people outside the US live great lives, and have longer vacations, faster broadband, better medical care and as much freedom of speech as I do, or more. And their countries don't have hundreds of foreign military bases or an utterly bloated military budget.


The US military exists not for the purpose of defending citizens, but to impose the will of this country's elite upon the rest of the planet. There are, according to Dr. Chalmers Johnson, about 800 US military bases, three quarters of them outside the borders of the US. Those bases are not defending me. They are defending the privatizers who dictate to third world countries that they have to sell their natural resources at a deep discount to American and European elites and their local compradors. AFRICOM is not defending me. The two or three nuclear armed carrier task forces in the Persian Gulf are not defending me, nor are troops which have been in Korea for the last 50 years.



And no, I do not feel threatened by "radical Islam". I am a lot more threatened by some right wing Christians, quite a few of whom are in command positions in the Us military, like that crazy general who said his God is bigger than the Somali's and that a haze around Mogadishu was evidence of "demonic presence". That guy is number two or three in the Defense Intelligence Agency right now. Really, we need protection FROM the military.

The US military budget is bigger than that of the next dozen countries combined. There are more than 800 US military bases, about three quarters of them outside the US borders.


And you are telling us Barack and Hillary are right about needing to expand it further? You are also telling us that King was flat out wrong when he said that a nation which spends more on the military than on programs for people is approaching spiritual death. You are also telling us that most African American voters, who want to see the military budget cut because it conflicts with everything we need to see the money spent on here --- are wrong too.



The military breaks things, kills people and spends money. Lots of things, lots of people and lots of money. To suggest that we need more troops and a bigger military is just plain wrong. Barack's numbers among black voters would surely go down if voters were allowed to see a candidate with an alternative position, but alas, the corporate media will not allow that.



My question then, is why are we following the lead of corporate media on this, allowing them to decide what are the legitimate issues, who should be included or excluded? Why are so many of us blindly signing on to campaign for a candidate, to crft had carry his messages, and ignore what he or she ignores, rather than trying to hold candidates accountable? I don't understand. I thought black blogs were gonna lead, not follow.



Barack did say something I agreed with last night. When asked who King would endorse for president, he said "none of us". King would be leading a movement to pressure all of us to do better, Obama said.



Why aren't black bloggers doing that?

Brotha O wants to add 103,000 more troops to the army and marines and jack the military budget even higher than Bush. Hillary wants to add 83 or 88 thousand, more troops to the army and marines.


Adding troops to the military and raising the military budget even higher, as both the Democratic front runners intend to do, takes money from every human need we know black people are in favor of, from job creation to education to health care and more. Why no questions on this?

Historically the second amendment was, like so much else in the constitution, placed there to protect slavery. The "well regulated militia" referred to in the late eighteenth century document refers to what we now call slave patrols, and also to ad hoc armed bands of white citizens pulled together to hunt down and murder Native Americans.


Free white male citizens in some slaveholding areas, regardless of whether they owned property, were subject to be drafted into the slave patrols a certain number of days per year, or called upon to join Injun hunting expeditions of the kind that George Washington and later Andy Jackson made famous. The founding fathers in their wisdom, needed a federal law to ensure that no state took away the guns owned by free white men which were needed for that purpose. That is why we have the 2nd amendment.



That's it and that's all.

Still the question remains, dear lady, what makes you imagine that the US military is even remotely the answer to anything going on in Pakistan, as you began this conversation by suggesting?