Trickle Up Poverty (31 page)

By the early 1990s, though, the New Black Panther Party was formed to carry on the dubious work of its predecessor. The motto of the New Black Panther Party is “Freedom or Death.” The lead stories in the Spring 2010 edition of the group’s newspaper, The New Black Panther, the organization’s self-described “Fastest Growing Black National Newspaper,” paint a picture of the “New Black Panther Party under fire,” particularly from “Congress” and the “Right Wing.”16 New Black Panther Party leader Malik Zulu Shabazz, the author of a feature article on Party founder Dr. Khallid Abdul Muhammad in “The New Black Panther,” describes Muhammad in glowing terms: He stayed “true to core Black Muslim teachings, Nationalist Pan-Africanist Ideology and Revolutionary Doctrine in a time when everybody else was running for cover.” The article features a picture of Muhammad brandishing an automatic rifle.17

Are you starting to get the picture?

It is the “core Black Muslim teachings” that Shabazz refers to that bear closer examination than American journalists have done. First, they’re straight out of the 1960s radical left Muslim playbook. The Nation of Islam combines all the dangerous anti-Christian, anti-western teachings of the religion of Islam with a racist message of hate for the white man. You probably weren’t aware of this, but according to the Honorable Elijah Muhammad, the founder of the Nation of Islam in America:

The entire creation of Allah (God) is of peace, not including the devils who are not the creation of Allah (God) but a race created by an enemy (Yakub) of Allah…. These enemies of Allah (God) are known at the present as the white race or European race.18

Muhammad clarifies, explaining that the white man is “the devil.”

The “Yakub” Muhammad refers to is, according to the Nation of Islam version of the history of humankind, a mad scientist, a man who, more than eight thousand years ago, “embittered of Allah….decided, as revenge, to create upon the earth a devil race, a bleached-out, white race of people.”19 Mr. Yakub did that by systematically genetically engineering a new race of people. In order to further his purpose to enslave the black race, Yakub began to separate out the children.

As the Nation of Islam website explains, “We know that Mr. Yakub set up a rigorous birth control system at the beginning of his civilization, by dividing the brown babies from the black, the brown from the reds, the reds from the yellow. Now bear in mind these are only the major solutions, for there were nine more lighter colors that came after these.”20

It’s on this sort of perverse and distorted belief system that the Nation of Islam—whose followers call themselves Black Muslims—was built, and it’s this belief system, which rests on a hatred of white people that is systematized in the beliefs and preachings of the sect’s founder and in those of the Black Muslim leaders that have followed him. They form the foundation of yet another radical leftist group with direct ties to the Obama administration.

The New Black Panther Party’s connections to the Obama administration are manifest in the special treatment they’re receiving from Attorney General Eric Holder. They’re further manifested in the administration’s pursuit of the political agenda formulated and followed by the Panthers and other Marxist organizations.

The Enslaving Politics of Color

One of the most devastating effects of the activities of groups such as ACORN and the New Black Panther Party is their reduction of a racially identified group of people to the status of pawns in a leftist power play. Minorities, especially inner city blacks, have seen the individuality they had been trying to recover as they emerged from slavery systematically stripped from them as they were grouped together by the Marxist militants, with whom Barack Obama and his administration have close ties, for the purpose of advancing their leftist “causes.”

This type of identity politics is rampant in the Obama administration and among black leaders in general. Although its purpose is ostensibly to promote the interests of blacks and other groups identified by race, ethnicity, or sexual orientation, in fact, the practice of separating out groups of people leads to their interests being subsumed in the greater purpose of the left: to gain power.

The 2008 presidential campaign provides the classic example of how Democrats use identity politics as the basis for almost all their strategic decisions. One of the first things Hillary Clinton brought up when she ended her campaign and endorsed Barack Obama for the presidency was her “gender”:

I was proud to be running as a woman, but I was running because I thought I would be the best president. But I am a woman, and like millions of women I know there are still barriers and biases out there, often unconscious, and I want to build an America that embraces and respects the potential of every last one of us. We must make sure that women and men alike understand the struggles of their grandmothers and their mothers and that women enjoy equal opportunities, equal pay and equal respect.21

But if Hillary Clinton was engaging in identity politics by playing the gender card, Old York Times columnist Bob Herbert who, as a true affirmative action journalist, is always ready to remind us that he’s black, was ready with the race card. After Clinton had conceded the nomination to Obama, Herbert referred in his “celebratory” column to Bobby Kennedy’s picturing, in the late 1960s, America electing a black president within forty years: “The fact that even a dreamer could imagine nothing shorter than a 40-year timeline gives us a glimpse of the nightmarish depths of racial oppression that people of goodwill have had to fight.”

Herbert, like all left-leaning liberals, insists on telling us of the egregious inequities that held at the time Kennedy made his prediction. Instead of celebrating the fact that a woman and a black man were the contenders for the Democratic presidential nomination, he wallows in the statistical inequities of the 1960s: “Fewer than 1% of all federal judges were women, fewer than 4% of all lawyers, and fewer than 7% of doctors.”22 Of course, the kicker is that it wasn’t Democrats or those on the left who really championed equal rights for minorities.

Herbert, as is the tendency of Marxist sympathizers in general, is either ignorant of history or is engaging in the common leftist practice of rewriting it. Perhaps both are true. While he cites the examples of inequity in the ‘60s, what he fails to point out is that it was Republicans, and not Democrats, who actually enabled, for instance, then-President Lyndon Johnson’s Civil Rights legislation to pass. Republican Senator Everett Dirksen was called on by Johnson to lead the vote in the Senate. As a result, while twenty-one Democrats voted against the Civil Rights Act only six Republicans did so. Republicans did the right thing, and Democrats would have obstructed passage of the Civil Rights Act.

And Herbert conveniently manages to overlook the fact that it was a Republican, President Dwight D. Eisenhower, and not a Democrat, who mobilized federal troops in support of the integration of Little Rock, Arkansas’s public schools in 1957, following the landmark 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision. Without the support of Republicans, the anti-civil-rights Democrats in the Senate would have torpedoed President Johnson’s Great Society legislation, which has unfortunately turned out in retrospect to be a budget-busting entitlement that has essentially created a permanent minority underclass in the United States dependent for its very survival on federal largesse.

If Republicans had not supported the bill, they’d have been branded as racists, even though not supporting it would have been the right thing for them to do. The fact that Democrats voted in large numbers against the legislation is conveniently ignored by commentators like Herbert, even though, as we look back, they were, without knowing it, voting to save blacks from the terrible fate of once again becoming slaves to their white massas. Democrats did the right thing because they were racists; Republicans did the wrong thing because they weren’t. It’s identity politics at its most perverse.

Always ready to pull out the club of identity politics in their search for reasons to denigrate America, leftists insist on mouthing such absurdities as this:

No doubt there has been a decline in the overt expression of race and gender bias [in the past 40 years]. But in the most fundamental sense, in class and economic terms, America is more unequal today than at any time since the days of the Robber Barons in the late nineteenth century.

The top one percent in American society controls more than 45 percent of the wealth. The top one-tenth of one percent has monopolized

nearly the entire increase in national wealth over the last two decades, while the vast majority of the people have seen their living conditions deteriorate, their jobs become more precarious, their overall social position become more insecure.

For black workers and youth, the decline has been even more precipitous. It is hardly necessary to recite the well-known figures: more young black men in prison than in college, crumbling schools and other social services in the inner cities, poverty levels once again approaching those of the early 1960s, disproportionate levels of unemployment, drug abuse, violence, homelessness and other social evils.23

The fact is that the author of these lines is right: all those things he cites are rampant today, especially in our inner cities. But they have gotten worse not because we didn’t try to address them through socialist, identity-politics-based legislative initiatives, but because that’s the way we did address them. It is precisely because of policies that have their origin in the left’s insistence on seeing people as members of groups rather than as individuals that these conditions have worsened. Identity politics legislation invariably brings about precisely the opposite of its stated outcomes because it subsumes the individual in the group. In denying individuality and the strength and creativity of the human spirit, it dehumanizes those it seeks to help.

Such legislative initiatives reflect a fundamental inability of those on the left to understand an important economic principle: There’s not a finite and limited amount of capital that somehow needs to be “redistributed”; rather, capital is created by people and is an unlimited and unending resource through which people can lift themselves out of the prison of poverty through individual initiative. Legislation that fails to recognize the creative power of the individual spirit if it is given the freedom and the economic tools to realize its limitless potential merely creates dependency.

Identity politics insists on seeing people as caricatures, exaggerated, distorted versions of the human beings they are at heart. It insists on seeing minorities based strictly on the color of their skin and on the assumption that if they’re black, they’re not capable of fending for themselves and need some sort of big brother to protect them. It’s precisely this soul-killing, enterprise-denying nature of leftist identity politics that makes it so dangerous and so wrong. It’s precisely because it is so dangerous that the legislative initiatives of President Obama, who insists on dehumanizing so many Americans by demanding that the government interfere in every aspect of their lives, must be turned back.

The Myth of the Living Wage

Democrats seem to view the concept of wages in the same way they view the U.S. Constitution: As something “living” that they should be allowed to change at their whim. They demonstrate no understanding whatsoever of what’s involved in running a business. Look no further than the makeup of Obama’s advisory staff: Between 30 and 60 percent of the cabinet advisors appointed by every other president over the past century have been from the private sector, reflecting the recognition by our nation’s Chief Executives that they need to get input from people who have real-world experience.

By contrast, only 8 percent of Obama’s cabinet comes from the private sector, and too many of these are from a single organization, Goldman Sachs.

What’s worse is that 92 percent of the president’s cabinet appointees are either government flaks or “college pudding,” as late Beatle John Lennon so aptly described these ivory-tower know-nothings.24 The reason this is the case is that anyone who’s had any private sector business experience knows what a sham the leftist, community-organizer agenda supported by the president is.

The “living wage” movement has been championed by radical leftist political groups such as ACORN, which founded the Living Wage campaign in 1995 in cooperation with several unions, including the United Food and Commercial Workers International Union (UFCW) and the Service Employees International Union (SEIU).25 Both groups have been lobbying to get municipalities to pass legislation that requires employers to pay more than the federal minimum wage to their “low-income”—formerly “un-skilled”—workers. The movement has been very successful, if by “success” you mean driving employers to reduce their use of unskilled labor and to move their operations out of cities that have instituted living-wage policies.

That means that in cities which have passed living-wage laws, residents now face diminishing employment opportunities and a reduced standard of living. Like the minimum wage, the so-called “living wage” requires, in cities where it is passed, that designated employers pay an hourly wage to their employees that would sustain “a family of four based on an area’s cost of living” 26 if it were extended out to full-time employment. In other words, if the cost of living in a specific area were determined to be $40,000 a year for a family of four, the living wage for that area would be $20 an hour.

The living wage movement has also broadened out into other areas under the umbrella concept “sustainable economics.” The socialistic policies favored under this agenda include such things as the provision of money for job training programs, so-called “socially responsible banking” (which includes making ill-advised loans to those unable to pay them back), and “environmentally friendly” projects.27 And to the charge that the living wage movement is not a socialist movement, ACORN, failing to recognize the irony, has actually published a manual entitled “The Living Wage undercuts the incentive to privatize.” It’s a blatant attempt to bring more and more local, state, and, because the president is considering living wage legislation on the national level, federal contracts under government control.