Past Views Articles
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| The Congressional Black Caucus (CBC) struggles - and too often fails - to maintain a progressive majority in the face of rightward pressures from House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama. Key votes on the financial crisis, government spying on citizens, and the military budget reveal a Caucus adrift, with no discernable political identity or clear mission of its own. For the second consecutive grading period, no CBC member garnered a perfect score on the Congressional Black Caucus Monitor Report Card. |
| According to a recently released study, the weapon most used by men to kill African American women was a gun. The Violence Policy Center, a national non-profit organization that conducts research on violence in the United States stated in its annual report, "When Men Murder Women: An Analysis of 2006 Homicide Data," that 551 African American women were murdered by males that year. Of those homicides where a murder weapon could be identified, 305 of the victims were fatally shot and most during the course of an argument. The study stated there were 1,818 race-identified females murdered by males. And while white women accounted for the largest total of those killed–1,208–African American women were killed at a rate nearly three times higher. |
| The U.S. — not to mention Western Europe — is in the grip of a downward spiral that financial experts call deleveraging. Having accumulated debts beyond what's sustainable, households and financial institutions are being forced to reduce them. The pressure to do so results from a decline in the price of the assets they bought with the money they borrowed. It's a vicious feedback loop. When families and banks tip into bankruptcy, more assets get dumped on the market, driving prices down further and necessitating more deleveraging. This process now has so much momentum that even $700 billion in taxpayers' money may not suffice to stop it. |
| His candidacy has implications for the millions of voiceless Afro-Latinos, who will be further emboldened to speak truth to power. Many Afro-Latino communities are at varying stages of development. Countries such as Venezuela, Brazil, Colombia, Panama, and Peru have relatively vocal grassroots organizations with strong leadership to articulate the concerns of their communities. Unfortunately, most grass roots organizations are either suppressed or lack the organizational infrastructure to mount any successful political campaigns on their own behalf. I believe that once these communities achieve full access to educational opportunities for their youth, they will develop a cadre of new leadership motivated by role models such as, Martin Luther King Jr., Nelson Mandela, and Barack Obama. |
| The bottom line is that we have badly over-leveraged banks who are on the edge of collapse and we have a credit tightening due to an economic downturn. These problems are related, but even if we could snap our fingers and make the banks healthy again tomorrow, we would still have a serious credit problem due to the recession. In other words, many of the businesses and people who have been appearing on news shows because they could not get credit would still not be able to get credit. (Although they probably will not be appearing on the news shows once the bailout passes.) |
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