Our House Is On Fire, Part 3: New York, City of the Poor

By David A. Love, BlackCommentator.com

The following is the third part of an ongoing Color of Law series.

Click here to read Part 1 of this series: Our House Is On Fire, Part 1: Now the Robber Barons Replace the Welfare Queens (and Rightly So).

Click here to read Part 2 of this series: Our House Is On Fire, Part 2: Please Don’t Feed the Prison Monster

As the song goes, “If I can make it there, I’ll make it anywhere, it’s up to you, New York, New York.” The problem is that if you are counting on making it in New York City, you could be setting yourself up for disappointment.

A recent report by The Center for an Urban Future, a public policy organization dedicated to dealing with the problems facing low-income and working-class neighborhoods in New York City, suggests that the Big Apple is too expensive for most people to live. The report, called Reviving the City of Aspiration: A study of the challenges facing New York City’s middle class, confirms what many New Yorkers already knew anecdotally - with an ever-widening gap between earning power and expenses, New York is unable to sustain a middle class. In a city where even many upper middle class families are stretched to their limits, the cost of living is beyond the reach of most working families. The city lost more than its fair share of blue collar manufacturing jobs over the years. There are no new jobs to create or sustain a middle-class lifestyle, and there is little hope of upward mobility. New York City never was cheap, but it was once perceived as a city of aspiration, a place where people could live, work, scratch their way up the ladder, and raise a family. But people are leaving, and the path from poverty to the middle class is proving far more elusive.

These days, the city is losing a number of demographic groups, including people with a bachelor’s degree, families, immigrants, municipal workers, and the Black community of Eastern Queens, one of the country’s largest African American middle class populations.

Meanwhile, the ranks of the poor are rising. In 2005, 46% of New Yorkers living in poverty held regular jobs, a 17 point increase from 1990. And 31% of New Yorkers over age 18 work in low wage jobs.

There are a number of challenges facing working families. First and foremost, of course, is the high cost of living, particularly exorbitant housing costs. In addition, the price New Yorkers pay for electricity, phone service, auto insurance, parking, milk, home heating oil and state and local taxes are among the highest in the nation. While most families require two working parents to make ends meet, child care is prohibitively expensive, averaging $13,000 to $25,000 per year, per child. Then there are the inferior quality schools and the long, uncomfortable commutes on public transportation for people who live outside Manhattan, in one of the outer boroughs. And there was the housing boom which led to haphazard construction, diminishing the aesthetic qualities of many New York City neighborhoods, and straining the infrastructure of many communities.

Just to understand how bad things are, consider this: in Manhattan, the nation’s most expensive urban area, it takes an annual salary of $123,322 to enjoy the same standard of living as someone making $50,000 in Houston. In San Francisco, the nation’s second most expensive place, you would need $95,489 to live like that person in Houston. In Queens, NY (the fifth most expensive area in the nation) $85,918. In Nassau County, NY, $83,168. In Los Angeles, $80,583. In Boston, $72,772. What about Philadelphia? You would require $69,196. Chicago, $63,421. In Atlanta, only $53,630.

As for those who are leaving New York, where are they going? Well, it should be no surprise that they are moving to places such as Philadelphia. I’m not surprised because I am a New Yorker who moved to Philadelphia. I was born and raised in New York, and although I had lived in a number of places - as diverse as Boston, Detroit and Tokyo - I was a New Yorker. You can never really get the New York out of your system, even if you try, and you probably wouldn’t want to do it in any case. A New York community activist and journalist, I came to Philly for law school, where I met my wife, a Philadelphian turned New York activist. We had grand ideas of moving to Brooklyn after law school. But we were pulled back to Philadelphia, in no small measure, because we had expensive college and law school education, but with public interest careers with modest salaries serving underserved communities. You do the math. And besides, Philadelphia is a great city with a distinctive, down-to-earth character, a thriving arts community and public parks, and a sizable progressive community, albeit with its problems and challenges like any other city.

Meanwhile, New York, the capital of American capitalism and global capitalism, has become a city that only AIG executives, hedge fund managers, art dealers, and hotshot corporate lawyers can afford. The rest are poor, strangled and struggling. This is a scenario that would make Dickens blush. Yet, this was in the works for years before the economic crisis, in a city and a nation that has witnessed the dramatically widening gap between rich and poor, via public policy. And how telling that the titans of capitalism - who have brought down Wall Street through their own unchecked greed, and have no qualms about taking their corporate stimulus welfare payments - are now fighting vigorously to kill the Employee Free Choice Act and other initiatives that would help average working New Yorkers earn a living and raise their families.

As the report notes, there are a number of things that should be done to save New York: better-paying jobs, upgrades to infrastructure, diversifying the economy to include green jobs, and utilizing community college as a path to upward mobility. And there is the need to move away from the construction of luxury developments and sports stadiums, towards building affordable homes for everyday families, people with middle incomes, and professionals.

In the end, New York City provides a reality-based cautionary tale about the future of America, mired in poverty, about its priorities, what it has become and what it can become. This city that never sleeps, and other cities as well, will experience economic and social death without a vibrant middle class and viable opportunities to earn a living.

Click here to read Part 1 of this series: Our House Is On Fire, Part 1: Now the Robber Barons Replace the Welfare Queens (and Rightly So).

Click here to read Part 2 of this series: Our House Is On Fire, Part 2: Please Don’t Feed the Prison Monster.

Our House Is On Fire, Part 2: Please Don’t Feed the Prison Monster

By David A. Love, BlackCommentator.com


The following is the first part of an ongoing Color of Law series. Click here to listen to my discussion with Mark Thompson on the "Make It Plain" program, Sirius Radio 146, XM 167.

At its worst, America’s criminal justice system represents the place where racism, greed and corruption intersect. At its best, it is inherently flawed, unjust, and unreliable, and little better than its worst.

The engine that drives this injustice system is known as the prison industrial complex. It is the theater in which the nation’s foremost method of social control—and a failed method at that—plays itself out to the detriment of society. Recent events help to underscore just how bad things are:


First, two Pennsylvania judges were recently convicted for receiving $2.6 million in cash to send 5,000 juveniles, many first-time offenders, to two private detention centers. One judge secured the contracts for the companies, while the other judge filled up the facilities with warm bodies.


Meanwhile, Judge Sharon Keller, presiding judge of the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals, that state’s highest criminal court, is in a heap of trouble.  The State Commission on Judicial Conduct initiated impeachment proceedings against Keller for incompetence, violating her duties as a judge and casting public discredit on the court. Now for a state such as Texas, whose justice system boasts an already pitifully low standard of integrity, with defense attorneys allowed to fall asleep during their client’s trial, this is no small potatoes. What did this self-described pro-prosecution judge do? Well, she refused to keep the court open after 5pm when she knew Michael Richard, a death row inmate, sought a last-minute appeal challenging the constitutionality of his punishment (lethal injection). The inmate was unable to file an appeal and was executed.

Also, Keller rejected a new trial for Roy Criner, a mentally retarded man convicted of rape and murder, even though DNA evidence showed that he did not rape the victim.  “We can't give new trials to everyone who establishes, after conviction, that they might be innocent,”  Judge Keller said. “We would have no finality in the criminal justice system, and finality is important. When witnesses testify, and when jurors return a verdict, they need to know that they can't come back later and change their minds.”


Finally, a three-judge federal panel recently ruled that California’s state prisons must reduce their inmate population by one-third, or about 57,000 prisoners. The judges found that the level of overcrowding in the state institutions deprives the inmates of adequate healthcare and is unconstitutional.


By itself, any one of these stories shocks the conscience. We would hope that these sordid tales are the exception to the rule. However, these cases reflect a dysfunctional system that is functioning as designed by a dysfunctional society. Allow me to demystify the prison industrial complex and identify the threads that connect the crooked judges in Pennsylvania and Texas, and overcrowded prisons in California.

It was no accident that the United States became the nation with the world’s largest prison population, with 2.3 million behind bars, and a total of 7.3 million in jail, prison, parole or probation, or 1 in every 31 adults. America, with 5 percent of the world’s population, incarcerates 25 percent of the world’s prisoners, and the majority of these are people of color. The most ruthless and repressive totalitarian dictatorship cannot claim such impressive statistics. Public policy, informed by a legacy of Jim Crow racism, the profit motive and obscene, misplaced priorities, explains it all.

The United States has decided to treat prisons as a growth industry. Prisons have become the new company town, in a nation where most of the factory jobs left long ago, casualties of globalization and the race to find the lowest worldwide labor costs. They are built in mostly rural White areas, and over the years these communities courted these prisons, whether state-operated or privatized, for the jobs they promised to bring to these depressed communities.

Every factory requires raw materials. The raw materials for the prison-as-factory are Blacks and Latinos, and poor Whites—uneducated, in many cases illiterate, and unskilled casualties of a system that has programmed their failure through a cradle-to-prison pipeline. The criminalization of youth of color, systemic poverty, failed public schools and the wholesale denial of opportunity is fundamental to this pipeline.

In order to ensure a steady stream of Black, Brown and poor White bodies, these raw materials, into the factory, you must maintain the right policies. So, in the Jim Crow segregated South, the powers that be decided to keep Blacks in their place and eviscerate their political power, to maintain a system of slavery after slavery had been supposedly abolished. Through the Black Codes, the Southern establishment criminalized certain behaviors that were associated with the Black community. Certain offenses such as “mischief,” “insulting gestures” “cruel treatment to animals,” and the “vending of spiritous or intoxicating liquors” applied only to African Americans. In addition, it was illegal for Blacks to cohabit with Whites (which carried a life sentence) or keep firearms. Kangaroo courts were utilized to fill the prisons with Black men, who were farmed out for their labor and summarily, forever, denied the right to vote.

Nowadays, a high-tech Jim Crow has met the information age. In recent decades, the war on drugs has resulted in draconian sentencing, particularly for crack cocaine (a drug associated with poor drug users of color) vs. powdered cocaine. Politicians climb the career ladder through their tough on crime stance, exploiting White fears of Black criminality. Police conduct raids and sweeps in Black and Brown poor communities, rather than the suburbs and posh corporate suites, to find illegal drug activity. Communities of color are punished in the process. Black and Latino men (and increasingly women) are shipped upstate to far-flung prisons in White communities. Their families can visit them only through great personal and financial hardship. In a new twist on the infamous Three-Fifths Compromise (which counted slaves as three-fifths of a person for the benefit of the Southern states in terms of Congressional apportionment and the distribution of taxes), these prisoners are counted as residents of these rural for census and tax purposes. Yet, they are unable to vote, and in many cases unable to vote after they complete their sentence (about 5.3 million people cannot vote because they have felony convictions, including 13% of all Black men). Meanwhile, the mostly urban communities that raised them are depleted of resources— human, political and economic.

And the lynching of Black men was made cleaner, legitimate and more “respectable” by bringing it into the justice system in the form of state-sponsored executions. Executions, like Texas backwater lynchings, are arbitrary, barbaric and race-based. The defendant typically is a man of color, the underlying crime involves a White victim (80% of the time, according to the Death Penalty Information Center), and the chief prosecutor is White (98% of the time). Like the lynch mob, the administrators of the death penalty system ultimately care little about guilt or innocence. Someone’s got to pay, and anyone will do. When soon-to-be former Judge Keller expressed her sentiments that we can’t give every innocent person a new trial, she was getting at the heart of a criminal justice system that cares everything about finality and little about true justice. And so, new raw materials are constantly required to satisfy the hunger of the prison machine.

Those who are interested in the expansion of the prison boom, including the corrections officers’ union in California, private prison firms, and others, lobby state legislatures for longer, harsher sentences to keep more people behind bars for longer periods of time. As a result, ruinous policies based on catchy slogans, including three strikes laws, have prevailed. And as the prison population has burgeoned in the process, so too have the state budget allocations for prison spending. A society should be judged for its misplaced priorities when it spends more on incarcerating people than on educating them. But this is where criminal justice policy clashes with economic reality. At a time when states are going bankrupt—unable to pay their state employees, unable to pay tax refunds, or unable to collect the trash—ineffective profligate prison spending is breaking the banks of state governments. And despite the promises of a retributive and punitive legal regime, the war on drugs has been an abysmal failure. Draconian sentencing destroys communities and does not fight crime. America’s attitude towards drugs and drug policy, not to mention a steady supply of guns from the U.S., is wreaking havoc on cartel-ridden Mexico. And as the Obama administration has signaled that the federal government is moving away from the decriminalization of marijuana, California is now considering legalizing marijuana and taxing it to bring in billions of dollars in annual revenue.

One thing is for sure: the current path is bankrupting the United States, both in a moral and economic sense. The prison building madness has run its course, and it is time for it to stop. In a nation that has tried to make a buck from just about everything, including human bondage and the misery of others, America must stop feeding the prison monster.

Cick here to read Part 1 of this series: Our House Is On Fire, Part 1: Now the Robber Barons Replace the Welfare Queens (and Rightly So)

Our House Is On Fire, Part 1: Now the Robber Barons Replace the Welfare Queens (and Rightly So)

By David A. Love, BlackCommentator.com

The following is the first part of an ongoing Color of Law series.


Gordon Gecko had a long run of it, but now the party is over. I’m talking, of course, about the character in the film Wall Street, that conniving titan of finance who would sell his mother for a buck and a quarter, and there is scant evidence that he had not already accomplished that goal. "Greed is good," he declared.

Gecko began to have his heyday in the Reagan era. That’s when the "conventional wisdom," fueled by greed, began to call for a supply-side economic policy in which financial benefits would be bestowed upon the wealthy and businesses in the form of tax cuts. And as the theory goes, the benefits would "trickle down" to the common folk. In reality, the result was more like "trickle on".

Another hallmark of the Reagan era, which was perfected in the Clinton and Bush years, was the deregulation of the financial markets and other industries. Over the years, these policies were bought and paid for to the tune of $5 billion in contributions, given by Wall Street to Democratic and Republican politicians alike, to keep the government out of the gambling casinos, I mean financial markets. This led to the proliferation of exotic financial instruments called derivatives, which have turned out to be a little more than a high-tech, blue chip hustle. Unregulated, unmonitored, and getting their money’s worth, the banks were able to engage in predatory lending, sucking homeowners - particularly homeowners of color - into unconscionable subprime mortgages. When applied to the environment and food and safety standards, deregulation has resulted in salmonella - and rat - infested peanuts, E-coli tainted beef and climate change.

Meanwhile, as the land of opportunity became the most unequal, top-heavy society in the West, the media - deregulated, conglomerated and with fewer diverse voices (thank you, President Clinton) - provided us with empty calories for our entertainment. Many of us did not realize what was taking place right under our noses: the most dramatic upward redistribution of wealth in history, and a level of income inequality which makes democracy unsustainable.

Since the 1980s, when much of the New Deal regulatory framework has given way to the best unbridled capitalism money could buy, society has steered its best and brightest into the whole Wall Street thing. As the nation’s infrastructure began to crumble and its students fell behind the rest of the developed world in math and science, everyone, including yours truly in a former life, wanted a job shuffling paper and moving numbers around but not creating anything tangible, not building anything of much use to society.

With the adoration of the rich and famous, and the glorification of wealth as a virtue, came the vilification of the poor and the stigmatization of poverty. This gave birth to the concept of the welfare queen, the fictional Black woman on welfare who has six children, wears a mink coat and drives a Cadillac. The typical welfare recipient is White, but never mind. What a worthy scapegoat, no doubt created in some conservative think tank. And what better justification for taking from the poor (unworthy as they are, living off the government dole), and giving to the rich (needy as they are, and unable to live the American dream)? It was "reverse Robin Hood", as Jesse Jackson aptly described it, which culminated in the passage of welfare reform by President Clinton and a Republican Congress.

A Dickensian treatment of the poor was in full fashion. Poverty became a moral failing, an issue of genetics. "Are there no debtors’ prisons? No poor houses?" Well, given that American capitalism never was meant to employ everyone (for more information, see slavery), and given that many of the good blue collar and even white collar jobs have been sent overseas, what do you do with that surplus population, as Dickens called it? It seems no accident that the prison boom, the war on drugs, and draconian prison sentencing came at a time when there were no jobs to be found in the inner cities. The "land of the free" has the world’s largest prison population, even more than China, which is a police state and has over four times the population of the U.S. Prisons are one of America’s primary forms of social control, and there is profit in the warehousing of Black, Brown, and poor bodies.

And as all of this was going on, the people at the top were having a big party at our expense. There has been very little mention of the plight of the poor, although their ranks rose under Bush. In America, over 41 million people were poor as of 2005. Further, 18 percent of children live in poverty, and 1 in 50 children is homeless. With the collapse of the financial system, how can you scapegoat the poor when everyone is either poor or has real potential to join its ranks? This time around, the anger is directed towards the real culprits: the people who, like the robber barons of old, actually stole the money and brought us to where we are today.

It is cathartic to watch the spectacle of bank executives hauled before Congress to explain themselves. What got these people in trouble was not merely their obscenely immense wealth or the manner in which they earned or stole that wealth. Rather, in the midst of all the destruction they left in their path, the broken lives and stolen futures, these individuals still wanted to be rewarded for their failure, for being the special people they think they are. With their pernicious sense of entitlement, the robber barons looked at the rest of society with contempt, as if they are superior to the regular everyday chumps at the bottom of the pyramid scheme.

In a moment of clarity, everyday people have identified the real problem - unfettered capitalism. The robber barons have replaced the welfare queens, and so we have come full circle. This time around, the public refused to fall for the okeedoke and allow themselves to be distracted by some straw man or scapegoat. The Right’s early contention - that Black and Latino homeowners brought the financial system down with mortgages they could not afford - did not hold water. So, is this a sign of political maturity for the common folk, a new populism? Perhaps, but it is too early to tell. The test will come in how society responds to the crisis, learns the lessons of history, and constructs an economic system that seeks fairness, equity and justice. Heaven forbid we become more like those so-called "socialist" Europeans, with their universal healthcare, lower levels of inequality, lower poverty rates and higher educational standards. In the meantime, it will probably get worse before it gets better. But no one said it would be a pretty sight.

Don't blame Eric Holder. He has truth as his defense.

By David A. Love, Progressive Media Project

Don’t blame Eric Holder. The first African American to hold the position of U.S. Attorney General, Holder created controversy when he called the United States a “nation of cowards” for not candidly addressing racial issues.

He has truth as his defense.

A racist cartoon published that same day in the New York Post helped to substantiate it.

"Though this nation has proudly thought of itself as an ethnic melting pot, in things racial we have always been and continue to be, in too many ways, essentially a nation of cowards,” Holder said on Feb. 18, at a black history month celebration at the Justice Department. “Though race-related issues continue to occupy a significant portion of our political discussion, and though there remain many unresolved racial issues in this nation, we, average Americans, simply do not talk enough with each other about race.”

Holder also lamented that although the nation has done a reasonably good job of bringing diversity to the workplace, and people socialize fairly well regardless of race, the U.S. remains a segregated nation on Saturday and Sunday. "One cannot truly understand America without understanding the historical experience of black people in this nation,” he said.

The infamous New York Post cartoon played off that experience in the ugliest way. The cartoon depicted a white police officer shooting of a chimpanzee. As two white police officers, one with a smoking gun, observed the ape's bloody and bullet-ridden corpse, one of the officers said, "They'll have to find someone else to write the next stimulus bill."

The cartoon, ostensibly a spoof on the recent shooting of a chimpanzee, is no laughing matter. Many people concluded that the chimp was supposed to be President Obama. A photo of the president signing the stimulus bill was on the preceding page.

For black Americans, the symbolism was unmistakable. After all, throughout our history, black people have been depicted in cartoons as monkeys, gorillas and chimpanzees. In a nation with a sordid history of lynching and police brutality, and the assassination of presidents and black leaders, the cartoon seemed to incite violence.

Now the owner of the New York Post, Rupert Murdoch, has finally apologized, sort of, for running the cartoon.

“Last week, we made a mistake,” he said. “We ran a cartoon that offended many people. Today I want to personally apologize to any reader who felt offended, and even insulted.”

But Murdoch said that the racism was in the eye of the beholder, not the cartoonist. “I can assure you — without a doubt — that the only intent of that cartoon was to mock a badly written piece of legislation,” he said. “It was not meant to be racist, but unfortunately, it was interpreted by many as such.”

No, the unfortunate thing was not the interpretation but the cartoon itself.

That the cartoonist, and now Murdoch himself, can plead ignorant of its racist connotations shows that Attorney General Holder knew what he was talking about.

How refreshing it is now to have a leader in the Justice Department who understands this country's troubling legacy, and is not afraid to bluntly make us face it.

Although America now has its first black president, we cannot wave a magic wand and pretend that all of the social inequities have disappeared.

Holder was brave enough to call us out, collectively as a nation, on our silence about race. Hopefully the rest of us will muster the courage to take his lead and speak out, with honesty, whenever we can.

Southern Governors Block the Stimulus Like the Schoolhouse Door

By David A. Love, BlackCommentator.com

Recently, Rep. Jim Clyburn (D-S.C.) was accused of playing the race card when he characterized Southern governors’ opposition to the $787 billion federal stimulus package as “a slap in the face of African-Americans.”

He was referring to the four Republican governors who have opposed accepting some or all of the money, including Gov. Rick Perry of Texas, Haley Barbour of Mississippi, Mark Sanford of South Carolina, and Bobby Jindal of Louisiana. These states are part of the Black Belt, states in the South with the largest percentages of African Americans. These are among some of the poorest and neediest counties in America. Rep. Clyburn believes that these Republican governors don’t want the stimulus to help poor Black people, so they’d rather not take the money. And not surprisingly, I agree with the Congressman.

When I first heard about this, I googled the deep recesses of my memory and recalled an episode of Little House on the Prairie. Just work with me on this one. In this episode, Dr. Caleb Ledoux, a Black university-trained doctor, comes to work with Dr. Baker, the town doctor. Ledoux is a far superior doctor to Baker, who assigns him menial tasks because he is, well, Black. And with the exception of the Ingalls, none of the other people in Walnut Grove would go to him. One day, Doc Baker is away, and a woman is in childbirth and needs an emergency C-section. Dr. Ledoux can do the job, and Dr. Baker would have been ill-equipped in any case, but the racist husband of the expectant mother refuses his help. A whoopin’ from Charles Ingalls allows the husband to see the error of his ways, and the operation is a success, with mother and baby doing well. Dr. Ledoux, tired of the disrespect, decides to leave the town for good, but the townsfolk convince him to stay.

Fast forward to today: Obama is playing the role of Dr. Ledoux, and the Southern governors are defiant patients in a Black hospital.

Part of the GOP Southern Strategy had been to oppose social programs on the grounds that they would help people of color. Never mind that poor Whites would benefit as well. And it was this strategy which, applied years earlier by Southern elites, helped to keep the South dumb, backwards and poor by convincing poor Whites to support slavery and render their own labor superfluous. Under Jim Crow segregation, those elites kept poor Whites and Blacks separate and apart, by law, thereby preventing the formation of a biracial labor movement. Even to this day, the South is wholly nonunionized.

So, let’s return to the matter at hand and take a look at the states in question. Texas, which will receive an estimated $16.9 billion share from the Obama stimulus package, boasts the ninth highest poverty rate in the country, and ranks eighth in childhood poverty. The state is 15 percent Black.

Mississippi - whose governor says he will refuse $50 million from the federal government for unemployment compensation - ranks first in the nation in poverty, second in childhood poverty, and ranks 48th out of 50 states in educational standards. And the state is 39 percent Black.

South Carolina, where my family traces its origins in this country, is the twelfth poorest state in the union. It is also 30 percent African American. Clyburn noted that relief from the stimulus would assist 12 of South Carolina’s 46 counties along the I-95 corridor, in which more than one-fifth of the residents have lived in poverty for the past 30 years.

Finally, Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal has said that he wants to reject $98 million in stimulus money that would expand unemployment benefits for his state. Louisiana stands to collect $4 billion from Washington, and it needs every penny. Its wounds still festering from Hurricane Katrina, and its people displaced, Louisiana ranks number 44 in education and number 3 in poverty. Louisiana is also one-third Black. Jindal, one of the more prominent water carriers and hewers of wood for the Republican retrograde freak show, is Louisiana’s second governor of color (the first was Pinckney Benton Stewart Pinchback, who became the nation’s first African American governor in 1872).

Jindal, who is of Indian descent, opposes abortion, embryonic stem cell research and same-sex marriage. He has an A rating from the Gun Owners of America. He signed into law the teaching of intelligent design in the Louisiana public schools, and authorized the chemical castration of sex offenders. We are told Gov. Jindal is the future of the Republican Party, a brilliant individual who has accomplished many great things in his state. But during his fifteen minutes of fame, when he gave the GOP response to President Obama’s address to Congress, we learned how underwhelming and inconsequential this man really is. His performance that evening was far more of an embarrassment for Brown University and the University of Oxford, the schools he attended, than for the governor himself.

We know about Jindal’s Punjabi background, but we get absolutely no sense as to whether he has learned anything from his people’s rich cultural heritage. And how ironic it is that this second generation immigrant, who would fashion himself as an anti-tax, anti-government spending, Simple Simon “redneck of color” in order to appeal to the base of his party, would quickly be labeled a “terrorist” by the same base that smeared and vilified Obama.

But I digress…

In opposing crucial economic aid to their citizens, these four governors seem to be channeling their inner George Wallace, their inner Ross Barnett, or their inner Orval Faubus. Their strategy is to stand in front of the schoolhouse door, with a 21st century twist, and stand in the way of an historic seismic shift in America. The political winds have brought federal budgets that reflect progressive priorities and an emphasis on the needs and concerns of everyday people. Pragmatic moderates such as Gov. Charlie Crist of Florida, and Arnold Schwarzenegger of California are taking the stimulus money because they are no idiots (and Obama won their respective states in November), but they are few in number in their party.

Governors of any state likely cannot pick and choose which parts of the stimulus they wish to take, and their state legislatures can override them in any case. If nothing else, this latest chapter of the Republican Party makes for good entertainment, and I have my popcorn ready. If this is the only strategy they have left - to refuse to take the Black man’s help when their people are jobless, hungry and increasingly homeless, yet conclude they’ll end up looking fabulous in the process - then they have already written their own political epitaph.