Like most newbies, I tried to pick up a lot of weight because I didn’t want to look weak in front of my brother and our crew. So they put on about 100 pounds in weight on the barbell and I thought my muscles (what little I had) was going to pop off my arms. I struggled to lift the weight and my brother had to spot me by almost lifting up the weight himself. At the time they were already lifting 200+ in weight. That sad moment was around 1992. It took me about 2 years to put on a bit of size and strength. Lots of push ups, punching bags, bench press, and curls. I ended up buying a serious weight system at my mother’s house which had about 275 pounds in total weight. It was one of those all-in-one systems that had the breacher curl, cables for triceps, and multi-incline/decline bench-press. My brother would come by my mom’s house and as we used to say back in the day, “yo, let’s get big”.

So that’s what I did, I got big. Want to know how crazy? I was maxing out between 275 and 300 pounds on bench press. 100 pound dumbbells on bench. Curling 110 pounds. I had pretty good sized legs because of running track (and genetics) so I didn’t have to get crazy with my legs. Here is what I looked like then:

But a funny thing happens when you get obsessed with working out. You start pushing yourself to the edge. That edge led me to getting a “strangulated hernia” in 1997 that almost killed me. We had the fall break at Syracuse University and I usually worked those weeks to have a bit of money going back to school. At the time I worked at a supermarket and one of the grueling minimum wage responsibilities was pulling these heavy 5-crate storied milk crates 50 feet from the milk truck to the walk-in dairy refrigerator with a crowbar. This task contributed to inflaming an already tense situation in my intestines. Between lifting all this weight and pulling all this weight I was destined to have this hernia. The doctor said it was one of the worst hernia’s that he has ever seen and it could have killed me. Luckily my mother used her “spidey” senses and found it odd that I went to bed right after work. That wasn’t my routine so she forced me to get up and go to the hospital. Waiting in the ICU, I felt faint and my life was slipping away. Like an invisible boa contractor just squeezing the life out of me minute by minute. Right before I went into emergency surgery I threw up and it was “slimer” green. Very scary when you know you haven’t eaten anything that remotely looks that color in years.

This close call with death never deterred me from working out nor has it changed my love affair with being fit. One of the things that fascinates me about working out is the ability to transform your body with weight, pressure and time. During the first 5 years of working out, I couldn’t believe how I could transform my body with simple weight moments. The ability to augment my body to whatever I wanted has always kept me engaged.

Today, I’m a bit more careful, but I’ve still managed to keep my workout regiment creative and imaginative. I no longer try to curl the body weight of the average 13 year old, and have swapped in my dumbbells for Kettle Bells. I’ve moved away from traditional weight machines and now focus more on natural body movement resistance and pull ups. I have “slenderized” my workout regiment, but still enjoy doing advanced pushups for size and strength. At this point in my life, I’m most interested in maintaing good fitness and health than trying to look like the next Ronnie Coleman or Dorian Yates.

Sometimes my blog posts go through a long development process while others are more spontaneous and dynamic. This post is the latter. Written as a response on a email thread for the HHRT (Hip Hop Round Table) regarding the killing of Trayvon Martin by a wannabe cop, George Zimmerman. As many of you now know, Trayvon Martin is the latest innocent Black kid or man to be shot dead for doing absolutely nothing. 18 years ago I could have been Trayvon Martin. The Trayvon Martin story has not only occupied my Facebook and Twitter feed, it’s also occupied my thoughts. In short, “Why the hell does this keep happening?”. Now for those who don’t come from Black and Latino communities this might seem like a rare event. It’s not. Too many Black and Latino families are directly impacted by this level of ultra-violence and inconsideration. It’s really a gross injustice. I think innocent Black and Latino young men getting shot to death will always be a sub-national issue. I’ll tell you why:

1. Black and Latinos getting shot to death does not impact non-Black and non-Latino communities. Other than the emotional impact, a healthy amount of sorrow/remorse, the disruption in their communities is nil. I don’t say this as a slam to non-Black and non-Latino communities, but these are just the facts. And the reality of non-Black and non-Latinos being served the same type of inconsideration and raw violence is so far removed from their communities and social circles that even the most considerate person would have a hard time “walking in the shoes” of the Walking Dead (Typically Black and Latino men)
2. The justice system has handled the murderers of Black and Latino people with velvet gloves. Hence signaling to the nation that you can treat Black and Latino life like an expendable commodity. You can kill them in cold blood and the justice system will give that murderer the benefit of the “absurd” doubt. No jail time and maybe a bit of probation with community service. Although we’ve had a few victories against those murderers who kill innocent Black and Latino individuals, it’s clearly not enough to move the needle of justice in the other direction.
3. The people who do a lot of the shooting to death (police or enforcement brutality) do not come from Black and Latino (typically) communities. You might be tempted to say, “Whoa Malik, this dude was Hispanic and White”. Clearly there’s a difference between ethnic and cultural allegiances. When I say they don’t “come from B&L communities” I mean that have divorced themselves from the cultural, social, and tribal responsibilities that would include you in a B&L community. Just like I have ethnically “White” best-friends that have more insight into “Black” culture than some friends who are ethnically Black.
4. Black and Latino communities do not have enough political power to stop this. This is why we’ve been “talking” and marching about this since Malcolm and Martin got murked, yet ultra-violence has been institutionalized against Black and Latino communities or individuals.
5. Black and Latino communities are big business for the industrial prison complex. You now have prison companies on the stock market.

When you have a system that profits from the death and incarceration of certain individuals while the emotional and moral concern is completely absent from the general public, it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out what the end result will be.

This goes back to a post I did last year:
I Want My Country Back But from Who

where I said the following:

This reminds me of the Columbine father that said the following:

I am here today because my son Daniel would want me to be here today. If my son Daniel was not one of the victims, he would be here with me today. Something is wrong in this country when a child can grab a gun, grab a gun so easily, and shoot a bullet into the middle of a child’s face, as my son experienced. Something is wrong. But the time has come to come to understand that a Tech-9 semi-automatic -bullet weapon like that, that killed my son, is not used to kill deer. It has no useful purpose. It is time to address this problem.

It’s sad to see any father lose their son to such horrific violence, but at the time, we had already reached the tipping point where guns were in the hands of our youth. The carnage has now reached “everyones” doorstep, but many doorsteps have already been visited by gun violence. The anarchy is now more widespread. Now that we have shared economic grief, we are harking back to the “good ole days”. Keep in mind that there were many before you that have been living with these wounds, but your wounds are now fresh.

As expected the national conversation on teenagers getting killed went nowhere because the “Columbines” of the world were no longer susceptible to the type of violence that leaves their children dead.

Of course we can’t attribute all of Black and Latino death to enforcement brutality (we have a lot of Black on Black and Latino on Latino crime), but we certainly have a justice system that seems to look the other way on some of the most heinous injustices to Black and Latino men.

Shared sacrifice and grief is becoming a lost tradition in America.

Books

• Race, Crime and The Law by Randall Kennedy
• The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness by Michelle Alexander
• The Classroom and the Cell: Conversations on Black Life in America by Mumia Abu-Jamal and Marc Lamont Hill

The Gym is boring

Such a monotonous environment of techno-pump music, half-naked men and women, meat heads who thump weights for ego points, people who run up on you to talk (when you want to actually work out), then waiting for machines on lines that wrap around the perimeter of the gym. Sorry, no thanks.

My time is valuable

By the time I drive to the gym, drive home to the gym, while waiting in line to use my favorite machines, I could have finished an hour of P90x.

My money is valuable

Although the cost of gym memberships have come down considerably, it’s a service I seldom use. According to Medical News Today, 80 percent of 40 million Americans who have bought gym memberships are not using them. Guess who was part of the 80%?…me.

My home workouts are more interesting

Over the last several years I’ve been slowly moving my fitness to a home-based workout. Between P90x, Barstarzz, Bartendaz, TRX training and running, I think I have all I need to get in the best shape of my life. I now have included a matrix of pull-ups, natural movement exercises (hand-stand pushups), exotic plank-style pushups, and jump training techniques that keeps me engaged and interested.

I like to listen to podcasts and audiobooks when I workout

One of the issues I have with gyms, is they are really loud. I can’t even hear what I’m listening to. I don’t need the thunder of treble and bass to get me amped. A nice engaging podcast/audiobook can help me rip muscle just like any “workout” music can.

I don’t shun those who still go to the gym. Some people like the environment of a gym. I just realize that the gym and how it’s structured is not working for me. I’ve given it my best shot, but eventually you have to call it quits.

For anyone who is still in doubt about the effectiveness of a home-based workout, let me know. When you have the right tools and motivation, you can get the same results, if not better than any gym can.

A couple tools I’ll be adding to my home-base workout regiment:

Weighted Vest

If you really want to take your workout to the next level of strength, a weighted-vest is a necessary. Just watch as your pull-up and push game grows exponentially in strength and endurance.

THERACK® Workout Station

The good ole folks at Bartendaz introduced this product and it’s really a dip-bar meets ab-bar meets curl bar meets natural movement bar. It’s a total body gym on steroids.

As I patiently but anxiously wait for my Kindle Touch 3G to arrive in the mail, I realize I have surrounded myself with a couple of nifty tools to make my content consumption addiction easier, faster, and more efficient. Although I consider my self the Jamaican Muslim version of Henry Bemis from the Twilight Zone, I still need a little bit more than just a “brick and mortar” Library to satiate my diverse content consumption needs.

You are probably already familiar with many of these apps, but I have found them extremely helpful in covering 3 simple areas:

1. How do get access to tons of content?
2. How do I organize all this great content?
3. What type of tools will help me organize all this audio and textual content?

Instapaper. This app has been around for a while but I only recently started using it about 3 weeks ago. Instapaper is a simple app that allows you to save web article pages from any web browser, Smartphone, Tablet, E-reader and just about any other device. Any article that you “Read Later” with Instapaper (irrespective of what device you used to save the article) goes into the “cloud” and you can then access that web content from anywhere that is connected to the internet. All your devices that are connected to the internet do a short sync via Instapaper and now you have all that content stored on your device locally. Once the content is on the device, no internet connection is needed. It’s all on the device. You can read content on any one of the devices that have downloaded the web content from Instapaper’s cloud. With my third content device (Kindle Touch) on the way, I can now sync content from my IPhone, Mac Book, and Kindle Touch. (or any other computer that is connected to the Internet). It really makes it easy to consume a lot more long form article content online, or maybe I should say offline.

Goodreads. Yet another “cloud” content based app, Goodreads has several Android and IPhone apps that compliment the goodreads.com website. Goodreads is basically Amazon’s book recommendation engine, wishlist, and book reading history turned into a full blown website. They are not affiliated with Amazon, but it’s probably where Amazon should have taken their recommendation/wishlist app. The site allows readers around the world to share books they’ve read, books they want to read, books they are currently reading while allowing users to rate, review and comment on any book. The site (and the complimentary phone apps) have a wonderful recommendation engine that is separated by a variety of categories (they call these categories Genres). You can then customize this Genre list and Goodreads will select books that match these Genres. The more you submit to Goodreads the better it gets at giving you books that match your interests. The site is extremely social. You can read books from your friends and share your book lists. Once again all this activity is synced between all your devices that are using the Goodreads app and website.

Calibre. Actually found this app searching for an article Bookmark app that would sync with a Kindle device. Calibre is basically the ITunes version of e-book management tool. It allows you to update the covers of e-books, titles, topics, categories, publisher date and tons of other meta data. It also syncs and converts all your e-book files to the appropriate format for your e-reader device. For those who want to fine tune their e-book library I really don’t know another piece of software that is more easy to use and efficient than Calibre. It covers just about all e-book devices and it’s…wait for it…FREE.

Flipboard. Yet another recent addition to my content consumption tool kit, Flipboard has really transformed how I consume content. It was initially built for the IPad, but now it’s available for the IPhone (sorry folks, no Android yet but I’m sure it’s coming). It’s a social magazine app that allows you to easily flip (literally) through tons of content from hundreds, if not thousands of publishers. You can also pull content from your Twitter and Facebook feed. This app is all about making content beautiful while making it easier to share that same content on your favorite social networks. Like an infographic that visually beautifies raw data to make it easier to consume, Flipboard is no different.

Audible. I think audible.com has been around long enough for most people to be familiar with the website and the complimentary app for Android and the IPhone. Getting into audio books via audible has allowed me to consume so much more content. The best thing about audio books, is unlike regular books you can listen to these books while being somewhat idle with other things. Whether you are washing dishes, cutting the lawn, going for a walk or run, or just listening to an audio book at work. (of course while doing work). Other than the standard audio player options, you have the ability to bookmark (somewhat of an electronic dog ear) any part of the audio so you can refer back to it later. What is truly missing from Audible is the ability to sync your e-bookmarks with an audible app or maybe an Audible plugin for ITunes. All your audible purchases are still in the “cloud” which makes for an easy way to download your audible files to your phone or computer.

As child growing up in America during the 80s, what many dark-skin black people will call the “Light-Skin” or “Al B Sure” era, it was not easy growing up as a dark skin kid. I’m sure it wasn’t easy for “light-skin” kids in a more darker hue community as they have been attacked for having intra-cultural “beauty arrogance”. I’m sure that some of the emotionally painful remnants of such abandoned practices like the brown paper bag test or the pencil test still linger. It’s actually quite interesting considering the “Black and Proud” era was only several decades away. It seems like the 70′s became an era of identity regression. It wasn’t until the 90s, what I will now call the “Big Daddy Kane” or “Wesley Snipe” era, that darker skin brothers were back on center stage. What also helped is my father being the handsome and dark skinned man that he was. I’ve long abandoned those adolescent insecurities, but there are always reminders around me that dark skin is still seen as a badge of disgrace or less pleasant.

Many times I want to ignore the present identity crisis that’s either internalized or imposed. I was reminded by this after watching the media avalanche of Fair and Lovely commercials that inundate the TV screens in this part of the world. Just spend a couple minutes on the Fair and Lovely commercials page to get a sense of the overt “skin color” propaganda that light skin makes you prettier, wealthier, more famous, and makes your life full of blissful prestige.

After being in the Middle East for 4 months, I was reminded that “darker skin” is still a sensitive issue. Whether it’s women using make-up that is several “obvious” shades lighter, that the skin takes on a texture that is similar to Vitiligo or men/women getting their Fair and Lovely on at the local supermarket.

I was then reminded again of this silent but deadly identity crisis by Bradin French’s new Documentary called Dark Girls.

Dark Girls: Preview from Bradinn French on Vimeo.

So for those who still suffer from this identity confusion my comical and absurd suggestion is to live in a country where you will be considered the most “fair skin”, because clearly depending on what country you are in, different shades of skin color are considered “the prize” of the cultural pack.

This cultural epidemic has global reach. I’ve seen the likes of this from America, to African cultural circles, to the Middle Eastern/Arab cultural circles, to Indian/Pakistani cultural circles and many others. Please don’t take this as an indictment against “light-skinned” women and men. This isn’t. This is an indictment against those cultural, social and community “institutions” that have normalized beauty bias while reinforcing the idea that different shades of skin color are superior or inferior in beauty. Many times the self-hatred and skin color degradation is intra-cultural.

If anyone is still in denial (regardless of what side of the color line you sit on), just check out Study: White and black children biased toward lighter skin, or The impact of light skin on prison time for black female offenders, or Perception of Race and Skin Color in Pakistan or Skin Bleaching a Growing Concern in Jamaica or Skin Whitening Big Business in Asia or Color Complex in South Asian Diaspora or The Politics and Morality of a Skin Tone Ordering. Or you can read Hochilds’ The Skin Color Paradox and the American Racial Order Social Forces from December 2007 or maybe the documentary Black in Latin America.

Still in denial?

Since the unraveling of the U.S. economy you hear many people shouting from the rooftops “I want my country back”. At the gist of this statement is a need to capture the greatness of a previous moment in U.S. history that was for the betterment of the individual. As many would say, “the good ole days”. For many, the current economic and political environment has created a lot of uncertainty in their lives. However, I have a couple issues with this statement. First off, who are the individuals who want to go back in time? Second, how far back would they like to go? Third, who do they feel took the country from them? Fourth, where do they live? Five, what is their current economic level? Six, what was their current economic level at the time they would like to go back to? If you posed this question to a million people you would probably get a million types of answers.

A lot of people in this U.S. have had their heads in the sand for a while (On certain things I can include myself in this category). To be honest, I have been part of the problem in one way or another, so these criticisms are not only leveled at others, but also myself. We have now become so delusional and desperate for an economic antidote that recent polls show that 36% of Americans wish for the economic policies of Ronald Reagan. I would like to know who these people are, but that’s quite a considerable number knowing the “Gipper’s” economic policies were pretty disastrous. Although many have debunked the merits of the “Reagan Revolution”, many romantic nostalgists just won’t let go. That’s not to say there weren’t people who benefited from the policies of Reagan, but collectively his policies were a disaster. Just ask former budget Director David Stockman on how ‘wonderful” the economic Reagan era was.

The disruptive social and economic “bullet” was fired decades ago. Let’s paint a picture. Just imagine millions, maybe even billions of people lined up after one another. An individual fires a bullet (economic instability and social disruption) from a gun. When you get hit with that bullet it’s economic anarchy for you. In that same line, many folks were, lets say number 10267 to get fired upon. Some were even in the hundredth and millionth or billionth.  If you were towards the back of the line it wasn’t your problem because  33,  672, 45976, 273192, 834165, 5938200242 are getting socially and economically “murked” way before you. Many even thought, “oh it will never get to me” or even “Maybe the bullet will lose its momentum and velocity” before it gets to me. Or maybe in denial about the destruction of the bullet, “Maybe the bullet won’t hurt when it gets to me”. Maybe they felt it was someone else’s problem.

Now that the bullet is racing forward and it’s, as O.C. said, “Times Up“, people are clamoring around for answers as to what happened.  Of course it would be “nice” to go back in time when the bullet wasn’t so close to home. The net of economic disruption had already been cast. Now that person is in the net with everyone else.

This reminds me of the Columbine father that said the following:

I am here today because my son Daniel would want me to be here today. If my son Daniel was not one of the victims, he would be here with me today. Something is wrong in this country when a child can grab a gun, grab a gun so easily, and shoot a bullet into the middle of a child’s face, as my son experienced. Something is wrong. But the time has come to come to understand that a Tech-9 semi-automatic -bullet weapon like that, that killed my son, is not used to kill deer. It has no useful purpose. It is time to address this problem.

It’s sad to see any father lose their son to such horrific violence, but at the time, we had already reached the tipping point where guns were in the hands of our youth. The carnage has now reached “everyones” doorstep, but many doorsteps have already been visited by gun violence. The anarchy is now more widespread. Now that we have shared economic grief, we are harking back to the “good ole days”. Keep in mind that there were many before you that have been living with these wounds, but your wounds are now fresh.

I remember a discussion I had with a close family member in the mid 90s and we were talking about the gang violence that had been prevalent in a neighborhood right next to ours. The town was Roosevelt, Long Island in New York. At the time the Bloods and Crips had made significant inroads into the neighborhood. We lived in Uniondale, about a stones throw away. The conversation went something like this:

Me: Wow, we really need to do something about this gang violence. A lot people getting killed in Roosevelt
Family Member: Well that’s Roosevelt, you know how THEY are
Me: Hmmm…well what happens when the gangs come to Uniondale?
Family Member: No, that won’t happen. This is Uniondale, gangs don’t come to Uniondale
Me: I don’t think so. If we don’t take care of the surrounding communities around us, we are definitely going to have gangs here
Family Member: [blank stare]

As expected, the Bloods and the Crips made their way into Uniondale and although the degree of our gang problem was lesser than Roosevelt, we still had people getting shot over gang violence and whatnot. In short, when the economic plane goes down it won’t matter that you paid $5000 dollars for your first-class ticket. Irrespective of your seating arrangement, we are all going down. It’s just a matter of who hits the ground first.

In September 2009 I wrote a post about learning the roots of the 2008 Financial Crisis. It really gets to the crux of why I was compelled to go on somewhat of an economic “expedition” to find out what went wrong with the U.S. economic system in 2008. Prior to the crisis there I wasn’t aware of any body of economic work that intelligently outlined the causes (not just the symptoms) of the financial crisis than the Austrian School of Economics. As I’ve said in earlier posts, I truly believe that the Austrian Business Cycle Theory (ABCT) is by far one of the most complete descriptions of the “science”, if you will, of economic booms and busts. In addition to the ABCT, I believe that the Austrians have a way of interweaving a healthy amount of skepticism when it relates to the government intervening in the broader economy.

Unfortunately many other economic disciplines make wild assumptions, often very overly optimistic assumptions about the value of government intervention. At the same time, I have my own skepticism on the benefits of a 100% Libertarian approach to our social and political problems, but they clearly have the right pulse on many of the causes of how financial markets and economic incentives can be distorted by “well intentioned” governments. Private corporations don’t get off the hook, but in the context of the financial crisis, they worked in tandem with the government to completely destroy the economy.

I want to make a couple of points:

1. Be an economic policy skeptic. All policy isn’t created equal. As a matter of fact, many of the policy “prescriptions” by the government were completely backward and financially destructive and/or these policies were instituted to benefit a few while impoverishing many.
2. Read some of the suggested resources below. As a matter fact, read as much economic policy as you can. Many times you’ll get to the “real” intentions behind a lot of these policies.
3. Your Congress is bought (Thank you Dylan Ratigan from MSNBC). Please watch the video below and make sure you listen to every single word. If it’s not clear after you watch this video that voting for these cronies is a waste of time, then just off yourself. Okay..that was a joke..don’t off yourself but really understand that depending on our “do nothing” Congress is a waste of time.
4. The only option left is civil disobedience. What I like to call “soft” anarchy. Be an active participant in the economy. Vote with your pocket. Our government was not always enslaved to corporate interests. This can be undone, but it’s going to take a lot more than marching, waving hands, and holding creatively snark protest signs in different cities. There’s trillions of dollars at stake and if a high level of creative destruction doesn’t take place by the people, then we are playing a very dangerous, albeit participatory charade of musical “armchair revolutionary” chairs. Instead of sitting at home or in a cafe we are sitting in the streets.

Books

• Griftopia: Bubble Machines, Vampire Squids, and the Long Con That Is Breaking America by Matt Taibbi
• Greedy Bastards: How We Can Stop Corporate Communists, Banksters, and Other Vampires from Sucking America Dry by Dylan Ratigan
• Economics in One Lesson by Henry Hazlitt
• Road to Serfdom by F.A. Hayek
• The Return of Depression Economics and the Crisis of 2008 by Paul Krugman
• America’s Great Depression by Murray N. Rothbard
• Meltdown: A Free-Market Look at Why the Stock Market Collapsed, the Economy Tanked, and Government Bailouts Will Make Things Worse by Thomas E. Woods Jr. and Ron Paul

(AP Photo/Julie Jacobson)

At the root of every social movement is the will to change the present situation for something better. At the root of the Occupy Wall Street protest, which has now moved to other cities around the country, the intention of this movement is to unhook the almost parasitical tentacles of Wall Street from government policy (Washington). More on this here

I don’t believe ANY significant changes will happen via government policy or Washington’s intervention. Washington is an entity that is in the last stages of terminal “political” cancer. At the end of the day, this has to result in the banking firms that were responsible for this crisis to be reprimanded for their corporate malfeasance. We should reward (with our business) those financial institutions that are fiscally responsible, and move our money out of those financial institutions that contributed to the financial crisis.

I’m not convinced that the TBTF banks really understand what they did, nor does our government really care to prosecute these banks who irresponsibly unhinged the global economy for their narrow benefit.

So what we truly need to occupy, is our apathy. It’s our apathy and reluctance to being properly engaged in our political process that has contributed to Wall Street usurping power from the laymen and laywomen. In short, we kept our eye off the ball for too long. This corporate takeover has been happening for decades. Some would say it’s been happening since the inception of the Federal Reserve Bank. Regardless of when you think international banks started unsettling our political process, we are clearly at a tipping point where banks have complete control over our political process.

My suggestion is we engage in a bit of creative destruction to bring the balance of power back into the hands of where it belongs. the Proletariat and many of the hard working people of America (and around the world) who watched their jobs, wealth, financial security and personal livelihood go up in flames by the Wall Street, Federal Reserve Bank, Government-sponsored enterprise (GSE) doomsday machine.

We should start with the following approach:

1. Remove all your assets and loans (checking, savings, IRA, Mutual funds, Brokerage accounts, credit cards, car loans, mortgages, etc) from all banks that were given a bailout from the government.
2. Take all those assets/loans and transfer them to a credit union or firm that was not given a bailout.
3. Everyone who did the first 2 steps should draft a personal letter using their own words and explain to the banks/investment firms (who no longer have your business) why you removed all your money. In addition to that, explain why you moved your assets to the other bank/investment firm.

It’s time to transform our thoughts into action. Show these banks and our “absentee landlord” government that they cannot push our society to the edge of financial oblivion, while profiting off that same financial destruction.

A bank is a place that will lend you money if you can prove that you don’t need it. – Bob Hope

Related Links

This blog post below was a comment I posted from an article my wife shared on her Facebook wall. My boy Clarence, suggested I turn the comment into a blog post. The article, Black Unemployment Highest in 27 Years appeared on Roland Martin’s magazine/blog website. It seems like you have three typical responses when someone sees these type of “Blacks have a more destitute situation than __________ (insert race of choice here)” articles. The first response is “America is racist, ergo if there wasn’t racism we wouldn’t have such high unemployment”. The second response is, “Blacks are a bunch lazy fry chickin’ eating watermelon cologne wearing, hip hop lovin’, overspending, loud mouthin’ government lovin’, drag on the economy havin’ monkeys that are unemployable who will continue to be the last hired and the first fired.” The third response is, “Oh these ____________ (insert race of choice here) keep taking our jobs. They’ll take so much less to work ______________ job”.

These absurd responses don’t get us any closer to solutions. They are simple knee-jerk reactions to a long-standing problem. I have seen these types of “high unemployment among blacks” headlines since I graduated from college (and before college) and it’s getting worse. The technology shift was supposed to be our golden parachute into prosperity. Didn’t happen. Happen for some but not many and clearly not enough. I wish I finished my If I Had My Own Black Leadership Forum series, but I still have 2 parts left to do. If you’re interested in reading the first 3 parts, you can start here However, I give you My Thoughts on Black Unemployment.

There are no short turnarounds for the high black unemployment rate but at the root of our problems is a misallocation of economic resources. Whether you believe the misallocation of economic resources was driven by a bunch of klan sympathizing racists in corporate america (and the general workplace) and our political system or self inflicted by the black community, we are clearly dealing with a misallocation of economic resources in the black community. This situation has been going on since our “inclusion” into the main economy. Many of you have heard me say this before (and I’ll say it again):

The total GDP of the African-American community makes us the 13th largest economy in the world. That’s right, only 0.6% of planet earth (African Americans) represents the 13th largest economy in the world. The African American/Black Market profile from the Magazine Publishers of America has slated the purchasing power of African Americans to hit the 1 trillion dollar mark by 2012. How can the 13th largest economy in the world, have one of the highest unemployment rates in America? Umm..misallocation of economic resources. (I said it in my quiet e-typing-voice so you don’t get annoyed by me saying this a billion times. I might say it a couple more times)

There are only a few individuals that have actually outlined real solutions and they are the following:

• Powernomics: The National Plan to Empower Black America by Dr. Claud Anderson
• Black Lies, White Lies: The Truth According to Tony Brown by Tony Brown
• Blueprint for Black Power: A Moral, Political, and Economic Imperative for the Twenty-First Century by Amos N. Wilson
• The Entrepreneurial Secret To Starting a Business: Without A Bank Loan, Collateral or Revenue (Volumes 1, 2, 3) by Cedric Muhammad

Although I have huge issues with their past prejudice/religious theology, the other organization is the Nation of Islam. With all it’s past faults, prejudices, and warped theology, Message to the Blackman by Elijah Muhammad was the first book that had me thinking about how my income and productivity in the economy made other folks rich and not my local community. I repeat, the book’s religious theology is rife with shirk, misinformation, hatred and black supremacist theology. However, it’s economic prescriptions are 21st century. The book should be republished, minus the hatred. If I was part of the NOI, I would include a public apology in the introduction of the book.

If you look at many black media communication vehicles, including Black Enterprise mag and BET (Viacom), many of them [black owned or not] have never mentioned any of these individuals. If they mentioned them, there hasn’t been any real effort in promoting their ideas. The average black person has no idea who these individuals are. That is not a simple oversight. It’s intentional. Not in a conspiratorial way, but in a “these individuals will upset the apple cart” type of way. Unfortunately, Amos Wilson has passed on but his rich wealth of economic information lives on in his seminal work, Blueprint for Black Power. It might be tempting to dismiss many of these individuals as a bunch of black supremacist separatist who long for a day when the black seperation movement will transform itself into a 21st century authoritarian movement. No, this is a immature characterization of their intent and economic ideas. They were concerned with the flimsy social contract that America promised it’s black citizens and wanted to usher in a concrete economic platform which we could depend on with certainty. Clearly we are in uncertain times and the social contract that America had with it’s black citizens is gone.

If Black America studied these ideas in these books with vigor and dedication, I believe we can significantly lower black unemployment into the lower single digits in about 20-30 years while becoming a viable and powerful economic engine for growth. There are no easy answers. It’s going to take time, skill reallocation, and a lot of money from those wealthy black individuals to invest in this plan. The government and non-black corporations have already moved on. This is what many of the individuals I mentioned above were trying to say 50 years ago. There will come a time when African Americans will be completely on their own. No jobs programs, no social institutions, no nothing. So in short, they were saying we have to build our own institutions and local economies of scale because the “support window” is going to eventually close. Now that the American economy is in such disarray, its going into hardcore economic Darwinian mode.

Obama and any other government employee can do very little for the black community. His jobs bill cannot overturn hundreds of years of economic mismanagement and social degradation. The government and too many “black leaders” are absentee landlords, time to look within our own community for answers. If they had your back, you would of been out of this mess a long time ago. We are on our own.

The title of this post is a very dark and somewhat uncharacteristic thought I had after I saw the twin towers go down. At the time I was working for ABCNews in New York City. I was supposed to be working in the World Trade Center. When I moved back to NYC in 2000, I had a choice to work for a technology consulting firm on the 103rd floor of the World Trade Center or ABCNews in Lincoln Center. I chose the latter. Seeing three jumbo plane jets (Pentagon and World Trade Center Towers) used as ballistic missiles was something that my mind could not comprehend. It was horrific, shocking, and incomprehensible. Why? Who? Is this the first line of attack? Are there dozens of other planes set to come raining down on every major city? Who’s next? Los Angeles? Philadelphia? Chicago? Houston? My mind raced around as I thought of city landscapes littered with buildings on fire, smashed jumbo jet parts, rubble, and bodies. Dozens of cities smoldering with the stench of jet fuel and charred bodies piercing our noses for miles.

I’m not sure if “patriotism” is the right description of how I felt, but I definitely felt invaded and attacked. I felt enraged that such a horrific act had taken place in my country. You know, like the big bully who pushed you into the wet muddy grass while celebrating your new mud stained reality on the ground. Nothing could prepare me for what I saw on TV. People jumping off of the tower building because the heat was too intense. Burn to death or plummet 80 stories to your death. After the fear and rage had dissipated I felt a need to react. I wanted to join the armed forces. I wanted to go to war with the villains who would carry out such a demonic act against innocent civilians. I wanted the enemy to know that this is the last time you will commit such a horrific act. But before I got my “armed forces on” I needed to know my enemy. Who did this and why?

As I dug deeper and deeper down the rabbit hole of “who dunnit” and “why diddit” my patriotic/militaristic flames were quickly smothered by the water hoses of objective information and factual history. Oh really, the United States CIA had a program called Operation Cyclone to arm, train, and finance the Afghan mujahideen during the Soviet war in Afghanistan from 1979 to 1989. Oh really, after months and months of the press asking for firm evidence on the accusation that Iraq had an elaborate nuclear arms “dirty bomb” program (Weapons of Mass Destruction) the only evidence the Bush Administration can scare up is some aluminum tubes they claim are being used for uranium enrichment. Oh really, Opium production sky rockets after the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan. Oh really, unilateral approach on the Iraq War after the international community was completely opposed to this war effort. The final nail in the coffin was reading Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and Bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001 by Steve Coll. As you can see from the evidence, I decided to opt out of joining the armed forces. At the time, my plan was to join The U.S. Marines Corps.

There are many dimensions to my grief. I grieve for the American people who don’t understand how foreign policy creates new enemies. I grieve for the Iraqi people. I grieve for the Afghan people. I grieve for the Pakistani people. I grieve for the countless innocent civilians that lost their lives, here and abroad. I grieve because we are usurped by patriotic fervor. I grieve because we still believe it’s us vs them. I grieve because Muslims are still seen as untrustworthy and terrorist sympathizers. I grieve because people will read this and accuse me of being unpatriotic. I grieve for many of the armed forces who were killed during this war effort. I grieve because this will not be the last post I write on why militarism and occupation are stone age approaches to regime change. I grieve because only a few will see the connection between 9/11 and military occupation. I grieve because that last statement will be seen as insensitive to the 3000+ who lost their lives from a bunch terrorist maniacs. I grieve because too many see the terrorists as jealous of American freedom. I have no more tears for you America but I wish you well. Carry on.

• Costs of War
• CIA Operation Cyclone’s Blow Back By Mir Hekmatullah Sadat
• War in Afghanistan by History Guy
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