If you thought that the country had escaped the jaws of economic recession, you were right. Theres just one problem – if you are black in this country, that means absolutely shit.
Even as the economy added a better-than-expected 244,000 jobs, the percentage of black males over 20 who are currently employed dropped slightly to 56.9, the Labor Department’s April report shows. For whites, the equivalent figure is 68.1 percent. Before this recession, the percentage of black adult men with a job had never dropped below 60 percent, according to Labor Department statistics. – Yahoo News, May 11, 2011
What can we (specifically Black men) learn from this? What can we do about this?
1. Create Cooperatives
I have talked a lot about the Accountability Group concept, and my own local group is flourishing. We have determined that this group could become a powerful economic force for setting Black men free from jobs, as well as employing and training members of our community that would normally be disqualified from high paying and high priority jobs (felons, those without college degrees or high school diplomas, those with no prior experience). If a Black man in our community is committed to learning and working within one of our enterprises, and adheres to our values, then he is welcomed into our cooperative.
A Cooperative is the professional title for a group of people working together for mutual benefit. A cooperative business belongs to the people who use it – people who have organized to provide themselves with the goods and services they need, while making money at the same time. Member-owners meet regularly, present and hear reports on their business and investment activities, and hire General Managers to handle day-to-day affairs in their companies. Members invest in the businesses to provide capital for a strong and efficient operation, and once the businesses start making money, the profits are returned to co-op members. There are over 100 million people involved in 47,000 U.S. cooperatives that are in every sector of our economy.
(Read More Here: http://unitedblackamerica.com/building-black-cooperative-empire/
2. Gain Economic Sovereignty
Economic Sovereignty is our ability to control the economy of our community in response to our own needs. The goal of my cooperative as well as this movement is supreme power over our own personal and collective economies with freedom from external control and exploitation.
The necessity for us as Black Americans to become economically sovereign becomes more urgent every day, as more and more signs point to the American economy’s decline and eminent collapse. We know that empires dont last forever, and if this evil empire comes to an abrupt end, it will take us further down than any other group of people in this country.
(Read More Here: http://unitedblackamerica.com/gaining-economic-sovereignty/
3. Localize
Move back into Black communities, build assets there, and create both vertical and horizontal integration. Vertical and Horizontal Integration are economic terms that basically mean to take control of all means of production and distribution – from the dirt that produces corn that feed the chickens that go into our black owned restaurants and grocery stores (whose advertising and prices we also control). I am proposing, as I have proposed for years, a mass movement into Atlanta so that we may continue to build on the advances that we have made there. There are both strategic and common sense reasons why every Black man, woman, and child should go to (or return to) Atlanta that I will not expound on here. I love Los Angeles just as much as you love New York, Charlotte, or wherever you are now, but we are reaching a point where we cannot remain physically divided.
By making a choice to proactively reverse these trends and protect ourselves from the attacks of the white values system, YOU must make some difficult decisions. Are you serious about helping your people? Are you truly dedicated to setting both yourself and your generations to come free? Are you willing to get off your ass, stop reading, and start doing? If so, when the almighty calls you, you will stand before him and testify that in both word and in deed you have been honest in your intentions. Otherwise, you are just mentally masturbating, you are subconsciously accepting second class status. You are saying to yourself and all the Black men and women yet to come that you are settling for whatever disadvantage this country heaps upon you, and in the words of Marcus Garvey…
If you cannot do it, if you are not prepared to do it then you will DIE.
You race of cowards, you race of imbeciles, you race of good for-nothings!
If you cannot do what other men have done, what other nations have done, what other races have done,
THEN YOU HAD BETTER DIE.
Have You Read These Yet?
