Power is obviously no respecter of race. Anyone is likely to become afflicted. Bruce Dixon comes to tell us that the Mayor of Atlanta seems to have fallen victim.
Occupy Atlanta VS Kasim Reed, the Black Misleadership Class and the One Percent
by Bruce Dixon
Why are police across the country arresting and dispersing occupation sites? And why is the Black Misleadership Class, and its black Atlanta Mayor Kasim Reed threatened by the occupy movement? Why did Atlanta send copters, hundreds of police, and spend at least $800,000 to breakup Occupy Atlanta? Where will it assemble next? Can homeless Atlanta and Occupy Atlanta work together, and if they can, will Mayor Reed and his friends in the one percent like that even less?
Back in Janaury 2010, I wrote that
“the black political elite no longer believes its mission is to fight for peace and justice. The newer, more cynical black elite are unmoored from their peace-and-justice-loving base. They are focused on their own careers, and the corporate largesse that makes those careers possible… the black politics of a previous generation, in which black candidates and public officials were expected to stand for something beside their own careers, is over.”
But, the author is providing more than an indictment. He's encapsulated the history of Atlanta, the capital of the New South, in a few paragraphs you should not miss.
Not to mention that Like the Dew deserves a wider readership.
In 1977, Mayor Maynard Jackson defined the relationship between the class of newly privileged black politicians and the rest of black Atlanta by deliberately provoking and then savagely breaking a strike by Atlanta sanitation workers seeking decent pay and medical benefits. Georgia’s white business leaders began to understand that though the color of the city’s politicians had changed, little else would. And it hasn’t. By the end of the 70s, the Maynard Jackson administration boasted of leveraging city contracts and the construction of the nation’s largest airport to create two or three dozen new black millionaires, from whom wealth was to trickle down to the entire African American community. The only thing that really trickled down to black Atlanta and black communities nationwide was the PR campaign, the self-celebrating myth of Black Mecca, where the climate was benign, the housing affordable, the jobs plentiful and the policians enlightened. It was a myth, but a potent one.
Maynard Jackson was succeeded by Andy Young, a former confidante of Martin Luther King. Young’s signature project was bringing the 1996 Olympics to Atlanta, providing the excuse to clear vast tracts in the city of poor people and abandoned industries, and replace them with richer people and more shopping. Jackson returned for a last term after Young, and was followed by Bill Campbell, who sold the city’s water network to a private firm. Young cashed in his chips as a civil rights icon to found GoodWorks International, a PR and consulting firm for multinational corporations like Wal-Mart and Nike, and serve on the boards of corporations like Barrick Gold, which is heavily implicated in plunder and genocide in the Congo.
Shirley Franklin came in after Campbell with a campaign of sweeping privatizations of parks, city services, parking and more. But with Atlanta’s newly privatized water works pumping rust colored mud through the taps of tens of thousands of Atlanta residents (including wealthy white ones), the drive to privatize everything in sight had to be slowed, though Franklin was able to complete demolition of nearly all Atlanta’s public housing, driving tens of thousands of poor black Atlantans from the city. Like Andy Young, Franklin also cashed in after leaving Atlanta’s City Hall, as a consultant for the telecom industry, and championing the privatization of schools and services of all kinds. By 2002, after a generation of “Black Mecca,” and black political leadership, the city’s poverty rate was in the top five of metro areas nationwide. One in three black Atlanta children is in poverty, even with the expulsion of tens of thousands of poor Atlantans as their neighborhoods have been demolished.
Privatization, percentages and profit are the three forces which engineer the transfer of public assets into private wealth. And it's all legal. Deprivation under cover of law.
But, once we know how it's done, we can reverse it.