Black Point Man for the Right

The Black Commentator. Posted January 8, 2005.

"You have to understand people like George Bush. He's a nice guy. We need to learn from him. Remember what Bill Clinton did: He figured out what Republicans were doing well, and instead of complaining about it, he figured out a way to do it better." - Rep. Harold Ford, Jr. (D-Tenn.)

The black body politic has been invaded by corporate money, which seeks through its media arms to select a "new" black leadership from among a small group of compliant and corrupt Democrats. Memphis Congressman Harold Ford, Jr. is a principal vector of the disease, an eager acolyte of the corporate-funded Democratic Leadership Council (DLC), and now the point man among black Democrats in the Republican mission to destroy Social Security.

Ford should also be known as the "Black Man Who Dances With Blue Dogs" – one of only two black congressional members of the Blue Dog Democratic Coalition (the other black Blue Dog is Georgia Rep. Sanford Bishop). C-SPAN congressional scholar Ilona Nickles aptly describes the Blue Dogs as "closer in purpose to a former coalition of southern Members of the House known as the 'Boll Weevils,' whose heyday was in the early 1980's. These Members defected as a group from the Democratic party to vote with Congressional Republicans on budgetary and tax bills."

Harold Ford is preparing to defect from the Democratic and Congressional Black caucuses in service to George Bush's Social Security privatization scheme, which he has embraced in principle. Blue Dog and DLC congresspersons form the core of the Democrats that Ford hopes will join Republicans, like South Carolina Sen. Lindsay Graham, "to create an ownership society in a variety of creative ways, and move away from 'if you're for privatization, you're with the Republicans' and 'if you're against it, you're with the Democrats,'" in Ford's words.

"Ownership society" is, of course, the slogan George Bush has deployed in his campaign to transfer trillions of Social Security dollars to Wall Street. White House guru Karl Rove must be giving Harold Ford copies of Bush's scripts. The 34-year-old congressman has been mimicking Bush on Social Security since at least April of last year, when Ford addressed a forum organized by Centrists.org, the Concord Coalition, the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget at the New America Foundation and the Alliance for Worker Retirement Security. The latter is a front set up by the National Association of Manufacturers specifically to undermine Social Security. Centrists.Org is the Blue Dog Coalition's think tank, the Concord Coalition opposes "entitlements" of all kinds and spreads hysteria about the coming "bankruptcy" of Social Security, while the New America Foundation's Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget is a public policy factory for a mix of DLC Democrats and "moderate" Republicans. All are slaves of corporate funding.

What do these people have to do with Rep. Ford's mostly black constituents in the 9th congressional district in Memphis, Tenn.? Nothing. They are denizens of purely corporate constructs that share no constituencies on Ford's home turf or in any significant sector of black America. The congressman has journeyed far afield to inhabit a Neverland much more dangerous and alien to black interests than anything Michael Jackson could conjure or imagine. Harold Ford has crossed over to the corporate side of the world, beyond redemption. And he's not alone. As we wrote in our Dec. 2, 2004 Cover Story, "Black Dems Must Clean Up Their Own Act ": "One-fifth of the CBC are members of the DLC. These include Harold Ford, Jr. (TN) ... Artur Davis (AL), beneficiary of the 2002 corporate cash offensive that also ousted Cynthia McKinney in neighboring Georgia; David Scott (GA), possibly the most conservative-voting member of the CBC, also a 2002 black "New Democrat"; Gregory Meeks (NY), Juanita Millender-McDonald (CA) and James E. Clyburn (SC), an otherwise decent man who nevertheless finds it useful to co-chair his state's DLC; and Albert R. Wynn (MD), who is proud to have "represented the Congressional Black Caucus on the [House Democratic] Caucus Democratic Leadership Council."

Not all of these tainted black politicians will abandon the historical Black Political Consensus to support privatization of Social Security – the founding program of the New Deal – but Harold Ford has already sprinted across the great divide. Ford's personal ambitions and utter lack of principle have propelled him beyond the boundaries of the Black Consensus and, therefore, outside of the African-American conversation. The problem is: Black people don't control the terms of their own conversations. Corporate dominion over media is just as endemic to the black airwaves and print outlets as to general media, and these media corporations celebrate crossover dreams even when they are the product of treachery against historical and current black aspirations.

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