The problem with Cornel West
Sam Smith – Given that I helped to start what became the national Green Party you might think that I’m delighted to learn that Cornel West is seeking to be its presidential candidate next year. I admire both the Greens and West but I also learned at an early stage of life that politics, unlike religion, was not about gaining and displaying one’s personal virtue but about working collectively with others to move things forward as much as the reality of the time permits. It’s not about defining and displaying who you are but working with those who are may only be right on some things but who have the best chance of turning such views that into an election victory. Cornel West can only hurt progress by taking votes away from Joe Biden. This has nothing to do with his or his supporters’ virtues but rather reflects the reality of the politics we’re trying to affect.
Latino links
Latino links
Note: For reasons we can’t unravel, this page doesn’t load in our list of pages so we are listing it separately.
2022
83% of latinos say they would come north again
2021
Latinos Cracked 50% Turnout In 2020
New Study on Latinos in Leading Roles and Speaking Parts Offers Little to Celebrate Census data leaves Latinos wondering: Were we counted?
36% of latino men voted for Trump
57% of US Latinos Say It Doesn’t Matter What Label Is Used to Describe Their Community
2020
Hispanic Americans see highest unemployment rate of any racial group at 18.9%
MEDIA
Latin America News Dispatch
Latino Rebels
Latino USA
NBC Latino News
US News Latino Report
UNDERNEWS OCT 7
Merck Sells Federally Financed Covid Pill to U.S. for 40 Times What It Costs to Make
Senate report gives new details of Trump efforts to use Justice Dept. to overturn election
Our Foreign Policy Elite Has Learned Nothing From Afghanistan
Baltimore Museum Employees Are Planning to Unionize
Trust in media nears record low
Sam’s jazz bands
These tunes are uploaded to soundcloud.com which has stopped working for unknown reasons. If it comes back, please let us know at prorevam@gmail.com
SAM SMITH’S
DECOLAND BAND
BABY WON’TYOU PLEASE COME HOEME
SIT RIGHT DOWN AND WRITE MYSELF A LETTER
Bob Walter, trumpet; Jimmy Hamilton & Coleman Hankins, clarinet; Paul Hettich, bass; Sam Smith, piano. Bob Resnik, drums
PHOENIX JAZZ BAND
led by Bob Walter
APEX BLUESGeorge James sax
OH MAMA Sam piano & vocal
HILL CITY JAZZ BAND
led by Bob Walter
ACE IN THE HOLE: With the lyrics altered to fit Washington
AINT NOBODY’S BUSINESS IF I DO
BYE & BYE Sam piano & vocal
WHEN YOU’RE SMILING Sam piano, Bob Walter vocal
Sam Smith started the first jazz band his Quaker school ever had. At Harvard he played with various bands, once for 12 hours straight at two locales. He played drums with bands up until 1980 when he switched to stride piano.
Sam Smith’s last drum gig was a party for Walter Mondale after the inauguration of Ronald Reagan. Sam offered to let Mondale sit in but he said,” Thanks but I’m in enough trouble already.”
He had his own band until the mid-1990s and also played with the New Sunshine Jazz Band, Hill City Jazz Band, the Not So Modern Jazz Band and the Phoenix Jazz Band. Thanks to Bob Walter on trumpet and clarinetists including Jimmy Hamilton, Coleman Hankins and Don Rouse, plus the driving bass of Paul Hettich – we got along much of the time without a drummer (although not on the tracks here). Having two horns gave us a bigger sound and the lack of percussion got us gigs in places where drums would have been too much.
What does this all have to do with news and politics? Only this, as I wrote in one of my books:
“The essence of jazz is the same as that of democracy: the greatest amount of individual freedom consistent with a healthy community. Each musician is allowed extraordinary liberty during a solo and then is expected to conscientiously back up the other musicians in turn. The two most exciting moments in jazz are during flights of individual virtuosity and when the entire musical group seems to become one. The genius of jazz (and democracy) is that the same people are willing and able to do both.”
The recording of the Phoenix Jazz Band was made at the Central Ohio Jazz Festival in 1990 and features George James on saxophone on ‘Apex Blues’, band leader Bob Walter on trumpet, Coleman Hankins on clarinet and your editor on piano, among others. The sound effects come from the audience.
George James was 84 years old at the time and had to be helped to the stage. Once he got there it was a different story as is apparent on the cut. He had sixty recordings behind him and had been a regular with both Louis Armstrong and Fats Waller. The tune we played with him was the Apex Blues written by Jimmy Noone in honor of the second floor Apex Club on the south side of Chicago where Noone had an orchestra in the 1920s. The club was raided and closed in 1930 by federal agents enforcing prohibition. One of those who played with Noone was Earl ‘Fatha’ Hines. Another was George James, who played in Noone’s group before going on the road with Louis Armstrong.
We played just two tunes with James but for a stride piano player like myself to go even eight bars with one of Fats Waller’s sidemen is about as close to heaven as one can reasonably expect to get. And who would have guessed it would happen in Columbus Ohio? But, then, as Fats used to say, “One never knows, do one?”
Changes in corruption
Sam Smith, 2018 – Corruption is not just a crime, it is a culture. And, by its nature, it can have different effects. I have become convinced, for example, that contemporary corrupt culture is, in no small part, the direct effect of the culture of television, in that corruption used to be a feudal system in which communities were served even as they were being scammed. With the major force in politics becoming one’s televised public image, and with advertising replacing community familiarity, you have candidates come to the fore like Trump, Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton whose real record and real past disappears in a media-supported fictional image.
Among the people who could change this are those in the national media. But over my lifetime the cultural role of this media has drastically changed. When I started, over half the reporters in the country had only a high school education. As I wrote over a decade ago:
“Even in sophisticated Washington, I kept quiet about my Harvard degree as I learned the trade. Then the trade stopped being a trade as not only a college degree but a masters in journalism became increasingly desired. Further, journalists – with the help of things like the Washington Post’s new Style section – began joining the power structure by increasingly writing themselves into it.”
Absent a criminal investigation, it became against the rules to undermine the media image of someone as powerful as a Trump or Clinton. In covering the Clinton Arkansas story I thought I was just doing what a good reporter was meant to do, but I found myself instead banned from CSPAN and from the DC public radio station not because my facts was wrong, but because I was challenging the accepted view in the establishment media.
This helps to explain why the coverage of Trump was so unrevealing until a special prosecutor came along. You weren’t meant to challenge the false media image of the man even with stuff like the record of his bankruptcies, his untruths, accusation of rape and his dubious real estate dealings. He was a TV star and that was enough.
Sam Smith, 2014 – One of the reasons we are so disgusted with politics these days is that corruption just isn’t as good as it used to be. Once one supported a corrupt politician because you and your friends got something out of it. The politician got power but partially returned the favor to people like you. And you opposed the ones who took but didn’t give back.
With the growth of television and modern public relations, however, politicians increasingly became optical illusions with image replacing actual record, loyalty, or favors done. Instead of our national legislature voting for a bridge to nowhere, it became itself a Congress to nowhere, filled with people paid large sums to do what campaign contributors wanted. Modest pork barrel legislation was replaced by the massive anti-citizen effects things like the Citizens United case.
It has become a time when one gets enough credit just talking about the middle class that you don’t actually have to do anything for it, especially if you’re rushing off next to a $50,000 endowed speech for a Wall Street financial firm. It’s the optics that count, not the reality.
I learned about corruption as a teenager in Philadelphia. You couldn’t hang around politics in Philly in those days without knowing what was going on. And nobody pretended it wasn’t. The polling guy who went into the curtained booth with my aged aunt to pull the levers for her. The FBI agents who visited my politically active father seeking help in a corruption case they were working on. The police car in the back drive being loaded with a case of champagne liberated from my sisters’ wedding reception. These weren’t just incidents, they were the culture.
Later, covering the Cambridge, Massachusetts, city council for the Harvard radio station introduced me to a new variety. I remember one councilmember who told me he didn’t know how he was going to vote on a police and fire pay raise because he figured that each of these fellows was getting a few thousand more on the side. They didn’t tell you about that in political science class.
Then, In the sixties, I became the press guy for then DC civil rights leader Marion Barry. We hit it off and I later backed Barry for school board and his first two terms as mayor. Then I soured on him not because of any great moral revelation but for specific policies I didn’t like. Even before cocaine got to him, some of the city’s big interests were already doing the job.
Modern DC has only had elected mayors since the 1970s and Barry’s first two terms were among the best. The drug problem overwhelmed this fact, but Barry handled much of the government well and he started a summer jobs program for thousands of youths, whereas recently a DC council member was found guilty of stealing around $300,000 from a youth program, a small metaphor for a big political change.
I came to call Marion “the last of the great white mayors,” in that his approach to urban politics had much more in common with Mayors Curley, Daley and LaGuardia than with the newer generations of politicians for whom far more money came in but the favors returned to its sources rather than to the average citizen. Corruption no longer required tithing to one‘s community.
One of the ways you can get a handle on these earlier mayors is to check out their homes. Some were humble, some were pretty nice, but part of the deal was you stayed close to your ‘hood. Curley built an 18 room home in 1915 in his first term and was still living their 41 years later when he sold it to for $60,000 to the Society of Oblate Fathers for Missions Among the Poor. Daley died in a modest brick bungalow just a few doors from his birthplace. Young mayor Barry lived for over a decade in a house in the poorer part of town and he still lives in the city’s poorest ward and represents it on the city council.
And it wasn’t just a local thing. At the state level, two classic corrupt politicians – Earl Long of Louisiana and EH Crump of Tennesee — did some things you won’t find in average references. Reports Historic Memphis, “Unlike most Southern Democrats of his time, Crump was not opposed to blacks voting in Memphis and they, for the most part were reliable Crump machine voters.” In fact, Memphis Blues was originally written by WC Handy as a campaign song for Crump. By the time, a young Marion Barry of Memphis came along, however, Crump had joined the segregationists.
As for Long, one of the reasons some thought he was crazy because he was registering tens of thousands of black voters. But, as Ol’ Earl once explained, when asked if ideals had a place in politics, “Hell yes. You should use ideals or any other damn thing you can get your hands on.”
And at the national level, Adam Clayton Powell and Lyndon Johnson – two politicians of dubious ethics – got more good legislation passed in less time than in almost any other period of American history, yet you wouldn’t want your daughters near them.
Corruption has also been deep in American ethnic and urban progress. Speaking of immigrants, Richard Croker, a tough 19th century county boss of Tammany Hall, said his organization “looks after them for the sake of their vote, grafts them upon the Republic, makes citizens of them.” Boston politician Martin Lomansey met every new immigrant ship and “helped the newcomers find lodging or guided them to relatives.” James Michael Curley set up nationalization classes to prepare recent arrivals for the citizenship examination. Can you imagine any Texas politician doing that today?
Over all, there is little doubt that the system, for all its faults, also gave the poor a boost and helped build the strength of immigrant groups like the Irish.
My first big hint that things had really changed was when I began looking into Bill Clinton’s Arkansas. I had been forewarned by my friend Sally Denton’s book, The Bluegrass Conspiracy, about next door Kentucky in which she described a drug driven corruption that ran from the police right up to the governor’s office. The book told enough truths that once a friendly retired cop brought his gun along for her safety as she gave a book talk.
I found more than a few echoes of Kentucky in Arkansas. Like the drug pilot who said he really liked the state, giving as an example the time he landed in a field and his pick up was a state trooper in a marked car. There were also new scents of old trails I had followed while writing about Reagan and Bush — back when no one ever accused me yet of being a conspiracy theorist for just reporting things I had found. The droppings of BCCI, Iran-Contra, the S&L scandals and the CIA were in Arkansas as well.
Then there was the $50 million the Arkansas Development Financial Authority sent to a bank in the Cayman Islands, a favorite destination spot for laundered drug money. And the IRS warning other law enforcement agencies of the state’s “enticing climate.” According to Clinton biographer Roger Morris, drug operatives went into banks with duffel bags full of cash, which bank officers then distributed to tellers in sums under $10,000 so they don’t have to report the transaction.
And there was the major drug trafficker Barry Seal who, under pressure from the Louisiana cops, relocated his operations to Mena, Arkansas. Seal would later claim to have made more than $50 million out of his operations. He even had a Navy surplus minesweeper to recover drugs in case a plane went down
Several things struck me about the Arkansas story. The first was that – unlike Chicago, Boston or DC – the ordinary Arkansan seemed to be getting hardly anything out of it all. The second was that the national public and media didn’t want to hear about it. Some reporters who tried to tell the story even got taken off the case, liberals bought into the Clintons’ “vast rightwing conspiracy” theory even though, in my case at least, the first leads had come from a progressive student group at the University of Arkansas. The third – and most important change – was that facts no longer were worth what they once were. It was all a question of who could create the best optical illusion.
Consider that the American illegal drug trade is estimated to be roughly the size of the legal pharmaceutical industry. Yet, as far as one can tell, at least from conventional media, it is the only industry that never contributes to any politicians, never lobbies on Capitol Hill and never tries to influence our political agenda. In other words, based on the silence of the news accounts at least, the least corrupt industry in America.
And, as I found out with the Arkansas story, it was not something you were meant to challenge.
Now the term optics has become one of journalism’s favorite clichés. What something seems is more important than what it is. Instead of modest earmarks and pork legislation we have candidates who get $200,000 for speaking to Goldman Sachs and then go on TV to talk about their concern about “income inequality.”
The press used to love delving into corruption stories, but now, for many, it’s too risky and might hurt access to their sources – you know, those people who give them the latest talking points.
And instead of corruption being, as it once was, a form of political feudalism with a complex set of quid pro quo aspects, today our politicians give back to their contributors rather than to the voters and then tell the TV interviewer about their concern for the middle class.
Today we’re suffering the consequences of what may be the worst corruption in the nation’s history. . . What we’re up against isn’t just the shameful work of individuals like these. It’s a much broader problem. . .
When Clinton left office there were 9,500 special interest lobbyists in Washington. There are more than 34,000 today. That’s 63 for each member of Congress.
They have infiltrated every aspect of the government. Their money and donations shape the opinions of corrupt lawmakers in a way that public opinion no longer does. . From tax policy to public television and radio programming to the laws that regulate the safety of our drinking water, nothing has proved too precious to avoid being sold for a price.
The Progressive Review 