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OPINION ONE
I guess your reading this waiting to see some more republican bashing over
the pathetic state of our economy, or maybe more on our diminishing ‘human
rights’, or maybe a strong soliloquy about the inequities in racial leadership.
Though most opinion articles reflect some past injustice or some present movement
within the political soup, we have a separate journey to make. I have questions
and I’ve been given the power to ask them, thank you TallahasseeBlackPages.com.
In short this will be a forum to open activity for creating our own identity such
that we will be able to provide goods and services to the world at large, while
also establishing a true culture from which we can grow and develop.
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Question One: How do we organize our resources such that we can employ some
small fraction of the 1.3 million African Americans that graduate from higher
education to the work force every year (1)? With the Blacks falling further
behind in education compared with other nationalities with in America, we must
provide a means to employ those who are reaching these higher levels of
education. The education gap is going to continue to increase especially
considering President Bush’s Pell Grant Reduction Plan (PGRP). Recently the
PGRP was implemented and is an action to slash the number of Pell Grant
recipients and award amounts, which directly reduces the number of Blacks
entering college, which obviously impacts the number graduating. If you are
anything like me, than it was no way you could have gone to college off of your
parents income, thus the Pell Grant along with money from the military reserve
service supported your matriculation through undergraduate college. But what
about your children? When we graduate now, we are not making that much more
than our parents before us ($15-$40k/yr) and the granting awardees have just
been limited to those in the $15k-$35k range, which has eliminated at least
500k Black recipients and reduced the award amount for an even larger number (1).
This is a quote from one of my close peers, "Dear parents, you sent me out to college
to learn, I thought it was so I could help, but now after my training, rather programming,
all I can do is work in corporate America patching problems created by big industry and
global mad science… so now I have a job that I hate and my people are still dying."
Question Two: What if we took some portion of this graduating population to make our own
college institution? From there, could we generate some environmentally friendly
factories to produce marketable products? The products could be as simple as a
refrigerator egg cushions or as complex as solar fuel cells with nighttime energy
generation from microorganisms and electro-hydrolysis. This leads to a whole field of
internal questions. First and foremost, why are we so affixed on money, when resource
accumulation is the goal of every other nation (Do we need to become a nation)?
Presently, America as a whole is facing the worst financial disaster ever, based on
reports by Peter Schiff (amongst other finincial anaylist), CEO and chief global
strategist of Euro Pacific Capital in a report printed by DAN ACKMAN January 14, 2005.
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NEW YORK - The stock market is up and economic growth has been steady, if
unspectacular. But, an increasing number of economists are seeing serious storms
build on the horizon. They point to ever-growing federal budget deficits, a record
current-account deficit, increased consumer debt, a real estate market that looks
like a bubble ready to burst, a surge in personal bankruptcies and the prospect of
inflation.
Meanwhile, interest rates are on the rise, and if they increase much more, many of
these problems could get dramatically worse.
Could the falling dollar mean we're in for a major financial disaster? Peter Schiff
says the thing to do is get out of the dollar. That means selling U.S. stocks and even
real estate and putting your money into non-dollar investments.
He has been warning about the currency's fall for a while now. Even though it lost a
third of its value in the last two years against the euro, he believes it will decline
even further. But, the dollar's fall is more a symptom than a cause. The real problem
is that the U.S. is producing too little--and spending too much--and the result is
likely to be far worse than the happy-talkers on Wall Street will ever let on.
"We are going to go through one of the most trying financial times in U.S.
history, including the Great Depression," Schiff says.history, including the Great Depression," Schiff says.”
Now if we, as Black America, were producers instead of strict consumers, then we would not be
the ones who are going to take the blunt of this upcoming depression. If you have noticed,
Bush’s measures for repairing, rather sustaining, the United States financial problems is to
suck dry all the supplement programs for those on the lower end of the economy, which is
exactly were we stand. I know we have a tendency to apply the ‘I got mines, you get yours’
philosophy that we learned from our predecessors, but if we as a species under the human
nomenclature are to survive then we must pool some resources (land, mind power, and labor
the only true resources) under one cultural norm. Can we build our own culture, one that
we can be confident and proud of and one that will continue to grow and prosper into the
future? It need not be based in religion, but be more centered on something that we can
all agree upon? Ultimately, it seems that we need to let go of the differences and build
our worth instead of our wealth, because in the end money is
only paper.
The questions and information presented here is open for discussion. Please provide
responses to info@tallahasseeblackpages.com attention Don Surr. Thank you all and welcome
to the future.
1. Mike Bergman Public Information Office (301) 763-3030/457-3670
(fax)(301) 457-1037 (TDD) e-mail: pio@census.gov March 2002 Current
Population Survey (CPS). www.census.gov/Press-Release/www/releases/archives/education/000818.html
2. Greater than 500k Black Americans are loosing Pell Grants and still a larger percent is
loosing some portion of the Pell Grant. The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education, 200 W. 57th
Street, 15th Floor, New York, NY 10019, Telephone: (212) 399-1084 Fax: (212) 245-1973,
E-Mail: info@jbhe.com, Copyright © 2005. The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education. All
rights reserved.
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