The Gantt Report
By: Lucius Gantt
Recent news reports say the devils are dancing in the streets! America’s economic satans are prancing and dancing up and down Wall Street. They are partying on Biscayne Boulevard, Peachtree Road, Central Avenue, Lakeshore Drive and everywhere else after hearing that the American economy is getting better.
But only the rich man feels it.
Unemployment rates have gone down for some but those same rates have not substantially decreased in America’s ghettos, barrios, projects and slums.
Many poor people still can’t find a job, still can’t get a loan and will never be able to afford the kind of health care that Presidents, Congress persons and other elected officials have!
Yes, it appears as though the rash of stimulus packages are doing what they intended to do…..keeping the rich from joining the poor in homeless shelters, in soup lines and in jail cells.
I wonder where the American economy would be if stimulus money had not been used to pay million dollar bonuses to financial criminals. I wonder if the little man and the little woman could have gotten a better interest rate on mortgage loans if big shot politicos didn’t get so many sweet heart mortgage deals from predatory lending companies.
I don’t expect the Black community to be bailed out by government. It never has been and never will be. We couldn’t get forty acres and a mule back in the old days and today we can’t get a bus pass and forty dollars in food stamps!
We can, however, rise up and improve our lives and our communities. To excel, we must rely on each other. To progress, we must depend on each other. To be successful, we must support each other.
Everybody will team up against us. Northerners will team up with Southerners, Democrats will team up with Republicans, capitalists will team up with communists but nobody wants to join hands with the poor, oppressed and exploited masses!
They don’t want us to unite but we must come together. We have to lower unemployment rates in the hood by supporting the Black businesses that hire Black people. Once in a while, we should all eat at the Black restaurant, subscribe to the Black newspaper, patronize the Black mechanics and auto repairers and let the Black cosmetologists do our hair and nails.
Yes, Wall Street investors are excited about the apparent recovery from America’s economic head cold but the people on Martin Luther King Drive continue to have the Pig Flu!
