The well-dressed morning audience was treated to a short speech by a leading black female scientist from this firm. She praised her employing company for sharing the NUL's concern about appalling racial health disparities that have recently received some national media attention. She told us about various contributions her corporation was making to minority health services.

She was gone before I got a chance to ask her about her company's position on the United States' glaring failure to guarantee minimally adequate health care for all of its citizens. Solving that problem would go a long way to overcoming the minority health gap, but her corporate employer is opposed to the creation within the United States of the inclusive, socially democratic health insurance system that is normative throughout the rest of the industrialized world. The absence of such a system in "the world's richest" indicates reflects the special hyper-power bestowed upon The Corporation in America The Best Democracy Money Can (and Did) Buy.

I wondered if Big Pharma's sponsorship of the SOBA gathering was helping erode the NUL's recent tendency to support a national health insurance plan. At the end of the NUL's latest annual SOBA report (released at the breakfast), in a chapter bearing the pharmaceutical title "Prescriptions for Change," there is no mention of national health insurance. There is only a call for "Congress to support policies that promote greater access to affordable and preventive health care for African Americans and other communities of color, including adequate health insurance, education about healthy eating and exercise programs as well as testing for chronic diseases and conditions like HIV-AIDS, diabetes, and cardiovascular care." There's nothing the drug lords can't get behind in that squishy formulation.

I meant to the ask NUL staffers if they see any conflict between the large-scale corporate sponsorship they clearly pursue and enjoy and the NUL's purported effort to advance traditional civil rights and social justice objectives. After all, the centers of private power are dedicated to the erosion of the very public sector capacity upon which the black equality and social justice struggles have long depended.

After the black corporate chemist spoke, NUL breakfast attendees heard from a white statistician with "Global Insights, Inc" - a leading financial and investment "intelligence" firm that markets itself to multinational companies as the source of "the most comprehensive economic and financial coverage of countries, regions, and industries available." The fiercely neoliberal Global Insight (GI) recently accused the popular and populist elected leaders of Argentina and Venezuela of practicing "economic terrorism" against the world's leading petroleum corporations - those noble agents and guardians of global economic and military security and democracy (seehttp://www.globalinsight.com/Perspective/PerspectiveDetail1758.htm). For $700, your company can obtain an electronic version of GI's take on investment opportunities in "liberated Iraq" in the wake of the recent elections there.

In a somewhat mysterious calculation that was financially supported by leading global investment corporation J.P. Morgan Chase, GI's number crunchers determined that Black America suffers from an "Equality Index" of 0.73. This means that black Americans are just less three fourths the equal of whites on a scale that posits zero as absolute inequality and 1.0 as absolute equality. This was the main statistic cited in the Urban League's SOBA report. I never got hold of GI's analyst to ask him how his 0.73 number jibed with leading academic Thomas Shapiro's finding - reported in the first chapter of the 2005 SOBA volume - that "the 1999 net worth (all assets minus all liabilities) of typical white families is $81,000 compared to $8,000 for black families." That's 10 cents of black net worth for every dollar of white net worth. By the recessionary year of 2002, thanks to usual racial disparities in the capitalist business cycle, black net worth had fallen (according to Shapiro) to seven cents on the white dollar.

JP Morgan Chase has been working hard to look racially sensitive ever since it was learned that thousands of black slaves were used as collateral for loans by two banks that later became part of what NUL chief Marc Morial called (last Tuesday) "the JP Morgan Chase family." The big white daddy in that family - CEO William Harrison - received a pay package of $20 million in 2003 (http://www.forbes.com/reuters/newswire/2004/02/20/rtr1269972.html)

Walking around Washington D.C. on some lovely April evenings, with the cherry blossoms on full display, I saw numerous desperately poor black Americans begging and otherwise trying to survive in the shadows of the regal white structures of American national and global political power.

An NUL luncheon on the "state of the cities" included comments from a Republican D.C. city council person who denounced the fact that the district lacks proper representation in the U.S. Congress. Her call for such representation received loud applause. But NUL delegates responded with a mixture of disbelief and disinterest when I noted that Washington D.C. is the most unequal city in the United States.

Just for the record, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities reported last year that "The gap between high-income and low-income households in the District of Columbia is wider than in any other major U.S. city, according to a new analysis of Census data by the DC Fiscal Policy Institute. The study found that the average income of the top fifth of DC's households equaled $186,830 in 1999. This was 31 times higher than the average income of the bottom fifth of households - $6,126."

"While Atlanta and Miami have income gaps similar to DC's, income inequality is much less pronounced in most other cities. In the typical city in the analysis - which includes central cities of the nation's 40 largest metro areas - the income of the top fifth of households is 18 times the income of the bottom fifth."

It makes a certain amount of sense when you realize that Washington D.C. is the capital of the most unequal nation in the industrialized world - a country where the top 1 percent owns more than 40 percent of the nation's wealth.

The high point in my visit was the chance to meet with each of the three black House of Representatives delegates from Chicago - Jesse Jackson, Jr., Danny Davis, and Bobby Rush. These are noble, smart, and progressive leaders from districts whose constituents suffer terribly from America's "color blind" determination to maintain savagely separate and unequal structures of racial disparity in the "post-Civil Rights era," when the nation's deep institutional racism is more firmly entrenched by mainstream acceptance of the notion that the only remaining barriers to black equality and progress are internal to black community, culture, and character. Jackson, Davis, and Rush struck me as exasperated in their battle with an in-power right that is determined to impose many-sided state failure on those who do not enjoy the special privileges of concentrated wealthy, power, and white skin privilege.

Reflecting the massive external social and political barriers to black equality, two of the black Chicago Congressmen spoke movingly of efforts they have engaged to heal damaged inner city communities from within. The other one spoke passionately about his struggle to spark economic development in his "separate and unequal" district through the construction of a south suburban airport.

I missed out on the opportunity to meet with Illinois' Senatorial delegation. Both Barrack Obama and Richard Durbin flew to Rome to view the body of the recently departed Pope John Paul II, whose opposition to the last two American Iraq invasions (1991 and 2003-05) did not deter the noted Arab-killing war criminals George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush from joining the Belgrade Bomber Bill Clinton and the uber- petro-imperialist Condi Chevron Rice in mourning at the Vatican. There was no living pontiff available to forgive boy-king George for murdering 1,536 (by Thursday) American military service members and 100,000 Arab civilians in the unjust and illegal occupation of Iraq.

Interestingly enough, the enormous costs of that war are no small part of the corporate-managed state failure that so terribly cripples government's capacity to act on the egalitarian and democratic goals of the civil rights movement.

This was another missing topic at the NUL gathering, held exactly 38 years and 2 days after Martin Luther King. Jr came out in opposition to the Vietnam War. Besides being an act of immoral racist imperialism in and of itself, King argued on April 4, 1967 (at the Riverside Church in New York City), that invasion was furthering social and racial inequality at home by stealing critical funding from the abortive, partial-birth "War on Poverty." Exactly one year later, King was assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee. An earlier generation of rich and powerful public authorities and personalities cleared their schedules to get their properly mournful pictures taken next to the dead body of a fallen spiritual leader.

Paul Street (pstreet99@sbcglobal.net) is the author of Still Separate, Unequal: Race, Place, Policy and the State of Black Chicago (Chicago, IL: The Chicago Urban League, April 2005) and Empire and Inequality: America and the World Since 9/11 (Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers). His book Segregated Schools: Race. Class, and Educational Apartheid in the Post-Civil Rights Era (New York, NY: Routledge, 2005) will be released in the fall of 2005.

Dr. Paul Street

Vice President for Research and Planning

Chicago Urban League

4510 S. Michigan Avenue

Chicago, IL 60653

773-451-3591

http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=30&ItemID=7604