On the face of it, there would seem to be zero relationship between the state of Kenya Airways and the US Presidential race in which the Democrats seem poised to mount a very serious challenge to regain the White House. In this contest, there is no doubt that 95% of black American votes will go to Barack Obama should he be nominated or around 85% to Hillary Clinton should she squeak by.
This has been the black American tradition since around 1940. Previously blacks, most especially those in the South, voted Republican. Most people would be surprised to know that Martin Luther King was one. That's because most people, and almost no Kenyans, have any idea that the Democratic Party in the USA was the party of the slave owners and fought for segregation after the US Civil War right up until the late 1960's. Kenyans are amazed to hear that the Democratic Party supported the Klu Klux Klan and denied blacks all voting rights for 100 years after the end of slavery. They would almost fall over if they learned all the southern state Governors in the time of the great 60's civil rights crusade were Democrats. Yet African-Americans now vote against the Republicans, the party of Abraham Lincoln?
The explanation is the Democratic Party was split between southern and northern in the USA with the south following a racist brand and the north a non-racial type of Democratic Party politics. Most blacks lived prior to 1940 in the south but the Great Depression forced millions to migrate to northern cities in the 1930's where the northern Democratic Party was in control gave them welfare and other forms of assistance they had never seen in their lives under the southern Democrats. Thus black Americans switched allegiance from the Republicans to the Democrats and have kept that allegiance, besides a rare 10% Republicans like King, ever since.
Voting for the Democratic Party has not helped black Americans so much as destroyed large parts of their former independence, thrift, marriage rates and hard work ethic. From the hard bigotry of the southern Democrat , black Americans ran into the soft bigotry of the northern variety. This "kindness" allows for very low expectations of black Americans. They were the subject of endless handouts in welfare, socially ruinous policies that paid them more for having illegitimate children than for marrying, and affirmative action that allowed blacks to have high placement for lower achievement than others academically and professionally.
All of these Democratic Party practises seem to be "progressive" but have a message: "You are not to be held to high expectations because of the past". This is not very far from a hidden message of, "You are not to be held to high expectations because you can't reach them" - hence the soft bigotry.
Politically the Democrats have used every trick in the book to block welfare reform, to prevent the faith based help of the older African-American society, to offer school choices to inner-city parents and replace affirmative discrimination with helping raise the educational standards of black Americans so they can be independent of welfare.
What has this got to do with Kenya Airways? Here is a black run company with under 0.05% expatriates in the work force that was privatised a decade ago when it was a shoddy Government run corporation. Consistently it beats the profit records and service standards of other African airlines, including South African Airlines which has a very high percentage of "white" employees. It is voted often as the best airline in Africa and as a preferred carrier to European ones like British Airways or Air France.
Kenya Airways works to the high expectations of strict international airline standards, not a low expectation that Africans need extra help or are otherwise incapable of running an airline. Instead of being in confrontation with non-African airlines the way black Americans are in confrontation with the entire range of Republican values (self reliance, non-affirmative, small government, anti-welfare), it partners with a major European airline and shares ideas and expertise.
This story is repeated with black Kenyan hotel management as another example. Our large tourism industry meets international standards, not the local standards of small hotels. Consequently, Kenyan hotel managers can be found in Dubai, Europe, Asia and America running hotels and often 5 star ones of exacting international quality. But what if promotions in our local hotel industry, which is the springboard to an international career, met only Kenyan standards which are lower than international?
It remains a tragedy for black Americans not that they should ever vote Republican en masse, but that the Democrats, while offering to help them have actually added to the low esteem and dependency culture that prevents many of them, racism aside, from prospering. If the split between the parties in the black American community was more 60/40 or 55/54 as in most other communities in the USA it would mean a healthy internal debate and dynamic between the endless dependency of affirmative welfare the Democrats offer and the non-affirmative conservative social and economic values of the Republicans.
That would be good for all of America and especially African-Americans. There seems to be no sign either Democratic candidate in 2008 is willing to shift an inch away from the failed past the way Kenyan Airways did.
This has been the black American tradition since around 1940. Previously blacks, most especially those in the South, voted Republican. Most people would be surprised to know that Martin Luther King was one. That's because most people, and almost no Kenyans, have any idea that the Democratic Party in the USA was the party of the slave owners and fought for segregation after the US Civil War right up until the late 1960's. Kenyans are amazed to hear that the Democratic Party supported the Klu Klux Klan and denied blacks all voting rights for 100 years after the end of slavery. They would almost fall over if they learned all the southern state Governors in the time of the great 60's civil rights crusade were Democrats. Yet African-Americans now vote against the Republicans, the party of Abraham Lincoln?
The explanation is the Democratic Party was split between southern and northern in the USA with the south following a racist brand and the north a non-racial type of Democratic Party politics. Most blacks lived prior to 1940 in the south but the Great Depression forced millions to migrate to northern cities in the 1930's where the northern Democratic Party was in control gave them welfare and other forms of assistance they had never seen in their lives under the southern Democrats. Thus black Americans switched allegiance from the Republicans to the Democrats and have kept that allegiance, besides a rare 10% Republicans like King, ever since.
Voting for the Democratic Party has not helped black Americans so much as destroyed large parts of their former independence, thrift, marriage rates and hard work ethic. From the hard bigotry of the southern Democrat , black Americans ran into the soft bigotry of the northern variety. This "kindness" allows for very low expectations of black Americans. They were the subject of endless handouts in welfare, socially ruinous policies that paid them more for having illegitimate children than for marrying, and affirmative action that allowed blacks to have high placement for lower achievement than others academically and professionally.
All of these Democratic Party practises seem to be "progressive" but have a message: "You are not to be held to high expectations because of the past". This is not very far from a hidden message of, "You are not to be held to high expectations because you can't reach them" - hence the soft bigotry.
Politically the Democrats have used every trick in the book to block welfare reform, to prevent the faith based help of the older African-American society, to offer school choices to inner-city parents and replace affirmative discrimination with helping raise the educational standards of black Americans so they can be independent of welfare.
What has this got to do with Kenya Airways? Here is a black run company with under 0.05% expatriates in the work force that was privatised a decade ago when it was a shoddy Government run corporation. Consistently it beats the profit records and service standards of other African airlines, including South African Airlines which has a very high percentage of "white" employees. It is voted often as the best airline in Africa and as a preferred carrier to European ones like British Airways or Air France.
Kenya Airways works to the high expectations of strict international airline standards, not a low expectation that Africans need extra help or are otherwise incapable of running an airline. Instead of being in confrontation with non-African airlines the way black Americans are in confrontation with the entire range of Republican values (self reliance, non-affirmative, small government, anti-welfare), it partners with a major European airline and shares ideas and expertise.
This story is repeated with black Kenyan hotel management as another example. Our large tourism industry meets international standards, not the local standards of small hotels. Consequently, Kenyan hotel managers can be found in Dubai, Europe, Asia and America running hotels and often 5 star ones of exacting international quality. But what if promotions in our local hotel industry, which is the springboard to an international career, met only Kenyan standards which are lower than international?
It remains a tragedy for black Americans not that they should ever vote Republican en masse, but that the Democrats, while offering to help them have actually added to the low esteem and dependency culture that prevents many of them, racism aside, from prospering. If the split between the parties in the black American community was more 60/40 or 55/54 as in most other communities in the USA it would mean a healthy internal debate and dynamic between the endless dependency of affirmative welfare the Democrats offer and the non-affirmative conservative social and economic values of the Republicans.
That would be good for all of America and especially African-Americans. There seems to be no sign either Democratic candidate in 2008 is willing to shift an inch away from the failed past the way Kenyan Airways did.
In many ways Obama's big speech on race was courageous, novel and forthright in a way political speeches rarely are, but his failure to denounce Pastor Wright fully is revealing. The first time we have heard him talk openly about the white half of his family, he managed to throw his grandmother under the bus for her occasional remarks, whilst refusing the denounce Wright for his frequent ones. One has to imagine what would be the reaction were he a white person on the conservative side and running for President whilst taking spiritual nourishment from someone like Pastor Wright, with the racism reversed.
It strains credulity that Obama was for 20 years able to have the most intimate mentoring by Wright and not absorb his “Hate America” and the dollops of crypto-marxist “Black Liberation Theology” doled out at his church. Indeed, it could be thought that it is precisely this hard-left, hate America, down-with-capitalism and collectivist underpinning of Wright's version of religion that actually brought the atheistic, but highly political, Obama into church in the first place. Obama argues such talk is common in black American churches but if it is as wrong and totally repugnant as his speech claims, it seems not to have bothered him till the other day.
Of course, to get elected on a Democratic party ticket where there is a big black urban vote, as Obama had to in Illinois, you simply have to spout such anti-American, anti-white nonsense, or at least give it a nod and a wink or you won't get the vote. So is it cynical realism that made Obama join an "Afrocentric" church that spews race-hustler talk every Sunday? It would be a sad mark on his hopeful and fresh character were that the case.
Are Americans going to be happy with a President and First Lady who have lapped up angry anti-American and occasionally racist comments for years in the same pew? Michelle Obama, Ivy League super-grad on top tier salary and black, has never had anything to be proud of in America except Barry in 2008 - as she told the press recently. Not even the silver spoon she fed herself with to now.
It needs to be asked, if in his speech he says he “never” agreed with many of pastor Wright’s virulent, racist ideas ( one that white people “invented” HIV to decimate blacks - straight out the Nation of Islam hatebook), his visits to dictatorships like Libya with Farrakhan and other anti-American baggage, why then did he stay in the church for 20 years, bathe his children in Wright's ideas that says now he thinks totally wrong, yet not find another church?
He is trying to be too clever by half, damming his pastor with faint praise for the “causes” of Wrights rants, whilst offering collectivist and class solutions ( the “poor whites” bit of his speech) and all straight out of the soft-left catechism.
I admire his eloquence and a certain amount of courage he displays but dislike his faint heartedness and his sidestepping of an issue if he truly wants to get all Americans and not just the Democratic echo-chamber on his side, he will have to do better. Obama is an exceptional politician that only America, the sole truly revolutionary country that has ever worked, could produce. However America's success is due not to it's collectivism but it's individuality, nor to a statist political philosophy but the breath of freedom that inspired it's founders.
Nothing changes from Obama being an inexperienced but highly gifted young politician bathed and imbued with the standard ideas of the American left, ideas which only a fraction of Americans embrace. Republicans and independent voters want race to cease to be an issue and remind themselves that the Democratic party once stood for slave owners and Southern whites-only politicians and has always been the party to play the "race card". We shall see, perhaps Obama is America's destiny, in which case nothing can stand in his way but I remain unconvinced.