Things took an even darker turn when we started Edgewood Technology Services, a data servicing company in an Afro-American residential community in Washington, D.C. Edgewood gave us the ability to build much more powerful databases and software tools as well as understand the investment opportunity to train people working at minimum wage jobs or living on subsidies to develop more marketable skills and earning power by doing financial data servicing and software development.

We also discovered that it was much less expensive to train people to do these jobs than to fund their living on HUD subsidies, let alone going to prison. For example, a woman with two children living in subsidized housing in Washington, D.C. on welfare and food stamps cost the government $55,000 or more. …

What we found at Edgewood was that there was a portion of the work force that, due to obligations to children and elderly parents, was not able to commute. Some of these people could be a productive work force working near their home and developing computer and software skills at their own pace. If training was combined with the creation of jobs, the economics of training people to do these jobs were sustainable and with proper screening and management could be profitable for the private sector.

… As I traveled and researched around the country, it became apparent that data servicing jobs like those we were prototyping at Edgewood were highly competitive with jobs in the illegal economy. In other words, data servicing jobs paying $8-10 per hour and offering health care benefits and the opportunity to improve skills had the potential to attract a surprising number of people away from dealing drugs in areas with heavy drug dealing, prostitution and other street crime. The Hamilton Securities Group’s primary competition for the multi-racial younger portion of this work force appeared to be organized crime and the industries they feed — including enforcement and private prisons.

… There was a much more economic way for government to reduce domestic subsidies and crime. Indeed, with both the private sector and federal government predicting very significant increases in the need for data servicing support and other jobs that could be outsourced through telecommunications, there appeared to be a significant opportunity. …

While the initial response was positive from a number of quarters, there was concern from special interests whose business had become managing “the poor.” Many of these were traditionally powerful Democratic constituencies, including private for-profits, foundations, universities and not-for-profit agencies that had built up a significant infrastructure servicing and supporting all of these programs. If people were no longer poor, what was their purpose?

I'm reading every word of Catherine Austin Fitts’ series and find it fascinating, particularly her analysis of the institutionalized nature of corrupt big-money capitalism.

Austin Fitts has an excellent handle on the bigger forces at play in the “free-market” economy and how those forces inter-connect and are manipulated to affect all of us. She also offers an excellent first-person insight into the greedy, conniving nature of many “leaders” in that so-called free-market system who are in positions of power to pull the strings in the economy.

But I do have a concern with a particular perspective I pick up on in Austin Fitts’ work that seems to be out of touch with the street-level reality of the country. I offer these observations not as an over-arching criticism of her work by any means (and not of her personally, in anyway). In fact, I find in reading the series to date that I have been enlightened by Austin Fitts’ keen analysis, and respect that it comes from the point of view of someone who’s been there, on the inside of the big game. I also am impressed by her personal integrity, for which she appears to have paid a steep price.

Finally, I do tend to agree with almost all of her major premises – which Austin Fitts does a superb job of supporting with facts.

But I do find her perspective on the plight of poor folks, particularly minorities, to be a bit myopic – even if well intentioned. I suspect it might simply be related to the structural challenge of crafting a complex series of articles that attempts to paint such a broad canvas. Still, I feel a need to at least broach the subject to stir the pot of debate on the topic. For example, based on the current story, a reader could walk away easily assuming that most black folks in Washington, D.C., are poor, uneducated and destined to deal drugs and go to prison – albeit due to the mechanizations of a corrupt system.

But from personal experience, I know there is a rather large community of working and middle-class "Afro-Americans" living in and around D.C., and in the nation overall -- though that reality is mostly ignored by the macro-economic social planners in government and business who often seem to view the urban landscape as some sort of plantation, with the do-gooders wanting to help the field slaves make it to the grade of house servants.

If resources are to be committed to lifting poor black folks out of poverty and providing them with a fighting chance against the destructive forces of the prison-industrial complex, maybe we should further empower those in the African American community who have already made that journey. Maybe we should provide them with access to substantial capital (the real currency of power in a capitalist society) that can be used to help lift up the less fortunate by bringing community solutions to the community. But the reality of the current free-market system makes that highly problematic, if not impossible, because of the divisive nature of racism, which is used as a wedge by those who control capital to assure they maintain that control -- even by using it as a tool to divide minority communities.

Also, I'm quite certain that African Americans, who have been economically disenfranchised from the system for centuries, will suddenly be embraced by that same system if we only teach them how to do data entry so they can work non-union $10-an-hour jobs. That just sounds like a plan that is a day late and a dollar short of being much of an answer to the misery inflicted on poor minority communities due to poverty and the drug war. I think we’d do far better to keep the promise made a century ago and give all African Americans 40 acres of land – in other words, some real capital in the capitalist system.

But more than that, I think we need to tear up the deeper roots of racism in this country, at a minimum, to get at anything approaching a solution; economics is only part of it, though a big part. I also part ways with Austin Fitts’ perspective with respect to the assumption that white folks from Wall Street and Washington should be dictating the solutions -- as they are in fact the very same people who have created the problem to a great extent. Austin Fitts’ assumption in her recent story that the reason people might oppose her data-services training program is because it would put the Democrat’s welfare bureaucracy out of work is a bit too partisan for my taste – even if it is Clintonesque in overtones.

In my estimation, the problems of poor African Americans, or the poor in general, won’t be addressed by providing folks with vocational training and computers so they can work in a digital sweatshop or from home in a government-subsidized dwelling – or even in an overpriced house they bought through a high-rate subprime loan due to credit-history redlining.

Getting any gig with a big corporation, particularly with health insurance controlled by the company store, even at an hourly wage of $10 -- which by the way is what a piece of rock used to go for on the streets not too long ago – is not a ticket out of ghetto. That is a very white upper-class view of a solution for the structurally imprisoned lower class in the so-called free-enterprise system, based on my experience.

I recently engaged in a conversation on this very topic with one rather astute member of the African American community –- a conversation spurred, in part, by the issues raised in Austin Fitts’ series. The individual, after apologizing for “getting ethnic on this” put it this way: “I’m tired of white folks always telling brown people how to solve their problems.” (The implication was that when white folks offer, often force, those solutions, they typically are in the context of white culture and its perception of values.)

That remark was followed by this same person, a black female in Ph.D.-track university program, providing the following analogies (shared with her by one of her professors – also African American) that go a long way in explaining the riddle of racism in America and America’s relationship with black folks.

First Analogy: Racism in this country is like that crazy relative you keep in the basement. You ignore him most of the time, and you definitely don't want him coming up in the house, and you'd really like to kick him completely out of the house, for good, but he owns the house, so you can't figure out how to get rid of him without jeopardizing your inheritance.

(The dominant white culture, particularly Wall Street and Washington, benefits economically from the continuation of racism, and, as such, its policies and solutions normally reflect that reality — even if they are seemingly well intentioned. It is something the dominant culture likes to keep hidden in the basement of polite discourse, though. As a result, solutions imposed by that dominant culture on minority communities invariably tend to perpetuate the very problems they are ostensibly designed to solve.)

Second Analogy: America for black people is like the uncle who molested you and then paid your way through college.

(From that perspective, do you really expect black folks as a community to trust, what’s more embrace, solutions offered by the molesters –- even if they get paid $10 an hour?)

So again, I stress, that overall, I find Austin Fitts has much to offer us in terms of her intellectual analysis of the capital system and her experiences in the power circles of Wall Street and D.C. For that reason alone, I have, and will continue to, read every word of her series. But I have to part ways with Austin Fitts on the street level, where my experience tells me the answers to poverty, racism and oppression will not be found from above, from Washington and Wall Street, but from below- and to the left – which is why I am reading with even more interest the continuing coverage of the Other Campaign in Mexico.  

… And just so you don’t’ assume I’m on a high horse here, I too admit to dealing daily with that crazy relative living in the basement of my house.