Ah, Andrew, Andrew, Andrew...

In the interview, published yesterday in The Los Angeles Sentinel, a weekly, Mr. Young said that Wal-Mart “should” displace mom-and-pop stores in urban neighborhoods.

“You see those are the people who have been overcharging us,” he said of the owners of the small stores, “and they sold out and moved to Florida. I think they’ve ripped off our communities enough. First it was Jews, then it was Koreans and now it’s Arabs.”

The state of things being what it is, you had to resign. I understand. But let's be real.

Poor pay more for services, study says
S.F. has high density of check cashers
- Leslie Fulbright, Chronicle Staff Writer
Tuesday, July 18, 2006

(07-18) 04:00 PDT Washington -- Low-income residents of 13 cities across the nation pay extra for many everyday services, sometimes thousands of dollars more over a whole year, a study to be released today shows.

By taking out higher-interest mortgages, shopping at rent-to-own furniture stores, using check-cashing businesses instead of banks and buying groceries at convenience stores, the nation's working poor households pay much more than moderate- and high-income households for life's essentials, says the Brookings Institution study, which analyzed services in San Francisco, Oakland and 11 other cities.

The report -- "From Poverty, Opportunity: Putting the Market to Work for Lower-Income Families" -- calls on government officials to create laws to curb services that gouge low-income consumers, and it proposes reproducing fledgling programs the authors found across the country.

This is the Brookings Institute, people. Here's the report under discussion... the overcharging charge wasn't pulled from a hat.

As for identifying the overchargers, let us see if a less-specific designation..."well-funded immigrants"...sits better in folks' minds. Think about it. Where is a new entrepreneur most likely to be able to afford to open a business: Beverly Hills or Watts? It is TOTALLY their intent to invest, accrue and flip the business.

Poor neighborhoods are like the gateway to immigrant wealth.

Hired when workers are needed, released first because hired last when things slow down, I've long thought of Black folks as capacitors in the economic circuitry.

Why don't U-People want to just accept the way things are and work to get ahead?

I need to use a metaphor for this one. Euro-American economic development has depended on extracting the value of the efforts of others. In the USofA, this has meant leveraging Black people. It's very much as if you had to get over a chasm using one of those teeter-totter arrangements Wile E. Coyote uses. . . you know, where you stand on one end of a lever, toss a heavy weight on the other end and you are catapulted forward. The USofA has used Black people as that heavy weight. The weight, in this case, has been the forced and spontaneous products of Black activity.

What we are offered now, at best, is an opportunity to toss some of our own people on the other end of our lever, to fuel our progress at the expense of others of our people.

This is not acceptable.

Jews, Koreans and Arabs can be identified but it's the nature of the game that's responsible. The very economic ground is tilted to make setting up shop and overcharging folks who have little choice of markets a rational choice.