Not far into the next century, and Tony Brown has made much of this, there will be two
classes of people in the United States; those with adequate computer literacy and those
who lack it. And the failure of our educational system to prepare students in that regard
only compounds the problem. Many big city school systems have effectuated a sort of
economic and social segregation which is not helping this problem. A variety of special
schools have been created for top students. Thus, the 'better' students are removed from
the more general student body either to attend these, or are otherwise placed into private
and parochial schools where their parents have the means to do so. While not all students
left in the general curriculum schools will be programmed into certain failure, those who
need the most intensive educational experience will be. And any students who have some
of the discipline skills to achieve despite their 'segregation' are finding the effort even more
difficult for the environment they are left to develop (or not develop) in, while 'diversity'
and 'values clarification' are emphasized over content skills and cognitive development.

	Yet, while it is liberal politicians and judges who have contributed to the
decimation of public education, it is these same characters who do not want to open doors
to private education through such programs as vouchers or schools of choice to their
young victims. Another avenue of 'escape' for some of these youngsters has been the
military, which, if the policies of the Clinton Administration are continued, is being turned
into both a dumping ground and a vehicle for social experimentation, further slamming the
door in their faces.

       Although it is true that intact black families, both heads of which have college degrees,
earn income higher than other comparable units, the overall impact on black Americans
generally of such components as these pillars taken together, from education and
affirmative action, to discrimination, welfare, drugs, crime, residential patterns, and the
like, comprise a political economy of this new apartheid which reinforces it and is
detrimental to society overall through the diminishment of wealth creation potential.

	Much as liberal policies have slapped harsher gun control laws on urban areas with
concentrations of black populations, they seem similarly bent on laying higher tax rates on
such groups, as well. But this is accomplished by stealth. Even as it is much more likely
that lower income levels are more likely than upper levels to play the lottery or frequent
casinos, since the proportion of the black population at lower income levels is higher than
it is for white members of our society, such 'taxes' fall more heavily on their shoulders.

	It is no secret that officially-sanctioned gambling is a tax on the poor and working
people, but the rather lawful extension of that demographically to the realization that rates
of taxation of black people are higher on black people than they are on white people of the
same or even somewhat higher income levels is scarcely recognized. That this would have
detrimental effects on capital formation in black communities is further complicated by the
higher overt tax rates, in such forms as city income taxes and property tax rates (even if
property values tend to be somewhat lower). It is also such areas which have been in the
vanguard of the headlong charge to 'revitalize' themselves by permitting casinos to open.
In addition to this, there is the burden of 'taxation' of crime, less development and
opportunity out of it and ancillary factors which inhibit investment, higher insurance rates,
and the like which fall more heavily upon those who live in many urban areas -- principally
black citizens. These varied pillars are intersecting, as well, as it is the very students
victimized by the attack on the family, which actually has gone far beyond the welfare
vehicle, who are those channeled into the public education quagmire, where they are
offered a menu of sex education, given condoms, and turned loose too often to wreck
havoc, more on themselves, but certainly on society. 

	It gets worse, for they are not expected to learn grammar, or history, or requisite
mathematics or science. Instead, they are exposed only to the meanest levels of remedial
skills. Black students are increasingly taught a 'separate culture,' as well, only reinforcing
the separateness of the new Jim Crow, grounded in the hyphenated group-think which
permeates liberal thinking. And the problem of crime has been a main factor in the
phenomenon sociologists like to term 'white flight' which has fostered the de facto
segregation of our society. There are, of course, black families which also 'escape' as our
cities become Third World economies, but other characteristics of the new Jim Crow leave
vast numbers behind in neighborhoods too infected by crime, drugs, hopelessness, and
dispair.

	On top of the welfare reform package, Clinton has maneuvered an increase in the
minimum wage level, a measure which is only going to close employment opportunities
for the youngest and less developed students and even adults, no matter how many times
such as Robert Reich claim, in the Harvard Business Review or anywhere else that not
raising it is causing our economic woes. That, of course, only widens the avenue of their
prospective entry into the drug culture, at either the delivery or use (or both) end of its
hellish destructiveness. Nor is this limited to such illegal substances as crack or heroin, as
alcohol is a curse which destroys many. Quite obviously, it is not only young black people
who will suffer this fate, but it becomes more of a dilemna for them simply because of the
other pillars of their separate status. Drugs plus racism, may, indeed, equal genocide!

	Compound all of this with the prevalence of acceptance and practice of abortion,
often paid by government, among particularly poor black citizens and the promotion of it
by liberal politicians, black and white, and it is not surprising that the proportion of black
women having abortions is higher than that for others at similar income levels. The
government promotion of the termination of the lives of unborn black babies, coupled with
the higher death rates and incarceration rates, themselves attributable to liberal policies,
shorter life expectancies of black citizens, and more, may actually mean that the new Jim
Crow is tantamount to more than racism, but actually constitutes genocide.

	There is, of course, more to this neo-segregation than these pillars of the new
apartheid. But taken together, they constitute a very real and severe barrier that functions
as a separating phenomenon in our society. Liberal policies have created an iron curtain
that has descended on America. And while this barrier re-enforces racial division in our
society like a Berlin Wall, it transcends that. The perhaps one positive characteristic of the
Great Society, the culmination of the civil rights revolution, has been turned on its head so
that his Great Society itself has become that iron curtain.

	It should not be suggested, however, that it has even been principally due to
federal intervention that we have moved away from our former despicable version of
apartheid. Not to denigrate the civil rights struggle totally, such a view ignores the impact
of 'market' forces represented by such sundry influences as Jackie Robinson and Diana
Ross, for example). All of us are weighted down by it. An albatross of runaway taxation
not only has been saddled on us, but that has drastically inhibited the potential for
economic development which is the only way to overcome it, for even as 'the death of any
man diminishes every man,' so does the diminution of anyone diminish everyone.

	It should go without saying that we must eliminate this new apartheid, but that will
require a mindset bent on tearing down the wall that has been erected. That will require a
new cold war mobilization to free America from this Great Society cancer, and it will be a
struggle which has embedded in it the same dangers of escalation into conflagration we
lived under during the struggle against the evil empire of Soviet communism. We must
challenge liberal political leaders (as well as conservative ones) much as Ronald Reagan
challenged Mikhail Gorbachev to 'tear down the wall.' In the waning years of this century,
we have reached the threshold of an ability to embark on such a course, but the outcome is
by no means certain. 

	In fact, there may be some real reasons for deep pessimism over the results of the
struggle. Those unifying forces which have operated in our history to unite the nation are
themselves under direct assault. Foremost as the aim of  this attack have been the
institutions and values of capitalism. Economists have long articulated the propensity of
capitalism to pull together the most disparate elements in association, and it has effected
the highest standard of living in the history of the world. This has enforced the movement
toward a rather universal quest for the 'ties that bind.' Across skin color and language and
religious beliefs, we drive the same cars, wash in the same machines using the same
detergents, compete and cheer together at the same sporting events, shop for many of the
same goods at the same malls, and so on. But the liberal policies which have fostered the
fracturing effects on our society referenced here are also set upon a course of undermining
capitalism and the liberty that rests on it. We may be all intricately bound up together so
that the death of anyone diminishes everyone, but the capacity of capitalism to continue to
produce those results is being seriously compromised. Indeed, this is often posed by
liberals as necessary due to the oppressiveness of the capitalist system itself (an
oppressiveness which brings the world beating at our door). Thus, as we approach the
new millenium, we would do well to bear in mind for whom it is that the bell tolls.


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