Andy Young - The Shameless Son

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Thu, 2 Mar 2006 12:21:08 -0600

Andy Young - The Shameless Son

 

 

 

 

 

Andy Young - The Shameless Son

by BC Editor Bruce Dixon

http://www.blackcommentator.com/173/173_cover_andy_young.html

 

Black History Month 2006 ended on a jarring note. Andrew Young, a

former member of Dr. King's inner circle at SCLC, who went on to serve

three terms in Congress, a stint as UN ambassador and two terms as

mayor of Atlanta before cashing out his Freedom Movement chips for a

lucrative career as an international " business consultant, " decisively

spat upon the movement for human rights and economic justice that he

spent his early career helping to build. Young announced on February

27, 2006 that he would chair Working Families for Wal-Mart, a media

sock-puppet for the ruthless multinational firm. The cynical misuse

of his stature as an icon of the Freedom Movement, preacher, former

elected official, and honored elder in black America to mask and

obscure the crimes of his corporate client marks Mr. Young as nothing

more nor less than a corporate whore.

 

When Atlanta's WAOK-AM radio gave Young several minutes of live air

time the morning of the 27th to justify himself to an African American

hometown crowd, the response was overwhelmingly negative. How could

he do this, one caller after another wondered incredulously. Wal-Mart

does more to depress the wages of working people on both sides of the

Pacific than any other single player in the game, listeners called in

to say. Other callers reminded each other that Wal-Mart relentlessly

discriminates against women and minorities, ruthlessly crushes unions,

and dumps its health care costs onto the public sector while receiving

millions in local government subsides and tax abatements for each of

its thousands of US stores. Andy Young used to walk with Dr. King.

He used to be on our side, more than one observed. Why, they asked,

is this happening?

 

To get at the answer we need to understand what an international

" business consultant " is. Andy Young is co-founder, with Carlton

Masters of Good Works International. Stephen Glass's 1997 New

Republic article " The Young and the Feckless " succinctly spells out

what Andy Young's firm did for its first client, Nike. Public outrage

in the US was building over Nike's outrageous business practices

including child labor and forcing employees to work as many as 65

hours per week for only $10. Incensed citizens disrupted the opening

of a Nike Town superstore in San Francisco standing in front of the

store chanting, " Just don't do it! "

 

Two days after the San Francisco incident, Nike CEO Phil Knight

announced that his company was taking swift - and, it would turn out,

savvy - action to shore up its meticulously maintained but suddenly

threatened public image. Nike was commissioning an independent

investigation of its Asian operations: it would make all facilities

and internal documents available to a team of inspectors, and it would

then allow the inspectors to make their findings public. " Nike has

always been a business about excellence and achievement, " Knight

proclaimed. And, to prove it, Nike would hire not just any old

corporate hack to lead the investigation into its overseas operations,

but a man of famous independence and renowned stature - a man who had

first gained recognition as a civil rights hero, who had won wide

acclaim as the mayor of Atlanta, who had served his country as

ambassador to the United Nations and who had co-chaired the Atlanta

Committee for the Olympic Games. The honorable Andrew Young, Knight

said, would get to the bottom of this.

 

...Young had recently founded a firm in Atlanta called GoodWorks

International... Nike was GoodWorks's first big client; its first

chance to send corporate America evidence that GoodWorks did, from the

businessman's point of view, good work. And when, four months after

Knight's announcement, Young's firm published its seventy-five-page,

full-color report on Nike's Asian operations, the client certainly had

reason to feel it had gotten its money's worth. There was, Young had

concluded, " no evidence or pattern of widespread or systematic abuse

or mistreatment of workers " in the twelve operations he examined. To

hammer home the point, GoodWorks packed the report with photographs -

many taken by Young himself - of smiling workers playing a guitar on

their break and relaxing around a television in their dorm.

 

As depictions of the actual conditions faced by the real working

humans in Nike sweatshops, Andy Young's photos of contented guitar

strumming Nike workers on a porch had about as much integrity as

pictures of harmonica-playing happy-go-lucky darkies in a 1909 Alabama

chain gang or cotton patch. But integrity is not what international

" business consultants " do.

 

Only weeks behind Andy Young's cotton patch tour auditors from the

accounting firm Ernst & Young visited some of the same locations, and

detailed the unsafe, inhuman and abysmal conditions. This report,

promptly leaked by a gutsy company insider with a human conscience

flatly contradicted Andy Young's lies.

 

Still, the Nike job put Andy Young's Good Works International on the

map, and over the next few years lucrative contracts walked in the

door. Young cynically rented his " civil rights hero " and

philanthropist image out to oil and mineral extracting corporations in

Africa, to bankers in the Caribbean and other interests on the Asian

continent to paper over their atrocities.

 

In Nigeria, where every sensible person expects the nation's vast

treasure of easily extracted oil to be pumped dry in a few decades

with little or no lasting benefit to the masses of its people, Good

Works International is widely credited with introducing the Nigerian

president to thievery, American style. Andy Young and co-founder

Carlton Masters helped engineer the creation of the first Nigerian

Presidential Library, and one or both sit on its board. Fifty million

naira in corporate donations poured in the first day, with Texaco and

Chevron thought to be among the major contributors. By early this

year the library had netted billions of naira from Nigerian and

foreign firms that do business with government, generated a storm of

controversy over the ethics of such legalized bribery, and sparked an

official investigation by Nigeria's Ethics and Financial Crimes

Commission. And along the way, Good Works landed the lobbying

contract to represent Nigeria in the US. The motto of Good Works

International is after all, to do good by doing well.

 

While most callers to the Monday morning Atlanta radio station

excoriated Young's willful treachery, the most interesting response

came from one of the show's co-hosts who spoke in Young's defense.

The man was a civil rights leader, he declared, a former congressman

and mayor. Andy is a philanthropist, he went on to say, whose good

works help set up scholarship funds, endow university schools of

public policy, send kids to summer camp and much, much more. He knows

things we don't. He sees things we don't. It's time to shut up, to

wait and see if the benefits outweigh the prices. Though Young's

defender is dead wrong, his stance reveals the one asset upon which

corporate whores like Andy Young can and will always trade. That

asset is our slavish and uncritical deference to elected officials, to

civil rights icons, to the clergy, to established authorities. This is

what Andy Young's clients count on, and it's what Young himself counts on.

 

As the National Black Peoples Unity Convention in Gary, Indiana,

begins this March, we are well served to bear this lesson in mind.

When is it time to listen to leaders, to icons, to elected officials?

When is it time to ignore or criticize them, or cast them aside

altogether? How many more times will other Andys and Amoses of our

black business-class leadership betray us in the name of what they say

is economic development? Will Gary make a difference at all?

 

The Gary convention can make a difference, if we don't allow the icons

to work their show, for their own benefit. In that sense, every black

event can make a difference, if we do not allow ourselves to be

hoodwinked and bamboozled by whores like Andrew Young, who have sold

us out to the corporate world - but yet expect us to worship at the

altar of their own prosperity.

 

Show up at Gary. Show out at Gary. Get crazy at Gary. Let the

luminaries know what you think, and don't allow any of them to get

away with the kind of con game that Andrew Young has run on us. Demand

action, and refuse to provide a pleasant forum for those who betray

us, as Andy has done.

 

We should never give up on our people. Each venue is another

opportunity to correct ourselves. Let us take up the challenge. Raw

and blatant betrayal cannot be tolerated, and it is up to us to make

it extremely uncomfortable for the betrayers. They cannot sit among

us, much less in elevated positions.

 

Andrew Young voluntarily surrendered that privilege, years ago. We

must now take it from him. Cast him out of our house. Let him camp out

in Bentonville, Arkansas, with his Wal-Mart benefactors.

 

For information on the National Black Peoples Unity Convention, call

(301) 627-8436 or send email to Pbrock9353.