by Jesse J. Lewis, Sr.

At the present time, Tiger Woods’ future, as it relates to playing golf, has diminished over the past several years, and I seriously doubt whether he will continue as a professional golfer. In the event that he does, his chances of winning any tournament is less than 10 percent.
Tiger Woods has several problems:
1. his age – even though Tiger is younger than 40, he has been playing golf over three decades.
2. his health – he has had several operations on his knees and back.
3. his swing problem – he cannot decide which swing he would like to use on any given day or from
one hole to another.
4. his mental problem – in other words, he is not convinced he can execute every shot.
Most experts will tell you that over 50 percent of playing golf is mental. They will also tell you it is more difficult to fix a mental problem than any other phase of golf.
The golfing community had great growth because of Tiger Woods. There are only two Blacks on the golf circuit for men and women and both are named Woods.
When Tiger plays the spectators swell and the TV ratings soar. I truly pray that most of the things I have written in this article will not come true. My prediction would be that Tiger will play in the Masters.  In the event he does not make the cut, he will never return to professional golf again.

Finally, There is a Discussion

I am not naive enough to believe that the articles I have written about golf and baseball, as its relates to the slowness of the games, have prompted a conversation on a national basis.
I’ve said this for 20 years about baseball. Here’s where I said the changes should be:
1. A tie should be a tie, in other words, you do not have to break a tied game. At the end of the season the scores could be Won 9, Lost 10, Tied 2. I have known on many occasions that one game of baseball has lasted over seven hours.
2. Baseball should be played in seven innings instead of nine. Now you are looking at a three hour game instead of four or five hours.
3. There should be a clock on the field. The purpose of the clock is to make sure that the pitcher has 10-15 seconds to release the ball. How many times have you seen the pitcher stand on the mound, rub the ball for two minutes, step off the mound, talk to the catcher, step back on the mound, rub the ball for another five minutes, step off again, and talk to the manager. In many instances it almost takes 10 minutes for one pitch. This is why fewer and fewer spectators go to the games.
I’m hoping I will not have to write this article for the next 20 years because no changes have been made. If some changes are made moving forward, I can truly say, in my own mind, that my articles were were responsible, even though I know better.

How Can You be so Stupid?

I’m not a psychiatrist, I think the reason people make unsubstantiated statements is that they want to be recognized for heroic deeds. When I think about Brian Williams, I think about the civil rights movements in the ’50s and ’60s that happened right here in Birmingham, Alabama. I have never heard so many lies told by people concerning their contribution to the Civil Rights Movement – everybody went to jail and everybody walked with Martin Luther King.
I’m one of the few people that I know who lived in Birmingham during the height of the Civil Rights Movement who did not make any contribution. The Birmingham Times newspaper was founded in 1963 and I wrote a lot of articles about right and wrong. The person who wrote the greatest articles was Emory O. Jackson, editor of the Birmingham World.
I received an award from the National Newspaper Publisher’s Association several years ago for Journalism. I explained to them I would accept in the name of Emory O. Jackson, one of the top five person who made contributions.
Brian Williams told the lie about his chopper in Iraq having been hit by a rocket-propelled grenade. Overwhelming public opinion is that he should not keep his job. Brian Williams didn’t kill anyone. He skewed a story about his experience in Iraq which made him sound a bit closer to the action and therefore more heroic than he actually was. It was untrue and wrong of him to do it, but why should it be terminally so? Can he be forgiven?
There are a lot of people who make outlandish statements. In particular, a friend of mind who stated on several occasions that he saw his daddy kill his mother with a hatchet; they were so poor they had to eat rats, and he was consistently sexually molested. Whether this is a lie or the truth – no one can verify it. During those years he was speaking of, they didn’t keep records of Black-on-Black crime. No one can definitively say he ate rats or was sexually molested. I happen to believe he was telling the truth for I can think of no one who can make up this big of a lie.

The Kanye West Grammy Story

By criticizing Beck, who won a Grammy for Album of the Year, and approaching the stage saying he should give his award to Beyoncé, there has been a rush to defend Beck, an artist most people didn’t even know. According to Billboard, radio is rallying around Beck. This attention has brought a 338 percent increase in streams of Beck’s music.
According to The Week’s Scott Meslow, West’s near-interruption of Album of the Year winner Beck hearkened back to the last time Kanye single-handedly made a music show culturally relevant, when he grabbed the microphone from Best Female Video winner Taylor Swift at the 2009 Video Music Awards. Then, as now, Kanye proved himself to be America’s biggest Beyoncé fan by hijacking an entire awards ceremony to sing her praises.
At this year’s Grammys, Kanye came this close to grabbing the microphone before grinning and stepping away, and the whole thing was immediately written off as a self-aware gag on the Taylor Swift incident. But the only thing better than Kanye’s “joke” was the revelation that Kanye actually meant to have his say.
“I just know that the Grammys, if they want real artists to keep coming back, they need to stop playing with us,” he said in a post-show interview with E!. “We ain’t gonna play with them no more. And Beck needs to respect artistry and he should’ve given his award to Beyoncé.”
This is, of course, a ludicrous thing for Kanye to demand, but it’s also a welcome departure from the massaged, pre-planned statements that pass for commentary in these kinds of situations.

 “History shows that it does not matter who is in power… those who have not learned to do for themselves and have to depend solely on others never obtain any more rights or privileges in the end than they had in the beginning.” –    Dr. Carter Goodwin Woodson
I read a book many years ago titled The Mis-education of the Negro. It was originally written as a dissertation by author Carter Godwin Woodson who wanted to investigate how efficient the current education structure was for African-Americans. Despite being written in 1933, some of the struggles facing African-Americans mentioned in the book still hold true today: African-Americans have the highest unemployment and poverty level percentages of all ethnic groups. African-Americans show the lowest percentages of being business owners, and despite facing lower barriers to college entry than in 1933 African-Americans still show the lowest college admittance and graduation rates of all ethnic groups.
The foundation of Dr. Woodson’s book is that African-Americans of his day were being culturally indoctrinated, rather than taught, in American schools.  When students are being exposed and educated through a one-sided view of society they are being culturally indoctrinated and not taught to be thinkers, problem solvers, and leaders. This conditioning, he claims, causes African-Americans to become dependent and to seek out inferior places in the greater society of which they are a part. He challenges his readers to “do for themselves”, regardless of what they were taught. Doing for self is being leaders and not followers, being aggressive and ambitious and not subservient and passive. It means making things happen to better your quality of life.
As I contemplate the state of today’s Black adolescents, rereading this piece of literature provided a new perspective on the present condition of African-Americans. This book is more than a piece of literary history; it is the lens with which we should use to reevaluate our education, our family and our commitment to building a stronger African-American community.
 What I loved most about this book is how it illustrates the power of education and knowledge. It explains how an improper education can make people unfit to solve their own problems. Furthermore, it explains how a proper education can lead to freedom. I whole-heartedly believe that the neglect and continued falsification of African American History which is taught in the school system, as well as the blatant distortion of the facts concerning us in most history books, has gravely deprived Black children of their racial heritage, and relegated them to a state of a perpetuated feeling of nothingness. What I see before me is the product of the aftermath: a completed cycle of this misguided conditioning, an ignorance begetting more ignorance.
 As stated by Woodson “If you teach the Negro that he has accomplished as much good as any other race he will aspire to equality and justice without regard to race.”
We must ask ourselves, are African-American students being taught or culturally indoctrinated in American schools? Are they being taught to simply settle for inferior statuses in life and continue to serve in subservient roles? Are we teaching them to be proud of their African heritage and that they are descendants of Kings and Queens?  Will reinforcing that they come from greatness raise their personal expectations of themselves? This may not be the answer in totality to a complex and convoluted problem, but I do feel that one must have self-pride before they can reach their greater potential.
(Mahari A. McTier is a Financial Advisor with Tier 1 Advisors, LLC and can be reached at maharimctier1@gmail.com.)

There’s a saying in the insurance business: “Grow with those we know.” It means when you are out looking for new business, always think of your existing customers first. I think this is a good concept that we need to apply to job creation here in Alabama.
Many of our state’s leaders have been touting a declining unemployment rate, even though it really isn’t declining. While our unemployment rate has gone down some, we also have fewer people actively in the workforce now. When the labor force shrinks, so does the unemployment rate.
This point was made recently in an article on AL.com that noted how workers are leaving the workforce, while the jobs we are creating are low skill, low wage jobs that often cannot provide for a family. The jobs we are creating are mostly in the service sector at the lower end of the pay scale, primarily in the hospitality sector. While these kinds of jobs can drive down the unemployment rate, they will not grow our economy or relieve the financial burden on families.
Economists cited in the AL.com report are divided as to the cause of Alabamians leaving the workforce. But many argued it is because of an education deficit. Without a higher level of education, many Alabamians are having a difficult time finding work that pays a livable wage, much less begin a new career. Better education means workers will be more qualified. That, in turn, means more good-paying jobs for the people of Alabama.
But another problem is our strategy on job creation.
When it comes to job creation, Alabama is a beggar state. Our method of choice is to offer huge tax breaks to out-of-state businesses in order to lure them here. And so far, the only changes to that strategy that is being proposed involves the way we recruit out-of-state businesses to Alabama.
While I am all for using tax incentives to bring in new business, provided we do it the right way, we also need to focus on growing existing business and industry. We need to “grow with those we know.”
That means first focusing on keeping the jobs we have here by making our schools better. This will attract growth within the companies already invested in Alabama, which saves jobs and creates new ones.
But there is also work we can do to help existing industries grow, particularly in the field of medical research.
Many states that have booming industry also limit non-compete clauses. Non-compete clauses are meant to protect trade secrets. But they also have the unwanted effect of limiting growth. The law should protect trade secrets and proprietary knowledge. But employees should also be free to leave their current employer and form their own business in the same industry if they want to.
For example, why are so many technology companies based in Silicon Valley in California? It’s because people who started out working at places like Microsoft and Apple later left those companies to form their own businesses. Protecting employees from overly strict non-compete clauses allowed that industry to thrive. We can do the same here in Alabama. Our medical research industry, in particular, could benefit from similar protections.
There will always be a place for creating new industry and recruiting new business. It is extremely important to the function of our economy. But we also cannot lose sight of job retention. We need to focus on keeping the jobs that are already here, here. We need to create a culture for those companies and industries to expand, thus protecting and creating more jobs.
And if we continue to focus primarily on tax incentives that are only given to new industries and out-of-state businesses, then we need a system of checks and balances to make sure that we can recoup our money if they don’t meet a job creation requirement.
And we need to level the playing field so that out-of-state companies aren’t being taxed at a lower rate than in-state companies. For example, we must protect our independent pharmacies, they are small businesses born and bred here in the state of Alabama. However, right now, instead of protecting them, we protect the out-of-state large corporate pharmacies by giving them tax breaks to open locations, putting the mom and pop pharmacies out of business.
Yes, the state of Alabama needs to be “open for business.” We need to create more, lasting, quality jobs. But almost as importantly, we need to retain the jobs we currently have, grow the businesses and industries that are already here and protect our small business owners. We need to grow with the ones we already know.

Rep. Craig Ford is a Democrat from Gadsden and the Minority Leader in the Alabama House of Representatives.

by Steve Flowers

As the legislature and governor prepare for the upcoming initial legislative session of the quadrennium, they are facing ominous and obvious problems. The General Fund is in dire straits, primarily due to the escalating costs of Medicaid and prisons.
The problems in the Prison System may be even more acute than with Medicaid. The reason is that our prison population is well in excess of what federal courts have determined is constitutional. There are federal judicial standards of humane care for prisoners and we currently are not within these guidelines. Therefore, we are on thin ice and shaky ground if our prison problems come before a federal judge.
The remedy they might adjudicate could be more expensive than our fixing the problem ourselves. History has a way of repeating itself. We have been dealt this card before in the Heart of Dixie.
We in the South have had a propensity, probably due to our heritage, of rebelling against the federal government. We seem to always come up on the short end of the stick. These losses have been very costly.
The history of federal intervention into our affairs is pronounced. The results have been expensive, devastating and usually avoidable.
The most famous and glaring federal intervention came in the 1960s when George Wallace stood in the schoolhouse door. The U.S. Supreme Court had ruled school segregation unconstitutional in 1954 in the landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision. Alabama and the entire South had ignored the federal mandate. It came to a head here in Alabama with Gov. Wallace’s theatrical stand in front of Foster Auditorium at the University of Alabama. Federal officials forced Gov. Wallace to stand down and allow two Black students to attend the University.
The next year, the federal government, under the authority of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, forced the state to desegregate all public schools. The following year, after the Selma to Montgomery march and whirlwind of civil rights marches and protests, Congress passed the 1965 Voting Rights Act. Up until that time, very few Blacks could vote in the South.
The Voting Rights Act of 1965 outlawed discriminatory practices, such as poll taxes and literacy tests. The Act also allowed for federal oversight over Alabama’s voting laws. African American Alabamians voted in mass in 1966.
Alabama’s Mental Health System became the subject of federal intervention in the 1970s. The legislature cut an already paltry appropriation for mental health. A class action lawsuit followed. The case Wyatt v. Stickney centered on overcrowding and inhumane conditions in our mental institutions. A federal judge ruled that mental health patients have a right to a certain standard of care. The judge ordered restoration of the funding. It was not until 2003, close to 30 years later, that the Feds stopped overseeing our mental health facilities. The case wound up costing the state millions in court and compliance costs.
In 1985, a federal lawsuit was filed against Alabama’s Department of Transportation alleging that the Highway Department had discriminated against Blacks in their hiring practices. At that time, the department had less than 10 percent Black professionals and technicians. The plaintiffs won.
The federal court decree restrained the departments hiring until it reached the quota they desired. By 2003, 31 percent of the professionals and 25 percent of the technicians at ALDOT were Black. This lawsuit has cost the state over $300 million and is still ongoing.
We have also seen federal intervention regarding our teacher testing standards. A federal court decree kept Alabama from testing our teachers for close to two decades.
In 2001, Chief Justice Roy Moore placed a Ten Commandments monument in the Alabama Judicial Building. A federal judge ordered the monument removed in 2003. Judge Moore in a bold move, similar to George Wallace’s schoolhouse door stand, refused to obey the federal order. He was then removed from office.
The people of Alabama sent the Feds a message that they stood with Moore when they reelected him as Chief Justice of the State Supreme Court in 2012.
When it comes to federal intervention, this current possible intrusion into our prisons will not be our first rodeo.
See you next week.

Steve Flowers is Alabama’s leading political columnist. His weekly column on Alabama politics appears in over 60 Alabama newspapers. He may be reached at www.steveflowers.us.