Though Michael Bloomberg’s Greenwood Initiative represents the most comprehensive prospective antidote to the paucity of financial assets that this nation’s African-American complement have acquired, it is grievously deficient both as it relates to the emaciated breadth of its scope and the equally essential requirement that initiatives of this character that seek as their fundamental objective the mitigation of poverty and the equally urgent necessity of significantly diminishing inequality among our citizens, must be formulated and deployed to accomplish these goals on behalf of all those who are currently mired in circumstances of impoverishment irrespective of their racial identities, ethnic origins, or religious affiliations.

However, whatever its inadequacies it represents a quantum conceptual leap beyond the proposals which all other candidates who are seeking the presidency have articulated.

It proceeds from the recognition that the critically imperative ingredients of an explicit articulated commitment to this result and the political volition which flows from that irrevocable promise, the appropriate technical resources required to assist those who reside in these areas with the expertise to most efficaciously formulate and implement the paradigms and policies which these community residents formulate, and the financial resources to translate these proposals into operational reality, must be deployed in the quest to transform these locales from regions of material scarcity into geographic designations of self-sustaining economies that provide for those who reside there with membership in the comparative comfort of a middle-class existence.

For innumerable decades have those in our African-American communities been neglected by public servants who though providing the barest minimum of financial assistance to those who dwell in poverty in these areas; these programs and initiatives did little more than perpetuate the intrinsic symbiotic nature of this relationship, e.g. a politics of dependency which exchanged continued electoral support for those officials who ensured the meager flow of capital to these recipients.

Nowhere within this arrangement could there be found the dynamic that would provide a pathway for those in these neighborhoods to escape the clutches of poverty and create a life for themselves and their families as the result of their efforts and exertions to acquire those materials assets that would provide for an existence of that was self-sustaining and contained as well the capability to ensure a retirement of relative comfort and financial sufficiency.

We as a nation have not formally addressed the imperative objective of eradicating poverty as a national priority since the laudable efforts which Lyndon Johnson initiated more than half a century ago, and in the intervening decades the plight of our poor and our middle-class has deteriorated significantly as the affluent and oligarchy have continuously acquired obscene magnitudes of wealth and political efficacy.

It is imperative that the undertaking which Michael Bloomberg is proposing whatever its deficiencies be implemented should he emerge victorious in the struggle to obtain the nomination of the Democratic party and vanquish the current occupant of the White House.

However, it is equally important that all others who are engaged in the pursuit of the presidency formulate and declare their solemn intent should they be the party’s standard bearer this autumn to mount those activities and policies which are dedicated to this objective, i.e. an initiative that shall when successful greatly mitigate if not abolish the poverty and financial insecurity in which so many of our fellow citizens are currently engulfed.

I urge all who are engaged in this campaign to become our nation’s chief executive to most assuredly deploy these programs to alleviate the suffering of so many within the African-American community; but also regardless of their racial origins or ethnic identities extend this endeavor to all among us, i.e. Latinos, Caucasians, Asians, etc. who reside in the tragic circumstances of impoverishment irrespective of any other considerations or characteristics

For it is beyond all other factors in our contemporary cultural conflicts and escalating enmities the reality of both the declining financial prospects of our middle-class and the continued subjugation of our poor and the corresponding deprivation of our collective capacity to shape and impact governmental actions and determinations at all levels that is the primary cause of our current miseries and suffering.

Enlarging the scope of the Bloomberg proposal to include each individual among us who is imprisoned in the dehumanizing basements of penury and acute financial circumstances will (though far from a panacea for all our social ills and injustices) be enormously ameliorative and be but the first major initiative of many as a Democratic president seeks during their tenure to transform our current national reality of an unraveling plutocracy into an equitable nation where social justice is both vibrant and transcendent.