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::January 2010: A New Year: A New Decade :: By Norm Bond
“The Empowerment Experiment, The African American Connection, International Business Kids, the Black Press of America, The Black Electorate and the National Alliance of Market Developers. These are some of the powerful solutions that you can align yourself with today.” ----Norm BondOn December 31, 1999, I traveled to Times Square in New York City to celebrate the birth of a new decade. Millions were on pins and needles due to fear of the Y2K bug. Computers were predicted to fail en masse and cause the collapse of the free world. Banks were expected to fail since their mainframes would be unable to adjust from processing 1-9-9-9 to 2-0-0-0. Many people planned to be left with only their purchased and stored Y2K Survival Kits as a means of existence. It was going to be a dog-eat-dog world. Well, if you’re reading this you also survived the Y2K scare. Now here we are ten years later. Congratulations to you and Happy New Decade. But we certainly are still living in a world of fear. Our thoughts are with the people of Haiti. The global community shoudl continue to answer the call to this disaster of epic proportions. Of course are other global issues. And in the US, Blacks are suffering through an economic tsunami and "Silent Depression" with unemploymnet, underemployment, and job loss. Ten years ago we couldn’t have imagined that we’d be living in a “post-racial society”. If someone would have predicted the United States would have a Black president named Barack Hussein Obama they would certainly not have been taken seriously, probably committed if they persisted. Who knew you’d be paying $35 to check your bags for a flight on an airplane and oh yeah, buying your snacks in-flight. So much change in the decade. The internet was being described as the “World Wide Wait” because of slow download speeds. Now we watch videos and television on our cell phones, take pictures, and even run our desktop applications at 4G speed. So much has changed. But Black people in America have still not changed our economic condition by capitalizing on the opportunities that being the 9th-12th largest economic power on earth should yield. Our communities suffer, our wealth has been further eradicated due to being targeted by the subprime predators, and we have been struggling through a “silent economic depression” for at least the past five years. We’ve seen the disaster of Katrina, the fiasco of the “stimulus dollars” reaching those “most impacted” and now are being told to endure a “jobless recovery” from “the Great Recession.” That's why this decade I'm focusing on solutions and you should too. I gave you a starter list at the beginning of this article. There is good news as we move into this decade. We have more tools to connect than at any time in our history. We are truly in a global economy where you can learn, teach, and build an international network to provide value, service and reach your goals. The Bond Report continues our aim to achieve “true freedom” both psychological and economic freedom for people of African descent “by any means necessary”. Our shared culture, our collective unity, and our economic spending, projected to reach $1.2 trillion dollars by 2012 are phenomenal assets. Imagine the tremendous results we can achieve by building on our existing projects: The Empowerment Experiment, The African American Connection, International Business Kids, the Black Press of America, The Black Electorate and the National Alliance of Market Developers. These are some of the most powerful solutions that you can align yourself with today. Imagine where we can be collectively in ten years by working to use our creativity, our commitment to excellence, and demanding reciprocal economic relationships from those that we choose to support with our dollars. As we say in our theme song every Saturday, “Let’s go Blackman, let’s go Blackwoman – the whole world’s waiting on you.” Have a great year – and a great decade! Norm Bond is the national president of the National Alliance of Market Developers, Inc. (NAMD) founded in 1953. He can be reached at www.namdntl.org or www.normbond.com |
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