(FinalCall.com) -- I am ashamed that the U.S. government has bombed a wedding party in Afghanistan resulting in the loss of some 40 or more lives. Thousands of lives have already been lost in that poor and desperate nation, and Bush should pull out the U.S. troops immediately and stop talking about making war on other people.

Yet, based on the history of two centuries of a militaristic U.S. foreign policy, we should take him seriously and expect a continued war economy that slashes domestic spending on health, education, the environment and welfare to the bone. I am ashamed that Bush has cut with a very sharp knife most of the support needs for AIDS victims at a time when millions of people around the world are dying every year. At the present rate some 68 million are expected to die in the next two decades.

I am ashamed but not surprised that Bush and the other Western leaders have decided not to provide sufficient funds for African development following centuries of rape and plunder of that continent which enabled the Western nations to become rich.

I would like to know how much of the discussion focused on ethics when the Detroit City Council voted to pay $450,000 to a sitting member of the council, Lonnie Bates, as a settlement for a previous lawsuit. I am ashamed that Mayor Kilpatrick has offered to pay a $230,000 salary to a director of an agency in a city that is broke and where 40 percent of the residents in Wayne County live under the poverty line. Not only that, but the same new administrator has a record of privatizing city services in his previous job.

That ought to make all the employees in city hall and trade union members everywhere quite happy.

The economic resurrection of Africa or urban America will not be accomplished by more loans and dependency on the big corporations and governments that created the problems in the first place. We should know by now that those Wall Street and Fleet Street Crips and Bloods in suits have a vested interest in keeping the little folk barefoot and pregnant from Dar es Salaam to Detroit. Africa will eventually have to establish trade within the continent and within communities, and depend primarily on itself rather than producing for export to the West, which controls the markets and prices of the basic commodities. That will not be quick, easy nor jazzy. Nor will it allow the Black elite to drive big sleek Mercedes while the family farmers in the villages ride mammy wagons to the market. Unfortunately, that has become an all too common scene since Africa won political but not economic liberation from European colonialism.

Similarly, the economic distinction between the Black American elite and the working classes have become wider and uglier, and continues to expand since the end of the Civil Rights Movement. Prior to that Movement, we had the slogan: "Lift as You Climb," meaning the success of one was the success of the group. Today we think of ourselves as autonomous individuals and so many of us live for our personal achievements, usually defined as monetary success. Too many professional Black Americans and Africans on the Continent have moved away from and forgotten about the old neighborhoods and villages, and too often they turn down their noses at the people left behind.

Too often, success is seen as escaping from rather than changing the ’Hood.

And success has come to mean acquiring luxury toys and more and more trendy but poor quality consumer stuff that we don’t need, can’t afford, and can’t get rid of.

Far too many of our local and national leaders in Africa and in the U.S. blindly follow the lead of Washington, Wall Street and other multinational pimps as they continue to plunder the Third World, the Environment, and steal cheap labor from the workers everywhere in the name of Patriotism.

This is a process that started in an earlier conference in Berlin, Germany in 1885 when the Big Powers sat down to carve up Africa among themselves. That same policy of Grand Theft continues today at the various G8 conferences where the diplomats use smiles and the rhetoric of human rights to swindle the people.

The economic crisis that the U.S.—particularly the small farms and urban communities—find ourselves in now can be expected to get worse as Bush rushes towards making more devastating war on all fronts to benefit the Big Oil companies. In these times we need a different type of leadership that will define success as the achievement of the group, mutual cooperation that benefits all the earth’s residents, a peaceful world in which everyone can develop a wholesome quality of life.

That will take leadership like that demonstrated by Julius Nyerere, the late president of the small east African nation, Tanzania. Not only did President Nyerere lead his nation to independence from Britain in the early 1960s, but his first act after taking office was to reduce his salary. He frequently traveled to his small village where he was seen working in the fields with the farmers, on his knees digging in the ground with hand tools to plant or harvest crops. He rode in a small inexpensive car with one driver. From the early days of the Organization of African Unity, Nyerere became the champion of the African Liberation Committee, which was responsible for much of the support given to other people throughout southern Africa who were then struggling for independence from Apartheid governments backed up by Washington and Wall Street.

Nyerere’s domestic economic policy was to promote cooperative villages, known as Ujamaa. He believed in service for the little folk rather than policies that benefited the big foreign corporations. Rather than spend the majority of the budget on the military, as does the U.S., his focus was on education, public health, housing and world peace.

As my grandfather, a militant in the early days of the UAW, would say when he boasted about the worker’s sit-down strikes against the auto barons: Nyerere had a backbone. He was a simple honest man and was not for sale. He believed that people ought to come before profits. Therefore, he was not liked in the West but was loved deeply by his people. He was a symbol of the type of leadership, government and society needed so desperately today in Washington and Detroit.

(Charles Simmons is a professor of journalism and law at Eastern Michigan University and co-chair of the Committee for the Political Resurrection of Detroit (CPR). Email: csim592951@aol.com)