REALITY IS THE STATE OF THINGS AS THEY ACTUALLY EXIST
Recommended Readings for those who seek the truth
*"the color of law" - a forgotten history of how our government segregated america - by richard rothstein
*"survival of the richest" - how the corruption of the marketplace and the disparity of wealth created the greatest conspiracy of all - by donald jefferies
*"stark mad abolitionists" - lawrence, kansas, and the battle over slavery in the civil war era - by robert k. sutton
*"all the real indians died off"
and 20 other myths about native americans
by roxanne dunbar-oritiz and dina gilio-whitaker
*where we invade next(movie)
by michael moore
* A People's History of the United States
by Howard Zinn
*The Untold History of the United States
by Oliver Stone and Peter Kusnick
*White Trash - the 400-year untold history of class in america
by nancy isenberg
The Permanent Lie, Our Deadliest Threat
by Chris Hedges
...“The venal political figures need not even comprehend the social and political consequences of their behavior,” psychiatrist Joost A.M. Meerloo wrote in “The Rape of the Mind: The Psychology of Thought Control, Menticide, and Brainwashing.” “They are compelled not by ideological belief, no matter how much they may rationalize to convince themselves they are, but by the distortions of their own personalities. They are not motivated by their advertised urge to serve their country or mankind, but rather by an overwhelming need and compulsion to satisfy the cravings of their own pathological character structures. The ideologies they spout are not real goals; they are the cynical devices by which these sick men hope to achieve some personal sense of worth and power. Subtle inner lies seduce them into going from bad to worse. Defensive self-deception, arrested insight, evasion of emotional identification with others, degradation of empathy—the mind has many defense mechanisms with which to blind the conscience.”
When reality is replaced by the whims of opinion and expediency, what is true one day often becomes false the next. Consistency is discarded. Complexity, nuance, depth and profundity are replaced with the simpleton’s belief in threats and force. This is why the Trump administration disdains diplomacy and is dynamiting the State Department. Totalitarianism, wrote novelist and social critic Thomas Mann, is at its core the desire for a simple folktale. Once this folktale replaces reality, morality and ethics are abolished....
"INVERTED TOTALITARIANISM." BY SHELDON WOLIN
Thus the elements are in place: a weak legislative body, a legal system that is both compliant and repressive, a party system in which one part, whether in opposition or in the majority, is bent upon reconstituting the existing system so as to permanently favor a ruling class of the wealthy, the well-connected and the corporate, while leaving the poorer citizens with a sense of helplessness and political despair, and, at the same time, keeping the middle classes dangling between fear of unemployment and expectations of fantastic rewards once the new economy recovers. That scheme is abetted by a sycophantic and increasingly concentrated media; by the integration of universities with their corporate benefactors; by a propaganda machine institutionalized in well-funded think tanks and conservative foundations; by the increasingly closer cooperation between local police and national law enforcement agencies aimed at identifying terrorists, suspicious aliens, and domestic dissidents.
QUESTIONS FROM THE HOOD
have you ever questioned..... ?
*the republican great depression of 1929 is about to be repeated with another worthless republican administration causing it.
*how do you become a billionaire and ignorant at the same time?
*if the gop covers for trump who is putin's bitch, then what do you call the gop?
*if you consider yourself to be a good american, then how do you square kidnapping children from their parents at the border?
*after watching one year of trump destroy america, how stupid do you have to be to continue voting for republicans??
*if new jersey has an opiod overdose problem, why hasn't sen. booker not spoken out against the drug companies?
*how many racists are in the house of representatives, how many republicans are there?
*if your history is a lie, what does that say about your integrity?
*how can you own land that was stolen in the first place?
*is there something in trump voters' water that makes them so stupid?
*how stupid do you have to be to allow guns in airports? ask the florida legislature.
*what is the difference between using religion to dodge reality or drugs?
*what would be the impact if oil was used only for making gasoline and renewables for electricity only?
*how do you rationalize voting for obama in 2008, 2012, and trump in 2016?
*if you have seen Michael moore's movie "where we invade next", what do you think of america now?
*if you vote for a racist, what does that make you?
*how stupid are to you vote for the re-election of a gop senator?
is being a terrorist the only way not to be killed if you are black?
if you live in an urban city and don't vote, why do you wonder about your lack of equality?
Why are people denied the right to vote in a democracy?
if stupid people are elected to office, what does that say about those who voted for them?
if a racist apologizes for his actions, does that mean he is no longer a racist?
Can you think of anyone dumber than a Republican when it comes to governing?
Can you name a corporation in america that pays its fair share of taxes and doesn't rob its customers?
Are there any billionaires who got rich without slave labor?
Which states have the dumbest Voters: kansas, Texas, Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin, or all the South?
Have you ever heard a racist admit to being a racist?
This is some bitter truth
"When white people are hurting economically we’re supposed to feel their pain and “bring the jobs back” to their dying rural towns. But when people of color lack jobs in the cities (in large part because of the decline of manufacturing over 40 plus years, as well as discrimination) we tell them to “move,” to go to school and gain new skills, and we lecture them on pulling themselves up by their bootstraps because the government doesn’t owe them anything. But apparently we DO owe white coal miners and assembly line workers their jobs back because remember, out of work white men are “salt of the earth” while out of work people of color are lazy."
- Tim Wise
COMMENTARY
America has never been united. So how do we move forward together?
This current political climate has exposed the not-so-secret racial wound within this country
By RANDALL HORTON - salon
PUBLISHED JANUARY 1, 2024 5:45AM (EST)
Consider this another report from the inverted other, or those relegated to existing underneath the folded fabric of the American consciousness.
However, to get to the breadth of this reported narrative, we must begin with the poet Reginald Shepherd and his book "Orpheus in the Bronx: Essays on Identity, Politics, and the Freedom of Poetry," Shepard makes an interesting theoretical observation regarding race, and its impact on American society, when he asserts Whiteness and Blackness are social constructs, i.e. manmade; yet, Blackness has been designated or assigned as the “marked construct” within our national consciousness while whiteness has been allowed to fade into a privileged invisibly, insulated from the ramifications of race and racial matters. Note: we can also insert any group relegated to "other" status in Shepherd’s statement. Perhaps through my own set of constructions and analyzing those as a poet, I am compelled to see what others cannot, to create a reportage of what I know to be true, an unknown but true narrative hidden from public view.
I must report that democracy is eroding quick, fast, and now really fast.
Our judicial and criminal justice systems are laughable jokes while morality is dangling at the edge of a crumbling cliff, and the gentlest of breezes is prepared to exhale that final breath, flailing morality backward into a state of nonexistence. This current political climate we inhabit has exposed a not-so-secret racial wound within this country that has never healed. The news media constantly reminds its denizens of this so-called division through political polling that reveals there are no consequences for trying to destroy America in the eyes of those privileged to live within its invisibility. People, jurors of the common body, the state: I would like to correct one thing here. America has never been whole, so saying it is now divided is misleading, false and inaccurate.
It is, as it has always been: Divided we stand.
This outgoing year of 2023 has exposed the severe racial wounds of this country through a continued mockery of the judicial system and a confluence of lies from those who play on the construction of whiteness, and those who truly believe whiteness is the pure blood of America. The problem with this school of thought is, as James Baldwin so eloquently writes in his essay, “On Being White and Other Lies,” that not one person came to America in the early days of its conception thinking they were white, and let me advance this a step further, not one slave considered themselves black in the beginning — this was a forced construct that cannot be taken back in terms of identity. The damage is irreversible on either side. This duality of construct is the genesis of the never-ending problem of race in America. Blackness or otherness, as a marked construct, shaped a twisted white-driven ideology, thereby creating a false sense of superiority that has placed this country in grave danger, a danger not seen since perhaps the Civil War; and yet, in that military conflict, the racial wound was never addressed, only given a bandage and kicked down the road like an aluminum can whose destination is to be recycled, over and over.
At the crux of this dilemma is how power, influence or wealth can skirt or bypass laws heavily enforced on those without economic means, social status and/or grace within the public sphere. Let us not forget this country originally created a system in which being associated with the criminal justice system — and yes, being charged with a crime without a conviction — has caused and continues to cause irreparable harm while influencing employment, where one can live, as well as how one can live. There have been generations affected by this practice as old as convict leasing and the Black Codes, which swelled prisons with convict labor after the Civil War. Because I break bread with and claim to be part of this marked construct, this otherness, complete with jail time within the carceral state, allow me to enlighten you.
The hypocrisy of America is on full tilt display.
Let me bring you into the intimate conversations between the common denizens of the state that may never be made public. They are often held when family and friends gather, get animated and talk smack amid a spades or bid whist card game where jokers and deuces are always wild. They occur at the barbeque cookout while eating pork ribs, baked beans and potato salad, and the conversations almost always speak of an eroding confidence, that was at best suspect, of their station in American society. They can also be heard on Christmas Eve while wrapping gifts in red wrapping paper in the living room. In all these conversations there is no unyielding belief everyone is equal, especially under the law. These sublime figures that walk among the living do not believe they fit in this deranged construct that uses its people as pawns in a game of political chess with race as the sublime. In this perverse narrative of hypocrisy that has been normalized through misinformation, blatant lying and mistruths, we must ask ourselves, when did a lie become the truth? Where they do that at?
Let’s dig a bit deeper. For example, the former president of the United States of America is running for president again, with more criminal charges than Van Camp got pork and beans.
The hypocrisy--Oh, the hypocrisy. With that said, allow me to transport you through a portal of moving corridors to January 6, 2021. There are those in powerful stations with influence that would have you believe we did not witness what we witnessed on national television, as if it were a fabrication, or worse, necessary to save the United States of America. While watching this insurrection in real time, I remember making the comment on social media: look at all the non-melanin not get shot dead on the spot. To be clear and direct, there is not one person in my diverse group of friends that span the spectrum of color who believes if that had been any other cultural group than a white mob, they would not have all been sprayed like Raid on roaches and announced dead at the scene.
Of this, the marked construct is certain, and those who live within this construct understand, as presently constructed, that they do not have an amplified voice that can pierce the idea of privilege to the point it changes the current trajectory of democratic destruction through power. They see the dwindling and ever-fragile concept of democracy about to be dismantled, and the future is petrifying as it hints at the possibility of another divisive conflict from the erodible residue of the Civil War. Listen, a divided America is telling you who it is. And as we know, when someone tells you who they are, please believe them. Ask the poet, Maya Angelou.
If that is the case, what is the answer? How do we prevent a twisted narrative based on falsehoods from becoming reality? To be honest, it requires heavy lifting on the part of humanity.
This is the hard truth: There is no such thing as pure blood, and no cultural group or human being has the right to oppress another. We must acknowledge we are all different and, perhaps here within lies the answer. Each one of us, as a living thinking organism, contributes to the totality of humankind. If only we could love unconditionally, then violence and hatred would be eradicated from this nation’s lexicon. Maybe it begins in the new year with telling someone you vehemently disagree with: “I love you, my fellow human being; we are one and the same. I embrace your difference.” The only way we as a nation can begin to think about being whole and undivided is to accept the fundamental truth that universality or the universal or one cohesive group resides in the differences we have as people, as human beings. Maybe this is the blueprint to the grace needed to sustain a new and practical reality. This does not have to be the en
However, to get to the breadth of this reported narrative, we must begin with the poet Reginald Shepherd and his book "Orpheus in the Bronx: Essays on Identity, Politics, and the Freedom of Poetry," Shepard makes an interesting theoretical observation regarding race, and its impact on American society, when he asserts Whiteness and Blackness are social constructs, i.e. manmade; yet, Blackness has been designated or assigned as the “marked construct” within our national consciousness while whiteness has been allowed to fade into a privileged invisibly, insulated from the ramifications of race and racial matters. Note: we can also insert any group relegated to "other" status in Shepherd’s statement. Perhaps through my own set of constructions and analyzing those as a poet, I am compelled to see what others cannot, to create a reportage of what I know to be true, an unknown but true narrative hidden from public view.
I must report that democracy is eroding quick, fast, and now really fast.
Our judicial and criminal justice systems are laughable jokes while morality is dangling at the edge of a crumbling cliff, and the gentlest of breezes is prepared to exhale that final breath, flailing morality backward into a state of nonexistence. This current political climate we inhabit has exposed a not-so-secret racial wound within this country that has never healed. The news media constantly reminds its denizens of this so-called division through political polling that reveals there are no consequences for trying to destroy America in the eyes of those privileged to live within its invisibility. People, jurors of the common body, the state: I would like to correct one thing here. America has never been whole, so saying it is now divided is misleading, false and inaccurate.
It is, as it has always been: Divided we stand.
This outgoing year of 2023 has exposed the severe racial wounds of this country through a continued mockery of the judicial system and a confluence of lies from those who play on the construction of whiteness, and those who truly believe whiteness is the pure blood of America. The problem with this school of thought is, as James Baldwin so eloquently writes in his essay, “On Being White and Other Lies,” that not one person came to America in the early days of its conception thinking they were white, and let me advance this a step further, not one slave considered themselves black in the beginning — this was a forced construct that cannot be taken back in terms of identity. The damage is irreversible on either side. This duality of construct is the genesis of the never-ending problem of race in America. Blackness or otherness, as a marked construct, shaped a twisted white-driven ideology, thereby creating a false sense of superiority that has placed this country in grave danger, a danger not seen since perhaps the Civil War; and yet, in that military conflict, the racial wound was never addressed, only given a bandage and kicked down the road like an aluminum can whose destination is to be recycled, over and over.
At the crux of this dilemma is how power, influence or wealth can skirt or bypass laws heavily enforced on those without economic means, social status and/or grace within the public sphere. Let us not forget this country originally created a system in which being associated with the criminal justice system — and yes, being charged with a crime without a conviction — has caused and continues to cause irreparable harm while influencing employment, where one can live, as well as how one can live. There have been generations affected by this practice as old as convict leasing and the Black Codes, which swelled prisons with convict labor after the Civil War. Because I break bread with and claim to be part of this marked construct, this otherness, complete with jail time within the carceral state, allow me to enlighten you.
The hypocrisy of America is on full tilt display.
Let me bring you into the intimate conversations between the common denizens of the state that may never be made public. They are often held when family and friends gather, get animated and talk smack amid a spades or bid whist card game where jokers and deuces are always wild. They occur at the barbeque cookout while eating pork ribs, baked beans and potato salad, and the conversations almost always speak of an eroding confidence, that was at best suspect, of their station in American society. They can also be heard on Christmas Eve while wrapping gifts in red wrapping paper in the living room. In all these conversations there is no unyielding belief everyone is equal, especially under the law. These sublime figures that walk among the living do not believe they fit in this deranged construct that uses its people as pawns in a game of political chess with race as the sublime. In this perverse narrative of hypocrisy that has been normalized through misinformation, blatant lying and mistruths, we must ask ourselves, when did a lie become the truth? Where they do that at?
Let’s dig a bit deeper. For example, the former president of the United States of America is running for president again, with more criminal charges than Van Camp got pork and beans.
The hypocrisy--Oh, the hypocrisy. With that said, allow me to transport you through a portal of moving corridors to January 6, 2021. There are those in powerful stations with influence that would have you believe we did not witness what we witnessed on national television, as if it were a fabrication, or worse, necessary to save the United States of America. While watching this insurrection in real time, I remember making the comment on social media: look at all the non-melanin not get shot dead on the spot. To be clear and direct, there is not one person in my diverse group of friends that span the spectrum of color who believes if that had been any other cultural group than a white mob, they would not have all been sprayed like Raid on roaches and announced dead at the scene.
Of this, the marked construct is certain, and those who live within this construct understand, as presently constructed, that they do not have an amplified voice that can pierce the idea of privilege to the point it changes the current trajectory of democratic destruction through power. They see the dwindling and ever-fragile concept of democracy about to be dismantled, and the future is petrifying as it hints at the possibility of another divisive conflict from the erodible residue of the Civil War. Listen, a divided America is telling you who it is. And as we know, when someone tells you who they are, please believe them. Ask the poet, Maya Angelou.
If that is the case, what is the answer? How do we prevent a twisted narrative based on falsehoods from becoming reality? To be honest, it requires heavy lifting on the part of humanity.
This is the hard truth: There is no such thing as pure blood, and no cultural group or human being has the right to oppress another. We must acknowledge we are all different and, perhaps here within lies the answer. Each one of us, as a living thinking organism, contributes to the totality of humankind. If only we could love unconditionally, then violence and hatred would be eradicated from this nation’s lexicon. Maybe it begins in the new year with telling someone you vehemently disagree with: “I love you, my fellow human being; we are one and the same. I embrace your difference.” The only way we as a nation can begin to think about being whole and undivided is to accept the fundamental truth that universality or the universal or one cohesive group resides in the differences we have as people, as human beings. Maybe this is the blueprint to the grace needed to sustain a new and practical reality. This does not have to be the en
The "Party of Life" GOP is OK with 700,000+ Dying of Poverty
The so-called “party of life” doesn’t, it turns out, give a damn about actual human life unless it has a net worth over a half-billion dollars...
THOM HARTMANN
APR 20, 2023
Kevin McCarthy has a keen new idea about what he thinks he can get out of Democrats in Congress in exchange for Republicans authorizing the government to pay the trillions in debt that Donald Trump racked up in his four years in office.
In exchange for lifting the so-called debt ceiling, McCarthy wants Biden and congressional Democrats to throw millions of families off food stamps (SNAP) and end even the possibility of any help to low-income young people unable to pay off student loans.
He claims this is because the federal government can’t afford to help out students or hungry Americans.
Nonetheless, his caucus is also pushing a new $1.8 trillion cut to the already-hobbled estate tax, paid exclusively by “lucky sperm club” children of the morbidly rich when they inherit fortunes they didn’t lift a finger to create.
Ironically, this proposal came out the same week that The Journal of the American Medical Association published a new study finding that poverty is the fourth largest killer of Americans.
And by poverty, they’re not just talking about the profoundly poor or homeless: for the purposes of this study they defined poverty as everybody living on less than the 50 percent median of income in the nation.
The study was unambiguous, noting:
“Current poverty was associated with greater mortality than major causes, such as accidents, lower respiratory diseases, and stroke. In 2019, current poverty was also associated with greater mortality than many far more visible causes—10 times as many deaths as homicide, 4.7 times as many deaths as firearms, 3.9 times as many deaths as suicide, and 2.6 times as many deaths as drug overdose.”
The outlook for people who’ve spent at least the past 10 years living below the US median income level is even more grim. The researchers refer to this as “cumulative poverty”:
“Cumulative poverty was associated with approximately 60% greater mortality than current poverty. Hence, cumulative poverty was associated with greater mortality than even obesity and dementia. Heart disease, cancer, and smoking were the only causes or risks with greater mortality than cumulative poverty.”
Concluding that “poverty should be considered a major risk factor for death in the US,” the researchers noted that the situation is probably even worse than what they were able to easily measure:
“[O]ne limitation of this study is that our estimates may be conservative about the number of deaths associated with poverty.”
You’d think that discovering over a quarter-million Americans every year die from current poverty, and an additional 406,000 die every year from long-term or “cumulative” poverty, would move the GOP.
After all, they control the poorest states in the nation, so this hits their constituents harder than it does the electorate of Democratic politicians. This hits right smack in the middle of where Republican politicians live.
But ever since five corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court first legalized political bribery in 1976 and 1978, paving the way for the Reagan Revolution, the GOP has abandoned Eisenhower’s embrace of unionization and anti-poverty programs to instead suck up to the morbidly rich and the corporations they control.
Just in the past six years, Republicans have:
Repeatedly fought efforts to raise the $7.25 minimum wage (which would be over $15 if inflation-adjusted and over $25 if adjusted for worker productivity gains).
— Blocked passage of the Protecting the Right to Organize (PRO) Act, which would give workers the right to join a union by simply signing a card, all while putting forward new legislation to block gig workers from unionizing.
— Cut funding for school lunches by about 40 percent.
— Refused to extend the Child Tax Credit, which lifted millions of families with kids out of poverty during the pandemic.
— Denied healthcare to low-incoming working families in almost a dozen GOP-controlled states refusing to expand Medicaid.
— Sued the Biden administration all the way to the Supreme Court to stop Democrats’ efforts to reduce the burden of student debt by a paltry $10,000.
— Responded to the slaughter of schoolchildren in Tennessee by proposing legislation making it impossible for grieving parents to sue gun manufacturers and sellers.
— Challenged legislative efforts by Democrats to slow down climate change by citing bullshit phony science promoted by the fossil fuel industry and Marjorie Taylor Greene.
— Demanded cuts in social security and propose raising the retirement age to 70 for people currently under 50.
— Supported the ongoing privatization of Medicare through George W. Bush’s corrupt Medicare Advantage private insurance scam.
President Biden’s $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan expanded child tax credits and access to Medicaid in 2021, lifting an estimated 12 million people, including 5.6 million children, out of poverty. As Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP) economists noted:
“[T]he Rescue Plan may turn out to be the most effective single piece of legislation for reducing annual poverty since 1935.”
When Republicans refused to go along with an extension of the program last year, however, childhood and general poverty both shot back up, proving that poverty in America isn’t some mystical or even natural force, but a policy choice embraced by the GOP.
When confronted with the option of cutting or even ending poverty in America (and the homelessness and crime attendant to it) or adding trillions to the money bins of the morbidly rich, Republicans choose the latter every time.
Biden’s policies brought Trump’s 14.7 percent unemployment rate all the way down to 3.6 percent, lifting millions of families out of poverty. Now, however, Trump appointee and lifelong Republican Jerome Powell has dedicated his efforts at the Fed to jacking unemployment back up (while doing nothing at all about out-of-control corporate price gouging) just in time for the 2024 election.
As Senator Ron Wyden said yesterday:
“Republicans manufactured this [debt ceiling] crisis, and Speaker McCarthy's proposal to get out of it would destroy jobs, worsen healthcare, increase hunger, hurt the climate, and make millions of American families poorer.”
The so-called “party of life” doesn’t, it turns out, give a damn about actual human life unless it has a net worth over a half billion dollars.
In exchange for lifting the so-called debt ceiling, McCarthy wants Biden and congressional Democrats to throw millions of families off food stamps (SNAP) and end even the possibility of any help to low-income young people unable to pay off student loans.
He claims this is because the federal government can’t afford to help out students or hungry Americans.
Nonetheless, his caucus is also pushing a new $1.8 trillion cut to the already-hobbled estate tax, paid exclusively by “lucky sperm club” children of the morbidly rich when they inherit fortunes they didn’t lift a finger to create.
Ironically, this proposal came out the same week that The Journal of the American Medical Association published a new study finding that poverty is the fourth largest killer of Americans.
And by poverty, they’re not just talking about the profoundly poor or homeless: for the purposes of this study they defined poverty as everybody living on less than the 50 percent median of income in the nation.
The study was unambiguous, noting:
“Current poverty was associated with greater mortality than major causes, such as accidents, lower respiratory diseases, and stroke. In 2019, current poverty was also associated with greater mortality than many far more visible causes—10 times as many deaths as homicide, 4.7 times as many deaths as firearms, 3.9 times as many deaths as suicide, and 2.6 times as many deaths as drug overdose.”
The outlook for people who’ve spent at least the past 10 years living below the US median income level is even more grim. The researchers refer to this as “cumulative poverty”:
“Cumulative poverty was associated with approximately 60% greater mortality than current poverty. Hence, cumulative poverty was associated with greater mortality than even obesity and dementia. Heart disease, cancer, and smoking were the only causes or risks with greater mortality than cumulative poverty.”
Concluding that “poverty should be considered a major risk factor for death in the US,” the researchers noted that the situation is probably even worse than what they were able to easily measure:
“[O]ne limitation of this study is that our estimates may be conservative about the number of deaths associated with poverty.”
You’d think that discovering over a quarter-million Americans every year die from current poverty, and an additional 406,000 die every year from long-term or “cumulative” poverty, would move the GOP.
After all, they control the poorest states in the nation, so this hits their constituents harder than it does the electorate of Democratic politicians. This hits right smack in the middle of where Republican politicians live.
But ever since five corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court first legalized political bribery in 1976 and 1978, paving the way for the Reagan Revolution, the GOP has abandoned Eisenhower’s embrace of unionization and anti-poverty programs to instead suck up to the morbidly rich and the corporations they control.
Just in the past six years, Republicans have:
Repeatedly fought efforts to raise the $7.25 minimum wage (which would be over $15 if inflation-adjusted and over $25 if adjusted for worker productivity gains).
— Blocked passage of the Protecting the Right to Organize (PRO) Act, which would give workers the right to join a union by simply signing a card, all while putting forward new legislation to block gig workers from unionizing.
— Cut funding for school lunches by about 40 percent.
— Refused to extend the Child Tax Credit, which lifted millions of families with kids out of poverty during the pandemic.
— Denied healthcare to low-incoming working families in almost a dozen GOP-controlled states refusing to expand Medicaid.
— Sued the Biden administration all the way to the Supreme Court to stop Democrats’ efforts to reduce the burden of student debt by a paltry $10,000.
— Responded to the slaughter of schoolchildren in Tennessee by proposing legislation making it impossible for grieving parents to sue gun manufacturers and sellers.
— Challenged legislative efforts by Democrats to slow down climate change by citing bullshit phony science promoted by the fossil fuel industry and Marjorie Taylor Greene.
— Demanded cuts in social security and propose raising the retirement age to 70 for people currently under 50.
— Supported the ongoing privatization of Medicare through George W. Bush’s corrupt Medicare Advantage private insurance scam.
President Biden’s $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan expanded child tax credits and access to Medicaid in 2021, lifting an estimated 12 million people, including 5.6 million children, out of poverty. As Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP) economists noted:
“[T]he Rescue Plan may turn out to be the most effective single piece of legislation for reducing annual poverty since 1935.”
When Republicans refused to go along with an extension of the program last year, however, childhood and general poverty both shot back up, proving that poverty in America isn’t some mystical or even natural force, but a policy choice embraced by the GOP.
When confronted with the option of cutting or even ending poverty in America (and the homelessness and crime attendant to it) or adding trillions to the money bins of the morbidly rich, Republicans choose the latter every time.
Biden’s policies brought Trump’s 14.7 percent unemployment rate all the way down to 3.6 percent, lifting millions of families out of poverty. Now, however, Trump appointee and lifelong Republican Jerome Powell has dedicated his efforts at the Fed to jacking unemployment back up (while doing nothing at all about out-of-control corporate price gouging) just in time for the 2024 election.
As Senator Ron Wyden said yesterday:
“Republicans manufactured this [debt ceiling] crisis, and Speaker McCarthy's proposal to get out of it would destroy jobs, worsen healthcare, increase hunger, hurt the climate, and make millions of American families poorer.”
The so-called “party of life” doesn’t, it turns out, give a damn about actual human life unless it has a net worth over a half billion dollars.
Uncle Clarence Thomas and Other House Negroes
Jaime O’Neill | the smirking chimp
April 14, 2023
The "news" feed on my computer is from Microsoft, and it really sucks, a compendium of poorly selected stories culled from a variety of sources dominated by shit from Fox News and the Washington Examiner. Wherever they're pulled from, they often are topped by garbled headlines, and they give undue legitimacy to the schlockiest pieces that some editors at that Microsoft "News" Service seem to think will draw readers.
Yesterday, I was read a piece there about how much trouble House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries was currently in for something he'd written when he was in college. As reported in Newsweek, Jeffries, as a student, had referred to Colin Powell and Clarence Thomas as "house Negroes" in a paper he wrote for a class he was in. You can be sure that the outrage against Jeffries was ginned up before being served to Fox "News" viewers who just can't get enough of stuff like that.
The idea that guys like Clarence Thomas are House "N-words" is hardly startling, Guys like him have long been used as window dressing for right wingers. In other words, it's just another utterly weightless "news" story that is, in fact, not news at all. Most of us who have long noted the right-wing tendency to to try to legitimize the their racism by selecting token black folks to come and hang out with them in their houses and in habitats usually reserved for old money rich pricks or corporate gonifs. These black pawns in their game are usually ambitious men and women of color quite willing to be in service to Ol' Massa, delighted to provide cover for fascists in exchange for access, favor, and an escalator to opportunity far more effective than Affirmative Action for those willing to take the ride.
And all that's required is much the same lack of character shown by even the well-bred and entitled white folks who live in those mega-mansions who call the tunes to which their lackeys will dance.
An American hero, Colin Powell, shed the mantel of rectitude he had worn before he lied for Bush, Cheney, and the neo-cons to get us into war with Iraq, but his ignominy really began when he chose a political party he surely had to have known was largely made up of racists, many of them among the richest of Republicans. But if you want to be richer and more powerful, you go where the money is, where the allegiances are rewarded if the people those rewards are being offering can be useful to the people dispensing them. And women and minorities in a party not noted for giving much thought to people in those constituencies are especially useful. To the simple minded, they serve to counter the arguments that right wingers are not bigoted or misogynistic, as the liberals think, because see, here's one or two of their very best friends, and they're black, or their women. Not many of 'em, just the good ones.
Take Condoleeza Rice, for instance, the black female student "conservative" profs could put forth as evidence of their own color blind fairness to minority students in their classes. Not that she wasn't bright, exactly, but those conservative professors' eyes lit up whenever they found a clever black student whose papers echoed their own thoughts. They inevitably groomed such students with special care and put them forward for ready advancement in their fields. So it was that Condi worked for Dubya in the White House though neither Bush nor Cheney had any bragging rights, not did Dubya's dad, when it came to furthering the struggle for equal rights. But those people who weren't allowed in the white boss's house, those who were dirty and were kept working in the fields, wereh never much a matter of concern to the house Negroes. In fact, they often looked down on them themselves, seeing the field negroes as dirty, ignorant, ill-mannered, bad-smelling, and no account. As so often happens, the people being degraded or oppressed often take on the attitudes of their masters. There are self-hating Jews, and women who incorporate misogny into their views of themselves, or if not themselves personally, then women they just don't like.
If there was ever a guy who could have been the poster boy embodying the attitudes of the House Negro, it would surely be Clarence Thomas, a guy who relished every moment of his rise to heights that allowed him to hang out with rich white folks, on their yachts, in their mansions, and at the exclusive soirees of right wing elites. No more did he have to feel the taint of skin color. In the company he kept, it had turned from a liability to an asset. The benefits were great so long as he could ignore or deny the ill-concealed racism of his white benefactors. And with that denial, Clarence Thomas had very little trouble.
Later in the day yesterday, I learned that Clarence Thomas's mom lives in a house in Savannah, Georgia, purchased by Harlan Crow from Clarence Thomas in an undisclosed sale. Mr. Crow, billionaire and big contributor to Republicans and an array of "conservative" causes, followed up on the purchase of that modest home with a lot of costly improvements to the place. That's the same Harlan Crow who has treated Clarence and Ginni Thomas to hundreds of thousands of dollars in generous hospitality.
The Dishonor Roll of black folks who have served the interests of right-wing Republicans (pardon the redundancy) isn't particularly long, but the names on that list would include Herman Cain, who died of COVID contracted after he attended a maskless event for Donald Trump. Don King probably belongs on that list, too, as does Kanye ("Ye") West.
Black people are no more immune from being corrupted than people of any other color, but it seems especially odious when some among them align themselves with people who have been known to stand against extending equal rights to people who share their color in exchange for the privilege of working in the white man's house.
Yesterday, I was read a piece there about how much trouble House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries was currently in for something he'd written when he was in college. As reported in Newsweek, Jeffries, as a student, had referred to Colin Powell and Clarence Thomas as "house Negroes" in a paper he wrote for a class he was in. You can be sure that the outrage against Jeffries was ginned up before being served to Fox "News" viewers who just can't get enough of stuff like that.
The idea that guys like Clarence Thomas are House "N-words" is hardly startling, Guys like him have long been used as window dressing for right wingers. In other words, it's just another utterly weightless "news" story that is, in fact, not news at all. Most of us who have long noted the right-wing tendency to to try to legitimize the their racism by selecting token black folks to come and hang out with them in their houses and in habitats usually reserved for old money rich pricks or corporate gonifs. These black pawns in their game are usually ambitious men and women of color quite willing to be in service to Ol' Massa, delighted to provide cover for fascists in exchange for access, favor, and an escalator to opportunity far more effective than Affirmative Action for those willing to take the ride.
And all that's required is much the same lack of character shown by even the well-bred and entitled white folks who live in those mega-mansions who call the tunes to which their lackeys will dance.
An American hero, Colin Powell, shed the mantel of rectitude he had worn before he lied for Bush, Cheney, and the neo-cons to get us into war with Iraq, but his ignominy really began when he chose a political party he surely had to have known was largely made up of racists, many of them among the richest of Republicans. But if you want to be richer and more powerful, you go where the money is, where the allegiances are rewarded if the people those rewards are being offering can be useful to the people dispensing them. And women and minorities in a party not noted for giving much thought to people in those constituencies are especially useful. To the simple minded, they serve to counter the arguments that right wingers are not bigoted or misogynistic, as the liberals think, because see, here's one or two of their very best friends, and they're black, or their women. Not many of 'em, just the good ones.
Take Condoleeza Rice, for instance, the black female student "conservative" profs could put forth as evidence of their own color blind fairness to minority students in their classes. Not that she wasn't bright, exactly, but those conservative professors' eyes lit up whenever they found a clever black student whose papers echoed their own thoughts. They inevitably groomed such students with special care and put them forward for ready advancement in their fields. So it was that Condi worked for Dubya in the White House though neither Bush nor Cheney had any bragging rights, not did Dubya's dad, when it came to furthering the struggle for equal rights. But those people who weren't allowed in the white boss's house, those who were dirty and were kept working in the fields, wereh never much a matter of concern to the house Negroes. In fact, they often looked down on them themselves, seeing the field negroes as dirty, ignorant, ill-mannered, bad-smelling, and no account. As so often happens, the people being degraded or oppressed often take on the attitudes of their masters. There are self-hating Jews, and women who incorporate misogny into their views of themselves, or if not themselves personally, then women they just don't like.
If there was ever a guy who could have been the poster boy embodying the attitudes of the House Negro, it would surely be Clarence Thomas, a guy who relished every moment of his rise to heights that allowed him to hang out with rich white folks, on their yachts, in their mansions, and at the exclusive soirees of right wing elites. No more did he have to feel the taint of skin color. In the company he kept, it had turned from a liability to an asset. The benefits were great so long as he could ignore or deny the ill-concealed racism of his white benefactors. And with that denial, Clarence Thomas had very little trouble.
Later in the day yesterday, I learned that Clarence Thomas's mom lives in a house in Savannah, Georgia, purchased by Harlan Crow from Clarence Thomas in an undisclosed sale. Mr. Crow, billionaire and big contributor to Republicans and an array of "conservative" causes, followed up on the purchase of that modest home with a lot of costly improvements to the place. That's the same Harlan Crow who has treated Clarence and Ginni Thomas to hundreds of thousands of dollars in generous hospitality.
The Dishonor Roll of black folks who have served the interests of right-wing Republicans (pardon the redundancy) isn't particularly long, but the names on that list would include Herman Cain, who died of COVID contracted after he attended a maskless event for Donald Trump. Don King probably belongs on that list, too, as does Kanye ("Ye") West.
Black people are no more immune from being corrupted than people of any other color, but it seems especially odious when some among them align themselves with people who have been known to stand against extending equal rights to people who share their color in exchange for the privilege of working in the white man's house.
When Will Republican Voters Wake Up to Their Own Oppression?
Somehow the “conservative” base voters never seem to figure it out. Why?
Thom Hartmann
1/3/2023
When will Republican voters figure out how badly they’re getting screwed by Republican politicians?
— Desperate workers struggle with soaring rents (courtesy of Republican-donor hedge funds);
— lack of healthcare (12 GOP-controlled states still refuse to expand Medicaid for under-$15,000/year workers) is literally killing Americans;
— wages have flatlined since Reagan declared war on workers in 1981 while the merely rich have become the morbidly rich;
— Americans pay 10 times as much as Canadians for some drugs because Republicans block any effort to bring competition to that marketplace;
— at the same time Trump and his GOP buddies in the House and Senate borrowed $1.7 trillion to fund a tax giveaway to his billionaire buddies, student debt passed the $1.7 trillion mark…
Yet somehow the “conservative” base voters never seem to figure it out. Why?
Most Republican voters don’t think much about it, but there are two very distinct layers to the GOP. It’s like a pyramid with a capstone at the very top.
The vast base of the pyramid are the white voters who Richard Nixon invited into the party after the Democrats embraced racial equality in 1964/1965 with the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act.
They mostly live in all-white neighborhoods, attend all-white churches, and send their kids to all-white schools. While most aren’t the Confederate-flag-toting “out and open” racists like the folks who showed up at the Capitol on January 6th, they’re nonetheless “uncomfortable” with nonwhite people. It’s their “culture,” they’ll tell you.
At the tippy-top of the pyramid, it’s capstone, are the handful of white billionaires who answered Lewis Powell’s 1971 call to get active and seize control of America’s political institutions.
They’ve funded think tanks in every state and at the federal level, sponsor anti-labor economics and political science professors in our colleges and universities, lever judges into positions all the way up to the Supreme Court, and pour a seemingly unending river of cash into Republican candidates for office.
These elite of the GOP live insular lives in their mansions with servants’ quarters and private security, travel on private jets, and vacation on private islands or their own personal super-yachts. They don’t really care that much about race because it’s not an issue in their daily lives: the people who enter the circle around them and their families are tightly regulated.
These conservative elite often own or are descended from the owners of America’s largest and most profitable businesses. Their issues, therefore, are their own income taxes and the regulation of their companies’ behavior.
They understand that Voltaire was dead serious when he said, “The comfort of the rich depends on an abundant supply of the poor.”
To keep their taxes low they fund movements to privatize public schools, gut “entitlements,” and oppose any sort of “welfare” aid to working class or poor people. To keep their businesses “free of government interference” they pay off politicians and hire judges to destroy unions, kneecap regulations, and spiff “conservative” media celebrities who lionized them as “job creators” and “geniuses.”
You’d think the white base of the GOP would have figured out by now that the Republican elite are more interested in keeping their wages down than having them as neighbors, but the “Makers” of the party have executed a brilliant strategy to keep their own taxes low and profits high while suppressing the “Takers’” wages and benefits among the party’s base.
Truth be told, many in the GOP base were beginning to figure this out by the end of the disastrous presidency of trust-fund-baby George W. Bush.
He’d begun the privatization of Medicare with his Medicare Advantage scam in 2003; lied us into two unnecessary and illegal wars; borrowed around $4 trillion to fund a massive tax cut for his donors, family, and friends; and to top it all off was only in the White House because his brother was governor of Florida and threw 80,000 Black voters off the rolls just months before the 2000 election…and still needed his father’s friends on the Supreme Court to get him into office.
Bush Junior was also the least racist of the Republican presidents since Nixon, and put two Black people at the top of the State Department: many in the white GOP base never forgave him for Colin Powell or Condoleezza Rice.
All in all, most Americans — including a substantial margin of Republican voters — were done and over with Bush and the metaphorical horse he rode in on (as much as he wanted to emulate Reagan, Bush is afraid of horses which is why his Texas election-prop “ranch” was an old pig farm).
Combine that dynamic with Barack Obama being one of the most gifted political orators of the 21st century and in 2008 a Black man became President of the United States for the first time in history.
Obama’s ascension to the highest office in the land was a gift to the morbidly rich funders of the GOP: a “Black liberal from Chicago” being president broke the brains of the most reliable part of the GOP base.
The billionaires leaped to the opportunity. Resurrecting a meme from the tobacco industry’s “smoker’s rights” scam of the 1990s, they rolled out the 2009 version of the Tea Party, complete with millions of dollars to pay for buses, staged events, and well-funded PR operations to get it all into the media every day.
While the foreground was “taxed enough already” and “death panels,” the background was “Black man in the White House wants to give your tax dollars to his Black friends.” It was Nixon’s “Southern Strategy” all over again, only in a far more sophisticated form.
There’s a lot of truth to the internet meme: “Republicans have gotten over Trump’s sexual assaults, affairs, idolatry, greed, profanity and vulgarity…but they’ve never gotten over Obama being Black.”
By the end of Obama’s presidency, though, the Tea Party had become a caricature of itself: old white boomers with silly “Keep your government hands off my Medicare” signs wrote their own jokes.
So, with fellow billionaire (at least he said he was) Trump in the White House, the capstone funders of the GOP changed their brand positioning.
They plastered the word “freedom” all over everything, including the caucus they bought and paid for in Congress. They helped launch hundreds of Spanish-language radio stations to spread the gospel of “free markets” and “you, too, can have white privilege” to America’s fastest growing demographic group. Their media operations made billions and aligned themselves with Russia, Hungary, and other straight-white-male-power authoritarian states.
They even continue to financially support politicians who tried to overthrow the government of the United States.
Which brings us back to the question:
“When will Republican voters wake up to their own oppression at the hands of the GOP’s billionaire funders?”
My bet is that as long as Democrats continue to welcome racial and gender minorities into their party, Republican voters will stay with their nearly-all-white politicians. Particularly people like Steve “David Duke without the baggage” Scalise and Marjorie “Jewish space lasers” Greene.
Will investigations of Hunter Biden’s laptop or the FBI be enough for Republicans to re-energize their base and gain control of all of Congress and the White House by 2024?
Hold my popcorn…
— Desperate workers struggle with soaring rents (courtesy of Republican-donor hedge funds);
— lack of healthcare (12 GOP-controlled states still refuse to expand Medicaid for under-$15,000/year workers) is literally killing Americans;
— wages have flatlined since Reagan declared war on workers in 1981 while the merely rich have become the morbidly rich;
— Americans pay 10 times as much as Canadians for some drugs because Republicans block any effort to bring competition to that marketplace;
— at the same time Trump and his GOP buddies in the House and Senate borrowed $1.7 trillion to fund a tax giveaway to his billionaire buddies, student debt passed the $1.7 trillion mark…
Yet somehow the “conservative” base voters never seem to figure it out. Why?
Most Republican voters don’t think much about it, but there are two very distinct layers to the GOP. It’s like a pyramid with a capstone at the very top.
The vast base of the pyramid are the white voters who Richard Nixon invited into the party after the Democrats embraced racial equality in 1964/1965 with the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act.
They mostly live in all-white neighborhoods, attend all-white churches, and send their kids to all-white schools. While most aren’t the Confederate-flag-toting “out and open” racists like the folks who showed up at the Capitol on January 6th, they’re nonetheless “uncomfortable” with nonwhite people. It’s their “culture,” they’ll tell you.
At the tippy-top of the pyramid, it’s capstone, are the handful of white billionaires who answered Lewis Powell’s 1971 call to get active and seize control of America’s political institutions.
They’ve funded think tanks in every state and at the federal level, sponsor anti-labor economics and political science professors in our colleges and universities, lever judges into positions all the way up to the Supreme Court, and pour a seemingly unending river of cash into Republican candidates for office.
These elite of the GOP live insular lives in their mansions with servants’ quarters and private security, travel on private jets, and vacation on private islands or their own personal super-yachts. They don’t really care that much about race because it’s not an issue in their daily lives: the people who enter the circle around them and their families are tightly regulated.
These conservative elite often own or are descended from the owners of America’s largest and most profitable businesses. Their issues, therefore, are their own income taxes and the regulation of their companies’ behavior.
They understand that Voltaire was dead serious when he said, “The comfort of the rich depends on an abundant supply of the poor.”
To keep their taxes low they fund movements to privatize public schools, gut “entitlements,” and oppose any sort of “welfare” aid to working class or poor people. To keep their businesses “free of government interference” they pay off politicians and hire judges to destroy unions, kneecap regulations, and spiff “conservative” media celebrities who lionized them as “job creators” and “geniuses.”
You’d think the white base of the GOP would have figured out by now that the Republican elite are more interested in keeping their wages down than having them as neighbors, but the “Makers” of the party have executed a brilliant strategy to keep their own taxes low and profits high while suppressing the “Takers’” wages and benefits among the party’s base.
Truth be told, many in the GOP base were beginning to figure this out by the end of the disastrous presidency of trust-fund-baby George W. Bush.
He’d begun the privatization of Medicare with his Medicare Advantage scam in 2003; lied us into two unnecessary and illegal wars; borrowed around $4 trillion to fund a massive tax cut for his donors, family, and friends; and to top it all off was only in the White House because his brother was governor of Florida and threw 80,000 Black voters off the rolls just months before the 2000 election…and still needed his father’s friends on the Supreme Court to get him into office.
Bush Junior was also the least racist of the Republican presidents since Nixon, and put two Black people at the top of the State Department: many in the white GOP base never forgave him for Colin Powell or Condoleezza Rice.
All in all, most Americans — including a substantial margin of Republican voters — were done and over with Bush and the metaphorical horse he rode in on (as much as he wanted to emulate Reagan, Bush is afraid of horses which is why his Texas election-prop “ranch” was an old pig farm).
Combine that dynamic with Barack Obama being one of the most gifted political orators of the 21st century and in 2008 a Black man became President of the United States for the first time in history.
Obama’s ascension to the highest office in the land was a gift to the morbidly rich funders of the GOP: a “Black liberal from Chicago” being president broke the brains of the most reliable part of the GOP base.
The billionaires leaped to the opportunity. Resurrecting a meme from the tobacco industry’s “smoker’s rights” scam of the 1990s, they rolled out the 2009 version of the Tea Party, complete with millions of dollars to pay for buses, staged events, and well-funded PR operations to get it all into the media every day.
While the foreground was “taxed enough already” and “death panels,” the background was “Black man in the White House wants to give your tax dollars to his Black friends.” It was Nixon’s “Southern Strategy” all over again, only in a far more sophisticated form.
There’s a lot of truth to the internet meme: “Republicans have gotten over Trump’s sexual assaults, affairs, idolatry, greed, profanity and vulgarity…but they’ve never gotten over Obama being Black.”
By the end of Obama’s presidency, though, the Tea Party had become a caricature of itself: old white boomers with silly “Keep your government hands off my Medicare” signs wrote their own jokes.
So, with fellow billionaire (at least he said he was) Trump in the White House, the capstone funders of the GOP changed their brand positioning.
They plastered the word “freedom” all over everything, including the caucus they bought and paid for in Congress. They helped launch hundreds of Spanish-language radio stations to spread the gospel of “free markets” and “you, too, can have white privilege” to America’s fastest growing demographic group. Their media operations made billions and aligned themselves with Russia, Hungary, and other straight-white-male-power authoritarian states.
They even continue to financially support politicians who tried to overthrow the government of the United States.
Which brings us back to the question:
“When will Republican voters wake up to their own oppression at the hands of the GOP’s billionaire funders?”
My bet is that as long as Democrats continue to welcome racial and gender minorities into their party, Republican voters will stay with their nearly-all-white politicians. Particularly people like Steve “David Duke without the baggage” Scalise and Marjorie “Jewish space lasers” Greene.
Will investigations of Hunter Biden’s laptop or the FBI be enough for Republicans to re-energize their base and gain control of all of Congress and the White House by 2024?
Hold my popcorn…
excerpt: How the GOP weaponized ignorance
Satirist Andy Borowitz on deliberate dumbness in America, and how it became central to the Republican brand
How the GOP weaponized ignorance — and how “smart people acting like dopes” stay in power
Satirist Andy Borowitz on deliberate dumbness in America, and how it became central to the Republican brand
By DEAN OBEIDALLAH - salon
PUBLISHED SEPTEMBER 30, 2022 6:00AM (EDT)
.....You write about ignoramuses and argue that they're attracted to the Republican Party, or so it seems. Democrats, by contrast, have eggheads. You mentioned Adlai Stevenson, Al Gore, even Mike Dukakis. Is there something about the parties that naturally self-select?
I think both parties started in a similar place. If you go back to ancient history before either of us was born, to the 1950s, and you look at Harry Truman and Dwight Eisenhower, both of them were actually big readers. Harry Truman didn't go to college, but he read like crazy. He read every library book in Independence, Missouri. Ike on the other hand, was also a huge reader, but he kept it a secret. He thought it was going to hurt his image. He acted like he just played golf all the time, but Ike stayed up every night until 11 o'clock reading. I think reading is actually a really good measure for determining how knowledgeable somebody is.
I'm a little bit hesitant to say that the Democrats are the party of smart people and the Republicans are the party of ignorant people. But I think the Republicans caught on a little bit sooner to the fact that this whole projection of anti-intellectualism was a vote-winner, and they really made it their brand. The Democrats were a little bit tempted by that too. I mean, certainly Bill Clinton was looking at Ronald Reagan and saying, "Now, he's got a real winning message. How can I dumb down my message a little bit?" So the Democrats haven't been immune to it, but the Republicans really are untouchable when it comes to this movement. They are really the vanguard.
---
You describe three stages of the "profiles in ignorance." The first one is ridicule. Tell us a little bit about ridicule.
First of all, I should say: Nothing in this book is just my opinion. As you point out, it's very thoroughly documented. It's all facts. That doesn't mean it's totally serious. It is hilarious because, and I'm not taking credit for it, I'm quoting very funny people.
The three stages of ignorance are ridicule, acceptance and celebration. Ridicule came first. That was when dumb politicians had to pretend to be smart. It was still important, we thought, for our politicians to be knowledgeable. Then after that, we moved into the acceptance phase, where dumb politicians felt it was OK and even cool to appear dumb. That's George W. Bush, the guy you want to have a beer with. And now we're in a phase, which is really the most horrifying phase, where smart politicians pretend to be dumb because they think that wins votes. You have very well-educated guys, like Josh Hawley, the world class sprinter, and Ron DeSantis, who talk nonsense because that's what they think their voters want to hear.
But ridicule — let's start with ridicule. There was an era a long time ago, say 50 years ago, where we still expected politicians to know stuff. The Republicans discovered in the 1960s, after the Kennedy-Nixon debates, that it was important to have somebody who was good on TV. Because Kennedy cleaned Nixon's clock on TV. Not on the radio, because on the radio they both sounded knowledgeable. So the Republicans reverse-engineered this and thought, well, instead of finding a politician who's knowledgeable and making him good on TV, let's just find somebody who's really good on TV and then make it appear as though he knows stuff.
And that was the beginning of Ronald Reagan. They recruited Ronald Reagan, who was at that point a has-been TV host. I mean, he'd hosted the "General Electric Theater." They hired this guy, Stu Spencer, who was a really shrewd campaign manager. And he hired — this is not made up! — some UCLA psychologists to basically, "Clockwork Orange"-style, load Reagan with information.
It was barely convincing. I mean, he would get up there and do talking points and seem like he had memorized the script, which of course he was really good at, since that's what he did for a living. But he won the California gubernatorial race by a million votes, and that really set the whole thing off. Because at that point the Republicans realized, we just have to find people who are good on TV. ...
----
Sarah Palin, as you say, began to show us glimmers of what the GOP is today: the the celebration of ignorance and the trolling. Like, I'm going to stick it in your face and I'm going to gin up hate against people on the other side. Is that fair?
It's totally fair, because what you find, and this is true in other countries too, is that when facts and information disappear, hatred and prejudice fill the void. It's easier. Learning about geopolitics is tricky and complicated. Learning about economics, people's eyes glaze over. But if you say something like, "There are rapists coming over from Mexico," or, "Barack Obama wasn't born here," that's easy stuff to grasp. There is a very nefarious side to ignorance, which is, what fills that void? In the case of Sarah Palin, her own campaign manager, Steve Schmidt, who was John McCain's campaign manager, when he finally sat down with her after she'd been selected, he came to the horrifying conclusion, and this is a direct quote, "She doesn't know anything." And it's true.
She had never heard of Margaret Thatcher. She thought that the queen of the U.K. commanded the armed forces. She didn't know who attacked us on 9/11. She thought it was Saddam Hussein. This was somebody John McCain chose to be one heartbeat away from the presidency. I actually found her defeat, in the most recent election [as a candidate for Congress], really encouraging. I really feel that her status as a national joke may actually have caught up with her. Wouldn't that be wonderful? We say history doesn't move in a straight line. This book tells a story that's pretty horrifying. But wouldn't it be wonderful if we're actually due for a correction? You can be dumb as a politician in this country, but not that dumb. That would be amazing.....
I think both parties started in a similar place. If you go back to ancient history before either of us was born, to the 1950s, and you look at Harry Truman and Dwight Eisenhower, both of them were actually big readers. Harry Truman didn't go to college, but he read like crazy. He read every library book in Independence, Missouri. Ike on the other hand, was also a huge reader, but he kept it a secret. He thought it was going to hurt his image. He acted like he just played golf all the time, but Ike stayed up every night until 11 o'clock reading. I think reading is actually a really good measure for determining how knowledgeable somebody is.
I'm a little bit hesitant to say that the Democrats are the party of smart people and the Republicans are the party of ignorant people. But I think the Republicans caught on a little bit sooner to the fact that this whole projection of anti-intellectualism was a vote-winner, and they really made it their brand. The Democrats were a little bit tempted by that too. I mean, certainly Bill Clinton was looking at Ronald Reagan and saying, "Now, he's got a real winning message. How can I dumb down my message a little bit?" So the Democrats haven't been immune to it, but the Republicans really are untouchable when it comes to this movement. They are really the vanguard.
---
You describe three stages of the "profiles in ignorance." The first one is ridicule. Tell us a little bit about ridicule.
First of all, I should say: Nothing in this book is just my opinion. As you point out, it's very thoroughly documented. It's all facts. That doesn't mean it's totally serious. It is hilarious because, and I'm not taking credit for it, I'm quoting very funny people.
The three stages of ignorance are ridicule, acceptance and celebration. Ridicule came first. That was when dumb politicians had to pretend to be smart. It was still important, we thought, for our politicians to be knowledgeable. Then after that, we moved into the acceptance phase, where dumb politicians felt it was OK and even cool to appear dumb. That's George W. Bush, the guy you want to have a beer with. And now we're in a phase, which is really the most horrifying phase, where smart politicians pretend to be dumb because they think that wins votes. You have very well-educated guys, like Josh Hawley, the world class sprinter, and Ron DeSantis, who talk nonsense because that's what they think their voters want to hear.
But ridicule — let's start with ridicule. There was an era a long time ago, say 50 years ago, where we still expected politicians to know stuff. The Republicans discovered in the 1960s, after the Kennedy-Nixon debates, that it was important to have somebody who was good on TV. Because Kennedy cleaned Nixon's clock on TV. Not on the radio, because on the radio they both sounded knowledgeable. So the Republicans reverse-engineered this and thought, well, instead of finding a politician who's knowledgeable and making him good on TV, let's just find somebody who's really good on TV and then make it appear as though he knows stuff.
And that was the beginning of Ronald Reagan. They recruited Ronald Reagan, who was at that point a has-been TV host. I mean, he'd hosted the "General Electric Theater." They hired this guy, Stu Spencer, who was a really shrewd campaign manager. And he hired — this is not made up! — some UCLA psychologists to basically, "Clockwork Orange"-style, load Reagan with information.
It was barely convincing. I mean, he would get up there and do talking points and seem like he had memorized the script, which of course he was really good at, since that's what he did for a living. But he won the California gubernatorial race by a million votes, and that really set the whole thing off. Because at that point the Republicans realized, we just have to find people who are good on TV. ...
----
Sarah Palin, as you say, began to show us glimmers of what the GOP is today: the the celebration of ignorance and the trolling. Like, I'm going to stick it in your face and I'm going to gin up hate against people on the other side. Is that fair?
It's totally fair, because what you find, and this is true in other countries too, is that when facts and information disappear, hatred and prejudice fill the void. It's easier. Learning about geopolitics is tricky and complicated. Learning about economics, people's eyes glaze over. But if you say something like, "There are rapists coming over from Mexico," or, "Barack Obama wasn't born here," that's easy stuff to grasp. There is a very nefarious side to ignorance, which is, what fills that void? In the case of Sarah Palin, her own campaign manager, Steve Schmidt, who was John McCain's campaign manager, when he finally sat down with her after she'd been selected, he came to the horrifying conclusion, and this is a direct quote, "She doesn't know anything." And it's true.
She had never heard of Margaret Thatcher. She thought that the queen of the U.K. commanded the armed forces. She didn't know who attacked us on 9/11. She thought it was Saddam Hussein. This was somebody John McCain chose to be one heartbeat away from the presidency. I actually found her defeat, in the most recent election [as a candidate for Congress], really encouraging. I really feel that her status as a national joke may actually have caught up with her. Wouldn't that be wonderful? We say history doesn't move in a straight line. This book tells a story that's pretty horrifying. But wouldn't it be wonderful if we're actually due for a correction? You can be dumb as a politician in this country, but not that dumb. That would be amazing.....
opinion: Why 'economic policy' is code for class warfare
Richard D. Wolff and Independent Media Institute - alternet
August 29, 2022
At the end of July, an economic adviser working for Bank of America wrote a memo that got leaked. It made bluntly explicit the long-standing common knowledge among savvy investment advisers: those “economic policies” debated among politicians, economists, and dutiful mass media operate at two different levels. On the public level, debaters discuss what “we” need to do to fix “our economy’s problems.” It reeks of that “we are all in this together” language that reminds us of commercial greeting card poetry. On the other, private level, insiders discuss how the government should respond to economic problems in ways that boost employers’ profits even if at employees’ or the public’s expense. Insiders express their preferred solutions in that nicely neutered term: “policies.”
Inflation, that “problem” torturing capitalist economies these days, offers us the first example of such policies. Inflation is a general increase in prices. Employers, not employees, decide the prices to charge for whatever goods and services their employees’ labor produces. Employers are at most 1 percent of the population while employees and their families constitute most of the other 99 percent. That 1 percent is not accountable to the other 99 percent of the population. Inflations directly impact—reduce—the standards of living of the 99 percent. The only exceptions are those employees who are able to raise their wages or salaries at least as fast as inflation raises prices. That is a tiny minority of the employees in general and also right now during the 2022 U.S. inflation. If inflation raises prices faster or more than wages, that represents a redistribution of income and wealth upward from employees to employers. Simply put, raising or protecting profits motivates employers’ price-setting decisions. Indirectly, inflation deeply impacts societies that suffer them, yet no democratic process determines where, when, or how employers’ decisions to inflate prices lead to those impacts. In modern capitalism, inflation reveals the class struggle in economics. There it operates without the constraints that formal democracy (voting) imposes on politics.
“Quantitative easing” (QE) intoned Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, repeating what Fed Chair Jerome Powell had said while offering a policy solution to recession. The technical-sounding phrase simply referred to the Federal Reserve’s particular economic policy to slow or stop the sharp economic downturn that had started in 2020 and was worsened by the COVID-19 pandemic. That Fed policy created a vast new amount of money and provided it, via loans and security purchases to big banks and other large financial institutions. To be clear here, the Fed made vast new monetary resources available to some of the largest and richest financial employers. The stated goal was to stimulate “the economy.” The Fed hoped that the financial employers it enriched would find it profitable to use this money to lend more to non-financial employers who would then hire unemployed workers. Note that QE favors the employer class. It works first and foremost to enrich the top 1 percent and then “hopes” the latter’s gains trickle down to the other 99 percent. Note further that the fresh new money is not provided to the mass of workers with the hope that they spend it thereby generating sales and profits for employers. Such a “trickle-up” approach to “stimulate the economy” would favor workers. That is why it is rare and almost never the primary focus of “expansionary monetary policy.”
Against inflation—the other scourge of capitalism’s instability—the Fed’s preferred policy is reversed to become “quantitative tightening” (QT). This policy reduces the quantity of money in circulation and raises interest rates. To these ends, the Fed sells securities chiefly to major financial institutions (inducing them to buy by charging attractively low prices for those securities). Those major financial institutions then pass on the higher rates (plus a markup for their own profits) to their customers (individuals and businesses). In short, the major financial players profit from Fed policy while offloading its costs onto the smaller economic players they service with loans. Note that the policy favors the biggest financial players and merely “hopes” that costlier loans will dissuade borrowers who will then demand fewer goods and services and thereby “induce” sellers to inflate their prices less. All the “ifs” and “hopes” concern the ultimate results of such policies. They immediately convey cash advantages to major employers, especially in financial enterprises. QT policies likewise favor the richer among all individuals and businesses. That is because higher interest costs are a heavier burden, and a greater risk, the smaller the size of a business or of an individual’s wealth.
Note that inflations can be and have been reduced in other ways less favorable to capital as against labor and to the richer as against the rest. Wage-price freezes, like the one then-President Richard M. Nixon imposed in August 1971, provide alternative anti-inflationary policies. Likewise, rationing can replace markets as a way to stop inflation. Former U.S. President Frankin D. Roosevelt used rationing in the early 1940s. But precisely because such policies are less favorable to the employer class, they are only used rarely. The dubious achievement of President Joe Biden’s administration (and the complicit GOP) has been to speak and act as if QT were the only policy that exists to fight inflation. Yellen’s and Biden’s past verbiage of “concern” about U.S. income and wealth inequalities might have acquired some teeth had a freeze of prices combined with wage increases been able to actually reduce those inequalities. That would have been an anti-inflationary policy doing double duty, reversing rather than exacerbating existing inequalities.
Fiscal policies work quite like monetary policies in terms of the class favoritism built into them. When recession is the problem, expansionary fiscal policy—for example, increased government spending—usually favors spending on infrastructure, defense, and other objects where well-established, large capitalist enterprises prevail. The government spending to moderate a recession then flows first and foremost into the hands of large employers. They will in turn use that money much as they do with all their capital and revenues: minimize labor and other costs so as to retain the maximum as profits and funds for capital accumulation. Only when it becomes politically unavoidable will government spending bypass employers and flow directly into the hands of the employee class. “Transfer payments” or “entitlements” encounter the most resistance, delay, undoing, or reductions resulting from pressure from the employer class. Thus, for example, the extra governmental outlays in 2020 and 2021 supplementing unemployment insurance and mass assistance during COVID-19 shutdowns stopped even as negotiations for massive infrastructure spending and “chip subsidies” to employers proceeded.
Similarly, when anti-recessionary fiscal policies entailed cutting taxes, history shows that taxes on corporations and the rich were disproportionately cut. Certainly, the massive tax cut under former President Donald Trump late in 2017 followed that pattern.
Class warfare lies behind how many politicians, mass media, and academics explain the economic problems requiring the solutions that their policies offer. For example, consider the typical analyses during 2022’s inflation as it became a hot public issue in the U.S. and beyond. Prices rose, we were told, since demand had risen (because of COVID-deferred spending) and supply had fallen (because of disrupted supply chains). Conservatives stressed the demand side: huge fiscal stimuli responding to COVID-19 (government checks and additional unemployment cash) that would be funded by budget deficits. Liberals stressed on supply chain disruptions instead (attributed to, say, China’s lockdown policies such as COVID-19 and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine). Note how both sides neatly removed employers’ profit-driven price increases from their respective analyses.
Yet employer decisions do play a key role in modern capitalism’s inflations. When demand rises (for any reason), most employers know they have a decision to make. They can either order more goods and services to be produced and sold to meet the rising demand or they can raise the prices of the goods and services they already have. Whatever mix of higher price and availability of more products they choose will be determined by what they deem as their more profitable course of action. Their choices in 2022 produced major inflation in the U.S. and beyond. Yet the vast majority of discussions by mainstream media, politicians and academics about inflation omitted to mention, let alone analyze, how employers’ profit-driven choices led to the inflation. Capitalist competition provides incentives for enterprises to accumulate significant market share. Enterprises with such a share and the pricing power this often entails could well choose price increases as their most profitable course of action. And if that is the case, then inflation is caused in part by employers’ profit-driven choices. Note that avoiding that conclusion was, consciously or not, a key component of anti-inflationary policy debates throughout 2022. That was why the debates so bizarrely left out employers’ decisions as if they had no choice and thus no responsibility for the inflation.
Endless policy discussions focus on raising or lowering taxes or government spending as ways to counter recessions or inflations. Rarely is the discussion focused instead on whose taxes should be raised or lowered and which recipient of government spending should get more or less. Yet it is well-known that cutting taxes imposed on middle-income and poorer individuals and their families is usually more stimulative than cutting taxes on corporations or the rich. Likewise, government spending on middle-income and poor people is more stimulative rather than spending on corporations and the rich. Discussing and voting on fiscal policies in terms of aggregates of taxes or spending abstracts precisely from those policies’ class dimensions.
A class analysis of economic policy reveals that its goals include much more than solving an immediate economic problem. Policies are carefully selected and pruned to leave intact the employer-employee structure of enterprises and thus the basic economic system. Exposing that bias can enrich all policy discussions by opening them to policy options that are now kept off the social agenda. System change can then come into view and focus as another way to solve the problems ailing the economic system. Given the accumulation of problems confronting global capitalism today, bringing system change into the discussion is long and desperately overdue.
Inflation, that “problem” torturing capitalist economies these days, offers us the first example of such policies. Inflation is a general increase in prices. Employers, not employees, decide the prices to charge for whatever goods and services their employees’ labor produces. Employers are at most 1 percent of the population while employees and their families constitute most of the other 99 percent. That 1 percent is not accountable to the other 99 percent of the population. Inflations directly impact—reduce—the standards of living of the 99 percent. The only exceptions are those employees who are able to raise their wages or salaries at least as fast as inflation raises prices. That is a tiny minority of the employees in general and also right now during the 2022 U.S. inflation. If inflation raises prices faster or more than wages, that represents a redistribution of income and wealth upward from employees to employers. Simply put, raising or protecting profits motivates employers’ price-setting decisions. Indirectly, inflation deeply impacts societies that suffer them, yet no democratic process determines where, when, or how employers’ decisions to inflate prices lead to those impacts. In modern capitalism, inflation reveals the class struggle in economics. There it operates without the constraints that formal democracy (voting) imposes on politics.
“Quantitative easing” (QE) intoned Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, repeating what Fed Chair Jerome Powell had said while offering a policy solution to recession. The technical-sounding phrase simply referred to the Federal Reserve’s particular economic policy to slow or stop the sharp economic downturn that had started in 2020 and was worsened by the COVID-19 pandemic. That Fed policy created a vast new amount of money and provided it, via loans and security purchases to big banks and other large financial institutions. To be clear here, the Fed made vast new monetary resources available to some of the largest and richest financial employers. The stated goal was to stimulate “the economy.” The Fed hoped that the financial employers it enriched would find it profitable to use this money to lend more to non-financial employers who would then hire unemployed workers. Note that QE favors the employer class. It works first and foremost to enrich the top 1 percent and then “hopes” the latter’s gains trickle down to the other 99 percent. Note further that the fresh new money is not provided to the mass of workers with the hope that they spend it thereby generating sales and profits for employers. Such a “trickle-up” approach to “stimulate the economy” would favor workers. That is why it is rare and almost never the primary focus of “expansionary monetary policy.”
Against inflation—the other scourge of capitalism’s instability—the Fed’s preferred policy is reversed to become “quantitative tightening” (QT). This policy reduces the quantity of money in circulation and raises interest rates. To these ends, the Fed sells securities chiefly to major financial institutions (inducing them to buy by charging attractively low prices for those securities). Those major financial institutions then pass on the higher rates (plus a markup for their own profits) to their customers (individuals and businesses). In short, the major financial players profit from Fed policy while offloading its costs onto the smaller economic players they service with loans. Note that the policy favors the biggest financial players and merely “hopes” that costlier loans will dissuade borrowers who will then demand fewer goods and services and thereby “induce” sellers to inflate their prices less. All the “ifs” and “hopes” concern the ultimate results of such policies. They immediately convey cash advantages to major employers, especially in financial enterprises. QT policies likewise favor the richer among all individuals and businesses. That is because higher interest costs are a heavier burden, and a greater risk, the smaller the size of a business or of an individual’s wealth.
Note that inflations can be and have been reduced in other ways less favorable to capital as against labor and to the richer as against the rest. Wage-price freezes, like the one then-President Richard M. Nixon imposed in August 1971, provide alternative anti-inflationary policies. Likewise, rationing can replace markets as a way to stop inflation. Former U.S. President Frankin D. Roosevelt used rationing in the early 1940s. But precisely because such policies are less favorable to the employer class, they are only used rarely. The dubious achievement of President Joe Biden’s administration (and the complicit GOP) has been to speak and act as if QT were the only policy that exists to fight inflation. Yellen’s and Biden’s past verbiage of “concern” about U.S. income and wealth inequalities might have acquired some teeth had a freeze of prices combined with wage increases been able to actually reduce those inequalities. That would have been an anti-inflationary policy doing double duty, reversing rather than exacerbating existing inequalities.
Fiscal policies work quite like monetary policies in terms of the class favoritism built into them. When recession is the problem, expansionary fiscal policy—for example, increased government spending—usually favors spending on infrastructure, defense, and other objects where well-established, large capitalist enterprises prevail. The government spending to moderate a recession then flows first and foremost into the hands of large employers. They will in turn use that money much as they do with all their capital and revenues: minimize labor and other costs so as to retain the maximum as profits and funds for capital accumulation. Only when it becomes politically unavoidable will government spending bypass employers and flow directly into the hands of the employee class. “Transfer payments” or “entitlements” encounter the most resistance, delay, undoing, or reductions resulting from pressure from the employer class. Thus, for example, the extra governmental outlays in 2020 and 2021 supplementing unemployment insurance and mass assistance during COVID-19 shutdowns stopped even as negotiations for massive infrastructure spending and “chip subsidies” to employers proceeded.
Similarly, when anti-recessionary fiscal policies entailed cutting taxes, history shows that taxes on corporations and the rich were disproportionately cut. Certainly, the massive tax cut under former President Donald Trump late in 2017 followed that pattern.
Class warfare lies behind how many politicians, mass media, and academics explain the economic problems requiring the solutions that their policies offer. For example, consider the typical analyses during 2022’s inflation as it became a hot public issue in the U.S. and beyond. Prices rose, we were told, since demand had risen (because of COVID-deferred spending) and supply had fallen (because of disrupted supply chains). Conservatives stressed the demand side: huge fiscal stimuli responding to COVID-19 (government checks and additional unemployment cash) that would be funded by budget deficits. Liberals stressed on supply chain disruptions instead (attributed to, say, China’s lockdown policies such as COVID-19 and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine). Note how both sides neatly removed employers’ profit-driven price increases from their respective analyses.
Yet employer decisions do play a key role in modern capitalism’s inflations. When demand rises (for any reason), most employers know they have a decision to make. They can either order more goods and services to be produced and sold to meet the rising demand or they can raise the prices of the goods and services they already have. Whatever mix of higher price and availability of more products they choose will be determined by what they deem as their more profitable course of action. Their choices in 2022 produced major inflation in the U.S. and beyond. Yet the vast majority of discussions by mainstream media, politicians and academics about inflation omitted to mention, let alone analyze, how employers’ profit-driven choices led to the inflation. Capitalist competition provides incentives for enterprises to accumulate significant market share. Enterprises with such a share and the pricing power this often entails could well choose price increases as their most profitable course of action. And if that is the case, then inflation is caused in part by employers’ profit-driven choices. Note that avoiding that conclusion was, consciously or not, a key component of anti-inflationary policy debates throughout 2022. That was why the debates so bizarrely left out employers’ decisions as if they had no choice and thus no responsibility for the inflation.
Endless policy discussions focus on raising or lowering taxes or government spending as ways to counter recessions or inflations. Rarely is the discussion focused instead on whose taxes should be raised or lowered and which recipient of government spending should get more or less. Yet it is well-known that cutting taxes imposed on middle-income and poorer individuals and their families is usually more stimulative than cutting taxes on corporations or the rich. Likewise, government spending on middle-income and poor people is more stimulative rather than spending on corporations and the rich. Discussing and voting on fiscal policies in terms of aggregates of taxes or spending abstracts precisely from those policies’ class dimensions.
A class analysis of economic policy reveals that its goals include much more than solving an immediate economic problem. Policies are carefully selected and pruned to leave intact the employer-employee structure of enterprises and thus the basic economic system. Exposing that bias can enrich all policy discussions by opening them to policy options that are now kept off the social agenda. System change can then come into view and focus as another way to solve the problems ailing the economic system. Given the accumulation of problems confronting global capitalism today, bringing system change into the discussion is long and desperately overdue.
The 6 Secrets to Becoming a Fabulously Rich Con Artist
by Robert Reich - the smirking chimp
August 22, 2022
As the saying goes, in America everyone is entitled to a second chance — especially con artists. Herewith the 6 rules for getting a second (or third or fourth) chance to sell a giant con:
1. Market a mundane idea as “disruptive.” Adam Neumann, the founder of WeWork, hyped his office-sharing startup as the first “physical social network.” In reality it was nothing more than what you’d find in any coffee shop with customers at their laptops, but Neumann made it sound so revolutionary — “disruptive,” to use the high falutin con word — that JPMorgan, SoftBank, and other investors sank hundreds of millions into his company. At its height it was valued at some $47 billion.
2. Pocket the money. Neumann used some of his investors’ money to buy buildings that he then leased back to WeWork. He also borrowed against his own stake in the company. And he was going to charge WeWork almost $6 million to use his trademark of the word “We” after the company rebranded itself the “We Company.” He lived like a mogul, with his own jet and penthouse apartments.
WeWork never made a nickel of profit. The prospectus for its initial public offering was widely ridiculed as incoherent. After Neumann was forced to disclose his personal conflicts of interest, the IPO fell apart and the company’s estimated value plummeted from $47 billion to about $4 billion (after being rescued by SoftBank).
3. Make sure your investors have their own investors, so they’ll want to salvage whatever they can and won’t sue you. Neumann wasn’t convicted of criminal fraud. His early investors didn’t want to sue him because they wanted to salvage whatever of their investment they could, and didn’t want to admit to their own investors that they’d been conned. In fact, they paid Neumann over $1 billion to exit the board and give up his voting rights. Neumann collected another $185 million in consulting fees from WeWork. Meanwhile, other WeWork employees were left holding near-worthless stock options and thousands were laid off.
4. Do the same thing again. Neumann has just launched a new company called Flow, which he says will “transform” the residential rental real estate market with reliable services and “community” features (he used the term “community” a lot with WeWork, too).
What about Neumann’s previous con? It’s been forgotten. “Flow” has already attracted $350 million of financing from the venture capital firm Andreesen Horowitz — the largest check it’s ever written in a round of funding a company. Andreesen values Flow at more than $1 billion before Neumann has even opened its doors.
Last week, Marc Andreesen explained in a blog post on his firm’s website that the rental real estate market is “ripe for disruption,” especially now that so many people are working from home and “will experience much less, if any, of the in-office social bonding and friendships that local workers enjoy.” If this sounds a lot like the language Neumann employed to hype WeWork, that’s no accident. It worked once, so why not again? As Andreesen wrote, “we love seeing repeat-founders build on past successes by growing from lessons learned,” and that for Neumann “the successes and lessons are plenty.”
5. Never admit fault or defeat. Adam Neumann’s con is small change compared to Donald Trump’s — who has also managed to fail upward but far more spectacularly. The master con artist has defrauded customers, renters, students, hoteliers, contractors, and, finally, American voters. He never admits defeat. Trump has leveraged every fraud into an even bigger fraud. As he infamously claimed, he could shoot someone in the center of Fifth Avenue and get away with it.
Trump “disrupted” American democracy with his Big Lie and attempted coup. Now, it seems, he’s about to seek a second chance at the presidency.
6. Don’t be poor or Black or brown. Not everyone in America gets a second chance. This is especially true of people who are poor or of color, particularly those convicted of crimes without jury trials through plea-bargains with prosecutors (who threaten worse penalties if they won’t plead guilty).
An estimated 5.2 million Americans couldn’t vote in the last presidential election because of felony “convictions,” including one in every 13 Black adults, according to the Sentencing Project. Last Thursday, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis touted the arrests of 20 people on charges of “voter fraud,” who had voted in 2020 but had been convicted of crimes for which Florida made them ineligible to vote. (Many said they would not have voted had they known they were ineligible.)
Many millions more can’t get jobs because employers don’t want to consider people who have broken the law. (Unlike Marc Andreesen, most employers don’t “love seeing people grow from lessons learned.”) Although some states and localities now prohibit employers and landlords from considering conviction or arrest records in their initial screening of applicants, it’s still the case that one big mistake on the part of someone who’s poor or of color can end their careers and perhaps their freedom.
But if you’re not poor or a person of color, you can get away with the giant cons Adam Neumann and Donald Trump have gotten away with. Just follow the steps enumerated above. Hell, you might even become President.
1. Market a mundane idea as “disruptive.” Adam Neumann, the founder of WeWork, hyped his office-sharing startup as the first “physical social network.” In reality it was nothing more than what you’d find in any coffee shop with customers at their laptops, but Neumann made it sound so revolutionary — “disruptive,” to use the high falutin con word — that JPMorgan, SoftBank, and other investors sank hundreds of millions into his company. At its height it was valued at some $47 billion.
2. Pocket the money. Neumann used some of his investors’ money to buy buildings that he then leased back to WeWork. He also borrowed against his own stake in the company. And he was going to charge WeWork almost $6 million to use his trademark of the word “We” after the company rebranded itself the “We Company.” He lived like a mogul, with his own jet and penthouse apartments.
WeWork never made a nickel of profit. The prospectus for its initial public offering was widely ridiculed as incoherent. After Neumann was forced to disclose his personal conflicts of interest, the IPO fell apart and the company’s estimated value plummeted from $47 billion to about $4 billion (after being rescued by SoftBank).
3. Make sure your investors have their own investors, so they’ll want to salvage whatever they can and won’t sue you. Neumann wasn’t convicted of criminal fraud. His early investors didn’t want to sue him because they wanted to salvage whatever of their investment they could, and didn’t want to admit to their own investors that they’d been conned. In fact, they paid Neumann over $1 billion to exit the board and give up his voting rights. Neumann collected another $185 million in consulting fees from WeWork. Meanwhile, other WeWork employees were left holding near-worthless stock options and thousands were laid off.
4. Do the same thing again. Neumann has just launched a new company called Flow, which he says will “transform” the residential rental real estate market with reliable services and “community” features (he used the term “community” a lot with WeWork, too).
What about Neumann’s previous con? It’s been forgotten. “Flow” has already attracted $350 million of financing from the venture capital firm Andreesen Horowitz — the largest check it’s ever written in a round of funding a company. Andreesen values Flow at more than $1 billion before Neumann has even opened its doors.
Last week, Marc Andreesen explained in a blog post on his firm’s website that the rental real estate market is “ripe for disruption,” especially now that so many people are working from home and “will experience much less, if any, of the in-office social bonding and friendships that local workers enjoy.” If this sounds a lot like the language Neumann employed to hype WeWork, that’s no accident. It worked once, so why not again? As Andreesen wrote, “we love seeing repeat-founders build on past successes by growing from lessons learned,” and that for Neumann “the successes and lessons are plenty.”
5. Never admit fault or defeat. Adam Neumann’s con is small change compared to Donald Trump’s — who has also managed to fail upward but far more spectacularly. The master con artist has defrauded customers, renters, students, hoteliers, contractors, and, finally, American voters. He never admits defeat. Trump has leveraged every fraud into an even bigger fraud. As he infamously claimed, he could shoot someone in the center of Fifth Avenue and get away with it.
Trump “disrupted” American democracy with his Big Lie and attempted coup. Now, it seems, he’s about to seek a second chance at the presidency.
6. Don’t be poor or Black or brown. Not everyone in America gets a second chance. This is especially true of people who are poor or of color, particularly those convicted of crimes without jury trials through plea-bargains with prosecutors (who threaten worse penalties if they won’t plead guilty).
An estimated 5.2 million Americans couldn’t vote in the last presidential election because of felony “convictions,” including one in every 13 Black adults, according to the Sentencing Project. Last Thursday, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis touted the arrests of 20 people on charges of “voter fraud,” who had voted in 2020 but had been convicted of crimes for which Florida made them ineligible to vote. (Many said they would not have voted had they known they were ineligible.)
Many millions more can’t get jobs because employers don’t want to consider people who have broken the law. (Unlike Marc Andreesen, most employers don’t “love seeing people grow from lessons learned.”) Although some states and localities now prohibit employers and landlords from considering conviction or arrest records in their initial screening of applicants, it’s still the case that one big mistake on the part of someone who’s poor or of color can end their careers and perhaps their freedom.
But if you’re not poor or a person of color, you can get away with the giant cons Adam Neumann and Donald Trump have gotten away with. Just follow the steps enumerated above. Hell, you might even become President.
The Latest For-Profit “Advantage” Assault on Medicare Exposed Apparently, Medicare
now needs the money to pay the Advantage scammers, who continue to pour millions into TV advertising to sucker in new rubes…er…customers
Thom Hartmann
6/6/2022
The latest grim news from the for-profit “Advantage” assault on Medicare is two-fold.
First, the private “Advantage” plans continue to rip us all off; there’s a new round of busts of companies caught defrauding our government and every worker in America who’s paying into Medicare through their FICA payroll taxes.
Second, the “Real Medicare” price hike of a few months ago (originally rationalized by the price of the new Alzheimer’s drug) will stay in place, even though that drug won’t generally be available. Apparently, Medicare now needs the money to pay the Advantage scammers, who continue to pour millions into TV advertising to sucker in new rubes…er…customers.
The most frustrating part of this entire crisis is that most Americans — not having taken Civics in school since the Reagan Revolution — don’t understand the difference between “public” and “private.”
There are things government (“public”) should do, and things that should be done by private industry. The variable that differentiates them is determining when and where the profit motive will help or hurt society.
For example, we wouldn’t want our police or fire departments to run based on the profit motive. They should be run and supervised in a fully transparent way, answerable to the citizens of the community, not for-profit like a private company.
Occasionally a corrupt police department will behave like a for-profit, trying to extract as much cash as it can from its city’s residents — like happened in Ferguson, Missouri for years — and the result is more arrests, fines, and incarcerations for minor traffic violations, something that hurts a local community.
On the other hand, profit motivates companies like Apple or Ford to innovate and develop new products. When I lived on the East German border in the 1980s, I saw what happens when the government builds cars: the two-cycle East German Trebbies and the Soviet Ladas were loud, stinky, and constantly broke down.
For those just waking up to this concept, Medicare now offers a real-time, real-world example of the difference between a private and public benefit.
“Real” or “traditional” Medicare (parts A & B), when combined with a small (and heavily regulated so they can’t rip you off) “Medigap” policy to cover the 20% of expenses not covered by Medicare, is comprehensive, hassle free, and completely lacking the evil tricks insurance companies have played on us for decades.
With real Medicare, if your doctor orders it, it happens. No pre-authorizations, no denials, no BS. Any doc or hospital in the country that takes Medicare will see you and you’ll never get hit with a terrible bill for “out-of-network” services.
Medicare Advantage, however, is an entirely different animal that’s all about showing a profit.
When the Bush administration pushed it through in 2003, this “Medicare Part C” program gave people over 65 the option of buying privatized “Advantage” plans instead of regular Medicare parts A & B.
These plans are nothing more than private/corporate health insurance, mostly offered by one of the most predatory industries in America.
If you have “Medicare Advantage,” you can expect to have your doctor’s recommendations second-guessed and often denied by the insurance company that issues the policy, particularly if you’re sick in a way that is expensive to the company.
The closer you get to the end of your life (which is where the bulk of medical expenses occur) the more aggressive your Advantage provider will become in trying to deny you services.
And often, at that point, it’s virtually impossible to shift back to real Medicare because of the way that law passed during the Bush administration was written for the insurance industry.
A recent CMS Inspector General’s report found that the Advantage industry was regularly denying — without justification — about one in four of all procedures, surgeries, tests, and/or drugs recommended by physicians.
The companies do this because they’re paid a flat per-person rate for everybody on their plans, so if they deny care and services, they make more money. In economics, this is known as a “perverse incentive.”
Similarly, that flat per-person rate of payment to the insurance company is raised or lowered depending on how many people on the plan are seriously ill.
This has motivated numerous companies to simply lie to the government about how sick their customers are.
The most recent egregious example was California-based Sutter Health, which was busted for this very scam and paid $90 million to Medicare to make the charges go away.
While the Justice Department doesn’t say how much Sutter ripped the agency off for, typically these fraud-type settlements with Medicare/CMS are for a fraction of the money for which the companies had defrauded Medicare.
Additionally, because it’s the “Real Medicare” fund from which these “Medicare Advantage” hustlers are paid, the annual billions in profit-driven fraud in the Advantage programs raises the rates people on Real Medicare must pay.
Medicare Advantage is a scam that’s making billions in profits every month for the insurance companies while weakening the actual real Medicare program.
And, doubly galling, it’s raising the rates that real Medicare recipients must pay to subsidize the Advantage programs so they can continued to pour millions into TV to advertise their “free” stuff.
Which, of course, is exactly what “I’m running for president to privatize Social Security and Medicare” George W. Bush and his GOP buddies were hoping for when they created it back in 2003.
If there was ever an example we could use to teach High School Civics classes about the dangers of privatizing what should be public functions, this is it.
First, the private “Advantage” plans continue to rip us all off; there’s a new round of busts of companies caught defrauding our government and every worker in America who’s paying into Medicare through their FICA payroll taxes.
Second, the “Real Medicare” price hike of a few months ago (originally rationalized by the price of the new Alzheimer’s drug) will stay in place, even though that drug won’t generally be available. Apparently, Medicare now needs the money to pay the Advantage scammers, who continue to pour millions into TV advertising to sucker in new rubes…er…customers.
The most frustrating part of this entire crisis is that most Americans — not having taken Civics in school since the Reagan Revolution — don’t understand the difference between “public” and “private.”
There are things government (“public”) should do, and things that should be done by private industry. The variable that differentiates them is determining when and where the profit motive will help or hurt society.
For example, we wouldn’t want our police or fire departments to run based on the profit motive. They should be run and supervised in a fully transparent way, answerable to the citizens of the community, not for-profit like a private company.
Occasionally a corrupt police department will behave like a for-profit, trying to extract as much cash as it can from its city’s residents — like happened in Ferguson, Missouri for years — and the result is more arrests, fines, and incarcerations for minor traffic violations, something that hurts a local community.
On the other hand, profit motivates companies like Apple or Ford to innovate and develop new products. When I lived on the East German border in the 1980s, I saw what happens when the government builds cars: the two-cycle East German Trebbies and the Soviet Ladas were loud, stinky, and constantly broke down.
For those just waking up to this concept, Medicare now offers a real-time, real-world example of the difference between a private and public benefit.
“Real” or “traditional” Medicare (parts A & B), when combined with a small (and heavily regulated so they can’t rip you off) “Medigap” policy to cover the 20% of expenses not covered by Medicare, is comprehensive, hassle free, and completely lacking the evil tricks insurance companies have played on us for decades.
With real Medicare, if your doctor orders it, it happens. No pre-authorizations, no denials, no BS. Any doc or hospital in the country that takes Medicare will see you and you’ll never get hit with a terrible bill for “out-of-network” services.
Medicare Advantage, however, is an entirely different animal that’s all about showing a profit.
When the Bush administration pushed it through in 2003, this “Medicare Part C” program gave people over 65 the option of buying privatized “Advantage” plans instead of regular Medicare parts A & B.
These plans are nothing more than private/corporate health insurance, mostly offered by one of the most predatory industries in America.
If you have “Medicare Advantage,” you can expect to have your doctor’s recommendations second-guessed and often denied by the insurance company that issues the policy, particularly if you’re sick in a way that is expensive to the company.
The closer you get to the end of your life (which is where the bulk of medical expenses occur) the more aggressive your Advantage provider will become in trying to deny you services.
And often, at that point, it’s virtually impossible to shift back to real Medicare because of the way that law passed during the Bush administration was written for the insurance industry.
A recent CMS Inspector General’s report found that the Advantage industry was regularly denying — without justification — about one in four of all procedures, surgeries, tests, and/or drugs recommended by physicians.
The companies do this because they’re paid a flat per-person rate for everybody on their plans, so if they deny care and services, they make more money. In economics, this is known as a “perverse incentive.”
Similarly, that flat per-person rate of payment to the insurance company is raised or lowered depending on how many people on the plan are seriously ill.
This has motivated numerous companies to simply lie to the government about how sick their customers are.
The most recent egregious example was California-based Sutter Health, which was busted for this very scam and paid $90 million to Medicare to make the charges go away.
While the Justice Department doesn’t say how much Sutter ripped the agency off for, typically these fraud-type settlements with Medicare/CMS are for a fraction of the money for which the companies had defrauded Medicare.
Additionally, because it’s the “Real Medicare” fund from which these “Medicare Advantage” hustlers are paid, the annual billions in profit-driven fraud in the Advantage programs raises the rates people on Real Medicare must pay.
Medicare Advantage is a scam that’s making billions in profits every month for the insurance companies while weakening the actual real Medicare program.
And, doubly galling, it’s raising the rates that real Medicare recipients must pay to subsidize the Advantage programs so they can continued to pour millions into TV to advertise their “free” stuff.
Which, of course, is exactly what “I’m running for president to privatize Social Security and Medicare” George W. Bush and his GOP buddies were hoping for when they created it back in 2003.
If there was ever an example we could use to teach High School Civics classes about the dangers of privatizing what should be public functions, this is it.
COMMENTARY
Dumbass nation: The wages of ignorance
Dumbass nation: Our biggest national security problem is America's "vast and militant ignorance"
Millions of Americans embrace vapid lies and conspiracy theories — and the proudly moronic leader who spreads them
By BRIAN KAREM - SALON
PUBLISHED OCTOBER 28, 2021 10:57AM (EDT)
With apologies to Paul Simon, and despite all of the information available to the mortal man, there are still millions of Americans who currently believe they're gliding down the highway when in fact they're slip slidin' away.
As President Biden prepares to travel to Europe to meet with the Pope and our NATO allies next week, there remains a huge national security problem for him to grapple with, one that hasn't been addressed in any meaningful fashion for many years.
It is the root cause of our problems with China. It's why some people don't want to get vaccinated. It's why some people still gleefully follow Donald Trump. It explains why Congress can't get together in a bipartisan fashion to deal with infrastructure, health care and gun control. It's why we have problems understanding climate change. It explains voter suppression. It's why "critical race theory" has become controversial, why elements of our population on the left and right are at war with each other and why some believe the earth is flat and the Holocaust didn't occur. It's why some of us believe we're still the "No. 1" nation in the world when — other than having the largest military — we clearly lag behind other major nations in many critical factors. More than anything else it explains why we fail.
The United States is a nation of militantly ignorant people, arrogant in their beliefs, unable to change their minds and unwilling to try. We lack education.
And the lack of education in this country is such a problem that national security adviser Jake Sullivan described it this week as a critical issue for our national security. "I do consider it a national security problem," he told me during a White House briefing on Tuesday. "In fact, it's Dr. [Jill] Biden who has repeatedly said — and the president frequently quotes her — that any country that out-educates the United States will outcompete the United States, and that is a fundamental national security issue."
NPR reported Tuesday that, in part because of COVID-19, we have 500,000 fewer students enrolled in colleges this year. Does anyone really think we can compete in the modern workplace with just a high school education?
I coached high school football for many years. I can tell you firsthand that the quality of education of the "average" student today would have been below the level of a remedial education when I was in high school. There are scores of students who are functionally illiterate as well as scientifically and mathematically illiterate, and have no idea how government works or what their responsibilities in a democracy are. Many scream about "rights." Fewer understand responsibility.
Many are hoping and praying to find a menial job where they can "survive," and rarely do they dare to dream they might thrive. Many cry out for universal health care, but don't believe we'll get it. Some don't even understand how to get a decent salary, paid medical leave and other benefits, let alone how joining a union could help them accomplish those tasks. They don't know what socialism or capitalism are — other than thinking that one is bad and the other is American. They don't know our history, have no view of the future and are moribund in a present they fear, hate and don't understand.
We have to do better. The reasons are clear. Biden is correct: Without a competitive education, we sentence our progeny to industrial servitude while those who are educated amass power and wealth. Look around. We're in a new space race with China. We're behind in hypersonic technology. Our scientists say we must have a nuclear rocket to beat the Chinese to Mars, but millions of people believe that Clorox might treat the coronavirus. Some even tried it.
Biden wants to provide free or affordable post-secondary education, and has pointedly reminded us how useless a mere high school diploma is today — and that frightens some of us. George Carlin warned us that the overlords of society want you smart enough to operate the machinery, but no smarter than that. Some believe that to be true. Others in Congress tell us that such educational outlays in the budget are cost-prohibitive — while at the same time nodding reflexively each time we increase our bloated military budget.
This is not a recent development. Our dedication to education has fallen steadily during the last 40 years — and like most of the rot that has occurred in this country, I place the blame at the feet of Ronald Reagan and the ultra-conservatives he used to get elected and that he helped bring into the mainstream.
If you don't want to accept that Reagan was a feckless fool who destroyed unions, education, the free press and health care, and took us down the road to ruin, then look at the stench stirred up by George W. Bush and his infamous "No Child Left Behind" education policy.
That moronic mantra became every child left behind, creating an entire generation of Americans who were taught how to pass tests — but never how to think critically.
Many of those children who grew up being trained to pass tests are adults now and beginning to populate mid-level management positions in the American workforce. They have become part of what H.L. Mencken described as a "vast and militant ignorance" a century ago, which reminds us that arrogant ignorance isn't a new phenomenon — only that No Child Left Behind exacerbated the problem. "Team America World Police" and "Idiocracy" look more like documentary films than satire these days.
What's the most striking example of the lack of education? Two words: Donald Trump.
And I have one real question I'd like answered: Will someone please stop sending me emails from Donald Trump and his children, relatives, underlings and minions, begging me for money and guaranteeing me private time with the Donald?
Don Jr. even sent me an email telling me he was going to tell his daddy if I didn't give some amount of money NOW! I also got promised a football if I contributed to Donald Trump — who isn't even officially running for office yet, but certainly has honed the art of conning people out of their hard-earned cash to a laser-like precision.
I know dozens of other White House reporters who are apparently on the Donald's email list, and none of us signed up for his systematic harassment and panhandling. He's an internet stalker and homeless vagrant rolled into one. Apparently the former president took the White House correspondents' email list with him when he fled D.C. Since I'm also getting email from the Sarah Sanders campaign and a few other close Trump associates who hold office, I can only assume they are sending me their scatological musings because Trump has shared the email list with his itinerant, angry, brain-dead acolytes.
They all send me content designed to make the uneducated howl at the moon and scratch themselves like a junkyard dog with fleas. These "press releases" from Trump's moronic disciples are met with yelps of pleasure from their fans. Poor grammar and spelling aside, these fecal releases usually make no sense and appear to be the mutterings of simpletons who've ingested tainted hallucinogens.
The idea that the most qualified candidate in the Republican Party for the highest office in the land could once again be a guy who was impeached twice and encouraged us to ingest Clorox and shine ultraviolet light inside our bodies — that's something even an overabundance of psilocybin in your bloodstream can't explain.
But a lack of education explains all of it, including but not limited to Jim Jordan, Matt Gaetz, Lauren Boebert, Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema.
Our lack of education is the single greatest threat to the existence of our nation. Jake Sullivan is right: It's a national security issue.
"And though my lack of education hasn't hurt me none/ I can read the writing on the wall," Paul Simon also told us.
Today, I'm not sure how many people can even read that.
As President Biden prepares to travel to Europe to meet with the Pope and our NATO allies next week, there remains a huge national security problem for him to grapple with, one that hasn't been addressed in any meaningful fashion for many years.
It is the root cause of our problems with China. It's why some people don't want to get vaccinated. It's why some people still gleefully follow Donald Trump. It explains why Congress can't get together in a bipartisan fashion to deal with infrastructure, health care and gun control. It's why we have problems understanding climate change. It explains voter suppression. It's why "critical race theory" has become controversial, why elements of our population on the left and right are at war with each other and why some believe the earth is flat and the Holocaust didn't occur. It's why some of us believe we're still the "No. 1" nation in the world when — other than having the largest military — we clearly lag behind other major nations in many critical factors. More than anything else it explains why we fail.
The United States is a nation of militantly ignorant people, arrogant in their beliefs, unable to change their minds and unwilling to try. We lack education.
And the lack of education in this country is such a problem that national security adviser Jake Sullivan described it this week as a critical issue for our national security. "I do consider it a national security problem," he told me during a White House briefing on Tuesday. "In fact, it's Dr. [Jill] Biden who has repeatedly said — and the president frequently quotes her — that any country that out-educates the United States will outcompete the United States, and that is a fundamental national security issue."
NPR reported Tuesday that, in part because of COVID-19, we have 500,000 fewer students enrolled in colleges this year. Does anyone really think we can compete in the modern workplace with just a high school education?
I coached high school football for many years. I can tell you firsthand that the quality of education of the "average" student today would have been below the level of a remedial education when I was in high school. There are scores of students who are functionally illiterate as well as scientifically and mathematically illiterate, and have no idea how government works or what their responsibilities in a democracy are. Many scream about "rights." Fewer understand responsibility.
Many are hoping and praying to find a menial job where they can "survive," and rarely do they dare to dream they might thrive. Many cry out for universal health care, but don't believe we'll get it. Some don't even understand how to get a decent salary, paid medical leave and other benefits, let alone how joining a union could help them accomplish those tasks. They don't know what socialism or capitalism are — other than thinking that one is bad and the other is American. They don't know our history, have no view of the future and are moribund in a present they fear, hate and don't understand.
We have to do better. The reasons are clear. Biden is correct: Without a competitive education, we sentence our progeny to industrial servitude while those who are educated amass power and wealth. Look around. We're in a new space race with China. We're behind in hypersonic technology. Our scientists say we must have a nuclear rocket to beat the Chinese to Mars, but millions of people believe that Clorox might treat the coronavirus. Some even tried it.
Biden wants to provide free or affordable post-secondary education, and has pointedly reminded us how useless a mere high school diploma is today — and that frightens some of us. George Carlin warned us that the overlords of society want you smart enough to operate the machinery, but no smarter than that. Some believe that to be true. Others in Congress tell us that such educational outlays in the budget are cost-prohibitive — while at the same time nodding reflexively each time we increase our bloated military budget.
This is not a recent development. Our dedication to education has fallen steadily during the last 40 years — and like most of the rot that has occurred in this country, I place the blame at the feet of Ronald Reagan and the ultra-conservatives he used to get elected and that he helped bring into the mainstream.
If you don't want to accept that Reagan was a feckless fool who destroyed unions, education, the free press and health care, and took us down the road to ruin, then look at the stench stirred up by George W. Bush and his infamous "No Child Left Behind" education policy.
That moronic mantra became every child left behind, creating an entire generation of Americans who were taught how to pass tests — but never how to think critically.
Many of those children who grew up being trained to pass tests are adults now and beginning to populate mid-level management positions in the American workforce. They have become part of what H.L. Mencken described as a "vast and militant ignorance" a century ago, which reminds us that arrogant ignorance isn't a new phenomenon — only that No Child Left Behind exacerbated the problem. "Team America World Police" and "Idiocracy" look more like documentary films than satire these days.
What's the most striking example of the lack of education? Two words: Donald Trump.
And I have one real question I'd like answered: Will someone please stop sending me emails from Donald Trump and his children, relatives, underlings and minions, begging me for money and guaranteeing me private time with the Donald?
Don Jr. even sent me an email telling me he was going to tell his daddy if I didn't give some amount of money NOW! I also got promised a football if I contributed to Donald Trump — who isn't even officially running for office yet, but certainly has honed the art of conning people out of their hard-earned cash to a laser-like precision.
I know dozens of other White House reporters who are apparently on the Donald's email list, and none of us signed up for his systematic harassment and panhandling. He's an internet stalker and homeless vagrant rolled into one. Apparently the former president took the White House correspondents' email list with him when he fled D.C. Since I'm also getting email from the Sarah Sanders campaign and a few other close Trump associates who hold office, I can only assume they are sending me their scatological musings because Trump has shared the email list with his itinerant, angry, brain-dead acolytes.
They all send me content designed to make the uneducated howl at the moon and scratch themselves like a junkyard dog with fleas. These "press releases" from Trump's moronic disciples are met with yelps of pleasure from their fans. Poor grammar and spelling aside, these fecal releases usually make no sense and appear to be the mutterings of simpletons who've ingested tainted hallucinogens.
The idea that the most qualified candidate in the Republican Party for the highest office in the land could once again be a guy who was impeached twice and encouraged us to ingest Clorox and shine ultraviolet light inside our bodies — that's something even an overabundance of psilocybin in your bloodstream can't explain.
But a lack of education explains all of it, including but not limited to Jim Jordan, Matt Gaetz, Lauren Boebert, Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema.
Our lack of education is the single greatest threat to the existence of our nation. Jake Sullivan is right: It's a national security issue.
"And though my lack of education hasn't hurt me none/ I can read the writing on the wall," Paul Simon also told us.
Today, I'm not sure how many people can even read that.
Happy Independence Day? Not for me
How are we supposed to celebrate July 4 after Juneteenth?
I admit I was jaded when Juneteenth was made a federal holiday. But I'll take it over July 4
By D. WATKINS
PUBLISHED JULY 4, 2021 7:00AM (EDT)
America, you can have the Fourth of July back.
Last month, President Joe Biden signed legislation designating June 19, or Juneteenth — a day commemorating the end of slavery in the United States — a federal holiday. I received the news via text from a friend: "JUNETEENTH IS OFFICIALLY A HOLIDAY!!!!", followed by a series of emojis. I went to Twitter to see what people were saying about it and got kind of freaked out by the Super Bowl-winning level of excitement I found.
Don't get me wrong — I think it's a great gesture. But people were acting like the president released a reparations plan, as if the direct deposits were about to hit our accounts. I could understand the excitement if the federal government had done something meaningful like ended the war on drugs and freed the people incarcerated in federal prison for marijuana distribution while legal cannabis clinics open up all over the county. They just made a new federal holiday. Relax.
That said, the energy and meaning behind Juneteenth is special enough for me to stop celebrating July 4 — the day, the idea, the theme, the outfit choice — for good, starting this year. I'm going to call my editor and ask for some extra task I'm normally not responsible for, like filing papers in the office even though we're still working virtually, or standing on the beltway near my house swinging a huge red sign telling people to go read Salon
Giving up the holiday won't be hard. I've never really embraced July 4 for a number of reasons, including but not limited to the following:
1. I am Black. Black people fought in the Revolutionary War for Caucasian freedom, but didn't receive their own. Thomas Jefferson wrote in the Declaration of Independence that all men were born equal with the right to liberty while he enslaved hundreds of people of African descent. George Washington began his command of the Continental Army forbidding the recruitment of Black soldiers, an order he later had to rescind. Some enslaved soldiers who fought ended up being returned to lives of bondage after the war, and the U.S. Congress banned African Americans from military service in 1792. The irony of the founding fathers fighting for their independence while robbing others of their most basic rights shouldn't be lost on anyone.
2. The national anthem is awful. The lyrics to "The Star-Spangled Banner" come from a terrible piece of poetry, "Defence of Fort M'Henry," that should have been forgotten instead of set to song. It was written by Francis Scott Key, a racist slave-owning hypocrite who took a shot at the enslaved men who fled to fight with the British in the War of 1812 in exchange for their freedom with the line, "No refuge could save the hireling and slave / From the terror of flight, or the gloom of the grave". Every year I ask the question, "Who wouldn't want freedom, and how could he not understand them opting out for a better life?" And even aside from the meaning, the poem itself doesn't hold up. He'd never win a slam with that elementary rhyme. I'd like to see him sit through a critique in even the kindest MFA workshop. He'd leave the table crying.
3. I stand with Colin Kaepernick. Watching a football game or lighting a firecracker on the Fourth is disrespectful to Colin Kaepernick. That man sacrificed his extremely lucrative NFL career in the name of justice for Black people, and I will never forget that. Last year, he denounced July 4 as a celebration of white supremacy. He's not wrong. I think he might proudly celebrate Independence Day if Black people in America didn't still have to worry about poor housing, poor schools, discrimination across the board, and — oh yeah — getting our heads blown off by police officers who too often get away with it, or serve only minimal jail time.
4. And also, the uniforms are trash. The American flag makes a terrible fashion statement. I don't wear red, white and blue star-spangled short sets, or T-shirts or socks or hats or gloves or skull caps or sneakers or the flagged-out plastic drapes that my old neighbor used to protect his Geo Metro from the sun and inclement weather.
So here I am: too jaded to fully embrace Juneteenth but too literate to hold a warm place for Independence Day in my cold, cold heart.
I think about our conflicting celebrations of independence around this time every year. I've been attending Juneteenth events, functions and parties for the last five years or so, but I've been to Independence Day cookouts my whole life. I always eat the food on July 4 — plates of grilled lamb, barbecue chicken, deviled eggs, all the salads, carbs on carbs on carbs. But I'm not eating for me; no, I have principles and discipline. I will, however, eat for the ancestors.
I never contribute financially or materially as that would feel too much like honoring the cause. I have to be strong. So when I get invited, whether by family and friends or strangers from the internet, I let them know that I will be arriving with nothing but an appetite for destruction, just like the Founding Fathers.
While I honestly do connect more with Juneteenth, I would be lying if I said the initial hype around its new federally recognized status this year didn't make it feel a bit like a special little Independence Day for the Blacks. Hearing Nancy Pelosi and Joe Biden sing "Lift Every Voice" off-beat does not liberate anyone.
But I am a sucker for the happiness of my people. Seeing them lace themselves into full-on dashiki levels of attire they haven't worn since Chadwick Boseman's "Black Panther" premiere, being proud of our African heritage in the name of freedom, all of that is a win for me. And so I will not get upset at people who still choose to celebrate the July 4, because having the ability to champion what you want to champion and celebrate what you want to celebrate is what these holidays are supposed to be about.
So if you do decide to have a big Independence Day cookout — white people, that's what you call a barbecue — I will gladly come, eat, and even take two or three plates to go. For the ancestors, of course.
Last month, President Joe Biden signed legislation designating June 19, or Juneteenth — a day commemorating the end of slavery in the United States — a federal holiday. I received the news via text from a friend: "JUNETEENTH IS OFFICIALLY A HOLIDAY!!!!", followed by a series of emojis. I went to Twitter to see what people were saying about it and got kind of freaked out by the Super Bowl-winning level of excitement I found.
Don't get me wrong — I think it's a great gesture. But people were acting like the president released a reparations plan, as if the direct deposits were about to hit our accounts. I could understand the excitement if the federal government had done something meaningful like ended the war on drugs and freed the people incarcerated in federal prison for marijuana distribution while legal cannabis clinics open up all over the county. They just made a new federal holiday. Relax.
That said, the energy and meaning behind Juneteenth is special enough for me to stop celebrating July 4 — the day, the idea, the theme, the outfit choice — for good, starting this year. I'm going to call my editor and ask for some extra task I'm normally not responsible for, like filing papers in the office even though we're still working virtually, or standing on the beltway near my house swinging a huge red sign telling people to go read Salon
Giving up the holiday won't be hard. I've never really embraced July 4 for a number of reasons, including but not limited to the following:
1. I am Black. Black people fought in the Revolutionary War for Caucasian freedom, but didn't receive their own. Thomas Jefferson wrote in the Declaration of Independence that all men were born equal with the right to liberty while he enslaved hundreds of people of African descent. George Washington began his command of the Continental Army forbidding the recruitment of Black soldiers, an order he later had to rescind. Some enslaved soldiers who fought ended up being returned to lives of bondage after the war, and the U.S. Congress banned African Americans from military service in 1792. The irony of the founding fathers fighting for their independence while robbing others of their most basic rights shouldn't be lost on anyone.
2. The national anthem is awful. The lyrics to "The Star-Spangled Banner" come from a terrible piece of poetry, "Defence of Fort M'Henry," that should have been forgotten instead of set to song. It was written by Francis Scott Key, a racist slave-owning hypocrite who took a shot at the enslaved men who fled to fight with the British in the War of 1812 in exchange for their freedom with the line, "No refuge could save the hireling and slave / From the terror of flight, or the gloom of the grave". Every year I ask the question, "Who wouldn't want freedom, and how could he not understand them opting out for a better life?" And even aside from the meaning, the poem itself doesn't hold up. He'd never win a slam with that elementary rhyme. I'd like to see him sit through a critique in even the kindest MFA workshop. He'd leave the table crying.
3. I stand with Colin Kaepernick. Watching a football game or lighting a firecracker on the Fourth is disrespectful to Colin Kaepernick. That man sacrificed his extremely lucrative NFL career in the name of justice for Black people, and I will never forget that. Last year, he denounced July 4 as a celebration of white supremacy. He's not wrong. I think he might proudly celebrate Independence Day if Black people in America didn't still have to worry about poor housing, poor schools, discrimination across the board, and — oh yeah — getting our heads blown off by police officers who too often get away with it, or serve only minimal jail time.
4. And also, the uniforms are trash. The American flag makes a terrible fashion statement. I don't wear red, white and blue star-spangled short sets, or T-shirts or socks or hats or gloves or skull caps or sneakers or the flagged-out plastic drapes that my old neighbor used to protect his Geo Metro from the sun and inclement weather.
So here I am: too jaded to fully embrace Juneteenth but too literate to hold a warm place for Independence Day in my cold, cold heart.
I think about our conflicting celebrations of independence around this time every year. I've been attending Juneteenth events, functions and parties for the last five years or so, but I've been to Independence Day cookouts my whole life. I always eat the food on July 4 — plates of grilled lamb, barbecue chicken, deviled eggs, all the salads, carbs on carbs on carbs. But I'm not eating for me; no, I have principles and discipline. I will, however, eat for the ancestors.
I never contribute financially or materially as that would feel too much like honoring the cause. I have to be strong. So when I get invited, whether by family and friends or strangers from the internet, I let them know that I will be arriving with nothing but an appetite for destruction, just like the Founding Fathers.
While I honestly do connect more with Juneteenth, I would be lying if I said the initial hype around its new federally recognized status this year didn't make it feel a bit like a special little Independence Day for the Blacks. Hearing Nancy Pelosi and Joe Biden sing "Lift Every Voice" off-beat does not liberate anyone.
But I am a sucker for the happiness of my people. Seeing them lace themselves into full-on dashiki levels of attire they haven't worn since Chadwick Boseman's "Black Panther" premiere, being proud of our African heritage in the name of freedom, all of that is a win for me. And so I will not get upset at people who still choose to celebrate the July 4, because having the ability to champion what you want to champion and celebrate what you want to celebrate is what these holidays are supposed to be about.
So if you do decide to have a big Independence Day cookout — white people, that's what you call a barbecue — I will gladly come, eat, and even take two or three plates to go. For the ancestors, of course.
Coard: Blacks who celebrate July 4th are ignorant or traitors or both
Michael Coard TRIBUNE CORRESPONDENT - philly tribune
7/3/2021
July Fourth is a celebration of kidnapping, transporting/buying/selling human beings, separating families, torture, whippings, rapes, castrations, lynchings and enslavement.
And that wasn’t too long ago either. In fact, it’s modern history as recently as a mere 17 years ago when former President Ronald Reagan died in 2004. Consider, for example, what TikTok user @doorbender perceptively pointed out in a May video that has gone viral: “When Harriet Tubman was born, Thomas Jefferson was still alive. And when Harriet Tubman died, Ronald Reagan was (still) alive. Stop saying everything was 400 years ago. It wasn’t.”
Although Tubman’s precise birth date is unknown, genealogical historians have concluded that she was definitely born in the early 1820s. When Jefferson died July 4, 1826, Tubman was approximately 3 to 5 years old. When Tubman died March 10, 1913, Reagan was already 2 years old, having been born Feb. 6, 1911.
From slavery-promoting Jefferson to slavery-abolishing Tubman to apartheid-enabling Reagan. Hmm.... Think about that for a second. America has consistently been and still consistently is racist.
So why do many Black folks continue to do their flag-waving, fireworks-blasting, and swine-barbecuing thing on July Fourth? The answer’s obvious. They’re ignorant or they’re traitors or they’re both.
Let’s start with the ignorance. First of all, ignorant doesn’t mean stupid. It simply means not knowing. And obviously, July Fourth-celebrating Black folks must not know about the 1619 birth of slavery in the British American colonies and about the 1776 birth of the racist American nation. Well, allow me to enlighten. Pull up a chair because class is in session.
Following raids in southern Africa by Europeans from Portugal beginning in 1617, two years later they invaded the village of Ndongo in Luanda, Angola and loaded 350 of those Kimbundu-speaking human beings aboard the “slave” ship São João Bautista before ordering it sent to Vera Cruz, Mexico. After setting sail, that ship, while in the waters of the so-called West Indies, encountered an English pirate ship called the Treasurer, which was accompanied by the White Lion, a ferociously armed Dutch war vessel and pirate ship. Together, they attacked and boarded the Bautista before kidnapping about 60 of the 350 Angolans. There is no historical record regarding what happened to the remaining 290 or thereabout.
Approximately less than 30 of the kidnapped 60 or so were loaded onto the White Lion, which arrived at Old Point Comfort, Va., on Aug. 25, 1619, when the human cargo was traded, sold, and forced to labor at plantations along the nearby James River in what would become Charles City. Hence, the birth of American slavery.
The other approximately 30 were forced onto the Treasurer, which, historians believe, transported them to Bermuda for enslavement in that English colony.
Although slavery was founded in Virginia, which is in the South, it wasn’t unique to that colony or state or region. It also happened in the North, including right here in Philadelphia. On the southwest corner of Front and High Streets- now Market Street- stood the London Coffee House, which opened in 1754 with funds provided by 200 local merchants. It was where shippers, businessmen, and local officials, including the governor, socialized, drank coffee and alcohol, and ate in private booths while making deals. It was where, on the High Street side, auctions were held for carriages, foodstuffs, horses, and African girls, boys, women, and men who had just been unloaded from ships that docked right across the street at the Delaware River.
Slavery was a key component of daily life here in Pennsylvania generally and Philadelphia particularly. In the 1760s, nearly 4,500 enslaved Blacks labored in the colony. About one of every six white households in the city held at least one Black person in bondage. This cruel institution began here in 1684 when the slave ship Isabella from Bristol, England, anchored in Philadelphia with 150 captured Africans. A year later, William Penn himself held three Black persons in bondage at his Pennsbury manor, 20 miles north of Philly. Even George Washington enslaved Blacks, 316 to be exact. And he held nine of them right here in the so-called City of Brotherly Love at America’s first “White House,” which was known as the President’s House at Sixth and Market (then High) Streets and which since 2010 is where a historic Slavery Memorial was installed.
Despite the claim in the second paragraph of the Declaration of Independence that “All men are created equal,” about 500,000 Black men, women, and children were enslaved in the Thirteen Colonies in 1776. In that same year, the Declaration- which led to the official creation of this nation- was formally adopted by the Continental Congress on July 4, two days after its members voted to approve it. And during that time, slavery was legal in each of the 13 colonies, which is obvious since 27 of the 56 white male property owners who signed the Declaration enslaved Black people by holding them, shipping them, and/or investing in their forced labor.
By the way, Jefferson, who drafted (some say plagiarized) the Declaration, held 175 Black human beings in bondage in 1776 and increased that number to 267 by 1822.
Such racist duplicity is what compelled Frederick Douglass in 1852 to give a speech entitled “The Meaning of July Fourth for the Negro.” In that unmasking and explosive elocution, he thundered:
“What, to the American ‘slave’, is your Fourth of July? I answer, a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham, your boasted liberty, an unholy license, your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; … your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery … fraud, deception … and hypocrisy- a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages. There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices more shocking and bloody than are the people of the United States….”
Beginning in 2002, Avenging The Ancestors Coalition (ATAC) — of which I am a proud founding member — began a successful eight-year battle for the aforementioned Slavery Memorial at Sixth and Market Streets. And each year since 2002, ATAC has continued to avenge our enslaved ancestors at that site on July Fourth by proudly telling their story in a Critical Race Theory-type presentation.
Although COVID seems to be relenting somewhat, it still hasn’t disappeared completely. Therefore, this year’s ATAC-sponsored “Anti-July Fourth Day,” like last year’s “Anti-July Fourth Day,” will be held via Zoom on Sunday, July 4 at 2 p.m. It’ll be hosted by yours truly. The Zoom Meeting ID number is 787 9102 9266 and the Passcode is Lp9XYY.
For more information, log onto avengingtheancestors.com.
Now that you know the racist meaning of July Fourth, you’re no longer ignorant. Therefore, if you still choose to reject Blackness and embrace whiteness on July Fourth, you’ve moved from being an ignoramus to being a traitor. After all, a traitor is someone who commits treason, which is defined in Article III, Section 3 of the U.S. Constitution as follows: “Treason ... shall consist ... in ... adhering to ... enemies... [by] giving them aid and comfort.” It’s also defined in the U.S. Code at 18 U.S.C. Section 2381 as follows: “Whoever, owing allegiance to ... (one’s own nation), ... adheres to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort ...” is guilty of treason. Celebrating an oppressor’s historically oppressive holiday is culturally giving him “aid and comfort” at your own expense.
So stop celebrating white supremacy/white savagery and start celebrating Black self-respect/Black liberation.
And that wasn’t too long ago either. In fact, it’s modern history as recently as a mere 17 years ago when former President Ronald Reagan died in 2004. Consider, for example, what TikTok user @doorbender perceptively pointed out in a May video that has gone viral: “When Harriet Tubman was born, Thomas Jefferson was still alive. And when Harriet Tubman died, Ronald Reagan was (still) alive. Stop saying everything was 400 years ago. It wasn’t.”
Although Tubman’s precise birth date is unknown, genealogical historians have concluded that she was definitely born in the early 1820s. When Jefferson died July 4, 1826, Tubman was approximately 3 to 5 years old. When Tubman died March 10, 1913, Reagan was already 2 years old, having been born Feb. 6, 1911.
From slavery-promoting Jefferson to slavery-abolishing Tubman to apartheid-enabling Reagan. Hmm.... Think about that for a second. America has consistently been and still consistently is racist.
So why do many Black folks continue to do their flag-waving, fireworks-blasting, and swine-barbecuing thing on July Fourth? The answer’s obvious. They’re ignorant or they’re traitors or they’re both.
Let’s start with the ignorance. First of all, ignorant doesn’t mean stupid. It simply means not knowing. And obviously, July Fourth-celebrating Black folks must not know about the 1619 birth of slavery in the British American colonies and about the 1776 birth of the racist American nation. Well, allow me to enlighten. Pull up a chair because class is in session.
Following raids in southern Africa by Europeans from Portugal beginning in 1617, two years later they invaded the village of Ndongo in Luanda, Angola and loaded 350 of those Kimbundu-speaking human beings aboard the “slave” ship São João Bautista before ordering it sent to Vera Cruz, Mexico. After setting sail, that ship, while in the waters of the so-called West Indies, encountered an English pirate ship called the Treasurer, which was accompanied by the White Lion, a ferociously armed Dutch war vessel and pirate ship. Together, they attacked and boarded the Bautista before kidnapping about 60 of the 350 Angolans. There is no historical record regarding what happened to the remaining 290 or thereabout.
Approximately less than 30 of the kidnapped 60 or so were loaded onto the White Lion, which arrived at Old Point Comfort, Va., on Aug. 25, 1619, when the human cargo was traded, sold, and forced to labor at plantations along the nearby James River in what would become Charles City. Hence, the birth of American slavery.
The other approximately 30 were forced onto the Treasurer, which, historians believe, transported them to Bermuda for enslavement in that English colony.
Although slavery was founded in Virginia, which is in the South, it wasn’t unique to that colony or state or region. It also happened in the North, including right here in Philadelphia. On the southwest corner of Front and High Streets- now Market Street- stood the London Coffee House, which opened in 1754 with funds provided by 200 local merchants. It was where shippers, businessmen, and local officials, including the governor, socialized, drank coffee and alcohol, and ate in private booths while making deals. It was where, on the High Street side, auctions were held for carriages, foodstuffs, horses, and African girls, boys, women, and men who had just been unloaded from ships that docked right across the street at the Delaware River.
Slavery was a key component of daily life here in Pennsylvania generally and Philadelphia particularly. In the 1760s, nearly 4,500 enslaved Blacks labored in the colony. About one of every six white households in the city held at least one Black person in bondage. This cruel institution began here in 1684 when the slave ship Isabella from Bristol, England, anchored in Philadelphia with 150 captured Africans. A year later, William Penn himself held three Black persons in bondage at his Pennsbury manor, 20 miles north of Philly. Even George Washington enslaved Blacks, 316 to be exact. And he held nine of them right here in the so-called City of Brotherly Love at America’s first “White House,” which was known as the President’s House at Sixth and Market (then High) Streets and which since 2010 is where a historic Slavery Memorial was installed.
Despite the claim in the second paragraph of the Declaration of Independence that “All men are created equal,” about 500,000 Black men, women, and children were enslaved in the Thirteen Colonies in 1776. In that same year, the Declaration- which led to the official creation of this nation- was formally adopted by the Continental Congress on July 4, two days after its members voted to approve it. And during that time, slavery was legal in each of the 13 colonies, which is obvious since 27 of the 56 white male property owners who signed the Declaration enslaved Black people by holding them, shipping them, and/or investing in their forced labor.
By the way, Jefferson, who drafted (some say plagiarized) the Declaration, held 175 Black human beings in bondage in 1776 and increased that number to 267 by 1822.
Such racist duplicity is what compelled Frederick Douglass in 1852 to give a speech entitled “The Meaning of July Fourth for the Negro.” In that unmasking and explosive elocution, he thundered:
“What, to the American ‘slave’, is your Fourth of July? I answer, a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham, your boasted liberty, an unholy license, your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; … your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery … fraud, deception … and hypocrisy- a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages. There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices more shocking and bloody than are the people of the United States….”
Beginning in 2002, Avenging The Ancestors Coalition (ATAC) — of which I am a proud founding member — began a successful eight-year battle for the aforementioned Slavery Memorial at Sixth and Market Streets. And each year since 2002, ATAC has continued to avenge our enslaved ancestors at that site on July Fourth by proudly telling their story in a Critical Race Theory-type presentation.
Although COVID seems to be relenting somewhat, it still hasn’t disappeared completely. Therefore, this year’s ATAC-sponsored “Anti-July Fourth Day,” like last year’s “Anti-July Fourth Day,” will be held via Zoom on Sunday, July 4 at 2 p.m. It’ll be hosted by yours truly. The Zoom Meeting ID number is 787 9102 9266 and the Passcode is Lp9XYY.
For more information, log onto avengingtheancestors.com.
Now that you know the racist meaning of July Fourth, you’re no longer ignorant. Therefore, if you still choose to reject Blackness and embrace whiteness on July Fourth, you’ve moved from being an ignoramus to being a traitor. After all, a traitor is someone who commits treason, which is defined in Article III, Section 3 of the U.S. Constitution as follows: “Treason ... shall consist ... in ... adhering to ... enemies... [by] giving them aid and comfort.” It’s also defined in the U.S. Code at 18 U.S.C. Section 2381 as follows: “Whoever, owing allegiance to ... (one’s own nation), ... adheres to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort ...” is guilty of treason. Celebrating an oppressor’s historically oppressive holiday is culturally giving him “aid and comfort” at your own expense.
So stop celebrating white supremacy/white savagery and start celebrating Black self-respect/Black liberation.
The Myth of a Majority-Minority America
Richard Alba - the atlantic
6/13/2021
In recent years, demographers and pundits have latched on to the idea that, within a generation, the United States will inevitably become a majority-minority nation, with nonwhite people outnumbering white people. In the minds of many Americans, this ethno-racial transition betokens political, cultural, and social upheaval, because a white majority has dominated the nation since its founding. But our research on immigration, public opinion, and racial demography reveals something quite different: By softening and blurring racial and ethnic lines, diversity is bringing Americans together more than it is tearing the country apart.
The majority-minority narrative contributes to our national polarization. Its depiction of a society fractured in two, with one side rising while the other subsides, is inherently divisive because it implies winners and losers. It has bolstered white anxiety and resentment of supposedly ascendant minority groups, and has turned people against democratic institutions that many conservative white Americans and politicians consider complicit in illegitimate minority empowerment. At the extreme, it nurtures conspiratorial beliefs in a racist “replacement” theory, which holds that elites are working to replace white people with minority immigrants in a “stolen America.”
The narrative is also false. By rigidly splitting Americans into two groups, white versus nonwhite, it reinvents the discredited 19th-century “one-drop rule” and applies it to a 21st-century society in which the color line is more fluid than it has ever been.
In reality, racial diversity is increasing not only at a nationwide level but also within American families—indeed within individual Americans. Nearly three in 10 Asian, one in four Latino, and one in five Black newlyweds are married to a member of a different ethnic or racial group. More than three-quarters of these unions are with a white partner. For more and more Americans, racial integration is embedded in their closest relationships.
Multiracial identities are gaining public recognition and approval. Numerous young Americans consider themselves both white and members of a minority racial or ethnic group. One in every nine babies born in the U.S. today will be raised in a mixed minority-and-white family, and this group is steadily growing. These children have kin networks—including grandparents, aunts and uncles, and cousins—that include both white people and minorities. Among Latinos, identifying as white or as simply “American” is common, and belies the notion that Latinos should be classified monolithically as nonwhite.
Furthermore, most Americans of both white and minority descent are not positioned as minorities in American society. For example, people who identify as Hispanic and white, or Asian and white, tend to start life in more economically favorable situations than most minority groups, are typically raised in largely white communities, have above-average educational outcomes and adulthood incomes, and frequently marry white people. They have fluid identities that are influenced by both minority and white ancestries. Children with Black and white parents face greater social exclusion and more formidable obstacles to upward mobility. But their social experiences are more integrated than those of Black Americans who identify as monoracial.
These trends expose the flaw lurking behind the headline-grabbing claim that America will soon be a majority-minority society. That narrative depends on the misleading practice of classifying individuals of mixed backgrounds as exclusively nonwhite. The Census Bureau population projections that relied on this practice first predicted the majority-minority future in 2008. The idea quickly took on a life of its own. Some Americans now instinctively think of rising diversity as a catalyst of white decline and nonwhite numerical dominance. But as more recent news releases from the bureau have begun to acknowledge, what the data in fact show is that Americans with mixed racial backgrounds are the most rapidly growing racial group in the country.
---
For all the talk about racial polarization in America, the broad consensus is that an expanding and more diverse mainstream portends a better future. Journalists, subject-matter experts, and political leaders have an obligation to tell Americans the full story about rising diversity and racial blending. At the same time, discussions of demographic change must not fuel complacency about the unequal opportunities that minority groups, especially Black Americans, continue to face. Narratives are aspirational as well as informational. One that highlights our growing connections and interdependence should more effectively call attention to our collective obligation to break racial barriers and overcome bigotry than to retain historical zero-sum thinking about racial division.
Americans need to remember that they have been here before. A century ago, the eugenicist Madison Grant asserted that Nordic Americans were committing “race suicide” by letting in millions of immigrants from Eastern and Southern Europe who would out-breed them and destroy their nation’s identity. Swayed by this narrative, the United States Congress enacted drastic, racist restrictions on immigration that lasted for 40 years. [...]
The majority-minority narrative contributes to our national polarization. Its depiction of a society fractured in two, with one side rising while the other subsides, is inherently divisive because it implies winners and losers. It has bolstered white anxiety and resentment of supposedly ascendant minority groups, and has turned people against democratic institutions that many conservative white Americans and politicians consider complicit in illegitimate minority empowerment. At the extreme, it nurtures conspiratorial beliefs in a racist “replacement” theory, which holds that elites are working to replace white people with minority immigrants in a “stolen America.”
The narrative is also false. By rigidly splitting Americans into two groups, white versus nonwhite, it reinvents the discredited 19th-century “one-drop rule” and applies it to a 21st-century society in which the color line is more fluid than it has ever been.
In reality, racial diversity is increasing not only at a nationwide level but also within American families—indeed within individual Americans. Nearly three in 10 Asian, one in four Latino, and one in five Black newlyweds are married to a member of a different ethnic or racial group. More than three-quarters of these unions are with a white partner. For more and more Americans, racial integration is embedded in their closest relationships.
Multiracial identities are gaining public recognition and approval. Numerous young Americans consider themselves both white and members of a minority racial or ethnic group. One in every nine babies born in the U.S. today will be raised in a mixed minority-and-white family, and this group is steadily growing. These children have kin networks—including grandparents, aunts and uncles, and cousins—that include both white people and minorities. Among Latinos, identifying as white or as simply “American” is common, and belies the notion that Latinos should be classified monolithically as nonwhite.
Furthermore, most Americans of both white and minority descent are not positioned as minorities in American society. For example, people who identify as Hispanic and white, or Asian and white, tend to start life in more economically favorable situations than most minority groups, are typically raised in largely white communities, have above-average educational outcomes and adulthood incomes, and frequently marry white people. They have fluid identities that are influenced by both minority and white ancestries. Children with Black and white parents face greater social exclusion and more formidable obstacles to upward mobility. But their social experiences are more integrated than those of Black Americans who identify as monoracial.
These trends expose the flaw lurking behind the headline-grabbing claim that America will soon be a majority-minority society. That narrative depends on the misleading practice of classifying individuals of mixed backgrounds as exclusively nonwhite. The Census Bureau population projections that relied on this practice first predicted the majority-minority future in 2008. The idea quickly took on a life of its own. Some Americans now instinctively think of rising diversity as a catalyst of white decline and nonwhite numerical dominance. But as more recent news releases from the bureau have begun to acknowledge, what the data in fact show is that Americans with mixed racial backgrounds are the most rapidly growing racial group in the country.
---
For all the talk about racial polarization in America, the broad consensus is that an expanding and more diverse mainstream portends a better future. Journalists, subject-matter experts, and political leaders have an obligation to tell Americans the full story about rising diversity and racial blending. At the same time, discussions of demographic change must not fuel complacency about the unequal opportunities that minority groups, especially Black Americans, continue to face. Narratives are aspirational as well as informational. One that highlights our growing connections and interdependence should more effectively call attention to our collective obligation to break racial barriers and overcome bigotry than to retain historical zero-sum thinking about racial division.
Americans need to remember that they have been here before. A century ago, the eugenicist Madison Grant asserted that Nordic Americans were committing “race suicide” by letting in millions of immigrants from Eastern and Southern Europe who would out-breed them and destroy their nation’s identity. Swayed by this narrative, the United States Congress enacted drastic, racist restrictions on immigration that lasted for 40 years. [...]
The hidden racism of American taxes
Are taxes racist? Author Dorothy Brown on how the tax code makes the wealth gap worse Author of "The Whiteness of Wealth" explains how the tax code privileges
whites — and punishes Black people
By DEAN OBEIDALLAH - SALON
MAY 5, 2021 10:00AM (UTC)
A typical white family has eight times the wealth of a typical Black family in the United States. Let that sink in for a long moment. The why behind that racial wealth gap has included a discussion of various factors, but until recently has overlooked one driving reason: The U.S. tax code. That's why Dorothy Brown, a professor of law at Emory University, wrote her compelling new book, "The Whiteness of Wealth: How the Tax System Impoverishes Black Americans — and How We Can Fix It."
The disparate impact our tax code has had on white and Black Americans has never been explored in this depth because — as Brown discussed in our recent "Salon Talks" conversation, the IRS doesn't collect data on the race of taxpayers. As a result, Brown became a "detective," as she put it, to uncover the real-world impact of our tax code on Americans by race.
What she discovered is jaw-dropping. Simply put, when white and Black Americans engage in the exact same thing — from marriage to homeownership to paying for college — U.S. tax policy typically provides far more advantages to whites than it does to Blacks.
For example, single wage-earning couples see a tax reduction when they get married, but couples who earn close to equal wages pay higher taxes upon tying the knot. On its face that doesn't seem like a big deal, but guess which couples are far more likely to be two-income, equal wage earners? Black families, as Brown details — including her own parents.
Our tax code also contributes to the fact that 73% of white people are homeowners, compared to only 44% of Black people. As Brown documents, the tax code has fostered this gap by offering tax deductions when a person sells a home for a profit, but not one if you sell for a loss. Again, that provision is neutral on its face, but in the real world, far more white homeowners see their residences appreciate in value, given that they're likely to buy homes in white neighborhoods. In contrast, Black people purchase homes in Black or mixed neighborhoods and often don't see a significant increase in value, or any at all — which Brown has dubbed "the appreciation gap."
Brown, says she "veers between pessimism and optimism" as to whether the issues she has raised will be rectified. In any event, her work is a necessary first step on the road to addressing the institutional racism embedded in our tax code.
---
You lay that out in your book. So why is that?
Right, because as I like to say, taxpayers bring their racial identities onto their tax returns. So notwithstanding a race-neutral law, we live in a world with systemic racism. So let's take jobs. We know the statistics that say Blacks don't earn what whites do. We know the statistics that show if you are a Black college graduate, it's harder for you to get an interview and when you do, you are targeted for lower-paying jobs. When we talk about married Black couples, it takes two owners to equal what one potential white male owner would get. So the job market and the racism in the job market impacts the level of taxes we pay, and impacts the exclusions we get. Think about employer-provided retirement accounts — those only come with the best jobs. Who is most likely to get those? And even when Black Americans get those jobs, research shows that Black college graduates are more likely to send money home to their parents and grandparents who didn't have the same opportunities, whereas white college graduates are more likely to get money from their parents and grandparents.
So think about these two workers, one Black, one white, they're next door to each other, or they're next cubicle to each other, pre-pandemic, right? And they are both eligible for a retirement account. The white employee maxes out because he doesn't have all of the burdens of his family. The Black college graduate on the other hand, sending money to their parents or grandparents, they have less available to save for retirement. If they do manage to get a retirement account and put money into it, you're more likely to take an early withdrawal, which has significant tax penalties associated with it. So Black Americans are less likely to have jobs that come with that tax-free retirement benefit. And even when they do, they're more likely to take money out, subjecting them to a tax penalty.
You make a point about your own parents. They're making relatively equal incomes, which from an outside point of view, people might go, "Oh, that's nice. Look, a man and a woman making relatively equal income." The problem is that's not what our tax code favors or incentivizes. Share a little bit about your own family, which I think is instructive in the bigger picture.
Yes. So my mother was a nurse, my father was a plumber and like any good daughter who has an LLM in tax, I started doing their tax returns. I would do mine and I would do theirs, and I made by myself what my parents made combined. And under our progressive tax system, I should be paying a whole lot more than they were. I wasn't, and I couldn't figure it out. It wasn't that I was doing anything wrong, I know what I'm doing. What I never could figure out until I became a professor and started studying this, was they paid higher taxes because their incomes were close together. Let's say my parents' combined income was $70,000. Take one $70,000 wage-earner who gets married, they get a tax cut. My parents, on the other hand — they get married, and their taxes go up. So the joint return that's so race-neutral is designed to benefit the way more white Americans do marriage than the way Black Americans do marriage.
---
You go through some of the factors for why homes in Black communities might be lesser valued, You had, first of all, government-approved discrimination. Then you had redlining. But there's a third thing you bring up that the political left fails to acknowledge. Please share what they're missing.
What a lot of the left misses is that race discrimination isn't just historical, it's 21st-century race discrimination based on where white homeowners choose to live. And where they choose to live is in virtually all-white neighborhoods or neighborhoods with very few Black Americans. Now, when I say this, left law professors, whoever I'm talking to, they don't like to hear this and they often push back: "Well, Dorothy, this really isn't because white people are racist. What white people are really concerned about is property value." My response is, "As a Black homeowner, I don't care whether you're making a decision because you're revealing you're a racist, or you're just acting like one. My home value is based on your decision, on who you do not want to live next to."
Research shows videos of neighborhoods where the only thing that was changed were the actors hired to walk in the neighborhood. When it was all white, when it was all Black, and when it was 60% white and 40% Black. What did the viewers say? The white people who viewed it picked the all-white neighborhood. The Black viewers picked racially diverse or all Black neighborhoods. There was no fear of crime, it was an identical neighborhood. There was no social amenity gap, it was an identical neighborhood. So we see white Americans are comfortable in neighborhoods with no Black Americans, and that's a choice they make when they could choose to make different choices.[...]
The disparate impact our tax code has had on white and Black Americans has never been explored in this depth because — as Brown discussed in our recent "Salon Talks" conversation, the IRS doesn't collect data on the race of taxpayers. As a result, Brown became a "detective," as she put it, to uncover the real-world impact of our tax code on Americans by race.
What she discovered is jaw-dropping. Simply put, when white and Black Americans engage in the exact same thing — from marriage to homeownership to paying for college — U.S. tax policy typically provides far more advantages to whites than it does to Blacks.
For example, single wage-earning couples see a tax reduction when they get married, but couples who earn close to equal wages pay higher taxes upon tying the knot. On its face that doesn't seem like a big deal, but guess which couples are far more likely to be two-income, equal wage earners? Black families, as Brown details — including her own parents.
Our tax code also contributes to the fact that 73% of white people are homeowners, compared to only 44% of Black people. As Brown documents, the tax code has fostered this gap by offering tax deductions when a person sells a home for a profit, but not one if you sell for a loss. Again, that provision is neutral on its face, but in the real world, far more white homeowners see their residences appreciate in value, given that they're likely to buy homes in white neighborhoods. In contrast, Black people purchase homes in Black or mixed neighborhoods and often don't see a significant increase in value, or any at all — which Brown has dubbed "the appreciation gap."
Brown, says she "veers between pessimism and optimism" as to whether the issues she has raised will be rectified. In any event, her work is a necessary first step on the road to addressing the institutional racism embedded in our tax code.
---
You lay that out in your book. So why is that?
Right, because as I like to say, taxpayers bring their racial identities onto their tax returns. So notwithstanding a race-neutral law, we live in a world with systemic racism. So let's take jobs. We know the statistics that say Blacks don't earn what whites do. We know the statistics that show if you are a Black college graduate, it's harder for you to get an interview and when you do, you are targeted for lower-paying jobs. When we talk about married Black couples, it takes two owners to equal what one potential white male owner would get. So the job market and the racism in the job market impacts the level of taxes we pay, and impacts the exclusions we get. Think about employer-provided retirement accounts — those only come with the best jobs. Who is most likely to get those? And even when Black Americans get those jobs, research shows that Black college graduates are more likely to send money home to their parents and grandparents who didn't have the same opportunities, whereas white college graduates are more likely to get money from their parents and grandparents.
So think about these two workers, one Black, one white, they're next door to each other, or they're next cubicle to each other, pre-pandemic, right? And they are both eligible for a retirement account. The white employee maxes out because he doesn't have all of the burdens of his family. The Black college graduate on the other hand, sending money to their parents or grandparents, they have less available to save for retirement. If they do manage to get a retirement account and put money into it, you're more likely to take an early withdrawal, which has significant tax penalties associated with it. So Black Americans are less likely to have jobs that come with that tax-free retirement benefit. And even when they do, they're more likely to take money out, subjecting them to a tax penalty.
You make a point about your own parents. They're making relatively equal incomes, which from an outside point of view, people might go, "Oh, that's nice. Look, a man and a woman making relatively equal income." The problem is that's not what our tax code favors or incentivizes. Share a little bit about your own family, which I think is instructive in the bigger picture.
Yes. So my mother was a nurse, my father was a plumber and like any good daughter who has an LLM in tax, I started doing their tax returns. I would do mine and I would do theirs, and I made by myself what my parents made combined. And under our progressive tax system, I should be paying a whole lot more than they were. I wasn't, and I couldn't figure it out. It wasn't that I was doing anything wrong, I know what I'm doing. What I never could figure out until I became a professor and started studying this, was they paid higher taxes because their incomes were close together. Let's say my parents' combined income was $70,000. Take one $70,000 wage-earner who gets married, they get a tax cut. My parents, on the other hand — they get married, and their taxes go up. So the joint return that's so race-neutral is designed to benefit the way more white Americans do marriage than the way Black Americans do marriage.
---
You go through some of the factors for why homes in Black communities might be lesser valued, You had, first of all, government-approved discrimination. Then you had redlining. But there's a third thing you bring up that the political left fails to acknowledge. Please share what they're missing.
What a lot of the left misses is that race discrimination isn't just historical, it's 21st-century race discrimination based on where white homeowners choose to live. And where they choose to live is in virtually all-white neighborhoods or neighborhoods with very few Black Americans. Now, when I say this, left law professors, whoever I'm talking to, they don't like to hear this and they often push back: "Well, Dorothy, this really isn't because white people are racist. What white people are really concerned about is property value." My response is, "As a Black homeowner, I don't care whether you're making a decision because you're revealing you're a racist, or you're just acting like one. My home value is based on your decision, on who you do not want to live next to."
Research shows videos of neighborhoods where the only thing that was changed were the actors hired to walk in the neighborhood. When it was all white, when it was all Black, and when it was 60% white and 40% Black. What did the viewers say? The white people who viewed it picked the all-white neighborhood. The Black viewers picked racially diverse or all Black neighborhoods. There was no fear of crime, it was an identical neighborhood. There was no social amenity gap, it was an identical neighborhood. So we see white Americans are comfortable in neighborhoods with no Black Americans, and that's a choice they make when they could choose to make different choices.[...]
Republicans have a dream: The end of democracy and the return of Jim Crow
Republicans can't win elections without a crackdown on voting. But their real vision is about rolling back history
By CHAUNCEY DEVEGA - salon
APRIL 2, 2021 9:50AM (UTC)
In Georgia and 46 other states across the country, the Republican Party is trying to keep Black and brown people and other members of the Democratic Party's base from voting. The goal is to keep the Republican Party in power indefinitely through a pseudo-democratic system political scientists call "competitive authoritarianism."
In essence, today's Republicans want to turn back history's clock to the Jim Crow era.
The smokescreen for this assault on American democracy is that such anti-democracy efforts are intended to "protect" the "security" of votes against the threat of "voter fraud," "manipulation" and "corruption" by unseen (and of course nonexistent) forces.
But the smokescreen is transparent.
On Tuesday, Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp admitted the truth about the Republican plot against democracy, telling WABE radio, "A lot of this bill is dealing with the mechanics of the election. It has nothing to do with potential fraud or not."
Kemp's statement echoes other public admissions by prominent Republicans and members of the white right: They that know they cannot win competitive elections in a real democracy because their policies and proposals are broadly unpopular with the American people. This is especially true given the country's changing racial demographics, and the fact that the Republican Party's core appeal is almost exclusively based on white identity politics, racism, and white supremacy. Donald Trump's neofascist presidency only accelerated that dynamic.
Former labor secretary and political columnist Robert Reich recently wrote that while "Trump isn't single-handedly responsible" for the Republican turn toward overt racism, "he demonstrated to the GOP the political potency of bigotry, and the GOP has taken him up on it. This transformation in one of America's two eminent political parties has shocking implications, not just for the future of American democracy but for the future of democracy everywhere."
There has been much excellent writing on the legal, legislative and procedural details of the Republican Party's war on Black and brown voters and American democracy.
We know now that the Jim Crow Republicans are attempting to pass at least 350 bills and initiatives that will make mail-in and absentee voting much more difficult, narrow the window of time to vote, remove polling places in predominantly Black, brown and poor communities, add onerous ID requirements and sabotage many voter mobilization efforts, especially those used by Black churches and other community organizations.
These anti-democracy laws also literally allow Republicans to rig the outcome of elections in their favor by expanding their control of local voting boards.
In total, these are de jure examples — written in the law — of how Republicans and the white right are trying to overturn America's multiracial democracy with the goal of creating a new American apartheid state across the South and elsewhere.
But much less has been written about how these Jim Crow Republican attacks are also a de facto assault on the day-to-day lives, dignity, freedom, safety and humanity of Black and brown Americans. The long arc of the Black freedom struggle is one where the de jure realities of institutional racism and white supremacy cannot be properly separated from quotidian social inequality and injustice. These new attempts by Republicans and the white right to undermine America's multiracial democracy are an open declaration that American democracy is to be first and foremost a White democracy. The Jim Crow Republicans' plot against the rights of Black and brown people is also an attempt to make civic life and representative politics a "whites only" space. Because the Republicans and their allies are literally rewriting the rules of democracy in their favor they stand a good chance of succeeding, at least for now.
White supremacy, on a fundamental and basic level, is a declaration that white people can act however they wish toward nonwhite people, up to and including maximal cruelty and violence, without consequences. Why? Because whiteness constructs white people as dominant over other groups by definition. This is the logic of Trumpism and other forms of racial authoritarianism that the post-civil rights era Republican Party has so enthusiastically embraced.
The Jim Crow Republicans have enshrined this principle into law: The Georgia anti-democracy bill makes it illegal to give people waiting in line to vote food or water. President Biden has described such laws as "un-American" and an "atrocity," and other prominent voices have condemned it as well. But these critics are dancing around a more basic and fundamental truth about what is being communicated by the Jim Crow Republicans and their allies.
The real truth and connotative meaning of the Jim Crow Republicans' ban on giving food and water to voters who are waiting in line is that Black and brown people are not quite human — the Other, not worthy of the same respect and decency as "real Americans," understood to be white by default. If the Republicans and other members of the white right who write these anti-democracy bills were being fully honest, they would simply state, "Do not feed the animals."
To properly understand the breadth of the Republican Party and its forces' attack on multiracial democracy one must locate such efforts as part of a larger right-wing campaign to dehumanize Black people and other nonwhites. By implication, votes by such dehumanized people are deemed to be illegitimate and therefore not allowed.
So we reach a teachable moment: What is white privilege? It is understanding that one's basic humanity — as a member of a group of people deemed to be "white" in America — will not be challenged. As we see with the Republican Party's war on multiracial democracy that freedom is by definition denied to Black and brown people in the United States.
In his sweeping and essential book "Trouble in Mind" the late historian Leon Litwack described the informal rules and resulting dehumanization of black people during the earlier Jim Crow regime this way:
The indignities visited on black youths were meant to impress on a new generation the solidity of racial lines and the unchallengeable authority and superiority of the dominant race. … Young blacks underwent the rites of racial passage in a variety of ways. But the specter and threat of physical violence — "the white death" — loomed over nearly every encounter. If they themselves were not the victims, the violence fell on members of the family, friends, and neighbors, almost always with the same intent — to remind black men and women of their "place," to impose severe restraints on their ambitions, and to punish any perceived signs of "impudence," "impertinence," or independence."
With their nationwide crusade to reinstate de jure Jim Crow laws across the United States, the Republicans and their allies are also summoning these old, ugly day-to-day white supremacist cultural norms and rules.
Jim Crow was a form of terrorism, so widespread that millions of Black people (who could accurately be described as internal refugees) fled the South during two great migrations. Jim Crow involved informal rules: Black people could not make eye contact with white people, as that was "disrespectful." Black people were expected to step off the sidewalk and into the street to let white people pass. Black people could not protest or otherwise resist if they were not paid for work they had completed on their jobs. Black and brown adults were to be treated like children and addressed as "boy" or "girl", "auntie" or "uncle". Black adults were also expected to be deferential to white children. Regardless of their income, Black people should not have nicer clothes, cars, homes or personal property than white people. At four-way intersections, a black driver was expected to let white drivers go first.
These social rules were enforced by violence — and all too often by death.
The informal codes and rules of Jim Crow life were in many ways defeated by the Black freedom struggle in the 20th century. But as documented repeatedly by social scientists and other experts, the logic and expectation of Black people's deference to white people and white authority still remains. These are the expectations that fueled the Tea Party, the rise of Trump and other recent manifestations of fake right-wing populism in the United States. This is the expectation that drives the Republican Party's ongoing attacks on multiracial democracy in Georgia and across the country. These expectations of white power were also at the heart of Donald Trump's attempted coup, the Capitol attack and the broader right-wing terrorist movement.
Will America move forward as a prosperous and free multiracial democracy or will it instead jettison that project and be pushed backward into a white supremacist pseudo-democracy. These are the stakes. We face a battle for the soul of America.
In essence, today's Republicans want to turn back history's clock to the Jim Crow era.
The smokescreen for this assault on American democracy is that such anti-democracy efforts are intended to "protect" the "security" of votes against the threat of "voter fraud," "manipulation" and "corruption" by unseen (and of course nonexistent) forces.
But the smokescreen is transparent.
On Tuesday, Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp admitted the truth about the Republican plot against democracy, telling WABE radio, "A lot of this bill is dealing with the mechanics of the election. It has nothing to do with potential fraud or not."
Kemp's statement echoes other public admissions by prominent Republicans and members of the white right: They that know they cannot win competitive elections in a real democracy because their policies and proposals are broadly unpopular with the American people. This is especially true given the country's changing racial demographics, and the fact that the Republican Party's core appeal is almost exclusively based on white identity politics, racism, and white supremacy. Donald Trump's neofascist presidency only accelerated that dynamic.
Former labor secretary and political columnist Robert Reich recently wrote that while "Trump isn't single-handedly responsible" for the Republican turn toward overt racism, "he demonstrated to the GOP the political potency of bigotry, and the GOP has taken him up on it. This transformation in one of America's two eminent political parties has shocking implications, not just for the future of American democracy but for the future of democracy everywhere."
There has been much excellent writing on the legal, legislative and procedural details of the Republican Party's war on Black and brown voters and American democracy.
We know now that the Jim Crow Republicans are attempting to pass at least 350 bills and initiatives that will make mail-in and absentee voting much more difficult, narrow the window of time to vote, remove polling places in predominantly Black, brown and poor communities, add onerous ID requirements and sabotage many voter mobilization efforts, especially those used by Black churches and other community organizations.
These anti-democracy laws also literally allow Republicans to rig the outcome of elections in their favor by expanding their control of local voting boards.
In total, these are de jure examples — written in the law — of how Republicans and the white right are trying to overturn America's multiracial democracy with the goal of creating a new American apartheid state across the South and elsewhere.
But much less has been written about how these Jim Crow Republican attacks are also a de facto assault on the day-to-day lives, dignity, freedom, safety and humanity of Black and brown Americans. The long arc of the Black freedom struggle is one where the de jure realities of institutional racism and white supremacy cannot be properly separated from quotidian social inequality and injustice. These new attempts by Republicans and the white right to undermine America's multiracial democracy are an open declaration that American democracy is to be first and foremost a White democracy. The Jim Crow Republicans' plot against the rights of Black and brown people is also an attempt to make civic life and representative politics a "whites only" space. Because the Republicans and their allies are literally rewriting the rules of democracy in their favor they stand a good chance of succeeding, at least for now.
White supremacy, on a fundamental and basic level, is a declaration that white people can act however they wish toward nonwhite people, up to and including maximal cruelty and violence, without consequences. Why? Because whiteness constructs white people as dominant over other groups by definition. This is the logic of Trumpism and other forms of racial authoritarianism that the post-civil rights era Republican Party has so enthusiastically embraced.
The Jim Crow Republicans have enshrined this principle into law: The Georgia anti-democracy bill makes it illegal to give people waiting in line to vote food or water. President Biden has described such laws as "un-American" and an "atrocity," and other prominent voices have condemned it as well. But these critics are dancing around a more basic and fundamental truth about what is being communicated by the Jim Crow Republicans and their allies.
The real truth and connotative meaning of the Jim Crow Republicans' ban on giving food and water to voters who are waiting in line is that Black and brown people are not quite human — the Other, not worthy of the same respect and decency as "real Americans," understood to be white by default. If the Republicans and other members of the white right who write these anti-democracy bills were being fully honest, they would simply state, "Do not feed the animals."
To properly understand the breadth of the Republican Party and its forces' attack on multiracial democracy one must locate such efforts as part of a larger right-wing campaign to dehumanize Black people and other nonwhites. By implication, votes by such dehumanized people are deemed to be illegitimate and therefore not allowed.
So we reach a teachable moment: What is white privilege? It is understanding that one's basic humanity — as a member of a group of people deemed to be "white" in America — will not be challenged. As we see with the Republican Party's war on multiracial democracy that freedom is by definition denied to Black and brown people in the United States.
In his sweeping and essential book "Trouble in Mind" the late historian Leon Litwack described the informal rules and resulting dehumanization of black people during the earlier Jim Crow regime this way:
The indignities visited on black youths were meant to impress on a new generation the solidity of racial lines and the unchallengeable authority and superiority of the dominant race. … Young blacks underwent the rites of racial passage in a variety of ways. But the specter and threat of physical violence — "the white death" — loomed over nearly every encounter. If they themselves were not the victims, the violence fell on members of the family, friends, and neighbors, almost always with the same intent — to remind black men and women of their "place," to impose severe restraints on their ambitions, and to punish any perceived signs of "impudence," "impertinence," or independence."
With their nationwide crusade to reinstate de jure Jim Crow laws across the United States, the Republicans and their allies are also summoning these old, ugly day-to-day white supremacist cultural norms and rules.
Jim Crow was a form of terrorism, so widespread that millions of Black people (who could accurately be described as internal refugees) fled the South during two great migrations. Jim Crow involved informal rules: Black people could not make eye contact with white people, as that was "disrespectful." Black people were expected to step off the sidewalk and into the street to let white people pass. Black people could not protest or otherwise resist if they were not paid for work they had completed on their jobs. Black and brown adults were to be treated like children and addressed as "boy" or "girl", "auntie" or "uncle". Black adults were also expected to be deferential to white children. Regardless of their income, Black people should not have nicer clothes, cars, homes or personal property than white people. At four-way intersections, a black driver was expected to let white drivers go first.
These social rules were enforced by violence — and all too often by death.
The informal codes and rules of Jim Crow life were in many ways defeated by the Black freedom struggle in the 20th century. But as documented repeatedly by social scientists and other experts, the logic and expectation of Black people's deference to white people and white authority still remains. These are the expectations that fueled the Tea Party, the rise of Trump and other recent manifestations of fake right-wing populism in the United States. This is the expectation that drives the Republican Party's ongoing attacks on multiracial democracy in Georgia and across the country. These expectations of white power were also at the heart of Donald Trump's attempted coup, the Capitol attack and the broader right-wing terrorist movement.
Will America move forward as a prosperous and free multiracial democracy or will it instead jettison that project and be pushed backward into a white supremacist pseudo-democracy. These are the stakes. We face a battle for the soul of America.
Rev. William Barber on Greed, Poverty and Evangelical Politics
By David Marchese - ny times magazine
12/28/2020
...Your politics flows from an understanding of love, justice and compassion as being at the heart of Christian faith, which is something that presumably every Christian agrees with. You also identify as an evangelical. How do you square that with the politics of Christians — I’m thinking mostly of conservative evangelicals — whose faith manifests itself politically as support for politicians and policies that seem to go against those same values? I understand it as a form of heresy. In the Bible, there was always tension between prophets and false prophets. When you look today and see so-called white evangelicalism, you have to understand they are powerful, but they are not the majority of religiosity (According to a 2014 Pew poll, 25.4 percent of Christians identify as evangelical Protestant.) in this country. They are a loud, well-funded group. If you think about it, white evangelicals say they’re against abortion, but they vote for candidates who’ve never undone Roe v. Wade. They say they’re against gay people, and they’ve lost on their battle against gay people’s rights. But what do their preferred candidates always win on when they get elected? Helping corporations. So we’ve got an unholy connection: Religion is being used as the cover for greed. The term ‘‘evangelical’’ has been hijacked in favor of corporate interests. You have to stand up and say that systemic racism, systemic poverty, ecological devastation, denial of health care, the war economy and the false moral narrative of religious nationalism are interlocking injustices that require us as people of faith to challenge them. If you’re going to promote the faith, at least do it from the biblical foundations of love, truth and justice! You know, we asked to debate Jerry Falwell (Though not himself a clergyman, Jerry Falwell Jr., son of the famous televangelist, was president of the private evangelical institution Liberty University from 2007 to 2020, when he resigned after a spate of personal scandals and Franklin Graham. (The son of the evangelist Billy Graham and an ordained minister, Graham is president of both the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association and Samaritan’s Purse, a Christian humanitarian aid organization. They won’t agree to it.
Why do you think that is? A lot of the policies they push in the public square, have you ever noticed they never say about them, ‘‘Jesus said this’’? Because they can’t! I once met with Franklin Graham. I was with a group of folks, and I asked him: ‘‘Have you ever even read the Bible? Have you ever even read the Scriptures?’’ He wouldn’t answer. In fact, the group that we were with, a couple of folks said to me: ‘‘Reverend, don’t do that. He welcomed us here.’’ But I’m saying: ‘‘No, this is my brother. I have a responsibility to challenge him.’’ I mean, Jesus is very clear. That’s the problem for people like Graham and Falwell. They can’t debate us publicly because there’s no way they can say, ‘‘We’re against guaranteed health care for all because Jesus was against guaranteed health care for all.’’ Jesus never charged a leper a co-pay! How can you stand up and say God is for the oppression of the poor when Isaiah — in Isaiah 10 — says, ‘‘Woe unto those who legislate evil and rob the poor of their right and make women and children their prey?’’
---
More than 70 million people voted for Trump in 2020. That’s a bigger number than in 2016. What makes you confident that your moral vision will win out? Because I know American history. We are the country that had a reconstruction movement and then had a violent, meanspirited regression. We had a civil rights movement and then a regression. We have a strange history as a country, but there is another side: After Woodrow Wilson and Hoover, we get Roosevelt. Roosevelt pushes through Social Security, minimum wage, union rights, leads us through a war. He puts the first Black people in the cabinet. (In his first term, Roosevelt appointed multiple Black people to his cabinet, albeit primarily in minor positions. The educator and civil rights activist Mary McLeod Bethune was the most notable of the appointees, though her role as head of the Division of African-American Affairs in the National Youth Administration was not an official cabinet position.)
So here’s what I say: Yes, 70 million voted for Trump, but more people than at any time in history voted for a white man and a Black woman with Indian descent who ran openly saying that if you elect us, we’re going to talk about systemic racism and we’re going to expand health care. They won in the West, in the upper Midwest and in the Northeast, in Georgia and Virginia and almost won in a few other Southern states. And we still have about 80 million people who didn’t vote! We don’t know what this democracy would look like with a full vote. So let’s acknowledge that democracy is hard, and we’ve always had to battle. Having said that, it is also important that we ask, Where does healing come? What doesn’t heal us is conversations about left versus right. When you swear to be a politician, you don’t swear to be a liberal, you don’t swear to be a conservative. You swear to defend and uphold the Constitution. The Constitution is clear that the purpose of government is to establish justice and promote the general welfare. So, does a policy establish justice? Does it promote the general welfare? If it does, then you will ensure domestic tranquillity, healing. So, now you say --
Now I say, What does that mean practically? Yes, ‘‘Reverend Barber, what does that mean practically?’’ I talked with Vice President Biden during Eastertime. I said to him, ‘‘The hope is in the mourning. When you get in, don’t listen to the politicians and the right and left.’’ Seventy-two percent of Americans want a minimum-wage increase. Give them that. If you do that, all these people that are mad, they’ll say, ‘‘Wait a minute. I was told to hate this person, but he increased the living wage in my family.’’ And these people in the South, in states that didn’t expand health care, they need it now. So do the policies that will help people in their pain. That will cause a lot of them to say, ‘‘You told me they were socialists, but they just passed policies that are making sure my child has health care.’’ The way to heal the soul of the nation is to pass policies that heal the body of the nation. It’s the just thing to do. That’s how we as a nation can together move forward.
Why do you think that is? A lot of the policies they push in the public square, have you ever noticed they never say about them, ‘‘Jesus said this’’? Because they can’t! I once met with Franklin Graham. I was with a group of folks, and I asked him: ‘‘Have you ever even read the Bible? Have you ever even read the Scriptures?’’ He wouldn’t answer. In fact, the group that we were with, a couple of folks said to me: ‘‘Reverend, don’t do that. He welcomed us here.’’ But I’m saying: ‘‘No, this is my brother. I have a responsibility to challenge him.’’ I mean, Jesus is very clear. That’s the problem for people like Graham and Falwell. They can’t debate us publicly because there’s no way they can say, ‘‘We’re against guaranteed health care for all because Jesus was against guaranteed health care for all.’’ Jesus never charged a leper a co-pay! How can you stand up and say God is for the oppression of the poor when Isaiah — in Isaiah 10 — says, ‘‘Woe unto those who legislate evil and rob the poor of their right and make women and children their prey?’’
---
More than 70 million people voted for Trump in 2020. That’s a bigger number than in 2016. What makes you confident that your moral vision will win out? Because I know American history. We are the country that had a reconstruction movement and then had a violent, meanspirited regression. We had a civil rights movement and then a regression. We have a strange history as a country, but there is another side: After Woodrow Wilson and Hoover, we get Roosevelt. Roosevelt pushes through Social Security, minimum wage, union rights, leads us through a war. He puts the first Black people in the cabinet. (In his first term, Roosevelt appointed multiple Black people to his cabinet, albeit primarily in minor positions. The educator and civil rights activist Mary McLeod Bethune was the most notable of the appointees, though her role as head of the Division of African-American Affairs in the National Youth Administration was not an official cabinet position.)
So here’s what I say: Yes, 70 million voted for Trump, but more people than at any time in history voted for a white man and a Black woman with Indian descent who ran openly saying that if you elect us, we’re going to talk about systemic racism and we’re going to expand health care. They won in the West, in the upper Midwest and in the Northeast, in Georgia and Virginia and almost won in a few other Southern states. And we still have about 80 million people who didn’t vote! We don’t know what this democracy would look like with a full vote. So let’s acknowledge that democracy is hard, and we’ve always had to battle. Having said that, it is also important that we ask, Where does healing come? What doesn’t heal us is conversations about left versus right. When you swear to be a politician, you don’t swear to be a liberal, you don’t swear to be a conservative. You swear to defend and uphold the Constitution. The Constitution is clear that the purpose of government is to establish justice and promote the general welfare. So, does a policy establish justice? Does it promote the general welfare? If it does, then you will ensure domestic tranquillity, healing. So, now you say --
Now I say, What does that mean practically? Yes, ‘‘Reverend Barber, what does that mean practically?’’ I talked with Vice President Biden during Eastertime. I said to him, ‘‘The hope is in the mourning. When you get in, don’t listen to the politicians and the right and left.’’ Seventy-two percent of Americans want a minimum-wage increase. Give them that. If you do that, all these people that are mad, they’ll say, ‘‘Wait a minute. I was told to hate this person, but he increased the living wage in my family.’’ And these people in the South, in states that didn’t expand health care, they need it now. So do the policies that will help people in their pain. That will cause a lot of them to say, ‘‘You told me they were socialists, but they just passed policies that are making sure my child has health care.’’ The way to heal the soul of the nation is to pass policies that heal the body of the nation. It’s the just thing to do. That’s how we as a nation can together move forward.
We've lost control: The real lessons of the Trump regime and the pandemic
Our society, and our species, is gripped by hopeful delusion. Dire recent events should have stripped all that away
By CHRIS HEDGES - SALON
DECEMBER 22, 2020 10:00AM (UTC)
Joe Biden and the systems managers of the deep state and empire are returning to power. Donald Trump and his coterie of buffoons, racists, con artists and Christian fascists are sullenly preparing to leave office. U.S. pharmaceutical corporations are starting to disseminate vaccines to mitigate the globe's worst outbreak of COVID-19, which has resulted in more than 2,600 deaths per day. America, as Biden says, is back, ready to take its place at the head of the table. In the battle for the soul of America, he assures us, democracy has prevailed. Progress, prosperity, civility and a reassertion of American prestige and power are, we are promised, weeks away.
But the real lesson we should learn from the rise of a demagogue such as Trump, who received 74 million votes, and a pandemic that our for-profit health care industry proved unable to contain, is that we are losing control as a nation and as a species. Far more dangerous demagogues will arise from the imperial and neoliberal policies the Biden administration will embrace. Far worse pandemics will sweep the globe with higher rates of infections and mortality, an inevitable result of our continued consumption of animals and animal products, and the wanton destruction of the ecosystem on which we and other species depend for life.
"One of the most pathetic aspects of human history," Reinhold Niebuhr wrote, "is that every civilization expresses itself most pretentiously, compounds its partial and universal values most convincingly, and claims immortality for its finite existence at the very moment when the decay which leads to death has already begun."
Biden's appointments are drawn almost exclusively from the circles of the Democratic Party and corporate elite, those responsible for the massive social inequality, trade deals, deindustrialization, militarized police, world's largest prison system, austerity programs that abolished social programs such as welfare, the revived Cold War with Russia, wholesale government surveillance, endless wars in the Middle East and the disenfranchisement and impoverishment of the working class. The Washington Post writes that "about 80 percent of the White House and agency officials [Biden has] announced have the word 'Obama' on their résumé from previous White House or Obama campaign jobs." Bernie Sanders, apparently rebuffed in his efforts to become secretary of labor in the Biden administration, has expressed frustration with the Biden nominations. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was denied a seat by House Democrats on the House Energy and Commerce Committee because of her support for the Green New Deal. The message of the Biden administration to progressives and left-wing populists is very clear: "Drop dead."
The list of new administration officials includes retired Gen. Lloyd J. Austin III, who is being nominated to be secretary of defense. Austin is on the board of Raytheon Technologies and a partner at Pine Island Capital, a firm that invests in defense industries and also includes Antony Blinken, Biden's nominee to be secretary of state. Blinken, who was deputy national security adviser and deputy secretary of state under the Obama administration, is a strong supporter of the apartheid state of Israel. He was one of the architects of the invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq and a proponent of the overthrow of Moammar Gadhafi in Libya, resulting in yet another failed state in the Middle East.
Janet Yellen, former Federal Reserve chair under Barack Obama, is slated to be Treasury secretary. Yellen, as chair of Bill Clinton's Council of Economic Advisors (CEA) and later as a member of the board of the Federal Reserve, backed the repeal of Glass-Steagall, which led to the banking crisis of 2008. She supported the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). She also lobbied for a new statistical metric intended to lower payments to senior citizens on Social Security. Yellen backed "quantitative easing" that provided trillions in virtually no-interest loans to Wall Street, loans used to bail out banks and corporations and engage in massive stock buybacks while the victims of financial fraud were abandoned.
Former Secretary of State John Kerry is to become a special envoy for climate. Kerry championed the massive expansion of domestic oil and gas production, largely through fracking, and, according to Obama's memoir, worked doggedly to convince those concerned about the climate crisis to "offer up concessions on subsidies for the nuclear power industry and the opening of additional U.S. coastlines to offshore oil drilling."
Avril Haines, a former Obama deputy CIA chief, is to become Biden's director of national intelligence. Haines oversaw Obama's expanded and murderous drone program overseas and backed Gina Haspel's nomination to be the head of the CIA, despite Haspel's direct involvement in the CIA torture program carried out in black sites around the globe. Haines called Haspel "intelligent, compassionate, and fair." Brian Deese, the executive who was in charge of the "climate portfolio" at BlackRock, which invests heavily in fossil fuels, including coal, and who advocated austerity measures as an Obama economic adviser, has been chosen to run the White House's economic policy.
Neera Tanden, a former aide to Hillary Clinton, has been picked to be director of the Office of Management and Budget. Tanden, as head of the Democratic Party's think tank, the Center for American Progress, raised millions in dark money from Silicon Valley and Wall Street. Her donors include Bain Capital, Blackstone, Evercore, Walmart and the defense contractor Northrup Grumman. The United Arab Emirates, a close ally of Saudi Arabia in the war in Yemen, also gave the think tank between $1.5 million and $3 million. She relentlessly ridicules Sanders and his supporters on cable news and social media. She previously proposed a plank in the Democratic platform calling for the bombing of Iran.
The perpetuation of deeply unpopular wars and onerous neoliberal policies by the Biden administration will be accompanied by a fevered demonization of Russia, most recently blamed for cyber-attacks. A new Cold War with Russia will be used by the corporate Democrats to discredit domestic and foreign critics and deflect attention from the political stagnation and the corporate pillaging of the country. It will allow MSNBC and The New York Times, which spent two years slogging empty Russiagate conspiracies, to disseminate a daily stream of emotionally charged rumors and shady accusations about Russia. Cable celebrities such as Rachel Maddow will hyperventilate night after night about Russia while ignoring the corruption of the Biden administration. The only reason Russia is not blamed for rigging the election in 2020, as opposed to 2016, by the Democratic Party is because Trump was defeated. [...]
But the real lesson we should learn from the rise of a demagogue such as Trump, who received 74 million votes, and a pandemic that our for-profit health care industry proved unable to contain, is that we are losing control as a nation and as a species. Far more dangerous demagogues will arise from the imperial and neoliberal policies the Biden administration will embrace. Far worse pandemics will sweep the globe with higher rates of infections and mortality, an inevitable result of our continued consumption of animals and animal products, and the wanton destruction of the ecosystem on which we and other species depend for life.
"One of the most pathetic aspects of human history," Reinhold Niebuhr wrote, "is that every civilization expresses itself most pretentiously, compounds its partial and universal values most convincingly, and claims immortality for its finite existence at the very moment when the decay which leads to death has already begun."
Biden's appointments are drawn almost exclusively from the circles of the Democratic Party and corporate elite, those responsible for the massive social inequality, trade deals, deindustrialization, militarized police, world's largest prison system, austerity programs that abolished social programs such as welfare, the revived Cold War with Russia, wholesale government surveillance, endless wars in the Middle East and the disenfranchisement and impoverishment of the working class. The Washington Post writes that "about 80 percent of the White House and agency officials [Biden has] announced have the word 'Obama' on their résumé from previous White House or Obama campaign jobs." Bernie Sanders, apparently rebuffed in his efforts to become secretary of labor in the Biden administration, has expressed frustration with the Biden nominations. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was denied a seat by House Democrats on the House Energy and Commerce Committee because of her support for the Green New Deal. The message of the Biden administration to progressives and left-wing populists is very clear: "Drop dead."
The list of new administration officials includes retired Gen. Lloyd J. Austin III, who is being nominated to be secretary of defense. Austin is on the board of Raytheon Technologies and a partner at Pine Island Capital, a firm that invests in defense industries and also includes Antony Blinken, Biden's nominee to be secretary of state. Blinken, who was deputy national security adviser and deputy secretary of state under the Obama administration, is a strong supporter of the apartheid state of Israel. He was one of the architects of the invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq and a proponent of the overthrow of Moammar Gadhafi in Libya, resulting in yet another failed state in the Middle East.
Janet Yellen, former Federal Reserve chair under Barack Obama, is slated to be Treasury secretary. Yellen, as chair of Bill Clinton's Council of Economic Advisors (CEA) and later as a member of the board of the Federal Reserve, backed the repeal of Glass-Steagall, which led to the banking crisis of 2008. She supported the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). She also lobbied for a new statistical metric intended to lower payments to senior citizens on Social Security. Yellen backed "quantitative easing" that provided trillions in virtually no-interest loans to Wall Street, loans used to bail out banks and corporations and engage in massive stock buybacks while the victims of financial fraud were abandoned.
Former Secretary of State John Kerry is to become a special envoy for climate. Kerry championed the massive expansion of domestic oil and gas production, largely through fracking, and, according to Obama's memoir, worked doggedly to convince those concerned about the climate crisis to "offer up concessions on subsidies for the nuclear power industry and the opening of additional U.S. coastlines to offshore oil drilling."
Avril Haines, a former Obama deputy CIA chief, is to become Biden's director of national intelligence. Haines oversaw Obama's expanded and murderous drone program overseas and backed Gina Haspel's nomination to be the head of the CIA, despite Haspel's direct involvement in the CIA torture program carried out in black sites around the globe. Haines called Haspel "intelligent, compassionate, and fair." Brian Deese, the executive who was in charge of the "climate portfolio" at BlackRock, which invests heavily in fossil fuels, including coal, and who advocated austerity measures as an Obama economic adviser, has been chosen to run the White House's economic policy.
Neera Tanden, a former aide to Hillary Clinton, has been picked to be director of the Office of Management and Budget. Tanden, as head of the Democratic Party's think tank, the Center for American Progress, raised millions in dark money from Silicon Valley and Wall Street. Her donors include Bain Capital, Blackstone, Evercore, Walmart and the defense contractor Northrup Grumman. The United Arab Emirates, a close ally of Saudi Arabia in the war in Yemen, also gave the think tank between $1.5 million and $3 million. She relentlessly ridicules Sanders and his supporters on cable news and social media. She previously proposed a plank in the Democratic platform calling for the bombing of Iran.
The perpetuation of deeply unpopular wars and onerous neoliberal policies by the Biden administration will be accompanied by a fevered demonization of Russia, most recently blamed for cyber-attacks. A new Cold War with Russia will be used by the corporate Democrats to discredit domestic and foreign critics and deflect attention from the political stagnation and the corporate pillaging of the country. It will allow MSNBC and The New York Times, which spent two years slogging empty Russiagate conspiracies, to disseminate a daily stream of emotionally charged rumors and shady accusations about Russia. Cable celebrities such as Rachel Maddow will hyperventilate night after night about Russia while ignoring the corruption of the Biden administration. The only reason Russia is not blamed for rigging the election in 2020, as opposed to 2016, by the Democratic Party is because Trump was defeated. [...]
opinion
Why Biden shouldn't extend an olive branch to Republicans
Joshua Craze and Ainsley LeSure - the guardian
11/26/2020
Biden must choose whether to build a post-white America – or to placate the white supremacist project of the Republican party.
Shortly after Biden was declared president-elect, he announced that he would reach a hand across the aisle. “We must stop,” he said, “treating our opponents as enemies. We are not enemies. We are Americans.” This is the Biden playbook at work, honed through years of compromises made with the Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell: appealing to the Republican elite in office, while trying to appeal to moderate Republicans on the ground.
Having stretched out its hand to the Republicans, the center of the Democratic party then turned to its real enemy – the left that it blames for its poor showing in the election. Virginia congresswoman Abigail Spanberger led the charge, contending that “no one should ever say ‘defund the police’ ever again”. Despite the fact that progressive candidates did well across the ticket, and Biden ran a campaign modelled on Hilary Clinton’s neoliberal program, centrist Democrats blamed the core demand of the Black Lives Matter movement for alienating moderates. In centrist Democrats’ telling, the problem is the left – and the answer is to reach out to that poor soul, the moderate Republican.
The moderate Republican is a myth. For all the Lincoln Project’s assertions that it would peel away Republican voters, the president actually secured a larger share of the Republican vote than he did in 2016. Some 94% of Republicans looked back on the debacles and racism of the last four years and concluded that they wanted more. This is not a delusion; it is the core of the Republican party. Biden would like to frame his presidency as a return to normality after the Trumpian exception. The reality, however, is that Trump doesn’t represent something new; it emerges from the long shadow that white supremacy cast over American history.
We need to acknowledge that the core white Republican voter knows exactly why they vote for Trump. Propelled by Fox News and talk radio, the Republican voter chooses their party because the Republicans guarantee the continuity of white supremacy both economically and culturally. When Trump campaigned to save the suburban (white) woman from the urban poor, he was mocked as hopelessly out of touch. Despite the promises of the pollsters, however, his strategy worked: Trump’s share of the white female vote increased to 55%.
While white supremacy is not novel in America, it is likely to become increasingly vitriolic. The US is projected to become minority white by 2045, and the Republican party has decided to resist this demographic shift by rallying its base and using the tools of American politics to hang on to minority white government for as long as it can.
For instance, as Biden was fervently appealing to moderate Republicans, two white Republican canvassers refused to certify electoral results from Michigan’s overwhelmingly black Wayne county. Trump’s post-election strategy is indicative of that of the Republican party more generally: disenfranchise voters of color by any means possible, and use gerrymandering and the unrepresentative alchemy of the electoral college system to produce Republican political power.
When Biden reaches across the aisle, it is likely his hand will be met by turned backs; most Republicans haven’t even acknowledged the election result yet. There is little for the Republican establishment to gain from working with Biden. With the Senate liable to remain in Republican hands, and the Democrats seemingly more worried about appealing to Republicans that taking substantive action over the economic crisis brought about by Covid-19, Mitch McConnell can rub his hands together at the thought of the 2022 mid-terms.
For the Republican party to actually want to work in a bipartisan way would require the Democrats gaining support for the kind of systematic political reform – of the electoral college system, for instance – that the very gesture of reaching across the aisle is likely to prevent.
We have been down this road before. While Biden spent the 2020 election campaign insisting he wasn’t a socialist, in 2008, Obama came to power having distanced himself from the “radical” agenda of Jeremiah Wright, his former pastor. Obama also faced an economic crisis, and took a bipartisan approach, shoring up the banks and creating only a modest stimulus package. The result? After a two-year campaign of determined obstruction by Mitch McConnell, the Republicans rode a Tea party wave all the way to a midterm majority in the House of Representatives in 2010.
It doesn’t have to be this way. In the 2020 election, voter turnout was the highest it has been since 1908. Black voters were crucial in delivering a Democratic victory, and preventing a continuation of white minority rule. If the Democratic party is not going to squander the opening that the people have made, it must change how it orients itself to the American people. Rather than exploiting black support while marginalizing the black voices that push against a neoliberal political agenda, the Democratic party should give black voters the respect that it has thus far reserved only for that fantasy: the moderate Republican.
The Democratic party cannot have it both ways. There are red and blue states. There are Americans who want to defend white supremacy, and Americans who are struggling over what the refusal of white supremacy looks like on American soil. Biden can commit the Democratic party to building a genuinely post-white America, or he can try and placate the white supremacist project of the Republican party. But he must choose.
Shortly after Biden was declared president-elect, he announced that he would reach a hand across the aisle. “We must stop,” he said, “treating our opponents as enemies. We are not enemies. We are Americans.” This is the Biden playbook at work, honed through years of compromises made with the Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell: appealing to the Republican elite in office, while trying to appeal to moderate Republicans on the ground.
Having stretched out its hand to the Republicans, the center of the Democratic party then turned to its real enemy – the left that it blames for its poor showing in the election. Virginia congresswoman Abigail Spanberger led the charge, contending that “no one should ever say ‘defund the police’ ever again”. Despite the fact that progressive candidates did well across the ticket, and Biden ran a campaign modelled on Hilary Clinton’s neoliberal program, centrist Democrats blamed the core demand of the Black Lives Matter movement for alienating moderates. In centrist Democrats’ telling, the problem is the left – and the answer is to reach out to that poor soul, the moderate Republican.
The moderate Republican is a myth. For all the Lincoln Project’s assertions that it would peel away Republican voters, the president actually secured a larger share of the Republican vote than he did in 2016. Some 94% of Republicans looked back on the debacles and racism of the last four years and concluded that they wanted more. This is not a delusion; it is the core of the Republican party. Biden would like to frame his presidency as a return to normality after the Trumpian exception. The reality, however, is that Trump doesn’t represent something new; it emerges from the long shadow that white supremacy cast over American history.
We need to acknowledge that the core white Republican voter knows exactly why they vote for Trump. Propelled by Fox News and talk radio, the Republican voter chooses their party because the Republicans guarantee the continuity of white supremacy both economically and culturally. When Trump campaigned to save the suburban (white) woman from the urban poor, he was mocked as hopelessly out of touch. Despite the promises of the pollsters, however, his strategy worked: Trump’s share of the white female vote increased to 55%.
While white supremacy is not novel in America, it is likely to become increasingly vitriolic. The US is projected to become minority white by 2045, and the Republican party has decided to resist this demographic shift by rallying its base and using the tools of American politics to hang on to minority white government for as long as it can.
For instance, as Biden was fervently appealing to moderate Republicans, two white Republican canvassers refused to certify electoral results from Michigan’s overwhelmingly black Wayne county. Trump’s post-election strategy is indicative of that of the Republican party more generally: disenfranchise voters of color by any means possible, and use gerrymandering and the unrepresentative alchemy of the electoral college system to produce Republican political power.
When Biden reaches across the aisle, it is likely his hand will be met by turned backs; most Republicans haven’t even acknowledged the election result yet. There is little for the Republican establishment to gain from working with Biden. With the Senate liable to remain in Republican hands, and the Democrats seemingly more worried about appealing to Republicans that taking substantive action over the economic crisis brought about by Covid-19, Mitch McConnell can rub his hands together at the thought of the 2022 mid-terms.
For the Republican party to actually want to work in a bipartisan way would require the Democrats gaining support for the kind of systematic political reform – of the electoral college system, for instance – that the very gesture of reaching across the aisle is likely to prevent.
We have been down this road before. While Biden spent the 2020 election campaign insisting he wasn’t a socialist, in 2008, Obama came to power having distanced himself from the “radical” agenda of Jeremiah Wright, his former pastor. Obama also faced an economic crisis, and took a bipartisan approach, shoring up the banks and creating only a modest stimulus package. The result? After a two-year campaign of determined obstruction by Mitch McConnell, the Republicans rode a Tea party wave all the way to a midterm majority in the House of Representatives in 2010.
It doesn’t have to be this way. In the 2020 election, voter turnout was the highest it has been since 1908. Black voters were crucial in delivering a Democratic victory, and preventing a continuation of white minority rule. If the Democratic party is not going to squander the opening that the people have made, it must change how it orients itself to the American people. Rather than exploiting black support while marginalizing the black voices that push against a neoliberal political agenda, the Democratic party should give black voters the respect that it has thus far reserved only for that fantasy: the moderate Republican.
The Democratic party cannot have it both ways. There are red and blue states. There are Americans who want to defend white supremacy, and Americans who are struggling over what the refusal of white supremacy looks like on American soil. Biden can commit the Democratic party to building a genuinely post-white America, or he can try and placate the white supremacist project of the Republican party. But he must choose.
Trump’s destruction of America started with Reagan
Thom Hartmann / Independent Media Institute - alternet
Donald Trump and his billionaire buddies are letting America die.
The billionaires who make their money from fossil fuels have bought off Trump and Republicans so that they’re denying climate change while a dozen states in the West burn and the Gulf Coast is repeatedly ravaged by hurricanes. Firefighters are using dogs to identify the remains of homes where people died by the smell of burnt human flesh.
The billionaires who make their money screwing American students with almost $2 trillion in student loans bribed politicians in 2005 to make it illegal to declare bankruptcy on those loans. Across America, students are experiencing depression, despair, and suicide.
The billionaires who own millions of rental properties across the country are actively ignoring both legal requirements and morality-based requests, depending on the state, to prevent evictions and are today throwing people out of their homes in the middle of a pandemic.
The billionaires who own Fox News and some of our largest radio networks are facilitating lies about climate change and the coronavirus, both of which are killing people, while these billionaires live in their protected bubbles. They are also stoking racial violence by repeatedly portraying protesters calling for Black equality under the law as terrorists.
Massive tax cuts by Republican presidents (Ronald Reagan, George W. Bush and Donald Trump) have transferred fully $50 trillion from the homes and pockets of working people into the money bins and foreign bank accounts of the billionaire class since 1975. As a result, fewer than half of all Americans are still in the middle class, and fear and rage increasingly dominate the American political landscape.
Using that despair and anger people are feeling as they watch their lives be wiped out, their homes destroyed, and their jobs vanish, Trump and the Republican Party are fomenting violence and political instability by trying to scapegoat Black and Brown people. The growing QAnon movement, a rebranding of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion that the Nazis weaponized for political purposes in the 1930s, further asserts that “international Jewish bankers” like George Soros are behind it all, stoking anti-Semitism along with their garden-variety racism.
This all began in the 1980s with the so-called Reagan Revolution, when Reagan dropped the top tax rate from 70 percent to 28 percent and began a vicious, scorched-earth campaign to destroy unions across the country while he and George H.W. Bush authored NAFTA and other free trade agreements.
Reagan even championed the destruction of our public schools and the modern-day Republican rejection of science on everything from the origin of the Earth to climate change. He empowered people like “Christian” billionaire Pat Robertson who argued, at the peak of the AIDS crisis that Reagan refused to acknowledge, that the biggest crisis facing America was homosexuality.
If America is to recover from this hellscape that right-wing billionaires and their bought-off politicians have inflicted on us, it’s going to require a massive, nationwide awakening and a nonstop multiyear effort.
Reaganism needs to be ripped out by the root. His policies of minimizing science, privatizing our public schools, defunding Social Security and social welfare programs, ending support for infrastructure repair and construction, wiping out union protections for working people, and transferring America’s wealth to the billionaire class must be reversed.
Until Reaganism is utterly repudiated and reversed, the crises engulfing America will simply get worse and worse. If Democrats take power in 2021, this must be at the top of the to-do list.
The billionaires who make their money from fossil fuels have bought off Trump and Republicans so that they’re denying climate change while a dozen states in the West burn and the Gulf Coast is repeatedly ravaged by hurricanes. Firefighters are using dogs to identify the remains of homes where people died by the smell of burnt human flesh.
The billionaires who make their money screwing American students with almost $2 trillion in student loans bribed politicians in 2005 to make it illegal to declare bankruptcy on those loans. Across America, students are experiencing depression, despair, and suicide.
The billionaires who own millions of rental properties across the country are actively ignoring both legal requirements and morality-based requests, depending on the state, to prevent evictions and are today throwing people out of their homes in the middle of a pandemic.
The billionaires who own Fox News and some of our largest radio networks are facilitating lies about climate change and the coronavirus, both of which are killing people, while these billionaires live in their protected bubbles. They are also stoking racial violence by repeatedly portraying protesters calling for Black equality under the law as terrorists.
Massive tax cuts by Republican presidents (Ronald Reagan, George W. Bush and Donald Trump) have transferred fully $50 trillion from the homes and pockets of working people into the money bins and foreign bank accounts of the billionaire class since 1975. As a result, fewer than half of all Americans are still in the middle class, and fear and rage increasingly dominate the American political landscape.
Using that despair and anger people are feeling as they watch their lives be wiped out, their homes destroyed, and their jobs vanish, Trump and the Republican Party are fomenting violence and political instability by trying to scapegoat Black and Brown people. The growing QAnon movement, a rebranding of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion that the Nazis weaponized for political purposes in the 1930s, further asserts that “international Jewish bankers” like George Soros are behind it all, stoking anti-Semitism along with their garden-variety racism.
This all began in the 1980s with the so-called Reagan Revolution, when Reagan dropped the top tax rate from 70 percent to 28 percent and began a vicious, scorched-earth campaign to destroy unions across the country while he and George H.W. Bush authored NAFTA and other free trade agreements.
Reagan even championed the destruction of our public schools and the modern-day Republican rejection of science on everything from the origin of the Earth to climate change. He empowered people like “Christian” billionaire Pat Robertson who argued, at the peak of the AIDS crisis that Reagan refused to acknowledge, that the biggest crisis facing America was homosexuality.
If America is to recover from this hellscape that right-wing billionaires and their bought-off politicians have inflicted on us, it’s going to require a massive, nationwide awakening and a nonstop multiyear effort.
Reaganism needs to be ripped out by the root. His policies of minimizing science, privatizing our public schools, defunding Social Security and social welfare programs, ending support for infrastructure repair and construction, wiping out union protections for working people, and transferring America’s wealth to the billionaire class must be reversed.
Until Reaganism is utterly repudiated and reversed, the crises engulfing America will simply get worse and worse. If Democrats take power in 2021, this must be at the top of the to-do list.
Don't be fooled by the "cancel culture" wars: Corporate power is the real force behind racism
Elite infighting about "free speech" and "diversity" won't end racism — or challenge corporate capitalism
CHRIS HEDGES - salon
JULY 13, 2020 11:00PM (UTC)
The "cancel culture" — the phenomenon of removing or canceling people, brands or shows from the public domain because of offensive statements or ideologies — is not a threat to the ruling class. Hundreds of corporations, nearly all in the hands of white executives and white board members, enthusiastically pumped out messages on social media condemning racism and demanding justice after George Floyd was choked to death by police in Minneapolis. Police, which along with the prison system are one of the primary instruments of social control over the poor, have taken the knee, along with Jamie Dimon, the chief executive of the serially criminal JPMorgan Chase, where only 4 percent of the top executives are Black. Jeff Bezos, the richest man in the world whose corporation, Amazon, paid no federal income taxes last year and who fires workers that attempt to unionize and tracks warehouse laborers as if they were prisoners, put a "Black Lives Matter" banner on Amazon's home page.
The rush by the ruling elites to profess solidarity with the protesters and denounce racist rhetoric and racist symbols, supporting the toppling of Confederate statues and banning the Confederate flag, are symbolic assaults on white supremacy. Alone, these gestures will do nothing to reverse the institutional racism that is baked into the DNA of American society. The elites will discuss race. They will not discuss class.
We must be wary of allowing those wielding the toxic charge of racism, no matter how well intentioned their motives, to decide who has a voice and who does not. Public shaming and denunciation, as any student of the Russian, French or Chinese revolutions knows, is one that leads to absurdism and finally despotism. Virulent racists, such as Richard Spencer, exist. They are dangerous. But racism will not end until we dismantle a class system that was created to empower oligarchic oppression and white supremacy. Racism will not end until we defund the police and abolish the world's largest system of mass incarceration. Racism will not end until we invest in people rather than systems of control. This means reparations for African Americans, the unionization of workers, massive government jobs programs, breaking up and nationalizing the big banks along with the for-profit health services, transportation sector, the internet, privatized utilities and the fossil fuel industry, as well as a Green New Deal and the slashing of our war expenditures by 75 percent.
The politically correct speech and symbols of inclusiveness, without a concerted assault on corporate power, will do nothing to change a system that by design casts the poor and working poor, often people of color, aside — Karl Marx called them "surplus labor" — and forces them into a life of misery and a brutal criminal caste system.
The cancel culture, with its public shaming on social media, is the boutique activism of the liberal elites. It allows faux student radicals to hound and attack those deemed to be racist or transphobic, before these "radicals" graduate to work for corporations such as Goldman Sachs, which last year paid $9 million in fines to settle federal allegations of racial and gender pay bias. Self-styled Marxists in the academy have been pushed out of economic departments and been reborn as irrelevant cultural and literary critics, employing jargon so obscure as to be unreadable. These "radical" theorists invest their energy in linguistic acrobatics and multiculturalism, with branches such as feminism studies, queer studies and African-American studies. The inclusion of voices often left out of the traditional academic canon certainly enriches the university. But multiculturalism, moral absolutism and the public denunciations of apostates, by themselves, too often offer escape routes from critiquing and attacking the class structures and systems of economic oppression that exclude and impoverish the poor and the marginal.
The hedge fund managers, oligarchs and corporate CEOs on college trustee boards don't care about Marxist critiques of Joseph Conrad. They do care if students are being taught to dissect the lies of the neoliberal ideology used as a cover to orchestrate the largest transference of wealth upwards in American history.
The cancel culture, shorn of class politics, is the parlor game of the overeducated. If we do not examine, as Theodor Adorno wrote, the "societal play of forces that operate beneath the surface of political forms," we will be continually cursed with a more ruthless and sophisticated form of corporate control, albeit one that is linguistically sensitive and politically correct.
"Stripped of a radical idiom, robbed of a utopian hope, liberals and leftists retreat in the name of progress to celebrate diversity," historian Russell Jacoby writes. "With few ideas on how a future should be shaped, they embrace all ideas. Pluralism becomes a catchall, the alpha and omega of political thinking. Dressed up as multicultural, it has become the opium of disillusioned intellectuals, the ideology of an era without an ideology."
The cudgel of racism, as I have experienced, is an effective tool to shut down debate. Students for Justice in Palestine organizations, which almost always include Jewish students, are being banned on college campuses in the name of fighting racism. Activists in these outlawed groups are often barred from holding any student leadership positions on campus. Professors that dare to counter the Zionist narrative, such as the Palestinian American scholar Steven Salaita, have had job offers rescinded, been fired or denied tenure and dismissed. Norman Finkelstein, one of the most important scholars on the Israel-Palestine conflict, has been ruthlessly targeted by the Israel lobby throughout his career, making it impossible for him to get tenure or academic appointments. Never mind that he is not only Jewish but the son of Holocaust survivors. Jews, in this game, are branded as racists, and actual racists, such as Donald Trump, because they back Israel's refusal to recognize Palestinian rights, are held up as friends of the Jewish people.
I have long been a target of the Israeli lobby. The lobby, usually working through Hillel Houses on college campuses, which function as little more than outposts of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), does not attempt to address my enumeration of the war crimes committed by Israel, many of which I witnessed, the egregious flouting by Israel of international law, exacerbated by the plans to annex up to 30 percent of the West Bank, or the historical record ignored and distorted by the lobby to justify Jewish occupation of a country that from the 7th century until 1948 was Muslim. The lobby prefers not to deal in the world of facts. It misuses the trope of anti-Semitism to ensure that those who speak up for Palestinian rights and denounce Israeli occupation are not invited to events on the Israel-Palestine conflict, or are disinvited to speak after invitations have been sent out, as happened to me at the University of Pennsylvania, among other venues.
It does not matter that I spent seven years in the Middle East, or that I was the Middle East bureau chief for The New York Times, living for weeks at a time in the Israel-occupied territories. It does not matter that I speak Arabic. My voice and the voices of those, especially Palestinians, who document the violations of Palestinian civil rights are canceled out by the mendacious charge that we are racists. I doubt most of the college administrators who agree to block our appearances believe we are racists, but they don't also want the controversy. Zionism is the cancel culture on steroids.
The Israel lobby, whose interference in our electoral process dwarfs that of any other country, including Russia, is now attempting to criminalize the activities of those, such as myself, who support the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement. The lobby, with its huge financial clout, is pushing state legislatures, in the name of fighting anti-Semitism, to use anti-boycott laws and executive orders to punish companies and individuals that promote BDS. Twenty-seven states have so far enacted laws or policies that penalize businesses, organizations and individuals for supporting BDS.
The debate about the excesses of cancel culture was most recently ignited by a letter signed by 153 prominent and largely privileged writers and intellectuals in Harper's Magazine, a publication for educated, white liberals. Critics of the letter argue, correctly, that "nowhere in it do the signatories mention how marginalized voices have been silenced for generations in journalism, academia, and publishing." These critics also point out, correctly, that signatories include those, such as New York Times columnist David Brooks and Malcolm Gladwell, with access to huge media platforms and who face no danger of being silenced. They finally note that a few of the signatories are the most vicious proponents of the Zionist cancel culture, including New York Times editor Bari Weiss, who led campaigns while at Columbia University to destroy the careers of Arab professors; literary scholar Cary Nelson, who was one of those who denounced the Palestinian American scholar Salaita as a racist; and political scientist Yascha Mounk, who has attacked Rep. Ilhan Omar as an anti-Semite.
I find the cancel culture and its public denunciations as distasteful as those who signed the letter. But these critics are battling a monster of their own creation. The institutional and professional power of those targeted by the Harper's letter is insignificant, especially when set against that of the signatories or the Israel lobby. Those singled out for attack pose little threat to the systems of entrenched power, which the signatories ironically represent, and indeed are more often its victims. I suspect this is the reason for the widespread ire the letter provoked.
The most ominous threats to free speech and public debate do not come from the cancel culture of the left, which rarely succeeds in removing its targets from power, despite a few high-profile firings such as James Bennet, who oversaw a series of tone-deaf editorial decisions as the opinion page editor at the New York Times. These corporate forces, which assure us that Black Lives Matter, understand that the left's witch hunts are a harmless diversion.
Corporations have seized control of the news industry and turned it into burlesque. They have corrupted academic scholarship. They make war on science and the rule of law. They have used their wealth to destroy our democracy and replace it with a system of legalized bribery. They have created a world of masters and serfs who struggle at subsistence level and endure crippling debt peonage. The commodification of the natural world by corporations has triggered an ecocide that is pushing the human species closer and closer towards extinction. Anyone who attempts to state these truths and fight back was long ago driven from the mainstream and relegated to the margins of the internet by Silicon Valley algorithms. As cancel culture goes, corporate power makes the Israel lobby look like amateurs.
The current obsession with moral purity, devoid of a political vision and incubated by self-referential academics and educated elites, is easily co-opted by the ruling class who will say anything, as long as the mechanisms of corporate control remain untouched. We have enemies. They run Silicon Valley and sit on corporate boards. They make up the two ruling political parties. They manage the war industry. They chatter endlessly on corporate-owned airwaves about trivia and celebrity gossip. Our enemies are now showering us with politically correct messages. But until they are overthrown, until we wrest power back from our corporate masters, the most insidious forms of racism in America will continue to flourish.
The rush by the ruling elites to profess solidarity with the protesters and denounce racist rhetoric and racist symbols, supporting the toppling of Confederate statues and banning the Confederate flag, are symbolic assaults on white supremacy. Alone, these gestures will do nothing to reverse the institutional racism that is baked into the DNA of American society. The elites will discuss race. They will not discuss class.
We must be wary of allowing those wielding the toxic charge of racism, no matter how well intentioned their motives, to decide who has a voice and who does not. Public shaming and denunciation, as any student of the Russian, French or Chinese revolutions knows, is one that leads to absurdism and finally despotism. Virulent racists, such as Richard Spencer, exist. They are dangerous. But racism will not end until we dismantle a class system that was created to empower oligarchic oppression and white supremacy. Racism will not end until we defund the police and abolish the world's largest system of mass incarceration. Racism will not end until we invest in people rather than systems of control. This means reparations for African Americans, the unionization of workers, massive government jobs programs, breaking up and nationalizing the big banks along with the for-profit health services, transportation sector, the internet, privatized utilities and the fossil fuel industry, as well as a Green New Deal and the slashing of our war expenditures by 75 percent.
The politically correct speech and symbols of inclusiveness, without a concerted assault on corporate power, will do nothing to change a system that by design casts the poor and working poor, often people of color, aside — Karl Marx called them "surplus labor" — and forces them into a life of misery and a brutal criminal caste system.
The cancel culture, with its public shaming on social media, is the boutique activism of the liberal elites. It allows faux student radicals to hound and attack those deemed to be racist or transphobic, before these "radicals" graduate to work for corporations such as Goldman Sachs, which last year paid $9 million in fines to settle federal allegations of racial and gender pay bias. Self-styled Marxists in the academy have been pushed out of economic departments and been reborn as irrelevant cultural and literary critics, employing jargon so obscure as to be unreadable. These "radical" theorists invest their energy in linguistic acrobatics and multiculturalism, with branches such as feminism studies, queer studies and African-American studies. The inclusion of voices often left out of the traditional academic canon certainly enriches the university. But multiculturalism, moral absolutism and the public denunciations of apostates, by themselves, too often offer escape routes from critiquing and attacking the class structures and systems of economic oppression that exclude and impoverish the poor and the marginal.
The hedge fund managers, oligarchs and corporate CEOs on college trustee boards don't care about Marxist critiques of Joseph Conrad. They do care if students are being taught to dissect the lies of the neoliberal ideology used as a cover to orchestrate the largest transference of wealth upwards in American history.
The cancel culture, shorn of class politics, is the parlor game of the overeducated. If we do not examine, as Theodor Adorno wrote, the "societal play of forces that operate beneath the surface of political forms," we will be continually cursed with a more ruthless and sophisticated form of corporate control, albeit one that is linguistically sensitive and politically correct.
"Stripped of a radical idiom, robbed of a utopian hope, liberals and leftists retreat in the name of progress to celebrate diversity," historian Russell Jacoby writes. "With few ideas on how a future should be shaped, they embrace all ideas. Pluralism becomes a catchall, the alpha and omega of political thinking. Dressed up as multicultural, it has become the opium of disillusioned intellectuals, the ideology of an era without an ideology."
The cudgel of racism, as I have experienced, is an effective tool to shut down debate. Students for Justice in Palestine organizations, which almost always include Jewish students, are being banned on college campuses in the name of fighting racism. Activists in these outlawed groups are often barred from holding any student leadership positions on campus. Professors that dare to counter the Zionist narrative, such as the Palestinian American scholar Steven Salaita, have had job offers rescinded, been fired or denied tenure and dismissed. Norman Finkelstein, one of the most important scholars on the Israel-Palestine conflict, has been ruthlessly targeted by the Israel lobby throughout his career, making it impossible for him to get tenure or academic appointments. Never mind that he is not only Jewish but the son of Holocaust survivors. Jews, in this game, are branded as racists, and actual racists, such as Donald Trump, because they back Israel's refusal to recognize Palestinian rights, are held up as friends of the Jewish people.
I have long been a target of the Israeli lobby. The lobby, usually working through Hillel Houses on college campuses, which function as little more than outposts of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), does not attempt to address my enumeration of the war crimes committed by Israel, many of which I witnessed, the egregious flouting by Israel of international law, exacerbated by the plans to annex up to 30 percent of the West Bank, or the historical record ignored and distorted by the lobby to justify Jewish occupation of a country that from the 7th century until 1948 was Muslim. The lobby prefers not to deal in the world of facts. It misuses the trope of anti-Semitism to ensure that those who speak up for Palestinian rights and denounce Israeli occupation are not invited to events on the Israel-Palestine conflict, or are disinvited to speak after invitations have been sent out, as happened to me at the University of Pennsylvania, among other venues.
It does not matter that I spent seven years in the Middle East, or that I was the Middle East bureau chief for The New York Times, living for weeks at a time in the Israel-occupied territories. It does not matter that I speak Arabic. My voice and the voices of those, especially Palestinians, who document the violations of Palestinian civil rights are canceled out by the mendacious charge that we are racists. I doubt most of the college administrators who agree to block our appearances believe we are racists, but they don't also want the controversy. Zionism is the cancel culture on steroids.
The Israel lobby, whose interference in our electoral process dwarfs that of any other country, including Russia, is now attempting to criminalize the activities of those, such as myself, who support the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement. The lobby, with its huge financial clout, is pushing state legislatures, in the name of fighting anti-Semitism, to use anti-boycott laws and executive orders to punish companies and individuals that promote BDS. Twenty-seven states have so far enacted laws or policies that penalize businesses, organizations and individuals for supporting BDS.
The debate about the excesses of cancel culture was most recently ignited by a letter signed by 153 prominent and largely privileged writers and intellectuals in Harper's Magazine, a publication for educated, white liberals. Critics of the letter argue, correctly, that "nowhere in it do the signatories mention how marginalized voices have been silenced for generations in journalism, academia, and publishing." These critics also point out, correctly, that signatories include those, such as New York Times columnist David Brooks and Malcolm Gladwell, with access to huge media platforms and who face no danger of being silenced. They finally note that a few of the signatories are the most vicious proponents of the Zionist cancel culture, including New York Times editor Bari Weiss, who led campaigns while at Columbia University to destroy the careers of Arab professors; literary scholar Cary Nelson, who was one of those who denounced the Palestinian American scholar Salaita as a racist; and political scientist Yascha Mounk, who has attacked Rep. Ilhan Omar as an anti-Semite.
I find the cancel culture and its public denunciations as distasteful as those who signed the letter. But these critics are battling a monster of their own creation. The institutional and professional power of those targeted by the Harper's letter is insignificant, especially when set against that of the signatories or the Israel lobby. Those singled out for attack pose little threat to the systems of entrenched power, which the signatories ironically represent, and indeed are more often its victims. I suspect this is the reason for the widespread ire the letter provoked.
The most ominous threats to free speech and public debate do not come from the cancel culture of the left, which rarely succeeds in removing its targets from power, despite a few high-profile firings such as James Bennet, who oversaw a series of tone-deaf editorial decisions as the opinion page editor at the New York Times. These corporate forces, which assure us that Black Lives Matter, understand that the left's witch hunts are a harmless diversion.
Corporations have seized control of the news industry and turned it into burlesque. They have corrupted academic scholarship. They make war on science and the rule of law. They have used their wealth to destroy our democracy and replace it with a system of legalized bribery. They have created a world of masters and serfs who struggle at subsistence level and endure crippling debt peonage. The commodification of the natural world by corporations has triggered an ecocide that is pushing the human species closer and closer towards extinction. Anyone who attempts to state these truths and fight back was long ago driven from the mainstream and relegated to the margins of the internet by Silicon Valley algorithms. As cancel culture goes, corporate power makes the Israel lobby look like amateurs.
The current obsession with moral purity, devoid of a political vision and incubated by self-referential academics and educated elites, is easily co-opted by the ruling class who will say anything, as long as the mechanisms of corporate control remain untouched. We have enemies. They run Silicon Valley and sit on corporate boards. They make up the two ruling political parties. They manage the war industry. They chatter endlessly on corporate-owned airwaves about trivia and celebrity gossip. Our enemies are now showering us with politically correct messages. But until they are overthrown, until we wrest power back from our corporate masters, the most insidious forms of racism in America will continue to flourish.
To the World, We’re Now America the Racist and Pitiful
By Robin Wright - new yorker
July 3, 2020
The real saga of the Statue of Liberty—the symbolic face of America around the world, and the backdrop of New York’s dazzling Fourth of July fireworks show—is an obscure piece of U.S. history. It had nothing to do with immigration. The telltale clue is the chain under Lady Liberty’s feet: she is stomping on it. “In the early sketches, she was also holding chains in her hand,” Edward Berenson, a professor of history at New York University, told me last week. The shackles were later replaced with a tablet noting the date of America’s independence. But the shattered chain under her feet remained.
The statue was the brainchild of Edouard de Laboulaye, a prominent French expert on the U.S. Constitution who also headed the French Anti-Slavery Society. After the Civil War, in 1865, he wanted to commemorate the end of slavery in the U.S., enshrined in the new Thirteenth Amendment, which, in theory, reaffirmed the ideals of freedom—this time for all people—first embodied in the Declaration of Independence. The now famous line—“Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,” from a poem by Emma Lazarus—wasn’t added until 1903, Berenson noted. The poem had been donated as part of a literary auction to raise funds for the statue’s pedestal. France donated the statue; the Americans had to raise the funds to pay for its pedestal. Long after Lazarus’s death, a friend lobbied to have the poem engraved on a plaque and added to the base. It has since associated the Statue of Liberty with a meaning that Laboulaye never intended.
One has to wonder what Laboulaye would think of America today, amid one of the country’s gravest periods of racial turmoil since the Civil War. Last month, a poll by Ipsos found that an overwhelming majority of people in fourteen countries, on six continents, support the protests that erupted across the United States after the murder of George Floyd. Russia, the fifteenth country in the survey, was the only place where a minority—about a third—backed the demonstrators.
On the eve of America’s anniversary—our two hundred and forty-fourth—much of the world believes that the country is racist, battered and bruised. “Europe has long been suspicious—even jealous—of the way America has been able to pursue national wealth and power despite its deep social inequities,” Robin Niblett, the director of the Royal Institute of International Affairs, also known as Chatham House, in London, told me. “When you take the Acela and pass through the poorest areas of Baltimore, you can’t believe you’re looking at part of the United States. There’s always been this sense of an underlying flaw in the U.S. system that it was getting away with—that somehow America was keeping just one step ahead of the grim reaper.”
The flaw, he said, is reflected in the American obsession with the stock market as the barometer of national health—economically, politically, socially. The reaction to Floyd’s murder exposed the deep injustices in the American economic model, as well as in the police and judicial systems, Niblett said. Europeans, he added, are no longer so envious.
The Trump Administration’s ineptitude in handling the covid-19 crisis, as well as the President’s disdain for longstanding allies and international treaties, have compounded the damage to America’s image. A second poll, released last week by the European Council on Foreign Relations, reported that public perceptions of the United States are increasingly negative in virtually all of the European nations surveyed. In France, the country that backed the American Revolution and later donated the Statue of Liberty, forty-six per cent of the people polled said that their opinion of the U.S. has “worsened a lot.” The proportion of respondents who still view America as a key ally is “vanishingly small”—as low as six per cent in Italy.
America’s standing worldwide has sunk before, although usually over foreign-policy decisions, such as the invasion of Iraq, in 2003. The mood globally feels different now, Richard Burkholder, who was the director of Gallup’s international polling for decades, told me. Criticism is now focussed on American practices at home. “The United States was once a beacon,” he said. “I don’t see people looking up to us as they did before.” Fintan O’Toole, a columnist for the Irish Times, was blunter. “Over more than two centuries, the United States has stirred a very wide range of feelings in the rest of the world: love and hatred, fear and hope, envy and contempt, awe and anger,” he wrote, in April. “But there is one emotion that has never been directed towards the US until now: pity.”
Negative polls, however, don’t capture the depth of anguish among people who long believed in American ideals, however imperfectly they were implemented in the past. Antoinette Sithole’s little brother, Hector Pieterson, was the George Floyd of South Africa. On June 16, 1976, I was in Soweto, then the black township outside Johannesburg, when the first mass uprising against apartheid began. The white minority government had just announced that children would henceforth be taught in Afrikaans, the language of white settlers. Black children poured out of schools in protest. Police opened fire. Hector, who was thirteen, was the first to die. The picture of a teen-ager carrying Hector’s limp body, Antoinette screaming at his side, made the front pages of newspapers worldwide—and eventually onto the walls of the United Nations. The memorial to the uprising—which eventually led to Nelson Mandela’s freedom, fourteen years later—is the Hector Pieterson Museum, in Soweto. Over the decades, Antoinette and I have stayed in touch. Her firstborn is named for her brother.
“You know everyone in South Africa, including me, thought the United States is the country where one can live better and be comfortable—a dreamland,” she told me. But America has recently turned into “a bully,” she said, adding, “I am wondering, why do they dwell so much on color? Being black, it’s a threat to them. Why? George Floyd was killed like a beast. For what?” Black and white go together “like hands,” she said. “How can you separate people? The one hand needs the other.” Discrimination in the twenty-first century in the United States is the same as apartheid in South Africa was in the twentieth, she said. Both represent evil.
Abdulkarim Soroush was an Iranian revolutionary who soured on the Islamic Republic. I met him at Tehran University, after he became the father of the country’s reform movement, in the nineteen-nineties. Soroush was known as the Martin Luther of Islam because—like the catalyst for the Protestant Reformation, in the sixteenth century—he challenged the absolutist beliefs and abusive practices of a faith. Soroush, a British-educated philosopher, infuriated Iran’s theocratic rulers by arguing that individual freedoms preceded religious belief. “The first pillar is this: To be a true believer, one must be free,” he told me, in 1995. “To become a believer under pressure or coercion will not be true belief. And this freedom is the basis of democracy.” A few months after that discussion, I was at the Jefferson Memorial, in Washington, D.C., and saw four quotes on its walls. I took photos and carried them back to Iran on my next visit. I laid the four pictures out on Soroush’s oak desk. One of them read “Almighty God hath created the mind free. All attempts to influence it by temporal punishments or burdens . . . are a departure from the plan of the Holy Author of our religion.” Soroush read each one, then took off his wire-rimmed glasses. “Exactly,” he pronounced.
Soroush subsequently wrote about the need to separate mosque and state. He argued that the Supreme Leader could not be above the law—or possess powers to override the President, veto legislation, overturn judicial verdicts, or disqualify candidates from running for office. Soroush was increasingly harassed and threatened. In 2000, he fled to the West. He did teaching or research stints at Harvard, Princeton, Georgetown, Stanford, Columbia, and the Library of Congress. He is now an American citizen and lives in California. One of his sons works for Microsoft in Seattle.
“My life here has been a happy experience. I have the freedom to think and write and lecture—all the things denied to me in my own country,” he told me last week. But he is haunted by current events in his new home. America formerly demonstrated an ability to absorb big changes—a hallmark of democracy, he said. “The United States, after the black movement led by Martin Luther King, Jr., became a different country. If it had happened in another place, it could have caused a revolution, but here the system could absorb it.” To the outside world, America appeared to be a place to find justice and fairness. “But nowadays, I see a different face,” he said. “Something is going badly wrong in this country.”
America today is a capitalist democracy more than a liberal democracy, Soroush said: “Capital is the tyrant here.” Even justice—“the pounding heart of democracy”—has become expensive, he added. “I greatly fear that this may be lost—due to racism, and capitalist democracy and the justice system becoming weaker for the poor. Heaven forbid, if that happens, America would not be the aspiration of anyone in the world.”
The sorry state of America’s political and physical health ripples across the globe. The United States, long the bedrock of the Western alliance, is less inspirational today—and perhaps will be even less so tomorrow. “The United States has traditionally had an ability to reinvent itself,” Mark Leonard, the co-founder and director of the European Council on Foreign Relations, told me. “The brutality of the American political system—where entire élites get kicked out whenever there is a change of party at the top—has led to resilience historically. What you see now are structural problems much more difficult to solve.” He added that inequality is so “deeply baked”—in education, property and the economy, job opportunities, gerrymandering of voting districts, policing and justice, and the media—that America is now a “toxic brew” of problems. “That means there’s not much bandwidth in America for thinking about anything other than its culture wars,” he said.
This Fourth of July holiday is one of the most humbling in our history. Even at the height of world wars or the Great Depression, America inspired. But, today, the United States is destroying the moral authority it once had. There will still be fireworks. And the Statue of Liberty still towers over New York Harbor. But it is harder today to convince others that Americans embrace—or practice—the ideals that Lady Liberty represents.
The statue was the brainchild of Edouard de Laboulaye, a prominent French expert on the U.S. Constitution who also headed the French Anti-Slavery Society. After the Civil War, in 1865, he wanted to commemorate the end of slavery in the U.S., enshrined in the new Thirteenth Amendment, which, in theory, reaffirmed the ideals of freedom—this time for all people—first embodied in the Declaration of Independence. The now famous line—“Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,” from a poem by Emma Lazarus—wasn’t added until 1903, Berenson noted. The poem had been donated as part of a literary auction to raise funds for the statue’s pedestal. France donated the statue; the Americans had to raise the funds to pay for its pedestal. Long after Lazarus’s death, a friend lobbied to have the poem engraved on a plaque and added to the base. It has since associated the Statue of Liberty with a meaning that Laboulaye never intended.
One has to wonder what Laboulaye would think of America today, amid one of the country’s gravest periods of racial turmoil since the Civil War. Last month, a poll by Ipsos found that an overwhelming majority of people in fourteen countries, on six continents, support the protests that erupted across the United States after the murder of George Floyd. Russia, the fifteenth country in the survey, was the only place where a minority—about a third—backed the demonstrators.
On the eve of America’s anniversary—our two hundred and forty-fourth—much of the world believes that the country is racist, battered and bruised. “Europe has long been suspicious—even jealous—of the way America has been able to pursue national wealth and power despite its deep social inequities,” Robin Niblett, the director of the Royal Institute of International Affairs, also known as Chatham House, in London, told me. “When you take the Acela and pass through the poorest areas of Baltimore, you can’t believe you’re looking at part of the United States. There’s always been this sense of an underlying flaw in the U.S. system that it was getting away with—that somehow America was keeping just one step ahead of the grim reaper.”
The flaw, he said, is reflected in the American obsession with the stock market as the barometer of national health—economically, politically, socially. The reaction to Floyd’s murder exposed the deep injustices in the American economic model, as well as in the police and judicial systems, Niblett said. Europeans, he added, are no longer so envious.
The Trump Administration’s ineptitude in handling the covid-19 crisis, as well as the President’s disdain for longstanding allies and international treaties, have compounded the damage to America’s image. A second poll, released last week by the European Council on Foreign Relations, reported that public perceptions of the United States are increasingly negative in virtually all of the European nations surveyed. In France, the country that backed the American Revolution and later donated the Statue of Liberty, forty-six per cent of the people polled said that their opinion of the U.S. has “worsened a lot.” The proportion of respondents who still view America as a key ally is “vanishingly small”—as low as six per cent in Italy.
America’s standing worldwide has sunk before, although usually over foreign-policy decisions, such as the invasion of Iraq, in 2003. The mood globally feels different now, Richard Burkholder, who was the director of Gallup’s international polling for decades, told me. Criticism is now focussed on American practices at home. “The United States was once a beacon,” he said. “I don’t see people looking up to us as they did before.” Fintan O’Toole, a columnist for the Irish Times, was blunter. “Over more than two centuries, the United States has stirred a very wide range of feelings in the rest of the world: love and hatred, fear and hope, envy and contempt, awe and anger,” he wrote, in April. “But there is one emotion that has never been directed towards the US until now: pity.”
Negative polls, however, don’t capture the depth of anguish among people who long believed in American ideals, however imperfectly they were implemented in the past. Antoinette Sithole’s little brother, Hector Pieterson, was the George Floyd of South Africa. On June 16, 1976, I was in Soweto, then the black township outside Johannesburg, when the first mass uprising against apartheid began. The white minority government had just announced that children would henceforth be taught in Afrikaans, the language of white settlers. Black children poured out of schools in protest. Police opened fire. Hector, who was thirteen, was the first to die. The picture of a teen-ager carrying Hector’s limp body, Antoinette screaming at his side, made the front pages of newspapers worldwide—and eventually onto the walls of the United Nations. The memorial to the uprising—which eventually led to Nelson Mandela’s freedom, fourteen years later—is the Hector Pieterson Museum, in Soweto. Over the decades, Antoinette and I have stayed in touch. Her firstborn is named for her brother.
“You know everyone in South Africa, including me, thought the United States is the country where one can live better and be comfortable—a dreamland,” she told me. But America has recently turned into “a bully,” she said, adding, “I am wondering, why do they dwell so much on color? Being black, it’s a threat to them. Why? George Floyd was killed like a beast. For what?” Black and white go together “like hands,” she said. “How can you separate people? The one hand needs the other.” Discrimination in the twenty-first century in the United States is the same as apartheid in South Africa was in the twentieth, she said. Both represent evil.
Abdulkarim Soroush was an Iranian revolutionary who soured on the Islamic Republic. I met him at Tehran University, after he became the father of the country’s reform movement, in the nineteen-nineties. Soroush was known as the Martin Luther of Islam because—like the catalyst for the Protestant Reformation, in the sixteenth century—he challenged the absolutist beliefs and abusive practices of a faith. Soroush, a British-educated philosopher, infuriated Iran’s theocratic rulers by arguing that individual freedoms preceded religious belief. “The first pillar is this: To be a true believer, one must be free,” he told me, in 1995. “To become a believer under pressure or coercion will not be true belief. And this freedom is the basis of democracy.” A few months after that discussion, I was at the Jefferson Memorial, in Washington, D.C., and saw four quotes on its walls. I took photos and carried them back to Iran on my next visit. I laid the four pictures out on Soroush’s oak desk. One of them read “Almighty God hath created the mind free. All attempts to influence it by temporal punishments or burdens . . . are a departure from the plan of the Holy Author of our religion.” Soroush read each one, then took off his wire-rimmed glasses. “Exactly,” he pronounced.
Soroush subsequently wrote about the need to separate mosque and state. He argued that the Supreme Leader could not be above the law—or possess powers to override the President, veto legislation, overturn judicial verdicts, or disqualify candidates from running for office. Soroush was increasingly harassed and threatened. In 2000, he fled to the West. He did teaching or research stints at Harvard, Princeton, Georgetown, Stanford, Columbia, and the Library of Congress. He is now an American citizen and lives in California. One of his sons works for Microsoft in Seattle.
“My life here has been a happy experience. I have the freedom to think and write and lecture—all the things denied to me in my own country,” he told me last week. But he is haunted by current events in his new home. America formerly demonstrated an ability to absorb big changes—a hallmark of democracy, he said. “The United States, after the black movement led by Martin Luther King, Jr., became a different country. If it had happened in another place, it could have caused a revolution, but here the system could absorb it.” To the outside world, America appeared to be a place to find justice and fairness. “But nowadays, I see a different face,” he said. “Something is going badly wrong in this country.”
America today is a capitalist democracy more than a liberal democracy, Soroush said: “Capital is the tyrant here.” Even justice—“the pounding heart of democracy”—has become expensive, he added. “I greatly fear that this may be lost—due to racism, and capitalist democracy and the justice system becoming weaker for the poor. Heaven forbid, if that happens, America would not be the aspiration of anyone in the world.”
The sorry state of America’s political and physical health ripples across the globe. The United States, long the bedrock of the Western alliance, is less inspirational today—and perhaps will be even less so tomorrow. “The United States has traditionally had an ability to reinvent itself,” Mark Leonard, the co-founder and director of the European Council on Foreign Relations, told me. “The brutality of the American political system—where entire élites get kicked out whenever there is a change of party at the top—has led to resilience historically. What you see now are structural problems much more difficult to solve.” He added that inequality is so “deeply baked”—in education, property and the economy, job opportunities, gerrymandering of voting districts, policing and justice, and the media—that America is now a “toxic brew” of problems. “That means there’s not much bandwidth in America for thinking about anything other than its culture wars,” he said.
This Fourth of July holiday is one of the most humbling in our history. Even at the height of world wars or the Great Depression, America inspired. But, today, the United States is destroying the moral authority it once had. There will still be fireworks. And the Statue of Liberty still towers over New York Harbor. But it is harder today to convince others that Americans embrace—or practice—the ideals that Lady Liberty represents.
Racism is an essential tool for maintaining the capitalist order
June 24, 2020
By Richard Wolff, Independent Media Institute Commentary - raw story
U.S. capitalism survived because it found a solution to the basic problem of its instability, its business cycles. Since capitalism never could end cyclical downturns and their awful effects, its survival required making those effects somehow socially tolerable. Systemic racism survived in the post-Civil War United States partly because it helped to achieve that tolerability. Capitalism provided conditions for the reproduction of systemic racism, and vice versa.
Every four to seven years, on average, capitalism produces a downturn (“recession,” “depression,” “bust,” “crash”—many words for a problem so regularly repeated). Political leaders, economists, and others have long searched for a cure for capitalism’s instability. None was ever found. Capitalism has thus already recorded three crashes in this new century (spring of 2000, autumn of 2008, and now in 2020).
Defenders of capitalism prefer to call its inescapable instability the “business cycle.” That sounds less awful. Yet its cycles’ hard reality has always frightened capitalism’s defenders. They recognize that when large numbers of people suddenly lose their jobs, many businesses die, production shrinks, and governments lose tax revenues, the results can and often do threaten the entire economic system. Capitalism’s cyclical crises could potentially turn their victims against it and make them receptive to the system’s critics.
This would more likely happen if everyone in the society were roughly equally vulnerable to cyclical downturns. Most employees would then rightly worry that their jobs would be lost in the next crash. They would periodically face income losses, interrupted educations, lost homes, and so on. Whatever relief employees felt if neighbors, rather than themselves, got fired, they would know that it might well be their turn in the next cycle. The losses, insecurities, and anxieties produced by such a capitalism would long ago have turned employees against it and provoked transition to a different system.
U.S. capitalism solved its instability problem by making cyclical downturns afflict chiefly a minority subpart of the whole working class. It positioned that minority to bear the brunt of each cycle and suffer its damages disproportionally. That minority was repeatedly drawn into and then thrown out of jobs as the cycle dictated. Any savings it might accumulate when working would be lost when unemployed. Repeated firings precluded such a minority from enjoying the benefits of job longevity (seniority, promotion, household stability, etc.). Poverty, disrupted households and families, unaffordable housing, education, and medical care would haunt such a minority. It would become capitalism’s “business cycle shock-absorber”—the last hired, first fired—across the four-to-seven year average duration of its cycles.
For capitalism, making such a minority absorb most of the costs of capitalism’s instability allowed the majority of the working class to be relatively exempted, relieved, freed from them. The majority could be less subject to cycles because the minority was made relatively much more subject. Capitalism promised the majority relatively secure jobs and incomes because it took those away from the minority. The majority could thus worry less about the next cycle, whereas the minority had to worry more and adjust their lives more. Racists could then attribute the resulting differences between minority and majority subparts of a population to inherent qualities of different “races” instead.
Other advanced capitalist countries found parallel solutions. Some condemned immigrants to play the role assigned to African Americans in the United States. Racism aimed at immigrants often followed. In cyclical upswings, immigrants would be brought in: North Africans into France, southern Italians into Switzerland, Turks into Germany, and so on. Then, cyclical downswings would return those immigrants to their home countries. Capitalisms would thus save on costs of unemployment insurance, welfare payments, etc., for the workers who had returned. While some capitalisms relied on domestic minorities to be shock-absorbers and others relied on immigrants, some countries relied on both. The United States used Central American immigrants alongside domestic African Americans, and it still does. Germany allowed some immigrants to settle and acquire German citizenship alongside Turkish and other immigrant “guest workers.”
In the United States, married white women also played the role of business cycle shock-absorber. During cyclical upswings, they would enter the paid labor force in part-time or full-time positions. Like African Americans, they earned less than white men. Women’s jobs, too, were likely to be temporary, undone by cyclical downturns.
Whatever communities were forced into the shock-absorber role, poverty, depression, broken families, slums, and inadequate education and health facilities became more widespread among them than they were among the majority of the working class. Insecure jobs, incomes, homes, and lives often bred bitterness, envy, desperation, crime, and violence. These collateral damages had to be “managed” by the capitalisms whose survival depended on producing and reproducing those communities. Police and prisons were and are assigned that management task.
Police and prisons were to “keep the lid on,” “tame,” “patrol and control” the restive portions of the shock-absorber communities sequestered in slums or ghettos. Interactions with police coupled with cycling and recycling through prisons were the chosen means to manage capitalism’s collateral damage. Those means generated collateral damage of their own: the long, tragic record of police violence, use of excessive force, the harshness and violence of incarceration, and the killing especially of African Americans.
Why were African Americans “chosen” to be key (but not the only) cyclical shock-absorbers in the United States? One factor concerned the racist legacies of U.S. slavery. They included beliefs that slaves were either not fully human or inferior humans. Even the U.S. Constitution had counted a slave as merely three-fifths of a full (i.e., white) person for census purposes. Accommodation to slavery before the U.S. Civil War had already shaped a racialized consciousness in both masters and slaves. And because U.S. slavery entailed different skin colors for masters and slaves (unlike many slaveries in world history), a readily identifiable minority had already been defined in racial terms in the slave portions of the United States. Moreover, that definition had spread to other parts of the United States as well. U.S. capitalism used, absorbed, and built on slavery’s legacy by inserting large portions of the African American community into the shock-absorber role that the system required. The racism developed by U.S. slavery thereby both facilitated U.S. capitalism and was reinforced by it.
A significant portion of the white working class in all capitalisms has always also been forced into the shock-absorber role. “White trash” in U.S. capitalism was never far from the African Americans similarly situated. There thus arose possibilities of class solidarity between these Black and white working-class communities. U.S. history displays moments when those possibilities were realized, as C. Vann Woodward documented so well. It also displays moments of intense racist violence used to block the realization of those possibilities. Employers played on racialized differences to keep employees from unifying against them. In bitter competitions between Black and white shock-absorbers for cyclically scarce jobs, whites could and often did use racism to gain advantages in access to those jobs. In multiple ways, then, capitalism fostered and benefited from racism; it thus settled deeply into the system.
Fundamental injustice characterized the relationship between police and prisons, on the one hand, and the African American and other communities (Indigenous, people of color) condemned to play capitalism’s shock-absorber role, on the other. The solution was and is not better training or more funding; both have been tried repeatedly and both have likewise failed repeatedly. A real solution would provide a decently paid job to everyone who wants one as a matter of right. Unemployment would then be outlawed much like slavery, child abuse, etc. Taxes levied on capitalist enterprises would provide the funds needed to find jobs, private or public, for those laid off by an employer (much as such taxes help fund unemployment insurance now). Those funds would include wages or salaries paid for each worker’s time between being laid off and rehired. Minimum wages, applied universally, would cover reasonable housing, transport, health care and other living costs.
If such a solution were deemed to be incompatible with capitalism as a system, capitalism would have to give way to a system that made adequately paid employment a basic right for all. Enterprise profit would then finally be ejected from its throne as capitalism’s number one social priority.
Such a solution would finally free African Americans, Indigenous, and Brown people from long-standing abuses in and by police and prisons. It would thus reduce the racism that those institutions have exemplified and reinforced. It would also reduce pressures on police and prison personnel to behave in ways that self-destructively rob them of their humanity as well as oppress others. Police and prisons in the United States today serve an inherently unstable capitalism by means of systemic racism. The logic of alliance between anti-racism and anti-capitalism could not be clearer.
Every four to seven years, on average, capitalism produces a downturn (“recession,” “depression,” “bust,” “crash”—many words for a problem so regularly repeated). Political leaders, economists, and others have long searched for a cure for capitalism’s instability. None was ever found. Capitalism has thus already recorded three crashes in this new century (spring of 2000, autumn of 2008, and now in 2020).
Defenders of capitalism prefer to call its inescapable instability the “business cycle.” That sounds less awful. Yet its cycles’ hard reality has always frightened capitalism’s defenders. They recognize that when large numbers of people suddenly lose their jobs, many businesses die, production shrinks, and governments lose tax revenues, the results can and often do threaten the entire economic system. Capitalism’s cyclical crises could potentially turn their victims against it and make them receptive to the system’s critics.
This would more likely happen if everyone in the society were roughly equally vulnerable to cyclical downturns. Most employees would then rightly worry that their jobs would be lost in the next crash. They would periodically face income losses, interrupted educations, lost homes, and so on. Whatever relief employees felt if neighbors, rather than themselves, got fired, they would know that it might well be their turn in the next cycle. The losses, insecurities, and anxieties produced by such a capitalism would long ago have turned employees against it and provoked transition to a different system.
U.S. capitalism solved its instability problem by making cyclical downturns afflict chiefly a minority subpart of the whole working class. It positioned that minority to bear the brunt of each cycle and suffer its damages disproportionally. That minority was repeatedly drawn into and then thrown out of jobs as the cycle dictated. Any savings it might accumulate when working would be lost when unemployed. Repeated firings precluded such a minority from enjoying the benefits of job longevity (seniority, promotion, household stability, etc.). Poverty, disrupted households and families, unaffordable housing, education, and medical care would haunt such a minority. It would become capitalism’s “business cycle shock-absorber”—the last hired, first fired—across the four-to-seven year average duration of its cycles.
For capitalism, making such a minority absorb most of the costs of capitalism’s instability allowed the majority of the working class to be relatively exempted, relieved, freed from them. The majority could be less subject to cycles because the minority was made relatively much more subject. Capitalism promised the majority relatively secure jobs and incomes because it took those away from the minority. The majority could thus worry less about the next cycle, whereas the minority had to worry more and adjust their lives more. Racists could then attribute the resulting differences between minority and majority subparts of a population to inherent qualities of different “races” instead.
Other advanced capitalist countries found parallel solutions. Some condemned immigrants to play the role assigned to African Americans in the United States. Racism aimed at immigrants often followed. In cyclical upswings, immigrants would be brought in: North Africans into France, southern Italians into Switzerland, Turks into Germany, and so on. Then, cyclical downswings would return those immigrants to their home countries. Capitalisms would thus save on costs of unemployment insurance, welfare payments, etc., for the workers who had returned. While some capitalisms relied on domestic minorities to be shock-absorbers and others relied on immigrants, some countries relied on both. The United States used Central American immigrants alongside domestic African Americans, and it still does. Germany allowed some immigrants to settle and acquire German citizenship alongside Turkish and other immigrant “guest workers.”
In the United States, married white women also played the role of business cycle shock-absorber. During cyclical upswings, they would enter the paid labor force in part-time or full-time positions. Like African Americans, they earned less than white men. Women’s jobs, too, were likely to be temporary, undone by cyclical downturns.
Whatever communities were forced into the shock-absorber role, poverty, depression, broken families, slums, and inadequate education and health facilities became more widespread among them than they were among the majority of the working class. Insecure jobs, incomes, homes, and lives often bred bitterness, envy, desperation, crime, and violence. These collateral damages had to be “managed” by the capitalisms whose survival depended on producing and reproducing those communities. Police and prisons were and are assigned that management task.
Police and prisons were to “keep the lid on,” “tame,” “patrol and control” the restive portions of the shock-absorber communities sequestered in slums or ghettos. Interactions with police coupled with cycling and recycling through prisons were the chosen means to manage capitalism’s collateral damage. Those means generated collateral damage of their own: the long, tragic record of police violence, use of excessive force, the harshness and violence of incarceration, and the killing especially of African Americans.
Why were African Americans “chosen” to be key (but not the only) cyclical shock-absorbers in the United States? One factor concerned the racist legacies of U.S. slavery. They included beliefs that slaves were either not fully human or inferior humans. Even the U.S. Constitution had counted a slave as merely three-fifths of a full (i.e., white) person for census purposes. Accommodation to slavery before the U.S. Civil War had already shaped a racialized consciousness in both masters and slaves. And because U.S. slavery entailed different skin colors for masters and slaves (unlike many slaveries in world history), a readily identifiable minority had already been defined in racial terms in the slave portions of the United States. Moreover, that definition had spread to other parts of the United States as well. U.S. capitalism used, absorbed, and built on slavery’s legacy by inserting large portions of the African American community into the shock-absorber role that the system required. The racism developed by U.S. slavery thereby both facilitated U.S. capitalism and was reinforced by it.
A significant portion of the white working class in all capitalisms has always also been forced into the shock-absorber role. “White trash” in U.S. capitalism was never far from the African Americans similarly situated. There thus arose possibilities of class solidarity between these Black and white working-class communities. U.S. history displays moments when those possibilities were realized, as C. Vann Woodward documented so well. It also displays moments of intense racist violence used to block the realization of those possibilities. Employers played on racialized differences to keep employees from unifying against them. In bitter competitions between Black and white shock-absorbers for cyclically scarce jobs, whites could and often did use racism to gain advantages in access to those jobs. In multiple ways, then, capitalism fostered and benefited from racism; it thus settled deeply into the system.
Fundamental injustice characterized the relationship between police and prisons, on the one hand, and the African American and other communities (Indigenous, people of color) condemned to play capitalism’s shock-absorber role, on the other. The solution was and is not better training or more funding; both have been tried repeatedly and both have likewise failed repeatedly. A real solution would provide a decently paid job to everyone who wants one as a matter of right. Unemployment would then be outlawed much like slavery, child abuse, etc. Taxes levied on capitalist enterprises would provide the funds needed to find jobs, private or public, for those laid off by an employer (much as such taxes help fund unemployment insurance now). Those funds would include wages or salaries paid for each worker’s time between being laid off and rehired. Minimum wages, applied universally, would cover reasonable housing, transport, health care and other living costs.
If such a solution were deemed to be incompatible with capitalism as a system, capitalism would have to give way to a system that made adequately paid employment a basic right for all. Enterprise profit would then finally be ejected from its throne as capitalism’s number one social priority.
Such a solution would finally free African Americans, Indigenous, and Brown people from long-standing abuses in and by police and prisons. It would thus reduce the racism that those institutions have exemplified and reinforced. It would also reduce pressures on police and prison personnel to behave in ways that self-destructively rob them of their humanity as well as oppress others. Police and prisons in the United States today serve an inherently unstable capitalism by means of systemic racism. The logic of alliance between anti-racism and anti-capitalism could not be clearer.
We Are Witnessing an Uprising Against a World Built on Anti-Blackness
BY Connie Wun, Truthout
PUBLISHED June 16, 2020
How we understand the current uprising in the wake of multiple police killings is critical. It is not only a protest. If we are fortunate, it stays an uprising — against a whole system built on anti-Blackness. This is not about a few “bad apples,” but an entire institution that has a monopoly on the definition of “justice.” It is about people’s psychic, emotional and economic investments in a heavily resourced system that functions to protect white supremacy through anti-Black violence. It is about George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Tony McDade, Oscar Grant, Sandra Bland, Rekia Boyd and so many others, as well as the hundreds of years’ worth of violence against Black communities. As such, and as the world is witnessing — because of the gravity and depth — every strategy to disturb, let alone upend this world, will be taken.
But in recent days, I have received too many messages and phone calls that essentially ask, “I know you’re against police violence, but are you in support of looting?” Before a long pause and depending upon my mood, I will talk about how the United States is built upon the looting of land, resources and human life from Indigenous peoples. I will emphasize that this nation is made possible through the theft of Black humans, life, labor, cultures and families — through the legacy of chattel slavery, the prison-industrial complex, the child welfare system, the medical-industrial complex, the educational system, and the culture vultures who love all things Black but have been extremely quiet during this time. On other days, I simply say, “Black lives over property every day.”
Sometimes, people ask why the uprising is happening. I am forced to recall that the U.S. educational system has done an incredible job in inducing historical amnesia and reproducing multicultural white nationalism while policing Black youth and Black culture. As a former educator, I don’t remember teaching about the depth, breadth, gravity and ongoing implications of the transatlantic slave trade, the genocide of Native Americans, nor the U.S. occupation and colonial wars in Vietnam, Philippines, Guam, Hawaii, Samoa, Laos, Cambodia and elsewhere. I am reminded that this schooling system does not teach about the legacy of anti-Black violence, including the 1951 “We Charge Genocide: The Crime of Government Against the Negro People” petition, which was submitted to the United Nations. This petition documented 152 killings and 344 other acts of violence against Black communities in the U.S. between 1945–1951. We have barely learned about the important work of the Chicago-based We Charge Genocide campaign that continued in the legacy of resistance. Nor has the nation learned about the history of the Chicago Police Department with torture and the brilliant organizing to win reparations for the more than 100 victims, most of whom are Black men. Instead, I am aware of the ongoing history lessons and political science courses that drill down the importance of the Constitution and of the history of the U.S.’s purported greatness. I am also reminded that schools do not only help craft a white nationalist narrative and identities, but the policies and practices have historically and foundationally been anti-Black.
Very rarely are we taught that anti-Black violence is enacted by and makes white supremacy possible. We know this through the transatlantic slave trade, red-lining and racial covenants, the Tulsa massacre, policing and incarceration, educational and health disparities, and more. These forms of violence are committed by individuals and institutions in order to delineate and protect the supremacy of whiteness and its borders. Unfortunately, communities that consciously or unconsciously subscribe to the nation’s values and systems that are built upon anti-Blackness are implicated in the violence until we all work to upend it.
When people ask why this uprising is happening, I am also forced to painfully recall a willful ignorance that is made possible through privilege and safety. For way too long, people — particularly non-Black communities — have benefited from anti-Blackness (and albeit differently, anti-Indigeneity).
There is a (real or imagined) privilege in being able to believe in, let alone to realistically rely on, the police. There is an Amy Cooper, who so easily called on the police to attend to her manufactured white fear and tears, in every workplace and predominantly white neighborhood. She readily weaponizes her white womanhood to incriminate and punish Black communities. This violent form of comfort and reliance upon criminalization makes police violence possible.
There is also a relative ease in the ways that so many non-Black communities love and wear Black culture, but are either silent or only perform solidarity in the war against Black death. The ways that their forms of support do not help to create substantial systemic change instead fulfills their own guilts or comforts their own sadness. Instead of creating change or centering Black rage or leadership, corporations and institutions clamor to declare solidarity as a trend. Instead of redistributing funds, helping to house gentrified and displaced communities, helping to advance campaigns to defund and abolish police, or deeply invest in community-based economies, they capitalize off of grief with empty letters of support and new marketing strategies. This uprising demands for everyone to actively divest from all forms of policing, to redistribute resources and help create conditions for communities to thrive.
When people ask about why the uprising is happening, they fail to realize that this was all a work in progress. Organizers and educators have long worked to prepare us for this moment. This work is in response to a system and world ready to implode because too many have been invested and profited from Black deaths. There are civilians, non-police officers, who have also committed anti-Black violence in their neighborhoods or schools; populations of people who appropriate Blackness but scoff at movements to acknowledge Black suffering, let alone share their resources. There are many who rail against the destruction of businesses, but do not work to systematically welcome Black communities into their own. None of this means that people have to experience violence, but it does mean that lives are built upon anti-Blackness, and people should not have the luxury of deciding when or where they will participate in working to end that violence.
Anti-Black violence isn’t only about police violence. It is systemic. It takes place through other state institutions and is interpersonal. These layers of violence and the silence or disregard for their impacts beg for an uprising against “business as usual” — figuratively and literally.
When people argue that the uprisings have negatively impacted businesses and corporations, we have to know that many of these businesses have been historically and contemporarily built upon so much bloodshed.
More than 100,000 people have died — many of them Black, Latinx, Indigenous and other communities of color — from COVID-19. Meanwhile, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos’s fortune grows by $24 billion as his company’s workers and other essential workers continue to be dangerously exposed to the virus.
All of this incites justifiable rage. When someone says that the shutting down of businesses will cause people to lose their jobs, one cannot help but say, the job that makes $15 an hour or less, while corporate executives make hundreds of thousands more?
People are long exhausted of a system that does not fail them but systematically robs them of health, their lives, their labor and too much more. The U.S. has benefited those who are financially resourced and those with racial capital — while systematically working to debilitate others, particularly Black communities. While there is ongoing resistance and defiance, this moment is when we are able to witness, support and participate in a collective uprising.
Because when people ask what this is about, it is not only about the violence of the police — the entity that needs to be defunded so that resources can be redirected toward historically neglected communities, including Black, Indigenous, low-income communities of color — it is about an entire nation that was built upon and continues to build upon the ongoing looting of Black (and Indigenous) communities. This cannot be a time in which people are interested in saving themselves, especially not when we are in the middle of a global pandemic that is decimating entire populations. This is not the time to try to save this violent nation or anything that it once was. It is a time to create an entirely different world because Black lives depend upon it. There can be no going back.
But in recent days, I have received too many messages and phone calls that essentially ask, “I know you’re against police violence, but are you in support of looting?” Before a long pause and depending upon my mood, I will talk about how the United States is built upon the looting of land, resources and human life from Indigenous peoples. I will emphasize that this nation is made possible through the theft of Black humans, life, labor, cultures and families — through the legacy of chattel slavery, the prison-industrial complex, the child welfare system, the medical-industrial complex, the educational system, and the culture vultures who love all things Black but have been extremely quiet during this time. On other days, I simply say, “Black lives over property every day.”
Sometimes, people ask why the uprising is happening. I am forced to recall that the U.S. educational system has done an incredible job in inducing historical amnesia and reproducing multicultural white nationalism while policing Black youth and Black culture. As a former educator, I don’t remember teaching about the depth, breadth, gravity and ongoing implications of the transatlantic slave trade, the genocide of Native Americans, nor the U.S. occupation and colonial wars in Vietnam, Philippines, Guam, Hawaii, Samoa, Laos, Cambodia and elsewhere. I am reminded that this schooling system does not teach about the legacy of anti-Black violence, including the 1951 “We Charge Genocide: The Crime of Government Against the Negro People” petition, which was submitted to the United Nations. This petition documented 152 killings and 344 other acts of violence against Black communities in the U.S. between 1945–1951. We have barely learned about the important work of the Chicago-based We Charge Genocide campaign that continued in the legacy of resistance. Nor has the nation learned about the history of the Chicago Police Department with torture and the brilliant organizing to win reparations for the more than 100 victims, most of whom are Black men. Instead, I am aware of the ongoing history lessons and political science courses that drill down the importance of the Constitution and of the history of the U.S.’s purported greatness. I am also reminded that schools do not only help craft a white nationalist narrative and identities, but the policies and practices have historically and foundationally been anti-Black.
Very rarely are we taught that anti-Black violence is enacted by and makes white supremacy possible. We know this through the transatlantic slave trade, red-lining and racial covenants, the Tulsa massacre, policing and incarceration, educational and health disparities, and more. These forms of violence are committed by individuals and institutions in order to delineate and protect the supremacy of whiteness and its borders. Unfortunately, communities that consciously or unconsciously subscribe to the nation’s values and systems that are built upon anti-Blackness are implicated in the violence until we all work to upend it.
When people ask why this uprising is happening, I am also forced to painfully recall a willful ignorance that is made possible through privilege and safety. For way too long, people — particularly non-Black communities — have benefited from anti-Blackness (and albeit differently, anti-Indigeneity).
There is a (real or imagined) privilege in being able to believe in, let alone to realistically rely on, the police. There is an Amy Cooper, who so easily called on the police to attend to her manufactured white fear and tears, in every workplace and predominantly white neighborhood. She readily weaponizes her white womanhood to incriminate and punish Black communities. This violent form of comfort and reliance upon criminalization makes police violence possible.
There is also a relative ease in the ways that so many non-Black communities love and wear Black culture, but are either silent or only perform solidarity in the war against Black death. The ways that their forms of support do not help to create substantial systemic change instead fulfills their own guilts or comforts their own sadness. Instead of creating change or centering Black rage or leadership, corporations and institutions clamor to declare solidarity as a trend. Instead of redistributing funds, helping to house gentrified and displaced communities, helping to advance campaigns to defund and abolish police, or deeply invest in community-based economies, they capitalize off of grief with empty letters of support and new marketing strategies. This uprising demands for everyone to actively divest from all forms of policing, to redistribute resources and help create conditions for communities to thrive.
When people ask about why the uprising is happening, they fail to realize that this was all a work in progress. Organizers and educators have long worked to prepare us for this moment. This work is in response to a system and world ready to implode because too many have been invested and profited from Black deaths. There are civilians, non-police officers, who have also committed anti-Black violence in their neighborhoods or schools; populations of people who appropriate Blackness but scoff at movements to acknowledge Black suffering, let alone share their resources. There are many who rail against the destruction of businesses, but do not work to systematically welcome Black communities into their own. None of this means that people have to experience violence, but it does mean that lives are built upon anti-Blackness, and people should not have the luxury of deciding when or where they will participate in working to end that violence.
Anti-Black violence isn’t only about police violence. It is systemic. It takes place through other state institutions and is interpersonal. These layers of violence and the silence or disregard for their impacts beg for an uprising against “business as usual” — figuratively and literally.
When people argue that the uprisings have negatively impacted businesses and corporations, we have to know that many of these businesses have been historically and contemporarily built upon so much bloodshed.
More than 100,000 people have died — many of them Black, Latinx, Indigenous and other communities of color — from COVID-19. Meanwhile, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos’s fortune grows by $24 billion as his company’s workers and other essential workers continue to be dangerously exposed to the virus.
All of this incites justifiable rage. When someone says that the shutting down of businesses will cause people to lose their jobs, one cannot help but say, the job that makes $15 an hour or less, while corporate executives make hundreds of thousands more?
People are long exhausted of a system that does not fail them but systematically robs them of health, their lives, their labor and too much more. The U.S. has benefited those who are financially resourced and those with racial capital — while systematically working to debilitate others, particularly Black communities. While there is ongoing resistance and defiance, this moment is when we are able to witness, support and participate in a collective uprising.
Because when people ask what this is about, it is not only about the violence of the police — the entity that needs to be defunded so that resources can be redirected toward historically neglected communities, including Black, Indigenous, low-income communities of color — it is about an entire nation that was built upon and continues to build upon the ongoing looting of Black (and Indigenous) communities. This cannot be a time in which people are interested in saving themselves, especially not when we are in the middle of a global pandemic that is decimating entire populations. This is not the time to try to save this violent nation or anything that it once was. It is a time to create an entirely different world because Black lives depend upon it. There can be no going back.
opinion
Why white silence is deafening — and deadly
Your anger and sadness are meaningless if you choose to do nothing about the small things you have control over
SIRRY ALANG - salon
MAY 31, 2020 9:00AM (UTC)
Once again, a video was released: George Floyd. For eight minutes, life was squeezed out of him. We saw him beg for water, for his breath, for his life. We saw the indifference with which his pleas were met. The video depicted Derek Chauvin, a now-fired Minneapolis police officer charged with murder, kneeling on Mr. Floyd's neck as he lost consciousness. It is enraging and horrifying, yet common.
Most white people I know believe that black lives matter. They will tell you they voted for Obama twice. They cannot stand Donald Trump. They are enraged by police brutality. These are the white people I want to speak to: Your anger and sadness about the big things are meaningless if you choose to do nothing about the small things you have control over.
Words matter. Express your outrage. It makes me feel supported. If you don't know what to say, say so. Share something that someone else has written that you agree with. For the sake of black lives, don't be silent. White silence is deafening. I might assume you care, but I will also assume you do not care enough to resist publicly. Perhaps you worry about your colleagues or friends who might think differently, a family member who is a police officer, or others on social media who might "attack" you. Put your concerns in perspective. George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, among many others, were attacked and lost their lives because of the silence of good white people.
Actions matter. Don't just talk, act. Check out the actions that white people have already compiled for their peers. What I want to do here is draw your attention to similarities between three very mundane actions of white people that perpetuate modern-day lynching without requiring a knee on the neck, a chokehold, or a loaded gun. These types of everyday actions of white people make it difficult for my community to breathe.
1. The failure to humanize black people.
Intellectually, you may know we are people. Practically, we aren't full people to you; people with names, joys and worries, families and friends. You see us only when you fetishize or tokenize us, need to build your "woke" credentials or because you perceive us as a threat. You do not think of us as people. In my graduate school years, I was often referred to as "the black girl in Carrie's cohort," or "the black girl in Gilbert's cohort."
I know these people will not murder a black man, but how they see us is a manifestation of white supremacy. It is the same inability to truly humanize black people that we see play out in violence against us.
2. The automatic presumption of guilt.
You are black, therefore you cheated, you stole, you are lying. A community collaborator has been overwhelmed distributing everything from food to diapers during this pandemic. He forgot that he had cashed an institutional check, so he emailed to inquire. Instead of emailing him back directly with a copy of the cashed check to remind him or alert him in case someone else cashed the check, I, as his supervisor, received an email that was essentially reporting his behavior as suspicious.
Black people are not given the benefit of doubt. The sender of that email would not have shot Ahmaud Arbery, but the same mentality led to his death. Presumed a thief.
3. The assumption that white people are inherently better.
White people create opportunities for other white people that they won't create for black people. Indeed, they find reasons why a black person is less deserving. So white people disproportionately ascend the socio-economic ladder, then create even more opportunities for other white people. It is why boards of directors are mostly white, just like administrators, directors and managers.
Sometimes in colleges, when a black professor is finally hired, they wait another five, 10 or 20 years to hire another. They tell themselves it not their fault that most "qualified" applicants are white, while creating targeted positions to hire white scholars they know. These exceptions then lead to an even whiter campus and foster the lie that white people are better. Special exceptional treatment because you are white is exactly why it took so long for Gregory and Travis McMichael to be arrested and charged with the murder of Ahmaud Arbery.
In the end, actions speak louder than words. Small symbolic actions matter. Stand up for justice and equity in small things, then we will know you truly have our backs when we are shot while sleeping, eating ice cream, playing video games, jogging, or suffocated by a knee on our necks.
Most white people I know believe that black lives matter. They will tell you they voted for Obama twice. They cannot stand Donald Trump. They are enraged by police brutality. These are the white people I want to speak to: Your anger and sadness about the big things are meaningless if you choose to do nothing about the small things you have control over.
Words matter. Express your outrage. It makes me feel supported. If you don't know what to say, say so. Share something that someone else has written that you agree with. For the sake of black lives, don't be silent. White silence is deafening. I might assume you care, but I will also assume you do not care enough to resist publicly. Perhaps you worry about your colleagues or friends who might think differently, a family member who is a police officer, or others on social media who might "attack" you. Put your concerns in perspective. George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, among many others, were attacked and lost their lives because of the silence of good white people.
Actions matter. Don't just talk, act. Check out the actions that white people have already compiled for their peers. What I want to do here is draw your attention to similarities between three very mundane actions of white people that perpetuate modern-day lynching without requiring a knee on the neck, a chokehold, or a loaded gun. These types of everyday actions of white people make it difficult for my community to breathe.
1. The failure to humanize black people.
Intellectually, you may know we are people. Practically, we aren't full people to you; people with names, joys and worries, families and friends. You see us only when you fetishize or tokenize us, need to build your "woke" credentials or because you perceive us as a threat. You do not think of us as people. In my graduate school years, I was often referred to as "the black girl in Carrie's cohort," or "the black girl in Gilbert's cohort."
I know these people will not murder a black man, but how they see us is a manifestation of white supremacy. It is the same inability to truly humanize black people that we see play out in violence against us.
2. The automatic presumption of guilt.
You are black, therefore you cheated, you stole, you are lying. A community collaborator has been overwhelmed distributing everything from food to diapers during this pandemic. He forgot that he had cashed an institutional check, so he emailed to inquire. Instead of emailing him back directly with a copy of the cashed check to remind him or alert him in case someone else cashed the check, I, as his supervisor, received an email that was essentially reporting his behavior as suspicious.
Black people are not given the benefit of doubt. The sender of that email would not have shot Ahmaud Arbery, but the same mentality led to his death. Presumed a thief.
3. The assumption that white people are inherently better.
White people create opportunities for other white people that they won't create for black people. Indeed, they find reasons why a black person is less deserving. So white people disproportionately ascend the socio-economic ladder, then create even more opportunities for other white people. It is why boards of directors are mostly white, just like administrators, directors and managers.
Sometimes in colleges, when a black professor is finally hired, they wait another five, 10 or 20 years to hire another. They tell themselves it not their fault that most "qualified" applicants are white, while creating targeted positions to hire white scholars they know. These exceptions then lead to an even whiter campus and foster the lie that white people are better. Special exceptional treatment because you are white is exactly why it took so long for Gregory and Travis McMichael to be arrested and charged with the murder of Ahmaud Arbery.
In the end, actions speak louder than words. Small symbolic actions matter. Stand up for justice and equity in small things, then we will know you truly have our backs when we are shot while sleeping, eating ice cream, playing video games, jogging, or suffocated by a knee on our necks.
Opinion
How White Women Use Themselves as Instruments of Terror
There are too many noosed necks, charred bodies and drowned souls for them to deny knowing precisely what they are doing.
By Charles M. Blow - ny timrs
May 27, 2020
At a time of so much death and suffering in this country and around the world from the Covid-19 pandemic, it can be easy, I suppose, to take any incidents that don’t result in death as minor occurrences.
But they aren’t. The continued public assault on black people, particularly black men, by the white public and by the police predates the pandemic and will outlast it. This racial street theater against black people is an endemic, primal feature of the Republic.
Specifically, I am enraged by white women weaponizing racial anxiety, using their white femininity to activate systems of white terror against black men. This has long been a power white women realized they had and that they exerted.
This was again evident when a white woman in New York’s Central Park told a black man, a bird-watcher, that she was going to call the police and tell them that he was threatening her life.
This was not innocent nor benign nor divorced from historical context. Throughout history, white women have used the violence of white men and the institutions these men control as their own muscle.
From the beginning, anti-black white terrorists used the defense of white women and white purity as a way to wrap violence in valor. Carnage became chivalry.
We often like to make white supremacy a testosterone-fueled masculine expression, but it is just as likely to wear heels as a hood.
Particularly in the post-Civil War era, when slavery had been undone, white male politicians used the fear of rape of white women by black men to codify racial terror.
As the author and scholar Rebecca Edwards has pointed out in her book “Angels in the Machinery: Gender in American Party Politics From the Civil War to the Progressive Era,” white politicians have long focused their furor by claiming to be the defenders of white women, a last guard against their suffering.
As Dr. Edwards noted, Mississippi’s James Vardaman, arguably one of the most violent racist politicians in American history, and that’s quite a feat, said in 1903, “a vote for Vardaman is a vote for white supremacy, a vote for the quelling of the arrogant spirit that has been aroused in the blacks by Roosevelt and his henchmen, … a vote for the safety of the home and the protection of our women and children.” Vardaman, who once famously said, “If it is necessary, every Negro in the state will be lynched,” won election and became governor of Mississippi.
Indeed, untold numbers of lynchings were executed because white women had claimed that a black man raped, assaulted, talked to or glanced at them.
But it goes even further than that. The Tulsa Race massacre, the destruction of Black Wall Street, was spurred by an incident between a white female elevator operator and a black man. As the Oklahoma Historical Society points out, the most common explanation is that he stepped on her toe. As many as 300 people were killed because of it.
In 1944, 14-year-old George Stinney Jr. was electrocuted for the killing of two little white girls. He was the youngest person executed in the United States in the 20th century. His trial lasted only a couple hours. There was little or no cross-examination of prosecution witnesses or calling of defense witnesses. The all-white, all-male jury deliberated for only 10 minutes before finding Stinney guilty, and he was sentenced to death.
He was just 5 feet 1 inch tall. As Laura Bradley wrote in Slate, “He weighed 95 pounds when he was arrested, and was so small he had to sit on a phone book in the electric chair when he was executed within three months of the murders.” Some say the book was in fact a Bible.
A circuit court judge threw out Stinney’s conviction in 2014.
The torture and murder of 14-year-old Emmett Till in 1955, a lynching actually, occurred because a white woman said that he “grabbed her and was menacing and sexually crude toward her.” His torturers beat him, shot him in the head and tossed his body into the Tallahatchie River tied to a cotton gin fan with barbed wire. A few years ago, the woman admitted to an author that she had lied.
Till’s lynching would serve as the big bang of the Civil Rights Movement. Indeed, when Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on that bus, she said that she was thinking of Till.
This practice, this exercise in racial extremism, has been dragged into the modern era through the weaponizing of 911, often by white women, to invoke the power and force of the police who they are fully aware are hostile to black men.
In a disturbing number of the recent cases of the police being called on black people for doing everyday, mundane things, the calls have been initiated by white women.
And understand this: Black people view calling the police on them as an act of terror, one that could threaten their lives, and this fear is not without merit.
There are too many noosed necks, charred bodies and drowned souls for these white women not to know precisely what they are doing: They are using their white femininity as an instrument of terror against black men.
But they aren’t. The continued public assault on black people, particularly black men, by the white public and by the police predates the pandemic and will outlast it. This racial street theater against black people is an endemic, primal feature of the Republic.
Specifically, I am enraged by white women weaponizing racial anxiety, using their white femininity to activate systems of white terror against black men. This has long been a power white women realized they had and that they exerted.
This was again evident when a white woman in New York’s Central Park told a black man, a bird-watcher, that she was going to call the police and tell them that he was threatening her life.
This was not innocent nor benign nor divorced from historical context. Throughout history, white women have used the violence of white men and the institutions these men control as their own muscle.
From the beginning, anti-black white terrorists used the defense of white women and white purity as a way to wrap violence in valor. Carnage became chivalry.
We often like to make white supremacy a testosterone-fueled masculine expression, but it is just as likely to wear heels as a hood.
Particularly in the post-Civil War era, when slavery had been undone, white male politicians used the fear of rape of white women by black men to codify racial terror.
As the author and scholar Rebecca Edwards has pointed out in her book “Angels in the Machinery: Gender in American Party Politics From the Civil War to the Progressive Era,” white politicians have long focused their furor by claiming to be the defenders of white women, a last guard against their suffering.
As Dr. Edwards noted, Mississippi’s James Vardaman, arguably one of the most violent racist politicians in American history, and that’s quite a feat, said in 1903, “a vote for Vardaman is a vote for white supremacy, a vote for the quelling of the arrogant spirit that has been aroused in the blacks by Roosevelt and his henchmen, … a vote for the safety of the home and the protection of our women and children.” Vardaman, who once famously said, “If it is necessary, every Negro in the state will be lynched,” won election and became governor of Mississippi.
Indeed, untold numbers of lynchings were executed because white women had claimed that a black man raped, assaulted, talked to or glanced at them.
But it goes even further than that. The Tulsa Race massacre, the destruction of Black Wall Street, was spurred by an incident between a white female elevator operator and a black man. As the Oklahoma Historical Society points out, the most common explanation is that he stepped on her toe. As many as 300 people were killed because of it.
In 1944, 14-year-old George Stinney Jr. was electrocuted for the killing of two little white girls. He was the youngest person executed in the United States in the 20th century. His trial lasted only a couple hours. There was little or no cross-examination of prosecution witnesses or calling of defense witnesses. The all-white, all-male jury deliberated for only 10 minutes before finding Stinney guilty, and he was sentenced to death.
He was just 5 feet 1 inch tall. As Laura Bradley wrote in Slate, “He weighed 95 pounds when he was arrested, and was so small he had to sit on a phone book in the electric chair when he was executed within three months of the murders.” Some say the book was in fact a Bible.
A circuit court judge threw out Stinney’s conviction in 2014.
The torture and murder of 14-year-old Emmett Till in 1955, a lynching actually, occurred because a white woman said that he “grabbed her and was menacing and sexually crude toward her.” His torturers beat him, shot him in the head and tossed his body into the Tallahatchie River tied to a cotton gin fan with barbed wire. A few years ago, the woman admitted to an author that she had lied.
Till’s lynching would serve as the big bang of the Civil Rights Movement. Indeed, when Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on that bus, she said that she was thinking of Till.
This practice, this exercise in racial extremism, has been dragged into the modern era through the weaponizing of 911, often by white women, to invoke the power and force of the police who they are fully aware are hostile to black men.
In a disturbing number of the recent cases of the police being called on black people for doing everyday, mundane things, the calls have been initiated by white women.
And understand this: Black people view calling the police on them as an act of terror, one that could threaten their lives, and this fear is not without merit.
There are too many noosed necks, charred bodies and drowned souls for these white women not to know precisely what they are doing: They are using their white femininity as an instrument of terror against black men.
Mass Unemployment Amid the Pandemic Is an Indictment of Capitalism
BY Richard D. Wolff, Truthout
PUBLISHED May 6, 2020
Today’s headlines scream at us about the trauma, pain and loss from an historic explosion of capitalist unemployment. Unemployment always stood as a mocking indictment of capitalism. Unemployment also threatens capitalism. This system rewards employers with profits from the waged labor of employees. Yet it fails to keep them working and thereby undermines its profits. Worse, that failure recurs quite regularly — a phenomenon known as the business cycle.
Its cycles expose capitalism as intrinsically socially irrational. Unemployed workers continue to consume, albeit in reduced quantities. They just stop producing. It would obviously be better to keep workers producing what they keep consuming. Capitalism cannot do that during its recurring cycles despite countless efforts, including Keynesian economics and policies since the 1930s. The cycles repeatedly cause much suffering and loss.
Still another irrationality of capitalism resides in most capitalists’ obstinate refusal to consider, let alone implement, an obvious alternative to unemployment. When workers start being fired (because of falling demand, automation, etc.), employers could instead maintain employment but reduce workers’ hours per week. Instead of 10 percent unemployment, cut the basic work week for all from 40 to 36 hours. All workers go home at 1 pm, not 5 pm, each Friday.
The costs of unemployment versus reduced hours are difficult to measure and thus compare. What likely explains most capitalists’ preferences for unemployment is the power it allows them to wield over workers. The real prospect of unemployment keeps workers anxious, competing with one another to avoid eventually being the one fired. In this case, what is rational for the employers (a social minority) prevails despite it being irrational for employees (the majority). Even in a pandemic like today’s, wherever social distancing can secure safe workplaces, substituting reduced hours for unemployment makes sense but remains rare.
The prospect of unemployment plagues workers and their families with anxieties. The experience of unemployment is associated with rising levels of depression, alcoholism, drug abuse, marital problems, child abuse, and other social ills. It is likewise associated with declining levels of worker self-esteem, job skills, personal savings, and physical and mental health.
Unemployment is unwanted by both employees and employers, yet it hits them again and again. Defenders of capitalism always worry: unemployed workers, as victims of capitalism, provide receptive audiences for its critics. Alliances of capitalism’s victims and critics have challenged the system in the past and threaten it now again.
Unemployment is often part of a vicious cycle in capitalism. Unemployed workers lose incomes and therefore cut their consumption. That deprives capitalists producing workers’ consumption commodities of market demand, sales, and thus profits. In response, those capitalists fire portions of their workforce. That worsens unemployment: the vicious cycle.
Many phenomena can trigger unemployment in capitalism. Whether each initial instance of unemployment descends into a vicious downward spiral depends on conditions within capitalism being triggered. For example, suppose changing consumer tastes mean less of commodity A gets purchased, and capitalists fire workers producing A. This might lead to a vicious downward cycle — but not if, for example, consumers shifted to buy more of commodity B. Capitalists might then hire the workers fired from A to take jobs making B.
The staggering, fast-rising unemployment spawned by capitalism’s failures to prepare for and cope with the COVID-19 pandemic is different from our example. It has already set off a vicious downward spiral. The virus was the trigger, but a weakened capitalism reacted to the trigger with an economic crash. In the U.S. especially, much too little was done too late to counter — by increased employment elsewhere in the system — the unemployment set off by the pandemic. Increased hiring by delivery services, for example, fell far short of absorbing the millions fired from restaurants, bars, department stores, hotels, airlines, and so on. So, the downward spiral exploded.
None of this was necessary. As in the 1930s New Deal, the U.S. government could have undertaken a massive federal jobs program. That could have re-employed millions fired by employers who shut down the private sector. The list of socially useful tasks for such federal job holders includes campaigns across the U.S. for massive social coronavirus testing; for regular cleaning/disinfection of public spaces; for reorganizing public facilities to maintain social distancing when needed; for ongoing tutorials via social media for public school students (but also for the general public seeking to learn new skills); for “greening” the economy; for establishing a worker-cooperative sector of the economy, and so on.
Capitalism sees itself as a “rational” economic system. Yet, it is irrational to deprive employees of jobs when the tools, equipment and raw materials needed to produce socially useful goods and services are available. It is likewise irrational to allow workplaces to sit idle gathering rust and dust rather than reconfiguring or restructuring them to be safe as locations for socially useful production. It is irrational to undercut the needs of unemployed millions for the mental and physical health associated with meaningful labor. Last but not least, it is irrational to deprive the whole society of the goods and services capable of being produced by re-employed workers. If the private capitalist sector either cannot or will not re-employ in the socially most useful manner, then the government can and must do so.
If profit considerations lead private capitalists to decisions that are socially irrational — like firing millions of employees — then profit should not be society’s decisive criterion. We should replace the profit system with different criteria, different “bottom lines” driving enterprise decisions. Such a system might usefully combine private and public enterprises organized, in both cases, as worker cooperatives. In them, workers make enterprise decisions democratically: Each worker gets an equal vote. Moreover, two other stakeholder groups participate, equally democratically, in reaching those decisions: (1) the consumers of each enterprise’s output; and (2) the residents of the communities in which each enterprise functions.
Such a system would target the qualities and security of jobs, consumption and residence as key goals — “bottom lines” alongside enterprise profitability.
Proposing worker co-ops as frameworks for re-employing the millions deprived of work in capitalist crashes has a particular objective. Workers in worker co-op enterprises would much sooner see and act on unemployment’s basic irrationality than capitalists typically do. The Italian region of Emilia-Romagna provides a useful example of a region where worker co-ops are institutionalized and comprise 40 percent of the economy. Its large co-op sector is a major contributor to the region’s low unemployment rates (lower than Italy and also lower than the EU), its higher productivity rates, its outstanding GDP figures, and so on. Building such a sector in the United States would enable its residents to genuinely choose economic systems. Citizens could observe, purchase from, and work within enterprises organized as worker co-ops and thus compare them to their capitalistically organized counterparts. Then informed, democratic choices could be made as to what mix of the two alternative economic systems are wanted by the U.S. population.
Moving in such directions would go a long way toward finding and building on positive possibilities now buried under the catastrophic pile-up of a viral pandemic and a major capitalist crash.
Its cycles expose capitalism as intrinsically socially irrational. Unemployed workers continue to consume, albeit in reduced quantities. They just stop producing. It would obviously be better to keep workers producing what they keep consuming. Capitalism cannot do that during its recurring cycles despite countless efforts, including Keynesian economics and policies since the 1930s. The cycles repeatedly cause much suffering and loss.
Still another irrationality of capitalism resides in most capitalists’ obstinate refusal to consider, let alone implement, an obvious alternative to unemployment. When workers start being fired (because of falling demand, automation, etc.), employers could instead maintain employment but reduce workers’ hours per week. Instead of 10 percent unemployment, cut the basic work week for all from 40 to 36 hours. All workers go home at 1 pm, not 5 pm, each Friday.
The costs of unemployment versus reduced hours are difficult to measure and thus compare. What likely explains most capitalists’ preferences for unemployment is the power it allows them to wield over workers. The real prospect of unemployment keeps workers anxious, competing with one another to avoid eventually being the one fired. In this case, what is rational for the employers (a social minority) prevails despite it being irrational for employees (the majority). Even in a pandemic like today’s, wherever social distancing can secure safe workplaces, substituting reduced hours for unemployment makes sense but remains rare.
The prospect of unemployment plagues workers and their families with anxieties. The experience of unemployment is associated with rising levels of depression, alcoholism, drug abuse, marital problems, child abuse, and other social ills. It is likewise associated with declining levels of worker self-esteem, job skills, personal savings, and physical and mental health.
Unemployment is unwanted by both employees and employers, yet it hits them again and again. Defenders of capitalism always worry: unemployed workers, as victims of capitalism, provide receptive audiences for its critics. Alliances of capitalism’s victims and critics have challenged the system in the past and threaten it now again.
Unemployment is often part of a vicious cycle in capitalism. Unemployed workers lose incomes and therefore cut their consumption. That deprives capitalists producing workers’ consumption commodities of market demand, sales, and thus profits. In response, those capitalists fire portions of their workforce. That worsens unemployment: the vicious cycle.
Many phenomena can trigger unemployment in capitalism. Whether each initial instance of unemployment descends into a vicious downward spiral depends on conditions within capitalism being triggered. For example, suppose changing consumer tastes mean less of commodity A gets purchased, and capitalists fire workers producing A. This might lead to a vicious downward cycle — but not if, for example, consumers shifted to buy more of commodity B. Capitalists might then hire the workers fired from A to take jobs making B.
The staggering, fast-rising unemployment spawned by capitalism’s failures to prepare for and cope with the COVID-19 pandemic is different from our example. It has already set off a vicious downward spiral. The virus was the trigger, but a weakened capitalism reacted to the trigger with an economic crash. In the U.S. especially, much too little was done too late to counter — by increased employment elsewhere in the system — the unemployment set off by the pandemic. Increased hiring by delivery services, for example, fell far short of absorbing the millions fired from restaurants, bars, department stores, hotels, airlines, and so on. So, the downward spiral exploded.
None of this was necessary. As in the 1930s New Deal, the U.S. government could have undertaken a massive federal jobs program. That could have re-employed millions fired by employers who shut down the private sector. The list of socially useful tasks for such federal job holders includes campaigns across the U.S. for massive social coronavirus testing; for regular cleaning/disinfection of public spaces; for reorganizing public facilities to maintain social distancing when needed; for ongoing tutorials via social media for public school students (but also for the general public seeking to learn new skills); for “greening” the economy; for establishing a worker-cooperative sector of the economy, and so on.
Capitalism sees itself as a “rational” economic system. Yet, it is irrational to deprive employees of jobs when the tools, equipment and raw materials needed to produce socially useful goods and services are available. It is likewise irrational to allow workplaces to sit idle gathering rust and dust rather than reconfiguring or restructuring them to be safe as locations for socially useful production. It is irrational to undercut the needs of unemployed millions for the mental and physical health associated with meaningful labor. Last but not least, it is irrational to deprive the whole society of the goods and services capable of being produced by re-employed workers. If the private capitalist sector either cannot or will not re-employ in the socially most useful manner, then the government can and must do so.
If profit considerations lead private capitalists to decisions that are socially irrational — like firing millions of employees — then profit should not be society’s decisive criterion. We should replace the profit system with different criteria, different “bottom lines” driving enterprise decisions. Such a system might usefully combine private and public enterprises organized, in both cases, as worker cooperatives. In them, workers make enterprise decisions democratically: Each worker gets an equal vote. Moreover, two other stakeholder groups participate, equally democratically, in reaching those decisions: (1) the consumers of each enterprise’s output; and (2) the residents of the communities in which each enterprise functions.
Such a system would target the qualities and security of jobs, consumption and residence as key goals — “bottom lines” alongside enterprise profitability.
Proposing worker co-ops as frameworks for re-employing the millions deprived of work in capitalist crashes has a particular objective. Workers in worker co-op enterprises would much sooner see and act on unemployment’s basic irrationality than capitalists typically do. The Italian region of Emilia-Romagna provides a useful example of a region where worker co-ops are institutionalized and comprise 40 percent of the economy. Its large co-op sector is a major contributor to the region’s low unemployment rates (lower than Italy and also lower than the EU), its higher productivity rates, its outstanding GDP figures, and so on. Building such a sector in the United States would enable its residents to genuinely choose economic systems. Citizens could observe, purchase from, and work within enterprises organized as worker co-ops and thus compare them to their capitalistically organized counterparts. Then informed, democratic choices could be made as to what mix of the two alternative economic systems are wanted by the U.S. population.
Moving in such directions would go a long way toward finding and building on positive possibilities now buried under the catastrophic pile-up of a viral pandemic and a major capitalist crash.
now, it is a party of traitors & racists!!!
A historian explains why the Republican Party is dead
September 30, 2019
By History News Network- Commentary - raw story
The Republican Party was founded in 1854 to oppose the expansion of slavery. It has survived in philosophy and leadership over the past 165 years but now it has reached its demise under Donald Trump. While the Republican Party might still exist in name, it has lost all principle, all purpose, and all reason to exist under its present name.
The new revelations about Trump pressuring the Ukraine President to investigate former Vice President Joe Biden and his son for corruption now have put the Republican Party on warning. With the movement in the House of Representatives toward impeachment, will any Republicans speak up and condemn what Trump has most recently done, or will they, effectively, go down in disgrace with a President who has never really shown respect for the party and its history?
Today’s Republicans have totally repudiated its great Presidential leaders, including Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, Dwight D. Eisenhower and Ronald Reagan. All four of these outstanding Republican Presidents would certainly be shocked and dismayed by the Presidency of Donald Trump. But it has also repudiated Congressional giants, including William Seward, Charles Sumner, Robert La Follette, Sr, George Norris, Robert Taft, Arthur Vandenberg, Everett Dirksen, Jacob Javits, Barry Goldwater, Clifford Case, Mark Hatfield, Charles Mathias, Charles Percy, and a multitude of other luminaries. It has also ignored the principles and convictions of gubernatorial giants, including Thomas Dewey, Earl Warren, Nelson Rockefeller, George Romney, William Scranton, and many others.
Under Abraham Lincoln and during Reconstruction, the Republican Party was the party of ending slavery and promoting racial equality. It was the party of responsible government regulation of capitalism in the public interest under the administration of Theodore Roosevelt. Under Theodore Roosevelt and even Richard Nixon, the Republican party encouraged responsible environmental and consumer legislation to protect the American people. It was the party of a strong military and promoted national security during the Cold War under Dwight D. Eisenhower and Richard Nixon. It was the party of responsible international alliances and treaties in the years since the Second World War under all Republican Presidents from Eisenhower to George W. Bush.
The Republican Party was far from perfect and at times it contradicted these principle. It encouraged monopoly capitalism in the Gilded Age, the 1920s, and has once again since Ronald Reagan. It has ignored and sometimes encouraged racism and nativism. Richard Nixon employed the “Southern Strategy” and the Watergate tapes recordings demonstrated his anti Semitism and racism. Ronald Reagan allowed the “Religious Right’ to have an undue influence in the 1980s. The Republican Party today pushes to end the enforcement of the Voting Rights Act, promotes mass incarceration and tough mandatory minimums, and continues the injustice it has done to racial minorities and the poor. Massive evidence of government corruption under Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan previously undermined Republican credibility with the Watergate and Iran-Contra scandals, respectively. Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush engineered massive tax cuts, harming the middle class and the poor, and created a new Gilded Age similar to the late 19th century.
But the party always had healthy internal debates: progressive and conservative Republicans clashed in the early 20th century Progressive Era and the New Deal era; liberal and conservative Republicans in the post World War II period from 1945-1980; and moderate and conservative Republicans in the age of Ronald Reagan and the Bushes. If Republican Presidents did not always offer great leadership, members of Congress and state governors often weighed in on policy. Whenever the Republican Party seemed to have lost its way, challenges came from Republican members of Congress and governors that kept the party viable and respectable. Few felt that the party leaders in Congress and in the states were willing to give up their independence to any President and the party leadership.
But now, that has all changed. All of the principles of the Republican Party have been destroyed in the age of Donald Trump. The Republican leadership in Congress and the states has simply given up any concept of disagreement or resistance, and have accepted Donald Trump as an authoritarian leader with no limits on his executive power. This is true of racial and ethnic discrimination; of overlooking massive violations of civil liberties; of abuse of immigrant children and their families escaping from poverty, violence, and bloodshed in Central America; and of giving over total control of the economy to major corporations without any government regulation. There is no resistance to policies that totally abandon environmental and consumer regulation and fail to protect national security from the threats of foreign nations with authoritarian leaders who flatter our President like Russia, China, North Korea, and Saudi Arabia. The Republican party now supports undermining international alliances and treaties, alienating such close friends as the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Canada, Japan, South Korea, Australia, and India. Additionally, the total abuse of any standard of ethics and morality, including the President’s own scandalous private life is ignored and often denied as reality by the leaders and office holders of his own party.
Months ago Special Counsel Robert Mueller testified before the House Judiciary Committee and House Intelligence Committee and emphasized that Russia interfered in the Presidential Election of 2016; that Donald Trump and his campaign welcomed Russian intervention; and that Donald Trump obstructed justice in the investigation of the campaign. Still the GOP leadership has no issue publicly with Donald Trump. No matter how outrageous his statements, the extent of his lies, or the harm he brings domestically or internationally, almost no Republican defies Trump. Even Trump’s move to oppose free trade, a long held view of the party, moves ahead without much protest. In fact, it seems as if the Republican leadership and office holders are terrified of our President. Even after the El Paso, Dayton, and Odessa-Midland Massacres, there is mostly silence from Republicans.
Donald Trump has promoted so many policies of abuse and corruption, including undermining the contributions of past Republican Presidents, and yet House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy of California, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, and nearly all Republican office holders defend him, or stay silent. Only a few Republicans not in office anymore have spoken up and challenged Trump.
The Republican Party is dead as we knew it, and the question is this: will anyone in that party finally lead a decisive challenge to the abuse of power going on, which threatens the nation and the world at large, or will a new political party emerge, as the Republicans did in the crisis of the 1850s, when they replaced the Whig Party?
American democracy and constitutional government is at stake right now every day!
The new revelations about Trump pressuring the Ukraine President to investigate former Vice President Joe Biden and his son for corruption now have put the Republican Party on warning. With the movement in the House of Representatives toward impeachment, will any Republicans speak up and condemn what Trump has most recently done, or will they, effectively, go down in disgrace with a President who has never really shown respect for the party and its history?
Today’s Republicans have totally repudiated its great Presidential leaders, including Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, Dwight D. Eisenhower and Ronald Reagan. All four of these outstanding Republican Presidents would certainly be shocked and dismayed by the Presidency of Donald Trump. But it has also repudiated Congressional giants, including William Seward, Charles Sumner, Robert La Follette, Sr, George Norris, Robert Taft, Arthur Vandenberg, Everett Dirksen, Jacob Javits, Barry Goldwater, Clifford Case, Mark Hatfield, Charles Mathias, Charles Percy, and a multitude of other luminaries. It has also ignored the principles and convictions of gubernatorial giants, including Thomas Dewey, Earl Warren, Nelson Rockefeller, George Romney, William Scranton, and many others.
Under Abraham Lincoln and during Reconstruction, the Republican Party was the party of ending slavery and promoting racial equality. It was the party of responsible government regulation of capitalism in the public interest under the administration of Theodore Roosevelt. Under Theodore Roosevelt and even Richard Nixon, the Republican party encouraged responsible environmental and consumer legislation to protect the American people. It was the party of a strong military and promoted national security during the Cold War under Dwight D. Eisenhower and Richard Nixon. It was the party of responsible international alliances and treaties in the years since the Second World War under all Republican Presidents from Eisenhower to George W. Bush.
The Republican Party was far from perfect and at times it contradicted these principle. It encouraged monopoly capitalism in the Gilded Age, the 1920s, and has once again since Ronald Reagan. It has ignored and sometimes encouraged racism and nativism. Richard Nixon employed the “Southern Strategy” and the Watergate tapes recordings demonstrated his anti Semitism and racism. Ronald Reagan allowed the “Religious Right’ to have an undue influence in the 1980s. The Republican Party today pushes to end the enforcement of the Voting Rights Act, promotes mass incarceration and tough mandatory minimums, and continues the injustice it has done to racial minorities and the poor. Massive evidence of government corruption under Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan previously undermined Republican credibility with the Watergate and Iran-Contra scandals, respectively. Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush engineered massive tax cuts, harming the middle class and the poor, and created a new Gilded Age similar to the late 19th century.
But the party always had healthy internal debates: progressive and conservative Republicans clashed in the early 20th century Progressive Era and the New Deal era; liberal and conservative Republicans in the post World War II period from 1945-1980; and moderate and conservative Republicans in the age of Ronald Reagan and the Bushes. If Republican Presidents did not always offer great leadership, members of Congress and state governors often weighed in on policy. Whenever the Republican Party seemed to have lost its way, challenges came from Republican members of Congress and governors that kept the party viable and respectable. Few felt that the party leaders in Congress and in the states were willing to give up their independence to any President and the party leadership.
But now, that has all changed. All of the principles of the Republican Party have been destroyed in the age of Donald Trump. The Republican leadership in Congress and the states has simply given up any concept of disagreement or resistance, and have accepted Donald Trump as an authoritarian leader with no limits on his executive power. This is true of racial and ethnic discrimination; of overlooking massive violations of civil liberties; of abuse of immigrant children and their families escaping from poverty, violence, and bloodshed in Central America; and of giving over total control of the economy to major corporations without any government regulation. There is no resistance to policies that totally abandon environmental and consumer regulation and fail to protect national security from the threats of foreign nations with authoritarian leaders who flatter our President like Russia, China, North Korea, and Saudi Arabia. The Republican party now supports undermining international alliances and treaties, alienating such close friends as the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Canada, Japan, South Korea, Australia, and India. Additionally, the total abuse of any standard of ethics and morality, including the President’s own scandalous private life is ignored and often denied as reality by the leaders and office holders of his own party.
Months ago Special Counsel Robert Mueller testified before the House Judiciary Committee and House Intelligence Committee and emphasized that Russia interfered in the Presidential Election of 2016; that Donald Trump and his campaign welcomed Russian intervention; and that Donald Trump obstructed justice in the investigation of the campaign. Still the GOP leadership has no issue publicly with Donald Trump. No matter how outrageous his statements, the extent of his lies, or the harm he brings domestically or internationally, almost no Republican defies Trump. Even Trump’s move to oppose free trade, a long held view of the party, moves ahead without much protest. In fact, it seems as if the Republican leadership and office holders are terrified of our President. Even after the El Paso, Dayton, and Odessa-Midland Massacres, there is mostly silence from Republicans.
Donald Trump has promoted so many policies of abuse and corruption, including undermining the contributions of past Republican Presidents, and yet House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy of California, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, and nearly all Republican office holders defend him, or stay silent. Only a few Republicans not in office anymore have spoken up and challenged Trump.
The Republican Party is dead as we knew it, and the question is this: will anyone in that party finally lead a decisive challenge to the abuse of power going on, which threatens the nation and the world at large, or will a new political party emerge, as the Republicans did in the crisis of the 1850s, when they replaced the Whig Party?
American democracy and constitutional government is at stake right now every day!
celebrating in the land of ignorance!!!
Independent of everything: Is America too dumb for democracy?
Our nation's massive ignorance and lack of curiosity have led us into crisis. Are we smart enough to survive it?
DAVID MASCIOTRA - Salon
JULY 4, 2019 12:00PM (UTC)
Independence Day presents a good opportunity to consider that many Americans act as if their young country is independent from the rest of the world. The former popularity of the mindless slogan, “My country right or wrong,” offers a perfect summary of America’s suicidal self-absorption. When the fireworks no longer illuminate the sky, the barbecue is down to bones, and the hangovers begin to commence, a genuine act of patriotism would insist on the widespread realization that small-minded chauvinism is not virtuous. One need to look no further than the early stages of the presidential campaign to survey the damage of a country’s inability to look beyond its own borders.
The provincialism of American culture renders its politics both farcical and dangerous. While it is encouraging to see previously “extreme” and “radical” ideas, such as socialized medicine, paid family leave and debt-free higher education, become mainstream in the Democratic Party, it is also amusing to imagine a French or Canadian observer watching American politicians debate a national health care program as if it were a novel concept.
Much credit goes to Sen. Bernie Sanders, who is fond of reminding his interlocutors and audiences, in a wonderful tone of exhaustion, that the United States is the “only country in the developed world” that does not achieve universal health care coverage through public funding. Sanders, and his fellow candidates for the Democratic nomination, have strenuous labor to complete considering that most Americans know and care little about the world beyond its borders.
In 2003, when Americans still had the minimal interest in international affairs necessary to understand who we were bombing, a U.S. strategic task force of Education Abroad concluded that America’s ignorance of the outside world was so great as to constitute a threat to national security.
The specific details only sharpen the image of American obliviousness. A recent National Geographic survey indicates that merely 37 percent of recent college graduates can identify Iraq on a map, most failed to identify North Korea, only one in four could identify Iran or Israel, and among Americans ages 18 to 24, 6 percent could not even point to the United States. If you are among the 6 percent, and you are reading this, that’s where you live.
Derek Alderman, president of the American Association of Geographers, argues for the urgency of a “radical geographic literacy” in the United States, expressing grave concern that President Trump’s denigration of African nations as “shithole countries” will resonate with too many citizens for comfort. He reports that the answers on advanced placement geography exams from high school students are often littered with racist stereotypes regarding Africa and Asia.
The American perspective on history is as sophisticated as one would expect in a country where Donald Trump can even run for president without eliciting of universal laughter and disgust. Three-fourths of the public is unaware why the U.S. fought a cold war with the Soviet Union, and 41 percent are unfamiliar with the term “Auschwitz.”
America’s perverted priorities of giving tax breaks to the wealthy while its public schools decline into states of disrepair, along with a shallow and superficial news media operating under the demands of corporate ownership, are largely to blame for America’s failures, but the general public is not exactly resistant.
Historian Richard Hofstadter analyzed “anti-intellectualism” in American life in his seminal 1963 Pulitzer-winning book. Decades of of compounding fatuity have created a culture where leisure reading, according to several reports, is at an all time low.
It seems unlikely that those Americans who do crack open a book are studying comparative politics or international relations. For the full picture of how pitiful American culture has become, consider that for many recent years the bestselling “historian” in the country was Bill O’Reilly.
To bemoan the spectacular incuriosity of Americans is not an exercise in snobbery, but a red alarm warning of an impending crisis. The consequences of American ignorance are not academic.
A Washington Post survey, two years after American forces invaded Iraq, revealed that 70 percent of respondents believed that Saddam Hussein was personally responsible for the 9/11 attacks.
American provincialism also functions as insulation of the brain, preventing the average citizen from seeing and hearing the warning signs that history offers into the transformation of democracy into despotic rule. Fascism is not an overnight development, and when your country is earnestly debating whether its treatment of immigrant and refugee children qualifies for the term “concentration camp,” you have already taken a few large steps down that deadly road.
The qualities of Donald Trump, and the zealotry of his worshipful supporters, resemble the images of nearly every authoritarian movement in European, Asian and Latin American history. If America’s political culture possessed some semblance of literacy, its voters would collaborate to consign Trump to the political garbage disposal. When it came to providing basic services for its own people, it would not allow intellectual titans like Chuck Todd to ask Democrats, “How are you going to pay for it?” — as if countries with far less wealth have not already managed to do so.
A friend of mine whose father recently died told me that her brother, who lives in London, took one month off with full pay to travel to Texas, make some final memories with his dad, and attend the funeral service. Britain, contrary to popular belief, is not a mythical, far-off universe from a fantasy novel.
If one wants to drift off entirely into dreamland, envision an America where its federal government invites consultants from countries with better performing health care systems, affordable universities and more effective poverty relief policies to assist in the expansion of the social welfare state.
Instead of seeking outside advice, we will continue to display the symptoms of national solipsism, bumbling along as if there is no reality outside what we can see right in front of us.
The United States of America is one year older today. Only time will tell if it is also wiser.
The provincialism of American culture renders its politics both farcical and dangerous. While it is encouraging to see previously “extreme” and “radical” ideas, such as socialized medicine, paid family leave and debt-free higher education, become mainstream in the Democratic Party, it is also amusing to imagine a French or Canadian observer watching American politicians debate a national health care program as if it were a novel concept.
Much credit goes to Sen. Bernie Sanders, who is fond of reminding his interlocutors and audiences, in a wonderful tone of exhaustion, that the United States is the “only country in the developed world” that does not achieve universal health care coverage through public funding. Sanders, and his fellow candidates for the Democratic nomination, have strenuous labor to complete considering that most Americans know and care little about the world beyond its borders.
In 2003, when Americans still had the minimal interest in international affairs necessary to understand who we were bombing, a U.S. strategic task force of Education Abroad concluded that America’s ignorance of the outside world was so great as to constitute a threat to national security.
The specific details only sharpen the image of American obliviousness. A recent National Geographic survey indicates that merely 37 percent of recent college graduates can identify Iraq on a map, most failed to identify North Korea, only one in four could identify Iran or Israel, and among Americans ages 18 to 24, 6 percent could not even point to the United States. If you are among the 6 percent, and you are reading this, that’s where you live.
Derek Alderman, president of the American Association of Geographers, argues for the urgency of a “radical geographic literacy” in the United States, expressing grave concern that President Trump’s denigration of African nations as “shithole countries” will resonate with too many citizens for comfort. He reports that the answers on advanced placement geography exams from high school students are often littered with racist stereotypes regarding Africa and Asia.
The American perspective on history is as sophisticated as one would expect in a country where Donald Trump can even run for president without eliciting of universal laughter and disgust. Three-fourths of the public is unaware why the U.S. fought a cold war with the Soviet Union, and 41 percent are unfamiliar with the term “Auschwitz.”
America’s perverted priorities of giving tax breaks to the wealthy while its public schools decline into states of disrepair, along with a shallow and superficial news media operating under the demands of corporate ownership, are largely to blame for America’s failures, but the general public is not exactly resistant.
Historian Richard Hofstadter analyzed “anti-intellectualism” in American life in his seminal 1963 Pulitzer-winning book. Decades of of compounding fatuity have created a culture where leisure reading, according to several reports, is at an all time low.
It seems unlikely that those Americans who do crack open a book are studying comparative politics or international relations. For the full picture of how pitiful American culture has become, consider that for many recent years the bestselling “historian” in the country was Bill O’Reilly.
To bemoan the spectacular incuriosity of Americans is not an exercise in snobbery, but a red alarm warning of an impending crisis. The consequences of American ignorance are not academic.
A Washington Post survey, two years after American forces invaded Iraq, revealed that 70 percent of respondents believed that Saddam Hussein was personally responsible for the 9/11 attacks.
American provincialism also functions as insulation of the brain, preventing the average citizen from seeing and hearing the warning signs that history offers into the transformation of democracy into despotic rule. Fascism is not an overnight development, and when your country is earnestly debating whether its treatment of immigrant and refugee children qualifies for the term “concentration camp,” you have already taken a few large steps down that deadly road.
The qualities of Donald Trump, and the zealotry of his worshipful supporters, resemble the images of nearly every authoritarian movement in European, Asian and Latin American history. If America’s political culture possessed some semblance of literacy, its voters would collaborate to consign Trump to the political garbage disposal. When it came to providing basic services for its own people, it would not allow intellectual titans like Chuck Todd to ask Democrats, “How are you going to pay for it?” — as if countries with far less wealth have not already managed to do so.
A friend of mine whose father recently died told me that her brother, who lives in London, took one month off with full pay to travel to Texas, make some final memories with his dad, and attend the funeral service. Britain, contrary to popular belief, is not a mythical, far-off universe from a fantasy novel.
If one wants to drift off entirely into dreamland, envision an America where its federal government invites consultants from countries with better performing health care systems, affordable universities and more effective poverty relief policies to assist in the expansion of the social welfare state.
Instead of seeking outside advice, we will continue to display the symptoms of national solipsism, bumbling along as if there is no reality outside what we can see right in front of us.
The United States of America is one year older today. Only time will tell if it is also wiser.
Soph0571 - Demo Underground
how stupid are americans??
Here are 9 things Americans just don’t understand — compared to the rest of the world
ALEX HENDERSON, ALTERNET - COMMENTARY - raw story
03 FEB 2019 AT 01:13 ET
To hear the far-right ideologues of Fox News and AM talk radio tell it, life in Europe is hell on Earth. Taxes are high, sexual promiscuity prevails, universal healthcare doesn’t work, and millions of people don’t even speak English as their primary language! Those who run around screaming about “American exceptionalism” often condemn countries like France, Norway and Switzerland to justify their jingoism. Sadly, the U.S.’ economic deterioration means that many Americans simply cannot afford a trip abroad to see how those countries function for themselves. And often, lack of foreign travel means accepting clichés about the rest of the world over the reality. And that lack of worldliness clouds many Americans’ views on everything from economics to sex to religion.
Here are nine things Americans can learn from the rest of the world.
1. Universal Healthcare Is Great for Free Enterprise and Great for Small Businesses
The modern-day Republican Party would have us believe that those who promote universal healthcare are anti-free enterprise or hostile to small businesses. But truth be told, universal healthcare is great for entrepreneurs, small businesses and the self-employed in France, Germany and other developed countries where healthcare is considered a right. The U.S.’ troubled healthcare system has a long history of punishing entrepreneurs with sky-high premiums when they start their own businesses. Prior to the Affordable Care Act of 2010, a.k.a. Obamacare, many small business owners couldn’t even obtain individual health insurance plans if they had a preexisting condition such as heart disease or diabetes—and even with the ACA’s reforms, the high cost of health insurance is still daunting to small business owners. But many Americans fail to realize that healthcare reform is not only a humanitarian issue, it is also vitally important to small businesses and the self-employed.
In 2009, the Center for Economic and Policy Research published a study on small businesses around the world and found that “by every measure of small-business employment, the United States has among the world’s smallest small-business sectors.” People in the Netherlands, France, Germany, Sweden, Finland, Belgium and other European countries are more likely to be self-employed—and the study concluded that universal healthcare is a key factor. According to CEPR’s study, “High healthcare costs discourage small business formation since start-ups in other countries can tap into government-funded healthcare systems.”
2. Comprehensive Sex Education Decreases Sexual Problems
For decades, social conservatives in the U.S. have insisted that comprehensive sex education promotes unplanned pregnancies and sexually transmitted diseases. But in fact, comprehensive sex education (as opposed to the abstinence-only programs that are common in the American Bible Belt) decreases sexual problems, and the data bears that out in no uncertain terms. Public schools in the Netherlands have aggressive sex education programs that America’s Christian Right would despise. Yet in 2009, the Netherlands had (according to the United Nations) a teen birth rate of only 5.3 per 1,000 compared to 39.1 per 1,000 in the U.S. That same year, the U.S. had three times as many adults living with HIV or AIDS as the Netherlands.
Switzerland, France, Germany and many other European countries also have intensive sex-ed programs and much lower teen pregnancy rates than the U.S. Still, far-right politicians in the U.S. can’t get it through their heads that inadequate sex education and insufficient sexual knowledge actually promote teenage pregnancies and sexually transmitted diseases instead of decreasing them.
3. American Exceptionalism Is Absolute Nonsense
No matter how severe the U.S.’ decline becomes, neocons and the Tea Party continue to espouse their belief in “American exceptionalism.” But in many respects, the U.S. is far from exceptional. The U.S. is not exceptional when it comes to civil liberties (no country in the world incarcerates, per capita, more of its people than the U.S.) or healthcare (WHO ranks the U.S. #37 in terms of healthcare). Nor is the U.S. a leader in terms of life expectancy: according to the WHO, overall life expectancy in the U.S. in 2013 was 79 compared to 83 in Switzerland and Japan, 82 in Spain, France, Italy, Sweden and Canada and 81 in the Netherlands, Germany, Norway, Austria and Finland.
4. Adequate Mass Transit Is a Huge Convenience
When it comes to mass transit, Europe and Japan are way ahead of the U.S.; in only a handful of American cities is it easy to function without a car. New York City, Chicago, Boston, Philadelphia and Washington, DC are among the U.S.’ more mass transit-oriented cities, but overall, the U.S. remains a car culture—and public transportation is painfully limited in a long list of U.S. cities. Many Americans fail to realize that mass transit has numerous advantages, including less air pollution, less congestion, fewer DUIs and all the aerobic exercise that goes with living in a pedestrian-friendly environment.
5. The Bible Was Not Written by Billionaire Hedge Fund Managers
Christianity in its various forms can be found all over the developed world. But the U.S., more than anywhere, is where one finds a far-right version of white Protestant fundamentalism that idolizes the ultra-rich, demonizes the poor and equates extreme wealth with morality and poverty with moral failings. The problem with hating the poor in the name of Christianity is that the Bible is full of quotes that are much more in line with Franklin Delano Roosevelt than Ayn Rand—like “It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God” (Mark 10:25) and “The love of money is the root of all evil” (1 Timothy 6:10).
6. Learning a Second or Third Language Is a Plus, Not a Character Flaw
In the Netherlands or the Scandinavian countries, becoming proficient in two or three foreign languages is viewed as a sign of intellect and sophistication. But xenophobia runs so deep among many neocons, Republicans and Tea Party wingnuts that any use of a language other than English terrifies them. Barack Obama, during his 2008 campaign, was bombarded with hateful responses from Republicans when he recommended that Americans study foreign languages from an early age. And in the 2012 GOP presidential primary, Newt Gingrich’s campaign ran an ad in South Carolina attacking Mitt Romney for being proficient in French.
In February, an eighth-grade girl who was studying Latin in Vermont received equally clueless responses when she wrote to a state senator suggesting that Vermont adopt a Latin motto in addition to its English-language motto (not as a replacement). The wingnuts went ballistic, posting on the Facebook page of a local television station that if the girl wanted to speak Latin, she should move to Latin America.
7. Union Membership Benefits the Economy
In 2014, a Gallup poll found that 53% of Americans approved of labor unions while 71% favored anti-union “right to work” laws. Union membership is way down in the U.S.: only 6.6% of private-sector workers, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, belonged to unions in 2014 compared to roughly 35% in the mid-1950s. The U.S.’ overall unionization rate (factoring in both public-sector and private-sector workers) is 11.1%, which is quite a contrast to parts of Europe, where overall union rates range from 74% in Finland and 70% in Sweden to 35% in Italy, 19% in Spain and 18% in Germany. That is not to say unionization has not been decreasing in Europe, but overall, one finds a more pro-labor, pro-working class outlook in Europe. The fact that 47% of Americans, in that Gallup poll, consider themselves anti-union is troubling. Too many Americans naively believe that the 1% have their best interests at heart, and they fail to realize that when unions are strong and their members earn decent wages, that money goes back into the economy.
8. Paid Maternity Leave Is the Norm in Most Developed Countries
The U.S. continues to lag behind the rest of the developed world when it comes to maternity leave. Paid maternity leave is strictly voluntary in the U.S., where, according to the organization Moms Rising, 51% of new mothers have no paid maternity leave at all. But government-mandated maternity leave is the norm in other developed countries, including the Netherlands (112 days at 100% pay), Italy (140 days at 80% pay), Switzerland (98 days at 80% pay) and Germany (98 days at 100% pay).
9. Distrust of Oligarchy Is a Positive
In February 2015, the Emnid Polling Institute in Germany released the results of a poll that addressed economic and political conditions in that country: over 60% of the Germans surveyed believed that large corporations had too much influence on elections. ThE survey demonstrated that most Germans have a healthy distrust of crony capitalists and oligarchs who take much more than they give. Meanwhile, in the U.S., various polls show a growing distrust of oligarchy on the part of many Americans but with less vehemence than in the German Emnid poll. A 2012 poll by the Greenberg Quinlan Rosner Research showed that while 62% of American voters opposed the U.S. Supreme Court’s disastrous Citizens United decision, only 46% strongly opposed it. And in a 2012 poll by the Corporate Reform Coalition, most Americans agreed that there was too much corporate money in U.S. politics—although only 51% strongly agreed.
Here are nine things Americans can learn from the rest of the world.
1. Universal Healthcare Is Great for Free Enterprise and Great for Small Businesses
The modern-day Republican Party would have us believe that those who promote universal healthcare are anti-free enterprise or hostile to small businesses. But truth be told, universal healthcare is great for entrepreneurs, small businesses and the self-employed in France, Germany and other developed countries where healthcare is considered a right. The U.S.’ troubled healthcare system has a long history of punishing entrepreneurs with sky-high premiums when they start their own businesses. Prior to the Affordable Care Act of 2010, a.k.a. Obamacare, many small business owners couldn’t even obtain individual health insurance plans if they had a preexisting condition such as heart disease or diabetes—and even with the ACA’s reforms, the high cost of health insurance is still daunting to small business owners. But many Americans fail to realize that healthcare reform is not only a humanitarian issue, it is also vitally important to small businesses and the self-employed.
In 2009, the Center for Economic and Policy Research published a study on small businesses around the world and found that “by every measure of small-business employment, the United States has among the world’s smallest small-business sectors.” People in the Netherlands, France, Germany, Sweden, Finland, Belgium and other European countries are more likely to be self-employed—and the study concluded that universal healthcare is a key factor. According to CEPR’s study, “High healthcare costs discourage small business formation since start-ups in other countries can tap into government-funded healthcare systems.”
2. Comprehensive Sex Education Decreases Sexual Problems
For decades, social conservatives in the U.S. have insisted that comprehensive sex education promotes unplanned pregnancies and sexually transmitted diseases. But in fact, comprehensive sex education (as opposed to the abstinence-only programs that are common in the American Bible Belt) decreases sexual problems, and the data bears that out in no uncertain terms. Public schools in the Netherlands have aggressive sex education programs that America’s Christian Right would despise. Yet in 2009, the Netherlands had (according to the United Nations) a teen birth rate of only 5.3 per 1,000 compared to 39.1 per 1,000 in the U.S. That same year, the U.S. had three times as many adults living with HIV or AIDS as the Netherlands.
Switzerland, France, Germany and many other European countries also have intensive sex-ed programs and much lower teen pregnancy rates than the U.S. Still, far-right politicians in the U.S. can’t get it through their heads that inadequate sex education and insufficient sexual knowledge actually promote teenage pregnancies and sexually transmitted diseases instead of decreasing them.
3. American Exceptionalism Is Absolute Nonsense
No matter how severe the U.S.’ decline becomes, neocons and the Tea Party continue to espouse their belief in “American exceptionalism.” But in many respects, the U.S. is far from exceptional. The U.S. is not exceptional when it comes to civil liberties (no country in the world incarcerates, per capita, more of its people than the U.S.) or healthcare (WHO ranks the U.S. #37 in terms of healthcare). Nor is the U.S. a leader in terms of life expectancy: according to the WHO, overall life expectancy in the U.S. in 2013 was 79 compared to 83 in Switzerland and Japan, 82 in Spain, France, Italy, Sweden and Canada and 81 in the Netherlands, Germany, Norway, Austria and Finland.
4. Adequate Mass Transit Is a Huge Convenience
When it comes to mass transit, Europe and Japan are way ahead of the U.S.; in only a handful of American cities is it easy to function without a car. New York City, Chicago, Boston, Philadelphia and Washington, DC are among the U.S.’ more mass transit-oriented cities, but overall, the U.S. remains a car culture—and public transportation is painfully limited in a long list of U.S. cities. Many Americans fail to realize that mass transit has numerous advantages, including less air pollution, less congestion, fewer DUIs and all the aerobic exercise that goes with living in a pedestrian-friendly environment.
5. The Bible Was Not Written by Billionaire Hedge Fund Managers
Christianity in its various forms can be found all over the developed world. But the U.S., more than anywhere, is where one finds a far-right version of white Protestant fundamentalism that idolizes the ultra-rich, demonizes the poor and equates extreme wealth with morality and poverty with moral failings. The problem with hating the poor in the name of Christianity is that the Bible is full of quotes that are much more in line with Franklin Delano Roosevelt than Ayn Rand—like “It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God” (Mark 10:25) and “The love of money is the root of all evil” (1 Timothy 6:10).
6. Learning a Second or Third Language Is a Plus, Not a Character Flaw
In the Netherlands or the Scandinavian countries, becoming proficient in two or three foreign languages is viewed as a sign of intellect and sophistication. But xenophobia runs so deep among many neocons, Republicans and Tea Party wingnuts that any use of a language other than English terrifies them. Barack Obama, during his 2008 campaign, was bombarded with hateful responses from Republicans when he recommended that Americans study foreign languages from an early age. And in the 2012 GOP presidential primary, Newt Gingrich’s campaign ran an ad in South Carolina attacking Mitt Romney for being proficient in French.
In February, an eighth-grade girl who was studying Latin in Vermont received equally clueless responses when she wrote to a state senator suggesting that Vermont adopt a Latin motto in addition to its English-language motto (not as a replacement). The wingnuts went ballistic, posting on the Facebook page of a local television station that if the girl wanted to speak Latin, she should move to Latin America.
7. Union Membership Benefits the Economy
In 2014, a Gallup poll found that 53% of Americans approved of labor unions while 71% favored anti-union “right to work” laws. Union membership is way down in the U.S.: only 6.6% of private-sector workers, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, belonged to unions in 2014 compared to roughly 35% in the mid-1950s. The U.S.’ overall unionization rate (factoring in both public-sector and private-sector workers) is 11.1%, which is quite a contrast to parts of Europe, where overall union rates range from 74% in Finland and 70% in Sweden to 35% in Italy, 19% in Spain and 18% in Germany. That is not to say unionization has not been decreasing in Europe, but overall, one finds a more pro-labor, pro-working class outlook in Europe. The fact that 47% of Americans, in that Gallup poll, consider themselves anti-union is troubling. Too many Americans naively believe that the 1% have their best interests at heart, and they fail to realize that when unions are strong and their members earn decent wages, that money goes back into the economy.
8. Paid Maternity Leave Is the Norm in Most Developed Countries
The U.S. continues to lag behind the rest of the developed world when it comes to maternity leave. Paid maternity leave is strictly voluntary in the U.S., where, according to the organization Moms Rising, 51% of new mothers have no paid maternity leave at all. But government-mandated maternity leave is the norm in other developed countries, including the Netherlands (112 days at 100% pay), Italy (140 days at 80% pay), Switzerland (98 days at 80% pay) and Germany (98 days at 100% pay).
9. Distrust of Oligarchy Is a Positive
In February 2015, the Emnid Polling Institute in Germany released the results of a poll that addressed economic and political conditions in that country: over 60% of the Germans surveyed believed that large corporations had too much influence on elections. ThE survey demonstrated that most Germans have a healthy distrust of crony capitalists and oligarchs who take much more than they give. Meanwhile, in the U.S., various polls show a growing distrust of oligarchy on the part of many Americans but with less vehemence than in the German Emnid poll. A 2012 poll by the Greenberg Quinlan Rosner Research showed that while 62% of American voters opposed the U.S. Supreme Court’s disastrous Citizens United decision, only 46% strongly opposed it. And in a 2012 poll by the Corporate Reform Coalition, most Americans agreed that there was too much corporate money in U.S. politics—although only 51% strongly agreed.
Here are 20 of the world’s weirdest religious beliefs
VALERIE TARICO - COMMENTARY - raw story
14 JAN 2019 AT 08:50 ET
We find it easy to dismiss the fantastical beliefs of people in other times and places, but those that we’ve been exposed to since childhood seem not so far out. Virgin birth? Water turning into wine? A fig tree shriveling on the spot? Dead people getting up out of their graves and walking around?
All of the following beliefs are found in respected religions today. They have been long taught by religions that either are considered part of the American mainstream or are home grown, made in the U.S.A., produced here and exported. Some of these beliefs are ensconced in sacred texts. Others are simply traditional. All, at one time or another, have had the sanction of the highest church authorities, and many still do.
How many of them can you match up with a familiar religious tradition? (The answers are at the bottom.)
1. The foreskin of [a holy one] may lie safeguarded in reliquaries made of gold and crystal and inlayed with gems–or it may have ascended into the heavens all by itself. (2)
2. A race of giants once roamed the earth, the result of women and demi-gods interbreeding. (1, 6). They lived at the same time as fire breathing dragons. (1)
3. Evil spirits can take control of pigs. (1)
4. A talking donkey scolded a prophet. (1, 3)
5. A righteous man can control his wife’s access to eternal paradise. (6)
6. Brown skin is a punishment for disobeying God. (6)
7. A prophet once traveled between two cities on a miniature flying horse with the face of a woman and the tail of a peacock. (4)
8. [The Holy One] forbids a cat or dog receiving a blood transfusion and forbids blood meal being used as garden fertilizer. (7)
9. Sacred underwear protects believers from spiritual contamination and, according to some adherents, from fire and speeding bullets (6)
10. When certain rites are performed beforehand, bread turns into human flesh after it is swallowed. (2)
11. Invisible supernatural beings reveal themselves in mundane objects like oozing paint or cooking food. (2)
12. In the end times, [the Holy One’s] chosen people will be gathered together in Jackson County, Missouri. (6)
13. Believers can drink poison or get bit by snakes without being harmed. (1)
14. Sprinkling water on a newborn, if done correctly, can keep the baby from eons of suffering should he or she die prematurely. (2)
15. Waving a chicken over your head can take away your sins. (3)
16. [A holy one] climbed a mountain and could see the whole earth from the mountain peak. (1, 2)
17. Putting a dirty milk glass and a plate from a roast beef sandwich in the same dishwasher can contaminate your soul. (3)
18. There will be an afterlife in which exactly 144,000 people get to live eternally in Paradise. (8)
19. Each human being contains many alien spirits that were trapped in volcanos by hydrogen bombs. (5)
20. [A supernatural being] cares tremendously what you do with your penis. 1,2,3,4,6,7,8.
Key: 1-Evangelical or “Bible Believing” Christianity, 2-Catholic Christianity, 3-Judaism, 4-Islam, 5-Scientology, 6-Mormonism 7-Christian Science 8-Jehovah’s Witness
Each of these beliefs is remarkable in its own way. But the composite goes beyond remarkable to revealing. What it reveals is an underlying belief that is something like this:
The process that produced this world and human life is best unveiled not by the scientific method but by the musings of iron age herdsmen (1,2,3,4,7,8) or science fiction writers (5), or con artists (6) whose theories are best judged by examining only assertions that cannot be falsified.
Underlying that belief is a sort of rational swiss cheese that is going to keep cognitive scientists investigating and arguing for decades.
We humans are astoundingly susceptible to handed down nonsense. Human children are dependent on their parents for a decade or even two, which is why nature made children credulous. When parents say, eat your peas, they’re good for you, kids may argue about the eat your peas part but they don’t usually question the factual assertion about nutrition. When parents sayNoah put all of the animals into the ark, it is the rare child who asks, Why didn’t the lion eat the guinea pigs?
Even as adults, we simply can’t afford to research everything we hear and read, and so, unless something isn’t working for us, we tend to accept what we are told by trusted authority figures. We go with the flow. Religion exploits this tendency by, among other things, establishing hierarchy and by ensuring that believers are in a certain mindset when they encounter religious ideas. A friend once gave me a button that said, Don’t pray in my school and I won’t think in your church. I didn’t really want to wear a button that said “I’m an arrogant jerk,” but the reality is that even the best of churches aren’t optimized for critical thinking. Quite the opposite. The pacing, the music, the lighting—all are designed for assent and emotion, for a right brain aesthetic experience, for the dominance of what Nobel prize winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman has called System 1 thinking, meaning intuition and gut feel rather than rational, slow, linear analysis.
Some of our ancestors were doing the best they could to understand the world around them but had a very limited set of tools at their disposal. It would appear that others were simply making stuff up. Mormonism and Scientology appear to fall in the latter camp. But when it comes to religious credulity, the difference matters surprisingly little. For example, Mormonism is more easily debunked than most other religions, both because of its recency and because it makes so many historically or scientifically wild claims, and yet it is also one of the fastest growing religions in the world proportional to its membership. Wild claims matter less than whether a religion has certain viral characteristics.
All of the following beliefs are found in respected religions today. They have been long taught by religions that either are considered part of the American mainstream or are home grown, made in the U.S.A., produced here and exported. Some of these beliefs are ensconced in sacred texts. Others are simply traditional. All, at one time or another, have had the sanction of the highest church authorities, and many still do.
How many of them can you match up with a familiar religious tradition? (The answers are at the bottom.)
1. The foreskin of [a holy one] may lie safeguarded in reliquaries made of gold and crystal and inlayed with gems–or it may have ascended into the heavens all by itself. (2)
2. A race of giants once roamed the earth, the result of women and demi-gods interbreeding. (1, 6). They lived at the same time as fire breathing dragons. (1)
3. Evil spirits can take control of pigs. (1)
4. A talking donkey scolded a prophet. (1, 3)
5. A righteous man can control his wife’s access to eternal paradise. (6)
6. Brown skin is a punishment for disobeying God. (6)
7. A prophet once traveled between two cities on a miniature flying horse with the face of a woman and the tail of a peacock. (4)
8. [The Holy One] forbids a cat or dog receiving a blood transfusion and forbids blood meal being used as garden fertilizer. (7)
9. Sacred underwear protects believers from spiritual contamination and, according to some adherents, from fire and speeding bullets (6)
10. When certain rites are performed beforehand, bread turns into human flesh after it is swallowed. (2)
11. Invisible supernatural beings reveal themselves in mundane objects like oozing paint or cooking food. (2)
12. In the end times, [the Holy One’s] chosen people will be gathered together in Jackson County, Missouri. (6)
13. Believers can drink poison or get bit by snakes without being harmed. (1)
14. Sprinkling water on a newborn, if done correctly, can keep the baby from eons of suffering should he or she die prematurely. (2)
15. Waving a chicken over your head can take away your sins. (3)
16. [A holy one] climbed a mountain and could see the whole earth from the mountain peak. (1, 2)
17. Putting a dirty milk glass and a plate from a roast beef sandwich in the same dishwasher can contaminate your soul. (3)
18. There will be an afterlife in which exactly 144,000 people get to live eternally in Paradise. (8)
19. Each human being contains many alien spirits that were trapped in volcanos by hydrogen bombs. (5)
20. [A supernatural being] cares tremendously what you do with your penis. 1,2,3,4,6,7,8.
Key: 1-Evangelical or “Bible Believing” Christianity, 2-Catholic Christianity, 3-Judaism, 4-Islam, 5-Scientology, 6-Mormonism 7-Christian Science 8-Jehovah’s Witness
Each of these beliefs is remarkable in its own way. But the composite goes beyond remarkable to revealing. What it reveals is an underlying belief that is something like this:
The process that produced this world and human life is best unveiled not by the scientific method but by the musings of iron age herdsmen (1,2,3,4,7,8) or science fiction writers (5), or con artists (6) whose theories are best judged by examining only assertions that cannot be falsified.
Underlying that belief is a sort of rational swiss cheese that is going to keep cognitive scientists investigating and arguing for decades.
We humans are astoundingly susceptible to handed down nonsense. Human children are dependent on their parents for a decade or even two, which is why nature made children credulous. When parents say, eat your peas, they’re good for you, kids may argue about the eat your peas part but they don’t usually question the factual assertion about nutrition. When parents sayNoah put all of the animals into the ark, it is the rare child who asks, Why didn’t the lion eat the guinea pigs?
Even as adults, we simply can’t afford to research everything we hear and read, and so, unless something isn’t working for us, we tend to accept what we are told by trusted authority figures. We go with the flow. Religion exploits this tendency by, among other things, establishing hierarchy and by ensuring that believers are in a certain mindset when they encounter religious ideas. A friend once gave me a button that said, Don’t pray in my school and I won’t think in your church. I didn’t really want to wear a button that said “I’m an arrogant jerk,” but the reality is that even the best of churches aren’t optimized for critical thinking. Quite the opposite. The pacing, the music, the lighting—all are designed for assent and emotion, for a right brain aesthetic experience, for the dominance of what Nobel prize winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman has called System 1 thinking, meaning intuition and gut feel rather than rational, slow, linear analysis.
Some of our ancestors were doing the best they could to understand the world around them but had a very limited set of tools at their disposal. It would appear that others were simply making stuff up. Mormonism and Scientology appear to fall in the latter camp. But when it comes to religious credulity, the difference matters surprisingly little. For example, Mormonism is more easily debunked than most other religions, both because of its recency and because it makes so many historically or scientifically wild claims, and yet it is also one of the fastest growing religions in the world proportional to its membership. Wild claims matter less than whether a religion has certain viral characteristics.
The Capitalism/Racism Partnership
by Richard Wolff | the smirking chimp
July 19, 2018 - 6:28am
In the wake of W.E.B. DuBois ’s 150th birthday, his works offer a lens through which to assess US capitalism’s relationship to racism today. He famously wrote: “Capitalism cannot reform itself; it is doomed to self-destruction,” while adding that in the US, race would be a key issue in that process. Thus he would have had much to say when, around last Memorial Day, Trump suggested that NFL players peacefully protesting police killings of black people did not belong “in the country.”
An extreme right-wing capitalist agenda prevails. It pushes private capitalists’ goals—privatization and deregulation; tax cuts for corporations and the rich;and subsidies for them—to lengths not seen before. A kind of unhinged capitalist euphoria makes a virtue of learning nothing about restraint from the catastrophic booms and busts associated with 1929 and 2008.
Capitalism’s headlong rush is quite logically symbolized and figureheaded by Trump. Yet what makes it possible is above all the absence of any serious, organized opposition such as that successfully mounted during the Great Depression by the New Deal coalition of industrial unions, two socialist parties, and one communist party. After 1945, Republicans attacked and Democrats abetted the demise of the New Deal Coalition and subsequent efforts to rebuild it. That allowed a capitalist resurgence and thereby the resumption yet again of another drive to crisis. When that happened in 2008-2009, the absence of a serious left opposition precluded anything like another New Deal. After 2008 we had only bailouts (much bigger than FDR’s in the 1930s). Oblivious to capitalism’s history, today’s centrist Democratic Party leadership waits for Trump’s demise so it can resume the Clintons’ legacy: another drive to crisis.
While no broad-based national opposition yet exists in the US, there are signs of it struggling to be born. Public school teachers—some with and some without union supports—became active finally against years of public school funding cutbacks accelerated under the grotesque DeVos administration. The striking teachers’ success in West Virginia showed what serious, organized opposition can do. Likewise the high-schoolers from Parkland, Florida, organized opposition to the gun lobby, mocking the fakeries and lip-service of so many others. Consider too the proliferating organizations of and for worker coops as a democratic alternative to undemocratically organized capitalist enterprises.
There are more examples, but what matters basically is this: social change requires serious, organized opposition to the status quo. The further the social change seeks to go, the better organized its proponents within that serious opposition need to be. Defeating a particular politician takes less organizing than defeating a political party and that, in turn, takes less than making a transition to a better, different economy.
DuBois understood that capitalism’s drive to self-destruction would eventually prompt last-ditch efforts to save the system. We see these now in the sorts of extreme deregulation, tax cuts for business and the rich, etc. undertaken by the Trump regime. The bubble and subsequent recession to which they are building plus the extreme income and wealth inequalities that they worsen are signals of impending serious opposition. So too are the efforts to distract attention from system-critique and toward selected scapegoats, non-white immigrants especially. Revulsion is building towards the smokescreens of hypocrisy, racism, and nationalism barely masking capitalism’s ongoing failure to provide the jobs and incomes people need.
DuBois split his political efforts between appealing to African-Americans to embrace anti-capitalism and to socialists to embrace anti-racism. In his view, no program to establish socialism in the US could succeed or survive so long as African-Americans were kept as employees or unemployed. Likewise, no program to abolish racism was possible within the US capitalist system.
Racism in the US had settled deeply into the economics, politics and culture of the US since its inception. It had adjusted itself to capitalism and vice-versa. Their interdependence or partnership was deeply structured. Thus, for example, US capitalism could use racism to solve the problems of two of its worst features: instability and inequality. The business cycles ever besetting capitalism threatened the entire working class with periodic unemployment, poverty, etc. That constant threat—as well as the recurring downturns themselves—risked provoking working class opposition to capitalism as a system. Racism facilitated offloading instability’s risks and costs onto the African-American community that was last hired, first fired. A large part of the white population could thus escape capitalism’s instability or suffer less from it. Racist arguments then blamed African-Americans for their unemployment and poverty by contrasting it with that of most whites. Racism and capitalism reinforced one another in this way.
In parallel fashion, capitalism’s incessantly rising inequality threatens the entire working class with relative and often also absolute poverty. Racism assigns African-Americans to the bottom of the income and wealth distributions (via racist hiring, housing, schooling, public policies, and attitudes). Many whites feel less threatened by capitalism’s drive to ever greater inequality because a disproportionate share of that inequality is dumped onto the African-American community. Whites have a constant exhibit of “it could be worse” flowing from that community’s living conditions.
A partnership between anti-capitalism and anti-racism within social movements and in public discourse could dissolve the mutual reinforcement between racism and capitalism and thereby advance progressive social change. Today’s capitalism includes contradictions pushing toward that dissolution. Long-term wage stagnation and profit-driven technical changes are subjecting more and more whites to conditions previously limited largely to African-Americans. Hence the household disintegrations, drug dependencies, etc. long afflicting African-Americans are increasingly suffered among whites as well.
The resurgence of white-supremacy represents anxiety about descent into conditions that capitalism and racism had earlier let most whites escape. It is the other side of whites’ recognizing their basic employee position within capitalism as shared with African-Americans. Capitalism’s current development (the rush to privatize, cut taxes, export jobs, automate, etc.) drives conservatives (not just Trump) to cultivate white-supremacy against the growing working class solidarity the system itself generates. In the light of DuBois’s concept of capitalism’s “self-destruction,” might today’s polarizing politics (Trump), ideologies, culture and economy be its multiple signs?
An extreme right-wing capitalist agenda prevails. It pushes private capitalists’ goals—privatization and deregulation; tax cuts for corporations and the rich;and subsidies for them—to lengths not seen before. A kind of unhinged capitalist euphoria makes a virtue of learning nothing about restraint from the catastrophic booms and busts associated with 1929 and 2008.
Capitalism’s headlong rush is quite logically symbolized and figureheaded by Trump. Yet what makes it possible is above all the absence of any serious, organized opposition such as that successfully mounted during the Great Depression by the New Deal coalition of industrial unions, two socialist parties, and one communist party. After 1945, Republicans attacked and Democrats abetted the demise of the New Deal Coalition and subsequent efforts to rebuild it. That allowed a capitalist resurgence and thereby the resumption yet again of another drive to crisis. When that happened in 2008-2009, the absence of a serious left opposition precluded anything like another New Deal. After 2008 we had only bailouts (much bigger than FDR’s in the 1930s). Oblivious to capitalism’s history, today’s centrist Democratic Party leadership waits for Trump’s demise so it can resume the Clintons’ legacy: another drive to crisis.
While no broad-based national opposition yet exists in the US, there are signs of it struggling to be born. Public school teachers—some with and some without union supports—became active finally against years of public school funding cutbacks accelerated under the grotesque DeVos administration. The striking teachers’ success in West Virginia showed what serious, organized opposition can do. Likewise the high-schoolers from Parkland, Florida, organized opposition to the gun lobby, mocking the fakeries and lip-service of so many others. Consider too the proliferating organizations of and for worker coops as a democratic alternative to undemocratically organized capitalist enterprises.
There are more examples, but what matters basically is this: social change requires serious, organized opposition to the status quo. The further the social change seeks to go, the better organized its proponents within that serious opposition need to be. Defeating a particular politician takes less organizing than defeating a political party and that, in turn, takes less than making a transition to a better, different economy.
DuBois understood that capitalism’s drive to self-destruction would eventually prompt last-ditch efforts to save the system. We see these now in the sorts of extreme deregulation, tax cuts for business and the rich, etc. undertaken by the Trump regime. The bubble and subsequent recession to which they are building plus the extreme income and wealth inequalities that they worsen are signals of impending serious opposition. So too are the efforts to distract attention from system-critique and toward selected scapegoats, non-white immigrants especially. Revulsion is building towards the smokescreens of hypocrisy, racism, and nationalism barely masking capitalism’s ongoing failure to provide the jobs and incomes people need.
DuBois split his political efforts between appealing to African-Americans to embrace anti-capitalism and to socialists to embrace anti-racism. In his view, no program to establish socialism in the US could succeed or survive so long as African-Americans were kept as employees or unemployed. Likewise, no program to abolish racism was possible within the US capitalist system.
Racism in the US had settled deeply into the economics, politics and culture of the US since its inception. It had adjusted itself to capitalism and vice-versa. Their interdependence or partnership was deeply structured. Thus, for example, US capitalism could use racism to solve the problems of two of its worst features: instability and inequality. The business cycles ever besetting capitalism threatened the entire working class with periodic unemployment, poverty, etc. That constant threat—as well as the recurring downturns themselves—risked provoking working class opposition to capitalism as a system. Racism facilitated offloading instability’s risks and costs onto the African-American community that was last hired, first fired. A large part of the white population could thus escape capitalism’s instability or suffer less from it. Racist arguments then blamed African-Americans for their unemployment and poverty by contrasting it with that of most whites. Racism and capitalism reinforced one another in this way.
In parallel fashion, capitalism’s incessantly rising inequality threatens the entire working class with relative and often also absolute poverty. Racism assigns African-Americans to the bottom of the income and wealth distributions (via racist hiring, housing, schooling, public policies, and attitudes). Many whites feel less threatened by capitalism’s drive to ever greater inequality because a disproportionate share of that inequality is dumped onto the African-American community. Whites have a constant exhibit of “it could be worse” flowing from that community’s living conditions.
A partnership between anti-capitalism and anti-racism within social movements and in public discourse could dissolve the mutual reinforcement between racism and capitalism and thereby advance progressive social change. Today’s capitalism includes contradictions pushing toward that dissolution. Long-term wage stagnation and profit-driven technical changes are subjecting more and more whites to conditions previously limited largely to African-Americans. Hence the household disintegrations, drug dependencies, etc. long afflicting African-Americans are increasingly suffered among whites as well.
The resurgence of white-supremacy represents anxiety about descent into conditions that capitalism and racism had earlier let most whites escape. It is the other side of whites’ recognizing their basic employee position within capitalism as shared with African-Americans. Capitalism’s current development (the rush to privatize, cut taxes, export jobs, automate, etc.) drives conservatives (not just Trump) to cultivate white-supremacy against the growing working class solidarity the system itself generates. In the light of DuBois’s concept of capitalism’s “self-destruction,” might today’s polarizing politics (Trump), ideologies, culture and economy be its multiple signs?
Read Martin Luther King Jr. on White America’s Delusions
In 1967, the civil-rights leader foresaw that white resistance to racial equality would stiffen as activists’ economic agenda grew more ambitious.
the atlantic
Martin Luther King Jr.
3/30/18
Why is equality so assiduously avoided? Why does white America delude itself, and how does it rationalize the evil it retains?
The majority of white Americans consider themselves sincerely committed to justice for the Negro. They believe that American society is essentially hospitable to fair play and to steady growth toward a middle-class Utopia embodying racial harmony. But unfortunately this is a fantasy of self-deception and comfortable vanity. Overwhelmingly America is still struggling with irresolution and contradictions. It has been sincere and even ardent in welcoming some change. But too quickly apathy and disinterest rise to the surface when the next logical steps are to be taken. Laws are passed in a crisis mood after a Birmingham or a Selma, but no substantial fervor survives the formal signing of legislation. The recording of the law in itself is treated as the reality of the reform.
This limited degree of concern is a reflection of an inner conflict which measures cautiously the impact of any change on the status quo. As the nation passes from opposing extremist behavior to the deeper and more pervasive elements of equality, white America reaffirms its bonds to the status quo. It had contemplated comfortably hugging the shoreline but now fears that the winds of change are blowing it out to sea.
The practical cost of change for the nation up to this point has been cheap. The limited reforms have been obtained at bargain rates. There are no expenses, and no taxes are required, for Negroes to share lunch counters, libraries, parks, hotels and other facilities with whites. Even the psychological adjustment is far from formidable. Having exaggerated the emotional difficulties for decades, when demands for new conduct became inescapable, white Southerners may have trembled under the strain but they did not collapse.
Even the more significant changes involved in voter registration required neither large monetary nor psychological sacrifice. Spectacular and turbulent events that dramatized the demand created an erroneous impression that a heavy burden was involved.
The real cost lies ahead. The stiffening of white resistance is a recognition of that fact. The discount education given Negroes will in the future have to be purchased at full price if quality education is to be realized. Jobs are harder and costlier to create than voting rolls. The eradication of slums housing millions is complex far beyond integrating buses and lunch counters.
The assistant director of the Office of Economic Opportunity, Hyman Bookbinder, in a frank statement on December 29, 1966, declared that the long-range costs of adequately implementing programs to fight poverty, ignorance and slums will reach one trillion dollars. He was not awed or dismayed by this prospect but instead pointed out that the growth of the gross national product during the same period makes this expenditure comfortably possible. It is, he said, as simple as this: “The poor can stop being poor if the rich are willing to become even richer at a slower rate.” Furthermore, he predicted that unless a “substantial sacrifice is made by the American people,” the nation can expect further deterioration of the cities, increased antagonisms between races and continued disorders in the streets. He asserted that people are not informed enough to give adequate support to anti-poverty programs, and he leveled a share of the blame at the government because it “must do more to get people to understand the size of the problem.”
Let us take a look at the size of the problem through the lens of the Negro’s status in 1967. When the Constitution was written, a strange formula to determine taxes and representation declared that the Negro was 60 percent of a person. Today another curious formula seems to declare he is 50 percent of a person. Of the good things in life he has approximately one-half those of whites; of the bad he has twice those of whites. Thus, half of all Negroes live in substandard housing, and Negroes have half the income of whites. When we turn to the negative experiences of life, the Negro has a double share. There are twice as many unemployed. The rate of infant mortality (widely accepted as an accurate index of general health) among Negroes is double that of whites. The equation pursues Negroes even into war … [From early 1965 to early 1966,] twice as many Negro soldiers died in action (20.6 percent) in proportion to their numbers in the population.
In other spheres the figures are equally alarming. In elementary schools Negroes lag one to three years behind whites, and their segregated schools receive substantially less money per student than do the white schools. One-twentieth as many Negroes as whites attend college, and half of these are in ill-equipped Southern institutions.
The majority of white Americans consider themselves sincerely committed to justice for the Negro. They believe that American society is essentially hospitable to fair play and to steady growth toward a middle-class Utopia embodying racial harmony. But unfortunately this is a fantasy of self-deception and comfortable vanity. Overwhelmingly America is still struggling with irresolution and contradictions. It has been sincere and even ardent in welcoming some change. But too quickly apathy and disinterest rise to the surface when the next logical steps are to be taken. Laws are passed in a crisis mood after a Birmingham or a Selma, but no substantial fervor survives the formal signing of legislation. The recording of the law in itself is treated as the reality of the reform.
This limited degree of concern is a reflection of an inner conflict which measures cautiously the impact of any change on the status quo. As the nation passes from opposing extremist behavior to the deeper and more pervasive elements of equality, white America reaffirms its bonds to the status quo. It had contemplated comfortably hugging the shoreline but now fears that the winds of change are blowing it out to sea.
The practical cost of change for the nation up to this point has been cheap. The limited reforms have been obtained at bargain rates. There are no expenses, and no taxes are required, for Negroes to share lunch counters, libraries, parks, hotels and other facilities with whites. Even the psychological adjustment is far from formidable. Having exaggerated the emotional difficulties for decades, when demands for new conduct became inescapable, white Southerners may have trembled under the strain but they did not collapse.
Even the more significant changes involved in voter registration required neither large monetary nor psychological sacrifice. Spectacular and turbulent events that dramatized the demand created an erroneous impression that a heavy burden was involved.
The real cost lies ahead. The stiffening of white resistance is a recognition of that fact. The discount education given Negroes will in the future have to be purchased at full price if quality education is to be realized. Jobs are harder and costlier to create than voting rolls. The eradication of slums housing millions is complex far beyond integrating buses and lunch counters.
The assistant director of the Office of Economic Opportunity, Hyman Bookbinder, in a frank statement on December 29, 1966, declared that the long-range costs of adequately implementing programs to fight poverty, ignorance and slums will reach one trillion dollars. He was not awed or dismayed by this prospect but instead pointed out that the growth of the gross national product during the same period makes this expenditure comfortably possible. It is, he said, as simple as this: “The poor can stop being poor if the rich are willing to become even richer at a slower rate.” Furthermore, he predicted that unless a “substantial sacrifice is made by the American people,” the nation can expect further deterioration of the cities, increased antagonisms between races and continued disorders in the streets. He asserted that people are not informed enough to give adequate support to anti-poverty programs, and he leveled a share of the blame at the government because it “must do more to get people to understand the size of the problem.”
Let us take a look at the size of the problem through the lens of the Negro’s status in 1967. When the Constitution was written, a strange formula to determine taxes and representation declared that the Negro was 60 percent of a person. Today another curious formula seems to declare he is 50 percent of a person. Of the good things in life he has approximately one-half those of whites; of the bad he has twice those of whites. Thus, half of all Negroes live in substandard housing, and Negroes have half the income of whites. When we turn to the negative experiences of life, the Negro has a double share. There are twice as many unemployed. The rate of infant mortality (widely accepted as an accurate index of general health) among Negroes is double that of whites. The equation pursues Negroes even into war … [From early 1965 to early 1966,] twice as many Negro soldiers died in action (20.6 percent) in proportion to their numbers in the population.
In other spheres the figures are equally alarming. In elementary schools Negroes lag one to three years behind whites, and their segregated schools receive substantially less money per student than do the white schools. One-twentieth as many Negroes as whites attend college, and half of these are in ill-equipped Southern institutions.
Martin Luther King Jr. Saw Three Evils in the World
Racism was only the first.
Martin Luther King Jr. - the atlantic
Three major evils—the evil of racism, the evil of poverty, and the evil of war. These are the three things that I want to deal with today. Now let us turn first to the evil of racism. There can be no gainsaying of the fact that racism is still alive all over America. Racial injustice is still the Negro’s burden and America’s shame. And we must face the hard fact that many Americans would like to have a nation which is a democracy for white Americans but simultaneously a dictatorship over black Americans. We must face the fact that we still have much to do in the area of race relations.
Now to be sure there has been some progress, and I would not want to overlook that. We’ve seen that progress a great deal here in our Southland. Probably the greatest area of this progress has been the breakdown of legal segregation. And so the movement in the South has profoundly shaken the entire edifice of segregation. And I am convinced that segregation is as dead as a doornail in its legal sense, and the only thing uncertain about it now is how costly some of the segregationists who still linger around will make the funeral. And so there has been progress. But we must not allow this progress to cause us to engage in a superficial, dangerous optimism. The plant of freedom has grown only a bud and not yet a flower. And there is no area of our country that can boast of clean hands in the area of brotherhood. Every city confronts a serious problem. Now there are those who are trying to say now that the civil rights movement is dead. I submit to you that it is more alive today than ever before. What they fail to realize is that we are now in a transition period. We are moving into a new phase of the struggle. For well now twelve years, the struggle was basically a struggle to end legal segregation. In a sense it was a struggle for decency. It was a struggle to get rid of all of the humiliation and the syndrome of depravation surrounding the system of legal segregation. And I need not remind you that those were glorious days. We cannot forget the days of Montgomery, when fifty thousand Negroes decided that it was ultimately more honorable to walk the streets in dignity than to accept segregation within, in humiliation. We will not forget the 1960 sit-in movement, when by the thousands students decided to sit in at lunch counters, protesting humiliation and segregation. And when they decided to sit down at those counters, they were in reality standing up for the best in the American dream and carrying the whole nation back to those great wells of democracy which were dug deep by the founding fathers in the formulation of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence. We will not forget the Freedom Rides of sixty one, and the Birmingham Movement of sixty three, a movement which literally subpoenaed the conscience of a large segment of the nation to appear before the judgement seat of morality on the whole question of civil rights. We will not forget Selma, when by the thousands we marched from that city to Montgomery to dramatize the fact that Negroes did not have the right to vote. These were marvelous movements. But that period is over now. And we are moving into a new phase.
And because we are moving into this new phase, some people feel that the civil rights movement is dead. The new phase is a struggle for genuine equality. It is not merely a struggle for decency now, it is not merely a struggle to get rid of the brutality of a Bull Connor and a Jim Clark. It is now a struggle for genuine equality on all levels, and this will be a much more difficult struggle. You see, the gains in the first period, or the first era of struggle, were obtained from the power structure at bargain rates; it didn’t cost the nation anything to integrate lunch counters. It didn’t cost the nation anything to integrate hotels and motels. It didn’t cost the nation a penny to guarantee the right to vote. Now we are in a period where it will cost the nation billions of dollars to get rid of poverty, to get rid of slums, to make quality integrated education a reality. This is where we are now. Now we’re going to lose some friends in this period. The allies who were with us in Selma will not all stay with us during this period. We’ve got to understand what is happening. Now they often call this the white backlash … It’s just a new name for an old phenomenon. The fact is that there has never been any single, solid, determined commitment on the part of the vast majority of white Americans to genuine equality for Negroes. There has always been ambivalence … In 1863 the Negro was granted freedom from physical slavery through the Emancipation Proclamation. But he was not given land to make that freedom meaningful. At the same time, our government was giving away millions of acres of land in the Midwest and the West, which meant that the nation was willing to undergird its white peasants from Europe with an economic floor, while refusing to do it for its black peasants from Africa who were held in slavery two hundred and forty four years. And this is why Frederick Douglass would say that emancipation for the Negro was freedom to hunger, freedom to the winds and rains of heaven, freedom without roofs to cover their heads. It was freedom without bread to eat, without land to cultivate. It was freedom and famine at the same time. And it is a miracle that the Negro has survived.
In 1875 the nation passed a civil rights bill, and refused to enforce it. In 1964, the nation passed a weaker civil rights bill and even to this day has failed to enforce it in all of its dimensions. In 1954 the Supreme Court rendered a decision outlawing segregation in the public schools. And even to this day in the deep South, less than five per cent of the Negro students are attending integrated schools. We haven’t even made one per cent progress a year. If it continues at this rate, it will take another ninety seven years to integrate the schools of the South and of our nation …
Now let us be sure that we will have to keep the pressure alive. We’ve never made any gain in civil rights without constant, persistent, legal and non-violent pressure. Don’t let anybody make you feel that the problem will work itself out …
The second evil that I want to deal with is the evil of poverty. Like a monstrous octopus it spreads its nagging prehensile tentacles into cities and hamlets and villages all over our nation. Some forty million of our brothers and sisters are poverty stricken, unable to gain the basic necessities of life. And so often we allow them to become invisible because our society’s so affluent that we don’t see the poor. Some of them are Mexican Americans. Some of them are Indians. Some are Puerto Ricans. Some are Appalachian whites. The vast majority are Negroes in proportion to their size in the population … Now there is nothing new about poverty. It’s been with us for years and centuries. What is new at this point though, is that we now have the resources, we now have the skills, we now have the techniques to get rid of poverty. And the question is whether our nation has the will …
Now I want to deal with the third evil that constitutes the dilemma of our nation and the world. And that is the evil of war. Somehow these three evils are tied together. The triple evils of racism, economic exploitation, and militarism. The great problem and the great challenge facing mankind today is to get rid of war … We have left ourselves as a nation morally and politically isolated in the world. We have greatly strengthened the forces of reaction in America, and excited violence and hatred among our own people. We have diverted attention from civil rights. During a period of war, when a nation becomes obsessed with the guns of war, social programs inevitably suffer. People become insensitive to pain and agony in their own midst …
Now I know that there are people who are confused about the war and they say to me and anybody who speaks out against it, “You shouldn’t be speaking out. You’re a civil rights leader, and the two issues should not be joined together.” Well … the two issues are tied together. And I’m going to keep them together. Oh my friends, it’s good for us to fight for integrated lunch counters, and for integrated schools. And I’m going to continue to do that. But wouldn’t it be absurd to be talking about integrated schools without being concerned about the survival of a world in which to be integrated …
For those who are telling me to keep my mouth shut, I can’t do that. I’m against segregation at lunch counters, and I’m not going to segregate my moral concerns. And we must know on some positions, cowardice asks the question, “Is it safe?” Expediency asks the question, “Is it politic?” Vanity asks the question, “Is it popular?” But conscience asks the question, “Is it right?” And there’re times when you must take a stand that is neither safe nor politic nor popular, but you must do it because it is right.
Now to be sure there has been some progress, and I would not want to overlook that. We’ve seen that progress a great deal here in our Southland. Probably the greatest area of this progress has been the breakdown of legal segregation. And so the movement in the South has profoundly shaken the entire edifice of segregation. And I am convinced that segregation is as dead as a doornail in its legal sense, and the only thing uncertain about it now is how costly some of the segregationists who still linger around will make the funeral. And so there has been progress. But we must not allow this progress to cause us to engage in a superficial, dangerous optimism. The plant of freedom has grown only a bud and not yet a flower. And there is no area of our country that can boast of clean hands in the area of brotherhood. Every city confronts a serious problem. Now there are those who are trying to say now that the civil rights movement is dead. I submit to you that it is more alive today than ever before. What they fail to realize is that we are now in a transition period. We are moving into a new phase of the struggle. For well now twelve years, the struggle was basically a struggle to end legal segregation. In a sense it was a struggle for decency. It was a struggle to get rid of all of the humiliation and the syndrome of depravation surrounding the system of legal segregation. And I need not remind you that those were glorious days. We cannot forget the days of Montgomery, when fifty thousand Negroes decided that it was ultimately more honorable to walk the streets in dignity than to accept segregation within, in humiliation. We will not forget the 1960 sit-in movement, when by the thousands students decided to sit in at lunch counters, protesting humiliation and segregation. And when they decided to sit down at those counters, they were in reality standing up for the best in the American dream and carrying the whole nation back to those great wells of democracy which were dug deep by the founding fathers in the formulation of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence. We will not forget the Freedom Rides of sixty one, and the Birmingham Movement of sixty three, a movement which literally subpoenaed the conscience of a large segment of the nation to appear before the judgement seat of morality on the whole question of civil rights. We will not forget Selma, when by the thousands we marched from that city to Montgomery to dramatize the fact that Negroes did not have the right to vote. These were marvelous movements. But that period is over now. And we are moving into a new phase.
And because we are moving into this new phase, some people feel that the civil rights movement is dead. The new phase is a struggle for genuine equality. It is not merely a struggle for decency now, it is not merely a struggle to get rid of the brutality of a Bull Connor and a Jim Clark. It is now a struggle for genuine equality on all levels, and this will be a much more difficult struggle. You see, the gains in the first period, or the first era of struggle, were obtained from the power structure at bargain rates; it didn’t cost the nation anything to integrate lunch counters. It didn’t cost the nation anything to integrate hotels and motels. It didn’t cost the nation a penny to guarantee the right to vote. Now we are in a period where it will cost the nation billions of dollars to get rid of poverty, to get rid of slums, to make quality integrated education a reality. This is where we are now. Now we’re going to lose some friends in this period. The allies who were with us in Selma will not all stay with us during this period. We’ve got to understand what is happening. Now they often call this the white backlash … It’s just a new name for an old phenomenon. The fact is that there has never been any single, solid, determined commitment on the part of the vast majority of white Americans to genuine equality for Negroes. There has always been ambivalence … In 1863 the Negro was granted freedom from physical slavery through the Emancipation Proclamation. But he was not given land to make that freedom meaningful. At the same time, our government was giving away millions of acres of land in the Midwest and the West, which meant that the nation was willing to undergird its white peasants from Europe with an economic floor, while refusing to do it for its black peasants from Africa who were held in slavery two hundred and forty four years. And this is why Frederick Douglass would say that emancipation for the Negro was freedom to hunger, freedom to the winds and rains of heaven, freedom without roofs to cover their heads. It was freedom without bread to eat, without land to cultivate. It was freedom and famine at the same time. And it is a miracle that the Negro has survived.
In 1875 the nation passed a civil rights bill, and refused to enforce it. In 1964, the nation passed a weaker civil rights bill and even to this day has failed to enforce it in all of its dimensions. In 1954 the Supreme Court rendered a decision outlawing segregation in the public schools. And even to this day in the deep South, less than five per cent of the Negro students are attending integrated schools. We haven’t even made one per cent progress a year. If it continues at this rate, it will take another ninety seven years to integrate the schools of the South and of our nation …
Now let us be sure that we will have to keep the pressure alive. We’ve never made any gain in civil rights without constant, persistent, legal and non-violent pressure. Don’t let anybody make you feel that the problem will work itself out …
The second evil that I want to deal with is the evil of poverty. Like a monstrous octopus it spreads its nagging prehensile tentacles into cities and hamlets and villages all over our nation. Some forty million of our brothers and sisters are poverty stricken, unable to gain the basic necessities of life. And so often we allow them to become invisible because our society’s so affluent that we don’t see the poor. Some of them are Mexican Americans. Some of them are Indians. Some are Puerto Ricans. Some are Appalachian whites. The vast majority are Negroes in proportion to their size in the population … Now there is nothing new about poverty. It’s been with us for years and centuries. What is new at this point though, is that we now have the resources, we now have the skills, we now have the techniques to get rid of poverty. And the question is whether our nation has the will …
Now I want to deal with the third evil that constitutes the dilemma of our nation and the world. And that is the evil of war. Somehow these three evils are tied together. The triple evils of racism, economic exploitation, and militarism. The great problem and the great challenge facing mankind today is to get rid of war … We have left ourselves as a nation morally and politically isolated in the world. We have greatly strengthened the forces of reaction in America, and excited violence and hatred among our own people. We have diverted attention from civil rights. During a period of war, when a nation becomes obsessed with the guns of war, social programs inevitably suffer. People become insensitive to pain and agony in their own midst …
Now I know that there are people who are confused about the war and they say to me and anybody who speaks out against it, “You shouldn’t be speaking out. You’re a civil rights leader, and the two issues should not be joined together.” Well … the two issues are tied together. And I’m going to keep them together. Oh my friends, it’s good for us to fight for integrated lunch counters, and for integrated schools. And I’m going to continue to do that. But wouldn’t it be absurd to be talking about integrated schools without being concerned about the survival of a world in which to be integrated …
For those who are telling me to keep my mouth shut, I can’t do that. I’m against segregation at lunch counters, and I’m not going to segregate my moral concerns. And we must know on some positions, cowardice asks the question, “Is it safe?” Expediency asks the question, “Is it politic?” Vanity asks the question, “Is it popular?” But conscience asks the question, “Is it right?” And there’re times when you must take a stand that is neither safe nor politic nor popular, but you must do it because it is right.
