Without a moment's pause for reflection, Donald Trump has done a cannonball into the cesspool of U.S. neoliberal consensus politics. He's upset the still, fetid waters with his bloated, self-unaware orange corpus and in reaction conventional politicians and pundits are floundering, saying and doing things you would never see or hear them do otherwise, when everybody sticks to the script.
Such was the case yesterday with far-right political pundit Charles Krauthammer on the O'Reilly Factor.
Mark this moment: tried-and-true conservative Charles Krauthammer said that class and (lack of) education were central to Trump's appeal and the U.S. Presidential race.
He said, beautifully, that the GOP is already a party of whites, so Bill O'Reilly's adducing "white grievance" was irrelevant to the GOP primary contest.
Krauthammer said that Trump has tapped into something else.
If a Democrat would have said this on any other Monday, FOX would have shrieked "class warfare." But this was no ordinary Monday, no ordinary GOP primary. And sometimes, a little bit of the truth squirts out when you bite into a bullshit sandwich.
Enjoy:
http://video.foxnews.com/v/4831340298001/white-grievance-and-the-republican-party/
P.S. -- The bullshit bread of this truth sandwich was Krauthammer's assertion that we don't know how to address lack of education and opportunity in America. No, we know plenty. Just listen to Bernie Sanders. Step 1: Educate, train and heal American workers without putting them into a lifetime of debt. Step 2: Stop giving tax breaks and trade deals to multinational corporations (MNCs) that are nominally American yet do most of their production, and pay most of their taxes, overseas, and then "import" their products into America. Yeah, I'm talking about you, Apple.
Showing posts with label white people. Show all posts
Showing posts with label white people. Show all posts
Monday, April 4, 2016
Thursday, June 19, 2014
The backwards South is moving backward
It's strange and pathetic how the today's Southern states promotes themselves to businesses and investors as a kind of third-world enclave within the United States -- not only low-tax but also low-wage, and of course no unions.
Maybe that strategy is OK for Bangladesh, but touting oneself as low-wage is not a long-term winning strategy for the US of A. Lower wages and incomes mean a lower tax base, leading to poorer schools, less infrastructure and hence weaker long-term economic growth.
Indeed, the poorest and most miserable U.S. states are located in the South.
By Nelson Lichtenstein
June 18, 2014 | Reuters
We used to call it the “New South.” That was the era after Reconstruction and before the Civil Rights laws — when the states of the old Confederacy seemed most determined to preserve a social and economic order that encouraged low-wage industrialization as they fought to maintain Jim Crow.
What was then distinctive about the South had almost as much to do with economic inequality as racial segregation. Between roughly 1877 and 1965, the region was marked by low-wages, little government, short lives and lousy health — not just for African-Americans but for white workers and farmers.
The Civil Rights revolution and the rise of an economically dynamic Sun Belt in the 1970s and ‘80s seemed to end that oppressive and insular era. The Research Triangle in North Carolina, for example, has more in common with California’s Silicon Valley than with Rust Belt manufacturing. The distinctive American region known as the South had truly begun to vanish.
This is the thesis of economic historian Gavin Wright’s new book on the economic consequences of the civil rights revolution,Sharing the Prize. Ending segregation, Wright argues, improved the economic and social status of both white and black workers The South became far less distinctive as wages and government-provided benefits increased to roughly the national level.
But the New South has returned with a vengeance, led by a ruling white caste now putting in place policies likely to create a vast economic and social gap between most Southern states and those in the North, upper Midwest and Pacific region. As in the late 19th century, the Southern elite appears to believe that the only way their region can persuade companies to relocate there is by taking the low road: keeping wages down and social benefits skimpy. They seem to regard any trade union as the vanguard of a Northern army of occupation.
Exhibit A is the refusal of every Southern state except Kentucky and Arkansas to expand Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act. Senator David Vitter (R-La.), running to replace Bobby Jindal as Louisiana’s governor, made headlines Monday when he announced he would consider adopting the Medicaid expansion.
In 2012 the Supreme Court gave states the right to back out of this part of Obamacare. The South rushed to take this opportunity — despite the loss of billions in federal dollars. Now 5 million poor Southerners are consigned to health insurance purgatory.
The Republican Party as a whole has made opposition to Obamacare virtually a fetish. But outside the South, Republican governors from Arizona and Nevada in the West to Iowa, Ohio, and New Jersey further East, have seen the economic logic and social utility of taking the federal money. After the 2014 elections, when Democrats look likely to oust Republicans from statehouses in Pennsylvania and Maine, those states will do the same.
Southern states also keep wages low by neglecting to raise their state minimum wage standards. In the North and West, a movement to dramatically increase wages — to $10, $12 or even $15 dollars an hour — has caught fire. Seattle just mandated a $15 minimum wage that will kick in over the next few years.
Today 21 states have raised minimum wages higher than that of the federal standard of $7.25 an hour. But only two of these states, Missouri and Florida, border on the South. As in the New South era, when textile factories were enticed to flee the North for the low-wage Piedmont region, Southern states now trumpet not just low taxes and an absence of trade unions, but low wages.
Although Oklahoma joined the Union in 1907, it immediately joined the ranks of the Jim Crow South with its strong segregation and anti-union policies. This continues today. In April, for example, when Oklahoma City residents sought to put a municipal wage increase on the November ballot, the state legislature quickly enacted a law banning any city or town from raising the local minimum wage or requiring that employees have a right to sick days or vacation, either paid or unpaid.
Of course, such regressive social policies, including voting rights limitations, are supported by a fierce white partisanship. The solid South has returned in full force. Black voters there are overwhelmingly Democratic, whites of almost every income level equally determined to vote Republican.
The presence of an African-American in the White House plays a large role in this racial-political polarization on the ground in Dixie. But not even Southern-born white Democrats, like former President Bill Clinton and former Vice President Al Gore, have been able to transcend this Southern partisanship. Despite for their cultural affinities and Southern accents, they could not persuade Southern whites to vote Democratic.
This is, however, not just a product of racial fears and resentments. Instead it appears to reflect an increasingly inbred Southern hostility to the exercise of economic regulatory power on virtually any level. As in the 19th century, many in the South, including a considerable proportion of the white working-class, have been persuaded that the federal government is their enemy.
As in the New South era, Southern whites, both elite and plebian, have adopted an insular and defensive posture toward the rest of the nation and toward newcomers in their own region. Echoing the Jim Crow election laws promulgated by Southern states at the turn of the 20th century, the new wave of 21st century voting restrictions promise to sharply curb the Southern franchise, white, black, and brown.
The new New South rejects not only the cosmopolitanism of a multiracial, religiously pluralist society, but the legitimacy of government, both federal and state, that seeks to ameliorate the poverty and inequality that has been a hallmark of Southern distinctiveness for more than two centuries.
The Civil War has yet to be won.
Wednesday, April 30, 2014
Frum: Why NRA wins while other conservatives lose
A more illiberal and un-PC person than myself might summarize Frum's arguments thusly: the NRA speaks to the racial prejudices and economic insecurities of conservative rednecks.
Well, duh.
By David Frum
April 29, 2014 | The Atlantic
Sunday, September 22, 2013
Problem solved?: GOP cuts food stamps
In case you weren't paying attention, the House GOP's vote on the annual farm bill showed us two things: 1) food stamps for hungry people are bad; and 2) agricultural subsidies for Congressmen and rich farmers are good. What do those two things tell us?
It’s the juxtaposition of the two programs that so clearly exposes the party’s agenda. Anti-government ideology can justify even the most vicious cuts to the safety net. It can’t justify the massive socialist scheme that is agriculture policy. And, to be fair, conservative intellectuals generally don’t justify agriculture socialism. But the Republican Party certainly does. The ultraconservative Republican Study Committee recently banned the Heritage Foundation from its meetings because Heritage denounced the GOP’s farm subsidies. There is a grim hilarity here: Republicans punished Heritage for its one technocratically sane position.
The GOP's stance on these two issues also belies their hypocrisy on social spending:
Obama has attacked the GOP farm-subsidy bill for spending too much. Here is the one chunk of social spending where Republicans are not only failing to issue hostage threats to secure the cuts they demand, they are also refusing to cut spending as much as Barack Obama asks. And the program they pick to defend is, on the substantive merits, the most unjustifiable program of any significant scale in the federal budget.
But that's OK, because this wasteful federal spending doesn't go to black ghetto queens:
It is also one that accrues to disproportionately wealthy and overwhelmingly white recipients. (As opposed to Obamacare, whose beneficiaries are disproportionately poor and non-white.)
That's really the only thing that matters to Republicans nowadays. Because it's clearly not about the numbers. It's simply a question of: could this federal spending possibly benefit a single brown-skinned person who games the system, no matter how many people genuinely need it?
More broadly, Republicans' present meme that, If only we could repeal Obamacare and reduce food stamps, our economy would take off!, is completely asinine and without economic merit. We liberals and Democrats must not let such idiotic thinking go unchallenged as a "credible" policy alternative!
By Jonathan Chait
September 20, 2013 | New York Magazine
Tuesday, September 3, 2013
The real decline and possible REBIRTH of Detroit
Joyce's article about the real Detroit, its "4 economies," and the hopeful developments there is worth reading in full.
But I want to highlight the racial, or rather, racist elephant in the room that Joyce, a native Detroiter, points out while the MSM ignores it. This might sound like the urban area near you:
And yes, race does have everything to do with it. There are three counties that make up the political economy of Southeast Michigan. Wayne County encompasses Detroit but also includes large suburbs such as Dearborn, Livonia (the most segregated city of more than 200,000 residents in the entire country) and most of the affluent Grosse Pointes. Oakland County immediately north of Detroit is the 4th most affluent county of its size in the United States. Nearby Macomb County is predominately working class and the “birthplace” of “Reagan Democrats”.Much of the Detroit punditry one reads or hears conveniently ignores race altogether, concentrating instead on the decline of the domestic auto industry or macro economic trends. Usually when race is included on a list of “causes for Detroit’s decline,” it is described with weasel words such as “racial tensions” or “the racial divide.” Nonsense. What it was and what it remains, is white racism pure and simple. Bloviators love to talk about the “unsustainable legacy” costs of pensions for city workers. They never talk about the “legacy” costs of racism.By 1980, African Americans out numbered whites within the city limits of Detroit. Yes, capital started leaving Detroit in the 1940’s. But the population disinvestment is just as important. Make no mistake about it. The extreme segregation that has long characterized Southeast Michigan was anything but accidental.For decades, it was the policy of the Federal Housing Administration to deny loans to African Americans trying to buy houses in the suburbs. To this day, if you buy a suburban house that hasn’t changed hands in a long time, the deed may well contain a “restrictive covenant” that explicitly prohibits the sale of the house to Negroes.That’s not all. Twenty-three out of twenty-three attempts to create a tri-county transportation authority to improve region-wide public transit went down to defeat in the white controlled state legislature. So, not only was it impossible for African Americans to buy homes near where the jobs were moving, it was difficult to get to suburban jobs that came along with suburban growth.And just to add insult to injury, the financial institutions that wouldn’t lend money to African Americans to move out of the city wouldn’t lend it for home improvement in the city either. But they would charge more, far more, for home and car insurance. For those too young to remember, that practice was called redlining. It’s still prevalent today.One dramatic example of the cost of racism born by Detroit is this: Detroit has an income tax on those who work within the city limits. The two-tier tax is lower for those who work in the city but live in the suburbs. In enacting the tax, the state legislature required employers based in the city to collect the tax via payroll deduction as they do with federal and other taxes. Suburban based employers are not required by the law to collect the tax. Most of them don’t. The revenue lost to Detroit per year is estimated to be as much as $142 million.Zooming out our historical lens even further, we see the unbroken pattern of white supremacy even more clearly. The counterrevolution to the civil war was the Jim Crow system. The counterrevolution to the end of Jim Crow is mass incarceration and other components of the institutionalized racism that perpetuate and in some ways intensify white privilege today. Detroit’s history as the national leader in residential segregation and all that flows from it definitely underpins today’s Detroit crisis and that of Flint, Pontiac, Benton Harbor and Muskegon as well.While observers sometimes notice that a majority of predominately African American cities in Michigan are under some form of emergency management. The question they don’t ask is, why are there predominately African American cities in the first place?The beauty of this “willful ignorance” for many whites is that as the quality of life declined in Detroit, the decline itself became the moral justification for whites for the inequality itself. It’s an old story. Slave society did the very same thing. Slaves were routinely portrayed as lazy and shiftless. To put the meme in contemporary terms, the slaves were demonized as the takers and the slave owners were the makers.
By Frank Joyce
September 2, 2013 | Alternet
Wednesday, August 28, 2013
Pitts: Black crime not a racial statement
Right on time, my man Leonard Pitts nailed it:
No, what is meant is that even when violence is done against you [as a black person], you may automatically be considered the “suspect” and your killer set free. What is meant is that judges are harder on you, doctors less aggressive in treating you, banks more apt to deny you, landlords less likely to show you apartments, hiring officers more likely to round-file your application. What is meant is good luck hailing a cab in midtown Manhattan. What is meant is that other people will airily dismiss the reality of those things, or, as has many times happened to me, admit the reality but advise that you should accept your lot in silence.Then in the next breath, those same people will ask you to empathize with how racially victimized they are. The sheer, blind gall of it beggars imagination.
We poor, oppressed white people! Oh Lord, deliver us from this reverse racism!
Hey, here's an idea: let's all overdose on tanning pills like C. Thomas Howell in Soul Man and then we'll be living on easy street... right? Right? [Crickets chirping].
 |
| This white guy figured out how to beat reverse racism back in 1986. |
By Leodard Pitts
August 27, 2013 | Miami Herald
I have nothing to say about the murder of Christopher Lane.
Except this:
The killing of this Australian man, allegedly by a group of boys who were bored and could think of nothing better to do, suggests chilling amorality and a sociopathic estrangement from the sacredness of life. The fact that these teenagers were able to get their hands on a gun with which to shoot the 22-year-old student in the back on Aug. 16 as he was jogging in the small Oklahoma town of Duncan, leaves me embarrassed for my country — and thankful I am not the one who has to explain to his country how such a thing can happen.
None of this will satisfy the dozens, perhaps hundreds, of people who have written me emails demanding (it is always interesting when people think they can demand a column) that I write about this drive-by shooting as an act of racial bigotry, an inverse of the Trayvon Martin killing, if you will. There is a numbing repetitiveness to these screeds: Where is Jesse Jackson, they demand. Where is Al Sharpton? Where are you? Or as one subject line puts it: “Why no outrage!”
Actually, I have plenty outrage. Just not the flavor of outrage they would like me to have.
It is, for some people, a foregone conclusion that any time violent crime crosses racial lines, some kind of racial statement is intended. But violent criminals are not sociopolitical theoreticians, and violent crime is not usually a social manifesto. With relatively rare exceptions — we call them hate crimes — the fact is, if a thug shoots you, it is not because you are white, black, gay or Muslim, but because you are there.
So is Lane’s shooting one of those exceptions? A case can be made that it is. One of the young black suspects, after all, tweeted his anti-white bigotry back in April. The hashtag: HATE THEM.
But a case can also be made that it isn’t. Of the remaining two suspects, one is reportedly white and the other, the alleged shooter, apparently has a white mother. The prosecutor told the Duncan Banner newspaper there’s no evidence Lane was targeted because of his race, and in any event, bringing hate-crime charges is a moot point. In Oklahoma, hate crimes are misdemeanors; the boys are already facing felonies.
Again, none of this will satisfy those dozens, if not hundreds, of email writers, not to mention the authors of similar screeds on right-wing websites. What they’re doing is simple. They are using tragedy to play a cynical game of tit-for-tat: “I’ll see your Trayvon Martin and raise you a Christopher Lane.” In other words, they want to use this tragedy to validate their view that white people are victims of black racism.
And if all that was meant when African Americans decry racism is that sometimes white people do violence against you, then the email writers and right-wing pundits might have a point. But it isn’t and they don’t.
No, what is meant is that even when violence is done against you, you may automatically be considered the “suspect” and your killer set free. What is meant is that judges are harder on you, doctors less aggressive in treating you, banks more apt to deny you, landlords less likely to show you apartments, hiring officers more likely to round-file your application. What is meant is good luck hailing a cab in midtown Manhattan. What is meant is that other people will airily dismiss the reality of those things, or, as has many times happened to me, admit the reality but advise that you should accept your lot in silence.
Then in the next breath, those same people will ask you to empathize with how racially victimized they are. The sheer, blind gall of it beggars imagination.
Last week, Christopher Lane was killed for no good reason, apparently by three morally defective boys.
Sorry, but he’s the victim here. White America is not.
Thursday, August 22, 2013
Racial media parity?
In an "ah-ha!" tone, my Republican agents have been feeding me recent news stories about the Australian white guy murdered, and the Oklahoma white guy murdered, both by "racists." Even though there is no indication these were racially motivated crimes.
Then we have FOX rushing to the scene, asking if the media coverage of the Oklahoma murder of Christopher Lane compares to the media coverage of the murder of Trayvon Martin.
None of this makes rational sense to me, I'm sorry. I'm not being partisan here; this is just dumb.
It seems that we've moved on from insisting on some kind of "objective" left-right balance in news coverage of events, to insisting that we establish a black-white balance of media coverage of crime.
Why is this utterly pointless and stupid?
First, because you and I don't control the media. But of course FOX and talk radio know that. They play up the black-on-white crime, then accuse the "liberal" media of downplaying it. Do I have to explain how self-serving and slanted that is?
Second, because so many thousands of murders escape the national media. We had more than 11,000 firearm homicides and more than 16,000 total homicides in the U.S. in 2012. How many of them can you recall hearing about on the evening news or talk radio? Exactly.
Third, these stories on FOX, the Blaze, etc. always mention Trayvon Martin, as in, "The media was so obsessed with Trayvon Martin... but they ignore THIS?!"
First, refer to point #1. Second, I challenge you to show me the black George Zimmerman. That's right, show me the case of the black man who murdered an unarmed white man and claimed it was in self-defense, despite police dispatchers telling the black man to leave that white man alone. Then the black man is set free, despite no contest that he shot and killed that white man, a white man who never bothered him or sought him out.
Yes, please, send me the link to that story, my Republican friends. I can't wait to read all about it.
And fourth, most black crime is black-on-black. That's a tragedy. Just like all crime is a tragedy. But what the hell does this have to do with the media or political correctness?
Yes, please, send me the link to that story, my Republican friends. I can't wait to read all about it.
But until then, please do me a favor and shut up about race.
And fourth, most black crime is black-on-black. That's a tragedy. Just like all crime is a tragedy. But what the hell does this have to do with the media or political correctness?
White people, stop pretending whites are an aggrieved minority and not an entitled majority who hold the keys to everything valuable in American life. Whining is un-American.
None of you whining whities would trade places with a black or Hispanic American for a minute, and that's all you need to know about race relations in the U.S.
UPDATE (08.23.2013): OMG, this is so outrageously dumb: "A dead Australian is just the price you pay to be politically correct." Yep, FOX's Greg Gutfeld said it.
Oh no, I'd better stop being so liberal and PC, or else piles of dead Australians are going to start washing up on U.S. shores!....
Oh no, I'd better stop being so liberal and PC, or else piles of dead Australians are going to start washing up on U.S. shores!....
Wednesday, July 31, 2013
AP: Poor white people
Uh-oh! In America, "uppity" blacks feeling more confident + poor, dispirited whites = trouble.
By Hope Yen
July 29, 2013 | AP
Four out of 5 U.S. adults struggle with joblessness, near poverty or reliance on welfare for at least parts of their lives, a sign of deteriorating economic security and an elusive American dream.
Survey data exclusive to The Associated Press points to an increasingly globalized U.S. economy, the widening gap between rich and poor and loss of good-paying manufacturing jobs as reasons for the trend.
The findings come as President Barack Obama tries to renew his administration's emphasis on the economy, saying in recent speeches that his highest priority is to "rebuild ladders of opportunity" and reverse income inequality.
Hardship is particularly on the rise among whites, based on several measures. Pessimism among that racial group about their families' economic futures has climbed to the highest point since at least 1987. In the most recent AP-GfK poll, 63 percent of whites called the economy "poor."
"I think it's going to get worse," said Irene Salyers, 52, of Buchanan County, Va., a declining coal region in Appalachia. Married and divorced three times, Salyers now helps run a fruit and vegetable stand with her boyfriend, but it doesn't generate much income. They live mostly off government disability checks.
"If you do try to go apply for a job, they're not hiring people, and they're not paying that much to even go to work," she said. Children, she said, have "nothing better to do than to get on drugs."
While racial and ethnic minorities are more likely to live in poverty, race disparities in the poverty rate have narrowed substantially since the 1970s, census data show. Economic insecurity among whites also is more pervasive than is shown in government data, engulfing more than 76 percent of white adults by the time they turn 60, according to a new economic gauge being published next year by the Oxford University Press.
The gauge defines "economic insecurity" as experiencing unemployment at some point in their working lives, or a year or more of reliance on government aid such as food stamps or income below 150 percent of the poverty line. Measured across all races, the risk of economic insecurity rises to 79 percent.
"It's time that America comes to understand that many of the nation's biggest disparities, from education and life expectancy to poverty, are increasingly due to economic class position," said William Julius Wilson, a Harvard professor who specializes in race and poverty.
He noted that despite continuing economic difficulties, minorities have more optimism about the future after Obama's election, while struggling whites do not.
"There is the real possibility that white alienation will increase if steps are not taken to highlight and address inequality on a broad front," Wilson said.
___
Sometimes termed "the invisible poor" by demographers, lower-income whites are generally dispersed in suburbs as well as small rural towns, where more than 60 percent of the poor are white. Concentrated in Appalachia in the East, they are also numerous in the industrial Midwest and spread across America's heartland, from Missouri, Arkansas and Oklahoma up through the Great Plains.
More than 19 million whites fall below the poverty line of $23,021 for a family of four, accounting for more than 41 percent of the nation's destitute, nearly double the number of poor blacks.
Still, while census figures provide an official measure of poverty, they're only a temporary snapshot. The numbers don't capture the makeup of those who cycle in and out of poverty at different points in their lives. They may be suburbanites, for example, or the working poor or the laid off.
In 2011 that snapshot showed 12.6 percent of adults in their prime working-age years of 25-60 lived in poverty. But measured in terms of a person's lifetime risk, a much higher number — 4 in 10 adults — falls into poverty for at least a year of their lives.
The risks of poverty also have been increasing in recent decades, particularly among people ages 35-55, coinciding with widening income inequality. For instance, people ages 35-45 had a 17 percent risk of encountering poverty during the 1969-1989 time period; that risk increased to 23 percent during the 1989-2009 period. For those ages 45-55, the risk of poverty jumped from 11.8 percent to 17.7 percent.
By race, nonwhites still have a higher risk of being economically insecure, at 90 percent. But compared with the official poverty rate, some of the biggest jumps under the newer measure are among whites, with more than 76 percent enduring periods of joblessness, life on welfare or near-poverty.
By 2030, based on the current trend of widening income inequality, close to 85 percent of all working-age adults in the U.S. will experience bouts of economic insecurity.
"Poverty is no longer an issue of 'them', it's an issue of 'us'," says Mark Rank, a professor at Washington University in St. Louis who calculated the numbers. "Only when poverty is thought of as a mainstream event, rather than a fringe experience that just affects blacks and Hispanics, can we really begin to build broader support for programs that lift people in need."
Rank's analysis is supplemented with figures provided by Tom Hirschl, a professor at Cornell University; John Iceland, a sociology professor at Penn State University; the University of New Hampshire's Carsey Institute; the Census Bureau; and the Population Reference Bureau.
Among the findings:
— For the first time since 1975, the number of white single-mother households who were living in poverty with children surpassed or equaled black ones in the past decade, spurred by job losses and faster rates of out-of-wedlock births among whites. White single-mother families in poverty stood at nearly 1.5 million in 2011, comparable to the number for blacks. Hispanic single-mother families in poverty trailed at 1.2 million.
— The share of children living in high-poverty neighborhoods — those with poverty rates of 30 percent or more — has increased to 1 in 10, putting them at higher risk of teen pregnancy or dropping out of school. Non-Hispanic whites accounted for 17 percent of the child population in such neighborhoods, up from 13 percent in 2000, even though the overall proportion of white children in the U.S. has been declining.
The share of black children in high-poverty neighborhoods dropped sharply, from 43 percent to 37 percent, while the share of Latino children ticked higher, from 38 to 39 percent.
___
Going back to the 1980s, never have whites been so pessimistic about their futures, according to the General Social Survey, which is conducted by NORC at the University of Chicago. Just 45 percent say their family will have a good chance of improving their economic position based on the way things are in America.
The divide is especially evident among those whites who self-identify as working class: 49 percent say they think their children will do better than them, compared with 67 percent of non-whites who consider themselves working class.
In November, Obama won the votes of just 36 percent of those noncollege whites, the worst performance of any Democratic nominee among that group since 1984.
Some Democratic analysts have urged renewed efforts to bring working-class whites into the political fold, calling them a potential "decisive swing voter group" if minority and youth turnout level off in future elections.
"They don't trust big government, but it doesn't mean they want no government," says Republican pollster Ed Goeas, who agrees that working-class whites will remain an important electoral group. "They feel that politicians are giving attention to other people and not them."
Thursday, June 13, 2013
White America fading away
Thanks and enjoy your golden years, white people! Your time is nigh. Soon John must pass the torch to Jose, Jamal, Jin and Jung:
“It’s a bookend from the last century, when whites helped us grow. Now it’s minorities who are going to make the contributions to our economic and population growth over the next 50 years.”
Let's see if they can do a better job. Minorities' tendency to vote Democratic is a good omen.
By Carol Morello and Ted Mellnik
June 13, 2013 | Washington Post
Sunday, June 2, 2013
I gotta post this right-wing forward
I usually delete these right wing e-mail forwards as soon as I get them. Sometimes I read them, sometimes I don't. Some return to me again and again, like strange old acquaintances.
But this forward that originated after the 2012 election is so over the top, it reads like a liberal trying to mimic the oldest, grumpiest, whitest Tea Paryter you could find. I couldn't have done a better job stereotyping "the other side" if I tried. So I have to forward this one myself... with a few of my sarcastic comments inserted in brackets, for fun.
Some versions of this forward say it's from a USMC vet, others don't. Some conclude, "John Galt has left the building," this one doesn't. That's typical of right-wing forwards: they tweak the authors and insert made-up quotes, hoping it will make the message more convincing. This is one reason why I always say that conservatives form their political views from anecdotes and personal experience; to them the messenger is just as important as the message.
You can find a version of this archived at MyRightWingDad.net, which leads to a tip for you right-wing serial e-mail forwarders: just go to this site, copy and send all these mails yourself and be the first, instead of waiting months for your buddies to forward them to you. You'll be the coolest guy on your conservative e-mail list, and a veritable Klondike of right-wing crapolla!)
So here 'tis. Enjoy:
Written by a USMC Vet
[Who appears to be sleeping on the beach. That's an angry, fed-up pose if I've ever seen one! - J]
( I can't argue with any of it. Passing it along as it was received. )
He wrote:
The American Dream ended (on November 6th) in Ohio. The second term of Barack Obama will be the final nail in the coffin for the legacy of the white Christian males who discovered, explored, pioneered, settled and developed the greatest Republic in the history of mankind.
[White Christian women, take no offense. You were just sitting on the ship/wagon/horse behind the men, so technically you did not discover or pioneer anything. - J]
A coalition of Blacks, Latinos, Feminists, Gays, Government Workers, Union Members, Environmental Extremists, the Media, Hollywood, uninformed young people, the "forever needy," the chronically unemployed, illegal aliens and other "fellow travelers" have ended Norman Rockwell's America.
[You gotta hand it to us liberals though, that's a pretty big coalition. But he forgot to include Academics, Artists, the Fashion Industry, Professional Athletes and Muslims.
And about Norman Rockwell's America... let me remind you what it was with a few illustrations...
[... that show even Norman Rockwell wasn't white enough for some people. - J]
The Cocker Spaniel is off the front porch... The Pit Bull is in the back yard.
[At least the Pit Bull is not on the front porch! ... But all that will change after Hillary is elected. - J]
The American Constitution has been replaced with Saul Alinsky's "Rules for Radicals" and Chicago shyster, David Axelrod, along with international Socialist George Soros will be pulling the strings on their beige puppet to Bring us Act 2 of the New World Order.
[My conservative friends don't believe me, but I keep telling them that no liberal outside Chicago knew who Saul Alinsky was until Glenn Beck, et al, discovered him. So even if they are right, and liberals love Alinsky's ideas, what they have done for Alinsky's fame is like those guys who brought ebola out of the jungle. They should shut up and stop mentioning him or I swear, one of these days I'm actually going to read "Rules for Radicals"...!
David Axelrod is now gone from the White House, by the way. And George Soros is the richest socialist forex trader you will ever see. - J]
Our side ran two candidates who couldn't even win their own home states, and the circus fattster Chris Christie helped Obama over the top with a glowing
"post Sandy" tribute that elevated the "Commander-in-Chief" to Mother Teresa status. (Aside: with the way the polls were run, he didn't need any help!)
[Lay off Christie's weight already! Why don't Republicans make any fat jokes about Rush Limbaugh? He's been publicly fat way longer. Anyway, Christie looks like your average American. In a few decades, at the rate we're growing, we'll be making fun of slim politicians like Obama.... - J]
People like me are completely politically irrelevant, and I will never again comment on or concern myself with the aforementioned coalition which has surrendered our culture, our heritage and our traditions without a shot being fired.
[Aw, come on, cheer up! You white Tea Partyers are not "completely politically irrelevant." You can still affect Republican primaries. You can still rock a town hall meeting on the latest city zoning plans. A.M. radio is still your uncontested political playground. And you can still move the markets for chicken sandwiches and gold coins in response to political events. - J]
You will never again out vote these people. It will take individual acts of defiance and massive displays of civil disobedience to get back the rights we have allowed them to take away. It will take Zealots, not moderates--not reach-across-the-aisle RINOs to right this ship and restore our beloved country to its former status.
[Acts like sending threatening letters laced with ricin to President Obama and Mayor Bloomberg?
[And I don't know about you, but I haven't noticed any RINOs reachin' across the aisle the past few years. - J]
Those who come after us will have to risk their lives, their fortunes and their sacred honor to bring back the Republic that this generation has timidly frittered away due to "white guilt" and political correctness..... I'm done.
[Here's a suggestion: Viagra. I mean, while you still can, with a little help from modern pharmacology, go out and find a white, Christian woman and make some more white Christian babies. And you old white guys have all the money so you can definitely afford to raise them. (OK, granted, there's a 10 percent chance those kids will be gay no matter what you do, but 9 out of 10 ain't bad).
In politics and war, birthrate wins -- not "individual acts of defiance and massive displays of civil disobedience." - J]
Tuesday, January 1, 2013
Pitts: 'Race is the stupidest idea in history'
Sums up Pitts: "Race is the stupidest idea in history. It is also, arguably, the most powerful."
His meditation on race -- and humanity's relatively recent preoccupation with race, and how it determines identity -- is worth reading in full.
In America, attitudes and prejudices about race concern mostly blacks, and mostly black males, in negative ways. Ironically,
When Africans were gathered on the shores of that continent to be packed into the reeking holds of slave ships for the voyage to this country, they saw themselves as Taureg, Mandinkan, Fulani, Mende or Songhay -- not black. As Noel Ingnatiev, author of How The Irish Became White, has observed, those Africans did not become slaves because they were black. They “became” black because they were enslaved.
On the flip side, continues Pitts:
I’ve often thought the word “white” had a tendency to discomfit the people to whom it is applied, to carry some hint of accusation that is no less real for being unspoken. In my experience, white people are often ill at ease with being referred to as white people.There is, I think, a reason for that. “Black” and “white” are equally artificial, but black fairly quickly took on the contours of a real culture.
Whereas "white" includes all the categories not covered by anything else. Like on those applications and Census forms, where we white guys are supposed to check "Non-Hispanic White." [SPOILER ALERT: I'm white.] That's a pretty big catch-all, if you ask me. Although there is a lot of truth to this, too: http://
Seriously though, I should add that, among academics, the idea is taking hold that we should talk about ethnicity, not race. FYI, here's as good a definition of ethnicity or ethnic groups as any:
An ethnic group is a social category of people who share a common culture, such as a common language, a common religion, or common norms, customs, practices, and history. Ethnic groups have a consciousness of their common cultural bond. An ethnic group does not exist simply because of the common national or cultural origins of the group, however. They develop because of their unique historical and social experiences, which become the basis for the group’s ethnic identity. For example, prior to immigration to the United States, Italians did not think of themselves as a distinct group with common interests and experiences. However, the process of immigration and the experiences they faced as a group in the United States, including discrimination, created a new identity for the group.
If you accept this definition then you must conclude, as Pitts has, that the term "African-American" is meaningless. Indeed, a long time ago I babysat for an African-American woman who emigrated from South Africa, and she was white as can be. But there are even more subtle but important distinctions than that among the so-called African-American community....
P.S. -- Happy New Year! (That is, if you subscribe to the Western-European-centric Gregorian calendar....)
By Leonard Pitts, Jr.
January 1, 2013 | Miami Herald
Saturday, December 22, 2012
The REAL gun debate is spiritual
If the gun control debate were factual and reasonable, then liberals would have won it a long time ago. There simply is no debate.
Apropos, Jill Filipovic taps into something deep and disturbing about American culture, and that is the prevailing conservative belief that we live in a "fallen world" filled with evil and dominated by bad people. Conservatives think that there is nothing we can do to make this a better world; we (meaning our nuclear families) can only try to be one of the chosen few good people defending ourselves and our values against the immoral hordes storming the gates.
By contrast, liberals believe that human civilization can and should be perfected, and that most people are fundamentally good and decent, therefore near-perfection is achievable, eventually. No issue is more emblematic of that philosophical -- I would say, spiritual, divide than the gun control debate. If you believe, like I do, that most people are kind and trustworthy, then you naturally question why everybody should need so many deadly guns to protect themselves against... whom? Other kind and decent people? It doesn't make sense.
Even in the conservative/Red State conception, the justification for possessing lots of deadly guns presents a contradiction. For they are the first ones to point out, post-Sandy Hook, how rates of violent crime in Chicago and Washington, DC are higher than in Small Town, USA; they always have been, well before recent RTC and concealed-carry laws. Yet conservatives are not quite ready to credit their small towns' relative tranquility to the abundance of their guns; nay, they truly consider themselves to be better morally. Meanwhile they see immorality and bestiality in the multicultural, multi-class structures of our growing, bustling, complicated urban areas. Pro-gun conservatives may pay lip service to "An armed society is a polite society," but indeed, the presence or absence of guns is a distant second, in their minds, in terms of what distinguishes them.
That is why these shooting rampages at schools throw conservatives -- and all of us, really, since we all go in for this nonsense to some extent -- for such a loop, because they are usually committed in suburbs and rural areas. Moreover, shooting rampages are overwhelmingly white-on-white crime. Yet statistically, we know that our chances of falling victim to a deranged, heavily armed mass murderer are tiny. For conservatives, the main thing is to stay focused on the real threat and stay armed in case they come for them: blacks, Muslims, Latinos, OWS hippies and anarchists, godless atheists, activist gays, poor people -- all the alleged marauders storming their Gates of Goodness.
And so, there are articles of faith in pro-gun conservatives' minds that no amount of statistics or facts can alter. That is why our gun debate never goes anywhere, we always start at zero, and nothing much will happen this time (after Sandy Hook) either:
As we've seen in the debates on issues from climate change to gender equality to foreign policy, facts, statistics and rational arguments don't really matter if the goal of offering them up is to improve things in the here and now. It's a deeply pessimistic view of humanity that projects a strong sense of fatalism.The point of being "good" isn't because goodness is valuable unto itself or because goodness is widely beneficial. The point of being good is to earn heaven points. Goodness, then, is defined according to a very particular set of religious and cultural values, and is highly "in-group" focused. Goodness means going to church, marrying early, submitting to a husband-in-charge family structure, having children out of obligation and upholding the social pillars that organize society to keep a particular group on top.Goodness isn't necessarily helping other people or taking steps that are proven effective at decreasing violence or working to create a more accepting and happy world for our children. Goodness is upholding the power structures that have traditionally benefited the small group of men who think they have a monopoly on defining "goodness."
[...] It is certainly true that "good" people don't walk into a classroom and shoot a group of six year-olds. It's also true that good people don't murder their wives and girlfriends – yet five times more women are killed by intimate partners every year than by strangers, and 95% of the women who are killed with a firearm are murdered by a man. If there's a gun involved, an incident of domestic violence is 12 times more likely to result in death. And while mass shootings understandably capture our national attention, the more than 30,000 American gun deaths every year (and their $37bn price tag) should spur us to action.It's easy to read those figures and conclude that conservatives are right: we are a world of awful, violent people who are going to keep on being awful and violent no matter what, so gun control serves no purpose and we'll all be better off in Heaven anyway. But as is true with almost anything that makes life on Earth brutish and miserable, we have the power to change that. Gun deaths are lower in the states with the strictest gun control laws. And the majority of US gun deaths actually comprises suicides – acts committed not generally by evil, murderous people, but by individuals who are sick and hurting and need help.
By Jill Filipovic
December 21, 2012 | Guardian
Friday, October 26, 2012
Poll: It's a black thing?
Thank goodness we're a post-racial society where people vote for their economic interests.
Oh, wait a minute....
Seriously though, one person already countered with that '90s line: "It's the economy, stupid."
You think so? If that's so, then I guess that means only white men understand economics. And even they admit that Obama would do more to help the non-rich. Hmm... something doesn't add up....
Poll finds deepest racial split since ’88
By Scott Clement, Jon Cohen
October 25, 2012 | Washington Post
By Scott Clement, Jon Cohen
October 25, 2012 | Washington Post
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