tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31098019144408056252024-03-13T13:09:58.223-07:00PROGRESSIVE PROFESSORJohnhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02883617794291815218noreply@blogger.comBlogger55125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3109801914440805625.post-73216227465858225482016-06-12T14:05:00.000-07:002016-06-14T15:05:40.347-07:00The Trump Effect: The Impact of the Presidential Election on our Nation's Schools If you are frustrated, anxious, or even disgusted by "The Trump Effect," imagine its impact on innocent school children, especially if people of their ethnic backgrounds or immigration status are the specific targets of Trump's hateful and obscene rants. Imagine what it is like to try to teach a classroom full of those vulnerable children about the meaning of democracy, citizenship, decency, and respect for individual differences. <br />
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Well, you don't have to imagine, because you can find out by reading the report of that title distributed by the Southern Poverty Law Center and its Teaching Tolerance Project, which "combats prejudice among our nation's youth, while promoting equality, inclusiveness, and equitable learning environments in the classroom." It sent out a survey to 2,000 elementary and high school teachers on this topic and received 5,000 responses. <br />
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Here are the highlights: <br />
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1) More than two-thirds reported that students--mainly immigrants, children of immigrants, and Muslims--have expressed concerns or fears about what might happen to them or their families after the election.<br />
2) More than half have seen an increase in uncivil political discourse<br />
3) More than one-third have observed an increase in anti-Muslim or anti-immigrant sentiment<br />
4) More than 40 % are hesitant to teach about the election<br />
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Out of the 5,000 responses, more than 1,000 mentioned Donald Trump. In contrast, a total of fewer than 200 contained the names of Ted Cruz, Bernie Sanders or Hillary Clinton. "My students are terrified of Donald Trump,." says one teacher with a large population of African-American Muslims.<br />
They think that if he is elected, all black people will get sent back to Africa." A North Carolina high school teacher says "she has Latino students who carry their birth certificates and Social Security cards to school because they are afraid they will be deported." A Tennessee kindergarten teacher says a Latino child--told by her classmates that he will be deported and kept behind a wall--asks every day, "Is the wall here yet?" in Pampa, Texas, where half the students are Hispanic, according to a middle school teacher, "The word 'Trump' is enough to derail a class." <br />
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Perhaps most disheartening of all are the number of teachers who lament that they used the 2012 election as a "real time case study in civic life. Not this year!! Not touching it!!! Not touching it,!!! Not sure what's worse, the candidates or what they stand for." The usual course of an election "does not apply here," wrote a Pasadena, California high school teacher. "The sad part is that the students are losing respect for the office of the president" according to "They see the candidates as jokes (<em>they have</em> <em>obviously been watching the Republican debates), </em>a high school teacher from East Hartford, Connecticut says, "and are offended and dismayed for the future." The extreme rhetoric, says a New York high school teacher "is not helping their ability to utilize reason and evidence, rather than replying in kind." <br />
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There are a lot more egregious examples. You can download the entire 15 page report at <splcenter.org><br />
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<em> </em>Johnhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02883617794291815218noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3109801914440805625.post-20450625401564506832016-01-29T11:06:00.000-08:002016-01-29T11:06:47.209-08:00Gerrymander: The Ultimate Despicable Device! <div style="text-align: right;">
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In my post of November 24,2015, I enumerated the "despicable devices" by which the enemies of democracy are trying to disenfranchise millions of potential Democratic voters. As I noted, 49 states introduced 295 transparently partisan measures between 2011 and 2014, just in time for the mid-term elections. But what recourse do they have if the surviving Democratic voters still manage to elect a sizeable number of Congressmen and state legislators? To deal with such a contingency, they have resurrected one of the most time-tested and pernicious "dirty tricks" in their arsenal--the <strong><em> Gerrymander. </em></strong> </div>
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That derogatory appellation was coined in 1812 by the Federalist editor of the Boston <em>Gazette, </em>responding to the outrageous redistricting map drawn by the Jeffersonian Republican legislators and signed off on by Massachusetts Governor Elbridge Gerry. Because the configuration on the map seemed to him to resemble a salamander, he dubbed it the "Gerry-mander." The stigma has, ever since, been applied to any blatant attempt to "to establish a political advantage for any party or group by manipulating boundaries to create partisan-advantaged districts." Over last two centuries it has been frequently been utilized as a potent weapon in political warfare. In antebellum Southern states, it was wielded to buttress the overrepresentation of the "Black Belt" counties at the expense of the "Piedmont." As a result, it played critical role in the decision for secession in several jurisdictions. During the Reconstruction Era, it facilitated the disenfranchisement of Freedmen, helping to destroy the accomplishments of the first Civil Rights Era by emasculating the 14th and 15th Amendments. Prior to the Second Civil Rights Era, according to Douglas Smith in <em>On Democracy's Doorstep, </em>malapportionment served as "a cornerstone of white supremacy, ensuring the overrepresentation of the most ardent segregationists, and thus further delaying the realization the realization of civil and voting rights for African Americans." Thanks to <em>Baker v. Carr and Reynolds v. Sims, </em>legislative districts have to be roughly equal in population. Even so, thanks to<em> Shelby v. Holder, </em>the doctrine of "one person, one vote" has been thoroughly undermined, thus negating or marginalizing the power of African Americans and other minorities.<br />
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Why has Gerrymandering had such a continuous history? According to analyst Robert Draper, it's "because the U.S. is the only democracy in the world where politicians have an active role in creating voting districts." As if that weren't reason enough, the Republican State Leadership Committee, founded in 2006, has spent up to $40 million a year working to elect conservative Republicans. During the 2012 election cycle, it focused its efforts on state legislative races in an attempt to give them control of the redistricting process following the 2010 census. Karl Rove has admitted that "Republican strategies are focused on 107 seats in 16 states. Winning those states would give them control of drawing district lines for nearly 150 congressional seats." The RSLC is disguised as a 527 political organization, heavily backed by big business. The Chamber of Commerce has donated about $7.2 million over six years, while American Justice Partnership, which lobbies for legislation limiting liability awards and reducing "abusive lawsuits," has contributed nearly $2 million since 2006. Other top donors are Wal Mart, Pfizer, Devon Energy, AT&T, and Reynolds American Tobacco. Its chairman is Ed Gillespie, former chair of the Republican National Committee. In 2010, RSLC partnered with American Crossroads, American Action Forum, and resurgent Republicans. <br />
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Together, these cabals engineered "The Great Gerrymander of 2012." Even though the Democrats polled i.4 million more votes for the House, the Republicans won control, 234 to 201. Through artful drawing of district boundaries, it is possible to put large groups of voters on the losing side every time. In 2013, the RSLC issued a progress report on "Redmap," its $30 million multiyear plan to influence redistricting, which tilts the playing field in two stages: 1) take over state legislatures prior to the decennial census and 2) then redraw legislative and congressional districts to lock in long-term partisan advantage. Whatever else this process is, it is clearly <strong>NOT </strong>democratic. In fact it is blatantly <strong>anti-democratic. </strong>One Virginia lawmaker has even proposed Gerrymandering the <br />
presidential vote by allocating electoral votes by congressional district. Such a split would have elected Romney in 2012, despite the fact that he received five million fewer votes. <strong> </strong><br />
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Using the statistical tools of his profession, neuroscientist Sam Wang has "developed approaches to detect such shenanigans by looking only at election returns." He starts with "the naïve standard that the party that wins more than half the votes should get at least half the seats." In 2012, Arizona, Michigan, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin "failed to clear even this low bar." In North Carolina, the House vote was 51 percent Democratic so the seats should have been split 7 Democrats to 6 Republicans. Its redistricting scheme produced only 4 Democrats and 7 Republicans! "If these districts had been fairly drawn," he charges, "this lopsided discrepancy would hardly ever occur. " he then picked combinations of districts that added up to the same statewide total, so that he could determine "what would have happened if a state had districts that were typical of the rest of the nation." Using his "most discrepancy criterion," he found 10 states "out of whack": the five mentioned above plus Virginia, Ohio, Florida, Illinois, and Texas. Arizona had been redistricted by a combination of Republicans and federal court efforts, and Illinois by Democrats. The other 7 were designed by Republican legislators. "Both sides do it," he concluded, "but one side does it more often." In California, 62 percent of the vote went to Democrats, while the mock delegation of 38 Democrats and 15 Republicans "exactly matched the newly elected delegation." WHY? BECAUSE THE VOTERS "TOOK REDISTRCTING OUT OF THE LEGISLATORS' HANDS BY CREATING THE CALIFORNIA CITIZENS REDISTRICTING COMMISSION!! <br />
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The core strategy of gerrymandering is jamming voters likely to favor your opponents into a few "throwaway" districts, where the other side is allowed to win lopsided victories. That is called "packing." They then arrange other boundaries where they can eke out narrow victories. That is known as "cracking." Although legislators use highly sophisticated software, "free software from Dave's Redistricting Apps lets you do it from your couch." Political analysts have identified other tactics, such as cramming voters into crowded urban districts, "but in 2012 the net effect of intentional gerrymandering was far larger than any one factor." <br />
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Wang suggests three different possible outcomes. 1) Democrats have to win the popular vote by 7 percentage points, the way that districts are presently constituted, to take control of the House.<br />
2) Replacing his 8 partisan districts with mock delegations derived from his calculations would result in 215 Democrats and 220 Republicans, "give or take a few." 3) In the 7 states where Republican legislatures "gamed" the results, 16.7 million Republican and 16.4 Democratic votes produced 73<br />
Republican congressmen and 34 Democratic ones. "Given the average percentage that it takes to elect a Representative, that combination would require only 14.7 million Democratic votes." Put another way, 1.7 votes were packed into Democratic districts and effectively wasted." Compared to the national total of House votes--121 million--the difference is huge--maybe even controlling. In Illinois, Democrats did the converse, wasting about 70,000 Republican votes. "In both cases," Wang estimates, "the number of wasted votes dwarfs the likely effect of either Voter ID laws (which the Democrats fight against) or "voter fraud" (the Republicans' <em>bête noire.)</em><br />
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Wang proposes two plans to preserve majority rule and minority representation: 1) Nonpartisan redistricting commissions in all 50 states and 2) "Adopt a robust standard for partisan gerrymandering." The advent of inexpensive computing and free software "has placed the tools for fighting politicians who draw absurd districts into the hands of citizens like you and me." Republicans, especially, facing demographic and ideological changes in the electorate, use redistricting to cling to power. It is up to us "to take control of the process, slay the gerrymander, and put the people back in charge of what is, after all; our House."<br />
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While Wamg considers the Texas redistricting to be a model, the process was quickly challenged by the "Project On Fair Representation, the same ersatz organization that sponsored S<em>helby County v. Holder. </em>It contends, in <em>Evenwel v. Abbott, </em>that boundary lines should be drawn on the number of eligible voters, instead of on Census data, which, of course, counts every resident of a state. That would eliminate children, documented and undocumented immigrants, prisoners, and other non-voters. Although a three-judge federal panel dismissed their argument as one based on "a theory never before accepted by the Supreme Court or any circuit court," SCOTUS agreed to hear it on a 5-4 vote. If it prevails, according to Ari Berman, "electoral districts would become older, whiter, " more rural, and more conservative." In short, more Republican. Of the 38 congressional districts where more than 40% of residents are eligible to vote, for example, 32 are represented by Democrats in such cities as Los Angeles, New York, Houston, Dallas, Miami, and Chicago. <br />
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The E<em>venwel , </em>as Berman clearly states, "is an attempt to further weaken the VRA by limiting representation for the very communities most harmed by the Shelby County decision, in particular Latinos, African Americans, and Asian Americans." The vice-president for litigation at the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund charges that "their persistence in bringing this litigation is rooted in the goal of counteracting the gains that we have won under the VRA." If the plaintiffs' argument carries the day, ""a staggering 55% of Latinos --those under 18 or non-citizens--won't be counted, as well as 45% of Asian Americans and 30% of African Americans. The associate counsel at LatinoJustice adds that 'it would signal a major retreat from the post-Civil War principle that all people should be fully counted as equal members of society under equal protection." <br />
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<strong><em>The court will render its decision in June. The portents so not look auspicious> </em></strong><br />
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Johnhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02883617794291815218noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3109801914440805625.post-89730261424880932402015-10-30T10:24:00.001-07:002015-11-29T09:53:19.603-08:00The Demise of Slavery and the Rise of Racism"Freedom's arrival was not the work of a moment; it was a process, rather than an occasion." That is the organizing thesis of <em>The Long Emancipation: The Demise of Slavery in the United </em>States by Ira Berlin, the premier historian of American slavery world. Seldom has anyone captured the essence of so vital and complex a phenomenon in such a cohesive manner. In 211 riveting pages, he "connects the arrival of freedom with the post-emancipation standing of former slaves, hence the debate over citizenship and its attributes, among them race<strong><em>, </em></strong>as well as with the confrontation over property-in-man that made some people rich. At every turn, the coincidence between <strong><em>blackness </em></strong>and slavery, was reconstituted in the creation of a new relationship. Emancipation, in short, was a critical moment in the history of<strong><em> racialization</em></strong>---and it, too, was a long process." <br />
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Some historians have interpreted emancipation as a continuous linear progression toward freedom, while others have presented slavery and anti-slavery as parallel trajectories in which "emancipation's road was long and bumpy," its outcome uncertain. In Berlin's calculus, "it can best be revealed by examining the elements--four in number--that shaped the long struggle for universal freedom. Although played out against the ever-changing circumstances of American life, these four omnipresent constituents of emancipation's long history provide the essentials for understanding the arrival of universal freedom." First and foremost was "the resolute commitment of a few men and women--most of them black slaves, along with former slaves and the descendants of slaves--to end slavery and create a slaveless world." Second was "the issue of black people in freedom, and therefore the question of citizenship and its attributes. If black people were not to be slaves, what exactly would they be?" Third, "the challenge to racial slavery necessarily evoked the question of racial freedom, and so the matter of race and the relationship between whites and blacks emerged simultaneously with any discussion of emancipation." Finally, "and most inescapably, emancipation was a violent process, for undoing the violence of enslavement required just as much brutality as the creation of chattel bondage, if not more." <br />
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Although insisting upon "the primacy of black people" in the fight, Berlin argues that his focus "in no way denies the principled commitment, extraordinary courage, and deep sacrifice of others....in which can rightly be seen as the first interracial social movement." But neither does that reality "minimize the fact that the vast majority of black and white Americans lived in different worlds, which themselves had developed from slavery and from the allied structures of white supremacy." White abolitionists focused "on the societal damage slavery wrought as it perverted the work ethic, corrupted Christianity, distorted democracy, and twisted the most basic human relations," while blacks emphasized "the slaves' suffering, the physical and psychological abuse they endured, and the multiple ways slavery denied men and women a normal life. most especially a familial life." Nor does he deny that "most slaves grudgingly accepted--and sometimes welcomed--improvements in their lives in lieu of the risks entailed in reaching for complete freedom." Even so, most demonstrated "their unalloyed opposition to chattel slavery at the first opportunity." Freed slaves also did their utmost in behavior, dress, and speech to assure whites that they stood apart from slaves, but when the crisis came, "no other Americans pressed harder than free blacks for the opportunity to fight the slaveholding enemy, despite risks of enslavement and execution." Most realized that free blacks could never hope to be seen as equals so long as the masses were still enslaved.<br />
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In Berlin's rendering, the "long emancipation" began during the chaos of the American Revolutionary War, when thousands of slaves were able to "free" themselves, at least temporarily. <br />
Their bold actions were so disruptive that most of the newly emerging states were forced to deal with the future of slavery as they drafted their founding constitutions. In every state north of the Carolinas, their deliberations culminated in a glacially slow process known as "post-nati-emancipation," whereby the children born to enslaved women would be free after a specified date." <<em>post nati is Latin for "born after"> </em>The process varied from state to state, but it was generally so "glacial" that slaves were still residing in Maryland, Delaware, and Virginia on the eve of the Civil War. Nowhere, however, were they accepted as "equals."<br />
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More than any other people, slaves and free blacks internalized and personalized the words "that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness." Those ideals were especially adopted by those at the bottom of society, <em>none more enthusiastically than the nearly one million enslaved Africans and African-Americans, and the small, but growing, free black population. For some, it only reinforced the assurances of spiritual equality offered by religious radicals, who found a spark of divinity in every soul, and by evangelical Christians who preached that all are equal in God's eyes. For many, perhaps most, who knew something of the world and had observed their "masters" without the trappings of superiority, Jefferson/s notion was only common sense. It provided an antidote to the allegations of inferiority that weighed heavily upon them</em>.<br />
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Berlin is quick to point out that others shared this egalitarian persuasion:<em> Whether their beliefs emerged from the natural rights philosophy of the Enlightenment, from the theology of radical Protestant sectarians or from the emerging sensitivity to the commonalities of human nature, the confluence of egalitarian ideas and revolutionary experiences produced a heady mixture that the American people adopted as their first principle. </em><em>As the Declaration became the touchstone of American nationality, men and women --especially those confined to the margins of American society such as religious dissenters, laboring people, women of all ranks, and, of course, enslaved and free people of color--employed Jefferson's self-evident truth to fulfill the nation's promise. While the power of the egalitarian ideal waxed and waned over the next century--indeed over the entire course of American history--it had a particularly powerful resonance among black Americans. </em><br />
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But post-nati emancipation generated a counter-revolution. It was manifested most glaringly in the federal Constitution of 1787: the three/fifths clause, the continued importation of slaves until 1807, and the agreement to return "fugitives from justice" to their states of origin. The eventual prohibition of importation in 1807 guaranteed that slavery would henceforth be perpetuated almost solely by "natural increase"---a situation that most enslavers enthusiastically embraced. Whites in the "free states" obligingly acquiesced in the admission of several new slave states, but their growing resentment boiled over when Missouri--the first territory to emerge out of the Louisiana Purchase and the first west of the Mississippi River--applied for admission to the Union as a slave state. The vitriolic disputes that ensued---which came to be known as the Missouri Debates--"lasted through two congressional sessions and shook the Republic to its very essence, eventually setting the antislavery movement on a new path." The furor "touched on every aspect of the question of slavery and race revealing the full range of white sentiment on both sides." In the end, though, "the divisions within the Northern ranks contrasted sharply with the unity of Southern representatives--slavery and white supremacy carried the day." The resulting Missouri Compromise drew an imaginary line through the entire Louisiana Territory, allowing slavery to expand south of 36 degrees, 30 minutes of north latitude. The antislavery movement" once again faded from national politics and returned to the African churches, mutual aid societies. and civic associations that had emerged with the post-revolutionary growth of black freedom." <br />
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As blacks took control of the antislavery movement, it assumed a new form: "less deferential, less gradualist, and more direct, more strident, more confrontational--in a word more militant." Everywhere, "the movement to abolish slavery was joined to the movement for racial equality." Nowhere were the differences between black and white opponents of slavery more starkly revealed than in the question of colonization, which was institutionalized in the American Colonization Society in 1816. As early as the 1820s, its founders, who included mostly Jeffersonians, alienated black people. They disparaged them and "wanted only to purge the nation of free blacks." At the same time, Denmark Vesey and David Walker "came to epitomize, though hardly typify, the new style of antislavery activism." The former was a slave who had purchased his own freedom. He was accused of organizing a wide-ranging conspiracy to overthrow slavery in Charleston, and was tried, convicted, and executed as an insurrectionist. His notoriety, however, "made him an exemplar of antislavery activism," especially among a younger generation who were facing removal to the territories acquired by the annexation of Texas and victory in the Mexican War. <br />
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Walker was a free black born in North Carolina, who was probably inspired by Vesey's martyrdom and migrated to Boston. There he published his<em> Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World, </em>which energized "the largely self-taught intellectual class, where notions of evangelical Protestantism mixed with ideals of classical republicanism." Although he chided blacks for their timidity, he reserved his most vitriolic criticism for whites--especially Jefferson--for their presumption of white supremacy.<br />
The Appeal "captured the rage of an enslaved people and became an underground classic within the black community." While white opponents of slavery "dithered over colonization, the new generation of African-Americans--urged on by Walker--denounced colonization and demanded a direct confrontation with the slaveholding enemy." They also motivated a new generation of white abolitionists, led by William Lloyd Garrison, who espoused racial equality and called for an immediate end to slavery. White abolitionists were mobbed, beaten, and, at least in one case, murdered. Garrison was nearly lynched on the streets of Boston. Kidnapping "became a growth industry," that "sent black men and women, often free or having been promised freedom, to a lifetime of labor on the plantations of the Deep South." With increasing frequency, free blacks directly confronted aspiring kidnappers and the authorities who aided them." The only way to make the Fugitive Slave Law a dead letter," asserted Frederick Douglass, "is to make a half dozen or more dead kidnappers ". <br />
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While the great majority of northern whites obviously did not share the militancy of the abolitionists, they grew increasingly hostile toward the <strong><em>expansion</em></strong> of slavery. Even though those in the free states rejoiced in the addition of California and Oregon, they refused to regard the annexation of Texas and the Mexican Cession as an adequate<em> quid pro quo</em>. Their major objection to the Compromise of 1850 quickly became the Fugitive Slave Act, which mandated the return of runaway slaves, and commissioned U.S. marshals to pursue and capture them in the free states, subject only to permission from the courts. That was the spark that ignited the explosion of kidnapping, false imprisonment, pitched street battles, court histrionics, and widespread mayhem that ensued, both in cities and on the frontier. "Distinguishing many of these occasions,"was the presence of black men in arms, as the vigilance committees transformed themselves into militias." The "attempted and successful renditions of fugitive slaves became signature events of the decade as much as did the border wars in Kansas, the caning of Charles Sumner of Massachusetts on the Senate floor, and John Brown's raid on the federal arsenal at Harper's Ferry." The Dred Scott decision opened the entire country--including the North and its territories--to slavery and barred people of African descent from membership in the larger community...threatened the rights of white people, degrading their labor by identifying it with that of black people and equality as the central tenet of American nationality."<br />
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According to Berlin, "the Civil War changed nothing and everything. Black men and women, slave and free, remained in the vanguard of the movement for universal freedom, demanding immediate emancipation." Freedom came for most slaves "through the force of arms. The mobilization of warring armies that transformed the war for union into a war for freedom ratcheted up the level of violence," as slavery came apart in pieces." Within a month, Congress prohibited Union soldiers from returning fugitive slaves to their masters, and Lincoln freed slaves in the District of Columbia. From the beginning of the war, "the strongest advocates of universal freedom were the slaves themselves." They "risked all for freedom," and "forced federal soldiers to recognize their importance to the Union's cause." Free blacks and white abolitionists dismissed the official Republican doctrine that slavery should be respected and given constitutional protection where it existed. Only the slaves "had both the commitment and the opportunity to initiate a direct assault on slavery." Hundreds of thousands "would work for the Union, and more than 135,000 slave men would become Union soldiers." The actions of slaves made it "possible and necessary for citizens, legislators, military officers, and the president to take action on the matter of emancipation." Nothing more clearly marked the transformation of the war for union into a war for freedom than "<em><strong>the appearance of black men in blue uniforms</strong></em>." That was so even though "the federal government violated virtually every such promise, and in so doing raised critical questions about the meaning of "real freedom." It was a stark reminder "that racial prejudice pervaded Northern as well as Southern society." <br />
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How, exactly, did the eventual triumph of The Long Emancipation help generate the pervasive racism that has poisoned our society and culture ever since? The answer, Berlin demonstrates conclusively, is that African-Americans--slave and free--struggled to obtain both "freedom" and "equality," while even the most sincere and dedicated white abolitionist advocated for "freedom"---in and of itself--as the ultimate prize. Regardless of location or status, blacks and whites "lived in different worlds." Material differences in wealth that spawned differences in education and aspirations "elevated whites<strong>, imbuing them with a sense that they were the black's defenders, protectors, and benefactors,</strong> <strong>but not as colleagues and comrades</strong>. Such condescension manifested itself in the lament that all-too-many white opponents of slavery "love the colored man at a distance." Their differences made it difficult for even black and white abolitionists "to see one another as equals." Whites "were remaking the world anew," and "repairing the damage created by the old world." They took part in the emancipation movement "as a matter of duty--but they were no more likely to believe that Negroes were naturally equal to whites than they were that chalk was cheese." It was part of the slave's "ongoing struggle for <em><strong>full </strong></em>equality that may have begun as an attempt to improve conditions of everyday life but that always aimed for recognition of their dignity and the respect granted a free people." Their long struggle for <strong><em>freedom</em></strong> also "rested on the expectation and demand for <strong><em>equality</em></strong>, meaning access to the tools of citizenship: at a minimum, the right to vote and the ability to earn a living through one's labor."<br />
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During the past 150 years, there have only been two relatively brief periods during which the majority of white people have actively supported African-American efforts to achieve true "equality." The first was the era of Congressional or "Radical" Reconstruction" which lasted--at most--from 1867 to 1877. The second was during the 1950s and 1960s, when the "Civil Rights Movement" was at its zenith. The former produced the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments and several Civil Rights Acts. African-American males became an important voting force; Sixteen blacks served in Congress, more than 600 in various state legislatures, and hundreds more as sheriffs , justices of the peace, and other local officers. Reconstruction governments established the region's first public school systems and hospitals, made taxation more equitable, and outlawed racial discrimination in public transportation and accommodations. The latter period produced the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and "officially" desegregated nearly every aspect of public life--from the military to education, from housing to transportation, and from restaurants to movie theaters.<br />
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Naturally, all of these measures provoked a firestorm of reaction among southern whites, ranging from intimidation to beatings, lynching, electoral fraud, and even wholesale assaults on black communities. That was to be expected, and African-Americans of both eras displayed almost unbelievable courage, fortitude, and resilience. Southern states erected a "Jim Crow" system of legal segregation in all aspects of life that persisted into the 1960s. Even more devastating. however, was abandonment by most northern whites, who were either distracted by other interests or motivated by a desire for white reunification. They even asserted their own brand of <em>de facto </em>segregation, which had much the same result as the <em>de </em>jure version. While white southerners told blacks to "come as close as you want, but don't try to go any higher; northern whites admonished them to "go as high as you want, but don't come any closer." Although continuing to pay at least lip service to the gains of the 1960s, many whites act as if "equality" has been fully achieved, once and for all. They even show a disturbing tendency to acquiesce in "roll backs" of the gains in education, housing, and voting rights supposedly "set in stone" during the Civil Rights Era. All of which begs the question:<strong> Have most whites ever accepted the kind and degree of "equality"that blacks have been pursuing over the past three and more centuries. Will we ever?</strong><br />
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JDB<br />
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<br />Johnhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02883617794291815218noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3109801914440805625.post-36715915783862084482015-10-28T21:44:00.000-07:002015-11-04T13:05:12.103-08:00Slavery's Trail Of TearsThose of you who found Edward E. Baptist's <em>The Half Has Never Been Told </em>as eye-opening and mind-boggling as I did <em><</em>See my post of September 20: <strong><em>The Half Is Finally Being Told</em></strong>> will be at least as astounded by an article in the November issue of<em> Smithsonian</em> magazine titled "Slavery's Tale of Tears: Retracing America's Forgotten Migration--The Journey of a Million African-Americans from the Tobacco South to the Cotton South," (pp. 58-83). The author is Edward Ball, a university instructor and author <em>of Slaves in the Family</em>, whose ancestors were a slaveholding family in North Carolina for 170 years. It brings to life--in stunning and excruciating detail--the actual experiences of many "whose half has never been told." <br />
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Ball's interest was piqued by an 1834 note found in the University of North Carolina's archives from James Franklin of Natchez, Mississippi to the home office in Alexandria, Virginia of the partnership of Franklin and Armfield, "the undisputed tycoons of the domestic slave trade, with an economic impact that is hard to overstate." <In 1832, for example, five percent of the commercial credit available through the Second Bank of the United States was extended to the firm.> It was owned by Isaac Franklin, James' uncle, who operated in New Orleans, and John Armfield, who ran the business in Alexandria. The note read that "we have about ten thousand dollars (about $300,000 in today's money) left to pay yet. Should you purchase a good lot for walking, I will bring them out by land this summer." That "good lot for walking" was a gang of enslaved men, women, and children, possibly numbering in the hundreds, "who could tolerate three month afoot in the summer heat." Bringing them out by land referred to a forced march overland from the fields of Virginia to the slave auctions in Natchez and New Orleans. That note, according to Ball, was 'the first sign that I might be able to trace the route of one of Franklin and Armfield's caravans." <br />
<br />
And retrace it he did--albeit "the easy way"--in his own car! Either way, it was a journey of 1,100 miles, from Alexandria, Virginia (just across the Potomac River from my graduate school<br />
<em>alma mater--</em>Georgetown University) to New Orleans. Just like that caravan, he drove in a southwesterly direction through Virginia until he crossed the Tennessee border at Knoxville. From there he proceeded to Nashville via Gallitin. Then through Tennessee and Mississippi to Natchez, and finally to New Orleans. Along the way, he uncovered manuscript collections at various libraries, archives and historical societies, and had the opportunity to interview several curators, archivists, and librarians, most of whom were in the process of discovering and exhibiting long-ignored treasure troves shedding considerable light on "Slavery's Trail of Tears." Even more revealing were his interviews with descendants of both the enslavers and the enslaved.<br />
<br />
One of the most instructive interviewees was Delores McQuinn of Richmond, who has been both a city council member and a representative in the Virginia House of Delegates. She informed Ball that her grandfather had visited the house where his family had once been enslaved, and inquired if the owner had any documentation about their history. The man obligingly brought out a sheaf of papers and proceeded to burn them, saying "You want your history? Well, here it is. Take the ashes and get off my land." The intent, Ms. McQuinn intoned, was to "keep that history buried. Our history is often buried. You have to unearth it." Outside universities and museums, Ball concludes, "the history of the Slave Trail lives in shards, broken and scattered." While in Richmond, he met with Maurie McInnis, historian and vice-provost of UVA and curator of the Library of Virginia exhibit on the slave trade. She told Ball that some 450,000 slaves from Virginia were "sent south" between 1810 and 1860, and that, in 1857 alone, the sale of people in the future capital of the Confederacy netted its white masters $4,000,000. "That would be more than $440,000,000 today."<br />
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The mansion at Belle Grove--built by relatives of President James Madison--has been turned into a "house museum" by historian Kristen Laise. She pulled out an 1824 newspaper ad placed by the master of Belle Grove, Madison's brother-in-law, saying that he "shall proceed to sell sixty slaves of various ages, in families." He regretted that he had to charge interest "if buyers insisted on using credit." The nicest families in the Shenandoah, Ball observes, "tipped people into the pipeline south." At the Winchester-Frederick County Visitor Center, in a bookshop in Edinburg, the Staunton Visitor Center, and in a Roanoke tourist information outlet called Virginia's Blue Ridge. Ball asked " did people there know anything about the chain gangs that streamed southwest through these parts?" He elicited answers like "never heard of it" and "don't know what you are talking about." They mostly changed the subject to stories about "brave Confederates" or their own ethnic lore. He did happen upon an 1834 account by one George Featherstonhaugh, a geologist doing a surveying tour for the federal government. he described Armfield as "sordid, illiterate, and vulgar," with "overpowering bad breath," from eating raw onions. He also described a "singular spectacle" of nine wagons and carriages and some 200 men "manacled and chained to each other," lining up in double file, while Armfield and his men made jokes, "standing near, laughing and smoking cigars." It was "the most revolting sight' he had ever seen. <br />
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Men and boys sold, on average, for about $700. Multiply that by 200 and it comes to about $3.5million today. Slaves were routinely insured --plenty of companies did that sort of business with policies guarding against "damage." bur collecting "would be inconvenient." While walking the streets of Radford, Ball chatted with one "Daniel," who exchanged pleasantries, "until I bring up the slave days Daniel's expression empties. He shakes his head. His face acquires a look that suggests the memory of slavery is like a vampire visiting from a shallow grave." <br />
<br />
At the Shenandoah, Armfield's "coffle" merged with others coming from the east. One of these was led by William Waller, who walked from Amherst, Virginia to Louisiana in 1847 with 20 or more slaves. In the deep archive of the Virginia Historical Society, Ball discovered "an extraordinary batch of letters that Waller wrote about selling people he had known and lived with for much of his life." His wife, Sarah Garland, was Patrick Henry's daughter and the wife of a congressman. He was deeply in debt and left a few slaves behind in Amherst as house servants for his family, while he marched with the rest to Natchez and New Orleans. He wrote some 20 letters home, in which he seems like businessman sending word that there is nothing to worry about. He was careful to assure his wife that "the negroes were happy." Even so, he admitted that he had felt and seen enough to make me loath the vocation of slave trading." He was especially morose because he had sold two young women apart from their parents. 'My heart grieves over Sarah and I do wish it could be different, but Sarah seems happy." It as at the spine of the Blue Ridge where Armfield turned over his coffle to James, Isaac Franklin's nephew, and took a stage coach back to Alexandria. <br />
<br />
In Gallitin, Ball drove out to the old Franklin estate, which was being transformed into a housing development and golf course called Fairvu Plantation. "A thicket of McMansions, in every ersatz style," filled most of the area. But Ball decides to visit the more modest home of Kenneth Thomson, a direct descendant of Isaac Franklin, whose living room is dominated by a large oil portrait of his ancestor. He turned out to be the most candid--and therefore the most infuriating of all the descendant of slavers. After Isaac died, in 1846, "they published an inventory of his belongings" that ran to 900 pages. He had six plantations and 650 slaves." He knew "how to be a gentleman He had the equivalent of an eighth grade education. He was not ignorant. He could write a letter." Before he married, "Isaac had companions, some willing, some unwilling. That was just part of life." He had a child by a black woman before he married, but this daughter of his left Tennessee and nobody knows what happened to her after that." Actually, Uncle Isaac "sent her off" because he didn't want her around after he married." It is possible, Ball interjects, that he sold her. "It would have been the easiest thing to do." <br />
<br />
Thomson produces a letter that he wrote some years ago to the Gallitin<em> Examiner. </em>The headline reads "Isaac Franklin Was a Well-liked Slave Trader." Asked how a person inside the family measure the inheritance of slave trading, he replies that "You can't judge those people by today's standards." He adds that "many things in the Old Testament are pretty barbaric, but they are part of our evolution." Thomson expressed a special contempt for "revisionist historians." He emphasizes that has been around blacks his whole life, and that "they are good people." He denies that he is in any way responsible for the actions of his ancestors. Slavery "developed because of the ignorance of the blacks.They just "slid into slavery." He stresses that people in his family "looked after their slaves," that some free blacks themselves became slaveholders, and that American black are better off than West Africans. <strong><em>There is more, but you have to read it for yourself</em></strong>. Ball, himself the descendant of slave holders, that he recognized "the melody , and let the song pass."<br />
<br />
While in Gallitin, Ball also interviewed 73-year--old Florence Hall Blair, a retired nurse. She tells him that "a lot of black people don't want to know about their ancestry," but counters that she is "not one of those people. When asked how she felt about Isaac Franklin, Ms. Blair professed "a certain detachment." He was "a cruel individual, but he was human." His humanity was not always visible, but it was there. She concludes that she has let go of hatred, because it only hurts those who hate. But she adds that she "wouldn't have made it too well in slavery days, because I am the kind of person who just can't imagine you would treat me the way they treated people. Like a dog, she calls it. "They would have had to kill me with my temperament." She expresses admiration for her own people. "We carried on."<br />
<em></em><br />
Although there are few records about the trip from Nashville to New Orleans, Ball admits, "it is possible to follow in detail a coffle of people...thanks to William Waller's letters." Waller muses that the scenery is beautiful, but the trip itself was brutal. He was especially morose because he is not able to sell many of his slaves along the way, because the market for slaves was at low ebb. Prospective buyers came to look at "my negroes," and wanted to buy seven or eight, "but they objected to the price." Waller wrote to Sarah that he did eventually sell some to "as kind a masters as could be found." She wrote back that she was "most pleased that you have sold at such fine prices," but that<em> </em>"I wish you could have sold more of them." After examining the people on display, a buyer would talk to a seller and negotiate. Ball can't resist interjecting that "it was like buying a car today." <br />
<br />
In Natchez, Ball interviewed the individual whom he calls "the man who has done the most to call attention to the Slave Trail." Clifton Boxley, who changed his name to Ser Seshsh Ab Heter brcause he regards his birth name as "the plantation name, his slave name." He is 75, "direct, assertive and arresting," with a full baritone voice. He does not make small talk. "I want to resurrect the history of the enslavement trade, and for 20 years that is where I've focused." His "Jim Crow Kitchen" is filled with mammy salt shakers, black lawn jockeys, Uncle Tom figurines, and similar demeaning memorabilia. He forced the white population to accept his "Forks in the Road" project, for which he wrote the text for four of the trail markers. "You feel something?" he asks Ball. "That's good. They say there were no feelings here." Boxley says that his aim is preserve every inch of dirt in this area. "I am fighting for our enslaved ancestors." Asked if there is any way to do this without injuring the sensitivity of friendly white people, he says "I don't spare anything. It is the humanity of our ancestors denied that I am interested in. This is your story as well as an African-American story."<br />
The only way to transcend pain and hurt, he continues, is "to face the situation, to experience and cleanse yourself, to allow the humanity of your ancestors and their suffering to wash through you<br />
and settle into your spirit." His parting words were "<strong><em>Peace out."</em></strong> <br />
<br />
When he reaches his final destination, Ball talks with Erin Greenwald, who is the curator of the Historic New Orleans Collection, which is featuring an exhibition titled "Purchased Lives, New Orleans and the Domestic Slave Trade, 1808-1865," She is also the director of a developing data base of names of those enslaved who were shipped from the Eastern States: "We studied hundreds of shipping manifests and compiled a list of 70,000 names. Of course, that is only some." The auction advertisement at the end of the Slave Trail, she relates, always said Virginia and Maryland Negroes, "because that meant compliant, docile, and not broken by overwork." She also produced a copy of <em>the Milwaukee Daily Sentinel </em>discussing slave auctions at the posh St. Louis Hotel, where two stages did business simultaneously--in both French and English. Here, families at the end of the Slave Trail were divided. The reporter described "a noble-looking woman with a wide-eyed seven-year-old." He was sold separately to a man from Mississippi, his mother to a man from Texas. "She burst forth in the most frantic wails that ever despair gave utterance to." <br />
<br />
After emancipation, historian Heather Williams relates, <em>the Southwestern Christian Advocate</em> began to carry a column called "Lost Friends," in which people called out for family members who had disappeared on the Slave Trail. She has unearthed a handful of reunion stories, one of which obviously deeply affected Ball. After years of searching, Robert Glenn located his aged mother from whom he had been torn at the age of eight. At first, she gave no indication of recognition, but she later approached him and asked "Tell me, ain't you my child whom I left on the road near Mr. Moore's farm before the war?" Glenn broke down and cried: "I did not know before I came home whether my parents were dead or alive, and now mother nor father did not know me." <br />
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<strong>I trust that my truncated rendering has inspired you to read Ball's article in its entirety---because:</strong><br />
<strong>1. Edward ball is a far better story teller than I am</strong><br />
<strong>2, The caricature on the title page brilliantly captures the essence of the Trail of Tears</strong><br />
<strong>3. The detailed map of the various Slave Trading Routes in absolutely incredible</strong><br />
<strong>4. It features a bone-chilling poster headlined "One Hundred Negroes For Sale."</strong><br />
<strong>5. There are gorgeous full-page photos of Delores McQuinn, Maurie McInnis, Kenneth Thomson, F</strong><strong>lorence Blair Hall, Clifton Boxley, and Erin Greenwald.</strong> <em> </em><br />
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<em> JDB </em><br />
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<em> </em>Johnhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02883617794291815218noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3109801914440805625.post-4339731718971045302015-09-20T15:17:00.000-07:002015-11-09T22:13:49.656-08:00"The Half" Is Finally Being Told "<strong><em> </em>TRULY, SON, THE HALF HAS NEVER BEEN TOLD.": Former slave Lorenzo Ivy to Claude Anderson, an African-American master's student at Hampton University, who is interviewing him as part of SLAVE NARRATIVE PROGRAM of the WORKS PROGRESS ADMINISTRATION IN 1936.</strong><br />
<br />
<em>To this day, it still has not. it still has not. For the other half is the story of how slavery changed, and moved, and grew over time. Lorenzo Ivy's time, and that of his parents and grandparents. In the span of a single lifetime, the South grew from a narrow strip of worn-out tobacco plantations to a continental cotton empire, and the United States grew into a modern, industrial, and capitalist economy. Until the Civil War, the most important American innovations were ways to make slavery ever more profitable. Through forced migration and torture, slave owners extracted continual increases in efficiency from enslaved African Americans. Thus the United States seized control of the world market for cotton, the key raw material of the Industrial Revolution, and became a wealthy nation with global influence. Entrepreneurial enslavers moved more then a million enslaved people that survivors of the slave trade from Africa had built in the South and in the West to vast territories that were seized also by force from their Native American inhabitants. From 1783, the end of the American Revolution, to 1861, the number of slaves in the U.S. increased five times over, and all this expansion produced a powerful nation. For white enslavers were able to force enslaved African Americans to pick cotton more efficiently than free people. Their practices rapidly transformed the southern states into the dominant force in the global cotton market, and cotton was the key raw material during the first century of the industrial revolution. The returns from cotton monopoly powered the modernization of the American economy, and by the time of the Civil War, the United States had become the second nation to undergo large-scale industrialization. In fact, slavery's expansion shaped every crucial expansion of the economy and politics of the new nation --not only increasing its power and size, but also, eventually, dividing United States politics, differentiating regional identities and interests, and helping make the Civil War possible... The idea that commodification and suffering and forced labor is what made the United States powerful and rich is not an idea that people are happy to hear. Yet it is the truth, and the truth was half the story that survived, mostly in the custodianship of those who survived slavery's expansion. Forced migration had shaped their lives and also shaped what they thought about their lives and the wider history in which they were enmeshed. Even as they struggled to stay alive in the midst of disruption, they created ways to talk about this half untold. But what survivors experienced, analyzed, and named was a slavery that did not fit the comfortable boxes into which other Americans have been trying to fit it ever since it ended.</em><br />
<em></em><br />
The above paragraph encapsulates the driving thesis of one of the most intellectually stimulating and emotional riveting books that I have ever had the great fortune to read<em>: The Half Has Never Been told: Slavery and the Making of American </em>Capitalism (Basic Books, 2114). It is easier for me to conceptualize his thesis as two separate, arguments, but, in their real world operation, they are inextricably intertwined. The first is the inescapable conclusion that the Plantation Economy was the engine that drove the nation's industrialization, financialization, and modernization. The Civil War, in his interpretation was not a clash between two incompatible paradigms, but rather a quarrel over how the proceeds should be apportioned, and whether the Plantation Economy, with its total reliance on slave labor, would be allowed to expand farther into the new western territories. The second is that slave labor was not an aberration in a modernizing world, but a dynamic and expanding component, precisely because it was more "<strong><em>efficien</em></strong>t" than free labor. That assumes, of course, that you did not need your workforce to function as consumers, as well as producers. He argues that, in the one instance when planters from the North tried to pay free labor a fair wage on the Carolina Sea Islands, "half the cotton was rotting in the fields--cotton that could have been picked only at whip-driven speed." The same held true when masters tried to utilize laborers from the cotton fields on the factory floor. It was also true if you did not scruple about subjecting your workforce to beatings, torture, maiming, mutilation, and homicide. The minions of the "lords of the lash" would always have bested those of the "lords of the loom."<br />
<br />
With profound apologies to Professor Baptist, I will endeavor to provide you with an outline and a chronology in which to understand his narrative. Slavery was legal and ubiquitous throughout all 13 colonies at the time of the American Revolution, but it was far more vital in those whose economies were based on growing tobacco--Virginia, the Carolinas, Georgia, Maryland, and Delaware. As the colonies morphed into states and wrote their respective constitutions, each debated the issue of slavery. The other 7--New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and New Hampshire--provided for its gradual abolition. In some, the process of emancipation was so "gradual" that they still had elderly slaves living there at the advent of the Civil War. Those who were emancipated were generally sentened to the lowest rungs on the socioeconomic ladder. All of them instituted<em> de facto </em>segregation in employment, housing, education, and politics, which persisted well into the 20th century. A substantial portion of white Northerners experienced measurable increases in the standard of living by investing in cotton--and slaves, all the while chastising Southerners for providing them with the <strong>source of their good fortune. </strong>The movement to abolish slavery proceeded at a glacial pace, if at all. Both Baptist and historian Ira Berlin insist that such movements "were not the charitable work of respectable white people, or not mainly that." It was, instead, "made possible by the constant discomfort inflicted upon middle-class white society by black activists." <br />
<br />
The issue of slavery was so contentious during the 1787 Constitutional Convention that it required several crucial compromises: 1) Counting slaves as three-fifths of free people for purposes of both taxation and representation; 2) Prohibiting the importation of slaves--but not until 1807, giving those who continued the practice an additional two decades to benefit. Even after 1807, slave-smuggling remained a lucrative--if nefarious--business; 3) all states agreed to extradite "fugitives from justice." <Guess who most of those were ?> The Northwest Ordinances, which predated the Constitution, prohibited slavery in what eventually became Ohio, Michigan, Indiana, Illinois, and Wisconsin. No provision for or against it was made for the remaining territory ceded by Britain in the 1783 Peace of Paris, but a fair number of slaveholders began to move their "property" into what eventually became Kentucky, Tennessee, Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana. It was generally agreed that the Ohio River would constitute the boundary between slave and free territories.<br />
<br />
Much of the history of the mid-19th century featured a series of "compromises" between those who wanted to extend slavery into each newly acquired chunk of real estate, and those who wanted to prohibit it in those lands "due west" of "free" territories. Probably the most important compromise of all was the mutual agreement there must be an equal number of free and slave states--and a corresponding parity of U.S. Senators. New states were only admitted in "pairs." The Louisiana Purchas of 1803 virtually doubled the size of the country, opening up a vast new arena in which to contest the extension of slavery. Equally portentous was the acquisition of the port of New Orleans, which allowed unimpeded access to the Gulf of Mexico--up and down the length of <br />
the Mississippi River on both sides. In 1819, Missouri applied for admission to the Union as a slave state, threatening to upset the carefully constructed balance. But the Compromise of 1820 (more generally known as the Missouri Compromise) restored it by the admission of Maine as a free state, and by drawing an imaginary line of demarcation at 36 degrees, 30 minutes North Latitude throughout the entire Louisiana Purchase territory--prohibiting slavery north of it and permitting it south of the line. In the Adams-Onis Treaty of 1819, Spain ceded all of Florida to the U.S., in return for the latter's agreement not to contest the former's claims southwest of the Mississippi.<br />
<br />
As "luck" would have it, all of Mexico won its independence from Spain the following year, thus rendering the agreement moot--at least in American eyes. In a frantic effort to protect what was to become Texas from American expansion, the nascent Mexican government gave generous land grants to those settlers willing to swear a loyalty oath, convert to Catholicism, and leave their slaves behind. Large numbers of Americans (GTT quickly became the operant explanation for any departure from an American address) took up the offer, with some even marrying Mexican women and converting<strong>, but they also brought along their slaves</strong>. Together with those Mexicans seeking relief from the central government in Mexico City, they seceded and formed their own republic. <em>(Contrary to popular belief, many "Texicans" were ethnically Mexicans</em>.) The newly minted Texicans were seriously divided over maintaining independence versus annexation by the U.S.. That same issue started a firestorm in the U.S., between those who envisioned Texas as potentially one or more slave states, and those who proclaimed that annexation was a "slaveholders' plot" to take over the country. During the election campaign of 1844, Democratic presidential candidate James K. Polk's (who was James K. Polk ?) opponents sarcastically asked.) promised annexation; his election persuaded the "lame duck" Congress to do exactly that. The controversy over the southern boundary of Texas led to U.S. invasion of Mexico ( a one-term Congressman from Illinois named Abraham Lincoln was one of those who disputed Polk's version). The overwhelming American victory led to the hotly-contested Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which Polk threatened to abrogate, but which also included Mexican cession of California, and parts of what became Arizona, New Mexico, Nevada, Utah, Colorado, and Wyoming. Polk had also pledged to annex the Oregon Territory, including even what became British Columbia (<strong>54/40 or Fight</strong>!). Another compromise--this one with Great Britain--established the U.S.-Canadian border at <strong>49 degrees North Latitude</strong>. <br />
<br />
The super-charged debate over the territories acquired from Mexico lasted four bitter years, until it was seemingly settled by yet another compromise, which its overly optimistic supporters dubbed "The Great Compromise." It consisted of five different bills, all passed on the same day in September, 1850.Texas surrendered its claim to New Mexico and the federal government agreed to assume the state's public debt. California was admitted to the Union as a free state. The slave trade was abolished in D.C., although slavery <em>per se</em> was continued. <strong>(Well, you couldn't expect slaveholding members of Congress to get along without their personal servants!) T</strong>he territories of Utah and New Mexico were officially declared "organized" under the rubric of "popular sovereignty, while the rest of the lands taken from Mexico were annexed "without reference to slavery." This was a classic case of "passing the buck," allowing both sides to heave a sigh of relief, albeit temporarily. <br />
<br />
But it was the fifth bill<strong>--the Fugitive Slave Act--</strong>that proved to be incendiary!!! It mandated the return of runaway slaves and commissioned U.S. marshals to pursue and capture them in free states, subject only to approval by the courts. It was the "fire bell ringing in the night" that Jefferson had predicted long before. Many Northerners vociferously condemned it, vowed to disobey it, and denounced such anti-slavery icons as Daniel Webster for urging its passage. (see Webster's Seventh of May Speech). Other reluctantly agreed, regarding it as the price to pay for California, the end of slave auctions in the nation's capital, and delaying the spread of slavery into the rest of the Mexican cession. But the last was only a stop-gap measure; slaveholders were already beginning to infiltrate Utah and New Mexico. The brutal reality of federal marshals arresting runaways in Massachusetts and Wisconsin, however, provoked armed resistance, and made numerous converts to the abolitionist cause. The flames were fanned by the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act, the brain child of Senator Stephen A. Douglas of Illinois, who was regarded as the likely Democratic presidential candidate for 1860. The act divided the territory in twain, with the question of slavery left to "popular sovereignty." To accomplish this legerdemain, the 36/30 line of the Missouri Compromise was repealed. The resulting firestorm led to the proliferation of "anti-Nebraska" protest meetings , tore the Whigs asunder, giving birth to the nascent Republican Party, the outbreak of the bloody "Kansas Civil War," and John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry. <br />
<br />
By the time of the 1860 elections, the majority of Northerners were adamantly opposed to any further expansion of slavery, the touchstone of the successful Republican presidential candidate Abraham Lincoln. The new president, who received only 40 percent of the popular vote, but the necessary number of electoral votes, tried to temporize by declaring that his priority was the preservation of the Union, no matter what the ultimate fate of slavery. Douglas had expressed the same devotion to the Union, blissfully unaware that popular sovereignty made that impossible. Many died-in-the-wool abolitionists had abstained, seeing little difference between the two candidates. Many were in favor of the "colonization" of emancipated African Americans to Africa or the Caribbean, a solution that Lincoln himself seriously considered. Even at that late date, John Crittenden of Kentucky formed a group of 13 compromise-minded Senators who cobbled together an "omnibus" of six amendments and four resolutions they hoped would avoid secession. The most important amendment would have restored the Missouri Compromise line, thereby allowing slavery in Kansas, even though it was north of that demarcation. Their proposal would have made slavery perpetual--in direct contradiction to Lincoln's oft-repeated conviction that the nation could not exist "half free and half slave." The president responded that there could be "no compromise on the question of extending slavery. If there be, all our labor is lost, and ere, must be done again." It would also mean voiding the1860 election, deposing Lincoln, and rendering the nascent Republican Party stillborn. If the Crittenden compromise were adopted, Lincoln declared, "a year will not pass, till we shall have to take Cuba as a condition upon which they will stay in the Union." The Republicans in Congress reluctantly sided with Lincoln, although they offered to admit New Mexico as a slave state.<br />
<br />
It is impossible to know for certain what would have transpired if the Southern states had not seized the initiative by seceding and expropriating Union property. Once they did so, Lincoln had no real alternative but to provision the soldiers at Fort Sumter, although he explicitly ruled out staging any military action to rescue them. Some have even claimed that he planned it that way from the outset, but there is no substantial evidence to support such a stratagem. In any case, it was the secessionists who fired the first shot of the Civil War. In their conventions, Baptist pointedly observes, "the more enslaved people secession delegates owned, the more radical were their demands." Taking the high ground, Lincoln famously proclaimed "though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battle ground and patriot grave---may yet swell the chorus of Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature." <br />
<br />
Probably the most brilliant section of this incredibly brilliant book is the author's <em>Afterword, </em>pp. 401-420, titled "Corpse." On pages 397 to 407, he carefully analyses the impact of the war on the plantation hierarchy. It was not exactly "bottom rail on top," but it was certainly a mind-blowing reconfiguration. Believing that "King Cotton" would give them enough leverage to sway European powers to their cause, they stopped growing their precious staple crop, switching to the production of food for the Confederate armies. By early 1862, the volume of bales received at Liverpool fell to a mere three percent of 1860 levels. This sudden dearth of cotton on the world market, however, shockingly increased prices, rendering cotton from other production zones--West Africa, Egypt, and Brazil--price-competitive for the first time. Accordingly, the African slave trade directly to Egypt swelled from 5,000 in the 1850s to 20,000 by 1865. Simultaneously, the Confederacy lost control of its oldest and most productive region--the Carolina sea islands--as the Union Navy wrested control and the planters fled. The African Americans, who made up more than 90 percent of the remaining population, petitioned to convert plantation lands into small plots for their use, but policy makers had other ideas. As the 1862 crop neared fruition, the federal Treasury Department asserted authority over the abandoned lands and rented them out to Northern entrepreneurs, who reinstituted the plantation system, using the former slaves as "free", but cheap, labor. They claimed that they could produce the same amount of cotton 25 percent cheaper. <See discussion above> Neither new source of cotton production came even close to matching pre-war levels, rendering it scarce and high-priced on the world market. When the Union navy captured New Orleans in early 1862, "contrabands" fled from slave labor camps to Union-held forts west of the city. In April of that year, Congress appropriated $1,000,000 to buy freedom for the 3,000 slaves in D.C.. When Union forces "won" the bloodbath at Antietam in September, Lincoln secretly drafted the Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation, freeing slaves in territories under Confederate control. On January 1, 1863, he went public with the proclamation that Baptist calls "important executive order ever issued by an American president." It <strong>did not </strong>free slaves in Union-occupied territory, in the 50 western counties of Virginia about to become West Virginia, and in southern Louisiana, where Northerners were planning to establish a "reconstructed" state government. Following Lincoln's example, a growing number of Union officers began to give runaways the choice of being returned to their place of origin or enlisting in the army. Most chose the latter. <br />
<br />
Panicked slaveholders herded as many of their captives as possible to Texas, a practice called "refugeeing." Union occupiers tried to "scatter about" as many slaves as possible onto their plantations to do heavy labor.Meanwhile, Lincoln issued an order allowing African Americans to enlist in the U.S. Colored Troops (USCT). Over the next two years, according to Baptist, almost 200,000 --many of them former slaves--"did mighty things that defined the rest of their lives." In so doing, he fulfilled the prediction of Fredrick Douglass: "Let the black man get upon his person the brass letter U.S., a musket upon his shoulder, and bullets in his pocket, and there is no power on earth, or under the earth, which can say that he has not earned the right of citizenship in the U.S.". Although the Confederacy was too weak to mount any major offensives in 1864 and 1865, the author charges, "it could still make the Union spill oceans of blood for every advance in Virginia, Tennessee. and Georgia." As the resolve of Northerners waned, volunteers declined, draft resistance increased, and a growing number began to favor a negotiated peace," which was "exactly what Jeff Davis and the Confederacy wanted." Under those constraints, Baptist boldly asserts, 200,000 African American soldiers "kept the faith and provided the spark needed to achieve victory." They "paid a collective heavy price--40,00 died in battle, and a similar number may have died in camps or in the chaos of the war-devastated South." They provided a crucial increment for a North that "was running out of soldiers." Their service in battle, he concludes, "had saved the nation." <br />
<br />
In Baptist's view, Lincoln was "either the last casualty of the Civil War or the first of a long civil rights movement that is not yet over." Either way, it is clear that his assassination prevented realization of the Reconstruction he envisioned in his second inaugural address, which the author calls ?the greatest speech ever given in the English language," one "that was itself a history of the half told." But his assassination also killed Lincoln plans for reconstruction, because his successor was" unfortunately an alcoholic racist bent on undermining emancipation." Andrew Johnson signaled southern whites that "they could build a new white supremacy that looked very much like the one that blacks had fought to end." In the elections of 1865, southern white voters made it glaringly obvious that they would not come to terms with black freedom. In Congressional elections that fall, "they sent a host of sullen Confederates back to Washington." At the same time, they worked in their state legislatures to keep the status of African Americans as close to slavery as possible. They enacted vagrancy laws to limit mobility, apprenticeship statutes binding young blacks to white families as captive labor, and threatened to reinstate "the law of the lash" in order to reinvigorate productivity. Incensed by whites who refused to accept the verdict of the war, a majority faction of "Radical" Republicans assumed control of Reconstruction. Overriding Johnson's objections, they refused to seat the newly elected members of Congress, while passing a series of bills taking the franchise away from ex-Confederate officers and officials. They extended the authority of occupying Union forces, and created the "Freedman's Bureau" to employ new systems of "free" labor. The Bureau sent agents to mediate between the land-owning, but cash-poor, planters and their former slaves. Although the latter wanted "40 Acres and a Mule" to practice subsistence agriculture, they remained landless. Neither white landowners nor federal policy-makers had any intention of allowing former slaves to become competitors. Instead, the Freedman's Bureau forced former slaves and former owners to sign and honor wage-labor contracts. Eventually, a compromise system of "sharecropping" and "tenant farming" emerged, in which blacks were given small plots for subsistence farming, in exchange for a percentage of the harvest. Land owners and "country stores" advanced blacks seeds, goods, and utensils on credit, to be paid on "settling up day." Guess who kept the books? <As "Tennessee Ernie" Ford sang it in the 1950s, blacks and poor whites alike "owed their soul to the company store."> <br />
<br />
The Congressional "Radicals" also made ratification of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments a condition for "readmission" to the Union (<em>from which they had supposedly never had the power to</em> <em>secede in the first place</em>). With occupying Union soldiers policing, many Southern states "enjoyed" the closest thing to "real" elections prior to the Civil Rights era of the 1960s. Naturally, that meant that a fair number of African Americans were elected to local, state, and national offices--<em>for a while</em> <em>at least</em>! To many observers, Reconstruction "seemed like it might produce a radically transformed South," one that also looked a lot like that portrayed by today's revisionist historians, such as Foner , Franklin, Weisberger, and Stampp. <See my previous post "A New Look At Reconstruction.><br />
<br />
Battered by the severe economic depression of 1873-1877, and exhausted from several decades of trying to deal with reality, a majority of whites lost their enthusiasm for remaking society. The final blow came in the bitterly disputed presidential election of 1876, in which Democrat Samuel J. Tilden seemingly bested Republican Rutherford B. Hayes of Ohio. Except that Tilden was an electoral vote short, with the 20 tallies of three southern states as yet uncertified. In an attempt to resolve the issue, Congress empowered a committee composed of 8 Republicans and 7 Democrats After weeks of acrimonious debates, that august body approved what became known as the "Compromise of 1877." The Republicans accepted "home rule" for the remaining southern states, in exchange for Hayes election. The "winner"' removed all federal troops from the South, while newly elected "Redeemer" state legislatures disenfranchised virtually all African Americans, as well as "many of the less reliable whites." Their methods included the poll tax, the literacy rest, the "grandfather clause," and "multiple ballot boxes." Above all, they resorted to intimidation, rape, violence, lynching, and other assorted form of murder. Stealing one election after another, they substituted the Democratic "Solid South" for real political competition. <br />
<br />
Redeemer legislatures imposed legal segregation--better known as "Jim Crow"--on every aspect of life. Freed from the "tyranny" of military occupation, the KKK and myriad other terrorists engaged in systematic mayhem. The erected statues of Confederate "heroes" in most public spaces, memorialized ant-bellum days in every conceivable media <Who could resist "Birth of a Nation" or "Gone With the Wind"?>, and wrote ersatz histories that portrayed slavery as a "benign" and "states rights" as the sole cause of secession. <As Eric Foner has observed, those "historians have a lot to answer for."><br />
<br />
But, as Baptist clearly documents, this new white empire proved more self-destructive and less profitable than its predecessor. Although the redeemers promised a "New South," they were severely constrained by "two post-slavery realities." One was that no un-enslaved human being could possibly perform hard labor "at the breakneck, soul-searing pace of the whipping machine." The number of bales did not even reach their 1859 peak until 1875, despite a significant increase in the number of "hands." Many enslaved people could pick well over 200 lbs. a day in the 1850s; their great-grandchildren ere unable to harvest 120. Many white "yeoman' farmers," impoverished by war and unable to pay either taxes or debts, lost their land and became sharecroppers or tenants themselves. Because of the political and economic isolation necessary to maintain white supremacy, the entire region sunk into a subordinate, colonial-like status. It did not have enough capital--"whether of the financial or well-educated human kind." Thus by the 1930s, a lifetime after the Civil War, the majority of blacks and white alike "were poor and worked on farms--often farms they did not own." <br />
<br />
The last ten pages of the book are a masterpiece of penetrating historical analysis combined with passionate conviction. He begins on page 411; "<em>But the body of African Americans, stretched and chained again, the body whose tongue and spirit and blood had developed alongside slavery's</em> <em>expansion was still alive....Day after day, year after year, the half untold was told, and in the tomb the body stirred" </em>and ends on page 419<em>: And somewhere--not far from Danville--law students three generations removed from slavery's expansion were still alive, huddled, planning the next move against Jim Crow and lynching." </em>Those pages are quite simply the most enlightening and powerful summary of its topic that I have ever read, far beyond my limited ability to summarize or paraphrase.<br />
<br />
<strong>SO READ IT FOR YOURSELF. IT WILL BE AN EYE-OPENING AND MIND-BLOWING EXPERIENCE!</strong><br />
<br />
JDB Johnhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02883617794291815218noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3109801914440805625.post-65431808724165146262015-09-05T14:10:00.000-07:002015-09-05T14:10:52.520-07:00Taking Another Look at the Reconstruction Era Jennifer Schuessler 's "Taking Another Look at the Reconstruction Era," <strong><em>(New York</em></strong> <strong><em>Times, </em></strong>August 24, 2015) is further proof that a growing number of Americans are struggling to come to grips with the historical reality that slavery and racism have been indelibly imprinted on American identity and culture from the very beginning. There can be little doubt that the Reconstruction Era has long been one of the most polarizing topics of our national story--both for professional historians and for the general public. The particulars of that polarization have been skillfully delineated by Bernard Weisberger in "The Dark and Bloody Ground of Reconstruction Historiography," <em>The Journal of Southern History, </em>v.25 ( November, 1959), pp.427-447 and by Eric Foner in <em>Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877 </em>(1988). <br />
<br />
There has been general agreement that the Era of Reconstruction began with Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation in January,1863 and ended with the Compromise of 1887, in which Congressional Democrats agreed not to contest the nefarious 1876 election of Rutherford B. Hayes as president.In exchange, Republicans disavowed further national efforts to enforce the rights of black citizens, and allowed white Democrats to control the politics and government of the Southern states. Even so, some Republicans still tried to block efforts to impose complete legal segregation and the "Jim Crow" system until well into the 1890s. The final blow came in 1896, with the Supreme Court's "separate but equal" decision in <strong>Plessey v. Ferguson. </strong><br />
<br />
From that point until the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s, Reconstruction Era historiography was almost completely dominated by pro-Southern scholars, such as the "Dunning School", who argued that black suffrage had been a gigantic blunder and that the Republican state governments that rested upon the votes of Negro Freedmen, Northern"carpetbaggers", and Southern "scalawags" had been corrupt, extravagant, unrepresentative, and oppressive. This interpretation was given great popular currency in myriad books and movies, such as <em>The Birth of a Nation </em>and <em>Gone With the Wind. </em>Just about the sole dissenting voice among historians was that of WEB Du Bois, the first African American to earns a doctorate at Harvard, co-founder of the NAACP, and civil rights activist, As editor of <em>The Crisis,</em> he penned numerous editorials and essays on Reconstruction; he also published <em>Black Reconstruction in America, </em>in which he refuted the arguments of the Dunning School, while painting a richly detailed and highly positive portrait of Reconstruction in the various states. His work later served as a primer for historians of the 1950s and 1960s, such as Foner, Weisberger, John Hope Franklin, C. Vann Woodward, and Kenneth Stampp, who have almost totally rewritten the historical record.Their work was inspired by the successes of the Civil Rights Movement, which has often been called" the Second Reconstruction."<br />
<br />
As Foner recently proclaimed, these more recent scholars regard the Dunning School as "not just an interpretation of history. It was part of the edifice of the Jim Crow system. It was an explanation for and justification of taking the vote away from black people on the grounds that they completely abused it during Reconstruction....And it was only after the Civil Rights revolution swept away the racist underpinnings of that old view that black people are incapable of taking part in American democracy--that you get a new view of Reconstruction widely accepted." By the end of the 20th century, their pro-Reconstruction interpretation predominated just about everywhere, except among white supremacists and die-hard believers in "the Lost Cause." Perhaps the best indicator<br />
of how far the interpretive pendulum has swung during the past half-century is Foner's admonition in "Why Reconstruction Matters," (New York <em>Times,</em> March 28, 2015): "For a long time, it was an intellectual straightjacket for much of the white South, and historians have a lot to answer for in helping to propagate a racist system in this country."<br />
<br />
Inevitably, this historiographical revolution is being gradually reflected in the exhibits, artifacts, and archival material displayed in historical sites and museums. Many of those venues, as Schuessler demonstrates in great detail, are staffed and operated by the U.S. National Park Service (NPS) During the past two decades, NPS has overhauled its Civil War sites, incorporating material on slavery and race into exhibits that had long been criticized by scholars for avoiding discussion of their root causes. Even so, its 408 properties still do not include a single site dedicated the postwar struggle to build a racially equal democracy. " It is biggest gap in the record by far, according to Robert Sutton, its chief historian, adding that too many Americans still regard Reconstruction as "a disaster" best left forgotten."<br />
<br />
To fill that chasm, the NPS has hired two historians to conduct a comprehensive survey of "nationally significant" sites connected with Reconstruction--the first step toward possible designation of a new site by Congress. Its on-the-ground coordinator is Michael Allen, a community partnership specialist with three decades of experience. Allen, who grew up in South Carolina, admits that he "had to become an adult to learn that history. It was never presented to me." This initiative was first announced in May and has been given added impetus by the proliferation of racial conflicts in Ferguson and Charleston, as well as by the continuing debates over Black Lives Matter. These incidents, she notes, "have only underlined enduring relevance of an era that saw both the dramatic expansion of rights for African-Americans and their violent rollback." As Allen has observed, the nation has just finished commemorating the 150th anniversary of the Civil War, and some people have jumped to various civil rights anniversaries, but "how do you make that jump without dealing with what came in between?" <br />
<br />
The NPS, in acknowledging the interpretive recalibrations wrought by historians, has defined the Era as dating from 1861, when slaves began fleeing to Union encampments, until 1898, when Jim Crow laws were firmly in place. It will highlight the passage of the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments, which granted equal citizenship and voting rights to four million formerly enslaved African-Americans, as well as the creation of the first statewide public school systems in Southern states (<em><strong>for</strong> <strong>whites as well as blacks</strong></em>), the first significant public hospitals, new labor policies and other transformations. "It was an amazing period in the history of American democracy," says Kate Masur, a Northwestern University professor who is one of the authors of the seminal NPS report. "It is when you really see these ideas about equality and human rights that America had put on the table being understood in a new way." There may not be any field of history "where the gap between what historians know and what people believe," added Gregory P. Downs, co-author of the report who has recently moved from City University of New York to U.C., Davis. He and Masur have also edited a collection of essays on Reconstruction written by leading historians, which will be distributed in all NPS shops beginning this month. <br />
<br />
The NPS is searching for possible museum sites, and Schuessler makes a strong case for Beaufort, South Carolina, a city of some 13,000 that sits between such popular tourist venues as Charleston, Hilton Head, and Savannah. It was at Beaufort that Union forces took control in November, 1861, and initiated what historian Willie Lee Rose called the "rehearsal for Reconstruction." Since its sea island plantation owners had fled, soldiers worked with missionaries, teachers, and former slaves to establish a viable society. They built churches and schools, and founded Mitchelville, on Hilton Head, where about 3,500 people constructed houses, established mandatory education, and established a government. It was from nearby Charleston Harbor that Robert Smalls, the pilot of an enslaved ship commandeered a Confederate vessel that joined Union ships in battle, later bought his former master's house and was elected to the state legislature and to Congress. Beaufort's mayor, Billy Keyserling, is attempting to create a "Reconstruction hub" in its central business district. A bill to allocate funding passed the Senate in 2003, only to fail in the House, primarily due to an campaign led by the Sons of Confederate Veterans, that stigmatized Reconstruction as a time that "victimized many South Carolinians." The organization helped sponsor a 150th commemoration of "The War," that culminated in a "secession ball." Allen, who has mediated discussions between the SCV and the NAACP that resulted in the removal of a Confederate battle flag from the state capitol, is optimistic about the creation of a" new climate." Democratic Congressman James E. Clyburn, a former high school history teacher who represents part of Beaufort County is more sanguine, seeing the NPS plans as "long overdue," but predicting "some resistance, maybe some significant resistance." He charges that the NPS initiative has been "intentionally misrepresented" by the Sons and similar organizations. <br />
<br />
Some institutions, especially the Woodrow Wilson Family Home in Columbia SC, are already highlighting Reconstruction's positive achievements, while denouncing the "political terrorism" that eventually undermined them. Fielding Fred, director of house museums for historic Columbia, believes that "it's not like we hit people over the head and tell them 'Everything you've heard about Reconstruction is wrong,' but as people move through, you can see them thinking." The president of the Mitchelville Preservation Project calls it "an incredible story that has never been told," even while admitting that he "personally doesn't like Reconstruction." <br />
<br />
Downs, Masur's co-director, sums the task up succinctly: "It took a lot of time and effort to establish the myths of Reconstruction. It's going to take a lot of time and effort to tear down those myths."<br />
<br />
THAT MAY BE ONE OF THE CLASSIC UNDERSTATEMENTS OF ALL TIME.<br />
<br />
JDB<br />
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Johnhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02883617794291815218noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3109801914440805625.post-78637811392294625672015-08-27T23:03:00.000-07:002015-08-30T11:13:34.446-07:00Rhode Island: Slavery's "Deep North"Once upon a time in a parallel universe, I was trying to enlighten my History 101students about the economy of the American colonies in the 18th century. As an illustration, I mentioned the "Triangular Trade," in which ships loaded with rum sailed from the ports of lower New England to West Africa, where they exchanged their cargo for newly captured slaves, whom they then transported to the sugar plantations of the Caribbean. This leg of the journey was the horrendous "Middle Passage," on which countless thousands were brutalized in chains, contracted various infectious diseases, and were thrown overboard as "shark bait." Those who survived this atrocity were callously auctioned to sugar planters in "payment" for boatloads of the sweet stuff, which they carried back to their ports of origin in lower New England. The sugar was gobbled up by distillers who combined it with maple syrup to make more rum for eventual transport to West Africa--thus completing the "Triangle."<br />
<br />
The obscene profits from this business transaction enriched thousands of ship owners, distillers, brokers, and bankers for whom it became the basis of family fortunes for many of New England's most illustrious dynasties. Conspicuous among these were the Brown family of Providence, Rhode Island whose ill-gotten gains eventually served as a generous endowment for the founding of Brown University, which grew into one of the illustrious pillars of today's Ivy League. Ironically enough, one of my students turned out to be the girl friend of a young man who was then enrolled at Brown. I don't recall whether he was shocked or indignant when she conveyed him the news, but he clearly did not have the slightest inkling of the connection. He asked his friend to find out my sources, and added my somewhat sarcastic observation that Brown probably did not include this historical tidbit in its recruitment or orientation materials.<br />
<br />
I forgot about the incident until I was reminded by an article in the August 23rd New York TIMES headed "Rhode Island Church Taking Unusual Step To Illuminate its Slavery Role." According to Katherine Q. Seelye, "one of the darkest chapters in Rhode Island history involved the state's preeminence in the slave trade, beginning in the 1700s. More than half of the slaving voyages<br />
from the United States left from ports in Providence, Newport, and Bristol--so many, and so contrary to the popular image of slavery as primarily a scourge of the South, that Rhode Island has been called "the Deep North." That history, however, she continued, will soon become common knowledge in the Episcopal diocese here, which "was steeped in the trans-Atlantic slave trade," when it "establishes a museum dedicated to telling the story, the first in the country to do so." <br />
<br />
Many of those involved in the Triangular Trade were Episcopalians; the church supported slavery and continued to profit by it, even after the trade was outlawed and slavery had been banned in the state. Among the most prominent Episcopalian slaveholders, as Seelye points out, were Thomas Jefferson and George Washington. Over the past decade, the Episcopal Church of the United States has formally acknowledged and apologized for its involvement, and several of its dioceses have begun re-examining their culpability and holding services of repentance, while starting programs of truth and reconciliation. <br />
<br />
Under the leadership of Bishop W. Nicholas Knisely, the Rhode Island diocese has established a museum focused on the Trans-Atlantic slave trade and slavery and the North's complicity, as part of a new center for reconciliation and healing. The Bishop says that he "wants to tell the story of how the Episcopal Church and religious voices participated in supporting the institution of slavery and how they worked to abolish it. It's a mixed bag." While some museums and historic sites touch on slavery in the North, none are devoted to the region's deep involvement, according to James DeWolf Perry VI, a direct descendant of what was probably the most prolific slave trading family in the entire country, and author <em>of Interpreting Slavery at Museums and Historic Sites. </em>He is aiding in the planning of the museum and reconciliation center, which are still in the organizing and fund-raising phases. The institutions are to be housed at the 200-year-old stone Cathedral of St. John, which is the seat of the Episcopal Diocese of Rhode Island. The majestic, but deteriorating, cathedral was closed in 2012, due to declining membership.<br />
<br />
"We are trying to move in concert with what's happening around the country," said the Rev. David Ames, who is helping to establish the center. "Events like those in Charleston have really focused us on the dire need to improve race relations in this country." Diocesan officials are engaging in conversations with African-American church leaders, universities, and other organizations to sponsor speakers and programs that delve into racial issues, and have scheduled more forums for the fall throughout the state where slave traders once worshipped. The region's economy was inseparable from the slave trade in the late 17th and 18th centuries. The earliest settlers to New England bartered Native Americans they had captured for slaves brought from Africa. Merchants and suppliers who grew wealthy from the slave trade founded and endowed several Ivy League colleges, including Brown. Northern textile mills hummed with Southern cotton picked by slaves. The first slave ship is believed to have arrived in New England as early as 1638---the first one arrived in Jamestown Virginia less than two decades before. An historic marker will be placed later to mark the spot where the first ship would have docked. The ceremony held on August 23rd was part of a larger project commemorating the two million slaves who died and the 10 million who survived the Middle Passage, only to spend the rest of their lives horrible captivity. <br />
<br />
Thanks to Rhode Island's financiers, seafaring workforce, and officials "who turned a blind eye to the colony's antislavery laws," the colony played a major role in the trade. Many slaving ships were built in Boston, and were supplied, manned, and launched from Rhode Island ports. Between 1725 and 1807 (when Congress officially ended the importation of slaves), more than one thousand slaving voyages---about 58 percent of the total from the American colonies--left from Providence, Newport, and Bristol. Those vessels brought more than 100,000 Africans to the Americas as part of the Triangular Trade. Many of them ended up in the North, where they populated numerous households. According to an investigation by Brown University, which began to explore its own deep ties to slavery in 2003, about ten percent of the colony's people were enslaved.<br />
<br />
According to Bishop Knisely, whose own research has revealed "shameful episodes in church history." Many New Englanders switched to the Episcopal Church because Quakers and Baptists in Newport gradually turned to anti-slavery; they were welcomed and their slave holding was not challenged. "We sounded an uncertain trumpet," the bishop confessed, and "were happy to receive their financial support. We allowed ourselves to be convinced by the prejudice of the time and didn't speak out." In establishing the museum and reconciliation center, the church is collaborating with the Brown Center for the Study of Slavery and Justice and several descendants of the Bristol-based DeWolf family, which alone imported more than 12,000 Africans. The profits of James DeWolf--speaker of the Rhode Island House , U.S. Senator, banker, merchant, privateer, and owner of numerous rum distilleries--made him the second richest man in the U.S. at the time of his death in 1837. One of his descendants, James DeWolf, became the first bishop of the Cathedral of St. John and presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church of the United States. Katrina Browne, a seventh-generation descendant of the family's first slave trader, organized a journey for ten family members to trace their legacy from Bristol through the slave forts in Ghana and old family sugar plantations in Cuba. In 2008, she produced a documentary from the trip called "Traces of the Trade." Along with Perry--a distant cousin--she founded the Tracing Center on Histories and Legacies of Slavery, "dedicated to educating the public about the complicity of the entire nation in slavery and the slave trade.<br />
<br />
"The experience of seeing black audiences respond to a white family acknowledging these things ---that's a powerful starting point" Perry insists. "I want my family to remember our family history, both good and bad. I think this is how we need to approach our shared history as a nation."<br />
<br />
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Johnhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02883617794291815218noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3109801914440805625.post-6759313582739283332015-07-08T14:18:00.000-07:002015-08-10T20:20:12.450-07:00Why Did the Confederate States Secede?Why did the eleven states that comprised the Confederacy secede from the Union? Why did Delaware, Maryland, Kentucky. and Missouri--slave states all--not join them? Why did several of its counties secede from Virginia to form West Virginia? How much opposition to secession emerged in the eleven CSA states?<br />
<br />
On the surface these can be dismissed as purely "academic" questions, of importance only to Civil War historians, but they actually speak to the core meaning of our people and our nation. They continually explode into public consciousness during such traumatic events as the picture of racist mass murderer Dylan Storm Roof with the Confederate flag draped across his lap, and the acrimonious debate over removal of the "Stars and Bars" from the South Carolina statehouse grounds. The issue even roiled the House of Representatives for three days, from July 8 to10, when Democrats proposed amendments to a spending bill blocking the Confederate flag from display in national cemeteries and banning flag images from gift shops and concession stands operated by the National Park Service. The amendments initially passed without debate or a roll call vote, but several Republican Congressmen persuaded Speaker Boehner to allow the introduction of a measure to undo them. The resulting acrimonious debate put the Republicans under the spotlight on a racially-charged issue, at the very time when the party was struggling to attract minority voters. North Carolina Representative G.K. Butterfield, chairman of the Congressional Black Caucus, countered by asking if Republicans "don't understand that the Confederate flag is an insult to 40 million African-Americans and many other fair-minded Americans?" After several other Democrats contributed to the fray, Boehner recognized that he did not have the votes--either for the Republican measure, or to pass the spending bill without the original Democratic amendment. He then called for a "working group" to review all Confederate symbols at the Capitol, including flags statues, and paintings. Beyond irony, he proclaimed that "it's time for some adults in Congress to actually sit down and have a conversation about how to address the issue."<br />
<br />
There are essentially four major categories of evidence that slavery and race were the most important causes of secession:<br />
1. The chronology of secession<br />
2. The debates and votes in the individual state legislatures or <em>ad hoc</em> conventions<br />
3. The Ordinances of Secession of individual states<br />
4. The constitution of the Confederate States of America<br />
5. The "Cornerstone Speech" of Alexander Stephens<br />
<br />
1. The seven Deep South states (South Carolina, Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, and Texas), whose economies were entirely dependent upon slave labor, seceded in January and February, 1861, even before Lincoln's March 4 inauguration. The other four (Virginia, Arkansas, Tennessee, and North Carolina) did not secede until April and May, after Lincoln had made clear his intention to keep the Union intact, by military means if necessary, and after the firing on Fort Sumter in the harbor of Charleston, South Carolina. Virginia and Tennessee even required referendum votes before acting. The other four slave-holding states (Delaware, Maryland, Kentucky, and Missouri), who had considerably fewer slaves, debated and delayed until Lincoln occupied their capitals with federal troops.<br />
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2. The divisions within the seceding state legislatures generally saw most of the dissenting votes coming from the upcountry, where subsistence white farmers owned few or no slaves. They were considered "poor white trash" by the planter class, and were primarily concerned with maintaining their own illusion of "white supremacy." Most were unsure if secession and the eventual abolition of slavery would help or hurt their already tenuous positions. The most extreme case was in Virginia, where the 50 western counties were so opposed to secession that they "seceded" from the state, eventually forming West Virginia, with its new capital at Wheeling. They were admitted to the Union as a free state in 1863, just in time for Lincoln's reelection. The affirmative votes were overwhelmingly cast by the representatives of the coastal "Black Belt," where blacks frequently outnumbered whites.<br />
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According to distinguished historian Eric Foner, the situation was complicated, even in "Deep South" states. Votes in their legislatures or conventions "showed considerable division on secession." Each were rent by three factions: "those for immediate secession, those who sought delay until the policy of the new administration toward the slave states became clear, and those who believed they could bargain with the new administration." Even though Lincoln proposed a constitutional amendment guaranteeing slavery where it legally existed, and pledged to hold only federal property that was in the possession of the Union as of March 4, 1861, those in favor of immediate secession eventually prevailed. The vote in the Georgia legislature was 208 to 89, that in the Tennessee convention 104,471 to 47,183, and that in the Virginia referendum 132,201 to 37,451. <br />
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3. The Mississippi Ordinance of Secession, for example, proclaims that "our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery--the greatest material interest in the world. Its labor supplies the product which constitutes by far the largest and most important portions of the commerce of the earth. These products are peculiar to the climate verging on the tropical regions, and by the imperious laws of nature, none but the black race can bear exposure to the tropical sun. These products have become necessities of the world, and a blow at slavery is a blow at commerce and civilization,--There was no choice left us but submission to the mandates of abolition or a dissolution of the Union, whose principles have been subverted to work out our ruin." In its declaration, Texas insists that it is "maintaining and protecting the institution known as negro slavery--the servitude of the African to the white race within her limits--a relation that had existed from the first settlement of her wilderness by the white race, and which her people intended should exist in all future time. Her institutions and geographical position established the strongest ties between her and the other slave-holding states of the confederacy." South Carolina attributed its decision to secede to "increasing hostility on the part of the non-slaveholding states to the institution of slavery." Georgia argued that " the North demanded the application of the principle of prohibition of slavery to all of the territory acquired from Mexico and all other parts of the public domain then and in all future times....The South with great unanimity declared her purpose to resist the principle of prohibition to the last extremity." Florida proclaimed that election of "an obscure and illiterate man without experience in public affairs or any general reputation mainly if not exclusively on account of a settled and often proclaimed hostility to our institutions and a fixed purpose to abolish them....Can anything be more impudently false than the pretense that this state of things is to be brought about from considerations of humanity to the slaves?" Alabama averred that "it is the desire and purpose of the people of Alabama to meet the slaveholding states of the South, who may approve such purpose , in order to frame a provisional as well as permanent Government upon the principles of the constitution of the United States."<br />
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4. The Constitution of the CSA largely follows the US Constitution except that it dealt with slavery directly, not obliquely or by implication. It boldly established the CSA as a slaveholders' republic and felt no need to obfuscate that reality. <em>Article 1, Section 2, Clause 3</em> says that "representatives and direct taxes shall be apportioned among the several States, which may be included in <strong>this Confederacy</strong>, according to their respective numbers, which shall be determined by adding the whole number of free persons, including those bound for service for a term of years, and excluding Indians not taxed<strong>, three-fifths of all slaves</strong>. <em>Article 1,Section 9, Clause 4</em> made slaves a sacrosanct type of property, with special protection under the law: No bill of attainder, ex post facto law, or law denying or <strong>impairing the right of property in negro slaves shall be passed</strong>. Article 2, section 2, Clause 3 proclaims a ban on the <strong>importation of slaves except from the United States. </strong><em>Article 2,</em><strong> </strong>Section 2, Clause 1 states that "the citizens of each State shall be entitled to all the privileges and immunities of citizens in the several States; and shall have the right of transit or sojourn in any state of this Confederacy<strong>, with their slaves and other property; and the right of property in said slaves shall not be thereby impaired</strong><em>." Article 1, Section 3, Clause </em>3 stipulates that "the Confederate States may acquire new territory; and Congress shall have power to legislate and provide governments for the inhabitants of all territory belonging to the Confederate States, lying without the limits of the several States, and may permit them, at such times and in such manner by law provide, to form <br />
States to be admitted to the Confederacy in all such territory <strong>the institution</strong> <strong>of negro slavery, as it now exists in the Confederate States, shall be recognized and protected by Congress and by the Territorial government; and the inhabitants of the several Confederate States shall have the right to take such Territory any slaves lawfully held by them in any of the States or Territories of the Confederate States. </strong><br />
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Equally explicit is the "Cornerstone Speech" given by Confederate Vice-President Alexander Stephens at the Athenaeum in Savannah, Georgia on March 12, 1861, after the secession of the seven Deep South states, and just weeks before the firing on Fort Sumter. In it, he dismisses the ideas of the U.S. Constitution as "fundamentally wrong" because they "rested on the assumption of the equality of races.This was an error. It was a sandy foundation, and the government built upon it fell 'when the storm came and the wind blew.' " He proudly proclaimed that "our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its foundations are laid, its corner-stone rests, upon <strong>the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery, subordination to the superior race, is his natural and normal condition." </strong>This new Constitution has put at rest forever all the agitating questions relating to our <strong>peculiar institution --African slavery as it exists among us--the proper status of the negro is our form of civilization.</strong> <br />
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In his detailed analysis of current U.S. history texts, historian James Loewen has concluded that "the reason so many people believe false things about the Civil War and the Confederacy is because many of our textbooks teach those wrong things even today." He insists that many Confederate memorials "date conspicuously from the days of George Wallace, rather than Jefferson Davis." Text book publishers are concerned with selling books in all fifty states, so the gap between their content and serious scholarly work in monographs and historical journals is often cavernous. No amount of cleverly contrived obfuscation, nor willful ignorance, however, can hide the shocking reality that the Civil War and its aftermath were fundamentally about <strong>slavery</strong> and <strong>race</strong>. Our national amnesia about our own history--our stubborn refusal to accept the logical and historical implications of "all men are created equal and endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights"--continues to plague us in a million disastrous ways, and could very well lead to our disintegration. Johnhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02883617794291815218noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3109801914440805625.post-52265477770939205572015-06-19T12:32:00.000-07:002015-06-19T12:32:05.001-07:00Rent-Seeking Predators <br />
What should we call the heartless, greedy, amoral cretins who are responsible for destroying our nation's economy, and for ruining the lives of countless million Americans? Lets cut right to the heart of the matter and call them <strong><em>Rent-Seeking Predators</em></strong>!<strong><em> </em></strong><br />
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According to Wikipedia<em><strong>, </strong></em>"predation is "a biological interaction when a predator (an organism that is hunting) feeds on its prey." If you watch <em>NatGeoWild, </em>you know all too graphically what that means in the natural world. Predation in human society, of course, is an analogy. It does not involve actual ingestion of one person by another, but the practical effects on the well-being of "the prey" are every bit as gruesome and catastrophic. In our unnatural and hypercompetitive world, depriving someone of the opportunity to earn a decent livelihood and to realize their full potential is tantamount to devouring their life-chances, and--all too often--cutting short their lives. Many who would not think of committing such inhuman atrocities as individuals often do so--blissfully unaware--as members of predatory organizations and institutions. <br />
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But why call these particular predators "rent-seeking"? Probably the most instructive way to understand what such liberal economists as Joseph Siglitz, James K. Galbraith, and Paul Krugman, mean by "rent" is the polar opposite of "profit." Ideally, they consider profit to be the <em>legitimate</em> product of invested capital, ideas, and labor--an award for risk-taking and the most productive utilization of resources. Rent, on the other hand, is the <em>illegitimate</em> "payment made (including imputed value) by non-produced inputs such as location (land) and for assets fortified by creating official privilege over natural opportunities (e.g. patents)." They are income reaped from other people's investment, ingenuity and work, as well as from conditions created by society and government. In simple terms, economic rent is "an excess where there is no enterprise or costs of production." It is "unearned and passive income," and "has important implications for public revenue and tax policy. One of the nastiest words in the economists' lexicon is <em>rentier.</em><br />
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<em>"As long as there is sufficient accounting profit, governments can</em> <em>collect a portion of economic rent for the purpose of public finance</em>." In other words, modern. democratic governments can tax as much of economic rent as they decide, under constitutional due process, because it is the common property of all its citizens, i.e. "unearned" by any additional effort made by "rentiers." Economic rents are "excess returns," above the "normal levels that are generated in competitive markets--a return" in excess of the resource owner's opportunity costs." They are "extra returns that firms or individuals obtain due to their positional advantages."<br />
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<em>The rentier </em>mindset was succinctly captured by Adam Smith in <em>The Wealth of Nations "</em>As soon as the land of any country has all become private property, the landlords, like all other men, love to reap where they never sown , and demand a rent even for its natural produce. The wood of the forest, the grass of the field, and all the natural fruits of the earth, which, when land was held in common, cost the laborer only the trouble of gathering them." Once the land is privatized, "he must give up to the landlord a portion of what his labour either collects or produces. This portion, or, what comes to the same thing, the price of this portion, constitutes the rent of the land." <br />
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Rent-seeking, according to Wikipedia, is "an attempt to gain economic rent (i.e. the portion of income paid to a factor of production in excess of that which is needed to keep it employed in its current use) by manipulating the social or political environment in which economic activities occur, rather than creating new wealth. Rent-seeking implies the extraction of uncompensated value from others, without making any contribution to productivity. Rent-seeking is distinguished from profit-seeking, in which entities seek to extract value by engaging in mutually beneficial transactions. Profit-seeking is the creation of wealth, while rent-seeking is the use of social institutions, such as the power of government, to redistribute wealth among different groups <strong><em>without creating new wealth</em></strong>. In a practical context, income obtained through rent-seeking may contribute to profits in the standard, accounting sense of the word. An example is spending money on political lobbying for government benefits or subsidies, in order to be given a share of wealth that has already been created, or to impose regulations on competitors, to increase market share....The concept of rent-seeking would also apply to corruption of bureaucrats who solicit and extract bribes for applying their legal, but discretionary, authority for awarding benefits to clients. Tax officials, for example, may take bribes for lessening the burden of tax payers. <br />
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A closely related concept is <em>regulatory capture, </em>which refers to collusion between firms and the government agencies assigned to regulate them, an extensive rent-seeking behavior, especially when the government agency must rely on the same firms for knowledge about the market. The chair of the British Financial Services Authority, Lord Adair Turner, has argued that innovation in the finance industry is often a form of rent-seeking. The high proceeds of drug trafficking are generally regarded as rents, because they are neither legal profits nor the proceeds of common-law crimes. Rent-seeking also involves a major <em>moral hazard</em>,<em> </em>because the proceeds are entirely unrelated to any contribution to total wealth or well-being, and because it results in a sub-optimal use of resources--money spent on lobbying rather than on research and development, improved business practices, employee training, or additional capital goods--seriously retarding real economic growth, which depends on actual, rather than <em>ersatz, </em>innovation. In <em>The Rise and Decline of Nations, </em>Mancour Olson argues that, as countries become dominated by organized interest groups, they lose economic vitality and fall into decline. Some critics have argued that rent-seeking has decreased total income in the USA by 45 percent, while many agree that total rent-seeking costs "equal the sum of aggregate current income plus the net deficit of the public sector." Joseph Stiglitz has argued that rent-seeking contributes significantly to income inequality through lobbying for government policies that permit the wealthy and powerful to acquire income, "not as a reward for creating wealth, but by grabbing a larger share that would otherwise have been produced without their effort." Such students of international economics as Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez have concluded that "much of income inequality is a result of rent-seeking among wealthy tax payers." <br />
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In <em>The Predator State</em>: <em>How Conservatives Abandoned the Free Market and Why Liberals Should Too</em>, University of Texas economics professor James K. Galbraith bluntly defines our "rent-seeking predator state" as "a coalition of relentless opponents of the regulatory framework on which public purpose depends, with enterprises whose major lines of business compete with or encroach on the principal public functions of the enduring New Deal." They" seek to control the state partly in order to prevent the assertion of public purpose and partly to poach on the lines of activities that past public purpose has established" They "have no intrinsic loyalty to any country," and "operate as a rule on a transnational basis, and naturally come to view the goals and objectives of each society in which they work as just another set business conditions, more or less inimical to the free pursuit of profit." They "assuredly do not adopt any of society's goals as their own, and that includes goals that might be decided upon, from time to time, by their country of origin, the United States. As an ideological matter, it is fair to say that the very concept of public purpose is alien to, and denied by, the leaders and operatives of this coalition."<br />
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None of these enterprises has an interest in diminishing the size of the state, (in fact, they want <strong>ever</strong> <strong>bigger government</strong>) and that is "what separates them from the principled conservatives" Their <em>raison d'etre</em> "is to make money off the state--so long as they control it. And this requires the marriage of the economic and the political, which is what, in every single case, we actually observe...The major battlegrounds of American domestic politics emerge clearly once there is an understanding of the Predator State." The real political conflict is not "government versus the state." It is a continuing battle over "who gets cut in on the deal--and a corresponding argument over who gets cut out, and how, for there is profit in both cutting in and cutting out." We actually live in "<em>a corporate republic, </em>where the methods, norms, culture, and corruption of government have become those of the corporation." A narrow coalition of the high plutocracy actually rules, "mainly from the resource industries (oil, mining, and agribusiness) and the surviving old-line industrial firms (notably automobiles, steel, and defense), combined with big media, insurance, and pharmaceuticals. Ironically, Galbraith insists that this alliance found itself "entirely dependent on noneconomic issues directed at low-income working Americans through the one social institution that effectively reached most of them: their churches<em><strong>." Well, beer commercials help a lot</strong></em>.<br />
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But, he cautions, this does not constitute <strong>class war, </strong>because "not everyone who is successful under capitalism is a fan of the Predator State." It is a "the enemy of honest and independent and especially of sustainable business, of business that simply want to sell to the public and make a decent living over the long run." Predatory regimes, are "more or less exactly, like protection rackets." They are feared, but neither loved or respected. Its demise, he proclaims, will come "only when the more reasonable, more progressive part of the business community insists on it and is willing to make common cause with unions, consumers, environmentalists, and other mobilized social groups to bring the predators to heel." It is, he intones, "a race against time." Johnhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02883617794291815218noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3109801914440805625.post-52275008481348831632015-05-04T12:06:00.000-07:002015-05-04T12:06:46.532-07:00The Scientific Consensus on GunsAn article with that title recently appeared in the Los Angeles Times, written by David Hemenway, who is a professor at the Harvard School of Public Health and director of the Harvard Injury Control Research Center. He was motivated by a conversation with a journalist who told him that the media only abandoned their <em>balanced coverage</em> of a controversial scientific issue--like global warming--"when objective findings indicated that the overwhelming majority of scientists thought climate change was indeed happening, and that it was caused by humans." So Hemenway decided to "determine objectively, through polling, whether there was a scientific consensus on firearms." The results, he found, "won't please the National Rifle Association." <br />
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Accordingly, his first step was to compile "a list of relevant scientists," who had published articles on firearms in a peer-reviewed scientific journal within the past four years. Most of the qualifying scholars came from the disciplines of political science, criminology, economics, public policy, or public health. His graduate assistants eventually identified 300 such people and found more than 280 email addresses. Beginning last May, they began sending them short, monthly surveys composed of three basic questions. The first asked how much the respondent concurred with a specific claim related to firearms, while the other two asked them to rate the quality of the scientific research and to state their level of familiarity with the scientific literature on that particular topic. <br />
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One question asked whether having a gun in the home increased the rate of suicide--84 percent of 150 respondents answered YES. This result squares with the findings of numerous area-wide studies that "the differences in rates of suicide across the country are less explained by differences in mental health, suicide ideation or even suicide attempts than they are by differences in levels of household gun ownership." It also agreed with a 2014 meta-analysis conducted by researchers at the University of California at San Francisco, and with a 2012 study by the National Strategy for Suicide Prevention from the National Action Alliance for Suicide Prevention. Ditto a report by the Surgeon General which concluded "firearm access is a risk factor for suicide in the United States." <br />
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Responses to other Hemenway questions<em>: 72 percent agreed that a gun in the home increases the risk that a woman residing there will be the victim of a homicide; 64 percent concurred that a gun in the home makes it a more dangerous place to </em>be <strong>(only 5 percent said that it made the home safer</strong><em>); 73 percent agreed that guns are used more frequently in the commission of a crime than in self-defense; 62 percent conclude that more permissive gun carrying laws have not reduced crime rates; 71 percent, on to the contrary, agree that stronger gun laws reduce homicide. </em><br />
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While acknowledging that scientific consensus on any topic is not necessarily always right, he concludes that they are" our best guide to understanding the world." Hemenway concludes with a reasonable request: "Can reporters please stop pretending that scientists, like politicians, are evenly divided on guns<strong>. We're not. </strong><br />
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<strong><em>For a closely related Op-Ed Piece, see Robert J. Spitzer, "Stand Your Ground Makes No Sense," in the May 4 edition of </em>the New York Times.</strong><br />
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<strong>JDB </strong>Johnhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02883617794291815218noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3109801914440805625.post-63323494247328446862015-03-07T13:48:00.002-08:002015-03-23T10:46:11.135-07:00Get your billions back, America!!If you watch TV at all, you have undoubtedly been assaulted by the ad in which an irritating little man in the GREEN (How subtle can you get?) bow tie screaming that mantra. It is a great idea, only it is directed at the wrong target. To hit the right target, read LEGALIZED TAX FRAUD: HOW TOP US CORPORATIONS CONTINUE TO PROFIT THROUGH OPFFSHORE TAX HAVENS, a report from Senator Bernie Sanders, ranking minority member of the Senate Budget Committee. If it doesn't galvanize you to demand real corporate tax reform, check your pulse to make sure that you are still alive. <br />
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The data in the report is based on a study of the Business Roundtable (BRT), a coalition of the CEOs from 201 of the nation's wealthiest corporations, who are, among other atrocities, on record for raising the eligible age for Social Security and Medicare to 70, cutting The benefits of both programs, lowering the corporate tax rate (its true that the US rate is one of the highest in the world, except <strong>that almost nobody even comes close to paying at that level. In fact, as this study blatantly documents, some corporations don't pay any income taxes at all!!), </strong>and adopting a "territorial" tax system that exempts their offshore profits entirely.<br />
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At least 111 0f the 201 use offshore tax havens to avoid paying some $280 billion in taxes on assets of $1,000,000,000.<br />
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Twenty-one of these corporations have disclosed that if they brought their collective $235 billion in offshore profits to the US, they would owe taxes of $65 billion--28 % of the total. THE REST OF THEM DO NOT DISCLOSE THIS INFORMATION.<br />
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Since they are allowed to deduct whatever income taxes they have paid to foreign governments, they are paying these tax haven levies at a rate of about SEVEN PERCENT.<br />
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At least 81 of these BRT corporations who are supposed to pay US federal corporation income taxes have been profitable for five years and yet almost none are paying anywhere near the official rate of 35%. From 2008 through 2011, these 81 companies have received a total of $188 billion in tax breaks--the difference between the 35% that they should have paid and what they actually paid. They have actually paid US corporate income tax at an average rate of 18.1 percent--slightly more than one-half of what they should have paid.<br />
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Several of these "fortunate" 81 BRT corporations--American Electric Power, Boeing, Corning, Duke Energy, General Electric, the Interpublic Group. NextEra Energy, PG&E Corporation, Tenet Healthcare, and Verizon--HAVE ACTUALLY RECEIVED REFUNDS!!<br />
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111 of these BRT corporations have disclosed ownership of subsidiaries in countries designated by the Government Accountability Office as "offshore tax havens." Most are banks, technology, and pharmaceutical companies, but the list also includes Catepillar and other manufacturers.<br />
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Many of the rest are highly profitable "C companies," which are required to pay US corporate income taxes, but which actually manage to avoid paying most of the statutory 35 percent. That list includes manufacturers, energy companies. utilities, and FedEx.<br />
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The report describe the profits earned by many BRT corporations as "officially" held overseas "because much or most of their profits are actually earned in the US or other countries where actual business is being carried out and then manipulated through accounting principles so that they appear to be earned in countries with no corporate income tax at all." They claim to generate more profits in tax havens, MANY OF WHICH ARE TINY COUNTRIES WITH VERY SMALL POPULATIONS AND MUCH HIGHER PROFITS THAN COULD POSSIBLY BE EARNED THERE." One of the most egregious examples are corporations is Bermuda, where BRT companies regularly report to the IRS earnings "EQUAL TO 16 TIMES THE ENTIRE GROSS DOMESTIC PRODUCT OF Bermuda." The profits they report to earn in the Cayman Islands "EQUAL 20 TIMES THE GDP OF THAT TINY COUNTRY." Countries like Ireland, the Netherlands, and Luxemburg "provide LOOPHOLES AND SPECIAL DEALS so that profits can be moved through them and into the zero-tax countries like Bermuda and the Cayman Islands." <br />
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N.B. This report relies on data compiled by the US Public Interest Research Group and Citizens for Tax Justice from companies' public filings with the SEC comparing disclosed offshore subsidies with the list of tax havens used by the GAO in its 2008 report. Companies are required to disclose only "significant subsidiaries," so many have stopped revealing 99% of their subsidiaries, rather than actually shutting down or divesting them. <br />
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Despite claims by the BRT that lower taxes will provide investment and job growth, "THERE IS NO EVIDENCE THAT CORPORATIONS WITH LOWER TAX BILLS CREATE MORE JOBS THAN THOSE WITH HIGHER TAX BILLS." A December 2013 report by the Center for Effective Government compared 30 of the higher taxed corporations with 30 of the lowest taxed and "found that the high-tax group created almost 200,000 jobs between 2008 and 2012, while the low-tax group collectively REDUCED EMPLOYMENT BY 51,999 JOBS." The "clear winner" is VERIZON, which has eliminated 62, 338 jobs since 2008, despite having an effective income tax rate of TWO PERCENT!<br />
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The remainder of the report is a detailed analysis of each of the BRT companies taking advantage of offshore tax havens, ranging in alphabetical order from CITIGROUP to THE WILLIAMS COMPANIES, INC, revealing each one's taxpayer bailout from the Federal Reserve and the Treasury Department during the financial crisis of 2008 to 2011, its number of subsidiaries in offshore tax havens in early 2014, its profits officially held offshore by that date, and the amount of federal income tax each would have to pay--at 27 percent--if those profits were brought to the US. Each example concludes with the charge that "there is strong EVIDENCE that many American corporations are simply choosing NOT to disclose as many of these subsidiaries as they had in the past." <br />
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For those who prefer to ingest their poison in tabular form, there is a four-page appendix detailing that information for each of the BRT companies. <br />
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If you have not yet filed your 1040 forms for 2014, I would recommend doing so before reading this report. Afterwards, you probably won't want to. <br />
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Keep on keeping on, <strong>JDB</strong><br />
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Johnhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02883617794291815218noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3109801914440805625.post-50892828054371054172015-02-20T11:24:00.000-08:002015-02-20T11:24:59.244-08:00Does Social Security Work? You Betcha!Will Social Security "be there for me" when I need it? That is the ultimate question, so far as most people are concerned. What about all those predictions that the system is on the verge of "bankruptcy," or that it is nothing but a glorified "Ponzi scheme"? Does it need to be "privatized" in order to survive?<br />
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Whenever anybody tries to persuade you of any such claptrap, simply tell them to read <em>Social </em><em>Security Works! Why Social Security Isn't Going Broke and How Expanding It Will Help Us All, </em>written by Nancy J. Altman and Eric R. Kingson. and just recently published by The New Press. She is a former faculty member of both the Harvard University Law School and its Kennedy School of Government, She is currently a member of the Boards of the National Academy of Social Insurance and the Pension Rights Center and is the author of <em>The Battle for Social Security: From FDR's Vision to Bush's Gamble</em>. He is a professor at Syracuse University's School of Social Work, and the co-author of four books on Social Security and Medicare, including <em>Ties That Bind: The Interdependence of Generations. </em><br />
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The book is divided into five parts: <strong>The Facts; The Challenges; The Solution; The Threats; </strong>and <strong>Next Steps</strong>.<strong> </strong>Each part includes two or more essays:<br />
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I. <strong>Facts:</strong><em> The Changing Conversation; Social Security Works For All Generations.</em><br />
<em>II. </em><strong>Challenges: </strong><em>The Precarious Lives of Today's Old; The Coming Retirement Income Crisis; T</em><em>he </em><br />
<em> Debt Owed To Those Who Care; The New Gilded Age</em><br />
<em>III. </em><strong>Solution: </strong><em>Expand Social Security For All Generations and Paying the Bill</em><br />
<em>IV. </em><strong>Threats: </strong><em>The Billionaire's War On Social Security; The Conventional "Wisdom" Is Just Plain </em><br />
<em> Wrong</em><br />
<em>V. </em><strong>Next Steps:</strong><em> There They Go Again: Why the Supporters of Social Security Must Remain Vigilant; </em><br />
<em> Passing </em><em>Social Security Forward: A Legacy For All Generations </em><br />
<em> </em><br />
<strong>The book also includes four appendixes:</strong><br />
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A: <em>Additional information About How Social Security Works</em><br />
B. <em>Additional Information About The Social Security Works All Generations Plan and Other </em><br />
<em>Proposals, including Cost and Revenue </em><br />
<em>C. Descriptions of Various Social Security Expansion Legislative Bills and Organization's Plans</em><br />
<em>D. Leading Organizations Working to Expand Social Security </em><br />
<em></em><br />
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The entire book is a treasure trove of reason and truth, with reams of statistics, so I will highlight a few of my favorites. For example, <strong>The Coming Retirement Crisis </strong>reveals that the "difference what people have saved for retirement and what they should have at this point--is a staggering $6.6 trillion, and half of Americans have less than $10,000 in savings."<br />
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According to a poll conducted by National Academy of Social Insurance in 2013, 89 percent of respondents believe that " S.S. benefits are more important than ever," 84 percent did not mind paying its payroll tax "because it provides security and stability to millions," and 75 percent believe "we should consider increasing S.S. benefits." Even 81 percent of Republicans agree with statement #1, 74 percent agree with statement #2, and 62 percent agree that we should consider raising benefits. Broken down by generation, the positive responses to #1 ranged from 84% of "Generation Y to 93% of "baby boomers"; by family income, the positive range is 87% for those in the $75,000 to $99,999 bracket to 93% for those making between $30,000 and $49,888. On "consider raising benefits," the lowest positive response is 72% for the "silent generation;" 67% for those making $100,000 or more; and 62% for Republicans.<br />
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SO WHERE DOES THE "CONVENTIONAL WISDOM" COME FROM AND WHY DO SO MANY PEOPLE REGARD IT AS "SOMETHING EVERY KNOWS, LIKE THE SUN RISING IN THE EAST (WHICH OF COURSE IT DOESN'T REALLY?). <br />
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The answer is "THE BILLIONAIRES' WAR AGAINST SOCIAL SECURITY," along with the obviously intertwined circumstance "that much of the press has reported only one side of this story using "facts" that are misleading or flat-put wrong while ignoring others." This litany of despair "has resulted from a deliberate campaign, backed by hundreds of millions of dollars and a cottage industry of academics who have built their careers on criticizing Social Security. Together, these forces have brought a veneer of respectability to claims that Social Security is unsustainable, in crisis, and spawning competition and conflict between generations." <Or as the pompous governor of my home state has openly bragged on numerous occasions: DIVIDE AND CONQUER!><br />
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Broadcasting that campaign "have been journalists and politicians who have either willingly advanced an anti-Social Security agenda or have fallen prey to myths, half-truths, and a few outright lies that have been masquerading as incontrovertible facts." Their three-decade long assault is a "tale of three commissions: " the one chaired by Ayn Rand devotee Alan Greenspan in the early 1980s, the Bipartisan Commission on "Entitlements" and Tax Reform of the 1990's which branded S.S., Medicare, and Medicaid combined as one humongous "entitlement crisis," and the Obama administration's National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform, chaired by Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson. In the process, S.S. was calculatedly transformed from a program of social insurance paid for by a carefully calibrated "payroll tax" on employers and employees over the entire work-life of the latter to an unearned "welfare handout," whose escalating cost would bankrupt not only the system itself, but the entire United States. (The same slight-of-hand stigmatized the Affordable Care Act as "Obamacare.") The "money behind the campaign" that effected the triumph of that "Big Lie" has been primarily that of Peter G. Peterson, former Nixon Secretary of Commerce, one-time CEO of Lehman Brothers, and the 147th richest American, with a reported net worth of near $3,000, 000,000. He has bankrolled several foundations dedicated to obliterating Social Security, including <strong>Fix The Debt</strong>, of which his son Michael is president and whose board of directors includes both Bowles and Simpson.<br />
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In an absolutely mind-blowing table titled <em><strong>THE RETIREMENT SAVINGS OF SOME FIX THE DEBT CEOS WHO WANT TO CUT YOUR SOCIAL SECURITY</strong></em> spells out in graphic detail their "Total CEO Retirement Assets," "Estimated CEO Monthly Pensions," and "Employee Pension Deficit Fund." The list includes the CEOs of 13 of the nation's richest corporations. It could just as well be captioned " The Personification of Greed and Hypocrisy." (See p. 155). Their total CEO retirement assets range from a "low" of $20,677,631 to a high of $78,084,417, while their estimated monthly pension benefits range from a "low" of $113,363 to a high of $428,092. <The average monthly Social Security benefit is $1,294; for "widowed caregiving parents with two children" it is $2,593.> Estimated employee pension fund deficits range from $454,000,000 at Corning to $21,756,000,000 at General Electric. "Independent Living" accommodations at the newly-opened Primrose Retirement Community" in my hometown start at $2,695/monthly for a one-bedroom apartment; $3,595 for "assisted living."><br />
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The best feasible "SOLUTION", according to Altman and Kingson, is the "Social Security Works All Generations Plan,"(SSWAGP)-- " a comprehensive package of benefit and revenue changes that expands Social Security's protections in important ways."<br />
1. Increase benefits for current and future beneficiaries by 10%, up to a maximum of $150 monthly<br />
2. To prevent erosion of benefits over time, use the Consumer Price Index for the Elderly<br />
3. Minimum benefit of 125% above poverty for those reaching retirement age after 30 years work<br />
4. Twelve weeks of family leave upon birth or adoption of child or illness of covered worker<br />
5. Up to five years of SS benefit credits for care of one or more children under age 6<br />
6. Restore student benefits up to age 22 in case of death or disability of covered parents <br />
7. A new benefit of $1,000 upon birth or adoption of a child<br />
8<strong>. Eliminate maximum taxable wage base, giving credit for those contributions</strong><br />
9. Dedicated 10% marginal income tax on those with income more than $1,000,000<br />
10. Gradually increase contribution rate by 1% for both employers and employees<br />
11. Gradually diversify SS portfolio by investing 40% of its reserve in broad-based equity funds<br />
12. Treat all salary deduction plans the same as 401(k) with respect to definition of SS wages<br />
13. Combine OASI and DI Trust Funds<br />
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The authors' assert that, except for modest in the SS premium rate, these revenue sources "would have no impact on the vast majority of Americans." The existing refundable Earned Income Tax Credit could be expanded to offset any increased burden on lower income workers. These various revenue sources could be "mixed and matched depending upon how substantially the nation want to expand SS," and phased in gradually to blunt impact on individuals." They would build upon SS "existing financing and retain premiums as the primary source of income<strong>, consistent with the earned-benefit nature of Social Security." </strong>They also provide precise estimates of how much each of their proposals would cost in the taxable payroll and in percent of GDP. In almost every case, the increased cost would amount to considerably less than 1% of either one. They are all "fully affordable." So what's the hang- up<strong>? "Standing in the way</strong>, they state flatly<strong>, are determined, powerful, and well-financed foes</strong>," which they spell out in frightening detail as<strong> "THE BILLIONARIES WAR AGAINST SOCIAL SECURITY" </strong><br />
<strong> </strong><br />
<strong><em>This is most definitely a war and one which the vast majority of Americans are losing! The ammunition for mounting a successful counter-offensive lies clearly between the covers </em>of SOCIAL SECURITY WORKS! </strong><br />
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Johnhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02883617794291815218noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3109801914440805625.post-64768775814937551832014-09-05T11:00:00.000-07:002015-11-06T22:28:00.561-08:00What's The Reason It Isn't Treason?<br />
"Treason doth never prosper, what's the reason? For if it prosper, <strong><em>none dare call it treason." </em></strong>Words of wisdom from Sir John Harrington (1561-1612), Elizabethan Era courtier, affectionately known as the Queen's "saucy Godson," until he fell out of her good graces by penning a political allegory and coded attack on the monarchy titled <em>A New Discourse on a Stale Subject </em>in 1596. He is perhaps better known, appropriately, as the inventor of the flush toilet. <br />
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And, indeed, <strong><em>"it" does prosper</em></strong>. What's it? "It" is pseudo-Americans depriving the nation of untold billions of dollars in revenue by hiding much of their income in secret bank accounts in Switzerland and the Caribbean, and by practicing "inversion": partnering with foreign companies to avoid paying their fair share of U.S. income taxes. "It" is <em>ersatz Americans </em>reaping obscene profits by enjoying the manifold benefits and protections of U.S. citizenship, while not contributing their fair share of the costs. <br />
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Of course, every American schoolchild knows that the Constitution defines "Treason" very narrowly and precisely: <em>Treason against the United States shall consist <strong>only </strong>in levying war against <strong>them</strong>, or to adhering to their Enemies, giving <strong>them</strong> Aid and Comfort. No person shall be convicted of Treason unless on the Testimony of two Witnesses to the overt Act, or on Confession in open Court. </em><br />
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The use of <strong><em>them </em></strong>is perplexing. It seems to indicate a pre-Constitution mind-set that <strong><em>the United States </em></strong>means the States that happen to be United, which sounds like the nature of the Union as set forth in the Articles of Confederation and the Ordinances of Secession proffered by southern slave states in 1861. In any case, that fiction was obliterated by the preamble to the Constitution and a plethora of Supreme Court decisions.: "<strong><em>We</em></strong> <em><strong>the people</strong></em> <em><strong>of the United States...In order to form a more perfect Union</strong></em>." So who is<strong><em> them? </em></strong>The States or The People? Whose "ox is being gored"? Who or what is the victim of Treason? Can the "victim" and the "perp" be one and the same? The Civil War and the 14th Amendment (which obviously came much later) supposedly settled that question in favor of <em><strong>the people</strong></em>, but many of "the Makers" seemingly meant <strong><em>the States.</em></strong><br />
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That aside, the Constitution defines Treason itself "levying war against<em><strong> them</strong></em>" or "giving<strong><em> them</em></strong> Aid and Comfort." The first offense clearly means taking up arms in a "shooting war" against the U.S. You could possibly interpret what these "tax dodgers" are doing as waging metaphorical "war," but that would be quite a stretch, one which their army of obsequious attorneys would have no difficulty in laughing out of court. <I have always assumed--obviously naively--that paying one's fair share of legally constituted taxes is one absolute and irreducible principle of true citizenship and patriotism. <strong>Apparently not everyone agrees</strong>! To clarify that issue, it would probably take a constitutional amendment--one that would obviously be vehemently opposed by the nation's most rich and powerful. But something very similar was accomplished during the Progressive Era, when a broad-based, painstakingly constructed nationwide coalition eventually overcame the adamant opposition of the "robber barons" and "malefactors of great wealth" to enact <strong>the Sixteenth Amendment and the federal income tax</strong>. [See my <em>The Income Tax and the Progressive Era (</em>New York: Garland Publishing, Inc.,1985).<br />
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That signal achievement took from 1895 until 1913, and survived a veritable tsunami of attacks and challenges, <strong>but it finally succeeded</strong>! Whether the construction of such a coalition is even a remote possibility today seems highly problematic, but what is the alternative? I seriously doubt that any of todays' "malefactors of great wealth" would ever "confess in open court," but they might possibly be convicted by the testimony of millions of witnesses.<br />
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To quote Senator Elizabeth Warren, "these companies are renouncing their American citizenship, turning their backs on this country, simply to boost their profits." To stop this nefarious and unpatriotic practice, she and fellow Senator Sander Levin have introduced the "Stop Corporate Inversions Act," which allows American corporations "to renounce their citizenship only if they truly give up control of their company to a foreign corporation and truly move their operations overseas." These corporations, Senator Warren correctly charges "are not actually leaving America behind. They just don't want to pay for it." America, she boldly asserts, "is a great place to do business because of the <strong><em>investments</em></strong> we have made together." Those<strong><em> investments</em></strong>, she insists, include <strong><em>public education</em></strong> to produce millions of skilled workers, the <strong><em>infrastructur</em></strong>e of roads, bridges, and ports that make it possible to move products to market, and <em><strong>scientific and medical research</strong></em> giving American corporations access to the most innovative and cutting-edge technologies. <br />
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How absurd can it get? In the Wisconsin State Senate, minority leader Peter Barca has managed to hoist Governor Scott Walker on his own petard, so to speak. Barca has introduced a bill that would prevent firms "offshoring" jobs from receiving state money and tax incentives. Since Walker is normally one of the big supporters of permitting Wisconsin corporations to "offshore" everything, it would follow that his administration would fight Barca's proposal "tooth and nail<strong>." </strong>BUT, it turns out that one of his biggest attacks on his Democratic gubernatorial opponent, Mary Burke, is that her jointly-owned company--Trek Bicycles--has, in fact, "offshored" some of its jobs. So Walker, the candidate, had no choice but to publicly support Barca's bill, thus enraging the very companies that Walker, the governor, relies upon for campaign contributions and other considerations. <strong>Irony doesn't</strong> <strong>even begin to describe his dilemma!</strong> So now Walker, who, from day one, has alienated most of the state's moderate to liberal voters, is also getting some flak from the right. This "flip flop" is even more problematic than insisting that he has fulfilled his pledge to create 250,000 private sector jobs, when he has clearly failed to produce half that number (and has eliminated tens of thousands of public sector jobs in the process.) <br />
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Like the reactionary, corrupt, racist Senator Billboard Rawkins <em>in Finian's Rainbow</em>, Walker is boldly leading Wisconsin<strong> FORWARD--F</strong><strong>ORWARD TO YESTERDAY!!!! </strong><br />
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<br />Johnhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02883617794291815218noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3109801914440805625.post-43181671467009501152014-08-28T09:51:00.002-07:002014-08-28T09:59:17.520-07:00We Need a 28th Amendment--NOW!!!!!!To save what little semblance of democracy we still have left, we absolutely need to overturn <em>Citizens United and McCutcheon v. FEC</em>. According to <em>Public Citizen News, </em>83 percent of Americans favor limiting the amount of money that corporations and other organizations can spend on elections. By its calculations, about $7 billion was spent on the 2012 federal elections--most of it due to<em> Citizens United</em>, which permits corporations and the wealthy to spend unlimited amounts of money on ads and other campaign activities. The elimination of the old $123,000 limit in <em> </em>McCutcheon enabled the 600 individuals who exceeded that amount to funnel up to $5.9 million into the political process. What can we do about, while we still have the machinery---even if not much of the substance of---the democratic process? <br />
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One of the most effective strategies is for progressives everywhere to throw their support behind S.J. Res.19, which has been in the works for four years. It was introduced by U.S. Senator Tom Udall (D-N.M.) and it would overturn not only <em>Citizens </em>United and<em> McCutcheon</em>, but also<em> Buckley v. Valeo, </em>a 1976 Supreme Court decision that established the doctrine popularly called "money equals people." On June 3, the Senate Judiciary Committee held a hearing on the proposed amendment, which would give Congress and the states the authority to regulate and limit campaign spending, including expenditures by, in support of, or to oppose candidates in federal elections. Before the hearing even began, a number of progressive organizations delivered a petition in support of the amendment signed by more than two million people from throughout the country. It pledged the support of sixty progressive organizations including Public Citizen, USAction, Common Cause, the Sierra Club, Greenpeace, the NAACP, and the Communication Workers of America. Speaking for them, Public Citizen President Robert Weissman proclaimed that "this is an historic moment.This amendment will help restore the most basic meaning of democracy--rule by the people."<br />
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In a prepared statement, Senator Harry Reid (D-Nev), the Senate Majority Leader, testified that "American families cannot compete with billionaires, Our involvement in government should not be dependent on our bank account balances." On June 18, the Constitution, Civil Rights and Human Rights Subcommittee of the Judiciary Committee approved a revised version that simplified and shortened the amendment's language. This version contains slightly more than 100 words stipulating that "to protect the integrity of government and the electoral process, Congress and the States may regulate and set reasonable limits on the raising and spending of money by candidates and others to influence elections." In addition, it empowers Congress and the states to "distinguish between natural persons and corporations or other artificial entities created by law, including by prohibiting such entities from spending money to influence elections." On July 10, the full committee voted to send the revised version to the Senate floor, where it is scheduled for a vote this fall. So far, 47 Senators have signed on in support. <br />
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In urging support for the amendment, Weissman proclaims that "the American people know that the current system is failing them. They desperately want action. They believe passionately in ensuring that their speech--not that of any one select group, but the speech of We the People--matters. They are clamoring for the 28th Amendment."<br />
<em></em><br />
In his brilliant treatise <em>Six Amendments: How and Why We Should Change The Constitution, </em>retired<em> </em>Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens makes a compelling case for a "Campaign Finance" amendment. (the others are the "Anti-Commandeering Rule, Sovereign Immunity, Political Gerrymandering, the Death Penalty, and Gun Control.) In this succinct 177 page treatise, Justice Stevens argues that the first four "would nullify judge-made rules, the fifth would expedite the demise of the death penalty, and the sixth would confine the coverage of the Second Amendment to the area intended by its authors." Over time, he contends that the "soundness of each of my proposals will become more and more evident, and that ultimately each will be adopted." The purpose of this book, he states flatly is "to expedite that process and to avoid future crises before they occur." In support of the amendment regarding campaign finance, Justice Stevens quotes from President Theodore Roosevelt 1905 annual message to Congress:<br />
<em>All contributions by corporations to any political committee for any</em><br />
<em> political purpose </em><em>should be forbidden by law; directors should not be </em><br />
<em> permitted to use stockholders' </em><em>money for such purposes; and, moreover,</em><br />
<em> a prohibition of this kind would be, as far as it </em><em>went, an effective method </em><br />
<em> of stopping the evils aimed at in corrupt practices acts. </em><br />
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Two years later, Justice Stevens argues, " Congress passed a statute banning all corporate contributions to political candidates. For decades thereafter, Congress, most state legislators, and members of the Supreme Court apparently agreed that it was both wise and constitutional to impose greater restrictions on corporate participation in elections than on individuals." That consensus maintained until 1990, when Justices Anton Scalia and Anthony Kennedy wrote a dissenting opinion in <em>Austin v. Michigan Chamber of </em>Commerce. The majority upheld the constitutionality of a Michigan statute prohibiting corporations from making any expenditure in connection with an election campaign for state office. The dissenting opinion written by Scalia, who argued that "corporate speech, like other expressive activities by groups of persons, was entitled to the same First Amendment protection as speech by an individual." Fast forward to 2011 and <em>Citizens United v. FEC</em>, in which the Scalia-Kennedy interpretation became the majority opinion (5-4), and "the rest is history," at least until the present. <br />
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Stevens does not "fast forward," but traces the devolution of campaign finance regulation from<em> </em>Austin to<em> Citizens </em>United, step-by-step. He also points out that campaign contributions by labor unions have been seriously restricted since the Court upheld that limitation as part of the infamous Taft-Hartley Act of 1947. Stevens also pointedly argues that most members of the TV viewing public "share my opinion that at least 75 percent--perhaps even 90 percent--of the campaign commercials could be omitted without depriving viewers of any useful data." He goes on to say that the decision <em>in Citizens </em>United took a giant step in the wrong direction by "giving corporations an unlimited right to spend <em><strong>their shareholders money in election campaigns</strong></em>." < Isn't it odd that corporations that always insist that their primary (only?) responsibility is to their shareholders, as opposed to labor, consumers or the general public, feel empowered to spend their shareholders money on political action without having to get their permission?> A constitutional amendment allowing Congress and the states to place "reasonable" limits on campaign expenditures "would allow corporations to make public announcements of their views but would prohibit them from engaging in "the kind <strong><em>of repetitive and excessive advocacy that the candidates typically employ." </em></strong><br />
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In conclusion, Justice Stevens even provides the exact language that such an amendment should take<em>: Neither the First Amendment nor any other provision of this constitution shall be construed to prohibit Congress or any state from opposing reasonable limits on the amount of money that candidates for public office, or their supporters may spend in election campaigns</em>. Of course. there will be intense disagreements over the definition of "reasonable." That is what is normally called <strong><em>POLITICS!!! </em></strong><br />
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<em>JDB</em>Johnhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02883617794291815218noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3109801914440805625.post-37214791103960094022014-08-05T10:07:00.000-07:002014-08-15T10:11:56.243-07:00The "Do-Even-Less-Than-Nothing" Congress Way back in 1948 President Harry Truman immortalized the 80th Congress as the "Do-Nothing Congress." By hammering away at that theme, HST was able to pull victory from what almost all Pols and Pundits predicted would certainly be the "jaws of defeat." <em>The Chicago Tribune</em> was so certain that it made "Dewey Wins" the gigantic front-page headline of an edition that they were quickly forced to retract. Whether or not Truman's assessment was categorically true, he pulled off what is still almost universally regarded as the greatest upset in the history of presidential elections, and used it as a goad to press the 81st Congress to enact several parts of his Fair Deal platform. (I actually held a copy of the <em>Trib</em> in my hot little hand when one of the parish priests at St. Pats interrupted our touch football game to teach us a couple of lessons about<em> hubris</em> in real world politics.)<br />
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Memories of that "do-nothing 80th Congress came flooding back to me when I read two articles in the opinion section of the New <em>York Times. </em>One was headed "The Do-Even-Less Congress" and written by Charles W. Blow. the other was "What the Republicans Failed to Accomplish" by David Firestone. As of the end of July, Blow asserted, "the current Congress had enacted 142 laws, the fewest of any Congress in the past two decades over the equivalent time span," and only 108 of those were substantial pieces of legislation. Most of the rest involved the renaming of post offices, anniversary commemorations, and other purely ceremonial acts. President Obama has found it necessary to veto only two bills, fewer than and president since James Garfield in 1881--and his term lasted only 200 days before he was assassinated. (Now that paucity of vetoes might signify a high level of agreement between the executive and the legislature, but anybody with a breath in her or his body knows how ridiculous that conclusion would be.) Perhaps we should be grateful that the House is scheduled to be in session 135 days, which works out to 942 hours, an average of about 28 hours per week. Even the most low-paid member of the House scores $174,00 a year, plus a benefit package to die for. That is about the only thing that Democrats and Republicans agree upon, besides the conviction that it should be more. (Don't even attempt to calculate pay per hour. It would only drive you crazy, suicidal, or better yet, homicidal). The average full-time worker logs in more than 1,700 hours per year, for a comparative pittance.<br />
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Mr. Blow cites a June report by the Pew Foundation that found "Republicans and Democrats are more divided along ideological lines.....and partisan antipathy is deeper and more extensive than at any point in the last two decades." In my view, this is more about "partisan antipathy" than ideology. <br />
Neither party wants to tackle the real "hot button" issues, such as immigration, inversion, inequality, and "too big to fail." The more liberal Democrats and right-wing Republicans are obviously poles apart on these issues, but the leadership and majority in both parties does not want to touch any of these because of their potential for real ideological disputation. Better to ignore them and rest comfortably in the status quo. Better to sling vitriol back and forth than engage in serious negotiations on any of these "elephants in the room." Republicans blame Obama and Democrats blame Republican intransigence. As Mr. Blow concludes: "Legislation is only a hobby for members of this Congress. their full time job is raising hell, raising money and lowering the bar on acceptable behavior." <br />
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Mr. Firestone elaborates upon the same theme: "The failure of this Congress (principally the House) to perform the most basic tasks of governing is breathtakingly broad." To prove his point, he appends "a catalog of the vital tasks the House was unable to accomplish before taking an unnecessary recess."<br />
1. Failure to pass a full set of appropriations bills for the 2015 fiscal year of a continuing resolution to keep the government open past Sept. 30<em>. Haven't we seen this movie before? It should be a real bloodbath!</em><br />
<em>2.</em> Failure to enact a long-term transportation bill. The current one expires in ten months and is full of gimmicks necessitated by the failure to raise the gasoline tax<br />
3. Failure to enact comprehensive immigration reform<br />
4. Failure to renew the Import/Export Bank and terrorism risk insurance<br />
5. Failure to raise the minimum wage<br />
6. Failure to extend unemployment compensation <br />
7. Failure to pass the Employment Non-Discrimination Act<br />
8. Failure to enact the Paycheck Fairness Act <br />
9. Failure to fix the Voting Rights Act after it was gutted by the Supreme Court<br />
10. Failure to pass any measure imposing background checks on gun buyers<br />
11. Failure to enact any long-term legislation to stimulate the economy and create jobs<br />
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"But there is one thing House Republicans did enthusiastically before pack their bags. They voted to sue the president for taking executive actions they disliked ---actions that were necessary because Republicans failed to do their jobs.<br />
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What is a voter to do? One good suggestion comes from Ann McFeatters of the McClatchy-Tribune News Service:<br />
<em>Voters, return to your senses. Do not elect or reelect anyone who wants to refuse to pay debts America has already incurred. Do not pull any lever for someone who proudly promises never to compromise (without it politics is meaningless). Do not send to Washington anyone who tells you how much he/she hates government. Do not give your precious vote to anyone who labels the other side evil, treasonous, demonic, or stupid. (Well, stupid is OK.) </em><br />
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Keep on keeping on. <br />
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JDBJohnhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02883617794291815218noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3109801914440805625.post-83479990564179175922014-06-23T08:28:00.000-07:002014-07-05T11:56:19.914-07:00Republican's Own Data Proves "Voter Fraud" is a Myth Well, the smell (stench) of Republican campaign propaganda is once again in the air. Can specious claims of "Voter Fraud" be far behind? As if any further proof that "Voter Fraud" is a cynically constructed "Myth" is needed, the re-release by Cornell University Press of THE MYTH OF VOTER FRAUD by Lorraine C. Minnite should do the job. The author is political scientist at Barnard College of Columbia University and a senior fellow at DEMOS. Most of her data comes from the American Center for Voting Rights (ACVR), a Republican sponsored "think tank" founded in 2005, specifically to dig up evidence of voter fraud. It disbanded in frustration in 2007. <strong>That should be a real clue, in and of itself.</strong><br />
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According to the author, the book "began as a response to a simple question from Miles Rappaport, the director of Demos, a democracy reform research and advocacy organization in NYC. When he was Connecticut Secretary of State, Rappaport found that his efforts to lower barriers to voting were routinely opposed with arguments that such reforms would only open the door to more "voter fraud." He wanted to find out how big the problem actually was, so that Demos could develop an agenda for electoral reform. So motivated, Minnite "spent a number of years engaged in painstaking research, aggregating and sifting all of the evidence that I could find." The results of her quest are spelled out in the book's chapters, but she "can short-circuit the suspense"--<strong>voter fraud is rare. It cannot compare in magnitude to the multiple problems in <em>election administration, </em>which present a far greater threat to the integrity of elections. </strong><br />
<strong></strong><br />
This exercise led her "to explore why these allegations are made when the facts do not support them, and why they succeed in influencing electoral rules." To answer that question, she contends, we first need to get "the best estimate" of the incidence of voter fraud, and "to know <strong>WHY</strong> the myth of voter fraud can be so successfully rejuvenated in the political culture to the point that all it takes to recall it is a wink and a nod--and maybe a little bullying." She declares unequivocally that<strong> VOTER FRAUD IS A POLITICALLY CONSTRUCTED MYTH</strong>! She begins by discussing a couple of high-profile fraud allegations as examples that have influenced the national election debate, and demonstrating "how they fall apart when we interrogate them." Voter fraud politics are so enduring "because they capitalize on general and widely held folk beliefs <<strong><em>urban myths</em></strong>> that are rooted in in facts and real historical experience, notions such as corruption in party politics and government but also stereotypes and class-and racially biased preconceptions of corruptions among groups by their marginal or minority status in U.S. history. (As a student of American political history, I am well aware that the charges being levied about African Americans, Latinos, and recent immigrants are almost verbatim those made against almost every minority ethnic group throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. I also know that many of those holding such biases today are the descendants of those who were once the victims of those very same injustices. I am also aware that<br />
such prejudices against African Americans are more deep-seated and persistent than those levied against any other ethnic group.) <br />
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An almost equal source of the author's passion was the "Alice-in-Wonderland" election of 2000, in which "the candidate with the most votes lost and the Supreme Court declared the winner." For those of you too young to have experienced that "sleight-of-hand" in person, this was the "election?" that sentenced us to eight years <strong>of George W. Bush</strong>. Interest in the "deadening minutiae of election administration, never before a subject of so much spilled ink, captured the attention of the public, the press, and academia." Interest in election law, "a subject about as sexy as patent law, has exploded and the field has suddenly earned some respectability, with academic centers, institutes, and journals all its own." The issue of election fraud, "an obsession of reformers and muckrakers in a bygone era <read Gilded Age and Progressive Era>, returned to the fore." Concerns ranged from felons' illegally voting, to Democratic ballot count observers' eating chads, and Al Gore operatives among Florida canvassing boards double-punching Palm Beach ballots to invalidate votes for George W. Bush or Pat Buchanan." In arguing for counting overseas military absentee ballots that lacked postmarks or failed to comply with the template. the Bush team waxed patriotic: "To not do so would disenfranchise patriotic soldiers and sailors." <br />
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"Epidemics" of voter fraud broke out all over. Especially suspect, at least to right-wing Republicans, were nationwide Democratic registration drives, bounty programs, and transportation schemes to get the maximum number of voters to the polls. Republicans had countered with "task forces" of lawyers and volunteer poll watchers "to root out what they were convinced was fraud endemic to the Democrats' efforts and the electoral process itself." What she found in several cases is that "the Republican antifraud campaigns appeared to be directed at suppressing the minority vote and tipping the election to the Republican candidate. In Jefferson County, Arkansas, where African Americans are 40 percent of the eligible voters, a group of predominantly black voters trying cast their ballots during the state's "early voting" period were confronted by Republican poll watchers who photographed them and demanded to see ID. One even stood behind the desk in the county clerk's office and photographed voter information on the clerk's computer screen.<br />
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In South Dakota, the minorities in question were Native Americans on federal reservations who were mobilized by the SDDP, United Sioux, and other tribal councils. About a month before the election, local election auditors in counties on or near reservations reported irregularities in voter registration and absentee balloting. The charges were directed at a single contractor hired by the SDDP, who was immediately fired. The federal and state's attorneys, with the cooperation of the SDDP, uncovered several hundred registration and absentee voter irregularities. The Republican state's attorney found only two cases where criminal law<strong> may have been </strong>violated. He concluded that "I just don't want the suggestion out there that there is widespread fraud when we don't have any evidence of that." No matter! Right-wing pundits, including Michelle Malkin, Rush Limbaugh, and John Fund of the <em>Wall Street Journal </em> jumped all over the case to arouse their readers and listeners. What happened next, Minnite declares, "reveals the power of the <strong>perception of voter fraud </strong>to justify electoral and law enforcement policies that strategically advantage one party over the other." They succeeded in "embedding a campaign strategy in the voting rights enforcement routines of the U.S. DOJ." It consisted of aggressively investigating Democrats and their allies, on the barest of evidence, to use the media to create the impression of widespread violation, and to keep those investigations open long enough to influence the 2002 elections. To give the charges even greater currency, U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft proclaimed a Voting Access and Integrity Initiative that involved the creation of several "task forces," consisting of 94 assistant U.S attorneys and numerous FBI officials "to deter and detect discrimination, prevent electoral corruption, and bring violators to justice." <strong>The statewide South Dakota phone number for reporting such alleged election fraud received only one call!!</strong> The DOJ opened only sixteen investigations in the month before the election, none of which were carried to conclusion. The entire fiasco, in the author's judgment, was reflective of "an evolving pattern of conservative thinking and political strategy: conservatives are victimized by the liberal agenda, whites suffer discrimination than blacks, and the rich unfairly get less from government than the poor<em><strong>." They obviously live in an alternate universe</strong></em>!<br />
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Ignoring obvious reality, escalating allegations of voter fraud after 2002 had a profoundly negative effect on the mechanics of voting, one that threatens to undo the progress toward real democracy that it has taken more than 200 years of dedication, courage, and struggle to achieve. It has been "the justification for the erection of much of the convoluted electoral apparatus that plagues the electoral process today." More than a century ago, during the Progressive Era, "the threat of voter fraud was the rhetorical rationale for the very invention of voter registration rules, and each of the major national efforts at election reform since then....has been seriously compromised by an organized party-based opposition warning of the dangers of voter fraud." <strong><em><Always remember that it is the individual states that set voting requirements and procedures. For details see my post of November 26, 2012: "Why We Need A National Election Law."> </em></strong><br />
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Easily her two most informative and fascinating examples of fabricated voter fraud are: 1) the myth that several of the 9/11 bombers were able to become eligible voters, and 2) the saga of the abortive and surreal American Center for Voting Rights (ACVR) . The former dates from the publication, in 2004, of <em>Stealing Elections </em>by John Fund, a regular columnist for the <em>Wall Street Journal, </em>in which he charged that several of the 9/11 hijackers were registered to vote. <Considering that they planned to crash their planes well before the next election would seem to make registering to vote unnecessary in the extreme, as well as a waste of valuable prep time, since they also had to learn to fly a jumbo jet airplane, but what the heck?> Fund's book asserts that "at least eight of the nineteen hijackers who attacked the World Trade Center and the Pentagon were actually able to register to vote in either Virginia or Florida <both states noted for their "squeaky clean" elections> while they made their deadly preparations for 9/11." Fund bases his claim solely on a December 22, 2002 interview that he conducted with Michael Chertoff, then attorney general in charge of the Justice Department Criminal Division, and we all know how well he did on that job prior to 9/11. Note that Fund writes that they "were actually able to vote," not that they <em>did register </em>or that they <em>were registered. </em>Of course, we all know that every state--even Virginia and Florida--requires that every voter be a "citizen of the U.S." Several other right-wing pundits uttered lots of variations> on the same theme, but Republican Senator "Kit" Bond of Missouri took it to the point of absurdity by claiming---on the Senate floor, no less--that a Pakistani citizen in Greensboro, North Carolina, "with links to two of the September 11 hijackers was indicted by a federal grand jury for having illegally registered to vote." When asked during a CNN interview with Lou Dobbs on October 24, 2004, if he meant that eight of the hijackers <em>could </em>have registered, Fund corrected Dobbs by insisting that they <em>did </em>register. Fund and others extrapolated from the well-known fact that several of the hijackers had obtained driver's licenses and were therefore able to <em>apply </em>for voter registration under the National Voter Registration Act (NVRA) of 1993. Obviously, being able to <em>apply to register to vote </em>because you obtained a driver's license is not the same thing as being <em>able to register, </em>let alone able to vote. As Minnite carefully points out, Fund, Bond, and their cronies were really trying to discredit the NVRA by "talking in code." The 9/11 Commission did find that several of the hijackers ""manipulated in a fraudulent manner," made detectable false statements on their visa applications, and gave false statements to border officials in order to gain entry," and obtained driver's licenses or state ID cards in California, Florida, Maryland, and Virginia, making them, hypothetically, eligible to register at the same time.<strong><em> But there is no evidence that any of them actually did</em></strong>. To do so would, of course, subject them to closer scrutiny--the last thing in the world they wanted.Therefore, Minnite asserts that "in the absence of any affirmative evidence from state or federal law enforcement officials, it is highly unlikely that any of the hijackers was registered to vote.<br />
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Nevertheless, Fund's allegations have received wide and persistent currency among those opposed to any effort to make voting more accessible, especially to poor and minority voters. Charges based upon false or non-existent documentation have been entered into the Congressional Record, swayed lawmakers, and even persuaded Supreme Court Justices. On the evening of the 2006 Congressional elections, Fund told Fox News propagandist Glenn Beck that he still stood by his original accusation, and added that "Our registration rules have a lot of people on there who are dead, don't exist or registered many times over." This ridiculous "folk myth," the author asserts, is an example of <em>voter fraud politics: "</em>the use of spurious or exaggerated voter fraud allegations to persuade the public about the need for more administrative burdens on the vote." In conducting case studies, she asks 1) who are the actors?; 2) who are the targets?; 3) what are the tactics deployed?; and 4) what are the tactics employed, and what are the factors that account for their success in maintaining barriers that "disproportionately affect certain Americans"? Voter fraud politics "is all about the behavior of partisans and their allies." While committing voter fraud is a crime, "<strong><em>falsely accusing someone of it is not." </em></strong>And therein, to quote Hamlet, lies the rub.<br />
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Even more categorical is the case of the report of the ACVR (see above) created on March 15, 2005 at the behest of Robert Ney (R-Ohio), then chairman of the U.S. House Administration Committee. During the course of its hearings, Mark F. "Thor" Hearne, founder and general counsel of ACVR testified that the Ohio NAACP had supplied cocaine to African Americans in return for their registering to vote.According to Murray Waas of the right-wing <em>National Journal, </em>Hearne was a quintessential Republican, who had served in the Department of Education during the Reagan administration, an attorney for the GOP during the 2000 Florida election fiasco, and a national counsel for the Bush-Cheney campaign. He reportedly founded ACVR "with encouragement from Rove and the White House." He has a long history of involvement in schemes to prevent potentially Democratic voters from exercising the franchise. Just days after the Administrative Committee hearings, an enterprising journalist reported that ACVR's address was a U.S. Post Office Box in Dallas, which it shared with a fund raising operation chaired by former Secretary of State James Baker, the leader of the Bush-Cheney recount team. The same journalist also discovered that ACVR's internet domain was <av4vr.com>, and that its street address was supposedly 8409 Pickwick Lane 229, Dallas, 75225. <strong>That</strong> <strong><em>turned out to be the location of a UPS store!! </em></strong>Moreover, its Legislative Fund was a specious 501 (c) (4 ) organization, one of those eerie tax-exempt "social welfare" institutions. Obscured by several layers of phony shell organizations, the Fund had numerous ties to the GOP, the Bush-Cheney campaign, the National Rifle Association, and the infamous Swift Boat Veterans for Truth. <br />
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The ACVR Legislative Fund released a self-commissioned report titled "Voter Fraud, Intimidation, and Suppression in the 2004 Presidential Election," which it claimed to be "the most comprehensive and authoritative review" of voter fraud during the 2004 election. Closer examination of its myriad claims, according to Minnite, "shows it to be little more than a pile of poorly scrutinized newspaper articles sensationalizing election shenanigans instigated in all but two instances by Democrats, who were accused of far more voter intimidation and suppression than Republicans. <strong><em>In other words, it is a piece of political propaganda produced by Republican Part operatives who veiled their work as civil rights advocacy." </em></strong>She includes a table summarizing the findings of the report and shows that "among the more than one hundred cited of alleged voter fraud implicating nearly 300,000 potentially fraudulent votes in the 2004 election cycle, only about 185 votes could be confirmed as <em>possibly tainted by fraud. </em><<strong>For those of you without a handy, dandy calculator, that comes to .0006166 of one prevent.></strong><br />
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Significantly, nearly all of these allegations involved cities with substantial black populations or in projected "swing states" for the upcoming 2006 elections. Incredibly, the report "achieved remarkable influence, promoting the idea that U.S. elections are riddled with voter fraud." in 2005 and 2006, ACVR advocated for photo IDs, earliest possible voter registration book closings, a one-week turnaround for the return of voter registration forms by volunteer groups, and more stringent list-maintaining procedures during the last months before an election. Significantly, ACVR "appeared and disappeared swiftly enough to evade the federal reporting requirements that might have revealed the true sources of its revenue." But the "Report" itself is still out there, circulating, just like<em> The</em> <em>Protocols of the Elders of Zion </em>or<em> The Donation of Constantine.</em> <br />
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Of course, Minnite's impeccable credentials and exhaustive documentation still might not be enough to convince those get their political news and opinion from "Talk Radio" and Fox TV. They are so beyond the reach of rational thought that even <strong>contradictory evidence generated by the Republicans themselves intended to provide evidence of widespread voter fraud </strong>probably will not even penetrate their defenses. Nor would most of them even dare to tackle a scholarly work with more than 100 pages of charts and graphs and 43 pages of documenting "Notes." Besides, it is a logical impossibility to prove the "non-existence" of anything. <br />
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That's all for now. Much of the book consists of the author's very insightful discussion of <em><strong>how and why</strong></em>. That is a subject for a later Post, but why not read Minnite's book yourself.<br />
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<strong>JDB</strong><br />
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<br />Johnhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02883617794291815218noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3109801914440805625.post-9989601155194237482014-06-16T13:46:00.000-07:002014-07-06T15:07:38.325-07:00What Makes Me Think I Am "A Progressive"? If there is a single word that has subsumed my professional and personal life, it has definitely been "progressive." As you have doubtless noticed, my blog is titled "Progressive History Professor." I belong and contribute to a plethora of "progressive" organizations, and I once factiously told an audience that one of my goals was to write a book that did not have the word "progressive" in its title. It seems, however, that there are almost as many definitions of "progressive" as there are people who consider themselves "progressives." In fact, progress itself is a "loaded word," a <strong><em>paradox whose meaning is largely "in the eye of the beholder." </em></strong>Even if we could all agree on a single definition, we would still have to admit that "progress" has both positive and negative consequences. Without getting into that philosophical quagmire, I think that it is high time for me to inform you--as unequivocally as possible--what I mean by "progress" and "progressive,"---at least as of the end of June, 2014.<strong><em> </em></strong><br />
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During the 1970s and '80s, I was privileged to be a participant in what Daniel T. Rodgers called "the search for progressivism"--an ongoing dialogue that "helped attract more historical talent to the first two decades of the twentieth century than to any other period of modern America." The summary that best expressed the results of our labors was provided by Rodgers himself, in a 1982 <em>American Quarterly </em>article titled "The Search for Progressivism": "those who called themselves progressives did not share a common creed or a string of common values, however ingeniously or vaguely defined." At most, they "drew upon three distinct clusters of ideas--three distinct social languages--to articulate their discontents and their social visions: <strong>the rhetoric of anti-monopolism, an emphasis upon social bonds and the social nature of human beings,</strong> <strong>and a language of social efficiency</strong>." After more than a decade of critiquing each other's interpretations, most of us "agreed to disagree," and moved on to investigate other historical problems.<br />
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In truth, we had come full-circle to the interpretation proffered by contemporary reformer Benjamin Parke De Witt in his 1915 <em>The Progressive Movement: A Non-Partisan Comprehensive Discussion of Current Tendencies in American Politics. </em>In his summation, those "tendencies" were three: 1. <strong>All special, minority, and corrupt influences in government---national, state, and city--must be removed. 2. The structure or machinery of government, which has been heretofore been admirably adapted to control by the few, be so changed and modified that it will be more difficult for the few, and easier for the many, to control. 3. The rapidly growing conviction that the functions of government are too restricted and that they must be increased and extended to relieve social and economic distress." </strong><br />
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Combining De Witt's contemporary definition with Rodgers' modern day analysis has provided me with a set of principles that I believe best capture the essence of today's "progressivism." First and foremost, to quote "Fighting Bob" La Follette, "the supreme issue involving all others is the encroachment of the powerful few upon the rights of the many." He elaborated upon that conviction in 1912: <em>If it can be shown that Wisconsin <</em><strong>or anywhere else</strong><em>> is a happier state , that its institutions are more democratic, that the opportunities of its people are more nearly equal, that social justice more nearly prevails, that human life is safer and sweeter, then I shall rest content in the feeling that the Progressive movement has been successful. </em>Applying those goals to the entire United States in the early 21st century should be the primary task of today's " progressives." <br />
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Of almost equal importance is the conviction that government at all levels should be a positive force "to promote the general welfare." It is clearly the "sine qua non" of all "reform" proposals, the best litmus test for distinguishing progressives from "reactionaries"--- those who want to "shrink government to a size where it can be drowned in a bathtub." Convincing so many people that "government is the problem" has been the reactionaries' most significant achievement. <<em>Tell the government to keep its hands off our Social Security and Medicare.></em>The indisputable reality, as DeWitt argued in 1915, is that <strong>government does too little, not too much.</strong> Our "social security net" is the weakest among all "civilized countries"; most of our regulatory agencies have been "captured" by the very interests they were designed to regulate. <strong>And today's reactionaries want even more of the same!</strong><br />
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<strong>To be a progressive is to understand that it is impossible to separate taxation from the provision of public services. If you want to cut taxes, you also have to decide which government functions</strong> should be eliminated or severely curtailed. Of course, reactionaries want to cut <strong><em>their </em></strong>taxes and do away with government programs upon which <strong><em>other people </em></strong>rely for their livelihood and well-being. As economist and philosopher J.K.Galbraith brilliantly predicted more than a half-century ago, their goal is to create "private affluence and public poverty."<br />
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The progressive position on taxes was clearly outlined in the Sixteenth Amendment and the Revenue Act of 1913. Both were based upon two bedrock principles: the tax should be apportioned according to "the ability to pay" and "from whatever source derived." <See my <em>The Income Tax and the Progressive Era, </em>New York: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1985> Believe it or not, more advanced progressives, such "Fighting Bob" La Follette and the <strong>Republican Insurgents,</strong> actually advocated higher tax brackets on the wealthiest "three percent," as well as taxing income from stocks and bonds more heavily than that from wages and salaries.<br />
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It hardly needs mention that a "progressive" believes that all of the rights, responsibilities, and privileges enumerated in the Constitution and the Bill of Rights should apply to every single American, regardless of gender, race, religion, ethnicity, social class, location, or age. We are well aware that much of our nation's history can be summed up in the conflict between those who have had an <strong><em>inclusive view</em></strong> of America and Americans, and those who have wanted to<strong><em> exclude</em></strong> "them" or "the other," because "they" were "unfit" to evolve into "us." My favorite summation of the meaning of American history is that of historian Darrett Rutman in <em>The Morning of America:</em><br />
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<em><strong>In the years beyond 1789, governments drawn from but one of America's peoples --the White, Anglo-Saxon Protestant and propertied--would claim that being of the people, and elected by the people they ruled for the people. One after another of America's peoples --the propertyless, laboring man, the immigrant, the Catholic, the Jew, the non-white, the impoverished--would rise to claim it was not so. < </strong></em>For whatever reason, Rutman failed to include "women" in his panoply of <br />
fighters against the <em>status quo</em>, but I, most emphatically, put them at the top of the list.><br />
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Like most progressives of my generation, I regarded the enactment of the Civil Rights Act of 1864 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 as the end product of all those struggles; of the United States of America--at long last--living up to those ideals first proclaimed in the Declaration of Independence. In the euphoria of those times, these achievements were quickly followed by Medicare, Medicaid, Affirmative Action, the Hart-Cellar Immigration Act, the proposal of the Equal Rights Amendment, and the Environmental Protection Act. <strong><em>History seemed to me to be moving in an inevitably "progressive trajectory."</em></strong> In his provocative <em>Land Of Promise, </em>Michael Lind characterizes the period from 1946 to 1975 as "The Glorious Thirty Years" and of the emergence of "The Third American Republic": an amalgam of the ideas and institutions of the New Nationalism and the New Freedom. Along with the western European democracies, the United States "experienced similar combinations of high growth and rapid expansion of mass middle classes, underpinned by high labor-union membership, middle -class welfare states, and highly regulated economies." The developing "mixed economy" sought to "blend private enterprise with public regulation, redistribution, and in some cases public ownership." A widely shared prosperity gave the white majority " the confidence and security to examine, and<strong><em> begin to eliminate</em></strong>, the racial-caste system that had long made a mockery of their purported ideals." <br />
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But even at its zenith, the Third American Republic was being surreptiously undermined in what Lind calls "The Great Dismantling" and Paul Krugman "The Great Unraveling." Under Democratic and Republican administrations alike, Congress systematically dismantled industrial and financial systems that had operated from the New Deal through most of the 1960s. Managerial capitalism gave way to financial-market capitalism. Under lobbying by Wall Street, vertically integrated corporations were dismantled and dispersed. Former brand-name businesses became "brands," whose products were increasingly made in Asia and Latin America. Corporations sought to raise their profit margins by ending the postwar truce with organized labor and smashing unions.( By 2000, private-sector union membership declined to levels not seen since the Gilded Age.) Ironically, the influx of immigrants---skilled and unskilled, legal and undocumented--- accelerated the downward pressure on wages. A new army of "working poor" sprang up--full-time workers who could not subsist on a minimum wage that inflation turned into near starvation income. The dismantling of large corporations led to the demise of the always-inadequate employee-based benefit systems that had been devised to supplement earned benefits from Social Security, Medicare, and other government insurance programs. Corporate pension programs were either eliminated or replaced by 401 Ks and similar employee-contribution systems. Utility deregulation spawned the return of the very problems that had prompted their enactment in the first place. The drastic cutbacks in infrastructure spending resulted in the crumbling of highways, bridges, and canal systems, while traffic congestion escalated almost exponentially. Stock market "bubbles,' like the savings and loan meltdown of the 1980s and the subprime mortgage disaster of the 2000s, decimated millions. Bankruptcies, hostile takeovers, and the proliferation of conglomerates constricted the depth and breadth of our industrial and financial systems. <br />
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I have elaborated on various aspects of this onslaught in previous posts. Most of you are all-too-familiar with them, from personal experience. Sad to say, much of being "progressive" in the past four decades has involved defending the achievements that we once assumed were permanent fixtures of our way of life. "Playing defense" so much of our time has hindered our ability to build upon the accomplishments of 1945-1975. In one sense, we have become the "real conservatives":those who are seeking to "conserve" the gains of "the Glorious Thirty Years." In any case, it is hard to see what is "conservative" about Tea Partiers, Neo-Cons, Neo-Libs, and Climate Catastrophe Deniers.<br />
<strong>What is it that they are pretending to "conserve? </strong><br />
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Perhaps the best recent description of what I understand by "progressive" (or liberal as they prefer) is that of Eric Alterman and Kevin Mattson in <em>The Cause: <strong>It means standing firm on the belief of the foundational freedoms of thought, expression, and the necessity of individuals to take hold of their collective fates and shape them according to the values of liberty and equality, while being fully aware that the two must always coexist in tension with each other</strong></em>. Like the "guiding spirit" of those who founded the United States of America, <strong><em>progressives "must have courage to use your own understanding--that is the motto of </em>ENLIGHTENMENT <em> </em></strong><br />
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<br />Johnhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02883617794291815218noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3109801914440805625.post-91899664901970512162014-06-09T09:44:00.000-07:002014-06-10T11:17:04.290-07:00How the Rich Stole Our Money and Made Us Think They were Doing Us a FavorBack in the dim, distant past when the L.A Dodgers were still the pride of Brooklyn, the cry "we wuz robbed" was a frequently heard, heartfelt lament. As a fervid Yankee fan during the 1950s, I generally dismissed that complaint as "sour grapes." Now though, as David Atkins, founder of Pollux Group, makes starkly clear, the vast majority of Americans "wuz robbed" again and again during the past four decades. What is more, we continue to be "robbed" and, like the helpless urchins of<em> Oliver Twist</em>, we obsequiously respond "Thank you Sir, and may I have another.?" <br />
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For the past four decades, Atkins proclaims, the Super Rich and their political lackeys have been "pushing people toward stocks, real estate, and credit cards." They have largely succeeded in convincing the majority of Americans that the real key to their prosperity lies not in improving salaries and wages, but in dabbling in the Big Casino where the House always wins--at the gambler's expense--: stocks, credit cards, and using the highly inflated value of their homes as collateral for more borrowing. These "passive assets" grew almost exponentially over the past forty years, while "earned income" (wages and salaries) stagnated, even though worker productivity continued to increase at a record pace. Unfortunately for most Americans, almost fifty percent of these passive assets are owned by the top one percent of income receivers, while more than 85% are possessed by the top ten percent.<br />
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So why isn't the majority in open revolt? Part of the answer, Atkins proclaims, is because "the top 1% have done an excellent job disguising the upward transfer of wealth by making the rest of us feel better off than we actually are while enriching themselves in the process." He is quick to point out that "the trend toward greater hoarding of wealth by economic elites and shrinking middle-class is not limited to the U.S."; that it is "present to one degree or another throughout the industrialized world." The current inequality crisis, he asserts, is one part "the self-interested preferences and self-serving ideology of the super-rich," and one part "a series of decisions made in response to the inflation shocks of the 1970s and to the growing threat of globalization and workforce mechanization." <br />
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Atkins lists at least four diabolical plots to actuate this ultra-right-wing a agenda:<br />
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1. Push people away from defined-benefit pensions and into stocks and 401(k)s. The switch from pensions to market-based retirement accounts not only reduced "the obligated burden on <br />
corporate 'bottom lines'," but also helped "to goose the financial sector <which has obviously become 'the tail that wags the economic dog"> upon which the ultra-rich depend for their passive incomes." Its share of GDP has grown exponentially and its profits now account for nearly one-third of corporate income. Reading about the ups and downs of Wall Street has become "hot popular culture," while a growing number of people "watched breathlessly as the health of the Dow Jones was commonly equated with the health of the overall economy." Many more ordinary Americans "watched their meager stock portfolios rise," and so became less concerned with "the slow growth of their regular wages." <misdirection was no longer just the favorite device of magicians and NFL quarterbacks><br />
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2. Push more people into using the equity in their homes as a "cash cow." Rates of home ownership surged in the postwar years, due largely to the GI Bill and the FHLA, leveled off during the 1970s, and exploded from the 1980s to the mid-"Aughts." The government used all the levers of public policy to encourage home ownership <the New American Dream> and reduce mortgage interest rates. The deregulation of Wall Street during the Reagan-Clinton-Bush administrations "not only boosted the stock market but also enabled large banks to make unprecedented money off of home loans." Wealthy landlords and asset owners became even richer while rents soared and real wages declined. Most Americans didn't feel the pinch because rising home values made them feel "paper rich" <good old misdirection again> Besides, home equity loans allowed them to continue to consume goods and services at the same or higher rates. The government did its bit through "quantitative easing" by the Federal Reserve, zero percent interest rates, and numerous homeowner incentive schemes. <br />
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3. "Democratize" consumer debt through the use of credit cards. Their widespread use from the mid-1870s on, about the same times as Wall Street deregulation, 401(k) transitions, and "the birth pangs of the real estate boom." They served a perverse dual purpose: further enrich the same financial services companies whose success disproportionately benefits the ultra-rich; and "to disguise and soften the effects of stagnant wages.' <Ain't misdirection grand?><br />
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4. Reduce the cost of goods through "free trade" policies. It has become increasingly obvious that agreements like NAFTA benefit wealthy stockholders, while reducing jobs in developed nations. Moreover, they reduce the price of goods made overseas, which, in turn, help again to disguise wage stagnation. <Ditto and Double Ditto><br />
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Not only do these policies obviously directly benefit the super-rich, Atkins cogently summarizes, <br />
"they have served to create a more purely capitalist society, hide the decline of the middle class and mitigate public discontent over stagnant wages." The vast preponderance of wealth will continue to accrue to the very top incomes, guaranteeing that assets inflate while wages stagnate. Moreover, an asset-based economy is "bubble-prone, unstable, and given to boom-bust cycles." The economic disasters of the past half-decade have, at least, partly removed "the blindfold that has been hiding wage losses over the past half-century. Housing prices have skyrocketed, even as household debt nears record highs. Nearly one-half of Americans have absolutely no retirement savings at all, while much of the rest of the developed world "faces a pension obligation crisis. The tools policymakers have used "to distract the public from the raw deal of low wages are no longer working." The only hope, Atkins adamantly and correctly asserts, is that the current crisis will at last "usher in a new era of populist progressivism in the U.S." Perhaps the most startling revelation that Atkins demonstrates is that political party of the New Deal, Fair Deal, and the Great Society has been almost as complicit in this fiasco as have the Republicans. Himself the chairman of the Ventura, California Democratic Party, he boldly proclaims that this "new era of populist-progressivism" can only happen "if the Democratic Party can shift from reinforcing the asset-based economy toward rebuilding a sustainable model that encourages wage growth and a strong labor market."<br />
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<strong>This is the most cogent and coherent explanation for our horrible situation that I have ever read.</strong><br />
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<strong><em>JDB</em></strong><br />
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<strong></strong><br />Johnhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02883617794291815218noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3109801914440805625.post-21207827564363002082014-06-07T08:21:00.000-07:002014-06-07T08:21:57.547-07:00Not that NRA, But the Other One<br />
That other NRA, of course, is the National Restaurant Association,whose lobbying juggernaut is surpassed only by--you guessed it<strong>?--The National Rifle Association</strong>. Almost sixty percent of its employees are classified as "low wage," the highest percentage of any American industry. That, according to an April report of the Institute for Public Policy, entitled "Restaurant Industry Pay: Taxpayers' Double Burden. " Big corporate restaurant chains pay their employees so meagerly that more than half of the nation's front-line, fast-food workers rely on at least one public-assistance program, such as Medicaid or food stamps through Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program (SNAP>). Irony does even begin to capture that abomination <as a="" an="" annually="" billion="" contribute="" dollars="" in="" industry="" last="" profits="" realized="" result="" seven="" social-welfare="" subsidies="" taxpayers="" that="" to="" year.=""> Not to mention, of course, that customers are expected to pony up anywhere from ten to twenty percent of the bill in "TIPS." Many "cheapskates" fail to even meet that percentage and, even when patrons do, the amount is usually divvied up among the waiter, the bus boy, the hostess, and, in many cases, "the house."
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In addition, when Congress--which still functioned reasonably well in 1993--capped the tax-deductible "salaries" of corporate executives at $1,000,000, most corporations simply increased "performance- based" pay, which can be deducted from corporate income-tax filings. Over the past two years, CEOs at the NRA's twenty largest corporate affiliates were lavished with $662 million in fully deductible performance pay. If that compensation had been taxed as salary, those conglomerates would have paid the IRS an additional $232 million dollars. That increased revenue would, for instance,cover food stamp benefits--at $133 per month--for 145,000 households of fast-food workers employed by the big restaurant chains<strong>.</strong></as><br />
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<as a="" an="" annually="" billion="" contribute="" dollars="" in="" industry="" last="" profits="" realized="" result="" seven="" social-welfare="" subsidies="" taxpayers="" that="" to="" year.=""><strong>
FOOD FOR FUTURE THOUGHT: WE NEED TO DO A REAL COST BENEFIT ANALYSIS ON THE COST TO BUSINESSES OF BENEFITS, SUCH AS EXTENSION OF UNEMPLOYMENT BENEFITS OR MINIMUM WAGE LAWS, COMPARED TO HOW MUCH THEY SPEND ON LOBBYISTS TO FIGHT THOSE LAWS.NOT TO MENTION THE MONEY THEY SPEND ON CAMPAIGN CONTRIBUTIONS TO POLITICIANS COMMITTED TO OPPOSING MINIMUM WAGE LAWS OR EXTENDED UNEMPLOYMENT BENEFITS. IT MIGHT JUST BE MORE COST-EFFECTIVE FOR MOST BUSINESSES TO ALLOW SUCH "HORRORS" THAN IT IS FOR THEM TO "BUY" LOBBYISTS AND POLITICIANS.IFTHAT TURNS OUT TO BE THE CASE, THEN WHY NOT JUST "TAKE THE HIGH ROAD" INSTEAD? WHO WOULD BE HURT? LOBBYISTS? BOUGHT AND PAID FOR POLS? THE COMMUNICATIONS INDUSTRY THAT EXTORTS TRILLIONS OF DOLLARS FROM BUSINESSES TO "TAKE THE LOW ROAD"? COULD IT BE THAT "THE BOTTOM LINE" OF MOST BUSINESSES WOULD BE SUBSTANTIALLY IMPROVED IF THEY STOPPED WASTING MONEY ON LOBBYISTS,POLITICAL CAMPAIGNS, AND OTHER PARASITICAL PRACTICES? IT CERTAINLY SEEMS WORTH THE EFFORT AND MONEY FOR CORPORATIONS TO ENGAGE IN SUCH ANALYSES!
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<as a="" an="" annually="" billion="" contribute="" dollars="" in="" industry="" last="" profits="" realized="" result="" seven="" social-welfare="" subsidies="" taxpayers="" that="" to="" year.=""><strong></strong></as><br />
<as a="" an="" annually="" billion="" contribute="" dollars="" in="" industry="" last="" profits="" realized="" result="" seven="" social-welfare="" subsidies="" taxpayers="" that="" to="" year.="">Which restaurant chains? I am sad to say that the list includes several of our families' favorites. For instance, Starbucks CEO received $236 million in deductible performance pay over 2012-2013. That is a tax break of $82 million for a chain that pays baristas an average of $8.79 an hour. <And Starbucks pays its employees more than do most of its competitors. </as><br />
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<as a="" an="" annually="" billion="" contribute="" dollars="" in="" industry="" last="" profits="" realized="" result="" seven="" social-welfare="" subsidies="" taxpayers="" that="" to="" year.="">The CEO of Yum! Brands (Taco Bell, KFC, and Pizza Hut) received $67 million in performance pay during that same period. That's on top of the $232,622,472 in tax-deferred retirement benefits that he has been provided over the last 14 years. By way of contrast, the Tax Code only allows workers to defer up to $23,000 a year on 401k contributions. Yum! pays its workers an average of $8 a an hour, while its patrons--US--provide them with $650 million in various public assistance programs. </as><br />
<as a="" an="" annually="" billion="" contribute="" dollars="" in="" industry="" last="" profits="" realized="" result="" seven="" social-welfare="" subsidies="" taxpayers="" that="" to="" year.=""></as><br />
<as a="" an="" annually="" billion="" contribute="" dollars="" in="" industry="" last="" profits="" realized="" result="" seven="" social-welfare="" subsidies="" taxpayers="" that="" to="" year.="">The dual CEOs of Chipotles received a combined total of $82 million in non-taxable options respectively and $20 million each in vested performance stock. One of the "twins" also exercised another $42 million in options. Their combined taxpayer subsidy for 2012-2013 was $69 billion. </as><br />
<as a="" an="" annually="" billion="" contribute="" dollars="" in="" industry="" last="" profits="" realized="" result="" seven="" social-welfare="" subsidies="" taxpayers="" that="" to="" year.=""></as><br />
<as a="" an="" annually="" billion="" contribute="" dollars="" in="" industry="" last="" profits="" realized="" result="" seven="" social-welfare="" subsidies="" taxpayers="" that="" to="" year.="">The head of Dunkin' Brands (Dunkin' Donuts, Baskin-Robbins, and Togo's) cashed in more than $20 million in tax-exempt stocks in both 2012 and 2013, thus saving the company $15 million in corporate income taxes. </as><br />
<as a="" an="" annually="" billion="" contribute="" dollars="" in="" industry="" last="" profits="" realized="" result="" seven="" social-welfare="" subsidies="" taxpayers="" that="" to="" year.=""></as><br />
<as a="" an="" annually="" billion="" contribute="" dollars="" in="" industry="" last="" profits="" realized="" result="" seven="" social-welfare="" subsidies="" taxpayers="" that="" to="" year.="">"Tax-payers are losing billions of dollars, shareholders are being taken for a ride," asserts former Secretary of Labor and U. of California-Berkeley economist Robert Reich. At the same time, millions of food chain workers who put in </as><as a="" an="" annually="" billion="" contribute="" dollars="" in="" industry="" last="" profits="" realized="" result="" seven="" social-welfare="" subsidies="" taxpayers="" that="" to="" year.="">40 hours a week qualify for means-tested anti-poverty programs. </as><br />
<as a="" an="" annually="" billion="" contribute="" dollars="" in="" industry="" last="" profits="" realized="" result="" seven="" social-welfare="" subsidies="" taxpayers="" that="" to="" year.=""><strong><em>BON APPETITE!</em></strong></as><br />
<as a="" an="" annually="" billion="" contribute="" dollars="" in="" industry="" last="" profits="" realized="" result="" seven="" social-welfare="" subsidies="" taxpayers="" that="" to="" year.=""><strong><em></em></strong></as><br />
<as a="" an="" annually="" billion="" contribute="" dollars="" in="" industry="" last="" profits="" realized="" result="" seven="" social-welfare="" subsidies="" taxpayers="" that="" to="" year.=""><strong>JDB</strong></as><br />
<as a="" an="" annually="" billion="" contribute="" dollars="" in="" industry="" last="" profits="" realized="" result="" seven="" social-welfare="" subsidies="" taxpayers="" that="" to="" year.=""><strong>
</strong></as>Johnhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02883617794291815218noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3109801914440805625.post-23223305488521000732014-04-23T08:30:00.000-07:002015-11-16T22:03:51.008-08:00Organize or PerishI have probably read hundreds of thousands of book chapter headings over the past 60 or so years, but there is one that was indelibly impressed on my mind during my first year in graduate school at Georgetown (1959-1960). The book was<em> Response to Industrialism, 1885-</em>1920 by Samuel P. Hays, and the chapter heading was "Organize or Perish." In it, the author argues that the only effective and rational response to the rise of "Big Business" was for everyone else to organize as well.<br />
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That chapter followed the author's analysis of the "Great Merger Wave" of 1895-1904, which produced such industrial behemoths (<strong><em>Trusts </em></strong>in the parlance of the times) as Standard Oil, U.S. Steel, and International Harvester. During that decade, 1800 firms were combined into 157 companies, most of them in manufacturing. Of the 93 consolidations studied by historian Naomi Lamoreaux in <em>The Great Merger Movement in American Business, </em>72 of the new combinations controlled at least 40% of their industries while 42 dominated at least 70 %. The American Tobacco Company, formed by a consolidation of 162 firms, controlled 90 % of the market. The "Morganization" of finance, according to Michael Lind in <em>Land Of Promise,</em> also produced enormous investment institutions that "acted as intermediaries between the shareholding public and individual companies." By 1912, five American banks had "representatives on the "boards of 68 corporations whose combined assets added up to more than half of US gross natural product." Investigative journalists, called "muckrakers" by Teddy Roosevelt, also made millions of people aware of what historian Richard McCormick has called "the discovery that business corrupts politics."<br />
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Unlike many of today's people who seem to celebrate each new merger, our ancestors became increasingly horrified at this proliferation of oligopolies, fearing them as serious threats to economic and political democracy. The crucial election of 1912 revolved largely around the "Trust Question," with Woodrow Wilson's "New Freedom" urging "trust busting," and Theodore Roosevelt's "New Nationalism." advocating their effective regulation by the federal government. Although Wilson won the election, his administration actually behaved more like TR, laying the groundwork for today's "administrative state"---for better and worse.<br />
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As stunning as McCormick's "discovery" was to people of that time, the situation we face today makes it pale by comparison. Part of what underlies this perversion is the reality that Big Business has surreptitiously "captured" most of those very same regulatory agencies. But just as before, the only realistic strategy for reclaiming economic democracy has to be <strong>ORGANIZATION,</strong> which is <br />
the absolutely indispensable first step in what historian John W. Chambers has proclaimed <strong>THE NEW INTERVENTIONISM. </strong>This involved a three-staged process: 1) " associationalism"or "voluntarism," which Chambers defined as "organization by nonstatutory institutions," a strategy that Tocqueville had long ago identified as the peculiar genius of Americans;" 2) collaborating in "coalitions" with other private sector organizations for motives that are varied but compatible; and 3) political action, such as lobbying or endorsement of candidates or parties that advocate measures desired by different segments of the coalition. For example, the American Federation of Labor (AFL) originally abided by the "pure and simple trade unionism" dictum of Samuel Gompers and tried to achieve their goals of higher wages, shorter hours, and better and safer working conditions by collective bargaining, strikes and boycotts, without involving government. The National Consumers Union granted its "seal of approval" to businesses that agreed to meet its standards, and "blacklisting" those who refused. The Women's Trade Union League (WTUL) engaged in organizing drives, joined picket lines, and gave aid and comfort to strikers. Small business associations embraced volume buying in order to compete with the economies of scale enjoyed larger competitors, while the Immigrant's Protective League (IPL) established waiting rooms, provided interpreters, procured transportation, jobs, and lodging, helped locate relatives, and screened employment agencies, banks, and schools. The Country Life Movement tried to make the agrarian environment more attractive, to bring some of the amenities of urban living to farmers, and to stem the "rural drain" to cities, especially for young people. Perhaps the most ambitious and effective voluntary efforts of all were the "social settlements," in which young women and men, imbued with a mixture of the "new social science' and the Social Gospel, and funded mainly by churches and philanthropic organization, actually resided and worked among the urban underclasses to help them better living and working conditions. Thousands joined groups dedicated to ameliorating or prohibiting the abuses of child labor. <br />
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No matter how successful they were operating in the private sector, most organizations also eventually turned to political action--lobbying government at all levels for favorable legislation, backing the most amenable candidates and parties, and electioneering at the "grass-roots." Many turned to political action because their perceived adversaries were doing the same thing, and because their leaders came to realize that only government possessed the necessary leverage to accomplish their goals. Organized labor found its "pure and simple trade unionism" ineffectual as long as unions were considered "conspiracies," "yellow dog contracts" and labor spies were legal, and strikes and boycotts could be easily halted by injunctions and law suits. Trade associations and consumer leagues found that "fair trade" laws and regulatory legislation could rein in "big business." The Country Life Movement evolved into the Country Life Commission in 1908, while agrarian organizations lobbied for the county agent system, agricultural "extension" programs, and government subsidies to institutions engaged in agricultural education. The WTUL found that "political action, then, was required along with trade union activities to secure better conditions, a decent wage, a limit on hours, and the right to bargain and organize without harassment." The IPL "urged that local and national government take over tasks begun by private begun by private organizations. Settlement residents found that political action was necessary because "to stay aloof from it might be to lose one opportunity of sharing the life of the neighborhood," and because "private beneficence is inadequate to deal with the vast numbers of the city's disinherited. The largely unorganized urban masses, caught in the web of impersonal economic forces and under increasing pressure from "nativists" and immigration restrictionists, had little recourse but to rely upon their elected representatives to do right by them. Operating in the public sector required forming "coalitions" with compatible groups on specific issues, often for significantly different reasons. <strong>The New Interventionism </strong>paid off and sometimes it didn't, but without it there was no progress at all--<strong>Then or Now!!!!</strong> <br />
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<strong>The</strong> <strong>New Interventionism </strong>is hardly <strong>New </strong>anymore, but it certainly is in dire need of revival. What are the two things that Right-Wingers hate and fear the most?: <strong>labor unions </strong>and <strong>activist government. </strong>Why? Because they both empower the rest of society. Understanding that, and organizing to combat it, is our only real chance at reversing the "great unraveling" that has devastated our lives for the last four decades.<br />
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<br />Johnhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02883617794291815218noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3109801914440805625.post-34314042309812853062014-03-26T10:24:00.004-07:002014-04-04T13:08:42.722-07:00Lets "Decommodify" People <br />
There is one point on which Adam Smith, the godfather of classical economics, and Karl Marx, its severest critic, are in basic agreement: that our "market society" is founded on the "commodification of labor." To quote Benjamin Radcliff, author <em>of The Political Economy of Human Happiness:" </em>The phrase is designed to illustrate the fact that people's ability to work---which is to say, their human capacity for intelligence, creativity, imagination, and judgment that separates them from the machines they manipulate--is something that is bought and sold in the market like any other commodity." Individuals must, of necessity, "sell their capacity to work--in order to survive." Given the difficulty of separating "who we are" from "what we do," it is well-nigh impossible not to "take the further step and simply think of people themselves being "commodified," i.e. being themselves turned into commodities." As counterintuitive as it may be, the first published exposition of the concept came in 1776, on page 67 of Smith'<em>s Wealth of Nations</em>, the "bible" of classical economics,<br />
as well as of today's neo-classical version. As you history and econ majors undoubtedly know, Marx was not even born until 1818. Two of America's most revered political philosophers--Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln--both asserted that labor was necessarily antecedent, and therefore superior, to capital. <br />
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Although Smith and Marx are in substantial agreement concerning the logic, advantages, and costs of capitalism, they diverge over the structural differences between the market for labor and that for everything else. Smith regards labor as a unique genus of commodity, and therefore governed by a different set of rules in the marketplace. He concurs with Marx that employers take advantage of their privileged positions to extract a disproportionate share of the "surplus" from their subordinates, that employees are forced to submit to this inequitable bargain because of their absolute need to provide for themselves and their families when the "means of production" are beyond their control, and that "profit" comes from the owner's disproportionate appropriation of the "surplus" or "value" created by the efforts of the workforce. That being the case, increased productivity ought to result in higher wages as well as greater profits, but we all know that the reality is more of a nightmare than a fairy tale. While Smith agrees with Marx that employers will maximize their self-interest by reserving a disproportionately large share of the surplus for themselves and their organizations, he concludes that this disparity can--and should be--remedied by removing what he considers "artificial restraints" on the labor market. Doing so, Smith posits, would establish a genuinely free labor market in which the worker's share of the surplus would be set by the same "invisible hand" that determines the price of every other, non-human kind of commodity. Marx, to the contrary, insists that the guiding hand needs to be "visible," in the form of what John Kenneth Galbraith brilliantly termed "countervailing forces," chiefly the organization of workers and the power of the democratically controlled state. It is precisely that divergence in remedies that still continues to place today's progressives/liberals and conservative/reactionaries at opposite ends of the political spectrum.<br />
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The operant question, then, is how to "decommodify" labor in order to bring about "the greatest good for the greatest number." I firmly believe that the most effective and reasonable solution is that laid out by Professor Radcliff in his<em> The Political Economy of Human Happiness</em>. At the risk of oversimplifying his carefully constructed and meticulously researched argument, the task requires three basic elements<strong>: Labor Unions, Big Government</strong>, and the <strong>Welfare State. </strong>Transactions in the market economy, Radcliff explains, "depends on an <em>inherent asymmetry </em>in power between two classes of persons, one of which depends for its livelihood on the sale of its labor power as a <em>commodity</em>, and another who purchases <em>that </em>commodity in order to so profit by." Capital is always in a superior position because "its very ownership over the capital resources that allow production ensure that it need not engage in wage or salary labor in order to survive or flourish." (He makes it abundantly clear that this same <em>asymmetry </em>obtains regardless of whether the laborers are unskilled workers toiling for a miniscule wage or a well-educated, highly-skilled, relatively well compensated professional. Although Radcliff avoids using the trite "golden rule" cliché that "he who has the gold makes the rules," the same logic obviously applies.) <br />
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The economic advantages of collective versus individual bargaining on wages, hours, working conditions, and "fringe benefits" are too well documented to rehearse here. What is less appreciated is the fact that non-union employees of the same enterprise also share in those benefits, and that union -negotiated contracts enhance pay scales throughout entire industries or professions. (My Dad was a dues-paying member of the brewery workers union who was often involved in contract negotiations. I remember his anger when his fellow employees who refused to pay union dues were always among the first to press him and his fellow negotiators about what benefits they had secured for everyone.) Unionized workers also wield much more political clout in lobbying for labor-friendly legislation and campaigning in elections. Unionization, Radcliff. argues, "provides the basis for mobilization in the electoral and policy-making processes, wherein unions make financial and human (i.e. activist and volunteer) contributions to progressive parties and movements so as to become, potentially, an organized interest that sees itself as representing all workers. As historian Samuel Hays famously observed about life in the Progressive Era, it is a case of "organize or perish." Or as various commentators over the years have put it, we live in an economy that provides socialism for the rich, and free enterprise for everyone else. The most affluent Americans passionately extol the benefits of "rugged individualism," while working even more passionately to protect their own advantages by creating ever more convoluted and powerful organizations. Moreover, unions bestow upon their members a sense of "agency"---of belonging to something greater than the individual, of making a difference, of "mattering" in the larger scheme of things, of being more of a valued human being, instead of <em>just a commodity.</em><br />
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Big Government and the Welfare State are almost inextricably intertwined. It is well-nigh impossible to conceive of a big government that does not include a variety of welfare functions within its scope. It is equally ridiculous to imagine a welfare state that is not a vital component of a vast and complex administrative apparatus. As Radcliff cogently explains, the welfare state "directly transfers income from its a priori market distribution to a politically determined distribution." Specifically, it "distributes unemployment and sickness benefits, family allowances, pensions, and other kinds of income maintenance to those in need." In short, it "decommodifies" persons in a manner that fundamentally changes the basic relationship between workers and employers, and that has profound consequences for both individuals and society. The welfare state reduces poverty and increases standards of living, ameliorates the insecurity endemic in the market system, as well as the pathologies resulting from it. In myriad ways, it also conveys a sense of "agency": the ability to control one's own life and to make free choices. It enables families to maintain an acceptable standard of living "independent of market participation," and "emancipates" them from "the deleterious consequences of the market." <br />
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Besides administering the Welfare State, Big Government attempts to bring some measure of equity and rational order to the economy and the environment. The U.S. has never had an a completely unregulated, laissez-faire economy (not with Alexander Hamilton and Henry Clay setting the boundaries), but the marketplace and the desire for untrammeled growth and profit ran amok during most of the 19th century. Government regulation of the economy haltingly began with the Granger Laws of the 1870s, the Interstate Commerce Act of 1887, and the Sherman Anti-Trust Act of 1890. It picked up steam during the administrations of Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson. The defining issue of the landmark election campaign of 1912 between TR and WW was whether the "Trusts" (code word for Big Business domination of the economy) should be "busted" or "regulated." Funny thing, small business people, farmers, workers, and just about everyone else regarded mergers producing monopolies or oligopolies to be a threat to their economic well-being. Nowadays we celebrate them as if they benefit everyone. <Who was more savvy--them or us?> The reforms of the Wilson administration--aided by World War I--produced the beginnings of a reasonably effective regulatory state, and those of the New Deal, Fair Deal, New Frontier, and Great Society built upon that foundation. The attempt to roll back the accomplishments of the Progressive Era during the 1920s resulted in the Great Depression, which, in turn, gave impetus to demands for greater federal regulation.<br />
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Even Eisenhower, Nixon, and mainstream Republicans generally understood that the Regulatory State and the Welfare State were not only here to stay, but were also the necessary components of a prosperous and equitable economy.So did most of the leaders in business and finance, even though they had to contend with high taxes, reasonably strict regulations, and empowered labor unions. The result was more than three decades of continuous growth and prosperity, the longest and most productive in our history. But it all began to unravel in the 1980s, and has been on a precipitous downward slide ever since. Much of that decline has been due to globalization, cybernation, technological revolution, downsizing, outsourcing and other supposedly "apolitical" developments, but the impact could have been far less devastating if most of the Big Government apparatus had not been systematically and maliciously trashed by reactionary Republicans and "centrist, third way" Democrats, at the behest of Big Business and even Bigger Finance. <strong>For more detailed discussion see my posts of May 20, 2013 ("The Right Wing Juggernaut"), October 23, 2013 (Back to the 19th Century,</strong>"<strong> and <em>Rule and Ruin: the Downfall of Moderation and the Destruction of the Republican Party, from Eisenhower to the Tea Party </em></strong>by Geoffrey Kabaservice.<br />
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Of course, it goes without saying that Labor Unions, Big Government ,and the Welfare State are the major targets of "commodifiers,",Tea Partiers, and all those who don't understand where their own self-interest really lies. As I stated in my post about <em>The Political Economy of Human Happiness</em> (January 1, 2014), I wholeheartedly agree with Radcliff's argument that everyone---even the super rich and their minions--fare better under a progressive, "decommodified" regime. The historical record on that point is beyond serious dispute. But I am under no illusion that they will experience an epiphany and begin to work with progressives to build a just and humane society. It will have to be forced upon them.They will resist with every weapon at their disposal. It will be a long and bitter conflict, but "the good guys" have triumphed before. <See my<em> The Income Tax and the Progressive </em>Era for a detailed account of the decades-long struggle to enact the federal income tax over the ferocious resistance of the super-rich during the Gilded Age and the Progressive Era.> What can we, as mere mortals, do to bring about "the greatest good for the greatest number"? We can strive to be "active citizens," instead of "passive consumers" or "commodities in the marketplace. Johnhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02883617794291815218noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3109801914440805625.post-19572622123738519912014-03-20T12:01:00.000-07:002015-11-06T21:57:24.763-08:00ON WISCONSIN!!!On an almost purely partisan vote, the Wisconsin State Legislature just passed three bills designed to prevent countless numbers of citizens from exercising our most cherished political right<strong>--VOTING!!</strong> The first drastically limits extended voting hours into the night and weekends. The second allows "election observers," to stand as close as three feet from people registering to vote or picking up their ballots. (Current law stipulates that the chief inspector of elections or the municipal clerk designate those areas.) The third would permit those "observers" to come from any place within the county limits of the polling place, whereas they now must reside in the same municipality or ward. The lone Republican dissenter was Senator Dale Schultz of Richland Center, who is not planning to run for reelection. "I am not willing to defend them.[i.e., his party's blatantly anti-democratic <br />
measures designed to disenfranchise tens of thousands of legitimate voters, especially those residing in Dane, Milwaukee, Racine, and Kenosha counties>. I'm just not , and I'm embarrassed by this.." It's "just sad when a political party has lost so much faith in its ideas that it's pouring all of its energy into election mechanics," he continued ." We should be pitching as political parties our ideas for improving things in the future rather than mucking around in the mechanics and making it more confrontational at the voting sites and trying to suppress the vote."<br />
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The sponsor of these particular abominations--Republican Senator Glen Grothman of West Bend--disingenuously asserts that "it is important that we do something toward establishing uniformity for early voting around the state." He and the rest of the Republican caucus self-righteously protest--with their usual disdain for reality and truth--that their only goal is to promote "fairness," because rural and small-town areas don't have the money or the ability to hold extended in-person absentee voting hours. ("Fairness" seems to have superseded--or at least supplemented-- "honesty" as the operant Republican virtue>) The rest of us understand that "fairness" and "honesty" are both euphemisms for disenfranchising large numbers of potential Democratic voters--minorities, college students, the elderly, the homeless, the poor, and inner-city residents in the state's largest municipalities. As the Democratic opposition rightly insists, the proper role of the legislature ought to be to expand voting opportunities, not restrict them. Even if their rationales for these measures are sincere, why should urban voters have to conform to the unfamiliar rhythms of life and work in other parts of the state? Democratic Senator Lena Taylor of Milwaukee hit the nail right on the head when she charged that "it screams of backward-thinking mentality, all the way back to Jim Crow and you ought to be ashamed." It is an attempt to destroy the work of 225 years of American political history, whose central theme has been to expand the electorate from a handful of propertied white males to all adult citizens, regardless of race, ethnicity, gender, religious belief, socioeconomic class, or political persuasion. That history has essentially been a refutation of the arrogant utterance of John Jay, our first Attorney-General and later Supreme Court Justice: "The people who own the country ought to run it." The people who "own the country" today are too devious and savvy to openly espouse Jay's rhetoric, but their actions graphically betray their ideology.<br />
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For those who have difficulty recalling the sordid details of the nefarious Great Purge of 2012, I suggest consulting my post of September 27, 2012 entitled "Voter Repression II," as well as the definitive T<em>he Truth About Voter Fraud,"</em> published by New York University's Brennan Center for Justice. For a more up-to-date information, please check out "VoterFraudFacts.com." It provides information, statistics, and analysis on the various types of voter fraud, and on the "Voter ID Laws" of more than 20 states. It demonstrates how these statutes are crafted to prevent low-income families, students, seniors, and ethnic minorities from exercising their franchise. They have found just 13 cases of in-person voter impersonation out of 649 million votes cast in general elections between 2000 and 2010. Moreover, 12 percent of voting-age citizens do not have a valid form of state ID. To obtain a "free ID," they need a certified birth certificate, which costs from $10 to $45 depending on the state, a passport which costs $85, and certified naturalization papers which cost $19.95. This highly informative website also reveals that electoral "fraud" includes intimidation, vote buying, misinformation, misrecording of votes, misuses of proxy votes, destruction/invalidation of ballots, and tampering with electronic voting machines. <br />
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Fortunately for the integrity of our democratic political system, the coldly-calculated purge of 2012 was only sporadically successful. That it was not more devastating was primarily due to two interrelated efforts. The first was a massive "get out the vote" campaign spearheaded by the ACLU, NAACP, LWV, and a host of other progressive organizations. The other was the success of these organizations and the Department of Justice in convincing some courts to issue "stays" against " laws already enacted by Republican-dominated state legislatures. It is an absolute certainty, however, that they are gearing up for an even more ferocious assault during the current election season, especially since the Supreme Court, in <em>Shelby County v. Holder</em>, has "greased the wheels" by eliminating most of the enforcement machinery mandated by the Voting Rights Act of 1965.<br />
<br />
All of the nefarious laws enacted prior to the 2012 elections are still on the books, and the "stays" granted in Wisconsin, South Carolina, and other states could conceivably be vacated by other courts. Voting restrictions like those just instituted in the Badger State are of a different--and more insidious-order because they directly attack democracy itself. They are cynically intended to obfuscate the details concerning when and where and how voting can take place. Rather than "levelling the playing field"---which is the root meaning of "democracy"--they are designed to damage or destroy the "playing field" itself. It is horrendous enough to discriminate against individual voters, but it is an offense of even greater magnitude to deliberately subvert or destroy the very institutions that make it viable The real purpose of challenging individuals by invoking baseless objections is to foment arguments and delays that will frustrate those in line, thereby reducing turnout. They " eat up" already foreshortened time, call into question the legitimacy of the registration and voting processes, and discourage people who have already constricted voting time, due to work or class schedules, childcare limitations, or physical disabilities. In one Ohio precinct in 2012, the actual casting of ballots was not completed until 4:00 am, even though no one was admitted to the premises after the appointed closing time of 7:00 pm. < And why do we continue to designate Tuesday--in the middle of the work and school week--as election day? That may or may not have made sense in the late 18th century, in an agrarian society with primitive communications, and a miniscule electorate composed almost entirely of people with generous leisure time. Today, it is either the dead hand of tradition or a deliberate desire to prevent a lot of people from having sufficient opportunity to cast their ballots. You decide! ><br />
<br />
And what is the point of allowing poll watchers to "get in the face" of minorities, the elderly, young people, the handicapped, pregnant women or women trying to keep their pre-school children from running wild, while Mommy tries to concentrate on making decisions that will directly affect their day-to-day lives? "In your face" challenges can easily lead to confrontations--verbal or even physical-that may require intervention by police and security personnel. All that brouhaha will almost certainly disproportionately affect the physically and emotionally vulnerable. It may render them too fearful of experiencing a similar trauma or just disgusted and discouraged. The 1965 VRA explicitly forbid intimidation and interference in the act of voting, but even before <em>Shelby </em>penalties were relatively innocuous and enforcement sporadic Members of "True the Vote," a spinoff of the Tea Party, have bragged that their actions were calculated to make the voting experience itself like "driving and seeing the police following you." <br />
<br />
The ultimate goal of all these tactics, according to Charles Pierce on <em>Esquire.com, </em>is to make voting "inconvenient," and to make targeted voters "nervous about moving through the various steps needed to comply." The solution to "the problem of the braver voters who navigate the new landscape" is to "knock them off the rolls".....or simply to get in their faces at the polls and intimidate them directly."<br />
<br />
JDBJohnhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02883617794291815218noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3109801914440805625.post-4450050685468858102014-03-08T13:38:00.000-08:002014-03-11T15:49:06.527-07:00Republican Senate Task Force SurveyIt is obvious that the Republican National Committee has not understood my post of February 21--"Should I 'Renew My Membership in the GOP"?, in which I explained why I could not accept their generous invitation to renew membership in a political party to which I have never belonged. I know this because I have just recently received a copy of the "Republican Senate Task Force Survey Questionnaire," an "official project of the RNC." It is "registered and must be accounted for during tabulation," and should be "signed and returned, using the postage-paid envelope provided," regardless of whether or not I agree to represent my district "in this official Senate Task Force survey." It even has its own "Registration Number," which I do prefer not to reveal, because I want to continue to receive the innermost secrets of the RNC. <br />
<br />
Question 1 asks me to rank, from "Very Important" to "Not Important," the "importance of having citizens in my state have leaders in Washington address the following issues": strengthening border security, reducing federal spending, keeping taxes low," keeping our military well trained, equipped and prepared, repealing and replacing ObamaCare, expanding domestic exploration for oil and gas, stimulating job creation in <em><strong>the private </strong></em>sector [emphasis mine], fully investigate the Obama Administration's oversight of the IRS, and "block expansion of the federal debt ceiling unless equal reductions to federal spending are made." Question 2 asks whether I believe that "President Obama's policies and leadership have helped make the economy better, had no impact on the economy, or made the economy worse." <br />
<br />
The remaining 28 questions ask for a Yes or No response: <br />
3. Do you want the individuals responsible for the IRS targeting conservative and Tea Party groups <br />
for harassment to be criminally prosecuted?<br />
4. Are you comfortable having the same IRS officials who led the unit that targeted conservative <br />
groups now in charge of implementing the IRS collection of ObamaCare taxes?<br />
5. Do you believe President Obama and the Democrats in the U.S. Senate have made creating jobs <br />
and helping our economic growth their number-one priority?<br />
6. Are you in favor of raising tax rates or imposing a "millionaire's surtax" on financially successful <br />
individuals and families?<br />
7. Do you believe that the Second Amendment guarantees the right of every law-abiding citizen to <br />
own firearms?<br />
8. Are you concerned that rising inflation will undercut your savings, devalue your home and increase <br />
your cost of living?<br />
9. Do you believe that the big government policies and tax increases being pushed by President <br />
Obama will help create jobs and improve the economy in your area?<br />
10. Do you support another round of "stimulus" spending by Democrats that adds to the federal debt <br />
and provides hundreds of millions of tax dollars for special interest spending projects?<br />
11. Should putting our federal government on a pathway to a balanced budget be a goal of the <br />
U.S. House and Senate?<br />
12. Would you support a phased-in increase for Social Security benefits that would not affect anyone <br />
over the age of 55?<br />
13. Should retirees be exempt from property increases on their primary residences?<br />
14. Has the Obama Administration done enough to stop Iran's drive to build nuclear weapons?<br />
15. Should the U.S. expand funding and deployment of our missile defense system?<br />
16. Should Republicans demand that the federal government strengthen border security and reduce <br />
the immigration laws we have on the books before we pass any new measures?<br />
17. Do you believe Obama's strategy of treating all countries as equals strengthened our security and <br />
weakened the resolve of our enemies?<br />
18. Do you support efforts to repeal and replace ObamaCare?<br />
19. Are you satisfied that the administration has told the full truth about the terrorist attack in <br />
Benghazi, Libya?<br />
20. Has the government and news media provided information to ensure that our citizens hav a good <br />
understanding of the requirements, impact and costs of ObamaCare?<br />
21. Are you concerned that ObamaCare eventually lead to the creation of a single-payer government-<br />
run health insurance and healthcare system?<br />
22. Do you believe that you can receive the same quality of health care and accessibility through a <br />
government-run health care system?<br />
23. Do you support Obama's unprecedented decision to stop enforcing and defending the Defense of <br />
Marriage Act?<br />
24, Do you support overturning <em>Roe v. Wade </em>to allow states to regulate/restrict abortion?<br />
25. Should church-run hospitals and schools be required to pay for birth control and abortion services <br />
for their employees?<br />
26. Should federal funds be provided to non-profit clinics whose primary function is providing <br />
abortions?<br />
27. Should the minority in the senate have the power to filibuster to block confirmation of judges and <br />
cabinet members that embrace radical left-wing views?<br />
28. Do you support allowing parents to use government vouchers to send children to the school of <br />
their choice?<br />
29. Are you satisfied that Republicans are effectively communicating our reasons for opposing <br />
President Obama's liberal agenda? <br />
<br />
Several of these questions are of the "when did you stop beating your wife" variety. Most remind me of a questionnaire that I had to fill out for a summer sales job when I was a penurious grad student. The "correct" answers were blatantly obvious and diametrically opposed to my own convictions. Suffice it to say, I did not get the job. These questions are similarly loaded with Republican "buzz words": targeting conservative groups, taxing financially successful individuals and families, special interest groups, radical left-wing views, and Democrat's liberal agenda. are we doing enough to prevent inflation?, (when the economy has been stagnating for years) Several questions demonstrate their all-consuming obsession with the ACA and their determination to repeal it and replace it. (So far, the score is Repeal 37-Replace 0). Their fixation on abortion and birth control is equally obsessive and just as absurd. The one question which gave me pause was whether the GOP is "effectively communicating our reasons for opposing Obama and the Democrats."? They had better hope that they are not. Anyway, I made the same mistake that I made with that job questionnaire so many years ago. I went with my convictions. I can hardly wait to see my test score.<br />
<br />
JDB <br />
Johnhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02883617794291815218noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3109801914440805625.post-77067728088855230802014-03-01T12:21:00.000-08:002014-03-11T16:07:00.563-07:00Voter Suppression, the War on Drugs, and the New Jim Crow In a speech at Georgetown University, on the <strong><em>actual anniversary of Abraham Lincoln's birth, </em></strong><br />
Attorney General Eric Holder advocated for the repeal of laws that prohibit millions of convicted felons from voting--<strong>EVER, </strong>calling them a vestige of the racist policies pursued by several Southern states during what is popularly known as "the Jim Crow Era." Most of these policies, legitimized by the ruling of the Supreme Court in <strong><em>Plessey v. Ferguson, </em></strong>persisted until the<br />
the passage of the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts of the mid-1960s. Though he did not specifically mention it in this speech, the enforcement machinery of the Voting Rights Act was eviscerated by the ruling of an equally reactionary Court <strong><em>in Shelby v. Holder </em></strong>last year. <Yes, the same Holder, because Shelby County, Alabama, in effect, sued the U. S. government, and it was the duty of the Attorney General to uphold its duly enacted laws.<br />
<br />
According to New <em>York </em>Times reporter Matt Apuzzo, Holder "has made racial inequities a consistent theme, and in recent months he has made it clear he sees criminal justice and civil rights as inescapably joined." He has sued Texas and North Carolina to overturn voter-identification laws that studies show are more likely to keep minorities and the poor from voting. He is also urging Congress to eliminate mandatory minimum sentences for non-violent drug offences, and has encouraged low-level drug criminals sentenced during the crack epidemic to apply for clemency. (Because a close relative fell victim to the outrageous mandatory minimum sentencing guidelines , I was an early member of Citizens Against Mandatory Minimums.) "On all the issues that he's framed, he's put these two themes together and he sees them as very much intertwined," says Marc Mauer, executive director of the Sentencing Project. "The criminal justice system is the civil rights issue of the 21st century" Mauer opines. "He hasn't used those words, but that is what I hear when I listen to him." Laws banning felons from the voting booth <like mandatory minimum sentences for relatively minor drug offenses> disproportionately affect minorities. African Americans represent more than a third of the estimated 5.8 million people who are prohibited from voting. By way of comparison, they represent only about 12 percent of the total U.S. population. Nearly every state <and, again remember, it is the individual fifty states that control voting requirements, subject only to the requirements of a few Constitutional Amendments, and--until the Supreme Court moved to eviscerate its enforcement provisions--the Voting Rights Act of 1965.> prohibits actual prisoners from voting, but they vary widely on whether felons can vote once they have been released. Some states allow voting while on parole, others while on probation. Some states require waiting periods or have convoluted processes before felons are allowed to even register, let alone vote. In Mississippi <surprise, surprise> passing a $100 bad check carries a lifetime ban from voting. In Florida, Iowa, Kentucky, and Virginia, all felons are barred from voting for life unless they receive clemency from the governor. "This isn't just about fairness for those who are released from prison," the Attorney General insists, "It's about who we are as a nation. It's about confronting with clear eyes and in frank terms, disparities and divisions that are unworthy of the greatest justice system the world has ever known," <br />
<br />
Not surprisingly, felons denied the ballot are far more likely to have voted for Democrats than Republicans. A 2002 study conducted by scholars at the University of Minnesota and Northwestern University concluded that the 2000 presidential election <remember that miscarriage by the Supreme Court. Imagine a country governed by Gore instead of W. Think of how many young men and women would have been deprived of the honor of defending our way of life from Iraqi terrorists.> In the never--never-land of Florida, the state the Supreme Court allowed to put W. in office, 10 percent of the population was prevented from voting because of the ban on felons at the polls. <Guess for whom the great majority of those Floridians would have supported?> According to Appuzo, state laws have generally become more lenient toward felon voting over the past two decades as crime decreased and voters cared less about tough-on-crime policies. Several prominent Libertarians have joined progressive Democrats in pushing for the right of felons to vote, albeit for different reasons. Right-wing Republican Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky, for example, has endorsed the efforts of legislative Democrats and Governor Steven L. Beshear to extend the ballot to felons. He has also called for reducing the state's prison population and an end to mandatory minimum sentences for low-level drug crimes. <br />
<br />
To a significant extent, Holder's Georgetown speech, intentionally or not, reinforces at least some of the thesis put forth by Michelle Alexander <em>in The New Jim Crow:Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. </em>(See my post of 1/22/14.) in which she proclaims that "an extraordinary percentage of black men in the United States are legally barred from voting today, just as they have been throughout most of American history. What has changed since the supposed end of the Jim Crow system, she asserts, "has less to do with the basic structure of our society than with the language we use to justify it." Since it is no longer "politically correct" to use race, explicitly as a justification for discrimination exclusion, and social contempt, <strong><em>"we use our criminal justice system to label people of color 'criminals,' and then engage in all the practices we supposedly left behind. Today it is perfectly legal to discriminate against criminals in nearly all the ways that it was once legal to discriminate against African Americans. Once you are labeled a felon, the old forms of discrimination-----employment discrimination, housing discrimination, denial of the right to vote, denial of educational opportunity, denial of food stamps and other public benefits, and exclusion from jury service--are suddenly legal. As a criminal, you have scarcely more rights, and arguably less respect, than a black man living in Alabama at the height of Jim Crow. We have not ended racial caste in America, we have merely redesigned it."</em></strong><br />
<strong><em></em></strong><br />
Reading this book reminded me of Douglas Blackmon's <em>Slavery by Another Name, </em>but with a significantly different twist. Blackmon focuses on the post-Reconstruction South and the use of the criminal justice system to circumnavigate the 14th Amendment. Desperately in need of much less than cheap labor to replace their newly emancipated slaves, Southern planters and industrialists inaugurated a system similar to the one illuminated by Professor Alexander. Since the 14th amendment allowed the indentured servitude of convicted criminals, Southern police departments and courts responded to this "deeply-felt need" by arresting, convicting, and sentencing large numbers of African Americans for a plethora of petty crimes, real and contrived. The prison system then "hired out" prisoners in chain-gangs and other forms of mass labor. As now, these "felons" were systematically deprived them of all political rights supposedly guaranteed by the 15th Amendment. This subterfuge became part and parcel of the original Jim Crow regime, along with poll taxes, grandfather clauses, literacy tests, and other devices for the disenfranchisement of blacks. Together, these perversions of the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments remained in force in most states until they were seemingly invalidated by the federal legislation of the 1960s. As impossible as it has seemed for the past four decades, those rights are once again in jeopardy because of the Supreme Court's "exercise in fantasy" embodied in <em>Shelby v. Holder. </em>Unless that decision can be overturned, the massive disenfranchisement of African Americans in several states is almost a certainty. What makes today's situation even more dire is the fact that Sothern states still needed cheap forced black labor back during the late 19th century. Not so in today's global highly technological economy. "Warehousing" those who are "superfluous" in that economy seems the only "rational" alternative.<br />
<br />
Professor Alexander is quick to acknowledge that she has come to this conclusion "reluctantly." She admits that as recently as ten years ago, she would have argued strenuously against the central theme of her own book: "that something akin to a racial caste system exists in the United States." If Barack Obama had been elected president at that time, she would have argued that his electoral victory "marked the nation's triumph over racial caste--the final nail in the coffin of Jim Crow." Today, however, she has come to believe that his election has been tempered by "a far more sobering awareness": that what pundits proclaimed a transformative event has made little or no difference in the situation of lower and middle class African Americans. In fact, it has left most of them worse off than before. It has fostered the debilitating illusion that most Americans have become permanently "colorblind,." that they reside in a Utopia where everyone is fairly measured by the color of their character, rather than by the color of their skin. <br />
<br />
Alexander relates the story of her "conversion" in a few pages. Most of it occurred during her tenure as director of the Racial Justice Project of the ACLU. She gradually shifted her focus from discrimination in employment to criminal justice reform "and dedicated myself to the task of working with others to identify and eliminate racial bias whenever and wherever it reared its ugly head." By the time she left the ACLU, she had become convinced that the criminal justice "was not just another institution infected with racial bias--but rather a different beast altogether." It was only "quite belatedly" that she came to see mass incarceration as a "stunningly comprehensive and "well-disguised system of racialized social control that functions in a manner strikingly similar to Jim Crow." She admits to a certain amount of frustration in trying to get the traditional civil rights organizations to appreciate that mass incarceration is the linchpin of all other forms of racial discrimination. People who have been incarcerated, she argues, 'rarely have difficulty identifying the parallels between these systems of social control." She also strongly disputes the argument that the War on Drugs "was launched in response to the crisis caused by crack cocaine in inner-city neighborhoods." She insists that the WOD preceded the crack panic and that it "began at a time when illegal drug use was on the decline." It also came at a time when "well-respected criminologists were predicting that the prison system would soon fade away," and when prison populations were steadily declining. .<br />
<br />
In the past three decades during which we have waged this <em>ersatz</em> war, Alexander charges, the U.S. penal population has quintupled, from around 300,000 to more than two million, with drug-related convictions accounting for the majority of the increase. The U.S. now has the highest incarceration rate in the world, surpassing even highly repressive regimes like Russia, China, and Iran. "The racial dimension of mass incarceration," she avers, "is its most striking feature, even though "people of all colors<em> </em>use and sell drugs at remarkably similar rates." In fact, various studies suggest that young white youths are more likely to engage in drug crimes than are people of color. Why then, she asks, is it that black men in several large cities have been imprisoned for drug crimes at rates of 25 to 50 times greater, and that as many as 80 percent of young African American men now have criminal records and "are thus subject to legalized discrimination for the rest of their lives."? These, she proclaims, are "a part of a growing undercaste permanently locked up and locked out of mainstream society." Her book, Alexander insists, "argues that mass incarceration is, metaphorically, the New Jim Crow, and that all those who care about social justice should fully commit themselves to dismantling this new racial caste system." <br />
<br />
It is a virtual certainty that Mr. Holder would not agree completely with Professor Alexander's thesis about mass incarceration and the New Jim Crow, or if he is even aware of it. Even if he did fully concur ,his position in the Obama administration would prevent him from advocating it publicly. It seems more likely that his view, at this point, would closely mirror her own when she as director of the Racial Justice Project of the ACLU---that the criminal justice system is just another of the myriad institutions "infected with racial bias." The same is true for his personal opinion of the WOD, whatever it may be. Nevertheless, there are clearly broad areas of concurrence between the Attorney General and the author of <em>The New Jim Crow, </em>including the repeal of mandatory minimum sentencing, the restoration of voting rights to felons who have "served their time," and who were convicted of drug-related and other non-violent crimes. Although neither Holder or Alexander has explicitly branded mass incarceration of young black men a disenfranchisement conspiracy, per se, they agree that its continuation will have the same results. (Even Kentucky Republican Senator Rand Paul, the libertarians' libertarian, supports restoring voting rights for felons, and that "there are civil rights components to changing the sentencing laws." While he insists that such laws were "well-intentioned," Paul agrees that their implementation "can go overboard," and that "I don't think it was intended to have a racial outcome, but it did.") Since the Attorney General is also the point man in efforts to overturn--or at least profoundly mitigate--the effects of the <em>Citizens United </em>and <em>Shelby County </em>decisions, it is hard to imagine that he does not see all efforts to disenfranchise African Americans, minorities, and the lower classes as "all of one piece." It is also even harder to believe that Professor Alexander does not see an even more intertwined connection among mass incarceration and other means of voter suppression. <em> </em><br />
<em></em><br />
<em>JDB</em><br />
. <br />
<br />
Johnhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02883617794291815218noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3109801914440805625.post-37325920377394881292014-02-21T13:11:00.000-08:002014-02-23T13:46:43.243-08:00Should I "Renew My Membership" in the GOP? I don't know how this keeps happening. Many of you possibly remember my post of January 6, 2013, politely refusing my generous invitation to join the NRA. Well, this time, I have received a personal invitation from the chair of the Republican National Committee to "renew my membership" in the party, even though "my name is not among the active Republicans in Racine." I am not sure why his missive assumes that I have ever been a "card-carrying member" of the GOP. Anyone who has even has the slightest idea of my ideological and political persuasion could never have imagined that I was ever a Republican, < My parents would spin in their graves and haunt me for the rest of my life.> even in those long-ago days when the GOP was a legitimate political party with a genuine--though largely wrong-headed-- commitment to "the general welfare." I have known and worked with a number of genuine Republicans; most are appalled at the perverse caricature of a responsible political party that has subverted their organization, and made a mockery of its principles. I am not in the least surprised that Mr. Priebus has emerged as the leader of this despicable remnant of what was once a tolerably responsible and reasonable "loyal opposition." <br />
<br />
I am perplexed that the current chairman has allowed this letter to be sent over his signature. I first became aware of him in 2010 when he waged a vicious and thoroughly dishonest campaign against the election of State Senator Bob Wirch, one of the most decent and upright public officials that I have ever had the honor of knowing. Based upon Priebus's "mud-slinging" television spots and public appearances, I marked him as one of the slickest and sleaziest snake oil salesmen I had ever encountered. Everything that he has done and said since then has only reinforced that initial repulsion. God help me, he has even caused me to nurture at least a grudging respect for the "integrity" of Nixon, Reagan, and "W." <br />
<br />
The type of Republican that I have respected in the past has been marginalized or destroyed by the right-wing reactionaries/anarchists. The saga of that hijacking is spelled out in graphic detail by Geoffrey Kabaservice in his <em>Rule and Ruin: The Downfall of Moderation and the Destruction of the Republican Party, From Eisenhower to the Tea Party. </em>He forthrightly acknowledges that the party's moderates themselves played an unwitting role in their own destruction by helping to propel Newt Gingrich and his supporters into control of the House of Representatives in 1985. Like the moderates and conservatives in Germany who allowed Hitler to assume power because they believed that they could "control" him, mainstream Republicans of the mid-1980s calculated that Gingrich could help<br />
forge a coalition that would end forty years of Democratic rule. They ignored the warning of minority leader Robert Michel, who "embodied the moderate's political sensibility," that House Republicans "also have an obligation to the American people," and to be "responsible participants in the process." They soon discovered, as Kabaservice cogently asserts, that "there were few things more dangerous than getting what you want." They failed "to protest as Mr. Gingrich transformed their party into an ideological faction and set it on its present course of anti-government radicalism." Republican Congressional moderates loyally and unwittingly followed Gingrich's lead, but the new Speaker "couldn't control the troops on his right flank because their real loyalty lay not with the party, but with the conservative movement." Even before databases and computers, and "gerrymander-loving legislatures allowed Republicans to draw safe conservative districts, the true believers enjoyed the support of a vast right-wing infrastructure of outside donors, highly motivated grass-roots supporters, think tanks, and media outlets." As the party's demographic base continues to shrink, he laments, the GOP "won't change course until the Gingrich strategy for winning House elections stop working." <br />
<br />
His analysis was mirrored in an October 22, 2013 Op-Ed piece in the New York <em>Times</em> entitled "The Cry of the True Republican." The true Republican in question was John G.Taft, who styled himself "a genetic Republican," and that "five generations of Tafts have served our nation as unswervingly stalwart Republicans." His great, great, great grandfather, Alphonso, was a confidant of Abraham Lincoln and one of the founders of the Republican Party in the 1850s. His great grandfather, William Howard, was the only man ever to be both President and Chief Justice. <br />
His grandfather, Robert, Sr., was the party's three-time presidential candidate and long-time minority leader of the Senate in the 1940s and 50s. He was universally regarded as "Mr. Republican." His father, Robert, Jr., was also a U.S., while his cousin was two-term Republican governor of Ohio. If his grandfather, "Mr. Republican," were alive today, John Taft insists, "I can assure you that he wouldn't even recognize the modern Republican Party, which has repeatedly brought the United States of America to the edge of a fiscal cliff--seemingly with every intention of pushing us off the edge." The Republican Party, he intones, "is (or should be) about responsible behavior," and "is (or should be), at long last, about decency" As a progressive, I have mixed emotions about the impact of the Taft dynasty upon the development of our country, but I, at the very least have to give them this: <strong><em>They wanted to govern the country, not destroy it.</em></strong><br />
<br />
Not so Mr. Priebus and his merry band of fanatics. The opening salvo of his invitation to me asserts that "President Obama is moving at a shocking rate to further expand government until America is unrecognizable." He assails Obama's "failed left-wing policies." < Obama a "left winger"? Not according to any definition of left-wingers of which I am aware. I proudly acknowledge my own "left-wing" proclivities and insist that the President, to my sorrow and frustration, much more resembles those long-ago moderate Republicans with whom Messrs. Kabaservice and <br />
Taft nostalgically identify.> The letter asserts that we "are now in a virtually hand-to-hand battle for the very survival of the America you and I love." The most immediate goal for 2014 is to win control of the Senate, and "effectively cut President Obama's term in half, and end his drive to give government control over all aspects of your life." My "urgently needed support will also help conservative candidates, from the grassroots up," because we "are refocusing and rebuilding our Party on the conservative principles that will slam the brakes on the skyrocketing $17 trillion national debt and improve the lives of average Americans." Our goal, he reiterates is nothing short of winning a victory that will permanently end President Obama's drive for socialist-style policies, restart real economic growth and repeal and replace Obamacare with a market-based system." <Isn't that the system we already have, save for Medicare, Medicaid, "socialized medical care" for members of Congress, the executive and judicial branches of the federal government, and some veterans? This is the system that has consistently been ranked the most expensive and least effective among the OECD nations?> With my membership, I can help the GOP "seize control of the Senate and maintain our Majority in the House by making sure these Democrats are held responsible for the devastating impact of Obamacare <Isn't it still in its registration phase, and hasn't its legitimacy been upheld by both houses of Congress and by the Supreme Court?>, and the deepening economic misery caused by President Obama and Harry Reid? <Those two did it all by themselves, without any help from "W', Wall Street, the Tea Party, and a whole raft of Republican legislators and administrators?><br />
<br />
Mr. Priebus concludes by asking if I "am not troubled by how President Obama is shredding the Constitution by ignoring and not enforcing laws he doesn't like and appointing judges who want to rewrite the Constitution <Actually, that sounds a lot like the current conservative Republican majority on the Supreme Court.>? If so, "it is imperative that you answer today." So I guess that I should RSVP my regrets, ASAP.Johnhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02883617794291815218noreply@blogger.com1