stillrobertpaulsen » Mon Nov 21, 2016 7:18 pm wrote:tapitsbo » Thu Nov 17, 2016 9:06 pm wrote:Someone cited the SPLC as a source, in earnest?
Those guys can't even pull off their thinly transparent agenda with any smoothness at this point. I wouldn't trust them to be able to provide criteria for anything that make any sense whatsoever.
Actually,
I cited them as a source in earnest. Multiple times on this thread. AFAIK, the Southern Poverty Law Center have been
extremely transparent in what they're about: exposing hatred and bigotry in the United States, either by groups or individuals. From what I've read, they seem to understand the context in which these activities are occurring in this country: a dominant white male power structure. What exactly do you have a problem with?
I have a problem with the SPLC.
King of the Hate Business
By ALEXANDER COCKBURNWhat is the arch-salesman of hate-mongering, Mr. Morris Dees of the Southern Poverty Law Center doing now? He’s saying that the election of a black president proves his point. Hate is on the rise! Send money!
Without skipping a beat, the mailshot moguls, who year after year make money selling the notion there’s been a right resurgence out there in the hinterland with massed legions of haters, have used the election of a black president to say that, yes, hate is on the rise and America ready to burst apart at the seams, with millions of extremists primed to march down Main Street draped in Klan robes, a copy of Mein Kampf tucked under one arm and a Bible under the other, available for sneak photographs from minions of Chip Berlet, another salesman of the Christian menace, ripely endowed with millions to battle the legions of the cross.
Ever since 1971 US Postal Service mailbags have bulged with Dees’ fundraising letters, scaring dollars out of the pockets of trembling liberals aghast at his lurid depictions of hate-sodden America, in dire need of legal confrontation by the SPLC. Nine years ago Ken Silverstein wrote a devastating commentary on Dees and the SPLC in Harpers, dissecting a typical swatch of Dees’ solicitations. At that time, as Silverstein pointed out, the SPLC was “the wealthiest civil rights group in America,” with $120 million in assets.
As of October 2008 the net assets of the SPLC were $170,240,129, The merchant of hate himself, Mr. Dees, was paid an annual $273,132 as chief trial counsel, and the SPLC’s president and CEO, Richard Cohen, $290,193. Total revenue in 2007 was $44,727,257 and program expenses $20,804,536. In other words, the Southern Poverty Law Center was raising twice as much as it was spending on its proclaimed mission. Fund-raising and administrative expenses accounted for $9 million, leaving $14 million to be put in the center’s vast asset portfolio.
The 990 non profit tax record for the SPLC indicates that the assets fell by about $50 million last year, meaning that like almost all non profits the SPLC took a bath in the stock crash. So what was thr end result of all that relentless hoarding down the year, as people of modest means, scared by Dees, sent him their contributions. Were they put to good use? It doesn’t seem so. They vanished in an electronic blip.
But where are the haters? That hardy old stand-by, the KKK, despite the SPLC’s predictable howls about an uptick in its chapters, is a moth-eaten and depleted troupe, at least 10 per cent of them on the government payroll as informants for the FBI. As Noel Ignatiev once remarked in his book Race Traitor, there isn’t a public school in any county in the USA that doesn’t represent a menace to blacks a thousand times more potent than that offered by the KKK, just as there aren’t many such schools that probably haven’t been propositioned by Dees to buy one of the SPLC’s “tolerance” programs. What school is going to go on record rejecting Dees-sponsored tolerance?
Dees and his hate-seekers scour the landscape for hate like the arms manufacturers inventing new threats and for the same reason: it’s their staple.
The SPLC’s latest “Year in Hate” report claims that “in 2008 the number of hate groups rose to 926, up 4 per cent from 2007, and 54 per cent since 2000.” The SPLC doesn’t measure the number of members in the groups, meaning they probably missed me. Change that total to 927. I’m a hate group, meaning in Dees-speak, “one with beliefs or practices that attack or malign an entire class of people,” starting with Dick Cheney. I love to dream of him being water-boarded, subjected to loops of Schonberg played at top volume, locked up naked in a meat locker. But the nation’s haters are mostly like me, enjoying their (increasingly circumscribed) constitutionally guaranteed right to hate, solitary, disorganized, prone to sickening relapses into love, or at least the sort of amiable tolerance for All Mankind experienced when looking at photos of Carla Bruni and Princess Letizia of Spain kissing.
The effective haters are big, powerful easily identifiable entities. Why is Dees fingering militia men in a potato field in Idaho when we have identifiable, well-organized groups which the SPLC could take on. To cite reports from the Urban League, and United for a Fair Economy, minorities are more than three times as likely to hold high-cost subprime loans, foisted on them by predatory lenders, meaning the big banks; “all black and latino subprime borrowers could stand to lose between $164 billion and $213 billion for loans taken during the past eight years.”
Get those bankers and big mortgage touts into court, chief counsel Dees! How about helping workers fired by people who hate anyone trying to organize a union? What about defending immigrants rounded up in ICE raids? How about attacking the roots of southern poverty, and the system that sustains that poverty as expressed in the endless prisons and Death Rows across the south, disproportionately crammed with blacks and Hispanics?
You fight theatrically, the Dees way, or you fight substantively, like Stephen Bright, who makes only $11,000 as president and senior counsel of the Southern Center for Human Rights. The center’s director makes less than $50,000. It has net assets of a bit over $4.5 million and allocates about $1.6 million a year for expenses, 77 percent of its annual revenue. Bright’s outfit is basically dedicated to two things: prison litigation and the death penalty. He fights the system, case by case. Not the phony targets mostly tilted at by Dees but the effective, bipartisan, functional system of oppression, far more deadly and determined than the SPLC’s tin-pot hate groups. Tear up your check to Dees and send it to Bright,(
http://www.schr.org/) or to the Institute for Southern Studies (
http://www.southernstudies.org.html) run by Chris Kromm, which has been doing brilliant spadework on the economy, on poverty and on exploitation in the south for four decades.
History
The Southern Center for Human Rights was founded in 1976 by ministers and activists concerned about criminal justice issues in response to the Supreme Court's reinstatement of the death penalty that year and to the horrendous conditions in Southern prisons and jails. Its creation followed the historic case of Gates v. Collier, 349 F.Supp. 881 (N.D. Miss.1972). affirmed, Gates v. Collier, 501 F.2d 1291 (5th Cir. 1974), brought in federal court in the Northern District of Mississippi, which ending egregious constitutional violations at the Mississippi State Penitentiary (Parchman Farm). For a detailed description of the horrific abuses at Parchman Farm, click on the two court decisions. For a description of Mississippi's use of its criminal justice system to maintain white supremacy after Emancipation through convict leasing and Parchman Farm, see David M. Oshinsky, Worse than Slavery: Parchman Farm and the Ordeal of Jim Crow Justice (Free Press 1996).
Originally named the Southern Prisoners Defense Committee, the organization's attorneys and investigators struggled alongside civil rights organizations, families, and faith-based organizations to protect the civil and human rights of people of color, poor people, and other disadvantaged people facing the death penalty or confined to prisons and jails in the South.
After the 1970s, the criminal justice system exploded in size and reach. After holding steady for 150 years, the number of people imprisoned in the United States increased from around 200,000 to over 2 million. The United States now has the highest incarceration rate of any nation in the world.
In addition to providing representation to people facing the death penalty, SCHR employs class action lawsuits and individual representation in challenging unconstitutional and unconscionable practices within the criminal justice system. It also engages in public education and joint efforts with other organizations and individuals to oppose the death penalty and overcrowding of prisons and jails, to advocate for effective representation for poor people accused of crimes, just and humane sentencing policies and the fair, equal, and humane treatment of all people who come into the criminal justice system.
I suppose it comes down to whether one considers which aspects of "hate" speech (*) can be considered as free speech.
(*) hate as as defined by whom?
This is an issue that is also linked with technology, and which is coming up everywhere.
https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2016/nov/24/free-speech-talking-point-sierra-leone-whatsapp-storm-rages
