The White Man’s Last Tantrum?

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The White Man’s Last Tantrum?

Postby seemslikeadream » Fri Oct 04, 2013 5:35 pm

The White Man’s Last Tantrum?
October 4, 2013
Exclusive: With the U.S. government shutdown and a threatened credit default, Tea Party Republicans are testing out a new system of national governance in which they get their way – or else. But is this the beginning of a new Jim Crow era of imposed white supremacy or just the white man’s last tantrum, asks Robert Parry.


By Robert Parry

American pundits are missing the bigger point about the Republican shutdown of the U.S. government and the GOP’s threatened default on America’s credit. The real question is not what policy concessions the Tea Partiers may extract, but rather can a determined right-wing white minority ensure continuation of white supremacy in the United States?

For years, political scientists have been talking about how the demographic changes in the United States are inexorably leading to a Democratic majority, with Hispanics and Asian-Americans joining African-Americans and liberal urban whites to erode the political domains of white conservatives and white racists.


Rep. Marlin Stutzman, R-Indiana.
But those predictions have always assumed a consistent commitment to the democratic principle of one person, one vote – and a readiness of Republicans to operate within the traditional standards of democratic governance. But what should now be crystal clear is that those assumptions are faulty.

Instead of accepting the emergence of this more diverse and multi-cultural America, the Right – through the Tea Party-controlled Republicans – has decided to alter the constitutional framework of the United States to guarantee the perpetuation of white supremacy and the acceptance of right-wing policies.

In effect, we are seeing the implementation of a principle enunciated by conservative thinker William F. Buckley in 1957: “The white community in the South is entitled to take such measures as are necessary to prevail, politically and culturally, in areas in which it does not predominate numerically.” Except now the Buckley rule is being applied nationally.

A Nationwide Strategy

This reality is hard to deny even though much of the U.S. political elite remains in denial. But the truth is apparent in a host of anti-democratic moves that have emanated from the lily-white Tea Party and that have been implemented by the predominantly white Republican Party at both the state and federal levels.

It’s there in the nationwide campaign to impose “ballot security” by requiring photo IDs for voting to cure the virtually non-existent problem of in-person voting fraud. The well-documented result of requiring photo IDs will be to reduce the number of urban minority voters who are less likely to have driver’s licenses and other approved identification.

It’s there in the reduction of voting hours, which — when combined with disproportionately fewer (and less efficient) voting booths in poor and minority areas — guarantees long lines and further skews the political power to wealthier white areas. In the pivotal election of 2000, we saw how this combination of factors in Florida suppressed the vote for Al Gore and handed the White House to the national vote loser George W. Bush.

It’s there in the sophisticated gerrymandering that Republican statehouses have applied to congressional districts around the country by lumping minorities and other Democratic voters together in one deformed district so other districts have comfortable Republican majorities.

This gerrymandering – now aided by computer models to remove any guesswork – played an important role in maintaining the current Republican “majority” in the House of Representatives even though congressional Republicans lost the national popular vote in 2012 by about 1½ million votes.

Congressional Tactics

The Right’s anti-democratic strategy is there, too, in the endless use of Republican filibusters in the U.S. Senate. Because of compromises made at the Constitutional Convention in 1787, some of this anti-democratic bias was built into the system (from a deal to assure the small states that they would not be overwhelmed by the large states under the Constitution, which concentrated power in the federal government).

Except for that long-ago compromise, there is no logical reason why the 240,000 registered voters in Wyoming should have the same number of senators as the 18 million registered voters in California. (Or why the 400,000 registered voters in the District of Columbia should have none.)

However, this violation of democracy’s one-person, one-vote principle is exacerbated in the U.S. Senate when Republicans filibuster even minor bills and demand that Democrats muster 60 votes in the 100-seat Senate to proceed. That means that a handful of lightly populated states can block legislative action favored by large majorities of the American people, such as requiring background checks on gun-show purchasers.

Republicans also have found endless excuses to deny congressional voting rights to Washington DC residents. You can probably guess what color skin many DC citizens have and what political party they favor.

The New Jim Crow

If you step back and take a look at this ugly landscape, what you will see is something akin to a new Jim Crow system, a sickening reprise of what happened the last time white supremacists saw their political and cultural dominance threatened in the years after the Civil War.

In the late 1860s and 1870s, the two parties were on the opposite sides of the racial-equality issue. Then, the Republicans pressed for a reconstruction of the South to assure civil rights for blacks. However, the Democrats, the old party of slavery, acted to frustrate, sabotage and ultimately defeat those efforts.

What the United States then got was nearly a century of racial segregation across large swaths of the country although most egregious in the South. It was not until the 1960s when the Democratic Party of John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson broke with the old traditions of collaborating with the Old Confederacy. These new Democrats instead supported civil rights legislation pushed by Martin Luther King Jr. and other advocates for racial equality.

However, opportunistic Republicans, such as Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan, saw an opening to flip the electoral map by snaking away the South’s resentful white racists from the Democrats and locking them into the Republican Party. The maneuver – cloaked in coded messages about states’ rights and hostility toward the federal government – proved astoundingly successful.

Still, the white supremacists faced a politically existential problem. They were demographically fading from their historic dominance, steadily replaced in numbers by Hispanics, Asian-Americans and blacks as well as by younger whites who viewed racial bigotry as a disgusting residue from the age-old crimes of slavery and segregation.

Countering Demographics

So what to do? Right-wing billionaires helped by pouring in vast sums to create a powerful right-wing propaganda machine, an ideological media unparalleled in American history. The loud voices and angry words from the likes of Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck and Rupert Murdoch whipped up white grievances, but – as the election and reelection of African-American Barack Obama showed – more was needed.

The votes of non-whites and the young needed to be suppressed via manipulated election rules; the use of scientific gerrymandering had to be expanded to further devalue Democratic votes; obstructionism in Congress had to become the rule, not the exception.

Finally, it became clear that a de facto transformation of the constitutional system was needed to prevent the rule of this emerging – and “undeserving” – majority. Thus, government by extortion became the ultimate solution. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “America’s Government by Extortion.”]

By using the Republican House and its gerrymandered “majority” to prevent votes on straightforward bills to pay for the government and raise the debt ceiling, the Tea Party is now testing whether the majority of the nation can be coerced into accepting the demands of a right-wing minority through threats of economic calamity.

Even some Republicans seem confused about their short-term goals. Rep. Marlin Stutzman, R-Indiana, declared, “we’re not going to be disrespected. We have to get something out of this. And I don’t know what that even is.”

But the message that the Tea Party Republicans are delivering to the nation is that if the American people insist on electing Democratic presidents or enacting federal legislation to “promote the general Welfare,” the Tea Party will respond by making the economy scream. The economic dislocations from a credit default alone could be so severe that millions of people will be thrown out of work and out of their homes.

The implicit warning is that you will suffer that fate — you may be driven into poverty — if you don’t let whites continue to rule. Or as the urbane William Buckley put it, you must let whites “prevail, politically and culturally.”

An Unthinkable Idea?

For those Americans who recoil at this scenario – and think it must be unthinkable in the Twenty-First Century – they should remember their history. In the 1870s, racist whites – especially in the South but also in many parts of the North – refused to accept post-Civil War amendments that guaranteed equal rights and voting rights for blacks.

Through connivance and violence, the racist whites prevailed and it took nearly a century – and much more bloodshed – to reverse their victories. What America is witnessing today is the next phase of that war for white supremacy. Well-meaning people should not be too cavalier about the outcome.

The Tea Party-induced government shutdown and the upcoming extortion demands over the debt ceiling may indeed turn out to be the white man’s last tantrum – but this extremist strategy of mayhem and extortion could also be the inauguration of a grim new era of Jim Crow.
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: The White Man’s Last Tantrum?

Postby justdrew » Fri Oct 04, 2013 9:12 pm

so it's dawned on me that basically we are looking at an attempted coup in progress.
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Re: The White Man’s Last Tantrum?

Postby seemslikeadream » Fri Oct 04, 2013 9:40 pm

Why They’ll Die On This Hill
OCT 4 2013 @ 12:11PM
The Democratic group headed up by Stan Greenberg and James Carville has just put out a report on their recent focus group discussions with Republican voters. It’s a sobering read (pdf) – and definitely helps explain the primal scream now threatening to take down the entire American system of elective government.

Here, for starters, is the word cloud for what these voters say when talking in like-minded focus groups about president Obama:

Image

The base Republican voters in these focus groups view themselves as besieged by minorities seeking free benefits, and see Obama as the Pied Piper of those hoping to abuse the system. They are not explicitly racist about the president or about the beneficiaries of the new goodies (though they had no such qualms during Bush’s Medicare D entitlement). But they believe they are losing an America that a Roanoke evangelical describes like this:

Everybody is above average. Everybody is happy. Everybody is white. Everybody is middle class, whether or not they really are. Everybody looks that way. Everybody goes to the same pool. Everybody goes – there’s one library, one post office. Very homogeneous.

This is the America they believe is being taken away from them. Some money quotes:

“The government’s giving in to a minority, to push an agenda, as far as getting the votes for the next time”. (Evangelical man, Roanoke)

“There’s so much of the electorate in those groups that Democrats are going to take every time because they’ve been on the rolls of the government their entire lives. They don’t know better.” (Tea Party man, Raleigh)

But this is the core conclusion of the study and why it helps us understand our current predicament – nothing represents their sense of loss and anger more powerfully than Obamacare:

When Evangelicals talk about what is wrong in the country, Obamacare is first on their list and they see it as the embodiment of what is wrong in both the economy and American politics. In fact, when asked what she talks about most, one woman in Colorado replied, “Obamacare, hands down, around our house.” In Roanoke, it was the first thing mentioned when asked “what’s the hot topic in your world?”

To participants in these groups, Obamacare “just looks like a wave’s coming, that we’re all going to get screwed very soon. ” (Evangelical woman, Colorado Springs)

“Obamacare’s just another intrusion on the Constitution … And I just – I’m appalled. I’m appalled by what’s going on in our country.”(Evangelical man, Roanoke)

“It’s putting us at the mercy of the government again.” (Tea Party woman, Roanoke)

“[Our rights] are slowly being taken away… like health care.” (Tea Party woman, Roanoke)

I’ve long argued that you have to see the bigger cultural and religious picture when analyzing what has happened to American conservatism these past two decades or so.

The bewildering economic and social and demographic changes have created a cultural and existential panic among those most heavily concentrated in those districts whose members are threatening to tear down the global economy as revenge for losing two presidential elections in a row. They feel they have already lost and have nothing to gain from any constructive engagement with a president they regard as pretty close to the anti-Christ of parasitic minorities. They feel isolated in a more multi-cultural country. They feel spied upon and condescended to. They have shut out any news sources apart from Fox. It does not occur to them, for example, that Obamacare might actually help them. And you get no actual specifics on policies they like or dislike. It is all abstractions based on impressions.
More to the point, the bulk of these Republicans no longer believe in the Republican party. They identify more strongly with the Tea Party or Evangelical groups or Fox News than the GOP. On social issues, the defining issue is homosexuality – not abortion. That intransigence will alienate them them even further from the future mainstream. Their next big issue: denying climate change. Right now, I see no way to integrate these groups and people into the broader body politic or conversation. Their alienation is so deep it is close to unbridgeable. And further defeats will make their isolation worse, not better, their anger more, not less, intense.

This is the deeper crisis we face – and without strong economic growth, it is hard to see how it can be ameliorated in the near future. Perhaps if moderate Republicans – a mere quarter of the whole – jumped ship to the Democrats, then the electoral losses would be so great as to demand some kind of reform. But the center is not holding. And I fear it will get even worse than this until it gets better.

Except it’s hard to imagine political dysfunction getting worse than risking the first ever default by the Treasury of the United States because a key minority feels “disrespected.”



Why The Tea Party’s Power Keeps Growing

October 3rd, 2013written by: Erica Seifert
105


Today, Democracy Corps is releasing findings from focus groups with evangelical, Tea Party, and moderate Republicans. Our conversations with these Republicans help explain why the GOP is committed to shutdown politics — and why in the future, its leaders likely will move more deeply into intransigent far-right conservatism.

While moderate Republicans want their leaders to seek what they call “middle ground,” they form only one quarter of today’s Republican voters. The most conservative factions in the party — evangelicals and Tea Party adherents — now comprise more than half of Republican partisans. These folks do not worry that Republican leaders’ intransigence has led to this kind of shutdown politics in Washington. Instead, they worry that current Republican leaders are too compromising:

The problem is there’s not a party that thinks like us. We don’t have a voice in Washington. Or where else? The Republican Party? They might as well just have a D beside their name, as far as I’m concerned. (Evangelical man, Roanoke)

I don’t have a party anymore. (Evangelical man, Roanoke)

And the Republicans – a lot of Republicans are just RINOs – Republican in name only. But we’ve really got to turn this ship around, or we’re in deep doo. (Evangelical man, Roanoke)

Above all, they think that the Republican Party has proved too willing to “cave” to the Obama administration’s agenda:

They cave all the time. (Evangelical woman, Colorado Springs)

They’re rollovers. (Evangelical man, Roanoke)

They turn to the Tea Party because it gives them hope that someone is finally “standing up” and “fighting back” against the forces of Obama and big government.

Well, I would say, the rise of the Tea Party, that people are getting involved, and they’re standing up… Grass roots. I’ve never been really into politics. And I’m getting more involved. And people I think are standing up. Like you were talking gun control. People are saying hey, this isn’t what’s in our Constitution, and it’s not what’s in our schools. And I think people are taking a stand now, and we need to, before it’s too late. (Evangelical woman, Colorado Springs)

America is rising back up and getting a backbone again, and making our voices heard one way or another, whether it’s Tea Party, or whatever else. People are being emboldened. (Evangelical woman, Colorado Springs)

They are a group to be reckoned with, because if we’re going to turn things around, The Tea Party’s going to need to be part of it. And less government and less spending, and throw the rascals out – to quote Ross Perot – is what they’re all about. I’m there. (Evangelical man, Roanoke)

I would say that our greatest strength is…we do have a lot of rednecks in our country, and we have a lot of people who are stepping out and saying things now. (Evangelical woman, Colorado Springs)

As a result, they believe that the Tea Party should form the new core of the Republican Party.

I think [the Tea Party] is good [for the Republican Party.] I think that the rest of the GOP needs to get on board. We need to all agree on some of the basic stuff. (Tea Party man, Raleigh)

I think it’s a good thing, because [the Tea Party represents] core Conservatives…So you’ve got the Republicans against the Conservatives, and they said, “You need to be more Conservative if you’re going to win the elections and get more people.” (Tea Party man, Raleigh)

These voters — a majority of Republican partisans — do not want their leaders in Washington to work for compromise. Instead, they support the kind of strong-arm government-by-threat-and-fiat that finds us now in a government shutdown — and possibly also heading for a default on the country’s debt. In the future, this majority looks to move the GOP farther to the right. It will do so at the expense of moderate and center-right voters, but in the interim, we should not look for more moderate Republican leaders to step forward to broker pragmatic solutions.

Read the full Democracy Corps report here.
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: The White Man’s Last Tantrum?

Postby justdrew » Fri Oct 04, 2013 11:11 pm

can you imagine if we were fully engaged in fresh war in Syria right now?
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Re: The White Man’s Last Tantrum?

Postby Iamwhomiam » Fri Oct 04, 2013 11:21 pm

My first deleted post! Sorry, wrong thread.

However, I'll now add this, Yes Drew It is indeed a attempted coup.

Astounding, isn't it, that our country had at its beginning and at its ending a tea party with a bang.
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Re: The White Man’s Last Tantrum?

Postby JackRiddler » Fri Oct 04, 2013 11:28 pm

How can anyone think this is the Tea Party getting stronger? This is happening because they've peaked.
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Re: The White Man’s Last Tantrum?

Postby justdrew » Sat Oct 05, 2013 12:42 am

JackRiddler » 04 Oct 2013 20:28 wrote:How can anyone think this is the Tea Party getting stronger? This is happening because they've peaked.


they were only needed long enough to set this up, so who cares if they've peaked. If the majority party in the House chooses to wreck the country, there's no redress conceived of in the Constitution.

No chance of recalls, they OWN their districts.

No expulsions, they control the House.

We either meet whatever demands they make or shit continues to spiral out of control, in whatever direction they have WELL PLANED, until we do meet the demands.

Don't expect "public opinion" to matter one fucking bit to these people. It's completely irrelevant.

There is no Constitutional Option except meeting their demands, whatever they are, any time they come up, from now until forever.

How else can this possibly play out?
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Re: The White Man’s Last Tantrum?

Postby peartreed » Sat Oct 05, 2013 1:41 am

From an outsider’s overview of the U.S. political and social schism, the OP article captures the core conflict evident between Democratics and Republicans.

While “Obamacare” has become the catchword catalyst of the crisis, the unspoken undercurrent that also encapsulates it is the issue of the extent of sharing one’s hard-earned personal resources and significant tax contributions with the less-privileged majority of the population needing such help for a basic quality of life.

While admittedly oversimplified, the historical roots of government power and control created a civil war dividing a nation along economic, social and racial lines that covertly continue today, and extremists have once again shone the spotlight on the subversive and suppressed emotional, economic and social separation still splitting a world power into two intractable, opposing ideologies..

While labels, symbols and rhetoric add lightning rod sparks to social unrest, the real revolution solution is once again dependent upon inspirational leaders to arise quickly from the ranks with the courage to be catalysts for the collective conscience and compassion actually expressed in the governing constitution and its founding institutions.

In simplest terms, a compelling voice of reason has to be heard, listened to and understood. That call has to be expressed in the simplest of terms for universal comprehension. The consequences of history demand a new oracle to speak to the people, for the people, and to inspire the people to change polarized positions.

In that continued absence of leadership, this conflict will collapse a falling empire.

And history has also found oracles to emerge from the unlikliest of places. Join us in a search.
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Re: The White Man’s Last Tantrum?

Postby justdrew » Sat Oct 05, 2013 2:00 am

why collapse? I don't see any necessity of collapse, not in the near term. Democrats will just have to eat shit and will be far too busy trying to stay alive to mount any meaningful opposition, anyway who wants to be a loser? The suffering will be entirely invisible in the media the majority view. A President Boehner is only two 'tragedies' away from reality. As for the Deep Politics crowd, well irrelevancy remains. Though any form of dissent will increasingly be met with the full range of intimidation tactics. Mysterious break-ins, muggings, law suits, "investigations" etc.

Not really seeing any way out of this. Life as we knew it, may already be over.
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Re: The White Man’s Last Tantrum?

Postby justdrew » Sat Oct 05, 2013 3:47 am

:shrug: sumbuddy tell me why I'm wrong :shrug:
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Re: The White Man’s Last Tantrum?

Postby seemslikeadream » Sat Oct 05, 2013 9:21 am

you're correct sir


JackRiddler » Fri Oct 04, 2013 10:28 pm wrote:How can anyone think this is the Tea Party getting stronger? This is happening because they've peaked.


gerrymandering


The rise of the New Confederacy

By Colbert I. King, Published: October 4 E-mail the writer
It took on new force with fears of the federal government in Washington interfering with their cherished way of life. It gathered steam with the election of Abraham Lincoln in 1860. And it all came into full flower when shore batteries fired on Fort Sumter. It was the spirit of the Old Confederacy, a state-sponsored rebellion hellbent on protecting its “peace and safety” from the party that took possession of the government on March 4, 1861.

The rebels launched a grisly war against the Union. In his inaugural address, Lincoln warned the Confederacy: “You have no oath registered in Heaven to destroy the government, while I shall have the most solemn one to preserve, protect and defend it.”

“Peace and safety” are ideals drawn from South Carolina’s Dec. 24, 1860, declaration of secession from the Union. The expression was designed to encompass all that the Deep South states held dear — chiefly, their existence as sovereign states and their ability to decide the propriety of their domestic institutions, including slavery.

This virulent hostility to the Union led the Old Confederacy to conclude — as expressed by South Carolina — that with Lincoln’s elevation to the presidency, “the slaveholding States will no longer have the power of self-government, or self-protection, and the Federal Government will have become their enemy.”

Federal government as the enemy.

Today there is a New Confederacy, an insurgent political force that has captured the Republican Party and is taking up where the Old Confederacy left off in its efforts to bring down the federal government.

No shelling of a Union fort, no bloody battlefield clashes, no Good Friday assassination of a hated president — none of that nauseating, horrendous stuff. But the behavior is, nonetheless, malicious and appalling.

The New Confederacy, as churlish toward President Obama as the Old Confederacy was to Lincoln, has accomplished what its predecessor could not: It has shut down the federal government, and without even firing a weapon or taking 620,000 lives, as did the Old Confederacy’s instigated Civil War.

Not stopping there, however, the New Confederacy aims to destroy the full faith and credit of the United States, setting off economic calamity at home and abroad — all in the name of “fiscal sanity.”

Its members are as extreme as their ideological forebears. It matters not to them, as it didn’t to the Old Confederacy, whether they ultimately go down in flames. So what? For the moment, they are getting what they want: a federal government in the ditch, restrained from seeking to create a more humane society that extends justice for all.

The ghosts of the Old Confederacy have to be envious.

South Carolina wept and wailed as it withdrew from the Union, citing the Supreme Court’s 1857 Dred Scott decision when it noted that states in the North had elevated to citizenship “persons who, by the supreme law of the land, are incapable of becoming citizens; and their votes have been used to inaugurate a new policy, hostile to the South, and destructive of its beliefs and safety.”

Not to worry, Old South, the New Confederacy’s spirit is on the move.

In June, the Supreme Court got rid of fundamental legal protections against racial discrimination in voting.

Legislation aimed at suppressing votes is pending across the country, notably in the Deep South.

Hold on to that Confederate money, y’all. Jim Crow just might rise again.

But it’s here in Washington where the New Confederacy’s firebrands are really holding court. Many of them first appeared after the 2010 midterm elections and when the scope of the president’s economic recovery program was taking form. Unlike their predecessors, however, members of this group hail from Dixie and beyond, though I stress there is no evidence that the New shares the racist views of the Old. The view on race is not the common denominator. The view on government is.

These conservative extremists, roughly 60 of them by CNN’s count, represent congressional districts in Alabama, Arizona, California, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Louisiana, Maryland, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Mississippi, Montana, Nebraska, New Mexico, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Utah and West Virginia.

But don’t go looking for a group by the name of New Confederacy. They earned that handle from me because of their visceral animosity toward the federal government and their aversion to compassion for those unlike themselves.

They respond, however, to the label “tea party.” By thought, word and deed, they must be making Jefferson Davis proud today.
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: The White Man’s Last Tantrum?

Postby Iamwhomiam » Sat Oct 05, 2013 12:51 pm

Oh, I do agree with you Jack, that the TP has peaked, no doubt about it.

However the outcome of this 'crisis' will determine whether it dies off or evolves into a yet more radical organization. Considering this a Republican-created catastrophe rather than a success, many Rs will run to the Libertarian party.

Peartreed wrote,
While “Obamacare” has become the catchword catalyst of the crisis, the unspoken undercurrent that also encapsulates it is the issue of the extent of sharing one’s hard-earned personal resources and significant tax contributions with the less-privileged majority of the population needing such help for a basic quality of life.

Unfortunately it's not an unspoken undercurrent. It's been being shouted by the privileged for decades. One need only look to the tax rates of the wealthy over the past 40 years to see why.

And I do believe a complete collapse is coming. I see it as unavoidable. Those FEMA camps were not intended for the masses, but to harbor the privileged.
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Re: The White Man’s Last Tantrum?

Postby peartreed » Sat Oct 05, 2013 1:32 pm

I also agree that the greatest probability is a continued crumbling towards an inevitable collapse, unless some wannabe Messiah with miraculous, instant credibility on both sides can assemble a mass media platform to deliver a timely message with a formula for rescue and resurrection of the republic on the scale of another revolution.

I specialize in impossible oversimplification, dreams and hope for nobility in mankind. It eases my otherwise constant cynicism.
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Re: The White Man’s Last Tantrum?

Postby seemslikeadream » Sun Oct 06, 2013 11:22 am

Understanding the Culture of White Right-Wing Rage That Produced the Govt. Shutdown
What we can learn from the Philadelphia firebombing of 1985.

October 5, 2013 |

In Jason Osder’s disturbing and extraordinary new documentary “Let the Fire Burn,” which entirely consists of archival footage, we see a Philadelphia police officer named James Berghaier testify at a commission hearing about the events of May 13, 1985. That was when police dropped an incendiary device (a bomb, in plain English) on a rowhouse in West Philadelphia, igniting a massive fire that killed 11 people – five of them children – and destroyed 61 homes in a working-class neighborhood. Although it happened almost three decades ago, at a time of immense urban dysfunction in America, the Philadelphia MOVE bombing has a startlingly contemporary feeling, partly because it was one of the first all-day live news events, captured in extensive detail by numerous video cameras.

Most of the official testimony we see at the hearings is standard buck-passing and ass-covering, much of it either misinformed, misleading or flat-out false: Members of MOVE, the radical group inside the house, had started the violence; the six adults in the house were dangerous terrorists with automatic weapons (not true) and we had to proceed with caution; in dropping the bomb and letting the fire burn unchecked, we were simply doing what we were told. The police commissioner even says that he does not know whether the children in the house had fired on the police, and I suppose as a technical matter that must be true. He is not asked whether he finds that likely.

Berghaier’s testimony is quite different. The stone-faced police demeanor is missing; this young officer clearly feels conscience-stricken about what happened, and is visibly grieving. Of the hundreds of cops at the scene, he was the one who risked his life to save the only two MOVE members, an adult and a child, who made it out of that house on Osage Avenue. When asked by a commission member what he thought about during the assault on the house, Berghaier says he can’t really answer the question, then does so. “I thought a lot about those kids. I thought about my kids.” One member of the commission, an African-American man, praises him as a hero and one of the few bright spots of that whole terrible episode. After his testimony was over, Berghaier went back to work, and found a racial slur written on his locker. He quit the force soon thereafter.

Welcome to America, people, where the past, as Faulkner famously observed, is not even past. That wrenching story of hope and hatred from 28 years ago hit me especially hard in this year of white rage and white derangement, the year of George Zimmerman and Paula Deen and a government shutdown engineered entirely by a small group of congressmen who represent a lily-white, neo-Confederate nation within a nation. Half a century of evil and insidious racial politicking has brought us to this point of right-wing wish-fulfillment apocalypse, along with the profoundly racist congressional gerrymander of 2010 and the creeping fear among many white Americans that the country they thought they understood – thought they owned — has been yanked out from under their feet.

Statistics and recent electoral history paint a deceptive picture of an increasingly diverse society that mostly appears harmonious, despite worsening economic inequality: White births are now a minority, the white majority population continues to shrink toward 50 percent, and a moderate biracial Democrat has been comfortably elected president twice, winning several previously conservative states. But a great many white people, more than anyone really wants to admit, find these facts profoundly troubling. They have been pandered to for generations by conservative politicians who assured them that their mythological vision of a white-picket-fence, exurban America was more authentic than anyone else’s. I remember covering George H.W. Bush on the campaign trail in 1992 – the son of a senator and Wall Street banker, raised in Greenwich, Conn., and educated at Phillips Andover and Yale – when his stump speech included lines about “rural America, real America.”

Of course “real America” hasn’t been rural since the 19th century, and white panic about the changing nature of American society goes clear back to “No Irish Need Apply,” the “gentleman’s agreement” that barred Jews from elite universities and the housing covenants that prevented black families from moving to the suburbs even in states where there was never legal segregation. (F. Scott Fitzgerald specifically mocks this racial paranoia in the character of Tom Buchanan in “The Great Gatsby,” published in 1925.) Every time we suppress that stuff in American life, it comes boiling back up in a different form, and the government shutdown strikes me as a long-delayed sequel to Pickett’s Charge, a self-appointed and doomed crusade on behalf of White America, flipping the multicultural usurpers the double-handed bird as it burns down the house. It would almost be noble, if it weren’t evil and pathetic and damaging.

As my colleague Joan Walsh has repeatedly observed, the racial subtext of American politics in 2013 – and hell, it’s the text, not a subtext – is impossible to miss, but every time you bring it up you get lambasted by the right as a race-baiter. I got a similarly overheated response a few weeks ago when I wrote a column about the racially coded public discourse,especially on the right, surrounding the bankruptcy of Detroit and the post-Katrina problems of New Orleans, which to my mind was making pretty obvious points. Literally hundreds of people wrote in to remind me that those cities had primarily been governed by black Democrats, as if local elected officials had anything to do with the cultural and economic questions I was talking about (and as if I had some interest in protecting the Democratic Party). If you really believe that old-school racist vitriol has been banished from the public sphere, by the way, you haven’t been reading the comments on those articles, or any on dozens of others about racial topics published on our site this year.

Of course it’s not sufficient to describe the government shutdown and the hysterical attack on Obamacare as exclusively a matter of racial animus, any more than one can describe the MOVE firebombing in those terms. Philadelphia had a black mayor at the time, Wilson Goode, who presumably could have ordered an end to the disastrous confrontation at any time but had vowed to clear MOVE from that house and didn’t want to look weak. (It was Goode who uttered the phrase that gives Osder’s film its title, and he might as well order it engraved on his tombstone.) MOVE’s neighbors, who were mostly black, definitely wanted the group out, although it’s safe to conclude they didn’t want an entire city block’s worth of family homes incinerated in the process. At any rate it’s silly to pretend that the election of one African-American politician somehow neutralized the poisonous history of policing and race relations in Philadelphia, or dismantled the deeply ingrained attitudes that led the cops to treat a tiny radical sect – who despite their angry rhetoric had little or no actual weaponry – like an entrenched battalion of Viet Cong guerrillas.

If anything, Mayor Goode’s election likely galvanized a semi-conscious backlash among the predominantly white police department and other traditional power centers in Philadelphia, a phenomenon quite similar to what we see today on a national scale. It’s important to say, as Joan has done, that most white people in America, including the most hardcore Southern Republicans, are no longer “racist” in the old-fashioned sense of the word. Indeed, they are not racist at all, as they understand the term. They do not don bedsheets and go to Klavern meetings; they do not call for segregated public bathrooms, seek to ban interracial marriage or preach the genetic inferiority of blacks. Those views endure, and not just among isolated white-supremacist whack jobs, but it is no longer acceptable to express them, even in private.

So nearly all conservatives will continue to insist that there is no racism implicated in the politics of the shutdown, because they’re so steeped in it they can’t even see it. One of our two political parties has been kidnapped by zealots who appear willing to wage a self-destructive and even suicidal war against a half-baked half-measure to provide health insurance for most (but by no means all) uninsured Americans, a plan in large part devised by the man who was that party’s most recent presidential nominee. That plan has variously been compared to the 9/11 attacks, to slavery and to Soviet Communism; it was evidently hatched in hell by Satan and Joseph Stalin, rather than in Boston and Washington by Mitt Romney and a bunch of insurance executives.

It isn’t an accident, as Joan has observed, that this plan abruptly seemed to change character once it was appropriated by our first black president. The interests of the GOP’s corporate power base and its Ayn Randian free-marketeers, which are often in conflict, suddenly coalesced with the 50-year Republican strategy to depict the federal government as “an oppressor that works primarily as the protector of and provider for African-Americans, to the detriment of everyone else.” Republicans have carefully fed and nurtured this sense of racial grievance among the white working class, leading to pollster Stanley Greenberg’s famous analysis that suburban whites in a previously Democratic county in Michigan saw government “as a black domain where whites cannot expect reasonable treatment.” That was 30 years ago, by the way, around the same time as the MOVE atrocity.

Remember all that breast-beating within the Republican Party after Mitt Romney’s defeat, when Karl Rove’s all-white path to victory had been exposed as a sham and everybody was saying the party had to reach out to Asians and Latinos or risk electoral irrelevance? Well, never mind. First of all, Ted Cruz! Mission accomplished. More important, the white-pride caucus of the all-white party, the Tea Party congressmen from apartheid America, have fought back with a vengeance. They have grasped (or understood all along) that the GOP has an ironclad congressional majority until at least 2020, and that they don’t need the White House – or any nonwhite support at all — in order to control the political agenda.

John Boehner and Mitch McConnell and Karl Rove and the other so-called Beltway pragmatists of the Republican Party have relied on angry white people for political victories for decades. They placated them and pandered to them and fed them an extensive line of bullshit, and absolutely could not afford to alienate them, but were scared of them the whole time. (Many Republican operatives will tell you, way off the record, that the Republican base is crazy.) Now those white insurrectionists have risen up and taken their former leaders prisoner, which carries a certain poetic justice. They “want their country back.” Failing that, they want to let the fire burn.

“Let the Fire Burn” is now playing at Film Forum in New York. It opens Oct. 18 at theGene Siskel Film Center in Chicago and the Nuart Theatre in Los Angeles; Nov. 1 in Atlanta, Boston, Denver, Hartford, Conn., Philadelphia, San Diego, San Francisco and Winston-Salem, N.C.; Nov. 8 in Minneapolis and Portland, Ore.; Nov. 15 in Boca Raton, Fla.; and Dec. 6 in Ithaca, N.Y., Seattle and Washington, with more cities and dates to be announced.
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: The White Man’s Last Tantrum?

Postby seemslikeadream » Sun Oct 06, 2013 2:46 pm

Welcome to Ted Cruz’s Thunderdome


By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: October 5, 2013 260 Comments
A PLACE ONCE CALLED WASHINGTON


The year is 2084, in the capital of the land formerly called North America.

The peeling columns of the Lincoln Memorial, and Abe’s majestic head, elegant hands and big feet are partially submerged in sludge. Animals that escaped from the National Zoo after zookeepers were furloughed seven decades ago migrated to the memorials, hunting for food left by tourists.

The white marble monuments are now covered in ash, Greek tragedy ruins overrun with weeds. Tea Party zombies, thrilled with the dark destruction they have wreaked on the planet, continue to maraud around the Hill, eager to chomp on humanity some more.

Dead cherry blossom trees litter the bleak landscape. Trash blows through L’Enfant’s once beautiful boulevards, now strewn with the detritus of democracy, scraps of the original Constitution, corroded White House ID cards, stacks of worthless bills tumbling out of the Treasury Department.

The BlackBerrys that were pried from the hands of White House employees in 2013 are now piled up on the Potomac as a flood barrier against the ever-rising tide from melting ice caps. Their owners, unable to check their messages, went insane long ago.

Because there was no endgame, the capital’s hunger games ended in a gray void. Because there was no clean bill, now there is only a filthy stench. Because there was no wisdom, now there is only rot. The instigators, it turned out, didn’t even know what they were arguing for. Macho thrusts and feints, competing to win while the country lost.

Thomas Jefferson’s utopia devolved into Ted Cruz’s dystopia.

Law and order broke down as police, who were not getting paid, eventually decided to stay home. The fanatics barricaded in the Capitol dug in, determined to tear down what their idols, the founding fathers, had built. Darkness soon devoured the rest of the country.

Unlike Suzanne Collins’s “The Hunger Games,” where the capital thrived as the nation withered, here, the capital withered first, as the federal city shriveled without federal funds. But, in other ways, it mirrors the fantasy dystopias depicted by Hollywood and Cormac McCarthy in his novel “The Road,” “bloodcults” consuming one another in “an ashen scabland,” a “cold illucid world.”

In 2084, there’s little sign of life in the godless and barren lost world. The insurance exchanges are open and the kinks are almost ironed out. But there is no one to sign up. Koch brother drones patrol the skies. A Mad Max motorcycle gang wielding hacksaws roars through the C.I.A., now a field of dead cornstalks, and the fetid hole that was once Michelle Obama’s organic vegetable garden. Will Smith and Brad Pitt are here, hunting aliens and monsters.

The Navy-Air Force game goes on, somehow, and there are annual CrossFit games on the Mall, led by flesh-eating Dark Seeker Paul Ryan, now 114 years old. CrossFit is still fighting the Department of Agriculture’s food pyramid, even though there’s no Department of Agriculture and no food.

A gaunt man and sickly boy, wrapped in blue tarps, trudge toward the blighted spot that was once the World War II monument, scene of the first shutdown skirmishes. They know they may not survive the winter.

“How did this happen, Papa?” the boy asks.

“Americans had been filled with existential dread since the 9/11 attacks, but they didn’t realize the real danger was coming from inside the government,” the man says. “It started very small with a petty fight over a six-week spending bill but quickly mushroomed out of control.”

“Whose fault was it, Papa?” the boy presses.

The man tries to explain: “The Grand Old Party, the proud haven of patriots who believed in a strong national security and fiscal responsibility, was infected with a mutant form of ideology. It was named the Sarahcuda Strain after the earliest carrier. Remember when you saw that old science fiction movie, ‘I Am Legend’? A scientist described the virus that burned through civilization as being like ‘a very fast car driven by a very bad man.’ That’s what happened: In the infected Tea Party politicians, brain function decreased and social de-evolution occurred. They began ignoring their basic survival instincts.

“It’s hard to believe now, but they were fixated on stopping an effort to get health care to those who couldn’t afford it. It eventually led them to destroy all the things they said they held most dear.”

The boy is confused. “They killed America because they didn’t care about keeping Americans alive?” he asks.

The man sits down. His voice grows faint. “Well, they didn’t seem to understand themselves or what they were doing,” he continues. “In the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, many of the feverish pols believed they were waging the right and moral fight even as G.O.P. party elders like Jeb Bush, John McCain, Karl Rove and James Baker warned them that they were dragging the country toward catastrophe. The Tea Party leaders liked to refer to themselves as the Children of Reagan. But as Baker told Peggy Noonan, Reagan always said, ‘I’d rather get 80 percent of what I want than go over the cliff with my flag flying.’ ”

The boy frowns. “But Papa, didn’t the healthy Republicans realize the infected ones had lower brain functions?”

“Well, son, they knew there was something creepy about the ringleader, Ted Cruz,” the man replies. “His face looked pinched, like a puzzle that had not been put together quite right. He was always launching into orations with a weird cadence and self-consciously throwing folksy phrases into his speeches, like ‘Let me tell ya,’ to make himself seem Texan, when he was really a Canadian.”

The boy looks alarmed. “A Canadian destroyed the world, Papa?”

“Once the government shut down, a plague came, because they had closed the Center for Disease Control,” the man says. “Storms, floods and wildfires raged after FEMA was closed down and the National Guard got decimated.

“Once we went into default, the globe got sucked into the economic vortex. With a lot of the Defense Department, F.B.I., and intelligence community on forced leave, the country became vulnerable to terrorist attacks. Without the C.I.A. to train the moderate Syrian rebels, Syria fell to Al Qaeda.

“After the final American president, Barack Obama, canceled his trip to Asia, that part of the world decided we were weak. China moved quickly to fill the vacuum. Obama grew so disgusted, he spent his final years in office isolated in the White House residence. When he stopped returning the calls of Hassan Rouhani and Bibi Netanyahu, it was only a matter of time before the Middle East went up in flames.

“What is left of the world is being run by Julian Assange from what is left of the Ecuadorean Embassy in London and by some right-wing nut in a cabin in Idaho.”

The boy begins to cry. “Papa, stop. You’re making me sad. Are all the good guys gone?”

Looking through the gray skies toward the ashen Lincoln Memorial, where an ape sits in Abe’s chair, the man replies sadly, “Yes, son.”
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
User avatar
seemslikeadream
 
Posts: 32090
Joined: Wed Apr 27, 2005 11:28 pm
Location: into the black
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