All-purpose news and politics thread: Two Steps Beyond!(Part II)

[Joker Venom]

Who's gonna tell Jon?

Good Lord. You know, I often say to myself, "Surely, Trump supporters can't be THAT stupid.", then the universe goes, "Not so fast there, Buddy!".

[Gray Lensman]

Good Lord. You know, I often say to myself, "Surely, Trump supporters can't be THAT stupid.", then the universe goes, "Not so fast there, Buddy!".

I learned a long time ago that the answer to the question of "How stupid can they get?" is always, always, always "Dumber than you were thinking!"

[Iron Maiden]

Why is this OK with ANY American? Seriously Trump doesn't know anything about policy. And he is no expert reading people either way. A room alone with Putin there is only one person who will get played and that is trump. Putin is a calculating ex KGB spy ffs. That he would go to these lengths to hide what was discussed should be disturbing to anyone. Even if details were just classified with intelligence and policy people reading it that's fine. at least there would be some records some honest assessment other than that Putin or trump say.

It does not benefit America for only trump and Putin to know what they talked about.

QFT. This ignorant man is causing more damage to our democracy than I thought possible. The GOP should change the name of the party to the Invertebrates for standing by and doing nothing.

[Mecegirl]

As crazy as it is that now days a news article can be written about a tweet. This is kinda funny though.https://thehill.com/blogs/blog-brief...d-be-puppet-of

[WestPhillyPunisher]

Actually, destroying those notes means he destroyed official records, which is a felony and high crime. Impeachable offense. Along with treason from being a Russian agent.

Good luck getting those gutless bastards in the GOP to call for impeachment, because it ain’t happening. Trump could pull a gun during the State of the Union speech, murder Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer without provocation in front of a nationwide audience, and Republicans would just shrug and say they had it coming.

[Darkspellmaster]

Good luck getting those gutless bastards in the GOP to call for impeachment, because it ain’t happening. Trump could pull a gun during the State of the Union speech, murder Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer without provocation in front of a nationwide audience, and Republicans would just shrug and say they had it coming.

That is until he turns the gun on them and then its "Oh no what have we done." For a hot second.

Honestly I hope there's s way to at least get him on a felony charge for those papers being wrecked.

Nice article fro. The hill.

[aja_christopher]

"Not a Tea Party, a Confederate Party"

"The Civil War was easy to misunderstand at the time, because there had never been anything like it. It was a total mobilization of society, the kind Europe wouldn’t see until World War I. The Civil War was fought not just with cannons and bayonets, but with railroads and factories and an income tax. If the Napoleonic Wars were your model, then it was obvious that the Confederacy lost in 1865: Its capital fell, its commander surrendered, its president was jailed, and its territories were occupied by the opposing army. If that’s not defeat, what is?

But now we have a better model than Napoleon: Iraq.

After the U.S. forces won on the battlefield in 1865 and shattered the organized Confederate military, the veterans of that shattered army formed a terrorist insurgency that carried on a campaign of fire and assassination throughout the South until President Hayes agreed to withdraw the occupying U. S. troops in 1877. Before and after 1877, the insurgents used lynchings and occasional pitched battles to terrorize those portions of the electorate still loyal to the United States. In this way they took charge of the machinery of state government, and then rewrote the state constitutions to reverse the postwar changes and restore the supremacy of the class that led the Confederate states into war in the first place.

By the time it was all over, the planter aristocrats were back in control, and the three constitutional amendments that supposedly had codified the U.S.A’s victory over the C.S.A.– the 13th, 14th, and 15th — had been effectively nullified in every Confederate state. The Civil Rights Acts had been gutted by the Supreme Court, and were all but forgotten by the time similar proposals resurfaced in the 1960s. Blacks were once again forced into hard labor for subsistence wages, denied the right to vote, and denied the equal protection of the laws. Tens of thousands of them were still physically shackled and subject to being whipped, a story historian Douglas Blackmon told in his Pulitzer-winning Slavery By Another Name.

So Lincoln and Grant may have had their mission-accomplished moment, but ultimately the Confederates won. The real Civil War — the one that stretched from 1861 to 1877 — was the first war the United States lost.

Today, historians like Eric Foner and Douglas Egerton portray Reconstruction as a missed opportunity to avoid Jim Crow and start trying to heal the wounds of slavery a century sooner. Following W.E.B. DuBois’ iconoclastic-for-1935 Black Reconstruction, they see the freedmen as actors in their own history, rather than mere pawns or victims of whites. As a majority in Mississippi and South Carolina, and a substantial voting bloc across the South, blacks briefly used the democratic system to try to better their lot. If the federal government had protected the political process from white terrorism, black (and American) history could have taken an entirely different path...

That created a dynamic that has been with us ever since: Early in Reconstruction, white and black working people sometimes made common cause against their common enemies in the aristocracy. But once it became clear that the upper classes were going to keep their ill-gotten holdings, freedmen and working-class whites were left to wrestle over the remaining slivers of the pie. Before long, whites who owned little land and had never owned slaves had become the shock troops of the planters’ bid to restore white supremacy.

Along the way, the planters created rhetoric you still hear today: The blacks were lazy and would rather wait for gifts from the government than work (in conditions very similar to slavery). In this way, the idle planters were able to paint the freedmen as parasites who wanted to live off the hard work of others. But the enduring Confederate influence on American politics goes far beyond a few rhetorical tropes. The essence of the Confederate worldview is that the democratic process cannot legitimately change the established social order, and so all forms of legal and illegal resistance are justified when it tries.

That worldview is alive and well. During last fall’s government shutdown and threatened debt-ceiling crisis, historian Garry Wills wrote about our present-day Tea Partiers: “The presiding spirit of this neo-secessionism is a resistance to majority rule.”

The Confederate sees a divinely ordained way things are supposed to be, and defends it at all costs. No process, no matter how orderly or democratic, can justify fundamental change..."

https://weeklysift.com/2014/08/11/no...ederate-party/

[Ragged Maw]

"Not a Tea Party, a Confederate Party"

"The Civil War was easy to misunderstand at the time, because there had never been anything like it. It was a total mobilization of society, the kind Europe wouldn’t see until World War I. The Civil War was fought not just with cannons and bayonets, but with railroads and factories and an income tax. If the Napoleonic Wars were your model, then it was obvious that the Confederacy lost in 1865: Its capital fell, its commander surrendered, its president was jailed, and its territories were occupied by the opposing army. If that’s not defeat, what is?

But now we have a better model than Napoleon: Iraq.

After the U.S. forces won on the battlefield in 1865 and shattered the organized Confederate military, the veterans of that shattered army formed a terrorist insurgency that carried on a campaign of fire and assassination throughout the South until President Hayes agreed to withdraw the occupying U. S. troops in 1877. Before and after 1877, the insurgents used lynchings and occasional pitched battles to terrorize those portions of the electorate still loyal to the United States. In this way they took charge of the machinery of state government, and then rewrote the state constitutions to reverse the postwar changes and restore the supremacy of the class that led the Confederate states into war in the first place.

By the time it was all over, the planter aristocrats were back in control, and the three constitutional amendments that supposedly had codified the U.S.A’s victory over the C.S.A.– the 13th, 14th, and 15th — had been effectively nullified in every Confederate state. The Civil Rights Acts had been gutted by the Supreme Court, and were all but forgotten by the time similar proposals resurfaced in the 1960s. Blacks were once again forced into hard labor for subsistence wages, denied the right to vote, and denied the equal protection of the laws. Tens of thousands of them were still physically shackled and subject to being whipped, a story historian Douglas Blackmon told in his Pulitzer-winning Slavery By Another Name.

So Lincoln and Grant may have had their mission-accomplished moment, but ultimately the Confederates won. The real Civil War — the one that stretched from 1861 to 1877 — was the first war the United States lost.

Today, historians like Eric Foner and Douglas Egerton portray Reconstruction as a missed opportunity to avoid Jim Crow and start trying to heal the wounds of slavery a century sooner. Following W.E.B. DuBois’ iconoclastic-for-1935 Black Reconstruction, they see the freedmen as actors in their own history, rather than mere pawns or victims of whites. As a majority in Mississippi and South Carolina, and a substantial voting bloc across the South, blacks briefly used the democratic system to try to better their lot. If the federal government had protected the political process from white terrorism, black (and American) history could have taken an entirely different path...

That created a dynamic that has been with us ever since: Early in Reconstruction, white and black working people sometimes made common cause against their common enemies in the aristocracy. But once it became clear that the upper classes were going to keep their ill-gotten holdings, freedmen and working-class whites were left to wrestle over the remaining slivers of the pie. Before long, whites who owned little land and had never owned slaves had become the shock troops of the planters’ bid to restore white supremacy.

Along the way, the planters created rhetoric you still hear today: The blacks were lazy and would rather wait for gifts from the government than work (in conditions very similar to slavery). In this way, the idle planters were able to paint the freedmen as parasites who wanted to live off the hard work of others. But the enduring Confederate influence on American politics goes far beyond a few rhetorical tropes. The essence of the Confederate worldview is that the democratic process cannot legitimately change the established social order, and so all forms of legal and illegal resistance are justified when it tries.

That worldview is alive and well. During last fall’s government shutdown and threatened debt-ceiling crisis, historian Garry Wills wrote about our present-day Tea Partiers: “The presiding spirit of this neo-secessionism is a resistance to majority rule.”

The Confederate sees a divinely ordained way things are supposed to be, and defends it at all costs. No process, no matter how orderly or democratic, can justify fundamental change..."

https://weeklysift.com/2014/08/11/no...ederate-party/

Not sure how to feel about this article. Has a very "glass half-empty" viewpoint in regards to the progress that was actually made. Not that I don't at least understand the train of thought.

[aja_christopher]

Not sure how to feel about this article. Has a very "glass half-empty" viewpoint in regards to the progress that was actually made. Not that I don't at least understand the train of thought.

The glass is (at least) half empty for many of us in this country and Trump is just further confirmation of that fact.

For you, it's an "article" -- for others here, it's the unspoken truth in life that we know schools will never teach because they are part of the problem as well.

More to the point of the article however, the facts seem to speak for themselves: many Republicans, especially Southern Republicans, seem to think the law only matters when it serves their agenda, which is why they find things like gerrymandering, homophobia, and racial discrimination completely acceptable even when they have been determined to be unlawful in nature.

[numberthirty]

Didn't see this get a mention...

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/14/u...rs-strike.html

L.A. Teachers’ Strike Updates: 500,000 Students at 900 Schools Affected

[numberthirty]

On the "Illinois" front, JB sounded better than I thought he would. Fingers crossed. There's not going to be much of an excuse if he flubs it.

[Ragged Maw]

More to the point of the article however, the facts seem to speak for themselves: many Republicans, especially Southern Republicans, seem to think the law only matters when it serves their agenda, which is why they find things like gerrymandering, homophobia, and racial discrimination completely acceptable even when they have been determined to be unlawful in nature.

Now that in particular I don't find difficult to believe, given those "CSROTD" posts I see here now and then (I'm going off the assumption that the GOP hasn't - at the very least - consistently distanced themselves from them).

[aja_christopher]

Now that in particular I don't find difficult to believe, given those "CSROTD" posts I see here now and then (I'm going off the assumption that the GOP hasn't purged or rebuked them yet).

I read a lot of things that I don't want to believe, but have to since they are factual in nature -- you can't solve a problem if you refuse to acknowledge that it exists.

-----
"The Racial Wealth Gap: Addressing America's Most Pressing Epidemic"

"You might think that that the economic outlook for the black community and other people of color has gotten better lately, given our President touting black unemployment is as low as it’s ever been. Yet RZW shows that far from getting better, the total economic picture for black people is still deteriorating. In fact, by 2020 (just two years away) black and Latino households are projected to lose even more wealth: 18 percent for the former, 12 percent for the latter.

After those declines, the median white household will own 86 times more wealth than its black counterpart, and 68 times more wealth than its Latino one.

If this trend continues, the median black household wealth will hit zero by 2053.

How did this happen?

The term “systemic racism” ruffles a lot of feathers. It often triggers emotional arguments about how people feel about racism and its effects. Yet concrete data over long periods of time shows very clearly that systemic racism exists.

Blacks were historically prevented from building wealth by slavery and Jim Crow Laws (laws that enforced segregation in the south until the Civil Rights act of 1964). Government policies including The Homestead Act, The Chinese Exclusion Act and even the Social Security Act, were often designed to exclude people of color.

For example, in the 1930s, as part of the New Deal, the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) created loan programs to help make home ownership accessible to more Americans. The Government created color-coded maps — green for good neighborhoods and red for bad neighborhoods — to determine who got those loans. Spoiler alert: many neighborhoods were designated as red because blacks and other people of color lived in them. This process, known as redlining, systematically prevented them from not only getting home loans but also encouraged developers in green areas to explicitly discriminate against non-whites. This often led households of color into wealth stripping “land contracts,” where they paid exorbitant prices for homes that they could lose very easily.

These polices resulted in 98% of home loans going to white families, from 1934 to 1962. Not only did the ability to purchase homes give whites the ability to accrue wealth, it also attracted new businesses to those neighborhoods, which increased property values and allowed those homeowners access to other wealth building vehicles like going to college. As a result, wealth in the white communities compounded and passed to future generations.

Even after these policies were eliminated, the lack of wealth still prevented minorities from moving up to the green neighborhoods and kept the communities separated by race. Additionally, certain structures like a racially skewed criminal justice system and the tax code favoring the rich continue to contribute to this divide. The compounding effects of these types of laws have led to the wealth chasm that now exists. Even now, these effects are felt between otherwise similar families of different races. According to the Economic Policy Institute, the typical black family with a graduate or professional degree lagged its white counterpart in wealth by more than $200,000...."

https://www.forbes.com/sites/brianth.../#67d699fd7a48

-----
"Median wealth of black Americans 'will fall to zero by 2053', warns new report"

Study predicts huge and growing gulf between white US households and everyone else could be disastrous for future of America’s middle class

"With the US set to become “majority minority” by 2044, researchers say this spells major economic peril for the nation. “If the racial wealth divide continues to accelerate, the economic conditions of black and Latino households will have an increasingly adverse impact on the economy writ large, because the majority of US households will no longer have enough wealth to stake their claim in the middle class..."

https://www.theguardian.com/inequali...rns-new-report

[aja_christopher]

(Cont'd)

So what do we do about it? Here are a couple of solutions.

Spread the word

First and foremost, we need to spread the word. As pointed out in the New York Times, despite these staggering figures, we tend to forget or dismiss the research. Do your part to spread the word about this gap and help build the collective consciousness of the problem. Now is the time to be vigilant and understand we have a lot of work to do.

To keep yourself informed, I strongly encourage you to read the entire RZW study. The mind-blowing research helps put in to perspective the severity of the situation and how the racial divide will have a continuing negative impact our economy.

Support policies to end discrimination and engender parity

We got into this mess largely because government policies encouraged wealth building for white Americans to the detriment of black Americans and other communities of color. To fix it, we’ll need policies that will help close the gap. RZW points out that no one initiative will do. The response needs to be wide spread including a racial wealth divide audit, improved data collection and tax reform. The study highlights many specific polices that we can institute and their individual impact. While we as individuals don’t make policy, we elect the legislators who do. So we should use our collective voices to support and elect those people, especially people of color, that can put this type of policy policy reform in place.

Financial Education

The wealth divide isn’t due to individual behaviors. However, because of the wealth insecurity, it’s more important than ever that households of color make smart decisions with their money. So we need to start stripping away the taboos around talking about money and promote education for issues that particularly affect people of color. That will involve making the financial industry more accessible to people of color and creating programs like the Dead Day Job Army that support their specific needs."

[aja_christopher]

And it's not just about the education gap -- something else Trump has made pretty clear, especially when contrasted with Obama.

One thing a lot of black people will tell each other is "twice the work for half the credit"... which I suppose is "progress" when you consider it used to be "all of the work for none of the credit".

-----
"White High School Drop-Outs Are As Likely To Land Jobs As Black College Students"

"African-American college students are about as likely to get hired as whites who have dropped out of high school. So says a new report from a non-profit called Young Invincibles, which analyzed data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics and the U.S. Census and examined the effect race and education levels have on unemployment.

“We were startled to see just how much more education young African-Americans must get in order to have the same chance at landing a job as their white peers,” said Rory O’Sullivan, deputy director of Young Invincibles, in a statement..."

https://www.forbes.com/sites/susanad.../#5bf67aec7b8f