“Getting Past The Outrage On Race”: Unless We Work For Fundamental Justice, Our Society Will Have A Permanent Underclass
George Yancy’s recent passionate response in The Stone to Trayvon Martin’s killing — and the equally passionate comments on his response — vividly present the seemingly intractable conflict such cases always evoke. There seems to be a sense in which each side is right, but no way to find common ground on which to move discussion forward. This is because, quite apart from the facts of the case, Trayvon Martin immediately became a symbol for two apparently opposing moral judgments. I will suggest, however, that both these judgments derive from the same underlying injustice — one at the heart of the historic March on Washington 50 years ago and highlighted in the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s speech on that occasion.
Trayvon Martin was, for the black community, a symbol of every young black male, each with vivid memories of averted faces, abrupt street crossings, clicking car locks and insulting police searches. As we move up the socioeconomic scale, the memories extend to attractive job openings that suddenly disappear when a black man applies, to blacks interviewed just to prove that a company tried, and even to a president some still hate for his color. It’s understandable that Trayvon Martin serves as a concrete emblem of the utterly unacceptable abuse, even today, of young black men.
But for others this young black man became a symbol of other disturbing realities; that, for example, those most likely to drop out of school, belong to gangs and commit violent crimes are those who “look like” Trayvon Martin. For them — however mistakenly — his case evokes the disturbing amount of antisocial behavior among young black males.
Trayvon Martin’s killing focused our national discussion because Americans made him a concrete model of opposing moral judgments about the plight of young black men. Is it because of their own lack of values and self-discipline, or to the vicious prejudice against them? Given either of these judgments, many conclude that we need more laws — against discrimination if you are in one camp, and against violent crime if you are in the other — and stronger penalties to solve our racial problems.
There may be some sense to more legislation, but after many years of both “getting tough on crime” and passing civil rights acts, we may be scraping the bottom of the legal barrel. In any case, underlying the partial truths of the two moral pictures, there is a deeper issue. We need to recognize that our continuing problems about race are essentially rooted in a fundamental injustice of our economic system.
This is a point that Martin Luther King Jr. made in his “I Have a Dream” speech, one rightly emphasized by a number of commentators on the anniversary of that speech, including President Obama and Joseph Stiglitz. Dr. King made the point in a striking image at the beginning of his speech. “The Negro is not free,” he said, because he “lives on a lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast sea of material prosperity.” In 2011, for 28 percent of African-Americans, the island was still there, the source of both images of Trayvon Martin.
The poverty is not an accident. Our free-enterprise system generates enough wealth to eliminate Dr. King’s island. But we primarily direct the system toward individuals’ freedom to amass personal wealth. Big winners beget big losers, and a result is a socioeconomic underclass deprived of the basic goods necessary for a fulfilling human life: adequate food, housing, health care and education, as well as meaningful and secure employment. (Another Opinionator series, The Great Divide, examines such inequalities in detail each week.)
People should be allowed to pursue their happiness in the competitive market. But it makes no sense to require people to compete in the market for basic goods. Those who lack such goods have little chance of winning them in competition with those who already have them. This is what leads to an underclass exhibiting the antisocial behavior condemned by one picture of young black men and the object of the prejudice condemned by the other picture.
We need to move from outrage over the existence of an underclass to serious policy discussions about economic justice, with the first issue being whether our current capitalist system is inevitably unjust. If it is, is there a feasible way of reforming or even replacing it? If it is not, what methods does it offer for eliminating the injustice?
It is easy — and true — to say that a society as wealthy as ours should be able to keep people from being unhappy because they do not have enough to eat, have no safe place to live, have no access to good education and medical care, or cannot find a job. But this doesn’t tell us how — if at all — to do what needs to be done. My point here is just that saying it can’t be done expresses not realism but despair. Unless we work for this fundamental justice, then we must reconcile ourselves to a society with a permanent underclass, a class that, given our history, will almost surely be racially defined. Then the bitter conflict between the two pictures of this class will never end, because the injustice that creates it will last forever. Dr. King’s island will never disappear, and there will always be another Trayvon Martin.
By: Gary Gutting, The New York Time, September 11, 2013
“Nothing Short Of Everything”: The Republican Leaders Vs The GOP’s Neanderthals
House Republicans, perhaps tired after working for four days after a six-week absence, will wrap their work week today around noon, leaving just five more days in September in which the chamber will be in session. And as House members depart this afternoon, they’ll leave increasing odds of a government shutdown in their wake.
Part of the problem is simply a matter of logistics: the government will run out of money on Sept. 30, and House leaders haven’t left themselves much time to get their work done.
But just as important is the fact that Republican leaders have absolutely no idea how they intend to govern. House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) and the GOP leadership team thought they’d worked out a viable solution, which House Republicans rejected less than a day after it was introduced. Party officials are looking for someone to blame.
It’s not hard to find frustration with Heritage Action and the Club for Growth among senior Republicans, who believe the groups’ demand that they include Obamacare defunding language on any spending bill keeping the government open will ultimately empower Democrats in a series of fall battles over spending. They believe it’s part of a pattern of pushing untenable demands that have no chance of becoming law.
“Heritage Action and Club for Growth are slowly becoming irrelevant Neanderthals,” one senior GOP aide said.
Neanderthals, of course, is a subjective term — draw your own conclusions — but characterizing the right-wing activist groups as “irrelevant” is plainly incorrect. The House Republican leadership spent weeks carefully crafting a plan to avoid a government shutdown; Boehner & Co. unveiled their scheme on Tuesday; and by Wednesday morning, Heritage Action and Club for Growth had convinced Boehner’s caucus to reject Boehner’s plan out of hand.
I can appreciate why the Speaker’s office is frustrated, but which side of this equation sounds “irrelevant”?
Regardless, Republican leaders are left with an unsettling set of circumstances, which makes the odds of a government shutdown far more likely than they were 24 hours ago. Indeed, GOP lawmakers oppose their leaders’ plan, and the leaders don’t have a backup plan.
Consider just how brutal this is.
A clearly frustrated Boehner seemed to realize that he leads a conference where no plan is quite good enough. There are frequently about 30 Republicans who oppose leadership’s carefully crafted plans — just enough to mess things up. A reporter asked him whether he has a new idea to resolve the government funding fight. He laughed and said, “No.”
“Do you have an idea?” he asked the reporters. “They’ll just shoot it down anyway.”
That sounds terribly sad, though it also happens to be true. The party is out of control, and its most powerful leader has no power.
A significant, outcome-changing contingent within the House GOP caucus is driven by such irrational hatred of the Affordable Care Act that it won’t accept anything short of everything. Party leaders realize this approach would trigger a shutdown that the public would blame on Republicans. But if Boehner crafted a far-right spending measure to make extremists happy, this would quickly be rejected by the Senate and White House, again leading to a shutdown that the public would blame on Republicans.
The best way out is for the Speaker to give up on the radical wing of his party and strike a deal with House Democrats by scrapping the destructive sequestration policy. The shutdown would be averted; the economy would get a boost (remember when Congress occasionally thought about the economy?); and the Speaker would win plaudits for bipartisan cooperation and governing.
This, of course, won’t happen.
What’s likely to be the way out is Boehner will promise the extremists that if they support his idea of a temporary spending measure, he’ll hold the debt ceiling hostage over “defunding Obamacare.” The right-wing will probably see this as good enough and the nation will spend the next five or six weeks dealing with yet another Republican-imposed crisis.
Buckle your seat belt.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, September 12, 2013
“It’s A Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World”: In The End However, History Will Remember Where We End Up
In a political environment that stays thirsty for clear winners and losers and operates on a stopwatch, the Syrian debate hasn’t satisfied, and is unlikely to.
This debate is too serious to be subjected to the rules of Washington’s game, even as it must be conducted by its gamesmen.
It has broken down the normal tribalism of left-right, liberal-conservative constructs, and mixed folks into maddeningly contradictory coalitions.
On one side are some of President Obama’s staunchest supporters, who are always convinced that he’s the smartest man in the room, that he’s always playing chess when others are playing checkers.
As someone tweeted to me on Tuesday night, “I support my President and ANY decisions he makes.” She continued, “we elected him to do a job so we must pray for his discernment and allow him to do it.”
For many like this woman, their faith in Obama is resolute and unshakable. But, they have found kinship with conservative, hard-line war hawks who see an opportunity to alter the Syrian civil war and place another imperial imprint on the region. Their thirst for intervention will never be sated. Their trigger finger is always itchy. Their appetite for expansion knows no bounds.
This is the might-makes-right crowd.
On this side are also those who are simply convinced of the administration’s argument: that Bashar al-Assad used chemical weapons on his own people and that he should be punished, not only for moral reasons but to ensure our own national security.
And then there are people who generally support the president’s policies but feel, as a matter of principle — and perhaps provincial interest — that they simply cannot support his call to arms.
For them, this is not about an opposition to Obama the man, but to a military instinct.
And many of them seem to have reconciled their support for the president with their resistance to this action. That may help to explain why opposition to military action in Syria is overwhelming but, according to a Gallup report released Tuesday, Obama’s personal approval rating, as well as approval of his foreign affairs policies, remain relatively unchanged.
The truly anti-war-inclined, many of them true liberals, are so exhausted by our current and recent forays that they can’t even fathom another.
And they have real concerns. Would a United States military action be legal without a United Nations resolution? How do we ensure that dropping bombs won’t be tantamount to whacking the hornets’ nest, setting in motion painful repercussions that we cannot foresee? What to make of this Goldilocks bombing strategy of not-too-little, not-too-much but just enough? How is such a thing calibrated? And why bomb at all if we plan to leave Bashar Assad in power?
This genuine anti-war-in-Syria crowd finds itself in the odd company of the pro-war-on-Obama crowd. The latter will never be satisfied with anything this president does or how he does it. The president’s very presence irritates like a rock in a shoe.
For many of these folks, everything is a bargaining chip and all roads lead to Benghazi.
On Sunday, Senator Ted Cruz, a Republican, said:
“One of the problems with all of this focus on Syria is it’s missing the ball from what we should be focused on, which is the grave threat from radical Islamic terrorism. I mean, just this week is the one-year anniversary of the attack on Benghazi.”
With Benghazi, Republicans are like a dog with a bone.
So into this crazy, mixed-up world of odd alliances steps the Russian president, Vladimir V. Putin, with a proposal — whether serious or not only time will tell — to defuse the situation by creating an even odder alliance: the Russians persuade the Syrians to declare and surrender their chemical weapons to international monitors in order to prevent American military action.
Under this new deal, we’d all be partners of a sort, working toward a common goal. And ironically, such a deal will most likely require boots on the ground in order to guard weapons inspectors and secure weapons, something that President Obama promised wouldn’t happen if Congress gave him authorization to bomb.
Now, personally, I don’t trust Russia’s Putin or Syria’s Assad any further than I could throw them, and the logistics of the Russian plan seem nearly impossible. Though at least America can now say that it has tried to pursue a diplomatic option before having to pursue a military one.
In the end, history will remember where we end up much more than how we got there. But, history takes time.
The fact that immense power should require immense patience seems to satisfy very few. We are an all-or-nothing culture, watching a get-it-over-quick clock. We dislike complexity, or ambiguity, or sophistication.
So, when the president offered no one-line take-away in his address to the nation on Tuesday, many of those already on the fence were left there with a one-word reflection: ambivalence.
By: Charles M. Blow, Op-Ed Columnist, The New York Times, September 11, 2013
“Following The Will Of The People, Sometimes”: For Some Politicians, Public Opinion Only Seems To Matter On Syria
When the Founding Fathers sought to form a country for the people and by the people, one of the central components was to establish a representative government – to create a legislative body that reflected the will and values of the masses.
In today’s technologically advanced, media-frenzied world, tweets, “likes”, emails, texts and sound bites have become the voice of the people. Politicians are left to sift through massive amounts of data points to determine the will and desire of their constituents.
In addition, public opinion polls are conducted on an almost constant basis that seek to demonstrate and frame the public debate in ways that elected officials can fine-tune and adjust their strategy and approach to better anticipate the public’s demand.
So it’s always curious to see whether a politician chooses to reflect the poll’s findings or whether they act counter to its conclusions.
Of late, public polls have suggested that the American people are war fatigued and that they increasingly fear that military action in Syria would engage the United States in another messy, prolonged conflict in the Middle East. Further, there is a serious concern that involvement in Syria would increase the terrorist threat to Americans. According to a new survey by the Pew Research Center and USA Today, 63 percent of Americans oppose U.S. air strikes in Syria, a 15-point shift against the involvement in just the last week.
As a result, this overwhelming opposition to the strikes – echoed in town hall meetings, negative phone calls and emails to congressional offices – has shaped the points of view for a majority of House members who pledged their opposition and sought defeat of a proposed resolution for force in Syria.
Kristina Miller, author of Constituency Representation in Congress noted that, “it’s commonplace for politicians to cite opinion among their constituents. When there’s a vote that’s particularly difficult or consequential, it provides them some cover – ‘I was doing what my people wanted me to do.'”
But, when presented with polling that shows overwhelming support for expanded background checks for gun purchases (86 percent support), apparently public opinion becomes less compelling and even dismissed, as House Republicans refuse to debate or take action on any bill addressing this issue.
Similarly, 64 percent of Americans support the immigration reform act passed by the U.S. Senate, but stalled in the House. “The public supports the immigration bill 2-1 and shows unusual agreement given the divisions in the country on many other issues,” said Peter A. Brown, assistant director of the Quinnipiac University Polling Institute. “It seems the only group divided on this issue is Congress.” But, efforts for comprehensive immigration reform legislation have been stymied by the GOP in the House and left for another day.
According to the latest United Technologies/National Journal Congressional Connection poll, Republican primary voters pose the greatest threat to a GOP incumbent, with 35 percent of those polled saying they would be less inclined to support their re-election if they support a military strike in Syria.
One has to wonder if, when a politician puts their finger in the wind, is he or she really looking to find the pulse of the people, or just convenient political cover? Do our elected officials really care about the will of the people, or are they most interested in casting “safe” votes (or avoiding them altogether), so as to not threaten reelection?
By: Penny Lee, U. S. News and World Report, September 12, 2013
“That Threat Worked”: It’s Critical To Keep The Military Option Alive
For all you innumerable skeptics of President Obama’s calls for military strikes on Syria, consider this:
For decades, Syria has refused to confirm that it has chemical weapons. Now, facing a limited strike, its position abruptly changed to: Oh! We do have them after all! And we want to sign the Chemical Weapons Convention! We want to show them to United Nations inspectors.
In short, the mere flexing of military power worked — initially and tentatively. And while it seems that neither Congress nor the public has any appetite for cruise missile strikes on Syria, it will be critical to keep the military option alive in the coming weeks or Russia and Syria will play us like a yo-yo.
Frankly, I’m skeptical that a deal can be worked out in which Syria hands over its chemical weaponry, and President Obama may have exchanged a losing struggle with Congress with a Sisyphean struggle with Russia. But it’s not impossible. And even if Syria cheated and stalled and eventually handed over only half of its chemical arsenal and none of its biological arsenal, that would still be a huge win for global security.
So here’s a three-track strategy for Syria going forward:
• Negotiate with Moscow on removal of Syrian chemical weapons and insist on conditions to ensure we’re not being played, including immediate disclosure to the United Nations of chemical weapons stockpiles, a binding Security Council resolution confirming the deal, a reference in the resolution to “serious consequences” for noncompliance, and immediate installation of camera monitors on at least a few locations.
• Groundwork in Congress to authorize a limited missile strike if Syria does not comply, partly to retain leverage with Moscow.
• Expansion of efforts to arm and support moderate Syrian rebels, accompanied by covert cyberwarfare on the Syrian regime, to try to change the momentum on the ground.
Ultimately, that’s the best hope to coerce President Bashar al-Assad to step down so that all sides can try to reach a cease-fire and power-sharing agreement. Yet if we’re going to sustain the pressure, we have to address these fundamental questions: Can we really promote peace with military force? Is it possible to help a country by bombing it?
Longtime readers know that I adamantly opposed the Iraq war and Afghan surge, oppose strikes on Iranian nuclear sites and tend to think we overinvest in military tools and underinvest in diplomatic ones. So many readers were stunned that I’ve endorsed missile strikes on Syria — and I’m hearing screams of betrayal.
“You can’t kill people to show that it’s wrong to kill people,” Christine protested on my Facebook page.
“When has violence, killing and aggression helped anything,” demanded Jan, also on Facebook.
The answer is: Sierra Leone, Mali, Ivory Coast, Bosnia and Kosovo. In each of those countries, an outside military force intervened at minimal cost and saved large numbers of lives. In several (as Clausewitz would have predicted), war buttressed diplomacy and helped achieve peace agreements.
We think of warfare in binary terms, as if our options are invasions or nothing at all, but that’s misleading. All-out wars have a poor record, but modest interventions of the kind President Obama is talking about in Syria have a more successful (though still mixed) history.
That’s even true in Iraq, although I hate to mention the word because it sends a shudder up every reader’s spine. While the war that began in 2003 was a disaster, two limited interventions succeeded in Iraq. One was President Clinton’s 1998 bombing of Iraqi military sites for a few days (maybe the closest parallel to Obama’s plan for Syria); it may have convinced Saddam Hussein to abandon W.M.D. programs. The other is the no-fly zone over Iraq’s Kurdish areas in the 1990s to prevent a genocide there. They were limited uses of force that proceeded so smoothly that they are hardly remembered.
“War is obviously terrible, but it’s not the ultimate evil,” notes Kenneth Roth, executive director of Human Rights Watch. “Some things are worse, and one is the deliberate slaughter of civilians.”
Human Rights Watch doesn’t take a position on a strike on Syria, and Roth notes that military intervention isn’t the first tool to reach for to prevent mass atrocities. Sometimes armed intervention hurts. Sometimes it helps. We’re left to decide on a case-by-case basis.
In Syria, for two-and-a-half years, we’ve given the regime a green light, and the killing has escalated from 5,000 a year to 5,000 a month — and, last month, to a poison gas attack that was perhaps the biggest massacre in the war. Now Obama’s threat of military strikes has turned the light yellow, Syria is scrambling to adjust, and there is some hope of a diplomatic solution.
Let’s not allow the light to go green again.
By: Nicholas D. Kristof, Op-Ed Columnist, the New York Times, September 12, 2013
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