“There Is No Simpler Way To Put It”: Cliven Bundy’s An Old-Fashioned Racist – And He’s Not Alone
When I was a kid growing up in South Carolina, I was racist. I used the ‘n” word. I was taught that word by those around me, men and women who I looked to for moral guidance. My late father was a horrible bigot and he truly believed black people were simply beneath him. My late grandmother didn’t really use that word around me but she made it clear by her actions that anyone who wasn’t white was simply “lesser.”
Yet, these were two people who had more influence over me than pretty much anyone else in my youth. I loved them both and even today their deaths affect me emotionally.
When I was finally able to admit and embrace being gay to my family, something in me changed. I was moved from a place of hate to a place of empathy. I began to see the world not through the eyes of a privileged white Southern kid but from the perspective of someone on the other side of the railroad tracks. It was, in a word, sobering.
When I hear white people talk about race, I get a little clammy. When I hear Cliven Bundy talk about race, I get really pissed off. This “tea party” favorite, an American grandfather who’s a rancher with a very loyal family, seems to have bared his soul for the press. He likes the bully pulpit that comes from being a “taker,” a freeloader, a tax evader. He’s a man who doesn’t recognize the U.S. government in any way shape fashion or form. He’s also a man who said this, as reported by the New York Times:
“I want to tell you one more thing I know about the Negro,” he said. Mr. Bundy recalled driving past a public-housing project in North Las Vegas, “and in front of that government house the door was usually open and the older people and the kids — and there is always at least a half a dozen people sitting on the porch — they didn’t have nothing to do. They didn’t have nothing for their kids to do. They didn’t have nothing for their young girls to do.
“And because they were basically on government subsidy, so now what do they do?” he asked. “They abort their young children, they put their young men in jail, because they never learned how to pick cotton. And I’ve often wondered, are they better off as slaves, picking cotton and having a family life and doing things, or are they better off under government subsidy? They didn’t get no more freedom. They got less freedom.”
The “negro?” Picking cotton? Seriously? Who the hell is this guy? Let me tell you who Cliven Bundy is. He’s a bigot who believes in “freedom.” In case it’s lost on you, Bundy is the ultimate government subsidy. He believes in feeding his cattle for free. He doesn’t believe he owes federal taxes. He doesn’t believe in the rule of federal law. Bundy is purely and simply a common criminal who deserves to go to jail.
He believes in using us in the press as his bully pulpit and we let him. Bundy believes in a land mass of 50 states, not one nation of 50 states. He’s a secessionist. He’s not a patriot as some have called him. George Washington was a patriot – who, not for nothing, used force to put down citizens who refused to pay the federal excise tax in the Whiskey Rebellion. Abraham Lincoln was a patriot, who by the way implemented the federal income tax. I’d love to hear Bundy’s wise opinion on Lincoln. No doubt he’ll tell us if we let him. No doubt we’ll give him that microphone. We should.
I guess the question we must ask is, does Cliven Bundy represent a thin and narrow sliver of American society or is he something bigger? With freedom fighters and birthers and tea partiers and their ilk rallying behind him and his right to steal from the American taxpayer, I’m convinced this man is no sliver of hate. Clearly, the freedom fighters hate what America has become and they’re convinced President Obama is leading us all down the path to Hell. Their new spokesman? Cliven Bundy.
This Bundy fellow isn’t a one-off. Conservative opinion columnist George Will seems to think so. He has opined that Democrats scream racism anytime we don’t like what we’re hearing. I’d probably agree if this were just Bundy but it’s not. Just Google Cliven Bundy and you’ll see his following, his supporters, his freedom followers. Even fools like Allen West support this racist.
I don’t know Mr. Bundy but I knew his type when I was a kid. There’s not much difference between my father and Bundy. That makes me sad. I always held my father on a pedestal even with his grotesque flaws. When I hear the Cliven Bundys of the world spew out their filth, their racism, I’m reminded of my ignorant childhood, of my grandmother’s and daddy’s view of the world and I’m horrified.
By: Jimmie Williams, an MSNBC Political Contributor; Published in U. S. News and World Report, April 24, 2014
“Now We Know”: Economic Inequality Is A Malady — Not A Cure
It has been a long, long time since Americans accepted the advice of a French intellectual about anything important, let alone the future of democracy and the economy. But the furor over Thomas Piketty’s stunning bestseller, Capital in the 21st Century – and especially the outraged reaction from the Republican right – suggests that this fresh import from la belle France has struck an exposed nerve.
What Monsieur Piketty proves, with his massive data set and complex analytical tools, is something that many of us – including Pope Francis — have understood both intuitively and intellectually: namely that human society, both here and globally, has long been grossly inequitable and is steadily becoming more so, to our moral detriment.
What Piketty strongly suggests is that the structures of capitalism not only regenerate worsening inequality, but now drive us toward a system of economic peonage and political autocracy.
The underlying equation he derives is simple enough: r > g, meaning the return on capital (property, stock, and other forms of ownership) is consistently higher than economic growth. How much higher? Since the early 1800s, financiers and landowners have enjoyed returns of roughly five percent annually, while economic growth benefiting everyone has lagged, averaging closer to 1 or 2 percent. This formula has held fairly steady across time and space. While other respectable economists may dispute his methodology and even his conclusions, they cannot dismiss his conclusions.
As a work of history and social science, Capital in the 21st Century outlines a fundamental issue while providing little in policy terms. Piketty mildly suggests that nations might someday cooperate in a progressive and global taxation of capital gains, with shared proceeds. There isn’t much reason to hope for any such happy solution. But then it isn’t up to Piketty to solve the problem.
He has already done America and the world a profound service by demolishing the enormous shibboleth that has long stood as an obstacle to almost every attempt at economic reform, from raising the minimum wage to restoring progressive taxation: Only if we coddle the very wealthy – and protect them from taxation and regulation — can we hope to restore growth, employment, and prosperity. Only if we meekly accept the revolting displays of power and consumption by the very fortunate few can we expect them to bestow any blessing, however small, on the toiling many.
If you read Piketty – whose translation into English by Arthur Goldhammer makes macro-economics a literary pleasure – you will quickly realize that we’ve been told a big lie about this most basic social bargain. The stratospheric accumulation of rewards accruing to the top 0.01 percent of owners, at the expense of society and everyone else, is not only unnecessary to promote growth; in fact, that unfair dispensation retards growth.
Rather than argue honestly with Piketty’s findings, right-wing responses have varied from old-fashioned redbaiting, although he is plainly no communist, to juvenile misrepresentation of a book that at least one critic admits she didn’t bother to read! The boneheaded Tea Party reaction is to accuse him of demanding that sanitation workers earn the same salary as surgeons – although he explicitly agrees that a degree of inequality is important to encourage innovation, enterprise, and industry.
“I have no interest in denouncing inequality or capitalism per se,” he notes early in the book. But then the wing-nuts and trolls attacking him have no interest in debate, let alone knowledge. They hate social science just as much as they hate plain old science.
For the rest of us, Piketty’s opus poses an epochal challenge. Confronted with the truth about exacerbating inequality and the costs imposed on democratic society, what are we going to do about it? History provides a few clues if not a blueprint. The highest level of economic equality and social strength in the West arrived during the postwar era – back when unions were strong, taxes restrained the rich, minimum wages were higher, and redistribution was not a dirty word.
It will be the task of the next generation to restore decency and democracy – and save the planet — against the ferocious political resistance of the super-rich. They can now begin by discarding the ideological illusions that Piketty has so neatly dispatched.
By: Joe Conason, Editor in Chief of NationalMemo.com; Cross-Posted in TruthDig, The National Memo, April 25, 2014
“A Rising Up From Within”: NRA Members Need To Step Up On Ending Gun Violence
Please, Mr. Bloomberg… leave the checkbook open, but step away from the podium.
Your efforts to curb gun violence and improve firearms safety are notable. The National Rifle Association thanks you.
For years, former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg has been the best membership recruitment tool the NRA could hope for: a walking, talking, Big Gulp-banning embodiment of government overreach. And look what he’s done now… given the NRA yet another gift on the eve of their national convention.
In Bloomberg’s mind, his new national organization, Everytown for Gun Safety, is is a much-needed counter to the NRA: a grassroots effort that will encourage pro-gun-control voters to step up to the polls, press for expanding background checks at the state and national levels, and make sure states keep guns away from the dangerously mentally ill and domestic-violence offenders.
Everytown for Gun Safety seeks to accomplish virtually everything the NRA has opposed in recent years. Its agenda is filled with action that needs to happen to ensure more Americans don’t die by gunfire, whether accidental, suicidal or homicidal. And Bloomberg, a billionaire, is bankrolling it with $50 million.
That’s not the problem. What is worrisome is that Bloomberg plans on chairing the new group. At this point, he seems determined to be its most out-front face.
Great. He might as well have just handed the NRA talking points for its Indianapolis convention, which begins April 25.
The sad fact about the gun debate in America is that the voices on the extremes are the loudest, and they drown out those in the middle. Yes, there is a middle ground. Bloomberg just rarely conveys it.
In an interview with The New York Times to announce Everytown, he praised himself for his good deeds: “If there is a God, when I get to heaven I’m not stopping to be interviewed. I am heading straight in. I have earned my place in heaven. It’s not even close.”
This declaration was made with a smile, but the joke reveals one of Bloomberg’s qualities, his arrogance, which has a way of putting off even those of us who agree that secondhand cigarette smoke is dangerous, trans fats are unhealthy and large sugary soft drinks are a dietary scourge. And, oh yes, guns need to be better controlled.
But it wasn’t the common-sense messaging that took the lead following the introduction of Everytown for Gun Safety. No, it was Bloomberg.
The Washington Times didn’t waste an opportunity to twit the great potentate on his pompous gates-of-heaven-quote. Its editorial was headlined “Sainthood for gun-grabbing ex-Mayor Bloomberg.” The piece painted Bloomberg as a money-wasting loser, making great sport of the pro-gun-control candidates he has backed who have lost elections.
In truth, NRA-bankrolled candidates have also seen their share of defeat in recent elections. But that’s the sort of fact-check that both sides conveniently leave out. It’s in the middle ground where reason lies, where the really effective mobilizing needs to occur.
Want to move gun control efforts in this country? Energize the former or current NRA members who believe the organization no longer represents their interests.
They’re out there. The hunters, marksmen and concealed-carry license holders who readily acknowledge that violent crime is down and that there is little use for a hunter to have a military-grade weapon. Peruse hunter listservs and listen to people talk about fearing the hyped-up shooters who carry magazines to track small game like quail. Listen to families who have lost members to suicides — deaths that could have been prevented had a gun been locked away from a depressed person.
Vilifying the NRA can actually be counterproductive. It merely puffs up the organization’s most alarmist elements.
What really needs to happen is a change of thinking within the NRA membership: a rising up from within the ranks of the calm and reasonable gun owners. The stage is wide open for an effective spokesperson. Maybe a celebrity with a passion for hunting and a deep conviction that stopping many of the 31,000 American deaths to gunfire each year is not only doable, it’s an American obligation.
For all the good he has accomplished, Bloomberg just isn’t the man for that cause.
By: Mary Sanchez, The National Memo, April 22, 2014
“How Wayne LaPierre Increases Gun Sales”: Completely Freaking Out The Public About Some Imminent Demise Of Law And Order
The National Rifle Association is holding their annual conference in Indianapolis this year, and Wayne LaPierre is sounding more unhinged than ever. He sounds almost as paranoid as our quail-hunting former vice-president.
Perhaps the nation’s most visible gun rights advocate, LaPierre drew a stark picture of the dangers that he said plague the country and argued the government has failed to protect its citizens.
“We know that in the world that surrounds us there are terrorists, home invaders, drug cartels, car jackers, ‘knock-out’ gamers, rapers, haters, campus killers, airport killers, shopping mall killers, and killers who scheme to destroy our country with massive storms of violence against our power grids or vicious waves of chemicals or disease that could collapse as a society that sustains us all,” he said.
“So I ask you this afternoon: do you trust this government really to protect you and your family?” he continued. “We’re on our own. That’s a certainty.”
LaPierre got so worked up there that basic grammar broke down for him. I don’t know quite what to make from such heated rhetoric. Is it some kind of sign of desperation? Do the people who travel to NRA conferences really need to be sustained on this level of high-octane bugnuttery?
Notice the incredible inversion of reality, where campus killers and shopping mall killers and airport killers are less a threat because they’ve legally purchased semiautomatic weapons despite being insane than they are an excuse for the rest of us to purchase semiautomatic weapons for our own defense.
Notice that the argument is not that we need to be armed to serve in a well-regulated militia but to prepare for the complete breakdown of modern civilization.
We must be prepared for “vicious waves of chemicals” that will no doubt be unleashed on the unincorporated hamlets of red state America rather than in our densely-populated cities.
Maybe the following helps explain the true source LaPierre’s angst:
The share of American households with guns has declined over the past four decades, a national survey shows, with some of the most surprising drops in the South and the Western mountain states, where guns are deeply embedded in the culture.
The gun ownership rate has fallen across a broad cross section of households since the early 1970s, according to data from the General Social Survey, a public opinion survey conducted every two years that asks a sample of American adults if they have guns at home, among other questions.
The rate has dropped in cities large and small, in suburbs and rural areas and in all regions of the country. It has fallen among households with children, and among those without. It has declined for households that say they are very happy, and for those that say they are not. It is down among churchgoers and those who never sit in pews.
The household gun ownership rate has fallen from an average of 50 percent in the 1970s to 49 percent in the 1980s, 43 percent in the 1990s and 35 percent in the 2000s, according to the survey data, analyzed by The New York Times.
The only way to make up for this is to get gun owners to own more guns. And the best way to do that is to completely freak them out about some imminent demise of law and order.
By: Martin Longman, Washington Monthly Political Animal, April 26, 2014
“Race And The Supreme Court”: Furthuring The Racial Divide In Our Two Americas
When the United States Supreme Court upheld Michigan’s ban on affirmative action in higher education Tuesday, the justices weren’t just endorsing similar bans in seven other states and inviting future ones. They were, fundamentally, continuing a painful conversation among themselves, and between themselves and the rest of us, on the topic of race in America.
It is a conversation that has been ongoing in its present iteration since the Court’s ideological core shifted to the right almost a decade ago, following the resignation of Justice Sandra Day O’Connor in July 2005. She was replaced by a far more conservative jurist, Justice Samuel Alito, the Court’s center of gravity then shifted from Justice O’Connor to the more conservative Justice Anthony Kennedy, and the ascent of Chief Justice John Roberts, who replaced his friend and mentor Chief Justice William Rehnquist, made the Court’s transition complete.
And it’s a conversation that, judging from the past few related decisions, isn’t bridging the racial divide in this country but rather splintering it further apart. The Court’s ruling in Schuette v. Coalition to Defend would not have happened 10 years ago. We know this because Justice O’Connor herself, in Grutter v. Bollinger, another case out of Michigan, crafted a 5-4 ruling that gave such remedial programs another shaky decade of life. But now they are as good as dead and, as Justice John Paul Stevens said in another context, the Court’s majority didn’t even have the courtesy to give them a proper burial.
Instead, they will be killed over time by what Justice Anthony Kennedy labeled as the procedural necessity of allowing state voters to impose their will upon minorities. We aren’t ruling on the merits of affirmative action, the justice wrote, instead we are merely allowing the voters of Michigan to render their own judgment about affirmative action. And even though that action commands university administrators not to consider race as a factor in admissions, and even though everyone understands that the Michigan measure was passed to preclude what supporters called “racial preferences,” this democratic choice somehow does not offend equal protection principles under the Constitution.
Also unthinkable before the Roberts Court kicked into gear would have been its Court’s decision last June in Shelby County v. Holder to strike down the preclearance provision of the Voting Rights Act. And it would be a mistake today not to connect that ruling to the one in Schuette. They are different sides of the same coin. Shelby County told white politicians in the South that they could now more freely change voting rules to make it harder for minorities to vote. Tuesday’s decision tells white voters that they can move via the ballot box to restrict remedies designed to help minority students and, by extension, communities of color. In each case, the Court sought to somehow extract race out of racial problems.
In Shelby County, the Court’s majority refused to acknowledge the will of the people as expressed through Congress, which repeatedly had renewed Section 4 of the Voting Rights Act with large bipartisan majorities. Yet in Schuette, the Court’s majority rushed to embrace the will of the people of Michigan as expressed in their rejection of affirmative action. Contradiction? Sure. But what these cases have in common is clear: this Court is hostile to the idea that the nation’s racial problems are going to be resolved by policies and programs that treat the races differently. This is what the Chief Justice means when he says, as he did in 2007, that “the way to stop discriminating on the basis of race is to stop discrimination on the basis of race.”
In a perfect world– a post-racial world, you might say—the Chief Justice would be absolutely correct. But the problem with his formula is that he seeks to declare it at a time when there is still in this country widespread discrimination, official and otherwise, based upon race. It is present in our criminal justice systems. It is present still in our election systems. It is present economically and politically even though, as conservatives like the Chief Justice like to point out, far more minorities participate in the political process then did half a century ago. And so the idea that now is the time to stop reflecting this reality in constitutional doctrine is to me a dubious one. “Enough is enough,” the essence of Justice Antonin Scalia’s argument, is neither a solution nor a just way in which to end the experiment in racial justice we’ve experienced in America for the past 50 years. Enough may be enough for white Americans. But it’s not nearly enough for citizens of color.
And this surely is what Justice Sotomayor had in mind when she wrote her dissent in Schuette. What is the role of the federal judiciary if not to protect the rights of minorities against the tyranny of majority rule?
The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to speak openly and candidly on the subject of race, and to apply the Constitution with eyes open to the unfortunate effects of centuries of racial discrimination. As members of the judiciary tasked with intervening to carry out the guarantee of equal protection, we ought not sit back and wish away, rather than confront, the racial inequality that exists in our society. It is this view that works harm, by perpetuating the facile notion that what makes race matter is acknowledging the simple truth that race does matter.
This is the language that future historians will cite when they cite this cynical decision and this troubling era in America’s racial history. What’s the best evidence that the Supreme Court has it all wrong? Just consider how the two Americas, the two solitudes, reacted to the news of Schuette. The Chief Justice, in his short and defensive concurrence, accused Justice Sotomayor of “doing more harm than good to question the openness and candor of those on either side of the debate.” But to Justice Sotomayor, and to those who share her view, there is no debate. It’s already over. And the side that usually wins in America clearly has won again.
By: Andrew Cohen, Fellow, The Brennan Center For Justice at New York University School of Law; April 23, 2014
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