“We Must Examine Our Own Prejudices”: Removing The Confederate Flag Is Easy; Fixing Racism Is Hard
When the Republican National Committee chose Tampa as the site for the party’s 2012 national convention, it seemed quite fitting—Florida being a red state and all, and one in which evangelical fervor mixed freely with the brand of Tea Party vindictiveness epitomized by Governor Rick Scott.
As I traveled to the city limits, destined for a motel reserved for any C-list, left-wing journalists covering the confab, the taxi I occupied exited the highway on a ramp dominated by perhaps the largest thing of its kind I had ever seen. Hoisted on a 139-foot pole, this Confederate battle flag measures 30 feet high and 60 feet long. That’s a lot of cloth, and the day I viewed it, it whipped violently against the winds stirred up by Hurricane Isaac, who mercifully defied predictions by remaining offshore.
I nearly jumped out of my skin at the sight of the immense flag; whoever had placed it there clearly meant to make a statement, and not one of peace, love, or understanding. When I recaptured my ability to speak, I stammered to the cab driver, who was black, “What on earth is that?”
He shrugged his shoulders. “They put it up a few years ago,” he said. He drove past it pretty much every day, he said.
It was 2008 when the flag first ascended the pole at the junction of I-75 and Interstate 4 on June 3, the birthday of Jefferson Davis, the only president of the short-lived Confederate States of America, a day observed in many Florida localities as a holiday. In what may or may not have been a coincidence, Barack Obama was closing in on the Democratic presidential nomination. (Hillary Clinton would suspend her campaign four days later.)
The land on which the flag stands was owned at the time by Marion Lambert, a proud member of the Sons of Confederate Veterans, and who since donated the parcel to the group. According to a June 21 report in the Tampa Bay Times, Lambert called the flag “a catalyst for a mental movement.”
“The reason we put that flag up is to start people thinking,” he told the Times.
He said this as white people across America began debating whether the white murderer Dylann Roof, who gunned down nine black people in a church rooted in the rebellion of enslaved people, is a simple racist or a mentally ill one. In Lambert’s “mental movement,” Roof is, at the very least, an army of one.
Roof’s actions, combined with photographs of him bearing the treasonous battle standard, have touched off a furious cry to rid the land of the symbol of one of America’s original sins (the other being the genocide of the land’s indigenous people). While it would be lovely to never gaze upon such a disgraceful emblem again, the rush to do so is fast becoming a diversion useful to those who seek to continue the nation’s long denial of its own bloody history of race-based oppression, which will do nothing to forestall the growth of racism in its lesser-seen forms.
Yes, it is a big deal when even Republican governors and luminaries—including the party’s last presidential nominee—call for the removal of the flag from state capitols and public buildings, a phenomenon unthinkable a decade ago. But party leaders also know it’s what needs to happen in order for the party to survive, since millennials are not terribly keen on displays of racial hatred.
But allowing the removal of the flag to stand as the sole answer to the Charleston massacre would let the North entirely off the hook for its own brand of racism, often every bit as brutal, if occasionally more subtle, as that displayed by the Sons of Confederate Veterans—or an almost entirely white Republican Party entertaining speech after speech at its Tampa national convention peppered with the Jacksonian language of “makers” and “takers,” and throwing the old welfare-queen card in the face of a black president.
But the white people of the North have plenty to account for, too, in the construction and maintenance of a racist society. I grew up in a New Jersey town that no black person dared to drive through. It was a nearly all-white town; we had one Chinese family, and two or three Latino families. No real estate agent who valued his or her job would show an African American buyer a house there. The cops in the Township of Clark were notorious for pulling over African American drivers seeking to enter the Garden State Parkway from the on-ramp that put our town on the map. And Clark was hardly an outlier among the burgs of the Northeast; it was just crassly obvious in its redlined bigotry.
You can take down all the Confederate flags in the country, and you won’t change a thing in Clark, or the thousands of towns just like it above the Mason-Dixon Line.
Nor should the progressive movement be let off the hook, despite its vociferous and righteous cry against the racist evil channeled by Dylann Roof the day he went on his murderous spree. In organizations not specifically focused on matters of race, it’s rare to see a black person in leadership, just as it’s rare to see women lead progressive organizations that are not specifically feminist. Until that changes, the underpinnings of a racist society remain intact. Until that changes, the false and evil narrative that claims those of African descent to be a lesser race lives on in the recesses of our minds, shaping the nation to its confines.
So, yes, remove the Confederate flag—that standard of dehumanization, treason, and murder—from our sight. But proof of our intention demands great change in the way in which we lead, the way in which we live, the way in which we think; we must be willing to truly open the riches of progressive society and culture to all. To do that, we must—each and every one of us—examine our own prejudice, and be determined to transcend it. Then the real work of a just society can begin.
By: Adele M. Stan, The American Prospect, June 24, 2015
“Voodoo, Jeb! Style”: Mr. Bush Imagines That He Is Privy To Secrets That Have Evaded Everyone Else
On Monday Jeb Bush — or I guess that’s Jeb!, since he seems to have decided to replace his family name with a punctuation mark — finally made his campaign for the White House official, and gave us a first view of his policy goals. First, he says that if elected he would double America’s rate of economic growth to 4 percent. Second, he would make it possible for every American to lose as much weight as he or she wants, without any need for dieting or exercise.
O.K., he didn’t actually make that second promise. But he might as well have. It would have been just as realistic as promising 4 percent growth, and considerably less irresponsible.
I’ll get to Jeb!onomics in a minute, but first let me tell you about a dirty little secret of economics — namely, that we don’t know very much about how to raise the long-run rate of economic growth. Economists do know how to promote recovery from temporary slumps, even if politicians usually refuse to take their advice. But once the economy is near full employment, further growth depends on raising output per worker. And while there are things that might help make that happen, the truth is that nobody knows how to conjure up rapid productivity gains.
Why, then, would Mr. Bush imagine that he is privy to secrets that have evaded everyone else?
One answer, which is actually kind of funny, is that he believes that the growth in Florida’s economy during his time as governor offers a role model for the nation as a whole. Why is that funny? Because everyone except Mr. Bush knows that, during those years, Florida was booming thanks to the mother of all housing bubbles. When the bubble burst, the state plunged into a deep slump, much worse than that in the nation as a whole. Taking the boom and the slump together, Florida’s longer-term economic performance has, if anything, been slightly worse than the national average.
The key to Mr. Bush’s record of success, then, was good political timing: He managed to leave office before the unsustainable nature of the boom he now invokes became obvious.
But Mr. Bush’s economic promises reflect more than self-aggrandizement. They also reflect his party’s habit of boasting about its ability to deliver rapid economic growth, even though there’s no evidence at all to justify such boasts. It’s as if a bunch of relatively short men made a regular practice of swaggering around, telling everyone they see that they’re 6 feet 2 inches tall.
To be more specific, the next time you encounter some conservative going on about growth, you might want to bring up the following list of names and numbers: Bill Clinton, 3.7; Ronald Reagan, 3.4; Barack Obama, 2.1; George H.W. Bush, 2.0; George W. Bush, 1.6. Yes, that’s the last five presidents — and the average rate of growth of the U.S. economy during their time in office (so far, in Mr. Obama’s case). Obviously, the raw numbers don’t tell the whole story, but surely there’s nothing in that list to suggest that conservatives possess some kind of miracle cure for economic sluggishness. And, as many have pointed out, if Jeb! knows the secret to 4 percent growth, why didn’t he tell his father and brother?
Or consider the experience of Kansas, where Gov. Sam Brownback pushed through radical tax cuts that were supposed to drive rapid economic growth. “We’ll see how it works. We’ll have a real live experiment,” he declared. And the results of the experiment are now in: The promised boom never arrived, big deficits did, and, despite savage cuts to schools and other public services, Kansas eventually had to raise taxes again (with the pain concentrated on lower-income residents).
Why, then, all the boasting about growth? The short answer, surely, is that it’s mainly about finding ways to sell tax cuts for the wealthy. Such cuts are unpopular in and of themselves, and even more so if, like the Kansas tax cuts for businesses and the affluent, they must be paid for with higher taxes on working families and/or cuts in popular government programs. Yet low taxes on the rich are an overriding policy priority on the right — and promises of growth miracles let conservatives claim that everyone will benefit from trickle-down, and maybe even that tax cuts will pay for themselves.
There is, of course, a term for basing a national program on this kind of self-serving (and plutocrat-serving) wishful thinking. Way back in 1980, George H.W. Bush, running against Reagan for the presidential nomination, famously called it “voodoo economic policy.” And while Reaganolatry is now obligatory in the G.O.P., the truth is that he was right.
So what does it say about the state of the party that Mr. Bush’s son — often portrayed as the moderate, reasonable member of the family — has chosen to make himself a high priest of voodoo economics? Nothing good.
By: Paul Krugman, Op-Ed Columnist, The New York Times, June 19, 2015
“Is Rubio Really Hillary’s ‘Nightmare’?”: If This Is Her Nightmare, Hillary Is Getting A Good Night’s Sleep
Well, 14 more Republicans announced their candidacies, but clearly, Marco Rubio was the It Boy on the Republican side this week. It started last weekend with a Times article advancing the idea that Rubio as the GOP nominee is a “scary thought” for Democrats for all the reasons you can reckon on your own—he’s Latino, he’s young, he’s charismatic, he has a “million-dollar smile” (not kidding!), and of course he might be able to defeat her in “vital” Florida with its 29 electoral votes.
Mmmm, okay. He is most certainly Latino and young, not much arguing with those. He is reasonably charismatic. He has about a $627,000 smile, which isn’t a million (a little too on the boyish and elfin sides to project the proper Reaganesque, enemy-smiting mien) but isn’t peanuts.
I would add other and I think even more substantive claims for him. He’s not stupid, in policy terms, and more to the point isn’t intentionally stupid, constantly playing down to his most rigid base’s lowest common denominator. He does that only about 78 percent of the time, which in the context of today’s GOP is almost impressive. I could picture a President Rubio dragging the party to a couple of places where most of it really would prefer not to go. Not a lot of places, but a couple, which is two more than most of them would do.
But is Rubio really Clinton’s nightmare candidate? First of all, let’s say this. Elections are far less about the dollar value of smiles and whether a candidate colors her hair than journalists would like to think. They’re more about what the political scientists call “the fundamentals,” by which they mainly mean the economy. If the economy is still chugging along in the fall of 2016, creating 225,000 jobs a month—and by that time, if the streak holds, wages would probably be going up as well—then nobody is Clinton’s nightmare. All right, two other ifs: no terrorist attack, and no giant, quid-pro-quo Clinton scandal. If all that holds the only drama ought to be whether she tops 350 electoral votes.
But if all that doesn’t hold, then we have a race. I suppose Rubio is as plausible as any of them and more than most of them. But let’s stop and take a look at the bases of these nightmare claims. There are two.
The first is that he’ll compete with her among Latinos. The data point you’ll often see invoked here is that when first running for Senate in 2010, Rubio drew 55 percent of the Latino vote against two opponents. That he did. But here are two reasons that impressive number doesn’t necessarily translate to a presidential race.
Number one, neither of his opponents that year had much going for them among Latinos. Independent Charlie Crist wasn’t really trusted by anyone because of his party flipping, and Democrat Kendrick Meek just never fired, as they say in the horse-racing business. Number two, voters understand, Latino voters included, that a vote for senator and a vote for president aren’t the same kind of vote. For the Senate, independent and even a few Democratic Latinos would be more willing to cast an “identity” vote, just for the sake of seeing one of their own (more or less their own, since there are many different kinds of Latinos in Florida) in the Senate. The candidate’s positions matter, of course, but if voters know he’s only one of 100 in a body that never does much anyway, positions aren’t dispositive.
But a presidential vote is a different thing. There, you’d better believe positions matter. And here, Rubio has the same problems with Latino voters all the Republicans have.
Spend a few minutes on this web page, brought to you by the Seattle-based Latino Decisions. The polling I’m about to cite is from last November, so things may have changed. But still. It’s a bucket of icy water on the nightmare thesis.
Rubio favorable-unfavorable among Latinos: 31-36. Rubio favorable-unfavorable among Latinos in Florida: 39-42. In seven states with sizable Latino voting blocs, Rubio was underwater in six of them (all but Texas). Oh, and in six of the seven states (all but Florida), Clinton’s favorable numbers among Latinos were more than twice Rubio’s.
Why would this be? Are Latinos uniquely immune to the charms of high dollar-value smiles? No. The answer is his positions. Latinos support a path to citizenship, President Obama’s executive actions, and Obamacare. Rubio opposes them all. Those positions, especially on immigration, are deal breakers for a big majority of Latino voters, most of whom don’t feel an intense natural bonhomie for Cuban-Americans, who’ve always been seen to occupy a different political space from Mexicans, Puerto Ricans, Dominicans, and Central Americans.
Now as I say that was last November. Things have probably shifted a little in his direction since then, just because some people may have forgotten his lame immigration reversal. I called four pollsters to try to get current numbers on Clinton vs. Rubio head-to-head among Latinos, but oddly, none had anything current based on large enough sample sizes. If we start to see such numbers and Rubio is with 15 points or so, then Clinton should worry a little. But the overall numbers, in which she has essentially the same narrow-ish lead over Rubio that she has over everyone else, don’t suggest that he’s doing much better among the small subsets of Latinos in these polls than any other Republican is.
And now, to our second point (remember, there was a second point way up there!): “vital” Florida. I really wish people who write about politics would bother to understand the electoral map. This is a longer conversation and another column but please remember: Florida is vital to Republicans, but it’s gravy for Democrats. Obama won Florida in 2012, but if he’d lost it, he’d still have received 303 electoral votes.
Think of it this way: The Republican can win all the normal red states plus the violet quartet of Ohio, Virginia, Colorado, and Nevada, as well as Iowa and New Hampshire—two states that have gone Republican just once each since 1992—and still have only 262 electoral votes. The Democrat can afford to lose Florida and still have a number of paths to 270. The Republican cannot.
Rubio has some strengths the others don’t. But if all this adds up to a nightmare, I’d think Clinton is sleeping pretty well at night.
By: Michael Tomasky, The Daily Beast, May 29, 2015
“Particularly Shameless”: Rick Scott Lied On His Mother’s Grave — And Blew A Hole In The GOP’s Anti-ObamaCare Argument
When it comes to ObamaCare’s expansion of Medicaid, it may seem like a matter of simple logic for states to take the money that’s on offer. It would both help their most vulnerable citizens and pump lots of money into local economies.
Alas, logic and the contemporary Republican Party have little relation to each other, so most GOP-controlled statehouses have turned down the offer. But few have done so in a more clownish manner, or exposed the contradictions in the Republican position more clearly, than Florida Gov. Rick Scott.
Scott has flip-flopped on Medicaid, first opposing it, then supporting it, then opposing it again. This is bad, if not entirely unusual, political behavior. But Scott was particularly shameless, citing his recently deceased mother as his justification for suddenly embracing the expansion in 2013.
As he has now revealed, however, Scott was lying on his mother’s grave. He pretended to embrace the Medicaid expansion to secure a federal waiver for privatizing Florida’s Medicaid system, then quietly dropped his support once the waiver was granted. (The Obama administration’s decision to give the quid without first getting the quo, given who they were dealing with, was not its finest hour.)
So Scott used his deceased mother as a shield to lie about his motives in order to funnel federal taxpayer money to Florida businesses, then reneged on his part of the deal, leaving many poor Floridians to needlessly suffer and in some cases die. All par for the course for Scott, who before entering politics oversaw a massive amount of Medicare fraud as CEO of a large for-profit hospital operator.
At this point, one could say that, rank dishonesty and opportunism aside, at least Scott is standing on principle. He is turning down federal dollars to protect state sovereignty. Not a very attractive principle, but at least a principle, right?
Nope. Before the Affordable Care Act, the federal government made money available to states to create Low-Income Pools (LIP) that would reimburse hospitals that treated patients who couldn’t afford to pay for emergency services. Florida is receiving more than $1 billion a year in federal funds from LIP. The ACA, however, makes the LIP obsolete. It addresses problems of uncompensated hospitals by expanding Medicaid, greatly reducing the number of patients who cannot pay their bills.
The federal government has told Florida that it will not make the LIP funds available, pointing to the Medicaid funding which remains available. But Scott wants to have his cake and eat it, too. Not only is he demanding that the federal funding continue, he has actually filed a frivolous lawsuit arguing that the federal government is obligated to give Florida the LIP money. The Obama administration, having been burned by Scott already, is unmoved.
This lawsuit builds on the Supreme Court’s already shaky holding that allowed states to opt out of the expansion, pushing it to an extreme that would be too absurd even for the Roberts Court. It has virtually no chance of succeeding.
But the decision to file it is instructive. On the one hand, Scott is arguing that taking an extraordinarily good offer from the federal government to insure its poor citizens would be an intolerable intrusion on the sacred sovereignty of the state of Florida. On the other hand, Scott is arguing that Florida has a right to another source of federal tax dollars for health care.
There is, in other words, no actual principle involved here — not even a bad “states’ rights” one. It’s just pure partisan politics, with Florida’s poor people being punished as a result.
As Michael Hilzik of the LA Times observes, Scott’s disgraceful behavior reflects broader trends in Republican governance. The decision of Republican officials at the state level to reject the Medicaid expansion, while misleading their constituents about the dread ObamaCare, continues to have disastrous results for their citizens.
The ensuing mess in Florida — where a huge hole has been blown in the state budget because anti-ACA fanatics won’t take the Medicaid expansion — does at least provide a glimmer of hope for the longer term. Red-state legislators may not particularly care about the many poor people being needlessly denied access to medical care. But they will start to increasingly care about the medical professionals and hospitals who are also being screwed. Once Obama leaves office, it’s likely that more and more states will grudgingly take the federal money.
In the meantime, however, the consequences of misrule in these states will continue to be grim.
By: Scott Lemieux, The Week, May 18, 2015
“Praise The Lord, Mom’s Alive”: Rick Scott’s Stunning Health Care ‘Ruse’ In Florida
In early 2013, Florida Gov. Rick Scott (R) surprised nearly everyone by announcing he’d changed his mind about Medicaid expansion through the Affordable Care Act. The Republican governor had long condemned the idea, but he apparently had a change of heart.
“I cannot, in good conscience, deny the uninsured access to care,” he said at the time. Scott added that Medicaid expansion is “a compassionate, common sense step forward.” The governor even referenced the death of his mother when explaining his rationale.
“A few months ago, my mother passed away, and I lost one of the only constants in my life,” Scott said. “Losing someone so close to you puts everything in new perspective … especially the big decisions…. As I wrestled with this decision, I thought about my Mom’s struggles raising five kids with very little money.”
That was February 2013. In April 2015, Scott reversed course again, announcing his renewed opposition to the policy he’d endorsed. And today, the local CBS affiliate in Miami reports that the governor offered an unexpected explanation for his posture two years ago.
Scott conceded this week that was all a ruse. He now says his support for Medicaid expansion was a calculated move designed to win support from the Obama administration for the state’s proposal to hand over control of Medicaid to private insurance companies. At the time, he denied that his support was tied to a deal with the federal government.
Now that he’s succeeded in privatizing Medicaid, Scott is again railing against Medicaid expansion and is suing the federal government for allegedly forcing it on him.
Oh my.
Of course, if you notice that CBS/Associated Press excerpt, you’ll notice that it’s missing something: a quote. The entire report appears to be a paraphrase of Scott’s comments, and the exact wording always matters.
Indeed, the governor’s office this afternoon pushed back against the AP’s reporting, saying the piece “editorialized” Scott’s comments.
So, which is it? On Twitter, Gary Fineout, an AP reporter in Florida, fleshed this out in a little more detail, explaining the argument Scott presented yesterday. As Fineout described it, the governor may have claimed at the time that his mother’s death inspired him to change his perspective, but in reality – according to Scott’s comments yesterday – the Florida Republican only supported Medicaid expansion as part of “a quid pro quo” to get a waiver from the Obama administration for Medicaid privatization.
Scott may have publicly claimed in 2013 that his position was about his “conscience” and deceased mother, but according to the governor’s new version of events, the rhetoric wasn’t actually sincere – his previous position was a calculated move to gain approval for his privatization plan.
In other words, the governor didn’t literally use the word “ruse” yesterday, so much as he effectively described a scheme in which he told the public something untrue in order to get what he wanted at the time.
I don’t expect much from Florida politics, but when a governor references his deceased mother to make a deliberately misleading argument, the Sunshine State is quite possibly breaking new ground in ugliness.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, May 7, 2015
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