“Income Inequality Creates Huge Gaps In Opportunity”: The Class Divide Is One Of The Biggest Problems Now Facing The Country
By now, you’ve surely heard of the Texas drunken-driving case that has sparked national outrage — angering victims, upsetting psychologists and sending Twitter into overdrive. A 16-year-old who killed four people while intoxicated was sentenced to 10 years’ probation and treatment in a tony rehab facility.
As unusual as that example of mercy may be, it was the rationale offered by a defense expert that drove observers into a frenzy. A psychologist hired by defense attorneys told the court that the young man’s tragically irresponsible actions were the fault of his rich parents, who didn’t rear him with sufficient discipline. As a consequence, G. Dick Miller said, the teenager suffered from “affluenza” and didn’t know right from wrong. (Many other psychologists have disagreed vociferously, saying there is no such diagnosis.)
It’s hard to stomach that notion, especially since Judge Jean Boyd of the Fort Worth Juvenile Court seems to have swallowed it whole. I can’t imagine how bitter and resentful — not to mention mystified — the victims’ families must be.
But Boyd might have unintentionally done us a favor by opening the door to a dank, dark room that we have worked too hard to keep closed. She has let out the putrid aromas of economic inequality, which we have long ignored. Wealthy people, the judge’s sentence reminds us, have huge advantages over ordinary folk, despite an American mythology about equal opportunity. And the opportunity gap is growing as inequality cleaves the country into haves and have-nots.
The very terms “wage gap” and “disappearing middle class” have become clichés in Washington, often muttered by pandering politicians and comfortable journalists who have little real understanding of the effect that income inequality has had on the lives of ordinary Americans. But the fallout is real enough.
Since the 1970s, the wages of working-class Americans — those without college degrees — have stagnated and fallen further and further behind. Meanwhile, the wealthy have only become more prosperous.
Despite what you may believe to be true, the individual’s work ethic has little to do with those results. No matter how hardworking you are, a job at Walmart won’t give you much in the way of financial security. And if you are born to parents who can give you a trust fund, it doesn’t matter how little you work; you’ll still have plenty of security.
The trends that have eaten away at the great American middle — including globalization and technological gains — have been evident for decades, but the Great Recession accelerated the consequences. Even as economic data show huge gains in productivity, the jobless rate remains high, stuck at around 7 percent. (Translation: Companies have found ways to get more and more work done with technology, whether it’s through eliminating bank tellers and installing more ATMs, or using more robots in factories.)
This is a complex problem with no easy answers, but we could make a start toward solutions by looking squarely at the issue and refusing to call it by other names. Here are a few things it’s not: indolence, racism, the failure of the welfare state.
Mitt Romney became appropriately infamous for his condescending dismissal of the “47 percent” who he claimed don’t want to work, but that wrong-headed idea doesn’t stop with Romney. U.S. Rep. Jack Kingston (R-GA), running for the GOP nomination for the U.S. Senate, has proposed that poor children sweep school cafeteria floors in exchange for free or reduced lunches, a deal that would get the “myth out of their head that there is such a thing as a free lunch,” he said.
But liberals often get it wrong, too — confusing rampant income inequality with racism. The legacy of racism has certainly contributed to the wealth gap between black and white Americans, but class is now a bigger factor in a child’s future than race. President Obama’s children are virtually assured a bright future, while millions of their cohort among the working classes are not.
The class divide is one of the biggest problems now facing the country, and it’s time we started to confront it. Judge Boyd’s unjust sentence is just the provocation to force us to take it on.
By: Cynthia Tucker, The National Memo, December 28, 2013
“Reality Isn’t So Ducky”: Profit, Not Equal Rights Or Freedom Of Religion, Is The Real Coin Of The Realm
It’s Christmas and a strange white-bearded fellow uttering quack-quack-quack has streaked across the continent, dumping a large sack of something on America’s hearth.
Phil Robertson — millionaire star of “Duck Dynasty” — seems an unlikely antagonist as 2013 wraps up. As all sentient beings know by now, he was suspended from the wildly popular A&E program for comments he made about gays during a recent GQ interview.
Suddenly our nation is consumed anew with impassioned debate about nearly every foundational principle — freedom of speech, religious freedom, civil rights and same-sex marriage.
The last is relatively uncontroversial in some states and most urban areas, but not in rural America where hunters convene — or among fundamentalist Christians, for whom biblical literalism is a virtue — and certainly not among millions of “Duck Dynasty” fans. Needless to say, these three groups overlap considerably.
Robertson isn’t just a megastar in waterfowl world, he is the composite character so loathed by liberals and certain elites who would nigh perish at the thought of close contact with his sort — a white, fundamentalist, Bible-thumping, duck-killing yahoo who somehow missed the civil rights movement, not to mention the New England Enlightenment.
Distilled, Robertson said two things in particular that provoked protests outside the bayou. One, that homosexual acts are sins, which is hardly news among recipients of the Gospel (hate the sin, love the sinner). Two, he said that African Americans he worked with during the Jim Crow era were just fine. “They were godly; they were happy; no one was singing the blues,” he said.
Except, of course, many blacks were singing the blues and had been since about the 19th century when plantation slaves invented the genre while toiling in the Mississippi Delta not far from Robertson’s haunts.
Robertson’s words released an onslaught of fire and brimstone not seen since God unleashed his fury on Sodom. Speaking of which, it is tempting to note that God was rather selective in his outrage back then. Furious with homosexuals, he seemed to have no problem with Lot, whom he saved, when Lot offered his virgin daughters to townsmen who were demanding to “know” the angels hanging with Lot that God had sent to destroy Sodom.
Similarly, sort of, Robertson’s fans didn’t seem to care much about the vile, X-rated imagery he used to make his point to GQ concerning the relative merits of human apertures for sexual gratification. Granted, GQ is read mostly by old teenagers and young adults, but is this really the fellow Christians want instructing America’s camouflaged kiddos?
Robertson’s blunt talk caused a stir not because he was delivering tablets from the burning bush but because he was clearly speaking outside his wheelhouse to the detriment of people whose equal rights — even their very lives — are endangered by such talk. Robertson may “love the sinner,” but you sure can’t tell.
Executives at A&E clearly were banking on hicks acting like hicks, not expressing what they actually think. But then, what did they expect from a Louisiana duck-call whittlin’, part-time preacher, for Pete’s sake?
“Aw, shucks, the more love in the world the better is what I always say” ?
To the greater point, the fact that a healthy, if dwindling, percentage of the country feels helplessly opposed to redefining marriage reveals an existential divide that won’t easily be bridged. Robertson didn’t create it; he exposed it.
He also helped illuminate our persistent confusion about gay rights. South Carolina’s largest newspaper, the State, recently featured two stories back to back — one dealing with “Duck Dynasty” fans protesting Robertson’s indefinite hiatus, the other about Methodists defrocking Frank Schaefer for performing his gay son’s marriage.
One is damned for being anti-gay marriage and the other for being pro — both in the name of the same deity, presumably. So which is it? The Christian, as well as the constitutional, way seems to me the latter. But fundamentalism, regardless of religion, finds refuge in the toxic swamp of moral certitude.
In other near-certainties, Robertson reportedly will be back on the show when it returns in January. With shelves emptied of “Duck Dynasty” paraphernalia by loyal consumers, and A&E facing boycott threats, there’s too much money at stake.
Profit, not equal rights or freedom of religion or any of the other high-minded principles we seize to bolster our selective outrage, is the real coin of the realm. And, as if you didn’t know, it quacks like a duck.
By: Kathleen Parker, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, December 24, 2013
“A Fence That Cannot Be Straddled”: Gingrich’s Praise Of Mandela Rips Open Issue Of Race
Newt Gingrich has been right about very few things during a long political career of hypocrisy, duplicity, narcissism and devotion to the no-holds-barred tactics of bomb-throwing and hyper-partisanship. But ever alert to political trends, he was right about this much: He openly opposed South Africa’s apartheid government back in the 1980s, and he tried to persuade Ronald Reagan to support the stiff sanctions that finally helped to topple the hateful regime.
Gingrich understood that the Republican Party would not be well served if it continued to be identified as a defender of South Africa’s pariah government. When Reagan vetoed legislation that imposed harsh economic penalties against the Pretoria regime, Gingrich helped to lead an effort to override the veto and impose sanctions.
Still, Gingrich has been as guilty as any Republican of using the 21st-century version of the Southern strategy to appeal to the least progressive members of the GOP base. So he shouldn’t be surprised that his recent praise of Nelson Mandela was met with harsh responses by so many of his fans on the right.
The Republican Party has a huge race problem — one that once again broke into the open in the aftermath of the extraordinary South African’s death. American conservatives still find it difficult to celebrate the life of a man who stood against white supremacy. While several Republican politicians were laudatory when reflecting on Mandela’s life, other conservatives were ambivalent.
Bill O’Reilly claimed that Mandela was a “great man” but also insisted he was a “communist.” (South Africa’s economic record under his leadership gives the lie to that.) Similarly, Dick Cheney called Mandela a “great man,” but stubbornly defended his opposition to the sanctions that eventually led to Mandela’s release.
It’s no surprise, then, that Gingrich sparked a firestorm when he released a statement citing Mandela as “one of the greatest leaders of our lifetime.” His Facebook fans unleashed a torrent of hateful comments in response, from chastising Gingrich for supposedly airbrushing Mandela’s past — “Newt, I thought you of all people, a historian, would be true to who this guy really was” — to those more open in their racial antagonism: “He hated America, Newt. Quit pandering to the blacks.”
Gingrich, to his credit, responded with a frank post to conservatives, asking them to consider what they would have done had they been in Mandela’s place. But it hardly quelled the uproar.
For far too long, Republicans have been comfortable playing to the worst instincts of their base, especially those steeped in racial antagonism and uncomfortable with the changes wrought by the civil rights movement. It will take years of hard work in the GOP vineyards to rip away all the kudzu of animus and suspicion toward black and brown citizens.
Since Barry Goldwater ran a 1964 presidential campaign on a platform of states’ rights, the Republican Party has honed a strategy of appealing to disaffected whites — stoking their resentments, fueling their fears, marshaling their paranoia. Every GOP presidential candidate since Goldwater has used that strategy because it reliably delivers certain voters to the polls.
In more recent times, GOP leaders have struggled to try to find a way to broaden the party’s appeal to a more diverse constituency while also continuing to win the hearts and minds of disaffected whites. But it’s a fence that cannot be straddled. Too many Republican voters refuse to acknowledge the toll of their country’s racist past. And too many fear a future wherein whites will no longer constitute a majority.
Gingrich knows that all too well because he pandered to those fears in his 2012 campaign for the GOP presidential nomination. He labeled President Obama the “food stamp president,” an appellation designed to conjure up images of indolent black voters dependent on government aid.
The appalling comments he drew after he praised Mandela were simply retributive justice. Like other GOP leaders, he has appealed to the worst instincts of many Republican voters when he needed to — a strategy that will continue to haunt the party as it tries to plot a course to the future.
By: Cynthia Tucker, The National Memo, December 14, 2013
“Jesus, Santa Claus, And Race”: Conservative Secularism And The Pride Of White Identity
It’s probably appropriate that an anchor on the media network which annually gives us the maddening agitprop over the “War On Christmas” has kicked up a stir by insisting that Jesus Christ and Santa Claus were (and presumably “are” for believers) white folks, just like most Fox viewers. Politico‘s Hadas Gold has the story:
On Wednesday night Megyn Kelly declared on her Fox News show that both Santa Claus and Jesus were white. Discussing a piece in Slate by Aisha Harris about a black versus white Santa, Kelly that “just because it makes you feel uncomfortable it doesn’t mean it has to change.”
“You know, I’ve given her her due. Just because it makes you feel uncomfortable doesn’t mean it has to change,” Kelly said. “Jesus was a white man, too. It’s like we have, he’s a historical figure that’s a verifiable fact, as is Santa, I just want kids to know that. How do you revise it in the middle of the legacy in the story and change Santa from white to black?”
Santa Claus can be traced to a real life monk named St. Nicholas who lived in what is today Turkey, according to the History Channel. Jesus Christ was born to a Jewish family around what is now Israel, and his race has long been debated with several scholars saying he likely looked like what many modern day people of Middle Eastern descent look like.
The unusual segment, where the panelists also debated whether Santa Claus should be a penguin as Harris writes in her piece, seemed to be directly contradicting what Kelly said on Monday when she appeared on “The Tonight Show with Jay Leno.”
“I’m a straight news anchor, I’m not one of the opinion hosts,” she told Leno. “The way we do it on the Fox News Channel is the straight news anchors like us give a hard time to both sides.”
It seems especially idiotic to claim a race for a mythical figure like Santa Claus. As for Jesus Christ, we have the authority of a fellow named Paul of Tarsus (Galations 3:28):
In Christ Jesus, you are all children of God through faith. As many of you as were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ. There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus.
So who cares to what race–or for that matter, gender–the “historical Jesus” belonged? The principal of absolute equality before God is a central principle of Christianity–or at least forms of Christianity that haven’t succumbed to the secularism (yes, that’s what it is, folks) that associates the faith with cultural or political conservatism or the pride of white identity.
By: Ed Kilgore, Contributing Writer, Washington Monthly Political Animal, December 12, 2013
“The RNC Reflects On Ending Racism”: The Republican Party No Longer Qualifies For The Benefit Of The Doubt
For all of its many benefits, Twitter’s brevity can cause trouble for plenty of political voices. Yesterday, for example, the Republican National Committee decided to honor the anniversary of Rosa Parks’ “bold stand,” which seemed like a perfectly nice gesture. The RNC added, however, that Parks played a role “in ending racism.”
Not surprisingly, the message was not well received. Despite what you may have heard from Supreme Court conservatives in the Voting Rights Act case, racism hasn’t ended, it certainly wasn’t vanquished on a bus in Montgomery, Alabama, in 1955.
A few hours later, realizing that they’d made a mess of things, RNC officials returned to Twitter to say, “Previous tweet should have read ‘Today we remember Rosa Parks’ bold stand and her role in fighting to end racism,’” which was a welcome clarification, though the damage was done.
In fairness to the Republican National Committee, it’s hard to believe the party was trying to be deliberately offensive. For that matter, I rather doubt the RNC believes Rosa Parks helped end racism 58 years ago. This was likely the result of clumsy tweeting, not ignorant malice.
But in the larger context, stories like these resonate because the party no longer qualifies for the benefit of the doubt. Too many incidents come quickly to mind: the Nevada Republican who’d embrace slavery, the North Carolina Republican whose appearance on “The Daily Show” became the stuff of legend, the birthers, the fondness for Jesse Helms, the widespread voter-suppression laws that disproportionately affect African Americans, the Maine Republican who wants the NAACP to kiss his butt, the former half-term Alaska governor who’s comfortable with “shuck and jive” rhetoric, etc.
The RNC, in other words, can’t lean on its credibility on racial issues to easily dismiss poorly worded tweets. The fact that the party can’t even say a nice thing about Rosa Parks without screwing up and getting itself in trouble only helps reinforce the extent to which race is a systemic problem for the party.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, December 2, 2013
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