Author: Doug Berger

Founder, visionary, and editor of Doug's Views. Need more info - see the About page linked below the masthead.
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Hey Tea Party and Sarah Palin – racism doesn’t mean just using the N-word

Members of the tea parties and Governor quitter Sarah Palin complained about the NAACP calling out the Tea party people for being racist. As pointed out by Melissa Harris-Lacewell, associate professor of politics and African-American studies at Princeton University, being racist isn’t just about using racist language or simply being in a majority white group.

Professor Harris-Lacewell was on MSNBC’s “Countdown with Keith Olbermann” and she said something profound that will help me explain in the future how you can be racist and not use the N-word or join the Klan and why many white people claim not to see racism, or claim it doesn’t exist, unless it is overt like that.

[I]f you regularly support public policy which will have a disparate impact, creating greater inequality for people of color, that that is racially biased.

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Transcript of specific segment:

OLBERMANN: I was going to ask you about this sincerity of misperception. I`ve always wondered if we`re dealing with the kind of mental euphemism that in previous — when there have been previous backlashes against advances in relations between races, they were still in a time when it was OK to come out and campaign on the “we`ve done enough for them” platform, which was essentially done in 1966 by the Republicans. They won a boat load of seats in the House running on those platforms after the Civil Rights Acts. You can`t say something like that anymore in almost any aspect of society. The fringes, obviously, but not anywhere in the mainstream. Is this inability to see racism and to need to provide a euphemism for it internal? They need to believe there`s no racism, and therefore they don`t see it?

HARRIS-LACEWELL: Maybe, but it could also be simply that we`ve done a really bad job in this country talking about what racism is. So many may feel that if they don`t use the ” N” word or if they don`t actively keep a black person from getting a job or spit on a black person when they see them, then they`re not racist. And we haven`t done a very good job of talking about the fact that if you regularly support public policy which will have a disparate impact, creating greater inequality for people of color, that that is racially biased. And we haven`t talked about, for example, privilege, or we haven`t talked very well in the public about privilege. So that many white Americans feel like, well, I have a difficult circumstance; I`m losing my job; bad things are happening to me. So why should we be talking about race and racism? And we haven`t talking about, for example, how white privilege operates in the context of even, you know, an economic downturn. So it could be, in part, just sort of our fault in terms of a collective incapacity to talk about what racism really is.

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Senator Jon Kyl: douche bag – Saint Ronnie Reagan: thief

No joke that elected Republicans in Congress hate the unemployed. Latest proof is this week’s douche Senate Minority Whip Jon Kyl who claimed that tax cuts for the rich are needed more than unemployment benefits. Also it seems that Saint Ronald Reagan was more into wealth redistribution and it wasn’t to regular Americans.

The second highest ranking Republican in the Senate doubled down on a controversial statement he made this weekend, arguing in greater detail that tax cuts for wealthy people should never be offset by tax increases in other areas — but that unemployment benefits need to be fully paid for by either spending cuts or tax increases. In so doing, he claimed candidly that the very existence of unemployment insurance is a “necessary evil,” while tax cuts ought not be paid for by increases in order to make it easier to shrink the size of government.

Kyl: Rich Need Tax Cuts More Than Jobless Need Benefits

And the truth about President Ronald Reagan and his economic policy when he took office in 1981:

“Conservative policies transformed the United States from the largest creditor nation to the largest debtor nation in just a few years, and it has only gotten worse since then. Working people’s share of the benefits from increased productivity took a sudden turn down. This resulted in intense concentration of wealth at the top.”

6 Shocking Ways Conservatives Helped Cause the Economic Destruction of America

So the long and short is the Reagan Era brought out a redistribution of wealth from regular people to the very rich that we see today.

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Big business is NOT our friend

I have been watching the events surrounding the massive oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico and it reaffirms my philosophy that Big Business is NOT our friend.

I’m not a Marxist or advocate state ownership of business but I do feel that industry needs to be heavily regulated. Big businesses, left to their own devices, will screw us over in some form if we aren’t watching them like a hawk. The corporation only answers to their owners and shareholders. With some rare exceptions, benevolence from big business only exists if it doesn’t cost them very much money and if they benefit from it.

History is full of the damage and chaos when big business is left to run amok. The big example is the Crash of 1929. The Dow Jones Industrial Average lost 89 percent of its value by 1932 and put us into a depression that didn’t subside until the start of World War II. That was 12 years of massive unemployment and suffering.

We had the robber barons of the 19th century which included John D. Rockefeller, John Jacob Astor and Andrew Carnegie. These guys were the Goldman Sachs and AIG of their day. Men like that were known for extensive use of child labor, deadly working conditions and strong arm tactics if workers complained.

Upton Sinclair wrote “The Jungle” that exposed conditions in the U.S. meat packing industry and led to the Pure Food and Drug Act in 1906. Now we seem to be returning to those days when you didn’t know if your food or medicine was safe. The food industry have worked for years to reduce the regulations in place.

More recent follies included the Savings and Loan crash in the 1980s and there was Black Monday in October 1987 when the stock market dropped 500 points or 22.6 percent of value. We’re still experiencing the damage from the crash in 2008 and the collapse of the housing loan market.

The BP oil spill isn’t the first or last example of big business raping our environment in the name of profits. Google “superfund” and you will find a lot of information on trashed environments that taxpayers paid to have cleaned up — places like Love Canal, Times Beach and smaller locations like old factories that found it was cheaper to dump their hazardous wastes on their property than to have it properly disposed.

The problem with “big business” is shown in little ways as well. Grocery chains don’t locate in low income areas so those people are forced to pay more for their food. Money and favorable policies meant to help family farms end up going to agriculture conglomerates like ConAgra. Wal-mart treats their employees so bad that many have to apply for food stamps and welfare to make ends meet.

What bothers me the most is most people let these things happen or look the other way. One reaction is that they would rather have a cheaper price than a company that acts ethically and responsibly. Big business isn’t the driver of the economy. The engine of our economy is small businesses— the mom and pop locally owned shops and services. Big business’ charity work comes from their advertising budget and most of their profit leaves the area and contributes nothing where they operate.

An obstacle to stopping this screw over is the government. Legislators in D.C. or in the states are bought and paid for by big bushiness in some way. Both Democrats and Republicans. If we want to return our country to the people we need to only vote for people who will refuse to be bought.

Unless that happens, things like the BP oil spill will continue.

*This article appeared in the July/August 2010 issue of The Central Ohio Humanist*

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Sick of the right wing racism – really!

The right wing propaganda machine spit out another manufactured outrage about an incident involving the New Black Panther voter-intimidation case from 2008. Not only is it a continuation of the GOP “southern strategy” but it’s also based on false information and omissions. Shocking, right???

The “southern strategy” is basically race baiting to win elections – scare white people about blacks and other minorities.

What the conservative biased media fails to tell you is that there was action taken in the New Black Panthers case and the Bush Department of Justice failed to act on a similar case in 2006.

But Perez noted DOJ’s decision to proceed with default judgment against the man with a weapon [in the New Black Panthers case]

Perez: “[T]hey made the judgment on the merits that we should proceed with the default judgment against the gentleman who was — who had the stick.” Adams’ attack is completely undermined by comments Perez made that were edited out by Kelly. Perez specifically discussed the DOJ’s decision in the Black Panther case to “proceed with the default judgment against the gentleman who was — who had the stick and that the evidence didn’t sustain the case against the national party or the head of the national party for the reasons that we have discussed.”

Perez: “[T]he Department declined to bring any action for alleged voter intimidation” in 2006. In the very testimony Kelly cited, Perez highlighted a case that completely undermines the notion that the DOJ’s decisions in the Black Panthers case were unprecedented or racially motivated. Perez testified that in 2006, the Justice Department “declined to bring any action for alleged voter intimidation” “when three well-known anti-immigrant advocates affiliated with the Minutemen, one of whom was carrying a gun, allegedly intimidated Latino voters at a polling place by approaching several persons, filming them, and advocating and printing voting materials in Spanish.” [U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, 5/14/10]

Fox’s Kelly deceptively cites DOJ testimony to further Adams’ attacks

Biased media like FOX News regularly trumps up any incident involving minorities but ignores any incident where the perpetrator is white. Here are racists they don’t show you on FOX.

Fox News runs incendiary video of New Black Panther’s racist rant. Here are some other racists they don’t show you.

Anyone who tries to gloss over or ignore the blatant racism on the right needs some serious mental help.

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