Monday, 3 May 2010
Sunday, 2 May 2010
DON’T blame it all on Arizona. The Grand Canyon State simply happened to be in the right place at the right time to tilt over to the dark side. Its hysteria is but another symptom of a political virus that can’t be quarantined and whose cure is as yet unknown.
That's an ominous way to begin a column that proceeds to examine the reactionary immigration legislation recently passed in Arizona as a "which came first, the chicken or the egg?" conundrum instead of a more populist "us vs. them" equation. But Rich makes a number of salient points.
Arizonans, like all Americans, have every right to be furious about Washington’s protracted and bipartisan failure to address the immigration stalemate. To be angry about illegal immigration is hardly tantamount to being a bigot. But the Arizona law expressing that anger is bigoted, and in a very particular way. The law dovetails seamlessly with the national “Take Back America” crusade that has attended the rise of Barack Obama and the accelerating demographic shift our first African-American president represents.
True. Ever since Barack Obama's ascension to America's highest office become a fait accompli, segments of the population have become whirling dervishes, spitting out cultural molasses in their attempts to slow the force majeure of white descent as the majority demographic.
That's two French phrases in one paragraph. Need some Freedom Fries before we move on?
It wasn't election night that set these factions in motion. As soon as Obama began knee-capping Hillary Clinton in the Democratic primary race, the rumbling began. There's enough video of McCain supporters with monkey puppets and bigoted misspelled signs to fill several days worth of Fox News airtime, not to mention the countless Photoshop pics of the White House as a watermelon patch, or Obama caricatured as the Huggy Bear of 21st century American politics.
If absolute power corrupts absolutely, then loss of power most certainly turns folks into frightened, shrill dingbats.
Rich:
To the “Take Back America” right, the illegitimate Obama is Illegal Alien No. 1. It’s no surprise that of the 35 members of the Arizona House who voted for the immigration law (the entire Republican caucus), 31 voted soon after for another new law that would require all presidential candidates to produce birth certificates to qualify for inclusion on the state’s 2012 ballot. With the whole country now watching Arizona, that “birther” bill was abruptly yanked Thursday.
The legislators who voted for both it and the immigration law were exclusively Republicans, but what happened in the Arizona G.O.P. is not staying in Arizona. Officials in at least 10 other states are now teeing up their own new immigration legislation. They are doing so even in un-Arizonan places like Ohio, Missouri, Maryland and Nebraska, none of them on the Department of Homeland Security’s 2009 list of the 10 states that contain three-quarters of America’s illegal immigrant population.
Ah, yes. The bed-wetting, hand-wringing, "what if they change the American symbol from a bald eagle to Cheech Marin?" crowd has mobilized, determined to dig into their very own ultranationalist Alamo, forgetting two key historical points - the Mexicans kicked Texian ass, and only two Alamo defenders survived.
But what of the current racial tensions permeating our national discourse? One hopes that clearer minds will prevail, but then again, no one puts Baby in the corner. And that's where many who have enlisted in the alabaster army fervently believe they've been forced.
It's not true, of course. Sadly, rational ideas and fear mix like the Gulf of Mexico and BP oil. Nate Silver could set the loyalist gringos straight with some metrics and fancy graphs and trendlines, but facts and figures are no match for cultural hysteria.
In this Alice in Wonderland inversion of reality, it’s politically incorrect to entertain a reasonable suspicion that race may be at least a factor in what drives an action like the Arizona immigration law. Any racism in America, it turns out, is directed at whites. Beck called Obama a “racist.” Newt Gingrich called Sonia Sotomayor a “Latina woman racist.” When Obama put up a routine YouTube video calling for the Democratic base to mobilize last week — which he defined as “young people, African-Americans, Latinos and women” — the Republican National Committee attacked him for playing the race card. Presumably the best defense is a good offense when you’re a party boasting an all-white membership in both the House and the Senate and represented by governors who omit slavery from their proclamations of Confederate History Month.
In a development that can only be described as startling, the G.O.P.’s one visible black leader, the party chairman Michael Steele, went off message when appearing at DePaul University on April 20. He conceded that African-Americans “really don’t have a reason” to vote Republican, citing his party’s pursuit of a race-baiting “Southern strategy” since the Nixon-Agnew era. For this he was attacked by conservatives who denied there had ever been such a strategy. That bit of historical revisionism would require erasing, for starters, Strom Thurmond and Jesse Helms, not to mention the Willie Horton campaign that helped to propel Bush 41 into the White House in 1988.
Sound the bugles, you pallid jingoists. Want to read a history book on your Kindle while you wait?
Image via Wikimedia Commons
Saturday, 1 May 2010
I'm going to miss Bill Moyers. Do not go gentle into that good night, Bill.
You've no doubt figured out my bias by now. I've hardly kept it a secret. In this regard, I take my cue from the late Edward R. Murrow, the Moses of broadcast news.Ed Murrow told his generation of journalists bias is okay as long as you don't try to hide it. So here, one more time, is mine: plutocracy and democracy don't mix. Plutocracy, the rule of the rich, political power controlled by the wealthy.Plutocracy is not an American word but it's become an American phenomenon. Back in the fall of 2005, the Wall Street giant Citigroup even coined a variation on it, plutonomy, an economic system where the privileged few make sure the rich get richer with government on their side. By the next spring, Citigroup decided the time had come to publicly "bang the drum on plutonomy."And bang they did, with an "equity strategy" for their investors, entitled, "Revisiting Plutonomy: The Rich Getting Richer." Here are some excerpts:"Asset booms, a rising profit share and favorable treatment by market-friendly governments have allowed the rich to prosper...[and] take an increasing share of income and wealth over the last 20 years...""...the top 10%, particularly the top 1% of the US-- the plutonomists in our parlance-- have benefited disproportionately from the recent productivity surge in the US...[and] from globalization and the productivity boom, at the relative expense of labor.""...[and they] are likely to get even wealthier in the coming years. [Because] the dynamics of plutonomy are still intact."And so they were, before the great collapse of 2008. And so they are, today, after the fall. While millions of people have lost their jobs, their homes, and their savings, the plutonomists are doing just fine. In some cases, even better, thanks to our bailout of the big banks which meant record profits and record bonuses for Wall Street.Now why is this? Because over the past 30 years the plutocrats, or plutonomists — choose your poison — have used their vastly increased wealth to capture the flag and assure the government does their bidding. Remember that Citigroup reference to "market-friendly governments" on their side? It hasn't mattered which party has been in power — government has done Wall Street's bidding.Don't blame the lobbyists, by the way; they are simply the mules of politics, delivering the drug of choice to a political class addicted to cash — what polite circles call "campaign contributions" and Tony Soprano would call "protection."This marriage of money and politics has produced an America of gross inequality at the top and low social mobility at the bottom, with little but anxiety and dread in between, as middle class Americans feel the ground falling out from under their feet. According to a study from the Pew Research Center last month, nine out of ten Americans give our national economy a negative rating. Eight out of ten report difficulty finding jobs in their communities, and seven out of ten say they experienced job-related or financial problems over the past year.So it is that like those populists of that earlier era, millions of Americans have awakened to a sobering reality: they live in a plutocracy, where they are disposable. Then, the remedy was a popular insurgency that ignited the spark of democracy.Now we have come to another parting of the ways, and once again the fate and character of our country are up for grabs.So along with Jim Hightower and Iowa's concerned citizens, and many of you, I am biased: democracy only works when we claim it as our own.
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