Tag Archives: The South

Selected Reading On The Mess We’re In

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Historian Sean Wilentz makes a forceful argument in favor of Obama invoking the 14th Amendment to protect the world’s economy:

… the president would have done his constitutional duty, saved the country and undoubtedly earned the gratitude of a relieved people. Then the people would find the opportunity to punish those who vandalized the Constitution and brought the country to the brink of ruin.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/08/opinion/obamas-options.html?pagewanted=2&hp

The New York Times editorial board is justifiably outraged that many people living in Republican-run states will still lack health insurance next year — they’ll earn too little to be covered by the Affordable Care Act and too much to be covered by Medicaid:

Their plight is a result of the Supreme Court’s decision last year that struck down the reform law’s mandatory expansion of Medicaid and made expansion optional. Every state in the Deep South except Arkansas has rejected expansion, as have Republican-led states elsewhere, [although] there is no provision in the ACA to provide health insurance subsidies for anyone below the poverty line … those people are supposed to be covered by Medicaid… Eight million Americans who are impoverished and uninsured will be ineligible for help of either kind.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/04/opinion/a-population-betrayed.html?ref=opinion

Of course, Congress could easily fix this problem, but that would require You Know Who to cooperate.

At Jacobin, Shawn Gude writes about the fundamental tension between capitalism and democracy, in the context of living-wage legislation in the District of Columbia:

The controversy throws into sharp relief one of our era’s great unspoken truths: Capitalist democracy, if not an oxymoron, is less a placid pairing than an acrimonious amalgamation. The marriage that Francis Fukuyama famously pronounced eternal is in fact a union of opposites. Inherent to capitalism is inequality, fundamental to democracy is equality. Class stratification, the lifeblood of capitalism, leaves democracy comatose. The economic “base,” to put it in classical Marxian terms, actively undermines the purported values of the political superstructure.

http://jacobinmag.com/2013/08/capitalism-vs-democracy/

And finally, Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz argues that we can undo the decisions that got us into this mess:

We have become the advanced country with the highest level of inequality, with the greatest divide between the rich and the poor… The central message of my book, The Price of Inequality, is that all of us, rich and poor, are footing the bill for this yawning gap. And that this inequality is not inevitable. It is not … like the weather, something that just happens to us. It is not the result of the laws of nature or the laws of economics. Rather, it is something that we create, by our policies, by what we do.  

We created this inequality—chose it, really—with laws that weakened unions, that eroded our minimum wage to the lowest level, in real terms, since the 1950s, with laws that allowed CEO’s to take a bigger slice of the corporate pie, bankruptcy laws that put Wall Street’s toxic innovations ahead of workers. We made it nearly impossible for student debt to be forgiven. We underinvested in education. We taxed gamblers in the stock market at lower rates than workers, and encouraged investment overseas rather than at home.

http://www.alternet.org/economy/joe-stiglitz-people-who-break-rules-have-raked-huge-profits-and-wealth-and-its-sickening-our

Meanwhile, the Swiss are voting on whether to guarantee everybody a minimum monthly income of $2500 francs ($2800 dollars). They’re also voting on a proposal to limit executive pay to no more than 12 times what the company’s lowest-paid workers earn. Who knew that the businesslike, orderly Swiss were a bunch of commies? Or maybe they’re just fed up with rising inequality, even in Switzerland.

http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/10/04/us-swiss-pay-idUSBRE9930O620131004

The Cold Civil War and the South Rising Again

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It’s tragic that we have to keep fighting the Civil War, even though it’s been a cold war for the last 150 years. Witness Reconstruction’s failure, white Southern insurgency, lynchings, Jim Crow laws, “separate but equal”, the Ku Klux Klan, chain gangs, filibusters, Lester Maddox, “right to work” laws, the Tea Party, voter suppression, and so on.

But that’s the situation we’ll be in until the biological and cultural descendants of those 19th century Southern traitors (also known as “rebels”) lose their ability to screw up America.

That blessed day will begin to dawn when there are enough African-Americans and Hispanic-Americans in Texas and Florida to make those state consistently blue. When that eventually happens, the rest of us should finally be protected from the South ever rising again.

It’s the Civil War Minus the Armed Rebellion Part

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Michael Lind grew up in Texas, which apparently gives him an advantage in understanding Tea Party-ish people.

Lind argues that there are a number of common misconceptions about Tea Party supporters. First, they aren’t merely a group of ideological extremists. Second, they aren’t populists – the average Tea Party supporter is more affluent than the national average. Third, despite their silly costumes and bizarre beliefs, they aren’t stupid or uneducated – they’re actually better educated than the average voter.

If the Tea Party isn’t best understood as a case of “abstract ideological extremism”, “working-class populism” or “ignorance and stupidity”, how should it be understood?

According to Lind, the Tea Party is simply the latest example of white right-wingers, mostly Southern, doing whatever they can to maintain their privileged position. He prefers referring to this movement as the “Newest Right”. They are merely the traditional right wing “adopting new strategies in response to changed circumstances”. The social base of the Newest Right consists of “local notables”, i.e.: “provincial elites whose power and privileges are threatened from above by a stronger central government they do not control and from below by the local poor and the local working class”.

Basically, it’s a continuation of the Civil War carried on by mostly Southern county supervisors and car dealers, “second-tier people on a national level but first-tier people in their states and counties and cities”, without the armed rebellion part.

Before describing their current strategies, Lind outlines some history:

For nearly a century, from the end of Reconstruction, when white Southern terrorism drove federal troops out of the conquered South, until the Civil Rights Revolution, the South’s local notables maintained their control over a region of the U.S. larger than Western Europe by means of segregation, disenfranchisement, and bloc voting and the filibuster at the federal level. Segregation created a powerless black workforce and helped the South’s notables pit poor whites against poor blacks. The local notables also used literacy tests and other tricks to disenfranchise lower-income whites as well as blacks in the South, creating a distinctly upscale electorate. Finally, by voting as a unit in Congress and presidential elections, the “Solid South” sought to thwart any federal reforms that could undermine the power of Southern notables at the state, county and city level. When the Solid South failed, Southern senators made a specialty of the filibuster, the last defense of the embattled former Confederacy.

It shouldn’t be surprising, therefore, to see Republicans using similar methods now in order to maintain their economic position and insure a supply of cheap, compliant labor. Lind highlights these four strategies (although there are others, such as providing limited funding for public education):

Use partisan and racial gerrymandering to maintain a Solid South;
Employ the filibuster and the “Hastert” rule to sabotage Congress;
Disenfranchise politically unreliable voters; and
Localize and privatize federal programs.

It’s an excellent article if you want to understand today’s political environment:

http://www.salon.com/2013/10/06/tea_party_radicalism_is_misunderstood_meet_the_newest_right/

At the Globalist, Stephan Richter places the government shutdown and debt ceiling mess in the same historical context:

One of the biggest hoaxes of American history is that the Civil War ended back in 1865. Unfortunately, it has not ended yet. What was achieved back then was an armistice, similar to the situation between the two Koreas.

As the current logjam in the U.S. Congress makes plain, the Civil War is still very present in today’s America – and with virulence that most other civilized nations find as breathtaking as it is irresponsible.

The reason why the Civil War was declared finished, according to the history books, is the military defeat of the South and its secessionist forces. But can anyone seriously doubt that the same anti-Union spirit is still to be heard loud and clear in the halls of the U.S. Congress today?

http://www.theglobalist.com/u-s-civil-war-continues/

Justice Anthony Kennedy, Champion of Equal Rights?

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On PBS’s Religious & Ethics NewsWeekly program this morning, a correspondent referred to Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy as a “champion of equal rights” for gay people. He called Justice Kennedy a “champion” because Kennedy has voted with the majority more than once for gay rights, most recently this week when the Supreme Court declared the so-called “Defense of Marriage Act” to be unconstitutional on a 5-4 vote.

Although Kennedy taking a liberal position on this issue is an excellent thing, it’s an exaggeration to refer to him as a “champion of equal rights”. After all, the only reason Kennedy stands out among the 5 justices who declared the law unconstitutional is that he tends to vote against equal rights (and common sense) in so many other cases. The other 4 justices are reliable votes for equal rights, so their votes aren’t newsworthy.

This week, for example, Kennedy joined his benighted right-wing brethren in throwing out the part of the Voting Rights Act that required certain states to get Justice Department approval before tinkering with their electoral laws. The immediate result of this Supreme Court decision is that some of those states (ones whose leaders committed treason in order to defend slavery) have already announced plans to make voting more difficult.

Everyone knows that the purpose of these restrictive voting laws so popular in certain states is to suppress turnout among blacks, Hispanics and the poor (who tend to vote Democratic), not to eliminate voter fraud (which has never been shown to exist to any mathematically significant degree at all).

So in a couple of cases this week, Justice Kennedy voted for equal rights. In a case that was at least equally important, he voted to make it more difficult for people to exercise their right as an American citizen to vote — not their right to vote as the holder of one or more specific forms of identification. People all over the world vote by showing up at the polls and getting their hands stamped. They don’t have to “prove” that they live where they live.

For your consideration: Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy, champion of equal rights in a very limited sense.

Death and Taxes

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A recent article by Katherine Newman, a sociology professor at Johns Hopkins, highlights the effect of rising tax rates on the poor. She points out that for the past 30 years or so, many states in the South and the West have been raising sales taxes and fees for government services, both of which especially affect the poor. States in the Northeast and Midwest, on the other hand, have generally been more progressive in their tax policies, some even going so far as to create local versions of the federal Earned Income Tax Credit, which is specifically designed to assist people who don’t earn much money.

According to Professor Newman, the result of these policies, after correcting for other variables, like the local poverty rate, racial composition, diet and cost of living, is that there is a clear relationship between taxing the poor and “negative outcomes”, such as heart disease, infant mortality, dropping out of school, divorce, property crime and violent crime:

“The poor of the South — and increasingly the West — do worse because their states tax them more heavily. They have less money to buy medication, so their health problems get worse. High sales taxes make meals more expensive, so they shift to cheaper, unhealthy food. If people can’t make ends meet, they may turn to the underground economy or to crime.”

Partly for this reason, Southern and Western states receive more than their share of the federal budget (it’s not just because they have lots of military bases):

“Medicaid payments, food stamps, disability benefits — all of these federal programs swoop in to try to patch up a frayed safety net. Consequently, the Southern states reap more dollars in federal benefits than they pay in taxes (like Mississippi, which saw a net gain of $240 billion between 1990 and 2009), while the wealthier states — which do more to take care of their own — lose out for every dollar they pay (like New Jersey, which handed over a net of $706 billion over that same period)… We all pay for the damage done when states try to solve their fiscal problems, or score ideological points, on the backs of the poor.”

And yet the situation is getting worse, as states like Louisiana, Nebraska and North Carolina consider cutting income and corporate taxes, while raising sales taxes. 

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/03/09/in-the-south-and-west-a-tax-on-being-poor/