Is there a race war underway?
From this article:
"A war rages on in America, and it didn’t begin with Donald Trump or the assault on the Capitol.
It started with slavery and never ended, through lynchings and voter suppression, the snarling attack dogs of Bull Connor and the insidious accounting of redlining.
Today’s battles in the race war are waged by legions of white people in the thrall of stereotypes, lies and conspiracy theories that don’t just exist for recluses on some dark corner of the internet."
I think it's safe to say that most Americans don't realize a race war is underway. Granted, Trump encouraged American racists (did he also encourage racists across the world?)
They took advantage of the new climate with enthusiasm that's alarming.
But where's the race war? Maybe I just don't understand what a race war is, if there's one underway. Do you see it?
"A war rages on in America, and it didn’t begin with Donald Trump or the assault on the Capitol.
It started with slavery and never ended, through lynchings and voter suppression, the snarling attack dogs of Bull Connor and the insidious accounting of redlining.
Today’s battles in the race war are waged by legions of white people in the thrall of stereotypes, lies and conspiracy theories that don’t just exist for recluses on some dark corner of the internet."
I think it's safe to say that most Americans don't realize a race war is underway. Granted, Trump encouraged American racists (did he also encourage racists across the world?)
They took advantage of the new climate with enthusiasm that's alarming.
But where's the race war? Maybe I just don't understand what a race war is, if there's one underway. Do you see it?
Comments (117)
Maybe it's more like a "Cold" Race War, rather than a "Hot" Race War.
I love how the media blames the politicians when they are just as culpable for propagating lies and misinformation. After all, they report what the liars in government say, as if any of it is actually other than meaningless platitudes and spin. If the media actually did think that all the whites in power were such evil racists, then why do they give them a platform to speak on their news channels? Fucking hypocrites.
Red-lining is an example of systematic measures to keep the US from developing a diverse society. The goal was segregation. Let's poetically call that a war on blacks.
The idea of a race war goes back to before the Civil War. It was envisioned as a real war starting with a mass slave revolt
Is it that people like Morrison don't know about that slice of American History? If so, that's maybe a good thing.
That actually makes sense. Cold wars have occasional outbreaks of down scale violence. Otherwise it's just tension.
Who are the people engaged in this cold race war?
Yea, I'm just sincerely burned out on the extreme rhetoric. If you just want to sling insults, could you please go elsewhere?
Yes he did. I guess he woke up the beast that was sleeping since 1945 when Second World War ended. It is so complex determine what is a race war and if it actually exists. I think it is related to the context of the country: jobs, rent, economy and other social values. Covid-19 brought us a very big breach in the social pyramid/structure, people lost jobs, GDP losing percentage, companies shutting down...
so when you are in a critical environment, some people prefer to start putting labels and differences to just empower their selfishness. It is common if the easy argument of “they are quitting our jobs”
Which jobs? I guess the lowest paid... because sadly immigrants always have the shittiest jobs of society.
I wish when life comes to normality, we would forget this differences and confrontation between us as humans.
The only advancement racists have made in the last while is the critical race theorists permeating academia and the industrial media complex. It will lead to segregation, apartheid, but not war.
No.
Quoting frank
Please explain in what way calling racial conditions in the US a war makes a solution to those issues easier or more likely. All they do is give one group of people an opportunity to feel self-satisfied.
How much of it is really continuous with historic racism, and how much of it is the outlet for today's fears?
Maybe it's an attempt to keep the focus on race since the events of the summer. Every year this happens. Every year nothing changes.
So let's just act like it's Malcolm X time and declare an invisible race war.
The justice system is biased. Subtract the racial bias and there's still a bias against the poor. I'm glad academia thinks about it. Aren't you?
I'll ask again. Please explain in what way calling racial conditions in the US a war makes a solution to those issues easier or more likely.
The extremists on both sides, and the politicians that use the rehetoric that created and then reinforce the extremists. The rest of us are able to see that another person excercising their liberties isn't necessarily a threat to our liberties. Only when others try to take a larger piece of the pie than they deserve because they've been led to believe that they have been slighted in some way, does it affect everyone. Over-representing some is under-representing others.
If you're proposing that our society should be so called "color-blind," that won't sell. Maybe it might in the future sometime once we've worked ourselves out of this hole we've dug ourselves into over centuries.
I think it is unmeasurable. There a lot of traditions and social ruptures that comes from historic racism. Today’s fears about having in your own country citizens from other cultures dependes of the quality of education level. Some States are used of it for example UK, USA, Canada, etc... others are not so openly like Russia or Japan.
Some don't have the luxury of being able to forget what they look like. But yea, being able to see past race is a good thing.
What are you talking about specifically?
I don't know.
Quoting frank
Some examples would include a black person marching against police brutality, in which some cops view that as a threat to their holding a job. Marching against police brutality won't make you lose your job if you aren't a cop engaging in police brutality. If you are a good cop, then you should be joining the march as weeding out those bad cops will give all cops a better name for themselves. All groups have been victims of police brutality.
A white person marching for ensuring that votes are legitimate doesn't threaten someone's rights to vote. It is ensuring that all legal votes count and illegal votes don't. If you weren't voting illegally, then you should welcome such a cause and even join the march, as it is valuable to all legal voters to ensure that the power of their vote is not diminished by illegal votes. All legal voters are negatively affected by illegal votes.
Nobody felt threatened by the marchers.
Personally, I prefer "The only war is the class war", but I'll stick to race.
What people call a "race war" is really just "business as usual".
If we read the histories of housing discrimination, for instance, we find that "red lining" was a survey conducted in the 1930s by the Home Owners' Loan Corporation (HOLC), a government agency. If we look at white people organizing to repress black people, we find that "Jim Crow" was organized in the 1890s. Slavery had just ended 30 odd years earlier. In the post-WWII period, the government financed a huge growth in suburban building, and it was both explicit and implicit that the suburbs were to be white.
The consequences of government and private actions during the century--1860s to the 1960s--locked in the race-poverty relationship. Circling back to "the only war is the class war", government and private actions have also locked in a lot of people (white and colored alike) to the increasingly impoverished working class.
The upshot of all this is that long term race and class discrimination is impossible to overcome without very radical changes, and short of a revolution, which is unlikely to happen.
Was Bernie Sanders trying to initiate that kind of change? What do you think will happen to today's progressives? Will they sell out eventually?
Then you feed that fear through media and present a scapegoat.
These days progressives have a major problem of 'social efficacy': we have some good ideas, goals, objectives, desired ends, etc., but we are not able to achieve much. Conservatives, reactionaries, and propertied interests are hostile to anything more than token changes. Redistribute income? Reform education? Undo unjust, century-long housing discrimination? Not a chance.
Progressives are more likely to wear out than sell out. Anyway, nobody is offering much of a bribe to progressives.
I don't know what precisely should be done, anymore. The progressive housing reform advocates working during the 1930, '40s, and '50s are the people responsible for the nightmares that many public housing projects turned into. Some of the progressive advocates predicted in the early '50s that the high-rise housing projects were a huge mistake, and they turned out to be right. Other equally sensible progressives were shocked and appalled by how fast and how bad the housing projects ended up being.
Waves of progressive educational reform have come and gone, without eliminating the sometimes huge gaps between white and black or hispanic student performance. Anti-poverty programs often end up benefitting only the middle-class workers in the programs. on and on and on...
The thing is, rational sensible plans for progressive change end up being severely warped by the existing system which creates and maintains the problems in the first place.
If your title would be the "national race and ethnicity writer for The Associated Press", would your objective be to provide solutions race relations or to show that serious racial problems exist in the US and that they matter?
So as whites, blacks, and latinos become genetically mixed, the race problem will go away, but inequality is too deeply rooted in our kind of civilization to uproot.
Why do we accept it? Is it because we need it?
I don't understand how your post is intended as a response to mine.
People maintain all sorts of delusions. One delusion: I could be rich, too. Another delusion: People get rich by their own efforts; work hard, get rich. Rich people deserve what they have. Yes, Mark, Jeff, and Bill earned every cent!
Do I have a choice about severe inequality? Do you? No. It's deeply, systemically embedded and protected by laws and courts.
Will we, should we, all be equal? Maybe we should be, but there's not much danger of that happening soon.
We could, at least, aim for such modest reforms as trimming the extremes -- reducing the wretchedness of the poor on one end and reducing extravagant wealth on the other end. We could engage in moderate income redistribution through taxation.
I'm not sure we know how to bring about educational performance equalized UP, not down. How well, or poorly, a child performs in school is often rooted in a family's ability and motivation. More, students and families need to see that education pays off. If they can't see a pay-off, what's the point?
Do you think the 4 racial groups will become homogenized? Should they?
The Occupy protests were about class issues. "Banks got bailed out, we got sold out!" was a common refrain. If you look up the frequency of the word "racism" in the news, it was flat for a really long time then started moving up dramatically right around then and it has continued to this day.
The theory being, that the powers that be needed to deflect attention from class issues, so they got everyone worked up about race. You ask the kids on campus what's wrong with society and they sace racism. They never notice the class issues, that the global elite are sucking all of the wealth of the nation and destroying the middle and working classes.
Makes sense to me.
Right now American poor people are being munched up by drugs, disease, and gun violence. There are always more though because they keep coming in from Mexico.
Quoting Bitter Crank
There's no more discrimination against the Irish and Italians. Why? I think mostly because they mixed into the pot.
I think one of the purposes of Jim Crow was to keep it from happening with whites and blacks. Now that Jim Crow is gone, it's happening.
Latinos are already mixed with whites and blacks to some extent.
Isn't that the objective here? Class or what was the slogan..."We are the 99%" would be far too unifying.
Wokestan vs Magastan works for the elites very well. Divide et Impera.
However, to the credit of OPB, it has mentioned some former slaves became slave owners. It was like owning a car today. People who could afford it owned a slave, and many of us came from slaves because we came from Europe where feudalism sold people with the property they lived on, and they had no freedom to leave that property. Aristotle said a man should have an ox and wife and a slave, those wives did not have the freedom of women today. Or we could turn to India where girls are married off at 8 years of age, so their parents don't have to feed them, and may even benefit from the marriage. In the US the age for marriage for girls was 14 and the husband was not necessarily the man of her choice and forcing a wife to have sex was not considered a crime.
We need to be fully honest and swallow the fact that humans have not been very nice and we did not have such good lives until after the second world war. No group of humans is better or worse than another. Humans are humans. Our abundance since WWII has given us the best period in human history, but back in the day, no one had indoor plumbing and a supermarket full of food year-round, no matter how wealthy they were. Mental retardation was a result of malnourished children and that reality was not that long ago.
The Occupy protests may have been initially mistaken by the overly-eager as the revolution. Sadly, not, but it was a good thing. Too bad it didn't endure. One reason it didn't endure is that the powers that be had enough sense (from their POV) not to martyr the children camped on corporate or government plazas. They let them sit there till they got tired of it.
You are absolutely correct about race, racism, and racists being hyped as a distraction. Towards the end of the 20th century, It took a certain amount of bending over backwards to identify fresh, active racism as the #1 problem. There was, and is, active racism, still. But much of what is identified as current racism is actually the long-economic-tail of racially discriminatory policies executed in the 1930s.
In the Talking Union labor song, Pete Seeger in 1941 sings:
"If you don't let race hatred break you up,
You'll win. What I mean, take it easy, but take it!
The ruling class has always recognized working class solidarity as a danger, and has consistently moved to break it up, quite often by breaking heads. Racial conflict has been an excellent tool.
According to Pew Research, slightly less than 7% of children have racial mixed parents. I assume that figure does not include the children of Irish/Italians (shudder). Advertising agencies like to people product ads with mixed-rave couples and their children. Maybe this is just a cheaper way to advertise to white and black audiences at the same time.
Lives were much better after WWII for those who happened to survive it. But it is extremely true: Humans are just not very nice. Seriously. It always seems to surprise us when fresh evidence of our deep-down-awfulness is revealed.
Exactly. Nobody else does either. This is why you allow people to do what is in their interests. Revoke all corporate charters, cut the government back by 90% and allow freedom to do its thing!
I would say those mixed racial commercials are just jumping on the bandwagon. It is the politically correct thing to do, unless a person is a racist bigot. I am waiting for the couple to be gay.
African genes for appearance are dominant. If that wasn't true, the distinction between the two groups would have disappeared a long time ago.
See everybody thinks they're right and has the best philosophy per se, and anyone who doesn't agree with their view is at best confused or at worse deficient, anyone who adamantly opposes their view is at best wrong or at worse a living cancer and plague on humanity that if not neutralized will spell doom for the human race. Lol. Once you realize that, you're able to debate with anyone and things begin to start making a whole lot more sense.
Race war? Since Columbus' 1492 "conquest" of the "Americas". Since 1619 through to the establishment of colonial Slave Patrols in 1701. Since 19th century pseudo-scientific "eugenics" & "social darwinism". Since King Leopold's genocide in central Africa, US Jim Crow and SA Apartheid. Since August 6th & 9th, 1945 and the following thirty year French-US colonial aggression throughout Indochina. Since Nixon's "law & order" "southern strategy" culminating in a 50 year "war on drugs" against urban working classes and the poor. Since ... when in the last half millennium have Whites not waged race war against Non-Whites at home & abroad?
And now with a looming "demographic crisis of 2040s" wherein Whites in America are projected to be a majority-minority for the first time since the colonial era (Francoist arch-rightwingnut Pat Buchanan had sounded the alarm during his first presidential run in 1992), decades of "cold race war" is now apparently on the verge of going HOT! Instead of working to make the US as equitable and socially just for individuals & families who belong to minority communities as possible (which, btw, will include themselves soon), some Whites fuel hatred with fears of being overrun – out-bred, out-migrated, out-(illegally?!) voted, out-protected by civil rights & out-politically corrected – by black brown yellow red & "miscegenated" urban and migrant hordes, locking-n-loading up via the ballot & the bullet to "build a wall" "send them back to their shithole countries" "take our country back" "stop the steal" & Make America White Again ... in order to avoid what terrifies them most: "they will not replace us" by melting us [Whites] down into the gumbo pot of a Republic of Minorities governed by the will of multi-color/ethnic people (i.e. majority rule of coalitions of minority communities).
IIRC, in 1980 Ronald Reagan gave his "States Rights Speech" (i.e. code for pro-segregation) in Philadelphia, MS ('home of the KKK' and site of the 1964 murders of Schwerner, Goodman & Chaney) during the GOP primaries, which he then followed up in his first Inaugural Address with a statement which has, more than any other, framed the last four decades of US political partisanship:
And what's "our problem, the problem"? Government is less and less for and by Whites Only and more and more (though only in painfully tiny, often only symbolic, increments) Also for and by Non-Whites. Because the "present crisis" – 40+ years hence – is the approaching "demographic crisis" of the majority-minority status of White Americans. The throughline from Reagan (GOP) to Tr45h (MAGA/QAnon) is unmistakable.
(brb gotta reload ...)
That is a nice way to put it. I got on board before it all fell about, and rode through to end following someone being killed in our camp. As I have learned more about the 1% taking advantage of the housing crisis, and what has happened to property values since then, I strongly regret what happened to Occupy. Which is a story that really could add to this thread.
If we don't end the race wars we will all loose. Ignorance and stupidity are our worst enemies. Most of us were fighting too hard to just survive to tackle the social problems we think are important today. WWII was a big game changer. And throwing stones at people as though we always had the abundance we have today might be a reflection of a lack of information?
:lol: That is not exactly how I would word things. I do not think of myself as a bad person, and doubt that many people think of themselves as bad people. Most of us are too busy with our own lives to know much about anyone else's. We are not exploiting people or taking advantage of them. We are just hanging in there doing the best we can to keep our heads above water.
I am not saying that wrongs were not done, but we are not the ones who did them, and in many cases we had no idea that injustice was happening, and if we did know of injustices, how many of us knew what to do to correct them? Do we vote on banking policy and industrial decisions? We might have more power, but we have done almost nothing to change the fact that we don't. Can we fall back on the example of Occupy? If there ever was a time of terrible injustice, the housing crisis and Occupy was one of those times, and Occupy was a huge failure. White folk could do nothing to say their own asses, so how many stones should throw at them for failing to resolve other social problems? Who knows how to make a real change? It is easy to blame others and to hate them, but it is not so easy to resolve problems.
Until we replace autocratic industry with democratic industry, I don't think any of us will have much meaningful power. When we gain power by being united by industry, perhaps then we can take on banking and politics.
Individually, people are usually quite nice. We can be, sometimes, quite nice in large groups, too. Think of a church picnic. But it is when we get into large groups and are not nice, like the Republic Party or Nazi Party, that we become really awful.
A dictatorship of the proletariat? Am I reading you right?
I get what you're saying.
That is interesting and it makes culture very important. Jefferson devoted himself to public education because he saw it as the way to make our republic in the US united and strong. That was the focus of our education until 1958. The National Defense Education Act ended the transmission of that culture and liberal education from the first grade on that lead to good moral judgment and left moral training to the church. A big mistake. Now we are not united and don't know morals have to do with liberty.
Things were not perfect back then, especially when it comes to racism. We should have stayed on task after the civil war to prevent the racist problem that is also a cultural problem. I think we still have important changes to make. No child should grow up in a neighborhood where people are killed on a regular basis and schools in those neighborhoods need to as well funded as all schools. This means doing something about poverty. People didn't move into cities for a welfare check. They moved to the city for industrial jobs and a better standard of living. The industry left and poverty is an economic problem that needs to be resolved. When we feel safe I think we behave better.
I am not sure but I think a dictatorship is rule by one person? At best, it might be a rule by one party. A democracy is rule by reason, and everyone has a part in the reasoning. Totally different from a dictatorship.
No one is threatened by marchers, per say, but there are others that misconstrue what the marchers are marching for in order to make people that aren't threatened by marchers, threatened by them. Not to the mention the criminals that join the march as cover for doing illegal things like destroying property and looting.
It is very difficult to start a grassroots movement without having it hijacked and miscontrued by the elitists in power. After all, there can only be Democrat and Republican movements. Any other movement is "adopted" by one of the two parties, which is then demonized by the party that didn't "adopt" it, or procrastinated by the party that did "adopt" it to hold it over the heads of their constituents as an issue that is never resolved to keep them voting for that party.
Trump played to white supremacists. He played to QAnon. When the president is egging on armed wackos, it's a little more than that Democrats are demonizing somebody.
C'mon, you're so sane in some areas, be sane about that.
In what way? What specifically did he say to egg on armed wackos? How is that any different than the Dems egging on the looters during the Floyd protests?
Democrats egged on looters?
Half sane then. That's better than none at all.
We'd likely be deluded if we thought we could be billionaires, but I don't think it's a delusion to think we could be richer than we are, if we so desired. All sorts of things are decided for us, like where we were born, who we were born to, what sorts of parents we had, the schooling available to us, our race, our gender, and on and on. Those things no doubt matter. There are things we can choose, like how hard we wish to try in school, what sorts of subjects we migrate to, whether we want to work at the non-profit or go to law school, and all sorts of stuff. I'm not willing to say every cent received is well earned, but I can't say the opposite either. Hard work and good decisions do pay off, but, sure, there are those undeserving of their riches and of their poverty, but more or less, the system does generally predictably reward and punish those who engage in certain behaviors.
I also don't see inequality as a bad thing. The concern should be over inequity, not inequality.
The chooks are laying at half-speed. So I've started eating more cereal, and also cut back on coffee consumption. Wife has settled on a combination oats, dates and dried mulberries, which has an excellent aroma.
The kind of inequality that is also inequity is the share of wealth held by the 1% vs. the 99%.
The disparity of wealth between the 1% and 99% (which to a significant extent was engineered through tax law) distorts the whole economy. It isn't Mark's, Jeff's, and Bill's high-end furniture, wine cellar, and house as such that is the problem. It's the draining of cash out of the 99% that is the problem (see the French economist Thomas Pikety).
My weekday usual: a pot of hot tea (black, very strong), a glass of cranberry juice, 2-3 hardboiled eggs & 1 small-ish blueberry bran muffin.
Then walk for 1-2 hours ...
Which is better than you. We could do this all day where you make an assertion, I question it and you evade it. I would have expected such an amazing claim to be supported by amazing evidence. I thought you actually had a quote of Trump saying, "I want all you armed wackos to rush the Capitol and take hostages". Instead you answer my question for specifics and how what Trump said was different than what Dems have said, with a question about what the Dems said. Do you see the problem yet?
The insane popularity of Trump stems from the impression he gave of himself as a savior to America, particularly to Americans living on unstable economic ground.
In his campaign he hit on nostalgia for the stability that existed in the 1960s and promised to bring American jobs back to the US and basically reindustrialize the US.
The response of Democrats like Obama to this was incredulity. He had the same response to Sander's plans for reform.
The Democrats basically stood for the status quo which was for the continuation of grotesque concentration of wealth.
Sanders and Trump both stood against the status quo, but Trump was a man poor white Americans could identify with. Trump actually is racist and his plan to go backwards to the 1960s meshes with white supremacist goals.
Largely due to internet culture there was communication among Trump's supporters who ranged from people who innocently longed for a return to the economic stability of the 1960s, to people who longed for a return to segregation and possibly a black holocaust.
After the events of America's Year of Crap, 2020, race relations were highlighted in the minds of everyone.
It's not a neoliberal plot to turn the focus to the racist element of Trump's supporters and ignore the desire among them for simple economic peace of mind. Neoliberal ideas are built in to our common sense now. We've forgotten how to think beyond it or think big enough to plan for something else.
It's all just circumstances that accidently benefit neoliberalism that we don't see what's innocent about support for Donald Trump.
"There are, he noted, two kinds of freedom, one good and the other bad. Among the latter he listed ‘the freedom to exploit one’s fellows, or the freedom to make inordinate gains without commensurable service to the community, the freedom to keep technological inventions from being used for public benefit, or the freedom to profit from public calamities secretly engineered for private advantage’.
"But, Polanyi continued, ‘the market economy under which these freedoms throve also produced freedoms we prize highly. Freedom of conscience, freedom of speech, freedom of meeting, freedom of association, freedom to choose one’s own job’. While we may ‘cherish these freedoms for their own sake’,—and, surely, many of us still do—they were to a large extent ‘by-products of the same economy that was also responsible for the evil freedoms’.33
"Polanyi’s answer to this duality makes strange reading given the current hegemony of neoliberal thinking: The passing of [the] market economy can become the beginning of an era of unprecedented freedom. Juridical and actual freedom can be made wider and more general than ever before; regulation and control can achieve freedom not only for the few, but for all. Freedom not as an appurtenance of privilege, tainted at the source, but as a prescriptive right extending far beyond the narrow confines of the political sphere into the intimate organization of society itself. Thus will old freedoms and civic rights be added to the fund of new freedoms generated by the leisure and security that industrial society offers to all. Such a society can afford to be both just and free.34
"Unfortunately, Polanyi noted, the passage to such a future is blocked by the ‘moral obstacle’ of liberal utopianism (and more than once he cites Hayek as an exemplar of that tradition): Planning and control are being attacked as a denial of freedom. Free enterprise and private ownership are declared to be essentials of freedom. No society built on other foundations is said to deserve to be called free. The freedom that regulation creates is denounced as unfreedom; the justice, liberty and welfare it offers are decried as a camouflage of slavery.35 The idea of freedom ‘thus degenerates into a mere advocacy of free enterprise’, which means ‘the fullness of freedom for those whose income, leisure and security need no enhancing, and a mere pittance of liberty for the people, who may in vain attempt to make use of their democratic rights to gain shelter from the power of the owners of property’. But if, as is always the case, ‘no society is possible in which power and compulsion are absent, nor a world in which force has no function’, then the only way this liberal utopian vision could be sustained is by force, violence, and authoritarianism. Liberal or neoliberal utopianism is doomed, in Polanyi’s view, to be frustrated by authoritarianism, or even outright fascism.36 The good freedoms are lost, the bad ones take over."
David Harvey, Brief History of Neoliberalism
I'm about to move and will have room for chickens. How hard are they to keep? We have coyotes, hawks, and owls and probably there are foxes and raccoons nearby. How hard is it to keep them safe?
A few years back we had "Death in the night" visit us once every few months - one chicken would disappear, without fuss, without a trace. After a few months a spotted quoll was found not far off - unfortunately, road kill.
I didn't mind providing the occasional chicken takeaway for an endangered species.
But foxes - one found a hole and took the entire flock (eight hens at the time) in a night. Lesson: keep an eye on the fences.
I've an open pen that's maybe five by five metres, with a small tree in the middle for protection from raptors. Deep litter of straw and leaves. I keep two to six hens - four at present. A twenty kilo bag of grain lasts a couple of months. Three eggs a day. Very easy to care for.
So you would say there is a race war taking place?
I've come to the same conclusion.
They've been doing this for hundreds of years. Profit and power is their objective, and if they can ruin people's lives to get it, they will.
I've been reading about neoliberalism. I don't think there are CEOs or oligarchs who try to instigate racial conflict. They don't have to. There's generational inertia where a child comes into a community that's waiting to pass on anger and fear. In that sense, today's racism is old.
But neoliberalism became a sort of social virus that reorganized America and to some extent the world to think of health only in terms of the health of Wall Street. The doctrine is to let Main Street disintegrate as long as Wall St. is ok.
This is why there is zero will or funds available to do something about it. I think 180Proof is right that there is a war on African Americans and brown people that has deep roots. On the other hand, BitterCrank is right that concentration of wealth has created a sense of loss among whites that leaves them vulnerable to manipulation. So the war is old and new at the same time.
There are. The whole of WWII was their doing. And the Cold War. Google "Wall Street Trilogy" it goes in depth on this. All three sides in WWII and the Cold War were ran by Wall Street.
But you're not supposed to point this out. That the real Nazis and real Communists are actually right in our own backyard. AND they won the war. The Nazis won the war. But again, you're not supposed to point this out.
Those same people own the media that tells people what to believe and do in this country, and fund the university system which teaches people the "official narrative" But, I'm sure they're not related at all and we should just trust what they say.
That's right. America was originally one node within the larger Anglosphere, the British Empire. So actually, yes. Then of course, the British Empire collapsed. But the apparatus of that empire has not. The same families of elites who lived then own everything today. Then of course, the American Empire stepped up. And it's currently in it's state of collapse as well.
The real power in the world are the Anglo-American elites, well at least since the past few hundred years. Not throughout the whole history of time, obviously.
Well, neoliberalism is just recasting liberal economics, hence "neoliberalism." That liberal economics was created during the British Empiricist period within the nascent British Empire.
Adam Smith, was a friend of David Hume, he created it, and David Ricardo basically created the version that exists today.
And where do the assumptions of British Empiricism come from, well, medieval Scholasticism: nominalism. It all goes back to nominalism.
When you believe in nominalism, there's no inherent values or natures to things, so there is no inherent value to things in the world. They're just commodities you sell on a market. And it's value and price is subjective. The value of your land is subjective, of your life, of your drinking water, of your food, of your children and of your country. This is nominalist economics. I don't call it neoliberalism, it's nominalism.
The neoliberalism I'm talking about is a post ww2 philosophy that identifies various threats to freedom. Freedom is the key word, and the almighty good is a free market.
Any government intervention of any kind is anathema because only the market knows what ought to be done for the health of society. People don't know, nature knows.
But post ww2, people in power identified social instability as the greatest threat to mankind. This led to embedded liberalism where labor unions had significant political power and there was an assumption that corporations should be interested in the welfare of communities. This was the 1960s. If they only hadn't been so incredibly racist back then, we would live in a totally different world now.
Im still not totally clear on what happened in the 1970s. Capital accumulation faltered. That means there wasn't enough demand in the economy to create the conditions for successful investment. Real interest rates were sometimes negative.
If you think of the economy as a circulatory system with demand as the pumping heart, the lack of demand was flooding the system. In medicine it's called congestive heart failure and the solution is to forcibly dry the system out with diuretics.
Lol. As you can see, I'm still trying to understand it, anyway, neoliberalism, which had been around for a while, presented itself as a solution.
Yes, so am I. "Neoliberalism" comes out of classical liberalism, classical liberalism comes from British empiricism, and British empiricism comes out of nominalism.
So nominalism is what the true issue is. From my perspective. I know the history of economics, I have a degree in it. I have degrees in politics, economy, philosophy, international relations all of these things we've been discussing.
If there is no inherent value to anything, then the market (by which is truly meant: the Oligarchs, the "owners of the country" as George Carlin put it,) decides the value.
The money-power, the State-corporate apparatus, decides the value.
:up:
Quoting Dharmi
:up:
Wouldn't that be the role of the market?
Yeah, but the market is rigged by those who have the most power and money. So, it is the market, but the market is not this pie in the sky thing. It's controlled by material forces. The State and the corporate sector primarily. Though the bankers control the money supply, and hence the value of the currency in relation to the products, so they're more powerful than any of the others really.
So how would you explain the stagflation of the 1970s?
Well, I know there is a Post-Keyensian explanation for it. I think they'd say that if you'd had taxed the money out of the economy, then prices would fall.
But a huge aspect of that problem was the oil cartels messing with the price of oil.
I guess you'd have to be more specific.
Hmm.
Free market works better than a command economy, yet for a free market to operate healthily needs a lot more is needed than the Ayn Randian libertarian just assumes to be. Simply put it: A society isn't based on competition, but on a community.
I think the basic reason is that the present elite doesn't feel that they have a responsibility towards the larger society and they have no understanding that they should take care that there exists social cohesion in the society.
Here it's important to understand what actually social cohesion is about. Here's a definition:
Political polarization, social and economic inequality reduces social cohesion and in the end creates violence, distrust and fear throughout the society. And if the elite just stands by, then the train wreck happens. The elite can withdraw to it's guarded communities or simply move to safer places abroad and then bemoan how bad things have gotten in their country and how much nicer it was decades ago without ever understanding that their lack of action was very crucial in the collapse.
Exactly, and that's part of the neoliberal doctine. Civic responsibility and equality leads to stagnation. Raiding social assets and fostering concentration of wealth makes the economy burn hot.
I think they might be right about that. The twist is that Neoliberals rode into power exhalting freedom. As things progressed, they learned to exert military authority to open societies to neoliberal raiding.
Do you agree with that?
In a way, governments have lost their power or simply pushed forward an agenda of the most wealthy and corporations. That has happened.
Basically money and investment, capital, was given freedom to cross borders and nobody thought what would happen to labor. I think that there's ample examples of that in the US. Add there that more and more production and even services are done by machines.
Let's take one example: the role of trade unions.
Strong labor unions and government control can indeed lead to a more stagnant economy, yet if trade unions are not powerful and basically unimportant, then what can emerge is totally reckless behavior from the employer side. This can create far larger problems than the negative aspects of a heavily unionized workforce can produce. Sweden has a labor union participation rate of 82% and Finland and Denmark of 76% while with the US this is at 13%. What is missing from this from the below map is Iceland, which has the highest level of the work force participating in labor unions:
Then lets look at the gini coefficient by country, which measures income inequality. Again in very close order the listing of the countries: the least inequal countries have the highest labor union participation rates.
And where do we find the countries when relative povetry is measured? Again far less relative povetry in countries with higher union participation.
Labor unions can also have harmful policies: they can promote trade barriers that make industries totally incapable of competing with other nations in the long run. Or simply be taken over by organized crime. And do note that this isn't a leftist issue: trade unions do not mean that these unions would be made of people on the political left.
Yet the basic simple fact is that workers get a better deal when haggling over salaries on a collective level than as individual workers. And this ought to be totally fine for liberals/libertarians too. But for some, it isn't so.
I think there always have been racial tensions, or at least for a long time in human history. What scares me is modern warfare. Including the dark web with its illegal weapon trade. I see race war in parts of Africa, where genocides are still happening frequently. It happened in the 90s in Eastern Europe in countries that are not far from the EU.
For the US I wish the criminalization of weapons. It will give some peace to the people. And if everyone feels safer there's more room for solutions.
Nothing brings one a sense of peace like not being able to defend oneself or at least die defending oneself on equal terms I suppose.
I would rather see all weapons being destroyed. But I do not have that power.
I still don't totally understand why this is. I think it's because it leads to a state of equilibrium between wages and prices so that profit margins become small. Workers are then laid off to try to increase profitability and invite investment for R+D, new facilities and equipment, etc, but that only lowers demand. Now inventory becomes bloated. More workers are laid off. Is this right?
This is a system headed for a deep recession after lingering in stagnation for a decade.
I don't think it's totally clear what the solution to this is. In the 70s, a lot of people thought socialism was the answer.
Is it? And why does France have both low labor union participation and low wealth concentration?
I wrote out this long post to 180Proof to explain that calling it a war is falsely dignifying what happened to my ancestors. They were never in a position to defend themselves. There were no weapons, no generals, no spies or strategies.
But then I realized that nobody wants to hear that poignant nihilistic shit. If it's just a matter of a shift in meaning, then yes, it's a war.
But let's not pretend we all know equally what that means. Ok?
Yes. It is silly to argue about the definition of war, or whether a genocide is a war or not, or whether the slave trade or the apartheid system was or is part of a war.
But to the extent that we want to call a conflict a race war, we all know who won and who lost, whether we are talking about the holocaust, the conflict in Myanmar, the Tutsis and Hutus, or blacks and whites.
So I guess you're saying BLM should just shut up and go home because they already lost.
By far, the most important event in the 70's was the final break with gold by Nixon in 1971. This adoption of FIAT currency allowed what we see today, particularly using the USD to balance trade internationally. This led to the exportation of the U.S.'s manufacturing base and an entire succession of events, including the running of enormous trade deficits, the counterfeiting of USDs and wholesale manipulation of interest rates leading to multiple commodity and asset bubbles.
Oil was a little blip on radar, but often used to cover up the adoption of Monopoly (the game) money and the corruption of the entire political and corporate system through bogus central banking.
We now know the US was planning to blow up the Middle East to get oil flowing. The Saudis backed down and were forced to send all oil profits to NY banks. This led to massive investment in Latin American countries which were eventually forced to end all social welfare programs and open their societies to foreign exploitation rather than default on their loans.
Er, no. Any more than I'm saying Jews should shut up and go home, or into exile or any other place. I'm saying when we stop arguing about silly things, we are left with a reality of systematic prejudice and marginalisation. And we all know who are the victims and who are the perpetrators as racial groups. I'm saying that white whiners are being plain dishonest in their complaints and fatuous arguments that using terms like 'race war' are unfair to them.
I see. I'm a brown person thinking of it against a backdrop of Malcolm X. I think Mr Morrison was smuggling that into his article and it's blatant bullshit. African Americans would have to learn to stop shooting each other before they could begin organizing violent resistance and I don't say that condescendingly. I say it as a person who's tired of taking care of them in the hospital setting.
As BitterCrank and 180Proof said, history got us here. The global economic system is blocking any way out, not American neo-nazis.
I get the oil thing, but in a historical context, the creation of FIAT money is a MUCH bigger deal. And the presiding empire is always going to do what it needs to to secure resources (especially when the entire West was dependent on relatively cheap energy).
Ok. If you were to go step by step through the 1970s, how would you describe how we got to fiat money?
1971 was the final break with the gold standard but this process began decades previous. There are many volumes written on this but here are the brief highlights...
1916 The establishment of the third central bank in the U.S.
1933 FDR suspended the gold standard except in international trade
1971 Nixon's imposition of the USD legal for the balance of international trade
The establishment of FIAT currency is the greatest national fraud you can commit. It is essentially giving license to counterfeit the currency, a crime that would find an individual strung up by their toenails, but when carried out by politicians and bankers is holiday celebrated like none other.
Apart from the undeniable claims that the past led to the present and and the economy is responsible for inequality, this doesn't say very much to me. If you like history, there is a direct line of proud inheritance from the state sanctioned piracy and invention of white superiority of the Elizabethan age to the British royal family of today, accused of institutional racism. This is not nothing, even though it is global gossip. Let me put it this way, the American War of Independence was a revolution against that exact same institution founded on the notion of the God-given superiority of certain bloodlines. The US is still struggling to rid itself of the psychological legacy of the British Empire. Race was a British invention, and a natural extension of Royal prerogative.
It's not that simple even in a small economy.
It's obvious here and in for example Sweden.
What it comes down to is that the Nordic system leads to centralization where there are central trade union organizations and a central employer union that decide wage increases, which favors the larger companies and corporations and don't look at how bureaucratic and burdensome the whole system comes to be from a perspective of the small firm or entrepreneur. This kind of corporatism leads to an environment which favors large companies and makes it more difficult for smaller firms. It simply comes down to the ease of negotiation: it's easier to negotiate with the 10 largest corporations than 100 000 entrepreneurs, even if the entrepreneurs are far more important to the economy than the 10 largest companies. Also companies that are working in a booming industry where there is huge demand and little supply of trained specialists, the system prohibits luring people with huge salaries. Brain drain to other countries can happen. Also the system increases red tape and as there are many things in place to protect the employee, it also makes the whole issue far more difficult than in let's say the US. Or especially in China.
Hiring employees can become a huge obstacle: If the employee gets an 100 euro salary, the employer has to pay basically 140 euros in all. If you can buy the service for less than 140 euros, then you have a dilemma. After all, hiring an employee or buying the service from an outside company are the two options and just as you don't have any obligations towards your grocery market (other than to pay what you buy) neither has the company for a service bought. Also a welfare state really does make people think twice before going into a low salary job: if your net income goes only barely increases if you take a low paying job and you then you haven't much spare time anymore, it really is a question. Many do alienate from the society and never hold a job. This causes low self esteem and true apathy. Republican politicians can exaggerate this problem, yet the issue is real if not at all comparable to the problems what a non-existent welfare can produce.
You can easily observe that there are always pros and cons in these issues and people can abuse a system, any system there is. And this makes economics and sociology so complex that these issues cannot really be put into a simple math formula in their entirety. Nuances are important.
It's a focus on who the participants in the war are and what their goals are.
Quoting unenlightened
The whole world was shaped by the British Empire. I guess the good parts and bad parts are fused, as Polanyi said.
Quoting ssu
Reviewing the Nordic countries helped, thanks. I think I have a ways to go before it starts coming together for me.