38.5 - Outrage of the Week: sexism, the cause of sexual harassment and assault

Outrage of the Week: sexism, the cause of sexual harassment and assault

I have talked on occasion on this show about the scourge of racism, one of our two great national evil -isms. I have also talked some about our least recognized -ism, that of classism, our contempt for the poor no matter their race.

But I have not talked enough about our other big national evil -ism: sexism. But this week it is the Outrage of the Week.

There has been a lot of talk and news recently about sexual assault and sexual harassment as the hashtag #metoo continues to trend. It seems not a day goes by now without some man whose name you know being accused of sexual harassment or assault as the fact that some women have come forth has emboldened others to tell their stories which has in turn emboldened still more.

It's like a floodgate has been opened, releasing a torrent of pent-up frustrations, hurts, injuries, and bad memories.

It's important this is happening because - the temptation is to say it "reminds" men, but that allows for too much prior awareness; let's say rather it hopefully "informs" and "educates" some men and for some who were to some degree aware, "emphasizes" to them just how commonplace these sorts of experiences are for women, just how almost, if not in fact, routine they are. Not so much the outright physical violence, but the degradations, the humiliations, the commonplace put-downs and sneers they experience.

A good place to see this was a recent article in which four women, all US senators, recalled their own experiences with sexual harassment and the comments section on the article, as is all too common, is where the truth of things was visible, as the comments were chock-a-block with things like:

- Are we sure these are women? (with the response of) They are women, that no one wants to go near.
- They got hit with the Ugly stick a couple of times.
- I think they are faking and just hostile because they are NOT a man.
- They could only PRAY for someone, probably legally blind, to hit on them.
- The Guys Involved must have really been hard up for some action!!
- I would think that these homely women would be flattered.
- There [sic] just upset cause they were told to do the dishes.

Numerous cases, that is, of denials of their words and sneering references to their appearance, which served as proxies for denial of either the truth or the significance of the accounts.

The fact is, sexual harassment can be anything from a passing crude comment to a laser-focused, deliberate, on-going attack; sexual assault can be anything from an unwanted grope to brutal and brutalizing rape. The effects on victims can be anything from mere irritation to physical and emotional catastrophe.

It is vital, it is important, it is necessary that we as society, particularly we as men, face, acknowledge, and deal with this - but at the same time there is a point in all of this that I don't want to get lost.

A recent article claimed that a common thread among the abusers in the news lately was economic inequality, that the abusers were in a position to damage their targets' jobs or careers if the victims resisted or complained. Which I would say is close but not quite right - the difference between abuser and abused is not money but power, social power, social dominance. In these cases it was the money issues involved that created that power, but it was the power dynamic itself that lay at the root.
Men do not abuse their girlfriends, their fiancees, their wives because of the economic inequality between them; the subway groper has no control over his victim's job; the date rapist is not thinking about her career prospects.

Because sexual harassment and assault, for all their venomous nature, are not ultimately the issue. They are an outgrowth of the issue.

The issue is sexism, the root of the poisonous plant of sexual harassment and assault. The issue is the underlying assumptions about women that society has long held and still does hold and yes, including among too many women, who are no less likely to be shaped by the culture around them than men are, assumptions either that women are inferior to men or that women should be, deserve to be, "protected" by men - both of which relegate women to lesser status and, as we are also finding about race, assumptions which few people will admit to embracing but which they still express in attitudes and behavior even if they are not consciously aware of it

Beyond the recent news about sexual harassment and assault, there was something else that prompted addressing this now. It was an article I recently came across at the website of the Harvard Business Review. I want to tell you about it.

The article noted that despite improvements, women remain underrepresented among CEOs, receive lower salaries, and are less likely to receive that critical first promotion to manager than men are and looked to examine the claim that this was because - it wasn't put this way, but it's what it came down to - women are not as ambitious as men. [The three links are from the article.]

So they asked: Do women and men act all that differently at work?

Working with what was described as "a large multinational firm," researchers

collected email communication and meeting schedule data for hundreds of employees in one office, across all levels of seniority, over the course of four months. We then gave 100 of these individuals sociometric badges, which allowed us to track in-person behavior.

I'm going to skip over relating what data they gathered and how they went about maintaining employees' anonymity and so on to get to the conclusion. They found

almost no perceptible differences in the behavior of men and women. Women had the same number of contacts as men, they spent as much time with senior leadership, and they allocated their time similarly to men in the same role. [M]en and women had indistinguishable work patterns in the amount of time they spent online, in concentrated work, and in face-to-face conversation. And in performance evaluations men and women received statistically identical scores. This held true for women at each level of seniority. [Emphasis added.]

They also found men and women had roughly equal levels of access to senior management and that women were just as central as men in the workplace's social network.

Yet men were advancing in the hierarchy and women weren't, and at each higher level of management there were fewer women.

Our analysis suggests that the difference in promotion rates between men and women was due not to their behavior but to how they were treated. Gender inequality is due to bias, not differences in behavior.

In other words, the cause is sexism. The existence of sexism in the workplace is well-established, so it's not so much that this is new information, as it is meticulously researched information, with the very meticulous nature of the work adding to the outrage of the message it carries.

Sexism, the assumptions that constitute sexism and the sense of privilege and power those assumptions breed, even if unconsciously, in men, is the problem.

It's sexism. Sexism is the reason why women remain underrepresented at every level in corporate America, the reason why women don't advance in business despite earning more college degrees than men for thirty years and counting. Sexism is the reason why despite improvement women still get paid only 83% of what men do.

And sexism and the corrupting influence of power it feeds is why women have been forced to pretend to ignore the smirks and sneers, to abide the grabs and gropes, to fear the silent street and the empty elevator.

It is good, it is needed, it is brave of this growing number of women to speak out about the harassment and even assault they have experienced, to let other women know that they are not alone and no, their own experience was not an outlier; it is necessary for men to hear this message, to absorb it, and frankly it's even necessary for some women who will continue to deny it.

In realities ranging from stifled dreams and blunted careers to harassment and brutal assault we have the chills, the throbbing aches, the raging fevers; in sexism we have the disease.

I have, yes, several times denounced racism on this show. It's about time I denounced our other great social wrong, the outrage, the monumental outrage, of sexism.

36.6 - Special Comment: some sympathy and understanding for the white working class

Special Comment: some sympathy and understanding for the white working class

For the rest of the show, I'm going to be talking about something I've been meaning to raise for a time so I just decided I was going to go ahead and do it.

Although the thoughts involved are not new, the more immediate prompt was something that happened few weeks ago. Hillarybot Joy Ann Reid of MSNBC was on The Daily Show with Trevor Noah and was going on about how the Democrats should be the party of, I forget the term she used, outsiders or minorities or those without power, something along those lines. The idea is that it should be the party of women, minorities, LGBTQ folks, and so on, rather than dwelling on economic issues and the working class. When Noah said why can't you do both, she said, referring to the working class, "Because they're Republicans." That is, "Hey, working class people, we should write you off. You're a lost cause. We don't care about you and shouldn't waste any time on you."

She is far from the first to say this and she certainly wasn't the last either, that implied and sometimes explicit declaration often offered with an undercurrent of "Our time is coming; soon we will outnumber you."

At this point it's important to note that when people talk about "the working class" they are really - and usually state directly that they are, in fact - talking about the "white working class," with the emphasis on "white" rather than on "working class."

That is, they mean specifically white people who are working class - a group that, according to the Census Bureau and using the Bureau's definition of "working class," makes up 42 percent of the population of the US, more then any other single group.

So let's be blunt: When we talk about in effect writing off the working class, when we talk about pursuing so-called "identity" politics as opposed to - not, I repeat, in addition to or in conjunction with, but opposed to - so-called "lunchpail" politics, we are being profoundly politically stupid. When we think we can just write off 42 percent of the population, that is stupid.

And even more bluntly we are being profoundly immoral. When we say "Who cares about you, we don't care about you, in fact we shouldn't care about you," we are being immoral.

This notion of writing off the white working class is usually justified by saying they were the people who put TheRump over the top - actually they weren't, it was more upper-class whites that did that, but this is the argument, the argument that the white working class is, as one writer put it, "allergic to voting for Democrats" and that the reason for that, the real reason, the only reason, is racism. Period, full stop.

I say that is narrow-minded, insensitive, even cruel. So here I am going to have some words of sympathy, of understanding, for the white working class.

Right at top, we have to say that we have been through this before, we have had this discussion before: There were for example the "angry white male" of mid-1990s and the Tea Party of several years back.

So it's absurd to say we got TheRump because of bigotry with no other factors involved unless you are making the ridiculous assertion that this racism suddenly just appeared in 2016. But the racism was always there, it has been there, and despite the rise in hate crimes, despite the rise in overt bigotry, we as a  people are no more racist than before. The difference is that now it's more acceptable to show it, to express it.

But why? It can't be simply because TheRump started his campaign by calling Mexicans rapists, because that wouldn't have had the effect on what became his base unless it resonated with them in a way that wouldn't have in previous years - and,  more importantly, the increase in hate crimes began in 2015, before he declared.

For a "why" it would be better to look back to 2008, to the time when Barack Obama was attacked during the campaign for referring to people in western Pennsylvania as "clinging to their guns and their religion." The point was clumsily expressed and deserved a clearer explanation, but it was entirely valid: The people in the area were suffering real economic dislocations. Jobs were disappearing and the sort of stable communities on which those people had depended for generations were disappearing along with them. So of course they clung to their guns and their religion. When you are under pressure, constantly stressed, when the things you have counted on seem to be slipping away, you are going to cling ever more tightly to those things you have left, those parts of your world that still make sense, that you still can control. It is a natural, normal, entirely human reaction.

And let's be clear, those of the white working class are not without legitimate grievances: Their hopes are shrinking, their dreams for their family and their children are fading, they keep working harder and getting less for it - they are, in short, losing ground or at the very best, like Alice, running as fast as they can to stay in the same place. And it's been going on for decades.

Robert Reich recently said this:

Look at the past 44 years, 1972 to 2016. The average typical American is actually, adjusted for inflation, making less today than they were making in 1972.

That is, we have been working for 44 years to get exactly - nowhere.

Yes, yes, of course those of the white working class were not only ones affected, but the very fact of saying they were not the only ones means acknowledging that they were affected - that those grievances, those stresses, are real.

Meanwhile, things that they thought they could take for granted in social relationships - or,  more accurately, never thought about at all because privilege, the privilege which they possessed (and possess), is generally invisible to those that have it -  things that they thought they could take for granted have been subjected to almost constant assaults in which they are too often cast as the conscious villains of the piece rather than as what they are: the unwitting beneficiaries of standards and (pre-)judgments that profit them in the short run but damage them in the long run.

The result is that they feel pressured, frustrated, haunted by the suspicion that they've failed their families, that their efforts are unappreciated, and that they’re being blamed for things that "aren't my fault" - which combine to make them bitter and defensive; ready, even eager, to have someone to blame to relieve their own guilt and creeping despair.

Bill Clinton, of all people, expressed the idea well in a speech back in 1995, when the "angry white male" was the symbol du jour: Referring to middle-aged white men who when they were 20 looked forward to a "good life" of sending their kinds to college followed by a secure retirement, he said:

Now they've been working for 15 years without a raise and they think they could be fired at any time. And they go home to dinner and they look across the table at their families and they think they let them down. They think somehow, what did I do wrong? It's pretty easy for people like that to be told by somebody else in the middle of a political campaign with a hot 30-second ad, you didn't do anything wrong, they did it to you.

So the problem isn't that the "white working class"'s frustrations are without any legitimate cause. It's rather that the very people who are most responsible for that contracting future, for the sense of loss (and for the genuine loss of economic security) - that is, the corporate elite, the rich, the powerful, those who've selfishly gained from the economic trends of the past decades, those who benefit the most from the old oppressions and divisions - are the very people who are doing their damnedest (so far successfully) to get that white working class to point their fingers at anyone except them.

These people, who too many among us would dismiss and condemn, have been misguided. Misled. Lied to. Manipulated. Manipulated into directing their frustrations at the weak, not the strong; at the victims, not the victimizers; at the servants of the powerful (in and out of government), not the powerful themselves (mostly not in government).

The sad fact is, it's always easier to blame those weaker than yourself for reasons that are not only sociological but also psychological: In a foot race, you may resent or envy those in front of you, particularly if you see them pulling away - but it's those coming up from behind who make you feel a threat to your position. Meanwhile, challenging the legitimacy of the position of the leaders would require an adjustment in how the structure of the race itself is viewed. In other words, blaming the poor, blaming undocumented immigrants, blaming minorities, blaming affirmative action, blaming who- or whatever, that requires only calling them names. Blaming the rich requires re-thinking the nature of society. Which of those is more likely to be seized on by lost people who feel - and have been misled into feeling - their world no longer makes sense?

The thing is, social changes can cause confusion and resentment, but you get over it, you adjust and move on and, usually, the next generation isn't sure what all the fuss was about. Economic recessions, even depressions, cause genuine hardship, but you hunker down, you survive, and expect, in what I maintain is the real American dream, that at the end of the day your children will be at least a little better off than you were. Instead, we have seen an unremitting stagnation in personal income that has come to look as though it has no end, that this is no "slump" or "downturn" that will eventually reverse itself, that rather this is the way it is and is going to be, that it's not going to change, that work gets you nowhere and more work gets you more nowhere. Perhaps never before in our history, certainly never before in this century, has such a large portion of our population (and not just that white working class, either) looked at their children and felt that those children will wind up worse off than they themselves are - felt, that is, like failures.

What has this has done to that white working class? It's made them a little colder, a little harder, a little more inured to others' suffering, and a lot angrier. It's prompted them to regard as "unfair" anything that they don't see as benefitting themselves, personally and immediately. It's propelled them toward isolation from their own communities, fragmentation of any sense of mutual responsibility, and condemnation of anyone different or "other."

It's been demonstrated often enough by both psychological testing and historical analysis to be common wisdom that the one common factor that unites those who call themselves "conservative," crossing all lines of age, sex, race, nationality, and gender, is fear of change. The more change, the more conservatism grows. Conservatism, bluntly, is based on fear - the internal fear, the personal fear, that the world around you is no longer comprehensible. I've talked before of the idea of a "worldview," a way of organizing the world we perceive around us such that it makes sense. Our worldview significantly shapes our views on matters of philosophy and morality and it informs our positions on issues of public policy. What that worldview consists of can vary greatly from person to person, but every sane, sentient being has one; you can't function without it.

If the world, if society, around you is changing in ways you can't seem to understand, that don't fit your personal worldview, you can become disoriented and frightened - and that fear, that fear of the changes, will make you more conservative, angry at the prospect of change and with an increasing urge to show that anger, to have someone or something on which to focus that anger. (Which is also why people in general tend to become more conservative as they get older: The more "set in your ways" you are, the more used you are to things being a certain way, the more disturbing changes can seem.)

So why is all this relevant? Why does it mean that dismissing 42% of the population is not only politically stupid and immoral but also counterproductive?

Because people who feel economically secure can accept more change, can deal with, can adapt to change to a degree that others without that security can't. (Remember here we are not talking about changes you want or seek but about adapting to, accepting, changes you never sought and which are being thrust upon you.)

For an example, think of the 1960s. Think of social disruptions of civil rights movement, of the Indochina war, of emerging feminism, of the environmental movement (which at the time was charged with being a communist-inspired plot to "undermine the American way of life") and more. The divisions that were generated were not just between red and blue states or political parties or even between friends, these divisions were deep enough to rip up families. We had sit-ins, mass demonstrations, civil disobedience, riots, wars, terrorism.

But we survived and managed to get through it without generating the sort of calcified divisions that we are seeing today.

Why? One good reason is that the economy was pretty strong. You knew as member of the white working class that you could get job. Heck, you very likely had a job, one that you looked forward to staying with until retirement. In the six-year period of 1966-1971, unemployment was always below 5%; in the four years of 1967-1970, it was always below 4%. Except for a couple of years in the mid-1950s, it was the closest to the so-called "full employment" level of 3% in the past almost 70 years. And remember, it was not accompanied by that stagnation in personal income and unlike today, unemployment was not low because of a mass of low-paying, low- or no-benefit jobs.

And because you felt that security in your economic life, you were better able to handle the changes in society that you saw around you. Not to say you liked or even approved of those changes, but you could, at the end of the day, deal with them.

So, again: The racism has always been there. The difference now is that it is being justified, legitimized, exploited. We were no more racist in 2016 than we had been before, it was just more acceptable to show it - and there was more of an urge to have the anger focus on someone or something, just as with the "angry white male," just as with the Tea Party, because that white working class had felt so insecure for so long.

So we can't just say we got TheRump just because of bigotry without reference to the economy because it was the economy, it was that decades-long, growing frustration and feeling of failure and fear and anger that was lever, the crowbar, that was used to pry open the emotional gates containing the bigotry and use it as a weapon.

So when we propose to ignore 42% of the population, we are politically stupid. When we say we can't be bothered addressing the legitimate economic concerns of the working class in general or the white working class in particular, we are being immoral.

And when we ignore the reality that by not addressing those concerns we are enabling the reactionaries to marshal the emotional stresses arising from those concerns to their own greedy advantage we are doing damage to our own cause, that cause, the only one worth fighting for, being justice, political and economic and social.

242.5 - Drug war used to demonize poor people

Drug war used to demonize poor people

Well, plus ça change. In more recent times, drugs have served not so much to attack hippies or the antiwar left - probably in good part because there aren't a lot of hippies around and the antiwar left seems to evaporate whenever a Democrat is in the White House. But they have still proved politically useful to demonize a different group: poor people, who are usually envisioned in the racism-infused public mind as African-Americans, so it's kind of a two-fer.

Patron saint of welfare "reform"

It was in 1996, during the presidency of - and with the urging of - the sainted Bill Clinton, that the US enacted a welfare "reform" law that among other abominations placed a lifelong ban on receiving welfare on people convicted of drug felonies. No other sort of felony was subject to this lifelong ban - not murder, not assault, not armed robbery, not arson, none of them. Nothing except drugs.

As a direct result, to this day, many men and women exiting prison after doing their time don't have access to certain forms of government assistance, including TANF, or Temporary Aid to Needy Families, what we used to call welfare, and SNAP, still commonly known as Food Stamps.

It has gotten somewhat better with regard to SNAP: Eighteen states have abandoned the federal prohibition on drug offenders receiving Food Stamps and 26 more, most recently Alabama, have eased the restrictions, allowing benefits under certain conditions. Three more states - Georgia, Indiana, and Nebraska - are considering doing the same.

But six states - Alaska, Georgia, Mississippi, South Carolina, West Virginia, and Wyoming - still bar anyone with a drug felony from receiving any Food Stamp benefits and need be damned.

"Need be damned" is even more true of TANF benefits. Thirteen states continue to fully prohibit anyone with a drug-related conviction from getting welfare benefits, and 23 others maintain a partial ban. Only 14 have lifted the ban and treat people who have done their time the same as they do anyone else.

The Marshall Project, which collects this data, suggests that the difference is that, unlike Food Stamps, states have to foot part of the bill for TANF. Put another way, the frequent attitude is, "Sure, you can have benefits on the same basis as everyone else - provided we don't have to pay for it."

But even if there has been some improvement in the possibility of those with drug convictions being able to obtain aid if they need it, there is still an on-going effort to use the specter of drugs to demonize the poor. Only the means, not the intent, has changed.

The means now is drug-testing of applicants or recipients of public aid, of making it a requirement for obtaining or continuing to receive assistance.

State after state after state - 13 states, in fact - have instituted some form of drug-testing regimen for those in need of aid, with 19 more considering it. And it's always, always, always, done on the claims that this will save money and we don't want the tax dollars or hard-working citizens to be subsidizing the drug habits of those poor people and besides we're actually helping poor people because this will force them to get off drugs and get a job!

That stigma of the poor as being druggies, and as being poor because they are druggies, drives the entire enterprise, an enterprise pushing the idea that we are somehow doing poor people a favor by treating them all as suspected criminals who have to prove the purity of their bodily fluids to their governing overlords, those who hold in their hands the power to decide if the accused gets any help with food or shelter or health care for themselves or their children.

So state after state after state has pursued this notion - and state after state after state has shown it to be a fantasy.

Florida tried it and found only 2% of recipients of public aid used drugs, in a state where the rate of drug use among the population as a whole is estimated to be 8%.

Utah tried it and found a rate of drug use among benefit recipients to be just 0.2%. In Tennessee, it was under a quarter of a percent.

In Arizona, more than 87,000 welfare recipients went through drug testing and only one person tested positive. Not one percent, one person.

Kansas, Mississippi, Missouri, Oklahoma, all with similar results.

And now North Carolina has joined the list. According to the state's Department of Health and Human Services, a mere 0.3% of the approximately 7,600 applicants and recipients screened for drug use tested positive.

But none of this has stopped states from doing testing and it hasn't stopped other states from considering doing the same. How many failures does it take to add up to failure?

Unless - unless it actually wasn't a failure. Unless the drugs were never the issue. Unless the actual intent is to, as I said at the top, demonize the poor, mark them as somehow different, alien, as "not us," and so as undeserving of our concern.

That stigma of the poor as druggies, which drives the entire drug-screening idea, is just one more obstacle faced by those who economically struggle every single day, with all that entails for, again, necessities such as food and clothing and shelter and health care and more, who struggle every day to try to escape the trap of poverty but who find that stigma of them as drug abusers that follows them even as they try to find work, that demonization of their condition, that assumption of their moral inferiority, that classism, our contempt for the poor, is just one more mountain for them to climb.

For the sake of maintaining our sense of class superiority, we have made the poor into more victims of our failed war on drugs.

But I have to add, footnote, whatever, that the stigma goes beyond the false idea of the poor as druggies. It goes to the core of our entire social attitude about poverty.

Consider, for example, how many states have precise rules as to what Food Stamps can be used to buy, in one case going right down to the size and type of canned beans you can buy. Consider how often any sort of treat for a child, a soda, candy, whatever, is on the banned list. Consider how many states have similar rules about TANF, with long lists of things for which welfare assistance can't be used, ranging from the absurd (jewelry, cruises) to the mundane because God forbid if you are poor that you should be able to take your kid to a movie.

Consider, particularly, how often we put demands on the poor that we would never dream of putting on others who are not poor but who are getting public benefits.

CalWORKS is California's welfare program. Everyone who applies for aid and is accepted must agree to have their homes be preemptively searched for evidence of fraud at a time of the agency's choosing, which of course they do not tell you in advance because then you could hide the evidence of fraud of which they assume you are guilty - and if you're not there when they come, obviously unannounced, you can be declared "uncooperative" and denied aid. In short, the Fourth Amendment does not exist for you and neither does innocent until proven guilty - because you are poor and need help.

Can you even conceive of someone who declares their children as deductions on their tax return being told they have to agree to have their home preemptively searched to prove those kids really live there and really are dependent on them? Remember, that deduction is a benefit, a tax benefit that by cutting their taxable income puts extra money in their pocket just as surely as does any cash aid to a poor person. But can you even imagine anyone being told they have to surrender their Fourth Amendment rights in order to claim that benefit?

You know, some of those drug-testing regimens not only want you to be drug-tested to get benefits, they want you to be tested on a regular basis to keep them.

Can you even imagine, can you even conceive of, someone declaring a home mortgage deduction on their income taxes being told that every year that they do so that they have to submit to a drug test to prove that they are not using the benefits we are providing to them to get high?

Of course you can't. It seems absurd. But you can imagine such being done to a poor person; in fact, you know it does and it happens to them every single day.

None of this is about helping the poor. Rather, it is all about being able to say that because you are poor, because you are in need of help, because you are struggling, therefore you are no longer a full human being, therefore you are morally inferior, therefore we have the right and the power to judge you, to look down on you, therefore we have the right and the power to shape you, to correct your (to we superior sorts) obvious failings, to demand that you behave as we tell you to, we have the right and the power to humiliate you, to demean you, to strip away your rights, and you will kowtow and tug at your forelock and kiss our ring or you can just damn well go hungry and cold.

I say it again: None of this, none of this, none of this is about helping the poor. It is about our contempt for the poor, our classist assumptions that those who are poor are simply inferior in some way, morally, ethically, or both, that it's simply a matter of personal failings and they somehow deserve their condition rather than being just the most obvious victims of the economic injustice that has turned too many of us into economic throwaways as power and wealth become more concentrated.

I have in the past referred to classism as our greatest unacknowledged evil. And so it remains.

Sources cited in links:
http://www.aol.com/article/2016/03/17/should-people-with-felony-drug-convictions-have-access-to-food-s/21328901/
http://www.al.com/news/index.ssf/2016/02/alabamians_with_drug_convictio.html
https://www.themarshallproject.org/2016/02/04/six-states-where-felons-can-t-get-food-stamps?ref=tsqr_stream#.8s7hSzmEc
http://whoviating.blogspot.com/2015/02/1939-outrage-of-week-drug-testing-poor.html
http://www.aol.com/article/2016/02/18/States-tested-their-welfare-recipients-and-the-results-w/21314760/
http://whoviating.blogspot.com/2015/10/2237-states-continue-to-demonize-poor.html
http://whoviating.blogspot.com/2015/07/2112-our-worst-unacknowledged-evil-part.html
http://www.dailykos.com/stories/2016/2/22/1489251/-The-Republican-war-on-poor-people-s-grocery-lists-continues
http://www.dailykos.com/stories/2016/3/20/1501544/-Punishing-the-poor-is-not-going-to-end-poverty

Left Side of the Aisle #239

Left Side of the Aisle
for the week of March 2 - 9, 2015

This week:

Good News: partial ceasefire in Syria
http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Middle-East/2016/0229/UN-chief-Syria-cease-fire-holding-despite-some-fighting-accusations
http://www.reuters.com/article/us-mideast-crisis-syria-idUSKCN0W21O5
http://www.cnn.com/2016/03/01/middleeast/syria-conflict-aid/
http://in.reuters.com/article/mideast-crisis-syria-kerry-idINKCN0W32VW

Footnote: US continues build-up in Iraq
http://www.care2.com/causes/u-s-backed-military-contractors-are-returning-to-iraq-in-droves.html
http://www.acq.osd.mil/log/PS/.CENTCOM_reports.html/5A_January_2016_Final.pdf

US expands bombing/drone war to 7th majority-Muslim nation: Libya
http://www.dailykos.com/stories/2016/2/28/1492885/-The-invasion-of-Libya-is-in-progress
http://whoviating.blogspot.com/2016/02/2374-bernie-sanders-just-like-hillary.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/28/us/politics/hillary-clinton-libya.html?_r=0
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/28/us/politics/libya-isis-hillary-clinton.html
http://www.salon.com/2015/10/26/the_real_benghazi_scandal_that_is_being_ignored_how_hillary_clinton_and_the_obama_administration_destroyed_libya/
http://www.salon.com/2016/02/20/u_s_kicks_off_its_new_bombing_campaign_in_libya_killing_2_serbian_embassy_workers/
http://www.militarytimes.com/story/military/2016/02/29/pentagon-signals-support-expanded-operations-libya/81107750/
http://www.wsj.com/articles/libya-will-need-american-help-to-defeat-islamic-state-general-says-1456776041
http://news.yahoo.com/recognised-libya-govt-condemns-us-strike-jihadists-171414242.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libyan_Council_of_Deputies_election,_2014
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Council_of_Deputies
http://intpolicydigest.org/2016/01/05/un-takes-the-wrong-road-in-libya/
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/africaandindianocean/libya/12176114/British-advisers-deployed-to-Libya-to-build-anti-Isil-cells.html
http://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory/briefly-takes-center-strategic-libyan-city-37153386
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/dec/22/un-support-libya-government-open-door-potential-uk-airstrikes-isis
http://www.salon.com/2016/02/10/obama_on_verge_of_launching_another_bombing_campaign_in_libya_after_dropping_23144_bombs_on_six_countries_in_2015/
http://whoviating.blogspot.com/2011/09/911-2.html

RIP: al-Jazeera America
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2016/02/27/1492281/-Goodnight-and-good-luck-R-I-P-Al-Jazeera-America
http://variety.com/2016/digital/news/al-jazeera-america-online-operation-shut-down-1201716258/

Clown Award: right-wing attorney Kory Langhofer
http://www.dailykos.com/stories/2016/2/27/1492222/-The-Right-to-allow-Video-tape-Police-Not-Allowed-According-to-Federal-Judge
http://www.citylab.com/crime/2016/02/there-is-no-first-amendment-right-to-film-cops/470670/?utm_source=atlfb
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2016/2/19/1487715/-Idaho-Republicans-wrote-a-bill-saying-schools-must-use-Bible-in-biology-and-astronomy-and-geology
http://www.legislature.idaho.gov/idstat/Title33/T33CH16SECT33-1604.htm
http://biblehub.com/joshua/10-12.htm
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2016/2/22/1489329/-Conservative-lawyer-says-Scalia-should-get-vote-on-pending-cases-despite-handicap-of-being-dead
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/kory-langhofer-scalia-vote-still-counts
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=npjOSLCR2hE

Outrage of the Week: Islamophobic document to guide development of federal anti-terrorism programs
https://theintercept.com/2016/02/23/department-of-defense-white-paper-describes-wearing-hijab-as-passive-terrorism/
http://www.care2.com/causes/are-hijab-wearers-terrorists-a-military-paper-says-yes.html

229.1 - Rejecting Syrian immigrants is xenophobia

Rejecting Syrian immigrants is xenophobia

I would say I'm outraged, but I'm not. I'm frustrated and depressed. I said last week that the attacks in Paris had resulted in old questions - what do we do - getting old answers - more bombs.

But those aren't the only old answers we're hearing become louder by the day. No, we hear cries from a very old playbook, one we seem to refer back to whenever we feel pressed, a playbook of knee-jerk fear, a playbook of bigotry, a playbook of xenophobia, so that even when, decades later, we have the decency to feel at least embarrassed by what we did, we still turn right back to it every time some event somewhere turns us again into a nation of bed-wetters, sniveling about how all of "them" - whoever the current "them" may be - are all out to get us.

So we have seen calls for internment camps, we have seen proposals for a national database of all Muslims, for closing mosques, we have seen refugees compared to rabid dogs.

We have seen governors not only declare they will keep Syrian refugees out of their state, but at least one, Mike Pence of Indiana, has told a specific family, in effect, to get out - even though they have neither legal nor constitutional authority to do any of that.

And we have seen, most recently, the House of Representatives overwhelmingly pass a bill that has the single and deliberate intention of keeping Syrian refugees from entering the US by hardening the requirements for admission under the refugee resettlement program. Pres. Obama has proposed admitting 10,000 Syrian refugees under the program this fiscal year, a fraction of the hundreds of thousands Europe is dealing with but still 10,000 too many for the bigots and mouth-breathers of the US House.

And - you need to know this - this bill was passed with the help of 47 Democrats, including several who would claim to be liberals, who voted for this piece of bigoted, xenophobic trash.

One way they'll justify this, you can be sure, is claiming that their constituents want it - although what their constituents want never seems to matter when the interests of a rich donor are involved. According to a recent Bloomberg poll, 53 percent of Americans - although it seems odd to call them Americans when they seem to have forgotten what America is supposed to be about - but 53% want the resettlement plans be stopped and another 11%, really letting their bigotry hang out, said the program should continue but only admit Christian Syrian refugees.

Oh, but it's all for "security," we'll be told. It's all for "protection" because some terrorist might slip in among the refugees. We don't want to keep them out, we just want to make sure that there are no terrorists among them!

Anyone who tells you that is either lying through their teeth or has no idea what they are talking about. There is no third option.

The refugee resettlement program involved here has been going on for about 40 years. Over 3 million refugees have been resettled in the US and not one of them has ever committed a terrorist act against the US.

Terrorists coming in? Seriously? Are you really going to argue that Daesh is going to try to bring in terrorists through a program with background checks so extensive that it takes 18 months to 2 years to get through them and which already turns away half of applicants? Seriously?

Gov. Dannel Malloy

Which is why that House bill has nothing to do with security and everything to do with blind panic - along with, I strongly suspect, some making use of that panic for their own political and ideological ends.

The only upside I can find here is that Sen. Harry Reid says that bill will not pass the Senate and whatever his faults and they are many, he knows how to count.

Oh, and that family that effectively got kicked out of Indiana? They resettled in Connecticut, where they were personally greeted by Gov. Dannel Malloy, calling accepting them "morally the right thing to do."

They say be thankful for small favors, and these really are small in the face of the sweeping waves of brain-dead paranoia rushing across our nation, but they are favors and so I will be thankful.

Sources cited in links:
http://www.aol.com/article/2015/11/20/virginia-mayor-refugee-comments-werent-meant-to-offend/21269635/
http://www.aol.com/article/2015/11/20/trump-carson-ratchet-up-heated-rhetoric-about-muslims/21269787/
http://www.indystar.com/story/news/politics/2015/11/20/what-you-should-know-syrian-refugee-controversy/76120180/
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/house-democrats-refugee-bill_564e5101e4b0258edb30ca4e?cps=gravity_5034_-2560823616016277327
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/congress-obama-syrian-refugees_564cf5d6e4b00b7997f913ca
https://twitter.com/alexanderbolton/status/667395117586784258
http://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory/syrian-family-diverted-connecticut-indianas-request-35284421
http://www.indystar.com/story/news/politics/2015/11/18/indy-bound-syrian-refugee-family-redirected/75981622/

228.4 - Outrage of the Week: using the Paris attacks to close the door to Syrian refugees

Outrage of the Week: using the Paris attacks to close the door to Syrian refugees

Now for one of our regular features. This is the Outrage of the Week.

I mentioned a few minutes ago the weaponization of grief. Closely related to that, of course, is the weaponization of fear. And we are seeing that in full bloom as well over half the nation's governors - 31 as of the time I'm preparing this, the night of November 17 - have called on the federal government to stop admitting Syrian refugees. Most of those governors, all but one of them GOppers, have promised to do everything in their power to prevent such refugees from being settled in their particular state.

While most of the states involved are from the traditionally so-called red states of the south and the plains, they do include even some blue states such as Massachusetts and New Jersey.

This is driven, it shouldn't be necessary to say, by plain old-fashioned bigoted xenophobia with a side order of specifically Islamophobia.

None of this anti-immigrant frothing arose now, of course, immigrants, even legal ones, have been a favorite punching bag of the right and the nativists for decade upon decade. But now there is a new claim, a new way to dog-whistle your rejection of immigrants, documented or otherwise, without admitting that's what you are doing:

Example of anti-immigrant cartoon

Every one of these governors cited the terrorist attacks in Paris. Every one of them warned darkly of terrorists sliding in among the immigrants to bring desolation to our shores. The argument for this is based essentially entirely on a Syrian passport found on or near one of the suicide bombers.

That passport was traced back to a crossing into Greece and proved to be either a copy or a forgery when police in Serbia arrested a man with a passport identical to the other in every way except for the photo.

So it certainly appears that the passport was a fake, which is not surprising considering the active trade in fake passports and other documents among people trying to get out of Syria. But this one, it appears on available evidence, was used by someone somehow connected to ISIS to get into France.

So why is the argument of the governors still such bullshit?

For one thing, the passport itself is a red flag. The migration correspondent for The Guardian said that "analysts find it strange that a bomber would remember to bring his passport on a mission, particularly one who does not intend to return alive." More pointedly, Charlie Winter, an analyst focusing on Islamist extremism, tweeted

Why would a jihadist who expressly rejects all notions of modern citizenship take his passport on a suicide mission? So it gets found.

Which makes real sense in the context of an observation by Iyad El-Baghdadi, an activist who keeps and reviews a private Twitter list of around 200-300 Jihadist accounts. He tweeted that:

You know what pissed off Islamist extremists the most about Europe? It was watching their very humane, moral response to the refugee crisis.

That is, the passport was used and brought to the scene of the attacks specifically so it would be found for the precise purpose of provoking exactly the reaction that our jackass governors have had: paranoia and suspicion about all Syrian refugees with the intent of driving a wedge between them and the West, to convince those trying to flee that there is nowhere to go, that the West will never accept them, that they have nowhere to go except the imaginary caliphate.

The heinous attacks in Paris had nothing to do with Syrian refugees. Not a damn thing.

The suspected "mastermind" behind the attacks, Abdelhamid Abaaoud, is a French citizen. At least five of the eight suspected militants are French or Belgian nationals. Even French president Francois Hollande said the attacks had been "planned in Syria, organized in Belgium, perpetrated on our soil with French complicity."

As for the US resettlement program the governors are demanding be stopped, the Obama administration plans to admit just 10,000 Syrian refugees this fiscal year as compared to the hundreds of thousands coming into Europe. What's more, those 10,000 will have to get through security screenings that typically take 18 to 24 months. And the resettlement program, which has been going on for about 40 years and has resettled more than 3 million people here, has never seen one of them commit a terrorist act.

These - I can't think of what to call them that is fit for air - these scumbags, these foul, ugly, venomous, toads occupying and defiling the governors' mansions of the nation, panderers to the bigotry of nativism, more interested in a self-serving soundbyte than in what is good in our nation's heritage, ready to throw the huddled masses yearning to breathe free back into the maelstrom of desperation and war rather than offend some right-wing donor, ready to feed our fears and muzzle our morality, they are contemptible. They are despicable. They are an outrage.

Sources cited in links:
http://www.cnn.com/2015/11/16/world/paris-attacks-syrian-refugees-backlash/
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/republican-governors-syrian-refugees_564a0ef9e4b06037734a0209
http://patch.com/massachusetts/arlington/massachusetts-wont-welcome-syrian-refugees-0
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3321632/Police-arrest-migrant-carrying-passport-Paris-suicide-bomber-sneaked-Europe-posing-migrant.html
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/nov/15/why-syrian-refugee-passport-found-at-paris-attack-scene-must-be-treated-with-caution
https://twitter.com/charliewinter/status/665807972161863680
https://twitter.com/iyad_elbaghdadi/status/665398164363608064
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/17/world/europe/paris-terror-attack.html?_r=1
http://www.mcclatchydc.com/news/nation-world/national/national-security/article45269139.html#emlnl=Evening_Newsletter

223.8 - Cleveland prosecutor lays grounds to whitewash killing of Tamir Rice

Cleveland prosecutor lays grounds to whitewash killing of Tamir Rice

Now for our other usual feature, the Outrage of the Week. And this week, oh boy.

You remember - at least I certainly hope you remember - the murder last November of Tamir Rice, a black 12-year-old boy who was shot down by a Cleveland cop quite literally less than two seconds after he and another cop zoomed up to him in a patrol car.

It has now been nearly eleven months since Tamir Rice lay on the ground dying as the two cops did nothing to offer or obtain help and the Cuyahoga County Prosecutor's Office claims to still be "investigating" what would appear to be an open-and-shut case of at my gosh absolute minimum negligent homicide.

Why the hell is this taking so long? Well, now we know. It was taking a long time for the prosecutors to find a couple of supposed "experts" who could be counted on to reach conclusions that would achieve the goal of letting the cop walk.

Kimberly Crawford and Lamar Sims

The two are retired FBI agent Kimberly Crawford and Lamar Sims, the chief deputy district attorney in Denver - oh yeah, ex-FBI and a prosecutor, there's a real pair of impartial and disinterested sources.

Both of them declared grandly that oh this was just such an unfortunate tragedy and we really really feel for the family - but what the cop did was just fine. Entirely reasonable. Case closed.

They said it in different ways, but they said the same thing: The only thing that matters is what the cop thought, or at least what he said he thought, since the original police report on the killing proved to be laced with lies when the video - which the cops at first didn't know existed - came out. And if the cop thought - or said he thought - there was a threat, then it was entirely reasonable of him to instantly shoot to kill. His own behavior, they maintain, is entirely irrelevant.

But their own words, as clever as they think they are, condemn them and brand them as apologists for a killer.

Crawford said "the speed with which the confrontation progressed would not give the officer time to focus on the weapon" to, apparently, realize it was a toy.

What confrontation? There was no confrontation except the one created by the cops.

Sims, for his part, said that the cop, whose name is Timothy Loehmann by the way, was in a position of great peril because he was so close to Tamir. "The officers did not create the violent situation," he said.

What the hell is he talking about? He was close to Tamir because he chose to be close. He created the peril. And there was no violent situation until the cops created it. And do not forget that the only violent part of the entire thing was cop Timothy Loehmann shooting Tamir Rice to death.

Tamir Rice

Oh, but that's unimportant. It doesn't matter. Crawford said that considering the cops' role in creating the very supposed risk that justified killing Tamir Rice is "armchair quarterbacking" which has "no place" in the discussion. Because, it seems, we mere mortals are not fit to judge cops. And the badge number of every cop in the country should start with double-0.

The reports were released, the prosecutor's office said, in the interests of "transparency." The only thing that's transparent here is the laying of the groundwork for, preparing the public for, letting another killer cop walk.

I cannot begin to tell you how disgusted I am by this. So I will just say it's an outrage.

Sources cited in links:
http://www.cdispatch.com/news/article.asp?aid=45365
http://www.ibtimes.com/tamir-rice-cleveland-shooting-reasonable-independent-probes-what-constitutes-2139703

223.3 - Good News: Signs of acceptance of transgender people

Good News: Signs of acceptance of transgender people

Another bit of good news, not so much for the particular facts as for what it represents, comes to us from Kansas City, actually from Gladstone, Missouri, part of the greater Kansas City area.

On October 1, members of the cult known as the Westboro Baptist Church showed up at Oak Park High School with their usual collection of multi-colored hate placards, spewing their venom there because the student body had elected a transgender student named Landon Patterson to be homecoming queen. A counter-protest by the students who drowned out the haters with cries of "long live the Queen" forced the cult to leave, with the students following them back to their car and cheering as they drove off.

Landon Patterson

Now, while it's always fun to see the WBC run away when they are challenged, as they often do, what struck me here was not only that the students elected a transgender student to be homecoming queen, but they were prepared to defend her against the abuse - which is an even more powerful statement than the election itself that they just don't see what the big deal is about being transgender. They realize that transgender folks face discrimination, but they don't see a legitimate reason why.

Just like support for same-sex marriage, acceptance of transgender individuals increases as the polled group gets younger. We are, with each generation, maturing as a society on questions of gender identity. And that is good news.

Sources cited in links:
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2015/10/08/1429134/-Westboro-Baptists-Protest-Transgendered-Homecoming-Queen-High-School-Kids-Force-them-to-Leave?detail=email
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qqG1Ma_NCgs
http://revolution-news.com/westboro-baptist-church-run-out-of-town-high-school-students-in-missouri/
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2013/12/18/1263463/-Transgender-Acceptance#

214.7 - Why "All lives matter" is no answer to "Black lives matter"

Why "All lives matter" is no answer to "Black lives matter"

So a guy named Dustin Lee Gunnells is driving in Towns County, Georgia on July 15. He's stopped by the cops. He is uncooperative. He reaches for a gun. He is grabbed. He reaches for another gun, this one in a holster at the small of his back. Cops, according to the official statement, get him "under control and disarm him."

Okay. Uncooperative driver. Actually reaches for an actual gun, not once but twice - both guns, by the way, were loaded and the one at his back was cocked. And there were at least four more guns in the car.

He is under arrest - but he is alive and well. Not dead.

If you took a guess as to his race, you'd be right.

Which brings me to something I want to say, I've been wanting to say, and it involves a rather long introduction

In response to the call of "Black lives matter," the chant of "Black lives matter" directed at politicians, the movement that has become known as "Black lives matter," a number of people among our pundit and political classes - as well as some well-intentioned ordinary folk - have responded with "All lives matter," simultaneously declaring their supposed concern with the issues the movement is raising and scolding that movement for its supposedly narrow, self-interested vision. They don't have the broad view. Not like me, I'm interested in everyone, not just some!

But the fact is "All lives matter" completely misses the point in the case of some, and intends to distract from the point in the case of others.

"All lives matter" would be a valid response if we actually acted like all lives matter, if we actually acted like all lives were equal in our eyes, if we actually treated all lives equally.

But we don't. We treat some lives as better than others, we treat some lives as more deserving than others, we act as if some lives are more valuable than others.

Shall we go down the list, from birth to death?

The infant mortality rate among African-Americans in the United States is more than twice that among whites.

Black pre-schoolers are far more likely to be suspended than white children. Black children make up 18 percent of the pre-school population, but represent almost half of all out-of-school suspensions.

In the K-12 years, black children are three times more likely to be suspended than white children. Black students make up almost 40 percent of all school expulsions, and more than two thirds of students referred to police from schools are either black or Hispanic.

Even disabled black children suffer from institutional racism. About a fifth of disabled children are black – yet they account for 44 and 42 percent of disabled students put in mechanical restraints or placed in seclusion.

Black children are 18 times more likely to be sentenced as adults than white children, and make up nearly 60 percent of children in prisons. Black juvenile offenders are much more likely to be viewed as adults in juvenile detention proceedings than their white counterparts.

Education, which we claim is the great equalizer, isn't: Black college graduates are twice as likely as whites to be unemployed and the overall jobless rate for blacks has been double that of whites for decades. A study found that people with “black-sounding names” had to send out 50 percent more job applications than people with “white-sounding names” just to get a call back.

For every $10,000 increase in pay, blacks’ percentages of holding that job falls by 7 percent compared to whites. The higher you go in the wage scale, the fewer blacks there are there.

About 73 percent of whites own homes, compared to just 43 percent of blacks. The gap between median household income for whites and blacks is astounding: about $91,000 versus about $7000. That gap has tripled in the past 25 years. The median net worth of white families is about $265,000; it's $28,500 for blacks, a little over one-tenth as much.

A black man is three times more likely to be searched at a traffic stop, and six times more likely to go jail than a white person. Not because they’re more prone to criminal behavior, but, according to a study by the Sentencing Project, because of an "implicit racial association of black Americans with dangerous or aggressive behavior." We just assume black people are likely to be criminals.

On the New Jersey Turnpike, blacks make up 15 percent of drivers, more than 40 percent of stops and 73 percent of arrests – even though they break traffic laws at the same rate as whites. In New York City, blacks and Hispanics were three and four times as likely to be stopped and frisked as whites.

Black Americans are victimized by the so-called War on Drugs: Despite roughly equal usage rates, blacks are nearly four times more likely than whites to be arrested for simple possession of marijuana.

If a black person kills a white person, they are twice as likely to receive the death sentence as a white person who kills a black person. Local prosecutors are much more likely to upgrade a case to felony murder if you’re black than if you’re white.

Black people are sentenced to prison terms that are up to 20 percent longer than white people convicted of essentially similar crimes. They are 38 percent more likely to be sentenced to death than white people for the same crimes.

And a young black man is 21 times more likely to be killed by a cop than a young white man is.

And yet we refuse to face it.

The National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago did a study using a weighted questionnaire with a range of possible answers which was designed to reveal unadmitted, even unrecognized, biases.

The results? More than half the survey respondents rated African-Americans as less intelligent than whites; 62 percent rated African-Americans as lazier than whites; and more than three out of four survey respondents said that African-Americans are more inclined than whites to prefer welfare over work.

And yet we refuse to face it.

In a test developed by University of North Carolina psychologist Keith Payne, called the Weapons Identification Task, most white people who take the test find that they associate black people with guns and white people with tools and non-violent images.

And yet we refuse to face it. In fact, we will go out of our way to avoid facing it.

Newly published research out of Stanford University finds that white people who are exposed to evidence of white privilege are likely to respond by creating a counter-narrative centered around the personal hardships they have experienced. Put another, probably clearer, way, whites who were shown evidence of white privilege and then filled out a questionnaire about their childhood memories would indicate that they have experienced more hardships, more difficulties, in their lives than those whites who were not shown that evidence of privilege first.

What the results ultimately indicated was that the people in the study - and, by extension, white people in the US as a general rule - may well accept the reality of white privilege in the abstract, but convince themselves that they themselves have not benefitted from it. That is, white privilege may exist, but not for them. They did not gain from any such privilege. They made it all on their own, baby.

We refuse to face it. We even adjust our memories to enable us to refuse to face it.

Which brings me back to "All lives matter" and the thing that I wanted to say, say to any of you out there who have thought to themselves any variation of "Well sure black lives matter - because all lives matter, don't they?"

"All lives matter" is a misdirection, a trick, a trap. "All lives matter" looks to take the harsh reality of racism that affects African-Americans from birth to death, from day to day, week to week, year to year;
it looks to take the daily stresses, the daily strains of things like seeing a cop car in your rear-view mirror and having to worry about if your rear license plate is on crooked;
it looks to take the hundred daily cuts of suspicious looks from security guards and store clerks;
it looks to take the unemployment, the poverty, the circumscribed futures;
it looks to take the institutional racism and police violence that make the cry "Black lives matter" necessary in the first place;
the vapid phrase "all lives matter" looks to take all of that and immerse it, sink it, drown it in a thick, syrupy-sweet, sticky goo of greeting card sentimentality.

Yeah, all lives matter, sure. And when we start acting like we really believe that, then it will become a reasonable response to the moral call "Black lives matter" - and not before.

Sources cited in links:
http://www.rawstory.com/2015/07/sovereign-citizen-arrested-after-twice-trying-to-grab-one-of-six-loaded-guns-in-his-confederate-flag-car/
http://accesswdun.com/article/2015/7/323858/hiawasse-man-arrested-after-pulling-gun-on-officers
http://kff.org/other/state-indicator/infant-mortality-rate-by-race-ethnicity/
http://www.usnews.com/news/blogs/at-the-edge/2015/05/06/institutional-racism-is-our-way-of-life
https://www.aclu.org/feature/war-marijuana-black-and-white?redirect=billions-dollars-wasted-racially-biased-arrests
http://www.usnews.com/news/blogs/at-the-edge/2015/01/13/america-racial-bias-does-exist
http://www.psmag.com/politics-and-law/sure-whites-are-privileged--but-not-me-personally
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0022103115000852

211.2 - Our worst unacknowledged evil: Part 2

Our worst unacknowledged evil: Part 2

When I say we tell the poor like it or lump it, I'm not exaggerating in the least. Just consider by way of way of example the way we demonize the hungry, the folks who rely on SNAP - the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, what we used to call, and often still do call, Food Stamps - for food purchases.

A Wisconsin state representative wants people getting SNAP benefits to have to go to "privately run food pantries" - more bluntly put, he wants "separate but (no doubt) equal" grocery stores for poor people.

One member of Congress has called on his constituents literally to spy on what people using EBT cards buy at the supermarket and to question them if they think anything they are buying looks suspicious or "inappropriate."

The state of Wisconsin has a list of precisely what you can and can't buy with your SNAP benefits right down to things like what type and size of canned beans you can buy.

Maine wants to say SNAP recipients can't use any of their benefits for candy or soda because heaven forbid poor children should have something fun or a treat.

It's not just SNAP, not just Food Stamps, it's all assistance in all forms. More than 20 states have extensive lists of what cash assistance can't be used for - with one state official insisting the list has educational value in that it sends the message that cash assistance should be used for necessities. Because of course the poor are unaware of the need for food or clothing or housing or medicine or transportation or whatever else and we have to "educate," that is, control, them, all for their own good, of course, because they are inferior and can't be trusted to make their own decisions.

And then there is the drug testing. No matter how many time it turns out that poor people looking for help are less likely to use drugs than their richer fellow citizens, no matter how many times it turns out that forcing applicants to submit to a drug test winds up costing the state more than it saves, no matter now many times these programs are miserable failures that do nothing more than brand all poor people as drug addicts, still they get pushed.

And the thing is, that's why they get pushed: They get pushed, and they get public support, because they label the poor as druggies, because we are prepared to assume that all poor people are somehow inferior, they are irresponsible, they are lazy, self-indulgent, moochers who spend all their time and money getting high. They're not like us! And because they are poor, rules of privacy protection and against self-incrimination don't apply to them.

We put demands on the poor that we simply do not put on the rich. It does not occur to us.

In his recent book Divide, journalist Matt Taibbi refers to "a creepy inverse correlation between rights and need" [emphasis in original] that exists in the US, where the protection of Constitutional, of basic human, rights is inversely proportional to how rich you are. Put another way, the poorer you are, the less rights you have.

He cites the example of CalWORKS, the state of California's what would in the past have been called welfare program. Everyone who applies for aid and is accepted must agree to have their homes be preemptively searched for evidence of fraud at a time of the agency's choosing, which of course they do not tell you in advance because then you could hide the evidence of fraud of which they assume you are guilty - and if you're not there when they come, you can be declared "uncooperative" and denied aid. In short, not only are you in effect a prisoner in your home until this raid takes place, the Fourth Amendment does not exist for you and neither does innocent until proven guilty - because you are poor and need help.

Can you even conceive of someone declaring their children as deductions on their tax return being told they have to agree to have their home preemptively searched to prove those kids really live there and really are dependent on them? Remember, that deduction is a benefit, a tax benefit that by cutting your taxable income puts extra money in your pocket just as surely as does any cash aid to a poor person - in fact, in both cases, that is the idea: giving you more money to spend. But can you imagine anyone being told they have to surrender their Fourth Amendment rights in order to claim that benefit?

You know, some of those drug-testing regimens not only want you to be drug-tested to get benefits, they want you to be tested on a regular basis to keep them.

Can you even imagine, can you even conceive of, someone declaring a home mortgage deduction on their income taxes being told that every year that they do so that they have to submit to a drug test to prove that they are not using the benefits we are providing to them to get high?

The fact is, of course you can't. You can't imagine a non-poor person being told they have to surrender basic rights in order to obtain a public benefit.

But you can imagine it being done to a poor person; in fact, it happens every day and you know it happens every day. It is the great unacknowledged evil in our society - unacknowledged because even though you might be aware of the fact that the poor are treated differently, it doesn't register that way, it doesn't register as an evil the way equally blatant racism and sexism do. In point of harsh fact, it often doesn't even register as an evil but is perceived by far too many of us as a good thing, a proper thing, a right thing, to assume, to build public policy on the idea, that poor people are lazy, ignorant, drug-addicted frauds just sitting on their asses waiting for a handout.

Although most of us would be loath to admit it, the fact is, that is what many of us believe even if we would not express it so bluntly. The tell is that we don't as a society regard the different, the cruel, ways the poor are treated as an evil.

That great unacknowledged evil of our society, the one we don't face, the one we refuse to recognize, is called classism and it is our contempt for the poor, a contempt that cuts across lines of gender, age, race, and even income class, a contempt that is pervasive, constant; it is all around us in ways major and minor, big and small. Classism is driven by the moral corruption of power among the rich, but it infects our entire society.

In Divide, Matt Taibbi said "We have a profound hatred for the weak and the poor." When asked how he came to that conclusion - which I would re-label an insight - he said it was from visiting US courtrooms and seeing the different ways poor and rich defendants get treated by the courts.

When a poor person, a person without means, comes before a judge in an inner-city courtroom, he says, the judge doesn't want to hear anything the defense attorney has to say and seems angry at having to deal with this person at all. But when he attends trials involving white-collar criminals, Taibbi says, the judge is often very interested in what the defense attorneys - the plural is deliberate - have to say, even to the point of asking their advice on points of law, and there is a sense of admiration for the accused, who are regarded as somehow special, important, respectable, even superior, people.

As I would sum it up, what the word "justice" means in the US political and legal system depends almost entirely on who is asking for it.

Even the way we donate money reflects that class division, reflects the classism of our society. Repeated studies have shown that, as a percentage of household income, the poorest 20% of the population gives more than the richest 20% - and that gap has grown in recent years. Also to the point is that the poor give mostly to religious organizations and social-service charities, while the wealthy give to colleges, museums, and the arts - in other words, the stuff they themselves use. In fact, of the 50 largest individual gifts to public charities in 2012, not one went to a social-service organization or charity that principally serves the poor and the dispossessed.

We are an unjust society. And I don't just mean an unequal one - I mean a morally corrupt one. A society whose richest - that is, most powerful - members are by that very wealth, that very power, twisted into an ethically-bankrupt indifference to the concerns and needs of others, an indifference, that, precisely because it is expressed by the most powerful among us, again, infects the rest of us.

And it will not change. Not on its own. It's not something we can grow out of as a society, especially because we are now ever-more growing into it. It will not change on its own. It will, rather, only get worse absent direct action against it. And no, neither Hillary nor even Bernie represent that kind of direct action.

Because this is not about faces and this is not about just slowing the decline, which is all your "Hillary's the one"s and "Feel the Bern"s will ever do - now I will grant you that there's nothing wrong with doing that, nothing wrong with slowing the decline, so long as you realize that's all you're doing: You're not reversing the decline, you're just slowing it down. But ultimately, at the end of it all, that simply isn't good enough. A slower decline is not good enough. Because the issue here is about change, about real change; this is about power, about changing power - and when you talk about confronting power in search of real change in power, you are talking about revolution.

Frederick Douglass said it: "Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will."

I have said it before: Change is going to require struggle. It's going to require a genuine social revolution. It's going to require disruption. It's going to require people in the streets. It's going to require more, a lot more, than twitter feeds and Facebook posts and far more than "vote for Democrats!" It's going to require a combination of the intensity and determination of the labor movement of the 1930s, the fearlessness of the civil rights movement of the '50s and '60s, the passion of the antiwar and counterculture movements of the '60s and '70s, and the creativity of the Occupy movement of this century.

That revolution does not have to be, it should not be, violent, but it does have to be aggressive. We have to be loud, boisterous, insistent, not just once but over and over again. We have to fill the streets and yes the jails. We have to make "business as usual" impossible. We have to be disruptive, noisy, disrespectful, impolite.

I think of something from some years ago: On May 17, 1968, a group of nine antiwar protesters went into the draft board in Catonsville, Maryland, pulled out a pile of files on men about to be drafted, took them outside, and burned them with homemade napalm before waiting for arrest. At his sentencing, one of the nine, Daniel Berrigan, read a statement in which he said the action was

in consequence of our inability to live and content in the plagued city, to say "peace peace" when there is no peace, to keep the poor poor, the thirsty and hungry thirsty and hungry. Our apologies, good friends, for the fracture of good order, the burning of paper instead of children, the angering of the orderlies in the front parlor of the charnel house. We could not, so help us God, do otherwise.

We, too, have to be prepared to anger the orderlies to overcome those who stand behind them.

Quoting Douglass again,

It is not light that we need, but fire; it is not the gentle shower, but thunder. We need the storm, the whirlwind, and the earthquake.

We are, I fear, approaching a time when there will be the stark choice: confront or capitulate. Not one of those movements I mentioned could fairly or even rationally be called violent. But each in their own way, in their impact, they brought the fire, the thunder, the whirlwind. We need that sort of storm again.

I hope that revolution comes soon. I don't know if it will, I don't know if it will come at all. No one ever doesWhat I do know is that it is possible and that when it happens, whenever it happens, it will, as do most revolutions, come as a complete surprise to those who are its targets.

Sources cited in links:
http://wonkette.com/583395/wisconsin-rep-will-card-poors-for-food-at-their-separate-and-unequal-welfare-groceries
http://wonkette.com/577424/congressloon-spy-on-your-neighbors-shopping-carts-for-your-country
http://wonkette.com/584739/wisconsin-takes-lead-in-fck-the-poors-sweepstakes-now-you-cant-buy-beans-and-rice
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/04/24/paul-lepage-food-stamps_n_7134902.html?cps=gravity_2692_-7114837514795982426
http://www.aol.com/article/2015/04/16/new-kansas-rules-would-limit-spending-of-welfare-benefits/21172946/
http://time.com/3117361/welfare-recipients-drug-testing/
http://whoviating.blogspot.com/2015/02/1939-outrage-of-week-drug-testing-poor.html
https://www.powells.com/biblio/9780812993424
http://www.rollingstone.com/contributor/matt-taibbi
http://live.huffingtonpost.com/r/archive/segment/matt-taibbi-on-the-profound-hatred-of-the-weak-and-the-poor/534d9e0578c90a533c000134?cn=tbla
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2013/04/why-the-rich-dont-give/309254/
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/10/06/wealthy-charity-giving-greedy_n_5937100.html
http://thinkexist.com/quotation/power-concedes-nothing-without-a-demand-it-never/1273306.html
http://c9.digitalmaryland.org/index.cfm

http://www.commondreams.org/views/2012/06/11/daniel-berrigan-americas-street-priest
http://www.tomjoad.org/catonsville9.htm