Tuesday, August 18, 2009
Congress / Kotz / Media / Politics / The Economy Jim Crow 2.0: Are Republicans Just Exploiting Their White Southern Base?
Posted by Pete Kotz on Tue, Aug 18, 2009 at 5:52 AM
The world is obviously changing, and that's freaking working class whites out. Their jobs, their homes, their ability to provide for their families -- it's all become very tenuous, which produces a natural anger. And since rage tends to be irrational, they're willing to see anyone as the cause of their woes.
But instead of providing policies that might assuage these worries, the Southern aristocracy -- in this case Republicans -- are doing their best to fan these fears. Take Senator Bob Corker. At a town hall meeting last week, his constituents spoke of forced abortions and euthanasia and a federal government out to get the white man. None of this is true, of course. But you didn't hear Corker say it. Though insurance reform is designed to help the very poor, rural people he was speaking to, Corker's against it. So better to let them think it's an evil plot, perpetuated by a black president, than admit he'll do nothing for them.
It's a strategy that goes back to Jim Crow and through the Southern strategies of Nixon, Reagan and the Bushes. Get whitey worried about a rising black man, and he'll entirely forget his own interests. "The Southern aristocracy took the world and gave the poor white man Jim Crow," said Martin Luther King. "And when his wrinkled stomach cried out for the food that his empty pockets could not provide, he ate Jim Crow, a psychological bird that told him that no matter how bad off he was, at least he was a white man, better than a black man."
It's not much different in many parts of the South today. Except this time, senators like Corker can afford to be more subtle, because the party's official mouthpieces are doing the dirty work for him. Writes Wright:
Feeling poor, white and out of sight? It's because that black guy's trying to reshape America without you. Get him! Fox's Glenn Beck said it best: "Everything that is getting pushed through Congress, including this health care bill, are transforming America, and they're all driven by President Obama's thinking on one idea: reparations." And Rush Limbaugh: "The objective is an expanding welfare state. And the objective is to take the nation's wealth and return to it to the nation's quote, 'rightful owners.' Think reparations. Think forced reparations."
Comments (8)
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We all pay for health care for the poor whether we believe it or not. Sometimes we pay through block grant programs like Medicaid. Sometimes we pay through local taxes to support hospitals and clinics that provide medical aid to the poor. Sometimes we pay through higher bills at the hospital when we private pay. And the rest of the time we pay through higher insurance rates because hospitals and doctors pass their loss through as much as they can to insurance. But, we always pay. Just because the cost isn't readily seen does not mean it has gone away.
We can go on riding the horse we are riding now if we want. After all, families driven into bankruptcy by medical disasters is not such a big deal - unless it happens to us personally that is. Or, we can think things through logically and come up with a rational plan that provides adequate medical care for everyone and doesn't assume that hiding the ball is the equivalent of providing a solution.
The trick is for our leaders to actually lead. Of course there are going to be crowds of hysterical people incited to they hysteria by manipulative seekers of power. So what? As the last election demonstrated, they are a minority. Our leaders are elected to lead, not pander. They need to buck up, put on their big person underwear, and vote for a plan instead of listening to yowling.
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It's all racism. Riiiiight.
This is almost as silly as this clip:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_XV8KwMRiSY&eurl
This race thing is getting real old, real quick.
You'd think after 45 years of getting tricked, again and again, using the Republican 'Southern Strategy', Bubba would start to put himself and his family ahead of his prejudices.
Not unlike Charlie Brown & Lucy -
http://www.snoopy.co.jp/fungames/html/c4b.html
Kotz, you are terribly ignorant.
By the way, Georgia is Republican controlled now because of, in great part, the nonSouthern transplants.
It always kills me how the establishment uses race to devide and demonize in order to keep people from coming together. It's now easy to see how and why Obama got so far so very very fast. There is no such thing as race anyway, as far as biology is concerned. It is only a political reality.
Yeah there are racist still but only a few have much of an impact anymore. One of the biggest racist of all time that has had a huge inpact on US policy, one of Hillary's heroes, was Margarate Sanger, who founded Planned Parenthood. No wonder Bill played the race card in SC to get Hillary back in the mix. Also there's old Robert Byrd.
Truth is this the worst economy since the last Great Depression and people are out of work because of Democrat and Republican policy
yeah last year Planned Parenthood took a huge donation to abort black babies. Once this got out they had to apologize for it. Just Google it
Donna Locke, why is Kotz "terribly ignorant?" Please explain because your next sentence is nothing more than a statement that you made, hardly a fact. It's been attributed that non-southern transplants are the reason that North Carolina and especially Virginia turned blue in the last election. So are you saying Georgia did the opposite? But you could be right. But to prove it, please provide some documentation to that.
And Anon, you are kidding yourself if you think race isn't important anymore. It's just not as in your face as it was before. But it's there and has a lot to do with the viciousness of the political discourse these days.
