Breitbart’s heavily edited video was published with the title “Video Proof: The NAACP Awards Racism” in response to the NAACP’s call the previous week for Tea Party groups to repudiate racist elements in their midst. Breitbart’s “story” was then picked up by conservative and then mainstream media outlets (lead by Fox news), many of whom highlighted Sherrod’s racism and the double standards of the NAACP. In general, conservative groups and the media were all too willing to accept Breitbart’s narrative of Black on Whilte discrimination. It was a narrative, after all, that they had been propagating for the past year with hyperbolic stories about ACORN, Van Jones, the New Black Panther Party, et. al. All of these stories carried the subtext that African Americans are asserting control and gaming the system for their advantage at the expense of whites. This attitude not uncommon in writings of Tea Party supporters as well, who often claim they are not racist, but go on to suggest that African Americans are receiving government services and special treatment unavailable to whites, and that these ‘perks’ contribute to America’s economic ills and the size of its government. Of course, the majority conservatives and tea party activists carry no racial animus; however, they do seem to be particularly susceptible to arguments which strike a cord of racial division. This may simply be part of the nature of being a conservative which, as William F Buckley said, is “..someone who stands athwart history, yelling Stop…”

As Rachael Maddow Pointed out this week, the ginning up of racial animus in order garner white votes is nothing new, and has been common in the Republican party since Richard Nixon employed the Southern Strategy in the late 1960’s. What Maddow, and many other commentators, fail to see or acknowledge is how this constant hyping of racial issues overlies our current economic problems. In the early days of the economic meltdown in 2008 several conservative commentators tried to blame minority lending for the collapse of the housing and credit markets. Shortly after President Obama’s inauguration many of these same commentators, followed by the Tea Party groups, began to rail against “redistribution of wealth”, “socialism,” and “communism” — though very few seem to have any idea of what these concepts entail. The cry against redistribution is a cry against the movement of services or capital from the wealthy to the poor. For many Americans, this suggests a movement of capital from white to black or hispanic Americans. The anti-redistribution crowd often site taxes as their real concern. But this is a ridiculous argument, as a glance at the historic tax rates show:

Top Marginal Tax Rates

As we can see the top marginal tax rates are presently  near the lowest levels they have been at in the last 60 years. In fact arguments about redistribution and taxes are often diversions to obscure more fundamental economic problems: the loss of manufacturing and the climbing trade deficit, for instance, due to neo-liberal free-trade policies. Or the widening gap in our nation between rich and poor and the loss of the middle class. Race baiting allows these issues to be obscured in favor of a narrative that pits groups, often suffering the same economic hardships, against one another. This type of division almost always suits the status quo except, of course, is when the smoldering resentment, driven by the media, turns into a violent blaze, and people’s lives become endangered.

Many bloggers and commentators have pointed to the Sherrod incident as an example of the duplicity of Andrew Breitbart. While Breitbart’s manipulation of the facts to generate racial animus is contemptuous, it is not nearly as appalling as the media’s rush to repeat his narrative. Breitbart can be excused for simply being what he is — a partisan huckster selling any trope which brings him attention and his cause to power. Many in the mainstream media (CNN, CBS, FOX, and MSNBC), however, were all too happy to repeat the story without investigation. This alone shouldn’t come as a major surprise. The media, overall, has done an abysmal job at covering some of the most important stories of the past decade (ie. the ongoing wars in Iraq and Afganistan, the fianancial crisis and melltdown, healtcare and financial reform, etc). Again, the Sherrod story fit a particular narrative that the media was eager to exploit — one which divided Americans at a time of shared suffering, and helped maintain the status quo.

Breitbart, racism, Sherrod, wingnuts

As the piece was being painted some passersby would stop and shout racial epithets at the artists and children working on the mural. Prescott City Councilman Blair then began to attack the mural on his radio talk show, and demanded that the mural be removed. Blair has said, “I am not a racist individual, but I will tell you depicting a black guy in the middle of that mural, based upon who’s president of the United States today and based upon the history of this community when I grew up, we had four black families … to depict the biggest picture on that building as a black person, I would have to ask the question, ‘Why?” Of his constituents Blair said, “What these people don’t like is somebody forcing diversity down their throats.” (note: it seems strange that people of color are always suppose to see themselves in representations of caucasians, but the reverse is never true.) In response to the “controversy” R.E. Wall, director of Prescott’s Downtown Mural Project, was asked to lighten the faces of the children depicted.

What’s particularly disgusting about this story is not that a bunch of bigots object to a prominent public depictions of darkly colored children, but that the paintings they object to are based on actual children who attend the school. Mr. Blair and his people have said to these children in this school, and within their city, that they are not the right color to represent their community. That these children should somehow consider their skin too political or too controversial to be represented in a public mural. Imagine, for one moment, what it would be like to be one of those children: to be told that because of your skin color your depiction offends a city councilman and parts of your community.

This type of racism is one of the most monstrous because it grinds down children and robs them of their belief that they are full fledged human beings with the same potential as any other. In the end, it robs all of us of their potential and diminishes our humanity.

racism, AZ

The Church’s position on abortion and life is well known, and it is pointless to try to debate faith with reason. Still, for an organization which seems to show so much compassion and forgiveness for ordained child molesters to deny Sister Margaret the sacraments and Christian fellowship seems beyond cruel. It has taken a difficult decision by the mother of four and Sister Margaret and applied a simple manichean  template to it. The Church has abandoned any any  notion of the individual conscience and has replaced it with dogmatic execution. In do so the Church has also abandoned any claim it may have on compassion, forgiveness, or humanity.

¹ Given the accepted efficacy of torture today to produce truthful results, we all should begin to accecpt the fact that we live in a geocentric solar system. After all, Galileo simply couldn’t lie under the threat of water boarding. 

“It is the law that to become a naturalized citizen of this country you must have knowledge and understanding of English, including a basic ability to read, write, and speak the language,” Tancredo said. “So what may I ask are our presidential candidates doing participating in a Spanish speaking debate? Pandering comes to mind.”

According to the Immigration and Nationality Act an immigrant must show the “ability to read, write, and speak English” in order to become a naturalized citizen of the United States. Additionally, they must show “a favorable disposition towards the United States.”

So, Tancredo is asserting that if you are a naturalized citizen and you don’t speak english you’re not only breaking the law but you are unamerican. He is suggesting that multi-lingualism is something new and frightening. Since the first immigrants arrived in this country they have brought with them their own cultures and languages. My great-grandmother –a naturalized citizen– never did converse in english, preferring her native polish. My great-grandfather ran for councilman and served his constituents in their native tongue. Was he illegal, Tom? My grandfather, who served in the Pacific as a mechanic on Bougainville and other hellish hotspots, was completely bi-lingual and chose to live in a neighborhood where polish was the everyday language of commerce and life. Was he unamerican, Tom?

There is nothing new or different about immigrant groups retaining their language for two or three generations. As a boy, when I visited my grandfather’s house, I remember seeing the local newspapers in polish, hearing the local polish radio stations, and watching the badly dubbed polish TV — in fact, the first time I saw “It’s a Wonderful Life” it had been dubbed into polish. The nature of media is to serve its audience, to pander to them in some way to get their attention. It is assinine to assert that an immigrant is somehow less American because they have not fully discarded their native language.

A little history lesson may be beneficial for for Tom, and his followers. The idea of a national language was broached early on in the days of our republic, it was dismissed as impractical and pointless. The leading languages our founding fathers considered for their new country, Tom, were french and greek — with some calls for hebrew. English, it seems, was too much associated with the monarchy they had just fought to free themselves from. By not choosing a national language, our early statesmen and thinkers allowed America to do with language what it does best with all things: assimilate, adapt, and grow. If we were to characterize American english as a person we would have to characterize it as (with some apologies to my feminist friends) a happy slut. Our language gleefully takes vocabulary where ever it finds it –a greek prefix here, a latinate suffix there, a spanish noun, a turkish title, it doesn’t care. English has grown in use around the world not due to US military might, but because it adapts and remains relevant. English is never lacks for vocabulary to describe the world. Why? Because it accepts all comers and adapts itself to the world. People, Tom, do not assimilate countries and languages do –otherwise they become irrelevant.

Language is not what defines us as Americans. The english language is simply a way in which we express our culture. The question of what it means to be an American goes back to the earliest days of the original colonies. It’s a question which is at the heart of American literature and art. To some degree, Americanism can be defined as the ability to survive in a new land away from home and loved ones, to seek a better economic and civic life for yourself and your loved ones, to define a new country as it defines you. This has never been a easy process, as bigotry and hatred have always followed newcomers. But one would think that our country would have learned by now that it is those who dare to leave all, or those who standup against the injustices of their migration, which bring to this country the courage which is so desperately needed.

This Sunday, 11/18/07, the NorthShore chapter of the Illinois Green Party will be showing Ian Inaba’s film American Blackout at our coffeehouse. The film documents the practices of fraud and voter caging which have occurred in recent elections. There will be a number of Illinois Green candidates attending the showing, as well as people involved in recent suits launched against the Federal Election Commission. We expect an interesting and enlightening discussion following the showing. The film will begin around 4:00 Pm at 1813 Dempster, Evanston, IL. There is, of course, no admission charge — though we’d appreciate it if you bought a cup of coffee or a snack.

There is nothing inherently illegal with private or local currencies — in fact the United States has a long history of alternative currency models. Private currencies, however, cannot be represented as legal, government backed, tender. This point was always stressed to any of our Liberty Dollar users. Most of our users, however, didn’t care, as they saw the coins — made of silver — as having traditional fungible value. Personally, I have some issues with metallic currency standards, and a number of the folks with Liberty Dollar and I had some heated discussions about the topic. However, I always found the Liberty Dollar people to be very thoughtful, well informed, and committed. So I would be surprised to find that there was any real illegality occurring within Liberty Dollar itself.

It does seem odd that the government would choose this time to act against the Liberty Dollar, and in such a heavy-handed fashion. It may be that some in the government are concerned about the perceived value of the US dollar –presently trading at 1.47€ and $1.02 to the Canadian dollar, a drop of 50% in the past 9 months. If even a small percentage of Americans began to loose confidence in the dollar and began to adopt a commodity based currency, the result could be disastrous: we could easily find ourselves in a period of hyper-inflation and economic depression. Of course, eliminating commodity currencies does not prevent this from happening anyway. If such a downturn would occur it would be the result of the disastrous monetary policies followed for the past seven years, far more then it would be the fault of the Liberty Dollar.

Today is Armistice day – Veteran’s Day. A day to try to remember all those of sacrificed their lives and more for their countries. It is a truism that as time passes, we forget the conflicts of the past: the reason’s they were fought and the people who sacrificed for them. For how long will we remember today’s conflicts? How long until we repeat the same mistakes over?