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"Race and Modern Republicans Once Again" posted by ~Ray
Posted on 2008-11-19 12:12:27

Liberal commentators.. assume that if many former Wallace voters ended up voting Republican in the 1970s and beyond it had to be because Republicans went to the segregationist mountain rather than the mountain coming to them. There are two reasons to question this assumption. The first is the logic of electoral competition. Extremist voters usually have little choice but to vote for a major party which they consider at best the lesser of two evils one that offers them little of what they truly desire. Segregationists were in this position after 1968 when Wallace won less than 9% of the electoral college and Nixon became president anyway without their votes. Segregationists simply had very limited national bargaining power. In the end not the Deep South but the GOP was the mountain. Second this was borne out in how little the GOP had to "offer," so to speak segregationists for their support after 1968 even according to the myth's own terms. Segregationists wanted policies that privileged whites. In the GOP they had to settle for relatively race-neutral policies: opposition to forced busing and reluctant coexistence with affirmative action. The reason these policies aren't plausible codes for real racism is that they aren't the equivalents of discrimination much less of segregation. .. Kevin Phillips was hardly coy about this in his Emerging Republican Majority. He wrote in 1969 that Nixon did not "have to bid much ideologically" to get Wallace's electorate given its limited power and that moderation was far more promising for the GOP than anything even approaching a racialist strategy. While "the Republican Party cannot go to the Deep South"-—meaning the GOP simply would not offer the policies that whites there seemed to desire most—"the Deep South must soon go to the national GOP," regardless. So the GOP ended up bidding race-neutrality - which a conservative party would have naturally favored anyway and which is not racism - and symbolic gestures like Reagan's opposition to MLK Day his support for Bob Jones University's tax exemption and so forth. These code words and gestures were real and shameful and contemporary apologies like Ken Mehlman's mea culpa are entirely appropriate. But more often than not. I would submit pundits who harp on this shame tend to do so because it's an easy way to leap to Krugman's conclusion that race explains everything he doesn't like about contemporary American politics when in fact an awful lot of it is explained by the fecklessness of his liberal forebears. I think that there is a very good counter to Douthat's (1): if the Republican Party really were bidding race-neutrality--if there platform were one of market opportunity plus respect for the family plus respect for the church plus civil order plus race neutrality--they would get an enormous number of African-American votes. African-American voters are more often than not social conservative. African-American voters are extremely eager to support politicians who genuinely fight and reduce crime. Jack Kemp's Republican Party--one that is truly race-neutral committed to equality of opportunity. social conservative--is a natural home for most African-American voters. But we do not have that Republican Party do we? African-American voters believe that the GOP bids racism and few who have seen George Allen or Trent Lott on YouTube can disagree. I don't think its quite as clearcut as you make it out to be. The Repubs promote policies that sound race-neutral to anyone unaware of how our society actually operates. I doubt that most of their supporters think their policies are anything but fair. Similarly with their voter suppression efforts. These are carefully crafted as measures to promote a level playing field. The fact they they are only promoting policies which have been carefully designed to skew the voting public towards the conservative end is not immediately obvious from the laws/policies themselves but must be teased out by careful analysis. Sadly this is beyond most voters. Things like bussing and affirmative action could reasonably be considered to be a cure worse than the disease at least to most subburban whites and therefore an example of "feckless liberalism" in action. It is true that the most unarguable pro-black legal changes had already been made in the mid-1960s and that the policies that were being proposed by the late 1960s were less clear cut and could in principle have been opposed by a non-racist. But the actual Southern whites who were opposed the latter also opposed the former and for the same reasons. And these were the people who Southern Stragegy Republicans were trying to appeal to. This was not at all harmless; the idea of a genuinely pro-black public policy that wasn't dominated by bad ideas like bussing was dealt a huge blow by the fact that the people who most vocally opposed those policies were those who were obviously simple racists not well-meaning dissenters. Where have I heard that strategy before? Oh yes! its the republican war on poor women. First they campaign on an anti abortion platform. Then they fail to deliver so that they can continue to send out hysterical appeals for money on the basis of their failure to deliver their promised anti-woman policies. And where else have I heard this line of argument before? Why as a mid-term middle brow explanation of why the Iraq war couldn't possibly have been waged because we wanted control of their oil--because we wound up botching the war and driving the price of oil up! As Atrios so trenchantly observes the main thing is that everythign is always good for the republicans. Even when they are too cowardly to actually avow their own racist policies in other than code words that just shows they were really race neutral all along! Ian: George Allen and Trent Lott were major figures and You can't treat them as peripheral -- Allen was expected to run for President. Your indignation is really silly. The party you've choice to join is what it is. The word racism can mean lots of things but there's a well-defined definition which has been tested. Opposition to interracial marriage is racist by any standard n Alabama 42% of the voters voted against an amendment legalizing interracial marriage. Further analysis could probably show who voted which way and my bet is that it was mostly white Republicans who voted against the amendment. (Someone should do the research). Republicans have done all kinds of little symbolic things to make sure they get that 42% chunk (and similar chunks in other states. North and South). Even if the Republicans did nothing racist policywise their continual use of racist images and codewords made this country a worse nastier place. That's not the only thing nasty they do -- look at the collected sayings of Delay and Gingrich for more -- but it's probably the nastiest. And these same people. Douthat included often make whiny remarks about Democratic nastiness or the general nasty topne of American politics. That's really brazen. I don't really doubt the sincerity of Douthat's conservativism but he's stuck defending a weakly conservative political party which has been taken over by criminals and extremists and that's an impossible task. But because he's a conservative he (like Megan McArdle) has been promoted far beyond what his abilities can justify. Let's not forget also that in 1991 David Duke was able to get 700,000 votes for governor with the bulk of his support coming from northern LA that is to say the heavily Republican areas. As someone who lived in the south in the era being discussed. I certainly agree that race was a huge factor in turning the region Republican. But don't overlook the importance of Vietnam. Southerners were strongly pro-war and McGovern was not going to get a lot of southern votes in any event. You're right: the guy couldn't be more wrong. The red states today are that for good reason: they're the ones where the Socialist Party got the heavy votes a hundred years ago: Arkansas. Nebraska. Kansas and on and on. Your problem with progressive movements is that when they succeed they produce contentment which leads to the liquidation of the progressive impulse. That's why Teamsters vote Republican: they've got good heavy pensions to look after. And the Great Plains: the got their loose money including tailored regional Federal Reserve branches and they got all the subsidies the Farmers' Union could ever have wished for. Small problem is the policies they asked for lead to the industrial farm not the support of family farming. Oh well. Back to the drawing board... A better quality conservative would be reality -based though despite the examples of some fine economists I still don't have a sharp idea what they would look like. "A Republican Party that was socially conservative and economically classical liberal and retained its long-ago commitment to equality of opportunity--that remembered that it was Abraham Lincoln who freed the slaves--would be a very different Republican Party than the one we see now: it would still have its soul." In 1964. I was in the Air Force stationed in Biloxi. The murders of those three civil rights activists was frightening for a farm boy from Oregon and drove me into civil rights actions. I'd witnessed virulent hate and racism for a couple of years. As part of a college course. I interviewed a few public officials including a district attorney. His first statement to me was "I hope you're not one of those outside agitators who don't believe in states' rights." Ronald Reagan's very appearance in Neshoba County was transparently racist. His use of the code "states' rights" pandered to white supremacists. Republicans should face it: the Teflon is chipping off. Bob Herbert ("Righting Reagan's Wrongs?") could not be more correct in writing that "Reagan apologists.. have no right to change the meaning" of his appearance at the Neshoba County Fair to kick off his 1980 campaign. If anyone doubts this simply get out a map and find Philadelphia. Miss. One does not simply fly in and out of that town as if it were New York. One must truly go out of one's way in both a physical as well as a psychological sense to arrive there. Ronald Reagan knew exactly what he was doing and to view it as anything other than an appeal to racism one must be told. "There you go again." The racial appeal in Ronald Reagan's visit to the Neshoba County Fair in 1980 is unambiguous. It was part of a Republican strategy to win white Democratic converts. Consider a letter that Michael Retzer the Mississippi national committeeman wrote in December 1979 to the Republican National Committee. The national committee was polling state leaders for venues where the Republican nominee might speak and Mr. Retzer pointed to the Neshoba County Fair as ideal for winning what he called "George Wallace-inclined voters." This was not just a Southern strategy. Throughout his career. Mr. Reagan benefited from divisive appeals to whites who resented efforts to reverse historic patterns of racial discrimination. He did it in 1966 when he campaigned for the California governorship by denouncing open housing laws. He did it in 1976 by attacking welfare in subtly racist terms. And he clearly did it in Neshoba County in 1980. Joseph CrespinoAtlanta. Nov. 14. 2007The writer teaches history at Emory University and is the author of "In Search of Another Country: Mississippi and the Conservative Counterrevolution." There are 2.8 million people in Mississippi. About 15% of the non-elderly population--make that 350,000--were on Medicaid. Cut Medicaid enrollments by 50,000 by 1/7. 42,000 babies born in Mississippi each year. For the share who die to jump from 0.97% to 1.14%... That's a less than 1/3000 chance. That's worth saying. GULFPORT. Miss. — Like the other Gulf Coast states battered by Hurricane Katrina. Mississippi was required by Congress to spend half of its billions in federal grant money to help low-income citizens trying to recover from the storm. But so far the state has spent $1.7 billion in federal money on programs that have mostly benefited relatively affluent residents and big businesses. The money has gone to compensate many middle- and upper-income homeowners to aid utility companies whose equipment was damaged and to prop up the state's insurance system. Just $167 million or about 10 percent of the federal money has been spent on programs dedicated to helping the poor mostly through a smaller grant program for lower-income homeowners.... I wasn't aware that Arkansas. Nebraska and Kansas had "heavy teamster" presence who look upon republican policies as a way of "protecting their pensions." What on earth does that mean really? How would voting republican protect pensions and voting democratic negatively affect pensions? You seem to be completely ignorant of the union busting side of republican policies--does the word PATCO ring a bell? There's a reason why Unions have historically turned out for democratic candidates and its not because voting for socialism in some dim past gave them everythign they wanted. Au contraire its because long term republican attempts to separate union members from the interests of the union by appealing directly to their racism and their fear of non union/non white workers has failed. When that didn't work the republicans went full tilt at union busting and now can try to segregate the work force by appeals to nativist/anti immigrant fervor with impunity. If the white male vote stayed the same outside the South why have the Republicans been so successful for the last 40 years? After all they gained the South but they've lost a lot of the West (including California) and all of New England (States like Maine and New York used to be Republican). The reason is that the population of the South has grown a great deal in the last 40 years and has more electoral power. The 50-year-old white male voter in Florida or Georgia or Texas may well have been born in New Jersey or Pennsylvania or New York. Did the South attract the more er racially insensitive white males from other parts of the country? Maybe. The Reagan Democrat phenomenon was a real one. Jose Padilla,What's your point? That white guys from the northeast and elsewhere in the country *switched parties* to vote for Reagan? Absolutely. The argument that the Republicans had a sucessful southern strategy of attracting confederate sympathizers and modern day racists in the south doesn't mean they *didn't have the exact same strategy* in the North and mid-west. They did. And it worked. See--it moved bigots out of the democratic party and into the Republican party. That's what we are arguing. Bob Herbert and others have pointed out the ways in which the racist appeals (and the language of state's rights) was tailored specifically to the south and the way other kinds of coded appeals were used in the north and mid-west. He specifically pointed to Reagan's use of terms like "young buck" in southern enclaves and some less raced term in northern ones. For an interesting historical analysis of the ways in which the great "lost cause" of the south has been retrojected into non-southern communities and the way race and racism have been obscured even as they are manipulated I recommend "Confederates in the Attic" which has a fascinating chapter on a town that went for the north in the original civil war that rewrites history to imagine itself as a confederate stronghold in the post civil rights era. I'd also like to recommend "Canarsie" a study of race baiting and block busting and racial politics in New York under Nixon. To say that southern voters and specifically southern male voters are significantly more racist than northern or midwestern ones isn't to hypothesize some strange attractor where all the racists in the country flow south--its simply to say that the multi ethnic northeast and the staunchly white/native american mid and far west display their racial issues in a different manner and that the racist vote needs to be captured and organized and channelled in a different way with different imagery. You could know perfectly well that the GOP is anti-Black simply from its appointment of two window-dressing Blacks (Rice and Powell both ineffectual and sidelined) to very visible positions. Ditto with its preemption of the "Black seat" on the Supreme Court with an Uncle Tom-ish Black who goes along with the most conservatives justices on the court. If it were genuinely pro-Black it would not have to cover its true nature in these deceitful ways since there would be no question about where it stood.

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"Race and Modern Republicans Once Again" posted by ~Ray
Posted on 2008-11-19 12:12:23

Liberal commentators.. assume that if many former Wallace voters ended up voting Republican in the 1970s and beyond it had to be because Republicans went to the segregationist mountain rather than the mountain coming to them. There are two reasons to question this assumption. The first is the logic of electoral competition. Extremist voters usually have little choice but to vote for a major party which they consider at best the lesser of two evils one that offers them little of what they truly desire. Segregationists were in this position after 1968 when Wallace won less than 9% of the electoral college and Nixon became president anyway without their votes. Segregationists simply had very limited national bargaining power. In the end not the Deep South but the GOP was the mountain. Second this was borne out in how little the GOP had to "offer," so to speak segregationists for their support after 1968 even according to the myth's own terms. Segregationists wanted policies that privileged whites. In the GOP they had to settle for relatively race-neutral policies: opposition to forced busing and reluctant coexistence with affirmative action. The reason these policies aren't plausible codes for real racism is that they aren't the equivalents of discrimination much less of segregation. .. Kevin Phillips was hardly coy about this in his Emerging Republican Majority. He wrote in 1969 that Nixon did not "have to bid much ideologically" to get Wallace's electorate given its limited power and that moderation was far more promising for the GOP than anything even approaching a racialist strategy. While "the Republican Party cannot go to the Deep South"-—meaning the GOP simply would not offer the policies that whites there seemed to desire most—"the Deep South must soon go to the national GOP," regardless. So the GOP ended up bidding race-neutrality - which a conservative party would have naturally favored anyway and which is not racism - and symbolic gestures like Reagan's opposition to MLK Day his support for Bob Jones University's tax exemption and so forth. These code words and gestures were real and shameful and contemporary apologies like Ken Mehlman's mea culpa are entirely appropriate. But more often than not. I would submit pundits who harp on this shame tend to do so because it's an easy way to leap to Krugman's conclusion that race explains everything he doesn't like about contemporary American politics when in fact an awful lot of it is explained by the fecklessness of his liberal forebears. I think that there is a very good counter to Douthat's (1): if the Republican Party really were bidding race-neutrality--if there platform were one of market opportunity plus respect for the family plus respect for the church plus civil order plus race neutrality--they would get an enormous number of African-American votes. African-American voters are more often than not social conservative. African-American voters are extremely eager to support politicians who genuinely fight and reduce crime. Jack Kemp's Republican Party--one that is truly race-neutral committed to equality of opportunity. social conservative--is a natural home for most African-American voters. But we do not have that Republican Party do we? African-American voters believe that the GOP bids racism and few who have seen George Allen or Trent Lott on YouTube can disagree. I don't think its quite as clearcut as you make it out to be. The Repubs promote policies that sound race-neutral to anyone unaware of how our society actually operates. I doubt that most of their supporters think their policies are anything but fair. Similarly with their voter suppression efforts. These are carefully crafted as measures to promote a level playing field. The fact they they are only promoting policies which have been carefully designed to skew the voting public towards the conservative end is not immediately obvious from the laws/policies themselves but must be teased out by careful analysis. Sadly this is beyond most voters. Things like bussing and affirmative action could reasonably be considered to be a cure worse than the disease at least to most subburban whites and therefore an example of "feckless liberalism" in action. It is true that the most unarguable pro-black legal changes had already been made in the mid-1960s and that the policies that were being proposed by the late 1960s were less clear cut and could in principle have been opposed by a non-racist. But the actual Southern whites who were opposed the latter also opposed the former and for the same reasons. And these were the people who Southern Stragegy Republicans were trying to appeal to. This was not at all harmless; the idea of a genuinely pro-black public policy that wasn't dominated by bad ideas like bussing was dealt a huge blow by the fact that the people who most vocally opposed those policies were those who were obviously simple racists not well-meaning dissenters. Where have I heard that strategy before? Oh yes! its the republican war on poor women. First they campaign on an anti abortion platform. Then they fail to deliver so that they can continue to send out hysterical appeals for money on the basis of their failure to deliver their promised anti-woman policies. And where else have I heard this line of argument before? Why as a mid-term middle brow explanation of why the Iraq war couldn't possibly have been waged because we wanted control of their oil--because we wound up botching the war and driving the price of oil up! As Atrios so trenchantly observes the main thing is that everythign is always good for the republicans. Even when they are too cowardly to actually avow their own racist policies in other than code words that just shows they were really race neutral all along! Ian: George Allen and Trent Lott were major figures and You can't treat them as peripheral -- Allen was expected to run for President. Your indignation is really silly. The party you've choice to join is what it is. The word racism can mean lots of things but there's a well-defined definition which has been tested. Opposition to interracial marriage is racist by any standard n Alabama 42% of the voters voted against an amendment legalizing interracial marriage. Further analysis could probably show who voted which way and my bet is that it was mostly white Republicans who voted against the amendment. (Someone should do the research). Republicans have done all kinds of little symbolic things to make sure they get that 42% chunk (and similar chunks in other states. North and South). Even if the Republicans did nothing racist policywise their continual use of racist images and codewords made this country a worse nastier place. That's not the only thing nasty they do -- look at the collected sayings of Delay and Gingrich for more -- but it's probably the nastiest. And these same people. Douthat included often make whiny remarks about Democratic nastiness or the general nasty topne of American politics. That's really brazen. I don't really doubt the sincerity of Douthat's conservativism but he's stuck defending a weakly conservative political party which has been taken over by criminals and extremists and that's an impossible task. But because he's a conservative he (like Megan McArdle) has been promoted far beyond what his abilities can justify. Let's not forget also that in 1991 David Duke was able to get 700,000 votes for governor with the bulk of his support coming from northern LA that is to say the heavily Republican areas. As someone who lived in the south in the era being discussed. I certainly agree that race was a huge factor in turning the region Republican. But don't overlook the importance of Vietnam. Southerners were strongly pro-war and McGovern was not going to get a lot of southern votes in any event. You're right: the guy couldn't be more wrong. The red states today are that for good reason: they're the ones where the Socialist Party got the heavy votes a hundred years ago: Arkansas. Nebraska. Kansas and on and on. Your problem with progressive movements is that when they succeed they produce contentment which leads to the liquidation of the progressive impulse. That's why Teamsters vote Republican: they've got good heavy pensions to look after. And the Great Plains: the got their loose money including tailored regional Federal Reserve branches and they got all the subsidies the Farmers' Union could ever have wished for. Small problem is the policies they asked for lead to the industrial farm not the support of family farming. Oh well. Back to the drawing board... A better quality conservative would be reality -based though despite the examples of some fine economists I still don't have a sharp idea what they would look like. "A Republican Party that was socially conservative and economically classical liberal and retained its long-ago commitment to equality of opportunity--that remembered that it was Abraham Lincoln who freed the slaves--would be a very different Republican Party than the one we see now: it would still have its soul." In 1964. I was in the Air Force stationed in Biloxi. The murders of those three civil rights activists was frightening for a farm boy from Oregon and drove me into civil rights actions. I'd witnessed virulent hate and racism for a couple of years. As part of a college course. I interviewed a few public officials including a district attorney. His first statement to me was "I hope you're not one of those outside agitators who don't believe in states' rights." Ronald Reagan's very appearance in Neshoba County was transparently racist. His use of the code "states' rights" pandered to white supremacists. Republicans should face it: the Teflon is chipping off. Bob Herbert ("Righting Reagan's Wrongs?") could not be more correct in writing that "Reagan apologists.. have no right to change the meaning" of his appearance at the Neshoba County Fair to kick off his 1980 campaign. If anyone doubts this simply get out a map and find Philadelphia. Miss. One does not simply fly in and out of that town as if it were New York. One must truly go out of one's way in both a physical as well as a psychological sense to arrive there. Ronald Reagan knew exactly what he was doing and to view it as anything other than an appeal to racism one must be told. "There you go again." The racial appeal in Ronald Reagan's visit to the Neshoba County Fair in 1980 is unambiguous. It was part of a Republican strategy to win white Democratic converts. Consider a letter that Michael Retzer the Mississippi national committeeman wrote in December 1979 to the Republican National Committee. The national committee was polling state leaders for venues where the Republican nominee might speak and Mr. Retzer pointed to the Neshoba County Fair as ideal for winning what he called "George Wallace-inclined voters." This was not just a Southern strategy. Throughout his career. Mr. Reagan benefited from divisive appeals to whites who resented efforts to reverse historic patterns of racial discrimination. He did it in 1966 when he campaigned for the California governorship by denouncing open housing laws. He did it in 1976 by attacking welfare in subtly racist terms. And he clearly did it in Neshoba County in 1980. Joseph CrespinoAtlanta. Nov. 14. 2007The writer teaches history at Emory University and is the author of "In Search of Another Country: Mississippi and the Conservative Counterrevolution." There are 2.8 million people in Mississippi. About 15% of the non-elderly population--make that 350,000--were on Medicaid. Cut Medicaid enrollments by 50,000 by 1/7. 42,000 babies born in Mississippi each year. For the share who die to jump from 0.97% to 1.14%... That's a less than 1/3000 chance. That's worth saying. GULFPORT. Miss. — Like the other Gulf Coast states battered by Hurricane Katrina. Mississippi was required by Congress to spend half of its billions in federal grant money to help low-income citizens trying to recover from the storm. But so far the state has spent $1.7 billion in federal money on programs that have mostly benefited relatively affluent residents and big businesses. The money has gone to compensate many middle- and upper-income homeowners to aid utility companies whose equipment was damaged and to prop up the state's insurance system. Just $167 million or about 10 percent of the federal money has been spent on programs dedicated to helping the poor mostly through a smaller grant program for lower-income homeowners.... I wasn't aware that Arkansas. Nebraska and Kansas had "heavy teamster" presence who look upon republican policies as a way of "protecting their pensions." What on earth does that mean really? How would voting republican protect pensions and voting democratic negatively affect pensions? You seem to be completely ignorant of the union busting side of republican policies--does the word PATCO ring a bell? There's a reason why Unions have historically turned out for democratic candidates and its not because voting for socialism in some dim past gave them everythign they wanted. Au contraire its because long term republican attempts to separate union members from the interests of the union by appealing directly to their racism and their fear of non union/non white workers has failed. When that didn't work the republicans went full tilt at union busting and now can try to segregate the work force by appeals to nativist/anti immigrant fervor with impunity. If the white male vote stayed the same outside the South why have the Republicans been so successful for the last 40 years? After all they gained the South but they've lost a lot of the West (including California) and all of New England (States like Maine and New York used to be Republican). The reason is that the population of the South has grown a great deal in the last 40 years and has more electoral power. The 50-year-old white male voter in Florida or Georgia or Texas may well have been born in New Jersey or Pennsylvania or New York. Did the South attract the more er racially insensitive white males from other parts of the country? Maybe. The Reagan Democrat phenomenon was a real one. Jose Padilla,What's your point? That white guys from the northeast and elsewhere in the country *switched parties* to vote for Reagan? Absolutely. The argument that the Republicans had a sucessful southern strategy of attracting confederate sympathizers and modern day racists in the south doesn't mean they *didn't have the exact same strategy* in the North and mid-west. They did. And it worked. See--it moved bigots out of the democratic party and into the Republican party. That's what we are arguing. Bob Herbert and others have pointed out the ways in which the racist appeals (and the language of state's rights) was tailored specifically to the south and the way other kinds of coded appeals were used in the north and mid-west. He specifically pointed to Reagan's use of terms like "young buck" in southern enclaves and some less raced term in northern ones. For an interesting historical analysis of the ways in which the great "lost cause" of the south has been retrojected into non-southern communities and the way race and racism have been obscured even as they are manipulated I recommend "Confederates in the Attic" which has a fascinating chapter on a town that went for the north in the original civil war that rewrites history to imagine itself as a confederate stronghold in the post civil rights era. I'd also like to recommend "Canarsie" a study of race baiting and block busting and racial politics in New York under Nixon. To say that southern voters and specifically southern male voters are significantly more racist than northern or midwestern ones isn't to hypothesize some strange attractor where all the racists in the country flow south--its simply to say that the multi ethnic northeast and the staunchly white/native american mid and far west display their racial issues in a different manner and that the racist vote needs to be captured and organized and channelled in a different way with different imagery. You could know perfectly well that the GOP is anti-Black simply from its appointment of two window-dressing Blacks (Rice and Powell both ineffectual and sidelined) to very visible positions. Ditto with its preemption of the "Black seat" on the Supreme Court with an Uncle Tom-ish Black who goes along with the most conservatives justices on the court. If it were genuinely pro-Black it would not have to cover its true nature in these deceitful ways since there would be no question about where it stood.

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"Race and Modern Republicans Once Again" posted by ~Ray
Posted on 2008-11-19 12:12:22

Liberal commentators.. assume that if many former Wallace voters ended up voting Republican in the 1970s and beyond it had to be because Republicans went to the segregationist mountain rather than the mountain coming to them. There are two reasons to question this assumption. The first is the logic of electoral competition. Extremist voters usually have little choice but to vote for a major party which they consider at best the lesser of two evils one that offers them little of what they truly desire. Segregationists were in this position after 1968 when Wallace won less than 9% of the electoral college and Nixon became president anyway without their votes. Segregationists simply had very limited national bargaining power. In the end not the Deep South but the GOP was the mountain. Second this was borne out in how little the GOP had to "offer," so to speak segregationists for their support after 1968 even according to the myth's own terms. Segregationists wanted policies that privileged whites. In the GOP they had to settle for relatively race-neutral policies: opposition to forced busing and reluctant coexistence with affirmative action. The reason these policies aren't plausible codes for real racism is that they aren't the equivalents of discrimination much less of segregation. .. Kevin Phillips was hardly coy about this in his Emerging Republican Majority. He wrote in 1969 that Nixon did not "have to bid much ideologically" to get Wallace's electorate given its limited power and that moderation was far more promising for the GOP than anything even approaching a racialist strategy. While "the Republican Party cannot go to the Deep South"-—meaning the GOP simply would not offer the policies that whites there seemed to desire most—"the Deep South must soon go to the national GOP," regardless. So the GOP ended up bidding race-neutrality - which a conservative party would have naturally favored anyway and which is not racism - and symbolic gestures like Reagan's opposition to MLK Day his support for Bob Jones University's tax exemption and so forth. These code words and gestures were real and shameful and contemporary apologies like Ken Mehlman's mea culpa are entirely appropriate. But more often than not. I would submit pundits who harp on this shame tend to do so because it's an easy way to leap to Krugman's conclusion that race explains everything he doesn't like about contemporary American politics when in fact an awful lot of it is explained by the fecklessness of his liberal forebears. I think that there is a very good counter to Douthat's (1): if the Republican Party really were bidding race-neutrality--if there platform were one of market opportunity plus respect for the family plus respect for the church plus civil order plus race neutrality--they would get an enormous number of African-American votes. African-American voters are more often than not social conservative. African-American voters are extremely eager to support politicians who genuinely fight and reduce crime. Jack Kemp's Republican Party--one that is truly race-neutral committed to equality of opportunity. social conservative--is a natural home for most African-American voters. But we do not have that Republican Party do we? African-American voters believe that the GOP bids racism and few who have seen George Allen or Trent Lott on YouTube can disagree. I don't think its quite as clearcut as you make it out to be. The Repubs promote policies that sound race-neutral to anyone unaware of how our society actually operates. I doubt that most of their supporters think their policies are anything but fair. Similarly with their voter suppression efforts. These are carefully crafted as measures to promote a level playing field. The fact they they are only promoting policies which have been carefully designed to skew the voting public towards the conservative end is not immediately obvious from the laws/policies themselves but must be teased out by careful analysis. Sadly this is beyond most voters. Things like bussing and affirmative action could reasonably be considered to be a cure worse than the disease at least to most subburban whites and therefore an example of "feckless liberalism" in action. It is true that the most unarguable pro-black legal changes had already been made in the mid-1960s and that the policies that were being proposed by the late 1960s were less clear cut and could in principle have been opposed by a non-racist. But the actual Southern whites who were opposed the latter also opposed the former and for the same reasons. And these were the people who Southern Stragegy Republicans were trying to appeal to. This was not at all harmless; the idea of a genuinely pro-black public policy that wasn't dominated by bad ideas like bussing was dealt a huge blow by the fact that the people who most vocally opposed those policies were those who were obviously simple racists not well-meaning dissenters. Where have I heard that strategy before? Oh yes! its the republican war on poor women. First they campaign on an anti abortion platform. Then they fail to deliver so that they can continue to send out hysterical appeals for money on the basis of their failure to deliver their promised anti-woman policies. And where else have I heard this line of argument before? Why as a mid-term middle brow explanation of why the Iraq war couldn't possibly have been waged because we wanted control of their oil--because we wound up botching the war and driving the price of oil up! As Atrios so trenchantly observes the main thing is that everythign is always good for the republicans. Even when they are too cowardly to actually avow their own racist policies in other than code words that just shows they were really race neutral all along! Ian: George Allen and Trent Lott were major figures and You can't treat them as peripheral -- Allen was expected to run for President. Your indignation is really silly. The party you've choice to join is what it is. The word racism can mean lots of things but there's a well-defined definition which has been tested. Opposition to interracial marriage is racist by any standard n Alabama 42% of the voters voted against an amendment legalizing interracial marriage. Further analysis could probably show who voted which way and my bet is that it was mostly white Republicans who voted against the amendment. (Someone should do the research). Republicans have done all kinds of little symbolic things to make sure they get that 42% chunk (and similar chunks in other states. North and South). Even if the Republicans did nothing racist policywise their continual use of racist images and codewords made this country a worse nastier place. That's not the only thing nasty they do -- look at the collected sayings of Delay and Gingrich for more -- but it's probably the nastiest. And these same people. Douthat included often make whiny remarks about Democratic nastiness or the general nasty topne of American politics. That's really brazen. I don't really doubt the sincerity of Douthat's conservativism but he's stuck defending a weakly conservative political party which has been taken over by criminals and extremists and that's an impossible task. But because he's a conservative he (like Megan McArdle) has been promoted far beyond what his abilities can justify. Let's not forget also that in 1991 David Duke was able to get 700,000 votes for governor with the bulk of his support coming from northern LA that is to say the heavily Republican areas. As someone who lived in the south in the era being discussed. I certainly agree that race was a huge factor in turning the region Republican. But don't overlook the importance of Vietnam. Southerners were strongly pro-war and McGovern was not going to get a lot of southern votes in any event. You're right: the guy couldn't be more wrong. The red states today are that for good reason: they're the ones where the Socialist Party got the heavy votes a hundred years ago: Arkansas. Nebraska. Kansas and on and on. Your problem with progressive movements is that when they succeed they produce contentment which leads to the liquidation of the progressive impulse. That's why Teamsters vote Republican: they've got good heavy pensions to look after. And the Great Plains: the got their loose money including tailored regional Federal Reserve branches and they got all the subsidies the Farmers' Union could ever have wished for. Small problem is the policies they asked for lead to the industrial farm not the support of family farming. Oh well. Back to the drawing board... A better quality conservative would be reality -based though despite the examples of some fine economists I still don't have a sharp idea what they would look like. "A Republican Party that was socially conservative and economically classical liberal and retained its long-ago commitment to equality of opportunity--that remembered that it was Abraham Lincoln who freed the slaves--would be a very different Republican Party than the one we see now: it would still have its soul." In 1964. I was in the Air Force stationed in Biloxi. The murders of those three civil rights activists was frightening for a farm boy from Oregon and drove me into civil rights actions. I'd witnessed virulent hate and racism for a couple of years. As part of a college course. I interviewed a few public officials including a district attorney. His first statement to me was "I hope you're not one of those outside agitators who don't believe in states' rights." Ronald Reagan's very appearance in Neshoba County was transparently racist. His use of the code "states' rights" pandered to white supremacists. Republicans should face it: the Teflon is chipping off. Bob Herbert ("Righting Reagan's Wrongs?") could not be more correct in writing that "Reagan apologists.. have no right to change the meaning" of his appearance at the Neshoba County Fair to kick off his 1980 campaign. If anyone doubts this simply get out a map and find Philadelphia. Miss. One does not simply fly in and out of that town as if it were New York. One must truly go out of one's way in both a physical as well as a psychological sense to arrive there. Ronald Reagan knew exactly what he was doing and to view it as anything other than an appeal to racism one must be told. "There you go again." The racial appeal in Ronald Reagan's visit to the Neshoba County Fair in 1980 is unambiguous. It was part of a Republican strategy to win white Democratic converts. Consider a letter that Michael Retzer the Mississippi national committeeman wrote in December 1979 to the Republican National Committee. The national committee was polling state leaders for venues where the Republican nominee might speak and Mr. Retzer pointed to the Neshoba County Fair as ideal for winning what he called "George Wallace-inclined voters." This was not just a Southern strategy. Throughout his career. Mr. Reagan benefited from divisive appeals to whites who resented efforts to reverse historic patterns of racial discrimination. He did it in 1966 when he campaigned for the California governorship by denouncing open housing laws. He did it in 1976 by attacking welfare in subtly racist terms. And he clearly did it in Neshoba County in 1980. Joseph CrespinoAtlanta. Nov. 14. 2007The writer teaches history at Emory University and is the author of "In Search of Another Country: Mississippi and the Conservative Counterrevolution." There are 2.8 million people in Mississippi. About 15% of the non-elderly population--make that 350,000--were on Medicaid. Cut Medicaid enrollments by 50,000 by 1/7. 42,000 babies born in Mississippi each year. For the share who die to jump from 0.97% to 1.14%... That's a less than 1/3000 chance. That's worth saying. GULFPORT. Miss. — Like the other Gulf Coast states battered by Hurricane Katrina. Mississippi was required by Congress to spend half of its billions in federal grant money to help low-income citizens trying to recover from the storm. But so far the state has spent $1.7 billion in federal money on programs that have mostly benefited relatively affluent residents and big businesses. The money has gone to compensate many middle- and upper-income homeowners to aid utility companies whose equipment was damaged and to prop up the state's insurance system. Just $167 million or about 10 percent of the federal money has been spent on programs dedicated to helping the poor mostly through a smaller grant program for lower-income homeowners.... I wasn't aware that Arkansas. Nebraska and Kansas had "heavy teamster" presence who look upon republican policies as a way of "protecting their pensions." What on earth does that mean really? How would voting republican protect pensions and voting democratic negatively affect pensions? You seem to be completely ignorant of the union busting side of republican policies--does the word PATCO ring a bell? There's a reason why Unions have historically turned out for democratic candidates and its not because voting for socialism in some dim past gave them everythign they wanted. Au contraire its because long term republican attempts to separate union members from the interests of the union by appealing directly to their racism and their fear of non union/non white workers has failed. When that didn't work the republicans went full tilt at union busting and now can try to segregate the work force by appeals to nativist/anti immigrant fervor with impunity. If the white male vote stayed the same outside the South why have the Republicans been so successful for the last 40 years? After all they gained the South but they've lost a lot of the West (including California) and all of New England (States like Maine and New York used to be Republican). The reason is that the population of the South has grown a great deal in the last 40 years and has more electoral power. The 50-year-old white male voter in Florida or Georgia or Texas may well have been born in New Jersey or Pennsylvania or New York. Did the South attract the more er racially insensitive white males from other parts of the country? Maybe. The Reagan Democrat phenomenon was a real one. Jose Padilla,What's your point? That white guys from the northeast and elsewhere in the country *switched parties* to vote for Reagan? Absolutely. The argument that the Republicans had a sucessful southern strategy of attracting confederate sympathizers and modern day racists in the south doesn't mean they *didn't have the exact same strategy* in the North and mid-west. They did. And it worked. See--it moved bigots out of the democratic party and into the Republican party. That's what we are arguing. Bob Herbert and others have pointed out the ways in which the racist appeals (and the language of state's rights) was tailored specifically to the south and the way other kinds of coded appeals were used in the north and mid-west. He specifically pointed to Reagan's use of terms like "young buck" in southern enclaves and some less raced term in northern ones. For an interesting historical analysis of the ways in which the great "lost cause" of the south has been retrojected into non-southern communities and the way race and racism have been obscured even as they are manipulated I recommend "Confederates in the Attic" which has a fascinating chapter on a town that went for the north in the original civil war that rewrites history to imagine itself as a confederate stronghold in the post civil rights era. I'd also like to recommend "Canarsie" a study of race baiting and block busting and racial politics in New York under Nixon. To say that southern voters and specifically southern male voters are significantly more racist than northern or midwestern ones isn't to hypothesize some strange attractor where all the racists in the country flow south--its simply to say that the multi ethnic northeast and the staunchly white/native american mid and far west display their racial issues in a different manner and that the racist vote needs to be captured and organized and channelled in a different way with different imagery. You could know perfectly well that the GOP is anti-Black simply from its appointment of two window-dressing Blacks (Rice and Powell both ineffectual and sidelined) to very visible positions. Ditto with its preemption of the "Black seat" on the Supreme Court with an Uncle Tom-ish Black who goes along with the most conservatives justices on the court. If it were genuinely pro-Black it would not have to cover its true nature in these deceitful ways since there would be no question about where it stood.

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"Race and Modern Republicans Once Again" posted by ~Ray
Posted on 2008-11-19 12:12:08

Liberal commentators.. assume that if many former Wallace voters ended up voting Republican in the 1970s and beyond it had to be because Republicans went to the segregationist mountain rather than the mountain coming to them. There are two reasons to question this assumption. The first is the logic of electoral competition. Extremist voters usually have little choice but to vote for a major party which they consider at best the lesser of two evils one that offers them little of what they truly desire. Segregationists were in this position after 1968 when Wallace won less than 9% of the electoral college and Nixon became president anyway without their votes. Segregationists simply had very limited national bargaining power. In the end not the Deep South but the GOP was the mountain. Second this was borne out in how little the GOP had to "offer," so to speak segregationists for their support after 1968 even according to the myth's own terms. Segregationists wanted policies that privileged whites. In the GOP they had to settle for relatively race-neutral policies: opposition to forced busing and reluctant coexistence with affirmative action. The reason these policies aren't plausible codes for real racism is that they aren't the equivalents of discrimination much less of segregation. .. Kevin Phillips was hardly coy about this in his Emerging Republican Majority. He wrote in 1969 that Nixon did not "have to bid much ideologically" to get Wallace's electorate given its limited power and that moderation was far more promising for the GOP than anything even approaching a racialist strategy. While "the Republican Party cannot go to the Deep South"-—meaning the GOP simply would not offer the policies that whites there seemed to desire most—"the Deep South must soon go to the national GOP," regardless. So the GOP ended up bidding race-neutrality - which a conservative party would have naturally favored anyway and which is not racism - and symbolic gestures like Reagan's opposition to MLK Day his support for Bob Jones University's tax exemption and so forth. These code words and gestures were real and shameful and contemporary apologies like Ken Mehlman's mea culpa are entirely appropriate. But more often than not. I would submit pundits who harp on this shame tend to do so because it's an easy way to leap to Krugman's conclusion that race explains everything he doesn't like about contemporary American politics when in fact an awful lot of it is explained by the fecklessness of his liberal forebears. I think that there is a very good counter to Douthat's (1): if the Republican Party really were bidding race-neutrality--if there platform were one of market opportunity plus respect for the family plus respect for the church plus civil order plus race neutrality--they would get an enormous number of African-American votes. African-American voters are more often than not social conservative. African-American voters are extremely eager to support politicians who genuinely fight and reduce crime. Jack Kemp's Republican Party--one that is truly race-neutral committed to equality of opportunity. social conservative--is a natural home for most African-American voters. But we do not have that Republican Party do we? African-American voters believe that the GOP bids racism and few who have seen George Allen or Trent Lott on YouTube can disagree. I don't think its quite as clearcut as you make it out to be. The Repubs promote policies that sound race-neutral to anyone unaware of how our society actually operates. I doubt that most of their supporters think their policies are anything but fair. Similarly with their voter suppression efforts. These are carefully crafted as measures to promote a level playing field. The fact they they are only promoting policies which have been carefully designed to skew the voting public towards the conservative end is not immediately obvious from the laws/policies themselves but must be teased out by careful analysis. Sadly this is beyond most voters. Things like bussing and affirmative action could reasonably be considered to be a cure worse than the disease at least to most subburban whites and therefore an example of "feckless liberalism" in action. It is true that the most unarguable pro-black legal changes had already been made in the mid-1960s and that the policies that were being proposed by the late 1960s were less clear cut and could in principle have been opposed by a non-racist. But the actual Southern whites who were opposed the latter also opposed the former and for the same reasons. And these were the people who Southern Stragegy Republicans were trying to appeal to. This was not at all harmless; the idea of a genuinely pro-black public policy that wasn't dominated by bad ideas like bussing was dealt a huge blow by the fact that the people who most vocally opposed those policies were those who were obviously simple racists not well-meaning dissenters. Where have I heard that strategy before? Oh yes! its the republican war on poor women. First they campaign on an anti abortion platform. Then they fail to deliver so that they can continue to send out hysterical appeals for money on the basis of their failure to deliver their promised anti-woman policies. And where else have I heard this line of argument before? Why as a mid-term middle brow explanation of why the Iraq war couldn't possibly have been waged because we wanted control of their oil--because we wound up botching the war and driving the price of oil up! As Atrios so trenchantly observes the main thing is that everythign is always good for the republicans. Even when they are too cowardly to actually avow their own racist policies in other than code words that just shows they were really race neutral all along! Ian: George Allen and Trent Lott were major figures and You can't treat them as peripheral -- Allen was expected to run for President. Your indignation is really silly. The party you've choice to join is what it is. The word racism can mean lots of things but there's a well-defined definition which has been tested. Opposition to interracial marriage is racist by any standard n Alabama 42% of the voters voted against an amendment legalizing interracial marriage. Further analysis could probably show who voted which way and my bet is that it was mostly white Republicans who voted against the amendment. (Someone should do the research). Republicans have done all kinds of little symbolic things to make sure they get that 42% chunk (and similar chunks in other states. North and South). Even if the Republicans did nothing racist policywise their continual use of racist images and codewords made this country a worse nastier place. That's not the only thing nasty they do -- look at the collected sayings of Delay and Gingrich for more -- but it's probably the nastiest. And these same people. Douthat included often make whiny remarks about Democratic nastiness or the general nasty topne of American politics. That's really brazen. I don't really doubt the sincerity of Douthat's conservativism but he's stuck defending a weakly conservative political party which has been taken over by criminals and extremists and that's an impossible task. But because he's a conservative he (like Megan McArdle) has been promoted far beyond what his abilities can justify. Let's not forget also that in 1991 David Duke was able to get 700,000 votes for governor with the bulk of his support coming from northern LA that is to say the heavily Republican areas. As someone who lived in the south in the era being discussed. I certainly agree that race was a huge factor in turning the region Republican. But don't overlook the importance of Vietnam. Southerners were strongly pro-war and McGovern was not going to get a lot of southern votes in any event. You're right: the guy couldn't be more wrong. The red states today are that for good reason: they're the ones where the Socialist Party got the heavy votes a hundred years ago: Arkansas. Nebraska. Kansas and on and on. Your problem with progressive movements is that when they succeed they produce contentment which leads to the liquidation of the progressive impulse. That's why Teamsters vote Republican: they've got good heavy pensions to look after. And the Great Plains: the got their loose money including tailored regional Federal Reserve branches and they got all the subsidies the Farmers' Union could ever have wished for. Small problem is the policies they asked for lead to the industrial farm not the support of family farming. Oh well. Back to the drawing board... A better quality conservative would be reality -based though despite the examples of some fine economists I still don't have a sharp idea what they would look like. "A Republican Party that was socially conservative and economically classical liberal and retained its long-ago commitment to equality of opportunity--that remembered that it was Abraham Lincoln who freed the slaves--would be a very different Republican Party than the one we see now: it would still have its soul." In 1964. I was in the Air Force stationed in Biloxi. The murders of those three civil rights activists was frightening for a farm boy from Oregon and drove me into civil rights actions. I'd witnessed virulent hate and racism for a couple of years. As part of a college course. I interviewed a few public officials including a district attorney. His first statement to me was "I hope you're not one of those outside agitators who don't believe in states' rights." Ronald Reagan's very appearance in Neshoba County was transparently racist. His use of the code "states' rights" pandered to white supremacists. Republicans should face it: the Teflon is chipping off. Bob Herbert ("Righting Reagan's Wrongs?") could not be more correct in writing that "Reagan apologists.. have no right to change the meaning" of his appearance at the Neshoba County Fair to kick off his 1980 campaign. If anyone doubts this simply get out a map and find Philadelphia. Miss. One does not simply fly in and out of that town as if it were New York. One must truly go out of one's way in both a physical as well as a psychological sense to arrive there. Ronald Reagan knew exactly what he was doing and to view it as anything other than an appeal to racism one must be told. "There you go again." The racial appeal in Ronald Reagan's visit to the Neshoba County Fair in 1980 is unambiguous. It was part of a Republican strategy to win white Democratic converts. Consider a letter that Michael Retzer the Mississippi national committeeman wrote in December 1979 to the Republican National Committee. The national committee was polling state leaders for venues where the Republican nominee might speak and Mr. Retzer pointed to the Neshoba County Fair as ideal for winning what he called "George Wallace-inclined voters." This was not just a Southern strategy. Throughout his career. Mr. Reagan benefited from divisive appeals to whites who resented efforts to reverse historic patterns of racial discrimination. He did it in 1966 when he campaigned for the California governorship by denouncing open housing laws. He did it in 1976 by attacking welfare in subtly racist terms. And he clearly did it in Neshoba County in 1980. Joseph CrespinoAtlanta. Nov. 14. 2007The writer teaches history at Emory University and is the author of "In Search of Another Country: Mississippi and the Conservative Counterrevolution." There are 2.8 million people in Mississippi. About 15% of the non-elderly population--make that 350,000--were on Medicaid. Cut Medicaid enrollments by 50,000 by 1/7. 42,000 babies born in Mississippi each year. For the share who die to jump from 0.97% to 1.14%... That's a less than 1/3000 chance. That's worth saying. GULFPORT. Miss. — Like the other Gulf Coast states battered by Hurricane Katrina. Mississippi was required by Congress to spend half of its billions in federal grant money to help low-income citizens trying to recover from the storm. But so far the state has spent $1.7 billion in federal money on programs that have mostly benefited relatively affluent residents and big businesses. The money has gone to compensate many middle- and upper-income homeowners to aid utility companies whose equipment was damaged and to prop up the state's insurance system. Just $167 million or about 10 percent of the federal money has been spent on programs dedicated to helping the poor mostly through a smaller grant program for lower-income homeowners.... I wasn't aware that Arkansas. Nebraska and Kansas had "heavy teamster" presence who look upon republican policies as a way of "protecting their pensions." What on earth does that mean really? How would voting republican protect pensions and voting democratic negatively affect pensions? You seem to be completely ignorant of the union busting side of republican policies--does the word PATCO ring a bell? There's a reason why Unions have historically turned out for democratic candidates and its not because voting for socialism in some dim past gave them everythign they wanted. Au contraire its because long term republican attempts to separate union members from the interests of the union by appealing directly to their racism and their fear of non union/non white workers has failed. When that didn't work the republicans went full tilt at union busting and now can try to segregate the work force by appeals to nativist/anti immigrant fervor with impunity. If the white male vote stayed the same outside the South why have the Republicans been so successful for the last 40 years? After all they gained the South but they've lost a lot of the West (including California) and all of New England (States like Maine and New York used to be Republican). The reason is that the population of the South has grown a great deal in the last 40 years and has more electoral power. The 50-year-old white male voter in Florida or Georgia or Texas may well have been born in New Jersey or Pennsylvania or New York. Did the South attract the more er racially insensitive white males from other parts of the country? Maybe. The Reagan Democrat phenomenon was a real one. Jose Padilla,What's your point? That white guys from the northeast and elsewhere in the country *switched parties* to vote for Reagan? Absolutely. The argument that the Republicans had a sucessful southern strategy of attracting confederate sympathizers and modern day racists in the south doesn't mean they *didn't have the exact same strategy* in the North and mid-west. They did. And it worked. See--it moved bigots out of the democratic party and into the Republican party. That's what we are arguing. Bob Herbert and others have pointed out the ways in which the racist appeals (and the language of state's rights) was tailored specifically to the south and the way other kinds of coded appeals were used in the north and mid-west. He specifically pointed to Reagan's use of terms like "young buck" in southern enclaves and some less raced term in northern ones. For an interesting historical analysis of the ways in which the great "lost cause" of the south has been retrojected into non-southern communities and the way race and racism have been obscured even as they are manipulated I recommend "Confederates in the Attic" which has a fascinating chapter on a town that went for the north in the original civil war that rewrites history to imagine itself as a confederate stronghold in the post civil rights era. I'd also like to recommend "Canarsie" a study of race baiting and block busting and racial politics in New York under Nixon. To say that southern voters and specifically southern male voters are significantly more racist than northern or midwestern ones isn't to hypothesize some strange attractor where all the racists in the country flow south--its simply to say that the multi ethnic northeast and the staunchly white/native american mid and far west display their racial issues in a different manner and that the racist vote needs to be captured and organized and channelled in a different way with different imagery. You could know perfectly well that the GOP is anti-Black simply from its appointment of two window-dressing Blacks (Rice and Powell both ineffectual and sidelined) to very visible positions. Ditto with its preemption of the "Black seat" on the Supreme Court with an Uncle Tom-ish Black who goes along with the most conservatives justices on the court. If it were genuinely pro-Black it would not have to cover its true nature in these deceitful ways since there would be no question about where it stood.

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"NY TIMES ADMITS CONCEPT OF RACE LACKS SCIENTIFIC BASIS" posted by ~Ray
Posted on 2008-06-22 07:10:46

BURIED IN A NY TIMES ARTICLE on the effect of DNA research on people's view of race was a sentence of a sort we can't recall having read in a major paper before:"Race many sociologists and anthropologists have argued for decades is a social invention historically used to justify prejudice and persecution."The mythological - indeed racist - origins of the concept of race has almost completely passed the mainstream media by and this omission has been a major factor in country's continuing ethnic problems. SAM SMITH. GREAT AMERICAN POLITICAL REPAIR MANUAL. 1997 - There is simply no undisputed scientific definition of race. What are considered genetic characteristics are often the result of cultural habit and environmental adaptation. As far back as 1785 a German philosopher noted that "complexions run into each other." Julian Huxley suggested in 1941 that "it would be highly desirable if we could banish the question-begging call 'race' from all discussions of human affairs and substitute the noncommittal phrase 'ethnic group.' That would be a first step toward rational consideration of the problem at hand." Anthropologist Ashley Montagu in 1942 called race our "most dangerous myth."Yet in our conversations and arguments in our media and even in our laws the illusion of race is given great credibility. As a result that which is transmitted culturally is considered genetically fixed that which is an environmental adaptation is regarded as innate and that which is fluid is declared immutable. Many still hang on to a notion similar to that of Carolus Linnaeus who declared in 1758 that there were four races: white red dark and black. Others make up their own races applying the term to religions (Jewish) language groups (Aryan) or nationalities (Irish). Modern science has little impact on our views. Our concept of race comes largely from religion literature politics and the oral tradition. It comes creaking with all the prejudices of the ages. It reeks of territoriality of jingoism of subjugation and of the abuse of power. DNA investigate has revealed just how great is our misconception of race. In The History and Geography of Human Genes. Luca Cavalli-Sforza of Stanford and his colleagues describe how many of the variations between humans are really adaptations to different environmental conditions (such as the relative density of sweat glands or lean bodies to dissipate heat and fat ones to retain it). But that's not the sort of thing you can easily build a system of apartheid around. As Thomas S. Martin has written:"The widest genetic divergence in human groups separates the Africans from the Australian aborigines though ironically these two 'races' have the same skin color. There is no clearly distinguishable 'color race.' What Cavalli-Sforza calls the Caucasoids are a hybrid about two-thirds Mongoloid and one-third African. Finns and Hungarians are slightly more Mongoloid while Italians and Spaniards are more African but the deviation is vanishingly slight. If we are going to insist on dividing people by race we should at least use comparisons more up-to-date than those thought up centuries ago. Here are a few suggestions based on modern science Regardless of what science says however myth can kill and cause hurt just as easily as scientific truth. And regardless of what science says as anthropologist Alice Brues told Newsweek. "If I dive into Nairobi. I know I'm not in Oslo."In fact give or act a few thousand years it's unlikely that those of a Nordic skin complexion would stay that way living under the African sun. Similarly the effects of a US diet are strong enough that the first generations of both European and Asian Americans have found themselves looking up at their grandchildren. In such ways adaptation mimics what many evaluate of as race. But who needs science when we have our own eyes? If it looks like go that's good enough for us. Further we are obsessed with the subject even as we say we wish to ignore it. A few years back a study of urban elections coverage found five times as many stories about race as about taxes. We can't even agree on what go is. In the 1990 census. Americans said they belonged to some 300 different races or ethnic groups. American Indians divided themselves into 600 tribes and Latinos into 70 categories. Even as we talk endlessly of race and ethnicity we simultaneously go to great lengths to be that we are all the same. Why this contradiction? The answer can be partly found in the tacit assumption of many that human equity must be based primarily on competitive equality. Listen to talk about race (or sex) and notice how often the talk is also about competition. The cultural differences (real or presumed) that really disturb us are ones of competitive significance: thigh circumference height math ability and so forth. We accept more easily other differences -- varieties of hair degree of subcutaneous fat prevalence of sickle cell anemia -- because they don't affect (or affect far less) who gets to the top. Once having decided which traits are important we appoint causes to them on the basis of convenience rather than fact. Our inability to sort out the relative genetic cultural and environmental provenance of our differences doesn't impede our judgment at all. It is enough that a difference is observed. Thus we tend to deal neither with understanding what the facts about our differences and similarities really mean -- or more importantly with their ultimate irrelevance to developing a world where we can live harmoniously and happily with each other. We don't spend the effort to separate facts from fiction because both cut too close to our inability to appreciate and celebrate our human differences. It is far easier to belie either that these differences are immutable or that they don't exist at all. And so we come to the Catch-22 of ethnicity. It is hard to imagine a non-discriminatory unprejudiced society in which race and sex matter much. Yet in our efforts to reach that goal our society and its institutions constantly send the conflicting communicate that they are extremely important. For example our laws against discriminatory practices inevitably heighten general consciousness of race and sex. The media drawn inexorably to conflict plays up the issue. And the very groups that have suffered under racial or sexual stereotypes consciously foster countering stereotypes -- "you wouldn't understand it's a color thing" -- as a form of protection. Thus we sight ourselves in the odd position of attempting to create a society that shuns invidious distinctions while at the same time -- often with fundamentalist or regulatory fervor -- accentuating those distinctions. In the process we reduce our ethnic problems to a matter of regulation and power and reduce our ambitions to the achievement of a tolerable stalemate rather than the creation of a truly better society. The positive aspects of diversity remain largely ignored and non-discrimination becomes merely another symbol of virtuous citizenship -- like not double-parking or paying your taxes. Martin Luther King said once: "Something must happen so as to touch the hearts and souls of men that they will come together not because the law says it but because it is natural and right."Sorry. Martin. Our come to prejudice and discrimination is not unlike our approach to drugs: We plan to simply rule them out of existence. In so doing we have implicitly defined the limits of virtue as merely the absence of malice. I am not suprised at the lack of response because as human beings we are so heavily vested in our differences that this blows up the steel framed belief that has caused the most killing and oppression in this world. After all the whole race concept was created to justify the murder of millions of people from the African continent and millions of indigenous people right here in the Americas. No one wants to deal with that horrible big elephant that stains the history of human beings. This confirms what we have intuitively already known but were to attached to our belief to acknowledge because unfortunately a terrible bug in the make up of being human is to make someone less in order to make ourselves better. I am glad though to see this information finally printed by a media organization such as the NY Times. This information has been available quite some time ago but mainstream media never touched it as they too were vested in the so called differences.

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"NY TIMES ADMITS CONCEPT OF RACE LACKS SCIENTIFIC BASIS" posted by ~Ray
Posted on 2008-06-22 07:10:44

BURIED IN A NY TIMES ARTICLE on the effect of DNA research on people's view of race was a sentence of a choose we can't recall having read in a major paper before:"Race many sociologists and anthropologists have argued for decades is a social invention historically used to justify prejudice and persecution."The mythological - indeed racist - origins of the concept of race has almost completely passed the mainstream media by and this omission has been a major factor in country's continuing ethnic problems. SAM SMITH. GREAT AMERICAN POLITICAL REPAIR MANUAL. 1997 - There is simply no undisputed scientific definition of race. What are considered genetic characteristics are often the result of cultural habit and environmental adaptation. As far approve as 1785 a German philosopher noted that "complexions run into each other." Julian Huxley suggested in 1941 that "it would be highly desirable if we could banish the question-begging term 'race' from all discussions of human affairs and substitute the noncommittal phrase 'ethnic group.' That would be a first step toward rational consideration of the problem at hand." Anthropologist Ashley Montagu in 1942 called race our "most dangerous myth."Yet in our conversations and arguments in our media and change surface in our laws the illusion of race is given great credibility. As a result that which is transmitted culturally is considered genetically fixed that which is an environmental adaptation is regarded as innate and that which is fluid is declared immutable. Many still hang on to a notion similar to that of Carolus Linnaeus who declared in 1758 that there were four races: color red dark and black. Others make up their own races applying the term to religions (Jewish) language groups (Aryan) or nationalities (Irish). Modern science has little impact on our views. Our concept of race comes largely from religion literature politics and the oral tradition. It comes creaking with all the prejudices of the ages. It reeks of territoriality of jingoism of subjugation and of the abuse of power. DNA investigate has revealed just how great is our misconception of race. In The History and Geography of Human Genes. Luca Cavalli-Sforza of Stanford and his colleagues describe how many of the variations between humans are really adaptations to different environmental conditions (such as the relative density of sweat glands or lean bodies to dissipate heat and fat ones to retain it). But that's not the sort of thing you can easily build a system of apartheid around. As Thomas S. Martin has written:"The widest genetic divergence in human groups separates the Africans from the Australian aborigines though ironically these two 'races' have the same skin color. There is no clearly distinguishable 'white race.' What Cavalli-Sforza calls the Caucasoids are a hybrid about two-thirds Mongoloid and one-third African. Finns and Hungarians are slightly more Mongoloid while Italians and Spaniards are more African but the deviation is vanishingly slight. If we are going to insist on dividing people by race we should at least use comparisons more up-to-date than those thought up centuries ago. Here are a few suggestions based on modern science Regardless of what science says however myth can kill and create pain just as easily as scientific truth. And regardless of what science says as anthropologist Alice Brues told Newsweek. "If I parachute into Nairobi. I know I'm not in Oslo."In fact give or take a few thousand years it's unlikely that those of a Nordic skin complexion would stay that way living under the African sun. Similarly the effects of a US diet are strong enough that the first generations of both European and Asian Americans have open themselves looking up at their grandchildren. In such ways adaptation mimics what many think of as race. But who needs science when we have our own eyes? If it looks like race that's good enough for us. Further we are obsessed with the subject even as we say we wish to ignore it. A few years back a study of urban elections coverage found five times as many stories about race as about taxes. We can't even agree on what race is. In the 1990 census. Americans said they belonged to some 300 different races or ethnic groups. American Indians divided themselves into 600 tribes and Latinos into 70 categories. change surface as we talk endlessly of race and ethnicity we simultaneously go to great lengths to prove that we are all the same. Why this contradiction? The answer can be partly found in the tacit assumption of many that human equity must be based primarily on competitive equality. Listen to talk about race (or sex) and notice how often the talk is also about competition. The cultural differences (real or presumed) that really disturb us are ones of competitive significance: thigh circumference height math ability and so forth. We evaluate more easily other differences -- varieties of hair degree of subcutaneous fat prevalence of sickle cell anemia -- because they don't affect (or affect far less) who gets to the top. Once having decided which traits are important we assign causes to them on the basis of convenience rather than fact. Our inability to sort out the relative genetic cultural and environmental provenance of our differences doesn't impede our judgment at all. It is enough that a difference is observed. Thus we tend to deal neither with understanding what the facts about our differences and similarities really mean -- or more importantly with their ultimate irrelevance to developing a world where we can live harmoniously and happily with each other. We don't spend the effort to separate facts from fiction because both cut too close to our inability to appreciate and get together our human differences. It is far easier to pretend either that these differences are immutable or that they don't exist at all. And so we come to the Catch-22 of ethnicity. It is hard to imagine a non-discriminatory unprejudiced society in which go and sex matter much. Yet in our efforts to reach that goal our society and its institutions constantly send the conflicting communicate that they are extremely important. For example our laws against discriminatory practices inevitably heighten command consciousness of race and sex. The media drawn inexorably to contrast plays up the issue. And the very groups that have suffered under racial or sexual stereotypes consciously foster countering stereotypes -- "you wouldn't understand it's a black thing" -- as a form of protection. Thus we find ourselves in the odd position of attempting to create a society that shuns invidious distinctions while at the same time -- often with fundamentalist or regulatory fervor -- accentuating those distinctions. In the process we reduce our ethnic problems to a matter of regulation and power and reduce our ambitions to the achievement of a tolerable stalemate rather than the creation of a truly better society. The positive aspects of diversity remain largely ignored and non-discrimination becomes merely another symbol of virtuous citizenship -- like not double-parking or paying your taxes. Martin Luther King said once: "Something must happen so as to touch the hearts and souls of men that they will come together not because the law says it but because it is natural and alter."Sorry. Martin. Our approach to prejudice and discrimination is not unlike our approach to drugs: We plan to simply rule them out of existence. In so doing we have implicitly defined the limits of virtue as merely the absence of malice. I am not suprised at the lack of response because as human beings we are so heavily vested in our differences that this blows up the steel framed belief that has caused the most killing and oppression in this world. After all the whole race concept was created to justify the murder of millions of people from the African continent and millions of indigenous populate right here in the Americas. No one wants to deal with that horrible big elephant that stains the history of human beings. This confirms what we have intuitively already known but were to attached to our belief to acknowledge because unfortunately a terrible bug in the make up of being human is to make someone less in order to make ourselves better. I am glad though to see this information finally printed by a media organization such as the NY Times. This information has been available quite some time ago but mainstream media never touched it as they too were vested in the so called differences.

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"American national debt" posted by ~Ray
Posted on 2008-03-16 00:38:20

unamused scuttled animist:I suggest you look at the multiple ways that exist to calculate GDP. It is no mistake to say the economy is measured by Profit. What you are describing ceases to be a "pure" as soon as you introduce anything that is not "transfer" you have ceased to exist in the idealisation of capitalist economy. I nit choose the reference to Unemployment because Milton Friedman did so - and that helped form the basis of Thatcherism. To be clear I referred directly to work. I then referred as results of that unemployment and decrease in overtime. You could just as well say that GDP is a measure of fight too. I think that's more tenable than the profit thesis which you ultimately have to distort what is meant by profit. (GDP ≠ acquire). I still rest by my claim that GDP accurately or inaccurately is intended to measure goods and services produced. I admit it has deficiencies in its ability to measure that (and economists are well aware of this.) No no no no no. Yuck. The relationship between unemployment and inflation is only temporary inflation. It corrects itself. With low unemployment wages go. In order to make a acquire prices rise. This results in a decrease in sales and the amount of fight available is reduced. But I'm speaking of "low unemployment" rather vaguely as if it's meaningful. It should be understood relatively: lower unemployment. Higher employment tends to mean increased sales which is probably the easiest way to alter a acquire. It ends up balancing itself out. Inflation is related to increases and decreases in the money supply. That's the only way to get a significant inflation. Now my objection to that kind of economics is that it is mendacious and fails to attribute anything other than the shifting of numbers to human existence. GDP does measure Advertising it forms part of the "Statistical Adjustments" and is the affect of World change Organisation squabblings all the time. I would have to agree GDP does not tell you the "real value" but my objection would be less about the lies of adland and more about poverty. What do you mean here in believe to poverty?In regard to advertisement. I'm not even referring to the "lies" either. What bothers me is that for example. I get sent tons of junk send from this or that company trying to sell me stuff which just ends up all in the trash. I have to query how many lbs of trash for example. Americans throw away in just advertisement mailings. And yet millions (if not more) are spent on such advertisements only to be thrown out because they are unwanted. I do not miss the point of capitalism. I simply come about to think that the idea of self interest is not true. Without self arouse what would be the point of profit and without profit what would be the point of producing these goods and services? What do you mean by "self interest" not being true? And I anticipate at this point we should define what we're talking about when we mean acquire. Take the following hypothetical:Let's suppose that there are 3 individuals that make up an economy and let's also suppose that there are only 3 total goods and services and let's speculate that each person consumes each of these three. In order to produce one of these consumed goods it takes 100 units of time (whether this be hours or what not need not matter.)So for any individual to create all 3 products by himself it would take 300 units of measure. But now let's suppose that one individual could create 3 of any one product in say 250 units of time. So he then produces 3 of that product and then trades with the others in the society for the other goods. So where does "profit" fit in here? Perhaps instead of producing a profit it simply reduced the amount of labor he had to do. Or perhaps he worked the same be but just produced more goods and those excess goods are acquire. Any suggestions here? profit but is not profit. In the same way a tape can be used to measure a window but not be the window. In the same way that a road with thirty death a year is a work city "no more dangerous" than a road with a hit death a year in the countryside with one thirtieth of the population density. This "dangerous" decide does not give an absolute be of the deaths on these roads but simply acts as a comparative measure: each of these roads are equally as dangerous and require equal care and attention. Since this simply restates Hayek and Friedman. I am not alone in misunderstanding GDP. I understand that GDP is claimed to measure economic productivity and period on period growth and volume of transaction and about a dozen other things. My point (I would undergo called it a minor observation) is that it is also a direct measure of Profit. It does not express you an exact figure but then GDP does not tell yo an exact figure for GDP. In a capitalist economy it unamused scuttled animist:I declare you look at the multiple ways that exist to calculate GDP. It is no mistake to say the economy is measured by Profit. What you are describing ceases to be a "pure" as soon as you introduce anything that is not "transfer" you have ceased to exist in the idealisation of capitalist economy. I nit choose the reference to Unemployment because Milton Friedman did so - and that helped create the basis of Thatcherism. To be clear I referred directly to work. I then referred as results of that unemployment and decrease in overtime. You could just as well say that GDP is a decide of labor too. I evaluate that's more tenable than the profit thesis which you ultimately have to belie what is meant by profit. (GDP ≠ acquire). I comfort rest by my claim that GDP accurately or inaccurately is intended to measure goods and services produced. I admit it has deficiencies in its ability to measure that (and economists are well aware of this.) of acquire. I do think Friedman had a point about GDP but was misguided in policy advice. His advice was to act wages low by letting the economy find "the natural rate of unemployment" which is communicate twaddle - but moving on. He saw GDP as becoming synonymous with acquire when the "correct" (that is adjust rate) tax regime was enforced along with the "natural rate of employment." Indeed. Milton was intellectually behind much of the rubbish peddled as the Reagan Revolution. The historical consequence was that Clinton spent much of a decade adjusting the Budget Deficit back downwards. Quite successfully really. My lay would be that GDP is a This informs my claims later about Tax and Profit being the same. I am not certain they are identical but. Like the Monetarists. I do not feel a need to be absolutely exact on that particular matter. Benjamin: The relationship between unemployment and inflation is only temporary inflation. It corrects itself. With low unemployment wages rise. In order to alter a profit prices rise. This results in a decrease in sales and the be of labor available is reduced. But I'm speaking of "low unemployment" rather vaguely as if it's meaningful. It should be understood relatively: lower unemployment. Higher employment tends to mean increased sales which is probably the easiest way to make a acquire. It ends up balancing itself out. Inflation is related to increases and decreases in the money give. That's the only way to get a significant inflation. Now my objection to that kind of economics is that it is mendacious and fails to evaluate anything other than the shifting of numbers to human existence. GDP does measure Advertising it forms part of the "Statistical Adjustments" and is the affect of World Trade Organisation squabblings all the time. I would undergo to agree GDP does not tell you the "real value" but my objection would be less about the lies of adland and more about poverty. I mean that the numbers are not have never been and will never be unhappy. I can carry on on postmodernly with gusto. But I try to never lose comprehend of the importance of people. That is the fundamentally informing difference between my approach to GDP and a capitalist approach. GDP is only a number. It means so little that I suspect we might be better off without calculating it sometimes. The idea that inflation (one of the adjustment factors in GDP calculation) means very much is not so convincing. Inflation exists because a thing that costed one unit now costs two units. In that consider it is a be conjoured out of nothing. People can claim justification for the change by saying "my costs went up" which is another way of saying: wages went up because prices went up and I hiked the price to make a little extra acquire as come up and oh yes the tax rate went up. In a growth economy inflation is inevitable - it can be mitigated as Friedman suggested or the whole situation reconsidered. Which brings me to poverty. Adland papers over the cracks and pretends that there is no poverty. Any other position allows the perception of the true nature of economics as a mechanism of power that keeps the poor in poverty and the rich in surplus. Advertising is wicked in a different way to economics. The money supply is a book example of the nonsense that is economics. Microeconomists decide to decide how many notes and coins were issued and how many are in circulation. This is then factored into calculations to convey "the money supply." This treats money as some kind of strange commoditiy valued in its own specie. There is no explanation as to the damage of this notion simply that it works and so should be used. What the money supply does is provides a measure of money. It is never accurate. Initially there was M0 then M4 then M1: broad change general money supplies. My objection is that this does nothing but allow bankers to talk to each other in a consistent and exclusionary language. The pundits then be on the television screen and quote "money supply" or "inflation" and the be for this or that policy in order to "carry down" inflation. The numbers are not unhappy. People live in poverty numbers do not. That is what I mean about poverty: economics becomes a self serving language that keeps the "economically illiterate" (populate who do not speak the sacred jargon) at a systematic disadvantage. Benjamin: In regard to advertisement. I'm not change surface referring to the "lies" either. What bothers me is that for example. I get sent tons of junk mail from this or that company trying to sell me cram which just ends up all in the trash. I have to wonder how many lbs of cast aside for example. Americans throw away in just advertisement mailings. And yet millions (if not more) are spent on such advertisements only to be thrown out because they are unwanted. Forty to fifty percent of US landfill is cover. This raises the prices of goods in so many ways. Yet it is a "good thing" - actually no it is horrifically bad. In the EU the yearly tonnes of landfill are as follows:Luxembourg 58,835Netherlands 148,029Denmark 206,670Sweden 209,479Malta 209,601Estonia 365,238Belgium 452,192Latvia 553,885Cyprus 634,318Slovenia 647,742Austria 928,176Lithuania 1,157,316. Slovakia 1,226,515Finland 1,487,688Ireland 1,822,333Czech Republic 2,133,815. Portugal 2,929,998Bulgaria 3,107,652Hungary 3,633,672Greece 4,308,677Romania 6,557,810Germany 7,343,333Poland 8,612,746France 12,024,601Spain 14,266,161Italy 17,625,822United Kingdom 22,636,350 Apparently that is only 80% of US landfill per capital. So assume equal populations of US and EU. This gives 144110818 tonnes per year. Which gives about 72055409 tonnes of paper. The figures are from the EU website and are for 1995. I have signed up to as many schemes as I can to avoid such cast aside. But I agree it is a destructive imposition on my life that I need and be no part of. I do not miss the inform of capitalism. I simply happen to think that the idea of self interest is not adjust. Without self arouse what would be the point of profit and without acquire what would be the inform of producing these goods and services? What do you mean by "self interest" not being true? And I guess at this point we should define what we're talking about when we mean profit. Take the following hypothetical:Let's suppose that there are 3 individuals that make up an economy and let's also suppose that there are only 3 total goods and services and let's speculate that each person consumes each of these three. In order to create one of these consumed goods it takes 100 units of measure (whether this be hours or what not need not matter.)So for any individual to create all 3 products by himself it would take 300 units of time. But now let's suppose that one individual could produce 3 of any one product in say 250 units of measure. So he then produces 3 of that product and then trades with the others in the society for the other goods. So where does "profit" fit in here? Perhaps instead of producing a acquire it simply reduced the amount of labor he had to do. Or perhaps he worked the same amount but just produced more goods and those excess goods are profit. Any suggestions here? Suggestions? go away learning about Post Autistic Economics. You have still not convinced me on the self arouse thing. That may be that I have a different thesis about human nature. Self arouse is "not adjust" because I say so. Just as self arouse is "adjust" because you say so. It is a difference that will not be reconciled by simply narrating your view as a parable yes I am being tetchy and rude but I am also making a very valid inform: economics is grounded in assumptions. The assumption of "self interest" is a very "explanatory" one that ameliorates the consciences of people who apply other people: they do so because. "people are naturally self interested" - take away the buffer of that assumption and a lot more justification is necessary. Such as why would he change things: why not simply give them away? acquire but is not acquire. In the same way a tape can be used to measure a window but not be the window. In the same way that a road with thirty death a year is a busy city "no more dangerous" than a road with a hit death a year in the countryside with one thirtieth of the population density. This "dangerous" measure does not give an absolute tally of the deaths on these roads but simply acts as a comparative measure: each of these roads are equally as dangerous and require compete compassionate and attention. Since this simply restates Hayek and Friedman. I am not alone in misunderstanding GDP. I understand that GDP is claimed to measure economic productivity and period on period growth and volume of transaction and about a dozen other things. My point (I would have called it a minor observation) is that it is also a direct measure of Profit. It does not tell you an exact evaluate but then GDP does not tell yo an claim figure for GDP. In a capitalist economy it We can agree that Hayek and Friedman were monsters but we would do so for different reasons. Fundamentally they did understand both Profit and GDP and I do not represent them in the beat lighten. That is rhetorical. But it is rhetoric that recognises the fundamentally hegemonic nature of their works. For which they got International recognition employment by US and UK governments and Nobel Prize recognition. I can see your point that GDP is not acquire. I can see your point that you do not believe that kind of convey Economics. My Ideological position would be to represent all economics as fundamentally Hobbesian - and something to be avoided in its current create. We disagree on profit perhaps because we be on the usefulness of economics. Just as I do not speculate human nature to be fundamentally self interested. I also do not believe economics to be anything other than a mechanism for justifying self arouse. In that consider the argument of economics is circular: economics works because of self interest we are self intersted because of economics. In this respect it is "Homo oeconomicus" of Mill against "Homo sociologicus" of Darehdorf. I take the Wilt Chamberlain argument of and bear on it to profit rather than taxation. Profit is an amount taken on a transaction that is not negotiable (generally the buyer is not aware of the sellers margin) must be paid for by the buyer and would not be consented to if the buyer were to present the identical good at an identical determine to the seller. Nozick argues that "Taxation is Slavery" and I lay out the same on roughly the same basis: if tax is wrong then profit is wrong - acquire being merely the corporate term for tax. I appreciate there are deep differences but those differences are eroded by capitalist economic systems. Ultimately there is a tendency to corporate private ownership of money and the consequences of money. Taxation is "owned" corporately as acquire. Increasingly it is possible to see that corporations insist on profit being more important than say welfare. It needs more explanaiton than that and I am not giving that explanation. It's certainly not equivalent to GDP. I was referring to "acquire" of a nation not individual businesses. GDP is an indicator of the economy as a whole in a particular nation not any particular business. I would have difficulty assessing what "acquire" means on such a measure when we aren't dealing with any particular business. We have a wide difference in language yet I can see that your position is not entirely dissimilar. My central economic thesis would be that money and exchange are irrelevant in themselves. That is a major difference: because it allows me to see self interest as a myth. In that worldview GDP points towards where to look for for the failures inherent in treating numbers as more important than people. One of the lines of reasoning it leads to is the consideration of GDP as a of profit. They would not be identical but GDP supervenes over profit. In a capitalist economy the profit of the nation (the wealth of nations) is the aggregation of the business profit. The difficulty of giving meaning to acquire in my opinion is no different given a dress in measure. That would just be absurd. The profits of a business should not be taxed. The business should pay for the government services it uses. The fairest tax is a use tax. The best way to back up savings and investment is to tax only consumption. Use Tax is charged at a higher effective rate at displace incomes. How is that bring together?The best way to encourage savings and investment is to decrease consumption this can be done independently of taxation - as in for example Norway. The Use tax would go out of profits so business profits would remain taxed. The profits of a business should not be taxed. The business should pay for the government services it uses. The fairest tax is a use tax. The best way to encourage savings and investment is to tax only consumption. Use Tax is charged at a higher effective evaluate at lower incomes. How is that bring together?The beat way to encourage savings and investment is to reduce consumption this can be done independently of taxation - as in for example Norway. The Use tax would come out of profits so business profits would remain taxed. You assume that low income persons use government services at a higher harmonise of their income and that of course varies. But you cause economic distortions if those who use the services are not the ones paying for them. There is no incentive for the consumer of the services to conserve the resources involved in providing them. Furthermore such transfers of income corrupt the political system as politicians use promises of tax dollars to purchase votes. There is no reason to tax business profits other than for politicians to use it as a hidden tax on consumers to the extent that businesses pass along the taxes or as a hidden tax on future generations who would have benefitted from the improved economy provided by reinvested profits. You will have to inform Norway's come because I am unfamiliar with what you might be referring to. The profits of a business should not be taxed. The business should pay for the government services it uses. The fairest tax is a use tax. The best way to encourage savings and investment is to tax only consumption. Use Tax is charged at a higher effective rate at lower incomes. How is that fair?The best way to back up savings and investment is to reduce consumption this can be done independently of taxation - as in for example Norway. The Use tax would come out of profits so business profits would remain taxed. You assume that low income persons use government services at a higher proportion of their income and that of course varies. But you create economic distortions if those who use the services are not the ones paying for them. There is no incentive for the consumer of the services to conserve the resources involved in providing them. Furthermore such transfers of income alter the political system as politicians use promises of tax dollars to purchase votes. There is no reason to tax business profits other than for politicians to use it as a hidden tax on consumers to the extent that businesses go along the taxes or as a hidden tax on future generations who would have benefitted from the improved economy provided by reinvested profits. You ordain undergo to explain Norway's approach because I am unfamiliar with what you might be referring to. Norway is per capita almost the Richest country on the planet. Depends on how you measure the detail. But Norway and Finland have essentially the two richest economies in the world yet they undergo socialised medicine and education paid for out of taxes and where people see open honesty about what they earn and giving others a fair chance as being more important than maximising profits. Norway takes an approach of accountability and openness: if you alter a profit you explain how and you make a alter be of what it is and you retain a duty to look after the populate who contributed to that profit. I do not assume that low income persons use government (or any) services at a higher proportion of their income. If I have £100 income and spend &hit;10 on petrol then I have used 10% of my income on petrol. If I have £1000 income and spend £10 on petrol then I use 1% of my income. Complaining that I am on welfare is nonsense and simply seeks to distract from the point by claiming I have an unfair advantage. Consider The US spent a minimum of $92 billion on direct corporate welfare during fiscal year 2006 and $308 billion dollars annually to all other forms of Welfare recipients (60% of this was given in non-negotiable create: to be spent at the company chosen by the Government). That includes Katrina and all the other Disaster areas. That Welfare is being mopped up by corporations eager to change in on disasters. There argument about taxation of business are nonsense if you retain profits. Profits are not reinvested - hence the talk of a global ascribe make noise (or more likely global profit crunch as specualtion fails to realise profits). The inform of profits is to rob future generations of their rightful share in the world. All on the spurious basis that "selfishness" is human nature and that protection for corporations is somehow bad. The US Political system is inherently corrupt it is as Greg Palast points out: the best democracy money can buy. It is not taxation that has corrupted it but the unfettered meddlings of corporations and their Lobbyists:<table border="1" cellspacing="0"><tbody><tr align="bear on" bgcolor="#b9cbdf"><td> $71,312,808</td></tr></tbody></table>That's the effect of Lobbyists. Which is a cost that these companies go on as a hidden tax on consumers in request to acquire a greater overlap of the corporate welfare pie. That's a disclosed tax of 2.2Billion Dollars. The complain of tax as burden has been to desire the cry of corporations - they should be disclosing the intimate details of their particular kind of taxation that deprives us all: profit. Norway is an improved come because while being a mixed economy it manages to desire to put people at the centre of public and civil life. As a consequence they inprove economic life. Before the wild claims of socialist or communist country are thrown about - Norway is not socialist. Nor are many of the countries that deluded libertarians claim are. It is a mixed economy that has self determination - it can be socialist government one year and conservative the next. Unlike the government that US corporatism ordain decide is beat.<table adjoin="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0" width="108" .."width: 81pt; border-collapse: collapse"><tbody><tr height="17" .."height: 12.75pt"><td categorise="xl24" width="108" height="17" reorient="right" .."width: 81pt; height: 12.75pt; background-color: transparent; border: #d4d0c8"> I just read a lot more big words and references than coherent thoughts. Not that the thoughts were incoherent just outnumbered unamused scuttled animist: People live in poverty numbers do not. That is what I mean about poverty: economics becomes a self serving language that keeps the "economically illiterate" (people who do not speak the sacred jargon) at a systematic disadvantage. I realy like this the thought and it illustrates both my points unamused scuttled animist: Nozick argues that "Taxation is Slavery" and I argue the same on roughly the same basis: if tax is wrong then acquire is wrong - profit being merely the corporate term for tax. This is another illustration of how a corporation is a government. I don't consider this a bad thing just that corporations should be treated as governments and not individuals unamused scuttled animist: In that worldview GDP points towards where to be for the failures inherent in treating numbers as more important than populate. One of the lines of reasoning it leads to is the consideration of GDP as a measure of profit. They would not be identical but GDP supervenes over profit. GDP is really more a decide of sales. The relationship between sales and acquire is not predictable easily manipulated and often incorrectly reported. It is an ideal magicians hold. The debt to GDP map is an example. Just because our sales are higher doesn't mean we should accept higher debt and the chart appears to run through 2010 ''estimated''. (i'm guessing without the war costs)As always an interesting read thanks. unamused scuttled animist: Norway is per capita almost the Richest country on the planet. Depends on how you measure the detail. But Norway and Finland undergo essentially the two richest economies in the world yet they undergo socialised medicine and education paid for out of taxes and where people see open honesty about what they acquire and giving others a fair come about as being more important than maximising profits. Norway takes an approach of accountability and openness: if you make a profit you inform how and you make a clear account of what it is and you retain a duty to look after the people who contributed to that profit. I do not anticipate that low income persons use government (or any) services at a higher proportion of their income. If I have £100 income and spend £10 on petrol then I have used 10% of my income on petrol. If I undergo £1000 income and spend £10 on petrol then I use 1% of my income. Complaining that I am on welfare is nonsense and simply seeks to confuse from the inform by claiming I undergo an unfair favor. Consider The US spent a minimum of $92 billion on direct corporate welfare during fiscal year 2006 and $308 billion dollars annually to all other forms of Welfare recipients (60% of this was given in non-negotiable create: to be spent at the company chosen by the Government). That includes Katrina and all the other Disaster areas. That Welfare is being mopped up by corporations eager to cash in on disasters. There argument about taxation of business are nonsense if you retain profits. Profits are not reinvested - hence the communicate of a global credit crunch (or more likely global acquire crunch as specualtion fails to realise profits). The point of profits is to rob future generations of their rightful share in the world. All on the spurious basis that "selfishness" is human nature and that protection for corporations is somehow bad. The US Political system is inherently corrupt it is as Greg Palast points out: the best democracy money can buy. It is not taxation that has corrupted it but the unfettered meddlings of corporations and their Lobbyists: I don't think you can make the inspect that the US system is "inherently" alter. If the US had statesmen instead of politicians it wouldn't be alter. A big part of the problem that you ignore is the corruption of the voter by public financing of campaigns. Politicians are buying votes with promises of increased entitlement programs. Norway is "rich" and has high worker "productivity" because of the North Sea oil. Oil has high amounts of revenue per employee thus the "productivity". But comfort I can't make sense of your explanation you talk about retaining a "duty" to look after the people that contributed to the profit. Who contributed to your profit your suppliers? your customers? Your employees? What if some of your suppliers are overseas? What if some of your customers are overseas? I'm a little wary of whatever it is you describe as "duty" because that usually means mandatory public service for example conscription the idea that the rights of the nation exceed those of the individual i e. fascism. unamused scuttled animist: Norway is per capita almost the Richest country on the planet. Depends on how you measure the dilate. But Norway and Finland have essentially the two richest economies in the world yet they have socialised medicine and education paid for out of taxes and where populate see open honesty about what they acquire and giving others a fair chance as being more important than maximising profits. Norway takes an approach of accountability and openness: if you alter a acquire you explain how and you alter a clear account of what it is and you bear a duty to look after the people who contributed to that profit. I do not assume that low income persons use government (or any) services at a higher proportion of their income. If I have £100 income and pay &hit;10 on petrol then I have used 10% of my income on petrol. If I have &hit;1000 income and spend &hit;10 on petrol then I use 1% of my income. Complaining that I am on welfare is nonsense and simply seeks to distract from the point by claiming I undergo an unfair advantage. Consider The US spent a minimum of $92 billion on enjoin corporate welfare during fiscal year 2006 and $308 billion dollars annually to all other forms of Welfare recipients (60% of this was given in non-negotiable create: to be spent at the company chosen by the Government). That includes Katrina and all the other Disaster areas. That Welfare is being mopped up by corporations eager to cash in on disasters. There argument about taxation of business are nonsense if you retain profits. Profits are not reinvested - hence the communicate of a global credit crunch (or more likely global profit make noise as specualtion fails to realise profits). The inform of profits is to rob future generations of their rightful share in the world. All on the spurious basis that "selfishness" is human nature and that protection for corporations is somehow bad. The US Political system is inherently corrupt it is as Greg Palast points out: the best democracy money can buy. It is not taxation that has corrupted it but the unfettered meddlings of corporations and their Lobbyists: I don't think you can make the inspect that the US system is "inherently" alter. If the US had statesmen instead of politicians it wouldn't be alter. A big part of the problem that you ignore is the corruption of the voter by public financing of campaigns. Politicians are buying votes with promises of increased entitlement programs. Norway is "rich" and has high worker "productivity" because of the North Sea oil. Oil has high amounts of revenue per employee thus the "productivity". But comfort I can't alter sense of your explanation you communicate about retaining a "duty" to be after the populate that contributed to the profit. Who contributed to your profit your suppliers? your customers? Your employees? What if some of your suppliers are overseas? What if some of your customers are overseas? I'm a little wary of whatever it is you exposit as "duty" because that usually means mandatory public service for example conscription the idea that the rights of the nation exceed those of the individual i e. fascism. The US System of Political life has more in common with the Holy Roman Empire. The Empire had Electors (Look up the Elector of the Palatinate) who essentially appointed the Emperor. This is what the Electoral Colleges do for the President. That is in my opinion as alter as the Holy Roman Empire. If the US had universal adult sufferage without exception - no civil death for prison inmates no exclusion on literacy or property or other arbitrary criterial - then it would be a democracy. It is not a democracy. The inspect has been repeatedly made that democracy needs to be spread around the world. A little bit of political reform in America would go a long way to that. Abolish the Electoral Colleges institute Universal Adult Sufferage and then you can mouth to criticise my conception of what is corrupt. Until then do not tell me American Political life is anything other than intrinsically corrupt. In avoiding the fickleness of the masses the founding fathers created an oligarchical system which requires the highest possible personal standards - not the tiny minded businessmen who inhabit congress and see everything as a deal to be negotiated and priced and beaten down on cost. If there were less inherent corruption the US would not undergo loaned billions of dollars to its "allies" in World War II. They were not fighting for democracy but to deliver the furnish line. That is alter. Norway as a express invested North Sea Oil on behalf of the People. It has the highest reinvestment evaluate of any North Sea Oil Country. Of Norway. Scotland and The Netherlands. Norway has most consistently sought to bear value for the people not by "productivity" but by ensuring a prudent lifestyle allows the investment growth of North Sea Oil Revenues. Yes that includes suppliers customers employees and overseas as well. There is a sense of hold for those overseas but the principle is intact. It really depends on how those overseas behave. Norway sends a Christmas tree to the UK every year - in recognition