Tag: political power

Racism is as American as apple pie

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A number of competent economists have written of the origins of racism as a “successful” defense of slavery. In the days of slavery being one of the supports of the economy of this new nation fighting to survive disengagement from status as a British colony – a believable rationale was needed to defend the white, rural, wealthy supporters of our revolution who relied on an economic system centuries out of date that worked “well enough” to keep and maintain their political power.

It worked well enough to survive the Civil War. It worked well enough to keep Democrats in power in the Deep South for decades after that war. It worked well enough to supplant the Democrats with Republicans when the strength of the new civil rights movement challenged the core of American racism.

So, now, Trump and his followers wheedle their support for “very fine people on both sides” – a tagline that worked well enough to satisfy a majority of electors in the 2016 election, the leaders of the Republican Party ever since.


Photograph by Mark Peterson

” New York’s December 23, 2019–January 5, 2020 issue confronts America’s growing white supremacy movement through a photo-documentary portfolio by Mark Peterson and an essay by poet and National Book Award–nominated author Claudia Rankine. “It is our inheritance,” Rankine writes. “Institutionalized since the Civil War by a government that only recently, and tentatively, began to address domestic terrorism for what it is…”

” James Walsh, a writer at New York, contributed additional research and reporting in order to bring readers more context to the phenomenon. He spoke with Nate Snyder, a former counterterrorism official in the Department of Homeland Security, who notes that Trump’s rhetoric has had an impact on the movement’s rebirth. After Trump’s comments about Charlottesville, his infamous words about “very fine people on both sides,” Snyder says: “You saw activity on [neo-nazi site Stormfront] exponentially spike. “It was a validation point. You started seeing posts like ‘We now have an ally in the White House…'”

RTFA. The time to speak up on a national scale, from pages and pulpits that thrive on moderation, is overdue. Nice folks can no longer turn their back on the most vicious, reactionary stream polluting American culture.

American Dark Money Funds Europe’s Far Right/Populist Politicians

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Pier Marco Tacca/Getty

❝ Five years ago, Matteo Salvini stripped and posed half-naked for a series of “sexy” photos that were auctioned on eBay…Today, Salvini’s party has transformed itself into one of the most prominent nationalist movements in Europe (now known only as Lega). Salvini himself has become Italy’s interior minister and the country’s most recognizable politician…

❝ Along with Marine le Pen in France, leader of the National Front (now rebranded as the National Rally party), Hungary’s prime minister, Viktor Orbán, and others, Salvini is leading a startling resurgence of Europe’s far right…Holding up a rosary, kissing a crucifix, and thanking the “Immaculate Heart of Mary,” he proclaimed it time to “save” Europe’s “Judeo-Christian roots.”…

❝ These movements did not emerge overnight, nor will they fade anytime soon. Since mid-2016, together with colleagues at openDemocracy, we have tracked the growth of Europe’s nativist movements, from the Brexit campaign, to Orbán’s increasing stranglehold on the levers of power in Hungary, to cross-border networks seeking to block or roll back women’s and LGBTQI rights. Their strategy begins by influencing elections, courts, education, and healthcare systems, as well as policymakers and public opinion, and ends by taking power.

RTFA. Not quite up to the beerhall putschists of the 1930’s. The mindset is the same. Lots of the money comes from “the land of the free, the home of the brave”. Trumpkins.

Time for Democrat leaders to learn to say more than “Thank You”

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Up and voting before dawn

❝ It’s not an accident that Doug Jones was so popular among black voters. He prosecuted two Ku Klux Klan members for the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing in Birmingham that killed four black girls in 1963. Mr. Jones also campaigned with quality black surrogates, like the former basketball player Charles Barkley, Senator Cory Booker, the former Massachusetts governor Deval Patrick, Representative John Lewis and Representative Terri Sewell, Alabama’s only congressional Democrat. Mr. Obama even recorded a robocall for him. Mr. Jones visited black churches and historically black colleges, and focused much of his get-out-the-vote effort on black voters…

❝ Mr. Jones’s victory should wake up the Democratic Party. Black people made up 13 percent of Democratic voters in 1992, but that figure rose to 23 percent by 2014. Yet a majority of them think the party takes them for granted and doesn’t even try to win their votes, according to a 2017 survey. We are drowning in reports on how Democrats can win the white working class. But blacks are the ones who have a much more robust history of turning out to vote and winning elections for Democrats.

Nationally, I couldn’t agree more with this premise. Most places I’ve lived and worked throughout this nation, incumbent Democrats work hardest at joining whatever is the Old Guard…who, in turn, work hardest at absorbing insurgent candidates into that cadre which generally gets campaign funding in equal measure to Republicans. The closest either wing of America’s bourgeois democracy gets to classless. They both are led by and funded by the same class.

They have a tough time trying to fold the independence and courage of America’s Black Liberation soldiers into the Democratic Party. Outside of joiners willing to submit to any epoch’s white middle-class analysis. Whatever that pallid imitation of a platform may be that year. Include independent Hispanic thinkers into that army and you must recognize it takes politicians truly blinded by their self-importance to ignore the point of the spear that can puncture the stinking gasbag entity that is today’s Republican Party.

Polish party calls for removal of crosses from public buildings

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A new Polish political party has ruffled conservative feathers in the Catholic country with a campaign to have the cross ousted from public buildings.

Supporters of the party want the crosses removed, or hung alongside the Star of David, in an attempt to diminish the power of the Church.

In a clear challenge to the strong and omnipresent influence of the Catholic Church in Poland, members of the Support Janusz Palikot party caused outrage in the city of Szczecin by trying to hang Jewish and Muslim symbols in the town’s council chamber alongside the Christian cross, before removing the cross…

The Christian cross is ubiquitous in government buildings in Poland and hangs from thousands of walls in schools and hospitals across the country.

A maverick politician – who said last week that “Poles have been slaves to the Catholic Church for a 1,000 years” – Mr Palikot argued that under the Polish constitution Poland is officially a secular state and therefore there should be no religious symbols.

As an alternative, he said that as the constitution guarantees the equality of all faiths, no one symbol should take precedent.

“Why should there be only one religious symbol?” the politician asked in a television interview.

“I’m all for removing all of them but that would be treated as an attack on the Church.”

We should run this dude for office in Chicago. After we take out a life insurance policy on him.

Religious Poland fears inexorable rise of secularism

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Poland is still an overwhelmingly Roman Catholic nation, still conservative and still religious, especially when compared with its European neighbors. But supporters and critics of the Roman Catholic Church all acknowledge that the society is changing. They agree that church representatives in Poland have lost authority and credibility, and that much of the population is moving toward a more secular view of life, one with a greater separation between church and state, and a rejection of church mandates on individual morality.

“We are considered the European museum of Catholicism, but let me tell you we are no longer,” said Szymon Holownia, program director for Religia TV, a relatively new station that aims to convince Poles that faith can and should be relevant in modern life with programs like a cooking show led by a nun. “The relationship between faith and state is changing; it is changing dramatically in Poland,” Mr. Holownia said. “It is really huge.”

“Twenty years of freedom and religion is evaporating,” he said. “This is the crisis of Christianity in Poland.”

Church supporters said the trend was evident in the numbers: 95 percent of Poles identify themselves as Catholic, but only 41 percent attend Sunday Mass regularly. In the big cities of Warsaw and Krakow, only about 20 percent attend Mass regularly on Sundays, according to the Institute of Statistics of the Church. Supporters of the church also said that the numbers dropped far below the 41 percent when it came to accepting moral mandates about issues like divorce and in vitro fertilization, both of which the church opposes and a majority of people appear to support.

“It seems we are Catholics in a cultural way; we identify as Catholic, but do not attend church,” said Tomasz Terlikowski, editor of Fronda, a conservative Catholic magazine, who said he was upset with what he called the lack of effective church leadership against the secular tide…

Antichurch sentiment has run so hot that one of the most popular politicians in the country, Janusz Palikot, started a political party based largely on an anticlerical platform…

RTFA. Lots of rationales and excuses offered by clergy who obviously are panicked over their loss of stature within Polish politics, fear of a massive reduction in social and political power in daily life.

That’s what happens when your ideology is irrelevant. That is, in nations where education and learning aren’t limited [or self-limited] to exclusively parochial concerns. True throughout Europe. Becoming true through Asia and Latin America.