Nature of Prejudice & Discrimination Class

America is transforming before our eyes, and with our focus on the short-term economic crisis, we are blind to what might very well be the most fundamental economic shift of the past 50 years: the nine-to-five, 40-hour-week job with benefits and some security is fast going the way of the compact disc. It still exists, barely, but is more of an echo than a modern reality. According to a recent Bureau of Labor Statistics report, almost 30 percent of all Americans work contingently as free agents, contractors, day laborers, consultants or are self-employed.

This transformation of the American workplace will be as profound for 21st century as the Industrial Revolution’s shift from farms to factories was for the 19th century. One of the fastest growing contingent worker groups today is college-educated, white-collar professionals. They grew up thinking they would lead lives of economic security and corporate advancement. Now they jump from job to job, career to career and project to project working as consultants. Current estimates predict that this trend will only continue to increase in the coming years. Imagine, by 2020 maybe as many as 50 percent of all collars, working on a contingent basis, with a growing majority of them consisting of college-educated, white-collar and professional classes. What was the old middle class, as confusing as such terms can be, may just become part of the new working-class majority.

The shift from nine-to-five jobs to a gig economy has fundamentally forced us to rethink our relationship to work and the centrality work plays in all our lives. This sea change has brought with it a new work ethic that values multitasking, embedded communities of workers, the blending of leisure and work activity, and the rise of creativity and independence, along with money as co-measures of success. We seem to be returning to a craft sensibility as workers blend leisure and work and work harder, faster, and longer, but also find time to squeeze in a social life too. They constantly work, as defined blocks of time are meaningless for them. This squeezing in, mixing, or blending completely blurs the lines between social and work worlds. Most accept this quickened pace because they get some enjoyment out of work by finding ways to make a living doing things they are passionate about. They are combinations of 19th-century craftsman, outworkers and high-tech gurus. They struggle in what they may not yet fully understand as a continually shrinking economy.

Why do conservatives hate freedom? The question may be startling. After all, don’t conservatives claim they are protecting liberty in America against liberal statism, which they compare to communism or fascism? But the conservative idea of “freedom” is a very peculiar one, which excludes virtually every kind of liberty that ordinary Americans take for granted.

I distinguish conservatives from libertarians, who, on issues of personal liberty, tend to side with liberals. Since World War II, mainstream conservatives have opposed every expansion of personal liberty in the United States.

During the civil rights era, the leading conservative politician, Barry Goldwater, and the leading conservative intellectual, William F. Buckley Jr., along with most of their followers opposed federal laws banning racial discrimination. To their credit, they later admitted they had been mistaken; indeed, both Buckley and Goldwater supported gay rights late in their careers. But at the time that conservative support for a color-blind society might have made a difference, the leaders of American conservatism sided with the Southern segregationists. They claimed they did so, not because of racial prejudice, but because they feared federal tyranny — a weaselly stance that, in practice, made them side with white supremacist tyranny at the state level. If they had truly believed in their own propaganda about federalism, conservatives could have opposed federal civil rights legislation while campaigning for civil rights laws at the state level. They didn’t.

The civil rights revolution was followed by the sexual revolution. Here again, conservatives, as distinct from libertarians, were on the side of government repression. The mainstream conservative movement opposed the legalization of contraceptives and abortion. In this case, unlike in the case of civil rights, the American right did not even pretend to have constitutional reasons for opposing Supreme Court decisions like Griswold v. Connecticut in 1965 (which struck down state bans on the use of contraception, including by married couples) or Roe v. Wade in 1973 (which struck down state bans on most abortion). The mainstream right simply argued that conservative Christian beliefs about sexual morality should be incorporated into law. In other words, the very conservatives warning us about the dangers of “mobocracy” when it came to the welfare state had no objection to using the power of government to force their fellow citizens to live their private lives according to the teachings of Thomas Aquinas or the Book of Leviticus, as interpreted by semi-literate Southern Protestant preachers.

The conservative campaign against gay rights is equally impossible to justify, in terms of America’s Founding philosophy of natural rights. Unable to come up with any Lockean liberal reason why citizens of a democratic republic should be discriminated against, on the basis of their sexual orientations, conservatives are forced to cite the Bible or thousands of years of tradition. The whole point of the American Founding, however, was to establish a regime that was not based, like the pre-modern monarchies of Europe, on revealed religion or ancient custom. In the words of Gen. George Washington in his circular to the states, shortly after victory in the American war of independence:

The foundation of our Empire was not laid in the gloomy age of Ignorance and Superstition, but at an Epocha when the rights of mankind were better understood and more clearly defined, than at any former period, the researches of the human mind, after social happiness, have been carried to a great extent, the Treasures of knowledge, acquired by the labours of Philosophers, Sages and Legislatures, through a long succession of years, are laid open for our use, and their collected wisdom may be happily applied in the Establishment of our forms of Government…” A theocratic or tribalist Right that argues for public policies by invoking divine revelation to some ancient prophet or immemorial custom dating back to “the gloomy age of Ignorance and Superstition,” is profoundly, radically un-American.

In the cases of freedom from racial discrimination and freedom from sexual repression, American conservatives have been solidly on the side of government repression of the powerless and unprivileged. The same is true with respect to workers’ rights, debtors’ rights and criminal rights.

stuff-that-irks-me:

College students are being played for suckers by the Democratic Party again. Barack Obama’s 2013 budget indicates that the interest rate on federally backed student loans student loan will jump from 3.4 percent to 6.8 percent in the summer of 2013.  This comes as Obama is preaching his love for college students on campuses by virtue of his agreeing with the Republicans to limit the rate to 3.4 percent. The doubling of the rate will only occur eight months after Obama’s reelection can be attained.

This is not a new ploy for the Democrats and Obama. In 2007, when the Democrats reacquired control of Congress, they pushed through the College Cost Reduction and Access Act, which gradually reduced the interest rates which had been fixed at 6.8 percent during the 2006-2007 and 2007-2008 academic years to the current 3.4 percent.

The ploy worked in 2008; Obama trounced John McCain in the youth vote by 34 percent.

And so far in 2012, it’s working again; last month a poll conducted by Harvard University showed Obama leading Mitt Romney by 12 points among voters aged 18 to 24.

The wording in the Obama budget, as usual, obfuscates the issue by claiming that Obama’s kindness is due to the bad economy:

“Under current law, interest rates on subsidized Stafford loans are slated to rise this summer [July 1] from 3.4 percent to 6.8 percent … At a time when the economy is still recovering and market interest rates remain low, it makes no sense to double rates on student loans.”

Of course, the economy is unlikely to get much better under Obama’s stewardship, so the summer of 2013 may be just as bad as it is now. But don’t worry, college students; wait for it … wait for it … you can take the hit.

This past October, at an Occupy encampment in Cleveland, Ohio, “suspicious males with walkie-talkies around their necks” and “scarves or towels around their heads” were heard grumbling at the protesters’ unwillingness to act violently. At meetings a few months later, one of them, a 26-year-old with a black Mohawk known as “Cyco,” explained to his anarchist colleagues how “you can make plastic explosives with bleach,” and the group of five men fantasized about what they might blow up. Cyco suggested a small bridge. One of the others thought they’d have a better chance of not hurting people if they blew up a cargo ship. A third, however, argued for a big bridge – “Gotta slow the traffic that’s going to make them money” – and won. He then led them to a connection who sold them C-4 explosives for $450. Then, the night before the May Day Occupy protests, they allegedly put the plan into motion – and just as the would-be terrorists fiddled with the detonator they hoped would blow to smithereens a scenic bridge in Ohio’s Cuyahoga Valley National Park traversed by 13,610 vehicles every day, the FBI swooped in to arrest them.

Right in the nick of time, just like in the movies. The authorities couldn’t have more effectively made the Occupy movement look like a danger to the republic if they had scripted it. Maybe that’s because, more or less, they did.

The guy who convinced the plotters to blow up a big bridge, led them to the arms merchant, and drove the team to the bomb site was an FBI informant. The merchant was an FBI agent. The bomb, of course, was a dud. And the arrest was part of a pattern of entrapment by federal law enforcement since September 11, 2011, not of terrorist suspects, but of young men federal agents have had to talk into embracing violence in the first place. One of the Cleveland arrestees, Connor Stevens, complained to his sister of feeling “very pressured” by the guy who turned out to be an informant and was recorded in 2011 rejecting property destruction: “We’re in it for the long haul and those kind of tactics just don’t cut it,” he said. “And it’s actually harder to be non-violent than it is to do stuff like that.” Though when Cleveland’s NEWS Channel 5 broadcast that footage, they headlined it “Accused Bomb Plot Suspect Caught on Camera Talking Violence.”

In all these law enforcement schemes the alleged terrorists masterminds end up seeming, when the full story comes out, unable to terrorize their way out of a paper bag without law enforcement tutelage. (“They teach you how to make all this stuff out of simple household items,” one of the kids says on a recording quoted in the FBI affidavit about a book he has just discovered, The Anarchist Cookbook. Someone asks him how much it says explosives cost. “I’m not sure,” he responds, “I just downloaded it last night.”) It’s a perfect example of how post-9/11 fear made law enforcement tactics seem acceptable that were previously beyond the pale. Previously, however, the targets have been Muslims; now they’re white kids from Ohio. And maybe you could argue that this is acceptable, if the feds were actually acting out of a good-faith assessment of what threats are imminent and which are not. But that’s not what they’re doing at all. Instead, they are arrogating to themselves a downright Orwellian power – the power to deploy the might of the State to shape a fundamental narrative about which ideas Americans must be most scared of, and which ones they should not fear much at all, independent of the relative objective dangerousness of the people who hold those ideas.

pushthemovement:

separability:

A must-read in general. One fantastic response:

I think that it’s important to consider the implications that all of this unpaid (and likely stemming from the upper-class) labor has on society as well, especially within the industries that largely require entire chunks of time and resources from those aspiring to join them. Particularly within the public sector, one glaring example of this is the field of legislative aide job opportunities that are often only handed out to those who have toiled away for months (and indeed sometimes years) on end as campaign volunteers. 

This creates a setup where an entire profession (any job offering Congressional support) effectively shuts out the very large proportion of the college-aged population who do not have parents (or some other richer benefactor) that can afford to subsidize living costs for however long they need to gain the extensive and unpaid experience necessary to enter the good graces of a Congressman or Senator. The implications of this are far-reaching and structural; and reinforce the culture of privilege already rampant in Washington D.C. where not only do federal lawmakers themselves often lack valuable perspective on the issues plaguing lower- and middle class Americans that constitute the majority of the nation’s citizenry, but also with the advisors and assistants working for them, who by virtue of being able to land their jobs in the first place already were fortunate enough to have been born into the nation’s wealthy economic minority. This creates a cycle of dissonance between the real world economic reality that Americans face and what the legislative class in Washington understands the proper solutions are to those very problems.

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(Source: The Atlantic)

The cold truth is that Democrats’ decision to support working families and organized labor from 1930-1970 led to an intense and furious backlash by moneyed interests, without which the Movement Conservative revolution would not have been possible. Republicans outraised Democrats in presidential elections during the late 1970s and throughout the 1980s by a factor of 7-1 and higher. That in turn led to the creation of the DLC and the rise of the neoliberal elite to raise enough funds to be remotely competitive.

The cold truth is that Democrats’ decision to support women’s rights and especially minority rights in the 1960s led to the loss of the Deep South and much of the Rust Belt.

The cold truth is that adding the full force of Wall Street’s money and the medical industry’s money to the entirety of the racist and misogynist vote in the Deep South and Rust Belt would disable Democrats from winning a single Presidential election until most of the racists and misogynists are dead and buried. Which will happen, but not for quite some time.

Welcoming their hatred sounds great. But to do it without committing electoral suicide would require major campaign finance reform, and actively marginalizing states and populations where racism holds sway. Both of those things can be accomplished. They’re not as easy as simply demanding a more forceful rhetorician, but they’re more realistic. And that’s the cold truth.