#economic costs of racism

[ausetkmt]

Racism Impoverishes the Whole Economy - The New York Times

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Discrimination hurts just about everyone, not only its direct victims.

New research shows that while the immediate targets of racism are unquestionably hurt the most, discrimination inflicts a staggering cost on the entire economy, reducing the wealth and income of millions of people, including many who do not customarily view themselves as victims.

The pernicious effects of discrimination on the wages and educational attainment of its direct targets are being freshly documented in inventive ways by scholarship. From the lost wages of African-Americans because of President Woodrow Wilson’s segregation of the Civil Service, to the losses suffered by Black and Hispanic students because of California’s ban on affirmative action, to the scarcity of Black girls in higher-level high school math courses, the scope of the toll continues to grow.

But farther-reaching effects of systemic racism may be less well understood. Economists are increasingly considering the cost of racially based misallocation of talent to everyone in the economy.

My own research demonstrates, for example, how hate-related violence can reduce the level and long-term growth of the U.S. economy. Using patents as a proxy for invention and innovation, I calculated how many were never issued because of the violence — riots, lynchings and Jim Crow laws — to which African Americans were subjected between 1870 and 1940.

The loss was considerable: The patents that African-Americans could have been expected to receive, given equal opportunity, would have roughly equaled the total for a medium-size European country during that time.

Those enormous creative losses can be expected to have had a direct effect on business investment and therefore on total economic activity and growth.

Other economists are beginning to estimate harm to the economy caused by racism in broad ways.

An important principle suggests that the person who can produce a product or service at a lower opportunity cost than his or her peers has a comparative advantage in that activity. Recent research calculates the effects of the discriminatory practice of placing highly skilled African-American workers, who might have flourished as, say, doctors, into lower-skilled occupations where they had no comparative advantage. Such practices 50 years ago — which linger, to a lesser extent, today — have cost the economy up to 40 percent of aggregate productivity and output today.

Similarly, other research estimates that aggregate economic output would have been $16 trillion higher since 2000 if racial gaps had been closed. To put that total in context, the gross domestic product of the United States in 2019 was $21.4 trillion. The researchers estimate that economic activity could be $5 trillion higher over the next five years if equal opportunity is achieved.

Right now, if more women and African-Americans were participating in the technical innovation that leads to patents, the economist Yanyan Yang and I calculate that G.D.P. per capita could be 0.6 to 4.4 percent higher. That is, it would be between $58,841 to $61,064 per person compared with $58,490 per person in 2019.

This entire line of research suggests that organizations — companies, laboratories, colleges and universities — are leaving colossal sums of money on the table by not maximizing talent and living standards for all Americans.

I have thought and written a lot about remedies. Here are a few ideas aimed at addressing discrimination in the innovation economy. First, we need more training in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM), like the extensive and highly successful program once sponsored by Bell Labs to encourage participation in these fields by women and underrepresented minorities

STEM fields should not be the sole target, however, because the innovation economy encompasses more than this narrow set of subjects. Two of the last three people I’ve talked to at tech firms have a B.A. in international relations and a Ph.D. in political science. Clearly, problem-solving skills matter, but these skills are not unique to the STEM majors.

Second, there is substantial evidence of systemic racism in education, which needs to be addressed. Research shows that professors are less likely to respond to email inquiries about graduate study from Black, Hispanic and female students than from people who are discernibly white and male. A system of incentives — and penalties — could hold those responsible accountable at every level of the education and training process.

At the invention stage, such as at corporate, government and university labs, my research shows that mixed-gender teams are more prolific than those whose members are all female or male. And a large body of literature has documented the positive effects of diversity in teams. Managers at each level should be held responsible for being good stewards of the resources of their companies and promoting diverse teams and behavior and, therefore, better outcomes.

When invention is commercialized and companies sell shares to the public, the wealth gaps are stark. Seven of the world’s 10 richest people on the Forbes list are associated with tech companies that commercialize inventions. Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk are in the top five. None among the top 10 (or 50) is Black.

The statistics for venture capital funding are striking. In 2014, less than 1 percent of venture capital funding went to businesses founded by African-American women, and in 2015, only 2 percent of all venture capitalists were African-American.

A number of worthwhile recommendations have been made to address the lack of diversity at the commercialization stage of innovation. These include:

Enhancing mentoring opportunities through programs such as those of the Small Business Administration.

Seeking and recruiting founders to invest in places like Atlanta, and not exclusively in Silicon Valley.

Addressing systemic racism at every level of management and within venture capital firms.

Diversifying corporate boards so that senior leadership will be held accountable for diversity and workplace climate. (California has done this with women on the boards of public companies.)

The Kapor Center, a think tank that promotes participation by underrepresented minorities in tech fields and education, has proposed noteworthy remedies at many stages, including at the pre-college level.

The social compact most societies have with their governments is that standards of living will rise continually and that each successive generation will be better off than preceding ones. We are robbing countless people of higher standards of living and well-being when we allow racial discrimination to flourish from

[wilwheaton]

The GOP wonders why young people (and others) don't want to vote for them. Some wise scribe assembled this list.

1.) Your Reagan-era “trickle-down economics” strategy of tax breaks for billionaires that you continue to employ to this day has widened the gap between rich and poor so much that most of them will never be able to own a home, much less earn a living wage.

2.) You refuse to increase the federal minimum wage, which is still $7.25 an hour (since 2009). Even if it had just kept up with inflation, it would be $27 now. You’re forcing people of all ages but especially young people to work multiple jobs just to afford basic necessities.

3.) You fundamentally oppose and want to kill democracy; have done everything in your power to restrict access to the ballot box, particularly in areas with demographics that tend to vote Democratic (like young people and POC). You staged a fucking coup the last time you lost.

4.) You have abused your disproportionate senate control over the last three decades to pack the courts with religious extremists and idealogues, including SCOTUS—which has rolled back rights for women in ways that do nothing but kill more women and children and expand poverty.

5.) You refuse to enact common sense gun control laws to curb mass shootings like universal background checks and banning assault weapons; subjecting their entire generation to school shootings and drills that are traumatizing in and of themselves. You are owned by the NRA.

6.) You are unequivocally against combatting climate change to the extent that it’s as if you’ve made it your personal mission to ensure they inherit a planet that is beyond the point of no return in terms of remaining habitable for the human race beyond the next few generations.

7.) You oppose all programs that provide assistance to those who need it most. Your governors refused to expand Medicaid even during A PANDEMIC. You are against free school lunches, despite it being the only meal that millions of children can count on to actually receive each day

8.) You are banning books, defunding libraries, barring subject matter, and whitewashing history even more in a fascistic attempt to keep them ignorant of the systemic racism that this nation was literally founded upon and continues to this day in every action your party takes.

9.) You oppose universal healthcare and are still trying to repeal the ACA and rip healthcare from tens of millions of Americans and replace it with nothing. You are against lowering the cost of insulin and prescription drugs that millions need simply to LIVE/FUNCTION in society.

10.) You embrace white nationalists, Neo-Nazis, and other groups that are defined by their intractable racism, xenophobia, bigotry, and intolerance. You conspired with these groups on January 6th to try to overthrow the U.S. government via domestic terrorism that KILLED PEOPLE.

11.) You oppose every bill aimed at making life better for our nation’s youth; from education to extracurricular and financial/nutritional assistance programs. You say you want to “protect the children” while you elect/nominate pedophiles and attack trans youth and drag queens.

12.) You pretend to be offended by “anti-semitism” while literally supporting, electing, and speaking at events organized by Nazis. You pretend to hate “cancel culture” despite the fact that you invented it and it’s basically all you do.

13.) Every word you utter is a lie. You are the party of treason, hypocrisy, crime, and authoritarianism. You want to entrench rule by your aging minority because you know that you have nothing to offer young voters and they will never support you for all these reasons and more.

14.) You’re so hostile to even the notion of helping us overcome the mountain of debt that millions of us are forced to take on just to pay for our post K-12 education that you are suing to try to prevent a small fraction of us from getting even $10,000 in loan forgiveness.

15.) You opened the floodgates of money into politics via Citizens United; allowing our entire system of government to become a cesspool of corruption, crime, and greed. You are supposed to represent the American people whose taxes pay your salary but instead cater to rich donors.

16.) You respond to elected representatives standing in solidarity with their constituents to protest the ONGOING SLAUGHTER of children in schools via shootings by EXPELLING THEM FROM OFFICE & respond to your lack of popularity among young people by trying to raise the voting age.

17.) You impeach Democratic presidents over lying about a BJ but refuse to impeach (then vote twice to acquit) a guy whose entire “administration” was an international crime syndicate being run out of the WH who incited an insurrection to have you killed.

18.) You steal Supreme Court seats from democrats to prevent the only black POTUS we’ve ever had from appointing one and invent fake precedents that you later ignore all to take fundamental rights from Americans; and even your “legitimate” appointments consist of people like THIS (sub-thread refuting CJ Roberts criticisms of people attacking SCOTUS' legitimacy).

19.) You support mass incarceration even for innocuous offenses or execution by cop for POC while doing nothing but protect rich white criminals who engage in such things as tax fraud, money laundering, sex trafficking, rape/sexual assault, falsifying business records, etc.

20.) You are the reason we can’t pass:—Universal background checks—An assault weapons ban—The ‘For the People/Freedom to vote’ Act or John Lewis Voting Rights Act—The ERA & Equality Act—The Climate Action Now Act—The (Stopping) Violence Against Women Act—SCOTUS expansion.

21.) You do not seek office to govern, represent, or serve the American people. You seek power solely for its own sake so you can impose your narrow-minded puritanical will on others at the expense of their most fundamental rights and freedoms like voting and bodily autonomy.

22.) Ok, last one. You are trying to eliminate social security and Medicare that tens of millions of our parents rely on and paid into their entire lives. And you did everything to maximize preventable deaths from COVID leaving millions of us in mourning.

Source: https://imgur.com/gallery/e8DBZLH

[batboyblog]

Things Biden and the Democrats did, this week #9

March 9-15 2024

The IRS launched its direct file pilot program. Tax payers in 12 states, Florida, New Hampshire, Nevada, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Washington, Wyoming, Arizona, Massachusetts, California and New York, can now file their federal income taxes for free on-line directly with the IRS. The IRS plans on taking direct file nation wide for next year's tax season. Tax Day is April 15th so if you're in one of those states you have a month to check it out.

The Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights opened an investigation into the death of Nex Benedict. the OCR is investigating if Benedict's school district violated his civil rights by failing to protect him from bullying. President Biden expressed support for trans and non-binary youth in the aftermath of the ruling that Benedict's death was a suicide and encouraged people to seek help in crisis

Vice President Kamala Harris became the first sitting Vice-President (or President) to visit an abortion provider. Harris' historic visit was to a Planned Parenthood clinic in St. Paul Minnesota. This is the last stop on the Vice-President's Reproductive Rights Tour that has taken her across the country highlighting the need for reproductive health care.

President Biden announced 3.3 billion dollars worth of infrastructure projects across 40 states designed to reconnect communities divided by transportation infrastructure. Communities often split decades ago by highways build in the 1960s and 70s. These splits very often affect communities of color splitting them off from the wider cities and making daily life far more difficult. These reconnection projects will help remedy decades of economic racism.

The Biden-Harris administration is taking steps to eliminate junk fees for college students. These are hidden fees students pay to get loans or special fees banks charged to students with bank accounts. Also the administration plans to eliminate automatic billing for textbooks and ban schools from pocketing leftover money on student's meal plans.

The Department of Interior announced $120 million in investments to help boost Climate Resilience in Tribal Communities. The money will support 146 projects effecting over 100 tribes. This comes on top of $440 million already spent on tribal climate resilience by the administration so far

The Department of Energy announced $750 million dollars in investment in clean hydrogen power. This will go to 52 projects across 24 states. As part of the administration's climate goals the DoE plans to bring low to zero carbon hydrogen production to 10 million metric tons by 2030, and the cost of hydrogen to $1 per kilogram of hydrogen produced by 2031.

The Department of Energy has offered a 2.3 billion dollar loan to build a lithium processing plant in Nevada. Lithium is the key component in rechargeable batteries used it electric vehicles. Currently 95% of the world's lithium comes from just 4 countries, Australia, Chile, China and Argentina. Only about 1% of the US' lithium needs are met by domestic production. When completed the processing plant in Thacker Pass Nevada will produce enough lithium for 800,000 electric vehicle batteries a year.

The Department of Transportation is making available $1.2 billion in funds to reduce decrease pollution in transportation. Available in all 50 states, DC and Puerto Rico the funds will support projects by transportation authorities to lower their carbon emissions.

The Geothermal Energy Optimization Act was introduced in the US Senate. If passed the act will streamline the permitting process and help expand geothermal projects on public lands. This totally green energy currently accounts for just 0.4% of the US' engird usage but the Department of Energy estimates the potential geothermal energy supply is large enough to power the entire U.S. five times over.

The Justice for Breonna Taylor Act was introduced in the Senate banning No Knock Warrants nationwide

A bill was introduced in the House requiring the US Postal Service to cover the costs of any laid fees on bills the USPS failed to deliver on time

The Senate Confirmed 3 more Biden nominees to be life time federal Judges, Jasmine Yoon the first Asian-America federal judge in Virginia, Sunil Harjani in Illinois, and Melissa DuBose the first LGBTQ and first person of color to serve as a federal judge in Rhode Island. This brings the total number of Biden judges to 185

[probablyasocialecologist]

To say Israel’s economy is built on war and oppression is no more an exaggeration than to say that Israel’s science, technology, and industrialization have been built for the primary purpose of safeguarding western interests in the region of the Middle-East and North Africa (conveniently cleaved in half by the Zionist entity) as well as globally. First, as a cost-saving measure, an Israel industrialized around its own arms industry reduces the quantity of the still astronomically high amount of direct military aid from the west, while also appeasing Israel’s neighbors. Second, Israel’s export of weapons and other oppressive techniques served to cover up the dirty work of the western ruling class. Israel is the world center of counter-insurgency training and weapons provision, from the former Rhodesia and Pinochet’s Chile, to Marcos’s Philippines and Modi’s India today—neocolonial regimes that welcome the west to plunder its peoples and lands. Third, an economically and technologically advanced Israel propagates the ideology of developmentalism. Just as victims of capitalist exploitation are blamed for their own failure to correctly apply the bootstraps, victims of imperialist plundering are shown to be essentially backward, i.e., “racially/culturally inferior,” further justifying their subjugation by the west and occupation by “an army with a state.” In effect, Israel is part and parcel of US imperialism, as “the purest expression of Western power, combining militarism, imperialism, settler colonialism, counterinsurgency, occupation, racism, instilling ideological defeat, huge profitable war-making and hi-tech development into a manticore of destruction, death, and mayhem.”

Erica Jung and Calvin Wu, A Mirror of Our Immediate Future: On Green Imperialism and Palestine

[qqueenofhades]

I feel like, if Democrats want to win in places that AREN'T deep blue, if they want swing states and rural areas, they NEED to shut up about social issues. Don't talk about abortion or birth control or women's rights. Don't talk about police brutality and racism and immigration, legal or not. Don't talk about transphobia or homophobia. They should talk SOLELY about economic policy and solid legislation and sneak in protections for marginalized groups once elected.

Imma be real with you chief, since you came to my inbox and you presumably want my opinion: that is an absolutely terrible idea. Here's why:

First and most importantly, this is confusing "Democrats/progressives need to learn how to explain their policies in terms that are acceptable to the American mushy middle" with "they shouldn't talk about those policies at all." It's not that we can't pursue left-wing economic or social policies, it's that we should stop f'n calling them "socialist," which does nothing and causes a lot of harm among the people who instantly tune out or turn hostile the instant they hear that word and are unreachable afterward. If we CAN put them in terms that the American public likes, i.e. freedom, justice, opportunity, we should do that.

So... black people don't exist in America? LGBTQ people don't exist in America? Immigrants/racial minorities don't exist in America? Women (HALF THE ENTIRE POPULATION) don't exist in America? Especially when those are all core constituencies of the Democratic Party and vote for it precisely because it has openly expressed support for their issues and protection for their basic personal rights and civil liberties, especially as the right wing gets ever more reactionary, fascist, and crazy? You really think we should just throw up our hands and totally cede the public debate on these issues to the fascists, and act like any pushback or critique is the aberrant position??? Really???

Likewise, we're not gonna go for the "absolutely everyone in a red state/area is an unrepentant bigot who can only be mobilized if we discreetly tuck away our social liberalism." We're gonna talk about gerrymandering. We're going to talk about voter repression laws. We're gonna talk about how Ken Paxton, the Texas AG so wildly, insanely corrupt that he finally managed to get impeached by fellow Texas Republicans, boasted that if he didn't stop Texas counties from mailing out ballots to all registered voters, Biden would have won Texas. We're not going to act like there are Sensible Americans in Deep Blue Areas and everyone else is f'n David Duke of the KKK who needs to be appeased in hopes we can meekly trick them into supporting us. We're just not.

We're not gonna act like abortion or LGBTQ rights are shameful, unpopular, or minoritized views that have to be hidden or treated as secondary, especially when we're pummeling the Republicans, even and especially in deep red areas, precisely because of those things. Ordinary people in Tennessee, Florida, Texas, and all the other usual suspects are coming out to protest against drag bans and bathroom laws, not "superior" blue-area liberals. Republicans are backtracking on the abortion issue as fast as they can because it is so incredibly politically toxic and is costing them local/state/other competitive elections like crazy. 60% of the country supports abortion rights and 70%+ supports LGBTQ rights. The fascists are a minority and that is why they are so loud and so terrible: because they're shit-scared and they see the demographics coming to end them. We are not, again, acting like they're the majority or it's too shameful to speak about anything related to anything that's not the economy, especially since:

It won't work anyway! If people were actually, genuinely motivated by appeals to improved economic circumstances, they would already vote for Democrats! But they don't, because white supremacy and white grievance is too important for them! Even if the Democrats did try to rebrand themselves as solely focused on economic issues (which, for all the reasons stated above, would be insane), the people who don't vote for them now still wouldn't vote for them then! They will still vote for the Republicans, because a) they've been fed for decades on the myth of REPUBLICANS ARE BETTER FOR THE ECONOMY and b) they know that Republicans will punish non-white people, while Democrats won't. If they did try to "sneak in" protections for marginalized groups even once, and since that's, again, what they've built their entire party on, that would be it. It's the racism. It is always the racism.

Basically, this is the exact kind of mega-reductive "the only war is the class war"/"economic oppression is the only oppression" analysis that is so popular among Online Leftists and attempts to just erase racism, sexism, homophobia, misogyny, xenophobia, and all the other complex reasons why people vote, experience oppression, want the government to represent their interests, affiliate with a political party, or prioritize their particular identity/civic participation, because it's inconvenient for something something the purity of their Marxist theory. Besides, this is not even to mention that the Democrats' existing supporters would abandon them in droves, which would gut any remote increase in the number of voters that they could even (wildly unrealistically) hope to gain for doing it. You might as well be the f'n No Labels party, which is trying this exact kind of BS in hopes of peeling off just enough of the ideologically wavering Biden voters to hand the election to Trump. So. Yeah. No.

[menalez]

things i’ve been accused of lying about on this hellsite:

1. being raped

2. facing CSA

3. being traumatised

4. being part black

5. my sister being my full biological sister (bc i’m not allowed to have a sister who is more visibly part black?)

6. my economic status

7. my father’s childhood

8. my asthma

9. my life in the UK

10. my abusive ex gf

11. my gf’s existence

12. my hospitalisation

13. the loss of my brother

14. where i’m from

15. where i grew up

16. being middle eastern

17. being middle class

18. not having slaves (u might notice a theme with racism in these accusations. & ur right)

19. speaking arabic

20. being exposed to tear gas

21. housing prices in my country

22. standard of living in my country

23. cost of living in my country

24. my skin colour ???

25. not having had lip fillers

26. not having had a nose job

27. being from a village

28. not being religious

29. coming from a communist family

30. my sex (accused of actually being male)

31. my sexuality

32. my sexual history

33. the size of homes in my country

34. my explicitly stated beliefs

35. being coerced

36. being abused

37. not having abused my ex

38. facing racism

39. internet being accessible to almost all of my country’s population

did i forget something

[posttexasstressdisorder]

If you want to see what the GOP has in store for the rest of America, visit the Old South

Thom Hartmann

June 27, 2024 5:42AM ET

Photo by Miltiadis Fragkidis on Unsplash

Today is the first Biden-Trump debate and many Americans are wondering how each will articulate their ideas for the future of America.

Republicans have a very specific economic vision for the future of our country, although they rarely talk about it in plain language: they want to make the rest of America look and function just like Mississippi. Including the racism: that’s a feature, not a bug.

It’s called the “Southern Economic Development Model” (SEDM) and has been at the core of GOP economic strategy ever since the days of Ronald Reagan. While they don’t use those words to describe their plan, and neither did the authors of Project 2025, this model is foundational to conservative economic theory and has been since the days of slavery.

The SEDM explicitly works to:

— Maintain a permanent economic underclass of people living on the edge of poverty, — Rigidify racial and gender barriers to class mobility to lock in women and people of color, — Provide a low-cost labor force to employers,

— Prevent unions or any other advocates for workers’ rights to function, — Shift the tax burden to the working poor and what’s left of the middle class while keeping taxes on the morbidly rich extremely low, — Protect the privileges, power, and wealth of the (mostly white and male) economic overclass, — Ghettoize public education and raise the cost of college to make social and economic mobility difficult, — Empower and subsidize churches to take over public welfare functions like food, housing, and care for indigent people, — Allow corporations to increase profits by dumping their waste products into the air and water, — Subsidize those industries that financially support the political power structure, and, — Heavily use actual slave labor.

For hardcore policy wonks, the Economic Policy Institute(EPI) did a deep dive into the SEDM last month: here’s how it works in summary.

Republicans claim that by offering low-cost non-union labor and little to no regulatory oversight to massive corporations, they’re able to “attract business to the region.” This, they promise, will cause (paraphrasing President Kennedy out of context) “a rising tide that lifts all boats.”

Somehow, though, the only people who own boats that rise are those of the business owners and senior executives. The permanent economic underclass is key to maintaining this system with its roots in the old plantation system; that’s why Mississippi, Louisiana, Alabama, Tennessee, and South Carolina have no minimum wage, Georgia’s is $5.15/hour, and most other GOP states use the federal minimum wage of $7.25/hour and $2.13/hour for tipped workers.

It’s thus no coincidence that ten out of the 20 Republican-run states that only use the federal minimum wage are in the Old South.

Anti-union or “right to work for less” efforts and laws are another key to the SEDM; the failed unionization effort last month at the Alabama Mercedes factory was a key victory for the GOP. Unions, after all, balance the power relationship between management and workers; promote higher wages and benefits; support workplace and product safety regulations; advance racial and gender equality; boost social mobility; and have historically been the most effective force for creating a healthy middle class.

Unionization, however, is antithetical to creating and maintaining a permanent economic underclass, which is why, as EPI notes, “while union coverage rates stand at 11.2% nationally, rates in 2023 were as low as 3.0% in South Carolina, 3.3% in North Carolina, 5.2% in Louisiana, and 5.4% in Texas and Georgia.”

Unions also make wage theft more difficult, essentially forcing government to defend workers who’ve been ripped off by their employers. That’s why Florida doesn’t even have a Department of Labor (it was dismantled by Republican Governor Jeb Bush in 2002), and the DOLs in Alabama, Delaware, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, and South Carolina no longer bother to enforce wage theft laws or recover stolen money for workers.

Another key to the SEDM is to end regulation of corporate “externalities,” a fancy word for the pollution that most governments in the developed world require corporations to pay to prevent or clean up. “Cancer Alley” is probably the most famous example of this at work: that stretch from west Texas to New Orleans has more than 200 refineries and chemical plants pouring poison into the air resulting in downwind communities having a 7 to 21 times greater exposure to these substances. And high rates of cancer: Southern corporate profits are boosted by sick people.

Between 2008 and 2018, EPI documents, funding for state environmental agencies was “cut [in Texas and Louisiana] by 35.2% and 34.8% respectively.… Funding was down by 33.7% in North Carolina, 32.8% in Delaware, 20.8% in Georgia, 20.3% in Tennessee, and 10% in Alabama.”

To keep income taxes low on the very wealthy, the SEDM calls for shifting as much of the taxpaying responsibility away from high-income individuals and dumping it instead on the working poor and middle class. This is done by either ending or gutting the income tax (Texas, Florida, and Tennessee have no income tax) and shifting to sales tax, property taxes, fees, and fines.

Nationally, for example, sales taxes provide 34.4% of state and local revenue, but in the SEDM states that burden is radically shifted to consumers: Tennessee, for example, gets 56.6% of their revenue from sales tax, Louisiana 53.3%, Florida 50.9%, Arkansas 49.6%, Alabama 48%, and Mississippi 45.5%. Fees for registering cars, obtaining drivers’ and professional licenses, tolls, traffic and other fines, and permits for home improvements all add to the load carried by average working people.

Republicans argue that keeping taxes low on “job creators” encourages them to “create more jobs,” but that old canard hasn’t really been taken seriously by anybody since Reagan first rolled it out in 1981. It does work to fill their money bins, though, and helps cover the cost of their (tax deductible) private jets, clubs, and yachts.

Another way the SEDM maintains a low-wage workforce is by preventing young people from getting the kind of good education that would enable them to move up and out of their economic and social class. Voucher systems to gut public education, villainization of unionized teachers and librarians, and increasing college tuition all work together to maintain high levels of functional illiteracy. Fifty-four percent of Americans have a literacy rate that doesn’t exceed sixth grade, with the nation’s worst illiteracy mostly in the Old South.

Imposing this limitation against economic mobility on women is also vital to the SEDM. Southern states are famous for their lack of female representation in state legislatures (West Virginia 13%, Tennessee 14%, Mississippi and South Carolina 15%, Alabama and Louisiana 18%), and the states that have most aggressively limited access to abortion and reproductive healthcare (designed to keep women out of the workplace and dependent on men) are entirely Republican-controlled.

Perhaps the most important part of the SEDM pushed by Republicans and Project 2025 is gutting the social safety net. Wealthy rightwingers have complained since FDR’s New Deal of the 1930s that transferring wealth from them to poor and middle-class people is socialism, the first step toward a complete communist tyranny in the United States. It’s an article of faith for today’s GOP.

Weekly unemployment benefits, for example, are lowest in “Mississippi ($235), Alabama ($275), Florida ($275), Louisiana ($275), Tennessee ($275), South Carolina ($326), and North Carolina ($350)” with Southern states setting the maximum number of weeks you can draw benefits at 12 in Florida, North Carolina, and Kentucky, 14 in Alabama and Georgia, and a mere 16 weeks in Oklahoma and Arkansas.

While only 3.3% of children in the Northeast lack health insurance, for the Southern states that number more than doubles to 7.7%. Ten states using the SEDM still refuse to expand Medicaid to cover all state residents living and working in poverty, including Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, South Carolina, Florida, Tennessee, and Texas.

The main benefit to employers of this weak social safety net is that workers are increasingly desperate for wages — any sort of wages — and even the paltriest of benefits to keep their heads above water economically. As a result, they’re far more likely to tolerate exploitative workplace conditions, underpaid work, and wage theft.

Finally, the SEDM makes aggressive use of the 13th Amendment’s legalization of slavery. That’s not a metaphor: the Amendment says, “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.” [emphasis added]

That “except as punishment for crime” is the key. While Iceland’s and Japan’s incarceration rates are 36 for every 100,000 people, Finland and Norway come in at 51, Ireland and Canada at 88, there are 664 people in prison in America for every 100,000 people. No other developed country even comes close, because no other developed country also allows legalized slavery under color of law.

Fully 800,000 (out of a total 1.2 million prisoners) Americans are currently held in conditions of slave labor in American jails and prisons, most working for private prison corporations that profitably insource work and unfairly compete against normal American companies. Particularly in the South, this workforce is largely Black and Hispanic.

As the ACLU documented for the EPI, “The vast majority of work done by prisoners in Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Mississippi, South Carolina, and Texas is unpaid.” Literal slave labor, in other words. It’s a international scandal, but it’s also an important part of this development model that was, after all, first grounded in chattel slavery.

The Christian white supremacist roots of the SEDM worldview are best summed up by the lobbyist and head of the Southern Committee to Uphold the Constitution, Vance Muse — the inventor of the modern “right to work for less” model and advocate for the Southern Economic Development Model — who famously proclaimed in 1944, just days after Arkansas and Florida became the first states to adopt his anti-union legislation, that it was all about keeping Blacks and Jews in their places to protect the power and privileges of wealthy white people.

So, if you want to see what Republicans have in mind for the rest of America if Trump or another Republican becomes president and they can hold onto Congress, just visit the Old South. Or, as today’s MAGA GOP would call it, “the New Model.”

[gothhabiba]

Because the territory of Palestine is a contested space the conflict over land and water is shown to be one of the main drivers behind land use and labour practices and the development and implementation of agricultural technology in Israel/Palestine. [...]

One aspect of agricultural development in Israel is that there exists the imperative for extensification along with intensification, due to security needs. This refers to increasing the area under cultivation and pursuing agriculture in peripheral areas (the desert, the north) regardless of the economic cost as a means of claiming, occupying and in the process defending territory under dispute. In Israel, this is called «creating facts on the ground.» Thus, rather than accepting water scarcity as an ecological constraint, Israeli agriculture has turned to technological fixes which permit agricultural activity at any cost. This need to overcome water supply limitations in the face of the «agricultural imperative» has contributed to a range of technological innovations regarding water use – including drip irrigation, the reclamation and reuse of wastewater, cloud seeding and large-scale desalination. This has enabled the country to continue and expand agricultural production despite growing water scarcity.

On the Palestinian side we see how agriculture has responded to politically created water and land scarcity. After the occupation (1967), agriculture in the West Bank is reshaped in large part through Israel´s direct and indirect control of labour, land and access to water so as to complement and discourage competition with the Israeli market. The various mechanisms of control exerted can be defined as environmental racism or environmental injustice, the inequitable distribution of environmental burdens and access to environmental goods (Martínez-Alier, 2002), whereby valuable ecological resources are transferred to Israel and environmental bads such as pollution from the settlements are externalized onto the occupied territories (OPT). Agriculture in the West Bank is conditioned through a series of coping strategies as a response to these pressures.

– 2009. Leah Temper, "Creating Facts on the Ground: Agriculture in Israel and Palestine (1882-2000)," Historia Agraria 48, pp. 75-110.

[max1461]

I think the deepest indictment of the... SSC-adjacent worldview (an earlier version of this post said "rationalist worldview", but I don't think that's fair—I'm really talking about something confined to certain subsets of the rationalist community, which I've seen most often on and around SSC, although not endorsed in its most potent forms by Scott himself) is not that so many of them are race science enthusiasts, but that so many of them seem to want race science to be true. The racism which I see in rationalist spheres doesn't seem to stem from a gut-level fear of the Other, as racism usually does, but rather from a deep and pervasive desire to sort people according to worth; a desire to reconstruct society into a ruthlessly optimized machine in which each individual is understood as nothing but a cog from birth. Even the ones who reject racial hierarchies per se often still love biological determinism. Let's run a battery of tests on all young people, determine What They Will Be Good At, and place them into that role as soon as possible. Set the mindless worker drones to their mindless work, and the real smarty-pants to their rightful positions in the professions and in academia. Sort sort sort sort sort. Maximize maximize maximize. It will all be so efficient! Everyone in their proper place! Everything running so smoothly!

And I don't know how to really explain to them why that's heinous. I don't know how to get at it in a way they'll understand. I don't know how to explain the value of human freedom and dignity, the way that being nothing but a cog in a machine is for many (maybe most) a fate worse than death. It doesn't matter if it's more efficient. It doesn't matter if every biological-determinist theory is true! To enact policy that crystalized those biological differences into an authoritarian hierarchy would be just as heinous! If anything, you should be using policy to reduce the effects of inborn differences in ability on life outcomes!

Because—look, I'm being emotional and not articulating this well, maybe I'll do better in another post later—the point isn't the end result! The point isn't to gather all the smartest people and make the most advanced contraption. The point is human freedom! The point is the ability to live, to go out there and chase your dreams, the ability to desire and to pursue and to accomplish what you can accomplish! The point is a world worth living in! We don't need maximum efficiency for that. Efficiency isn't meaningless, and I'll continue to defend its necessity to the kind of leftists who see it as a bad word. But it isn't the point. Better, I suppose, sufficiency than efficiency—economic and cultural sufficiency for human flourishing. And beyond that, freedom, even if it comes at a cost.

I don't know. I'm definitely not putting forth my strongest case here, though these thoughts have been floating around in my head for a long time.

Really this isn't about the rationalists specifically, it's something I was seeing in tech spaces long before I knew who the rationalists were. I think it stems, perhaps, from the kind of thinking that often attracts people to computer programming in the first place. But I don't really know, maybe that's totally wrong. There is something deeply offputting to me about much of "techie culture" though, something that this post is trying to get at. But I don't really know.

[ausetkmt]

Cost of Racism to White America - John H. Bracey

In his lecture, Professor John H. Bracey, Jr. examines how racism and white entitlement have economic costs for all Americans. Professor Bracey is a member of the W.E.B. DuBois Department of Afro-American studies at Umass. This lecture includes an introduction by Prof. Dovi Afesi.

[beguines]

The question of Palestine, after all, and the dispute in Kashmir both emerged from the ashes of British colonialism. Whereas Palestinians were uprooted by the Nakba, hundreds of thousands of people from Jammu and Kashmir were displaced too in the weeks and months following Partition and as a result of a large-scale massacre against the Muslim population in the region of Jammu. Over the years, both the Kashmiri and Palestinian right to national self-determination have been subsequently reduced into a rubric of religious conflict: Hindu versus Muslim in Kashmir and Jew versus Muslim in Palestine. Both Palestine and Kashmir have been severely sold out by their leaders. Under the 1975 Indira-Sheikh Accord, Kashmiri leader Sheikh Abdullah, who had spent more than a decade in prison, forfeited the demand for self-determination in exchange for being the chief minister of the state. Almost 20 years later, the Oslo accords would accomplish much of the same for the Palestinians. Kashmiris were moved by the first intifada in the late 1980s in fomenting their own mass uprising against Indian rule.

In the post-9/11 moment and in the context of global anti-Muslim racism, both struggles against foreign occupation were slipped under the rubric of "Islamic terrorism." Palestine and Kashmir are targets of the ethno-nationalist ideologies of Zionism and Hindutva that seek their eradication. As colonial projects, India and Israel have exercised similar modalities of control to wield power of their dominions: extrajudicial killings, arbitrary detentions, maiming, torture, economic dependencies, surveillance, home demolitions (or spaciocide), restrictions on mobility, checkpoints, a network of informers, as well as the creation of a collaborator class—the Palestinian Authority in Palestine, as well as pro-India "unionist" parties in Kashmir like the National Conference and the People's Democratic party (PDP). Both countries also instrumentalize the law to protect their armed forces. Whereas the Indian government uses the Armed Forces Special Powers Act (AFPSA), to provide cover for the abuses of their soldiers, an entire cultural and legal apparatus in Israel protects Israeli soldiers from facing accountability for "unjustified use of lethal force."

Several similarities notwithstanding, it is not my intention here to argue that the occupations of Palestine and Kashmir are the same. They aren't. Instead, the comparison between India and Israel is meant to illustrate the ways in which oppressive methods are shared and duplicated and crucially, justified. As Samreen Mushtaq and Mudasir Amin argue: "The colonization of Kashmir, like Palestine, is not just the influx of a settler population that would derive multiple economic and political benefits at the cost of the natives. It is to be the 'crown' of a Hindutva project that wants to make itself the only legitimate sovereign of a people that refuses its control over them."

Azad Essa, Hostile Homelands: The New Alliance Between India and Israel

[rijl]

The politics of class and privilege in Young Royals

I wrote this post a few days ago about why I read Young Royals as anti-monarchy, sparked by the results of this poll. Since then, I've been thinking, and I realized that some of the details of the show that form its political attitudes are quite subtle, and deserve to be pointed out. And I know how much we love YR deep-dive analysis posts, and so this post was born.

Note that this is coming from a USA perspective, with light research on Swedish context. I welcome questions, additions, corrections, and disagreements. And let me know if this was helpful to you at all! If so, there are more scenes I can write about (though none of them would be this long).

Season 1, Episode 1: Wille's first class

This is a revealing scene. It feels significant from the start, because it’s the first time Simon and Wille are in close quarters. And then the very first kind-of-interaction between the boys is loaded with tension about class and politics.

This appears to be some kind of ethics or social studies class. The whiteboard reads “[something], punishment, and crime,” and the teacher has been asking the students to rank the severity of various crimes. She casually invites discussion on tax evasion vs. welfare fraud, “two less sensitive issues.” Did she not anticipate how loaded that question would be in this context?

Walter is ready with an answer before the teacher has even finished her question. He defends tax evasion with the common capitalist talking point of “job creation.” Proponents of economic conservatism claim that businesses should be freed from regulations (e.g. laws on workers’ rights and fair business practices) and taxes, because the more free rein they have, the more jobs they will create. This is a myth. Capitalist businesses always prioritize growth and profit. If there’s ever an opportunity to make more money while employing fewer people and paying them less, they will take it. Left to their own devices, businesses develop new technologies and efficiencies, often at the cost of workers’ safety, and for many of them, their jobs. What really increases the number of jobs available? Tax rates and social benefits that boost the middle class, because that increases consumption, and therefore business and employment. Laws for workers’ health, safety, and well-being also increase available jobs. (If you can’t make one person do this job for this many hours, or this quickly, or alone, you have to hire more people.) Despite having no backing in reality, the idea of unencumbered businesses as job creators remains popular.

Walter sounds like he may be parroting his pro-capitalist parents. Stella could be parroting her own parents, or just the society at large when she adds that “welfare scammers give nothing back, they just take.” The specter of welfare fraud is a myth engrained even more in the public consciousness, and a racist one at that. The welfare fraud myth got big in the US in the 70’s, when US President Reagan used the false stereotype of the “welfare queen” to attack government-provided benefits (food stamps, unemployment income, etc.) and stoke anti-Black racism. By any measure, welfare fraud is actually very rare. But the myth is perpetuated, because it gives conservative politicians an excuse to police and criminalize people of color, who (in the US at least) require food stamps at disproportionate rates (though white people still receive food stamps more than any other racial group).

Think about what Stella’s statement says about her perspective on the humanity and worth of different groups of people. She’s hating on the idea of poor people receiving any more welfare (literally meaning health, happiness, well-being) than the amount the government has chosen to ration out. She says “welfare scammers,” but you can tell she’s also talking about welfare recipients in general. She’s suggesting that something that improves the life of a poor person or family doesn’t actually matter to society or to her—because that person or family is worthless, and not a significant part of society. Stella is a member of the upper class, and sees herself as entirely separate and fundamentally different from the sectors of working class and poor people.

Henry continues where Walter left off, defending tax evasion. He suggests that businesses are in the right to evade taxes, because the government is guilty of over-taxing them. (By the way, moving businesses abroad doesn’t just help evade taxes, it also often gives opportunities to pay workers less and exploit them more.) It is so ironic that Henry claims that taxes are resulting in his dad’s estate “struggling to make ends meet.” If you have an estate that you’re using to do business, you already have wayyy more than you need! You know who’s actually struggling to make end meet? The people receiving benefits.

I can understand why that’s the point when Simon laughs. Prompted by the teacher to share more, he points out that the very language used, tax evasion vs. welfare scam, is biased in favor of the rich. He points out the double standard whereby the poor are over-policed while the rich get away with cheating, harming, and breaking laws all the time (something that becomes a theme throughout the show, especially with August). To see who really “takes and gives nothing back,” check out this visual of the value of wage theft vs. burglary in the US. (And note that civil asset forfeiture, i.e. legal theft by police, also dwarfs burglary in the US.)

Simon mentions the deductions and subsidies provided by governments that value businesses over humans, and Henry gets rude and defensive. Henry doesn’t actually know how to defend his argument, which can’t stand up to Simon’s critique. And then Simon has his famous mic-drop moment: With a slight smirk and a side-eye towards Wille, he says, “Well, we all know who this country’s biggest welfare receivers are.” If I’m looking at it right, the Swedish government gives about SEK 143 million ($13.7 million USD) to the monarchy and all its trappings each year. This is less than many other European monarchies. Some might say that makes it ok. Why is the bar so low? Why do we excuse millions in public funds going to bankroll the extravagant lives of a family that already has millions in inherited wealth, when there are people who truly can’t make ends meet? Is the monarchy really “giving back” more than $13.7 million USD’s worth to the Swedish people? Is there really no better use of that money?

The most important point in Simon’s comment is the connection between the monarchy and the upper classes—especially the nobility. The positions of both the monarchy and the upper classes rest on no one questioning a system of inequality. All these rich people need us to accept that this is just the way things are: some people bask in riches while others starve; some people deserve millions in public funds, others are greedy for wanting more food stamps to feed their family.

Wille is a little stunned by Simon’s jab. We can tell, especially later at lunch, that Wille is intrigued by Simon’s bluntness, something Wille doesn’t experience in a lot of his interpersonal relationships. But he also appears to agree with Simon’s political point on some level. Remember that Wille has been attending public school so far in his life. I’m sure he’s familiar with the conservative talking points, but this class is probably the first time he’s heard them coming so strongly from his own classmates.

BONUS: Season 1, Episode 5: Presentation day

In episode 5, we get a scene of the same class, where the students appear to be doing group presentations on various topics of crime and punishment. If you’re busy pondering what happened to Alexander, you could easily miss the 10 seconds where Stella and Fredrika introduce their presentation. But these 10 seconds speak volumes. “Capital punishment,” says Fredrika, with a winning smile. Stella giggles as she says, “Yes, or no?” Fredrika confidently concludes: “We say yes.” Capital punishment, aka the death penalty, is when a government kills someone as punishment for a crime. It’s the ultimate case of “it’s not ok for ordinary people to do it, but it’s totally ok for the people and institutions in power to do it.” I won’t go into how the US has used capital punishment in racist and ableist ways, or how many cases of suspected or confirmed wrongful execution there have been. I think the main point of this short scene is to show the casual ruthlessness of these two teen girls. Their wealth and privilege has so warped their thinking that they can promote state-sanctioned killing with a giggle. The lives of regular people are not real or substantial to them, and deep down they know that no one they care about would ever be at risk of being sentenced to such a punishment, no matter what they were guilty of. (By the way, capital punishment was abolished in Sweden in 1973.)

Looking at the two ethics class scenes, we see that Young Royals portrays the upper-class students as living inside a bubble of privilege that allows them to dehumanize regular people. This causes both moral rot and intellectual laziness. It also causes a kind of ridiculous immaturity that’s both a little bit funny and a little bit sad.

[communist-ojou-sama]

I can already see the new era of rationalized racism on here where all the useless white liberals see African states increasingly turning toward Russia as a security partner and China as an economic partner and demand that you therefore don't celebrate any decrease in poverty on the continent or increased access by the people to resources like modern medicine or clean drinking water because instead of doing it by magic, or by making deals with flawed Good Guys like the US and the EU they made the Faustian Bargain, the cost of which they are clearly ignorant, with evil China and Russia, who are doing things way worse than Israel I promise I have proof of it meet me again here at the same time tomorrow the proof is so real bro

[cinnbar-bun]

This might sound dumb and I’m tryna word this in a way that’s not weird but for your American Dream series why would Valentine marry an immigrant when he’s like… that? Are you trying to make him not racist?

Okay so at first I admit I was taken aback but I also realized this is FV and he’s got a heinous list of crimes against him, so fair. I’ll try my best to explain my thought process on him but uuuhhhh this gonna get wordy and maybe spoilery??

Despite FV being president we really don’t hear a lot about his political views or economic views that got him elected. All we know is he served for the Union during the Civil War, he had a 91% approval rating even after he “disappeared”, and he’s a staunch imperialistic nationalist. It’s really a toss up if he would have been a Republican or a Democrat because there’s tons of evidence serving both sides. I choose to think of him as a Republican (Republican back then meaning Democrat) due to his stance on the Civil War and also him replacing Benjamin Harrison, who was a Republican.

THAT BEING SAID despite the time difference… I don’t think he was racist. At least, not in the ‘usual’ sense. His whole plan was to make America a dominant super empire over the world, while making every bad thing happening in America redirected somewhere else over the world. He just doesn’t care about the rest of the world because America should come first and be the best. But he’s also callous and doesn’t actually care about American people, but “America” the concept.

Considering Mike O. (a black man) is his most trusted bodyguard and one he even lets protect his wife and FV’s service for the Union, I don’t think he’s racist like that. It’s much deeper and more complex than a “white vs every other race” type of racism.

I think it’s more he’s ‘xenophobic’ but also, again, not in the usual sense. Considering his attitude on America and other countries, I believe he doesn’t mind immigrants, but they have to be ‘useful’ to America in a sense, or do something to help/benefit America. If you choose to be in America versus staying in the homeland, well, you’re an American to him and you made a good choice leaving that other place.

He’s a ‘might makes right’ type of guy, so I see it as “if you prove your value to America, you are a true American.” One of his earliest lessons was patriotism and dying for your country is the most honorable thing anyone can do, so it’s clear that that would be an easy way to somewhat earn his respect (so long as you don’t meddle with his plans).

In the example I wrote for The American Dream, his late wife is MENA. Obviously she would not have been treated as equal to a white woman in America itself for the time period. If she were to stay in the Middle East, FV would have had no respect for her and would not care if she was hurt by the effects of the corpse and Love Train. She would just be another nameless non-American who doesn’t deserve the ambitions of America. However, she immigrated to America, thus making her an American woman. What elevated her in his mind (and thus became a major point in his idealization of her) was that she joined in the Civil War effort as a nurse and also died for the Union (and his daughter).

To normal people, one could argue that she really didn’t need to join and serve a country that didn’t care for her, but to FV, it’s the opposite. She immigrated here to America, compared to staying back there. America gave her the opportunity to do something different and live out the “American Dream”, and she was merely paying it back by serving her country in a war. She proved herself to be a true, respectable American, which is done through actions, not merely lineage.

It’s the name of his own spirit manifested, “Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap”. He doesn’t give a shit about the cost, but a ‘strong’ person is one who does things with their own hands and is unafraid to get them dirty to do it. He doesn’t care about the sacrifices so long as it benefits the collective of America.

So TLDR: he’s fucked up but not racist like that. If you live in America, whether a minority or not, you’re American. If you don’t, you’re on his shit list. Hence why I also gave him a MENA wife (as a MENA woman) but also as a commentary for later chapters that I will go into.

[futurebird]

Abortion alone is not full reproductive freedom.

Abortion itself is not reproductive freedom, abortion is one of many technologies that can help make reproductive freedom a reality. Technologies that facilitate reproductive freedom include contraception and treatments that increase fertility. If we mistake abortions alone for "freedom" we could incorrectly conclude that black people, who have more abortions per capita than white people, must be more "free" when it comes to control of our wombs.

The reality is, in fact, the reverse of this.

This essay is, in part a response to discussions about Margaret Sanger and her connections to racism and eugenics. This has been used as a talking point by anti-abortion groups and some people have suggested that the only correct response is to burry the discussion since an accurate and open discussion might confuse black people and lead us to distrust the modern incarnation of Planned Parenthood. This is a condescending and infantilizing perspective. The history is, as history tends to be, complex and Sanger emerges as neither saint nor villain. Black people participate in and interact with organizations with terrible racist histories every day. Planned parenthood will not be harmed by this unsurprising history.

But, even if she is not connected to the eugenics movement other people were, it was a real thing and the history of eugenics has always been tied to the history of abortion access for poor and minority women, and this connection isn't even totally dead.

So, what we really need to talk about are the reasons why so many black people have deeply ambivalent feelings about the "success" (as it is sometimes called) of falling birth rates among black women in the US. This very sudden and drastic decline in black babies being born has happened mostly through increased rates of abortion among black women to the point that black women make of 30% of all women who get abortions every year despite being 12% of the overall population. True success would look more like falling birth rates and falling abortion rates. Abortion is an important tool, but it is not without costs.

Part of this is because many pro-life groups have until very recently ignored black women in their quest to "save" the unborn from abortion. I remember a few years back there were some ads on the train from a pro-life group (one of the more sinister ones that pose as family planning clinics that try to convert women who know they want an abortion in to their way of seeing things) these adds advertised "free help for pregnant women" and pictures of sullen-looking white teen girls. Often, it'd say something like "I just didn't know what to do but ____ clinic helped!" A quick phone call on my part confirmed that they did not do abortions, rather they would do an ultra-sound then show the young mother her "baby" -- show manipulative films and generally make women feel like abortion was very wrong and very bad. They didn't provide any real pre-natal care either not so much as a packet of folic acid tablets. (what a scam)

The thing is these ads that only showed white women were in a city where only 35% of the population is white, and moreover, the young people in the worst economic circumstances are almost universally black and Latino. (the ones who'd nee "help") So, most organizations from churches to free clinics feature very diverse advertisements in this city.

But, no, not these pro-life people.

Now, I don't think that they were sitting there rubbing their hands in a dark room saying "muahahaha we'll only save the white babies!" In fact, I know of a few black women who were bamboozled by them. So, they take all comers. But, I do think that the images that they choose say something about their world view. And it's a reflection of broader social values not just those of pro-lifers. Like the way that missing white children get so much more attention in media than missing black and Latino kids. It is part of the cultural mirror that shows us our values. (and the flaws in those values)

What the cultural mirror shows is this endless destructive drumbeat of a simple message "you are not valuable or important. you are not worth saving." And it's not universally coming from "the right" either.

For example, health care providers can be insensitive about the way that they present options to black women. It can be quiet hard to get help if you are having fertility issues as a black women. I have experienced this indifference myself. Many doctors think the only fertility problem black woman have is having too many kids.

I first found out about this issue reading Killing the Black Body by Dorothy Roberts. It's a really great book that brings out statistics and ethnographic studies to add missing dimensions to this issue.

The fundamental thing however is that black lives (black children) have not been valued in the same way as white children. So some of us wince when the high number of black women having abortions comes up. Too often, black children are seen as a problem. A black woman who is pregnant faces a lot of pressure to have an abortion (along with messages that she is a bad person for having and abortion it's a no win situation, very much like the slut/prude divide women of all colors face.) --This pressure comes from poverty, it comes from media, it comes from health care providers. And a single black mother will encounter outright disdain. What images has media linked to the phrase "single black mother" in your mind? Are any of them positive or beautiful? Most likely not. How dare she have a child! --I have had to work hard to rebuild those image in my own mind. Now I think of all of the wonderful "single black mothers" that I know and their amazing cute kids.

There is a long ugly history:

The U.S began to heavily support population control policies abroad, arguing that population control was vital in the fight against communism. Domestically, the success of the Civil Rights movement in challenging segregation caused many politicians to become increasingly fearful of African American political power. Instead of offering a political argument, they coded their concerns by claiming that Black ghettos would continue to grow, and that a growing welfare class predominately concentrated in inner cities would cause crime rates to skyrocket.

As a result, conservative support for federally-supported family planning grew. Former president Richard Nixon said in 1970, “It is my view that no American woman should be denied access to family planning assistance because of her economic condition.” He established the Office of Economic Opportunity to fund family planning programs, particularly in Latino and African American communities, arguing that such programs would reduce health and welfare costs.

The establishment of family planning programs in mainly Black and Latino urban areas in the South caused a division between white conservatives. On one hand, some whites wanted programs that implemented eugenical ideas about reducing the populations of people of color. On the other hand, a strong portion of the conservative white American population was threatened by the idea of all women controlling their fertility. They were especially concerned that white women would have access to family planning intended for women of color. In clinics throughout the South, white women were actively discouraged from using these services, such as in Louisiana and Arkansas. This split among conservatives over family planning was not healed until after Nixon, when Ronald Reagan helped launched the “Moral Majority” to put conservatives back in power in 1980.

(source A Short History of African American Women and Abortion, Muna Abdullahi)

At the same, time too many black women do not feel empowered enough to insist on contraception with their partners. And access to health care makes contraception such as the pill harder to get as well. This goes right back to a total failure to teach black girls that they are beautiful, special unique and valuable. That their bodies matter. It is very hard for parents to fight the tide of negative images and messages girls encounter.

So, rather than trying to cover up our countries history of eugenics and its decedent modern racism we really need to talk openly about what real reproductive freedom would be.

Real reproductive freedom means never feeling bad about asking your partner to wear a condom. It means easy and affordable acces to birth control such as the pill. It means choosing to have an abortion of you need one. It means having a child if you want to and are ready to care for that child. It means equal access to fertility treatment, and doctors not questioning your desire to have a child. It means no more women who think about what might have been if they had the baby or if they didn't have the baby because they subverted their will to avoid being a "single black" statistic-- or to avoid being a "sinning selfish slut."

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

April 13, 2024

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

APR 14, 2024

There are really two major Republican political stories dominating the news these days. The more obvious of the two is the attempt by former president Donald Trump and his followers to destroy American democracy. The other story is older, the one that led to Trump but that stands at least a bit apart from him. It is the story of a national shift away from the supply-side ideology of Reagan Republicans toward an embrace of the idea that the government should hold the playing field among all Americans level.

While these two stories are related, they are not the same.

For forty years, between 1981, when Republican Ronald Reagan took office, and 2021, when Democrat Joe Biden did, the Republicans operated under the theory that the best way to run the country was for the government to stay out of the way of market forces. The idea was that if individuals could accumulate as much money as possible, they would invest more efficiently in the economy than they could if the government regulated business or levied taxes to invest in public infrastructure and public education. The growing economy would result in higher tax revenues, enabling Americans to have both low taxes and government services, and prosperity would spread to everyone. 

But the system never worked as promised. Instead, during that 40-year period, Republicans passed massive tax cuts under Reagan, George W. Bush, and Trump, and slashed regulations. A new interpretation of antitrust laws articulated by Robert Bork in the 1980s permitted dramatic consolidation of corporations, while membership in labor unions declined. The result was that as much as $50 trillion moved upward from the bottom 90% of Americans to the top 1%. 

To keep voters on board the program that was hollowing out the middle class, Republicans emphasized culture wars, hitting hard on racism and sexism by claiming that taxes were designed by Democrats to give undeserving minorities and women government handouts and promising their evangelical voters they would overturn the Supreme Court’s 1973 Roe v. Wade decision recognizing the constitutional right to abortion. Those looking for tax cuts and business deregulation depended on culture warriors and white evangelicals to provide the votes to keep them in power.

But the election of Democrat Barack Obama in 2008 proved that Republican arguments were no longer effective enough to elect Republican presidents. So in 2010, with the Citizens United v. Federal Elections Commission decision, the Supreme Court freed corporations to pour unlimited money into U.S. elections. That year, under Operation REDMAP, Republicans worked to dominate state legislatures so they could control redistricting under the 2010 census, yielding extreme partisan gerrymanders that gave Republicans disproportionate control. In 2013 the Supreme Court’s Shelby County v. Holder decision greenlighted the voter suppression Republicans had been working on since 1986.  

Even so, by 2016 it was not at all clear that the cultural threats, gerrymandering, and voter suppression would be enough to elect a Republican president. People forget it now because of all that has come since, but in 2016, Trump offered not only the racism and sexism Republicans had served up for decades, but also a more moderate economic program than any other Republican running that year. He called for closing the loopholes that permitted wealthy Americans to evade taxes, cheaper and better healthcare than the Democrats had provided with the Affordable Care Act (also known as Obamacare), bringing manufacturing back to the U.S., and addressing the long backlog of necessary repairs to our roads and bridges through an infrastructure bill. 

But once in office, Trump threw economic populism overboard and resurrected the Republican emphasis on tax cuts and deregulation. His signature law was the 2017 tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy at a cost of at least $1.9 trillion over ten years. At the same time, Trump continued to feed his base with racism and sexism, and after the Unite the Right rally at Charlottesville, Virginia, in August 2017, he increasingly turned to his white nationalist base to shore up his power. On January 6, 2021, he used that base to try to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election. 

Republican senators then declined to convict Trump of that attempt in his second impeachment trial, apparently hoping he would go away. Instead, their acquiescence in his behavior has enabled him to continue to push the Big Lie that he won the 2020 election. But to return to power, Trump has increasingly turned away from establishment Republicans and has instead turned the party over to its culture war and Christian nationalist foot soldiers. Now Trump has taken over the Republican National Committee itself, and his supporters threaten to turn the nation over to the culture warriors who care far more about their ideology than they do about tax cuts or deregulation.

The extremism of Trump’s base is hugely unpopular among general voters. Most significantly, Trump catered to his white evangelical base by appointing Supreme Court justices who would overturn Roe v. Wade, and in 2022, when the court did so, the dog caught the car. Americans overwhelmingly support reproductive freedoms, and Republicans are getting hammered over the extreme abortion bans now operative in Republican-dominated states. Now Trump and a number of Republicans have tried to back away from their antiabortion positions, infuriating antiabortion activists. 

It is hard to see how the Republican Party can appeal to both Trump’s base and general voters at the same time. 

That split dramatically weakens Trump politically while he is in an increasingly precarious position personally. He will, of course, go on trial on Monday, April 15, for alleged crimes committed as he interfered in the 2016 election. At the same time, the $175 million appeals bond he posted to cover the judgment in his business fraud trial has been questioned and must be justified by April 14. The court has scheduled a hearing on the bond for April 22. And his performance at rallies and private events has been unstable. 

He seems a shaky reed on which to hang a political party, especially as his MAGA Republicans have proven unable to manage the House of Representatives and are increasingly being called out as Russian puppets for their attacks on Ukraine aid.  

Regardless of Trump’s future, though, the Reagan Era is over. 

President Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris have quite deliberately rejected the economic ideology that concentrated wealth among the 1%. On their watch, the federal government has worked to put money into the hands of ordinary Americans rather than the very wealthy. With Democrats and on occasion a few Republicans, they have passed legislation to support families, dedicate resources to making sure people with student debt are receiving the correct terms of their loans (thus relieving significant numbers of Americans), and invested in manufacturing, infrastructure, and addressing climate change. They have also supported unions and returned to an older definition of antitrust law, suing Microsoft, Amazon, and Apple and allowing the federal government to negotiate with pharmaceutical companies over drug prices.

Their system has worked. Under Biden and Harris the U.S. has had unemployment rates under 4% for 26 months, the longest streak since the 1960s. Wages for the bottom 80% of Americans have risen faster than inflation, chipping away at the huge disparity between the rich and the poor that the policies of the past 40 years have produced. 

Today, in an interview with Jamie Kitman of The Guardian, United Auto Workers president Shawn Fain, who negotiated landmark new union contracts with the country’s Big Three automakers, explained that the world has changed: “Workers have realized they’ve been getting screwed for decades, and they’re fed up.”

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON