Archive for current-events

Obama’s Scandal Fest

Posted in Community and Citizen Action, National Affairs with tags , , , , , on May 15, 2013 by thomassobottke

Three scandals in as many days erupt to engulf the Obama Administration and President Barack Obama is now being compared unfavorably to Richard Nixon. Is this the end? Is Obama the most corrupt President ever? Is he a radical Muslim Socialist Kenya- born Mau-Mau revolutionary bent on destroying America? Nah.

Benghazi

President Obama should admit the infamous talking points were changed to protect the integrity of the CIA’s ongoing hunt for the terrorists who made the attack on the consulate and that his campaign of course put a bit of spin on the news of the event during the height of a presidential campaign. Romney had been spinning it so much in the fall of 2012 that he was going harder and faster than a whirling Dervish. As to the rest, the 29 Recommendations of the Accountability Board Report are being implemented by the State Department. And now it is most important to catch and destroy the people who killed those four Americans at the consulate—it is as simple as that.

IRS Scandal

First of all, the acting head of the IRS should be fired along with the woman who was the immediate supervisor to the people who used Tea Party and Patriot to find organizations as a shortcut to find the slew of organizations attempting to get tax exempt status as 501-C4’s. The people in the Washington office should be asked to tender their resignations and the President should accept them. The President should do two things: one, ask for a special prosecutor in the case himself—don’t wait for members of Congress. Two: President Obama and the Democrats in Congress should introduce legislation further clarifying that 501-C4 organizations are truly those that aid the welfare of society and are NOT organizations that spend millions to lobby Congress or the public for or against candidates for public office or toward any specific public issue, political party, or legislation. If you want to do that you will have to pay taxes and report your donors. That should reduce the overwhelming workload of processing so many applications for 501-C4 status from both political parties and their surrogates that flooded the IRS in the wake of the Citizens United Supreme Court decision and that produced the attempt to make a shortcut in processing them that both disrespected the public taxpayer and citizen organizations in the first place. The President is NOT involved in this scandal at all.

Associated Press – DOJ

Attorney General Eric Holder properly recused himself from the investigation into the leak about the person who has been used to penetrate El Qaeda in Yemen and foil a huge terrorist plot that could have brought down one or more airliners. It is a proper criminal investigation. But the subpoenas calling for the phone records of hundreds of journalists at the AP or with AP affiliations were much too broad and wide ranging. It is a serious violation of the First Amendment to the Constitution. Secretary Holder’s inability to take charge and act to deal with this and his lame excuses in two press conferences now require that President Obama ask for and receive Secretary Holder’s resignation. The Deputy Attorney General should be fired outright and another put in his place who understands how to more selectively use this power to investigate via subpoena and how important it is not to restrict freedom of the press.

There you have it. President Obama and the White House Staff subscribe to this blog’s posts so it is hoped they are paying attention to this very solid advice. Here the President should have a brief press conference where he announces personally the actions he has already taken and then he ought to get right on the road to hammer away at the need for job creation and immigration reform as Congress gets set to make a second vote in the Senate on gun background checks.

End of Scandal Fest. Will the Administration do these things? If not, they can forget about anything meaningful in the entire second term and perhaps look forward to the impeachment of the President at the very least.

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Anne Coulter–House Republicans’ Path to Nowhere on Immigration Reform by Thomas Martin Sobottke

Posted in Community and Citizen Action, Essays, National Affairs, Race, The Faith Community with tags , , , on February 23, 2013 by thomassobottke

Anne Coulter in a recent piece on immigration reform and the GOP has chucked any interest in bringing in the some 10 to 12 million undocumented long-term Latino immigrants into the American family at any time in the future.

“Why do Republicans want to create up to 20 million more Democratic voters, especially if it involves flouting the law?” writes Coulter.

Virginia Representative Rob Goodlatte the senior Republican on the House Judiciary Committee has come out against any immigration reform bill that would provide any kind of path to citizenship for the undocumented.

“People have a pathway to citizenship right now: It’s to abide by the immigration laws, and if they have a family relationship, if they have a job skill that allows them to do that, they can obtain citizenship,” Goodlatte told National Public Radio (NPR). “But simply someone who broke the law, came here, [to] say,’ I’ll give you citizenship now,’ that is not going to happen.

Idaho Representative Raul Labrador, another Republican in the House told NPR “the people that came here illegally knowingly—I don’t think they should have a path to citizenship. “ Labrador added, “if you knowingly violated our law, you violated our sovereignty, I think we should normalize your status but we should not give you a pathway to citizenship.”

The basic Republican objection to comprehensive immigration reform that gives a path to citizenship to the overwhelming majority of undocumented immigrants—not every one of them Latino–is based on the deep objection to the breaking of U.S. immigration law with foreknowledge and premeditation.

If this is such a deep and abiding violation of the law then the punishment must be banishment from the United States or long-term imprisonment. These people then would have to be located and deported and imprisoned in a manner that makes the U.S. commitment to human rights and democracy a standing joke and repudiation of what we profess to believe as Americans. It is the very antithesis of what it is to be an American.

There are two legal measures taken against those who have entered the United States illegally. First, it is a civil and not a criminal violation when those caught violating immigration law are not themselves possessing a criminal record. This civil violation is acknowledged in front of a Federal judge and then the violator is deported to their country of origin. Second, a fine may also be levied against undocumented persons.

But if we are going to reform our immigration law in a way that respects these long-time residents of the United States doing that or placing them in a second-class, non-citizen status on a permanent basis will shackle them and prevent the full exercise of the rights all people need to realize their dreams and fully contribute to the United States and its future strength and prosperity. It is also doubtful most of the undocumented would come forward and identify themselves, making some kind of police-state racially profiled hunt for undocumented Latinos, violating the rights of millions of documented American citizens among the Latino population here more likely.

Why come forward and receive a status that is little better than you have staying underground?

Almost no one even knows that aliens who illegally enter the United States or violate provisions of their Visas without any prior criminal record either here or in their country of origin are given punishment that does not involve criminal prosecution. A civil violation cannot be a permanent bar to improving their status in the United States. We reserve life without parole and the death penalty and outright deportation for people who are not those that immigration reform would touch.

What President Obama and the Democrats have suggested allows for the undocumented to come forward and admit before a court of law that they violated our immigration law at some point in the past and to pay a suitable fine for what is at present and ought remain a civil violation. It is not a death sentence. By admitting before our courts that they violated the law and paying a civil fine the law breaking is on their record and they have made restitution to all American citizens and the United States Government and they show respect for the rule of law.

Thus the undocumented would have paid their full debt to our society and ought to be welcomed in as full citizens subject to the prescribed immigration and naturalization process as prescribed in our Supreme Law the Constitution of the United States. How can Republicans fail to grasp this? Well let’s see.

Everybody agrees that any path to citizenship must place the undocumented who would come forward under a new immigration law at the back of the line for citizenship—behind all those who up to that moment have come to the United States legally.

Oddly, the President’s own plan has them wait for eight years before even beginning to get to the back of the line. Why not put them there as soon as their case is adjudicated in a court of law? The record would not bar them from employment or be a stain on their citizen status and full restitution is their admission to breaking the law and the fine they pay, which would be according to their ability to pay.

President Obama has correctly pointed out, most recently in his State of the Union message earlier this month that our five-year immigration path to American citizenship as spelled out in the United States Constitution does not provide it to legal immigrants within five years due to the back up in the system as it is: it is broken here too.

Republicans often characterize Latinos or Hispanics as “lazy and dependent” people who overuse Federal welfare, Food stamps, and both Federal and State services such as police, fire, healthcare, and especially the public education of their children.

The truth is just the opposite. Republicans, outside of President George W. Bush in his 2000 campaign and previously as Governor of Texas, don’t know that Latinos are extremely hard-working and often do work the rest of us would never consider and certainly not at the below minimum wage people who are undocumented and off the charts are forced to accept. Those millions of Latinos who are citizens are like the newcomers– extremely entrepreneurial and overwhelmingly Catholic and conservative on at least some social questions—presumably a pro-life anti-abortion stance of their church.

This makes hash of Anne Coulter’s suggestion that a path to citizenship will create twenty million new Democrats. These people are more likely to be most comfortable with the Republican Party and its strong pro-business, hard work get-ahead ideology and respect for human life. All that prevents Republicans from once again getting forty percent of the Latino vote like Bush did in 2000 or that Reagan did when he ran for President (specifically 37%) and even more is to get out in front of the immigration issue and be more liberal in getting the some 11.1 million undocumented Latinos in this nation onto a quick path to citizenship. With that removed, and with a true welcoming stance to these people, the Democratic Party advantage of gaining seventy percent and more of the Latino vote would even up quickly.

But that would be smart and the Republican Party in 2013 is as Republican Governor of Louisiana and 2016 Presidential Hopeful Bobby Jindal remains solidly entrenched as “The Party of Stupid.”

White people accounted for almost 64 percent of the population in 2010 and received 69 percent of entitlement benefits. Latinos are 16 percent of the population yet receive 12 percent of entitlement benefits. This is hardly over dependent. On that basis it raises questions about the dominant white citizen population that should be even more troubling to Republicans but which is not.

Lazy is a characterization that has no scientific measurement index that is reliable. It is a measure of the opinion of those who watch others work and strive to succeed in our nation over their lifetimes.

It has to be said that professional American historians of immigration have long noted the common label of laziness and shiftlessness applied to both new immigrants from the Irish to the Italians and to the people from the Caribbean and most prominantly African-Americans.

Somehow the Germans escaped this label but they were thought to be overly clannish, keeping to themselves, obtaining citizenship and voting rights in the Republican Party during the Civil War Era and Reconstruction much too quickly for Democrats, and drinking entirely too much beer; Scandinavians too.

But Gilded Age immigrants of all backgrounds were routinely exploited for their low-wage labor under horrendous conditions—something the undocumented of our own time are all too well acquainted with.

And it is a commonplace of our history and of white prejudice against African-Americans that they remain lazy and shiftless and awaiting gifts from Obama if re-elected as Mitt Romney has recently charged and that they are all poor, and over dependent on Federal support. That is racial prejudice plainly visible to anyone who cares to look.This view of Latinos is rooted in racial and ethnic prejudice and bigotry too, and it suggests strongly that the Republican Party base has a great hostility for Latinos in general due to this racial and ethnic stereotype so magnified and so out of line with reality.

Republicans view of the undocumented as lawbreakers who have committed such a serious breach of the law to never be given a chance at citizenship is so harsh as to suggest that it too is rooted in the Republican’s own view that these people of color and who speak a different language to start with are the permanent “stranger” “other” and are dangerous to public order.

Anne Coulter’s assumption embedded deeply in what she has just written is that Republicans, overwhelmingly white and older and with a male tilt will never accept Latinos as their full equals. And they will never be comfortable with people of color becoming in aggregate as numerous as white people in the demographic future of America somewhere around 2040 according to the latest projection of the U.S. Bureau of the Census.

Why not instead make as many of these people full American citizens as soon as possible? That would be five to six years from the moment immigration reform takes effect. Then we would add 11.1 million new payers of Federal Income Taxes and State Income Taxes and not just sales taxes. Paying for what we need and balancing the budget becomes easier. And we unleash the full potential of these people and can better harness them to the full American economy and the civic life of the nation. Their children will fill out the ranks of our military, they will go to college and be some of the people who provide the innovation and edge we always want for the United States.

Dare we say, this is an ass-backward and stupid stance on the part of Republicans on this issue of immigration reform?

Of course any comprehensive immigration reform bill will include penalizing employers that hire undocumented people and mercilessly exploit them in the process and thus spurring more illegal immigration. Many of the undocumented are that desperate to find any kind of employment and freedom to support themselves and their families.
And we will maintain even heavier border patrols using all of the available technology to secure our borders.

Even George W. Bush was wise enough to seek agreement with Mexican and Central-American leaders on economic development that would make the very dangerous migration of desperate people from those countries less likely and less necessary.

So Anne Coulter and so many key leaders in the House of Representatives on the Republican side of the aisle: your immigration reform plans are a path to nowhere. And your sobriquet as “The Party of Stupid” is in no danger of being eclipsed by any more flattering characterization of what it means to be a Republican Conservative in the United States in the Twenty-first century.

Dr. Thomas Martin Sobottke
For Struggles for Justice

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Newtown Shooting: Constitution’s “Insure Domestic Tranquility” Incompatible with Present-day Gun Culture

Posted in Community and Citizen Action, National Affairs with tags , on December 15, 2012 by thomassobottke

As always, our hearts and prayers truly go out to all the victims of gun violence and the families and friends connected to them. And those hearts and attendant prayers continue on an ongoing basis. The grieving process is long and hard. The memory will be permanent. And the killing continues.

The Constitution of the United States promises to “insure domestic tranquility.” It is a core value and goal of the document found immediately in the Preamble. It is just as much a part of the Supreme Law of the Nation as are the Seven Articles in the document and the Twenty-seven Amendments to the document since ratification in 1789.

The intersection of powerful semi-automatic weapons with mental illness, racial, ethnic and religious bigotry, criminality, and an American culture of guns supported by the arms industry, National Rifle Association, and to the surprise of some, Hollywood and video games, is a deadly nexus in American life that reaches its tentacles into every community and the lives of every single citizen.

The culture of guns in America now makes the promise and legal responsibility of our government to ensure even a reasonable level of safety to the public untenable. Discussing this as “an issue” or letting us have a “conversation” on guns is not needed. It is, in truth, a positive impediment to solving this problem. The now almost daily acts of mass gun violence and the thousands of individual deaths due to guns every single day make that a moot argument.

We know that the United States has more than twice as many guns per person as any other nation state in the world. Consequently, it is not hard to grasp that we have the most gun deaths—and by far of any nation.

No American would say that the 58,000 names on the wall marking the dead of the Vietnam War are inconsequential. Yet just less than two years is now needed to exceed that death toll from domestic gun violence alone. 32,000 and more persons die through the agency of guns in this country each year; just over half from suicides and a growing number where powerful firearms and people who are in an unstable or hateful emotional state meet.

If the young man who had shot his way into that elementary school in Connecticut or the one who did so in a movie theater in Colorado, or a parking lot in Arizona, or a Chicago street corner, or a religious house of worship in a Wisconsin suburb, or Virginia Tech, had had to do what they did with fists or knives or even old fashioned single shot muzzle loading rifles and pistols the death tolls in these horrific incidents would have been greatly reduced. Many more people would be surviving these acts of violence that have dogged humankind with the presence of illness and evil in this world since the inception of time.

The next time a State government or the Congress votes to cut needed funding to support our families for food, housing, and healthcare in times of distress, or to reach out and deal with mental illness and with those suffering from feelings of human prejudice, we must tell those representatives that they are casting a second vote with unseen and deathly hands for more mass shootings and dead children and grieving families and communities.

The next time you buy a ticket to a Hollywood movie where a man wielding a gun confirms their manhood, or increasingly womanhood, and self-worth, or where guns on television are seen visually and verbally as the final arbiters of our social problems, we do real harm to ourselves and communities.

Real initiatives to restore social spending and to even extend it, along with reducing the number and power of firearms available to American civilian citizens are now becoming more vital than protecting Second Amendment gun rights as some sort of absolute right or license to contribute as we wish to a culture obsessed with guns and gun violence.

The Second Amendment and its basic protections will always remain. Hollywood will continue to churn out films and television where drama and conflict are present and fiscal responsibility will continue to be measured against public need. Taking gun rights away, censorship, and wasteful social spending are not required nor are they wanted.

But the status quo ante ended with the shooting in Connecticut Friday morning as far as Struggles for Justice is concerned. The first reaction of so many Americans should have been “enough! This must end now!” It must have been a huge straw that broke the largest and strongest of Camels’ backs.

We won’t be able to eliminate gun violence or suicide or violent deaths in the United States. But we must act now to do the obvious things.

First, a re-instatement of the assault weapons gun ban and limitations on the sizes of magazines our guns have outside military bases, law enforcement and gun ranges properly supervised needs to be put in place.

Second, full and up-to-date background checks nationwide in a common system shared by mental health professionals and law enforcement.

Third, there must be the will and actual outcome to see significant increases in social spending, to support our human infrastructure that is crumbling even faster than that of our material one.

Fourth, voluntary changes in the games we play and the films and videos we watch. The visual images laid down along our brain’s neural pathways need to be counterbalanced to a much greater extent by ones showing creative–non-violent means of overcoming human adversity and human conflict.

When the Second Amendment is in conflict with the Constitution’s equally great promise to “insure domestic tranquility,” the most important need of any government to protect the public safety, public safety must be consulted fully and the overdependence on an obsessive culture of guns must end. Actions not words are what are needed now.

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Wisconsin in 2011 and Now Michigan in 2012: Assault on Labor is Assault on Democracy

Posted in Community and Citizen Action, National Affairs, The State of Labor with tags , , on December 11, 2012 by thomassobottke

The Michigan House voted near midday on Tuesday to approve right-to-work legislation in a state where organized labor is valued and well supported by the populace. The Michigan Senate was expected to follow suit almost immediately. Republican majorities in both houses swept in during the Tea Party surge of enthusiasm of 2010 and kept in by gerrymandered senate and house districts in that state are responsible.

When a non-union worker enters a unionized workplace, that union is required by law to supply them with all the representational benefits of membership without any of its attendant responsibilities. Right-to-work legislation in Michigan today is not only aimed at weakening labor unions in Michigan—the rights of workers to organize and maintain their voice in the workplace, but it is an attack on a significant portion of the Democratic Party electoral coalition.

But it is even more than just one party trying to get an edge over the other in the next election. The laws are being passed despite hundreds of thousands of Michigan citizens rallying to oppose the legislation. The bills were not subject to the customary committee hearings where citizens and interested parties can comment on the proposed legislation and it can be discussed. There was absolutely no floor debate in either Michigan legislative chamber at all. A court order had to be obtained to open the doors to the legislative chambers for the people and press of the State of Michigan and the nation to know what it is their government is doing in their name.

This was the M.O. of Scott Walker and his Republican majorities in Wisconsin in 2011. Republicans in Michigan are now acting in precisely the same fashion. Locked doors to the Statehouse, bills receiving little or no debate, rammed through in the dead of night with no proper notice or in broad daylight but leaving the people of Michigan with little opportunity to oppose what is being done to them.

It seems evident that if Walker in Wisconsin and Snyder in Michigan wanted to take away rights previously guaranteed under State law they could do so—and they have done so with impunity. It was after all Governor Rick Snyder and his Tea Party corporate dominated legislature that passed legislation where the Governor could and did appoint business managers to supersede the representatives of the people in Michigan municipalities. Walker and the Fitzgerald boys rammed anti-collective bargaining rights legislation down the throats of hundreds of thousands of public employees in that state.

The sheer arrogance and disregard for the democratic process in these cases is simply astounding. No, this is not just Republicans making a mistake. It is not Republicans saying dumb things. It is Republicans themselves. This is who they are. This is what they do. This is what they really believe. “By their fruits you shall know them” truly applies. The essence of the Republican Party has been the party of racial and ethnic exclusion. It is the Party of corporate privilege. It is the party of gender inequality. It is the party of xenophobia. It is the party of uncompromising opposition to any other party or groups of citizens who stand in their way. It is the Party that is the bastion of white male supremacy. It is the Party of a past century of shame in American human rights.

Political Pundits all say that the Republicans will have to change their tone from here on. Talking as if you are a democrat (small d) and then acting like a tyrant is not democracy. It is indecent and immoral. And it is contrary to the spirit if not the letter of our laws in so many cases.

Republicans have set out to destroy labor unions in America. They are succeeding. Working people may be suspicious of Unions—even hate them. But the reality is far different. Labor unions form a web of advocacy for all sorts of causes that support and underpin our representative democracy. Unions not only speak for otherwise powerless individual workers in the workplace. They support civil rights concerning race and gender equality. They support safety in the workplace. They support legal due process. They help to tie together citizen groups of all kinds who seek to aid the poor and less fortunate among us.

The Republican Party of the United States of America is fast becoming a fascist organization intent on destroying American democracy. They refuse and will not change their course on so many things that most Americans have accepted as good for generations. They are the panic felt by the lunatic fringe. They are the ones who hate 47% of us and want us to go away. They are a “me first” and “to hell with you” political party. It is disgusting and shameful.

Just a week ago, Republicans in the United States could not vote for a UN Treaty signed by over 120 nations of our world protecting the rights of disabled persons. The 1996 Republican Nominee for President, Bob Dole was present to see them pass this legislation which was modeled after the Americans with Disabilities Act passed during the 1990’s under a Republican Bush Administration.

Nothing in the law involves black helicopters coming in and snatching home-schooled kids. It just is what it is. Bob Dole went home knowing the bill had failed. He went home knowing that disabled American veterans and civilians alike were being disrespected. The world must wonder about us and our failure to pass even the most obvious moral and beneficent legislation. We could not simply acknowledge our debt with the debt ceiling crisis and our leaders don’t even understand legislation before them—or if they do are too morally depraved to do right.

The world is going to be out there no matter how much Republicans wish to deny it. They can pass legislation that harms the masses of the people and oppose so much legislation of the present and the past that aids and supports a common humanity and a moral decency. They can give the real power to multi-national corporations and their pseudo interest groups like Americans for Prosperity—a Koch industries operation. The American Chamber of Commerce is also standing behind the Republican laws.

Struggles for Justice asks the reader to contemplate who the “we” are in “We the People” at the very beginning of our Supreme Law. Which Americans are for prosperity and which ones actually get it as an outcome? To what degree are the rule of law and the will of the people respected in the land? Is what the Republican Party actually does in so many state legislatures and in the Congress a positive good for the United States and the largest and broad mass of its populace?

The ball has opened and the battle is joined. The nation’s labor community will fight this one to the every last ditch–the bitter end–to total and final sweet victory!

Yours for the One Big Union and in Solidarity with our Brothers and Sisters in Michigan and wherever the rights of working people are suppressed.

Struggles for Justice

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Where Have All The Racists Gone? by Thomas Martin Sobottke

Posted in Essays, National Affairs, Race with tags , , , , , on March 8, 2012 by thomassobottke

“Liberals and white supremacists are the only people left in America who are neurotically obsessed with race.”
–Anne Coulter

“It has become a depressing ritual of American politics that when one is confronted with evidence of one’s racism, the proper response is to insist that while old-fashioned bull Connor-style racism has disappeared, liberals and journalists—and rarely is any distinction made here—remain obsessed with this now-imaginary phenomenon as a means of persecuting conservatives for telling it like it is.”
–Eric Alterman, The Nation

Our first reaction to Anne Coulter’s statement might be to nod our heads and with our chests puffed out with pride note how racial bigotry has all but disappeared in America and the harmony between people is so immense that we have a black President, and black people dominate sports and entertainment today in ways they never did before. We could even look at the larger number of black professionals in all the major professions and the fact that people of color generally have their right to vote respected in America in ways that were not the case a half century and more ago. But we’d be dead wrong.

We might ask ourselves: if the millions of undocumented immigrants were white Northern Europeans with advanced educations and professional skills would there be such an outcry at their presence? The anger and hatred of illegal immigration in the United States on the part of white Americans goes beyond the strict respect for legality and rule of law as important as they both are. The resentment so many white Americans feel at the perceived slowness of Latinos to adopt English as their main language and the use of skin color to define what an undocumented immigrant is are firmly rooted over discomfort over race and culture. American citizens of Latino background are often confused with undocumented immigrants and the only thing that marks them out is their racial background.

We might ask ourselves: if white criminal defendants received on average twice the sentences and were incarcerated at much higher rates in proportion to their part of the general population what characteristic but the color of their skin is responsible? A black man has more chance today of being held in a state or federal prison than in graduating from high school. In Wisconsin six percent of the State’s population is black but 51% of those in jail are black. 73% of black school children are taught by teachers working outside their area of professional preparation where a mere fraction of white kids face that. It would seem incarcerated while black must now join driving while black as social phenomena that defy our wish to easily dismiss racism as a force in American life today.

We might ask ourselves: why do white Americans retain racial stereotypes so strongly so far after the day of racial bigotry has passed? Across America sports teams at all levels portray Native-Americans as Indians in buckskins and with tomahawks, war paint and doing war whoops. Presidential candidates use racial shorthand like “Food Stamp President” and where was the Birther Movement for all of our previous white Presidents? And what was a Federal Judge trying to say when he told friends he was deeply touched by an Obama joke that had his mother mating with dogs to produce the President? Who sent the judge that e-mail? Where did the six e-mails go? Why are Muslims are still portrayed as always being terrorists? Towelheads? Where is this fear of Sharia Law emanating from in the American heart?

In an America so free of racial bigotry, why does the color of your skin yet determine so much about your level for opportunity and advancement in the future? Would any white American willingly and enthusiastically become black, or Latino, or an indigenous person (yes they still exist)? While we laud the people of color who have made it in America we don’t stop to consider all those who have not and why. And no, it is not the nature of the character of people who are of color to be more criminal, less natively intelligent or beautiful and human than white people. If we’re not careful we may find evidence that the reverse is true.

So Anne Coulter, if Eric Alterman and liberals like myself, along with the NAACP of which I am proud to be a member in the cause for true racial equality and brotherhood and sisterhood, obsess about racism it is because it still exists and is very real. Why are 79% of Latinos polling as supporting Obama in the coming election in 2012? Why are 92% and perhaps more of blacks in America not jumping on the bandwagon with Herman Cain and Allen West and the few black apologists for racial bigotry Fox News can dig up? Why is Mitt Romney trailing President Obama among women by eighteen points? No, Anne, it’s not because these people are just looking for a shiftless and lazy racially or even sexually stereotyped handout from big government. It’s because they know that the white conservatives are likely to display hostility to them or an indifference to their interests that is remarkable in its breadth and depth. They merely seek to align themselves with those who respect them for who they are and not just look at the pigmentation of skin the Creator has so wonderfully provided them. What has happened since the great gains for Civil Rights of the 1960’s is that those with racial prejudices have learned how to disguise it and encode their bigotry in a host of terms and ideas that allow them to retain these feelings.

It’s not illegal to think the most racist thoughts. And in some circumstances it is not illegal to express them nor should it be under the First Amendment. But any civilized and compassionate human being would reject what has been on display in the United States in our polarized politics. Those of us on the left and who still think of ourselves as liberal simply don’t want an America full of racial bigotry; where we do not pay as close attention to the needs of a host of people with a darker set of skin colors than we do to those who are white. Nor would we stand a moment if the situation were reversed.

Racism has gone into the cracks and crevices and the dark corners of American life where it thrives and strikes out at people of color just like it always did but with a subtlety and craft that is extraordinarily adaptable to its continued survival.

Take the slew of Voter ID bills passed in the United States over the past couple of years. The reason for the legislation is to protect the electoral process from voter fraud. Yet, when we look at the statistics on the prevalence of fraudulent voting we find it is almost non-existent: Fourteen fraudulent votes for every 554 million. This is hardly the stuff to justify restricting the right to vote or suppressing the vote in order to make sure everybody is qualified.

In Wisconsin Scott Walker wrote in an editorial piece today that the issue of Voter ID is settled and it’s time to move on and that we ought not be “rehashing and litigating Voter ID at the taxpayer’s expense.” He also has said his recall election is a waste of time and money. He notes that the injunction to delay implementation of Voter ID in this spring’s election will be overturned.

What he does not tell us is that such a bi-partisan and distinctly moderate organization as the League of Women Voters is one of the major party’s to the lawsuit challenging the new law in Wisconsin.

What is missed is that Wisconsin State Officials have been told to charge $30.00 for the Voter ID. This is plainly a modest but real Poll Tax that has been illegal in Federal law since the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

He does not remind people that the progressive and proud Wisconsin tradition of being able to present documentation of your identity and residence on Election Day allowed you to register at the polling place and vote the same day. The new law removes that.

The purpose of the new laws around the nation is not to combat fraud. In Wisconsin in 2010, there was one case. It was an older couple who had voted absentee, canceled their vacation plans, and forgot they had already voted and cast duplicate ballots. That’s it. That is the dimension of the problem Walker is trying to solve. The purpose of the Voter ID laws around the nation are to suppress the votes of people of color who are more often likely not to own a car and not have either a driver’s license or U.S. passport. Even Veterans Department photo ID’s and faculty staff, and student ID’s with photos and accompanying documentation are not seen as valid.

So the Voter ID law inhibits by about six percent, political scientists tell us, the ability of blacks, Latinos, the elderly, and college students from being able to easily vote. Is it a coincidence that these are all liberal, Democrat constituencies? No. It’s not a coincidence. It is by design. And embedded within it is a real as well as visceral expression of the subtle and adaptable racism of Twenty-first century America. Not to mention being the opposite of what we ought to be promoting: higher voter turnout by all citizens no matter what party affiliation or color or sex or loyalty.

Then there is the latest report from the Southern Poverty Law Center that a record number of hate groups are active in the United States. In 2000 there were 602 identified in the Center’s report. In 2011 there were 1,018. Notably, the largest numbers of groups were hate groups premised on race. The Southern Poverty Law Center only counts groups who are by direct evidence active in meeting, lobbying, expressing their views in public or via flyers or newsletters or websites.

While the Ku Klux Klan fell from 221 chapters, or cells, to 152, Neo-Nazi’s clocked in at a healthy 170 groups. White Nationalists accounted for 146. There were 133 Racist Skinhead groups, and 55 Christian Identity hate groups. (none of these are Evangelical Christians or main line denominations but based on bigotry identified with race.) 32 Neo-Confederate groups that were identified as hate groups too. It must be noted that black Separatist hate groups numbered 140. General hate groups numbered 190, many of these white and bigoted.

A record number of Patriot and Militia groups are being documented and followed by the Southern Poverty Law Center as well. They became much more active and numerous with the Presidency of Barack Obama and a perceived tyrannical government they wish to oppose. Strangely, for most Americans they are yet to be put away in concentration camps or have their guns taken away. In point of fact, a record number of States have enacted less stringent gun laws the past two years and the Supreme Court of the United States has overturned a Chicago anti-gun ordinance. President Obama and his Administration have done nothing to reverse any of it. The last time the Militia Movement was this active was in the 1990’s during the Clinton years. It culminated in the 1995 bombing of the Federal building in Oklahoma. Here it seems to be a liberal or Democrat or black is a threat to patriotic liberty in the United States.

Even our memory of the American Civil War and 32 active Neo-Confederate groups tells us that the memory of the war Americans have differs widely and there is a big racial divide. CNN did a poll in April of 2011 that discovered that 42 percent of all Americans believe the war was over State’s rights and not Slavery. The poll further delineated that the more white, conservative, and Southern you were, the more likely you were to have this view. Darker, more diverse, more liberal and Northern people were more certainly to see slavery and white supremacy as root causes of the conflict.

There is ample evidence the Civil Rights years in the 1960’s did not erase racial bigotry. For people of color the evidence is real and direct. It smacks them in the face daily; sometimes literally.

Where have all the racists gone? Oh, they’re out there alright. They are anywhere people respond to their fears and anger and prejudices rather than their hopes, dreams and the “better Angels of our nature” spoken of so long ago. The growing diversity of the United States racially and ethnically and the destruction of the Middle Class since the depression of 2008 hit, has strengthened racial prejudice in this country. So Anne Coulter, we remain obsessed with race and racism. And we will fight to end it and have all citizens have real equal opportunity and smash the racial stereotypes that continue to shackle us.

Dr. Thomas Martin Sobottke
Struggles for Justice

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